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"Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine: Continental Liar from the State of Maine" was the chant that accompanied Blaine wherever he would go in 1884.

There was a Protestant minister who introduced him at a New York City Republican fundraiser who, on that occasion, described the Democrat Party as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." That was of course a none too subtle expression of anti-Catholic bigotry and specifically anti-Irish bigotry. It took the GOP nearly a century to put that behind them along with the Massachusetts GOP equivalent that greeted Irish immigrants on the docks at Southie (South Boston): "Jobs available: No Irish need apply."

I don't know anything about money corruption of the conventional sort (see Robamney for an example) that may have touched or defined Blaine. I'll leave that to others.

Grover Cleveland was a champion of small government. He may have been the last POTUS to actually use the Tenth Amendment regularly in vetoing any Congressional enactment (and there were many) that he viewed as not being characterized as among the specific powers granted to the federal government by the Constitution itself. He was a hard money man who was the opposite of William Jennings Bryan in that respect. You may say that he was a champion of "the flag, the Bible and no damn taxes." To this day, Grover Cleveland is responsible for the fiscal conservatism of French Canadians in the New England states for reasons that are not clear to me.

When Benjamin Harrison defeated Cleveland in 1888 after Cleveland's first term, Senator Harrison famously went to the office of his campaign manager (Matt Quay) on the morning after the election and said: "Matt, thank God, we have won." Quay replied: "Harrison, God had nothing to do with it. We bought every vote you got." Cleveland never bought votes, not even with taxpayers' money. Four years later, his honesty and frugality were missed and Cleveland was again elected to the White House for his second and final term.

Also, research the Blaine Amendments (associated loosely with him which were, among Catholics, widely regarded as enactments of anti-Catholic bigotry in depriving Catholic schools of any governmental funding. The Blaine Amendments have been chipped away at for some time. In various Blaine Amendment jurisdictions, in spite of the obvious intent of Blaine Amendment proponents, bus service is paid for, or secular subject textbooks, or vouchers for tuition paid to the parents and through them to the schools (actually saving taxpayers considerable cost unless the secular portion of education is deemed a Church responsibility for Catholic parochial school parents or Christian Academy parents or Jewish Academy [such as those of the Chassidic Jews) parents]).

Whether Blaine's critics were fair to him or not, such controversies in the 19th century kept Catholics from the GOP and have residual effects to this day. My Irish grandmother who arrived at 12 years of age in South Boston from the County and City of Cork and never lived in a Blaine Amendment state was quite eloquent in denouncing Blaine for bigotry. She was probably unaware that his mother, wife and daughters were all practicing Catholics which would only have made her denunciations all the more enthusiastic. My grandmother lived to be quite old and never lived a state with a Blaine Amendment. She lived only in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Blaine was a Congregationalist.

There was once a consensus among Catholics, Protestants and Jews in this country that there was nothing wrong with the conventional moral formation of children and much to recommend such formation. The loss of that consensus is a tragedy for this nation.