Custom House Gossip: in the argot of now and then
Can we take a moment and compare the 2024 presidential election with the elections of the Gilded Age?
Not since the second administration of President Grover Cleveland, in 1892, has a candidate out for the stuff gained the opportunity to humblebrag nonconsecutive terms in the seat of Brother Jonathan. Old Cleveland was a chunky fellow, but right small potatoes when compared to the swelled head of the brandname monarch creeper, fairly elected in November, 2024. There’s no two ways about it: once the popular vote was in, and the convict clackbox was announced victorious, anyone in support of the Civil Rights Act was ready to absquatulate, while the dopes and note-shavers finally felt seen. Country jakes and bluebloods alike took a hard pass on goodwill for a taste of the fast boodle promised by the gasconading muttonhead. Liberals were out on their ear, and totally not heeled for another four years counting ties while the wheelhorse of the Grand Old Party lights up a D.C. dumpster fire the way red herrings torched Dolly and James Madison’s house in the War of 1812.
It was the cray-cray 1880s… When showman P.T. Barnum promoted the Greatest Show on Earth up at the Garden on Madison Square, with two herds of performing elephants, Giants, Dwarfs, Midgets, Sprites, Goblins, Ogres, Skeletons, Albinos, Zulus, and Aztecs… When People’s Party utopianist Ignatius Donnelly advocated bunkum conspiracy theories abided by a heteronormative stanbase of trolls and lickspittles: instead of Democratic pedophilia cartels operating from D.C. pizzerias, Donnelly argued against Shakespeare as the author of his own plays; instead of the libtard machinations of the Deep State, Donnelly wrote about the lost city of Atlantis as if an archaeological fact… When the first plank-spankers and chatterboxes and sensation troupes of vaudeville played Tony Pastor’s Theatre on Broadway between Prince and Houston; Mark Twain published best sellers in the colloquialisms and provincialisms of the English language born of American soil; and incel Charles Guiteau murdered President Garfield in a public D.C. train station with gunshots to the back, and recited his original verse “I Am Going to the Lordy” in the chair before executioners pulled the switch.
Younger generations were all “OK, Boomer” about the old War Between the States, and waving the bloody shirt no longer stirred voter sympathy. The bygone authors of The Federalist Papers would have recognized the “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” behaviors that possessed the Gilded Age as the Union double-shuffled from its 100th birthday toward the Modern Age. Between the end of Reconstruction and the consolidation of the City So Nice They Named it Twice, the Republican Party was the party of progress, protectionism, and the Pendleton Act, while Democrats the party of rum, Romanism, and rebellion.
In the election of 1884, Cleveland was the first winning Democrat since Abraham Lincoln took office under the new Republican party, no longer its authentic self after petty tussling between the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds sent any chances of a presidential get up the flume. Uncle Jumbo benefitted from the support of disaffected Republicans, with their mug in one direction and wump in another. Back then, “Democrat” signified what in the 2020s describes one who shares disinformation about the plandemic, gives thumbs-up emojis to chokeholds of unarmed Black men by cops, and finds it totally OK to grab a pussy.
Prior to the Late Unpleasantness, the population count of southern states tallied each enslaved individual equal to 3/5s a person, which increased electoral votes in favor of Democratic candidates, who won the majority of federal elections up until fire-eater Edmund Ruffin fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. Once Congress cinched the 15th Amendment, Black voters were as inclined to vote Democrat as Elon Musk to assume all debt from the Public Student Loan Forgiveness program. But by the 1880s, Dixie had bulldozed African-American southerners from exercising the elective franchise, and, alot like the 1980s, the gimme-it-it’s-mine economy was much more of a thing to white voters than civil rights, or civil war.
Just as the mendacious bloviant wussed out from the Vietnam War because of bone spurs, Cleveland, too, evaded military service, paying a substitute to bear arms against Johnny Reb. The future president’s you-be-damned-ness applied equally to conscription as government social services. Cleveland’s take on pensions for military veterans and their dependents pretty much equaled Dutch Reagan on Section 8 handouts for welfare queens. It also took Trump about a month to throw the VA under the bus. “Though the people should support the Government,” Cleveland declared in his message vetoing a seed bill that butthurt farmers, “government should not support the people."
In the election of 1888, Grover the Good won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, sending Buckeye Benjamin Harrison to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Mirroring last November, Republicans took the White House, Senate, and House. Harrison was expected to get next level on the enforcement of patronage jobs, like picking Vulcan-eared whim-wham dealer Dr. Oz to administer the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (two organizations which likely would have made Cleveland ugly cry), or constipation face Robert Kennedy, Jr., to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Cleveland wouldn’t truckle to Tammany Hall, and Harrison’s front porch campaign appealed to the Anglophobia of Democrat Irish laborers by posing Cleveland as a diplomatic shilly-shallier of British free trade. FWIW, what if white men with no college degree, plus the Oath Keepers, withdrew support for the agro pumpkinhead jackanapes and cast ballots for the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected Vice President?
A mammoth parade of thousands of wideawakes marched down Fifth Avenue in support of the Human Iceberg one week before voting day. Groups included the Fulton Marketmen Club, who stepped in time with canes tipped by imitation fish, pumpkins, and turnips; the Hide and Leather Club; Harness-makers and Saddlers’ Club; the Harrison and Morton Baseball Club, the Leaf and Tobacco Trade Club, and the second division of the Longshoremens’ Club, including the Ship Joiners’ Club and New York Lightermens’ Club.
