Mr. Wells included many other similar illustrations in his report, but it was wool, salt, iron, and ship-building which demonstrated his points most clearly: that tariffs, which were so high that they were practically prohibitive, as in these cases, could not restore a depressed industry, they raised prices unnaturally high to the consumer, gave unnatural profits to the few manufacturers as in the case of pig-iron, led inevitably to monopolies as in the case of salt, and destroyed related industries as in the case of ship-building.
The report created a great noise and played a big part in the debate on the tariff bill, which General Schenck introduced into the House in February, 1870. That any bill attempted at this juncture should follow the pledges the leaders had given in ’62 and ’64 to reduce the tariffs as the internal taxes were reduced, would seem evident. But there was no proof that General Schenck and his committee had given more than a passing glance at these pledges. That the tariffs, whose unjust and dangerous excess had been demonstrated, should be corrected, seemed evident—but they were either ignored or only partially readjusted. Thus pig-iron, which undoubtedly would have been amply protected by a duty of $3.00 a ton, was allowed $7.00. The revenue was reduced, as it was imperative it should be, by lowering the duties on sugar, tea, and coffee—a “free breakfast table” being the committee’s slogan. An animated wrangle followed the introduction of the bill. The leaders on the extreme wings were William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania for the high protectionists, and S. S. Cox of New York for the free traders; while Messrs. Allison of Iowa and Garfield of Ohio led the moderates.
Mr. Kelley was at this time at the height of his power, and a more passionate and convinced supporter of the doctrine of protection has never sat in the Congress of the United States. He had not always been a protectionist. “In 1847,” he wrote once, “I had seen with gratification the protective tariff of 1842 succeeded by the revenue or free-trade tariff of 1846. To promote this change I had labored not only with zeal and industry, but with undoubting faith that experience would prove its benefits. For ten years all went well, and then came the panic of 1857.” To Mr. Kelley it was a knockout blow. He seems not to have considered the natural causes of the disturbance, but to have concluded the trouble lay entirely in the tariff, and for two years he went through the agony of a man losing his faith. Then in 1859 he sought Henry C. Carey for help. His conversion to protection was complete. As he himself said he came to regard the doctrine as an “exquisite harmony.” Everything which we could produce or manufacture should be so protected that the foreigner could not enter the market. By diversifying and expanding our industries we would draw greater and greater numbers to our country, thus giving larger and larger markets to our farmers. The manufacturers were to supply all the tools of the farmers and miners. Encouraged by prosperity production would multiply, and competition would reduce prices at home lower than abroad. It was a perfect circle.
There is no doubt that the basis of Kelley’s devotion to protection was his belief that it was for the interest of the American working classes. The improvement of their condition was the passion of his life. Apprenticed as a boy to a Boston printer he had refused to be sent to college lest it might wean him from his class. He wanted to taste with them all the experiences of poverty—to know what it cost for a day laborer to live and rise in America. He had studied law at night, had sought the society of Channing and Emerson, had become a man of influence, but his motive had remained unchanged. The misery he saw in 1857 he charged entirely to the free-trade system. He could not rest until he had found a substitute. He believed he had found it in the “exquisite harmony” of protection.
Having adopted a formula he believed competent to solve all problems, Kelley could support no criticism of its operations. Mr. Wells’s demonstration that high tariffs had not restored wool to its old vigor, had been the determining factor in building up the salt monopoly, that the iron men were getting the lion’s share of the duty on iron, that we could not build ships if we kept the price of materials so much higher than in other countries, was to him little better than blasphemy. Wells became his pet abomination—a detestation soon after extended to Professor Sumner of Yale, a man and an institution existing, he used to say angrily, for “the stupefaction of the youth of this country!”
In the debate on the Schenck Bill Mr. Kelley’s defence of the high tariffs was impassioned and angry. Monopoly, what did he care for monopoly, he cried, when Mr. Allison called his attention to the fact that a certain iron manufacturer whose scale of wages Kelley was praising, had, with the only three other of his kind in the country, agreed upon a list of prices made by adding to the price abroad the duty and a profit on the cost at home. “I do not care what they agreed to do if they are thereby enabling workingmen to keep their children at school, well-fed and comfortably clad, to maintain their seats in church and to lay something up for old age and a rainy day.”
Kelley’s refusal to consider any argument for lowering duties, particularly on iron, led to a charge that he was in the pay of the iron manufacturers. No proof of this accusation was ever offered. The New York Nation, which repeated it in 1872, made the amende honorable soon after, saying that Mr. Kelley and his friends had convinced them that he had no interest which would justify this charge. Kelley’s case was different from that of Thaddeus Stevens, who did own an iron foundry. The cause of the charge was due no doubt to Kelley’s unwillingness to admit that there could be evils in applying his favorite doctrine. For corruption outside of the tariff he had a just indignation—as for the whiskey frauds. He looked with horror on Simon Cameron; and in 1872, when office-seeking was causing great scandal, he refused to accept renomination to Congress, except on condition that hereafter he should not be regarded as a “patronage broker.” His defeat was generally prophesied, but he kept his word and won.
At the other end of the scale from Kelley was Samuel Sullivan Cox, by far the most eloquent, witty, and well-informed debater the Democrats had. Cox was an uncompromising free-trader, and one of the most interesting figures in Congress. He was still a young man, forty-four at this time, but an experienced one. A graduate of Brown, he had first taken part in public life as the editor of the Statesman of Columbus, Ohio. Here at the very start he earned his sobriquet of “Sunset Cox” by an editorial, which went all over the country; “A Great Old Sunset,” it was called. It opened, “What a stormful sunset was that of last night! How glorious the storm, and how splendid the setting of the sun.”
His popularity sent him to Congress in 1857, where, although a Democrat, he immediately put himself in opposition to the Buchanan administration by voting against the Lecompton Constitution. In 1866 he removed to New York City, which promptly sent him back to Congress as one of its representatives. The spirit and wit Cox could infuse into a tariff debate can only be understood by reading the Congressional Record. His irreverent interpretations of extreme protectionism kept poor Mr. Kelley in a constant tumult. Kelley’s sense of humor, which seems not to have been strong at any time, was utterly swamped by the serious view he took of his favorite doctrine, and Cox gibed him unmercifully. “Pig-Iron Kelley” he called him, and his resolutions “pig-iron resolutions.” Perhaps his most successful sally at his opponents in this Congress was his resolution against free sunshine—a resolution adapted from Bastiat—made when there was a fight on against lowering the duty on coal:
“Resolved, That all windows, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains and blinds shall be permanently closed, as also all openings, holes, chinks, clefts, and fissures through which the light and heat of the sun have been allowed to enter houses to the prejudice and injury of meritorious miners and dealers in gas-coal to protect domestic industry.”