KBATs Unit 5

Bipartisan

of or involving the agreement or cooperation of two political parties that usually oppose each other's policies. A bipartisan vote of 233 to 18 stopped Grant from trying to get a 3rd term. They passed a resolution to remind the country and Grant of the anti dictator implications of the 2 term tradition.

Panic of 1873

overreaching promoters had laid more track, sunk more mines, erected more factories, sowed more grainfields than existing markets could bear. BAnkers had made too many imprudent loans to finance those enterprises. Profits failed to materialize, loans went unpaid, and the credit house of cards broke.

Disbursing

pay out money from a fund

Resumption Act of 1875

pledged the gov to the further withdrawal of greenbacks from circulation and to the redemption of all paper currency in gold at face value. The hard money advocates had persuaded a confused Grant to veto a bill to print more paper money.

Asian newcomers

about 9 percent of its entire population mostly poor uneducated single males from the taishan district in southern china. They originally came to america to dig in the goldfields and to sledgehammer the track of the transcontinental railroads across the west. They also created many small businesses

Freewheeling

act or proceed in a relaxed or casual way, without making much effort. Freewheeling railroad promoters sometimes life gullible bond buyers with only 2 streaks of rust and a right of way.

Inject

add money into the economy

Creditors

advocated depreciation, as the didn't want the money they had loaned to be repaid in depreciated dollars

Filibuster

an action such as a prolonged speech that obstructs progress in a legislative assembly while not technically contravening the required procedures. The Democrats undertook to launch a never ending filibuster when they sensed defeat

Reconstruction era

an era after the civil war when the United states was reconstructed on three different level, state, congressional, and presidental

Pilloried

attack or ridicule publicly.

Pilloried

attacked or ridiculed publicly. Thomas Nast did this to Tweed, after spurning a heavy bribe to desist. Tweed died behind bars.

Grotesquely

odd or unnatural in shape, appearance, or character; fantastically ugly or absurd; bizarre.

Whiskey Ring

1874-75, it robbed the Treasury of millions in excise tax revenues. Grant's own private secretary turned up among the culprits.

Supreme Court

3;2

Plessy v. Ferguson

6 ruled that separate but equal facilities were conditioned under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. But in reality, quality of AFrican American life was very unequal to that of whites. Segregated in everything, including railroad cars, theater's, restrooms. S whites dealt harshly with any black who dared to violate racial code of conduct. Record # of blacks were lynched during 1890s, most often for the crime of asserting themselves as equals.

House majority democratic

:3

Coinage of silver dollars

Congress formally dropped this in 1873, but then, new silver discoveries later in 1870s forced silver production up and prices down

Freedman's Savings and Trust Company

Blacks were hard hit in panic of 1873. This had made unsecured loans to several companies that went under. Black depositors had entrusted over $7 million to the bank and lost their savings, and black economic development and black confident in savings institutions went down with it.

Half

Breeds -Republican faction and were opposed to the Conklingites, and they flirted with civil service reform, but their real fight was with the Stalwarts over who was going to dish out the spoils. Their champion was James G Blaine of Maine, a personable congressman with an elastic conscience. Conkling and Blaine only stalemated each other and deadlocked their Republican party.

Samuel J. Tilden

Democratic nominee, who had risen to fame as ban who bagged Boss Tweed in NY. He campaigned against the Republican scandal, and had 184 electoral votes of the needed 185, wich 20 votes in 4 states doubtful b/c of irregular returns. He could surely pick up at least 1 of these, esp b/c he had cotted more popular votes than Hayes.

Rest of Compromise of 1877

Democrats reluctantly let Hayes take office if he withdrew intrusive federal troops from the last two states they were in Louisiana and SC. Among other concessions, Republicans assured Democrats a place and presidential patronage trough and support for a bill subsidising the Texas and Pacific Railroad's construction of a S transcontinental line. Not all promises were kept in later years, like the last one ^, but the deal held together long enough to break the dangerous electoral standoff. Democrats let Hayes receive the remainder of the disputed returns. All this happened through the partisan vote of 8 to 7. This issue was settled only 3 days before the prez was sworn into office.

