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From Party Tickets to Secret Ballots 223
lize the popular will. In particular they condemned the party-ticket
system. By
permitting parties to print and distribute their own tickets at the polls,
it required
parties to collect large sums of money and create large and disciplined
organizations
or "machines." The money needed to prepare ballots and hire ticket peddlers
in
every election district provided parties with the excuse for the assessment
of candi-
dates, which in turn led the unscrupulous partisan, once elected, to use
his public
office to recoup his political expenses at the cost of the taxpayer, a
process the
mugwumps termed "the cycle of corruption."16
Maryland's mugwumps, led by the "peacock of Park Avenue," Charles J. Bona-
parte, organized themselves into two major and overlapping groups, the
Civil Ser-
vice Association of Maryland and the Baltimore Reform League, virtually a
who's
who of the city's social register. Because of the Democratic dominance of
state and
city politics, they directed their energies at attacking the Democratic
party organi-
zation, personified by state "boss" Senator Arthur P. Gorman and Baltimore
City
"boss" Isaac Rasin. They prided themselves that their attacks on electoral
corruption
produced among these Democratic politicians "rancorous and unremitting
hostility,
varied by occasional exhibitions of abject terror." The persistent class
animus of
such reformers was always obvious, as when they condemned the appointment as
election officials of "drivers of hacks, peanut vendors"-people "whose very
occu-
pations . . . rendered their appointment a simple outrage." They demanded
instead
the appointment of election supervisors only "from the business community,
who
have neither the ambitions nor the temptations" of politicians.l7
Not surprisingly, the mugwumps often found common cause with the Indepen-
dent Democrats, a group of conservative Democrats based in the Baltimore
business
community, led most prominently by John K. Cowen of the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad. Their program resembled that of the mugwumps in condemning "ma-
chine politics" and "corrupt elections" and in advocating election reform
and civil
service. Their objectives, if different, were no more disinterested. Such
reforms,
they believed, would weaken the regular party organization by restricting
its pa-
tronage, its control over nominations and thus public policy, and its
capacity to
mobilize Maryland's farmers and workers at the polls. Their ultimate motive
was
revealed in a public address they issued in 1887: "It is by power wielded
through
these fraudulent elections," they asserted, that the regular Democrats
established
public policy and levied taxes for "jobs and corrupt expenditures." What
the Inde-
pendents wanted was to reduce their existing taxes and prevent the adoption
of any
additional tax legislation. Indeed, the Independents' periodic crusades
against "ring
rule" paralleled the regular Democrats' periodic attempts to achieve tax
reform in
response to the complaints of farmers and workers. The Independents'
opposition to
tax reform reflected their determination to maintain the tax exemptions for
corpora-
tions for which Maryland was notorious= "Cowenism," declared one regular
Dem-
ocrat, stood for the "aggrandizement of corporate influence in the State
and nation"
-and to preserve the immunity from taxation of other forms of business
property.
It took the form of an argument to restrict the functions of government,
which
they believed had been unnecessarily inflated by a parry machine too
responsive to
the lower classes in its determination to win elections. R. E. Wright, a
prominent
Baltimore merchant, for instance, complained of the city's "rapidly
enlarging and
dangerous proletariat" which, because it was mobilized for elections by the
regular
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