Let’s review the state of the nation.
Our economy is being transformed by technological advances we can scarcely comprehend. These changes have elevated some parts of the country to unheard-of prosperity and left others behind. There have always been rich people and poor people but now that divide seems wider, exacerbated by the rise of the wealthy barons of some of these new industries who now try to manipulate our politics, as well.
Immigrants are flowing into the country at unprecedented rates, turning some cities into places where it sometimes seems as if English is only a secondary language. Some of these immigrants come from places we haven’t seen immigrants from in the past; with different backgrounds, different languages, different faiths, they are challenging our notion of what it means to be an American. We seem to have no control over our borders. In some cases, we have deported certain immigrants as undesirables and they’ve simply walked back across the border.
Our political system seems incapable of resolving anything. We are so polarized politically that our presidential elections are exceedingly close, at least in the popular vote. We’ve seen one president who was voted out returned to the White House four years later, partly because the president in between was rendered unpopular by inflation. We’ve even seen occasional spasms of political violence.
This overview may seem to describe things today but it’s really an account of American politics in the late 1800s, roughly from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s to 1890s. The details may be different — then it was the rise of the industrial age, now it’s the rise of the information age — but the overall themes are the same. We’ve been here before. Consider two big issues then, which are two big issues today:
Immigration
Immigrants now constitute 14.3% of the U.S. population, according to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute. That’s not unprecedented. In 1870, the figure was 14.4%. In 1890, it rose to 14.8%. As late as 1910, it was 14.7%. The share only seems high to us because we grew up during a time when immigration was abnormally low: Immigration restrictions passed in the 1920s, followed by World War II and the Cold War, cut off much international migration, so that by 1970, only 4.7% of the U.S. population was foreign-born. The immigration levels today are more in line with historical figures than the ones most of us are familiar with.
Illegal immigration isn’t a new issue, either. The late 1800s saw the United States alarmed by Chinese immigration to California. Laws were passed, and laws were ignored. Many Chinese immigrants simply sailed to Vancouver, British Columbia, and then walked across the Canadian border. When American authorities detained them and deported them back to Canada, the immigrants walked right back across the border. President Benjamin Harrison was so frustrated by this that he included a reference to it in his 1891 State of the Union address. When Canada finally cracked down on these practices, Chinese immigrants found another route into the United States: through Mexico. Our borders have always been more porous than we’d like.
Trade and tariffs
Tariffs were an animating issue in the late 1800s. Donald Trump has held up William McKinley as an exemplar for his desire to see high tariffs as a barrier against foreign imports. Indeed, when McKinley served in Congress, he became known as “the Napoleon of Protection.” What is less mentioned is that his Tariff Act of 1890 resulted in companies raising prices for consumers. The resulting inflation led to Republicans losing their majority in Congress later that year — and then losing the presidency in 1892.
The rise of monopolies and a new class of wealth
The controversial corporate powers of the 19th century were often railroads — necessary for a community’s economic success but also not always mindful of political delicacies or heedful of political pressures. Their equivalent today might be technology companies. Both eras have produced their own monopolies.
The news media was highly partisan
In the late 19th century, the expectation was that newspapers were partisan organs. The concept of an objective news media did not arise until much later. The concern that some voters may only be consuming one point of view is not new.
The nation was closely divided politically
Congressional elections in the late 19th century often saw wild swings that we don’t see now (such as that 1890 reaction against the tariff), but presidential elections were exceedingly close, even closer than the ones we have now. Both eras also saw disputed presidential elections: 1876 then (where Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but the electoral vote was challenged because of problems, perhaps fraud, related to Reconstruction), 2000 and 2020 in our era.
From 1876 to 1888, a span of four elections, the biggest margin in the presidential race was 1 percentage point. In 1892, the margin was 3 percentage points. In 1896, it expanded to 4.6 percentage points — although even then the winner managed just 51% of the vote. That’s 20 years of close elections. Here’s another measure: From 1876 to 1892, not a single presidential winner took a majority of the popular vote.
