Donald Trump has been waxing nostalgic about the 1890s these past few weeks.
“Our country,” he says of that decade, “was probably . . . the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.”
His love of the era has become so pronounced that it’s now a fixture of his stump speech, meant to defend the massive tariffs now central to the economic platform he’s promising in a second term. There’s just one problem: Trump’s comments are historically oblivious, evincing no awareness of the depression of the 1890s, whose severity was owed, in part, to the protectionist tariffs he praises.
In 1890, William McKinley, a Republican congressman from Ohio, was the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Federal budget legislation started at his desk, which made him one of the most important people in the U.S. government and in the Republican party. In that latter capacity, he faced a difficult task. In 1884, Grover Cleveland had become the first Democrat elected president since the Civil War. He was defeated in 1888, and the Republicans were now back in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House. They wanted to keep and, if possible, extend their advantage.
The Democrats had regained power in large part by disfranchising black voters in the South and ensuring, through terror and chicanery, a white electorate there. The Republicans in control of the federal government had at first used the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping and administrative role in the South, but when that proved costly—both literally and politically—the Army was ordered out. In 1890, Republican Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge proposed a solution: a law permitting federal supervision of elections upon petition. It would restore black voters’ rights and with them, a Republican majority. Lodge’s bill passed the House but stalled before a filibuster in the Senate.
Republicans therefore looked West for votes. They invented new states from territories with particularly Republican electorates—Idaho, Wyoming, and two Dakotas. But they also had to win the prairie states like Nebraska, full of homesteaders who felt exploited by railroads and banks, and the mining states like Colorado. The Republicans’ traditional policies of subsidizing railroads, banks, and industry were nonstarters with those electorates.