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RECENT HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES

BY
FREDERIC L. PAXSON
i>»
Professor of History in the University of Wisconsin
Sometime Major, U.S.A. Historical Branch, General Staff
Author, The New Nation

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON • NEW YORK • CHICAGO ¦ SAN FRANCISCO

COPYRIGHT, I92I, BY FREDERIC L. PAXSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Copyright by Underwood Sf Underwood, S Y.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1S5S-1919

PREFACE
The period covered in this narrative falls between two
eras. It is preceded by the age of national growth across
the continent, in which one frontier after another was ab
sorbed by society. It seems likely to be followed by an
era of American permeation of the world. The Civil War
and Reconstruction furnished much of its spiritual back
ground, but belonged to the period that was gone. The
World War was the natural outgrowth of the rivalries of
the age itself. Separated from the past by one period of
reconstruction, and from the future by another, the years
1877 to 1 92 1 have a distinct unity as the period in which the
new nation of the Westem Hemisphere found itself and
realized its powers. The years are substantially the age
of Roosevelt, although they overlap a little at either end
of the public life of that statesman. More than any other
American, he seems to have personified his generation, and
although others may have thought more deeply, or con
tributed more permanently to the advancement of Ameri
can ideals, his virtues and defects are those that illustrate
best the American character at the meeting of the cen
turies. I owe much of what is good in this book to the careful
criticism of my wife, and the patient forbearance of my
secretary. Miss Caroline W. Munro. To the generosity of
my commanding officer in the World War, Colonel Charles
W. Weeks, G.S., I owe my opportunity to see in action much
of the vast machine with which the United States realized
its determination to maintain its ideal of democracy.
Frederic L. Paxson
Madison, Wisconsin

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. The Basis of Peace i
Inauguration of Hayes — Cabinet and Congress — Home rule in
the South — Educational renascence — Land-grant colleges — Reli
gious colleges — Women's education — Education of negroes — Pro
fessional education — Johns Hopkins University — Bibliographical
note.
CHAPTER n. Civil and Border Strife 14
Deadlock over army bills — Canadian annexation — Mexican Revolu
tion of 1876 — • Indian wars, 1876-77 — Social unrest • — National
Labor Union — The "Molly Maguires" — Railroad strikes of 1877
— Socialism — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER III. Post-Bellum Ideals 26
Literary periodicals — Whittier dinner — Mark Twain — The new
writers — Transition in literature — "Ethiopiomania" — Dialect lit
erature — Provincialism — Historical writing — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER IV. Specie Payments, 1879 35
Silver and greenbacks — Decline in silver — Mining booms and free
silver — Bland-Allison Act, 1878 — Resumption Act — Greenback
Party — Election frauds — Resumption — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER V. The Collapse of the Stalwarts, 1880 46
Republican factions — Office-holders in politics — Arthur and
Cornell — Return of Grant — Nominations of 1880 — Election of
Garfield — • Patronage and the Senate — Murder of Garfield — Ches
ter A. Arthur — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER VI. The National Transportation Plant 56
Era of prosperity — Disappearance of frontier — Land grants to
railroads — The Northern Pacific Railway — Standard time — Star-
route frauds — The Hubbell letter — Acquittal of Dorsey and
Brady — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER VII. Business and Society 66
Kerosene — The telegraph — The telephone — The typewriter —
Incandescent lights — Industrial reorganization — Development of
the South — Money kings — Popular recreation — Bibliographical
note.
CHAPTER VIII. Reform 76
Congressional elections, 1882 — Tariff revision — National prosperity
in the eighties — Tariff Commission, 1882 — Tariff of 1883 — Ar
thur's Administration — Civil service reform — Bibliographical
note.

vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER IX. The Mugwump Campaign, 1884 86
Tariff and politics — Benjamin F. Butler — James G. Blaine — The
Irish vote — The "Mulligan letters" — Mugwumps — Republican
Convention — Grover Cleveland — The canvass of 1884 — Biblio
graphical note.
CHAPTER X. The National Estate 96
Cleveland's Cabinet — Civil War pensions — Public land frauds —
Railroad land grants — Panic of 1884 — Cheap silver money —
Death of Grant — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XI. The Closed Frontier 106
The cattle kings — American food supply — The long drive — Chi
cago stockyards — Cattle ranches — End of the long drive — Inter
state commerce — The Granger movement — Department of Agri
culture — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XII. Wild West and Sport 116
Frontier spirit — "Buffalo Bill " — " Greatest Show on Earth " — Rise
of sport — Yachting — Walking — Boxing — Baseball — Amateur
sports — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XIII. Labor Ideals 126
Labor movement — Wages and prices — Bureau of Labor — An
archy and socialism — Henry George and labor parties — South
western strikes — Potter, Bellamy, and Ford — City-life problems
— Social workers — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XIV. The Election of 1888 135
Tariff issue — Party conventions — Benjamin Harrison — Canvass
of 1888 — Secret ballot — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XV. Protection 145
Harrison's Cabinet — Organization of Fifty-First Congress — • The
McKinley tariff — Sherman Silver Purchase Act — Anti-monopoly
movement — • Sherman Anti-Trust Law — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XVI. The Far West in Politics 155
Admission of the omnibus States — Division of Dakota — Indian
Territory — Opening of Oklahoma — Utah — Woman suffrage —
Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XVII. Populism 165
Agricultural over-production — Farmers' Alliances — Drought —
The Free-silver movement — Southern Alliances — The Populist
Party — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XVIII. The Reelection of Cleveland, 1892 174
The Populist platform — The Harrison Administration — The Re
publican Convention — Death of Blaine — Renomination of Cleve
land — The Canvass of 1882 — Cleveland's second Cabinet — Bib
liographical note.

CONTENTS vii
CHAPTER XIX. The Panic of 1893 184
State of the Treasury, 1893 — Causes of the panic of 1893 — Panic
and depression — Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act —
Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XX. Industrial Unrest 194
Free silver and class interests — World's Columbian Exposition —
The age of steel — The Homestead strike — The Pullman strike
— Government by injunction — The militia and regular army —
Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXI. The Democratic Schism 204
Democratic campaign pledges — Effect of the repeal of the Sherman
Act — Successes of the Populists — The state of the Treasury — The
Wilson tariff of 1894 — The elections of 1894 — The Venezuela dis
pute — The new American navy — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXII. The First McKinley Campaign, 1896 214
Protection and the gold standard — McKinley and protection —
Hanna and the Ohio statesmen — McKinley and Hobart — Coinage
planks in party platforms — William J. Bryan — Populism — The
gold Democrats — Election of McKinley — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXIII. The "G.O.P." 224
Property and politics — Prosperity and rising prices — McKinley's
Cabinet — The Dingley tariff — Republican counter-reformation —
The "interests" in politics — Direct primaries — Submergence of
reform — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXIV. The War with Spain 233
Cuban pacification — Insurrection of 1895 — Spain and the insur
rection — Woodford and Weyler — Destruction of the Maine —
Naval mobilization — The Spanish War — Dewey at Manila — Bib
liographical note.
CHAPTER XXV. The Invasion of Cuba 242
The Philippines and Hawaii — Army legislation — Sampson and the
Atlantic fleet — Patrol of Cuban coasts — Blockade of Santiago —
Army and navy cooperation — Battle of Las Guasimas — Biblio
graphical note.
CHAPTER XXVI. Santiago and the Peace 252
Advance on Santiago — Battle of San Juan — Naval battle — Health
of the army — Armistice — Peace Commission — Problem of the
Philippines — Congressional election of 1898 — Ratification of the
treaty — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXVII. The Campaign of 1900 264
McKinley and Republican Party — Business in politics — Gold stand
ard legislation — Revival of prosperity — The new trusts — Decline
of Populism — Renomination of Bryan — McKinley and Roosevelt
— Public opinion and the issues — Assassination of McKinley — Bib
liographical note.

viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXVIII. Theodore Roosevelt 274
Youth of Roosevelt — Early political career — Other activities —
Two political eras — The office of President — The National Com
mittee — Hanna and Roosevelt — Booker T. Washington — Labor
problems — Bibliographical note. r
CHAPTER XXIX. World Policy 283
Hay and Root — The "open-door" policy — Panama Canal problems
— Venezuela intervention — Government of Porto Rico — Cuban
independence — The Philippines — Reorganization of War Depart
ment — Military education — General Staff — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXX. Business in Politics 293
Railroad reorganization — The Harriman system — The Southern
Pacific merger — Integration of the steel industry — The Sherman
Anti-Trust Act — The Northern Securities Company - — Northern
Securities prosecution — Anti-trust laws, 1903 — Bibliographical
note.
CHAPTER XXXI. The Roosevelt Campaign 302
Cuban reciprocity — Anthracite coal strike, 1902 — Congressional
election of 1902 — The " Iowa " idea and the tariff — Joseph G. Can
non, Speaker — Hanna and the conservatives — The Republicans
nominate Roosevelt, 1904 — Alton B. Parker, the Democratic nomi
nee, 1904 — Campaign funds — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXXII. Muckraking and the New Standards 312
Public opinion and business — New types of journalism — The ten-
cent magazines — Ida M. Tarbell — Literature of exposure — Liter
ary and dramatic standards — Vaudeville and movies — Music and
opera — Religious and social spirit — The Carnegie benevolences —
The Rockefeller Foundation — Educational trend — Specialists in
government — Federal civil service — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXXIII. The Extension of Government Control 325
Immigration problems — Northern Securities Case — Economics of
the trust problem — The Ananias Club — The Hepburn Railroad
Law — Abolition of free passes — Food control, 1906 — Admis
sion of Oklahoma — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXXIV. National Resources 334
Period of prosperity — Panic of 1907 — Disappearance of American
frontier — Land losses and conservation — Irrigation — Control of
water powers — Inland navigation, the Mississippi — Forest re
serves — ¦ Conservation conference, 1908 — Bureau of Mines — Super
vision of business — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XXXV. World Power 343
American battle fleet, 1907-09 — War Department changes — Taft
and the colonies — Russo-Japanese War — Algeciras Conference —
Second Hague Conference — The Declaration of London, 1909 ¦ —
The Panama Revolution — Canal construction — Bibliographical
note.

CONTENTS ix
CHAPTER XXXVI. William Howard Taft 354
Political manners, 1900-09 — Republican leaders — Hughes, Taft,
and Root — Taft and Sherman — Death of Cleveland — Bryan and
Kern — Third parties — Labor and politics — Election of Taft — Bib
liographical note.
CHAPTER XXXVII. The Party Pledge 364
Departure of Roosevelt — Tariff revision — The Payne-Aldrich
tariff, 1909 — Income Tax Amendment — Rise of insurgents — The
Ballinger controversy — The West and conservation — Bibliograph
ical note.
CHAPTER XXXVIII. Insurgency 373
Insurgent revolt — Attack on Cannon — Program of reforms — Change
in House rules — Administrative progress of Taft — Admission of
Arizona and New Mexico — Alaska Territory — Railroad Act of 1910
— Return of Roosevelt — "New Nationalism" — Bibliographical
note.
CHAPTER XXXIX. The Program of Peace 383
Goethals and the Panama Canal — Latin-American neighbors —
Canadian fisheries dispute — James Bryce and British arbitration —
Carnegie and the Palace of Peace — Taft and the reorganized Su
preme Court — Champ Clark and the Democratic program — Cana
dian reciprocity — Hudson-Fulton celebration — Mechanical and
scientific progress — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XL. The Campaign of 1912 393
The National Progressive Republican League — Taft and party split
— La Follette and the nomination — Roosevelt again — Fight for
convention delegates — The National Committee and contests —
Taft and Sherman — The Democratic Convention — Woodrow Wil
son — The Progressive Party and Roosevelt — Democratic victory
— Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XLI. Woodrow Wilson 403
A minority President — Wilson's Cabinet — Tariff revision — Presi
dential leadership — Underwood-Simmons Act, 1913 — Monetary
investigations — Federal Reserve Act — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XLII. Federal Control 413
Anti-trust policies — Finance and trusts — Federal Trade Commis
sion — Department of Labor — Children's Bureau — Workmen's
Compensation — Educational grants — Seamen's Act — Critical
journalism — Philippine Government — Attack on Bryan and
Daniels — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XLIII. Watchfltl Waiting 423
Bryan in State Department — Mexican Revolution — The Huerta
Administration — The Mobile Doctrine — Canal treaty with Colom
bia — Mexican intervention — Diplomatic isolation of United States
— Repeal of Panama Canal tolls exemption — Central American rela
tions — Opening of Panama and Kiel Canals — Bibliographical note.

X CONTENTS
CHAPTER XLIV. Neutrality and Preparedness 433
The World War — American neutrality — Friendly services — Cen
sorship and propaganda — Pro- Allies opinion — War revenue legisla
tion — Democratic successes, 1914 — American grievances — The
submarine — Submarine warfare — "Strict accountability" — The
Lusitania — The Preparedness movement — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XLV. The Election of 1916 445
Pacifist movements — League to Enforce Peace — Munitions em
bargoes — German secret intrigue — Sussex ultimatum and pledge —
National Defense Act, 1916 — Naval program — Council of National
Defense — Roosevelt and Progressives — Nomination of Hughes
by the Republicans — Hyphenated Americans — Wilson and Adam-
son Bill — Reelection of Wilson — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XLVI. Labor 456
Wages and cost of living — The Adamson Law — Gompers and the
American Federation of Labor — Socialist Party — Syndicalism and
sabotage — State constabularies — Industrial Workers of the World —
The McNamara and Mooney cases — Americanization — Woman
Suffrage — Non-Partisan League — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XLVII. The War of 1917 467
Status of the war — German peace overtures, 191 6 — American
peace terms inquiry — Unrestricted siibmarine warfare — Breach
with Germany — Anti-war agitation — Armed merchant ships —
Senate filibuster — Closure rule in Senate — Russian Revolution — •
War session of Congress — State of war — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XLVIII. War Preparation 478
Council of National Defense — Labor and the war — Socialist split —
Committee on Public Information — Emergency Fleet Corporation
— Food and the war — Hoover and Food Administration — Raw
materials and munitions — Aircraft program — War finance — First
Liberty Loan — Loans to Allies — Officers' training camps — Selec
tive service — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER XLIX. Launching the A.E.F. 489
General Pershing — Joffre and Balfour — Naval participation —
Pershing in France — American base in France — Divisions of 1917
— The National Army — Draft and officers' training camps — The
Roosevelt Division — The Espionage Act — War risk and allowances
— Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER L. War Policies 501
New conditions of warfare — Neutral trade — The War Trade Board
— Food and fuel control — Revenue Act of 1917 — Receipts, expen
ditures, and loans — Civilian cooperation — People's Council for
Democracy — National unanimity — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER LI. Conservation 512
The winter of 1917-18 — Control of priorities — The War Industries
Board — War service committees — Congestion of transport — Rail
roads' War Board — Railroad Administration — Fuelless days — Sen-

CONTENTS xi
ator Chamberlain's attack — The Overman Act — A "War Cabinet"
— Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER LI I. War Aims 522
Peace overtures of 1917 — The " Fourteen Points" — The Stockholm
Conference — British Labor Manifesto — The Brest-Litovsk Peace
— " Force without limit " — Allies' Purchasing Commission — Inter-
Ally Finance Council — Colonel House's "inquiry" — Inter-Allied
Conference — Supreme War Council — Transport, munitions, and
food councils — Drive of 1918 — Foch and supreme command —
Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER LIII. Work or Fight 533
Battle of 1918 — Labor in the war — U.S. Employment Service —
Government housing — National War Labor Board — "Work or
Fight" — Baruch and War Industries Board — Requirements,
prices, and priorities — War Finance Corporation — Pittman Silver
Act — War Department reorganization — General Goethals; Divi
sion of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic — Eighteen to forty-five draft
— Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER LIV. The Americans in France 543
Training program of A.E.F. — Quality of American troops — German
drives — Staff supervision — Cantigny — Chateau-Thierry — The
second Marne battle — Foch's counter-attack — Allied offensives —
First American Army — Saint-Mihiel — Meuse-Argonne battle —
Central Powers collapse — German armistice — Bibliographical
note.
CHAPTER LV. Peace and the League of Nations 555
Congressional election of 1918 — Republican Party reorganized —
"Unconditional surrender" — American Commission to Negotiate
Peace — Europe and the peace — Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau,
and Orlando — Covenant of the League of Nations — Demobilization
» in America — Wilson back in Washington — Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER LVI. Reconstruction 566
The unsettled world — Wilson in Paris again — Compromises of the
Peace Conference — The Senate and treaties — Opposition to the
Treaty of Versailles — The treaty session of Congress — Fight over
ratification — Collapse of Wilson — High prices and labor unsettle-
ment — Steel strike of 1919 — Labor conferences and radicalism —
Bibliographical note.
CHAPTER LVII. The Election of 1920 578
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments — International finance,
1920 — Railroad Control Act — Wilson and the "solemn referen
dum" — The Hoover boom — Harding and Coolidge — The Army
Act, 1920 — The Jones Merchant Marine Act — The Democratic
candidates — Cox and Roosevelt — Third party movements — Busi
ness conditions and politics — Election of Harding — Bibliographical
note.
INDEX 589

ILLUSTRATIONS
Theodore Roosevelt, 1858-1919 Frontispiece
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, D. Litt. Oxon. 1907 28
First National Meet of the League of American Wheelmen,
Newport, May 31, 1880 122
From a contemporary cut in Frank Leslie's Weekly
The Court of Honor, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago,
1893 196
American Ships of War, 1887 and 192 i 212
The Army Transport Mount Vernon in the Upper Chamber,
Miraflores Locks 384
American Airplanes at Coblenz 484
General John J. Pershing at a French Port, 1917 490

LIST OF MAPS

The United States in 1870
The Caribbean
The Philippine Islands
The American Base in France
The Battle of 191 8
The United States in 1920

(.facing page)

9

253

257

493

545
{facing page)
581
RECENT HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
•
CHAPTER I
THE BASIS OF PEACE
"Let us have peace," was the hope of Grant when he ac
cepted his first nomination for the presidency of the United
States, but the obstacles that prevented a return j^^^ ^^^_
of peace to the hearts and lives of his fellow- tion of
countrymen endured through the next eight ^^^
years, and the hope unrealized remained to inspire his suc
cessor, Rutherford Birchard Hayes, nineteenth President
of the Republic. When that successor took the public oath
of office on Monday, March 5, 1877, there had been added
to the irritation of the sections the exasperation of a party
that believed the presidency to have been stolen. The
most ardent of his adherents could make no surer case for
his election than that his- inauguration was in accordance
with the law, and that with a free and honest vote his choice
would have been assured. Only the fact that he, with
Grant, believed the time had come for peace gave to his
term a promise of good for the United States.
Peace or no peace, the United States was in 1877 tired of
its past — though it had recently celebrated its centennial
with enthusiasm — and eager to explore its future. War
and panic and maladministration had left scars that needed
healing. A reconciliation of its sections, a new organization
for public and private affairs, a free religion, and a better
education attracted and filled the public mind. While poli
ticians scolded, the people turned their hearts against
politics for a decade and found their vital interests in intel
lectual and economic reconstruction. It was the mission
of Hayes, once in office, to facilitate this work. From the

2 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
day he formed his Cabinet it was evident that a change had
come. The names of his advisers, undetermined until he reached
Washington, and unannounced until he sent them to the
Cabinet and Senate, contained a promise for the future.
Congress William M. Evarts brought to the State Depart
ment great fame as a lawyer and the virtue that he was no
man's man and was friendly with reformers. He was bit
terly opposed by Senator Roscoe Conkling, confidant of
Grant and leader of the New York Republican machine.
The propriety of John Sherman's appointment to the
Treasury was heightened by his long association with finan
cial legislation in the Senate. In the War Department
George W. McCrary, of Iowa, ousted Don Cameron, son of
Simon and heir-apparent to the Republican political ma
chine in Pennsylvania, whose reappointment Conkling and
the elder Cameron wished to force.
Richard M. Thompson, an old Whig spell-binder of
Indiana, became Secretary of the Navy, succeeding Robe
son, of New Jersey, whom the last House had not impeached
for malfeasance only because the evidence against him fell
short of the conclusive. At the Post-Office, which Conk
ling had wanted for Thomas C. Piatt, his chief-of-staflf , was
David M . Key, who was a hostage of peace and an affront to
party men because he was a Tennesseean, an ex-Confeder
ate, and even a Tilden Democrat. There had been talk of
taking General Joe Johnston into the Cabinet, but Key was
the final choice. The cup of bitterness was filled for the
steersmen of radical Republicanism by the selection of Carl
Schurz for the Interior Department. Schurz, a Liberal
Republican of 1872, was a consistently active and earnest
reformer. He succeeded Zachary Chandler, of Michigan,
who, as chairman of the Republican National Committee
in 1876, managed to steer a national campaign without hav
ing conference or correspondence with the candidate whom
he elected. Judge Charles E. Devens, of Massachusetts, as
Attorney-General, completed what Wendell Phillips, strong-
mouthed as ever, soon denounced as the ' ' slave-hound Cab-

THE BASIS OF PEACE 3
inet." From Evarts to Devens the council list, equally
displeasing to violent radicals and to men grown old in stal
wart manipulation of the dominant party, proved what
Schurz had written, that the Republican Party had "nomi
nated a man without knowing it," and that Hayes intended
to establish peace.
The pledge of Hayes in his inaugural repeated the earlier
promise of his letter of acceptance that he would restore
home rule to the South, clean up the national administra
tion, and maintain the public credit. With advisers iden
tified with each of these three tasks, but with a Congress
divided against itself, he set to work. The House of Repre
sentatives, Democratic since the election of 1874, was more
anxious to embarrass the Administration than to do its
work; and in the Republican Senate the President had few
friends after he sent in his Cabinet list, Tuesday, March 6.
There was an immediate outbreak of wrath at the trea
son to his party seen in the nominations. "The path of
reform to which he [Hayes] is pledged," said the most im
portant of Republican papers, the New York Tribune, "can
go only over the ruins of the average Congressman's dearest
interests." Blaine, new to the Senate, to which he had
been appointed in 1876 after thirteen years in the House,
led in the criticism of presidential policy and in defense of
Republican control of the South. Conkling, as bitter an
enemy as Blaine possessed, joined the attack less from dis
approval of the Southern policy than from patronage resent
ment. Simon Cameron, chairman of the Senate Commit
tee on Foreign Relations, was unable to stop the confirma
tion of Evarts and the rest, and resigned his seat in the
Senate; but showed that he — the "old Winnebago chief
tain" — still had power by making his pliant Pennsylvania
legislature choose his son, J. Donald Cameron, as his suc
cessor. The members of the Cabinet received their con
firmation with the people less interested than their leaders
in the wrangle, but the President was left confronting a
gloating opposition, a divided party, and the most difficult
of civil tasks.

4 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
In eight of the Confederate States white control had been
restored before Grant left the presidency. In the remaining
„ , three there were contests which made possible
Home rule , , i-
in the the duplicate electoral returns from Florida,
°"* South Carolina, and Louisiana, upon whose
counting the fate of the election turned in 1876. In two,
Louisiana and South Carolina, the Republican State Gov
ernments held their control only because federal troops, sta
tioned in their state houses by Grant, deterred the Demo
cratic claimants from seizing public office. The deterring
influence was moral rather than physical, since of the whole
regular army, listed in 1876 as 28,571 officers and men, only
5885 were within the limits of the Confederacy, and more
than half of these were occupied with Indian and border
patrol duties on the Texas plains. In New Orleans there
were 232 clerks, officers, and men; in Columbia, 141.
The withdrawal of the last vestige of military control
from the Southern States was bound up with the fate of
the claimant Governments. In both South Carolina and
Louisiana the canvass of 1876 produced fraud to fight "bull
dozing. ' ' Intimidation of negroes entitled to vote under the
Fifteenth Amendment had matched fraud in counting the
returns. In each State there were both official and contest
ing returns upon the presidential vote as well as upon the
local vote. The Electoral Commission, declining to go be
hind the official record, had counted the official Republican
vote in each instance ; but the people -themselves had organ
ized Democratic State Governments in Louisiana and South
Carolina, with Grant giving official countenance and pro
tection in each case to the Republican claimants; to Stephen
B. Packard in Louisiana and to David H. Chamberlain in
South Carolina.
The Packard and Chamberlain Governments were both
inaugurated under federal patronage, but during January
and February, 1877, while Congress was working out the
basis for the final presidential count, it became clear that
the Democratic pretender governors. General Wade Hamp
ton in South Carolina and Francis T. NichoUs in Louisiana,

THE BASIS OF PEACE 5
had the real support. There was no possibility for a unani
mous decision upon the titles. Each house of Congress, sole
judge under the Constitution of the returns of its own mem
bers, seated the claimants whom the majority desired,
Democratic Representatives in one case, and Senators
chosen by the Republican legislatures in the other. The
President by his course could not have pleased even Con
gress, let alone all the people, and accordingly he followed
the course that Grant had already outlined for him before
inauguration. Grant had protected the establishment of
the Republican Governments, had maintained the peace,
but had refrained from defending either Government as
legitimate. Hayes found peace prevailing on March 4, and
no sign of an insurrection that could warrant active inter
ference by the Executive. "If all the people whose recog
nition amounts to anything refuse to recognize a state
government, that government falls of its own weight,"
explained the New York Independent, which believed with
Blaine that the legal title of Chamberlain and Packard was
as good as that of Hayes. It frankly confessed that it could
not see ' ' how the Federal Government can by a standing
army take permanent care of a majority that cannot take
care of itself." In this view the great body of Americans
appears to have concurred. Some believed in the validity
of each contestant, but most were also ready to leave the
adjustment to be worked out by the people of the South.
The actual steps in disentanglement took some seven
weeks. On April 3 the Secretary of War was ordered to
remove the squad of troops from the Columbia State House
to their barracks, and on April 20 similar orders cleared the
State House at New Orleans. In neither case did insult or
outrage follow the withdrawal. The effective opinion of the
States in question upheld the Democratic Governments, as
it had already done in every Southern State. The dispos
sessed governors came North to attend Republican conven
tions and pour their woes into willing ears, but the North
was no longer willing to fight ; the war was over. The South
was solid and the United States had turned its mind from

6 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
strife to the larger tasks of peace. In vain did Blaine shout
in the Senate, "You discredit Packard and you discredit
Hayes." In vain did he hope that "there shall be no au.
thority in this land large enough or adventurous enough to
compromise the honor of the national administration of
the good name of the great republican party that called
that administration into existence." The epoch of Blaine
and his associates, Conkling, Grant, Logan, and Cameron,
had passed. The new realities of life had for leaders in one
direction an Astor, a Vanderbilt, and a Gould ; in another,
an Edison and a Bell; in yet another, Eliot, Angell, Gilman,
and Alice Freeman. War had been effective only in pre
venting disunion; national unity was to be the result of
business and education.
Education, as the underlying problem of self-govern
ment, had been sensed in the United States from the begin-
Educa- iiii^g- The first action of the old Congress look-
tional ing toward the use of the national estate had,
in the Northwest Ordinance (1787), pledged
public aid to the common schools, and when issues of im
migration and localization arose thereafter, education ap
peared to provide the cure. ' ' What are you going to do with
all these things?" Thomas Huxley asked, at the opening of
Johns Hopkins University in 1876: "You and your descend
ants will have to ascertain whether this great mass will
hold together under the forms of a republic and the despotic
reality of universal suffrage." The university that he was
helping to launch was itself convincing evidence of the pas
sion for education at all levels and in all directions that had
begun to consume the American people during the Civil War,
and that brought forth new enterprises every few months
from 1865, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and Vassar College began their experiments, until the middle
eighties when the university had been differentiated from
the college, and the whole system of education was in full
blast. College, university, normal, technical, and secondary
education were at work upon the American character.
American education during the first century of independ-

THE BASIS OF PEACE 7
ence was narrower in fact than in theory. It began in the
district school, and ended there for most of the population.
In the older communities colleges, generally under religious
control, carried a few boys on to law, medicine, and theology.
In the newer regions, where land grants had been pledged
to public education. State seminaries and universities belied
their name, and did the work of indifferent high schools.
Of technical training there was almost none except in the
United States Military Academy at West Point. Railroad
and canal promoters turned thither for chief engineers, who
made the surveys, and often retired from the army to man
age the roads. George B. McClellan, after a young man's
distinguished career in the regular army, was president of
a railroad when the Civil War began.
A divorce between education and the affairs of the world
grew clearer as science began to demand recognition in the
thirties. Here and there a president saw the need for a wider
angle in the collegiate vision. Francis Wayland realized it
at Brown, whose presidency he assumed in 1826. Horace
Mann, as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Educa
tion, worked toward it after 1837. But the general mandate
upon the college president was that he should be a father to
his boys, and "by timely interference prevent bad habits,
detect delinquencies, and administer reproof and punish
ment." The college faculties clung to the old precedents
in the curriculum.
College education declined in general repute in the middle
of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the crystallization of
the course, perhaps the rejection of science, perhaps the ar
rogance of the classics caused it; but whatever the reason
there were fewer collegiate students in 1870 than in 1830.
The studies of F. A. P. Barnard, who started Columbia
upon a modern course when he assumed her presidency in
1864, give the estimate that in 1830 the United States had
645 such students per million of population, in 1850 only
497, and in 1869 but 392. An effort to arrest the decline —
for there was no despair of education — brought religion,
capital, and the frontier spirit into conjunction.

8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
In the summer of 1862 Congress, having completed its
homestead system and having for a dozen years contributed
Land-grant directly to the building of the Western railroads,
colleges passed the Morrill Act endowing in every State
a land-grant college of agriculture and mechanic arts. Only
a handful of the States already had such colleges, the Michi
gan Agricultural College (1857) at Lansing standing out as the
earliest of its kind ; but every State accepted the proposed
lands and applied them shortly to an existent college, to the
State university, or to a new creation. The universities
of Wisconsin, California, Illinois, and Minnesota received
impetus from this toward a new curriculum and standard.
In New York the subsidy was added to the benefaction of
Ezra Cornell whose university opened in 1868. In Pennsyl
vania the new State college was chiefly a school of agricul
ture. In Massachusetts the proceeds were divided between
an agricultural college and the Institute of Technology.
The result of federal policy was most striking in the
Western schools, but it was real throughout the whole
Union. As the agricultural colleges were enlarged and
strengthened, as they added experiment and research, and
began in another generation to show positive results in dis
covery and invention, they tended to lessen the gap that
had separated education and life before the Civil Wa.v.
The growth of education in State and land-grant univer
sities stimulated the religious zeal that had dotted the
Religious country with its foundations since colonial days.
colleges j^ ^j^g East, Hicksite Friends opened their
Swarthmore College in 1869; the Congregationalist college,
Carleton, at Northfield, Minnesota, began work in 1870;
the Boston University of the Methodists was a complete and
going concern by 1873, as was the Episcopal University of
the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, by 1876; and from this
time until the munificence of John D. Rockefeller reopened
the University of Chicago under Baptist rule in 1892 there
was continuous pressure to stimulate the old and start new
projects for education within the safeguards of religion.
The wealth of Americans flowed freely into all of these

UNITED STATES
1870
SCALE ut- MILES
(I liltl 2M 300
State CaiMtals in this ty\t<.' Denver
Cities of 50,000 or more inhaliitants by solid dot,
EXPLANATION OF SHADING

] 10,000 fee I t

JO.OOO to 10,000 feet

O

2,000 to 6.000 foot

Lonyit

ie We--.t from Greenwicli

THE BASIS OF PEACE 9
activities as public interest, deadened in politics in the sev
enties, turned more wholly to education as guarantee for the
future. The average citizen resented the education tax less
than any other. The private purse opened voluntarily to the
religious college and the non-sectarian as well — to women, to
negroes, to poor whites at the South , and to the new vocations.
Matthew Vassar was not the first to desire real college
discipline for girls, but his college, opened at Poughkeepsie
in 1865, is a great landmark in the education of Women's
women as well as a measuring-rod for their at- education
tainments. The long existence of its preparatory depart
ment revealed the dearth of women prepared for college.
If the trustees exacted high entrance requirements they
could not fill their dormitories, and the college would face
financial disaster. If they filled up with preparatory stu
dents they learned that the discipline and type of teaching
needed by girls of sixteen spoiled the college for its more
mature students. Between the devil of bankruptcy and the
deep sea of the young ladies' seminary they struggled along
for many years, as did WeUesley, which opened on the out
skirts of Boston in 1875. More fortunate in its financial
arrangements was the college that grew from the gift of
Sophia Smith, of Northampton, Massachusetts. This could
afford to wait to test its conviction that girls could stand the
strain of Greek as well as boys. It opened In 1875 with only
fourteen freshmen, whom it allowed to ripen as genuine
collegians, letting in a new class of freshmen each succeed
ing autumn and paying the full price for a high standard
fully maintained. A decade later, when Bryn Mawr College
opened its doors, the preparatory schools had caught up,
and there was no talk of letting down the bars. Instead of
this, Bryn Mawr could tell of the duty of its teachers to
be men of industry and research, professionally instead of
accidentally drawn into their college work.
In the West the women had an easier entry into the field
of higher education. Here the frontier had clarified the
rights of women and here the colleges were new, lacking
tradition of exclusive masculinity; and here by 1870 it had

IO RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
become the general practice to co-educate the boys and
girls. Women entered the men's collegiate course. In in
creasing numbers the experiment of co-education was tried,
with no bad consequences. Spurred by the activities of the
women's colleges in the East and co-education in the West,
Harvard and Columbia felt a need to extend their work.
The "Annex" at Harvard offered its first courses in 1879
and developed Into Radcliffe College a little later. At
Columbia the admonitions of President Barnard to take
like action were long in vain, but when the women got their
college It received his name. In 1882 thirteen colleges and
universities, all doing men's work for women, shared in the
formation of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae.
The part education was to play in the real reconstruction
of the South impressed the imagination at an early date.
Education Under the protection of the Freedmen's Bureau
of negroes schools Were opened almost before the echoes
of the guns were silent. In 1867 George Peabody handed
over to a group of notable trustees a fund to help the ' ' more
destitute portions of the Southern and Southwestern States
of our Union." From this fund negro schools and normal
schools were aided and encouraged year after year. In
1875 a normal college at Nashville became the largest single
interest of the fund, which, in another generation, passed
its remaining assets to this college and wound up its work.
JohnF. Slater, of Connecticut, inaugurated a friendly rivalry
to Peabody when he set aside a million dollars in 1882 for
"the uplifting of the lately emancipated people of the South
ern States. ' ' Booker T. Washington began , with small equip
ment and a large vision, in 188 1, his Tuskegee experiment of
self-help for negroes.
The growth of professional education fills the same two
decades after the Civil War. Agriculture, engineering.
Professional law, and teaching shifted to a new basis of inter-
education gg^ ^^^ popularity. The normal schools multi
plied and grew into the teachers' college. The high school
entered upon its delicate mission mediating between the
needs of the common school and the exactions of the over-

THE BASIS OF PEACE ii
shadowing university. Its task grew in volume and diffi
culty as a prosperous nation sent ever larger numbers of its
children into the high school, in which it had full confidence,
and on into the university where its uncertainties were grow
ing less. From 392 to the million of population, when Bar
nard examined the figures of higher education In 1869, the
ratio of attendance rose to 1161 in 1880, and to 1913 in
1900, with endowment, equipment, and public interest
growing in proportion.
The renascence of American education began simultane
ously with the legislation of the sixties, which created the
land-grant colleges in 1862 and a United States Bureau of
Education In 1867. The stream of private benefactions
that -StiU flows unchecked began Its run. Public leaders in
education formed a new school of college teachers who were
neither pedants nor pedagogues, but were statesmen in the
best sense. Charles W. Eliot, beginning his reign at Har
vard in 1869, was the most prominent of these, but at his
side were White at Cornell and McCosh at Princeton (1868),
Angell at Michigan and Porter at Yale (1871), Alice Free
man at WeUesley (1882), and Gilman at Johns Hopkins
(1876), Pepper at Pennsylvania (1881) and Northrop at
Minnesota (1885); while the newly inspired universities
were training Wilson, Lowell, James, Jordan, and Van Hise
to take the lead a generation later.
At Johns Hopkins University the new education made
its special imprint. The great teachers of the old colleges
had been drafted from the clergy, with only j^^^^^
general preparation for their work. Beginning Hopkins
about the thirties there had come now and then
young men inspired with science and scholarship from the
German universities. Only in the seventies did advanced
work in America become possible. There were in 1850
eight graduate students recorded in the United States, said
Ira Remsen in his Johns Hopkins inaugural In 1902; and In
1875 but 399. By 1900 there were 5668, In whose produc
tion and training no one had surpassed the predecessor of
Remsen at Johns Hopkins — Daniel Coit Gilman.

12 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
It was Gilman who shaped the graduate university for
which Johns Hopkins gave three and one half millions to
Baltimore and the South, founding its leadership not upon
a shell of buildings, but upon teachers and scholars. Here
Gildersleeve and Martin and Adams trained the graduates
who filtered Into the new faculties of the eighties, and dis
turbed the tranquillity of the old with their ideas of re
search. It was science and scholarship, not irreligious, but
without religious bias. The Inaugural orator, Thomas Hux
ley, in 1876, by his presence indicated the courage of Gil-
man's scientific conviction, for evolutionists were in dis
repute and even Charles Darwin had not yet received his
Cambridge LL.D. Science was on the program at Johns
Hopkins, but not prayer; and to one who complained of the
lack of the latter a clergyman aptly answered: " It was bad
enough to invite Huxley. It were better to have asked God
to be present. It would have been absurd to ask them
both." The warfare of science and religion was at its height when
Hayes became President, but society was clearly turning
to education to solve its problems. "What is the signifi
cance of all this activity'*" asked Gilman at the opening of
his university: "It is a reaching out for a better state of
society than now exists; ... it means a wish for less misery
among the poor, less ignorance in schools, less bigotry in
religion, less suffering in the hospital, less fraud in business,
less folly In politics ; It means more love of art, more lessons
from history, more security In property, more health in
cities, more virtue in the country, more wisdom in legisla
tion; It implies more intelligence, more happiness, more
religion." BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley,
i87J-i8g6 (1919), is volume vm of his monumental and invaluable work.
John W. Burgess, Administration of President Hayes (1916), is a sketchy
continuation of his writings on the Civil War. Paul L. Haworth, The
Hayes-Tilden Election of 1876 (1906), gives the best view of the electoral
contest; his United States in Our Own Times, 1865-1920 (1920), contains a

THE BASIS OF PEACE 13
general narrative of the period, which may be studied from a difl'erent angle
In Charles A. Beard, Contemporary American History (1914), and Charles
R. Lingley, Since ihe Civil War (1920). Charles R. Williams, Rutherford
Birchard Hayes (1914), is a definitive work based upon the correspondence
and diary of the President. James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress
(1884), was for many years the standard Republican history of its period.
The educational renascence may be studied in James B. Angell, Reminis
cences (1910); Fabian Franklin, Daniel Coit Gilman (1910); George H.
Palmer, Alice Freeman Palmer (1908), one of the most charming American
biographies; Andrew D. White, Autobiography (1905); Arnold Haultain,
Selections from Goldwin Smith's Correspondence [1846-1912] (n.d.): and
Scott and Stowe, Booker T. Washington (1916), which supplements the
view of negro progress given in Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
(1905).

CHAPTER II
CIVIL AND BORDER STRIFE
The army of the United States, fixed by law in the last
year of the Grant Administration at a maximum strength
Deadlock °^ 25,ooo, was released from one of its duties
oyer army by the Southern policy of President Hayes. It
was no longer obliged to police the South. And
its members were no longer certain of their livelihood, for
the outgoing Congress in 1877 had deadlocked over the use
of troops as posse for civil purposes, and the Democratic
House had defeated the army appropriation bill rather than
concede a duty to protect the voting rights of citizens or to
defend the peace. From William Tecumseh Sherman at
its head, down the long list of general officers whose names
suggested a roster of Union victories, the army was hated
at the South — and not loved even at the North. A special
session of Congress to vote their pay was announced soon
after the inauguration, but many more events were to draw
notice to the army before October 15, 1877, when that Con
gress met.
With the remote world America was In profound peace,
and the last of the settlements with Great Britain under the
Treaty of Washington was nearly reached. This was the
Halifax arbitration of the value to Canada of certain rights
in the St. Lawrence fisheries, claimed and wanted by New
England. The award on November 23, 1877, failed to
please the United States, but it at least closed one aspect of
the case; while throughout Canada events were pointing
toward a new relationship — annexation.
From an early period in the century all of Canada was
conscious of the nearness of the United States, if only
Canadian through the anti-Amerlcan feelings of those
annexation exiled torles who, as United Empire Loyalists,
had been colonized in New Brunswick and Ontario after

CIVIL AND BORDER STRIFE 15
the Revolutionary War. Upper Canada had felt the near
ness during the rebellion of 1837, when New York proved a
convenient recruiting ground for rebels; and both Upper
and Lower Canada served through the sixties as a base for
Confederate attacks upon the American border, or as an
objective for Fenian raids by American Irishmen upon the
territory of Great Britain. Beyond the Great Lakes the
Canadian Northwest was nearer to St. Paul than to any
other center of population, and derived its annual supplies
over the trail thence to Red River. Its urgent pressure
forwarded the railroad construction that laid the founda
tions for the fortunes of Lord Strathcona and James J. Hill.
The approaching completion of an American Pacific rail
way in the later sixties drove Canadians to urge a Pacific
railway of their own, or, failing that. Incorporation with
America. The Dominion Act with its impetus to the
imperial bond came simultaneously with the purchase of
Alaska (1867) which made America Canada's neighbor at
another corner. All through the seventies Canadian politics
were filled with imperialism as the alternative to annexation.
The latter policy had the valiant aid of Goldwin Smith,
professor at Toronto and once reglus professor at Oxford.
Smith had been imported to the United States by Andrew
D. White to aid in building the new university at Ithaca
(Cornell), and had soon crossed the border to live in Can
ada, retaining meanwhile a wide acquaintance in and a
keen understanding of America. A Canadian election of
i878broughtSir John A. MacDonald and imperial protection
back to power, but annexation and its various substitutes
continued to clamor on the northern border for another
fifteen years.
There was no talk of annexation coming out from Mexico.
Here, instead, a new dictator was struggling to establish
his government and to prevent the United States Mexican
from acquiring an excuse for intervention. Por- Revolution
firio Diaz proclaimed himself provisional presi
dent in November, 1876, and proceeded to demand im
mediate recognition from the United States through John

l6 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
W. Foster, the American Minister. It was the disposi
tion of Grant to recognize at once, but Foster held off, dis
cussing first the measure of control that the new president
possessed over his army and his unenthuslastic subjects.
Along the Rio Grande this control was a matter of critical
importance. For many years before the revolution of 1876 the United
States had complained of the inability of Mexico to police
the stretch of territory from El Paso, where the Del Norte
emerges from the mountain trough of New Mexico, to
Brownsville and Matamoros, where it empties into the
Gulf. West of El Paso there was friction, more or less, but
there were too few Americans to make It menacing. The
Southern Pacific Railroad had not yet crossed the Colorado
River into Arizona, and even bad Mexican "greasers" could
do little damage there. But below El Pago there were iso
lated tracts of settlement on each side of the river, which as
yet no railroad touched or even approached, with a "dense
chaparral of cactus, Spanish dagger, mesquite, and other
similar plants ' ' In the Interstices where there was not actual
desert. Here cattle throve, and cattle thieves abounded
who forded the river and ran off American stock, leaving
behind too often a trail of burning ranches, slaughtered
owners, and mutilated women and children. "Our people
are murdered," complained Governor Hubbard of Texas
in 1878, "their property stolen, and, with but rare excep
tions, our claims for redress are met with Indifference, and
our demands for fugitive thieves and murderers laughed to
scorn from the opposite side of a shallow river, and almost
within sight of their victims."
The recognition that Diaz demanded was deferred until
April, 1878, and until new measures to protect the Texas
border had been taken by President Hayes. Most of the
regular troops remaining In the South in April, 1877, when
they were finally detached from Southern police duty, were
on the border of Texas, stewing in the sun and chasing ban
dits. Their attempts to secure cooperation with the Diaz
troops were vain. On June i, 1877, by order of Hayes,

CIVIL AND BORDER STRIFE 17
General Ord, who commanded in Texas, was directed to
disregard the Rio Grande and to pursue thieves over the
international boundary into Mexico. With solemn words
the Mexican Government protested this invasion of its
sovereignty, but the raids soon lessened under the vigorous
pursuits of Lieutenant-Colonel W. R. Shafter. The ene
mies of the Administration avowed that this was war, and
that the South, in the saddle again, was desirous to redress
the balance of the Union by forcible annexation. But
Hayes stood firmly by his policy, and in his own good time
gave recognition to the great Mexican dictator.
The Southern vote, clamoring In Congress for army re
duction and getting It In 1876, fighting the police duties
and leaving the troops unpaid, had nevertheless wanted this
Texas patrol kept to the front and the cavalry regiments
recruited for this purpose to full strength. Another West
ern duty in the summer of 1877 revealed again the depend
ence of the United States upon an army and the straits to
which sectional politics had reduced it.
There had been no systematic Indian wars for several
years before 1876, the campaigns between 1864 and 1868
and the general peace negotiations of 1 867 having Indian wars,
marked the end of a period of general restlessness. "*76-77
In 1876, however, the Dakota Sioux, exasperated by pros
pectors In the Black Hills region, gave pretext for a punitive
campaign. A column under General Custer was destroyed
on the Little Big Horn early in this enterprise, and Sitting
Bull with his followers escaped to ,a refuge in Canada.
Unwelcome guests, but not expelled from Canada, the
Sioux braves were In 1877 negotiating for a return to the
United States. In June the Nez Percys of Idaho followed
them upon the war path.
The grievances of the Nez Perc6s were trespass and ex
tortion, and excited the commiseration of even their official
scourge, General O. O. Howard. They were the guUtless
victims not of special malice, but of the relentless frontier
that had ever pushed over the obstructions in its way, and
of the weakness of administration that left the army too

I8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
small for an Indian police and poorly adapted to it. In Can
ada the Royal Mounted Police had little trouble with their
wards, doing with twos and threes what whole regiments of
cavalry found trying tasks on the American side. Toward
Canada Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces started, once actual
hostilities began in June, 1877. The raid began in the
Clearwater country of Idaho ; thence across that State and
Montana, too, went the fugitive, with General Howard In
pursuit until Chief Joseph was maneuvered Into the arms of
Colonel Nelson A. Miles In October. To reenforce Howard
it was necessary to send a regiment from Atlanta, Georgia,
and unpaid at that. The public remained indifferent to
General McClellan's plea that it cost nearly as much to
transport troops such great distances as would keep a rea
sonable army on the ground.
The greatest of the military emergencies of 1 877 occurred
not on the border or among the sullen and outraged Indians,
Social but in the most populous and wealthy region in
unrest ^-j^g East, where outbreaks in July caused thought
ful men to ask whether government itself could last in the
face of threatened revolution. The railroad strikes along the
Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania lines, and ex
tending to their neighbors, brought a new element into the
American situation — that of a class struggle with revolu
tionary ideals fighting the existing order. Socialism and
anarchy abroad, with the recollection of the excesses of com
munism in Paris after the last war, disturbed many minds.
Tourgenieff's Virgin _^ Soil was among the newer books,
through whose pages the reader could see into the vortex
of social unrest.
The immediate cause of the railroad strikes of 1877 was a
general reduction of wages, effective July i, and occasioned
by hard times with shrinking freight receipts. The panic
of 1873 caught the American raUroads overbuilt. The en
suing depression forced many of them into bankruptcy, to
emerge from which they reorganized, sacrificing in turn
stockholders, bondholders, and, finally, employees. These
last fought against the reduction, led by the Brotherhood

CIVIL AND BORDER STRIFE 19
of Locomotive Engineers, and countenanced by labor so far
as it was organized.
The labor movement, with its resulting stratification of
society, left the United States almost untouched until the
middle of the nineteenth century. An agricultural people,
with unlimited free land on Its margin, expected the normal
citizen to work for his parents in youth ; then to work awhile
for wages; then to marry and make a farm somewhere.
There was never enough labor for the ordinary crafts of non-
industrial society, and no man of industry was driven long
to work at an uncongenial job. It accordingly happened
that unions of laborers were local and temporary, few reach
ing wide or permanent organization before the Civil War.
The crisis induced by high and fiuctuating prices, as the cur
rency dropped in the last year of the war to thirty-five cents
on the dollar, and aggravated by the over-supply of labor
as the armies returned to civil life, gave the shock that
crystallized out of society organized labor on a large scale.
The organization of national trade unions progressed
far enough during the Civil War to make possible the
consideration of a general federation. After va- j^ . ,
rious caucuses held by the unionists a group of Labor
some fifty delegates of national crafts met at the
Front Street Theater in Baltimore and formed a National
Labor Union in August, 1866. For several years thereafter
the annual congresses of this body considered the obtainable
needs of labor, and struggled against the efforts of other
agitators to graft their reforms upon the labor stem. The
eight-hour day was an immediate objective, as were factory
laws and statistical studies. In the meeting of 1867 the in
fluence of German socialists was noted, and an idea of re
pudiating the national debt took root. The next year, with
an estimated membership of 640,000 in member unions, the
National Labor Union reached the crest of its importance.
After this it lost its single devotion to labor problems. It
flirted with women's rights, adopted an outright political
problem, and became forerunner to the independent party
of Greenbackerg that emerged in 1876. It lost its grip on

20 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
labor as it broadened its aims. After 1872, when the Na
tional Labor Party and the National Prohibition Party
were born simultaneously at Columbus, it died. But it set
a pace for labor in the fat years of the later sixties; and in
the lean years after the panic of 1873 it was an inspiration
for imitators.
The history of unionism Is embedded in conscious secrecy
during these years. Many employers dismissed known
unionists on sight and had favorable public opinion behind
them. "If they [the National Labor Congress of 1868]
could . . . banish from their discussion the idea of a necessary
and inherent enmity between Capital and Labor, it would
be a great step toward the end they seek," said Horace
Greeley's paper. "Having left the service of the com
pany," wrote another observer of a great strike, "they [the
strikers] should have recognized the fact that they bad no
longer any interest in its action, and should have sought
employment elsewhere." And a Wall Street journal, ex
pressing the most stubborn of the anti-labor opinions, said,
as late as 1877, "the only injustice a railroad can inflict upon
its men is to neglect paying them."
With public opinion aA^erse to their existence and approv
ing their destruction, the promoters of unionism had the al
ternatives of secrecy and starvation; but the reclassification
of society due to the entry of the factory could not but com
pel them to strive for better things. Too often they were
injured by the confusion of darkness. The secrecy in which
they must be cloaked was used by less worthy movements
for less desirable ends. In Pennsylvania, among the anthra
cite miners, the discovery of a secret murderous society dis
credited for a time all labor organizations.
The "Molly Maguires" started a reign of terror in the
anthracite region early in the sixties. The demand of the
The "Molly Eastern cities for hard coal attracted thither
Maguires" large quantities of unskilled labor, much of it
Irish, during the sixties and early seventies. The social
conditions in the mining towns were always bad, but the
labor was so fluctuating in personnel and the distinctioni

CIVIL AND BORDER STRIFE 21
between the miner and his unskilled helpers so sharp, that
unionism took root slowly. The "MoUies" tried to do by
terror what unions might have done by open dealings. They
beat and murdered unpopular foremen, bosses, or owners,
and in their secret way they became an agent as often for
private malice as for group action. Their reign was never
even threatened until James McParlan, a courageous de
tective, entered the district in 1874.
McParlan, in disguise, became a "Mollie" and worked
his way into the confidence of the inner ring of murderers.
When the time was ripe, he turned in his evidence against
the leaders. In May, 1876, he threw off his disguise and took
the stand against one of them on trial for murder, and in his
testimony let the people see the crime that had existed.
Against intimidation, threat, and public pressure he con
tinued his work for law and order, and the governor of
Pennsylvania, Hartranft, refused to call him off. In the
end, Mauch Chunk and Pottsville were the scene of eleven
hangings of the conspirators, the first executions in a series
of murder scandals running freely since 1865. This was in
June, 1877. It prepared the public mind to believe any bad
tale about a secret order and to consider a union of workers
as a menace to society. In the same weeks events were
preparing for a general strike.
The organization of railroad employees came at an early
stage in the union movement. They were a new and grow
ing class. The engineers, firemen, and conduc- Railroad
tors were responsible and skilled. Their in- strikes of
. . . . ... 1877
dustry was receiving recognition as basic in
national development, and the engineers since 1863 had
been organized. In this year their national union, the
Brotherhood of the Footboard, appeared, changing its
name in 1864 to the Grand International Brotherhood of
Locomotive Engineers. In 1874 P. M. Arthur assumed
direction of their affairs as grand master engineer. In
AprU, 1877, came a strike on the Philadelphia and Reading,
a coal carrier whose president, Franklin M. Gowen, was
at that moment acquiring, in his fight against the " Mollies "

22 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
in his mines, an intolerance of all organization among his
employees. No wage question was immediately involved,
but Gowen announced In March that all his engineers must
choose between the railroad and the Brotherhood. In re
sponse to this the engineers took their locomotives into the
roundhouses at midnight, April 14, 1877, and went on strike.
In both of these strikes non-union men took out the engines
almost before their fires were cold, and detention of travel
was slight. In July, however. President Hayes and the
governors of four States called upon the troops at their
command to control the violence incidental to the more
ominous outbreak on the line of the Baltimore and Ohio.
No industrial uprising since the Chartist demonstration
of 1848, when the old Duke of Wellington barricaded Lon
don against the mob, so greatly disturbed the comfortable
elements of society as this strike that began in Baltimore
and Martinsburg on Monday, July 16, 1877. The wage
reductions effective on all the trunk lines were the occasion,
and when the company tried to move its trains with non
union crews, their course was impeded by riotous mobs.
Trains were stopped, crews were assaulted, cars and coaches
were overturned, and arson was added to violence and
murder. How far the strikers were personally guilty does
not appear. In all the railroad towns there was sharp dis
content because of slack times or unemployment. There
were, too, crowds of boys and hoodlums. The tramp nui
sance, much commented on In this summer, provided out
casts ready for violence and theft. And the result was out
rage that recalled the Civil War and seemed to foretell
another social cataclysm.
By Tuesday, July 17, Baltimore was under control, with
trains running locally; but the governors of Maryland and
West Virginia had called out their militia and besought
aid of the United States. Martinsburg was in possession of
the mob. The next day Hayes, by proclamation, warned
the mobs to cease obstruction, and squads of troops were
scraped together from the thin Eastern garrisons and hur
ried to centers of disturbance. At Martinsburg the procla-

CIVIL AND BORDER STRIFE 23
mation and the troops produced quiet by the 19th, but the
disorder spread west and north to the Pennsylvania lines
at Pittsburgh.
In Pennsylvania a new administrative rule for double-
header trains requiring only one crew to do the work of two
aggravated the trouble produced by wage reductions, and
Thomas A. Scott, president of the road, became the object
of attack. Governor Hartranft ordered the rioters around
Pittsburgh to disperse on July 20, by proclamation at
tested by Matthew S. Quay, then Secretary of the Common
wealth; and on Saturday afternoon, July 21, General Brin-
ton's Pennsylvania militia engaged the rioters in a pitched
battle as they tried to clear the tracks in Pittsburgh. The
next day was, indeed, a "bloody Sunday" in Pittsburgh,
with mayor and sheriff helpless, the militia generally im
potent, and the mob burning and shooting. The union
depot was destroyed that afternoon.
In the next week the wave of unrest spread to the Dela
ware, Lackawanna, and Western and west to Chicago. The
New York Central was held loyal by a judicious bribe of
$100,000 which William H. Vanderbilt, who had just suc
ceeded to the control of the great estate of his father, the
"Commodore," had promised his men. In Chicago, on
the 26th, the week ended in a pitched battle in Turner Hall,
where the police broke up a meeting of alleged communists
and ejected them from their meeting-place.
Through these eleven days the railroad riots advertised
the opening of a new industrial epoch and affected every
class of society. Labor leaders, while only occasionally
defending violence, were united in denouncing the use of
troops. A grand jury in Pittsburgh, Instead of hunting out
mob leaders for punishment, tried to secure conviction of
the militia officers whose commands, bewildered and badg
ered, had fired upon the rioters. It was observed that
the militia were often unequal to the tasks of riot duty,
whereas federal proclamations, supported by a mere hand
ful of regulars, produced order at once. Republican leaders
in general ceased for a time their attacks upon Hayes to

24 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
castigate the South for its weakening of the army. Con
servative citizens, fearful that this was only the opening
gust of a social cyclone, regretted the lack of a stronger
national government.
The strikers themselves went quietly back to work after
their effort had wasted its strength in blind explosion. The
bottom of the financial depression had been reached, and
hereafter conditions generally improved for the men at
work, while the dangerous army of the unemployed lessened
as new jobs drew off its more industrious units. It was a
squall, but not a revolution; the stability of government
was affected not at all; and the opponents on both sides
turned directly to popular Institutions to record their
claims. The operators appealed to legislatures to admit a
doctrine of public responsibility for property lost through
mob violence; the unionists for more favorable labor and
mUitia laws. The " moral instinct of the people " had been
the real vindicator of law and order.
The railroad strikes of 1877 gained nothing Immediately
for the workers but publicity and a keener feeling for the
^ . ,. identity of their interests. Their leaders moved
Socialism . . .
on along the course of superior organization, and
a new order, the Knights of Labor, which had existed in
seclusion since 1869, raised its head above the surface as a
coordinating body. New Immigrants added their influence
to what agitators described as the war of classes, and many
of them speedily rose to places of leadership because the
workers of Europe had thought out the problems of social
order more penetratingly than had Americans. Socialism,
against which Germany, Russia, and France were raising
their weapons, entered America as an adjunct of the labor
movement. Even the Roman Church, through an encycli
cal of Leo XIII In 1878, attacked "that sort of men who,
under the motley and all but barbarous terms and titles of
Socialists, Communists, and Nihilists, are spread abroad
throughout the world and, bound intimately together in
baneful alliance, . . . strive to carry out their purpose . . .
of uprooting the foundations of cIviUzed society at large."

CIVIL AND BORDER STRIFE 25
"It is a good sign," commented Lyman Abbott in the
Christian Union, "that the Church of Christ, both Protes
tant and Roman, is turning its attention to the problems of
social and political life." American society had ahead of it
a long period of education and study before it could under
stand the appeal of the workers or readjust its government
to the needs of modem life.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A clear, running view of the problems of peace may be found in Harper's
Weekly, the Nation, the Christian Union, and the Independent, all of which
were conducted through these >-ears with intelligence and information.
Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (1881), gives a sentimental and
sympathetic view of the Indian problem, which may be checked by Nel
son A. Miles, Serving the Republic (191 1), O. O. Howard, Nez Perce
Joseph, An Account of his Ancestors, his Lands, his Confederates, his Ene
mies, his Murders, his War, his Pursuit and Capture (1881), and F. L.
Paxson, Last American Frontier (1910). A. L. Haydon, Riders of the
Plains (1910), pictures the Canadian Indian problem. The strikes are
described in detail in volume vm of Rhodes, who follows J. A. Dacus,
Anruils of the Great Strikes in the United States (1878); and there is useful
material in John R. Commons (ed.), Documentary History of American In
dustrial Society (1910-1 1). A literary sensation was created by the anony
mous novel Democracy (1880), whose authorship was later avowed by
Henry Adams and his friends; The Bread-Winners {1882,) -was also anony
mous and revealed the reactions of contemporary society to the labor
movement. It was later conceded to be the work of John Hay.

CHAPTER III
POST-BELLUM IDEALS
The genuine spirit of America is elusive in the black days
of financial stress and moral discontent that extended from
the panic of 1873 until after the railroad strikes of 1877.
The historian turns in vain to any single set of actors to
reveal it. Astor, Stewart, and Vanderbilt, dying within
a few months of each other and leaving their millions to
self-conscious heirs, are but partly representative of their
contemporaries. The statesmen of the day, bewildered
by the new ethical standards that arose to vex them, reveal
few elements of leadership. The universities, struggling
to acclimate a new ideal within a medieval shell, did not
yet touch the masses of the people; and Eastem men of
letters, whose leaders were about sung out, could rarely get
their heads above the confusion of the present. Too high
or too low, each of these groups failed to reveal the spirit
of the nation as it entered upon its second century of in
dependence, but there was a spirit, none the less, conscious
and clear of vision, and gathering up itself for a new attack
on life. Its records are in a literature that emerged from
this period of transition, and in none of its figures was the
embodiment fuller or finer than in Samuel Langhorne Clem
ens (Mark Twain), writing at leisure In his quaint octagonal
study on a knoU at Quarry Farm, and putting on paper in
the summer of 1874 the first draft of Tom Sawyer and Life
on the Mississippi.
The pessimism of James Russell Lowell and Edwin Law
rence Godkin and their doubts as to the success of democ-
Literary racy were inspired by their realization that aU
periodicals America was not like New England and were
intensified by ideas from the West and South that looked to
them like repudiation and decay. The Atlantic Monthly,
founded in 1857, had become, full-blown, the literary ve-

POST-BELLUM IDEALS 27
hide of New England men of letters. There had been
nothing like it in the past, and it had no rival. Its stand
ards were those of the best intelligence the United States
possessed, but its circulation, like that of the New York
Nation, hardly reached beyond the acquaintances of its
contributors. Lowell edited it at first, then Fields, and
Howells, and in 1880 Thomas Bailey Aldrich took it in
hand. Less literary, but more lively, its rival. Harper's
Monthly, shared with it in the later se%-entles the leadership
in American letters. The field was enlarged when in 1881
the old Scribner's Monthly became the Century Magazine
under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and then of
Richard Watson Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson,
whose inspiration sustained the new periodical for forty
years. Scribner's itself was revived in 1886 to complete the
quartette. The broadening of public taste, revealed by the literary
periodicals that it supported, called soon for literary gossip
as well as literature. The Dial was founded in Chicago in
1880, to purvey this gossip. The Critic began a yeafr later
with its office close to the centers of literary information in
the East. The Book-Buyer, revived in 1884, was some
thing more than a trade journal, and catered to the same
new interest, while in due time Current Literature (1888) and
the Bookman (1895) broadened and intensified the field.
American literature in the century just ended was lim
ited in its appeal and its accomplishment, but "the only
position that has ever been acknowledged cheerfully by the
American people," as some one wrote in the Atlantic in 1881 ,
"has been the small circle of first-class historians, poets,
and scientists, Prescott, Motley, Ticknor, Agassiz, Bryant,
Longfellow. ..." The spirit of democracy tended to rec
ognize an intellectual aristocracy even if it refrained from
reading all its works, but the aristocracy was now one of
old men with a gap in years between them and the oncom
ing generation.
The contrast between the old and the new in letters was
so sharp at times as to be embarrassing. A dinner given

28 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
to Whittier on his seventieth birthday in 1877 by the
Whittier Atlantic Monthly brought together the literary
dinner family of that periodical in the service of com
radeship and letters. On this occasion the venerable Ralph
Waldo Emerson was there, and the dean of American poets,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as the sprightly Oli
ver Wendell Holmes. James Russell Lowell would prob
ably have been present had not Hayes sent him to Madrid as
Minister in accordance with the American tradition that
diplomacy Is one of the functions of men of letters. The
speeches at the banquet were full of reminiscence over the
glories of the past, until a false note uttered by Mark Twain
brought dismay to both diners and speaker.
With the modesty that was always mingled with his
naive and pleasant vanities, Clemens felt that his invita-
Mark tlon to the Whittier banquet marked his recog-
Twain nition by the East. He prepared with great
pains and long premeditation a speech in which he placed
himself in a miner's cabin in the Sierras and introduced the
wordlof Holmes as well as those of Emerson and Longfellow
into the mouths of uncouth mountain vagabonds. In his
later years he republished the address, reverting to his
earlier belief that it was both humorous and appropriate,
but when he delivered It in Boston on December 17, 1877, it
was received with a silence growing colder and more deadly
every minute, as his audience resented what seemed to be
deliberate Insult to the dignity and good taste of its leaders.
He went home in dismay that was lightened only by the
fact that the immediate victims of his ill-timed humor
either faUed to hear it or were themselves more generous
than their associates. To the end of his life he never knew
the difference between humor that was in good taste and
humor that was unprintable, and only the scrupulous edit
ing of his wife saved him from himself.
Mark Twain was in 1877 just on the verge of recognition
from America, with the Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
as his newest work, and with an English success that con
vinced New England of his importance. There is no truer

t I J jl I by Ln/e I _ _V. y.
SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, D LITT. OXON. 1907

POST-BELLUM IDEALS 29
description of the great plains and mining camps in the last
decade before the advent of the railroad than he wrote in
Roughing It (1872). His travels carried him to Europe,
whUe European adventures were still novel, and The Inno
cents Abroad (1869) and A Tramp Abroad (1880) brought
him an expanding circle of readers who knew they liked him,
but were not sure that he was literature. The vital humor
of Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog (1865) continued to
inspire his later writings, as well as his lectures on the
lyceum circuit. Like the writers of the older generation,
he told his story to audiences over all the country, and in
1872 he followed Artemus Ward to London, where his suc
cess was instant. New England was slow to admit him
within its dignified circle. "The literary theories we ac
cepted were New England theories," wrote Howells, who
sat at an Atlantic desk after 1866; "the criticism we valued
was New England criticism, or, more strictly speaking,
Boston theories, Boston criticism."
Whittier and his contemporaries had done their work,
but it was not until the middle of the following decade
that America recognized their successors. By The new
the time E. C. Stedman wrote his "TwUight of ^"^^^''^
the Poets" (1885) for the Century, new names had risen to
the head of the American list, while the public was finding
enjoyment in a wider range of letters. The first fifteen
names on a list of immortals compiled by the Critic and
Good Literature in 1884 Included only four of the older group :
Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, and the historian Bancroft, who
was now in his old age revising his monumental History of
the United States and admitting to his intimacy the young
men who were td be leaders in Washington letters in the
next generation: Hay, Henry Adams, Clarence King, and
Lodge. The remaining names of the first fifteen were Howells,
Curtis, Aldrich, Harte, Stedman, White, Hale, Cable,
James, Clemens, and Warner.
The men whose writings have since been accepted as the
most expressive of the American character were recognized

30 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by their contemporaries as their work appeared. Henry
James, with The American (1876), stepped at once into
leadership as an exponent ' ' of contemporary American life
in fiction," and held the position until his death. William
Dean Howells, who stood above him on the Critic's list of
1884, was gaining power as he used it In The Lady of the
Aroostook (1879) and A Modern Instance (1882), until his
Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) became perhaps the most dis
tinctive portrait of Eastern society in the decade. Clemens
was accepted without question as the years advanced. Tom
Sawyer was followed by its companion tale, The Adven
tures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which the Athenceum subse
quently described as "one of the six greatest books ever
written in America." His powers were steadily broaden
ing, and The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and The Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895) revealed him in his
broader sympathies, after he had outgrown the r61e of the
professional humorist.
The themes of the American men of letters ran to por
traiture and local color. "There is nothing definite in
Transition American society for the dramatist to get hold
in literature ^f _ ' ' g^id a writer In the A tlantic in 1 88 1 , who had
in mind the social uniformity dominant in the old American
society. The lack of caste as a motive In fiction was filled
in part by the appearance of the American girl as a novel
species, untrammeled by social limitations and breezy with
the expansiveness of the open country. Howells and Henry
James used her with freedom, and the illustrators made out
of her a definite literary type. The amazing popularity of
General Lew Wallace's Ben Hur (1880) and F. Marion
Crawford's Mr. Isaacs (1882) revealed the catholic tastes
of a widening reading public.
The sharp change in the course of literary production
was nowhere clearer than in literature for children. The
moral tracts of the mid-century and the sensational ro
mances which Ned Buntllne manufactured and Nick Carter
continued were gradually displaced by literature of a dif
ferent stripe. Howard Pyle brought out The Merry Ad-

POST-BELLUM IDEALS 31
ventures of Robin Hood (1883), popularizing a folk-lore and
setting a new standard with his own illustrations. Frances
Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) added a
new child to the personages of fiction. St. Nicholas (1873)
and Harper's Young People (1879) began to produce much
of the new children's literature in periodical form, and were
accepted in England nearly as freely as at home.
A search for local color carried Mark Twain to the west
ern fringe of civilization, where Bret Harte found treasures
of a similar character, and where Helen Hunt "Ethiopio-
Jackson found the materials for Ramona (1884). ™ania"
The South was rediscovered at the same time and an "ethio
piomania" ran its course through the early eighties, as
negro songs and music had their day. The cult expressed
itself sometimes In doggerel:
"Piano put away
In de garret for to stay;
De banjo am de music dat de gals am crazed about.
De songs dat now dey choose
Am 'spired by de colored muse,
An' de ole kind o' poeckry am all played out."
Sometimes it was revealed in the popularity of negro play
ers and of white actors masquerading as such. Haverly's
Mastodon Minstrels, with forty men in the cast, held the
stage at Drury Lane in London in 1884, forty years after
the first minstrel troupes had made their appearance, and
serious students of negro lore took the trouble to debate
in public whether the banjo was or was not the negro's in
strument. Joel Chandler Harris brought the negroes into letters
on a higher plane when he collected their folk-lore In Uncle
Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1880). His popularity
was shared by George W. Cable, whose Grandissimes (1880)
portrayed the Creole life in old New Orleans. Cable soon
had the descendants of the Creoles buzzing around his ears,
but the portrait seemed true to life to the rest of the
country, and readings by the author were welcome every
where. Judge Albion W. Tourg^e's A Fool's Errand (1880)

32 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
gave a less benevolent view of Southern life than Harris and
Cable did, and was used as a campaign document against
the mild treatment of the South begun by President Hayes.
America continued to be entertained by dialect litera
ture such as Lowell had exploited long since in the Biglow
Dialect Papers, and by professional humorists like Pe-
literature troleum V. Nasby and Artemus Ward. James
Whitcomb Riley stopped painting* signs in Logansport and
gave up his travels with a patent medicine troupe, and
brought out in 1884 The Old Swimmin' Hole, and Seven
More Poems. He soon began a long career upon the plat
form reading his dialect verse. -» In 1886 he traveled in
company with Edgar Wilson (BUl) Nye, founder of the
Laramie Boomerang (1881), and one of the most successful
humorists. The taste of the eighties was the product of the common
schools Inspired somewhat by the literary reputations of
Provincial- New England and led here and there by grad-
'^"^ uates of the aspiring new colleges. It made up
in avidity what it lacked in discrimination and standards.
When Richardson built Trinity Church In Boston for the
congregation of PhiUips Brooks, his adaptation of the roman-
esque was imitated west to the Pacific. There was still
enough provincialism for the United States to be keenly
sensitive to what Europe thought about it. James Bryce
since the early seventies had been a repeated and welcome
visitor as he gathered his materials for the American Com
monwealth (1888). Thomas Huxley found ready audiences
as he discussed " The Evidences of Evolution " on his Ameri
can trip of 1876. Herbert Spencer, whose Principles of
Sociology (1876) invented the science of that name, was
welcomed In 1882. Matthew Arnold, in 1883, found "the
blaring publicity" of New York beyond his expectations,
but was grateful for "the kindness and good-will of every
body." The English historian Edward A. Freeman wrote
Some Impressions of the United States (1883), after a lectur
ing trip in 1 88 1. He spoke at Lowell Institute in Boston, a
century after the surrender at Yorktown, upon the English

POST-BELLUM IDEALS 33
people in their three homes : Germany, Britain, and America;
and gained wide notoriety a little later through his sugges
tion that "this would be a grand land if every Irishman
would kill a negro, and be hanged for it." American curi
osity was wide open, and there was a welcome even for
Oscar Wilde, who lectured In 1882 on the English renascence
In "a fine aesthetic jargon . . . knee breeches, pumps, a
white waistcoat, and white silk stockings."
The self-consciousness that led the United States to be In
terested in what others thought of it evoked a new curiosity
as to the meaning of American history. The Historical
Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 anting
was part of a series of patriotic centennials that continued
until, in 1889, the one-hundredth anniversary of the inaugu
ration of Washington was celebrated. The early years of
this period brought out a flood of oratory on the Revolution,
and Bancroft revised his History ofthe United States in a cen
tennial edition. Interest was turned to other aspects of
American history. In one field Francis Parkman was bring
ing to a conclusion his studies on the French In America
and their struggle with the English in the eighteenth cen
tury. Henry Adams, lifting history to a new level of in
struction at Harvard in the seventies and studying the lives
of Albert Gallatin and John Randolph, settled down in the
eighties to his nine-volume History of the United States
during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-
91). In 1883 the first two volumes of the History of the
People of the United States appeared. The author, John
Bach McM aster, an obscure instructor in engineering at
Princeton College, became immediately the holder at the
University of Pennsylvania of one of the earliest chairs in
American history to be created, and started in the United
States a school of historians who saw the realities of history
in the whole life of the people rather than In the doings of
kings and courts. In the autumn of 1884 a group of stu
dents interested in the historical revival, led by Herbert B.
Adams, of Johns Hopkins University, and Andrew D. White,
organized the American Historical Association. The next

34 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
year a Cleveland business man, James Ford Rhodes, who
had already made himself financially independent, turned
his affairs over to his brother-in-law, Marcus A. Hanna, and
set out to write the story of the Civil War under the title
A History ofthe United States Since the Compromise of 1850.
The frontier of history was pushed down through the
nineteenth century under the new impulse. - Its quality rose
from the level of antiquarlanism and the defense of democ
racy, that Inspired most of the writings before the Civil
War, and bore the Impress of the higher scholarship of the
graduate seminary at Johns Hopkins and the superior teach
ing elsewhere. A treatise on Congressional Government
(1885), by Woodrow Wilson, one of the Johns Hopkins
students, received immediate recognition. Another of the
group carried the standards of scholarship Into the West.
Frederick Jackson Turner produced in Wisconsin in 1893
his essay on the Significance of the Frontier in American
History with such compelling logic as to force a complete
restatement of the facts in American history in the next
quarter-century. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The works cited above in the text constitute the best bibliography for
this chapter. M. A. De Wolfe Howe, The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers
(1918), throws light on the Atlantic group. Sara Norton and M. A.
De Wolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (1913), and Norton's Let
ters of James Russell Lowell (1894), are also of great value. Gustav Pollak,
Fifty Years of American Idealism (1915), traces the story of the New York
Nation. George Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher (1915), and J. H.
Harper, The House of Harper; A Century of Publishing in Franklin Square
(1912), are useful special works. Henry Watterson, Marse Henry (1919),
is the autobiography of the most picturesque and the last survivor of the
great journalists of the seventies. Albert Bigelow Paine, Life of Mark
Twain (1912), has few equals in American biography. Compare also
Julia C. Harris, Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (1918).

