Books: Booty & the Beast

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Butler went on to crusade for Negro civil rights. In 1875, he introduced a "radical" but prophetic civil rights bill before the House: it demanded that Negroes be granted "full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances, theaters, places of public amusement; and also of common schools and public institutions of learning." Congress passed it (sans the education clause), but the act was declared unconstitutional in 1883 by the Supreme Court.

Beast Butler was too far ahead of his time, concludes West. Uncompromising in his "liberalism," he broke with the Republicans in 1884 to run for President as the candidate of a coalition known as the "People's Party." Though he campaigned with a verve and color reminiscent of Daniel Webster, his reputation—deserved or undeserved—had caught up with him. He polled only 175,000 votes of the 10 million cast in an election that went narrowly to Democrat Grover Cleveland. When Butler died in 1893, at the age of 74, Charles Dana of the New York Sun wrote his epitaph: "He was no pretender and no hypocrite."