CHAPTER VI
THE GROWTH OF DISSENT
Important as was the legislation described in the preceding chapter, there were sources of discontent which it could not, in the nature of things, dry up. With the exception of the income tax, there had been no decisive effort to placate the poorer sections of the population by distinct class legislation. It is true, the alien contract labor law and the Chinese exclusion act were directed particularly to the working class, but their effects were not widely felt.
The accumulation of vast fortunes, many of which were gained either by fraudulent manipulations, or shady transactions within the limits of the law but condemned by elementary morals, and the massing of millions of the proletariat in the great industrial cities were bound in the long run to bring forth political cleavages as deep as the corresponding social cleavage. The domination of the Federal government by the captains of machinery and capital was destined to draw out a counter movement on the part of the small farmers, the middle class, and the laborers. Mutterings of this protest were heard in the seventies; it broke forth in the Populist and Socialist movement in the nineties; it was voiced in the Democratic campaign of 1896; silenced awhile by a wave of imperialism, it began to work a transformation in all parties at the opening of the new century.
This protest found its political expression in the organization of "third" or minor parties. The oldest and most persistent of all these groups is the Prohibitionist party, which held its first national convention at Columbus, Ohio, in 1872, and nominated Mr. Black, of Pennsylvania, as its candidate. In its platform, it declared the suppression of the liquor traffic to be the leading issue, but it also proposed certain currency reforms and the regulation of transportation companies and monopolies.
Although their popular vote in 1872 was less than six thousand, the Prohibitionists returned to their issue at each succeeding campaign with Spartan firmness, but their gains were painfully slow. They reached 9522 in 1876, and 10,305 in 1880. In the campaign of 1884, when many Republicans were dissatisfied with the nomination of Blaine, and unwilling to follow Curtis and Schurz into the Democratic camp, the Prohibition vote rose to 150,369. A further gain of nearly one hundred thousand votes in the next election, to which a slight addition was made in 1892, encouraged the Prohibitionists to hope that the longed-for "split" had come, and they frightened the Republican politicians into considering concessions, especially in the states where the temperance party held the balance of power. In fact, in their platform of 1892 the Republicans announced in a noncommittal fashion that they sympathized with "all wise and legitimate efforts to lessen and prevent the evils of intemperance and promote morality." The scare was unwarranted, however, for the Prohibition party had about reached its high-water mark. Being founded principally on one moral issue and making no appeal to any fundamental economic divisions, it could not make headway against the more significant social issues, and its strength was further reduced by the growth of state and local prohibition.
Almost immediately after the Civil War, labor entered politics in a small way on its own account. In 1872, a party known as the "Labor Reformers" held a national convention at Columbus which was attended by delegates from seventeen states. It declared in favor of restricting the sale of public lands to homesteaders, Chinese exclusion, an eight-hour day in government employments, civil service reform, one term for each President, regulation of railway and telegraph rates, and the subjection of the military to the civil authorities. The party nominated Justice Davis, who had been appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Lincoln and had shown Populist leanings immediately after the War; but Mr. Davis declined to serve, and O'Connor of New York, to whom the place was then tendered, only polled about 29,000 votes.