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Title: The New Nation
Author: Frederic L. Paxson
Editor: William E. Dodd
Release Date: January 31, 2009 [EBook #27953]
Language: English
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[Illustration: Copyright, 1912, Moffett, Chicago
[Signature]Woodrow Wilson]
THE NEW NATION
BY
FREDERIC L. PAXSON
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
[Illustration: logo]
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY FREDERIC L. PAXSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.
PREFACE
A new nation has appeared within the United States since the Civil War,
but it has been only accidentally connected with that catastrophe. The
Constitution emerged from the confusion of strife and reconstruction
substantially unchanged, but the economic development of the United
States in the sixties and seventies gave birth to a society that was, by
1885, already national in its activities and necessities. In many ways
the history of the United States since the Civil War has to do with the
struggle between this national fact and the old legal system that was
based upon state autonomy and federalism; and the future depends upon
the discovery of a means to readjust the mechanics of government, as
well as its content, to the needs of life. This book attempts to narrate
the facts of the last half-century and to show them in their relations
to the larger truths of national development.
FREDERIC L. PAXSON.
CONTENTS
I. THE CIVIL WAR 1
II. THE WEST AND THE GREENBACKS 20
III. THE RESTORATION OF HOME RULE IN THE SOUTH 39
IV. THE PANIC OF 1873 59
V. THE HAYES ADMINISTRATION 75
VI. BUSINESS AND POLITICS 92
VII. THE NEW ISSUES 108
VIII. GROVER CLEVELAND 126
IX. THE LAST OF THE FRONTIER 142
X. NATIONAL BUSINESS 162
XI. THE FARMERS' CAUSE 177
XII. THE NEW SOUTH 192
XIII. POPULISM 208
XIV. FREE SILVER 225
XV. THE "COUNTER-REFORMATION" 244
XVI. THE SPANISH WAR 258
XVII. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 276
XVIII. BIG BUSINESS 293
XIX. THE "MUCK-RAKERS" 309
XX. NEW NATIONALISM 324
INDEX i
MAPS AND CHARTS
THE RAILWAYS OF THE "OLD NORTHWEST" 13
THE WESTERN RAILWAY LAND GRANTS, 1850-1871 23
THE SOLID SOUTH, 1880-1912 53
THE POLITICAL SITUATION AT WASHINGTON, 1869-1917 76, 77
POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION, 1850-1910 120
THE WESTERN RAILROADS AND THE CONTINENTAL FRONTIER, 1870-1890 146, 147
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, 1789-1904 153
THE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION OF 1890 _between 186 and 187_
THE FLOOD OF SILVER, 1861-1911 227
ALASKA, THE PHILIPPINES, AND THE SEAT OF THE SPANISH WAR 259
NORTH AMERICA IN 1915 _between 340 and 341_
THE NEW NATION
CHAPTER I
THE CIVIL WAR
The military successes of the United States in its Civil War maintained
the Union, but entailed readjustments in politics, finance, and business
that shifted the direction of public affairs for many years. In the eyes
of contemporaries these changes were obscured by the vivid scenes of the
battlefield, whose intense impressions were not forgotten for a
generation. It seemed as though the war were everything, as though the
Republican party had preserved the nation, as though the nation itself
had arisen with new plumage from the stress and struggle of its crisis.
The realities of history, however, which are ever different from the
facts seen by the participant, are in this period further from the
tradition of the survivor than in any other stage of the development of
the United States. As the Civil War is viewed from the years that
followed it, the actualities that must be faced are the facts that the
dominant party saved neither the nation nor itself except by changing
its identity; that economic and industrial progress continued through
the war with unabated speed, and that out of the needs of a new economic
life arose the new nation.
The Republican party, whose older spokesmen had been trained as Whigs or
Democrats, had by 1861 seasoned its younger leaders in two national
campaigns. It had lost the first flush of the new enthusiasm which gave
it birth as a party opposed to the extension of slavery. The signs of
the times had been so clear between 1856 and 1860 that many politicians
had turned their coats less from a moral principle than from a desire to
win. When Lincoln took up the organization of his Administration, these
clamored for their rewards. There was nothing in the political ethics of
the sixties that discountenanced the use of the spoils of office, and
Lincoln himself, though he resented the drain of office-seeking upon his
time, appears not to have seen that the spoils system was at variance
with the fundamentals of good government.
It was a Republican partisan administration that bore the first brunt of
the Civil War, but the struggle was still young when Lincoln realized
that the Union could not stand on the legs of any single party. To
develop a general Union sentiment became an early aim of his policy and
is a key to his period. He was forced to consider and reconcile the
claims of all shades of Republican opinion, from that of the most
violent abolitionist to that of the mere unionist. In the Democracy,
opinion ranged from that of the strong war Democrat to that of the
Copperhead whose real sympathies were with the Confederacy.
To conciliate a working majority of the voters of the Union States, a
majority which must embrace many Union Democrats, Lincoln steadily
loosened the partisan bonds. The congressional elections of 1862 showed
that he was still far from success. His overtures to the Democrats of
the border States fell into line with his general scheme. His tolerance
of McClellan and his support of Stanton, both of whom by sympathy and
training were Democrats, reveal the comprehensive power of his
endurance. As the election of 1864 approached to test the success of his
generalship, he had to fight not only for a majority in the general
canvass but for the nomination by his own party.
There were many men in 1864 who believed that the war was a mistake and
that Lincoln was a failure. The peace Democrats denounced him as a
military dictator; to the radical Republicans he was spineless and
irresolute. Within his own Cabinet there was dissension that would have
unnerved a less steady man. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, wanted
to be President, and had allowed his friends to intrigue in his behalf,
yet had not withdrawn from the counsels of his rival. At various times
he had threatened to resign, but Lincoln had shut his eyes to this
infidelity and had coaxed him back. Not until after the President had
been renominated did he accept the resignation of Chase, and even then
he was willing to make the latter Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Chase, in the Cabinet and in touch with dissatisfied Republicans
outside, was a menace to impartial administration. Less distressing, but
noisier than he, was John C. Frémont, the first nominee of the party,
who had sulked in the midst of admiring friends since Lincoln had
removed him from important military service in 1861. About him the
extreme abolitionists were gathered, and in his favor there was held a
convention in May, 1864. But this dissenting movement collapsed upon
itself before the elections in November.
The Republicans went into convention at Baltimore, on June 7, 1864. The
candidacy of Chase had faded, that of Frémont was already unimportant,
and the renomination of Lincoln was assured. But the party carefully
concealed its name and, catering to loyalists of whatever brand, it
called itself "Union," and invited to its support all men to whom the
successful prosecution of the war was the first great duty. It was a
Union party in fact as well as name. Delegations of Democrats came to it
from the border States, and from one of these the convention picked a
loyal Democrat for the Vice-Presidency. With Lincoln and Andrew Johnson
on its ticket, with a platform silent upon the protective tariff, and
with an organization so imperfect that no roll of delegates could be
made until the convention had been called to order, the Administration
party of 1864 was far from being the same organization that had, in
1856, voiced its protest against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.
The excesses of the Democrats aided Lincoln almost as much as the
efforts of the party which nominated him. A convention at Chicago, in
August, presided over by Governor Seymour, of New York, and under the
dominance of Clement L. Vallandigham, did not need to denounce the war
as a failure in order to disappoint the Union Democrats. Not even the
nomination of McClellan, nor his repudiation of the platform, could undo
the result of such leadership. It was far from certain which ticket
would receive the greater vote in November, but it was clear that union
against disunion was the issue, and that men would vote according to
their hopes and fears. The former were in the ascendant when the polls
were opened, for Sherman had gained a decisive victory in his occupation
of Atlanta, while Farragut had gained another at Mobile Bay. On the
strength of these successes the Union ticket carried every State but
Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey.
Chase, who left the Treasury during the presidential campaign, had by
that time finished the work which carried the financial burdens of the
Civil War and provided party texts for another generation. He had come
to his task without special fitness, but had speedily mastered the
essentials of war finance. In his reports he outlined the policy which
Congress followed, more or less closely. Taxes ought to be increased, he
urged, to meet all the costs of civil administration, interest on the
debt, and sinking fund for the same. These were current burdens which
the country ought not to try to escape. But the extra cost of the war,
which was to be regarded as a permanent investment by the Union for its
own defense, might fairly be made a charge upon posterity. To meet these
he urged the creation of a sufficient bonded debt.
The Thirty-seventh Congress (1861-63) had been more ready to borrow
than to tax. In all its experience until 1861 the United States had met
no crisis in which large revenues had been required. In the thirty
preceding years its total annual receipts had ranged from $20,000,000 to
$81,000,000, while in the fiscal year in which the war began the total
had reached $83,000,000, of which $41,000,000 were loans rather than
revenue. Since the panic of 1857 the Treasury had faced a deficit at the
end of each year, and had been compelled not only to spend its
accumulated surplus on current needs, but to borrow heavily. The tariff
duties, collected at the custom-houses, were, as they always had been,
the mainstay of the revenue. But these had not met the needs of the
three lean years before the war.
Had there been no war, the disordered finances of the United States
might, in 1861, have called for corrective measures and new taxes, and
these could not have become effective before 1862 or 1863. As it was,
loans were resorted to for first-aid. In 1862 they alone were more than
six times as great as the total receipts of 1861; in 1865 they were
nearly three times as great as in 1862. Taxes were authorized more
reluctantly than loans, they became profitable more slowly, and did not,
until the last year of war, reveal the fiscal capacities of the United
States.
The favorite national tax of the United States had always been the
tariff. Supplemented by miscellaneous items which included no internal
revenue after 1849, and no direct tax after 1839, it carried most of the
financial burdens. Whether parties preferred it high or low, or levied
it for protection or for revenue, they had continued to cherish it as a
fiscal device, and had acquired no experience with alternate sources of
supply. Like the army of the United States, which in time of war had to
break in its volunteer levies before it could win victories, the
Treasury and Congress had to learn how to tax before they could bring
the taxable resources of the United States to supplement the loans.
The tariff was revised and increased several times between 1861 and
1865, and yielded its greatest return, $102,000,000, in 1864. The result
was due to both the swelling volume of imports and the higher rates.
Like all panics, that of 1857 had lessened the buying capacity of the
American people. In hard times luxuries were sacrificed and treasury
receipts were thereby greatly curtailed. A return to normal conditions
of business would have been visible by 1861 had not war obscured it.
Steadily through the war a prosperous North and West bought more foreign
goods regardless of the price.
The rate of tariff was based upon the probable revenue, the protective
principle, and the tax burdens already imposed upon American
manufacturers. Not until 1863 were the internal or direct taxes
noticeable, but in 1864 these passed the tariff as a source of revenue,
with a total of $116,000,000. In 1866 this total was swollen to
$211,000,000. Like the tariff, the income, excise, and direct taxes were
often revised and raised, and many of the tariff increases were
dependent upon them. When the American manufacturer, who already
declared that he could stay in business only because the tariff
protected him from European competition, found himself burdened with a
tax on his income and with others upon his commercial transactions and
his output, he complained bitterly of the disadvantage at which he was
placed. To equalize his burdens, the import rates were repeatedly raised
against the foreigner. By the end of the war, the tariff exceeded
anything known in American experience, and was fixed less with the
intention of raising revenue than of enabling the American producer to
pay his internal tax. Less than $85,000,000 were collected from the
customs in 1865; while $211,000,000 came from internal sources.
By taxing and borrowing the United States accumulated $88,000,000 in
1861, $589,000,000 in 1862, $888,000,000 in 1863, $1,408,000,000 in
1864, and $1,826,000,000 in 1865. The Treasury, unimportant in the
world's affairs before 1861, suddenly became one of the greatest dealers
in credit. Its debt of $2,808,000,000, outstanding in October, 1865,
affected the interests and solidity of international finance, and
indicated, as well, resources of which even boastful Americans had been
unaware in 1861. One item in the debt, however, was a menace to the
security of the whole, which was but little stronger than its weakest
part.
The physical currency in which the debt was to be created and the
expenses paid was as difficult to find in 1861 as the wealth which it
measured. After Jackson destroyed the second Bank of the United States
there had been no national currency but coin, and too little of that.
Gold and silver had been coined at the mint, and the former had given
the standard to the dollar. In intrinsic worth the gold dollar, as
defined in 1834 at the ratio of sixteen to one, was slightly inferior to
its silver associate, and by the law of human nature, which induces men
to hold the better and pass the cheaper money, the value of the gold
coin had become the measure of exchange.
The coined money did not circulate generally. It was devoted to a part
of the business of government, and to the needs of the banks which
provided the actual circulating medium. Scattered over all the States,
hundreds of state and private banks issued their own notes to serve as
money. At best, and in theory, these were exchangeable for gold at par;
at worst, they were a total loss; yet as they were, variant and
depreciated since the panic of 1857, they were the money of the people
when the Civil War began. Before the end of 1861 the banks gave up the
pretense of redeeming their notes in coin. The United States Treasury
suspended the payment of specie early in 1862, and thereafter for
seventeen years the paper money in circulation depended for its value on
the hope that it would some day be redeemed.
The needs of the Treasury, in the crisis of suspension, induced Congress
to authorize the emission of $150,000,000 of legal-tender paper money.
These notes, soon known as the "greenbacks," became the measure of the
difference between standard money and coin. Issued at par, they sank in
value and fluctuated until in the darkest days of 1864 a dollar in gold
could be exchanged for $2.85 in greenbacks. Yet they were called
dollars, and the creditor was forced to accept them in payment of his
debts. They were themselves a forced loan, borrowed by compulsion from
the people, and constituting $433,000,000 in the total debts of the
United States in 1865.
The greenback element in the national debt threatened the integrity of
the whole. Should redemption take place at par, and at once, the credit
of the United States could not fail to be strengthened. But should the
greenbacks be allowed to remain below par, should more of them be
issued, or should the United States avail itself of its technical
privilege to pay off part of the bonded debt in "lawful money"
manufactured by the printing-press, the weakest item in the total might
easily depress the whole.
The future of American politics after 1865 was largely determined by the
methods through which the revenue had been increased and by the fate of
the greenbacks, but more important for the immediate future than either
of these was the great fact that in five years the United States had
been able to incur its net debt of $2,808,000,000, and had raised in
addition more than $700,000,000 through taxation. It was a prosperous
Union that emerged from the Civil War, and every region but the South
was strong in its conscious wealth.
The whole of the United States had shared in the unusual growth in the
period following the Mexican War, in which the new railroads were tying
the Mississippi Valley to the seaboard. The census of 1860 reported an
increase of 36 per cent in total population in ten years, somewhat
unevenly divided, since the Confederate area had increased but 25 per
cent, as compared with 39 per cent in the North and West, yet large
enough everywhere to keep up the traditions of a growing population. The
growth continued in the next decade, despite the Civil War. It is not to
be expected that it should have touched the record of the fifties, for
2,500,000 men were drawn from production for at least three years--the
three years in which most of them would have grown to manhood and
married, had there been no war. The South, desolated by war, and with
nearly every able-bodied white man in the ranks, stood still, with under
9 per cent increase. But the whole country grew in population from
31,443,321 to 38,558,371 (22 per cent), while the North and West, in
spite of war, grew 27 per cent,--more than the South had done in its
most brilliant decade.
How far the North and West would have gone had they not been hampered by
the depression after 1857 cannot be stated. These regions had suffered
most from the panic, since in them railroads and banks, factories and
cities, and all the agents of a complex industrial organization had been
most active. The industrial disturbance had disarranged for the time the
elaborate Northern system. The simpler South, with its staple crops, its
rural population, and its few railways, had suffered less. Southerners
before the war had seen in their immunity from the effects of panic a
proof of their superiority over other social orders; they had misread
the times and prophesied the disintegration of the industrial
organization of the North.
The South seceded before the rest of the United States emerged from the
panic period. In the next four years the treasury receipts show the
resources of the loyal States. Industry, recovered from its depression,
went ahead unnoticed in the noise of war, yet little impeded by the fact
of war.
Communication by rail brought the most significant of the single changes
into the Northern States. Before the panic of 1857 the trunk-line
railways had completed their net of tracks between the Mississippi and
tidewater. Nearly ten thousand miles had been built in the Old Northwest
alone in the ten preceding years. But the effect of this on business,
certain to come in any event, was not seen until secession closed the
Mississippi to the agricultural exports of the Northwest. For a part of
1861 and 1862 traffic piled up along the young railroads extending from
St. Louis and Chicago to Buffalo, Pittsburg, New York, and Philadelphia.
But before 1863 these lines, notably the New York Central, the Erie, and
the Pennsylvania, had adapted themselves to the trade which the South
had thrust upon them; and never since secession has New Orleans regained
her place as the great outlet of the Mississippi Valley.
The fundamental change in the direction of its trade added to the
prosperity of the North. In the additions to the transportation system,
made to accommodate the new business, new railroads were less prominent
than second tracks, bridges, tunnels, and terminal facilities. The
experimental years of railroading had passed before most of the lines
learned the importance of city terminals. The growth of the cities and
the rising price of land made the attainment of these more difficult
than they need have been, while city governments and their officials
learned that illicit profits could be made out of the necessities of the
railroads. The great lines, active in the development of their plants,
and consolidating during the sixties to get the benefits of unified
management, added to the bustle in the cities in the North.
[Illustration: THE RAILWAYS OF THE "OLD NORTHWEST"
Showing the development between 1848 and 1860, upon which the Civil War
prosperity of the region was based]
The United States was an agricultural country until the beginning of
manufacturing and the revolution in communication made it profitable to
concentrate people and capital in the cities. Between 1850 and 1880 the
number of cities with a population of 50,000 more than doubled. The
actual construction of the houses, the water and lighting systems, and
the sewers for these communities gave employment to labor. As cities
grew, their more generous distances brought in the street-car companies,
whose occupation of the public streets added to the temptations and
opportunities of the officials of government. The swelling manufactures
increased the city groups and gave them work.
The country life itself began to change. The typical farming families,
developed by pioneer conditions, had remained the social unit for
several generations, but these felt the lure of the cities which drew
their boys and girls into the factories. Domestic manufactures could not
compete in quality, appearance, or price with the output of the new
factories. The farmer began to give up his slaughtering and
butter-making, as he had already abandoned his spinning and weaving, and
devoted himself more exclusively to raising crops. Here, too, the
mechanical improvements touched his life. Agricultural machinery was
coming into general use, while the new railroads carried off his produce
to the great markets which the rising cities created.
The number of employees of American factories increased more than half
between 1860 and 1870, while the capital invested and the goods turned
out were more than doubled. The United States was for the first time
looking to a day when all the ordinary necessities of life could be made
within its limits. At Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, and a host of cities in the interior, men were not
disturbed by the war in their attempt to exploit the abundant resources
of the continent. The manufacture of food began to shift from the
household to the city factory, to the advantage of the cities lying near
the great fresh areas of farm lands. The flour mills of the Northwest,
the meat-packing establishments at Chicago and elsewhere, the
distilleries of central Illinois, utilized the agricultural staples and
transformed them for export. The presence of factories forced upon the
city governments, East and West, already embarrassed by the pains of
rapid growth, the problems of police power and good government. Charters
written for semi-rural villages were inadequate when the villages became
cities.
Clothing, no less than food, passed into the factory, thanks to Elias
Howe and his sewing-machine and the shoe machinery of McKay. Before the
war the influences of this change were visible in the increasing demand
for cotton. Now came the great growth of the textile regions of the
East, around Fall River and Philadelphia, and of the shoe factories in
the Lynn district.
The use and manufacture of machines gave new stimulus to those regions
where coal and iron, placed conveniently with reference to
transportation, had fixed the location of smelters and rolling-mills. In
the middle of the sixties Henry Bessemer's commercial process for the
manufacture of steel marks the beginning of a revolution in the
construction of railroads and bridges, as well as in public and private
architecture. Pittsburg became the heart of the steel industry, and the
young men who controlled it fixed their hands upon the commercial future
of the United States. The newest of industries, the trade in petroleum
and its oils, reached fifteen millions in Pittsburg alone in 1864.
The trunk-line railways with their spurs and branches adjusted
themselves early in the war to the new direction of business currents.
They then began to carry the new inhabitants into the cities, the new
manufactures to their markets, and to press upon iron, coal, and timber
for their own supplies. Men of business laid the foundations of huge
fortunes in supplying the new and growing demands. The stock company,
with negotiable shares and bonds, made it possible for the small
investor to share in the larger commercial profits and losses.
The growth and elaboration of companies and commerce were projected upon
a legal system that was most accustomed to small enterprises and local
trade. Not only had the corporations to establish customs and precedents
among themselves, but courts, legislatures, and city councils had to
face the need for an amplification of American law. The speed with which
the new life swept upon the country, the inexperience of both business
men and jurists, the public ignorance of the extent to which the
revolution was to go, and the cross-purposes inevitable when States
tried to regulate the affairs of corporations larger than themselves,
make it unnecessary to search further for the key to the confusing
half-century that followed the Civil War.
The rapid changes in manufacturing, transportation, urban life, and
business law that came with the prosperity of the early sixties gave to
these years an appearance of materialism that has misled many observers.
None of the developments received full contemporary notice, for war
filled the front pages of the newspapers. The men who directed them were
not under scrutiny, and could hardly fail to bring into business and
speculation that main canon of war time that the end is everything and
that it justifies the means. But though war was not the sole American
occupation between 1861 and 1865, and though a new industrial revolution
was begun, material things often gave way in the American mind to
altruistic concepts and the service of the ideal.
Congress endowed the agricultural colleges in the early years of the
war, and the state universities, though thinned by the enlistment of
their boys, established themselves. The creation of new universities,
the endowment of older foundations, and the beginning of an education
that should fit not only for law, medicine, and theology, but for
business, agriculture, engineering, and teaching, all bear testimony to
the real interests of American democracy. The ideal was as yet far
removed from the fact, and the intellectual leaders of the United States
were yet to pass through a period of black pessimism, but the people
were still firm in their faith that education is the mainstay of popular
government, and gave their full devotion to both.
The four years of the Civil War carried the United States over a period
of social and economic transition and left it well started on the new
course. They enlarged and expanded the activities of government,
hastening that day when there should exist a public conviction that
government is a matter of technical expertness and must be run in a
scientific manner for the common good. They raised the problems of
taxation and currency to a new importance, and impressed their
significance upon the men who directed the industries of the country. In
their prosperity they made it possible to save the Union; and at their
close a Union party, uncertain of its strength and its personnel, faced
the problems of a united country which included an industrial North, a
desolated South, and a vanishing frontier.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For further references upon the Civil War period, consult William E.
Dodd, _Expansion and Conflict_ (in this series), and F.L. Paxson, _The
Civil War_ (1911). The best and most exhaustive narrative is J.F.
Rhodes, _History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the
Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877_ (7 vols.,
1892-1906), and this may be supplemented to advantage by E.D. Fite,
_Social and industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War_
(1910). There is a convenient account of the election of 1864, with
platforms and tables of votes, in E. Stanwood, _A History of the
Presidency_ (1898) and there are many valuable documents in E.
McPherson's annual _Political Manual_. The biographies of W.H. Seward,
by F. Bancroft, and Jay Cooke, by E.P. Oberholtzer, are among the best
of the period. There are no better summaries of finances than D.R.
Dewey's _Financial History of the United States_ (1903, etc.); W.C.
Mitchell's _History of the Greenbacks_ (1903); and J.A. Woodburn's
_Thaddeus Stevens_ (1913). In the _Annual Cyclopædia_ (published by D.
Appleton & Co., 1861-1902) are useful and accurate accounts of current
affairs. E.L. Godkin began to publish the _Nation_ in New York in the
summer of 1865, and H.V. Poore issued the first volume of his annual
_Manual of the Railroads of the United States_, in 1868.
CHAPTER II
THE WEST AND THE GREENBACKS
The activity of the North and the East between 1861 and 1865 was
imitated and magnified among the youthful communities that made up the
western border and ranged in age from a few weeks to thirty years. These
had been mostly agricultural in 1857. Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and
Kansas had been the frontier before the Civil War. In place of these,
now grown to be populous and more or less sedate, a new group appeared
farther west, within what had been believed to be the "American Desert."
By 1868 Congress completed the subdivision of the last lands between the
Missouri River and the Pacific, since which date only one new political
division has appeared in the United States.
The last frontier, that developed after 1857, was novel as well as new.
It was made up of mining camps. Everywhere in the Rocky Mountains
prospectors staked out claims and introduced their free-and-easy life.
Before 1857 the group of Mormons around the Great Salt Lake was the only
considerable settlement between eastern Kansas and California. Now came
in quick succession the rush to Pike's Peak and Colorado Territory
(1861), the rush from California to the Carson Valley and Nevada
Territory (1861), and the creation of the agricultural territory of
Dakota (1861) for the up-river Missouri country, where in a few more
years were revealed the riches of the Black Hills. In 1863 the mines of
the lower Colorado River gave excuse for Arizona Territory. Those of the
northern Continental Divide were grouped in Idaho in the same year, and
divided in 1864 when Montana was created. Wyoming, the last of the
subdivisions, was the product of mines and railroads in 1868. Oklahoma
was not named for twenty years more, but had existed in its final shape
since the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854.
The legitimate influence of these mining-camps upon the United States
was great. It was no new thing for Congress to solve its national
problems on the initiative of the West. Since the passage of the
Ordinance of 1787 this had been a frequent occurrence, and the history
of the public lands had always been directed by Western demands. In 1862
the agricultural West, whose capacity to cultivate land had been
magnified by the new reaper of McCormick, had obtained its Homestead
Act, by which land titles were conveyed to the farmer who cleared the
land and used it. Thomas H. Benton had fought for this through a long
lifetime. He died too soon to see the full apotheosis of the squatter,
who gradually developed, in point of law, from the criminal stealing the
public land to the public-spirited pioneer in whose interest a wise
Congress ought to shape its laws. Under the influence of this new
Homestead Law, aided by the Preëmption Law, which remained in force,
land titles were established in the Mountain States as rapidly as the
Indians could be removed.
The frontier mining territories were loud in demanding that Congress
should give them more land, remove the Indians, extend police
protection, and give them mails and railroads. The miner disliked the
isolation which his speculations brought upon him, and Congress unfolded
new powers to remove it for him. In 1858 it organized the great overland
mail that ran coaches to California in less than twenty-five days. The
pony express provided faster service in 1860-61. And after private money
had built the telegraph line to the Pacific, both Congress and the West
took up the subject of a continental railway.
In the summer of 1862 a group of railroad companies was authorized to
build a track from the Missouri River (which had already been reached at
St. Joseph by a railway from the East) to California. As modified by law
in 1864 the contract provided for extensive government aid in the
speculation: twenty sections of land for every mile of track, and a loan
of United States bonds at the rate of at least $16,000 per mile. But the
West had little capital, and the prosperous East had better investments
at home, so that money could hardly be got into this scheme on any
terms. The Western promoters were driven to shifty extremes before they
overcame the Eastern belief that no continental railroad could pay. Not
until 1866 was the construction work begun in earnest.
[Illustration: THE WESTERN RAILWAY LANDGRANTS, 1850-1871
Explanation of the map of
THE WESTERN RAILWAY LAND GRANTS, 1850-1871
(This map is based upon the one in Donaldson, Public Domain, 948, and
includes certain wagon-road lands.)
There never were any public lands in the State of Texas. Oklahoma lay
within the Indian Country in which no lands were available for grants
between 1850 and 1871.
The railway land grants, authorized between 1850 and 1871 lay within the
areas shaded, and consisted, in all cases, of alternate sections on each
side of the track. The sections retained by the United States were,
however, withdrawn from entry upon filing of the railway survey, and
remained withdrawn until the railway allotment had been made. Regions
thus impeded in their development often became centers of hostility
toward the railroads.]
Between 1866 and 1869 the building of the Union Pacific was the most
picturesque enterprise in America. Across the great plains, the desert,
and the mountains, from Council Bluffs to Sacramento, it was pushed. In
the West, Stanford and his group of California visionaries carried the
burden. The eastern end brought out no single great promoter. Both ends
fought the problem of timber and stone and railroad iron, but most of
all of labor. Stanford finally imported the Chinese coolie for the job.
Civil War veterans and new immigrants did most of the work on the
eastern end. And along the eastern stretches the Indian tribes of the
plains watched the work with jealous eyes. The Pawnee, the Sioux, the
Arapaho, and the Cheyenne saw in the new road the end of a tribal life
based upon wild game.
Severe Indian outbreaks accompanied the construction of the railroad, as
the tribes made their last stand in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Indian
Territory. Before the line was done, the tribes of the plains were under
control in two great concentration camps, in South Dakota and Indian
Territory, and the worst of the Indian fighting in the West was over.
In the spring of 1869 the railroad was finished and a spectacular
celebration was held near Ogden, in Utah Territory. The finishing stroke
was everywhere regarded as national, since not only had Congress given
aid, but the union of the oceans was an object of national ambition.
With the completion, the problem shifted from the exciting risks of
construction and finance to the prosaic duties of paying the bills, and
with the shift came a natural falling-off in enthusiasm.
The Union Pacific was the longest railroad of the sixties, and aroused
the greatest interest. In an economic way it is merely typical of the
speculative expansion of the North that began early in the Civil War and
continued increasingly thereafter. The United States was engaged in a
period of hopeful growth such as has followed every panic. After a few
years of depression, stagnation, and enforced economy, business had
revived about 1861. Confidence had increased, loans had been made more
freely, and capital had taken up again its search for profitable
investment. In the newer regions, where permanent improvements were
least numerous, the field for exploitation had been great. The climax of
exploitation was reached throughout the West.
As had been true at all the stages of the westward movement, the West
was heavily in debt, and upon a forced balance would generally have
shown an excess of liabilities over assets. Borrowed money paid much of
the cost of emigration. During the first year the pioneer often raised
no crops and lived upon his savings or his borrowings. He and his local
merchant and his bank and his new railroad had borrowed all they could,
while the creditor, living necessarily in the older communities where
saving had created a surplus for investment, lived in the East, or even
in Europe. The necessary conditions of settlement and development had
prepared the way for a new sectional alignment of business interests,
those of the Far West and the Northwest taking their tone from the
interests of a debtor class, while those of the East represented those
of the creditor. The possible cleavage was revealed as real when the
United States Treasury Department, in its work toward financial
reconstruction, approached the subject of the greenbacks.
The legal-tender greenbacks, which were in circulation to the extent of
$433,000,000 in 1865, constituted not only a part of the debt of the
war, but the foundation of the currency in circulation. Throughout most
of the war they were supplemented by the notes of state banks, local
token-money, and fractional currency, or "shinplasters," of the United
States. Coin ceased to circulate in 1862 and was used only by those
whose contracts obliged them to pay in gold or silver. In 1863 Secretary
Chase inaugurated a system of national banks, to circulate a uniform
currency, secured by United States bonds, but these did not become a
factor in business until the state bank notes had been taxed out of
existence in 1865. After this time national banks were formed in large
numbers, replacing the uncertain notes of the state banks with their own
notes, which were quite as good as greenbacks. But all paper money was
below par in 1865, and gold remained out of circulation, at a premium,
until the end of 1878.
The depreciation of the greenbacks reflected a popular doubt as to the
outcome of the Civil War. They entailed hardship upon all who received
them as dollars, since their purchasing value was below the standard of
one hundred cents in gold. When the Government, desperate in war time,
forced its creditors to accept them at par, it did an injustice which
it regarded as real, though necessary. The speedy restoration of the
greenbacks to par received the immediate attention of the Treasury upon
the return of peace.
Hugh McCulloch, of Indiana, who became Secretary of the Treasury in
1865, was a banker of long experience and success. He proposed, if
allowed, to reduce the whole war debt, including the greenbacks, to
long-term bonds bearing a low rate of interest, and to create a sinking
fund which should redeem them as they fell due. This involved the
withdrawal from circulation of the greenbacks, and the destruction of
that amount of the money used in business. Congress authorized it,
however, and McCulloch canceled greenbacks from month to month until he
had reduced the total to $356,000,000 in February, 1868.
The withdrawal of the legal tenders had not been long under way before
protests began to come in upon the Treasury and Congress from the West.
Bad as the depreciated currency was, it was the only currency available
for the active business of the country. If the greenbacks should go
there would be nothing to take their place until coin should finally
emerge from hiding. The reduction of the volume of money in a time of
increasing business would enforce upon each dollar an enlarged activity
and a greater market value. The price of money rising, the price of all
commodities measured in money would necessarily fall, and in a period of
falling prices the West thought it saw financial catastrophe. There was
enough real truth in the contention that resumption meant a fall in
prices for the Treasury to be compelled to make the difficult choice
between this evil and the other evil of a depreciated currency forced
upon the people.
The creditor East regarded the possible increase in the purchasing value
of the dollar with entire complacency. Its selfish interests harmonized
with sound theories of finance. But in the debtor West the process had
so different an aspect that the financial obligations of the United
States were obscured by the local interest.
The great "boom" of the West began after the depreciation had commenced.
Most of the Western debts, whether on the farm of the settler, the stock
of the merchant, or the bonds of the industrial corporation, had been
created in legal-tender dollars of the value of the depreciated
greenbacks. Any appreciation which might come to the greenbacks must
increase the content-value of the debt. If "dollars," borrowed when they
were worth sixty cents in gold, were to be repaid in "dollars" worth
eighty or more cents in gold, the debtor was repaying one third more
than he had received, and no appeal to the importance of public credit
could make him forget his loss. He resented not only the decrease in the
actual amount of money, but the appreciated value of the remainder.
McCulloch, trained in finance, was ready to sacrifice the debtor for the
sake of national solvency,--and, indeed, one or the other had to yield.
But Congress felt the pressure, which was strong from all the West, and
most strong from the Northwest, between Pittsburg and Chicago, whose
industry had been reorganized during the years of war. In February,
1868, the retirement of more greenbacks was forbidden by law, the amount
then in circulation being $356,000,000. The inflation which war had
brought about was legalized in time of peace, and the Supreme Court
ultimately ruled[1] that the issue of legal tenders, in either war or
peace, is at the free discretion of Congress.
Like every other West, the West of 1868 was in debt; like every other
debtor community, it was liable to yield to theories of inflation, and
was prone to look to politics for redress of grievances. The farmers of
Massachusetts and Connecticut had followed Shays for this purpose in
1786; Ohio and Kentucky had attacked the second Bank of the United
States when it forced their banks to pay their debts; and now the
Northwest listened to politicians who told them that more greenbacks
would cure their ills.
The advocates of the Greenback movement urged that the legal tenders be
retained as the foundation of the currency, and that all bonds and
interest payable in "lawful money" be paid in paper. By thus increasing
the volume of greenbacks in circulation they hoped to avoid a fall in
prices or an increased pressure on the debtor. Wherever men were heavily
in debt, they accepted this doctrine. George H. Pendleton, of Ohio,
became its most prominent spokesman, though it received the support of
men as far apart as Thaddeus Stevens and B.F. Butler, and on it as an
issue Pendleton sought to obtain for himself the Democratic nomination
for the presidency in 1868.
[Footnote 1: In the cases of Knox _vs._ Lee and Juilliard _vs._
Greenman.]
The aspirations of Pendleton, when his friends brought his "Ohio Idea"
to the national convention, in Tammany Hall, New York, on July 4, were
opposed by the similar desires of Chief Justice Chase, who still wanted
the Presidency, and Horatio Seymour, the Democratic war Governor of New
York. In its leader, commenting on the convention, _Harper's Weekly_
asserted that "The Democratic Convention of 1864 declared the war a
failure. The loyal people scorned the words and fought on to an
unconditional victory. The Democratic Convention of 1868 declares that
the war debt shall be repudiated. And their words will be equally
spurned by the same honorable people." Pendleton failed to secure the
nomination, which went to Seymour, on the twenty-second ballot, with
Francis P. Blair, Jr., for the Vice-Presidency, but the "Ohio idea" was
embodied in the platform of the party, although Seymour distinctly
disavowed it.
Pledged to what the East commonly regarded as repudiation, the
Democratic party was severely handicapped at the beginning of the
campaign. Not only could their opponents reproach Seymour as a
Copperhead, but they could profess to be frightened by Wade Hampton and
the "hundred other rebel officers who sat in the Convention." Already
including "treason," and disloyalty, the indictment was amended to
include dishonor, by the Republicans, who scarcely needed the strong
popularity of Grant to carry them into office.
The Republican party was compelled to disguise itself as "Union" in
1864, and it paid for the disguise during the next four years. Upon the
death of Lincoln, the Tennessee Democrat, Andrew Johnson, took the oath
of office. The bond which kept Democrats and Republicans together as
Unionists had dissolved with the surrender of Lee, so that Johnson was
enabled to follow his natural bent as a strict constructionist. His
policies had carried him far away from the radical Republicans before
Congress convened for its session of 1865-66, and led to a positive
breach with that body in 1866.
The quarrel between Johnson and the Republican leaders was occasioned by
his views upon the rights of the Southern States, conquered in war and
held within the military grasp of the United States. It was his belief,
as it had been Lincoln's, that these States were still States and were
in the Union, even though in a temporarily deranged condition. As
President, entrusted with force to be used in executing the laws, he
regarded himself as sole judge of the time when force should no longer
be needed. And in this spirit he offered pardon to many leaders of the
Confederacy in May, 1865. He followed amnesty with provisional
governments, and proclaimed rules according to which the conquered
States should revise their constitutions and reëstablish orderly and
loyal governments. He had reorganized the last of the eleven States
before Congress could interfere with him.
The difference between Johnson and his Republican associates lay in the
character of the restored electorates in the South. The whole white
population had, in most States, been implicated in secession. There was
no Union faction in the South that remained loyal throughout the war.
Pardoned and restored to a full share in the Government, these Southern
leaders would come back into Congress as Democrats, and with increased
strength. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and raised the
representation of the negroes in the South from the old three-fifths
ratio to par. Every State would come back with more Representatives than
it had had before the war, and with the aid of Northern Democrats it was
not unlikely that a control of Congress might be obtained.
To Northern Republicans it was unreasonable that the conquered South
should be rewarded instead of punished, and that any theory of
reconstruction should risk bringing into power the party that Union men,
headed by Lincoln, had defeated in 1864. Politicians, interested in the
spoils of office, were enraged at the thought of losing them.
Disinterested Northerners, who had sacrificed much to save the Union,
believed it unsafe at once to hand it over to a combination of peace
Democrats and former "rebels." Yet this was Johnson's plan, and
Congress, with radical Republicans in control, set about to prevent it.
Although Johnson, as President, controlled the patronage, Congress
possessed the power, if not the moral right, to limit him in its use. No
appointment could be made without the consent of the Senate, which was
Republican. In 1867 Congress enacted that no removal should be made
without the same consent, in a Tenure-of-Office Bill that brought the
dispute to a climax. More important than this power of concurrence was
the exclusive right of each house to judge of "the elections, returns,
and qualifications" of its own members. So long as the Southern Senators
and Representatives were out of Congress no power could get them in
without the consent of either house. Violent advisers of the President
argued that a Congress excluding the members of eleven States by
prearrangement was a "rump," and without authority, but they failed to
influence either the conduct of the majority or the acts of Johnson.
In the Thirty-ninth Congress, which sat in 1865 and 1866, it was the
problem of the leaders, Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus
Stevens in the House, to hold the party together and to block the
designs of the President. In the House, the heavy Republican majority
made this easy. In the Senate the majority was slighter, and could be
kept at two thirds only by unseating a Democratic Senator from New
Jersey, after which event both houses were able to defy Johnson and to
pass measures over his veto. The vetoes began when Johnson refused his
consent to the Freedmen's Bureau and the Civil Rights Bills. These and
all other important acts of reconstruction were forced upon the
President by the two-thirds vote.
The split, so far as founded upon honest divergence in legal theory, was
embarrassing. It was made disgraceful by the violence of the radical
Republicans and the intemperate retorts of Johnson. In 1866 Congress
sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the States for ratification. In 1867 it
passed its bills for actual reconstruction under the control of the army
of the United States, and defied Johnson to interfere by refusing to
allow him to remove officials from office.
Johnson carried himself through the partisan struggle with ability and
success. His language was often extreme, but he enforced the acts which
Congress passed as vigorously as if they had been his own. So far as any
theory of the Constitution met the facts of reconstruction, his has the
advantage, but in a situation not foreseen by the Constitution force
outranked logic, and the radical Republicans with two-thirds in each
house possessed the force. There was no lapse in the President's
diligence and no flaw in his official character which his enemies could
use. They began to talk of impeachment in 1866, but could find no basis
for it.
The Tenure-of-Office Act furnished the pretext for impeachment. Advised
by his Attorney-General that it was unconstitutional, Johnson dismissed
the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, for whose protection the law had
been passed. In removing Stanton he broke with Grant, commanding the
army, over a question of veracity, and gave to Congress its chance. In
February, 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach him.
The trial of Andrew Johnson before the Senate dragged through April and
May. The articles of impeachment were long and detailed in their
description of the unquestioned bad manners of the President, but the
only specific violation of law cited was in the case of Stanton, and
here it could be urged both that the law was unconstitutional and that
it was so loosely drawn that it did not really cover this case. In
brief, it was the policy of Johnson that was on trial, and it was
finally impossible to persuade two-thirds of the Senators that this
constituted a high crime or a misdemeanor. The President was acquitted
in the middle of May, while the Republican party turned to the more
hopeful work of electing his successor.
In the fight over Johnson party lines had been strengthened and defined
so that no Unionist, not in sympathy with congressional reconstruction,
could hope for the nomination. No other issue equaled this in strength.
The greenback issue was condemned in a plank that denounced "all forms
of repudiation as a national crime," but ran second to the basis of
reconstruction. No other candidate than Ulysses S. Grant was considered
at the Chicago Convention.
Few men have emerged from deserved obscurity to deserved prominence as
rapidly as General Grant. In 1861 he was a retired army officer, and a
failure. In 1863, as the victor at Fort Donelson and at Vicksburg, he
loomed up in national proportions. In the hammering of 1864 and 1865 it
was his persistence and moral courage that won the day. In 1868, as
commander of the army, and fortunate in his quarrel with Johnson, he was
the coveted candidate of both parties, for he had no politics. Held by
his associations to the Republican leaders, he was nominated at Chicago
on the first ballot, with Schuyler Colfax, of Indiana, as his
Vice-President.
The nomination of Grant occurred as the impeachment trial was drawing to
a close. Before Congress adjourned it readmitted several of the Southern
States that had been restored under the control of Republican
majorities. Tennessee was already back; the new States were North
Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and
Arkansas. Only three States remained under provisional control when
Grant was elected in November and seated in the following March. As he
took the oath of office there were few, North, South, or West, who did
not rejoice in his election; he had defeated the Greenback pretension,
which endeared him to the East; the West remembered that he had been
born and bred in the Mississippi Valley; and to the South he presented
the clean hands of the regular army officer, and the welcome promise of
his letter of acceptance, "Let us have peace."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For general accounts of the Far West in this period consult K. Coman,
Economic _Beginnings of the Far West_ (2 vols., 1912), and F.L. Paxson,
_The Last American Frontier_ (1910). These should be supplemented by
E.L. Bogart, _Economic History of the United States_ (1907), K. Coman,
_Industrial History of the United States_ (2d ed., 1910), W.A. Scott,
_The Repudiation of State Debts_ (1893), and W.C. Mitchell, _History of
the Greenbacks_. The more valuable memoirs include H. McCulloch, _Men
and Measures of Half a Century_ (1888), and J.G. Blaine, _Twenty Years
of Congress_ (2 vols., 1884). A brilliant analysis of the financial
interests of the debtor sections is M.S. Wildman, _Money Inflation in
the United States_ (1905). Rhodes continues to furnish a comprehensive
narrative, and is paralleled by the shorter W.A. Dunning,
_Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877_ (in _The American
Nation_, vol. 22, 1907). A detailed account of impeachment politics is
in D.M. DeWitt, _Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson_ (1903), and in
J.A. Woodburn, _The Life of Thaddeus Stevens_ (1913). J.P. Davis, _The
Union Pacific Railway_ (1894), is the standard account of the early
movement for a continental railroad. S.L. Clemens (Mark Twain) presents
a vivid picture of frontier life in _Roughing It_ (1872), while A.B.
Paine, _Mark Twain_ (3 vols., 1912), contains much material of general
historical interest for this period.
CHAPTER III
THE RESTORATION OF HOME RULE IN THE SOUTH
The eight Southern States whose votes were cast in 1868 were far
different from the States of the same names in 1860, and were, like the
three still outside the Union, largely under the control of radical
Republicans. Restoration, after a fashion, they had received, but it had
been accompanied by a revolution in society, in politics, and in
economic life. "Reconstruction" is an inappropriate name for what took
place.
Many efforts have been made to show the price paid by the South for its
attempt at independence, but these have always failed to be exact. No
scheme of accounting can uncover all the costs. It is a sufficient
suggestion as to the total that a million men, at the prime of life,
were diverted from ordinary production for about three years. Not only
did the South lose the products of their labor, but it lost many of
them, while its houses, barns, and other permanent improvements wore
out, were burned, or went to pieces from lack of care. Its slave
property was destroyed. Poverty was universal within the region of the
Confederacy when Johnson issued his amnesty proclamation and the troops
came home.
The most immediate problems before the Southern planter in the spring of
1865 were his dilapidated buildings, his spring crops, and his labor
supply. Without money or credit, he needed all the stiffness of a proud
caste to hold off bankruptcy. The daughter of a prominent Mississippi
planter told later how her father, at seventy years, did the family
washing to keep his daughters from the tub. A society whose men and
women took this view of housework (for the daughters let their father
have his way) had much to learn before it could reëstablish itself. Yet
this same stubbornness carried the South through the twenty trying years
after the war.
The system of slave labor was gone, but the negroes were still the chief
reliance for labor. It appears from the scanty records that are
available that the planters expected to reopen the plantations using the
freedmen as hired laborers. In 1865 and 1866 they tried this, only to
find that the negro had got beyond control and would not work.
Supervision had become hateful to him. A vagrant life appealed to his
desire for change. At best, he was unintelligent and indolent. In a few
years it became clear that the old type of plantation had vanished, and
that the substitute was far from satisfactory.
Failing at hiring the negro for wages, the planter tried to rent to him
a part of the estate. But since the tenant was penniless the landlord
had to find much or all of the tools and stock, and too often had to see
the crops deserted while the negro went riding around the county on his
mule, full of his new independence. The census records show the decline
of the plantation as the labor system changed. In 1860 the average
American farm contained 199 acres, while those of the eleven seceding
States ranged in average from 245 in Arkansas, to 430 in Georgia, and
591 in Texas. All were far above the national average, for the economics
of the plantation system impelled the owner ever to increase his
holdings. In 1870, and again in 1880, the reports show a rapid decline.
The average for the whole country went down from 199 to 134 acres in the
twenty years, as intensive agriculture advanced, but the South declined
more rapidly than the whole, and in 1880, in all but two States, the
average farm was less than half its size before the Civil War.
The vagrant, shiftless freedman was a social problem as well as
economic. To fix his new status was the effort of the legislatures that
convened in 1865, under the control of those who had qualified as loyal
in Johnson's scheme. In several States laws were passed relating to
contracts, apprenticeship, and vagrancy, under which the negro was to be
held to regular work and the employer was given the right to punish him.
The laws represented the opinion of the white citizens that special
provisions were needed to control and regulate the negro population now
that the personal bond of the owner for the good behavior of his slaves
was canceled. To the North, still excited and nervous in 1865, the laws
appeared to embody an overt attempt to restore the essentials of
slavery. They served to embitter Congress toward Johnson's plans, and to
convince Republicans that the professed loyalty of former Confederates
was hypocritical,--that these must not be permitted to return at once to
federal office or to Congress.
It was not until the summer of 1867 that Congress substituted
governments of its own design for those which Johnson had erected by
proclamation. These, meanwhile, had proceeded to revise their
constitutions and to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment, which was
proclaimed as part of the Constitution in December, 1865. The direct
hand of Congress was shown in the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau
in the spring of 1866, and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in
the following summer.
The Freedmen's Bureau had its excuse in the poverty and ignorance of the
negroes who crowded about the invading armies. Toward the end of the war
it was authorized to administer abandoned property, and to aid the
freedmen in farming upon the same. It did wide charitable and
educational work in easing the abrupt change from slavery to freedom,
and would have been dissolved a year after the return of peace had not
Congress maintained it to offset the tendencies of Johnson's
administration. Hereafter the agents of the Bureau were thrown into
politics until 1872.
The permanent government of the conquered South by the army was
repugnant to even radical Northerners, yet the white inhabitants were
Democratic almost to the last man, and if restored to civil rights would
control their States. The only means of developing a Southern Republican
party that might keep the South "loyal" was the enfranchisement of the
freedman, for which purpose the Fourteenth Amendment was submitted. The
agents of the Bureau were expected not only to feed and clothe the
negroes, but to impress upon them the fact that they owed their freedom
to the Republicans. Some spread the belief that the Democrats desired to
restore slavery. Many built up personal machines. The responsibility
upon these white directors of the negro vote was great, and was too
often betrayed. Generally not natives, and with no stake in the Southern
community, they lined their own pockets and earned the unkindly name of
"carpet-baggers." The Territories had always known something of this
type of ruler, but the States, hitherto, had known bad government only
when they made it themselves.
The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 ordered the President to divide the
South into five military districts, whose commanders should supersede
all the state officers whom Johnson had restored. With troops behind
them, these commanders were, first, to enroll on the voting list all
males over twenty-one. The negroes, before the adoption of the
Fourteenth Amendment, were thus given by Congress the right to vote in
their respective States, and were included in the lists. Excluded from
the lists were the leaders of every Southern community, those whites who
had held important office in the Confederacy; and none was to be
enrolled, white or black, until he had taken an ironclad and offensive
oath of allegiance.
Based upon the list of voters thus made up, state conventions were to be
summoned to revise the constitutions. In every case they must modify the
laws to admit the status of the freedmen, must ratify the Fourteenth
Amendment with its guaranty of civil rights, and must extend the right
of suffrage to the blacks. When all these things had been done, with
army officers constantly in supervision, the resulting constitutions
were to be submitted to Congress for final approval or rejection.
No constitutional theory ever met all the problems of reconstruction.
The war had been fought on the basis that no State can get out of the
Union. If this was true, then all the States were still States, and it
was a reasonable presidential function to restore order and withdraw the
troops. The unreasonable result of this theory was the immediate
restoration of an enlarged influence to those very men who had tried to
break the Union, at a moment when the greenback movement threatened the
foundations of public faith. Yet Congress, by pretending to readmit or
restore States, denied that they were still States, and by implication
conceded the principle for which the Confederacy had contended: that the
members of the Union could get outside it. The power of Congress to seat
or unseat members, however, placed it beyond all control. Every effort
to get the courts to interfere broke down, when the suits were directed
against the President (Mississippi _vs._ Andrew Johnson), or the
Secretary of War (Georgia _vs._ Stanton). A personal suit that promised
some relief (_Ex parte_ McCardle) was evaded by a sudden amendment of
the law relating to appeals. The situation was unpremeditated, and the
Constitution made no provision for its facts. In the end, reconstruction
must be judged by its results rather than by its legality. If it brought
peace, restored prosperity, safeguarded the Union, and created no new
grievances of its own, it was good, whatever the Constitution.
Johnson enforced the Reconstruction Acts with care, and the Southern
conventions, meeting in the autumn of 1867, sat into the following
winter. In five of the States the roll of electors showed a majority of
negroes, and in none were conservatives able to control the election of
delegates. The old leaders were still disfranchised, and many of them
could not believe that the North would permit the radicals to subject
them to the control of illiterate negroes. The resulting conventions
contained many negroes and were dominated by white Republicans,
carpet-baggers, or scalawags as the case might be. An active part in
directing them was taken by the officers of the Freedmen's Bureau, while
the freedmen were consolidated by the secret ritual of the Union League.
Only Tennessee escaped the ordeal, she having ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment so promptly that Congress could not evade admitting her in
1866.
An analysis of the conventions of 1867 reveals the extent of the
political revolution which Congress intended to thrust upon the South,
whose industrial revolution was now well advanced. Planters had begun
already to break up their estates and entrust small holdings to cash
renters, or share tenants, known as "croppers." Their financial burdens
were heavy, but with intelligent government and reasonable commercial
credits from the North, the problems of labor and capital might be met.
But the men who must control the economic future of the South were
excluded from the Government as traitors. Their places were filled by
Northern adventurers and by negroes. The Mississippi convention included
seventeen negroes, and was called the "black and tan." Inexperience and
incompetence were in control, leading to extravagance and dishonesty,
but the conventions were generally superior to the legislatures which
followed them.
Framing new constitutions, most of the States had met the demands of
Congress by the summer of 1868, with the respectable portion of the
South looking on in desperate silence. The war had left no grievances
equal to those now being suffered. Seven of the new constitutions were
adopted in time for the radicals to give to their States votes in the
election of 1868. Alabama, making the eighth, was allowed to vote under
a constitution which Congress had forced upon her after it had failed of
ratification by the people. Only Georgia and Louisiana, of these eight,
did not give their votes to Grant. Only Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas
remained without the pale when Grant was inaugurated in 1869.
The completion of reconstruction in its formal sense was reached during
Grant's first Congress. Mississippi completed her process in February,
1870. She had in 1868 voted down the reconstruction constitution, taking
courage in the leadership of a conservative governor, Humphreys. When he
was removed, and replaced by a Northern governor, the conservatives lost
heart and ratified the constitution that they had rejected. Their delay
cost the State one more humiliation, since in the interval the
Fifteenth Amendment had been submitted by Congress and made a condition
of readmission for the recalcitrant States. A Republican legislature,
the first fruit of reconstruction, accepted this and sent to Washington
as the new Mississippi Senators the Northern military governor, Ames,
and a negro preacher named Revels.
Virginia was readmitted in January, 1870. Her original loyal government
under Pierpont, which Lincoln had respected, had been supplanted by a
military régime, having lost its last chance for recognition when it
rejected the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867. Under congressional direction
a negro-radical convention made a new constitution which was forced upon
the people in January, 1870. Texas, too, was in her final stage of
restoration in 1870, and like Virginia and Mississippi was readmitted
upon conditions that had become more onerous since the passage of the
Reconstruction Acts in 1867.
Eleven States, all the old Confederacy, had been restored by the spring
of 1870; but one, Georgia, was ejected after restoration, and thus
became the last item in congressional reconstruction. In 1868 Georgia
had ratified her new constitution and moved her capital from its
ante-bellum location at Milledgeville to the new town growing upon the
ashes of Atlanta. She had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, but her
first legislature had so poorly read the meaning of Congress that it
expelled every negro whom the radicals had elected to membership.
Congress had thereupon declined to seat the Georgia delegation at
Washington, and had renewed the probationary period until the
legislature, humbled and browbeaten, had undone the expulsion, whereupon
Georgia received her final recognition.
The arbitrary acts of Congress, passed by the radicals over the
unvarying vetoes of Johnson, find little sanction in the Constitution,
but it is to be expected that the laws should suffer in a time of war.
Congress held off the day of restoration until it saw in the South what
its majority believed to be loyal governments. Its majority could not
believe that any party but its own was loyal, and was thus led to a
policy much more debatable than that of actual reconstruction. Step by
step it moved. The abolition of slavery, in the Thirteenth Amendment
(effective December 18, 1865), was expected by all and accepted without
a fight. The next amendment, inspired by a fear that the freedmen would
be oppressed and by a hope that they might be converted into a political
ally of the Republicans, was submitted to the States before the
Reconstruction Acts were passed, and was proclaimed as part of the
Constitution July 28, 1868. Only compulsion upon the Southern States
procured its ratification. It left negro suffrage optional with the
States, but threatened them with a reduction in representation in
Congress if they refrained from granting it. In the Southern States
Congress had already planted a negro electorate by law. The Fifteenth
Amendment forbade the denial of the right to vote on grounds of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude, and was not submitted to the
States until after the inauguration of General Grant. A fear that the
South would disfranchise the freedmen, pay the price, and revert to
Democratic control seems to have been the prime motive in its adoption.
When it was proclaimed, March 30, 1870, the radical Republicans had done
everything in their power to save themselves, and had inflicted on the
conquered States, in malice, ignorance, or mistaken philanthropy, a
condition that in the North, with its trifling number of negroes, was
tolerated with reluctance.
The South was in name completely restored in 1870, but neither
restoration nor reconstruction was in fact far advanced. In the latter
process it was yet clearing away the wreckage of the institution of
slavery, breaking up the plantations, devising new systems of tenure and
wage, rebuilding the material equipment that the war had left desolate.
The former process was only commenced. It was unthinkable that an
American community should permit itself to remain subject to the
absolute control of its least respected members, yet this was the aim of
white disfranchisement and negro suffrage. Law or no law, the
restoration of the South was not complete until its government was back
in the control of its responsible white population.
Almost without exception, until 1870, the Southern State Governments
were what Congress had chosen to make them. Their Senators and
Representatives in Congress were Republican, commonly of the carpet-bag
variety. Their governors, administrative officers, and legislatures were
Republican, too. Rarely were they persons of property or standing in
their communities, and often, as their records show, they were both
black and illiterate. Had all possessed good intentions they could
hardly have hoped to meet the local needs, which called for a wise
revision of law in order that the community might recover and live. That
their work should be accompanied by error and waste was inevitable.
From the contemporary accounts of travelers in the South, from public
documents, from the growing body of Southern biography and reminiscence,
it is easy to gather a mass of detail upon the extravagance of the
Reconstruction Governments. Printing bills and salary lists rose without
a corresponding increase in service done. When expenditures exceeded the
revenues, loans were created carelessly and recklessly. For negroes,
only a few months out of the cotton-field, there was an irresistible
attraction in the plush carpets, the mahogany desks, and the imported
cuspidors that the taxpayers might be forced to provide for the comfort
of their servants. A free and continuous lunch, with ample food and
drink, was set up in one of the capitols. Gratuitous waste was the least
of the burdens inflicted upon the South.
It is unreasonable to lay all the corruption of the Reconstruction
Governments to the account of the congressional policy. The period of
the Civil War was one of abuse of power by local officials everywhere.
It took a Tweed in New York to drive a Northern public to revolt, and a
Nast to focus public attention upon the crime. In other States, where
rogues were less brutal in their methods, or prosecutors less acute, the
evil ran, not unnoticed but unchecked. In the South the same phenomena
were resented with greater vigor than in the North because the crimes
were more openly and clumsily committed, and because they were the work
of "outsiders."
Deliberate theft of public money was so common as to occasion no
surprise. In no State were books so kept that the modern student can be
sure he knows where all the money went. Graft in contracts, fraud in the
administration of schools and negro-relief schemes, sale of charters and
votes, illegal issues of bonds, improvident loans to railroads, combined
to enrich the office-holder and to increase the volume of public debts.
A long series of repudiations of these debts injured Southern credit for
many years. South Carolina occasioned the most vivid description of the
orgy in a book entitled _The Prostrate State_, by a Maine abolitionist
and Republican, named Pike; but several other States would have
furnished similar materials to a similar historian.
So far as law was concerned, the South was helpless in those regions in
which the negroes approached a majority. The military garrisons which
Congress kept on duty saw to it that the freedmen were protected, yet
were unable in the long run to control the white population. It is a
vexed question whether negro violence or white was the first to appear,
but by 1867 events had begun to point the way to the elimination of
negro control by force or fraud. By law it could not be destroyed unless
the whites struggled and argued for negro votes, treating the negroes as
citizens and equals, which was generally as impossible as an acceptance
of their control.
The Ku-Klux Klan was a secret movement, with slight organization, that
appeared earliest in Tennessee, but spread to nearly every crossroads in
the South. It began in the hazing of negroes and carpet-baggers who were
insolent or offensive to their neighbors. Its members rode by night, in
mask, with improvised pomp and ritual, and played as much upon the
imagination of their victims as upon their bodies. Frequently it
revenged private grievances and went to extremes of violence or murder.
From hazing it was an easy step to intimidation at election time, the
Ku-Klux Klan proving to be an efficient means of reducing the negro
vote. It was so efficient, indeed, that Grant asked and Congress voted,
in 1871, special powers for the policing of the South. In this summer a
committee of Congress visited Southern centers and accumulated a great
mass of testimony from which a picture of both the Ku-Klux Klan outrages
and the workings of reconstruction may easily be drawn. The reign of
terror subsided by 1872, but it had done much to dissuade the negro from
using his new right, and had started the movement for home rule in the
South.
That the normal politics of the South was Democratic is shown by the
votes of the border States, where a population of freedmen had to be
assimilated and Congress could not interfere. Delaware, Maryland, and
Kentucky voted against Grant in 1868, although all the restored
Confederate States but two voted for him. In Georgia the Democrats
swallowed their pride, electioneered among the negroes, and elected a
conservative State Government in 1870. Tennessee escaped negro
domination from the start. Virginia, late to be readmitted, had
consolidated her white population as she watched the troubles in South
Carolina and Mississippi, and never elected a radical administration. In
North Carolina, after a fight that approached a civil war, a Democratic
State Government was chosen in 1870. The rest of the Confederate States
followed as opportunity offered; after 1872 the process was rapid, and
after 1876 there was no Republican administration in the old South. The
Republican party, itself, almost disappeared from the South at this
time. A bare organization, largely manned by negroes, endured to enjoy
the offices which a Republican National Administration could bestow, and
to contribute pliant delegations to the national conventions of the
party. But the South had become solid in the sense that its votes were
recorded almost automatically for the Democratic ticket.
[Illustration: THE SOLID SOUTH 1880-1912
Within the shaded area every electoral vote was cast for the Democratic
presidential candidate between 1880 and 1892; since 1892 the heavily
shaded area has continued solidly Democratic, while the border States
have occasionally cast Republican votes.]
Force and fraud played a large part in the restoration of white control,
but it could not have been effective without some connivance from the
North. Before 1872 the keenness of Northern radicalism was blunted.
Thoughtful Republicans began to examine their work and criticize it. "We
can never reconstruct the South," wrote Lowell, "except through its own
leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for
their interest and compatible with their honor to be so." A social order
which needed the constant support of troops lost the confidence of
political independents. These, as the presidential campaign of 1872 drew
near, openly expressed their hostility to reconstruction as carried out
by Grant, and threatened to prevent his reëlection.
The first term of Grant ended unsatisfactorily. His appointments to
office were marked by favoritism and incapacity. He appointed the only
really inferior man who has ever represented the United States in
London,--one who thought it not incompatible with his high office to
publish a treatise on draw-poker, and to appear as bellwether in a
mining prospectus. Grant's personal intimates included shifty
financiers. Corruption and misgovernment at the South were held against
him, though Congress was properly to blame for them. Only in his stand
for honest finance, his effort to improve the Indian service, and his
conclusion of the disputes with Great Britain, could his supporters take
great pride.
The settlement with England was his greatest achievement. Since the
summer of 1862, when the Alabama had evaded the British officials and
had gone to sea, the American Minister in London had continued to press
for damages. The Alabama claims were based on the assertion that the law
of neutrals required Great Britain to prevent any hostile vessel from
starting, in her waters, upon a cruise against the United States. In the
face of official rebuff and popular sneers Charles Francis Adams
formulated the claims. His successor, Reverdy Johnson, reached a sort of
settlement which the Senate declined to ratify, and which Sumner
denounced. It was Sumner's contention that the Civil War was prolonged
by British aid and that a demand for national damages (perhaps
$2,000,000,000, or Canada, by way of substitute) ought to be advanced.
So tense did the international situation become in 1869 and 1870 that
friends of peace were frightened. Boundaries, fisheries, and general
claims aggravated the situation, which was given into the hands of a
Joint High Commission, hastily summoned to meet in Washington in 1870.
The resulting Treaty of Washington, and the successful arbitrations
which followed it, eliminated Sumner's extreme contention but vindicated
the main American claims and founded Anglo-American relations on a more
secure basis than they had ever known. It was Grant's great triumph, but
it was a political danger as well, for the negotiator in charge, Charles
Francis Adams, loomed up as the possible presidential candidate of the
Republican dissenters.
The Liberal Republicans included the enemies of Grant as well as
dissatisfied reformers of all sorts. Carl Schurz, the great
German-American independent, was their leader. Horace Greeley, whose
_Tribune_ had done much to make the Republican party possible, gave them
his support. Charles Francis Adams was not indifferent to them. Salmon
P. Chase wanted their nomination. Young newspaper men, like Whitelaw
Reid and Henry Watterson, tried to control them. And the new group of
civil service reformers, disappointed in Grant, hoped that the new party
would take a step toward better government. At Cincinnati, in May, 1872,
they met in mass convention, and nominated Horace Greeley and Gratz
Brown. Their platform denounced Republican reconstruction, urged the
return to self-government in the South, and advocated civil service
reform, specie payments, and maintenance of public credit. The schism
became more threatening when the Democrats saw a chance through fusion,
and nominated the same candidates at Baltimore in July.
No quainter political figure has appeared in America than Horace
Greeley, thus transferred from his editorial office to the stump. Long
used to the freedom of the press, he had advocated many things in his
lifetime, had examined and exploited unpopular social reforms, had
contradicted himself and retraced his tracks repeatedly. The biting
cartoons of Nast exploited all these; but no contrast was so absurd as
that which brought to the great denouncer of slavery and the South the
support of the party of the South.
The Republican Convention renominated Grant at Philadelphia without
opposition, refused Colfax a second term, and picked Henry Wilson for
Vice-President. Its platform, as in 1868, was retrospective, taking
pride in its great achievements and assuming full credit for the war,
reconstruction, and financial honor. It offered its ticket to all the
States for the first time since 1860, and elected Grant with ease. The
inharmonious Democrat-Liberal-Republican alliance increased the
Republican majority, but the returns from the South confirmed the
suspicion that home rule was in sight.
Restored completely to themselves, four years later, the Southern
Governments ceased to play much part in national affairs and continued
the economic rebuilding of their region. It was thirty years after the
war before the South, in population and business, had recovered from its
devastation, and even then it was far from subordinating its local
politics to national issues.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The writings of Rhodes and Dunning contain the best comprehensive
accounts of political reconstruction. For greater detail, the series of
doctoral dissertations on reconstruction in the several States, directed
by Professor Dunning and printed generally in the Columbia University
Studies, has great value. In W.L. Fleming, _Documentary History of
Reconstruction_ (2 vols., 1906), important selections from the sources
have been printed; the same writer's _Civil War and Reconstruction in
Alabama_ (1905) is the best account of the process in a single State.
J.A. Woodburn, _Thaddeus Stevens_, is useful. The old and new economic
systems of the South receive their keenest interpretation in the works
of U.B. Phillips and A.H. Stone. The _Annual Cyclopædia_ continues
valuable; the Report of the Ku-Klux Committee is invaluable (42d
Congress, 2d Session, Senate Report, No. 41, 13 vols.). _Harper's
Weekly_, which supported Grant in 1872, was the most prominent journal
of the period. C.F. Adams, Jr., has contributed to the diplomatic
history of these years his _Charles Francis Adams_ (1900, in American
Statesmen Series), and his "Treaty of Washington" (in _Lee and
Appomattox_, 1902). Elaborate details of the arbitrations are in J.B.
Moore, _History and Digest of the International Arbitrations to which
the United States has been a Party_ (6 vols., 1898). An interesting
series of recollections of reconstruction events, by Watterson, Reid,
Edmunds, and others, was printed in the _Century Magazine_ during 1913.
CHAPTER IV
THE PANIC OF 1873
"Are not all the great communities of the Western World growing more
corrupt as they grow in wealth?" asked a critical and thoughtful
journalist, Edwin L. Godkin, in 1868, as he considered the relations of
business and politics. He answered himself in the affirmative and found
comrades in his pessimism throughout that intellectual class in whose
achievements America has taken conscious pride. For at least ten years
they despaired of the return of honesty. James Russell Lowell, decorated
with the D.C.L. of Oxford, and honored everywhere in the world of
letters, was filled with doubt and dismay as late as 1876, at "the
degradation of the moral tone. Is it, or is it not," he asked, "a result
of democracy? Is ours a 'government of the people by the people for the
people,' or ... for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?"
It was not without reason that serious men were fearful in the years in
which military heroes dominated in politics, and in which commerce
struggled with its revolution. Had they foreseen the course of the next
generation, noted the progress of new ideas in government, the extension
of philanthropy and social relief, and the passion for education that
swept the country, they need not have despaired. Godkin, himself, could
not have made a living from his _Nation_, with its high ideals, its
criticism, and its despondency, in a land that was wholly rotten. The
young college presidents of the period could not have found a livelihood
in a country that was not fundamentally sound. At Harvard, Charles
William Eliot broke down the old technique of culture and enlarged its
range; at Michigan, James Burrill Angell proved it possible to maintain
sound, scholarly, and non-political education, in a public institution
supported by taxation; in a new university a private benefactor, Johns
Hopkins, gave to Daniel Coit Gilman a chance to show that creative
scholarship can flourish in a democracy. But the essential soundness of
the Republic was as much obscured in 1868 as its wealth had been in
1861, and for the present the objects on the surface, brought there by
violent convulsion, represented its less creditable part.
The years of Grant's Presidency were filled with unsightly episodes,
that were scandalous then and have been discouraging always. In his
first year of office, Jay Gould and James Fisk, tempted by the premium
on gold, tried to corner the market, and Grant's public association with
the speculators brought upon him fair reproach. Tweed, exposed and
jailed after a long fight, revealed the close alliance between crooked
politics and business in the cities, and became a national disgrace.
Less prominent than these but far from proper were Schenck and Frémont.
The latter was arrested in France, charged with promoting a railroad on
the strength of land grants that did not exist. He had been close to
the old Republican organization, and the figurehead of the radicals in
1864, so that his notoriety was great. Schenck, while Minister in
London, posed as director of a mining company, and borrowed from the
promoters of the scheme the money with which he bought his shares. When
the company proved insolvent, and perhaps fraudulent, Grant was forced
to recall him. Critics who saw dishonesty or low ethical standards in
these men were ready to see in the carnival of the Reconstruction
Governments wholesale proofs of decadence.
During the campaign of 1872 yet another item was added to the unpleasant
list. Letters were made public showing how Congressmen had taken pay, or
its equivalent, from men behind the Union Pacific Railroad. The scandal
of the Crédit Mobilier touched men in all walks of life, beginning with
Schuyler Colfax, Vice-President of the United States, including Blaine,
Allison, and Garfield, Wilson and Dawes, and other men who no longer
held office. Some of these denied the charges and proved their
innocence. But none entirely escaped the suspicion that their sense of
official propriety was low, and their list sampled the Republican party
at all its levels. One of the victims, Colfax, talked freely in 1870 of
gifts received--a carriage from a Congressman and horses from an express
company.
In 1872 the notorious Butler aimed at the governorship of Massachusetts.
He failed to get the Republican nomination, but the strength of his
candidacy showed the uncritical devotion of many voters to success. He
resumed his seat in Congress, unabashed, and put through an act
properly increasing the salaries of Washington officials, but applying
also to the men who voted for it and to the session just ending. Its
makers went home to explain their part in the "salary grab" to their
constituents, and many never returned to Congress.
Other improprieties of the first Administration of Grant came to light
in his second term. His Secretary of War, Belknap, confessed to the sale
of offices. In the Treasury Department were uncovered the whiskey frauds
which tainted even Grant's private secretary. And the Speaker of the
House, Blaine, was shown to have urged a railroad company to recognize
his official aid, promising not to be a "deadhead in the enterprise" in
its future service.
There is no better illustration of the commercial ethics of the sixties
than may be found in the letters of Jay Cooke, philanthropist and
financier. With a lively and sincere piety, and an unrestrained
generosity, he at once extended hospitalities to the political leaders
of the day, carried their private speculations on his books, and
performed official services to the Government. It was impossible to tell
where his public service ended and his private emolument began, but
there was nothing in his life of which he was ashamed. A friend of
General Grant, and liberal patron of his children, Cooke was actually
entertaining the President at his country home just outside of
Philadelphia when the failure of his banking house precipitated the
panic of 1873.
There had been financial uneasiness abroad and in the United States for
several months, but few had anticipated the collapse of credit that
followed the suspension of Jay Cooke and Company, September 18, 1873. If
this house failed, none could be regarded as safe. Jay Cooke had
established his reputation during the Civil War through his ability to
find a market for United States bonds. After the war he had carried his
activity and prestige into railways. In 1869 he had become the financial
agent of the Northern Pacific, and customers, encouraged by their good
bargains in the past, continued to invest through him as he directed.
His personal followers, numerous and confident, had been taught to
believe his credit as sound as that of the Government whose bonds he had
handled. When he collapsed, overloaded with Northern Pacific securities,
in which his confidence was enthusiastic, the panic was so acute that
the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors for ten days, to prevent
the ruinous prices that forced sales might have created. Thirty or more
banking houses were drawn down by the crash within forty-eight hours.
Others followed in all the business centers, while trade stood still
through the paralysis of its banking agents.
The distribution of the panic throughout the United States followed the
usual course. In the first crisis, banking houses broke down, unable to
meet the runs of their depositors or their original obligations. The
depositors next, unable to secure their own funds or to obtain their
usual loans, were driven to insolvency. After the failure of banks came
that of railroads, the wholesale houses, and the factories. As these
last defaulted, the loss was spread over their employees, their
contractors, and their creditors. Confidence was everywhere destroyed.
Investments were lost, or lessened, or put off indefinitely in their
payments. After a few days the acute crisis was over, but the resulting
depression brought stagnation to business. Industries marked time, at
best; expansions were out of the question; new enterprises were not
heard of. From 1873 until 1879 the United States was engaged in recovery
from the injury which the panic had done and from the weakness which it
had revealed.
The panic, followed by five years of economic prostration, was only
occasioned by the failure of Cooke. Its real causes lie throughout the
period of Civil War expansion. Never had the daily necessities of the
United States equaled its production, and the resulting surplus,
available for permanent improvements, was larger than ever in the
sixties because of the growing use of machinery. Funds for investment,
produced at home and increased through the strong foreign credit of the
United States, tempted and aided the speculative development of the
North and West. Yearly greater sums were sunk in municipal improvements
that brought in no return, or in railroads that were slow in paying, or
in errors that were a dead loss. The loss from the Civil War was an
added charge upon the surplus. Great fires in Boston and Chicago
consumed more of it. By 1870 the United States was using surplus at a
rate that threatened soon to exhaust it. When the limit should be
reached, new enterprises must necessarily cease, and all that were not
wisely planned must fall, dragging down others in their ruins. For
months before the failure of Jay Cooke, business had been dangerously
near this margin. His failure, caused by his inability to find a market
for Northern Pacific, merely precipitated the inevitable crash.
The faulty currency, outstanding since the war, and adding to the
business uncertainty, now aggravated the panic when it broke. The
greenbacks were slowly rising in value. They profited by the growing
credit of the United States, and received a special increase because of
the development of business. After 1865 business transactions grew in
number and volume more rapidly than the amount of available money, and
this, driven to greater activity in circulation, rose in value from the
increased demand. As the purchasing value of the dollar increased,
prices, measured by the greenbacks, necessarily fell, while the
equivalent of every debt that had to be paid in a specified number of
dollars as steadily rose. Indeed, so great was the increase of
production from the new farms, reached by the new railroads, and
supplying raw materials for the new factory processes, that prices fell,
even when stated in terms of gold. In a period of falling prices and
appreciating currency, the gap between the poor and the rich was
widened. The debtor carried a growing burden while the creditor
harvested an unearned increase. Persons who lived on fixed salary or
income profited by the fluctuations, but commercial transactions were
made more difficult for the debtor.
The organized Greenback movement had figured in politics during the
campaign of 1868, and made a special appeal to the debtor section
during the hard times after 1873. The Republican Congress had, in 1869,
sealed the professions of the party's platform by passing a resolution
"to strengthen the public credit," in which it declared "that the faith
of the United States is solemnly pledged to the payment in coin or its
equivalent," of the greenbacks, and that the United States would not
take advantage of its creditors by paying off its "lawful-money" bonds
in depreciated paper. All debts created before the war or during its
early years had lost through depreciation, just as the later debts had
gained through the reverse.
Despite this pledge, advocates of greenback inflation, with Butler among
their leaders, became more numerous in both parties after the panic, and
an attempt was made to have Congress reverse itself. Grant's Secretary
of the Treasury gave a new construction to the law by reissuing during
the critical days of the panic some $26,000,000 of greenbacks that had
been called in by McCulloch. He raised the total outstanding to
$382,000,000, and Congress in 1874 passed a law increasing the amount to
$400,000,000, in an act named by its opponents the "Inflation Bill." To
the surprise of many, Grant sharply vetoed the act, adhering to his
views of 1869 on the evils of an irredeemable paper currency. During the
next winter John Sherman, Senator from Ohio, induced Congress to take a
step in fulfillment of the guaranty which Grant had saved. On January
14, 1875, it was provided that the Treasury should resume the payment of
specie on demand on January 1, 1879.
Ultimately Congress was saved from the act of repudiation which the
Greenbackers urged upon it, but while the movement flourished it added
another to the catalogue of troubles with which men like Godkin and
Lowell were distressed. Easterners, in general, had as little
understanding of the West as they had had of the race problem in the
South. They were disposed to attribute to inherent dishonesty the
inflation movement, and to ignore the real economic grievance upon which
it was founded. The suspicions directed against the ethical standards of
the West were increased by the Granger movement, to which the panic gave
volume and importance.
Among the social phenomena of 1873-74 was the sudden emergence in the
Northwest of a semi-secret, ritualistic society, calling itself the
"Patrons of Husbandry," but popularly known as the "Grange." It was
founded locally upon the soil, in farmers' clubs, or granges, at whose
meetings the men talked politics, while their wives prepared a picnic
supper and the children played outdoors. It had had a nominal existence
since 1867, but during the panic it unexpectedly met a new need and grew
rapidly, creating 1000 or more local granges a month, until at its
maximum in 1874 it embraced perhaps 20,000 granges and 1,600,000
persons. In theory the granges were grouped by States, which latter were
consolidated in the National Grange; in fact, the movement was almost
entirely confined to the region north of the Ohio River, and even to the
district northwest of Chicago.
Such a movement as the Grange, revealing a common purpose over a wide
area and in a great number of citizens, could not but affect party
allegiance and the conduct of party leaders. Simultaneously with its
development the legislatures of the Northwest--Illinois, Wisconsin, and
Iowa--became restive under existing conditions, and assumed an attitude
which became characteristic of the Grange,--one of hostility to
railroads and their management. With the approval of the people, these
States passed, between 1871 and 1874, a series of regulative acts
respecting the railways, which were known at the start as the "Granger
Laws," and which became a permanent contribution to American government.
To Eastern opinion the Greenback movement had been barefaced
repudiation; the Granger movement seemed to be confiscation; for every
law provided a means by which public authority should fix the charge
imposed by the railroad upon its customer. Both movements need to be
studied in their local environment, which at least explains the Western
zeal in clamoring for the greenbacks, and shows that in the Granger
movement the West saw farther than it knew.
The Civil War period marks a new era in the history of American
railways. Prior to the panic of 1837, the few lines that were built were
local. Few could foresee that the railway would ever be more than an
adjunct to the turnpike and canal in bringing the city centers closer to
their environs. In the revival of industry after the panic of 1837, the
mileage increased progressively, and before the next panic checked
business in 1857 the tidewater region was well provided, and the
Alleghanies had been crossed by several trunk lines whose heads extended
to the Lakes and to the Mississippi. But in these years the change was
of degree rather than of kind. The lines were built to supplement
existing routes, like the Erie Canal, the Lakes, the Ohio River, or the
Mississippi. They connected communities already well developed and
prosperous, and in undertaking new enterprises promoters had figured
upon capturing the profits of existing trade.
In the new epoch of the sixties there were only new fields to conquer.
The great enterprises were forced to speculate upon the development of
the public domain and to find their profits in the business of
communities to which they themselves gave birth. Natural waterways and
roads extended little west of Chicago. The new fields were entered by
the railroads without prospect of any competition but that of other
railroads. The resulting communities, born and developed between 1857
and 1873, were peculiarly the creatures of, and dependent on, the
railway lines.
This inevitable dependence on railways colored the history of Wisconsin,
Iowa, and Minnesota, and, to a lesser degree, of all the West. While men
were yet prosperous and sanguine and without adequate railway service,
they offered high inducements to promoters of railways. Once the roads
were built and the communities began to pay for them and to maintain
them, the dependence was realized and anti-railway agitation began. The
fact that they were commonly built on money borrowed from the East
threw debtors and creditors into sectional classes injurious to both.
The antagonism to railways was increased because these yet regarded
their trade as private, to be conducted in secrecy, with transportation
to be sold at the best rates that could be got from the individual
customer. The big shipper got the wholesale rate; the small shipper paid
the maximum. Favoritism, discrimination, rebates, were the life of
railway trade, and railway managers objected to them only because they
endangered profits, not because they felt any obligation to maintain
uniformity in charges.
In a community as dependent on the railways as the Northwest was, the
iniquity of discriminatory or extortionate rates was soon seen. The
East, with rival routes and less dependence on staple interests, saw it
less clearly. The charges were paid grumblingly in good times; in bad
times, when the rising greenbacks squeezed the debtor West and the panic
of 1873 stopped business everywhere, the farmers soon made common cause.
They seized upon the skeleton organization of the grange and gave it
life. In 1874 their organized discontent compelled attention.
The Granger Laws were an attempt to establish a new legal doctrine that
railways are quasi-public because of the nature of the service which
they render and the privileges they enjoy. This principle was overlaid
in many cases by the human desire to punish the railroads as the cause
of economic distress, but it was visible in all the laws. It is an old
rule of the common law that the ferryman, the baker, and the innkeeper
are subject to public control, and railways were now classified with
these. In Wisconsin, the "Potter" Law established a schedule with
classified rates, superseding all rate-cards of railroads in that State.
Illinois created a railroad and warehouse commission with power to fix
rates and annul warehouse charters. In Iowa the maximum rates were fixed
by law.
The railroads failed to realize at once what the new laws meant. They
denounced them as confiscatory, and attacked them in court as wrong in
theory and bad in application. Even admitting the principle of
regulation, the laws were so crudely shaped as to be nearly unworkable.
Farmer legislators, chosen on the issue of opposition to railways, were
not likely to show either fairness or scientific knowledge. Coming at
the same time with the panic of 1873, it is impossible to measure the
precise effect of any of these laws, and all were modified before many
years. But the railroads' objection lay beneath the detail, and the
fundamental fight turned on two points--the right of public authority to
regulate a rate at all, and whether state regulation was compatible with
the power of Congress over interstate commerce.
By 1876 the appeals of the railroads against the constitutionality of
these Granger Laws had gone through the highest state courts to the
Supreme Court of the United States. In the spring of 1877 that body
handed down a definitive decision in the case of Munn _vs._ the State of
Illinois in which it recognized that the "controlling fact is the power
to regulate at all." It held that when the institutions in question (in
this case warehouses) established themselves, they did so "from the
beginning subject to the power of the body politic to require them to
conform to such regulations as might be established by the proper
authorities for the common good." It upheld the rate laws, declared that
they were not an infringement upon the powers of Congress, and thus gave
formal sanction to a new doctrine in American law.
The legal consequences of the "Granger Cases" extended through the
ensuing generation. The need for public intervention grew steadily
stronger, and as time went on it became clear that this control could
not be administered by orators or spoilsmen, but called for scientific
training and permanence of policy. It was one of many influences working
to reshape American administrative practice.
The Granger movement had close relations with the panic of 1873,
although it must anyway have appeared in the Northwest at no remote
date. As a political force it soon died out, leaving the principle of
regulation as its memorial. With the gradual recurrence of prosperity
the Northwest found new interests, and as early as 1877, when the
decisions were made, the passion had subsided.
It was, however, a gloomy United States that faced the end of its first
century of independence, in 1876. Pessimism was widely spread among the
best educated in the East. Public life was everywhere discredited by the
conduct of high officials. The South was in the midst of its struggle
for home rule, which it could win only through wholesale force and
fraud. The West was discouraged over finance and still depressed by the
panic. Yet Philadelphia went ahead to celebrate the centennial as though
it were ending the century as hopefully as it had begun.
The Exposition at Philadelphia this year was a revelation to the United
States. Though far surpassed by later "world's fairs," it displayed the
wide resources of the United States and brought home the difference
between American and European civilization. The foreign exhibits first
had a chastening influence upon American exuberance, and then stimulated
the development of higher artistic standards. In ingenuity the American
mind held its own against all competition. But few Americans had
traveled, the cheap processes of illustration were yet unknown, and in
the resulting ignorance the United States had been left to its
assumption of a superiority unjustified by the facts. From the
centennial year may be dated the closer approach of American standards
to those of the better classes of Europe.
In the summer of 1876 the thirty-eighth State, Colorado, was added to
the Union. It had been seventeen years since the miners thronged the
Kansas and Nebraska plains, bound for "Pike's Peak or Bust!" In the
interval the mining camps had become permanent communities. Authorized
in 1864 to form a State, they had declined to accept the responsibility
and had lingered for many years with only a handful of inhabitants. Now
and then entirely isolated from the United States by Indian wars, they
had prayed for the continental railroad, only to be disappointed when
the Union Pacific went through Cheyenne instead of Denver. One of the
branches of the Union Pacific was extended to Denver in 1870, and
thereafter Colorado grew in spite of the panic of 1873. Grant began to
urge its admission in his first Administration, and signed a
proclamation admitting it in 1876. It came in in time to cast three
Republican electoral votes in the most troublesome presidential contest
the United States had seen.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Among the more valuable books of biography and reminiscence for this
period are R. Ogden, _Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin_ (2
vols., 1907); H.E. Scudder, _James Russell Lowell_ (2 vols., 1901); C.E.
Norton, ed., _Letters of J.R. Lowell_ (1894); _Reminiscences of James B.
Angell_ (1912); J. T. Austen, _Moses Coit Tyler, 1835-1900_ (1911); J.G.
Blaine, _Twenty Years of Congress_; E.P. Oberholtzer, _Jay Cooke_; and
A.B. Paine, _Th. Nast_ (1904). The Crédit Mobilier may best be studied
in Rhodes, in J.B. Crawford, _Crédit Mobilier of America_ (1880), and in
the reports of the committees of Congress that investigated the scandal
(42d Congress, 2d Session, House Report no. 77). J.W. Million, _State
Aid to Railways in Missouri_ (1896), gives a good view of railroad
promotion schemes. F. Carter, _When Railroads were New_ (1909), is a
popular summary. In J.R. Commons (ed.), _Documentary History of American
Industrial Society_ (10 vols., 1910-), are various documents relating to
the Grange, which organization received its classic treatment in E.W.
Martin, _History of the Granger Movement_ (1874; his illustrations
should be compared with those in J.H. Beadle, _Our Undeveloped West_, in
which some of them had originally appeared in 1873). There are numerous
economic discussions of the Grange in the periodicals, which may be
found through Poole's Indexes, the best work having been done by S.J.
Buck. The _Chapters of Erie_ (1869), by C.F. Adams, is a valuable
picture of railroad ethics. Much light is thrown upon financial matters
by the Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury and J.D.
Richardson (ed.), _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ (10 vols.).
CHAPTER V
THE HAYES ADMINISTRATION
The reëlection of Grant in 1872 was almost automatic. No new issue had
forced itself into politics to stir up the old party fires or light new
ones. The old issues had begun to lose their force. Men ceased to
respond when told that the Union was in danger; they questioned or
ignored the statement. Many of them contradicted it and voted for
Greeley in 1872, but they were impelled to this by repulsion from
Republican practice rather than by attraction to Democratic promise.
Yet, on the whole, the habit of voting the Union or Republican ticket
retained its hold on so many in the North that Grant's second term was
insured, and it was even possible that a Republican successor might
profit by the same political inertia.
The second term (1873-77) added no strength to Grant or to his party.
Throughout its course, administrative scandals continued to come to
light, striking at times dangerously near the President, but failing to
injure him other than in his repute for judgment. The period was one of
financial depression and discouragement. The best intellect of the
United States was directed into business, the professions, and
educational administration. Politics was generally left to the men who
had already controlled it, and these were the men who had risen into
prominence in the period of the Civil War.
THE POLITICAL SITUATION AT WASHINGTON, 1869-1917
Showing the party in control of the national government in each Congress
President
+------+ +-------+ +--------+ +------------+ +-------------+ +-----------+
|GRANT | | GRANT | | HAYES | | GARFIELD- | | CLEVELAND | | HARRISON |
| | | | | | | ARTHUR | | | | |
| R | | R | | R | | R | | D | | R |
+------+ +-------+ +--------+ +------------+ +-------------+ +-----------+
Senate
1869 1873 1877 1881 1885 1889 1893
+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------+-----+-----+-----+----+---+
| R | R | R | R | R | D | R | R | R | R | R | R |
+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------+-----+-----+-----+----+---+
House
1871 1875 1879 1883 1887 1891
+---+ +----+ +---+ +-----+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +----+ +---+
|41 | |42 | |43 | |44 | |45 | |46 | |47 | |48 | |49 | |50 | |51 | |52 |
| B | | B | | B | | R | | R | | R | | K | | C | | C | | C | | R | | C |
| l | | l | | l | | a | | a | | a | | e | | a | | a | | a | | e | | r |
| a | | a | | a | | n K | | n | | n | | i | | r | | r | | r | | e | | i |
| i | | i | | i | | d e | | d | | d | | f | | l | | l | | l | | d | | s |
| n | | n | | n | | a r | | a | | a | | e | | i | | i | | i | | | | p |
| e | | e | | e | | l r | | l | | l | | r | | s | | s | | s | | | | |
| | | | | | | l | | l | | l | | | | l | | l | | l | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | e | | e | | e | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| R | | R | | R | | D | | D | | D | | R | | D | | D | | D | | R | | D |
+---+ +----+ +---+ +-----+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +----+ +---+
President
+----------+ +----------+ +-----------+ +-----------+ +--------+ +--------+
| | | | | | | | | | | |
|CLEVELAND | | McKINLEY | | McKINLEY- | | ROOSEVELT | | TAFT | | WILSON |
| | | | | ROOSEVELT | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| D | | R | | R | | R | | R | | D |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
+----------+ +----------+ +-----------+ +-----------+ +--------+ +--------+
Senate
1893 1897 1901 1905 1909 1913
+------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
| D | R | R | R | R | R | R | R | R | R | D | D |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+
House
1895 1899 1903 1907 1911
+---+ +---+ +---+ +----+ +---+ +----+ +----+ +----+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+
|53 | |54 | |55 | |56 | |57 | |58 | |59 | |60 | |61 | |62 | |63 | |64 |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| C | | R | | R | | H | | H | | C | | C | | C | | C | | C | | C | | C |
| r | | e | | e | | e | | e | | a | | a | | a | | a | | l | | l | | l |
| i | | e | | e | | n | | n | | n | | n | | n | | n | | a | | a | | a |
| s | | d | | d | | d | | d | | n | | n | | n | | n | | r | | r | | r |
| p | | | | | | e | | e | | o | | o | | o | | o | | k | | k | | k |
| | | | | | | r | | r | | n | | n | | n | | n | | | | | |(?)|
| | | | | | | s | | s | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | o | | o | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | n | | n | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| D | | R | | R | | R | | R | | R | | R | | R | | R | | D | | D | | D |
+---+ +---+ +---+ +----+ +---+ +----+ +----+ +----+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+
During only three of the ten Congresses between 1875 and 1895 did either
party control the national government. The Democrats were in possession
only once, in the 53d Congress. The Republicans controlled the 47th
Congress by manipulation of senators, and the 51st by Reed's drastic
rules. Most of the partisan legislation of twenty years was enacted
during these three Congresses.
A new and not a better type was brought into American politics by the
Civil War. Notwithstanding the bad manners and excesses of ante-bellum
politics, the leaders had been men of defined policy, only occasionally
reaching high office through trickery or personal appeal. Now came the
presence of an intense issue which smoothed out other differences,
magnified a single policy,--the saving of the Union,--and gave
opportunity to a new type of intense, patriotic, narrow mind. Men of
this type dominated in the reconstruction days. As the sixties advanced,
their number was recruited by men who had won prominence and popularity
on the battlefield, who used military fame as a step into politics, and
who came into public life with qualifications adapted to an issue that
was closed.
Few of the leaders of the period 1861 to 1876 ever grew into an
understanding of problems other than those of the Civil War. The most
eminent of them were gone before the latter year. Lincoln was dead;
Grant had had two terms; Stevens was gone; Sumner had been driven from
party honor before his death; Chase had died Chief Justice, but unhappy.
With these men living, lesser men had remained obscure. As they dropped
out, a host of minor leaders, trained to a disproportionate view of the
war and ignorant of other things, controlled affairs.
About these men the scandals of the Grant Administrations clustered, and
their standards came to be those of the Republican party organization.
They represented a dead issue, which they had never directed when it
was alive, and were chosen by voters whose choice had become automatic.
In their hands office tended to become a thing to be enjoyed for its own
sake, not a trust to be fulfilled.
If the Republican organization was drifting into the control of
second-rate men who misrepresented the rank and file, the status of the
opposition was no better. At the South the Democratic party was openly
founded on force and fraud. In the deliberate judgment of the white
population of the South, negro control was intolerable and worse than
any variety of political corruption that might be necessary to prevent
it. The leaders of the party in this section had borne so important a
part in the Confederacy that it was hopeless to think of them for
national leaders, while they could meet the Northern charge of fraud
only by the assertion of a greater alternate evil, which their opponents
would not recognize as such. The South could be counted on for
Democratic votes, but not as yet for leaders.
In the North and West the Democratic party was still weakened by its
past. Its leaders of the early sixties, where they had not joined the
Union party, were Copperheads, and were as little available as
ex-Confederates. One of them, Seymour, whose loyalty, though he was in
opposition to Lincoln, is above question, had been nominated and
defeated in 1868. So few had been available in 1872 that the party had
been reduced to the indorsement of Horace Greeley. Even the scandals of
the Republican administration could not avail the Democrats unless a
leader could be found free from the taint of treason and copperheadism
and strong enough to hold the party North and South.
In the paucity of leaders during Grant's second Administration the
Democrats turned to New York where a reform governor was producing
actual results and restoring the prestige of his party. Like other
Democrats of his day, Samuel J. Tilden had few events in his life during
the sixties to which he could "point with pride" in the certain
assurance that his fellow citizens would recognize and reward them. He
had been a civilian and a lawyer. He had not broken with his party on
its "war a failure" issue in 1864. He had acted harmoniously with
Tammany Hall while it began its scheme of plunder, in New York City. But
he had turned upon that organization and by prosecuting the Tweed Ring
had made its real nature clear. Within the party he had led the demand
to turn the rascals out, and had been elected Governor of New York on
this record in 1874. As Governor he had proved that public corruption
was non-partisan and had exposed fraud among both parties so effectively
that he was clearly the most available candidate when the Democratic
Convention met in St. Louis in 1876.
The only competitors of Tilden for the Democratic nomination were
"favorite sons." Thomas A. Hendricks, a Greenbacker, was offered by
Indiana and pushed on the supposition that this doubtful State could not
be carried otherwise. Pennsylvania presented the hero of Gettysburg,
General Winfield Scott Hancock, through whom it was hoped to bring to
the Democratic ticket the aid of a good war record. The other candidates
received local and scattering votes, and altogether they postponed the
nomination for only one ballot. On the first ballot Tilden started with
more than half the votes; on the second he had nearly forty more than
the necessary two thirds. Hendricks got the Vice-Presidency, and the
party entered the campaign upon a program of reform.
The Republicans had completed their nominations some weeks before the
Democrats met, and having no unquestioned leader had been forced to
adjust the claims of several minor men. Six different men received as
many as fifty votes on one ballot or another, but only three factions in
the party stood out clearly. The Administration group had sounded the
public on a third term for Grant, and receiving scanty support had
brought forward Conkling, a shrewd New York leader, and Morton, war
Governor of Indiana. The out-and-out reformers were for Bristow, who had
made a striking reputation as Secretary of the Treasury, over the frauds
of the Whiskey Ring. Between the two groups was the largest single
faction, which stood for James G. Blaine from first to last.
The political fortunes of James G. Blaine prove the difficulty with
which a politician brought up in the Civil War period retained his
leadership in the next era. Blaine had been a loyal and radical
Republican through the war. Gifted with personal charms of high order,
he had built up a political following which his unswerving orthodoxy and
his service as Speaker of the House of Representatives served to widen.
Never a rich man, he had felt forced to add to his salary by
speculations and earnings on the side. In these he had come into contact
with railroad promoters and had not seen the line beyond which a public
man must not go, even in the sixties. His indiscretions had imperiled
his reputation at the time of the Crédit Mobilier scandal. They became
common property when an old associate forced him to the defensive on the
eve of the convention of 1876. In the dramatic scene in the House of
Representatives when Blaine read the humiliating "Mulligan" letters that
he had written years before, tried to explain them, and denounced his
enemies, he convinced his friends of his innocence, and evidenced to all
his courage and assurance. But his critics, reading the letters in
detail, were confirmed in their belief that if his official conduct was
not criminal, it was at least improper, and that no man with a blunted
sense of propriety ought to be President.
Despite all opposition, Blaine might have won the nomination had not a
sunstroke raised a question as to his physical availability. He led for
six ballots in the convention, and only on the seventh could his
opponents agree upon the favorite son of Ohio, General Rutherford B.
Hayes, who added to military distinction a good record as Governor of
his State.
Neither Hayes nor Tilden represented a political issue. Each had been
nominated because of availability, and each party contained many voters
on each side of every question before the public. Even the appeal to
loyalty and Union, which had worked in three campaigns, failed to stir
the States. Blaine, expert in the appeal, had revived it over the
proposition to extend pardon and amnesty to Jefferson Davis, but his
frantic efforts, as he waved the "bloody shirt," evoked no general
enthusiasm. The war and reconstruction were over, but the old parties
had not learned it.
There was doubt throughout the canvass as to the nature of the issue,
and when the votes were counted there was equal doubt as to which of the
candidates had been elected. Tilden had received a popular plurality
over Hayes of about 250,000 votes, but it was not certain that these
carried with them a majority of the electoral college. Of the 369
electoral votes, Tilden and Hendricks had, without question, 184; while
Hayes and Wheeler were equally secure in 166. The remaining 19 (Florida,
Louisiana, and South Carolina) were claimed by both parties, and it
appeared that both claims were founded on widespread fraud. Unless all
these 19 votes could be secured, Hayes was defeated, and to obtain them
the Republican party set to work.
For weeks between the election and the counting of the electoral votes
the United States debated angrily over the result. The Constitution
required that when Congress should meet in joint session to hear the
returns, the Vice-President should preside, and should open the
certificates from the several States; and that the votes should then be
counted. It was silent as to the body which should do the counting, or
should determine which of two doubtful returns to count. Since the
outcome of the election would turn upon the answer to this question, it
was necessary to find some solution before March 4, 1877.
Failing to find in the Constitution a rule for determining cases such as
this, Congress made its own, and created an Electoral Commission to
which the doubtful cases were to be submitted. This body, fifteen in
number, five each from Senate, House, and Supreme Court, failed, as
historians have since failed, to convince the United States that the
claims of either Republican or Democratic electors were sound. Honest
men still differ in their beliefs. The members came out of the
Commission as they went in, firm in the acceptance of their parties'
claims, and since eight of the fifteen members were Republican, the
result was a decision giving none of the nineteen contests to Tilden,
and making possible the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes.
There was bitter partisanship shown over the contest, and the Democrats,
with a real majority of popular votes, maintained that they had been
robbed of the Presidency. Excepting this, there was no issue that
clearly separated the followers of Hayes from those of Tilden when the
former took the oath of office. There was likewise, unhappily for Hayes,
no common bond by which the President could hold his own party together
and make a successful administration.
Like three of his predecessors, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and
Martin Van Buren, Hayes was carried into office by the weight of a
well-organized machine, rather than by his own hold upon the people.
Like all of them he fought faction as a consequence, and every new step
in administration forced upon him increased his embarrassment in
conducting the Government. At the start, he alienated many Republicans
by his policy toward the South.
Before the election Hayes had reached the conclusion that coercion in
the South must be abandoned. The people must be left in control of their
own institutions, and if they mishandled them must take the
consequences. This meant that the last of the States, in which only the
army garrisons had kept the Republicans in office, must revert to the
control of the Democrats. It also meant an attack upon the President by
those who still believed the South a menace, and those who cherished it
as a political issue,--the "sentimentalists controlled by knaves," in
Godkin's language. Hayes acted upon his conviction as soon as he took
office, withdrew the troops, and turned over to the South her own
problems. Political reconstruction, as shaped by Congress, had broken
down in every part, and it remained to be seen whether the
constitutional reconstruction, as embodied in the amendments, would be
more permanently effective.
In addition to taking their issue from them, Hayes deprived the
politicians of their plunder. The personal conduct of his household
added nothing to his popularity in Washington, for his wife served no
wines and gave to the White House the atmosphere of the standard
middle-class American family. His official family struck a blow at the
political use of offices.
Although many of the Liberal Republicans of 1872 were still dissatisfied
and saw no prospect of a change of heart for their party, most of them
had voted for Hayes, and one of them was taken into the new Cabinet.
Carl Schurz became Secretary of the Interior, bringing into office for
the first time an active desire to reform the civil service. Congress
had made a timid experiment in civil service reform early in the
seventies, but had soon wearied of it. Schurz announced that his
subordinates would be chosen on merit, and acted upon the announcement.
The storm broke at once upon the Secretary over the issue of the
patronage, and soon reached the President. The offices were not only
valued assets of Senators and Representatives, who held control over
their followers through them, but had come to be regarded as the cement
that held the national party organization together. In the absence of an
issue, the binding force of the offices had an enlarged importance. But
Hayes generally backed up Schurz in the fight. The Indian Bureau, in
particular, profited by the new policy. Two serious outbreaks had
recently occurred as the result of bad administration. In one, Custer
had been led to his destruction; in the other Chief Joseph and the Nez
Percés had worried the regular army through a long campaign. The
Democratic House of Representatives had in this very period been
striking at the army appropriations in order to shape Grant's Southern
policy. It had enabled Nast to draw, in one of his biting cartoons, a
picture of the savage, the Ku-Klux, and the Congressman shaking hands
over a common policy. Schurz and his Indian Commissioner foresaw the
changes needed, now that the range Indians had all been consolidated on
reserves, and took this time to reorganize the service.
Hayes refused to give over all the offices as spoils, and removed some
officials for pernicious political activity. The most important removal
was that of Chester A. Arthur, Collector of the Port of New York, whose
enraged friends, Conkling among them, became the center of the attack on
the titular head of the party. Sneering at the sincerity of the new
policy, Conkling cynically declared that "when Doctor Johnson said that
patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, he ignored the enormous
possibilities of the word reform." But because Hayes did not in every
case follow an ideal that no other President had even set, he lost the
support of the reformers who soon denounced him nearly as fiercely as
did the "Stalwarts."
Even if Hayes had been able to keep a united party behind him, his
Administration could scarcely have been marked by constructive
legislation. His party had lost control of the House of Representatives
in the election of 1874. The Forty-fifth Congress, chosen with Hayes in
1876, and the Forty-sixth, in 1878, were Democratic, and delighted to
embarrass the Administration. Dissatisfied Republicans saw the deadlock
and laid it upon the shoulders of the President. The Democratic Congress
checked Administration measures, and managed to advance opposition
measures of its own. Twice Hayes had to summon special sessions because
of the failure of appropriation bills, and in his first winter the
opposition endangered those policies of finance to which the Republican
party had become pledged.
The Greenback agitation, rising about 1868 and stimulated by the panic
of 1873, had not subsided when Hayes became President. It had lost much
of its force, but there continued throughout the West, in both parties,
a spirit that encouraged inflation of every sort. In Congress there were
repeated efforts to repeal the Resumption Act of 1875, which the
Democratic platform had denounced the next year. And when a sudden
increase in the production of silver reduced its price, a silver
inflation movement was placed beside the Greenback movement.
The United States had used almost no silver coin between 1834 and 1862
because the coinage ratio, sixteen to one, undervalued silver and made
it wasteful to coin it. No specie was used as currency between 1862 and
1879, and the relative market prices of bullion remained close to their
usual average until the year of panic. During the seventies the price of
silver fell as new mines were opened in the West. The ratio rose above
sixteen to one, and silver, from being undervalued at that ratio, came
to be overvalued. It would now have paid owners of silver bullion to
coin it into dollars at the legal rate, but Congress had in 1873, after
a generation of disuse of silver, dropped the silver dollar from the
list of standard coins. As silver fell in value, mine-owners asked for a
renewal of coinage, and inflationists joined them, hoping for more money
of any kind. During the winter of 1878 a free silver coinage bill,
passed by the Democratic House under the guidance of Richard P. Bland,
of Missouri, was under consideration in the Republican Senate.
John Sherman, the defender of gold resumption, was no longer in the
Senate to fight this Bland Act. He had become Hayes's Secretary of the
Treasury, and in this capacity was working toward resumption and
upholding Hayes in his war on the spoilsmen. In his place, Allison, of
Iowa, forced an amendment to the Bland Bill, taking away its
free-coinage character and substituting a requirement to buy a specified
amount of silver bullion each month--from $2,000,000 to $4,000,000
worth--and coin it. Thus amended, the House concurred in the act, which
Hayes vetoed in February, 1878. It became a law over his veto.
The Administration was embarrassed in its financial policy, but not
defeated. The Resumption Bill withstood attacks and, as the day for the
resumption of specie payment approached, the price of greenbacks
reflected the growing credit of the United States. It reached par two
weeks before the appointed day. When that day arrived, Wednesday,
January 1, 1879, John Sherman had the satisfaction of seeing the change
to a coin basis effected without a shock. More gold was turned into the
Treasury for exchange with greenbacks than greenbacks for redemption in
gold. It appeared that Horace Greeley had been right when he had
maintained that "the way to resume is to resume,"--that few would want
gold if they could get it.
The adherence of Hayes to the gold standard and resumption drove from
his side another body of Republicans. He had now lost the reformers and
the spoilsmen, the radical Republicans and the inflationists, and no one
hoped or believed that he would recall his pledge for a single term and
be renominated in 1880 to succeed himself. The disintegration of his
party was as complete as the collapse of its issues. On no subject,
between 1876 and 1880, was it possible to bring before the public a
distinctive party issue. The uncertainties of the campaign of 1876 were
increased during the next four years.
Both parties had ceased to represent either policies or the people. The
office-holders were in no sense the leaders of their communities.
Industry, social life, education, and religion had parted company with
politics since the decline of the Union issue, and unless a new
political alignment could be found there was a prospect of continued
rivalry for offices alone. Yet men were beginning to realize that a new
period of growth had begun during the Hayes Administration, and that
American institutions, formulated before the Civil War, had ceased to
meet industrial needs.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
J.F. Rhodes terminates his great history with the election of 1876, and
although he has promised sometime to continue it, he has as yet
published only a few scattered essays upon the later period. A.M.
Gibson, _A Political Crime_ (1885), is a contemporary and partisan
account of the electoral contest; P.L. Haworth, _The Hayes-Tilden
Disputed Presidential Election_ (1906), is a recent work of critical
scholarship; E. Stanwood may be relied upon for platforms, tables of
votes, and other formal details, in his _History of the Presidency_.
_The Writings and Speeches of S.J. Tilden_ (2 vols., ed. by J. Bigelow,
1885) are useful, as are the Blaine books: J.G. Blaine, _Twenty Years of
Congress_, E. Stanwood, _James Gillespie Blaine_ (1905, in American
Statesmen Series); G. Hamilton (pseud. for M.A. Dodge), _James G.
Blaine_ (1895, a domestic biography); and the spicy _Letters of Mrs.
James G. Blaine_ (edited by H.S.B. Beale, 2 vols., 1908). Other useful
biographies or memoirs exist for R.P. Bland, Roscoe Conkling, Robert G.
Ingersoll, O.H. Platt, T.C. Platt, John Sherman, and Carl Schurz, etc.
CHAPTER VI
BUSINESS AND POLITICS
A great commercial revival, affecting the whole United States, began
during the Administration of Hayes. Ingersoll had predicted it, in
defining his candidate in 1876, when he declared: "The Republicans of
the United States demand a man who knows that prosperity and resumption,
when they come, must come together; that when they come, they will come
hand in hand through the golden harvest-fields; hand in hand by the
whirling spindles and the turning wheels; hand in hand past the open
furnace doors; hand in hand by the flaming forges; hand in hand by the
chimneys filled with eager fire, greeted and grasped by the countless
sons of toil." In every section and in every occupation commerce revived
during 1878 and 1879. Manufactures began to invade the South;
mining-booms gave new life to the camps of the Far West; the wheat-lands
of the Northwest, reached by the "Granger" railroads and cultivated by
great power machines, produced a new type of bonanza farming; in the
Southwest and on the plains great droves of cattle produced a new type
of cattle king; and the factory towns of the East began again to grow.
Connecting the various sections, the railroads played a new part, and
built more miles of track in the next ten years than in any decade
before or since. The whole country awoke as from an anæsthetic, tested
its muscles to find that they were stronger than ever, and set to work
again.
The silent evidence of the United States Treasury testifies to the
prosperity of the next ten years. The average expenditures of the United
States from 1850 to 1860 were under $60,000,000; they ranged between
1880 to 1890 from $244,000,000 to $297,000,000 without exhausting the
supply. Yearly, despite the heavy drains upon it, a surplus accumulated
to the embarrassment of the Government and the demoralization of
Congress. The aggregate accumulation for ten years was over
$1,000,000,000.
The disbursements of the United States were growing at a higher rate
than its population, though this was keeping up the traditions of a new
country. From 31,443,321 inhabitants, with which the nation faced the
Civil War in 1860, it had grown to 38,558,371 in 1870, and it was now,
in 1880, 50,155,783. In mobility and activity it had increased even more
rapidly than this, for it was served by nearly three times as many miles
of railway (87,000) in 1880 as when the war broke out. Along the old
frontier the percentage figures for population and railway mileage were
highest, but everywhere a larger population was moving more actively,
and studying itself more intently than ever before. It was also
generating more internal friction than ever. In the silver mines at
Leadville in 1878 had occurred one of the great forerunners of economic
clash. This had been preceded in 1877 by the railway strikes of
Pennsylvania and the East. In California, Dennis Kearney and the Irish
were driving the Chinese from society in the interest of "America for
Americans." The murders by the "Molly Maguires" had brought condign
punishment upon the lawless in the anthracite region; and throughout the
East men were vaguely conscious of a secret society that called itself
the Knights of Labor.
Complexity, class interest, and the problems at once of labor and of
capital, thrust themselves upon a society that had occupied its
continent and used most of its free land. The Centennial had revived the
study of American history from patriotic reasons. An intense interest in
self-analysis now kept this alive, as Henry Adams, James Schouler, and
John Bach McMaster devoted themselves to a scrutiny of historic facts,
as colleges began to create chairs of American history, as James Ford
Rhodes retired from his office to his study to write the history of his
own times. In the next few years associations for the study of political
economy, political science, sociology, and history multiplied the
testimonies to the existence of a new nation.
It was many years before the study of history and institutions reached
the eighties and began to place events in their true proportion. Then it
appeared that there was in fact a fundamental economic problem and that
the political issues of the decade faced it from various angles.
The United States had nearly reached its greatest capacity in production
by 1880, and was no longer able to consume its output. Through its first
century there had been a rough plenty everywhere,--enough food, enough
work, and free land,--so that the industrious citizen need never go
hungry, although he was rarely able to acquire great wealth. Men had
worked with their own hands and with the labor of their beasts of
burden, as men had ever worked. Their land had appeared, indeed, to be
the land of opportunity. Population had doubled itself in a short
generation, and America had called upon the oppressed of Europe to aid
in reclaiming the plains and forests. With all the labor and
opportunity, there had rarely been either an overproduction or a lack of
work.
The industrial revolution changed the nature of American society in many
directions. Through an improved system of communication, whose results
were first visible between 1857 and 1873, it had broadened the realm to
be exploited, brought the rich plains of the West into agricultural
competition with the Middle West and the East, and enabled an increased
production of staples by lessening freights and widening the area of
choice. As the result of rapid communication grain, cotton, and food
animals increased more rapidly than population. The use of manures and a
more careful agriculture on the smaller farms--and all the farms were
growing smaller--further swelled the productivity of the individual
farmer.
Machinery increased the capacity of the laborer as transportation
widened his choice of home. The factories, as they were reorganized in
the new period of prosperity, found that invention had lessened the need
for labor and increased the product. Machine tools in agriculture, in
iron and steel, in textiles, in shoemaking, rendered the course of
manufacture nearly automatic, and when steam neared its limit in
dexterity active minds could see electricity holding out a new promise.
In 1880 population and the capacity to consume American products were
growing less rapidly than the power to produce. The United States was
finding every year greater difficulty in selling all its output. It was
possible to foresee the day when overproduction might be a menace unless
there should be some reorganization of society to meet the new problem.
Pending the arrival of that reorganization, prices fell.
A study of the prices of standard commodities shows that there was a
constant, moderate decline after the Civil War. During the war nominal
prices, expressed in depreciated greenbacks, rose far above the normal,
but when corrected to a gold basis they show little change. At the end
of the war, however, the steady decline set in; by 1880 it was
perceptible, and by 1890 it had come to be generally admitted. It
continued until 1900, when the larger production of gold and an extended
use of bank credits and checks, increased the volume and mobility of
currency and started a general rise in prices. Inflationists believed,
in the eighties, that the falling prices were due to an appreciation of
gold, and demanded more money because they so believed; but
overproduction appears to give a better explanation of the decline than
gold appreciation. In the falling prices may be seen a proof of the
enlarged production and a justification of serious study of remedial
measures.
Solutions, intended to restore good prices and to correct social evils,
became numerous as the eighties advanced. Tariff reformers claimed that
the tariff was a vexatious interference with proper freedom of trade,
without which a foreign market for American surplus could not be
obtained. The protected manufacturers retorted that only through a
higher tariff could manufactures be developed and an enlarged consuming
population of factory workers be created at home. A Western economist
brushed both these aside and found the key to the situation in the
disappearance of free land, and urged a single tax upon land as a
panacea. United labor found the cause to be unrestricted immigration.
Too much government, with its extravagance and corruption, was a cause
in the mind of extreme theoretical democrats. Too little government was
equally responsible for the discords, in the eyes of growing groups of
socialists and communists.
Before 1890 the United States was involved in an elaborate discussion of
its troubles and their causes, but in 1880 the period had only just
begun and its trend was not clear to the political leaders who were yet
quarreling over the spoils of office. Hayes was ending his term in
disfavor, and was passing into the jurisdiction of the historians, which
was much more kindly disposed toward him than was that of his
contemporaries. He had gone into office without being the leader of his
party and without having a single definitive issue. He had alienated one
faction after another; while in Congress, in which both houses were
never Republican, it was never possible to pass constructive laws. The
fight for the next nomination began soon after his inauguration.
Grant and Blaine were the most probable candidates for the Republican
nomination as the spring of 1880 advanced. For the former there was a
feeling of affection among the senatorial crowd, headed by Roscoe
Conkling, who had been so severely disciplined by Hayes. The refusal of
the President to allow the officials of the United States to engage too
actively in politics had brought about the dismissal of Arthur and
Cornell from their posts, and a prolonged quarrel with the Senate. Hayes
had won here, but the defeated leaders turned upon his Southern policy,
demanded a "strong" candidate who would really keep the South in check,
and called for Grant as the only strong man who could lead his party.
Grant was willing in 1880 as he would have been in 1876. Upon his return
from his trip around the world his candidacy was pressed and had strong
support among Civil War veterans and men who were displeased with Hayes.
Blaine, too, was still a candidate, drawing his strength from men of the
same type as those who stood for Grant. He might have secured the
nomination had he not been opposed by the Secretary of the Treasury,
John Sherman, whose friends thought his distinguished service in the
cause of hard money entitled him to a reward. A special element in
Sherman's strength was a group of pliant negro delegates, from the
Southern wing of the party, which was brought to Chicago under close
guard, fed and entertained in a suite at the Palmer House, and voted in
a block as Sherman's managers directed. None of these three, Grant,
Blaine, and Sherman, could please the reform element, that found its
choice in Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont.
The convention at Chicago was marked by the fight of Conkling to secure
unity and the nomination for Grant, and by the stubbornness with which
the opposing delegates held out against a third term and for their own
candidates. In the end the deadlock was broken when the followers of
Blaine and Sherman shifted to the latter's floor manager, James A.
Garfield, and gave him the nomination on the thirty-sixth ballot. The
Vice-Presidency was thrown to the Conkling men, falling upon Chester A.
Arthur, who accepted it against the desires of his leader. The platform
was a "code of memories" as it had been in 1876 and 1872, congratulating
the party on its successes of the past and having no clear vision of the
future.
The Democratic party in 1880 was without leader or issue, as it had been
since 1860. Tilden, who might have been renominated and run on the
charge that he was counted out in 1876, was sick. He was unwilling to
run unless the demand were more spontaneous than it appeared to be. In
its perplexity the party turned to a military hero who called himself a
Democrat and had been passed over in 1876. General Winfield Scott
Hancock had never been in active politics, but was now nominated over a
long list of local candidates. William H. English, of Indiana, who was
known to have money, and was believed to be ready to use it in the
campaign, was the vice-presidential candidate.
The canvass of 1880 was fought during a prosperous summer on issues that
were largely personal. As Sherman said of Ohio in 1879, so he might have
said of the country in 1880, that "the revival of industries and peace
and happiness was a shrewd political trick of the Republicans to carry"
the United States. Following their practice for three campaigns, the old
line speakers dwelt upon the conditions in the South. An Indiana rhyme
"for young Democrats" ran:--
"Sing a song of shotguns,
Pocket full of knives,
Four-and-twenty black men,
Running for their lives;
When the polls are open
Shut the nigger's mouth,
Isn't that a bully way
To make a solid South?"
But the audiences were unresponsive. An old political reporter remembers
being in the national headquarters late in the campaign, and hearing
Blaine, who had been stumping for Garfield, say, "You want to fold up
the bloody shirt and lay it away. It's of no use to us. You want to
shift the main issue to protection." Not until the campaign was nearly
over did a real issue emerge.
The protective tariff had not played a large part in any campaign since
1860. In 1868 and 1872 both parties had looked forward to the reduction
of revenue to a peace basis, adopting mild planks to that effect. In
1876 the topic had been more prominent in the platforms, but not in the
canvass. In 1880 Hancock was questioned on the tariff during one of his
speeches. The question was probably unpremeditated, but it took the
candidate unaware, for as an officer in the regular army he had never
given the matter thought. His evasive answer, that the tariff was a
local issue only, gave an opening to his opponents, who forced the
tariff to a prominent place in the few remaining days before election.
They made much of Hancock's ignorance, and perhaps by this maneuver
offset the disadvantage done to Garfield by a forged letter, which
purported to show him as a friend of cheap labor and Chinese
immigration. Garfield and Arthur were elected by a small plurality over
Hancock. No one received a popular majority, for a third candidate,
named Weaver, headed a Greenback-Labor ticket and polled 308,000 votes.
General James A. Garfield would have become Senator from Ohio in 1881
had not his election transferred him to the Presidency. The fifty years
of his life covered a career that was typically American. The son of a
New England emigrant, he was born in the Connecticut Reserve in Ohio. He
worked his way from the farm through the log school to college. His
service on the towpath of the Ohio Canal, in the course of his
education, became a strong adjunct to his popularity among the common
people. He taught Latin and Greek after leaving college, studied law,
worked into politics, and went to the front upon the call for troops. He
left the war a major-general to enter Congress, in 1863, where he sat
until his election to the Senate in 1880. He was the friend of John
Sherman and had been the manager of his campaign. Like his friend, and
like most Ohio Republicans, he believed that the tariff was one of the
bases of prosperity in his State. In his campaign a young Cleveland
merchant named Hanna raised funds among the local manufacturers on the
plea that Republican success and their interests would go hand in hand.
In his inaugural address, however, Garfield said nothing of the new
issue which was threatening to enter politics, but dwelt upon the
supremacy of law, the status of the South, hard money, religious
freedom, and the civil service.
The Republican party had been left broken and in hostile camps by
President Hayes; Garfield tried in his Cabinet to change this and "to
have a party behind him." The State Department went to his rival and
ally, Blaine, whose personal following was larger than that of any other
American politician. The independent Republicans, who had seceded in
1872 and had muttered ever since, were pleased by the elevation of Wayne
MacVeagh, a Pennsylvania lawyer, to the post of Attorney-General. A
friend of Conkling, who had made a striking record in the New York
Post-Office through two terms, Thomas L. James, became Postmaster-General.
The sensibilities of the West, always jealous of the East in matters of
finance, were appeased by the selection of William L. Windom, of
Minnesota, as Secretary of the Treasury, for "any Eastern man
would be accused of being an agent or tool of the 'money kings' and
'gold-bugs' of New York and Europe." The Cabinet as a whole was received
with favor, but the harmony which its members promised was soon
disturbed.
The appointment of Blaine as Secretary of State, which Garfield had
determined upon a few days after his election, was a blow to Roscoe
Conkling. Hayes had struck at Conkling in removing Arthur and Cornell.
Now when Garfield decided to please himself in the New York
collectorship, Conkling saw in the act the hand of Blaine. He fell back
upon the practice of senatorial courtesy, and held up the confirmation
of the appointment. When he found himself unable to coerce the
President, he broke with him as he had broken with Hayes, and this time
he and his colleague from New York, Thomas Collier Platt, resigned their
seats and appealed to the New York Legislature, then in session. The
move was not without promise. Cornell was now Governor of New York.
Arthur, with the prestige of the Vice-Presidency, left his chair in the
Senate to work for the reëlection and triumphant return of Conkling and
Platt, on the doctrine that the appointments of a President must be
personally acceptable to the Senators from the State concerned. But the
New York Legislature failed to give the martyrs their vindication, and
permitted them to remain in private life. Their friends, the
"Stalwarts," ceased to support Garfield.
James, who was not enough a follower of Conkling to emulate him,
remained in the Post-Office, where he had already found wholesale
corruption. It had been the practice of the Post-Office to classify the
mail routes according to their method of transportation, and to mark
those running by stage or rider by a star on the general list. These had
come to be known as the "star routes." The contracts for the star routes
were flexible in order to meet the shifting needs of the Western
population that lived away from railways and depended upon the
stage-coach. When the business of any route justified a better service
than it was receiving, the Department was at liberty to increase the
service, hasten speed, and raise the pay without a re-letting of the
contract. During the latter seventies the growth of settlement
throughout the remoter West had justified a large increase in star-route
costs, but James discovered not only legitimate increase but collusive
fraud. The official in charge, in collusion with former Congressmen who
"knew the ropes," and with the mail contractors, had awarded original
contracts to low bidders who had no intention of fulfilling their bids.
After the letting of contracts the compensation had been increased
without investigation or reference to actual needs.
The unearned profits had been shared by the promoters and the dishonest
officials, and some of it had gone into the Republican campaign fund. A
former Senator, Dorsey by name, who was indicted for fraud in 1882, had
been Secretary of the Republican National Committee in 1880, and had
been hurried to Indiana to save that State. He did this so effectively
that his friends gave him a dinner, which Arthur attended, and at which
the allusions to his methods in Indiana were but loosely veiled. Brady,
the official in the Post-Office, had collected the usual assessments on
federal office-holders for Garfield's campaign fund. When he and others
were threatened with criminal prosecution they produced letters by which
they hoped to prove that Garfield was cognizant of and had approved
their financial methods. How far they might have succeeded in blackening
the President and stopping his prosecutions must remain unknown, for he
was shot on July 2, 1881, while on his way to a college celebration, and
died on September 19.
The murderer of Garfield declared to the policeman who arrested him, "I
am a Stalwart and want Arthur for President." It was soon learned that
he was a disappointed candidate for office, and irresponsible Washington
gossip soon had it that Garfield's friends wanted him to hang, while
Arthur's thought he was only insane. The murderer's sister, in an
incoherent book based on his story, asserted, "Yes, the 'Star-Route'
business killed Garfield! The claim, 'The Stalwarts are my friends,'
hung Guiteau!" He was perhaps insane, and was certainly irresponsible,
but his crime, coming simultaneously with the notoriety of the
star-route frauds and the demands of Conkling, emphasized the pettiness
of factions and the need for a reform in the civil service.
The illness of Garfield dragged on through eleven weeks in the summer of
1881, with bulletins one day up and the next down. The strain told on
every one in the Administration. The prospect of Arthur's succession
called attention to the fact that the Vice-President is rarely nominated
for fitness, but is chosen at the end of a hot convention, in
carelessness, or to placate a losing side. It led soon to the passage of
an adequate Presidential Succession Act. The death of Garfield threw the
control to the Republican faction that disliked him most.
Blaine, the head of Garfield's Cabinet, was most directly affected by
the catastrophe. He had stepped from the Senate into the State
Department at Garfield's request. While he was a receptive candidate for
the Presidency this post suited his needs and gratified his taste. He
loved business and liked to associate with men. He had a diplomatic
vision that led him to formulate a more constructive policy than most
Secretaries have had.
With England, Blaine found negotiations upon the Isthmian Canal pending,
having been taken up by Hayes. His attitude in his notes of 1881 failed
to meet the approval of Great Britain, and ignored obligations that the
United States had long before accepted. But it pointed to an American
canal and was part of his larger scheme. His America was inclusive of
both continents, and drew him to hope for larger trade relations in the
Western Hemisphere. With the approval of Garfield he had started to
mediate in South America, in a destructive war between Chile and Peru.
He had on foot, when Garfield died, a scheme for a congress of the
American States in the interest of a greater friendliness among them.
The invitations for this gathering had just been issued when Arthur
reorganized his Cabinet, brought F.T. Frelinghuysen in as Secretary of
State, and let Blaine out. There was no public office ready for him at
this time, so he retired to private life and the historical research
upon which his _Twenty Years of Congress_ was founded. Jefferson Davis
had just brought out his _Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_,
while the Yorktown centenary, like the centennial of independence, had
stimulated the market for historical works.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The United States Census of 1880 is more elaborate and reliable than its
predecessor of 1870, and may be supplemented to advantage by H.V. Poor,
_Manual of the Railroads of the United States for 1880_, which contains
a good sketch of railroad construction, and by R.P. Porter, _The West
from the Census of 1880_ (1882). E.E. Sparks, _National Development_ (in
_The American Nation_, vol. 23, 1907), is a useful survey of the years
1877 to 1885, and contains a good bibliographical chapter. The
bibliographies in Channing, Hart, and Turner's _Guide to the Study and
Reading of American History_ (1912) are specially valuable for the years
1876 to 1912. E.B. Andrews, _The United States in Our Own Time_ (1903),
is discursive and entertaining. Special phases of material development
may be reached through D.R. Dewey, _Financial History of the United
States_; T.V. Powderly, _Thirty Years of Labor_ (1889); H. George,
_Progress and Poverty_ (1879; and often reprinted), and the Aldrich
Report on Prices (52d Congress, 2d session, Senate Report, No. 1394).
Many interesting details are to be found in W.C. Hudson, _Random
Recollections of an Old Political Reporter_ (1911); and J.F. Rhodes has
touched upon this period in his essays, among which are "A Review of
President Hayes's Administration in the Light of Thirty Years" (_Century
Magazine_, October, 1909); "The Railroad Riots of 1877" (_Scribner's
Magazine_, July, 1911); and "The National Republican Conventions of 1880
and 1884" (_Scribner's Magazine_, September, 1911). Among the economic
journals started in the eighties, and containing a wealth of scholarly
detail for contemporary history, are the _Quarterly Journal of
Economics_ and the _Political Science Quarterly_.
CHAPTER VII
THE NEW ISSUES
Garfield died before he met his first Congress, the Forty-seventh, which
was elected with him in 1880, but he lived long enough to foresee the
first chance to do party business that had appeared since 1875. When
Grant lost the lower house at the election of 1874, the Democrats gained
control of that body and Michael C. Kerr, of Indiana, supplanted Blaine
as Speaker. On Kerr's death in 1876, Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania,
took the place, and was continued in it through the next two Congresses,
in the latter of which, the Forty-sixth, his party controlled the Senate
too. It had been impossible to produce an agreement between the Senate,
the House, and the President on important new matters. They could not
always agree even on appropriations, and all Republicans felt with Mrs.
Blaine when she wrote, after the election of 1880, "Do you take in that
the House is Republican, and the Senate a tie, which gives the casting
vote to the Republican V.P.? Oh, how good it is to win and to be on the
strong side!"
When the new Congress organized, Randall ceased to be Speaker and became
leader of the minority, while J. Warren Keifer, of Ohio, took his place,
with a small Republican majority behind him. In the Senate the
predictions of Mrs. Blaine were fulfilled, although the accident which
made a President of Arthur left the Senate without a Vice-President. In
the even division of the Senate, the two independent members controlled
the whole. Judge David Davis, transferred "from the Supreme Bench to the
Fence," became the presiding officer, and generally voted with the
Republicans, though elected as a Democrat. Mahone, of Virginia, an
Irishman and an ex-Confederate, called himself a "Readjuster," and voted
with the Administration. These two men made it possible to carry party
measures through Congress.
Shortly after Congress met in 1881, Arthur reorganized his Cabinet,
allowing the friends of Garfield to resign and putting his own Stalwart
friends in their places. The new Secretary of State, Frelinghuysen, took
up Blaine's policies and mangled them. He adhered to the general view of
an American canal, as Blaine had done. He pushed the influence of the
United States in Europe as far as he could, keeping Lowell, in England,
busy in behalf of Irish-Americans whose lust for Home Rule got them into
trouble with the British police. But he dropped the South American
policy, recalled the invitations to the Pan-American Congress, and kept
hands off the Chilean war. Blaine protested in vain against this
humiliating reversal.
The decision of Arthur to take counsel from the Stalwarts aroused fears
among others of the party that his would be the administration of a
spoilsman. His first message, however, somewhat allayed these fears, for
it dwelt at length upon the unsatisfactory status of the civil service,
and the need for a merit system that should govern removals and
appointments. He promised his support to measures even more
thoroughgoing than the reformers had asked, and, in January, 1883,
signed the "magna carta" of civil service reform.
The use of public offices for party purposes had been regarded as a
scandal by independents of both parties for four administrations. The
long list of breaches of trust, revealed in the seventies, had made
reformers feel that incompetence and spoils endangered the life of the
nation. As late as 1880, they had heard a delegate in the Republican
Convention, when asked to vote for a civil service plank, exclaim
indignantly: "Mr. President, Texas has had quite enough of the civil
service.... We are not here, sir, for the purpose of providing offices
for the Democracy.... After we have won the race, as we will, we will
give those who are entitled to positions office. What are we up here
for?" And they had become used to the silent or outspoken resistance to
their demands from men in "practical" politics.
The history of the civil servants of the United States falls into three
periods: Before 1829, 1829-65, and 1865-83. In the first period they
were commonly treated as permanent officials. Rarely had they been
removed for partisan purposes, although it had been the wail of
Jefferson that "few die, and none resign." Appointments had often been
given as the reward for past services, but none had felt a need for a
general proscription of officials upon the entry of a new President.
Andrew Jackson brought a new practice into use in 1829. His election
followed a political revolution, in which it was believed by his
supporters that the National Republican party had become corrupt. It was
a matter of faith and pledge to turn the incumbents out of office.
Hungry patriots crowded round the jobs, while Jackson's advisers
included men who in New York and Pennsylvania had already learned how to
use the offices as retainers for future service. Advocacy of the
Democratic principle of rotation in office was in practice easily
converted into the maintenance of the maxim that "to the victors belong
the spoils."
Every President after Jackson used the offices for partisan purposes,
and few objected to the practice on theoretical grounds. The simplicity
of the National Government made the habit less destructive than it
otherwise would have been. The spoils system did not enter the army or
navy, the only extensive technical departments of the United States. In
other branches of the Government a large majority of the officials were
unskilled penmen, whose places could easily be filled with others as
little skilled as themselves. Always a few clerks who knew the business
were saved to guide the recruits, and the departments were generally
working again before a President met his first Congress.
Lincoln was not different from his predecessors in the use of offices.
He permitted the most complete sweep that had yet been made, being
forced to an unusually high percentage of new appointments by the
necessity of removing Southerners. In his hands the patronage became an
additional weapon for the Union, upholding the leaders in Congress, and
striking at the backsliders. In the election of 1864 the Union party
carried all the branches of the Government, and it had a vision of four
years of complete control of the offices when the death of Lincoln
brought a Tennessee Democrat into the White. House.
The discussion of civil service reform, on theoretical grounds, began
about 1865, when the evil of removals for party purposes was shown to
the Senate. Johnson was trying to use the patronage for his own ends, in
opposition to the will of the radicals in Congress. Reformers who
maintained the iniquity of this custom now found temporary converts
among the Republicans. They got a committee appointed on the civil
service in 1866, and President Grant announced his conversion to the
principle early in his Administration.
In 1871 Congress tried the experiment of a modest appropriation
($25,000) for a reform of the civil service, and Grant placed the test
in the hands of George William Curtis, a leader of the new reform. The
commission breasted the whole current of politics, found that Grant
would not support it in critical cases, and was abandoned by Congress
after a short trial. The demand, however, increased, receiving the
support of the independents who were Liberal Republicans in 1872, and
who thereafter constituted a menace to party regularity. Schurz, Godkin,
and Curtis were their admitted leaders. In 1872 and 1876 they persuaded
the great parties to put general pledges for civil service reform into
their platforms. Schurz, as Secretary of the Interior under Hayes, put
their ideal partly into practice. In 1881 they were a well-recognized
body of advocates, with a definite doctrine of non-partisan efficiency,
which few politicians denied in principle or liked in fact.
Public attention was focused upon the civil service by the events of
1881. The fight between Garfield and Conkling raised not only the
question of the relative rights of President and Senate in appointments,
but that of the use of offices for the support of political machines.
The frauds uncovered in postal administration by the star-route
investigations could hardly have occurred in a department administered
by experienced and competent officials. The murder of Garfield by a
disappointed office-seeker gave additional emphasis to the need for
reform, and these things coming together made possible the passage of a
civil service act earlier than its advocates expected.
President Arthur recommended the reform in 1881, and his party,
chastened by the fall election of 1882, took up a law in the session of
1882-83. Eaton, one of the leading reformers, and first chairman of the
Civil Service Commission, wrote the bill which Congress passed with
little real debate. Men who hated the measure knew the unwisdom of
opposing it. A board of three commissioners was created in 1883 to
classify the civil servants, prepare rules and lists, and conduct
examinations. The classified service, removed from politics, began with
13,780 officers in 1884; by 1896 it contained 87,044; by 1911, 227,657.
It grew most actively toward the end of each administration, as outgoing
Presidents transferred to it the offices that they had filled. Its best
recommendation was to be found in the opposition of politicians toward
it.
Arthur did better than the reformers had hoped in urging and
administering the Civil Service Act. He prosecuted the star-route
trials, even among his Stalwart friends.
In 1882 Congress, with Arthur's approval, took up a revision of the
tariff. Neither of the great parties had, in 1882, received a clear
mandate touching the tariff, although it was true that most Republicans
were content with the system in its general outlines, while a
considerable number of Democrats were listening to tariff reform and
asking for a tariff for revenue only. It had been eighteen years since
the last general revision had taken place, and in that period unforeseen
conditions had developed, whose tendency was at once to point the need
for a readjustment of schedules and to create a class of citizens whose
profits would be touched thereby. The course of financial reconstruction
between 1865 and 1875 had raised the rate of actual protection beyond
the expectations of its advocates.
In 1865 the revenues of the United States, amounting to $322,000,000,
and far exceeding the needs of the Treasury in time of peace, came
chiefly from the tariff and the internal revenue. The two taxes were
dependent upon each other. Each increase in the latter had forced an
increase in the former, lest special burdens should be laid upon
American manufacture. The ideal of protection had never been lacking,
nor had special interests failed to look out for themselves, but the
dominant spirit in the war taxes was revenue.
When Congress undertook to reduce the revenue to a peace basis, it found
that every approach to the tariff aroused classes of interested
manufacturers, while every attack upon the internal revenue was welcomed
by the public. As a result, following the line of least resistance, most
of the internal taxes were removed by 1870, leaving the tariff rates
where they had been, and higher than any protectionist had asked. A
large part of the tariff rate had been intended to equalize the internal
revenue tax; the removal of the latter created to that extent an
incidental protection, which was unexpected but was none the less
acceptable. Some few details of the tariff were modified by special
acts, and there was a flat reduction of ten per cent in 1872. But the
panic of 1873 reduced the revenues and frightened Congress, in 1875,
into restoring the ten per cent. In 1882 the rates of 1865 remained
substantially unchanged, leaving the protected industries in the
enjoyment of an incidental protection never intended for them and
created only by accident in the general reduction of revenue.
Spasmodic attacks were made upon the tariff system throughout the
seventies, but since few defended it on principle they failed to affect
the public. The tariff was not a political issue. Opposition to it was
confined to members of the Democratic party, in search for weapons to
turn against the Republicans, and to theorists and economists who had
little connection with politics. There were free-trade clubs after
1868, though few ever wanted to establish real free trade. All that the
free-trader commonly desired was a mitigation of protection and the
establishment of reasonable rates. Godkin, Schurz, Sumner of Yale, David
A. Wells, Edward Atkinson, and Henry D. Lloyd taught the
tariff-for-revenue theory wherever they could find listeners. Wells
wrote on "The Creed of Free Trade," in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1875,
and was sure he had found the issue of 1876. But in neither this nor the
next campaign did the parties face the issue. In 1880 the tariff figured
only as a means of embarrassing Hancock, while Garfield did not even
mention it in his inaugural.
The forces that compelled a revision of the tariff in 1882-83 had to do
with revenue and expenditures. Following the new prosperity the receipts
increased beyond the ability of Congress to spend them. There was a
small surplus in 1879. In 1880 it was $68,000,000; in 1881,
$101,000,000; in 1882, $145,000,000; in 1883, $132,000,000. The surplus
was a constant incentive to extravagance and deranged the currency. If
it was allowed to remain in the Treasury, its millions were withheld
from circulation, and contraction was the result; if it was applied to
the purchase or redemption of bonds, the national bank currency was
contracted, for this was founded upon bonds owned by the banks; and it
could not be spent without the invention of new channels. The temptation
to increase pension payments was strengthened, while public works
multiplied without reason.
The waste of money on public works induced Arthur to advertise the need
for a reduction of the revenue. The annual River and Harbor Bill had
consumed $3,900,000 in 1870, and $8,900,000 in 1880. In 1882 the bill
was swollen to over $18,000,000 by greed and log-rolling. Arthur vetoed
it as unreasonable and unconstitutional in August, 1882. It passed over
his veto, but the defeat of his party in the following November was
construed as a vindication of the President. The Republicans lost
control of the House of Representatives, Democratic governors were
elected in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, in New York, Connecticut, New
Jersey, and Indiana, and critics began to ask if this was the beginning
of the end of the party. The certainty that party bills could not be
passed in the next Congress, with the control divided, stimulated the
Republicans to act while they could. The Civil Service Act was passed
early in 1883, and on the same day the House took up the consideration
of a new tariff.
Arthur, in 1881, had urged that the revenues be reduced and the tariff
be revised, and Congress had created a commission to investigate the
needed changes, in May, 1882. This committee was in session throughout
the following summer, sitting in manufacturing centers all over the East
and hearing testimony from all varieties of manufacturers. It had been
organized on a conservative basis, containing members familiar with the
needs of sheep-raisers and wool manufacturers, and iron and sugar, as
well as experts on administration. Its enemies thought that it was
pledged to protection at the start. The commission expressed a belief
that the country desired to adhere to the general idea of protection,
but it early learned the force of the demand for revision and reduction,
and sent into the House, in December, 1882, a project for a bill
intended to reduce the tariff at least twenty per cent. The bill based
on this was reported from the Committee on Ways and Means on January 16,
1883, and was debated until February 20, and then abandoned in the House
for a bill which had passed the Senate.
The Senate Bill was in the form of an amendment to an Internal Revenue
Bill already before that house. It was passed on February 20 under the
leadership of the young Senator from Rhode Island, Nelson W. Aldrich,
and was sent to conference by the House a week later. In conference a
new bill was substituted for the Senate Bill. This was hurried through
both houses in time to receive the signature of Arthur on March 3, 1883.
The tariff of 1883 failed to meet the demand for a revision. Its debates
show the difficulties attendant upon the construction of any tariff.
Congress was divided upon the theory of protection, both parties
including high protectionists as well as tariff-for-revenue men. The
revenue-producing side of the tariff increased the complexities, since
every change in a rate might affect the standing of the Treasury. In
addition to the economic and the fiscal needs, quite serious enough,
there was the tireless influence of the lobby of manufacturers, pressing
for single rates which should aid this business or that. Few Congressmen
were sufficiently detached in interests to be entirely dispassionate as
they framed the schedules. Many did not even try to disguise their
desire to promote local interests. Neither party had a mandate on the
tariff in 1882, but when the act had become a law it was clear that most
of the Republican leaders voted cheerfully for all the protection they
could get, that the intent to reduce the revenue had failed, and that
what little hope of revision remained was in the opposition party. "The
kaleidoscope has been turned a hair's breadth," said the _Nation_, "and
the colors transposed a little, but the component parts are the same."
It was deliberate bad faith throughout, urged a Democratic leader, and
"finished this magnificent shaft [of the tariff policy] which they had
been for years erecting, and crowned it with the last stone by repealing
the internal tax on playing cards and putting a twenty per cent tax upon
the Bible."
Throughout the tariff debate no argument had been used more steadily
than that of the protectionists that protection to labor was their aim.
The degradation of "pauper labor" in Europe was contrasted repeatedly
with that prosperity that was typical of America. The insistence upon
the argument revealed the desire to conciliate a class that was being
noticed in American society for the first time.
The great labor problem before the Civil War had been that of getting
enough laborers and meeting the competition which the abundant free
lands of the West had offered. Labor organizations and strikes had been
so unusual that public opinion had not yet come to regard them as normal
features of society. But the manufacturing development of the sixties
in iron and steel, in textiles, and in other machine industries, threw
workmen together in increasing number, taught them their interests as a
class, and set the scene for an outbreak of strikes when the shops shut
down or reduced wages in the depression of the seventies. About 1877
these strikes shocked society by their violence. Neither had the public
been educated to the strike itself, nor the labor leaders to that
moderation, without which public sympathy cannot be retained or strikes
won. A feeling adverse to organized labor swept the country and
endangered the existence of the labor movement.
POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION, 1850-1910
(Table and Diagram based upon Thirteenth Census, 1910, Population,
Vol. 1, pp. 129, 130.)
Total Foreign
Population. and Mixed Foreign Born.
Parentage.
1910 91,972,266 18,897,837 13,345,545
1900 75,994,575 15,646,017 10,213,817
1890 62,947,714 11,503,675 9,121,867
1880 50,155,783 8,274,867 6,559,679
1870 39,818,449 5,324,268 5,493,712
1860 31,443,321 4,096,753
1850 23,191,876 2,240,535
[Illustration: graph]
The Knights of Labor received the heaviest weight of disfavor. This was
an industrial union, founded in 1869, embracing labor of all trades, and
held together by a secret organization. Dismissal so often followed
admitted membership in a union that secrecy was defensible, but secrecy
mystified and frightened the public. The policy of secrecy was abandoned
in 1882, after the excesses of the "Molly Maguires" had brought
discredit upon all organized labor. Under the leadership of Grand Master
Workman Powderly the Knights carried on an open and aggressive campaign
of education for labor and inspection laws throughout the Union. The
American Federation of Labor, founded in 1881 and reorganized in 1886,
aided in this general work, and with the Knights helped to reconcile the
public to the principle of unionism.
State bureaus of labor appeared in many States as the result of the
general agitation. An eight-hour law, for federal employees, had been
gained in 1868, while in 1884 a Commissioner of Labor was created in
the Department of the Interior. Arthur was urged to give the post to
Powderly, but selected instead an economist less actively identified
with the propaganda, Carroll D. Wright, under whose direction the Bureau
grew steadily in importance. Its reports became quarries for statistical
information on the labor problem, and its success justified its
incorporation in the new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903.
The "Army of the Discontented," as Powderly called the workers, demanded
education and protective laws, and turned their attention to competition
about 1882. The cutting of wages by peasant laborers, newly arrived in
America, was a grievance as soon as labor became class-conscious.
Opposition to this became virulent in the Far West, where the foreigner
was also a Mongolian. The Chinese of the Pacific Slope, more frugal and
industrious than Americans, were harried in the early eighties, and
violence was done them in many quarters. Garfield had been weakened in
1880 by a forged letter seeming to show that he favored the introduction
of more Chinese. So numerous were the persecutors that Congress
responded to the demand for a Chinese Exclusion Bill, in spite of the
Treaty of 1880, which guaranteed fair treatment. Arthur vetoed the first
bill, but accepted a second, less stringent in its terms. After this
victory, the labor forces turned upon immigration in general.
No idea had been fixed more firmly in the American mind than that the
oppressed of Europe were here to find opportunity. Immigrants had
always been welcomed and assimilated, while Congress had, in 1864,
organized a bureau to encourage and safeguard immigration. The influx
always increased in prosperous, and declined in adverse, years. After
1878 the annual number broke all records. Western railway corporations
were inviting immigrants to use their lands, manufacturers called them
to the mills, and the total rose from 177,000 in 1879 to 788,000 in
1882. This latter year was the greatest of the century, its newcomers
attracting the attention of the press, of the city charities who felt
their growing responsibilities, and of the unions who felt their
competition. Nearly all the immigrants were producers, a high percentage
being able-bodied young men and women. The greatest number came from
Great Britain, among whom the Irish settled in the Eastern cities. Next
were the Germans, who moved toward Chicago or St. Louis, while the
Scandinavians filled up the wheat-lands of the Northwest.
Under the demand of the labor vote, Congress provided, in 1882, for the
inspection of immigrants and the deportation of undesirable aliens, and
in 1885 it forbade the importation of skilled laborers under contract.
As yet the labor movement was largely aristocratic, safeguarding the
skilled workmen, but disregarding the common laborers.
The labor and immigration movement in its new aspect widened the field
for economic legislation, for few States had factory laws, employers'
liability laws, or laws protecting the weak,--the women and the
children. It also complicated the situation in politics. The Germans
and Scandinavians, settling in centers which had been strongly Unionist
in the Civil War, were believed to absorb the doctrines of the
Republicans from their compatriots already in America. The Irish were
generally Democrats, and the only Republican leader who had a large
following among them was Blaine. He had fraternized with the California
Irish leader, Dennis Kearney; as Secretary of State he had protected
naturalized Irishmen who went home to fight for Home Rule; some of his
immediate family were Catholics; and his insistence on an American canal
won him friends who were already disposed to hate Great Britain.
The votes of 1876 and 1880 showed that the two parties were nearly even
in strength, so that any slight popularity or accident might decide an
election. As politicians prepared for 1884 the attitude of naturalized
foreigners assumed a new importance which the friends of the various
candidates tried to measure. The campaign could not be fought on any of
the old issues, but which of the new--civil service, tariff, or
labor--was in doubt.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best history of civil service reform is C.R. Fish, _The Civil
Service and the Patronage_ (1905). This supplants all previous accounts,
and may itself be supplemented in detail by the Annual Reports of the
United States Civil Service Commission (1883-), by the _Memoirs of Carl
Schurz_ (3 vols., 1907-08), the _Writings of Carl Schurz_ (7 vols.,
Frederic Bancroft, _ed._, 1912), the biographies of J.R. Lowell, E.L.
Godkin, and George William Curtis, and the files of _Harper's Weekly_,
the _Nation_, and the _North American Review_. The general narrative of
the eighties is covered by E.E. Sparks, _National Development_, and D.R.
Dewey, _National Problems_ (in _The American Nation_, vols. 23 and 24,
1907), and E.B. Andrews, _The United States in Our Own Time_. A
thoughtful economic analysis of the period is D.A. Wells, _Recent
Economic Changes_ (1890). The Report of the Tariff Commission of 1882 is
valuable for the study of tariff revision, as are also the standard
tariff histories by E. Stanwood, I.M. Tarbell, and F.W. Taussig. The
Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Labor (1884-) are fundamental for
the labor problem. Useful monographs are C.D. Wright, _An Historical
Sketch of the Knights of Labor_ (in _Quarterly Journal of Economics_,
vol. I), T.V. Powderly, _Thirty Years of Labor_ (1889), G.E. McNeill,
_The Labor Movement_ (1887), and M.A. Aldrich, _The American Federation
of Labor_ (in American Economic Association, Economic Studies, vol.
III).
CHAPTER VIII
GROVER CLEVELAND
The Administration of Chester A. Arthur proved that the President had
never been so discreditable a spoilsman as the reformers had believed,
or else that he had changed his spots. The term ended in dignity and
Arthur hoped to secure a personal vindication through renomination by
his party. His struggle precipitated a contest of leaders, and until the
nominations were made, none could say where either party stood.
The independents, chiefly of Republican antecedents, hoped to retain
what had been gained in the last Administration. They hoped to extend
the reform in the civil service and to focus attention upon the tariff.
The failure of downward revision in 1883 had strengthened their hands
and increased their hopes. They had dallied with bolting movements and
threats so long that party regularity meant little to them. Either party
could obtain their support by nominating men who could be trusted to
stick to their platform. Arthur was not acceptable to them, and Blaine
was anathema.
The candidacy of Arthur was doomed to failure. He had alienated the
Stalwarts by his independence, while he had failed to win the reformers
because he had not invariably refrained from playing the politician. In
the fall of 1882 he had interfered in the campaign in New York, allowing
his Secretary of the Treasury, Charles J. Folger, while retaining that
office, to be the Republican candidate for governor. This had led to the
belief that the patronage was being used for local purposes, and had
stirred up an opposition to Folger which defeated him. Arthur's veto of
the Chinese Exclusion Bill and the River and Harbor Bill further
increased his unpopularity in various sections. He failed to win over
the Blaine faction, who regarded him as an intrusive accident and waited
impatiently for the next national convention.
Blaine was the leader of the Republican party in 1884, so far as it had
a leader, and he possessed all the weaknesses of such a leader as well
as personal weaknesses of his own. Rarely has it been possible to
nominate or to elect one who has gained a dominant place through party
struggles. Such men, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and their kind, have
commonly created enough enemies, as they have risen, to make them
unavailable as leaders of a national ticket. Blaine was handicapped like
these. His prolonged fight against Conkling and the Stalwarts created a
breach too deep to fill, while the old questions respecting his honor
would not down.
Early in 1884 Blaine was the leading candidate for the nomination in
spite of all opposition. The Republican National Committee was in charge
of men who sympathized with him. Dorsey had resigned as its secretary
after the star-route exposure, though his associate in land
speculations, Stephen B. Elkins, remained as one of the managers. The
control was in the hands of men who had close affiliation with the old
organization, and of the manufacturers who had blocked tariff revision
in 1883. It was improbable, in the opinion of many independents, that a
tariff reduction could be got from an Administration headed by Blaine;
they questioned his sincerity upon civil service reform; and they
thought it not right that any man, concerning whose character there was
a doubt, should be President. They put forward, within the party,
Senator George F. Edmunds, whom they had desired in 1880, and who had
since become President of the Senate. Other candidates with local
followings were General John A. Logan, of Illinois, John Sherman, and
the President himself.
The Chicago Convention of the Republican party, meeting early in June,
was the scene of a battle between the two elements in the party. At the
outset, the old independents, headed by Curtis, and reinforced by
younger men like Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, and Theodore
Roosevelt, of New York, broke the slate of the National Committee and
seated a chairman of their own choice. But the regulars rallied,
controlled the platform, and made the nomination. Blaine and John A.
Logan were selected, the former accepting the honor with secret
misgivings, for he had a clear understanding of the intensity of the
opposition within the party. The reformers went home discouraged, many
of them determined not to let party regularity hold them to Blaine.
Out of the nomination of Blaine grew the "Mugwump" movement, whose
influence was greater than that of the last bolt. The origin of the name
"Mugwump" is not entirely clear, but it was well known as an opprobrious
epithet, and was applied now by party regulars to the "holier-than-thou"
reformers. One of the regulars later quoted Revelation at them: "Thou
art neither hot nor cold ... so, then, I will spew thee out of my
mouth." They were more offensive to Republicans than were the Democrats,
while the latter were bewildered but cynical. "I know that to-day we are
living in a very highly scented atmosphere of political reform," said
one of the Democratic Senators a little later, "I know that under the
saintly leadership of the Eatonian school of political philosophers we
are all ceasing to be partisans, that we no longer recognize party
obligations, party duty, party discipline, and party devoirs; that we
are all to become reconciled to a life of political monasticism; but I
will continue to have one failing, and that is in my humble way to be as
watchful and as vigilant of the purposes, designs, and craft of the
Republican leaders as I have endeavored to be in the past."
The Mugwumps left Chicago and at once opened negotiations with the
Democratic leaders. The _Nation_ and the _Evening Post_ were already
with them. _Harper's Weekly_, which had been a Union journal in the war,
and Republican ever since, abandoned the party ticket. George William
Curtis, its editor, led in the revolt, and the Mugwumps met at the house
of one of the Harpers for organization, on June 17, 1884. Their problem
was whether to nominate an independent ticket and be defeated, or to
support and help elect a Democratic President, in case the Democrats
should be willing to coöperate with them.
Not all the reformers turned from Blaine. Whitelaw Reid, the successor
of Horace Greeley on the New York _Tribune_, remained regular. Lodge
went back to Massachusetts and persuaded himself to take part in the
canvass. Roosevelt, discouraged by the nomination of Blaine, remained
regular, but stepped out of the campaign and began his ranch life in the
Far West. With him, as with many others, it was a matter of conviction
that reform, to be effective, must be urged within the party. But enough
of the reformers went with the Mugwumps to lessen Blaine's chances of
election.
When the Mugwumps made overtures for fusion to the Democratic leaders,
they had in mind as a candidate a young Democratic lawyer who had
appeared as Mayor of Buffalo in 1881 and had been elected as reform
Governor of New York in 1882. He had secured the aid of independent
reformers in that campaign,--men who resented the candidacy of Folger
and the intrusion of the National Administration in local politics. As
governor he had speedily established his reputation for stubborn honesty
and independent judgment. Grover Cleveland had become, like Tilden, the
most promising candidate in a party that had no admitted leader.
The opposition from two elements in his party, at the Democratic
Convention in Chicago, strengthened Cleveland as the candidate of
reform. Ben Butler, who had himself been nominated for the Presidency by
an Anti-Monopoly Convention, denounced him as a foe of labor; and such
was Butler's reputation that his enmity was one of Cleveland's assets.
John Kelly, the chief of Tammany Hall, opposed him, too, having learned
to know him as Governor of New York. Well might Cleveland's friends say,
"We love him for the enemies he has made." They nominated him on the
second ballot, selecting Thomas A. Hendricks, of Indiana, to run with
him. Their platform was full of reform, even of the tariff, but on the
latter subject it was less specific than the tariff reformers had hoped.
As the parties stood in 1884, personal character meant more than
platform or party name. Cleveland possessed qualities that made his
appeal to independents quite as strong as it was to Democrats. With
older brothers in the army he had supported his mother during the war,
and had kept clear of copperheadism. He stood for sound money; he
believed in a tariff for revenue; he had proved his devotion to civil
service reform; he lacked the factional enemies who weakened the
candidacy of a prominent leader like Blaine; and his peculiar appeal to
Republican dissenters led the canvass away from issues into the field of
personalities.
The charge of the independents upon Blaine's personal honor caused the
Republican schism and drove the party regulars into a retort in kind.
The private life of the candidates was uncovered to the annoyance of
both and to the greater embarrassment of Cleveland. Nothing
discreditable to his honesty could be found, but an apparent lapse in
his private conduct gave the pretext for wild and dishonest attacks upon
his character. A few years later the novelist, Paul Leicester Ford, in a
keen study of New York politics entitled _The Honorable Peter Stirling_,
portrayed a situation somewhat resembling that of Cleveland, though
disclaiming Cleveland as his model. The Boston _Journal_ led in the
exploitation of the charges, and partisans forgot decency on both sides.
Nast, having formerly cartooned Blaine in the "Bloody Shirt," now turned
to "A Roaring Farce--The Plumed Knight in a Clean Shirt," while others
pointed out the fact that the admirer who coined the "plumed knight"
epithet had been counsel for the fraudulent star-route contractors.
Attempts were made to appeal to class hatred on both sides. Butler had
hesitated for several weeks in his acceptance of the nomination by the
Anti-Monopoly Convention. Greenbackers and a few labor leaders made up
his following, and it was supposed that they would draw votes from the
Democrats. After conference with Republican leaders, Butler agreed to
run, and it was freely charged that these leaders financed his campaign
to injure Cleveland. Republicans appealed to the Irish vote by recalling
Blaine's vigorous diplomacy against Great Britain; their opponents
caricatured Blaine by representing him as consorting with Irish thugs
and dynamiters. At the very end of the canvass a chance remark may have
decided the result.
So much had been said of character in the campaign that both candidates
brought out the clergy to give them certificates of excellence. In
October a meeting of clergymen of all denominations was held at the
Fifth Avenue Hotel to greet Blaine. The oldest minister, Burchard by
name, was asked to deliver the address, and while he spoke Blaine
thought of other matters. He thus missed a phrase which other hearers
caught and which the Democrats immediately advertised. It denounced the
Democrats as adherents of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion," and was
reported as conveying a gratuitous insult to the Irish vote. How many
Irish turned from Blaine to Cleveland in the last week of the campaign
cannot be said, but the election was so close that a few votes, swung
either way, could have determined it. Cleveland carried New York and won
a majority of the electoral college, but his popular plurality over
Blaine was only 23,000, while he had some 300,000 fewer than his
combined rivals. Butler drew 175,000 votes without defeating Cleveland.
Purists, disgusted with the personalities of the campaign, swelled the
Prohibition vote to 150,000.
On March 4, 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the first Democrat
elected President since James Buchanan. His Cabinet was necessarily
filled with men inexperienced in national administration, for the party
had been proscribed for six terms. The greatest attention was attracted
by the two former Confederates, Garland and Lamar, whose career did much
to disprove the "gloomy and baseless superstition" of twenty years,
"that one half of the nation had become the irreconcilable enemies of
the national unity and the national will." It was an American
Administration, and of its chief, James Russell Lowell, who had known
men in many lands, wrote, "He is a truly American type of the best
kind--a type very dear to me, I confess."
The State Department was entrusted to Thomas F. Bayard, who had been a
competitor for the nomination in 1884, and who sustained the tradition
that only first-rate men shall fill this office. Bayard proceeded at
once to undo the work of the last five years and to reverse a policy of
Blaine. A treaty with Nicaragua, negotiated by Frelinghuysen in
December, 1884, ran counter to the English treaty of 1850. After a vain
attempt to persuade Great Britain to abandon the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty
respecting an isthmian canal, Frelinghuysen had disregarded it and
acquired a complete right-of-way from Nicaragua. This was pending in the
Senate when Cleveland was inaugurated, and was withdrawn at once. The
United States reverted to the old Whig policy of a neutralized canal.
In all departments the new Administration was forced to test the
strength of its convictions upon civil service reform. During its long
years of opposition the party had often voiced a demand for reform, but
now in office its workers demanded the usual rewards of success.
Cleveland had fought the spoils politicians in New York, and had taken
counsel of Carl Schurz after his election as President. In the next four
years he nearly doubled the number in the classified service in the face
of opposition from his most intimate associates.
The problems of prosperity and national growth, developing in the
eighties and culminating between 1885 and 1889, involved administrative
efficiency rather than party policy. On every side the Government was
forced to expand its activities, and Cleveland was occupied in getting
new machinery into operation and meeting conditions for which no
precedents existed.
Organized labor had gained concessions from Congress in a Bureau of
Labor, in 1884, and an Anti-Contract Labor Law in 1885. These called for
sympathetic administration and encouraged labor to hope for more. During
1886 and 1887 the views of labor leaders attracted much attention
because of a series of strikes and riots. In the greatest of these the
local chapters of the Knights of Labor fought against the Gould railways
of the Southwest--the Missouri Pacific and the Texas Pacific. The strike
originated in March, 1886, in sympathy with labor organizers who had
been discharged by the railroad. Under the leadership of Martin Irons it
spread over the Southwest, causing distress in those regions which were
dependent upon the railroad for fuel and food and causing disorder in
the towns where the idle workmen congregated. Powderly and the other
chief officials of the Knights tried to stop the strike, but were
ineffective, while the railroad managers shaped events so as to divert
the sympathies of the Western people against the strikers. The Knights
never recovered from the blow which the loss of the strike inflicted
upon them.
In May, 1886, a general demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day
was planned and carried out. In Milwaukee riots ensued, the militia was
called out by Governor Rusk, and a volley was fired into the mob. In
Chicago the union movement was combined with anarchy and socialism, and
opponents of all did not discriminate among them. A meeting of the
anarchists was broken up by the police, several of whom were killed by
the explosion of a bomb thrown in the tumult. In 1887 a group of the
anarchist leaders were hanged, having been convicted of what may be
called constructive conspiracy. The unrest revealed by the strikes and
riots showed that the old period of uniform well-being and satisfaction
was over.
The demands made upon politics by organized labor were exceeded by the
demands of organized patriotism. The veterans of the Civil War, who were
in early manhood in 1865, were now in middle life, were possessed of
political influence, and turned to the National Government for personal
advantage. Advocates of protection acted upon the theory that for
national purposes special advantages ought to be given to manufacturers.
The same idea of government readily bestowed these advantages in return
for a past service.
The machinery of the veterans was the Grand Army of the Republic, which,
from being an unimportant, reminiscent league, had grown to be an
instrument for the procuring of pensions. The surplus tempted citizens
to make demands upon it; the number of soldier votes encouraged
politicians to comply with the demands. In 1879 the movement began with
an Arrears of Pensions Act, by which pensioners were entitled to back
pay from their mustering-out dates, regardless of the period at which
their incapacity set in. The next step involved the issuing of pensions
for incapacity and dependence, regardless of their cause, and opened the
way for pensions for service only. In 1887 Cleveland vetoed a pension
bill of this character, and prevented its passage until the term of his
successor, in 1890. He had already offended many of his supporters by
guarding the offices; his pension veto offended more by checking the
attack of the old soldiers on the Treasury. No one opposed the granting
of pensions to soldiers who had been injured in the Civil War, but the
demands of the leaders of the Grand Army, supported by the interests of
hundreds of attorneys who lived on pension claims, now assumed the
appearance of an organized raid on the Treasury. The general laws were
supplemented by special private pension laws, of which 1871 were sent to
Cleveland in four years. He vetoed 228 of these, often to his political
injury. In many cases these made allowances to persons whose claims had
been rejected by the Pension Bureau as inadequate or fraudulent. In the
course of time Cleveland became "thoroughly tired of disapproving gifts
of public money to individuals who in my view have no right or claim to
the same." The pension fund, he maintained, was "the soldiers' fund,"
and should be distributed so as to "exclude perversion as well as to
insure a liberal and generous application of grateful and benevolent
designs." In the ten years ending in 1889, Congress spent $644,000,000
on pensions; in the next ten it spent $1,350,000,000.
The surplus incited extravagance, and its reduction had been demanded on
this ground, the tariff appearing to afford the best method of
reduction. When the Democratic party gained control of the House, in
1883, it proceeded at once to discuss revision, and promptly uncovered a
difference of opinion among its members. The last Democratic Speaker of
the House had been Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who
had been trained in the philosophy of Henry Clay and in the interests of
a great manufacturing State. He was by conviction and association a
protectionist, and was a candidate for his party's nomination as Speaker
in the Forty-eighth Congress, which met in December, 1883. From this
date he ceased to lead his party in the House and became the leader of
an internal faction. John G. Carlisle, of Kentucky, supplanted him, was
elected Speaker, and organized the House in the interest of a tariff for
revenue only. For the next six years the Democratic organization of the
House was pledged to revision, but operated in the face of a growing
Republican opposition, and with Randall and the protectionist Democrats
attacking from the rear.
The election of Cleveland gave the Democrats control of two branches of
the Government, but left the Senate in the hands of the Republicans. It
was vain to talk of serious revision or any other party measure in a
divided administration, yet the President chafed under his inability to
fulfill party pledges. The surplus continued to accumulate, to permit
extravagance in Congress, and to arouse the cupidity of citizens. In his
message to his second Congress, in 1887, Cleveland startled the country
by devoting his undivided attention to this single topic. He set his
party a text which could not be evaded, although there was even yet no
reason to believe that a tariff bill could pass both houses. He had
taken Carlisle into his confidence before sending the message; the
latter entrusted the leadership in revision to Roger Q. Mills, of Texas,
a free-trader, whom he appointed as chairman of the Committee on Ways
and Means.
With the opening of the debate on the Mills Bill, in April, 1888, there
began "the first serious attempt since the war to reduce toward a peace
basis the customs duties imposed during that conflict almost solely for
purposes of revenue." Mills and William L. Wilson, who had been a
college president in West Virginia, bore the burden of advocacy of a
reduction of the revenue to the extent of $50,000,000. They were opposed
by a united Republican party, both frightened and gratified because the
issue had been made so clear. It was charged that the Committee on Ways
and Means had drawn up the bill in secrecy, and that a majority of its
Democratic members were Southerners who knew nothing of the needs of
manufactures. The danger to American labor from the competition of the
pauper labor of Europe was urged against it. It was asserted to be a
pro-British measure, and stories were circulated of British gold, coming
from the Cobden Club, a free-trade organization, to subvert American
institutions. The Democratic organization drove the bill through the
House of Representatives in spite of all resistance. In the Senate, with
the Republicans in control, the bill never came to a vote, and was used
to manufacture campaign materials for the campaign then pending. Many of
the advisers of Cleveland had urged him to withhold the tariff message,
lest he arouse the enemy and defeat himself, but he had risked personal
and party defeat in order to get an issue definitively accepted--the
first issue so accepted in politics since 1864.