Over the past 24 years, we have also had six presidential elections, only one of which wasn’t particularly close: Barack Obama’s 2008 win by 7.2 percentage points. Even that year, Obama took just 52.9% of the popular vote. This year, Trump’s share sits at exactly 50.0% to 48.4% for Kamala Harris, according to the Associated Press, with some votes still being counted in some states, primarily on the West Coast. It’s been a long time — Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide over Walter Mondale — since we’ve had a presidential election where the winner amassed a large majority of the vote.
Not everything lines up perfectly, of course. One key difference between the rise of today’s information age and yesterday’s industrial age is that the new economy has severed ties between different parts of the country. While the industrial age saw agricultural areas left behind, there were still economic connections between sections of the country. Factories in the rising industrial belt along the Great Lakes required steel, which ultimately required coal mined from Appalachia and railroads to transport that coal. This is when Roanoke rose out of Big Lick and brand new towns were founded across Appalachia. The growth of one prompted the rise of another. By contrast, today’s Silicon Valley requires no raw materials from the interior of the country, so some parts of the country have prospered while others haven’t.
Some of the things we’re seeing now are a mirror image of the 19th century. For instance, Trump has set his sights on the federal workforce and wants more appointees who are loyal to him. That represents a direct assault on the civil service, which was a product of the 19th century — meant to combat the corruption of the “spoils system” that preceded it. The assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a disgruntled office-seeker prompted widespread demands for overturning the spoils system; the Pendleton Civil Service Act was passed and signed into law by President Chester Arthur in 1883.
Another mirror image: That era, like this one, produced a populist disruptor who was powered by the votes of those who felt left behind. Today, that’s Trump. Then, it was William Jennings Bryan. Like Trump, Bryan had a rural base and like Trump, he was anti-immigration. Unlike Trump, Bryan was a Democrat. In that era, it was the Republicans who were the more pro-immigration party. Like Trump, Bryan ran three times for the presidency, in 1896, 1900 and 1908. Trump, though, won twice, while Bryan never did. In that sense, Trump may be more analogous to another disruptive populist from an earlier era: Andrew Jackson.
What can we learn from the late 19th century that might be applicable today?
Rights can be taken away
History does not always move in straight lines. Sometimes it moves backwards. Some lessons about that we can learn from Virginia of that era. In the 1880s, Virginia gave birth to the Readjuster Party, a party unique to the state, over how to deal with its pre-Civil War debt (much of which had been accumulated from the part of the state that had broken away to form West Virginia). As their name suggests, the Readjusters were in favor of “readjusting” that debt, much to the chagrin of those to whom that debt was owed. The Readjusters were also a socially progressive party for that era: When they briefly controlled state government, they appointed Black office-holders, they established a university for Black students (today’s Virginia State), they abolished the poll tax and the whipping post. They also prompted the inevitable backlash that saw the poll tax reinstated, along with what today we know as Jim Crow.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion applies to physics as well as politics
In layman’s terms, for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. The monopolies of the Gilded Age led to the Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, and ultimately to Theodore Roosevelt, who railed against “certain malefactors of great wealth.”
Social change happens whether politicians want it to or not.
Consider the case of women’s suffrage, which was initially opposed by both major political parties. The women’s suffrage movement predated the Civil War but consistently made gains through the late 1800s. While Black Americans were steadily losing rights through that period, women were making slow advances. The Supreme Court in 1875 ruled that women didn’t have a constitutional right to vote and in 1886 the Senate voted 2-1 against women’s suffrage. However, by the end of the century, four states had granted women the right to vote anyway.
That may seem frustratingly slow by today’s standards, but perhaps the major point is this: Politics never exists in a frozen state. Even during the late 1800s, when the political environment seemed deadlocked, there were pressures building up underneath the surface. We may not know where today’s politics are taking us, but we can rest assured, whether we like today’s political alignments or not, no political arrangement lasts forever.
Most votes this year weren’t cast on Election Day
That’s one of my findings from an analysis of this year’s election returns. I break down the numbers in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, that goes out Friday afternoons. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters below: