The Splintered Party: National Liberalism in Hessen and the Reich, 1867-1918 [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674437142, 9780674437111

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THE SPLINTERED PARTY

PROVINCES AND REICHSTAG ELECTORAL DISTRICTS IN THE GRAND DUCHY OF H E S S E N

Alsfeld" Homberg Lauterbach

1871- 1918 PROVINCES 1

I Oberhessen

I

I

Storkenburg

'Giessen Grünberg Schotten

7771 R h e i n h e s s e n ELECTORAL

DISTRICTS

I • Giessen

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Bad

\

Nauheim Friedberg-Büdingen Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten Fried berg Darm Stadt - Gross - Gerau Offenbach- Dieburg Bensheim- Erbach Worms - Heppenheim Bingen - Alzey Bad Vilbel Mainz - Oppenheim Frankfurt

'Mainz

Gross- / Umjtüftt-'

' ' ' ' / \ Wormsl

\'//U

Bensheim Heppenheim

Erbach 6

THE SPLINTERED PARTY National Liberalism in Hessen and the Reich 1867-1918

DAN S. WHITE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

1976

Copyright© 1976 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data White, Dan S The splintered party. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Nationalliberale Partei—History. 2. Hesse—Politics and government. 3. Germany— Politics and government—1871-1918.1. Title. JN3946.N33W48 329.9'43'41 75-23213 ISBN 0-674-83320-1 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

To my parents Philip and Anna White

PREFACE

I first became curious about the National Liberals' evolution in Imperial Germany when I discovered how powerful they had remained until 1914 in localities such as Hessen. In my dissertation "Hessen and the Reformulation of National Liberalism 1880-1884" (Harvard University, 1966) I investigated the party's development in the period of its first great setback and recovery. In writing this book I widened the scope of my original analysis and drew on many additional materials in order to follow the National Liberals throughout the period of the Second Empire. My findings follow. They are my contribution, my responsibility. The translations from German sources are also mine. Most of the research for The Splintered Party was done in Germany in 1964-65 and again in 1967. On the first trip I was aided by a Frederick Sheldon Travelling Fellowship from Harvard University and by a Fulbright Travel Grant from the United States Government. On the second I again received financial assistance from Harvard University. An Old Dominion Fellowship from M.I.T. enabled me to devote full time to writing for a semester in 1971-72. Many people helped me, both individually and through their aid in libraries and archives. In Germany I was given friendly assistance by staff members at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, the Politisches Archiv of the Foreign Office in Bonn, the Hessisches Staatsarchiv and the Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek in Darmstadt, the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Wiesbaden, the Badisches Generallandesarchiv in Karlsruhe, the Stadtbibliothek in Glessen, the Stadtarchiv und -bibliothek in Friedberg, the Geschichts- und Altertumsverein Alsfeld, the Archiv der Stadt Bensheim and the Institut für wissenschaftliche Politik der Philipps-Universität in Marburg. I owe particular thanks to Frieherr Ludwig von Heyl for allowing me access to the Freiherr Heyische Archiv in Worms-Liebenau as well as for permission to quote his grandfather's memoirs. Permissions from the Badisches Generallandesarchiv to quote letters of Paul Thorbecke and Ferdinand Scipio are likewise appreciated. My approach to the National Liberals was aided by suggestions from Franklin Ford, who supervised my dissertation at Harvard, and from Mack Walker, James Sheehan, and Robert MacMaster. My colleagues

viii

Preface

Lewis Wurgaft and Arthur Kaledin heard out many of the ideas of the later chapters. An invaluable contribution was made by Michelle Huggins and Helen Hannon, who typed the manuscript. No one, however, helped me more than my wife Nancy, whose encouragement was always there.

CONTENTS

1

National Liberalism in the Context of German Politics 1

2

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

3

The Crisis of National Liberalism and the Hessian Progressive Party

4

The Heidelberg Declaration

5

The Era of Heidelberg

6

The Autonomy of the Provinces

7

National Liberalism in the Context of European Politics 199 Appendices Bibliography Notes

257

Index

297

225 242

84

123

THE SPLINTERED PARTY

1

National Liberalism in the Context of German Politics

The National Liberal Party of Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany was one of the two genuinely national parties of its day. Drawing support from all sectors of the middle strata of society and from all parts of the Empire, the National Liberals had an electoral reach matched only by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), whose workingclass following likewise spanned the nation. Their nearest ideological rivals, the left liberals, were often divided into two or three feuding groups and remained generally restricted to Prussia and to pockets of free trading sentiment elsewhere in the Reich. Other parties were even more territorially confined—the Conservatives to Prussia east of the Elbe; the Center Party to the districts of Catholic population; the Alsatians, the Poles, and the Danes to the ethnically mixed borderlands. Like any large party, the National Liberals had their regional strongholds, but these were scattered fairly evenly across Germany. Rather than make the party strong, however, the National Liberals' representative breadth left them vulnerable to internal division and political ineffectiveness. Over the last three decades before 1914 the party's leaders continually faced the problem of doing justice to the conflicting demands of their variegated following and yet maintaining unity enough to be a respected force in the Reichstag. All too often the only unity possible was an agreement to disagree. An opponent once said that the National Liberals were the party that voted twenty-five men for a bill and twenty-five against and might as well have stayed home. Frequently that was the case. 1 The leading characteristic of the National Liberals was their inability to solve their own discords. " A great party," wrote the historian Friedrich Meinecke in 1912, "can surely tolerate a certain freedom of opinion in its ranks, and must even 1

2

The Splintered Party

wish for it, lest it become torpid. Within the infinitely complicated and differentiated organism of modern politics the great parties fulfill the function of subjecting the manifoldly inspired popular impulses to a first condensation, of effecting an initial compromise between the desirable and the possible." Meinecke, who was a National Liberal, believed his party could become the sort of balancing agent he described if it would learn to judge affairs in terms of the state interest. "The more the party comes internally to resemble the state, the sooner it will overcome partisan spirit in the narrow, ugly sense of the word. The National Liberals have always striven in this direction." 2 As a scholar of foreign policy Meinecke derived his standard of state interest—Staatsräson—from a field in which it had a limited and traditional definition. Herein also lay the weakness in his formulation. As a guiding concept in domestic matters—on questions of social justice, economic principle, constitutional doctrine—it gave little practical lead; worse, it could be and was easily corrupted to mean uncritical compliance with the policies of the Imperial government: an escape from the problem rather than a solution. Meinecke understood that a large party like the National Liberals had to elevate its politics above the immediate demands of its constituents. His prescription, however, did not offer them a truly autonomous base. Given the circumstances of Imperial Germany and the class character of the National Liberal constituency, the only course that offered the party a chance for internal unity was the adoption of some form of social liberalism, a standpoint that would measure the claims of specific interests against the conviction that the material sacrifices demanded by government must be shared in a manner corresponding to the distribution of wealth among the various classes of society. Once, and only briefly, in 1909-10, the National Liberals took up this position. Very quickly, however, intraparty conflicts reasserted themselves, and the policy collapsed. The sequel, during the last peacetime years before 1914, was a period of internal squabbling and, beyond the party, of what contemporaries called Reichsverdrossenheit—a weariness of the Imperial order, a doubt in the value of political action. The political demoralization that pervaded middle-class circles in Germany by 1914 has already been the subject of considerable analysis. In two essays published in the late 1920s Eckart Kehr brilliantly sketched out the militarization of civilian values through the institution of the reserve officer and the quashing of opposition in the Prussian civil service through the Puttkamer purges of the 1880s. Kehr's pioneering studies set out the major themes to be pursued by subsequent writers—the liberals' acceptance of much of the illiberal value system of the creators of the new Empire; and the German middle class's inability to match the

National Liberalism and German Politics

3

3

power of its monarchical and aristocratic opponents. The erosion of an independent liberal perspective after 1871 has since been documented in several explorations of the late-century German intellectual world, among which should be mentioned the works of Ernest K. Bramsted on novels and popular literature, of Leonard Krieger (in the concluding sections of a longer survey) on political theory, and of Fritz Stern on public morality. 4 The weakness of the middle strata in contending with the active forces in German society—late industrialization spearheaded by large-scale enterprises, the survival of a strong aristocracy, the tradition of a powerful state—has been an even stronger motif in recent approaches to Imperial Germany. In the pages that follow, the historical problem in Ralf D a h r e n d o r f s words, " o f a society in which the liberal principle could settle only haltingly and occasionally," 5 undergoes another diagnosis. In this book, the focus will be on the arena of practicing politics. I would like to offer an additional reason and an important one behind the middle class's relative impotence in Imperial Germany, namely, its leaders' failure as politicians and, in particular, the failure of the National Liberal Party as a political force. As I have suggested in the opening paragraphs, the National Liberals fell short as a party because of their internal divisions. At the heart of this failure was their inability to deal with the question of representation. For whom or what did the party stand? Or, to put the problem in the context of its apparent but unattained solution, why were the National Liberals unable to unite around a program of social liberalism? Finding answers to these questions depends on one's gaining an understanding of the multiple political contexts in which National Liberals operated—regional and local as well as national. It was in the states, where restrictive suffrage laws were perpetuated down to 1918, and in the constituencies, where deputies could purchase security by tying themselves to specific interests, that National Liberals had most of their opportunities for power during the Imperial era. Accordingly, regional and local considerations counted heavily in the development of party policy. Above all else it was these influences that prevented the National Liberals f r o m achieving unity and effectiveness in national politics. During the first ten years of the National Liberals' existence, following the party's founding in 1867, regional and local concerns carried little weight in the formulation of policy. Over the next decade and a half, however, their importance increased to the point where National Liberalism was as much an assemblage of colliding sectional interests as a coherent force in Reich politics. One of the chief agents of this transformation is also its symbol: the southern National Liberals' Heidelberg Declaration of 1884. The Heidelberg Declaration stands at the center of this

4

The Splintered Party

account. Its promulgation is the pivotal event in my rendering of National Liberalism's evolution. It was intended to be a new program— even a program that contended with the social question—for the entire party. But in the situation of 1884 it became instead a regional platform for the National Liberal branch parties of South and Southwest Germany—the first of many such programs, some to be openly announced, some merely to be spelled out through actions. The effect of Heidelberg was to demonstrate to National Liberals around the country that their best security lay in taking positions aligned with the needs of the states and constituencies in which they were based. Once that lesson became apparent through the elections of 1884, it was not possible to achieve a single working definition of National Liberalism. Rather the new paramountcy of regional and local factors ensured that the National Liberals would permanently remain the splintered party of this study's title. In the party's early days National Liberal leaders found it easy to identify their constituency. " W e are not the spokesmen of the bourgeoisie," said Karl Twesten, one of the party's leaders-to-be early in 1866, " . . . in the sense that the bourgeoisie is depicted as a small, distinct class which lives from great industrial enterprises and is totally immersed in material interests." But translated from French to German, we are, I agree, the representatives of the middle class [Bürgertum] . . . insofar as the middle class stands for the material and ideal interests with which the laboring and educated populace is imbued, the classes of the nation that have been struggling upwards since the end of the middle ages and that are always the possessors of moral authority and sooner or later will also become the possessors of political power in our State. 6 It was upon this premise that the National Liberals linked the two causes represented in the new party's name. National in the sense they meant it carried the connotation of popular, majority approval. It was thus inseparable from liberal—anything liberal being presumed to benefit the society as a whole. During the first ten years of the party's existence events seemed to bear out these beliefs. In all four national elections of the 1870s the National Liberals asserted themselves as the strongest party in the Reichstag, an apparent confirmation of their claim to speak for the majority of Germans. The era of the Reichsgründung—the founding of the Empire—was also their era. The men who created the National Liberal Party operated on an additional premise, however, which tacitly limited the party's representative claim. It was their conviction that if a German liberal party were to real-

National Liberalism and German Politics

5

ize its domestic aims, it must cooperate with any government that forwarded the nation's interest, no matter what its political complexion. They drew this lesson from the events of 1866, when Bismarck, their great antagonist in the struggle for parliamentary rights in Prussia, had opened the way for national unification by forcing Austria, through war, from the stage of German politics. Joining together with Bismarck—making peace, if only temporarily, with the conservative order he represented in Prussia—was a heavy sacrifice for liberals to make, but the party's founders felt they had no alternative. To stay in opposition when government policy coincided with their aspirations for a unified Germany seemed impermissible to them, even though association with Bismarck meant that the pace of liberal progress would have to be slow. Liberalism in opposition would be altogether fruitless. Liberals at the right hand of the government could further their cause and, in a broader forum—in 1867 it was the new North German Confederation; after 1871 it was the Empire—might reap more success than in conservative Prussia. 7 The party's first decade of experience also appeared to sustain this view. In partnership with Bismarck the National Liberals put their stamp on a series of legislative acts defining the institutional structure of the new national state. Perhaps it was in looking back upon the synthesis of representative claims, electoral success, and alliance with the Reich government in these early years that Friedrich Meinecke saw the realization of the model political condition he described for his fellow National Liberals in 1912. Already by the end of the 1870s, however, this equilibrium was collapsing, and the wisdom of the National Liberals' guiding premises had become uncertain. Whether the government still furthered the national interest became an open question in 1879, when Bismarck, breaking with the National Liberals, pushed a bill for increased protective tariffs through the Reichstag with the votes of the Catholic Center and the Prussian Conservatives—a bill that many National Liberals denounced, and a coalition that none could admit to be representative of a German majority. Yet it was also unclear whether the party now was more justified in calling itself representative. Across the country the popular consensus of previous years seemed lost beneath the economic conflicts opened up by the trade slump of 1873. A new era of interest lobbying seemed to be commencing, bringing with it the riddle of defining the economic general interest. Some on the right wing of the National Liberals accepted the solution offered by Bismarck, when he described his new tariff policy in terms of "the protection of national labor," and they quit the party in July 1879 when its Reichstag delegation refused to vote for the government's bill on the ground that its form was faulty. A larger group on the National Lib-

6

The Splintered Party

eral left answered the question of economic representation with a reaffirmation of the principle of free trade, a standpoint that allowed them to argue that Bismarck had abandoned the interest of the many by endorsing a tariff shield for the few. Once the chancellor's change of course seemed to them to be irreversible, they also seceded, in August 1880, and established a new Liberal Union in opposition to the Reich government. Before the warmth of a decade's successes had worn off, then, the National Liberal Party suddenly found its numbers significantly diminished and its place in German political life severely challenged. The National Liberals who remained with their party in 1879 and 1880 neither wished to choose for or against Bismarck nor to decide once and for all on economic policy. They believed that despite his turn to the right the chancellor continued in the broadest sense to represent their national goals. His foreign policy had not altered; and while he had switched from free trade to protection, they were unwilling to stake their attitude toward him on the economic issue, over which the party continued to be divided even after the strongest partisans of the two conflicting philosophies had departed. On trade policy they saw the proper response as one of accommodation to a new situation. The protectionists had asserted themselves as a potent political and economic force. Their claims therefore merited recognition. Besides, a more serious barrier between the party and the chancellor was the future of the Empire's institutions under the Conservative-Center coalition. But National Liberal leaders did not foresee a long life for the new parliamentary majority. " I t is our firm conviction," they said in their proclamation for the 1881 Reichstag elections, " t h a t a national German policy cannot be lastingly and beneficially carried out in opposition and struggle against the efforts of a moderate liberalism which has its solid roots in the broad middle strata of our people.'" Thus the National Liberals reacted to the crisis of 1879-80 by keeping the old faith. Their best effort toward defining a "national German policy" in the new circumstances was their commitment to economic tolerance. It was hardly enough to save the party f r o m a stunning electoral defeat in 1881. From 67 seats in August 1880, already a drop f r o m the 99 gained at the polls two years before, the National Liberals declined to 47 in the new Reichstag. They were now desperately in need of revival. Over the following years, however, the party wavered between government and opposition, scarcely provided with direction, much less with innovation, by those who were appointed to lead it. Although the crisis of 1879-80 threw the national party into confusion, the forces associated with National Liberalism on the regional and local

National Liberalism and German Politics

7

levels of German politics remained virtually intact throughout the ordeal. After the 1881 elections, as the lassitude of the national leadership became more and more pronounced, the initiative for renewal silently passed to party activists in the individual states. In South and Southwest Germany in late 1883 and early 1884 men from this organizational tier became the architects of a National Liberal revival. The manifesto that sparked off this resurgence, the Heidelberg Declaration of March 23, 1884, was issued by a gathering of regional leaders. Regional parties were the driving forces in the National Liberal electoral recovery in the following autumn. In the crucial interval between 1881 and 1884 the future course of National Liberalism was shaped far from the corridors of power in Berlin. All parties, as Maurice Duverger remarks at the outset of Les partis politiques, seek to win power and to exercise it. 9 As power in Imperial Germany was divided between the Reich and its member governments, correspondingly, alongside the parties of the Reichstag there existed a parallel system of regional parties operating in the various German states. In addition, the size and heterogeneity of the largest state, Prussia, encouraged the formation there of provincial groups analogous to the regional parties in the other states. Over time the regional and provincial parties became regular branches of the Reichstag parties to which they were informally tied in the early years of the Empire. As the power of the Reich government gradually increased vis-à-vis the individual states, the national parties also gained ascendance over the local groups. Still, the difference was a matter of degree, and the regional parties held on to a significant measure of autonomy. Down to 1918 educational and religious matters, most forms of direct taxation, regulations regarding county and municipal government, and all franchise requirements save those for the Reichstag were determined in the states. In making their influence felt on these questions the regional parties, as they had done from the outset of the Imperial era, adjusted the political standpoint they shared nationally with others to the parliamentary and electoral circumstances of their immediate localities.10 Regional influences coexisted with national forces from the beginning in the world of National Liberalism. Among the cofounders of the party in 1867 were men who had already belonged and continued afterwards to be members of regional liberal parties in South Germany and the newly annexed territories of Prussia. Outside the Prussian borders these parties maintained their original names: the Hessian and Bavarian Progressives, the German Party in Württemberg, the National and Liberal Party of Baden. And often, as in Bavaria in the early 1870s, they defined the philosophical limits of their liberalism less strictly, toward the left as well

8

The Splintered Party

as the right, than did the National Liberals of the Reichstag. 1 ' The closest identity between the regional units and the Reichstag delegation was to be found in the older Prussian areas, where the participation of former Prussian Progressives in the founding of the National Liberal Party coincided with their creation of a National Liberal delegation in the Prussian Diet. The fact that both parliaments met in Berlin tended to perpetuate this personal union. Well into the 1880s the regional parties remained as much the organizational core of National Liberalism as was the party in the Reichstag. With rare exceptions only the Reichstag deputies traveled to Berlin and actually participated in the national party's affairs. Most of the individuals who associated themselves with National Liberalism found that the action and rewards of politics came chiefly through the regional party. Accordingly, their concepts of liberalism were strongly influenced by local conditions, and their judgments on policy were as much opinions drawn from experience in town or state affairs as they were expressions of general philosophical tenets or responses to great national events. Organizationally, the national party was hardly distinguishable from the National Liberal Reichstag delegation during the first decade and a half of the Empire. National and state statutes forbade formal ties between political organizations in separate electoral districts, and the National Liberals appear not to have been very concerned with building up a coordinated network of local associations. Between 1870 and 1881 they held no national party conferences. At times of Reichstag elections the party leadership established a central electoral committee, staffed by deputies and candidates with campaign experience. After the voting was over the committee went out of existence.12 Likewise the links that held the national party together were not institutional but personal and programmatic. National Liberals in the early years referred to party colleagues as "our friends" and viewed their group as an informal union of like-minded men. Disregarding the opportunists who inevitably find their way into a successful organization, this judgment was an accurate one. This loose conception of party and the institutional weakness it bred left little for the national party to fall back upon when its leadership faltered in the early 1880s. To make matters worse, the National Liberals had lost their best organizational talents to the Liberal Union. On the regional level, by contrast, personal loyalties and material ties held the liberal groups firmly together. Their friendly relations with the provincial and state governments continued unaffected by national events, and while these were debated, there were no parallels to the break with Bismarck and the intraparty conflicts it had engendered. The regional parties, then, possessed the energy and unity to revitalize National Liber-

National Liberalism and German Politics

9

alism. Once their leaders were fully aware of the failure of direction in the national party, it was only a small step forward—that of combining forces—for them to confront on their own the question of the National Liberals' representative role. Their solution was simple and direct. The tariff struggle had shown that German voters no longer would follow automatically the National Liberal flag. The better-off elements who supplied most of the party's leadership were too narrow to serve alone as an electoral base. If the National Liberals were to approach their earlier strength they would have to capture other, broader sections of the population. To hold these strata they would have to associate themselves with the economic interests on which their members depended. At Heidelberg in March 1884, National Liberals from the southern regional parties committed themselves to such a set of specific interests and to the social groups that shared them. Through that action they initiated a pattern that characterized the national party's politics throughout the remainder of the Imperial era. As an electoral tactic the policy of Heidelberg was immediately successful, especially in the southern and southwestern areas where it originated. Over time, however, its effect was not so bright. For the new approach worked centrifugally. It made local and regional considerations preeminent for the deputies and party organizations, and it encouraged them to go their own way in deciding major issues. Power moved away from the center, out to the provinces and the individual constituencies. The full extent of the change was hidden in the first few years after Heidelberg, when the continuing entente among the southerners allowed them to dominate the national party. As early as 1890, however, the southerners' supremacy had collapsed in policy disagreements. What remained as the National Liberal Party was an unstable coalition of divergent regional interests. As the new character of the national party emerged in the late 1880s and the 1890s, National Liberal leaders tried to discover in it a new opportunity for themselves. In the difficult art of conciliating the clashing aims of party elements around the country they discerned a fresh basis for their claim to represent the national interest. The size of their electoral following no longer entitled them to speak in the name of the majority; instead they would function as the honest broker in German domestic politics. This was to take the task they had to accomplish within the party and to project it as a service that the party could perform for the country. The similarities made such a parallel easy to draw. After 1879 German politics, like the policies of the National Liberals, lacked a unifying thread. The cultural criticism that blossomed a decade later bears witness to this feeling of loss, but even at the time of Bismarck's turn away from the National Liberals men were speaking of a new

10

The Splintered Party

"interest politics" (Interessenpolitik) based on the pursuit of material reward. Like the party, the country had to learn to live with its economic and social divisions. National Liberal leaders found it easy to envision their party providing a new middle ground in German politics, mediating between the disputing interest groups and political parties in the same way that they had become accustomed to settling conflicts among the regional and constituency representatives in their own ranks. There was something honorable, even constructive, in this effort to remain a national party in a country that in retrospect seems to have been so hopelessly riven by internal conflicts and particularistic divisions. But it was a futile attempt. It might have been effective had the National Liberals commanded enough power in the Reichstag to force compromise upon others. But they did not; the new role to which they appointed themselves was a substitute for such power. In consequence, there was no compelling purpose that could impose unity in the party and counteract the centrifugal effect of the politics inaugurated in 1884 at Heidelberg. Party leadership became an art of accommodation, whether practiced by an Ernst Bassermann nationally or by less well-known figures on the regional level. In the last three decades of its existence the National Liberal Party became a mirror of the stresses that immobilized German society in a web of fragile compromises. The experience was devastating for the middle-class men who believed that a middle road still lay open in German politics. By 1914 they were weary and demoralized, neither fully a party of the ruling strata nor solidly rooted in the society for which they wished and claimed to speak. Historically the National Liberals are truly the representative party of Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany. In its emphasis on regional and local influence, the synopsis that I have just sketched out differs from most analyses of the relationship of National Liberalism and German society. Historians, especially Marxians, usually have argued that what held the party together counted more than what divided it internally. According to this interpretation the division of 1880 separated the forces of commercial capital, who went over to the Liberal Union, from the representatives of heavy industry, who henceforth became the dominating influence in the shrunken National Liberal Party. The split was an inevitable outcome of the passage of tariff legislation in the previous year. Although the National Liberals had voted as a bloc against the chancellor's bill, their unity in opposition was only momentary; it related not to tariffs but to the federal mechanism of the system proposed by Bismarck. Once protection became the law, the National Liberals' facade of unanimity disintegrated. The wing of heavy industry, all along in favor of tariffs, accepted the substance of the new

National Liberalism and German Politics

11

legislation. The commercial wing quit the party in order to fight for a restoration of free trade. 13 From this standpoint 1879 was the watershed year of late nineteenthcentury German politics. It signified the disappearance of parties grounded upon political principle and ushered in a new era, in which parties were to act as the agents of specific economic interests. The breakup of the National Liberals is symptomatic of the general trend: the slump of 1873 ended the bourgeois unity of prosperous times, and political loyalties quickly fell into line with economic commitments. It follows that if we are to understand the subsequent shifts and turns of German domestic politics, we ought to ignore what the chief figures said or wrote in order to see the better who they were and what interests they represented. This method yields a convenient shorthand for analyzing party behavior in the later years of the Empire. Successively, from right to left, it equates Junker and Conservative, industrialist and National Liberal, commercial entrepreneur and left liberal, workingman and Social Democ r a t . U s e d with care by Marxian and left-wing historians it has stimulated the most incisive analyses we have of the social background of politics in Imperial Germany. But built into this interpretation is a presumption that parties and deputies had a free hand to work for the economic interests with which they were associated. The practitioners of this approach have shown little curiosity about the influence that voters may have exercised upon their elected representatives, and the inference is that it was negligible. Social position, personal income, links with powerful economic concerns are the conventional indices of what a man stood for: a party's policies may be understood by assembling an economic and social profile of its leadership. Occupational studies of the Reichstag deputies have given shape and substance to such profiles, and in the case of the National Liberals they have yielded the already noted portrait of a party closely allied with heavy industry. 15 Recent and more detailed research, while following the same general approach, has obscured the original clear divisions separating the social and economic forces behind the parties. As investigation has become more intense and thoroughgoing, the groups under the microscope have appeared less cohesive than they had originally seemed to be. A postwar generation of German scholars has demonstrated that economic conflicts went on within the parties as well as between them, that conservative and liberal parties—the nonsocialist Protestant segment of the German political spectrum—did not depend solely on one sort of economic interest, and that the influence of pressure groups upon the parties varied with men and circumstances. In this revised version, the substance of Imperial

12

The Splintered Party

Germany's politics remains struggle and conflict, but organized pressure groups have replaced economic interests categorized by their productive functions as the major forces in play. 16 Such an approach develops a more complicated picture than the earlier model, but like its predecessor it still focuses mainly on the social and political elites in German society. Its treatment of the electorate is usually confined to an emphasis on the increasing size and political strength of the working classes and their party, the SPD. Accordingly, party attitudes toward the wishes of the general population are conventionally presented in terms of politics waged against proletarian demands rather than politics contested in the interests of the middle strata. Applied to the actions of the liberal groups, this line of analysis accepts the presumption that behind those powerful elements that pulled the strings of influence over the parties there stood an inert following that silently assented to the values of the social and economic grandees. One still need look no further than the top to see how society and politics meshed together in Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany. If any side of the interplay between social and economic interests and politics has been neglected in these analyses, it is, as I have been suggesting in this introduction, the relationship of deputies and parties to the areas and populations they represented. Rarely have the individual states and the Reichstag districts been considered on par with national forces as entities to which the parties had to respond. And in the case of the National Liberals it is worth stressing the imperative sense of these words: " h a d to respond." As I have mentioned above, it was in state politics that National Liberals held their greatest share of power after 1879. In the constituencies, it should be added, paying heed to the demands of the voters was a matter not only of preserving another slice of power but of political survival itself. Other parties—the Social Democrats, the Center, occasionally the Conservatives—had their "Riviera districts," safe enough that a candidate could go on vacation instead of campaign. For National Liberals as for any candidate, liberal or conservative, who depended primarily on middle-class votes, no victories were assured after the 1870s. Every three years, then every five after 1890, they fought a new battle for existence. That they could meet this challenge by associating themselves with the interests of their home areas was the lesson that the regional leaders of National Liberalism drew for themselves in the early 1880s. Very quickly it became a guiding principle throughout the national party. Nationally powerful pressure groups were, of course, active in the constituencies, and they made their weight felt as much as they could. Still, they could succeed only if the makeup of a region or a district allowed

National Liberalism and German Politics

13

them an opening. If a candidate in an urban area believed he could win without the help of the agrarian Bund der Landwirte, he could afford to ignore its offers or its threats. If he was fighting for a rural seat, he probably needed BdL endorsement. Aid from pressure groups was one of many variables in elections. Candidates' fortunes also hung upon incumbency, the number of parties in the race, and the affiliations of runoff opponents, to name a few others. The social and economic interpretations that have dominated the Imperial period's historiography tend to level out this diversity. They substitute a synthetic and uniform surface for the actual terrain in which the parties had to locate themselves, and inevitably they oversimplify developments. To shift focus to the regional and local scene is not to abandon generalization—common patterns still emerge—but it does allow a more accurate impression of the interplay between politics and social structure. It becomes all the more interesting because it enables us to gain a sense of the fluid makeup of the electorate. Town populations grow, occupational categories expand and contract; the social fabric is loose. The combination of interests that won a district or ruled a state fifteen years ago may be outworn today. It is always easy to underestimate the provincial element; the connotation of the word in both German and English is a demeaning one. In the development of National Liberalism in Imperial Germany, however, it was often the provincial element that counted most heavily. This study takes the former Grand Duchy of Hessen as its specific field of inquiry. Hessen, or Hessen-Darmstadt as it was often called, was National Liberal territory throughout the Imperial period. The party held at least one of the Grand Duchy's nine Reichstag seats at all times, and generally it controlled several; in the state parliament it possessed an absolute majority until the late 1890s. As in other National Liberal strongholds, there was an edge to the party's activity in Hessen that did not exist in areas where its members were effectively shut out from power and could use their strength only for tactical bargaining. National Liberals in the Grand Duchy took campaigns seriously and fought them tenaciously down through the half-century between 1867 and 1918. They kept a close watch on the sentiments of their electorate and strove to turn the national party's policies in directions that accorded with regional and local interests. Consequently, the issues in Hessen were typical of those in which National Liberals were caught up elsewhere in Germany. Events in Hessen also particularly influenced the national party's course. The National Liberals of the Grand Duchy played a role out of proportion to their numbers in the 1880s, especially in the formulation of

14

The Splintered Party

the Heidelberg Declaration. Moreover, because the party remained strong over the years, it maintained an important voice in national councils until the collapse of the Empire. Those who know something of the Hessian National Liberals might wonder about their significance in the years after 1905, when they acquired notoriety as the most conservative regional group in the national party. The Hessians, it is true, did not have a great influence over National Liberal policy in that era. Nonetheless, their opposition to Ernst Bassermann's forward-minded leadership kept them prominent. As the loudest protesters they played a part nationally to the end. Hessen's importance in German history has often been disproportionate to its size. Politically it has served as a bridge between the north and south since the 1520s and 1530s, when Landgrave Philip I attempted to unite Zwinglian and Lutheran reformers against the Holy Roman Emperor. Geographically it stands at the meeting point of the Main and Rhine, where east-west as well as north-south trade routes converged. The Zollverein in 1828 stretched out first to Hessen from Prussia. In the years before 1848, when Heinrich von Gagern and his friends assumed the leadership of the national movement, the Hessian Diet was one of the great forums in Germany for programmatic declarations in the name of liberty and unity. Hessen had been a Grand Duchy for only sixty-five years when it entered the German Empire in 1871. Previously for the three and a half centuries after its creation in 1567, it had been a landgravate, one of originally four separate sovereignties into which Philip I had split his domains so that his legitimate heirs would assent to the endowments he wished to confer upon the sons of his second, bigamous marriage. Throughout the long age of European absolutism the landgraves in Darmstadt had taken land where they could and kept what they had, slowly building up their territorial state as the small princes all over the west and south of Germany were doing. Only in the Napoleonic period, however, under Landgrave Ludwig X, who became the first Grand Duke, did Hessen-Darmstadt enlarge itself on a major scale. Switching sides advantageously as the fortunes of France and then of its enemies prevailed in the years of the Consulate and Empire, Ludwig adroitly advanced himself and his territories into the ranks of the politically significant German states.17 Ludwig I, as he was styled as Grand Duke, gained most of his new lands from areas formerly held by the Catholic Church and by lesser nobles. The archbishopric of Mainz had owned great tracts on both sides of the Rhine before the French Revolution. By the terms of the famous Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, Hessen-Darmstadt received

National Liberalism and German Politics

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several of these ecclesiastical territories on the right bank as well as a few districts of the defunct Electorate of the Palatinate. As a reward for joining Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine in 1806 Ludwig was recognized as sovereign over a number of domains ruled until that time by powerful local aristocrats. When the French lost the left bank after 1814 the new Grand Duke expanded his borders across the Rhine by acquiring Mainz and a large block of land to its west and south. By 1815, also having incorporated the former territories of the princes of Isenburg, the Grand Duchy had achieved the geographic contours it was to retain, with one disruption, until 1918. Subsequent to the German "fraternal w a r " of 1866, Hessen lost the hinterland counties of Battenberg and Biedenkopf to the victorious Prussia and was given the Prussian enclave around Bad Nauheim as the small change of defeat." In 1869 the National Liberal publicist Karl Braun began a sketch of Hessen by suggesting that his reader imagine himself on the railroad bridge spanning the Rhine at Mainz, just below the spot where the Main River flows into the Rhine. It is still a convenient place from which to gain a sense of Hessen's geography. Only the land on the northwest was not at some point a part of the Grand Duchy. To the south and west lay the province of Rheinhessen, which formed a rough quadrilateral on the left bank of the Rhine. To the south and east was the second Hessian province, Starkenburg, enclosed by the Rhine, the Main, and at its southernmost extreme the Neckar. To the northeast, but separated from the rest of the Grand Duchy by a strip of Prussian territory, was the third province, Oberhessen.' 9 Starkenburg was the central Hessian province, the connecting link between the others. It was also the most diverse of the three. On the north the plain of the Main extended across the province like a cap, with farmland and forest alternating across its flat surface. Further, south, running perpendicular to the course of the Main, lay three distinct regions. Closest to the Rhine was the level and often marshy area called the Ried, again with a mixture of arable land and woods. Paralleling it at a slightly higher elevation ran the scenic and fertile Bergstrasse, a natural highroad to the south. Then, rising up from the Bergstrasse, came the largest area of Starkenburg, the Odenwald, a hilly and forested region cut in all directions by valleys whose streams ran out toward the great rivers bounding the province. 20 At the end of the first decade of National Liberal power in Hessen, in 1880, Starkenburg was the most heavily populated of the three provinces, with 394,574 of the Grand Duchy's 936,340 inhabitants. 21 Many of its cities were on the Main, whose navigational possibilities attracted industry. The foremost of these manufacturing centers was Offenbach, which

16

The Splintered Party

was already being described in the 1820s as the workshop of Hessen. Just another peasant village at the end of the sixteenth century, Offenbach had developed under the favor of the counts of Isenburg-Birstein, who recruited refugee Huguenot artisans to initiate manufacturing. The city then grew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a less commercially restrictive neighbor of the great trading hub of Frankfurt. By 1880 its population had reached 28,597, third largest in the Grand Duchy. The other industrial towns along the Main were all far smaller than Offenbach and still making the transition from the older artisan economy. The most developed were those in the economic sphere of Mainz—Gustavsburg, the terminus of the Rhine bridge, Ginsheim, and Bischofsheim. 22 The largest city in Starkenburg was the provincial capital and ducal Residenzstadt, Darmstadt. Located at the point where the east-west configuration of the Main plain gave way to the north-and-south contoured regions, Darmstadt was a geographic as well as administrative focal point for the province, as its status as a major rail junction attested. With a population of 41,199 in 1880 it stood second in size among Hessian cities. Leading into Darmstadt from the south was a string of towns along the Bergstrasse, of which Bensheim and Heppenheim were the most significant. The Ried also had a few larger centers, while in the Odenwald the more important settlements were situated in the broader reaches of the Gesprenz and Mümling valleys. Economically Starkenburg was divided in two in 1880. If one drew a line on the map just below Darmstadt, the area north could be called industrial, the territory south would still be agricultural. As the Hessian occupational census of 1882 shows, in two of the three northern Kreise (counties), Darmstadt and Offenbach, only about one-fifth of the population was still attached to farming. The railroads, built earliest and most extensively in the level stretches of the Main plain, were now carrying commuting laborers from their villages into Darmstadt and Offenbach or to the nearby Prussian centers of Frankfurt and Hanau. The new occupational structure is indirectly visible in the high proportion of dwarf landholdings in the province—48.2 percent under 1 hectare in 1882, compared to 37.6 percent in Oberhessen and 37.9 percent in Rheinhessen. Many of the families that held these plots now pursued agriculture as a side occupation, wife and children doing most of the daily work while the husband held down a factory job in one of the big cities.23 In the remaining northern county of Starkenburg, Gross-Gerau, and in the four southern Kreise of the province, Bensheim, Dieburg, Erbach and Heppenheim, between 48.86 and 52.05 percent of the population were engaged in agriculture, forestry, or fishing. In fact the farm population in Starkenburg was still rising in absolute numbers, as more inten-

National Liberalism and German Politics

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sive cultivation enabled the land to absorb more people. It would not increase much further, however. The 1882 figures come near the peak totals of agricultural population in the Imperial period. Over the next thirteen years, until the next occupational census was taken in Hessen, a downward trend commenced in the numbers of people on the land. Agriculture, therefore, while still strong in much of Starkenburg in 1880, was on the verge of more dramatic transformations than it had yet experienced. 24 Moving from Starkenburg north to Oberhessen in 1880, one also passed from the most advanced to the least modern Hessian province. Only in Oberhessen was the farm population still greater than the industrial work force. Nearly 53 percent of its inhabitants were engaged in agriculture or forestry. There were few large towns in the region. Only one, Giessen, exceeded 5,000 persons; eleven others went over 2,000. In area the largest of the Hessian provinces, Oberhessen was smallest in population. Geographically it was dominated by the rolling and fertile Wetterau, a broad apron of land extending from below Giessen to the Prussian border near Gelnhausen, and by the massive Vogelsberg, which rose up on the east flank of the Wetterau to a height of 2,900 feet. Compared to other mountains in Germany the Vogelsberg was not very high, but it was the paramount feature of the landscape of Oberhessen, impeding transportation to external points to the northeast as well as between the eastern and western parts of the province. 25 Few railroad lines had been built in Oberhessen by 1880. The earliest was the stretch of the route linking Frankfurt and Berlin, completed in 1849-1852 and passing through the chief towns of the Wetterau—Friedberg, Bad Nauheim, Butzbach—on its way north over Giessen and into Prussian territory. The other main lines ran between Giessen and Gelnhausen, traversing the eastern Wetterau, and from Giessen to Fulda, likewise in Prussia, looping around the back side of the Vogelsberg. Giessen was also connected in the west to Wetzlar, just over the Prussian border, and through Wetzlar to Koblenz and the Rhine. 26 Giessen had been a university town more than two hundred years before it became the chief rail junction of Oberhessen, and its residents preferred to think of it as the home of the Hessian Landesuniversität, the educational pride of the Grand Duchy. The university had achieved European renown in the 1830s and 1840s through the discoveries of the brilliant native chemist Justus von Liebig, and its reputation still shone in the later decades of the century. Along with the academic population a large number of officials and military personnel lived in the city, which housed, in addition to the university, the provincial government of Oberhessen and a garrison. These elements, as well as its size, set Giessen off

18

The Splintered Party

from the other towns of Oberhessen. Nevertheless, the city did not dominate the province the way Darmstadt and Offenbach did in Starkenburg. 27 In 1880 Oberhessen produced about three-fifths of the wheat grown in Hessen and more than half the oats. Its rye crop also surpassed those of the other provinces, while its barley yield ran slightly behind Rheinhessen's. No other region of the Grand Duchy depended so heavily on grain and the grain market. Cattle, sheep, and hogs were also raised in the province, but the techniques of breeding were still primitive. Industry was present only on a limited scale. As in southern Starkenburg, most enterprises exploited the natural wealth of the area—coal mines, ironworks, sawmills. Textile production was extensive but outmoded, resisting the inevitable switch to mechanization. Oberhessen's most flourishing industry was also its most improbable one: tobacco manufacture. More can be said about this subject, however, when we turn in a later chapter to the tariff battles of the late 1870s.28 Socially, Oberhessen was the strongest preserve of the Standesherren, the once independent local nobility that had been mediatized during the Napoleonic era. To take one measure of their power, there were eighty landholdings greater than 100 hectares in Oberhessen, more than twice the number in either Starkenburg or Rheinhessen. These eighty holdings covered 8 percent of the province's farmland, again double the amount in either of the others. Most of this land was in noble hands, a good part of it purchased between the 1840s and the 1870s from recently liberated smallholders who had discovered that they had little recourse against hard times but to sell out, often to the same aristocratic family to whom they or their people had formerly been bound by feudal obligations. It was an experience common throughout Germany in the period following the peasant emancipations of the early decades of the century. In a few local cases entire villages were bought out by individual Standesherren. The agricultural population of Oberhessen declined between 1840 and 1861, as waves of poorer farmers emigrated. It rose again only in the 1860s.29 "The people of Rheinhessen are lively, talkative, inquisitive," commented a portraitist of the Grand Duchy in 1877, "and when I am stopped on the open Landstrasse in Rheinhessen by the first peasant who comes along, so that I might converse with him or tell him news of the capital, I always remember that passage of Caesar: 'It is the custom in Gaul to halt travellers, even against their will, and to inquire about all they have heard or experienced.' " 3 0 This description evokes several characteristics of the third Hessian province. Politics, as the writer suggested, were more a part of life here than in Starkenburg or Oberhessen.

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Moreover, the political horizons of the people of Rheinhessen extended beyond the Grand Duchy, out onto the historical stage of European diplomacy and back into a past that began in Roman times and included periods of French as well as of German overlordship. The territories amalgamated into the province of Rheinhessen came under Hessian rule in 1815, as part of the settlement agreed upon at the Congress of Vienna. In previous centuries they had often been chattels in the diplomatic trade of Europe, pieces handed back and forth from one treaty to another. Much of the later Rheinhessen belonged to the Palatine Electorate between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, but actual control of the land revolved among the native Electors, France, and Bavaria. Apart from a few aristocratic holdings, the rest of the future province was divided between the Archbishopric-Electorate of Mainz and the Bishopric and Free Imperial City of Worms. Mainz and Worms, whose stately Romanesque cathedrals commemorated the dominion of the medieval Church, were no more protected from the actions of the great powers than the neighboring secular territories, and like the others they were alternately occupied, ransomed, and left alone again. The last French occupation of the left bank, between 1793 and 1815, did away with the old rulers and boundaries. Under the Republic, Consulate, and Empire the French unified the territory and incorporated it into the enlarged Grande Nation. Departments and cantons replaced the traditional local divisions. Most of Rheinhessen fell into the Mont-Tonnerre (Donnersberg) Département, whose prefect between 1802 and 1813 was the veteran of the Committee of Public Safety, Jeanbon SaintAndré. Beyond administration, the revolution abolished feudalism, divested the Church of its secular properties, and gave Rheinhessen a modern legal system in the form of the Napoleonic codes. All of these changes were confirmed and guaranteed in the treaties which officially transferred the province to Hessian rule in 1816. Over the next three decades the memory of the French remained strong, and affection for Darmstadt was not great. Rheinhessen was the most feverish of the Hessian provinces during the revolution of 1848-49, and Mainz was the cockpit of radicalism in the Grand Duchy. A swing of opinion toward Darmstadt took place after the revolution, however, when Louis Napoleon, whose name implied expansionism, came to power in France. Rheinhessen now became national as well as liberal, and its attachment to the Grand Duchy hardened. 3 ' Rheinhessen was the smallest province in area, but during the 1870s it overtook Oberhessen in population. Perhaps its intense political life to some degree reflected the larger size of communities in the province. Whereas at least half the settlements in Oberhessen and Starkenburg had

20

The Splintered Party

fewer than five hundred inhabitants, in Rheinhessen over four-fifths of the towns had populations that exceeded five hundred. They were evenly spread across a landscape divided between the flat, narrow banks of the Rhine and a broad hinterland of rolling hill country. Forest covered less than a twentieth of the surface of the province. Rheinhessen was the most intensely cultivated region in Hessen. 32 The great city and capital of Rheinhessen was Mainz—das goldene Mainz—the first archepiscopal see of the Holy Roman Empire, the home of a legendary and boisterous Lenten carnival. One in four inhabitants of the province lived in Mainz, the largest city in the Grand Duchy. But the glitter of the old days was gone. The Mainz of 1880 was a manufacturing and commercial center, hemmed in by old city walls that prevented rapid expansion, and sobered in mood by the presence of a Prussian garrison. As a shipping point, Mainz was waging a losing fight for primacy against Frankfurt and Mannheim. Its industrial production, meanwhile, was increasing only slowly in scale. Rheinhessen was not favored with natural resources usable in heavy industry. It had no coal or iron, and its meager forest had not supported extensive development in the earlier part of the century, when wood was still widely used as fuel. These deficiencies in turn held back the industrial progress of Mainz. 33 Like Mainz, Worms had lost the luster of its previous glory. More an overgrown village than a city at the beginning of the century, Worms revived as a manufacturing center through the development of its leather industry, which was favored by the abundance of tanning bark nearby in the Odenwald and the Palatinate hills. But the city could not overcome the lead of Mannheim in commerce, despite continual efforts to improve its Rhine harbor. The other larger towns in Rheinhessen, Bingen and Alzey, were county seats with some small-scale manufacturing. Bingen's economy was tied to commerce on the Rhine, Alzey's to the wine trade. 34 Outside the cities Rheinhessen was agricultural, and throughout the province farming was mixed with viniculture. The vineyards were most extensive along the Rhine and, in the interior, in the northern part of the province, whereas the fields were most widespread in the south. Agriculture in Rheinhessen was more advanced than in the other provinces. Crop rotation had replaced the three-field system of cultivation before the end of the eighteenth century. Observers in the 1820s found a more progressive peasantry than they knew from the older parts of the Grand Duchy. Not nobles, as in Starkenburg or Oberhessen, but wealthy bourgeois landowners led the advance in farming in Rheinhessen, where the influence of the relatively weak territorial aristocracy had been crushed under the French occupation of 1793-1813. In abolishing the old order the French sold off domain and ecclesiastical land at low prices to better-

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off peasants and townsmen, who became thereafter the leading social group in rural Rheinhessen.35 A railroad network for the province was finished by 1871. Mainz was its radial point: from there lines ran west along the Rhine to Bingen, southwest over the hills to Alzey, and south along the riverbank flatland to Worms. A line from Worms over Alzey to Bingen tied the ends of the circuit together. Transporation was easy in Rheinhessen. A number of secondary lines remained to be constructed, but no part of the province was as isolated as the outlying areas of the Vogelsberg and Odenwald. 36 Maps which depict the religious divisions of the time locate the greatest concentrations of Catholics in the Grand Duchy in Rheinhessen. In this respect the past still strongly influenced the present. Philip I had made Hessen Protestant in the sixteenth century, but in expanding their domains his successors in the Darmstadt line, particularly Ludwig I, gained Catholic subjects. In 1880 Catholics made up about 30 percent of the Hessian population. Their distribution throughout the Grand Duchy was uneven. In Rheinhessen they outnumbered Protestants by a slight margin. In Oberhessen there were but few Catholic villages, mostly near Friedberg. In Starkenburg Catholics lived in the east of the province, near the former Benedictine abbey of Seligenstadt, and in the south, in the area around Lorsch and Heppenheim that had earlier been ruled from Mainz. There were also some 25,000 Jews in Hessen, just under 3 percent of the population. They were particularly numerous in the former free cities of Worms and Friedberg, but they also lived in the middle-sized and smaller towns. 37 Religion appears to have been the only consideration apart from the shape of provincial boundaries that influenced the manner in which the Grand Duchy's nine Reichstag electoral districts were demarcated. In order to splinter the Catholic vote in southern Starkenburg, Kreis Heppenheim, straddling the Ried and Bergstrasse, was joined to the heavily Protestant Kreis Worms, on the other side of the river in Rheinhessen.38 This constituency was the only one that crossed provincial lines. Two districts, Bingen-Alzey and Mainz-Oppenheim, encompassed the remainder of Rheinhessen, while the other provinces each contained three, Glessen, Friedberg-Büdingen and Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten in Oberhessen; and Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau, Offenbach-Dieburg, and Bensheim-Erbach in Starkenburg. In the variety of conditions that one discovers even in a brief survey lies an important reason for selecting Hessen as an area of enquiry into the relationship of National Liberalism to the regional and local scene under the Empire. Also to the historian's advantage, the Grand Duchy is, or was small enough to permit a detailed exploration of the constituen-

22

The Splintered Party

ties' social and economic character, the particular balance of parties in each, and the lives of the individuals who ran politics. All the same, there is always presumption in generalizing f r o m an analysis of one local segment of party history. In the end the overview of National Liberalism's evolution that I have presented in this chapter and the broad conclusions that come later rest on what I have learned about the National Liberals of Hessen. As far as I can determine, developments in other parts of Germany parallel the Hessian experience. The transformations in National Liberalism affected the party's branches throughout Germany; and although the particular regional slant of politics might be different in other strong National Liberal areas such as Hannover, Baden, or the region around Magdeburg, the process of change and adjustment was the same. As a check on the typicality of Hessen I have also investigated National Liberalism in neighboring areas in Southwest Germany. My scanning of the events there could not go as deep as the examination of the Hessian party, but the results do, I think, attest to the representativeness of the experience in the Grand Duchy. Alone and of itself, however, the career of the National Liberals in Hessen makes an interesting story. Individualism and color have always been the attractive constituents of local history. In this account some aspects of Imperial Germany's politics may catch the breath of life that more general and more schematic surveys deny them. Whatever the validity of the notion of the "unpolitical G e r m a n , " 3 ' it is impossible not to be struck by the vibrancy of the German Empire's political life when it is examined under the regional microscope. History is a sharing of experience, however imperfect, as well as an analysis of what has gone before us. In retrospect the National Liberals may seem distant figures. Their politics may appear confined by the social prejudices of their time. As men seeking to find a unifying force in their community, however, they stand out as more contemporary, or timeless, subjects for our attention.

2 Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

If our own growing habituation to centralized institutions has helped to obscure the regional and local influences in National Liberal politics, another modern preoccupation, our understanding of the pervasiveness of political power, may aid us to see them more clearly again. The scope and scale of the National Liberals' power in the states and constituencies are the subjects of the following pages, which trace the early development of the Hessian Progressive Party, the national party's regional counterpart. At the end of the 1870s, on the eve of the National Liberals' great internal crisis, the Hessian Progressives were, apart from the government, the strongest political force in the Grand Duchy. They had built their power through a decade of struggle, secured it in a series of sweeping institutional changes, and cemented it through extensive property and family ties. Regional parties in National Liberal strongholds elsewhere in Germany offer very similar profiles. Following the general pattern of regional politics, the Hessian Progressive Party began in the opposition. Its formation in 1862 opened a new episode in an ongoing battle between liberals and government in the Grand Duchy. A few of the party's founders emerged from the pre-1848 era of subversive pamphlets and political trials. Perhaps the majority of its members entered politics during the revolution of 1848-49. Others became active in 1859, upon the founding of a Hessian branch of the new Nationalverein, or National Union. Two causes united them—the same causes that liberals had pressed and the government had resisted since the early 1830s. The first was to get rid of the conservative regime in the Grand Duchy. The second was to make Hessen part of a German national state. 23

24

The Splintered Party

Hessen in 1862 represented the corruption of a once progressive idea. The idea was enlightened government. The men who introduced it during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were strong first ministers given free rein by the ruling monarchs; Friedrich Karl von Moser (1772-1780) and Baron Karl du Thil (1820-1848) are the best known. Aiming for the general welfare, the Hessian reform ministers attacked the specific rights accorded individuals under the ancien régime on the valid ground that they had become personal vested interests. But having scrapped the old, such men had little understanding for the new universal liberties advanced by the French Revolution. From the Revolution and Napoleon they derived instead a definition of good government as rationally ordered and efficient administration, an ideal leaving at best a consultative voice for the citizen and at worst no voice at all. 1 Conflict between citizen and state was inevitable under this system, and it became endemic when numbers of the gentry and educated middle class lost confidence in the regime's abilities, as happened before 1848 under du Thil and after the revolution under the new chief minister, Baron Reinhard von Dalwigk zu Lichtenfels. By Dalwigk's time the rationale for the bureaucratic state was failing. The administrators were no longer the innovators of Hessian society, and many citizens found the government's powers of imagination best expressed in Dalwigk's edict requiring all civil servants, schoolteachers and judges included, to wear uniforms complete with sword while performing their official duties. By muffling the legislature Dalwigk had his way until the end of the 1850s. But Hessen had too talented and intelligent a citizenry to accept for very long the role of obedient children in a second-rate military boarding school. 2 The most notable feature of the Hessian Progressives' fight against Dalwigk was its interrelationship with rivalries on the national plane. Paradoxically, national politics influenced events in Hessen more in the decade before unification than in the score of years after 1871. The reason lay in the dynamics of the German situation, which remained unstable so long as the national question was not resolved. The experience of 1848-1850 had shown that Prussia alone of the two major German powers had an interest in unifying the nation and, further, that liberalism—preferably a drop at a time—was a continual temptation to Prussian statesmen willing to trade reforms for support of Prussian primacy in Germany. Austria, with whom Dalwigk aligned his regime, was not drawn on by such enticements. As events in 1848 demonstrated, a German national state represented an unacceptable prospect for the Habsburg Monarchy, whose survival depended on the denial and suppression of political structures founded upon the principle of nationality. Austria's leaders were committed to the defense of the restored German

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

25

Confederation and the regimes that constituted it, and a conservative like Dalwigk knew the Austrians would risk war with Berlin to preserve a government such as his own. They had done so and faced down Prussia in 1850 by sending troops through Prussian territory to uphold the Elector of Hessen-Kassel in a dispute with his legislature. Prussia's sorry performance in this incident, closed off by the "humiliation of Olmütz," left Dalwigk's liberal enemies unsure whether they could expect help from Berlin in similar circumstances. It was clear to them, however, that if the Prussians were problematical champions of liberalism, they alone could open the way for liberal triumphs in the smaller states by neutralizing the power of Austria. 3 Apart from their hopes for future reforms from Berlin, liberal businessmen and manufacturers in Hessen were attracted to Prussia by her free-trading policies and her sponsorship of the Zollverein, the German customs union. Economically, the Grand Duchy had been swinging in the direction of Prussia since 1828, when it became the first southern state to join the Zollverein. It extended the tie into finance in 1853 by becoming the provisional outpost for the first important investment bank in Germany, the Bank für Handel und Industrie, commonly known as the "Darmstädter," whose capital came from Rhenish and French sources. The Grand Dukes and their ministers, quite willing to aid these ventures for the profit they returned to the state, drew no political consequences from them. Hessian liberals, however, viewed these economic ties to Berlin as links in the chain of modern progress and considered Prussia's commercial policies a first proof that conservative governments that wished to keep abreast of the times would have to give in to the realities that favored liberal politics. 4 In taking their name from the German Progressive Party, the leader of the constitutional opposition in Prussia, Dalwigk's liberal challengers underlined the connection between the conflict in Hessen and Berlin's attitude in German affairs. Ideally they hoped for a German Progressive victory over the government of Wilhelm I and his new first minister Bismarck. If the Progressives in Berlin won control of the government, presumably they would act—through war if necessary—to free the " t h i r d " Germany from Austrian influence, enabling liberals to capture power in the states and to join in the creation of a united Germany patterned after their ideals. As one point of the Nationalverein program stated, Prussia's government deserved support, ' 'insofar as its endeavors are based on the principle that the tasks of the Prussian State coincide essentially with the needs and tasks of Germany, and insofar as it directs its activity toward the introduction of a strong and free common constitution for Germany." 5 For the liberals in the smaller states, a Progressive victory in

26

The Splintered Party

Berlin represented the surest promise that these conditions would be met. Among the opponents of the Hessian Progressives' model of unity, the Catholics of the Grand Duchy were the most intransigent, one more evidence of the interplay of regional and national politics in the era before 1871. Apprehensive that their schools and worship would be endangered were they to become a minority in a Prussianized "little Germany," Hessian Catholics approved Dalwigk's alliance with Austria, the traditional guardian of the Church in German-speaking Europe. Dalwigk offered them more than a foreign policy, however. In 1854, in exchange for guarantees of political support, he negotiated an agreement with Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, the archbishop of Mainz, whereby the Church was secured a range of privileges broad enough to include the residence of Jesuits in the Grand Duchy. This "Mainz-Darmstadt Convention" incensed Hessian Protestants, who had no agreement of their own with the state nor any prospect of gaining one. Seven of every ten inhabitants of the Grand Duchy were Protestants, as were a majority of the Hessian Progressives. It was a foregone conclusion that if the party achieved power, it would make a quick end of the Catholics' special rights. The first parliamentary attacks on the Mainz-Darmstadt Convention coincided, in 1859, with the liberal revival in the Grand Duchy, and in the following years religious and political antagonisms continued to overlap. 6 Apart from the Catholics, Dalwigk's chief allies came from the two elites to which he belonged, the Hessian nobility and the higher civil service. Before the Grand Duchy was created in the Napoleonic era, territorial princes and counts had enjoyed independent sovereignty over onequarter of the later Hessian state, and smaller aristocrats also held enclaves throughout the area. After 1815, when the last of the great nobles, or Standesherren, became a subject of the Grand Duke, the remaining privileges of the aristocracy depended entirely upon the government in Darmstadt. Under the pressure of revolution in 1848-49 the regime abolished the surviving personal rights of the nobles, but in Dalwigk's time the Hessian aristocrats still were favored institutionally through the twochamber Diet and a lenient tax system. They were the natural targets of a liberalism that spoke of parliamentary government and a graduated income tax, and they also drew the fear and antagonism of the rural population, who had not forgotten the harsh side of aristocratic rule. In addition, many of the Standesherren were tied to Austria by generations of family service. As for the officials, although many might have preferred Prussia over Austria for its bureaucratic efficiency, they knew that they would become small fish in a large pond if the Grand Duchy were to be

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

27

swallowed up in a Germany ruled from Berlin. Unification and reform thus drew their opposition equally. 7 Despite Dalwigk's obstruction and Catholic opposition, the Hessian Progressives came out of their first electoral campaign in 1862 with a majority of seats in the lower house of the Hessian Diet. But following their triumph they did no more than spar with the government through one legislative session after another. Dalwigk was too much a cavalier of the old school to be harried out of office by speeches and resolutions, and the Grand Duke, Ludwig III, felt no compulsion to drop him so long as Austria's backing was secure. A threat of revolution might have changed Ludwig's mind, but the Hessian Progressives were not a revolutionary party. The personal experience of 1848 and 1849 had sobered radicals as well as moderates and led them away from extraparliamentary actions, and Hessian liberals usually recalled the revolutionary period as the "wild year," with the special fondness Germans often express for youth, once it is safely gone by. However, they also had a larger political lesson to draw from 1848, namely, that Prussia and Austria would stand together against any attempt in the rest of Germany to change the status quo by force. In the Hessian Progressives' judgment, pressure from outside, not upheaval from below, must break the stalemate in the Grand Duchy. Consequently, they marked time in the middle 1860s and awaited the outcome of events in Prussia. 8 Liberalism in Hessen, then, no less than liberalism in Prussia, was decisively affected by Bismarck's settlement of the German question in 1866. Yet the results in Darmstadt and Berlin offer an instructive contrast: on balance a gain for the Hessian Progressives; a crippling defeat for their counterparts in the north. The differences in regional circumstances explain why. Bismarck's rout of Austria and her German allies changed the balance of forces in the Grand Duchy in much the same way a liberal Prussia's victory would have done, strengthening the Hessian Progressives' hand by depriving Dalwigk of his protection from Vienna. Ultimately the war also added to the party's public standing since Prussia had fulfilled at least part of the liberal program of unification through the foundation of the North German Confederation. Prussia's rough treatment of the beaten Grand Duchy temporarily cost the Hessian Progressives some of their popular support in the summer and fall of 1866; but though they were bruised by the fluctuations of opinion in the wake of Hessen's defeat, the damage was not permanent. It was their opponents whose losses were irrecoverable. ' By contrast, 1866 forced a bitter choice upon the liberal opposition in Prussia. The Progressives in Berlin had never been able to count on out-

