30. crop-lien system: System that allowed farmers to get more credit.

They used
harvested crops to pay back their loans. Storekeepers extended credit to small farmers
for food and supplies and in return took a lien on their harvests. Shrewd merchants
generations to come, southern blacks were condemned to eke out a threadbare living
under conditions scarcely better than slaver.

31. pork-barrel bills: congress votes for an unnecessary building project so that a
member can get more district popularity. Congress could reduce the vexatious surplus
in this way.

32. populism: the political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common
people in their struggle with the privileged elite. Historians identified populism as
virtually the only organized opposition to the social, economic, and political order that
took shape in the last decades on the nineteenth century. Populist Lawrence Goodwyn
portrayed Populism as the last gasp of popular political participation, a democratic
“moment” in American history that expired with the Populists’ absorption into the
Democratic party.

33. grandfather clause: an exemption based on circumstances existing prior to the

adoption of some policy. The Populist inspired reminder of potential black political
strength led to the near-total extinction of what little African American suffrage remained
in the South. White southerners more aggressively than ever used literacy tests and poll
taxes to deny blacks the ballot. This clause exempted from those requirements anyone
whose forebear had voted in 1860- when black slaves had not voted at all.

34. “Ohio Idea”: wealthy eastern delegate demanded a prmoise that federal war bonds
be released in gold, even though many were purchased with badly depreciated paper
greenbacks. Poorer western delagates wanted this.They came up with the “Ohio Idea”
which called for redemption of greenbacks. Debt-burdened democrats thus hoped to
keep more money in circulation and keep interest rates lower. This dispute introduced a
bitter contest over monetary policy that continued to convulse the Republic until the
century’s end.

35. the “bloody shirt”: reviving gory memories of the Civil War. It became for the first
time a prominent feature of a presidential campaign. “Vote as You Shot” was a powerful
Republican slogan aimed at Union army veterans.

36. Tweed Ring: the corrupt part of Tammany Hall in New York City, that Samuel J.
Tilden, the reform governor of New York had been instrumental in overthrowing. The
infamous Tweed Ring in NYC vividly displayed the ethics(or lack of) typical of the age.
Burly “Boss” Tweed- 240 pounds of rascality—employed bribery, graft, and fraudulent
elections to milk the metropolis of as much as $200 million. Honest citizens were cowed
into silence. Protestors found their tax assessments raised.

37. Credit Mobilier: a joint-stock company organized in 1863 and reorganized in 1867 to
build the Union Pacific Railroad. It was involved in a scandal in 1872 in which high
government officials were accused of accepting bribes. A newspaper exposé and
congressional investigation of the scandal led to the forma censure of two congressmen
and the revelation that the VP of the US had accepted payments from the Credit
Mobilier.

38. Whiskey Ring: During the Grant administration, a group of officials were importing
whiskey and using their offices to avoid paying the taxes on it, cheating the treasury out
of millions of dollarsin excise-tax revenues. President Grant said “let no guilty man
escape” as his own private secretary was one of the culprits. He volunteered a written
statement to the jury that helped exonerate the thief. His secretary of war, William
Belknap resigned after accepting bribes from suppliers to the Indian Reservations.
Grant, ever loyal to his crooked cronies, accepted Belknap’s resignation “with great
regret”

39. Liberal Republicans: Party formed in 1872 (split from the ranks of the Republican
Party) which argued that the Reconstruction task was complete and should be set
aside. Significantly dampered further Reconstructionist efforts. Reform-minded citizens
banded together to form the Liberal Republican Party. Voicing the slogan “Turn the
Rascals Out” they urged purification of the Washington administration as well as an end
to military reconstruction. Liberal Republican agitation frightened the regular
Republicans into cleaning their own house before they were thrown out of it. The
Republican Congress in 1872 passed a general amnesty act, removing political
disabilities from all but some five hundred former confederate leaders. Congress also
moved to reduce high Civil War tariffs and to fumigate the Grant administration with mild
civil-service reform.

40. “Crime of ʼ73”: The Fourth Coinage Act was enacted by the United States Congress
in 1873 and embraced the gold standard and de-monetized silver. U.S. set the specie
standard in gold and not silver, upsetting miners who referred to it as a crime.

41. Bland-Allison Act: government buys silver each month and mint it into coins.

42. Greenback Labor party: Political party that farmers sought refuge in at first,
combined inflationary appeal of earlier Greenabackers w/ program for improving labor.
The party polled over a million votes and elected fourteen members of Congress.

43. Grand Army of the Republic (GAR): Civil War Union veteran's organization that
became a potent political bulwark of the Republican part in the late nineteenth century.
The lifeblood of the party was patronage—disbursing jobs by the bucketful in return for
votes, kickbacks, and party service. Boisterous infighting over patronage beset the
Republican party in the 1870s and 1880s.

44. stalwart: a person who is loyal to their allegiance (especially in times of revolt). A
“Stalwart” faction, led by the handsome and imperious Roscoe Conkling, US senator
from NY, unblushingly embraced the time-honored system of swapping civil-service jobs
for votes. Opposed to the Conklingites were the so called Half-breeds like James Blaine
of Maine, who flirted coyly with civil service reform, but whose real quarrel with
Stalwarts was over who should grasp the ladle that dished out the spoils. Conkling and
Blaine succeeded only in stalemating each other, and deadlocking their party.

45. Half-breed: against spoil system, opposed to the Conklingites. Half-breeds like
James Blaine of Maine, who flirted coyly with civil service reform, but whose real quarrel
with Stalwarts was over who should grasp the ladle that dished out the spoils. Conkling
and Blaine succeeded only in stalemating each other, and deadlocking their party.

