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The road to Wounded Knee started in 1884, when voters angry that the Republicans had sold out to big business elected Democrat Grover Cleveland to the presidency. The first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War, he promised to lower the tariffs that squeezed ordinary Americans in order to protect big business. Horrified at the growing opposition to a government that worked for those industrialists who would soon be called “robber barons,” Republicans began to circulate pamphlets as soon as Cleveland was elected, claiming that lowering the tariff would destroy the economy and warning that voters must return Republicans to power or face economic ruin.
In 1888, Cleveland nonetheless won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but after an extraordinarily corrupt campaign, Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison won in the Electoral College. This is “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” the editors of a pro-Harrison newspaper boasted. They predicted that “business men will be thoroughly well content with it.”
Knowing that the popular mood had turned against tariffs and the party that protected them, Harrison Republicans looked for ways to cement their control over the government.
Adding to the Union new states they believed would vote Republican would give them two more seats per state in the Senate, as well as a seat per state in the House of Representatives, and thus three more electors in the Electoral College, for each state has a number of electors equal to the number of senators and representatives combined. Between November 1889 and July 1890 the Republicans added five new states to the Union. They added Washington, Idaho, and Montana. They also divided the huge Dakota Territory in two, creating North Dakota and South Dakota. The new states should give the Republicans ten new seats in the Senate, Harrison’s men noted happily.
more at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-26-2025
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