28

The Splintered Party

side help in their fight to reform the Prussian state. They stood on public support. Now, in the months after the war, they found many of their followers moving toward Bismarck, whose unification of North Germany had won for him the liberal approval that his internal policies had failed to gain in the previous four years. Given the shift in the popular mood, the alternatives before the party's leaders were either to continue their constitutional struggle at the risk of isolation, or to moderate their opposition to the monarchical system in Prussia in the hope of holding public opinion for a later effort at liberalization. A majority of them— the men who joined in the following spring to found the National Liberal Party—opted for cooperation and split off from the Progressives. The remainder kept the party's name and stayed in the opposition. Either way they decided, however, liberals in Prussia gave up a share of their ideals in 1866. Bismarck had been their enemy, not, as elsewhere in Germany, the enemy of their enemies. His triumph allowed him to settle the Prussian constitutional conflict as he wished, and liberals could only choose whether or not to go along with him. 10 Hessian Progressives generally sympathized with the Prussian liberals who chose accommodation with Bismarck. On the plane of national politics the war had created a common dilemma for liberals in Darmstadt and Berlin, since the hopes of both for the unification of all Germany had now to be placed in Bismarck or abandoned indefinitely. Like the founders of the National Liberal Party, the majority of Hessian Progressives tabled a prime objective—the swift realization of liberal constitutional principles in the united Germany—in order to come to terms with the man who now dominated the national question. As one of them, Ludwig Bamberger, rhetorically addressed Bismarck's diehard opponents in 1866: It depends on the future to justify u s . . . If you are not for unity in our sense, we are not in the least against freedom in your sense. If events had produced a German federated republic we would have greeted it heartily and scarcely demanded that you make the leader of Prussian policy its president . . . And so then, since you have now actually nothing better to offer us, grant the beginning of unity, however bad your opinion of it, the chance to earn a place in the sun. If you say the North will not overcome its Junkerdom, we ask: has then the South until now overcome its bewigged despotism? 11 Liberals in Hessen were hostile toward Bismarck before 1866, and their adjustment to his triumph was no happier than that of the German Progressives in Prussia. Nevertheless, in telling them and other southern liberals that they were no further along the way than their friends in the

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

29

north, Bamberger missed the regional differences in the situation of German liberalism, and not only between north and south, but also between the older Prussian territories and the areas annexed by Berlin in 1866. Liberals in Prussia had little chance of reforming the monarchy after they terminated the constitutional conflict, but their local prospects were not uniformly bleak. After 1866 the opportunity for dislodging the aristocratic order in the older eastern provinces of the kingdom had passed, and liberalism was soon on the defensive. By contrast, men now wearing the National Liberal label achieved local dominance in the new Prussian areas—Hannover, Hessen-Kassel, and Nassau—where Bismarck, who mistrusted the elites that had been attached to the former dynasties, had no other possible allies to approach. In South Germany, finally, the opportunity still remained for liberals to gain a commanding voice in state politics. The events of 1866 did not force parties like the Hessian Progressives into concessions of principle in their local efforts. On their own ground they remained free to remodel the constitutional order, providing they could turn out the conservative ministers who, like Dalwigk, still hung on after Austria's loss. Had they maintained the following they had held since 1862, the Hessian Progressives might have pressured Ludwig III into turning out Dalwigk in summer 1866. Instead they lost the initiative for a few crucial months as anger at Prussia's victory and Prussian methods swept the Grand Duchy following the end of the fighting. The Prussians were not lenient victors. They occupied Hessian territory for several months, exacted an indemnity of three million florins from the Grand Duchy under the terms of the Peace of Frankfurt, annexed the two northernmost Hessian counties, and forced the inclusion of the province of Oberhessen, which lay north of the Main, into the North German Confederation. A considerable number of Hessian Progressives found this treatment a mockery of the trust their party had placed in Berlin, and in reaction to it, they moved to Dalwigk's side. They still favored national unification, but they wanted an alternative to what they had just experienced, a "Hessian" plan to oppose to the actions of the Prussians. Organized more as a loose coalition than as a party, they took the name "LiberalConservative" to signify the go-slow attitude they represented. But in view of the new balance of power in Germany, a "Hessian" or southern plan of unification was wishful thinking. Its advocates could cling to it as an alternative only so long as unification—under Prussian leadership— was postponed. 12 Because the Liberal-Conservatives held a politically illogical version of their own outlook, the Hessian Progressives were bound to win them back sooner or later. The same was not true of the party's democratic left

30

The Splintered Party

wing, which also went its own way in 1866. In contrast to the majority, the left wing saw no reason to exchange Dalwigk's petty authoritarianism for a national state ruled by Bismarck. Like the Progressives in Prussia who continued to oppose Bismarck after 1866, the Hessian Democrats viewed the North German Confederation as a creation of the Prussian army, not of the German people. They were vague themselves, however, about the possibilities of realizing their own ideal of a free and unified Germany. Although they had ties with workingmen's groups, most of their message was anti-Prussian and not social. This choice of emphasis had its counterpart in the firm alliance the Democrats made with Dalwigk, whereas their links to socialist organizations remained transitory. 13 The Democrats, a small party, might have been smaller and the Liberal-Conservatives might have faded away altogether had Dalwigk not taken advantage of the outrage against Prussia and called parliamentary elections in the summer of 1866. Making "Hessen" versus "Prussia" the issue and giving his officials absolute free rein to interfere, Dalwigk united an incongruous phalanx of Liberal-Conservatives, Catholics, Democrats, and noblemen against the Hessian Progressives. The result justified his timing. The Hessian Progressives salvaged only twelve seats out of their former majority, and Dalwigk was secure from serious parliamentary trouble for another six years. The artificiality of this outcome became visible in 1868, when the shock of the war had abated and the continuing nuisance of Dalwigk's "system" was once again the primary fact of Hessian political life. In that year the Hessian Progressives captured 50 percent of the vote in elections for the national Customs Parliament. Dalwigk still had them boxed into a parliamentary corner, but they were again the leading political force in the Grand Duchy. Two years after the Austro-Prussian War, then, a stalemate like that of spring 1866 prevailed in Hessen. 14 Again it was Bismarck who broke the deadlock in the Grand Duchy, and again—to use his phrase—by blood and iron. In Hessen the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 collapsed the domestic equilibrium between the liberals and Dalwigk. In the first frantic weeks of fighting, amid reports of Hessian bravery at Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour, public opinion swung overwhelmingly in favor of Prussia, immediate national unification, and the party that had championed both. The Hessian Progressives now became the unchallenged leaders of Hessian politics, all the more because they had been isolated by Dalwigk over the previous five years. The Liberal-Conservatives' hopes for an alternative plan of unification were finished, and as a group they ceased to exist. Many returned to or now joined the Hessian Progressives. The Catholics and Democrats were left alone as the new opposition. 15

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

31

Unification, realized in January 1871 at Versailles, signaled Dalwigk's fall. Already imperiled by the rush of popular sentiment to the Hessian Progressives, he was forced out of office by Bismarck in the spring of 1871. Using an elderly stand-in, Ludwig III prolonged the system of his deposed minister for another year. Then he surrendered to the fact of unification and the new strength of the Hessian Progressives and appointed Karl Hofmann, a liberal bureaucrat, as chief minister. Hofmann completed the change of direction by allying in the Diet with the Hessian Progressives so that in the 1872 elections the party won four-fifths of the seats in the second chamber. The liberal era in Hessen had arrived. It should be noted once more how different was the effect of Bismarck's wars on liberals in the various sections of Germany. The conflict with France and the completion of unification mattered little to the political situation in Prussia. In the south, however, the events of 187071 produced an upsurge of good will for Prussia and compelled the governments that had resisted liberalism to give up their former course. Henceforth the regional liberal parties of the southern states were assured a significant influence in internal affairs. Not surprisingly, in the months and years that followed, National Liberals from South Germany tended to judge Bismarck more favorably than did their Prussian friends. The clearest evidences of the Hessian Progressives' leading role in the 1870s are their electoral record and their legislative achievements. Running as National Liberals in the first elections to the new German Reichstag, Hessian Progressives won seven of the Grand Duchy's nine constituencies in March 1871, and the party supported the winner in another. Altogether its candidates received a majority of the votes cast in Hessen, a dramatic indication of the party's new power. This unanticipated result set a pattern for the decade. In each of the three subsequent Reichstag elections, in 1874, 1877, and 1878, National Liberal candidates amassed the largest combined vote in the first round of balloting. Twice they gained a popular majority. Candidates from the ranks of the Hessian Progressives captured twenty-one of twenty-nine elections under the National Liberal banner between 1871 and 1878, and candidates endorsed by the party won four others." Politics still followed religion to a great extent in the Hessen of the 1870s, and opposition to the Hessian Progressives was usually Catholic. It was common on either side for towns to vote unanimously, and in areas where the religious homogeneity of the past remained strong it was virtually the rule. In the 6th electoral district (Bensheim-Erbach) 80 of 137 towns reported a unanimous vote in 1874, 77 of 147 in 1877, 88 of 141 in 1878. Allowing for occasional dissenters and counting the towns

32

The Splintered Party

where 90 percent of the vote went to one party, the figures are overwhelming. In the same 6th district the tallies were 115 of 137, 113 of 147, and 111 of 141, respectively." Across the Rhine, in the 96 towns of the 8th district (Bingen-Alzey) there were 35 majorities of 90 percent in 1871, 53 in 1874, 50 in 1877, and 53 again in 1878.18 Most of these majorities belonged, of course, to the Hessian Progressives. After the Landtag elections of 1872 the Hessian Progressives exercised absolute control over the second chamber of the legislature. At all times they held at least forty of the fifty mandates. Opposition deputies often skipped committee meetings, since invariably they would be outvoted. Yet though their control of the lower house gave the Hessian Progressives more leverage against their government than the national party had vis-à-vis Bismarck in the Reichstag, they were not a ruling party in the English sense. For a bill to become law the constitution of the Grand Duchy required consent by both houses of the Diet. After 1872, as before, the Hessian Progressives possessed little influence in the upper chamber, a mixed assembly of princes of the ducal house, nobles sitting by hereditary right, elected petty nobles, religious and university hierarchs, and distinguished bourgeois appointed by the crown. Legislation twice passed by one chamber and twice rejected by the other became law, however, if the government submitted it once more and a majority of the combined membership of the two chambers approved i t . " This procedure gave the Hessian Progressives a potential edge in numbers over the aristocrats. In general, however, the party looked for compromise, trading concessions for equal concessions from the first chamber, not getting all they wanted but advancing enough to satisfy their sense of progress. One circumstance that contributed to the Hessian Progressives' dominance of political life was the absence of a strong conservative party in the Grand Duchy. Political conservatism in Hessen attracted some nobles and officials, but it was never a popular movement, and in the 1870s it was discredited along with the Dalwigk regime. A small episode can serve to illustrate this point, as well as to demonstrate Bismarck's attention to the details of parliamentary politics. Early in 1872 a small group of upper-level bureaucrats founded a political weekly in the hope of creating a new party of the moderate right out of the ruins of the Liberal-Conservative group. The journal failed to win a readership, however, and died in a few months. Through the Prussian envoy in Darmstadt Bismarck then offered the ex-editors space in a Frankfurt newspaper controlled by his government. They accepted the invitation and used the paper, the Frankfurter Presse, through the summer and autumn of 1872. But they won no more of a following than with their weekly, and by the end of the year

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

33

they abandoned their attempt. 20 Gentle conservatism inspired from above could not pull voters away from the Hessian Progressives, who had the apparent judgment of events as well as good organization on their side. Karl Hofmann, who became chief minister late in the summer of 1872, realized this fact more quickly than many other officials, and from the start he dealt with the Hessian Progressives as the leading party in the Grand Duchy. Shortly after he took over his new portfolio, Hofmann recommended to the Grand Duke the appointment of a member of the liberal inner circle to a high post in the justice ministry. As the Prussian envoy reported to Berlin, this step was " a concession that would scarcely have been deemed possible just a few weeks ago." 2 1 It was an act of good faith toward the Hessian Progressives, a response to their concern, expressed later in the year through a campaign manifesto, that "the most essential security for an honest reform" was the "removal of the former servants of the deposed system." 22 The party returned the favor during the Landtag elections in December by pledging support for the new ministry. The Hessian Progressives came out of this election with forty-one of the fifty seats in the second chamber. Their initial majority was smaller, but it increased, first, as new deputies aligned themselves with the acknowledged leading party, and then, after the majority of the moderates gave up their effort to form a separate party and decided to press for their views as Hessian Progressives. Partly because of the addition of the moderates, but also because they henceforth cooperated with Hofmann, the Hessian Progressives as a majority were a less contentious party than they had been in the opposition. Some of the old spirit flavored the party's actions as long as its first leader, August Metz, had a hand in affairs. Metz died in 1874, however, and the direction of the party passed to a committee of several deputies. Under these men the Hessian Progressives became still more a Regierungspartei—a party of the government—than before. 23 This friendship between the Hessian Progressives and the ducal ministry was the key to parliamentary politics in the Grand Duchy during the 1870s. According to one contemporary, a National Liberal and former state minister in Baden, such a partnership was natural; opposition, if at times necessary, was not the normal role of the liberal. Both liberalism and the bureaucratic ethic, he argued, eschewed special interests and placed the cause of the state first. Each accepted the given situation and tried to operate within its limits. And beyond these similarities in outlook, liberals and officials were linked by a common educational experience and a related position on the social scale.24 Baden, the writer's

34

The Splintered Party

homeland, offered the classic example of this alliance, but taken with reservations, his analysis goes a long way toward explaining why it was easy for the Hessian Progressives to settle into the role of partner to the government. The relationship was not free of friction. Ministers valued equilibrium and deliberation more than the party did. The Hessian Progressives had an electorate to regard and promises to fulfill, and even after the death of Metz the party's leaders occasionally forced the government into actions it was reluctant to take. Generally, however, the relationship was harmonious. The contrast with the National Liberals' position in the Reichstag is noteworthy. A greater identification in outlook united party and ministry in Hessen. A larger amount of power lay at the disposal of the Hessian party in cases of disagreement. The balance between liberals and regime was much more even in the Grand Duchy than it was in the Reich. The partnership of ministry and Hessian Progressives produced a new electoral law in time for the 1872 elections and a liberal reform of administration and local government two years later. Also in 1874, the rules of the Landtag were revised to increase the powers of the legislature, and a constitution was established for the Protestant Church in the Grand Duchy. The latter united Lutherans, Calvinists, and Unionists into a single Protestant Church and gave laymen equal voice with the clergy in the assemblies and synods. Along with these reforms, Hofmann and the Hessian Progressives passed a number of laws directed at the Catholic Church. Dalwigk had suspended the Mainz-Darmstadt Convention in 1866 as a gesture to the Liberal-Conservatives, but unofficially the Catholics continued to enjoy a favored status. With Hofmann's arrival this advantage disappeared, and a Hessian version of the Kulturkampf against Rome began.25 Hofmann's symbolic opening shot was a decree of November 1872 banishing the Jesuits from the Grand Duchy. In 1874 he won passage of a law establishing optional nondenominational elementary schools in the Grand Duchy for those parents who did not want their children taught by clerical instructors. The Hessian Progressives compromised with him here in order to gain the assent of the upper house. They had wanted to separate religion and education altogether. Hofmann gave them more satisfaction with his "April laws" of 1875, which affirmed the power of the state over the churches and in practice introduced official supervision over the education and assignments of the Catholic clergy. As a result of this law, which Archbishop von Ketteler would not observe, pastorates went unoccupied and Catholic education declined. When Ketteler died in 1877, the state refused to confirm the candidate nominated as his successor. For nine years thereafter there was no archbishop in Mainz. If not

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

35

as bitter as in Prussia or in neighboring Baden, the Kulturkampf in Hessen still gave the Progressives sweet revenge for the Mainz-Darmstadt Convention. 26 Hofmann went to Berlin in 1876, to replace Rudolf Delbrück as head of the Reich Chancellery, but his like-minded successor, Baron Julius Rinck von Starck, continued the alliance with the liberals. With the death of Ludwig III in 1877 and the coronation of his nephew as Ludwig IV, the Hessian Progressives gained a declared friend on the throne and a further bulwark for their political strength. The accession of the new Grand Duke also demonstrated the party's bargaining power. In 1878, in return for the second chamber's grant of one million marks for Ludwig IV's civil list, Starck reduced the number of government ministries from three to two. But this was not his most significant concession. In May 1878, following the first assassination attempt of that year upon Wilhelm I, Starck instructed the Hessian delegate to the Bundesrat to oppose Bismarck's draft of an antisocialist law. Apart from the Hansa cities, which had commercial quarrels with the Reich, the Grand Duchy was the only state to vote against the proposal. If Hessen had assented, Stark confessed afterwards to the Prussian envoy, the approval of the civil list might not have ensued. 27 There can be no better illustration of the strength of the Hessian Progressives than this instance, in which their pressure counted more with Starck than did Bismarck's wishes. Neither the Hessian Progressives' power nor the party's partnership with the government was limited to the arena of the Landtag. Both extended into every agency of provincial and local government in the Grand Duchy. Hessian Progressives served in a variety of elected or appointed positions in their communities in numbers far beyond those of any other political group. Often the officials with whom they worked also belonged to the party, or were sympathetic to it. Hessian Progressive influence, therefore, was not limited after 1872 to what Landtag or Reichstag deputies could do for their constituents. Through the network of liberal citizen officeholders and government officials the party's outlook and goals shaped administration, public policy, and justice at all levels of government in the Grand Duchy, from the provincial down to the village. This political power is not so immediately visible as the party's strength in the Landtag or in Reichstag elections, yet it was a distinguishing mark of Hessian liberalism, and it gave the Hessian Progressives a greater stake in the regime of Hofmann and Starck than the national party had in the Imperial government. In the federal structure there were no citizen agencies below the Reichstag, and the administration was staffed almost exclusively by Prussian bureaucrats. The Na-

36

The Splintered Party

tional Liberals in the Reichstag were able, therefore, to consider opposition to the government without worrying about its effect on their positions outside the legislature. The same was true when some members began to entertain the idea of leaving the party. In the Grand Duchy, however, opposition or a division was certain to cost the Hessian Progressives some of their local power. As informal an organization as the party was, its members had a strong interest in keeping it united. Through their reform legislation of the 1870s the Hessian Progressives took a large part in shaping the institutions through which they held power locally. Generally the new structure of government combined a democratic base with some moderating apparatus—indirect balloting, or a two-class system of voting—in order to contain the influence of the broad electorate. Some sacrifices had to be made for the sake of passage by the first chamber. Nevertheless, the revised institutions were liberal enough to satisfy the Hessian Progressives, and they made self-government by the majority for the first time a significant principle of the Hessian constitution. Before the Landtag franchise was liberalized in November 1872, voting was restricted by a tax census, and office was reserved to the very wealthy. Under the 1872 electoral law, anyone who paid income tax was eligible to vote in the initial balloting for electors, who then selected the deputy. The same requirement also qualified a man for election to the Landtag." Since every wage earner was subject to income tax, only the poorest were deprived of their right to vote. Restrictions were present, however, in the provisions that required electors to be assessed at least 40 Gulden (68.56 Marks after currency uniformity was established in 1875) not in income tax but in taxes on property and business enterprise. A rough estimate from available tax figures would place one-fourth of the 72,000 persons who paid tax on enterprise above the 40-Gulden minim u m . " Some of those below the line, however, also owned property and may have qualified through their combined assessment. It is hard to say what proportion of property owners could have been electors. Land and buildings were not assessed as uniformly as enterprises, and exact information was not published. Probably the fraction was also about onefourth. Judging from the economic status of the men who served in the Landtag it seems clear that the electors usually chose individuals who were as well-off as they were. In practice, then, the Landtag franchise allowed a popular mandate for a select group of representatives. A series of three laws passed in June 1874 reformed local government in the Grand Duchy. They applied, respectively, to cities with over 10,000 inhabitants (Städteordnung), to communities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants (Landgemeindeordnung), and to the counties and provinces

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

37

(Kreisordnung). Again a structure that leaned in the direction of property was built atop a democratic foundation. Qualifications for voting and holding office were relatively open. A man must have paid municipal taxes in the previous year and have supported poor relief for two years or he had to have acquired citizen's rights in his community either through inheritance or by petition. The two-year requirements caused some injustices, particularly to working men, but the others were not hard to meet. Only municipal councils in the cities, however, and town councils and mayors in communities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants were elected directly, and even then half the number of councillors had to be chosen from among the highest-taxed third of the population. All other offices were filled either by indirect balloting or through a limited franchise, again favoring the wealthy. At the next level of government, one-third of the members of the county assembly, or Kreistag, were chosen by the hundred highest taxpayers in the county. Delegates chosen from the already weighted municipal and town councils elected the other twothirds. Each Kreistag elected a county executive board, or Kreisausschuss. All of the county assemblies in a province together elected a provincial assembly (Provinzialtag), which in turn chose a provincial executive commission (Provinzialkommission). As in the Landtag, what is known of the members of these bodies suggests that despite the open qualifications for election, the better-off element predominated over, not to say monopolized, local government (see figure). As might be expected in such an elaborate structure, power centered in the two executive agencies—the county board and the provincial commission. The Kreisausschuss was composed of the chief official of the county, the Kreisrat, and six elected members, three of whom were members of the county assembly which chose them. With the Kreisrat as its permanent executive, the board supervised the administration of the county and named county employees. It also selected the three public members of the county school committee (.Kreisschulkommission). Most of its responsibilities, however, were judicial under the new system of administrative law that the Hessians copied from Prussia. The Kreisausschuss was an administrative court of first instance, the immediate agency for settling all the matters—elections, rights of way, building permits, tax equalization—in which local government touches the citizen. The Provinzialkommission, which included the chief provincial official and eight elected members, acted as administrative court of second instance and adjudicated appeals against the county board's decisions. It also oversaw the administration of county affairs. 30 Insofar as Hessian Progressives sat in the assemblies and on the executive boards, the considerable power that resided in these agencies became

38

The Splintered Party

O O

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

39

part of the latticework of the party's strength. Particularly in the Kreisausschuss and Provinzialkommission, Hessian Progressives had an opportunity to deal directly and personally with the highest local officials.31 It should also be clear that under the 1874 legislation, those party members who held positions in local government came from the highesttaxed strata of Hessian society. As late as 1907 Social Democratic representatives were complaining that the "plutocratic composition" of the county boards was responsible for the latter's systematic exclusion of laborers and the poor from jury duty. 32 Hessian Progressives were also active in the organizations that officially represented economic interests in the Grand Duchy. The oldest of these institutions, the chamber of commerce, appeared first in Mainz in 1802, while the city was under French rule. After Mainz became a part of Hessen in 1815, other cities gradually copied the innovation: Offenbach in 1821, Worms in 1842, Darmstadt and Bingen in 1862, and Giessen in 1871. Despite their name, as the century progressed the chambers became the representatives of industry as well as commerce. In the 1830s industrial interests and the government had founded the Hessian Trades Association (Landesgewerbverein) to encourage manufacturing in the Grand Duchy. After the 1848 revolution, however, artisans dominated this association; and the larger industrialists, outnumbered and outvoted by the small producers, found a more comfortable home in the chambers of commerce, which limited their membership to the major merchants and manufacturers. It was also a natural move as the growing scale of industry focused manufacturers' attention on sales and markets. In 1871 the Landtag established a uniform statute for the chambers, opening membership to a wider circle than was previously invited. The new law, however, did allow only those individuals and companies to join who were classified in the four highest assessment brackets for the tax on enterprise. This proviso virtually established the same 40-Gulden requirement that the Landtag reform of the following year set for electors. Only the wealthier businessmen and industrialists, therefore, voted for their official representatives. From reports of poor turnouts in the 1870s it appears that this limited electorate left control to an established leadership of prominent entrepreneurs. The Hessian Progressives who served on the chambers of commerce may be reckoned among these leaders. 33 The Hessian chambers of commerce helped formulate the state's economic policy through advice and recommendations. The ministry was free to ignore them, but it could not do so too often without harming business confidence. In addition to the chambers, one other important industrial organization was active in the Grand Duchy. It was the Middle Rhenish Manufacturers' Association (Mittelrheinischer Fabrikanten-

40

The Splintered Party

verein) based in Mainz. Most chambers of commerce favored free trade in the 1860s and 1870s. The Middle Rhenish Manufacturers' Association was formed in 1868 by industrialists who feared that free trade might hurt the interests of their branches of production. Its membership extended beyond the borders of the Grand Duchy to include the considerable industry of Nassau and the Frankfurt area, and particularly the flourishing chemical manufacturers of the region—Meister, Lucius, and Brüning in Hoechst, the Elektrochemiefabrik in Griesheim, and Kalle and Company in Biebrich, near Wiesbaden. In Hessen the organization was most closely tied to Mainz and Offenbach, and the secretary of the chamber of commerce in Mainz doubled as the association's general secretary. 34 Hessian farming was represented by the agricultural associations of the Grand Duchy. Responding to the need for improved science and technology in agriculture, the Hessian government took the lead in founding the associations in 1832. Their activity was steady but did not reach beyond a narrow circle of officials and wealthier farmers until the 1860s. In the sixties and seventies, however, they extended their influence to the peasantry. Small farmers were now more literate as well as less distrustful of their larger competitors, many of whom were aristocrats. The prosperity of these decades also stimulated interest. In 1872 the Landtag passed a regulation enlarging the independence of the agricultural associations from official tutelage. It confirmed the three provincial associations as the primary units of agricultural representation and gave each of them four delegates on an eighteen-man policy making central board. This regulation revealed a shift in the organization's function, away from technical and scientific concerns and toward direct advocacy of the farm interest on matters affecting agriculture. 35 But if the agricultural associations spoke in the name of all Hessian farmers, they did not necessarily speak in the interest of all. No small-holders belonged to the organization in 1880. Only farmers holding five hectares or more (about twelve-and-a half acres) were members. The Hessian Progressives active in the agricultural associations came from the wealthier strata of rural society.36 All these examples underscore the point that, while they opened political participation to nearly all citizens, the representative institutions of the liberal era in Hessen delivered power to men of property. There is nothing surprising in this bifurcation. The Hessian Progressives were and believed they should be an Honoratiorenpartei, a party of "notables." Wealth, not occupation, set them off economically. The Honoratioren encompassed all varieties of occupational groups: lawyers, state officials, farmers, industrialists, professors, bankers, individuals of private means. To borrow Max Weber's definition, the Honoratior was a man

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

41

who could afford " t o live for politics without living from politics." 37 According to liberal theory, he was thereby a more impartial representative of the common good. Money alone did not make the notable, however. Along with wealth went education, understood in the contemporary sense of Bildung. Bildung meant more than a completed course of university studies. Formal education was important to the Honoratioren, but Bildung went beyond what one learned in the classroom. It was a sense of cultivation, a filter through which the beautiful and significant could be drawn out of the ordinary experience of life. In the view of the liberal notables, Bildung was the mark of a new aristocracy of the mind, which was to supplant the old nobility of birth. And while it raised those who attained it to at least equal status with the titled nobility, it also elevated them above the great mass of the middle and laboring classes, to the position of moral and political leadership they claimed. Education, so ran the argument, "civic, generally humane, classical," 38 had liberated them from self-interested politics. Through Bildung, it seemed to the men of the Hessian Progressive Party, the way lay open for individuals of talent, whatever their origins, to rise to the upper reaches of society. On the whole this was a rose-tinted view of social mobility in the Grand Duchy and in Germany at large. Most of those who entered the elite of wealth and talent started out from a solid, if not always affluent, middle-class background. Membership in a party like the Hessian Progressives was limited to the Honoratioren and, in any case, was loosely construed. Newcomers did not join the party so much as they became acquainted with some members and were coopted into it. The atmosphere was informal. In place of a regular organization there was usually an electoral committee, a collection of a few men, for each Reichstag district. Beneath the committees were the Vertrauensmänner, the party's local workers and contact-men in the cities, towns, and villages, who arranged meetings during campaigns, distributed handbills and ballot slips, and kept an eye on the polls on election day. Only a handful of leaders devoted a significant amount of their time to the party's affairs. For most Hessian Progressive notables, politics was one more arena in which they worked together with the same men they knew and respected through business, social contact, community involvement, or, often enough, family ties. 39 Who were these men? Ludwig Bamberger was the best known of the Hessian Progressives in the 1870s. Like many among the party's middle generation, Bamberger entered politics on the democratic-republican side of the 1848 revolution. Only twenty-five at the time, a clever journalist and a winning speaker, Bamberger quickly gained a share in the leader-

42

The Splintered Party

ship of the radical cause in the Grand Duchy. In 1849 he took a column south from Hessen to fight against Prussian troops in the vain Palatinate uprising. Then, with a death warrant on his head, he crossed the Swiss border into an exile that lasted nearly two decades. During these years away from Germany, which he spent for the most part as a successful banker in the Paris of Napoleon III, Bamberger went through a political metamorphosis typical of the men of his generation who ultimately became National Liberals. Letting go his dream of a democratic republic but not his hopes for German unification, Bamberger, like the liberals in Hessen at the end of the 1850s, turned toward Prussia as the potential servant of his revised aims. As he did, he began to pick up the threads that connected him to his native city, Mainz, and following the Austro-Prussian War he prepared to return to Germany. An amnesty freed him of the charges left over from 1849, and he came back to the Grand Duchy in 1868 to stand for the Hessian Progressives in Mainz-Oppenheim, the most bitterly contested electoral district in that year's campaign for the national Customs Parliament. Bamberger defeated his Democratic opponent, and from that moment he stood at the head of the liberal movement in Hessen. Like a number of the early Hessian Progressive leaders, Bamberger was a Jew. Numerically insignificant, although they comprised a proportion of the Grand Duchy's population (about 3 percent) that was roughly double the Reich average, Jews in Hessen were able to make their way into the higher circles of society with the same credentials, money and education, that served Catholics and Protestants. Many who did were, like Bamberger, private bankers, a profession flourishing in the investment-hungry 1860s and 1870s in spite of the growing competition of the new joint-stock banks. Bamberger's financial interests, together with his deep involvement in the Reichstag, led him to move to Berlin in 1874. But he retained an influential voice in the Hessian party; and through his brother Rudolf, a banker in Mainz, and the local leaders in BingenAlzey, the constituency he represented after 1874, he kept track of regional matters in Hessen. 40 One of the younger men who looked up to Bamberger in the 1870s was the leather manufacturer and Reichstag deputy from Worms, Cornelius Heyl. Thirty-one years old in 1874 when the voters of his district first sent him to Berlin, Heyl represented the extreme of industrial wealth in the Hessen of his time. By the end of the 1870s his factories employed nearly two thousand laborers in the production of patent leather for shoes and comprised by far the largest manufacturing establishment in the former Free Imperial City on the Rhine. Worms was little more than an overgrown town when Cornelius Heyl's grandfather turned his leather busi-

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

43

ness into a large-scale undertaking in the 1840s, and thereafter the firm and the city expanded together. Ludwig Bamberger was once to compare Heyl's influence in Worms to that of the steel magnates Krupp of Essen and "King" Stumm of the Saar. The remark was not meant as a compliment, but Heyl might have accepted it as one. He took pride in his participation in every aspect of communal life: charitable foundations, the local historical society, committees for flood prevention or for the restoration of the Romanesque Worms cathedral, the chamber of commerce. At the end of the 1870s his power had not reached its full extent, but already the critics were calling him the "Grand Duke of Worms." Heyl was born to privilege, but he was also taught to take privilege as a responsibility. He was sent to a local elementary school before going on to a private institution in Darmstadt, and he finished his education at the pietistic Moravian academy at Neuwied, where the curriculum stressed social duty. From his youth he moved in the highest circles of Hessian society. Heyl's grandfather owned the former archepiscopal palace in Worms, an indication of the family's position already in the 1840s. The elder Heyl was also one of the few appointed bourgeois members of the Hessian upper chamber, an honor that came in turn to his grandson in 1876. Heyl grew up in Darmstadt, where his mother moved following the early death of his father, and he and his brother Maximilian knew the grand ducal family from childhood days. His attachment to the nephew and heir of Ludwig III, Prince Ludwig, lasted on into manhood, and it became politically important upon his friend's accession as Ludwig IV. The strongest impression Heyl retained from the 1848 revolution was the memory of his grandfather holding together his workers against the appeals of the radicals. The younger Heyl became interested in politics in the late 1860s, through contact with liberal friends in the neighboring Palatinate, but it took the events of 1870 to wake his involvement. He accepted nomination to the Reichstag in 1874, when the local party association urged a candidacy upon him to replace a retiring deputy. In the parliament his youth and modesty kept him in the background, and he occupied himself primarily with technical problems like flood control on the Rhine. He left the Reichstag in 1878, but returned a year later when his replacement received a judicial promotion and chose not to stand again for the reelection it required. 41 More typical than Heyl among the industrial Honoratioren in the Hessian Progressive Party was Gustav Böhm. As a young man, "disappointed in his patriotic hopes," Böhm left the Grand Duchy in 1848 for the United States. Four years later, having found no El Dorado in America, he was back in his native city, the manufacturing center of Offenbach. Böhm returned with a new idea—to produce perfumed soap for the

44

The Splintered Party

German market—and in this venture he was eminently successful. By the end of the 1870s his firm was shipping to buyers all over the world. Meanwhile, as political conditions changed, he resumed his interest in public affairs. He served on the municipal council in the early 1870s, and in 1878 he was elected to represent Offenbach in the second chamber of the Diet. He also belonged to the executive committee of the Offenbach chamber of commerce. 42 It is characteristic of the personal nature of much of liberal politics that, following Böhm's death in 1900, his eldest son Theodor, who succeeded him in the firm, also took over the leadership of the National Liberals in Offenbach. The same spirit of enterprise and initiative that set apart a Gustav Böhm also distinguished Hessian Progressive rural leaders. Johannes Albert Möllinger of Pfeddersheim is one of the best examples. Möllinger came from a Mennonite family which took refuge in Hessen in the seventeenth century after being persecuted in Switzerland. They were hard working and innovative farmers. In the 1700s a Möllinger revolutionized cultivation in southern Rheinhessen by successfully planting clover on hilly terrain, a breakthrough that enabled the region to sustain cattle raising to an extent sufficient to supply the area with fertilizer. As a result, annual crops became possible, and farmers were able to abandon the uneconomical system of leaving land fallow every two or three years. In the 1870s and 1880s Johannes Möllinger continued the family tradition of leadership as president of the agricultural association of Rheinhessen and member of the central board of the united Hessian associations. Möllinger exemplified the notables of the countryside by virtue of his numerous public responsibilities. In addition to his activity in the agricultural associations, he was mayor of his town, Pfeddersheim, Landtag deputy for his home region, and a member of the county board in Kreis Worms. If it is true, as another deputy privately claimed in 1866, that Möllinger first ran for the Landtag for the sake of the daily allowance which deputies received, by the end of the 1870s he typified the successful farmers who gave the party much of its influence in rural Hessen. 43 Along with prosperous farmers like Möllinger, officials counted significantly among the Hessian Progressive notables in rural areas. The most outstanding was Wilhelm Haas, who was deputy administrator in Kreis Friedberg, in Oberhessen, during most of the 1870s. Haas helped start the Hessian Association of Agricultural Cooperatives in 1873 and became and remained its president, as well as a leading figure nationally in the cooperative movement. He also was a colleague of Möllinger on the central board of the Hessian agricultural associations. Like most liberal officials Haas operated behind the neutrality of his position when it

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

45

suited him, and he did not enter electoral politics until 1881. By then his efforts on behalf of Hessian agriculture had earned him a respect among farmers that went beyond the influence he normally commanded as an official. It is a measure of the inbred character of the Hessian notables that Haas, who eventually became Kreisrat in Offenbach, also married the daughter of a Kreisrat.44 A final type among the notables must be mentioned, the lawyers, one of whom was the party's chairman in the late 1870s. Arthur Osann, whose office was in Darmstadt, is one of the little-noticed regional chieftains upon whom the fortunes of the National Liberal Party greatly depended. If not a brilliant politician, he was an unyielding competitor, a good speaker, and a capable organizer—as much a party professional as a liberal was likely to be in these early unprofessional days. Like most party leaders anytime and anywhere, he kept his job because he worked harder than anyone else. Later in his career he was described as "shrewd and endowed with a practical intellect; his flaw is his vehemence and . . . a high opinion of himself." 45 The extent of Osann's legal practice is hard to determine, but his financial solidity may be surmised from his daughters' marriages into established official families—the Welckers and the Hoffmanns—that had served the Hessian crown for several generations. As was the case with Gustav and Theodor Böhm in Offenbach, Osann's son followed him into politics, and once more the element of inheritance is evident. The younger Osann, also named Arthur and also a lawyer, succeeded his father as party chairman, when the latter retired from politics around the turn of the century. Collectively the Hessian Progressives present an imposing tableau of social and economic power, but where did they stand in relation to other groups? In locating them in the class spectrum I choose to employ Ralf Dahrendorfs definition, according to which social classes are "such organized or unorganized collectivities of individuals as share manifest or latent interests arising from and relating to the authority structure of imperatively coordinated associations." 46 By this last, long-winded term, Dahrendorf means an association in which given persons issue orders and the others acknowledge their authority and obey. The content of the orders may be political, economic, or of some other nature, and the objects of class conflicts will vary accordingly. Dahrendorfs concept releases class analysis from a strict focus on property relations and permits a pluralistic view of social conflict. Therefore it is particularly helpful in identifying the major forces in play in a transitional society like Germany in the late nineteenth century. As it pertains to the Hessian Progressives, his approach leads to the conclusion that they both were

46

The Splintered Party

and were not a class party, depending on the social context in which they operated. German society was changing rapidly from the beginning of the Imperial period, but as the national occupational census of 1882 shows for both the Reich and Hessen, agriculture still employed more persons than any other branch of the economy. 4 7 If Germany was industrializing, it was not yet an industrial country. The great debate over the nature of the national economy, Agrarstaat oder Industriestaat, erupted a decade later, when farming had lost its primacy to manufacturing. Industrialization, moreover, affected the society and economy unevenly, killing off or stunting the growth of enterprises in backwater areas as it built them u p in advanced regions. In 1880 five of the nine Hessian electoral districts were still agricultural. Here the older social distinctions of nobility on the one hand and middle class and peasantry on the other reflect social conflict more accurately than an industrial model of owners and propertyless workers, or bourgeois capitalists and proletarian laborers. Julius Jolly, the National Liberal ex-minister f r o m Baden, used this older schema in describing the National Liberals in 1880; and while he betrayed a blind eye for the future by dismissing the "workers' p a r t y " as a special interest group, his analysis accurately represented much of the contemporary situation. 4 8 The basic conflict in the countryside was still between the nobility and the rest of society. The issue was privilege, and the liberal notables who led the antiaristocratic cause were still considered to be men of the people. Not only socially, but culturally too, conditions in the countryside gave the wealthier and educated manufacturers and farmers leadership of the unprivileged majority. Some explanation of the authority they exercised may be seen in the findings of a sociological study of a rural area near Cologne. Voting restrictions in Prussia were tighter in 1881 than they were in Hessen; but the difference in effect was not great, since in each case the wealthiest third of the population virtually monopolized office. The results of the study therefore apply to the agricultural sector of Hessian society as well as to the Rhineland. In the region near Cologne, leadership went to the professional men (there were no manufacturers) out of respect for their education. It also went to the richer farmers, a more numerous group in the rural community. These men were respected primarily because they were prosperous. The fact that they successfully managed large farms was an impressive display of competence to many smaller peasants. In a way, the local preeminence of the large farmers also made them the easiest choices as candidates, since their qualifications were least in dispute. Also favoring them was their undoubted influence with the authorities. They were, furthermore, power-

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

47

ful enough to influence some of the voters who elected them; but it should be added that they had few opponents. Life was hard for smaller farmers, and politics a luxury. Evidence from Hessen, in the form of a turn-of-the-century study of agricultural conditions in Oberhessen, shows that landless day-laborers generally ignored politics. The Hessian electoral statistics also demonstrate that except where religious differences encouraged a high turnout, participation in Reichstag elections was lighter in the countryside than in the cities. 4 ' At all levels of government, moreover, those who voted were happy to return good leaders. A man like Johannes Möllinger typifies the mayors who were reelected until they died, because their communities would have none but their tried and proven servants. In an earlier day deference to wealth, influence with the government, and local power would have explained why the rural population accepted the leadership of the aristocracy. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, new political ideas had reached far enough into rural society to break down the former respect for the nobles. The turning point was 1848, when uprisings in the Hessian countryside forced the regime to abolish the remaining seigneurial rights of the aristocrats. The peasants were no longer willing to acknowledge power based on birth. It did not conflict with their changed ethos, however, to recognize power based on ability, hard work, and the wealth they created. A broad coalition against the privileged order was therefore possible in the Hessian countryside. Dalwigk angered it by favoring the nobles and the very wealthy, but the balance turned permanently against the aristocrats through the reforms of 1874, which made rural Hessen the most democratically ruled part of the Grand Duchy. Thereafter, the nobility, if still locally powerful, put its main effort into rearguard actions conducted from the upper chamber of the Landtag. The old animosities persisted, however, and they kept the better-off and the poorer farmers united, despite the inequalities in their own ranks. Contrast this picture now, which accords so well with the party's view of its representative role, with the Hessian Progressives' position in the industrial areas of the Grand Duchy. Aristocrats played no part in affairs here. Their place at the top of society was taken by large entrepreneurs— men like Cornelius Heyl and Gustav Böhm—seconded by a broader group of smaller businessmen and officials. Competitively, the interests of these men collided with those of artisan producers. This conflict had been manifest since the big manufacturers left the Landesgewerbverein in the 1850s. As employers, the entrepreneurial group clashed with their workers, who, unlike the quiescent peasantry, constantly gained in political self-consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s. Hessian industrialists

48

The Splintered Party

were generally decent employers. Many of them inaugurated insurance and savings plans for their workers long before the state undertook such projects. 50 Nevertheless, discord over wages persisted and friction was sharp. An incident at a Hessian Progressive gathering in Offenbach, in the summer of 1870, conveys the anger in the conflict. The meeting was called as a demonstration of Hessian desire for national unification. It was opened with a few words from the liberal poet Emil Pirazzi. When the Hessian Progressive banker August Kugler was proposed as chairman, however, a workingman mounted the platform, pushed Kugler away, and gave a short speech of his own to the crowd: "Didn't you liberal gentlemen breakfast well before the meeting, on cutlets and wine, but we workers are still hungry. Leave us alone with your talk, and first give us bread." 5 ' By 1880 the overriding social conflict in the industrial regions of Hessen was between manufacturers and factory workers. It follows that National Liberalism, the political creed of the large owners, could not have the same popular following here that it commanded in the countryside. Although small businessmen, officials, and even some laborers voted National Liberal, the party could not win the majority of artisans and workingmen, whose interests conflicted so directly with the interests of the local Hessian Progressive leaders. In the urban electoral districts— Mainz-Oppenheim, Offenbach-Dieburg, Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau—the Hessian Progressives were maintaining their popular leadership with difficulty, if not losing it to left liberals or socialists. The clash between their expectations of leadership and the facts of class division is manifest in the losses they suffered in the cities after 1874 under the reformed Städteordnung. And once their majority position was in danger, they resorted to other means to keep control in their hands. In Offenbach Gustav Böhm and his friends upheld a complicated and lengthy registration procedure to keep workers off the voting rolls. A related device was the Worms employers' pact of 1878, pushed on by Heyl after the assassination attempts against Wilhelm I, under which 156 manufacturers mutually pledged themselves to dismiss any worker who was a Social Democrat or read socialist literature. 52 To summarize: the Hessian Progressives operated in two contexts. In each the wealthy and educated strata ran the party and held local office. The same weighted institutions helped the party to hold power in the city and the countryside. But while that power was respected and given assent in rural areas as a safeguard against an aristocratic resurgence, it was fought in the cities as class rule. In the countryside the party's leaders were part of a larger class. In urban society they were a class by themselves, and the party was weaker for it, as was its claim to be spokesman

Profile of a Regional Liberal Party

49

for the entire populace. The long-term process of industrialization and the evolution of new social alignments contributed unevenly to the strength of the Hessian Progressives. In the industrial areas the transformation was already working against them. In the countryside they were still profiting from the change. Granting the inevitable local variations, the Hessian Progressives' experience of the 1860s and the 1870s offers a representative picture of the regional parties' evolution in places where National Liberalism was strong. Most of these areas were in the south, but they also included the new Prussian territories annexed in 1866 as well as some regions in middle Germany. Generally speaking, political developments in these areas paralleled the course of events in Hessen. In the 1860s liberals fought reactionary ministries, campaigned for unification, and put their hopes first in the liberal Prussia they expected might emerge from the constitutional conflict and then in the Prussia of Bismarck, with whom they came to terms following the war of 1866. Their enemies were also the antagonists the Hessian Progressives contended with locally: conservatives and Catholics before 1866, joined afterwards in South Germany by democratic elements. Partnerships between the regional parties and state or provincial governments existed prior to 1871, notably in Baden. After the Reichsgründung they became the rule in National Liberal strongholds. In Prussia, as noted previously, they did not extend beyond the provincial level, and liberal influence in government stopped there. In South Germany the scope of such alliances went further. Where the regional parties were most powerful, as in Hessen, a practical dualism evolved, wherein the ruling ministry, although formally responsible only to the prince who appointed it, respected the wishes of the dominant party. Such an arrangement characterized Baden, which a contemporary once described as a republic of bureaucrats with the Grand Duke at its head and the administration geared to maintain a National Liberal majority. It was less well articulated in Bavaria, where the government needed the liberal Bavarian Progressive Party in the Landtag, but the party was hard pressed to hold a parliamentary majority against Catholic opposition. In Württemberg, finally, one could not speak of dualism. The Württemberg constitution allotted 23 of 93 seats in the second chamber to nonelective privileged representatives, and together with an almost equal number of nonparty governmental deputies (a group recalling the Liberal-Conservatives in Hessen) they provided the staunchest backing for the chief minister of the 1870s and 1880s, Hermann Mittnacht. Mittnacht relied on the liberal German Party, but he did not have to depend on it. 53

50

The Splintered Party

Along with the historical parallels, liberalism in these core areas exhibited a social profile resembling that of the Hessian Progressives. Consider this description of the Hannoverian National Liberals in the 1870s: The intelligent strata supported them for the most part. Bourgeois landowners, merchants, manufacturers, most judges, independently situated officials, the mayors and "senators" of the towns along with the municipal employees, middle-grade state officials, the majority of the lawyers and doctors, and the secondary school teachers joined their ranks. 54 One discovers the same types again and again. "Gentlemen," a Hessian Progressive deputy once said during a debate on electoral reform, "I am of the view that a certain division of labor is necessary in politics as in everything, that not everyone has the ability to understand and manage everything, and that the composition of this chamber as it presently exists does not deserve the complaint that it fails to represent the interests of the public." 55 Here was the attitude of the Honoratioren in a single sentence: the best in society laboring for the good of society. Although the National Liberals won Reichstag seats in the industrial centers during the 1870s, these were not secure positions for the party, nor were they buttressed by influential regional organizations. The heart of National Liberal strength lay instead in areas like Hessen, where industrialization had not advanced so rapidly, areas that still offered the liberal Honoratioren a clear opportunity for political leadership. It is worth noting that these regions lay outside the crucial Silesia-Berlin-Ruhr axis that Helmut Böhme has identified as the geographical base of the controlling economic forces of the 1870s. If the National Liberals had their connections to coal, steel, and joint-stock banking (Friedrich Hammacher and Johannes Miquel, the examples chosen by Böhme, are representative figures here), the map of National Liberal power augurs the difficulty of associating the party, in the 1870s and afterwards, even primarily with the interests of heavy industry. 56 At the end of Imperial Germany's first decade both the National Liberals and the regional parties that secured them their local footholds across Germany were still attempting, and to a considerable extent managing, to represent a multitude of interests under one flag.

3

The Crisis of National Liberalism and the Hessian Progressive Party

Eighteen seventy-nine, 1880, and 1881 are years of disaster in the annals of National Liberalism, years in which Bismarck severed his partnership with the party and allegedly boasted he would "press it to the wall," years in which first the right wing and then the left wing split away to form independent parliamentary groups. In the states, however, the regional counterparts of the National Liberals suffered less from the conflicts and reverses of the period and recovered from them more rapidly. Parties like the Hessian Progressives were shaken in 1879-1881, but they did not break apart, nor did they lose their alliances with the state governments or even with the provincial authorities in Prussia. In areas like Hessen, consequently, men who had been National Liberals in the 1870s had two reference points from which to assess the changes in German politics and two complexes of problems around which to plan a future course. As we shall see in this chapter, the regional experience taught rather different lessons than the national. The difficulties that pushed the national party into crisis at the end of the decade began with the trade slump of 1873. A fever of investment and expansion had accompanied the Reichsgründung years, the peak boom era of nineteenth-century Germany. From the middle of 1873, however, the economy slumped badly. Despite a continued expansion of production, German industry experienced an unprecedented string of poor years in the latter two-thirds of the decade. Stock values, dividends, domestic investment, profits, and prices all fell sharply, transforming the free market from what had appeared in good times to be an arena of harmonious exchange into what seemed now a pit of murderous competition. Manufacturers had to produce and sell more goods at the new lower 51

52

The Splintered Party

prices merely to break even with their returns of the 1860s and early 1870s, and many failed to reach the old levels. An air of pessimism pervaded the world of business and industry. "The universal sign of the times," reported the Offenbach chamber of commerce in 1881, "is that of modest and fairly laboriously earned profits, demanding the utmost exertion of the work force and the fullest use of all resources.'" Entrepreneurs were working harder under heavier competition for smaller rewards. German agriculture also entered a period of difficulty after 1873. Throughout the country commercial grain producers had enjoyed favorable conditions in the 1850s and 1860s, as prices and yields rose ahead of the costs of labor and implements. This advantageous lead shortened, however, in the years just previous to 1873, as agricultural wages followed industrial wages upward in response to the flourishing state of the economy, and as the prices of tools and materials rapidly increased. In the wake of the commercial crash production costs declined again, but wages retreated slowly, and profit margins remained narrow. A series of poor harvests in the mid-seventies aggravated the squeeze on agriculture. "Hat der Bauer Geld, so hat's die ganze Welt, " German farmers liked to say—when the peasant has money, the whole world is rich. But money was tight, and in the closing third of the decade the world seemed to turn against the farmer as cheap imported grain began to crowd out the German product in some domestic markets. In addition, as shall be seen in more detail below, the tax burden upon the countryside was growing, affecting the many farmers who were not in the grain market as well as the larger operators who were. 2 Economic historians disagree over the nature of these reverses. In the view of Hans Rosenberg, the foremost recent advocate of a cyclical approach, the German economy passed through a "Great Depression" between 1873 and 1896. Using terms first proposed in the 1920s by the Russian economist Kondratiev, Rosenberg sees the era as a "long wave" or "trend period" in the business cycle, in this case a quarter-century downswing when the rate of economic growth contracted in comparison to the prosperous periods of 1849-1873 and 1897-1913, and when bad years (1873-1878, 1882-1886, 1890-1894) outnumbered the good. If one phenomenon stamps the "Great Depression" as an historical epoch, it is the steep fall in prices between 1873 and 1896. The general estimate is that wholesale prices dropped by one-third during the period. In the face of this decline the increased output and turnover of these two-and-a-half decades became for many industrialists not a balancing compensation but a stark necessity. With profits down, investment in domestic manufacture also sank, and interest rates dropped in turn. As Hans-Ulrich

The Crisis of National Liberalism

53

Wehler has argued, following Rosenberg's analysis, German investors increasingly turned toward foreign and overseas markets to escape the trap of the depression at home. In agriculture, finally, the Great Depression hit with double force because the cyclical downswing coincided with a major structural crisis.5 Those who disagree with Rosenberg and Wehler turn the emphasis around on this last point and make their argument count for industry as well as for agriculture. Structural problems, they contend, not a "long swing" in the business cycle, were at the root of Germany's economic troubles in the seventies and eighties. Though industrial output did stagnate during the 1870s, it advanced at a healthy rate of 4.5 percent between 1882 and 1896. Periodization in terms of a "long swing" thus becomes questionable. The stock market crash of 1873 signaled less the start of a depression than the end of the era in which railroad construction was the leading growth element in the economy. With most of the main routes completed, returns on new lines were bound to be limited, and a period of floundering followed after 1873, until new leading sectors—steel, chemicals, electricity—emerged in the eighties and nineties. Part of the slowdown of the 1870s derived from technical problems in the iron and steel industry: until the Thomas-Gilchrist process was introduced into Germany in 1879, steel manufacture was expensive and restricted because the low-phosphorous iron necessary for the Bessemer process had to be imported from England, Spain, or North Africa. From the structural viewpoint, the price decline of 1873-1896 was not the expression of a cyclical contraction but the continuation of a century-long secular trend caused by phenomenal rises in industrial and agricultural productivity. Agriculture's problems, finally, resulted from the intrusion of American and Russian grain into both traditional German export markets—above all, England—and the domestic market of the Reich, a change made possible by new methods in milling, storage, and transport. 4 These two general approaches to the late-century economic slump merit a brief digression here because of the divergent interpretations they carry for political events. Those who deny Hans Rosenberg's cyclical explanation will not reject his assertion that there was a significant connection between economic life and political developments after 1873. But they, and I too, see difficulties in linking the two together in the framework of the business cycle. If 1873 marks a turning point, heralding a new public awareness of economic issues, 1896 did not end the debate over tariffs, taxes, and investment priorities. It was only in the 1890s that the organized representation of interest groups reached maturity through the founding of the agrarian Bund der Landwirte, the finished-goods

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The Splintered Party

producers' Bund der Industriellen, and the white-collar Deutscher Handlungsgehilfenverband. These powerful alliances, together with the older Centraiverband Deutscher Industrieller, reached the zenith of their influence in the years after 1900, when investment, prices, and profits were once more on the rise. After 1896, despite the predominance of good years in the business cycle, economic questions continued to spur the great conflicts in German domestic politics. One needs only to recall the bitter tariff fight of 1902 or the taxation controversies of 1906-09. The search for overseas markets, with all the political hazards it carried, also continued after 1896, in China, in Morocco, in Turkey, to name only the most volatile areas. To view the extended trade slump as an overriding factor in politics, therefore, or to discern a major difference in attitudes after 1896, when the commercial horizon had become sunnier again, is mistaken. Worry may have given way to optimism in the business world, but the economic struggle went on. Consequently, many of the characteristics that Rosenberg attaches to the period 1873-1896 are also visible in the subsequent, final two decades of Imperial Germany's existence. Indeed, the weakness of studies like Rosenberg's and Wehler's is that they fail to carry the linkages between politics and economics into previous and succeeding periods. Wehler halts in 1890, Rosenberg in 1896, leaving us more to presume than to be certain about political life being different because of the change in the economic growth rate. All this is not to deny that the price decline and the sluggishness of trade in the period 1873-1896 affected both the German economy and the political life of the nation. Their impact, so clearly expressed in the pessimistic reports of the chambers of commerce, is particularly noticeable in the world of industry and large commerce. Above all, however, the initial economic slide of the 1870s shook the confidence of the country. It was the most severe falloff of the quarter-century slump and also the most unsettling, coming as it did in the wake of a great boom and after the euphoric moment of national unification. Although determining a quality as elusive as the public mood is necessarily an imprecise affair, Rosenberg and Wehler contribute most toward an understanding of Bismarckian Germany through their observations of the popular response to the hard times that followed 1873. Their insights into the psychology of social groups and their identification of the victors and the victims of the economic struggle transcend the limitations of the cyclical hypothesis, and it is a mark of their contribution that a leading critic of the theory of "long swings," Alexander Gerschenkron, speaks of the heritage of 1873 as a "permanent trauma," virtually the same expression that Wehler uses in describing the "traumatic experience" of the 1870s.5 In the context of this study, the sociological and psychological perceptions offered by

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Rosenberg and Wehler help considerably to define the problem that the National Liberals first confronted at the end of the 1870s and with which they grappled for the remainder of the Imperial era. Hans Rosenberg describes the change in attitude after 1873 as the rise of "protectionistic collectivism," a widespread unwillingness to wait out the end of the slump, following the dictates of the laissez-faire economic liberalism that had been the policy of Prussia and then of the Reich since the 1860s. This impatience was itself profoundly influenced by liberalism's optimism concerning economic development. Germans had become accustomed to prosperity during the boom years before 1873, and they continued to regard it as the normal state of affairs during the inquiet period that followed. 6 "The man who has lost everything in bad shares blames not his imprudence, but the law regulating stocks," complained the National Liberal publicist Wilhelm Wehrenpfennig in 1876. "The man who has lost on reliable securities finds the cause not in the vicissitudes of temporal affairs, which since Pharoah's time have caused lean years to follow those of plenty, but in our mistaken economic policy." 7 Wehrenpfennig reported the new attitude without understanding it, without seeing that people no longer wanted to live through the lean years again. When individual effort—the summum bonum of liberalism—seemed to offer no way out of their economic distress, many sought solidarity and protection in collective action. Instead of patiently awaiting the self-adjustment of the economy, they called on the state to end the crisis. Spiritually and intellectually, the slump of the 1870s put liberalism on the defensive. Rosenberg's term, however, defines the new mood too narrowly. More accurate is the contemporary expression "interest politics" (Interessenpolitik), which conveys the marriage of individual and group economic concerns that now began to define the shape and quality of German political life. "Protectionistic collectivism" implies that every group demanding a hearing from the parties and the government wanted a stronger tariff barrier for Germany. This was not the case. Not all the new interest coalitions favored tariffs, and among those that did, protection against foreign competition was not the exclusive motivation. Fiscal arguments also weighed strongly. The mark of Interessenpolitik was not a specific set of policies. It was rather the advent of group action directed at the state, the parties, and the individual elected representatives. Expressions of the new thinking may be found among all classes in Imperial German society. As Hans Rosenberg points out, however, the groups affected most significantly were the independent, self-supporting elements of the middle class who were, at least relatively speaking, hurting most from the depression. Big businessmen like the urban entrepre-

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The Splintered Party

neurs among the Hessian Progressives may have had bad years, but they innovated and economized their way through to better times. Other groups, unaffected by structural changes, even benefited from the slump because of the fall of prices. In general the labor force, persons on fixed incomes or graded salaries such as officials and military personnel, and debtors achieved some improvement in their living standards. Those in the most trouble were the small men of the economy whose situations turned on their own efforts and resources—middle farmers, local retailers, artisan manufacturers. They were faltering in their competition with large-scale producers and distributors, who had advantages in unit costs and volume savings. On the other hand, their financial situation was relatively inflexible. They were least prepared to absorb short-term losses or to undertake new investments that could modernize their facilities and improve their competitive position. Politically, these groups were important constituents of the liberal electorate. Their distress was thus a critical matter for a party like the National Liberals. 8 They were not going to abandon their political loyalties lightly, but they wanted help economically. By the closing years of the 1870s the question of how the National Liberals should respond to their plight was a capital issue inside the party. In the twentieth century governments seeking to influence the direction of economic activity have been able to choose their means from among three types of policy—monetary, fiscal, and commercial. This range of selection was not at hand in Germany in the 1870s. Monetary control was as yet an unknown concept. Although the instrument of such a policy, the national Reichsbank, came into existence in 1875, its directors took as their objective the maintenance of a sound currency. They did not pay attention to the effect of credit adjustments on investment, but, true to a policy of stability, they raised and lowered the discount rate in response to the movements of gold. Fiscal policy's potential effect on the economy, by contrast, was understood by some academic and political figures. But they also realized that it was an unusable tool, given Germany's decentralized tax structure and the state's relatively small share of the national product. By elimination, then, the range of options for governmental action remained confined to the area of commercial policy. As a result, the debate on what should be done about the economic slump became a debate over tariffs. 9 Since official policy had favored free trade since the 1860s, it was the advocates of protection who took the initiative in calling for new policies. Tariffs, in the judgment of their protectionist spokesmen, were the key to securing the domestic market for German producers who were being

