The Tariff in Our Times

by Ida M. Tarbell

In a message sent to Congress in December, 1882, President Arthur said:

“The present tariff system is in many ways unjust. It makes unequal distributions both of its burdens and benefits.... I recommend an enlargement of the free list so as to include within it the numerous articles which yield inconsiderable revenue, a simplification of the complex and inconsistent schedule of duties upon certain manufactures, particularly those of cotton, iron, and steel and a substantial reduction of the duties upon those articles and upon sugar, molasses, silk, wool, and woollen goods.”

The words had unusual weight, for Arthur was the only President we have had who could speak from a practical experience in administering the customs. For seven years (1871 to 1878) he had been Collector of the Port of New York. It was at a time when the Custom House was undergoing a series of rude shocks, the combined results of the ambiguities of the tariff laws, the greed of importers, the dishonesty of some of its officials, and the “pernicious activity” in politics of others. Arthur had been obliged to fight for the honor of his own administration, and he had finally been suspended by President Hayes. That is, President Arthur knew much from close contact of the ambiguities, the frauds, the injustice of the duties then in force, so that any expression of his had the merit of being “practical.” It had additional force, because nobody could doubt Arthur’s devotion to protection. He had been from boyhood a “Henry Clay Whig.” Everybody recognized that nothing but a profound conviction that the country demanded lower duties would have driven him to ask for them. The country indeed had not long before this given the Republicans a stern rebuke on its tariff policy by electing a good-sized Democratic majority to the House in the next Congress—the forty-eighth, meeting in December, 1883.

Spurred to action by Arthur’s message, the report of the Tariff Commission, and by their own defeat, the Republicans lost no time in getting to work. The report of the Tariff Commission was sent at once to the Committee of Ways and Means in the House and to the Finance Committee in the Senate, and both bodies began to frame bills. Under ordinary circumstances, the Senate would have been obliged to wait for a bill from the House before expressing itself,—the House alone having the right to originate revenue bills,—but the circumstances were not “ordinary.” The Senate at this moment had before it a bill for reducing the internal revenue. This bill had come from the House in the preceding session and had only been kept from becoming a law by the filibustering of certain Democratic Senators. It was somebody’s bright idea now to tack to this internal revenue bill, as an amendment, a tariff bill of the Senate’s own making. It was, of course, an adventure of uncertain issue. The House was notoriously jealous of its constitutional rights. Would it recognize a measure proposed by the Senate? The Senate thought it worth the trial at least, and fell to work.

The two committees which at opposite ends of the Capitol now began to sit daily over the tariff were remarkable bodies. At the head of the Senate committee was Mr. Morrill, who twenty-three years before had introduced into the House of Representatives the bill with which this narrative opened. Since 1867 he had been a member of the Senate, giving the bulk of his time to revenue questions. He was seventy-two years old now, and in spite of over twenty years’ labor on tariff schedules was still dignified and courteous!

John Sherman was next to Morrill on the Committee—a place he held with bad grace. Sherman had lost his rank on the Committee of Finance, of which he had formerly been chairman, by his appointment to Mr. Hayes’s cabinet in 1876, it being an invariable rule that a member returning to the Senate after an interregnum should go to the foot of his party colleagues on committee. When Sherman returned in 1881 he thought he should be an exception to the rule. He had up to this time outranked Mr. Morrill in both House and Senate. His services as Secretary of the Treasury had given him special skill in dealing with revenue questions. But Mr. Morrill declined to yield. It looked as if Mr. Sherman would sit at the foot of the table, when Mr. Allison, who was a member of the Committee, appreciating the strain, quietly suggested to his Republican colleagues that Mr. Sherman be moved up next to Morrill. This was done, but from the beginning of the work on the bill the effect of his defeat was most noticeable on Sherman’s temper and attitude. He was arrogant in committee and out. He says in his “Recollections” that he was “piqued” by Morrill’s failure to yield to him. The word is mild.

It began to be noticed soon after the Committee went to work that Mr. Sherman was getting much help from the member at the foot—a new Senator, the Senator from Rhode Island—Nelson W. Aldrich. People who watched the hearings said he seemed to have at his tongue’s end all the facts which bore on the high tariff side. It was said on the inside, too, that he was the man who had written the cotton schedule for the report of the Tariff Commission. He had certainly done well for his constituents. He had secured an increase on that class of cotton goods which was chiefly imported, and a decrease on those of which little or nothing could be imported.

The leading Democrat on the Committee was James B. Beck of Lexington, Kentucky. Beck was a Scotchman by birth and a Democrat of eighteen years’ Congressional experience. Powerful in body and mind, brave, honest, and combative, he led his party in the Senate with great effectiveness. It was on the tariff that Beck was at his best. Let him get after a rate he regarded as iniquitous and he was like an avalanche. “His mighty arms swing like hammers,” wrote an English correspondent who heard him once on that theme. “His Scotch tongue, which some call harsh and rasping, thunders out the shortest and simplest Anglo-Saxon words that can be found to compose his terse sentences. Now and then the clinched fist comes down on his desk with telling force. The whole speech is made up of facts and statistics. If a flower of rhetoric should spring up in his path he would crush it with his ponderous foot. If a trope should get into his throat, he would swallow it. Adjectives, metaphors, and similes find no place in his oratory. Like Joseph Hume, he is a man of figures, and like him he speaks like a problem in mathematics.”

The House Committee was strong on both sides. The chairman was “Pig Iron” Kelley, who, in spite of twenty-five years’ experience with protection, still found it an “exquisite harmony.” He had as supporters the experienced Mr. Kasson of Iowa and the devoted young Mr. McKinley of Ohio, but it was on neither of them he was depending chiefly. There had been put on the Committee in the previous session a man from Kansas, Dudley C. Haskell, who was now to take about the same relation to Kelley as Kelley had taken to Thaddeus Stevens in the tariff debate of 1866 and 1867. The Democrats of the Committee were four of the strongest that Congress has seen since the war—Carlisle of Kentucky, Randall of Pennyslvania, Morrison of Illinois, and Tucker of Virginia.

Here, then, were two able committees giving their entire time to tariff bills. They were under instructions from a Republican country and a Republican President to lower the duties, and they had as a guide a report of a Republican commission of their own creation advising its reduction. They had Republican majorities to back them. Their duty seemed plain. It seemed clear, too, that they should be free from outside pressure. All of those individuals whose interests were affected had had ample opportunities to lay their cases before a commission constituted for the purpose. To keep away from Washington would seem to be their obvious business. But they saw it differently. Indeed, the two committees had scarcely gone to work before a “third house” was in session—a house of lobbyists come to Washington for the express purpose of preventing the recommendations of the Tariff Commission from becoming law. The wool-growers, disgusted that Mr. Garland, representing them on the commission, had consented to nearly 20 per cent reduction, held public meetings in Ohio denouncing him, and sent down what scoffers called the “wool trinity”—Columbus Delano, one-time Secretary of the Interior under Grant, William Lawrence, afterward a Comptroller of the Treasury, and David Harpster—all wool-growers and all from Ohio.