Michael
Nov 3rd 2009, 02:52 PM
For all of you (like me) who have always wondered why there were TWO Dakotas when there doesn't seem to be enough population for even ONE Dakota... (let alone Wyoming!).
On this day in 1889, Grover Cleveland signed into law the omnibus admissions bill that brought the Dakotas, Montana, and Washington into the union as states—which might seem unremarkable enough on the face of it, but in fact poses one of the few Genuine Historical Mysteries I have lying around.
...
As I get it, this is a story about corruption in the late nineteenth-century. Not the penny-ante, vote-stealing kind of corruption, but the grand, manipulation-of-the-electorate-in-broad-daylight kind of corruption.
...
Now, in the fiftieth Congress (which sat 1887-1889), Democrats have the House, Republicans the Senate, and Cleveland, the President, is a Democrat. So there’s room for partisan compromise: statehood for Dakota, Washington, New Mexico, and Montana. Partisan balance, as far as Senators go: four apiece.
Except: Republicans figure that if you’re gonna have a state that’s as reliably as Republican as Dakota looks, you ought to have two of it. So they put a bill before the Senate to split it.
Read the whole thing (http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/omnibusted/)
No surprise really. 19th century politics was horrificly corrupt by modern standards.
On this day in 1889, Grover Cleveland signed into law the omnibus admissions bill that brought the Dakotas, Montana, and Washington into the union as states—which might seem unremarkable enough on the face of it, but in fact poses one of the few Genuine Historical Mysteries I have lying around.
...
As I get it, this is a story about corruption in the late nineteenth-century. Not the penny-ante, vote-stealing kind of corruption, but the grand, manipulation-of-the-electorate-in-broad-daylight kind of corruption.
...
Now, in the fiftieth Congress (which sat 1887-1889), Democrats have the House, Republicans the Senate, and Cleveland, the President, is a Democrat. So there’s room for partisan compromise: statehood for Dakota, Washington, New Mexico, and Montana. Partisan balance, as far as Senators go: four apiece.
Except: Republicans figure that if you’re gonna have a state that’s as reliably as Republican as Dakota looks, you ought to have two of it. So they put a bill before the Senate to split it.
Read the whole thing (http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/omnibusted/)
No surprise really. 19th century politics was horrificly corrupt by modern standards.