Goo-Goos, Mugwumps, and Stalwarts
“Good Government,” Its Origins and Consequences in Late 19th Century America

In late 19th Century America, the Democratic Party was unquestionably the party of white supremacy. But the Republican Party was by no means the party of Black liberation.

At its founding in 1854, the Republican Party opposed the extension of slavery into newly organized western territories of the US, but Republicans were divided over the question of the slave system itself.

Yes, the Republican Party attracted many abolitionists, but even abolitionists did not agree on the future of formerly enslaved people. Only the most radical believed in social, political, and economic equality for Black people.

Socially conservative abolitionists expected to deport formerly enslaved people to Africa. With the victory of the Republican controlled federal government in the Civil War (1861-1865), divisions in the Republican Party became acute. Lincoln advocated a policy of reconciliation with the former Confederate states.

His opponents in the party – the so-called Radical Republicans – wanted to exclude the Southern planter class from political power and destroy its economic base by confiscating its plantations and redistributing the land to formerly enslaved people.

Ulysses Grant had been impressed by the performance of Black troops under his command in the Civil War, and he became president in 1869 with a strong commitment to protect the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment rights of Black people.

Grant's Attorney General, Amos T. Akerman, was successful in smashing the original Ku Klux Klan by 1871. Grant also supported the US military occupation of the South, which provided the muscle for Akerman’s enforcement of federal civil rights laws.

The Radical Republican strategy for pacifying the South also included appointing ideologically committed party loyalists to administrative posts – port commissioners, revenue collectors, customs agents, etc.

Needless to say, Grant was hated by Southern Democrats and their allies in the North. His administration was portrayed as appallingly corrupt by writers of the “Lost Cause” school of history, and the appointment of Republican loyalists was slandered as “the spoils system.”

Enter the aristocratic Republicans of New York and New England. They hated the Southern slave system, but they also hated the newly emerging class of industrial tycoons, railroad barons, and oil magnates who were challenging their dominance in the US economy. Most of all they were terrified of the Irish immigrant workers who’d looted their mansions and social clubs in the anti-draft riots of 1863.

Once the slave system was defeated, they didn’t particularly care what happened to formerly enslaved people. They didn’t like their taxes going to support a large military force in the South. They sneered at the low-class party loyalists who staffed the civil service. Consequently, they joined Democrats in demanding “good government” – that is, government free of Radical Republicans.

Radical Republicans called these people “Half-Breeds” – implying they were only half Republican – or “goo-goos” – from “good government.” Later goo-goo evolved into “goody-goody,” a term we still use for holier than thou people. The Radicals began calling themselves Stalwarts.

The Democratic Party also had its own divisions. Populists represented the interests of Mid-Western farmers and Western ranchers. “Bourbon” Democrats came from the same social classes as the goo-goos. They were for hard money – the gold standard – low taxes, and fiscal restraint. They were called “Bourbons” not because they liked whiskey, although most of them did, but after the reactionary Bourbon Dynasty of pre-revolutionary France.

In the election of 1876, Republican Rutherford Hayes won, but only by making a backroom deal to gain disputed electoral votes from Louisiana. Although Hayes had been an abolitionist, he agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South and hand the former Confederate states back to the Democrats in return for the presidency.

In the election of 1884, Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland ran against Republican James G. Blaine. Blaine had been aligned with the Half-Breeds, but he had such a reputation for dishonesty that some Republicans bolted the party and endorsed Cleveland.

Newspaper man Charles Anderson Dana started calling the defectors “Mugwumps,” after an Algonquian word, mugguomp, meaning “important person,” and mocked them as self-important moralizers.

Cleveland won the 1884 election and repaid the mugwumps by keeping “competent” Republicans in their posts. He did not appoint a single Black per-son to any federal job and he did not enforce Black voters’ 15th Amendment voting rights in the South.