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224 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE
party organization, required appeasement by the subsequent adoption of
extrava-
gant public expenditures and by representation on the public payroll. " Cur
com-
plaint" declared Wright to the landlords Mutual Protective Association, "is
that
there is a party."1$
Such conservative Democrats wanted to replace party-based government with a
government run "like a business," with appointed officials motived by
"efficiency."
"Our offices must no longer be scrambled for at every election, nor handed
about as
bribes," declared Cowen. A limited, efficient, and nonpartisan government
would
require less taxation and minimize the need for the more equitable tax laws
that
would reach their exempt intangible properties such as rents and mortgages.
A
report by Johns Hopkins University economist Richard Ely to the 1888
Maryland
Tax Commission, recommending that the state shift to corporate and income
taxes
and the city to taxes levied on realty and business rents, particularly
prompted
business groups to invoke the issue of election reform to cover their
objective of
preserving their vested economic interests. Not surprisingly, the Landlords
Mutual
Protective Association was a major advocate of election reform. If revenue
were
needed, Cowen told an enthusiastic meeting of the Landlords Association, it
should
come not from taxation on businesses but from high license fees on saloons,
a tactic
that would force the city's lower classes to fund the government
expenditures their
presence demanded as well as weaken the regular party organization that
depended
upon saloons as organizing bases. "But to obtain these or other reforms,"
Cowen
told the businessmen, "we should direct our efforts primarily to the
enactment" of
new election laws.19
In similarly attacking election fraud, machine rule, and the existing
electoral
system, third parties and labor organizations had still different
objectives. Not
surprisingly, labor organizations particularly condemned the intimidation of
workers' voting by their employers under the system of open voting. Some
labor
leaders complained of intimidation by the workers' other "master, the
political
boss, . . . the ward-heeler." Improved conditions for the working class, it
was
argued, required the emancipation of the worker from the domination of
either
master. Greenbackers, Industrials, Prohibitionists, and other third-party
groups all
criticized the party-ticket system because of the hardships it imposed on
small
parties, thereby limiting their possible influence. The printing and
distributing of
ballots was expensive, excluding poor citizens from nomination and
influence over
public policy; the system also required a uniform organization across all
election
districts-something few third.parties had-if every voter was to have an
oppor-
tunity to vote his principles. Paying for the printing of tickets and their
distribu-
tion at every polling place by hawkers was effectively beyond the reach of
small
third parties. Each major party spent $7,000-8,000 per election on printing
and
distributing ballots and paying challengers in Baltimore's 180 precincts,
but the
total campaign funds collected by the Industrial Parry for the city's 1886
election
was only $196.30. As a consequence, third parties often had no one in some
precincts to distribute their tickets, which limited the possibility of
their attracting
votes. Labor parties and Prohibitionists sometimes took out advertisements
in the
newspapers directing their prospective voters to homes and offices where
their
tickets would be available, a necessary tactic that increased the "costs"
of voting for
their followers. 20
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