CHAPTER IV
SPECIE PAYMENTS, 1 879
"Mark Twain inflicted indigestion on Boston," said the
Chicago Inter-Ocean, in comment upon his speech at the
Whittier dinner, "and the silver dollar has driven silver and
New York to almost hopeless lunacy." Thein- gi'eenbacks
vasion of the West in the fields of letters and history was
paralleled by an eruption of border problems that demanded
adjustment from the party leaders. Among these the
emergence of a silver issue attracted the attention of Con
gress in 1877 and 1878.
The American silver dollar was in truth the "dollar of our
daddies" in 1878. It had rarely been seen in circulation
since Jackson's act in 1834 established its relative weight, or
coinage ratio, at sixteen to one with gold. The original at
tempt of Hamilton In his financial report of 179 1 to establish
a bimetallic money, in which two metallic coins should cir
culate at the same value, was frustrated by the Inability
of the two metals selected, gold and silver, to maintain an
unchanging commercial ratio with each other. Hamilton
provided for their coinage at the ratio of fifteen to one, at
which weights the gold dollar was a few cents more valuable
than the silver dollar, and was speedily withdrawn from cir
culation. The ancient Gresham law, to the effect that bad
money drives out good, or, otherwise stated, that when two
moneys are in existence with the same nominal value, but
with different intrinsic value, the more valuable will be
hoarded, and the less valuable will remain In circulation and
fix the value of the coin, was fully borne out by the experi
ence of the United States under both Hamilton's law and
Jackson's. The change of coinage ratio to sixteen to one in 1 834 was
designed to bring it closer to the commercial ratio in order
to keep both metals in simultaneous circulation. The

36 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
result was merely to change the inequality. The silver
dollar now became more valuable than its gold associate,
and disappeared from use. Subsidiary coins of the value
of fifty cents or less were deliberately made light weight in
1853, but being issued only as they were bought at par from
the Treasury did not displace the gold in circulation. The
American half-dollar was a favorite coin thereafter, because
of the unreliability of bank-notes and the inconvenience of
handling small gold coins, but it was possible to grow to
manhood before the Civil War without ever seeing a sUver
dollar of American coinage.
The Gresham law, which haJ driven gold out of circula
tion before 1834 and silver after that date, disposed of boti^'
metals early In the Civil War. The issuance of greenba^cs
by the United States was perhaps a necessary measurftV '
enlarge the currency to meet the war demands upon itjS'but
the legal-tender quality give^i to the greenbacks, which
forced the creditor to accept tnfem when offered to him by-
his debtor, resulted in both a rise of prices and a premium i
upon gold. The gold dollar passed out of circulation in a
few days, the cheaper subsidiary silver passed out a little
later, and the currency of the United States went upon a
paper basis with small notes or "shin-plasters," postage
stamps, and private tokens serving as small change. It
was still upon this paper basis when Hayes was Inaugu
rated and pledged himself to restore the financial credit of
the United States.
In February, 1873, when no coins had beei^ In circulation
for a dozen years, and few silver dollars for nearly forty.
Decline in Congress revised its coinage lie -, and the silver
silver dollar, although not losing its legal standing, was
dropped from the list of coins to be manufactured freely at
the mint upon the presentation of "bullion. The price of
silver was still above $1.2929 per ounce, at ¦ ii commer
cial rate the gold and silver dollars would have been equal
in value. In later years Senator Stewart of Nevada per
suaded himself that the law "was conceived for the sole
purpose of clandestinely omitting the silver dollar from the

SPECIE PAYMENTS, 1 879 37
list of coins," and Henry Demarest Lloyd, writing editorials
for the Chicago Tribune, came to believe that it was "done
secretly and stealthily to the profound ignorance of those
who voted for it, and of the President who approved It."
The act, however, had been pending in Congress for several
sessions, with its content clear to any one who chose to read,
and would never have been denounced as the "crime of
1873 " if the price of silver had not declined shaiply in that
year, changing thereby the relative value of the two dollars
and bringing loss to every one Interested in the production of
silver. The decline in the value of silver beginning about 1873
•MSas due to the same complex of causes that decreased *the
prl^ of nearly all commodities in the last third of the nlne-
t ^^ch century. The extension of railroads into the West
made it easier to reach the silver mines. The output of the
Comstock lode in Nevada, which had been laboriously
hauled to San Francisco under guard, was able to get to
market by rail after 1 869. New discoveries in chemistry and
metaUurgy and better practice In mining engineering came
from the European laboratories and the American schools of
technology. They tended to reduce the cost of extracting sil
ver from the ore and brought Into easy commercial use low
grade and refractory ores hitherto of little value. The price
of silver fell from normal forces affecting Its cost of produc
tion. The fall was hastened by a lessening necessity for its
use in commerce. Bank-checks and clearing-houses made
It possible to C'i^ansact much business without a physical
transfer of money, while gold was less bulky and more con
venient than sllo7/Bifor the settlement of large accounts.
The decline in the value of silver was further accelerated
by the discovery and development of new deposits. Dur
ing the CivU Wg.r,,there»was a succession of min- fining
ing booms f^iiM dotted the inland empire with booms and
¦ ircG silver
transient camp,s, some of which became the foun
dations for the new Territories of Colorado, Nevada, Arizona,
Idaho, and Montana. Nevada was admitted to the Union
in 1864 and Colorado followed twelve years later. In 1868,

38 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
as a consequence of the mining booms. Congress was able to
complete the territorial subdivision of the United States by
the organization of Wyoming, leaving only one line still to be
drawn upon the map of the United States, the boundary
between North and South Dakota.
Dakota Territory, created in 1861 and reshaped in the
next few years, was conceived as an agricultural community,
with a farming population In its southeast corner. Its wheat
lands In the valley of the Red River of the North were as
yet only a promise, since there was no railroad to take the
wheat to its market. The western half of Dakota was an
Indian country in which in 1868 the Sioux Indians were as
signed a permanent home. In the Black Hills at the heart of
the Sioux reserve, in the southwest corner of the Territory,
gold and silver were found in 1875, and in 1876 an army of
prospectors overran the reservation. From Bismarck on
the upper Missouri, where a railroad had arrived in 1873,
and from Fort Pierre and Yankton, farther down the river,
the miners followed routes to the Black Hills published by the
War Department. An Indian outbreak and the massacre
of Custer's men on the Little Big Horn was a consequence of
the attrition between the races. The boundaries of the re
serve were rearranged, and the towns of Deadwood, Custer,
and Rapid City became the centers of an active mining com
munity In 1877. The stage-coaches to Deadwood attracted
much of the romantic interest that had gathered around the
overland stages to California two decades earlier, and the
flood of precious metal was swollen by the output of the
mines. A biU to establish a Territory of Lincoln in the Black
Hills region, with lands cut away from Dakota, Montana,
and Wyoming, was recommended for passage in the Sen
ate in 1878. The bonanza wheat farms of the Red River
Valley aroused the simultaneous discussion of a Territory
of Pembina.
New mines were discovered in Colorado to increase still
further the production of silver. While the Atchison,
Topeka, and Santa Fd was contesting with the Denver and
Rio Grande the right to the exclusive use of the Royal Gorge

SPECIE PAYMENTS, 1 879 39
for a railroad extending up the Arkansas River above
Pueblo, new deposits were uncovered near the headwaters
of that stream, and LeadvIUe began to ship both ore and
bullion to the world. By 1878 there was a population of
20,000 in the new silver camp, upsetting the political balance
of Colorado and stimulating the demand for legislation to
avert the consequences of the falling price of silver.
The silver dollar had been dropped from the coinage list
only a few months when a demand appeared in the Western
States to put it back and restore the free coinage of silver
at the old ratio. In all of the mining States the demand was
repeated, and men who, like Senator Stewart, had supported
the Act of 1873 discovered now that it had been a crime.
Bills to restore free silver were added to the group of financial
measures looking toward the resumption of specie payments
and the refunding of the Civil War debt, and were pressed
insistently upon Congress. At the commercial rate existing
at the end of 1877, it was possible to buy enough silver for a
silver dollar for about ninety-three cents, and the words
"honest money" and "sound money" had come to be used
by persons who believed that the free coinage of silver
dollars would bring Gresham's law into operation, and bring
a cheap dollar into circulation, with the resulting loss to
every one who was forced to receive it. "There seems to be
a general agreement among monied classes that its [the free
silver bill's] intent is dishonest," said the Commercial and
Financial Chronicle. A newspaper poet In Norwich wrote:
"Now, Messrs. Congressmen, be just,
Throw off the veil of thin pretense;
Stamp on the lie — 'In God we trust
For the remaining seven cents.' "
Richard Parks Bland, a Missouri Congressman, whose
experience embraced that of the depressed South, the debtor
frontier, and the silver mining districts, carried a Bland-
bill for the resumption of free silver coinage at ^j.'^'^""^ g
the old ratio through the House of Representa
tives in 1877. The majority of the House was Democratic,
but the vote was bi-partisan, as it was in the Senate,

40 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
where the majority was Republican. In the upper house
Senator Allison of Iowa procured the adoption of an amend
ment limiting the character of the bill. As the Bland-
AUison Act finaUy passed, it directed the Secretary of the
Treasury to buy each month from two million dollars' worth
to four million dollars' worth of silver and to coin it into
standard silver dollars which should have the quality of legal
tender. The Bland-Allison Act ran counter to the financial policy
of President Hayes and Secretary Sherman, who believed
that It contained the elements of repudiation, since it was a
deliberate action to lower the value of the standard dollar.
Hayes adhered to his pledge to uphold the financial credit
of the nation. He vetoed the law, but Congress passed it
over his veto, February 28, 1878, by a sweeping bi-partisan
majority. The influence of the silver States was behind the
law as a measure of protection, and was reenforced by the
conscious desire of the debtor West and South for more and
cheaper money.
The legal-tender greenbacks of the Civil War constituted
the basis of American currency at the close of the struggle
and became the emblem of a movement that affected both
great parties for twenty years after 1865. At the close of
the Civil War the greenbacks were far below par, the pre
mium on gold standing at 150 on the day of Lee's surrender,
and the greenback dollar worth accordingly only sixty-
seven cents in gold. The greenbacks Issued by the Govern
ment at par had constituted a forced loan to the extent of
nearly four hundred and fifty million dollars, and as they de
preciated in value they worked a confiscation of property
against every holder In whose hands their value declined.
As the Treasury undertook to redeem the public faith and
get rid of the greenbacks, their value rose. By June, 1868,
they were worth seventy-one cents on the dollar. Their
rise impressed upon every person who was in debt the fact
that the real value of his debt was increased to that extent.
The whole South was depressed with the debt and bank
ruptcy that the Civil War produced and Reconstruction in-

SPECIE PAYMENTS, 1 879 41
creased. The Northwestern States were equally in debt,
due to their speculative investments in reclaiming a new
frontier and increasing the improvements on their old prop
erty. A demand that the redemption of the greenbacks be
discontinued originated in the Northwest and was known
as the "Ohio idea." Congress yielded to the pressure and
forbade further withdrawals of the greenbacks in 1868, while
the Democratic Party in Its national convention of that
year adopted substantially a greenback plank.
Throughout the two administrations of General Grant
the greenback movement was strongly supported by poli
ticians in both parties, and the panic of 1873, Resump-
wlth the lean financial years that followed it, *'°" ^'^*
filled the ranks of the discontented. An inflation bill for
increasing the volume of greenbacks in circulation passed
both houses of Congress in 1874, but was blocked by Grant's
veto. The next year John Sherman, Senator from Ohio
and chairman of the Committee on Finance, was the fa
ther of a bill for the resumption of specie payments, which
became a law January 14, 1875. The date set for resump
tion was January i, 1879, and meanwhile the Secretary of
the Treasury was directed to accumulate a fund of gold to
make resumption possible. The financial doctors disagreed
as to the size of the fund necessary, but the Secretary was
given power to accumulate the necessary amount by bor
rowing or otherwise. The promise of resumption improved
the credit of the United States and raised the value of the
greenbacks in consequence so that they were worth eighty-
nine cents in January, 1875, and ninety-six cents two years
later, when Hayes became President in 1877 and appointed
Senator Sherman Secretary of the Treasury.
The increasing certainty that resumption was likely to
be accomplished led the Greenbackers to more aggressive
action. They demanded that the redemption of Greenback
the greenbacks be stopped, and that all the bonds ^^'^^'^
of the Civil War that were described in the legislation as
"payable in lawful money of the United States" should
be redeemed In an ^d4itional issue of greenbacks, which

42 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
would have the double advantage of Increasing the green
backs in circulation and so helping the debtor, and of get
ting rid of the public debt without raising by taxation the
funds to satisfy it. The Greenback National Party placed
a ticket in the field in 1876, headed by Peter Cooper and
General Sam F. Carey, and pledged to "financial reform
and industrial emancipation." "To this work — to help
ing care for the Rag Baby, as the gold gamblers sneeringly
term the child of war and the saviour of the country, till it
reaches Washington and drives the money-changers from
the Temple of Liberty, we pledge the support of this paper,"
wrote the editor of Pomeroy's Democrat, one of the free
lance journals supporting the new third party.
The strikes of 1877 brought new hopes to the leaders of
the Greenback Party, who glimpsed a chance to unite the
discontented elements of labor to the discontented farmers,
and to produce as a result an agrarian-industrial party of
reform, to fight the "bloated, moneyed aristocracy." The
Greenback vote in 1876 was unimportant, but here and
there in Maine, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin local contro
versies made it possible for the Greenback Party to control
the balance of power in 1877. Peter Cooper and Wendell
Phillips joined in the call for a national convention to be
held at Toledo February 22, 1878, to blend the two move
ments into a new party for which they chose the name
"National." "Financial theories are as plenty as black
berries among delegates, and nearly every man hcis a pet
scheme for the salvation of the country," wrote the Cin
cinnati Commercial of the convention. The delegates were
described as "the rattle-brained publicists at Toledo" by
the New York Tribune, which went on to say that "the gush
of woman suffragists, the drivel of prairie financiers, and
the rant of working-men's demagogues all tend to promote
a spirit of pessimism on this side of the Atlantic." Edito
rials on the coming party. Inspired by a remembrance of the
commune at Paris and the strikes of 1877, caUed it "com
munism"; but in the elections of 1878 the aggregate of dis
contented votes for Greenback candidates in the several

SPECIE PAYMENTS, 1 8 79 43
States ran beyond a miUion, and General Benjamin F.
Butler, of Massachusetts, always politically on the make,
avowed a willingness to become the standard-bearer of the
new National Labor-Greenback Party.
While the sections and classes were struggling with the
panaceas for reform, President Hayes was confronting the
difficulty of doing business with an unsympa- Election
thetic Congress. His first steps in organizing ^''^^'^^
his government alienated the leaders of his own party,
while the House of Representatives was controlled by the
Democrats with Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, as
Speaker. The Democratic claim that Hayes was President
by fraud was made more credible by the admissions of
members of his own party. William E. Chandler, a mem
ber of the Republican National Committee, openly at
tacked the title of Hayes in a public letter to New Hamp
shire Republicans in December, 1877. The following May,
Clarkson N. Potter, of New York, became chairman of a
House committee that investigated the alleged frauds. The
Democratic hopes that the Investigation would uncover
reasons for voiding the election and unseating Hayes were
lessened as facts were accumulated by the Potter com
mittee, and the Matthews committee that the Senate
created simultaneously. The Western Union Telegraph
Company was forced to submit its file of messages for ex
amination, with the result that cipher dispatches were dis
covered, sent from Tilden's own house to Southern Demo
crats. These dispatches were deciphered by the New York
Tribune and revealed an attempt on the part of some one
to buy enough Hayes electors to seat Tilden. The charge
of fraud became a boomerang against the Democrats, and
Hayes, by his steadiness under attack and his adherence to
his campaign pledges, gained increasing respect from the
country at large.
The forces of discontent that gave birth to the National
Party supported the silver miners' movement for free silver,
which would have the same tendency as the greenbacks to
increase the volume of money and lower its value. The

44 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
overwhelming majorities by which the Bland-Allison Act
became a law showed the wide distribution of the forces of
inflation, but had no effect upon a President who was al
ready used to working without the approval of either his
own party leaders or the opposition. Secretary Sherman
continued to assemble his gold reserve to cover the redemp
tion of the greenbacks. The international conference on
silver made mandatory by the Bland-Allison Act was held
in Paris in August, 1878, and was entirely fruitless. The
advances of the American delegation in favor of an inter
national agreement upon a bimetallic ratio were received
with courtesy, but without result. Europe was too defi
nitely pledged to the gold standard to be affected by Ameri
can pressure to the contrary.
The price of greenbacks and the credit of the United
States continued to rise with the preparations for re-
Resump- sumptlon. In December, 1878, the greenbacks
*'°" reached par, and throughout the country there
were evidences of universal prosperity instead of the calam
ity that the Greenbackers had foretold. On January 2,
1879, the New York sub-treasury began to exchange gold
for greenbacks on demand, with a reserve of $133,508,000
in coin to control the $346,681,016 outstanding greenbacks.
Resumption came without a shock, and the first day's ex
perience indicated the correctness of Horace Greeley's view
that "the way to resume is to resume." Instead of a long
line of greenback-holders anxious for the redemption of their
paper, holders of gold brought their metal in to exchange it
for greenbacks. No one wanted gold when he was sure he
could get it, nor was he willing to exchange any money of
the United States for less than par. When Secretary Sher
man wrote his annual report in November, 1879, after ten
months of resumption, he had redeemed only $11,256,000
in notes, but had increased the coin reserve in the Treas
ury to $225,000,000.

SPECIE PAYMENTS, 1 879 45

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Murray S. Wildman, Money Inflation in the United States (1905), gives
an excellent analysis of the chronic tendency of the frontier toward infla
tion. Wesley C. Mitchell, History of the Greenbacks (1903), is the best book
on its subject, while Davis R. Dewey, Financial History of the United
States, is in its numerous editions an almost ideal textbook on that subject
Fred E. Haynes, James Bird Weaver (1919), gives a picture of the green
back movement in the Middle West, which may be supplemented some
what by the thin compilation, W. Byars (ed.), Richard Parks Bland (1900).
The papers of Ignatius Donnelly are in the Minnesota State Historical
Society, while those of L. H. (Calamity) \\'eller are in the Wisconsin State
Historical Society. Ellis P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, the Financier of the
Civil War (1907), provides an admirable background for this period of
financial history.

CHAPTER V
THE COLLAPSE OF THE STALWARTS, 1880
The independent members of the Republican Party ex
erted a continuous influence after 1872, and by their threat
Republican to repeat the secession of that year brought pres-
factions g^j-g ^q |-,gar upon the professional rulers of th";
party. The widespread corruption in national sind local
administrations, revealed or suggested by the exploits of
Tweed, the gold conspiracy of Gould and Fisk, the Credit
Mobilier scandal, the whiskey ring, and the salary grab,
kept them resolved to struggle against the election of spoils
men to national office. In the spring of 1876 the meeting
of the independents at the Fifth Avenue Hotel was a
warning to the Republican Convention to be careful in its
nomination. The selection of Hayes was acceptable to
them, and his pledges to reform the national administra
tion followed by his appointment of Carl Schurz as Sec
retary of the Interior found favor in the independent
group. The main body of the Republicans were "Stalwart"
or "Half-Breed," according to their preference for leaders.
Senator Roscoe Conkling was the most prominent of the
Stalwart leaders, and included among his political intimates
most of the men who had been identified with the two
administrations of Grant. The Half-Breed faction com
monly avowed an interest in reform as opposed to the open
cynicism of many of the Stalwarts. James G. Blaine, their
most prominent leader, and John Sherman were less identi
fied with machine politics and more with the substance of
government than most of the Stalwarts. Both groups
were offensive to the Independents, and both found reasons
for an aversion to the political policies of Hayes, as the
latter undertook to fulfiU his pledge for good government.
The anger of the party leaders at the structure of the

THE COLLAPSE OF THE STALWARTS, 1880 47
Cabinet was intensified by an executive order issued in
June, 1877, forbidding office-holders to take office-
active share in party management. A bill to holders in
hinder the collection of assessments upon office
holders had been passed the summer before, but the new
order struck at the best recognized fact In party organi
zation. "The decision is undoubtedly the forerunner of
the most important new departure In modern politics,"
said the Chicago Tribune. Public officials everywhere held
party offices as national committeemen or as members
of the party organization in the States. The political ex
istence of many of these was tied up with the advantage
they enjoyed from their dual capacity, and the summer
conventions were watched for evidence as to the effective
ness of the reform. "He will need the zealous support of
all good men of both parties," said the New York Herald.
In New York, Alonzo Cornell, chairman of the State Re
publican Committee, defied the order, and continued to
hold on to his office as naval officer of the port of New York.
In Wisconsin Colonel E. W. Keyes treated it with more
respect and abdicated his State chairmanship rather than
be displaced from the post-office at Madison.
Public attention was directed to the New York Custom
House by the insubordination of Cornell, and the knowl
edge that he and Chester A. Arthur, collector of Arthur and
the port, were Stalwarts who stood high in the Cornell
councils of Senator Conkling. The Treasury Department,
under whose administrative jurisdiction they fell, was in
process of investigation by direction of Sherman, and was
reported to be a nest of political appointees more interested
in serving Stalwart policies than in earning the salaries they
received. It was rumored that the President had deter
mined to displace both officials, and Senator Conkling hur
ried home from a European trip to dominate the New York
Convention, and to fight the President. In December "we
saw to it that the President's plan was foiled," said Thomas
C. Piatt, chief assistant of Conkling. The Senate refused
to confirm the nominations of Theodore Roosevelt and

48 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
L. B. Prince as successors to Arthur and Cornell, and the
Stalwart officials continued at their posts until the close of
the session in 1878, when Hayes summarily suspended them
from office. Conkling denounced the suspension in fury
as party treachery, but the Senate finally permitted the
removal of the officers.
The breach between Hayes and the Stalwarts was widened
by the political martyrdom of Arthur and Cornell, but the
Independent Republicans were not drawn any closer to the
President. In the Interior Department and the Treasury
Schurz and Sherman were encouraged to make their ap
pointments on the basis of merit, but the President found
appointive offices for Florida and Louisiana Republicans
whose jobs had been lost when he withdrew the troops from
the South, and he temporarily closed the breach in the
party by sending Half-Breed members of his Cabinet to
help the Conkling forces in the New York campaign of 1878.
"We shall not have a political millennium until the people
want it" was the comment of Leslie's In 1877. The inde
pendents resented the President's inability to divorce him
self completely from politics, and the personal isolation of
Hayes continued to the end of his administration.
In September, 1879, General Ulysses S. Grant landed at
San Francisco from' his voyage around the world. His
Return of arrival followed a long series of stories of state
Grant receptions accorded him wherever he had gone.
He was received not only with the honors of royalty due to
an ex-President, but as the greatest soldier of his day. As
he traveled east across the States, with public banquets
and civic receptions at every stop, his popularity, tarnished
when he left the White House, resumed its fullest luster.
His former comrades in arms felt their political power for the
first time seriously. The prolonged Democratic filibusters
against paying the army and the enforcement of the law by
federal troops Increased the public's distrust of politicians
and its regard for Grant. He formally completed his trip
by a visit to PhUadelphia on December 16, where he was
entertained at the great celebration at the Union League

THE COLLAPSE OF THE STALWARTS, 1880 49
under the direction of Senator Don Cameron, his former
Secretary of War ; and the next day Cameron, with the fame
of Grant at its height, took up the reorganization of the Re
publican National Committee in order to make the renom
ination of Grant possible in 1880. "The reasons urged for
the renomination of General Grant," said Harper's Weekly,
" are typified in a picture of a man on horseback withstand
ing a host of anarchists."
The Republican National Committee, when it met in
Washington December 17, 1879, was without a head, since
Zachary Chandler, its former chairman, had recently died.
The friends of Grant took advantage of the vacant Pennsyl
vania seat on the committee to bring in Cameron. William
H. Kemble, the Pennsylvania member whom he replaced,
the reputed author of the spoilsman's phrase, "addition,
division, and silence," was under indictment for bribery,
growing out of the Pittsburgh riots of 1877. Cameron was
elected chairman of the committee at once, and with the
support of Conkling and Logan laid the plans to control the
Chicago Convention in the following June.
There was no thought of the renomination of Hayes to
succeed himself. He had disclaimed a second term before
starting on his first, and had not been under Nomina-
pressure to reconsider his determination ; nor did tions of
he give active support to any other aspirant for
the nomination. Blaine and Sherman were both brought
forward by their friends, Sherman believing that the nomina
tion was a fitting reward for his financial services, and Blaine
stirring up the antipathies aroused against him in 1876
when his similar aspirations had been impeded by scandals
connected with his career as Speaker of the House of Repre
sentatives. In the Chicago Convention Grant could have been nom
inated if It had been possible for the Stalwart leaders to hold
each State delegation to the unit rule. They contended
that the majority of a delegation from any State had the
right to determine the vote of the whole delegation as a unit.
This claim was beaten on the floor of the convention after a

50 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
persuasive speech against it by General James A, Garfield,
Congressman and Senator -elect from Ohio, and floor man
ager for Sherman. With the unit rule beaten. Grant's
" old guard " of 306 faithful delegates clung together in vain
Neither Sherman nor Blaine could command a majority of
the convention, and after a long deadlock Garfield was
nominated for the presidency on the thirty-sixth ballot.
Having nominated Garfield, a Half- Breed, the conven
tion made overtures for party unity by nominating Chester
A. Arthur as Vice-President. Goldwin Smith thought that
the victory of Garfield represented "the purer and better
part of the republican party," but the proceedings of the
convention indicate that the majority was inspired chiefly
by the desire to win. ''We are not here, sir," said Flana
gan, of Texas, whom the Chicago Tribune described as
possessing "a truthful and ingenuous mind," — "We are
not here, sir, for the purposes of providing offices for the
democracy. . . . After we have won the race, as we will,
we will give those who are entitled to positions office.
What are we up here for?"
A week after the Republican Convention the Greenback
Party nominated James B. Weaver, of Iowa, for the presi
dency. The Chicago Tribune reporter, impressed perhaps
by his recollection of Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth that
had exhibited the preceding week on the lake front, called it
a "side-show, and a funny one. ... It was an idiotic trin
ity, composed of Fiatists, Labor-Union Greenbackers, and
foreign Communists, with Free-Lovers, Woman-Suffragists,
and fanatics of every description." The Greenback Con
vention at least knew what it wanted, which was more than
could be said of the Democratic Party, which was stUl with
out a recognized leader except Tilden, who lay under the
suspicion aroused by the cipher dispatches. At Cincinnati
later in the month, the Democrats selected General Win
field Scott Hancock, "the Democratic Trojan horse," for
their candidate ; otherwise cynically described by the New
York Sun as "a good man, weighing two hundred and fifty
pounds."

THE COLLAPSE OF THE STALWARTS, 1880 51
There was no clear issue separating the two major parties,
and the nomination of each ticket was determined chiefly
by party avaUabUity. In General Hancock the Election of
Democratic Party sought to evade the Republi- ^^'¦'^^'<*
can charge of continued disloyalty, and to enjoy the advan
tages accruing from the nomination of a military hero. The
canvass was one of orthodox oratory and party Intrigue. To
ward the end of October a letter was forged In the interests
of the Democratic candidate and printed in the New York
Truth. It purported to have been written by Garfield to a
manufacturer named Morej' favoring the employment of
cheap Chinese labor throughout the West. It was widely
used in spite of Garfield's denial of the fraud. The chair
man of the Democratic National Committee affirmed its au
thenticity for a time "Look out for Roorbacks" was the
warning of the New York Tribune, cautioning the party to
be on its guard against further fresh lies. The Maine elec
tions coming in September stimulated more vigorous or
ganization by the Republican Party in behalf of Garfield.
Secretary Dorsey, of the Republican National Committee,
went in person to Indiana to take charge of the State elec
tion there on October 12, and the swinging of this doubtful
State into line was regarded as the political master-stroke
of the campaign. His Republican friends attended a
famous banquet given him at Delmonico's a little later,
where Grant was toastmaster and leaders of the party
gave countenance to his methods and success. The speech
of Arthur, openly alluding to corruption in the election,
was greeted with approving laughter by the banqueters.
The difficult task of Garfield during the canvass, to keep
in line the Conkling faction without losing the support of
Blaine and his friends, was made more difficult after his
election, when it was necessary for him to organize a Cabinet
to please all tastes. Blaine became his Secretary of State
and was his chief adviser. Overtures were made to the in
dependents by the appointment of one of their number,
Wayne MacVeagh, of Philadelphia, as Attorney-General.
An old supporter of Conkling, Postmaster Thomas L.

52 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
James, of New York, was promoted to be Postmaster-
General. The aversion of the Greenbackers in the West
to the financial methods of New York was recognized by
the appointment of WiUiam L. Windom, of- Minnesota, as
Secretary of the Treasury. The apparent harmony for
which Garfield struggled lasted only until he ventured
to send into the Senate his first personal nominations for
offices in the State of New York, and precipitated a strug
gle with the Senators from that State over his right to
control this patronage.
"Did you notice the nominations sent in yesterday?
They mean business and strength," wrote Mrs. James G.
Patronage Blaine, March 24, 1881, commenting upon the
and the nomination by President Garfield of a new col-
lector of the port for New York. Until this date
Garfield steered a middle course between the factions, and
the Stalwart Senators persuaded themselves that he would
not interfere with their local control of patronage. The in
fluence of Blaine In the Cabinet, however, as its only strong
and seasoned political member, was growing every day. His
long letters of advice to the President often contained sound
counsel, but when the President chose to assert his power
over offices at the center of Conkllng's political domain, he
invited certain opposition. Conkling opposed the confirma
tion of the nomination at once, invoking senatorial courtesy
on the ground that he had not been consulted in advance,
while Garfield invited attention to the issue by withdrawing
from the Senate other pending nominations in order to give
prominence to this particular appointment. He said to
John Hay, to whom he had offered the post of private
secretary, "They may take him out of the Senate head first
or feet first; / will never withdraw him." For nearly two
months Conkling and Piatt successfully postponed the con
firmation, but in May the Senate yielded to a growing pres
sure of public opinion that upheld the fundamental con
tention of Garfield that the power of appointment belongs
to the President and not to the Senator of any State.
On May 14 Conkling resigned his seat in the Senate in

THE COLLAPSE OF THE STALWARTS, 1880 53
protest against this impairment of his senatorial preroga
tive, and hurried to Albany, where the New York Legisla
ture was in session, hoping to be vindicated in his position
and triumphantly reelected. The junior Senator, Thomas
C. Piatt, resigned as weU, earning thereby the nickname,
" Me too," that clung to him for two decades, until he came
to be known as the "Easy Boss." Vice-President Arthur
went to Albany to assist in lobbying for his old associate,
but the "quixotic quest of vindication" by the "Stalwart
Jupiter" and his "little sateUite" came to nothing. The
New York Legislature was unmoved by the injured esteem
of its Senators and reelected neither of them. Piatt with
drew for a period into private business; Conkling passed
forever out of national politics, leaving behind him noth
ing that lasted except his cynical declaration that "when
Doctor Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge
of a scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibUIties of the
word 'reform.'"
The new Administration, fighting for its political life as
that of Hayes had done, was at least not hampered by or
ganized opposition in Congress. Here the Re- Murder of
publican Party expected to be able to command Garfield
majorities in both houses when they should convene in
December, 1881. Before that date arrived the whole as
pect of the political situation was changed by the murderous
attack made upon the President on July 2. Garfield was
at the time on his way to a college reunion at Willlamstown,
Massachusetts. The murderer, Guiteau, shot him as he
passed through the railway station to the train, and then
ran noisily into the arms of a waiting policeman, who asked
him why he had committed the act. His answer was, " I am
a Stalwart, and want Arthur for President." The later in
vestigations that were made showed that Guiteau was prob
ably a madman, and that he had earlier in the spring infested
the White House seeking a job, which had been refused.
His language that suggested a Stalwart plot had no founda
tion in the acts of any but himself, but the, mere fact that
the life of a President lay at the mercy of an office-seeker,

54 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
and that even a lunatic could justify murder on political
grounds, served to advertise the futility of the struggle of
the factions and the demoralizing nature of the fight for
patronage. Garfield lingered through the summer, reported as dying
one day and as recovering the next, and the Government
Chester A. in Washington was forced to dwell upon the
Arthur meaning of the phrase "total disability of the
President" as contained in the Constitution. The recess
of Congress prevented any attempt at legislative action to
interpret it. On September 19 Garfield died and Chester A.
Arthur, who had first come into national prominence when
Hayes attacked him as a spoilsman, took up the work of
President of the United States. Within the next few weeks
most of the members of Garfield's Cabinet were allowed to
resign and were replaced by Secretaries more congenial to
the new President. Only one of the resigning statesmen
left a perceptible gap. Blaine had brought force and
personality into the State Department, and had seen the
possibility of turning American foreign policy into an af
firmative program. He carried on with vigor the contro
versy that Evarts started under Hayes with reference to
the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and American rights on the
Isthmus of Panama. He revived the note of American
cooperation that Simon Bolivar touched in 1825, and
issued invitations for a Pan-American Congress to meet in
Washington. He intervened in the war in South America
and he brought foreign affairs into domestic politics by the
anti-British tenor of his correspondence, which gained him
wide popularity with the Irish vote. He retired into pri
vate life in December, 1881, residing in Washington and
devoting himself to the composition of his Twenty Years of
Congress. The successor of Blaine, Frelinghuysen, contin
ued the policies as started except that the invitations for
the Pan-American Congress were withdrawn.
The reorganization of the Cabinet, instead of being the
first step toward a clean sweep of Half-Breeds out of office,
was substantially the last step taken. To the amazement

THE COLLAPSE OF THE STALWARTS, 1880 55
of his former associates "Chet" Arthur was unwilling to
proscribe the faction of Garfield. He never gained the re
gard of the Half-Breed group, nor the support of the in
dependents, but he succeeded In turning against himself the
opposition of the group that had followed Conkling. In
his personal conduct he changed from the manners of a
custom-house politician to those of one of the most dignified
Presidents of the United States. Before the end of his
administration, decay had weakened the powers of the Stal
wart ring, and issues connected with new problems in
American life had begun to remould the character of the
Republican Party. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency (1898), is always the easiest
and best reference for the platforms of national parties and the details of
presidential campaigns. Professor Theodore Clark Smith is engaged in the
preparation of a needed life of Garfield. James G. Blaine, Twenty Years
of Congress (1884), covers the period preceding his appointment as Secre
tary of State. His official biography written after his death is Mary
Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Biography of James G. Blaine (1895).
Edward Stanwood, his brother-in-law, also has a James Gillespie Blaine
(1905). The Recollections of John Sherman give one a version of the con
vention of 1880. A. B. Conkling, Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling
(1889), is an unimportant biography. Campaign methods may be fol
lowed in Testimony Before the Wallace Select Committee of the Senate on
Election Frauds, 46th Cong., 2d Sess., Sen. Rep. 427.

CHAPTER VI
THE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLANT
National politics lost much of its hold on the people in
the administrations of Hayes and Garfield, in which poll-
Era of ticlans seemed to be squabbling for factional
prosperity advantage and the spoils, and In which few of
the recognized leaders had any program to offer for the
better adjustment of government to the facts of life. More
interesting in all respects were the facts of life themselves,
as the depression prevailing for five years after 1873 was
replaced by normal conditions, and these in turn by in
creasing prosperity that burst into an era of lavish specu
lation while Arthur was President. Robert IngersoU,
perhaps the greatest orator of his day, spoke better than
he knew when he declared in the Republican Convention
of 1876 "that prosperity and resumption, when they come,
must come together; that when they come, they will come
hand in hand through the golden harvest fields; hand In
hand by the whirling spindles and the turning wheels ; hand
in hand by the open furnace doors; hand in hand by the
flaming forges; hand in hand by the chimneys filled with
eager fire, greeted and grasped by the countless sons of toil."
lerneath the prosperity that prevailed in the decade
/of the eighties was confidence In the stability and credit of
' the Government. Resumption placed all money on a parity
and destroyed the uncertainties that came with fluctuating
currency. The supply of labor was recruited by increasing
hordes of immigrants from Europe. Continuous falling
prices made the dollar of the wage-earner go farther than
expected every day. Economic leadership at the top was
founded upon the completion of a transportation plant
national in its extent and upon mechanical Invention that
enlarged the list of human wants and increased the ease of
satisfying them.

THE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLANT 57
Most of the railroads of the United States in 1879 had
been built in the preceding forty years and all of them had
commonly been operated as private business on a oigappear-
competitive basis. One by one the regions of the ance of
United States were relieved from the limitations
upon free communication established by the mountain
ranges and the direction of river flow. The railroads cut
across all obstacles and introduced new competitions with
the older highways of trade. Before the Civil War, with
thirty thousand miles of track in operation, the East and
the old Northwest were well supplied with railroads, and
the South was partially provided. In the decade of the
sixties the greatest railway changes were north and west
of Chicago, and on the border of the Western plains, where
the Union Pacific Railway was driven to the Pacific. The
opening of this road in 1869 marks the beginning of the
final chapter in the building of the railroad plant. The
Eastern States were still separated from the Pacific slope
by the great barrier of plains, mountains, and desert, but in
the next fifteen years this space was crossed and recrossed
until, by the end of 1883, the open frontier was gone forever,
and the United States was equipped with a national railroad
system of 110,414 miles that enabled every region in the
country to find a market for its products and that worked
continuously to lower the costs of delivery from maker to
consumer. In the years between 1869 and 1883, four continental
railroads, all encouraged by grants of land by Congress,
were carried to completion. The Northern i^^^^^
Pacific was chartered in 1864 to run from Lake grants to
Superior to Puget Sound ; the Atlantic and Pacific
was to be built from southwestern Missouri to southern
California and was chartered in 1866. The Texas Pacific,
authorized in 1871, was the last of the land-grant continen
tal railroads, and was proposed to be built from the junc
tion point of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, west to
California. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fd received
a local land grant given by Congress to Kansas and built

58 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
southwest over the Santa Fe Trail and down the valley of
the Rio Grande. All of these railroads were started before
the panic of 1873, and the completion of all was delayed
until the depression following that panic had spent its
force. The construction gangs of the continental railroads re
appeared upon the high plains in the building seasons of
1878 and 1879. In the interval of depression, steel rails
had increased in popularity and structural steel had begun
to be available to take the place of timber and masonry.
The discoveries of Sir Henry Bessemer and the resulting
processes for the commercial manufacture of steel took
place In the preceding decade, but the output of the rolling
mills was not sufficient for the needs of building before
1873. The use of steel wrought a revolution in the construc
tion of bridges, in naval engineering, and in city architec
ture, but nowhere was the change more welcome than in
railroad-building where the steel rail provided for the first
time a safe and durable roadway for the rolling stock.
The Southern Pacific of California, although it had no
continental franchise of its own, led in the completion of
the Southern group of railroads. By 1883 through trains
were running over its tracks to the Colorado River, and
thence east over three lines to the Mississippi. It estab
lished traffic arrangements with the Atchison, Topeka, and
Santa Fd, which took its trains to Kansas City and St.
Louis; and with the Texas Pacific, which took them across
the whole width of Texas from El Paso to Texarkana; and
it acquired local lines in southern Texas through San An
tonio and Houston to New Orleans.
The opening of the Southern continental railroads took
place in 1882 and 1883. The successful operation of the
lines called for a degree of team-work unusual on the rail
roads, notorious for their rate wars and their cut-throat
competition. The Western magnates, drawn into the rail
road business to build the Central Pacific, and staying in
It to control the Southern Pacific and its eastern connec
tions, desired to simplify their holdings. They secured in

THE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLANT 59
1884 a charter from the State of Kentucky for a Southern
Pacific Company which they operated as a holding cor
poration for their Western roads. They secured their
charter as far away from the location of the railroads as
they could so as to minimize the risk of public Interference
with their business. The Southern Pacific system, which
emerged from their construction and manipulation, domi
nated the whole southwestern quarter of the United States.
Henry Villard, a journalist of German birth, played the
most prominent part in the completion of the Northern
Pacific Railway. Jay Cooke, the financier of -j-j^g North-
the Civil War, and the best-known American em Pacific
banker of the sixties, had undertaken to build
this road and had been broken by it in 1873. From Duluth
at the tip of Lake Superior It had been built to the Missouri
River before the panic stopped it, and it had constructed a
few miles in Washington near Its terminal city of Tacoma.
In 1879 construction was renewed from the Missouri River
to the junction of the Columbia and Snake near old Fort
Walla Walla. At this point Henry Villard, who had ac
quired control of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Com
pany, began to exert pressure upon the Northern Pacific
to secure favorable terms for his rail and steamship lines in
the Northwest. He failed to secure these terms by open
negotiation, but was able to raise a large sum among his
New York friends to form a "blind pool" for a profitable
private speculation. With the funds of the pool he bought
secretly enough stock to control both the Northem Pacific
and the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company and
organized the Oregon and Trans-Continental as a holding
company to manage it.
The Northern Pacific line was opened in September,
1883, but failed to arouse much comment because the news
value of Pacific railroads had recently been lessened by the
completion of the Southern Pacific links. Villard made a
great celebration of it, with a special train and many in
vited guests, but his road traversed an unsettled country
and was in financial trouble from the start.

6o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The Denver and Rio Grande, working in cooperation
with the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, opened another
through service almost continental in its extent in the sum
mer of 1883. Its tracks from Denver to Ogden followed
the royal gorge of the Arkansas River, and in Ogden it made
a connection with the Union Pacific and lines leading to the
Northwest. The continental frontier, first pierced by a railroad in
1869, was completely destroyed by 1884. Along six differ
ent lines, between New Orleans and St. Paul, it had been
made possible to cross the sometime American Desert to
the Pacific States. No large portion of the United States
remained beyond the reach of easy colonization. Instead of
a waste that forbade national unity, and compelled a rudi
mentary civilization in its presence, a thousand plains
stations beckoned for colonists and long lines of railroads
bound the nation into an economic and political unit. That
which General Sheridan had foreseen in 1882 was now a fact.
He had written : ' ' As the railroads overtook the successive
lines of isolated frontier posts and settlements spread out
over country no longer requiring military protection, the
army vacated Its temporary shelters and marched on into
remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue its
pioneer work. In rear of the advancing line of troops the
primitive 'dugouts' and cabins of the frontiersmen were
steadily replaced by the tasteful houses, thrifty farms, neat
villages, and busy towns of a people who knew how best to
employ the vast resources of the great West. The civiliza
tion from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that rap
idly approaching it from the direction of the Pacific, the
long Intervening strip of territory, extending from the Brit
ish possessions to Old Mexico, yearly growing narrower;
finally the dividing lines will entirely disappear and the
mingling settlements absorb the remnants of the once
powerful Indian nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly at
tempted to forbid the destined progress of the age."
The completion of the continental railroads made possi
ble the adoption of a reform long needed for the comfort of

THE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLANT 6i
the traveling public. In England, with the Hmited dis
tances, it had been possible to extend the time standard
of Greenwich Observatory over the whole island *™^
without causing great Inconvenience. In France the time
of Paris had been made the standard time, but in the
United States with a range of fifty degrees In longitude,
meaning a difference in true time of some three hours be
tween the oceans, no single standard could be adopted.
Every railroad followed its own preference In adjusting its
time-tables, and in cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St.
Louis, where large numbers of railroads converged, each
with its own system, the traveler needed to have his wits
about him when he handled the railroad guides. A stand
ard time convention held in the spring of 1883 found some
fifty-six standards of time in use In the United States. Later
in the year the owners of nearly eighty thousand miles of
railroad agreed to the adoption of four zones, each uni
formly operating on a single standard. On November 18,
1883, standard time came into existence.
With the continental railroads built, the transportation
plant of the United States was substantially complete, and
although its mileage continued to grow, the future growth
was one of detail and improvement of local service. The
rapidity with which the continental roads were thrust across
the plains and the mountains to the Pacific, following the
trails of the overland emigrants and searching out the min
ing camps of the Western Territories, brought an unex
pected strain upon both the General Land Office and the
Post-Office Department, with the result that the latter
broke down and became the victim of a notorious scandal
in 1 88 1, while the Land Office needed a thorough overhaul
ing by the successor of Arthur.
The task of the Postmaster-General to deliver the mails
was susceptible of routine administration in those parts of
the country where the population was thickly spread in
permanent residences. The mail service to the frontier was
the most expensive and the most difficult to administer, but
the mail routes followed the wagon-roads of the farmers

62 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
with considerable success. In the mining region of the Far
West there was no such certainty. At best the mines were
hundreds of miles away from the larger centers of settled
life. The transitory character of the mining camp made it
possible for a city of ten thousand inhabitants to appear
within a single month and to disappear as rapidly. The
mining communities demanded a mail service sufficiently
elastic to keep up with their shiftlngs from place to place,
and Congress recognized this need by providing special
treatment for the Western mail routes.
The practice of the Post-Office Department was to divide
all mail routes into two classes, according as the pouches
were carried by train or boat, or by some other conveyance.
The latter group. Indicated on the Post-Office's lists by-
stars, were known as the ' ' star routes ' ' and included those
services rendered by wagon, stagecoach, or mail rider.
The longest and most important of the star routes served
the remote settlements in the Western plains and moun
tains. They were subject to the sudden and unexpected
demands of a shifting population that became more insist
ent as the population of the plains Increased and as the ad
vancing railroads encouraged wider settlement. The or
dinary mail routet) were advertised and let at fixed prices to
the contractors who operated them, but in the case of the
star routes the law permitted a readjustment of compensa
tion without readvertising the route in case a need should
arise for increased service or greater expedition. The
Second Assistant Postmaster-General, whose duty it was to
adjust the mail service to the fluctuating demands upon It,
became in 1881 a central figure in the star-route frauds.
For several years before 1881 Congress was irritated by
the fact that the financial needs of the star routes could not
Star-route be anticipated, and that the office was being
frauds operated without reference to available funds,
but in reliance upon deficiency appropriations. In the post-
office hearings testimony was taken to show the uncertain
ties of the service and the impossibility of reducing it to
schedule. The star routes were investigated in 1878 and

THE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLANT 63
shown to be In an unsatisfactory condition, partly because
of the financial Irresponsibility of the frontier mail con
tractors. Washington became conscious of a group of con
sistent bidders for the star routes, among whom the most
prominent were Stephen W. Dorsey and various of his rela
tives. Dorsey was a former Senator from Arkansas and as
secretary of the Republican National Committee managed
Garfield's campaign in 1880.
Thomas J. Brady, in charge of the star routes as Second
Assistant Postmaster-General, was under suspicion of mis
management and extravagance in 1880, and resigned his
office under pressure from the President in April, 1881,
while the Senate was deadlocked over the New York Cus-
tom-House appointment. The charge against Brady, as
rumor popularly stated it, was that he had acted in collu
sion with a ring of political star-route contractors, of which
Dorsey was the chief ; that the favored contractors had put
In fictitious bids for the star routes and had secured the
contracts because their bids were below the actual cost of
the service to any honest contractor; that upon receiving
the contracts they had by collusion and fraud produced
evidence in favor of accelerating' the mails or increasing the
service over their routes, and that Brady had criminally
raised the compensation to an unreasonable amount. In
134 routes originally awarded at $143,169, the compensa
tion was thus raised to $622,808. After raising the com
pensation the favored contractors sublet the routes and
divided the proceeds among themselves. It was charged
that they had also contributed generously to the Republi
can campaign funds. "It is difficult to believe," said the
Stalwart Chicago Inter-Ocean, "that he [Brady] was not in
league with a set of unscrupulous contractors to defraud
the Govemment."
Brady resigned under pressure, denying his guilt, and
Washington gossip was informed that he would never be
prosecuted because Garfield was himself in- The Hub-
volved and because Brady possessed letters that ''^'^ '^**^^''
would involve others in his downfall. A few days after his

64 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
retirement, a letter written by Garfield while a candidate,
to the chairman of the Republican campaign committee, was
given to the press, and It was threatened that more would
follow. The Hubbell letter was written in a dark moment
of the campaign, when party funds were low, and there was
doubt as to whether the Stalwarts would support the ticket.
"My dear Hubbell," wrote Garfield from Mentor, August
23, 1880, "Yours of the 19th instant is received. Please
say to Brady that I hope he will give us all the assistance
possible. I think he can help effectively. Please tell me
how the departments are doing." The murder of Garfield
before the trial of Brady prevented further revelations if
Indeed there were any to be made, but Attorney-General
MacVeagh proceeded to prepare the cases, employing in the
work Benjamin Harrison Brewster, whom Arthur selected
to succeed him as Attorney-General. The trial and con
viction of Guiteau was dragging out Its fifty-three days of
unseemly court-room conduct when the first of the star-
route cases came to trial in Washington and was dismissed
on technical grounds. One of the accused, M. C. Rerdell,
a former private secretary of Dorsey, had already confessed
his guilt and filed affidavits showing the nature of the fraud.
A Washington grand jury indicted Dorsey and Brady and
several others in February, 1882, and suits against indi-
Acquittal vldual Contractors were brought locally through-
of Dorsey out the Country. The trial took place in the
summer with Robert IngersoU defending the
accused, two of whom, minor accomplices, were found
guilty. The conviction was set aside by the court and a
new trial was arranged for the summer of 1883, Dorsey
meanwhile publishing a long public statement of his in
nocence on December i, 1882, as well as numerous letters
tending to show his political intimacy with General Gar
field. He resigned as secretary of the Republican National
Committee in January, 1883, and was finally acquitted in
June in spite of the testimony of Rerdell. None of the
principals of the star- route frauds was ever convicted, but
the testimony throws a strong light upon the conditions

THE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION .PLANT 65
prevailing in the Far West in the last days of the old fron
tier, and upon the character of the civil service that Presi
dent Hayes had tried in vain to reform.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best works on the continental railroads are L. H. Haney, A Con
gressional History of Railroads, 1850-1887 (1910), E. V. Smalley, Northern
Pacific Railroad (1883), J. P. Davis, The Union Pacific Railway (1894),
and C. F. Carter, When Railroads Were New (1909). Further data on the
Northern Pacific maybe found in E. P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke (1907), and
Henry Villard, Memoirs (1904). For the Canadian Pacific, see Beckles
Willson, The Life of Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal (1915), and Walter
Vaughan, The Life and Work of Sir William Van Home (1920) ; for the
Great Northern, see Joseph G. Pyle, The Life of James J. Hill (1917).
The subject is specially treated in the monograph, F. L. Paxson, "The
Pacific Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier," in the American
Historical Association, Annual Report, 1907. The trend of falling prices
after 1879 may be studied in T. E. Burton and G. S. Selden, A Century of
Prices {l^if)). ,The history of the star routes must still be dug out from
the newspaper reports of the trials and the congressional investigations.

CHAPTER VII
BUSINESS AND SOCIETY
The completion of the national railroad system brought
forces into operation that tended to reduce prices in the
years that followed, and made it possible for business to take
advantage of the wider markets that were made avaUable.
In March, 1881, Howells published, in the Atlantic Monthly,
"The Story of a Great Monopoly," by Henry Demarest
Lloyd, which was the "first volley" in a national attack
upon monopolies. The article was so widely read that It
took seven editions of the Atlantic to meet the demand,
while the Standard Oil Company, which was the subject of
the story, took a leadership among the unpopular monopo
lies that it has never lost.
The petroleum industry began about 1859, when means
were found to refine, the crude petroleum that existed in
widely spread deposits in the Appalachian re-
Kerosene . , 11, , . ,
gion, and to burn the kerosene that resulted
for illuminating purposes. The kerosene lamp lengthened
the day throughout the civilized world and speedily drove
out of use the candles and the animal oils upon which
society had formerly been forced to rely. The dim and
flickering flame of the gaslight continued to be adopted and
improved, but the new lamp filled such a genuine want that
it created a universal market for petroleum.
Between i860 and 1880 the petroleum Industry passed
through its speculative stages, while John D. Rockefeller,
of Cleveland, and his associates gained control of most of
the refineries. The business was essentially one of monop
oly character because of the heavy investment necessary
before the oil could be transported with economy, and the
cheapness of transport after the Investment had been made.
In the oil regions any farmer could sink his wells and pro
duce crude petroleum at the well mouth at low cost. In

BUSINESS AND SOCIETY 67
the early years this was carried In barrels from the well
mouth to the refinery and thence to the retailer. The oil
was cheap and the barrels were costly, and the difficulties
of storage and transportation controlled the price of oil.
Tank-cars were invented a little later at greater initial cost,
but with greater economies in operation, while the owner of
tank-cars was able to bargain to advantage with the trunk-
line railroads for the business of hauling them to tidewater.
The New York Central, the Erie, the Lackawanna, the
Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and Ohio all reached the
oil region and scrambled for the business, offering special ad
vantages and rebates to secure the traffic of the larger ship
pers. These special rates made it possible for the larger
shippers to grow still larger, and none of the refiners ex
celled Rockefeller in skill and ingenuity in gaining advan
tage from the unstable railroad rates.
As public opinion tfirned against special rates and re
bates in the later seventies, the pipe-line from oil-field to
refinery, and thence to distributing points, with pumplng-
stations en route, was invented to take over much of the
traffic of the tank-cars. These pipe-lines still further in
creased the costs for construction, yet made possible more
sweeping economies in the delivery of oil. The most vex
atious portion of the business from the standpoint of the
operators was the great number of rival companies and their
various competing policies. In January, 1882, Rockefeller
brought about a combination In the oil business, whereby
the stock in the competing companies was turned over to
be managed by a board of trustees. He dominated this
board, and the trust that it created produced Immediate
harmony in the oil-refining busmess, which was recognized
at once in spite of the fact that the agreement Itself was kept
secret for several years.
The oil monopoly raised a problem in politics that tended
to dim the recognition of the importance of kerosene in mak
ing life more livable. Another monopoly, openly launched
in January, 1881, brought into single hands another of the
newer inventions, the electric telegraph.

68 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The story of Samuel F. B. Morse and his persistent
struggle to secure the adoption of the telegraph and to re-
The tain control of its operation is one of the most in-
telegraph spiring tales in the field of Industry. After its
experimental period the telegraph became a reality in 1844,
and spread its network of wires over the nation in the next
few years. Like the early railroad lines telegraph wires
were stretched piecemeal by a multitude of rival companies.
At the end of the seventies consolidation of the rival com
panies had progressed so far that three organizations, the
Western Union, the American Union, and the Atlantic and
Pacific controlled most of the Hnes. In January, 1881, Jay
Gould and William H. Vanderbilt brought about the consoli
dation of these three companies in the Western Union, and
the newspapers of the country bitterly described themselves
as in the clutcnes of a monster monopoly.
The telegraph was discovered by the random reflection
of a portrait painter, while its sister instrument was patented
The by Alexander Graham Bell, an elocutionist who
telephone reached his idea through the theory of acoustics.
The basic patent of the Bell telephone was filed in February,
1876, and at the Philadelphia Centennial the interesting toy
was on exhibition, where it aroused the excited admiration
of the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil. W^ith the assistance
of Theodore N. Vail, Bell put his patent into commercial use
and before the end of the decade commercial exchanges
made their appearance in the larger cities. There were
444,000 instruments in use in 1890, the Bell Telephone com
panies had approached the condition of monopoly, but the
habits of business had undergone a greater change than has
been produced by any other instrument except the type
writer. The invention of a practical writing machine was not due
to chance, but to long experiment by many inventors, in
The which Charles Latham Sholes was the first to be
typewriter successful. By 1 874 he had devised a machine
with movable types that would actually write, and soon after
1880 several typewriters were on the market. It took many

BUSINESS AND SOCIETY 69
years for the typewriter to overcome the prejudice in favor
of the written word in polite and formal correspondence, but
its easy popularity In the business office encouraged Inven
tors to try to adapt the idea to typesetting. Mark Twain,
who spent money freely when he had it, wasted a fortune In
this search, backing the wrong inventor of a typesetting
machine. Other inventions that, increased the ease of com
munication and widened the influence of the individual in
business were the half-tone process that made it possible
to reproduce photographs and other illustrations, and the
photographic dry plate, which appeared in 1878 and brought
the camera within reach of every one.
The increasing use of electricity Invited the experiments
that were made by Thomas A. Edison to perfect the incan
descent light. In his experimental laboratory incandes-
at Menlo Park, New Jersey, he carried out a long ^^"-^ ''^^*®
series of experiments in a deliberate search for the right fila
ment and the proper structure of the glass bulb. The arc
Hght was already here and there in use, but was noisy in
operation and gave at best only a flickering light. Edison
was successful in 1879, and at the end of the year introduced
a perfected light. The significance of the incandescent light
was instantly seen. Gas companies became apprehensive
as to their future revenues. A decade later, when plans
were being laid for the decoration of the World's Fair at
Chicago, it was possible to rely upon the incandescent Hght
not only for illumination, but for artistic and easily controlled
effects of light. The phonograph that Edison designed
earlier than his incandescent light was a workable toy, but
developed less rapidly.
The new inventions, gaining popularity for themselves
in the early eighties, ran parallel to a wider use of older in
ventions. The sewing machine fell in price due to the ex
piration of its basic patent rights in 1877, agricultural
machinery continued to be Improved and to be used upon
an ever-wider scale, while the manufacture of the new de
vices brought new factories into existence and increased the
congestion in the cities. The home became more comfort-

70 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
able, with the oil lamp and the sewing machine; and into
newer homes was brought the luxury of the telephone and
incandescent lights, as the central stations were built to
provide these services. The Increasing size of the cities
raised the problem of rapid transit, with New York, be
cause of its peculiar topography, leading in the search
for improvements in transportation. The horse-cars and
omnibuses that provided the first organized traffic in the
cities came to be regarded as too slow and clumsy. Ele
vated railroads were experimented with in the Interests of
speed and safety, and before 1880 were In operation in New
York. A bridge across the East River to Brooklyn, much
desired for a similar reason, was built during this decade and
was formally opened to traffic in May, 1883. Edison was
by this date experimenting with an electric-driven trolley-
car, while other inventors were hoping to solve the problem
b/3ieans of cables run In underground conduits.
The Middle and Eastern States underwent the greatest
as the Industrial reorganization advanced. The
Westem States were most affected by the rail
way growth. The Southern States in these same
years of business revival showed signs of re
covery from the depression of the Civil-War period, and
started upon an Independent economic life. The Southern
railroads were nearly extinct in 1865, and their rebuilding
ran through many years. The construction of great rail
road bridges across the Mississippi at St. Louis in 1874 ^^^
at Memphis in 1892 give the limits for the period in which
the South revived. The old plantation as it was known be
fore the war disappeared in the economic revolution, and in
Its place came a shrinkage in the size of farms and an in
crease in the number of tenant farmers. These farmers,
white or black, still devoted themselves chiefly to the culti
vation of cotton, and carried a burden of debt as heavy as
that of the pioneer farmer In the Western States. The debt
of the Southern farmer held him to the cultivation of a
single crop, the loans were made by the general storekeeper
in the form of credit advances secured by notes upon the

BUSINESS AND SOCIETY 71
forthcoming cotton crop, and it was to the interest of the
creditor to secure as large a crop as possible in order to
safeguard his loans.
The credit system of the South was a burden upon its
development, but in spite of it a new spirit was visible in
the former Confederacy. A Cotton States' oeveiop-
Exposition was held at New Orleans in 1884 to ment of
celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the earli
est cotton exports from the South. The exhibits revealed
the economic regeneration that was under way. In the
next few years the development of the railroad systems in
duced a more diversified agriculture. The cotton-lands of
Texas were brought Into use, and their competition reduced
the prosperity of the older cotton States, driving these to
better agriculture and the cultivation of additional crops.
The social life of the South was still determined by the
presence of its negro population. The unwillingness of the
white inhabitants to be ruled by the negro vote brought
about a practical nullification of the Civil-War amendments
to the Constitution. The right of the negro to vote was
taken away from him by fraud or force, as home rule was
reestablished in the early seventies. The civil rights con
ferred upon the freedman by the Fourteenth Amendment
and enforced by subsequent acts of Congress were declared
by the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1884 not
to include the right to equality of social treatment. In
1890 Mississippi adopted an educational test as a qualifi
cation for suffrage and as a means of disfranchising the
negro without violating the Fifteenth Amendment, and the
other Southern States soon followed suit. The South as
a whole was recovering its self-confidence, but it had be
come poHtically a region of a single^ party.
The change in business, whether through new inventions
or through the reorganization of old industries, gave oppor
tunities for the accumulation of private fortunes Money
hitherto unknown in the United States. A ^'"^s
group of money kings arose, with fortunes whose existence
appeared to challenge the success of the existing social

7i RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
order, and whose personal conduct absorbed public atten
tion to an increasing extent.
The earlier American fortunes were ordinarily the result
of commerce or banking. In 1877 Commodore Cornelius
Vanderbilt died and within a few months he was followed
by John Jacob Astor and A. T. Stewart, who with him were
regarded as the richest men in America. The three for
tunes thus passed on to other hands were typical of different
methods of accumulation. Two had been acquired, one
had been inherited. The original John Jacob Astor, a Ger
man peddler, came to America near the close of the Revolu
tion and was soon identified with the organization of the
fur trade in the Northwest. His gains, according to the
popular tradition, were Invested in New York real estate
and became the nucleus of an estate that grew in value as
New York City spread up Manhattan Island toward the
Bronx. By 1877 it had become the greatest of American
inherited properties and was becoming the foundation of a
notable family.
.Stewart and Vanderbilt made their own fortunes. The
former, an Irish immigrant, became a general merchant,
and his New York store was started before his death upon
the course of development that produced the great depart
ment store of the next decade. Cornelius Vanderbilt earned
his honorary title of "commodore" by operating steam
boat lines in the waters around New York. About 1 867 he
turned his savings into railroad securities and soon became
the dominating master of the New York Central. His
son, William K. Vanderbilt, took on the guidance of the
business before his father's death, and later defended the
will, in which the Commodore had held most of his wealth
together and passed It qn to the favorite son. The younger
Vanderbilt carried the New York Central lines through the
strikes of 1877 with a minimum of interruption, and in 1882
became identified with one of the famous phrases in Ameri
can business. The Pennsylvania Railroad had just started
a new fast train to Chicago and when Vanderbilt was asked
what the New York Central would do to meet the public

BUSINESS AND SOCIETY 73
expectation of a rival train, he replied briefly (so the re
porter insisted), "The pubHc be damned." The phrase
gained a wide and embarrassing circulation and was given
interpretations not intended by its user, but did not mis
represent the practical attitude of most railroads and many
other great Industrial enterprises of Its day.
Xhe newer fortunes, whose owners were now working
themselves Into the public eye, were often too huge to have
been accumulated by the efforts of a single man, and were in
many cases the results of successful speculation or of well-
directed team-work. Jay Gould and Thomas A. Scott
were representative of the railroad group. The latter, pres
ident of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was also identified
with many Western roads and was engaged in 1878 in an
effort to secure the land subsidy voted to the Texas Pacific
Railway in 1871, but forfeited through non-construction.
The New York Sun insinuated that the Texas Pacific pool
had induced the Southern States to accept Hayes as Presi
dent without revolt on the promise that Congress would
do something for the Texas Pacific. Scott at least was oc
cupied in the construction and operation of railroads. Jay
Gould's connection with them was chiefly speculative.
Gould gained his place before the public as one of the
gold conspirators who tried in 1869 to corner the market
and raise the premium on gold. A decade later he was
associated with the reorganization of the Union Pacific and
the Kansas Pacific as they struggled to get on their feet
after the depression of the seventies, and a little later he
put the Wabash system together. In 1880 he was sus
pected of being the principal financial supporter of James
G. Blaine. He died in 1892, turning his whole estate into
family channels. .  ^
The fortunes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rocke
feller, becoming notable in this decade, were founded upon
team-work and the exploitation of natural resources. Each
was believed capable of ruthless competition, but each was
the center of a group of associates that added to the re
sources of the country, Oil and steel were brought into a

74 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
new relationship with society as the industrial revolution
progressed, and the profits that accrued as the Standard
Oil companies and the Carnegie Steel Interests rose to
national ascendancy were largely the result of a service
actually rendered.
The American millionaire became a figure in all the cap
itals of the world, as well as in American society, and re
ceived a full-length portrait in the Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885). The ambition to found families was early recog
nized, and as the great wealth of millionaires made it diffi
cult for poorer persons to associate with them, they flocked
by themseWes at Saratoga Springs and Newport, and gave
the incentive for the development of winter resorts in Flor
ida and southern California. Their social habits were con
stantly under criticism by a public that regarded them with
a mixture of pride and exasperation. In 1886 a group of
wealthy New Yorkers opened a residence colony of their
own at Tuxedo Park, on the former estate of Pierre Loril-
lard, where they built a casino, and playgrounds, and cot
tages, and acquired the distinction without knowing it of
bringing the country club into American life.
The plainer Americans, admitting no inferiority and irri
tated when travelers spoke of the middle and the lower
Popular classes, organized recreation of their own as the
recreation cities became too congested for comfort. The
population of New York City discovered Coney Island in
1876 on an attractive beach that had been unoccupied a
few years before, and the drive thither from Brooklyn was
crowded with trotting horses and showy carriages, while
steamboat lines and special railroads moved the larger
crowds. Cape May, famous before the Civil War as a
summer resort, was now outclassed by Atlantic City, whose
nearness to Philadelphia made it an easy outlet for the city
crowd. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Ida M. Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), is the best
work of its kind. John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men ani
Events (1909), is of slight value, g. L., Morse (ed.), Samuel f.. B.. iforsfi,^

BUSINESS AND SOCIETY 75
His Letters and Journals (1914), is an invaluable contribution to the history
of the telegraph; less substantial are Herbert N. Casson, History of the
Telephone (1910), F. T. Cooper, Thomas A. Edison (1914), and F. J.
Garbit, The Phonograph and its Inventor, Thomas Alvah Edison (1878).
Mrs. Burton Harrison, History of the City of New York (1896), describes the
changes in the material structure of that city. Robert P. Brooks, The
Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, i86s-igi2 (1914), gives a detailed picture
of the changes in one Southern State. Burton J. Hendrick, The Age of Big
Business (1919), gives entertaining biographical sketches of several of the
wealthiest captains of industry.

CHAPTER VIII
REFORM
Widespread prosperity followed the resumption of specie
payments in 1879. Railroads and factories provided con
stant demand for labor, while the former opened up great
areas of public domain for purposes of farming. The fall In
prices, that had seemed a menace to the existence of the
farmer in the days of the depression, ceased to worry him
in the good years that followed. The parties of protest,
born of hard times, dwindled between 1878 and 1882, and
lost most of their supporters except the incorrigible ideal
ists, who were unwilling to put up with the compromises of
the larger parties and persisted in hoping that a third party
might be the vehicle of real reform.
In the Congressional elections of 1882, the Democratic
Party rushed to the attack with party capital derived from
Congres- ^^^ misfortunes of the Republicans, and here and
sional elec- there, where factional controversy existed in
Republican communities, there was unearned
political profit for Democratic and Greenback candidates.
President Arthur was performing his duties in partial iso
lation, with his former Stalwart friends chilled by his deser
tion, and Independents not satisfied of his complete repent
ance. The star-route frauds were at the height of their
notoriety, and were used to show a demoralized condition
in Republican administration. The varied attempts of the
Administration to save its party were turned to its disad
vantage. The Secretary of the Treasury, Charles A. Fol
ger, was nominated for governor of New York and was sup
ported vigorously by the Administration, with the result
that he was treated as a machine candidate and was beaten
by a relatively unknown man, Grover Cleveland, who stood
as the champion of reform.
The Republican Congressional campaign was managed

REFORM 77
by the same J. A. Hubbell, of Michigan, to whom Garfield
had written his unwise letter In 1880. In a series of circu
lars which Democratic papers copied widely, he called upon
the federal office-holders for assessments to the party funds,
and declared that these were voluntary, when taxed with
violation of the anti-assessment law of 1876.
The appeal for reform attracted much attention. Hub
bell himself lost his seat In Congress, and a Democratic
House of Representatives, chosen to take office Tariff
in 1883, became an admonition to the Republi- "^^vision
cans in the short session of 1882-83 to pass what laws they
could before they lost control. A revision of the tariff was
the most pressing of their necessities, for there were signs
that the Democratic Party was demanding a reform in the
revenue system, and that good Republicans were unwilling
to defend it. "There are stupendous interests in America
which have grown into monopolies through the artificial
nurture of the tariff," said the Stalwart New York Herald.
The Secretary of the Treasury saw It from a different angle,
and wrote in his annual report of 1882, "What now perplexes
the Secretary is not wherefrom he may get revenue and
enough for the pressing needs of the Government, but
whereby he shall turn back into the flow of business the
more than enough for those needs that has been with
drawn from the people."
The tariff situation in 1882 had come about as much by
accident as by design, and In its immediate operation was
the heritage of financial reconstruction. The Morrill
tariff of 1 86 1, passed by a Republican Congress in the last
days of the administration of James Buchanan, was a
moderately protective measure, and provided the back
ground for all tariff legislation of the next two decades.
The details and rates of this tariff were greatly changed
through the necessities of the Civil War, and it was dis
covered that the internal revenue taxes and the tariff rates
must be adjusted in harmony with each other. The situa
tion produced by the Morrill tariff was changed for rnany
American manufacturers when they were compelled to pay

78 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the heavy internal taxes levied upon incomes, trades, and
manufactured goods before 1865. Their European com
petitors, who could not be required to bear similar burdens,
received an advantage in the competitive market. Con
gress yielded to the pressure of manufacturers to restore the
equilibrium of trade by increasing tariff rates in order to
balance the burden placed upon domestic manufacturers by
the internal revenues. Every time the internal taxes were
increased during the war. Congress was called upon to In
crease the tariff rates as well, and in 1865 both sources were
yielding revenues beyond anything hitherto known in
American experience. The tariff in that year brought in
$84,000,000; the internal revenue, $209,000,000.
The program of financial reconstruction called for the
reestablishment of public credit and the redemption of the
greenbacks, as well as the lowering of revenues to a peace
basis. In reducing the revenues the difficulties were un
even. The internal taxes had no friends, and public opinion
generally approved the reduction and elimination of the in
come and stamp taxes, and the other forms of excise that
had been borne as a patriotic duty. Tariff revision was
attended with great difficulty. At each suggestion of this,
manufacturers hurried to Washington to protest against the
injury to their business that would occur if the rates were
lowered, and Congressmen made common cause with each
other to protect their constituents from these losses.
By 1873 most of the internal revenue taxes had been
withdrawn, leaving industry protected not only by the orig
inal rates of the Morrill tariff, but by the additional com
pensatory rates that had been added to offset the internal
war taxes. In most cases there was now no justification for
these extra rates, which had come to give an unintended and
accidental protection, but as a matter of practical poHtlcs,
it was difficult to get rid of them because they were in
timately tied up with the personal profit of Influential
citizens. A flat reduction of ten per cent in tariff rates was voted
by Congress In 1872. This was less than the amount of the

REFORM 79
accidental protection, but seemed to be more than the
country could bear when a few months later the panic of
1873 made hard times universal, reducing American pur
chases abroad, and lowering the national revenue until it
was insufficient for the needs of the Government. By
1879, when prosperity came back, most persons had for
gotten that the tariff rates had not existed forever. The
tariff question was entirely out of politics, and manufacturers
enjoyed almost unchallenged the extra profits conferred on
them by the accident of financial reconstruction.
There had been some theoretical opposition to the tariff
and protection even through the period of depression, and
the principles of free trade were advanced by a group of
economists among whom David A. Wells, Edward Atkinson,
and William Graham Sumner were the leaders. Their
teachings aroused indignant rejoinders from practical busi
ness men. "In nothing Is it easier to show stupidity than
in the framing of a tariff law," wrote Joseph Wharton, one
of the most important of the Pennsylvania ironmasters, who
founded a school of finance and economy in the University
of Pennsylvania in 1881 to teach what he regarded as sound
views of finance. There was a conference of free-traders
held in Saratoga, in 1877, that attributed the prevailing
depression to the interference with freedom of trade caused
by the tariff. In Congress in 1878 Fernando Wood, of
New York, brought in a Democratic measure to lower the
rates. Among the junior Republican Congressmen on his
committee was William McKinley, of Ohio, whose appoint
ment to the Committee on Ways and Means Garfield had
secured, and who had been advised by President Hayes to
study the tariff and grow up with it.
The new national prosperity was early shown in an in
crease of national revenue. There was a Treasury surplus
of $100,000,000 in 1881 and of $145,000,000 in
1882. Thereafter through the decade the sur- prosperity
plus continued in varying amounts, averaging g"ij'j;gg
$104,000,000 per year. President Garfield died
before he had a chance to make to Congress any recommen-

8o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
dation upon the reduction of the revenue in order to lessen
surplus or to remove the abuses that were charged against
it. In the closing days of his campaign the revenue system
and the protection which was a part of it showed signs of
coming back into politics.
The barren political debate of 1880 was more significant
after the Democratic candidate, Hancock, expressed him
self upon the tariff. Speaking at Paterson, New Jersey, on
October 7, in reply to an inquiry for his opinion on the tariff
he said: "The tariff is a local question. The same question
was brought up once in my native place in Pennsylvania.
It is a matter that the General Government seldom cares to
interfere with, and nothing is likely ever to be done that wIU
interfere with the industries of the country." In the few
days of the canvass that remained the tariff was much dis
cussed, but without extensive preparation on either side.
Much sensitiveness was shown in manufacturing communi
ties. "General Hancock posts himself for a political green
horn," said the New York Tribune. "Was there ever such
twaddle shown? ... [Is] a man who considers the tariff
question as merely local ... fit to become the first citizen
of the United States?" Democratic pressure upon this
theme Increased as Republican irritability was revealed.
Upon recommendation of Arthur, Congress created a
tariff commission in 1882 to recommend action, and the de-
Tariff ^^^t incurred by the Republican Party in the
commission, following autumu made it desirable to act at
once. John L. Hayes, the chairman of the com
mission, was identified with the woolen industry and most
of his associates were connected with other fields of manu
facture. There were few experts available for appointment
who knew anything about the details of tariff who were not
identified with interests affected by It. The New York
Herald described the commission as "the product of the
manufacturers' machine, and it is almost certain that from
first to last It will dance to the music of the party that ' pro
tects' American labor." The report of the commission,
presented to Congress In September, 1882, recommended a

REFORM 8 1
considerable reduction in tariff rates, and Congress under
took the passage of a general bill to bring this about.
The tariff of 1883 was passed under conditions that
brought out the difficulties of passing laws that affected
business profits. It was enacted in the short ses- Tariff of
sion and the two houses worked, upon it simul- '^^3
taneously, each drafting an independent bill. The Senate
attached its draft to a bill that had already passed the
House of Representatives for the further reduction of the
internal revenue. The need for a reduction of the rates in
order to lower the surplus revenue was voiced by the Ad
ministration. It was obstructed by the lobbies of the man
ufacturers, all of them more Interested in protecting the prof
its of their several businesses than In making any scientific
revision of the tariff. These latter were aided by general
arguments that were advanced defending the theory of pro
tection as such. Canada had in 1879 adopted a system of
protection on a basis resembling that of Henry Clay and his
American system. The German tariff of 1879 was based
upon the same assumption.
The arguments that had been heard in the tariff debates
of the middle of the century were brought back into the dis
cussion before the debate was ended, but appear to have had
less influence than the representations of the manufacturers.
In neither party was there anything approaching uniformity
of opinion, although the Republicans had an old tradition
in favor of protection as well as most of the manufacturers
who desired it. Randall, of Pennsylvania, former Demo
cratic Speaker and now leader of the minority, was as far
away from his party associate. Beck, of Kentucky, as the
Repubhcan ' ' Pig-iron ' ' Kelley ^ of Pennsylvania, was from his
Repubhcan colleague, Kasson, of Iowa. Regardless of party.
Congressmen responded to the interests of their districts, and
the tariff that became a law in March, 1883, failed to provide
the reduction that Arthur had urged. It was treasured by
the Democratic opposition as another evidence of the inca
pacity of the Republican Party, and was used as additional
campaign material for the approaching national election.

82 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The political course of Arthur surprised his critics if it did
not conciliate them. In 1882 he vetoed a rivers and harbors
Arthur's ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ ^^ usual with "political pork."
Adminis- He Vetoed a Chinese exclusion bill that dis-
tration regarded the existing treaty with the Chinese
Government. He approved a law in March, 1882, for the
more vigorous suppression of polygamy in the Mormon
Territory, Utah. The Edrrtunds Act, which was directed
at this condition, disqualified polygamlsts for office, jury
service, or the franchise, and created a special commission to
take over much of the power of government in the Territory
until this should be accomplished. The President startled
both his friends and his critics by giving genuine support to
a bill for the reform of the national civil service.
The spoils system against which the advocates of civil
service reform directed their attacks, became entrenched In
Civil serv- the American Government in the second quarter
ice reform q£ ^j^g nineteenth century. It was a device dis
covered by groups of politicians working in the larger East
ern States about 1825. In New York and Pennsylvania
political machines were put together, cemented by the use of
public offices. Party workers were rewarded by appoint
ments to office, office-holders were expected to continue
acting for the organization, and looked upon each election
with certainty that If their efforts failed they could not hope
to hold their positions. The phrase of William H. Marcy,
"to the victors belong the spoUs," was an apt expression
of the spirit of the system and was not surpassed by Kem-
ble's maxim, "addition, division, and silence." When the
Democratic politicians, who had turned their machines to
the support of Andrew Jackson, came into control of the
national administration In 1829, they renovated the govern
ment by making a clean sweep among the office-holders and
rewarding the supporters of Jackson.
For forty years after 1829 few Americans complained of
the spoils system. Politicians who lost their jobs were sore
at their defeat, but yielded to the maxim of Marcy with such
philosophy as they could command. Reform for all parties

REFORM 83
was a thing to be attained by turning the rascals of the other
party out of office. Some politicians were more adept than
others in manipulating the spoils, but few disowned the
system. Presidents complained of the waste in time in
volved in listening to office-seekers and their friends. Lin
coln protested against the burden In the months when the
Union seemed to be falling apart, and likened himself to the
hotel clerk whose upper floors were In flames and who was
compelled to continue to rent new rooms Instead of putting
out the fire; but for four years Lincoln used the offices to
sustain the Union against the Confederacy.
Little is heard of reform in the civU service until the death
of Lincoln threw the presidential patronage Into the hands
of Andrew Johnson. As a loyal Tennessee War Democrat
Johnson strengthened the ticket In 1864, when the Republi
can organization called itself the Union Party, and appealed
for the votes of all loyalists. Within a few months after the
death of Lincoln political warfare had been declared between
Johnson and the radical majority that controlled Congress.
According to the precedents of a generation the radical
majority, successful in 1864, was entitled to use the national
offices for its own purposes. Johnson's determination to
use them in erecting a presidential machine aroused an oppo
sition which In March, 1867, passed the Tenure of Office
Bill over his veto. The President was permitted to suspend
an officer from service, but not to remove him unless the
Senate concurred in the removal. The new law made It
difficult for a President to remove his enemies from office,
while the Senate by its power to withhold confirmation of
appointments built up a system by which each Senator in
the majority party expected to nominate the federal officers
appointed within his state. Johnson fought the Tenure of
Office Act in vain. Grant protested against it, and Hayes
forced the system into the open by his determination to re
move Arthur and Cornell against the will of Roscoe Conk
ling. A group of civil service reformers gained a hearing for
the first time, as they pointed out the Injury to the National
Government that was inflicted whenever an officer was ap-

84 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
pointed for party reasons instead of character and capacity.
Thomas A. Jenckes, a Congressman from Rhode Island,
urged the removal of the offices from politics in the middle of
the sixties, and the reform was taken up by Godkin in the
New York Nation, and by George William Curtis in Harper's
Weekly. The Republican platform of 1868 assented to it
in theory and President Grant was given a small sum for the
inauguration of a merit system.
The administrative scandals while Grant was President
gave additional prominence to the need for the reform.
The party leaders generally opposed it; Conkling sneered
at it openly as ' ' snivel service ' ' reform. Their opposition
to it was increased when Hayes gave Carl Schurz a chance
to experiment with it in the Indian Bureau, but there was
no hope of a public Interest that would compel the passage
of an effective law when Hayes left office.
The murder of Garfield, the star-route frauds, and the
Democratic victory of 1 882 on the platform of reform, pro
duced a situation that silenced the open enemies of the move
ment and made its enactment not only possible, but politi
cally necessary. A bill, drawn up by Senator George W.
Pendleton, of Ohio, with the approval of the Civil Service
Reform Association, became a law in January, 1883. It
provided for a non-partisan commission of three, holding
office for an indefinite term, with power to prepare eligible
lists by examination for such offices as might be turned over
to the commission.
Dorman B. Eaton, secretary of the Civil Service Reform
Association, was appointed by Arthur to inaugurate the
operation of the law. Some thirteen thousand offices were
placed in the classified service In the first year of the com
mission. Under succeeding Presidents the number was
steadily increased as well as its proportion to the whole
body of civil servants. By the end of the century one
hundred thousand offices were thus safeguarded, and a
decade later, a quarter of a million.
The reform of the civil service, accomplished because of
the effect of notorious scandals, could not have been delayed

REFORM 85
long after 1883. The new technical duties assumed by the
United States Government were in need of trained and
permanent staffs that had not been possible under the old
system. A system of government by experts was not yet
in question, but demands were being made upon govern
ment beyond the capacity of mere politicians.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Fred E. Haynes, Third Party Movements since the Civil War with Special
Reference to the State of Iowa (1916), gives a picture of reform movements
in the region where they were most numerous. Carl Russell Fish, The
Civil Service and the Patronage (1904), is the. standard treatise upon its
theme. William Dudley Foulke, Fighting the Spoilsmen : Reminiscences of
the Civil Service Reform Movement (1919), is full of detail upon the working
of reform. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1888), was written
after many years of observation and became a standard text at once.
Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century
(1903), is the work of a supporter of the protective system ; F. W. Taussig,
Tariff History of the United States, contains in its successive editions a
series of essays upon the tariffs; Ida M. Tarbell, The Tariff in Our Time
(191 1), reveals the personal side of tariff legislation; many useful details
and tables are in the Report of the Tariff Commission (1882). More fun
damental in the light it throws upon industrial conditions is Wholesale
Prices, Wages, and Transportation: Report by Mr. Aldrich from the Com
mittee on Finance, March 3, 1893; in 52d Cong., 2d Sess., Sen. Rep. 1394.

CHAPTER IX
THE MUGWUMP CAMPAIGN, 1 884
John G. Carlisle, a Democratic Congressman elected from
Kentucky In 1876, was chosen Speaker of the House of
Tariff and Representatives when the Forty-Eighth Con-
politics gress assembled In December, 1883. His election
followed a controversy within the Democratic Party In
which the rising issue of the protective tariff played the chief
part. His leading opponent, Samuel J. Randall, was a
protectionist from Pennsylvania, and had been Speaker of
the Democratic Congresses of the preceding decade, when
the tariff issue had been quiescent. The discussions begun
in 1880 continued in the tariff legislation of 1883, and,
stimulated by the surplus in the National Treasury, revived
in Southern Democrats their old antipathy to a protective
tariff. The fact that many Republicans desired tariff re
form added to the advantage of organizing a new Congress
on this basis. Randall was defeated for reelection, and with
Carlisle In the chair the South came back into control of the
Democratic Party. It was Impossible to pass a Democratic
tariff with Arthur as President, but the threat of one in
creased the determination of Northern manufacturers to
secure the nomination of a candidate in 1884 who could be
counted upon to defend the existing system.
Before either of the large national conventions was held,
Benjamin F. Butler had been nominated by two of the
Benjamin minor parties. The fusion of the greenback and
F. Butler labor elements attempted in 1878 was not suc
cessful in bringing the reformers together or in establishing
an Important national party. A growing opposition to
monopoly revived the hopes of a third-party protest based
upon the failure of the Democratic and Republican organi
zations to take necessary action. On May 14, 1884, an
anti-monopoly convention met at Chicago and two weeks

THE MUGWUMP CAMPAIGN, 1884 87
later the remnants of the National Greenback-Labor Party
convened at Indianapolis. The political poverty of the
movement was shown by the nomination of Butler by both
organizations. "Ben" Butler aroused much stormy difference of opinion
throughout his political career. A prominent Democratic
lawyer in Boston before the Civil War, he became a politi
cal major-general, whose service In command of troops in
Virginia was regarded as grossly incompetent. His career
at New Orleans established order there, but was noto
rious. Doubts as to his honesty were widespread and were
strengthened by a brusqueness in his manner and the cyni
cal opinions constantly attributed to him. As a member of
Congress he expressed an open contempt for measures of
reform, and when the better elements of society turned
against him, he declared himself the friend of the working-
man. He struggled repeatedly for the governorship of
Massachusetts, and was victorious in the election of 1882, in
which the Republican Party was disrupted everywhere. As
governor of Massachusetts his notoriety was increased by
the refusal of Harvard College to confer upon him the hon
orary degree that it usually bestowed upon governors of the
State. Having left the Republican Party on the charge
that it was faithless to the common citizen, and having
suffered indignity from the intellectuals of his own State,
he entered the canvass for the Democratic nomination as
President on the issue of reform. He had earlier expressed
his attitude upon the way to seek office: not as a maiden
coyly and reluctantly, but as a widow who knows her own
mind; and as "the widow" in politics Butler figured in the
cartoons of his day. He Invited the early nominations that
he received from the smaller parties, but withheld accept
ance of them, hoping to secure their endorsement from the
Democratic Party.
The strongest Republican candidate for the nomination
was James G. Blaine, who had a wider influ- jamesG.
ence than any other leader of his party, and who ^'^'"^
was not opposed by any personality of great Importance,

88 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
President Arthur desired renomination and had support
from the professional office-holding class ; and deserved still
more because of the character of his administration. John
Sherman was still hopeful of receiving the distinction, but
neither of these possessed the magnetism of Blaine, nor the
power to interest Americans en masse.
In his twenty years of political life Blaine had identified
himself with the major issues that his party supported,
without originating them. He entered Congress at the be
ginning of the Civil War, and established a power of parlia
mentary leadership that made him Speaker and kept him
in that post for six years. His charm of manner made
him personal friends and he cultivated the politician's gift
of recognizing them on sight. Always an eloquent speaker,
he was most successful upon themes arising from the CivU
War. His short service as Secretary of State under Gar
field was long enough for him to show a deliberate policy,
jingoistic in part, but Including the constructive notion of
cooperation among the Americas. After 1881 he lived gen
erally in Washington, working upon his Twenty Years of
Congress (1884) and strengthening his hold upon the Re
publican Party as one who could bring back the glories of
the past.
Among the special qualifications of Blaine was the fact
that he had many friends and followers in a racial group
The Irish that was usually Democratic — the Irish voters.
vote 'pj^g Irish came into America in sufficient num
bers to affect the balance of parties during the Mexican
War and later. Their tendency to settle in the cities
brought them within reach of the overtures of city bosses
who controlled the local Democratic machines, and their
natural gift for party manipulation made them active work
ers from the start. A generation after the first wave of the
Irish came, a second emigration was started, stimulated by
the agricultural depression that prevailed in England and
Ireland about 1879. The new Irish immigrants like the
older filled the Eastern cities and brought to the United
States a vigorous dislike for their mother country.

THE MUGWUMP CAMPAIGN, 1 884 89
In all the Irish immigration poverty and suffering at
home acted as a stimulus. Non-resident ownership of their
farms by English landlords was a constant provocative of
misunderstanding and hard feeling. In 1879 the Irish
Land League was organized by Michael Davitt, Charles
Stewart Parnell, and their associates to fight the absentee
landlord in the Interest of an Irish ownership of Ireland.
The movement aroused bitterness in England and fear
among those whose property was threatened, but In the
United States it was welcomed by Irish -Americans many of
whom were both able and willing to help the cause. Parnell
was in the United States in 1880 raising funds for the Land
League, and was welcomed not only by the Irish, but also
by American politicians who either sympathized with the
Irish protest or desired the Irish vote. Blaine was one of
the few Republican leaders to attract the Irish. The fact
that his mother was an Irish Catholic was widely adver
tised. As Secretary of State he was sufficiently anti-British
to Interest the Irish, and he gave them special grounds for
support by his vigor in working to get out of jail in Ireland
those Irish- Americans who had returned to the old country
to agitate in favor of the Land League. "The feeling is
gaining ground in this country that Ireland is one of the
United States," said the New York Tribune in 1882. The
Chicago Inter-Ocean had already remarked that "this is the
political bummers' chance."
After the passage of the Coercion Act in March, 1881, the
Irish Land League was broken up in Ireland, and the aim
of the movement was shifted to home rule. The murder
of Cavendish and Burke in the following year, and the
prominence of the dynamiters among the Irish, advertised
the movement still further. In AprU, 1883, a great con
vention was held in Philadelphia on the call of the Irish
National League. Patrick Egan, of Dublin, former treas
urer of the Land League, who had been spirited out of Ire
land, made his first American appearance on this occasion,
and Democratic leaders welcomed the opportunity to ad
dress the body.

