The Tariff in Our Times

by Ida M. Tarbell

“In the broad and sweeping sense which the term usually implies I am not a free-trader,” he said. “I will add that in my judgment it will be years yet before anything in the nature of free trade would be wise or practicable in the United States. When we speak of this subject we refer to approximate free trade which has no idea of cutting the growth of home industries, but simply of scaling down the inequalities of the tariff schedules where they are utterly out of proportion to the demands of that growth. After we have calmly stood up and allowed monopolists to grow fat we should not be asked to make them bloated. Our enormous surplus revenues are illogical and oppressive. It is entirely undemocratic to continue these burdens on the people for years and years after the requirements of protection have been met and the representatives of these industries have become incrusted with wealth.”

That is, Carlisle saw clearly that certain evils inherent in high protection, evils against which Garfield and all the Republican tariff reformers had so often warned, were becoming realities. The word monopoly was already in everybody’s mouth, for at this time the impossibility of preventing the over-production and consequent depressions which are the logical results of an artificial stimulus like a high tariff, except by some artificial check like a combination to limit output and hold up prices, had been completely demonstrated.

Mr. Randall, however, saw no danger in the building up of monopolies and combinations to limit production which counterbalanced the advantage there was in shutting out foreign competition and keeping the home market inviolate. The danger he claimed to see was unsettling capital. “There is nothing in life so sensitive to adverse criticism and which takes alarm so quickly,” he said, “as capital invested in large industrial enterprises.... Shall we unsettle business interests by constant tinkering with the tariff? Shall no law last longer than the meeting of the next Congress?”

The contest between the two men had begun in the summer and had been followed with keen interest in political circles. Early in November the candidates opened headquarters in Washington and soon the town was full of “Randall men” and “Carlisle men,” each ready to prove his candidate a sure winner! All of the big newspapers had correspondents on hand, foretelling confidently the success of the candidate favored by their readers. But there was little to indicate the result. It all depended, it was seen, upon how deep and how general a belief there was in the Democratic party that high tariffs were dangerous.

The only really significant feature of the fall contest in Washington was the activity of the protected interests in Randall’s behalf. The iron men and steel men, the wool men, the New Jersey potters, the Standard Oil Company, the Pennsylvania Railroad, were all said to be on hand. There were many hints of the use of money. Mr. Barnum of Connecticut, former United States Senator and now chairman of the National Democratic Committee, was said to be in town “buying mules” for Randall, as the slang of the day went. How much truth there was in the charges of bribery the writer does not know; but this is certain, an alliance of business interests in support of Mr. Randall was plainly evident in the fall of 1883. The protectionists were most active, but they had with them the railroads and the Standard Oil crowd, who at that moment were fighting hard to prevent threatened regulation of interstate commerce; that is, all of the interests which were thriving on special privileges were combined into a league for the continuation of those privileges.

Up to this time these allied interests had supported the Republican party. It was in power and it had granted the privileges they enjoyed, but they were quite willing to support a man of any political faith who agreed with them. Naturally their great desire was that both parties should agree to protection as the American system, that the question should practically be taken out of politics. This would result if Mr. Randall’s effort to protectionize the Democrats succeeded. Naturally, then, they were eager to do their utmost to support him in his contest with Mr. Carlisle. But to their surprise and unquestionably to the surprise of Mr. Randall, Mr. Carlisle was elected speaker by a large majority. The tariff question was to be opened again. The man whom Mr. Carlisle selected to open it was William R. Morrison of Illinois, who had worked shoulder to shoulder with him the winter before in obstructing the Kelley Bill.