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undercut by foreign competitors. As the sluggishness in economic life persisted, many observers attributed it to an influx of goods from abroad which, for a variety of supposed causes (abundance of natural riches, cheapness of labor, advances in technical processes) sold lower than comparable German manufactures. Tariffs, according to this view, would restore fair competitive conditions by nullifying these unpreventable cost advantages. The strongest advocates of this standpoint were the representatives of heavy industry: the iron and steel producers of the Rhineland and Silesia and the cotton manufacturers of South Germany. They were seconded by industrialists from other branches such as leather and alkali, who were also feeling the pressure from abroad. To the directinterest argument the ironmasters added a broader consideration: by increasing production in the basic sector of industry, tariffs would generate jobs and wealth in other areas of the economy. German foundries and rolling mills were not working at full capacity. When they did, their beneficial effects would be felt throughout the country. What was good for the Ruhr would be good for the Reich at large. 10 Tariffs also drew partisans in the late 1870s because of the place they occupied in the fiscal structure of the Reich. Under the constitution of 1871 revenue was divided according to its nature between the Imperial and the state governments. Income from tariffs and from most indirect taxes went to Berlin. Direct taxes on land, business, and personal incomes were reserved for the states. If, however, the Reich government could not live on its own financial resources and wished to limit its borrowing, the states were obligated to make up the deficit, each paying a percentage corresponding to the size of its population. Through this system of "matricular contributions" a direct relationship was established between the Reich's yield from tariffs and the level of taxation in the states. Since the foundation of the Empire the Reich had never fully covered its expenses, and the states were forced each year to augment their own tax levies by the amounts they were assessed in payments to Berlin. At least in theory, however, the mechanism could also work in the opposite direction. If the Reich should gain sufficient revenue from tariffs and indirect taxes, the matricular contributions could conceivably be lowered or even done away with altogether. In the early 1870s the Reich had actually reduced the matricular contributions, but only by exhausting an irreplaceable asset: its share of the 5,000,000,000-franc indemnity paid by France in compliance with the Treaty of Frankfurt. By 1876 the "French billions" were spent, and the Imperial government began to increase its levies on the states. As the imbalance widened between the Reich's revenues, now normal and fairly constant, and its expenditures, which were steadily climbing, leaders in

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The Splintered Party

both government and the parties began to talk of the necessity of an Imperial financial reform. As one obvious means of increasing the Empire's revenues tariff revision became a frequently discussed subject. When Bismarck first mentioned financial reform, in 1875 and 1876, he spoke of selective increases in duties on luxury items as an appropriate instrument for bringing the Reich's accounts back into equilibrium. 11 Over the next several years this fiscal impulse for raising tariffs remained one of the chief determining elements in German politics. All too often, however, it has been neglected while historians concentrated their attention on protectionism's influence upon tariff policy. On that account it seems to me important to fly the standard of revisionism openly on this question and to insist, without carrying interpretation to the opposite extreme, that an accurate understanding of the events of the late 1870s must pay continual heed to the financial functions of tariffs, both as major sources of the Imperial government's revenues and as potential alternatives to the direct taxes that the states drew on for matricular contributions. Certainly it was in this context that the majority of National Liberals considered tariff revision at the outset. The number of outright protectionists in the party was small when the issue first arose; they came f r o m economic sectors or localities that were feeling foreign competition. Most National Liberals still shared the attitude expressed in Wilhelm Wehrenpfennig's remark about the lean years that followed the years of plenty. They viewed the economic slump as a normal, if painful, corrective to a period of excessive speculation, and they expected the situation to right itself in due time. But if free trade was still their creed, most party members also drew a distinction between protective and fiscal tariffs and were willing to support the latter. 12 As circumstances stood, then, at the end of 1876, a reform of the Reich financial structure seemed likely to be realized through a package of selective tariff increases proposed by Bismarck and carried through the Reichstag by the National Liberals. By now, however, the chancellor was weighing other possibilities. At stake for Bismarck was more than a necessary technical adjustment. If it provided sufficient revenues, a reform of the Empire's finances promised him nearly complete fiscal independence from the states and a good measure of budgetary autonomy vis-à-vis the Reichstag. By the late 1870s Bismarck had come to believe that he must have greater freedom of action in both domestic and foreign policy. In the finance reform he saw a means of achieving it. His problem was to find a parliamentary majority that would give him such legislation without asking in return for meaningful political concessions—concessions that would negate his basic purpose. It would have been simplest for him if this majority was built upon the party with which

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he had collaborated over the previous ten years. But as Bismarck discovered in the latter part of 1877 during a series of private discussions with the National Liberals' parliamentary leader, Rudolf von Bennigsen, his allies of the moment wanted more in exchange than he was willing to grant—not the single Reich ministry that he offered to Bennigsen personally, but two additional portfolios, to make fast the party's foothold in the administration. In February 1878, therefore, two months after his last fruitless conversation with Bennigsen, the chancellor ended both the deadlock and his alliance with the National Liberals. Commenting in the Reichstag on February 22, during a debate on an assortment of minor tax increases, Bismarck declared the "ultimate ideal goal" of his reform hopes to be an Imperial tobacco monopoly. It was a statement of war against the National Liberals, who opposed all monopolies, and Bennigsen immediately let the chancellor know that he and his party were no longer interested in negotiations. 13 Three years later Bismarck was to reach again for the tobacco monopoly as a weapon against liberal opposition. But his pursuit of this "ultimate ideal goal" remained fleeting in the spring of 1878. Having cut himself loose from the National Liberals, the chancellor now had to fashion a new majority; and as dear as the tobacco monopoly may have been to him, it attracted no broad constituency. To gain the public and parliamentary support he needed Bismarck instead turned to the protectionists. A protariff lobby had been building in national politics since the mid1870s. It had acquired a powerful institutional voice through the founding of the Centraiverband Deutscher Industrieller (CDI) in 1876. Protection did not yet command majorities in the Reichstag or in the country, but it was already well entrenched among the two conservative groups and in the Center Party. A parliamentary coalition drawn from these elements would be politically acceptable to Bismarck. The acrossthe-board tariff increase they wanted could restore the financial equilibrium of the Reich. All that was needed by the late spring of 1878 was that the new marriage be properly arranged. 14 Two events beyond Bismarck's control hastened the consummation of this alliance. The first, the elevation of the conciliatory Leo XIII to the papacy in February 1878, broadened the chancellor's maneuvering room in parliament by freeing the Center Party from the rigid opposition it had maintained as long as Pius IX, the previous pope, was alive. When Bismarck broke with the National Liberals on February 22, he already knew of Leo's wish for better relations between the Church and the Imperial government, and he could guess what the consequences would be for the Center. A second windfall, the near-assassination of Wilhelm I early in June, gave the chancellor an additional opportunity to widen his

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The Splintered Party

operating base in the Reichstag. At the end of the month before, following a first, abortive attempt on the old Emperor's life, the National Liberals had blocked Bismarck's effort to pass exceptional legislation aimed at the Social Democratic Party, which he claimed was responsible for the attack. This opposition provided him an excuse in June to dissolve the Reichstag and to accuse the National Liberals, indirectly through the semiofficial press, of inviting the second assault on the monarch. "Now I have those fellows where I want them," Bismarck said shortly after Wilhelm I had been wounded. "Your Highness means the Social Democrats?" he was asked. "No, the National Liberals," he replied, and he was correct. 15 In the election of August 1878 the National Liberals slipped from 128 to 99 seats, and the liberal parties lost their preponderance in the Reichstag. The balance of power in the new parliament lay with a new protectionist majority. On October 19, through a petition signed by 204 deputies, it requested that the chancellor increase the Imperial revenues through a comprehensive protective tariff. In addition the "204" asked that he immediately initiate an enquiry into the competitive state of the German economy. On December 15 Bismarck made his public reply and sealed the new partnership in a "Christmas letter" to the Bundesrat, in which he committed himself to a comprehensive tariff in order to effect a Reich financial reform. 16 Seven months later, in July 1879, the Conservative-Center coalition, joined by protectionist hangers-on from other parties, passed the corresponding legislation. In the early and middle 1870s the differences among National Liberals over the major issues before the country had been either minimal or at worst manageable. The most troublesome of the government's proposals, the army appropriation of 1874, fell in an area where party members had already learned to compromise, and the other great questions of the day—the shape of the new Empire's institutions and the rights of the Catholic Church—were matters upon which National Liberals easily agreed. National Liberal unity was especially well served by the Kulturkampf. The emotional bonds created in the fight against "ultramontanism" were complemented theoretically by the party's gain of a cultural context in which it could claim to represent the national majority against particularist forces. In the closing years of the decade, however, faced with the new complex of issues that were resolved in the passage of the 1879 tariff and Bismarck's turn to the Center-Conservative majority, the National Liberals found it difficult and then impossible to hold together. In the thirteen months following the final round of voting on the Reich financial reform the party split and split again. By the end of 1880 National Liberal strength in the Reichstag had been reduced to half of what it was in 1878.

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The first break came during the decisive Reichstag sessions of July 1879, when sixteen National Liberal deputies broke discipline to side with the government and its new coalition. Their leaders, the Bavarians Friedrich von Schauss and Joseph Völk, were linked to the South German textile industry. Others in the group included August Servaes of the Langnamverein, the organization of the Ruhr industrialists, and Hermann Rentzsch, general secretary of the Association of German Iron and Steel Manufacturers. In the view of the schäussliche Völkerschaften, as one wit called them, protection was now a consideration that overrode whatever misgivings they might have about the federal form of the financial reform, the coalition that passed it or, in the end, the unity of the National Liberal Party, whose leadership fought the bill down to the last roll call. The immediate cause of their defection was a flareup in the Reichstag delegation between Völk and Rudolf von Bennigsen. But its deeper roots lay both in their close ties to protectionist branches of industry and in their belief that liberals must not ignore what might be their last chance to resurrect the alliance with Bismarck.' 7 The National Liberal majority that voted against the Reich financial reform stayed united for barely more than a year. In August 1880 twenty-eight deputies from the party's left wing split off to form a second new group, the Liberal Union. Most of the Secessionists, as they were popularly called, were convinced free traders; and one of their reasons for going it alone was the wish to have economic liberalism championed without equivocation in the Reichstag. Fundamentally, however, their disagreement with the liberals they left behind was political. "As its origin shows," one of them wrote in 1880, "the existence of the National Liberal Party depended not merely on the representation of a specific political belief but also on a certain relationship with the government, that stood in harmony with this outlook." Increasingly, however, the party had been asked "to support a government that deserted liberal principles and turned back toward the opposite side." In the view of the Secessionists it was now necessary "to regard the spirit of the relationship that originally existed as destroyed and thereby the reasons for the old National Liberal Party's existence as nullified.'" 8 If liberalism was to have a future in Germany its advocates must be henceforth independent and, as long as Bismarck held office, in the opposition. If they moved in opposite directions in 1879 and 1880, nonetheless the Schauss-Völk group and the Liberal Union had some things in common. Each was convinced that a party could no longer claim to represent the majority of Germans without taking a clear stand on economic policy— whether for protection or for free trade. Similarly, each considered Bismarck's actions irreversible and believed the liberals' connection to government—whether cooperative or antagonistic—had to be redefined

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The Splintered Party

on the basis of the chancellor's new position. These common judgments, above all, separated those who left the National Liberal Party in 1879 and 1880 from those who stayed. Among the latter the conviction still prevailed that it was an error to take hard and unchangeable party positions regarding tariffs or Bismarck. Protection might be beneficial or harmful, but an economic philosophy was no rock upon which to found a party. Bismarck might have chosen the wrong policy and the wrong allies, but he was not necessarily committed to either forever. The National Liberals who remained with their party in 1880 stood their ground on the same principles that had guided the party's formation in 1867. Unlike those who broke away they considered the existing situation to be abnormal, an interlude, in their words, "when economic apprehension and political disappointment and bitterness threaten to confuse calm judgment and to alienate large numbers of the population from public life or to drive them to the extreme groups of right or left.'" 9 Accordingly, they continued to be flexible and counted on the future to restore Bismarck to his senses and to release the nation from the grip of Interessenpolitik. Just as it had failed to prevent the dissenters from walking out, however, this patient and passive standpoint gave the National Liberals little with which to counteract the popular appeal of their competitors. National Liberalism was a broken house in 1880. What now must be examined is why the same process of division did not occur on the regional plane. A look across the Hessian Progressive Party's history in these years reveals two primary causes behind the regional parties' ability to stay united. As in the Reich, the issue of tariff revision overshadowed liberal politics at the end of the 1870s. Even beyond the election of 1881, however, the majority of Hessian Progressives viewed tariffs from the perspective of fiscal reform. As a result, the regional party did not experience the divisions over fundamental economic principles that caused the national party to founder. Protectionism won some converts in the province of Rheinhessen, but they were too few in number to force a commitment by the Hessian Progressives either for or against their aims. Liberals in Hessen had come to tariffs by way of a series of attempts to correct the inequities of the Grand Duchy's tax system, and while they fell into disagreement over the Imperial reform legislation of 1879, their differences did not extend beyond the tactical question whether across-the-board tariff increases constituted an acceptable means of strengthening the Empire's financial situation. The second chief reason that there was no breach among the Hessian Progressives lay in the bond of power that continued to unite them after

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the national party had lost its ties to the Imperial government. As we shall see later in this chapter, the severest strains the Hessian Progressives underwent in this period arose in the 1881 Reichstag campaign, when their regional dominance was challenged by left liberals from the German Progressive Party. Party members' responses to this rivalry varied according to the social and economic structure of the constituencies. Additional grounds for divergence emerged as the stilled controversy over tariffs, taxes, and fiscal reform was reawakened into an electionyear storm, which Bismarck intensified by reviving his plan for an Imperial tobacco monopoly. Yet in spite of the separate and sometimes contradictory orientations they assumed in the 1881 campaign, Hessian Progressives in the various constituencies shared the common goal of maintaining power, and that rationale held them together as a party through all the smoke and fire of the electoral struggle. Politics and taxes, always inevitable companions, are particularly interwoven in the Hessen of the 1870s. Taxation in the Grand Duchy drew upon three sources of revenue: land and buildings, business enterprise, and personal income. Within this structure the income tax, introduced in 1868-69, was the newest and conceptually the most modern instrument. Although only mildly graduated, it was a considerable improvement over the personal tax in force before 1868, which had been in part a straight head tax and in part scaled upon the rental cost of an individual's residence. The old system had rested on the concept that assessments should be determined on the basis of visible objects, a method, it was claimed, that ensured each man's privacy while yielding an accurate index of his wealth. Hessian officials invoked the blessing of Adam Smith in defense of the personal tax, but its replacement in the late 1860s reflected a growing belief that visible objects by no means provided the best indication of how much a man earned. The frugal first generation of capitalist entrepreneurs did not live in palaces. 20 The major group left unappeased by the passage of the income tax were the Hessian farmers. In their view, not only were the wealthier inhabitants of the cities contributing less than their fair share because of the mild gradations of the new tax, but income from stock dividends and interest was escaping taxation altogether. It was the farmer, they said, who paid the difference, and they complained bitterly against the system under which he paid. Like the defunct personal tax, the Hessian land tax was assessed according to visible objects, namely, the size and estimated yield of a plot of land. Assessments varied with the quality of the soil and the type of crop grown, all values being fixed on the basis of a scale established in 1827. This scale, structured on extensive topographical surveys, determined the value for a " s t a n d a r d " hectare in each tax dis-

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trict. Other plots were then graded according to their divergence from the standard. That the scale still resembled actual land values was hotly denied by the agricultural representatives in the Landtag. Were the farmers right? In 1873 Johannes Möllinger of Pfeddersheim, one of the Hessian Progressives' rural leaders, submitted a set of calculations to the lower house which, in his view, documented the tax inequities inflicted upon Hessian agriculture. In effect Möllinger argued that for the farmers of the Grand Duchy the land tax represented a surcharge three times the amount of the universally applied income tax. In contrast, businessmen and shopkeepers paid the value of their income tax only once over again through the tax on enterprise, while investors, rentiers, officials, and laborers got off free from additional taxes, whatever their unearned income. Möllingens arithmetic impressed his fellow deputies. So, however, did the government's reply, which came the following year, after some spot-checking of land valuations. According to the finance minister, Arnold von Biegeleben, Mollinger had gone too far. His proposals for remedying the situation set agriculture's tax share several points below its portion of productive wealth. Land assessments and tax rates, Biegeleben pointed out, had remained virtually steady since 1827; the government and legislature had widened the revenue base over the years by revaluing the assessments on buildings and on enterprise in 1860, and then by substituting the income tax for the personal tax. But the government did agree that the farmers had a case with respect to the distribution of the fiscal burden, and it was ready to draw up a bill to touch unearned income, as Möllinger and his friends desired. Regardless whether they were country or city men, the Hessian Progressives in the Landtag responded positively to these first agricultural complaints. Some deputies, including the Offenbach banker August Kugler and farmers from Oberhessen, urged that it was now time to throw out the old system altogether and enact into law the liberal ideal of a single progressive income tax. A more moderate and more numerous group of reformers, led by Möllinger, professed sympathy with that goal but believed it was not practicable. Instead, they endorsed a government plan, similar to Möllingens 1873 proposals, providing for a more significant gradation in income tax assessments, a revision of the valuations on enterprise, and—the keystone—a new tax on unearned income (Kapitalrentensteuer). This bill passed the second chamber by a wide margin in the early months of 1878. Later in the spring, however, the upper house rejected it with the excuse that it was too near the close of the session to decide such an important measure. All therefore had to be started anew. 21 During the five years that the Landtag debated tax reform the situation

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of Hessian agriculture worsened under the cost squeeze that struck farmers throughout Germany. By 1878 the curve of mortgage indebtedness in the rural districts of the Grand Duchy was rising sharply, and tax relief, which most farmers had considered a matter of fairness in the early part of the decade, was becoming a matter of survival in their view—the best help they could find against a swelling tide of foreclosures and bankruptcies. As some contemporaries could see, the real remedies for these difficulties had to be structural changes. One of the more perceptive, Rudolf Weidenhammer, the general secretary of the Hessian Agricultural Associations, warned that if agriculture was to remain a paying proposition for any but the big landowners, then farmers must join in cooperative ventures in order to cut overhead and to finance labor-saving investments. In addition, he wrote, crop diversification must replace reliance on grain. Weidenhammer's arguments made sense of the fact that by 1876 Germany had become a net importer of the four major grain crops—wheat, rye, barley, and oats—a development meaning that in a free market the price of the grain that had to be purchased abroad would inevitably influence and, under existing conditions, lower the domestic price. But his suggestions asked for more initiative, risk, and sacrifice than most Hessian farmers wanted to undertake. If the character and complexity of their problems had changed since the first complaints were raised against the land tax, tax rates had also risen during the interval. However partial their view, it was natural for Hessian farmers to blame their growing difficulties on the increasing fiscal burden they had to bear. 22 As they considered their next step after the Landtag defeat of spring 1878, agricultural leaders in the Grand Duchy turned away from the idea of a new tax reform proposal and looked instead toward Berlin for help. Since the Hessian government had decided to make another check on the assessed value of land, it would be 1880—too long to wait—until the Landtag could act on a new bill. But delay or not, farmers in Hessen were in any case beginning to focus on the matricular contributions as the basic cause of their problems. Since the Reich had run into new deficits in the mid-seventies, its assessments on the state governments had continually risen. In fiscal 1877-78 Hessen paid the Imperial government 1,211,640 marks, about one-sixth the Grand Duchy's 1877 tax intake. To meet these obligations to Berlin, the ministry in Darmstadt had been compelled to increase direct taxes, and even higher levies seemed unavoidable in the future. Yet Hessen, like most other states, was already struggling financially. There, as elsewhere, efforts at fiscal reform had slowed down in the early seventies, when, by virtue of their shares in the French war indemnity, the states for once found themselves with more

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The Splintered Party

money than they needed. State governments easily absorbed the burden of matricular contributions in the first half of the decade and still had a reserve that enabled them to cut their indebtedness, lower some taxes, and abolish many obsolete charges. Once the French money was gone, however, the states, like the Imperial government, went into the red. By 1876 most state finance ministers had raised taxes or returned to borrowing simply to even their own accounts, and they were ill-prepared to withstand a spiral of increased payments to Berlin. Changes in their antiquated tax structures were still several years away, while presently the commercial slump had cut down the normal expansion of revenue. The states had no choice but to force more money out of direct taxes. In the Hessian farmers' view that prospect meant a further strangulation of agriculture. 23 As the drain on their resources became more severe after 1876, the state governments joined in pressing Berlin for reform. Finance ministers in the states carefully avoided promising tax reductions if the level of matricular contributions could be stabilized or lowered. The best they allowed was that new increases would be prevented and recent debts paid off. But given the possibilities once the Reich's deficits were ended, the prospect of lower direct taxes in the states became part of the public discussion over financial reform. In April 1878 the Imperial government, less cautious than the states, invited their finance ministers to a summer conference at Heidelberg in order to plan an improved Reich fiscal system and so make possible "relief of the budgets of the individual states over the course of time, so that it would be feasible for them to eliminate or reduce oppressive taxes, or, if they considered it advisable, to give up certain appropriate taxes wholly or in part to the provinces, counties, and municipalities." 2 4 Farm leaders in Hessen, as elsewhere, responded eagerly to this idea. In the Grand Duchy, then, the idea of an Imperial financial reform rapidly attracted a broad following as at least a partial remedy for the faults in the state's own fiscal system. Pushing the hardest for it and expecting the most f r o m it was the countryside, with its resentment against the land tax. As K. W . Hardach has shown recently, not only Hessian farmers but the majority of German agrarian opinion in 1878 and 1879 shared this view of the legislation pending before the Reichstag. Agricultural protectionism did exist in some regions in 1879, and it was politically well-represented through the Prussian-based " U n i o n of Tax and Economic R e f o r m e r s , " which had close ties to the Conservative Party. The fact that in the end the Reichstag passed a set of bills based on the principle of a comprehensive tariff increase and supported by this politically conspicuous minority among German farmers has encouraged

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the conclusion that protectionism lay behind agriculture's approval of the reform. But this interpretation merges the events of two distinct, successive periods. The mass of German farmers did move to protectionism, but not in 1879. Only in 1882, 1883, and 1884, when the world grain market first decisively affected domestic price levels, did tariffs replace tax relief as their primary concern. From 1878 to 1881 German agriculture remained preoccupied with taxes, first in seeking a suitable reform plan, and then in awaiting the reductions it was expected to produce. 25 In demonstrating that taxation was the supreme issue in the countryside during the crisis of National Liberalism, Hardach also indirectly explains why the national party's affiliates in the individual states survived the tariff battle intact. Dependent as they were on the rural electorate, the regional liberal parties could not easily have maintained both unity and poll strength had agriculture committed itself to protectionism. It was thus of crucial import that most farmers saw an across-the-board tariff as a second or third choice, never a primary objective. Agricultural leaders in Hessen would have preferred a reform based on increased tariffs and indirect taxes on "nonessential" items—the plan favored by the National Liberals in the Reichstag. Some, including Johannes Möllinger, liked the alternative of a tobacco monopoly that Bismarck had flirted with early in 1878. Few were for protective tariffs until the political shifts of the summer and fall of 1878 made it apparent that protective tariffs were the only means whereby a financial reform was going to be realized. On February 26,1879, two months after Bismarck released his Christmas letter, the central board of the Hessian Agricultural Associations resolved to support the chancellor's program "as a requirement of necessity." The proposed tariffs, their resolution said, would not aid agriculture directly: The indirect a d v a n t a g e . . . consisting in the fact that as a result of increasing the Reich's own revenues, the states will be put in a position to lower their direct taxes, would be achieved in a far more productive manner if a certain number of articles not considered everyday necessities of life but as superfluous luxuries would be subjected to substantial increases of the tariffs levied upon them . . . and even the [tobacco] monopoly would be preferable to the introduction of a general tariff on all imported articles. 24 Only in Rheinhessen was there any notable feeling favoring protection for its own sake. Here pressure had been growing on local wheat and rye producers as the quantities of Russian and American grain imports built up at the end of the seventies. Following the conclusion of the Russo-

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Turkish War in 1878, two Russian harvests were shipped concurrently to Western Europe, to sell at depressed prices resulting from the weakened Russian currency. At the same time a bumper crop from the United States reached Hessian markets. Imports, through Bingen and Mainz, were needed in the northern part of Rheinhessen, which did not grow enough grain to cover the area's demand. But foreign shipments coming into Worms, where they were not necessary, drove down local prices in 1877, 1878, and 1879, and caused an 11.6 percent cutback in the province's wheat acreage—while the total wheat acreage in the Grand Duchy stayed about even. By the summer of 1878 a protariff faction had formed and was gaining strength among the grain-producing farmers in southern Rheinhessen. Led by Tobias Deiss, a district committeeman of the provincial Agricultural Association, it carried on a noisy campaign of peasant assemblies and newspaper polemics the following year, until the tariff bill was passed. In the corner of Hessen most exposed to foreign competition, then, protection became an agricultural issue rivaling tax relief. But Deiss's group was the exception to the rule among Hessian farmers in 1879.27 However justified they seemed to the countryside, tariffs could not command the united support, either in the Hessian Progressive Party or in the Grand Duchy at large, that tax revision had attracted as a means of helping agriculture. Consequently, in endorsing Bismarck's tariff program in the spring of 1879, the leaders of the Agricultural Associations opened a breach with their political friends. All six National Liberal deputies from Hessen voted against the tariff bill when it passed the Reichstag, and they probably mirrored the majority opinion in the Grand Duchy. None of the Hessian chambers of commerce accepted the principle of protection in 1879. Most conceded that tariffs would aid certain branches of industry; but, as their reports pointed out, the benefits that new or higher duties brought to some areas, leather production, for example, they nullified by raising costs for others, like shoe manufacturing. Industrially Hessen was predominantly a workshop for semifinished and finished goods. If tariffs were increased, there would be more losers than gainers in the Grand Duchy. Amidst the stream of petitions that flowed into the Reichstag in spring 1879 may be found antiprotectionist appeals from metalworks in Mainz, from perfume and toilet soap manufacturers in Offenbach (almost certainly inspired by Gustav Böhm), and from tobacco workers in Giessen. By contrast, nearly all the protariff petitions from Hessen came from agricultural groups or food processing interests. In 1878 industrialists and businessmen had been willing to sacrifice a measure of their profits to a thoroughgoing tax reform. Tariffs, however, did not propose to skim the extra off the top. By increasing the

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costs of raw materials, they threatened the entrepreneur's competitive position, the actual source of his profit. In other areas of Germany protection brought the interests of industry and agriculture closer together. In Hessen, for the most part, it drove them apart. 28 Protection also clashed with liberal tradition in the Grand Duchy. " T a r i f f , " wrote Ludwig Bamberger in the spring of 1879, " a s long as I recall, this word was scarcely known in our blessed, industrious, freethinking Rhineland, and when known [it was] condemned and rejected." 2 9 Bamberger's argument beautifully illustrates the way economic liberals presented laissez-faire doctrine as a defense of equality and the little man. Protective duties, he wrote in an open letter to his constituents, made one man work free of charge for another, since the money to pay for tariffs originated in labor. A tariff on lumber meant that 43 million Germans would pay a higher price so that a few who owned forests—primarily state governments and the great nobles— would take in larger profits. And according to Bamberger, this example was typical. Protective duties benefited the wealthy and powerful because they could influence legislation and government policy most easily. As Bamberger presented the question, tariffs represented a new form of the old evil of privilege, against which liberals had fought since they first challenged the rights of the aristocracy. The fact that Bismarck had turned to conservatives and Catholics, the old coalition of privilege in the Grand Duchy, added to this argument's impact in Hessen. Opponents of the new legislation saw in its form an additional slap at liberalism, for the tariff that Bismarck's coalition passed in 1879 did not get rid of the matricular contributions. Instead, as the federally-inclined Center Party desired, the bulk of the augmented income from tariffs and indirect taxes was funneled out to the states, which were to meet the Reich's needs, as in the past, through annual payments to Berlin. Rather than put the Imperial government on its feet, the financial reform profited the states, giving them both the revenue they needed to sustain Berlin and the prospect of surpluses that could make tax cuts possible. Like the original Reich financial system, the revised structure ran counter to the Hessian Progressives' preference for centralized national institutions, and it was not popular in the Grand Duchy. Simply with respect to the merits of the tariff bill the division among the Hessian Progressives was serious enough. Potentially, however, it was all the more threatening because of the way sentiment pro and con paralleled the line separating rural and urban members of the party. No division could have hurt the Hessian Progressives more, had it been prolonged, particularly considering that the countryside was now their firmest electoral base. If a majority of the party chose too often against

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agriculture, if the party's men in the Reichstag voted too many times against rural interests, farm leaders like Johannes Möllinger would be hard put to remain loyal to the will of their fellow liberals and yet retain credibility with their local followers. Fortunately for the Hessian Progressives, the pressures did not all run in one direction in 1879. Once the tariff bill was passed, political circumstances helped close the distance between town and country. Economically, the Hessian farmers had got what they wanted, and the majority had no further stake in protection. But many of them disliked the retention of the matricular contributions and, remembering the Dalwigk era, were uneasy about the Catholic-Conservative alliance in the Reichstag. The manner in which the new legislation was passed thus warmed their liberal sensibilities. On their part urban Hessian Progressives accepted the new situation and did not attempt to commit the party unequivocally to free trade. Although opposed to protection and satisfied with the action of the six Reichstag deputies, the industrial and commercial leaders in the party were unwilling to raise the economic issue again and reopen the wounds it had inflicted. Once the government's bill passed the Reichstag, most Hessian manufacturers and businessmen wanted nothing so much as to let calm return and business revive after the months of uncertainty concerning tariffs. As free traders most believed that the new duties ultimately would prove their harm to the public. In the meantime they found that their world had not fallen in with the shift to protection. A rush of inventory buying occurred in the second half of 1879 in branches affected by increases in duties, and although the predictable slump in these sectors set in after January 1, when the revised rates became effective, business in Hessen was generally better in 1880 than during the previous year. Practically as well as figuratively, it appeared that Hessian industry and commerce could a f f o r d to live with the new legislation. 30 Generally speaking, therefore, the resolution and aftermath of the financial reform enabled the Hessian Progressives to bridge over the conflicts it had engendered. An important corollary of this outcome was that the departure of the Schauss-Völk group from the national party had little impact in the Grand Duchy. Yet the tariff issue could not be buried either, for protectionism still had its rural backers in Rheinhessen. In Bingen-Alzey disgruntled agrarians mounted a petition campaign against Bamberger, who had been a leader of the floor fight against Bismarck in the Reichstag. In Worms-Heppenheim they raised enough alarm to dissuade Joseph Görz, who resigned his Reichstag seat in July 1879 after a judicial promotion, f r o m running again. Let Bamberger and Görz represent the commercial cities, the complaints ran, and let the farm areas be spoken for by men who could see that imports were turning Germany

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into "the sheep shorn by the Americans." A similar position was taken by the one significant dissenter from free trade among Hessian industrialists, Cornelius Heyl of Worms. Heyl converted to protectionism in 1878 under the twin influences of his own struggle against American leather competition and the strong current of opinion among the farmers of southern Rheinhessen. His espousal of tariffs was an exceptional stand for a Hessian manufacturer to take in 1879, but it preserved for him the confidence of the rural leaders of his area, and when Görz declined to run again for the Reichstag, they prevailed upon the young Fabrikherr of Worms to take back his old seat. His easy victory in the byelection in December reiterated the point that protectionism was by no means dead as an issue. Still, there was no intraparty split even in Rheinhessen. Tobias Deiss and his friends were sufficiently mollified by Heyl's replacement of Görz to forget about bolting the Hessian Progressives, and for his part Heyl would not have gone along with them. 31 Cornelius Heyl's unwillingness to lead a march out of the party confronts us with the second major influence that helped the Hessian Progressives to stay united: their appreciation of power. Like Johannes Möllinger and the agricultural supporters of the Reich finance reform earlier, the protectionists of southern Rheinhessen still shared a common political stake with those fellow liberals whom they fought over tariffs. For the Hessian Progressives' power in the Grand Duchy was inseparable from their ability to hold together. A split within the party was bound to jeopardize the legislative and popular majorities that had sustained its leverage on the government since the early years of the decade. At the end of 1879 Hessian Progressives of all economic persuasions, from Heyl to Ludwig Bamberger, continued to believe that the advantages unity brought them were worth the compromises it necessitated and, conversely, that they would lose more than they would gain from a party division. Whatever course Bismarck was now embarked upon in Reich affairs, Baron von Starck had not altered his policies, and the partnership between the government in Darmstadt and the Hessian Progressives was undiminished. Power thus remained a magnet in the Grand Duchy after, in the wake of Bismarck's parliamentary turnabout, it ceased to pull men together in the national party. Considerations of local position once more determined the Hessian Progressives' stance following the second National Liberal split in 1880. No one from the Grand Duchy had been involved in the Schauss-Völk group. Among the leading names of the Secession, however, were Ludwig Bamberger and Friedrich Dernburg, the Hessian Progressives' most prominent Reichstag deputies. A third representative to Berlin, Bernhard

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Schroeder, was on the verge of joining them. Yet despite the inevitable personal frictions that the new scission aroused, the response to it in Hessen paralleled the reaction to the first break in the national party. As in the previous year Hessian Progressives passed over their differences on tariff policy and again put first importance on power and on the unity upon which power depended. This orientation received clear expression at a party conference held in Frankfurt on the first Sunday in November 1880 to decide what response, if any, should be made to the Secession. In opening the discussion, Arthur Osann, the Hessian Progressives' chairman, appealed for agreement on the essentials and free choice in what was not fundamental. As the ensuing debate revealed, most party members saw as essential their holding together and holding power. Thus they judged the proposals put before them not with regard to the Secession's merits but with an eye toward their potential effect on the party's unity. In these circumstances it was not the Secessionists but their opponents who threatened to unleash intraparty warfare. Had it been necessary, as Friedrich Dernburg argued in the new group's defense, to say to the government in Prussia, "Here and no further!" neither he nor any other speaker from the Secessionist side proposed that the same action was warranted in Hessen. Instead the demand to draw a line between liberals in the Grand Duchy came from Cornelius Heyl, who moved that the party disavow the Secessionists on the ground that they had put material interests ahead of the liberal cause. Heyl's urgings were consistent with his position of the previous December. Viewing the Secession as primarily an economic movement, he wanted it condemned for taking the step that the protectionists of his district had been dissuaded from through his candidacy. Yet the effect of the action he called for would have been to affirm the same incompatibility in Hessen between free trade and liberal unity that he accused the new group of having planted on the Reich level. Not surprisingly, the majority of the party, satisfied at having escaped such a division in 1879, found the tolerance advocated by the Secessionists more congenial. And when Bernhard Schroeder told them that liberal unity must rest not on material interests but on the fight against reactionaries and ultramontanes, he put the Secessionists in accord with the Hessian party's background and in line against their potential enemies in the Grand Duchy. The official declaration approved by the meeting shows just how compatible were the new group's position and the Hessian Progressives' aim of unity: The Hessian Progressive Party, sirice its founding the union of the national- and liberal-minded men of Hessen, finds no cause for

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division in the most recent party realignments and the difference of views expressed in them; in view of the dangers which threaten national unity and liberal development from various quarters, particularly from the ultramontanes and reactionaries, it recognizes in them rather the most serious summons to unanimous cooperation among the national- and liberal-minded men of Hessen, since in conformity with its organization and its development until now, these differing views can certainly enjoy mutual respect within the Hessian Progressive Party. 32 As much as the language adopted by the Frankfurt gathering may have leaned in the direction of the Secessionists, the political line reaffirmed by the Hessian Progressives was unmistakably that which the National Liberals were attempting to maintain on the Reich level. In Hessen, in other words, it had been possible to pass through the liberal upheavals of 1879 and 1880 without any faction coming to believe, as the SchaussVölk group and the Secessionists had, that a regional party must choose sides economically and politically if it was to preserve its representative claims. As the national controversies filtered through the fabric of local politics, the National Liberal goal of linking broad representation with influence upon the government had regained its credibility. In their manifesto for the Landtag elections of spring 1881 the Hessian Progressives declared they would pursue the common good "unperturbed by the catchwords of free trade and protective tariffs, of state socialism and Manchesterism." 3 3 In the campaign the party stayed united behind the liberal flag and won its usual overwhelming majority. And when the National Liberals met in Berlin in June 1881 to reassert their commitment to their original purposes, fifteen leading Hessian Progressives publicly endorsed their stand. 34 Successful as they had been in averting the fragmentation that crippled the national party, the Hessian Progressives still had their sternest challenge ahead of them in June 1881. Once the Landtag elections were over and the approaching Reichstag campaign became the center of political interest, the party found itself on a new and very difficult testing ground. The 1881 election, eventually set for October 27, was to be the first since the National Liberals had divided, the first in which Secessionists and loyal National Liberals were to field rival candidates. Such competition, even when it was limited, as in the Grand Duchy, reawakened acrimony among liberals. In Hessen, however, the more serious threats to party unity were the controversies that the Reichstag campaign engendered over taxation and the Hessian Progressives' local preeminence. These were fundamental issues, and feelings on them proved to be heated and often clashing.

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Tax relief became an issue in 1881 because the Reich finance reform had not yet brought about reduced direct taxes in the states. One cause of this failure was the scheduling of the revisions approved in 1879. The new tariffs were to take effect by stages over the space of a few years, and their full revenue was not yet available in mid-1881. But there were other obstacles. A military bill passed in spring 1880 increased the monetary needs of the Reich and thereby offset some of the expected gain in income. Moreover, the states were using the funds they received f r o m the new duties to liquidate the debts they had amassed in the late 1870s—a policy the Reich government could not interfere with because the federal organization of the Imperial finances had been preserved through Bismarck's concessions to the Center Party. State finance ministers argued that tax relief was foolhardy before their budgets were balanced. Otherwise a government would reduce taxes only to increase them again when it went into the red. The best Bismarck could do against this tide was to browbeat his finance minister in Prussia into giving way on reductions despite the prospect of deficits. Bismarck well recognized the political danger he ran if taxes were not lowered in the states. In August 1880 he wrote gloomily: The difficulties that the government has to overcome in the Reichstag and [Prussian] Landtag in order to gain accomplishment of its reforms and a more just assessment of state taxes fail to receive a fair evaluation from the majority of the voters; among them only dissatisfaction with the government and the disposition to vote with the opposition will remain a residuum . . . In the apprehension that other factors like administrative reform, the question of legal costs, and above all the fear of ecclesiastical reaction will also darken our electoral prospects I consider it important to use the upcoming session of the Prussian Landtag to give the voters such clear and binding assurances of the intention of the government regarding tax reform that the distortions of our opponents cannot obscure them. 3 5 Bismarck's problem was that he could not achieve his aim without gaining additional indirect taxes for the Reich, that could accumulate the surpluses he had originally expected f r o m the reforms of 1879. Either the Reichstag must pass new taxes so that the states would be able to lower theirs, or the Prussian Landtag must grant tax relief in order to force the Reichstag to cover the loss of income incurred. But Bismarck was able to win support in neither direction. The Reichstag held him off in spring 1880, his opponents in the Prussian Landtag outmaneuvered him in the fall, and the Reichstag again killed his main proposals the following spring. Loyal Conservatives excepted, most deputies did not want to

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return home as the men who had voted for new taxes before there was relief from the old ones. The liberal opposition was also very well aware that by rejecting the chancellor's plans they were caging him into a vulnerable position for the forthcoming campaign. 36 Stalemated on taxes, Bismarck grasped at another issue in the spring and summer of 1881 in a desperate attempt to recapture the voters' imaginations. His new tack was announced in an article in the semiofficial Provinzial-Correspondenz which claimed, under the heading "The Advocate of the Little M a n , " that it was the chancellor's last great task in life to assure the material well-being of the less-endowed classes. The shape of his effort was already visible in the Reich government's initial step toward the new goal—a bill, turned down by the Reichstag, that would have provided state accident insurance for workers. Its full scope and its significance for the 1881 election appeared only in mid-August, however, when Adolf Wagner, a professor of economics who occasionally acted as public mouthpiece for the chancellor, delivered a speech in which he described Bismarck's plans for a "patrimony of the disinherited," a government-run insurance program for invalid and retired workers that would be financed by revenues from—a Reich tobacco monopoly! 37 Bismarck made fewer more harmful mistakes in his career than when he set the tone of the coming campaign through Wagner's address. Had he presented the tobacco monopoly as a solution to the problem of tax relief, he would unquestionably have picked up the same agricultural backing that had swung behind the 1879 tariff for the fiscal advantages it promised. But in linking the monopoly to old age and invalid care for industrial workers, he froze its prospects for support in the countryside while only slightly denting the socialist or liberal loyalties of the urban population. Contrary to Bismarck's intent, then, the tobacco monopoly's effect was to convince those who believed the government was taking too much that it would take more and give them nothing in return. The tobacco monopoly was also an ill-chosen project for many reasons peculiar to the branch. It usually comes as a surprise to discover that tobacco was a significant item in the Imperial German economy, but in fact many people were engaged in its production and marketing and thus were threatened by Bismarck's plan. Some 367,000 enterprises retailed tobacco products as a secondary source of income. All stood to be shut off from the trade under a monopoly. Around 7,000 privately owned factories, employing chiefly unskilled help and often located in otherwise depressed areas, faced the prospect of being incorporated in a Reich system or else closed down. Planters outside the areas selected by the government would also lose their livelihood. Finally, the ordinary con-

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sumer, who had been switching from "the poor man's pipe" to cigars in the 1860s and 1870s, would have to look forward to higher prices. 38 "Tobacco must bleed more," Bismarck said in February 1881. As the electoral campaign developed in autumn, however, it was the friends of the monopoly who were bloodied. To favor it in localities where tobacco was important was virtually to sign a political death warrant in 1881. In the twenty-five constituencies of highest employment in tobacco production the left liberal and socialist opposition gained nine seats; only one mandate was won by a friend of the monopoly. Outside these areas there was bitterness over the tax reductions that had not come. " N o new taxes! No tobacco monopoly!" the slogan of a left liberal candidate in WormsHeppenheim, accurately coupled the two issues.39 In Hessen these developments burst apart the live-and-let-live arrangement by which the Hessian Progressives had managed to avoid serious economic conflict over the preceding two years. As the campaign intensified in September and October and debate swirled about taxes and tobacco, the approaching election gradually took on the character of a referendum on Bismarck's economic policy as a whole. In response to this turn, as we shall see in detail in a few pages, the earlier divisions among the Hessian Progressives again broke through the surface. Free traders in the Grand Duchy had desisted from post-mortems on the 1879 tariff for the sake of business calm. Now they found commercial life disrupted by Bismarck's new projects, and they came out in attack against his policies. On the other side, their erstwhile opponents, the agricultural supporters of the Reich finance reform, continued to stand by the chancellor's accomplishments although for the most part they rejected the monopoly. Only in the smallest Hessian economic camp, that of the protectionists, did Bismarck receive unconditional backing. The party's unity, again strained by economic controversy, was put under further pressure in 1881 by the second great moving force in the campaign, the electoral offensive of the German Progressive Party. As late as January 1877 the German Progressives' central committee in Berlin had known of scarcely a party member in all of Hessen. But in the Reichstag election of that month an independent left liberal candidate took the seat for Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau away from the Hessian Progressives and brought it into the German Progressives' column. From this time forward the latter turned their attention to the Grand Duchy. Like the new deputy for Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau, Wilhelm Büchner (a brother of the famous playwright Georg), most of the early joiners of the German Progressives in Hessen were former Democrats. In the next few years, however, the party rapidly expanded its popular base. The first German Progressive local associations in the Grand Duchy were founded in 1878,

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in Darmstadt and Offenbach. In September 1880 the party held a regional meeting in Darmstadt at which all but one of the nine Hessian Reichstag districts were represented. By the spring of 1881 German Progressive associations were actively considering candidacies in five of the nine constituencies. 40 If local men like Wilhelm Büchner gave the original impulse to the left liberal revival in Hessen, the speed and extent of the German Progressives' advance owed much to the party's energetic young leader, Eugen Richter. Richter approached the situation of the late 1870s convinced that the German Progressives, small and uninfluential since 1866, must be transformed into a strong independent "resolutely liberal" force—the necessary antidote, in his view, to the compromise politics of the National Liberals and the growing conservatism of the chancellor. Using local associations as his building blocks, Richter began in the 1877 Reichstag campaign to extend his party's base out from its native territory, Prussia, into areas like Hessen where the German Progressives had never before been active. After the election he kept the party campaign committee's executive arm functioning in order to maintain permanent contact with the associations across the country, and at the end of the following year he brought together a congress in Berlin—the first held in Germany by a bourgeois party—to rewrite the Progressive program in terms suitable to a truly national party. Richter's efforts really blossomed in 1879 and 1880, however, as the number of Progressive associations doubled from 42 to 83. By 1880, moreover, he was in full personal control of the party apparatus. Correspondence, the Progressive newsletter, campaign broadsheets all came from his pen or passed under his review. The Hessian regional meeting of September 1880 was one of nine the party staged that autumn. Richter appeared at all of them, and at all he won the passage of a standard resolution aimed toward the coming Reichstag campaign. As 1881 opened, Richter and his party looked ahead to the election in the anticipation of being well rewarded at the polls for their organizational work of the previous few years.'" Richter's memoirs understandably devote a large space to his efforts between 1877 and 1881, for the Progressive upsurge in these years was the most exhilarating episode in the party's history. Richter won loyalties and built new associations by hammering away at the themes of governmental reaction and increased taxes. He was intransigent and untiring, and many Germans who disliked Bismarck's new course came to see the Progressive leader as a genuine tribune of the people. If apocryphal remarks signify the deeper currents of the public mood, then "Fort mit Bismarck!"—Out with Bismarck!—the battle cry attributed to Richter, may rank alongside the chancellor's alleged promise to squeeze the

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National Liberals to the wall as an indication of where the passion lay in the political struggles of the late 1870s and early 1880s. It was Richter's good fortune that Bismarck chose the tobacco monopoly to be the main ornament of the 1881 campaign. During the Reichstag budget debate that spring Richter had advised the tobacco interests in Germany to place themselves at the head of the electoral campaign rather than send petitions to Berlin. 42 Perhaps the tobacco men did become the head of the opposition in 1881. Its heart and soul in any case were Eugen Richter and the German Progressive Party. At the German Progressives' Berlin congress in 1878 one of the speakers said that the most immediate and decisive stimulus to extend the party beyond Prussia had come from Hessen, "where the need to say what a Progressive Party really was stood out to a greater extent than anywhere else." 4 3 The need to say what a Progressive Party really was alluded, of course, to the confusion of names with the Hessian Progressives. But the speaker's words were also a challenge to the latter's political credentials, and as such they suggest why the Hessian Progressives' unity was affected three years later by Richter's electoral offensive. The Hessian Progressives' dilemma in 1881 was a matter of responding to a party that had become a threat to their power base because, among sufficient numbers of the electorate, it was outbidding them in liberalism. Were they to sacrifice position, or conviction, and where? Just as they could not agree on an answer to Bismarck's campaign strategy, the party's members did not find a common solution to the problem posed by their German Progressive competitors.

As in the previous three years, again a combination of the requirements of the Hessian Progressives' power and the nature of local economic interests determined how party members reacted to the dual challenge thrown at them in the 1881 election. The shape of their response varied, however. Three distinct campaign patterns may be found in Hessen in 1881. In Mainz-Oppenheim and in the three Reichstag districts of Oberhessen the party's local groups joined with their German Progressive or (in Mainz) Democratic counterparts to nominate a left liberal candidate and wage an anti-Bismarckian campaign. By contrast, in the three Starkenburg constituencies and in Worms-Heppenheim the Hessian Progressives had to contend with left liberal competition, and they sought out their nominees from the right of the liberal spectrum. In Bingen-Alzey, finally, the party's local leadership split, and two Hessian Progressive candidates fought for the mandate, the only instance in which disagreements within a constituency actually produced an intraparty battle.

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Coalitions with the left liberals were possible in Oberhessen above all because the German Progressives there came from the same social stratum as the Hessian Progressive notables and operated on the same premise of elite leadership from which the latter approached politics. Consequently, the German Progressives did not really threaten the local foundation of the older party's power. What they wanted and got in 1881 was a share in nominating the candidates and running the campaigns. The argument of a Hessian Progressive deputy who stayed loyal to his party in 1880—that liberals in Oberhessen could not afford the luxury of divorce—kept Hessian Progressives and German Progressives together in 1881. In both parties men still viewed the primary social conflict in the province as the old struggle between the privileged order and the popular interest, and each side made sacrifices for the sake of that fight. In two of the three constituencies German Progressive local associations dropped the idea of separate candidacies, while on their part the Hessian Progressives drew a clear boundary—no nominee to the right of Bennigsen— even though it required the party group in Glessen to abandon the incumbent Baron Nordeck zu Rabenau, a member of the Imperial Party, whom they had backed through four previous elections. In each of the three districts the two parties picked their candidates from what was, under the circumstances, a middle ground represented by the Secessionists. Each easily defeated a conservative aristocrat in October. 44 Common dislike of the chancellor's economic projects also brought liberals and left liberals together in Oberhessen. A joint candidacy in Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten would not have been possible had the local Hessian Progressives not previously turned down a prospective nominee as much because of his vacillation on the tobacco monopoly as because of political incertitudes. In Giessen the specter of the monopoly apparently was the direct stimulus behind the creation of a German Progressive association in 1880. Three of its four founders belonged to the executive committee of the local chamber of commerce. Two of them were tobacco manufacturers. Giessen's factories accounted for one-fiftieth of the total German cigar production, and there were some 2,500 persons employed in the industry either in the city or in the neighboring towns and villages. The fears aroused by Bismarck's plans are clearly expressed in the chamber of commerce's report for 1880, which remarked of the monopoly: " I n our very district, presumably thousands of industrious workpeople who are occupied today in the tobacco industry would become jobless and poor, and a number of villages whose inhabitants presently work chiefly in cigar factories would be reduced to poverty, while today they enjoy a certain prosperity." 4 5 If this statement is not enough, the statistics of the 1881 election leave no doubt that the monopoly issue helped

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the Secessionist candidate to defeat the veteran Rabenau. 46 Economically as well as politically it was impossible to favor Bismarck and be elected in Oberhessen in 1881. The conservative candidates tried by appealing for agricultural support on a platform emphasizing the tariff-financial reform of 1879. The farmers of the province, still waiting for relief from the land tax, were not much stirred by this approach. Another left liberal victory occurred in Mainz-Oppenheim, where Democrats enjoyed a rough parity with the Hessian Progressives, and members of both parties shared in the commercial and social leadership of the city. Although the opponents of liberalism in Mainz-Oppenheim were Catholics and Social Democrats rather than Conservatives, the liberal alliance rested on the same solidarity among the Honoratioren that existed in Oberhessen. Programmatically the Mainz Democrats may have stood to the left of the Hessian Progressives, but in practice they were no more populist. On economic policy, moreover, the two parties both held fast to free trade, which retained the loyalty not only of the commercial interests in Mainz but also of farm leaders in the rural sections of the district. Previously, Hessian Progressives and Democrats had successfully pooled their efforts in the Reichstag election of 1877 and again in the local balloting of 1880, when they recaptured control of the municipal council from the Center. Their candidate in 1881, a German Progressive editor from Berlin, lost out in the runoff but got another chance when the Social Democratic victor, Wilhelm Liebknecht, accepted election in Offenbach-Dieburg. On his second try the left liberal defeated the socialists' replacement, none other than the party co-chairman, August Bebel.47 Political and economic tendencies reinforced each other in the districts where the Hessian Progressives moved leftward and won. In WormsHeppenheim and the Reichstag districts in Starkenburg, where the Hessian Progressives fought left liberal candidates, the party's political course was not as unanimously defined as in Oberhessen, and it ran athwart the direction toward which local sympathies were inclined by economic considerations. The conflict between liberals and left liberals closely followed the social antagonisms in the three constituencies— Worms-Heppenheim, Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau, and Offenbach-Dieburg —among these four in which large manufacturing cities were located. Already on the defensive because of the growing opposition to rule by the Honoratioren, the majority of Hessian Progressives in these districts saw no probability of regaining popular support by attempting to outdo the left in liberalism. Similarly, they were unwilling to risk the power they held by assuming a more democratic orientation. Instead they tried to sidestep social divisions by nominating men who, they could claim, stood

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above the clash of interests—a former Prussian state minister, an experienced Hessian official, and a professor at the Technical Institute in Darmstadt. It is doubtful that the German Progressives in the three districts would have backed them regardless of whom they chose. Animosity toward the notables gave left liberalism an opening in the cities; and particularly where the Social Democrats had not already taken over the ground, German Progressives took a more democratic tack than in the countryside and went out to recruit a lower middle-class and proletarian following. Neither side thus sought an alliance in 1881. In the constituencies in question the wall between liberals and left liberals was solidly in place. Richter's offensive and the liberal self-questioning provoked by the campaign did, however, produce tensions among urban Hessian Progressives. In Offenbach conflicts over policy immobilized the party's local group, allowing the farmers in the rural part of the district to nominate the pro-Bismarckian Kreisrat in Dieburg as their candidate. In Worms some Hessian Progressives openly disputed the unyielding line that Cornelius Heyl convinced the party association to take against left liberalism. These stirrings damaged the Hessian Progressive effort, especially in Offenbach-Dieburg, but most party members in the cities believed they had no choice save to draw the line on the left. 48 Taking this course, however, meant accepting a handicap in the campaign, for economic conditions in all four districts generally favored the left's "resolute liberalism," if not socialism, in 1881. Higher consumer prices, business uncertainties aroused by Bismarck's policies, and above all the prospect of the tobacco monopoly made it impossible for the Hessian Progressive candidates in Worms-Heppenheim and Starkenburg to hold their usual following against the competition to their left. In Bensheim-Erbach and Worms-Heppenheim, where intensive employment in tobacco manufacture and cultivation overlapped regions of Catholic population, the issue of the monopoly promoted alliances between the left liberals and the Center and upset the base of former Hessian Progressive margins. Runoff support from Center voters in the tobacco areas enabled a Secessionist to defeat the Hessian Progressive nominee in Bensheim-Erbach. In Worms-Heppenheim German Progressives crossed religious lines to support a Catholic after their own candidate lost out on the first ballot. The monopoly also contributed to the Hessian Progressives' division in Offenbach, where tobacco was important both as a branch of local industry and as a prop of the municipal tax system. Only in Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau, easily won by Wilhelm Büchner, was the monopoly of little importance, perhaps because the Hessian Progressive candidate had come out against it from the start. 49 Economic resentment hurt the party least in the countryside in these four districts, where there

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remained a reservoir of positive feeling for the Imperial financial reform. But in three of the constituencies the farm vote was not enough to offset the weight of urban and tobacco interests. Only in Worms-Heppenheim, captured by the former Prussian state minister Adalbert Falk with Cornelius Heyl's assistance, did the Hessian Progressives gain a victory. That even the triumphs came dearly under these circumstances may be seen in the Worms party association's difficulty in finding a replacement for Falk after he decided to accept reelection in his old Prussian constituency. Before they filled the candidacy with the Erlangen professor, Heinrich Marquardsen, the local committee tried thirteen suggested names and received negative replies from all. 50 A third sort of campaign, again profiled by local factors, took place in Bingen-Alzey in 1881. It was a unique contest in that the main concerns of Hessian Progressives elsewhere in the Grand Duchy were of little moment here. Although some German Progressives were active in the district, they neither pressured nor challenged the Hessian Progressives, for in this instance they had a candidate to their liking in the Secessionist incumbent Ludwig Bamberger. Outside the town of Bingen, furthermore, the tobacco monopoly scarcely affected the campaign. Instead, tariffs were the main subject of debate in this district of grain and wine, and the election was a plebiscite not on Bismarck's policies but on Bamberger and his free trading record. Elsewhere in the Grand Duchy Hessian Progressive local groups generally remained united in 1881, whatever their attitude toward left liberalism or the chancellor's designs. In Bingen-Alzey, with tariffs the primary issue, the party's small-town and rural leadership divided. Bamberger's antagonists of 1881 were protectionist Hessian Progressive farmers, and their candidate, suitably enough, was Maximilian Heyl, the younger brother of Cornelius. Here, then, local economic discords produced a split that matched the divisions in the national party. s ' Although he had a close call, Bamberger defeated Max Heyl in 1881. After the election, however, the Antibambergerianer remained unreconciled, and the Hessian Progressives continued to be separated into two camps in Bingen-Alzey. But as in 1879 and 1880, the circumstances in rural Rheinhessen were still the exception at the close of 1881. In January 1882 the Prussian envoy in Darmstadt reported to Bismarck that during the preceding autumn's Reichstag campaign in Hessen, "the National Liberal Party proved itself entirely incapable of united action and its inner disintegration became manifest in almost every electoral district." It appeared to him now that favorable terrain was there for the taking if a conservative movement could be organized

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quickly, "since the dissolution of the large National Liberal Party here is an inevitable result of the newest events." 52 As happened so often, however, when diplomatic reports were sent from the Grand Duchy to Berlin, the wish to convey news pleasing to the Prussian government misled the observer's judgment. True, Hessen was now to be represented in the Reichstag by five Secessionists, two German Progressives, a Social Democrat and a lone National Liberal—Marquardsen in Worms-Heppenheim. Yet the Hessian Progressives were by no means as disunited or as crushed as the envoy made them out to be. Disparate as the electoral configurations became in 1881, a common intent to protect the party's local position characterized all the campaigns but the one in Bingen-Alzey. It was less the motivations at work than the results they produced which gave Hessian Progressive politics a patchwork appearance in 1881, and even then the outcome of the election did not represent a serious departure from earlier trends. In the cities where they had been slipping, the Hessian Progressives lost additional ground. In rural Hessen, where it was still firmly planted, the party maintained its advantage. Economic conflicts stimulated by the campaign reinforced both tendencies. In spite of the divergencies in the constituencies, then, the Reichstag election of 1881 hardly brought the Hessian Progressives to the brink of dissolution. The party still commanded the Landtag, still spoke with influence in the administration, still disposed over the most extensive political organization in the Grand Duchy. It remained the healthy political arm of the Honoratioren. Rather than tell Bismarck of a liberal collapse, the Prussian envoy would have done better to note how again, as in the previous two years, the Hessian Progressives had managed in practice to blend toleration and unity in exactly the manner the National Liberals had aimed for but missed on the Reich level. It was to make a considerable difference in the next few years that National Liberal ideals remained tenable among the regional parties in 1881.

