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.