 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with John Grinspan, author of The Age of Acrimony. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. Tonight at 7 p.m., Karen Tumulty will discuss Nancy Reagan's role as partner to the president, which she profiles in her new book, The Triumph of Nancy Reagan. And on Tuesday, May 4th, a noted constitutional scholar, Akhil Reed Amar, will discuss his new book, The Words that Made Us, an account of how Americans wrestled with weighty constitutional questions during the country's first half century. Political campaigns in our lifetimes have been waged in large part through electronic media, first on television and later on digital media. In the 19th century, however, campaigning was a much more personal exercise. Partisans took to the streets for the candidates in what our guest author, John Grinspan, calls the loudest, closest, most violent elections in US history. The Gilded Age has a reputation as an age of excess, and that applied to electioneering as well. Voters in great numbers performed their civic duty, but the path to the polls was hardly civil. In the 20th century, elections moved away from the raucous confrontations of those days, but the aggressive partisanship of the political battles sounds more and more familiar. By looking at our past as described in The Age of Acrimony, we hope to gain more understanding of our democracy today. As Michael Barone wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, it's hard not to see echoes of our current politics in historian John Grinspan's chronicle of this rambunctious period. The Age of Acrimony isn't a detailed narrative of the era's political struggles or political science thesis with tables and graphs. Mr. Grinspan's focus on practical politics, which in this period meant mass politics, the highest rates of voter turnout and mass participation in the nation's history. John Grinspan, the curator of political history at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, studies the deep history of American democracy, especially the wild partisan campaigns of the 1800s. As curator, he collects objects from current protests, conventions, elections, and riots for the Smithsonian to try to preserve our own heated moment for generations to come. He frequently contributes to the New York Times and his work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. He's been interviewed on C-SPAN, National Public Radio, NBC's Meet the Press, PBS's The Open Mind, and other programs. Grinspan is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Massachusetts Historical Society Fellow, Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellow, and Jefferson Scholars Foundation Dissertation Fellow at the University of Virginia. Now let's hear from John Grinspan. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for joining me here today to talk about my new book, The Age of Acrimony, How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865 through 1915. I, as may have been mentioned, I am John Grinspan. I'm curator of political history at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. And in my job at the Smithsonian, I attend elections, conventions, rallies, protests from contemporary politics to talk to people about what's going on in American democracy and to collect their objects for future museum goers to enjoy and to kind of help understand our political moment. I get things like this incredible umbrella from a Bernie Sanders supporter from the 2016 Democratic Convention. He was protesting in the streets of Philadelphia and that object is now in the Smithsonian with Lincoln's hat. We take these moments from the present and make them part of our history. And at events around the country over the last several years, I keep having a version of the same conversation, whether it's at a rally of Trump supporters, or Bernie Sanders supporters, or what have you. People keep saying the same things to me as I talk with Americans around the country. They say some version of this is not normal. How could this be happening in America? They express a kind of a shared sense that something is broken in our democracy. Our politics have taken an unprecedented turn. And then in my other job, the other aspects of my job as a curator at the Smithsonian Museum, I go back into our archives, into our collections to explore the objects from 19th century American democracy, things like torches from midnight rallies, as you can see in the middle there, and ballots from stolen elections on the left, and uniforms from partisan paramilitary organizations like the White Awakes depicted on the right, all evidence of a vibrant but violent politics in our past. And I've started to see that our moment really is precedented, that many of our problems have, if not identical moments in the past, parallel and similar tendencies in our democracy across time. And to me, this is good news. It means that past generations have shared many of our deepest anxieties about our current moment, and also that they've managed to reform those errors and kind of write the ship of democracy. America has survived a crisis of democracy in the past. It's just that the last generation are worried about many of the things we're worrying about today, died off a century ago. From the 1860s through 1900, America went through a generation long, cultural-wide war over democracy, over how democracy should work, over who should get to participate, and especially, I think, over how we should behave in politics. It was campaigns that battled over race and class and ethnicity and immigration and gender and inequality. It all took place during the loudest, closest