4 The Heidelberg Declaration

Forty-five deputies registered themselves as National Liberals when the new Reichstag convened in Berlin in November 1881. This number was two short of the Secessionists' count and fourteen fewer than Eugen Richter's Progressives, whom the National Liberals had also trailed for the first time in the popular vote. Given their diminished parliamentary stature and Bismarck's continuing indifference, it was going to be difficult in this new session for the party to uphold the premises of representativeness and cooperation with government for which it had stood through the just-completed election. Yet the leadership had no new formula to offer to cope with the National Liberals' changed situation. At a dinner for the Reichstag members early in December Rudolf von Bennigsen mapped out the future along a familiar route. The National Liberals, he said, must stay independent of all groups, especially the other liberal parties, "in order to be able to step forward to new activity at the given moment." 1 But Bennigsen did not specify the activity or define the moment, either that evening or later during the three-year session, and without such a lead from him the position he recommended in effect left the party waiting vainly for the irretrievable conditions of the 1870s to be restored. Bennigsen dropped out of the Reichstag in June 1883, and thereafter the party's national leaders did little beyond the ordinary parliamentary housekeeping. It was not in Berlin that the impulses for a renewal of National Liberalism were to be found in the early eighties. Instead the forces pushing for revival were the bruised but intact regional liberal parties of Southwest Germany, and foremost among them, the Hessian Progressives. It was their Heidelberg Declaration of March 1884 that produced a new orientation for the national party. Generally speaking, the experience of the other regional parties of the South and West paralleled that of the Hessian Progressives between 1878 84

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and 1881. Although each met the issues of these years somewhat differently, overall there was a common pattern of response. None of the southern parties expelled members or deputies who gave up their National Liberal allegiance in Reich politics, nor did the latter quit their state organizations. In every region of South Germany liberals disagreed over the great questions that split the national party, but neither the passage of the 1879 tariff nor Bismarck's parliamentary shift caused them to separate. 2 As in Hessen, liberal parties elsewhere in the South chose the way of tolerance—in effect an orientation closest to that of the National Liberals in Reich affairs. Although each to some extent suffered electoral reverses as a consequence of this stand, at the beginning of 1882 all were still firmly planted on National Liberal ground. Liberal attitudes toward tariffs varied from region to region in South Germany in accordance with what were felt to be the needs of the local economy. Protectionism ran strongest in Württemberg as well as in the Bavarian areas of Upper Franconia and Swabia, which included the Reichstag districts represented by Friedrich von Schauss and Joseph Volk. These latter two localities were centers of the cotton industry, the loudest claimant of protection in South Germany. Cotton was also important in Württemberg. In both Bavaria and Württemberg, moreover, agricultural opinion favored a Reich financial reform, even if based on across-the-board tariffs, as a means of relieving state land taxes. Schauss, Volk, and the other South German members of their group thus expected and got little argument from their home constituencies when they broke with the national party to vote for tariffs in 1879. In Baden, the Palatinate, and Middle Franconia, by contrast, free trade held the field. Agriculture in these areas eventually supported the Reich finance reform, but more grudgingly than in Württemberg or the rest of Bavaria. Liberals here leaned toward the Secession, but in Baden and the Palatinate they believed the new group, especially as personified by Ludwig Bamberger, to be too much committed to "Manchesterism," which they understood as a doctrine of absolute laissez-faire with respect to all aspects of economic activity. Sympathies thus ran in the direction of the Secessionists in these regions, but there were few joiners. In Middle Franconia the Secession gained more adherents, partly because its local leader, Baron Franz von Stauffenberg, made it clear that his allegiance to free trade did not make him a pure Manchestermann.3 As a rule, regional attitudes accorded with the economic stands of the locally prominent liberals who left the national party in 1879 and 1880— a situation similar to that in Hessen. Such affinities of viewpoint helped both the regional parties and their committees in the individual constituencies to avoid the either-or choices on tariff policy that contributed to

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the National Liberals' fragmentation. Outside Hessen it is difficult to find an intraliberal conflict to parallel the fight between Bamberger and his protectionist opponents in Bingen-Alzey in 1881. In Bavaria, where liberals in separate areas did take antithetical economic positions, geographical divisions and the looseness of organizational ties blunted potential frictions. Once the Reich finance reform was passed, moreover, and the new tariff rates established, there was a general readiness to avoid economic controversy. Thus the question of protectionism caused strain in the other regional parties south of the Main, but it occasioned no splits. Like the Hessian Progressives, the other southern parties also sidestepped the decision for or against Bismarck posed by both the SchaussVolk group and the Secessionists. As in the Grand Duchy, they were guided by the consideration that it was not the Reich government but their own which they had to deal with primarily. What men did with regard to the chancellor remained their personal affair. Locally the regional parties had no reason to sever their ties with the state governments and thus had no issue over which to divide. On the contrary, the uncertainties of their respective parliamentary situations everywhere worked against disunity. In Bavaria the balance in the Landtag between the liberals and their Catholic and conservative opponents was too even to risk a split. As a result, although the old Bavarian Progressive Party had disintegrated, the more loosely connected group that supplanted it held together through the political storms that blew down from Berlin. In neighboring Württemberg the German Party already faced difficulties because Mittnacht had his own ministerial bloc in the lower chamber. To preserve unity and with it influence, the party's leaders, Julius Hölder and Max Römer, themselves members of the Schauss-Völk group, steered their following toward a more moderate position than they had personally taken in Reich affairs and curbed the pro-Bismarckian elements associated with the Stuttgart newspaper, the Schwäbische Merkur. In Baden the narrowness of the National and Liberal Party's Landtag margin and the ongoing fight against political Catholicism combined to discourage division. In each of these cases the unity forwarded by parliamentary and electoral calculations was reinforced by a common fear that rifts among the liberals would weaken South German loyalties to the Empire. Commitment to the nation-state had been one of the twin founding inspirations of the regional parties, and it became all the more a bond among their members once the requirements of liberalism fell into dispute. 4 As much as local circumstances enabled and encouraged the regional parties of the South to slip around the particular issues that splintered

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the National Liberals, the cohesiveness the southern groups displayed in 1879, 1880, and 1881 also reflected a difference in nature between them and the national party. Apart from individual friendships and a shared philosophical heritage, few links had bound the National Liberals of the Reichstag together. At the end of the 1870s the party was still primarily a parliamentary entity. Few attachments were broken, therefore, when the Reichstag delegation divided; most of the personal relationships survived. By contrast, as we have seen earlier, the regional parties were grounded in an amalgam of power, wealth, social position, and personal relationships that made it impossible to separate political attachments from the everyday ties by which men were connected. It followed that in the states party division could not be simply a political matter. Rather it threatened to weaken the entire social order, where leadership rested in the exclusive and unified corporation of local Honoratioren, Since the 1860s in Baden and the early seventies elsewhere, the liberal notables of the southern states had turned local government and society in the direction of their ideals. As they would have freely admitted, their progress was uneven and incomplete. Still, most of the institutions that affected the ordinary citizen—schools, churches, commerce, administration, justice—had felt their touch, and outside the sometimes overlapping ranks of obedient Catholics and industrial laborers, society recognized their leadership. Accomplishments, position, influence, advances in the future all stood to be lost, however, if the regional parties were to break apart. None of them did. Even in unity the liberals experienced setbacks. For many southerners the economic slump that began in 1873 had taken the gilt edge off the Reich, and in the latter half of the decade the liberals paid for this dissatisfaction at the polls. The slippage first showed in Württemberg in 1877 and 1878, when the German Party was able to hold just two of eight Reichstag mandates, and it accelerated over the next few years, reaching a low point in 1881. That summer—while the Hessian Progressives maintained their legislative supremacy—the National and Liberal Party in Baden lost its Landtag majority for the first time in more than a decade, and the liberals in Bavaria fell decisively behind the clerical-conservative bloc. 5 The Reichstag elections in the fall brought additional defeats, particularly in Württemberg, where the German Party had favored the tobacco monopoly as a device for tax relief and was left naked, together with its electoral allies from the ministerial bloc, when Bismarck rolled out his plans to finance workingmen's benefits through the monopoly. In Bavaria there was less damage, although Eugen Richter's thrust into the South did claim one prize victim—Schauss in Hof—and four liberal seats went to Secessionists. In Baden, where tobacco cultivation and produc-

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tion were heavily concentrated, the National and Liberal Party opposed the monopoly and held its own, with serious competition on the left coming only from the Democrats in Mannheim. 6 Viewed from a National Liberal perspective, the overall results of the 1881 Reichstag balloting were not bad in the South: sixteen seats won compared to twenty-six in 1878, when the party was still united. Even more important, the prevailing attitude in the southern regional parties had remained in accord with the National Liberals' general standpoint. A further boost to the national party's health in Southern Germany was the postelection demise of the Schauss-Völk group as an active factor in politics. Schauss, beaten in two constituencies, was out of the Reichstag. Volk, who did not run, died early in 1882. Of the Württembergers, Max Römer had also died, while Julius Hölder was ready to make peace with his old comrades. The lone member of the group reelected in South Germany, Friedrich Feustel of Bayreuth, rejoined the National Liberal delegation when he returned to Berlin in December 1881.7 National Liberal influence in the southern parties thus remained challenged only by the Secessionists, whose chief strength was concentrated in Hessen and Middle Franconia. Nevertheless, no regional group was committed outright to the national party. A discrepancy persisted between the fundamentally National Liberal outlook and practice of the parties in the southern states and the weakness of articulated ties—both programmatic and organizational—between them and the National Liberals. Midway through 1882 Heinrich Marquardsen sent off a letter to Bennigsen in Hannover telling of a trip he had just made to Worms in order to report to his new electorate on the spring session of the Reichstag. " O n the confidential suggestion of friends there," Marquardsen wrote, " I have undertaken to bring about a National Liberal party meeting for Grand Duchy of Hessen, Rhenish Palatinate, Württemberg, Bavarian Franconia, and Baden, if possible in Frankfurt, where there is an old, loyal National Liberal following." 8 All that was necessary to ensure success, he continued, was the presence of the party's national leader. Marquardsen elaborated on both the prospective gathering and the need for Bennigsen to attend in a second letter near the end of July: It was and is important to offer to our political friends in Hessen, in the Bavarian Palatinate, in Baden, Württemberg, and Bavarian Franconia, divided as they are into separate organizations and induced to dissimilar tactics by dissimilar adversaries, the opportunity to give expression to the common character of our goals and tasks through a meeting of notables, and for that the most natural occasion and focal point would be the presence of our party

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leader . . . . The wish to be once together .with you personally is the simplest and most natural rationale for such a gathering, which, if it turns out well, would lend meaningful support to the party's friends in the individual states and would bring things back on the right track, for example, in the Grand Duchy of Hessen, where the Secessionists have been given everything through boundless ineptitude. 9 Although Marquardsen did not name him, undoubtedly the most influential of the " f r i e n d s " he conferred with in Worms was Cornelius Heyl. Even without a record of their conversations, it would follow from what we know of Heyl's politics that he envisioned the projected Frankfurt meeting as a means of moving the Hessian Progressives toward the strictly defined positions—true National Liberalism in his view—for which he had fought in vain in 1880 and 1881. In one sense, then, as Marquardsen's particular reference to Hessen also implies, the idea merely represented a new reach for leverage in the ongoing dispute among the liberals of the Grand Duchy. Yet there was also something novel in the proposal. In spite of the various shadings that liberals took on in the individual states, Marquardsen and presumably Heyl were suggesting that taken together the regional parties of the German Southwest offered a launching point for a revived National Liberalism and that the national party's cause could be well served through action at the sectional level. In retrospect this assessment appears to have accurately gauged the National Liberals' possibilities in the South. In no other large area of the Empire was there a similar disposition toward the national party's position. All the same, Marquardsen and Heyl were not sufficiently confident of their judgment to initiate action on their own without Bennigsen's approval and presence, and their reliance on the party leader's appearance to bring the southern National Liberals under one roof was an admission that they still lacked a set of concrete political goals to serve as a more permanent base of unity. As he made clear in his replies, however, Bennigsen was far more impressed by the southern parties' dissimilarities than by the potential for common action that lay in their related situations and experiences. " I t is a mystery to m e , " he wrote to Marquardsen, "what tangible purpose there should be in bringing not merely the Badensers but also the Württembergers together with our friends from Rheinhessen and the Palatinate. Political conditions, especially those of our party, are so different in these states—in Württemberg our party hardly even exists any longer, or only still in its offshoots to the extreme right—that a great National Liberal meeting which was to represent all these areas could become an utter mishmash and run into great embarrassment for the sake of a com-

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mon political f o r m u l a . ' " 0 When Bennigsen put off a possible trip south at least until early 1883, Marquardsen took the reply to be a polite refusal and laid the project aside. A southwestern meeting, he had said in one of his letters, must occur sooner or later. In this prediction he was to be proven correct, but only after several significant changes further opened up the National Liberals' opportunities in the South. Bennigsen's immediate worry in the summer months of 1882 was the coming autumn election in Prussia. Whether a group of South German regional leaders could meet together struck him as a matter of far less moment for the National Liberals' future than the outcome of the voting in Prussia. He did not foresee great changes. As he wrote to Marquardsen, he hoped to maintain "sufficient representation" in numbers for the National Liberals in the Prussian lower house. But unquestionably Bennigsen believed that the party could not overcome its troubles without a respectable showing in the largest German state. This opinion was shared by rivals. Bismarck and his Prussian interior minister, Robert von Puttkamer, wavered between concern that National Liberal gains would restore the party's bargaining position with the government and fear that the left liberals would cut too deeply into the National Liberal electorate. For his part Eugen Richter rejected the idea of an all-liberal campaign alliance in the belief that National Liberal candidates would be vulnerable against Progressive challengers. The results of the voting confirmed the pessimists—the National Liberals lost nineteen seats—but did not appreciably alter the party's situation. Lacking the popular and parliamentary strength to give such objectives meaning, the National Liberals remained committed to their old goals of representativeness and cooperation with the government. 11 Not only the National Liberals were at a standstill, however. To their left the tide that carried Richter's Progressives to their triumphs in the previous year's Reichstag elections had apparently crested in Prussia. "Everything first depends on still further strengthening the trend to the left," Richter wrote in December 1881, and in pursuit of that aim the Progressives successfully mounted a nationwide series of protest meetings against the tobacco monopoly bill in the early months of 1882. But once the monopoly was defeated in the Reichstag, in May, the steam ran out of the Progressives' efforts. To maintain continuous militant opposition is an impossible task for any party out of power, and from the late spring of 1882 Richter simply did not have an issue that could keep his drive against Bismarck running at high pitch. The economic situation had improved momentarily. Chamber of commerce reports for 1881 and 1882 are more optimistic than in previous years, and if few asserted that

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business was good, most said that profits were once again possible. Ordinary men and women also breathed more freely as cost indexes turned downward and the threat of new taxes receded somewhat, thanks to the income from the 1879 tariffs that now was flowing into the state governments' treasuries. Fewer groups were alarmed over the economy, and Bismarck, faced with an oppositional Reichstag, kept his legislative proposals relatively modest following the defeat of the tobacco monopoly, in order not to provoke the country anew. In these circumstances the Progressives did well to hold their ground in the Prussian elections and to capture a string of vacant Reichstag constituencies. 12 But Richter's belief that the left liberals would advance beyond their 1881 victories and so transform the national parliamentary balance was now a fading hope. The Secessionists, along with Richter the winners in 1881, also made little headway after the spring of 1882. Whereas Richter sought to build a resolutely (entschieden) liberal majority among the voters, the Secessionists tried to assemble a majority of liberals in the Reichstag—a "grand liberal party," as it was called in these years, uniting Progressives, Secessionists, and National Liberals in a working alliance. From time to time in the early months of the new Reichstag session it was possible to mediate joint action by the three liberal groups, but the arrangement never became permanent; and the Secessionists, in the middle, lacked the leverage to force the mutually suspicious Progressives and National Liberals to toe a common line. By the middle of 1882 they were aware that if the grand liberal party was to be born, it must be brought into the world upon a stronger basis than occasional understandings in parliament could provide. During the Prussian campaign, therefore, the Secessionists tried to create an organizational base for liberal unity through a series of nominating caucuses on the provincial and district level. Members of all liberal groups were invited, but few Progressives and even fewer National Liberals appeared. Rather than promoting unity, the effort opened up conflicts between the Secessionists and the other liberal parties as well as a particularly bitter squabble among the Progressives in which Richter, who meant to preserve the organization he had labored over since 1876, humbled those in the party who favored pooled candidacies. In the end the Secessionists did creditably merely in getting their own people reelected in Prussia. But the failure of their organizational bid left them less a party than a parliamentary faction—officers without troops, as their enemies said. It was symptomatic of their decline that the Berlin paper they had purchased with high hopes in 1881 went out of business in February 1883. Thereafter most of them counted on a change of rulers to accomplish what they had failed to do themselves. Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, a personal friend of several leading Secessionists, was a

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man of liberal inclinations. Under his rule there could be hope for a revival of liberalism and the replacement of Bismarck, at least in domestic affairs. Secessionists expected little more after 1882.' 3 Though the forward movement of the two liberal opposition parties halted with the Prussian elections, Bismarck could draw limited satisfaction from their setback. That his victorious antagonists of 1881 had lost impetus did not mean that the chancellor gained it back. Instead he found himself in the same cramped parliamentary space he had occupied since the new Reichstag had convened, forced into dependency on a majority he could not control, yet unable to replace it. Not Bismarck but the Center Party and its leader, Ludwig Windthorst, were now the pivotal actors in parliament. In alliance with the conservative groups the Center offered the government the same majority that had carried the 1879 tariff. Joined with the left liberals, however, the Center held a veto over the government's legislation. It would not be possible for the government to work with the Center Party over the long run, Bismarck told Rudolf von Bennigsen in December 1881, and periodically during the following year he spoke of resurrecting the liberal-conservative majority of the mid-seventies to free himself from Windthorst. But the idea never went beyond the talking stage. Bismarck made no gestures in the direction of the National Liberals, and the matters he chose to emphasize in public debate—a defense of government interference in elections, the tobacco monopoly, state-paid accident insurance—kept him far apart from Bennigsen and his friends. As long as the National Liberals were unwilling to pledge him the degree of loyalty he demanded, the chancellor stayed with his on-again, off-again alliance with the Center. 14 Immobility, then, was a general malady in German politics by the end of 1882. The Prussian elections merely locked the parties more firmly in place. In the Reichstag the National Liberals now lay marooned somewhere between Bismarck and his enemies, and there seemed to be little way for the party's parliamentary leadership to regain the mediating role reaffirmed by the delegates at the National Liberal conference in Berlin in 1881. Bennigsen himself, tired and discouraged, resigned his Reichstag mandate and withdrew from party activity in June 1883, after a final frustrating encounter with the chancellor. His departure further diminished the chance that the party could renew itself from the center. "All of us feel the general discontent with the shape of things most bitterly," wrote Bennigsen's friend and fellow National Liberal Robert von Benda, "but hope for improvement is still not out of the question and does not yet stand so far away that one renounces any further participation.'" 5 Whence improvement was to come, however, was a question that Benda,

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who now became cochairman of the party's parliamentary group, did not answer. As much as they wanted to reverse the party's decline, Benda and the National Liberals' other new cochairman, Armand Buhl of the Palatinate, had a difficult enough task holding together the parliamentary group in the months following Bennigsen's withdrawal. Away from Berlin, however, in Southwest Germany, a quiet movement forward was underway in the summer and fall of 1883. A by-election in the Palatinate district of Neustadt-Landau provided the immediate stimulus for this new push. Although it remained in National Liberal hands in 1881, Neustadt-Landau had given the German Progressives a healthy vote in their first attempt to win the constituency; and when the seat fell vacant in June 1883, the left liberals nominated a popular local estate owner and mounted a three-week assault on the district. At its climax, a day before the election, Eugen Richter spoke in Landau to a meeting of several thousand forced outdoors because the National Liberals had rented every large hall in the area. The next day the Progressive candidate fell short of victory by eighty-three votes, 9,208 to 9,290 for the incumbent party. It was a very close call for the National Liberals, who waged a very dirty campaign to hang on. 16 Armand Buhl, whose estate in Deidesheim lay within the district, managed the National Liberal defense of Neustadt-Landau, and the narrowness of the result appears to have convinced him and his local friends of the need to buttress the electoral resources of their regional party. In autumn, therefore, they began publishing a newsletter, aimed primarily against Richter's "Berlin" Progressives. At Landstuhl in January 1884, Buhl announced that a National Liberal party congress for the Palatinate would soon be held and that organization would stand high on the agenda. Neither of these steps was given more than local significance. After the scare they had experienced the previous June, the National Liberals of the Palatinate caused no surprise when they set about to patch up their campaign machine in anticipation of the coming year's Reichstag elections." Away from the public eye, however, Buhl and his close associates did not limit their efforts to their home area. From the time they decided that action was necessary they appear to have contemplated steps to involve National Liberals throughout southwestern Germany. Accordingly, they planned their party congress as a manifestation of National Liberalism's vitality everywhere south of the Main. When the meeting was definitely fixed for March 2 at Neustadt, it was also reported that in addition to the

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Palatinate's Reichstag deputies, several prominent National Liberals f r o m outside the area would attend, most notably the lord mayor of Frankfurt-on-Main, Johannes M i q u e l . " Miquel's name was generally associated with that of Bennigsen. Like Bennigsen, he was a Hannoverian, and together the two men had led the middle group of National Liberals during the first decade of the party's existence. But Miquel had declined to stand for reelection to the Reichstag in 1877. The widening split in the party between left and right seems to have torn him personally; according to his biographer, Hans Herzfeld, Miquel wished the National Liberals to maintain their unity and independence and yet to support the government. When he felt they could no longer do both, he withdrew from the front line of politics. Then in 1879 Miquel accepted F r a n k f u r t ' s offer to become lord mayor. Assuming the position in March 1880 he was thereafter heavily involved in municipal affairs. Thus during his party's crisis years, Miquel stood off to the side. At intervals he took a hand—sending advice to Bennigsen, working to keep the southwestern liberal parties loyal following the Secession, helping to write the National Liberal campaign manifesto in 1881. For the most part, however, he held to his exile on the M a i n . " After Bennigsen left the Reichstag in 1883, Miquel turned down a request from his old friend's Hannoverian constituency to stand in the by-election. But Miquel was too astute a politician and too ambitious an individual to turn away from the larger opportunity that Bennigsen's retirement offered him—leadership in the party. Neither of Bennigsen's parliamentary successors had the stature or inclination to take command, and no one outside the Reichstag delegation had a national reputation equal to Miquel's. He needed only the right opportunity, which came in the autumn when the National Liberals of the Palatinate approached him with their plan for a regional congress and asked for his advice and participation. Miquel agreed to join their effort following a series of discussions at the F r a n k f u r t home of the National Liberal chemical magnate Adolf Brüning, with whom A r m a n d Buhl had business ties. Accounts of what was said remain sketchy, but the main part of the conversation seems to have revolved around the general objective of party renewal and the National Liberals' desire to provide Bismarck with a parliamentary alternative to the Center. 2 0 At this point in its planning, with Miquel committed to appear, the projected congress in the Palatinate had come to bear some resemblance to Marquardsen and Heyl's abandoned attempt of 1882 to convene an assembly of southwestern liberal notables. It would be a different sort of meeting, drawing a large public audience in a more limited geographical area. But through the device of an ample guest list it promised to bring

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men from the various regional parties together, and in Miquel it had a personality suited to play the role of party unifier that Bennigsen had rejected in 1882. Perhaps such an assemblage would have been enough to kindle the potential for common action among the liberals in the South. At least one man, however, did not think so: Cornelius Heyl. Heyl heard about the proposed congress in early winter at Munich when he happened to speak with a National Liberal Landtag deputy he knew from the Palatinate. When he returned home, he arranged to see Miquel in Frankfurt around the beginning of February to talk over the matter with his onetime Reichstag colleague. Out of their meeting came a significantly changed set of priorities. As we saw earlier, Heyl's principal concern since the Secession had been to pin National Liberalism to definite positions on social and economic issues. At Frankfurt he urged this point on Miquel, arguing that a National Liberal revival in South Germany would not be possible unless the regional parties could unite behind a specific program. Many years later Heyl recalled the conversation: " I . . . urgently demanded that the stock exchange be taxed in addition to the nearly exclusive taxes on agriculture (tobacco, sugar, etc.). He answered me, how can I, as lord mayor of Frankfurt, come out for a tax on the stock exchange. I replied with the further assertion that if the line was not drawn against Manchesterism (with regard to agriculture and labor questions) a defection of the South Germans would be near at hand, and I urged this upon him with spirit." 21 Eventually Miquel concurred. Some time toward the middle of the month the two men, along with Arthur Osann, the Hessian Progressives' parliamentary leader, met at Zwingenberg on the Bergstrasse and drafted a short statement of National Liberal aims—the preliminary version of the later Heidelberg Declaration. Once the new program was on paper, Miquel moved quickly to get it approved. In a week's time he put together a gathering both more intimate than the Palatinate congress and more inclusive of southern liberal opinion. His friends in the Palatinate, who had been joined meanwhile by Marquardsen, helped out by deferring their own convocation at Neustadt. " A few days ago," Miquel wrote to Bennigsen on February 27, "Buhl, Marquardsen, and others from the Palatinate were here. We want to hold a meeting in Heidelberg with the Badensers, Hessians, Bavarians, Württembergers to agree on a new program (the drafting of which I have undertaken) for the South Germans and thereby to prepare the election campaign." 22 At the end of February 1884, then, eighteen months after its first suggestion, Marquardsen and Heyl's plan " t o give expression to the common character of our goals and tasks through a meeting of notables" was on the verge of realization. And as a result of

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Heyl's intervention with Miquel the southern National Liberals were preparing for the first time to link their regional parties' futures to specific economic and social objectives. Following their visit to Miquel, Marquardsen and Buhl sent out invitations to the key figures of the regional parties to meet in Heidelberg on March 9. At the last moment, however, the Franconians and Württembergers said that they would not be present, and the gathering had to be postponed. It remains unclear whether the delay can be connected to the sensational news that broke in South Germany on March 6 of the fusion of the Progressives and Secessionists into a new German Independent Party. As the Reichstag was convening that same day, it would have been difficult in any circumstances for deputies like Buhl and Marquardsen to travel to Heidelberg over the weekend. Unquestionably, however, the transformation of the two left liberal groups into a single organization a hundred deputies strong in the Reichstag spurred the southwestern National Liberals ahead, and Marquardsen now alerted those who had been asked for March 9 that the meeting would take place on March 23.23 At noon, then, on Sunday March 23, forty-two delegates from the regional liberal parties of the South and Southwest sat down together at the Europäischer Hof in Heidelberg. Eighteen came from the Palatinate, seven from Württemberg, six each from Baden and Franconia, four from the Prussian province of Hessen-Nassau. Hessen had but a single representative, Friedrich Schoen, a cousin of Heyl, and also a manufacturer in Worms. After the original Heidelberg meeting was cancelled, Heyl and Osann had turned their immediate attention to the Grand Duchy, where they hoped to carry a program similar to the one they had drawn up with Miquel. A Hessian Progressive congress to map out the 1884 Landtag and Reichstag campaigns had been announced for the end of March. As its date was then set for March 23 before the conference at Heidelberg was rescheduled, the Hessians could send only a token participant, Schoen, when Marquardsen renewed his invitations. Still, Heyl and Osann had made their contribution already, and the declaration adopted at Heidelberg legitimately included the name of the Hessian Progressive Party in its introductory paragraph." Marquardsen presided at Heidelberg, while Buhl presented the successive points of the declaration previously drawn up by Miquel and the two Hessians and thence put into finished form by the man who now held the gavel. Miquel himself was absent, detained in Berlin by the deliberations of the Prussian upper house. According to one source, the Württembergers and Hessians constituted the right wing at the meeting, the Badensers the left wing, and the Bavarians held the center. But the divisions were minor, and after a thorough discussion the conferees were

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able to accept the proposed text with just one modification. In the words of the declaration's opening paragraph, the participants found themselves "thoroughly in agreement in their judgment of the general condition of the German Empire and of the attitude of the national and liberal regional parties of South Germany to the paramount questions of the day." 2 s In this phrase the long-standing potential for united action in the South was set into motion. More was involved than a piety to bless the occasion when the fortytwo conferees at Heidelberg affirmed their concurrence on the leading issues. The roots of the meeting's unity ran deep into the everyday life of southern Germany. The National Liberals of the South spoke a common language and found a common program in the spring of 1884 because the social and economic problems they addressed varied little from state to state. Similarly, the Heidelberg Declaration achieved an immediate resonance throughout South Germany because it touched large numbers of people where they were now politically sensitive, on the close-to-home issues of money and power. An explanation of the meaning and impact of Heidelberg must therefore begin by exposing the primary concerns that developed among the liberal electorate of South and Southwest Germany during the early 1880s. These preoccupations are indicated in the successive paragraphs of the declaration. As a gesture to continuity, the first clause of the text associated the statement of aims that followed with the National Liberal program of May 29, 1881. But in its substantive points the Heidelberg Declaration urged the party to move to the right, onto a new platform whose most important planks advocated a positive response to Bismarck's social legislation (5), a sympathetic attitude toward agriculture's needs (8, 9, 11), and the rejection of any merger with other parties (13), a shaft aimed particularly at the recent left liberal f u s i o n . " Accordingly, in assessing the program and its consequences, we must not only identify the economic and social pressures to which the southern liberals responded but also must grasp their specific reading of these circumstances. Hessen offers a representative laboratory in which to observe both the forces in play in 1881-1884 and their political ramifications. At Heidelberg most of the discussion revolved around the social question, a problem that one speaker said required the National Liberals " t o offer a helping hand against need and misery to the fellow human beings who perform the hardest labor all their lives, and to see to it that those matters be settled jointly which would otherwise be decided against us in perhaps dreadful fashion." 2 7 These words might seem an overstatement in a

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South Germany from which the Social Democrats had managed to send only two deputies to the Reichstag—from Offenbach-Dieburg and from Nürnberg in 1881—since the founding of the Empire. If we reduce the frame of reference, however, and recall the growing class antagonisms in the urban districts of Hessen, the tone of worry becomes understandable. As we have seen, the liberal Honoratioren of the Hessian cities had been placed on the defensive by the late 1870s. In the 1881 Reichstag campaign they lost additional ground to both Social Democrats and Progressives. At the start of 1884 the outlook for the fall elections promised no improvement. The Hessian situation is typical of conditions in the South and Southwest. Conflict between a narrow stratum of local notables and a growing working population characterized nearly every large city in southern Germany—Mannheim in Baden, Stuttgart in Württemberg, Ludwigshafen in the Palatinate, Frankfurt and Hanau in Hessen-Nassau, Nürnberg in Franconia, Munich in the older part of Bavaria. As was the case in Darmstadt, left liberals still led the opposition in some places. In general, however, popular leadership in the southern cities was passing to an increasingly self-assertive Social Democratic movement. By 1884 it was apparent that the cat-and-mouse game between authorities and agitators, whose Hessian version has been so well described by Carl Ulrich, could not halt the Socialists' progress. Urban National Liberals were therefore all the more sensitive about the best existing safeguard of their local eminence, the limited suffrage. One result was a weakening of their attitude toward constitutional reform. When in February 1884 the Hessian second chamber considered the question of direct election of Landtag deputies, most Hessian Progressives voted in opposition even though earlier party programs had endorsed this goal. A lawyer-representative from Giessen made no bones about the real issue: " I also believe that the fear . . . that elements which none of us want could now gain entry into the chamber under a system of direct balloting—I believe that this fear is not at all so remote when we think of those localities or districts in which a large working population is present." 28 The Heidelberg Declaration took note of the new significance of constitutional restrictions against democracy in a back-handed way, by mentioning only a commitment to fight all attempts at reaction—in other words, any retreat from the status quo. The program also stated that the prolongation of the antisocialist law, due for renewal later in the spring, was "urgently needed." But ameliorative action held a more important place in the thinking of the southern liberals: take care of the worker when he is sick or hurt, and he will repay you with political acquiescence. One of the rare specifics in the Heidelberg Declaration was the hope ex-

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pressed in its fifth point that an accident insurance law would be passed before the Reichstag concluded its session. More than two years earlier a National Liberal member of the Middle Rhenish Manufacturers' Association had pointed out to his organization the political significance of such legislation: "The accident insurance law . . . demands compensation for every workman injured on the job, for the sake of humanity and Christianity and for the sake of social peace and the interest of the State. "2® It was a succinct formulation of the mixture of paternalism, high ideals, and class protectiveness that moved urban liberals in South Germany to approach the social question with a renewed optimism in the aftermath of the Heidelberg meeting. The National Liberals of the South were not unique in their desire to calm middle-class fears and meet working-class needs through welfare legislation. As the response to Heidelberg was to show, party members in other parts of Germany shared this hope. But action and leadership with respect to the social question were distinctly southern contributions in 1884. Concentrated within the small circle of men responsible for the Heidelberg Declaration was much of the national party's expertise on the issue. Armand Buhl was the Reichstag delegation's spokesman on insurance proposals. Adolf Brüning and Miquel were among the handful of National Liberal participants in the Verein für Sozialpolitik, the organization founded in 1873 to promote state action in the social and economic spheres. Cornelius Heyl had pioneered support in Hessen for government-sponsored workingmen's insurance. 30 Although all of these men were or had been involved in large-scale enterprise, self-interest is not a sufficient explanation for their social activism. The particular situation of South Germany must also be taken into account. Unlike the Kingdom of Saxony, where Social Democracy was already firmly established, or the greater part of the Rhineland, where Catholic workers had earlier been lost on the religious issue, the states below the Main, with their scattered industrial centers and still limited laboring population, appeared to offer the National Liberals a chance to win back the workers or at least to curb their political movement. It was an opportunity not to be missed by men whose ultimate domestic ideal remained the representation of all elements of the nation and whose political domination in the states rested on their claim of standing for the common good. Perhaps there was also a strain of corporatism in southern thinking. At Heidelberg a Franconian and then a Württemberger said it would be far easier to cooperate on social reform with their local opponents in the People's Party than with the new Independents, whose program opposed "state socialism" and emphasized private initiative. In the following months the difference they had noted led to a violent polemic between

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Eugen Richter and the People's Party's Leopold Sonnemann, whose Frankfurter Zeitung condemned the Independents for their uncompromising resistance to state participation in welfare efforts. It is instructive in this regard to view the attendance lists of the 1879 and 1882 congresses of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, both held at Frankfurt. Along with Miquel, Brüning, and several other National Liberals may be found the names of Sonnemann, Martin May, and Wilhelm Kopfer of the People's Party. None of those, however, who later found their way into the German Independent Party were present. At least an indication of a more interventionist southern attitude on social issues may be gleaned from this division among the left liberals. In any case the Independents' position clearly marked them off from the approach endorsed at Heidelberg. Rather than win them through material promises, Richter's strategy toward the workers was to compete with the Social Democrats as the champion of the common man's resentments. 3 ' Reports of what was said at Heidelberg give little mention to agriculture. Measured, however, against the subsequent course of National Liberalism, the southerners' most significant departure in the spring of 1884 was their offer of friendship to the countryside. "They have," it was stated in the Heidelberg Declaration, " a full appreciation for the present state of German agriculture and will impartially examine the demands arising from the necessity of preserving this important fundament of our nation." 3 2 Other clauses called the tariff question a closed matter and spoke out for higher taxes on sugar and spirits and on stock exchange transactions. Unlike their advocacy of social legislation, which was designed to win back voters—specifically, disenchanted workers— the southern National Liberals' support of farmers' demands bespoke a new concern about losing the electorate they had held onto through all the recent storms of party division—the rural population. The reasons behind this sense of urgency are easily discovered when once again we examine conditions in Hessen. Rural Hessen, it will be remembered, had developed an independent voice during the tax-reform debates of the 1870s. As a group farmers in the Grand Duchy fell quiet again following the passage of the Reich finance reform in 1879. Two years later, when Bismarck built his campaign around antiliberalism and the tobacco monopoly, agriculture's special problems were for the most part submerged in the revived conflict in country districts between the old popular interest and the privileged order. "Junkers and priests together/Put townsmen and peasants in tether"—that slogan catches the rural mood in 1881.33 After the election, however, the political atmosphere changed once more, and agricultural

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spokesmen in Hessen began calling again, but on a more militant note than previously, for the defense of what they considered to be their particular needs. One may see here an intensification of the process of bloc-formation that Hans Rosenberg has identified as the primary characteristic of the era. As in the 1870s, taxes were still agriculture's immediate target in this new stage. How strongly Hessian farmers felt about the tax question became apparent in March 1882, when their representatives in the Landtag punished the government with a budget vote resolving that the Technical College at Darmstadt be shut down if its student count did not increase within a year. Higher education of course had its defenders: "Elimination of the Technical College would involve an offense against the cultural mission of Hessen, a groundless destruction of the influence which this educational institution exerts beyond Hessen's borders, an irresponsible disregard for the lecturers, and an injury equally grievous and senseless against the city of Darmstadt." Against these sentiments, however, deputies from the countryside responded that somewhere, somehow, the line must be drawn before taxes and indebtedness drove the peasantry under: "Gentlemen, for these reasons it is then understandable why these constant efforts and this emphasis on saving are heard from the representatives of agriculture who come from the country districts. Because we know the difficulties of life and are oppressed by them, because we are close to the grievances of the people; for these reasons, not because we are enemies of culture and morality, because perchance we are opponents of the interests of the city of Darmstadt, no, because we see the distress of the rural population from close at hand, because we are the proxies for this misery." 34 In these last remarks, and in many others offered by the representatives of the farm areas in the 1881-84 Landtag session, the resentments of the seventies were expressed with a new bitterness and desperation at what the countryside perceived as the unfulfilled promise of the Reich finance reform. " H o w o f t e n , " asked a deputy from Oberhessen, "have we heard from Conservative newspapers and even from competent sources in the Reichstag that the taxes coming from the Reich to the individual states are to be employed in relieving the little man—the so much patronized little man—the communities, and particularly the farmer. Now, gentlemen, what has happened here in this regard? Nothing!" Against such complaints government spokesmen pointed out that losses from other sources of revenue had forced the state to use moneys from the Reich to preserve a balanced budget. Annual returns from the state forests during the 1882-85 budget term were estimated at 2,134,320 marks, a drop of over a million marks each year compared to previous

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budgets. The plus side of the ledger had also been depleted by Hessen's sale of its share of the Main-Weser railroad to Prussia, a step that at least allowed the state to reduce its heavy debts in rail construction subsidies. But these explanations scarcely consoled men who were waiting for lower taxes. Even focusing on the state budget alone, some noted, painted a rosier picture than the facts justified, since provincial, county, and communal taxes were thereby ignored. All these levies had risen in the last decade, driven higher both by legislation promoting schools and road improvements and also by the depression that raised the local burden of poor relief. After a brief surge upward in 1880 and 1881, moreover, grain prices were again falling. "Agriculture is the milch-cow that has to pay taxes," a deputy said in 1882. "When no one feeds the cow, then the milk gives out, and to some extent we are not very far from that in certain sections of the country." 3 5 The agricultural deputies finally lost on the Technical College appropriation when their temporary allies from the Catholic People's Party, the Landtag counterpart of the Center, switched to the government's side on the third reading of the budget. But agriculture's situation did not change over the following year, and when the legislature reconvened in 1883 to take up a new plan for tax reform in the Grand Duchy, the rural deputies again pressed their cause. As in 1873-1878, the Hessian Progressives as a group were agreed on the shape of the reform—a revision of the income tax assessment scale to make it more progressive, a restructuring of the tax on enterprise, and the introduction of a new tax on income from capital investment. As before, all acknowledged the aim of the reform to be relief of those persons who paid direct taxes, above all the farmers. The representatives of agriculture, however, wanted the commitment in writing, and one of the main subjects of dispute became whether to add two provisions to the tax on investment income specifying that it be used "particularly for the reduction of the previous rates of the land and enterprise tax," and more explicitly, that "taxable capital so created is to be employed proportionally in the lowering of taxable capital assessed for the land and enterprise t a x . " Like the motion to do away with the Technical College, these two provisions were first accepted and then finally defeated in the second chamber. In this case, however, the countryside at least got its reform. The revisions themselves passed both houses of the Landtag in the spring of 1884.36 A c c o m p a n y i n g the u n p r e c e d e n t e d militancy t h a t a g r i c u l t u r a l spokesmen displayed throughout these debates was an equally new insistence that the primary victims of the rural troubles were the middle farmers—those with holdings between five and twenty hectares. Already

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during the period in the seventies when the Landtag deliberated tax reform, rural deputies had moved from asking for relief of the countryside on grounds of fairness to demanding help for the sake of survival. Still their references remained general, and when they talked of agriculture, farmers, and peasants, their tone was inclusive. Now, in the 1881-1884 session, such sweeping remarks gave way to pointed analyses focused on the group from which most agricultural deputies themselves came: In my opinion the people with up to 10 and 20 Morgen * of land are not the oppressed; these are either blacksmiths, wheelwrights or masons, they work in the winter as woodcutters, etc., and have their agricultural employment in addition. Their chief income is based on their industrial occupation and wage. We have examples of a worker who draws a very considerable wage, 2- 2Vi M. daily, having still perhaps 5-10 Morgen of land. These are prosperous people compared to the small peasants, who admittedly are getting ahead everywhere and little by little absorbing the dying middle peasantry. Most of all oppressed are the farmers of middle rank, who have nothing but their agricultural pursuit, and with insufficient working capital and high taxes cannot keep up with the competition and the more difficult conditions of production. 37 Not only in Hessen but throughout Germany in the early 1880s farmers and the men who studied agriculture reiterated this point: the most serious problem in the countryside was the crisis of the middle peasantry. Reviewing two recent surveys of rural conditions in the spring of 1883, the economist Gustav Schmoller diagnosed the ailment as a combination of short-term and more permanent difficulties. Poor harvests, increased production costs, and low prices, he said, were all temporarily working against the farmer. Ordinarily, such a negative trend could be dismissed as an episode in the commercial cycle. In the present case, however, the decline had been compounded by the effects of deeper and more lasting weaknesses in agriculture's situation—the increase of population on the land, changed inheritance customs, higher taxes, unhealthy credit practices—all of which limited the medium and small operator's ability to survive a string of bad years. The results were a sharp rise in farm failures and an epidemic of Giiterschlachterei, the butchering-up of middle-sized holdings. The fundamental question for the nation, Schmoller wrote, was thus whether the middle peasantry could be saved,

* 1 Hessian Morgen: 2,500 square meters. 4 Morgen·, thus 1 hectare.

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"whether or not we can avoid dwarf-scale cultivation and the formation of latifundia, the social cancers of ancient civilizations." 38 Contemporary reports of growing indebtedness and forced sales of land confirm that the middle farmers were having difficulty maintaining themselves in the 1880s. But it is personal values and judgments that give moral significance to economic phenomena. In absolute terms the true victims in the rural Germany of Bismarck's era were the poorest group, the landless farm laborers; and after reading pages upon pages about the distress of those on a higher level, who lived in decent surroundings and had meat on their tables, one wants to add an " a m e n " to the remark of one Hessian deputy that in many cases the tax burden on landowners might easily be met at the cost of foregoing a few glasses of beer each year. But such skepticism was unusual. Since the Enlightenment it had become an article of public opinion in Germany that a healthy, independent peasantry was integral to the nation's well-being. In the 1880s this attitude led men to perceive a major crisis in the reversals of the middle peasantry. 3 ' "The preservation of a strong agricultural middle stratum," Schmoller wrote toward the close of his review, "of a peasantry which calls enough land and soil its own, is free enough from pressing debts to take part in the advance of agriculture and to be tolerably able to endure the unavoidable fluctuation of good and bad years—that goal appears to nearly all social and political parties as one we must work toward with all our energy." 40 To no party, however, did this aim matter more than to the National Liberals and their regional affiliates in the South and Southwest. National Liberalism's hold in the urban areas had already been undermined sufficiently to compel the party to rely on the rural electorate. Schmoller's summary of the new evidence on the status of the middle farmer indicated that National Liberal primacy in the countryside could no longer be secure if it depended on the old conflict between the nobility and the rest of society, led by liberal landowners and professionals. Throughout southern Germany the notables of the rural Mittelstand had achieved political power by exploiting this division. Now it had become secondary. In the Hessian Landtag debates of the early 1880s the talk was of a different struggle, "the battle between town and country," a metaphor for a new set of class alignments in a broadened arena of conflict, wherein the middle farmers, still the leaders of rural society, found that the most immediate opponents of their interests were urban groups desirous of low food prices and disinclined to pay more taxes so that the countryside might pay fewer. 41 Politically, this development cast a heavy shadow over the National Liberals. Without the allegiance of agriculture the regional parties could not maintain or, as

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the case might be, challenge for power in the states. Without the agricultural electorate the national party might not survive. But the militancy of the middle farmers threatened new splits on the order of the 1879 breach in the Grand Duchy, when the Hessian Progressives' farm leaders broke with liberal opinion to support the Reich finance reform. The assurances that the Heidelberg Declaration extended to agriculture were meant to preclude such divisions. A final expression of South German conditions may be seen in the Heidelberg Declaration's rejection of a merger with any other party. In their 1881 program the National Liberals had stated their willingness to cooperate with parties (meaning the Secessionists and Progressives) that pursued goals similar to their own. It was a limited offer—cooperation did not translate into a common campaign, much less a merger—but it evidences the National Liberals' feeling that they shared an allegiance of principle with the other liberal groups. In 1884 the conferees at Heidelberg backed away from this identification. " T h e regional liberal parties of South Germany," the declaration concluded, "will hold fast with respect to all sides to their hitherto independent position as representatives of the views of large sections of the population." 4 2 In practical language this statement signaled a retreat by the southern parties from the liberal ecumenicism they had upheld through the years when the parliamentary National Liberals had splintered. Henceforth they counted the left liberals among their opponents. The waning of the Secession in South Germany prominently influenced this shift in attitude. Concerned to keep the lock of unity upon their power and uncertain of the sentiments of the electorate, the regional parties had played down the National Liberals' divisions in the Reichstag and had emphasized their own tolerance of differing viewpoints in the years 1879-1881. Bismarck's wholesale attack on liberalism in the 1881 campaign additionally strengthened this tendency. But once the elections were past, the pressures on the regional parties relaxed. As we have seen, by the spring of 1882 the Schauss-Völk group had disintegrated. On the opposite flank, the Secessionists, no longer the unknown quantity they had been in 1880, lacked strong local connections. Whatever the chosen method, whether gaining control of existing liberal associations or building up their own, Secessionists in South Germany needed to fortify themselves organizationally in 1882 lest otherwise they lose their limited influence on the regional parties. But all of their party's effort that year went into the drive for joint liberal candidacies in Prussia; and when that failed, there were no further initiatives. A look at Hessen, where the Secessionists had done so well in

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the Reichstag elections, shows how shaky their local position was by the close of 1882. Of the five Secessionist deputies only Ludwig Bamberger had a constituency organization he could call his own. Egid Gutfleisch in Giessen and Bernhard Schroeder in Friedberg-Büdingen had to rely on the good will of the Hessian Progressive and German Progressive associations in their areas, while the representatives for AlsfeldLauterbach-Schotten and Bensheim-Erbach were completely out of touch with their districts.43 In the absence of organization the Secessionists' fortunes in South Germany depended heavily on their ideological drawing power. But at the end of 1882 there seemed little immediate prospect for the Secessionist objective that had enjoyed the most favor in the South—the creation of a grand liberal party. As its importance receded, the distinctive character of the Secessionists as mediators among the liberals also lost its imprint. On most other issues they stood close to Richter's Progressives, and by the spring of 1883 opponents were asking whether the remaining differences between the two groups were worth much. After the Secessionists' Tribüne folded in February, the Worms weekly that usually spoke for Cornelius Heyl predicted that in the next round of elections the choice would be one of "the Berlin Progressives or the moderate liberal course." 44 Over the following year the Secessionists were unable to lay that prophecy to rest. Although in some instances the liberals of the southern regional parties cooperated with German Progressives in 1881—Oberhessen provided the examples in the Grand Duchy—generally they were hostile to Eugen Richter and his party. To an extent this antagonism sprang from a personal distaste for Richter, whose directness and partisanship struck a plebeian note compared to the refined manners of a Bennigsen. For the most part, however, it was motivated by the instinct of self-preservation. Unlike the Secessionists, the Progressives aimed for local power as well as Reichstag mandates. Through their organizational drive and electoral offensive of 1878-1881 they had made a respectable start in both directions. Most of the elements to whom they appealed—and this was especially true of urban districts—stood in conflict with the notables of the regional liberal parties. Not surprisingly, the latter usually fought back hard. This animus of the Honoratioren toward their German Progressive challengers remained strong after the 1881 elections. Consequently, it was also extended to the Secessionists two years later, when they showed signs of sliding into the Progressives' orbit. Well before the fusion of March 1884, a significant gap separated the southern regional parties from both of the left liberal groups that were to coalesce as the German Independents.

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Increasing divergences over the issues before the country hardened this division in 1883 and 1884. As the differences between the Secessionists and Progressives concerning means and ends dropped into the shadow of their common laissez-faire outlook on social and economic issues, concurrently the liberals of the southern regional parties began to move toward an opposing position favorable to state intervention. The distance between the two viewpoints became manifest in March 1884, when each was given programmatic formulation—the left liberals' in the founding manifesto of their new party, the southerners' in the Heidelberg Declaration. As we have seen, much was made at Heidelberg of the conferees' disavowal of "Manchesterism." Three weeks later, at the Palatinate National Liberals' congress, finally held on April 14 at Neustadt, Miquel underscored the point. Among the major disagreements between the two liberal camps, he said, must be included " a strong difference between them and ourselves in the conception of the duties and obligations of the modern state with respect to its provision for economic matters and for the social condition of the less well-off classes." 45 Often political figures reveal more in their denials than in their affirmations. In his widely noted speech at Neustadt Johannes Miquel said that the Heidelberg Declaration was not " a particular South German construal of the party's aims." 4 6 As can be seen, however, from our reconstruction of the program's origins, Miquel's phrase stated precisely what it was. South German influences are no less noteworthy when we go on to examine the consequences of the Heidelberg meeting. But equally important here was the reaction of Bismarck. It was the combination of the southern response to the new program and the chancellor's initiatives towards its framers that lifted the Heidelberg Declaration out of the ordinary run of party manifestos and confirmed it as a genuine agent of change. If their new program expressed the concerns of their home regions, the southern National Liberals also saw it as a bridge to the chancellor. In the months previous to Heidelberg there had been some indications that Bismarck might now be more friendly toward the party. Following a by-election in October 1883, in which National Liberal voters had given a Conservative his winning margin over a Progressive, Adolf Wagner, who had unveiled the "patrimony of the disinherited" for the chancellor in 1881, harshly attacked the Center in a speech at Nauen and called on moderate liberals to group themselves with the Conservatives. It was possibly a signal to the National Liberals, and it aroused considerable journalistic speculation. 47 But a clearer hint came from Bismarck himself

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in March 1884, a week after the left liberal fusion was announced. Speaking in the Reichstag on his decision to refuse the American Congress's message of condolence upon the death of the Secessionist deputy Eduard Lasker in New York in January, the chancellor referred to " m y political and personal friend, Herr von Bennigsen," and blamed the deceased Lasker for ruining the 1878 negotiations concerning Bennigsen's entry into the ministry. Afterwards, lunching with his foreign office adviser, Friedrich von Holstein, Bismarck elaborated on his intent: "Yes, I was trying to encourage the National Liberals. Unless they regain their former spirit the ship of state will once more be on the rocks." 4 8 During the autumn and winter of 1883-84 people in Germany had begun to talk about the coming change of rule in the Empire. Wilhelm I was in his late eighties; yet since the attempts on his life five years before, there had been little public guessing concerning the reign to come. Suddenly, however, everyone was discussing it. Perhaps a bout of ill health which the Emperor experienced in these months touched off the mood. Perhaps the Crown Prince's trip to Spain in autumn 1883 contributed to it; it was the successor's most significant official undertaking in several years. But above all the prospect of new elections encouraged conjecture. The Reichstag that the German people would elect in 1884 would be very likely the first Reichstag that sat under the Emperor Friedrich III. If one thought of the elections it was hard not to think also of the new reign. If one thought of the new reign, however, it was hard in turn not to consider its implications for the existing political constellations. It was a safe conclusion that the liberal Crown Prince would not care for a government that depended on the Conservatives and Center in the Reichstag. Bismarck knew, therefore, that the parliamentary combination with which he presently operated would be a liability under the new Emperor. Holding to it would expose him to the danger of all the liberal parties uniting under the leadership of a liberal aspirant for the chancellorship—perhaps the Crown Prince's friend General Albrecht von Stosch, whom Bismarck suspected of such ambitions. At least in regard to the Center, however, an alternative lay with the National Liberals, as it had since 1881. Given proper help from the government, they might be expected to increase their numbers sufficiently in the coming elections to form a new Reichstag majority with the conservative parties. Equally to Bismarck's advantage, a reunion between himself and the National Liberals might satisfy the Crown Prince's political preferences and simultaneously destroy the last hopes on the left for a grand liberal party. Until the early months of 1884 Bismarck confined

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109

himself to reflecting on these contingencies while he explored the alternative of juggling constitutional arrangements to secure his future position. But the fusion of March 5 forced his hand. As a partial realization of the grand liberal party, the union of Secessionists and Progressives broadened the possibility that the chancellor might become wholly isolated from the liberals. Eight days later he spoke his friendly words about Bennigsen in the Reichstag. 4 ' On the day following Bismarck's Reichstag appearance a confidential message from the Prussian minister in Darmstadt reached the foreign office in Berlin, bringing a first report of the movement underway among the South German liberals. Identifying Miquel, Buhl, Heyl, and Osann as the leaders, the envoy recounted the planning and subsequent delay of the meeting called for March 9 at Heidelberg. According to his information, it remained uncertain whether a new date would be set for the gathering. In any case the Hessians intended to go on; the fusion of the left liberal parties would move them " t o a more vigorous stance." Bismarck underlined these last words when he read the dispatch and then added in his penciled scrawl "that that is to be encouraged as far as possible & to tell min [ister] there confidentially] I hold it in the interest of the confederated] governments to aid the National] Lib [erais] in elections." A communication to this effect went out to Darmstadt on March 18.50 Already before Heidelberg, then, Bismarck privately let it be known that he welcomed new initiatives from the National Liberals. It is uncertain whether his message to Darmstadt was known to the South German liberals when they convened on March 23. In any event their leaders were soon aware of his promise of election help to the Hessians. In it they could not but see a justification of their hope for a new alliance with the Reich government. Once the Heidelberg Declaration became an accomplished fact, Bismarck moved quickly. A few days after the South Germans had met, the chancellor sent for Miquel, who had been in Berlin for the sessions of the Prussian upper house. But Miquel had already returned to Frankfurt. Holstein, who discussed the matter with Bismarck, then decided to write on his own to Miquel to let him know of the invitation. His note went out on March 27. Three days later came a reply expressing Miquel's willingness to confer with the chancellor at any convenient time. In the next few days, however, the press (informed, Holstein believed, by Miquel himself) began to carry stories mentioning the possible entry into the government of a "well-known former National Liberal leader who now holds a municipal office." Miquel then wrote to Holstein that he was deferring a trip to Berlin until the gossip died down. 51 But if he wished to avoid a direct meeting, Miquel left no doubts in his

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The Splintered Party

April 14 speech at Neustadt about his own and his friends' attitude towards the chancellor. " W e rejoice that we are able to work together with Prince Bismarck on many important matters. [Lively applause.] We are never hostile to him when we have to say no, but as an independent party we reserve for ourselves the right and the obligation to say no when we cannot convince ourselves of the correctness of his advice. [Applause.] Gentlemen, indeed we are all grateful to the Prince and Imperial chancellor for his achievements and for his unparalleled services to the German Empire and the German people, and I am glad that the loathsome fear is gone of being thought a weakling or a servile man if for once someone can publicly repay this debt of national gratitude. [Stormy applause.]" 5 2 Two days after Miquel spoke at Neustadt, Bismarck definitively cast his electoral lot with the National Liberals. On April 16 copies of the following message to the Prussian envoy in Weimar were sent marked confidential to the Prussian missions in Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, Hessen, Oldenburg, and Hamburg. 5 3 Presumably, similar instructions were relayed to officials in Prussia and to the governments of Baden and the smaller states. In essence, the dispatch repeated Bismarck's scribbled response to the first report of movement among the southern National Liberals. Now, however, the chancellor outlined his full strategy. The fear of the Conservative party leader in Weimar of being " c h e a t e d " by the National Liberals proves anew that there also the general interest is being placed after that of the party and that greater consideration is given to the more distant possibility of bringing through a Conservative candidate in the future than to the more obvious one of aiding a different but comparatively useful and friendly party to victory over the dangerous democrats [i.e., Independents]. In my view the chief task in the elections will be to create as sharp a division as possible between the National Liberals and the Progressives. For this, however, there is no better means than cooperation of the Conservatives with the National Liberals. There is no need at all to think about a formal merger of the two parties; such a thing would perhaps even have a harmful effect because the National Liberals would suffer a loss in liberal votes, which would fall to the Progressives, as a result. An electoral compromise as the situation permits would suffice completely, and the decision for it should not, in my opinion, be difficult for the Conservatives where, as in Weimar, they have no prospect of winning on their own. You will perhaps be in a position confidentially to influence the personalities in authority in Weimar in the sense of the above; I would be happy if through conclusion of

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an electoral compromise with the National Liberals the Conservatives in Weimar chose to give an example to their friends in other parts of the Reich, which would not remain without imitation and also would make it easier for the National Liberals to practice reciprocity where support of Conservative against Progressive candidates comes into question." 1 By mid-April, then, Miquel and Bismarck had arranged an entente at long range. " W e are not a party of the government," Miquel insisted at Neustadt, and to Benda he protested that the rumors linking him to the chancellor were "mere humbug." On his own, however, and doubtless with the approval of other southern National Liberals, Miquel remained in indirect communication with Berlin. Early in May, in a private conversation with the Prussian envoy in Darmstadt, he echoed much of what Bismarck had said in his dispatch to Weimar. Cooperation with the Conservatives, Miquel told his interlocutor, was possible in the South. It could not become a party policy, however, and the National Liberals might lose votes on the left if they entered into an outright alliance. Miquel added that demonstrations of the chancellor's good will towards the National Liberals were very welcome and that the party appreciated what he had already d o n e . " It must have pleased Bismarck to read these words. What the Reich government's aid could mean to the National Liberals may be seen in an episode in which the conversation just mentioned played a part. Writing to Miquel from Stuttgart on May 3, Otto Elben had complained about the Mittnacht ministry's coolness towards the German Party. Three days later the Prussian envoy in Darmstadt reported Miquel's remark "that the German Party in Württemberg needed support and in this regard some pressure upon Herr von Mittnacht could be most helpful." Near the end of May the Prussian representative in Stuttgart approached Mittnacht on the matter and suggested to him that minor differences should not keep apart the minister's governmental-conservative following and the German Party. Mittnacht answered with some complaints about the latter, but he took the message to heart, at least for the duration of the campaign. 56 Interventions of this sort abounded in 1884. To illustrate their extent it is enough to point out the examples that may be found on the familiar terrain of Hessen. At the beginning of May it was reported to Berlin from Darmstadt that Baron von Starck had accepted the view that his government's help must be extended to National Liberal candidates. Within a matter of days the prospects for such aid advanced considerably as a result of a court scandal—the revelation that the Grand Duke, sympa-

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The Splintered Party

thetic toward left liberalism, had contracted a morganatic second marriage with a divorced Polish countess. This misstep, which was soon annulled, temporarily cancelled the monarch's political influence; and although it also compelled the retirement of Starck, who had performed the secret wedding ceremony, the Prussian envoy, Stumm, arranged things equally well with the new minister-president, Jacob Finger. At the end of September Stumm was able to tell Berlin that the Hessian government had instructed its officials that it desired the election of National Liberal or Free Conservative candidates. (In fact there were none of the latter.) The effect might be limited, he added, but it was a notable change from the "theory of absolute laissez-faire" of the past. 57 Throughout the campaign the semiofficial Darmstädter Zeitung reprinted articles from the Hessian Progressives' electoral newsletter. In two instances officials allowed an unusually long interval between the first ballot and the runoff so that National Liberal candidates would have extra time to cover their districts. Stumm also persuaded the Conservative leader in Hessen, Count Solms-Laubach, not to put up candidates where they had no chance to win and instead to support National Liberals. Finally, there was the case of the runoff in Friedberg-Büdingen, where the main issue became whether the Independent candidate, a retired army major named Hugo Hinze, had left the service because of a bribe offer to a contractor. Here one finds the indefatigable Bismarck ordering the military records searched so that a criminal charge might be prepared against the left liberal ex-officer. 58

Through his response to the southern National Liberals in 1884 the leader of Reich policy ensured that the movement generated by the Heidelberg Declaration became Bismarckian. By their enthusiastic reaction to the new program's commitment to the countryside the farmers of South and Southwest Germany ensured that the party's revival was bound to the defense of agricultural interests. Again we can be led to this second development by Miquel, this time through the private excuses he directed late in April to old colleagues like Robert von Benda: "The somewhat agrarian tinge to the proceedings in Heidelberg and Neustadt was absolutely necessary if we do not want to lose the farmer altogether," and Bennigsen: "The party has plainly gained new life and is getting a better footing in the populace. But it has to take a firmly independent stance toward the left and above all not let go of the farmers." 59 Unlike the deceptions concerning his links with Bismarck, these remarks honestly stated Miquel's worry that the agricultural side of the Heidelberg Declaration was being overstressed. But here the farmers

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were pulling the cart, and the National Liberals had to hurry to keep pace. Many southern leaders shared the misgivings expressed by Miquel and personally ranked the farmers' problems behind the social question. Yet they were also aware that the rural districts were now their chief electoral base. The risk to the regional parties was obvious should they ignore the outpouring of agricultural demands that followed Heidelberg. This surge of the countryside towards the National Liberalism of Heidelberg represents the political expression of a major shift of attitude among the farmers of southern Germany. At the heart of this reorientation lay a switch in first objectives, whereby tariff protection now gained precedence over tax relief. Two years earlier, commenting on the burgeoning literature on American competition in grain, Gustav Schmoller had predicted that for several decades to come pressures from the world market would depress European prices until the United States and Russia exhausted their virgin lands and population growth caught up with agricultural production. It was a foresighted observation; recent scholarship offers a similar explanation, usually under the rubric of a structural crisis, wherein grain prices ceased to fluctuate in relation to the domestic supply and instead, from the late 1870s onward, dropped steadily under the competitive weight of the newly emergent global market. Nonetheless, in his 1883 review of the plight of the middle farmers, Schmoller assigned foreign producers only half the responsibility for the difficulties of German agriculture and emphasized equally those domestic factors—foremost taxes—that cut into profits from the cost side. 60 Here is another caution against approaching agricultural issues in Bismarckian Germany, after 1879 as well as before, solely in the context of the struggle between protection and free trade. It was only in the early months of 1884, and then in a rush, that the mass of farmers in South and Southwest Germany came to see higher tariffs as their most immediate need. At this juncture, through the Heidelberg Declaration, agriculture's traditional liberal friends in the South placed themselves on the side of protection and made clear their willingness, as Miquel said with a peasant flourish at Neustadt, " t o see where the shoe pinches and how we can help." 6 ' The countryside responded with feeling. Grain imports had fallen in 1880 and 1881 under the influence of the new tariffs and the stockpiling that preceded the date they went into effect. They rose again, however, in the next two years, and by the first months of 1884 there were unmistakable signs that Russian, American, and now Indian and Argentine grain would be flooding the German market in unprecedented quantities. Meanwhile, wheat and rye prices had sunk roughly four Marks per 100 kilograms since 1881, and barley and oats were also down. Hessian examples illustrate the decline: 62

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The Splintered Party Average Prices in Marks per 100 kg.

