The Writings of Carl Schurz/To James A. Garfield, July 20th, 1880
TO JAMES A. GARFIELD[1]
My dear Garfield: Those are not the least sincere and faithful among your friends who tell you the truth even when it is not pleasant. I consider it a duty to say to you that your letter of acceptance has been a great disappointment to very many good men who hailed your nomination with joy and hope. Especially the vagueness of your language on the financial question, and still more the positive abandonment of ground taken, and to a great extent maintained, by the present Administration with regard to the civil service, have greatly discouraged many who expected to support you with enthusiasm and would have done so with effect. I enclose a letter from Horace White which is only one of a large number I have received and which indicate that the same feelings are alive with a much more numerous class of voters than that which he represents. You will find a tone of regret running through many Republican newspapers that do not always give an indiscriminate approval to whatever the party and its candidates may do or say. I do not even mean here the Nation and kindred periodicals. I know how I feel about it myself and how much stronger that feeling would be, did I not know you personally.
If your letter was intended to serve your chances in the election, the calculation was, I think, at fault. The voters who are going to decide this election by throwing their weight on one side or the other, are likely to be influenced by one of two currents of sentiment: one is that since the Republican party has been in power for twenty years, the time has come for a change, and this current has great strength; the other is that the administration of public affairs during the last four years having been on the whole satisfactory, it is most prudent to let well enough alone. This current may become stronger provided the next Republican Administration bids fair to be at least as good as the present. As the one or the other of these currents of feeling grows during the campaign, so the election will go. Discussion of all other topics will have little effect upon the result.
Your letter of acceptance has had the effect of strengthening the current first mentioned and to weaken the second. It is universally interpreted as opening a prospect of the reëstablishment of the party machine in the civil service, and of a return to the old system of Congressional patronage; in one word, as a reactionary movement in the direction of the worst of old abuses. It is useless to speak after this of regulating the civil service on sound principles by Congressional action, for everybody knows as well as you or I do that as long as Congressmen do not find their patronage cut off by the Executive, it will be idle to expect any Congressional legislation curtailing their enjoyment of it. And I know from four years of executive experience, that honest government is impossible with the civil service as a party machine, and the public offices used as patronage and perquisite. The intelligent public knows it just as well. But the public does not know as well as I, that if elected, your whole moral and intellectual nature will recoil from a relapse into the old abuses. The public judge you from your utterances. You may fear defeat from two causes: the disaffection of the regular party machinists, or the disaffection of the intelligibly independent and the conservative elements which stand between the two parties but are necessary to the victory of either. If you should suffer defeat in consequence of strong declarations for sound principles which might attract the latter but disaffect the former, it would be a defeat with honor. If you should suffer defeat by surrendering sound principles and which might propitiate the former but drive away the latter, it would be a defeat with disgrace tainting your whole future career.
Where is the greater danger? The regular machine elements do not like you because they know that at heart you do not belong to them, whatever you may say. If they support you it is because they cannot do otherwise; they care for party success and are nothing without their party. If they did wish your defeat, any concessions of principle you may make to them will simply deprive you as a man of their respect without winning their support. I think they will support you because they cannot do otherwise without destroying themselves. If Conkling himself sulks, his following will go on without him and he will lose it.
The independent and conservative elements care little for mere party. If they support you, it is only because they see reason to hope for good government at your hands. They would have supported Hayes heartily and vigorously, and expected to favor you in the same measure as you would give assurance of improving upon what he had begun. In the same measure as they see reason to fear a reaction, they will drop off, thinking that it might be just as well to try a change of party. It may be said that they are not very numerous. But they are certainly numerous enough to hold the balance of power in the contested States necessary for Republican success. Without them you can scarcely hope to win.
Besides, you want not only to be elected, but, if elected, to do good service to the country and credit to yourself by your Administration. I think I am not entirely ignorant of politics. Let me make a prediction. No skill in nice balancing will save you from the necessity of choosing between two roads, one running in the reactionary tendencies and machine politics, and the other in the direction of intelligent, progressive and reformatory politics. Following the latter, you will be supported by the best intelligence and moral sense not only of the party but of the country and be their leader. Following the former, you will have the political machinists around you and will be their slave. Just in the same measure as President Hayes maintained in practice the principles with which he started out, he won the applause of the country and made his party strong. His failures, which have brought the censure of the respectable opinion of the country upon him, all were in the direction indicated in your letter of acceptance as the course you mean to follow. I must confess that I regretted to find in your first utterance as a candidate an implied disapproval of the principles of your predecessor, the good record of whose Administration is at the present moment the best capital of the party whose candidate you are. I should not wonder if President Hayes had felt that himself.
I write you this for the reason that I think it necessary you should understand every phase of the campaign, and to point out some dangers which might be rendered still more serious by further steps in the same direction. I am going to speak here to-night and you will find my speech in the papers. I had originally sketched out a different and higher kind of argument, when your letter appeared and forced me to adopt the low key you observe in its tone. You will discern at once that it is intended to stop all hasty demonstrations of discontent in independent quarters. I have written to my correspondents to the same [end], and with what effect, I do not know yet.
I communicate to you Horace White's letter, of course only in strict confidence. Please return it to me after having read it. I am on my way to the Pacific coast, and letters will find me from Aug. 28th to Sept. 1st in San Francisco, and until Sept. 5th at Sacramento City, Cal.
- ↑ Republican candidate for President.