David Frum

And even after the demobilization, everyone saw the tremendous latent power of the United States, both military and economic.

But the government, much bigger than before the Civil War, was still a scandal.

Jobs were given by patronage.

The government was financed by tariffs that were kind of random and crazy and punitive.

And all of politics was about distributing government jobs to people who would help the government, whoever won the election, usually the Republican, to win.

There was no rational administration.

Levels of corruption were extremely high.

This all had to be brought into the modern era.

That was problem two.

The great tragic choice was the political coalition that supported justice for problem one, that is democracy.

bringing the freed slaves fully into national life, was a very different coalition from the coalition that might exist to pull the United States government into the modern era.

And politicians of the time were forced to choose.

The so-called stalwarts, who were the group around Roscoe Conkling, who was one of the characters in the drama,

said, our job is to try to bring the freed slaves into national life.

That's going to mean some very dirty politics, because this is not a popular cause in the northern part of the country.

Certainly not after about 1873.

It loses all its popularity.

The only way we're going to keep winning elections is if we use the tariffs to raise a lot of money from protected industries.

If we use patronage and pork barrel to get a lot of votes and persuade people to vote for us, even though

They don't like very much the things we're doing for the freed slaves, but they like what we're doing for them.