90 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The organization attained by the Irish -Americans for
their own sentimental and reminiscent purposes was a
continuous temptation to American politicians to seize it
for party purposes; and Blaine's special hold upon the Irish
might have secured his nomination without any opposition
had it not been for the objection of a group of independent
Republicans desirous of reform, but distmsting him as its
agent. Twice before 1884 Blaine had almost had his fingers upon
the coveted nomination. In 1876, while he was a leading
jjjg candidate, rumors were heard in Washington
Mulligan that damaging letters existed that would destroy
his character if published. On April 24 he de
nounced certain of the charges that connected him with the
improper ownership of railroad bonds, and his friends be
lieved that he had silenced them; but the stories continued,
and it became known that a man named Mulligan had come
into possession of incriminating letters. Blaine visited
Mulligan at his hotel, took the letters from him, and on
June 5 read them in the House, interpreting as he went
along. His spirit and courage won for him an immediate
parliamentary victory over the forces of detraction, but five
days later he was overcome by a sunstroke, and when the
Republican Convention met he was in no physical condition
to be nom'nated for the presidency.
Much of the opposition to Blaine In 1880 was founded
upon the belief that the Mulligan letters revealed miscon
duct on his part. Blaine confessed they revealed poverty
and an attempt to eke out his income by a sale of railroad
securities on a commission basis. The charge that was most
difficult to explain away was that Blaine, while Speaker In
1869, and presiding over a debate upon a land grant for the
Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, had shown the pro
moters of that land grant how to save their measure from
defeat in Congress. The Congressional Globe and the testi
mony presented established the fact of this assistance. A
few days later, as one of the Mulligan letters revealed,
Blaine was writing to one Fisher, who was interested in this

THE MUGWUMP CAMPAIGN, 1884 91
transaction, asking to be admitted to the enterprise and
promising that he would not prove a "deadhead" in the
business. Subsequently Blaine obtained a contract for
selling securities of this railroad upon profitable terms.
The other letters showed that the venture was not success
ful, and that hard feeling was developed not only among the
speculators, but also among those constituents of Blaine
who bought the securities upon his recommendation. It
was not shown that he had been bribed to perform any
public act, but it was clear that he had- asked to be re
warded by the beneficiaries of his official conduct, and that
he had been wiUing while Speaker to trade upon the prestige
of his office. He was at least dangerously near the margin
of public honesty, and when the demand for a higher stand
ard of public conduct was created by the scandals of the
early seventies, he was never able to square his former
practice with the new code.
As it became clear In 1884 that Blaine was the strongest
candidate for the Republican nomination, the group of in
dependent Republicans revived their hostility to „,
1 • 1 1 • 1 1 1 1 1 -I Mugwumps
him and let it be known that he could not re
ceive the support of the whole party. They were described
by machine leaders as "parlor and clear election-day Re
publicans," and were given the nickname "Mugwumps,"
for which the New York Sun provided an Indian etymology,
translating the term as "big bug, or swell head." Then
"holier than thou" attitude was denounced by politicians
with whose plans they Interfered, but in New York and New
England they had a strong Influence over the selection of
the party delegates to the convention at Chicago.
Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, and Theodore
Roosevelt, of New York, made their initial national appear
ance as leaders of this movement against the nomination of
Blaine. Lodge, fresh from his studies at Harvard College
where he had lectured on history for several years in the
later seventies, was acclaimed as an early instance of a new
phenomenon, the scholar In politics. Roosevelt had com
pleted three sessions of the New York Assembly, and though

92 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
not yet twenty-six years of age, had made himself a leader
of the party delegation. Harper's Weekly came to the sup
port of the Mugwump protest. The Nation aided it, and
a large number of Republican newspapers showed a dispo
sition to sympathize with it.
When the Republican Convention met in Chicago on
June 3, 1884, it was clear that a nomination of Blaine would
Republican probably be foUowed by some kind of party
Convention disaffection. The opposing forces were strong
enough to secure the election of their own temporary chair
man, but were not able to merge their strength on any
single candidate. The choice of the Mugwumps, Senator
George F. Edmunds, of Vermont, was not a candidate to
inspire personal enthusiasm even among his friends, and
was described as the "presidential glacier" by his op
ponents. Blaine was nominated in spite of the continued
opposition of the independents and received, as his com
panion on the ticket, General John A. Logan, 'a Grant sup
porter of 1880, who was supposed to have the same hold on
the Grand Army of the Republic that Blaine had held over
the Irish vote. '^'
The defeated opponents of Blaine were forced to choose
between leaving the party and supporting a candidate
whom they believed to be unworthy. Roosevelt and
Lodge took the latter course, the others, led by Horace
White and George W. Curtis, returned to New York, dis
cussing plans for a party schism, and held conferences
within the next few days upon the best way to beat Blaine.
The simplest method was to induce the Democratic Party,
whose convention would be held on July 8, to nominate a
candidate whom they could support as an honest man and
a genuine reformer. Their attention had already been
drawn to Governor Grover Cleveland, of New York.
Grover Cleveland, a middle-aged country lawyer, emerged
from civic obscurity when he was elected as mayor of Buf-
Grover falo in 1881 Upon a reform ticket. A year later,
Cleveland when the Democratic Party needed a suitable
candidate to oppose Secretary of the Treasury Folger, the

THE MUGWUMP CAMPAIGN, 1884 93
leaders induced the convention to accept Cleveland as a
candidate for governor. He won by a surprisingly large
majority, and made civil service reform a chief issue in the
campaign and acted upon it after his election. As governor
he aroused the hostility of the Tammany Democrats in
New York City by his refusal to be a machine man and by
supporting non-partisan measures for municipal govern
ment. His fighting qualities and his slow, stubborn sin
cerity gained him immediate rank as a leader in a party
that had developed few national figures since the Civil War.
The Mugwumps intimated that they would support him if
nominated, and thus influenced the Democratic nomination,
since that party was willing to nominate anybody to win.
The Tammany delegates protested in vain against the nom
ination, giving point to the rejoinder of General Bragg, who
declared that "we love him for the enemies he has made."
He was nominated for the presidency, with Hendricks for
the vice-presidency.
The canvass of 1884 was one of personality rather than
one of principle. Neither platform made an issue of any
single theme. Republicans still harped on the The canvass
untrustworthiness of Democrats, and Democrats °^ '^^4
jpledged themselves to all measures of reform that might
embarrass Republicans. The Republican platform state
ment on the tariff was less emphatic than the determination
of party leaders to maintain the system. The civU service
legislation of 1883 had lessened the value of public offices
as a means of cementing party organization, and had made
it difficult to raise party funds by the old methods of as
sessment upon office-holders. The campaign fund of 1884
was sought from manufacturers who were interested in
maintaining the tariff without any change or in rearranging
the rates. B. F. Jones, of Pittsburgh, a steel manufacturer
and a friend of Blaine, was made chairman of the Republi
can National Committee to direct the fight.
The Mugwump attack upon the political character of
Blaine encouraged Republican party organs to search for
something discreditable in the character of Cleveland. To-

94 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ward the end of July they found it in improper relations
maintained eight years earlier with a Buffalo woman, and
immediately they described him "as a notorious libertine
and profligate." Democratic journals rejoined with at
tacks upon the correctness of Blaine's marriage, but were
silenced by Blaine's statement of facts and Cleveland's
refusal to countenance their move. The personalities of
the campaign became more disgraceful as the canvass ad
vanced, and Increased the number of voters dissatisfied with
either candidate.
Butler accepted the third-party nominations after Cleve
land had been chosen by the Democrats, and carried on his
candidacy with the New York Sun as his chief supporter.
It was openly charged that the Republican Party was pay
ing the expenses of his campaign, in order to detach votes
from Cleveland. Republicans, on the other hand, unwUl-
ing to support Blaine and unable to vote for Cleveland,
showed a willingness to throw their votes away upon ex-
Governor St. John of Kansas, whom the Prohibition Party
nominated on July 23. St. John was denounced as a "stool-
pigeon," whose canvass was intended to weaken Blaine.
A few days before the election the supporters of Blaine
arranged for a meeting of clergymen at the Fifth Avenue
Hotel to endorse the character of the Republican candidate.
The senior member of the group, a Catholic priest, who had
been expected to make the address, failed to appear, and
a Protestant clergyman named Burchard took his place.
Blaine, tired by the campaign and thinking over his speech
in reply, faUed to follow the speaker or to notice when he
described contemptuously the Democratic Party as the sup
porters of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion." "I am the
last man In the United States who would make a disrespect
ful allusion to another man's religion," Blaine declared, when
the evil was done and it was too late to stop it. The Demo
cratic papers spread the phrase "rum, Romanism, and re
bellion" broadcast; some even put the words into Blaine's
own mouth In spite of his denial and Burchard's abject con
trition. It is impossible to say how far the Irish vote upon

THE MUGWUMP CAMPAIGN, 1884 95
which Blaine counted was repelled by the apparent insult.
When the ballots were finally counted, Cleveland and
Hendricks were elected by a plurality of 23,000 over Blaine
and Logan; though with a minority of all the votes cast.
The small pluralities by which Cleveland carried various
Irish precincts In New York gave plausibility to the asser
tion that Blaine might well have been elected had there
been no Burchard episode.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Harrison C. Thomas, The Return of the Democratic Party to Power in 1884
(1919), is founded upon a careful study of the available sources. It should
be supplemented by the biographies of Blaine by Gail Hamilton and
Edward Stanwood, and the brilliant essay by Gamaliel Bradford in the
Atlantic Monthly (1920). The antecedents of the Mugwump movement
are carefully traced in Earle D. Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement
(1919). The lack of an authoritative biography of Cleveland will shortly
be filled by an official biography now in preparation by Robert M.
McElroy. G. F. Parker, Recollections of Grover Cleveland (1909), and
Richard Watson Gilder, Grover Cleveland, A Record of Friendship (19 10),
are of considerable value. William C. Hudson, Random Recollections of
an Old Political Reporter (191 1), contains interesting gossip on this cam
paign. Harry Thurston Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic (1907), be
gins its narrative with the Cleveland Administration.

CHAPTER X
THE NATIONAL ESTATE
After a period of twenty- four years In opposition, the
Democratic Party returned to only partial control of the
Govemment in 1885. Its President was a Northern Demo
crat, selected because of his ability to widen the schism In
the Republican Party. The House of Representatives was
under the control of Southern Democrats, who reelected
John G. Carlisle as Speaker when Congress reassembled In
December. The Senate remained Republican throughout
the administration, making It Impossible for party legisla
tion to be enacted, but favoring somewhat the passage of
non-partisan laws that had to do with the management of
the national estate.
The Cabinet of Cleveland had at its head Thomas F.
Bayard, of Delaware, a Senator since 1869, who had been
Cleveland's a Candidate for the presidential nomination in
Cabinet jggQ ^nd 1 884. HIs father had preceded him
in the Senate, and his family had been famous in the
State and National administrations since independence.
Under his direction the United States withdrew from the
aggressive attitude assumed by Blaine with respect to the
isthmian canal, and accepted the status of joint interest
as agreed upon in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. The re
maining members of the Cabinet were untested leaders,
necessarily so, since their party had been so long in oppo
sition. Daniel Manning, Secretary of the Treasury, was a
New York journalist. William C. Whitney, Secretary of
the Navy, was a New York anti-Tammany lawyer and
son-in-law of Senator Payne, a Standard OU magnate from
Ohio. Lamar, the Secretary of the Interior, and Gar
land, the Attorney-General, had been Confederate officers.
William F. Vilas, of Wisconsin, whose oration at a reunion
of the Army of the Tennessee had made him a leading mem-

THE NATIONAL ESTATE 97
ber of his party, was made Postmaster-General. There was
nothing in the personnel of the Cabinet to give a clue as to
what its policies would be.
The Republican campaign charges of disloyalty in the
Democratic Party had included repeated assertions that
the Democratic Party proposed to vote national civil War
pensions for Confederate veterans who had tried pensions
to break the Union. The votes of former Union soldiers
were asked to prevent such treason, and to make possible
continued generous treatment of the loyal veterans. The
attitude of the Cleveland Administration with reference to
pensions was watched for signs of hostility to the men who
saved the Union. Cleveland's record as a candidate had
been seriously attacked because he had not enlisted in the
Civil War, although of military age, but this attack had
been weakened by the fact that Blaine of similar age was
equally without a military record. The Grand Army of the
Republic, which was formed in April, 1866, at Springfield,
Illinois, now became the official representative of the vet
erans of the Civil War. Its growth had been slow for a
decade, until after Congress passed an arrears of pensions
blU in 1879.
The military pension system of the United States was
founded upon the principle that disability incurred in the
service entitled the veteran to a pension from the Govern
ment. The number of pensioners after the Civil War
reached a total of 242,755 by 1879. In this year Hayes
against his better judgment signed a law providing that
every pensioner was entitled to receive his annuity not from
the date of the award, but from the date of mustering out.
Every pensioner on the rolls thus became entitled to re
ceive arrears of pension to cover the interval between his
discharge and the beginning of regular payment, running
to a total of hundreds or even thousands of dollars in In
dividual cases. The financial effect of this law had not even
been estimated at the date of its passage. In addition to
the back payments entailed, new pensioners appeared upon
the rolls in large numbers, tempted by the heavy and in-

98 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
creasing bonus of arrears. Pension attorneys, who secured
the affidavits and prepared the papers, charged extortionate
fees against the arrears, and were Incited to hunt out possi
ble pensioners and Induce them to file their claims. Some
of the firms of attorneys published private newspapers for
propaganda work among the soldiers, and all of them en
couraged the expansion and development of the Grand
Army of the Republic, which was not for them a patriotic
order, but a machine for detecting the presence of new pen
sioners and for bringing political pressure In favor of even
greater liberality. For its members the Grand Army was
a patriotic and devotional society; the claims attorneys
used it to increase their profits. The membership of the
Grand Army grew rapidly after 1879. Corporal James
Tanner became its commander in 1882, and a campaign was
started for the passage of a new general law for the payment
of pensions based not upon disability in the service, but
upon subsequent disability or upon service alone. A de
pendents' pension bill vetoed by Cleveland in 1887 brought
him under the displeasure of the promoters of such legis
lation. The private pension bill was a greater abuse than the
general legislation because in hundreds of cases individuals
not entitled to pension by any general rule obtained the
friendly intervention of their Congressmen to secure the
favor by direct special legislation. The private bills in
cluded cases of deserters with the effrontery to seek aid
from the country they had betrayed ; and trumped-up cases,
where the evidence frequently showed reasons why the pen
sion should not be granted. Many of them covered cases
that had been disallowed by the Commissioner of Pensions
for cause. Cleveland was the first President to examine
the private pension bUls critically and to veto those that
were unworthy. Toward the end of his Administration he
vetoed them by the score, arousing professed indignation
among Republicans, who claimed that the vetoes revealed
lack of Interest In the soldier. The Republican Party
pledged Itself to more generous treatment, and redeemed

THE NATIONAL ESTATE 99
the promise, after Harrison had made Corporal Tanner
Commissioner of Pensions, by passing a dependents' pen
sion law in 1890.
The willingness of Cleveland to perform ungracious acts
of public honesty led him to undertake a reform of the ad
ministration of the General Land Office, which Public land
had been wide open since the passage of the ^''^"ds
Homestead Law, and which had been administered "to
the advantage of speculation and monopoly, private and
corporate, rather than in the public interest." " I am satis
fied," said Sparks, the Commissioner of the Land Office,
"that thousands of claims without foundation in law or
equity, involving millions of acres of public land, had been
annually passed to patent upon the single proposition that
nobody but the Government had any adverse Interests."
"Cleveland seems determined that the rich shaU obey the
laws as well as the poor," said the Idaho Avalanche.
The national estate of the United States came into ex
istence when the original States ceded their surplus lands
to Congress to be used for the benefit of the Union and for
the creation of additional States. Subsequent purchases
added to the area of the public domain thus created. With
the exception of the thirteen original States and the first
three to be admitted, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee,
and West Virginia and Texas, making eighteen in aU, the
United States itself provided the land upon which its com
monwealths were erected. In disposing of the land to in
dividual owners, two general policies prevaUed; the ear
lier, a tidewater policy, framed under the dominance of the
original States, offered lands for sale and assumed that there
would be profits accruing from the process to be used for
national advantage.
In 1841 the West itself became the controlling element
in land distribution, marking its arrival by the passage of
a general preemption law that recognized that the settler
who made a farm out of virgin land was a public benefactor
entitled to a reward. Squatters who were found in residence
vvhen any tract of public land was placed on the market

lOO RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
were allowed to buy their land at a minimum price in ad
vance of the public auction sale. The West continued to
ask for still more liberal treatment of the settler, and in
1862 Congress accepted the principle of the Homestead
Act, whereby the citizen who made his farm and lived upon
it for a term of years was given title to it free of charge.
The Homestead Law drew the attention of all the
world to the free lands of the West, whUe the continental
railroads, constructed after the Civil War, made them
easily accessible. The rush of population swamped the
General Land Office, as It did the Post-Office, and both
broke down, partly through fraud and partly through the
lack of an Intelligent civil service. Abuses in the land
system were noted In the three administrations preceding
Cleveland's, and became more imposing as the area of free
land dwindled around 1885.
The principal abuses that needed to be corrected in
cluded frauds in the homestead system, fraudulent pre
emption, theft of public land by Ulegal enclosures, theft of
the natural resources, timber or mineral, and the fraudu
lent attempts of railroads to secure their land grants with
out complying with the terms of the award.
The theory of the land laws was that the lands were to
be disposed of in small tracts for immediate occupancy and
cultivation. Everything was done to make it difficult to
acquire land for speculative purposes or to build up large
holdings. The system worked well in farming regions In
the Mississippi Valley, but on the Western plains, where
large areas were without sufficient rainfall, it made no pro
vision for the only way in which the lands could be used.
Here the lands were needed in large tracts for grazing and
timber purposes and could not well be used in section tracts
or less.
The Homestead and Preemption Laws were repeatedly
violated in the interest of persons who were building up large
estates on the public domain. Sparks, the new Commis
sioner of the General Land Office, took office toward the
end of March, 1885, and a few days later began his attack

THE NATIONAL ESTATE loi
upon fraudulent and collusive entries by suspending final
action upon any of the Western entries until the cases could
be reexamined. Every entry on the public domain was
founded upon local testimony and filed at a local office,
where it was possible that the local agents might be in
collusion with fraud. Only by means of inspection directed
from Washington could these frauds be detected. The
affidavits showing that entries had been cultivated needed
to be checked up by Inspection to determine whether this
was a fact. Proof that residences had been built needed
to be cross-examined. In more than one case the entry-
men of four adjacent quarter sections erected one small
and temporary sod house over the common corner of the
four sections, after which each entryman separately swore
to the existence of a dwelling upon his section.
The Homestead Law permitted the entryman, who did
not desire to serve out the required period of residence, to
commute his entry and purchase the land on the basis of pre
emption. In a multitude of cases these commuted entries
were made at the earliest legal date, and local deed books
showed that adjacent sections were all immediately trans
ferred to a single holder, who thus became the owner of a
greater acreage than the law permitted. It was common
gossip on the plains that new employees on the ranches were
induced to file homestead or preemption claims on ad
joining territory, and sell the claim to the owner. This
sort of collusive work constituted a fraud upon the Govern
ment which could not be detected except by inspection.
The number of inspectors authorized by law was so small
that the order of Sparks, holding up the final passage of
claims untU they were examined, filled the office with
thousands of pending cases. The protests of honest entry-
men against this proceeding were mingled with those of the
land robbers, whose work was interfered with.
The Illegal enclosure of public lands involved nearly
five million acres of known cases before Cleveland became
President. In February, 1885, Arthur signed a law for the
rertjpval of fences from the public domain. In some cases

I02 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
tracts of several thousand acres were enclosed in wire fences
by the cattle-men without a shadow of legal title. In other
instances the encloser would acquire title to a string of
sections through which passed a stream suitable for pur
poses of stock-watering, and would then enclose the grazing
lands of the neighborhood that stUl belonged to the Gov
ernment. The sanctity of the fence was such that this
illegal possession prevented honest homesteaders from en
tering on the lands thus enclosed. Some States upheld the
theft and even exacted taxes from the illegal holders of such
lands. Mail-carriers on the plains reported to the Post
master-General that they were sometimes forced to deviate
from the direct trail as much as twenty or thirty miles be
cause of the existence of a fence. They were afraid to cut
the wire and go across the enclosure because of threats
made by the fence-builders. In August, 1885, Cleveland
issued a proclamation against the illegal enclosures, and
agents of the Land Office were turned loose against the fences.
The theft of natural resources from the public domain
was universal, but a more important cause of loss was the
fact that the land laws did not make proper provision for the
use of timber, minerals, and fuel. The resources of the
United States lasted so long that great stores of unused
wealth passed unintentionally Into private hands, by means
of the homestead and preemption entries that were intended
only for agricultural purposes.
The failure of the continental railroads to complete the
construction of their lines in accordance with the terms
Railroad of their land grants brought up the question of
land grants auditing these grants and returning the unearned
balances to the public domain. In 1882 the time limit of
the last outstanding grant expired. This was the grant of
the Texas Pacific, which, like the Atlantic and Pacific, whose
time Hmit expired in 1878, had hardly begun the guaranteed
construction. The struggle of the interested roads to secure
unearned lands or to gain extensions of time, or to procure
the transfer of the lands to other roads actually built in the
vicinity, was met by an attempt in Congress to forfeit them

THE NATIONAL ESTATE' 103
entirely. The courts held that the unearned grants could
not be returned to the public domain for private entry with
out additional legislation. The accounts had not been kept
with accuracy and there was legal question as to whether
the roads were entitled to receive any land opposite even
their completed mileage, if they failed to finish the whole
line on time. The issuance of further lands was brought
to an end by Arthur. Under Cleveland Congress declared
forfeited the unearned grants and in 1888 the Democrats
boasted in their campaign textbook that Cleveland had
restored fifty-one million acres of railway land to the pub
lic domain.
The wave of prosperity begun about 1879 was temporarily
checked by financial troubles in 1884. A panic in May of
that year produced numerous failures affecting padic of
chiefly the stock gamblers In Wall Street. Sev- ^^^^
eral banks collapsed and numerous brokers were involved,
including the firm of Grant and Ward, whose fate aroused
wide public Interest because General Grant was its figure
head. Grant went into business after his failure to secure
the nomination in 1880, and attached himself to a firm of
brokers, knowing nothing of the trade and little about his
partners. The collapse of his firm was due to their incom
petence and dishonesty. They had fraudulently promoted
their business by alleging that Grant's position enabled them
to control valuable Government contracts. "The failure,"
said the Nation, "is the most colossal that ever took place
among merely private firms in the United States and one of
the most disgraceful. . . . The misfortune of the position
into which General Grant allowed himself to get is, that it en
ables people to libel him with impunity." No one believed
that Grant was himself guilty of misconduct, but his mis
fortune called attention to the panic and to the unsatis
factory condition of American finance.
The Bland- Allison Act of 1878 had been in force for six
years, in every month of which the Secretary of cheap sil-
the Treasury had been obliged to buy at least ^^'^ money
two mUlion dollars' worth of silver bullion to be coined into

104 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
standard dollars at the ratio of sixteen to one, and which
were to be legal tender. Each Secretary had protested
against the law as weakening the stability of national credit.
The cheap silver dollars thus coined, which were worth
eighty-five cents in 1884, were unpopular; and since few
citizens called for them, they were left reposing in the Treas
ury vaults. The Government had the power to force them
into circulation, but refrained from doing so because un
willing to promote such depreciation in the currency. The
large annual surplus was great enough to provide for the
purchase of this silver and to allow it to be stored away un
used ; but as the silver assets in the Treasury exceeded those
of gold at the time of the panic, a fear developed that ul
timately the United States would have to force the use of
the cheap dollars. The Topeka Commonwealth complained
of the existence of five thousand tons of silver dollars in the
Treasury, "and yet neither party has the courage to say that
the coinage should stop, because the bonanza kings have
bullion to sell, and there are demagogues who cry for cheap
money." A convention of silver miners held in Denver In
January, 1885, demanded free coinage; Cleveland at once
announced his approval of Arthur's recommendation that
the coinage should be stopped. The fear of cheap money,
intensified by the suspicion that the partners of Grant
were not the only financial crooks at large, helped to retard
recovery from the crisis.
The panic brought Grant into the public eye once more,
with the scandals of his Administration forgotten, and with
Death of universal affection as the dominant note. His
Grant poverty, for he turned all of his property over
to his creditors at once, aroused general sympathy. One of
the Vanderbilts advanced funds for his immediate need, for
the repayment of which Grant insisted upon pledging his
war trophies and the valuable gifts he had received upon his
trip around the world. Ill health was added to his mis
fortune, and as the rumor spread that his life was soon to
end, Congress revived the office of General of the Army of
the United States, and Arthur issued the commission in

THE NATIONAL ESTATE 105
Grant's name as one of his last public acts. Grant had
meanwhile discovered a means of earning money. At the
request of the editors of the Century he prepared an article
on the battle of Shiloh, which was published in February,
1885. In the next six months he completed on a sick bed the
manuscript of his Personal Memoirs that earned a fortune
for his family and that took rank at once among the greatest
military narratives. He died in July, 1885.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
There are two excellent treatises on the pension system, W. H. Glasson,
Federal Military Pensions in the United States (1918), and John W. Oliver,
History of the Civil War Military Pensions (1917). The abuses of the system
are best described in the laconic messages of President Cleveland, in J. D.
Richardson (ed.), Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1896-99). No
adequate account of the administration of the public lands has been
written, but the annual reports of the Commissioner of the General Land
Office contain valuable though partisan summaries, while Thomas C.
Donaldson, The Public Domain (1881), is an accumulation of indispen
sable statistics. Shosuke Sato, History of the Land Question in the United
States (1886), was prepared for the information of the Japanese Govern
ment and was printed in the Johns Hopkins University Studies.

CHAPTER XI
THE CLOSED FRONTIER
The American bonanza kings, whose sudden fortunes, de
rived from the mines of California and Colorado, startled
The cattle socIcty after the Civil War, had as later rivals
•^'¦^ss the cattle kings, who entered society with the
first great fortunes derived from agricultural pursuits since
the cotton planters of the old South. Their appearance and
their later disappearance were due to the interplay of forces
that began to operate when the continental railroads reached
the eastern margin of the great plains and which weakened
when the completion of these railroads had destroyed the
open range. The cow country, where the cattle kings had
their domain, played no part in American life before 1865,
and by 1 890 it was gone forever, after bringing a new phase
of civilization into existence and letting loose new movements
in society.
The food supply of the United States, ordinarily the least
of its troubles, was generally provided by regions near to the
American place of Consumption. A few commodities not
food supply produced within the United States or raised there
in insufficient amount, like sugar, tea, and coffee, were always
Impoi^ted. The plantation South preferred to devote its
attention to its staple crops, cotton and tobacco, and im
ported flour and wheat from other sections of the Union.
Cincinnati became "Porkopolls" before the CivU War, and
retained permanently its important trades in fats and their
by-products. But most of America raised Its own food,
ground Its wheat in the local mill, and lived on a narrow
but sufficient diet of local origin.
One influence of the railroads was to broaden the diet
and to introduce direct competition among the farmers.
The center lof the wheat industry swung toward the north
west, from central New York to the prairies of Illinois and

THE CLOSED FRONTIER 107
Iowa, and thence, with the completion of the Northem
Pacific Railroad and the Canadian Pacific (1885), to the
Red River country and the region beyond the Great Lakes.
The water power near the junction of the Minnesota and the
Mississippi Rivers provided the basis for the flour indus
tries of St. Paul and Minneapolis, which were aided by the
ownership of the patent rights for the roller process, and
became a center of world supply before 1880. The re
frigerator cars introduced In the later sixties widened the
market for the citrus fruits of Florida and California, and
made possible an all-year-round traffic in fresh vegetables
that relieved the United States from the dominance of
seasonal foods and salt meats. The great plains, not yet
occupied by farmers, became the basis of a wholesale cattle
industry. About 1866 it was discovered that cattle could winter on
the northern plains without shelter and be better fitted
for butchering than before the exposure. The wild cattle
of the plains of central Texas flourished In the milder climate
in huge herds, but were slight and stringy, and were slaugh
tered chiefly for their hides during the sixties, when the
buffalo herd was being extinguished to supply the demand
for buffalo robes. But the long-horned, long-enduring Texas
cow, though making poor beef, was the mother of sturdy
calves, and when the strain was crossed by Hereford or
shorthorn sires, the calves could be fattened into prime beef
while losing little of the resisting power of the native stock.
The Union Pacific RaUroad building west acjoss Nebraska
reached the open plains in 1866, just as it was discovered that
cattle could winter there. One of Its stations, Ogallala,
was seized by the new industry as a convenient shipping-
point for plains-fed stock. As the trade developed, the
cattle were bred upon the Texas plains between Fort Worth
and the Rio Grande. They roamed, unfenced and with little
care, until each spring they were rounded up at convenient
centers by the owners of the several herds, and as the young
calves trotted after their mothers toward the great pens, they
were seized and branded with the brand of the owner. The

io8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
heifers and the mothers were turned loose again. The young
steers were kept together and were sold to Northern cattle
men. The "long drive" began in central Texas and ran a little
west of north through the panhandle of Texas and the Chero-
The "long kee country adjoining it into Kansas and thence
^"^^" to Ogallala and the railroad in Nebraska. A
little later, when the Northern Pacific had been constructed
to the Yellowstone, the stations of Glendive and Miles
City on that river lengthened the drive and reduced the im
portance of Ogallala. The herds of cattle left the round-up
camp in the custody of gangs of cowboys, who steered
them slowly up the drive. At Dodge City in southwestern
Kansas, where the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad
touched the old Spanish boundary at the one-hundredth
meridian, the Southern cowboys often turned their charges
over to the crews provided by the Northern buyers, who
guarded the herds to their destination.
Every year after 1866 larger herds were bred in Texas
and driven north, costing their owners only the trifling
charge for stock-tending, living on the public domain, and
grazing on Government grass. It was possible to ship the
fattened animals to the slaughter-houses at Chicago and
Kansas City, and make great profits for the cattle-men at
the same time that the beef was distributed to the East and
to Europe at prices lower than local beef could be obtained.
Fresh meat became a more important item of American
food than it had ever been before. The agricultural de
pression in Europe in the later seventies was intensified by
the competition of the cheap American foods.
Beef became a new article of commerce and brought into
existence new forms of commercial organization that in-
Chicago tensified the cry against monopoly. In every
stockyards American city of importance the local slaughter
house had been a problem because it was a necessary evil.
Always offensive to the neighborhood, there was no way of
doing without it, but its presence was commonly restricted
by local ordinances. In Chicago in 1865 the numerous local

THE CLOSED FRONTIER 109
stockyards were merged into a single union stockyard on
the western margin of the city, and there it was proposed to
concentrate the local traffic. Almost Immediately there be
gan the endless procession of stock-cars laden with Western
steers that were to force the conversion of the butchers'
business into a national Industry. The stockyards district
was of necessity enlarged. To the slaughter-houses there
were added a chain of packing-houses, where the meat that
could not be refrigerated and shipped fresh was tinned or
converted into some other form of preserved meat. The
ice machine and the tin-can machine were active agents in
the development of the new trade. Around the packing
houses there arose a network of by-product factories that
utlHzed the hides and hair, the horns and hoofs, and even
the blood of the animals, and Increased in number as in
dustrial chemistry solved the new problems of manufacture.
The Chicago stockyards became the center of a world of its
own, where the names of Armour, Swift, Hammond, Morris,
Libby, and McNeal represented the forces of control, and
where unskilled labor of foreign extraction did much of the
work. The invasion of Chicago beef was resented by local butch
ers, who formed protective associations in all parts of the
United States and tried in vain to stay the revolution In
their industry. The cry of monopoly was raised against the
packers, not only by the butchers who could not meet their
competition, but by the stock-men, who believed that il
legal combinations held down the price of steers. The rail
roads welcomed the new industry, which created a demand
for transportation, but soon found themselves obliged to
meet the dickering propensities of the packers, as they were
already obliged to meet those of the oU monopoly. By
playing off one road against the other, the larger packers
secured for themselves special rates and rebates, and drove
from the business many of their less skUlful competitors.
The Eastern butchers could only scold against the monop
oly. Their trade in its older form was doomed to speedy
extinction. The cattle-men on the Western plains were

IIO RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
more able to take steps to fight the packers' monopoly,
Cattle and there arose in Nebraska and Dakota great
ranches ranches where the cattle, driven up from the
plains, were held for the market. In the first decade of the
cow country the cattle were shipped East as soon as stock-
cars could be had at Ogallala or Glendive to handle them.
When the Chicago price was high, the cars were hard to get.
When the market broke, the cowmen had no option but to
ship their steers and to accept the price fixed by the packers
at the Chicago yards. By fencing in a ranch along the
Northern Pacific, it was possible to reduce the cost of stock-
tending and to hold the steers without great loss for a year
or more. The fact that the land law provided no means
for the acquisition of such ranches did not prevent their
growth. Some were bought openly from the railroads,
others were acquired In collusion or abuse of the Home
stead and Preemption Laws, or were deliberately fenced in
without a shadow of right. Eastern capital was drawn into
the profitable business, until by 1885 there were more cattle
on the plains than the market could absorb, and the industry
was threatened by losses due to glutting the market. Most
famous among the Northern ranches was that at Chimney
Butte on the Little Missouri in Dakota, which Theodore
Roosevelt bought whUe he was in the New York Assembly,
and which remained his playground throughout the decade.
From its beginning In 1866 the cattle industry on the
open plains developed until by 1880 it was world-famous and
European capitalists began to Invest In ranches of their own.
The sympathy with Ireland in her land controversies made
these holdings a matter of public concern In the United
States, and some observers thought they could detect a
danger of alien landlordism in America. The real danger
was the destruction of the industry by its own internal
processes. Every year after 1866 the flood of homesteaders washed
farther out upon the plains, and the fences of the farmers
— or "nesters," as the cowboys called them — narrowed
the eastern limits of the range. Every year the enclosures

THE CLOSED FRONTIER in
restricted the freedom of the "long drive." The wire fences
broke up the unity of the grazing lands, and the g^^j ^f
efforts of the cowmen to safeguard themselves the "long
by these made it more difficult to drive their
stock. As the open drive was restricted, experiments were
made in shipping the cattle north, but the natural courses
of the railroads did not serve this traffic. By 1884 still
another obstruction appeared. As early as 1879 the British
Government forbade the importation of American cattle
on the ground that they were often diseased, and In addi
tion to being unfit for consumption, were likely to contami
nate the British herds. Texas fever came to be talked about,
together with hoof-and-mouth disease and tuberculosis.
The State of Kansas passed a quarantine law in 1885, for
bidding the driving of Texas cattle Into the State, and
guards with shotguns patrolled the border of the State, to
maintain the law. The next year Colorado passed a similar
law and effectively closed the drive.
Associations of cattle-men saw the impending termina
tion of the business. In 1884 they held two conventions,
one at Chicago where the stock-men were chiefly concerned
with the new dairy interests of Illinois and Wisconsin, and
one at St. Louis, where the Western dealers discussed their
future. In the latter convention they turned instinctively
to Washington, as the frontier has always done. They pre
sented a request for the erection of a national cattle trail
from central Texas to the Canadian line, wide enough for
the herds to find abundant pastures and forever to be with
held from private entry or state restriction. "As the Indian
gave way to the pioneer," said a speaker at one of the cattle
conventions, "so must the cowboy go before the settler,
and the ranche take the place of the range, until the eight
million acres of land now grazed by cattle shall teem with
villages and model farms for the cultivation of refined cat
tle cared for, not by cowboys with revolvers, but cowboys
with brains." After 1885 the cow country was gone and the
beef industry underwent a long reorganization.
The charges of the cattle-men that the raUroads treated

112 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
them unfairly and that the packers operated a selfish
Interstate monopoly added to the complaints that grew In
commerce volume through the eighties and that led toward
an assertion of national power over the railroads. The fact
that the continental systems were substantially complete
by 1884 and that the country was beginning to regret its
generosity In the land grants gave further Impetus to the
same movement. The Senate In 1885 yielded to the pres
sure. A select committee on interstate commerce, with
Shelby M. CuUom, of Illinois, as chairman, was directed
to make inquiries into the needs for regulation and the
methods of accomplishing It.
The earliest important movement for railroad regulation
in the Interest of fair play and of the community served by
the road, arose In the States northwest of Chicago about
1873. The railroads in this region preceded much of the
population instead of following it, and were not restrained
by parallel and competing water routes or well-established
highways. The export surplus of the region was chiefly
grain, for hauling and storing which the railroad companies
and the terminal elevators which they controlled frankly
charged "all the traffic would bear." In the flush years
between 1865 and 1872 the Northwestern farmer made
money In spite of the rising value of the greenbacks and the
high freight tariffs of the railroads. The depression of 1873
intensified the greenback movement and caused the farm
ers to join by hundreds of thousands a new society, the
Patrons of Husbandry.
The Patrons of Husbandry were organized in 1867 as an
agricultural benevolent society, but found few interested
-Phe supporters for half a decade. The National
Granger Grange, as their central organization was called,
movement , r , , c , ^
was composed of delegates from the State
Granges, and these in turn gathered in the representatives
of the local Granges, to which the farmers belonged. The
Granger movement became a reality when the farmers be
came aware of their dissatisfaction, sought for a means of
venting It, and found In the mechanism of the local Grange

THE CLOSED FRONTIER 113
a tool ready to be used. The membership of the Patrons of
Husbandry began to grow after 1870. In the ensuing State
elections candidates found it prudent to avow their interest
in the regulaton of the railroad rates, which was the chief
subject of discussion In the Granger gatherings. State laws
were passed, culminating in the Potter Law of Wisconsin in
1874, which asserted the right of the Commonwealth to reg
ulate the railroads' charge for service. The railroads of the
Granger district ignored the legislation when they could and
fought the Granger laws with all the legal powers at their
disposal. Most of the laws were faulty, being based upon
hostility to the roads, rather than upon an understanding
of their business, but the Supreme Court of Wisconsin ap
proved the theory of the Potter Law, and in March, 1877, the
Supreme Court of the United States in a series of Granger
cases upheld the common-law right of a State to regulate its
railroads. The case of Munn vs. Illinois was the basic case
in connection with which the decision was handed down.
Most of the States followed the precedent of the Granger
legislatures and passed rate-fixing laws or created railroad
commissions before 1885. The problem was gradually
lifted out of the field of class politics into that of economic
investigation. In the Windom Report made to the Sen
ate in 1873, and the Hepburn Report made to the New
York Legislature at the end of the decade, and in the annual
reports of the various railroad commissions, data were ac
cumulated upon which to found the conviction that the
railroads needed to be regulated, and that no single State
was powerful enough to do it. In a case decided in 1885
the Supreme Court reached this latter conclusion, and
declared that the regulation by a State of any portion of
an interstate journey was an infringement upon the exclu
sive powers of Congress over interstate commerce. The
whole machinery of regulation was thus threatened. The
completion of the continental railroads at the same time
broadened the conviction of a need for regulation, and the
CuUom committee, reporting in January, 1886, made a
similar recommendation to Congress.

114 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
An Interstate Commerce Act was passed in February,
1887, forbidding combinations among the raUroads and
creating a non-partisan Interstate Commerce Commission
to investigate and report upon grievances against the roads.
The pooling of freight receipts by competing roads was
prohibited, and they were forbidden to charge more for a
short haul than for a longer haul over the same track in the
same direction. The attempt to force the roads to compete
with each other for their business was in part nullified by
this " long-and-short-haul clause," because since no two
roads between competing points rendered their service
under precisely the same conditions, it was sometimes im
possible for the longer road to compete for through traffic
without fixing a rate for its long-haul service which would
have been ruinous if applied to its whole business. Judge
Thomas M. Cooley, of Michigan, became the guiding spirit
of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and formulated
the principles upon which it operated until its powers were
revised In 1906.
Another non-partisan measure inspired by the impor
tance of the agricultural problem was the creation of a De-
Department partment of Agriculture with a seat in the
of Agri- Cabinet. There had been a department of that
name since 1862, but with subordinate rank
under the Interior Department. It was enlarged In 1884
by the addition of a Bureau of Animal Industry for the
purpose of controlling cattle disease and lessening the dan
ger of Its spread. Cleveland signed the bill creating a new
department, of which ex-Governor Jeremiah M. Rusk, of
Wisconsin, was appointed Secretary by President Harrison.
In 1890 it was given the duty to inspect cattle and fresh
meat offered for export. The reluctance of European Gov
ernments to concede the sanitary character of American
foods forced this action upon Congress. The consequence
of the inspection service was an extension of the technical
duties of the United States, and was one of the facts tend
ing to change the nature of the National Government.
Further examination of the remaining natural resources

THE CLOSED FRONTIER 115
was authorized at the same time. Ten years earlier the
survey work of the Interior and War Departments had
been combined in the Geological Survey In the Department
of the Interior. Under the direction of Clarence King and
Major J. W. Powell it turned the resources of science upon
public lands. Powell's report upon the arid regions was
followed in 1889 by appropriations for the survey of all
the sites available for the construction of reservoirs and
Irrigation projects. The Preemption Law, whose abuse
was an old nuisance, was repealed in 1891.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Ethelbert Talbot, My People of the Plains (1906), gives a sympathetic
picture of the spirit of the vanishing frontier, which was also caught by
Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902). The cattle industry is described in
Emerson Hough, The Story of the Cowboy (1897) ; Clara M. Love, "History
of the Cattle Industry in the Southwest," in Southwestern Historical Quar
terly (1916); and F. L. Paxson, "The Cow Country," in American His
torical Review, October, 1916. Edward W. Martin (pseud, for J. D.
McCabe), History of the Grange Movement (1874), is a contemporary sub
scription history that was circulated among the farmers. The Granger
movement is exhaustively treated in Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement
(1913). The Windom Report on Transportation Routes to the Seaboard is in
43d Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Rep. 307. The CuUom Report of Senate Com
mittee on Interstate Commerce is in 49th Cong., ist Sess., Sen. Rep. 46.
Joseph Gilpin Pyle, The Life of James J. Hill (1917), contains much material
upon frontier problems.

CHAPTER XII
WILD WEST AND SPORT
The spirit of the open frontier passed out of American
life forever in the decade of the eighties, leaving behind it
Frontier survivals that lasted for another generation, and
spirit Inducing the development of substitutes to take
its place. The frontier while it lasted was a social safety-
valve that prevented the rise of social pressure or class an
tagonism to the danger point. Not only upon the western
margin of the United States, but in every State farm land
was either free or cheap, and invited each generation to
enlarge the area of settlement and erect new homes. There
was no chance for the socially discontented to become nu
merous or ominous. No oppressed lower class could be
created in a community in which any young man with rea
sonable nerve and luck might hope to be an Independent
farmer before he was thirty. All American society was
close to its frontier origin, and the man of affairs, wherever
he found himself, normally looked back to his boyhood on
the farm.
The influence of universal farm life with independence
within easy reach of all gave Its peculiar aspect to the
American character. The more picturesque life upon the
actual frontier provided the theme that men of letters
grasped in the second quarter of the century. James Fen-
imore Cooper with his romances of the frontier made himself
a lasting place in American letters. His Deerslayer and
Chingachgook were unreal portraits, but they coincided
with what his Eastem readers thought the West to be, and
perpetuated the spirit of the frontier life.
In one form or another this spirit permeated American
society, and when the creative force was stopped, its sur
vivals carried on the legend. In December, 1887, a group
of the young men who had hunted on the buffalo range

WILD WEST AND SPORT 117
and had followed the rear guard of American big game
Into the mountains organized the Boone and Crockett Club,
through which they cherished a memory of the past and
a love of outdoor life. A few years later they exhibited at
the Chicago World's Fair a frontiersman's log cabin set on
an island in its typical surroundings. "The club felt very
strongly," wrote Theodore Roosevelt, one of its members,
"that the life of the pioneer settler, the life of the man who
struck out into the wilderness as part of the vanguard of
civUization, and made his living largely In warfare with the
wild game, represented a phase of our history so character
istic and yet so evanescent that it would be a mistake not
to have it represented. . . . There is nothing in the history
of any other nation which quite corresponds to it." Roose
velt set to work to write the history of the frontier in his
Winning of the West (1889-96), and a more genuine plains
man than he dramatized it.
Colonel William F. Cody, known through a generation in
Europe and America as " Buffalo BUl," grew to boyhood on
the margin of the plains. At the age of four- "Buffalo
teen he was rider on the pony express which
carried the mails in less than eight days across the plains
from St. Joseph on the Missouri to Sacramento. He later
became a professional hunter providing fresh buffalo meat
by contract to the construction camps of the Union Pacific
Railroad while It was building across Nebraska, and when
the road was done, he was in demand as guide and friend
for Eastern sportsmen and distinguished foreigners, who
wished to hunt big game and see the West.
About 1872 Cody went upon the stage, acting In cheap
Western melodramas whose Indians were all painted white
men. In 1883 he prepared a larger venture, gathering at his
ranch on the North Platte cowboys and mustangs as well
as real Indians borrowed from the reservation. Here he
organized his Wild West Show with its open-air presenta
tion of cowboy life. His performance leaped into immedi
ate popularity. In 1887 he took it to London to exhibit at
the American Exposition there in the JubUee year of Queen

ii8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Victoria, and earned even greater popularity than at home.
The novel life aroused the Interest of the youthful royalties
gathered In London that summer. Command perform
ances were frequent and Cody returned their hospitalities
with Western barbecues in the big arena. Alexandra, then
Princess of Wales, came repeatedly with her children, and
like the rest of royalty insisted upon riding around the
arena in the Deadwood coach during the Indian attack.
So long as it was possible to obtain real Indians and cow
boys, the popularity of the Wild West Show continued, and
when Cody died In 191 7 his rivals were still imitating his
performance and moving-picture actors without number
had seized upon his theme.
The Wild West Show preserved a part of the disappear
ing life with the technique derived from an even greater
"Greatest Spectacle, then at its height — P. T. Barnum's
Show on "Greatest Show on Earth." It was the mission
of Barnum, who turned his Yankee ingenuity to
the trade of showman In 1835, to make amusement and
recreation respectable. The Puritan ideals and the fron
tier simplicity of American life had restricted the develop
ment of public amusements. The theater was unimportant
outside the cities and in bad repute within them, but there
existed in most of the population sufficient means to patron
ize whatever entertainments might arouse their interest.
Barnum, with genius for both entertainment and advertis
ing, became a great figure in New York with his American
Museum. His exploitation of the dwarf Tom Thumb and
his later importation of the Swedish singer Jenny Lind In
1850 were typical successes in his career. Out of his mu
seum and menagerie there developed a traveling circus that
he put upon the road in 1871, and that ten years later was
famous under Its boasting name, with three rings under the
main top and Its gigantic side-shows. His Importation of
Jumbo in 1882 failed to produce an international clash as
Punch feared, but led to violent and profitable publicity.
His royal Burmese white elephant, imported a little later,
was white enough to be unQsual, but not white enough to

WILD WEST AND SPORT 119
be profitable, and added the phrase "white elephant" to
the rich American vernacular.
In the fifty years during which Barnum was prominent
before the pubHc, American life lost its rural simplicity
and city populations came into existence, living a narrower
and less satisfying life than that of the farm, and craving
new outlets to restore their spiritual balance. Farm life
had given opportunities for a rounded development that
was denied not only to the inhabitant of the city tenements,
but even to the city well-to-do. The latter now organized
their country clubs, yacht clubs, and athletic clubs, while
the former became willing supporters of public recreation
and organized sport.
The rise of sport In America between the Centennial Ex
position In Philadelphia in 1876 and the World's Fair at
Chicago in 1893 is due in part to a readjustment Rise of
of American life from rural to urban conditions, ^P""^'
and provides the outlets that replaced the frontier as it was
closed. Before the Civil War there was little sport In
America. The Turnverein members had imported group
gymnastics from Germany. There was some racing of
both horses and boats, and there was much hunting on a
small scale, but sport was generally only an afterthought
and a by-product. The breed of race-horses that Diomed,
winner of the English Derby of 1780, started in Virginia In
his old age, contributed to the development of the Ameri
can thoroughbred and the permanent Interest in racing
stock. In 1866 the American Jockey Club was opened on
the outskirts of New York, and was followed by similar
race-tracks that made racing a spectators' sport, entertain
ing the city population and discredited by the gamblers
who infested it. Robert Bonner, who owned Maud S.
when her records beat the world, found the burden of proof
still against him, as the public asked why a man of known
respectability should devote so much of his attention to
sport. The America's cup was brought to the United States from
the royal yacht races held at Cowes in 1851, and induced

I20 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
a long series of English sportsmen to undertake to take it
. back. During the eighties the Atalanta (1881),
the Genesta (1885), the Galatea (1886), and the
Thistle (1887) made the attempt In vain, and a generation
later the famous cup was still in the hands of the New York
Yacht Club, and the hope of its recovery was still alive In
Britain. Promoters of sport as a spectacle found that it could be
made to pay, with city audiences anxious for a chance to
contribute to its support. In 1878 an English
sportsman. Sir John Astley, offered a purse of
£500 and a championship belt worth £100 more to estab
lish a championship for a six days' go-as-you-please race.
Walking races among professional pedestrians had been
popular for some years, but had been marred by the Inabil
ity of referees to maintain any effective definition of walk
ing. The Astley belt was competed for in London and was
won by a Chicago Irishman named O'Leary, who covered
520 miles In six days. The trophy was defended four times
before the end of 1879, and other similar races had ample
patronage. The interest in walking races was surpassed by the re
viving interest In prize-fighting, and the personality of
_ . pugilists who followed the profession. The fight
of John C. Heenan against the English champion,
Sayers, in i860 was the last of the great fights of the old
school before promoters built arenas and commercialized
the pastime. About 1880 a Boston Irishman, John L.
SuUivan, began to attract interest by his engaging person
ality and his genius for slugging. In February, 1882, he
won the championship of America from one Paddy Ryan,
and thereafter repeatedly crowded the arena at Madison
Square Garden. Like Buffalo Bill he went to England for
the Jubilee in 1887, where his conduct when he met the
Prince of Wales and treated him as an equal was widely
noticed. Sullivan differed from many of the professional
fighters in his willingness to take punishment as well as to
give it. In 1889 a bout was arranged between him and Jake

WILD WEST AND SPORT 121
Kilrain for a new diamond belt offered by the editor of the
Police Gazette, and what they called the heavyweight cham
pionship of the world. He won this fight and his admirers
talked of running him for Congress on the Democratic
ticket. He went on a boxing tour to Australia instead and
came back to lose his title to a new winner, James J. Cor-
bett. In 1892. The popularity of boxing was well estab
lished, with the protests of the refined and tender-hearted
more than overborne by the interest of those who liked to
watch it or participate. Theodore Roosevelt engaged in
public boxing while an undergraduate at Harvard, boxed
with fighters whenever he had a chance at the White House
or elsewhere, and maintained a personal friendship with
John L. Sullivan throughout his life.
The National League of baseball clubs was formed in
1876 with eight member teams: Boston, Hartford, Chicago,
St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, the Mutuals
(New, York), and the Athletics (Philadelphia).
It marked the transition of baseball from a players' sport,
loosely organized though widely enjoyed, into a profitable
spectators' sport. Baseball evolved from earlier games of
ball played, some of them, between the Mexican and Civil
Wars. There was an organization of baseball players as
early as 1858, who enjoyed the game with a soft ball and
without gloves, masks, or protectors. The Civil War stim
ulated the game. It brought together groups of young men
who sought recreation in their off hours, and taught the
game to men from all sections, who carried it home with
them after demobilization. In the later sixties local base
ball clubs sprang into existence in all parts of the United
States and the Cincinnati Red Stockings, a strictly pro
fessional team, went on tour in 1869 with great profit to
themselves. The deliberate organization of leagues of
traveHng clubs followed In due course.
As a spectators' game baseball had no equal. The city
ball parks operated as vents where the surplus enthusiasm
of the crowds upon the bleachers was released with much
noise but a minimum of danger. An American Associa-

122 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
tion of clubs appeared In 1882 as a rival of the National
League, and minor or "bush" leagues grew up among
groups of cities everywhere. Albert G. Spalding was the
best-known patron of the game. He helped to organize
the National League, won the pennant year after year with
his Chicago team, and In 1889 took two full teams on a tour
around the world. Baseball was the only game of the sort
whose vogue was universal. Cricket, of sImUar fame in
England, was an exotic in America. It was played a little
on the fields around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia,
and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell remembered to have played it as
early as 1845. Philadelphia developed a group of country
clubs where cricket was the leading sport, and occasionally
visiting teams from Canada or England were invited for a
contest. The "gentlemen of Philadelphia" in September,
1885, for the first time beat eleven Britishers with an eleven
of Americans.
Baseball and cricket occupied the border-land between
the spectators' sport and that of the participants. The city
Amateur crowds Wanted recreation as well as entertain-
sports ment, and those who could afford it joined with
their friends to make it possible. Boys who went to col
lege found football and baseball, rowing and track athletics,
waiting for them. The Intercollegiate Athletic Association
came into existence In 1876 as did the National Amateur
Athletic Association of America. These societies drew the
line between amateur and professional sport, and endeav
ored to secure control over the former, and to maintain a
real distinction between those who played games for fun
and those who performed for money. Fields were acquired
on the unbuilt margins of the cities, where the games were
played. Club-houses were provided with dressing-rooms
and baths, and before long other conveniences made their
appearance In the form of general club-houses for non-
playing members, women's club-houses, and junior buildings
for the children of members. The athletic club became the
center of recreation in many a community and evolved
easily and naturally into the country club. A decade later,

FIRST NATIONAL MEET OF THE LEAGUE OF AMERICAN WHEELMEN, NEWPORT, MAY 31, 1880
From a contemporary cut in Prank Leslie's Weekly

WILD WEST AND SPORT 123
however, when golf was Imported into the United States,
and two decades later, when the motor car had made its
appearance, the country club developed Its largest useful
ness. The participants' sports increased in number and variety
as the population grew that needed them. About 1863 one
Plimpton invented the roller skate and bred a mania that
raged endemic among the youth and as an intermittent
epidemic among adults thereafter. Halls were converted
into skating rinks and great buildings were erected for skat
ing. The range of the sport was widened when concrete
sidewalks and asphalt streets appeared in the early eighties.
Six days' skating races were profitable for their promoters,
and a record of 1090 miles was made In such a race in
1885. Women and girls took to the pastime, causing their
elders to grieve over the demoralization of the growing
generation. Croquet made its appearance as a mild sport in the same
years, and had a wide popularity because of the simplicity
of its equipment. The handful of players who treated it as
a game of skill rather than as a pastime began their national
conventions in 1879, and persisted In them at the per
manent grounds of the National Croquet Association at
Norwich, Connecticut.
The improvements in city streets and country roads made
possible the rapid adoption of the bicycle. Contrivances of
this sort were experimented with for many years before the
machine with its large front wheel, its slender steel spokes,
and Its rubber tires assumed a standard form. Colonel
A. A. Pope, of Hartford, Connecticut, imported English
bicycles in 1878, and began to copy and improve upon them.
Bicycle clubs were organized whose members adopted uni
forms and rode together in a body. Club " runs ' ' to near-by
resorts became a common form of amusement, while occa
sionally the more stalwart members of the organizations
undertook their "century runs" upon a single day. In
1880 the delegates of twenty-nine bicycle clubs organized
the League of American Wheelmen which for nearly twenty

124 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
years took a leading position in the field of amateur sport.
The progress of Invention soon made bicycling safer and
adapted it to the use of women by the introduction of the
safety bicycle. This machine, chain-driven and with
wheels of equal size, appeared in the catalogues of 1887.
The pneumatic rubber tire that followed it in a few more
years completed the basic structure of the modern bicycle.
Lawn tennis, the only genuine rival of baseball and bicy
cling as American sports, was deliberately invented in
England and was Imported to America about 1875. Tennis
courts were built on private lawns and In the new athletic
clubs, and inspired a great Increase In the number of the
latter. A national association was organized In 1881 and
began its series of annual tournaments at Newport. A
women's national championship tournament appeared In
1890, and in the next decade the American girl invaded
England and there held her own against all comers.
The new interest in sport developed most rapidly in the
regions where the open country life first disappeared. The
games were taken up with an avidity that speedily made
them more than an outlet for repressed spirits, and turned
them into a positive expression of a new side of American
life. They spread from the cities where they were indis
pensable to the small towns where they were less needed.
Not only the rich patronized them, but people of moderate
means enjoyed them and were able to pay for them. City
governments provided them at public cost for the poorer
classes. The prosperity of the eighties was enough to pro
vide a wide and Immediate following for sport or anything
else that appeared to be worth while.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Phineas T. Barnum, Life of P T. Barnum (1855), was republished in
almost annual editions as an advertising device, but is packed with enter
taining information which is often accurate. Helen Cody Wetmore,
Last of the Great Scouts: The Life Story of Colonel WiUiam F. Cody, "Buffalo
Bill" (1889), and John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
(1910), give interesting data on the Far West. Theodore Roosevelt,
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (189 1), is one of the best accounts of the

WILD WEST AND SPORT 125
West as a playground. The literature of sport is fragmentary and unrelia
ble. The files of Outing (beginning 1882 as the Wheelman) provide the
best single source. The New York Herald gives the most detailed sport
ing news. Other works of value are Albert G. Spalding, America's
National Game (191 1); George B. Grinnell, Brief History of the Boone and
Crockett Club (191 1) ; and F. L. Paxson, "The Rise of Sport," in Mississippi
Valley Historical Review, September, 1917.

CHAPTER XIII
LABOR IDEALS
The closing frontier removed the outlet that had exerted a
continuous influence for a century, and the rise of sport to
some extent provided a substitute method of relief; but
greater changes were occasioned by the disappearance of
free lands than those which were simply of the body and the
spirit. The ease with which economic independence could
be obtained steadily declined, and a typical citizen lost the
expectations hitherto prevailing that he could be financially
independent in his early middle age. Lt became more dif
ficult to go Into agriculture. Expanding industry brought
into existence cities filled with factory workers whose fu
ture was often bounded by the factory walls.
The labor problem took on a new importance as the hope
of individual independence weakened. The factory pro-
Labor duced class consciousness among the workers,
movement ^j^q could see the sharp contrast between their
lives and those of their employers, without seeing a way of
bettering their condition except by organization.
The contrast between the comforts and resources of the
few and those of the bulk of the population became sharper
Wages and than It ever had been. In earlier periods wealth
prices ]^^^ been distributed with greater equality, and
there had been fewer luxuries or enjoyments that money
could buy. The new inventions and recreations were now
brought within reach of the well-to-do, and men of means
found opportunity in the shifting industry to increase their
wealth. It gave the worker little satisfaction to know that
he was probably better off than men in his position had ever
been before. The prices of commodities In 1890 were less
than half those that prevailed In 1865, and were actuaUy
lower than those of i860 before the Civil War. The declin
ing curve of prices after 1865 made life easier for the middle

LABOR IDEALS 127
class and the wage-earners living on fixed incomes. This
advantage was increased by the fact that wages were rising,
those of 1890 averaging 68 per cent above those of i860.
With prices falling and wages rising on a steeper curve, the
wage-earner had no grievance as he looked behind him.
His grievance lay before him, as he looked into the future and
saw a small fraction of the population enjoying advantages
hitherto unknown, whose attainment lay beyond his reach.
The National Labor Union of 1866 ran Its course until it
blundered into politics and died trying to absorb the green
back doctrine. The Knights of Labor represented the next
serious attempt to develop consciousness among working-
men, and to organize them on a national scale. Its exist
ence for over ten years as a secret society of which the
public was vaguely and nervously conscious carried it
through the panic of 1873 and the period of the railroad
strikes. At the beginning of the next decade it threw aside
the cloak of secrecy and became the open spokesman oi all
labor. Its basis of organization was the individual work
man, regardless of his craft, and it admitted all wo.rkers but
lawyers, bankers, and saloon-keepers. Its theory of organ
ization was a threat to that of the trade union that was work
ing for solidarity In the various crafts. In 1881 a federation
of organized trade and labor unions was organized In Pitts
burgh to preserve the autonomy of local union, and yet
provide a national organization. The American Federation
of Labor, as this body came to be known, had a limited suc
cess until 1887, the Knights of Labor, meanwhile, remain
ing the more prominent organization. One general activity
of the Knights of Labor was its promotion of a statistical
study of the conditions of labor. In 1891, said Senator
Aldrich m the preface to his report on prices, "there was no
data in existence by which the actual or relative status of
wage-earners could at any time be accurately measured."
A National Bureau of Labor was created by Con- Bureau
gress in 1884, to assist In this study, and thirty- of Labor
one States had somewhat simUar bureaus by 1893. The
Knights desired to secure the post of Commissioner of Labor

128 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
for their Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly, but
Arthur instead appointed a distinguished economist, Carroll
D. Wright. The annual report of the Bureau became a
mine of information on the labor movement. In 1887 and
again in 1894 and 1 901, it was devoted especially to a
summary of strikes and lockouts. Increasing knowledge
coupled with an actually Improving status increased the un
easiness of labor instead of moderating It. The panic of
1884 left temporary depression in its wake that distorted
the curves of wages and prices for a brief interval. In
1885 Powderly discussed "the army of the discontented" in
the North American Review, and believed that at the moment
there were two million workmen unemployed. There ap
peared to be a lack of correlation when farmers complained
of overproduction and falling prices and labor thought itself
unable to get along.
The prosperity that was insufficient for American work
men attracted immigrants In increasing numbers after 1878,
until in the year 1882 they totaled 788,992. To many of
these the condition of labor In America was better than
their expectation, but they quickly absorbed the discon
tent of organized American labor in addition to alien Ideals
that they imported and propagated in the United States.
Between 1878 and 1890 the German Government pro
scribed the Socialists, forcing them under cover and into
Anarchy secrecy, and driving the more enterprising of
and them to migration. Compulsory military serv-
sociahsm . , . j ^i, i r t- •
ice increased the volume of European emigra
tion. The repressive policy of Russia bred anarchy and
nihilism among the working-classes and further increased
the stream of population attracted by the prosperity of the
United States. The arrival in America of immigrants who
knew neither Republican nor Democrat, but who avowed
themselves to be followers of Karl Marx or of the exponents
of anarchy, jarred the complacency of the United States
as it regarded American institutions. The names of the
new schools of thought were freely used without differentia
tion. Violence and murder were their earmarks for the

LABOR IDEALS 129
public. The railroad strikes of 1877 caused dismay to those
who thought them the beginning of a communistic revolt.
From unshakable conviction of the merits of American in
stitutions, many persons had passed to a panicky fear of
any individual however dissenting or unimportant who advo
cated a change, whether by evolution or by revolution. In
May, 1886, after a period of strikes, egged-on by exuberant
oratory from a group of foreign anarchists, there was a
riot in the Haymarket In Chicago and bombs were thrown,
resulting in the death of several policemen. The trials of
the anarchists for murder and the execution of several of
them were generally accepted as a proper defense of society.
The Haymarket riots were described by Leslie's as "the
most significant event that has occurred in this country
since Sumter was fired on."
The army of the discontented offered a continuous in
vitation to the builders of new parties, still seeking for the
right moment to unite the forces of discontent and those of
reform. The New York mayoralty campaign of 1886 tested
the temper of the day.
Henry George, who was the candidate of the Labor-
Democracy for mayor of New York in 1886 had become a
national figure in the seven years since the publi- ^,
7 T-i T^i 1 Henry
cation of his Progress and Poverty, ihe theory George and
of the single tax expounded in this volume be- ^^^°^:^^^
came immediately popular in Ireland, where the
alien ownership of land was producing civil war. George
was recognized In Britain before America would listen to
him. His books were read and his addresses were welcomed
by large audiences. The labor and anti-monopoly forces in
New York made him their candidate In September, 1886.
Patrick Ford with his Irish World brought him support
from the New York Irish. He had the open support of Ter
ence V. Powderly, of the Knights of Labor, as weU as that of
Samuel Gompers, of the American Federation of Labor.
The older parties were driven to heroic exertions to save the
day. The Democratic Party nominated Abram S. Hewitt,
as strong a man as it possessed, who had been chairman of

I30 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the Democratic National Committee in 1876 and a member
of Congress, and who was in the abnormal position of being
at once a wealthy iron-master and a free-trade Democrat.
The Republican Party nominated Theodore Roosevelt, whose
fighting qualities more than offset his lack of years. Hewitt
was elected, but the friends of George believed that his more
than sixty thousand votes contained the nucleus of a new
political party.
The United Labor Party was formed in August, 1887, by
the group that worked with George the year before. Most
of its members were sympathetic with the doctrine of the
single tax, but the convention suppressed the Socialists who
tried to capture the organization. Six months earlier there
had been an industrial labor conference at Indianapolis,
dominated by Western reformers and the remnants of the
old Greenback organization. This convention thought
"every day brings tidings of the uprisings of the people"
and formed a Union Labor Party. Each group of reformers
hoped to bring about a merger of agricultural and industrial
labor, as the Greenback Nationals had tried to do in 1878.
The depression after 1884 was productive of complaints
against the existing order that took form not only in new so-
South- ^^^^ theories and parties, but also In open strikes.
western Jay Gould reduced the wages of the shopmen
and machinists on his Wabash road early in
1885 and brought on a strike that began in the SedaHa
shops of the Missouri Pacific in March. Somewhat to the
surprise of the strikers, they won their demands with the
support of the governors of the Southwestern States and
the local railroad commissioners. The men were encour
aged to continue and complete their organization. District
assemblies of the Knights of Labor appeared throughout
the Missouri Pacific system, and in March, 1886, local
assemblies of the Knights under the leadership of Martin
Irons renewed the warfare. The strike was disavowed by
the Knights of Labor, which as an organization did business
in other ways. There was, however, no means by which
the national organization could control the irregular acts

LABOR IDEALS 131
of its local assembhes, and Irons for a time became a dic
tator in the Southwest. Jay Gould was at the height of his
unpopularity and the strikers believed that because of this
public sympathy would side with them.
Gould defeated the hopes of the strikers by turning public
sympathy against them. Instead of trying to run his trains,
he brought them back to the yards, when the strikers did
not burn them on the way, and left them there. Within
a day or two southern' Kansas and the region southwest of it
realized their dependence upon continued freight service.
Coal and food ran low. Political pressure was brought upon
the governors to end the strike, while Powderly disavowed
it. The outlaw assemblies were held responsible for the
disorder, while the strike out of which it grew was declared
by the Commissioner of Labor to be ill-judged and without
proper cause. It was completely lost.
The Knights of Labor decHned in strength and popularity
after the Missouri Pacific strike. Its attempt at solidarity
of all labor antagonized the leaders of the trades. The
American Federation began to grow rapidly, encouraging
its member unions to develop themselves as far as possible,
and becoming itself a clearing-house for the common needs
of labor. The organization of 1881 was revised in 1886.
The renewed uneasiness of labor and reform, instead of
producing a demand for "a strong President" as it did in
1878, stimulated an examination of the workings potter,
of American government. The one hundredth Bellamy
. . , and Ford
anniversary of the Federal Constitution, cele
brated in 1889, became the occasion of a general discussion
of the changes In society. During these ceremonies Bishop
Henry C. Potter preached a scathing sermon upon the de
cay in morals to a congregation that included the Presi
dent! Edward Bellamy wrote a romance, Looking Backward
(1889), In which his hero was thrown into a prolonged
slumber on Memorial Day, 1887, to awake in the year 2000,
and to wonder at the new society. Bellamy followed the
trend to monopoly to its logical fullness, and described an
Arcadia of state socialism. His tale appealed to spirits

132 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
discontented with the reaHties of Hfe, and there came a
little crop of Bellamistic societies, whose members talked of
forming communities in which to live a communistic life.
A different picture drawn from the same society was given
by Paul Leicester Ford in The Honorable Peter Stirling
(1894), who described the foundations of the power of the
city boss and used episodes that made the life of his hero
somewhat resemble that of Grover Cleveland.
While politicians, reformers, and labor organizers were
working on the problems of the city wage-earner, the daily
City-life Hfe of that individual was an object of wide
problems concem. The cities of the eighties were piled
helter-skelter within the limits of what had been hardly
more than country towns. The census of the United States
shows 25 cities of fifty thousand in 1870, 35 in 1880, and 58
in 1890. New York City in these twenty years increased
from 942,292 to 1,515,301, Philadelphia from 674,022 to
1,046,964, Chicago from 298,977 to 1,099,850. The in
crease in houses was in every case less rapid than that in
city population. The poorer newcomers crowded in tene
ments, and it was small wonder that the city boss, with his
annual free picnic for his constituents, could win their
hearts and sway their votes. The city political organiza
tions acquired a degree of cohesion hitherto unknow-n in
American politics, and their steadiness gave to the national
party organizations an ability to resist the disintegrating
influences of reform. The cities became the scene of easy
political corruption. On every hand the needs of the com
munity called for water companies, gas companies, electric
lighting, rapid transit, and railroad terminals. The fran
chises of the community possessed great value for promoters
who could gain possession of them, and the city councils In
the presence of these agents of business were under constant
pressure to betray the interests of the people.
The condition of the less fortunate members of society
crowded In the city slums constituted a two-edged problem.
Their misery and lack of opportunity appealed to the com
passion of every one who knew them, while the future of

LABOR IDEALS 133
society in the hands of voters who had grown to manhood
amid the conditions of the slums was a matter of deep con
cern. When Jacob Rns published in 1890 the record of his
observations as a journalist on the East Side in New York
under the title How the Other Half Lives, he aroused both
amazement and incredulity.
The conditions arising from modern city congestion were
experienced in Europe earlier than in the United States
and were approached from both standpoints, of Social
the body and of the soul. The spasmodic re- workers
vival work conducted with effect by Moody and Sankey in
the later seventies in New York was paralleled by the per
manent revival work of the Salvation Army. This organiza
tion beginning in the English slums in 1865 stuck persist
ently to its task. The first edition of its War Cry appeared
in 1879. Its activities were extended to the United States,
and carried on amid jeers and misunderstandings, but "the
hallelujah circus" lasted in spite of the sneers.
The name of Arnold Toynbee is corfnected with the move
ment that began in England to take lay workers into the
slums and to help their inhabitants by methods other than
religious. The interest of Toynbee in the work was aroused
in part by the English lectures of Henry George. After his
death Toynbee Hall was founded in the East End of Lon
don, and here a group of university men went into the re
gion of the notorious White Chapel Road like any other
missionaries into a strange society.
The settlement idea was brought to America after the
opening of Toynbee Hall. Americans who would have
denied the existence of a need looked around them..and
were frightened by what they saw. The New York Col
lege Settlement was opened in the fall of 1889; a few days
after it a group of Western college women, with Jane Ad-
dams at their head, opened Hull House in Chicago. Lillian
D. Wald, one of the early group of workers in New York,
has described in autobiographic form The House on Henry
Street ( 1 9 1 5) , with which she was connected . The new ideas
spread rapidly, and before the end of the century more

134 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
than a hundred settlements of similar character had been
created to spread the happiness of modern life more uni
formly among the people.
Charity was refounded upon a new theory. The giving
to others for the benefit of the giver appeared to be inade
quate. The interest of society in the welfare of all its mem
bers and in being protected against the underdevelopment
of any of them was the foundation of new movements for
charity organization and cooperation among the charitable
agencies. The new science of sociology was studied for the
light it might throw upon these problems. Social workers
found themselves working for the same ends as the professed
advocates of labor. In both groups there was steady devel
opment of a conviction that democracy on the old basis had
had Its day with the passing of the rural Ideal, and that
under the conditions of modem industry democratic free
dom of opportunity would be lost unless the people as a
whole intervened to save themselves as individuals. By
1890 the United States was no longer a nation of relative
equality, but showed all the signs of approaching social
stratification. The degree with which this fact was unrec
ognized by the spokesmen of reform is one of the measures
of the survival of the belief in the doctrine of equal op
portunity. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John R. Commons, Documentary History of American Industrial Society
(191 1), is supplemented by his cooperative History of Labor in the United
States (1918). Contemporary narrati\-es are Terence V. Powderly,
Thirty Years of Labor (1889), and George E. McNeill, The Labor Movement
(1887). There is much testimony on labor conditions in the Report of the
Industrial Commission (1900-02). The Aldrich Reports, compiled 1892-
93, give detailed statistics on wages and prices and are printed in 52d
Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Rep. 986, and 52d Cong., 2d Sess., Sen. Rep. 1394.
There is an exhaustive report on immigration in 49th Cong., 2d Sess.,
House Ex. Doc. 157. Valuable biographies are Henry George, Life of
Henry George (1904); Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street (1915);
and Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910).

CHAPTER XIV
THE ELECTION OF 1 888
At no time between 1885 and 1889 did Grover Cleveland
have both houses of Congress In political agreement with
him. The Democrats failed to gain the Senate in 1884, and
repeated the failure in 1886. The President never received
the prestige that comes from the enactment of party meas
ures. His own party came to regard him as less than a
success, while the Republicans viewed him as the obstacle
between themselves and full control of the Government.
His tendency to rely upon his own judgment Increased with
his isolation. In December, 1887, he took all parties by
surprise by devoting the whole of his annual message to
the need for tariff reform.
The attack upon the protective tariff system advanced
along three lines after the chance injection of the issue into
the canvass of 1880, and the faUure of Congress, The tariff
under Arthur, really to revise It. The social '^^"^
reformers denounced it as class legislation that gave special
privileges to the monopolies that were already menacing.
Pohtical economists, filled with the theories of Adam Smith,
criticized it as an improper Interference with free trade
among the nations. Practical politicians saw in It the cause
for a swelling surplus In the National Treasury that either
tempted Congress into extravagance or took from the people
funds not needed for the purposes of government. Cleve
land was impressed by all three arguments, but most of all
by the last. In his third annual message he called Con
gress to its duty and his party to leadership, in cutting down
the revenues to the amount needed to maintain the Gov
ernment. Many of the wisest of the tariff reformers advised against
an attempt at reduction at this time. There was no pros
pect that a bill could be passed against the opposition of a

136 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Republican Senate. George W. Curtis, Carl Schurz, and
E. L. Godkin believed that it was more Important to reelect
Cleveland in 1888 than to force the tariff issue in 1887, and
feared that the result of Cleveland's act would be to split
the Democrats and improve the fighting spirit of the Re
publicans. Neither free trade nor tariff reform was accepted
unanimously in the Democratic Party, which had recog
nized the protectionist Randall as its parliamentary leader
untU 1883.
The tariff reform message of Cleveland was accepted by
the Republican leaders as a call to battle. James G. Blaine
was abroad when it was read, but instantly an interview
with him at Paris appeared in which he denounced free
trade. The Republican National Committee met in Wash
ington on December 8, 1887, to Issue the call for its next
convention. The committeemen welcomed the issue as
one upon which they were ready to fight, and the chairman,
B. F. Jones, announced that Blaine could have the nomina
tion if he wanted it. The aggressive in the tariff debate had
been conducted by Democrats thus far. It was now seized
by Republicans, who held it for the next ten years.
Neo-Republicanlsm was a name suggested for the Re
publican Party as its leaders took up the movement for
extreme protection, and advanced under the arguments
formulated by Henry Clay for the American system.
Throughout the debate over the tariff of 1883 the party
leaders had conceded that the tariff as it existed was inde
fensible. There was no excuse for the "accidental" duties
and it was imperative to reduce the surplus. The change
in party attitude visible by 1888 was a natural result of the
industrial changes since the panic of 1873, and the faU of
prices. Over-production and falling prices were among the results
of railroad construction and mechanical invention. The
welfare of the wage-earner was improved; his wages were
Increased while prices fell. But the producing classes,
farmers and manufacturers, watched with regret the de
clining market value of their output, and listened readily

THE ELECTION OF 1,888 137
to the suggestions for raising prices. The manufacturer
connected his loss with European competition. When
London Punch printed a cartoon describing Cleveland as
"English, quite English, you know," on account of his tariff
reform ideas, it strengthened the manufacturers' belief that
free trade was un-American, and that the route to greater
prosperity lay througl; protection. When Cleveland urged
a tariff policy whose consequence would be to encourage
the importation of more foreign goods, through lower
duties, the manufacturers turned to their own party and
financed the fight against him. Most of them lived in the
North and East, and belonged to the party that was dom
inant in that region. The voice of the Republican tariff
reformers was drowned by the noise of Republican pro
tectionists. When a New York City convention nominated
Roosevelt for mayor in 1886, a voice was raised against
him charging that he had belonged to a college free trade
club. Chauncey M. Depew, who presided, anointed the
sore spot with a jest, and defended the young man's privi
lege to make mistakes and repent them. The Republican
party organization was swung from apology for the tariff
and promise of amendment to its affirmative advocacy.
Roger Q. MUls, of Texas, appointed chairman of the
House Committee on Ways and Means by Speaker Car
lisle, was a tariff reformer, and approached, in his theoreti
cal views, what the tariff advocates described as free trade.
Under his direction the Democratic majority of the com
mittee prepared a tariff bill that contemplated a reduction
of $50,000,000 in the customs receipts. The House began
to debate it in AprU, 1888, and MUls's attack upon the ex
isting tariff situation as the result of Republican class leg
islation was met by William McKinley, of Ohio. McKin
ley was now minority leader on the committee, and was
supported by Thomas B. Reed and "Pig Iron" Kelley, of
Pennsylvania, In denouncing the bUl as a "star chamber"
measure which the majority members had drawn up^ in
secret. "Neither employers nor employed could view
with indifference th^ hasty manner in which modification

138 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
of a protective tariff, upon which depended their fortunes
and their daily earnings, was made by men fitted neither
by association nor experience for the task," wrote Walker
Blaine In the North American Review. The six Southerners
among the eight Democratic members of the committee
were charged with a sectional attack upon the industrial
life of the nation. Before the tariff passed the House, the
national conventions were held to nominate candidates for
the approaching election.
The Democratic Convention met in St. Louis on June
5, 1888, with the Administration forces in control, though
Party not able to dominate it in every way. Cleve-
conventions i^nd was renominated without serious dissent,
in spite of the opposition from his own State, where Gov
ernor David B. HUl had gained control of the Democratic
machine and was using It for his own purposes. Allen G.
Thurman was nominated for Vice-President, Hendricks
having died in office. Cleveland was able to secure the
election of his candidate for chairman of the convention,
Patrick Collins, of Boston, a prominent Irish leader whose
Influence offset that of Patrick Ford and Patrick Egan who
had led many Irish-Americans to Blaine In 1884. He was
not able to force the convention to endorse the Mills BiU
by name, although his friends overrode the objections of
the Democratic protectionists, and adopted a plank ap
proving tariff revision.
The Republican Party convened at Chicago two weeks
after the Democratic meeting, with the new spirit of protec
tion in the ascendant, and with no leader in sight except
James G. Blaine. In the discussion of the tariff since the
preceding December, Blaine had led the attack from Eu
rope, and he was still abroad when the convention met. In
1884 he had embarrassed his campaign at the last moment
by accepting a banquet at Delmonico's from Astor, Sage,
Gould, and other money kings. He was now in Scotland on
a coaching trip with Andrew Carnegie, from whose resi
dence he kept up a cable correspondence with his friends in
the Chicago Convention, He was not th^ ijiost available

THE ELECTION OF 1888 139
candidate, and knew it. The Mugwump charges, anent
the Mulligan letters and his conduct as Speaker had not
been silenced, and were certain to break out again if he
should resume his candidacy. His friends, loyal to the end,
were not ready to concede this, and held the convention in
session into Its second week while they clung to the hope
that he would consent to run.
With Blaine eliminated, the Republican field was wide
open. John Sherman, with his usual support of Southern
delegates, was still ambitious; but there was no unanimity
among his Ohio colleagues, and both Foraker and McKinley
were mentioned in rivalry to him. New York supported
a favorite son for a time, In the person of Chauncey M.
Depew. Allison, of Iowa, and Alger, of Michigan, were both
active aspirants; Indiana furnished Walter Q. Gresham
and Benjamin Harrison.
The Gresham candidacy was the hope of the surviving
Mugwumps, who had made no attempt to perpetuate a
party organization, and who had generally reverted to their
Republican allegiance after 1884. Some had remained
with the Democrats, attracted by Cleveland's leadership
against the tariff, but their number was small because it
was their general impression that In administering the civil
service Cleveland had done less well than they expected,
and many of them regarded him as a failure. The attitude
of Gresham against the tariff drew to him such Republicans
as regretted the new party trend.
As the convention week dragged on, Harrison grew in
strength, but the week-end passed without a choice. He
received the nomination on the foUowing Mon- Benjamin
day, after Blaine had repeated his refusal to Harrison
run, and had advised his friends to turn their support to
Harrison. Levi P. Morton, of New York, was nominated
with him. "Harrison lived near the center of population
and was almost a composite photograph of the nation's
want," wrote one of his admirers. "He was neither
Granger nor anti-Granger. He had good running qualities
of another kind. He had a home and cherished it. He had

I40 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
all the homely qualities which are the best gift to an Ameri
can who seeks for office by the popular vote. He had a
good record. He had an ancestry, but did not depend on
It." With the scandals of 1884 in view the nomination of
Harrison was an insurance poHcy for the party. His per
sonal life was above any reproach ; his party record as Sena
tor was good; he stood high in one of the most doubtful
States; and his grandfather, WiUiam Henry Harrison, still
aroused affections in the Northwest that resembled those
for Andrew Jackson.
The Republican platform was written by the advocates of
high protection in spite of protests from the West that the
Canvass Mississippi Valley was not devoted to it. The
of 1888 Western view, summed up in the Chicago Trib
une, a low tariff. Republican paper, stated the opinion:
"Protection, in a nutshell, means
A right for certain classes;
A little law that intervenes
To help them rob the masses.
The rich may put their prices high ;
The poor shall be compelled to buy."
The manufacturers had gained control of the Repubhcan
party organization, and upon their recommendation a little
later the Repubhcan National Committee chose Senator
Matthew Stanley Quay as chairman and campaign manager.
The Mills Bill served as a convenient text until the can
vass was nearly over. It was passed by the House during
July and in the Senate was given open hearings by the Com
mittee on Finance. At these hearings manufacturers who
objected to any lowering of the tariff rates brought forward
their testimony. The advocates of reduction, less well or
ganized, made a less important showing than the manu
facturers. The open hearings were emphasized by Repubh
eans in contrast to the secrecy in which the original bill had
been prepared. A few days before election the hearings on
the bill were dropped, and Congress adjourned to partici
pate in the closing days of the campaign. No real reduction
had been possible with the Republican Party in control of

THE ELECTION OF 1888 141
the Senate; the Democratic measure merely provided a
text for partisan debate.
The attack upon the Democratic Party for its failure to
carry out the reforms it promised produced new discussions
of the civil service. Republican critics quoted the Demo
cratic platforms since 1872 with their pledges of devotion to
civil service reform. The party in office had been beset with
demands for jobs from Democrats who had had no chance to
enjoy the federal patronage since i860. Cleveland had up
held the work of the Civil Service Commission, and had in
creased the number of offices in the classified civil service.
He had, however, taken the view that outside this service
there were many officers who "were appointed solely on
partisan grounds" and who had "forfeited all just claim to
retention, because they have used their places for party pur
poses In disregard to their duty to the people, and because,
instead of being decent public servants, they have proved
themselves offensive partisans and unscrupulous manipu
lators of local party management." Postmaster-General
Vilas had been permitted to remove large numbers of
Republican postmasters in the old fashion.
The echoes of the Civil War were not absent during the
debate, although they were subsiding every year. The
former Confederates in Cleveland's Cabinet aroused some
resentment, and the charge was often made that the Demo
cratic Government was under the control of the "rebel
brigadiers." It was held that in his pension vetoes Cleve
land "showed lack of sympathy with the pensioners"; and
he gave offense "to the patriotic public sentiment of the
country in going fishing on Decoration Day." Worse
than this he ordered the return to the Southern States of
battle- flags captured during the Civil War. It was too
early for the veterans of that struggle to accept this with
complacency, and one of them, Joseph B. Foraker, strength
ened his campaign for governor in Ohio in 1887 by his public
declaration that "no rebel flags will be surrendered while I
am governor."
The United States, as usual, was nearly evenly divided

142 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
upon the issues. In the three preceding elections the vic
torious candidates had been chosen by slight popular ma
jorities. Indiana and Ohio had now ceased to hold their
State elections earlier than the national election, and the
country accordingly lacked these indices to the temper of
the times. Indiana remained, however, a doubtful State,
which both parties made great efforts to carry. The Re
publican campaign treasurer, W. W. Dudley, received wide
notoriety from a letter in which he was alleged to have ad
vised local workers in Indiana to organize their "floating
voters" in "blocks of five" and to vote them under the eye
of trustworthy lieutenants. The letter was denounced as
bogus, but seems at least to be typical of party methods.
The British Minister at Washington, Sir Lionel SackvIUe-
West, fell into a trap set for him by a Republican worker.
A letter written to him by an alleged naturalized English
man who signed himself Murchlson asked him to advise
the writer how he might best vote so as to make his vote
of use to Great Britain. With an indiscretion matched
only by Blaine's failure to notice the remark of Dr. Bur
chard, he replied that a vote for Cleveland would support
the British policy of free trade. His act became known
in October, and he was immediately dismissed as persona
non grata, but no dismissal could overcome the injury of
his remark. Free trade was denounced as un-American
and pro-British. British gold was alleged to be behind the
Democratic Party, and votes were turned against the Demo
cratic ticket.
Benjamin Harrison was elected on November 6, 1888,
and with him there was chosen a Congress Republican in
both its branches. The election was so close, however, that
the victor received less than a majority of the votes cast;
but the Cleveland plurality was wasted on huge majori
ties in Democratic States, while the Harrison minority was
widely distributed so that It carried the electoral college.
In New York the presidential vote was given to Harrison,
while Cleveland's Democratic rival, David B. Hill, was
chosen as governor, under circumstances that suggested a

THE ELECTION OF 1 888 143
corrupt bargain between the local Democratic and Republi
can State machines.
The scandals of Indiana and New York, whether the in
dividuals mentioned were guilty as charged or not, drew at
tention to a condition in politics in grievous need of improve
ment. In most States all of the machinery used In making
nominations for office was outside the law, and was operated
by party organizations with no penalties for corruption and
no remedy for the cheated party members. Even the pro
vision of ballots to be used upon election day was a private
matter, and the State began its control at the ballot-box in
which these were deposited. It was possible to buy votes,
whether in "blocks of five " or otherwise, to place the desired
ballot in the hands of voters, and to require them to hold
the ballot so that it might be visible to the watcher at the
polls until it was safely deposited in the ballot-box. It
was possible by careful watching to observe which ticket was
voted by any voter. Democrats alleged that in manufactur
ing towns the mill-owners compelled their employees to vote
the Republican ticket under penalty of dismissal.
The abuses in the election system became more visible in
these elections in which the vote was nearly evenly divided
and in which elections turned largely upon party Secret
organization and political tricks. "We should '^^"'^'
so shape our governmental system," wrote Theodore Roose
velt in the Century in November, 1886, "that the action re
quired by the voters should be as simple and direct as possi
ble, and should not need to be taken any more often than is
necessary. Governmental power should be concentrated in
the hands of a very few men, who would be so conspicuous
that no citizen could help knowing all about them; and the
elections should not come too frequently." A movement
for a secret ballot, which the State instead of the party
should provide, made its appearance about 1885. Massa
chusetts passed such a bill in 1888 and Governor Hill vetoed
one in New York in the same year. The system had orig
inated in Australia thirty years earlier and had spread thence
into England, and now appealed to the United States as a

144 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
means of elevating the standards of elections. The action
of Massachusetts was followed by nine other States in 1889,
by seven more in 1890, and by eighteen In 1891. Before the
next presidential election the reform was national in its scope
and neither the purchase of votes nor the intimidation of
voters ever recurred on the scale in which they existed be
fore the adoption of the Australian ballot.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The tariff histories mentioned under Chapter VIII, above, continue to
be of use. William L. Wilson, The National Democratic Party (1888), is a
partisan compilation, but has considerable value in the absence of more
serious histories of parties. Joseph B. Foraker, Notes of a Busy Life (1916),
prints numerous letters relating to this campaign, and should be read in
connection with Charles S. Olcott, Life of William McKinley (1916).

