The Tariff in Our Times

by Ida M. Tarbell

Nobody pretended to deny that if it was found on fair experiment that these results were impossible in a particular industry the protection must be withdrawn. Otherwise it amounted to supporting an industry at public expense—an unbusinesslike, unfair, and certainly undemocratic performance.

But what has happened when the formula has not worked? Take the failure after decades of costly experiments to grow all the wool we use, to make woollens of as high a quality and at a price equal to those of the English. Fully sixty per cent of the raw wool used in the United States is brought from other lands, and a tax of 11 or 12 cents is collected on every pound of it. Our high grade woollens cost on an average twice what they do in Europe. The fact is, the protective dogma has not, and probably never can, make good in wools and woollens. It is one of those cases where we can use land, time, labor, and money to better advantage. The doctrine of protection as well as common humanity and common-sense orders the gradual but steady wiping out of all duties on everything necessary to the health and comfort of the people unless in a reasonable time these duties can supply us better and cheaper goods than we can buy in the world market. That time was passed at least twenty years ago in wool, but Schedule K still stands. It is supported by an interpretation of the formula of protection, which, as one picks it out to-day, from the explanations and practices of the wool-growers and wool manufacturers, is only a battered wreck of its old self. It ignores utterly the time limit, the “reasonable” period in which an industry was to make good. It ignores the condition that the duty should not destroy fair competition. Moreover, it stretches the function of the duty from that of temporarily protecting the cost of production to one of permanently insuring profits. The chief appeal of those who employ this distorted notion is not to reason at all, but to sympathy—sympathy for the American working-man. Call their attention to the inequalities of the duties on raw wool, and they will tell you of the difference in the labor cost of dress goods here and in England. Tell them the quality of our goods is deteriorating, and they will draw you a picture of the blessings of the American working-man. Tell them that the wool schedule has taken blankets and woollen garments from the sufferers from tuberculosis, who certainly need them, and they will tell you that “the American people are better clothed than any other people in the world and their clothes are better made.” The chief capital of the stand-pat protectionist is some variation of this appeal. The hearings preparatory to the Payne-Aldrich Bill were stuffed with them, and they were used in reply to every conceivable argument. For instance, the head of what is called the “file trust” was on the stand. It had been shown that the gentleman was selling files abroad much cheaper than at home, that he had a practically prohibitive duty, one which had reduced imports to about one per cent of the file consumption in the United States. It was also certain from his testimony that his laborers could not be getting a very large share of the duty. “Do you not think,” the chairman asked him, “that if the tariff is laid in the name of labor, labor ought to get the tariff?” Here is the answer he received:

“If you will pardon me for expressing one little thought, I will say that I walked down this morning from the Willard, and saw a pair of horses, a beautiful cart all equipped with fruit, vegetables, and one thing and another. I can close my eyes and see that condition over on the continent of Europe, with barefooted women in rags, with a few Newfoundland dogs, or some other kind of dogs, hitched up with a string harness to the cart, and a few vegetables, that they are pulling around.”

There is no reason to doubt that the gentleman saw on Pennsylvania Avenue the prosperous cart he described. There is no doubt he might have found on the continent of Europe his “barefooted woman in rags.” But if he had crossed over to the Washington market, he would have found on its outskirts numbers of men and women, some of them white-haired, who have brought in that morning from great distances out of Washington on their backs or behind tottering mules, pitiful handfuls of field flowers, wild roots, and perhaps a bunch or two of garden stuff, quite as pathetic a spectacle as the pathetic one with which he was trying to befuddle the Ways and Means Committee. All over Europe he will find as prosperous vegetable carts as those he saw in Washington—all over the United States on the outskirts of the cities he will find, if he will look, women picking up coal and bits of wood along the tracks of railroads and in the yards of factories, and see them carrying their pickings home on their backs. The gentleman indeed will rarely enter or leave an American city on a railroad that he will not see something of this kind.

Any one who has observed the life of the working-man on both sides of the Atlantic knows that wages, conditions, opportunities, are vastly superior as a whole in the United States. It is a New World, with a New World’s hopes. But it is only the blind and deaf who do not realize that the same forces of allied greed and privilege which have made life so hard for so many in the Old World are at work, seeking to repeat here what they have done there. The favorite device of those who are engaged in this attempt is picturing the contrast between the most favored labor of the United States, and the least favored of Europe. It is a device which “Pig Iron” Kelley used throughout his career with utter disregard of facts. Mr. McKinley followed him. In the course of his defence of the tin plate duty he read, with that incredible satisfaction which the prohibitive protectionist takes in the thought that his policy may cripple the industry of another nation, an English view of the effect the proposed duty would have in Wales. “The great obstacle to tin plate making on a large scale in the states,” said the article, “is the entire absence of cheap female labor.” Mr. McKinley paused and said impressively, “We do not have cheap female labor here under the protective system, I thank God for that.” And yet at that moment in the textile mills of New England, of New York, and of Pennsylvania, not only were thousands of women working ten, eleven, and more hours a day, because their labor was cheap, but thousands of children under twelve years of age were doing the same.

