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On this day in 1889, Grover Cleveland signed into law the omnibus admissions bill that brought the Dakotas, Montana, and Washington into the union as states—which might seem unremarkable enough on the face of it, but in fact poses one of the few Genuine Historical Mysteries I have lying around. This is a dissertation waiting to happen, people. Or at least an article. Or else one of you is going to email me to say that someone has already done it, and I will feel I have been ignorant (which is an unpleasant if familiar feeling, trust me, but I’d rather feel I have been ignorant than go on being ignorant).
Before I get into this, if you’re from the Dakotas, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona or Nevada and especially sensitive about how your state became a state, why don’t you accept my happy stativersary wishes and not click on the rest of the post? Mormons, Mormon-haters, racists, Democrats, and Republicans may also be offended. Also, proponents of plural marriage and opponents of polygamy. Probably, also, everyone else. This is a pretty obnoxious blog, isn’t it?
Those of you who venture below the fold have been warned.
As I get it, this is a story about corruption in the late nineteenth-century. Not the penny-ante, vote-stealing kind of corruption, but the grand, manipulation-of-the-electorate-in-broad-daylight kind of corruption.
On the eve of the omnibus bill, Dakota is the most Republican-voting territory: in territorial elections Democrats garner on average only about 27% of the vote. Washington state is also pretty reliably Republican—maybe 43% Democratic—so there’s no surprise that Congressional Republicans support its admission, too.
As it happens, Dakota and Washington are also the two most populous territories out there, so there’s some logic in admitting them to the Union as states.
The next three most populous territories are Utah, New Mexico, and Montana, in that order. They’re also Democratic territories: in territorial elections Montana goes 57% Democratic, New Mexico 51%, and Utah a whopping 86% Democratic on average. So it’s not surprising that Congressional Democrats back the admission of New Mexico and Montana as states, to balance Dakota and Washington. And if you think about Utah for, oh, five seconds <cough>Big Love</cough> you know why, despite that overwhelming electoral support in the territorial canvasses, Democrats don’t push too hard to give the Utahans statehood.
Now, in the fiftieth Congress (which sat 1887-1889), Democrats have the House, Republicans the Senate, and Cleveland, the President, is a Democrat. So there’s room for partisan compromise: statehood for Dakota, Washington, New Mexico, and Montana. Partisan balance, as far as Senators go: four apiece.
Except: Republicans figure that if you’re gonna have a state that’s as reliably as Republican as Dakota looks, you ought to have two of it. So they put a bill before the Senate to split it. Democrats know what’s up: “The effect … will be to seat upon this floor two [extra] Republican Senators, and settle, perhaps, for some time to come, the question of political supremacy in this body,” says Senator Matthew Butler of South Carolina. Other D’s agree. The bill goes through the Senate on a party-line vote. In the Democratic-controlled House, the committee on territories reports the bill unfavorably, and it’s dead.
In the 1888 elections, both parties run on presidential platforms supporting some manner of statehood. The Democrats say:
the Territories of Washington, Dakota, Montana and New Mexico are, by virtue of population and development, entitled to admission into the Union as States, and we unqualifiedly condemn the course of the Republican party in refusing Statehood and self-government to their people.
And the Republicans say in similar wise but with the opposite partisan slant:
The pending bills in the Senate to enable the people of Washington, North Dakota and Montana Territories to form constitutions and establish State governments, should be passed without unnecessary delay.
They also weasel thusly:
The Republican party pledges itself to do all in its power to facilitate the admission of the Territories of New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho and Arizona to the enjoyment of self-government as States, such of them as are now qualified, as soon as possible, and the others as soon as they may become so.
And for good measure, they add:
The political power of the Mormon Church in the Territories as exercised in the past is a menace to free institutions too dangerous to be longer suffered.
So forget it, Big Love.
In the ever-so-close 1888 elections, Cleveland wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college to Benjamin Harrison, and in addition the Republicans take the House and keep the Senate.
So facing two years in which the R’s will enjoy a majority in both houses of Congress and hold the presidency, what do the lame-duck Democrats do? You got it, they pass a bill that dumps New Mexico, admits two Dakotas, Washington, and Montana—which is to say, they add six presumptively Republican senators and two presumptively Democratic senators. And the Democratic president signs it.
