1884 questions.

Was there any way that Blaine could have won the 1884 election? If no was there any Republican who could have won?

What about Cleveland? Was his nomination assured? Who would the Democrats nominated in his place had something happened to him before the convention or he decided not to run?
 
Was there any way that Blaine could have won the 1884 election? If no was there any Republican who could have won?

Maybe if the Reps had pulled the same stunt they did in 1888, ie got someone to write to the British Minister asking who would be the candidate most favourable to British interests. If the Minister falls for it and says "Cleveland", that could bring out enough additional Irish voters to make NY switch columns. .
 
Maybe if the Reps had pulled the same stunt they did in 1888, ie got someone to write to the British Minister asking who would be the candidate most favourable to British interests. If the Minister falls for it and says "Cleveland", that could bring out enough additional Irish voters to make NY switch columns. .
When would this likely happen?
 
Was there any way that Blaine could have won the 1884 election? If no was there any Republican who could have won?

What about Cleveland? Was his nomination assured? Who would the Democrats nominated in his place had something happened to him before the convention or he decided not to run?
Blaine could most easily win if Samuel Burchard doesn't make that "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" remark days before the election - that would swing New York. As for any other Democrats, without Cleveland I could see Bayard, McDonald, or Hendricks being nominated.
 
When would this likely happen?

Whenever it suited some Republican to do it. Probably two or three weeks before election day, so the reply would arrive before the voting. Of course, it might not work if there's a different British Minister from 1888, and this one doesn't fall for it, but you never know.
 

Stolengood

Banned
Was the election particularly close without New York in play? What were the margins on some other close states?
 
Was the election particularly close without New York in play? What were the margins on some other close states?


Cleveland's margin was 219-182, which losing NY would have more or less reversed to 217-184 for Blaine.

CT was also a very narrow Cleveland win, by less than 1% as in NY. But it only had six electoral votes. Blaine's closest state, MI, was again won by less than 1%, due to a strong showing by the Prohibition Party. But even had Cleveland taken it, its 13 EVs would have been too few to make up for the loss of NY's 35.
 
"Contemporary explanations of Blaine's defeat were indicated by a transparency carried in a Democratic procession which celebrated the victory:

The World Says the Independents Did It
The Tribune Says the Stalwarts Did It
The Sun Says Burchard Did It
Blaine Says St. John [the Prohibition candidate] Did It
Theodore Roosevelt Says It Was the Soft Soap Dinner [a reference to the Dorsey dinner where Arthur practically acknowledged that the Republicans had won Indiana in 1880 by corruption https://books.google.com/books?id=_v0owy-Xl4sC&pg=PA58 ]
We Say Blaine's Character Did It
But We Don't Care What Did It
It's Done.

None of these explanations took into account the strength of Cleveland, but the closeness of the result made all of them important. From the vantage ground of later times, however, it could be seen that greater forces were at work. By 1884 the day had passed when political contests could be won on Civil War issues..." https://books.google.com/books?id=dispAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA183
 
The thing is, "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion!" was not some random and peripheral remark. As David T's post suggests, times were moving on from the Civil War era and new issues were rising, giving old factions that had been suppressed (not, in my humble opinion, without good reasons in some cases) new allies. The alignments were shifting. The Republicans themselves were factionally splitting between former alliances, with agrarians with strong notions of their fundamental rectitude (and thus ownership of the lofty principles of Lincoln's party and his aura) polarizing ever more bitterly against the Gilded Age "Robber Barons/Captains of Industry" another branch of the party figured were Lincoln's important legacy. Cleveland as a candidate projected a powerful (and I gather, well-founded) image of propriety and honesty. After all we are talking about a man who confessed, when challenged, to having had a relationship with a woman he was never married to and taking responsibility for supporting her out of wedlock child. No one knows if he was in fact this child's father--he acknowledged he might have been, but could not tell because the mother shared her affections with others in his then circle of friends--he being the only bachelor among them, he took the responsibility to spare them ongoing scandal. Republican smear campaign (albeit founded on truth)--"Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" Jubilant Democratic rejoinder after the election--"Gone to the White House, Ha Ha Ha!"

In connection with another thread I took a look at Cleveland's bio some time recently, and was impressed with the quality of his integrity. That said were I ISOTed to the era I'd want to back a more radical figure; he was quite conservative in many ways. But while some decades before I'd favor the Republicans strongly, by this time the rot in the established, insider figures in that party (never too clean-handed to be sure, but the dirt was more creative earlier on) was pretty deep; especially given the drift of OTL history an uptimer like me is gifted with knowing, I'd want to push for a really radical reformer. Certainly the post-Reconstruction Democratic Party would be a very dubious star to hitch my righteous wagon to.

But the thing that strikes me about "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" is its mean-spiritedness, its essentialism, its very un-Lincolnesque smugness that there are saved elected (good, well-off Protestant Republicans coasting on the glory of the Union in the past Civil War--without following through on seeing to the welfare of the former slaves any longer) versus a mass of the presumably damned. The complacency and tribal mentality shows I think that whether Blaine might have won in 1884, sooner or later there would be a reckoning of some kind.

