The reduction of the revenue which both parties recognized as of chief importance, the Senate bill sought to effect by the repeal or reduction of direct taxes on whiskey, tobacco, and alcohol used in the arts, and by reducing lower than the Mills Bill had the duty on sugar. An important principle which Mr. Aldrich adopted in his report was Mr. Kelley’s favorite argument that the way to reduce was to raise rates so high that people could not afford to import: that is, reduction by increasing taxation. Another significant feature of the document was the complete repudiation of the old promise to reduce rates when the extraordinary expenses of the Civil War had been fully met. “The practical question which we have to solve,” said Mr. Aldrich, “is not the date when duties were established or the circumstances or promises under which they were levied; but, the desirability of protection being conceded, it is what rates are proper and adequate under existing circumstances.” Equally significant was the almost exclusive attention Mr. Aldrich’s report gave to the manufacturer and his laborer. To hear him one would have gathered that the interests of the consumers could not be served except through protection. The almost exclusive attention given to the manufacturer by the Senate bill was only an expression of the appeal which the Republican party was making in the campaign for the presidency. The platform of the party had declared, “The protection system must be maintained”; such a revision must be made as would “check imports of such articles as are produced by our people, the production of which gives employment to our labor, and releases from import duties those articles of foreign production, except luxuries, the like of which cannot be produced at home. If there still remains a larger revenue than is required for the wants of the government, we favor the entire repeal of internal taxes rather than the surrender of any part of our protective system, at the joint behest of the whiskey trust and the agents of foreign manufacturers.” It was practically a declaration for prohibitive tariff, nothing else indeed would “check imports of such articles as are made by our people.”
There is no doubt that the party was driven to this extreme position on protection by its own political difficulties. The Mugwump movement out of the party in the early ’80’s, due partly to the failure of the leaders to keep faith on the tariff, and more to the general corruption in its service and its methods, had cost them the election of 1884. Mr. Cleveland had stolen their thunder as revisionists when he put boldly to the country a doctrine very like that which they had publicly proclaimed in 1872 and 1880. The only element in the country they could rely upon in 1888 was the manufacturers, and they could only rely upon them when they gave them what they asked. Particularly necessary was it that they produce a bill which should in principle and practice satisfy the Iron and Steel Association. This organization had come to take the same political relation to the tariff that the Industrial League had held earlier. Like its predecessor, it aspired to choose chairmen for the Ways and Means Committee, to name presidents, and to write tariff bills. Its position in the Republican party in 1888, which was close to that of a dictator, was due almost as much to the recognition it had received from Mr. Blaine as to its own energy and efficiency. As we have seen, Mr. Blaine in the ’70’s had thought it good politics to serve the Industrial League in any way he could. When the Iron and Steel Association gradually replaced that organization he followed the same practice and in 1884, took one of its leading members, B. F. Jones of Pittsburg, as chairman of the Republican National Convention. Mr. Cleveland’s election, and the popular revolt against the high tariff attitude, had only quickened the determination of the Iron and Steel Association to protectionize the country, to get out of the way all pestiferous Republican tariff reformers, all free-trade and tariff-for-revenue only Democrats. They began on the Congressional districts and did some most effective work. Their most brilliant stroke was defeating William R. Morrison of Illinois in 1886. For years Mr. Morrison had represented his District in Congress. He had won the hostility of the Iron and Steel Association by his aggressive fight on protection, and it decided he must go. In the fall of 1886 John Jarrett of Pittsburg, a former president of the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Association and at the time president of the Tin Plate Association, went into Mr. Morrison’s district, and by free use of money, “$3.00 a day and all necessary expenses” according to his own published letters, had organized a large body of laborers to work for protection. There were some bitter charges made against Jarrett’s methods; whatever they were, and it seems from the evidence that they were “bribery and hiring,” they were successful. Mr. Morrison’s majority was changed to a substantial minority.
When it came to the campaign of 1888 the Iron and Steel Association decided that the most critical point was the chairman of the National Republican Committee. Jones had made a fiasco of the campaign of 1884—no more practical business men were wanted. The one man the Association did want was Senator Quay of Pennsylvania. But Mr. Quay had a record behind him that he was none too anxious to have aired, and he did not want the work. The Iron and Steel Association, however, had determined that he must serve, and in July, a few days before the National Committee met, James M. Swank, who had been secretary of the Association since 1873 and its general manager since 1885, a position he still holds, and who for many years has managed every tariff campaign in which his Association has been interested, took matters into his own hands and telegraphed General Harrison’s managers that it was Senator Quay alone who would meet the approval of the financial interests of the East. Without his knowledge Senator Quay was appointed. He had not been in favor of Harrison’s nomination, had only consented to it when he found John Sherman, his own candidate, could not be named, and even then not until he had assurances from Indianapolis that Pennsylvania should have a seat in the cabinet. Nominated by the committee, he finally accepted. The first person Mr. Quay consulted was John Wanamaker (who afterwards received the seat in the cabinet which Mr. Harrison had promised Pennsylvania), who saw to the funds. As to Mr. Quay, he saw to using them to oil and fire the remarkable campaign he set in force—a campaign for protection backed by the protected. The highest Republican political authorities have declared repeatedly that only Quay could have won the campaign of 1888.