CHAPTER XV
PROTECTION
James G. Blaine was more prominent during the canvass
of 1888 th,an was Benjamin Harrison, the candidate, and
received the reward of his unquestioned party Harrison's
leadership In the appointment as Secretary of Cabinet
State. In the management of the campaign it was clear
that Republican manufacturers were providing the cam
paign funds and that they expected action from the new
Government in the direction of the extension of the pro
tective system. The rest of the Cabinet was made up of
party workers loyal to protection. William L. Windom
was made Secretary of the Treasury, although Thomas C.
Piatt declared the post had been promised to him. Most
of the other members were unknown in national affairs;
but one, John Wanamaker, of Philadelphia, who was ap
pointed Postmaster-General, occasioned considerable remon
strance. Wanamaker was described by Harper's Weekly as
the purveyor of money to be spent by Quay and Dudley.
In the closing days of the canvass he was believed to have
raised nearly four hundred thousand dollars for the party
treasury, extracting the funds from his manufacturing ac
quaintances who feared interference with their tariff rates.
The editor of the New York Tribune was made Minister to
France and Corporal Tanner was made Commissioner of
Pensions. The election of 1888 resulted in Republican majorities
in both houses in the Fifty-First Congress, but left the
majorities so small that party business could be ^
... . M 1 J. T Organiza-
transacted only in case it was possible to keep tion of
the whole majority continually at work. In congresr*^
the Senate with forty-seven Republicans against
thirty-seven Democrats the margin was large enough for
safe operation. In the House of Representatives, with one

146 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
hundred and seventy votes the Republicans possessed only
five more than the absolute majority necessary to produce a
quorum. Under the practice in the House the quorum was
determined by the number of members who answered on
a roll-call. When the Mills BUl was introduced in Novem
ber, 1888, the Republican members, under the leadership of
Thomas B. Reed, of Maine, sat silently in their seats during
the roll-call and compelled the Democrats to provide the
whole quorum out of their own membership before they
could proceed to business. If this practice were now turned
against the Republican majority the end result would be im
potence in the House wheiiever six Republicans were absent.
The practice was a scandal, sanctified by long continuance.
Thomas B. Reed was elected Speaker with the support of
most of his party votes, after a caucus in which the nomina
tion had been contested by Joseph G. Cannon, WiUiam Mc
Kinley, and David B. Henderson. Reed raised McKinley
to the chairmanship of the Committee on Ways and Means,
and determined upon his policy in case the minority should
impede a new revision of the tariff by a filibuster against a
quorum. The test occurred on January 29, 1890, when the
minority remained silent during a roll-call, and the Speaker
directed the clerk of the House to record the names of the
Democrats not voting and to count them present. The
ruling was autocratic and revolutionary and precipitated
a parliamentary riot among its Democratic victims, who
leaped angrily to their feet to insist that they were not
present. With Inflexible good humor Reed observed that
they appeared to be present and continued to count their
names. After some days' discussion the ruling of the chair
was upheld and the House rules were changed, abolishing
the old abuse. Reed received the nickname "Czar," and
earned it in so far as he used his power as Speaker and as
chairman of the Committee on Rules to prevent a minority
of the House from interfering with the performance of its
business by the majority. The McKinley tariff was taken
up as the first important party measure.
There was reasonable room for doubt as to the nature of '

PROTECTION 147
the mandate of 1888, since Cleveland received a majority of
the votes cast, while Harrison was elected Pres- -pjjg
ident. But there was no doubt as to the In- McKinley
tention of the Republican Party to regard the
election as a victory for the new dominant issue. "We are
uncompromisingly in favor of the American system of pro
tection," said their party platform. "We protest against
Its destruction as proposed by the President and his party.
They serve the interests of Europe; we will support the
interests of America." The new measure that McKinley
reported to the House represented the first attempt to ap
ply the principle of protection systematically. Burrows, of
Michigan, expressed the party intent:
" If there is any article on the free list in this bill the like
of which, by fair and adequate protection, could be produced
in this country in sufficient quantities to meet the home de
mand, it is an oversight on the part of the majority of the
committee, and, If it can be pointed out, we will move that it
be transferred to the dutiable list and given such protection
as will insure Its production in this country.
"If there is a single article on the dutiable list where the
duty is so low as to expose the like domestic industry to a
ruinous foreign competition and thus endanger its per
manency, it has biit to be indicated to secure such measure
of protection as will Insure its safety.
" If the proposed rate of duty on any article on the duri-
able Hst is in excess of what is required to give fair and ade
quate protecrion to the competing domestic industry, none
will be more ready than the majority of your committee to
reduce the rate to the level of such requirement."
The McKinley Bill passed through the usual phases of
tariff construcrion; passed by the House in one form. It was
rewritten in the Senate and became a law in still a third
guise after a thoroughgoing revision in the conference com
mittee. It contained novel features In its final form with
reference to agriculture, infant industries, and reciprocity.
The agricultural schedules were promised in 1888 to hold in
line discontented farmers in the West. The lukewarm-

148 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ness of the Mississippi Valley toward protection was largely
inspired by its dependence upon staple crops. Its complaint
that the tariff was for the benefit of the manufacturers was
now met by the adoption of rates to protect American food
from foreign competition. Since almost no food was Im
ported that could be raised in the United States at all, these
schedules were chiefly political in their intention. Sugar,
however, was placed upon the free list because, by abolishing
the revenue derived from it, the surplus could be lowered
about fifty million dollars a year. The sugar duty was the
largest single item in the tariff revenue and the easiest to
control. In order to prevent free sugar from working in
jury to the American producers, who raised about one eighth
of the national supply, a bounty of two cents a pound was
provided for these, with the additional advantage of lower
ing the surplus still further.
The Republican theory that every commodity that could
be produced In the United States must be protected, reached
its logical extension in the treatment not only of infant in
dustries, but of the unborn. For over half a century pro
tectionists had described the national advantage of en
couraging the beginnings of manufacture in order that the
infant industries might ultimately be able to supply the
nation and make It independent of the outside world. The
party of Cleveland declared that "the tariff is a tax" and
that this protective rate Increased the cost to the American
purchaser for the selfish benefit of the manufacturer. The
Republican Party officially denied this charge and sought to
prove that the foreign manufacturer paid the duty, taking it
out of the profits he would otherwise have extorted from the
American public without altering the retail price. The
treatment of tin plate carried the protective theory to the
extreme. This industry was developing rapidly because
of the growing use of tin containers for the preservation of
food, but the British manufacturer had maintained his
monopoly of the manufacture of tin plate despite the wide
distribution of both tin and steel in the United States. The
McKinley Bill provided a duty upon tin plate to be made

PROTECTION 149
effective at the discretion of the President when enough
American mills should have been established to mark the
birth of a new infant industry.
The " Chinese wall " of protection drawn around American
industry by this act brought disappointment to many inde
pendent observers. "This McKinley Bill," wrote Goldwin
Smith, who had worked twenty years for the annexation
of Canada, only to see protection prevail on either side of
the border, "Is a sad relapse and a great disgrace to democ
racy ... at the same time it Is right to say that Protection
ism in the United States is kept up as much by sheer dint
of bribery as by perversion of popular opinion." James
Russell Lowell regarded it as "the first experiment a really
intelligent people have ever tried to make one blade of grass
grow where two grew before, by means of legislation." The
extremity of the act aroused the fears of the Secretary of
State lest it interfere with his cherished policy of closer re
lations with the Latin republics. His idea of promoting
American cooperation had led to the invitation of a Pan-
American Congress during his first term as Secretary of
State in 1881. Arthur cancelled the invitation, but Harri
son authorized its renewal when Blaine returned to power.
In October, 1889, the delegates of the southern republics
met in Washington to discuss their common interests. It
was futUe to talk about developing trade relations while pre
venting them through the imposition of prohibitive tariffs.
The South American exports were in many cases raw ma
terials similar to those of the United States. At Blaine's
insistence reciprocal arrangements were authorized to be
made for the interchange of such commodities, and pro
vision was made for levying special duties against such
countries as did not participate in reciprocity.
WhUe the McKinley BUl was still under debate a new
aspect of protection appeared in the demand of silver mine-
owners that their output be protected like the sherman
output of Eastern manufacturers. In the Sen- ^^'j^^^rPur-
ate there were enough silver Republicans to
make a non-partisan majority in favor of the restoration of

ISO RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the free coinage of silver. A bill for free coinage passed
the Senate in June and Western Republicans united in the
threat that unless something were done for silver, the silver
Republicans would kill the McKinley Bill and block the
party purpose. The Treasury had spent to date, under
the Bland-Allison Law of 1878, $308,000,000 in the pur
chase of silver bullion, out of which it had been able to
coin $378,000,000 standard but depreciated silver dollars.
Most of these were still reposing In Treasury vaults, where
they constituted a growing part of the Treasury surplus.
The demand of the silver miners for more aid led to the
drafting of a compromise law, which bore the name of John
Sherman and provided that every month the Secretary of
the Treasury should purchase 4,500,000 ounces of silver,
paying for the same with a new issue of legal-tender Treas
ury notes. The amount specified was intended to repre
sent the total American production of silver. With the pas
sage of the Silver Act, the obstruction to the McKinley
Bill ceased and it was signed October i, 1890.
The appropriations of the Fifty-First Congress helped to
reduce the surplus that had embarrassed every administra
tion for a decade. For the first time the appropriations ex
ceeded a billion dollars for the biennlum. Congress was
lavish in its expenditures for salaries and public buildings.
Its additions to the pension laws met the demands of the
organized veterans of the Civil War, and still further re
duced the surplus. President Harrison's first choice as
Commissioner of Pensions, Corporal Tanner, had long been
a persistent advocate of generous treatment of the pension
ers. As Commissioner his policy was, wherever possible,
to grant new pensions or increase old ones, regardless of law.
He was soon removed from office, but his successor, too, was
an advocate of liberality. The party was pledged to re
verse Cleveland's attitude of suspicion of pensioners, and
Congress passed in June, 1890, a Dependents' Pension BUl
for the relief of veterans who were incapacitated, whether
because of their military service or not. Before the Fifty-
First Congress had completed its appropriations, the sur-

PROTECTION 151
plus ceased to cause anxiety, and in its place there was un
easiness as to the continued ability of the Treasury to do
business without forcing the cheap silver dollars into use.
The close connection between the Republican Party and
the manufacturing interests was a cause of increasing sus
picion that weakened the party in the West. ^^^^_
The anti-monopoly movement was bringing the monopoly
business interests into disrepute, and the word
"trust" was acquiring a sinister meaning in popular usage.
Andrew Carnegie decried "the bugaboo of trusts" in the
North American Review in 1889, but the apprehension could
not be dispelled by mere denial. In his opinion the so-called
trusts were the outgrowth of over-production and the en
suing low prices, and were a necessary attempt to regulate
competition in such a period. A growing public opinion, on
the contrary, believed that the trusts were huge combina
tions aiming at monopoly, and saw objections to them
along economic, social, and political lines.
The economic arguments against the trusts treated them
as agents of extortion, which deprived the public of the ad
vantages of free competition. The maxim that "competi
tion is the life of trade" provided a theory upon which the
common-law doctrine rested. The public was entitled to
free competition among Its servants, and the individual
participating in that competition had a right to immunity
from combinations and conspiracies among his competitors.
Interference by such conspiracies with free competition
was actionable under the common law. They were magni
fied in importance when the industries operated as giants
and brought the force of their conspiracy against individual
competitors. The social objection to the trusts was Inspired In part by
an unwillingness to accept the changes in the nature of
American life. The independence of the individual farmer
was an ideal Increasingly difficult to realize as manufac
tures and transportation were reorganized. The great
railroad company or manufacturing corporation provided
occupation for a multitude of salaried subordinates who

152 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
would have been their own masters under earlier American
conditions. The number of Independent manufacturers
and merchants was being further decreased by their in
ability to meet the new competition. Men who desired
to remain independent were forced to give up the fight.
Butchers were forced to become distributors for the Chicago
packers. Small merchants were forced to become section
chiefs in the great department stores. The whole trend of
organization was to reduce the number of men In positions
of entire Independence and to increase the number who op
erated as cogs In some machine. There was a growing fear
that this change would work an injury in American life,' and
the middle eighties were filled with complaints against the
trusts. Here and there a writer like Edward Bellamy sup
ported the drift toward monopoly, but the more common
attitude was one of regret and hostility.
The political consequences of the trusts were suspected
and feared more than they were visibly perceived. Begin
ning with the railroad lobbies working for their land grants,
the large corporations had appeared to expect favors from
legislative bodies. They had been able to raise fund,s to
influence legislation and opinion. The belief that they
were guilty of common bribery was supported by occasional
established instances and was Increased by the belief that
they had both the funds and the willingness to be corrupt.
In some States the affairs of a single corporation were fairly
comparable with those of the State itself. The Southern
Pacific Railroad Company In California and the Pennsyl
vania Railroad In Pennsylvania were common scapegoats.
A fear pervaded the country that the people were losing
control of their own institutions and that the trusts were
gaining it. The Republican Party was particularly subject
to the suspicion of being under these influences.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Bill, an outgrowth of anti
trust sentiment, became a law in July, 1890. It extended
the principle of the common law to interstate traffic and
forbade combinations and conspiracies in restraint of trade
in commerce among the States. It was made possible for

PROTECTION 153
an injured competitor to sue a trust for damages, or for a
defendant, sued by the trust, to prove that his sherman
prosecutor was a trust and quash the proceed- Anti- Trust
ings, or for the Government itself to proceed
against the trust to procure its dissolution. The votes
that passed the law were less partisan than those that passed
the tariff. The corporations had friends in both parties
who desired to ward off adverse action. A chance letter
from one of their Democratic friends written to Chauncey
M. Depew strayed into the papers In 1889. The writer was
begging for a railroad pass and justified his plea, "although
you are a Republican and I am a Democrat, we do not
differ much in regard to our views in connection with cor
porate property, and I may be able to serve these interests
should I pull through again."
The Republican docket of 1890 was full of important
laws with definitive measures respecting tariff, trusts,
silver, and pensions, and with a new high-water mark in
appropriations. The list, with the several groups of dis
senters produced by each statute, would have endangered
the stabUIty of a party well-founded on a large majority.
For a party whose President had been chosen by a minority
of votes, it was calamitous. The debate over the tariff,
' which Cleveland had precipitated In 1887, and which the
Republican organization had forced to the front thereafter,
believing it to be a battle-cry of victory, had been slow in
producing results. The Cleveland doctrine took increasing
hold in the agricultural West, where depression had suc
ceeded the boom period of the early eighties. As the date
approached for the McKinley Bill to become effective, the
city retail stores, even including that of John Wanamaker,
the Postmaster-General, urged their buyers to "purchase
now before the price goes up." The belief that the tariff
was a tax paid by the consumer took hold of the whole
country and in the Congressional election that followed
the adjournment of Congress in 1890 a landslide of discon
tented voters forced the Republican Party out of power.
Only 88 Republicans were elected to the new Congress,

154 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
which included 236 Democrats and 8 members of a new
third party, that called itself the Farmers' Alliance and that
presented a baffling problem for the deliberations of politi
cians. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Additional works having special value at this point are William D.
Orcutt, Burrows of Michigan and the Republican Party (1917), and Samuel
W. McCall, Life of T. B. Reed (1914).

CHAPTER XVI
THE FAR WEST IN POLITICS
The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 owed its passage
to a "hold-up" In Congress, engineered by Republican
Congressmen from the Western States. It was
not the first occasion on which the frontier had ofthe
demanded and obtained legislation satisfactory c?^^'^"®
to itself, but at no preceding time had there
been so large a group of new Western members present In a
single Congress. Six new States were received into the
Union between November, 1889, and July, 1890. North
Dakota and South Dakota, Washington and Montana con
stituted a group admitted under an omnibus act signed by
Cleveland in February, 1889. Idaho and Wyoming, which
failed to secure authorization In the same act, made consti
tutions without authority for doing so and were admitted
in the summer of 1890. The narrow Republican majority
In each house made that party peculiarly susceptible to the
admission of new States, whose Congressional delegations
were likely to be Republican. Of the twelve Senators and
seven Representatives allotted to the six new States, all but
one voted with the dominant party. Their support on
party issues demanded and received its reward, with the
result that the silver issue was advanced In Importance untU
it threatened to displace the tariff.
The State of Colorado, admitted as the thirty-eighth
State in the centennial year, 1876, was still In 1890 the far
thest west of the Eastern States. The old frontier of States
as it existed before the Civil War with its western border
touching the plains along the boundaries of Minnesota,
Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, represented the
limits to which agriculture was able to expand without
artificial aid. The three Territories of Kansas, Nebraska,
and Colorado, projecting west from the middle of this line,

156 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
owed their admission to the need for Republican votes in re
construction and to the demands of the miners in Colorado.
Their initial population was small, but the railroads that
crossed them from east to west. Union Pacific, Burlington,
Kansas Pacific, and Santa Fe, had lands to sell and stimu
lated their settlement by organized promotion. With the
revival of business in 1879, home-seekers turned toward this
triangle of young States. Omaha, Kansas City, and Den
ver developed new importance as distributing centers. In
connection with the cattle industry and with the influence of
the Western prairie farmers they brought a new political
pressure in Congress.
The Far Western States of 1880 had not been changed
since the admission of Nevada as a rotten borough in 1864.
There was no excuse for Nevada except that Lincoln needed
Republican votes to strengthen the Union majority In Con
gress. Nevada, Oregon, and California were separated from
the other organized States of the Union by a huge, irregular
tract of public domain that extended across half the width
of the continent along the Canadian line, and that covered
the Mexican border between the Colorado and the Rio
Grande. There were eight Territorial Governments within
this area, five in the Northwest — Dakota, Montana, Wyo
ming, Idaho, and Washington. Two In the Southwest —
New Mexico and Arizona — were scarcely less primitive
than they had been at the date of their conquest in 1846.
The barrier was narrowest between Colorado and Nevada
where the Mormon hierarchy of Utah covered a Territory
and retarded Its admission into the Union.
In the earlier decades of frontier advance the prevaihng
growth had occurred along a narrow strip on the western
edge of the last frontier. In each generation since the plant
ing of the seaboard colonies the new frontier was settled by
the children of the old, and as the new frontier ripened into
social consciousness its children were got ready to repeat
the process. The systematic advance of the frontier was
checked at the western border of Missouri by lack of easy
transportation, by the diminishing fertility of the land upon

THE FAR WEST IN POLITICS 157
the plains, and by the popular belief in the existence of the
"Great American Desert." West of Missouri the agricul
tural frontier did not advance unaided. When the aid
came in the form of free homesteads to advertise the West
and continental railroads to lessen its distances, the result
was a scattering of effort. The frontier line disappeared from
the map after 1 880. In its place the farther west was dotted
with irregular settlements whose location was determined by
natural resources or communications. From all of these
there early came demands for the abolition of the Terri
torial status and for admission into the Union.
The Southwest Territories were the least affected by the
incentives to colonization, and with a population relatively
stationary were the weakest of the statehood projects. New
Mexico, with nearly three times the population of Arizona,
had 153,000 inhabitants in 1890, and the preponderance
pi Mexicans among these weakened the force of her Inter
mittent demands for admission.
The five Northwest Territories more than trebled in the
decade, the population rising from 301,000 in 1880 to
1,136,000 in 1890. Within their limits 8673 miles of rail
road were completed in this decade. From the valley of
the Red River of the North to the banks of the Columbia
and the shores of Puget Sound, clusters of inhabitants were
spread along the lines of the Northern Pacific, and the
Great Northern which James J. Hill was thrusting through
the same country. In Dakota and Washington there were
already organized movements for statehood earlier than
1880. By the date of their admission Dakota had over
half a miUIon inhabitants and Washington 349,000.
In the struggle for the admission of Territories after Col
orado, Dakota was the usual text upon which arguments
were based. Largest in population and nearest the East,
if she might not tome in, no Territory could hope for en
trance. Her demands for statehood were shaped by the
geographic facts that produced a geographic sectionalism
within her borders. There was no good reason for most of
the boundary lines given to the Western Territories. They

158 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
were arbitrary and rectangular. Those of Dakota included
three isolated areas of divergent economic interests. Oldest
of these was the Yankton country In the southeast corner.
Next In prominence was the northeast corner, where Red
River wheat became the staple product of a region singularly
fitted for its production. Until nearly 1890 each of these
sections had less in common with the other than with the
city of Chicago through which each maintained its contacts
with the outside world. The mining region in the Black
Hills in the southwest corner found an outlet through
Cheyenne and the Union Pacific and constituted a third
center of sectionalism in the Territory.
Long before statehood was in sight the Territory was in
tent upon division before admission, and was thinking gen-
Division erously of its future as two States. Educational
of Dakota ^^^ penal Institutions were established in pairs,
making provision for the northern and southern halves
of the Territory. The capital of the Territory was shifted
from Yankton to Bismarck, where the Northern Pacific
crossed the Missouri River. Here Henry Villard, while
celebrating the completion of his road in 1883, stopped long
enough to lay the cornerstone of the prairie capital. "The
confidence of these Westerns is superb," wrote James Bryce,
who was a guest on ViUard's special train. "Men seem to
live in the future rather than In the present: not that they
fail to work while it is called to-day, but that they see the
country not merely as It is, but as it will be twenty, fifty, a
hundred years hence, when the seedlings shall have grown to
forest trees."
The Western demand for new States was stronger than
the disposition of Congress to admit them. From 1876
untU 1889 Congress was at no time under the control of a
single party except for the two years between 1881 and
1883. The Northwest Territories were all settled in years
in which the Republican Party was dominant and in which
its plea for party regularity received strong response from
men who had lived through the period of the CivU War.
The probability that they would add Republican votes to

THE FAR WEST IN POLITICS 159
Congress created a Democratic reluctance to admit them.
Dakota at least might have been admitted In 1883, when
the Republican Party was in full control of Congress, had
not Senator Hale, of Maine, obstructed its admission on the
ground that one of its counties had repudiated an Issue of
railroad bonds. In its zeal for rail connection with Chicago,
Yankton County borrowed money to further the construc
tion of the Southern Dakota Railroad. When the local
population became dissatisfied with the attitude of the rail
way toward the county, it convinced Itself that the owners
of the bonds were culpable and defaulted on Its interest
payments. When the bondholders sought for judgments
against the county officers, these resigned. A complacent
legislature changed the law so as to permit of easy resig
nations, and for some years county officers after their ap
pointment met by stealth to levy taxes and then resigned
to dodge the process-server. Hale's objection was sufficient
to exclude Dakota in 1883, while Democratic opposition
from the House continued the exclusion for six more years.
The demand for statehood from Dakota and the other
Territories was never long absent from Washington. The
Territorial delegates in Congress made repeated speeches
upon their territory, population, and virtues. An unau
thorized constitution was framed in Dakota in 1883, and
a second with the approval of the Territorial Legislature in
1885. Wheat farming was booming In the eastern counties,
the cattle Industry was at its height In the bad lands on the
western border. To the north, in Canada, the Canadian
Pacific was completed in 1885, and the economic future of
the northern plains was secure before Congress could be
prevailed upon to authorize statehood action.
The defeat of Cleveland in 1888 served notice that after
one more short session of Congress the Republican Party
would come into complete control of the National Govern
ment. After March 4, 1889, it would be within the power
of the Republican majority to admit any or all of the Terri
tories, and they were likely to Increase their strength wher
ever new States could do it. With this prospect in view a

i6o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
movement originated in the Democratic House of Repre
sentatives in the session after the election to pass an omni
bus bill In which the Democratic Territory of New Mexico
should be joined to the Inevitable Repubhcan Territories.
Dakota and Washington presented the best cases for ad
mission; Montana had framed a spontaneous constitution
in 1884, and was much in the public mind because of the
notoriety of the Coeur d'Alene mining boom. New Mexico
made the fourth member included In the omnibus bill,
which was passed by the House in January, 1889. The
Democratic attempt to Include New Mexico was blocked
by the same tactics that Democrats had used against the
Northem Territories. With complete freedom of action in
sight there was no need for Republicans tc concede any
thing to Democrats. New Mexico was stricken out, Dakota
was divided, and Cleveland finally approved a Republican
bUl for the admission of North and South Dakota, Mon
tana and Washington.
In the summer of 1889 these omnibus States completed
their constitutions, drawing upon their Inherited experience
and the spirit of the times for their details. The traditional
form of the American State was repeated in every instance.
The prevailing temper showed itself in a multitude of re
strictions upon the officers of government. In numerous
articles upon railroads and corporations that reflected the
universal hostility against monopoly, and iri detailed speci
fications that made each constitution a virtual code of laws.
The complex constitutions were described by Francis New
ton Thorpe as striking documents In a momentous "case of
the American People versus Themselves." The four States
were admitted by proclamation in November, 1889, and
Idaho and Wyoming were allowed to join them in the fol
lowing summer. "Living men," Owen Wister has written
of the process that was then under way — "Living men,
not very old yet, have seen the Indian on the war-path, the
buffalo stopping the train, the cowboy driving his cattle,
the herder watching his sheep, the government irrigation
dam, and the automobile — have §^en eyery one, (^{ these

THE FAR WEST IN POLITICS i6i
slides which progress puts for a moment^ Into its magic-
lantern and removes to replace with a new one."
With the admission of the omnibus States the number of
Territories was reduced to three. New Mexico, Arizona,
and Utah, in addition to the tract of land under Indian
an irregular status known as Indian Territory. Territory
The same influences that quickened the life on the Western
plains brought pressure upon the United States to dissolve
the Indian tribes and to throw their territory open to pub
lic entry. The Territory of Oklahoma was created by an act
of May, 1890, including an irregular tract in the western end
of Indian Territory.
The old Indian country was brought into existence by law
upon the recommendation of President James Monroe, who
urged that the American desert be set aside forever as the
home of the Indian. The treaties made between 1825 and
1 84 1 transferred most of the eastern Indians to reservations
west of the Missouri, where Indians were protected against
the damage done by contact with the whites by the Inter
course Act of 1834. The new policy failed to settle the In
dian problem and became only one of Its transitory stages.
The overland trails pierced the Indian country in all di
rections, and when these were followed by the continental
railroads, the policy was definitely abandoned. New re
serves were brought Into existence In southern Dakota, and
in the area between Kansas and Texas, which was the sole
remaining part of the original Indian country. The tribes
living here, the so-called five civilized tribes, Cherokee,
Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, were punished
for their adherence to the Confederacy by the forfeiture of
their western lands in the valleys of the Canadian and Red
Rivers. The tribes that originally lived on the buffalo range were
given reserves in these forfeited lands, but the difficulty of
maintaining their rights of ownership increased as the area
of free land lessened. Here were some of the most attractive
lands on the continent, and the acreage was far In excess of
any use to which the Indians could put them. Cattle-men

162 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
were allowed to lease the grazing rights from the tribes that
owned them, and advanced the contention that because of
their lease they had the right to exclude other cattle-men
from driving their stock from Texas across the Indian
country toward Kansas and the north. Individual squatters
evaded the federal troops and established themselves upon
choice spots in the desired country. Its Indian name,
Oklahoma, "the beautiful land," began soon to be heard,
and squatters set up the contention that certain areas of the
forfeited lands that had not been assigned to other tribes
were open to entry under the general land laws. In April,
1879, Hayes was obliged to remove by force organized bands
of squatters who had congregated along the northern bound
ary of Indian Territory, at Caldwell and Arkansas City, and
had publicly attempted to preempt the lands. The in
adequacy of federal law in the Indian country made it im
possible to do more to the trespassers than to escort them
out, feeding them meanwhile army rations. Nearly every
year thereafter the attempt was repeated and the ejection
followed. Arthur and Cleveland both proclaimed against it.
In 1887 preparations for the eventual opening of the
Territory were begun in connection with the Dawes Act for
Opening of extinguishing the tribal sovereignty to the land.
Oklahoma Under the act each Indian received an individual
allotment and the surplus lands were purchased from the
tribe by the United States and turned into the public do
main. One of the latest laws that Cleveland signed author
ized his successor to issue a proclamation opening these
Oklahoma lands to settlement. A cordon of federal troops
was drawn around the boundaries of the country to prevent
"sooners" from entering in advance and preempting the
choicest tracts. The official race began on April 22, 1889,
and within a few hours Guthrie and Oklahoma City had
sprung into existence as tent colonies, speculation had be
gun in building lots, and long queues of entrymen awaited
their turn at the federal land offices. There was no Terri
torial Government as yet. The Oklahoma voters were
obliged to rely upon their native respect for law, supple-

THE FAR WEST IN POLITICS 163
mented here and there by federal troops. A year later the
Territory was formally organized and Oklahoma was started
toward ultimate admission.
Utah had completed forty years of Territorial life when
Oklahoma was created and would have been admitted at
a much earlier date had it not been for the in
stitution of polygamy maintained there under the
sanction of the Mormon Church. In 1862 Congress for
bade polygamy by law, but the act remained a dead letter
in the Territory, where plural marriage was not only sanc
tioned, but encouraged by the Church. It was impossible
to procure either indictment or conviction by juries drawn
by Mormon officials and made up of Mormons. For twenty
years gentiles in Utah complained of the hierarchy that
dominated the territory. The Edmunds Law of 1882 ap
proached the problem from a new angle. In addition to
providing penalties for polygamlsts it disqualified them for
jury service, public office, and the franchise. It threw the
administration of the Territory into the hands of the gentiles
and created a federal commission of five to supervise the
enforcement of the law.
In spite of protests from the Mormon Church, the Ed
munds Law was enforced with the approval of American
public opinion. The leaders of the Church with numerous
plural families were convicted and sentenced, while each
year brought into the Territory more non-Mormon settlers.
The prosperity of the Irrigated counties In Utah gave an
impetus to irrigation in all the arid regions. In 1890 the
Church gave up the fight. The revelation concerning plural
marriage, which had been officially published in 1852, was
as officially withdrawn. The public attitude of the Church
became that of discouraging new plural marriages and of ad
hering to the law. The older heads of plural families gen
erally stuck to them and took the consequences, but in the
younger generation polygamy became uncommon. Presi
dent Harrison accepted the change of policy, issued a gen
eral amnesty to former offenders, and Congress In 1894
empowered Utah to become a State. The property of the

i64 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Mormon Church which had been seized as a punitive
measure was restored In 1893. Utah was admitted in 1896.
The new States of the Far West reflected In their institu
tions the liberal Ideas that were fighting in vain for recog-
Woman nltlou elsewhere in the country. Most notable
suffrage among these was that of woman suffrage. Wyo
ming accepted the principle in its constitution of 1890 and
Colorado adopted it by referendum in 1893. The new
State of Utah accepted it from the start, and in November,
1896, Idaho became the fourth of the suffrage States. The
movement had already been the objective of active re
formers for half a century and now entered into the realm
of practical politics. It was fourteen years before the next
State, Washington, was added to the list. After 1910 oppo
sition to woman suffrage rapidly diminished and it became
a generally accepted fact.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Robert P. Porter, The West from the Census of 1800 (1882), and Julian
Ralph, Our Great West (1893), are useful general surveys. F. L. Paxson,
"The Admission of the Omnibus States, 1889-1890," in Wisconsin State
Historical Society, Proceedings, 191 1, contains many bibliographical refer
ences. L. A. Coolidge, Orville H. Piatt (1910), is the life of a Senator long
interested in the Territories. Local histories, in addition to the voluminous
writings of Hubert Howe Bancroft, are John Hailey, History of Idaho '
(1910), Edmund S. Meany, History of Washington (1909), William A. Linn,
Story of the Mormons (1902), and Joseph Schafer, History of the Pacific
Northwest (1905).

CHAPTER XVII
POPULISM
The social changes of the eighties brought statehood to
seven Territories and internal reconstruction to the near-by
States. In 1880 the Unite'd States comprised three regions
of nearly equal size, the old States, the Territories, and the
frontier States that bordered on the Territories. In these
frontier States there were still free land and abundant
opportunity. In Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado the ac
tual changes of the decade were most extensive and the
resulting shift In social needs and political Ideals was most
severe. The railroads built more than eleven thousand miles of
track in these three States between 1880 and 1890, and in
this region the results of artificial stimulation ys^gr;,;^].
produced the greatest immigration. More than tural over-
.„. r • 1 1 • production
a million and a quarter new inhabitants ap
peared in them, most of them living on the farm and en
gaging with feverish haste In the erection of homes, towns,
railroads, and the material things of life. Wheat and corn
were the staple commodities of this region. The sugar beet
began to appear toward the end of the period, but In general
the farmers devoted most of their efforts to their standard
cro]te. There was thrown upon the world a greater mass
of food than could be immediately absorbed. By 1886
the cattle industry, that flourished just before the farmers
came, had passed the period of its greatest profit. The
faUing price of meat due to unregulated production was fol
lowed by falling prices of other agricultural products. The
readiness with which the manufacturers turned to Con
gress for' relief and asked for protection to improve their
market was paralleled among the farmers by a similar de
mand to raise the prices of their output.
The steady decline of prices hit with greatest severity

i66 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the industries in which arrangements were made over long
periods and In which quick readjustments to a change in
prices were most difficult. The Western and Southern
farmers equally were dependent for their prosperity upon
a market price that could not even be estimated when they
prepared their fields and sowed their crops. The manu
facturer could if need be store his output or reduce costs
by laying off his hands. The farmer with a single crop had
no such relief and must in general stick to his crop and sell
it for what the market offered. The few facilities for
storing cotton In the South were not controlled by farmers
or managed In their Interests. The Northern grain ele
vators had been objects of hostihty to the farmers who pat
ronized them since the Granger period. There appeared
early in the eighties movements In the Northwest and
South that looked, as the Grange had done, to the better
organization of the farmers. The manufacturers had their
home markets club and abundant means to advertise their
desires. The agrarian movements were carried on by lesser
men and showed in their course the poverty and political
Inexperience of most of their supporters.
The origin of the Farmers' Alliances that appeared in
most of the Western States before 1880 is to be found in
Farmers' the Continuing consciousness of farmers' prob-
Alliances lems. The Grange had passed the crest of Its Im
portance and the Alliance movement which succeeded it was
a spontaneous growth out of local conditions rather than
an expansion of a national organization. In October, 1880,
the National Farmers' Alliance held a mass convention in
Chicago and completed a loose federal organization. No
credentials appear to have been required at this convention
and Its permanent chairman permitted any one to partici
pate who desired. The motive inspiring its three hundred
delegates closely resembled that which inspired the Green
back Party in the same year. It was an anti-monopoly,
anti-railroad body that hoped to accomplish results through
economic cooperation rather than politics. When the or
ganization held its next annual convention in 1881, the

POPULISM 167
delegates reported the existence of about one thousand
local alliances with Kansas and Nebraska in the lead.
The social side of the alliances was similar to that of the
Grange. In a few Instances, where local leadership was
strong, farmers' cooperative movements were developed
and maintained general stores or grain elevators for the
benefit of their members. The movement was so informal
and the leadership so Httle known that the records of its
growth are difficult to trace. Many of its members were
identified also with the Greenback Party, and In their cor
respondence the common aims of the two movements are
sometimes discussed. "The Farmers are waking up as they
have not done since the Grange Movement," wrote one
of them in 1882; — "our County alliance is getting into
working order, and I see calls in all directions for a revival
of the Alliance Movement." "We are untrammeled advo
cates of Reform, with Rep. proclivities," wrote another
to Lemuel H. Weller, who was running for Congress in
Iowa on the Greenback ticket. Jesse Harper, an original
member of the Republican Party, was speaking continuously
for the Alliance in the South and West. " I am speaking for
the poor man's party," he wrote to Weller, "hence do not
charge much. Ten dollars a day and all expenses." From
Nebraska another leader wrote to Weller: "We have some
150 farmer Alliances formed in the State. A fair propor
tion in your district. Monopoly candidates must stand
from under as far as the Alliances are concerned. If you
are a distinctively farmers' candidate and your opponent
a R.R. attorney or a Monop. candidate, I could perhaps be
of some service to you."
The Narional Alliance reported the existence of 2700
local alliances In 1883, and Its leaders took an active part
In the reform activities started by the Union Labor Party
in anticipation of the election of 1888. " Every day brings
tidings of the uprising of the people," wrote one of Weller's
correspondents in 1886. Another observed that "God is
killing all the Old Party Leaders pretty fast. My Prayer
is he wUl take Cleveland, Manning, Blaine & John Sherman.

i68 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Then we may have some hope finantially [sic] in America."
The activities of the leaders of the Alliance and of the
Knights of Labor became closely interlocked. The Na
tional Farmers' Alliance developed its greatest strength
among the Southern States, while Northern farmers tended
to join the Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union. The
warfare between these two bodies was largely a partisan
struggle of leaders for individual advantage, but the Alli
ance was kept alive among the farmers. Thirty-five thou
sand members were claimed by the alliances in the sum
mer of 1888 and fifty thousand in 1889.
The hopes with which farmers settled along the lines of
the land-grant railroads in the early eighties turned to dis-
„ , may before the decade ended. The agricultural
settlements had been worked too far west in
Kansas and Nebraska, and there, as well as in eastern Col
orado and parts of Dakota, were encroaching on the semi-
arid plains. In ordinary years the rainfall west of central
Kansas Is too scanty to sustain farming. From year to
year, however, the average fluctuates. In the early eighties
there was a series of years of excessive rainfall that produced
good crops nearly all the way to Denver. The new regions
filled up with newcomers who had no earlier knowledge of
the country, and there were few old inhabitants to shake
their heads at the possibility of farming on the high plains.
The law of averages reasserted itself about 1887 with the
result that the crops received even less than normal rainfall
and dried up early in the summers. Local economists, who
had fancied that the "new science of meteorology had
changed the climate and increased the rainfall," learned
their mistake. In all the organizations that appealed to dis
contented farmers membership and activity increased as
the decade neared its end. The attempt to put together a
Union Labor Party with a solid backing of workers, whether
industrial or rural, was a failure in 1888, but the materials
for making such a party became more numerous. The
Knights of Labor, declining from the Importance formerly
held as the official spokesman of the labor movement, en-

POPULISM 169
couraged the overtures for a union with the farmers and
Grand Master Workman Powderly was a constant figure at
the farmers' gatherings.
Both parties made efforts to secure the support of the dis
contented. The Republican guarantee of protection for
farm products In 1888 increased the difficulty with which
the farmers maintained their identity as a separate move
ment, and "traitors in disguise" made continual efforts
to dump the Union Labor Party into one or the other of the
larger organizations.
In the autumn of 1889 the movement of protest gained
more momentum and started in upon a train of events that
led to the creation of an important new third party. In the
period of agricultural depression the farmers of this new
frontier learned a lesson that hard times have brought out
In every frontier region, that the payment of debt is less
exciting and more painful than the incurring of it. Every
American frontier community has been short of capital and
In need of credit which must be obtained from wealthier
regions. The country west of Missouri and north of Texas
was settled by farmers most of whom were in debt for the
cost of migration and the purchase of land, machinery, and
stock. The per capita debt was heavier than on earlier
frontiers because the old simplicity of life was gone. The
frontier family was less content in a cabin than its parents
had been, and insisted upon a house. There were railroads
to be built, schools to be constructed, water systems to be
installed, and machinery to be bought. The credit agen
cies were maintained partly by the banks, but largely by
mortgage companies that lent Eastern money on Western
farm security, charging Interest at the rate of ten to fourteen
per cent in addition to a premium for making the loan at all.
The average farmer was in debt beyond his reasonable ex
pectation of ability to pay. Hard times destroyed the last
vestige of the expectation. Facing bankruptcy and de
pressed by falling prices, the Western farmer was suscepti
ble to the economic theories of those who believed that con
ditions could be bettered by making money more plentiful
and lowering the value of the dollar.

I70 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Free silver was still the hope of the miners who produced
that metal. In 1890 they found themselves in a political
The free- situation in whlch they held the balance of
silver power In Congress and procured the passage of
™ ^^™ the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Their propa
ganda for free silver was maintained continuously. Copies
of their pamphlets were sent Into the newspaper offices and
brought to the attention of the assemblies of the Knights of
Labor and the farmers' societies. In November, 1889, a
conference of free-silver advocates was held at St. Louis on
the call of the mining stock exchange of that city. It was
a miners' movement to raise the price of silver by promoting
its use as currency. The word "bimetallism" began to be
used more widely by the advocates of silver coinage who
believed that there was some way whereby the Gresham
law might be kept from operating and gold and silver dol
lars be kept circulating side by side, with relative weights of
sixteen to one. There were some who believed that Con
gress could by law establish the relative values of silver and
gold ; others, less confident of national power in this direc
tion, thought they could be established by international
agreement. The silver miner in general persuaded himself
that the result of free silver or bimetallism would be to re
store the price of silver to the commercial ratio of sixteen
to one. Their purpose of advocating free silver was to
raise the price of their commodity. If this were not ac
complished free silver for them would be a failure.
In making overtures to the Farmers' Alliance for support
the silver producers invited aid from a social group whose
motive in supporting free silver was the direct opposite of
their own. The only reason why the debtor farmer should
support free silver was to raise prices by lowering the value
of a dollar. Free coinage might accomplish this in either
of two ways. If the Gresham law operated and the cheap
silver dollar became a medium of exchange, prices would
rise in Inverse ratio to the depreciation of the coin. If,
however, the Gresham law failed to operate and both coins
by some miracle of legislation remained in circulation, the

POPULISM 171
purchasing value of the dollar would still be lowered by the
addition of so many silver dollars to the total money of
the country. If prices rose for either of these reasons, the
alliances would gain advantage from free silver only in
proportion as the silver miners lost it.
The leaders of the Farmers' Alliance joined the miners in
the St. Louis convention, and in officially adopting free
coinage espoused a movement that ultimately submerged
their other demands for reform. They held a second con
vention at St. Louis in December, 1889, in which it was
attempted to subordinate the local differences of the North
ern and Southern alhances and to make out of them one
huge agrarian organization.
The Southern farmers were as susceptible to the Ideas of
inflation as were the Western alliances. The annual cotton
crop was still financed by crop mortgages with Southern
the local storekeeper as banker. The Western Alliances
debt, or Investment on capital account, was matched in the
South by debt created for current maintenance. For the
same reasons that once induced the South to support the
Greenback movement, that section now produced wide
support for free silver; but its attitude toward organization
for accomplishing results was different from that of the
Northwest. Conscious of its race problem. Southern opin
ion feared new movements that might seriously divide the
vote of the white population. The Southern alliances pre
ferred to get results by pressure in the Democratic primaries.
The Western alliances had no hope of working through the
Republican Party and saw their advantage only through
the organization of an independent party. The attempt at
a merger In 1889 was unsuccessful, and the matter went
over for another year. The conditions meanwhile through
out the West were steadily becoming worse. General Miles
in 1890 commented upon the "terrible results" of drought
In many States and believed that "should this impending
evil continue for a series of years, no man can anticipate
what may follow."
The passage of the McKinley Bill in October, 1890, was

1/2 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the shot that exploded the forces of Westem discontent.
The Republican majority in the lower house was wiped out
and a new majority was created of Democrats who owed
their seats to the dissension caused by the alliances in the
Republican ranks and to the discontent upon which the
alliances were based. When the annual convention of the
aUiances met at Ocala, Florida, In December, 1890, the re
sults of the election were all in, and the time appeared to
be ripe to consolidate the gains in a new party organiza
tion. "It occurs to me," said the chairman of one of the
local meetings, "that we are the people, and under the
name of the 'People's Party' everybody can rally." From
a different source one of the Knights of Labor suggested
"that they call it the 'Nationalist Republican Party,'"
adding, "we are trying to nationalize the Republic, not
only its politics, but its whole system of production, dis
tribution and exchange. . . . ' We the People ! ' was the cry
of the Sans Culottes during the horrors of the Robespierre
revolution, and the taint of that horror will stick; don't
conjure It up now."
The Ocala conference failed to bring the rival farmers'
organizations and the Knights of Labor into a union, but
ThePopu- a group of its delegates after its adjournment
hst Party signed the call for a meeting to be held at Cin
cinnati in May, 1891, to form a third political party. The
"conglomerate conference" was held as called. The new
party, which was to be known as the "People's Party" or
the "Populist," in spite of prudential considerations among
its founders, already had a Senator-elect, Peffer, who had
been chosen by the Kansas Legislature to succeed the more
distinguished John J. IngaUs, for whom reform had been
"an iridescent dream."
The leaders at Cincinnati were Ignatius Donnelly, of^
Minnesota, and General James B. Weaver, of Iowa, who
had been the Greenback candidate for President in 1880.
The convention turned the farmers' movement into a polltl-'
cal party, In spite of the obstruction of the Democratic
alliances In the South, and created the usual national com-

POPULISM 173
mittee for the People's Party. The New Orleans Times-
Democrat described it as "a gathering of all the political
odds and ends," and the New York Nation, whose sagacity
weakened when it dealt with Westem themes, believed "it
is not likely that the managers of either of the great political
parties will give much serious thought henceforth to the
'People's Party' which was organized in Cincinnati."
The enthusiasm with which the leaders of the Cincinnati
convention were greeted at home changed the notion that the
movement was unimportant. A national conference called
at Cincinnati met at St. Louis on February 22, 1892, to
consider plans for a convention to nominate candidates In
the ensuing campaign. The Chicago Tribune, aware of the
political danger, began to attack them as ' ' calamity howl
ers" and as "knaves" who sought to deceive simpletons by
a rotten platform and a debased currency.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Frank L. McVey, The Populist Movement (1896), is still the most val
uable narrative and can be better understood in the light of F. J. Turner,
"The Problem of the West," in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1896,
and Carl Becker, " Kansas," in Turner Essays (191 1). Appleton's Annual
Cyclopedia (1892-97) has useful articles on populism. Among the biogra
phies are Clement Dowd, Life of Zebulon B. Vance (1897), and William E.
Connelley, IngaUs of Kansas (1909), and Life of Preston B. Plumb (1913).

CHAPTER XVIII
THE REELECTION OF CLEVELAND, 1 892
The national convention of the People's Party met in
Omaha in July, 1892, to nominate a candidate around whom
it might be possible to rally the discontented forces of agri
culture and Industry. The business depression still con
tinued and added every month new converts to the farmers'
cause. Men were less important than principles In the con
vention, which finally nominated James B. Weaver, of Iowa,
as Its candidate after considering the possibility of Repub
lican dissenters like Judge Walter Q. Gresham, of Indiana,
or silver advocates like Senator William M. Stewart, of
Nevada. The Populist platform, based upon discontent among the
"plain people," recited a long list of grievances, "in the
The Popu- midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral,
hst platform political, and material ruin. Corruption domi
nates the ballot-box, the legislature, the Congress, and
touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are
demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to
isolate the voters at the polling-places to prevent univer
sal Intimidation or bribery. The newspapers are largely
subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business
prostrated; our homes covered with mortgages; labor im
poverished; and the land concentrating in the hands of
the capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right
of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized
labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army,
unrecognized by our laws. Is established to shoot them
down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European
conditions. The fruits of the toU of millions are boldly
stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented
in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in
turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From

THE REELECTION OF CLEVELAND, 1892 175
the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed
the two great classes of tramps and millionaries."
The demonetization of silver stood at the head of the
grievances which the Populists declared their intention to
correct. "A vast conspiracy against mankind has been
organized . . . and the supply of currency is purposely
abridged to fatten usurers, bankrupt enterprise, and en
slave industry." They demanded monetary reforms in
cluding "free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at
the present legal ratio of sixteen to one," an increase in the
circulating medium to the amount of fifty dollars per capita,
a national currency to be lent by the Government at two
per cent, and a graduated income tax, as well as postal sav
ings banks. A second group of demands declared for the
Government ownership of railroads, telegraph and tele
phone. A third group demanded the suppression of alien
ownership of land, and appealed to the single- tax followers
of Henry George by asserting that land ' ' is the heritage of
the people, and should not be monopolized for speculative
purposes." In an addendum to the platform the party ex
pressed its belief In the Australian ballot, reduction of tax
ation, liberal pensions, an eight-hour day, the initiative and
referendum, a single term for the President, and the direct
election of United States Senators. It condemned protec
tion, national subsidies to private corporations in any form,
and Pinkerton detectives. Tom Watson, one of its vig
orous Southern supporters, characterized the demands as
"Not a Revolt, It Is a Revolution."
While the farmers' movement was crystallizing into the
People's Party the Administration of Benjamin Harrison
was running a lukewarm course. Its crushing -pj^g j^^^.,.;.
defeat in the Congressional elections of 1890 dis- ?on Admin-
. • o istration
couraged the hopes of Republican success in 1892.
The Democratic Fifty-Second Congress chose Charles F.
Crisp, of Georgia, as its Speaker in 1891 with a Republican
minority supporting Reed, and with Thomas E. Watson,
of Georgia, securing votes of eight Farmers' Alliance meift-
bers. A few days before the Fifty-Second Congress met, a

176 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
threat of war startled the United States. In Chile, where
Blaine had sent as Minister his Irish supporter, Patrick
Egan, a revolution took place in the summer of 1891. The
open sympathy of Egan with Balmaceda, who like himself
was anti-English in his views, and who was overturned by
the revolt, made the American Minister persona non grata
with the new Government. On October 16 a group of
American seamen ashore at Valparaiso were attacked, and
in the course of the ensuing correspondence a note from the
new Foreign Secretary was offensive to the American Gov
ernment. A sharp discussion with the new Government, of
which Montt was installed as President in December, led to
an unexpected ultimatum delivered by Harrison and trans
mitted to Congress January 25, 1892. An apology was
peremptorily demanded under threat of war. On the same
day a voluntary disavowal was received in the State De
partment and was being decoded while Congress Hstened to
the ultimatum. The episode was unimportant save as to
its possible consequences, and was probably induced by
Egan's unfitness for his office. It served to attract attention
to the ease with which the President might drag the nation
into war and the inadequacy of existing means with which
to fight.
A diplomatic breach with Italy in which the United
States was the offender occurred earlier in 1891, following
. an exasperating controversy in which Italian Immigrants
were arrayed against the New Orleans police. A group of
Italians, under suspicion of murder in New Orleans, but
acquitted by the local police authorities, were lynched by
a mob on March 14. Popular feeling ran high because of
the belief that the lynched Italians were the guiding spirits
of a secret society that had sought to terrify the New
Orleans police by murder and assault. The Italian Min
ister, Fava, denounced the local authorities as "recreant
to their duty" for their faUure to safeguard the prisoners,
and asserted the right "to demand and obtain the punish-
ntent of the murderers and an indemnity for the victims."
This demand was made in brusque fashion under threat of

THE REELECTION OF CLEVELAND, 1892 177
severance of diplomatic relations and Fava was withdrawn
from Washington when the United States was unable to give
instant compliance. Blaine wrote to Governor Nicholls,
of Louisiana, that "the Government of the United States
must give to the subjects of friendly powers a security which
it demands for our own citizens when temporarily under a
foreign jurisdiction." The responsibility was easier to ad
mit than it was to obtain redress, or punishment of the
guilty. No machinery existed by which the United States
Government could compel the State to punish the guilty or
to bear the burden of its share of the International duties of
the National Government. Harrison decried the brusque
manner of the Italian Government, but forgot the latter
when Chile became the offender. The matter was ulti
mately patched up under the precedent afforded by the
Lopez riot of 1851. The President maintained that foreign
ers were entitled to no better protection than that afforded
to American citizens, but Congress, upon his recommenda
tion and out of sympathy with the persons injured, indem
nified their heirs.
The relations between the President and Secretary
Blaine attracted increasing attention as the convention of
1892 drew near. In a letter written in February Blaine
stated that he was not a candidate, but his loyal friends
continued to hope that he would yield and insisted upon
the need for a more popular nominee than Harrison. The
unusual success of Harrison on the stump was In sharp
contrast to his unpopularity in his own office. In his per
sonal relationships with the party leaders his manners were
irritating. He offended reformers by appointing to office
a long list of Republican editors, party hacks, and personal
associates. The leading party workers were not concili
ated, for they got too little. The wave of ballot reform
sweeping over the country was changing the conditions
under which campaigns should be fought. The Civil
Service Commission was allowed to grow in influence and
Harrison appointed Theodore Roosevelt as one of the Com
missioners and upheld him in a vigorous and well-advertised

178 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
fight to save the civil service. Blaine curtly resigned from
the Cabinet three days before the Republican Convention
assembled and gave hope to his supporters that he would
accept a nomination.
The Republican Convention at Minneapolis was under
the influence of anti-Blaine men who had no enthusiasm for
The Re- ^^^ alternative. " B. Harrison would be dead to
publican start with," wrote Speaker Reed, who was hlm-
Convention , ,. . j • j ^ ti. 1
self a minor candidate. I here was nearly as
much support for WUliam McKinley as there was for
Blaine, but their combined strength did not prevent the
renomination of Harrison on the first ballot. In spite of
its defeat In 1890, the Republican Party reaffirmed "the
American doctrine of protection. . . . We believe that all
articles which cannot be produced in the United States,
except luxuries, should be admitted free of duty, and that
on all Imports coming into competition with the products of
American labor there should be levied duties equal to the
difference between wages abroad and at home." The party
demanded bimetallism, but Insisted that "every dollar,
paper or coin, issued by the Government, shall be as good
as any other." Whitelaw Reid was nominated as Vice-
President. The retirement of Blaine from Harrison's Cabinet closed
his public career. Death had broken up his family within
Death of the few months preceding, and his own ill-health
Blaine terminated his life a few months later. Through
his whole public career he had been within reach of the
largest success without ever grasping it. He began in
a generation whose standards of political practice were
those of the business and society to which they belonged.
He allowed himself to be placed in positions which could
never be explained when a changing code of public ethics
became operative in his later life. His gift of leadership
and his vision of a harmonious western hemisphere were
sufficiently marked to enhance the tragedy of his failure to
deserve and win the greatest rewards in public life.
Grover Cleveland left the White House in 1889 and took

THE REELECTION OF CLEVELAND, 1 892 179
up the practice of law in New York City with his political
career apparently at an end. He had succeeded in compel
ling an unruly party to accept his leadership and had been
beaten upon his own issue at the polls. No other President
so defeated had come back Into national office except John
Quincy Adams, whose long membership in the House of
Representatives was more nearly a new and independent
career than a continuation of his earlier public life. In
Cleveland's case the rule was changed. Within the next
two years after his defeat his following for tariff reform was
increased In number and was strengthened by the support
of the forces of general discontent. After 1890 there was
widening recognition that he had been the leader of the
attack upon the tariff. There was no desire among profes
sional politicians to have him back in politics, for, like Harri
son, he had been stubborn and unaccommodating. Too
much a party man to please reformers and too little for the
politicians, his appeal to the voters at large Increased in
strength, and was measured by the calls upon him to dis
cuss national problems before popular audiences. Before
the end of 1891 his personal friends were corresponding on
a large scale in the hope of organizing the popular move
ment of approval so as to compel his renomination by the
Democratic Party in 1892. Hill, of New York, added to
the vogue of Cleveland by showing fear of it. At his dic
tation the New York convention to nominate delegates to
the Democratic National Convention was summoned three
months ahead of time and endorsed Hill for the presidency
in the vain attempt to head off the Cleveland movement.
The New York World, the leader of the Democratic dailies,
advised against the snap convention. Hill's manifest un
easiness strengthened the Cleveland movement, as well as
the fact that Hill's opposition might be construed as an
endorsement of Cleveland's merits.
The Democratic Convention at Chicago contained a wide
diversity of opinion upon the issues of the day. The tend
ency of Populism and the Alliance movement was to sepa
rate Republican converts from that party, but to create

l8o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
a popuhstic element within the Democrats. Governor
Boies, of Iowa, had a following for the nomination, because,
with Populist support, he had been elected in 1889 and 1891
to the leadership of a State normally Republican. Single-
taxers and free-traders sought to influence the convention.
Tom Johnson, of Cleveland, one of their leaders and an inti
mate adviser of Henry George, devoted himself to defeating
the hopes of Eastern Democrats for a straddle on the tariff.
Later, as member of Congress, he used his "leave to print"
in order to read Henry George's volume on Protection or Free
Trade into the Congressional Record, and used his frank to
circulate more than a million copies of it before election.
At the close of the convention he was told by William C.
Whitney, Cleveland's first Secretary of the Navy, " I would
rather have seen Cleveland defeated than to have had that
fool free-trade plank adopted."
Devotion to Cleveland was the unifying sentiment of the
convention. He was nominated on the first ballot with
Renomi- ^^ party leaders In New York and Maryland,
nation of DavId B. HIU and Arthur P. Gorman, openly
disgruntled, and with the Populist members of
the party dissatisfied by his attitude on the currency. The
nomination of Adlai E. Stevenson, of Illinois, a free-silver
advocate, for the vice-presidency, only partly appeased the
latter group.
A " force" bill that had been urged by Republicans in the
preceding Congress served to stiffen the Democratic ranks
The can- among the Southern States in the canvass of
vassof 1892. The measure was inspired by Northern
resentment at the exclusion of the negro from
the franchise. With open defiance of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, the South prevented the negro from
exercising his right to vote. Before 1890 most negroes ac
cepted the Inevitable and gave up the attempt to vote, thus
reducing the opposition to the Southern Democratic Party
to a negligible minority. In the close elections from 1876 to
1888 the North bewailed the loss of the Republican votes
that the negro might have cast. The Republican platform

THE REELECTION OF CLEVELAND, 1 892 181
of 1888 charged "that the present administration and the
Democratic majority in Congress owe their existence to the
suppression of the ballot by a criminal nullification of the
Constitution and laws of the United States." Under the
leadership of Henry Cabot Lodge and with the support of
Northern Republican leaders a force bill to protect the ne
groes In their right to vote passed the House In 1890. It
was dropped in the Senate in the following session after the
party reverses of November. The South kept its memory
alive by asserting that the reelection of Harrison would be
followed by enactment of such a law. The Southern States
began to follow the example of Mississippi in accomplish
ing virtual disfranchisement of the negro by means of an
education test.
The lifeless canvass of 1892 was due to lack of general
enthusiasm for Harrison, uncertainty as to the operation
of the new secret ballot laws which were In effect in some
thirty-five States, and the discouragement of Inroads of
Populism among the Republican farmers. In several of the
Westem States the new party was clearly preparing to take
possession of the whole local government. "Any man in
the country standing upon the doctrine of high protection
would have been defeated," said Senator Shelby M. CuUom.
"The people sat down upon the McKinley Tariff Bill, and
they have never gotten up. They were thoroughly imbued
with the feeling that the party did not do right in revising
the tariff up instead of down."
Cleveland was reelected In November by a slight plural
ity over Harrison because of the Populist secession. The
vote for Weaver was 1,040,886. In six States, all of them
Northern or Western, the Populist Party picked up twenty-
two electoral votes. In many others the Populist vote,
drawn from the Republican total, threw the victory to
Democratic candidates. What was true of the presidency
was true of Congress ; because of the schism the Democrats
gained the Senate and retained control of the House.
For the first time since the Civil War the United States
National Government was entirely in the hands of Demo-

1 82 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
crats when Cleveland was reinaugurated in 1893. The new
Cleveland's rriajority was in no sense homogeneous, but in-
second eluded around its Democratic nucleus anti-tariff
Republicans from the East, anti-monopoly Re
publicans from the West, and dissatisfied Republican re
formers like Wayne MacVeagh, Carl Schurz, and Walter
Q. Gresham. "Mr. Cleveland had recognized in the last
election a public movement almost equivalent to the crea
tion of a new party," said the Christian Union in comment
upon his Cabinet list. Official announcement of the person
nel of the new Government was made early in February.
Gresham, who had been a Republican until within a few
months, was made Secretary of State. John G. Carlisle,
the free-trade leader of the party In the House, was ap
pointed to the Treasury, while Daniel Lamont, private
secretary In Cleveland's first term, became Secretary of
War. Under Lamont the function of private secretary had
been elevated to a new level. The demands upon the time
and attention of the President had been accentuated be
cause of the long period in which the party had been out
of power. Lamont protected the President with an urban
ity and decision that brought him Immediate recognition.
The Navy Department was entrusted to Hilary A. Herbert,
of Alabama, who had been in Congress for twenty years
and had recently acted as chairman of the Committee on
Naval Affairs of the House. Richard Olney, of Massachu
setts, became Attorney-General. The pledge of Cleveland
in his second Inaugural was to accomplish the reformation
of the tariff, to prevent the further debasement of the cur
rency, and to continue the reform of the civil service.
There was wide comment upon the fact that the new
Cabinet differed from that of Harrison, in that it included
no social leaders and no men of great wealth. The contrast
was less due to a new principle In Cabinet selection than to
a shifting of social standards. Wealth had become more
ostentatious in the decade that was closing. City life had
become more luxurious, and with the wide distribution of
prosperity, luxury and personal service had appeared in

THE REELECTION OF CLEVELAND, 1 892 183
well-to-do homes where simplicity had formerly prevailed.
European travel was every year Introducing new ways of
life into the United States. At the World's Fair, about to
be opened in Chicago in commemoration of the discovery of
America, the display of American inventive ingenuity was
given a setting of beauty amid new standards of art and
architecture. In New York City, a few days after the in
auguration, W. W. Astor opened his five-million-dollar
Hotel Waldorf, the first institution of its kind in the new
American city life. The ostentation here was a sharp an
tithesis to the depression of the Western States and the
demand of farmers for immediate relief.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
G. F. Parker, who compiled the Democratic campaign textbook of
1892, has written Recollections of Grover Cleveland (1909), which is supple
mented on the personal side by Richard Watson Gilder, Grover Cleveland,
A Record of Friendship (1910). Matilda Gresham has collected the papers
of her husband in Life of Walter Q. Gresham (1920). Fred E. Haynes,
James Bird Weaver (1919), reveals the continuity of membership among
the reform parties. Abigail Dodge, under her familiar pseudonym of Gail
Hamilton, set to work on her biography of Blaine immediately after his
death.

CHAPTER XIX
THE PANIC OF 1 893
The silver dollar was worth sixty-five cents in gold when
Cleveland was reinaugurated. In accordance with the
Bland-Allison Act, and the Sherman Act which succeeded it,
some 417,000,000 silver dollars had been coined since 1878.
Of these, $362,000,000 were in Treasury vaults, in addition
to uncoined silver worth $118,000,000, because of the In
convenience with which they were handled and a growing
public reluctance to accept depreciated money. Unlike
the greenbacks there was no promise to redeem the silver
dollars In gold, and only the unwillingness of each National
Administration since Hayes to force them upon the public,
and the surplus revenue that made such action unnecessary,
averted the catastrophe of a depreciated standard. West
ern farmers who demanded free silver showed no willing
ness to use the silver money already on hand. Leaders in
the demand were frequently embarrassed by the exposure of
the fact that while calling loudly for free silver, they wrote
into their own mortgage contracts clauses calling for repay
ment in standard gold coin.
When John G. Carlisle took over the Treasury Depart
ment the cash balance in the Treasury was a source of ap-
State of the prehenslou. President Harrison and Secretary
Treasury, Foster, said the Nation in its issue preceding the
inauguration, "are watching the dollars in the
Treasury with unconcealed anxiety, and hoping against
hope that March 4 wUl come without an actual crash."
The decline In Imports due to Western and Southern hard
times had reduced the revenue from the tariff. The silver
provisions of the McKinley BUl reduced it still further.
Appropriations were consuming it more rapidly than ever
before, and it seemed likely that in the fiscal year 1893
there would be an actual national deficit.

THE PANIC OF 1893 185
The quality of the money included in the Treasury bal
ance was as discouraging as its amount. Silver dollars,
which the public would not use wUlingly and which were In
vicarious circulation (through sUver certificates) only be
cause the small denominations of Treasury notes had been
withdrawn, became each month a larger proportion of the
balance. The old custom of making most of the payments
to the Treasury In the form of gold had ceased. Debtors of
the Government everywhere took advantage of the unwill
ingness of Treasury officials to force silver into circulation
and began to sort out from their currency on hand gold,
which they hoarded, while they paid their silver and paper
to the Government. The percentage of gold receipts was
declining. The Sherman Act of 1890 was responsible for
an aggravation of the currency troubles. Under this law
the Treasury bought silver bulHon, paying for it with legal-
tender Treasury notes. It immediately occasioned an in
flation of the currency to the amount of the monthly pur
chase; as the bullion was subsequently coined into dollars
the legal tenders were withdrawn in amounts to match the
silver dollars that went into circulation, but before this date
arrived the original holders of the legal tenders turned them
into gold at the Treasury and carried off the gold.
Every month the Sherman Act not only increased the
amount of cheap silver money as the Bland-Allison Act had
done, but also reduced the gold balance In the Treasury
upon which the stabUIty of the inverted pyramid depended.
The gold reserve which Secretary Sherman had put together
in anticipation of resumption in 1879 was carried on the
Treasury balance thereafter as a separate Item. Amounting
to about one hundred mUlion dollars, it came to be accepted
as a low-water mark below which the gold could not be
allowed to fall without endangering the standard of cur
rency. In the last months of the Harrison Administration
the commercial world observed the decline of the Treasury
balance and the decreasing proportion of gold that it con
tained, and before Harrison left office it was for some weeks
a matter of chance alone whether he could preserve the

1 86 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
hundred-mlUion-doUar gold reserve intact. A few weeks
after Carlisle took over the Treasury the shrinking of the
gold reserve below this mark became the visible index of
financial panic.
The chief elements in the panic of 1893 were financial
apprehension and over-Investment. The former of these
Causes of ^^^ inspired by the fear that the gold doUar
the panic would cease to be the standard of value and that
In its place a depreciated silver dollar or, even
worse, an issue of irredeemable paper, might force gold to
a premium as had been done during the Civil War. The
attempt at bimetallism was still a failure. The relative
weight of the gold and silver dollars, fixed at sixteen to one
in 1835, had no effect upon the market value of the metals.
The bullion value of the silver dollar had declined steadily
since 1873. Both dollars were still legal tender, but most
of the silver was in the Treasury instead of in circulation.
Every owner of invested capital had financial reason to fear
the change from gold to silver standard which would reduce
the value of his dollars in proportion to the depreciation of
silver. Persons living on fixed salaries and all wage-earners
were in a similar condition. If such a shift were produced
unavoidably, it would cause Irremediable catastrophe; if
produced deliberately, It would be repudiation and a crime.
Nervousness as to the safety of the gold standard was
most pronounced In the Eastern and Middle States, and
was intensified after 1890 by two strong forces. The in
crease of silver money and the decline of the gold reserve
were ominous external symptoms of weakness. The swell
ing Western demand for free silver, which stood at the head
of the list of social panaceas, was still more ominous, as
revealing a popular Intent that might be successful. Fear
of free silver, as it became more general, stimulated an in
creased hoarding of gold and by this accelerated the shift
toward the silver basis.
Over-investment had by 1890 produced in the United
States an unsound condition that would have compelled
liquidation of debts and an ensuing depression even if there

THE PANIC OF 1893 187
had been no currency apprehensions to unsettle the nerves
of business. Since 1873 the United States had passed
through one of the economic cycles that revolved at irregu-
,lar intervals through the nineteenth century. The years
1819, 1837, 1857, and 1873 marked the completion of ear
lier revolutions, and the United States was in 1890 rap-
Idly approaching the end of another period and the need to
balance its books and begin again.
With falling prices and rising wages typical of the period
after 1873 the level of social welfare in America was higher
than it ever had been. But with new inventions and greater
ease in fulfilling old needs the demand for comfort and lux
ury was steadily growing. The farmer boy, bred to the
simplicity of the country, expected to live better when he
moved to town. The comforts of the city became available
on the farm through the enticing advertising pages of the
farm papers and the catalogues of the mail-order houses.
There were better opportunities to educate the children in
the State universities and the enlarged Eastern colleges.
There were railroads to be built, farms to be paid for and
stocked, cities to be extended into their suburbs. The in
creasing annual accumulation of wealth was met by more
rapidly increasing demands for expenditure and investment.
Nearly every year after 1879 saw heavier pressure upon the
resources available for permanent investment, and brought
nearer the date at which new projects would have to stop
through lack of capital, at which going projects would be
forced to get along upon smaller loans, and at which bank
ruptcy would confront not only speculative business, but
every business that depended upon continued credit.
The cycles of prosperity and panic have always been de
termined by the ratio of production of wealth to its use and
investment. They have been further modified by psycho
logical conditions. In the years of business depression
after 1873, men held themselves down to safe and sane
business, and took few avoidable risks. The gains of busi
ness were small, but relatively sure. In the next five years
the accumulated savings of a scared and frugal society be-

1 88 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
gan to press for means of safe investment, and promoters
of new ventures, assured by their avoidance of failure in the
careful years, regained their nerve. About the date of re
sumption money became available for enterprises that were
well endorsed. Men of good repute, like Henry Villard,
could obtain funds even for unmentioned ends, and the
enlarged profits of business both increased the available
capital and encouraged the spirit to risk again. The failure
of Grant and Ward in 1884 revealed the existence of specu
lators of doubtful honor, but did not check the movement
for speculative Investment. The rumors of great fortunes
to be made in mines or in railroads, in manufacture or In
cattle-raising, brought within reach of business the isolated
savings of cautious individuals and kept filled up that fund
out of which every new venture must be financed. In the
long run no permanent investment can be made except it
be paid for out of the capital that some one has produced
and saved. That fund is not without limit, and after a
dozen years of speculation society is warranted in suspect
ing that it may have approached the margin. When the
margin is reached, and there is no longer capital available
for the former scale of speculation or investment, something
must yield. And if at this moment some financial accident
scares the world, and men generally try to save some of their
property by selling part of it at a forced sale, no one can
foretell the extent of the panic that may ensue.
The panic of 1873 was precipitated by the failure of Jay
Cooke. That of 1857 came after the collapse of the Ohio
Life and Trust Company. In 1893, after three years of
warning and agricultural depression, with fear as to the
value of all property aroused by the danger of the silver
basis, the panic was precipitated by the failure of the gold
reserve to keep above the level of $100,000,000.
The Democratic Party, organized around the issue of
tariff reform, was unprepared to meet the issue presented
by a financial panic caused by dread of a silver currency.
Like the Republican Party, it had avoided a clear expres
sion of views upon the currency, and had adhered to safe

THE PANIC OF 1893 189
and unmeaning phrases that all money must be of equal
value and that there must be no discrimination against
one of the traditional metals. Both parties included voters
who desired free silver, whether from the hope of raising
its price or that of decreasing the value of the dollar; and
both contained others to whom free silver was anathema.
In 1892, with the People's Party calling for "free and un
limited coinage of silver and gold" and a circulation of
fifty dollars per capita, the Republicans asked for "the
use of both gold and silver as standard money ... so that
the purchasing and debt-paying power of the dollar, whether
of silver, gold, or paper, shall be at all times equal." The
Democrats called "the Republican legislation known as the
Sherman Act of 1890" a "cowardly makeshift," and also
held "to the coinage of both gold and silver without dis
crimination against either metal," but insisted that all of
either variety of money, as well as paper, must be kept at
par in coin. Neither party ventured to say how any nation
could coin both metals freely and yet avoid the fact that
two dollars of unequal value are not the same. With vague
phrases which any advocate might twist into at least a
partial endorsement of his own demand, the two great
parties dodged the issue of the currency.
International agreement was again invoked to try to
accomplish what could not be done by the United States
alone. The suggestion that the two dollars be brought
together in value by putting more silver into the silver
coin until it was worth a dollar in gold was rejected. Such
policy would defeat the aim of the mine-owners who wanted
a higher price for their bullion; and of the farmer inflation
ists who wanted cheaper money. It being clearly impossi
ble for the United States by law to raise the price of silver,
a monetary conference was convened at Brussels upon in
vitation of the United States to consider fixing such price
by international action. Twenty nations were present in
the conference that sat in November, 1892; but their long
discussions only brought out the fact that most of the im
portant nations had adopted the gold standard, and were

I90 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
satisfied with it. Like the preceding meetings of 1878 and
1 88 1, this conference took no action to help the United
States out of its currency dilemma.
Neither party was pledged to a clear policy respecting
silver in 1892, but there was no doubt where Cleveland
stood. Before he was first inaugurated in 1885 he went out
of his way to show his belief in the gold standard and the
necessity to hold the country upon a gold basis. By ad
ministrative acts he prevented the Bland-Allison dollars
from driving gold to a premium. The same policy was fol
lowed by his successor, who urged in vain the repeal of the
Sherman Act. With panic confronting the new Adminis
tration in 1893, and with Cleveland clear upon the action
needed, the Democratic majority that had been organized to
revise a tariff was called upon to reestablish the currency
upon a safe basis. It had no mandate upon this, and no
agreement among its members. It faced wreck upon a new
problem before it had time even to consider the work for
which it had been preparing since 1887.
The gold reserve fell below' $100,000,000 on- April 21,
1893. The alternatives before the Treasury were to borrow
gold and thus maintain the reserve, or to pay the obliga
tions of the United States In any lawful money, gold, silver,
or paper, and permit the cheapest form of the currency to
shift the value of the dollar to its own basis. Gresham's
law, that bad money drives out good, had operated too
often for there to be any doubt as to the consequence of
paying public debts In silver. On the other hand, if gold
were borrowed, the necessary publicity of this remedy would
increase the nervousness and accelerate the run upon the
Treasury for the redemption of paper in gold. And every
month by law the Treasury was forced to buy four and a
half million ounces of silver, and pay for it in another issue
of legal-tender notes. Not until August did the gold re
serve get back to its normal amount, and in the meantime
financial advice and political maneuver were focused upon
the Sherman Act.
Commercial failures were numerous • during the spring

THE PANIC OF 1893 191
of 1893, beginning with that of the Reading Railroad in
January. As nervousness increased, banks con- panic and
tracted their loans, and speculators unloaded depression
their holdings to save themselves or were sold out to cover
their margins. In May there was a stampede for safety,
with failures of brokers, banks, railroads, and industrials
on every hand. The New York Clearing-House resorted
to the use of certificates Instead of currency to settle bal
ances, while the report in June that the mints of India had
ceased the coinage of silver tended to lower the price of
that metal still further and make panic worse. On June 30
Cleveland summoned Congress to meet in special session
on August 7, 1893, to repeal the Silver Purchase Act.
Not until nearly thirty years later did it become common
knowledge that at the crisis of the panic the life of Cleve
land was in danger. Many years later the surgeon, Dr.
W. W. Keen, who was called In to operate, told of the grave
condition affecting the roof of Cleveland's mouth, and the
hesitation with which an operation which might affect his
life was undertaken. Secrecy was observed at the time be
cause of the belief that knowledge of the President's condi
tion, with a Vice-President, Adlai Stevenson, who believed
in free silver, in the offing, would make the panic worse.
Between the call for the special session and the date of its
meeting Cleveland left Washington, ostensibly for a cruise
on the yacht of New York friends. The operation took place
while the yacht lay at anchor in the East River, and Cleve
land was then protected from public observation at his
home on Buzzard's Bay until he had recovered from its
effects. A storm of political dissatisfaction broke upon the Presi
dent when his intention to call a special session was made
known. To the silver Democrats of the West Repeal of
and South the act seemed like apostasy to the t^^^J??:'^'
1 /^i 1 o "^^" Silver
interests of the common people. Charles S. Purchase
Thomas, of Denver, in an open letter to Secre- '^^
tary Carlisle charged him with abandoning these interests
and demanded that the Government take advantage of its

192 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
privilege to pay debts in any kind of lawful money and
force the silver dollars into circulation. Governor Davis
H. Waite, of Colorado, whom the Populists had elected in
the preceding year, announced that it would be the duty
of his State to coin silver dollars at the old ratio on its own
account and make them legal tender, and indulged in rhet
oric that made him nationally famous after a silver con
vention in July, where he declared, "It is better, infinitely
better, that blood should flow to the horses' bridles rather
than our national liberties should be destroyed." On
August I the silver forces met in convention in Chicago.
The representatives of the mine-owners were present,
" Bloody-Bridles" Waite was there, with Ignatius Donnelly,
a spokesman of the Populists, and Terence V. Powderly, of
the Knights of Labor. The convention denied that the
Sherman Act was the cause of the hard times and ascribed
them to the "crime of 1873," a conspiracy of the moneyed
classes to outlaw silver, and by limiting new coinage to
gold, a single metal, to raise the value of the dollar for their
own advantage.
Crisp was reelected Speaker when Congress assembled
on August 7, over Reed, the Republican leader, and Simp
son, of Kansas, who was supported by seven Populists'
votes. Elected the preceding year "to change our tariff
policy from a protective to a revenue basis," Congress was
now obliged by the panic to change the financial policy of
the country, for which neither party was prepared. Reed
and most of the minority members responded to the demand
of the President that the Sherman Act be repealed, and with
the gold Democrats, made a majority that passed the re
peal bill through the House before the end of August.
The acute panic of 1893 was ended when the action of
the House of Representatives indicated that the repeal was
to be accomplished. The resulting confidence that the
National Administration would not be a party to the depre
ciation of the currency strengthened the nerve of business.
Depression continued for at least four years, but the vio
lent liquidation was over. The leadership of the President

THE PANIC OF 1893 193
not only held Congress to the repeal, but carried the Issue
into the party conventions of the year. In Nebraska
J. Sterling Morton, Secretary of Agriculture, and a strong
gold Democrat, sought endorsement of the policy of Cleve
land at the Democratic Convention In October. He was
opposed by a silver faction In the convention under the
leadership of Congressman William Jennings Bryan, whom
the Outlook described as the finest orator and best thinker
among the free-trade and the free-silver Democrats. When
Bryan was beaten in the convention and announced his
shift to Populism, it commented, "There is no man in the
West whose change of political affiliation is of greater con
sequence." The repeal of the Sherman Act was signed on
November i, after Bland and Bryan had tried in vain to
operate a filibuster against it. "Eighteen months ago,"
said the Nation, "the coolest observers thought the chances
favored free coinage, and we certainly escaped from it only
by the narrowest squeak."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
F. W. Taussig, The Silver Situation in the United States (1892); J. L.
Laughlin, Bi-Metallism in the United States (1896); Charles J. Bullock,
Monetary History of the United States (1900); and M. S. Wildman, Money
Inflation in the United States (1905), devote much space to the topic of free
silver. W. H. Harvey, Coin's Financial School (1894), is a persuasive
free-silver tract widely used for campaign purposes and answered by
Horace White, Coin's Financial Fool: or, The Artful Dodger Exposed (1896).
W. Jett Lauck, Causes of the Panic of i8gj (1907), is a clear and useful
analysis. Reference should also be made to the files of the Arena, the
Forum, the North American Review, and Sound Currency.