elections in American history. Now, voter turnout, as you can see from this chart on the slide, shoots up in the early 1820s, 1830s, and for the next 60 years, 77% of eligible voters go to the polls on that, which people are turning out at incredibly high rates, well over anything we've experienced. And these are also the closest elections in American history. If you look at that incredible map, is in the Library of Congress, it's the first county-level map of an election, the 1880 election, which happens to be the closest popular vote election in American history, decided by a few thousand voters in a few key states. This is also the era of peak political violence in America in the late 19th century. You have the violence used to suppress reconstruction and a terrorism, basically, that is used to crush the African-American vote in the South. You have labor unrest throughout the nation and the use of militias and federal troops to crush unions violently often. You have political machines at war like gangs often and in big cities around America. This era is also the most relevant, the most vital and the most useful phase in understanding our history, I think. It's also among our most forgotten. In fact, we don't remember this era precisely because it was deliberately ended by the very reforms that we have come to consider normal, that our sense of normal politics, meaning calm, civil, low drama, low stakes 20th century elections, that's actually abnormal. That's a creation invented to fix democracy the last time it broke. Now, as I studied this forgotten moment in political behavior in the Smithsonian, I kind of stumbled across the story of this forgotten family that lived through this era and helped to define it. I come to consider America's greatest father-daughter dynasty, William Pig Iron Kelly and his daughter Florence Kelly, whose relationship with democracy and with each other captures this era of crisis and of change. Will Kelly was a congressman, his daughter was a labor activist, both made careers fighting to defend working people from the 1830s through the 1930s and built friendships with everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony to Teddy Roosevelt, but also to the steel workers and seamstresses, radical clerks and utopian reformers. Together, they played key roles in almost every big issue of the day from abolition to voting rights to women's suffrage to workers' rights to the growth of the industrial economy to ending child labor to even the designation of the tomato as a vegetable. Their lives are like a textbook of American politics for these years. And so to tell the story of the birth of normal democracy, I'd like to also tell you this story of this very unusual father-daughter dynasty. Now, in many ways, it's kind of hard to imagine this, but in the beginning of this period, in the mid 1800s, there's a lot of optimism about democracy in America. And we think of democracy in the 19th century, we rightly think of who's left out, all the ways it's limited and bigoted and exclusionary and denies the right to vote to key populations. But it's also important to remember that by the standards of world history moving forward into the 1800s, there's something widely optimistic going on about this experiment in self-government. It's been rarely tried in world history before that. This is an era of expanding voting rights when men without property, when immigrants, when young people get greater access to the ballot and those denied the right to vote build key reform movements to get the rights to vote. This is the era when black voting rights becomes a reality on the ground for a period when women's suffrage takes off. As you can see, there's a great photograph from a Republican and African American headquarters in the 1896 election that shows kind of the individuals who are on the ground kind of fighting for voting rights and winning elections. This is an era that is kind of building up optimism and especially with the end of the civil war with the death of slavery in the defeat of what they call the slave power aristocracy. Many in America, especially in the North begin to talk about something they call pure democracy, meaning politics freed of the old restraints of class and race and kind of the ballot box and majority rule as the main decider in society. But few people could see that this less restrained style of politics, this kind of more accessible style would bring its own challenges. This is a moment that the congressman Will Kelly called terrible times for timid people. And I think he captured something about his era in that quote. He said that line in a speech in Congress in 1865 in which he introduced the first bill of black voting rights in America. He argues that a government that's denied the right to vote to a population gives that population a right to rebel against a tyrant who will not hear their voice. And he kind of expresses this populist tone of democracy at this time. The bigger, the louder, the more accessible, the better. Now within a week of making this speech Will Kelly is attacked at the Willard Hotel in downtown DC and slashed by a fellow congressman and down to the bone with a knife. The congressman threatens to shoot him. He survives this fight but it kind of captures this, the highs and lows of this era. On the one hand within basically, within 10 days Will Kelly gives a speech calling for expanded voting rights and is attacked and slashed by a congressman. This is the highs and lows of politics at his time. Now Will Kelly's whole life story kind of captures this. He's born in poverty in 1814 in the Northern Liberty section of Philadelphia. And his father