46. Compromise of 1877: Ended Reconstruction. Republicans promise 1) Remove

military from South, 2) Appoint Democrat to cabinet (David Key postmaster general), 3)
Federal money for railroad construction and levees on Mississippi river. Democrats
agreed that Hayes might take office in return for his withdrawing intimidating federal
troops from the two states in which they remained, Louisiana and S. Carolina. The
Republicans assured the Democrats a place at the presidential patronage trough and
support for a bill subsidizing the Texas and Pacific RR construction of a southern
transcontinental line. Not all these promises were kept in later years, but long enough to
break the electoral standoff. The Compromise brought peace at a price. Violence was
averted by sacrificing the black freedmen in the south. With the Hayes-Tilden deal, the
Republican party quietly abandoned its commitment to racial equality.

47. Pendleton Act: Disgust w/ Garfield’s murder gave the Republican party itself a
previously undetected taste for reform. The medicine finally applied to the long suffering
federal govt. was the Pendleton Act of 1833—the so called Magna Carta of civil service
reform. It made compulsory campaign contributions from federal employees illegal, and
it established the Civil Service Commission to make appointments to federal jobs on the
basis of competitive examinations rather than “pull.” With “plum” federal posts now
beyond their reach, politicians were forced to look elsewhere for money, “the mother’s
milk of politics.” They turned to the bulging coffers of the big corporations. The
Pendleton Act partially divorced politics from patronage, but it helped drive politicians
into “marriages of convenience” w/ bug business leaders.

48. Mugwumps: reform-minded Republicans who could not stomach the 1884
nomination of James Blaine were given this nickname, which is a word of Indian
derivation meant to suggest that they were “sanctimonious”, or “holier-than-thou.”

49. “Redeemers”: Once reconstruction had ended white Democrats (aka Redeemers)
shamelessly relied on fraud and intimidation. They resume the political power in the
South and exercised it ruthlessly. Blacks who tried to assert their rights faced
unemployment, eviction, and physical harm.

50. Plessy v. Ferguson: (18690) The Supreme Court validated the South’s
segregationist social order in this case. It ruled that “separate but equal” facilities were
constitutional under the “equal protection” clause of the fourteenth amendment. In
reality the quality of African American life was incredibly unequal to that of whites.
51. Jim Crow: W/ white Southerners back in the political saddle, daily discrimination
against blacks grew increasingly oppressive. What started as the informal separation of
blacks and whites in the immediate postwar years developed by the 1890s inot
systematic state-level legal codes of segregation know as Jim Crow laws. Southern
states also enacted literacy requirements, voter registration laws, and poll taxes to
ensure full scale disenfranchisement of the South’s black population.

52. Chinese Exclusion Act: prohibited immigration from China even tried to strip native
born of citizenship. Congress finally slammed the door on Chinese immigrant laborers
when it passed the act in 1882. The door stayed shut until 1943.
53. US. vs. Wong Kim: In the Chinese Exclusion Act, some exclusionists tried to strip
native born Chinese Americans of their citizenship, but the Supreme Court in US .
Wong Kim Ark in 1898 that the Fourteenth amendment guaranteed citizenship to all
persons born in the US. This provided important protections to Chinese Americans as
well as to other immigrant communities.

54. “Rum, Romanisn, and Rebellion”: The contest between political parties hinged on
the state of NY, where Blaine blundered badly in the closing days of the campaign. A
witless Republican clergyman damned the Democrats in a speech as the party of “Rum,
Romanism, and Rebellion”—insulting w/ one swift stroke the culture, the faith, and the
patriotism of New York’s numerous Irish American voters. Blaine was present at the
time but lacked the presence of mind to repudiate the statement immediately. The
phrase, shortened to “RRR,” stung and stuck. The wavering Irishmen who deserted
Blaine’s camp helped account for Cleveland’s paper thin plurality of about a thousand
votes in NY State, enough to give him presidency.

55. Billion-Dollar Congress: under Benjamin Harrison, the Fifty-First Congress reached
a spending milestone and was subsequently nicknamed this. Congress showered
pensions on Civil War veterans and increased govt. purchases of silver. To keep the
revenues flowing in—and to protect Republican industrialists from foreign competition—
the Billion Dollar Congress also passed the McKinley Tariff Act.

56. Peopleʼs Party (populists): Politics was no longer “as usual” in 1892, when the newly
formed “People’s Party”, or “Populists,” burst upon the scene. They demanded inflation
through free and unlimited coinage of silver at the rate of 16 ounces of silver to one
ounce of gold. They called for graduated income tax; government ownership of the RRs,
telephone, and telegraph; and direct election of US senators; a one term limit on the
presidency; the adoption of the initiative and referendum to allow citizens to shape
legislation more directly; a shorter work day; and immigration restriction. Populists
nominated General James B. Weaver who was an old Greenbacker,

57. Sherman Silver Purchase Act: the 1890 act of Congress that provided for the
purchase of 4.5 million ounces of silver monthly and paid for it in notes redeemable in
either silver or gold. Cleveland saw no alternative but to halt the bleeding away of gold
by engineering a repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Repeal of the Sherman
Silver Purchase Act only partially stopped the hemorrhaging of gold from the Treasury.
58. McKinley Tariff: Sponsored in the House by rising Republican star William McKinley
of Ohio, the new tariff act brought fresh woes to farmers. Debt-burdened farmers had no
choice but to buy manufactured goods from high-priced protected American
industrialists, but were compelled to sell their own agricultural products into highly
competitive, unprotected world markets. Mounting discontent against the Tariff caused
many rural voters to rise in wrath. Republicans lost their precarious majority, and the
new congress included nine members of the Farmer’s Alliance, a militant organization of
Southern and Western farmers.