For the love of Mike, why? As Charles Dougherty (Democrat of Florida) says, “I am unable to understand why a bill which is characterized as an ‘omnibus bill,’ coming from the Democratic side of the House, should undertake to bring in all the Republican Territories of the United States and exclude the Democratic Territories. [Laughter and applause.]… Let in Arizona, and Utah; they will both be Democratic States. New Mexico will also be Democratic.”
Nope. As Francis Spinola (Democrat of New York) complained, “we on this side are to concede everything here….” And they did.
Why? Explanations tend to be exceeding sketchy, of the nature of, well, the Republicans had won Congress and the presidency and were going to do as they pleased anyway…. But preemptively rolling over didn’t help; in the next year, the Republicans gave the legislative finger to New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, and instead admitted reliably GOP Idaho and Wyoming even though nobody1 lived there.
Nerves about the Spanish language and culture in New Mexico were assuredly part of the story, but not the whole thing. Many Democratic Congressmen didn’t even bother to vote on the omnibus bill, and twenty joined the Republicans in putting it through.
Did it matter? Yes: suppose after the Civil War western territories had instead been admitted at around the time their populations reached the size of the average Congressional district. The Democrats would have controlled Congress, and presumably policy, for large chunks of the late nineteenth century. (Idaho wouldn’t have been a state till 1904, Nevada till 19712, and Wyoming still wouldn’t qualify.)
I wonder also what the effect was on the disfranchisement campaigns that began in the South in 1889. For if Republicans, immediately after the awfully close 1888 election, were admitting western states to buttress their hold on the West, Democrats were depriving blacks of the vote to buttress their hold on the South. Mere weeks after Cleveland signed the omnibus statehood bill, the Tennessee state legislature passed its pioneering disfranchisement laws, inspiring the Memphis Appeal to run headlines reading “Safe at Last” and “Good-bye, Republicanism, Good-bye.” And in the long run, the Democratic effort to manipulate the electorate worked better than the Republican effort. But that’s another story.
1In the statistical, technical sense of “nobody.”
2There’s a whole other set of shenanigans around Nevada statehood, but that’s not till October.
See:
McCarty, Nolan, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. “Congress and the Territorial Expansion of the United States.” In Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress, edited by David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, 392-451. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Perman, Michael. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Stewart, Charles, III, and Barry R. Weingast. “Stacking the Senate, Changing the Nation: Republican Rotten Boroughs, Statehood Politics, and American Politica Development.” Studies in American Political Development 6 (1992): 223-71.
38 comments
February 22, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Gene O'Grady
I asked the New Mexico question (why so late a state?) to my seemingly well-informed guide at the historical museum in Santa Fe and his answer was that there was local resistance to statehood because it was feared that some of the entangled church-state institutions in the territory that were valuable to the people there would be eliminated and replaced by a court and economic system run by Anglo outsiders who would be very insensitive to local ways of doing things.
Something of the same may also be true of Utah — and I’m not talking about polygamy, I’m talking about the bishop’s courts, which, as defended by Juanita Brooks in Quicksand and Cactus (I think) were more concerned with a form of justice that healed the community and less with winners and losers.
February 22, 2008 at 6:03 pm
charlieford
“. . . and instead admitted reliably GOP Idaho and Wyoming even though nobody1 lived there.”
I believe you meant to say, “though nobody spat there.”
February 22, 2008 at 6:50 pm
urbino
So you’re saying the recent pattern of the Dems inexplicably caving in to the Republicans on every issue at hand is not new? Was Harrison campaigning on the existential threat presented to the Republic by having all these rowdy territories next door? Did he advocate a military occupation of them for 100 years? The Laffer curve?
Sorry. I’ve run amok.
February 22, 2008 at 7:28 pm
eric
I’m saying I don’t know, and someone ought to do some work on the subject. How’s your free time for the next seven years?
February 22, 2008 at 7:36 pm
rootlesscosmo
I find myself wondering about the big Dem majorities in pre-statehood Utah. It wouldn’t have been the Rum or the Romanism; was it perhaps the Rebellion?
February 22, 2008 at 7:46 pm
urbino
How’s your free time for the next seven years?
Pretty free, but I’m unreliable.
