I keep reading that the election of 1884 was one of the “dirtiest” in American history, which strikes me like saying that a sewer is dirtier than a septic tank. Still I have to admit that there was a lot of mud flung around by James Blaine and Grover Cleveland. And as usual, he who flung the most, won. Blaine got in the first shot.
The Democratic convention in Buffalo, New York, ended on July 11th 1884, after having nominated hometown hero, “Honest” Grover “The Good” Cleveland. Just ten days later the “Buffalo Evening Telegraph” reported “A Terrible Tale”; that in 1874 Cleveland had an affair with a young widow from New Jersey, Maria Helpin. In September Mrs. Helpin had given birth to a son she named Oscar Folsom Cleveland (Folsom was Cleveland’s law partner). According to the “Telegraph”, Maria ended up in an asylum and the poor innocent boy had ended up in an orphanage. The Republican faithful began the chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”
It was a great story, and parts of it were true. But Cleveland refused to panic and instructed his followers to “Just tell the truth”, which is easy to say at those rare times when the truth actually helps you. The truth was that Mrs. Helpin had had affairs with several men (something that probably happened a lot more often than anyone in 1884 was willing to publicly admit), and there were several men who might have been the father. Cleveland never admitted parentage. But he had supported the infant after Maria started drinking heavily. Later, when it became clear Maria was not going to get sober anytime soon, Cleveland had paid her $500 to give up Oscar, and the boy was adopted by a friend of Cleveland’s. Oscar eventually ended up graduating from medical school. As the full story came out the initial Blaine attack resulted in Cleveland sounding more honest than he had before.
The second Blaine attack backfired even worse. There were two “third parties” in 1884; the Greenback Party and the Prohibition Party. The Greenback Party seemed likely to hurt the Democrats most, so Blaine’s supporters actually gave them money. “The Dry’s” had nominated John St. John, three time governor of Kansas. Blaine’s people were worried that St. John would siphon off Republican votes in upstate New York. They urged St. John to drop out of the race, and when he refused they spread the story that St. John had abandoned a battered wife and child in California.
Again, the smear was true, sort of. After his parents had died when St. John was just 15, he had joined the ‘49ers, looking for his fortune in the gold fields. He didn’t find gold but at the age of 19 he had found a wife and had fathered a child. And at his wife’s request he had “granted” her, to use the old phrase, a divorce, before returning, broke, to Illinois.
Like most smears this one hurt St. John the most amongst his most fervent supporters. Prohibitionists have always been a priggish bunch of humorless unforgiving bores, and they abandoned St. John as if they had just discovered the sacramental wine was actually wine. But St. John had that other trait you often find in prohibitionists; he considered revenge a matter of principle. Knowing he now stood no chance of even winning Kansas, St. John concentrated his efforts in upstate New York, just the place the Republicans were the most worried about.
Meanwhile, James Blaine, the Republican candidate, had his own problems, with the “Mugwumps”. This was yet another group of holier than thou Victorian prigs, but these prigs were Republicans, and they had a hard time deciding whether or not to support Blaine because he was so…well, crooked. They took their name from a supposed Algonquin word for “big leader”, but it was "New York Sun" columnist Charles Dana who defined them as Republicans who had their “mugs” on one side of the fence and their “wumps” on the other.
In defending Blaine Republican commentators went so far as to imply that the Mugwumps were members of the “Eastern effete”, or to use the vernacular, “Man millners”, i.e. homosexuals. And yes, it turns out there have always been gay Republicans as well as gay Democrats, and "gay baiting" has always been used to work up "the base". But it also turns out there is a reason they call it the "base"; because it is. I think we would be a healthier nation if our history books actually tried to tell the unvarnished truth about the past; its called perspective.