dies when he's a very young man. His first memory is seeing all the family's possessions auctioned off on the street to pay his father's debts. And he develops a kind of working class identity. He leaves school very early. He starts working as an apprentice. He gets injured on the job and has a scar on his eye for the rest of his life from his apprenticeship. He kind of develops a radical democratic identity. In the 1830s when this is taking off he begins speechifying on street corners and at political events in Philadelphia and in Boston calling for things that at the time seemed radical like the 12 hour work day or a 10 hour work day. And he stands out physically as well. Will Kelly is very tall. He's about six foot three and he's really skinny. And he has a kind of grizzled rugged face and he has a really deep, wumbly, well controlled voice. The Chicago Tribune said sounded like an eloquent graveyard when he spoke. And he's one of the rare politicians in his era who as he talks about working class politics is building a coalition between white and black working class voters. That he does not seek to kind of build his power by or his voice by pitting populations against each other, he's bringing them together. He fights for abolition in the years before the Civil War. He's attacked in Philadelphia, giving abolitionist speeches and helps found the Republican Party in Pennsylvania and helps get Abe Lincoln elected and builds a friendship with him. He fights through the Civil War with Abe Lincoln and afterwards becomes one of the main voices for black voting rights and for reconstruction. He's attacked again in Mobile, Alabama in 1867. He's giving a speech for voting rights and people in the crowd start shooting revolvers at him to die in this mobile riot at the Kelly riot as they called it and dozens of rounds, 65 rounds are fired at him while he's speaking. But he just goes on kind of campaigning. He writes the language of the 15th Amendment giving African-Americans the right to vote. He's really a good embodiment of the arrow in which he lives, which is kind of combative and grass roots and engaged in politics. He embodies what could be called the public partisan passionate style of American politics at the time. Politics is deeply public back then. New campaigns were convulsive and popular. Voters would turn out to vote in public by casting a ballot in front of their whole community. Non-voters, people like women and men under 21 and many African-Americans denied the right to vote, still followed the issues, argued over them, talked about them on streetcars, read the newspapers. European visitors were always impressed by America's schoolgirls who always seemed to know what was happening in every election. And they held torchlight marches. Tens of thousands of people stomping through their communities at midnight with torches for their Republican Party, the Democratic Party. This is a deeply partisan political system, kind of dominated by these two parties who take a tribal identity almost to politics. They take things like ethnicity, religion, race, region and encompass them all into these bigger tribal identities who fight out basically a culture war through elections at the time. This is an era where politics is also very passionate, driven by what they call government by indignation and oppressed that doesn't focus on the issues, doesn't really focus on winning over independence, focuses on firing up a base with insults, with deception, often without right lies and slander, all to get bigger elections, higher turnouts, better engagement. Now, during these years, Will Kelly lives a double life. On the one hand, he's fighting in Washington, he's campaigning for reconstruction, traveling the country to get people like Ulysses S. Grant elected, surviving the public partisan passion at politics of his time. On the other hand, he goes home to his house in West Philadelphia and trains his young daughter, Florey, to take over the family business. Now, Will had many children, including several boys, but he sees something in Florey that he doesn't see in the others. And he decides to kind of train her. He has her read books on child labor at a young age to learn about the inequities of the labor system. He takes her with him to meet with abolitionist leaders and brings her into steel mills so she can see the process of making steel and iron. People call him pig iron Kelly that becomes his nickname and he brings her into the steel mills to see the root of this identity. He communicates with her, writes her great letters about things like coming elections, the 1876 centennial, all while kind of engaging in building this identity together, the two of them care about how they can use government to help working people in America. By the time she's a young adult in her early 20s, she's living in Washington with Will, attending Suarez, impressing senators and congressmen and kind of intimidating everyone a little bit. They were a prominent site in Congress with Will on the floor making speeches in his deep rumbling voice and Florey sitting in the ladies gallery, you know, mouthing the same words to speeches that she helped him write. They're both deeply engaged in this campaign and this is lifelong mission of using government to help working, laboring people in America. Now at the same time, something is curdling in American democracy. This is the year, these are the years of peak political violence, as I said. This is a time when there are three of the four presidential assassinations in American history happened in just 36 years in this era. One congressman has murdered every seven years during this period. They're regular