By instinct and training indeed Garfield was a free trader. He was a Williams College man, and there had come under the influence of Professor Perry’s vigorous and clear reasoning. He came out of college committed to Perry’s ideas. From the beginning of his public life finance interested him, and he lost no chance to familiarize himself with the subject. In 1862, being called to Washington from the field to sit in a courtmartial for some weeks, he spent all his leisure with Secretary Chase studying the Treasury Department. In 1863 he was sent to Congress, where he was put on the military committee, but two years later, at his own request, he was transferred to the Committee of Ways and Means. Here he attacked all problems with resolution and industry. He pored over Tooke’s “History of Prices,” mastered thoroughly the history of tariffs in England and the United States, and acquainted himself with all the intricacies of the schedules. From the first he set himself against the efforts of Stevens and Kelley to place protection before revenue as an object of the tariff. Commerce and the consumers were quite as important as manufacturers, he insisted. He took a middle ground in argument, which he summed up in 1866 as follows:
“Duties should be so high that our manufacturers can fairly compete with the foreign product, but not so high as to enable them to drive out the foreign article, enjoy a monopoly of the trade, and regulate the price as they please. To this extent I am a protectionist. If our government pursues this line of policy steadily, we shall, year by year, approach more nearly to the basis of free trade, because we shall be more nearly able to compete with other nations on equal terms. I am for a protection which leads to ultimate free trade. I am for that free trade which can be achieved only through protection.”
One excellent feature of Garfield’s tariff work was his willingness to consider all the facts. When the attack began in Congress on David Wells, one of the first manœuvres was an attempt to prevent the printing of his reports. Mr. Garfield protested forcibly:
“I confess my great surprise,” he said, “at the opposition of the gentleman from Pennsylvania to the printing of this report of the Special Commissioner of the Revenue.... He admits, in the first place, that the facts stated are generally correct—that the statistics collected and arranged in tables are true and correctly stated, but declares that the marshalling of the facts is dangerous—that they are put together in such a way, and such inferences are drawn from them, that the report is dangerous to Congress, and to the enlightened people of the country. The gentleman asks this House to make a humiliating confession in which I, for one, am not ready to join. If any theories or opinions of mine can be damaged by facts, so much the worse for my theories. An officer who has served the country so ably and faithfully as the Special Commissioner of the Revenue deserves well of the country. I trust the motion to print will prevail.”
As we have seen, the tariff reformers of 1870–72 really numbered Garfield as one of them and wanted him as the head of the Ways and Means Committee—a position he would have had had it not been for Mr. Blaine’s slipperiness. The events that followed—the panic of 1873, the outspoken plank of the Democrats in 1876 in favor of tariff for revenue only, the effort of his party to keep quiet on the tariff—did not change Garfield’s views, though they did make him a shade more cautious in expressing them.
When he came to face a campaign for the presidency in 1880, he must have realized that whatever he thought about the tariff would count for little if a struggle were precipitated. He had nineteen iron foundries in blast in his Ohio district, and the watch their owners kept of him creeps out more than once in his speeches. He must have known that in case it should be needed these gentlemen were ready to make the biggest fight they had ever made for high protection. Indeed, only a few months before the nomination the ablest one among the organized metal workers, Mr. Joseph Wharton, had openly served notice of their intention on the coming administration. Mr. Wharton was speaking in Pittsburg on “The American Ironmaster,” and said: “It is meet that we should declare to the country that we will support no party and no candidate who cannot be depended upon by something better than election-day promises to protect and defend home labor. It is fitting for us to call ‘hands off’ to those who are itching to tear our tariff laws to shreds; to call upon the President in advance to refrain from meddling with commercial treaty-making and to veto, as he doubtless would, any measure injurious to home industry which a hostile majority in Congress may pass; to call upon the representatives of all other American industries to stand by us as we will stand by them in resisting all changes in the tariff laws and all tariff-making by treaty until these laws can be carefully and prudently revised by a Congress or a commission known to be devoted to the interests of the nation.”