The “American working-man” has long been the final argument in every tariff defence, the last word which routed both statistics and common-sense. This was Mr. Aldrich’s clincher when he worked so hard in 1909 to continue or to increase the duties of the Dingley Bill. “Protective duties are levied for the benefit of giving employment to the industries of Americans, to our people in the United States and not to foreigners,” he said, and reiterated in a variety of ways. But take Mr. Aldrich’s own tariff-made state and examine in detail the experiences of its laborers. Rhode Island is one of the most perfect object lessons in the effects of high tariffs in this or any land. An object-lesson should not be overlarge. It should be something you can see, can walk over if you will. Rhode Island satisfies this condition perfectly. In the matter of the protective tariff Rhode Island is the more useful as an object-lesson because she was a well-developed state when the system was applied to her. She had at the beginning of the nineteenth century flourishing farms and some 40,000 sheep. She was exporting annually between two and three millions of agricultural products. She was building many ships, and from her fine ports carrying on a varied and lively trade with other lands. She was well advanced for the time in manufacturing. Long before the Revolution, Rhode Island’s iron foundries turned out cannon and firearms, anchors and bells and all sorts of small wares. When the cotton factory came—and she had the first in the country, the Slater factory of Pawtucket, she was able to make her own cotton machinery. In the manufacture of woollen cloth, she took a prominent place from the start.

It was then to an all-around development that our policy of high protection was applied in this particular state. Under its stimulus her manufactories have multiplied and enlarged in a truly magnificent fashion. The story of this development cannot be told here, but like all stories of rapid growth it excites and dazzles. The results are sufficient for the present purpose. In 1909 the manufacturing plants of Rhode Island turned out goods worth $279,438,000—about $375 for each man, woman, and child in the state. But while she has been making things to sell at this prodigious rate, she has ceased entirely to build ships and send men to sea to trade. That is, while high duties were stimulating mightily the making of all that went into ships, they were making the ships so costly to buy that nobody could afford them. Rhode Island had her factories, and part of the price paid was her ships—her ships and her farms, for her farms steadily and surely went to pieces. To-day she has not over 4000 sheep, one-tenth of what she raised fifty years ago. Between 1880 and 1900 the improved land decreased by 17 per cent. She is practically dependent on the world outside for food. She buys her apples on the Pacific coast, her flour in the Mississippi Valley, and her meat from the Beef Trust.

But what has the tariff to do with the neglect of the Rhode Island farm? Everything. A farm is a family affair as no other industry is. It yields its best only when it passes down from generation to generation. Tenants, however faithful, are not sufficient. It demands its own, and in Rhode Island its own has deserted the farm for the factory. Quick fortunes seemed to lie that way. It seemed to demand neither the patience nor the drudgery; it was ready money at least, and the young men and women left the farms to the old people, and the old people died. Those who followed them were but dregs of the old communities—the shiftless, the weak, the ignorant, and the unambitious. The farm yearly dropped back and it lies to-day a forlorn and unkempt relic of its old self.

All Rhode Island then flocked to manufacturing, until to-day the one thing in the state which sticks out above everything else is the factory. It is the factory in which capital is invested and from which dividends are drawn. It is the factory which employs the population. It has been estimated that three-fourths of the people are dependent upon the textile mills alone. The great body of breadwinners in Rhode Island not directly connected with the textile trades is busy administering to the wants of the textile workers. Further, that portion of the population which does not belong to these industries is dependent upon other highly protected industries: on rubber, with its duty of 35 per cent, on machinery (45 per cent), on cheap jewellery (87 per cent), on silver and gold wares (60 per cent). That is, Rhode Island to-day is a tariff-made state, and as such should offer us ample material for an easy analysis of what the American system of protection, given full encouragement, does for a community.

As we have seen, it concentrates effort on one line, putting an end to agriculture and commerce. But this may not be a bad thing. If a state grows richer by specialization, is it not wiser to specialize? That of course depends upon how generally the fruits of the process are distributed, how greatly the condition of the mass is elevated, how much its happiness and health are improved. In a tariff-made state as in another the success of the system depends upon what the people at large are getting out of it; that is, what does it do for the American working-man? The first feature of the textile industry in Rhode Island which strikes even a casual observer is that the operatives are not Americans; they are distinctly foreigners—new-come foreigners. Less than 16 per cent of them, as a matter of fact, are born of what the industrial authority of the state calls “United States fathers,” the other 85 per cent are in percentages decreasing in order of their naming here: French Canadians, Irish, English, Italians, Germans, Scotch, Portuguese, Poles, and Russians, besides a considerable number classed under “other countries.” We have the surprising fact then that, as far as the benefits of the textile tariffs are concerned in Rhode Island, if the laborer gets them, it is a foreign laborer.