1881 1882 1883

Wheat

Rye

Barley

Oats

23.87 20.17 19.48

20.22 16.70 16.36

16.44 15.11 14.09

15.42 12.81 13.45

At the beginning of May the Prussian envoy in Darmstadt remarked on "the agitation for increasing the grain tariffs that is presently becoming particularly noticeable. Prices have never been as low as now, and besides [there is] a surplus of commodities. Mannheim is choked with grain from California, Odessa, and La Plata; the same superabundance afflicts the local farmer, who cannot sell because the prices on the Mannheim exchange have fallen and three months' credit is allowed there, and the farmer cannot manage it. On top of this continuous imports from abroad at constantly cheaper freight rates: for example, a grain ship that was just unloaded in Worms 22 days out of Odessa charges 50 pfennigs per hundredweight of wheat! In this way the view increasingly spreads that unless there is a tariff increase the farmer must be ruined." 63 At Heidelberg the southern National Liberals had declared that their satisfaction with the existing commercial legislation did not exclude " a modification, based on experience, of regulations on individual tariff rates." 64 The subsequent wave of agricultural sentiment in favor of higher grain duties forced them to make good on this proviso. Once the Reichstag campaign commenced in South Germany, one National Liberal candidate after another came out for increased protection for the farmers. Many did so cautiously. Even among the leaders of the Heidelberg movement opinions differed on the extent to which tariffs alone could solve the distress of the countryside. Higher duties, however, were what the National Liberals' rural electorate desperately wanted, as can be seen not only from the constant mention they received in candidates' speeches but as well in the roughly composed inserts that dotted the columns of local newspapers in the weeks before the election. An appeal like the following one from Friedberg-Büdingen well illustrates the public mood with which the southern National Liberals came to terms in 1884. Farmers! In the last three weeks America exported 1 3/4 million hundredweight of wheat according to the Frankfurter Zeitung; it produced in the last year five times as much as Germany, namely, 282 million hundredweight according to Hübner's Geographical-Statistical Tables.

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The free America has the highest protective tariff and imposes 25 percent of value upon imports of our products. In the western states, that is, in California, Oregon, etc. the American farmer, free from land taxes, reaches 30 hundredweight of wheat on the Morgen. In East India production costs are said to be mostly only 3 M. per hundredweight. Against competition of this sort, which according to all probability will increase still further in the future, it is obvious that even our most active and intelligent farmer cannot easily prevail and he truly needs protection. The German Independents are opposed to grain tariffs; therefore elect the National Liberal candidate Herr Görz in Darmstadt Several farmers 65 Spurred on by the enthusiasm of the farm population and by the friendly signs from Berlin, the regional liberal parties of the South quickly swung behind the Heidelberg Declaration in the spring months of 1884. The Hessian Progressives endorsed the new program in April after their first meeting on March 23 had held the issue in abeyance. The National Liberals of the Palatinate voted their approval at a private gathering on the morning of the Neustadt congress. The German Party in Württemberg, the National and Liberal Party in Baden, the National Liberals in Franconia and Nassau all followed between mid-April and the end of June. Former defectors also returned to the fold. At Regensburg on April 26 Friedrich von Schauss "joyfully" aligned himself with his old party's new direction. Even an infant pro-Heidelberg group appeared, the "Bavarian Imperial Party," founded in Augsburg on May 18 by eighty notables of very moderate stripe, foremost among them the mayor, Ludwig von Fischer, and the protectionist textile magnate, Theodor von Hassler. 66 National Liberals in North Germany at first took little notice of the Heidelberg Declaration. But their indifference rapidly gave way to uneasiness over the southerners' initiatives toward Bismarck and agriculture and over the responses they drew. Neither the chancellor nor grain tariffs were as popular north of the Main as they were to the south. The negative reaction of their northern counterparts upset the hopes of Miquel and his friends that their new program would have clear sailing within the national party—if not approval then at least no objection to it. By the middle of April it was apparent to both sides that for unity's sake they must settle their differences over Heidelberg. After the Neustadt meeting, when the Reichstag deputies returned to Berlin from Easter vacation, discussions began within the executive committee of the combined

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Reichstag and Prussian Landtag delegations. Buhl and Marquardsen were the chief spokesmen for the southerners; Benda and Arthur Hobrecht, from the Landtag, for the northerners. On both sides the aim was to produce a mutually acceptable program for the national party. While the talks went on, an all-German National Liberal congress was set for May 18 in Berlin to ratify the eventual compromise. In the end it was the southerners who softened their positions. Writing to Bennigsen shortly after the Neustadt meeting, Miquel had insisted that agriculture be mentioned in the declaration to be presented to the national congress. But when the northerners would not agree, Buhl and Marquardsen did not press the point. Similarly, the proposed draft did no more than hail the Heidelberg Declaration and the party's revival in South Germany—a rather pallid recognition, but one with which the southerners contented themselves. Each side was tossed a bone in the political section, which stressed the party's liberal past while rejecting, in phrases close to those of the Heidelberg Declaration, mergers with other parties. Each could also be satisfied with the specific endorsements of the need for social legislation and of the antisocialist law, which the National Liberals in the Reichstag helped to renew early in M a y . " Above all, then, the draft declaration that was presented on May 18 to the national party's congress was a piece of diplomacy. In his remarks to the delegates Miquel tried to put the best face on it. "The diversity of conditions in Germany," he said, "does not admit of an absolutely mechanical identity in practical questions of political conduct. Let us mutually recognize this! Let us have freedom on secondary things, and let us be united on all essential matters." 6 8 But in reality these words were nothing more than an invocation of the old, enervating National Liberal practice of allowing free choice on questions over which the party could not agree. As in the past, these issues were not secondary affairs but the very questions (of agricultural tariffs and of the party's relationship with the chancellor) that had become the focal points of the National Liberal resurgence in the South. In sidestepping them at Berlin the national party's leaders were able to maintain a harmonious front. In effect, however, their solution let the Heidelberg Declaration stand as a separate program for the southern National Liberals. Buhl and Marquardsen had filled the cracks in party unity with paper concessions. In the following weeks the divergencies between South and West, on the one hand, and North and East soon reappeared. On June 8 at Karlsruhe the Badensers resolved their support of the Heidelberg Declaration. Reports of their deliberations say nothing of Berlin. Two weeks later, at a meeting in Breslau attended by Arthur Hobrecht, the Silesian National Liberals accepted the Berlin Declaration without a word about Heidelberg. 6 '

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Transparent as it was, the national party's unity lost its chief props in May and June, when the Reichstag momentarily emptied its ledger on the issues that most pulled the party together, the social question and the containment of Social Democracy. As we saw, a majority, including the National Liberals, had already renewed the antisocialist law before the Berlin party congress convened. By the middle of June passage was also assured for an accident insurance bill sponsored by the Center and Conservatives, a version for which the National Liberals ultimately voted despite several reservations in order to make good on their promise of action in this area by the close of the session. Without further legislation on the agenda, it was no longer possible to use these questions as the main supports of party unity. It was also not going to be possible to put them in the forefront of the coming Reichstag campaign. Just offstage, however, was an issue that could serve these ends: colonialism. It was Bismarck, assisted by the National Liberal deputy Friedrich Hammacher, who made overseas expansion into the premier issue of the 1884 elections. During the spring months the foreign office had drawn up a series of proposals for government subsidies of steamship lines to the Pacific. In May the Bundesrat approved these plans and sent them on to the Reichstag. Already some left liberal voices warned of a trap, most notably the National-Zeitung, when it speculated that the chancellor, having unwillingly seen the antisocialist law renewed, would not mind having the opposition parties reject the subsidy bill so that he could use the colonial issue against them in the elections. In this case the Independents did not listen to their friends. When the bill came up for a first reading in mid-June, Richter and Bamberger led the fight against it. A few days later, in the committee hearings preparatory to the second reading, they joined with the Center to kill it. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Once the Independents had come out against subsidies, Bismarck arranged with Hammacher to be questioned in committee on the bill's significance for colonial efforts. It was a singular maneuver, the first time the chancellor had attended a budget committee session since 1871, and it was a spectacular success. Had Bismarck merely connected the steamer bill and colonial development in theory, the effect might have been strong enough, but two days earlier England had acknowledged the Reich's protective rights over a German outpost at Angra Pequeña, on Africa's southwestern coast. Bismarck was therefore able to answer to Hammacher that the connection was a practical one. Afterwards the left liberals insisted that colonies and subsidies were separate matters and that the connection was just an election trick. But they were not heeded. Bismarck had said that the defeat was a setback for overseas expansion, and the nation accepted his word. 70

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The Splintered Party

Territorial acquisition in Africa was an uncharacteristic sport for Bismarck, whose diplomacy had been unadventurous since the Reichsgründung. His chief reasons for taking it up lay in domestic affairs. If, as was true of all his major departures in foreign policy, a combination of motives guided the chancellor's decision for colonies, the primary impulses among them related to Bismarck's personal hold on power and to the economic and social stability of the Empire. Expansion as a flagrallying cause promised to solidify the chancellor's position both at court and in the Reichstag. To the degree that it encouraged popular resentment against Britain, it neutralized the inclinations of the Crown Prince and those who advised him towards adapting English constitutional practices for Germany. As for parliament, the debate in the June 23 budget committee hearing put the rapprochement between Bismarck and the National Liberals on firm ground and gave them a common electoral weapon with which to attack the left liberals." As Hans-Ulrich Wehler has indicated in his provocative study of Bismarck and imperialism, fears about the nation's economy, which had become sluggish again during 1882 and showed no signs of reviving, also were turning the chancellor's attention overseas. "We are not going to escape from overproduction any longer," wrote the Social Democratic leader August Bebel at the start of 1883. "Everything thus pushes in the direction of exports, and although increasing progress has been registered here from one year to the next, these advances are not sufficient because productive capacity is growing more rapidly than sales." And he outlined the consequences: "It doesn't matter to me whether the general crash comes in two or in five years, the main thing is that it is coming; and assuredly, the longer the delay, the more developed the restlessness in people's minds and the ultimate revolution will be so much the more radical." 72 Save for the relish and anticipation in Bebel's tone, many Germans who were not socialists, Bismarck included, could have produced the same analysis of the domestic prospects of the Reich. The progression seemed logical enough: from a prolonged trade slump through widening social unrest to political upheaval. For Bismarck in 1884 colonies offered a means whereby this nightmare might be banished. If colonization diminished the glut of manufacture through the capture of new markets, economic tension could be expected to relax at home, and dissidence would weaken. To these ends the chancellor enlisted his own great prestige and the state's resources on the side of expansion.73 As a matter of foreign policy, always a touchstone of party unity, colonialism drew support equally from northern and southern National Liberals in 1884. Its appeal as a domestic palliative also crossed sectional

The Heidelberg Declaration

119

lines. In the spring a source close to Cornelius Heyl had written that only a party devoted to social reform could present a counterweight to Social Democracy and ultimately repulse it. As evidenced in the Berlin Declaration, this proposition was one of the few programmatic points shared between the National Liberals of Heidelberg and those who mistrusted them. Colonialism now offered an alternative and possibly cheaper proposition: that a party committed to overseas expansion would be taking the most effective course to solve the conflict between the workers' movement and society. As the new issue seized the public's imagination in the months following the Berlin meeting, this latter approach—social imperialism—at least gained parity with the concerns of National Liberals over the social question. In this manner the common ideological ground in the national party was expanded. 74 Similarly, on the plane of economic interest colonies attracted National Liberals irrespective of their regional ties. Among the friends of colonialism in the community of high finance may be found party figures from both North and South—Hammacher of Essen and Adolf Woermann of Hamburg; Miquel in Frankfurt and Gustav Siegle of Stuttgart. Of greater importance, however, with regard to colonialism's unifying influence on the National Liberals is the fact that overseas expansion appealed equally to the partisans of the Heidelberg Declaration as well as to those interests that were unhappiest with the agrarian thrust, and, to a lesser extent, with the Bismarckian slant of the new movement. A prime example in the North is the Dessau manufacturer and Reichstag deputy Wilhelm Oechelhäuser, a free trader, a skeptic of Heidelberg, but also an active overseas investor. In the South many of the colonial activists were export producers from the finished goods and chemical industries, manufacturers enjoying easy access via the Rhine to overseas shipping points. 75 Developments in Hessen serve to illustrate how colonialism affected these groups. Since the early eighties cities like Offenbach and Mainz had been complaining about overproduction, about the loss of population resources through emigration, and about the relatively weak status of the Reich outside Europe. Here, where opposition to protectionism and the tobacco monopoly had been bitter in 1878-1881, colonialism lit a positive spark. In August 1882 the chamber of commerce in Offenbach joined the newly founded German Colonial Association as a corporate member. In June 1884 it wired its congratulations to Bismarck after his appearance before the budget committee. A month earlier a section of the Colonfel Association had been established in Mainz. 76 To the National Liberal manufacturers of Offenbach, who accepted the Heidelberg Declaration with the greatest reluctance, overseas expansion offered a meaningful quid pro quo. It did not end their

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The Splintered Party

disagreements with the countryside about the need for higher grain tariffs, but it allowed these differences to be superseded by the consideration that a policy of alliance with Bismarck now offered appreciable material dividends to all sides. Accomodations in this pattern occurred throughout the national party in 1884. Colonies were probably as popular in 1884 as the tobacco monopoly had been unpopular three years earlier, and as the elections approached the National Liberals and the government struck the colonial theme as strongly as possible. The semiofficial Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung wrote of nothing else all summer long. Against the stream of proexpansion agitation the left liberals could offer only qualified opposition. Though they did not oppose colonies in principle, they did reject the plans for steamship subsidies that had been laid before the Reichstag in the spring. In this round the unequivocal Nein! that they had pronounced in 1881 against taxes and the tobacco monopoly was denied them. Instead it was the National Liberals who enjoyed the advantage of absolute commitments—to colonialism everywhere in the Reich, and also to higher grain tariffs in the South. In the balloting the National Liberals advanced for the first time since 1874, gaining fifty-one seats compared to the forty-two to which they had sunk during the previous session. Their popular vote rose impressively, from 614,287 to 997,033, a total that gave them a hairbreadth of a margin over the Independents, who lost some 100,000 of their combined total of 1881.77 Starting from Heidelberg, in uneasy union, the National Liberals had held together and achieved victory at the polls and an inner revival of their party. If the National Liberals gained seats, they were far from strong enough in the new Reichstag to free Bismarck from his dependence on the Center. As a consequence, parliamentary alignments remained essentially what they had been in the 1881-1884 session. Under these circumstances the National Liberals continued to maintain the friendly ties that had developed in 1884 between themselves and the chancellor. Since Heidelberg they had become the government's party-in-waiting, and there was to be no retreat back to the middle ground between the regime and the opposition. Both their new relationship with Bismarck and the eventual manner in which, in 1887, they were to win enough mandates to displace the Center are indicated in a letter from Marquardsen to Bennigsen written shortly after the Reichstag convened. As Bennigsen's "successor to a certain degree in these interesting tête-à-têtes" with Bismarck, Marquardsen had discussed with the chancellor "the chances of a later dissolution in connection with inadmissible reductions in the military budget, its rejection by the Bundesrat, and the involvement of

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the seven-year military law and . . . [I] expressed to him my personal belief that you and no doubt Miquel also would accept reelection in such a crisis, in which we could be certain of electoral success. Naturally I emphasized t h a t a suitable u n d e r s t a n d i n g between g o v e r n m e n t , moderate conservatives, and ourselves regarding the ratios of party strength must precede such an electoral campaign.'" 8 Remaking the alliance between party and chancellor was one of the major accomplishments of the movement that began with the Heidelberg Declaration. In their most ambitious moments, however, the southern National Liberal leaders had hoped to couple that goal with an electoral recovery, inspired by their new program, of far greater magnitude than was achieved in 1884. Was their failure, as Hans Herzfeld once asked, a matter of using Beelzebub to drive out the devil? Herzfeld concluded that it was: that it was not possible for the National Liberals to recapture the dominance they had previously enjoyed on the strength of their political appeal by now seeking to build a coalition upon the newly emergent material interests that had shattered their once broad following. Yet it is in pointing out where they most nearly approached their ideal, among "extensive segments of the middle class, peasantry, and trades in southern and western Germany," that Herzfeld exposes the real limits of the Heidelberg vision. 79 By 1884 a popular majority that left out the urban laboring class was no longer a possibility in the Reich. But neither the social liberalism of the Heidelberg Declaration nor the social imperialism of the National Liberals' electoral campaign had much influence among workingmen. An appeal to their material interests could not succeed without a corresponding program of democratic reform—they had already been educated in the realities of social power. As we have seen, however, democracy contradicted the initial motivation behind the Heidelberg Declaration: to keep the allied notables of town and country in power on a new platform of interest representation. Accordingly, the National Liberal revival never made headway in the cities. Only in the rural and urban-rural districts of the South and Southwest, where social conditions still favored the political model it advanced, did the Heidelberg movement achieve a genuine impact. For nearly a decade after 1884 the regional liberal parties of the South maintained their local dominance on the principles agreed to at Heidelberg. Reconsideration of these positions became necessary only in the early 1890s, when the Social Democrats began to ford the suffrage barriers in large numbers, while in the countryside populist and Conservative competition arose for the farm vote. Few National Liberals foresaw such difficulties in the first months and years after the new program appeared. From Alsfeld Karl Grünewald wrote to Miquel, " I n

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Hessen also, a fresh breeze is noticeable in political life, National Liberalism has been awakened from its lethargy, people are saying that something must be d o n e . " Otto Elben in Stuttgart expressed the same optimism: " F o r our 'German Party' the Heidelberg Program was a genuine act of deliverance." 8 0 People later spoke of a " h u r r a h m o o d " that swept the South. This feeling of renewed vigor and power lingered in National Liberal memories. For a long time after 1884 it kept the idea of Heidelberg alive. Heidelberg left a more ambiguous legacy for the national party. It was stronger and had come out of the campaign of 1884 in apparent unity. A general secretary had been retained to run the party organization; regional and local groups were adding the designation National Liberal to their old particular titles. 81 Beneath the surface, however, party cohesiveness remained brittle, too heavily dependent on elements—above all, the chancellor and the state of international politics—over which the National Liberals had relatively little influence. If the one were indifferent, if the other were calm, there was likely to be internal trouble for the party which had bridged over its divisions in 1884 by linking itself to Bismarck and colonialism. For the National Liberals' cleavages on economic and social matters were now stronger because of Heidelberg. Individuals and regional groups now had committed themselves to their electorates on issues of material interest, and the commitments varied notably from North to South. Such obligations now commanded priority. They could be ignored only at the risk of losing local power, a danger few National Liberals were willing to chance. Contemplated from this perspective, Heidelberg had opened the way for a partial withdrawal from Reich politics by the National Liberals, a retreat to the regional and local preserves that still lent themselves to the style of a party of notables. James Sheehan has recently observed a similar shift on the municipal plane, where National Liberals were also turning their energies toward preserving what they still controlled. 82 The general tendency could not but fragment and weaken the national party in the long run. In the chapters that follow we shall see how this process of division advanced.

5 The Era of Heidelberg

Late on March 23, 1884, several hours after the conclusion of the regional congress the Hessian Progressive Party held that day in Frankfurt, Cornelius Heyl received a one-word telegram from Johannes Miquel in Berlin—"Bravissimo!'" A short resolution was the object of Miquel's long-distance applause, a statement that sharply separated the Hessian Progressives from the recent union of former Secessionists and Progressives and thereby offered an even stronger expression of the new party orientation that had been approved on the same Sunday afternoon at Heidelberg. This parallelism symbolizes the inauguration, on both the regional and national levels, of what may be called the era of Heidelberg in National Liberalism. For at least six years in the Reich and for more than a dozen in Hessen, National Liberal politics were consistently guided by the positions defined in the spring of 1884. It was the last extended period of stability that either the national or the regional party knew. The Hessian Progressives' congress was the first since the party's meeting of November 1880. Again the chief issue was what attitude to take regarding the left liberals, now represented by the new German Independent Party, into which the Secessionists, the subjects of debate four years earlier, had merged. Much of the tone of the party's response in 1880 was echoed in the statement that the majority of the Hessian Progressive executive committee recommended to the gathering. "Earlier," it began, "in the formation of a Secessionist group, we found no reason for dissolution of the union of all liberals in Hessen. Presently, in the fusion of this group with the [German] Progressive Party, we likewise find no ground for a change in our political position." Expressing the fear that Eugen Richter's oppositional principles would dominate the 123

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new left liberal group, the majority draft went on to reiterate another primary theme of 1880: " W e condemn the view that a political creed is also decisive for economic questions." As one of the executive committee's spokesmen said, it was better to emphasize what united the party and not what divided it. 2 A harsher alternative was offered to the delegates in the resolution that Arthur Osann submitted on behalf of the minority in the party leadership. In it Osann gave precise formulation to a number of points that he, Heyl, and Miquel had addressed in more general terms upon drawing up their draft for Heidelberg. On constitutional questions he went considerably beyond the Heidelberg proposals, rejecting "efforts to introduce a so-called parliamentary government" and waiving the principle that military budgets be fixed for a term not exceeding the statutory limit of a legislative period. On economic matters he stayed closer, endorsing protectionism, a tax on stock exchange transactions, and Bismarck's plans for social legislation. The majority of the executive committee was too timid, Osann said; they were like the girl who wanted to please every man and ended up with none. Better the girl with more modest ambitions, who knew what she wanted and got it: the party now had to take firm and specific stands. This plea was repeated by Heyl, who informed the congress of the concurrent meeting being held in Heidelberg and urged that the Hessian Progressives associate themselves with the new movement in southwestern Germany through a clearly defined program. 3 Although they elected to do so on their own terms and thus gave Heyl and Osann only a limited victory, the delegates at Frankfurt agreed that it was time for the party to define its positions more sharply. By a vote of all against one (an ally of Ludwig Bamberger from Bingen) they rejected association with the new Independent Party. Then they flatly turned down the resolution of the executive committee majority. But the debate had also elicited a warning that adoption of Osann's list of points would cause a party split. The delegates therefore chose a brief substitute motion that indirectly approved protectionism and the chancellor's social policies by condemning left liberal opposition to them. The task of elaborating on this declaration was left to the executive committee, which was instructed to prepare a revised program for a second congress in April. 4 When the Hessian Progressive leaders took up this commission two weeks later, the impact of the Heidelberg meeting was already perceptible in the Grand Duchy. Rather than labor over a new text the executive committee quickly decided to recommend the Heidelberg Declaration in their report to the congress at the end of April. Members of the earlier majority who had worried about the illiberal drift of Osann's constitu-

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tional proposals were not upset by the stand-pat position adopted at Heidelberg by the southwestern regional parties; instead the only expressions of uneasiness came from some among the former minority, who abstained from the vote approving the Heidelberg Declaration on the ground that it was too vague. Miquel's Neustadt speech of April 14 soon dispelled their reservations, and when the Hessian Progressives assembled again in Frankfurt on April 27, both sides were united in favor of acceptance, which was unanimous. But a second motion, reaffirming the party's commitment to the institutional achievements of the past decade, fell against the new hard mood of the party regulars. As one of Heyl's confederates from Worms put it, such important tasks lay ahead, "administrative reform, soil improvement, etc., that the people ought not be palmed off with the phraseology of the liberal legislation of the seventies." 5 A lessened regard for the constitutional aspects of liberalism again was evident in the congress's major debate over Cornelius Heyl's motion that the party nominate National Liberal candidates in every Hessian constituency. Heyl's rationale drew on the preceding resolution: if the Hessian Progressives' endorsement of the Heidelberg Declaration's economic planks was to have meaning, then they could not campaign arm in arm with those who opposed them on issues like tariffs and social legislation. The way to achieve clarity was for the party to contest each electoral district. It was the same argument that Heyl had advanced in vain in November 1880, but now opinion concerning the relative merits of unity among all liberals versus party commitments on the bread-and-butter questions had come around to his view, and his resolution easily passed. Most of the dissenters came from areas, chiefly in the cities, where the left liberals had a significant following—Giessen, Offenbach, Mainz. How could they elect a candidate without combining forces with other liberal groups? The newspaper closest to Heyl, the Wormser Zeitung, gave the answer: if a National Liberal was not elected, it did not matter. 6 Those who won an end to liberal ecumenicism on April 27 repeatedly had declared themselves prepared to absorb a loss of public support as the necessary price of clarity. In actuality, however, the cost was not very high. A sheaf of resignations, most of them from Bamberger's stronghold of Bingen-Alzey, came in following the first Hessian Progressive congress, but few more were sent after the policy of a National Liberal candidate in each district was ratified. 7 For all their oratorical flourishes about breaking ties with old comrades and carrying on even in the minority, Heyl and his friends had expected that they could keep the great majority of Hessian Progressives on their side; and

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the response both to Heidelberg and to the liberal shift of course in the Grand Duchy rapidly confirmed their hopes. By the early days of May it seemed clear that it would not be necessary to purchase programmatic exclusiveness at the sacrifice of the party's long-standing representative claims. As the Reichstag campaign unfolded over the subsequent summer and fall, this result was further substantiated. In the countryside the old division between the popular cause and the privileged order that still profiled most of the 1881 contests had now faded in importance. Gone with it was the rationale of the liberal-left liberal coalitions so prominent three years earlier. A parallel effect was produced in southern Starkenburg by the disappearance of the tobacco monopoly as an issue. The prevailing campaign pattern in rural Hessen in 1884 was one in which Hessian Progressives pledged to higher grain duties fought against Independents urging a return to free trade. With the refocusing of agriculture's concerns from taxes to tariffs and the farmers' developing awareness of their conflicts with urban interests, the sort of electoral struggle that had been the exception in 1881, when Max Heyl challenged Ludwig Bamberger over protectionism in Bingen-Alzey, now became the rule. To wage this battle where it had not occurred before—in Bensheim-Erbach and the three constituencies of Oberhessen—the Hessian Progressives picked three former Reichstag deputies and a well-known industrialist, responsible men whose promises to serve the countryside's needs could be trusted. Only one of these candidates was defeated, and then in a runoff surprise in Friedberg-Büdingen. In the other districts—Giessen, AlsfeldLauterbach-Schotten and Bensheim-Erbach—the Hessian Progressives returned the mandates to the National Liberal column. 8 As in 1881 the fiercest campaign in the Grand Duchy took place in Bingen-Alzey, where for a second time Ludwig Bamberger had to defend his free trading principles against a candidate encouraged jointly by the protectionist farmers of his area and by Cornelius Heyl in nearby Worms. Although a good deal was said about colonialism and Bamberger's role in defeating the steamer subsidy in the Reichstag, the heat of the battle was generated by the tariff issue. ' 'The farmers want to know nothing more of Bamberger," the Prussian envoy in Darmstadt was told in April. To offer them an alternative the local Hessian Progressives nominated Friedrich von Schauss, the coleader of the 1879 "Secession to the right" whom Heidelberg had just reconciled to National Liberalism. In his first appearance in the district Schauss declared that he was not a protectionist in principle, but if shown the need he was ready to vote for a moderate increase in grain tariffs. This was the standard National Liberal promise in Hessen in 1884, and

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everyone knew that the qualifying condition was meaningless—not trade statistics but the people who made him their standardbearer put Schauss on the side of higher duties. Nevertheless, after weeks of the wildest campaigning the district had ever witnessed, Bamberger again survived the challenge. Schauss's vote in the first ballot surpassed Max Heyl's total in 1881, but it remained confined within the same geographic limits. Bamberger then won the runoff easily, as the Catholics swung behind him with their man out of the field.' Although, by losing Bingen-Alzey and Friedberg-Büdingen, the Hessian Progressives missed a sweep in the rural constituencies, the actual electoral returns are the best evidence of their success with agriculture in 1884. In Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten they swamped the Independent incumbent everywhere outside Alsfeld and Schotten and their immediate environs. In Glessen and in Bensheim-Erbach they rolled up large enough margins in the outlying villages, often in the nearunanimous proportions of the 1870s, to offset left liberal strength in areas of light manufacturing or Catholic population. Even in defeat in Friedberg-Büdingen they led the balloting on the land; the Independent could not have won without Catholic and Social Democratic crossovers in the runoff. Similarly, in Bingen-Alzey, where Bamberger took forty-one towns to Schauss's thirty-five, the latter did best in the smaller localities where grain crops were primary. 10 Viewed collectively the 1884 results in the country districts offer a final proof of the Hessian Progressives' accomplishment in maintaining leadership among an agricultural electorate in transformation. In that respect the party's new commitment to tariffs and to the points laid down at Heidelberg may be seen as a means of continuing the policy of previous years, assuring the Hessian Progressives of the representative leadership they had achieved earlier on a different complex of issues. Continuity is also discernible in the urban returns of 1884. The need to temper working-class discontent through social legislation was a matter of common agreement among Hessian Progressives, and reform hopes akin to the sentiments expressed at Heidelberg also entered the Frankfurt discussions of March 23 and April 27. But the autumn election results showed that neither social liberalism nor the colonial agitation that began in June had seriously affected proletarian voters. Urban Hessian Progressives thus gained nothing from their party's new approach to the laboring classes. On the other hand, in forswearing alliances with other liberals under the terms of Heyl's motion of April 27, they were put at a severe campaign disadvantage. In Offenbach-Dieburg and Mainz-Oppenheim, where it was obvious that the urban notables could not command sufficient support on their own, demoralization in the local

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associations delayed the selection of candidates until October, the month of the election. The Hessian Progressives lost both constituencies. By contrast, the party chose its men early and won in Worms-Heppenheim and Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau, where the opposition in the past had been more left liberal than socialist. Worms-Heppenheim provided an easy victory for the incumbent "Heidelberger" Heinrich Marquardsen, who had a friendly press to assist him; with the tobacco monopoly out of the picture the Independents did not even nominate a challenger. In Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau the Hessian Progressives were given an opening through the retirement of the left liberal deputy Büchner, and they and the Social Democrats both pulled away enough votes from the Independents to knock them out of the running on the first ballot. The runoff then gave their candidate, Justus Ulrich, a brewer from Pfungstadt, a safe majority." Regaining an urban district, however, was not the same as reversing a general trend; in the long run the Hessian Progressives' reorientation of 1884 failed to halt the party's slippage in the cities. Even the triumph in Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau had its darker side, for Ulrich owed it chiefly to the steep falloff of support for the left liberals, a change from which the potentially more formidable Social Democrats also profited. In all, the 1884 electoral results indicate that the party's shift of position had accentuated the imbalance in its rural and urban strength already evident before Heidelberg. The new orientation assisted the Hessian Progressives in maintaining their claim to representativeness in the countryside; if anything, it weakened their appeal in the cities. In the next elections, in 1887, these tendencies were momentarily interrupted. Now more frequently calling themselves National Liberals, the Hessian Progressives added Offenbach-Dieburg and Friedberg-Büdingen to the five seats they had won in 1884. Fundamentally the outcome reflected Bismarck's success in making the vote a plebiscite on the rejection, by the Independent, Social Democratic, and Center deputies in the Reichstag, of a new military bill in the face of what the chancellor persuaded the nation to believe was a threat of war from France.12 But whereas the victory in industrial Offenbach-Dieburg was the last but one for the Hessian National Liberals, the party repeated its triumph in rural Friedberg-Büdingen five times in the later years of the Empire. During the dozen or so years after 1884 which encompassed the era of Heidelberg in the Grand Duchy, the Honoratioren still ruled in politics. As in the 1870s, the educated and the wealthy, usually the same people, influenced Hessian society to a degree far beyond what they merited by their numbers. In the counties and provinces and in the state government the National Liberals continued to exercise a preponderant influence.

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Only in 1896 did the party's margin in the second chamber fall low enough, to twenty-six of fifty seats, to threaten its exclusive rule. At long last, a left liberal observer wrote, the "absolute dominance" of the National Liberals was over; it was now time that they open up the legislature's committees to the deputies of other groups. 13 In that remark lay a pathetic acknowledgment of how successfully the notables had guarded their power. At the top level of government the hold of the liberal Honoratioren was stronger during these years than it had been before. If he wore no party label on his sleeve, Jacob Finger, the Grand Duchy's chief minister between 1884 and 1898, was seen by others as a National Liberal, and several experienced party members gained high office under him. August Weber, the finance minister who served through most of Finger's tenure, was one of the first. Emil Dittmar, who entered the administration in the late eighties and became justice minister in 1897, had earlier been one of the party's outstanding personalities in Giessen and a member of the Hessian Progressive executive. When Finger and Weber retired in 1898, another liberal career bureaucrat became chief minister, while the finances were entrusted to Wilhelm Küchler, the National Liberal mayor of Worms, a friend of Heyl and a veteran of the party's inner circle.14 Thus National Liberalism became the proper political affiliation in the upper echelons of the civil service. By the same token it did not pay to oppose the party publicly. One Provinzialdirektor who did, Max von Gagern, the son of the 1848 statesman Heinrich von Gagern, was reported thereby to have eliminated himself as a future ministerial possibility. 15 Unquestionably the leading figure of Hessian National Liberalism in the aftermath of 1884 was Cornelius Heyl. Forty-one in the year of Heidelberg, energetic and dedicated in the traditions of reform Protestantism—Laboremus was the family motto he chose—Heyl now commanded a personal influence unmatched in the Grand Duchy by anyone outside the ducal family and the state administration. In a portrait done a year earlier by the famed painter Franz Lenbach, the man whom his enemies grudgingly called the Grand Duke of Worms stares ahead with assurance, his even features firmly set in the manner of an individual who knows he will be listened to. Heyl was now a notable among notables. In 1884 he purchased the estate of the dukes of Dalberg at Herrnsheim, near Worms, and took up residence in its empire-style palace. In the same year he commissioned a more spacious and elegant home, the Heylshof, to be built in the city itself. Thus Heyl already had adopted the style of an aristocrat when, two years later in March 1886, he was elevated to the hereditary nobility by his friend Ludwig IV and given the title Baron von Heyl zu Herrnsheim. Between 1884 and 1890, while the national party held to the course

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marked out at Heidelberg, Heyl had little direct involvement in Reich politics. Bismarck's dismissal in March 1890 left him uneasy, however; and increasingly over the next three years his alarm grew over the policies, especially respecting tariffs, that were undertaken by the new chancellor, General Leo von Caprivi. In 1893 he reclaimed his old mandate from Marquardsen and returned to the Reichstag. During the interval he had remained active in state and local affairs, as well as in the management of his economic enterprises. He played a leading role both in the first chamber of the Diet, where he had sat since 1876, and in the municipal council of Worms, where he held a place by virtue of his status as highest-taxed citizen. Undoubtedly Heyl also had a hand next door in Bingen-Alzey during the 1887 Reichstag elections, when his brother Maximilian was persuaded "to make a personal sacrifice for the good cause" and run, again unsuccessfully, against Ludwig Bamberger.16 After Heyl the most important National Liberal personality in the Hessen of the 1880s and 1890s was Arthur Osann. As chairman of the party's executive committee, parliamentary leader in the Landstände, campaign speaker at innumerable rallies, and Reichstag deputy for Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau from 1890 to 1898, Osann influenced every dimension of National Liberal activity in the Grand Duchy. In 1891 he became a member of the national party's executive. In the 1893-1898 Reichstag session he belonged to the nine-man leadership of the National Liberal delegation.17 As the Hessian party's indispensable man Osann had ample opportunity to promote loyalty to the policies he had helped to formulate in 1884, and his retirement from the forefront of politics in 1898 contributed to the closing of an era in the Grand Duchy. The increased significance of the countryside in the period following 1884 is evidenced in the appearance of a number of new local National Liberal leaders who came from agricultural backgrounds. An older generation of farm spokesmen was now stepping into the shadows. Of the new men in the front rank, Wilhelm Haas, mentioned in an earlier chapter, was the best known. Haas, however, was too involved in the work of the Agricultural Associations and the cooperative movement to be anything more than a good Reichstag candidate for rural constituencies, and it was left to others to assume the political initiative in the country districts. One of the most active was Fritz Schade, a recently elected Landtag deputy from Altenburg, near Alsfeld, who had been among the most outspoken advocates of the middle farmer in the 18821884 debates on tax reform. Schade was another typical rural notable—a pioneer in dairy farming, a member of the county board in Kreis Alsfeld and of the Provinzialkommission of Oberhessen, and between 1881 and 1894 the representative of his home area in the second chamber in Darm-

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Stadt. In 1887 he can be found as a correspondent reporting on moneylending abuses for the Verein für Sozialpolitik, in 1890 as a charter member of a provincial association to combat usury, in 1893 as the local chairman of the new Bund der Landwirte, in 1898 as an unsuccessful Reichstag candidate in Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten. 18 With the emergence of politically knowledgeable farmers like Schade, a transformation within the ranks of the Honoratioren commenced in Oberhessen, where urban professionals, officials, and aristocrats (notably Baron Adalbert von Nordeck zu Rabenau) had previously dominated political life. For the Hessian National Liberals the consequence was a strengthening of agrarian influence, which henceforth had a strong base in Oberhessen in addition to its older roots in rural Rheinhessen. Oberhessen was also the home province of the fastest-rising new National Liberal leader of the eighties and nineties, Count Waldemar von Oriola. Oriola was an exception in the Hessian party, which never had more than a few aristocratic members, but then he was not an ordinary nobleman either. Born in Bonn, he had chosen a legal education and started up the ladder of the Prussian bureaucracy, a conventional beginning. But in 1880, still a young man, he quit the civil service and turned to agriculture, on his family's estate at Büdesheim in the Wetterau, and to politics. In 1884 he became a member of the county assembly in Kreis Friedberg, in 1887 he was elected to the second chamber, in 1890 he ran unsuccessfully for the Reichstag in Friedberg-Büdingen. But defeat did not halt his advance. In the spring of 1893 he became the provincial chairman of the Bund der Landwirte in Oberhessen. That June he won the Reichstag seat that had eluded him in the previous election. As a deputy Oriola distinguished himself by keeping in close touch with his constituency, frequently reporting on his activity in Berlin at meetings in the towns and villages of his district. As the saying goes, he did his homework. Think of what he had done, the election committee in Friedberg-Büdingen urged when he first ran for reelection, for the railroad network in the Wetterau, for the Gymnasium and the church in Friedberg, for the retention of the garrison in Butzbach. And the voters continued to think enough of such efforts that Oriola remained his district's Reichstag deputy until his death in 1910." Apart from agricultural spokesmen like Oriola and Schade, lawyers provided the Hessian National Liberals' leadership in the countryside during the decade and a half after 1884. In the cities that role still was filled primarily by men from industry and commerce, although lawyers again were also influential. Among the new urban National Liberal personalities Joseph Schlossmacher was the most significant figure. For Schlossmacher, secretary and then syndic of the Offenbach chamber of

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commerce, politics were part of the job. In 1884 and again in 1898 he ran as the National Liberal candidate for the Reichstag in Offenbach-Dieburg. In the intervening campaigns of 1887, 1890, and 1893 he took a leading part in organization and electioneering. Schlossmacher entered the political scene in 1884 as the protégé of the National Liberal industrialists—foremost, August Kugler and Gustav Böhm—for whom he worked in the chamber of commerce; and in the following years he became perhaps the most energetic advocate of business opinion in the Grand Duchy. As a candidate he liked to emphasize his rural upbringing for the benefit of the farmers in Kreis Dieburg, but his speeches expressed the concerns of Hessen's manufacturers and commercial institutions. Again and again Schlossmacher insisted that German commercial policy must keep foreign markets accessible. He argued that colonial expansion was vital to the nation's well-being. After 1893 he became a leading opponent of the tariff demands of the Bund der Landwirte in the name of a balanced policy that respected the importing needs of the processing industries, the key productive sector in Offenbach as well as the entire Grand Duchy. 20 In representing these views Schlossmacher spoke for a minority of Hessian National Liberals in the Heidelberg era. For until the final years of the century the majority believed that the party's fortunes hung on its ability to meet agriculture's demands. For better or worse, in regard to economic policy the cities would have to pay the freight. In the years after Heidelberg most Hessians still respected the norms of manners and deference upon which the rule of the Honoratioren operated. Among the Social Democratic workers, however, the old standards had lost their force. The estrangement of the urban proletariat was already evident in 1884, not only in the "alarming increase" in the socialist vote that was reported to Berlin but also in the frequently rough assertiveness of the workers. In Darmstadt Social Democrats broke up two Hessian Progressive rallies in answer to a leaflet attacking their candidate, and troops had to be called out to restore calm. Soldiers were also sent into the streets in Mainz on the night of the runoff, when the workers began parading in anticipation of a socialist victory—which did not come. 21 Over the next few years the bitter atmosphere continued. In January 1885 a police inspector who had made a name for himself in undercover activity against workingmen's groups was found murdered in Frankfurt. In July police with drawn sabers charged the crowd at a Social Democratic funeral ceremony, again in Frankfurt. A year and a half later limited martial law was imposed upon both Frankfurt and Offenbach. 22 Under the astute leadership of Carl Ulrich the Hessian Social Democrats exploited the opportunities in this situation. Avoiding frontal

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attacks, capitalizing on the Hessian government's reluctance to enforce the antisocialist law, they pressed forward their agitation not only in the cities but in the small towns and villages as well. Often a locality's political life began when a Social Democratic organizer paid it a visit. By the 1890s activists like the young Philipp Scheidemann in Oberhessen were carrying the socialist message deep into the countryside, sometimes to be greeted with fists or snarling dogs but more often with curiosity and a willingness to hear them out. The Hessian Social Democrats won their first two Landtag seats in a Mainz by-election of 1885. By 1898 they had increased their strength to five. Progress here was difficult because of the tax requirement for electors under the Hessian system of indirect suffrage. In Reichstag elections it was smoother; and after being defeated across the board in the 1887 war-scare campaign, the Social Democrats won both Offenbach-Dieburg and Mainz-Oppenheim in 1890. They repeated these victories in 1893. Then, although losing Mainz-Oppenheim, they captured Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau in the next elections in 1898, a symbolic conquest of the center of authority in Hessen. 23 In October 1884, mulling over the outcome of the first round of Reichstag balloting, the Frankfurter Zeitung wrote that voters in the cities were apparently doubtful about the progress which the liberal parties held in prospect for them; as the results showed, they had put their hopes instead in the promises of the Social Democrats. If the trend continued, the newspaper went on, every large city and eventually even the surrounding countryside would be voting socialist. Apart from Baron von Heyl's success in holding Worms-Heppenheim loyal to National Liberalism, the experience in the Grand Duchy in the decade and a half after 1884 confirmed this prediction. Migration into the cities and suburbs rushed forward in the 1880s and 1890s. Many who stayed behind to live on the land also began to commute to urban workplaces. As industry expanded and as the secondary nets of railroad lines penetrated into the rural areas, the boundaries of Social Democratic influence also lengthened—into the Main plain from Offenbach and Mainz, into the northern Odenwald from Darmstadt, into the Wetterau from Frankfurt and Hanau in Prussia, and into the Bergstrasse and the southern Odenwald from Mannheim and Weinheim in Baden. In the last five years of the century the Social Democrats broke through into the runoffs in three rural Reichstag constituencies—Glessen in a special election in 1896, and Friedberg-Büdingen and Bensheim-Erbach in 1898.24 As long as the socialists were not powerful enough to win a district outright, the easiest line of defense for the National Liberals was to get through the first ballot with as high a total as possible and then to appeal for unity in the runoff against the party of revolution. 25 After the failure

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of social liberalism in 1884, urban leaders in the Hessian party did not search for other approaches to the working class electorate but instead looked for support against the " r e d s . " It was a tactic that did not mesh well with the commitment to independent campaigning of 1884, for the logic of the situation in the cities pointed to alliance with other parties as the best means of assuring a common front against the Social Democrats. Until the closing years of the century, however, the urban National Liberals held to the Heidelberg position. Lacking a positive alternative, they stood their ground against the proletarian tide and waged their negative runoff battles with the help of whatever allies they could attract. They could fairly claim to have kept the score even in the cities. Under the circumstances that was a satisfactory enough result, whatever might be the longterm indications in the electoral returns. In maintaining their domination of the institutions of government in the period after 1884 as well as in failing to attract working class support, National Liberals in the Grand Duchy perpetuated trends that had characterized their party in its first dozen years in power. Until 1890 continuity also marked the Hessian party's situation in the countryside, where its turn to protectionism had anchored its leadership on a new and seemingly firm foundation. But in 1890 the string broke in the farm areas. For the first time since the early seventies the National Liberals lost large numbers of voters in rural constituencies. The force that shook their hold was a new agrarian movement built around a populist creed of anti-Semitism. It erupted into the Grand Duchy in the winter of 1889-90, rapidly captured a broad following, and came away f r o m the Reichstag balloting of January-March with two of the three mandates in Oberhessen. In the next few years the National Liberals were unable to stop its advance; they were heavily pressed to hold their own against a proliferation of antiSemitic candidates. Yet the threat the new movement posed to them was grave. They had staked their electoral future on the countryside in 1884, and now they faced the danger of being undercut there as they had been in the cities by the Social Democrats. As they recovered f r o m the first anti-Semitic onslaught, most party members found themselves in agreement that the best means of fighting their new opponents was a more respectable agrarianism. In subsequent Reichstag and Landtag elections this tactic yielded mixed results. Within the party, however, it eventually produced division over the lengths to which the National Liberals should go to satisfy farm demands. Again, as in the two previous decades, the agricultural electorate forced a crisis of direction in Hessian National Liberalism. Agrarian anti-Semitism first penetrated into Hessian politics during

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the 1881 campaign in Bingen-Alzey. The newspaper reports which mentioned it offered no explanation for its appearance, however, and its nature remains obscure. To an extent it represented an extreme form of personal resentment toward Ludwig Bamberger, but its tones also expressed the frustration of farmers in Rheinhessen with the grain and wine markets. The same shadowy hatreds again emerged here and there three years later in Bamberger's contest with Schauss, 26 but in 1884 antiSemitism was more prominent in the three constituencies of Oberhessen. There the furor was ignited by the publication of a letter sent by two Jewish left liberals in Glessen to the executive body of the city's Jewish community, in which they urged support for the Independent incumbent, Egid Gutfleisch, on the ground that his party, in contrast to the National Liberals, had stood up for religious equality in the Reichstag. The heat of the response, which was most intense in the neighboring districts of Friedberg-Büdingen and Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten, indicates that feeling against the Jews had already been simmering; only a small spark was needed to touch off an explosion. 27 The conclusion of a newspaper insert directed against Hugo Hinze, the Independent candidate in Friedberg-Büdingen, conveys the crudeness of the sentiment that now surfaced: Who, most of all, gives money for Hinze? The Jews. Who speaks in all the public houses for Hinze? The Jews. Who distributes leaflets and ballots for Hinze? The Jews. We are averse to all religious animosity, we have always spoken out most resolutely against all anti-Semitic efforts and rejected them as shameful,but we call out to you: Christian voters, do not be led astray from your convictions for the national and liberal party, turn away all the tricks of persuasion that are being made on the part of the Jews to change your mind to favor Major Hinze. And if some Jews have remarked that they have entire villages in their pockets for the German Independents, show them on election day that you are free from Jewish influence and vote National Liberal. 28 Typically, such slanders were printed without attribution or bore anonymous signatures like " A friend of agriculture." Politically they were aimed at the left liberals, not only as the allies of the Jews but also as the party of Berlin, which was the source of big money, big industry, and low morals.Their authors did not describe the National Liberals with the same vocabulary of good and evil with which they attacked the Jews; rather they were available and trustworthy men who would break a lance for agriculture by approving an increase in grain tariffs. National Liberals in Hessen thus benefited in 1884 from political anti-Semitism

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without having it directly associated with their campaigns. If the party's speakers addressed the issue, they defended their record on tolerance and criticized the Giessen letter and, occasionally, the responses to it.2* Anti-Semitism played no part in the 1887 Reichstag campaigns in the Grand Duchy, but it was a prime factor in the Marburg-Frankenberg district just above the northern border of Oberhessen. There a young folklorist named Otto Bockel won election on a straight anti-Semitic platform—the first victory of its kind in Imperial Germany. Otto Böckel has gone down in local memory as the "peasant king" of Oberhessen in the late eighties and early nineties. He was still in his twenties when he entered the Reichstag, a native of Frankfurt who had dropped legal studies for Volkskunde early in his university career and had come to politics by way of the contacts he made with farmers in Oberhessen and the former Electorate of Hessen during his rural expeditions in search of folk songs. Böckel's chief polemics—"The Jewish Peril to Europe" (1883), "The Jews, Kings of Our Epoch" (1886), "The Quintessence of the Jewish Question" (1889)—fall into the current of anti-Semitic writing combining racial with economic argumentation, and they are not unusual for his time. The distinguishing feature of his politics and movement lay rather in his populism. Böckel's slogan in 1887 was Gegen Junker und Juden—Against Junkers and Jews—and his standard was the red, black, and gold banner of the 1848 revolution. He called on Hessian farmers not only to make an end to what he charged was servitude to Jewish interests but to organize for self-help through credit associations and "Jewish-free" markets. Among the goals he outlined in an 1890 speech in Giessen were the introduction of a progressive income tax, reduction of the taxes on spirits, and lowering of legal costs and lawyers' fees—all aims with which his listeners were familiar from left liberal campaign literature. On another occasion he called his program "politically liberal"—a joke coming from a man who wanted to deprive one group of citizens of their civil rights, yet Böckel did defend freedom of speech and the press and even demanded abolition of the three-class voting system in Prussia. He was simultaneously antidemocratic and radical. 30 After his election in Marburg-Frankenberg Böckel attempted to extend his movement into the Grand Duchy. His first forays in 1887, to Londorf and Lollar in Kreis Giessen and Homberg in Kreis Alsfeld, met with resistance from both the Hessian authorities and the local Jewish communities, but he remained undeterred. In November 1889 he accepted the invitation of a group of students in Giessen to stand for the Reichstag in their constituency in the elections scheduled for the following January. A second anti-Semitic candidate, Oswald Zimmermann, a publisher from Leipzig, was found for Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten. Yet

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the Finger ministry showed little concern about their chances. Similarly, in the course of the campaign, Arthur Osann wondered publicly whether the anti-Semites were of sound mind, much less qualified to serve in the Reichstag. But National Liberal observers close to the scene did not discount them so lightly. After Zimmermann was cheered in Zell early in February, a local paper deplored "still how little comprehension our people have in political and legislative questions." An account of a joint appearance by Bockel and Zimmermann in Homberg ten days later expressed alarm at the "daemonic influence that the anti-Semitic leaders were able to gain over the masses during the course of the evening." The election results confirmed these misgivings. In both constituencies the National Liberal candidates lost out on the first ballot—actually twice in Giessen, where a second round of voting had to be held after the victor in the first, the former Independent deputy Egid Gutfleisch, accepted election in Friedberg-Büdingen, where he also ran and won. Gutfleisch's stand-in was beaten by an anti-Semitic salesman from Berlin, Wilhelm Pickenbach, after Bockel had been elected again in Marburg-Frankenberg. Zimmermann meanwhile defeated a left liberal in the runoff in Alsf eld-Lauterbach-Schotten. 31 In 1890 the percentage of Jews in the total population of the Grand Duchy stood at 2.57, among the highest regional averages in the Reich. Jews first came to the Rhine-Main area in Roman times and in the early middle ages. During the medieval centuries their numbers were augmented by refugees from English and French persecutions; later, around 1500, Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition also settled in the German Southwest. In the territories that afterward became Hessen an internal Jewish migration into the Vogelsberg has been traced back to the fourteenth century. Settlement in rural areas was encouraged primarily by the numerous territorial magnates and local nobles, whose trading price for toleration generally took the form of heavy special taxes. In 1662 the drift of Jews into the country villages and small towns was pushed further ahead by their expulsion from the cities of the Landgravate of Hessen-Darmstadt. Although there was a subsequent return to the urban centers, the distinguishing characteristic of the Jewish population in the areas later consolidated into the Grand Duchy remained its dispersion across the countryside. There the Jews followed the pursuits allowed them by the laws and, as moneylenders, small merchants, or cattle and grain dealers, became functioning elements of their rural communities. 32 Periodically anti-Semitic excesses broke out in Hessen during the middle ages and Reformation, outbursts of the usual sort that took the Jews as surrogates for feudal lords or urban patricians. But these abated during the absolutist era between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

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Jewish life, as a part of the rural existence in Hessen, remained relatively undisturbed until the French Revolution and Napoleonic order revolutionized both. For Christians and Jews alike in the countryside, the crucial event of this period was the Bauernbefreiung—the freeing of the rural population from feudal obligations. A fairly reliable index of the incidence of agrarian anti-Semitism at the end of the century may be constructed by surveying the burden of debts with which the emancipated Hessian farmers were saddled during its initial decades. In Rheinhessen the dispossessions carried out by the French left no indemnities to be paid, and anti-Semitism afterwards never got beyond the limited dimensions it reached in the 1881 and 1884 Reichstag campaigns. In Oberhessen and Starkenburg, by contrast, peasant liberation was a mocking euphemism. Here farmers had to repay the state for the compensation it had decreed for the nobility. In practice this obligation often became a debt to a local Jewish merchant or trader, who lent money for the annual indemnity payment when the farmer could not make it on his own. The result was a state of enmity, punctuated by occasional violence, as during the rural riots in Oberhessen in 1830, or by heated controversy, as in the reaction to the 1859 novel of conflict between Jews and farmers, Das Volk und seine TreiberAs the Great Depression of the seventies and eighties worsened the situation of Hessian agriculture, anti-Semitic resentment increased in Oberhessen and Starkenburg and finally flowed over into politics. Although they were preceded by the agitation in Bingen-Alzey, the newspaper attacks against the Jews in Oberhessen in 1884 were the more portentous signs of the new trend. Over the next six years anti-Semitism became a powerful movement in the Hessian territories north of the Main and began to spread into Starkenburg. It made little further progress, however, on the left bank of the Rhine. The economic position occupied by Jews in rural Hessen deserves some additional accounting before the other elements encouraging anti-Semitism in the Grand Duchy are considered. Transacting business was a dilemma for the ordinary farmer—selling crops and cattle, buying goods and supplies, obtaining credit. In most cases he made the Jewish merchant or trader his agent. In the beginning the latter was generally a local man. By the last quarter of the century, however, savings banks and consumer associations were entering the village scene, and the farmer did not have to rely on Jewish sources. Nonetheless, as this excerpt from a turn-of-the-century novel suggests, the country man's calculations were not strictly economic: The Jew gives money and keeps quiet—he has his receipt and the

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premium on the loan. If the borrower goes to the bank or the Raiffeisen association instead of to the Jew, they snoop around and rummage through all his property to check his solvency, and a lot of that gets out. The farmer won't stand that. His means ought to remain his secret. Letting association committees and commissions look into that strikes him as something shameful and dangerous. This danger does not exist with the Jew. 34 In his 1887 report to the Verein für Sozialpolitik Fritz Schade rendered a similar judgment. Along with confidentiality, he pointed out, Jewish moneylenders also offered lower interest charges than the savings banks and credit associations. Rural indebtedness, Schade further suggested, now rarely began with a great personal disaster but rather built up over years of exchange between farmer and trader. One day the farmer simply discovered himself in a trap from which there was no escape without financial ruin. Schade laced his analysis with a considerable amount of devil-theory in regard to the Jews, and he offered little statistical evidence for his claims. Still, contemporary observers almost unanimously supported his general analysis, and much of the recent research on rural anti-Semitism in Hessen has gone back to a similar, but unprejudiced perspective in emphasizing the economic motives behind the Bockel movement. 35 Again the emergence of indebtedness as a major agricultural issue points to the danger one courts in viewing rural politics in Imperial Germany solely from the perspective of tariff controversies. To be sure, Otto Bockel and his followers stood on the side of protectionism. In the late eighties, however, after successive increases had lifted grain duties to five Marks per hundredweight from the 1879 rate of one Mark, tariffs could not be said to be imperiled, and returns on grain crops were achieving respectable levels. Indebtedness, on the other hand, had become a chronic and apparently worsening malady in many sections of the Hessian countryside. Beyond the inheritance of capital-poor operations left behind by the Bauernbefreiung, a series of additional factors kept farmers in these areas, primarily the Vogelsberg and Odenwald, on the razor's edge financially. Soil was poor, railroads and markets were still distant, techniques of cultivation and livestock breeding still backward. Hand-weaving, earlier a basic source of supplementary income for much of the population, had collapsed under the competition of mechanized production, and nothing replaced it. In many sections, finally, the principle of indivisibility still ruled in landholding, another heritage from the aristocratic order. Small owners in trouble were thereby prevented from selling some of their land in order to preserve the rest. 36 Instead they were driven to borrowing. In other areas of the Grand Duchy—most