CHAPTER XX
INDUSTRIAL UNREST
The controversy over free silver precipitated another
episode in the age-long controversy between those with
Free silver money and those without. In its simplest form
and class free sllvcr was a device whose widest appeal was
to farmers burdened with the debts incurred in
the speculative decade just ended and exasperated by the
continuous downward trend of prices. Wheat, corn, and
cotton, each the chief financial reliance of a great and uni
form section of the United States, were all so low as to
endanger the stability of their respective regions. Free
silver promised certainly to increase the amount of cur
rency and probably to lower the value of the dollar. It
was easy to convince the debtor section of the country that
the falling prices were due to the conspiracy to raise the
price of gold.
The opposition to free silver was as instinctive among
the prosperous elements in society as belief in free silver
was among the debtor farmers. The strong probability
that free silver would bring the Gresham law into operation,
drive gold to a premium, and lower the purchasing value
of the dollar, inspired fear amounting to terror and panic
throughout the East and North. In these regions free sil
ver appeared to be repudiation and deliberate dishonesty.
The social cleavage between debtor and creditor classes ex
posed by the free-silver movement was intensified by the
fact of a sectional division along similar lines. The North
was predisposed to the gold standard in spite of party. The
South and West, in spite of party, were against it.
The currency dispute involved more than the financial
interests of either class. In a technical way, like the green
back controversy, it involved an examination of existing
laws with a view to determining the rights of the Govern-

INDUSTRIAL UNREST 195
ment of the United States under its statutes. The dis
cretionary power of the Government to use "lawful money"
in meeting its obligations, and to determine by law what
should constitute lawful money, was made clear by a study
of the currency legislation. Either silver or greenbacks
might be used to meet most of the obligations, without
infringing any existing law.
Behind the question of the legal right lay the larger
questions of moral right and of financial expediency. Most
Americans in the heat of the controversy were too warmly
biased by their selfish interests to be detached judges of the
larger issues. It was only a minority which approached the
controversy without bias toward class or subjection to self-
interest. These in general took the view that Grant had
taken of the greenbacks and the public debt, and that
HamUton had taken of the Revolutionary debt which he
found outstanding when he became Secretary of the Treas
ury under Washington. From the grounds of highest pub
lic expediency it was wise policy for the Government never
to take advantage of a technicality in its own interest, and
to interpret its obligations in the broadest way. Public
credit depends upon public expectation that it will be gen
erously maintained. For the Government deliberately to
force cheap money into circulation appeared to these not
only a crime against honesty, but a costly departure from
sound expediency. It was deplorable that currency should
fluctuate in value, but it would be criminal to produce such
fluctuation for the purpose of transferring wealth from one
social class to another.
The realignment of parties with free silver as the dom
inant issue began with the repeal of the Sherman Law. It
was impeded by the fact that free silver was only one of a
long list of reforms urged for the benefit of the plain people,
and that many of these reforms were inherently sound.
The widespread commercial depression affected the forces
of industry as well as those of agriculture. While farmers
felt that they had lost their market, workmen knew that
they had lost their jobs. The existing discontent was

196 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
wider than the distribution of any single class, and the dis
contented readily believed that the Government was in
league with those who would exploit the interests of the
people. The World's Columbian Exposition was opened in Chi
cago in May, 1893, under conditions resembling those amid
Worid's which the Centennial Exhibition had been held
Columbian in PhUadelphia, in 1876. Hard times prevented
each from realizing its fullest success as a public
spectacle. A comparison of the exhibits, however, shows
the long distance that the United States had traveled in less
than two decades. The ugly, straggling warehouses built
in Fairmount Park to house the Centennial bore no re
semblance to the wonder city that sprang into life around
the lagoons at Jackson Park. In their very framework the
buildings were a measure of the revolution. Structural
steel made possible at Chicago new effects in size and shape.
The plaster decorations, here used for the first time on a
large scale, concealed the skeletons and gave them the ap
pearance of marble palaces. At night they were outlined
by living fire with incandescent lamps, while searchlights
played upon them from all directions. For the first time
American architecture achieved an international triumph.
The contents of the buildings were as significant as their
externals. In the fields of electricity and transportation
they showed the vast change since the last world's fair.
The trains of Pullman and Wagner palace cars revealed a
luxury in travel that was new. Serious visitors relieved the
weariness of observation by attending the conferences that
were held on all conceivable subjects. The more frivolous
spent their moments in relaxation along the "Midway,"
where they found amusements ranging from Buffalo BUl's
"WUd West" to the "Streets of Cairo." The fair was less
than a complete success because of the effects of the panic
of 1893.
The open revolt of the farmers against the conditions of
their economic life was paralleled by that of labor, whose
unrest was intensified by the depression and panic. In the

THE COURT OF HONOR, WORLD'S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, CHICAGO, 1893

INDUSTRIAL UNREST 197
spring of 1892 the Nation commented upon a strike among
the steel workers in the Pittsburgh district and was im
pressed by the novel fact that public sympathy for the
strikers appeared among all classes of society. The well-
to-do had generally regarded the earlier strikes as revolu
tionary outbreaks. Public opinion was changing because
— the Nation thought — of an awakening to the abuses
incident to a protective system under the domination of
manufacturers. The Pittsburgh strikes of 1892 affected the Homestead
Works of Andrew Carnegie. Since the close of the Civil
War the steel industries had undergone great The age
changes due to the new methods of majking steel °^ ^'^^^
and its wholesale application In industry. The steel rail
for the first time provided the steam railroads with an ade
quate bearing surface for their rolling stock, and enabled
them to increase the size and weight of locomotives and
cars, to lengthen the train and increase its tonnage capacity.
One of the contributory causes of the strikes of 1877 was
the growing practice of running double-header trains, with
two locomotives, but only one crew of trainmen. The re
sulting economy was coveted by the railroads, but the
trainmen's unions fought the practice because it lessened
the number of jobs.
With steel available the raUroads were rebuilt after 1879,
and the new electric roads that supplanted horse-cars In
city streets used steel rails from their inception. Bridges
and trestles were remodeled with the new material. Wood,
iron, and stone became only supplementary to steel, while
cantilever bridges made It possible to carry the tracks over
obstacles that had hitherto been impassable. The car-ferry
lost its vogue as a means of crossing rivers. The Brook
lyn Bridge was the best known of the new monuments of
transportation, and in most of the large cities new terminals
with huge steel train sheds made their appearance.
City architecture entered upon a new era with the appear
ance of the steel truss. The limit of height in stone or
brick construction had long been reached in the cities of

198 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Europe, and even the wide use of the passenger elevator did
not greatly increase it. The height was determined by the
space available for foundations and supporting walls, and
after six or seven stories had been piled up these became
so wide that further building was prohibitive. The steel
frame made it possible to reduce the foundation area, and
hang the walls upon the metal skeleton instead of thicken
ing them to bear the burden. The maximum height rose
at once, and before 1890 office buildings appeared In New
York, described by contemporaries as " sky-scrapers." The
twelve or fourteen stories of the first sky-scrapers were
only a beginning of changes that altered not only the fun
damental conditions of city life, but created unlimited de
mand for steel shapes.
Naval architecture underwent similar changes between
1865 and 1890. The wooden ship that had formerly car
ried the commerce of the world was forced into a sub
ordinate position first by iron vessels and then by steel.
The navies of the world were similarly transformed after
the duel between the Monitor and the Merrimac exhibited
the fighting strength of the ironclad. Before 1880 the
United States had no steel works capable of manufacturing
the heavy plates of steel that were used as defensive arma
ment or the huge ingots out of which great naval guns were
forged and turned. Before 1890 the steel industry was
ready for each of these tasks.
Pittsburgh became the center of the steel industry during
the eighties because of Its fortunate position with reference
to deposits of iron and coal and of the network of rail and
water routes that gave cheap and competitive transporta
tion. The steel industry did not show as much trend to
ward monopoly as did petroleum. There was no single
factor whose control enabled any one group of individuals
to dominate the industry. Wealth and power were ac
quired by the men most skillful in handling the various
factors of labor, raw materials, and transportation. Among
these, Andrew Carnegie rose to the leading position.
The unionization of the steel industry was begun sporad-

INDUSTRIAL UNREST 199
ically in the later sixties when the Sons of Vulcan and other
craft unions appeared among the mills. In 1876 The Home-
several of these unions were merged in the stead strike
Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. In
1892 the Amalgamated Association began a strike in the
Homestead plant of the Carnegie Steel Company.
Carnegie was In Europe when the strike broke out, while
his works were under the direct management of one of his
younger associates, Henry Clay Frick. Had Carnegie been
present the strike might have been compromised, since his
general policy was one of conciliation toward his men.
Frick, however, refused to yield. The demands of the As
sociation were in part for their recognition by the company
and in part against a reduction of the wages for piece-work.
The latter controversy was common in all industries be
cause of the rapid substitution of machinery for human
labor. When the piece-worker was aided by the machine,
he desired the same rate with a resulting increased wage
due to the use of the machine. The employer's tendency
was to lower the piece-rate so as to leave the weekly wages
of the workman where they had been. .
In the course of the Homestead strike the Amalgamated
Association picketed the works, while Frick surrounded them
with a mob-proof fence and prepared to bring in non-union
men or scabs to break the strike. As an additional measure
of defense he employed the Pinkerton Detective Agency to
furnish guards for the mills. On July 6, 1892, a pitched
battle occurred in which strikers and their sympathizers
attacked a boatload of Pinkerton detectives who were being
convoyed up the river to the works. The Governor of
Pennsylvania called out the militia to maintain order and
the use of private guards was denounced by most of the
sympathizers with the strikers.
Public sympathy was turned against the strike by an event
for which the Amalgamated Association had no responsi
bUity. An anarchist named Berkman forced his way Into
Frick's office and sought to assassinate him with knife and
revolver. The outrage occurred at the crisis of the strike.

20O RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
In the wave of revulsion against it the union lost its cause.
The Homestead strike played a large part in the election
of 1892, serving as a text for those who sought to turn labor
against the Republican Party and to prove a corrupt al
liance between wealth and the forces of the Government.
It was claimed that the Republican Party was insincere in
its habitual tariff argument. The two defenses of pro
tection were to make America independent of Europe and to
protect the American workman against the competition of
low-grade immigrant labor. The Democratic orator now
attacked the party for maltreating and shooting up the work
man for whom it professed so warm an interest.
The depression of 1893 made employment scarce and re
sulted in attempts by employers to lower wages. In 1894
The Pull- the most notable of the strikes against the lower-
man strike jjjg q£ .\yages occurred In the environs of Chicago
where the Pullman Palace Car Company had built a model
village for its hands at Pullman. The wage reductions
carried out by the Pullman Company were aggravated by
, the fact that the workmen lived in dwellings owned by the
company, and dealt at company stores. A strike broke out
in May for the restoration of the old wage scale. It was
supported by the officers of the American Railway Union,
which, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs, was en
deavoring to organize all workmen on the railroads. When
the Pullman Company refused to arbitrate the strike the
union declared a boycott upon Pullman cars and ordered
its members not to haul them over the lines of any railroad.
In the last week of June, 1894, the boycott came into active
operation with attendant disorder in the trainyards of
Chicago. The companies appealed to the federal courts for
an injunction forbidding the American Railway Union to
interfere with the running of trains. Debs disregarded the
order and was thrown into jail for contempt of court. The
disorder in the yards continued, and a call was made for
federal troops to maintain order, but Governor Altgeld,
of Illinois, declined to Issue the call for troops and insisted
that he had the matter weU in hand.

INDUSTRIAL UNREST 201
When the disorder in the trainyards interfered with the
regular running of the United States mails. President
Cleveland intervened on his own account and ordered fed
eral troops from Fort Sheridan to Chicago to insure their
unimpeded carriage.
Out of the industrial disputes between 1892 and 1894
there arose wide discussion of the defense of society against
disorder. Government by injunction and the use Qovem-
of troops were both defended and denounced. p?nt by
They were denounced by those who saw in them '"^"""^ '°"
a corrupt alliance against which Henry D. Lloyd launched
his economic tract Wealth against Commonwealth (1894).
The courts were denounced as reactionary and servile sup
porters of organized wealth. The use of the injunction and
troops was defended by those who saw a primary issue in
the maintenance of order and believed that without order
as a condition precedent all society would suffer, the wage-
earner most of all.
The place of the court in the American system of govern
ment became more prominent as business became inter
state in its character and took on new forms of combination.
In the legislative field Congress and the State legislatures
were passing regulatory laws under strong public pressure.
The old right of private property as protected by the com
mon law underwent modifications as the police power of the
State was extended In new directions. It was no new thing
for the courts to declare acts void as unconstitutional, but
there had been no occasion for numerous decisions of this
sort until the Government entered the broad field of regula
tion of business. Critics of the courts because they inter
vened in labor disputes found themselves joined by other
critics who thought the courts perverse and reactionary and
an obstruction to the social advance of government.
The means of defense, whether internal or external, had
changed little in the half-century ending in 1894. Local
order was maintained by police forces that were, In nearly
every important city, in corrupt alliance with the party
machine. In^jyidiial members of the forces showed them-

202 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
selves repeatedly capable of acts of heroism, but law-break
ing was countenanced, vice was protected, and bosses levied
regular tribute upon the activities of the underworld. The
Lexow Commission In New York stripped the concealment
from the police system in that city and made possible in
1894 one of the spasmodic revolts of decent society against
corruption. Theodore Roosevelt became police commis
sioner there under the new Administration, and with Jacob
Riis as his Boswell sought to remove the force from politics.
The condition in the New York police department differed
only in degree from that in other cities. In the rural dis
tricts there was no organized police at all and public order
depended upon the law-abiding instincts of the community
reenforced by an occasional sheriff's posse.
Outside of half a dozen larger cities there existed no per
manent force capable of quelling serious outbreaks. When
The militia trouble Occurred the governor was called upon to
and regular summon the militia to the scene of the disturb
ance, but the mUitia was commonly so unpre
pared and Ul-disclplined that its presence before a mob made
the situation worse. Only In the great Industrial States in
which the calls for strike service were relatively numerous
was the militia well enough trained to be of use. Since
strikes constituted almost the only occasion for its use, it
easily became an object of the distrust of organized labor.
In one of the strikes of 1893 the local controversy approached
a condition of a petty civil war when a sheriff's posse in
Colorado sought to quiet striking miners in Cripple Creek
and Governor Waite called out the militia to arrest the
posse. The United States Army, as the last recourse for defense
In an emergency, ranked high in public esteem. The regular
soldiers were disciplined and self-restrained and aroused
fewer antipathies than militiamen. The army was not
materially changed from its condition when Hayes with
drew it from the Southern States. In 1894 it comprised
2136 officers and 25,772 men, and the bureaus in the War
Department which directed it had performed their customary

INDUSTRIAL UNREST 203
regime with little change through two decades. The line of
great commanders was running down. The title of General
of the Army, conferred upon Grant and Sherman, lapsed
with them, although it was temporarily revived for Grant's
benefit shortly before his death. After Grant and Sher
man the command of the army passed into Sheridan's hands,
and on his death in 1888 the list of great names ends. Scho
field, and then Miles, exercised command for the next
fifteen years, but there were no more great heroes of the
Civil War to lend the luster of their names to the office of
commanding general. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Benjamin Harrison, shortly after his retirement, published a popular
description of the National Government in This Country of Ours (1897);
Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), is an attack
upon business organization in general and the trusts in particular. James
Howard Bridge, The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company (1903), is
an interesting special study, as are Carroll D. Wright, " The Amalgamated
Association of Iron and Steel Workers," in Quarterly Journal of Economics,
vol. VII, and Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography (1920). T. S. Adams and
H. L. Sumner, Labor Problems (1905), is a convenient summary. Brand
Whitlock, Forty Years of It (1914), gives a sympathetic view of Governor
Altgeld's problems. Charles A. Beard, Contemporary American History
(1914), devotes much space to a discussion of the growing power of the
courts. The basic figures for the silver controversy are in Secretary of
the Treasury, Annual Report, 1893.

CHAPTER XXI
' THE DEMOCRATIC SCHISM
In his second inaugural address Cleveland laid greatest
stress upon two problems before his Administration; one,
the immediate need, was the maintenance of a "sound and
stable currency"; the second, which was the main purpose
of his campaign, was to correct "the injustice of maintain
ing protection for protection's sake." Before it was possi
ble to take up his major task, the emergency of the panic of
1893 drove him to demand the repeal of the Silver Purchase
Act. This was accomplished on November i , by which date
the most acute period of the crisis was over. When Con
gress reassembled in December to consider the tariff bill,
which William L. Wilson was ready to report, the organism
of the party was so wrenched because of the silver contro
versy that it was in no condition to function smoothly upon
tariff revision.
At least four sets of obstructive facts stood before the
President as he prepared to Induce his party to redeem its
Democratic plcdge to revIse the tariff. The political conse-
campaign quences of industrial unrest told against him.
The direct effect of the repeal of the Sherman
Act was to weaken the party unity from within. The
growth of Populism operated from without the party to se
duce Democrats from their allegiance, and finally the panic
itself was a weapon to be used with telling effect by the
Republican Party now In opposition.
Industrial unrest had contributed to Cleveland's election,
but Its continuance after his inauguration worked to his
detriment. The mass of unemployed workmen tended to
hold him responsible for their distress. The promptness
with which the President intervened during the Pullman
strikes brought down upon his head the wrath of labor
radicals and of liberal Democrats. John P. Altgeld, of

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHISM 205
Illinois, gave voice to the protest against what he believed
to be federal usurpation in State affairs. He had already
drawn attention to his extreme liberalism by pardoning a
group of the anarchists convicted after the Chicago riots
of 1886. His protests revealed a lack of unity within the
Democratic Party. The character of the unrest is illus
trated by the movement originated by Jacob S. Coxey,
of MassIUon, Ohio, who Invited the unemployed to start
with him on Easter Sunday, 1894, to march upon Washing
ton and to carry to Congress in person their demands for re
lief. Little detachments of " Coxey 's army" started from
numerous parts of the United States and ultimately arrived
in Washington, where the Capitol police arrested them for
walking on the grass around the Capitol. Their protest
fizzled to the level of comic opera, but the grievance did not
evaporate with the movement.
The repeal of the Sherman Act snapped many of the
party relationships that had been prepared with reference to
tariff revision. Until 1893 the party had tried to
avoid bringing the silver issue into politics, and the repeal
had formulated ambiguous and inconsistent oftheSher-
° , man Act
platform planks upon the subject. The desire
for free silver, however, was nearly unanimous among
Southern and Western Democrats, many of whom lost their
confidence In Cleveland when they thought of him as the
agent of Wall Street and in league with the "gold-bugs."
The appeal of Populism was strengthened by the success
of the People's Party in the election of 1892. This was
most marked among the Western States, where successes
fusion tickets were placed in the field and elected of the
by a Populist-Democratic combination. The
program of Populism embraced a long list of genuine reforms,
overshadowed by the demand for silver inflation. It was
cardinal doctrine with the Populists that both great parties
were derelict in their duties and sold out the interests of the
common people. Professional politicians were under the
ban, as having been guilty of deception and betrayal. The
Populists who were nominated for office were, as a conse-

206 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
quence, inexperienced men. Their honesty and devotion to
reform were generally unquestioned, but their experience
in the practical management of government was slight.
They at least were a protest to double-dealing. "It has
become much the fashion to run candidates on two or more
diverse platforms, so they can be for a gold standard in one
locality, free coinage of silver in another, and something else
elsewhere," wrote an Iowa Congressman upon the general
situation. In their conduct in office the inexperience of
Populist officials made them the butt of Eastern paragraph-
ers. Waite, of Colorado, whose frequent use of militia
and whose high-flown language opened him to attack, was
perhaps most widely known. But Peffer, of Kansas, and
"Sockless" Jerry Simpson were burlesqued and ridiculed,
while their sincere attempts to carry out the Populist re
forms were sneered at and opposed. Said the New York
Nation, which was never able to appreciate either their
provocation or their aims, "the whole course of Populist
reasoning and action in Kansas has betokened rascality
rather than ignorance."
The panic that Harrison evaded with dexterity and
passed on to Cleveland was chiefly due to a long train of
events for which neither party as such was responsible. It
was used, however, as a reason for attacking the Democratic
Party, which was in office when it broke. In later years,
as Republican stump speakers became more hazy in their
recollection of the sequence of events, it was habitually
charged that the panic of 1893 was due to the Democratic
tariff of 1894. Burrows, of Michigan, expressed the same
idea before that tariff was passed : " I confidently assert that
If the election of 1 892 had resulted in the retention of the
Republican Party in power, accompanied as it would have
been with the assurance of the continuance of the American
policy of Protection, the effect upon the public revenues as
well as the general prosperity of the country would have
been entirely reversed."
The natural consequence of the panic made tariff revision
difficult if not impossible. The national surplus disappeared,

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHISM 207
declining from $57,000,000 in 1890 to $37,000,000 in 1891,
$9,000,000 in 1892, and $2,000,000 in 1893. In The state
the fiscal year ending June 30, 1894, there was ofthe
a deficit of $69,000,000. The causes which drove '"'^^^"''y
the Treasury into deficit finance were contributed to by the
heavy appropriations of Reed's billion-dollar Congress, by
the ehmlnatlon of the sugar duties from the McKinley Bill,
and by the normal cessation of Imports that accompanies
every panic. The customs duties under the McKinley tariff
were $219,000,000 in 1891, $177,000,000 In 1892, $203,000-
000 in 1893, and $131,000,000 in 1894.
By the end of 1893 it was a problem for Secretary Car
lisle to find funds for the running expenses of the Govern
ment. It was a task of different character to keep enough
gold in the Treasury to make possible the exchange of gold
for other forms of money at the option of the customer. In
January, 1894, he reverted to the Resumption Act of 1875
and took advantage of its unrepealed provisions for borrow
ing gold in order to create a gold reserve. Under this law
John Sherman financed resumption In 1879. Carlisle now
invited bids for a bond Issue of $50,000,000, whose proceeds
were to strengthen the gold reserve. In subsequent issues
of $50,000,000 borrowed and $62,000,000 paid out directly
in the purchase of gold, the indebtedness created to main
tain the reserve was increased to $162,000,000. The task
was vexatious and burdensome. The SUver Purchase Act
had been repealed and had accordingly ceased to encourage
the withdrawal of gold from the Treasury. But the Civil
War greenbacks were still in circulation and by law were re
issued when received by the Treasury. Instead of being
redeemed once in gold, they were reissued and were re
peatedly turned in for redemption ; and as long as lack of
confidence prevailed they were a continuous drain upon the
reserve. The bond issues were only a palliative. Relief
came of itself as times gradually became more prosperous.
The Democratic borrowing to maintain the gold reserve
was attacked by Populists and silver Democrats as sub
servience to Wall Street. J. Pierpont Morgan, who nego-

2o8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
tiated the loans, gained the complete confidence of President
Cleveland in the transaction, but gained for himself the
position of dominant exponent of the banking Interests.
Until his death in 191 3 he remained the leader in American
finance. Republicans refused to believe that the bond is
sues were for the sole purpose of sustaining the gold reserve,
and attacked Cleveland for Increasing the national debt in
time of peace, and for demanding a reduction of the tariff
when there was already a deficit in the Treasury.
William L. Wilson opened the tariff debate in January,
1 894, and carried his measure through the House in the fol-
The Wilson lowIng month in the form of an honest reduction
tariff of of the tariff. In the Senate, where the party
lines were closer, and where the Western Demo
crats already believed that Cleveland had become the tool
of big business, there was open revolt against the bill. Re
publicans attacked it with ridicule as they had done in 1888,
and charged an incapacity in Democrats to construct a tariff.
"The framers of the Wilson Bill having classified hydraulic
hose . . . among articles of wearing apparel," said one of the
Republican Senators, "no doubt will remodel that extraor
dinary measure so as to include hydraulic rams and spin
ning-mules in the live-stock schedule." A group of Demo
cratic Senators openly allied themselves with the Republican
minority to defeat the revision. Arthur Pue Gorman, of
Maryland, and Calvin Brice, of Ohio, led In the breach and
made it more glaring, because each of them had been chair
man of the Democratic National Committee. With South
ern and Western party leaders fighting him on the silver
issue, and with Eastern leaders in rebellion over the tariff,
Cleveland became a President without a party. The Wilson
Bill emerged from the Senate as an ordinary log-rolling, tar
iff-tinkering measure, bearing no resemblance to the party
pledge upon which Cleveland had been elected. In Its later
stages Cleveland intervened in the hope of checking the re
volt. In an open letter to Wilson he renewed the arguments
of his tariff message of 1887 and described the pending
measure as ' ' party perfidy and party dishonor. ' ' Cleveland

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHISM 209
refused to sign the Wilson Bill. He allowed it to become a
law without his signature because of the financial condition
of the Treasury and the lack of prospect of a better bill.
His open indignation made his personal breach with the
Democratic protectionists permanent.
The greatest novelty included in the Wilson Bill was
a provision for an income tax inserted in response to a
demand of the PopuHsts, and drafted In part by WiUiam
J. Bryan, who was one of the junior members of the Com
mittee on Ways and Means. - In the scheme of Populism an
income tax was not only a means for raising a revenue, but it
was also a device for correcting inequalities in the distribu
tion of wealth. By Increasing the rate progressively upon
large incomes wealth was to be made to carry a heavy share
of national expense. The measure was fought in Congress
and outside as class legislation. In spite of the fact that
income taxes had been used throughout the Civil War, the
constitutionality of this new measure was tested in the
Supreme Court. The Constitution required that direct.
taxes be allotted among the States according to their popu
lation. In this income tax there was no such allotment and
none could have been made, since the great incomes which
were the objective of the measure were concentrated in a
few large cities in the East. The Supreme Court in 1895
overturned the income tax because of its unconstitutional
ity, and brought itself thereby within the range of Populist
fire directed against the alleged conspiracy of business to
control the government.
In the fall elections of 1894 the Republican Party was
returned to power in Congress with a huge majority In the
House and a plurality over the Democrats in the ^he elec-
Senate. The panic and the Wilson Bill were the tions of
main objects of attack. The Republican leaders "^
invaded Wilson's West Virginia district, where Stephen B.
Elkins directed the movement to defeat the nominal author
of the bill. Ex- President Harrison took part in the attack,
as did McKinley, who had himself been ousted from Con
gress after the passage of his tariff measure. Wilson was

2IO RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
defeated for reelection and at the same time a reaction
against Populism removed from office its most prominent
leaders. In the latter half of Cleveland's Administration the con
duct of the Government was reduced to formal terms as
The Vene- always when Congress and the President are at
zuela dis- variance on politics. In December, 1895, there
was temporarily revived a spirit of unity be
cause of a vigorous diplomatic attack made upon Great
Britain in a minor South American case. The boundary
between Venezuela and British Guiana had been a source of
irritation for many years, and Venezuela had more than
once invited the friendly offices of the United States to pro
tect her against the encroachment of her more powerful
neighbor. Cleveland took up the discussion through
Richard Olney, who had in 1895 become Secretary of State
upon the death of Gresham, and urged upon England an
arbitration which that country was unwilling to concede.
In the course of the correspondence Olney avowed a special
American right and interest in the problems of the Western
Hemisphere, basing his claim upon the Monroe Doctrine.
The British Government repudiated the idea and an im
passe was reached in the autumn. On December 17, 1895,
after Cleveland had sent a routine message at the opening
of Congress a few days earlier, he startled the world with a
special message on Venezuela in which he asked for authority
to make a study of the merits of the boundary controversy
with a view to intervention to maintain that boundary
which should be sustained by law and fact. He recognized
that this might produce a conflict with England which he
was ready if necessary to undertake.
The sharp language of the Venezuela message bewildered
both friends and critics of the President. Godkin, who had
supported him in the Nation thus far, now turned against
him. Republicans charged that it was only a partisan
trick to strengthen his Administration; Populists believed
that it was a part of the Wall Street conspiracy, and that
the temporary panic which followed the news of the mes-

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHISM ¦ 211
sage was deliberately planned for the benefit of speculators.
Cleveland himself appears to have believed that sharp lan
guage would produce not war, but compromise, and the
ensuing facts sustained this belief. The American commis
sioners to study the Venezuela boundary were given every
chance to examine the records of the British Foreign Office
itself, as they studied their subject. In the following winter,
partly as the result of the shock caused by a serious con
templation of a war between England and the United
States, a general treaty of arbitration was signed by Olney
and Lord Pauncefote. A few weeks later, in February,
1897, England agreed with Venezuela to arbitrate the
boundary dispute. The arbitration treaty with the United
States aroused opposition In the Senate and was first
amended to death and then defeated. But the cordial rela
tions between England and the United States were strength
ened rather than weakened by the episode.
If it had been necessary for Cleveland to resort to force
to defend his attitude upon Venezuela, he would have had
as weapons an uncompleted system of coast defenses on the
Atlantic planned by Secretary Endicott's board in 1886, a
regular army of little over 25,000, a national guard of vary
ing degrees of unpreparedness, and one modern battleship.
"The utterly defenseless condition of our seacoast ... is
now well understood by every civilized nation in the world,"
wrote Secretary Endicott in 1886. The naval vessels were
openly jeered at in the comic papers. "A man who will go
right out on the water In an American man-of-war does n't
know what fear is," said Leslie's in 1882, when the first
steps were being taken to rebuild the navy.
The American navy at the close of the Civil War had no
superior, but its units deteriorated in the years that fol
lowed, and popular indifference prevented the ^he new
addition of new ships. While the rest of the American
world was experimenting with armored cruisers "^^^
and heavy guns in the seventies, the United States was
content to rely upon the obsolete vessels that had been
modern in 1865. In 1882 there was no American warship

212 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
fit to go to war. In this year, however. Congress author
ized the preparation of plans for a group of steel cruisers
and in subsequent acts the birth of a new navy was author
ized. A new American Industry had to be created before
the navy could appear. The Ideas of protection, that were
crying more insistently for economic independence of
Europe, forbade the purchase of a navy abroad. It ac
cordingly became necessary to provide armor-plate mills
and gun foundries as well as to design the steel hulls that
were to bear the ordnance. Three little unprotected
cruisers, the Atlanta, Chicago, Charleston, and a lighter
craft, the Dolphin, "constituted the first attempt of the
Navy Department for many years to construct a war ves
sel up to the modern requirements." The earliest of the
cruisers was commissioned in 1887. In the autumn of this
year the Atlanta and the Dolphin engaged in what were
called maneuvers in an attack at Newport, where a Naval
War College had been brought into existence in 1885.
From its first units of unprotected light cruisers the naval
program developed into armored cruisers, and then to
battleships, whose plate and guns were manufactured in
the United States. The Indiana was the earliest of the new
craft to be commissioned, coming into active service in
November, 1895. The Massachusetts, Oregon, and Iowa
were under construction in the yards, but would have been
unavailable had war occurred with England in 1895.
A part of the scheme for modernizing the navy included a
Naval War College for the post-graduate instruction of naval
officers. Stephen B. Luce was detailed to command the new
enterprise, which opened its first session in 1885. The great
est service of Luce, who organized the college, was to sum
mon thither Alfred Thayer Mahan, who at the age of forty-
five "was drifting on the lines of simple respectability as
aimlessly as any one very well could." Mahan took his
duties seriously, began to lecture on naval history in the fall
of 1886, and a few years later produced, In The Influence of
Sea-Power upon i7wtory (1890), the most Important contribu
tion of his generation to the phUosophy of national strength.

Copyright 6v Underwood Sr Underv^ood. N. r
AMERICAN SHIPS OF WAR, 1887 AND 192T
THE ATLANTA, FIRST OF THE NEW NAVY, AND THE TENNESSEE,
COMMISSIONED 1920
The Tennessee is very much larger than the Atlanta, measuring 600 feet on the water-line,
while the length of the Atlanta was 276 feet. She is shown stern on, heading away from the
spectator.

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHISM 213

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A good general view of the period may be constructed from James Ford
Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. vm; D. R. Dewey, National
Problems (1907) ; and Paul L. Haworth, The United States in Our Own
Times (1920). Grover Cleveland, Presidential Problems (1904), discusses
and defends the bond issues. A. D. Noyes, Thirty Years of American
Finance (1898), is by a veteran financial writer. J. M. Gould and G. F.
Tucker, The Federal Income Tax Explained (1895), lost its timeliness when
the tax was declared unconstitutional. William F. Draper, Recollections
of a Varied Career (1908), gives a manufacturer's view of the nineties.
A. T. Mahan, From Sail to Steam (1907), is the autobiography of the
leading naval historian. G. W. Steevens, The Land of the Dollar (1897), is
a crisp, journalistic record of an American tour.

CHAPTER XXII
THE FIRST McKINLEY CAMPAIGN, 1 896
The "stirring events in our foreign relations" that occurred
during the administration of Cleveland involved the Presi
dent in much controversy and reenforced the efforts to
place the navy upon a modern basis, but had no "influence
in shaping the canvass of 1896, or in determining its re
sult." Before the Congress chosen in November, 1894,
took Its seat, Cleveland had lost the hold over his party
to which his reelection was due and had become an execu
tive unable to direct the course of current affairs. The
opposition party was intent upon assembling the parti
san materials to be used in regaining national control;
the Democracy was hopelessly split and without a leader ;
and along the western horizon the gathering power of the
People's Party threatened to retire one of the two major
parties Into obscurity.
Protection was the bond that held the Republican Party
organization together after 1887. Until the date of Cleve
land's memorable tariff message it was a gen-
Protection , , . ,. , .„., ,
andthe eral custom to apologize for the tariff as it had
standard ^^ accident become. From that date the party
tactics changed, and the intent was openly
avowed to make protection more systematic and complete
than it had ever been. The defeat of Cleveland in 1888
made it possible for this purpose to be executed in the
McKinley BUl of 1890; the defeat of Republican candidates
in the ensuing elections raised a doubt as to the degree in
which the people approved the policy, but only strength
ened the determination of the Republican organization to
perfect its own articulation upon this issue. For the first
time since plantation economics controlled the policy of the
Democratic Party in the middle of the century, a situation
had arisen in which the success of one party appeared to be

THE FIRST McKINLEY CAMPAIGN, 1896 215
synonymous with the business success of a group of power
ful interests. The protected manufacturer connected his
prosperity with the tariff schedules. His financial Interest in
the result of elections and the tariff" alterations that might
follow them developed an extensive source of campaign con
tributions to the Republican treasury. The efforts of John
Wanamaker in raising funds from Eastern manufacturers
who feared the success of Cleveland In 1 888 had been ante
dated several years by those of Marcus A. Hanna, of Cleve
land, who was raising funds earlier in the decade on the
theory that the manufacturer had an insurable interest in
Republican success.
The set-back of 1890 and the further rebuff of 1892 post
poned, but did not weaken, the Republican hopes for a con
tinuance of the McKinley idea. In defense of protection
the arguments became standardized before 1895. Clay's
defense of an American system was accepted in toto. The
protectionist regarded it as discreditable that the United
States should import any commodity susceptible of pro
duction in America. Time had added to the arguments
of Clay a second principle, that the American standard of
life must not be endangered by the competition of foreign
countries with a lower scale of welfare. As the arguments
were used upon the stump, the protection of the American
workman against the "pauper labor" of Europe was made
the dominant motive for the policy. Free trade was de
scribed as a British trick to secure foreign markets for
British manufactures, and the Democratic policy of tariff
reform was attacked as unpatriotic and un-American.
The Cobden Club, a British free-trade organization, was
named repeatedly in the tariff debates from 1884 to 1892,
always with the charge that it was the agency whereby
British gold aided the proposals of the Democratic Party.
The unfortunate letter of Sackville-West to Murchlson in
1888 was all that most Republicans needed to prove this
point. The McKinley Bill precipitated disaster upon the Re
publican Party, but produced a martyr for its rehabilita-

2x6 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
tion. William McKinley, author of the bUl, and the most
McKinley adequate of Republican legislators on protection,
and vvas defeated for reelection in 1890. To the
country at large it appeared that he had been
marked for slaughter because of his tariff leadership as
William L. Wilson was actuaUy destroyed in 1894. The
fact was that McKinley had been selected for defeat long
before his measure became a law. The close balance of
Ohio politics produced in the eighties an alternation of
Democratic and Repubhcan control, with the result that
four successive apportionment acts were passed under the
census of 1880. In each of these the party in control of
the legislature sought to gerrymander the Congressional
districts so as to gain more Congressmen than the propor
tional vote of the party would warrant. In such an act
passed by a Democratic legislature McKinley's home
county, in which a Republican majority was assured, was
attached to a group of adjacent Democratic counties whose
aggregate Democratic pluralities were known to be great
enough to procure a Democratic majority for the new
district. McKinley was gerrymandered out of his seat,
but was a good enough martyr for party purposes. He was
elected governor of Ohio the following year and reelected
two years later. When the panic of 1893 brought distress
to all the country, it was ascribed to the rejection of the
policies to which his name was attached, and his friends
urged him for the presidency as "the advance agent of
prosperity. ' '
Marcus A. Hanna was the chief promoter of McKinley's
political fortunes. Drawn to him by the unusual affection
Hanna and ^^^^ McKInley Inspired among his associates,
the Ohio Hanna devoted his time, his money, and his
political shrewdness to the advancement of his
friend's cause. The other Ohio statesmen who had am
bitions for the presidency, Joseph B. Foraker and John
Sherman, were forced aside, while McKinley was groomed
for the campaign of 1896 as the martyr of the McKinley
Bill and the spokesman of protection.

THE FIRST McKINLEY CAMPAIGN, 1896 .217
The devices by which Hanna gained popular favor for
McKinley appear to have been those of the successful pol
itician of the school of Dorsey, Quay, and Piatt. In those
aspects of the campaign in which personal Influence could
be effective, McKinley's charm of manner could be trusted
to produce results. The accumulation of potential dele
gates to the Republican Convention of 1896 was begun long
before the State conventions were named to choose them.
Since there was no Republican President in office, the
Southern delegates were procurable for any candidate
who might be able to reach them. In successive winters
Hanna established his home in the South, where Governor
McKinley was repeatedly his guest, while Southern poh
ticians were exposed to his influence. Before the Republi
can Convention was assembled at St. Louis on June 16,
1896, McKinley's nomination was assured; and it was con
firmed by that body upon its first ballot.
Thomas B. Reed ran second to McKinley in the conven
tion.. His supporters, who were more numerous than the
delegates voting for him would indicate, Included Repub
licans who distrusted the methods of the party organization
as well as those who disliked the Identification of the party
with protection. The other minor candidates. Quay, Whar
ton, and Allison, were favorite sons whose support would
probably not have lasted long after the first ballot. Garrett
A. Hobart, of New Jersey, was selected as Vice-President.
The nomination of McKinley was a foregone conclusion,
but as the date for the Republican Convention approached,
popular interest weakened in the protective tariff McKinley
and became absorbed in the newer issue of free *"^ Hobart
silver. Upon this latter theme the party had never taken a
specific stand. Its platforms had been uncertain or evasive,
and had been written to make it possible for the party to
retain the support of both free-sUver men and their oppo
nents. The attitude of the Repubhcan Party on the sUver
question, now that one could not longer be avoided, was
determined by two sets of factors, the probable conduct of
the Democrats and the opinions of individual Republicans.

2i8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Most of the delegates to the Democratic Convention had
been selected before the Republicans met, with instructions
to support the resumption of the free coinage of
plankf in sUver at the ratio of sixteen to one. It was cer-
Pf*/ tain that Democracy would take this attitude In
platforms ¦' z-^i , i
Spite of disapproval of President Cleveland and
his Cabinet. With a Democratic platform outspoken for
free silver, it would be impracticable for Republicans to
evade the issue any longer, while within the Republican
Party were a large majority of those voters to whom free
silver appeared to be malignant repudiation and dis
honesty. The strength of free silver was In the South and
West, where the converts to Populism were the most
numerous. In the North and East, where capital was more
abundant, and where its possessors were already likely to
be Republican, lay the opposition to it. Easterners laid
aside their discussions of the tariff for the time being in
order to meet the more alarming crisis. The opposition to
free silver insisted that the Republican Party take as ex
plicit an attitude as the Democrats were about to take,
and upon the other side.
The Repubhcan coinage plank began with a generality
for sound money and claimed credit because that party
procured "the enactment of a law providing for the re
sumption of specie payments in 1879; since then every
dollar has been as good as gold. We are unalterably op
posed to every measure calculated to debase our currency
or Impair the credit of our country. We are, therefore,
opposed to the free coinage of silver, except by International
agreement . . . and until such agreement can be obtained,
the existing gold standard must be preserved. All our
silver and paper currency must be maintained at parity
with gold, and we favor all measures designed to maintain
inviolably the obhgations of the United States and ajl our
money, whether coin or paper, at the present standard, the
standard of the most enlightened nations of the earth."
The crisis that thus made silver a party issue weakened the
availability of McKinley as a candidate, since he had never

THE FIRST McKINLEY CAMPAIGN, 1896 219
been especially identified with the currency question and
had incidentally made speeches that could be used against
him by the advocates of free silver. As the crisis loomed he
maintained a discreet and unbroken silence until his pro
tectionist friends had procured his nomination. As a can
didate he gave support to the gold standard.
The adoption of the Republican gold plank brought
about an open breach In the convention. Thirty-four
delegates followed Senator Henry M. Teller, of Colorado,
in a formal protest and left the convention in a body.
In the Western States, to which most of the bolting dele
gates belonged, It appeared that the Republican Party had
sold its soul to selfish interests. The belief there was pro
found that silver had been demonetized by a conspiracy of
money-lenders, and that the restoration of free coinage was
necessary to undo a crime against humanity.
The Republican split over free silver intensified the
certainty that the Democratic Party would support it. In
the organization of the convention meeting July 7 in
Chicago, the free-silver forces repudiated the attempts of
the National Cominittee to steer them away from the
chosen issue, and increased their voting strength by un
seating a gold-standard delegation from Nebraska in favor
of its free-silver contestants. By a vote of 628 to 301, the
party demanded "the free and unlimited coinage of both
silver and gold at the present legal ratio of 16 to i without
waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation. We
demand that the standard silver dollar shall be of full legal
tender, equally with gold, for all debts, public and private,
and we favor such legislation as will prevent in the future
the demonetization of any kind of legal-tender money by
private contract. . . . We declare that the act of 1873 de
monetizing silver without the knowledge or approval of the
American people has resulted in the appreciation of gold
and a corresponding fall in the prices of commodities pro
duced by the people; a heavy increase in the burden of
taxation and of all debts, pubhc and private; the enrich
ment of the money-lending class at home and abroad; the

220 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
prostration of industry and impoverishment of the people."
Fifteen candidates received votes on the first ballot for
the nomination, while 178 delegates who disapproved the
William platform refused to vote at all. Of the leading
J. Bryan candidates, two possessed the prominence that
belonged to men who had been Democratic governors of
Republican States, Robert E. Pattlson, of Pennsylvania,
and Horace Boies, of Iowa. A third, who was a leader on
the first ballot, was Richard P. Bland, of Missouri, who had
been sponsor of free silver for nearly twenty years. A
fourth was the leader of the victorious Nebraska free-silver
delegation, William J. Bryan. In his four years in Con
gress, 1891-95, Bryan had become known as an effective
and persuasive speaker. He had early supported free silver
as a measure of social reform, and after the expiration of
his term in Congress he had led In the organized movement
to convert his party to free silver. He had supported the
program of the People's Party without admitting that he
ceased to be a Democrat. When his delegation was finally
seated in the Chicago Convention, it fell to him to close the
debate upon a plank offered by a minority of the Committee
on Resolutions that repudiated free silver and commended
"the honesty, the economy, courage, and fidelity of the
present Democratic Administration." This was on the
third day of the convention with the delegates hot and
weary, with the old party leaders hopelessly outvoted, and
the headless minority bewildered by the possession of
power without leadership. "An opportunity to close such
a debate had never come to me before," wrote Bryan when
he described the contest, "and I doubt If as good an oppor
tunity had ever come to any other person during this gen
eration." The voice of the young orator, for he was only
thirty-six years of age, penetrated every corner of the con
vention hall, while his stage presence captured the attention
of the weary delegations and held It throughout his repeti
tion of the substance of a glowing speech that he had for
years been making on the stump. It was new to the dele
gates and was as new to national politics as were Bryan's

THE FIRST McKINLEY CAMPAIGN, 1 896 221
name and face. It ended with a peroration now famous In
campaign oratory: "If they dare to come out in the open
field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will
fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the pro
ducing masses of this nation and the world, supported by
the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the
toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold
standard by saying to them : You shall not press down upon
the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify
mankind upon a cross of gold." On the fourth ballot
Bryan took the lead; on the fifth he was within twelve
votes of the requisite two thirds to nominate him ; and these
were secured by transfer without another roll-call. Arthur
Sewall, of Maine, was nominated as his companion on the
ticket. The hopes of Populism to become a new great party v/ere
destroyed by the action of the major parties in accepting
the silver issue. On July 22 two conventions „
of- !• • r T. • Populism
met at St. Louis, one calling itself a National
Silver Party, and the other the People's Party. There was
no need for the former body to do anything but concur in the
Democratic stand, and to endorse its nominations. The
Populists, however, were faced with problems affecting the
future of the party. " If we fuse, we are sunk," wrote one
of the Populist leaders, who added, "If we don't fuse, all
the silver men will leave us for the more powerful Demo
crats." For the real leaders of the party, who sought an
extensive program of reform, this was a tragedy. The
majority of the convention, drawing their inspiration from
the single measure of free silver, voted for fusion with the
Democrats and concurrence in their nomination. A middle-
of-the-road movement of genuine Populists opposed fusion
of any sort in the hope of maintaining party existence.
The platform, repeating and elaborating that of 1892, was
carried first. The Vice-President was nominated next,
for even the fusion Populists opposed Sewall, who was
a wealthy Maine shipbuilder. Thomas E. Watson, of
Georgia, was chosen for this post after the first ballot, and

222 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
subsequently Bryan was nominated for the presidency over
four minor candidates, Norton, Debs, Donnelly, and Coxey.
The campaign of 1896 was fought upon the clear issue of
the gold standard as against free silver with the forces of
The Gold class and section arrayed against each other as
Democrats jj^ ^^ other canvass except i860. Party lines
were abandoned. Even the Prohibitionists split and
placed gold and silver tickets in the field. The bolt of the
mining delegates from the Republican Party was followed
by that of the advocates of gold from the Democratic
Party. On September 2 there convened at Indianapolis
a hastily assembled convention of Democrats who would
neither support a Republican candidate nor accept the
regular Democratic ticket. 'The declarations of the
Chicago convention," it declared, "attack individual free
dom, the right of private contract, the independence of the
judiciary, and the authority of the President to enforce
Federal laws. They advocate a reckless attempt to in
crease the price of silver by legislation, to the debasement
of our monetary standard, and threaten unlimited issues
of paper money by the Government. They abandon for
Republican allies the Democratic cause of tariff reform, to
court the favor of protectionists to their fiscal heresy."
The Gold Democratic Convention endorsed the "Fidelity,
patriotism, and courage" of Cleveland, and nominated a
ticket consisting of John M. Palmer, of Illinois, and Simon
B. Buckner, of Kentucky. Cleveland and members of his
Cabinet supported this ticket.
The fight of classes in the campaign was intensified by
education and the use of funds. The decision about free
Election silver turned in the last analysis upon an eco-
of McKin- nomic argument, the technicalities of which
lev were too stubborn to be removed by ordinary
platform oratory. The class appeal in favor of free silver
was met by class appeal against it. Both party organi
zations sought to secure the deciding votes from the mi
nority susceptible of being reached by better arguments.
Hanna was made chairman of the Republican National

THE FIRST McKINLEY CAMPAIGN, 1896 223
Committee and utilized the large funds made available by
his old allies, the manufacturers, and by new aUies in the
form of banks and insurance companies who feared re
pudiation. Campaign speakers were for the first time
deliberately trained to carry an argument to the people and
to gain a victory based upon conviction. Bryan was him
self the most persuasive speaker for his party and spread
panic in Republican centers, which he invaded on his
speaking tour. " Probably no man in civil life has succeeded
In inspiring so much terror, without taking life," said the
Nation, when the vote was in. McKinley, on the contrary,
remained quietly at his Canton home, receiving visiting
delegations from week to week, while his managers bore the
gospel of sound money to the people. He was elected by
an absolute majority of the vote cast, and with an electoral
vote of 271 to 176. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. vm (1919), comes
to an end with this election, and there is no compendious history that con
tinues his story. Biographical materials on the campaign can be found in
William J. Bryan, The First Battle (1896); William V. Byers, .471 American
Commoner. The Life and Times of Richard Parks Bland (1900); Tom L.
Johnson, My Story (1913); Herbert Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1912);
Charles S. Olcott, Life of William McKinley (1916) ; David Magie, Life of
Garrett A. Hobart (1910); William Dana Orcutt, Burrows of Michigan and
the Republican Party (1917) ; and L. J. Lang (ed.) Autobiography of Thomas
Collier Piatt (19 10).

CHAPTER XXIII
THE "G.O.P."
The Republican Party that was returned to power on
March 4, 1897, possessed a definlteness of purpose and a
Property closely loilt Organization that make It stand out
and politics among national parties in their periods of as
cendancy. Its record in the Civil War, still an asset in any
campaign, entitled its spokesmen to refer to it in glowing
terms as the "Grand Old Party." The initial letters of
the nickname, "G.O.P.," now possessed a connotation that
had reference to the present in addition to the past. The
purpose of the party organization was to advance the inter
ests of its members and thereby the Interests of the nation.
Under the impact of two great Issues in a single decade,
one aspect of those Interests had been forged Into a keen
and weighted determination. The demands for tariff re
form and free silver had driven into the Republican organi
zation nearly all citizens who were In a position to suffer
from European competition or domestic inflation. The
holders of property as a body were Republican, and it is
impossible to disentangle the complex of motives, selfish
and patriotic, that held them there. The best judgment
of history and economics has approved the fight for the
maintenance of the gold standard. It has been less cer
tain upon the elemental merits of the tariff. But what
ever the motives In individual cases, the result of the long
fight over these two issues was to bring to power In the
G.O.P. strong-willed men of financial power and political
resource who felt themselves vindicated and approved by
the defeat of Bryan.
The bitterness of the campaign disappeared so rapidly as
to arouse suspicion that it was only stage play. Explana
tions for the subsidence of passion are to be found in the
assurance that the currency would not be depreciated, and

THE G.O.P. 225
in the vision of prosperity that turned much of the bitter
ness of the discontented classes into hope. McKinley had
been advertised by his friends as the "advance agent of
prosperity." The prosperity which he heralded was visible
even before he was elected, in bumper crops and rising
prices for them. Populism was never a real party, but
was rather a temporary accumulation of the discontented
whose strongest bond of union disappeared as individual
Populists became solvent members of society. The general
recovery from the panic of 1893 began to be visible in the
summer of 1896 and Increasingly thereafter weakened the
forces of discontent and enabled Republican leaders to
take pride in their success in dispelling hard times.
The cycle of falling prices that began In 1865 reached the
dip of its curve about 1895 and started to ascend once more.
In so far as the low prices were due to the scar- prosperity
city of money and its appreciation in value, there and rising
was a tendency to correct this In the train of
events which began in the summer of 1 896 when a group of
prospectors found placer gold along the tributaries of the
Yukon River near the boundary that separates Canada
from Alaska. The Klondike gold fields became known to
the world in time for a rush of miners to hurry there In
1897. Out of the Klondike in the next two decades came
a flood of gold that was reenforced by other streams from
South Africa, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere.
The annual gold production of the world averaged $132,-
000,000 for the fifteen years before 1896 and rose to
$337,000,000 for the fifteen years that followed. The in
crease in gold lowered its value and operated both to in
crease the amount of money in existence and to depreciate
the doUar. Prices started upward about 1896, and as they
rose, bringing visible inflation with them, they further weak
ened the power of the party movement for cheap money.
The Cabinet of William McKinley was built around the
ideas of party regularity and financial solidity. McKinley's
McKinley himself had been an unwelcome candi- Cabinet
date in the eyes of many supporters of the gold standard

226 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
because of his late conversion to that doctrine. Hobart,
his Vice-President, was too sound on this to admit of any
doubt. The earliest offer of a Cabinet post was tendered
to Marcus A. Hanna, whom McKinley's biographer de
scribes as a magnificent "political general — square, effi
cient, and resourceful." The Invitation was rejected, for
Hanna preferred a freer position for himself. Thus far he
had been content to exert political influence from outside
the lines of office. He now desired to become Senator from
Ohio, and when John Sherman was made Secretary of
State, that desire became practicable. Hanna was ap
pointed to the Senate by Governor Bushnell, of Ohio, in
the vacancy created by Sherman's resignation. Sherrnan
as Secretary of State gave to the new Administration the
prestige of one who had been the wisest financial statesman
in the party.
The career of John Sherman was nearly at an end when
he entered upon this final chapter. For a long generation
he had been a figure in national affairs, and for two decades
a reasonable aspirant for the presidency. Under his hand
the Resumption bill had been framed and resumption Itself
administered. There were rumors now that his health was
gone and that mental decay had set in. These mmors
were so strong that McKinley felt forced to deny their truth
as late as February, 1897. He persisted, nevertheless, in
appointing Sherman, whose actual mental condition soon
confirmed the rumors. William R. Day, of Canton, an old
personal friend of the President, was made Assistant Secre
tary of State to carry the bulk of Sherman's burdens and
later to succeed him.
The connecting link between the new Republican Party
and the old was John Hay, who began life as Lincoln's
private secretary and who now was sent as Ambassador to
London, where he relieved Thomas F. Bayard, of Dela
ware. Due to the efforts of Hay, more than to those of any
other individual, the party and the nation possessed the
great heritage of Abraham Lincoln. The first Republican
President had died in 1865, with the terms of peace unset-

THE G.O.P. 227
tied and with his own party in revolt against him. The
monumental biography that Nicolay and Hay produced,
and that ran serially in the Century through four years in
the middle eighties, revealed the character and idealism of
Lincoln and brought him into the Httle inner group of great
Americans. Hay, whose acquaintance in America and
abroad had few equals, had been in England shortly before
his appointment as Ambassador, and had there taken oc
casion to give friendly, informal advice to the British Gov
ernment to adjust its differences with Cleveland over Ven
ezuela and not to expect that McKinley would weaken
from the position of his predecessor.
For Secretary of the Treasury McKinley chose Lyman P.
Gage, of Chicago, a prominent banker who had led in the
long agitation to defend the gold standard In the Middle
West. It was impossible to hope for Congressional action
in support of the gold standard at once. The Fifty-Fifth
Congress, elected with McKinley, was a Republican body
In both houses, but in the Senate that majority was avail
able only on measures not connected with the currency, for
a group of silver Republican Senators held the balance of
power. The appointment of Gage was accepted as a guar
antee of the determination of the Administration to sup
port the gold standard. During 1898 a monetary confer
ence was held at Indianapolis, where was begun a serious
and protracted national study In the elements of a sound
currency. The rest of the Cabinet was composed of self-made and
substantial men, chosen largely because of their importance
to the party. By the accident of events public attention
was later turned to Russell A. Alger, of Michigan, who be
came Secretary of War. Alger had emerged from the Civil
War at the age of twenty-nine with the rank of major-gen
eral of volunteers. He had then become a manufacturer
and had engaged in the profitable work of exploiting timber
resources of northern Michigan. By 1888 he had been
governor of Michigan and had become a prominent favorite
gon in the Republican Convention of that year. He was

228 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
identified with big business, the protected industries and
the trusts, and was a reasonable appointee in the Repub
lican Party as it was organized in 1897.
With the Senate majority still favoring free silver, it
was impracticable to carry out at once the currency mandate
of 1896, but the submerged purpose of the party to revls^"
the Wilson Bill came to the surface immediately after elec '
tion. A few gold-standard tariff reformers protested bit
terly that it was a betrayal of confidence to use the Re
publican majority for tariff purposes, but the official spokes
men of the party declared that the mandate of the election
was for the tariff as well as gold. Before Cleveland left
office, it was officially announced that among McKinley's
earliest acts would be a call for a special session to revise
the tariff. Congress assembled In accordance with this in
tent on March 15, 1897, and Reed, who was reelected as
Speaker, refused to appoint any committees of the House
except those connected with the legislative program.
Nelson R. Dingley, of Maine, introduced the new tariff
bill that passed the House after two weeks' perfunctory
The Ding- debate. The draft had been framed and par
ley tariff tially debated during the preceding session of
Congress, and the preliminary touches had been given it in
the recess between March 4 and March 15. Its passage
was aided by the fact that there was still a deficit in the
National Treasury. In 1894 the United States ran behind
$69,000,000, and drew upon the surplus to that extent. The
deficit of 1895 was $42,000,000; 1896, $25,000,000, and
1897, $18,000,000. The need for extra revenue was such
as to strengthen every appeal for higher rates.
In the rewriting of the Dingley Bill that took place while
it was pending in the Senate, the representatives of manu
facturing Interests possessed the greatest influence. The
general character of the measure had been determined upon
In advance. Only the amount of protection to be extended
remained In doubt, and this was settled upon the represen
tations of the industries affected. The chief of the Bureau
of Statistics, Worthlngton C. Ford, asserted during the de-

THE G.O.P. 229
bates that the protective rates were being made so high as
to be prohibitory, with the result that the bill would pro
duce insufficient revenue for the Government. He ob
served that the whole fiscal policy was changing from one
of revenue with Incidental protection to that of protection
v^ith Incidental revenue. The bill became a law in July,
1.J97, as the most thorough -going protective measure in
American history. It was passed, complained Laughlin
and WUlis, "with a striking disregard of all legislative pro
prieties and bolstered up by the feeling of security based
on a knowledge that the conservative classes of the country
had received a terrible fright."
The Dingley tariff was the fruit of the complete identi
fication of the Republican Party with the, interests of busi
ness. For nearly fifteen years the organization of the party
remained firm enough to withstand all attacks directed
against It from without. The country continued prosperous
and the party of prosperity held its power. The Demo
cratic opposition remained weak and disorganized as Cleve
land had left it. The absence of an effective opposition is
responsible for many of the political phenomena between
1897 and 1911.
Due to the double split produced by Cleveland and
Bryan, permanent animosities were sown among the leaders
of the party, and the disconnected factions lost their power
to hold the Republican majority to a definite course. The
effective influences tending to divert the Republican Party
to a new program came from within and were increased by
the feeling of security created by the Democratic collapse.
The People's Party, with its broad program of reform,
inspired Interest far beyond its capacity to gain votes. Nei
ther of the larger parties was receptive to new ideas or wel
comed their exponents. Neither party, whether it talked
of tariff or of currency, had a program that frankly faced
the changes brought into society by the recent revolution
in communication and manufacture. The old doctrine of
individual freedom had made It possible for a few individ
uals to exploit the natural resources of the country and to

230 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
appropriate a disproportionate share of the freedom for
themselves. Neither of the parties and few of the older poli
ticians had any vision of the changes that must be made to
restore a reasonable degree of opportunity to the tenant
farmer and the tenement workman. In the great cities,
boss rule was still defiant, and much of the organic strength
of both parties depended upon corrupt manipulation of
votes and selfish use of the power derived from this manipu
lation. Quay, Piatt, and Hanna had succeeded to the
leadership formerly exercised by Conkling, Cameron, and
Blaine, but brought little change for the better in their
understanding of the duties of the modern state.
In the People's Party the protest against this indifference
of the party organizations became a matter of religion.
Republican Both parties, in its belief, were corrupt and un-
counter- responsIvc. Measures that were designed to
broaden the opportunities of life or to break the
power of the bosses were accepted without criticism or ex
amination and incorporated in the miscellaneous catalogue
of reforms that constituted the Populist platform. The
interest in these reforms was widely spread among citizens
of no political activity and gained earnest converts among
young Republican politicians who found their aspirations
checked by the compact machinery of the G.O.P. The
stress of the currency campaign kept party regularity weU
to the fore until 1896, but thereafter signs are visible of a
counter-reformation within the Republican Party working
to detach it from its close alliance with business and to
make it more truly a party of the people.
The attack of the Populists upon the mechanics of the
great parties resolved itself into the demand for specific
The "in- reforms Including the direct election of Senators
terests" in and an increase in direct control over eovern-
politics , , , ^_, ="
ment by the people. The initiative and the
referendum seemed adapted to correct the abuses due to
improper control of the legislatures of the States. The con
trol of State legislation was an avowed policy of the rail
roads and the larger corporations. Most commonly it took

THE G.O.P. 231
the form of dissuading the legislatures from passing antag
onistic laws. The raUroad managers who employed their
lobbyists declared that this was necessary to prevent
blackmail, and asserted that unscrupulous legislators Intro
duced hostile legislation for the sole purpose of having it
bought off. In spite of the fact that railroad commissions
had been numerous for more than twenty years, little had
been done to equalize rates or to impose a fair burden of
taxation upon railroad property. The distrust of legis'
latures revealed itself in long and minute State constitu
tions. If the people could act directly, it was hoped that
some of the abuses might be avoided. The advocates of
initiative and referendum had this end in view.
The direct primary was urged, as early as 1897, as an
additional means of safeguarding the Government against
bosses and corrupt interests. In that year Direct
Robert M. La Follette advanced a general pro- P''™aries
gram for direct nominations for office, including even the
presldenc}'. La Follette had already served three terms in
Congress where his ready mastery of figures made him one
of the most serviceable of Republican members on the Com
mittee on Ways and Means. Defeated for reelection in
1890, he suffered with the Republican Government of Wis
consin because of the attempt of that Government to com
pel a wider use of the English language in the schools. He
soon came back into politics and was beaten for the nomina
tion as governor in 1896 by what he regarded as a corrupt
manipulation of delegates against him. His reform of the
convention system was based upon his own experience with
it. And as he renewed his efforts for the nomination in
1898 and 1900, keeping up continuously a hot fire upon the
nomination system, he attracted to his reform other leaders
who like him were disappointed because of their inability
to beat the machine.
The leaders of reform were Republican after 1896, as they
had generally been Democratic or Populist in the years
immediately preceding. With little encouragement from
the G.O.P,, they were heartened by an increasing interest

232 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
among the people at large. By 1900, in which year La
Submer- Follette succeeded in securing both nomination
gence of and election as governor of his State, the leaders
™ of the counter-reformation began to make an
impression upon the party by their local successes. They
worked under the handicap of national prosperity, and
struggled for the attention of a people who had forgotten
the pangs of the panic of 1893 and had been distracted
from affairs domestic by the glitter of unexpected and suc
cessful foreign war. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years (1895), was published before
his collapse in McKinley's Cabinet. His official biography is Winfield S.
Kerr, John Sherman, His Life and Public Services (1908) ; briefer and better
is Theodore E. Burton, John Sherman (1906). William Roscoe Thayer,
Life and Letters of John Hay (1915), is a notable contribution. Robert M.
La Follette, Autobiography (1913), may be profitably read in connection
with Isaac Stephenson, Recollections of a Long Life, 182Q-IQIS (privately
printed, 1915). Other useful books are J. L. Laughlin and H. P. Willis,
Reciprocity (1903) ; G. H. Haynes, The Election of Senators (1906) ; Ellis P.
Oberholtzer, Initiative, Referendum, and Recall in America (191 1); John
Moody, The Truth about the Trusts (1904); and W. Z. Ripley, Trusts, Pools,
and Corporations (1905).

CHAPTER XXIV
THE WAR WITH SPAIN
The venerable John Sherman, of Ohio, chief of McKinley's
Cabinet, had been selected as Secretary of State because
his years of experience as a financial statesman had qualified
him to undertake the difficult negotiation of an agreement
for international bimetallism, to which the Republican
Party had pledged itself in 1896. A secondary reason for
his appointment lay in the fact that Marcus Alonzo Hanna,
of Cleveland, chairman of the Republican National Com
mittee, and astute guardian of McKinley's aspirations, de
sired to enter the Senate. It was not certain in advance
that Governor Horace Bushnell, of Ohio, would consent to
gratify this aspiration, for the rifts among Ohio politicians
ran deep into their political organizations, but the matter
worked out as desired, and Hanna assumed the senatorship
as Sherman undertook the tasks of foreign secretary.
Among the minor pledges of the Republican Party in
1896 was a plank pledging action toward the ending of a
painful revolution then In progress on the Island Cuban paci-
of Cuba. But few imagined that this revolu- fi^^^-^ion
tion contained the germs of war, nor could Sherman have
been named as foreign secretary with Cuba as a major
subject for prospective diplomacy. On the theme of Cuba,
Sherman as a Senator had often expressed himself in lan
guage unmeasured and severe, upon evidence no weightier
than that contained in the headlines of the daily yellow press.
Coincident with the Cuban revolt a new journalism had
developed on both sides of the Atlantic. Alfred Charles
Harmsworth had taken over the Daily Mail in London,
and William Randolph Hearst had acquired control of the
New York Journal. With similar tactics both of these
editors had developed a journalism of sentimentality and
exaggeration, and the latter had seized upon the events of

234 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the Cuban Insurrection with a purpose to manufacture from
them a war with Spain.
It was In February, 1895, that insurgents in the eastern
end of Cuba revived the guerrilla warfare that had been
Insurrec- Suspended for seventeen years, since the close of
tion of 1895 |-]^g |.gjj years' war. Spanish administration In
Cuba had not improved in the intervening years. Havana,
as the center of culture and capital of the island, had lorded
it over the backwoods regions of the eastern provinces.
Madrid had failed to take seriously the problem of colonial
responsibUity at a time when the rest of western Europe
was awakening not only to a national appreciation of the
value of colonies, but also to an acceptance of a duty In
advance of exploitation.
The Insurgents of 1895, badly armed and poorly organ
ized, were unable to maintain in Cuba anything resembling
a de facto government. Early in the outbreak their leader,
Gomez, inaugurated a policy of devastation and directed
the destruction of the sugar-cane and mills of the Span
ish loyalists. Upon this pretext a strong-armed mUitary
governor. General Valeriano Weyler, was sent out from
Spain to conquer peace. At Weyler's command the re
bellious population, and even the suspected population of
the infected districts, were swept away from their homes
and concentrated in observation camps. Here in barbed-
wire enclosures they were allowed to sicken, starve, and die
uncared for. Across the whole width of the Island toward
its eastern end, he cleared a broad band from its jungle
entanglements and built a wire fence or trocha which he
patrolled constantly in the hope of confining the inarauding
patriot bands within their provinces north of Santiago. The
horrors incidental to this campaign of suppression were
seized upon and exploited by the press. The excesses of
the Cuban patriots were extenuated or ignored, while those
of the Spanish army were displayed as evidence of inherent
corruption, deception, and incapacity.
The revolutionary government had no real existence on
the island, but a handful of its leaders, safely living in New

THE WAR WITH SPAIN 235
York, formed a Cuban junta that pretended to be a gov
ernment and borrowed money where It could, gpain and
It bought arms and ammunition in the United the jnsur-
States, as it was entitled to do under the law of
nations, and ran them into Cuban ports by stealth. The
Spanish Government denied the existence of an actual war,
maintained that she was dealing with only an aggravated
riot; and hence was unable to suppress this munitions trade
by the exercise of the belligerent rights of blockade, contra
band, and search. As a consequence her naval vessels,
whatever their suspicions, could make no interference with
the traffic outside of the Cuban three-mile limit. The re
membrance of the Virginius correspondence of 1873 sug
gested the unwisdom of attacks on vessels flying the Ameri
can flag. It was, however, entirely Impossible to control
the whole Cuban coast, and numerous cargoes of weapons
reached their destination. The Spanish Government, suffer
ing from the traffic which it was too feeble to prevent, took
the attitude that it was the business of the United States
to stop it. Cleveland and Olney consistently repelled this
claim, while at the same time warning American sympathiz
ers not to go beyond their lawful rights, and not to start
within the limits of the United States those military ex
peditions against a friendly power that International law
forbids. Within the United States public sympathy with Cuba
permeated all parties, and repeated attempts were made in
Congress to force upon the President a recognition of Cuban
belligerency. To this suggested interference in the affairs
of Spain, Cleveland interposed as stubborn a denial as he
did to the Spanish demand that the United States police the
Cuban waters for her benefit.
President McKinley took over an exasperating problem,
but one of second magnitude. The tasks of organizing a
Cabinet and seeing the Dingley Bill through Woodford
Congress delayed the day when the Adminis- and
tration could give serious attention to the pacifi- ^
cation of Cuba. In September General Stewart L. Wood-

236 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ford arrived in Madrid to succeed Hannis Taylor as Minis
ter to Spain, and let it be known among his diplomatic
colleagues there "that before Congress should meet In De
cember, some means must be found whereby this struggle
may be put in the sure way of being peacefully and finally
ended." The friendly offices for mediation which he offered
were repelled by the Spanish Government with the comment
that It was the duty of the United States to stop the trade in
arms; and the declaration that if this were done, peace
would follow of itself. The Conservative Government which
Woodford found in power in Madrid was overturned in
October and was replaced by the Ministry of Sagasta. A
little later in the autumn, Weyler was recalled from Cuba
and a more moderate governor was sent out in his place.
On November 25, 1897, the Queen-Regent extended the
Spanish Constitution to Cuba, and established a system
of autonomy therein. But it seemed clear to General
Woodford that no Spaniard knew what the word "auton
omy" Implied, and on the island it was acceptable to
neither faction. The insurgents in Cuba hooted the idea
of less than independence, and were distressed that the
friendly United States should have seemed to ask it. The
Spanish loyalists resented the concession, and were angry
at the United States for seeming to have forced it.
In the winter of 1897-98, the first steps were taken to
establish autonomy In practice, with such disturbing con
sequences that General Fitzhugh Lee, the American con
sul-general in Havana, expressed a desire for the moral
security that would come from the presence of an American
warship in the harbor. Toward the middle of January
mobs in Havana, rioting against autonomy, were uncertain
whether their defiance should be directed against the Span
ish Government or the American consul-general, and on
February 15 the United States cruiser Maine, that had been
detached from the Atlantic squadron and sent to Cuba at
Lee's request, was destroyed at her anchorage in Havana
Harbor by an explosion, the responsibility for which has not
been fixed.

THE WAR WITH SPAIN 237
The destruction of the Maine shocked the American
conscience already disturbed over the sufferings Destruction
of Cuba, and many respectable leaders. In addi- of the
tion to the yellow press, shouted the cry, "Re
member the Maine," and demanded a war of vengeance.
Only a few days before the catastrophe, which seemed
to reveal deep treachery of Spanish character, occurred a
slighter event discreditable to Spanish manners. Dupuy
de Lome, Spanish Minister in Washington, Impressed by
the rising tide of American sentiment, and fearful that
neither Sherman nor McKinley could withstand it or de
sired to, had written a private letter to a Cuban friend In
which he characterized the President as a supine and spine
less politician, and had suggested the desirability of ap
parent but unreal compliance by Spain with the American
demands. The publication In facsimile of this letter filched
from the Havana post-office by an insurgent spy, and ac
quired by an American reporter, ended the usefulness of de
L6me In Washington. It also discredited, in advance of the
destruction of the Maine, anything that Spain might say or
do respecting the Maine accident or Cuba.
The diplomatic course of Spain after the explosion was
to urge Investigation and arbitration in order to fix responsi
bility. This was declined, and in the ensuing weeks naval
boards of inquiry sat separately for Spain and the United
States, and reached contradictory conclusions. The Spanish
board, examining in detail only the surrounding floor of the
harbor, for the doctrine of exterritoriality kept them outside
the warship's hull, reported that the Maine was destroyed
by an internal explosion. The American board, diving into
the mangled hull of the Maine, but not allowed to trespass
on Spanish territory in exploration of the harbor, ascribed
the destruction to an external mine. Before either of the
inconclusive reports was ready for publication, events had
drifted on. The Spanish Government had shown an inabil
ity to act rapidly enough in Cuba to satisfy the enraged
American opinion, whUe In the United States an uprising in
his own party, brought bluntly to his attention by Vice-

238 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
President Hobart, convinced McKinley of the impossibility
of avoiding intervention. Woodford thought until the last
that if it had not been for Congress, everything that Cuba
gained could have been brought about by gradual Spanish
yielding "without firing a shot or losing a single life." On
April II President McKinley transmitted to Congress the
whole problem in the certainty that only war could be its
outcome. The navy of the United States was fully mobilized for war
four days after the message went to Congress. It was a new
Naval mo- navy untested by combat, though officered in
bilization p^j.^ ^y veterans of the Civil War, and adminis
tered by Secretary John D. Long, of Massachusetts, with
the enthusiastic cooperation of Theodore Roosevelt as As
sistant Secretary. The birth of the new navy had been of
interest in America for more than fifteen years. First au
thorized in 1882 when the warships of the Civil War were
rotting in their honorable old age, its first battleship, the
Indiana, went to sea in 1895. A handful of the new units
had been sent to Kiel in that year to assist in the ceremonies
at the opening of the new German canal from the Baltic.
Already Europe had acclaimed the fact that an American
naval captain, Alfred Thayer Mahan, had revolutionized
the theory of naval warfare by his epoch-making volume
on the influence of sea-power on history. Between the
Atlanta and the Indiana, the armored cruisers and battle
ships New York, Brooklyn, Texas, Maine, with some pro
tected cruisers had gone Into commission. Following the
Indiana, the Massachusetts, Oregon, and Iowa had slightly
increased the number of modem battleships. These with
the minor vessels had been mobilized by the Navy Depart
ment early in 1898, at about the time when the dispatch
of the Maine to Havana indicated the wisdom of prepa
ration for any eventuality. The vessels in the Atlantic
were brought together near the capes of the Chesapeake,
and on March 27 Captain W. T. Sampson was given
command of the whole North Atlantic squadron. In the
Pacific there were only vessels of the more obsolete classesi

THE WAR WITH SPAIN 239
with the exception of the Oregon which found herself isolated
on the North Pacific coast. The Oregon was brought to
San Francisco Bay, docked and scraped at Mare Island,
and hurried off on her lonely voyage to the Atlantic. No
other fact had ever stimulated so keenly American zest for
a canal at Panama.
The vessels on the Asiatic station had recently received a
new commander, through a fortunate selection which was
due less to merit than to politics. Assistant Secretary
Roosevelt was responsible for the detail of George Dewey
to this post, but it was only through the political pressure
of Senator Redfield Proctor that he became aware of the
existence and merits of this officer. In the navy as in the
army dry rot had been the consequence of the ageing of
Civil War veterans and the indifference of the public and
Congress. There had been an abrupt departure from naval
precedent when Roosevelt insisted upon diligence in gun-
pointing and target practice. -In advance of the message of
April 1 1 , he had taken the responsibUity of ordering Dewey
to proceed to Hongkong, there to clean ship and outfit, and
thence in the event of war to proceed to Manila and destroy
the Spanish Asiatic fleet. In the selection of George Dewey
he lighted upon a commander with a mind as aggressive as
his own.
The President's message of April 11, 1898, was commonly
regarded as a war message, and in Congress the only serious
debate had to do with the form that the action The Span-
should take and the immediate effect of it upon '^^ ^^^
the lives and safety of Americans in Cuba. For some
days action was delayed to permit General Lee to commu
nicate with Americans on the Island in order to bring them
within reach of safety. The speeches that were made
bring out that the purpose of American action was peace
and freedom for the Island of Cuba. No considerable
group of people or politicians talked of annexation or con
quest. The resolutions that were finally passed give testimony to
the inchoate form of the revolt that was under way. After

240 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
three years of insurrection there was as yet no Cuban gov
ernment in existence entitled to even de facto recognition.
The people of Cuba were recognized as entitled to freedom,
which Congress pledged Itself to bring about, disclaiming
"any disposition or Intention to exercise sovereignty, juris
diction, or control over said Island except for the pacification
thereof ' ' ; and the President was directed to this end to
make Immediate demands on Spain for withdrawal from
Cuba, and to follow refusal of withdrawal by armed inter
vention. The final passage of the resolutions on the 20th of
April was accepted by Spain as an act of war. The Spanish
Minister in Washington at once demanded and received his
passports, and an ultimatum cabled to Woodford for delivery
at Madrid was never presented because of his dismissal by
the Spanish Government. By a subsequent resolution Con
gress declared that a state of war began on AprU 21; a
blockade of Cuba was ordered on April 22, and on the same
day Congress followed its usual course in military prepara
tion by enacting a law for the creation of an army after the
war had been declared.
Three days after the beginning of the war, on April 24,
a British proclamation of neutrality made it impossible for
Dewey at Dewey to continue at Hongkong the outfitting of
Manila j-^jg flgg^ The war itself had brought into opera
tion the orders he had received from Secretary Roosevelt. On
the 25th he withdrew from Hongkong for a near-by harbor,
and a few hours later on his flagship the Olympia started
for Manila Bay. Williams, the former consul at ManUa,
came upon the flagship on the 27th, the day on which
Matanzas, on the Cuban coast, was bombarded by vessels
from the Atlantic squadron, with resulting casualties, if one
may trust the Spanish governor, of a single mule. On the
early morning of May i, the Olympia led the American
squadron in through the capes at the mouth of ManUa Bay,
passing over anchored mines that ought to have destroyed
it, and under guns on shore emplacements that ought to
have controlled the entrance. It found the Spanish fleet
drawn up along the water-front of ManUa and in leisurely

THE WAR WITH SPAIN 241
fashion, against only an unexpectedly perfunctory defense,
destroyed the fleet and placed Manila at the mercy of the
American commander whenever he should receive military
forces with which to occupy it.
The date of victory at ManUa marks the entry of the
United States against its will upon an imperial course. It
marks by chance another entry toward a sImUar destiny,
less unintended. While Dewey was battering the Spanish
ships, off Manila, Prince William of WIed, at a meeting at
the Hotel Bristol, in the city of Berlin, was laying the
foundations of the German Navy League whose function
was to be to show the German Empire the pathway to a new
glory. The seizure of Klau-chau had already established
Germany In a promising field of Asiatic expansion whose
fertility the accidental arrival of the United States most
gravely threatened. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Diplomatic correspondence preceding the war with Spain is in the vol
umes of U.S. Foreign Relations, iSg^-gS, and has been summarized in
three important studies: H. E. Flack, Spanish-American Diplomatic Rela
tions preceding the War of i8g8 (1906) ; E. J. Benton, International Law and
Diplomacy of the Spafiish-American War (1908) ; and F. E. Chadwick, The
Relations of the United States and Spain: Diplomacy (1909). J. M. Calla
han, Cuba and International Relations (1899), is valuable. C. S. Olcott,
William McKinley (1916), is the best work available on its subject, but
needs to be supplemented by Henry Cabot Lodge, The War with Spain
(1899), and John D. Long, The New American Navy (1903). There are
biographies or autobiographies of George Dewey, Winfield Scott Schley,
Alfred T. Mahan, Charles D. Sigsbee.

