“What will be the fate of this bill at the other end of the avenue, it is impossible to forecast, but the President of the United States will belie his reputation for courage and tenacity of purpose if he does not promptly stamp it with his veto.
“When this bill is laid before the President for Executive approval and he has sufficiently examined it to be assured of its identity as the very measure which he himself has already publicly repudiated, I can imagine him taking the Wilson letter in one hand and reading his own words, ‘This is an act of party perfidy and party dishonor,’ and then dropping his pen from the other, exclaiming with ineffable scorn, ‘Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?’”
Mr. Reed was right. The bill, which was passed by a vote of 182 to 106, 12 Democrats only voting against it, was never signed by Grover Cleveland. It became a law without his name on August 27, 1894.
CHAPTER X
THE DINGLEY BILL
Two months after the Wilson Bill became a law, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives suffered as thorough a reverse as had the Republicans in 1892. The House stood, after the election, 246 Republicans, 104 Democrats, and 7 Populists. The South returned 33 Republicans. The painful failure of Congress to make the honest and thorough revision of the tariff which the country had expected was certainly one cause of the party’s overthrow. Honorable men could not sanction the scandal and barter which had attended the making of the new law. But there were other and powerful causes for the defeat. There was the silver question. With every month it became more certain that silver was to be the issue in the next campaign. There was a possibility at least that the Republicans would continue to make the issue their own. The group of Western Republican Senators who in 1890 had voted for a tariff bill of which they did not approve in order to get votes for a silver bill of which the voters did not approve, were more hotly devoted to free silver than ever,—more determined to make it a party measure. Already several Republican State Conventions had declared for it. Among the New England Congressmen there seems to have been a willingness to prepare the way for some kind of action, at least to consider free silver, for in the spring of 1894 Henry Cabot Lodge made a conciliatory and ambiguous speech on the subject in the Senate and there were others, who like him seemed to be ready to go either way. On the other hand, free silver had no hope with the then dominant faction of the Democratic party. Mr. Cleveland and his supporters were willing to go down to defeat rather than even seem to encourage the fallacy. Free silver then carried many voters to the Republicans in the fall of 1894.
The strongest reason for the overthrow was the least sound. It was an unreasoning revolt against the party because of the panic of 1893 and the long period of hard times which had followed it. The panic happened after Mr. Cleveland was nominated, and therefore his election and his policy caused it! The public overlooked entirely the fact that hard times, failures, falling prices, and labor troubles had begun soon after the passing of the McKinley Bill and had steadily become graver with every month of its life. Between 1890 and 1894, the period the McKinley Bill was in force, Ohio-scoured wool fell from 71½ cents to 44½ cents, a drop of 27 cents. In 1896, under the Wilson Bill, wool began to revive. Bessamer pig-iron fell off from $18.00 to $12.00 per ton between 1890 and 1894. These same tendencies were shown in nearly all prices where the articles carried prohibitive tariffs. Almost, if not quite as great a fall in prices occurred in 1890, 1891, 1892, and 1893 under the McKinley Bill, as after the Wilson Bill went into effect and a lower duty had been added to the general depression. The tariff considered the fall was greater under the McKinley Bill on many important articles. Take steel rails; under the McKinley Bill of 1890, they bore a duty of $13.44 per ton. In 1890 they sold at an average price of $31.77. In 1891 the price fell to $29.91; in 1893 to $28.12½. The Wilson Bill reduced the duty on rails to $7.84. The average price the first two years after the bill went into operation was $24.00, and in the third year the price rose to $28.00. The lowest price at which steel rails have ever been sold in this country was in the first year of the Dingley Bill, $17.00 per ton. After the duty was put on barley for the farmer by the McKinley Bill, the price went up for one year, 1891, but in 1892 it fell off 10 cents, and in 1893, 14 cents. Free barley and the continued depression did little worse.
Hides had no duty under either the McKinley or the Wilson bills. The price began to fall in 1892, reached its lowest level in 1894, and in 1895 rose higher than it had been in many years. All woollen goods fell under the McKinley Bill and began to recover in 1896. Measured by business failures and labor troubles, the period of the McKinley tariff was as disastrous as that of the Wilson. Indeed, there is quite as much reason for laying the panic of 1893 to one bill as to the other, but neither was responsible.
The new Congress, which was elected in the fall of 1894, first met in December, 1895. Mr. Reed was elected speaker of the House and Nelson Dingley, also of Maine, was appointed chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Dingley was a man over sixty years old, a hard-working, conscientious, experienced politician. He had been born and educated in Maine. He had been one of the state’s best newspaper editors and had filled, one after another, nearly all her offices, that of governor included. In 1881 Mr. Dingley was sent to Congress, where he had soon become invaluable because of his extraordinary fund of information on all sorts of subjects, particularly on all things relating to American history and American industry. He held the doctrine of protection in much the same pious regard as did Mr. McKinley. For him it was a settled dogma—the only question was the amount of a duty, and to the estimating of that he brought an amazing patience in calculation and in investigation. His colleague, Mr. Boutelle, once said that he had for years lived in the same hotel with Mr. Dingley and that he had never entered his room that he did not find him surrounded by documents, a pad on his knee, laboriously digesting them for his purposes. Facts alone stirred his mind. No man was ever witty enough or wise enough to impress Nelson Dingley, but no fact was too unimportant to receive his attention. It is obvious that any tariff bill he directed would be carefully made.
The first business of the new Congress was to provide revenue. Mr. Cleveland’s administration had inherited, as already pointed out, a deficit of nearly $70,000,000. The tariff bill which had been revised to increase the revenue had failed. The sugar refiners, finding that a duty was to be put on raw sugar, had brought in enormous quantities, free, to hold for their needs. Thus, by their foresight, the treasury in Mr. Cleveland’s first year was despoiled of revenues it had a right to count on. Again, the income tax on which they depended for a large sum was declared unconstitutional. Something had to be done to bring in more money. The Republicans had decided to use their power to put back the tariff on wool and to increase that on a variety of manufactured articles, and on December 26, 1895, Mr. Dingley reported a bill providing for these increases. The bill was passed at once by the House. Its fate in the Senate shows how thoroughly the tariff had already been replaced by free silver. The Finance Committee did not report it, but recommended to the Senate that the needed revenue be raised not by the House bill, but by the free coinage of silver; and pathetically enough, poor Mr. Morrill, who for forty years had struggled for sound money, was obliged, as chairman of the committee, to report the measure.
This putting of the tariff in second place was the more evident as the time approached for the National Convention of 1896. Silver was the question in which the real interest lay, not the tariff. Nevertheless, the wool-growers and woollen manufacturers, the Iron and Steel Association, the high protectionists everywhere, began, months before the Convention, a determined campaign to commit the Republicans to tariff revision as a leading issue, and to name William McKinley for President. “Bill McKinley and the McKinley Bill” seemed to them a slogan sufficient in itself to win an election. They had their way. The platform declared protection to be the “bulwark of American industrial independence and the foundation of American development and prosperity.” It also declared with evident reluctance its opposition to the free coinage of silver except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the world.