The Mills Bill fiasco was the most important party measure of
Cleveland's Administration, yet it served only to accentuate the
difficulties in tariff legislation which had been experienced in 1883,
and to provide an issue for the campaign of 1888. The laws that were
passed between 1885 and 1889 were generally non-partisan in their
character and were of most influence when they helped to readjust
federal law to national economic problems. The Federal Government was
unfolding and testing powers that had existed since the adoption of the
Constitution, but had not been needed hitherto in an agricultural
republic. The change that forced the resort to these powers came largely
from the completion of a national system of communication.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For the election of 1884, consult, in addition to Stanwood, J.F. Rhodes,
"The National Republican Conventions of 1880 and 1884" (_Scribner's
Magazine_, September, 1911), and "Cleveland's Administrations"
(_Scribner's Magazine_, October, 1911). There is an annotated reprint of
the "Mulligan Letters" in _Harper's Weekly_ (1884, pp. 643-46). The
biographies of Blaine by Hamilton and Stanwood should be examined, as
well as the sketches of Cleveland (who left few literary remains), by
J.L. Williams, G.F. Parker, and R.W. Gilder. Among partisan party
histories, the best are F. Curtis, _The Republican Party_, (2 vols.,
1904), and W.L. Wilson, _The National Democratic Party_ (1888). J.H.
Harper recounts details of the Mugwump split in his history of _The
House of Harper_ (1912). The standard compilation on the pension system,
which has not yet received adequate treatment, is W.H. Glasson,
_Military Pension Legislation in the United States_ (in Columbia
University Studies, vol. XII). C.F. Adams and W.B. Hale published useful
essays on the pension system in _World's Work, 1911_. H.T. Peck begins
his popular _Twenty Years of the Republic_ (1907) with the inauguration
of Cleveland in 1885. Consult also Sparks, Dewey, Andrews, and the
_Annual Cyclopædia_.
CHAPTER IX
THE LAST OF THE FRONTIER
Five statutes that received the signature of Grover Cleveland are
documentary proof of the new problems and the changing attitude of the
National Administration during the eighties. They indicate that the
chief function of the National Government had ceased to be to moderate
among a group of self-sufficient States and had come to be the direction
of such interests as were national in importance or extent. On February
4, 1887, the Interstate Commerce Law was passed in recognition of a
transportation system that had become national; and four days later the
Dawes Bill, providing that lands should be issued to Indians in
severalty, marked the disappearance of the wild Indian from the border.
In 1889 a Department of Agriculture, with a seat in the Cabinet, and a
law for the survey of irrigation sites in the Far West, mark the
interest of a nation in the prosperity of its whole area and population;
while laws of 1889 and 1890 admitting six new States extended the chain
of commonwealths for the first time from ocean to ocean. A process that
had been under way since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock had culminated in
the occupation of the whole breadth of the continent.
The first continental railroad, the Union Pacific, chartered in 1862
and finished in 1869, was admittedly a national project. Its purpose was
to bind the Pacific Slope to the East in a period when sectionalism was
a menace to national unity. Its opening was the first step in the
completion of an intricate system of lines extending to the Pacific.
Direct federal aid was given to the road in the form of land grants,
right of way, and a loan of bonds.
Other continental railroads were authorized in the later sixties. In
1864 a Northern Pacific, to connect Lake Superior and Puget Sound, made
its appearance. In 1866 the Atlantic & Pacific was given the right to
run from a southwestern terminal at Springfield, Missouri, to southern
California. In 1871 the Texas Pacific was designed to connect the head
of navigation on the Red River, near Shreveport and Texarkana, with Fort
Yuma and San Diego. Additional lines with continental possibilities
received charters from the Western States,--the Denver & Rio Grande, the
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé,--and
received indirectly a share of the public domain as an inducement to
build. Congress stopped making land grants for this purpose in 1871, but
not until more lines than could be used for twenty years had been
allowed.
All the continental railways were begun before 1873, were checked by the
five years of depression, and were revived about 1878. When they began
again to build there was associated with them a new project for an old
continental route.
The interoceanic canal had been foreseen ever since the first white man
stood on the Isthmus and gazed at the Pacific. Its construction had been
stimulated by the gold discoveries and the California emigration of
1848-49, and had been arranged for in a treaty signed with Great Britain
in 1850. No means to build the canal were found, however, and the
project drifted along until De Lesseps finished his canal at Suez, and
the new interest in continental communication in America resuscitated
the canal at Panama. In 1878 a French company, with De Lesseps at its
head, obtained a concession from Colombia. It began work in 1880, at
once arousing the jealousy of the United States which was shown in the
efforts of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty and procure for the United States a free hand at the Isthmus.
Cleveland reverted to the policy of a neutralized canal in 1885, but
interest on either side was premature, since no canal was built for
thirty years.
The continental railways aroused keen interest in problems of
transportation by their completion between 1881 and 1885. The Northern
Pacific was finished under the direction of Henry Villard, a German
journalist who had been a correspondent in the Civil War and had managed
the interests of foreign investors after 1873. He gained control of the
partly finished Northern Pacific and the local lines of Oregon through a
holding company known as the Oregon & Transcontinental. In September,
1883, he took a special train, full of distinguished visitors, over his
lines to witness the driving of the last spike near Helena, Montana. On
the way out, they stopped at Bismarck to help lay the corner-stone for
an ambitious new capitol of the Territory of Dakota. From Duluth to
Tacoma the new line brought in immigrants whose freight made its chief
business.
South of the Northern Pacific, the original main line of the Union
Pacific ran from Omaha up the Platte Trail through Cheyenne to Ogden,
with a branch from Kansas City to Denver and Cheyenne. Between the main
line and the branch the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy constructed a road
that reached Denver in May, 1882. Here it met, in 1883, the Denver & Rio
Grande, a narrow-gauge road that penetrated the divide by way of the
cañon of the Arkansas River, and extended to the Great Salt Lake. The
two roads together offered a competition to the Union Pacific for its
whole length from the Missouri River to Ogden, and drove that road to
extend feeder branches south to the Gulf and north into Oregon.
Farther south the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé stretched the whole length
of Kansas and followed the old trail to Santa Fé and the Rio Grande, and
thence to Old Mexico. Its owners coöperated with the owners of the
Atlantic & Pacific franchise, and the Southern Pacific of California, to
build a connecting link between the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé at
Albuquerque and the Colorado River at the Needles. From this point the
Southern Pacific traversed the valleys of California. In October, 1883,
trains were running from San Francisco to St. Louis over this road.
[Illustration: By 1870 the railway net had covered the eastern half of
the United States and had just begun its Pacific extension. There were
52,914 miles of railroad.]
[Illustration: By 1890 the railway mileage of the United States had
increased to 163,597, extending the railway net over the whole
trans-Missouri region, and reinforced by lines in Canada and Mexico.
THE WESTERN RAILROADS AND THE CONTINENTAL FRONTIER, 1870-1890
(Based upon the maps showing density of population in the Eleventh
Rand-McNally Official Rail-Census, and upon Appleton's Railway Guide,
November, 1871, and the way Guide, August, 1891.)]
The Southern Pacific of California met the other continental lines at
the Fort Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. The Texas Pacific had got
only to Fort Worth before the panic of 1873. It now built across Texas
toward El Paso. Subsidiary corporations owned by the Southern Pacific
men built the line between El Paso and Fort Yuma, and enabled a through
service to start to St. Louis in January, and to New Orleans in October,
1882. Yet another Southern Pacific line was opened through San Antonio
and Houston, tapping the commerce of the Gulf shore, and running trains
to New Orleans in February, 1883.
The opening of great lines in the United States in the early eighties
was part of a similar movement throughout the world. In Canada, Sir
Donald Smith, later raised to the peerage as Lord Strathcona, was
beginning the Canadian Pacific from Port Arthur to Vancouver, while on
the Continent of Europe the first train of the "Orient Express" left
Paris for Constantinople in June, 1883. In November, 1883, the American
railroads, realizing that they were a national system, agreed upon a
scheme of standard time by which to run their trains. Heretofore every
road had followed what local time it chose, to the confusion of the
traveling public.
Most of the continental railways had extensive land grants, of from
twenty to forty sections per mile of track, but whether they had lands
to sell or not they were vitally interested in the settlement of the
regions through which they ran. Each encouraged immigration and
colonization. Their literature, scattered over Europe, was one factor in
the heavy drift of population that started after 1878. Six new Western
States were created in the ten years after their completion.
The youngest American Territory in the eighties was Wyoming, created in
1868, and the youngest State was Colorado, admitted in 1876. After
Colorado, the political division of the West embraced eight organized
Territories: Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington along the Canadian
line, Wyoming and Utah in the middle, Arizona and New Mexico on the
Mexican border. Besides these Territories there was the unorganized
remnant of the Indian country known as Indian Territory, and attracting
the covetous glances of frontiersmen in all the near-by Western States.
Agriculture was the main reliance of the wave of pioneers that poured
over the plains along the lines of the railroads. In the valley of the
Red River of the North, wheat-farming was their staple industry. As the
Old South had devoted itself to the staple crop of cotton, so this new
region took up the single crop of wheat, bringing to its cultivation
great machines, white labor, and a modified factory system. South of the
wheat country, corn dominated in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, and went to
market either as grain or in the converted form of hogs or stock. In
Texas the cotton-fields pushed into new areas. The farm lands completely
surrounded the Indian Territory, in which a diversified agriculture was
known to be both possible and profitable.
Across the United States, from Canada to Mexico, the advance line of
farms pushed from the well-watered bottoms of the Mississippi Valley
into the plains that rise toward the Rocky Mountains. Near the
ninety-seventh meridian the rainfall of this region becomes insufficient
for general farming in ordinary years. But the solicitations of
land-sellers brought settlers into the sub-humid region, while for a few
years in the eighties the rainfall was greater than the average.
Permanent climatic changes were imagined by the hopeful. A Governor of
Kansas stated, in 1886, "with absolute certainty, that great areas in
the Western third of Kansas are becoming more fertile," while an Eastern
Senator, who was generally well informed, believed in 1888 that "the
whole Territory of Dakota is as capable of sustaining population as
Iowa."
Between the farming frontier and the mountains the cattlemen expanded
the grazing industry, with profits that were enlarged because of the
markets that the railroads brought them. The "long drive" from Texas to
Montana became a familiar idea on the border, while the cowboys in their
lonely watches developed a folk-song literature that is typically
American. Between the cattlemen and the sheepmen there was permanent
war, for the sheep injured the grass they grazed over. Although both
industries were trespassers on the public lands the herders resented the
appearance of the flocks as an intrusion upon their domain.
Kansas City rose suddenly to prominence as the meeting-place of the
railways of the West and Southwest with those of the East. Near to the
line that divided steady agriculture from the nomadic life of the
plains it became a convenient market for both. Here the packers
developed the traffic in fresh beef that the new railways with their
refrigerator cars made possible. The cities of the East, in need of more
fresh meat than the local farmers could provide, found their supply on
the plains of the Far West.
Beyond the plains, the mountain regions changed less from the advent of
the railways than any other section of the remote West. They had
attracted population to their camps during the Civil War, and now they
grew in size and permanence. But only such regions reached permanent
importance as had valleys to be irrigated and fields to be cultivated.
Without agriculture no important region has flourished in the West.
Toward the end of the eighties the pressure of the population for more
homestead lands brought about the opening of Oklahoma. Here, for over
half a century, the Indian tribes had lived in full possession. After
the Civil War the plains tribes had been colonized here too. Now, as the
lands were awarded to the Indians in severalty under the Dawes Act, the
old tribal holdings were surrendered and large areas were offered to
white settlement. After ten years of ejectment and restraint the
Oklahoma boomers were let into the country in 1889. Guthrie and Oklahoma
City were created overnight, and in 1890 the Territory of Oklahoma
received permanent organization.
Before the last continental railway was finished, the Territories were
asking for statehood and were showing advance in population to justify
it. When Villard aided in the corner-stone laying at Bismarck in 1883
there were already three clearly defined groups of population in Dakota
and an ultimate division had been determined upon by the settlers.
Repeatedly, in the decade, the Dakota colonists framed constitutions and
signed petitions, and the Republicans in Congress sought to give them
statehood. The Democratic House, which prevailed from 1883 to 1889, saw
no reason for creating more Republican States, as these would likely be,
and found pretexts for holding up the bills. Montana, less advanced than
Dakota, and Idaho and Wyoming which were yet more primitive, joined the
forces of the statehood advocates. Arizona and New Mexico did the same,
and Utah had been a suitor since 1850. Washington, with a growing
population on Puget Sound and in the Spokane country, was obviously not
long to be denied.
For party purposes, the Democrats resisted the demands for statehood
until the election of 1888 insured Republican control through every
branch of the United States Government. Thereafter there was no point to
resistance, and Cleveland, in 1889, signed an "omnibus" bill under which
North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington were admitted. Idaho
and Wyoming, defeated at this time, were let in by the Republicans in
1890. The unorganized frontier was now all but gone, and the pioneers of
these new States used Pullman cars and read the monthly magazines like
any other citizens.
Arizona and New Mexico were excluded from the new States of 1889 and
1890 because a Republican Congress expected them to be Democratic, and
both remained Territories for more than twenty succeeding years. Utah,
with ample population, was kept where the Federal Government could
control it because of the practices taught by its Church. The Mormons
had made a prosperous Territory in Utah by 1850. They had flourished
ever since, but their institution of polygamy frightened the United
States and created permanent hostility to their admission. In 1882 the
Territory was placed under a commission, and thereafter polygamous
citizens were brought to punishment. In 1890 the Church gave up the
fight and formally abandoned the obnoxious doctrine, but the surrender
came too late to accomplish admission at this time.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, 1789-1904
The large rectangle represents the total land area of the United States,
excluding Alaska and the Islands
1,902,000,000 Acres
+-----------------------------------------------------------+-------------+
| |Land area of |
| |the thirteen |
| |original |
| |states |
| |and Maine, |
| |Vermont, West|
| Public lands remaining in the possession |Virginia, |
| of the United States in 1904 |Kentucky, |
| about 700,000,000 Acres |Tennessee, |
| |and Texas, |
| |in none |
| |of which |
| |has the |
| |public domain|
| |ever existed |
+-----------+------------+------------+---------------------+ |
|Area |Land grants |Donations |Sales to companies | 460,000,000 |
|given to | for | to the | or individuals | Acres |
|individuals| internal | states for | under preëmption | |
|in the |improvements| education | and general laws, | (Diagram |
|form of | and | and | and private land | based upon |
|homesteads |railroads | other | claims allowed | the Report |
|or | | local | | of the |
|allotments | | purposes | | Public Lands |
| | | | | Commission |
| | | | | and the |
|122,000,000|137,000,000 | 164,000,000| 319,000,000 | Report of the |
|Acres | Acres | Acres | Acres | Commissioner |
| | of the |
| Land area of the twenty-nine states constituting the | General Land |
| public domain. 1,442,000,000 Acres | Office, 1905) |
+---------------------------------------------------------+---------------+
By 1890 the good agricultural lands of the United States were nearly all
in private hands. Their occupation had been hastened in the last five
years by facility of access and the efforts of the railways. With the
disappearance of free lands a new period in America began, as was
recognized at the time, and has become clearer ever since.
Out of forty-eight States comprising the United States in 1912, and
including about 1,902,000,000 acres, twenty-nine with 1,442,000,000
acres had been erected in the public domain to which Congress had once
owned title. By cession, purchase, or conquest this domain had been
acquired between 1781 and 1853; it had been treated as a national asset
and governed with what efficiency Congress possessed. By 1903 the United
States had transferred to individuals about half its public land and
nearly all its farm land. It retained many millions of acres, but these
were mountain or desert, and were not usable by the individual farmer
who had been the typical unit in the occupation of the West.
Already, by 1880, the statisticians had recognized that the period of
free land was at an end, and had turned their attention to the abuses
which had arisen in the administration of the estate. From the
beginning, it had been difficult to compel the West to respect national
land laws. The squatter who occupied lands without title had always been
an obstacle to uniform administration. Evasion of the law had rarely
been frowned upon by Western opinion, which had hoped to get the public
lands into private hands by the quickest route. In the region where the
laws had to be enforced, opinion prevented it, while the National
Administration, before the adoption of civil service reform, was
incapable of directing with accuracy and uniform policy any
administrative scheme which must be so highly technical as a land
office. The Preëmption, Homestead, and Timber Culture Laws were all
framed in the interest of the small holder, but were all perverted by
fraud and collusion. The United States invited much of the fraud by
making no provision by which those industries which had a valid need for
a large acreage could get it legally.
Among the special abuses that were observed now that it was too late to
remedy them were the violations of the law and the lawless seizures of
the public lands. The cattle companies took and fenced what they needed
and drove out "trespassers" by force. Mail contractors complained of
illegal inclosures which they dare not cross, but which diverted the
United States mail from its lawful course. Yet such was the general land
law that against all but the United States Government the possessors
could maintain their possession. If the Government could not or would
not interfere, there was no redress.
These abuses had been noticed for many years, and were specially
advertised in the early eighties by the enormous holdings of a few
British noblemen. The problem of absentee landlordism was exciting
Ireland in these years. When Cleveland became President his Commissioner
of the General Land Office, Sparks, turned cheerfully and vigorously to
reform, and denounced the discreditable condition the more readily
because it had appeared under Republican administration. He held up the
granting of homestead and preëmption titles for the purpose of
examination and inspection, and demanded the repeal of the Preëmption
Law. He was successful in recovering some of the lands that had been
offered to the railways to aid in their construction.
The railway land grants were notorious because the railways had rarely
been done on contract time, and had in theory forfeited their grants.
The estimated area offered them was about 214,000,000 acres, and the
question arose as to the extent to which forfeiture should be imposed
upon them. The spectacular completion of their lines and their efforts
to bring a population into the West, and the vast size of the
corporations that owned them, had aroused a hostile opinion that
supported the Democratic Administration in its efforts to save what
lands it could. Some fifty million acres were restored to the domain by
this fight, but the restoration only emphasized the fact that most of
the good lands were gone.
Out of the demand for the reform of the public lands grew a new interest
in the condition of the lands that were left. The Department of
Agriculture was created at the end of Cleveland's term, and Governor
Jeremiah Rusk was appointed as its first Secretary by Harrison. Rusk
accepted cheerfully his place as "the tail of the Cabinet," asserting
that as such he was expected "to keep the flies off," and set about
rearranging or organizing a group of scientific bureaus. Since most of
the remaining lands could not be used without irrigation, the surveys
undertaken by Congress started a new phase of public science, and led
ultimately to the rise of a positive theory of conservation.
The problems of national communication, Western settlement, and public
lands resulted from the completion of the continental railways, while
the railways themselves gave a new significance to transportation in
America. During the years of the Granger movement the doctrine had been
established that railroads are quasi-public and are subject to
regulation by public authority. In the Granger Cases in 1877 the Supreme
Court recognized the right of the States to establish rates by law, even
when these rates, by becoming part of a through rate, had an incidental
effect upon interstate commerce. The problem had been viewed as local
or regional during the seventies. Most of the States had passed railway
laws and had proceeded to accumulate a volume of statistical information
upon the railway business, that was increased by such public
investigations as the Windom and Hepburn Reports and by lawsuits that
revealed the nature of special favors and rebates.
Before the States had gone far in the direction of railway regulation it
was discovered that no State could regulate an interstate railway with
precision and justice. The great systems built up by Villard and Gould
and Vanderbilt and Huntington dominated whole regions and precipitated
the question of the effectiveness of state action. The continental
lines, necessarily long and traversing several States, emphasized the
inequality between the powers of a State and the problem to be met.
Their national character pointed to national control.
In Congress there were repeated attempts after 1873 to secure the
passage of an Interstate Commerce Act. In continuation of this campaign
a committee headed by Senator Shelby M. Cullom, of Illinois, made a new
investigation in 1885, and reported early in 1886 that supervision and
publicity were required, and that these could best be obtained through a
federal commission with large powers of taking testimony and examining
books. The committee was convinced, as the public was already convinced,
that the problem had become national.
The Supreme Court reached the same opinion in 1886 when it handed down a
new decision in the case of the Wabash Railway Company vs. Illinois.
Here it reversed or modified its own decision in the Granger Cases. In
1877 it had ruled that railways are subject to regulation and that the
States under their police powers may regulate. It now adhered to its
major premise, but declared that such regulation as affected an
interstate rate is exclusively a federal function. In effect it
determined that if there was to be regulation of the great systems it
could only be at the hands of Congress.
The regulation of interstate commerce was not a party measure. It had
its advocates in both parties, and found its opponents in the railroad
lobby that resented any public interference with the business of the
roads. The railway owners and directors were slower than the public in
accepting the doctrine of the quasi-public nature of their business. It
was a powerful argument against them that their size and influence were
such that they could and did ruin or enrich individual customers, and
that they could make or destroy whole regions of the West. Enough
positive proof of favoritism existed to give point to the demand that
the business must cease to discriminate.
The Interstate Commerce Act became a law February 4, 1887. It created a
commission of five, with a six-year term and the proviso that not more
than three of the commissioners should belong to one party. It forbade a
group of practices which had resulted in unfair discrimination and gave
to the commission considerable powers in investigation and interference.
The later interpretation of the law deprived the commission of some of
the powers that, it was thought, had been given to it, but during the
next nineteen years the Interstate Commerce Commission was a central
figure in the solution of the railroad problem. The work of this
commission, like the work of irrigation and agriculture, was technical,
calling for expert service, and aiding in the process that was changing
the character of the National Administration as one function after
another was called into service for the first time.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
In 1893 F.J. Turner called attention to the _Significance of the
Frontier in American History_ (in American Historical Association,
Annual Report, 1893). His theory has been elaborated by F.L. Paxson,
_The Last American Frontier_ (1910), and K. Coman, _Economic Beginnings
of the Far West_ (1912). There is no good account of the public lands.
T. Donaldson, _The Public Domain_ (1881), is inaccurate, antiquated, and
clumsy, but has not been supplanted. Many useful tables are in the
report of the Public Lands Commission created by President Roosevelt (in
58th Congress, 3d session, Senate Document, No. 189, Serial No. 4766).
The general spirit of the frontier in the eighties has been appreciated
by Owen Wister, in _The Virginian_ (1902), and _Members of the Family_
(1911), and by E. Talbot, in _My People of the Plains_ (1906). J.A.
Lomax has preserved some of its folklore in _Cowboy Songs and Other
Frontier Ballads_ (1910). The best narratives on the continental
railways are J.P. Davis, _Union Pacific Railway_ (1894), and E.V.
Smalley, _The Northern Pacific Railroad_ (1883). Many contributory
details are in H. Villard, _Memoirs_ (2 vols., 1904), E.P. Oberholtzer,
_Jay Cooke_ (2 vols., 1907), and in the appropriate volumes of H.H.
Bancroft, _Works_. L.H. Haney has compiled the formal documents in his
_Congressional History of Railroads_ (in Bulletins of the University of
Wisconsin, Nos. 211 and 342). The debate over the Isthmian Canal may be
read in J.D. Richardson, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_; the
Foreign relations Reports, 1879-83; L.M. Keasbey, _The Nicaragua Canal
and the Monroe Doctrine_ (1896); J.B. Henderson, _American Diplomatic
Questions_ (1901); and J. Latané, _Diplomatic Relations of the United
States and Spanish America_ (1900).
CHAPTER X
NATIONAL BUSINESS
Transportation was a fundamental factor in the two greatest problems of
the eighties. In the case of the disappearance of free land and the
frontier, it produced phenomena that were most clearly visible in the
West, although affecting the whole United States. In the case of
concentration of capital and the growth of trusts, its phenomena were
mostly in the East, where were to be found the accumulations of capital,
the great markets, and the supply of labor.
Through the improvements in communication it became possible to conduct
an efficient business in every State and direct it from a single head
office. Not only railroad and telegraph helped in this, but telephone,
typewriter, the improved processes in photography and printing, and the
organization of express service were of importance and touched every
aspect of life. Journalism both broadened and concentrated. The
effective range of the weeklies and monthlies and even of the city
dailies was widened, while the resulting competition tended to weed out
the weaker and more local. Illustrations improved and changed the
physical appearance of periodical literature.
Social organizations of national scope or ambition took advantage of the
new communication. Trade unions, benevolent associations, and
professional societies multiplied their annual congresses and
conventions, and increased the proportion of the population that knew
something of the whole Union. A few periodicals and pattern-makers began
to circulate styles, which clothing manufacturers imitated and local
shopkeepers sold at retail. Mail-order business was aided by the same
conditions. A new uniformity in appearance began to enter American life,
weakening the old localisms in dress, speech, and conduct. Until within
a few years it had been possible here and there to sit down to dinner
"with a gentleman in the dress of the early century--ruffles, even
_bag-wig_ complete"; but the new standards were the standards of the
mass, and it became increasingly more difficult to keep up an
aristocratic seclusion or a style of life much different from that of
the community.
With the growth of national uniformity went also the concentration of
control. As the field of competition widened, the number of possible
winners declined. Men measured strength, not only in their town or
State, but across the continent, and the handful of leaders used the
facilities of communication as the basis for the further expansion of
their industries. Business was extended because it was possible and
because it was thought to pay.
Many of the economies of consolidation were so obvious as to need no
argument. If a single firm could do the business of five,--or fifty--it
increased its profit through larger and better plants, greater division
of labor, and a more careful use of its by-products. It could cut down
expenses by reducing the army of competing salesmen and by lessening the
duplication of administrative offices. The same economics in management
which had driven the Old South to the large plantation as a type drove
American industrial society toward economic consolidation and the
trusts.
The technical form of organization of the trust was unimportant.
Strictly speaking, it was a combination of competing concerns, in which
the control of all was vested in a group of trustees for the purpose of
uniformity. The name was thus derived, but it spread in popular usage
until it was regarded as generally descriptive of any business so large
that it affected the course of the whole trade of which it was a part.
The logical outcome of the trust was monopoly, and trusts appeared first
in those industries in which there existed a predisposition to monopoly,
an excessive loss through competition, or a controlling patent or trade
secret.
The first trust to arouse public notice was concerned in the
transportation and manufacture of petroleum and its products. Commercial
processes for refining petroleum became available in the sixties,
enabling improvements in domestic illumination that insured an
increasing market for the product. The industry was speculative by
nature because of the low cost of crude petroleum at the well and the
high cost of delivering it to the consumer. Slight rises in price caused
the market to be swamped by overproduction, and threw the control of the
industry into the hands of those who controlled its transportation.
Once above ground, the cheap and bulky oil had to be hauled first to the
refiner and then to the consumer. The receptacles were expensive, and
the methods of transportation that were cheapest in operation had the
greatest initial cost. Barrels were relatively cheap to buy, but were
costly to handle. Tank-cars were more expensive, but repaid those who
could afford them. Pipe-lines were beyond the means of the individual,
but brought in greater returns to the corporations that owned them.
It was inevitable that some of the dealers who competed in the
oil-fields of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia in the sixties
should realize the strategic value of the control of transportation and
profit by it. John D. Rockefeller happened to be more successful than
others in manipulating transportation. His refineries grew in size, as
they bought out or crushed their rivals, until by 1882 most of the
traffic in petroleum was under his control. Economy and sagacity had
much to do with the success, but were less significant than
transportation. Railway rates were yet unfixed by law and every road
sold transportation as best it could. Rockefeller learned to bargain in
freight rates, and through a system of special rates and rebates gained
advantages over every competitor. His lobby made it difficult to weaken
him through legislative measures, while his attorneys were generally
more skillful than his prosecutors before the courts. The recognition of
the existence of rebates did much to hasten the passage of the
Interstate Commerce Law. The group of corporations that flourished
because of them became the greatest of the trusts. By 1882 the
affiliated Rockefeller companies were so numerous and complicated that
they were given into the hands of a group of trustees to be managed as a
single business.
The Whiskey and Sugar Trusts, formed in 1887, had to do with commodities
in which transportation was not the controlling element. These
industries suffered from overproduction and ruinous competition, to
eliminate which the distilleries and sugar refineries entered into trust
agreements like that of the Standard Oil companies. Other lines of
manufacture followed as best they could. Before Cleveland was
inaugurated the trend was noticed and attacked.
Most of the agitation against the trusts came from individuals whose
lives were touched by them. Competition was ruthless and often
unscrupulous. Every man who was crushed by it hated his destroyer. There
was much changing of occupations as firms merged and reorganized and as
plants grew in size and ingenuity. Perhaps more workers changed the
character of their occupation in the eighties than in any other decade.
As each individual readjusted himself to his new environment, he added
to the mass of public opinion that believed the trusts to be a menace to
society.
As early as 1881 there was a market for anti-trust literature, for in
March of that year the _Atlantic Monthly_ printed the "Story of a Great
Monopoly," by Henry Demarest Lloyd, who became one of the leaders in the
attack. It had been fashionable to regard success as a vindication of
Yankee cleverness and worthy of emulation, without much examination of
the methods by which it was attained. The Standard Oil Company,
attracting attention to itself, raised the question of the effect of
industry upon society.
The evils ascribed to the trusts were social or political. In a social
way they were believed to check individualism and to create too large a
proportion of subordinates to independent producers. As monopolies, they
were believed to threaten extortion through high price. It was strongly
suspected of the largest trusts that having destroyed all competition
they could fix prices at pleasure. Economists pointed out that such
price could hardly be high and yet remunerative to the trusts, because
the latter did not dare to check consumption. But fear of oppression
could not be dispelled by any economic law.
The trust was believed to have an evil influence in politics, and to
obtain special favors through bribery or pressure. The United States was
used to the influence of money in politics, and distrusted public
officials. The state constitutions framed in this period were being
expanded into codes of specific law in the hope of safeguarding public
interests. There was little belief that corrupt overtures, if made by
the trusts, would be resisted.
Lloyd, and men of his type, believed in regulation and control. Some of
them became socialists. Others hoped to restore a competitive basis by
law. The greatest impression on the public was made by one of their
literary allies, Edward Bellamy.
Early in 1888 Edward Bellamy published a romance entitled _Looking
Backward_, in which his hero, Mr. Julian West, went to sleep in 1887,
with labor controversy and trust denunciation sounding in his ears, to
awake in the year 2000 A.D. The socialized state into which the hero was
reborn was a picture of an end to which industry was perhaps drifting.
It caught public attention. Clubs of enthusiasts tried to hasten the day
of nationalization by forming Bellamistic societies. Those who were
repelled by a future in which the trusts and the State were merged
became more active in their demand for regulation.
The legislative side of trust regulation, like that of railway
regulation, was made more difficult because of the division of powers
between Congress and the States. It was an interesting question whether
one State could control a monopoly as large as the nation. But the
States passed anti-trust laws by the score, as they had passed the
railway laws. As in the earlier case they found their model in the
common law, which had long prohibited conspiracies in restraint of
trade. One of the States, Ohio, with only the common law to go upon,
brought suit against the Standard Oil Trust and secured a prohibition
against it in 1892. It was relatively easy to attack the formal
organization of the trust, but in spite of such attacks concentration
continued to produce ever greater combinations, as though it were
fulfilling some fundamental economic law.
Those of the anti-monopolists who were also tariff reformers had a
weapon to urge besides that of regulation. They maintained that part of
the power of the corporations was due to the needless favors of
protection, which deprived the United States of the aid that competition
from European manufacturers might have given. They insisted that a
revision of the tariff would do much to remove the burden of the trusts.
The House ordered an investigation of the trusts while it was engaged on
the futile Mills Bill in 1888, but it was the latter that furnished the
text for the ensuing presidential campaign.
So far as the parties were concerned the Republicans took the aggressive
in 1888. Cleveland's emphasis upon tariff reduction was personal and
never had the cheerful support of the whole party. The manufacturers,
however, were thoroughly scared by the continued threats of revision. As
they had come, by supporting the party in power, to support the
Republicans, so they now organized within that party to save themselves.
Their leaders sang a new note in 1888, no longer apologizing for the
tariff or urging reduction, but defending it on principle,--on Clay's
old principle of an American system,--and asking that it be made more
comprehensive. From Florence, and then from Paris, Blaine replied to
Cleveland's Message of 1887, and his friends continued to urge his
nomination for the Presidency. Only after his positive refusal to be a
candidate did the Republican Convention at Chicago make its choice from
a list of candidates including Sherman, Gresham, Depew, Alger, Harrison,
and Allison. The ticket finally nominated consisted of Benjamin
Harrison, a Senator from Indiana, and Levi P. Morton, a New York banker.
The platform was "uncompromisingly in favor of the American system of
protection." It denounced Cleveland and the revisionists as serving "the
interests of Europe," and condemned "the Mills Bill as destructive to
the general business, the labor, and the farming interests of the
country."
The Democrats, as is usual for the party in power, had already held
their convention before the Republicans met. They had renominated Grover
Cleveland by acclamation, and Allen G. Thurman, of Ohio, as
Vice-President, and had indorsed, not the Mills Bill by name, but the
views of Cleveland and the efforts of the President and Representatives
in Congress to secure a reduction. For many of the Democrats the need to
defend tariff reform was so distasteful that they left the party,
blaming Cleveland as the cause of their defection.
The canvass of 1888 was not marred by the personalities of 1884. The
issue of protection was discussed earnestly by both parties, Blaine, who
returned from Europe, leading the Republican attack. The only exciting
incidents of the campaign had to do with the "Murchison Letter" and the
campaign fund.
Matthew S. Quay, whose career as Treasurer of Pennsylvania had not been
above reproach, was chairman of the Republican campaign committee.
During the contest it was asserted that he was assessing the protected
manufacturers and guaranteeing them immunity in case of a Republican
victory. He was at least able to play upon their fears and bring a
vigorous support to the protective promises of his party. His committee
circulated stories of the un-Americanism of Cleveland, charging that
free-trade was pro-British, and making capital out of the pension
vetoes. Toward the end of the canvass Sir Lionel Sackville-West, the
British Minister, fell into a Republican trap and wrote to a pretended
naturalized Englishman, who called himself Murchison, that a vote for
Cleveland would best serve Great Britain. His tactless blunder caused
his summary dismissal from Washington and aided the Republican cause
much as the Burchard affair had injured it four years before.
Harrison was elected in November as a minority President, Cleveland
actually receiving more popular though fewer electoral votes. He came
into office with a Republican Senate and a Republican House, able to
carry out party intentions for the first time since 1883.
Benjamin Harrison was never a leader of his party. He had a good war
record and had been Senator for a single term. His nomination was not
due to his strength, but to his availability. Coming from the doubtful
State of Indiana, he was likely to carry it, particularly since the
Republican candidate for governor was a leader of the Grand Army of the
Republic. Harrison's personal character and piety were valuable assets
in a time when party leaders were under fire. Once in office he had a
cold abruptness that made it easy to lose the support of associates who
felt that their own importance was greater than his.
Blaine, the greatest of these associates, became Secretary of State,
and soon had the satisfaction of meeting the Pan-American Congress that
he had called eight years before. In his interest in larger American
affairs he lost some of his keenness as a protectionist and acquired a
zeal for foreign trade. With England he had another unsuccessful tilt,
this time over the seals of Bering Sea.
In some of the appointments Harrison paid the party debts. Windom came
back to the Treasury, although ex-Senator Platt, of New York, claimed
that he had been promised it. John Wanamaker, who had raised large sums
in Philadelphia to aid Quay in the campaign, became Postmaster-General.
The Pension Bureau, important through the alliance with the soldiers,
went to a leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, one "Corporal"
Tanner, whose most famous utterance related to his intentions: "God save
the surplus!"
The Fifty-first Congress, convening in December, 1889, took up with
enthusiasm the mandate of the election, as the Republicans saw it, to
revise the tariff in the interest of protection. It chose as Speaker
Thomas B. Reed, of Maine, and revised its rules so as to expedite
legislation. William McKinley prepared a revision of the tariff in the
House, while another Ohioan, John Sherman, took up the matter of the
trusts in the Senate.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Law was enacted in July, 1890, after nearly
ten years of general discussion. Although formulated by
Republicans--Sherman, Edmunds, and Hoar--it was not more distinctly
a party measure than the Interstate Commerce Act had been. It relied
upon the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution as its
authority to declare illegal "every contract, combination in the form
of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of commerce among
the several States, or with foreign nations," and it provided suitable
penalties for violation. The most significant debate in connection
with it occurred upon an amendment offered by Representative Richard
P. Bland, of Missouri, who desired to extend the scope of the
prohibition, specifically, to railroads. The Senate excluded the
amendment on the ground that the law was general, covering the railroads
without special enumeration. The full meaning of the law remained in doubt
for nearly fifteen years, for few private suitors invoked it and the
Attorneys-General were not hostile to the ordinary practices of business.
A great financial depression which appeared in 1893 acted well as a
temporary deterrent of trusts. There was a suspicion that the law had
been intended not to be enforced, but to act as a popular antidote to
the McKinley Tariff Bill which was pending while it passed.
There were two reasons for a revision of the tariff in 1890. The
surplus, still a reason, added $105,000,000 in 1889, and continued to
embarrass the Treasury with a wealth of riches. Secondly, the election
of 1888 had gone Republican, and party leaders chose to regard this as a
popular condemnation of Cleveland and tariff reform, and a popular
mandate for higher protection, in spite of the fact that more Americans
voted for Cleveland than for Harrison. A third reason, alleged by the
opposition, was the necessity of fulfilling the pledges given by Quay
and the campaign managers to the manufacturers who contributed to the
campaign fund,--manufacturers who were parodied as "Mary":--
"Our Mary had a little lamb,
Her heart was most intent
To make its wool, beyond its worth,
Bring 56 per cent."
In April, 1890, McKinley presented his act "to equalize the duties upon
imports and to reduce the revenues." For five months Congress wrestled
with the details of the bill and the issues connected with it. In June
it rewarded the soldier allies of the Administration with a Dependent
Pension Act which granted pensions to those who could show ninety days
of service and present dependence, and which, aided by the previous
laws, relieved the surplus of $1,350,000,000 in the next ten years.
Early in July the Anti-Trust Act was passed. Two weeks later Congress
paused in its tariff deliberations to pass the Sherman Silver Purchase
Bill at the demand of Republican Senators from the Rocky Mountain
States, who wanted their share of protection in this form and were so
numerous as to be able to produce a deadlock.
The tariff that became a law October 1, 1890, was the first success in
tariff legislation since the Civil War. It enlarged protection and
reduced the revenue. The latter was done by repealing the duty on raw
sugar, which had been the most remunerative item of the old tariff, and
by substituting a bounty of two cents per pound to the American
sugar-grower, which further relieved the surplus. The sugar clause was
one of the notable features of the McKinley Bill, and was closely
related to a group of duties upon agricultural imports. There had been
complaint among the farmers that protection did nothing for them. The
agricultural schedule was designed to silence this complaint.
Another novelty in the bill was the extension of protection to unborn
industries. In the case of tin plate, the President was empowered to
impose a duty whenever he should learn that American mills were ready to
manufacture it. This was an application of the principle that went
beyond the demands of most advocates of protection.
A final novelty, reciprocity, was the favorite scheme of the Secretary
of State. Blaine, in his foreign policy, saw in the tariff wall an
obstacle to friendly trade relations, and induced Congress to permit the
duties on the chief imports from South America to be admitted on a
special basis in return for reciprocal favors. McKinley, as his
experience widened, accepted this principle in full, and died with an
expression of it upon his lips. But in 1890 most protectionists inclined
toward absolute exclusion, regardless of foreign relations, and were
ready to raise the rate whenever the imports were large.
In the passage of the McKinley Tariff Bill it was noticed that a third
body was sharing largely in such legislation. After each house had
passed the bill and disagreements on amendments had been reached, it was
sent to a Joint Committee of Conference whose report was, by rule,
unamendable. In the Conference Committee the bill was finally shaped,
and so shaped that the Republican majority was forced to accept it or
none. The party leaders who sat on the Committee of Conference were a
third house with almost despotic power, and were, as well, men whose
association with manufacturing districts or protected interests raised a
fair question as to the impartiality of their decisions. The Republican
reply, in their hands, to the assertion that the tariff was the mother
of trusts was to raise the tariff still higher and to forbid the trusts
to engage in interstate commerce.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The _Life of Henry Demarest Lloyd_, by C. Lloyd (2 vols., 1912) contains
an admirable and sympathetic survey of the growth of anti-trust feeling,
and should be supplemented by the writings of H.D. Lloyd, more
particularly, "The Story of a Great Monopoly" (in _Atlantic Monthly_,
March, 1881), and _Wealth against Commonwealth_ (1894). The philosophy
of Henry George is best stated in his _Progress and Poverty_ (1879), and
is presented biographically by H. George, Jr., in his _Life of Henry
George_ (1900). The most popular romance of the decade is based upon an
economic hypothesis: E. Bellamy, _Looking Backward_ (1887). J.W. Jenks,
_The Trust Problem_ (1900, etc.), has become a classic sketch of the
economics of industrial concentration. The histories of the Standard Oil
Company, by I.M. Tarbell (2 vols., 1904) and G.H. Montague (1903), are
based largely upon judicial and congressional investigations. The
Sherman Law is discussed in the writings and biographies of Sherman,
Hoar, and Edmunds, and in A. H. Walker, _History of the Sherman Law_
(1910). For the election of 1888, consult Stanwood, Andrews, Peck, the
_Annual Cyclopædia_, the tariff histories, and D.R. Dewey, _National
Problems, 1885-1897_ (in _The American Nation_, vol. 24, 1907).
CHAPTER XI
THE FARMERS' CAUSE
The Republican protective policy had its strongest supporters among the
industrial communities of the East where the profits of manufacture were
distributed. In the West, where the agricultural staples had produced a
simplicity of interests somewhat resembling those of the Old South in
its cotton crop, the advantage of protection was questioned even in
Republican communities. The Granger States and the Prairie States were
normally Republican, but they had experienced falling prices for their
corn and wheat, as the South had for its cotton, in the eighties, and
had listened encouragingly to the advocates of tariff reform.
Cleveland's Message of 1887 had affected them strongly. Through 1888 and
1889 country papers shifted to the support of revision, while farmers'
clubs and agricultural journals began to denounce protection. The
Republican leaders felt the discontent, and brought forward the
agricultural schedules of the McKinley Bill to appease it, but
dissatisfaction increased in 1889 and 1890 through most of the farming
sections.
The farmer in the South was directly affected by the falling price of
cotton, and retained his hereditary aversion to the protective tariff.
He could not believe that either party was working in his interests. The
dominant issues of the eighties did not touch his problems. He was not
interested in civil service reform, which was a product of a
differentiated society, in which professional expertness was recognized
and valued. He knew and cared little about administration, and being
used to a multitude of different tasks himself saw no reason why the
offices should not be passed around. In this view American farmers
generally concurred.
The Southern farmer was without interest in the pension system and was
prone to criticize it. The Fourteenth Amendment had forced the
repudiation of the whole Confederate debt, leaving the Southern veterans
compelled to pay taxes that were disbursed for the benefit of Union
veterans and debarred from enjoying similar rewards. They could not turn
Republican, yet in their own party they saw men who failed to represent
them.
In the North agriculture was depressed and the farmers were
discontented. In many regions the farms were worn out. Scientific
farming was beginning to be talked about to some extent, but was little
practiced. The improvements in transportation had brought the younger
and more fertile lands of the West into competition with the East for
the city markets. Cattle, raised on the plains and slaughtered at Kansas
City or Chicago, were offered for sale in New York and Philadelphia.
Western fruits of superior quality were competing with the common
varieties of the Eastern orchards. Here, as in the South, the farmers
saw the parties quarreling over issues that touched the manufacturing
classes, but disregarding those of agriculture.
It was in the West, however, that agricultural discontent was keenest.
In no other region were uniform conditions to be found over so large an
area. The Granger States had shown how uniformity in discontent may
bring forth political readjustments. The new region of the late eighties
lay west of Missouri and Iowa, where the railroads had stimulated
settlement along the farther edge of the arable prairies. Texas, Kansas,
Colorado, and the Dakotas had passed into a boom period about 1885, and
had pushed new farms into regions that could not in ordinary years
produce a crop. Only blinded enthusiasts believed that the climate of
the sub-humid plains was changing. In good years crops will grow as far
west as the Rockies: in bad, they dry up in eastern Kansas.
It served the interest of the railroads to promote new settlements, and
speculation got the better of prudence. The rainfall coöperated for a
few years, enabling the newcomers to break the sod and set up their
dwellings and barns. The quality of the settlers increased the dangers
attendant upon the community.
Under earlier conditions in the westward migration each frontier had
been settled, chiefly, by occupants of the preceding frontier, who knew
the climate and understood the conditions of successful farming. The
greater distances in the farther West, and the ease of access which the
railroads gave, brought a less capable class of farmers into the plains
settlements. Some were amateurs; others knew a different type of
agriculture. The population which had to deal with this new region was
less likely to succeed than that of any previous frontier.
The frontier of the eighties presented new obstacles in its doubtful
rainfall and its experimental farmers. It contained as well the
conditions that had always prevailed along the edge of settlement.
Transportation was vital to its life,--as vital as it had been in the
Granger States,--yet was nearly as unregulated. The Interstate Commerce
Law of 1887 had little noticeable immediate effect. Discrimination,
unreasonable rates, and overcapitalization were still grievances that
affected the West. The new activity of organized labor, shown in the
Western strikes of 1885 and 1886, added another obstacle to the easy
prosperity of farmers who needed uninterrupted train service. The germs
of an anti-railroad movement were well distributed.
An anti-corporation movement, too, might reasonably be expected in this
new frontier. Producing only the raw products of agriculture, its
inhabitants bought most of the commodities in use from distant sections.
They were impressed with the cost of what they had to buy and the low
price of what they sold. They were ready listeners to agitators against
the trusts.
Like all frontiers, this one was financed on borrowed money. The pioneer
was dependent on credit, was hopeful and speculative in his borrowings,
built more towns and railroads than he needed, and loaded himself with a
mountain of debt that could be met only after a long series of
prosperous years.
By necessity he was readily converted by the arguments of inflation.
Greenback inflation had run its course, and after the resumption of
specie payments in 1879 had been only a political threat without
foundation or many followers. A Greenback party, affiliating with labor
and anti-monopoly interests, had nominated Weaver in 1880 and Butler in
1884, but even inflationists had not voted for the ticket in large
number. A new phase of inflation had become more interesting than the
greenbacks, and had led to the demand for the free coinage of silver.
Among the demands of the Western farmer, whose greatest problem was the
payment of his debts, none was more often heard than that for more and
cheaper money. The Eastern farmer, though less burdened with debt, knew
that more money would make higher prices, and believed it would bring
larger profits. The Southern farmer, heavily in debt, not so much for
purposes of development and permanent improvements, as because he
regularly mortgaged his crop in advance and allowed the rural
storekeeper to finance him, was also interested in inflation as a common
remedy. Together the farmers of all sections kept pressing on the
parties for free silver after the passage of the Bland-Allison Bill in
1878. As the price of silver declined the gain which silver inflation
would bring them increased, and they were joined by another class of
producers whose profits came from mining the silver bullion.
The silver mines furnished important industries in Montana, Idaho,
Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California, and were highly valued
in most of the Western communities. As their output declined in value
after 1873, their owners turned to the United States Government for aid
and protection, not differing much from the manufacturers of the East
in their hope for aid. The restoration of silver coinage was the method
by which they desired their protection, and they asserted that Congress
could coin all the silver and yet maintain it at a parity with gold.
They were allies with the farmer inflationists so far as means of relief
were concerned, and both failed to see how incompatible were their real
aims. The miners wanted free silver in order to increase the price of
silver and their profits; the farmers wanted it to increase the volume
of money and reduce its value. If either was correct in his prophecy as
to the result of free coinage, the other was doomed to disappointment.
But the combined demand was reiterated through the eighties. While times
were good it was not serious, but any shock to the prosperity or credit
of the West was likely to stimulate the one movement in which all the
discontented concurred.
The crisis which precipitated Western discontent into politics came in
1889 when rainfall declined and crops failed. In the Arkansas Valley,
with an average fall of eighteen inches, the total for this year was
only thirteen inches. General Miles, who had chased hostile Indians
across the plains for more than twenty years, and who had seen the new
villages push in, mile by mile, saw the terrible results of drought.
First suffering, then mortgage, then foreclosure and eviction, he
prophesied. "And should this impending evil continue for a series of
years," he wrote, "no one can anticipate what may follow." The glowing
promises of the early eighties were falsified, whole towns and counties
were deserted, and the farmers turned to the Government for aid.
The Western upheaval followed a period in which both great parties had
been attacked as misrepresentative. There was a widely spread belief
that politicians were dishonest and that the Government was conducted
for the favored classes. It was natural that the discontented should
take up one of the agricultural organizations already existing, as the
Grangers had done, and convert it to their political purpose.
Since the high day of the Granger movement there had always been
associations among the farmers and organizations striving to get their
votes. The Grange had itself continued as a social and economic bond
after its attack upon the railroads. There had been a Farmers' Union and
an Agricultural Wheel. The great success of the Knights of Labor and the
American Federation of Labor had had imitators who were less successful
because farming had been too profitable to give much room for organized
discontent, while in times of prosperity the farmer was an
individualist. A new activity among the farmers' papers was now an
evidence of a growing desire to get the advantage of coöperation.
The greatest farmer organization of the eighties was the Farmers'
Alliance, a loose federation of agricultural clubs that reflected local
conditions, West and South. In the South, it was noted in 1888 as
"growing rapidly," but "only incidentally of political importance." In
Dakota, it had been active since 1885, conducting for its members fire
and hail insurance, a purchasing department, and an elevator company.
In Texas it was building cotton and woolen mills. The machinery of this
organization was used by the farmers in stating their common cause, and
as their aims broadened it merged, during 1890, into a People's Party.
In Kansas, during the summer of this year, the movement broke over the
lines of both old parties and had such success that its promoters
thought a new political party had been born.
Agricultural discontent, growing with the hard times of 1889, had been
noticed, but there had been no means of measuring it until Congress
adjourned after the passage of the McKinley Bill and the members came
home to conduct the congressional campaign of 1890. They found that the
recent law had become the chief issue before them. The so-called popular
demand for protection, revealed in the election of 1888, had after all
been based upon a minority of the votes cast. The tariff and the way it
had been passed were used against them by the Democrats and the Farmers'
Alliance.
The act was passed so close to election day that its real influence
could not then be seen and its opponents could not be confuted when they
told of the evils it would do. Before the election of 1888, as again in
1892, Republican manufacturers frightened their workmen by threats of
closing down if free-traders won. This time the tables were turned
against them by the recital of prospective high prices.
Corrupt methods in framing the schedules furnished an influential
argument throughout the West. Even in the East the tariff reformers
asserted that undue favors had been done for greedy interests; that
manufacturers who had bought immunity by their contributions to Quay's
campaign fund had been rewarded with increased protection. The farmers
believed these charges, plausible though unprovable, for they were
disposed to believe that both the great parties were interested only in
selfish exploitation of the Government to the advantage of politicians.
In every State Republican candidates had to meet this fire as well as
the local issues. In Maine, Reed met it and was elected with enlarged
majority from a community that wanted protection. In Ohio, McKinley lost
his seat, partly from the revulsion of feeling, but more because the
Democrats, who controlled the State Legislature, had gerrymandered his
district against him. Cannon, of Illinois, who had already served nine
terms and was to serve ten more, lost his seat, and LaFollette, of
Wisconsin, whom the protectionists had made much of, was checked early
in a promising career because of an educational issue in his State.
Pennsylvania, protectionist at heart, elected the Democratic ex-governor
Pattison again in one of its revulsions against the Quay machine.
The Democrats defeated the Republicans in the East while the Farmers'
Alliance undermined them in the West. In Kansas and Nebraska the
Alliance controlled the result, sent their own men to Washington, and
secured the Kansas Legislature which returned the first Populist
Senator. In several States fusion tickets were successful with
Democratic and Alliance support. In the South, Democrats found it aided
them in winning nomination--for the real Southern election was within
this party and not at the polls--to assert that they were and had been
farmers.
When the votes were counted the extent of the reaction was realized. The
last Congress had contained a safe majority of Republicans in each
house. The new Congress, the Fifty-second, chosen in 1890, had lost the
high-tariff majority in the lower body. Only 88 Republicans were
elected, against 236 Democrats and 8 of the Alliance. The Republicans
retained the Senate partly because of the "rotten borough" States, Idaho
and Wyoming, which they had just admitted.
The greatest factor in the landslide was the tariff, but this was,
largely, only the occasion for an outburst of discontent that had been
piling up for a decade. The dominant party was punished because things
went wrong, because the trusts throve and labor was uneasy, because
prices declined, because there were scandals in the Public Lands and
Pension Bureaus, and because the rainfall had diminished on the plains.
The new House elected a Georgian, Crisp, as Speaker, and the second half
of Harrison's term passed quietly. Among the people, however, there was
much conjecture upon the future of the Farmers' Alliance. A convention
at Cincinnati, six months after the election, tried to unite the new
element and form a third party of importance.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Union between the Knights of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance for
political purposes was the aim of the promoters of the People's Party, a
party that was to right all the wrongs from which the plain people
suffered and restore the Government to their hands. Until the next
presidential election they had time to organize for the crusade.
The United States, by 1890, had begun to feel the influence of the
agencies of communication in breaking down sectionalism and letting in
the light of comparative experience. Men who survived from the
generation that flourished before the war found their cherished ideas
undermined or shattered. In public life, administration, literature, and
religion the old order was being swept away. The United States had
become a nation because it could not avoid it. Even the Congregational
churches, with whom parish autonomy was vital, had seen fit to erect a
National Council. Every important activity of trade had become national,
and the only agency that retained its old localism was the law, which
must cope with the new order. In many ways the trust problem was the
result of an inadequate legal system which left a wide "twilight zone"
between the local capacity of the State and the activity of the Nation.
Yet the Nation was unfolding and expanding its powers. Railroad control,
immigration and labor control, agricultural experiment, irrigation, and
reclamation were only samples of the new lines of activity that created
new administrative machinery and advanced abreast of the new idea of
appointment because of merit and tenure during good behavior. Men who
continued to see the center of political gravity in the State
Governments were behind the times.
An indigenous literature was rising in the United States. Dickens had
lived long enough to recognize the spirit of a new school in _The Luck
of Roaring Camp_, and _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, which appeared in
1868. Before 1890 the fame of their author, Bret Harte, was secure.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), too, had seen the native field
and had exploited it. The New England school, Emerson and Longfellow,
Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, lived into or through the eighties, but
were less robust in their American flavor than their younger
contemporaries who picked subjects from the border. _Tom Sawyer_,
_Huckleberry Finn_, and the _Connecticut Yankee_ were life as well as
art. Another writer of the generation, William Dean Howells, gave _The
Rise of Silas Lapham_ to the world in 1885, and revealed a different
stratum of the new society, while the vogue of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_
tells less of the life therein described than of the outlook of American
readers.
Pure literature was in 1890 turning more and more to American subjects;
applied literature was searching for causes and explanations. The
writings of Henry George, particularly his _Progress and Poverty_,
brought him from obscurity to prominence in six years, and by 1885 had
"formed a noteworthy epoch in the history of economic thought." The
success of Bellamy's utopian romance proved the avidity of the reading
public. Parkman and Bancroft, of the older generation, Henry Adams,
McMaster, and Rhodes, of the younger, led the way through history to an
understanding of American conditions. Economics, sociology, and
government were beginning to have a literature of their own, the last
receiving its strongest impulse from the thoughtful _American
Commonwealth_ of James Bryce.
In the field of periodical literature the rising American taste was
supporting a wider range of magazines. The old and dignified _North
American Review_ was still an arena for political discussion. During
1890 it printed an important interchange of views between William E.
Gladstone and James G. Blaine, on the merits of a protective tariff.
_Harper's Monthly_ and the _Atlantic_ had given employment to the
leading men of letters since before the Civil War. _Leslie's_ and
_Harper's Weeklies_ had added illustration to news, making their place
during the sixties, while the _Independent_ held its own as the leading
religious newspaper and the _Nation_ appeared as a journal of criticism.
