“…Reforms must begin, and progress, and end within the party, because I do not know of any political organization outside of it that has any reformative power to spare. Certainly not the Democratic party. I know that our Mugwump friends think that they have a great deal of surplus reformative energy, but the trouble with those people is that they have put themselves up on the shelf like dried cakes of Fleischmann’s compressed yeast, and they have no power upon the mass that they should leaven because they have ceased to have contact with it.”
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Benjamin Harrison, Republican Dinner at Delmonico’s, New York, February 12th, 1887
“Mugwumps” were Republican reformers who embraced Cleveland over the machine politician Blaine in the 1884 election. To win in ’88, the GOP needed to keep those members in the party. So they initiated a reform movement of their own, but kept it moderate.
Fleischmann’s is a brand of yeast, still sold in the US today. Harrison implied that the “yeast” was the reform spirit of the GOP itself, and Mugwumps were unable to “rise” without it.
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