Note that the Republican victory that divided Cleveland's two terms into non-consecutive ones was very blatantly a stolen one. Just three times in US history since the modern party system evolved (basically with Andrew Jackson) has the popular vote been contradicted by the electoral vote. One of these, the Election of 1876, is of course the widely known textbook case of a stolen election--though in this case, I personally think the Republicans were justified, since the newly rising Solid South depended on mass voter suppression of African American votes--had this not happened, Hayes would clearly have won a larger popular vote, and won electoral votes from Southern states that as things stood counted their African population for purposes of getting representatives in Congress and thus electoral votes, but did not allow that segment (and a fair number of whites either) to actually vote. Therefore stealing Oregon's vote back seems not too outrageous to me. (The outrageous part is Hayes agreeing to placate the controversy by ending Reconstruction--but after all it was bound to be abandoned someday).

The third case was of course the election of 2000. I won't expound on that--wrong forum after all!

And the forgotten second case? The "victory" of Harrison in 1888, known at the time and to history to have depended on corrupt manipulations in favor of the Republicans in certain states. A number of bad things came out of the Harrison administration, and Cleveland handily swept him aside in 1892.

I suspect a Blaine administration would have been as infamous as the Lesser Harrison's deserves to be. The other thread that interested me was a South American focused one that (rather improbably IMHO though it was an interesting thread to follow, and presumably may still be if it revives) involved Chile forming a grand alliance of South American powers against the Yankees, confronting them in Panama. Because Cleveland was President at the time it drew my attention to his administration, and his predecessors during the preliminary Pacific War, in which Chile seized control of the former coastlands of Bolivia as well as some Peruvian territory. As it happened, the USA under the prior Republican administration favored the losing side in that war. Blaine was Secretary of State early on and spoke (perhaps hyperbolically) of annexing Peru--he was replaced, I suppose for other reasons, by a more level-headed figure. But learning about this did nothing to improve the rather negative picture I had of Blaine before. Cleveland on the other hand opposed imperialism, though he did cave in against overwhelming Congressional opposition on such matters as the status of Hawaii's Queen Lilioukulani. At the same time Cleveland also acted to revamp the rather uninspiring weakness the US Navy had fallen into--again, a Navy that was something to be reckoned with in Civil War days had, by virtue of corruption, underfunding and coasting on Civil War glories by simply retaining the same once-cutting edge ships as they were surpassed by the advancing state of the art fallen into third-rate status. It was widely believed, probably with foundation, that a single battleship Chile had purchased from Britain would be able to sink every ship in the then USN with impunity. Cleveland acted to rectify that, though the results would take years to bear fruit.

(This is why it seemed rather unfair to me for the Chileans to choose to challenge El Norte at the particular moment they did. Sending that battleship to Panama, then part of Colombia, was apparently OTL. It did happen on Cleveland's watch--though the US Admiral present withdrew instead of creating a POD by ordering a mindless attack on it against his senior staff officers' collective advice).

So yeah, Blaine might win. But the "gaffe" that might have been crucial in costing him this election was the tip of an iceberg that dominated the political landscape. Thus the infamous phrase might not have been crucial to the outcome after all. And if chaos in this closely balanced election had put Blaine over the top, the matters would come to a head sooner or later, I believe.
 
Cleveland's margin was 219-182, which losing NY would have more or less reversed to 217-184 for Blaine.

CT was also a very narrow Cleveland win, by less than 1% as in NY. But it only had six electoral votes. Blaine's closest state, MI, was again won by less than 1%, due to a strong showing by the Prohibition Party. But even had Cleveland taken it, its 13 EVs would have been too few to make up for the loss of NY's 35.

But if Cleveland had lost CT *and IN* even carrying New York would not have elected him. IMO Cleveland's accomplishment in carrying CT and IN has been underrated, with all the endless discussion of New York. Neither of these two smaller states was safely Democratic in close Gilded Age elections--both CT and IN went for Garfield in 1880, and IN was again to go Republican in 1888 (admittedly for a Hoosier). IN might even have gone for Hayes in 1876 if Hendricks were not on the Democratic ticket--but in any event Tilden's margin there was less than his national popular vote margin.
 
My god, a Blaine presidency would be an earlier Teddy Roosevelt as far as foreign affairs. He was a strong expansionist and it was his time as sec of state that put America on the course that led to Caribbean dominance, Spanish-american war, hawai'i annexation, and more.
 
My god, a Blaine presidency would be an earlier Teddy Roosevelt as far as foreign affairs. He was a strong expansionist and it was his time as sec of state that put America on the course that led to Caribbean dominance, Spanish-american war, hawai'i annexation, and more.

If Congress would let him.

Could he have been frustrated as Grant was over Santo Domingo?
 
