The Tariff in Our Times

by Ida M. Tarbell

“1st. That they are unnecessarily high and will do nobody any good.

“2d. They are so high on the article our mills manufacture as to create unfavorable criticism.”

This letter and the strong and definite denials of Mr. North and Mr. Whitman were considered satisfactory by the investigating committee, which announced that in its judgment the statements of Mr. Bennett were “malicious and unwarranted,” and that he had forfeited his right to membership in the association.

The matter probably would have ended there if four years later, 1902, Mr. Bennett had not sued a Lynn, Massachusetts, newspaper for libel. When the case was tried the newspaper summoned various witnesses to prove that Mr. Bennett’s newspaper, the United States Investor, made a practice of blackmailing concerns which did not advertise in it. Among those witnesses was Mr. Whitman. In the course of his testimony, Mr. Bennett’s lawyer, Moorfield Storey, saw an opportunity to demand Mr. Whitman’s correspondence over the years of the making of the Dingley Bill. The court upheld him, and all of Mr. Whitman’s political letters of that period—“My entire private correspondence, embracing correspondence with every member I have relations with, private and public,” Mr. Whitman said of the letters—were turned over to Mr. Bennett, who at once took copies of those which interested him. It was nearly seven years before Mr. Bennett found a sufficiently dramatic moment in which to use the letters he took from Mr. Whitman’s file. It came finally—the day when Mr. Whitman was explaining to the Ways and Means Committee why a wool schedule made in 1867 should be preserved in 1909.

As related above, Mr. Whitman had cleared himself in 1898 from Mr. Bennett’s charge of manipulating the top duty in the Dingley Bill by publishing a letter he had written to Mr. Dingley protesting against the duty. He had also related that Mr. Dingley had accepted his suggestion and had put it into the bill, and that the reason it had not appeared finally was that the wool-growers had objected so strenuously that the committee had given in to them. This looked all right, but there was a chapter of which Mr. Whitman and Mr. North said nothing, and of which Mr. Bennett had no proof until he got hold of the correspondence, and this chapter was published in the little pamphlet distributed by Mr. Bennett to the Ways and Means Committee on December 2, 1908.

It seems that when the top duty suggested by Mr. Whitman came to the Senate Committee in 1897 it struck a snag at once. It was prohibitive—just as the higher one for which it had been substituted—the figures were different, but not their effect. Mr. North was summoned to explain—the Finance Committee having apparently accepted him as its wool expert. Mr. North consulted Mr. Whitman and an agitated correspondence followed. The letters to Mr. North show that Mr. Whitman was in great alarm lest the duty he had suggested be lowered: “No possible legislation in connection with the woollen schedule would be so dangerous to the woollen industry as legislation which would favor the importation of tops.” “You know how important it is, not only to me, but to the whole wool industry of the United States, that such rates of duty should be imposed upon tops as will enable them to be made here and not to be imported from foreign countries.” “The prosperity of the woollen industry in this country depends wholly upon the ability of the domestic manufacturers to manufacture the tops here.” “It is of the greatest importance that the Arlington Mills products (tops and yarns) have the full measure of protection accorded to associated industries.” These extracts and the context show conclusively that though Mr. Whitman may not have wanted a rate so high that it would be suspicious, he was after a duty which would be prohibitive, and that he was depending upon the confidential relations of the paid secretary of the wool association with members of the United States Senate in charge of the tariff bill to secure what he wanted.

Mr. Whitman’s second defence—that it was the wool-growers, not he, that kept the high duty on tops in the Dingley Bill—loses its weight also when one looks into the origin of that duty. It first appeared in the McKinley Bill of 1890, and so far as the writer has been able to discover from an extended examination of the debates and hearings, the top duty was devised for the McKinley Bill by Mr. Whitman. Nobody else ever seems to have had anything to do with it. He advocated it in 1889 before the Senate Finance Committee. He presented it in January, 1890, to the Ways and Means Committee, explaining and defending it. Mr. Whitman was the father of the obnoxious top duty. He found it was suspicious. He revised it so that it would “look better,” but do the same work!