Mr. Morrison was an experienced man at tariff reform; indeed, the first Democratic tariff bill presented after the war originated with him. That was in 1875 and 1876, when the Democrats first obtained possession of the House. The speaker, Michael C. Kerr, had asked Colonel Morrison to take the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Morrison had brought in a good and reasonable measure, one nearer in accord with sound tariff principles than those which he presented later, but even then the Randall faction of Protectionist-Democrats were too strong for him, and his bill had been speedily dropped. A little later Mr. Randall had succeeded Kerr as speaker and he had dropped Morrison from the Committee. He was not restored until 1879. But Mr. Morrison was too aggressively honest and outspoken ever to keep silence on a question which interested him. He had fought for reform in Congress, in caucus, in national conventions, everywhere he could get a hearing, and now that he had a chance to make a bill he went at it with great zest, and in March he had it ready—“a bill to reduce import duties and war-tariff taxes”—he called it. The bill was clever, for it really asked nothing more than what the Republicans themselves were already committed to. Thus he proposed a general 20 per cent reduction. The Republican Tariff Commission had advised from 20 to 25 per cent in 1882—Congress in 1883 had granted only a little over 4 per cent. So, declared Mr. Morrison, I am only asking what your own experts have advised. This 20 per cent reduction was to be applied horizontally to all duties on manufactured articles. Here again Mr. Morrison was following Republican precedent: their reduction in 1872 being a 10 per cent horizontal, and their increase in 1875 a restoration of the same. In order to forestall the objection that this reduction might bring certain duties back to the detested rates of 1857, Mr. Morrison put in the proviso that no duty should be lower than that provided by the Morrill tariff of 1861. That is, he was willing to give the Republicans the protection they themselves had devised before the war and which they had increased with a distinct understanding that as soon as the war was over the old rates should be restored. Even in putting salt and coal on the free list, Mr. Morrison followed a not very old Republican precedent, Mr. Hale backed by Mr. Blaine having introduced bills to that effect into the House in 1871.

From the day of the introduction of Mr. Morrison’s bill into the House, it was certain that Mr. Randall would oppose it. Randall indeed was working day and night to rally a strong Democratic opposition. His success was apparent when, after three weeks of general debate, Mr. Converse, an Ohio Democrat, suddenly moved that the enacting clause of the bill be struck out and the motion was carried by a vote of 159 to 155. That is, in a House having a majority of 80 Democrats a bill which was a moderate expression of a policy to which the party had always been committed could not be passed. Forty-one Democrats voted against the bill; twelve of them from Pennsylvania, ten from Ohio, six from New York, four from California, three from New Jersey, and four from the South. It was a powerful vote, for when boiled down it represented iron and steel, wool and sugar, and the hold they had on the Democrats.

The defeat of the Morrison Bill only aggravated the feeling between the two factions and made it certain that there would be a great fight over the tariff plank of the platform in Chicago in July, when the National Convention met to nominate a presidential candidate, and there was—one of the most stubborn and prolonged in the history of conventions. Henry Watterson was first on the ground with the plank “tariff-for-revenue only,” which he had placed in the platforms of 1876 and of 1880, and which he was determined should go in again. Ben Butler, a candidate for the presidency, followed him with a compromise plank, and after him came Abram S. Hewitt and Manton Marble, also with compromise expressions. Mr. Randall’s friends talked free whiskey and free tobacco for the plank. When the Committee on Resolutions finally was formed it included all these gentlemen. The session began with a deadlock over the chairman—18 being for Morrison, 18 for Converse of Ohio, Randall’s man. From that time until the end nothing but rumors of dead-locks came behind the closed door. The sub-committee to which the framing of the tariff plank was finally confided sat for fifty-one consecutive hours, and the session ended in what the disgusted Mr. Watterson called a “straddle,”—a plank calling for revision in “a spirit of fairness to all interests”—one which would “injure no domestic industry and would not deprive American labor of the ability to compete successfully with foreign labor.” It was an expression carefully arranged to back all shades of opinion between Mr. Carlisle and Mr. Randall—a platform which gave standing room to both factions, and it really compared very well with the Republican pledge to “correct the irregularities of the tariff and to reduce the surplus—so as to relieve the taxpayers without injuring the laborers or the great productive interests of the country.” If anybody was ahead in the platform contest it was Mr. Carlisle, and this from the fact that Mr. Morrison was selected to present the report to the Convention.

At the time of the National Convention it looked as if the tariff would be the chief issue of the campaign, but as it turned out the Republican candidate, Mr. Blaine, was the issue, and he had not the vitality for the strain. His opponent, Grover Cleveland—a man unheard of in public affairs until three years before, but whose short record as mayor of the city of Buffalo and governor of the State of New York had been of such courage and patriotism that it had made him available for the nomination to the presidency, was elected in November by an electoral vote of 219 to 182. The tariff issue was in Mr. Cleveland’s hands.