The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

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 The Italian Minister, Baron Fava, was withdrawn from Washington on this account, and returned only when Congress had healed the breach by making provision for the families of the sufferers.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.