massacres of African American voters in places like Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and North Carolina. And there's not an overall high murder rate in the society. It's not just a wild age. There's something happening in democracy that's making it unrestrained and pitting Americans against each other. So people look around for whom to blame. Many people blame the politicians and their great political cartoons like on this slide mocking the sleazy bosses and kind of thuggish leaders who have replaced the founding fathers as the leaders of American democracy and characterizing people like Will Kelly and that cartoon on the right is kind of dangerous radicals. Now some people, especially elites, begin to say this big public politics doesn't work. The voters are a pest, promiscuous suffrage is harming America. We need to restrain and restrict democracy. And especially in the South, we see these attacks on reconstruction, attacks on black voting rights as reconstruction ends in 1870s. And well through the 1890s, we see a growing effort to suppress voting rights. In the introduction of Jim Crow rules, a really, really crushed participation of many people who were participating before. In the rest of the country, there's a sense that democracy is overheating, that it's just getting bigger and louder even after the Civil War, even after reconstruction. Turnout is higher, elections are closer. There's a sense that Americans just can't get a handle on how to restrain their politics. Now this dark era is a dark phase for Will and Florey too. Florey Kelly moves to Switzerland. She becomes a socialist. She befriends the Friedrich Engels, the head of the Marxist movement at the time. And she writes letters to him that are really critical of democracy, of American voters and of her father who she says has hoodwinked American voters into supporting him, even though he's not really doing much to help them. Now during this period when they're kind of at odds with each other, Will Kelly dies. Shortly before his death, he reconciles with his daughter, father and daughter reconnect despite their differences. And she kind of begins to carry on his legacy. From the 1830s through 1890 when he dies, Will Kelly plays a key role in the three big revolutions of his era. The rise of popular democracy, the end of slavery, and the growth of the industrial economy. People knew he had a strange relationship with his daughter. They're kind of public celebrities in many ways. But few could see how forcefully she would carry on that legacy into the 20th century. Now at the same time, right around 1890, there's a new movement growing in American democracy that I call the great quieting. This effort to kind of calm American politics to make it more quiet as they often say. Now reformers on the left and the right, they can't agree about the direction American democracy should go in, but they can agree on what they want to stop. They want to stop this public, partisan, passionate politics. As one great muckraker, Henry de Maris Lloyd said, government by party isn't a means of settling things. It's the best means of keeping them unsettled. It's not working. This idea of pure democracy does not seem to be improving society. And to them, the only way to solve things is to calm the convulsions of politics, to restrain democracy and make politics more respectable, more civil and more calm, and really to launch a revolution for a more boring style of politics. They do this by introducing key cultural changes to voting and campaigning, by limiting rallies and turnout, by ending that kind of big public events with torchland marches and fireworks, by closing saloons on election day, by printing tons of pamphlets and educational literature instead of having canvassers go around and give free drinks to people. The motto, as the LA Times says, is more thinking, less shouting. They want a more restrained, more private, calmer politics. And they want to reform how voting works too. Instead of big elections, public voting, ballots printed by the parties, they introduce the secret ballot and the voting machines, thinking that they can make voting more technological, more efficient, more secret, more supported by the government, less entangled with the parties. They want voters to sit alone with their conscience in a voting booth or behind a voting curtain and reflect on who they really want to elect. Now, in some ways, this makes a more rational electorate, but it also makes one that has to have higher literacy rates, that is more socially isolated, that is in many ways a very different electorate than the electorate of the 19th century. Now, some of these people genuinely want to improve American politics, to improve access, to introduce women's suffrage, but they're also those who are operating with what they call the secret cause, making voting harder, less accessible, less popular, less fun. By 1900, these reforms, all these small cultural changes have had a big impact. Turnout crashes. Voter turnout in 1896 is roughly 80%. From there, it crumbles in every presidential election until by the 1920s, fewer than 50% of eligible voters are going to the polls. It especially crashes among younger people, poorer people, less well-educated people, immigrants, the children of immigrants, and among African Americans, both in the South and in the North as well. And you have an electorate going into the 20th century that is older, wealthier, whiter, more native form. There are positive changes of the same reforms. Partisanship starts to fall. People have less kind of strong diehard identity as a Republican or a Democrat, and independence suddenly becomes in the