It began to build in the summer of 1873.

Newspaper editors, attuned to the mood of their readers, felt it coming. Politicians from Maine to Oregon – two of the 16 states that held off-year elections between congressional and presidential elections – sensed it too, and tried to respond accordingly.

Mid-term congressional elections are viewed today as referendums on the president. The party in power in the White House typically loses seats in the House and sometimes, as in 1994 and 2006, loses control of one or both houses of Congress in what has come to be known as a “wave” election. Many believe one is coming this fall.

Modern historians and political junkies point to the congressional election of 1874, in which Democrats went from being a picked up 92 House seats, as the defining wave election of the Gilded Age. That election brought to an end Republican control of the House that began on the eve of the Civil War and marked the beginning of a 20-year era in which presidential elections were decided by razor thin margins.

While the party of Lincoln still controlled the Senate and the White House in the aftermath of its drubbing in 1874, its days of unchallenged hegemony in Washington were over. But the dramatic results of 1874 were foreshadowed by state balloting that occurred one year earlier.

Today, only four states – New Jersey, Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana – hold off-year gubernatorial and legislative elections (Kentucky elects its governor in off-year balloting but votes for state legislators in even-numbered years). But the practice was far more common in the 19^th century, and far more important. With U.S. senators chosen by state legislatures, state elections took on a national significance they don’t possess today.

As the two parties mobilized for elections that would determine the control of state houses, voter discontent was palpable.

The state elections followed on the heels of two disastrous missteps on Capitol Hill. The Credit Mobilier scandal – the discovery that members of Congress were buying profitable stock from a colleague who was selling the shares to promote the interests of the Union Pacific Railroad – preoccupied the House and Senate and filled front pages from New York to Sacramento.

Three congressional investigations (catalogued in previous blog posts) generated embarrassing revelations and disclosed that members lied about their stock purchases from Rep. Oakes Ames. Despite evidence that the stock was sold to further the interests of the railroad – evidence drawn from letters written by Ames and the lawmaker’s own testimony — the House took no action against anyone who bought the stock. The House committee investigating the stocks sales recommended the expulsion of Ames and Rep. James Brooks, D-N.Y., but they were merely censured for their actions.

This was bad enough. But Congress compounded its difficulties by voting itself a retroactive pay raise that earned universal condemnation from the public and the press. The so-called “salary grab” quickly became a serious liability for incumbents – particularly those who voted for it.

While Credit Mobilier and the salary grab hung in the air as state party bosses began to plot their fall campaigns, additional concerns loomed behind the specter of scandal and self-enrichment.

Violent resistance to Reconstruction in the South began to take its toll on Northerners weary of strife and sympathetic to the racist view that African Americans weren’t capable of self-government. Reconstruction wasn’t on the ballot in the state elections of 1873, but it cast a pall over the electorate.

In September, a massive stock-market crash forced banking houses to close and businesses to shut their doors and lay off workers. The damage caused by the Panic of 1873 would occur slowly and become more pronounced after the election, but it represented another worrisome development that could only make voters less sympathetic to the party in power.

Finally, farmers across the Midwest and South mobilized in opposition to the rising political and economic clout of railroads, who had dominated state legislatures across the country for decades with campaign cash, bribes and other benefits. Beginning in the early 1870s, farmers flocked to the new, non-partisan Patrons of Husbandry, also known as the Grange. The agrarian social organization quickly became the focal point for anti-railroad agitation.

The Washington Evening Star took early note of the emerging crusade. “The movement of the western people against the great railroad monopolies begins to assume definite shape,” the Evening Star wrote on Feb. 20, “and it is pretty certain that the control of railroad fares and freight will be the issue on which the next legislatures in several of the western states will be chosen.”

Over the next nine months, as voters stewed about Credit Mobilier and the salary grab and demanded action to control the railroads, parties and politicians scrambled to get on the right side of the electorate.

Democrats poked Republicans for Credit Mobilier and the salary grab. Republicans scrambled to distance themselves from the scandal and the pay raise. Both parties condemned abuses by railroads and tried to align themselves with angry farmers.

Republican state platforms published in the summer of 1873 show a remarkable uniformity. Credit Mobilier and the salary grab figured in the campaign programs of Republicans in Iowa, Minnesota and Oregon. In many platforms, the phrase “Credit Mobilier” connoted not just the railroad stock scandal but any scheme of insider self-enrichment.

At the same times, the state platforms oozed with hostility toward railroads. Several called for state or federal action to support “cheap transportation” reverberated in state Republican conventions across the country as the party scrambled to get on the side of voters angry at the Iron Rail.

The New York Tribune, a leading “liberal” organ of the day opposed both to corruption and government involvement in the economy, might not have been comfortable with such proposals. But the newspaper recognized the potency of anti-railroad sentiment and urged farmers to act on their fury with the industry.

