There was another paragraph in that letter which touched me deeply:
Your article has caused me to feel again the greatest sorrow and disappointment I have ever suffered in my public career—the failure of my party to discharge its most important duty and its fatuous departure from its appointed mission.
But lean as heavily as I dared on Mr. Cleveland, work as I would and did on the tariff debates of Congress (I can wish my worst enemy no greater punishment than reading them in full), I could not put vitality into my narrative. It was of the Congressional Record—it was secondhand.
It was the making of the Payne-Aldrich bill in 1909 that finally gave a certain life to my narrative. Here was something belonging to the present, not something of the past. By all the signs Theodore Roosevelt should have been the St. George to lead in the revision the public was calling so loudly for, particularly after the panic of 1907. Few of his party leaders paid attention.
“Are not all our fellows happy?” Speaker Joseph Cannon asked as the demand for revision became louder.
Roosevelt himself heard it, but frankly said to his intimates that he did not know anything about the tariff. He did not and he would not take the time to learn. He hammered at the effects of privilege, pursued “malefactors of great wealth,” but was not willing to do the hard studying of the causes which produced the malefactors.
Mr. Taft, who followed Roosevelt, had no choice. The platform on which he was elected called “unequivocally” for tariff reform, and as soon as he was inaugurated he called a special session to do the work. My chagrin was great when I realized at once that all the ancient technique I had been trying to discredit was repeating itself. It is, I told myself, the same old circus, the same old gilded chariots, the same old clowns. So far as arguments were concerned they might have been taken from the hearings of ’83, of ’88, of ’93, of ’96. Figures were changed, and nobody could deny that these figures of growth were impressive; but they came from interested men.
“They are incapable of judging,” Mr. Carnegie told the committee. “No judge should be permitted to sit in a cause in which he is interested; you make the greatest mistake in your life if you attach importance to an interested witness.”
The process which “Sunset” Cox back in the seventies characterized as “reciprocal rapine”—buying votes for the schedule their constituents wanted by voting for schedules they could not justify—was in full swing.
Never was the tariff as the “cause of prosperity” worked harder. It was the answer of the prohibitive protectionist to the charge that the tariff was a tax. In all the early years they had called it so—a tax to produce revenue, encourage new industries, protect higher wages, a better standard of living. But Mr. Cleveland had called it boldly “a vicious, inequitable, illogical tax,” and illustrated his adjectives tellingly. The effect of his attack was so disastrous that the supporters of prohibitive duties went into a huddle to find a new name. “The cause of prosperity” was the euphemism they produced.