Instead of endlessly focusing on what would have elected Blaine (in an election that close, any number of things could conceivably have done it), let's focus on what kind of president Blaine would have made if elected. From an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:

***

Mugwumps like E.L. Godkin of *The Nation* portrayed Blaine as the nemesis of reform, and bitterly attacked people like Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt (both of whom had backed the "Independent" reform-minded George Edmunds at the GOP convention) for allowing party loyalty to lead them to support Blaine in the general election. As TR and Lodge pointed out, the Mugwumps' self-righteous assumption that decent people *had* to back Cleveland over Blaine ignored several facts. One was Cleveland's ties to Irving Hall [the Brooklyn Democratic machine], already mentioned; another was the Democrats' choice of Thomas Hendricks, a soft-money politician of the type the reformers detested, as Cleveland's running mate; and a third is that Blaine's position on the issues was hardly as bad as Godkin and others asserted.

For example, Blaine's position on civil service had changed considerably since the 1870s. He had come out for civil service reform in 1882, and in 1884 was actually more specific about reform than Cleveland was. I see no reason to think Blaine would have been a worse president in this regard than Cleveland. As John G. Sproat has noted, "By July 1886 [Cleveland] had decided that 90 percent of the government officers under his direct control were 'incompetent.' In the Interior Department alone he cleared out 68 percent of the workers whose jobs could be filled by new appointments under the Pendleton Act; and he made almost a clean sweep of fourth-class postmasters." *The Best Men: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age*, p. 266. Blaine like Cleveland would have paid lip service to civil service reform; he might, as Harrison was to do, appoint a reformer like Theodore Roosevelt to the Civil Service Commission; but like Cleveland he would have to play the game by the established rules, which had been only slightly modified by the Pendleton Act.

One place Blaine and Cleveland would differ would be the tariff; Blaine loudly criticized Cleveland's call for downward revision in 1887. But one has to remember that as eloquently as Cleveland pleaded for lower tariffs, he really got very little tariff reform in either of his terms as president. OTOH, at least there was no large *increase* in the tariff under Cleveland comparable to the McKinley Tariff under Harrison. But I would not assume that such a tariff would have passed under Blaine, anyway. (Obviously this would partly depend on the relative strength of the two parties in Congress.) Blaine was a protectionist, but not a fanatical one. It is interesting that Blaine in fact called the McKinley Tariff "injudicious from beginning to end" and predicted that it would defeat the Republican party in 1892. (Sproat, p. 200)

Another area of possible difference was foreign policy. The foreign policy of Cleveland's first term was a rather old-fashioned laissez-faire policy--"isolationist" in the sense of trying to avoid foreign political commitments for the United States. Blaine wanted a more activist foreign policy. As Secretary of State under Garfield (and briefly under Arthur) he had championed the Pan-American movement (as he was to do again under Harrison) and was to (unsuccessfully) urge the British to consider the Clayton-Bulwer treaty (which made it impossible for either the US or the UK to build an isthmian canal without the other nation's consent) obsolete.

However, this does not to me make it likely that Blaine would get the US into a war with Britain. It is noteworthy that some of the bold diplomatic moves of Arthur and Secretary of State Frelinghuysen in 1884 were disapproved by Blaine as well as Cleveland. For example, Blaine opposed the Zavala-Frelinghuysen treaty which would have established a virtual US protectorate over Nicaragua; an isthmian canal was desirable, but this was going too far. (Of course it is conceivable that bitterness toward Arthur was one reason the defeated Blaine opposed the treaty, and that a victorious Blaine would have thought differently. But the truth is that Blaine's reputation as "Jingo Jim" was always overblown. He wanted commercial hegemony for the US in Latin America but was skeptical of the idea of territorial acquisition there; he disagreed with Grant for example on the acquisition of Santo Domingo.) Blaine also opposed US participation in the Berlin Conference on the Congo; as he explained to the British minister to the United States, Lionel Sackville-West, in December 1884, "How can we maintain the Monroe Doctrine when we take part in conferences on the internal affairs of other continents?" (Quoted in Edward P. Crapol, *James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire*, p. 102)

Of course, if Blaine was anti-annexationist with respect to Latin America, Hawaii was another matter. Way back in 1854 as the young editor of a Maine newspaper, Blaine had championed annexation. As Crapol writes (p. 7) "[Blaine] was infected by the Hawaiian annexation fever of the 1850s, and much like malaria, it reappeared throughout his life." But I doubt that this means he would strive for immediate annexation in 1885-9. What was more important immediately was saving the Hawaiian reciprocity treaty and getting the US exclusive rights to use of Pearl Harbor as a coaling and repair station. Indeed in 1883-4 Blaine as a private citizen did a great deal to stave off abrogation of the reciprocity treaty; Blaine admitted to a Republican senator that the treaty was indefensible as a revenue matter, but explained that "very important" strategic and diplomatic considerations justified renewal. (In 1887 when the Senate finally approved a renegotiated reciprocity treaty, the treaty's proviso on US rights to use Pearl Harbor was the work of Blaine's old friend, Alabama's Democratic Senator John Tyler Morgan, and was supported by several of Blaine's expansionist allies, including his protege from Maine, William P. Frye.)

Would Blaine have been re-elected in 1888? It's hard to say; Gilded Age presidential elections tended to be extremely close. Who would his Democratic opponent be? Cleveland might try for a comeback, but there would be other possibilities like Thomas Bayard of Delaware (but he would be hurt by his record as a Peace Democrat during the Civil War) and Cleveland's successor as governor of New York, David B. Hill.
 
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