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of Rheinhessen; the Main plain, Ried and Bergstrasse in Starkenburg; the Wetterau in Oberhessen—conditions were strikingly more favorable. The land was fertile, transportation was accessible, industrial jobs were available, farmholdings were divisible. The numbers of Jews in these regions were comparable to those in the poorer sections. Without widespread indebtedness, however, anti-Semitism made few inroads in politics. As much as the economic and demographic evolution explains why political anti-Semitism became viable in parts of Hessen, it does not account for its actual emergence in the latter years of the Bismarckian era. Half a century earlier, in the opening lines of their Hessische Landbote, Georg Büchner and Ludwig Weidig had laid the responsibility for rural poverty at the feet of a group other than the Jews: The life of those of rank is a long Sunday, they live in beautiful houses, they wear elegant clothes, they have plump faces and speak a language of their own; but the people are spread out before them like manure on a field.11 If "the Jews" is substituted for "those of rank" the passage would fit easily into the anti-Semitic literature of the eighties and nineties. To explain why the focus of agricultural resentment shifted in this manner is a task to fill volumes, but the general reasons may be outlined quickly. As the slump in production and trade extended year after year following the crash of 1873, anger at the invisible workings of the new capitalist economy ceased to be a socialist and proletarian monopoly. Rather than reject the entire system of property, however, the small businessmen, artisans, and middle farmers who made up the new party of the disaffected put the blame on the Jews, whose long-standing role in banking and investment made them prominent actors in the new world of stock companies and exchange quotations, and whose recent civil emancipation and social ascent made them appear the most visible beneficiaries of that world. Uncertainty, moreover, was not confined to economics in the seventies and eighties. A modern pace of life was overtaking Germany, forcing people to reassess the comfortable norms and culture with which they had grown up. In the broadest sense anti-Semitism represented a rebellion against the transition to industrial society. It interpreted the new as the alien and then attributed it to a "foreign" element, the Jews. In rural areas the unmistakable advance of the city over the countryside offered an additional impetus in this direction. Perhaps most important, the unification of economic activity in a national and international framework created a new context for the rural moneylender—he was no longer just the local Jew; he was now an agent of Jewry, the purported

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force behind the new strive-and-struggle existence. When an Otto Bockel demanded that the Jews be purged from commerce and government, he was asking as much as anything for the return of an imaginary era of pastoral harmony and the good old virtues. 38 This revolt against the modernizing world and the Jews who were allegedly its evil geniuses necessarily identified its political targets as the parties that had been "judaicized." In 1884, as we have seen, left liberalism was characterized in this manner in Oberhessen. Both in the Grand Duchy and in the Reich, however, the logic of the anti-Semites pointed more directly at National Liberalism as the enemy: was any party more closely associated with the laws, the economic system, and the values that threatened them? Many of the first wave of anti-Semitic pamphlets in Germany followed this line of argument in the late seventies. A decade later Bockel repeated it in his Reichstag campaigns in Oberhessen. Anti-Semitic-National Liberal conflict was also encouraged, however, by the political geography of the Grand Duchy. Heidelberg and the 1884 elections had allowed the National Liberals to reassert themselves as the major party of rural Hessen. To build his movement Bockel needed their voters. "Just as the rest of the parties ranged against the National Liberal Party . . . the anti-Semitic party owes its success to the recruitment of dissatisfied elements; it will vanish again in the same manner that it arrived." 39 This prophecy that Arthur Osann offered to an electoral rally in Glessen in March 1890 echoes the attitude expressed by the national party's leaders in the crisis of 1878-81: others may lose their heads but not us; our task is to hold fast until good sense returns. But the early 1890s was not a period to encourage calm among Hessian farmers. Eighteen ninety and 1891 were poor harvest years. Then in 1892 a flood of imported grain from Russia and the United States sent prices skidding downward into a three- to four-year decline.40 More "dissatisfied elements" were created by these setbacks, and Bockel's organizational efforts produced a continuing flow of new adherents. The farmers' association he founded in 1890, the Mitteldeutsche Bauernverein, grew rapidly over the next few years. Even more impressive in the public eye, the movement drew unprecedented crowds to its gatherings—15,000 persons at a "Jewish-free" market in Lang-Göns in 1890, 10,000 to the dedication of the colors of the Muschenheim Ortsgruppe in 1892.41 Böckel's organizational successes complicated the issue of how the National Liberals should respond to the anti-Semitic wave. Already in 1887 Fritz Schade had criticized the combined Hessian Agricultural Associations as "an organization that more often makes allowances for

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refined bureaucratic form than it promotes practical achievement." If they were to close the gap between themselves and the ordinary farmer, Schade went on, and give adequate expression to his concerns, the associations needed to scrap their Kreis organizations in favor of Gauvereine, local units built around the common economic interests of a vicinity. Only three years after Heidelberg, then, one rural National Liberal perceived the leadership of the notables to be falling short in the day-to-day affairs of the countryside.42 But rather than Schade's fellow Honoratioren and by extension his party, it was BöckePs Mitteldeutsche Bauernverein that seized the opportunity to organize agriculture intensively on the village level. National Liberals in Oberhessen did not merely lose a couple of elections in 1890. They also suffered a severe blow to their position of economic and social authority in the province. It followed that if they were going to win back the rural voters who had strayed from their ranks, they must also outcompete the anti-Semites organizationally. In the first years after 1890, however, they found no easy way to do so. With the founding of the Bund der Landwirte in February 1893 the organizational instrument the Hessian National Liberals were seeking fell into their hands almost as suddenly as the anti-Semites had burst into the Grand Duchy. Eventually the Bund developed into the most relentless and perhaps the most powerful interest group in Wilhelmine Germany. In 1893 it was a defensive league of grain farmers, formed in reaction to a succession of reverses—the poor harvests of 1890 and 1891, the price decline of 1892, and, the unkindest cut of all, the reductions in agricultural tariffs carried through the Reichstag by the new chancellor Caprivi, in renewing the Reich's commercial treaties with Austria-Hungary and Italy. In the last Bismarckian decade German farmers had enjoyed a favored status politically and economically. Caprivi's readiness to use agricultural duties as bargaining chips in negotiations for industrial export markets rudely brought them down. Their response was swift and bitter. "We have to strike out those paragraphs in the statutes of our agricultural associations that prohibit political activity, for we must engage in politics and specifically interest politics . . . only through ruthless and unvarnished interest politics can the interests of today's farmers perhaps be saved . . . we must cease to be and to vote liberal, ultramontane, or conservative, rather we must unite in a single great agrarian party and thereby seek to gain more influence on parliaments and legislation." These were the key passages in the December 1892 appeal of the Silesian leaseholder Ruprecht/Ransern and the immediate stimulus to the creation of the Bund der Landwirte the following February in Berlin. Conservative agrarians from East Elbia and Silesia

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were the prime movers in the new organization, but it quickly attracted support throughout Germany. In Hessen its first meeting, a mammoth rally of five thousand farmers from all corners of the South and Southwest, took place in Mainz just five weeks after the founding congress in Berlin. 43 By the end of April 1893, the BdL was functioning in all three Hessian provinces, and a six-man executive committee was running its affairs. National Liberal affiliations strongly marked this group. Two of its members, Count Oriola and the leaseholder Richard Westernacher of Lindheim, sat for the party in the Landtag. Among the others the chairman, Karl Lucke, had played a part in the 1887 campaign in Offenbach-Dieburg, while both of the representatives from Rheinhessen, Simon Hasselbach and Otto Möllinger, were active in the National Liberal organizations of their constituencies. 44 The same party shading characterized the chief figures in the organization's local branches. Bund leadership in Hessen read something like an honor roll of rural National Liberal notables, a social character underscored by the friendliness with which the establishment-oriented Agricultural Associations welcomed the new league. It was not altogether unfair of the anti-Semites to lump the Hessian BdL leaders together with champagne-drinking aristocratic land magnates in northern and eastern Germany. The tastes of the country Honoratioren in the Grand Duchy may have been more modest, but undeniably the Bund was controlled by estate owners and leaseholders of noble and domain lands, men of means whose first concerns, like those of the Prussian Junker, were grain and tariffs. 45 It was a very different group from Bockel and the other anti-Semitic leaders of 1890—socially a ragamuffin collection of academics, journalists, and small businessmen with little economic connection to the land, individuals whose personal experience had brushed against the subuniverse of indebted lives and marginal existences that their agitation protested. This difference also is evidenced in the varying degrees of the BdL's local success. It quickly recruited a following in wealthier areas like Rheinhessen, the Wetterau, and the flatland near the Main. Its progress in the Vogelsberg and Odenwald was much slower. The territorial split in rural Hessen between the Bund der Landwirte and the anti-Semites is a prominent feature of the Reichstag election returns of June 1893. At the beginning of May Caprivi dissolved the parliament after it had turned down a new military bill. In the ensuing campaign the Hessian National Liberals, relying heavily on the Bund der Landwirte, opened their counterattack against Bockel and his movement. Seven of the Hessian party's nine candidates had the endorsement of the Bund, and the other two were on record in its favor. 46 With the

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exception of Osann in Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau all of them had economic or organizational ties with agriculture. But the anti-Semites, with their Mitteldeutsche Bauernverein, were also stronger than in 1890, and they not only retained the two mandates they held in Oberhessen but added on Bensheim-Erbach, which they wrested away from the National Liberals with the help of Catholic votes in the runoff. For their part the National Liberals broke back into Oberhessen with Oriola's victory in FriedbergBüdingen and kept Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau and Worms-Heppenheim, where Heyl returned. With the two big industrial districts remaining socialist and a left liberal successor to the retired Bamberger holding on to Bingen-Alzey, the result amounted to a standoff for the National Liberals, the exchange of a poverty-dogged rural constituency for an affluent one. The advantages of alliance with the BdL are visible in this electoral outcome; after the defeats of 1890 and the onset of a disastrous period for farming, holding even in the countryside represented an accomplishment for the National Liberals in 1893. But the connection also had its uncertain aspects. On occasion during the campaign National Liberal candidates associated themselves as much with agriculture as with the party. Similar questions of identity arose periodically in regard to Heyl and Oriola during the following Reichstag session, in which they jointly took command of the agricultural wing of the parliamentary party. 47 As the Bund der Landwirte expanded its membership and influence in the mid-nineties, its relationship to National Liberalism became a problematic issue within the Hessian party. Sorting out the pros and cons was not easy. In rural Hessen the BdL had quickly become either the main political force or the most powerful competitor of the anti-Semites. To win elections the National Liberals had to have its goodwill. In return for helping the party's candidates, however, the Bund wanted general agreement with its program. Its demand was hardly an unusual condition for a pressure group to level. Nonetheless, it represented an obligation that National Liberals, with their ideology and traditions of parliamentary independence, had trouble accepting. More often than not during the five years that separated the BdL's founding and the next scheduled Reichstag elections party members in the rural constituencies played Faust to the Buncf s Mephistopheles. In 1898 the National Liberal label often appeared to be an embarrassment in the countryside. Wilhelm Haas, nominated in both Bensheim-Erbach and Bingen-Alzey, told an audience in the Odenwald that he was "not a party m a n , " and in Rheinhessen he ran under the auspices of a "Committee of the Free Economic Association for the Bingen-Alzey Electoral District"—in reality the same group of agrarian National

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Liberals that had fought Ludwig Bamberger throughout the previous decade. Similarly in Oberhessen Fritz Schade, although endorsed by the National Liberals in his home district of Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten, accepted nomination as a candidate of the Bund der Landwirte and stated that if elected he would not join a party group in the Reichstag. 48 Schade lost anyhow, as the anti-Semites retained both their seats in Oberhessen. Haas, making good on one of his two attempts, took Bensheim-Erbach away from them. Haas's victory, offsetting the loss of Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau to the Social Democrats, kept the National Liberals' strength in Hessen at three mandates. Heyl and Oriola had been reelected without difficulty. Now, however, the party's representation in Berlin lay exclusively with men whose primary political allegiance was agrarian. In the view of those who spoke for close ties with the BdL this result was a justification in practice of the party orientation that placed agriculture first. The inclination of rural National Liberals to associate themselves with the Bund der Landwirte was subtly reinforced in these years by the population movements occurring in the Hessian countryside. As many of the remaining village artisans and shopkeepers drifted away to the cities during the depressed eighties and nineties, the local importance of the farmers for the National Liberals actually grew. Although they were followers in the party, the handicraftsmen and small merchants of the old economic order had been recognized as loyal elements whose interests had to be respected. As a result of their exodus the occupational character of the National Liberals' rural electorate became more exclusively agricultural, and pressure to take an agrarian line became correspondingly more difficult to resist. In two Hessian Kreise, Lauterbach and Oppenheim, the proportion of inhabitants engaged in farming even rose slightly between the 1882 and 1895 censuses, although the figure for the Grand Duchy as a whole dropped from 41.55 to 36.03. In most other rural counties the percentages remained above 40.0 in 1895.49 There was also new pressure from the anti-Semites. In 1894 Otto Bockel was deposed as the movement's leader and replaced by two men, Philipp Köhler and Otto Hirschel. Köhler, the dominant political personality in Oberhessen for the next fifteen years, was a Hessian original. In 1884 and 1887 his name still stood on the lists of National Liberal endorsers in the Reichstag elections in Glessen. By 1890, however, he had found his way to Bockel. Köhler helped start the Mitteldeutsche Bauernverein in 1890 and also ran as an anti-Semite for the Landtag. Three years later he replaced Pickenbach as the movement's nominee in Giessen and successfully defended the mandate. He did so again in a

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special election in 1896 and once more in 1898. In his native Langsdorf Köhler was a local power in the classic mold—mayor, jury foreman, civil registrar, postmaster, and founder and director of the savings and lending bank. But he also was and remained a farmer, and as a leader on the broader political stage he shifted both the thrust and the focus of his movement—from anti-Semitism to the protection of agriculture against all quarters, and from the national arena to the Grand Duchy. On this more permanent agrarian footing the movement under Köhler and Hirschel became a stronger threat to the National Liberals' regional power than it had been under Bockel.50 In 1893 four anti-Semites were elected to the second chamber. In 1896 the total reached nine. Even as the economic situation began to improve, then, the anti-Semites held on as rivals to the National Liberals in the rural areas. Against this challenge party leaders in the countryside viewed their alliance with the Bund der Landwirte as the best means of self-defense. However, toward the close of the 1890s, Hessian National Liberals who were not linked to the BdL began increasingly to caution that the party could lean only so far in the direction of agriculture. A view of the National Liberals as Mittelpartei ran through many of these warnings: the party could be a distinct and representative political force only if it maintained an equilibrium among the demands of competing economic interests. Arthur Osann and, behind him, the National Liberal association in Darmstadt were the most frequent advocates of this position—a standpoint well-matched both to the party leader's task of encouraging unity and to the central geographic and administrative role of the Residenzstadt. Still, their definition of a middle line toward agriculture yielded too general and thus too elastic a standard to prevail over the parliamentary or electoral needs of the moment. Osann did a service for Hessian farming by putting the party behind legislation that expanded the rail network into the countryside. But he also drew the ire of agriculture by voting for the commercial treaty with Russia in 1894 in disregard of the program of the Bund der Landwirte, although he had been reelected the previous year with BdL help. In 1898 Osann's successor as the party's nominee in Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau campaigned on the theme of the National Liberals' mediating vocation, and he made a point of stating that he was not a member of the BdL. Once thrown into the runoff against a Social Democrat, however, the same candidate, Ludwig Nodnagel, declared his agreement with the Bund on nearly all major questions and also accepted the aid offered him by the anti-Semites.51 In two Hessian Reichstag constituencies, Offenbach-Dieburg and Glessen, National Liberals broke entirely with agrarianism in 1898 and

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joined with the local left liberal associations to nominate common candidates. This action went beyond Osann's middle line into outright conflict with the representatives of agriculture, and it was motivated by rather different considerations. To begin with, there were economic interests at stake. Industry in both districts was concentrated in export and finished-goods production, and manufacturers in Offenbach and Giessen had benefited from Caprivi's system of low tariffs and long-term commercial treaties. On questions of trade policy, therefore, they stood squarely opposed to both the Bund der Landwirte and the anti-Semites, who wanted grain duties pushed up again. In an election critical to the nation's future economic direction—revision or renewal of the Caprivi legislation was high on the agenda of the next Reichstag—the incompatibility of industrial and agricultural objectives broke the solidarity of interests of former years in the two districts, and the urban National Liberals turned to the left to find allies. Local party spokesmen justified this initiative in much the same language of balance and reciprocity that Arthur Osann used, but without Osann's ultimate willingness to bargain for agrarian support. They accepted the farmers' case within limits. The general National Liberal electoral manifesto of 1898 called for stronger protection for agriculture when the trade treaties were renewed, and Joseph Schlossmacher, once again the party's candidate in Offenbach-Dieburg, spoke in the same spirit when he declared himself ready under the right circumstances to vote for a return to the five-Mark duty on grain. 52 Still, the guiding perspective in both constituencies denied the primacy of rural interests, and that was unacceptable to the agrarians. The National Liberals' turn to the left in Offenbach-Dieburg and Giessen also had political roots. In neither case did there seem to be much prospect of beating the incumbents—respectively, the Social Democrat Ulrich and Philipp Köhler—with an agrarian candidate. In addition, however, the strongest bar against mounting joint candidacies with the left liberals had fallen by 1898. Until two years before party unity had been the necessary condition of the National Liberals' legislative power in Hessen, and urban elements had subordinated their political affinities with the left for the sake of internal harmony. But in 1896 the party's strength in the Landtag dropped to twenty-six of fifty seats, too narrow a margin on which to operate without allies. The old rationale of holding together to hold power could no longer be upheld. Maintaining the position of the Honoratioren henceforth demanded a choice of allies, and in this situation the National Liberals in Offenbach-Dieburg and Giessen decided not to withhold any longer their preferences for the left liberals over the agrarians. 53

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In 1884 National Liberals from Giessen and Offenbach were the least enthusiastic Hessian converts to the Heidelberg Declaration. In allying with the Independents in 1898, their successors in the local associations were the first to break openly with the Heidelberg orientation. Yet in the preceding years party leaders in the rural districts also had urged and given more binding commitments to agriculture than had been pledged at Frankfurt in 1884. Fifteen years may be long enough for any political program; it was for the Heidelberg Declaration in the Grand Duchy. By the close of the century the platform of 1884 no longer offered either of the main groups in Hessian National Liberalism an acceptable formula of popular representation. In the other South German states the challenges of economic change and competing political forces also gradually moved National Liberals away from Heidelberg. As in Hessen the distance between the program of 1884 and the regional parties' needs became significant only in the mid-nineties. In the first years after its adoption the Heidelberg Declaration remained very much an asset, a workable social and economic platform that provided considerable aid at the polls. Along with the renewed tie with Bismarck, to whom national-minded southerners were eternally grateful for achieving unification, it served as the focal point for a loose community of action among the southern party groups. In the 1887 elections the Heidelberg affirmation of independence toward all sides was stretched to permit National Liberal-Conservative cooperation under the auspices of Bismarck's war-scare Kartell. As a result the National Liberals made their best showing in a decade—99 mandates and 1,677,979 votes—and their friendship with the chancellor gained a firmer electoral footing. However, in the balloting three years later, when the party's totals sank to 42 seats and 1,177,807 votes, the chinks in the Heidelberg position became noticeable. 54 Even at the high water mark of 1887 the other regional parties of the South were no more successful than the Hessians in halting the advance of Social Democracy in the urban centers. In 1890, in addition to Mainz-Oppenheim and Offenbach-Dieburg, Mannheim, Nürnberg, and both districts in Munich sent socialists to the Reichstag. The Social Democrats also pushed into the countryside, particularly in Bavaria under the leadership of Georg von Vollmar. In the great debates over the agricultural question at the SPD congresses of 1894 and 1895 Vollmar and the Hessian Eduard David spoke for most South German party opinion when they urged a break with theoretical and tactical orthodoxy in order to win over the small landowner. 55 National Liberals in Baden,

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Bavaria, and Württemberg at best fought a holding action against this pressure from the left. After their endorsement of the chancellor's social policy in 1884 they made no further programmatic bids for workingmen's votes. As in Hessen they attempted instead to keep Social Democracy within bounds by means of their continued ascendance outside the industrial cities. Again, paralleling the Hessian experience, this rural position buckled in the 1890s under the weight of agrarian competition. In Catholic sections the confessionally bound peasant associations formed in the eighties and the independent Bavarian Peasants' League (Bayerischer Bauernbund), founded in the spring of 1893, blocked off National Liberal chances to pull wavering constituencies away from the Center Party. 56 In Protestant and mixed areas, their electoral home ground, the regional parties were hurt by the Bund der Landwirte and its affiliates. As in Hessen the BdL was a presence either to be appeased or to be resisted; but in contrast to the Grand Duchy, fewer agrarians on the model of Heyl or Oriola were to be found among the National Liberals elsewhere in the South. Party leaders in the Palatinate and Baden were intimately tied to banking in Mannheim and the chemical industry in Ludwigshafen and Frankfurt. Personal connections linked National Liberals in all three southern states with cotton manufacturing. For these industrial and financial interests the economic issue in the 1890s was not, as in 1884, a matter of overseas investments and colonial markets as complementary rewards for their acceptance of agricultural protectionism. The new chancellor's commercial legislation instead offered them increased trade with other European nations at the cost of lower grain duties. Even when, as happened with Arthur Osann, it meant abandoning a pledge to the BdL program, the case for the Caprivi treaties' advantages won over many southern National Liberals, including several signatories of the Heidelberg Declaration. But the regional parties paid the price at the polls. As eminent a figure as Armand Buhl was denied renomination to the Reichstag in Homberg-Kusel in 1893, when he refused to commit himself against the still pending treaty with Russia. In words ironically reminiscent of the agricultural opposition's attacks on Ludwig Bamberger in 1879-1881 in Rheinhessen, Buhl was called "well-suited to represent an industrial but not a rural constituency." It was just ten years since he had set the Heidelberg movement into motion. 57 National Liberals in the other southern states also encountered heavier opposition from the older parties in the 1890s. The Kartell was finished south of the Main by the end of 1890. In Baden the local Conservatives turned against the National Liberals in the following year's Landtag

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elections, while in Württemberg a newly formed regional branch of the Conservative Party made heavy inroads among the moderate elements in the German Party's following. Subsequently in Bavaria Conservatives in several areas gained the inside track with the Bund der Landwirte and with it the local rural advantage over the National Liberals. 58 The Conservatives chipped at the edges of the regional parties' power, and cut more deeply in Württemberg. Political Catholicism dealt them even more damaging blows. The local affiliates of the Center Party already dominated the legislature in Bavaria in the middle eighties. In the following years Catholic parties in the other two states also achieved respectable strength. In both Württemberg and Baden Catholic political leaders drew a lesson from the National Liberals' example at Heidelberg and shifted their orientation toward social and economic questions. Here was more favorable ground for them to challenge the regional liberal groups than the Kulturkampf issues of church and state had afforded. In Protestant-ruléd Württemberg Catholics had kept clear of the Kulturkampf during the seventies and eighties and divided their political loyalties between the ministerial Landespartei and an anti-Prussian faction. In uniting under the aegis of the Center in 1895 they asserted themselves as a coalition of popular interests, a confessional union of all classes and all callings. In the state elections of the same year they won eighteen mandates and overnight became the second strongest force in the Landtag. On a similar socially oriented base the Center Party in Baden revived aggressively in the late eighties and by 1893 had pushed up its parliamentary representation to the point of depriving the National Liberals of their absolute majority in the Karlsruhe legislature. 59 The National Liberals in Baden carried on as the ruling party with the aid of Conservatives or occasionally of Independents, but in campaigns they stood alone. The extent of their isolation was illustrated in 1895 in Mannheim, when electors f r o m the Conservatives, Center, and Independents provided the decisive votes to send an anti-Semite to the Landtag rather than let his National Liberal opponent be chosen, a new low in political common denominators. In Württemberg the German Party was thrown out on its own with equal abruptness in 1895. Since the end of the preceding decade the left liberal People's Party, invigorated by a new generation of leaders, had taken the offensive against the National Liberals of the German Party. In the Landtag elections of 1895, while the new Center group was winning its eighteen mandates, the People's Party swept thirty-one, its highest total since the founding of the Empire. Together left liberals and Catholics held a legislative majority, and in recognition of the result the Mittnacht ministry declared

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itself ready to work in concert with them and ended its twenty-five year partnership with the German Party. 60 After 1896, when the Hessian National Liberals lost their broad margin in the second chamber, no regional liberal party in South Germany exclusively controlled its state legislature. All faced the necessity of choosing allies and declaring for some interests and against others. For the most part party leaders outside Hessen made such decisions in an ad hoc manner. Next to the Grand Duchy intraparty divisions were most visible in Württemberg, where reformist and moderate factions were in continual discord. In Baden and Bavaria the veterans who still ran National Liberal affairs managed unity better by avoiding new policy departures and leaning on their old friends in the administration for help at the polls and on the good old cause (the struggle against "ultramontanism") for union in the ranks. 61 Neither the public quarrels nor the postponement of basic commitments enhanced the regional parties' influence in Reich politics. A decade earlier their cohesiveness had secured for the liberal groups in the South a prevailing voice within the national party. They had seized the initiative while the leadership in Berlin, pulled at once in several directions, failed to define a course of policy. By the late nineties the southern National Liberals no longer spoke forcefully or in unanimity, and their extraterritorial impact was no longer very strong. The more the regional parties of the South and Southwest engaged themselves in the effort to retain power on the state level, the looser became the bonds between them. Similarly, by the close of the century there was little outside stimulus for the southern National Liberals to act jointly. In the years immediately following Bismarck's dismissal the Imperial government had ceased to be a source of positive incentives to common action, but the negative effects of its policies were equally profound. Caprivi's reductions of agricultural tariffs, his concession of differential freight rates to East German grain farmers in 1891 as a rider to the trade agreement with Austria-Hungary, his apparent surrender to clerical authority in the Prussian school bill of 1891, his plans to increase taxes on South German commodities like beer and tobacco to underwrite his projected army bill—all brought National Liberals in the South together in protest. Antagonism toward the new chancellor found its most comforting outlet in demonstrations honoring his predecessor, now sniping at Caprivi from his enforced retirement. In July 1892 the outpouring of affection for Bismarck reached its peak at a gathering of five thousand South Germans led by spokesmen from the regional parties, at the spa of Kissingen where the fallen hero was staying after

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returning from his son's wedding in Vienna. (That private ceremony became a political scandal when the family was snubbed by the Habsburg court on Berlin's request.) At the end of the year a meeting of southern National Liberals at Heidelberg reiterated their dissent from Caprivi's domestic course in a strongly phrased resolution." However, the unity that fed on opposition to Bismarck's successor weakened thereafter as first the outstanding issues were settled and then Caprivi resigned. The Prussian school bill was withdrawn in the spring of 1892 after provoking a storm of criticism. In 1893 the Reichstag refused to accept a package of tobacco and wine taxes, the latter no less objectionable to the South than imposts on beer. The last of the commercial treaties, the pact with Russia, received parliamentary approval in March 1894, and simultaneously the differential freight rates on grain were abolished. 63 The following October Caprivi was replaced by Prince Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who had enjoyed a good reputation with South German liberals since the late 1860s when, as Bavarian first minister, he defended policies favorable to national unification. In April 1894, several months before Caprivi's resignation, Baroness Sophie von Heyl led a deputation of women from Hessen, Baden, and the Palatinate to Bismarck's estate at Friedrichsruh to honor the old statesman on his seventy-ninth birthday. Southern National Liberal unity was already assuming muted tones. Four and a half years later, just before a new Reichstag session opened, Heyl himself invited eleven southern deputies to Heidelberg in an apparent attempt to relaunch the movement of 1884. There were discussions but no results. 64 Throughout South Germany Heidelberg had become yesterday's program. As early as June 1884, in the aftermath of the National Liberal delegates' meeting in Berlin, the Heidelberg Declaration was interpreted differently on the regional and national levels of German politics. In the areas of its origin it remained what its framers intended it to be, a set of social and economic pledges meant to buttress the power of the Honoratioren. It failed in the southern states when it no longer seemed to be fulfilling this purpose. In Reich affairs Heidelberg carried a different thrust. As a program for the national party it stood on three elements: first, the parliamentary entente with the Imperial government—or more properly, with Bismarck—that gave the National Liberals a share of power; then an investment in the chancellor's social legislation and afterwards in his colonial policy as antidotes to Social Democracy; and finally a live-and-let-live attitude on economic matters out of regard for the southern leaders' need to court agriculture. Only five years after 1884 this synthesis on the national began to crumble.

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Colonialism was the most ephemeral element in this combination. Although many leading National Liberals remained personally and financially committed to the colonies, and although overseas questions were occasionally capable of arousing political passions in the Reich, Germany's imperial possessions were too distant and, once their modest limits in Africa and the Pacific were defined, too insignificant to serve as a persistent rallying point in the domestic arena. Most important, the illusion that colonial expansion could temper working-class dissatisfactions had been quickly dispelled by the 1884 campaign and elections. If social imperialism merits a place in the history of this era, that is because of its intentions, not its results. National Liberals and Bismarck alike soon understood that their only usable weapon against Social Democracy was the antisocialist law of 1878, itself a cheesecloth barrier. It was extended by the Kartell majority in 1887, and the National Liberals were willing to renew it again three years later. In the fall of 1889, however, Bismarck introduced a new and more repressive version of the law and, over the next few months, refused to agree to any compromise of its provisions. As the Conservatives lined up with him, a milder proposal sponsored by the National Liberals was defeated in January 1890. The antisocialist law was left to lapse, with the party and the chancellor on opposite sides of the decision. 65 Apart from its significance as a division over the social question, this breach between the National Liberals and Bismarck also deserves to be noted as one of the final blow-ups in a steadily worsening relationship. During the last years of Wilhelm I, who died in March 1888, and in the sad ninety-nine-day reign of his mortally ill successor, Friedrich III, cooperation between party and chancellor had continued in the spirit in which it had been reestablished in the spring of 1884. True to the scenario that Heinrich Marquardsen and Bismarck discussed in December 1884, the National Liberals won a remarkable victory—ninety-nine mandates with the help of the Conservative parties in the Kartell—when elections could be staged around a war-scare early in 1887. For the next year and a half, as partners in the Kartell majority, they enjoyed a revival of their old status as full allies of the chancellor. But with the accession of a willful young monarch in the summer of 1888, the party's dealings with the government became more complex. Perceptive observers, among them Johannes Miquel, were soon aware that a fundamental clash between Wilhelm II and Bismarck was bound to erupt. If the National Liberals were to maintain their connection with the government in that eventuality, they would have to side almost certainly against the chancellor. It would have been a painful decision to make. Bismarck, who also saw the probabilities, relieved them of it in late 1888 and 1889 by moving away from the Kartell and toward the Center, whose electoral

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outlook appeared more solid and whose independence of the new Emperor was more assured. The break over the antisocialist law confirmed the separation. 66 Thus the National Liberals escaped being dragged down on Bismarck's coattails when he was dismissed by Wilhelm II in March 1890. Over the next few years, however, the party also found itself unable to forge a parliamentary alliance with the new chancellor, Caprivi. Consequently, the Heidelberg Declaration's governmental orientation ceased to be a meaningful programmatic focus for the national party. A second plank of the platform of 1884 had collapsed. By mid-1892, the third, the live-and-let-live policy toward agricultural protection, was also losing its unifying appeal. Export and industrial interests in the party, favoring Caprivi's commercial proposals, became less tolerant, in the words of one manufacturer, "of the worm's-eye view of the farmers in the Palatinate." There was talk of a new economic program that would supersede Heidelberg and reestablish the party at the side of the government. Early in 1892 Rudolf von Bennigsen glimpsed an opportunity for liberal concord, not only within his own party but even between National Liberals and left liberals, in both groups accepting Caprivi's moderate protectionism. Yet at the end of the year, when a plan to reconstruct the party's unity on the basis of the new trade legislation was broached to him, he turned it down. 67 Given the anger in the South against Caprivi, Bennigsen's retreat is understandable. Although the testimony is indirect, it appears that he now judged the economic divisions in the party to be insoluble. It was better to take a safe middle line and allow wide flexibility when particular interests were involved. The Heidelberg Declaration was thus abandoned but not replaced as the national party's platform. As they celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary in the summer of 1892, therefore, the National Liberals found themselves adrift and without a compass. Much of their difficulty lay simply in the unanticipated circumstance of having their customary link with the Reich government broken and not being repaired. They had been ready for alliance in 1890. Caprivi was not. At first the new chancellor had wished not to rely on fixed majorities—in that respect he was less a parliamentary minister than Bismarck. However, anticipating his future need for support on the army bill, he eventually turned toward the power holders in the new Reichstag, the Conservative parties and the Center; to some extent the Prussian school bill of 1891 was a carrot dangled before them to produce a coalition. The National Liberals were the losers in this process. By 1892 they barely qualified as sometime partners of Caprivi. The party's main link to the government now went through Johannes

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Miquel, who had been called to the Prussian ministry of finance shortly after Bismarck's fall. As a Prussian minister Miquel was an occasional but not dependable friend. Always supple in politics, he adapted himself to his working circumstances, above all to the necessity of bargaining with the Conservative Party. Consequently, his receptivity to National Liberal perspectives was limited. 68 The National Liberals' inability to achieve a new standpoint in the early 1890s was also impeded by the strong current of loyalty to Bismarck that persisted within the party. Many party members had regretted the break of 1890. Others were drawn again toward Bismarck as a fellow outcast once it became clear that they could expect little from his successors or from Wilhelm II, who had seemed briefly to represent a more progressive social outlook in 1889-90. In April 1891 a National Liberal electoral committee in Hannover gave public expression to these feelings by nominating the retired chancellor as Reichstag candidate in a by-election. After a congress of the national party at the end of May in Berlin warnings were raised against becoming a "Partei Bismarck sans phrase."69 In fact under the existing circumstances a restoration was an impractical idea. All the same it was no less attractive to many party members—a perfect union of National Liberalism with both the government and the venerated Altreichskanzler. Admiration, nostalgia, remorse, wishful thinking all blended into this pro-Bismarckian surge. The full range of these sentiments is evident in the homage that the South Germans paid Bismarck at Kissingen in July 1892, the peak of the wave of National Liberal attachment for the fallen statesman. Southern National Liberals, it is true, had found a double blessing in the 1871 unification, which had enhanced their position in the state parliaments, and they felt a particular gratitude that, as one of their representatives put it, "thank God, the gateway for French attacks is now forever shut, and the great man has put away the key." Still, such feelings were shared by party adherents throughout Germany; and the main speaker of the day, Carl Eckhard, again expressed the majority National Liberal opinion when he told his listeners, "Our dreams and hopes have been fulfilled to a scarcely imaginable extent by this m a n ! " For Eckhard and his generation of Honoratioren, whose adult lives spanned the decades surrounding the Reichsgründung, Bismarck remained the "German hero" who had "brought honor and glory to the fatherland." 7 0 They had never expected his dismissal, and wishing him back was a natural response. Nonetheless, it was also a way of turning aside the inescapable and troubling question of what the political course of the Empire should be in the absence of its founder. In April 1894 a final National Liberal delegation visited Bismarck, this

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time at his estate at Friedrichsruh. By then, however, the great enthusiasm had passed. Before the year was out Caprivi was gone, and Bismarck and Wilhelm II were at least outwardly reconciled. The old chancellor would no longer divert the party's attention. Even then, however, the National Liberals continued to flounder in disunity, reluctant to define their objectives too closely out of fear of defections. At the 1896 party congress Bennigsen attempted to draw a line against agrarianism by pressing for the expulsion of four Reichstag deputies (including Heyl and Oriola) who had voted in favor of the Conservatives' Kanitz motion for a state grain-trading monopoly. He did not carry a majority." In 1897, looking ahead to the next year's Reichstag elections, Johannes Miquel proposed a formula for a governmental majority that would include the National Liberals—Sammlung—a rallying of industrial and agrarian interests on a common platform of protectionism and antisocialism. Judged against his past it was a corrupted version of the program that Miquel drafted for Heidelberg and elaborated at Neustadt in 1884. Then he had sought to build a solidarity of popular interests behind his party. Now he intended to assemble a coalition both more extensive, spanning several parties, and more exclusive, uniting "the possessing classes" behind the Reich government and the Emperor. Among the National Liberals the Sammlung gained its first adherents from the ranks of the industrialists delegated to serve on the Economic Committee on commercial legislation, the intended instrument of the new policy. Region made no difference here. Sammlungspolitik was backed by Karl Krafft and Theodor von Hassler from the cotton industry of the South and by Theodor Moeller and Louis Baare from the textile and iron interests of the North. According to his biographer it was Moeller who tempered the original program drawn up in early 1898 by a group of agrarians and industrialists from the Economic Committee to make it acceptable to his party. 72 Nonetheless, the Sammlung produced no solidarity among National Liberals. It was too obviously a marriage of economic interests whose chief political allegiances lay elsewhere, with the Conservative and Imperial parties. Even in Moeller's softened version, the 1898 "Economic Appeal" was signed by fewer than half the National Liberals in the Reichstag and Prussian Landtag. Among the missing were leaders of the stature of Bennigsen, Robert von Benda, Friedrich Hammacher, Arthur Hobrecht, and Arthur Osann. A party congress in May 1898 did approve a generally worded resolution favoring compromise between industrial and agricultural interests, but the more serious question regarding the terms of such an agreement was not answered. The National

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Liberals remained a party in search of a common social and economic standpoint. 73 In the absence of agreement or even friendly toleration on economic issues the national party's unity was sustained in the nineties by two elements: consensus on the Reich's military and foreign policies, and the community of experience in which the National Liberals' leaders shared. The principle of national interest above party interest—das Vaterland über die Partei—offered welcome refuge from the material struggle. National Liberal judgments of Caprivi may have differed widely on other counts, but in 1893 the Reichstag delegation voted to a man for the chancellor's army bill; later in the decade the party firmly backed Tirpitz's first naval expansion program. Personal bonds similarly overrode economic quarrels. Authority still lay with the party's older generation of leaders—Bennigsen, Benda, Armand Buhl, Albert Bürklin, Heinrich von Cuny, Hammacher, Hobrecht, Marquardsen—men who over the years had developed a deep mutual respect and fondness. The National Liberal Party embodied their political life's work, and they were careful to safeguard it. No new beginnings were to be expected from them. None were forthcoming. But they kept the ship afloat and intact through a troubled period—an achievement that well matched their collective role as the party's elder statesmen. For the generation of National Liberals whose race was nearly over, the representation of economic interests had finally become an unsolvable riddle. "In many respects," Arthur Hobrecht said in June 1897, . . . the National Liberal Party is less favorably situated than others . . . . In addition to their political programs and beyond the sphere of true politics nearly all other political parties also have their particular starting-points and focus to which they hold fast, whether in the religious domain, in the representation of a class or estate, or in the protection of material economic special interests. All of that is absent in the National Liberal Party. For us the protection of economic interests is an element of danger rather than of union. We have to seek our reputation in reconciling and harmonizing the opposed economic aspirations in our midst, as far as it is in our power. We are likewise not the representatives of a class or an estate; it is only an often-used oratorical twist that we constitute the true representation of the educated middle strata—I have never been able to draw anything specific out of that phrase. The so-called middle classes are too indeterminate, varied, and loose a substance to be fit into one mold, and the German Bürgertum is too German to work particularly well in union or under obligation. All the more valuable for

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If Hobrecht's words summoned up a measure of pride in adversity, they were pale assertions compared with Karl Twesten's equally proud affimation in 1866 that he and his friends spoke for a middle class that represented the nation's highest aspirations, or with Johannes Miquel's claim in 1884 that the Heidelberg Declaration had put the party in alignment with the practical needs of the country. Living on past accomplishments was not enough for a party with the representative ambitions of the National Liberals. Once again, now on the eve of a new century, they stood before the task of defining a common economic and social platform.

6 The Autonomy of the Provinces

Only one member of the National Liberals' Reichstag leadership of 1893-1898 returned to Berlin in the following session: Ernst Bassermann. Bassermann was a political latecomer who reached the top quickly. He was in his thirties and a lawyer in his native Mannheim when he became a member of the local National Liberal executive in the late eighties. In 1891 he represented his district at the national party's congress in Berlin. In 1893 he recaptured Mannheim from the Social Democrats in his first attempt at the Reichstag. Two years later he became secretary of the National Liberal parliamentary delegation. Following Bennigsen's retirement from parliamentary activity, Bassermann was elected the party's leader in the Reichstag. In 1905 he became party chairman as well. ' Bassermann's attempt to develop a National Liberalism suited to a changed society is the key theme in the segment of the party's history that extends from 1898 to the fall of Bernhard von Biilow from the Imperial chancellorship in the summer of 1909. If the national party's unity was to be reconstructed, the initiative had to come, as it did with Bassermann's effort, from the center; the regional groups' energies were exhausted by their struggles for power in the states. If the National Liberals were to give substance to their continuing hopes of representing the full constituency of the Empire and of leading it, then they needed a limited reformism like Bassermann's, sensitive to the discrepancies between the structure of power and the character of society in Imperial Germany and insistent that the middle strata, the party's backbone, gain their due in influence and consideration. In the last decade before war broke out in 1914 all of the nonsocialist parties sought stronger popular roots. The course charted by Bassermann kept the National Liberals in the competition. Memorializing Bassermann after his death in 1917, Gustav Stressmann 159

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spoke of his late friend's "historic service to the party . . . the creation . . . of a united front on economic policy based on moderate protectionism, as expressed in the last tariff legislation." 2 The "last tariff legislation" to which Stresemann referred was the package of increases that the Reichstag passed in December 1902; on the final reading the National Liberals voted in near-unanimity with the majority. In his first three years as head of the Reichstag delegation Bassermann, aided by a generally favorable climate of opinion, had smoothed over the economic antagonisms whose scars the party still bore from the nineties. To be sure, the National Liberals were not suddenly converted to a uniform economic philosophy; but they came near enough to agreement, and the parliamentary advantage of closing ranks was obvious enough to enable Bassermann to pull his Reichstag colleagues behind a common position. It was a triumph in contrast to the national party's past inability to find peace on tariff questions. 3 It was also an opening for Bassermann, a chance to move ahead toward new social and political objectives. As these goals were defined in the years after 1902, the fortunes of National Liberalism once more turned up. Settling the tariff controversy within the party was mostly a matter of placating the agrarians. In endorsing "stronger" protection of agriculture when the Caprivi treaties expired, the 1898 party congress took a position at odds with the specific and extreme demands of the Bund der Landwirte. Three years later, when the tariff issue was taken up in earnest, the gulf was still there, and the agricultural National Liberals were restless. By now agrarians and nonagrarians were no longer geographically split. In the course of the nineties the southern-northern cleavage that originated with the Heidelberg Declaration had given way to a division between those who had close personal or political connections to the land and those who did not. The agrarians of the National Liberal Party now came from Hannover, Schleswig, and the flatland around Magdeburg as well as from Hessen and the Palatinate, their continuing strongholds in the South. Few, perhaps none of them, expected that the increases demanded by the BdL leadership could find a majority in the Reichstag. For Heyl, Oriola, and their friends the question at hand was rather whether the party could be moved to go beyond the proposed increases in grain duties that the new chancellor, Billow, leaked through the press in the summer of 1901.4 Against the wishes of the agrarians Bassermann held the Reichstag delegation close to the government's line over the following year. In the intraparty debates he found his chief allies among the members linked to heavy industry, a considerable group in the parliament of 1898-1903. In conformity with the Sammlung idea and as quid pro quo reward for

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Conservative support of the 1898 and 1900 naval bills, National Liberal manufacturers were committed to moderate revisions of the gfain tariffs. After Theodor Moeller left the Reichstag in 1901 to become Prussian minister of trade, the main exponents of this position became Moeller's parliamentary successor, Wilhelm Beumer of the Langnamverein and the Association of German Iron and Steel Producers, and Alexander Hilbck of the Ruhr coal syndicate. Hilbck was Bassermann's cohort in January 1902 in arranging a meeting of the National Liberal delegation on short and incomplete notice in order to get a favorable vote on the government's proposals. The maneuver undercut Heyl, who had been negotiating for a package of higher rates with the Conservative and Center deputies in the tariff commission, but the shape of the division—twentyseven for the government's scale of duties, nine for Heyl's, fifteen absent—also demonstrated that the majority wanted to get off with as cheap an increase in grain tariffs as they could. In the end, with Biilow allowing only slight modifications of his rate schedules, Bassermann and his industrial allies got their way. Heyl ultimately went along with the legislation as the best compromise agriculture could obtain under the circumstances, and the other agrarian National Liberals made the same decision. On the final ballot the delegation voted forty-eight to one for the amended government bill. The lone dissenter was a Caprivi diehard. 5 As 1903 began, then, the tariff debate was over for the immediate future. Seven commercial treaties based on the new rates went through the Reichstag with little trouble in 1905. In the nation as well as in the party a more peaceful atmosphere prevailed. In 1902 the two great manufacturing lobbies, the Centraiverband Deutscher Industrieller of the raw materials producers and the newer Bund der Industriellen of the finishedgoods industries, had fought bitterly over Billow's retention of high duties on iron. In 1905 they became partners in a new Interessengemeinschaft der deutschen Industrie, designed to further Germany's export possibilities. For the National Liberals, who drew on both industrial camps, this era of better feeling paid dividends in unity. In contrast to the aftermath of the Caprivi treaties' passage, the conflict over tariffs was not only settled but buried. As for the agrarians, although the Bund der Landwirte sulked in public and spit defiance at industry for its part in the 1902 legislation, there was enough cause for satisfaction with the new rates. Land prices rose in the years after 1902. Grain prices and rye exports increased. National Liberal agrarians like Heyl and Oriola found no reason to revive the tariff question. 6 For the first time in more than a decade, then, an economic platform acceptable to all National Liberals had been achieved. In the 1903 Reichstag elections the party brought up its strength to 51 seats and 1,317,401

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votes, a sign of satisfaction among the various interests in the constituencies.7 At last unburdened of the tariff struggle, the National Liberals could move ahead to other issues. Opportunity awaited them in the growing current of resentment among the middle strata of German society. To a new middle class generation it was no longer consoling to glory in the past days of promise and fulfillment under Bismarck. Their fathers may have believed that the Reich was theirs. The sons knew that it did not belong to them. A dawning recognition of the change was already present in the pro-Bismarckian demonstrations of the early 1890s. The National Liberals who honored the Altkanzler may have conveniently ignored his frequent parliamentary and administrative attacks on their cause and the groups they represented. Still, they sensed correctly that he had more regard for them than did Wilhelm II. Under the new Emperor middle class meant second class in politics. The Reich and Prussian bureaucracies were caste preserves of the aristocracy; few men from outside the nobility reached high office. In parliament the preferred government coalition of Center and Conservatives raised no social or political challenges to the status quo. In these circumstances the feeling spread that the intermediate groups in society were being denied their due in power, position, and respect. "The sentiment is growing," Gustav Stresemann told the National Liberals' 1906 party congress: "Why do we always have to make the sacrifices?" 8 In responding to these discontents Ernst Bassermann made his distinctive mark as party leader. Between 1900 and 1910 he developed more of a consciously class-oriented political approach than the National Liberals had previously followed, an orientation well summarized in the same watchword with which Germany's overseas claims were asserted in this era: Gleichberechtigung. Gleichberechtigung may be translated as equality of rights. In Bassermann's frame of reference it more truly connoted equal entitlement—opportunity for the National Liberals and their electorate to gain the political and social rewards of which they felt deprived. Bassermann never had a programmatic grand design. He was far more the instinctive than the speculative man in politics. His values were conventional—he was a monarchist and a nationalist. Yet in the closed political atmosphere of the Wilhelmine Empire his efforts in the direction of Gleichberechtigung intermittently placed him in the opposition in spite of his loyalties, or even occasionally because of them. Orthodox foreign policy perspectives and National Liberal tradition made him an advocate of Germany's great power status in the world. Like others, however, most notably the left liberal Friedrich Naumann, Bassermann questioned whether the nation could be externally strong as long as the middle classes were dissatisfied and, going a step further, the proletariat

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was alienated. In domestic politics he detested the immobilist CenterConservative alliance as a perversion of the parliamentary function. To National Liberals like Bassermann the catchphrase Zentrum ist Trumpf—the Center is trump—represented an appropriate comment on the maneuvering game that party politics had become and the government was, content to encourage. How could the Reich be healthy if the National Liberals served as no more than its sometime auxiliaries and the groups they represented were too much taken for granted to be given what they merited? Before the early 1900s National Liberalism had spoken in the name of the Bürgertum, first in the sense of the notables' popular leadership, and then, after Heidelberg, animated by a vision of the Honoratioren as brokers among competing interests. Under Bassermann the party adopted the more up-to-date standard of the Mittelstand, a smaller constituency to aim for but a more active and demanding electorate than the middle classes in Bismarck's day. Among this public—old groups like professionals, businessmen, and middle farmers; new elements such as salaried employees and civil servants—the National Liberals gradually won new attention.' Initially the fight for Gleichberechtigung was often defensive. In the years after 1900 Bassermann and other National Liberal leaders repeatedly emphasized the party's attachment to universal, direct, and equal voting in Reichstag elections. Since the twilight months of Bismarck's chancellorship suspension of the Reichstag franchise was a frequent subject of discussion in the Imperial and Prussian governments and among conservative politicians. In 1867 and 1871 Bismarck had anticipated that full manhood suffrage guaranteed an overwhelmingly rural, docile, and loyal electorate. By 1890 the successes of the liberals, the Center Party, and, most alarmingly, the Social Democrats had exploded this hope. Each new election now raised the question whether the next Reichstag could be managed according to the Imperial government's wishes; one answer to the difficulty was to curtail voting rights. Occasionally individual National Liberals expressed favor for a restricted suffrage. After 1900, however, the party firmly opposed all modifications. The stakes of power at issue are stated without adornment in Dirk Stegmann's recent comment that the liberals stood against changes in the electoral law "not out of love for the equal franchise but certainly out of fear of giving the state up entirely to the Prussian Junkers." Going back on the constitution might neutralize Social Democracy, but it would also weaken the middle classes. One can view the National Liberals' action more sympathetically, however. Men like Bassermann understood that the Reichstag suffrage was the fundament not only of electoral fairness but of any social reform. By 1904 the matter had assumed sufficient

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importance that a Prussian Landtag deputy who openly attacked the franchise of the Reich was officially disavowed by the party. 10 Critics could object that Social Democracy was much more the beneficiary of the universal franchise than National Liberalism; between the fall of the antisocialist law in 1890 and the elections of 1903 the SPD doubled its popular vote and increased its parliamentary strength two-and-a-half times over. Therein lay the dilemma of the policy of Gleichberechtigung. In upholding constitutional rights in their own defense the National Liberals also protected other groups more radically at odds with the ruling elements in state and society. It was a difficulty reminiscent of the situation during the revolution of 1848-49, when liberals discovered that they could clinch parity with the nobility only through reforms promising a broader social distribution of power than they desired. In 1848 most liberals feared the masses sufficiently to accept the alternative of subordination to the still resilient old order. Six decades later their successors—Bassermann and his political friends— viewed the working classes less pessimistically and sought to find new common ground with them (if not yet with the SPD) by standing for the preservation of the basic liberties set forth in the Reich constitution. The connection was most visible in the National Liberals' defense of the laws assuring freedom of association, which applied not only to political parties like their own but also to trade unions. Opponents of the laws regarding association believed that no peace was possible with the laboring classes and no rights should be granted to them. Bassermann's view was a contrasting optimism. If the workers could not be won away from socialism—his ultimate goal until experience wore down his hopes—then at least tolerant relationships should be attainable. If the Social Democrats and the unions followed the established rules of the game, which was half the battle anyhow, then they should be accorded equal opportunity with others; changing the rules to exclude them foreclosed all chance of social tranquility. ' ' Bassermann first made his mark in the national party on an issue of social policy when virtually alone he spoke against the Revolution Bill (Umsturzgesetz), a new version of the antisocialist law, at the 1894 party congress. The first test of his Reichstag leadership, in 1899, also involved repressive legislation against the working class, in this case the so-called Penitentiary Bill (Zuchthausgesetz). After 1900 he sponsored proposals to confer legal rights on the unions. None of these efforts brought the Social Democrats over, as Bassermann's own itinerant electoral career indicates: sent wandering from Mannheim in 1898 by a socialist, he lost to an SPD candidate in Karlsruhe in 1903 in his only attempt to regain a Reichstag mandate from Baden. Successful or not,

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his approach to workers' questions nonetheless made him an uncomfortable presence to those in government and economic life who spoke for authority and inflexibility. Among National Liberals the industrialists who had been Bassermann's strongest allies in the 1902 tariff debate least welcomed his social initiatives. Their preference for the closed fist over the open hand was well expressed in the founding in 1904 of the Reich Association against Social Democracy (Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie), a propaganda and agitation organization chiefly financed by manufacturing interests in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Two years later a journal close to the Centraiverband Deutscher Industrieller pointed, with typical exaggeration, to the continuing differences over labor issues in the party: here the "half-socialist Bassermann;" there the "upright industrialism of a Dr. Beumer" (the National Liberal executive secretary of the Langnamverein).12 Until 1906 these differences were no more than tendencies. Other matters that engaged the National Liberals encouraged party unity, above all the two dominant events affecting the Reich's overseas position, the diplomatic struggle over Morocco and the Herero uprising in German Southwest Africa. For a time also Bassermann's energies were missing as a result of his 1903 defeat in Karlsruhe and a subsequent rest imposed by heart trouble. In 1906, however, the frictions over the party's social direction became more serious. In the Reichstag the National Liberals rendered an assenting judgment on the existing distribution of taxation by approving a package of fiscal proposals—the most extensive revisions in the Imperial financial structure since 1879—which, following past practice, fell most heavily on the average consumer. Afterwards, at the party congress at Goslar, individual members and local associations bitterly protested the action. A year of record labor unrest in 1905 and the passage of electoral reforms in Baden, Bavaria, and Württemberg provoked further conflicts around issues of social justice. In accepting the principle of the equal franchise National Liberals in the southern states particularly embarrassed their colleagues in Prussia and Saxony, who remained committed to a suffrage weighted against the poor. 13 Thus the stage was set for a period of more intensive fighting over the policies of Gleichberechtigung; and the occasion came quickly, when Bülow dissolved the Reichstag at the end of 1906 and, during and after the subsequent elections, brought the National Liberals back to the center of affairs as the middle element in a coalition—the "Bülow Bloc"—with the left liberals and the two conservative groups on the wings. For Bassermann the chance was now at hand to move the party decisively onto a new track. In the next two-and-a-half years, against mounting resistance, he made his bid.