_Scribner's_ and the _Century_ had been added more recently to the list
of monthlies, the latter running its great series of reminiscences of
the battles and leaders of the Civil War and its life of Lincoln by
Nicolay and Hay. Improvements in typography and illustration, combined
with greater ease in collecting the news and distributing the product,
made all the periodicals more nearly national.
The periodicals, in a measure, took the place as national leaders that
the newspapers had before. The newspaper as a personal expression was
passing away, as the great editors of Horace Greeley's generation died.
The younger editors were making investments rather than journalistic
tools out of their papers. Trade and advertisement used this vehicle to
approach their customers. News collecting became more prompt and
adequate, but the opinion of the papers dwindled. They bought their
news from syndicates or associations, as they bought paper or ink. The
counting-house was coming to outrank the editorial room in their
management.
Through the new literature the changing nature of American life was
portrayed, and as the life reshaped itself under nationalizing
influences theology lost much of its old narrowness. Among religious
novels _Robert Elsmere_ was perhaps most widely read. The struggle
between orthodoxy and the new criticism had got out of the control of
the professional theologians and had permeated the laity. A revised
version of the Old and New Testaments gave new basis for textual
discussion. The influence of the scientific generalizations of Darwin
and his school had reached the Church and forced upon it a rephrasing of
its views. It was becoming less dangerous for men to admit their belief
in scientific process. The orthodox churches lost nothing in popularity
as the struggle advanced, and outside them new teachers proclaimed new
religions as they had ever done in America.
The greatest of the new religions was that of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, in
whose teachings may be found a religious parallel to the political
revolt of the People's Party. Christian Science was a reaction from the
"vertebrate Jehovah" of the Puritans to a more comfortable and
responsive Deity. It was the outgrowth of a well-fed and prosperous
society, presenting itself to the ordinary mind as "primarily a religion
of healing."
Intellectual, spiritual, economic, and political revolt were common in
America in 1890, as they must have been after the industrial revolution
of the last ten years. The whole nation was once more acting as a unit,
for the South had outlived the worst results of war and reorganization
and was again developing on independent lines. The immediate problem was
the effect of the revolt upon political control.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The materials upon the unrest of the later eighties are yet uncollected,
and must be pursued through the files of the journals, many of which are
named above in the text. The new scientific periodicals: _Quarterly
Journal of Economics_, _Political Science Quarterly_, _Yale Review_,
_Journal of Political Economy_, etc., devoted much space to current
economic and social analysis. F.L. McVey, _The Populist Movement_ (in
American Economic Association, Economic Studies, vol. I), is useful but
only fragmentary. The materials on free silver are mentioned in the note
to chapter XIV, below. A.B. Paine, _Mark Twain_, gives many
cross-references to the literary life of the decade. J.F. Jameson
discusses the fertile field of American religious history in "The
American Acta Sanctorum" (in the _American Historical Review_, 1908).
CHAPTER XII
THE NEW SOUTH
The Old South, in which two parties had always struggled on fairly equal
terms, was destroyed during the period of the Civil War, while
reconstruction failed completely to revive it. The New South, in
politics, had but one party of consequence. With few exceptions white
men of respectability voted with the Democrats because of the influence
of the race question which negro suffrage had raised. From the
reestablishment of Southern home rule until the advent in politics of
the Farmers' Alliance no issue appeared in the Southern States that even
threatened to split the dominant vote. But under the economic pressure
of the late eighties the old white leaders parted company and even
contended with each other for the negro vote to aid their plans.
The political influence of the Alliance cannot be measured at the polls
in the South as easily as in the West. In most States, in 1888 and 1890,
Alliance tickets were promoted, often in fusion with the Republican
party. The greater influence, however, was within Democratic lines, at
the primaries or conventions of that party. Here, among the candidates
who presented themselves for nomination, the professional politician
found himself an object of suspicion. The lawyer lost some of his
political availability. Men who could claim to be close to the soil had
an advantage.
The value placed upon the dissatisfied farmer vote is shown in the
autobiographical sketches which Senators and Representatives wrote for
the _Congressional Directory_ of the Fifty-second Congress. Some who had
never before held office stated the fact with apparent pride. One, who
appeared from the Texas district which John H. Reagan had represented
through eight Congresses, announced that he "became a member of the
Order of Patrons of Husbandry, and took an active interest in advocating
the cause of progress among his fellow laborers; is now Overseer of the
Texas State Grange and President of the Texas Farmer Coöperative
Publishing Association." From Georgia came several Representatives of
this type. One "has devoted his time exclusively [since 1886] to
agricultural interests, and is a member of the Farmers' Alliance."
Another was elected "as an Alliance man and Democrat." A third "was
Vice-President of the Georgia State Agricultural Society for eleven
years, and President of the same for four years; he is now President of
the Georgia State Alliance." A fourth, Thomas E. Watson, lawyer, editor,
historian, and leader of the new movement, "has been, and still is,
largely interested in farming." A South Carolina Representative covered
himself with the generous assertion that he was "member of all the
organizations in his State designed to benefit agriculture."
The agricultural bases of the Southern political disturbance lay in the
changes in tenure and finance that had recently appeared. The South was
not without a pioneer immigration resembling that of the West. Many of
the carpet-baggers had undertaken to develop farms there. There was much
opportunity for rural speculation that increased in attractiveness as
the area of free Western lands diminished. So far as this went, it
produced a debtor class and prepared the way for inflation.
But the development of new areas in the South was less significant than
the method of its industry. The disintegration of plantations continued
steadily through the seventies and eighties. The figures of the census,
showing tenure for the first time in 1880, and color in 1890,
exaggerated this, since many of the small holdings there enumerated were
to all intents farmed by hired labor and were only matters of
bookkeeping. Yet there was a marked diminution in the size of the
estates. A class of negro owners was slowly developing to account for a
part of the diminution. Frugality and industry appeared in enough of the
freedmen to bring into negro ownership in 1900, within the slave area,
149,000 farms, averaging 55 acres. There were at this time 2,700,000
farms in the South, and 5,700,000 in the whole United States. Negro
renters and negro croppers, many of whom labored under the direct
supervision of the white landlords, increased the number of individual
farmers, and like the rest lived upon the proceeds of the cotton crop
that was not yet grown.
Much of the capital that was used in Southern agriculture came from the
North through the manufacturers and wholesalers who supplied the retail
merchants of the South. These merchants advanced credit to their
customers, measuring it by the estimated value of the next crop. Once
the bargain had been struck, the farmer bought all his supplies from his
banker-merchant, paying such prices as the latter saw fit to charge.
There could be little competition among merchants under this system,
since the burden of his debt kept the planter from seeking the cheapest
market. The double weight of extortionate prices and heavy interest
impressed a large section of the South with the scarcity of cash and the
evils of existing finance.
In agricultural method as well as in finance the South was oppressed by
its system. The merchant wanted cotton, for cotton was marketable, and
could not be consumed by a tricky debtor. Single cropping was thus
unduly encouraged; diversified agriculture and rotation of crops made
little progress. The use of commercial fertilizers was greatly
stimulated, but agriculture as a whole could not advance.
Tied fast to a system nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum
plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton
was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties
intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation
movement that allied the South and West in the demand for cheaper money
and more of it. The Farmers' Alliance, with its demands for railroad
control, trust regulation, banking reform, and free silver, was the
logical vehicle for the expression of Southern discontent.
The white population of the South, undivided since the Civil War, was
confronted in 1890 by an issue that bore no relation to race and that
divided society into debtor and creditor classes. For twenty years, by
common agreement in which the North had tacitly concurred, the negro had
been suppressed outside the law. Occasional negroes had got into office
and even to Congress in reconstruction days. One, who described himself
as "a bright mulatto," sat in the Fifty-first and Fifty-second
Congresses, but in most regions of the South the negro had not been
allowed to vote or had been "counted out" at the polls, while only in
sporadic cases, mostly in the mountain sections, was the Republican
party able to get enough votes to elect its candidates.
The Farmers' Alliance split the white vote and gave to the negro an
unusual power. From being suppressed by all to being courted by many
involved a change that raised his hopes only to destroy them. The South
no sooner saw the possibility that the negro vote might hold a balance
of power between two equal white factions than it took steps to remove
itself from temptation and to disfranchise the undesired class.
The purpose of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been to raise
the freedmen to civil equality and protect them there. Pursuant to the
Fourteenth Amendment, Congress passed, in 1875, a Civil Rights Bill,
which forbade discrimination against any citizen in "the full and equal
enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges
of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places
of public amusement." It was restrained from imposing coeducation of
the races only by Northern philanthropists who were interested in
Southern education. Its compulsion was disregarded at the South, where
social equality between the races could not be attained. Innkeepers and
railroads continued to separate their customers, and in time a few of
them were haled into court to answer for violating the law. Their
defense was that the Fourteenth Amendment forbade discrimination by the
States, but did not touch the private act of any citizen; that it
protected the rights of citizens, but that these rights, complete before
the law, did not extend to social relations,--that attendance at a
theater is not a civil right at all, and may properly be regulated by
the police power without conflict with the Constitution. In the Civil
Rights Cases, decided in 1883, the Supreme Court released the
defendants, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment was too narrow in its
intention to justify Congress in the passage of a code of social
relations at the South. This part of reconstruction thus broke down,
leaving the negro population at the discretion of its white neighbors.
The Fifteenth Amendment, too, had been limited in its protecting force
before 1890. It forbade a denial of the right to vote by any State. The
Supreme Court easily determined that no violation could occur when a
hostile mob excluded negroes from the polls. It had been settled before
1890 that the negro was defenseless against personal discrimination. It
remained to be seen whether he could be disfranchised by law and yet
have no redress. Not till the South found some of its people appealing
for the negro vote in the crisis of the Farmers' Alliance did it take
the last steps in the undoing of reconstruction.
The Fifteenth Amendment was not explicit. Instead of asserting the right
of the negro to vote, it said, by negation, that the right should not be
denied on account of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
The three qualities of race, color, and servitude separated the races,
but the South learned that they were separated by other qualities that
were not proscribed by the amendment as a basis for the franchise. The
negro was generally poor, and any qualification based on property would
exclude him. He was shiftless, and often vagrant, and hence could be
touched by poll-tax and residence requirements. He was illiterate, and
was unable to meet an educational test. Tired of using force or fraud,
the South began in 1890 a system of legal evasion of the Fifteenth
Amendment.
The State of Mississippi, in a new constitution framed in 1890, defined
the franchise in terms that bore heavily upon the negro. In the debates
of its convention members talked frankly and freely of their intention
to disqualify the race; the clause bore no mention of discrimination. It
permitted persons to vote who, being male citizens over twenty-one, and
having reasonable residence qualifications, had paid a poll or other tax
for two years preceding the election, and could read, or understand and
interpret when read to them, any section of the constitution of the
State. Under this clause, between the cumulative tax and the large
discretionary powers vested in the officers of enrollment, the negro
electorate was reduced until it was negligible in Mississippi; and it
was a subject of admiration for other Southern States, which proceeded
to imitate it.
All of the cotton States but Florida and Texas, and most of the old
slave States, revised their electoral clauses in the next twenty years.
Arkansas, in 1893, based the franchise on a one-year poll-tax. South
Carolina, in 1895, used residence, enrollment, and poll-tax, while the
convention called to disfranchise the negro passed resolutions of
sympathy for Cuban independence. Delaware, in 1897, established an
educational test. Louisiana, in 1898, established education and a
poll-tax; North Carolina, in 1900, did the same. Alabama, in 1901, made
use of residence, registry, and poll-tax. Virginia based the suffrage on
property, literacy, or poll-tax in 1902. Georgia did the same in 1908,
and the new State of Oklahoma followed the Southern custom in 1910.
It was relatively easy to exclude most of the negroes by means of
qualifications such as these, but every convention was embarrassed by
the fact that each qualification excluded, as well, some of the white
voters. In nearly every case revisions were accompanied by a
determination to save the whites, and for this purpose a temporary basis
of enrollment was created in addition to the permanent. Louisiana
devised the favorite method in 1898. Her constitution provided that, for
a given period, persons who could not qualify under the general clause
might be placed upon the roll of voters if they had voted in the State
before 1867 or were descended from such voters. The "grandfather
clause," as this was immediately called, saved the poor whites, and was
imitated by North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Georgia. The governor
of Louisiana, in 1898, sang the praises of the new invention: "The white
supremacy for which we have so long struggled at the cost of so much
precious blood and treasure is now crystallized into the constitution as
a fundamental part and parcel of that organic instrument, and that, too,
by no subterfuge or evasions. With this great principle thus firmly
embedded in the constitution and honestly enforced, there need be no
longer any fear as to the honesty and purity of our future elections."
The Supreme Court, in Williams _vs._ Mississippi (1898), and Giles _vs._
Teasley (1903), declined to go behind the innocent phraseology of the
clauses, and refused to overthrow them.
Before the courts had shown their unwillingness to interfere, Congress
had done the same. Two methods of redress were discussed during the
years of Republican ascendancy, 1889-91. One of these contemplated a
reduction of the Southern representation in the House, under that part
of the Fourteenth Amendment that requires such reduction in proportion
to the number of citizens who are disfranchised. Although urged angrily
more than once, this action was not taken, and would not have affected
cases in which the denial was by force and not by law. To meet the
former situation the Republican party pledged itself in 1888. A Force
Bill, placing the control of Southern elections in federal hands was
considered. It received the enthusiastic support of Henry Cabot Lodge,
and was the occasion for another waving of the "bloody shirt." It passed
the House, with the aid of Speaker Reed, but in the Senate was abandoned
by the caucus and allowed to die in 1891. The South was left alone with
its negro problem. In the words of a Southern governor, "There are only
two flags--the white and the black. Under which will you enlist?"
The New South removed the negro from politics, but he remained, in
industry and society, a problem to whose solution an increasing
attention was paid. At the time of emancipation he was almost
universally illiterate and lived in a bankrupt community. Northern
philanthropy saw an opportunity here. The teachers sent south by the
Freedmen's Bureau stirred up interest by their letters home. In 1867
George Peabody, already noted for his benefactions in England and in
Baltimore, created a large fund for the relief of illiteracy in the
destitute region. His board of trustees became a clearing-house for
educational efforts. Ex-President Hayes became, in 1882, the head of a
similar fund created by John F. Slater, of Connecticut. Through the rest
of the century these boards, in close coöperation, studied and relieved
the educational necessities of the South. In 1901 the men who directed
them organized a Southern Educational Board for the propagation of
knowledge, while in 1903 Congress incorporated a General Education
Board, to which John D. Rockefeller gave many millions for the
subsidizing of educational attempts.
The negro advanced in literacy under the pressure of the new influences.
In 1880 seventy per cent of the American negroes over ten years old were
illiterate, but the proportion was reduced in the next ten years to
fifty-seven per cent; to forty-five per cent by 1900; and to thirty per
cent by 1910. As the negro advanced, his own leaders, as well as his
white friends, differed in the status to which they would raise him and
in the methods to be pursued. Some of his ablest representatives, W.E.B.
DuBois among them, resented the discrimination and disfranchisement from
which they suffered, and insisted upon equality as a preliminary.
Others, like Booker T. Washington, who founded a notable trade school in
Alabama in 1881, worried little over discrimination, and hoped to solve
their problem through common and technical education which might lead
the race to self-respect and independence.
Friction increased between the races at the South after emancipation.
Freedom and political pressure demoralized many of the negroes, whose
new feeling of independence exasperated many of the whites. Southern
society still possessed many border traits. Men went armed and fought on
slight provocation. The duel and the public assault aroused little
serious criticism even in the eighties, and the freedmen lived in a
society in which self-restraint had never been the dominant virtue. In
Alabama, in 1880, the assessed value of guns, dirks, and pistols was
nearly twice that of the libraries and five times that of the farm
implements of the State. The distribution of the races varied
exceedingly, from the Black Belt, where in the Yazoo bottom lands the
negroes outnumbered the whites fifteen or more to one, to the uplands
and mountains, where the proportions were reversed. But everywhere the
less reputable of both races retarded society by their excesses.
In spite of its unsolvable race problem the South was reviving in the
eighties and was changing under the influence of the industrial
revolution. Northern capital was a mainstay of its agriculture.
Transportation, manufacture, and city development found stimulation from
the same source. In 1884 the National Planters' Association promoted a
celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the export of the first
American cotton. In a great exposition at New Orleans they showed how
far the New South had gone in its development.
In the twenty years after 1880 the South became a modern industrial
community. Its coal mines increased their annual output from 6,000,000
tons to 50,000,000; its output of pig iron grew from 397,000 tons to
2,500,000; its manufactures rose in annual value from $338,000,000 to
$1,173,000,000, with a pay roll swelling from $76,000,000 to
$350,000,000. The spindles in its cotton mills were increased from
610,000 to 4,298,000. With the industrial changes there came a shifting
of Southern population. The census maps show a tendency in the black
population to concentrate in the Black Belt, and in the white population
to increase near the deposits of coal and iron. Factory towns appeared
in the Piedmont, where cheap power could be obtained, and drew their
operatives from the rural population of the neighborhood. Unembarrassed
by the child-labor and factory laws of the North, the new Southern mills
exploited the women and children, and were consuming one seventh of the
cotton crop by 1900. In Alabama, Birmingham became a second Pittsburg.
The Southern railway system was completely rebuilt after the Civil War.
In 1860 it included about one third of the thirty thousand miles of
track in the United States, but war and neglect reduced it to ruin.
Partly under federal auspices it was restored in the later sixties.
After 1878 it suddenly expanded as did all the American railway systems.
Texas experienced the most thorough change in the fifty years after the
Civil War. From 307 miles her railways expanded to more than 14,000
miles. Only one of the Confederate States, Arkansas, had a slighter
mileage in 1860, but in 1910 no one had half as much as Texas. The
totals for the Confederate area rose from 11,000 miles in 1870 to 17,000
in 1880, to 36,000 in 1890, to 45,000 in 1900, and to 63,000 in 1910.
After 1880 no Confederate State equaled Texas, whose vast area, suddenly
brought within reach of railway service, poured forth cotton until by
the end of the century she alone raised one fourth of the American crop.
Through the expanding transportation system the area of profitable
cotton culture rose more rapidly than the demand for cotton, and in
overproduction may be found one of the reasons for the decline in cotton
values in the early nineties. In the decline may be found an incentive
toward diversified agriculture. When cotton went down, farmers tried
other crops. The corn acreage in the ten cotton States passed the
cotton acreage before 1899, and with the diversification came no
decrease in the total cotton output, but an increase in general
agricultural prosperity. In many regions fruit culture and truck-raising
forced their way to the front among profitable types of agriculture.
In spite of the changes in industry and transportation the South
remained in 1910 a rural community when compared with the rest of the
United States. Out of 114 cities of 50,000 population in 1910, only 15
were in the Confederate area. But when compared with its own past the
South was developing cities at a rapid rate. Only New Orleans and
Richmond, in 1880, had 50,000 inhabitants. Atlanta, Charleston, Memphis,
and Nashville were added to this class by 1890. Texas had no city of
this size until 1900. But in 1910 she possessed four, Dallas, Forth
Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. As the cities increased in number,
bound together, and bound to the cities of the rest of the United States
by the ties of trade and society, the localisms of the South diminished.
The essential fear of negro control remained untouched, but in
superficial ways the Southerner came to resemble his fellow citizen of
whatever section.
The sectionalism which had made a political unit of the South before the
war was weakened. In the tariff debates of 1883 and later a group of
Southern protectionists made common cause with Northern Republicans.
Sugar, iron, and cotton manufactures converted them from the old
regional devotion to free trade. A fear of national power had kept the
old South generally opposed to internal improvements at the public cost.
The Pacific railroads had been postponed somewhat because of this. But
this repugnance had died away, and in the Mississippi River the United
States found a field for work that was welcomed in the South.
The Mississippi never fully recovered the dominance that it had
possessed before the war, but it remained an important highway for the
Western cotton States. The whimsical torrent, washing away its banks,
cutting new channels at will, flooding millions of acres every spring,
was too great to be controlled by States that had been impoverished by
war and reconstruction. In 1879 Congress created a Mississippi River
Commission. Unusual floods in 1882 attracted attention to the danger,
and thereafter Congress found the money for a levee system that
restrained the river between its banks from Cairo to the Gulf.
The mouth of the river, always choked by mud flats, was opened by the
United States in 1879. A Western engineer, James B. Eads, devised a
scheme by which the current scoured out its own channel and converted
itself into an ocean-going highway. He had already proved his power over
the Father of Waters by building the railroad bridge that was opened at
St. Louis in 1874. In 1892 other engineers completed a bridge at
Memphis.
The active development of the New South lessened the difference between
it and the rest of the United States, and brought it within the general
industrial revolution. By 1884 the trend was not noticeable. By 1890
the white population had divided over a political issue like the North
and West. In the years immediately following 1890 Populism was as much a
problem in the South as anywhere.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Most of the books relating to the South are partisan. The most useful
economic analyses are to be found in the writings of W.L. Fleming, U.B.
Phillips, and A.H. Stone. Special points of view are presented in A.B.
Hart, _The Southern South_ (1911), E.G. Murphy, _Problems of the Present
South_ (1904), E.A. Alderman and A.C. Gordon, _Life of J.L.M. Curry_
(1911), J.L.M. Curry, _A Brief Sketch of George Peabody_ (1898), J.E.
Cutler, _Lynch Law_ (1905), B.T. Washington, _Up from Slavery_ (1905),
W.E.B. DuBois, _Souls of Black Folk_ (1903), and J.L. Mathews, _Remaking
the Mississippi_ (1909). The _Annual Cyclopædia_ is full of useful
details. The Annual Reports of the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund, and
the United States Commissioner of Education contain statistics and
discussions upon Southern society. The Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S.
Reports) give the best treatment of the legal status of the negro, and
are supplemented by J.C. Rose, "Negro Suffrage" (in _American Political
Science Review_, vol. I, pp. 17-43,--a partial sketch only), and J.M.
Mathews, _Legislative and Judicial History of the Fifteenth Amendment_
(in Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. XXVII). There were
interesting articles on the New Orleans Exposition, by E.V. Smalley, in
the _Century Magazine_ for April and May, 1885.
CHAPTER XIII
POPULISM
The election of 1890 stunned and bewildered both old parties. The
Republicans lost their control of the Lower House, while the Democrats
paid for their victory the price of a partial alliance with a new
movement whose weight they could only estimate. Populism was engendered
by local troubles in the West and South, but its name now acquired a
national usage and its leaders were encouraged to attempt a national
organization.
In a series of conventions, held between 1889 and 1892, the People's
Party developed into a finished organization with state delegations and
a national committee. At St. Louis, in December, 1889, the Farmers'
Alliance held a national convention and considered the basis for wider
growth. The outcome was an attempt to combine in one party organized
labor, organized agriculture, and believers in the single tax. The
leaders of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor
were not averse to such common action, although the latter preferred
their own Federation to any party. The dangers of political action, seen
in the decline of the National Labor Union of 1866, did not check the
desires of the Knights in 1889, although the leaders found it easier
then, as later, to promise the support of organized labor than to
deliver it at the polls. After the St. Louis Convention the name
Farmers' Alliance merged into the broader name of the People's Party,
though the attempt to win the rank and file of the unions failed.
In December, 1890, the farmers met at Ocala, Florida, to rejoice over
the congressional victory and to plan for 1892. Since each of the great
parties was believed to be indifferent to the people and corrupt, a
permanent third party was a matter of conviction, and in May, 1891, this
party was formally created in a mass convention at Cincinnati.
Miscellaneous reforms were insisted upon here, but were overshadowed by
the demands of the inflationists. James B. Weaver, of Iowa, the old
presidential candidate of the Greenbackers, was a leading spirit at
Cincinnati. His best-known aide was Ignatius Donnelly, of Minnesota, a
devotee of the Baconian theory and of the "Lost Atlantis," who was now
devoting his active mind to the support of free silver. A national
committee was created after another meeting, at St. Louis in February,
1892, and on July 2, 1892, the party met in that city in its first
national nominating convention.
The platform of the People's Party was based on calamity. "We meet in
the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and
material ruin," it declared. "Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the
legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The
people are demoralized.... The newspapers are largely subsidized or
muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes
covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrating
in the hands of the capitalists."
The greatest of the evils in sight was "the vast conspiracy against
mankind," which had demonetized silver, added to the purchasing power of
gold, and abridged the supply of money "to fatten usurers." To correct
the financial evils the platform demanded "the free and unlimited
coinage of silver at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one," and an
issue of legal-tender currency until the circulation should reach an
average of fifty dollars per capita. Postal savings banks, a graduated
income tax, and economy in government were the subsidiary demands.
No demand of the Populists attracted so much attention as this for free
silver, but its platform touched reform at every angle. In the field of
transportation it asked for government ownership of railroads,
telegraphs, and telephones. It asked that land monopolies be prevented,
that the public lands be in part regained, and that alien ownership be
forbidden. It wanted the Australian ballot, liberal pensions,
restriction of immigration, an eight-hour day, a single term for
President and Vice-President, direct election of United States Senators,
abolition of the Pinkerton detectives, and was curious about the
initiative and referendum. It was in many respects a prophecy as to the
workings of reform for the next twenty years.
The People's Party entered the campaign of 1892 with this platform and
with the support of advanced reformers, with a considerable following
in the West and South, and with James B. Weaver and James G. Field as
candidates. Few of the workers for its ticket were politicians of known
standing, and its voters had a preponderance of youth. In several
Western States the Democratic party supported it with fusion tickets. In
the South it often coöperated with the Republicans. From the first the
third party found it harder to stand alone than to unite with the weaker
local party.
The disrupting force of hard times was increased by the acts of the
Republican party. Harrison's first Congress had passed a series of laws
that provoked opposition and criticism. The Interstate Commerce Law was
still new when he took office. In quick succession in 1890 came the new
States, and Oklahoma Territory, the Dependent Pensions Bill, the Sherman
Anti-Trust Bill, the Silver Purchase Bill, and the McKinley Tariff. The
dominant majority had used arbitrary methods to enforce its will and had
given to its enemies more than one text. After 1891 the Democratic
majority in the House reduced the Administration to the political
incompetence that had prevailed from 1883 to 1889.
Benjamin Harrison gained little prestige as the result of the
Administration. He had been nominated for his availability, and the
campaign songs had said as much of his illustrious grandfather, the hero
of Tippecanoe, as of himself. His appointments had pleased neither the
politicians nor the reformers, while there was much laughter at the
presence in the offices of numerous personal friends and relatives. The
most notable of his appointments was the most embarrassing.
James G. Blaine, as Secretary of State, found no topic in foreign
relations as interesting as the canal had been in his earlier term. The
wranglings with Great Britain and Germany over their treatment of
naturalized Americans had subsided. The fisheries of the North Atlantic
had been temporarily settled by President Cleveland. The regulation of
the seal fisheries of Bering Sea brought no new glory to Blaine.
There was no doubt that the seal herd of the Pacific was being rapidly
destroyed by careless and wasteful hunters from most of the countries
bordering on that ocean. On the American islands the herds could be
protected, and here they gathered every summer to mate and breed. But
the men who hunted with guns at sea, instead of with clubs on land,
could not be controlled unless the world would consent to an American
police beyond the three-mile limit. In an arbitration with Great
Britain, at Paris, Blaine tried to prove that the seals were American,
and entitled to protection on the high seas, and that the waters of the
northern Pacific were _mare clausum_. The arbitration went against him
on every material point.
The only episode that threatened war occurred in Chile. Here Harrison
had sent as Minister Patrick Egan, a newly naturalized Irishman and
follower of Blaine. In a revolution of 1891 Egan sided with the
conservative party that lost. His enemies charged him with improper
interest in contracts and with instinctive antagonism to British
interests in Chile. After the revolution a mob in Valparaiso showed its
dislike for Americans by attacking sailors on shore leave. Egan's
extreme demands for summary punishment of the rioters were upheld by
Harrison, who prepared the navy for war. Finally the Chilean Government
was forced to make complete apologies.
In the same year an American mob in New Orleans lynched several
Italians, and Blaine repelled with indignation the demand that indemnity
be accorded before trial and conviction. He could not even promise trial
because of the helplessness of the United States in local criminal
proceedings. The Italian Minister, Baron Fava, was withdrawn from
Washington on this account, and returned only when Congress had healed
the breach by making provision for the families of the sufferers.
The internal relations of the Administration were not happier than the
external. Harrison chafed under the influence of Blaine, and alienated
so many of the regular Republican leaders that it became doubtful
whether he could secure his own renomination. Both Quay and Platt had
been offended, and the former had resigned his chairmanship of the
National Committee after the failure of a political bank in
Philadelphia. No one was anxious to manage the President's campaign, and
he showed little skill in managing it himself. The future was still in
doubt when, on June 4, 1892, three days before the meeting of the
convention at Minneapolis, Blaine resigned his position without a word
of explanation. Whether he was only sick and unhappy, or whether he
desired the nomination, was uncertain.
The strength of Blaine and the rising influence of William McKinley were
apparent in the Republican Convention. Harrison was renominated on the
first ballot, but Blaine and McKinley received more than one hundred and
eighty votes apiece. The former had reached the end of his career, and
died the next winter. The latter was now Governor of Ohio. McKinley had
lost his seat in the election of 1890, but had been raised to the
governorship in the next year. He was chairman of the convention that
renominated Harrison, reaffirmed the "American doctrine of protection,"
and evaded the issue of free silver.
The Democratic party had bred no national leader but Grover Cleveland
since the Civil War, and he had earned the dislike of the organization
before his defeat in 1888. His insistence upon the tariff offended the
protectionist wing of his party, and he left office unpopular and
lonely. He retired to New York City, where he took up the practice of
law and regained the confidence of the people. Demands upon him for
public speeches in 1891 revealed the recovery of his popularity. His
friends began to organize in his behalf during 1892, and David B. Hill
aided by his opposition.
The strength of Hill, who had been elected Governor of New York, and who
was now Senator, was based upon Tammany Hall and those elements in the
New York Democracy that reformers were constantly attacking. He was
believed to have defeated Cleveland in 1888 by entering into a deal with
the Republican machine by which Harrison received the electoral and he
the gubernatorial vote of New York. Early in 1892, as interest in
Cleveland revived, Hill called a "snap" convention and secured the
indorsement of New York for his own candidacy. The solid New York
delegation shouting for Hill was an item in Cleveland's favor at the
Democratic Convention in Chicago. With tariff reformers in control,
denouncing "Republican protection as a fraud, a robbery of the great
majority of the American people for the benefit of a few," and
reasserting Cleveland's phrase that "public office is a public trust,"
the convention selected Cleveland and Adlai E. Stevenson, of Illinois,
as the party candidates. Its coinage plank, like that of the
Republicans, meant what the voter chose to read into it.
There were two debates in the campaign of 1892. On the surface was the
renewed discussion of the tariff, with the Republicans fighting for the
McKinley Bill all the more earnestly because there was danger of its
repeal, and the Democrats officially demanding reduction. "I would
rather have seen Cleveland defeated than to have had that fool
free-trade plank adopted," said one of the Eastern Democrats to "Tom"
Johnson after the convention. But the Democratic protectionists were
forced into surly acquiescence so long as Cleveland was the candidate
and William L. Wilson the chairman of the convention. The partial
insincerity of the tariff debate aided the Populists, who were directing
a discussion upon the general basis of reform.
Cleveland was elected with a majority of electoral votes and a plurality
of popular votes, but the vote for Weaver and Field measured the extent
of the revolt against both parties. The Populists carried Colorado,
Idaho, Nevada, and Kansas, gained twenty-two electoral votes, and polled
over a million popular votes. Their protest, based on local hard times
and discontent, probably defeated Harrison, while their organization was
ready to receive a large following should the hard times spread.
Harrison was not unwilling to surrender the Government to Cleveland in
March, 1893, for he had been struggling for weeks to conceal the
financial weakness of the United States and to avoid a panic. The great
surplus that had been a motive for legislation for more than ten years
had nearly become a deficit. Continuous prosperity had tempted Congress
to make lavish appropriations. The McKinley Bill had reduced the revenue
through changes in the sugar schedule. The Pension Bill had used other
millions. Internal improvements had been distributed to every section.
The surplus, which had been at $105,000,000 for 1890, fell to
$37,000,000 in 1891, and in the next two years to $9,900,000 and to
$2,300,000. In the spring of 1893 the Treasury was so reduced that any
unexpected shock might cause a suspension. Cleveland's first duty was
with causes and cures.
The surplus had been affected both by increase in expenditures and by
decrease in revenues. The latter had been due in part to the hard times,
which had forced a curtailment of imports, with a resulting shrinkage in
tariff receipts. At the same time an increasing nervousness, based upon
the deterioration in quality of the assets of the United States, showed
itself. The fear of free silver was hastening the day of panic.
Silver and gold had always been traditional American coins, but since
1834 little of the former had been coined or circulated, while between
1862 and 1879 neither variety of specie was ordinarily used as money. In
1873 a codification of coinage laws had omitted from the standard list
the silver dollar, which had been unimportant for nearly forty years;
and when, shortly thereafter, the decline in the price of silver made
its coinage at the ratio of sixteen to one profitable, it was
impossible. The demand for a restoration of silver coinage began with
the silver miners who desired a stimulated market for their output. Some
believed coinage would raise the price of bullion; others thought the
Government would keep up the value of the silver coins, as it did the
greenbacks, by redemption in gold. In 1878 a Free Coinage Act, pushed by
R.P. Bland, was converted into the limited Bland-Allison Act. Under this
the Treasury bought the minimum amount of silver bullion (two million
dollars' worth) every month for twelve years, and protested continually
that the silver coined from it was increasing the burden of redemption
on the gold reserve. As the price of silver fell farther, the demand of
the miners increased, and toward 1890 it was reinforced by the demands
of inflationists who desired it for another reason.
In 1890 the free-silver movement was not political in the sense that
parties had declared for or against it. In each great party it had
supporters, and few politicians were actively opposing it. A movement in
its favor, with the support of the Senate, was reshaped under the
influence of Sherman, and became a law in July, 1890. Under this the
Treasury was forced to buy 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, and to
pay for it in a new issue of treasury notes. For the next three years
the United States kept at par with gold the Civil War greenbacks, the
Bland-Allison silver dollars, and the treasury notes of 1890. Only by
its constant willingness to pay out any form of money at the option of
the customer could it prevent the Gresham Law from operating and the
currency from declining to the bullion value of silver.
Every creditor feared the establishment of the silver basis because of
the loss which it would entail upon him. His dollars would shrink from
their gold value to their silver value. A depreciated currency was bad
enough when unavoidable, but the deliberate adoption of it would be
frank repudiation. Continually, after 1890, popular apprehension of this
grew more acute, discouraging the undertaking of new enterprises and
leading to the insertion of "gold clauses" in contracts. Gold was
hoarded whenever possible. The receipts at the New York Custom-House,
which had been mostly gold before 1890, contained less than four per
cent of gold in the winter of 1892-93. As the Treasury found its
expenditures nearing its receipts, and the proportion of gold in its
assets lessening, business men were badly worried over the future of the
currency, and an actual limit of available capital appeared.
For fourteen years there had been prosperity in the United States.
Financial and economic disturbances had been relatively slight, and
every year had seen a greater business expansion than the last.
Investment for permanent improvement had passed the amount of annual
savings, and before 1893 the United States as a community had approached
the point at which its economic surplus would be exhausted and an
enforced liquidation would be due. As banks curtailed in 1893 to save
themselves, stringency became general, and depression turned to panic.
In April the gold reserve in the Treasury, on which the whole volume of
silver and paper depended, passed below $100,000,000, which business had
come to regard as the limit of safety. In the summer Great Britain
closed her Indian mints to silver and that bullion dropped farther in
value. Before July there was panic and failure everywhere in the United
States.
Panic had been imminent before Harrison left office and remained for
Cleveland to confront. Already Cleveland had taken a solid stand against
free silver and the silver basis. He saw in the Sherman Silver Purchase
Act the most striking cause of danger, and summoned Congress to meet in
August, 1893, to repeal it, while he maintained the gold reserve for the
next two years by borrowing on bonds. For the first time since the Civil
War his party controlled every branch of the Government, yet it now met
an issue on which it had not been elected and over which it broke to
pieces.
An angry minority opposed the Message in which Cleveland described the
financial dangers and demanded the repeal of the Sherman Law. It was a
sectional minority that included Western Representatives from both
parties and many Democrats from the South. Men who had fought the
Populists since 1890 now fraternized with them and raised their strength
beyond their hopes. The President refused compromise, even to save his
party from destruction, and found a majority for repeal among Easterners
of both parties. The Sherman Law was repealed in November, and the
liquidation following the crisis was effected during the next three
years.
It was a bad beginning for tariff revision, to split the party at its
first session and to drive into opposition those Democrats who were most
genuinely interested in tariff reform. Cleveland had lost his influence
with Western Democrats before the repeal of the McKinley Act was
undertaken, and they, like the Populists, had decided that he was the
tool of the corporations and the "gold-bugs" of the East. The
anti-corporation feelings of the West were increased by the accident
which threw the corporations and the farmers into different sides upon
the silver question.
A tariff for revenue had been the winning issue in 1890 and 1892, and
the Democratic organization was pledged to pass it. When Speaker Crisp
made William L. Wilson chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means his
act showed an intention to fulfill the pledge, for which purpose Wilson
brought in his bill early in the regular session of 1893-94. Like
previous bills, this tariff was passed in the House, rewritten in the
Senate, and again changed in conference committee. "The truth is,"
confessed Senator Cullom long after, "we were all--Democrats as well as
Republicans--trying to get in amendments in the interest of protecting
the industries of our respective States." The surplus was no longer an
argument in favor of reduction. The free-trade arguments were flatly
contradicted by a group of Democratic Senators under whose leadership
the bill lost most of its reducing tendency. Out of doors the
Republicans attacked the measure and noisily charged it with having
produced the panic of 1893. Fourteen years later a Republican President
still described it as the measure "under the influence of which wheat
went down below fifty cents." When it finally came to the President it
was so little different from the McKinley Bill that he denounced it
violently. He had tried in vain to hold his party to an honest revision,
and now, in July, 1894, refused to sign the bill. It became a law
without his signature. It contained no novelty but an income tax, which
was a concession to the Populists and which the Supreme Court soon
declared to be unconstitutional.
In the fight over the Wilson Bill, Cleveland affronted Eastern members
of his party as he had the Western members, in 1893, over the Sherman
repeal. In the summer of 1894 he offended the whole body of organized
labor by intervening in a Western strike.
The panic of 1893 had unsettled labor and created a floating element
among the unemployed. These drifted toward Chicago, attracted by the
Columbian Exposition held there during that summer, and worried the
police for many months. About Easter, 1894, an "Army of the Unemployed"
marched on Washington under the command of Jacob S. Coxey. A few weeks
later a strike occurred among the employees of the Pullman Palace Car
Company. The American Railroad Union, under the leadership of Eugene V.
Debs, established a sympathetic boycott against the Pullman cars. The
Knights of Labor indorsed the strike, and railway travel was impeded
over all the West. Around Chicago there was disorder and rioting which
the Governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, did not suppress. He held the
militia in readiness, but had not intervened when Cleveland sent federal
troops to Chicago to remove obstructions to the carriage of the mails.
This federal intervention offended those who still adhered to the
doctrine of state rights, and angered the strikers and organized labor
as a whole. They believed the President was a tool of the railroads, and
believed the same of the courts when a federal judge issued an
injunction to Debs forbidding him to interfere in the strike. In the end
the strikers lost, leaving Cleveland's conduct in maintaining the peace
in sharp contrast with that of the Populist Governor of Colorado, who
intervened in a great miners' strike at Cripple Creek to arrest, not the
strikers who had seized control of the mines, but the sheriff and his
posse who wished to dislodge them. "It is better, infinitely better,"
Governor Waite had declared, "that the blood should flow to the horses'
bridles than that our national liberties should be destroyed." Congress
made Labor Day a legal holiday in 1894, but failed to placate the
unions.
By the summer of 1894 Cleveland's party was split beyond repair, and his
friends were mostly among the Republicans. Consistent in his belief in
sound money, tariff revision, and law and order, he had been forced by
events to alienate the West, the East, and organized labor. His course
had aided the Populist party by widening the belief that the Democrats
had no interest in their welfare. The panic had aided it yet more, by
multiplying the discontented who might be converted to the new faith.
Every month the Populist party increased in strength, the East watching
it with mingled fear and contempt and ignorance. The comic papers
pictured as the typical Populist the raw-boned, booted, unkempt farmer,
in shirt-sleeves and with flowing beard. It could not see the foundation
of real reforms on which the movement stood. A satirist pictured the
Populist as "The Kansas Bandit," declaiming
"The People's Party, to
Which me native instinct draws me because it
Loves the rule of mediocrity, is now on top. I
Love the rule of Ignorance."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
F.J. Turner discussed "The Problems of the West," in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ for September, 1896, and C. Becker has interpreted a similar
point of view under the title "Kansas" in the _Turner Essays_ (1910).
Wildman and McVey are valuable guides. The external facts of the
Populist movement are accessible in the _Annual Cyclopædia_; Stanwood,
_History of the Presidency_; Annual Reports of the Secretary of the
Treasury; and Richardson, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_.
Standard writings on the silver problem are J.L. Laughlin, _History of
Bimetallism in the United States_ (1886, etc.), and F. W. Taussig,
_Silver Situation in the United States_ (1893). Useful details are added
in the biographies of Blaine, Bland, Sherman, and Vance. W.E. Connelley,
_Ingalls of Kansas_ (1909), has included much material upon Populism,
including E. Ware's satirical verses, _Alonzo, or the Kansas Bandit_.
Light is thrown upon Governor J.P. Altgeld and his influence in the
Democratic party by B. Whitlock, "Forty Years of It" (1914), and C.
Lloyd, _Henry Demarest Lloyd_. The _Memoirs of a Varied Career_, William
F. Draper (1908), gives a glimpse of the rigid protectionist attitude. A
stimulating novel, based upon municipal politics in the nineties, is
P.L. Ford's _The Honorable Peter Stirling_ (1894).
CHAPTER XIV
FREE SILVER
Serious students of finance are almost unanimous in their belief that
the adoption of free silver would have brought into operation the
Gresham Law and would have resulted in a reduction of the value of the
dollar. But the motives which divided the United States were less
economic law than personal interest. The creditor foresaw the shrinkage
of his property, and feared it. The debtor saw the lightening of his
debt, and easily convinced himself that the ethics of the case required
such relief for him.
It appeared to the West that the declining prices of the eighties had
been due not so much to overproduction and mechanical invention as to an
appreciation of the dollar. The silver advocate claimed that the money
supply was inadequate to the demands of increasing business, that the
overworked dollars were acquiring a scarcity value, and that their
increase in value was placing an unfair burden upon every person with a
debt to pay. It was the old attitude of the Greenback Northwest, brought
out by a period of debt and depression. In accounting for the scarcity
of money the Act of 1873 seemed important to the West. The
demonetization of silver became a crime, and justice from the Western
standpoint demanded the restoration of the dollar to its old value,--the
value of its silver. Before 1893 the discontent was serious, but had
not come to be the primary interest of the West. Men were not yet
willing to leave their parties for the sake of silver. The panic drove
them to the final step.
Through the campaign of 1892 the major parties had dodged the issue of
free silver by adopting evasive planks, while the general ignorance
respecting the laws of money prevented the evasion from being seen.
Until 1890 neither organization had been unfavorably disposed towards
free silver and Congressmen catered to the movement when they dared. As
its accomplishment became more probable, the selfish interests that
would be adversely affected, and the economists who saw its theoretical
danger, and the moralists who disliked repudiation, made common cause in
a wide campaign of education.
With the exception of extreme inflationists, all had declared that they
wanted "honest" or "sound" money, and both parties insisted, in 1892,
that all dollars, of whatever sort, must remain equal in value and
interchangeable. They insisted, too, that silver must be used as well as
gold, and neither platform saw that the demands were either inconsistent
or improbable of realization. The pledge of equality pleased the
creditor East, while that of equal use of both metals satisfied the
debtor West and South.
Bimetallism was a cry of many who disliked free silver, yet feared that
a demand for the gold standard would wreck the party. As long as the
traditional ratio of sixteen to one remained the commercial ratio, the
free use of both metals was theoretically possible, but the experience
of the United States showed that a slight variation in the commercial
ratio inevitably drove the more valuable dollar into retirement and left
the cheaper in use. The truth of Gresham's Law was believed by most
economists, who doubted whether the commercial ratio was ever
sufficiently permanent to make bimetallism possible. With the silver
declining rapidly it was out of the question. If the silver in
circulation ever got beyond the power of the government to control it
through redemption in gold nothing could avoid the silver standard. No
law of the United States could prevent it. There was only a bare
possibility that an international agreement always to regard sixteen
ounces of silver as worth one ounce of gold might establish the ratio,
but to this straw the bimetallist turned, trying to ward off the demand
for free silver with his plea for international bimetallism.
[Illustration: The Flood of Silver
Gold and Silver Output of the World, 1861-1911 In Ounces
(Based on United States Statistical Abstract, 1912, pp. 796, 797)]
The panic of 1893, the decline of silver, and the repeal of the Sherman
Law stimulated the activities of those who believed in free silver and
produced formal steps to bring it into politics. A silver convention,
held in Chicago in August, 1893, denounced the "Crime of 1873," and
Governor Waite recommended to the Colorado Legislature that it open a
mint of its own for the coinage of legal-tender silver dollars. At state
conventions, in 1893 and 1894, both parties adopted silver planks. The
Nebraska Democrats rejected such a plank in 1893, but in 1894, after a
caucus of free-silver Democrats in Omaha, they adopted a demand for the
immediate restoration of free-silver coinage "without waiting for the
aid or consent of any nation on earth."
At the congressional election of 1894 the Republicans regained control
of both Senate and House and many of the silver candidates were left at
home. Some thirty, who had sat in the Fifty-third Congress, joined in
March, 1895, in a call for the adoption of free silver as a party
measure. To the iniquity alleged to exist in the gold standard was added
the aggravating fact that its defenders had wealth and were often
directors of corporations. The measure had become a class contest. Its
textbook was found in _Coin's Financial School_, a little book with
simple dialogue and graphic illustration, that popularized the Western
view of free silver and reached hundreds of thousands with its apparent
frankness. Free silver had by 1895 outgrown the Populists, and had
overshadowed other measures of reform before either party had taken a
frank attitude respecting it. "I have been more than usually
despondent," wrote the originator of the Wilson Bill, who had lost his
seat in 1894, "as I see how the folly of our Southern people, in taking
up a false and destructive issue, and assaulting the very foundations of
public and private credit, are throwing away the solid fruits of the
great victory, solidifying the North as it never was solid in the
burning days of reconstruction, and condemning the South to a position
of inferiority and lessening influence in the Union she has never before
reached."
When the Fifty-fourth Congress met in 1895, Reed was again enthroned as
Speaker, but the spread of silver sentiment had undermined party
loyalty. Cleveland's annual Message contained the usual range of items
upon government and foreign relations, and devoted several pages to a
résumé of the financial operations of the Treasury and the currency
problem. It closed with an appeal to the enthusiastic multitude that
approved free coinage to reëxamine their views "in the light of
patriotic reason and familiar experience." It gave no hint that any
other topic was likely to pass free silver in the public view. Fifteen
days later, on December 17, 1895, the President sent a special Message
to Congress, in reference to an old dispute between Great Britain and
Venezuela, that startled the world, upset the stock markets, and brought
to life once more the Monroe Doctrine.
For many years the unsettled boundary between Venezuela and British
Guiana had been a source of irritation. The pretensions of both
claimants were great and vague, while the continuous encroachment of
British miners alarmed the weaker country. For nearly twenty years
Venezuela had vainly appealed to the United States, asking that the
dispute be arbitrated. The United States had taken a mild interest in
the wrangle, but no one before Cleveland had felt vitally concerned. He
undertook, in the summer of 1895, to persuade Great Britain to accept an
arbitration, and pressed Lord Salisbury in a series of notes drafted by
Richard Olney, Secretary of State.
The contention of Olney was that the dispute was suitable for
arbitration because of the difference in physical strength between the
two countries, and that the United States had an interest in an
equitable territorial adjustment. He stated the doctrine that John
Quincy Adams had advanced in the Administration of Monroe, that
interference with the destiny of the South American Republics affects
the United States, and asserted that this was now a part of the public
law of the United States. He listed the precedents in which it had been
advanced since 1823, finding none in which it had been flatly checked.
His long arguments upon the interests and proper supremacy of the United
States in all American questions failed to convince the British Foreign
Office, which denied both Olney's correctness in applying the Monroe
Doctrine and the binding force of the doctrine itself. Arbitration was
declined, and Cleveland, in submitting the correspondence to Congress,
urged that an American court be created to ascertain the true boundary
and that the United States afterward maintain it. "In making these
recommendations," he admitted, "I am fully alive to the responsibility
incurred and keenly realize all the consequences that may follow."
The threat of war conveyed in the Message drove silver from the public
mind. Business was aghast, and judicious publicists either questioned
the value of the Monroe Doctrine or denied the propriety of its
application. The general public supported the President without
question, but many of his closest advisers turned against him. His
political enemies charged him with raising a foreign issue to reunite
his party, or with creating a scare to help his speculations in stocks.
Great Britain blustered in her press, but opened her archives to the
American Venezuelan Commission. In 1897 she allowed an arbitration to
take place, and the affair passed over.
Whatever Cleveland's motive in the Venezuela Message, it did not
establish more than a transient calm in either party. His own was doubly
split by silver and the tariff, while Republican plans for 1896 had
become badly deranged. That party had organized to play upon protection,
but found interest in its chosen subject silenced for the time.
In spite of its defeats in 1890 and 1892, the Republican organization
had kept up its fight for protection. Quay had in 1888 completed the
partnership between the manufacturers who had a cash interest in the
tariff and the Republican voters. In manufacturing communities the
doctrine had been accepted that prosperity and protection went together.
Ruin was prophesied if the Democrats should win. The panic of 1893
seemed to prove this, and when the Democrats passed the Wilson Bill the
Republicans asserted that the fear of this had caused the panic. In
private, the leaders agreed with the president of the Home Market Club,
who wrote in his memoirs, "The bill ... was much less destructive than
there was reason to fear." "Our business was not unprofitable during
these lean years, but much less profitable than it had been and ought to
have been." Prosperity was clearly lacking and to be desired, and among
the candidates for the nomination in 1896 was the author of the McKinley
Bill, in whom an Ohio cartoonist had discovered the "Advance Agent of
Prosperity."
Associated with the name of William McKinley, of Canton, Ohio, was that
of Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a citizen of Cleveland who had acted on the
borderland between business and politics since 1880. Hanna had been
among the earliest to see the financial interest of the manufacturers in
the tariff and to capitalize it for political purposes. For several
years he had collected money in Ohio for campaign funds, assessing the
manufacturers according to their interests and impressing upon them the
duty of paying on demand. It had been a business transaction. Hanna had
no extraordinary stake in the result, but combined a genuine interest in
politics with business standards of the prevailing type. About 1890 he
became a friend of the Ohio protectionist and worked steadily thereafter
for his election to the Presidency.
McKinley was a tactful and successful Congressman. He believed in the
tariff, spoke convincingly in its favor, had few enemies and many warm
friends, and was widely advertised by the Tariff Bill of 1890. In public
places after 1893 he was repeatedly hailed as the next candidate, but as
the silver issue rose it appeared that there might be great difficulty
in adapting his record to the new problem. He had favored bimetallism
and free coinage in so many debates that the East, where lay the
strongholds of the party, distrusted his soundness on the currency
question. Yet if he abandoned free silver it was doubtful if he could
hold the West. For months his friends, steered by Hanna, who spent his
own money freely, endeavored to keep the tariff in the foreground, while
the candidate preserved a discreet and exasperating silence upon the
dominant issue of free silver.
The most important rivals of McKinley for the nomination were Harrison
and Reed, but neither of these possessed a manager as shrewd and
resourceful as Hanna. McKinley was nominated on the first ballot at St.
Louis, with Garrett P. Hobart, of New Jersey, a corporation lawyer who
believed in the gold standard, as his associate.
The nature of the Republican platform had been in debate throughout the
spring of 1896. The organization was reluctant to take up the silver
issue and the predetermined candidate was uncertain upon it. In the
Platform Committee there was a contest involving the opportunists, who
wanted to continue the policy of evasion; the Westerners, who felt that
silver meant more to them than the party; and the representatives of the
populous commercial East, who were devoted to the gold standard.
Bimetallists had progressed in their education until most of them saw
that bimetallism must be international if it could be at all. Various
committeemen later assumed the credit for the plank that was finally
adopted. After castigating the Democrats for producing the panic and
renewing the pledge for protection, the party denounced the debasement
of currency or credit. It opposed the free coinage of silver, asserted
that all money must be kept at a "parity with gold," and pledged itself
to work for an international agreement for bimetallism.
The fight for free silver was carried by the silver state delegations to
the floor of the convention, where it was defeated by a vote of 818-1/2
to 105-1/2. At this point, led by Senators from Colorado and Utah,
thirty-four members withdrew from the convention in protest. Even the
Prohibition party had already been broken by the new issue. The humorous
weekly, _Life_, spoke seriously when it declared that "The two great
parties in the country at this writing are the Gold party and the Silver
party. The old parties are in temporary eclipse." Few were satisfied
with the Republican result, for while the platform pointed one way and
the candidate's career pointed the other on free silver, the real
interest of the party, protection, aroused no enthusiasm.
No Democrat was the predetermined candidate of his party when it met at
Chicago in July, 1896. Cleveland, least of all, was not given even the
scanty notice of a commendatory plank. He stood alone as no other
President had done, at issue with the Republicans on their major policy,
yet without followers in his own organization. Slow, patient,
courageous, stubborn, he had twice held his party to its promise, and he
had refused to be carried away by the transitory demand of the West for
dangerous finance. He had guided the National Administration through
eight years of expansion and reorganization, and had been a devoted
servant of civil service reform. In May, 1896, he had aggravated his
offenses in the eyes of the politicians by issuing new rules that
extended the classified service to include some 31,000 new employees,
making a total of 86,000 out of 178,000 federal employees. He passed out
of party politics at least two years before his term expired, and in
1897 he took up his final abode in Princeton. From Princeton he wrote
and spoke for eleven years, and before he died in 1908 the animosities
of 1896 were forgotten, and he looked large in the American mind as a
statesman whose independence and sincerity were beyond reproach.
Forces beyond the control of politicians carried the Democrats toward an
alliance with Populism and free silver. As two minority parties they had
felt in 1892 a tendency to fuse against the Republicans. By conviction
they were both obliged to fight the party of Hanna and McKinley, in
which the forces of business, finance, and manufacture were assembled in
the joint cause of protection and the gold standard. It was convenient
to make this fight in close alliance, the more so because the Populist
doctrine of free silver had permeated the Democratic organization in the
West and South. In the conventions of 1896 more than thirty States, as
Nebraska had done in 1894, asked for immediate free coinage, and a
majority of the Democratic delegates were pledged to this before they
came to Chicago. They gained control of the convention on the first
vote, determined contests in their own favor, and offered a plank
demanding "the free and unlimited coinage of both silver and gold at the
present legal ratio of sixteen to one without waiting for the aid or
consent of any other nation."
The debate on the silver plank was long and bitter, although its passage
was certain. It was closed by the leader of the Nebraska delegation,
William Jennings Bryan, who had been a former Congressman, and who
later said, "An opportunity to close such a debate had never come to me
before, and I doubt if as good an opportunity had ever come to any other
person during this generation." He took advantage of the moment, in a
tired convention that had been wrangling in bitterness for several days,
that had deserted the old politicians, and that had no candidate. He was
only thirty-six years old, his face was unfamiliar, and his name had
rarely been heard outside his State, but he had been preaching free
silver with religious intensity and oratorical skill. His speech had
grown through repeated speaking, and reached its climax as he pleaded
for free silver: "If they dare to come out in the open field and defend
the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost.
Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world,
supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the
toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for the gold standard by
saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this
crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
Swept off its feet by the enthusiasm for silver, and having no other
candidate in view, the convention nominated Bryan on the fifth ballot,
selecting Arthur Sewall, of Maine, as his companion.
The Populists met in St. Louis on July 22. "If we fuse, we are sunk,"
complained one of the most devoted leaders; "if we don't fuse, all the
silver men will leave us for the more powerful Democrats." Fusion
controlled the convention, voting down the "Middle-of-the-Road" group
that adhered to independence. Bryan was nominated, although Sewall was
rejected for Thomas E. Watson, of Georgia. The organization of the
People's Party continued after 1896, but its vitality was gone forever.
The campaign of 1896 was an orgy of education, emotion, and panic.
McKinley was driven by the opposition to defend the gold standard with
increasing intensity. Protection ceased to arouse interest and other
issues were forgotten. The Bryan party attracted to itself the silver
wings of the Republicans and Prohibitionists, and absorbed the
Populists. The gold Democrats, after several weeks of indecision as to
tactics, became bolters, held a convention at Indianapolis in September,
and nominated John M. Palmer and Simon Buckner. To this ticket,
Cleveland and his Cabinet gave their support. Up and down the land Bryan
traveled, preaching his new gospel, which millions regarded as "the
first great protest of the American people against monopoly--the first
great struggle of the masses in our country against the privileged
classes." "Probably no man in civil life," said the _Nation_ at the end
of the fight, "has succeeded in inspiring so much terror without taking
life."
As chairman of the National Committee, Marcus A. Hanna directed the
Republican campaign. He encouraged the belief that Bryan was waging a
"campaign against the Ten Commandments." He drew his sinews of war from
the manufacturers, who were used to such demands, and from a wide range
of panic-stricken contributors who feared repudiation. Insurance
companies and national banks were assessed and paid with alacrity. The
funds went into the broadest campaign of education that the United
States had seen.
In contrast to the activity of Bryan, McKinley stayed at home through
the summer, and delegations from afar were brought up to his veranda at
Canton, Ohio. To these he spoke briefly and with dignity, gaining an
assurance that grew with the campaign. His arguments were taken over the
country by a horde of speakers whom Hanna organized, who reached and
educated every voter whose mind was open on the silver question. In the
closing days of the campaign panic struck the conservative classes and
produced for Hanna campaign funds such as had never been seen, and cries
of corruption met the charges of repudiation.
An English visitor in New York wrote on the Sunday before election: "Of
course nothing can be done till Wednesday. All America is aflame with
excitement--and New York itself is at fever heat. I have never seen such
a sight as yesterday. The whole city was a mass of flags and innumerable
Republican and Democratic insignia--with the streets thronged with over
two million people. The whole business quarter made a gigantic parade
that took seven hours in its passage--and the business men alone
amounted to over 100,000. Every one--as, indeed, not only America, but
Great Britain and all Europe--is now looking eagerly for the final word
on Tuesday night. The larger issues are now clearer: not merely that the
Bryanite fifty-cent dollar (instead of the standard hundred-cent) would
have far-reaching disastrous effects, but that the whole struggle is one
of the anarchic and destructive against the organic and constructive
forces."
The vote was taken in forty-five States, Utah having been admitted early
in 1896, and no election had evoked a larger proportion of the possible
vote. Bryan received 6,500,000 votes, nearly a million more than any
elected President had ever received, but he ran 600,000 votes behind
McKinley. The Republican list included every State north of Virginia and
Tennessee, and east of the Missouri River, except Missouri and South
Dakota. The solid South was confronted by a solid North and East, while
the West was divided. McKinley received 271 electoral votes; Bryan, 176.
Education played a large part in the result, and economic opinion
believes that the better cause prevailed. But cool analysis had less
effect than emotion and self-interest at the time. The lowest point of
depression had been reached during 1894, while the harvests of 1895 and
1896 were larger and more profitable than had been known for several
years. Free silver was a hard-times movement that weakened in the face
of better crops. "Give us good times," said Reed to Richard Watson
Gilder, "and all will come out right." Inflation was not to be desired
by the citizen who had in hand the funds to pay his debts. When he
became solvent he could understand the theories of sound finance. It is
probable that nature as well as gold was a potent aid to Hanna in
procuring the result.
William McKinley was advertised as the "Advance Agent of Prosperity,"
and before he was inaugurated in March, 1897, prosperity was in sight.
His election had destroyed all fear that the currency would be upset by
legislative act, while the liquidation after the panic of 1893 had
nearly run its course. Business was reviving, crops were improving, and
the luckless farmers of the Western plains had abandoned their farms or
learned how to use them. After 1896 the financial danger was not silver
but gold inflation. In that year great mines were opened in Alaska,
drawing heavy immigration to the valley of the Yukon and, a little
later, to the beach at Nome. Other discoveries increased the gold output
and flooded the world with the more precious metal. By 1900 prices were
rising instead of falling, and public interest was turned upon the high
cost of living rather than the low prices of the previous period. The
average annual output of gold for the fifteen years ending in 1896 was
$132,000,000. For the fifteen years beginning in 1896, it was
$337,000,000. The election of McKinley was in name a victory for the
Republican party, but was in reality one for sound money. The
organization upon which he stood was an amalgamation of creditors and
manufacturers, reënforced by gold-standard men of all parties. Without
the aid of the last element he could hardly have been elected, on this
or any other issue. When he took office the Republican party had control
in both houses of Congress, had been elected on a money issue, but had a
permanent organization based upon the tariff propaganda. Before his
inauguration, Hanna declared that the election was a mandate for a new
protective tariff, and one of McKinley's earliest official acts was to
summon Congress to meet in special session, to fulfill that mandate, on
March 15, 1897.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The most popular document in the free-silver propaganda was W.H. Harvey,
_Coin's Financial School_ (_c._ 1894). This was replied to by Horace
White, _Coin's Financial Fool; or the Artful Dodger Exposed_ (_c._
1896); and the same author, in _Money and Banking_ (4th ed., 1911),
discusses the economics of free silver. The best economic arguments for
free silver came from the pens of Francis A. Walker and E. Benjamin
Andrews. The Reports of the International Monetary Conferences (at
Paris, 1867 and 1881, and at Brussels, 1892) are useful upon the attempt
to establish a currency ratio by international agreement. There is no
good biography of William McKinley, although the external facts of his
career may be obtained in the _Annual Cyclopædia_, and in _Who's Who in
America_ (a biennial publication which, since its first issue in
1899-1900, has been the standard source of biographical data concerning
living Americans). These may be strengthened by D. Magie, _Life of
Garrett A. Hobart_ (1910). The best biography of the period is H. Croly,
_Marcus Alonzo Hanna_ (1912), which gives an illuminating survey of
Republican politics, although based on only the public printed materials
and personal recollections. The opposition may be studied in W.J. Bryan,
_The First Battle_ (1896). The platforms, as always, are in Stanwood,
and there are useful narratives in Dewey, Latané, Andrews, and Peck.
From this period the _Outlook_ (January, 1897), and the _Independent_
(July, 1898), take on a modern magazine form and are to be added to the
list of valuable newspaper files, while the _Literary Digest_ begins to
play the part carried by _Niles's Register_ in the early part of the
century. They may generally be trusted as intelligent, honest, and
reasonably independent. The Venezuelan affair, besides stimulating
diplomatic correspondence (_q.v._, in Foreign Relations Reports), led to
the writing of W.F. Reddaway, _The Monroe Doctrine_ (1898), which is
still one of the most judicious discussions of the topic. J.B.
Henderson, _American Diplomatic Questions_ (1901), is useful also.
CHAPTER XV
THE "COUNTER-REFORMATION"
The mission of Populism did not end when free silver had been driven
like a wedge into all the parties. Its more fundamental reforms
outlasted both the hard times and the recovery from them. Although
obscured by the shadow of the larger controversy, the reforms had been
stated with conviction. The Populist party was not permitted to bring
the reformation that it promised, but it stimulated within the parties
in power a "counter-reformation," that was already under way. This
counter-reformation was largely within the Republican ranks because that
party dominated in every branch of the National Government for fourteen
years after 1897, but it was essentially non-partisan. It derived its
advocates from the generation that had been educated since the Civil
War, and many of its leaders bore the imprint of democratic higher
education. It derived its materials from historical, economic, and
sociological study of the forces of American society.
Practical politics in America was at its lowest level in the thirty
years after the Civil War. The United States was politically fatigued
after the years of contest and turned eagerly to the business
speculations that opened in every direction. Offices were left to those
who chose to run them, while public scrutiny of public acts was
materially reduced. The men in charge, unwatched in their business, used
it often for personal advantage, and were aided in this by the character
of both the electoral machinery and the electorate. A multitude of
offices had to be kept filled in every State and city by voters who
could know little of the candidates and who accepted the recommendation
implied in the party name. Control of the nominations meant control of
the elections, and was within reach of those who were persistent in
attending caucuses and conventions and were not too scrupulous in
manipulating them. The laws against bribery at the polls did not touch
corruption at the primaries. The cities, rapidly growing through
manufactures and immigration, were full of voters who could be trained
to support the "bosses" who befriended them.
The American "boss" made his appearance in the cities about 1870. His
power was based upon his personal influence with voters of the lower and
more numerous class. Gaining control of party machinery he dictated
nominations and policies, and used the government, as the exposures of
the Tweed Ring showed, to enrich his friends and to perpetuate his
power. Caring little for party principle, he made a close alliance with
the new business that continually needed new laws,--building laws,
transportation laws, terminal rights, or franchises. From these allies
came the funds for managing elections, and, too often, for direct
bribery, although this last was necessary only rarely.
Exposures of the evil of boss government were frequent after 1870, and
in most cities occasional revolts of outraged citizens overturned the
machines, but in the long run the citizen was no match for the
professional politician. In the unequal contest city government became
steadily worse in America at a time when European city government was
rapidly improving. States, too, were afflicted with machine politics,
and before 1890 it appeared that the dominant national party derived its
most valuable support from organized business that profited by the
partnership.
A minority of Americans fought continually for better and cleaner
government as the evils of boss rule became more visible. One of them,
Bishop Potter, of New York, gained wide hearing through a sermon
preached at the centennial of the Constitution, in 1887, in which he
turned from the usual patriotic congratulation to discuss actual
government. The keenest interest in the subject was aroused by the
_American Commonwealth_ of James Bryce.
Not since Alexis de Tocqueville published his _Democracy in America_, in
1835, had any foreign observer made an equally intimate study of
American life, until James Bryce, a young English historian, began a
series of visits to the United States in the early seventies. For nearly
twenty years Bryce repeated his visits, living at home a full life in
his Oxford professorate, in the House of Commons, and in the Ministry.
In America he knew every one worth knowing, and he saw the remoter
regions of the West as well as the older society of the East. In 1888
he brought out the result of his studies in two volumes that were filled
with admiration for the United States and with disheartening observation
upon its practices. One of its chapters cut so close that its victim
brought suit for libel, but American opinion accepted the book as a
friendly picture and regarded attacks upon it as further evidence of its
inherent truth. Probably no book in a generation so profoundly
influenced American thought and so specifically directed the course of
American reform. It became a textbook at once, teaching the truth that
corruption and misgovernment were non-partisan, and until the Populists
took them up the movements for reform were non-partisan as well.
The power of the boss lay largely in the structure of American
governmental machinery, and though some preached the need for a reform
in spirit, others saw that only mechanical improvements could accomplish
results. A corruptible electorate, such as had long confused British and
American politics, was one defect most easily improved. The prevailing
system for conducting elections made it easy for the purchaser of votes
to see that he got value for his money. The State provided the
polling-place, but the candidate or the party provided the printed
ballot. Party agents distributed these at the polls, and the voters who
received them could be watched until the votes were cast. Intimidation
of employees or direct bribery were easy and common, while secret deals
were not unknown. The loyal party voter deposited the ballots provided
for him; the boss could have these arranged to suit his needs. It was
commonly supposed that in 1888, through an agreement between the
Democratic and Republican bosses of New York, Hill and Platt, many
Republicans were made to vote for Hill as Governor, while Democrats
voted for Harrison as President.
A secret ballot was so reasonable a reform that once it had been
suggested it spread rapidly over the United States. In 1888
Massachusetts adopted a system based upon the Australian Ballot Law,
while New York advertised its value in the same year when Governor Hill
vetoed a bill to establish it. Before the next presidential election
came in 1892, open bribery or intimidation of voters was rapidly
becoming a thing of the past, for thirty-three States had adopted the
Australian ballot, provided by public authority and voted in secrecy.
"Quay and Platt and Clarkson may find in this fact a fresh explanation
of President Harrison's willingness to divest himself of their
services," wrote Godkin in a caustic paragraph in 1892.
The Australian ballot enabled the honest citizen to vote in secrecy and
safety, but it failed to touch the fact that the nominations were still
outside the law. "To find the honest men," Bryce wrote, "and having
found them, to put them in office and keep them there, is the great
problem of American politics." So long as a boss could direct the
nomination he could tolerate an honest election. The movement to
legalize the party primaries was just beginning when the ballot reform
was accomplished. The most extreme of the primary reformers saw the need
for a preliminary election conducted within each party, but under all
the safeguards of law, to the end that the voters might themselves
determine their candidates. Direct primaries were discussed by the
younger men, who were often ambitious, but helpless because of the rigor
with which the bosses selected their own candidates. In 1897 a young
ex-Congressman, Robert M. LaFollette, worked out a complete system of
local and national primaries, and found wide and sympathetic hearing for
it. The movement had to face the bitter opposition of the machine
politicians because it struck directly at their power, but it progressed
slowly. In 1901 it won in Minnesota; a little later it won in Wisconsin;
and in the next ten years it became a central feature in reform
platforms.
The reforms of the primary and the ballot were designed to improve the
quality of public officers, and were supplemented by a demand for direct
legislation which would check up the result. In Switzerland a scheme had
been devised by which the people, by petition, could initiate new laws
or obtain a vote upon existing laws. The idea of submitting special
measures to popular vote, or referendum, was old in the United States,
for in this way state constitutions and constitutional amendments were
habitually adopted, and matters of city charters, loans and franchises
often determined. The initiative, however, was new, and appealed to the
reformer who resented the refusal of the legislature to pass desired
laws as well as the unwillingness to pass worthy ones. The Populists, in
1892, recommended that the system of direct legislation be investigated,
and they favored its adoption in 1896. A journal for the promotion of
the reform appeared in 1894. In 1898 the first State, South Dakota,
adopted the principle of initiative and referendum in a constitutional
amendment. To those who attacked the device as only mechanical it was
answered: "Direct legislation is not a panacea for all national ills. In
fact it is not a panacea at all. It is merely a spoon with which the
panacea can be administered. Specific legislation is the panacea for
political ills."
The West was more ready than the East to break from existing practice
and take up the new reforms. It had always been the liberal section of
the United States. Between 1800 and 1830 it had led in the enlargement
of the franchise and in the removal of qualifications of wealth and
religion. It now approached the one remaining qualification of sex. With
the admission of Wyoming in 1890, full woman suffrage appeared among the
States. Colorado adopted an amendment establishing it in 1893. Utah, in
the words of the women, "completing the trinity of true Republics at the
summit of the Rockies," became the third suffrage State in January,
1896, while Idaho adopted woman suffrage in the same year. It was
fifteen years before a fifth State was added to the list, but the
women's movement was advancing in all directions. A General Federation
of Women's Clubs was organized in 1890 as a clearing-house for the
activities of the women, and through organizations like the Consumers'
League, the movement fell into line with the general course of reform. A
clearer vision of the defects in governmental machinery and of the
needs of society was spreading rapidly. Hull House, opened in 1889 by
Jane Addams, had a host of imitators in the cities, and enabled social
workers to study the results of industrial progress upon the laboring
class.
The new reforms, mechanical and otherwise, established themselves about
1890, and were taken up by the Populist party between 1892 and 1896.
Neither great party noticed the reforms before 1896, but in each party
the younger workers saw their point. As non-partisan movements they
gained adherents before the Populist party died out, and were pressed
more and more seriously upon reluctant organizations. As a whole they
were an attempt to make government more truly representative of the
voters, and to take the control of affairs from the hands of men who
might and often did use them for private aggrandizement. They were
overshadowed in 1896 by the paramount issue of free silver, and were
deferred in their fulfilment for a decade by accidents which drove them
from the public mind. The Spanish War, reviving prosperity, and the
renewal of tariff legislation, did not check the activities of the
reformers, but did divert the attention of the public.
William McKinley was inaugurated on March 4, 1897. He had served in five
Congresses and had been three times governor of Ohio. He "knew the
legislative body thoroughly, its composition, its methods, its habits of
thought," said John Hay. "He had the profoundest respect for its
authority and an inflexible belief in the ultimate rectitude of its
purposes." He was not likely to embarrass business through bluntness or
inexperience. He had risen through a kindly disposition, a recognition
of the political value of tact, and an unusual skill as a moderator of
variant opinions. He believed that his function was to represent the
popular will as rapidly as it expressed itself, differing fundamentally
in this from Cleveland, who thought himself bound to act in the interest
of the people as he saw it. His Cabinet reflected the interests that
secured his election.
The trend of issues had made the Republican party, by 1897, the party of
organized business. For twelve years the alliance had grown steadily
closer. Marcus A. Hanna was its spokesman. The burlesque of his sincere
and kindly face, drawn by a caricaturist, Davenport, for Eastern papers,
created for the popular eye the type of commercialized magnate, but it
did him great injustice. Self-respecting and direct, he believed it to
be the first function of government to protect property, and that
property should organize for this purpose. Without malevolence, he
conducted business for the sake of its profits, and regarded government
as an adjunct to it. He possessed great capacity for winning popularity,
and after his entry into public life in 1897 gained reputation as an
effective speaker. He destroyed, before his death, much of the offensive
notoriety that had been thrust upon him during the campaign of 1896, but
he remained the best representative of the generation that believed
government to be only a business asset. He did not enter the Cabinet of
McKinley, but was appointed Senator from Ohio when John Sherman vacated
his seat.
The pledge of the Republicans for international bimetallism created a
need for a financial Secretary of State, and John Sherman, though old
and infirm, was persuaded to undertake the office. The routine of the
department was assigned to an assistant secretary, William R. Day, an
old friend of the President. A magnate of the match trust, Russell A.
Alger, of Michigan, received the War Department. The president of the
First National Bank of Chicago, Lyman J. Gage, received the Treasury.
The other secretaries, too, were men of solidity, generally self-made,
and likely to inspire confidence in the world of business.
The new Senators who appeared at this time represented the same alliance
of trade and politics. Hanna, in Ohio, and Thomas C. Platt, president of
the United States Express Company, in New York, were the most striking
instances. In Pennsylvania Quay was able to nominate his colleague in
spite of the opposition of his old associate, John Wanamaker, and
selected Boies Penrose. Only with the aid of the silver Senators could a
Republican majority be procured in the Senate. This made currency
legislation impossible, but the managers hoped that there would be a
majority for a protective tariff when Congress met in special session,
two weeks after the inauguration.
Preparations for a revision of the tariff had been made long before
Cleveland left office. Reed was certain to be reëlected as Speaker by a
large majority. Nelson Dingley, of Maine, was equally certain to be
chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, and began to hold tariff
hearings early in 1897. A rampant spirit for protection was revealed as
the manufacturers stated their wishes to the committee. It was often
told how the low rates of the Wilson Bill had caused the panic of 1893,
and a New York maker of "Oriental rugs" created amusement by asking to
be protected from the competition, not of the Orient, but of the German
manufacturers. Since 1890 the strength of the Republican organization
had been directed toward this revision, and the leaders had held back
the silver issue lest it should derange their plans. Now, though
returned to power only on the issue of the currency, they held
themselves empowered to act as though the tariff had been dominant in
1896. The call stated the need for tariff legislation, and Reed held the
House to its task by refusing to appoint the committees without which
other business could not be undertaken.
The Dingley Bill passed the House of Representatives after a perfunctory
debate which every one regarded as only preliminary to the real struggle
in Senate and Conference Committee. In the Senate it became a new
measure at the hands of the Finance Committee, whose secretary, S.N.D.
North, was also secretary of the Wool Manufacturers' Association.
Revenue was everywhere subordinated to protection, until the Chief of
the Bureau of Statistics, Worthington C. Ford, declared that the act
would prolong the deficit which it was designed to cure. On its final
passage, the Democratic Senator, McEnery, of Louisiana, left his party
to vote for protection to sugar. He was welcomed home in August, in
spite of his "treason," by a reception committee with four hundred
vice-presidents. The silver Senators, headed by Jones, of Nevada, were
induced to support the bill. They had procured the Sherman Silver Bill
in 1890 by the same tactics, and now, holding the balance of power,
secured a group of amendments for themselves, covering hides, wool, and
ore. The measure passed the Senate early in July and became a law July
24, 1897. Senator William B. Allison, of Iowa, was largely responsible
for its final passage, although the law continued to bear the name of
its forgotten originator, Dingley.
The Republican party was in no condition in 1897 to become the vehicle
of the non-partisan reforms that the Populists advocated and that many
young Republicans had taken up. The interest in tariff legislation drove
everything else from the national organization, while returning
prosperity destroyed the mental attitude in which reforms had
flourished. Political introspection was less easy in 1897 and 1898 than
it had been in the years of confusion and enforced economy since 1890.
The civil service and ballot reforms had been started on the upward
course, but party machines continued in control of each great
organization.
The conduct of the Senate discouraged many of the reformers in the
spring of 1897. Cleveland had left in its hands a treaty of arbitration
with Great Britain, but no action had been taken upon it when he left
office. Arbitration had been a common international tool between Great
Britain and the United States. Boundaries, fisheries, and claims had
repeatedly been submitted to courts or commissions of varying
structure, and even the claims affecting the honor of Great Britain had
been settled by arbitration at Geneva. After the Venezuela excitement
friends of peace gathered in a convention at Lake Mohonk to discuss the
extension of the method of arbitration. When Great Britain had accepted
the principle in the case of Venezuela, Cleveland entered into a general
arbitration treaty, which was signed at Washington in February, 1897.
Public opinion received it cordially, but the Senate was slow to take it
up. Late in the spring it was ratified with amendments that destroyed
its force and showed the reluctance of Senators to accept the principle
of arbitration. International peace was thus postponed, while the rising
insurrection in Cuba drove it as well as general reform from the center
of public interest.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The _American Commonwealth_ of James Bryce (1888) is the starting-point
for the study of political conditions of the nineties, and is to be
reinforced by W. Wilson, _Congressional Government_ (1885), T.
Roosevelt, _Essays on Practical Politics_ (1888), and P.L. Ford, _The
Honorable Peter Stirling_ (1894). Among the personal narratives the most
useful are T. Roosevelt, _Fifty Years of My Life_ (1913); R.M.
LaFollette, _A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences_ (1913; also
published serially in the _American Magazine_, 1911, as
"Autobiography"); Tom L. Johnson's _My Story_ (1911; edited by E.J.
Hauser); C. Lloyd, _Henry Demarest Lloyd_ (2 vols., 1912);
_Autobiography of Thomas Collier Platt_ (1910; edited by L.J. Lang, and
highly unreliable); and Jane Addams, _Twenty Years of Hull House_
(1910). Much light is thrown upon the mechanics of tariff legislation by
I.M. Tarbell, _The Tariff in Our Times_ (1911), and by the lobby
investigations conducted by committees of Congress in 1913, and by the
campaign fund investigations conducted by similar committees in 1912.
The progress of the Australian ballot reform must be traced through the
periodicals, as it has no good history. E.C. Meyer, _Nominating Systems:
Direct Primaries versus Conventions in the United States_ (1902), is
standard in its field, as are E.P. Oberholtzer, _The Referendum in
America_ (1893), and E.C. Stanton, S.B. Anthony, and M.J. Gage, _History
of Woman Suffrage_, 1848-1900(4 vols., 1881-1902). The Annual Reports of
the Lake Mohonk Conferences on International Arbitration are a useful
aid in tracing the principles of arbitration.
CHAPTER XVI
THE SPANISH WAR
Cuba broke out in one of her numerous insurrections in 1895. The island
had been nominally quiet since the close of the Ten Years' War, in 1878,
but had always been an object of American interest. More than once it
had entered into American diplomacy to bring out reiterations of
different phases of the Monroe Doctrine. Its purchase by the United
States had been desired to extend the slave area, or to control the
Caribbean, or to enlarge the fruit and sugar plantation area. The free
trade in sugar, which the McKinley Bill had allowed, ended in 1894, and
almost immediately thereafter the native population demanded
independence.
The revolt of 1895 was defended and justified by a recital of the faults
of Spanish colonial government. Caste and monopoly played a large part
in Cuban life. The Spanish-born held the offices, enjoyed the profits,
and owned or managed the commercial privileges. The western end of the
island, most thickly settled and most under the influence of Spain, gave
least support to the uprising, but in the east, where the Cubans and
negroes raised and ground cane, or grazed their herds, discontent at the
system of favoritism and race discrimination was an important political
force. Here the insurgents soon gained a foothold in the provinces of
Santiago, Puerto Principe, and Santa Clara. From the jungle or the
mountains they sent bands of guerrillas against the sugar mills and
plantations of the ruling class, and when pursued their troops hid their
weapons and became, ostensibly, peaceful farmers. A revolutionary
government, sitting safely in New York, directed the revolt, raised
money by playing on the American love of freedom, and sent cargoes of
arms, munitions, and volunteers to the seat of war. Avoiding pitched
battles and living off the country, the patriot forces compelled Spain
to put some 200,000 troops in Cuba and to garrison every place that she
retained.
[Illustration: ALASKA, THE PHILIPPINES, AND THE SEAT OF THE SPANISH WAR]
Through 1895 and 1896 the war dragged on with no prospect of victory for
the authorities and with growing interest on the part of the United
States. Public sympathy was with the Cubans, and news from the front was
so much desired that enterprising papers sent their correspondents to
the scene of action. The reports of these, almost without exception,
magnified the character and promise of the native leaders and attacked
the policy of the Spanish forces of repression.
The insurgents began, in 1895, a policy of terror, destroying the cane
in the fields of loyalists and burning their sugar mills. To protect the
loyalists and repress the rebels the Queen Regent sent General Valeriano
Weyler to the island in 1896, with orders to end the war. Weyler replied
to devastation with concentration. Unable to separate the loyal natives
from the disloyal, or to prevent the latter from aiding the rebels, he
gathered the suspected population into huge concentration camps,
fortified his towns and villages with sentinels and barbed-wire fences,
and endeavored to depopulate the area outside his lines. American public
opinion, unused for a generation to the sight of war, was shocked by the
suffering in the camps and was aroused in moral protest. Sympathy with
the insurgents grew in 1896 and 1897, as exaggerated tales of hardship
and brutality were circulated by the "yellow" newspapers. The evidence
was one-sided and incomplete, and often dishonest, but it was effective
in steering a rising public opinion toward ultimate intervention.
The nearness of the contest brought the trouble to the United States
Government through the enforcement of the neutrality laws. There was no
public war, and Spain was thus unable to seize or examine American
vessels until they entered actual Cuban waters. It was easy to run the
Spanish blockade and take supplies to the rebel forces, which was a
permissible trade. It was easy, too, to organize and send out
filibustering parties, which were highly illegal, and which the United
States tried to stop. Out of seventy-one known attempts, the United
States broke up thirty-three, while other Powers, including Spain,
caught only eleven. Enough landed to be a material aid to the natives
and to embitter Spain in her criticism of the United States. Cleveland
issued proclamations against the unfriendly acts of citizens, and
enforced the law as well as he could in a population and with juries
sympathizing with the law-breakers. Even in Congress he found little
sympathy in his attempt to maintain a sincere neutrality.
Congress felt the popular sympathy with the Cubans and responded to it,
as well as to the demands of Americans with investments in Cuba. In the
spring of 1896 both houses joined in a resolution favoring the
recognition of Cuban belligerency. This Cleveland ignored. In December,
1896, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations reported a resolution
for the recognition of Cuban independence, and individual members of
Congress often read from the newspapers accounts of horror, and made
impassioned speeches for recognition and intervention. But Cleveland
kept his control over the situation until he left office, as Grant had
done during the Ten Years' War and the excitement over the Virginius
affair. He left the determination of the time and manner of ultimate
intervention to his successor.
Among the planks of the Republican platform of 1896 was one asserting
the duty of the United States to "use its influence and good offices to
restore peace and give independence to Cuba," but there is no evidence
that President McKinley contemplated a forcible intervention when he
organized his Cabinet. John Sherman had, as Senator, spoken freely in
sympathy with Cuba. As Secretary of State he recalled Hannis Taylor from
Madrid and sent out General Stewart L. Woodford, with instructions
looking toward a peaceful mediation. Not until the autumn of 1897 was it
possible to press the Cuban matter, for Spain suffered two changes of
Ministry and the murder of a Prime Minister. But by the end of
September Spain had been notified that McKinley hoped to be able to give
positive assurances of peace to Congress when it met in December.
A Liberal Government, headed by Sagasta, took office in Spain in
October, 1897. It declined mediation by the United States, retorting
that if the United States were to enforce the law of neutrality the war
would soon cease. It recalled Weyler, however, sent out a new and milder
governor-general, modified the _reconcentrado_ orders that had so
enraged the United States, and issued, on November 25, a proclamation
establishing a sort of home rule, or autonomy, for Cuba. In the winter
of 1897 the Spanish Government was endeavoring to give no excuse for
American intervention, and at the same time, by moderate means, to
restore peace in Cuba. The Spanish population of Cuba opposed autonomy
and made the establishment of autonomous governments a farce. In January
there were riots in Havana among the loyal subjects. Outside the Spanish
lines the rebels laughed at autonomy, for they were determined to have
independence or nothing. Woodford, in touch with the Spanish Government,
believed that in the long run the Spanish people would let the Queen
Regent go beyond autonomy to independence, and that with patience Cuba
might be relieved of Spanish control.
There was no positive news for Congress in December, 1897, but by
February the conditions in Cuba had become the most interesting current
problem. The New York _Journal_ obtained and published a private letter
written by the Spanish Minister, De Lome, in which McKinley was
characterized as a temporizing politician. The Minister had no sooner
been recalled than the Maine, a warship that had been detached from the
North Atlantic Squadron, and sent to Cuba to safeguard American citizens
there, was destroyed by an explosion in the harbor of Havana, on
February 15, 1898. There was no evidence connecting the destruction of
the Maine with any person, but unscrupulous newspapers made capital out
of it, using the catch-phrase, "Remember the Maine," to inflame a public
mind already aroused by sympathy and indignation. After February, only a
determined courage could have withstood the demand for intervention and
a Spanish war.
The negotiations with Spain continued rapidly in the two months after
the loss of the Maine. McKinley avoided an arbitral inquiry into the
accident, urged by Spain, but pressed increasingly for an end of
concentration, for relief for the suffering population, and for full
self-government. He did not ask independence for Cuba, and every demand
that he made was assented to by Spain. Notwithstanding this, on April
11, 1898, he sent the Cuban correspondence to Congress, urged an
intervention, and turned the control of the situation over to a body
that had for two years been clamoring for forcible interference. Nine
days later Congress resolved, "That the people of the Island of Cuba
are, and of right ought to be, free and independent." On April 21 the
Spanish War began.
The administrative branches of the Government had made some
preparations for war before the declaration. The navy was small but
modern. It dated from the early eighties, when Congress was roused to a
realization that the old Civil War navy was obsolete and began to
authorize the construction of modern fighting ships. The "White
Squadron" took shape in the years after 1893. Only two armored cruisers
were in commission when Harrison left office, but the number increased
rapidly until McKinley had available for use the second-class
battleships Maine and Texas, the armored cruiser Brooklyn, and the
first-class battleships Iowa, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Oregon. From
the beginning of the McKinley Administration these, as well as the
lesser vessels of all grades, were diligently drilled and organized. The
new Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, had foreseen
and hoped for war. He spent the contingent funds on target practice, and
had the naval machine at its highest efficiency when the Maine was lost.
On March 9, 1898, Congress, in a few hours, put $50,000,000 at the
disposal of the President for national defense, and the navy spent its
share of this for new vessels, transports, and equipment. The vessels in
the Orient were mobilized at Hongkong under the command of Commodore
George Dewey; the Oregon, on station in the Pacific, was ordered home by
the long route around the Horn; the ships in the Atlantic were assembled
off the Chesapeake. Part of the latter were organized as a flying
squadron, for patrol, under Commodore Winfield Scott Schley, while
toward the end of March Captain William T. Sampson was promoted over
the heads of many ranking officers and given command of the whole North
Atlantic Squadron, including the fleet of Schley.
Congress debated a new army bill while the navy was being prepared for
war. Not until April 22 did it permit the enlargement of the little
regular army of 25,000. Until war had begun the volunteers, of whom some
216,000 were taken into the service, could not be called out or made
ready for the field. Some preparations were made within the War
Department, but the little staff of clerks, used to the small routine of
the peace basis, and having no plan of enlargement or mobilization
worked out, made little headway. The navy was ready to strike the day
war was declared, but the army had yet to be planned, recruited,
clothed, drilled, and transported to the front. The men of the navy knew
their duty and were ready for it; in the army thousands of civilians had
to blunder through the duties of strange offices. William J. Bryan
accepted the colonelcy in a Nebraska regiment. Theodore Roosevelt
resigned his office in the Navy Department to raise a regiment of
volunteer cavalry. Politicians struggled for commissions for themselves
and friends. Civil War veterans fought for reappointment, and enough
soldiers of the Confederacy put on the blue uniforms, or sent their
sons, to show that the breach had been healed between the North and
South. It was an enthusiastic rather than an effective army that was
brought together in the two months after the war began.
Cuba, the cause of the war and its objective, was the center of the
scheme of strategy. The navy was called upon to protect the Atlantic
seaboard from the fleet of Spain, which was reputed to be superior to
that of the United States. It had also to maintain a blockade of Cuba
and prevent the landing of reinforcements until the army could be
prepared to invade the island. Dewey's fleet in the Pacific was ordered
to destroy the Spanish naval force in the Philippine Islands, and moved
immediately upon Manila when Great Britain issued her proclamation of
neutrality and made it impossible to remain longer in her waters at
Hongkong.
On the morning of May 1 Dewey led his squadron past the forts, over the
submerged mines, and up the channel of Manila Bay. The Spanish forces in
the islands, already contending with a native insurrection, were
helpless before evening, having lost the whole fleet. Dewey was left in
a position to take the city when he chose, and sent home word to that
effect. He waited in the harbor until an army of occupation had been got
ready, hurried to the transports at San Francisco, and sent out under
General Wesley Merritt. He brought the native leader Aguinaldo back to
the islands, whence he had been expelled, to foment insurrection. The
first American reinforcements arrived at Manila by the end of June. On
August 13 they took the city.
Before the news of the surprising victory at Manila reached the United
States there was nervousness along the Atlantic Coast because of the
uncertain plans of the main Spanish fleet, which had left the Cape Verde
Islands, under Admiral Cervera, on April 29, and which might appear off
New York or Boston at any time. The naval strategists knew it must be
headed for the West Indies, but seaboard Congressmen begged excitedly
for protection, and the sensational newspapers pictured the coast in
ruins after bombardment.
To Sampson and Schley was assigned the task of guarding the coast,
keeping up the blockade, and finding Cervera's fleet before it reached a
harbor in American waters. San Juan, Santiago de Cuba, Cienfuegos, and
Havana were the only probable destinations. Sampson watched the north
side of Cuba and Porto Rico, while Schley and the flying squadron moved
to Key West, and on May 19 started around the west end of Cuba to patrol
the southern shore. On that same day, entirely unobserved, Cervera
slipped into the port of Santiago, at the eastern extremity of Cuba.
When the rumor of his arrival reached Sampson at Key West, Schley was
already well on his way and firm in his belief that Cervera was heading
for Cienfuegos.
The flying squadron, impeded by its colliers and its tenders, moved
deliberately around Cuba to Cienfuegos, outside of whose harbor it
remained for two days. Here Sampson's orders to proceed immediately to
Santiago reached it. On May 26 the fleet was off the entrance to
Santiago Harbor, and in this vicinity it stayed for two more days.
Schley could get no news that Cervera was here; he feared that his coal
would give out and that heavy seas would prevent his getting what coal
he had out of his colliers. He decided, in spite of orders, to go back
to Key West; he started a retrograde movement, reconsidered it, and was
again on blockade when, early on Sunday morning, May 29, he discovered
the Spanish fleet at anchor in the channel, where it had been for the
last nine days.
The blockade of Santiago was strengthened on June 1 by the arrival of
Sampson, who had rushed thither on hearing that Schley had decided to
leave the post. The two fleets were merged, and Schley, outranked by
Sampson, became a passenger on his flagship Brooklyn. By day, the
warships, ranged in a great half-circle, watched the narrow outlet of
the harbor. By night they took turns standing close in, with
searchlights playing on the entrance. For five weeks they kept this up,
not entering the harbor because of their positive orders not to risk the
loss of any fighting units, and waited for the arrival of an army to
coöperate with them against the land defenses of Santiago.
Sampson asked for military aid early in June, and on June 7 the War
Department ordered the army that had been mobilized at Tampa to go to
his assistance. General Nelson A. Miles, in command of the army, was not
allowed to head the expedition, but was kept at home while General
William R. Shafter directed the field work. At Tampa there was almost
hopeless confusion. The single track railway that supplied the camp was
unable to move promptly either men or munitions, the Quartermaster's
Department sent down whole trainloads of supplies without bills of
lading, and when the troops were at last on board the fleet of
transports they were kept in the river for a week before they were
allowed to start for Santiago. Sixteen thousand men, mostly regulars,
with nearly one thousand officers and two hundred war correspondents,
sailed on June 14, and were in conference with Sampson six days later.
A misunderstanding as to strategy arose in this conference. Sampson left
it believing that the army would land and move directly along the shore
against the batteries that covered the entrance to the harbor. Shafter,
however, though he issued no general order to that effect, was
determined to march inland upon the city of Santiago itself. On June 22
and 23 the army was landed by the navy, for it had neither boats nor
lighters of its own. The first troops, climbing ashore at the railway
pier at Daquiri, marched west along the coast to Siboney, and then
plunged inland, each regiment for itself, along the narrow jungle trail
leading to Santiago. Shafter himself, corpulent and sick, followed as he
could. Before he established his control over the army on land the head
of the column had engaged the enemy at Las Guasimas, nine miles from
Santiago, on June 24. The First Volunteer Cavalry, under the command of
Colonel Leonard M. Wood, with Theodore Roosevelt as lieutenant-colonel,
had marched most of the night in order to be in the first fighting.
After a sharp engagement the Spanish retired and the American advance
upon Santiago continued in a more orderly fashion.
The narrow trail between Siboney, on the shore, and Santiago, was some
twelve miles long. There were dense forests on both sides. Along this
the American army stretched itself at the end of June. There were few
ambulances or wagons, and they could not have been used if they had been
more numerous. Rations for the front were packed on mules or horses. The
troops, hurried to the tropics in the heavy, dark, winter clothing of
the regular army, suffered from heat, rain, and irregular rations.
Before them the San Juan River crossed the trail at right angles. Beyond
this were low hills carrying the fortifications, trenches, and wire
fences of Santiago, behind which the Spanish force could fight with
every advantage in its favor. Some five miles to the right of the line
of advance was the Spanish left, in a blockhouse at El Caney. On the
night before July 1, the American army moved on a concerted plan against
the whole Spanish line.
Lawton, with a right wing, moved against El Caney, with the idea of
demolishing it and crumpling up the Spanish left. The main column
followed the trail, crossed the San Juan River, and stormed the hills
beyond. The fight lasted all day on July 1, leaving the American forces
to sleep in the Spanish trenches, and to re-face them the next day.
There was more fighting on July 2 and 3, after which Santiago was
besieged by land, as it had been by sea since June 1.
Cervera watched the invading army with growing desperation. He knew the
inefficiency of his fleet, that it had left Spain unprepared because
public opinion demanded immediate action, that its guns were lacking and
its morale low, that if it stayed at anchor in the harbor it would be
taken by the army, and that if it went to sea it would be annihilated
by Sampson. His only chance was to rush out, scatter in flight, and
trust to luck. On Sunday, July 3, he led his ships out of the harbor in
single file, turned west against the Brooklyn, which guarded the
American left, and endeavored to escape.
Sampson had already issued orders for battle in case Cervera should come
out. He had himself started with his flagship, the New York, for a
conference with Shafter, and was some seven miles east of the entrance
to the harbor when the fleet appeared and the battle began. He turned at
once to the long chase that pursued the Spanish vessels along the Cuban
shore. The Brooklyn, at which Cervera had headed, instead of closing,
circled to the right, and nearly rammed her neighbor, the Texas, before
she regained her place at the head of the pursuit. Schley was the
ranking officer in the battle, but no one needed or heeded the orders
that he signaled to the other ships. Before sundown the Spanish fleet
was completely destroyed.
The land and naval battles at Santiago brought the Spanish War to an
end. For several weeks the army kept up the investment, with health and
morale steadily deteriorating. On July 17 the Spanish army at Santiago
was surrendered. On July 27 an invasion of Porto Rico under General
Miles took place, and on August 12 the preliminaries of peace were
signed on behalf of Spain by the French Minister at Washington. Manila
fell the next day, and the war closed with the American army in
possession of the most valuable of Spain's remaining colonies.
The Spanish and American peace commissioners met in Paris in October to
fix a basis for settlement. An American demand that Cuba should be set
free, without debt, and left to the tutelage of the United States, and
that Porto Rico should become an American possession, was formulated
early in the autumn. There was less certainty about the retention of the
Philippines, for here the desire for expansion was checked by a
conservative opposition to the adoption of foreign colonies. The evil
effects of imperialism were already being pictured by those who had
opposed the war. The difficulties of returning the islands to Spain were
greater than those involved in their retention, and McKinley finally
determined that the cession must include the Philippine Archipelago, and
the island of Guam in the Ladrones. The chief of the American
commissioners was William R. Day, who had become Secretary of State
early in the war, and who was succeeded in that post by John Hay. Under
his direction the Treaty of Paris was signed December 10, 1898.
The war and the conquest of the Philippines hastened another though
peaceful expansion. The Hawaiian Islands had been a matter of interest
to the United States since the American missionaries had begun to work
there in the thirties. A growing, American, sugar-raising population had
long hoped for annexation and had carried out a successful revolution
shortly before 1893. Harrison had concluded a treaty of annexation with
the provisional government, but Cleveland had refused to approve it. On
July 7, 1898, however, the Newlands Resolution accomplished the
annexation of the republic, and in 1900 a regular territorial government
was provided for the group of islands. The spectacular journey of the
Oregon around Cape Horn revived the demand for an isthmian canal.
Expansion suddenly took possession of the American mind, and a new idea
of duty, summed up by Rudyard Kipling in _The White Man's Burden_,
filled a large portion of the press.
The United States had suddenly passed from internal debate over free
silver to war and conquest. At the end of 1898 the War Department, that
had proved its inadequacy in nearly every phase of the war, was forced
to develop a colonial policy for Porto Rico and the Philippines and to
guide Cuba to independence. It was still under the direction of General
Russell A. Alger, but was torn by dissension and criticism upon the
conduct of the war. Not until Alger was asked to retire, in 1899, and
Elihu Root, of New York, succeeded him, was the War Department made
equal to its task.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best account of the war with Spain is F.E. Chadwick, _Relations of
the United States and Spain: Diplomacy_ (1909), and _Relations of the
United States and Spain: The Spanish American War_ (2 vols., 1911).
These works have in large measure superseded the earlier studies; J.M.
Callahan, _Cuba and International Relations_ (1899); J.H. Latané, _The
Diplomatic Relations of the United States and Spanish America_
(1900:--so far as it relates to Cuba); H.E. Flack, _Spanish-American
Diplomatic Relations preceding the war of 1898_ (in Johns Hopkins
University Studies, vol. XXIV); and E.J. Benton, _International Law and
Diplomacy of the Spanish-American War_ (1908). Useful narratives
relating to the army are R.A. Alger, _The Spanish-American War_ (1901);
H.H. Sargent, _The Campaign of Santiago de Cuba_ (3 vols., 1907); J.
Wheeler, _The Santiago Campaign_ (1899); J.D. Miley, _In Cuba with
Shafter_ (1899); and T. Roosevelt, _The Rough Riders_ (1899). The navy
may be followed in J.D. Long, _The New American Navy_ (2 vols., 1903);
E.S. Maclay, _History of the United States Navy_ (3 vols., 1901, the
third volume containing allegations that precipitated the Schley-Sampson
controversy); G.E. Graham, _Schley and Santiago_ (1902); W.S. Schley,
_Forty-five Years under the Flag_ (1904); W.A.M. Goode, _With Sampson
through the War_ (1899). The public documents of the war are easily
accessible, especially in the Annual Reports for 1898 of the Secretaries
of War and Navy, and in the Foreign Relations volume for that year. The
controversies after the war illuminated many details, particularly the
Schley Inquiry (57th Congress, 1st Session, House Document, no. 485,
Serial nos. 4370, 4371), and the Miles-Eagan Inquiry (56th Congress, 1st
Session, Senate Document, no. 270, Serial nos. 3870-3872).
CHAPTER XVII
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Out of the humiliating debates upon the war, on the capacity of Alger
and Shafter, on the management of the commissary and the field
hospitals, on the failure of Sampson and Shafter to coöperate, on the
tactics and the alleged weakness of Schley, and on the diplomatic
sincerity of McKinley, only one name caught the public ear. The only
career that placed a soldier in line for political promotion was that of
Theodore Roosevelt, who was still under forty years of age, although he
had lived a keen, aggressive, and public life for nearly twenty years.
Just out of Harvard in 1880, Roosevelt entered the rough and tumble of
New York politics. He was a reform legislator when Cleveland was
governor, and an opponent of the nomination of Blaine in 1884. He did
not fight the ticket or turn Mugwump, for he had already formed a
political philosophy, that only those who stayed within the party could
be efficient in reform; but he dropped out of the ranks and took up
ranch life in the West. Harrison made him a Civil Service Commissioner
and supported him in a stern administration of the merit system. Before
he left this office in 1895, to become Police Commissioner of New York
City, the breezy and vigorous assaults of Roosevelt upon political
corruption had already marked him as a reformer of a new type, who
remained an active politician and a party man without losing his
interest in reform. As police commissioner he gained new fame and more
admirers. In 1897 he took the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy
and prepared for war. He had already found time to write many books on
the West, reform, naval history, and outdoor life. He resigned his post
in April, 1898, on the eve of war, raised a regiment of volunteers,
which the public speedily named the "Rough Riders," kept his men in the
center of the stage while there was fighting, risked and violated all
theories of discipline to attack the sanitary policy of the
Administration in the autumn, and in October received the nomination of
his party for Governor of New York, over the ill-concealed opposition of
Thomas Collier Platt.
During the campaign of 1898 Roosevelt carried his candidacy to the voter
in every part of the State. He spoke from rear platforms day after day.
Rough Riders, in uniform, accompanied his party and reinforced his
appeal to mixed motives of good government and patriotic fervor. He was
elected in November, and on the same day the Republican control of
Congress was assured. It was made possible for the party to fulfill the
last of the obligations laid upon it by the election of 1896.
A currency act, passed in March, 1900, was the result of Republican
success. It established the gold dollar by law as the standard of value,
legalized the gold reserve at $150,000,000, and made it the duty of the
Treasury to keep at a parity with gold the $313,000,000 of Civil War
greenbacks, the $550,000,000 of silver and silver certificates, the
$75,000,000 of Sherman Act treasury notes, as well as the national bank
notes, which aggregated $300,000,000 in 1900. The law left the currency
far from satisfactory in that it made it dependent upon redemption, and
hence liable to sudden changes in value, but it silenced the fear of
free-silver coinage.
In the spring of 1900 Congress was forced to consider the basis of
colonial government. Governments similar to those of the Territories
were provided for Hawaii and Porto Rico, but a troublesome revolt
prevented such treatment of the Philippine Islands. There had been a
native insurrection in these islands before the Spanish War began, and
the aid of the rebels had made it easier for the United States to
overthrow the power of Spain. Instead of receiving a pledge of
independence, as Cuba did, the islands became a territorial possession
of the United States. In February, 1899, under the native leader, Emilio
Aguinaldo, insurrection broke out against the United States and received
the sympathy of large numbers of Americans. The spectacle of the United
States subduing a spirit of independence in the Philippines aroused and
stimulated the movement of anti-imperialism that had fought against the
acquisition of the islands. The incompatibility of republican
institutions and foreign colonies, the demoralizing influence of ruling
on the ruling class, the lesson of the fall of Rome, were held up before
the public. Carl Schurz was one of the leaders in the protest, and his
followers included many whose names were already well known in the
advocacy of tariff and civil service reform. In 1901 the Supreme Court
upheld the constitutionality of expansion and imperial control. The
people had already decided in their favor in 1900.
There was no contest for either nomination in the campaign of 1900.
Bryan had established his right to the leadership that had come to him
by chance in 1896. Although conservative Democrats still distrusted him,
their voices were drowned by the popular approval of his honesty and
humanity. "Four years ago," said Altgeld, in the Democratic Convention
at Kansas City, "we quit trimming, we quit using language that has a
double meaning.... We went forth armed with that strength that comes
from candor and sincerity and we fought the greatest campaign ever waged
on the American continent.... [For] the first time in the history of
this Republic the Democracy of America have risen up in favor of one
man." On a platform that repeated the currency demands of 1896 and
denounced imperialism, Bryan was unanimously renominated, with Adlai E.
Stevenson for the Vice-Presidency.
The emphatic denunciation of imperialism brought to Bryan and Stevenson
the support of a group of independents,--the "hold-your-nose-and-vote"
group, as the Republican press called them,--who were strong for the
gold standard, but believed that currency was less fundamental than
imperialism. The Republican party had accepted and approved the war and
the benevolent intentions of the United States, and had renominated
McKinley at Philadelphia, without a dissenting voice. Vice-President
Hobart had died in office, or the original ticket might have been
continued. As a substitute, rumor had attacked the name of Governor
Roosevelt, while Senator Platt, preferring not to have him reëlected
Governor of New York, had encouraged his boom for the Vice-Presidency.
Repeatedly, in the spring of 1900, Roosevelt declared that he would not
seek or accept the Vice-Presidency. Hanna and McKinley did not desire
him on the ticket, but at the convention the delegates broke down all
resistance and forced him to accept the nomination.
The policy of dignity, which McKinley had assumed in 1896, was continued
by him in 1900, but the vice-presidential candidate proved the equal of
Bryan as a campaigner. In hundreds of speeches, reaching nearly every
State, they carried their personality to the voters. The two issues,
imperialism and free silver, divided the voters along different lines,
but the Administration had an economic basis for support in the recovery
of business on every hand. The Republicans took credit for the general
and abundant prosperity, and their cartoonists emphasized the idea of
the "full dinner pail" as a reason for continued support. A smaller
percentage of citizens voted than in 1896, for the issue was less clear
than it had been then. Many who were discontented with both candidates
voted with the Prohibitionists or Socialists. The Republican ticket was
elected, with 292 electoral votes, as against 155 received by Bryan and
Stevenson. A continuance of the Republican control of Congress was
assured at the same time.
William McKinley was the first President after Grant to receive a second
consecutive term. He made few changes in his Cabinet in 1901. Elihu Root
remained in the War Department, for the sake of which he had refused to
consider the Vice-Presidency, and strove for order in the Philippines,
in Cuba, and in the United States Army itself. John Hay, as Secretary of
State, continued his correspondence with the Powers over the Chinese
revolt, without a break.
Only Seward and John Quincy Adams can rival John Hay as successful
American Ministers of Foreign Affairs. Born in the Middle West in 1838,
Hay served in Lincoln's household as a private secretary throughout the
Civil War. He held minor appointments after this and alternated
diplomatic experience with literary production. The monumental _Life of
Abraham Lincoln_ was partly his work. His graceful verse gained for him
a wide reading. His anonymous novel, _The Breadwinners_, was an
important document in the early labor movement. McKinley sent him to
London as Ambassador in 1897, following the tradition that only the best
in the United States may go to the Court of St. James, and had recalled
him to be Secretary of State in the fall of 1898. The Boxer outbreak in
China in 1900 gave the first opening to the new diplomacy of the United
States, broadened out of its insularity by the Spanish War and
interested in the attainment of international ideas. Hay led in the
adjustment which settled the Chinese claims, opened the door of China
to the commerce of the world, and prevented her dismemberment. He was
still engaged in this correspondence when President McKinley was
murdered by an anarchist, and Theodore Roosevelt became President of the
United States, September 14, 1901.
In the hurried inaugural ceremony held in the Buffalo residence in which
McKinley died, Roosevelt declared his intention to continue the term as
his predecessor had begun it. He insisted that all the members of the
Cabinet should remain with him, as they did for considerable periods. He
took up the work where it had been dropped, and for some months it was
not apparent that a change had been made from a party administration to
a personal administration. The suave and cordial tolerance of McKinley
was succeeded by the aggressive certainty of his successor. Through John
Hay's skillful hand this new tone made a deeper impression on the
politics of the world than had that of any President since Washington
gave forth the doctrine of neutrality.
Cuba was a pending problem. The American army, under General Leonard
Wood, had cleaned up the island. The medical service had learned to
isolate the mosquito, and had expelled the scourge of yellow fever. The
natives formed a constitution which became effective on May 20, 1902. On
this day the United States withdrew from the new Republic, leaving it to
manage its own affairs, subject only to a pledge that it would forever
maintain its independence, that it would incur no debt without providing
the means for settling it, and that the United States might lawfully
intervene to protect its independence or maintain responsible
government. In the winter of 1901-02 Roosevelt urged Congress to adopt a
policy of commercial reciprocity with Cuba. He was supported in this by
opinion in Cuba, and by officials of the American Sugar Trust, but was
opposed in the Senate by a combination of beet-sugar Republicans and
cane-sugar Democrats. The measure failed in 1902, creating bad feeling
between President and Congress, but a treaty of modified reciprocity was
ratified in 1903.
In 1902 the United States became the first suitor to test the efficacy
of the new court of arbitration at The Hague. In 1898 the Czar of Russia
had invited the countries represented at St. Petersburg to join in a
conference upon disarmament. His motives were questioned and derided,
but the conference met the next summer at Huis ten Bosch, the summer
palace of the Queen of the Netherlands, at The Hague. Here the plan of
disarmament proved futile, but a great treaty for the settlement of
international disputes was accepted by the countries present. It seemed
probable that the Hague Court, thus created, would die of neglect, but
President Roosevelt, appealed to by an advocate of peace, produced a
trifling case and submitted it to arbitration. The Pious Fund dispute,
with Mexico and the United States as suitors, involved the control of
church funds in California. The suit was won by the United States, but
derived its chief importance from being the first Hague settlement.
The pledge of the United States for Cuban independence had hardly been
fulfilled when another Latin Republic became involved in trouble.
Venezuela, torn by war, had incurred obligations to European creditors,
and had defaulted in the payments upon them. In December, 1902, Great
Britain and Germany announced a blockade of the Venezuelan ports in
retaliation, and they were soon joined by other Powers with similar
claims. Disclaiming intent to protect Venezuela in defaulting, Roosevelt
urged the European claimants to abandon force for arbitration. Under his
leadership joint commissions were finally established, and in 1903 the
legal technicalities involved were sent to The Hague. The episode
involved a new interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, making it clear
that unless the United States wished to protect the South American
Republics in the evasion of their debts it must assume some
responsibility for the honest settlement of them.