The corruption of “Railway rings and Credit Mobilier rings” hurt farmers, the Tribune argued. “We look to the Farmers, more than to any other class, to counteract the mischievous money influence which has filled our public coffers with venality and selfishness.”

By the time all the voting was done in November (many states held their elections in October), the results were clear. Democrats, often in concert with Anti-Monopolist forces, surged to power in state houses across the country or made significant inroads on Republican majorities.

In Ohio, Republican Gov. Edward F. Noyce fell to Democrat William Allen. Wisconsin Republican Gov. Cadwallader C. Washburn, well known for his criticism of Credit Mobilier and railroads, lost to Democrat and Granger William R. Taylor. Iowa Republican Gov. Cyrus Carpenter joined the Grange and avoided defeat but had to contend with a lower house where Democrats and Anti-Monopolists tied Republicans for control.

With the effects of the Panic becoming more pronounced each day, another issue would soon join concerns about corruption, Credit Mobilier, the salary grab and the power of railroads. “Hard times have come. There is no doubt about that,” the Chicago Tribune warned on Nov. 9. “Capitalists are nervous and wary, merchants cautious and foreboding, workingmen pinched and apprehensive, and everybody forced to retrenchment.”

The coming wave was gaining strength.

***

The elections of 1873 and 1874 are covered in Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, available at amazon.com.

I recently had the opportunity to write about a long-forgotten piece of partisan mischief — the “Murchison letter” of 1888 — for the Washington Post’s Retropolis blog. It turns out that the story is not unique — far from it. Herewith, a short history of the fraudulent and forged letters that occupy a prominent — and notorious — place in the American political tradition.

***

Few examples of political skulduggery have shown more staying power than the fake letter.

The inglorious tradition of the mendacious missive spans dates back to the American Revolution, flourished in the Gilded Age and played a small but significant role in the Watergate scandal.

None other than George Washington was the target of fake correspondence produced during the early years of the Revolution. As recounted by Greg Schneider in the Washington Post’s Retropolis blog, seven letters purportedly written by Washington and obtained as the Americans fled Fort Lee, N.J., suggested that the Virginian at the head of the Continental Army was deeply demoralized and regretted his part in the conflict.

In one of the letters, published in pamphlet form in London in 1777, Washington was supposed to have confessed: “I love my king.” Washington concluded that the forgeries were written by Loyalist John Randolph, a Virginian who escaped to England when the war broke out, Schneider writes.

Cleverly mimicking Washington’s prose style, the letters were designed to portray him as a sad and pathetic colonial, Schneider writes. The Virginian “is a very different character from what they had supposed him,” the pamphlet’s unnamed editor writes. “I never knew a man so much to be pitied.”

There is no way to know exactly what the impact of the forgeries was on public opinion in England or the colonies, but there is little evidence that they had much of an effect. Washington defended himself to friends, according to Schneider. “But with a restraint that seems very foreign today,” Schneider adds, he chose to say nothing about the letters in public until the end of his second term as president, when he issued a statement circulated to newspapers denying he was the author.

***

The Gilded Age represented a high point (or perhaps a low point) in the dark art. In 1880 and again in 1888, phony correspondence altered, or threatened to alter, the outcome of presidential elections.

It didn’t take much to swing a presidential election in the years between 1876 and 1896. Each of those six contests were decided by 3.3 percent or less in the popular vote. Two winners – Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 – carried the Electoral College even though they failed to won a majority of the popular vote.

The evenly split and deeply divided electorate was a ready made audience for forgery and other dirty tricks.

Four years after Hayes squeaked into office after winning by a single electoral vote, Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield confronted a rude shock in the pages of a New York newspaper in what many historians call the first “October surprise.”

A facsimile of a letter supposedly written by Garfield on congressional stationery to one H.L. Morey of Lynn, Massachusetts, plastered on the front page of the New York Truth on Oct. 23, 1880, touched on two hot topics: Chinese immigration and labor. The letter promised to faithfully adhere to the controversial 1868 treaty with China that allowed what the Office of the Historian at the State Department called “the right to free immigration and travel within the United States.”

The letter, if legitimate, was potentially explosive. The treaty was deeply unpopular in California and elsewhere in the West, where xenophobic anti-Asian sentiments ran high. Adding to the letter’s potentially explosive power, it conflated support for the deeply unpopular treaty with an obsequious regard for the interests of manufacturers. “I am not prepared to say that [the treaty] should be abrogated until our great manufacturing and corporate interests are conversed on the matter of labor.”

Garfield authorized a spokesman to deny the authenticity of the letter, biographer Allan Peskin writes, but waited several days to do so himself. Part of the reason for the delay, Peskin writes, was that Garfield couldn’t be quite sure he didn’t write the letter until an aide pored through his papers back in Washington and confirmed it was a fake.

