[OSCAR W. UNDERWOOD]
Oscar Wilder Underwood, orator and magazine writer, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, May 6, 1862. He is the grandson of Joseph Rogers Underwood, a celebrated Kentucky statesman of the old regime. Mr. Underwood was prepared for the University of Virginia at the Rugby School of Louisville. In 1884 he was admitted to the bar and entered upon the practice of his profession at Birmingham, Alabama, his present home. He was prominent in Alabama politics prior to his election to the lower house of Congress, in 1895, as the representative of the Ninth Alabama district; and he has been regularly returned to that body ever since. Mr. Underwood is chairman of the committee on ways and means of the Sixty-second Congress, as well as majority leader of the House. In the Democratic pre-convention presidential campaign of 1912, the South almost unanimously endorsed Mr. Underwood for the nomination. Led by Alabama he was hailed in many quarters as the first really constructive statesman the South has sent to Congress in more than twenty years; further, his friends said, he has devoted his life to the study of the tariff and is now the foremost exponent of the subject living; his tariff policy is simply this: stop protecting the profits of the manufacturers; and that Underwood is Democracy's best asset. Earlier in the year, Mr. Underwood had been attacked by William J. Bryan, and his retorts in the House were so severe and unanswerable, he being the only man up to that time able to cope with the Colonel, that, of course, he had that distinguished gentleman's influence against him at the Baltimore convention. Nevertheless, every roll-call found him in third place, just behind Champ Clark, who was also born in Kentucky, and Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey. He was running so strong as the convention neared its close, that at least one Kentucky editor came home and wrote a long editorial calling upon the Kentucky delegation to change its vote from Clark to Underwood; but on the following day the governor of New Jersey was nominated. A few of Mr. Underwood's contributions to periodicals may be pointed out: two articles in The Forum on "The Negro Problem in the South;" "The Corrupting Power of Public Patronage;" "What About the Tariff?" (The World To-day, January, 1912); "The Right and Wrong of the Tariff Question" (The Independent, February 1, 1912); and "High Tariff and American Trade Abroad" (The Century, May, 1912). By friend and foe alike Mr. Underwood is admitted to be the greatest living student of the tariff; and his speeches in Congress and out of it on this subject have given him a national reputation.
Bibliography. The World's Work (March, 1912); Harper's Weekly (June 1, 1912); North American Review (June, 1912).
THE PROTECTION OF PROFITS
[Delivered before the Southern Society of New York City (December 16, 1911)]
The kaleidoscope of political issues must and will continually change with the changing conditions of our Republic but there is one question that was with us in the beginning and will be in the end, and that is the most effective, efficient and fairest way of equalizing the burdens of taxation that are levied by the National Government. Of all the great powers that were yielded to the Federal Government by the States when they adopted the Constitution of our country, the one indispensable to the administration of public affairs is the right to levy and collect taxes. Without the exercise of that power we could not maintain an army and navy; we could not establish the courts of the land; the government would fail to perform its function if the power to tax were taken away from it. The power to tax carries with it the power to destroy, and it is, therefore, a most dangerous governmental power as well as a most necessary one.
There is a very clear and marked distinction between the position of the two great political parties of America as to how power to tax should be exercised in the levying of revenue at the custom houses.