February 22, 2008 at 7:58 pm
eric
I find myself wondering about the big Dem majorities in pre-statehood Utah
I think it’s the fact that the Republican Party had, at its creation, declared it “the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery”.
February 22, 2008 at 8:05 pm
andrew
Have you looked at Howard Lamar’s Dakota book? (I’m genuinely curious; I haven’t looked at it, but I thought it took up this kind of detailed political history. Maybe not on a national level, though.)
February 22, 2008 at 8:09 pm
andrew
The review makes this book on Utah sound pretty interesting.
February 22, 2008 at 8:11 pm
hcr
The local politics behind statehood for the Dakotas were
incredibly complicated– too complicated to start in on
right now (although it’s probably worth noting that there
was a Cleveland appointee involved). But, just for the
record, the act of 2/22/89 that Cleveland
signed was an enabling act so far as the Dakotas were
concerned. South Dakota and North Dakota actually entered
the Union on November 2, 1889, under President
Harrison (although North Dakota representatives didn’t
qualify for office until November 4).
February 22, 2008 at 8:51 pm
eric
Yes, I’ve read the Lamar book, and I have the impression there are a number of episodes in which local politics do figure.
But—and thanks, hcr, for pointing out the details of the enabling act—none of this changes the basic point: between stonewalling the two-Dakotas legislation in 1888 and February 1889, the Democrats caved. Why? That’s what I want to know. A bunch of Democrats weren’t present—which, okay, many were lame ducks and absenteeism was common in c19 Congresses—but twenty actually voted with the Republicans.
February 22, 2008 at 11:21 pm
teofilo
I asked the New Mexico question (why so late a state?) to my seemingly well-informed guide at the historical museum in Santa Fe and his answer was that there was local resistance to statehood because it was feared that some of the entangled church-state institutions in the territory that were valuable to the people there would be eliminated and replaced by a court and economic system run by Anglo outsiders who would be very insensitive to local ways of doing things.
This is true, and they were right.
February 22, 2008 at 11:25 pm
teofilo
Concerns among others about the Hispanicism of the territory played a role too, of course.
February 23, 2008 at 8:06 am
John Emerson
What’s with the map you post? It seems that a chunk of Canada is being claimed.
February 23, 2008 at 8:28 am
eric
This is true, and they were right.
This may have been true at some part of the statehood project, but it clearly wasn’t a majority view at all times. NM sent along a constitution to Washington as early as 1850. There was I think a failed constitution in 1872, which may have had something to do with it. There were remarks about opposition to statehood in the 1890s and 1910s, but again, I don’t think it was a majority position nor do I see any report that it mattered in the 1889 episode.
February 23, 2008 at 8:29 am
eric
What’s with the map you post? It seems that a chunk of Canada is being claimed.
I noticed that. Unfortunately the map came from a site with no provenance. The LOC maps were all really dull and monochrome. And this is the Internets, which is all about color, right?
February 23, 2008 at 8:35 am
eric
For the 1888 act, The New Mexican
February 23, 2008 at 8:41 am
eric
On the rejection of a Constitution in 1890:
February 23, 2008 at 8:44 am
eric
On changing the name:
February 23, 2008 at 8:50 am
eric
On the runup to actual admission:
February 23, 2008 at 8:58 am
eric
And on Dakota’s local politics and statehood, with the standard non-explanation of why the omnibus bill, from a different source:
February 23, 2008 at 9:09 am
eric
And another version of the standard interpretation, closer to the one in the post:
Except, if the Democrats were determined to get credit, you’d think they’d actually vote for the bill. But the Democrats didn’t vote in a body for the bill.
So my question still stands, as far as I can see. Local politics weren’t the issue. Why did Congressional Democrats split, with 20 Democrats lining up with the Republicans?
Albright, Robert Edwin. “Politics and Public Opinion in the Western Statehood Movement of the 1880’s.” The Pacific Historical Review 3, no. 3 (September 1934): 296-306, on p. 302.
February 23, 2008 at 9:14 am
eric
John, on the original you can see the Canadian portion is labeled “Manitoba.” It appears simply to be a map of Dakota and Manitoba.
Showing only part of Manitoba. I don’t know.
