The Crime of Caste in Our Country

by Benjamin Rush Davenport

This disease was not confined to the horny-handed sons of toil; the heart in the hovel was not the only one that ached. It was not confined to the follower of the plow; but its pestilential breath pervaded every home in the land, leaving everyone below the multi-millionaire unhappy. The clerk of the dry-goods store was hurt because the floor walker assumed a superiority; the floor walker, because the proprietor assumed it; the proprietor, because the importer from whom he purchased goods assumed a distinction; and so it continued, from the longshoreman up, until it reached our millionaire would-be princes, who ape and mimic English life and manners, leaving, as it arose, a sting of increasing bitterness; but each man felt too proud to give utterance to what he thought it shamed him even to recognize as a sensation.

Hence the apathy on the surface, the sentiment confessed only to themselves and in the closet of the voting booth. Because the people had identified the Republican party with the class of men who were striving to create this class distinction, and because of the very charm of the word Democracy to their aching hearts, they voted the Democratic ticket—not Democrats alone in a political sense, but men who believe in democracy in the broad sense that St. Paul preached on Mars Hill at Athens, in the broad sense that Christ’s life demonstrated.

It was useless, against this first overmastering, powerful emotion in the American breast, to call upon the old veterans of the Civil War, to whom the Republican party had given increased pensions. It was useless to cry even to the negro, to whom the Republican party had given freedom. He, too, had become imbued with the spirit of equality. The wealthy could not purchase the birthright of the veteran by appealing to his pocketbook, any more than they could that of the laborer. He had shed his blood in the cause of equality, resisting then the assumed superiority of blood and birth so often flaunted in his face by gentlemen from the South.

In 1861, the “mudsills” of the North and West, the tillers of the soil, had shouldered their muskets at the call of that great man of the people, Abraham Lincoln, leaving home and loved ones to face unknown dangers and diseases in the cause of EQUALITY. Down in their hearts then was a sentiment which is revived in 1892. That thing which had been the hardest to bear, for the laboring settler of the West and the workman of the North, was the existence of “caste” in the South, and the supposed superiority of the Southerners in the halls of Congress. Love of the Union was the outspoken, pronounced cause of their coming at Lincoln’s call; but there was something behind and beneath all of that, that had been growing for years; it was resentment, because of the South’s assumption of “caste” in our country.

The question was settled, by these very veterans, from 1861 to ’65 with bullets, and it was utterly unavailing to call upon them for ballots in 1892 against the cause for which they fought in 1861.

The very negro said to himself: “You gave us freedom, the Republican party, but the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln was purely a Democratic party, in a broader sense.” To the negro’s mind, no three Presidents of the past will more thoroughly represent a picture pleasing to the eye of the enslaved or the lower classes, than Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. All were Democrats—men who believed in the people and labored for the people, leading lives of pure simplicity, affecting no superiority of rank or position. It was useless to attempt to hold the negro vote.

The very name of the “People’s Party,” so strongly did it indicate and describe this sentiment of the people; enabled that party, with all its incongruous doctrines, to carry the electoral votes of some States of the Union.

How frivolous seemed the claim of the Democratic papers and politicians, that the popularity of Grover Cleveland, and the confidence that people had in his rectitude and honesty, caused this revolution. How it appears to be trifling with truth to ascribe the victory of the people, the true Democracy, to the “masterly manner in which Mr. Harrity managed the campaign.” Mr. Whitney’s diplomacy, Mr. Dickinson’s energy and ability, Mr. Sheehan’s shrewdness, sink into utter insignificance, and become as a grain of sand upon the seashore, where they have happened to be tossed by the mighty wave of the ocean of feeling, full of resentment, that filled the hearts of the people. Their little all was but the piping of a penny whistle in a gale of wind. W. H. Vanderbilt’s four words, “The public be damned,” uttered from the pedestal of $150,000,000, made a greater impression, and became more indelibly impressed upon the minds of the whole people, ranging in wealth from $10,000,000 to less than a cent, than all the management of Harrity, the diplomacy of Whitney, the skill of Sheehan, or the energy of Dickinson. The reported expression of Mr. Russell Harrison, when asked, while in London, what his position was in America, as son of the President,—“Oh, about what the Prince of Wales is here,”—was thought of and resented to greater purpose than was produced by all the speeches of the eloquent Cockran.

The women of the land made more speeches, and effective speeches, to the voters of the land when they thought of the much-advertised American Duchess. They had felt most keenly—for woman’s life is social much more than man’s—the attempted social distinction; and, strange as it may appear to some of the skillful politicians that they had never recognized it, the women of America had become largely Democratic, and in them the Democratic party had its most powerful orators; for even the most brutal, neglectful, and unloving husband resents in a vigorous manner the least slight or insult offered to his wife. Upon every occasion, gathering, entertainment, charitable undertaking, some wife had been slighted. Because of the attempted creation of “caste,” she became a powerful factor, at once, in the campaign of the people. It mattered not whether her husband was a millionaire or not, no matter in what portion of society,—the clerk in a dry-goods store, the farmer, the banker, the millionaire,—the same result would follow. Some would attempt to arrogate to themselves a better position, and claim certain superiority over her. The banker’s wife feels as keenly the slight of the wife of a railroad president, as the wife of a longshoreman does any assumed difference in social position on the part of the wife of the retail grocer.

This all-prevailing crime of “caste” does not, like most crimes are supposed to do, originate in the gutter, but it permeates the mass of the population, like the source of a great river, starting at the very top of the mountain, and dripping constantly downward.