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Bassermann was initially favored by the circumstances of the Bloc's creation. To preserve himself Billow had had no choice but to break with the Center, his chief parliamentary ally since 1900, when it opposed his request for additional funds to suppress the revolt in Southwest Africa. Given the balance of forces in the Reichstag both before and after the elections of January 1907, his only alternative was a coalition pivoting on the National Liberals. That partnership was bound to last as long as Biilow remained chancellor, for the Center would not come back to a regime that he headed. So the National Liberals were assured of their most solid ties with the government since the Kartell. More than that, after an emotionally satisfying campaign against the Center on the national issue, the party won a popular vote of 1,630,581 and gained 54 Reichstag mandates, its highest totals since 1887. Both the victory and the prospects of the Bloc brought it new prestige.' 4 A major chance to realize the sort of moderately equalizing reform he sought also lay before Bassermann. The tax legislation of 1906 had been a stopgap package. A general restructuring of the Empire's financial system remained unfinished business for the new Reichstag. Since the turn of the century the Imperial government had been running deeper into the red; after two untroubled decades following the reform of 1879, rising outlays for the military, for a new world-class German navy, for colonial administration and state social services had outstripped the Reich's sources of income. Solving the financial problem was difficult because of the paucity of remedies. Tariffs were now too entwined in the struggle of economic interests to be considered or accepted as fiscal instruments, as they had been in 1879. Taxes had to be the means of a new reform. Yet the Reich was still constitutionally prohibited from levying direct taxes, while the parties, excepting the Conservatives, were now reluctant to load more indirect taxes upon the ordinary citizen without also placing larger obligations on the wealthy. A gesture in the latter direction was made in 1906 through inclusion of an inheritance tax, watered down to suit the Conservatives, in the legislation that passed the Reichstag. As a precedent it was a breakthrough; nonetheless, the brunt of the new rates still fell on those of least means. Judging by their hurt responses to critics at the 1906 party congress, Bassermann and his close parliamentary allies were unhappy about this inequity; in their defense they pleaded necessity as much as virtue. At the end of 1908, when deliberations began on the government's proposals for a major financial reform, the National Liberal leadership started from the principle that wealth must shoulder a larger share of the Reich's expenses than previously. On this round Bassermann meant to keep faith with his electorate. 15

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In the plans of Biilow and his finance minister, Reinhold von Sydow, only 100 million of a projected 500 million Marks were to be raised against property, this time through an estate tax rather than via obligations on individual inheritors. The degree of social justice in this proportion seems more symbolic than substantial. Still, the issue was of sufficient portent that had the government's final proposal, once more an inheritance tax, come to a third reading, the Social Democrats would have been hard pressed to break with orthodox practice and vote for it— even if the bourgeois state collected it. For the same reason the reform represented a gamble on the chancellor's part with respect to the future of the Bloc. Neither Biilow nor the liberal parties wanted to push the Conservatives too hard on taxes, lest they leave the coalition and resume their alliance with the Center, an alternative that the January 1907 elections had not removed. Yet they were also unwilling to concede the entire issue to the Conservatives, and behind them the Bund der Landwirte, whose spokesmen condemned inheritance taxes of whatever kind as the ruin of agriculture. For Bassermann this problem was even trickier, for the intransigence of the Bund imperiled the unity of his party as well as the existence of the Bloc. Since the turn of the century the party had carried on a relationship on two levels with the BdL—cordial with the members like Heyl and Oriola who were also National Liberals, antagonistic with the elements who were not. Bad as they were, relations with the latter group worsened under the Bloc. BdL attacks on National Liberals displayed unprecedented violence in the Prussian elections of 1908. Furthermore the agrarian deputies in the party were also becoming uneasy, an even more serious danger to Bassermann. As negotiations over the financial reform began in earnest at the end of 1908, Heyl, an unreserved opponent of inheritance taxes, cautioned the Reichstag delegation that no commitments should be entered into by the leadership without approval from the full parliamentary group. 16 Shifting orientations elsewhere in the political world added to the seriousness of the rift with the Bund der Landwirte. Before Bülow achieved his "mating of the conservative and liberal spirit" in 1907, heavy industry had displayed a new belligerency over social policy. In the parliaments this course pointed not to the Bloc but back to the Sammlung, and by 1908 the ties between the Centraiverband Deutscher Industrieller and the BdL, cool after passage of the 1902 tariff, were friendlier again. Concurrently, the CD/drew away from the more liberal Bund der Industriellen·, the two organizations' working union on export trade was severed at the end of 1908. The swing of heavy industry from manufacturers' solidarity to alliance with the agrarians repeated the progression of the 1890s, when the CDI fought agriculture over the Caprivi tariffs and

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then joined it in the Sammlung. In each case, once tariff settlements were achieved, political affinities gained precedence over economic bonds. Accordingly, as the CDI retraced its own tracks while moving into the anti-Bloc, antiliberal camp in 1908, its impatience with a National Liberalism under the "leadership of a democratically tinged South German" rose toward a peak. Party members close to heavy industry held up the National Liberals' losses in the Prussian elections as a proper commentary on the Bloc, and during the summer of 1908 one of them, Eugen Leidig, attempted to form a National Liberal "Industrial Association," both to secure a stronger voice for the interests he represented and to hold back the CDI from withdrawing its financial resources from the party. But Leidig was too late and the estrangement already too deep: the plan won insufficient backing in industrial circles. As 1909 opened, the policy with which Bassermann hoped to widen the National Liberals' popular appeal had become a new barrier to the party's unity." In 1910, when the Bloc had failed and the simmering rifts in the party had burst open, Ernst Bassermann told the National Liberals' congress at Kassel, "We are and we have to remain a middle party, which must strive to produce compromise between right and left; and we are further aware that, as things stand in our party, it is not possible to impinge upon the autonomy of the provinces.'" 8 In its immediate context this statement was meant to reaffirm the National Liberals' independence of all other parties. But Bassermann's reference to provincial autonomy also suggested a less proud conclusion: that the national party's influence over its regional units remained too limited for programmatic unity—around Gleichberechtigung or anything else—to be remade from the center. Here was yet another latter-day acknowledgment of the internally divisive heritage of 1884. From the perspective of this study it can also be read as an invitation to set the responses to Bassermann's policies into a regional framework. Against that background we can see that where his aims blended with priorities in the states and provinces there was acceptance; where they did not, there was opposition. At the heart of the division for and against Bassermann lay the perpetual concerns of the regional groups: power and representativeness. With National Liberal parliamentary strength everywhere reduced below majority numbers, representativeness on the old model of the notables' leadership was now as obsolete on the regional as on the national level of politics. Its pursuit continued, however, underpinned by some mix of Mittelstand advocacy and liberal social reformism, in the states and provinces friendly to Bassermann. Policy and tactical motives coincided in these cases. Regional equivalents of Gleichberechtigung existed where the climate of opinion and the parliamentary possibilities were both

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encouraging. In exceptional instances representativeness went together with opposition to Bassermann: the case of Hessen will soon receive closer attention. But usually where the party leader and his policies were resisted, National Liberals had finally dropped the popular claims of Honoratiorenpolitik and taken up the defense of privilege as their best assurance of at least a share in power. Regional groups positively oriented toward social reform and not fearful of Social Democracy gave Bassermann his firmest support. These tendencies ran strongest in Baden, Bavaria, and Württemberg, where the pace of industrial development remained moderate and the political power of the working class was still limited. Already at the time of the Heidelberg Declaration southern National Liberals had displayed more progressive attitudes than the northerners in regard to social policy. Under Bassermann the disparity persisted. In 1899 Rudolf von Bennigsen complained that his successor, as a South German, did not know industrial conditions well enough to appreciate the necessity for laws to curb the working classes. But the difference was a matter of regional experience, not inadequate knowledge; in the same period southern spokesmen in the Centraiverband Deutscher Industrieller were arguing for a more open approach to labor than the industrialists of the Rhineland and Westphalia were willing to concede." Attitudes toward social reform were also affected by the manner and actions of the local Social Democratic opponent. "You may certainly believe m e , " the National Liberal party secretary in Karlsruhe wrote to a correspondent in Berlin in 1909, " a s an apprentice lawyer (passed the first state examinations), whose North German family is very closely connected with the Conservatives, that I feel no enthusiasm for Social Democratic ideas." But, in his words, Social Democracy "here demonstrates a more moderate and reasonable character then North German Social Democracy." 20 It was a remark that could have been applied to the entire area south of the Main. By 1907 the South German branches of the SPD had become the champions of reformism in their party. Regional influences that had encouraged National Liberals to move leftward from the party norm equally contributed to these deviations from the revolutionary standard of German socialism. Similarly, Social Democracy was generally most militant in the areas where National Liberals had pared their ambitions down to power without the trimmings and had taken up an unyielding line toward the working population. The regional factor seems all the more significant for producing these reciprocally complementary divisions in the only truly national parties in German politics. Like interlocking pieces in a puzzle, the disposition toward reform often fit together with a need to meet the new social and economic appeal that political Catholicism had developed in the 1890s. It was in rivalry

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with the Center's locally powerful branches that southern National Liberals made the direct and equal franchise in the states a major goal—or wished they had after it was achieved. Such conflicts also led to parliamentary and sometimes to electoral cooperation with the left liberals. Going a step further in the 1905 elections in Baden, National Liberals, left liberals, and Social Democrats joined in a runoff pact against the Center, a tactical agreement, to be sure, but also a provocative indication of how far some party elements might carry the struggle against the clerical enemy. In the same letter in which he wrote of Social Democratic reasonableness, Paul Thorbecke, the National Liberal secretary in Karlsruhe, also offered a comparison: "The Center in Baden has displayed a character so dangerous to the German Empire that if I were compelled to choose between a Center candidate and a Social Democrat in an election, I would cast my vote only for the Social Democrat." 2 1 To the extent that the Bloc was aimed at the Center, the parallelism with such local struggles was another aid to Bassermann. Elsewhere, in regions where competition, apart from Social Democracy, came primarily from the Conservatives, National Liberals felt little external pressure for reform, and the party leader's aims were viewed more skeptically. Interest in change extended only to the prospect of gaining equal footing in the ruling minority—a parody of Gleichberechtigung as Bassermann pursued it. In 1908 National Liberals in Prussia grudgingly approved an electoral reform proposal drawn up by a special commission created by the national party executive. Even then the goals were limited: introduction of direct, secret balloting and revision of the 1861 constituency lines, but not equal suffrage. ("Unbelievable backwardness," was Bassermann's commentary on his Prussian colleagues.) In Saxony National Liberals assented in 1896, when the Conservatives revoked the existing direct and virtually equal franchise and replaced it with a regressive three-class system. Later, when they fought to modify this statute, they settled for a system of plural voting that gave them parity with the Conservatives. 22 Only where regional party groups were closely tied to the Bund der Landwirte, as in Hessen or Thuringia, did considerations of local power and an orientation to the right blend together with a claim to broad representativeness. Such areas were becoming few as the estrangement between the BdL and the party deepened under the Bloc. At the crossroads of the Bloc era, then, the action once more ran along two levels. As they sided with Bassermann or against him, the regional constituents of National Liberalism also judged whether, on their own ground, the old party ideals were still attainable in some way. The choices were inseparable; the divergencies that resulted from them

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inevitable. As Bassermann admitted at Kassel in 1910, the rewards of regional politics still counted sufficiently to frustrate a national leader's purposes. Hessen was one of the regional poles of opposition to Bassermann's course and the exception to the general pattern in South Germany. Personal bitterness between Bassermann and Heyl contributed to the antagonism. In the memoir she wrote of her father Karola Bassermann describes Heyl as "filled with restless ambition." In his short autobiography, composed during World War I, Heyl says Bassermann was well suited for the position of parliamentary chairman, "but he had the ambition to be a statesmanlike leader on Bismarck's model, and for that he lacked the talent and the requisite vision of statesmanship." 23 Still, politics often yokes together individuals who are not fond of one another; usually their mutual dislike becomes public only when there has been a break over substantive questions. Antipathy between Bassermann and Heyl became a divisive element after more fundamental differences had driven the Hessian and national parties apart. These deeper causes were rooted in the political landscape of the Grand Duchy; regional allegiances and regional obligations placed the majority of Hessian National Liberals in conflict with the party leadership in the Reich. Only among the urban opposition which had surfaced during the 1890s in Glessen, Mainz, and Offenbach did Bassermann gain a sympathetic following in Hessen. Above all else, the Hessian National Liberals' close bonds with the Bund der Landwirte, the lifelines of the party's survival in the countryside, set them at odds with Berlin. After 1898, working hand-in-hand with the BdL, rural National Liberal leaders actually improved the party's position with agriculture, moving beyond the standoff of the first half of the nineties to gain the upper hand over their rivals in the antiSemitic movement. In the Grand Duchy as in the Reich the worst was over for farming, and agrarian radicalism had lost some of its force. The "Jewish-free" markets of the Mitteldeutsche Bauernverein—later renamed Mitteldeutscher Bauernbund and then Hessischer Bauernbund —no longer attracted the crowds of former years; and although the Bauernbund delegation in the Landstände still grew, rising to eleven deputies in the 1902 elections, many of its new members were moderates, more sober in their politics and more mannered in their anti-Semitism than the movement's leader, Philipp Köhler. The distance separating these men from the BdL was not great. The advantages the Bund offered in financial resources and national influence were not lost on them. By 1903 the eventual capitulation of the Bauernbund was not difficult to

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forecast. In the Reichstag election of late spring Otto Hirschel, next to Köhler the most talented anti-Semitic agitator, campaigned in Bensheim-Erbach for the National Liberal incumbent Wilhelm Haas. Meanwhile, both anti-Semitic Reichstag deputies, Köhler in Giessen and Fritz Bindewald in Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten, were beaten by National Liberals, leaving their movement without a representative in Berlin for the first time since 1890. A year later, in August 1904, Köhler and Hirschel brought the Bauernbund into the Bund der Landwirte on terms that subjected it to BdL authority in matters of national politics but left it free to carry on independently in Hessian affairs. 24 National Liberalism, with its intimate links with the BdL in Hessen, received the benefits of this union in subsequent Reichstag elections. In the Landstände the National Liberals also got more cooperation than previously from the Bauernbund. For Köhler and his populist followers, however, the merger of 1904 was always an uneasy marriage. Over the next few years their influence waned. As Köhler wrote afterwards, "the interests of the leaseholders and the gentlemen f a r m e r s . . . the favor and protection of the elites of the small towns" now called the tune in the Bauernbund. Reaction against this trend soon followed. During the 1907 campaign anti-Semitic radicals in three electoral districts—BensheimErbach, Friedberg-Büdingen and Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten—disputed the endorsement of National Liberal candidates by the local BdL branches. In the first two their protests failed, and their independent challengers lost the rural vote to the incumbents Haas and Count Oriola. In Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten, however, they proved strong enough to force the Reich executive of the BdL to overrule its district leader, the National Liberal Fritz Schade, and to declare the Bund neutral in the contest; as a result Schade's man was defeated by the anti-Semitic former deputy Bindewald. Similar conflicts disrupted the Bauernbund during the following year until, late in 1908, Philipp Köhler quit the Landtag delegation. "It may be better," he wrote, "that the break finally came. Better for us, as we are now free again; better for the others, who now can completely indulge their reactionary and bureaucratic appetites." 25 Agrarians in the Grand Duchy, of whatever shade, were cool to ideas of Gleichberechtigung—the only echo of equality in their programs was the anti-Semites' mild demand in the nineties that estates be limited to a maximum of 150 hectares. In 1902 the rural deputies in the Landstände killed a revision of the electoral laws because it would have created five new urban constituencies without compensating the countryside. Later the Bauernbund continued to hold out for concessions that would keep representation in the second chamber weighted in agriculture's favor. The rural mood was also defensive in respect to social policy. Regardless

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whether their remedies were truly progressive, Reichstag deputies like Heyl and Wilhelm Haas, experienced in all aspects of economic life, understood that the problems created by the new manufacturing order had to be met and solved. More commonly, however, the farm view was a negative amalgam of fear and alarm, a response on the larger plane to the now unstoppable industrialization of Germany and locally to the ever increasing presence of commuting factory workers in the small towns and villages of the Grand Duchy.26 Already in the 1890s rural National Liberals had disagreed with the leadership in Darmstadt over how far the party should go to satisfy agriculture. In the following decade, faced with reform attempts that directly threatened the primacy of the countryside in Hessian politics, party elements associated with the Bund der Landwirte dug in firmly against change. Resistance to the policies identified with Bassermann was a logical extension of this position. Such agrarian opposition stiffened under the Bloc, when a Reich tax on property became the common objective of the national party and the Imperial government. In the 1870s the land tax in the Grand Duchy had been the prime grievance of farm spokesmen in the Hessian Progressive Party. Forty years later their National Liberal successors wanted no part of Billow's proposed estate duties. As we saw, in many of the regions which supported Bassermann, the Catholic party was the major rival of National Liberalism. In Hessen, by contrast, the Center was the only political force that was not a dangerous competitor. Its Landtag strength remained constant at eight or nine mandates. Likewise its drawing power among the electorate did not extend beyond the areas of Catholic population. In the 1890s, under a talented new parliamentary leader, the Mainz lawyer Joseph Schmitt, political Catholicism in the Grand Duchy came out of its long years of opposition and gradually aligned itself with the National Liberals. As Bishop von Ketteler had done in the Dalwigk era, Hessian Center leaders once again placed their interests under the protection of the ruling power and, subject to negotiation, their votes at its disposal. The Kulturkampf was dead. The National Liberals, concerned about their eroded position in the Landstände and at the polls, were equally interested in a partnership. In parliament the Center was a more dependable ally than the Bauernbund with its independent streak and its narrower agricultural outlook. In elections Schmitt and his colleagues could be bargained with. The National Liberals and Center first traded runofff commitments in 1898 for Schmitt in Mainz-Oppenheim and for Wilhelm Haas in Bensheim-Erbach, respectively. Further agreements followed. Generally, resistance to the policy of mutual accommodation came from local branches; the regional executives of the two parties dealt easily with one

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another. Even in the Bloc campaign of 1907 an "electoral cartel" between the National Liberals and the Center was nearly achieved for Offenbach-Dieburg and Mainz-Oppenheim. By the next year's Landtag election peace was restored, and there was extensive cooperation between the two parties—joint slates in Mainz and Offenbach, a tradeoff of candidacies in Friedberg and Ingelheim. 27 Such reciprocity reached the embarrassing point in a by-election in Bingen-Alzey early in 1909, when the Center's nominee, Philipp Uebel, gained the runoff against an Independent despite the covert efforts of his party's leaders to arrange a partial abstention for the National Liberals' benefit. The subsequent National Liberal endorsement of Uebel stated outright that "decisive electoral h e l p " now would be repaid with the Center's promise not to put up an opponent in the next regular election. 28 After 1900 National Liberal reliance on the Center was encouraged f r o m above. " I n Hessen," the first minister was reported to have said in 1909, "every government is dependent on the collaboration of the Center and the National Liberals. Conditions are different here than in Baden, where two-thirds of the population is Catholic. Clerical preponderance is out of the question in Hessen, but the Center is needed to meet the assault of the liberals [i.e., left liberals] and Social Democrats." 2 9 The leading ministers of the era, Carl von Rothe (1898-1906) and Carl von Ewald (1906-1918) personally shared the National Liberals' values and priorities. But their approval of the party's tie with the Center went beyond individual preferences. For a government that stood on the monarchical principle it was the best available parliamentary combination, once the period of solo dominance by the National Liberals had passed, and it survived unaffected in Darmstadt when the Imperial government dramatically broke with the Center at the end of 1906. "Nothing changed in this relationship with the Center and National Liberals," the Prussian envoy wrote three years later, " w h e n Prince Btilow dissolved the Reichstag and issued the watchword against Center and Social Democracy. Center and National Liberals continued to work together in internal Hessian politics, and this cooperation was assisted where possible by the Hessian government. For only in this manner could the regime secure a somewhat reliable majority for important political questions." 3 0 On the strength of their ties to agrarianism and the Center Party, then, the Hessian National Liberals proved able to retain their dominant position in the Grand Duchy even after losing their majority in the Landstände. Accordingly, the prevailing elements in the party felt little incentive to follow either Bassermann or the neighboring regional branches of National Liberalism on the track of reform. Change

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promised only to reduce their power, and so they resisted it. As in most of the German states, revision of the electoral laws was the foremost political issue in Hessen in the decade 1900-1910. Public opinion favored it, and while Staatsminister Finger had still opposed modifications in the nineties, his successors believed that the pressure for universal direct suffrage could not be withstood over time. But until 1911 the National Liberals, with help from others, held up the achievement of reform. Their tactics varied according to possibility, from delay and support for limiting amendments in the lower house to counterattack in the upper, where Baron von Heyl led the fight. Although the National Liberals in the second chamber dragged their feet on the necessary legislation and then concurred with the government's efforts to blunt the democratic aspects of the direct franchise, ultimately they approved revision in recognition and fear of the electorate's sentiments. Heyl, who had lifetime tenure, was free to assume a more unyielding stance. In 1904 he proposed that if the first chamber was to approve a new suffrage law, it must be recompensed with constitutional revisions allowing the actions of the lower house to be blocked more easily. This position, which his colleagues quickly accepted, created a stalemate of several years' duration, a deadlock particularly advantageous to the government and to many National Liberals, who now in painless cynicism could tell the voters they had tried, even when privately they knew that failure was certain. Through three terms of the Landstände, from 1899 to 1908, the combination of these obstacles sank the electoral reforms dutifully submitted by the government.31 National Liberal opposition to a direct and more open franchise was motivated positively by satisfaction with the status quo but also negatively, as it had been since the 1880s, by fear of socialism and the working classes. Here again the particular circumstances of Hessian politics produced attitudes at variance with the viewpoints held in regions friendly to Bassermann. The difference did not lie in the character of Social Democracy in Hessen. For the SPD in the Grand Duchy stood no less distant from revolutionary militancy than its counterparts in states where National Liberals sought ties to the left. Its most prominent intellectual, Eduard David, was one of the outstanding revisionist spokesmen in German socialism. Its leader, Carl Ulrich, "the Red Grand Duke of Hessen," was a self-educated workingman turned regional party boss, whose interests lay in organization and in immediate, material achievements. On one occasion, in Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten in 1903, a defeated Social Democratic candidate even gave a runoff endorsement to a National Liberal—this pragmatist was the later analyst and critic of parties, Robert Michels, then teaching at nearby Marburg. Such

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tendencies were at least discerned at the pinnacle of government, if not by the National Liberals. It caused a sensation throughout Germany when Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig, the son of Ludwig IV who had succeeded to the throne in the early nineties, appeared at a parliamentary reception in March 1901 and conversed with the socialist leader Carl Ulrich. But Ernst Ludwig, " a n urbane, noble, cultivated gentleman" unprejudiced in political affairs, seems to have accurately gauged the reformist nature of the Hessian Social Democrats, who spoke to monarchs even if they disapproved of monarchy. 32 Like other southerners, Hessian National Liberals held relatively progressive views on issues of social policy. Heyl once wrote that among other factors his interventionist social outlook put him out of consideration as a possible leader of the Reichstag delegation. Hostility toward legislated benefits for labor did not move the Hessian party to take a hard line against Social Democracy. Rather the National Liberals were not ready to concede political power to the working class; and, since they were not dependent on allies from the left, they were free to wage an allout fight against the " R e d s . " How intensively they carried on this struggle is best revealed in the most celebrated controversy of the era, the storm that arose in 1906 over the government's confirmation of a Social Democrat, Leonhard Eissnert, as Beigeordneter (deputy to the mayor) in Offenbach. Eissnert was elected to his unpaid office by the municipal council; there was nothing procedurally irregular about his case. Nonetheless, National Liberals reacted to his elevation as an intolerable precedent, the breaching of their last stronghold of urban power. A protest meeting in Darmstadt was called by the party's executive committee. "Deepest regrets" were expressed over the government's action, and the customary final cheering of the Grand Duke was omitted. Subsequently, the ministry, while arguing that in this instance nonconfirmation was "neither consistent with the requirements of political fairness nor useful in the battle against Social Democracy," refused, through a constitutional pretense, to approve socialist mayors or Beigeordnete chosen directly, under the provisions of the Landgemeindeordnung, in communities of fewer than 10,000 persons. 33 The complex of elements that kept the Hessian National Liberals apart from the leadership of the national party also limited the progress of the urban opposition that had appeared in the 1890s in reaction against agrarianism. In 1903 this left wing gained its first real triumph when a National Liberal manufacturer, jointly nominated by his own and the left liberal local associations, defeated Philipp Köhler in Glessen. Concurrently, in Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten the National Liberal who unseated Köhler's fellow anti-Semite, Fritz Bindewald, was given first-

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ballot support by the local left liberals. 34 But the orientation toward the left was more easily maintained in Oberhessen, where Social Democracy was comparatively undeveloped, than in the more industrialized sections of the Grand Duchy. As the issues before the party became social and political rather than economic, the urban opposition floundered. Glessen was the only Hessian constituency in which the Bloc policy was observed in 1907. In Mainz and Offenbach the National Liberals' regard for their local positions increasingly curbed their inclinations toward leftward policies. At home the partner they needed was the Center, and thus they tended to fall into line with the course of the party leadership. Briefly in Mainz in the early years of the century a "Goethe League" linking liberals, democrats, and socialists was formed to limit the Center's power, but it did not function after 1904. In Offenbach, where class antagonisms were old and deep-seated, the struggle against Social Democracy pulled the local organization back toward middle ground, particularly after the settlement of the tariff issue of 1902. That two leading urban National Liberals, the lawyer Friedrich Pagenstecher in Mainz and the second-generation manufacturer Theodor Böhm in Offenbach, ran in tandem with Centrists in the 1908 Landtag elections well indicates the weakness of the Hessian party's left wing. 35 Another cause of difficulty for the urban National Liberals was the aggressive revival of left liberalism in Hessen. As was true generally in the Reich, the breakup of the German Independent Party in 1893 was a disaster for its Hessian branch, too small to afford disunity. After the final, ruinous caucus which made the split irreparable, the Glessen lawyer and Reichstag deputy, Egid Gutfleisch, and an equally despairing friend went out "beer drinking in the most melancholy sense of the phrase." 3 6 It took more than a decade for Gutfleisch and the party whose most spirited representative he was to recover from the hangover. Only in 1906 did Hessian left liberalism exhibit new energies. With a volatile young personality, the reform-minded Protestant pastor Adolf Korell, as their nominee the left liberals challenged the National Liberals in a byelection in Darmstadt-Gross-Gerau and then threw their runoff support to the Social Democratic candidate, who won. In retribution the National Liberals played a role in the postelection disciplining of Korell by the Hessian Protestant synod. 37 The acrimony left over from this campaign helps account for the Bloc's insolvency in the Grand Duchy the following January. But the fundamental problem the left liberals posed for the urban National Liberals lay in their ability to outbid the latter in opposition to the agrarians. Their intransigence was well manifested in 1907, when, in spite of the entreaties of their own leaders in Berlin who were relaying Billow's

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wishes, they refused to support the Reichstag candidacies of Heyl and Oriola. 38 Rural conflict between left liberalism and National Liberalism was nothing new in Hessen, to be sure. From the 1880s until the passage of the 1902 tariff differences over commercial policy—protectionism versus free trade—had kept the two liberal groups apart in the country districts. But the nature of this antagonism was changing in the years of left liberal revival. After 1902 some Independents moved away from absolute opposition to agricultural duties, and the focal point of rural politics began to move with them. In 1907 there was talk of replacing the left liberal incumbent in Bingen-Alzey, a North German textiles manufacturer, with a moderately protectionist local estate owner. After the election, won by a National Liberal farmer running under BdL sponsorship, there were regrets that such a course had not been taken. Early in 1909, when opportunity again presented itself through a by-election made necessary by the death of the agrarian deputy the left liberals hesitated no longer and nominated Adolf Korell, who had by now publicly accepted protection on grain. Of course, the "peasant pastor" was criticized as a very late convert. Still, he succeeded in making the tariff question secondary to the issues of representation that were his concerns. For a time after leaving the Bauernbund delegation Philipp Köhler had envisioned Korell as a possible ally. Rather than join with Köhler, however, Korell hoped to supplant him and to establish left liberalism as the new democratic party in the countryside, the advocate of the middle and poorer groups who had now been deprived even of the misguided influence of the anti-Semitic radicals. In the initial voting in Bingen-Alzey in February 1909 this appeal brought Korell a plurality and put the National Liberal candidate, Dr. Jacob Becker, who had been Reichstag deputy for Offenbach-Dieburg in 1903-1906, out of the running. Thereupon the National Liberals endorsed Korell's Centrist opponent and held to this commitment in defiance of a countermand from the national party's directorate in Berlin. The Centrist then won the runoff. 39 Bingen-Alzey is a symbol of the state of Hessian National Liberalism in 1909. To the rural leaders of the party, who wanted to preserve the possibility of wrapping their social and political dominance in popular colors, the danger Korell represented had been all too clear, a worrisome external parallel to the feared reformism of Bassermann. Equally noteworthy, however, was the inability of the party left to counter so provocative a flaunting of the Bloc by the agrarians. Urban National Liberals in the Grand Duchy were still finding it difficult to reach as far to their left on issues of political power as they had been able to earlier on commercial questions. If the potential dissidents remained quiet, however, the possible

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sources of dissatisfaction with the party majority's policy were multiplying during the Bloc era. Several irritants came into play here: the slow pace of electoral reform, the successful resistance that Heyl led from the first chamber against the government's proposals to restructure communal taxes, a sudden drop in revenue from the Prussian-Hessian railroad condominium—an institution that had been approved in 1896 by the last National Liberal delegation holding a majority in the Landstände. All bore prospective significance through their relationship to questions of privilege or finance, issues that became the central elements in the final crisis of the Bloc in 1909. Even before Billow's coalition fell, the obstacle on which its unity collapsed, the Imperial financial reform, became a specific focus for the discontented in Hessen; at the outset of 1909 the finance committee of the second chamber reported that requests for higher civil service salaries could not be acted upon until improvements in the Reich's fiscal system were legislated. Some congruence, then, was developing between the interests of the dissentient National Liberal minority in Hessen and the intentions of the national party's leaders in the Reichstag as the latter entered the decisive spring weeks of 1909.40 The defeat of the Imperial government's finance reform legislation on June 24, 1909, deserves recognition as the crucial event in German domestic politics during the final prewar decade. Other crises such as the Daily Telegraph affair of 1908 and the Zabern incident of 1913 revolved about the issue of accountability, in one case Wilhelm II's, in the other, the army's. The Reichstag's decision over the critical element in the government's fiscal package, an extended inheritance tax, was the Empire's last moment of truth on the social question, the acid test of the willingness of the Conservatives, with whom every chancellor since Bismarck had governed, to abandon at least some of the material benefits their political power had gained them. 4 ' As a trial of the right's intentions the vote of June 24 held particular significance for the National Liberals. In its immediate aftermath most party members were sufficiently angered by the failure of the inheritance tax, the destruction of the Bloc, and the fall of Biilow to rally behind Bassermann when, at Berlin on July 4, he called for no compromise with the new agrarian-clerical majority. It was not too long, however, before the failure of the Reich finance reform led to open conflict over the policies of Gleichberechtigung. As early as July 1909 there were dissenting voices: from Hessen Heyl and Oriola dramatically protested the turn against the right by resigning from the Reichstag delegation. In the following months, as the likelihood sank in that a lengthy, if not permanent, estrangement from the Conservatives would result from Bassermann's orientation, a coordinated intraparty opposi-

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tion developed. The National Liberals who formed it acted in the conviction that social stability must replace social progress as the party's utmost priority. In pursuit of that end they urged rapprochement with the party of order par excellence, the Conservatives. At the outset of the Reichstag's deliberations on the finance reform, both the Imperial authorities and the National Liberals believed that a bill putting new demands on the wealthy could be carried. In submitting their plans for an estate tax Bülow and Sydow persuaded themselves that the Conservatives could be won over to it despite their previous record of opposition. Of far greater concern to the chancellor and his finance minister were the constitutional objections that any form of Reich tax on property would arouse among the states. A duty on inheritance had the precedent of 1906 on its side. Any other direct tax proposed by the Empire would have to be forced through the Bundesrat against powerful state resistance even before it was submitted to the parties in the Reichstag. Among the National Liberals, by contrast, neither the merits nor the parliamentary prospects of the estate tax encouraged much confidence. Agrarian deputies like Heyl had made plain their dislike of the government's legislation, and the leadership was well aware that it would be a hard sell in rural constituencies. Consequently, Bassermann and his associates, here most conspicuously Hermann Paasche, the first chairman of the Reichstag's special committee on taxation, favored an Imperial property tax as a more promising vehicle for agreement among the Bloc parties and a more comfortable solution in principle. As they judged the alternatives, the states' defense of their fiscal domains represented a rather easily passable barrier if Bülow had the will to force it. 42 If their particular approaches differed, nevertheless the chancellor and the National Liberals were in accord on the basic goal. As Paasche put it in one of the Reichstag delegation's strategy meetings: " N o Reich finance reform without a heavier burden on property." This sine qua non was the National Liberals' bond of good faith to their middle-class electorate. As such it also bore the specific implication that estate owners, heretofore a well sheltered caste, would pay higher taxes in the future. Yet on this point the Conservatives proved unyielding toward the government no less than in negotiations with their Bloc partners. In March 1909 the issue came to a head. At the beginning of the month both Billow's estate duty and the National Liberals' property tax were rejected by the taxation committee. Only a stopgap substitute motion then kept the Bloc afloat. But on March 24 the Conservatives abruptly told the other coalition parties that irrespective of existing alignments they would join any majority that appropriated the needed 100 million Marks in direct taxes

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exclusively through matricular contributions. The political meaning of this statement was unmistakable. The solution by means of matricular contributions had earlier been advanced by the Center. In accepting it the Conservatives broke apart the Bloc and resumed their old majority partnership with the clerical party and its parliamentary dependents. 43 After March 24 the chances for an even mildly equitable bill were precarious, but Bülow and the National Liberals kept on with their efforts. The chancellor had little alternative, for the Center had made it clear to the Conservatives that the price of cooperation was his dismissal. Yet Biilow, so slippery on other occasions, was also motivated by principle in this case. Although he liked to style himself an "agrarian chancellor," he also believed that the Conservatives and the Bund der Landwirte must understand that there were limits to the privileges to which landed wealth and the Prussian aristocracy could lay claim in the Germany of 1909. Accordingly, during the month of April, while the Reichstag recessed for Easter, the government drew up a new proposal, a tax on separate inheritors rather than on the estate itself, and opened up a strong press and propaganda campaign in its favor. Paralleling this drive, and perhaps in coordination with it, came a succession of meetings, resolutions, and telegrams on the part of National Liberal regional and local groups, some directly in response to a request by the party's executive committee. The party's leaders would have been happier had the government dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections. The National Liberals stood to gain in such a referendum, which also might have enabled them to avoid an internal struggle over the inheritance tax. But they likewise knew that Biilow was too much the loyal servant of the ruling order to recommend this step, which he feared would result in a Conservative disaster at the polls. As early as March 30, therefore, Ernst Bassermann told the Reichstag that the National Liberals had now given up their hopes for an Imperial property tax and were prepared to accept an extension of the inheritance tax. In the following weeks the party turned its energies in this direction. 44 Once again, however, neither the National Liberals nor the chancellor could exert sufficient leverage in the taxation committee to push the new plan through. Instead the balance tilted against them: in mid-May the Conservatives and Center gained a working majority in the committee and steered through a package of taxes on property sales and investment gains—the plan based on matricular contributions was set aside so that "liberal financiers," as one Catholic politician said, would pay the bill. Only one opportunity was now left to the government. On June 16, as the plenary second reading of the finance legislation began, Biilow appealed to the full Reichstag to overrule its committee and accept the inheritance

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tax. That the prospective return from this duty, 55 million Marks, fell far short of the sum originally targeted for the estate tax proposal made the principle at stake—would agriculture pay?—all the more prominent. But on June 24, in the rollcall on the decisive Paragraph 9a extending inheritance duties to spouses and children, the government and with it the National Liberals were defeated by a 194-186 vote. Two days later Bülow asked to be relieved of his offices. His resignation was held up until midJuly, when the reform worked out between his interior minister and eventual successor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and the new majority received final parliamentary approval. 45 A day before the chancellor made his plea for the inheritance tax to the Reichstag, Ernst Bassermann called on the National Liberal parliamentary delegation to observe discipline in the coming voting. Given the party's commitment to heavier burdens on wealth as well as Bülow's resolve to fight to a verdict on his proposal, it seemed imperative to Bassermann that the deputies act in unison in the climactic moment. Nonetheless, on June 24 four National Liberals did not vote with the government in the division on Paragraph 9a. One of them, Paul Emil Lehmann, a BdL member from Thuringia, had already left the Reichstag delegation and now voted " n o " as a new fellow-traveller of the anti-Semitic "Economic Association." The three others, all Hessians—Heyl, Oriola, and Haas—did not appear for the rollcall. For the moment these were the only breaks in the ranks. Haas's absence, moreover, was unintentional; illness had kept him from journeying to Berlin since the early spring. 46 Overall the party stood fast behind Bassermann. On July 4, following a summons issued on the day of the decisive vote in the Reichstag, an extraordinary National Liberal congress convened in Berlin and resoundingly confirmed the constituencies' solidarity with the parliamentary delegation and its leaders. It was a moment of vindication for Bassermann, who spoke of the struggle that must be waged against the new majority and pointed to the creation of two economic groups in which National Liberal names were prominent, the Hansa League for Enterprise, Industry, and Commerce (Hansabund) and the German Peasants' League (Deutscher Bauernbund) as evidence that the will to fight existed. Regardless of tendency, to the right as well as to the left, National Liberals were outraged by a fiscal restructuring that spared agriculture, overloaded the consumer, and channeled property taxes exclusively to the accounts of industry, finance, and commerce. Politically they had also been the losers, and the anger in the party against those who had destroyed the Bloc was equally intense. 47 Once the Berlin meeting ratified the leadership's course, Oriola, on July 6, and then Heyl, on the eighth, resigned from the Reichstag delega-

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tion and gave up their offices in the national and regional parties. In their public declarations each affirmed that loyalty to conviction and to the rural voters to whom both were connected through the Bund der Landwirte had made it impossible to accept party discipline on the inheritance tax. There were thirty-eight years of service in the Reichstag between the two Hessians; nonetheless, their break with the National Liberal delegation caused only a brief ripple of notice outside the Grand Duchy. Oriola had been too much a party regular—at the time of his withdrawal he was secretary of the parliamentary group—and Heyl was too much a loner to have a wide personal following.48 The immediate issue that arose with their resignations was the question of the Hessian National Liberals' attitude toward their actions. Anything less than censure and a clear separation from their politics was bound to be taken as a slap against Bassermann. Yet it was also obvious that the Hessian party would pay a heavy price in the countryside if it moved against the two deputies. Even before the events of June and July the inheritance tax had been a touchy subject in the rural constituencies. An agenda of hard choices thus lay before the National Liberals of the Grand Duchy when they met in Darmstadt on September 26 to consider action in regard to Heyl and Oriola. The pattern of debate at Darmstadt was simple. Agrarian members spoke in favor of Heyl and Oriola and warned of the consequences of estranging the Bund der Landwirte should the two deputies be disowned. Urban representatives from Mainz, Offenbach, Glessen, and even Friedberg, in Oriola's district, urged full support of the national party's line. In the middle the party chairman, Arthur Osann, maneuvered for compromise and attempted to minimize disagreement. Osann's intervention against the final paragraph of a resolution submitted from Offenbach was the turning point of the long meeting. According to the motion the question of the continued membership of the two deputies would be referred to the national party executive. But Osann objected that the issue was solely a regional matter and that, further, after the Bingen-Alzey imbroglio earlier in the year the Hessians' dirty linen should not again be aired in Berlin. Thereupon the resolution's sponsor, Theodor Böhm of Offenbach, dropped the paragraph from his motion. Böhm may have been convinced by Osann's arguments. Alternatively, he simply may have realized that his attempt would be defeated by a coalition of agrarians and those moderates who followed the party chairman. In any case the result was that Heyl and Oriola escaped effective sanctions. Once its final paragraph had been excised, the Offenbach resolution achieved nothing more than a standoff. Thereby it also became acceptable to all sides and, after further debate, was given approval. Heyl and Oriola were implicitly reproved by the first paragraph, which stated

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"agreement and . . . full confidence" in the National Liberal Reichstag delegation for its stand on the Reich finance reform. A Worms motion deploring the imposition of discipline in the parliamentary group was rejected by left and moderate delegates—Osann, the lone Hessian deputy to follow Bassermann on June 24, was not about to disavow his own action. The same left-center alliance provided the 70-39 majority that passed the second clause of the resolution, but this scarcely damaged the two resigned deputies: nothing more was expressed than "regret that Count Oriola and Baron von Heyl did not share the viewpoint of the Reichstag delegation so that they were compelled to declare their withdrawal from it." A motion to substitute condemnation for mere regret was turned down. Finally, the third and now concluding paragraph "took notice" that the two deputies had given up their party offices— again innocuous language. 4 ' Along with a rap on the knuckles, then, Heyl and Oriola received an understanding pat on the back, and more. For given the intraparty balance of power, the Darmstadt compromise was in reality a victory for the agrarian wing. Once it was decided not to subject the two dissidents to judgment by Berlin, they were safe; as Böhm's withdrawn motion indicated, the left National Liberals in the Grand Duchy were not powerful enough on their own to dislodge the leaders of the right. From a longer perspective it seems ironic that the resolution which preserved Heyl's influence in 1909 so resembled the Hessian Progressive Party's tolerant, mediating, dissimulating declaration of November 1880, against which the Heyl of that time had so vigorously protested because it allowed individuals who had quit the National Liberal Reichstag delegation to remain members of the regional party. In that instance Osann Vater had sought to build a "golden bridge" between the factions and so had helped the Secessionists. Now Osann Sohn, trying equally to satisfy all sides, played middleman to the benefit of the agrarians. With the party's center fearful of pushing the rural wing too strongly, Heyl and Oriola were able to remain National Liberals and at least locally to keep the upper hand over Bassermann. It was a reverse that prefigured the renewed difficulties the national leadership was to experience with its regional branches during the last years before war put party politics temporarily into suspense. The resignations of Heyl and Oriola open a new and final stage in the evolution of National Liberalism. In the remaining five years before 1914 the solitary protests of the two Hessian deputies gave way to broader and insistent challenges against Bassermann and his policies. Gradually the national party slipped into civil war. Regional influences shaped the lines of the conflict. Most of Bassermann's opponents came from areas com-

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mitted both to farm interests and to the Bund der Landwirte, or from sections in which National Liberal attachments to heavy industry and the party's weakness at the polls together encouraged a bias against Gleichberechtigung. In the states and provinces there was generally a sufficient identity of economic and political interests to encourage clear positions for or against the national leadership. In some, however, and above all in Hessen, the struggle at the Reich level was duplicated on the regional scale. Once again the National Liberals became too entrapped by their own divisions to be able to exert much effect on others. In the Grand Duchy the cleavage ran parallel to attitudes toward the BdL. As so often before, the party's relationship to the countryside was the central issue in the debate over policy. "Far be it for us, naturally," wrote the semiofficial Darmstädter Zeitung in 1912, "to express any opinion concerning these internal party affairs. We should like only to mention that the chief strength of the Hessian National Liberals rests mainly among the rural farming population. Generally, however, the National Liberal Hessian peasant has organized economically in the Bund der Landwirte, and it would be difficult to separate him from this economic organization—for as a rule he regards the Bund der Landwirte only as an economic, not a political organization." 50 One may safely dismiss this last claim. Hessian farmers had learned to appreciate the interconnections between economics and politics. But the statement's warning went to the heart of the matter. The national party may have broken with the BdL after the failure of the 1909 finance reform. Could the Hessian National Liberals afford to follow its example? A National Liberal split occurred in the Grand Duchy because the party's left wing eventually answered this question affirmatively in the final half-decade before the war. Earlier at Darmstadt in September 1909 the representatives of the left had been prepared in spirit for a break. But they were too weak to force it on their terms—exclusion of Heyl and Oriola—and unwilling, as yet, to leave the party organization themselves. Over the following three years, however, they gained strength and aid and grew bolder until, in June 1912, dissident members from Mainz, Offenbach, and Giessen, now joined by new adherents from several other districts, declared their independence of Heyl, the Bund der Landwirte, and the agrarian wing of the party and founded a separate "Free Association of Hessian National Liberals." Until 1909 the left wing drew its support from the cities and the areas surrounding them. In the next few years it also rooted itself in the countryside, principally in the electoral districts of Alsfeld-LauterbachSchotten and Bensheim-Erbach. There, after a decade and a half of good relations with the Bund der Landwirte, the local party associations expe-

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rienced frictions with agrarian interests. One cause of the trouble was the defeat of the Reich finance reform. BdL groups were satisfied with the outcome, but many National Liberals and other farmers were not: in the Vogelsberg and Odenwald, where noble-owned large estates were still numerous, the inheritance tax had held some appeal. In turn this quarrel revived the leftover doubts of cattle breeders about BdL advocacy of high tariffs on feed grains in 1902. A further irritant was the electoral reform finally passed by the Landstände, in which the National Liberals accepted a proposal of the Hessischer Bauernbund that men over fifty years of age be allowed two votes. In less populated rural sections this clause was expected to operate in favor of the out-and-out agrarians and to the disadvantage of " p u r e " National Liberals." Such differences were sharpened by the unsettled question of candidacies for the coming Reichstag election. Wilhelm Haas was retiring in Bensheim-Erbach. In Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten a new National Liberal nominee also had to be selected. On the other side, the same antiSemitic opponents who had bid for the BdL endorsement in 1907 would be back. The National Liberals thus faced serious contests for the rural vote and from a weaker competitive position than previously. In the Vogelsberg and Odenwald the party's local leadership had never included as many farmers as in Rheinhessen or the Wetterau. Now the veterans like Haas and Fritz Schade who had provided connections to the Bund der Landwirte were fading from the scene. By contrast the moderate elements of the Hessischer Bauernbund were active and numerous in the two constituencies; unless the National Liberals put up an agrarian, they could be expected to press for BdL support of the anti-Semitic candidates. Especially with the alternative of the Deutscher Bauernbund now available, the National Liberals in Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten and Bensheim-Erbach had reason to consider whether they should not drop the strict agricultural orientation of the past fifteen or even twenty-five years. In 1910 and 1911 they made the choice, shifting away from the BdL and toward the antiagrarian opposition. 52 Left National Liberalism gained in numbers and character through this realignment. With two country districts added to the core areas of Mainz, Offenbach, and Giessen, the opposition was now a power to be reckoned with in five of the nine Hessian Reichstag constituencies. Equally important, for the first time it included authentic rural spokesmen—men who could match the dirt in their fingernails with the agrarians of the Bund der Landwirte. Such advances were easily interpreted as rewards for past constancy, and they encouraged the left wing to push ahead with its fight against Heyl and his dominant faction. Interventions by the national party moved it further in this direction. Before the defeat

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of the Reich finance reform the National Liberal leadership in Berlin had paid little attention to Hessen, save on certain occasions when the regional party or its local committees diverged from established policy, as had recently happened in Bingen-Alzey. After the Darmstadt meeting of September 1909 handed a pardon to Heyl and Oriola, Bassermann and his organizational lieutenants followed events in the Grand Duchy closely in an attempt to influence them where possible. In successive by-elections, in Friedberg-Büdingen in spring 1910 after Count Oriola was fatally injured in a Berlin street accident, and in Glessen early in 1911 following the death of Philipp Köhler, representatives of the national party oversaw the choice of candidates and the management of the campaign. The agrarian wing was checked and the left assisted. In March 1911 the executive committee in Berlin acted even more decisively by sending Gustav Stresemann to Mainz, the symbolic capital of left National Liberalism in Hessen, to deliver a blistering condemnation of Heyl. Afterwards the opposition leader Friedrich Pagenstecher commented that a party division might be unavoidable. A horrible ending, as he put it, was preferable to the existing horror without end.53 For their part the agrarian National Liberals took the attacks of the left and the interference of Berlin in stride. In the constituencies where they were strongest, Worms-Heppenheim and Bingen-Alzey, their control remained absolute. In Oberhessen and Starkenburg they operated increasingly through BdL connections and ignored the district organizations' swing to the left. On which side, after all, was the rural electorate to be found? In the 1910 by-election in Friedberg-Büdingen a local newspaper set out the prospect of saving "the liberal and democratic-minded farmer, the small and middle peasant of the Wetterau from the embrace of the agrarian magnates' Bund der Landwirte. " But the joint National Liberal-left liberal candidacy that was to accomplish this feat did not even reach the runoff. In the 1912 Reichstag campaign the same paper drew the lesson of that experience and argued that the National Liberals must attach themselves to the BdL: "The ß««rfhas from 4,000 to 5,000 votes at its disposal; whoever doubted that must have been enlightened by last year's election [1910 was meant]. Can any rational politician who places fatherland above party dismiss this power factor and tilt against windmills?" 54 Agrarians could have asked the same question of the left National Liberals in Glessen, in Alsfeld-Lauterbach-Schotten, and in Bensheim-Erbach. If anything, the right wing of the Hessian party became more aggressive in responding to the challenges it confronted after the summer of 1909. A little more than a year after leaving the Reichstag delegation Heyl began publishing a South German National Liberal Correspond-

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enee, whose regular fare consisted of attacks upon Bassermann and his sympathizers in the Grand Duchy. By then he had also gained a formidable new ally, Dr. Jacob Becker, the physician-turned-politician who had been Reichstag deputy for Offenbach-Dieburg in 1903-1906 and most recently National Liberal candidate in the Bingen-Alzey by-election. Becker, a dynamo of activity who served as southwestern coordinator of the Reich Association against Social Democracy, more than made up for the loss of Count Oriola in 1910. If Heyl was still energetic as he neared seventy, it was Becker who became the available man of the agrarian wing in Hessen—and beyond. In the wake of the controversy over the Reich finance reform he quit the national party's central committee. By summer 1910 the regional secretary in Karlsruhe was complaining to Berlin about the "exceedingly harmful activity of the self-designated National Liberal Dr. Becker." 55 With the fronts hardening on both sides, Arthur Osann's effort to hold the Hessian National Liberals together became increasingly an exercise in tightrope-walking in 1910 and 1911. Party leadership in his hands was now a matter of offending no faction too often. In spite of BdL opposition to the National Liberals' nominee Osann spoke conciliatingly toward the Bund during the by-election campaign in Friedberg-Büdingen. Later in 1910 he blocked a left-wing attempt to submit the questions surrounding Heyl's status to the national party's congress at Kassel. In January 1911, at a regional congress convened to determine policy for the coming Reichstag elections, he successfully advocated leaving each district committee free to choose its allies—another escape from conflicts. Unity, Osann pleaded a month later in a speech at Giessen, was the only salvation of the party. "One can speak of a right wing in the National Liberal Party, the Worms camp, and of a left wing that has its seat in Mainz. It is easily conceivable that a party composed of the diverse ranks of the population cannot be forced into a single mold. Mutual understanding helps to get over the differences of opinion." 5 6 The trouble was that Osann's version of mutual understanding included more concessions to the stronger right wing than to the left. Although the constituencies were given free choice of electoral allies at the regional congress of January 1911, the leadership and the right also joined to carry a resolution defining middle class unity against Social Democracy as the party's foremost goal in the coming Reichstag campaign. Afterwards a satisfied Heyl spoke of a "middle line" being approved. From the standpoint of his opponents, however, it was far removed from the center: the formula to which Osann lent his authority set bounds on the left but no limitations upon possible attachments on the right. Several weeks later, when it was applied in the by-election in Gies-

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sen, it led to the runoff endorsement of an anti-Semite who barely managed a last-minute apology for an earlier description of the National Liberals as a "party of scoundrels." 57 Unity held on through the Landtag and Reichstag campaigns of the fall and winter months of 1911-12, but it was a thin reed. For the left was losing what faith it still had in Osann: once it concluded that the party leader and his middle-course following could not stand up to the agrarians, the logical next step was independent action. After the Reichstag elections of January 1912 the opposition made the break. Symptomatically, the incentive—or opportunity, from the long-run perspective—was provided by the campaign in Bingen-Alzey. As in 1909 the National Liberal district association had nominated Dr. Becker. Hopes on the left for a regional electoral pact with the reunified Progressives had died as a result. Becker was no more acceptable as a common candidate than Heyl and Oriola had been five years before. Instead Bingen-Alzey became the scene of a bitter rematch between Becker and his left liberal rival of 1909, Adolf Korell. With the Center redeeming the pledge of future help it had given then in the by-election, Becker won the mandate by a runoff margin of two ballot slips—12,012 to 12,010 votes. 58 Becker's candidacy frustrated the left wing. His victory threatened them. Unlike Heyl, who would never ask to come back, the new deputy for Bingen-Alzey expected to join the Reichstag delegation. Were he admitted and his party credentials honored in Berlin, those who had fought him in the Grand Duchy in the name of a true National Liberalism stood to be weakened. Thus after the election, knowing they would get no help from Osann, the leaders of the left appealed to the national leadership, via Gustav Stresemann, to keep Becker out of the National Liberal parliamentary group. Here they gained satisfaction. Although he had carelessly raised no objection to Becker's nomination, Ernst Bassermann did not wish to welcome back a man who had spent the last several years denouncing him and his policies. Consequently, for his own reasons as well as in response to the urgings from Hessen, he exerted his influence to exclude Becker; the Reichstag delegation reaffirmed the boundary to the right over which Heyl and Oriola had resigned in 1909. In turn this assist from Berlin encouraged the left wing in Hessen to strike out independently. On February 11, at a meeting in Frankfurt chaired by Theodor Böhm, some two hundred representatives of the intraparty opposition adopted a resolution declaring "that Herr von Heyl as well as Dr. Becker cannot be considered National Liberals" and wired Bassermann their "warmest" approval that Becker had not been accepted into the parliamentary group. 59 At Frankfurt the left laid down a choice before the Hessian party: go

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on without Heyl and Becker or go on without us. But at the subsequent regional congress of March 31, Böhm, Pagenstecher, and their followers were humbled by the right wing. Through the hurried creation of a string of "twenty-five-man associations," each allowed to send representatives to party conferences by virtue of their minimum complement, WormsHeppenheim and Bingen-Alzey accounted for 101 of the 203 delegates present, and they controlled the meeting. Wide majorities successively voted resolutions of confidence in Osann's conduct of affairs and of disapproval of actions unsanctioned by party authorities—a rebuke to the left's February gathering. Only by walking out were the members of the left able to prevent the passage of a motion applauding Heyl and Becker. They did not return. Three months later, in June 1912, they founded their own Free Association of Hessian National Liberals. 60 After June 1912, National Liberalism in Hessen was divided and spent. Although the individual members of the Free Association did not leave the regular organization, as a group they operated on their own until late in 1917, when a reconciliation with the leadership was achieved. But the reunited party survived for little more than a year. At the end of 1918, in the first weeks of the Republic, some elements of the left wing again broke away, now to join the new German Democratic Party. The majority hung on to their old loyalties until the national party dissolved itself in mid-December; then they moved over to its successor, the German People's Party. Hessian National Liberalism remained fragmented to the end. 61 Faction and conflict also disrupted the national party in the last years before the war. Ernst Bassermann may have held the National Liberals together through the collapse of the Bülow Bloc, but the angry, defensive unity of the Berlin congress of July 1909 was a passing mood. As party members began to consider the next step for National Liberalism, the differences between them again surfaced. In the half-decade until 1914 their divisions became more intense and increasingly bitter. The firmest choices before the party are well described in Theodor Eschenburg's pioneering study of National Liberal policy in the Bloc era. Late in 1909 Bassermann received a pair of memoranda, one f r o m Johannes Junck of the National Liberal left wing, one from Paul Fuhrmann of the right. In Eschenburg's summaries of the two letters the common theme is commitment. As Fuhrmann wrote, " t h e way that things have now come to a crisis, the old independent middle-party posture, the struggle on two to four fronts against Conservatives, Center, Independents, and Social Democracy must lead to the ruin or at least to a very considerable weakening of our party." 6 2 Each of Bassermann's corre-

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spondents contended that the fight must be abandoned on one side so as to wage it successfully on the other. Junck argued for an opening to the left. Social Democracy and the working class, he wrote to Bassermann, were both changing character, the SPD "gradually becoming a party of order," the ordinary laborer adopting a protective attitude toward the national economy on which his standard of living depended. In Junck's view, the National Liberals must encourage these tendencies through a cooperative approach to the SPD at the same time that they put the achievement of liberal domestic reforms to the forefront of their efforts. Such initiatives could make the party the leader of a liberal coalition enjoying support from labor and aimed directly at the power of the Conservatives and Center. Junck stopped short of recommending the alliance "from Bassermann to Bebel" which some elements in German liberalism believed to be the ultimate solution to its problems. But what his orientation could mean in practice was dramatically demonstrated in the same autumn of 1909 by a regional version of that combination—the "Grand Bloc" of National Liberals, left liberals, and SPD in Baden. From reciprocal help in the 1905 state elections through occasional parliamentary collaboration in the following Landtag session, the three groups had moved ahead to an open tactical partnership four years later. Its direction lay primarily in the National Liberals' hands. The Social Democrats were satisfied with the equal status they gained and the progressive legislation they helped to pass. How closely the long-range hopes of the National Liberal leaders in Karlsruhe paralleled the scenario that Junck sketched out for Bassermann is evident in their speculations in 1910 that a nonsocialist workers' party might still come into being through the agency of the Grossblock." Predictably, the policy of the Grand Bloc took hold most firmly among the regional National Liberal groups that were the strongest backers of Bassermann's reformist course—first Baden, then Bavaria and the Rhineland. Acceptance of the leftward thrust may have been easier on the state level than it was nationally, since two of the most problematical areas of cooperation with Social Democracy, social legislation and foreign affairs, stood beyond the competence of the regional diets. Still, this circumstance cut both ways; in the areas where the Grand Bloc won support in the years after 1909, its limits could not be fully tested. Consequently, it was possible for opponents to counsel prudence toward it or to argue it away as a South German aberration—exactly as orthodox Social Democrats rebuffed their reformists from below the Main. An approach like Junck's, then, could not gain general approval within the national party. It leaned too far in the direction of democracy for most National Liberals, including Bassermann, to be comfortable

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with it. The National Liberal leader in Baden, Edmund Rebmann, acknowledged as much at the 1910 party congress at Kassel when he defended the Grand Bloc as the product of specific regional conditions and conceded that it could not be extended to Reich politics for perhaps a generation. 64 Alliance with the Conservatives, the alternative choice which Paul Fuhrmann urged on Bassermann in late 1909, was a more familiar and, for most party members, a more comfortable option. In his memorandum Fuhrmann echoed the long-standing National Liberal fear that coalition with the left would mean an intolerable dependence on the left. As he assessed the possibilities, the party would remain truer to itself and do better for its electoral prospects by seeking a realignment with the Conservatives, whom he described as ready to cooperate. To what lengths their willingness extended, however, Fuhrmann did not and probably could not say, and there lay the weak point in his argument. 65 A few months previous, the Conservatives had refused to compromise on the inheritance tax, not only with the National Liberals but with a chancellor well disposed toward them. It remained for Fuhrmann to show why they should now be any more committed to a new pact with liberalism, particularly when the less demanding partnership with the Center was available to them. Such assurances were indispensable to allay both the lingering anger at the Conservatives' betrayal of the Bülow Bloc and also a widespread uneasiness over the electoral risks of a shift to the right. But Fuhrmann had no guarantees. Accordingly, his tactic could be no more acceptable beyond thè areas where links to the right already existed than could Junck's outside the regions favorable to the left. As long as party unity was a sine qua non, then the difficulties of coalition in either direction meant that the National Liberals would have to rely on their own efforts to improve their situation. But how could they do it? As the disintegration of the Bloc proceeded in the spring and early summer of 1909, Bassermann glimpsed the prospect of a National Liberal resurgence ahead. A turning point could be reached, he believed, if the Reichstag were dissolved and elections held—elections that could funnel the outrage of the public against the Conservatives and Center, elections that could forge a popular constituency for the new organizations which the National Liberals were launching. For Bassermann, in Theodor Eschenburg's words, "Hansabund, Bauernbund, and elections stood in the most intimate connection." But Biilow would not recommend a dissolution after his parliamentary defeat of June 24 any more than he had been ready to in March, when the Conservatives had overturned the Bloc. The crusading moment came and went. In the aftermath the National Liberals' expectations of the new economic groups were

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rapidly disappointed. The Hansa League failed to hold the allegiance of heavy industry and settled into the orbit of banking and finished-goods manufacturing. The German Peasants' League ran into financial troubles. National elections were too distant—1911 at the earliest—for the right parties' rejection of the inheritance tax to remain the springboard for a National Liberal campaign. Nonetheless, Bassermann, it appears, saw little alternative but to attempt to keep the issue alive as a rallying point for his party. 66 This stalemate to his hopes after 1909 indicates the limitations of Bassermann's liberalism. Frisch gewagt ist halb gewonnen, but Bassermann never ventured the unreservedly democratic course that offered National Liberalism its best chance for gaining a wider following in German society. Yet it must also be understood that Bassermann's politics of Gleichberechtigung was a true expression of his party's aspirations and fears. A policy of securing recognition and position for the middle classes was also a policy of continued separation from the working classes and Social Democracy, and the majority of National Liberals still wanted both. If, despite his moderate goals, Bassermann's actions often displayed a leftward inclination, it was because a middle line was not always possible to maintain in practice, and because the progressive initiatives that the National Liberals did undertake usually found their support among the left liberals and Social Democrats. During the months immediately following the debacle over the Reich finance reform Bassermann enjoyed a rare reprieve from criticism. Soon, however, the attacks on his leadership resumed and did not afterwards cease. As had been the case since 1906, the opposition displayed a regional character; Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Saxony, Brandenburg, the Magdeburg area, and Hessen were its strongholds. In spring 1910, subsidies to the national party from Rhenish-Westphalian industry were cut off. In September, at the National Liberal party congress in Kassel, the right-wing regional groups verged on a floor challenge to Bassermann. A triumphant reception by the delegates on the first day of the meeting spared him this fight, but in his remark, cited earlier, about "the autonomy of the provinces" the National Liberal chairman acknowledged the strength of his antagonists. Even before Kassel, Bassermann had yielded a point to them by declining to convene the party's central committee to review the Prussian National Liberals' foot-dragging on electoral reform. Two years earlier, when the national party had put a special commission to work on the same matter, he had not needed to be so careful. 67 An uneasy truce carried over from Kassel to the Reichstag elections of January 1912. Although Bassermann pressed for tactical alliances with

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the left liberals in the campaign to come, several of the right-wing regional and provincial organizations nonetheless aligned themselves with the parties of the ruling Conservative-Center bloc. Encouragement for these defections came both from the Bund der Landwirte, whose influence remained powerful in Schleswig-Holstein and Posen as well as in Hessen, and from the Centraiverband Deutscher Industrieller, which had brushed away the reverse of the Reich finance reform and resumed its agitational and funding efforts to harness National Liberalism in a coalition of the right. In the balloting the party won 1,662,670 votes, a slight advance beyond its 1907 totals, but it gained only 45 seats, a falloff of nine and a setback that National Liberal leaders on the right interpreted as a signal to take the offensive against Bassermann. The willingness of some newly elected deputies to support the Social Democrat August Bebel for the Reichstag presidency and of nearly the entire parliamentary delegation to back Philipp Scheidemann as first vice-president furnished additional incentives in this direction. 68 Early in February a conference of representatives from Westphalia and Schleswig, but also including Eugen Calman of the Bingen-Alzey district association, laid out a plan of action. At the constituent meeting of the party's central committee on March 24, they put it in motion. A Hessian matter allowed them to deal Bassermann an initial rebuff. From Mainz Friedrich Pagenstecher had formally protested that the delegates from the Grand Duchy had not been selected according to regular procedures. Bassermann personally raised this objection before the meeting commenced and lost the ensuing vote. Immediately thereafter he suffered a more severe blow when a proposal to confirm him by acclamation as party chairman met with opposition. In the balloting which then followed, thirty delegates cast blank votes—an embarrassment, even if the right was not powerful enough to unseat Bassermann. Subsequently, two of Bassermann's younger allies, Gustav Stresemann and Hermann Fischer, failed to gain reelection to the seventeen-man executive committee, and a resolution won approval that prohibited organizational affiliation and financial support to any National Liberal association which did not attach itself to the party's regional branches. 69 This last motion thrust particularly at the Reich Union of Associations of National Liberal Youth, the Young Liberal movement, as it was commonly called. Its name offers a comment on the era's exaggerated notions of maturity—among the Jungliberalen forty was the cutoff age for membership—but otherwise it is misleading. "In fact," as KlausPeter Reiss puts it, "their Reich Union was more an organization of the reformist left wing of the party than an organization for recruitment among young people." 70 A dozen years in existence by 1912, the move-

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ment had originated in 1899-1900, during the transitional period following Rudolf von Bennigsen's retirement. Its politics were democratically oriented, imperialistic, and anticlerical; and it had built up strong cadres in regions where the Center provided the National Liberals' chief opposition and the party's own branches leaned to the left. The Young Liberals supported Bassermann both during the Bülow Bloc period and after the failure of the Reich finance reform, and the right wing disliked them for that, among other sins. But they were not the real target in March 1912. Bassermann put the resolution that was to be passed by the central committee in better perspective several days before the meeting: "The fight against the Young Liberals is simultaneously the fight against the H[ansa] B[und], the [German] Peasants' League, and in the final analysis against the liberal course; and Young Liberalism, which is of little importance as an organization, offers the pretense."" At the conclusion of the March 24 meeting, the central committee accepted a motion of the left to summon a national congress within six weeks to review the party statutes—in other words, to pass judgment on the resolutions approved that day. In the interval that preceded this last gathering of National Liberal delegates, held on May 12 in Berlin, Bassermann employed the tool of compromise to offset some of the damage he had sustained. A committee was established to settle the Young Liberal issue before the party congress assembled. It arranged a solution whereby the Reich Union, and with it the group's freedom of action, remained untouched, but it lost the financial aid of the party, and local Young Liberal associations were obliged to attach themselves to the regional organizations. A pitched battle in Berlin was thereby avoided. At the meeting Bassermann and Robert Friedberg, for the right, engaged in a rather tame oratorical duel; 72 but the basic conflict in the party had been merely circumvented. On the evening of May 12, the leaders of the anti-Bassermann wing convened a private rump session and formed an association of their own, soon to be known as the Old National Liberal Reich Union {Altnationalliberaler Reichsverband). " O l d " in their sense meant tried and true; it signified loyalty to what were alleged to be the guiding principles of the party in Bennigsen's era. But the immediate allegiances of the Altnationalliberalen ran out toward the Centraiverband Deutscher Industrieller and the Bund der Landwirte, and their strength lay in predictable areas—Westphalia, Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, the Magdeburg area, Hessen. If they were old, it was only in the sense of opposition to Bassermann's politics, now grown older and bolder. Similarly, those who rallied against the new group were linked to the Hansa Bund and German Peasants' League and to the regions long identified with the party leader's course. 73

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Over the following two years, the repeated clashes between the factions immobilized National Liberalism. Relief from the intraparty struggle occasionally came by way of military or foreign policy issues like the army bill of 1913. However, as long as the shape of Germany's domestic order remained a matter of public debate, as it was throughout Bethmann Hollweg's chancellorship, the National Liberals could not escape their divisions. In suspending politics momentarily, the outbreak of war in 1914 helped patch up the party's unity. As in the SPD, however, the other great national party, prewar conflicts over social and constitutional goals resumed as the fighting went on. Like the Social Democrats, the National Liberals had their share of crossovers, as men took positions on war aims that joined them with former enemies—Bassermann and Stresemann among the annexationists and Robert Friedberg among the advocates of a more measured policy are the most notable examples. Permanent conversions, however, nearly always involved a passage from defense of the internal status quo to reform; prewar progressives like Bassermann and Stresemann did not allow agreement over German goals and strategy to obliterate their differences with others in domestic affairs. In 1917 and 1918, as internal questions and, above all, electoral reform in Prussia again came to the forefront, the National Liberals were once more swamped by discord. They remained fragmented until military defeat and revolution created a new basis for German politics in November 1918. 74 The party died then. Its divisions survived. Much of the former Bassermann wing and most Young Liberals joined the Democratic Party. Right National Liberals and Altnationalliberalen found their way to the German People's Party. Similarly, the regional divergences between the two postwar groups generally corresponded to the territorial splits the National Liberals had known. 75 " I t almost seems to m e , " a National Liberal in Mannheim speculated in February 1884, "that the existing party groupings only still partly coincide with the great political currents in the nation, or more accurately, that the latter are presently falling away from their previous direction without one's yet being able to discern a definite change." 76 As yet the author of these lines, Ferdinand Scipio, was unaware of the preparations afoot for a southwestern party conference. Six months later he was campaigning for the Reichstag in Bensheim-Erbach on the platform of the Heidelberg Declaration. Heidelberg had contrived a solution to the problems of direction sensed by Scipio and so many others. One sees its elements in his speeches in the towns and county seats of the Odenwald—help for agriculture, aid to injured and retired workers, an easing of local poor relief burdens, colonies. Scipio, said another speaker

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at Höchst, was a farmer himself and a man who well understood conditions in South Germany. Here was the essence of Heidelberg's message: we National Liberals can represent the needs of your constituency, your region.77 It achieved considerable success at the polls in autumn 1884. It also moved National Liberalism onto the track of regional fragmentation. Heidelberg was meant to place the National Liberals' representative claims on the solid ground of local interest. However, by the time of the May 1884 party congress in Berlin, it was apparent that such interests diverged fundamentally from one region to another. A lasting common platform could not be built upon them. From nearly a century's distance this inadequacy is evident. In 1884 the National Liberals also needed a broad aim or set of goals that could, simultaneously, complement their advocacy of the constituencies' economic wishes and achieve a unity of purpose and action. But here they played a very short suit. A quartercentury later Ernst Bassermann rhetorically asked his listeners at Kassel, "Gentlemen, what was the Heidelberg Program? Above all, what was it for those of us who belonged among the young men? It was an avowal of loyalty to Bismarck." 78 In his answer lies the weakness of the reorientation of 1884. Party politics is perhaps especially the art of the possible, so much determined by the here and now of events. In 1884, when Bismarck, as permanent a factor as any in German political life, offered the National Liberals a safe mooring at the side of the government and its colonial and tariff policies, the party's leaders accepted it with little hesitation. It was no easier for them to conceive of and design strategies for a world from which the chancellor would be absent than for Liberals in England, as we shall see, to choose directions without reference to the dominant figure of Gladstone. Still, considering the inescapable criterion of his age— sixty-nine—identification with Bismarck was not likely to afford the party an ideological and power base for more than a decade at best—four years beyond his actual fall, in 1890. A case can be made that the tie turned out to be advantageous for that full span, with Bismarck-in-exile serving as a symbol of the National Liberals' dissatisfactions during the Caprivi era. But after 1894 the living shadow and then the magnified memory of the Altkanzler were of little use to the party. Better had Bismarck fulfilled the threat attributed to him around the time of the 1881 elections, that he would press the National Liberals to the wall. In actuality, during the years following his turn away from them in the Reichstag, he succeeded only in pushing them back into the provinces, into their cushioned nests of local hegemony, where they stood beyond his control, or in Prussia where they were tolerated by him for

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their usefulness in particular areas. In defense of this close-to-home dominance, in the hope of fortifying the position of the Honoratioren, the regional leaders of the South worked forward to Heidelberg and, in the bright atmosphere of the spring of 1884, accepted the half-loaf of influence that Bismarck offered them once their movement gained headway. Thereafter, behind the buffers of their local power, National Liberals postponed any critical scrutiny of the social and political order of the Empire and escaped the reform conclusions that political men with representative ambitions were bound to draw from such an examination. A shift toward a more independent posture came only after the regional groups themselves had lost strength. As Ernst Bassermann learned through bitter experience, however, this change came too late to overcome the national party's territorial cleavages. On the eve of the 1912 Reichstag campaign, the last the party was to wage, Bassermann had reminded his fellow National Liberals that "in the life of our people there are not only economic and material questions, but that times also come when great idealistic conceptions permeate the national soul and purely political perspectives press to the forefront: what the government's course should be in Germany, whether we are willing to see our politics conducted under the pressure of the blue-black Bloc, the conservative-clerical brotherhood, or whether we strive ahead toward bright summits, toward the realization of the principles of liberalism, which have to be asserted and carried ahead in these elections." 79 At Heidelberg, a generation earlier, this recognition was not present. Eighteen eighty-four is neither a beginning nor an end in the complex story of German liberalism's stunted evolution, but it is a turning point. In Hessen, in the Southwest, in the states, National Liberals purchased new life, but at the cost of their future in Reich politics.