new century. They've seemed to be the more intellectually respectable thing to be. Until by the mid 20th century, political scientists worry that Americans aren't partisan enough and can't tell the difference between the parties. Violence falls as well. There are fewer of these kind of stabbing, shootings, brawls on election day. The rate of murders of congressmen goes from one every seven years to one every 25 years in the 20th century. And there's structural changes. They stop expanding the number of congressional seats, freezing it in 1911 at 435. We have the same number of congressmen today as we did in 1911, even though our country has three times the population. More powers given to administrators and bureaucrats, and they say we'll move from politics without government to government without politics. Now this revolution brings trade-offs. The good aspect is that it enables those progressive revolutions, the peer food and drug campaign, women's suffrage, direct election of senators, new legislation that really vaccination campaign, legislation that really approves Americans' lives on the ground. And they have a politics that's less divisive, less violent and less tribal. The bad news is that this politics is more distant, less engaged, less accessible. They basically trade participation for civility going into the 20th century. And a public, partisan, passionate political system becomes private, independent and restrained. It becomes impolite to talk politics at the dinner table. And the symbols go from the torches and uniforms of the 19th century to the campaign buttons and the straw boaters of the 20th century. You can see how the normal politics of the 20th century kind of emerges from the style. Now ironically, for someone so personally unrestrained, Florence Kelly really suits this new style. She really takes off in these years, 1900s, 1910s as a progressive reformer, the leader of the National Consumer League which fights sweatshops and works for to end child labor. She's a really prominent figure and explosive, hot tempered determined woman, friends with Teddy Roosevelt, Lily Brandeis, Jane Adams, W.E.B. Du Bois. She helps to fight to end child labor, to found the NAACP, to introduce protections for women and children from the federal government and in aid from maternal care and infants that will one day kind of blossom into social security in America. They call her the fire eater in the black dress because she's so aggressive and prominent and a gust in a way. And while she's personally aggressive, she uses this new style. She avoids electoral politics that her father relied on and focuses on administrators and experts and interest groups. She never really trusts the parties and seeks all the way she can around electoral democracy. Now Will Kelly and Florence Kelly share the same mission for a century from the 1830s to the 1930s of helping working people but they operate in different worlds with this chasm in the middle of the 19th century politics and the 20th century politics will benefit it from the style that was public, parted and passionate that in many ways seems to be making a little bit of a comeback in the 21st century. And so the Smithsonian is out there and we're in elections in Philadelphia in 2020 or collecting from the riot in Charlottesville in 2017 to tell our story and our struggle with our democracy to future generations who will surely be as puzzled by our current politics as we are by the elections of the Gilded Age. So as we consider this crisis of democracy that we're in today with this history in the past I think there are a few lessons we can take. The first is that this is not the first time we've had to fight to save our democracy for ourselves. Our crisis is not the end of the world and it is not unprecedented. Most of the things we're dealing with have clear precedents in our past. We just have to look for them and see them when they're in front of us. The second is that reform is possible. Previous generations have successfully turned down the volume on partisanship, political division and violence. Not all areas kind of inevitably end in the civil war. Our democracy is more resilient and less brittle than I think we've given it credit in the last couple of years. The third point though is that history is about trade-offs and whatever positive reforms people managed to make in the past they lost something along the way. They made a democracy that was more civil but lower turnout and less participatory. And we don't really have a sense yet of as we try to reform our politics today, what we may lose along the way to those changes. There will be trade-offs. It's just the nature of humanity and of history. The fourth point and this I think is really key is that culture is fundamental. The big reforms that calm democracy around 1900 there were some laws changed but many of them came from quieter changes in American culture. How Americans use politics in their life and talked about them at the dinner table. Fundamentally shifting their world of politics, the behavior of democracy. These things that aren't big federal amendments. It's a story that I think is more intimate and more human than just a list of voting rights amendments. It's how Americans use politics in their life. And it's a story that I think is best told through the lived experience of one fascinating, frustrating, forgotten father, daughter dynasty. Thank you for listening to this talk and engaging with this history. And please feel free to contact me through the Smithsonian with questions, ideas, insights. We're out there to engage the public and so any thoughts you have on this material, I'd love to hear them.