The boundary of Alaska next became a subject for arbitration. Since the
valley of the Yukon had attracted its first great migration in the
summer of 1897 the mining-camps had steadily increased in importance.
Many of these were on the Canadian side of the meridian of 141°, and all
were reached either by the river steamers or the trails from the south.
The most important ports of entry were Dyea and Skaguay, at the head of
the Lynn Canal, a long fiord projecting some ninety miles into the
continent. From these ports the prospector plunged inland, climbed the
Chilkoot or the Chilkat Pass, and followed one of several overland
trails to the Upper Yukon.
The importance given to Dyea and Skaguay revived the question of their
ownership and with this the boundary of Alaska. When Seward bought
Alaska for the United States in 1867 he received it with the boundaries
agreed upon at St. Petersburg between England and Russia in 1825. These
followed the meridian of 141° from Mount St. Elias to the Arctic Ocean,
and followed the irregularities of the shore-line southeast from that
mountain to the Pacific at 54° 40´, North Latitude. The narrow coast
strip was described as following the windings (_sinuosités_) of the
shore, bounded by the shore mountains if possible, but in no case to be
more than thirty miles wide. The narrow Lynn Canal pierces the
thirty-mile strip, and the dispute turned chiefly upon interpretation:
whether the canal should be regarded as a _sinuosité_ of the shore,
around which the boundary must go, or as a stream which it might
properly cross.
For thirty years after 1867 the British and Canadian government maps
treated the Lynn Canal and other similar fiords as American, but it
became convenient for Canada, after 1897, to urge that the boundary
should cross the canal and leave Dyea and Skaguay on British soil. A
Canadian and American Joint High Commission, meeting in 1898, had been
unable to adjust the controversy. In 1903 it was submitted to a
tribunal, three to a side, which sat in London. It was doubtful whether
the three American adjudicators, Root, Lodge, and Turner, were all
"jurists of repute," as the treaty provided, but the arguments of the
American counsel convinced Lord Chief Justice Alverstone, one of the
British adjudicators, and his vote, added to the American three, gave a
verdict that sustained most of the claims of the United States.
In Cuba and Venezuela, at The Hague, and in the Alaskan matter,
Roosevelt and Hay showed at once a firmness and a reasonableness that
attracted European attention to American diplomacy as never before. The
subject of American diplomacy became a common study in American
universities. England and Germany appeared to be desirous of
conciliating the United States. The German Emperor bought a steam yacht
in the United States, sent his brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, to
attend the launching, and sent as Ambassador a German nobleman who had
long been a personal friend of the President. The reputation for
firmness was enhanced, but that for fairness was lessened by the next
episode, which involved the Colombian State of Panama.
The dangerous voyage of the Oregon in 1898 completed the conviction of
the United States that an isthmian canal must be constructed, and that
the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was no longer adequate. The activity of De
Lesseps and his French company at Panama had raised the question about
1880, but nothing had been done to weaken the treaty that obstructed
American construction and control until Hay undertook a negotiation
under the direction of McKinley in the fall of 1899. Congress was in the
midst of a debate over a Nicaragua canal scheme when it was announced
that on February 5, 1900, Hay and Lord Pauncefote had signed a treaty
opening the canal to American construction, but providing for its
neutralization. The treaty forbade the fortification of the canal or its
use as an instrument of war. It was killed by amendment in the Senate,
but on November 18, 1901, Lord Pauncefote signed a second treaty, by
which Great Britain waived all her old rights save that of equal
treatment for all users of the canal, and left the future waterway to
the discretion of the United States. With the way thus opened,--for the
Senate promptly confirmed this treaty,--a new study of routes and
methods was hurried to completion.
An Isthmian Commission, created by the United States in 1899, was ready
to report upon a route when the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty was
concluded. The practicable routes had been reduced in number to two, at
Panama, and through Nicaragua. The former was under the control of the
French company, which placed so high a price upon its concession that
the commission recommended the Nicaragua route as, on the whole, more
available. In Congress there was a strong predisposition in favor of
this same route, but during 1902 this was weakened. Senator Hanna
preferred the Panama route and worked effectively for it. The French
Panama Company, frightened by the popularity of the Nicaragua route,
reduced its price. The earthquake and volcanic eruption on the Island of
Martinique reminded the world that Nicaragua was nearer the zone of
active volcanic life, and hence more exposed to danger, than Panama. In
June Congress empowered the President to select the route and build a
canal at once.
Negotiations with Colombia for the right to build at Panama dragged on
through 1902 and 1903. Weakened by continuous revolution, that Republic
realized that the isthmian right of way was its most valuable asset.
Only after prolonged discussion did its Government authorize its
Minister at Washington to sign a treaty reserving Colombian sovereignty
over the strip, but giving to the United States the canal concession in
return for $10,000,000 in cash and an annuity of $250,000. This treaty
was signed in Washington in January, 1903, and was received as a triumph
for the diplomacy of Hay and Roosevelt. It was ratified in March by the
Senate, in spite of a last filibuster by the friends of Nicaragua, but
the Colombian Congress rejected the treaty and adjourned.
By the autumn of 1903 Roosevelt had determined upon the route at Panama,
the French company had become eager to sell, and the Colombians living
on the Isthmus were anxious to have the negotiations ended and the
digging begun. In October the President wrote to an intimate friend
hoping that there might be a revolt of the Isthmus against Colombia,
though disclaiming any intent to provoke one. The friend made the wish
public over his own name, but before it appeared in print the revolt had
taken place. It was known in advance to the State Department, which
telegraphed on November 3, 1903, asking when it was to be precipitated.
It took place later on this day, the independence of the Republic of
Panama was proclaimed, the United States prevented Colombia from
repressing it by force, recognized the new Republic by cable, and on
November 18 signed at Washington a treaty with Panama granting the canal
concession. "I took Panama," boasted President Roosevelt some years
later, when critics denounced his policy as a robbery of a weak
neighbor.
The construction of a canal proceeded rapidly, once the diplomatic
entanglements had been brushed away. The incidental problems of
sanitation, labor, supplies, and engineering were solved promptly and
effectively. Congress poured money into the enterprise without
restraint, the first boats were passed through the locks in 1914, and in
1915 the formal opening of the canal was celebrated by a naval
procession at the Isthmus and an Exposition at San Francisco.
Vigor and certainty of purpose marked the conduct of domestic affairs as
well as foreign, but the necessity for the concurrence in these by
Congress made the former results less striking than the latter. The
appointments of President Roosevelt were such as might be expected from
one who had himself devoted six years to the Civil Service Commission.
Few of them met with opposition from the reform element. In the South he
became involved with local public opinion, especially in the cases of a
negro postmistress at Indianola, Mississippi, and the negro collector of
the port of Charleston, in which he maintained that although federal
appointments ought generally to go to persons acceptable in their
districts, the door of opportunity must not be shut against the negro.
Within a few weeks of his inauguration he precipitated a severe
discussion upon the status of the negro by entertaining Booker T.
Washington at the White House. He disciplined Republican leaders in the
South who endeavored to exclude negroes from the party organization and
to build up a "lily-white" Republican machine.
The administrative duties of the United States expanded rapidly after
the Spanish War. The extension of scientific functions beginning in the
eighties continued until the volume of work forced the creation of new
offices. Federal civil employees numbered 107,000 in 1880, 166,000 in
1890, 256,000 in 1900, and 384,000 in 1910. Among the newer scientific
activities was included that of the reclamation of the arid or semi-arid
lands of the Southwest.
The region between the Missouri River and the Sierra Nevada had been
regarded as uninhabitable since the days of Pike. Known as the "American
Desert," it figured in the atlases as a place of sand and aridity, and
became the home chosen for the Indian tribes between 1825 and 1840.
Under the influence of migration to Oregon and California the real
character of the Far West became known, but not until the continental
railways were finished did many inhabitants enter it. In 1889 and 1890
the "Omnibus" States were admitted, embracing all the northwest half of
the old desert. Utah followed in 1896. Arizona and New Mexico and
Oklahoma developed rapidly after 1890 and were all demanding statehood
in 1902.
The advance of population into the Far West revealed the existence of
large areas in which an abundant agriculture could be produced through
irrigation. Private means were inadequate for this and the land laws
discouraged it. A demand for federal reclamation appeared in the
eighties. In 1889 a survey of available sites for reservoirs was made by
government engineers, and in 1902 Roosevelt coöperated with the
Far-Western Congressmen in securing the passage of the Newlands
Reclamation Act. By this bill the proceeds of land sales in the arid
States became a fund to be used by the reclamation service for the
construction of great public irrigation works. In the succeeding years
dams, tunnels, and ditches were undertaken that were rivaled in
magnitude only by the railroad tunnels at New York and the excavations
at Panama.
The aggressive assurance with which the Roosevelt Administration handled
the problems of diplomacy and administration created for the President a
wide and unusual popularity, which was strongest in the West. Many
critics, also, were created, who distrusted personal influence when
injected into government, and who doubted the solidity of Roosevelt's
judgment. Personal altercations, in which the President was often the
aggressor, were numerous. Among professional politicians dislike was
mingled with fear because the President had established personal
relations immediately with their constituents. Under President McKinley
the state delegations in Congress had controlled the appointive federal
offices of their States, and had been secure in their personal standing;
under Roosevelt their control of appointments was less secure. When
matters of legislation were taken up, this dissatisfaction among
members of Congress was a serious obstacle to the attainment of
constructive laws.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
After the Spanish War the secondary materials for the history of the
United States become fragmentary and unsatisfactory. Peck, Andrews, and
J.H. Latané, _America as a World Power, 1897-1907_ (in _The American
Nation_, vol. 25, 1907), are the best general guides. The facts of
campaigns are contained in E. Stanwood's second volume,--_History of the
Presidency from 1897 to 1909_ (1912, with an appendix containing the
platforms of 1912), but the Annual Cyclopædia stopped publication after
1902, and left no good successor. The various year-books should be
consulted, and the files of the magazines, which steadily improve in
historical value: _Nation_, _Harper's Weekly_, _Collier's Weekly_,
_Independent_, _Outlook_, _Literary Digest_, and the _Review of
Reviews_. Articles in these and other periodicals, dealing with episodes
occurring after 1898, may be reached through Poole's Indexes. _The
American Journal of International Law_ and the _American Political
Science Review_ are typical of the new technical periodicals. Extensive
contributions to the history of international arbitration have been made
by F.W. Holls, J.B. Scott, and W.I. Hull. There is, of course, no
critical biography of Theodore Roosevelt, although there are numerous
panegyrics by F.E. Leupp, J.A. Riis, J. Morgan, and others, and some
autobiographical papers which appeared first in the _Outlook_ (1913),
and later as _Fifty Years of My Life_ (1913). The later Messages of
McKinley and those of his successors are scattered among the government
documents, which are to be found in many libraries. _The Second Battle_
(1900), by W.J. Bryan, is autobiographic, as is A.E. Stevenson,
_Something of Men I Have Known_ (1909).
CHAPTER XVIII
BIG BUSINESS
The panic of 1893 ended the first period of the trust problem. The
preceding years had been years of formation and experiment. They had
been accompanied by an increasing popular distaste for combinations of
capital and a growing activity in the organization of labor. The Sherman
Law of 1890 had temporarily quieted the anti-trust movement, while
economic depression had checked the extravagance of speculation that had
been prevalent everywhere. During the years of depression attention was
shifted to tariff and currency, but a new era began with the recurrence
of prosperity about 1897.
The industrial revival was marked by an extension of the scope of
industry, as every similar period had been. After the panic of 1837 the
railroad had appeared among the important new activities of American
society. Improvements in manufacturing technique followed the panic of
1857. After 1873 the varied applications of electricity to industry and
communication gave a new direction to investment. After 1893, with every
preceding activity stimulated and extended, there came the first
successful construction of a trackless engine--the motor-car--and the
rebuilding of the physical plants of cities, railways, and suburban
residences. The recovery of confidence came after 1896, and before the
end of the century speculation was at full blast.
The drift toward monopoly was marked. The trusts had already shown their
profitable character. Concentration had been made possible by the
development of communication in the eighties, and grew now on a larger
scale than the eighties had imagined. Within the field of transportation
the promoters reorganized the railroads after the panic, reduced their
number, and gathered their control into the hands of a few men.
The railway system by 1900, with 198,000 miles of track, was directed by
a few powerful groups of roads. In the East the New York Central and
Pennsylvania systems were dominant. In the West the continental railways
formed the basis of new organizations. The keenest interest gathered
round the reconstruction of the Union Pacific by Edward H. Harriman, who
reorganized its finances after 1897. The Union Pacific had been forced
into combination by its location and its neighbors. Running from Omaha
to Ogden it was dependent for through traffic upon the Central Pacific
that ran from Ogden to San Francisco. When the latter came under the
control of the California capitalists who owned the Southern Pacific
lines, the Union Pacific was driven to build or buy outlets of its own,
and extended into Oregon and Texas as the result. Jay Gould had begun
the consolidation in the eighties and Harriman continued it after the
panic of 1893. He rebuilt the main line and improved the value and
credit of his property. In 1901 his road borrowed money with which to
buy a controlling interest in the Central Pacific and Southern
Pacific--the Huntington lines,--and thereafter the Harriman system, with
two complete railroads from the Mississippi to the Pacific, was beyond
the reach of hostile competition.
The Interstate Commerce Law of 1887 stimulated combination among the
railroads, since it made pools and rate agreements illegal. The
alternative to such agreements was destructive competition, since no two
lines were of exactly equal strength. To avoid this, the stronger lines
bought or leased the weaker, with which they might not coöperate, but
which they might buy outright. Harriman, successful with his
Southwestern system, tried in 1901 to buy the Northern Pacific, too, and
came into direct conflict with another group of railway owners.
The Northern Pacific had been supplemented after 1893 by the Great
Northern, which James J. Hill had built without a subsidy. These two
roads, and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, covered the Northwest as
Harriman's lines covered the Southwest. They were so placed that with
common management they could be more effective than with rivalry. The
owners of the Great Northern and the Burlington, James J. Hill and J.
Pierpont Morgan, were on the verge of a general consolidation when
Harriman tried to buy a control of the Northern Pacific. They struggled
to retain it and succeeded, but their competition raised its stock to
one thousand per share, causing a stock exchange panic on May 9, 1901.
Only the speculators suffered by the panic, but public attention was
drawn by it to the gigantic size of the combinations which held
arbitrary control over nearly half the United States.
Minor consolidations followed these in 1902 and 1903, but none aroused
so much fear as the Northern Securities Company of New Jersey, the
holding company in whose hands Hill and Morgan determined to put the
control of their lines. The fate of any single company could be
determined by the ownership of not over fifty-one per cent of its stock.
If this was owned by another corporation, a similar proportion of the
stock of the latter would control the whole. The holding company was a
machine whereby capital could control property several times its bulk.
The Governors of the Northwest States, alarmed at the monopolization of
their railways, protested and started suits. It was claimed that this
sort of merging of railroads was, after all, a conspiracy in restraint
of trade. In March, 1902, President Roosevelt instructed his
Attorney-General, Philander C. Knox, to test the Sherman Act of 1890,
and bring suit under it for the dissolution of the Northern Securities
Company. For several years after 1897 foreign affairs and big business
had been dominant in the American mind, which had admired their bigness
and activity, but now the social consequences of big business aroused
the fears of the nation. In 1903 Congress passed the Elkins Law,
forbidding railroads to give rebates to favored customers, and an
Expedition Law, to make the wheels of justice move more rapidly when
prosecutions under the Sherman and Interstate Commerce Laws were under
way.
Industrial consolidation, like that of the railways, began again in
1897, and many of the new corporations assumed a type that marked an
evolution for the trust. In the earlier period the aim of the trust had
been to eliminate competition by gathering under a single control the
whole of a given business. Oil, sugar, steel, whiskey, and tobacco were
notable instances in which extreme consolidation had been reached.
Competition changed its character as consolidation increased. It ceased
to mean a struggle between rivals in the same trade, and came to mean a
struggle between successive processes of manufacture. The mine-owner
struggled for his profits with the smelter who used his ore. The smelter
struggled with the steel manufacturer in the same way. Control of single
industries left untouched this newer competition, but an integration of
great groups of related processes promised to avoid it.
In 1901 the greatest of the integrated trusts, the United States Steel
Corporation, was created. The iron and steel industry had been expanding
since the Bessemer and other commercial processes for the manufacture of
steel had made it available for railway, bridge, and architectural
construction. Andrew Carnegie, with his Pittsburg mills, was the most
successful producer. His partnership controlled by 1901 about
twenty-five per cent of the output of finished steel. He already
included many related and successive processes, but now he allowed his
works to be merged with those of his rivals into a large company. The
resulting United States Steel Corporation owned and operated the ore
deposits and the mines, the necessary coal fields, the local railways
and freight steamers, the smelters and the blast furnaces, the rolling
mills and the factories in which iron and steel were manufactured into a
multitude of shapes for sale. With a New Jersey charter it was
capitalized at $1,100,000,000, and drew attention to the industrial
phase of the trust problem much as Harriman, Hill, and Morgan had drawn
it to the railroads.
Promotion of new trusts, with billions of aggregated capital, was the
order of the day from 1897 to 1902. The fear of monopoly was speedily
aroused, and in 1898 Congress created an Industrial Commission, whose
nineteen volumes of reports contain the facts upon which the history of
the trusts must be based. In the fall of 1899 there met in Chicago a
great conference on the trusts, where business men, economists, and
politicians discussed the economic and social possibilities of the
movement. A willingness to hear and perhaps to rely on the judgment of
experts was shown in the discussions over the trusts. It marked a change
in the American attitude toward government. By 1902 the demand for a
solution of the trust problem was heard repeatedly, but there was little
agreement as to whether the trusts were good or bad, or whether they
should be abolished, regulated, or owned outright by the Government. It
was not even certain what powers the United States possessed to regulate
general industry, but a group of Supreme Court cases suggested that the
power could be found. In the Trans-Missouri Freight Case (1897), the
Supreme Court declared that the Sherman Law applied to railway
conspiracies, and in the Addystone Pipe Case (1898), a decision against
an industrial combination, written by Circuit Judge William H. Taft, was
upheld by the court of last appeal. The Northern Securities Case,
started in 1902, was pushed to a successful end in 1904, when it became
apparent that legal control could be exercised if Congress so desired.
Labor followed the course of industry and transportation, becoming
stronger and better united, and showing a keen jealousy of centralized
control. The years of trust promotion were years of notable strikes and
of episodes which drew attention to the social results of industrial
concentration. Sometimes the trust had labor at a disadvantage, as was
shown in the strike against the Steel Corporation by the Amalgamated
Association in 1901. In 1892 this union had conducted a great strike
against the Carnegie Works and had lost public sympathy and the strike.
Its men had committed open violence, and an anarchistic sympathizer had
tried to murder Carnegie's representative at Homestead, Henry C. Frick.
In 1901 the strike affected the unionized mills of the Steel
Corporation, but that trust had only to close down the mills involved
and transfer pending contracts to other mills, remote and non-unionized.
The strike collapsed because of the superior organization of the trust.
More important than the steel strike in its effect upon the public was
the strike of the miners in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania.
In 1900 these workers were organized by the United Mine Workers of
America, under the leadership of John Mitchell. They gained concessions
in a strike in this year, partly because the strike threatened to
disturb political conditions and embarrass the Republican national
ticket. The mine-owners, most of whom were Republicans, were persuaded
by Hanna and others to end the quarrel.
In the spring of 1902 the strike broke out again, turning largely upon
the question of the formal recognition of the union. All through the
summer John Mitchell held his followers together, gaining an unusual
degree of public sympathy for his cause. In the autumn, with both sides
obstinate, a third party, the public, took an interest in the strike.
The prospect of a coalless winter alarmed political leaders and citizens
in general. It was felt that public interest was superior to the claims
of either contestant, but there was neither law nor recognized machinery
through which the public could protect itself. At this stage, in
October, 1902, President Roosevelt secretly reached the intention "to
send in the United States Army to take possession of the coal fields" if
necessary. He called the operators and Mitchell to a conference at the
White House, spoke to them as a citizen upon their duty to serve the
public, and with rising public opinion behind him and supporting him,
forced the owners to consent to an arbitration of the points at issue.
The men returned to work, pleased with the President, to whose
interference they and the public owed industrial peace.
In 1903 another miners' union, the Western Federation of Miners,
conducted a great strike in the mines of Cripple Creek. Public opinion
in Colorado knew no middle class. The miners and the operators
represented the two chief interests of the section. Hard feeling and
violence accompanied the strike. The malicious murder of non-union men
added to the bitterness, which the presence of the militia and a series
of arbitrary arrests could not allay. The strike was complicated by the
presence among the workers of a strong element of Socialists, whose ends
were political as well as economic. The leaders of the Federation, Moyer
and Haywood, were Socialists, and for them the strike was only a
beginning of political revolution. The strike lasted until the outraged
citizens of Cripple Creek formed a vigilance committee and deported the
chief agitators to Kansas.
Socialism played an increasing part in labor discussions after 1897. A
Socialist Labor party had presented a ticket and received a few votes in
1892 and 1896, but socialism had not taken a strong hold on the American
imagination. The swelling immigration that followed the new prosperity
brought new life to socialism. In 1900 a Social Democratic party polled
94,000 votes for Eugene V. Debs for President. In 1904, with the same
candidate, it received 402,000 votes. Society was reorganizing amid the
industrial changes, while the discontented classes were growing more
coherent and constructive.
President Roosevelt met the changes in transportation, industry, and
labor with vigor. He invoked the Sherman Law against the Northern
Securities Company. He brought suits against certain of the trusts
which he stigmatized as the "bad trusts." Not all concentration, he
urged, was undesirable. Capital, like labor, had its rights, but it must
obey the law. Partly through his efforts Congress created in 1903 a new
administrative department of Commerce and Labor. George B. Cortelyou
became the first Secretary of this department. Through its Bureaus of
Corporations and of Labor there was new activity in the investigation of
the facts of the industrial movement.
The vigor with which the President directed foreign relations,
interfered in big business, and espoused the cause of labor produced a
breach between him and many of the regular leaders of the party. Through
two campaigns Marcus A. Hanna had worked on the theory that the
Republican party was the party of business, and had attracted to its
support all who believed this or had something to make out of it. Many
of these Republicans could not understand what Roosevelt was trying to
do, and maintained an opposition, silent or open, to his policies.
The popularity of Hanna was used by many Republicans to offset the
popularity of Roosevelt. Before 1896 Hanna had taken little part in
public politics. Entering the Senate in 1897, he developed great
influence. By 1900 he began to speak in public with directness and
effect, and to undo the work of the cartoonists who had misrepresented
his character. He interfered to bring peace in the anthracite regions in
1900, became interested in the labor problem on its own account, and
discovered that he was popular. He was essentially a direct and honest
man, who had had no reason to doubt that it was the chief end of
government to conserve business. As he came into touch with public
affairs he broadened, saw new responsibilities for capital, and had a
new understanding of the wants of labor. The only personality that even
threatened to rival that of Roosevelt in 1904 was that of "Uncle Mark"
Hanna.
Roosevelt had been made Vice-President to get rid of him in New York.
The single life that stood between him and the White House was removed
by an assassin, and as a President by accident he desired to establish
himself and secure a nomination on his own account in 1904. By the
summer of 1902 he appreciated the growing interest in the problems of
capital and labor. A speaking tour in 1902 gave him a chance to demand a
"square deal" for all, and the control of the trusts. From some sections
of the West came the suggestion that the way to approach the trusts was
through the tariff.
The Dingley Tariff was unpopular with the Republican farmers of the
Northwest, and for some years they tolerated it in silence as a test of
party loyalty. In 1902 a liberal faction, controlled by Governor Albert
B. Cummins, captured the Iowa convention and demanded a revision of the
more extreme schedules. The belief that the tariff was the "mother of
trusts" was spreading, and the Iowa idea gained wide acceptance. In
Congress, in the session of 1902, the Republican organization had shown
the stubbornness with which any opening in the tariff wall would be
opposed.
Cuba was set free in the spring of 1902, her government having been
formed under the guidance of the United States. The duty to aid the
young Republic, and in particular to mitigate the severities of the
Dingley Tariff impressed the President, who used all his influence to
get such legislation from Congress. He failed signally, raising only a
new issue by his attempt to coerce Congress. His speeches in the summer
showed a willingness to revise the tariff, while his interference in the
coal strike in the autumn showed his willingness to oppose the ends of
capital. How far he would go in breaking with the leaders of his party
was unknown, but their disposition to "stand pat" and do nothing with
the tariff was marked before the end of 1902.
In 1902 it became a habit of Republican state conventions to demand the
renomination of Roosevelt in 1904. Whatever his effect upon the party
leaders, the rank and file liked him and believed in him, while his
personal popularity among Democrats led many to think his strength
greater than it was. His candidacy was formal and authorized, but his
opponents hoped that Hanna might be induced to try to defeat him. In
1903 the Ohio convention, with the consent of Hanna, approved the
candidacy of Roosevelt, and early in 1904 the death of Hanna removed the
last hope of Roosevelt's Republican opponents. The delegates went to a
national convention in Chicago, for which the procedure had all been
arranged at the White House, where it had been determined that Elihu
Root should be temporary chairman, and that Joseph G. Cannon, the
Speaker, should be permanent chairman. Through these the convention
registered the renomination of Roosevelt and selected Charles W.
Fairbanks, of Indiana, as Vice-President.
In the Democratic party the forces that had dominated in 1896 and 1900
had lost control. William Jennings Bryan, after two defeats, was not a
candidate in 1904. He had become a lay preacher on political subjects,
lecturing and speaking constantly in all parts of the United States, and
reinforcing his political views in the columns of his weekly _Commoner_,
which he founded after his defeat in 1900. Roosevelt had adopted many of
his fundamental themes, but Bryan retained an increasing popularity as
did the President, and, like the latter, had relations of doubtful
cordiality with the leaders of his own party. The Cleveland wing of the
Democrats still believed Bryan to be dangerous and unsound upon
financial matters, and some of them made overtures to Cleveland to be a
candidate for a third term himself. His emphatic refusal to reënter
politics compelled the conservatives to find a new candidate. Judge
Alton B. Parker, of New York, was their choice. The owner of the most
notorious of the sensational newspapers, William Randolph Hearst,
offered himself. Several other candidates were presented to the
Democratic Convention at Chicago, but Parker received the nomination,
over the bitter opposition of Bryan. When a doubt arose as to his status
on the silver issue, Judge Parker telegraphed to the convention that he
regarded "the gold standard as firmly and irrevocably established."
Bryan supported the ticket, Parker and Henry G. Davis of West Virginia,
but without enthusiasm.
There was no issue that clearly divided the parties in the campaign of
1904. Roosevelt asked for an indorsement of his Administration and for
approval of his general theory of a "square deal," but it was obvious
that his party associates were less enthusiastic for reform than he, and
that only his great personal popularity prevented some of them from
withdrawing their support. The Bryan Democrats were drawn more toward
Roosevelt than toward their own party candidate. It was clear that
Parker represented, on the whole, the weight of conservatism, while
Roosevelt embodied the spirit of progress, and that neither was typical
of his party. Parker was driven by the progressive Democrats to insist
upon a regulation of the trusts; Roosevelt acquiesced in the desire of
the "stand-pat" Republicans and refrained from advocating a lowering of
the tariff.
The result of the election was proof of the public confidence in
Roosevelt. He carried every State outside the South, and Missouri and
Maryland besides. His popular vote was over 7,500,000, while his
plurality over Parker was more than 2,500,000. In the last week of the
canvass Parker charged that the trusts were supporting Roosevelt, and
that the reform demands were only a pose. He pointed out that the
Chairman of the Republican National Committee, who had succeeded Hanna,
George B. Cortelyou, had been Secretary of Commerce and Labor, and thus
in a position to examine the books of corporations. He hinted at a
political blackmail of the trusts, and many of the papers that
supported him were outspoken in their charges. An indignant denial of
blackmail appeared over the President's signature the Saturday before
election. Later investigation proved that many of the great corporations
had, as usual, contributed to the campaign fund, and that Roosevelt had
urged the railroad magnate, Harriman, to contribute toward the campaign
in New York.
As soon as the results of the election were known, Roosevelt answered a
question that was on the lips of many. His three and a half years
constituted his first term. He was now elected for a second term, and he
characterized as a "wise custom" the limiting of a President to two
terms. "Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept
another nomination," he declared.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The history of the recent trust movement may be followed in the writings
upon the United States Steel Corporation by E.S. Meade and H.L. Wilgus.
There is a detailed and gossipy _Inside History of the Carnegie Steel
Company_ (1903), by J.H. Bridge. W.F. Willoughby has made searching
analyses of Concentration and Integration, which may be found in the
_Yale Review_, vol. VII, and the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol.
XVI. The prosecution of the Northern Securities Company brought out many
typical facts of railroad consolidation, and is best described in B.H.
Meyer, _A History of the Northern Securities Case_ (in University of
Wisconsin Bulletin, no. 142). More general material upon these topics
may be found in E.R. Johnson, _American Railway Transportation_ (1903,
etc.); F.A. Cleveland and F.W. Powell, _Railway Promotion and
Capitalization in the United States_ (1909, with an admirable
bibliography); Poore's _Railroad Manual_; and the files of the
_Commercial and Financial Chronicle_. The voluminous Report of the
Industrial Commission (19 vols., Washington, 1900-02) is a storehouse of
facts upon industry; labor conditions are illustrated in the Annual
Reports of the United States Commissioner of Labor, who has also special
reports upon individual strikes, including that at Cripple Creek in
1903. The history of the campaign fund in 1904 was partially revealed in
an investigation in 1912. H. Croly, _Marcus A. Hanna_, is invaluable for
these years.
CHAPTER XIX
THE "MUCK-RAKERS"
Before Roosevelt was inaugurated for his second term, the national
"revival," in which he and Bryan and other preachers of civic virtue had
played the speaking parts, was sweeping over the country. The menace of
the trusts was seen and exaggerated as railways, corporations, and labor
availed themselves of the means of coöperation. The connection between
the great financial interests and politics was believed to be dangerous
to public welfare. All the mechanical reforms for the recovery of
government by the people, that had been originated between 1889 and
1897, were revived once more, and there was added to confidence in them
a widespread belief in the existence of a malevolent, plundering class.
It was not enough that the trust movement should be explained as an
unavoidable development from modern communication. It was believed to
constitute more than an economic evolution. The public was prone to
place an ethical responsibility upon an individual or groups of
individuals, and there came a series of revelations or exposures that
appeared, in part, to fix the blame. All the old uprisings against
boss-rule were revivified, and capitalistic control was placed upon the
Index.
Miss Ida M. Tarbell, an historical student who had gained an audience
through popular and discriminating lives of Napoleon and Lincoln,
published a history of the Standard Oil Company in _McClure's Magazine_
during 1903. She showed conclusively the connection between
transportation and monopoly in the oil industry, revealing the mastery
of the tools of transportation, by rebates, by control of tank cars, or
by pipe lines, that had enabled John D. Rockefeller to establish his
great trust. She showed also the unlovely methods of competition, long
common to all business, but magnified by their use in the hands of a
monopoly to establish itself. "What we are witnessing," wrote Washington
Gladden a little later, "is a new apocalypse, an uncovering of the
iniquity of the land.... We have found that no society can march
hellward faster than a democracy under the banner of unbridled
individualism."
Three years before Miss Tarbell displayed the tendency of the trusts,
President Hadley, of Yale, had suggested that social ostracism, or
social stigma, might be made an efficient tool for reform. Other writers
used the tool. Lincoln Steffens, in a series of articles on "The Shame
of the Cities," exposed the connection between graft and politics.
Thomas Lawson, with spectacular exaggeration, laid the troubles of
society at the feet of "Frenzied Finance." _Collier's Weekly_ undertook
to reveal the worthlessness and fraud in the trade in patent medicines.
Many of the exposers encroached upon the fields of fiction in their
work, while books of avowed fiction exploited the conditions they
portrayed. _Coniston_, by Winston Churchill, was based upon the control
of a State by a railroad boss. Upton Sinclair wrote _The Jungle_ to
expose the meat-packers.
A new journalism aided and was aided by the zeal to expose and the greed
of the public for literature of exposure. In the later nineties city
journalism was reorganized under the influence of the "yellow" papers,
and sensational news was made a profitable commodity as never before.
The range of the daily paper was, however, limited by a few hundred
miles, and its influence could not become national. A new periodical
literature, resembling the old literary monthlies, but using many timely
and journalistic articles, sprang into life and gained national
circulation and influence. S.S. McClure was one of its pioneers.
_Everybody's_, the _Cosmopolitan_, _Munsey's_, the _American_, and
weeklies like _Collier's_, the _Outlook_, and the _Independent_ were
among the journals that helped to spread the conclusions and advocate
reforms. Besides these a horde of imitators fattened for a time upon
exposure.
Journalism had a large part in directing the American revival, and
private investigators furnished many of the facts. Public suits marked
an attempt to act upon the facts and remedy them. In Missouri Joseph W.
Folk conducted a series of prosecutions against grafters in St. Louis
that elevated him in a few months to the head of his party and the
governorship of his State. The Bureau of Corporations, attached to the
new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, made a series of reports
the most notable of which showed that the charges against the Standard
Oil Company for extorting rebates, and against the meat-packers for
unsanitary conditions, were founded upon fact.
The most notable public exposure of indiscretion and wrongdoing in high
finance occurred in New York. Here, during 1905, a quarrel over the
management of the Equitable Life Insurance Company led to a legislative
investigation by a so-called Armstrong Committee. One of the attorneys
employed by the committee, Charles E. Hughes, soon became the spirit of
the examination. One by one he called insurance officers to the witness
stand, and drew from their reluctant lips the story of their relation to
banking, to speculative finance, and to politics. He revealed the
existence of a group among the bankers not unlike a money trust. He
proved that for at least three national campaigns the insurance
companies, like other corporations, had given heavy subsidies to the
campaign funds, sometimes of both but always of the Republican party.
Whenever an investigator rose above the level and established his
reputation for honesty and competence, the aroused public seized upon
him for use in politics. In September, 1906, the Democrats of New York
nominated the most successful of the sensational journalists, Hearst,
for governor. On the same day the Republican Convention, in which no
delegate had been instructed for him, nominated Hughes as governor of
New York, because public opinion in the party would take no other
candidate. Hughes was elected in 1906 and again in 1908, in spite of the
hostility of Republican party leaders. His administrations were
prophetic of the new spirit that was entering politics.
Many of the problems raised by the investigations were old and presented
only a need for an honest enforcement of the law against law-breakers.
Others were simple and prescribed their own methods of treatment. The
evil of corporation contributions to campaign funds was met in 1907 by a
law forbidding national banks to contribute to any election, or any
corporations to contribute to a presidential or congressional election.
In 1906 the gift of free railroad passes upon interstate railroads was
prohibited by law. The presidential candidates in 1908 pledged
themselves to publicity in the matter of contributions, while the
complaints of poverty-stricken campaign managers in 1908 and 1912
indicated that the laws were generally obeyed. Still other problems
raised large questions of scientific investigation and legislation.
The reaction from the carelessness revealed by the investigation of the
meat-packers stimulated a pure-food movement that had had its advocates
for many years. With the concentration of food manufacture and the
increase in the consumption of "package products," the consumer had
given up the preparation of his own food and thrown himself upon the
dealer. The numerous domestic industries typical of the American family
in 1880 had been sorted out. The sewing had gone to the sweat shop and
the factory, the baking had gone to the public baker, the laundry was
going, the killing and preservation of meat and the preparation of
canned vegetables and fruits were nearly gone. Population followed the
industries to work in the factories. Country life lost much of its
variety and interest, while the congested masses in the cities were made
dependent for their health and strength upon private initiative.
Rigorous bills for the inspection of meats at the slaughter houses, and
for the proper labeling of manufactured foods and medicines, were
carried through Congress in 1906 on the strength of the popular
revulsion against the manufacturers. Hereafter the Department of
Agriculture stood between the people and their food. James Wilson, of
Iowa, had been Secretary since 1897 and remained in the office until
1913. He and his subordinates, notably Dr. Harvey Wiley, in charge of
the pure-food work, administered the law amid the proddings of consumers
and the protests of manufacturers. With much complaint, but with little
difficulty because of the consolidation of control, business adjusted
itself to the new requirements and labels in the next few years.
The anti-railroad movement reminded the public that the Interstate
Commerce Law of 1887 was an imperfect statute. It had always done less
than its framers had intended. Judicial interpretation had limited its
scope. The commission did not have power to fix a rate or to compel in
the railroads the uniformity of bookkeeping without which no scientific
rates could be established. After Roosevelt had directed his speeches of
1903 and 1904 to the subject, Congress responded to the public interest
thus aroused with a flood of projected railroad bills. One of these
passed the House of Representatives in 1905, but was held up in the
Senate while a new investigation of interstate commerce, the most
exhaustive since the Cullom investigation of 1885, was undertaken. In
1906 the Hepburn Railway Bill was passed. In its chief provisions it
gave the Interstate Commerce Commission power to fix rates and to
prescribe uniform bookkeeping, and it forbade railways to issue free
passes or to own the freight they carried. The long railroad debate was
made notable by the speeches of a new Senator, Robert M. LaFollette, of
Wisconsin, who had fought his way to the governorship on this issue and
gone through a prolonged fight with the railroads of his own State. He
insisted that public rate-making could not succeed without a preliminary
physical valuation of the roads that would show the extent of their real
capitalization. He talked, often, to empty chairs in the Senate, but he
prophesied that the people had a new interest in their affairs, and that
many of the seats, vacant because of the indifference of their owners,
would soon be filled with Senators of a new type. In vacations he spoke
to public audiences on the same subject, reading his "roll-call," and
telling the people how their representatives voted for or against
commercial privilege. With its enlarged powers the Interstate Commerce
Commission made rapid headway against rebates and discrimination.
The popular revival was well advanced by 1905, but was becoming more
sensational every month. Led on by an expectant public, the magazines
manufactured exposures to supply the market, and hysteria often took the
place of investigation. The real needs of reform were in danger of
being lost in a flood of denunciation. In the spring of 1906 President
Roosevelt spoke out to check the indiscriminate abuse. He drew his topic
from Bunyan's "Man with the Muck-Rake," pointed out that blame and
exposure had run its course, and demanded that enforcement of the law be
taken up, and that efforts be turned from destruction to construction.
He had done much himself to "arouse the slumbering conscience of the
nation," and turned now to direct it toward a permanent advantage.
The trend of criticism injured the party under whose administration
corporate abuse had grown up. The personal popularity of Roosevelt, and
his associates, Root, Taft, Knox, and Hughes, saved the party from
defeat. In 1906 the congressional campaign was fought on the basis of
holding on to prosperity, enforcing the law against all violators, and
strengthening the hands of government. Roosevelt wrote the substance of
the platform, and his party gained control of its sixth consecutive
Congress since 1896. The canvass over, Roosevelt departed from an old
precedent, left the territory of the United States, and visited the
Isthmus of Panama to inspect the work on the canal.
Six months after the signing of the Panama Treaty in 1903 the United
States took possession of the Canal Zone and began to dig. It had to
learn lessons of both management and tropical engineering. One by one
its chief engineers deserted the enterprise. The choice between a
sea-level and a lock canal divided the experts. The legislation by
Congress was inadequate. In the spring of 1906 Roosevelt, with the
approval of Taft, who had been recalled from the Philippines to be
Secretary of War, determined to build a lock canal. The President
tramped over the workings in November, 1906, and sent an illustrated
message about them to Congress on his return. In 1907 Major George W.
Goethals was detailed from the army to be benevolent despot and engineer
of the Canal Zone. Inspired and encouraged by repeated visits from Taft,
the work now made rapid progress toward completion. Sir Frederick
Treves, the great English surgeon, visited the canal in 1908, and found
there not only gigantic engineering works, but a triumph for the
preventive medicine of Colonel William C. Gorgas, chief of the sanitary
officers.
The attention of the world, directed toward the United States since
1898, was held by the canal and by a continuation of a vigorous and open
diplomacy. In February, 1904, Russia and Japan, unable to agree upon the
conduct of the former in Manchuria, had gone to war. Hostilities had
continued until Russian prestige was shattered and Japanese finance was
wavering. In June, 1905, the United States directed identical notes to
the belligerents, offering a friendly mediation. The invitation was
accepted, and during the summer of 1905 the envoys of Russia and Japan
met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to conclude a treaty of peace. In 1906
the Nobel Committee awarded to Roosevelt the annual prize for services
to peace.
Relations with all the world were friendly between 1905 and 1909. Great
Britain contributed to the cordiality by sending to the United States
as her ambassador the best-fitted of her subjects, James Bryce. Under
his tactful management the next five years were a period of
unprecedented friendship. The South American republics, always sensitive
about the headship of the United States, were brought to kindlier
feelings. There had been two congresses of all the Americas, one in
1889, at the instigation of Blaine, the next in Mexico in 1901. In 1906
the American republics convened at Rio de Janeiro in July. Secretary of
State Elihu Root made a plea for friendship before this congress. From
Rio he went to other capitals of South America, achieving notable
triumphs in his public speeches.
The Pan-American Conference at Rio was an American preliminary to a
larger meeting in which the United States played an important part in
1907. During 1904 Roosevelt had agreed to start a movement for a second
conference at The Hague. He took up the negotiation during the
Russo-Japanese War, deferred it at the instance of the Czar, and then
stood aside to let the latter issue the formal invitation. The American
delegation at the Second Hague Conference was led by Joseph H. Choate,
leader of the American Bar and former ambassador to Great Britain. It
forced the discussion throughout the session, tried in vain to produce
an agreement to abolish the right of capture of enemy property on the
high seas in time of war, and helped to strengthen the permanent court
of arbitration. In January, 1906, the United States had sat in
conference at Algeciras, over the affairs of Morocco. It had mediated
in the Oriental war. It had strengthened its position at home. It was no
longer true that the United States was entirely disinterested in the
affairs of Europe, for it had become a world power.
A visible emblem of power was afforded to the world in 1907. Since the
Treaty of Portsmouth there had been friction with Japan over the
treatment of Japanese subjects on the Pacific Coast, and alarmists had
drawn pictures of a possible war. Late in 1907 the President announced a
practice voyage for the whole effective navy that would carry it around
South America and into the Pacific. In December he reviewed the fleet,
and saw it off from Hampton Roads. From the Pacific it was ordered round
the world, visited Japan and China, and was received with keen interest
everywhere. It came home early in 1909, having made a record for holding
together without breakdown or accident.
While the fleet was going round the world and business was adjusting
itself to the new constructive laws, an old problem was formally ended.
The tribal sovereignty, which had made the Indians a problem, was
terminated. The Dawes Act of 1887 had substituted severalty for tribal
landholdings among the Indians. Out of the first cessions which followed
the act Oklahoma Territory had been made in 1890. This had developed
more rapidly than any previous Territory because of the railroads that
crossed it in every direction. By 1900 it demanded statehood. In 1906 it
was enabled, and during 1907 it was admitted, with the longest and most
radical of state constitutions. Fear of the activities of corporate
wealth and distrust of the agents of government were written into nearly
every article.
In the spring of 1908 nearly all of the forty-six governors met with
President Roosevelt in the White House and registered another problem
upon which agitation and revelation had led to public reflection. The
coal strikes of 1900 and 1902 had drawn attention to the possible
relation of government to the coal supply of the people. The beginnings
of reclamation in 1902 had revealed the fact that public reclamation was
impeded by large private and corporate water rights. The natural
resources of the country were seen to be following the course of all
business and settling into the control of great corporations. The waste
of coal and timber and water and land itself was unreasonable. The
denudation of the hills led to terrible floods along the rivers. The
future was being darkened by the organized selfishness of the present. A
movement for conservation grew out of the conference of governors, but
Congress for the present would not encourage it.
In popular education, in initiation of new administrative policies, and
in the passage of constructive laws efforts were being made to adjust
government to the needs of modern industry and to safeguard society. The
business interests affected by the changes obstructed the process when
they could, and were intensified in their opposition by the series of
prosecutions brought by Attorney-General Knox, and his successor Charles
J. Bonaparte, under the Sherman Law. At no time in the earlier history
of this law had there been a strong disposition to test its merit, and
no one of the notorious trusts had been attacked before the Northern
Securities case. In later years it was turned against the Standard Oil
Company, the beef-packers, the Tobacco Trust, the Sugar Trust, and the
United States Steel Corporation, while railways and smaller
corporations, in great number, were prosecuted. The enforcement of the
law aroused blind opposition among many of the victims, and stimulated
queries as to whether or not any attempt to limit the size of business
was sound public policy. The debate upon regulation, as against
prohibition of trusts and monopolies, ran on with no sign of victory for
either side of the argument. Personal hostility against the
Administration for applying the law gave color to the last two years of
Roosevelt's Administration.
By 1907 there had been ten years of the prosperity that had begun with
the election of McKinley. Finance had developed with industry and trade.
The needs of corporations dealing in millions and hundreds of millions
of capital had induced the consolidation of banks and the concentration
of financial power in the hands of a small group of men. The holding
companies were great aids in the furtherance of this concentration. J.
Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were best known as
representative of the inner circle. Their speculations and investments
were embarrassed by the weakening of public confidence. It was certain
there would come a time when the whole surplus capital of the United
States would be invested in permanent improvements. Such periods had
followed eras of boom in 1837, 1857, and 1873. It was too probable that
some accident occurring in the period of liquidation would create a
panic. Suspicion had been directed against the controlling agents of
business by the revelations of 1902-07. It was exaggerated by
sensational journalism. It reached a climax in the fall of 1907 when a
group of banks, reputed strong, failed through dishonesty and
speculative management. The failure of the Mercantile National Bank and
the suspension of the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York brought
the crisis on October 22, 1907. The loss to the public was lessened by
resolute and sympathetic coöperation among the clearing-houses, Morgan,
Rockefeller, and the United States Treasury, but a period of enforced
economy was begun for all.
The managers of big business attributed the panic to "Theodore the
Meddler." They claimed that business was sound and honest, and the
upheaval was caused by the agitation of demagogues. The President, they
asserted, had destroyed confidence by his attack on the commercial
class. Federal prosecutions, new laws, and the enforcement of
inquisitorial pure-food regulations had made it impossible for business
to live. "Let us alone," they cried.
They convinced only themselves, a small minority of the people of the
United States. Since 1902 the people as a body, regardless of the great
parties, had opened their eyes to the trend of business and had decided
that public authority must be summoned to the defense of democracy. The
independent vote broke away from each party in increasingly numerous
cases. The old American view that democracy meant unrestrained
individualism had given way to the newer view that democratic
opportunity was dependent upon the restriction of monopoly. The
ostensible leaders, from the President down, were only the mouths that
spoke the new language. Without them the same condition would have
existed in large degree. The attack of the financial interests and Wall
Street upon the President only convinced the people that the Roosevelt
policies were, on the whole, their policies, and that individual
interest and party machinery must give way to their attainment.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The periodicals and special articles alluded to in this chapter
constitute the best sources as yet available for the period. There were
numerous investigations by committees of Congress that furnished facts
in their reports. Certain of the departments of government, notably the
Bureau of Corporations and the Department of Agriculture, were active in
the publication of facts. Thoughtful surveys of society in the United
States may be found in E.A. Ross, _Changing America_ (1912); H. Croly,
_The Promise of American Life_ (1909); A.B. Hart, _National Ideals
Historically Traced_ (in _The American Nation_, vol. 26, 1907). The
autobiography of R.M. LaFollette is of considerable value. A great
number of books upon America by foreign visitors bring out special
viewpoints. Among these are F. Klein, _In the Land of the Strenuous
Life_ (1905); A. Bennett, _Your United States_ (1912); W. Archer,
_America To-Day_ (1899); Anon., _As a Chinaman Saw Us_ (1904); and James
Bryce has revised and brought down to date his _American Commonwealth_.
CHAPTER XX
NEW NATIONALISM
The process of adjusting national administration and laws, to meet the
needs of life and business that knew no state lines, had been begun
during the Roosevelt period. For its completion it was necessary that a
successor be found, convinced of the Roosevelt policies and able to
carry them out. Three Republicans of this type were often mentioned for
the Presidency in 1908. Elihu Root had been the legal mainstay of three
administrations, and had received the public commendation of Roosevelt
often and without restraint. His availability for the elective office
was, however, weakened by his prominence as a corporation lawyer, which
would be urged against him in a campaign. William H. Taft, Secretary of
War, had a wider popularity than Root; had, as federal judge, long been
identified with the enforcement of law, and had been used repeatedly as
the spokesman of the President. He knew the colonies as no other
American knew them, and was in touch with every detail of the Panama
Canal. Neither he nor Root had won a leadership in competitive politics
as had the third candidate, Charles E. Hughes, who, as Governor of New
York, had shown his capacity to fight professional politicians on their
own ground.
In 1907, President Roosevelt announced his preference for Judge Taft,
and fought off, as he had often done, suggestions that he accept
another term himself. He controlled the Republican convention at
Chicago, where his candidate was nominated on the first ballot. A
Republican Representative from New York, James S. Sherman, was nominated
for the Vice-Presidency, and the party leaders were driven to a platform
of enthusiastic indorsement of the Roosevelt policies.
The Democratic party, meeting at Denver in 1908, was again under the
control of the radical element, and nominated William J. Bryan for the
third time. The career of Roosevelt had modified the emphasis of the
Bryan reforms. "Any Republican who, after following Roosevelt, should
object to Bryan as a radical, would simply be laughed at consumedly,"
said one of the weeklies. In the ensuing campaign both candidates
professed ends that were nearly identical, and their advocates were
forced to explain whether the Roosevelt policies would have a better
chance under Bryan or Taft. There was no clear issue, and in each party
there was a powerful minority that wanted neither of the candidates. The
election of Taft had been discounted throughout the campaign, but it was
accompanied by a demonstration of independent voting that revealed the
weakness of party ties. Four Democratic governors were elected in States
that were carried by the Republican national ticket.
The Administration of President Taft was greeted with cordial good will
by the progressive elements in both parties. His courage and sincerity
had never been questioned. Roosevelt was unlimited in his praise. His
judicial training made impossible for him types of political activity
that had made enemies for his predecessor among many conservatives, yet
his devotion to policies of administrative reform was beyond dispute. He
immediately fulfilled one pledge of the Republican platform by summoning
Congress to meet on March 15, 1909, to revise the tariff, and on this
subject he had for several years avowed a desire that revision should be
downward, to remove all trace of special tariff privilege.
The movement for tariff reform had begun in the Middle West about 1902,
and had spread with the feeling against the trusts. Roosevelt had
indicated a sympathy with it in 1902 and 1903, and had fought Congress
for tariff modification in the interest of Cuban reciprocity. But most
of the party leaders had opposed tampering with the protective system.
Speaker Cannon was an avowed protectionist and defended the attitude of
the stand-pat tariff advocates. After 1904 the President had ceased to
discuss the tariff, confining himself to other schemes for reform. He
left the problem of revision to his successor.
The tariff of 1909 bore the names of Sereno E. Payne, of New York,
chairman of the House Committee of Ways and Means, and Nelson W.
Aldrich, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance. As it passed the
House it embodied numerous reductions from the Dingley rates. In the
Senate it was reframed and became an instrument of even greater
protection than the existing law. It was debated in a stronger glare of
public interest than any other tariff, and its details were explained
and fought by a group of Republicans who refused to accept the control
of the inner circle of the party, and who were determined that the
revision should be downward and sincere. They did less to affect the
bill, however, than President Taft, who forced the conference committee
to accept a few reductions in the rates, notably on hides and lumber,
and to include a provision for levying an income tax on corporations. A
constitutional amendment, authorizing a general income tax, was a part
of the agreement. The bill became a law in August, 1909. "The bill, in
its final form," said the _Outlook_, which inclined toward free trade,
"is by far the most enlightened protectionist measure ever enacted in
the history of the country." "I think that the present tariff," wrote
Roosevelt, who had returned to private life, "is better than the last,
and considerably better than the one before the last."
Whatever its relation to earlier tariffs the Payne-Aldrich Act was
distasteful to the country, which had since 1897 become critical of the
methods of tariff legislation. Seven Republican Senators and twenty
Representatives voted against it on its final passage. These represented
the Middle West and the new generation, and returned home to find their
constituents generally with them in denouncing the measure as an
instrument of privilege. Some of them had broken with President Taft
during the debate, and the breach was deepened when the latter spoke in
the West, at Winona, Minnesota, and defended the act as a compliance
with the party pledge. It became apparent that the new President was
unable to procure party legislation and to maintain at the same time an
appearance of harmony in the party. Roosevelt had dissatisfied but had
overriden the conservative wing; Taft failed to satisfy the most
progressive wing and failed to silence them.
In the autumn of 1909 began a series of administrative misunderstandings
that greatly embarrassed the Taft Administration. A prospective minister
to China was dismissed abruptly before he left the United States, on
account of a supposed indiscretion. In the Department of Agriculture
there was dissension between the Secretary, James Wilson, and the
chemist engaged in the enforcement of the Pure Food Law, Harvey W.
Wiley. The chief of the forestry service, Gifford Pinchot, quarreled
openly with the Secretary of the Interior, Richard A. Ballinger, and
raised the question of the future of the policy of conservation.
The work of the forestry and reclamation services was at the center of
the scheme for conservation of natural resources that had grown out of
Roosevelt's conference with the governors in 1908. A subordinate of the
forestry service attacked the Secretary of the Interior in 1909,
charging favoritism and lack of interest in conservation. He was
dismissed in September, upon order of President Taft, whereupon
_Collier's Weekly_ undertook an attack upon the President as an enemy of
conservation, receiving the moral support of many of the progressives
who disliked the tariff act. In January, 1910, the growing controversy
led the President to dismiss Pinchot from the service, for
insubordination, and Congress to erect a joint committee to investigate
the Pinchot-Ballinger dispute.
The Ballinger committee ultimately vindicated the Secretary of the
Interior, but the testimony taken brought out a fundamental difference
between the theory of Taft, that the President could act only in
accordance with the law, and that of Roosevelt, that he could do
whatever was not forbidden by law. Although Taft stood by his
subordinate, claiming that he and Ballinger were both active in
conservation, a large section of the public believed that the aggressive
movement for reform had lost momentum. What Roosevelt thought of it was
impossible to learn, since he had gone to Africa in 1909, and remained
outside the sphere of American politics until the summer of 1910.
The progressive Republicans revolted in 1909 and 1910 against the
domination of the "stand-pat" group, and received the name "Insurgents."
Senators LaFollette and Cummins, both of whom desired to be President,
were the avowed leaders. In the House of Representatives, in March,
1910, the Insurgents coöperated with the Democratic minority, defeated a
ruling of Speaker Cannon, and modified the House rules in order to
curtail the autocracy of the presiding officer. They asked the country
to believe that Taft had ceased to be progressive and had become the
ally of the stand-pat interests. The split in the Republican party
enabled the Democrats to carry the country in 1910, and to obtain a
large majority in the House of Representatives. Champ Clark, of
Missouri, and Oscar Underwood, of Alabama, both aspirants for the
Democratic presidential nomination, became, respectively, Speaker and
chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means in the new House. No one man
controlled or led either party by his personality as Theodore Roosevelt
had done; the rivalry of lesser leaders destroyed the harmony of both
parties, and neither party even approached unanimity in regard to the
great policies of the future. In January, 1911, the Insurgent
Republicans organized a Progressive Republican League for the purpose of
capturing the nomination in 1912 for one of their number, presumably
Senator LaFollette.