The grand army of the republic

GAR

Grand old party

GOP

Galena illinois

General grant's hometown

Let us have peace

Grant struck a popular note in his letter of acceptance when he wrote this. This became a leading campaign slogan and was later engraved on his tomb next to the Hudson River.

General amnesty act

Liberal Republican agitations scared the Republicans into cleaning their house until they were thrown out of it. The Republican Congress passed this in 1872, and it removed political disabilities from all but - former Confederate leaders. Congress also moved to reduce high Civil War tariffs and clear the Grant administration with mild civil service reform.

Grantism

Much disgust with this was starting to build up by 1872, even before some of worst scandals were exposed

Liberal Republican party

Reform minded citizens banded together to form this, with slogan Turn the Rascals Out. They urged purification of Washington administration and an end to military Reconstruction.

"Stalwart" faction

Republican faction and was led by Roscoe Conkling and it embraced the time honored system of swapping civil service jobs for votes

Greenback Labor party

Republican hard money policy helped elect a Democratic House of Reps in 1874, and it spawned this in 1878. It polled over a million votes and elected 14 members of Congress.

William Belknap

Secretary of War who was forced to resign in 1876 after accepting bribes from suppliers to the Indian resignation.

Redeemers

white Democrats shamelessly rely on fraud and intimidation and reassumed political power in the S and exercised it ruthlessly. Blacks to tried to assert rights raced unemployment, eviction, physical harm.

How were the asians trated

white worker shad economic anxiety and mistreated the chinese in california.

Contraction

Treasury started accumulating gold stocks against the appointed day for resumption of metallic money payments. Coupled with the reduction of greenbacks, this policy was called this, and had a deflationary effect with the amount of money per capita in culturally decreasing. It worsened the impact of the depression, but restored the gov's credit rating and brought the greenbacks up to face value. Few exchanged their greenbacks for heavier gold when redemption day came.

Hayes

Tilden deal -with this deal, the Republican party abandoned its commitment to racial equality. It had already been weakening, as many Republicans had started questioning the worthiness of Reconstruction and were less willing to send $ and enlisted sons to bolster S state govs.

Credit Mobilier scandal

Union Pacific Rail insiders had formed this construction company and cleverly hired themselves at inflated prices to build the railroad, earning dividends as high as 348%. To quiet Congress, it secretly gave shares of its valuable stock to key congressmen. A newspaper expose and congressional investigation led to formal censure of 2 congressmen and revelation that VP of US had accepted payments from the company.

Lasszie Fare

When the government does not inject or contract any money from the economy and just lets it stay the same

Rutherford B. Hayes

With Grant out and Conklingites and Blainites neutralizing each other, Republicans turned to him as a compromise candidate. Was obscure, and is foremost qualification was that he was from electorally doubtful but potent state of Ohio, where he had served 3 terms as governor. The swing votes of Ohio were so crucial in the prez contest of the day that the state produced more than its share of prez candidates.

Monetary theory

a branch of economics that provides a framework for analyzing money in its functions as a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account.

Squeaker

a competition or election won or likely to be won by a narrow margin. Every prez election was this during the Gilded Age

Disillusionment

a feeling of disappointment resulting from the discovery that something is not as good as one believed it to be. This was experienced by idealistic Americans in postwar era, b/c they had spilled their blood for Union, emancipation, and Lincoln, who had promised new birth of freedom. They instead got corruption and political stalemate.

Samuel J tilden

a new york attorney who headed the prosecution gaining fame which lead to his presidential nomination

Bandwagon

a particular activity or cause that has suddenly become fashionable or popular.

Kickbacks

a payment made to someone who has facilitated a transaction or appointment, especially illicitly

Greenhorn

a person who is new to or inexperienced at a particular activity. Grant was a greenhorn in politics.

