What Made Gilded Age Politics So Acrimonious?
No longer were voters envisioned as a mass of excitable, corruptible, other-than-sober partisans embedded in networks of ward and neighborhood patronage and control; now they were deliberative and solitary citizens weighing the true public interest within the new sanctum of the secret ballotan innovation that sought to reduce pre-issued party-line ballots and to dilute further the baleful influence of the ward heeler and precinct captain. Voters were now meant to become deliberative and solitary citizens weighing the true public interest within the new sanctum of the secret ballot. But this battery of procedural reformswhich in addition to the secret ballot, included so-called educational campaigning initiatives and political clubshad the effect of narrowing the focus of American politics, while eventually dramatically depressing election turnouts. The aim, as the organizers of the fledgling Democratic Party club boasted, was to bring politics indoors. And sure enough, as The Washington Post observed during the 1892 presidential campaign, this new brand of electioneering refuses to get noisy or to break out in the gooseflesh of barbecues, torchlight processions, brass bands, joint discussions &c.  So the paradox of 1896 was an election that truly hinged on life-or-death questions of how and whether American democracy might adapt to new conditions of industrial plunder and affluent secession from the commonwealand an outcome that was a distinctly muffled capitulation, procedurally speaking, to those very conditions. It began with the marketing of the candidates themselveswithout an uprising of voters in locally organized marches and campaign events across the nations cities, presidential candidates themselves became, for the first time in our political history, the prime motive forces of campaigning. Rather than relying on the excitement of participation, Bryan in particular seized the initiative to agitate and entertain voters from the stump amid a landmark national campaign tour. In 1896, the candidate thrilled the public, Grinspan writes. He was the subject; they were the object. He was the actor; they were the spectators.  McKinley, for his part, assumed the role of subject in the retiring and serene manner of a candidate confident that the nations financial and political establishment would smoothly docent him into the nations highest office: He campaigned from his front porch in Canton, Ohio, while Republican operatives marshaled half a million voters onto his front yard over the course of the campaign. This stately charade masked an enormous outlay of party resources, howevernot just to ferry McKinley supporters in and out of Canton, but to publish a flood of educational campaign pamphlets to school voters on McKinleys hard-money financial platform and support for an industrial tariff. The party churned out 120 million pamphlets, in 275 different formats, in a host of languages. The net result was a triumph of the new managerial model of political campaigning, with the personality of the lead candidate as the great galvanizing selling point. It all grew from that same alone with his conscience revolution in voting: a fear of mass, public participation and a faith in the wisdom of a solitary, decisive man, Grinspan notes. Personal leadership was the trick, one writer argued in 1894. The people will not come out for a principle, but they will come out for a man.