The Taft policies differed from those of his predecessor chiefly in the
method of their advocacy. Like Roosevelt, Taft had trouble in getting
them enacted, and unlike Roosevelt, he failed to magnetize the people
and carry them with him. He procured, however, funds for the creation of
a board of tariff experts to aid in future revisions of schedules, and
for a commerce court, to handle appeals in interstate commerce cases.
The income tax amendment secured his support. He used his influence to
prevent the seating of William Lorimer, a Senator elected from Illinois
under conditions of grave scandal. The Interstate Commerce Law was
revised and strengthened in 1910. An enabling act for Arizona and New
Mexico was passed in 1910, under which both of these Territories became
States in 1912. He continued the series of anti-trust suits begun under
Roosevelt, and procured decisions ordering the dissolution of the
Southern Pacific merger, the Standard Oil Company, and the Tobacco
Trust, and the penalizing of many others.
In the field of administration President Taft showed an instinct for
orderly and economical government. He urged upon Congress the adoption
of a budget system for expenditures, and employed a body of experts to
aid in reducing the cost and inefficiency of the executive departments.
He extended the civil service until in 1912 only 56,000 of the 334,000
federal employees were still outside the classified service.
The foreign negotiations of the Taft Administration were most
distinguished in respect to Latin-American trade, to arbitration, to
neutrality, and to reciprocity. With the Latin-Americas he continued the
policy of friendly support, through Philander C. Knox, his Secretary of
State. The critics of this policy stigmatized it as "dollar diplomacy,"
but Taft and Knox defended it as leading these republics through sound
finance to stable government. A protracted revolution in Mexico led to
the expulsion of President Porfirio Diaz in 1911, and was followed by
counter-revolutions in 1912. Throughout the disturbance Taft maintained
a rigid neutrality, and induced Congress to permit him to prohibit the
export of arms for sale to the belligerents. This constituted an advance
upon the customary practice of neutrals, who are permitted under
international law to sell munitions of war to either belligerent.
In 1908, Roosevelt had signed general arbitration treaties with Great
Britain and other countries, containing the usual reservations of cases
involving honor or national existence. In 1911, Taft signed yet broader
treaties with Great Britain and France, providing for the arbitration of
all justiciable disputes, and for a commission to determine whether
disputed cases were justiciable or not. The Senate declined to ratify
these agreements.
Canadian reciprocity was a part of Taft's tariff program. In 1911, he
called Congress in special session to approve an agreement for a
modification of the Payne-Aldrich rates with Canada. The Democratic
majority in the House of Representatives supported this measure, as did
enough of the regular Republicans to insure its passage. But the
Insurgents opposed it as likely to injure the interests of the farmer.
In September, 1911, Canada rejected the whole measure after a general
election in which a fear of annexation by the United States was an
important motive.
The Taft policies failed to thrill the party or the people. They were
less spectacular than the evils which the muck-rakers had portrayed.
They were constructive and detailed, and aroused as opponents many who
had joined in the general clamor for reform. They interested the party
leaders little, for these were more concerned with their own personal
fates, and were not overshadowed by the President as they had been for
eight preceding years. They were all conceived in the spirit of a lawyer
and judge, and were passed in an alliance with the wing of the
Republican party that was most impervious to the new reforms, and were
hence open to the attack that they were in spirit and intent
reactionary.
In June, 1910, with the Republican schism well advanced, Theodore
Roosevelt returned to the United States. A few weeks later he made a
speaking trip in the West, and at Osawatomie, Kansas, he laid down a
platform of reform that he called "New Nationalism." This was in
substance an evolution from the history of forty years. It assumed the
fact of the development of business and society along national lines,
and demanded that the Government meet the new problems. It believed that
constitutional power already existed for most of the needed functions of
government, and demanded that where the power was lacking it should be
obtained by constitutional amendment. The platform was received with
equally violent commendation and attack. Many Progressives hailed it as
an exposition of their faith. Conservatives were prone to call it
socialistic or revolutionary. It restored Roosevelt to a position of
consequence in public affairs, and emphasized the fact that Taft had
developed no power of popular leadership comparable to that of his
friend and predecessor. It gave the Progressives hope that Roosevelt,
debarred from the Presidency by his pledge and by the unwritten
third-term tradition, would aid them in forcing the Republican party to
nominate a Progressive in 1912.
The concrete principles of the Progressive group embraced a series of
policies looking toward the destruction of ring-controlled politics.
They demanded and generally concurred in the initiative and referendum,
the direct primary, and the direct election of delegates to national
conventions, and the direct election of United States Senators. Many of
them believed in a new doctrine, the recall, which was to be applied to
administrative officials, to judges, and even to judicial decisions.
Woman suffrage was commonly acceptable to them.
The cause of woman suffrage had made great progress since Idaho became,
in 1896, the fourth suffrage State. A modified form of suffrage in local
or school elections had been allowed in many States. A new period of
agitation for unrestricted woman suffrage had begun in England about
1906, and had been given advertisement by the deliberate violations of
law and order by the militant suffragettes. The agitation, though not
the excess, had spread to the United States. In 1910, Washington, and in
1911, California, had become woman suffrage States. By 1914, the total
was raised to twelve by the addition of Arizona, Kansas, Oregon,
Illinois,[2] Nevada, and Montana.
In the winter of 1911-12, the prospect of Republican success in the next
national campaign was slight. The Democrats had gained the House in
1910, and they, with the aid of Progressive Republican votes, had passed
and sent up to the President several tariff bills, reducing the rates,
schedule by schedule. Everyone of these had been vetoed, each veto
tending to convince the Progressives that Taft was conservative, if not
stand-pat in his sentiments. The Progressive Republicans were pledged to
work against the renomination of Taft, and were unlikely to support him
vigorously, if renominated. Many regular Republicans believed he could
not be reëlected. The section of the party that desired a Progressive
President became larger than the group that believed in LaFollette, and
demands that Roosevelt return were heard from many sources.
[Footnote 2: In Illinois the right was somewhat restricted, yet included
the voting for presidential electors and for local officials.]
In February, 1912, an appeal signed by seven Republican governors, all
of whom dwelt in States now likely to go Democratic, urged Roosevelt to
withdraw his pledge and become a candidate for the nomination. The
demand was concurred in by admirers who believed that only he could
bring about the new nationalism, by Progressives who distrusted
LaFollette's capacity to win, and by Republicans who wanted to win at
any price and saw only defeat through Taft. On February 24, Roosevelt
announced his willingness to accept the nomination, explained that his
previous refusal to accept another term had meant another consecutive
term, and entered upon a canvass for delegates to the Republican
National Convention.
The campaign before the primaries was made difficult because in most
States the Republican machinery was in the hands of politicians who
disliked Roosevelt, whether they cared for Taft or not. It began too
late for the voters to overturn the state and national committees, or to
register through the existing party machinery their new desire. It
brought out the defects in methods of nomination which direct primaries
were expected to remedy, and in some States public opinion was strong
enough to compel a hasty passage of primary laws to permit the overturn
of the convention system. The LaFollette candidacy was deprived of most
of its supporters, through the superior popularity of Roosevelt.
When the convention met at Chicago on June 18, 1912, there were some 411
Roosevelt delegates among the 1078, and more than 250 more who, though
instructed for Taft, were contested by Roosevelt delegations. When the
national committee overruled the claims of these, Roosevelt denounced
their action as "naked theft." He had definitely allied himself with the
wing of the party that opposed Taft. When the convention, presided over
by Elihu Root, and supported by nearly all the men whom Roosevelt had
brought into public prominence, finally renominated Taft and Sherman,
Roosevelt asserted that no honest man could vote for a ticket based upon
dishonor. The Roosevelt Republicans did not bolt the convention, but
when it adjourned they held a mass convention of their own, were
addressed by their candidate, and went home to organize a new
Progressive party.
The Democratic counsels were affected by the break-up of the Republican
party and the success of its conservative wing at Chicago. They met at
Baltimore the next week, with Bryan present and active, but not himself
a candidate. They had to choose among Clark, the Speaker, Underwood, the
chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, and Governors Harmon, of
Ohio, Marshall, of Indiana, and Woodrow Wilson, of New Jersey.
The last of these had risen into national politics since 1910. He had
long been known as a brilliant essayist and historian. He was of
Virginian birth, and had left the presidency of Princeton University to
become Democratic candidate for Governor of New Jersey in 1910. He had
shown as governor great capacity to lead his party in the direction of
the progressive reforms. He differed in these less from Roosevelt and
LaFollette than he or they did from the reactionaries in their own
parties. "The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience," he
had written long ago, "to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will
set the limit.... He has no means of compelling Congress except through
public opinion." Unembarrassed by previous attachment to any faction of
the Democratic party, with a clear record against special privilege and
corporation influence in politics, and supported obstinately by Bryan
and the young men who had urged his candidacy, Woodrow Wilson was
nominated on the forty-sixth ballot, with Governor Thomas Marshall for
Vice-President. The conservative nomination by the Republicans had
thrown the Democrats into the hands of their radical wing.
The Progressives held a convention in Chicago on August 5, and nominated
Theodore Roosevelt and Governor Hiram Johnson, of California. Their
platform included every important reform seriously urged, and was built
around the idea of social justice and human rights. They denied that
either of the old parties was fitted to carry on the work of progress.
In the campaign their candidates and speakers revealed the vigor and the
bitterness of the former Insurgents.
The schism threw the election into the hands of the Democrats, who
retained the House, gained the Senate, and elected Wilson, though the
latter received fewer votes than Bryan had received in each of his three
attempts. The struggle was one of personalities, since few openly
attacked the avowed aim of progressive legislation. The popularity of
Roosevelt detached many Democratic votes from Wilson, but his
unpopularity among Republicans who feared him and Progressive
Republicans who resented his return to politics, drove to Wilson votes
that would otherwise have gone to Taft. Taft received only eight
electoral votes in November, and ran far behind both his rivals in the
popular count. More than four million votes were polled by the new third
party in an independent movement that was without precedent. The
Socialist vote for Debs rose from 420,000 in 1908 to 895,000 in 1912.
The last year of the administration of President Taft was overshadowed
by the party war, and reduced in effectiveness by the Democratic control
of the House. The prosecutions of the trusts were continued, a parcel
post was established as a postal savings bank had been, the income tax
amendment became part of the Constitution, and an amendment for the
direct election of Senators made progress.
When Woodrow Wilson succeeded to the Presidency he formed a cabinet
headed by William J. Bryan as Secretary of State, and including only
Democrats of progressive antecedents. He called Congress in April, 1913,
to revise the tariff once more, and overturned a precedent of a century
by delivering to it his message in person. With almost no breathing
space for eighteen months, he kept Congress at its task of fulfilling
his party's pledges as he interpreted them.
Tariff, currency, and trust control were the main topics upon which the
Democrats had avowed positive convictions, and upon which the great mass
of progressive citizens, regardless of party affiliation, demanded
legislation. One by one these were taken up, the President revealing
powers of coercive leadership hitherto unseen in his office. Only the
fact that non-partisan opinion was generally with him made possible the
mass of constructive legislation that was placed upon the books. The
tariff, which became a law on October 3, 1913, was a revision whose
downward tendency was beyond dispute. The Federal Reserve Act, revising
the banking laws in the interest of flexibility and decentralization,
was signed on December 23 of the same year. In January, 1914, President
Wilson laid before Congress his plan of trust control, advocating a
commission with powers over trade coördinate with those of the
Interstate Commerce Commission, and an elaboration of the anti-trust
laws to deal with unfair practices and interlocking directorates. The
Federal Trade Commission and Clayton Anti-Trust bills fulfilled these
recommendations in the autumn of 1914. The Panama Canal Act of 1912 had
meanwhile been revised so as to eliminate a preference in rates to
American vessels which the President believed to be in violation of the
guaranty of equal treatment pledged in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. With a
more portentous list of constructive laws than had been passed by any
Congress since 1890, the Democratic majority allowed an adjournment on
October 24, 1914, and its members went home to sound their constituents
upon the state of the Union.
The passage of economic laws had called for tact and force upon the part
of the President, whose party, like the Republican party, was without a
clear vision of its policy and included many reactionaries. Added
embarrassments were found in the continuance of civil strife in Mexico.
Here, shortly before the inauguration of President Wilson, there had
been another revolution, followed by the elevation by the army of
General Victoriano Huerta to the Presidency. The followers of the
deposed Madero went into revolt at once, and the new Government was
refused recognition by the United States on the ground that it was not a
Government _de facto_, and that its title was smirched with blood.
Patiently and stubbornly the United States held to its refusal to
recognize the results of conspiracy in Mexico. In April, 1914, Vera Cruz
was occupied by American forces in retaliation for acts of insult on the
part of the Huerta régime, and in July the steady pressure of "watchful
waiting" brought about the resignation of the dictator. The
Constitutionalists, succeeding him, quarreled shortly among themselves,
but the danger from Mexico appeared to be lessening as the year
advanced.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: NORTH AMERICA
IN 1915]
From Europe came other embarrassments in August. Here, the policy of
national armament which had been adopted in the middle of the
nineteenth century, reached its logical outcome in a great war
which was precipitated by Austria in an attack upon Servia. Russia
immediately came to the aid of her Slavonic kinsmen, and upon her
Germany declared war on August 1. In a few more days Great Britain and
France had joined Russia against the German-Austrian alliance, and most
of Europe was at war. To bring home the thousands of American tourists
whom the war had reduced to suffering was the first work of the
administration. The American ministers in Europe became the custodians
of the affairs of the belligerents in every enemy country, and with the
aid of all the belligerent nations Americans were carried home. After
this came the problems of neutrality and American business. Suffering,
due to the stoppage of the export trade, particularly that of cotton,
brought wide depression throughout the United States. A new law for the
transfer of foreign-built vessels to American registry, and another for
federal insurance against war risks, were hurriedly passed, and the
question of a public-owned line of merchant ships was discussed. All
these problems were distracting the attention of the United States when
Congress brought to an end its prolonged labors, and adjourned.
The congressional election of 1914 was profoundly affected by the
European war. Early in the year it appeared that conservative opposition
to the Democratic program was growing, and that the Democratic majority
was likely to be cut down. The Progressive party appeared to be
weakening, and the control of the Republican party was settling back
among those Republicans against whom the Insurgents had made their
protest. But President Wilson's precise neutrality won the confidence of
all parties, and although conservatives like Cannon, of Illinois, and
Penrose, of Pennsylvania, won over Democrats and Progressives alike in a
few cases, he retained for the Sixty-fourth Congress a working majority
in the House and an enlarged majority in the Senate. His election in
1912 had been, in part, due to the dispersion of Republican strength
caused by the Progressive schism; in 1914, the influence of the
Progressives was negligible and the Democrats retained their power in
the face of the whole Republican attack.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Between 1909 and 1914, the _Outlook_, to which Theodore Roosevelt had
been an occasional contributor, and which had been a strong supporter of
Republican policies since 1898, was the regular organ through which Mr.
Roosevelt addressed the public, over his signature as Contributing
Editor. In a similar way William J. Bryan reached his followers through
the _Commoner_ (1900-), and Robert M. LaFollette through his
_LaFollette's Weekly_ (1909-). _Collier's Weekly_ became a center of the
adverse criticism of President Taft. All of these, as well as the more
general periodicals, are indispensable sources for the period, but are
so highly partisan as to need constant correction for prejudice. The
election of 1908 is treated in Stanwood's _History of the Presidency
from 1897 to 1909_, while that of 1912 is excellently described in the
_New International Year Book_ for 1912. The theories of the new
nationalism are in T. Roosevelt, _The New Nationalism_ (1910).
INDEX
Adams, Charles Francis, 55, 56.
Agricultural colleges, beginning of, 17.
Agriculture, changes in, 14, 15;
in the South after the War, 39, 40;
Department of, created, 142, 157;
main reliance of Western pioneers, 149, 151;
discontent in North and West, 178, 179, 184;
depression of, in South, 195;
diversified by decline of cotton values, 204, 205.
Aguinaldo, Emilio, 267, 278.
Alabama Claims, the, 55, 56.
Alaska, gold mines in, 241;
settlement of boundary, 284, 285.
Aldrich, Nelson W., 118, 326.
Algeciras, United States in conference at, 318.
Alger, Russell A., 253, 274.
Allison, William B., 89, 255.
Altgeld, Gov. John P., 222, 279.
Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice, 285, 286.
Amendment, the Thirteenth, 33, 42, 48.
Amendment, the Fourteenth, 42, 43, 48, 196, 197.
Amendment, the Fifteenth, 46, 47, 48, 196, 198.
American diplomacy, 286.
American Federation of Labor, 121, 183, 208.
American Railroad Union, 222.
Ames, Adelbert, 47.
Angell, James B., 60.
Anti-Contract Labor Law, 135.
Anti-imperialism, 278, 279.
Anti-monopolists, 168, 169.
Anti-trust literature, 166.
Arbitration, 255, 256;
treaties refused by Senate, 331, 332.
Arizona, a Territory, 21, 152, 154;
becomes a State, 330.
Army of the United States, at outbreak of Spanish War, 266;
in poor condition during the war, 269-72, 274;
later service in Cuba, 282.
Arrears of Pension Act, 137.
Arthur, Chester A., removed from office by Hayes, 87, 98, 103;
Vice-President with Garfield, 99;
opposes Garfield, 103;
as President, reorganizes his Cabinet, 106, 109;
his first message, 109, 110;
recommends civil service reform, 113, 114;
approves revision of the tariff, 114;
vetoes River and Harbor Bill, 117, 127;
hopes for renomination, 126;
reasons for failure of his candidacy, 126, 127;
and the Panama Canal, 144.
Australian ballot, 248.
Ballinger, Richard A., 328, 329.
Ballot reform, 248, 249.
Bayard, Thomas F., 134.
Belknap, William W., 62.
Bellamy, Edward, 167, 168, 188.
Benton, Thomas H., 21.
Bimetallism, 226;
plea for international, 227, 234.
Black Belt, the, 202, 203.
Blaine, James G., improper official conduct of, 62, 81;
the Mulligan letters, 82;
and the proposal to extend pardon to Jefferson Davis, 83;
candidate for Presidential nomination (1880), 98;
his personal following large, 102;
Secretary of State under Garfield, 102, 103, 106;
plans for Pan-American Congress, 106;
his large following among Irish, 124, 133;
nominated for President (1884), 127, 128;
and the Mugwumps, 130;
caricatures of, 132;
defeated, 133;
replies to Cleveland's message on tariff reduction (1887), 169;
refuses to be Presidential candidate again, 169;
Secretary of State under Harrison, 171, 172;
urges reciprocity, 175;
exchanges views with Gladstone on protective tariff, 189;
in the seal fisheries controversy, 212;
resigns Secretaryship, 213;
death, 214.
Blair, Francis P., Jr., 31.
Bland, Richard P., 88, 89, 173, 217.
Bland-Allison Bill, 181, 217, 218.
"Bloody shirt," the, 83, 100, 201.
Bonaparte, Charles J., 320.
"Boss," the, 245, 246;
power of, 247, 248.
Boxer outbreak in China, 281.
Brady, Thomas J., 104, 105.
Bristow, Benjamin, 81.
Brown, B. Gratz, 56.
Bryan, William Jennings, nominated for President, 237;
wages vigorous campaign, 238;
defeated, 240;
colonel in Spanish War, 266;
renominated for President, 279;
denounces imperialism, 279;
again defeated, 280;
a lay preacher on political subjects, 305;
nominated for Presidency third time, 325;
made Secretary of State by Wilson, 338.
Bryce, James, his _American Commonwealth_, 188, 189, 246;
influence of, 247;
ambassador from Great Britain, 318.
Buckner, Simon B., 238.
Burchard, Rev. Samuel D., 133.
Bureau of Corporations, valuable reports of, 311, 312.
Butler, Benjamin F., advocates the Greenback movement, 30, 66;
aims at Governorship of Massachusetts, 61;
his relation to the "salary grab," 62;
Anti-Monopoly candidate for Presidency, 131, 132.
Canadian reciprocity, 332.
Cannon, Joseph G., defeated for Congress, 185;
Speaker of the House, 304, 305;
a stand-pat protectionist, 327;
ruling as Speaker defeated, 329;
returned to Congress, 342.
Carlisle, John G., 138, 139.
Carnegie, Andrew, 297.
"Carpet-baggers," 43, 45, 49, 194.
Centennial Exposition, at Philadelphia, 73.
Cervera, Admiral, 267, 268, 271, 272.
Chase, Salmon P., wishes to be President, 3, 4, 31, 56;
urges creation of bonded debt to provide for war expenses, 5;
inaugurates a system of national banks, 27.
Chile, threatened war with, 212, 213.
Chinese, coolies imported into California, 25;
and Irish, 94;
harried, 122.
Chinese Exclusion Bill, 122, 127.
Choate, Joseph H., 318.
Christian Science, rise of, 190.
Churchill, Winston, writes _Coniston_, 310, 311.
Cities, growth of, 14;
in the New South, 205;
government of, 246.
Civil Rights Bill, 196, 197.
Civil Service Act, 113, 117.
Civil Service reform, 86, 110;
growth of, 112, 113, 114;
further extended by Cleveland, 134, 235;
and by Taft, 331.
Civil War, the, influence of its military successes, 1;
benefits of the four years of, 18;
new type brought into politics by, 78;
veterans of, 136.
Clark, Champ, 329, 330, 336.
Clayton Anti-trust Bill, 339.
Clayton-Bulwer treaty, 134, 144;
inadequate, 286.
Cleveland, Grover, Mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York, 130;
favored by the Independents, 130, 131;
nominated for Presidency, 131;
his character attacked, 132;
elected and inaugurated, 133;
his Cabinet, 133;
Lowell's tribute to, 134;
meets new problems, 135;
vetoes pension bills, 137;
troubled by divided administration, 138, 139, 140;
signs "omnibus" bill for new States, 152;
his emphasis on tariff reduction, 169;
renominated, 170;
defeated by Harrison, 171;
again nominated for Presidency, 214, 215;
and elected, 215;
opposes free silver and the silver basis, 219, 229, 230;
loses influence with Western Democrats, 220;
refuses to sign Wilson Bill, 221;
sends federal troops to Chicago, 221, 222;
splits Democratic party, 223;
in Venezuela boundary dispute, 230, 231;
abandoned by his party, 235;
dies in Princeton, 236;
tries to maintain neutrality in Cuban revolt, 261, 262.
Cobden Club, and British gold, 139.
_Coin's Financial School_, 229.
Colfax, Schuyler, Vice-President with Grant, 37, 57, 61.
Colorado, Territory, 20;
becomes a State, 73, 74, 149.
Commissioner of Labor, 122.
Conkling, Roscoe, 81, 87;
disciplined by Hayes, 98;
fights for Grant, 99;
resigns from Senate, 103.
Conservation movement, 320, 328.
Consumers' League, the, 250.
Cooke, Jay, his connection with panic of 1873, 62, 63, 64.
Cornell, Alonzo B., 98, 103.
Cortelyou, George B., 302, 306.
Cotton, the staple crop of the Old South, 149;
hundredth anniversary of first export celebrated, 203;
overproduction, 204.
Cowboys, develop a folk-song literature, 150.
Coxey, Jacob S., 222.
Crédit Mobilier, scandal of, 61.
Cripple Creek, great miners' strike at, 301.
Crisp, Charles F., 186, 220.
Cuba, insurrections in, 258;
revolutionary government in New York, 260;
number of Spanish troops in, 260;
filibustering parties, 261;
Congress favors recognition of belligerency, 262;
autonomy proposed, 263;
Congress recognizes independence of, 264;
blockaded, 267, 268;
freed from Spain, 273;
sanitary improvement in, 282;
adopts a constitution, 282;
makes reciprocity treaty with United States, 283.
Cullom, Shelby M., 158, 221.
Cummins, Gov. Albert B., 303;
leader of Insurgent Republicans, 329.
Curtis, George William, leader in civil-service reform, 112, 128;
a Mugwump, 129.
Custer, Gen. George A., 86.
Czar of Russia, calls conference on disarmament, 283.
Dakota Territory, 21;
made into two States, 152.
Darwin, Charles, his influence on religious thought, 190.
Davenport, Homer C., 252.
Davis, Judge David, 109.
Davis, Henry G., 306.
Davis, Jefferson, 83, 106.
Dawes Act, the, awarding lands to Indians in severalty, 142, 151, 319.
Day, William R., 253, 273.
Debs, Eugene V., 222;
Social Democratic candidate for President, 301, 338.
De Lesseps, Ferdinand M., 144.
DeLome, Señor, criticizes McKinley, 263, 264.
Democratic party, the, differences in, during the Civil War, 2, 3;
Chicago convention (1864), 4, 5;
nominates Seymour (1868), 31;
gains control of readmitted Southern States, 52, 54;
nominates Greeley (1872), 57;
weakened by its past, 79;
nominates Tilden (1876), 80, 81;
gets plurality of popular vote, 83;
gains control of the House (1874), 87;
nominates Hancock (1880), 99;
gains the Senate (1878), 108;
loses the House (1880), 108;
regains it (1882), 117;
elects Cleveland (1884), 130-133;
on tariff revision, 138, 220, 221;
resists demands for statehood, 152;
casts plurality of votes in 1888, but loses all branches of government, 171;
regains the House (1890), 186;
reëlects Cleveland and wins the Senate (1892), 215;
split by free silver and tariff questions, 228, 229, 232;
loses both Senate and House (1894), 229;
nominates Bryan on free-silver platform (1896), 237;
denounces imperialism and renominates Bryan (1900), 279;
nominates Parker on conservative platform (1904), 305, 306;
nominates Bryan for third time (1908), 325;
regains the House (1910), 329, 330;
elects Wilson (1912), 337, 338.
Department of Agriculture, 142, 157.
Department of Commerce and Labor, 122, 302.
Dependent Pension Act, 174.
Dewey, Commodore George, 265;
destroys Spanish fleet at Manila, 267.
Diaz, Porfirio, expelled from Mexico, 331.
Dingley, Nelson, 253, 254.
Dingley Bill, the, 254, 255, 303, 304.
Dollar diplomacy, 331.
Donnelly, Ignatius, 209.
Dorsey, Senator Stephen W., in star route frauds, 104, 127.
Du Bois, W.E.B., 202.
Eads, James B., 206.
Eaton, Dorman B., 113.
Edmunds, George F., 99, 128.
Education Board, General, incorporated by Congress, 201.
Educational Board, Southern, organized, 201.
Egan, Patrick, Minister to Chile, 212, 213.
Eight-hour day, 135, 136.
Electoral Commission, the, 84.
Eliot, Charles W., 60.
Elkins, Stephen B., 127, 128.
English, William H., 99.
Equitable Life Insurance Company, investigation of, 312.
Factories, American, growth of, 14, 15, 16;
influenced by inventions, 95.
Fairbanks, Charles W., Vice-President with Roosevelt, 305.
Farmers, condition of, in North and South, contrasted, 178;
discontent keenest in West, 179;
experimental, 180;
demand cheaper money, 181;
desire coöperation, 182;
believe charges against both political parties, 185;
value of vote of dissatisfied, 193.
Farmers' Alliance, the, in South and West, 183, 184, 192, 193;
undermines Republicans in West, 185;
attempts union with Knights of Labor, 186, 187;
splits white vote in the South, 192, 193, 196;
used to express Southern discontent, 195;
holds national convention at St. Louis, 208;
merged in People's Party, 209.
Farms, American, size of, 40, 41, 95;
increase in number, 149, 150;
decrease in size of Southern, 194;
number of, 194.
Farragut, Admiral David G., 5.
Fava, Baron, Italian Minister at Washington, 213.
Federal Reserve Act, 339.
Federal Trade Commission, 339.
Field, James G., 211.
Fisk, James, Jr., 60.
Folger, Charles J., 127.
Folk, Joseph W., 311.
Force Bill, the, 200, 201.
Ford, Paul Leicester, _The Honorable Peter Stirling_, 132.
Ford, Worthington C., 254.
Forestry service, 328.
Free lands, disappearance of, marks new period, 154, 155.
Free passes, on interstate railroads, forbidden by law, 313.
Free silver, demanded by Populists, 209, 210;
agitation for, 226, 228;
textbook of, 229;
fight for, in Republican convention (1896), 234, 235;
demanded by Democratic convention, 236.
Freedmen's Bureau, 34, 201;
work of, 42, 43, 45.
Frelinghuysen, Frederick T., 106, 109, 134.
Frémont, John C., candidate for the Presidency, 3, 4;
arrested in France, 60;
charged with land frauds, 60, 61.
"Frenzied finance," 310.
Frick, Henry C., 299.
"Full dinner pail, the," 280.
Gage, Lyman J., 253.
Garfield, James A., nominated for Presidency (1880), 99;
forged letters against, 101, 104, 105, 122;
sketch of, 101;
his Cabinet, 102;
trouble with Conkling, 103;
death of, 105, 108;
and the Panama Canal, 144.
Garland, Augustus H., 133.
George, Henry, 188.
Georgia, difficulties with Congress, 47, 48.
Gilman, Daniel Coit, 60.
Gladden, Washington, 310.
Gladstone, William E., 189.
Godkin, Edwin L., editor of the _Nation_, 59, 67, 85;
and civil service reform, 112.
Goethals, Major George W., engineer of Canal Zone, 317.
Gold, at a premium, 27;
hoarded, 218;
great increase in production of, 241.
Gold dollar, ratio to silver, 9;
value in greenbacks, 10, 29.
Gorgas, Col. William C., chief sanitary officer of Canal Zone, 317.
Gould, Jay, 60, 294.
Grand Army of the Republic, used for procuring pensions, 136, 137.
Grandfather clause, the, 200.
Granger Laws, the, 68, 70, 157;
constitutionality of, 71, 72.
Granger movement, the, 67, 68, 183;
relations with the panic of 1873, 72;
doctrine established by, 157.
Grant, Ulysses S., the coveted candidate of both parties, 36;
general rejoicing in his election, 37;
inaugurated in 1869, 46;
his first term ends unsatisfactorily, 55;
success with the Alabama claims, 55, 56;
renominated, 57;
various unsavory episodes of his years as President, 60, 62;
vetoes the Inflation Bill, 66;
reëlection of (1872), 75;
receives scanty support for a third term, 81, 98, 99;
and civil service reform, 112.
Greeley, Horace, nominated for President by Liberal Republicans, 56;
a quaint political figure, 57;
quoted, 89.
Greenback movement, the, advocates of, 30, 65, 66;
Eastern opinion of, contrasted with Western, 68;
and silver inflation, 88, 180, 181.
Greenbacks, 9;
value of, 10;
depreciation of, 27;
withdrawal of, 28;
further retirement of, forbidden by law, 30;
rising in value, 65;
issued during panic of 1873, 66.
Guam, ceded to United States, 273.
Guiteau, William B., 105.
Hadley, Pres. Arthur T., 310.
Hague, the, court of arbitration at, 283;
Venezuelan claims referred to, 284;
second conference, 318.
Hancock, Gen. Winfield Scott, 80, 99, 100, 101.
Hanna, Marcus Alonzo, raises funds for Republicans, 102, 233, 238, 239;
appointed Senator, 252;
helps settle coal strike, 300, 302;
grows in popularity, 302, 303;
death, 304.
Harmon, Gov. Judson, 336.
Harriman, Edward H., 294, 295.
Harrison, Benjamin, nominated for Presidency, 169;
elected as a minority President, 171, 211;
friction with Chile, 212, 213;
renominated, 214;
defeated, 215, 216.
Hawaiian Islands, 273, 274, 278.
Hay, John, on McKinley, 251;
Secretary of State, 273, 282;
career of, 281.
Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, for Isthmian canal, 286, 287.
Hayes, Rutherford B., receives nomination for President, 82;
difficulties of his election, 83, 84;
alienates many Republicans by his attitude toward the South, 85;
his troubles with Democratic congress, 87;
removes Chester A. Arthur from office, 87, 98, 103;
financial policy of his administration, 89, 90;
a new period of growth begun during his term of office, 90, 92;
end of his term, 97, 102;
and the Panama Canal, 144;
becomes head of Slater fund, 201.
Hearst, William R., 305, 312.
Hendricks, Thomas A., candidate for Vice-President, 80, 81, 131.
Hepburn Railway Bill, the, 315.
Hill, Gov. David B., 214, 215, 248.
Hill, James J., 295, 296.
Hobart, Garrett P., Vice-President with McKinley, 234;
dies in office, 280.
Homestead Act, the, 21, 155.
Hopkins, Johns, 60.
Howells, William Dean, 188.
Huerta, Victoriano, President of Mexico, 340.
Hughes, Charles E., exposes wrongdoing of insurance companies, 312;
mentioned for Presidency, 324.
Hull House, 251.
Humphreys, Benjamin G., 46.
Husbandry, Patrons of, 193.
Idaho, becomes a Territory, 21;
admitted to the Union, 152.
Immigration movement, the, influences of, 123, 124.
Income tax, 221, 327, 338.
Indians, removal of, 22, 25;
outbreaks of, 25, 86;
Dawes Bill, 142, 151, 319.
Industrial Commission, 298.
Industrial consolidation, evolves new type of trust, 297, 299.
Industrial revival, after 1897, 293, 294.
Industrial revolution, effects of, 95.
Inflation Bill, the, 66.
Ingersoll, Robert G., quoted, 92.
Initiative and referendum, 249, 250.
Interstate Commerce Act, the, 142, 158, 159;
commission created, 159, 160;
influence of rebate system on, 165;
had little immediate effect, 180;
an imperfect statute, 314;
strengthened by Congress, 315, 330.
Irons, Martin, 135.
Irrigation, 142, 291.
Italians, lynched in New Orleans, 213.
Jackson, Andrew, 8, 111.
James, Thomas L., 102, 103, 104.
Japan, at war with Russia, 317.
Johnson, Andrew, candidate for the Vice-Presidency, 4;
becomes President upon death of Lincoln, 32;
opposition of Congress to, 33, 34;
impeached by House, 35;
acquitted, 36;
vetoes arbitrary acts of Congress, 48.
Johnson, Gov. Hiram, 337.
Johnson, Reverdy, 55.
Journalism, expansion of, 162;
reorganized in the later nineties, 311.
Kansas City, important as meeting place of railways, 150, 151.
Kearney, Dennis, 94, 124.
Keifer, J. Warren, 108.
Kelly, John, 131.
Kerr, Michael C., 108.
Kipling, Rudyard, _The White Man's Burden_, 274.
Knickerbocker Trust Company, suspension of, 322.
Knights of Labor, secret society in the East, 94;
meet with disfavor, 121;
demands of, 122;
fight the Gould railways, 135;
success of, 183;
union with Farmers' Alliance, 186, 187;
in Pullman strike, 222.
Knox, Philander C., 296, 320, 331.
Ku-Klux Klan, the, 52.
Labor, tariff supposed to protect, 119;
Commissioner of, 122;
Bureau of, 135;
danger from European pauper, 139;
becomes better united, 299.
_See also_ Knights of Labor, Strikes.
La Follette, Robert M., defeated for Congress, 185;
works out a system of primaries, 249;
in the Senate debate on railroads, 315;
leader of Insurgent Republicans, 329;
possible Presidential candidate, 330, 335, 336.
Lamar, L.Q.C., 133.
Land grants, to railroads, 22, 24, 148, 156;
discontinued, 143.
Land laws, difficulty in enforcing, 155, 156.
Lawson. Thomas W., 310.
Lawton, Gen. Henry W., 271.
Liberal Republicans, secede in 1872 and nominate Greeley and Brown, 56;
platform of, 56, 57;
in Garfield's administration, 102;
favor civil service reform and tariff revision, 112, 116, 126;
put Edmunds forward for Presidential candidate (1884), 128.
Lincoln, Abraham, his view in regard to the spoils system, 2;
aims to develop a Union sentiment, 2, 3;
aided by excesses of Democrats, 4, 5;
his use of offices, 111, 112.
Literature in United States, 187, 188;
periodical, 189, 190;
religious, 190.
Lloyd, Henry D., 116, 166, 167.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, as an independent, 128;
supports Blaine, 130;
approves the Force Bill, 200, 201.
Logan, John A., 128.
Lorimer, William, 330.
Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 54, 59;
on Cleveland, 134.
McClellan, Gen. George B., 3, 5.
McClure, S.S., 311.
McCulloch, Hugh, 28, 29.
McEnery, Samuel D., 254.
McKinley, William, his Tariff Bill, 172, 173, 174, 175;
accepts principle of reciprocity, 175;
defeated for Congress, 185;
Governor of Ohio, 214;
"advance agent of prosperity," 232, 241;
a tactful Congressman, 233;
nominated for President (1896), 234;
makes no personal campaign, 239;
elected, 240;
his election a victory for sound money, 241;
calls special session of Congress for new tariff, 242;
inaugurated as President, 251;
his theory of the office, 252;
action in the Cuban matter, 262, 264;
reëlected President, 280;
murdered, 282.
McKinley Bill, the, 173, 174, 215, 216;
sugar clause a notable feature of, 175;
opposition to, 184.
MacVeagh, Wayne, 102.
Machinery, influence of, 15, 16, 95.
Mahone, William, 109.
Maine, the, blown up in Havana harbor, 264.
Marshall, Thomas R., nominated by Democrats for Vice-Presidency, 337.
Merritt, Gen. Wesley, 267.
Mexico, revolutions in, 331, 340.
Miles, Gen. Nelson A., on the results of drought, 182;
commander of army in Spanish War, 269;
invades Porto Rico, 272.
Mills, Roger Q., tariff leader, 139.
Mills Bill, the, 139, 140, 169, 170.
Mining camps, rapid development of, 20, 21, 22.
Mississippi, the process of reconstruction in, 46, 47;
disqualifies negroes, 198, 199.
Mississippi River Commission, 206.
Mitchell, John, 300.
"Molly Maguires," 94, 121.
Monroe Doctrine, in Venezuela case, 230, 231, 284.
Montana, created a Territory, 21;
becomes a State, 152.
Morgan, J. Pierpont, 295, 321.
Mormons, 20;
make a prosperous Territory in Utah, 154.
Morton, Levi P., Vice-President with Harrison, 169.
Morton, Oliver P., war Governor of Indiana, 81.
Muck-raking, 315, 316.
Mugwumps, 129, 130.
Mulligan letters, the, 82.
Murchison letter, the, 170, 171.
Nast, Thomas, cartoonist, 50, 57, 86, 132.
National Labor Union, 208.
National Planters' Association, 203.
Navy, of the United States, at outbreak of Spanish War, 265;
sent round the world without mishap, 319.
Negro, the, would not work at close of war, 40;
a social and economic problem, 41, 42;
made a voter by Congress, 43, 45, 48;
elimination of control by, 51, 52, 54;
a factor in Republican national convention, 98, 99;
becomes a farm owner, 194;
suppressed outside the law, 196;
bad qualities of, 198;
practically disfranchised in South, 199, 200;
advances in literacy, 202;
distribution of, 202, 203;
Roosevelt's attitude toward, 289, 290.
Newlands Reclamation Act, 291.
New Mexico, 152, 154;
becomes a State, 330.
New South, the, has but one political party of consequence, 192;
dissatisfied farmer vote in, 193;
disintegration of plantations, 194;
oppressed by its agricultural system, 195;
practically disfranchises negroes, 196-200;
education in, 201, 202;
border traits of, 202;
a modern industrial community, 203;
development of cities, 205.
Nez Percés, outbreak of, 86.
Nicaragua Canal, 134, 286.
North, S.N.D., and the Dingley Bill, 254.
North Dakota, admitted to Union, 152.
Northern Pacific Railroad, 143, 295;
and panic of 1873, 63, 65;
finished under direction of Henry Villard, 144.
Northern Securities Company, 296, 299.
Oklahoma, Indians colonized in, 151;
opened to white settlers, 151;
becomes a State, 319.
Olney, Richard, 230, 231.
Oregon, the, spectacular voyage of, 274, 286.
Overproduction, menace of, 96.
Palmer, John M., 238.
Panama, Republic of, 288.
Panama Canal, begun by De Lesseps, 144, 286;
determined on by Congress and President Roosevelt, 287, 288;
Panama grants concession, 289;
first boats pass through, 289;
dispute over sea-level and lock systems, 316-17.
Pan-American Conference at Rio de Janeiro, 318.
Pan-American Congress, 106, 109.
Panic of 1857, the, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12.
Panic of 1873, the, 62-74;
Jay Cooke's connection with, 62-65;
real causes of, 64, 65;
reduces revenues, 115;
often attributed to low rates of Wilson Bill, 254.
Parker, Judge Alton B., Democratic candidate for President (1904), 305;
defeated, 306.
Payne, Sereno E., 326.
Peabody, George, creates fund to relieve negro illiteracy, 201.
Pendleton, George H., 30, 31.
Penrose, Boies, 253, 342.
Pension Bureau, 137;
important through alliance with the soldiers, 172.
Pensions, influence of soldier vote on, 136;
for service only, 137;
amounts spent on, 137, 138;
system criticized by Southern farmers, 178;
used millions of the national surplus, 216.
People's Party. 184;
to right all wrongs of the plain people, 186, 187;
becomes a finished organization, 208, 209;
demands of, 210.
Petroleum trust, 164, 165.
Philippine Islands, ceded to United States, 273;
revolt in, under Aguinaldo, 278.
Pierpont, Francis A., 47.
Pike, James S., author of _The Prostrate State_, 51.
Pinchot, Gifford, 328.
Pious Fund dispute, the, 283.
Platt, Thomas C., resigns from Senate, 103;
claims promise of Secretaryship under Harrison, 172;
offended by Harrison, 213;
Senator from New York, 253;
opposes nomination of Roosevelt for governor, 277;
aids Roosevelt boom for Vice-Presidency, 280.
Polygamy, in Utah, 154.
Populism, origin of, 208.
Populists, demands of, 210;
carry four States in Presidential election (1892), 216;
caricatures of, 223;
fuse with Democrats, 237, 238;
favor direct legislation, 249, 250.
Porto Rico, invaded by United States troops, 272;
ceded to United States, 273;
Territorial government provided, 278.
Post-office, the, corruption in, 103, 104, 105, 113, 114.
Potter, Bishop Henry C., 246.
Powderly, Terence V., 121, 122, 135.
Practical politics, 110.
Preëmption Law, the, 21, 155, 156.
Presidential Succession Act, 105.
Primaries, direct, 249, 335.
Progressive Republicans, revolt, 329;
organize a League, 330;
principles of, 333;
oppose renomination of Taft, 334;
urge Roosevelt to run, 335;
organize Progressive Party, 336;
nominate Roosevelt and Johnson, 337;
popular vote of, 338;
influence negligible in 1914, 342.
Protection, in Republican platform (1888), 170, 171;
earnestly discussed by both parties, 170;
enlarged by McKinley Bill, 174, 176;
of unborn industries, 175;
strongest in East, 177;
rampant spirit for, in 1897, 254.
Pure food movement, 313, 314, 328.
Quay, Matthew S., chairman of Harrison campaign committee, 170, 171, 174;
offended by Harrison, 213;
completes partnership of manufacturers and voters, 232;
selects Penrose for Senator, 253.
Railroads, development of, 10, 12, 68, 69, 92, 93;
importance of, 16, 69;
land grants to, 22, 24, 148;
continental, 22, 25, 26, 143, 144, 145;
hostility of the Grange, 68, 70;
rate laws, 71, 72;
agree upon standard time, 148;
encourage immigration and colonization, 148, 149;
regarded as quasi-public, 157, 159;
national control of, 158;
bargaining in rates, 165;
and the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, 173;
promote new settlements, 179;
in the South after the Civil War, 204;
controlled by a few men, 294.
Rainfall, importance of, 150, 179, 180, 182, 186.
Randall, Samuel J., 108, 138.
Rebates, railroad, forbidden by Elkins Law, 296.
Reciprocity, favorite scheme of Blaine, 175.
Reclamation of arid lands of the Southwest, 290, 291, 320.
Reconstruction, an inappropriate name for what took place, 39;
no constitutional theory adequate to meet problems of, 44;
must be judged by results, 44, 45;
completion of, in formal sense, 46;
not far advanced by 1870, 49;
dominant type of leaders, 78;
political superseded by constitutional, 85.
Reconstruction Acts of 1867, the, 43, 45, 47.
Reconstruction Governments, evils of, 50, 51, 61.
Reed, Thomas B., 172, 229, 240.
Referendum and initiative, 249, 250, 333, 334.
Regan, John H., 193.
Reid, Whitelaw, 56, 130.
Republican party, the, during the Civil War, 1, 2;
called itself Union, 4, 32;
paid for its disguise, 32;
in the South after 1876, 54;
new men in control, 78, 79;
regains control of the House (1880), 108;
but loses it again (1882), 117;
dissensions in, 128;
defeated in 1884, 133;
elects President and majority in both houses in 1888, 171;
suffers a landslide (1890), 185, 186;
regains control of Senate and House, (1894), 229;
platform in 1896, 234;
dominates every branch of National Government for fourteen years, 244;
the party of organized business, 252;
approves the Spanish War, 279;
elects Taft President (1908), 324, 325;
revises tariff, 326, 327;
dissatisfaction in, 327, 328;
loses the House (1910), 329;
renominates Taft (1912), 336.
Revels, Hiram R., negro Senator from Mississippi, 47.
River and Harbor Bill, 117.
Rockefeller, John D., gains chief control of petroleum traffic, 165, 166;
aids cause of education in South, 201;
methods of, 310, 321.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 128;
steps out of Blaine campaign, 130;
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 265, 277;
raises a regiment for Spanish War, 266;
in Cuba, 270;
early public career of, 276;
Governor of New York, 277;
a reformer of a new type, 277;
Vice-President with McKinley, 280;
succeeds to Presidency, 282;
and the Hague Court, 283, 284;
activity in securing Panama Canal, 286, 288;
questionable course toward Colombia, 286, 288;
attitude toward negroes, 289, 290;
widely popular, 291;
disliked by professional politicians, 291;
dissolves Northern Securities Company, 296, 299;
settles coal strike, 300;
alienates party leaders, 302;
wants nomination on his own account, 303;
tries to modify Dingley Tariff, 304;
nominated for President, 305;
and elected, 306;
declares he will not accept another nomination, 307;
goes outside of United States territory, 316-17;
receives the Nobel prize, 317;
promotes second Hague Conference, 318;
sends navy round the world, 319;
holds conference of state governors at White House, 320;
called "Theodore the Meddler," 322;
his policies those of the people, 323;
secures nomination of Taft for Presidency, 324, 325;
goes to Africa, 329;
formulates New Nationalism, 333;
defeated in Republican convention, 336;
nominated by Progressives, 337.
Root, Elihu, becomes Secretary of War, 274, 281;
Secretary of State, 318;
mentioned for Presidency, 324;
presides over Chicago convention, 336.
Rough Riders, the, 266, 270, 277.
"Rum, Romanism, and rebellion," 133.
Rusk, Jeremiah M., 136, 157.
Russia, at war with Japan, 317.
Sackville-West, Sir Lionel, 170.
Salary grab, in Congress, 62.
Salisbury, Lord, in Venezuela case, 230, 231.
Sampson, Capt. William T., in blockade of Cuba, 265, 268, 269, 270, 272.
Schenck, Robert C., 55, 61.
Schley, Commodore Winfield Scott, in blockade of Cuba, 265, 268, 269, 272.
Schurz, Carl, leader of the Liberal Republicans, 56;
introduces merit system, 86;
reorganizes the Indian service, 86, 87;
supports civil service reform, 112, 113;
an anti-imperialist, 278.
Seal fisheries, 212.
Sewall, Arthur, 237.
Seymour, Horatio, 4;
nominated for Presidency, 31;
loyalty above question, 79.
Shafter, Gen. William R., 269, 270.
Sherman, James S., nominated for Vice-Presidency, 325, 336.
Sherman, John, Senator from Ohio, 66;
Secretary of the Treasury, 89;
proposed for the Presidency, 98, 99, 128;
Secretary of State, 253.
Sherman, Gen. William T., 5.
Sherman Anti-Trust Law, the, enacted, 172, 173, 293;
enforced under Roosevelt, 320, 321.
Sherman Silver Purchase Bill, 174, 218, 219, 220.
Silver, fall in value of, 88, 228;
free coinage demanded, 181, 182;
mines, output of, 181;
coinage of, 217;
demonetization of, called a crime, 225.
Sinclair, Upton, 311.
Slater, John F., creates fund for education of negro, 201.
Social Democratic party, 301.
Socialist Labor party, 301, 338.
South, the, before the war, 11, 12;
price of its attempt at independence, 39;
stubbornness of, 40;
decrease in size of farms, 40, 41;
government of, by army, 42;
divided into five military districts, 43;
new constitutions of its States, 46;
readmission to Union, 47, 49;
repudiation of debts, 51;
normal politics Democratic, 52, 54, 79.
_See also_ New South.
South Dakota, admitted to Union, 152;
first State to adopt initiative and referendum, 250.
Southern Pacific Railroad, 145, 148;
passes into control of Union Pacific, 294, 295;
merger dissolved, 330.
Spain, sends Gen. Weyler to Cuba, 260;
embittered against United States by filibustering parties, 261;
changes of Ministry in, 262;
declines mediation, but recalls Gen. Weyler, 263;
establishes a sort of autonomy for Cuba, 263;
war with United States begun, 264;
loses fleet at Manila, 267;
and another at Santiago, 272;
army at Santiago surrenders, 272;
loses Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippine Islands, and Guam, 273.
Squatters, 21, 155.
Stalwarts, the, support Conkling against Garfield, 103;
claimed as friends by Guiteau, 105;
relations with Arthur, 109, 126.
Standard Oil Company, the, 166, 167;
suit against, brought by Ohio, 168;
history of, 310;
charges of extorting rebates, 311, 312;
dissolved, 330, 331.
Standard time, adopted by American railroads, 148.
Stanford, Leland, 25.
Stanton, Edwin M., 3, 35.
Star route frauds, 103, 104, 105, 113.
Steel industry, the, 16, 297, 298.
Steffens, Lincoln, 310.
Stevens, Thaddeus, 30, 34.
Stevenson, Adlai E., Vice-President with Cleveland, 215;
nominated with Bryan, 279.
Strathcona, Lord, interested in Canadian railways, 148.
Strikes, 121; Pullman, 222;
at Cripple Creek, 222, 301;
at Homestead, 299;
in Pennsylvania coal fields, 299, 300.
Sumner, Charles, 34, 55.
Surplus, embarrassing, 93, 173;
an incentive to extravagance, 116, 136, 138;
easily relieved, 174;
nearly exhausted, 216.
Taft, William II., decision as Circuit Judge against an industrial
combination, 299;
recalled from Philippines to be Secretary of War, 317;
Roosevelt's choice for Presidency, 324;
nominated and elected (1908), 325;
urges tariff revision, 326, 327;
alienates some of the Republican lenders, 327, 328;
in the Pinchot-Ballinger dispute, 328, 329;
pushes anti-trust suits, 330, 331;
extends civil service, 331;
negotiates arbitration treaties with Great Britain and France, 331, 332;
renominated (1912), 336;
badly defeated, 338.
Tanner, James ("Corporal"), 172.
Tarbell, Ida M., writes history of Standard Oil Company, 309, 310.
Tariff, the favorite national tax, 6, 7;
basis of the rate of, 7;
at the end of the war, 8;
different views of, 97;
influence of, in Presidential campaigns, 100;
revision of, 114, 116, 117;
as a source of revenue, 114, 115;
attacks upon, 115, 116;
commission created to investigate needs of, 117, 118;
difficulties of constructing, 118, 119, 140;
revision demanded, 169;
McKinley Bill, 172-75;
opposition to the new law, 184;
a factor in political landslide of 1890, 186;
McKinley Bill in danger, 215;
tariff for revenue the winning issue in 1890 and 1892, 220;
financial interest of manufacturers in, 233;
the Dingley Bill, 253, 254, 255;
the "mother of trusts," 303;
revised by Republicans, 326, 327;
reduced by Democrats, 339.
Taxes, as means of raising money, 6, 114, 115;
authorized more reluctantly than loans, 6;
often revised and increased, 7;
difficulties of Congress with, 115.
Taylor, Hannis, 262.
Tennessee, readmitted to the Union, 45;
escapes negro domination, 54.
Tenure-of-Office Act, 34, 35.
Texas, readmitted to Union, 47;
through change in, after the Civil War, 204, 205.
Thurman, Allen G., 170.
Tilden, Samuel J., prosecutes the Tweed ring, 80;
Democratic candidate for President in 1876, 80, 81;
doubtful result of the election, 83, 84;
unwilling to run in 1880, 99.
Timber Culture Laws, 155.
Tobacco Trust, 330, 331.
Transportation, a fundamental factor, 162;
creates new standards of living, 162, 163;
relation to the trusts, 164, 165;
vital to frontier life, 180.
Treves, Sir Frederick, praises work in Canal Zone, 317.
Trusts, formation of, 163, 164;
logical outcome of, 164;
influence of transportation, 164, 165;
whiskey and sugar, 166;
evils of, social or political, 167;
difficulty of regulating, 168;
investigation ordered, 169;
the aim of, 297;
Chicago conference on, 298;
and strikes, 299, 300;
not all "bad," 302;
tariff the mother of, 303;
the menace of, 309;
prosecution of, 320, 321.
Tweed, William M., 50, 60.
Underwood, Oscar W., 329, 330, 336.
Union League, of freedmen, 45.
Union Pacific Railroad, building of, 22, 24, 25;
celebration of completion, 25;
scandals of, 61;
extended to Denver, 74;
a national project, 142, 143;
extended to the Gulf and into Oregon, 145;
reconstructed by Harriman, 294.
United Mine Workers of America, 300.
United States Steel Corporation, 297, 298.
Utah, polygamy in, 154;
admitted to the Union, 240, 290.
Vallandigham, Clement L., 4.
Venezuela, boundary dispute with Great Britain, 230-32;
before the Hague Court, 284.
Villard, Henry, 144, 145.
Virginia, readmitted to Union, 47.
Waite, Gov. Davis H., 222, 228.
Wanamaker, John, 172, 253.
Washington, becomes a State, 152.
Washington, Booker T., 202, 290.
Watson, Thomas E., 193, 238.
Watterson, Henry, 56.
Weaver, James B., Greenback-Labor candidate for the Presidency, 101;
leader in the People's Party, 209;
Presidential candidate, 211, 216.
Wells, David A., 116.
Western Federation of Miners, in Cripple Creek strike, 301.
Weyler, Gen. Valeriano, 260, 261, 263.
Wheeler, William A., Vice-President with Hayes, 83.
Whiskey Ring, the, 62, 81.
Whiskey and Sugar Trusts, 166.
Wiley, Dr. Harvey, 314, 328.
Wilson, Henry, Vice-President in Grant's second term, 57.
Wilson, James, 314, 328.
Wilson, William L., 215;
leader in tariff revision, 139, 220, 221;
on free silver, 229.
Wilson, Woodrow, career of, 336, 337;
nominated by Democrats for Presidency, 337;
elected, 338;
delivers message to Congress in person, 339;
a coercive leader, 339;
attitude toward Mexico, 340;
neutrality in European war, 341, 342.
Windom, William L., 102, 172.
Woman suffrage, adopted by several States, 250, 334.
Wood, Gen. Leonard, 270, 282.
Woodford, Gen. Stewart L., Minister to Spain, 262, 263.
Wright, Carroll D., Commissioner of Labor, 122.
Wyoming, made a Territory, 149;
a State, 152, 250.
Yellow fever, suppressed in Cuba, 282.
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