CHAPTER XXV
THE INVASION OF CUBA
The immediate consequence of Dewey's victory at ManUa
was a need for an occupying army. The Spanish fleet had
been destroyed and Manila was within reach, but the Span
ish land forces still occupied Luzon and the adjacent islands,
and there were no troops at Dewey's disposal for grasping
the fruits of victory. The Spanish forces were already en
gaged, in the Philippines as in Cuba, in putting down a
native revolt. A prominent native leader, Emilio Agui-
naldo, whom the war found In exile in China, was brought
back to the islands by Dewey for the purpose of keeping
the revolt alive. The first specific demand upon the War
Department was for an expeditionary force, which was
speedily assembled In San Francisco under General Wes
ley Merritt, and which on August 13, 1898, occupied the
city of Manila by assault.
As in the case of the voyage of the Oregon, the operations
in the Philippines brought an old movement to final fruition.
The Philip- '^he Oregon constituted an object-lesson whose
pines and teachings made the Panama Canal imperative.
The possession of Manila revealed the strategic
importance of the Hawaiian Islands. A movement for the
annexation of these Islands, arising locally in their Ameri
can population, had been encouraged by President Harrison
and snubbed by Cleveland. President McKinley negotiated
a treaty for its consummation in 1897, but the Senate failed
to ratify it. On July 7, 1898, Congress took the project out
of the hands of the Senate, and passed a joint resolution
as a consequence of which the Republic of Hawaii was
annexed to the United States. On June 14, 1900, it was
given status as a Territory of the United States.
Congress had begun its debate upon the formation of an
army during the concluding weeks of the diplomatic dis-

THE INVASION OF CUBA 243
cussion with Spain. It was conceded that the basis must
be the regular army, which on April i comprised Army legis-
2143 officers and 26,040 enlisted men, the or- '^''°"
ganized National Guard of the States, and volunteers.
The regular army was on April 26 authorized to be raised
in strength to 62,597. The volunteer army was authorized
four days earlier, and upon April 23 President McKinley
issued a call for 125,000 volunteers apportioned among the
States. By August, when mobilization was complete, the
volunteer army comprised 8785 officers and 207,244 men.
The volunteer law authorized the President to accept three
volunteer regiments of cavalry. Of these the most impor
tant was raised by Leonard Wood, a captain in the Medical
Corps, who was to be "advanced within a few months from
attending surgeon to major-general of volunteers," and
who was actively supported by his friend. Assistant Secre
tary of the Navy Roosevelt. The regiment was recruited
among the outdoor men who perpetuated the tradition of
the frontier marksman whom Roosevelt described in his
Winning of the West. Under the nickname of the ' ' Rough
Riders" it became the most widely known single unit in
the war.
Not until after the passage of the army bills in April did
the War Department hold itself at liberty to begin specific
preparations for war. The regular army was as usual
diffused on duty throughout the country. The Secretary
of War, General Russell A. Alger, of Michigan, had been
chosen because of his political importance to the Hanna-
McKinley organization. His Civil War record had been
so dubious that McKinley had deferred appointment until
Senator Julius C. Burrows, of Michigan, had personally in
vestigated and underwritten it. The army itself was under
command of General Nelson A. Miles, senior major-general
with long years of Indian police experience on the plains
and the recollection of a lad's gallant services in the Civil
War. The administrative bureaus of the War Department
were in command of elderly officers whose business routine
had been unbroken for years. The line officers of the army

244 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
and the enlisted men were well trained and effective in their
work, but no general plans for any war existed in the depart
ment, nor was there a planning agency fit to execute them.
The normal consequence of an army under command of its
senior officers, with the rule of seniority generally applied,
was an army under the command of its least flexible and
most irascible leaders, whose careers were already behind
them. One of the statutes passed by Congress in anticipation
of war was an appropriation of fifty million dollars, on
March 9 "for national defense and for each and every
purpose connected therewith, to be expended at the dis
cretion of the President." This fund was expended largely
in guarding the coast and strengthening the navy. It
was ruled, said Secretary Alger, that the accumulation of
military supplies by the army was offensive rather than
defensive, and his establishment accordingly watched the
approach of the crisis without funds or authority to pre
pare to meet it. The passage of the army bills and the
calls for volunteers precipitated Immediate action and ex
pansion that strained the administrative capacity of the
War Department's bureaus. General Merritt's expedition
ary force was got ready first, and then units of the regular
army were mobilized at Tampa to constitute the nucleus
of an army for Cuban Invasion, while the volunteer forces
were mostly assembled in training camp at Chickamauga.
The First Volunteer Cavalry selected San Antonio as its
mobilizing point, and proceeded thence to join the regu
lars at Tampa. Its senior officers were thoroughly familiar
with the channels which led to action in the departments,
and secured for their volunteer force the greatest of military
opportunities. General William R. Shafter, from Michigan,
as were Secretary Alger and Senator Burrows, was given
command of the Invading army, which was about 17,000
strong by the first of June. His camp at Tampa lay at the
end of a single-track railroad, and was a rising winter resort
of the Florida west coast. Hither tralnloads of troops and
supplies were shipped sometimes without orders or bills of

THE INVASION OF CUBA 245
lading. The war correspondents crowded the veranda of
the great resort hotel waiting for something to happen, and
describing the confusion of a planless mobilization as in
cisively as they dared. General Adna R. Chaffee, later
chief of staff, but then Heutenant-colonel of the Third Cav
alry, in charge of a division, witnessed at Tampa "the com
plete breaking down of the quartermaster and commissary
departments." The medical department did not break
down until it reached the field.
The immediate objective of the army of Invasion remained
to be determined as events developed. There were plans
for raiding the Cuban coast, and for an invasion of the Ha
vana district the following winter, after the new recruits
had received their training; but before the end of May the
activities of the navy had revealed a special need for co
operation by the army.
Before the outbreak of the war the navy had mobilized
in the Chesapeake. Captain W. T. Sampson had been ele
vated to command of the North Atlantic fleet,
and a portion of his force had been grouped as a and the
flying squadron for patrol work under the com- flgg^"*"^
mand of Commodore Winfield S. Schley. On
paper the Spanish fleet excelled the American fleet in
major units, tonnage, and broadside strength. It was
known that no considerable naval force was in the Car
ibbean, and that Admiral Cervera was gathering his fleet
at the Cape Verde Islands, with a destination unannounced
but certain. As Mahan had pointed out a decade earlier,
the effective radius of a modern fleet was the bunker capac
ity of its units, while its speed was determined by" that of
its slowest member. The strategy board on which Mahan
was now sitting was rightly convinced that Cervera could
have no destination except some Spanish port in Cuba or
Porto Rico, with the former more probable since he carried
supplies for the army in Havana. No fleet could cross
the Atlantic and be ready for immediate maneuver against
the enemy, and the Spanish fleet could not hope to find the
facilities for recoaling and repair except at the Spanish

246 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ports of San Juan, in Porto Rico, or Havana, Cienfuegos, or
Santiago, in Cuba. With entire certainty the Navy De
partment prepared to intercept the Spanish fleet which
sailed on April 29, and to destroy it at sea before it reached
shelter in a Spanish colonial port.
Under the command of Sampson, the North Atlantic
fleet maintained the blockade of Cuban waters, where
Patrol of the Oregon joined it after her thrilling trip ori
Cuban May 24; the flying squadron under Schley was
detailed to patrol the southern coast of Cuba,
and left Key West for that duty on May 19. The rest of
Sampson's command, under his immediate control, watched
the passages leading to Cuba from the north between Porto
Rico and the Florida channel.
The strategic certainty of the Navy Department was dis
turbed by the nervousness of the seaboard cities. From
Savannah to Portland there was apprehension of a Spanish
bombardment. Mythical Spanish warships were daily re
ported In the newspapers, and nearly as often delegations
of Congressmen waited upon the Secretary of the Navy to
remind him of his duty to protect their constituents. The
political pressure was so great that at least apparent com
pliance had to follow, and various unseaworthy gunboats,
manned with Httle more than minimum crews for naviga
tion alone, were dispatched to lie offshore and give coijifort
to the nervous souls of seaboard citizens.
The patrol of the Cuban coast from May 19 until June i
became at a later date the occasion for a naval investiga
tion which made public many of the facts of the naval war.
Its chief intent was frustrated by the fact that on May 19,
as Schley set sail from Key West, Cervera steamed into the
landlocked harbor of Santiago. The news of his safe ar
rival In Cuba remained a secret for some hours, and even
when rumor of it had leaked into the United States It was
impossible at once to establish communication with the
ships at sea. Scout cruisers were hurried out, carrying first
the rumor, then news when the rumor was confirmed, then
specific orders to Schley to proceed at top speed to Santiago

THE INVASION OF CUBA 247
and blockade the port. Yet it was not until the morning
of May 29 that any obstruction to the emergence of Cer-
vera's fleet was consciously established. In these ten days
there was nothing to prevent a coaling of the fleet and a raid,
perhaps successful, against the North Atlantic coast — noth
ing except the fact, then unknown, that the Spanish fleet
was in no condition either to raid or fight.
'' The cruise of the flying squadron from Key West pro
ceeded leisurely around the western end of Cuba with the
idea of visiting first the port of Cienfuegos, Blockade
which was one of the conceivable objectives of °^ Santiago
the Spanish fleet. As the cruiser Brooklyn approached
port, flying the flag of the squadron commander, noises
were heard that were interpreted as gun-fire in honor of
Cervera's safe arrival there. Even Sampson believed at
this time that Cienfuegos would bear watching. For two
days, from May 22 to May 24, the flying squadron kept up
its blockade of Cienfuegos without learning whether the
enemy was there or not. The harbor was landlocked and
no methods were devised to explore its recesses. On the
24th, on receipt of orders indicating that Santiago might be
the place, Schley resumed his cruise toward the east. He
arrived off Santiago on the evening of the 26th, perhaps in
sight of the anchorage at which the Spanish warships had
lain for seven days. Neither. Schley's force, nor scout
cruisers from Sampson's fleet, confirmed by observation the
rumor that Cervera was in Santiago. The next day with
his bunkers running low of coal, and wlth'a heavy sea in
terfering with recoaling from the colliers, Schley decided to
return to Key West, sending a message to the Navy De
partment of his inability to remain on station. When the
weather moderated, he changed his mind and remkined off
Santiago. On the 28th he coaled his ships there, while at
Washington an agonized Navy Department, knowing that
Cervera's fleet was unwatched, was uncertain as to Schley's
station or intention. Sampson, learning of the confusion
upon one of his returns to Key West from a patrolling dash
along the north shore of Cuba, hurried off to Santiago,

248 RECENT HISTORY OF THE^UNITED STATES
where meanwhile Schley had on May 29 sighted the Span
ish fleet. Admiral Sampson arrived off Santiago June i,
and on the next day Issued a general order for the main
tenance of a blockade, assigning each vessel to its station
with directions as to its course in case Cervera should bring
his squadron out, and invite a fleet engagement by turning
to the east or to the west.
From this date Schley had no duties in command. By
day the larger warships lay offshore in a wide arc watching
the opening between the cliffs that command and conceal
the harbor. At night the line drew farther in toward shore,
and the battleships took turns in occupying a position
directly in front of the entrance and focusing their new
naval weapon, the searchlight, upon the cliffs. In the
intervals between the battleships and cruisers that were
stationed from east to west, in the order New York, Indiana,
Oregon, Iowa, Texas, and Brooklyn, were the smaller units
of the fleet, cruisers, converted yachts, and other irregular
warships. On June 7, Guantanamo Bay, some forty miles
east of Santiago, was occupied by Marines in anticipation
of its possible use as an invading point. Thereafter while
the blockade lasted, the various warships in their turn left
their stations and steamed to Guantanamo to coal.
No attempt was made to force the channel at Santiago
and engage the Spanish fleet at anchor as Dewey had done
at Manila. Dewey, indeed, had received the high rewards
for heroic disregard of danger, and was finally given the rank
of Admiral of the Navy for Hfe. But specific orders were
issued after his engagement that there should be no more of
its type. Sampson was under Instructions not to risk the
loss of any of his ' irreplaceable battleships in "the bom
bardment of fortifications." The doctrine of "Damn the
torpedoes. Go ahead!" was Farragut's at Mobile and
Dewey's at Manila, but was not a doctrine for a weak navy
in the face of a superior adversary.
As soon as Sampson established his effective blockade at
Santiago, he appealed to Washington for a military force
to occupy the land fortifications of the harbor, and either

THE INVASION OF CUBA 249
to enable the American fleet to enter in safety or to drive
the Spanish out. On May 30 orders were issued ^ ^^^j
to General Shafter to proceed on transports to navy co-
Cuba and to join the fleet off Santiago. The
first week in June was occupied by a scurrying aboard
transports at Tampa, and on the 7th the convoy was ready
to set sail. The rumor of the presence of a mythical Span
ish warship cruising in the Gulf delayed the sailing until
June 14. Six days later, after an uneventful voyage, a
junction of the forces took place, and Sampson and Shafter
entered into conference upon the Hne of action.
The plan of Sampson, which he believed to have been
accepted at the conference, involved a landing of troops
near the entrance to the harbor, after which the Spanish
forces were to be expelled from the hills and fortifications
overlooking the channel. This would make It possible to
proceed later with a joint attack upon the fleet and the
Spanish land forces. On the 3d of June an attempt had
been made to prevent the egress of the Spanish fleet by
sinking a collier, the Merrimac, across the narrows of the
channel. The effort partially failed, but the cool young
commander who attempted it, Richmond P. Hobson, be
came one of the popular heroes of the war. It is uncer
tain what the effect of success would have been upon the
strategy of the combined forces.
General Shafter left the conference of June 20 believing
that he had made it clear that his intention was to make a
landing east of the harbor "and march on Santiago." He
proceeded, to the dismay of Sampson, to act upon this
Intention. After the conference with his commanders on June 21,
Shafter published brief orders which were to govern the
landing the following day. With negligible re- 3^^^,^ ^j
sistance from the Spanish forces, and with the Las Gua-
assistance of the boats from the fleet (which ™
Long had offered and Alger had curtly declined a few days
earlier), a disembarkation was made along a mining rail
road from Siboney to Daiquiri several miles east of the

250 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
channel, and some eighteen miles southeast of Santiago
by the direct traU through the tropical jungle. The first
troops to land cleared the adjacent hills of sharpshooters,
and most of the forces were on shore before the end of
the 23d. From Siboney the narrow and much-worn trail
through the jungle loam led toward the Spanish entrench
ments and entanglements east and south of Santiago.
Without orders on the night of the 23d the troops swarmed
inland along this path. The nature of the terrain made it
less important that most of the cavalry horses had been left
behind at Tampa together with many of the ambulances
of the medical department and other wheeled vehicles be
longing to the supply service. Along a jungle path only
a pack-mule could advance with comfort. The morning of
the 24th found the head of the column deployed along the
line of hills marked by a junction in the trails at a point
known to the Cubans as Las Guasimas. The Rough Riders
were here too, dismounted but enterprising, for they had
marched all night without orders and unchecked by su
perior command, in order to select for themselves a good
fighting place upon the front. The correspondents and the
military reports differ as to whether the column was am
bushed or expected the engagement that the Spanish out
posts offered at Las Guasimas, but here on the 24th was
the first military engagement of importance with nearly a
thousand American troops involved, fighting rather bhndly
in the forest, and with some seventy casualties which fell
most heavily upon Colonel Wood's First Volunteer Cavalry.
During the next week General Shafter established con
trol over his army and prepared for his Santiago campaign
independent of Sampson's force.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Riders (1899), is the classic of the war, and
is supplemented by R. H. Davis, The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns
(1899), and the official histories, John D. Long, The New American Navy
(1903)1 and Russell A. Alger, The Spanish-American War (1901). The
Annual Reports (1898) of Long and Alger contain many documents.
W. A. M. Goode, With Sampson through the War (1899), and J. D. Miley,

THE INVASION OF CUBA 251
In Cuba with Shafter (1899), are narratives by journalistic eye-witnesses.
A convenient summary is H. W. Wilson, The Downfall of Spain (1899);
much more important is F. E. Chadwick, The Relations of the United
States and Spain: The Spanish-American War (191 1).

CHAPTER XXVI
SANTIAGO AND THE PEACE
From Siboney to the fortifications around Santiago there
extended a dense forest with no Improved roads and with
Advance only One important direct trail. Shortly before
on Santiago reaching the Spanish trenches and wire entangle
ments, the forest gave way to an open valley through which
the San Juan River flowed southwestward, and along the
western ridge of which the Spanish station had been taken.
General Shafter prepared for a direct attack along the line
of this road, and for an enveloping movement headed at
the Santiago waterworks at El Caney, some six miles up
the San Juan above the crossing of the trail. The army was
entirely ashore by the 25th, and in the remaining days of
June its units were sorted out, and Its brigade commanders
were given their tasks in connection with the general ad
vance which was to take place on the night preceding
July I. The Spanish forces made no serious attempt to in
terfere with these preparations, but instead discussed with
the Government at Havana the course to be taken in de
fense and the possibility of saving a portion of the fleet
through flight.
On the evening of June 30 the regiments got into position,
with Shafter sick in his tent behind the lines at El Pozo, and
deriving his information at second-hand. Lawton on the
right of the line moved early in the evening for his detour by
another jungle trail against El Caney and the Spanish block
houses defending It. Early on the morning of July i the
double attack opened. Its strategy was partly defeated at
the start by a stubborn Spanish resistance at El Caney.
Lawton, instead of wiping out the Spanish left and rejoining
the main American column early in the day, was detained at
El Caney until late In the afternoon, and came back into
line the following morning after thirty-six weary hours.

254 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The advance against the hills beyond the San Juan took
place as arranged. The trenches here were assaulted and
Battle of taken. The Rough Riders, now under the com-
San Juan mand of Colonel Roosevelt, charged at the right
of the main column, having their chief engagement at Ket
tle Hill, somewhat northeast of the San Juan hills. That
night the American forces occupied and reversed the Span
ish trenches. On the 2d of July the engagement continued
with considerable rifle fire all day, and by evening Shafter
began to wonder whether he was able to retain the ground
he had seized. The possibility of a withdrawal was dis
cussed with Washington, while Sampson was appealed to
to force the channel, engage the Spanish fleet, and create a
diversion in the Spanish rear. Arrangements were made
for a conference at Siboney on the morning of the 3d, in
order that the two commanders might reconstruct their
plan of action.
The successful assault upon the land defenses of Santiago
convinced the Spanish authorities of the certainty of defeat.
Upon July 2 Admiral Cervera was ordered to take his fleet
to sea, and to run the risk of total destruction in the hope
that some of the units might escape. He had known befote
leaving Spain, and had made record of the fact, that he was
being sent to defeat. The Spanish Ministry of Marine had
known that his fleet was hardly seaworthy, and in no sense
ready for an engagement. The heavy guns of his largest
ship were not mounted in the turrets, but were carried as
cargo in the hold. The fleet was sent to sea because of in
sistence on the part of Spanish opinion, and because the
Ministry feared that the monarchy could not stand an open
confession of naval incapacity. Defeat in battle would be
less of a blow.
The American battle fleet was, as usual, drawn up facing
the entrance to the harbor at daybreak on Sunday, July 3.
Naval At about eight o'clock Sampson started off in the
battle jy^g^ York, from his station near the right of the
line, for his conference with Shafter. At nine-thirty-five
the lookouts on the Brooklyn sighted the first vessel of the

SANTIAGO AND THE PEACE 255
Spanish column coming out. It turned sharply to the west
and within the next few minutes the naval fight was on.
Every American commander had his orders from Admiral
Sampson as to his conduct in such a battle, and the vessels
immediately closed In to hold the Spanish fleet against the
shore, and to destroy It there. Commodore Schley, on the
bridge of the Brooklyn, assumed that the departure of Samp
son had left him as the senior in command of the fleet. He
signaled orders to the other vessels, .which appear to have
been ignored. The emerging column headed for a few min
utes directly at the Brooklyn, which lay southwest of the
entrance. Instead of swerving to the left and taking im
mediately a westward course parallel to the Spanish fleet,
Schley ordered and the Brooklyn executed a loop to the
right, and nearly rammed the Texas, its right-hand neigh
bor, that was closing in according to Its orders. After com
pleting the circuit to the right that carried it away from
the danger of being rammed by the outcoming squadron,
the Brooklyn swerved back Into the line of pursuit and
speedily took the lead. Sampson meanwhile had proceeded
some six miles east from his station before the flight was
observed, and turning brought up the rear of the pursuit
rapidly overtaking the rest of his warships. The Oregon,
Brooklyn, and Texas did the bulk of the damage in the
chase, and one by one the Spanish ships were beached and
burned. The chase ended some forty-three miles west of
Santiago, when the last of the fugitives turned her nose
in shore for safety at about half-past two. The flagship
arrived on the scene to receive the surrender of the prisoners
as Schley was preparing to receive them, and a little later
that night Sampson's report of the engagement took the
wires ahead of the report which Schley had wished to send.
The overwhelming victory at sea reversed the whole
military situarion, and in the following fortnight Shafter
entered into correspondence with the Spanish Health of
commanders for an unconditional surrender of the army
their forces. This occurred July 1 7 , when the formal capitu-
larion was carried out, The surrender was received by an

256 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
American army riddled with fever and in danger of exter
mination from tropical diseases within the next few weeks.
The army had been landed In the tropics at the beginning
of the hottest season, in uniforms which had been designed
for winters on the western plains. Group sanitation was
yet In Its Infancy, and the medical department was un
provided with medicines and hospital facilities for the treat
ment of malaria, dysentery, and yellow fever. There was
some question as to whether the fighting morale of the army
could last until the capitulation of Santiago. Thereafter
It speedily broke down. On August 3 a "round robin" was
prepared under the leadership of volunteer officers who had
no military careers to hope for, asserting that the army must
be withdrawn to a cooler climate at once in order to be
saved. The regular officers, who were prevented by the
bonds of discipline from taking the lead in this sort of action,
were nevertheless nearly unanimous as to its need. The
responsibility was largely Colonel Roosevelt's, and upon him
fell much of the criticism when the protest was given to the
Associated Press before It was turned over to military
channels for transmission to Washington. The protest
accomplished its purpose. On August 8 the expeditionary
force started for a new camp at Montauk Point on Long
Island. Of the total force, that had been increased by this
time to about 25,000, four fifths were sick when they landed
in the United States.
The third of the expeditionary forces was put together
after the battle of Santiago, under the command of General
Miles. It was ordered to proceed to Porto Rico. Preceded
by the war correspondents, who, like the army, found the
Porto Ricans passive and indifferent, it accomplished its
purpose only to be halted on the eve of its first engagement
by notification that the war was over.
Negotiations for an armistice and peace were opened by
Spain through Jules Cambon, the French Ambassador at
, . . Washington, a few days after the capitulation of
Santiago. He found in the State Department a
new Secretary and a definite program. John, Sherman had

258 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
given way to William B. Day, an old personal associate
of the President, who had been Assistant Secretary of State
since the formation of the Administration. As the relations
with Spain had become more difficult. Judge Day had quietly
taken over more and more of the detail work In the Depart
ment, with the approval of McKinley, but to the great
chagrin of his immediate chief. Sherman was incapacitated
by age and health for his duties, and finally resigned on
April 25, when he found his Assistant Secretary actually
summoned to Cabinet meetings. Judge Day met the pro
posal for an armistice with a demand for the withdrawal
of Spain from the Western Hemisphere. The draft of a
protocol to be followed by a conference on peace was handed
to Cambon on August 10. Two days later he signed it on
behalf of Spain, and the Adjutant-General hurried copies
of it by telegraph to the three commanders in the field, to
Shafter at Santiago, to Miles at Ponce, and to Merritt at
Manila. Before it arrived at the last post, Merritt had on
the day following its signature stormed and occupied the
city of Manila.
The first problem which was taken up by the peace
commissioners when they convened at Paris, October i.
The Peace 1 898, was presented by this post-armistice cap-
Commission ture of the city of Manila. The American Gov
ernment refused to accede to the demand that the status
quo of August 12 be restored, but It accepted the principle
that the islands had not been conquered and that their
status was subject to negotiation.
The American Commission included four Republicans,
Day, Davis, Frye, and Reid, and one Democrat, Judge
George Gray. Day had withdrawn from the State Depart
ment to accept the chairmanship. To fill his place Presi
dent McKinley recalled from London the American Am
bassador, John Hay. Since early boyhood John Hay had
been familiar with the intimate workings of Republican
Governments. As one of Lincoln's private secretaries, he
had come to know Washington in war-time, and later he
was Assistant Secretary of State under President Hayes.

SANTIAGO AND THE PEACE 259
As a man of letters he had been prominent for thirty years.
"If there Is a man In the country who is handy with his
intellectuals," wrote E. S. Martin, "Colonel Hay is that
person; but he has been a lucky man, too." He had writ
ten verse that he regarded as too amusing and popular for
his dignity. His anonymous novel. The Bread-Winners,
was the best seller of 1884. As the joint biographer of
Lincoln with John J. Nicolay he had helped to establish
the great reputation of a national leader. In London as
Ambassador he had shared the credit for keeping England
friendly throughout the Spanish War. He now for the first
time in his life came into great responsibility, as part of a
Government before which the vistas of world Influence had
opened, and which was ready to give instant adhesion to
a new Idea of empire, the doctrine of the open door.
The instructions of the peace commissioners were definite
as far as the American campaigns were concerned. Cuba
was to be set free without encumbrance, and problem
Porto Rico was to be ceded to the United States, of the
The Philippine Islands constituted a new prob- ' 'PP>"es
lem for which public opinion was not yet ready, and which
the Protocol of August 12 had deferred for consideration at
Paris. As the autumn advanced the factors controlling
their destiny proved to turn upon relative disadvantages
rather than benefits. No thought of conquest in the Phil
ippines or elsewhere preceded the Spanish War, and no
serious desire to begin a colonial system was in evidence.
The most definite body of public opinion was fundamen
tally opposed to colonial control as un-American and un
democratic; but against the disadvantages involved in
holding the PhUippines McKinley weighed the greater dan
gers to their people in letting them go. The combined
force of Agulnaldo's insurrection and Dewey's victory had
broken down the Spanish power beyond repair. The in
surgents, although they pretended to maintailn a provisional
government, had even fewer elements of stability than
were in Cuba. Independence was unthinkable. The ob
vious desires of at least one great power, Germany, to

26o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
maneuver the United States out of the position which
Dewey had grasped, suggested that freedom for the Fili
pinos would be of short duration. On October 25 McKinley
wrote to Day, "There Is a very general feeling that the
United States, whatever it might prefer as to the Philip
pines, is in a situation where it cannot let go." On the
following day specific Instructions were cabled to the peace
commissioners, that while the President was sensible of the
grave responsibilities involved, the United States must
retain the whole of the Philippine archipelago.
After brushing aside the Spanish contention as to the
Philippine status quo, the commissioners took up the next
contentions that Cuba must be transferred to the United
States rather than simply abandoned by Spain, and that
the Cuban debt must go with the island. Both of these
claims were rejected, and by the end of October It seemed
doubtful whether the Spanish Commissioners could be
brought to agree to a treaty. The demand for the cession
of the Philippine Islands,, formally presented on Novem
ber I, increased the danger of deadlock, which was finally
avoided by the concession that the transfer of the islands
was not based upon conquest, but was In lieu of cash in
demnity for war costs, and by the added willingness to
reimburse Spain to the extent of twenty million dollars for
her cash outlay upon the Philippine Islands. On Decem
ber 10, 1898, the treaty was signed at Paris, and early in
January was transmitted to the Senate, for approval by the
constitutional two thirds.
The wave of feeling against the retention of the islands
mounted steadily through the autumn of 1898, and re-
Congres- celved the support of most of those in both
sional elec- parties who had opposed the war, and of an
additional group of Republicans, who feared
national decay as a consequence of empire and were speed
ily known as "anti-imperialists." A large proportion of
the Democratic Party opposed the Republican policies
which had permitted the war and its consequences. The
Congressional election of November, 1898, made it possible

SANTIAGO AND THE PEACE 261
to measure these forces of dissatisfaction and estimate the
political consequences of the war.
As a result of the election the Republican majority in
both houses was increased. The forces which had made for
free-silver votes two years earlier had materially weakened
with the improvement of business conditions. The war
had been most popular throughout the Middle West, and
brought back to the Republican Party votes that had been
lost for several years. Democratic campaigners warned
their audiences against the dangers of imperialism, while
Republican opponents pointed out that the military victory
could be retained and a satisfactory treaty negotiated only
by the support of the Administration that had won the war.
The campaign brought out the one permanent hero of
the Spanish War. Theodore Roosevelt had already aroused
the interest of progressive citizens because of his devotion
to clean government, and of hero-lovers because of his con
tinuous and breezy appeals. His regiment had brought
him a larger fame. His defense 01 the health and safety
of the troops at Santiago had Incurred the displeasure of
the McKinley Government and War Department, but had
widened his personal popularity. He returned to the hos
pital camp at Montauk Point on Long Island a colonel In
khaki and a national figure.
There had been no experience in New York politics so
refreshing as that of 1898 since Grover Cleveland, the
mayor of Buffalo, in 1882 became reform candidate for
governor. The community, tired of the tricks of machine
politics, whose notoriety had been Increased by the recent
experiences of New York City, turned with eagerness to
the new personality. The managers of the Republican
Party found It necessary to lay aside their slate and to
appear to welcome Colonel Roosevelt as their candidate for
governor. His canvass for that office was his first expe
rience in a general and personal appeal for votes. From the
rear platform of his special train he carried the campaign
into all corners of the State, and early in 1899 was installed
victorious at Albany "standing by the Ten Commandments

262 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
to the very best of his ability, and humping himself to
promote fair play."
Before the first of the year there was a real question
whether the treaty could be ratified. Demobilization of
Ratifica- ^^^ army had proceeded rapidly, and there was
tion of the a suggestion for scandal in nearly every field of
"^^^ ^ war activity. The advocates of Schley and
Sampson were mutually conscious of injustice to their
favorite. Secretary Alger was denounced as incompetent.
The administration of Shafter was under fire. The Quar
termaster's department was under charge of criminal in
adequacy. A strong minority in the dominant party op
posed the terms of peace, while the Democratic opposition
responded freely to the arguments of William J. Bryan
against imperialism. The treaty was sent to the Senate In
January, and was ratified after five weeks' debate, by a bare
two thirds. The uncertainty up until the final vote would
have resulted in defeat had not Bryan taken the attitude
that the treaty must not be repudiated and that any in
justices created by it must be corrected subsequently by the
United States. He turned his party toward the idea of
ultimate independence for the Philippines.
Within the Republican Party there was serious dissent
with Hoar, of Massachusetts, in the lead, but the junior
Senator from that State, Henry Cabot Lodge, spoke for the
view that prevailed in final ratification: "We must either
ratify the treaty or reject it. . . . The President cannot be
sent back across the Atlantic In the person of his commis
sioners, hat in hand, to say to Spain with bated breath, 'I
am here in obedience to the mandate of a minority of one
third of the Senate to tell you that we have been too vic
torious, and that you have yielded us too much.'"
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Most of the documents upon which military judgments on the Santiago
campaign are based are to be found in the Proceedings of Court of Inquiry
in Case of Winfield S. Schley (1902), 57th Cong., ist Sess., House Doc.
485 ; the Report on the Conduct of the War Department in the War (1899),
56th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. 221; and the War and Navy Department

SANTIAGO AND THE PEACE 263
Reports for 1898. The negotiations at Paris may be followed in the papers
that were transmitted to the Senate with the treaty of peace, 55th Cong.,
3d Sess., Sen. Doc. 62. Admiral French E. Chadwick, The Relations of the
United States and Spain: The Spanish-American War (1911), is the most
valuable general account, and may be supplemented by Colonel H. H.
Sargent, The Campaign of Santiago de Cuba (1907), which is a critical and
technical account. Much of the personal correspondence relating to the
treaty negotiations is in Olcott's William McKinley, Thayer's Life and
Letters of John Hay, and Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid
(1921). D. C. Worcester, The Philippine Islands (1899), was hurriedly
compiled by a young scientist who chanced to have visited them, and
became in its subsequent editions the standard work. Other data are in
Joseph Wheeler, The Santiago Campaign (1899), and Nelson A. Miles,
Serving the Republic (191 1).

CHAPTER XXVII
THE CAMPAIGN OF 190O
No American President has dealt with Congress more
happily than William McKinley did. His long service in
the lower house had familiarized him with the
andt'he^^ methods of lawmaking and the habits of Con-
Repubhcan gj-gss. His special field of Congressional interest,
the protective tariff, is one in which the price of
success is a high ability in compromise. The tact, sympa
thy, and unselfishness that he had developed while recon
ciling rival and antagonistic claims for protection served
him well when he was removed to the other end of Penn
sylvania Avenue, and presided over the nation.
The election of 1898 strengthened the tendency already
visible when McKinley was elected two years earlier.
Hanna in the Senate stood for a new type of commercial
statesman. Quay, the master manipulator of Pennsyl
vania politics, had sat as junior Senator since 1887, a
worthy junior to Don Cameron. LTpon the retirement of
Cameron, Quay became senior Senator, and assisted in the
election of his political heir apparent, Boies Penrose. From
New York Senator Thomas Collier Piatt, "the easy boss,"
came back in 1897. His earlier career in the Senate had
been unexpectedly ended when he resigned with Conkling
in a fit of petulance because of Garfield's assertion of the
rights of the President. As a business politician no Senator
stood higher than Piatt. Joseph B. Foraker, of Ohio, a
tested "spell-binder," strong In the Civil War tradition,
came within the same group.
In 1899 Quay's second term expired, and he faUed of re
election because he was under trial on charge of gross mis
application of Pennsylvania State funds. His attorneys
pleaded the statute of limitations and he was acquitted,
yet the legislature declined to reelect him. Upon the ad-

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1900 265
journment of that body, there being an unfilled vacancy
in the Pennsylvania delegation, Governor Stone appointed
Quay as Senator, and in the following winter Quay's Re
publican colleagues in the Senate were driven to the em
barrassing necessity of deciding whether to seat him or
reject him. By a vote of thirty-three to thirty-two ad
mission was refused him.
A distasteful atmosphere of business in politics swept
across the country. In New York the Democratic boss,
Richard Croker, had shown a disposition which Business
Indicated that "moral obliviousness" was not •« politics
confined to either party. " My theory is this," he said, "to
the victors belong the spoils. We win. We expect every
one to stand by us. Because men are loyal to us, you call
that plunder. I have to make a living, the same as you."
The second Congress of McKinley found the Republican
majorities increased, the Adminis tration enriched by the
reputation of a successful foreign war, and the q^j^j,
votes provided for the complete fulfillment of standard
the pledge of 1896. Sound money, or the gold ^^'®^*'°'^
standard, had been elected in that year, but there were
enough silver Republican votes in the Senate to prevent
the passage of a gold-standard law. The promised effort
to negotiate for international bimetallism had been in vain
because Europe was uninterested. In the winter of 1899 a
new currency act was formulated.
The great free-silver debate, that was part of the Populist
protest against hard times, illustrated the old truth that
connects inflation movements with debtor frontiers. The
same truth had been frequently illustrated from the be
ginning of American history. The debate also revealed the
clear defects of the currency and credit situation, and the
fact that the national banking system had been better
adapted to uphold the credit of Civil War bonds than to
maintain a flexible and adequate currency. The sub-
treasury system was revealed as an unnecessary hoarding
device to keep real money out of circulation. Free silver
was beaten in 1896, but it was still necessary to establish

266 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the principle of the gold standard by law and to devise an
adequate system for federal finance. This latter need
remained unsatisfied tUl 191 3 — but votes were available,
in the currency act of March 14, 1900, to specify gold as the
standard of value, to legalize the gold reserve at $150,000,-
000, and to require the Treasury to maintain all the lawful
money of the United States at a parity with gold. It was
not clear that the Treasury could do this if a severe crisis
should develop, since the gold reserve was many times ex
ceeded by the aggregate of the redeemable currency, which
included the CivU War greenbacks ($346,000,000), the
Treasury notes of 1890 ($76,000,000), and the silver, coined
or bullion ($643,000,000), every dollar of which lacked
fifty-three cents of being worth its face In gold. The na
tional bank notes ($331,000,000), based entirely upon the
credit of the United States, were an added burden upon the
gold reserve.
The demand for free silver ceased before the passage
of the Currency Act. It was fundamentally a hard-times
Revival of demand and the hard times had yielded to pros-
prosperity perity. The financial crisis of 1893 passed its
crest when Cleveland won his victory over the forces of
immediate inflation, and secured the repeal of the Sherman
Silver Purchase Act. The, depression that followed the
crisis coincided with the years of the greatest Populist suc
cess, 1893-96. The supplies of capital ready for invest
ment had been exhausted in the speculative splurges of the
later eighties. Until additional capital was accumulated,
by the unromantic and painful methods of economy, there
could be neither new investments nor the resumption of
enterprises under way in i8'93.
Banks failed in the period of depression, and with them
went railroads, manufacturers, and merchants. Financial
sobriety was the rule in Cleveland's second administration,
while the Populists were clamoring for the salvation of
mankind through the issuance of more cheap money. The
Western farmers who were the mainstay of Populism weak
ened in their support when large harvests in 1896 coincided

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1900 267
with a strong market for their grain. The farmer who was
out of debt had little desire for repudiation or Inflation.
The prosperity that the Republican organizers promised
was visible even before the first election of McKinley, and
was rampant long before his second nomination. The
dinner pail of labor was full, so full indeed that the indus
trial difficulties that existed everywhere failed to make
a deep impression on the minds of voters.
A revival of the trust movement accompanied the new
prosperity. The economies due to concentration In control,
standardizing of goods, and the elimination of The new
overhead charges, made it profitable for Indus- trusts
try to combine on a large scale, as it emerged from the
stagnant conditions of the middle nineties. The union
movement In the field of labor was developed at the same
time. In the universities economists began with a new in-
tentness to study the fundamental processes of business.
The inauguration of one of the economists, Arthur Twining
Hadley, as president of Yale in 1899, broke a long tradition
of theological presidencies and emphasized the connection
between education and modern life. The romancers felt
the spell of the new movement. BeUamy in 1888 had pub
lished Looking Backward, his vision of the state socialism
that he believed to be impending. H. G. Wells brought
out, in 1899, When the Sleeper Wakes, and foretold a society
entirely dominated by organized finance. Congress In 1898
appointed an Industrial commission whose nineteen vol
umes of report and hearings show the tendencies of business
at the close of the nineteenth century. In the fall of 1899
representatives of business and government met with pro
fessional students of economics, in the Chicago conference
on trusts, to consider the nature of the problem and the
methods of controlling it. The Socialist Party, organ
ized at Indianapolis through the fusion of minor groups,
launched its specific theory for the reorganization of society,
and nominated a labor leader, Eugene V. Debs, for Presi
dent In March, 1900.
The presidential election of 1900 came upon a country

268 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
inspired by its new prosperity, controlled by a dominant
party organization that was founded upon that prosperity,
conscious of the approach of the new relationship with the
rest of the world, and recognizing a need for the read
justment of social relationships. The preliminaries of the
campaign were offered by the minor parties as they strove
to state their issues and attract attention. The Socialist
nomination aroused less Interest than the last struggles of
the Populists.
"The first of America's Populists was Daniel Shays,"
said Leslie's in the summer of 1900 ; "the last of them will be
Decline of Wharton Barker and Ignatius Donnelly." The
populism movement of discontent that rolled up the ac
cumulated grievances of the later eighties and polled over
a mUlion votes in 1892 had lost Its chance to maintain an
independent existence when It concurred in the Democratic
nomination of Bryan in 1896. It lost both its organization
and its following. The "middle-of-the-road" Populists
struggled stubbornly for an independent existence, but in
vain. "The party is gone past redemption," wrote one of
its disheartened chairmen, in September, 1900. Its prin
ciples were in a way of acceptance by the larger parties, but
free silver had lost its appeal upon the masses that had
demanded it In 1896.
The Democratic Party, meeting in national convention
at Kansas City on July 4, 1900, found no difficulty In re-
Renomina- talnlng the ascendancy it established over the
tion of Populists in 1896. The convention shouted
^^^^ " manfully for ex-Senator David B. Hill, Demo
cratic boss of New York, whom Piatt had driven from the
Senate, but It voted for Bryan. E. L. Godkin in moments
of despondency recognized his established leadership in the
party, though looking upon him as "a medicine which the
country will probably have to take some day." The gold
Democratic organization that had been formed by the
Administration leaders in 1896 had faded to an empty
shadow. The only serious problem which confronted the
Democratic Convention was the relative stress to be

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1 900 269
placed upon the old and weakening issue of free silver, and
the new and rising principle of anti-imperialism. In the
end the platform stood for both, and Bryan, declining to
recognize that free silver had ceased to be the dominant
issue, destroyed whatever hopes there might have been of
a successful fight against Imperialism. His speech of ac
ceptance, made at Indianapolis in August, was devoted
chiefly to imperialism, and served as a textbook to the
anti-imperialists throughout the canvass.
There was as little uncertainty over the presidential can
didate in the Republican Party as in the Democratic.
WiUiam McKinley had no considerable oppo- McKinley
sition to fight. There were some murmurings and
against him among those who had supported
the claims of Thomas B. Reed in 1896, and who bfelieved
that his Governmem; was too closely identified with the
conservation of business. But the murmurings were hope
less against a candidate who stood well with Congress, was
popular with the people, and whose strength was intensified
by the glamour of things done In war and still doing in the
rehabilitation of Cuba. At the Philadelphia Convention,
which met on June 19, the Republican National Committee
under Senator Hanna was in command of the presidential
nomination. In the case of the Republican vice-presidency there was
difference of desires. Garrett A. Hobart, of New Jersey,
McKinley's first Vice-President, had been a genuine asset
to the Administration, but had died in office. The desires
of the President and Senator Hanna for a successor who
should work harmoniously with the Administration led them
first to Elihu Root, who declined to be drawn away from his
reorganization of the War Department. Root had been
summoned to this in the summer of 1899, when McKinley
yielded to external pressure and called for the resignation of
Secretary Alger. After Root, John D. Long seems to have
been the Administration's choice, but the movement for
Long was stopped by the appearance of a spontaneous
demand from the body of the party.

270 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
"I hope you will not allow the convention to be stam
peded to Roosevelt for Vice-President," said McKinley
(as quoted by Senator Foraker). The repute of Roose
velt, rising continuously since his election as governor of
New York, threatened to upset the well-balanced party
machine. Some Republicans had even talked of discard
ing McKinley In his favor, and Roosevelt had begun to
consider the distribution of patronage, should this occur.
He had not been among the McKinley supporters of 1896,
and his willing leadership among the critics of the War
Department in front of Santiago had created a personal
unwillingness to have him on the ticket. Governor Roose
velt agreed In substance with McKinley on this point. "I
should like to be governor for another term," he wrote to
Senator Piatt. "The Vice-Presidency is not ... an office
in which a man who is still vigorous and not past middle
life has much chance of doing anything."
The denials of Governor Roosevelt that he was a candi
date for the vice-presidency were repeated at frequent in
tervals during the spring of 1900, but failed to check the
popular desire for his services. This popularity fell in
well with the personal wishes of party leaders in Pennsyl
vania and New York. Quay, just refused his seat in the
Senate by a majority that included Senator Hanna, was
not averse to embarrassing the party organization that
had allowed him to be humiliated. Piatt In New York
had managed to maintain harmonious public relationships
with the governor, but was willing to back him as a can
didate for almost any position outside of New York. Dur
ing the days of the convention Colonel Roosevelt was in
PhUadelphia at the head of the New York delegation, wear
ing his campaign hat, visiting the headquarters of the other
State delegations In turn, and noisily protesting his un
willingness to be sacrificed as Vice-President. From the
records available in the biographies of Hay, Foraker, and
McKinley, it seems that the reluctance to be Vice-President
was mingled with a wilHngness to show McKinley that he
could be Vice-President if he so desired. A private wire to

THE CAMPAIGN OF 190O 271
the White House carried the story of the Roosevelt boom,
and at the end the Administration bowed as gracefully as
could be to the unanimous will of the party.
During the ensuing canvass President McKinley adhered
to the tactics that he had followed in the previous cam
paign. He maintained the dignity and poise suitable to
his own character and becoming, according to past prec
edent, in the presidency. Bryan took to the stump as
usual, but this time he aroused no fears In the hearts of his
opponents, and he was trailed back and forth across the
continent by as good a campaigner as himself. The Na
tional Committee made Colonel Roosevelt speak more than
three hundred times during the canvass. In the heart of
Populism in Denver he denounced free silver, and every
where he inspired the hopes of those who were longing for a
higher level in party politics.
Public opinion was badly split by the old issue and the
new. The problem of imperialism cut across the bound
aries that divided the free-silver advocates Public opin-
from those of the gold standard. Until late ion and
the issues
in the campaign a group of distinguished gold-
standard anti-imperialists wavered before the choice of
evUs. Many of them, believing that imperialism was more
closely connected with the future of democracy than any
currency controversy, voted for Bryan ; but these were more
than offset by the gains of the Republican Party due to the
prestige that came from a successful and prosperous ad
ministration. As the canvass advanced the argument of
the full dinner pail increased its grip upon the average
voter. On election day the prosperity that had been
promised in McKinley's first campaign secured a decisive
victory for him in his second.
The winter of 1900, with the presidency settled, with all
fears of repudiation expelled, and with four more years of
administrative continuity assured, has had no equal among
periods of industrial confidence. Both capital and labor
looked forward to a future of unchecked development, and
the organizations of both the trusts and the unions were

272 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
increased in size and projected further throughout the peo
ple. The feeling of assurance pervading the country was
partly based upon the absence of any disturbing national
program. The two things for which the Republican
Party had perfected its organization in 1896 had been ac
complished. The Dingley tariff of 1897 was producing an
abundant revenue. The gold standard had been pro
claimed as the official basis of national commerce. No
great legislative programs involving fundamental change
were pending. The national need for a canal at Panama
was within reach of gratification. The defects in adminis
trative organization that the Spanish War had disclosed
were in process of correction under the wise control of
Elihu Root. John Hay was extending American ideals of
fair play across the Pacific.
The inaugural ceremony of March 4, 1901, was the most
imposing ceremonial of its kind that had been seen, but
lacked significance as a public event. The Cabinet of Mc
Kinley needed no reorganization and received none. The
second term seemed likely to inspire only the uninteresting
annals of a happy people. This happiness was increased
when toward the end of March the insurgent leader Agui-
naldo was taken prisoner, bringing the Philippine revolt so
nearly to an end that It was possible to think of establishing
civil government In the islands.
The assassination of McKinley at Buffalo in September,
1901 , destroyed this certainty at a single stroke. It brought
Assassina- ^"^° ^^^ presidency on September 14 a new per-
tion of sonality that spoke for a later generation and a
in ey (jiffej-gnt era. It removed the basis for the rigid
political organization of which Senator Hanna was the chief
engineer, and opened the way for aspiring politicians in
the Middle West to push upon the party councUs their
demands that a program of national and social betterment
be formulated and adopted.

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1900 273

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The formal documents upon the campaign of igoo are to be found in
Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency, 1897-1909 (1912), which is as
invaluable as his earlier volume. Many personal details are preserved in
Thayer's Life and Letters of John Hay, Olcott's William McKinley, and
J. B. Foraker's Notes of a Busy Life. William J. Bryan, in The Second Bat
tle (1900), gives an autobiographic account of the struggle, which may be
supplemented by that in Tom L. John.son's Own Story, and Brand Whit-
lock's Forty Years of It. Cara Lloyd's Biography of Henry Demarest Lloyd
gives the best picture of the way in which the hopes of the social reformers
who had worked with the Populist Party went aglimmering when Populism
was absorbed by Democracy. The autobiography of Robert M. La Fol
lette contains testimony upon the movement within the Republican Party
to salvage what was good in Populism. The Report of the United States
Industrial Commission is packed with testimony upon the new industrial
society, while the technical articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics,
the Political Science Quarterly, the Annals of the American Academy, and
the Journal of Political Economy, indicate at once the nature of new
problems, and the new standards of economic scholarship.

CHAPTER XXVIII
THEODORE ROOSEVELT '
Theodore Roosevelt was not yet forty-three years of
age when he took his oath as President on September 14,
1 90 1, but he had behind him already nearly twenty years of
prominent political life. In personal appearance and be
havior he still showed the jubilance and enthusiasm of
youth, but in experience of affairs and political sagacity
he was as old as most of his seniors In the party. His origin,
and his career thus far, were as unusual in American poli
tics as the remaining eighteen years of his life were to be.
Born In 1858, his Infancy was passed during the Admin
istration of the self-made rail-splitter, Abraham Lincoln.
Youth of He left Harvard College as his party was elect-
Roosevelt jj^g Qarfield and glorying in the fact that the
candidate had begun his life upon the towpath. The self-
made man, born In the cabin, and ripening in the full op
portunity of American democracy was still the type Ameri
can. Roosevelt had none of this in his experience. He
was born in affluence, educated in a social group whose posi
tion had been secure for generations, and he was launched
into life free to determine for himself whether he would
make money or leave behind him a career of accomplish
ment in public work.
In the fall of 1881, "finding it would not interfere much
with my law" Roosevelt accepted a nomination to the New
Early polit- York Assembly, and described himself as "a
ical career 'political hack.' " At no time thereafter was he
ever really out of politics, and at every stage his name was
identified with the advance of self-government. Three
years as a young man in the New York Assembly made him
a national figure — "a light-footed, agile, nervous, yet
prompt boy, with light-brown, slightly curling hair, blue
eyes and an eye-glass, and ready to rise and speak with a

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 275
clear, sharp, boyish voice." He had already shown a ca
pacity to oppose the short-haired, noisy toughs of Tam
many with an equally short-haired and noisy virtue. Be
fore he was thirty, when there was talk of having his party
silence him, the professionally humorous Puck became seri
ous when it remarked that "silencing is a process which
requires at least two persons." He led the New York dele
gation to the National Republican Convention in 1884, and
was equally true to his standards when he opposed the nom
ination of Blaine and when he supported the party ticket
through the canvass. His later career as Civil Service
Commissioner brought him for six years into the inner
circle of Washington life, and made an uninspiring and ex
perimental national office a center of activity for better
government. His next two years as Police Commissioner
in New York City gave a new range to his knowledge of
society, and his return to Washington in 1897 as Assistant
Secretary of the Navy brought him new opportunities for
action. He was at once a reformer and a party man, laying
down his platform at the beginning of his career: "A man
cannot act both without and within the party; he can do
either, but he cannot possibly do both."
The political experience of the new President was broader
than his age indicated, and bore little resemblance to that
of any earlier President. On the other sides of other
his life he was equally different. He was a sue- activities
cessful man of letters, a painstaking amateur scientist, and
a lover of the world of sport. In the field of letters, he had
begun to write immediately upon leaving college, expressing
himself in works of history and the records of his outdoor
experiences. His Naval War of 1812 and his Winning of
the West made him the equal of any contemporary Ameri
can historian of his age. His Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
was an early number in a series that was to carry him even
tually to the heart of Africa and to the Brazilian River of
Doubt. The outdoor life of Roosevelt reclaimed him from a weak
childhood and made him a rugged man. As President he

276 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
shocked many of his conventional associates by inviting
prize-fighters to the White House and openly enjoying the
opportunity to box and wrestle with them. He subse
quently paid for this devotion with the loss of one of his
eyes, a loss that he could 111 afford, for his eyes were always
weak, as his ever-present spectacles bore witness. As a
naturalist he observed both broadly and accurately, and
had begun to pick as his friends men whose interests in
science and the world outdoors could run with his. As a
charter member of the Boone and Crockett Club that was
formed In -1887 he paid his tribute to the romance of big
game, and tempered his zest as a sportsman with a regard
for wild life as a science. The legend of the presidency In
frock coat, silk hat, and impenetrable dignity was to be
turned upon another course.
When the oath of office was administered to President
Roosevelt he Immediately announced that it would be his
"aim to continue absolutely unbroken the policies of Presi
dent McKinley for the peace, prosperity, and honor of our
beloved country." He urged the members of the Cabinet
to retain their positions under him, and took up the busi
ness on the President's desk with celerity, decision, and
confidence in his subordinates.
It was nevertheless the turning-point between two eras.
The Republican Party had fulfilled Its purpose, and was
Two politi- not yet pledged to the elements of any new pro-
caleras ^^.^^^ Before McKinley died the Supreme
Court had upheld the constitutionality of the Foraker Act,
and the colonial government depending upon it. The gold
standard was established, and a protective tariff was bring
ing in adequate revenue from a prosperous country. The
next few years under any President must have meant a
reshaping of party organization and an accommodation to
the new Issues that were locally appearing. Under Roose
velt It took a course unbelievable had McKinley lived.
Two theories of representation have struggled to control
in the Government of the United States, and these two ,
theories met In the administrations which ended and began

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 277
on September 14, 1901. According to one of the theories,
for which there is no better example than President Mc
Kinley, the will of the people Is entitled to instant trans
lation into action when it has manifested itself. It was
easy for men who had been Republicans during the Civil
War to believe that the party was always right, and that
it possessed a monopoly of virtue and patriotism. The
natural consequence of this belief was straight party loy
alty with an almost complete unwillingness to scratch the
party ticket. With this went a strong tendency to be
convinced of the correctness of any course toward which
the majority was tending or any view which it espoused.
When President McKinley shifted with the opinion of his
party from a tolerance of free silver to an insistent advo
cacy of the gold standard, he illustrated this tendency.
His honest sincerity was without question, and his reverence
for the party was supreme. When on April 11, 1898, he
turned the Spanish situation over to Congress, after he had
struggled against an entry into war, which he still deplored,
he again acted on the theory that the will of the party is
the highest law.
The other theory of representation places its emphasis
upon the fact that during his period of office it Is the duty
of the representative to act in behalf of his constituents.
Placed in a position where his knowledge of the facts of
government is superior to. that of any other citizen, this
theory holds that the representative has no right to be
guided by their clamor, but must shape his course as
trustee according to the facts, and stand or fall upon his
success In leading his constituents to follow him. The one
theory in the hands of shifty politicians leads to the career
of a demagogue or to abuse of office; the other tends to
develop the personal side of government and the high
responsibility of the administrator.
The significance of the change in Presidents as the
turning-point in history was apparent as President Roose
velt began to indicate his own attitude on public questions
without waiting to ascertain whether the party organi-

278 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
zation or the people were in agreement with him. He as
sumed the duty of positive leadership as Andrew Jackson
had assumed It, and as Hayes and Cleveland had tried to
do it. The President in his administration took a new
place in the structure of the party and in the nation.
The position of the President in the party organization
has varied according to issues and personalities. By the
The office close of the Civil War the standard type of
of President party Organization had been evolved. A na
tional party had come to mean the group of citizens who
were likely to vote together In a national election. Each
party once in four years met in full session through its repre
sentatives in the national nominating convention. Here
for four or five days delegates fresh from the body of the
voters canvassed their party issues and the personalities of
leadership. The last ordinary act of a national convention
was, and still is, to receive from the delegation of every
State its nomination of a member to sit upon the National
Committee which during the four-year interval acted as a
sort of trustee for the party interests. The chairman
chosen by this National Committee was the tactical com
mander-in-chief of the campaign.
The relations of the candidate to the National Com
mittee and its chairman shifted during the period 1896 to
The Na- '^904- Throughout the half-dozen campaigns at
tional the end of the last century the national chairman
really ran the party. In the Hayes campaign he
seems not to have been on speaking terms with the candi
date; and the national committeemen who could control
their regular reelection from their States came to regard
themselves as constituting the real party, and looked upon
a President's attempt to assert himself as insubordination
and trespass.
In the later eighties the custom arose of deferring the
selection of chairman until the candidate had had a chance
Hanna and to express hls wlshes. Hanna, as McKinley's
Roosevelt manager, was a natural choice as chairman of
the National Committee, and brought that post into a

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 279
position of great influence. One of the first practical
questions for President Roosevelt was that of determining
his relations with the chairman whom he found in office,
Roosevelt had never been a supporter of McKinley, and
both he and Hanna knew that the latter had wished
to keep him off the ticket in 1900. Both were too weU
seasoned as campaigners to fight without need, but both
were aware of the impending struggle in the party for
control. Their differences were political, not personal.
The Washington correspondents soon reported the zest
with which the President ate Sunday breakfasts with
"Uncle Mark" at his home in the Cameron house on
LaFayette Square, but no one expected the position of
leadership, assumed by the national chairman, to last long
without a struggle. The President was somewhat nervous
as to the outcome, but did not evade the issue. When In
1902 the friends of Hanna in Ohio were reluctant to en
dorse Roosevelt for another term, the President stated the
matter bluntly as a leader : ' ' Those who favor my adminis
tration and nomination will endorse them, and those who
do not will oppose them." Since the canvass of 1900 the
relative position of the national chairman has steadily
declined from commander-in-chief to chief of staff, and
thence to political secretary for the candidate. The
President has tended to become the responsible leader of
his party.
The political situation in 1901 was full of opportunity for
a President who was willing to assume responsibility, and
whose party possessed a perfected working or- Booker T.
ganization, but lacked a specific platform for Washington
the future. On the day of his accession Roosevelt wrote to
Booker T. Washington, at Tuskegee, inviting him to come
to Washington to consult upon Republican appointments
in the South. The desire to undermine the one-party system
of the South had been the ambition of earlier Republican
Presidents, and is still their hope. With Roosevelt it led to
an attempt to improve the personnel of federal office-holders
in Democratic States. It led also to an unforeseen attack.

28o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Dr. Washington, the ablest negro educator of his day,
came to Washington to see the President in October, 1901.
When their business outlasted the morning hours the Pres
ident kept him at the White House for luncheon, a fact
which scandalized opinion in the South, and made It more
difficult for Roosevelt to carry out his policy of breaking
down the barriers. It was long before this luncheon was
forgotten; but the Roosevelt policy of bringing to the
White House any citizens who could be of use to the
President, or who interested him, was established for the
next eight years. The powerful zest for life that made
Roosevelt an historian and a naturalist as well as a states
man, at the age of forty, led him to bring within his circle
all sorts and conditions of guests. The White House be
came the center of a charmed circle where the President
talked freely to all of the intimacies of politics and diplo
macy, and kept his interests alive by bringing to his table
the world that he could no longer easily visit.
The prosperous winter of 1900-01 was marked by huge
extension of corporation activities, and acute struggles be-
Labor tween capital and labor. Only an obtuse mind
problems could have ignored the fact that the nation was
speedily to be involved one way or another in the contro
versy. The changes in corporate organization were dis
turbing to the minds of many, but the inconveniences due
to strikes affected the disposition of perhaps larger numbers.
The last pronounced period of strikes had been associated
with the panic of 1893. The Homestead strike that pre
ceded the panic, the Pullman strike that followed it, and
the violent miners' strike at Cripple Creek had been par
tially forgotten In the years of depression when labor was
too keen to get a job to cavil at Its terms. The new pros
perity brought pressure upon production in the basic In
dustries and revived the social conditions in which organ
ized labor can flourish. The United Mine Workers of
America, calling out 150,000 anthracite miners in eastern
Pennsylvania, opened a new period of economic clash.
The organization of the miners had lagged behind that of

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 281
other industries because of the transitory character of much
of the labor and the high percentage of unskilled foreigners
involved. The last upheavals In the coal regions, in which
the "Molly Maguires " carried out their reign of terror, long
delayed any successful attempt to bring the coal miners to
gether. John Mitchell took charge of the strike in the an
thracite region, announced a limited series of demands, and
maintained a discipline over his followers unusual in labor
controversies. He kept his men sober, he dissuaded them
from congregating in public places, established friendly
relations with public opinion, and secured useful political
assistance. Senator Hanna, who was then managing the Republican
campaign, had good reason to be anxious for industrial
peace. The argument of the full dinner pail would have
lost its force if a great strike were being fought in a basic
industry upon election day. Political pressure was brought
upon the owners, who yielded in October, with the result
that the United Mine Workers of America acquired the
great prestige of a successful strike, and John Mitchell was
enabled to proceed to the speedy organization of all of the
mining region. It was common supposition that there
would be another and larger strike before long, with the
recognition of the union as its dominant issue.
In the following summer the steel industry was threat
ened with an upset that might interfere with the whole
course of industrial expansion. The Amalgamated Asso
ciation of Iron and Steel Workers that had fought and lost
the Homestead strike in 1892 had been reorganized after
the panic. It prepared in the summer of 1901 to strike
chiefly for the recognition of the union, and received the
promise of moral support from the American Federation of
Labor of which Samuel Gompers had long been chief. The
strike began In the first week of August and collapsed after
a month. The steel industries that were involved met it
in many cases by the relatively simple process of trans
ferring the contracts affected by the strike to remote mills
not affected or not unionized.

282 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Two symptoms were revealed by these two strikes. The
first indicated that It was possible for a labor body if well
organized and discreetly managed to gain the sympathy of
the public and to win its case. The other revealed the fact
that In at least one great industry centralization had pro
ceeded so far that labor had no chance against corporate
organization. The United States Steel Corporation that
had nullified the desires of this second Homestead strike
was in itself a new-born organization and had been in
existence but a few months. The opinion of the public
was attracted by both of these facts. The coal strike had
not proceeded far enough for public Inconvenience to over
balance interest in the strikers' cause. The tactical
strength of the Steel Corporation was a nnatter of some
alarm. At least two issues were ready for presentation in
the party councils. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The numerous biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, written during his
life, are necessarily inadequate and lack the full documentation available
in Joseph B. Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and his Time Shown in his own
Letters (1920), in the preparation of which Colonel Roosevelt himself
collaborated. The best brief work is William Roscoe Thayer, Theodore
Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography (1919). Other biographies, of varying
degrees of incompleteness and laudation, are Charles G. Washburn, Theo
dore Roosevelt, the Logic of His Career (1916); Francis E. Leupp, The Man
Roosevelt (1904); Jacob A. Riis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen (1904);
Lawrence F. Abbott, Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt (19 19); William
Draper Lewis, Life of Theodore Roosevelt (1919); Albert Shaw, A Cartoon
History of Roosevelt's Career (1910) ; and John J. Leary, Talks with T. R.
(1920). E. J. Scott and L. B. Stowe, Booker T. Washington, Builder of a
Civilization (1916), is of interest. Albert Bushnell Hart, Foundations of
American Foreign Policy (1901), is contemporary evidence upon the new
American interests abroad. John H. Latane, America as a World Power
(1907), gives a good running narrative. Croly 's Marcus Alonzo Hanna:
His Life and Work, and Thayer's Life and Letters of John Hay continue
of great value.

CHAPTER XXIX
WORLD POLICY
In the internal affairs of the Administration President
Roosevelt was little hampered by policies that had been
established by his predecessor. He found diffi- Hay and
culties because the business connections and ^°°t
preferences of members of the Republican Party made it
easier to go In some directions than in others, but the
selection of a final policy was his own. In his foreign re
lationships he inherited two great secretaries and a group
of well-established principles to which he gave consistent
support. Hay in the State Department and Root in the
War Department were well entered upon their tasks before
McKinley died, and renaained to work them out.
John Hay began his term as Secretary of State in time to
carry on the correspondence with the peace commissioners
in Paris. In his first few weeks the decision was made that
led to the retention of the Philippines and the acceptance
of the share of the "white man's burden" entailed thereby.
In the earliest correspondence with the peace commissioners
while this policy was stUl undetermined, the principle upon
which the United States proposed to act was laid down.
Whether Luzon alone was to be retained or the ¦wfhole archi
pelago, the islands were to be administered without pecul
iar advantages to the United States, upon the principle of
the "open door." This principle was novel In the Orient,
where China was falling to pieces and great European
powers were eagerly acquiring national concessions and
special spheres of influence. Germany at Kiau-chau,
England at Wel-Hai-Wei, Russia at Port Arthur, had all
since the close of the China-Japanese War in 1895 exercised
a privilege that they denied Japan, the victor in that war.
The conclusion of the Treaty of Paris, and Its final rati
fication, transferred the affairs of the Philippine Islands to

284 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the desk of the Secretary of War, but left the United States
The "open- predisposed to an extension of the doctrine of the
door" "open door." The early history of American
relations with China and Japan made this policy
of disinterestedness a thing to be expected of the American
Government. The application of the open-door policy to China was
made in September, 1899, while the European powers were
still engaged In the partition of China. The United States
urged this policy as a matter of fairness to themselves and
to China, and it was not easy for any other nation to for
mulate respectable reasons for rejecting it. In the following
spring, when Chinese revolutionists, the "Boxers," broke
into open revolt demanding the extermination of the ' ' for
eign devils," the sincerity of the policy was brought to test.
Peking was Invested by the rebels, and the foreign embassies
were cut off from the world outside. The United States,
with a legation In the beleaguered city, became involved
in the attempts at rescue. The American troops in the
Philippine Islands made American assistance readily avail
able. A joint intervention for the forcible relief of Peking
was organized at once.
The ordinary consequence of such interventions in
Chinese affairs had been the visitation upon China of
severe national penalties, and the acquisition by the Inter
vening powers of new and exclusive compensatory rights.
On July 3, 1900, while General Chaffee was preparing for
the actual invasion, Hay issued a circular to the powers
on the aims of the relief expedition. Whatever concealed
aspirations any of the interested powers may have had,
they were forced under cover when the United States
pointed out its understanding that the expedition was for
the release of the legations and that the doctrine of the
open door would prevaU in the final settlement with China.
With as good a grace as possible, the cooperating powers
avowed this benevolent intention to be their own, and it
became Hay's mission to hold them to their pledge. Be
fore Chaffee had been many days in China he found it

WORLD POLICY 285
necessary to transmit a protest to the German general
issimo of the expedition, complaining of the German loot
ing of the Royal Observatory at Peking. The astronomical
Instruments involved ultimately found themselves upon ped
estals in Prussian public places. The differences between
profession and conduct illustrated thereby gave reality to
the American task.
In China the United States operated with a minimum of
national interest. Nearer at home the effect of the Span
ish War had been to precipitate Interest In a p^nama
waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Canal
The idea was ancient, and had been under ac
tive negotiation for half a century. The Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty of 1850, which still governed the relationship of the
United States and Great Britain to the canal, provided
that "neither the one nor the other would ever obtain or
maintain for itself any exclusive control," or "ever erect
or maintain any fortifications commanding the same," or
"occupy or fortify or colonize or assume or exercise any
dominion" in the immediate vicinity of the waterway.
When negotiated in 1850 the treaty marked a victory for
the United States in that it placed a check upon the prob
able colonial expansion of England. In the next gener
ation the American view of the situation developed. The
Civil War added to national self-confidence, and when
President Hayes reached the conclusion that the canal
must forever be a part of the American shore-line, the
country had forgotten that the treaty was originally a
limitation of British power and beheved it a curtailment
of the privileges of tbe United States. Evarts, Blaine, and
Frelinghuysen tried in succession and In vain to induce
England to free the United States from the restrictions laid
by the treaty. Hay, when he now took the matter up,
found that Lord Pauncefote represented a more accommo
dating government. Early in 1900 he negotiated a treaty
whereby the obstacles to construction by the United
States Government were eliminated and the canal, to
which the principle of the open door was applied, was given

286 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the status of guaranteed neutrality. To his great chagrin
the United States Senate was insistent upon making the
canal an exclusive advantage and amended the treaty to
death. President Roosevelt found the canal business at a stand
still, but resumed the negotiation in an attempt to solve
it on a basis acceptable to the Senate. The British Gov
ernment, still accommodating, showed no disposition to
encroach upon the Indefinite area covered by the Monroe
Doctrine, and Lord Pauncefote signed, on November i8,
1 90 1, a second treaty which the Senate immediately ap
proved. Every British claim to Interest in the region of
the canal was surrendered, with the single exception that
the canal should be open without discrimination to the
vessels of all nations observing the rules prescribed for Its
use. The United States made a unilateral guarantee of the
neutrality of the canal, and was left entirely free to select its
own means for its maintenance.
Before Hay had succeeded In procuring a promise of
cooperation from the owner of the territory upon which the
Venezuela canal was to be dug, new problems of national
intervention control In its vlcInlty produced a sharp appeal
to the principles of the Monroe Doctrine. On December
20, 1902, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy joined in a
blockade of the ports of Venezuela, after denying that a
state of war existed. The claims upon which the three
powers were acting were such as always exist against the
uncertain Latin republics. A train of successful revolu
tions In Venezuela had produced numerous valid claims for
damages against that Government,' and an atmosphere
in which fraudulent and Inflated claims could flourish.
After long and futile attempts at satisfaction from Vene
zuela, the three countries whose subjects owned many of
the claims had recourse to force, having previously satis
fied themselves that President Roosevelt did not interpret
the Monroe Doctrine as guaranteeing any nation against
punishment for misconduct. The first attempt of the
intervening powers was to maintain a "pacific blockade,"

WORLD POLICY 287
exercising belligerent rights, although denying that a war
existed. The American Government refused to pay any at
tention to such a limited act, whereupon, on December 20,
the blockade was made regular and complete.
Although the intervention professed to have in view only
the collection of debts, President Roosevelt regarded it as
an attempt on the part of Germany to test the firmness of
the United States with reference to the Monroe Doctrine,
and the degree to which it would be safe to undertake a
policy of South American expansion. He determined to
force the controversy to adjudication at The Hague. Here
in the conference of 1899 the United States had assumed an
active leadership in the formation of a tribunal for the
voluntary settlement of international disputes. Few cases
had been brought to The Hague. The suggestion of the
President that this controversy was suitable for such ad
judication produced no action at Berlin until the whole
American fleet under Admiral Dewey was assembled for
maneuvers In the Caribbean Sea, and von HoUeben, the
German Ambassador, was bluntly informed that the
United States would intervene to defend Venezuela unless
arbitration were accepted. The President consented to
write a friendly note to the Kaiser, praising his activity in
behalf of peace, In case such arbitration were requested.
The note was ultimately written. The Kaiser yielded,
but von HoUeben was replaced by Baron Speck von Stern
berg, who as an old and intimate friend of Roosevelt might
be expected to get better results at Washington, and the
arbitration proceeded. At the time, the public was un
aware of the nearness of this breach with Germany, as it
was unaware of the movements launched in the same pe
riod for welding Germans in America Into an organized
and usable body devoted to the culture of the Fatherland.
The visit of Prince Henry of Prussia early in 1902 and the
development of the National German-American Alliance
were fragments in this new policy.
While Hay was at work in the State Department estab
lishing the new relationships which war had brought upon

288 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the United States, Root in the War Department took over
the administration of the American colonies and the re
organization of the military establishment.
¦ Porto Rico came under American control as spiritlessly
as it had lived under Spain. • The military government
Govern- found UO difficulty in establishing authority,
ment of and in April, 1900, President McKinley signed
the Foraker Act under which Charles H. Allen
was installed as the first civil governor of the island. The
revenues of the Island were for a time enhanced by customs
duties collected on American trade to the extent of fifteen
per cent of the Dingley tariff rates. This apparent viola
tion of the constitutional guarantee of unimpeded trade
within the United States gave rise to the Supreme Court
cases DeLIma vs. Bidwell, and Downes vs. Bidwell, in con
nection with which the insular policy was upheld. After
1901 free trade with Porto Rico was established.
Cuba became the scene of an unusual international ex
periment. By the Treaty of Paris the Spanish title was
Cuban in- entirely relinquished, and by the ultimatum
dependence ^j^g United States had already pledged itself
to secure independence for the Cubans. The volunteer
armies were withdrawn from Cuba in the autumn of 1898,
leaving behind them a garrison composed chiefly of regular
troops. The commanding officer of the military division of
Cuba acted also as governor of the civil population. Among
the tasks confronting him two were most imperative. The
sanitary rehabilitation of the island was necessary if Ameri
cans were to live there, and the creation of civil institutions
was indispensable before they could depart. Late In 1899
Leonard Wood, by this time a major-general of volunteers,
and soon to be given a similar rank in the regular establish
ment, succeeded General Brooke in command of the island.
He had previously been in command of the province of
Santiago, and had encouraged there the experiments that
finally placed yellow fever on the list of preventable
scourges. As soon as it was discovered that the disease
was transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito, it

WORLD POLICY 289
became possible to isolate the patients, eradicate the
mosquito, and make yellow fever unnecessary. William
C. Gorgas, later surgeon-general of the army, rose to de
served prominence In this work.
The organization of civil government was well advanced
before McKinley died. A constitutional convention was
convened at Havana, in November, 1900. It proceeded
under the direction of General Wood to draft the basic law
which was shortly adopted by the people. On May 20,
1902, the first Cuban President was installed under his own
flag, and the American troops were withdrawn. Cuba
came into possession of an independence limited only by
restrictions against self-destruction and an American guar
antee of law and order.
Civil government in the Philippine Islands was delayed
by the insurrection of Aguinaldo that broke out on Feb
ruary 4, 1899, and that ran its course until The
Aguinaldo was taken prisoner by Frederick Ph'''PP>nes
Funston in March, 1901. A few days later the insurgent
leader took an oath of allegiance to the United States,
which he continued to respect^ and It became possible to
lessen the military force and to begin the process of trans
ferring political authority to the Filipinos. An early com
mission for the study of Philippine affairs under President
Schurman, of Cornell, was In operation during 1899, adding
greatly to the scanty knowledge of the new domain. In
AprU, 1900, when the Administration desired that peace
might be established before election day, a second com
mission was created under the presidency of Judge William
Howard Taft, of Cincinnati. During the next year this
commission studied and visited the islands and laid its
plans for the inauguration of a civil government. On more
than one occasion the difference in point of view between
General MacArthur, who as military commander in the
islands was trying to put down insurrection, and Judge
Taft, whose duties were distinctly civilian, became so
pointed that they could be resolved only by Secretary Root
or President McKinley himself. On July 4, 1901, Judge

290 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Taft was installed as civil governor at Manila, but it still
required special executive action to lodge him in the local
seat of authority, the old royal palace of Mindanao, and to
get the military commander out. Under his direction as
civil governor peace was extended and local self-govern
ment was gradually applied. In 1904 Judge Taft was re
called to Washington to succeed Root as Secretary of War,
but in 1907 he was able to fulfill his promise to the Fili
pinos, and return to ManUa to install the first legislative
assembly of the Islands.
Before Root turned over the War Department to Judge
Taft he had completed a drastic program of internal re-
Reorganiza- Organization. One of his successors. In 1912,
tion of War declared that "untU after the Spanish \^"ar there
Department . . . ... ,1.1
was no provision m our military establishment
for anybody whose duty it should be to study the organi
zation of the army or to make plans for it." In 1886 Secre
tary Endicott had declared, "When a second lieutenant
enters the service . . . the rigid examination ... is made the
necessary condition for the commission, but this once
passed . . . the officer can, and but too frequently does,
close his books and his studies; and if he does not overwork
or expose himself ... he Is certain, under the operation of
compulsory retirement, to reach the highest grade open to
seniority in his arm of the service." In his first annual
report in 1899 Root urged upon Congress a reorganization
of the militia, since no one expected that the regulars
would ever fight alone, and a reorganization of the regulars
to provide for the better training of officers and the prep
aration of war plans. Congress was induced to respond
with laws carrying both appropriations and legal author
ity. On November 27, 1901, the Army War College was
opened in Washington under the presidency of Tasker H.
Bliss, as a post-graduate school for officers, and a little later
Congress provided the funds for the stately building on the
lower Potomac, whose terrace William II subsequently
adorned with an heroic statue of his ancestor, Frederick the
Great.

WORLD POLICY 291
At Fort Leavenworth, Root revived and enlarged the old
service schools, and the Staff College for the technical
training of officers in their professional arms of Military
the service. When a few of the officer students (education
detailed to receive this Instruction failed to take it seriously,
their conviction by court martial received the brief com
ment of Root, " I think the duty will be more clearly under
stood hereafter."
The Military Academy at West Point was enlarged to
make possible the training of the larger number of officers
required by the slightly enlarged regular army. The re
building of its plant on a monumental scale was begun in
1902, an even century after its creation. "I think," said
President Roosevelt at the centennial exercises, "it Is
going to be a great deal harder to be a first-class officer In
the future than It has been in the past."
Early in 1903 Root's program of military legislation was
completed by the passage of a new militia act, and the
creation of a General Staff Corps for the army. General
On August 8 of that year Nelson A. Miles was ^taff
retired as the last of the distinguished series of major-
generals commanding the army, and was succeeded by the
General Staff of which General S. B. M. Young became the
first chief.
Army reorganization and colonial expansion did not
draw the attention of the Administration away from the
need to keep the navy abreast of the times. Only four
modern battleships had been available In the Spanish War.
To these, others were added at the rate of one or two a
year, building up a new fleet of battleships that was be
lieved to be adequate until England launched the Dread-
naught in February, 1906, and opened a new chapter in
competitive naval armament. Not until the Delaware
went into commission in 1910 did the United States possess
one of the newest models, but its fleet of pre-dreadnaught
battleships had been able to make a memorable demon
stration in 1907. The national policy In which these ele
ments played their part was a coordinated scheme, at

292 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
whose head stood Root's administrative work. "The new
militia law and the General Staff measure," said the Pres
ident as he took credit for the series of achievements, "wiU
in the end quite transform our military conditions."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William Roscoe Thayer, Life and Letters of John Hay (1915), is naturally
rich in information upon this period. W. H. Carter, Life of Lieutenant-
General Chaffee (1917), covers the Chinese expedition, while Theodore
Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913), includes new material on the Vene
zuela intervention. The two standard works on the Philippines are D. C.
Worcester, The Philippines, Past and Present (1914), and J. H. Blount,
The American Occupation of the Philippines (1912), the latter being sub
stantially a brief for the Bryan policy. Mrs. William H. Taft, Recollections
of Full Years (1914), is packed with charming detail relating to Adminis
tration circles. Other useful works are J. A. LeRoy, The Americans in the
Philippines (1914); D. R. Williams, The Odyssey of the Philippine Com
mission (1913) ; and W. F. Willoughby, Territories and Dependencies of the
United States (1905). Full reports on insular affairs are in the War De
partment Annual Reports, 1899-1901. Frederick Funston, Memories of
Two Wars (19 11), has a bearing upon the Philippine insurrection. No
adequate history of Root's administration of the War Department has
been written. His annual reports as Secretary should be consulted, as
well as his Military Organization and Colonial Policy of the United States
(1916).

CHAPTER XXX
BUSINESS IN POLITICS
Among the destructive results of the panic of 1893 was the
bankruptcy of many of the great railroads. These had
been overbuilt during the preceding decade. Railroad re-
The railways to the Pacific had been multiplied, organization
for speculative purposes, beyond any reasonable prospect
of need, and these new lines collapsed upon themselves as
business fell away and credit became difficult to obtain.
There is no clearer indication of reviving prosperity after
1 896 than the systematic emergence of these roads from the
hands of their receivers, and their reorganization In larger
systems than had hitherto been known. By 1901 the
period of reorganization was so well advanced that the
plight of the railroads became less Interesting than the
effect of their combinations upon public welfare. In Feb
ruary, 1 90 1, announcement was made of a merger of South
ern Pacific lines that went beyond any precedent in rail
road finance.
The Southern Pacific merger was largely the result of the
financial genius of Edward H. Harriman, whose reputation
was well estabhshed as a builder of roads. It The Harri-
was founded upon one of his successful recon- "^^ system
structions, by which the Union Pacific system had been
resuscitated by him after the panic of 1893 and converted
into a valuable property.
After the completion of its main line in 1869, the owners
of the Union Pacific system became aware of the fact that
their property was not a unit. East of the Great Salt
Lake the Union Pacific stretched across the plains to
CouncU Bluffs, and found itself dependent for its through
business upon the Central Pacific that ran west from the
Great Salt Lake to Sacramento Bay. The opportunities of
the two roads were unequal since the Union Pacific had few

294 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED "STATES
near affiliations or friends, while the Central Pacific was
dominated by a group of active California capitalists who
were equally In control of the network of lines known as the
Southern Pacific. Leland Stanford and Collls P. Hunting
ton were the best known of the group. Their boldness as
railroad promoters was matched by their skill in securing
favors from Congress and the Western States. Before 1885
they were in possession of working agreements over the
Sante Fe and Texas Pacific roads, as well as their own main
line through Yuma, El Paso, San Antonio, and Houston to
New Orleans.
It was natural that little traffic found its way from the
Central Pacific to the Union Pacific, if It could as well be
routed over one of the southern lines. The Union Pacific,
manipulated by Jay Gould in the eighties, was driven to
organize a system of dependent lines for Itself, and piled up
a trackage of about seventy-six hundred miles before the
panic of 1893 flattened it out. When Harriman gained
control of the Union Pacific after the panic, the system was
run down, and was reputed to consist of no more than
two streaks of rust across the plains. He rebuilt the line,
straightening curves and cutting down the grades, and con
structing finally a gigantic causeway across the northern tip
of the Great Salt Lake. Lie reassembled the mileage under
his influence by rental, absorption, or friendly agreement.
The Southern Pacific system and the reorganized Union
Pacific covered the whole southwestern quarter of the
The South- United States. During 1900 it became known
ern Pacific that the Huntlngton holdings In the Southern
Pacific were In the market for sale. Harriman
saw the opportunity to merge the two railroad empires.
The purchase was announced In February; the Union
Pacific borrowed money on a special issue of bonds, and
with the proceeds of the loan became the owner of its
former rival. The absorption of more than fifteen thousand
miles of track under a single management, and subject to
the control of Harriman, was a big enough fact to fix public
attention upon the new period of financial concentration.

BUSINESS IN POLITICS 295
The news of the merger of the two Southwestern systems
had not yet lost its novelty when the New York Stock
Exchange gave evidence of a mysterious activity in the
affairs of another continental line, the Northern Pacific.
Henry Villard had finished this line in 1883. The four
Territories that it traversed, North Dakota, Montana,
Idaho, and Washington, became States In 1890-91, but
their population was too sparse to safeguard the road
against failure. In its Immediate neighborhood it was by
no means supreme. In the Granger area at its eastern
end the railroad net of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy
served wide areas with local facilities. Its western end
found itself in direct competition with the new line, the
Great Northern that James J. Hill pushed through in
1893. The Great Northern, which paralleled the Northern
Pacific throughout Its whole length, was the result of the
persistent enterprise of its promoter, who had observed the
failures of the Northern Pacific, to profit by them. He
drove his last spike in January, 1893, and eight months
later the Northern Pacific became insolvent.
An unexpected activity In Northern Pacific stocks in the
spring of 1 901 suggested that something might be on foot
respecting these Northern roads, whose dominance in the
Northwest was as complete as that of the Harriman Hnes
over the Southwest. On May 9, 1901, the stock market
broke under heavy speculation with no Northern Pacific
stock in sight, and with speculators who had sold it short
running their offerings up to a thousand dollars per share,
in vain. The panic was confined largely to professional
brokers and had no bearing on the general financial strength
of the country. When the confusion had subsided. It was
discovered that financial interests behind the Great North
ern and the Burlington, James J. Hill and J. Pierpont
Morgan and their associates, had undertaken to pick up a
control of Northern Pacific at the same time that E. H.
Harriman had determined to attach It to his Union Pacific
holdings. The battle of the financial giants added to the
impression that financial doings were assuming such di-

296 RECENT HISTORY OF TH£ UNITED STATES
menslons as to have a direct though uncertain effect on
public interests.
In most of the railroad systems of the country mergers
were under way that were less startling in magnitude than
those of the Far West, but resembled them in that the
financial control involved generally originated not far from
Wall Street. Industrial combinations had the same tend
ency to centralize in New York, and these within the last
few months had shown the same disposition as the railway
combinations to grow in size. The Standard Oil Company
had for more than twenty years been the chief text for
speakers who decried the trusts. Its habits as a corpo
ration had been displayed in the court records of many
States, and invariably it had been able to meet an industrial
or a legal rebuff by a new legal or industrial device equally
effective with the old and at least not yet declared un
lawful. In the same month In which the Harriman merger was
announced, the name of Andrew Carnegie threatened to
Integration cclIpse that of John D. Rockefeller as a pro
of the steel moter of monopoly. The United States Steel
y Corporation was launched with an aggregate
capitalization of eleven hundred million dollars and with a
clear tendency not only toward consolidation, but toward
the kind of Industrial Independence that the railroads were
working for. Each of the great railroad systems was
struggling to bring within itself terminal points for Its
heaviest traffic, so as to lessen its dependence upon neigh
boring lines and to escape the wastes of competition. Con
centration in industry had in the Standard Oil Company
gone as far as It could. The new Steel Corporation was
more truly described by the word "integration."
Most of the classic trusts were concerned with a single
commodity. They eliminated competition as their output
increased in volume, and approached more or less nearly
the total consumption of the country, whether of oil or
sugar or whiskey or tobacco or any of the other commod
ities involved; but each trust as it eliminated its rivals

BUSINESS IN POLITICS 297
in the same industry developed new and equally intense
rivalry at different points. The producers of its raw
material, the railways that transported its goods, and the
buyers that absorbed its output, offered a competition that
only increased in bitterness as the trust increased in size.
The trusts of 1901 tried to integrate under their control
the related processes as well as the terminal associates of the
industry. In the United States Steel Corporation integra
tion was nearly complete. More than two hundred and
fifty separate companies, using about half of the total ore
produced in the United States, were brought together. The
integration began with the ore companies that owned the
raw material, and maintained continuously in the field
their gangs of prospectors who searched the hidden places
of the earth for more deposits. Coal companies were in
cluded, and were selected with reference to their location,
their capacity, and the chemical availability of their prod
uct. Coal and ore railroads, as well as the lines of ore
steamers on the Great Lakes, reduced the dependence of
the corporation upon competitive carriers. Smelting mills,
steel furnaces, rolling mills, and factories for the final manu
facture of iron and steel in all the finished forms completed
the integrated organization that seemed to be as nearly
Independent as any corporation could be.
In the summer of 1901 the new Steel Corporation came
into conflict with organized labor, and was able to win
without even a serious fight. There was no ^j^g gj^^j.-
doubt but that the prosperity that had been so man Anti-
earnestly desired in the election of 1900 had
fully arrived, but there was genuine question as to what to
do with it. The statute books of the several States were
crowded with ineffective laws that had been passed to
preserve competition and to prevent monopoly, but the
only federal statute was the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of
1890, and this was commonly regarded as moribund. No
National Administration could fail to take cognizance of
the business trend that produced such economic organi
zations as the Steel Cprporation and the Harriman merger.

