AHC/WI: Hancock Defeats Garfield!

What it says on the tin. By all accounts the 1880 election was a close run thing, with the Republican nominee James A. Garfield beating the Democratic nominee Winfield S. Hancock by less than 2,000 votes.

So would would happen if Hancock eked out a win? What does his administration look like? What are the knock on effects?
 
Man, I am a silly person. When I saw the thread title, my immediate thought was a battle between these two titans...
hancock-movie.jpg


VS

clip-art-garfield-815896.jpg
 
A lot of very bad shit, presumably. More Redeemerist assholes populating the government.

I don't think Hancock would be any worse on racial matters than Cleveland's administration was after 1884. And anyway the GOP did nothing significant for African Americans in the South after 1876.

Really, leaving aside butterfly effects, it is hard to see how the 1880 election made much difference. The tariff? The Democratic platform was ambiguous, and Hancock himself strongly denied that he would end protection for industry. (Unfortunately, he said the tariff was a "local question." He later explained privately that what he meant was that it affected different localities differently, but his statement was still ridiculed by the Republicans. http://books.google.com/books?id=ubSem4UEn9AC&pg=PA301) Civil service reform? All the candidates said they were for it, and it would come eventually, but probably Congress would do nothing about it in the near future. (The only reason it did so in OTL was because of Garfield's assassination. So, yes, in that sense Garfield's election made a bit of a difference, but only accidentally.) The money question? Hancock was not as prominently associated with hard money as Tilden and Bayard were, but there is little likelihood he would have aligned himself with western inflationists.

Leonard Dinnerstein in “The Election of 1880,” in A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections , 4 volumes. New York : Chelsea House and McGraw-Hill, 1971) describes the 1880 election as "one of the most insignificant in United States history." It certainly did not seem that way to voters at the time--turnout has been estimated at 78 percent. But in terms of likely actual effects on public policy, I would say Dinnerstein was right.
 

Redhand

Banned
You might see some efforts to reign in the influence of big business as Hancocks party was less cozy with the captains of industry than the Republicans were. Not much change in the situation of blacks, and the Indian wars are basically over. I cant see that much being changed with this result.

To be honest, the changes that were occurring in the US from 1875-1895 were simply too massive and momentous for government to have much effect on. Population and capital were exploding, the settlers were claiming land with machine like persistence, businesses were making it big and the landscape was being developed. The small limited US government of the era in comparison with the one from Roosevelt on had very little influence on the dynamics of Americas changing society.
 
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