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1020 HISTORICAL ANNOTATION

of Europe. To many American workers it promised food on the table and expansion
of jobs, particularly for the large immigrant population. Others, however, viewed the
tariff as a monopolist creator of extravagant wealth that fueled corruption in
Washington. Democratic nominee and presidential incumbent Grover Cleveland was
among the strongest opponents of the tariff. In April 1888 his bill to revise the tariffs,
the Mills Bill, went to the House. This bill proposed modest reductions that many
businessmen viewed as nonthreatening. The Republican nominee, Benjamin Harrison,
steadfastly supported a high protective tariff throughout his political career. During
the campaign, nearly all of Harrison's speeches stressed the importance of retaining
the protective tariff He was supported by such groups as the American Iron and Steel
Association and the American Protective Tariff League. When Democrats countered
that Harrison's status-quo support for the tariff was akin to supporting excessive prof-
its for businessmen while ignoring the small wage earners, the Republicans retaliated,
claiming that Cleveland's tariff reforms would squelch the labor movement by
unleashing a flood of cheap foreign goods. In truth, both parties' positions on the tariff
hardly differed at all. Cleveland, far from wanting to abolish protectionism, merely
suggested more study and minor reforms. Harrison simply stood behind the estab-
lished system. Neither candidate's stance would have significantly altered the tariff,
but the Republicans campaigned more successfully than the Democrats, and Harrison
won the presidency. Schlesinger, Running for President, 387-96.

439.8 lynch law] The term "lynching" refers to punishment or physical violence
by self-appointed groups without regard to established legal procedures, often result-
ing in death. In American vocabulary the term can be traced to the Revolutionary era,
when Charles Lynch (1736-96), a Bedford County, Virginia, justice of the peace,
conducted a vigilante campaign against suspected Loyalists. In the following decades
"lynch laws" were inflicted throughout the nation by popular tribunals bent on pun-
ishing "transgressors of community standards." In the post-Reconstruction South,
whites lynched blacks who refused to show proper deference or disputed working
conditions. Southern lynch mobs were often sadistic in the brutal methods they
employed to execute victims. The brutality of the lynch mob became one of the defin-
ing images of bigotry and racial oppression in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Paul Finkelman, ed., Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth
Century, 3 vols. (New York, 2001), 2:238-39; EAAH, 2:307-14.

439.12 President Harrison] Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901), twenty-third presi-
dent of the United States, was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison.
Beginning his law career in Indiana in 1854. Harrison was a strong supporter of the
Republican party from its inception. He served with distinction during the Civil War.
earning promotion to brigadier general by war's end. Although he ran unsuccessfully
for the Indiana governorship in the 1870s, by 1877 he had acquired enough political
clout to be named leader of the state Republican party. He was instrumental in helping
James Garfield gain the Republican nomination in 1880 and was elected to the U.S.
Senate the following year. Losing his Senate seat when the Democrats swept Indiana