298 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
but President Roosevelt found little In the recorded policies
of his predecessor to guide him to positive action. The
history of the Sherman Act, however, in its eleven years of
activity, was rich in Its negative evidences upon the control
of business by the Government.
The Sherman Act forbade combinations or conspiracies
in restraint of trade among the several States, and might be
invoked by the Government itself in a public prosecution, by
a private suitor who avowed himself injured by such com
bination, or by the defendant in any suit brought against
him by a combination illegal because of this conspiracy.
Down to 1 90 1 It had been Involved in some forty litigations,
of which nearly half were brought by the Government
against minor offenders, and in which no jurist but William
Howard Taft had gained any considerable prominence.
No attempt had been made to break up any of the great
trusts on the ground that Its very existence was In violation
of the law. The panic of 1893 and its consequences had
extended over half of the lifetime of the law, and in these
years the practice of business had been too circumspect and
cautious to give unusual affront. Henry Demarest Lloyd
wrote his Wealth against Commonwealth in 1894, iri an at
tempt to prove that a crisis in government was approach
ing; but wealth was chastened, and commonwealths were
adverse to adding troubles where they were already too
numerous, and no great public reaction followed to stimu
late a wider use of the Sherman Law.
The political weakness of the Harrison Administration
would have made it difficult for that President to have
enforced the law with vigor. The attack of the PopuHsts,
threatening all capital with repudiation, drove Cleveland
In his second term into such affiliations with responsible
business as to have lessened his disposition to become an
anti-trust crusader. The party and faction of William
McKinley avowedly represented the demand that Govern
ment make it possible for business to exist, and McKinley
died before the full tendency of the new trust movement
had displayed itself. What he might have done had h^

BUSINESS IN POLITICS 299
lived is conjectural. A revision of his cherished views on
the tariff was in his mind when the assassin struck him, but
he sketched no course that could guide his successor. In
neither party organization had there been strong tendency
to distrust or impede the management of business.
The death of McKinley produced no shock in business,
and the mergers that were under way continued through
the autumn of 1901. The uncertainty as to
what was happening in the case of .Northern Northern
Pacific in the May panic was removed when It |o™"^n^
became known that the Harriman forces had
been defeated, and Hill and Morgan had been victorious.
In November the group of owners of the three railroads
that together dominated the Northwestern States organ
ized their holdings to safeguard their control. The law
forbade the direct merging of the lines under the ownership
of any one of them, and the only really important Supreme
Court decision on the Sherman Act — the Trans-Missouri
freight case — had held that the prohibitions of the law
extended to railroads as well as Industrial combinations.
The Northern Securities Company of New Jersey was
chartered to act as a holding company and take over the
stock in the several roads. The complacent corporation
laws of New Jersey made it easy for companies to operate
with large powers under merely casual scrutiny. It was
argued by the attorneys of the owners that a company
could not conspire with Itself, and that acts that might be
illegal if performed by separate corporations became legal
when these corporations had acquired a common owner.
Before Christmas, 1901, the Northwestern States from
Minnesota to the ocean were in action In their alarm at
what they regarded as the menace of a railroad monopoly.
Some of these States could still remember their activities
a generation earlier in the Granger movement, and could
recall the fact that the federal courts first recognized the
full liability of a railroad company to public control in the
Granger cases that they had brought. Conferences were
held among the officials of the States involved, where they

300 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
discussed ways and means for meeting the attack. In the
White House the movement was watched with interest and
appreciation. The President called upon his Attorney-
General, Philander C. Knox, for an opinion as to the legal
ity of the Northern Securities Company, and whether the
device of a holding company succeeded in evading the pro
hibition against conspiracy.
The appointment of Knox as Attorney-General had been
criticized because hjs professional connections as a Pitts-
Northern burgh lawyer made him appear to be the servant
Securities of big buslness. When he undertook to study
the legality of this case, the Sherman Law was
substantially, as CuUom, the author of the first Interstate
Commerce Act declared, "a dead letter." But Roosevelt's
action upon his opinion awoke the ' ' slumbering conscience
of the nation." On March lo, 1902, the National Govern
ment intervened in the situation in which the North
western States found themselves at a disadvantage, and
Attorney-General Knox, by direction of the President,
filed his petition for the outlawry of the Northern Secu
rities Company.
From this moment a new economic policy was taken on.
The Government intervened to protect the people from the
Anti-trust Operations of big business. As soon as Congress
laws, 1903 adjourned in the summer of 1902, Roosevelt
went upon a speaking tour directing his attention to those
"great corporations commonly called trusts." The Outlook,
that knew well of what it wrote, declared a little later that
the "peculiar popularity of Theodore Roosevelt dates from
the beginning of his campaign for the regulation of the trusts
in the summer of 1902." In the following session of Congress
three acts were passed looking toward the more effective con
trol of trusts. The Expedition Act of February 11, 1903,
made It possible to prosecute with firmness and quick results.
Federal suits of this character were given precedence on the
dockets of the courts, and the creation of special trial courts
to hear Government prosecutions was provided for. The
Northern Securities Case speedily found itself in one of these.

BUSINESS IN POLITICS 301
A few days after the Expedition Act, the Elkins Anti-
Rebate Act struck at one of the most persistent and perni
cious practices of the railroads. Many of the trusts were
believed to have gained their dominance as the result of
secret and unfair rebates on the carriage of their freight.
The Department of Commerce and Labor was created on
February 14, 1903, to provide a member in the Cabinet
whose duty it should be to watch over the interests of the
people in their economic relationships. The Commissioner
of Labor, who had existed for nineteen years In the Interior
Department, was brought into the new department with
a going organization. A new Bureau of Corporations with
duties to keep watch over business was entrusted to James
R. Garfield, son of the former President, while George B.
Cortelyou, who had risen from stenographer to Cleveland
to private secretary to McKinley, entered the Cabinet as
the new Secretary. Cortelyou's office, remarked the
Nation, was the President's personal department, and a
governmental field that was new and all his own.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Charles A. Beard, Contemporary American History (1914), gives an
effective presentation of the influence of business on politics. F. A. Cleve
land and F. W. Powell, Railway Promotion and Capitalization in the United
Stales (1909), contains an elaborate bibliography. Joseph G. Pyle, Life of
James J. Hill (1917), is one of the best biographies of a captain of industry,
and may be studied to advantage in connection with Beckles Willson,
Life of Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal (1915), and Henry Villard, Mem
oirs (1904). H. L. Wilgus, The United States Steel Corporation in its
Industrial and Legal Aspects (1901), is a lawyer's analysis. The standard
history of a trust is Ida M. Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company
(1903)-

CHAPTER XXXI
THE ROOSEVELT CAMPAIGN
Before the first session of his first Congress adjourned, in
the summer of 1902, Roosevelt had taken his stand with
reference to big business, had assisted in the launching of
the new Cuban Republic, and had threatened to precipi
tate a controversy over the protective tariff because of his
interest in reciprocity with Cuba.
There was some danger that Cuba, independent of Spain,
and under her own government, would be worse off than be-
Cuban fore the Spanish War. Spain had at least given
reciprocity ^-j^g colony a privileged position in her own
trade. This was lost. A dependent Cuba belonging to the
United States might have expected to share in the advan
tages of the free trade that was extended to Porto Rico,
but free Cuba was a foreign country outside the law. Its
Government immediately endeavored to negotiate for easy
trade relations with the United States, and received the spir
ited support of Roosevelt, to whom this was a matter of
elementary fairness. The project was Injured in the public
mind by the fact that free trade in sugar was welcomed by
the Sugar Trust ; it was blocked in Congress by the stubborn
antagonism of the "beet-sugar Insurgents," who refused to
permit a Cuban competition with their own domestic
product. There were also some members who were quite
willing to let Roosevelt learn that he could not expect
Congress always to do his bidding. In June the President
sent in a vigorous message on the subject, but failed to get
action from that Congress. Reciprocity with Cuba be
came one of the themes which he took with him upon his
speaking trip.
Popular nervousness over the expansion of the trusts
grew during the summer of 1902 and was paralleled in the
Republican Party by an uneasiness as to the President's

THE ROOSEVELT CAMPAIGN 303
probable attitude toward business. But a greater nervous
ness, steadily increasing during the summer, had Anthracite
to do with the comfort of the approaching win- coal strike,
ter, for the second great strike of the anthracite
miners had been under way since the middle of May and
showed no prospect of yielding.
The leadership of John Mitchell in the strike of 1900
consolidated his power. Increased the influence of the
United Mine Workers, and engendered among the mine-
owners a feeling that their situation was in danger. The
impending contest involved more than the conditions of
labor, and looked toward a complete recognition of the
union, but was met by an inflexible refusal to accept the
doctrine of the "closed shop." There was no presidential
canvass on to weaken the strategic position of the owners.
"The rights and interests of the laboring man," wrote
George F. Baer, who became the chief spokesman of the
operators, "will be protected and cared for ^ — not by the
labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in
His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property
interests of this country, and upon the successful manage
ment of which so much depends."
With a public already suspicious of big business, Baer's
letter, claiming that the capitalists were viceroys of Provi
dence, had a wide and unexpected circulation. It gave the
cue for cartoons without number, and from it may be
traced the growth of sentiment that made it possible for the
President to make another advance in policy.
The strike continued through the summer with the
workers under steady discipline and with a minimum of
lawlessness around the mines. Public sympathy was not
alienated by misconduct on behalf of the miners. The
unions showed a capacity to hold out and a deadlock
threatened the country with a winter without coal. On
October 3 Roosevelt summoned the presidents of the coal
companies and Mitchell to a conference at the White House.
He had already determined that if the deadlock could be
broken in no other way he would "send in the United

304 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
States Army to take possession of the coal fields." He
had discussed the details of this with General Scofield, and
intimated his intention to Senator Quay. It was a part of
his Intention to appoint a commission under ex- President
Cleveland to "decide on the rights of the case" while the
army got out the coal. The White House conference was
turbulent. The coal presidents got angry, and Roosevelt
confessed that "he behaved very badly himself, and that
Mitchell was the only one who kept his temper and his
head." The demand of the President was for an immediate re
sumption of mining, accompanied by an examination into
the merits of the controversy by a public commission. As
the deadlock continued, there appeared repeatedly all over
the country angry assertions of a new third interest In the
controversy. The interest of the public was avowed to be
superior to that of either miners or operators. Conserva
tive business tended to criticize the President for forcing
himself into a struggle In whose determination he had no
legal rights. The great majority, however, expressed satis
faction at his Intervention, and looked to Roosevelt with
increasing confidence as the only agent who could conserve
the public interest. On October 13 the operators yielded;
work was soon resumed, and a commission was set to study
the controversy. The approaching fall elections found the
National Administration headed upon the policy toward
labor indicated by the anthracite strike, and the public
discussing whether or not the party had started upon a
new career.
Four consecutive Republican Congresses were chosen in
the four elections prior to 1902. The Republican Party
Congres- approached the election of this year with con-
sional elec- fidcuce based upon its long tenure of office and
its perfected party machine, and faced only
those doubts that were indicated by the effect Roose
velt's new policies might have and the degree to which
local leaders might dominate their regions. The tenure
of the National Republican organization had been long

THE ROOSEVELT CAMPAIGN 305
enough for the development of local movements that now
possessed considerable strength within the party.
In Iowa, New York, and Texas recent movements indi
cated a popular desire to break away from partisan control
of local government. New York City, In the fall election
of 1901, experienced one of Its periodic revulsions against
Tammany control, and elected Seth Low as mayor, at the
head of a reform administration. The prospect of better
government for Greater New York, for the city had now
been extended over the adjacent communities, was an
index to movements of simUar character throughout the
country. In Cleveland a violent revulsion In politics brought Tom
L. Johnson Into office as mayor In the spring of 1901, on a
program looking toward a broadening of city activities.
Johnson had begun life In active business, and had made
himself a fortune as an operator of street railways. About
1890 he had a short period in Congress. The outstanding
feature In his Intellectual life was his reading of Henry
George's Progress and Poverty, and his conversion to its
doctrines. In Cleveland he worked for municipal owner
ship of the street railways, and for the extension of civic
services as "Golden-Rule" Jones had done in Toledo, and
as Brand Whitlock was to continue In Toledo after 1906.
The constructive side of Populism was struggling to the
surface In the spirit of these men. The "Texas idea," that
was just beginning to take hold, was advanced by the great
flood which left Galveston desolate in 1900. It had for its
view the divorce of municipal government from politics
through the substitution of a commission form of govern
ment. The lack of satisfaction with prevailing political methods
was closely paralleled by dissatisfaction with political
ideals. The "Iowa idea," launched in the Re- The"lowa
publican Convention in that State in July, 1902, idea" and
, , , , , , the tariff
showed that the party could not expect perma
nent docility even in the heart of its geographical area.
The Iowa Republicans, headed by Governor Albert B. Cum-

3o6 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
mins, questioned the wisdom of the extremes of protection,
and accepted the dictum that the tariff was the mother of
trusts. In the convention of 1902 the Iowa Republicans
demanded a revision of the tariff in order to prevent shel
ter to monopoly, and approved Roosevelt's language with
reference to trust control. Roosevelt took the cue from
this manifestation of public opinion, and in his public
speeches In the autumn urged a revision that should main
tain the principle of protection and yet keep the tariff
schedules flexible so that they might be subject to change
by the expert advice of a non-partisan commission, which
he advocated.
The revolt against the tariff and the belief that the
President would support it struck at the heart of Republi
can doctrine. The party was not pledged to any course
respecting the trusts, but the tariff idea had been its basic
creed since the reorganization of the machine by Jones,
Quay, and Hanra.
On November 4, 1902, the Republican Party elected its
fifth consecutive Congress, but with a reduced majority.
"The lesson it teaches to the Republican Party," was the
comment of the Outlook, "is that, if it would retain the
support of the voters. It should follow the President's lead
in modifying the tariff and establishing more rigid public
control of the operations of the trusts."
The party heresies in Iowa produced a national conse
quence of much importance. David B. Henderson, of
Iowa, Congressman from the Dubuque district, announced
in the summer of 1902 that he would not be a candidate to
succeed himself. Since he was Speaker of the House of
Representatives, this meant that in the new Congress a
successor must be found. He had succeeded Thomas B.
Reed, when the latter dropped out in 1899, dissatisfied with
his party's trend. Henderson was identified with the
movement for high protection that Governor Cummins
questioned. His opponents said that he could not have
been renominated had he desired.
When the new Congress met in 1903 the lesson of the

THE ROOSEVELT CAMPAIGN 307
"Iowa idea" had no influence upon the conduct of the
Republican majority. Joseph G. Cannon, of Joseph G.
Illinois, a sturdy Republican, with externals Cannon,
reminiscent of the tradition of Lincoln and with
no question In his heart as to the merit of the tariff, was
chosen to be Speaker. He had already sat In fourteen
Congresses, and nearly thirty years previously he had been
described as speaking "with an eloquence that was un
tutored, but very effective. . . . He spoke of the hayseed in
his hair, and under the magic touch of his voice that hay
seed glowed around his head like the halo of the martyrs."
Before his first session as Speaker was over, the Outlook
commented upon his "equal mixture of drollery, rugged-
ness, frankness, and common sense," and asserted that he
had ' ' established a personal relationship with the members
of the House of Representatives quite unique."
The leadership of Cannon respecting the tariff was In a
different direction than that advised by President Roose
velt, but the latter kept en cordial terms with Hanna and
"Uncle Joe," the Speaker. The question of the the con-
, . r . servatives
party nominations for 1904 was arousing com
ment at the date of Cannon's election, and the group of
Republicans that decried the influence that Roosevelt was
exerting over the party was hopefully casting about for a
candidate stronger with the people and acceptable to them
selves. This candidate they found in Senator Marcus
Alonzo Hanna.
Mark Hanna was "the fuU flower of the spirit of com
mercialism in politics." Twenty years before his successful
generalship landed McKinley in the White House he had
been identified with his party in Ohio, but had devoted
most of his attention to his private business. After 1 897 he
became a public figure. Opposition cartoonists caricatured
him as bloated business, branded with the dollar mark, but
before 1900 his personal appearance and his shrewd wisdom
had begun to contribute to his reputation as a statesman.
Unused to public speaking when he entered the Senate, he
learned the trade and became an acceptable speaker on

308 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
national affairs. Everywhere he went he gained the posi
tive mterest of conservative society, and lessened the hos
tility of others. His Intervention In the coal strike of
1900 left him with a genuine Interest in the problems of
labor, to which his active membership in the new National
Civic Federation soon bore witness. Before the death of
McKinley Southern Republicans had begun to talk of him
as a conservative Republican candidate for 1904.
Hanna was never really a candidate for the nomination,
but did not effectually withdraw his name from discussion.
He allowed the uncertainty as to his intentions to worry
Roosevelt, who was frankly a candidate for renomination
to succeed himself. Even If there had been ambitions,
Hanna knew they could not be realized because of an
incurable disease. He died on February 15, 1904, bringing
to an end all of the hopes that stirred among those who
desired to elect some other President than Roosevelt. Other
than Hanna there was no possible competitor for the Re
publican nomination.
Between the death of Hanna and the opening of the Re
publican Convention on June 21, most of the evidences of
party difference were eliminated. The con-
licans nom- servatlve leaders gave their support to the Presi-
'"^teRoose- (jgnt, to Root for temporary chairman, and to
Cannon for permanent chairman. Jacob Riis
published in serial form his laudatory biography, Theodore
Roosevelt the Citizen; Francis E. Leupp brought out The Man
Roosevelt. The conservatives accepted Roosevelt, the rank
and file of the party acclaimed him, and he himself paid the
price by postponing his demands for revision of the tariff
and for other unsettling policies.
The conservative decision of the President was made clear
by the treatment of Wisconsin Republicans at the conven
tion. In Wisconsin, like Iowa, there had been uneasiness
at organization control. Robert M. La Follette, after
three terms In Congress, had advanced his claim to be gov
ernor on a platform of tax reform, direct primaries, and
corporation control. In 1896 and again in 1898 he was

THE ROOSEVELT CAMPAIGN 309
beaten at the Republican Convention. In 1900 he gained
the nomination and was elected governor for the first of
three terms.
The Wisconsin legislation between 1900 and 1905 laid
the foundations of the "Wisconsin idea," beginning with
primary legislation and railway control. As a "champion
of the people's rights," Governor La Follette desired to
head the Wisconsin delegation to the Republican Conven
tion. A bolting Republican State Convention selected a
different delegation, dominated by the two Senators from
the State, and Henry C. Payne, who was Roosevelt's Post
master-General. The Republican National Convention ex
cluded the regular delegation and seated the conservative
bolting group. After 1904 it was always possible for critics
of President Roosevelt to use this discrimination against a
reform Republican as evidence of political Insincerity.
The Republican ticket was completed by the nomination
of Charles W. Fairbanks for Vice-President, and the selec
tion of George B. Cortelyou as chairman of the Republican
National Committee.
The Democratic Convention at St. Louis had no clear
candidate or issue. The new policies of President Roosevelt
had attracted the Interest of many voters who Alton B.
had supported Bryan in the last two campaigns. Parker the
T-, i-tr fl 1, Democratic
Bryan himself was not a candidate, but stood nominee,
outside the ring to let the convention do its best '^°'^
without him. Populism had ceased to be a vital force.
The middle-of-the-road Populists held a national conven
tion that emphasized their unimportance. The Democratic
Convention heeded neither the Populists' appeals for the
observance of their ancient faith nor the journalistic efforts
of William Randolph Hearst to secure the nomination for
himself. The final selection was Judge Alton B. Parker,
of New York, whose earlier political affiliations had been
with the faction of David B. Hill. Some regarded his
nomination as the end of Democratic rule by " a minority
who were enslaved while in a hypnotic trance." This im
pression was strengthened by a sensational telegram to the

310 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
convention, in which Judge Parker notified his party of his
repudiation of the Bryan doctrine of free silver. The politi
cal depression of the Democrats is indicated by the fact
that some of them talked seriously of a fourth nomination
of Grover Cleveland, as the only person who could beat
Roosevelt. The struggle for the votes in 1904 was one-sided in that
the personality of Judge Parker was no match for that
of President Roosevelt. The Democratic Party had no
principles that were not more attractively stated in either
the Republican platform or the speeches of the President,
and the country was still rioting In the prosperity that had
dominated the preceding campaign. Not until the last of
the canvass did any matter of genuine interest appear.
Then came an episode, as a consequence of which, says John
Hay, Judge Parker "was called a liar, and a malignant liar,
and a knowing and conscious liar," by the President.
The issue involved had been hinted at by Democratic
speakers throughout the canvass. They had complained
that Cortelyou, Roosevelt's campaign manager, had as
Campaign Secretary of Commerce and Labor been in a
funds position through his Bureau of Corporations to
examine the private accounts of big business. They charged
that the great corporations were giving freely to the Repub
lican campaign fund, and they insinuated as directly as they
dared that in this connection there was an opportunity
for possible blackmail. On the last day of October Judge
Parker, speaking in Madison Square Garden, denounced
Cortelyou's campaign fund as a scandal and repeated the
Insinuation as to his methods. To this President Roosevelt
replied in a resounding and indignant denial of the fact
and the inference. Whether the Democratic inference of
blackmail was correct or not, the fact was that great cor
porations, following their usual practice, had made large
gifts. George W. Perkins soon admitted making a contri
bution of nearly fifty thousand dollars on behalf of the
New York Life Insurance Company, and other contributions
were subsequently brought to light in the Senate investiga-

THE ROOSEVELT CAMPAIGN 3"
tion of 1912. In 1907 Congress forbade any federal corpora
tion to contribute to any campaign fund, and any corpo
ration to contribute toward the election of a President, a
Senator, or a Representative.
The attack of Judge Parker created a ripple of interest,
but was more than offset, for the time being, by Roose
velt's denial and his appeal to "all men of common sense"
and " all honest men." No President had ever received so
large a majority as Roosevelt did In 1904. Eugene V. Debs,
the Socialist candidate, ran third with six hundred thousand
votes. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The works listed under Chapter XXX are useful here also. Herbert
Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1912), is a vivid historical reconstruction,
considering that Hanna left almost no collected papers. The Wisconsin
movement may be watched in Robert M. La Follette, Autobiography (1913).
Joseph G. Cannon is now (1920) publishing chapters of his own autobiog
raphy. J. L. Laughlin and H. P. Willis, Reciprocity (1903), contains
materials on the Cuban problem.

CHAPTER XXXII
MUCKRAKING AND THE NEW STANDARDS •
The attack upon big business directed by Roosevelt in
1902 and 1903 was the first and the heaviest of the shocks
Public that destroyed the complacency of the American
opinion and spirit and Introduced a period of suspicion and
distrust. The America of the nineties was im
pregnated with what some critics described as gross mate
rialism. The history of the nation had seen the rewards of
life fall to the individual with spirit and ingenuity. The
frontier ideal had everywhere prevailed, and had gloried in
the successful surmounting of obstacles. The road from
the log cabin to the White House had been traveled more
than once, and the other road that led to wealth and busi
ness influence was beaten broad and smooth. Public opin
ion looked upon the successful man as a desirable asset In
society. Individuals looked forward to success for them
selves as a reasonable expectation, and the resulting popular
confidence in personal achievement produced a spirit of
complacency in the presence of material comfort. The in
spiring careers of the captains of the Industrial develop
ment lost much of their luster as the spirit got abroad that
business was corrupt, and that success was often founded
upon unfair practices.
Before the mechanism for the control of trusts could be
created, the public had to be shown that the trusts were bad
enough to need control. Criminal prosecutions and public
attacks directed from the seats of the mighty helped to
accomplish this. The period of suspicion was hastened by
the advent of a literature of exposure that dragged unsightly
practices from the seclusion of private business and invested
them with a public interest. It was a short step for public
opinion, from its stand that the trust must obey the law,
to its new stand that, in a great strike, the interests of the

MUCKRAKING AND THE NEW STANDARDS 313
direct combatants are less than those of the general public;
and from this to its new position that all business that
affects the public is the public's business.
The Roosevelt Administration witnessed the develop
ment of the literature of exposure as it passed from sensa
tion to sensation, and ended In a riot among the unsightly
facts that suggested the name of "muckraking" to cover
the process. It beheld as well an improvement in standards
of taste and a broadening of appreciation in literature and
art. It saw also a revival of interest In education and In the
sciences that bear upon the facts of life. The practice of
government began to change, under the Influence of non-
political experts whose decisions were more and more based
upon scholarly judgments, and whose number increased with
each new function of supervision assumed by the United
States. A new national journalism was the vehicle of the muck-
rakers. The American newspaper passed through one stage
in its development with the group of great edi- j,jg^ ^
tors that arose after the Civil War — Greeley ?f journal-
and Reid, Bowles, Halstead, Horace White, and
Henry Watterson. The vogue of the personal editors
weakened In the eighties as new habits in advertising and
new methods of handling news through the press associa
tions threw their influence in favor of local and colorless
journalism founded upon the interests of the business of
fice. In the nineties no American journal had an influence
such as Horace Greeley exerted for a generation with his
weekly Tribune. The new journals of local gossip founded
by Hearst and his imitators substituted thrill and flavor for
influence and sound knowledge, and did little to help in the
formation of an enlightened public opinion.
The mechanical devices of the printing trade made
possible new results In the printing of periodicals. The
half-tone process and the zinc etching made their appear
ance in the eighties, followed by Illustration on a scale of
accuracy and beauty hitherto unknown. The improve
ments in transportation widened the range and ease of

314 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
distribution, and prepared the way for a type of journalism
that was represented by McClure's Magazine, in 1893.
The story of the ten-cent magazines has to do with the
widening of interest in forms of literature higher than the
The ten- daily press. The old literary magazines kept to
cent their policy and their higher prices in spite of
the new competition. The Atlantic, Harper's
Monthly, Century, and Scribner's Magazine had established
definite reputations before S. S. McClure organized the new
invasion of the field. McClure's Monthly, Munsey's, and
The Cosmopolitan were the chief members of the new pe
riodical group that reached out for the news-stand trade at
a nominal price, and that sought for literary wares of in
terest to the new clientele.
The limitations of this clientele are discussed in the
autobiography of S. S. McClure. The range included the
great middle class capable of larger interests than the
ephemeral daily press could satisfy, yet not up to as high
standards as the readers of the Atlantic and Harper's. The
Century Magazine had come in contact with this class to its
great financial profit when In the eighties it ran its two
serials, the "Biography of Lincoln," by Nicolay and Hay,
and the "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," by the
leaders themselves. The new cheap magazines made
deliberate search for articles that should be universal in
their appeal, and hence marketable over the whole country.
They needed also to be obvious in their significance, for the
profits of the business depended upon reaching a public
unaccustomed to serious reading. A thrill of some sort was
indispensable. The yellow journals were already flourish
ing upon the appetite of society for exciting news. The
ideal material for the new periodicals combined universality
with obvious clearness, and some of the element that came
to be known as "punch."
McClure was the leader among the new periodical jour-
Ida M. nalists and early In his career discovered the
Tarbell greatest of his co-editors, Ida M. Tarbell. Two
serials by this young historian, covering the lives of Lincoln

MUCKRAKING AND THE NEW STANDARDS 315
and Napoleon, exploited the growing interest in Lincoln's
democracy and in the centennial of Bonaparte. McClure
sensed Immediately the fact that business contained the
themes for stories once the attention of the public was di
rected to the conduct of business. In 1903 Miss Tarbell
began to publish in McClure's Magazine her "History of
the Standard Oil Company," which was documented and
criticized as a sound piece of historical investigation, and
which proved to lay the foundation for a new period of
national thought. It began In a serious way the literature
of, exposure.
From making serious studies in the habits of business to
muckraking for the sake of the muck carried the new jour
nalism through a period of four years. The little group
of monthlies, supplemented by Collier's Weekly, did the
burden of pioneer work in responsible exposure. They
commonly safeguarded themselves before publication by
accumulating evidence that might be an adequate defense
if their victims brought suit for libel, but their trail was
followed by irresponsible sensation-mongers attracted only
by the thrills of exposure and the profits of huge circula
tion. Among the most prominent of the products of the
new literature were Lincoln Steffens's Shame of the Cities,
Thomas Lawson's Frenzied Finance, and the revelations on
patent medicine and its advertising that Collier's Weekly
published. Fiction was brought into the ranks to serve the muck-
rakers. Cut-throat speculation furnished the theme for
Frank Norris's Octopus (1901); the offenses of the meat-
packers inspired Upton Sinclair's Jungle (1906), while the
political intrigues of raUroads and big business were used
by Winston Churchill in Coniston (1906).
Exposure was both useful and profitable while it main
tained its connection with reality. As the months went
on much of it became irresponsible, and at once Literature
created among its readers a desire for excitement °^ exposure
and highly seasoned news, and destroyed the good balance
of their judgment. The worship of success with which the

3i6 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
critics had reproached American opinion in the nineties was
transmuted into suspicion and social hatred. Epithets
came to be substituted for constructive analysis, and
Roosevelt had not got far into his second term before muck
raking had become an obstruction to reform instead of
its ally. In April, 1906, having occasion to deliver an
address at the corner-stone laying of the new office building
for the House of Representatives, the President sought to
call a halt in the movement that he himself had so greatly
stimulated. He pointed out what John Bunyan had known
when he used the phrase, that muck is of use only when it
serves to fertilize the land — not when it is gathered for its
own sake. The time had come, he declared, to turn to con
structive work to remedy the evils that had been exposed.
The reality of these evils was too true to be denied. Charles
E. Hughes found them permeating the business of Insur
ance; Joseph W. Folk uncovered them in the Middle West;
Garfield in his public office showed the unfair practices that
prevailed In the transportation of petroleum. "What we
have been witnessing," declared the venerable Washington
Gladden, "is a new Apocalypse, an uncovering of the ini
quity of the land. . . . We have found that no society can
march hellward faster than a democracy under the ban
ner of unbridled individualism."
American literary taste and appreciation, distorted by
the one-sided activities of the muckrakers, was nevertheless
surer of Itself in the twentieth century than It
^a^rary ^^^ been two decades earlier. No European
dramatic visitor could Start as wide a ripple of irritation
standards . . . ' . ,
or self-examination in 1905 as Matthew Arnold
and James Bryce did in their day. The correspondence
of President Roosevelt with Sir George Otto Trevelyan,
the historian of the American Revolution, reveals the de
gree to which the best of the English had come to under
stand America ; while America took itself as an established
fact, and a growing number of Americans lived in the intel
lectual currents of the whole world, accepting and valu
ing ideals without much reference to their origin. It was

MUCKRAKING AND THE NEW STANDARDS 317
still possible for a foreigner, like Maxim Gorky, to weaken
his standing In an Instant by a departure from the accepted
American code of morals; but where he failed a hundred
others succeeded in gaining the approval of the country.
Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving were for a generation
living evidence of the standard taste that disregarded the
Atlantic Ocean. From his first appearance in America in
1883 untU the end of the century, he, or they — for they
frequently appeared together — found unvarying popu
larity for their presentations of romantic drama. Irving
found Edwin Booth at the top of his career when he first
appeared, Joseph Jefferson already well established as
"Bob Acres" and "Rip Van Winkle," Richard Mansfield
just starting a long career with a success in A Parisian
Romance, the younger Sothern taking over some of his
father's glory, and Denman Thompson reaching the middle
tones of American life in the perennial Old Homestead.
Year after year, as Irving and Terry returned to the Ameri
can theaters in their Shakespearean revivals, they found
the personnel changing and the standard rising. It ceased
to be true, as Henry Ward Beecher once suggested, that
"the only amusements tolerated by the American Church
were Banking and the Currency." John Drew, Nat C.
Goodwin, and Francis Wilson established themselves in
their fields of social comedy and farce, while Julia Marlowe,
Maude Adams, and Ethel Barrymore brought charm and
delicacy into a profession that had long needed It.
Edwin Booth died In 1893, after having turned his home
and much of his fortune over to his profession, in the form
of the Players' Club, which he founded in New Vaudeville
York. For a decade more Joseph Jefferson took and the _^
his place as dean of the American stage, yielding
the position on his death to Edward H. Sothern and Julia
Marlowe. By the end of the first decade of the new cen
tury, whUe taste was becoming standardized throughout
the English-speaking world, the rivals of the old drama were
forcing doubts as to its survival. In the lighter forms the
pageantry of the old Black Crook, that ran for a generation

3X8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
as a New York recreation for country visitors, yielded to
vaudeville and musical comedy. The melodious enter
tainment of comic opera, whose Pinafore and Mikado set
the eighties to humming tunes, suffered with the drama.
Lottie Collins, with her noisy Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, and
Anna Held and Yvette Guilbert, with their foreign accent
and their songs of shady suggestion, brought the standards
of the European music-halls to America in the nineties.
The moving pictures began In the next decade to cheapen
dramatic art and to popularize Its substitutes.
The historian of the drama might perhaps show that the
amount of interest in the highest forms of theatrical art
Music and steadily increased, but seemed proportionately
opera jgg^ because of the multitude of cheap and in
ferior productions that grew even more rapidly as city
populations with money to spend became more dense and
numerous. The best acting was, perhaps, not declining
below the standard of the Booths; musical appreciation was
being created and improved on every hand. The work of
Theodore Thomas laid the foundations of American music
in the East in the seventies and in the West in the eighties.
His orchestra In Chicago made that city a musical center
after the World's Fair; while the Boston Symphony Or
chestra, under the persistent patronage of Major Henry
L. Higginson, maintained standards creditable anywhere.
In the city amusement parks, gaining rapidly in popularity
as electric transportation made it possible to reach them,
music found additional patrons, and orchestras and bands
multiplied. John Philip Sousa and Walter Damrosch
helped to Increase the popular understanding of good music.
The father of the latter, Leopold Damrosch, was one of
the early pioneers in the task.
Grand opera became fashionable before it became popu
lar in the United States. The opening of Henry E. Abbey's
Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1883 was one
of the early landmarks in its development, and coincided
within a few months with the first presentation of Wag
ner's Parsifal at Bayreuth. Thomas and Damrosch were

MUCKRAKING AND THE NEW STANDARDS 319
already playing most of the Wagnerian scores in their con
certs before the importation of foreign singers made their
operatic production practicable in the United States. It
was a long distance from Barnum's exploitation of Jenny
Lind, in 1850, to the grand opera season In New York in
the nineties, with its huge subscription list and Its display of
millinery. The extension of the capacity to appreciate the
best In music moved more rapidly In the next two decades
as the phonograph in its various forms carried musical
education far beyond the widest of the concert audiences.
The operatic singers found the profits of their profession
vastly increased by the clientele created by the phonograph.
By the side of the broadening taste in matters of artistic
appreciation there was a broadening of the religious spirit
in America. The Church In the twentieth cen- Religious
tury seemed to be developing its social implica- and social
tions and subordinating its doctrinal. There
were no conceded leaders of the relative eminence of Phil
lips Brooks or Henry Ward Beecher, whose churches were
almost national monuments twenty years earlier. The
emotional side of religion that had been represented by
Moody and Sankey was continued by Billy Sunday and his
imitators. But religious thought, in the pulpit and outside
it, had come under the influence of science and sociology.
Inter-denominational respect and tolerance had succeeded
theological bickering. The institutional church was an
accomplished fact, and derived powerful support from non-
sectarian bodies Hke the Young Men's Christian Association
and the Young- Women's Christian Association. Heresy
trials became so rare as to appear anomalous, and church
papers generally lost both acidity and colorless piety,
while some, like the Independent and the Christian Union,
branched out into broader journalism. A growing zeal
for social service gave strength to the movement for politi
cal reform.
The Indignation at the trend of business, upon which the
muckrakers fattened, coincided with a new feeling of re
sponsibility for the public welfare on behalf of the very

320 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
offenders who were denounced. Both John D. Rockefeller
and Andrew Carnegie became notable leaders in the en
couragement of new movements In education, while a mul
titude of other benefactors enlarged the endowments of
universities and colleges.
For Andrew Carnegie the flotation of the United States
Steel Corporation marked a transition from captain of in-
The Car- dustry to sage and benefactor. He was already
negiebenev- identified with an educational movement which
olcticcs showed itself in the raising of a multitude of
libraries bearing his name. In January, 1902, he turned
over a clear gift of ten million dollars to the Carnegie Insti
tution of Washington for the encouragement of research.
There had been a question In his mind as to whether he
should create a new institution as Johns Hopkins did, or
revivify an old one, as Rockefeller did with the University
of Chicago. The final decision, in which Daniel C. Gilman
had a large share, was to create an institution to advance
those aspects of research that found difficulty In being
cultivated in existing institutions. The scientific bureaus
organized in the Carnegie Institution were soon at work
upon a range of studies that spread from European sources
for the history of the United States to the deflection of the
needle toward the magnetic pole.
In 1905 Carnegie set aside a second fund to be admin
istered for the improvement of teaching by the Carnegie
Foundation. A system of professorial pensions and re
tiring allowances was brought into existence by this means.
A little later he created a Carnegie Endowment for Inter
national Peace, and before he died. In 1919, he had ap
proached his ambition to die poor by consecrating the great
bulk of his wealth to the Carnegie Corporation (191 1) with
a mandate to keep his other endowments supplied with
funds. The Southern Education Board, created in 1901 with
Robert C. Ogden as its guiding spirit, was an outgrowth of
the Northern interest in Southern education already ex
pressed in the Peabody and Slg^ter funds. In 1903 the Gen->

MUCKRAKING AND THE NEW STANDARDS 321
eral Education Board was Incorporated on the initiative
of the Rockefellers to assist by encouragement -^he
and gift In the development of education by Rockefeller
, T-. 1 1- 11 T • / \ Foundation
private means. Ihe Rockefeller Institute (1901)
devoted itself to the laboratory study of medical problems,
and the Rockefeller Foiindation (1913) drew to itself In
1917 one of the most inspiring of the University presidents,
George E. Vincent, to develop its universal campaign for
social betterment.
The new university presidents of the first decade of the
twentieth century gave evidence to the growing determin
ation that higher education should solve the Educational
specific problems. A great scientist at Johns trend
Hopkins, Ira Remsen (1902), continued the tradition of
pure research that Gilman had established. At Columbia
University, Nicholas Murray Butler (1902) turned his broad
humanitarian culture to the service of education. At Wis
consin Charles Richard Van Hise (1903) came as a great
economic geologist to help solve the problems on the border
line of government and science. At Princeton a layman,
Woodrow Wilson (1902), took up the burden for the culti
vation of democratic Ideals. " I have studied the history of
America," he said in his inaugural; "I have seen her grow
great in the paths of liberty and of progress by following
after great ideals. Every concrete thing that she has done
has seemed to rise out of some abstract principle, some vi
sion of the mind. The greatest victories have been the
victories of peace [and] of humanity."
In the mind of the muckraker the injustices of the eco
nomic system were ascribable to the unrestrained cupidity
and criminal designs of wealth. The point of view was not
far different from that of organized socialism that put its
first presidential ticket in the field in 1900, and endeavored
thereafter to show that capitalism lay at the root of all
evil. It Is not necessary for the historian to accept this easy
diagnosis of the conditions that were revealed by inves
tigations and prosecutions. Government was undergoing a
change in both its purpose and method, and It would have

322 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
been difficult, with. the best and most conscientious of in
tentions, to have avoided much of the injustice that ac
companied the industrial revolution.
Steadily since the close of the Civil War the business of
government — city, state, or national — had increased In
volume and in scope. One after another the people en
trusted to their representatives tasks they had formerly
performed themselves, like water supply and drainage, as
well as tasks that had gone unperformed in the earlier
stages of American organization, like food Inspection and
reclamation. Not until 1883 was the principle definitely
accepted that the tenure of public office by the civil servant
must be connected with capacity and a proper fulfillment of
duties. The amount of work to be done steadUy increased,
while the technical portion of It became every year a larger
part of the whole.
With the approval of the people Government entered into
a field in which decisions could not be reached by political
Specialists argument, and In which proper action could
in Govern- be based only upon technical skill. The con
clusions of the bacteriologists and the plant
pathologists in the Government service could have no con
nection with practical politics, yet all American legislative
bodies in the nineteenth century were organized chiefly for
the purpose of reaching political decisions. Before Govem
ment could readjust itself to the new idea that made It the
protector of individual liberty and opportunity, it was nec
essary to devise new methods in legislation in order to make
it possible for political legislatures to direct scientific or
technical operations.
Congress and the legislatures gradually and almost un
consciously changed their habits. The public debate be
came less important than the committee hearing. Before
the committees, experts in the various fields of govemment
made their appearance to explain the reasonableness of the
programs that were recommended. These programs In in
creasing degree depended upon the integrity of the scholar
ship of expert civil servants. The process was under way

MUCKRAKING AND THE NEW STANDARDS 323
during the muckraking epoch, but both legislators and ex
perts had much to learn before the final position of both In
the new scheme could be established. A clean heart and
a love for the people was not an adequate preparation for
regulating the raUroads, nor was the most expert scientific
attainment a guarantee of wisdom in the direction of public
policy. The germ of the British Parliament, the mother of
American legislatures, was provided in ancient local finan
cial juries that heard testimony and rendered verdicts.
History was in a way repeating itself as the twentieth-cen
tury legislatures learned to sit in judgment over the techni
cal plans brought up to them from the administrative de
partments of government. What the muckraker ascribed
to guilty manipulation may in part have been due to guilt,
but has a simpler explanation in the fact that Industry had
grown more rapidly than the theory of the state.
When Roosevelt became President, the executive civil
service cost the United States about one hundred and thirty
millions a year in salaries, and included 235,766 Federal
positions, of which 108,967 were classified and '^'"^'' service
under the control of the Civil Service Commission. The
number thus protected included most of the responsible
positions, the unclassified places being open chiefly to un
skilled and low-paid routine workers. In the next sixteen
years before the World War overturned the civil service, and
inflated all offices beyond recognition, the expanding func
tions of government increased much more rapidly than pop
ulation. In 1 91 7 the Civil Service Commission controlled
and safeguarded 326,899 positions in the executive civil
service out of a total of 517,805. In these years the debates
in Congress as revealed in the Congressional Record lose
something of their value to the historian, but their loss is
more than supplied by the testimony and reports of Con
gressional hearings and investigations. The United States
was launched upon a period In which Govemment control
was to be extended not only over the ordinary acts of life,
but over the unused resources of national existence.

324 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best sources of muckraking are the writings of the muckrakers that
may be found in profusion in the cheaper magazines, 1903-07; and more
especially in McClure's, Everybody's, The American Magazine, and Collier's
Weekly. S. S. McClure, My Autobiography (1914), is a frank and self-
centered narrative; The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), is the
autobiography of the successful editor of the Ladies' Home Journal.
E. A. Ross, Changing America (1912), gives a sociologist's evaluation of
the new forces. James R. Day, The Raid on Prosperity (1907), was a
famous tract defending big business against the attacks upon it.

CHAPTER XXXIII
THE EXTENSION OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL
The anti-trust legislation of 1903 was accepted as a recogni
tion by the Government of the problems before it, and as an
earnest of new laws to come. The Expedition i^iniiera-
Act made it easier for the Government to en- tion prob-
force existing laws when prosecution was deemed
necessary, and the Bureau of Corporations soon provided
data for preliminary opinions as to both legislation and
prosecution. The Bureau of Labor made a continuous
study of the relations of labor to industry. A Bureau of
Immigration was brought into the Department of Com
merce and Labor, and a new general immigration law was
passed in 1907. The close relationship between immigra
tion and labor, recognized in the work of these bureaus, was
affected by the changing nature of the immigrant. The
"bird-of-passage" was Increasing In number, and the pro
portion from the races of southern Europe was steadily
growing. The wholesome migration from northern Europe
that had brought the Irish, the Germans, and the Scandi
navians to the United States had stopped. Between 1900
and 1914 the annual totals of immigration ranged from
448,572 to 1,285,349, of which northern Europe contrib
uted about thirty-five per cent. The southern Immi
grant became Americanized less easily than his North Eu
rope predecessors. He remained isolated In racial groups
as unskilled labor for a longer period. He showed less
tendency to make a career for himself and his family out
of the American opportunity, and showed a constant dis
position to live a subnormal economic life, accumulate his
surplus earnings, and return with them to his original
home. The interest of Roosevelt in the drafting and passage of
necessary legislation was continually expressed. The elec-

326 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
tion of 1904 added to his prestige, and weakened the powers
of the opposition. Speaking at the Union League Club in
Philadelphia, In 1905, he described the task as one for the
preservation of equal opportunity for rich and poor: "There
must be no hurry, but there must also be no halt." He
had already succeeded, in connection with the Northern
Securities prosecution, in proving that the Sherhian Law
possessed some teeth, and was less moribund than had been
believed. The inauguration of the Northern Securities prosecution
In 1902 was pushed steadily by Knox, and under the Ex-
Northern pedition Act was transferred to a special trial
Securities court, whose decision in favor of the Government
was unanimously concurred in by the Supreme
Court in March, 1904. The guilty corporation was ordered
to disband and disgorge. Among the claims of the Presi
dent in the campaign of this year was that of having proved
himself a successful "trust-buster." The business interests
involved looked at it from a different angle. It was too
bad, thought James J. Hill, "to have to fight for our lives
against the political adventurers who have never done any
thing but pose and draw a salary." Within both parties,
but chiefly within the Republican, there developed a group
of irreconcilable conservatives, many of whom had hoped
for Hanna In 1904, who continued increasingly to oppose
Roosevelt and all his works.
The Northern Securities case proved that successful
prosecutions were possible, but not that the problems of
concentration could be solved In this manner. The offense
of the company lay In the merging in a single ownership of
the control of stock of three great rival railway systems.
When the company disbanded by order of the Supreme
Court, this stock was distributed among the owners of the
Northern Securities stock, each of them receiving shares of
the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, and the Chicago,
Burlington & Quincy in proportion to the number of shares
he owned in the Northern Securities Company. As a
consequence of this the actual ownership of the three rail-

THE EXTENSION OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL 327
roads did not change. The same group of individuals who
had controlled them through the Northern Securities Com
pany continued to control them as private individuals.
Experience soon showed that by "gentlemen's agreement"
it was as easy for these owners to manage their property In
harmony as It had been through the vehicle of a holding
corporation. The guilty trust was broken up by law, but
the fact of consolidation remained as large as ever.
In the discussions of trust and railroad control that ran
parallel to the Northern Securities prosecution, from 1902
to 1906, the question emerges as to whether the Economics
solution of the trust problem lay In the Sherman of the trust
Act method of prohibition or in some other
method involving the elimination of unfair practices, while
recognizing the consolidations themselves as reasonable.
The experience of twenty years could point to no sure case
in which the anti-trust laws had succeeded In breaking up
consolidation and restoring free competition among small
units. Practical economists began to question whether the
advantages of combination could be repealed by statute.
The continued reliance of Government on prosecution,
however, was made necessary by an irritable public opin
ion, excited by the facts of the muckrakers, led on in many
cases by irresponsible reformers, and anxious to see some
body punished for what were regarded as the sins of society.
The railway laws of 1903 were preliminary to a general
revision of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Like
the Sherman Act, the Interstate Commerce Act aimed to
maintain free competition among the railroads. For many
years the Interstate Commerce Commission continued to
add new facts to the American knowledge of the railroad
problem, and In these same years, unimpeded by the law,
the great railway systems of the eighties had matured, and
the still greater systems of 1901 and 1902 had been launched.
The law was to be revised and Congress busied Itself with
the content of the revision.
The President's messages of 1904 and 1905 contained
repeated demands for the enlargement of the Interstate

328 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Commerce Commission. The general popularity of these
demands is proved by the multitude of railroad laws brought
In by Congressmen anxious to please the people of their
districts. Most of the bills drafted were conceived in ig
norance and bad temper, as the original Granger laws had
been, and languished permanently in the committees to
which they were referred. Congress was slow in learning
the lesson that technical economic problems could be solved
only on the basis of technical economic knowledge. In the
session of 1904 and 1905 one of the railroad bills received
the almost unanimous support of the House of Repre
sentatives. This Esch-Townsend Act was passed by a
vote of 326 to 17, and gave to the Interstate Commerce
Commission the power to fix the rates of transportation.
It was received in the Senate in February, 1905, and there
met with a delay that exasperated the angry opponents of
the trusts, who relieved their feelings by attacking the
"treason" and the "menace" of the United States Senate.
The conservatism of the Senate was built into it by the
Constitution for the purpose of creating an independent
agency willing and able to withstand gusts of public opinion.
Whenever the Senate has fulfilled the original Intention, It
has met with obloquy. It was here charged with being In
the employ of the trusts. The process that had sent suc
cessful men of affairs to the Senate in the nineties, and
brought It under the domination of a group like Aldrich of
Rhode Island, Piatt of New York, Quay and Penrose of
Pennsylvania, Hanna of Ohio, and Spooner of Wiscon
sin, lent itself readily to the attack that was now pressed.
The eager advocates of immediate railroad legislation de
nounced the conservatism of these Senators as service to
big business and to the machine. One of the new Senators,
elected In January, 1905, and seated in 1906, assumed the
open leadership against this group. This was Robert M.
La Follette, who, fresh from a successful program of leg
islation for corporation control m Wisconsin, began as
Senator to attack the corporations in season and out, to
propound constructive theories for their control, and to

THE EXTENSION OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL 329
join with the Democrats In demanding roll-calls on votes
whenever possible. In the long vacations, as he traveled
on Chautauqua circuits talking to the common people on
public affairs, he read these roll-calls with telling effect,
strengthening as he did it the popular idea of the existence
of a machine, of the power of vested interest, and of in
fidelity among the people's representatives.
Uninfluenced by the pressure from outside, the Senate
directed the Committee on Interstate Commerce to sit
during the recess of 1905 and accumulate data upon the
problems that needed more adequate control. In the fol
lowing winter this report was available in five great volumes,
the President had renewed his advocacy of legislation, a
new flood of private bills indicated the desire of Congress
men to clear their records before their constituents, and
some of the bolder legislators claimed that their panaceas
had the tacit support of the White House. It was danger
ous for Congressmen to go too far in this direction of claim
ing approval in advance. The political method of the
President was swift and effective. Again and The Ananias
again he defended himself by denying the cor- ^'"b
rectness of statements of his associates. His denunciation
of Judge Parker in 1904 was a typical instance. E. H.
Harriman was later brought within the group, and the
cartoonists derived much pleasure from their literary cre
ation, the "Ananias Club," Into which no man was ad
mitted until the President had openly called him a liar.
But the desire of Congressmen to appear to be associated
with the President In his attacks upon big business kept
many of them walking in the danger zone.
In the spring of 1906 the Hepburn Bill took shape as the
railroad measure that was to be passed. During its last
stages, a report from the Bureau of Corpora- .j-j^^ y^
tions on the traffic in petroleum brought con- burn Rail-
. 1 . . 1 1 r road Law
vincmg evidence as to the need tor more power
in Government, whether the ultimate aim was to be to
destroy the trust or to control it. A concluding debate
brought up the question of the relation of railway control

330 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
to the course of justice. The bill as proposed vested in the
Interstate Commerce Commission the power to fix rates.
Critics of this declared that such action might easily be
come confiscatory, and that rates might be fixed so low
as to require the roads to do business at a loss. This,
said Knox, who had withdrawn from the Cabinet to be
come Senator from Pennsylvania, would involve a violation
of the "due process" clause of the Constitution. The most
successful of the anti-trust jurists, he now led the demand
for insertion in the bill of a recognized right of judicial
review whereby the railroads should be entitled to bring
the fairness of an established rate before the courts. The
Senate accepted his doctrine. Three times the measure
went to conference before the two houses could agree, and
the bill could become a law on June 29, 1906.
The Hepburn Act widely extended Government control
over railroads. Among its most significant clauses from
the standpoint of regulation was one that empowered the
Interstate Commerce Commission to establish uniform
systems of accounting, and to prescribe what books the
roads should keep, and how they should keep them. A
lack of genuine comparative knowledge on railroad prob
lems impeded railroad control from the start, since no two
roads kept Identical accounts, and none permitted public
scrutiny. The organization of the new accounting systems
was worked out in the next few years under the direction of
Professor Henry Carter Adams, who had long been asso
ciated with the Commission as statistician. Adams was
himself a protege of Thomas Mortimer Cooley, of Michigan,
who had done much to define the functions of the Inter
state Commerce Commission in its early years.
As it became clear that legislation for control must be
expected, railroad practice was generally modified in the
Abolition of direction of improvement of manners and the
free passes elimination of abuses. The old practice of the
railroads' law offices to fight everything was displaced by
a new desire to compromise and avoid trouble. The Hep
burn Act forbade the issuance of private passes, and con-

THE EXTENSION OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL 331
tributed directly to the cessation of an old abuse. The
railroads had ever been the victims of petty graft by pub
lic men who demanded free transportation for themselves.
National conventions expected to be brought together on
free passes. Editors regarded them as among the per
quisites of their business, and even among the reform and
anti-monopoly extremists It is possible to point to individ
uals who expected the railroads to transport them without
charge. The muckrakers believed that the pass system was
a form of petty bribery. In any event it was a fraud upon
the stockholders that now rapidly disappeared.
With the passage of the railroad law the United States
entered upon a decade of legislation for the extension of
its powers of control. A second law passed in Pure Food
June, 1906, projected federal power In a new and ^'^^' '^"^
unexpected direction, for the protection of the public health.
With the change in habits of life brought about by the revo
lution in communication and manufacture in the eighties,
population drifted from the farms to the cities, and the man
ufacture of food went far along its course from the domestic
basis to the factory basis. In the meat industries the de
velopment of the packing companies went hand in hand
with the rise of the cow country. The refusal of Europe to
permit the importation of American meats on the ground
that they were unfit for food gave the incentive to create,
in 1884, the Bureau of Animal Husbandry to inaugurate a
policy of federal meat inspection. The creation of the De
partment of Agriculture in 1889 and the broadening of meat
inspection in 1891 are steps In the progressive extension of
public control over the food of the country. The Industrial
changes, to which the packers contributed, continued with
out stop. Factory food displaced home-cooked food, and
the grocer came to carry a steadily increasing portion of his
stock in proprietary packages instead of bulk. The cereal
foods came into line before the Spanish War. Clever in
ventions brought into the market shredded wheat, grape-
nuts, and corn flakes, while campaigns of national adver
tising, brightened with doggerel and cartoon,, produced a
market for the package foods.

332 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The growth of the food industries was attended by risks
foreseen from an early period. The factory provided no
substitute for the vigilance of the .good housewife in protect
ing the quality of food, the standards of preparation, or In
controlling the use of adulterants. A mild interest in legisla
tion within .this field can be traced for many years. The
muckrakers' exploitation of the packing-houses brought it
within the realm of practical politics In 1906, and legislation
to protect the purity of food and drugs was placed upon the
statutes within the control of the Department of Agricul
ture. The scientific determination of the value of foods and
the influence of adulterants and preservatives was still to
be worked out and manufacturers were still to be convinced
that the public would consume as readily a jam containing
artificial coloring and synthetic flavor as the same jam dis
honestly labeled as a pure fruit product. The detailed and
technical work involved in a successful assertion of a policy
of food control brought into every household a fuller recog
nition of the new functions of Government.
In 1907 Congress paused in its task of constructive legis
lation long enough to terminate an old problem by the ad-
Admission mission of a new State. Nearly a century before,
of Okia- Congress had entered upon a policy of Indian
consolidation upon the western frontier. The
Indian Country was legalized In 1830, placed under the con
trol of an Indian Commissioner in 1832, and safeguarded by
the Indian Intercourse Act of 1834. No sooner had the
Indian Country been clearly established than the process of
reducing Its area by the creation of new States was begun.
After 1854 it was reduced to a tract nearly surrounded by
the States of Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas, and thereafter
it was generally though Incorrectly known as the "Indian
Territory." The fertile lands between the Red River and the Arkansas,
dedicated to the Indians in the thirties, aroused the cupidity
of white settlers half a century later. President after Presi
dent proclaimed against the illegal invasion of the area.
After the Civil War, as a penalty for sympathizing with the

THE EXTENSION OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL 333
Confederacy, the Indians forfeited a portion of their lands.
In the later eighties they sold still more in the process
whereby their own holdings were reduced to a basis of
severalty. In the early nineties the lands of Oklahoma
were opened and the white invasion brought into existence
a new territory, that before 1900 had aspirations to become
a state. A long dispute over the basis of statehood was
waged in the next five years. Should there be one State or
two, Indian Territory and Oklahoma, or an amalgamation?
In June, 1906, Congress finally passed an enabling act for
a single State, and in the winter of 1906-07 the people of
Oklahoma gathered in their constitutional convention.
There is no shorter route to an understanding of the con
stitutional ideals of any period In American history than
through the study of the debates whereby a new State
constitution is created. Every new State has drawn its
first citizens chiefly from the young and enthusiastic classes
of its neighboring States. These have invariably begun their
work with the fundamental acceptance of the underlying
bases of American government, and have built upon these
a structure embodying the Ideals of ' the moment. The
Oklahoma constitution was long, specific, and radical. It
recognized the duty of the State to extend a protecting
control over its citizens. It was approved by Bryan with
his Popuhstic background, and was criticized by Taft, now
Secretary of War, from the standpoint of the conservative
judge. It contained as Its novelty in government a scheme
for the public guarantee of bank deposits, and became the
forty-sixth State In the Union by proclamation of the Pres
ident November 16, 1907.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Balthazar H. Meyer, The Northern Securities Case (1906), is a careful
study of the concentration of railroads. Albert H. Walker, History of the
Sherman Law (1913), and Oswald W. Knauth, Policy of the United States
towards Industrial Monopoly (1914), give full accounts of the workings of
the anti-trust laws. Charles R. Van Hise, Concentration and Control (1912),
presents a solution of the trust problem. Roy Gittinger, History of the
Formation of the State of Oklahoma (1917), is an adequate narrative.

CHAPTER XXXIV
NATIONAL RESOURCES
The period of prosperity ushered In by President McKin
ley outlasted the terms of his Republican successors, Roose-
Period of velt and Taft. Not until 1913 was there any
prosperity general depression in the United States that
threatened to bring business to a standstill. From time to
time there were flurries in the stock market that were more
truly ascribable to over-speculation than to adversity. The
brief crisis of May, 1901, was occasioned by stock gambling
incidental to a struggle for the control of the Northern
Pacific Railway. In October, 1907, there came a somewhat
larger panic that was ascribed by its sufferers to the med
dling of Roosevelt with business, and was called the "Roose
velt panic."
The open trouble began with the suspension of the
Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York on October 22.
Panic of During the next few days there was uncertainty
¦907 as to the extent to which the collapse might go.
A string of Eastern speculative ventures, in whose manage
ment there had been an element of fraud, broke down, but
the clearing-houses of the great cities managed to limit the
range of suffering. Banks In general restricted their pay
ments to depositors to their minimum cash necessities, and
large numbers of checks were made payable only through
the clearing-houses. For the time being there was an al
most complete suspension of credit, and much hoarding of
money by private holders. The critics of the President
scolded at "Theodore the meddler" and the New York Sun
gave wide circulation to the motto of business: "Let us
alone." Whether Roosevelt was responsible or not, the panic
advertised the fact that the Currency Act of 1900 had
failed to stabilize the currency. It had provided a policy

NATIONAL RESOURCES 335
in its enunciation of the gold standard, but had made no
step toward providing either a currency flexible enough to
expand and contract with the drains upon it, or a credit
system properly safeguarding the use of speculative and
commercial capital. The part played by the clearing
houses in mitigating the effects of the panic was both extra
legal and salutary. By restricting the payment of checks
except through the clearing-houses It was possible to carry
on large transactions without drawing upon the limited
supply of currency. Solvent banks that found themselves
without sufficient currency to meet the unexpected demands
were allowed to resort to clearing-house loans for which
they put up as collateral approved securities that could not
be marketed at once. With their clearing-house loans they
were allowed to pay the balances for which they had no
cash. The emergency method tided the country through the
period of panic, and in the following year Congress at
tempted to meet a portion of the need by passing the Al-
drich-Vreeland Act, whereby it was made possible in times
of emergency to procure and pay for a special emergency
currency. The Treasury Department printed and kept
ready for Issuance several hundred million dollars of this
currency to be Issued upon collateral when another emer
gency should arise. The Aldrich-Vreeland Act did some
thing to Increase the elasticity of the currency supply, but
did not touch the question of the safeguarding of credit.
A monetary commission presided over by Senator Nelson
W. Aldrich was, however, created to study the fundamen
tals of financial legislation. The report of this commission
was ready for the public in 1912.
The "Roosevelt panic" was a sharp reminder of the de
fects in the financial system, but those who hoped that it
might restrain the President in his attacks upon business
were disappointed. The policies looking toward the ex
tension of Government control were pressed steadily toward
their legislative goals, while in the conservation of national
resources Roosevelt discovered and popularized a wide

336 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
range over which Government powers, if they existed,
might be spread.
The dominant influence that made America different
from the rest of the world In Its first century of independ
ence was the possession of an easily accessible
ance of Open frontier Into which society could expand at
American .^^jjj Natural resources were plentiful and nearly
frontier _ ^ ¦'
free. Timber was so abundant as to be an ob
struction to the pioneer. Soil was so fertile that the wheat
farmer and the cotton planter used up its fertility by single
cropping, and developed new farms as they discarded old
ones. Not until the open frontier disappeared, about
1890, was there any general idea that the resources of na
ture were not limitless. Thereafter the idea slowly devel
oped that American society would one day approach the
Land losses posItlon already reached by most of the coun-
and conser- tries of Europe, in which it would need to ad-
vation ... , ,
minister its resources, not only that posterity
might be provided for, but In order that it might secure a
fair distribution for its living citizens. Most of the land
suitable for general farming purposes was already in private
hands before the end of the nineteenth century. Water,
whether used for irrigation, for power, or for transportation,
was assuming new Importance. The timber resources of
the nation were closely involved with the problems of water
supply and land, and had been slashed and wasted until
economists could estimate the number of years when they
should disappear. The mineral resources were undergoing
a continuous process of consumption and waste. Metals,
coal, and oil presented different aspects of the same problem
of Conserving the supply and procuring the maximum use.
Movements In all of these fields of activity came to a focus
in Roosevelt's second term.
The Homestead Law of 1862 gives the character to the
last phase of the occupation of American farm lands by farm
ers. Working upon the doctrine that the frontiersman who
makes a farm renders a public service, the United States
proceeded to give homes to citizens willing to cultivate them.

NATIONAL RESOURCES 337
Before the panic of 1893 most of the desirable lands had
been taken up, and many subsequent homestead entries ap
peared to be partly fraudulent in character. There was a
provision in the Homestead Law whereby the homesteader
could pay a minimum cash price for his farm and be relieved
of the obligations he had incurred, and be free to sell the
farm. An Increasing proportion of commuted homesteads,
whose entrymen often exercised the privilege to commute
at the earliest possible date, and sold immediately to great
timber, grazing, or mining corporations, proved that the
law was being used for the erection of corporate holdings
instead of farms for citizens. The bona-fide farmer had
difficulty in finding suitable farms, but there remained
abundant land in the Far West, rich In promise if Its arid
ity could be overcome.
There was slight interest in Irrigation until after the open
farms had been exhausted. The creation of the United
States Geological Survey in 1879 brought to- , . .
1 <- • r ^ Irrigation
gether for the first time a group of Government
scientists interested in, and competent to devise schemes
for, the reclamation of the arid lands. The peculiar fertility
of many of these lands lay in the fact that they were in a
region of constant sunshine where crops could grow for more
than a normal number of days per year; and also In that,
having little rainfall, the accumulated fertUIty of the soil had
not been washed away. About 1 889 Congress authorized a
survey of irrigation sites in the United States, which Major
J. W. Powell, of the Geological Survey, carried out.
The construction of irrigation works was a financial and
engineering task beyond the capacity of the pioneer farmer.
Small groups of associated farmers could do something, but
in general there was needed permanent direction and large
means procurable only through great corporations. When
Roosevelt became President there was pending in Congress
a measure looking toward Government participation in this
work, led by Senator Francis G. Newlands, of Nevada.
Western Congressmen were urging the creation of a rec
lamation fund to be appropriated by the United States,

338 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
and to be used for the construction of dams, tunnels, and
ditches. The costs of construction were to be assessed over
the farms brought under ditch in each irrigation project,
and as the individual farmer bought his farm and paid off
the debt, his payments were to go into the revolving fund
for reinvestment. The Newlands Bill became a law June
17, 1902, at once an extension of governmental control over
a huge scientific engineering task, and an assertion of a new
interest in the use of the natural resources that remained.
By 1909 nearly eight thousand farms had actually been
brought under ditch and new projects were in course of
development throughout the arid region. In 1903 President
Roosevelt appointed a commission to study the nature of
the remaining public lands and to report upon their proper
treatment. The work of the Reclamation Service developed the im
portance of dam-sites and water power, which were soon
Control shown to be entangled with the use of the inland
of water waterways for transportation. The Bureau of
Corporations made it Its business to study the
ownership of water power, and discovered that not only was
there potential water power sufficient to meet all the me
chanical needs of the United States, thus relieving the drain
on coal and oil, but that undeveloped sites were rapidly
being acquired by the General Electric, the Westinghouse,
and other corporations Interested in hydro-electric power.
In many cases the control of this lay outside the power of
the United States. Water rights lying within single States
and disconnected with the public domain called for State
control or none, but there was work to be done in show
ing the difference between proper and improper methods
of control, and in the passage of a suitable law for water
powers belonging to the Government. The dam built
across the Mississippi River at Keokuk brought to the fore
both the complex nature of the water problem and its rela
tions to inland navigation.
The building of the dam at Keokuk called attention to
the fact that the old glory of the Mississippi had faded away,

NATIONAL RESOURCES 339
and that In the fifty years elapsed since the completion of
the first bridge across it at Davenport, the rail
road had possessed Itself of the heavy traffic that igation —
the river had borne. Mark Twain, at the sum- *^f Missis-
sippi
mit of his glory, and honored with the degree
of D.C.L. of Oxford, escorted the presidential party that
cruised down the Mississippi after the ceremonies at the
site of the Keokuk dam; but the river traffic that he had
known In his youth, and perpetuated in Tom Sawyer and
Life on the Mississippi, was nothing but a reminiscence.
Along the line of the Mississippi and the Ohio local interests
from time to time urged that the steamboat commerce be
revived. The Mississippi itself had been brought under
physical control by the United States. Levees had been
constructed at all the danger points, the channels at the
mouth had been made clear, and there was nothing to
prevent a revival of the steamboat trade. This, it was sug
gested, might serve both to offer an effective competition
to the railroads and to reduce the consumption of coal for
transportation. In March, 1907, Roosevelt appointed an
Inland Waterways Commission to survey these unused
transportation routes and to report upon their revival.
Out of the work of the Inland Waterways Commission
there arose the suggestion that the problem of conserving
the natural resources was too large for any one Forest
commission, too intricate for any single group of reserves
scientists, and too close to the public Interest to be solved
without the full concurrence of all sections and parties.
The chief of the forestry service, Gifford Pinchot, had much
to do with the formulation of the suggestion. An intimate
friend of Roosevelt, he was one of the Inner group with
whom the President played tennis and indulged in cross
country tramps, and he had for many years brought into
the service of the Government an understanding of the
best foreign practice in the administration of forests. Con
gress had, in 1891, authorized the President to withdraw
the forest lands from entry in the public domain. By the
close of Harrison's Administration there were 17,564,800

340 RECENT HISTORY QF THE UNITED STATES
acres in the national forest. Cleveland increased the forest
reserves to 18,993,280 acres, McKinley to 46,828,449, while
Roosevelt multiplied the area several fold, and increased
the total to 172,230,233 acres before he left office. The
forests were so closely Involved in the problems of river
flow, soil waste, and timber conservation, that it was nat
ural for the forestry group to assume a leadership in the
new movement.
On May 13, 1908, there met at the White House a con
ference to which the governors of all the States had been
Conserva- Invited, and which most of them attended ac
tion confer- companied by scientific advisers, business men,
and political leaders. For three days this con
ference maintained its sessions, and continued its discus
sions of the natural resources of the United States and the
problems involved In their management. Never before had
the governors been gathered for a national purpose, and
there were numerous suggestions that out of this meeting
there might arise a sort of house of governors to supple
ment the deliberations of Congress. Members of Congress
watched the conference with much suspicion, because of
their unfamiliarlty with the subject-matter under discus
sion, and their fear that new policies In conservation might
upset political and business interests of long standing.
They showed this suspicion in their treatment of the con
servation movement.
A few days after the White House conference had adver
tised at once the new national movement and Roosevelt's
interest in it, the President appointed a National Conser
vation Commission of forty-nine members selected about
equally from the fields of politics, industry, and science.
This commission organized in the autumn of 1908 for a study
of the minerals, waters, forests, and soils of the United
States. In more than forty States local conservation com
missions were appointed and In operation before the end of
1909 supplementing by their studies the work of the na
tional commission. In December, the commission held
a national conference before which a draft of its report was

NATIONAL RESOURCES 341
presented, and early in 1909 President Roosevelt trans
mitted this report to Congress.
The work of the commission revealed the political
methods of Roosevelt, and the suspicions prevailing in
Congress. The commission was appointed without legal
authority, and served without compensation. Since Con
gress had provided no funds for its clerical assistance,
Roosevelt directed each of the executive departments when
called upon by the commission to provide the information it
desired. In this way It was possible for the commission to
include in its report three volumes of technical papers on the
different resources. Congress, however, jealous of its prerog
atives and suspicious of the work in question, refused an
appropriation to provide wide circulation to the report.
The President declared In January, 1909, that the "under
lying principle of conservation" was "the application of
common sense to common problems for the common good."
But Congress attached to one of the appropriation bills a
proviso forbidding the executive departments in the future
to render scientific assistance to such a commission as this.
The National Conservation Commission attracted wide
attention to the problem before it. Among the special im
mediate needs that it pointed out was legislation Bureau
to control the mining of coal. Throughout a °^ Mines
wide extent of the public domain coal deposits were known
or suspected to exist. The early land laws had provided
for the classification of public lands as coal lands or agricul
tural, but no attempt had been made to prevent the oc
cupation of lands as agricultural when their value was
chiefly with reference to their underlying coal. From the
reports of the General Land Office it appeared that large
areas of coal lands were being alienated as agricultural
lands, and that the Homestead Law was being perverted
by collusion between entrymen and speculators, whereby
great coal interests were being built up in private hands,
and the United States was being deprived of this portion of
its common heritage. In 1909 Congress modified the land
laws so as to provide for the separate sale of the agricultural.

342 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
timber, and mineral resources of the land, and the next year
the Bureau of Mines was created to give systematic study
to the problems connected with this industry.
Once the importance of conserva-tlon had come to his
attention, Roosevelt exerted his powers to protect the
Supervision publlc Interest. He had no lawful power to
of business dlspose properly of the timber or mineral lands,
or water rights, but he at least had power to determine what
public lands should remain on the market for open entry.
He accordingly proceeded with surveys to discover the
resources of the remaining public lands. He entrusted to
the recognized powers of the Forestry and Reclamation
Services whatever was suitable for them, and the remaining
acreage he withdrew from entry with the intention of hold
ing It in the national domain until Congress should take
action to safeguard the public Interest. In his later writings
he regarded his work for conservation as the most important
of his Administration. Its effect upon public opinion was to
raise new hopes of effective governmental action, and to add
to the uncertainties with which business regarded the future.
The trend of Government control had already established the
fact that business must expect to be supervised. The idea
of conservation suggested that great fields hitherto open to
private exploitation were hereafter to be closed. Public in
terest had been asserted as a factor to be respected In all
business, and to this was now added the Interests of posterity.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The most useful general works on conservation are Charles R. Van Hise,
Conservation of Natural Resources (1910); William E. Smythe, Conquest of
Arid America (1900); Frederick H. Newell, Irrigation in the United States
(1902). There are numerous useful illustrated articles in the National
Geographic Magazine. The Report of the National Conservation Com
mission was published in a small edition as 60th Cong., 2d Se.ss., Sen. Doc.
676; that of the Public Lands Commission as 58th Cong., 3d Sess., Sen.
Doc. 189; that of the Inland Waterways Commission as 60th Cong., ist
Sess., Sen. Doc. 325. The point of view of the West toward conservation
is revealed in the Proceedings of the Public Land Convention held in
Denver, Colorado, June 18, 19, 20, 1907 (Denver, 1907). The Annual
Reports of the Forestry Service, the Reclamation Service, and the Com
missioner of the General Land Office are, of course, indispensable.

CHAPTER XXXV
WORLD POWER
Before the disturbance occasioned by the panic of 1907
had subsided and had revealed the panic as a squall rather
than a storm, President Roosevelt embarked American
upon a new venture In the field of foreign rela- battle fleet
tions. On December 16, 1907, a fleet of American battle
ships left its anchorage at Hampton Roads for a voyage
around the Americas to northern Pacific waters and with
the ultimate intent to cruise around the world. The navy
of 1907, much stronger than the new navy whose units be
haved so well in the Spanish War, was now able to send to
sea the heaviest battle flotilla that the world had seen.
Sixteen new battleships under Robley D. Evans, who had
commanded the Iowa at Santiago, with the accompanying
tenders and supply ships, tested out the organization of the
Navy Department and the fidelity of the work that had
been done since 1895. In February, 1909, the fleet re
turned intact and triumphant, having completed a demon
stration that impressed every foreign office in the world,
and strengthened the general Interest in the new rules of
naval warfare, which were signed on February 26, 1909, by
delegates at the international naval conference at London.
The significance of the circumnavigation of the world by
the new fleet of battleships was variously interpreted as a
menace of war and an act of peace. The project was un
dertaken on Roosevelt's responsibility alone. When the
fleet started no funds had been appropriated to take it
across the Pacific, or even to bring it back from the Pacific
waters to which the President had sent it. Its mission to
the Orient was ostensibly a friendly visit, but the President
was by no means certain that it would not be attacked, and
had prepared the fleet for fighting. He had observed what
he interpreted to be an air of truculence in the correspond-

344 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ence of Japan, and had been advised by informal friends
that the time would come when Japan would contest
American power in the Philippines and at Hawaii. If
Japan should seize this moment to declare war, he believed
there would be a national advantage in being ready for it.
If there should be no attack, he believed it equally advan
tageous to have made a demonstration of strength in Orien
tal waters. At the time, however, the public was left to,
draw its own inferences as to the meaning of the venture,
and, as it worked out, the voyage was provocative of
friendly international relationships, and revealed an un
hoped-for capacity in the naval organization.
The fleet of 1907, though able to make the most impres
sive naval demonstration yet seen, was none the less nearly
obsolete. The great powers had ceased laying down the
keels of vessels of the battleship class, and were instead
experimenting with dreadnaughts. In July, 1908, a Navy
Department conference at Newport worked in secret upon
the designs for four new dreadnaughts, and when the keels
of these were laid, North Dakota, Delaware, Utah, and
Florida, It was believed that no better ships were under
construction anywhere. The first of these was commis
sioned in 1910. By the end of 1916 thirteen were In com
mission and four more were building, and the great armada
of 1907 had become at best a second line. Within the Navy
Department Improvement In organization progressed with
naval architecture. The complete independence of the
several bureaus that lessened the capacity for team-work,
and developed all of the forces for inertia, was under con
tinuous fire. In 191 5 a new Bureau of Naval Operations
was created to act as a general staff for the navy under
command of William S. Benson, with the rank of admiral.
Reorganization proceeded In the War Department as in
the navy. Under the General Staff Act of February 14,
War de- ^Q^S, it was sought to increase the efficiency of
partment the army by the organization of a corps whose
duty should be to prepare war plans and super
vise their execution. The new procedure had to fight its

WORLD POWER 345
way against the opposition of the older officers, and the
political Interference occasioned by their friends In Con
gress. Year after year, however, the schools at Fort
Leavenworth and the War College In Washington grad
uated their little groups of army specialists. The rule that
forbade officers to stay on administrative detail away from
their troops for more than four years out of six, weakened
the power of the "Manchu" class. One of these, it was
declared, had been on a single staff duty for forty-three
years. With the consistent support of President Roosevelt
and his secretaries, the new type of officer and of army
organization was given a chance to establish itself. Every
year the older type became less numerous through retire
ments, and every year a large percentage of the young men
had a new conception of their duties. General S. B. M.
Young, the first chief of staff, was succeeded by Adna R.
Chaffee, and he In succession by John C. Bates, J. Franklin
Bell, Leonard Wood, William W. Wotherspoon, and Hugh
L. Scott, who was In office at the entry into the World War
In 191 7. It was not possible in these years to produce
from Congress a more thoroughgoing army act than Root
had evoked while Secretary of War, but within the General
Staff there was developed an idea of what an army ought to
be that was ready for the test In 191 7, and was not found
wanting. When Root temporarily retired from the Cabinet in 1904,
Roosevelt recalled William Howard Taft from the Philip
pine Islands to take his place as Secretary of Taft and
War. Under Taft's administration the Philip- the colonies
pines had been progressing toward orderly government and
self-government. Natives of the islands were admitted to
seats upon the governing commission, and plans were laid
for the ultimate establishment of a native assembly. Judge
Taft was successful not only in pacifying the islanders,
but in carrying on a negotiation with the Vatican. At
the date of the Treaty of Paris a large proportion of the
area of the Philippine Islands was owned by the various
orders of the Catholic Church. Through the diplomatic

346 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
negotiation of Taft the title to these was settled by agree
ment in 1903. The sanitary work In Cuba was duplicated
in the Philippines, and the establishment of schools upon
the American plan was followed by a revival of the ancient
university at Manila. A new generation was started with
no recollection of Spanish rule, speaking English and con
scious of the processes of American government. The
erection of the Filipino Assembly In 1907 was followed by a
steady Increase in the proportion of Filipinos in Govern
ment offices and on the Council. By 1916 the local control
of insular affairs was in every direction in the hands of
native islanders.
World politics continued to call for American interven
tion as Roosevelt rebuilt the tools of national defense.
The Treaty of Portsmouth, signed on September 5, 1905,
drew the United States into world affairs as moderator,
and gained for Roosevelt the following year the award of
the Nobel prize for services to the cause of peace.
The war between Japan and Russia that was ended in
this treaty broke out in 1904, with Japan assuming the
Russo-Jap- aggressive to prevent the continuous encroach-
anese War ment of RussIa. Ten years earlier Japan had
shown her strength as a modern military power by crushing
the resistance of China within a few weeks. The Treaty of
Shimonosekl, in 1895, brought her little reward, since the
European powers exerted pressure to moderate her terms.
In the next few years they extended their own holdings in
northern China, and Russia pushed to completion her rail
road to the Pacific. With Its main Hne running to a
terminus at Vladivostok, Russia laid hands upon Man
churia and buUt a branch line extending to Port Arthur.
Repeated pledges to return Manchuria to China were
followed by repeated acts for the strengthening of the
defenses of Port Arthur. In February, 1904, Japan de
clared war against Russia, and John Hay began diplomatic
pressure to limit the area of hostilities and to safeguard
China by a recognition of her neutrality and her "admin
istrative entity" by both belligerents. By the spring of

WORLD POWER 347
1905 Japan gained notable victories over Russia, whose
army operated at a disadvantage at the terminus of the
single-track Siberian railway, and whose naval force col
lapsed. The successes of Japan brought both her mate
rial and her financial resources to the verge of exhaustion.
Both belligerents were anxious for peace if It could be
obtained without seeming to Invite It.
On June 8, 1905, began the negotiation of a peace. "I
first satisfied myself," said Roosevelt, "that each side
wished me to act, but that, naturally and properly, each
side was exceedingly anxious that the other side should not
believe that the action was taken on its initiative. I then
sent an identical note to the two powers." The move
ment thus started advanced rapidly toward consummation.
Commissioners were appointed on both sides to negoti
ate peace, and through the summer of 1905 they sat at
the Portsmouth Navy Yard, in New Hampshire, after a
formal reception on the presidential yacht, Mayflower, at
Oyster Bay. More than once during the conference the
danger of a deadlock appeared, but as the weeks advanced
the President exerted continuous pressure to produce an
agreement. Japan found England willing to renew the
treaty of alliance of 1902; and Russia, experimenting with
self-government and the first phases of revolution, felt the
need of peace. The conclusion of the treaty prepared the
way for a resumption by the powers of the negotiation
begun at The Hague in 1899, but before the Second Hague
Conference convened, Europe was brought to the verge of
war by the crisis at Morocco.
The status of Morocco involved the interests of England,
France, and Germany. England and France had agreed
in 1904 that France should be responsible for Algeciras
the maintenance of order there. The German Conference
Empire, anxious to break up the new friendly relations be
tween England and France, Insisted upon independence for
Morocco, or international control. In March, 1905, the
Emperor visited the Sultan at Tangier "to make It known
that I am determined to do all In my power to safeguard

348 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
efficaciously the Interests of Germany in Morocco." The
result of this dramatic "rattling of the saber" was a general
conference on the Moroccan question held at Algeciras in
January, 1906. The work of the conference has an im
portant bearing upon European rivalries that were already
leading Europe toward a general war. The United States
was represented, and may even have caused the conference;
the newly acquired Interest in world politics was recognized
by the rest of the powers ; and the Administration recognized
the American share in the responsibility for international
peace. The first conference at The Hague adjourned in 1899 in
the hope that it might be followed by a second confer-
Second ence which should continue its discussion of the
Hague laws of war, the reduction of armaments, and
Conference ,,..,. . ,_, .
the arbitration of controversies. The court of
justice created by the conference was seldom used until the
United States appeared there as a litigant in the contro
versy with Mexico over the Pius fund, and induced the
European powers to bring thither their claims against
Venezuela. President Roosevelt determined in 1904 to
summon a second conference, and Hay issued a preliminary
note to that effect, but the Russo-Japanese War made the
date Inappropriate, while Russia indicated a desire to invite
the conference. Upon the signature of the Treaty of Ports
mouth, the Russian ambassador. Baron Rosen, brought up
the matter, with the result that on June 15, 1907, the
delegates convened at The Hague. Among the topics sug
gested for discussion the limitation of armaments was the
most important. England, just embarking upon the con
struction of the early dreadnaughts, was anxious to reach
some agreement to lessen the cost of the naval rivalry.
The American delegates, headed by Joseph H. Choate, were
ready to support this movement, but the continental powers
were found to be unwilling to entrust their safety to any
thing but their own armed forces. The Algeciras episode
intensified the French fear of German attack, while in Ger
many the military party was deliberately relying upon war

WORLD POWER 349
and conquest as a means of securing national advantage.
The American delegation presented the old American Ideal
of the exemption of private property from capture at sea.
The South American delegations supported the doctrine of
their publicist, Drago, that the forcible collection of pri
vate international debts must be forbidden.
The work of the second conference was summed up In
several conventions relating to the pacific settlement of
international disputes, the Drago doctrine, and the laws of
war. An attempt to create a real court of arbitral justice
was defeated by the inability of the conference to agree
upon the selection of its judges. It was determined to hold
a conference upon maritime warfare in the near future, and
to hold a third great conference at The Hague at a suitable
date. The naval conference was initiated by Great Britain in
1908 and convened in the following winter with ten naval
powers represented. The Declaration of Lon- j^^ oecla-
don that it formulated was proposed to the ration of
world in 1909 as an interpretation of the "gen
erally recognized principles of international law." Its
seventy articles covered blockade, contraband, unneutral
service, enemy character, and search. It was never rati
fied, even England withholding its formal approval, but it
was accepted as a statement of the general trend of inter
national maritime law.
Each year after 1900 the United States became more
closely involved in the intricacies of world politics, and
each year brought closer the date at which the United
States would be free from the restrictions placed upon its
policies by the lack of a waterway across the Isthmus of
Panama. The negotiations with England with reference
to the new canal were concluded in 1901 upon terms which
left the United States free to choose the means and meth
ods of construction. Immediately Hay took up with the
Republic of Colombia negotiations for the transfer of the
rights that were controlled by the French Canal Company
at Panama, and Congress took up the question of route

350 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
and method of construction. As the debate progressed in
Congress the advocates of a route by way of the San Juan
River and Lake Nicaragua came to open issue with the
friends of the Panama route, who were headed by Senator
Hanna and President Roosevelt. Unable to command a
vote in Congress for either route, it was agreed in June,
1902, that the President should have authority to select
the route.
Early in 1903 Hay signed with the Colombian Minister,
Herran, an agreement authorizing the United States to
take over the French concession at Panama, and to control
the zone through which the canal should run. There had
already been excitement and dismay among the owners of
the French company because of a recommendation from a
commission of engineers headed by Rear-Admiral John G.
Walker that the extortionate price demanded by the canal
company for its property made It preferable for the United
States to turn from Panama and build at Nicaragua.
The French company immediately discovered that forty
million dollars would be a suitable price instead of one
hundred and twenty millions. The Walker commission
changed Its recommendation accordingly, and the signa
ture of the Hay-Herran Treaty was regarded as removing
the last of the diplomatic obstacles. In the Senate, how
ever. Senator Morgan, of Alabama, who believed in the
Nicaragua route, led a filibuster that prevented ratification
in the current session. The President Immediately called a
special session of the Senate in March, 1903, at which the
Hay-Herran Treaty was ratified.
There was no satisfaction with the treaty in Colombia,
where the opponents of the Administration that had nego
tiated It charged variously that ten millions cash and an
annuity of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year
was not a sufficient price for the right of way; that it was
unconstitutional to grant the exclusive jurisdiction over
the canal zone involved in the treaty ; and that it was Presi
dent Marroquin's intention to appropriate the sum for pri
vate purposes rather than to turn it into the Treasury,

WORLD POWER 351
For one reason or another action by the Colombian Congress
was delayed throughout the summer of 1903, and that body
adjourned in the end of October permitting the treaty to
die without action.
While Colombia delayed to pledge herself with reference
to the canal, American opinion fretted, and the French
owners of the concession despaired, because In 1904 their
rights would lapse and the unfinished enterprise would re
vert to the ownership of Colombia in accordance with the
terms of their contract. In the autumn President Roosevelt
prepared a message for Congress recommending the seizure
of the canal zone by the United States on the ground that
the work contemplated was in the Interests of "collective
civilization." About the same time he wrote a private
letter expressing a wish that the State of Panama would
secede from Colombia and negotiate directly for the canal
rights, but declared that his official position debarred him
from acting toward this end.
The French Canal Company was already acting In the
same direction. Its agent, Bunau-VarUla, visited Washing
ton and learned that If public disorder arose on ^j^^
the isthmus, the United States would regard It Panama
as its duty under a treaty w;ith New Granada
(Colombia) of 1846 to Intervene to maintain order, even
though this intervention should restrain Colombia from
suppressing her insurgents. This was as much as the in
habitants of Panama desired. On November 3, 1903, a
quick and bloodless revolt took place, the Independence of
the isthmus was proclaimed, an American naval force pre
vented the landing of Colombian troops to put It down,
and Roosevelt's message advocating seizure became un
necessary. A few days later the Republic of Panama was
recognized at Washington, and by a treaty of November
18, 1903, conceded to the United States everything that
Colombia had refused.
Roosevelt continued until his death to defend the equity
of his treatment of Colombia. He acted immediately upon
the new condition created by the Panama treaty, and in

352 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the spring of 1904 began the work of actual construction of
Canal con- the canal. On the engineering side there was
struction sharp difference of opinion respecting the mer
its of a sea-level canal or one with locks. The latter type
was determined upon because of the less cost and shorter
period required for construction. The French company
had already done much of the preliminary excavation, but
had learned little about sanitation in the tropics. Its Euro
pean engineers and workmen had died Hke flies in the huts
along the route of the canal. The sanitary renovation
of the Zone was among the earliest of the American tasks
and In this Colonel Gorgas applied what had been learned
in Cuba, until the healthful conditions of the Zone became,
in the opinion of Sir Frederick Treves, a triumph for pre
ventive medicine.
The administrative control of construction was vex
atious because the task called for executive direction,
while Congress wished the control to be through a com
mission. One engineer after another resigned the task
until finally George W. Goethals, a major In the regular
army, was made chairman and chief engineer in 1907. The
rest of the members of the commission were appointed by
the President, subject to their promise never to disagree
with the chairman; by which means the commission was
turned into an executive agency. "Damn the law. I want
the canal built," Roosevelt is said to have remarked to
Goethals as he entrusted him with the task. Five times
before 1910 Taft went to Panama to inspect the progress
of the work of construction, and in 1906 Roosevelt himself
established a new precedent for Presidents by leaving the
territory of the United States In order to visit the work
that he had so vigorously advanced.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
James Brown Scott, The Hague Peace Conferences of i8gg and igo7
(1909), and William I. Hull, The Two Hague Conferences and their Contribu
tion to International Law (1908), contain a narrative of American participa
tion at The Hague. In the American Journal of International Law (1907-)
there may be found special articles on most aspects of current diplomatic

WORLD POWER 353
relations as well as texts of the basic documents. Joseph B. Bishop,
The Panama Gateway (1913), is a popular account. There are many
details in the writings of Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Panama: The Creation,
Destruction, and Resurrection (1914), and The Great Adventure of Panama
and its Relation to the World War (1920). Roosevelt's Autobiography is, of
course, of value, as well as Root's addresses which have been collected
under the title The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States (1916).