Meanwhile the Democrats were throwing everything they could think of at "James Blaine, the Continental Liar From the State of Maine", like calling him "Slippery Jim" - which worked about as well as calling Bill Clinton "Slick Willie". The Democratic commentators dragged up the old charge of “Burn this letter after reading”. And the Indianapolis Sentinel even discovered that Blaine had married his wife only after her father had threatened him with a shotgun. Blaine sued the Sentinel for liable but the paper then produced the certificates showing the couple had been married in March, 1851 and their first child had been born less than three months later. Blaine came up with a story about two ceremonies, one private in 1850, and a public wedding a year later, but by the time he finish the audience had turned to the comic pages.
But the final nail in Blaine’s coffin was supposedly driven in by the Reverend Samuel Burchard, who at a New York City Republican rally, with Blaine sitting at the dais, announced that the Democrats stood for “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”. The press had a field day, implying the phrase was anti-southern (rebellion) and anti-Catholic, (which it was) and that by his silence that Blaine had approved of it. But that last part was absurd. Blaine’s mother was a practicing Catholic. His sister was a nun. The Republicans had even been hoping to attract some Catholic votes away from the Democrats. But none of that mattered to the press, or to the Democrats who very publicly organized "Catholic Democratic Lawyers" in case they had to contest the official election results from New York.
In the end it is difficult to say precisely why Cleveland won and Blaine lost. It was close. The popular vote cast on Election Day, November 4, 1884, was four million eight hundred seventy-four thousand for Cleveland (48.5%) and four million eight hundred forty-eight thousand (48.2%) for Blaine. But as we all know the popular vote is meaningless. What counted was the Electoral College, and there Cleveland won two hundred nineteen votes to one hundred eighty-two for Blaine, giving Cleveland a 37 vote electoral victory. The difference was New York State’s 36 votes, which Cleveland won by a mere 1,047 votes out of one million one hundred twenty-five thousand and forty-eight votes cast in that state. I think what made those 1,047 votes so powerful were the twenty-four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine votes cast in upstate New York for the Prohibitionist Party candidate, John St, John. 
It may have been the last time a prohibitionist could proudly say, “Here’s mud in your eye.”
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Journalist Edwin Black described the early economics of coal in an article at 
In this case the merchants were a forgotten class of lobbyists called “Hostmen”. Originally these were the medieval equivalent of Days Inn and Motel 6 operators. On July 24th, 1567 Queen Elizabeth I granted a patent to Mr. William Tipper as the sole provider of lodging and meals to “merchant strangers” or “merchant adventurers” visiting London. For that privilege Mr. Tipper paid her Majesty 40 shillings for each traveling salesman who paid him, and that is the origin for the term “a big tipper”, as in an extra payment for service. But the Hostmen of Newcastle-on-Tyne had bigger plans.
In 1529, to make the tax collector’s job easier, the crown decreed that every commodity harvested or produced within the watershed of the small River Tyne and its tributaries (in the vernacular, the Tyneside), had to be transshipped through the port city of Newcastle-on-Tyne. That also made it easier for the hostmen of Newcastle to gain control, since “…once the coal was on a boat, it was in the hands of merchants and shippers.” (Ibid) 
“By the fifteen hundred and fifties, the Hostmen (so) commanded the coal--from ground excavation to river distribution—that…in 1590, the Lord Mayor of London complained “…of the monopoly and extortion of the owners of Newcastle coals." (ibid) The tip left on the table for Elizabeth was one shilling paid to her for every 36 bushels of coal shipped. And it was said that 10 men - the Lidell, the Ridell, the Carr and the Clavering families (and the Queen) - controlled the sale of coal throughout all of England and much of coastal Europe.
After the Virgin Queen’s death in 1603, Parliament moved to cancel the royal monopolies, but the Hostmen of Newcastle too valuable to be interfered with, i.e. too big to fail. Their profit margins remained as high as 65%. Not even the bloody English Civil War could break their control of coal. “The Hostmen always produced smart defenses, polished cost justifications and retained the best spokesmen to make their case.” (ibid). By 1661 Thomas Fuller could define the popular phrase ‘to carry coals to Newscastle’ as “…to busy one's self in a needless employment.”
