Washington – White House strategist Karl Rove has a favorite historical analogy for deciphering contemporary American politics. Our turn of the century, he notes, has parallels to the last one, 100 years ago.
There are remarkable similarities between the two eras. Americans in the latter part of the 19th century had emerged from a great and costly war and a long, tense postwar period.
Just as we strive to cope with the tremors of the information economy, so our predecessors struggled in the disorienting transformation to the industrial age. A tide of immigration swamped the cities, spurring nativist reaction. There was corruption in government and a surplus of greed, income inequality and conspicuous consumption in the Gilded Age. Fundamentalists sought control of the public school curricula and challenged the theory of evolution.
There even had been a contested presidential election, with Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden previewing the roles of Bush and Gore. The Republicans prevailed in that 1876 bitter contest, as they did in 2000.
In fact, a fractious Democratic Party managed to break a chain of 10 Republican presidencies only by electing Grover Cleveland – a moderate governor whose presidency was marred by a sex scandal – for two terms.
The Republican Party of the 1890s had its own Rove-like strategist in Marcus Alonzo Hanna of Ohio. Boss Hanna changed the rules of American politics with a conceptual breakthrough about fundraising in 1896, collecting an unprecedented $3 million for William McKinley from business interests and outspending the Democrats by 10-to-1.
In that election, Republicans won the votes of middle-class and working families by promising security in the face of domestic terrorism. Bloody battles between labor and capital in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, the Homestead steel plant near Pittsburgh and other sites had bred fears of anarchism and domestic terror, which McKinley exploited.
There was a “splendid little war” with Spain. Then, mission accomplished, the victory was marred by a bloody guerrilla war in the Philippines, where an armed insurgency battled as many as 70,000 U.S. troops for almost a decade, claiming the lives of 4,200 American soldiers.
Rove’s use of fin de siècle America as a mirror of our age comes to mind as the Senate considers the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court.
As Sen. Sam Brownback, R- Kan., and Alito himself noted during last week’s hearings, the Supreme Court in those days was a notoriously racist, reactionary champion of powerful interests and the status quo.
The justices saw themselves as strict constructionists. In 1883, the Supreme Court threw out one of the nation’s first great civil-rights laws, which had banned racial discrimination. Three years later, in Plessy vs. Ferguson, the court gave its blessing to racial segregation.
The court narrowed the rights granted Americans by the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment; declared the income tax unconstitutional; outlawed efforts to create an eight-hour workday and ban child labor; upheld injunctions against striking workers and directed antitrust laws at unions.
“Taken together … these decisions outlawed virtually any attempt by states to limit maximum hours of work, of unions to strike, and of the federal government to curb or regulate monopolies,” writes historian Nell Irvin Painter in her book on the era, “Standing at Armageddon.” “These decisions gave a green light to wealthy individuals and corporations that shone for almost forty years.”
It is hard to envision America returning to the days of back-alley abortions and birth-control bans, when Christian prayers were mandatory in segregated public school classrooms, workers went without rights, Congress was shackled when regulating industry, and homosexuals were persecuted for private sexual relations between consenting adults. But if the conservative Alito is confirmed, and President Bush gets an opportunity to appoint more justices, at least some retrenchment seems likely.
Yet progressives can take heart. If the Rove analogy holds, the next president may very well be someone like Teddy Roosevelt: a maverick, war hero and progressive Republican, ready to tangle with the party’s embedded interests. Someone, perhaps, like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Once in office, Roosevelt concluded that the Supreme Court was too “conservative and hidebound.” He appointed three progressive justices, including the incomparable Oliver Wendell Holmes.
In contrast to his colleagues, Holmes had a fearless, expansive view of liberty. “Young man,” he once told a 61-year-old associate, “about 75 years ago I learned that I was not God. When the people … want to do something that I can’t find anything in the Constitution expressly forbidding them to do, I say, whether I like it or not, ‘Goddamit, let ’em do it.”‘
Holmes served on the court for three decades, retiring at 90. His great dissents, embraced in majority opinions by Supreme Court justices in the late 20th century, are now bedrock for modern American law.
Now that’s a parallel to root for.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Comment at the Washington and the West blog () or contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