February 23, 2008 at 10:44 am
Vance Maverick
I suspect southern Manitoba is included because it was part of the service area of the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railway, which was growing gradually westward (to become the Great Northern). See for example this.
February 23, 2008 at 12:59 pm
teofilo
Damn, (omni)busted. In my defense, I was mostly extrapolating from the fact that when NM did become a state, the Anglo-controlled constitutional convention did insert provisions that would have severely restricted the Church’s role in areas like education (had they been enforced), which the Hispanic community didn’t much like. So if anyone had had misgivings about statehood on those grounds, they would have been correct to do so.
In any case, I believe that support for statehood throughout the 62-year territorial period came primarily from the Anglo minority rather than the Hispanic majority. Who signed those petitions, anyway.
And the name thing is still true.
February 23, 2008 at 7:35 pm
eric
I don’t doubt there were people who had such concerns. I just doubt that it had much to do with delaying statehood.
February 23, 2008 at 7:50 pm
teofilo
Yeah, you’re probably right, and I had not actually heard that explanation until I saw Gene’s comment in this thread. It just made sense given what else I knew about recent NM history, which is very little.
February 24, 2008 at 9:02 am
Mike
So, this is off the top of my head and it could be totally wrong, and it’s been a long time since I read Sharkey, Nugent, and Coin Harvey, but weren’t these states also known as the “silver states”? While it’s true that Democrats appear to be killing themselves here, Republican representatives and Senators from these states could be relied upon to vote in favor of re-monetizing silver–which they in fact did in 1890 with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. This same period saw, first, the rise of the Farmers’ Alliance and then the Populist Party, both of which were opportunities for Democrats to siphon off Republican votes. If I remember correctly, Harrison and the eastern establishment Republicans rolled on silver–which they had resisted for years–in a bid to keep those states in the Republican column. Just a thought…
February 24, 2008 at 9:07 am
eric
Hi, Mike — yes, that’s correct, and that’s what I meant in my closing line, saying the Democratic effort to manipulate the electorate worked better than the Republican. Couple things: (1) so we know that voting expectations ex ante and behavior ex post are not the same (big revelation). (2) even though those states did go for Bryan in the 1890s, they’re generally Republican, especially at the Seante level, and over several decades they created a more Republican Senate than you otherwise would have had (see the Stewart and Weingast article).
February 25, 2008 at 10:25 am
AWC
Another factor comes to mind.
James J. Hill, the owner of the Great Northern Railway, was a leading Bourbon Democrat, with ties to the president. To benefit Hill, Cleveland had pushed for legislation opening Indian territory to railroad construction. Similarly, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad was Henry Villard, a Mugwump Republican who owned the Nation, which had been instrumental in helping Cleveland win election.
February 25, 2008 at 3:00 pm
eric
Which helps explain the Cleveland support; does it explain why the Congressional Democrats switched sides?
February 25, 2008 at 5:30 pm
AWC
I wouldn’t hazard an explanation without seeing who voted for the Omnibus Act.
But I’m guessing that they wrangled votes from an odd alliance of Silver supporters, Southern Temperance types, and Northeastern Swallowtail reformers. For some reason, local reform movements seem to have had success earlier in Western states, one reason women got the vote so early there.
February 25, 2008 at 5:33 pm
eric
You wanna do a dissertation/article on it?
February 25, 2008 at 5:56 pm
AWC
C’mon. You know I hate projects that have a beginning, middle, and end. I only like topics that are infinite, taking ten years or more to complete. Knowing me, the thing would turn into a study of American “incorporation” policy broadly construed, from the Mexican War through the Insular cases and ending in Hawaiian statehood. A great subject for a book, but not a summer fling.
Or are you serious? My editor would kill me.
February 25, 2008 at 6:16 pm
eric
I’m serious about an article.
February 25, 2008 at 10:56 pm
washerdreyer
How about just a wikipedia article on the swallowtails? I wasn’t familiar with the term, and the the internets don’t know much about them either. I eventually found this page explaining a Nast cartoon which uses the term, and then checked out the Wikipedia articles on John Morrissey and Tilden, neither of which have anything about the swallowtails. Long comment short, it’s hard to find things on them.
February 25, 2008 at 11:05 pm
teofilo
From w/d’s link:
Awesome.
June 16, 2009 at 2:20 pm
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