In spite of ample proof of gross unfairness and trickery in the Dingley wool schedule, Mr. Payne reported it practically unchanged. As it passed the House it still gave to Mr. Whitman a prohibitive duty on his tops. The Finance Committee was equally complaisant, for, as Mr. Aldrich, its chairman, said later, the schedule as he reported it to the Senate “followed precisely the act of 1897 in every word.” But when the wool schedule reached the Senate for debate, its smooth passage was over, for there on May 5, 1909, it was treated to one of the most searching analyses of duties which has ever been made in Congress. The significant fact was that it came from a Republican who had been for twenty years in Congress, and who had served on the Dingley Ways and Means Committee,—Senator Dolliver of Iowa, one of a group who, when they had discovered by the character of the bill reported from the House and by the attitude of the majority of the party in the Senate towards it that there was no intention of treating seriously the campaign promises of revising the tariff downward, had revolted: insurgents, they were called. These men all believed in the doctrine of protection, and most of them had been all their political lives under the spell of the notion that it had created American prosperity. But they were honest men, and slowly they had awakened to a consciousness that the sacred dogma had been stretched and twisted in the last fifty years until it had been made literally to cover a multitude of sins. They saw how its meaning had been manipulated to justify unscrupulous duties whose only contribution to prosperity was turning the profits of labor and natural wealth into some private pocket. They all seem to have taken without reserve the latest strain put upon the protective formula in order that it might cover whatever a manufacturer wanted, the form in which it had appeared in the Republican platform of 1908, insuring the person lucky enough to have a business which could be protected that he should have a duty which would not only cover the difference in the cost of his production, but insure him a profit. The insurgents did not object to this interpretation, but they saw at once that Mr. Aldrich in reporting his bill had no intention, in cases where duties had been advanced, of giving the Senate evidence that the difference in the cost of production here and abroad made an advance necessary, that the facts he had he refused to make public. I asked Senator Bristow of Kansas, whom I knew to be a strong and convinced protectionist, what started his revolt against the bill? “Red paint,” he replied promptly. “I was interested in that. We paint our barns with it in Kansas. I saw them putting up duties which I believed would affect its cost. I wanted to know why. I could find no reason—no proof that it was necessary. I insisted, and I soon made up my mind that they had no intention of considering the difference in the cost of production, that they sneered at the idea, that they were simply intent on giving their political supporters what they wanted. Moreover, they intended to force us to be a party to the business. It was the most dishonest and corrupt work I have ever seen, and I revolted.”

The insurgents determined to demonstrate to the country the utter unscrupulousness of the leaders of their own party, and to do this effectively they divided among themselves the schedules which they knew to be most important politically and therefore to be most open to suspicion, the intention being thoroughly to master their intricacies. Schedule K fell to Senator Dolliver. Now Senator Dolliver had always been what one may call a McKinley protectionist or prohibitionist. He had followed that leader with the unquestioning fidelity which the man had the ability to inspire in many who knew him. His speeches in the ’90’s are brilliant and witty defences of the new interpretation of protection which the party for political reasons was trying to force on the country. They are thoroughly orthodox and thoroughly unsound. In 1897 Mr. Dolliver was a member of the Dingley Ways and Means Committee, which seriously tried to lower the rates in all the schedules, and particularly in wool. He had seen the effort frustrated by the very group whom he knew now to be behind the wool bill which Mr. Aldrich reported. He determined to master the history and the operation of the schedule in so thorough a fashion that he could go on to the floor of the Senate or on to any platform and make clear to a popular audience its tricks and its injustices. He believed that such an exposure must in the long run kill it. Now the wool schedule is one of the most difficult in our tariff laws to understand and to explain. It is really the accumulation of fifty years of active superstition and greed. An ocular demonstration of the change in its character and its intelligibility may be had by comparing the wool schedule of fifty years ago and that of to-day as printed in the official collection of United States tariff bills. Fifty years ago wool was disposed of in perhaps fifty words, which anybody could understand; to-day it takes some three thousand, and as for intelligibility, nobody but an expert versed in the different grades of wools, of yarns, and of woollen articles could tell what the duty really is. It is a mistake to suppose that because a man has been twenty years in Congress and has served for a portion of that time on the Ways and Means Committee, he therefore understands the tariff schedules. As a rule, it is safe to say that a Congressman understands rarely the real meaning of the rates he votes for. What he understands is that the Committee has made the bill for what it considers sound party reasons, and that if he does not accept the rate, he or some colleague is in danger of defeat, and he accepts it without too much scrutiny. It is a case where it is just as well not to know too much. Moreover, it takes an amount of hard time-taking study to master a schedule, which only an occasional man has the will to give. Senator Dolliver knew that neither he nor any other insurgent understood enough of wool-growing and wool manufacturing to cope with the schedule. Later in the course of the debate he illustrated the difficulties he encountered in spite of his twenty years in Congress. He was told that a certain paragraph was worded to conceal a trick.

“I had to read it four or five times before I could see the point where the proposition emerged,” Senator Dolliver said. “I handed it to intelligent men and asked them if they saw any distinction in that language between clothing wools and combing wools, and, one after another, bright men said, ‘I cannot see any distinction.’ If you will get the paragraph and read it yourself, you will notice with what delicacy of phrase, worthy of poets and artists, this distinction has been wrought into the very foundation of the wool tariff.” Now it was this aggregation of tricks, evasions, and discriminations that Senator Dolliver determined to master, and master it he did, by months of the severest night-work. He poured over statistics and technical treatises. He visited mills and importing houses and retail shops. He sought the aid of experts, and in the end he knew his subject so well that he went on to the floor of the Senate without a manuscript and literally played with Schedule K, and incidentally also with Senator Aldrich and several other stand-patters whose long experience in juggling with untruths had destroyed their agility in handling truths.