Lien

a right to keep possession of property belonging to another person until a debt owed by that person is discharged

Gilded Age

a sarcastic name given by Mark Twain in 1873 to the three-decade-long post-Civil War era

Stalemate

a situation in which further action or progress by opposing or competing parties seems impossible. Political stalemate started with the inept politician, Ulysses S Grant.

Peccadilloes

a small, relatively unimportant offense or sin. The misdeeds of the fed gov were more serious than Boss Tweed's peccadilloes.

Clarion call

a strongly expressed demand or request for action. The Republicans sounded this for continued Reconstruction of the S with federal bayonets.

Visiting statesmen

both parties quickly sent these to the contestant S states of Louisiana, SC, and FL. All 3 submitted 2 sets of returns, 1 Democratic and 1 Republican. As weeks went by, a constitutional crisis generated. The Constitution says the electoral returns from the states shall be sent to Congress, and in the presence of the House and Senate, they shall be opened by the prez of the Senate, but it was silent on who would count them. The prez of the Senate was a Republican, and would choose the Republican returns. The Speaker of the House was a Democrat, and would choose the Democratic returns.

Shrewd

careful with money

Cheap money

clamored for a reissuance of the greenbacks with a crude fut accurate grasp on manetary theory.

Silver

debtors now looked for relief in this precious metal. They claimed that it had received a raw deal. In early 1870s, Treasury unrealistically maintained that an ounce of silver was worth only 1/16th as much as an ounce of gold, through open market prices for silver were higher.

Patronage

disbursing jobs by the bucketful in return for votes, kickbacks, party service

Compromise of 1877

election deadlock was to be broken by the Electoral Count Act, which Congress passed in early 1877. It set up an electoral commission consisting of 15 men selected from Senate, House, and Supreme Court.

Panic of 1873

explosive atmosphere of class struggle at the end of the Reconstruction was largely b/c of the long years of depression and deflation following this. Railroad workers had particularly hard times, while railroads continued to take in big profits. When presidents of nation's 4 biggest railroads collectively decided in 1877 to cut employees' wages by 10%, they workers struck back. Prez Hayes called in fed troops to quell the unrest, and this brought the string laborers an outpouring of working-class support. Work stoppages spread in cities from Baltimore to St. Louis. When battling of several weeks between soldiers and workers ended, over 100 were dead.

The railure of the great railroad strike

exposed the weakness of the labor movement in the face of massive government intervention on the side of railroads

Democratic strength

had solid electoral base in S and in the N industrial cities, which had many immigrants controlled by political machines

Muffed

handle a situation, task, or opportunity clumsily or badly. This is what the Liberal Republicans did when they nominated Greeley.

Personable

having a pleasant appearance and manner

Thomas nast

he pilloried tweed mercilessly after spurning a heavy bribe to desist

General Grant

he was the most popular N hero to emerge from the war. Many grateful citizens gave him presents. The Republicans were freed from the Union party coalition and nominated him for the presidency in 1868.

Democratic voters

immigrant Lutherans and Roman Catholics figured heavily among them. Democrats were more likely to adhere to faiths that took less stern view of human weakness. Religions professed toleration of differences in an imperfect world, and they spurned gov efforts to impose a single moral standard on the entire society.

Henry Smith

in 1893, this black man was buried at the stake in Paris, Texas, for supposedly molesting a 4 yr old white girl. Hundreds came to watch, and public executions like this were aimed at intimidating African Americans into accepting their 2nd class status.

Jim Crow laws

informal separation of blacks and whites in immediate postwar years became by 1890s systematic state-level legal codes of segregation

over speculation

is an economic indicator of a forthcoming economic crash the accumulated wealth disappears.

Republican strength

largely in Mid-W and rural and small town NE. Grateful freedmen in S continued to vote Republican in significant numbers, and the GAR did too.