In any event, the letter failed to pack the punch its author hoped. It was a bad forgery, with a signature that looked nothing like Garfield’s. Investigators failed to locate H.L. Morey” in Lynn or the “Employers Union” he claimed to represent.

Garfield won a narrow victory over Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock in the popular vote that was magnified in the Electoral College. California and Nevada, each carried by Republican Rutherford B. Hayes four years earlier, moved to the Democratic column in 1880.

“Except for the West Coast,” Peskin writes, Garfield “probably gained more from the episode than he lost. Even his old enemy, Charles A. Dana, advised the voters to punish Democrats for having indulged in such tactics.”

***

Eight years would elapse before the tactic made headlines again. This time, the effect was more substantial.

In September, 1888, the British ambassador to the United States received a letter from Pomona, Calif., appearing over the signature of “Charles F. Murchison.” The letter writer claimed to be an English native seeking the advice of Sir Lionel Sackville-West about the presidential campaign pitting President Grover Cleveland against Republican Benjamin Harrison.

Cleveland had recently taken a tough line on a fisheries dispute with Canada, the letter noted, raising the question of whether he was abandoning his pro-British inclinations. But if Cleveland were likely to return to a pro-British foreign policy after the election, “then I should have no further doubts but go ahead and vote for him,” the letter stated.

Sackville-West was an experienced diplomat who had spent enough time in Washington to understand the toxicity of being perceived as too friendly to America’s former colonial masters. He should have ignored the letter.

But he didn’t. He responded by noting the unpopularity of his government in the U.S. electorate but added that the Cleveland administration “is still desirous of maintaining friendly relations with Great Britain.”

In other words: Americans who wanted friendly ties with Britain could safely vote for Cleveland.

Alas, “Murchison” was the non de plume of one Charles Osgoodby. Over the years Osgoody’s explanations for writing the letter varied. He initially stated he simply wanted to play a prank on the British ambassador. Twenty-five years later he claimed a loftier motive — he wanted, he said, to expose the pro-British leanings of the Cleveland administration.

Whatever his motives, Osgoodby’s letter turned the campaign upside down after the correspondence appeared in the Republican Los Angeles Times on Oct. 21, 1888. Republicans seized on the correspondence in electoral vote-rich New York, a battleground state home to a sizable number of anti-British Irish immigrants.

“Means have been taken to distribute it as widely as possible and presses are being kept hot to keep up with the demand that has been made for copies of it,” according to the New York Tribune. “Thousands of copies were distributed among the vast crowds that were in and around Madison Square Garden last night.” The Tribune poured gasoline on the flames by featuring a facsimile of Sackville-West’s letter on its front page the Sunday before New York voters went to the polls.

Unlike the Morey letter, the Murchison letter may well have helped sway the outcome of the election. Harrison failed to get a majority of the popular vote, but he won in the Electoral College and carried the Empire State.

***

Fast forward to 1972. It is Feb. 26, days before the New Hampshire primary, and Democratic Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine is quaking with rage outside offices of the Manchester Union Leader.

Loeb’s newspaper had published a front-page editorial charging that Muskie held French-speaking voters in contempt and countenanced the use of a slur — “canuck” — to describe them. The basis for the editorial was a letter from Deerfield Beach, Fla., written in what David S. Broder of The Washington Post described as “block printing that could be a child’s handwriting,” alleging that someone with the Muskie campaign had used the term “canuck” in Florida and that the senator from Maine laughed about it.

Muskie denied using or condoning the term, but what really angered him that day were attacks in the Union-Leader on his wife, Jane. His emotional defense of her honor that day became a turning point in his doomed campaign. The Democratic nomination in 1972 went to George McGovern.

The so-called “canuck letter” would have earned a place in history on its own, but later disclosures revealed that it was one of many dirty tricks developed by the Nixon White House and the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote on Oct.24, 1972, that law enforcement officials investigating the bugging of the Watergate offices of Democratic National Committee believed the burglary represented part of a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” that included the “canuck letter.”

“Law enforcement sources said that probably the best example of the sabotage [conducted by CREEP and orchestrated by the White House] was the fabrication by a White House aide — of a celebrated letter to the editor alleging that Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) condoned a racial slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent as ‘Canucks,’ ” the story said.

***

These episodes, involving as they do the American Revolution, the Gilded Age and the Watergate scandal, have little in common except the method used to attack an opponent. Perhaps the grand lesson here is simply this: Times — and issues — change. The dirty trick endures.

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Perhaps it was my immersion in the greatest scandal of the Gilded Age — the Credit Mobilier affair — that whetted my appetite for political scandal. Check out my book — Congress and the King of Fraud: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age, — available at amazon.com.