In the Democratic Camp

In the boarding houses. – The Democratic attack. – A hellish cannonade of rockets and speeches. – The relation of the parties. – The extremes of Republicans. – Seventy thousand, perhaps fewer, in the ranks of the fiery army. – Disputes about numbers. – The cost of the procession.

Modest people and especially single individuals earning 100–200 dollars a month live here mostly in boarding houses. These are houses where individual rooms with a common table are rented out. Life in them is comparatively inexpensive, but at the same time has much interesting variety. Here at the table merge into one family, usually of 10–15 people, individuals of all nations, ranks, professions, characters, and beliefs. With such variety, everyone has something to say, and therefore noisy chatter is the most characteristic feature of this table gathering. In one such house lived the author of these lines, on 17th Street, just a hundred fathoms from the Democratic Union Square. The gathering here is as diverse as one could imagine. There lives a German actress who knows how to exchange the traditional Russian Easter greeting, and a city schoolteacher who has no clear idea which part of the world Russia is in, a Cuban insurgent making Havana cigars, and a Prussian German who curses Bismarck; a humorous Scotsman who mercilessly mangles the English language, and a pure London Englishman who pronounces the name of Her Majesty the English Empress with reverence; an aspiring and therefore constantly failing lawyer and an experienced engineer who had a finger torn off by a machine; a mocking Republican and a constantly heated Democrat, and so on. On one autumn evening, this company was sitting in the dining room and with general chatter was smoothing over a just completed dinner. It was 7 o’clock in the evening and stars were already twinkling in the sky. “B-boom!” – suddenly a cannon boomed, and the dining room windows trembled feverishly.

“What is that?” asked the Scotsman.

“Why, the Democrats have loaded Hancock into a cannon and fired him at the moon: he will be elected president there,” said the Republican with a sly look, winking at the Democrat.

“No, sir, excuse me,” replied the Democrat, “this is the first signal for whipping Republicans out of the White House! And here are the other signals for the same thing: look, look at the sky?” – added the Democrat with visible self-satisfaction.

The entire company rushed to the windows, and some went out onto the street entrance. The sky presented an interesting sight. In all directions, high, very high above, fiery arcs of rockets rose up, which with a hissing whistle cut through the air and seemed to burst with a crack right beneath the stars and scatter in a rain of multicolored fire. The entire Union Square is surrounded by Democratic halls, and from all of them now, as well as from the square itself, rockets were being launched with reckless extravagance. The whistle, crack, and flash of rockets, with the intermediate boom of a cannon placed in the square, killed the quiet of the pleasant evening. With such a cannonade the Democrats opened their attack on the hated Republicans, on that memorable day, September 23rd.

An old misfortune of the Democratic party has been that division which has constantly existed in it since the past war. Demagogic politicians, disagreeing with one another more over personal accounts than over principle, little by little formed separate factions which came to feud with one another more than with their common opponent – the Republican party. This division expressed itself even spatially. Each faction created for itself a special “hall” in which its members gathered for meetings and by which the factions themselves came to be named. Thus, at the present time, the most well-known factions are “Tammany Hall” and “Irving Hall.” Until recently they were bitter enemies, and the Democratic party owed its defeat in the elections two elections ago mainly to this circumstance. In the past year, the nomination of General Hancock as the presidential candidate contributed somewhat to a reconciliation between these factions, and they indeed unanimously declared themselves supporters of this candidate; but at the same time the spark of old enmity continued to smolder, and in September of last year it nearly burst forth again into open enmity.

At this time, discussions were taking place regarding the selection of a new mayor for New York. The governance of the city is in the hands of Democrats, and in these discussions, rivalry arose between the factions; each wished to select a mayor from its own ranks. The rivalry threatened to tear the recently established truce. Fortunately, among the members of the factions there were found people who sacrificed their personal interests for the common interests of the party and succeeded in bringing the warring factions to finally conclude a formal treaty of alliance, signed by their representatives. This event was very important for the Democratic party, and the Democrats decided to celebrate it in grand style. The cannon fire and rockets were the beginning of this celebration.

Rockets continued with hiss and crack to cut through the dark-blue gloom of the night atmosphere, and the cannon periodically boomed, shaking the windows of houses, when I set out for the site of action – Union Square. The square was already swarming with people, in dense masses occupying the sidewalks and following the fiery arcs. The statues of the “fathers” of the republic standing at the corners of the square were decorated with multicolored lights and flags. Only one statue stood as if forgotten, an orphan: on it not a light, not a scrap of cloth, and it bashfully hid from curious eyes in the night darkness. This was the statue of Lincoln: Democrats do not love it. On all the free spaces in the square stood platforms, decorated again with flags, electric suns, and policemen with their inseparable batons. From these platforms, according to the program, Democratic orators were to open a cannonade of speeches. One platform stood out with particularly lavish decorations, was, so to speak, the moon among the stars, a chair among stools. It was designated for Hancock himself, from which he was to review the fiery army of Democrats. To the great sorrow of the Democrats, their leader had caught a vicious cold just before the celebration, and the doctors advised him not to go into the open air.