Roscoe conklin

lead the stalwart faction a US senator from NY,

David A. Wells

leading economist of the era who described how the depression of 1873 struck the whole world

"Crop

lien" system -storekeepers gave credit to small farmers for food and supplies in return took a lien on their harvests

Fisk and Gould

millionaire partners that made a plot in 1869 to corner the gold market. They worked on Prez Grant directly and also through his brother in law, who got $25,000 for his complicity. F and G bid the price of gold upward for weeks, so they could later profit from its heightened value. But on Black Friday Sept 24, 1869, the Treasury was compelled to release gold, and price of gold plunged, and many honest businesspeople were driven to the wal

Grand Army of the Republic GAR

politically potent fraternal organization of several 100 1000 Union veterans of the Civil War It was politically powerful and routinely lobbied hundreds of private pension bills through a compliant Congress. Benefits were given to deserters, bounty jumpers, men who never served, and former soldiers who later got disabilities not related to service. Prez Cleveland was non veteran and Democrat, and was in awkward position when it came to fighting pension grabbers. But he was convinced driven, read each bill carefully, vetoed many, and wrote individual vetos for Congress.

Vote as You Shot

powerful Republican slogan aimed at Union army veterans

Graft

practices, especially bribery, used to secure illicit gains in politics or business; corruption

Irish and the Chinese in California

racial and ethnic fissures among workers fractured labor unity, and divisions between Irish and Chinese in Calie were particularly acute. 9% of Cali was Chinese by 1880.

Voter turnouts

reached highest unmatched before or since. 80% of eligible voters cast their ballots in prez elections during the Gilded Age.

repudiation

rejection of a proposal or idea.

Waving the bloody shirt

reviving gory reminders of the Civil War Grant in order to win the presidency. This became for the 1st time a prominent feature of a prez campaign.

Horatio seymour

scuttled democrats faint hope for success by repudantiting the ohio idea

Communist

someone advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. Greely was denounced by regular Republicans as this in the war of insults.

Texas and pacific railroad construction

south transcontinental railroad lines

Union veterans of the Civil War

supported Republican candidate Rutherford B Hayes in 1876

Civil rights cases

supreme court pronounced much of the act unconstitutional in the civil rights cases. The courts declared that the fourteenth amendment prohibited only government violations of civil rights not the denial of civil rights by individuals.

Contract

take money out of the economy

Republican voters

tended to adhere to the creeds that traced lineage to Puritanism. Stressed strict codes of personal morality and believed that the gov should play a role in regulating the economic and the moral affairs of society.

Eviction

the action of expelling someone, especially a tenant, from a property; expulsion

Horace Greeley

the fearless editor of NY Tribune, but dogmatic, emotional, petulant, notoriously unsound in his political judgements

Civil Rights Act of 1875

the last gasp of congressional radical Republicans. It supposedly guaranteed equal accommodations in public places and prohibited racial discrimination in jury selection, but the law was toothless, and stayed like that for nearly a century. Supreme Court pronounced much of the act unconstitutional in Civil Rights Cases 1883, and said that the 14th amendment only prohibited gov violations of civil rights, not the denial of civil rights by individuals. When Prez Hayes withdrew the federal troops propping up Reconstruction govs, those Republican regimes collapsed.

Disenfranchisement

the state of being deprived of a right or privilege, especially the right to vote.

Bloodletting

the violent killing and wounding of people during a war or conflict

Ticket splitting

this was failing to vote the straight party line, and was very rare.

Senate republican Majoirty

voted 3:2

"Hard money" people

wanted the battle-born currency to completely disappear from circulation. By 1868, Treasury had already taken $100 million of it from circulation.

Tweed Ring

was in famous and in NYC, and displayed the lack of ethics typical of the day. Boss Tweed used bribery, graft, fraudulent elections to take $200 million from the metropolis. Honest citizens were cowed into silence, and Protesters had their tax assessments raised.

Crime of '73

westerners from silver mining states joined with debtors in assailing this, and demanded a return of the dollar of their daddies. The demand for the coinage of more silver was another scheme to promote inflation.

Sharecropping

when a tenant farmer gives a part of each crop as rent. Many blacks and poor whites were forced into this and tenant farming.

Ohio idea

which called for redemption in green backs