The next step was described in “Extracts from the Company of Hostmen, Newcastle-Upon- Tyne (1901): “…(coal) miners soon drove shafts down to underground water levels, and mines had to be drained before production could be raised to meet the new demand…In 1712 Thomas Newcomen's first coal-fired, steam-operated pump was installed in a coal mine in the West Midlands. It pumped 600 liters of water (150 gallons) a minute from the bottom of a shaft 50 m (160 feet) deep…”
The final cost of the Hostmen’s monopoly was highlighted on Saturday December 6, 1952, in the Great Fog of London, when, acerbated by thousands of coal fires heating homes and businesses, visibility fell to one foot and “smoke ran like water.” The next day 6,500 people died while walking to London hospitals because the fog was so thick ambulances could not safely navigate city streets. On Monday, with most people locked in their homes and avoiding all physical effort, only 900 died. On Tuesday, December 9, the wind finally swept the fog away, leaving a final death toll of 12,000 killed in just four days while just breathing the air.
He certainly looked like a hero. As historian Contantin Pleshakov described him in “The Tsar’s Last Armada”, at over six feet, Peter was “Tall, powerfully built, his balding head…hinting at determination and obstinacy… (he was) the embodiment of a savage Russian admiral” “Mad Dog” earned his nickname for his violent temper when faced with stupidity or incompetence. As Peter led his ragtag fleet out of Kronshtadt naval base on October 15, 1904, “…Medals and stars glittered on his chest…He stood straight as a ramrod, looking so resolutely at (Tsar) Nicholas, that it seemed as if nothing could stop him.” Peter explained he mission to his men this way, “We’re now doing what needs to be done, defending the honor of the flag.” He said nothing about victory, and perhaps that was understandable. One battleship, the 13,000 ton Oryol, ran aground just trying to get out the harbor.
With this amateur fleet Peter was facing a voyage through the Baltic, down the Atlantic Coast of Europe and Africa, thence across the Indian Ocean, through the Sunda Straight, north across the South China Sea past Taiwan, and into the Yellow Sea to Port Arthur, a distance of some 18,000 miles. To make this voyage Peter was leading 56 coal fired ships recently renamed the Second Pacific Squadron: a fleet normally trapped in port by ice five months out of every year, a fleet with a handful of modern dreadnaughts, but mostly made up of antiquated slugs and "royal toy" yachts, and auxiliary ships crewed by 15,000 inexperienced seamen and officered by incompetent, insubordinate blue bloods and royal favorites, supplied by embezzling bureaucrats who scrimped on food and ammunition.
On October 20, the fleet put in at Cape Skagen, Norway, to re-coal. Over the entire voyage coal was so precious the Peter had none to spare to practice maneuvering. The nervous untested Russian crews saw Japanese dirigibles in every flock of seagulls and Japanese torpedo boats in every cloud bank. On the night of the 22nd as the fleet crossed the Dogger Bank fishing grounds the drunken captain of a supply ship thought he saw Japanese torpedo boats, and fired flares. In the flickering shadows the fleet found they were surrounded by small dark ships. Every Russian warship opened fire at point blank range.
Peter the “Mad Dog” threw a gunner away from his weapon, demanding, “Have I ordered this? Can you not see a fisherman?!” It took Peter twelve minutes to get the firing stopped. By then one English trawler had been sunk, several were damaged and three English fishermen were dead. The Russian cruiser Aurora was hit by five friendly shells. One Russian sailor and an Orthodox priest were killed, another sailor was badly wounded. Without waiting to apologize or explain or help their victims the Russians sailed on. Peter later complained to his wife, “One has to order five times to do the most trivial thing and then to check five times more to see if they have forgotten the order or not…this is a miserable fleet.”
Peter put his miserable fleet in at Vigo, Spain, where he had to negotiate with the aroused English, who were demanding an investigation, and with the Spanish, who were now unwilling to allow his warships to take on coal. The London Times complained, “"It is almost inconceivable that any men calling themselves seamen, however frightened they might be, could spend twenty minutes bombarding a fleet of fishing boats without discovering the nature of their target." In truth, the English didn’t know the worst of it. One Russian warship had fired 500 rounds at unarmed, barely moving fishing boats and had hit nothing.
