Talk:Mugwump

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"Gilded Age Politics," I love it!!!

[edit] to Geoffrey Blodgett

I dedicate my work on this article over the last few days to you. I wish I could go back to the 1970s, maybe sneaking along a Powerbook or iMac and a printer, and write history papers for you again. (Blodgett passed away in 2001 ... he was the history professor and undergraduate advisor for whom no matter how hard I worked, no matter what I wrote, I always got an A- instead of an A. He wrote one of the first books on Mugwumps.) Cheers Geoff. --Metzenberg 09:47, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] capitalization style

The style I recommend for this article is to capitalize Mugwumps when specifically referring to the movement and it so-called members, and to lowercase the word when it is used in a general sense. --Metzenberg 10:20, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mugwumps and the tariff

If anyone should feel like researching another issue about the Mugwumps, the tariff would be an interesting one. They tended to believe in free-market laissez faire economics. (That's what really bothered those liberal New Deal historians about them, and now is delighting a new generation of conservatives). However, the tariff was economic orthodoxy for the Republican northeast, and the Mugwumps never saw it as a "free market" issue. When Grover Cleveland came out against the tariff, he lost a lot of his support in northeastern industrial states that had swung the election to him in 1884. The "New Deal" generation of historians noted that Mugwumps actually had diverse interests and tended to advocate for their own economic interests on the tariff ... as in, how highminded were these guys? --Metzenberg 10:20, 26 July 2006 (UTC)