Iron and the Bloody Shirt: Leadership in the West Virginia Republican Party 1872--1896
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The electoral upheavals of 1894 and 1896 resulting in Republican Party dominance within West Virginia and around the nation were not just a sudden occurrence. They resulted, in part, because voters in key border states shifted their votes from the Democratic to the Republican Party. West Virginia's Republican Party had the greatest success in maintaining its long term influence after 1896 despite the fact that since 1872 it enjoyed little success. To build up to triumph in 1896 took a quarter century of painstaking work that started after electoral disaster in 1870. That election, the first since West Virginia removed restrictions on former Confederates, brought Democrats into a position of dominance. This dissertation tells the story of how West Virginia's Republicans rebuilt their party between 1872 and 1896.;Nathan Goff, a Union Army major during the Civil War, used the same methods as other party authorities around the country. He used his talent for public speaking and access to federal patronage to mobilize and reward the faithful as much as possible. State Republican newspapers battled their Democratic counterparts in conflicts over not only issues of the day, but also anger over measures taken during the Civil War. Goff's work helped to restore a working party organization in the 1870s, but did not put West Virginia Republicans into a position to return to competitiveness, much less power. Money, manpower, and organization do not ensure success without a relevant message.;The Republican Party across the country started to fashion a more appealing vision after the difficult Grant and Hayes Administrations. They advocated sound money and a protective tariff as cornerstones of national prosperity more often during the 1880s. Goff emerged as a national spokesman for protectionism at the same time as the Second Industrial Revolution started strongly transforming West Virginia's economy. However, national economic conditions in this decade did not result in massive movement towards the Republican cause. Instead, the country experienced partisan deadlock. West Virginia Republicans made gains during this decade. In 1888, Goff came very close to capturing the office of governor. The Democratic legislature successfully counted out enough votes to seat the Democratic nominee, but the results demonstrated a shift in party power.;Goff would not be able to take West Virginia Republicans to their eventual triumph. The year 1888 also saw Goff unseated as party chief by the nationally known Stephen Benton Elkins. Elkins built up a fortune in land speculation,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".