Down the coast of Africa the fleet sailed on, from Tangiers to Senegal, re-coaling in the open ocean and at each stop. As they approached the equator, the temperature below decks approached 140 degrees. Sailors collapsed with heat stroke. As the fleet moved on to Gabon, discipline began to collapse. The crews were sick, exhausted and frustrated. On November 25th fights between civilian workers and seaman broke out during a coaling. Three officers were sent back to Russia for court martial after they smuggled nurses aboard their ship. Of course, Peter’s mistress was aboard one of the two hospital ships that accompanied the fleet, but then rank has its privileges.
Wrote another historian, “Each day, black torpedo boats carried out to sea those stricken dead by malaria, typhoid, or their own hand….Those remaining in the harbor suffered (from)…rotten food, cloying heat, and torrential rain. Many had tropical eczema, scratching themselves until they bled….Moss and barnacles grew thick on the ships’ hulls, and sharks circled around the fleet, eager to consume any bad meat thrown overboard….Men got stupefying drunk, gambled,…(Peter) who was reputed to have punched out a sailor’s teeth for a minor transgression, let them off easy. “How can I intimidate men ready to follow me to the death by condemning them to be hanged?”
Rounding the Cape of Good Hope in late December, the Russians were not welcomed in British owned South Africa, and so continued on to the island of Madagascar. In the port of Hellville a hospital ship which had paused at Cape Town to pick up medical supplies, delivered word that Port Arthur had fallen to the Japanese and the Pacific fleet had been captured.
What brought him out of his funk was a mutiny. On January 23 seamen on the Cruiser Admiral Nakhimoff mutinied, after being forced to eat a reeking yellow substance called Solina, best described as an early failed attempt at inventing Spam. It was amazing they had not mutinied before. Men who had never been more than 10 miles off their farms had been cooped up aboard steel heat traps for six months in the tropics. The humidity was so high their underwear was never dry. The ships were infested with cockroaches that were “eating clothes, boots, and books" and biting the sleeping sailors. And when mail did arrive from Russia the packages from home were filled with warm clothing. Finally Peter decided he could wait no more and without waiting to inform the Tsar the Second Pacific Squadron, now the only Pacific squadron, set sail for Indonesia
By now Peter had given his junior officers nicknames like “Brainless Nihlist” and “Slutty Old Geezer”. It took the fleet 28 days to cross the Indian Ocean. the fleet was able to make only 6 knots because of barnacles on the hulls, and had to slow even more 112 times for repairs to various ships. In fits of homesickness men began to throw themselves overboard. They arrived off Sumatra in April 3, 1905, but did not stop. On April 12 they reached the coast of Vietnam, where they were now ordered (by the Tsar personally) to await the squadron of older battleships, and then sail for Vladivostok.
It was clear they were going to sail through the Tsugaru Strait between Korea and Honshu, Japan, past the island of Tsushima. In 1281 a Chinese invasion fleet had crossed this 45 mile wide strait, only to be destroyed by a kamikazi or “divine wind”; a typhoon. All things considered it was the worst possible course to take, but Peter did not have the coal to sail around the west coast of Japan, so it was the only choice he could make. Every sailor knew the Japanese were going to be waiting for them at Tsushima Island, and Peter and his crews fully expected a pointless death.
At about 2:45 P.M. on May 27, 1905 the modern efficient Japanese fleet crossed the Russian “T”, allowing their ships to fire broadsides while the Russians were limited to firing their forward guns only. Almost immediately Peter’s flagship was struck and he took a shell fragment in the head.
The Japanese came out of the battle convinced that huge battleships guaranteed victory, ignoring the utter incompetence of their adversary. They were now set on a course for conquest, which would eventually lead to war with America.
But don’t feel too sorry for him. Peter would have hated the Soviet Revolution. 
