On February 22, 1889, outgoing Democratic president Grover Cleveland signed an omnibus bill that divided the Territory of Dakota in half and enabled the people in the new Territories of North Dakota and South Dakota, as well as the older Territories of Montana and Washington, to write state constitutions and elect state governments. The four new states would be admitted to the Union in nine months.
Republicans and Democrats had fought for years over admitting new western states, with members of each party blocking the admission of states thought to favor the other. Republicans counted on Dakota and Washington Territories, while the Democrats felt pretty confident about Montana and New Mexico Territories.
In early 1888, Congress had considered a compromise by which all four states would come into the Union together. But in the 1888 election, voters had put the Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, and while the popular vote had gone to Cleveland, the Electoral College had put Republican Benjamin Harrison into the White House.
Democrats had to cut a deal quickly or the Republicans would simply admit their own states and no others. The plan they ended up with cut Democratic New Mexico out of statehood but admitted Montana, split the Republican Territory of Dakota into two new Republican states, and admitted Republican-leaning Washington.
Harrison’s men were eager to admit new western states to the Union. In the eastern cities, the Democrats had been garnering more and more votes as popular opinion was swinging against the industrialists who increasingly seemed to control politics as well as the economy.
Democrats promised to lower the tariffs that drove up prices for consumers, while Republican leaders agreed with industrialists that they needed the tariffs that protected their products from foreign competition. Republicans assumed that the upcoming 1890 census would prove that the West was becoming the driving force in American politics, and admitting new states full of Republican voters would dramatically increase the strength of the Republican Party in Congress. The one new representative each new state would send to the House would be nice, but two new Republican senators per state would guarantee the Republicans would hold the Senate for the foreseeable future.
Then, too, the new states would change the number of electors in the Electoral College, where each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of the state’s U.S. senators and representatives. Harrison’s men were only too aware that Harrison had lost the popular vote and won only in the Electoral College, and they were keen to skew the Electoral College more heavily toward the Republicans before the 1892 election.
In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the administration’s mouthpiece, Harrison’s people boasted that Republicans could take Montana, and gleefully anticipated that the new western states would send eight new Republican senators to Washington, D.C., making the count in the Senate forty-seven Republicans to thirty-seven Democrats. The newspaper also pointed out that changing the balance of the Electoral College would stop the Democratic-leaning state of New York from determining the next president.
In May 1889, elections for members of the constitutional conventions in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington Territory went Republican. Montana went Democratic, but Republicans blamed the result on Democratic gerrymandering. In October 1889, congressional elections in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington confirmed that those territories would come into the Union as Republican states. Frank Leslie’s counted the numbers: Republicans had garnered 169 seats to the Democrats’ 161. Republican legislatures would also give six new Republicans to the Senate, putting the count in that body at forty-five Republicans and thirty-nine Democrats. Frank Leslie’s reported the numbers, then explained what they meant: Republican control of Congress was pretty much guaranteed.
As for Montana, when it appeared the legislature would be dominated by Democrats, Republicans simply threw out the Democratic votes, charging fraud. They did have to admit that a Democrat had won the governorship, but they insisted he had done so by fewer than three hundred votes. The governor, Joseph K. Toole, was so popular that he was reelected twice, but the Republicans tried to weaken him by harping on what Frank Leslie’s called his “arbitrary, partisan, we might almost say indecent official conduct.”
In a little over a week in November 1889, four new states entered the Union. On Saturday, November 2, President Harrison signed the documents admitting North Dakota and South Dakota. On Friday, November 8, he welcomed Montana to the Union. The following Monday, November 11, he declared Washington a state.
Just as they had planned in February, Republicans had added three Republican states to the Union and had come close to capturing a fourth. The West seemed to be the key to maintaining national political power, and it looked as if Harrison’s men had managed to claim the region for themselves. Republican dominance in the new western states, Frank Leslie’s wrote, would tip the scale that had balanced the parties for more than a decade. The votes of the new states would virtually assure the Republicans the presidency in 1892, and the tariffs would be safe.
But by summer 1890 it was no longer clear that the Republicans would keep their majority. The economy was faltering, and Americans blamed the tariffs. They were looking favorably on former president Cleveland, who, after all, had won the popular vote in 1888. The Harrison administration seemed out of touch with the American people. Mrs. Harrison had drawn up plans for a $700,000 addition to the White House with conservatories, winter gardens, and a statuary hall, “so as to make it a fit home for a Presidential family.” The Harrisons’ ne’er-do-well son Russell insisted it was “shameful” for the head of the nation to be forced to live in cramped quarters, although observers noted that the cramping came from the fact that Russell Harrison and his wife and child had moved into the White House with the president and the first lady. And then President Harrison accepted a handsome plate of solid gold from supporters from California on his birthday in August.
Republicans turned again to the idea of protecting their majority by adding more states. They looked toward Wyoming and Idaho. Since Wyoming had boasted a non-Indigenous population of fewer than 21,000 people in 1880 and the Northwest Ordinance had established 60,000 as the necessary population for admission to statehood, it was a stretch to argue that it was ready, but the Republicans were adamant that it should join the Union.
They also wanted to add Idaho, which had a population of fewer than 33,000 in 1880. They were in such a hurry to admit Idaho that they bypassed the usual procedures of state admission, permitting the territorial governor to call for volunteers to write a state constitution, which voters approved only months later.
