“I leave to you, without suggestion from me, to make such other arrangements as you, in the discharge of official duty, may determine.”
There was no possibility of any legislation passing beyond the House in that session of Congress. A Republican Senate and President stood in the way, but agitation for political and educational purposes was possible and it was carried on. Fully 150 petitions were presented the first session of the new Congress, the 52d, December, 1891 to August, 1892, asking for the repeal of the whole or some part of the McKinley Bill. More than 100 bills were introduced, providing for its repeal or amendment. The Democrats undertook only the reform of especially obnoxious duties. Five bills were brought in: (1) a bill to place wool on the free list and to reduce the duty on woollen goods; (2) a bill to admit free of duty bagging for cotton, machinery for manufacturing bagging, cotton-ties and cotton-gins; (3) a bill to place binding twine on the free list; (4) a bill to reduce and ultimately to abolish the duty on tin and terne plates; and (5) to reduced the duty on lead ores. These bills were all passed by the House after thorough discussion; as good material as the party could have for the presidential campaign which was on the country before the “pop-gun” bills, as the Republicans called them, were out of the way.
In the face of an almost certain victory in the impending election, serious Democrats began to ask themselves what, after all, should they do? What did they mean by tariff reform? To the majority there is no doubt that it meant simply a combination of tariff for revenue and of moderate protection of those industries already established, which it was believed could not yet compete with foreign goods. They professed to believe in free raw material—and did unless the raw material happened to be a leading product of their constituents. They were not generally in favor of drastic cutting, but preferred it to gradual.
This in the main was the position of Mr. Cleveland. It certainly was a little more radical than some of Mr. Cleveland’s advisors, Mr. Whitney and Mr. Vilas, for instance. But it was a position which filled men like Colonel Mills and Henry Watterson and Tom Johnson with disgust. They determined that it was time that the party stopped its coquetting with protection and followed a single-hearted tariff-for-revenue only policy, and it was such a policy which Mr. Watterson in particular determined should be adopted by the Democratic convention. He had succeeded in getting a tariff-for-revenue only plank into the platforms of 1876 and 1880. In 1884 he had seen his party, “with General Butler astride its back and Mr. Randall on its flanks,” as he described it, obliged to straddle. In 1888 this straddle had been repeated. Mr. Cleveland, seeing a “condition and not a theory,” could not sanction a plank which promised to reform the tariff with revenue only in mind. He knew the effects of duties on industries ought to and would be considered. Mr. Watterson went to Cincinnati in 1892 prepared for the fight of his life. He won. They called him a platform-smasher afterwards; he corrected them: he was a platform-maker; and that was true. Henry Watterson by his tactics and eloquence led the Democratic convention of 1892 to declare for tariff-for-revenue only, and Mr. Watterson meant just that.
“How would I make a tariff bill?” he said, later, in one of the most notable political speeches of the period.
“By the aid of all the best experts and authorities I would get together all the needful statistical data. I would then find a clean sheet of paper. I would lay this on the table—not the little round one, but the big oblong table—in the Ways and Means Committee Room. Then I would open the cupboard containing, among other perishable contents, the McKinley Bill. I would take this out none too gently—and pitch it into the fire. Then I would draw upon my clean piece of paper three lines. Thus:
| Articles | Duty | Revenue |
| I | I | I |
| I | I | I |
| I | I | I |
| I | I | I |
| I | I | I |
| I | I | I |
I would begin at the top of the first column with sugar. Then the duty, say one cent a pound. Then the estimated revenue—say $35,000,000. Then I would abolish the sugar bounty, making a difference of $45,000,000 in the revenue. I would follow with tea and coffee. I would continue, giving precedence as far as possible to revenue-yielding commodities not produced in this country, down through the largest revenue-yielding domestic products—without the least regard to protection, incidental or otherwise—and when I got $200,000,000 I would stop. Then I would take another bit of white paper, and I would frame an Internal Revenue Act, raising $175,000,000 on spirits and tobacco-making, $375,000,000 in all—and the rest, $50,000,000 or $75,000,000, as the estimate might require, I would raise by a tax, first on inheritance and dividends, and then, if needs required, on big incomes.
“Then I would call the Committee—the Democratic members of the Committee, I mean—and, when any one of them proposed to confuse the simplicity of this perfectly plain Tariff-for-Revenue-only Act by the old cant about the danger of being too precipitate and extreme, I would knock him out—not down—by saying: “Read the National Democratic Platform.””
How far from this uncompromising sort of revision Mr. Cleveland was, his letter of acceptance in 1892 shows: