The most brilliant and witty, as well as the most thoroughly informed of the tariff insurgents was the amiable Senator Dolliver from Iowa—twenty years in Congress—always regular—always stoutly supporting the tariff bills turned out by the committee.
“What ails you now?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said, “I had been going on for twenty years taking practically without question what they handed me; but these alliances between the party and industrial interests have at last set me thinking. I began to understand something of the injustice that was being done to the consumer. And then we promised to reform the tariff.”
When the insurgents divided up the schedules for study, Schedule K—wool—the most difficult and the most important politically, fell to Senator Dolliver. He found he had been voting for years for duties which, when he sat down to read the schedule, he could not understand. He discovered they were a mixture of tricks, evasions, and discriminations—intended to be so, he believed. He determined to master them.
And master them he did by months of the severest night work. He pored over statistics and technical treatises. He visited mills and importing houses and retail shops. He sought the aid of experts, and in the end he knew his subject so well that he went onto the floor of the Senate without a manuscript and literally played with Schedule K, and incidentally also with Senator Aldrich, who was said to fly to the cloak room whenever Senator Dolliver rose to speak. When he had finished his clean, competent dissection, Schedule K lay before the Senate a law without principles or morals; and yet, just as it was, the Senate of the United States passed it, and the President of the United States signed it, and it went on the statute books.
Why? Neither Mr. Taft nor Mr. Aldrich defended the wool schedule which made the bill odious. They both were frank in explaining that it was politically necessary, not at all a question of the fairness of the schedule, but a question of what powerful interests demanded. The wool interests could defeat the bill if they did not get what they wanted.
My conviction about the inequity of Schedule K was so strong that when the Outlook published a long defense of it, plainly an advertisement but not so marked, I protested in a personal letter to its vociferous contributing editor, Theodore Roosevelt, with whom by this time I was on fairly friendly terms. Just what I said in my letter about the Herald which so stirred his wrath I do not remember, but his answer to my comment is so typically Rooseveltian in temper and reasoning that I think it should be preserved:
May 6, 1911
Oh! Miss Tarbell, Miss Tarbell!
How can you take the view you do of the Herald! You compare it with the Tribune. It is perfectly legitimate to compare the Tribune with Mr. Watterson’s paper, the Courier-Journal. Honest people could agree or disagree about those two papers. Personally I think that during the last thirty or forty years the Tribune has been infinitely more helpful to good causes than the Courier-Journal, but, as I say, people can differ on such a subject; and I should be very glad to meet at any time either Henry Watterson or Whitelaw Reid. But to compare either one of them with the Herald is literally and precisely as if I should compare either the American Magazine or The Outlook with Town Topics.