Democrats pointed out that there was no argument for Wyoming and Idaho statehood that did not apply to Democratic New Mexico and Arizona. “The picking out of the two Territories and plucking them into the Union by the ears looked like an operation that was not to be justified by any sound principle of statesmanship or of public necessity, and that only found justification in the minds of its promoters by the fact that they were thus increasing their political influence in the next presidential election,” a Democratic representative charged.
Republicans countered that Democrats were opposing the admission of new states out of partisanship, saying they would not add a new state unless it pledged allegiance to the Democratic Party.
On July 3, 1890, after a vote that fell along party lines, Wyoming and Idaho were admitted to the Union. The Republicans had added six new states to the Union in less than a year. Administration loyalists were elated, but Democrats and moderate Republicans were not enthusiastic. The Democratic Boston Globe pointed out that the two new states together had a population of “a fair sized congressional district in Massachusetts” but would be represented in Congress by four senators and two representatives.
The moderate Republican Harper’s Weekly was also concerned. It pointed out that the admission of the new states badly skewed congressional representation. The estimated 105,000 people of Wyoming and Idaho, it complained, would have four senators and two representatives. The 200,000 people in the First Congressional District of New York, in contrast, had only one representative. Harper’s Weekly pointed out there were fifteen wards in New York City that each had a population as large as the population of Wyoming and Idaho put together. To get their additional Republican senators, the magazine noted, the Harrison administration had badly undercut the political power of voters from much more populous regions, a maneuver that did not seem to serve the fundamental principle of equal representation in the republic.
Administration men did not stop at redrawing the map to ensure the success of their party. They manipulated the 1890 census to favor Republican districts, projecting their count would give fifteen more Republican congressmen while only seven for the Democrats. They erected statues of Civil War heroes and passed the Dependent Pension Act, which put money in the pockets of disabled veterans, their wives, and their children. And all the while, they blamed their opponents for partisanship. Frank Leslie’s lectured: “It behooves the citizen, regardless of party affiliations to think of the calamities that must in the end result from the intensifying of party feeling and the subordination of right and justice to the desire to advance party success.”
And yet the public mood continued to swing away from the Republicans, who continued to insist that the workers and farmers suffering under the Republicans’ policies were ungrateful and were themselves to blame for their own worsening conditions. In turn, opponents accused Republicans of stealing the 1888 election and believing they didn’t have to answer to voters so long as they had moneyed men behind them so they could buy elections.
In the 1890 midterms, voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed their opponents a majority of more than two to one. A new “Alliance” movement of farmers and workers had swept through the West “like a wave of fire,” Harper’s Weekly wrote, calling for business regulations and income taxes and working quietly through new, local newspapers that old party operatives had largely ignored. Republicans held power in the Senate only thanks to the admission of the new states, but even those did not deliver as expected: Republicans held a majority of only four senators, but three of them opposed tariffs.
In the presidential election of 1892, Harrison won four electoral votes from South Dakota, three from Montana, four from Washington, and three from Wyoming. Idaho’s three electoral votes went to the Populist candidate for president, James B. Weaver. North Dakota split its three votes among the three candidates. It was not enough. Grover Cleveland returned to the White House for a second term, and Democrats took charge of Congress for the first time since before the Civil War.
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Notes:
The material here is mostly from my Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre but the specific references are below:
New York Times, February 13, 1888, p. 1; February 24, 1888, p. 3; February 15, 1889, p. 5; February 17, 1889, p. 4; February 25, 1889, p. 1.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 5, 1889, p. 346; March 2, 1889, p. 39; March 16, 1889, p. 91, from New York World.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 1, 1889, p. 287; October 19, 1889, p. 191. Hubert Howe Bancroft and Frances Fuller Victor, History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, 1845–1889 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890), pp. 781–806.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 2, 1889, pp. 223, 230; November 16, 1889, p. 259; December 14, 1889, p. 331.
Benjamin Harrison, Message to Congress, December 3, 1889, at John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 8, 1890, p. 1; March 22, 1890, p. 163; March 29, 1890, p. 171; May 10, 1890, p. 294; May 3, 1890, p. 279; April 26, 1890, p. 259.
Harry J. Sievers, Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier President (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968), pp. 52–53.
New York Times, November 7, 1900.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 22, 1890, p. 147. Merle Wells, “Idaho’s Season of Political Distress: An Unusual Path to Statehood,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 37 (Autumn 1987): 58–67.
Harper’s Weekly, January 11, 1890, p. 31; July 19, 1890, p. 551. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 12, 1890, p. 211; May 3, 1890, p. 275; July 12, 1890, p. 487.
Boston Globe, June 28, 1890, p. 10; July 2, 1890, p. 6; July 3, 1890, p. 4. New York Times, June 28, 1890, p. 1.
New York Times, April 30, 1890, p. 1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 1, 1890, p. 79; April 26, 1890, p. 257 and 259; May 17, 1890, p. 311; May 31, 1890, p. 355. July 12, 1890, p. 487; September 27, 1890, p. 113.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census
New York Times, August 16, 1890, p. 4.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 22, 1890, p. 278. Harper’s Weekly, November 29, 1890, pp. 934–935.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/1892
This post has been syndicated from Letters from an American, where it was published under this address.