Exactly at 8 o’clock, when rockets had sufficiently prepared the ground for the general assault, the orators came out and opened a hellish cannonade of speeches, which thundered from all the platforms and together with the rockets burst in the night darkness. In New York, I for the first time became acquainted with public speaking in the open air, and it must be said that it is difficult to point to a more wretched position of a human being than when he is addressing a huge crowd under the open sky. First of all, this crowd, consisting, of course, not only of Democrats but also of Republicans who came to watch the celebration of their opponents, was insufficiently attentive and paid more attention to the hiss of rockets than to the crack of the orators. Then it was also insufficiently respectful. I was unpleasantly struck by a case where at one platform the rough mocking echoes of several voices from the crowd answered all the vocal transitions and exclamations of the orator. This case explained to me why Democrats, in decorating their platforms with lights and flags, found it necessary to decorate them also with whole patrols of policemen, who stood at the sides of the orators. Finally, the lack of resonance made futile all the efforts of the orators to make themselves heard by a more or less significant number of people. American orators generally distinguish themselves with strong voices, and I have nowhere encountered such thunderous loud-mouths as here. Often in a huge hall, an orator in passionate passages roars like an enraged buffalo – to the deafening of unprepared listeners. The development of such iron lungs here is undoubtedly influenced by the long-established practice of public speaking, upon whose efforts a great deal depends in the nation’s political life. And now under the open sky, the orators thundered with incredible force, but despite all this, the dull murmur of the many-thousand crowd and the hiss of rockets deprived the speeches of the clarity of sound, and therefore for the majority they were merely strange cries, disappearing without a trace into the air. However, there is no need to regret such a fate. Holiday speeches usually have little sense, and consist exclusively of bombastic phrases designed for momentary effect like rockets, and therefore burst in the air as noiselessly as rockets. Among the din of these speeches, only was heard that the Democratic party is the true people’s party, that Republicans hold power through deception and bribery, that now it is time for Democrats to take power in their hands, and so on. To become better acquainted with the principles and aspirations of the Democratic party, one should turn to such speeches as are given at quieter moments, when the head is not overcome by the excitement of passion. I will present here some of the grounds on which Democrats especially do not love Republicans and wish to take power from them.

After the war, the Republican party, as victor, completely seized power into its hands and, relying on it, began to treat the opposing party on the basis of the principle vae victis – woe to the vanquished. The South, for its separatist aspirations, had to endure many troubles; Republicans were generous in applying various extraordinary measures to it – to the direct detriment of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. In one case, the victorious North decided to employ military measures to eradicate among Southerners the remnants of sedition, and to this end General Hancock was given dictatorial powers. But the valiant general, able to be at the same time a true son of his republic, was not carried away by such omnipotence and upon taking up the post of dictator announced that he would completely subordinate his dictatorship to the Constitution of the nation, and indeed, instead of extraordinary repressive measures, began to restore in the troubled South a sense of legality and order, establishing there civic peace and confidence in the law. This was truly a valiant civic act of General Hancock, and it is mainly on this act that Democratic sympathies toward him are based; he owes his nomination to the presidency as a Democratic candidate chiefly to this act. Confidence and fidelity to the Union in the South were soon restored after the war, but Republicans continue to suspect a smoldering spark of separatism there. They are particularly disturbed by the fact that the South represents a too cohesive Democratic organization. In this organization they see sedition. “Solid South,” as they call the South because of such its Democratic cohesion, serves for them as a constant bugbear of “the bloody shirt.” In reality, however, the “cohesion of the South” depends not at all on separatist aspirations, but is produced by the Republicans themselves. First of all, according to the explanation of one Democrat, the cohesion of the South was caused by those oppressions to which Republicans were generous in relation to the South, which for its own defense against such oppression had of necessity to cohere into one united force. But now this cohesion is maintained by the order of things established there by the Republicans, who freed the Negroes from slavery and gave them the right to vote equal to that of their former masters. “You, gentlemen of the North,” wrote recently the Democratic senator from the South, Stewart, “overlook an important fact regarding Southern politics. You forget that in the Southern states, nine-tenths of the Republican party consist of the colored race. This race was only recently freed from slavery. It has not had sufficient time to rise in education to the level of the great duties placed upon it. To give power and control of public institutions in the South now to Republicans is to give it to the most ignorant and uneducated classes, or, what is worse, to unscrupulous and unprincipled demagogues who, for their own purposes, deceive and incite them. These black voters are what force the South to be cohesive. If the right to vote had been withheld from them until they had risen sufficiently in education to understand their duty, the cohesive South would have long since dispersed. But I ask the candid men of the North to say whether it would be wise and advantageous for the intelligence, progress, and property of the South to entrust all these precious interests to the governance of the ignorant and propertyless classes, who for the most part do not own property, are incapable of understanding the significance of legislation, or even do not know how to read the ballots they put in the voting urn.” – In this defense, the Democrats undoubtedly have a considerable share of truth on their side. They also have a share of truth in their offensive arguments. They accuse Republicans of despotic tendencies, and in this they are partly right. The distinguishing principle of the Republican party has always been the strengthening of centralization in the governance of the nation, and to this end it has used every opportunity to curtail the independence of individual states. Thanks to its prolonged dominance in the nation, it has of late so persistently pursued this principle that it does not stop even at violating popular traditions, as, for example, in the recent agitation for Grant for a “third” presidential term, which directly contradicted the great testament of the republic’s founder Washington. Finally, prolonged undivided dominance in the nation has led to the fact that among the nation there has developed to terrifying proportions bureaucracy and the so-called “machine politics,” by which bureaucrats begin to operate the state, without paying special attention to the actual demands of the people. All of this together has produced in the nation a desire for “a change in government,” which Democrats now ceaselessly trumpet, and the word “change” in the mouths of oratorical Democrats undergoes the most frequent and merciless torment. On the other hand, Republicans have their solid reasons not to hand over power to Democrats, and insistently point out to the people the prosperity that the nation has achieved under their governance. In this, undoubtedly, lies their main strength now, all the more so because the Democrats, despite all their oratorical efforts, have so far found nothing to oppose to this Republican argument except references to Providence.