84 - We Need More Mugwumps: Their Return Could Save the Nation
Rep. Liz Cheney is a Mugwump. So is her father, the former vice-president. Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, along with Sen. Mitt Romney and a host of half-sensible Republican others, could join the Cheneys to help save our Republic from disintegration and the loss of essential freedoms and rights.
The original Mugwumps were principled Republican Congresspersons and Republican opinion influencers who bolted from the Republican Party when it nominated James G. Blaine of Maine, implicated in a financial scandal, to oppose Democratic stalwart and anti-corruption campaigner Grover Cleveland, a mayor of Buffalo who had cancelled padded contracts, in the 1884 presidential election. The Mugwumps believed Blaine corruptible and, desirous of rooting out corruption in political appointments at the national level and beyond – as Massachusetts had just tried to do -- deserted their northern political affiliations to campaign and vote for Cleveland over Blaine.
Cleveland won the presidency by a mere 23,000 votes. The Mugwumps were pleased that they had helped to entrench the reform of civil service appointments that had followed the passage of the Pendleton act of 1883. President Chester Arthur’s unexpected elevation from vice-president after the assassination of President James Garfield had helped to ensure anti-corruption reforms in Washington. Indeed, Arthur – previously Collector of the Port of New York – knew well how corruption worked and was a surprisingly effective convert to anti-corruption endeavors.
Cleveland continued attacks on the spoils system, doubling the number of civil servants selected by merit. He also ordered his cabinet ministers to eliminate abuses and extravagances in their departments. His administration further forced western railroads to return illegally held rights of way.
This is not to say that Cleveland’s victory and the Mugwumps likely role in his election ended corruption in the United States. It is merely the first of many salvoes that reduced job selling and influence buying in Washington (pernicious behaviors that continue) and eventually led to the campaign finance reforms of the early twentieth century (now upended by the Supreme Court’s terrible decision in the Citizen’s United v Federal Election Commission case of 2010).
But Cleveland’s administration was an improvement over the Republican presidencies of the post-Lincoln era. And the Mugwumps were at least partially responsible. Historians differ on the importance of the Mugwumps. But whatever the historical verdict, it is obvious that these times call for more Mugwumps. Less than 100 days before the crucial mid-term elections, we need defections from Republican political ranks, but only honest contenders of principle and integrity need apply.
Mugwump, in case you are wondering, derived from the mistransliteration of an Algonquin word for “big person,” “chief,” or “person of influence.” An editor of the New York Sun supposedly named the defecting Republicans Mugwumps because they were fence sitters, with a Mug on one side of a fence and a Wump (Rump) on the other.
In the early 1880s, influential opinion-shaping Mugwumps included Harvard University President Charles William Eliot; Charles Francis Adams, president of the American Historical Association and head of the Union Pacific Railroad; Henry Adams, the famed author; future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis; Nation editor Edward Lawrence Godkin; Thomas Nast, the cartoonist who exposed the Tweed-ring corruption in New York City; Carl Schurz, editor of the Saturday Evening Post and a former U. S. senator from Missouri; William Graham Sumner, Yale’s esteemed social scientist; the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); the editor of the Chicago Tribune; and Mark Twain.
Today we have Republican outgoing governors like Charles Baker and Larry Hogan to lead a contemporary Mugwump revival. They could mobilize “real” Republicans disenchanted (to use a modest word) with what the spineless national Republican Party has become. Such a new Mugwumpery might begin to send the conspiracy theorists winning primary races in Arizona and Nevada back into their foxholes. Or is it too late?
The prejudice-spouting Huey Longs, Charles Lindberghs, and Father Charles Coughlins of their day eventually were eventually reduced to irrelevance by the policies of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson. The presidential candidacy of Wendell Willkie, an honest, principled, Republican also helped. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist conspiracisms, as I have written here several times, were eventually reduced to sputterings when Mugwump type Republicans called his bluff and refused to accept more of his poisonous tripe.
These United States have never gone too long without what historian Richard Hofstadter called the politics of paranoia. Seeing conspiracies under Red beds has always been associated closely with the American miracle. Even, or particularly, Supreme Courts have had their ups and downs. We have endured eras of backward decisions from the Supreme Court. What is different now is that we thought that our electorate had become sophisticated enough and media savvy enough to reject bunkum and castigate charlatans. Then unexpectedly and narrowly, for the wrong reasons, we embraced the raving lunacies of someone who Mayor Bloomberg rightly called “a con man.”
Why evangelicals stooped to vote for a twice-divorced pussy snatcher is less a puzzle than a reflection of status compression fears and realities, and deep-rooted anxieties about the ascent of peoples of dark complexion. An otherwise perfectly charitable grandmother who teaches in prisons told me that she voted for Trump to “save the white race.”
Let us search everywhere for modern Mugwumps. The time has come for Mugwumps to rise mightily against today’s Trump-captured Republicans nationally, in state after state, and at the local level.
PS For more on Liz Cheney, see the insightful article by Jonathan Martin in today’s New York Times.
And for excellent and incisive comment generally, see Andelman Unleashed in Substack.