7

National Liberalism in the Context of European Politics

After 1918 former National Liberals did not mourn the party for long. Little in their memories carried a sense of what might have been. The legacy that remained was one of decline and defeat, and opinion concerning the National Liberals has not changed appreciably since that time. Judgments on the depth of the party's early successes have varied to some extent; but there is general agreement that after the turning point of Heidelberg it was not able to realize its ideals and advance Imperial Germany beyond the condition of " a society in which the liberal principle could settle only haltingly and occasionally." If anything, the disappointments of National Liberalism have acquired a larger significance recently, as the past century of German history has been reinterpreted increasingly from the perspective of the Primat der Innenpolitik— the primacy of domestic politics. It is in line with this trend that Ralf Dahrendorf, whose above quoted formulation also appears in Chapter 1, has restated the "German Question"—"we want to find out what it is in German society that may account for Germany's persistent failure to give a home to democracy in its liberal sense.'" For this new German Question, however, a uniquely German answer is not possible, neither in general nor as it pertains specifically to the National Liberals. The degree to which their failure was a German defeat cannot be determined without our examining liberal experience elsewhere in Europe during the lifetime of the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Reich. As a tale of faction and weakness and ultimately of defeat, the National Liberals' fifty-one year history falls comfortably into place as a chapter in the new literature on the German Question. "In 1867 and 1871," Fritz Stern wrote recently, "Bismarck improvised a constitutional 199

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system that at best was a half-way house to liberalism." Stern then describes the extent to which this partial structure was dismantled in the era before 1914. Imperial Germany, he suggests, is best understood as an //liberal society.2 Others have chosen different labels, but their judgment has been much the same: a set of particularly national circumstances vastly narrowed liberal possibilities in Germany. 3 The analysis that I have developed in this study fits easily into this framework of interpretation. As neat as is this accord, however, it should not be allowed to shut out other perspectives. All of us who write on modern German history trace out our investigations under the shadow of the colossal failure of civilized, let alone liberal values in that country during this century. Such a disaster cannot but exercise a sort of magnetic attraction on historical explanation, channeling our lines of reasoning into the boundaries of the national experience, inducing us to attribute more weight to strictly national causes than they should perhaps bear. In this regard, it seems to me, special caution is warranted in any analysis of German liberalism and, here, of the National Liberals themselves. Liberalism in Europe nowhere survived the transition to mass politics with the same strength it possessed in the age of limited electorates. Even those liberal parties which flourished until 1914 afterwards lost their electoral pluralities and eventually, like the Germans before them, their claims to be broadly representative of the nation. If history and the character of society imposed particular burdens on liberalism in Germany, these can best be appraised once the course of politics elsewhere has been examined. Before we draw a final assessment on the National Liberals, let us compare their experiences with those of the liberal parties ordinarily ranked as the most successful in Europe before World War I—the Liberals of Britain and Italy. Ten years after their party's founding National Liberals in the new Empire might well have believed that the comparison with their leading counterparts favored them. In 1877 they had just come through their third national election as the strongest party in the Reichstag, where they remained the government's indispensable ally. Beyond Berlin, in the states and the provinces, their hegemony was at its peak. In England, by contrast, the Liberals were out of office as a result of electoral defeat in 1874, and lacking guidance from Gladstone, who had retired from the leadership the following year, they had lost focus and cohesion amid the "divisive courses of sectional opinion." 4 Similarly, in Italy in 1876 the Liberal successors of Cavour, concentrated in the party of the Right, had given up the premiership and then their electoral majority to their rivals of the Left. As the passage of a few years was to demonstrate, however, appearances were deceiving at the end of the National Liberals' first

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decade. Even at this favorable juncture the German party was far more precariously lodged than the corresponding groups in Britain and Italy. After 1877, when their fortunes declined, the National Liberals encountered obstacles not yet confronted by British and Italian liberals, to their benefit. The most fundamental of the National Liberals' handicaps lay in their electoral situation. Everywhere in Europe liberals had asserted that their creed embodied the common interest against privilege and special advantage. How successfully they maintained that claim depended considerably, however, on how much those who disputed it were excluded or, by their own choice, stayed aloof f r o m political participation. Neither barrier, the imposed or the self-imposed, was present in Germany. Under universal male suffrage, introduced by Bismarck over the National Liberals' objections, opportunity for competing parties to recruit a following was maximized. And because of the particular evolution of German history and society, there were no abstentions f r o m politics or from partisan organization among the large working-class and Catholic blocs. Even before the end of the 1870s the Social Democratic and Center parties had become major adversaries of the National Liberals. The party's electoral hegemony, then, was undermined at an early point in its development, and its popular mandate became uncertain. In Britain and Italy the operating terrain was more favorable for liberalism. Electorates, to begin with, were narrower and less heterogeneous than in Germany. A statistical survey f r o m 1877-80 illuminates the contrast. In Germany 20.6 percent of the population possessed the right to vote in national elections. In the United Kingdom and Italy the corresponding figures were 8.8 percent and about 2 percent, respectively. Reforms in the 1880s scarcely erased this gap. About two of every five adult males remained outside the franchise in Britain following the passage of the Third Reform Act in 1884. Seven percent of the population held the vote in Italy after parliament eased suffrage requirements in 1882.5 These limitations gave British and Italian liberals a powerful initial advantage over their German counterparts. Other circumstances then compounded it. In each case the comparative benefit may be usefully defined by contrasting the most harmful features of National Liberalism —the party's estrangement f r o m the industrial laboring strata, the profusion of rivals it had to face, the destructiveness of its internal regional conflicts. Neither in Britain nor in Italy was liberalism afflicted with so many weaknesses. The striking thing about Liberalism in the United Kingdom is that ele-

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ments hurting the National Liberals—a large working class, a variety of regional interests—although equally at hand, did not create problems of a magnitude comparable to those of the German party. For the British Liberals the enfranchised workingman represented an opportunity, not a danger, and even after separate political organizations for labor emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, most working class votes went to the Liberals. Similarly, regionalism was a strength to the party, not a dissipating force. (Irish Home Rule, although it had particular local effects in Lancashire and Scotland, was more than a regional issue.) Coalition worked for British Liberalism as it never did among the National Liberals. Liberalism's ascendancy over the British working class resulted f r o m a mingled current of restriction, compulsion, and persuasion. As noted above, two-fifths—the poorest two-fifths—of the adult male population in the United Kingdom were denied the vote before 1914. As institutions of labor's emancipation, the franchise reforms of 1867 and 1884-85 each had its limits. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 extended suffrage precisely to those urban artisan and skilled laboring strata whose values virtually matched those of the existing middle class electorate; it opened the door no further. In 1885 the redistribution following passage of the Third Reform Bill produced an electoral map designed to separate the "pursuits of the people," in other words, to hold the working-class vote within the most compact of geographical boundaries. In both cases the effect was to check the possibilities for rival workingmen's parties to get a start. 6 Often in the industrial constituencies political loyalties were further constrained by the influence of factory owners. Most manufacturers were Liberals. As large employers they were frequently in a position to make party allegiance one of their hiring terms. Particularly in districts where solitary big firms dominated the local economy, the owners had a powerful hand in assuring that labor voted Liberal. 7 Liberalism profited, then, because not all workingmen could vote and because pressure could be exerted upon those who did. But the party could not have achieved its predominance among the working classes had it not also held out a convincing appeal to them. Such an approach became possible in the 1850s and 1860s, after the defeat of Chartism and the return of better times had brought forward a new generation of trade union leaders disposed to cooperate with the advanced elements of the middle class. In the background also lay a set of moral and cultural values that extended across the mid-Victorian lines of wealth and occupation—faith in the elevating power of education, trust in an ethic of improvement through hard work, belief in "manliness, the rejection of the various forms of patronage, from soup to blankets u p w a r d s . " It remained for the progressive businessmen and municipal reformers who

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led the Radical wing of Liberalism to grasp the opportunity for alliance, and in the late fifties and early sixties they successfully bid for it with the issue of franchise reform. The effort to extend voting rights to "every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or political danger" brought middle and working classes together in solidarity against "feudalism with its twin monopolies, landed and ecclesiastical." Through it the Liberals gained an ideology of conflict against privilege whose possibilities were already, in the mid-1860s, nearly dead in the industrialized urban areas of Germany.® In these circumstances little room was left for a British socialist movement to make headway, and none arose until the 1880s. Even then, as Friedrich Engels wrote to August Bebel in 1883, the impulse to cut loose from Liberalism came from " a crowd of young thinkers from the bourgeoisie . . . who, it must be said to the disgrace of the Eng [lish] workers, understand matters better and grasp them more passionately than the workers." How different the situation was in the Bismarckian Empire can be read in Bebel's reply: " O n the whole here in Germany things are going very much as could be wished.'" Regarding the relative fortunes of liberalism in the two countries, it was a revealing exchange. Barely a glimmer of a liberal-working-class alliance is visible in the Germany of the 1850s and 1860s. The leaders of the Bürgertum, defeated in 1848-49 and frightened by the appearance of autonomous workingmen's organizations during the course of the revolution, let slide whatever slim possibilities of union might have existed in the subsequent two decades. When universal manhood suffrage was introduced in 1867 through the constitution of the North German Confederation, the political independence of German labor was assured. In the same year, meanwhile, the British workers' acceptance of middle-class and generally Liberal tutelage gained the rationale of accomplishment through the passage of the Second Reform Bill, notwithstanding the modest limits within which it expanded the electorate. Thereafter, while the National Liberals drifted into a defensive posture toward socialism, Liberals in Britain, more progressive in a less democratic electoral system, maintained undisputed authority over the working class for more than a generation. Equally to the advantage of the British Liberals, regionalism, although a pronounced characteristic of the party, was never the divisive factor it became among the National Liberals. Geographically, Liberal strength was concentrated in three sometimes overlapping areas—the industrial North of England, the provincial coalfield belt extending diagonally from Northumberland and Durham through the Midlands and into South Wales, and the "Celtic fringe"—Scotland, Wales and, indirectly, Ireland. In each of these regions the attachment to Liberalism arose from

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a compound of two or three primary elements—industrialization, nationality, and hostility to the Church of England. Within the national party the chemistry of interaction among these various blends of forces proved to be compatible. In contrast to the National Liberals' experience in Germany, conflicts among the party's regional groups were few. It was generally possible to satisfy one area's interests without antagonizing the others. After 1867 Scotland and Wales were the Liberals' steadiest electoral bases. About one-fifth of the party's parliamentary members came from those two areas in the era of the Second Reform Act, about three-tenths after the reform and redistribution of 1884-85 were enacted. 10 Although both regions shared economic and religious characteristics with the Liberal territorial strongholds in England, it was the party's success in accomodating Scottish and Welsh national aspirations that secured it an overwhelming dominance in each. In neither instance was the advantage purchased at a cost to other sections of the party. In Scotland the Liberal ascendancy dated from 1832, when the Whigs' First Reform Bill had effectively enfranchised the nation by enlarging the electorate from 5000 to 60,000 persons, thereby winning it a satisfactory political equivalent to the autonomy it already enjoyed in respect to religion, education, and the legal system. But Liberalism's supremacy in Scotland was also a matter of affinity: the native heritage of rationalism, the individualistic and democratic impulses in both Presbyterianism and the fabled Scottish business acumen, and the soft-edged leadership of the wealthy and professional strata who actually controlled politics all blended well with Liberal values. Apart from a period (1886-1900) of local defections over Irish Home Rule in areas of Irish immigration and over the party's opposition to the Boer War in districts with connections to the armed forces, the Liberals held undisputed sway north of the Tweed until 1914. No particular Scottish grievances arose to disturb the tie formed in 1832 or to trouble the national party. 11 Less tranquil was the bond with Wales, where alliance with Liberalism became an instrument of national emancipation rather than an emblem of its achievement. Welsh nationalism was a relatively young movement, borne forward from the 1840s by the advance of Nonconformity, by rediscovered pride in the native language, and by the resentments of the region's tenant peasantry—a unique social element in Great Britain— against an Anglican and anglicized landlord class. After the Second Reform Bill broadened the franchise in 1867, these currents forced their way into politics and rapidly transformed the region's Liberalism, previously the Whiggish preserve of a few gentry families, into a progressive and national creed. Energetic and demanding as the new generation of

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Welsh Liberals was, however, it proved possible for their skillful leaders to channel the regional party's efforts toward a goal—disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales—that both responded to the deepest impulse of the new national consciousness, yet was acceptable to the Liberals of other areas. By the end of the 1880s Welsh Disestablishment was an established goal of the national party, and Liberalism was immovably fixed in the region's constituencies. 12 In the mining districts the Liberal electorate's expectations of the party also turned on issues of limited significance to other groups. For the most part, miners shared a specific, self-contained political orientation focused on occupational questions, a product of the collective nature of their work and the insulated character of their communities. The harsh conditions of their employment aligned them with the party of change. Nonconformity, handed-down traditions of individual workmanship, and the general bias of miners against ideological radicalism brought them into the Liberal ranks.' 3 By comparison the Liberals' hold in the manufacturing constituencies was much less exclusive. In Lancashire the combination of popular Anglicanism and reaction against Irish competition in the labor market produced a strong working-class Toryism. Conservative industrial enclaves also showed up here and there in Yorkshire and the Midlands. Still it seems fair to portray the manufacturing North as a Liberal region, and one where, unlike the others, economic structure defined party loyalty. 14 Again, however, the local interest could be represented within the national party without damage to unity. Here the reason was to be sought in the Liberals' weakness in the agricultural counties and, regionally, in the South of England. British Liberalism was too peripherally established in the farm areas to be harmed, as the National Liberals were in Germany, by the agricultural slump of 1873-1896. Electorally, the party was best situated in the northern and western sections least hurt by depression. In addition, in line with their attempt to hold the workingman's vote, the Liberals favored the agricultural laborer over the farmer who employed him. Consequently, their solutions for the distress were posed in terms of land redistribution, which provoked no sectional quarrels in the party, rather than in terms of tariffs, which would have estranged the manufacturing regions. Protectionism divided the Tories in the early 1880s, not the Liberals." In the United Kingdom, then, the Liberals became "the party of the provinces" in the late nineteenth century without succombing to regional factionalism. No fundamental conflict was occasioned by the particular aims of the various sectional groups within the party, and none of them found it difficult to accept that "they have no hope of securing the triumph of one element . . . by pressing it on to the exclusion of all

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others.'" 6 Yet beyond this mutual tolerance there also lay a common hostility, a solidarity joined of the shared experience of being outsiders, toward the class claiming a traditional and unique title to rule over society, church, and state—the landed and Anglican aristocracy of the English South, whose political embodiment was the Tory Party. Gladstone gave a classic description of this antagonism in 1879, at the climax of his famous Midlothian campaign: We cannot make our appeal to the aristocracy, excepting that which must never be forgotten, the distinguished and enlightened minority of that body . . . With that exception in all the classes of which I speak I am sorry to say we cannot reckon upon what is called the landed interest, we cannot reckon upon the clergy of the established Church either in England or Scotland . . . We cannot reckon upon the wealth of the country, nor upon the rank of the country . . . But, gentlemen, above all these and behind all these there is something greater than these—there is the nation itself . . . The nation is a power hard to rouse, but when roused, harder still and more hopeless to resist." Reading over this passage, trying to hear the words spoken out of the past, it may seem possible to catch the sound of an overlapping tone in German accents—the language of conflict between nation and privileged elements which colored so much of the National Liberals' rhetoric during the party's first decade. Yet however similar the phrases, the concepts of nation put forward by the two parties and the consequences each suggested were not the same. By "nation" British Liberals meant a pluralistic coalition of the outgroups of their society. Some degree of political democracy was implied in their definition. In contrast, the "National" in the German party's name connoted majority approval but not democracy; in the circumstances of the party's founding it could not, for National in the Germany of 1867 also signified accomodation with the halfliberal constitution devised by Bismarck for the North German Confederation. In the early years, when the votes rolled in and the party's alliance with Bismarck was firm, success seemed to vindicate the National Liberals' formula. Even granting the shortcomings of the constitution, they could plausibly claim to be the popular representative, all the more justifiably given that their chief opponents, the Prussian Junkers in the Conservative Party and the Catholics in the Zentrum, remained wedded to the autocratic particularism that had ruled German domestic politics before unification. As they discovered, however, between 1876 and 1879, this position depended far too much on the party's parliamentary connection with Bismarck. Once the chancellor shifted his favor to

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the protariff coalition of Conservatives and Center, National Liberals were confronted with a dilemma. Not to oppose a Reich government based on what they perceived as special interests was to risk their claim to speak for the nation. But opposing the national state whose creation had been the stimulus of their own existence as a party also threatened to set them down in a representative no-man's land; most Germans still supported Bismarck and the Empire. Heidelberg was the National Liberals' attempt to solve the problem, but it straddled the basic issue. Grounded in the institutional position of the regional Honoratioren, it could not be national in the sense of political democracy. Cradled in local economic circumstances, it could not rise beyond the representation of sectional interests; even within the national party unity on tariffs could not be achieved. After 1884 party spokesmen were able to sound the national theme only on issues which they believed, or hoped, transcended domestic politics, for example, colonialism or support for Bismarck's diplomacy. None of these questions could offer the National Liberals an electoral base to match that of the Liberals in Britain or, as we shall now see, in Italy. In Italy Liberalism's electoral strength was even more formidable than in the United Kingdom. Italian Liberalism was often interpreted, both at home and in England, through analogy with its British counterpart. The comparison holds up well in respect to the franchise because its requirements under the 1882 reforms still tied the vote to property and educational qualifications, a formula sharing a common ground of principle with the Second and Third Reform Bills.18 All the same, Italian Liberals achieved their success at the polls as much by borrowing French administrative practice as by following British constitutional example. Perhaps inevitably, in 1861 the liberal founders of the Italian state had imposed a centralized prefectural system in the Napoleonic mold upon their newly united but scarcely unified kingdom. In rural areas and throughout southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, where narrow cliques of notables controlled politics, the consequence of this decision was that the prefect became the pivotal figure in elections. For centralization meant that the smallest local and regional matters had to be settled in the capital. As early as 1862 a critic could write that "parish-pump affairs" were clogging parliament. In this system votes for governmental candidates— from dead men, emigrants, even cows if need be—became the currency with which the local oligarchs could gain services and improvements for their districts, and the prefects became the brokers and guarantors of these transactions. In perhaps three-quarters of Italy Liberal majorities resulted from the violation of Liberal principle. The National Liberals,

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operating in Germany under a fairly honestly administered universal suffrage, never had such opportunities to corner the electorate." Among the enfranchised classes in Italy there remained considerable potential support for a conservative and Catholic rival to Liberalism. No party arose, however, to mount such a challenge. After 1871 practicing Catholics were discouraged and then forbidden by the Holy Penitentiary from participating in parliamentary elections. Since its founding a decade earlier the new Italian state had managed at best a strained modus vivendi with the Papacy. Even before unification Piedmont and its rulers had been condemned by Pius IX. But the seizure of Rome in September 1870 and the consequent shift of the capital to there from Florence, which left the Vatican only a tiny parcel of the city, thoroughly poisoned relations; and thereafter the Papal prohibitions on parliamentary activity were made explicit. As a result, no Catholic party appeared. Italian Liberals were spared the competition, both within parliament and among the electorate, that the National Liberals in Germany suffered from the Center Party. Only in 1904 was sanction granted in certain limited circumstances for Catholics to vote in national balloting, and in spite of further relaxations in 1909 and 1913, total restriction was not lifted until after the First World War. In the interval Liberalism enjoyed an artificial inflation of its power. On the left, meanwhile, it faced an initially weak and divided working-class movement, whose progress was impeded by the discriminatory suffrage laws and the administrative abuses that supplemented them. 20 The power they exercised by virtue of their parliamentary hegemony enabled the Italian Liberals to act effectively and to achieve reforms, to win supporters and to compromise over differences. It gave them, in short, opportunity to fulfill their representative claims. In Germany the National Liberals were offered similar chances only at the regional plane —either in states like Hessen and Baden, where the ruling princes were sympathetic, or in exceptional Prussian provinces like Hannover, where conservatism was joined with separatist opposition. Even then, and particularly in the 1860s and 1870s, friendly governments tended to choose liberal officials rather than party leaders for executive positions. Beyond, on the Reich level, Bismarck recruited his ministers almost exclusively from the bureaucracy; the exception to this practice, his 1877 invitation to Rudolf von Bennigsen, was a maneuver intended to detach the latter from his National Liberal base. In Italy, by comparison, Liberal politicians were accepted as ministerial candidates by midcentury. Following a decade of aristocratic leaders—a marquis, Massimo D'Azeglio; a count, Camillo di Cavour; a baron, Bettino Ricasoli—in Piedmont and the newly united national kingdom came " a spiritual aristocracy of upright

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and loyal gentlemen," as the historian Benedetto Croce called the bourgeois statesmen of the old Liberal Right. 21 South of the Alps the links were closer between power and parliament. Power permitted Italian Liberalism to develop features which would have been weaknesses in other contexts. Liberal party organization on a national scale did not exist before 1914, yet none was really required, either to promote unity or to win elections. Solidarity was assured by the Liberals' need to protect their hegemony over the numerically powerful forces of clericalism and socialism and, institutionally, by the centralized administration that became a de facto agent of factional compromise. As for electoral victories, they were less won than made; the restrictions imposed by the suffrage laws and the interventions of the prefects guaranteed safe results. Consequently, within the ranks of the Liberals a freelancing tendency became common. Individuals and groups focused their energies on becoming members of the government's majority. Here lay the setting for the elastic system of trasformismo, or flexible parliamentary coalitions, whose roots went back to the early 1850s but whose features were fully revealed after the fall of the Right in 1876. For its replacement in power by the Left brought little change. After the passage of a few years it was apparent that the common interests of the two groups had come to outweigh their earlier differences. "Where is the banner, where is the principle that divides us?" a member of the former majority asked the Chamber of Deputies in 1883. There were none, and so cabinets rose and fell on issues of the moment. 22 Trasformismo gave free rein to conflicts among the regional groupings within Italian Liberalism. Before 1861 perhaps a single Italian statesman—Massimo D'Azeglio—had fully comprehended the immense diversity of the peninsula. To a considerable extent, the quick imposition of centralized government upon the new kingdom was a reaction to this discovery. Among the Liberals, however, in the absence of a national party structure, regional currents persisted in strength in the decades following unification. The fall of the Right in 1876, for example, was occasioned by the desertion of a Tuscan faction. Nevertheless, regional divisions never disrupted the Italian Liberals as they did the National Liberals in Germany. In the supple world of trasformismo, the various territorial elements sooner or later found a place in one ministerial combination or another. It should be remembered, too, that as notables the Liberal spokesmen of regional causes retained a common view of society and politics; they would not rock the boat too far for the sake of a local interest. In fact, many crucial regional issues were neglected between 1861 and 1914. Areas of backwardness and poverty, most notably the South and the islands, never got a real hearing from the

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Liberals. How could they, after all, when every government majority depended on the ascari parlamentari, the spear-carriers whose loyalty was bought through concessions to the local oligarchs of their districts? Italian Liberals could pass over the deeper, more intractable regional questions because the constitutional system allowed them to ignore the problems of poor and often illiterate majorities. Here again they escaped the sectional struggles which weakened the National Liberals, whose influence in both the states and the Reich depended on their satisfying a far larger electorate's definition of local needs. 23 In the quality of its leaders Italian Liberalism enjoyed a final advantage over National Liberalism in Germany. To begin with, the National Liberals had no one to match C a v o u r — " a name, an event in Italian and European history." 2 4 Yet they also failed to produce men of sufficient talent to rival the comparatively modest figure of Agostino Depretis, who dominated parliamentary life between 1876 and 1887. Outwardly Depretis seemed an unlikely candidate for distinction. Critics excoriated his ordinariness—this "vintner of Stradella" who throughout his years as prime minister nightly climbed the 120 stairs to his flat. " T h e very fact of Depretis's long tenure of o f f i c e , " Benedetto Croce wrote later, "his eight ministries between 1876 and 1887, and what was called his 'dictatorship', seemed to the Italians to constitute a criticism of themselves, and a sign of their political weakness." Still, as Croce added, Depretis did not remain prime minister for want of competition. He stayed because of his accomplishments—passage of the 1882 electoral reform, abolition of the grist tax, stabilization of the currency. 25 Like the man, these achievements were careful, rational, limited. They also represented, however, what most Italian Liberals wanted. Depretis served his cause more successfully than a Rudolf von Bennigsen, who would not abandon his party for Bismarck but also would not lead it in opposition, or a Johannes Miquel, who proved all too ready to leave behind his liberal principles for the sake of personal advancement. This failure of leadership in National Liberalism seems all the more telling when the comparison is turned back to Britain and individually to Gladstone. The "greatest, noblest, purest and sincerest public m a n " of the century one admirer called him, and the opinion was shared by thousands of his fellow citizens. Gladstone was the first true popular statesman in British politics, the first Parliamentary hero of the common man. To some extent the role chose him: a new middle class electorate, educated after 1855 by inexpensive newspapers, was searching for spokesmen for its views. Still, it was his vision that uniquely matched theirs, or seemed to, on franchise reform and education, and in foreign policy and the tangled affairs of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. And

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Gladstone, through his public oratory, made the partnership come alive. "In the most literal sense, he went to the people," writes Robert Kelley; "he gave them the sense that they were being invited to join him in making moral judgments on public events of worldwide importance." 26 The Midlothian campaign of 1879-80 was the crowning episode in this effort. Riding its momentum, Gladstone achieved both a memorable electoral victory and a consolidation of his party's position among the enfranchised population. As a number of recent studies have shown, Gladstone also knew how to utilize his stature to direct the Liberals' course. From the time, in the 1860s, when he captured the public following which made him an independent power, he developed a tactic of personal intervention in the cause of a single great issue as a means of uniting the party. Withholding himself from factional and sectional quarrels, he was able to transcend them, at a chosen moment, with an appeal built around a major question on which public opinion could be expected to stand with the Liberals. 27 It was a style of leadership for which no parallel existed in Germany. If any party personality sought to be a popular tribune in Reich politics, it was the left liberals' Eugen Richter, and not Bennigsen, whose refined bearing made him a more likely personal counterpart to Gladstone. Nor did Bennigsen, who stood in the National Liberal center in the 1870s, learn to use his position to keep rein on the party's various factions. In the same two years, 1879 and 1880, that Gladstone celebrated his greatest triumphs, the National Liberal leader remained a helpless witness to his party's disintegration. Gladstone's 1880 victory and the permeation of the old Right by trasformismo in the next few years mark the recovery of British and Italian Liberalism from their reverses of the mid-seventies. In Germany, by contrast, the failure of the Heidelberg Declaration to regenerate National Liberalism in 1884 confirmed the party's decline. Up to this point, as I have sought to demonstrate, the fundamental difference between the National Liberals and the Liberals in Britain and Italy lay in their respective institutional and historical situations. Even without the personal and programmatic weaknesses of its leaders, the German party still would have been in a comparatively unfavorable position. Three decades later, however, the imbalance was not so great, and much of the advantage enjoyed by the British and Italians had been dissipated. When the comparison is extended to 1914, a good part of the German experience seems to prefigure the common dilemmas of European liberalism. In Britain the Liberals first stumbled in 1885-86, when Joseph Chamberlain on the left and the Marquess of Hartington on the right led

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their sympathizers out of the party in opposition to Gladstone's endorsement of Home Rule for Ireland. Their defections on this issue suggest a case in which the regional demands of an ally, if not a section, of the party had become incompatible with the interests of other Liberal groups. To some degree that was the situation. Yet the episode, although the most sensational Liberal conflict of the Gladstonian era, deserves mention here chiefly to point out that the party was not gravely hurt by it; to trip is not the same as to fall. Ireland was not the make-or-break issue it appeared to be, neither for Chamberlain nor for Hartington, whose motives were those of rival crown princes grown weary of awaiting Gladstone's retirement, nor for the party at large, which remained loyal to the leadership. As opposition to Home Rule was not a Radical cause, Chamberlain pulled along relatively few members from the left wing. Hartington did take most of the Whig element with him, further undermining the party's already weak position in the countryside, but that loss was no blow to Liberal unity. As we have seen, agricultural interests had little influence on party policy before 1886.28 Even when the Irish question is counted in, regional issues caused no lasting problems to the Liberals. Such difficulties did arise, however, in regard to the working-class electorate. Already before Gladstone undertook his last ministry of 1892-94, the character of labor's attachment to Liberalism had begun to change. In place of the deferential acceptance of middle-class leadership which had marked the 1860s and 1870s, a new, more equal partnership was sought. Labor was more assertive now. The old solidarity promoted by Nonconformity had relaxed as religion's appeal weakened among new generations of workingmen. Working-class voters were also less satisfied with the party, and particularly with its neglect of the privations brought on by the sluggish economic activity of the 1880s. Socialism was finally gaining an audience in Britain. 29 In retrospect it is clear that the Liberals were going to have to rethink their policies in order to hold labor for the party. Whether they could or did has become a matter of some contention. Reconsideration of the party's position on working-class questions implied some departure from the long-standing Liberal orthodoxy of noninterference. Liberals, wrote one of the party's bright young men in 1888, must "throw off that indifference to the relations of labour and capital which has characterized the Liberal party in the past and which has allowed a Socialistic party to grow up." 3 0 During the subsequent decade, however, the men who led the party—Gladstone and then his successors, Lord Rosebery and Sir William Harcourt—undertook no initiatives in this direction. Imperial questions, not social issues, became the focus of their attention and, in the case of Rosebery and Harcourt, of

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their rivalries. In 1899 the Liberals gained a more effective leader in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, but also one who described himself as "more and more confirmed in the old advanced Liberal principles, economical, social, and political, with which I entered Parliament 30 years ago." 3 1 This was a representative statement. Like the National Liberals, most Liberals in Britain tended to look past the political and social changes that made the 1890s a decade of movement, and to uphold attitudes which had been shaped in an earlier period. 32 New thinking on the social question came from the younger men in the party, and particularly from those whose training and professions— journalists, academics, university-educated politicians of leisure—encouraged reflection on broader problems. The extension of Liberalism, the refashioning of its majority appeal in the face of labor's new independence, was their common preoccupation. They fell into separate camps, however, in plotting out the direction of the party's revival. On the left there emerged a group of New Liberals, or Progressives, aiming to refortify the alliance with the working class by means of state intervention for reform. Opposite them on the right gathered a Liberal Imperialist faction whose great hope and on-and-off chieftain was Lord Rosebery, after he resigned from the party leadership in 1896 in order no longer to be "tied to Gladstonian chains . . . to start with a tabula rasa. "ll Its objective was to capture the political center by embracing "national" goals at home and overseas. The New Liberalism's thrust toward the left started from the premise that no boundary, philosophical or practical, could block the party's appeal in that direction. "There is no more important political t r u t h , " L. T. Hobhouse wrote in 1899, " t h a n that social reform as conceived by the best reformers of our time is a legitimate outgrowth of the older Liberal principles. To throw over these principles in the name of Socialism is to turn toward reaction in the search for progress." "The two ideals as ideals," he asserted on another occasion, "are not conflicting, but complementary." 3 4 But were they? In theory it might be possible to break down socialism's exclusive claims to the mantle of progress and justice; similar controversies were going on concerning German Social Democracy. In practice, however, a union of liberalism and socialism required a more difficult accomplishment: that of transcending the division between working and middle classes that had become increasingly rigid in the 1890s. If the New Liberals had been successful, they would well have earned their name; for the Liberal Party, as it had existed during the four decades before 1900, would have disappeared. Thus the most positive assessment of the New Liberalism concludes: " A t the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century it looked as

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though both Labour and Liberalism would be subsumed in progressivism.'" 5 Perhaps this was the case in Lancashire, the region whose prewar political evolution has yielded the evidence which stands behind this conclusion. Yet developments there can also be read more pessimistically, so that Progressivism's undeniable triumphs in 1906 and 1910 become transient episodes rather than indicators of a trend, while the run of Liberal by-election reverses between 1911 and 1914 portends a decline that became fully manifest in the 1920s.36 Other regional studies of late Victorian and Edwardian politics—focused on London, Wales, and the mining districts—also show the Liberals doing well in workingclass constituencies during the last prewar decades but still conclude that a shift of loyalties to Labor was already underway. It may be true that we should not affix the stamp of inevitability to this last tendency and declare that "time was on Labour's side." Still, the obstacles against more than a temporary realization of the Progressives' ideal seem overwhelming. Lancashire, it should be remembered, was an area of working-class Toryism in Gladstone's era; there Liberalism could be the next stop in a leftward migration. In most areas, however, if the workers moved to a more radical allegiance, it was by leaving the Liberals for Labor. Sometimes the cause was conflict with Liberal employers, as in the South Wales coalfields. Sometimes it was the unwillingness of local party associations to nominate a workingman Parliamentary candidate. It can fairly be assumed that such occasions would have become more numerous once, as was truly inevitable, the suffrage was further expanded, increasing the Labor Party's prospects of electoral victories.37 But it was not only the Labor Party that stood in the way of Progressivism. On available evidence, writes H. V. Emy, "it would appear that the strength of the 'New Liberalism' at the centre was not duplicated in any depth amongst the constituencies, and that there existed considerable tension between the old and the new (especially in the case of making conciliatory gestures toward the Labour party)." The Progressives could influence party programs and legislation because they had a coherent doctrine and were a self-conscious group—somewhat like the Nonconformist businessmen and reformers of the 1860s and 1870s. But they had neither the financial resources nor the territorial base to make them a permanent factor in the party, while those Liberals who did were generally unsympathetic to their views.38 Philosophically and electorally, Progressivism extended British Liberalism further to the left than any German liberal group was able to reach. By comparison, the social policy clauses of the Heidelberg Declaration and, later, the southern National Liberal branches' accept-

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ance of the Social Democrats as lesser-of-two-evils allies were feeble efforts. More of a parallel exists with the Liberal Imperialists, whose theme of mobilization of the full national energy recalls Bassermann and the Young Liberals. Still, the likeness cannot be drawn too finely; both the Germans' search for Gleichberechtigung and the Liberal Imperialists' quest for a post-Gladstonian new start are hard to pin down in detail. Liberal Imperialism's would-be hero, Rosebery, gave it slogans but not substance, public occasions but not leadership. The "clean slate" he wanted was never filled in. In part this failure is explained by his aversion to formal programs, which he believed could only fetter the party in a tangle of special interests. But Liberal Imperialism's indistinctness also reflected the inability of Rosebery and others like R. B. Haldane and Sir Edward Grey to give their doctrine a persuasive content. In this regard the key element in their outlook was "national efficiency," a term that sanctioned social reform within a framework of commitment to the Empire and to an activist role for the state—both reversals of traditional party principle. When it stood at the center of public debate, during the South African War of 1899-1902, national efficiency, with its suggestion of administrative expertise and improved living standards, exercised considerable appeal among some sections of political opinion. But these were as much to be found in Joseph Chamberlain's Unionist following, or around Fabians like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, as within the Liberal Party. The problematical implications that such a response carried for the Liberals were underscored by Rosebery's own equivocations concerning the audience that he was seeking. "I am quite sure that my policy does not run on Party lines," he affirmed in a great public speech in December 1901, "but it is not to Party that I appeal." Rather, he said, he spoke beyond Parliament, beyond the ruling Unionists and his own "distracted and disunited" party, to "the tribunal of public opinion and common sense." Such declarations left it unclear whether Liberal Imperialism represented a policy for the Liberal Party or a prescription for its amalgamation in a new party built in the direction of the Unionists. No answer was given during the Boer War period, and by the end of 1902 public attention was turning away from national efficiency toward postwar issues. Yet the uncertainties that the Liberal Imperialists had posed for their party were only slumbering. In 1910 they were revived from an unexpected quarter, by the behind-the-scenes attempt of the erstwhile "pro-Boer" David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer in the Liberal Asquith government, to bring about a national coalition with the Unionists, which might settle all major questions outstanding before the country. Lloyd George's private soundings came to nothing on this occasion. But they

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prefigure the similar course he undertook after becoming prime minister in 1916, first in constructing a non-party "efficiency" cabinet to run the war and then, after the Armistice, in committing himself and his Liberal followers to an electoral alliance with the Unionists which both split his party and ruined it as an independent force. 39 Even more than in the case of the New Liberalism, a search after the grass-roots strength of Liberal Imperialism yields small returns. During the South African War sentiment for the Empire dominated for a time in many constituencies. During the decade between 1895 and 1905 Rosebery was widely admired in the party. But the Liberal Imperialists' leaders never exploited these favorable circumstances. They were too much the "intellectual Whigs," neither interested in organizational work nor talented at it. Their contacts with the party rank-and-file and with the wealthy local circles who financed elections were alike insufficient—thus they never really tested the willingness of these few to underwrite a "national" policy of minimum standards of living for the many. 40 The message which the Liberal Imperialists preached may have awakened the party's multitudes, but it did not activate them. Rather, the party was mobilized and revived by Unionist initiatives which either threatened or actually overturned earlier Liberal achievements—the Education Act of 1902, reducing local control and providing funds from tax revenue for church schools; Chamberlain's 1903-05 campaign for Imperial tariff preference; and finally the Conservative Lords' attempt to uphold the remains of privilege during the constitutional crisis of 1909-10. Reacting against these encroachments, Liberalism achieved a new bloom between 1905 and 1914. Ordinary party members gained a new confidence in the men at their head: Campbell-Bannerman, who honored the old Gladstonian faith; and his successor, Herbert Asquith, whose authority rested on steadiness and moderation and an ability to effect progress free of adventure. Yet impressive as were the Liberal resurgence and the accomplishments of the Liberal governments which ruled from 1905 to 1914, the party did not stake out new ground for itself in these years. Through electoral compromises in 1906 and 1910 it managed a partnership with the Labor Party, but this was no answer to the broader dilemma of competing with a growing working-class-based rival on the left. Down to the outbreak of war the Liberals were still able to hold off from redefining their representative role and to avoid the choices of direction with which the National Liberals in Germany had long been struggling. Nonetheless, as the theoretical and practical limits of both Progressivism and Liberal Imperialism seem to demonstrate, ultimately the British party had no better solution in 1914 for keeping the loyalties of a democratic electorate than did its counterpart in the Reich. 41

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A similar judgment can be rendered on Italian Liberalism in 1914. Although it also remained dominant in parliamentary politics, the foundation of its power was shaky on the eve of the war. In the hands of its master practitioner trasformismo had become personalized as Giolittismo, yet whatever name it might be called, it was reaching the end of its effectiveness as a method through which Liberals could claim or obtain a national majority. In 1887, at the end of Agostino Depretis's long tenure, the Liberals had fortified their unity economically by adopting protectionist legislation that pleased both northern textile and steel producers and wheat-growing southern land magnates—the sort of regional tradeoff on commercial policy that the National Liberals never achieved until they joined behind Bülow in 1902. Still, while it succeeded as an internal settlement among the local and territorial notables who were the personnel of Italian Liberalism, the 1887 tariff also underlined the privileged boundaries within which the Liberals defined the public interest. In the next few decades an increasing number of Italians became actively discontented with these limits.42 The question of responding to the groups left outside the representative fold of Liberalism was given immediacy in the 1890s by a sudden crescendo of peasant and labor unrest. The troubles began with strikes and violence by agricultural workers in Sicily. Heavy-handed repression and a continuing economic slump, brought on in part by the new tariffs, extended the disorder throughout the peninsula. Francesco Crispi, the onetime revolutionary who was prime minister during the middle years of the decade, further contributed to the instability by a disastrous attempt to divert the country's attention from domestic issues to the conquest of Ethiopia; the rout of the Italian columns at Adowa in March 1896 shook the confidence of the nation in the regime and of the Liberals in themselves. Under Crispi's successor, Marquis Antonio di Rudini, the African adventure was halted without additional loss. But Rudini discovered no policy beyond force for meeting the persistent turbulence at home, and this course brought him down following the government's bloody suppression of street rioting in Milan in May 1898.43 Despite Rudini's failure, the next premier, General Luigi Pelloux, eventually adopted a similar approach to social conflict. Where Rudini's actions were born of irresolution, however, Pelloux, particularly in his second ministry (May 1899 to June 1900), was guided by a well-formulated vision of Liberalism, promoted chiefly by the Tuscan Baron Sidney Sonnino. Sonnino was one of the few Liberal politicians to know Southern Italy through personal experience. In the 1870s, together with Leopoldo Franchetti, he had undertaken one of the first serious studies of social and economic conditions in the former Kingdom of Two

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Sicilies. As understanding and sympathetic as he was, however, to the need for improvement in the South and to the poor in general, Sonnino was too convinced a believer in social hierarchy to conceive of reforms in terms other than those f r o m above. In the early 1880s he had supported universal suffrage in the expectation that the mass of the peasantry would be moderate and deferential in politics. The unrest of the following decade changed his mind in that respect, however, and at the beginning of 1897 he published an article that proposed a return to the "liberal and representative monarchy of the Statuto" (the 1848 Piedmontese constitution) "with a monarch who is an effective and active prince." Parliament was to be relegated to a purely legislative role, while the executive power that was restored to the king could be employed in the cause of reform. But in practice, when Sonnino became the brain behind the Pelloux ministry in 1899, the government's initiatives never got beyond its attempts to bridle parliament, and these aroused Liberals and non-Liberals alike and perpetuated the instability that was now almost a decade old. By the late spring of the following year Sonnino and Pelloux recognized that they could not peacefully overcome the resistance against their plans, and Pelloux resigned. 44 The logical successors to Pelloux and Sonnino were those Liberals who had advocated a policy of social reform built on respect for parliamentary institutions and reconciliation with the working classes. Within this group the key figure was Giovanni Giolitti, who as minister of the interior (February 1901-May 1903) and then as prime minister (November 1903-March 1905, May 1906-December 1909, March 1911March 1914) came to dominate the politics of the prewar era. Through a succession of legislative acts including aid to the South, state subsidies for industrial expansion, a national insurance monopoly, to name some objectives, and through personal leadership, most notably in keeping the government relatively neutral in labor disputes, Giolitti gave Italian Liberalism a record of achievement for the benefit of the mass of the population. " S o n n i n o is right in saying that the country is sick politically and morally," he declared in September 1900, " b u t the principal cause of its sickness is that the classes in power have been spending enormous sums on themselves and their own interests, and have obtained the money almost entirely from the poorer sections of society." Several months later he laid the problem directly before the Chamber of Deputies: " T h e supporters of existing institutions have one duty above all, and that is to persuade the lower classes, by means of acts, that they have much more to hope for from existing institutions than f r o m dreams of the future, that every one of their legitimate interests will find effective defense in existing political and social institutions." 4 5

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Giolitti's reform accomplishments were and have remained his and his admirers' justification for the electoral manipulations which earned him the sobriquet "minister of the underworld." Yet the material advances legislated by his obedient parliamentary majorities did not enlarge Liberalism's appeal among the working class and peasantry, and one is left to consider whether these elements perceived Giolitti's approach as being so different from Sonnino's, save in its greater sophistication, as a means of maintaining the existing order through reform from above. In 1901 Giolitti spoke in the Chamber of the "parliamentary geography" of Italian Socialism. "Take away from the Socialist party all those who are elected in the Emilia, at Mantua, at Rovigo, at Bologna, all those from that plain where the suffering of the peasants is greatest, and then tell me what is left of the Socialist party." 4 6 Under the electoral system over which he presided as minister of the interior this was an accurate enough appraisal. But take away from the Liberals the franchise restrictions, the friendly prefects, the favors done for their local clienteles of notables, and how much less fragmentary and partial a map would describe their "parliamentary geography?" Giolitti was too sober a political observer not to appreciate how much the Liberals' power depended on these props. He was also too intelligent not to recognize that eventually, under a broadened franchise, most of these advantages would have to be abandoned. His response to that prospect was to seek to extend the reach of Liberalism—not directly, to social groups that could be expected to place their loyalties with other parties, but by enlarging the scope of trasformismo, to include the parliamentary representatives of those classes. Winning over the Socialists was his chief objective in this effort, and from time to time there were friendly signs from some of their leaders. But no alliance materialized; those Socialists who were favorable to Giolitti became too deeply engaged in struggle with the radical wing of the movement to risk open cooperation with the existing order. Giolitti pressed on with his reforms, nonetheless. In 1911 the Chamber approved a new electoral law that established virtual manhood suffrage. By this time the prime minister was turning toward the right to widen his base. In the elections of 1909 Catholics in seventy-two constituencies had been permitted to vote for Catholic candidates or, the more usual situation, for Liberals pledged not to support legislation harmful to religion. Four years later, in the first national balloting under the reformed franchise, a similar arrangement was devised for 330 electoral districts, two-thirds of the total. Giolitti did not involve himself personally in the negoiations, but there is no question that they delivered the mass support he was seeking. In addition he had reaffirmed his position with the traditional Liberal following

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by taking Italy into a successful war in Libya in 1911-12. All the same, the aid the Liberals received from Catholic voters was theirs only on loan, to be withdrawn once the Papacy would authorize its communicants to form their own party. The satisfaction of the nationalist elements by the conquest of Libya was also temporary, particularly since Giolitti publicly deflated the importance of the war. Giolitti had not solved the problem of finding a mass base for Liberalism. 47 Giolitti's reputation as a great servant of Italian Liberalism is not to be justified, therefore, on the strength of his accomplishments as a party leader. Rather it is as a defender of the liberal state that he has been admired. "Giolitti," writes Frank J. Coppa, " w a s . . . a liberal not only in his sense of history but also in his sense of state which transcended the particular interests of class or party . . . in order to make it possible for all to appreciate the advantages of political liberalism—high regard for the individual, equality before the law, and equality of opportunity if not of talent—Giolitti held that the government had to abandon economic liberalism and become an active agent in the production as well as the distribution of wealth." 48 Viewed from this perspective, Giolitti becomes the supreme practical exponent of an Italian tradition that envisioned the state as a unifying ethical force, a tradition whose advocates also included Benedetto Croce and, earlier, Silvio Spaventa of the old Right. Still, the fact that most positive assessments of his career stand on this basis may also be interpreted as a sign of Giolittian Liberalism's weakness. Using the state's power for ethical ends was not an ideal unique to Liberalism in Italy. Accordingly, it could not draw the loyalties of those who held different visions of the moral duties of government. Nor was it a persuasive ideal to the ordinary Italian, for Giolitti did not seek to integrate the average voter into the liberal order through the bond of action. There was no recruitment into a party of righteousness, as with a Gladstone. There was no link between constituency politics and Giolitti's high purposes. Instead, the public knew its prime minister as an arch-manipulator, profiled by "his tendency to rule and work upon the vices rather than upon the virtues of men." " O n the eve of the war of 1914-18," Gaetano Salvemini wrote later, "Giolitti was the most powerful man in Parliament, but the most unpopular man in the country." 4 9 Salvemini's verdict on Giolitti leads us once more to the great question that confronted European liberals in the last decades before 1914: under a democratic franchise could they make good on their claims of general representation? The analysis of National Liberalism that I have developed in this study, as well as my judgments on British and Italian Liberalism, stand on the premise that an answer to that question must be

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looked for on the constituency and regional levels of politics. It was there that liberal commitment came alive, renewed itself, or withered. It is there that the class-based affiliations which emptied the liberal tent of much of its audience actually were formed. Class politics undermined the liberals' representative ambitions because they could not or would not reduce the barriers of wealth and even more of power which made inequality a grating everyday issue. Not a single failure crippled them, however, but an endless succession of local denials of the ideal which they could survive with—through resistance to electoral reform in Hessen, refusal to accept miners' candidacies in South Wales, rigged balloting in Apulia, and on and on. Amidst this overall tendency, however, there were also affirmative steps, positive initiatives aimed at recoupling liberalism with the broadest possible following. If they did not reverse the liberal parties' descent into minority representation, such efforts did affect institutions, traditions, mentalities—the wider political culture. Where they were undertaken, the legacy of liberal values had an easier passage than elsewhere into the new world of mass politics. If it seems too optimistic to conclude that the New Liberalism of Edwardian Britain was a success or that Giolitti presided over an Italian democracy in the making, the fact that formidable analyses can be mounted on these themes points toward the ways in which liberalism was carried forward into the twentieth-century context. Such advances seem all the more worthy of attention once we reflect that a similar case cannot be made for the National Liberals. Understanding why National Liberalism left no strong heritage involves a host of circumstances, beginning with the institutional and historical liabilities mentioned at the outset of this chapter. A major element in an explanation, however, must be the turn the party took in 1884. The National Liberals were unlucky in that political developments in Germany forced the problem of representativeness upon them long before their counterparts elsewhere in Europe had to deal with it. At Heidelberg, however, they compounded their misfortune. Heidelberg doubly obstructed National Liberalism's adaptation to electoral democracy, first by anchoring it regionally in the old framework of Honoratiorenpolitik that was already becoming obsolete in the Reich, and then by promoting the fragmentation which frustrated efforts to line up the party behind a reasonably modern program. Only after 1900, following the collapse of the branch parties' control in the states and provinces, were attempts made to develop new, independent, and progressive National Liberal policies. In the interval, however, the party's membership had accustomed themselves to regional perspectives. Now these were interjected into the debate over the national party's goals with

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wounding effects: the triumph of narrow self-protective horizons, the perpetuation of National Liberalism's internal divisions, and the defeat of renewal. It is contrary to the definition of a political party to have its members willing to be permanently shut out of power. But there are always questions to be considered when the opportunity to take or to share power arises: share with whom, with whose support, and with what consequences? The National Liberals' inability to unite around new policies after 1900 was the reflection of the dissimilar ways in which the party's regional branches met these problems. In areas like Prussia and Saxony the fear of losing a role in the government coalition persuaded most National Liberals to give up their broad representative hopes and, with them, liberal principle and a liberal future. Regional party groups instead tended to merge their forces with the parties of the right under the auspices of one or more of the large economic pressure groups—CDI, Bdl, BdL. By contrast, where the National Liberals moved left, they reanimated their representative claims. Few working-class voters were won, to be sure, but the growing new white-collar electorate did respond. Only in an exceptional region like Hessen, where the National Liberals had successfully held the countryside, could representative ambitions be coupled with an orientation towards the right. Given this diversity, one sympathizes with Ernst Bassermann in his failure to bring the national party behind a common standpoint. Elsewhere in Europe regional diversity did not fragment liberal parties. Elsewhere, however, the differences over power and economic priorities that splintered National Liberalism were absent or were mediated. The focus of regionalism that I have offered in this study extends the explanation of what was national in the failure of National Liberalism. If the German Question has now become a riddle of lost or missing liberal possibilities, then its solution must go beyond the recognition that much of the way forward in Germany was blocked by institutions and attitudes left over from feudal and absolutist eras. German liberalism was held back from the future not only by survivals from an anachronistic social order but also by the opportunities that remained after 1871 in the states and provinces to keep representativeness and democracy separate. The German Question of the Imperial era is in fact a problem of Hessen, or Baden, or Hannover and Saxony—of all the regions and localities in which the situation of liberalism was simultaneously more secure and more retrograde than in the nation at large.

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