Despite everything, most reformers had remained loyal to the Republican Party throughout the disappointing postwar years. The Blaine nomination, however, was one outrage more than they could swallow. The Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland, had won a reputation for honesty as the mayor of Buffalo and then the governor of New York. Cleveland supported civil-service reform, the gold standard, and free trade—the great causes of the reformers. As a block, they did something almost unimaginable in those days of white-hot partisan feelings: they broke with the party of Lincoln to support the nominee of the party of Jefferson Davis.

The editor of The New York Sun, Charles Dana, mocked these party-switchers as Mugwumps, a name he apparently took from an Algonquian Indian word for an important person—self-important was what Dana ironically meant to say. Other critics, less polite, drew them as absurd cartoon characters with their “mug” on one side of the fence and their “wump” on the other. Their opponents sneered at them as “hermaphrodites.” (The word homosexual had not yet entered the English language.) The boss of the New York state Republican Party, U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling, who detested Blaine, nonetheless complained, “When Doctor Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities of the word reform.”

In a tensely close election, who can assess what impact the Mugwumps had on the course of history? Cleveland won New York’s 36 electoral votes—and thus the presidency—by the razor-thin margin of 1,149 votes out of the 1,167,169 cast.

The 1884 party-switchers lethally damaged any ambitions they may have held for elective office. (Some who shared the sympathies of the Mugwump circle—notably Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge—had been more prudent, and endorsed Blaine.) But over the succeeding decades, the Mugwump causes would one by one prevail.

The reformers wanted an end to patronage hiring in the civil service. In the 19th century, almost every job in federal, state, and local government, all the way down to the clerks and messengers, turned on Election Day. For hundreds of thousands of Americans, an election was not a vote on the issues, but a referendum on a single urgent question: “Shall I keep my job?” The system conscripted every government worker—and everybody who hoped to become a government worker—into the machinery of the parties and compelled obedience to the party bosses. Beginning with the Pendleton Act of 1883, federal civil servants—and later state employees—were granted tenure for office so long as they competently performed their jobs. Over the next quarter century, the old patronage system and its accompanying kickbacks to the parties dwindled away.

The Mugwumps wanted the United States to resume free trade—not only as a matter of good economics, but also because they had witnessed how the switch to protectionism in 1861 had turned Congress into an auction house for industrial favors. The United States cut its high tariffs for a tragically brief period in 1913, but adopted free trade as a permanent policy after World War II.