Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,768
By This is the grave of Isidor Rayner.
Born in 1850 in Baltimore, Rayner grew up in a well-off Jewish family with roots in German. Like many German Jews, they did very well in the United States and were upwardly mobile. His father was also a rabbi in Baltimore. He went to fancy private schools and then the University of Maryland-Baltimore, later transferring to the University of Virginia. He studied for the bar in Maryland and passed it in 1871.
It did not take Rayner long to become interested in politics. A Democrat, he was first elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1878 and was there for the next six years before going to the Maryland Senate in 1885. He only stayed there for one year because he ran for Congress in 1886. He won that race too. He lost his reelection bid in 1888, not a great year for Democrats. But he ran again in 1890 and won and then won again in 1892. In the House, perhaps his biggest contribution was leading the fight in overturning the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Rayner was a strong Grover Cleveland supporter and the president, just entering his second term (remember when we could make the non-consecutive joke…) appreciated it.
In 1894, Rayner decided to leave Congress and mostly engaged with his law practice. But in 1899, he decided to run for the state’s attorney general. He stayed there for four years, leaving office in 1903. In 1904, he ran for the Senate and he won. As so, he became the fourth Jewish person elected to the Senate.
Rayner was a reasonably important figure in the body, largely based on his excellent oratorical skills. His major committee position was as head of the horribly named Committee on Indian Depredations. Now, you’d think this was something that reached back to the days of the Indian wars, but no. It was founded in 1893, coming out of a subcommittee that itself only went back to 1889. So this was post-wars. Basically, whites came up with all sorts of reasons to file claims against indigenous people and because governance on the reservations was unclear to many, these whites filed their claims with the federal government. Basically, it became another front in the genocide against the Tribes. I don’t have any particular information on how Rayner approached the issue, as most of the limited literature that mentions him focuses on other things.
To the extent Rayner is interesting, it’s that he represented a different kind of Democratic Party than that of the late nineteenth century that we usually think about. Largely, that’s because he was not overtly anti-Black. Rather, he was basically an early form of the moderate Jewish liberal that we see in many of our elected Democrats today. Thus, as a general rule, his political campaigns came as reform movements that were often vigorously opposed by Maryland’s Democratic machine politics. This was possible because Maryland had a relatively large immigrant population. Of course, political machines often did very well in organizing immigrants and I don’t really know that much about the specifics of Maryland politics at this time, except to say that the legendary Gorman Machine ran the Democratic Party there. They did not take Rayner seriously either, supposedly laughing when he announced his candidacy. But remember that Maryland was effectively a southern state and it’s Democratic Party mostly controlled by people openly wishing that state had committed treason in defense of slavery. So the politics of Maryland had a lot of complexities and Rayner was able to tap into enough internal machinations in the state legislature and people who hated the machine to get sent to Washington. Then, after he won, he strongly opposed disfranchising African Americans and generally stood up to his party on its racist politics.
One thing Rayner did have in common with a lot of other Democrats was anti-imperialism. The imperialist project of the Spanish-American War and its aftermath largely had a strongly partisan tinge. The only good position Grover Cleveland had was opposition to annexing Hawaii and exploring ways to start wars around the world to increase American political power. Then William McKinley came along and we had three straight presidents deeply committed to the practice. Four, really, though Wilson is more complicated. But by the time Wilson came along, the power of the Progressive Era was pretty overwhelming and remaking the world in the ways of rich white people in the United States had more bipartisan appeal. Well, that was after Rayner’s time. He was a leader in the Senate against Roosevelt’s politics in Latin America, denouncing things such as starting a civil war in Colombia in order to cleave off Panama and then forcing the Panamanians to hand over the canal zone as a very bad thing.
Although Rayner not only was not a practicing Jew, but in fact had half converted Christianity when he got married to a Christian (he did attend a synagogue sometimes that had a family member as a rabbi, but he seems to have been pretty agnostic generally), he led the successful fight in the Senate to overturn a treaty with Russia over the both that nation’s violent anti-Semitism at home and its discrimination against American Jews traveling there, which was the legal argument. Thanks to all of this, he was reelected to a second term in 1910.
As time went, Rayner became an important Democratic Party ally of such Progressive Republicans as Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, Albert Beveridge of Indiana (despite the Hoosier’s extreme imperialism), and Jonathan Doliver of Iowa, who were often standing up to their own party leadership as much as they were to the Democratic Party. Rayner was very much the type of senator who wanted to get rid of the old guard Gilded Age extreme conservatives and replace them with men who admitted the twentieth century existed. Of course he and his friends lost most of these battles. But they won a few.
Rayner died in 1912, at the age of 62. Not sure why. He was still in the Senate. The only thing I can see is that people said that generally he was “nervous” and “excitable,” which leads me to think he had a heart attack or something like that, perhaps while getting up in arms about something. I can relate to this.
Isidor Rayner is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.
If you would like this series to visit other senators sent to the body in 1904-05, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Morgan Bulkeley (also an important early baseball executive) is in Hartford, Connecticut and John Kean is in Hillside, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.