Many, not all Democrats, opposed the Reed policy as arbitrary. Mr. Evarts is said to have remarked, “Reed, you seem to think a deliberative body like a woman; if it deliberates, it is lost.” On the “yeas and nays” or at any roll-call some would dodge out of sight, others break for the doors only to find them closed. A Texas member kicked down a door to make good his escape. Yet, having calculated the scope of his authority, Mr. Reed coolly continued to count and declare quorums whenever such were present. The Democratic majority of 1893 transferred this newly discovered prerogative of the Speaker, where possible, to tellers. Now and then they employed it as artillery to fire at Mr. Reed himself, but he each time received the shot with smiles.
The cause for which the counting of quorums was invoked made it doubly odious to Democratic members. To restore the suffrage to southern negroes the Republicans proposed federal supervision of federal elections. This suggestion of a “Force Bill” rekindled sectional bitterness. One State refused to be represented at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, a United States marshal was murdered in Florida, a Grand Army Post was mobbed at Whitesville, Ky. Parts of the South proposed a boycott on northern goods. Many at the North favored white domination in the South rather than a return of the carpet-bag regime, regarding the situation a just retribution for Republicans’ highhanded procedure in enfranchising black ignorance. Sober Republicans foresaw that a force law would not break up the solid South, but perpetuate it. The House, however, passed the bill. In the Senate it was killed only by “filibuster” tactics, free silver Republican members joining members from the South to prevent the adoption of cloture.
A Treasury surplus of about $97,000,000 (in October, 1888) tempted the Fifty-first Congress to expenditures then deemed vast, though often surpassed since. The Fifty-first became known as the “Billion Dollar Congress.” What drew most heavily upon the national strong-box was the Dependent Pensions Act. In this culminated a course of legislation repeating with similar results that which began early in the history of our country, occasioning the adage that “The Revolutionary claimant never dies.” By 1820 the experiment entailed an expenditure of a little over twenty-five cents per capita of our population.
In 1880 Congress was induced to endow each pensioner with a back pension equal to what his pension would have been had he applied on the date of receiving his injury. Under the old law pension outlay had been at high tide in 1871, standing then at $34,443,894. Seven years later it shrank to $27,137,019. In 1883 it exceeded $66,000,000; in 1889 it approached $88,000,000. But the act of 1890, similar to one vetoed by President Cleveland three years before, carried the pension figure to $106,493,000 in 1890, to $118,584,000 in 1891, and to about $159,000,000 in 1893. It offered pensions to all soldiers and sailors incapacitated for manual labor who had served the Union ninety days, or, if they were dead, to their widows, children, or dependent parents. 311,567 pension certificates were issued during the fiscal year 1891-1892.
While thus increasing outgo, the Fifty-first Congress planned to diminish income, not by lowering tariff rates, as the last Administration had recommended, but by pushing them up to or toward the prohibitive point. The McKinley Act, passed October 1, 1890, made sugar, a lucrative revenue article, free, and gave a bounty to sugar producers in this country, together with a discriminating duty of one-tenth of a cent per pound on sugar imported hither from countries which paid an export bounty thereon.
The “Blaine” reciprocity feature of this act proved its most popular grace. In 1891 we entered into reciprocity agreements with Brazil, with the Dominican Republic, and with Spain for Cuba and Porto Rico. In 1892 we covenanted similarly with the United Kingdom on behalf of the British West Indies and British Guiana, and with Nicaragua, Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Austria-Hungary. How far our trade was thus benefited is matter of controversy. Imports from these countries were certainly much enlarged. Our exportation of flour to these lands increased a result commonly ascribed to reciprocity, though the simultaneous increase in the amounts of flour we sent to other countries was a third more rapid.
The international copyright law, meeting favor with the literary, was among the most conspicuous enactments of the Fifty-first Congress. An international copyright treaty had been entered into in 1886, but it did not include the United States. Two years later a bill to the same end failed in Congress. At last, on March 3, 1891, President Harrison signed an act which provided for United States copyright for any foreign author, designer, artist, or dramatist, albeit the two copies of a book, photograph, chromo, or lithograph required to be deposited with the Librarian of Congress must be printed from type set within the limits of the United States or from plates made therefrom, or from negatives or drawings on stone made within the limits of the United States or from transfers therefrom. Foreign authors, like native or naturalized, could renew their United States copyrights, and penalties were prescribed to protect these rights from infringement.
Mr. Blaine, the most eminent Republican statesman surviving, was now less conspicuous than McKinley, Lodge, and Reed, with whom, by his opposition to extreme protection and to the Force Bill, he stood at sharp variance. As Secretary of State, however, to which post President Harrison had perforce assigned him, he still drew public attention, having to deal with several awkward international complications.
David C. Hennessy.