It is doubtful if there has ever been a political campaign in the United States where the appeal for money was so frank—the acknowledgment that success depended upon it so open. For several years the party had been relying more and more on the use of money and had also been less and less nice about how it used it. It was an open secret that Indiana had been carried in 1880 by the “bright new crisp two-dollar bills” of Stephen W. Dorsey, secretary of the National Republican Executive Committee. The dominant faction of the party seemed indeed to think Dorsey’s work nothing more than a clever trick; no less a person than General Arthur, soon to be inaugurated as Vice-President of the United States, boasting of it at a dinner at Delmonico’s in February, 1881, said, “Indiana was really, I suppose, a Democratic state. It had been put down in the books always as a state that might be carried by close and perfect organization and a great deal of ——” General Arthur hesitated, while everybody laughed. “I see the reporters are present,” he continued; “therefore I will simply say that everybody showed a great deal of interest in the occasion and distributed tracts and political documents all through the state.”
The struggle for money in 1884 had been almost pathetic. Mr. Jones had of course the richest group in the country to draw from—the iron and steel manufacturers, and he gave liberally himself,—$87,000, it was reported at the time. He did not get enough, and a few days before the election, October 29, a dinner was given in New York for the express purpose of raising funds: a millionnaires’ dinner, at which were represented all the various “special interests” of the day, not tariff interests alone, but the railroads, the Standard Oil Company, monopolies and privileges generally. Large sums of money were pledged at this “Belshazzar’s Feast,” as the newspapers dubbed it. Who gave, and how much, were of course not recorded. David Wells said that he had it on the best authority that Jay Gould and John Wanamaker each contributed $100,000, but what his authority was the author does not know. Campaign contributions were not in as bad order in 1884 as they are to-day, but there was still a certain sense that contributions of $100,000 to campaign expenses, made on the eve of an election, were suspicious, and there is no doubt that the “monopoly dinner” helped defeat Blaine.
Another practice carried to the scandal point in the campaign of ’84 was that of extracting contributions from government officials. In Indiana a political manager informed the Federal employees that a list of the names and amounts given by each person would be carefully made out and the same reported to the National Committee, and a list would also be made of all persons who did not contribute. Quarters were set up in Washington purposely to work the government employees. In 1888 these proceedings were not repeated by the Republicans, and rumor that the Democrats in Chicago were attempting them caused a violent discussion in Congress.
The money precedent was well established then in the party and in 1888 the managers began as early as May, before the Convention nominated Harrison, to gather it in. The Mills Bill, with its free list, ad valorem duties, and reduced schedules, was still in debate, and naturally the money-getters appealed to the protected. James P. Foster, President of the Republican League of the United States sounded the slogan for the campaign in a letter which stated with amazing frankness the feeling the Republicans themselves had about who was getting the benefit of the “bulwark of prosperity.” It was the manufacturers, particularly the manufacturers of Pennsylvania, who being the most highly protected, ought to be “put over the fire and all the fat fried out of them.” Throughout his campaign Mr. Foster kept up this cry for “fat.” Another organization as active in money raising as Mr. Foster’s Republican League was the Tariff League founded in 1884 by Robert Porter, one of the members of the Tariff Commission of 1883. This League took itself with great seriousness and taught the doctrine pure and undefiled without qualification or hesitation. It divided none of the glory of prosperity with the energy and the thrift or the natural resources of the country. We were what we were because of protection and protection alone. The officers of the League undoubtedly believed in what they said, and they raised money as men would to spread the Gospel.
It was impossible that money raised from men interested as beneficiaries of protection were, should be all used without scandal. The one implies the other. Perhaps the most notorious incident of misused funds occurred in General Harrison’s own state.
But quite apart from the corruption which went on, a great debate characterized the campaign,—a debate which followed the line of the House arguments on the Mills Bill, of the Senate’s on the Allison Bill. The speeches in the two Houses were indeed campaign speeches, addresses not to a deliberating body, but to a balloting constituency. The Democrats depended mainly on the cry of excessive taxation. Their platform had rung the changes on the word until it almost lost its effect from over-repetition. The Republicans seized the opening and answered them with jeers. In New York City they even carried parrots in their processions taught to cry “tariff is a tax.” The high prices of certain necessities like woollen garments due to the tariff was another effective Democratic argument. General Harrison dismissed it lightly. “I have an impression,” he said, “that some things may be too cheap” “cheap coats involve cheap men.” There could have been no better epigram for those bent on keeping up prices. Argue as the Democrats would that the man who had to pay $20.00 here for a suit that would cost him but $10.00 abroad, would be better off if he could put his extra money to other uses, the Republicans could cry “But without the tariff he would have no twenty dollars, he would have no ten, for he would have no work!” The fallacy that there would be nothing to do in the country if protection did not enable men to manufacture was insisted on continually. Moreover, the Republicans would not admit what was, and still is, true, that the great body of wages in protected industries is less than in the unprotected. The trusts figured repeatedly in the attack on the Republican position, only to be waved aside, as by Mr. Blaine. “Trusts,” he declared, “are state issues,” “they have no place in a national campaign.”
The Republicans were not without good ammunition. The Democratic revision was full of inconsistencies as any revision made as ours are, is bound to be. It did show geographic bias. Moreover, the Democratic position had the disadvantage of being an attempt to meet a condition and one not of their making. They might be free traders as a few of them were; they might be tariff-for-revenue only men, as most of them were, but when it came to making a tariff bill they felt themselves obliged to fix duties not only with revenue and reform in mind, but with protection as well. The Republicans could taunt them with inconsistency and cowardice and describe their revenue duties as disguised protection to their own friends. And in the same breath that they accused them of protecting their friends they anathematized them as “free-traders,” friends of England, enemies of their own countrymen.