The Senate as a whole remained obdurate. When in the Fifty-third Congress the resolution of the House came before that body, Mr. Hoar, of Massachusetts, made, on April 6 and 7, 1893, one of his most eloquent and impassioned pleas for resisting this new proposal to the uttermost. He declared that it would transfer the seat of power to the "great cities and masses of population," that it would create new temptations to fraud and corrupt practices, that it implied that the Senate had been untrue to its trust, that it would lead to the election of the President and the judiciary by popular majorities, and that it would "result in the overthrow of the whole scheme of the Senate and in the end of the whole scheme of the national Constitution as designed and established by the framers of the Constitution and the people who adopted it." With impatience, he refused to listen to the general indictment which had been brought against the Senate as then constituted. "The greatest victories of constitutional liberty since the world began," he concluded, "are those whose battle ground has been the American Senate, and whose champions have been the Senators who for a hundred years, while they have resisted the popular passions of the House, have led, represented, guided, obeyed, and made effective the deliberate will of a free people."
Having failed to make an impression on the Senate by a frontal attack, the advocates of popular election set to work to capture that citadel by a rear assault. They began to apply the principle of the direct primary in the nomination of candidates for the Senate, and this development at length culminated in the Oregon scheme for binding the legislature to accept the "people's choice." This movement gained rapid headway in the South, where the real contest was over nomination, not election, on account of the absence of party divisions. As early as 1875, the Nebraska constitution had provided for taking a popular preferential vote on candidates for the Senate; but no considerable interest seems to have been taken in it at the time. In 1899, Nevada passed a law entitled "an act to secure the election of United States Senators in accordance with the will of the people and the choice of the electors of the state." Shortly afterward, Oregon enacted her famous statute which attempted to compel the legislature to accept the popular nominee; and from that time forward the new system spread rapidly. By 1910, at least three fourths of the states nominated candidates for the Senate by some kind of a popular primary.
It was not until 1911 that the Senate yielded to the overwhelming popular demand for a change in the methods of election provided in the Constitution. In December, 1909, Senator Bristow, of Kansas, introduced a resolution designed to effect this reform, and after a hot debate it was defeated on February 28, 1911, by a vote of 54 to 33, four short of the requisite two thirds. In the next Congress, which convened on April 4, ten Senators who had voted against the amendment had been retired, and the champions of the measure, taking it up again with renewed energy, were able to force it through the upper house on June 12, 1911, by a margin of five more than the two thirds. The resolution went to the House and a deadlock arose between the two chambers for a time over Federal control of elections, provided in the Senate resolution, which was obnoxious to many southern representatives. At length, however, on May 13, 1912, the opponents in the House gave way, and the resolution passed by an overwhelming vote. Within a year, the resolution was ratified by the requisite three fourths of the state legislatures, and it was proclaimed on May 31, 1913.
The advance of direct democracy in the West was accompanied by a revival of the question of woman suffrage. That subject had been earnestly agitated about the time of the Civil War; and under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others it made considerable headway among those sections of the population which had favored the emancipation of the slaves. Indeed, it was inevitably linked with the discussion of "natural rights," extensively carried on during the days when attempts were being made to give political rights to the newly emancipated bondmen. Woman suffrage was warmly urged before the New York state constitutional convention in 1867 by Mr. George William Curtis, in a speech which has become a classic among the arguments for that cause. During the seventies suffrage petitions bearing the signatures of thousands of men and women were laid before Congress, and an attempt was made to secure from the Supreme Court an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment which would force the states to grant the ballot to women.
At length the movement began to subside, and writers who passed for keen observers declared it to be at an end. The nineteenth century closed with victories for the women in only four states, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. The first of these states had granted the vote to women while yet a territory, and on its admission to the Union in 1890, it became the first state with full political equality. Three years later, Colorado enfranchised women, and in 1896 Utah and Idaho joined the equal suffrage commonwealths. Meanwhile, a very large number of northern and eastern states had given women the right to vote in local or school elections, Minnesota and Michigan in 1875 and other states in quick succession. Nevertheless, these gains were, relatively speaking, small, and there seemed to be little widespread enthusiasm about the further extension of the right.
Of course, the agitation continued, but in somewhat obscure circles, under a running fire of ridicule whenever it appeared in public. At length it broke out with unprecedented vigor, shortly after the tactics adopted by militant English women startled the world. Within a short time new and substantial victories gave the movement a standing which could not be ignored either by its positive opponents or the indifferent politicians. In 1910, the suffragists carried the state of Washington; in 1911, they carried California; in 1912, they won in Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon; but lost Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These victories gave them nine states and of course a considerable influence in the House of Representatives and the right to participate in the election of eighteen out of ninety-six Senators. But the defeat in the three middle states led the opponents of woman suffrage to believe that the movement could be confined to the far West. This hope was, however, dashed in 1913 when the legislature of Illinois gave women the right to vote for all statutory officers, including electors for President of the United States. Determined to make use of the political power thus obtained, the suffragists, under the leadership of Alice Paul, renewed with great vigor the agitation at Washington for a national amendment forbidding states to disqualify women from voting merely on account of sex.
The Rise and Growth of Socialism
With the spread of direct elections and the initiative and referendum, and the adoption of the two amendments to the Federal Constitution authorizing an income tax[73] and the popular election of Senators, the milder demands of Populism were secured. At the same time, the prosperity of the farmers and the enormous rise in ground values which accompanied the economic advance of the country removed some of the most potent causes of the discontent on which Populism thrived. Organized Populism died a natural death. Those Populists who advocated only political reforms went over to the Republican and Democratic parties; the advocates of radical economic changes, on the other hand, entered the Socialist ranks.
Socialism, as an organized movement in the United States, runs back to the foundation of the Social-Democratic Workingmen's party in New York City, in 1874, which was changed into the Socialist Labor party three years later,—a party that still survives. This group did not enter into national politics until 1892, although its branches occasionally made nominations for local offices or fused with other labor groups, as in the New York mayoralty campaign of 1886. In its vigorous propaganda against capitalism, this party soon came into collision with the American Federation of Labor, established in 1886, and definitely broke with it four years later when the latter withheld a charter from the New York Central Federation for the alleged reason that the Socialist Labor party of that city was an affiliated organization. After the break with the American Federation, this Socialist group turned for a time to the more radical Knights of Labor, but this new flirtation with labor was no more successful than the first, and in time the Socialist Labor party declared war on all the methods of American trades-unionism. Its gains numerically were not very significant; it polled something over twenty thousand votes in 1892 and over eighty thousand in 1896—the high-water mark in its political career. Its history has been a stormy one, marked by dissensions, personal controversies, and splits, but the party is still maintained by a decreasing band of loyal adherents.