That Garfield knew of this speech is certain, for a copy of it bearing his stamp was turned over to the Congressional Library when he left Congress in the spring of 1880. Altogether it was enough to make a man cautious, and it was certainly a mark of political sagacity on his part that he said nothing in his letter of acceptance about the tariff issue. But it was not to be downed. The Republicans, failing at the opening of the campaign to excite anybody about the South, suddenly attacked the Democratic phrase, “tariff for revenue only.” What did it mean? Why, nothing if not the destruction of the “home market,” the consequent shutting down of all American manufactories, the idleness of all American laboring men, a reign of “pauper labor,” the end of “prosperity.” Unfortunately for the Democrats, their candidate, General W. S. Hancock, a splendid soldier and gentleman, apparently was not certain that the phrase “tariff for revenue only” meant anything in particular. He tried to parry lightly with his famous remark that the tariff was only “a local affair.” The more he and his supporters talked, the more of a tangle they made of it. It was quite apparent if the tariff was to be a live issue they were too uncertain and too divided on it to handle it. The Republicans, on the contrary, came out boldly for protection to American industry, and on this they won. They won—but the victory seemed only to make more insistent the demand for revision. “I suppose,” said Mr. Morrill, regretfully, “that if the Bible has to be revised from time to time the tariff may have to be.”
If there had been no other reason at this time, the piling up of the surplus would in itself have forced a revision. The return of good times which began to be perceptible in 1878–79 had of course stimulated imports. In 1878–79 nearly $215,000,000 in duties had been collected; in 1879–80, $386,000,000. In these two years the national debt was reduced by a hundred million dollars, and there was more money left in the Treasury than they knew what to do with. Of course a stop had to be put to this. But more imperative than the surplus was public opinion. It was suspicious of high protection. The results of the census of 1880 had begun to filter through the country, and accordingly people began to compare the last decade—1870–80, which had been lived under a tariff of about 42 per cent (on dutiable goods)—with the one from 1850–60, lived under a tariff of about 20 per cent. In each had occurred a disastrous panic. In each there had been, in spite of panics, a great growth in agriculture, in population, in manufacturing. Taken on the whole, which had been the more normal growth?
To start with, it was evident that one claim of the high protectionists was a humbug—that is, given protection you had prosperity. Mr. Kelley, as we have seen, had become a high protectionist in 1859, because low tariff—he called it free trade—had not prevented a panic in 1857. But neither had a high tariff prevented the panic of 1873. “Where,” exclaimed the Parsee merchant, “was the Baal of protection all this time? Why did he not come to the relief of this distress? Alas, he was as lame, as impotent, and as false as the Baal in the Bible. The one was unable to strike a lucifer match in the plains of Judea three thousand years ago, and the other could not light a blast furnace in Pennsylvania.”
The census showed, too, that the general growth between 1850 and 1860 was greater than between 1870 and 1880. Capital had increased in the first decade about 90 per cent, in the second but 32 per cent; hands employed 37 per cent in the first, 33 per cent in the second; wages 60 per cent in the first, 22 per cent in the second; materials used 86 per cent in the first, 36 per cent in the second; products of manufacture 85 per cent in the first, 27 per cent in the second. The increase of the second decade over the first had been amazing in certain specific cases, as in iron and steel. In 1860 the iron production had been but 821,223 tons; in 1880 it was 3,835,191. In 1860 it was 60 pounds per capita; in 1880, 171 pounds. It was protection that had done this, said the Iron and Steel Association, but why had it not done as much for wool? As we have seen, the wool interests had secured the passage of a special bill in 1867 giving them the highest protection they had ever had, but in spite of it the industry had lagged. Evidently protection was not infallible. There were other elements in the problem of prosperity—what were they? Again, what about the prosperity it claimed to produce—that of iron and steel, for instance—was that prosperity equally divided? Was a high tariff as good a distributor as it was a generator?