One of the hottest issues between candidates in both the Gaslight Era and post-Covid was the taxing of foreign imports, or tariffs, "the most beautiful word in the dictionary" saith the bazoo-blowing dough-head. The litany of goods impacted by the protectionist duty could literally break the Internet: light trucks, mezcal, newsprint, aircraft landing gear, washtubs, velocipedes, buttplugs, tomatoes, gadolinium, airpods, spats...
In 1888, tariffs imposed on imported goods were the chief source of federal revenue, years before the advent of the enemy of the 1 percent: income tax. Three-fifths of all tariff revenue was collected at the Custom House in New York City, a “poorly ventilated and unwholesome building” – according to the New York Sun – located at the corner of William and Wall Street, today occupied by Cipriani. The Custom House was an institution as infamous for shenanigans as the Eric Adams administration, and employed over 3,000 clerks by appointment and promotion governed by Civil Service law; patronage jobs were normalized and party minions clawed like pizza rat for senior positions. Staff desks in the circular main hall surrounded a four-faced globe clock with perched eagle. $130 million was collected in duties for the fiscal year ending June, 1892, or just over 4.5 billion greenbacks in 2024; that year, the federal government collected around $4 trillion in individual income tax, compared with customs duties accounting for around $76.4 billion.
Unlike the age of artificial intelligence, polarization, and fake news, post-Reconstruction was a time in U.S. history when the traffic of vessels in New York harbor was covered in New York newspapers like gossip on pre-internet Page Six of the New York Post: the comings and goings of ships along the docks of Manhattan like Liza Minelli and Halston cavorting o’er the velvet ropes at Studio.
Beginning in March of that election year, the New York Sun published a weekly column titled “Custom House Gossip,” which continued on and off each week throughout the reign of Harrison, who got Chicagoed by Cleveland four years later. The tea skewed pro-Democrat under editor Charles A. Dana, an ex-Fourierist, and typically focused on the cruel – like, epic – salaries and cushy “places” of Republicans provided jobs in the Custom House: clerks, weighers, deputy collectors, janitors, gaugers, auditors, the nephew of failed presidential candidate James “Belshazzar” Blaine, and the sister of Blaine’s Republican nemesis, Lord Roscoe Conklin. The average salary was between $1,600 and $5,000, while Democrats were paid gubna with no prospect for promotion. The squib accrued like bilge water in the Communipaw ferry, and the Custom House found itself at a clinch spot in the elections of 1884, 1888, and 1892. The mash-up style of subject and tone in the column augured Cindy Adams more than TMZ, or as if Liz Smith transcribed a police blotter of civil partisan flapdoodle. “The hayseeders rule the Custom House,” noted the first column. The Sixth Division, run by “a veritable Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” was in a “slipshod and tangled state.” The Civil Service Bureau was dubbed “the Cryptogram Department,” and “Lawgiver” Joseph Trelour, chief of the correspondence room in the Collector’s office, was a Republican so devoted to the Custom House, “it has been said that he would rather read and ponder customs laws and decisions than eat.”
By the Mauve Decade, inflation caused the coin purses of the American public to resemble the gonad pouch of a neutered Lakeland Terrier. In the 1890 midterms, voters virtue signaled the Billion Dollar Congress, and soon the Populist Party had joined the ticket as the voice of hangry farmers roughing it in the backwoods and tuckered out by the honey-fugling duffers of both political parties whose chin music served only east coast bankers, southern planters, and railroad barons. Over a century later, funny how a mentally deranged sorehead dotard who never worked a day in his life, whose business strategy amounts to no more than huffy rhetoric and higgledy-piggledy lawsuits, and who is associated with one of the most elite industries in the world - Manhattan real estate – managed to hornswaggle the votes of rural paranoiacs sandbagged by corporate interests who left-wing media wokesters on the right side of history enjoy to mischaracterize as “populists.”
“A presidential election was taking place in November,” wrote Henry Adams in his Education, recalling the year 1892, “and no one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of them had no friends; the other, only enemies.” Adams leaned a smidge more for the Democrats, who “represented to him the last remnants of the eighteenth century; the survivors of Hosea Biglow’s Cornwallis; the sole remaining protestants against a banker’s Olympus which had become, for five-and-twenty years, more and more despotic over Esop’s frog-empire.”
Though Cleveland designated Labor Day a federal holiday during his second term, wage cuts and major layoffs triggered 50,000 trainhands and baggage smashers in the American Railway Union to boycott the Pullman iron horse company. “The paternalism of the Pullman is the same as the interest of a slaveholder in his human chattels,” speechified union boss Eugene V. Debs. Fat cats conspired to sway public opinion against the workers by hitching Pullman trains to mail cars, which hobbled the postal service at a time when business moved at the pace of a Bowery cart-man and telecommunications was about as advanced as an AOL email account. This prompted Pres. Cleveland to call in federal troops, who engaged in firefights with laborers in Chicago railyards as if the beer wars of the Roaring Twenties. Such was a use of expanded federal power that contradicted arguments in Big Steve’s first acceptance speech against the government “seeking to control people instead of representing them.” For a rizz-less cantankerous macroaggressor supported by swamp-drainers and dock wallopers, this new administration spends a shit ton of time exploiting executive power at the expense of accountability, horse sense, and the system of checks and balances.
Um… gee willikens! One shouldn’t unpack current events with too much intersectionality between present times and that badger game which tub-thumpers and tax-eaters refer to as “history.” As the 19th century teetered on the brink of Y1K like a flyover state swing voter, Americans could look forward to an imminent future that included a financial crisis, Einstein’s theory of relativity, the automobile, the telephone, and the first world war of the new century. Yaaaaaaaaay!
by Andy McCarthy