CHAPTER XXXVI
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
The Sixtieth Congress, the last of' the Roosevelt Adminis
tration, sat from 1907 to 1909. The acts passed and those
Political ^^^^ ^^ rejected Indicated clearly the trend of
manners, events within the Republican Party as the time
'^° approached for another presidential election.
The breach that had been healed in 1904, after the death
of Hanna, was now wide open, as "stand-pat" Repubheans
strove to bring about the nomination of a conservative
candidate, and to put an end to the period of executive
action and interference with business. Manners as well as
policies were involved In the breach. The aggressive as
surance of Roosevelt alienated his enemies and was trying
eyen to his friends. The rapidity with which he reached
decisions and acted upon them startled and embarrassed
many of his associates. The readiness with which he called
men liars and asserted that all honest men agreed with him
alienated within his own party many who would have
preferred to act in harmony with him.
The succession in 1908 was not complicated by any
prospect that Roosevelt would again be a candidate. Dur
ing the campaign of 1904 there had been much mild dis
cussion as to how he would stand with reference to the
national tradition against three terms. Technically his
first period as President was McKinley's term and not his
own. On election night, after enough returns were in to
indicate that his vote had run away from Judge Parker,
and that his election was assured, he voluntarUy answered
the question in these words: "On the 4th of March next I
shall have served three and a half years, and this three and
a half years constitutes my first term. The wise custom
which limits the President to two terms regards the sub
stance and not the form, and under no circumstances wiU

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 355
I be a candidate for or accept another nomination." Re
peatedly in the next four years he reiterated this announce
ment, and found the leaders of his party ready to take him
at his word.
For twelve years, by 1909, individual party leaders had
been submerged beneath the personalities of McKinley
and Roosevelt, and the rigor of party discipline. The en
thusiasm with which public opinion, regardless of parties,
approved the "Roosevelt policies" made it difficult for
other individuals than Roosevelt to command attention.
The list of possibilities discussed in the months preceding
the campaign reveals the diversity of opinion that had
developed within the dominant party.
The leading names among the "stand-pat" candidates
were Joseph G. Cannon, Charles W. Fairbanks, and Joseph
Benson Foraker. Cannon was now Speaker in Republican
his third term, and possessed a wide and homely 'waders
popularity together with the complete confidence of con
servative Republicans. Fairbanks was Vice-President, an
austere-appearing Indiana politician, who made no claim
to popularity and enjoyed none. Foraker, of Ohio, was
among the last of the spell-binders of the Civil War regime.
Belonging to the generation of Garfield, Hanna, and Mc
Kinley, Foraker saw himself for more than twenty years
within reach of national preferment and just missing it. His
hopes as a nominee of the available type were forcibly de
ferred when McKinley became the "advance agent of pros
perity" in the early nineties. When Hanna desired to enter
politics as Senator, Foraker found himself again forced to
step aside. In the fall of 1907 he formally announced his
candidacy, and announced himself as favoring the tariff
and the Independence of the Senate, and as opposing rail
way rate regulation and the liberal construction of the Con
stitution. Once more he found himself with ambitions
blocked by another Ohio leader, William Howard Taft.
Not a candidate himself. President Roosevelt was in a
position to throw the nomination nearly as he pleased. The
trend of politics made it easy for a President of Influence to

356 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
exert strong pressure on the National Convention. The
Republican Party maintained a political organization
throughout the South from which it neither expected nor
received electoral votes. In Republican administrations
the handful of Southern Republicans received their reward
in federal appointments. Roosevelt appears to have been
in conference on this theme on the first day of his presi
dency. Whether the Republican appointees were good or
bad, they could not be representative of the people among
whom they served, and when they elected themselves as
delegates to the national nominating convention, they
tended to bring into that body a block of votes subservient
to the President to whom they owed their jobs. With
these delegates to start with, and with a widd popular ap
proval of his policies, Roosevelt was able to block the hopes
of candidates whom he disliked and advance those of his
friends. Three names were most commonly mentioned as likely
to secure the support of the President, Charles Evans
Hughes Hughes, William Howard Taft, and Elihu Root
Taft, and whom Roosevelt regarded as the ablest man he
had known in public life. The reconstruction
of the War Department and the administrative organi
zation of the new colonies were accomplished by Root. As
Secretary of State he had taken over the difficult foreign
problems that were pending when John Hay surrendered
his portfolio. In the Orient he proved himself a firm and
tactful negotiator, reaching a general understanding with
Japan about her immigration into the United States and her
relations with China. In 1907 he visited the Latin-Ameri
can countries to interpret in a friendly way the position of
the United States and to moderate their suspicions that had
been stirred up by the Panama affair. But whatever his
strength, he was unavailable to receive presidential sup
port for the nomination. His whole life until 1899 had been
spent as a corporation lawyer In New York, and his business
affiliations were regarded as too vulnerable to permit him
to be nominated upon a Roosevelt platform. He accepted

iiiiiiii

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 357
instead election to the Senate from New York, entering
upon his term In 1909. The friends of Governor Charles
E. Hughes, of New York, hoped that he might receive presi
dential endorsement. Governor Hughes was a practicing
attorney in New York City when in 1905 he was called upon
to act as counsel for the Armstrong Committee of the New
York Legislature, appointed, to investigate the conduct and
management of the insurance companies. He speedily be
came the responsible director of the investigation, showing
unusual skill in extracting facts from reluctant witnesses,
and in uncovering the distasteful story of the intrigue of
business in politics. Before the investigation was com
pleted he was suggested as mayor of New York City, which
he declined to consider; but in 1906 he was nominated for
governor by a convention in which there was no delegate in
structed for him, and no partisan politician who desired
him. In the following election he defeated WiUiam Ran
dolph Hearst; and he took office with the magnates of his
party hostile to him. His career as governor made him a
marked national figure. No Republican had given more
convincing proof of his determination to establish the people
in control of their govemment and the government in con
trol of business malpractice. Roosevelt was unwilling to
support him for the nomination because he believed him
too independent of the party organization, and disliked his
tendency to play a lone hand.
WUliam Howard Taft was announced as Roosevelt's
choice In 1907. For nearly twenty years his career as an
administrator and judge had brought him into intimate
contact with two sides of government. A son of Judge
Alphonso Taft, of Cincinnati, who had sat in Grant's Cab
inet for a time, he had been an honor man at Yale and a
judge in the superior court of Ohio before Harrison made
him Solicitor-General in the Department of Justice at the
age of thirty-three. Before McKinley sent him to the PhU
ippines ten years later, Taft had lived in Washington and
had sat upon the federal bench. In the labor controversies
of the nineties he showed judicial courage in asserting the

358 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
powers of Government over the obstructions of organized
labor, and a little later his decisions brought the trusts
within the jurisdiction of the Sherman Act. Roosevelt
while Vice-President described him as a suitable governor
of the Philippines, asserting that that task called for all the
qualifications that would make a good President or a sound
Chief Justice. It was toward the Supreme Court that Taft's
own inclinations pointed, but he was forced twice to let
the opportunity go because of administrative duties In
hand in the islands or the War Department. Never did a
group of statesmen work more harmoniously than Roose
velt with Root and Taft. "Athos" and "Porthos" were
the nicknames of his favorite secretaries, used sometimes
in their Informal correspondence ; and it requires little imagi
nation to ascribe to Roosevelt the name of the hero of the
Three Musketeers — "D'Artagnan."
At times between 1905 and 1909 Taft was described as
the traveling secretary of the President because of the fre
quency with which he was sent to represent Roosevelt on
political missions, or to " sit on the lid" — a task for which
his figure seemed to make him singularly appropriate. He
was officially in charge of the American intervention in
Cuba, 1906-09; he often visited the Panama Canal to re
port on progress in construction; he carried on negotia
tions with the Vatican in Rome, made visits of courtesy
in Japan, and opened the Philippine Assembly in 1907.
As a presidential candidate he was doubly strong. He
had become an Intimate agent of the Roosevelt program
and a supporter of its policies, which made him acceptable
as a progressive leader. On the other hand, as judge and
administrator he had shown a firmness and a judicial tem
per that brought to him the confidence of those conserva
tives who thought Roosevelt too Impulsive. His candi
dacy was pushed persistently by the President as the date
for the Republican Convention approached, and accord
ing to the rumor among the -Washington correspondents,
the matter was clinched by asseverations from the White
House of "Taft or me."

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 359
The Republican nominations of 1908 were made at Chi
cago with Roosevelt in complete control of the convention.
The platform had been prepared in Washing- Taft and
ton and was given to the press even before the Sherman
convention met. Conservative Republicans found no op
portunity to organize their hostility to Roosevelt, and the
progressive Republicans had no chance to incorporate any
planks not acceptable to the President. Taft was nomi
nated on the first ballot; James Schoolcraft Sherman, a
conservative New York Republican, who had sat in nine
Congresses, was nominated as Vice-President. The friends
of Hughes were unable to make any Impression on the con
vention, and In the autumn Hughes was renominated and
reelected governor of New York.
Between the Republican and Democratic National Con
ventions Grover Cleveland died, on June 24, 1908. The
last eleven years of his life had carried him Into Death of
a position of dignity and popularity. He re- Cleveland
tired to Princeton upon leaving the White House in 1897
and there engaged in literary enterprises and public service.
The esteem which both parties denied him as President
came to him out of office. In 1904 there was even talk
among Democrats who especially feared Bryan of urging
him for another Democratic nomination. He gave no
countenance to this, however, and continued until the end
to be an unconventional, rugged, and honest adviser of
his fellow-countrymen.
At the Democratic Convention which met in Denver in
July, the Roosevelt policies were as popular as in the Re
publican Party. Many of the measures that had Bryan and
recently received executive approval were among ^^""n
those suggested or advocated by the Populists. The fig
ure of Bryan that had terrified the owners of property in
1896 had ceased entirely to alarm, and Bryan himself was
completely in control. The South and West were united
for him, and the opposition to his renomination among
Eastern Democrats was discredited by the fact that the
Tammany organization was against him. Judge Parker,

36o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the last candidate, was at the convention In command of
the conservative delegates, who were defeated and ignored
by the convention. Reporters who measured popularity
by noise noted that the Denver Convention applauded
Bryan for eighty-seven minutes, whereas the name of Roose
velt had received only forty-six minutes' applause at Chi
cago. John W. Kern, of Indiana, was nominated for Vice-
President. The minor parties of 1908 presented numerous and un
important tickets. William Randolph Hearst, a consist-
Third ent Democratic opponent of Bryan, formed his
parties own Independence Party, and nominated himself
for President. The Populist Party had nearly disappeared.
"You ask me what we are to do," wrote Thomas E. Watson
after he had received the Populist nomination for the presi
dency. "Frankly, I don't know. The Democratic Party is
chaotic ; the Republican Party is becoming so ; the Populist
Party is dead, and we are all at sea." A handful of former
Populists, still clinging to a hope of a union of agricultural
and industrial discontent, tried to form a new American
Party, and nominated Wharton Barker for the presidency,
but the American Party "died a-borning," wrote its vice-
presidential candidate, "Calamity" Weller, of Iowa. "The
only difficulty was we could not raise money enough to put
it on Its feet and keep it there until it could run the race
with decent and enticing respectability."
The Socialists renominated Eugene V. Debs, but ran an
unimportant third In the canvass, with 421,000 votes. The
effort of Its leaders to attract the vote of organized labor
was persistent. The New York Call, founded as a daily
May 30, 1908, with this in view. Interpreted the news of the
day from a Socialist slant. The Western Federation of
Miners had been captured by the Socialist leaders, but or
ganized labor in general followed the course urged by Sam
uel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor,
which was to support their friends, punish their enemies,
and keep out of politics as a body.
The point over which labor was fighting in 1908 was the

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 361
attitude of the courts toward strikes. For fifteen years,
since Debs was jailed for contempt in the Pull- Labor and
man strike of 1893, the practice had increased P°''tics
of forbidding, by injunction, acts that the unions regarded
as necessary. The sympathetic strike, boycott, and inter
ference with business by picketing and intimidation, were
at various times forbidden by this practice, and violators
of the injunctions, imprisoned for contempt of court, found
themselves with slight legal redress. Opposition to what
the unions described as government by injunction pervaded
the ranks of organized labor. Gompers himself was in
volved in contempt proceedings with the Supreme Court,
arising from the Buck Stove and Range Case. At Chicago
he appeared before the Republican Committee on Platform,
seeking an anti-Injunction plank, and was rebuffed. At
Denver he was better treated, and when the Democratic
Party included a protest against injunctions In its platform,
Gompers came out in support of Bryan and the Democratic
ticket, urging labor to follow him and reward its friends,
thus beginning a sort of alliance with the Democratic Party
that lasted until the World War.
The presidential canvass of 1908 was carried out In good
temper so far as the chief candidates were concerned.
Bryan, rehabilitated by Roosevelt's support of many of his
policies, contested with Taft as to which leader and party
might the better carry out the program upon which both
ostensibly agreed. "The time is ripe," he wrote, "for an
appeal to the moral sense of the nation ; the time Is ripe for
the arraignment of the plutocratic tendencies of the Repub
lican Party before the bar of public conscience; and the
Democratic Party was never in better position than now to
make this appeal."
No episode of the canvass was as sharp in a personal way
as Roosevelt's denunciation of Parker in 1904. An attempt
was made to discredit Taft as a Unitarian, which was re
buked by a letter from Roosevelt upon religion and politics
that silenced those who were trying to inject denomina
tional theology jnto the canapaign. An attempt to niake

362 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
political capital out of a casual remark by Taft with refer
ence to General Grant was equally unsuccessful. A forged
letter bearing the signature of Grover Cleveland, and an
nouncing his preference for Taft over Bryan, aroused a
ripple of Interest, but had no result. Only Hearst suc
ceeded in diverting public attention to irrelevant matters.
In the middle of September, while Hearst was campaign
ing for himself as a candidate of the Independence Party, he
read into his speeches letters that some one had stolen from
the files of the Standard Oil Company. However he got
them, they cut Into both great parties alike. HaskeU, the
Oklahoma member of the Democratic National Committee
and its treasurer, was shown to have had such business
relations with the Standard OU Company as to prevent his
further use by a party that denounced monopoly. J. B.
Foraker, of Ohio, one of the Stalwart Republican con
testants for the nomination, was similarly caught in the
exposure. Foraker maintained with angry Insistence the
correctness of his relation, and It was a commonplace that
he had never even pretended to desire Government control
over business; but he, too, speedily retired from public life.
The public temper that the muckrakers had produced and
that the Roosevelt attacks upon the habits of business had
intensified, was dominant in both parties. Whether noting
for Taft or Bryan, the bulk of the voters desired a further
extension of the policies of Government control.
Taft and Sherman were chosen in an election that re
vealed an unusual amount of independent voting. Demo-
Election cratic governors were elected In four of the States
of Taft |-]^^^ ^jjg Republican ticket carried for the presi
dency. The signs indicated that neither party organi
zation retained its usual control over the loyalty of its
members. Only the "Solid South" remained thoroughly
regular. Here the process of disfranchising the negro by
constitutional amendment was brought near to completion
when Georgia, In October, 1908, adopted a suffrage amend
ment establishing a new educational qualification for the
franchise that barred most negroes. The Dernocratic Party

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 363
continued In complete control of the Southern vote. Such
political debates as there were were restricted to the pri
maries of that party. On election day the outcome was
known In advance, and only a handful of voters cast their
ballots. The main issue in the election was the relative respon
sibility of Taft or Bryan.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The autobiographical writings of Foraker, Roosevelt, La Follette, and
Mrs. Taft throw considerable light upon the period 1905-10, which re
mains, withal, without much source material apart from the current peri
odical literature, the usual Government reports, and the Congressional
Record.

CHAPTER XXXVII
THE PARTY PLEDGE
' ' Never before in our time has the entry of a new President
into office marked so slight a break politically between the
present and the past," said the New York Tribune, as It
commented upon the installation of Judge Taft on March
4, 1909. The new Administration was regarded as a con
tinuation of the old, and Taft in his inaugural frankly
accepted the duty of upholding the policies of Roosevelt.
He pledged himself to bring forward as soon as possible
amendments to the Sherman Act for the improvement of
public control over trusts, and officially announced his in
tention to call the Sixty-First Congress — the eighth con
secutive Republican Congress — in an early special session
to revise the tariff. There was no denunciation in his
message, but through it there ran the belief that the work
ahead would call for creative and constructive legislation of
the highest order.
Roosevelt left Washington for Oyster Bay Immediately
after the inaugural ceremony, creating a new precedent
Departure by not returning to the White House with his
of Roosevelt successor. The ceremonies themselves, held in
the Senate Chamber because of a heavy storm, were of
necessity simple In character, and the throngs of visitors and
attendant governors with their trains found their oppor
tunities for display curtailed. The last days of the preced
ing Administration had been turbulent, with Congress in
dignant at Roosevelt, and with an unseemly discussion of
governmental practices emphasizing the fact that for the
time being Roosevelt's hold over the pohticians of his party
had been broken. There was a new temper in Washington
politics from the date of the inauguration, while Colonel
Roosevelt in Oyster Bay kept his hands off the policies of
Taft, and tested the camping outfit with which he proposed

THE PARTY PLEDGE 365
shortly to hunt big game in Africa. Not until the summer
of 1910 was it possible for politicians to get his ear. He
plunged into the jungle with the parting statement that
any interview purporting to reveal his views might safely
be regarded as untrue.
The Taft Cabinet was dominated by careful lawyers.
Philander C. Knox, formerly Attorney-General and now
Senator from Pennsylvania, resigned his seat to become
Secretary of State. Two members of the outgoing Cabi
net were retained, Meyer, who was transferred from the
Post-Office to the Navy, and James Wilson, who had been
Secretary of Agriculture for three Administrations. As
Postmaster-General Taft appointed Frank H. Hitchcock,
chairman of the Republican National Committee, and
manager of his campaign. Hitchcock, like Cortelyou, had
risen in the civil service and gained preferment by attract
ing the attention of the President.
Before Congress met in its special session on March 15,
1909, there had been comment as to whether It would be
practicable for it to perform the tasks expected of It. At
no time had the liberal Republicans controlled the organi
zation of the House of Representatives. Cannon, Speaker
since 1903, had the full confidence of the "stand-pat"
group, among which the demand for tariff revision and
trust control had made slight impression. The effect of the
agitation of the last eight years was to arouse popular ex
pectations, but also to stimulate the opposition of Interests
that had something to lose by the new policies. A little had
been done In the control of corporations, and Government
authority had been widely extended in new fields, but the
basic laws were still to be constructed and enacted.
From 1880 until 1896 the Republican Party became more
and more completely a party of protection. Leaders like
Hanna frankly demanded campaign contribu- Tariff
tions commensurate with the profits that manu- revision
facturers expected to get. In 1888 one of the rare cam
paigns with a real issue sharply separating the parties was
fought over the tariff; and when pubhc Interest drifted

366 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
toward currency problems in the nineties, Hanna kept the
party organization true to the tariff. McKinley as Presi
dent broadened his view of world problems, and came to
appreciate, what James G. Blaine had clearly seen, that
the Chinese wall of the protective tariff acts as a restriction
upon foreign trade. In his last public speech at Buffalo,
at the exposition In honor of the Pan-American idea, he
urged the adoption of a liberal policy of reciprocity.
Other reasons than those of foreign trade weakened the
hold of protection upon the Republican Party in the next
eight years. The farmers of the Middle West reverted to
their old belief that tariffs helped the manufacturer more
than the farmer. In the McKinley Bill there had been a
deliberate attempt to satisfy this feeling by Including a
schedule on agricultural imports, but since agricultural im
ports were then and continued to be relatively unimportant,
the concession failed to stop the anti-tariff drift. About
1900 the tariff was connected with the idea of monopoly.
The belief spread that special tariff privileges lay at the
foundation of big business, and one of the magnates of the
Sugar Trust openly called the tariff the "mother of trusts."
In 1902 the "Iowa idea," to the effect that tariff rates
ought to be reduced, started a reaction against the tariff
that was continuous thereafter. In Wisconsin and Minne
sota it took root, and its advocates made common cause
with other local leaders who desired to convert the party
organization into a more active agent against the trusts.
Between 1902 and 1904 Roosevelt showed that he was at
tracted by the idea of tariff revision, but after the death of
Hanna he made temporary peace with the conservatives
and thereafter had little to say about tariff revision except
that, as his second term advanced, he indicated that it
would be a task for his successor.
The Republican Convention of 1908 pledged the next
Administration to a revision of the tariff. In the canvass.
Judge Taft took the pledge seriously and 'promised not only
a revision, but a revision downward. Between election
and inauguration he visited Washington to confer with the

THE PARTY PLEDGE 367
party leaders and to urge that the Committee on Ways and
Means begin the gathering of materials for a tariff revision
to be handed over to the new committee after the 4th of
March. In November tariff hearings began, and before
Roosevelt went out of office a draft had been prepared in
secrecy, and was nearly ready to be introduced in the new
Congress. Whether or not it could be introduced was prob
lematical until after the organization of the lower house.
A group of Republican Congressmen had already started a
revolt against the Speaker, the rules, and the party policy,
and there were enough of these insurgents to control the or
ganization of the House if they could induce the Democrats
to work with them. They failed in this attempt, and Can
non was nominated by the Republican caucus and reelected.
A little later, when they opposed the readoption of the
House rules, enough Eastern Democrats voted with the Re
publicans to insure the maintenance of the old policy. A
conservative Speaker appointed Sereno E. Payne chair
man of the Committee on Ways and Means, and the latter
introduced a tariff bill on the third day of the session.
The original bill was somewhat better than the tariff re
visionists had dared to hope for, and passed the House after
three weeks of debate. Its content was, how- -pj^^ payne-
ever, unimportant, since the Senate proposed to Aldrich
rewrite it entirely, and Senator Nelson W. Aldrich
kept the Committee on Finance in almost continuous ses
sion to deliberate upon the Senate proposals. The bill went
to the Senate on April 9, and was ready for debate by the
end of the month. It had become in the meantime a maxi
mum tariff with numerous rates increased and with a tariff
board provided for the continuous study of tariff sched
ules. The bill passed the Senate in July with ten Insurgent
Republicans voting against it, among whom Beverldge,
Cummins, DoUiver, and La Follette were the most out
spoken. In the judgment of the Outlook, the Senate had
betrayed the party faith.
Until the Payne-Aldrich tariff was sent to conference in
July President Taft refrained from interference with the

368 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
processes of legislation. His view of the powers of the re
spective branches of government led him to abstain from
intervention. He began to take a hand only in the last
stages of the bill, when there appeared possible both a dead
lock between the houses and a failure of the hope of down
ward revision. Speaking at the Yale Commencement, he
asserted that the country would hold the party to a strict
accountability should the tariff faU. President Taft signed
the Payne-Aldrich BiU on August 5, 1909. When Roose
velt returned and became aware of what had been done,
he thought the tariff "better than the last [the Dingley
Bill] and considerably better than the one before the last
[WUson BUl]. " In the closing debate Taft succeeded in en
larging the free list of raw materials, and the Outlook, one of
the severest critics of the bill in its early stages, thought it
in its final form ' ' by far the most enlightened protectionist
measure ever enacted in the history of the country. "
It had been passed in the bright glare of publicity, with
insurgent members of both houses pointing out what they
Income Tax construed as its defects, and with journalists
Amendment trained In the technic of muckraking, exploiting
the iniquities of the measure. It included as novelties free
trade for the Philippines, which was close to the heart of the
President, and a tax on corporation incomes. This latter
measure marked a stage in the rehabilitation of Populism.
The Supreme Court decision of 1894, which declared un
constitutional the Income tax provision of the Wilson Bill,
enraged the Populists, who believed it to be a corrupt de
fense of privilege and wealth, and the constitutional amend
ment safeguarding the income tax became their immediate
demand. In a special message of June 16 Taft advocated a
tax on the income of corporations as likely to be regarded as
constitutional, and in the ensuing debates the tax was in
corporated, and a new amendment to the constitution was
agreed upon. The new amendment, proposed on July 12,
1909, received the requisite consent of three fourths of
the States, and was proclaimed in 191 3. It authorized
Congress "to lay and coUect taxes on incomes from what-

THE PARTY PLEDGE 369
ever source derived" and silenced permanently objections
founded upon limitation in the taxing power.
The insurgent Senators voted "no" upon the final pas
sage of the tariff bill, and hurried home to tell their constit
uents that the party pledge had been violated Rise of
and that the tariff was another victory for priv- '"^"rgents
ilege. The discontent that they voiced and stimulated
was so pronounced that Taft took a speaking trip to defend
the measure as a compliance with the pledge. He trav
eled sixteen thousand miles in vain. Speaking at Winona,
Minnesota, September 17, he made a thoroughgoing de
fense of the bill without convincing his Western critics.
The insurgent movement was centered in the upper Missis
sippi Valley, and accepted the explanation of its local lead
ers rather than that of the President. Instead of satisfying
his audiences that the tariff was wise and fair, he convinced
them that he had aUied himself with the "stand-pat" group,
and that Cannon and Aldrich, Penrose and Murray Cran^,
were to dominate his policies instead of those Republicans
who had avowed and shown their zeal for correcting the
abuses in trade and politics. The Insurgents began to ask
what would happen to the Roosevelt policies with such a
President. The Western speeches of the President were not confined
to tariff matters. Repeatedly as opportunity offered he
renewed his statement of determination to carry out the
policies of his predecessor, and discussed the question of
conservation In its various aspects. The difference between
the temper of Taft and that of Roosevelt greatly affected
their treatment of all administrative problems, and par
ticularly one like conservation that was founded thus far
chiefly in executive judgment. At the Conservation Con
ference in December, 1908, Taft alluded to the problem as
lying in the twilight zone of federal jurisdiction. In Roose
velt's view the twilight zone belonged to him, and he re
garded himself as warranted in doing anything In the public
interest that was not forbidden by some specific law. His
withdrawal of lands from entry had been based upon his

370 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
belief that they ought to be conserved rather than upon any
stated authority to conserve them. Taft approached simi
lar problems and believed himself excluded from the twilight
zone except as Congress directed him to enter it. He
searched thtt statute books for laws conferring authority
while Roosexdt searched to see If there were prohibitions.
The normd consequence of such difference in temper was
ditterence in conduct that showed itself now that Taft was
responsible for presidential policies, and It necessarily made
him appear to be allied with those who obstructed Govern
ment control.
Before leaving his summer home at Beverly, Massachu
setts, for his Western trip, it became necessary for President
The Bal- Taft to Straighten out a controversy involving
linger con- problems of Conservation. The Secretary of the
Interior, Richard A. Ballinger, had served as
Commissioner of the General Land Office under Roosevelt.
His policies as Secretary failed to meet the expectations of
the conservationists. Gifford Pinchot, of the Forestry Serv
ice, openly attacked him in the early summer because of his
policies respecting water-power sites and coal lands. The
controversy involved both policies and opinions, and was
the more difficult to settle because Pinchot was In the
Department of Agriculture and not under the control of
Ballinger. Only by the direct intervention of the President
could action be obtained. The attack on Ballinger was
founded upon specific charges made by one of his employees
named Glavls. A memorandum prepared for the President
and supporting the Secretary, although not passing judg
ment upon the merits of particular claims, was signed by
Taft In September. Glavis was dismissed from the Gov
ernment service, and persuaded his friends that he was
made a victim because of his activity in the public interest.
On November 13, 1909, he published in Collier's Weekly
"The Whitewashing of Ballinger."
Before Congress met, the friends of conservation were
engaged in a vigorous attack upon Ballinger as a servant of
the trusts and monopolies that were endeavoring to steal

THE PARTY PLEDGE 371
the public domain. A joint committee was appointed on
January 26 to Investigate the administration of the Depart
ment of the Interior. It ultimately filed a report upholding
the administration of the department, but the controversy
had grown from the limited field of conservation to the
broader one of general politics. Gifford PinehxDt had con
tinued his open attacks upon Ballinger and his policies.
He carried his fight until It involved a matter of adminis
trative discipline. In the early winter he wrote a letter to
Senator DoUIver in violation of a rule forbidding subordi
nates to carry on direct correspondence with Congress in
such cases. He believed the Secretary of Agriculture had
authorized him to write the letter, but when Secretary
Wilson denied having given the authority there remained no
other course than to treat it as a breach of discipline. Taft
dismissed Pinchot on January 7, 1910, and precipitated
thereby a party crisis in the face of approaching Congres
sional elections.
So far as conservation was concerned, there was room for
more than one opinion. The legal authority for as vigorous
a program as Roosevelt had carried out was ^he West
dubious at best. President Taft appealed in and conser-
defense of conservation, with every appearance
of sincerity, but his acts failed to satisfy the conserva
tionists, and the difference of opinion was seized upon by
the insurgents who were already disposed to believe that
he had abandoned the progressive cause to ally himself with
the "stand-pat." By 1910 another point of view had de
veloped with reference to conservation. In many respects
the policy was an Eastern policy for Western problems.
Local opinion in the West had always favored the speedy
development of the public domain. Western States in
vited Irrigation works, but looked askance at national
forests forever removed from State management or tax
ation, and objected to withdrawal of lands from entry.
The selfish interests that desired to appropriate national
resources found it possible to stir up a genuine Western
objection to a national policy that hindered local develop-

372 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ment. BaUInger had the Far Western point of view, while
Taft, his chief, had the legalistic mind. Of necessity their
conduct in conservation failed to meet the expectation of
the scientific conservationists. The dismissal of Pinchot
brought conservation into the field of active politics. Be
fore his dismissal he had already written of the controversy
to Colonel Roosevelt at Khartoum, and in the early spring
of 1910 he crossed the Atlantic to meet him at Porto
Maurizio as he traveled north from Africa. The friends
of conservation, thinking themselves deceived by the Ad
ministration, turned to the ex-President, the founder of
the movement, for leadership and comfort, while in Con
gress the insurgent Republicans as well as the Democrats
made the most of the Payne-Aldrich tariff and the Bal
linger- Pinchot controversy as proof that the conservatives
had gained control of the Administration.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
F. A. Ogg, National Progress (1917), gives a careful narrative of events
after 1907. Other works of special interest on this period are Frank J.
Goodnow, Social Reform and the Constitution (191 1); Nicholas Murray
Butler, Why Should we Change our Form of Government (1912) ; Herbert
Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909) ; and Paul L. Haworth, America
in Ferment (1915). The writings of Tarbell and Taussig continue usefui
upon the tariff. The insurgent point of view is best represented by
Collier's Weekly, 1909-10. The report of the investigating committee on
the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy is printed as 6ist Cong., 2d Sess., Sen.
Doc. 248.

CHAPTER XXXVIII
INSURGENCY
The differences of principle and the personal grievances
that had been suppressed or overridden by the dominating
personality of Roosevelt broke out in open war- insurgent
fare before Taft met his first Congress. While revolt
the Committee on Ways and Means was drafting its tariff
schedules in secrecy, a group of dissenters became openly
insurgent against the policies of the party, and let It be
known that there would be a test of strength in the organ
ization of the Sixty- First Congress. From this time until the
end of the Administration the insurgents held the center of
the political stage. Most of their members came from the
upper Mississippi Valley with the States that had harbored
the Granger movement now most active in revolt. In the
Senate their leaders had little chance for effective action,
since there were almost twice as many Republicans as
Democrats In that body, and the votes of men like Cum
mins, Beverldge, and La Follette were not needed to make
a majority. In the House, however, of the three hundred
and ninety-one members the Republicans at best had a
majority of under fifty, while the insurgents claimed to
control between twenty and thirty votes, and it was always
possible that by uniting with the Democratic minority they
might break the Republican control. Attempts were made
in March, 1909, to defeat Cannon for reelection, and these
constituted the first formal action of the insurgents.
The fundamental Insurgent claim was that machine poli
tics had usurped the control of the national parties, and had
defrauded the people of the right of self-govern- Attack on
ment. The most visible agent of this domi- Cannon
nance was the Speaker of the House of Representatives,
whose power had steadily grown more autocratic since
Thomas B. Reed had led in the revision of the rules in 1890.

374 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The large membership of the House and the short average
tenure of its members Inherently weakened it as a machine
for doing public business. On the floor and in the commit
tee rooms most of the members were usually new and in
experienced in the mechanism of government. The small
proportion who had sat in two or three preceding Con
gresses acquired a power of leadership based upon knowing
the ropes that was often far In excess of their right to leader
ship. The Speaker was in control of his party in the House.
He appointed all committees and these committees drafted
the rules and statutes that the House enacted. He con
trolled the floor for purposes of debate, and by withholding
recognition from private speakers ; or by collusion as to who
should be recognized, he was able to silence individuals or
factions. Few members of Congress had personal grievances
against Joseph G. Cannon, but all the Insurgent leaders
believed that his power was so exercised as to prevent
interference with the legislative policies of conservative
Republicans. The revolt had been long impending. A
dozen Republicans voted against Cannon's reelection, and a
larger number voted against the readoption of the rules of
the House that placed the entire control of committee poli
cies in his hands. In the ensuing debate over the Payne-
Aldrich tariff the insurgents' grievance over the mechanics
of party control was heightened by their hostility to the
tariff that was passed. In both houses ominous groups
voted against the final passage of the bill. When the
administrative quarrel between Ballinger and Pinchot
arose, and Taft most needed the support and confidence
of his party, the insurgent Republicans were indisposed to
grant it.
The reform program looked toward a revival of essential
democracy by making government more responsive to the
Program people. In the management of party conven-
of reforms tlons there had been personal grievances and
violations of principle over a long term of years. Candi
dates for office were nominated by party conventions,
while the delegates to these conventions were selected in

INSURGENCY 375
other conventions or caucuses in which few voters partici
pated and over which the influence of the political boss
could easily be exerted. It was natural for defeated as
pirants to feel that they suffered because of improper ob
structions of the public will, and to regard themselves as
entitled to more support than they received. It was also
true that the managers of parties and conventions strove
to have their business cut and dried, their slates framed in
the interest of party harmony, and their own conclusions
ratified without protest. Roosevelt had in 1908 helped to
draft the statement of party principles that was released
for publication before the convention that was to adopt it
had assembled.
The control of conventions was by no means the only
grievance of the insurgents. They declared that legislative
bodies, city councUs, State legislatures, and even Congress
itself, responded more quickly to the wUl of professional
politicians and big business than to the voice of the people,
which they claimed to represent. Their complaint resem
bled that of the Populist Party in whose early platforms
there had been accumulated similar charges of misgovern-
ment as well as proposals for fundamental reform. The
initiative and the referendum were words that became
known in America,n politics through the discussions of the
Populist period. With the referendum the United States
was entirely familiar, since it habitually submitted consti
tutions and their amendments to ratification by popular
vote. These ideas had been taken up by young Republi
can leaders as the Populists lost their grip. A few Western
States made provision for initiating laws by popular action,
as well as for calling a referendum upon legislative acts.
The system seemed to promise relief from boss control.
The tendency of conventions to override movements of
protest revived another mechanical reform, advocated by
Senator La Follette and his Middle-Western friends. The
direct primary as a means of making nomination for office
was only an elaboration of the principle of the Initiative, but
it went further in that its advocates proposed to do away

376 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
with the convention itself. Twice in Wisconsin, in 1896
and 1898, La Follette believed that conventions, because
of the corrupt influence of railroad politicians, defrauded
the party of Its desire to nominate him for governor. His
project for a national system of direct primaries for nomi
nating to all offices Including the presidency, was advanced
in 1897. In New York Governor Hughes was fighting for a
similar reform in 1909, and numerous States had extended
their election laws to control party behavior in making
party nominations. The demand for a direct primary
arose from a situation that the Nation in 1896 described as
"the product of thirty years of government by intrigue,
concealment, and bribery."
Another of the Populist reforms, the direct election of
Senators, received the approval of the Insurgents and was
advanced by the election of a Senator from Illinois in 1909.
William Lorlmer was then elected Senator after a long
struggle at Springfield in the course of which it was charged
that bribery had contributed to the result. Lorlmer was a
man of exemplary personal habits, and had made so many
strong friendships while in the lower house that the scandal
of his election was the more notorious. The system Itself
not only made it possible for corrupt influences to purchase
an election, but also to bring deadlock to the government
of a great State while its legislature neglected public affairs
in order to wrangle over a Senator at Washington. After
a long and bitter investigation, Lorlmer was expelled; and
insurgent Senators, Bristow and Borah, utilized the scandal
to urge the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The amendment was proclaimed in 1913 and placed the
election of Senators in the hands of the voters themselves.
The dismissal of Pinchot from the Government service
and the resulting investigation of the Interior Department,
Change in which was forced through the House by a com-
House rules blnatlon of Democratic and insurgent votes, gave
the cue for renewed effort by the insurgents to control the
party. Twenty-four of them signed a public statement
that the "object of the so-called insurgent movement in the

INSURGENCY 377
national House of Representatives is to bring about such
a revision of the present arbitrary rules under which the
business of the House Is carried on as will restore the prin
ciple of representative government without interfering with
the expedition of the public business." Under the leader
ship of George W. Norris, of Nebraska, they prepared an
amendment to the House rules, taking the appointment of
the Committee on Rules away from the Speaker, making it
elective by the House itself, and disqualifying the Speaker
from membership upon it. On March 17, 19 10, they sprung
their plot against Cannon, who exhausted all the parliamen
tary devices to delay a roll-call; but after thirty hours of
continuous debate the insurgent-Democratic combination
broke the power of the Speaker.
It was the hope of the opposition that it broke the power
of the Republicans as well. For the first time since free
silver split the Democratic Party was there a real hope of
Democratic success. Democrats made the most of the in
ability of Taft to dominate his party. They conspired with
the Insurgents and attacked the Administration. "For
the first time in the history of the country a President of
the United States has openly proclaimed himself the friend
of thieves and the enemy of honest men," wrote Henry
Watterson in the Louisville Courier- Journal for the inspi
ration of his Democratic associates.
With his own party debating the sincerity of his accept
ance of progressive ideas. President Taft had difficulty In
guiding a program of constructive legislation
through Congress. The revision of the tariff trative
was the only important work of his first session, ^^"ff"^^^^ °^
In the winter of 1909-10 he called the attention
of Congress to the need for further railroad regulation, for
additional amendments to the Sherman Anti-Trust Law,
and for special statutes defining the power of the President
in the twUIght zone of conservation. In this last field Con
gress removed the uncertainty with reference to the power
of the President to withdraw lands of the public domain
from entry, pending final determination as to their use.

378 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Roosevelt had acted freely in this direction without specific
authority. Taft now withdrew coal lands until at the end
of his Administration 58,863,785 acres of these had been
safeguarded in this way. The forest areas were increased.
The vacancy in the Forestry Service caused by the dismissal
of Gifford Pinchot was filled by the appointment of Henry
S. Graves, head of the Yale School of Forestry. The Bu
reau of Mines was created In the Department of the In
terior and shortly came under the direction of Van H. Man
ning, and received new powers for the scientific study of
mineral resources.
The progress made in the field of conservation was par
alleled by progress toward the completion of statehood for
all the United States. The admission of Okla-
Admission . . i i ji r i i-
of Arizona homa in 1907 marked the final disappearance
Mexico^ from the map of the old Indian Country. At
one stage In the proceedings with reference to
Oklahoma, an omnibus bill had been brought forward for
the division of the Territory into two States instead of one,
and for the enabling at the same time of the last remaining
Territories of the American Desert, Arizona and New Mex
ico. The stubborn opposition of Senator Beverldge to the
admission of Indian Territory except as a single State held
back the admission of any of the last group for several
years. The people of Arizona and New Mexico, caught in
the political entanglement with which they had no concern,
protested in vain, but procured no relief until 1910. Their
territorial status had lasted for fifty years, beginning when
New Mexico was made a Territory as a part of the Com
promise of 1850. The slow-going Mexican population of
the valley of the Rio Grande showed little disposition to
expand or grow. In 1863 discoveries of gold near the Col
orado River and the rediscovery of silver mines in the valley
of the Santa Cruz brought about the partition of New Mex
ico and the creation of Arizona. Whenever statehood was
discussed thereafter, these two Territories were included as
a part of the general problem. The Southern Pacific and
the Atchison, Topeka & Santa F6 built across them with-

INSURGENCY 379
out greatly affecting their development, but toward the
end of the century the progress of Irrigation and the rise of
large-scale mining, in which numerous company towns were
established, gave to Arizona a quickened appearance that
pointed toward speedy admission. In 1910 when they were
enabled, Arizona had a population of 204,354; New Mexico
of 327.301.
Under their enabling acts the Territories made rapid
progress, and both were admitted by proclamation of the
President in 191 2. Arizona was some weeks later than New
Mexico because of interference by President Taft that was
Interpreted as throwing light upon his attitude toward
the progressive movement. Like most constitutional con
ventions, the Arizona body was offered all of the modern
reforms and accepted many of them. One device, the recall
of judges, aroused In general more opposition than any of
the other mechanical reforms, and was widely attacked as
striking at the Independence and honesty of the judiciary.
President Taft never forgot his training as a judge, and de
clined to Issue a proclamation certifying the admission of
Arizona until the Territory had amended its projected con
stitution by excising the objectionable recall of judges.
Congress supported him in this and the Territory bowed to
the inevitable; but once admitted it flaunted Its Independ
ence of the President and Congress by amending its con
stitution and restoring the offending article.
Alaska was given full territorial organization in 1913.
Since its acquisition In 1867 it had been governed arbitrarily
and had been in continuous danger of exploita- Alaska
tion. Its coal lands aroused the interest of spec- Territory
ulators, whose attempts to secure control of them precipi
tated the attack upon Ballinger. There was need for rail
road development, whose control was tied up with that of
the natural resources, and whose execution was undertaken
by the United States Itself in the next Administration.
The program of railroad legislation included an extension
of the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission, an
enlargement of its jurisdiction to Include terminals, tele-

38o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
graph, telephone, and cable services, and the creation of a
Railroad new federal court for the special purpose of de-
Act of 1910 termining appeals arising from the orders of the
Commission. On June 18, 1910, Taft signed the Mann-
Elklns Act for these purposes after a prolonged debate
between the insurgent advocates of rigorous control and
conservative opposition to any control. Senator Cummins,
the head of the insurgents in this matter, with the support
of insurgent and Democratic votes, forced the adoption of
amendments until, in its final passage, the bill was an ac
ceptable compromise. Its commerce court was a distinct
novelty. Heretofore, cases arising out of public control
of the railroads had been long drawn out because of the
crowded condition of the judicial docket or had involved
technical matters in transportation economics that many
federal judges were unfitted to determine. The new panel
of circuit judges that made up the commerce court was
expected both to expedite decisions and to specialize In
railroad problems. The long and short haul clause of the
original Interstate Commerce Act was restated and placed
in the discretionary control of the Interstate Commerce
Commission. The bill retained the progress of 1906 and
made new advances toward national control.
A Postal Savings Act, long advocated by reformers and
included in the old Populist program, was passed in 1910,
and In due time turned every post-office into a savings
bank. The appropriation of a special fund for economic
studies in the tariff schedules made a new step toward
the adoption of a scientific basis for tariff legislation. The
debates over the Taft measures of 1910 were confused by
the rancorous controversy between the conservative and
insurgent Republicans. Their final passage was obscured
Return of by the fact that on June 18 Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt landed at New York to receive an ovation that
indicated the strong hold that he retained upon the Ameri
can people. The Roosevelt tour of 1909-10 began with a
hunting trip in eastern Africa. The expedition was chiefiy
scientific in its nature and was partly financed by friends of

INSURGENCY 381
the National Museum in Washington, to which institution
the trophies were presented when the naturalists returned.
When the hunt was over Roosevelt proceeded down the
Nile to Khartoum, and then to Cairo and Alexandria. He
crossed to Italy and paid a round of visits at the courts
of Europe, received everywhere as the most distinguished
American citizen, with honors usually accorded only to
royalty. At Christiania he delivered his Nobel address,
and In Paris, Berlin, Oxford, and London spoke upon
politics and letters. While in London he was appointed
special ambassador to represent the United States at the
funeral of Edward VII. He returned to Oyster Bay to
receive the visit of politicians of all shades of opinion and
to hear their tales of the events during his absence.
In August Colonel Roosevelt started West upon a speak
ing trip with his main objective at Osawatomie, Kansas,
where he had agreed to speak on the memory "NewNa-
of John Brown. Here as elsewhere he avoided tionahsm"
aligning himself against the Administration or expressing
an opinion as to whether it had upheld his policies, but he
gave a name to the movement in which the insurgents were
engaged when he spoke of the "New Nationalism" that
must be brought into the United States Government In
order to enable it to cope with the problems of industrial
life. He preferred to find his legal authority for the work
In the existing Constitution, but demanded the amendment
of the Constitution if necessary. The antipathies that
conservative Republicans had developed toward him in
1909 were revived with Increased intensity as he advocated
fundamental changes. He showed his power in September
by crowding Vice-President Sherman out of the chairman
ship of the New York Republican Convention; and entered
vigorously Into the New York canvass for Henry L. Stimson
as governor. The defeat of Stimson in November was in
terpreted as the work of conservatives to give Roosevelt a
lesson, but was more Intimately a part of the Democratic
gain due to the Republican split.
The Sixty-Second Congress, elected on November 8, 1910,

382 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
was under Democratic control after eight Congresses of
Republican ascendancy. It was the consequence of Re
publican collapse rather than of Democratic leadership.
Antagonism to the Payne-Aldrich tariff weakened the Re
publican vote, while the insurgent controversy gave op
portunity for individual Democrats to gain office. Each
faction blamed the other for the party losses, but the
Democrats interpreted their victory as a precursor of a
greater victory in 191 2. A renewed interest in the person
ality of Democratic leaders was bom and drew attention
to the successful governors in 1910, Harmon, of Ohio, DIx,
of New York, and Wilson, of New Jersey.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Charles R. Van Hise, Conservation of the Natural Resources of the United
States (1910), is a study in the basic problems of conservation by an
economic geologist. Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism (1910),
contains the Osawatomie speech in which the new phrase was coined.
Frederic C. Howe, Wisconsin, an Experiment in Democracy (1912); and
Charles McCarthy, The Wisconsin Ideal (1912), are enthusiastic descrip
tions of the workings of the movement in the Northwest, while some of its
larger aspects are covered in Edward A. Ross, Changing America (1912),
and Walter E. Weyl, The New Democracy (1912). Benjamin DeWitt,
The Progressive Movement (1915), gives a retrospect after the crest of
insurgency was passed. James J. Hill, The Highways of Progress (1910),
is a capitalist's support of conservation. A valuable report on campaign
contributions is "Testimony before a Sub-Committee of the Senate Com
mittee on Privileges and Elections," published by the 62d Cong., 3d Sess.

CHAPTER XXXIX
THE PROGRAM OF PEACE
The progress of excavation and construction in the Canal
Zone brought the Isthmus of Panama into ever greater
importance as the geographic center of American diplo
macy. Roosevelt eliminated the foreign obstructions and
headed off the possibility of German rivalry in the Carib
bean. The work of excavation was well advanced when
he left office in 1909 after reviewing the home-coming
American fleet. His demonstration of naval power and
diplomatic intention smoothed the way for his successor.
Taft found only those obstructions that were inherent in
the engineering problem and the temper of the Latin-
American neighbors around the Caribbean. The Roose
velt policy of swinging the "big stick" had warned off
interlopers, but had increased the suspicion of the United
States in South and Central America. Both Root and
Knox had this suspicion to contend with as they sought
to stabilize the conditions of government in the vicinity of
the canal.
Under the benevolent despotism of Goethals the work on
the canal advanced without cessation. The annual report
showed increasing millions of yards excavated
in the Culebra cut, the fills and spUlways for the and thV
dam at Gatun, and the monumental locks to P^inama ^anal
control the water level at either end. Roosevelt
determined the site, Taft the lock method of construction.
The estimates of the engineers indicated that the task
would be completed early In the Administration of Taft's
successor, and the formal date was finally placed at Au
gust 15, 1914, with a great world's fair at San Francisco to
celebrate the occasion in the following winter. The task
was done on time, and Goethals was advanced to the rank
of major-general as a reward for his services, while his
medical subordinate, Gorgas, becarae brigadier-general.

384 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Before the question of rewards was taken up Congress
found it necessary in 19 12 to settle the terms upon which
the Panama Canal should be used by the commerce of the
world. The only restriction upon the free power of Con
gress was the clause of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty pro
viding that it should be open on equal terms to the vessels
of all nations. The bill for the government of the canal
was shaped by those who desired a preference for American
vessels, and was passed with a clause exempting American
bottoms from the tolls. It was known at the time that
Great Britain would object to this as a violation of equality
of terms, but the provision was allowed to stand.
The neighbors of the canal continued to be centers of
intrigue and of upheaval. Of all Latin-American countries
Latin-Amer- they Were the most tropical in character and
ican possessed the smallest number of working white
men. Traffic of foreigners In railroad conces
sions, mining rights, and natural resources was a constant
provocative of bribery and repudiation. Their resulting
insolvency always Invited foreign interventions such as the
Venezuela blockade of 1902. In 1905 a step was taken by
the United States for the better stability of one of them,
Santo Domingo, by the erection of an American financial
receivership, and this Idea was extended toward Nicaragua
and Honduras, and was pressed by Knox as an Adminis
tration policy. The principle of the Piatt Amendment was
to be extended over Central America by the voluntary
consent of the countries concerned. American bankers
were to underwrite their debts and the American Govern
ment was to see that Treasury receipts were honestly col
lected and expended. The power of the United States was
to be used to safeguard them against invasion, and a Central
American court of arbitral justice, agreed to under the
leadership of Root, was to resolve their local differences.
American warships and detachments of marines were often
used to maintain order in Nicaragua, Honduras, Santo
Domingo, and In Cuba where the Cuban constitution spe
cifically conveyed that power, In the winter of 191 2 Knox

Copyright by Underwood tf Underwood, N.Y.
THE ARMY TRANSPORT MOUNT VERNON IN THE UPPER CHAMBER, MIRAFLORES LOCKS

THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 385
visited the Caribbean for a series of friendly conferences
with the republics bordering thereon. The Colombian
Government took occasion to announce that he would not
be welcome at Bogota, but elsewhere he was received with
a cordiality that seems to have had no effect In reducing
the amount of local disturbance.
Congress and the Senate were reluctant to become in
volved in the "dollar diplomacy" of Secretary Knox. The
problems of maintaining peace in the vicinity of the canal
were left to the next Administration, with Colombia still
aggrieved at what she believed to be the unfriendly inter
vention of the United States at the time of the Panama
Revolution. While Knox was engaged in pressing his dollar diplomacy,
as a means of stabilizing affairs in Central America, he was
carrying on other negotiations similarly founded Canadian
upon a willingness to conciliate and a respect fisheries
for the rights and interests of other nations.
The last of the important disputes with England was
brought to a friendly settlement by an arbitration at The
Hague in 191 o. This Involved the interpretation of the
fishing rights originally left with the United States at
the time of independence in 1783. Ever after that date
there was difference of opinion between New England, that
did most of the fishing, and Newfoundland and Quebec,
off whose shores the fishing was done. The shore rights
in connection with the fishing were always in debate. At
various times during the century, New England became
aroused by a belief that its treatment was unfair. The
Halifax award of 1877 failed to clear the matter up and left
details unsettled until 1910. In the last weeks of Roose
velt's Administration, it was agreed to submit the details to
an arbitration which Knox managed, and whose award was
handed down in September, 1910. A general claims con
vention with Great Britain was also signed In order to
dispose of the accumulated list of private claims.
Arbitration with Great Britain was no longer a novelty,
and after 1908 had special sanction from the language of

386 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the treaty concluded by Root. Cleveland's effort for a
general treaty of arbitration was without success, but
Root negotiated with James Bryce a general treaty that
the Senate finally accepted. In accordance with this, all
controversies were to be submitted to arbitration with the
usual exception of matters involving national honor, or
independence, or vital Interests. From the standpoint of
strict law an agreement so limited had little binding force,
for in moments of International dispute it is easy to elevate
any controversy until it seems to become a part of one of
these exceptions, but as an evidence of friendly feeling and «•
kindly interest the agreement had considerable value, and'
described the practice that has generally prevailed 'be
tween Great Britain and the United States for more than
a century. James Bryce, who conducted the British end of the ne
gotiation, placed the relatlouo between the two nations
upon a new plane because of the regard in which
Bryce and he was held by Americans of all classe.o ' _^'
bitration'^ pointed Ambassador in 1907, he had id, JiBar
forty years known more of America than most
Americans. His repeated visits had given him a sym^-
thetic understanding of the extent, difficulty, and success
of the American experiment. Only the Federalist of
Alexander Hamilton, and De Tocqueville's Democracy in
America rank with the American Commonwealth of James
Bryce, and each of these is more limited than the last. For
twenty years before Bryce came tc Washington as Am
bassador, his book was the standard text upon American
government. He was already intimate with most Ameri
cans of importance, and his administration of the embassy
paved the way for a celebration of the hundred years of
peace that would be rounded out In 1914. It did sO much
to solidify the cordiality between the two nations tb?' •
Americans with Irish and German names, fearful of -fVi^
much British influence In American affairs, broke up r^i^^J-
ings in celebration of the peace with Britain, and organized
In 19 1 2 what they called the "American Truth Society,"

THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 387
"to propagate true Americanism" by preventing an Anglo-
American understanding.
The arbitration agreement with England had meanwhile
been carried one step further, as a result of public state
ments separately made by President Taft and Viscount
Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, in which each declared
his willingness for a binding treaty for the arbitration of all
disputes without any reservation. In August, 191 1, Knox
signed such treaties with both England and France, and
uncovered in the Senate an unexpected hostility to un-
V limited arbitration. Roosevelt spoke vigorously against
the principle, and his old associate. Lodge, brought into the
Senate the majority report against a binding pledge. The
minority report of Root agreed with the position of Taft
and Knox that arbitration could have no national sanction
unless great nations were willing to accept it whether they
wanted it or not, and whether the decisions were likely to
go for them or against, j^l the anti-British elements in
th ted States were violent in their denunciations of
+' 'e ti. .y as subservient to England. The treaties were
so^ amended by their enemies in the Senate that they were
allowed to die by the President, and the Roosevelt treaty
remained in force.
International peace was progressing In spite of the re
luctance of the Senate. The objections to competitive
armament, and the reasonableness of arbitral
methods, at least where other nations were con- and the
cerned, were receiving ever wider attention. Pa^l^peof
One of the Carnegie funds was devoted to the
furtherance of peace, while its donor drew up his pjans for
a temple to be erected at The Hague, to house the court
that had been agreed upon in principle in 1907. The open
ing of this building In 1913 was accepted as an indication
\t the world was through with its great wars.
^he interest of Taft in the arbitration of international
ai_^ tes was a part of his larger interest in the adminis
tration of justice. His refusal to admit Arizona into the
Union with a constitutional provision for the recaU of

388 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
judges was another side of the same interest. His appoint
ments to the federal bench were made with un-
th^ reor- usual care, and it fell to his lot to rebuild the
ganized Su- personnel of the Supreme Court. MelviUe W.
preme Court '^Fuller, a member of that court since 1888, died
in 1910, which made it necessary to appoint a new Chief
Justice. Edward Douglass White, a member of the court
since 1894, when Cleveland appointed him from Louisiana,
was promoted to that position. A group of unexpected
vacancies changed the complexion of the court. Justices
Lurton, Van Devanter, Lamar, and Pitney were added
within two years, as well as Governor Charles E. Hughes,
of New York, who took his seat in October, 1910.
While the reorganization of the Supreme Court and the
movements for peaceful relationships were in process, the
old question of reciprocity with Canada came to the front.
In January, 191 1, Taft urged without avail upon the last
session of the Republican Congress the enactment of an
agreement for better trade relations with Canada. The
project was in line with the relaxation of the high pro
tective rates, demanded by insurgent Congressmen in 1909,
but it received the bitter opposition of many of them be
cause its result would be to bring Canadian agricultural
products into more direct competition with those origi
nating in the Northwestern United States. The session
adjourned without action, and the President immediately
summoned the Sixty-Second Congress in spedal session to
debate the project.
Champ Clark, of Missouri, who had been a Democratic
Congressman for eight terms, was elected Speaker when the
Champ House Convened, April 4, 191 1. He presided
the Dem'^ Over a group of lawmakers whose personnel had
cratic been greatly changed by insurgent contests and
program Democratic victory. One hundred and eighteen
of the members were new to their tasks; about two thirds
of them belonging to the majority. The Democratic
majority of more than sixty votes was able to control the
proceedings of the House if its members could maintain

THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 389
discipline within their ranks. A nev/ minority of one vote
appeared in this Congress for the first time in the person
of Victor L. Berger, a Socialist from a Milwaukee district.
In the Senate the old Republican majority was reduced to
so small a number that when Vice-President Sherman died
in October, 1912, it was doubtful whether a Republican
presiding officer could be elected to replace him. It was
only a theoretical majority at best, for thirteen of the
Republican Senators were insurgents who expected to be
treated as Republicans in the assignment to committees,
but who reserved their independent privilege of staying
out of caucus and voting with the Democrats at pleasure.
Speaker Clark, with Oscar W. Underwood, of Alabama, as
chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, blocked
out a party program of tariff revision, one schedule at a
time, and included the passage of the reciprocity agreement
with Canada, as in accord with the larger policy. Canadian
In the summer of 191 1 Congress accepted the reciprocity
reciprocal agreement, which became the basis of a general
election in Canada in September. The Laurier Govern
ment went to the polls in the Dominion, seeking support
for its trade policy, and met an opposition of Dominion
nationalists who aspired to make Canada an independent
nation, and who feared close contacts with the United
States. A letter written by Taft to Roosevelt in January,
1911, embittered the debate. "The amount of Canadian
products we would take," he wrote, "would procure a
current of business between Westem Canada and the
United States that would make Canada only an adjunct
of the United States. It would transfer all their impor
tant business to Chicago and New York, with their bank
credits and everything else, and it would increase greatly
the demand of Canada for our manufactures. I see this
is an argument against reciprocity, made in Canada, and I
think it is a good one." The unhappy phrase, "an ad
junct of the United States," inflamed Canadian opinion
against the Laurier Government, overturned It, and de
feated reciprocity. To the embarrassment of being forced

390 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
to appeal to Democrats to adopt the agreement was added
the chagrin at having it rejected by the people of Canada.
The political successes of the Administration of Taft were
never more than partially complete. The failures were
notorious and disastrous.
The world was moving toward new ideals on peace be
tween 1909 and 1913, and was changing Its physical habits
Hudson- with its ideas. On September 25, 1909, a few
Fulton cele- days after Taft started West to explain the
Payne-Aldrich tariff to the people, the State of
New York celebrated with pomp and ceremony the three
hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Hendrik Hudson,
and the hundredth anniversary of thework of Robert Fulton.
The tiny replica of the Half Moon and the reproduction
of the clumsy Clermont called attention to the changes of
one century and three. The naval review, in which great
European powers participated with the United States, re
vealed the revolutionary influence of steam and steel upon
the course of naval war, while the attention of the observers
was shifted from the earth and its waters to the air, as Wil
bur Wright circled the Statue of Liberty In his airplane.
Aviation was still a novelty that turned men's heads to
gape in admiration at a passing plane. For generations
its experimenters had struggled with ridicule and
and scien- Ignorance in its advancement, and many had
ress ^™^" ^^^'^ down their lives In its service. In 1903
Orville and Wilbur Wright, working together,
made their earliest flights in power-driven planes. The
gasoline engine made possible the attainment of success.
In the next six years their mastery of the air was Increased,
and imitators multiplied by hundreds throughout the world.
In July, 1909, Orville Wright performed tests for endurance
and distance exacted by the War Department before the
acceptance of its first signal corps airplane. For one hour,
nine minutes, and thirty-one seconds he circled above Wash
ington carrying a passenger with him in his biplane. Two
days earlier a Frenchman, Louis B16riot, flew his monoplane
across the English Channel to the cliffs at Dover, while in

THE PROGRAM OF PEACE 391
Germany Count Zeppelin's third dirigible made Its course
from Friedrlchshafen to Berlin in August. The conquest of
the air was not yet complete, but it was well begun.
Earlier in the year 1909 the world had had a signal dem
onstration of the achievements of science. At daybreak on
January 23 the White Star steamship, Republic, outbound
from New York, was rammed when off Nantucket light
ship by a tramp freighter. From his wireless cabin Jack
Binns, the wireless operator, sent out his CQD signal of
distress, which was picked up at a distance by the Baltic,
Lucania, and La Lorraine, with the result that although
the Republic foundered in her distress, her passengers were
saved. Three years later, in April, 1912, another demon
stration of the imperative need for wireless at sea started a
train of laws that made it compulsory for ocean-going vessels
to carry the new tool. The Titanic, fresh from her builders'
hands and the largest vessel in the world, rammed an Iceberg
on her maiden voyage, and sank, carrying with her nearly
fifteen hundred passengers and crew. The survivors, drift
ing in their lifeboats and on their rafts, were rescued by
the Carpathia, that had picked up the signal of distress
fifty-six miles away, and pushed at top speed through the
floes of Ice toward the scene of the accident.
Among the spectators of the Hudson-Fulton celebration,
none attracted more attention than Commodore Robert E.
Peary on the bridge of his yacht Roosevelt, and fresh from
his discovery of the North Pole on April 6, 1909. He, too,
had terminated a long and gallant struggle for a sporting
chance. His glory was dimmed by the fact that another
American explorer was claiming to have reached the Pole
a year earlier on April 21, 1908. The discovery of the hid
den places of the world was nearly over; on December 16,
191 1, Captain Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, reached the
South Pole in the heart of the Antarctic highlands.
The steamboat, airplane, and wireless had conquered the
water and the air. The motor car was changing the charac
ter of transportation, life, and business on the land. At the
end of Taft's Administration nearly a miUIon and a quarter

392 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
motor cars were registered In the United States. Ninety
per cent of them were gasoline pleasure craft and their
average cost was under one thousand dollars. The automo
bile had made its appearance in the closing years of the
last century. There were under a thousand in the United
States in 1900. The development of the pneumatic tire
by the bicycle industry of the preceding decade had made it
possible for the horseless carriage to travel smoothly and
safely over the highways. The study of the gasoline engine
that automobile manufacturing entailed made aviation pos
sible. From a status as a toy or as an extravagance, the
motor car in 1909 was becoming a commonplace utility.
The horse retained his place to draw the carriage upon state
occasions until the end of Taft's Administration, but the
White House stables were filled with touring cars before the
carriages were relegated to obscurity.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
In addition to the illustrated and technical articles to be found in the
National Geographic Magazine and the American Journal of International
Law, the following books on diplomatic themes are of use: Carl Russell
Fish, American Diplomacy (1915); Henry Cabot Lodge, One Hundred
Years of Peace (1913); George L. Beer, The English-Speaking Peoples
(1917); William Howard Taft, The United States and Peace (1914); Albert
Bushnell Hart, The Monrce Doctrine, an Interpretation (1916); and M. W.
Williams, Anglo-American Isthmian Diplomacy, iSi^-igi^ (1916). James
Bryce published South America, Observations and Impressions (1912), and
University and Historical Addresses (1913). Robert E. Peary, The North
Pole, its Discovery in igog (1910), is a standard work. The illustrated
papers published much material in connection with the Hudson-Fulton
celebration that serves to illustrate the advances in science and mechanics.

CHAPTER XL
THE CAMPAIGN OF I912
The National Progressive Republican League was organized
on January 23, 191 1, with Jonathan Bourne, of Oregon, as
president. Its program included a group of jhe Na-
mechanical reforms made necessary, its leaders <^i°"^.l P™-
declared, because, "popular government in publican
America has been thwarted, and progressive ^^^"^
legislation strangled," by corrupt Interests which "dictate
nominations and platforms, elect administrations, legis
latures, representatives in Congress, and United States
Senators, and control cabinet officers." The reforms ad
vocated by the league began with the demand for the direct
elections of United States Senators, direct election of dele
gates to national conventions, and direct primaries for the
nomination of elective officers. The initiative, referendum,
and recall were included in the list as suitable for State
enactment, as well as a corrupt practices act. The move-
m?nt thus crystallized in a formal organization was the out
come of the experiences of the insurgents In their controversy
in 1909 and 19 10. Its Immediate aim was to capture the
control of the Republican Party machinery, to defeat the
renomination of Taft in 1912, and to nominate and elect a
Progressive Republican.
The Republican split presaged by the formation of the
Progressive League followed an old line of cleavage. Roose
velt contended with the tendency throughout Taft and
his presidency, and until 1904 conducted himself ^^'^^'^ ^P''*
as though he expected to become the leader of reform.
The schism was founded upon a belief, widespread and
genuine, that the people were losing control of their gov
ernment, and it was accentuated by personal ambition.
The selection of Taft by Roosevelt as his heir-apparent was
resented by other leaders who were thus debarred frora

394 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
their chance to enter contests for the nomination, and who
believed that their devotion to good government was as
sound as his. The leaders of this group looked on without
regret when Taft showed himself unable to dominate the
political situation as Roosevelt had done. Their experi
ence with patronage showed them his weakness as a party
disciplinarian. He withheld appointments from the insur
gent Congressmen and then restored them ; and wavered in
his statements as to whether he regarded them as within
the party or outside.
After the defeat of 1910 the Democrats made haste to
consolidate their victory and Taft failed to narrow the Re
publican split. He suffered acute rebuffs upon Canadian
reciprocity and British arbitration, while the single sched
ule tariff bills of the Underwood-La Follette combination
caused him constant embarrassment. The Sixty-Second
Congress, called in 191 1 to pass the reciprocity agreement,
remained in session to legislate upon the tariff. The pur
pose was not to make a new tariff, but to make trouble for
Taft A revision of the notorious Schedule K of the Payne-
Aldrich Act was passed by a combination of Democrats and
insurgents, and was vetoed by Taft on August 17. "Much
has been made of La Follette's offhand statement that it
was put together with ' blacksmith's tools,' " commented the
Nation upon it. "But they are better than the burglar's
tools with something very like which the woolen schedule
was got into the Payne-Aldrich act." A farmer's free-list
bUl was vetoed on the following day and a cotton bill a little
later. By these maneuvers Taft was forced Into the position
of advocating a "stand-pat" tariff policy against the pro
gressive efforts of both Progressives and Democrats.
In the autumn of 191 1 the Progressive Republican
League held a conference at Chicago where it endorsed the
La Follette Candidacy of La Follette for the nomination as
andthe President in 191 2, and in the closing months
nomination , , it-. • . .
of the year the Progressive revolt gained such
weight that it ceased to be a forlorn insurrection and gave
promise of becoming revolution and victory. Through the

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1912 395
winter of 19 1 2 Republicans who had remained indifferent
to Progressivism reached the conclusion that Taft could not
be reelected. They reached the conclusion also that Sena
tor La Follette's Progressive leadership was local In charac
ter, and lacked the persuasiveness necessary in a winning
candidate. They wished to win and as Progressivism prom
ised possible victory, they wished a different leader. ' ' Good
judges of political situations were announcing it as their
deliberate conviction that La Follette had a fair chance of
getting the republican nomination," wrote Herbert Quick.
On February 2, 191 2, La Follette spoke at a public meeting
in Philadelphia. His physical condition was such as to
suggest to his hearers that a nervous collapse Impended,
and his enemies gave it wide publicity. Many of the Pro
gressives seized the occasion to follow Gifford Pinchot and
other La Follette supporters, and abandoned La Follette
in the hope of Influencing Theodore Roosevelt to reenter
politics and contest the nomination.
During February, 1912, the pressure upon Colonel Roose
velt increased. The Chicago Tribune led in organizing the
demand that he become a candidate for a third Roosevelt
term. Political friends who saw no way of win- ^^^'"
ning except with him as candidate, urged him to resume the
party leadership. Seven Republican governors wrote him a
letter urging him to become a candidate. On February 24
he yielded to the pressure and In reply to the appeal of
the seven governors announced his Intention to enter the
contest and remain there until the end. He had become
convinced that Taft had fallen into the hands of the con
servative Republicans, and that his policies could be saved
only by himself. A few days before formally entering the
contest he discussed the fundamental reforms in govern
ment before the Ohio Constitutional Convention.
A flood of denunciation greeted the return of Roosevelt.
His old Republican enemies, who had fought him as Presi
dent, and were enraged at his advocacy of the "new na
tionalism," denounced him as a revolutionist, as carried
away by ambition, and as desiring to get into the White

396 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
House for life. "Occasionally," he commented upon this
attack, "my more gloomy foes have said that I wanted to
be a king. I wanted to answer them that they did not know
kings as I did. Now, I hke those kings, but I don't want
to be one because the function of a modern constitutional
king . . . would be the function of a life vice-president with
the leadership of the four hundred thrown in. And I think
that there are other jobs that a full-sized man would pre
fer." The third term tradition was brought into the dis
cussion to discredit the candidate. His own declaration of
1904, as well as the unwritten law that had prevailed since
the days of Washington , were cited against him. He brushed
these objections away by alluding to a breakfast-table
episode. "When I say that I do not wish a third cup of
coffee, it does not mean that I shall never want another
cup." The bitterness of conservative Republicans was more
than matched by that of Senator La Follette, sore at the
Fight for desertion he had suffered, believing that Roose-
convention velt was treacherously seizing his position, and
convinced that Roosevelt's Progressivism was
only one of words. In the contest for delegates that ensued,
the great debate lay between the supporters of the renomi
nation of Taft and the advocates of Roosevelt, while a small
but irreconcilable La Follette group pursued them both.
The Republican National Committee had called the con
vention before the Roosevelt candidacy was launched.
The Southern delegates as usual were being chosen under
Administration auspices, while in States where conservative
Republicans controlled, the delegations were instructed to
vote for Taft. In a period of less than four months Roose
velt strove to overturn the political habits of a generation,
and used as his principal lever the demand for a direct
primary, that the people might rule. He denounced the
convention system as a mechanism of the bosses, and the
Southern delegations as corrupt. Like Andrew Jackson, in
1824, he demanded a reform in order to let his supporters
attain their will. As Jackson had then broken up the caucus

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1912 397
system, so Roosevelt and his supporters tried to destroy
the convention system. His claim that the voters were with
him if the leaders were not, was borne out In those States
where preference primaries existed or were adopted by
special legislative sessions at his demand. In Illinois in
April he swept the State, as he did Pennsylvania a little
later. His ringing appeals for honest popular government
drowned the utterances of the other candidates. In the
Southern States, where the Administration controlled all of
the party machinery, his friends organized irregular con
testing delegations for what Frank A. Munsey called the
"moral effect."
The Republican National Committee met in Chicago on
June 6, twelve days ahead of the meeting of the convention,
in order to prepare the preliminary roll, and
hear the contests upon more than two hundred tional
and fifty delegates. Of the 1078 delegates on Committee
¦^ ° / o and contests
the list, Roosevelt possessed 411 instructed for
him and uncontested. Of the rest about 250 were for other
candidates, Taft, La Follette, or Cummins without contest,
and the same number claimed for Taft were contested by
Roosevelt delegations. With less than a majority of all
the delegates the only hope of securing the nomination lay
in inducing the convention to rule out the votes of all con
testing delegates upon preliminary organization. In spite
of the fact that many of the contests were frivolous in char
acter, all of them were pressed with vigor. As the Na
tional Committee filed its preliminary opinion on them,
and listed Taft delegates on the temporary roll, Roosevelt
hastened to Chicago in person to conduct his fight. He
arrived there on the Saturday before the convention met
and immediately spoke from the balcony of the Congress
Hotel to an enthusiastic crowd that blocked Michigan
Avenue, denouncing the quashing of his contests as "naked
theft" on the part of the National Committee.
The leading members of the National Committee con
trolled the machinery of the convention and were too old
at politics to be intimidated. They had determined to

398 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
nominate Taft whether the party wished him or not, and
Taft and this they did, driving the "steam roUer" of the
Sherman organization over all obstructions amid the
derisive hoots of the contesting faction. Following Its
ancient practice, the convention permitted delegations
seated by the National Committee to vote, whether con
tested or not. Elihu Root was elected chairman of the con
vention, Taft and Sherman were renominated, and the party
platform was written by conservative Republicans. The
Roosevelt delegates sat silent on the final roll-calls, and
when the convention adjourned conferred with their leader
in a mass meeting at which they decided to return to their
homes, consult their constituents, and come back to Chi
cago in another national convention in August, there to
organize a new Progressive Party.
The Democratic Party Convention met in Baltimore on
June 25, 1912, exhilarated by the vision of success opened
-pjjg to them by the Republican split in Chicago.
Democratic Their leaders in the House of Representatives
Convention . , ^ , . . ^, . . .
had spent two years in preparing their majority
to receive such an opportunity. One of them, Champ
Clark, the Speaker, was supported by half the delegates,
but the old Democratic rule of two thirds for a nomination
made his selection anything but certain. The party was no
longer the group of disorganized factions that had contested
the last three presidential elections. Clark and Underwood
had shown themselves skillful party leaders, and the re
action in 19 10 had strengthened the group of Democratic
governors. Four of these were seriously considered as can
didates. Folk, of Missouri, had earned his position as a
prosecutor of fraud and corruption. Harmon, of Ohio,
shared with Taft the distinction of early opposition to
trusts. Marshall, of Indiana, had reestablished Democratic
control in a doubtful State, and was devoting himself to the
modernizing of an outgrown constitution. Wilson, in New
Jersey, two years removed from the presidency of Prince
ton, was the strongest of the group.
Woodrow Wilson, Virginian by birth, was one of the most

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1912 399
distinguished graduates of Princeton when he assumed its
presidency in 1902. In his student years he be- Woodrow
longed to the group of brilliant young men drawn Wilson
to Johns Hopkins to study history and politics. His
doctor's thesis on Congressional Government was nearly
contemporary with Bryce's American Commonwealth, and
ranked with it In penetration and Insight. Through the
nineties he was one of the notable lecturers at Princeton,
and one of the most widely quoted historical essayists of
the United States. A university, in his view, was a "place
where ideals are kept in heart, in an air they can breathe ;
but no fools' paradise. A place where to learn the truth
about the past and hold debate about the affairs of the
present, with knowledge and without passion." As presi
dent of Princeton his struggle to democratize college life
destroyed the effectiveness of his leadership. The unwill
ingness of the institution and its alumni to be reshaped
defeated him, but the world outside became conscious of
a new expression of the ideals of democracy. George
Harvey, editor of Harper's Weekly, thought he found in
Wilson the hope of the Democratic Party, one who could
inspire with new ideals and be free from the heresies of
Bryan. In 1910, beaten at Princeton, and ready to resign on aca
demic grounds, Wilson accepted the Democratic nomina
tion for governor of New Jersey and was elected. He
plunged immediately into a partisan contest In the politics
of his State, and proved a devotion to the principle of ma
jority rule by holding his party to the preference it had ex
pressed in a senatorial primary for James Martlne for Sen
ator. If the party had anticipated the complete victory
It secured, Martlne could not have gained the preference
vote; and practical leaders wished to throw him over after
the unexpected success. The stubborn insistence of Gov
ernor Wilson that the party leaders must play the game
fairly resulted in the election of Martlne and the wider
advertisement of the fact that a new personality was
emerging in Democratic politics. A series of anti-trust

400 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
laws put through the New Jersey Legislature at his instance
indicated his acceptance of the general progressive doctrine.
William Jennings Bryan was the most prominent figure
in the Baltimore Convention, but was not a candidate. The
real leader of his party, he espoused no candidate, but ob
structed the nomination of any one whose two-thirds ma
jority would have to include the votes of the New York
delegation. He Insisted that the party nominate some one
entirely free from the taint of Tammany support. Through
forty-five ballots the convention struggled in its endeavor
to make a nomination. The majority of Clark could not
be made two thirds without Tammany. The favorite
sons weakened one by one until on the forty-sixth ballot
Woodrow Wilson was nominated for the presidency. Gov
ernor Thomas R. Marshall, of Indiana, became his com
panion on the ticket.
In the early days of August the bull moose, as the emblem
of the Progressive Party, was added to the elephant of the
G.O.P. and the Democratic donkey. At an
gressive enthusiastic convention in Chicago, that re-
Party and called the nervous excitement of the canvass of
Koosevelt 1840 and the devotional Intensity of the Popu
lists in Cincinnati In 1891, the Progressives nominated The
odore Roosevelt and Governor Hiram Johnson, of Cali
fornia, to the tune of "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Their
platform included the reforms that the insurgents had made
popular as well as a long list of other reforms whose advo
cates had seen no chance for success. The program was
one of social betterment to be attained by an Improved
political machine responsive to the people. Social workers
like Jane Addams, who had struggled against the forces of
vicious politics in behalf of the less fortunate members of
society, saw in the new party an avenue to the promised
land. MUitant fighters of corporations like Hiram John
son brought their party methods to its support. Woman
suffrage was advocated and the attempt was made to gain
the votes of women wherever these were counted. The new
party included, in addition to its professional political lead-

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1 91 2 401
ers and its share of the time-servers in politics, "a brave
band of reformers who do not think in terms of practical
political organization, but who regarded the progressive
party as humanity's cause, and were for it without end,
whether it were big enough to be political or small enough to
be negligible." And around its margin hovered the im
practicable group whom Roose^'elt jovially described as the
"lunatic fringe."
The remnants of the Populist Part>' held a meeting in St.
Louis a week after the Progressi^'e Convention. The local
reporter observed that they had changed from the Populists
of twenty years before. They made no nominees, for their
work was done. Most of their original planks were either
incorporated in the platform of the new party or already
accepted by the older organizations.
The canvass of 1912 was less bitter than the pre-con-
vention struggle had been. The three personalities before
the public were such as to permit few personal attacks.
The noisy and confident appeal of the Progressives met
with wide sympathy in both parties, for the trend of a dec
ade had been to convince the bulk of the voters that the
United States needed a less reactionary program than the
Republican machine could offer. Taft was in general held
in high personal esteem, but it was believed that his political
associates were undesirable. Progressive-minded voters
cast their ballots in November for much the same reasons
that had prevailed in 1908. They were forced to guess
whether the progressive principles would stand a better
chance with Roosevelt or with Wilson.. In 1908 it had been
Taft or Bryan. The charge of the Progressive Party that
the Republican National Committee had stolen the nomina
tion for Taft affected only those voters who had already
determined how to vote. The charge of Roosevelt that
Taft had bitten the hand that fed him had no more effect.
In October the canvass nearly ended in tragedy when an
attempt was made to assassinate Roosevelt in ^Milwaukee.
His rivals stopped their contest until he was convalescent
and able to reenter the struggle.

402 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
When the votes were counted it was made clear that
Roosevelt had conducted the most successful of all third-
Democratic party struggles. With a new party organiza-
victory ^[^^ hurriedly thrown together in the heat of
the engagement he polled over four million votes, and ran
well ahead of the regular Republican candidate. The di
vision of the Republican strength, however, had its nat
ural consequence. For the third time since the Civil War
Republican dissension elected a Democratic President.
The combined Republican and Progressive vote was
7,500,000 against 6,291,000 for Wilson. With fewer votes
than Bryan received each time he was defeated, Woodrow
WUson was elected as a minority President. Taft and
Nicholas Murray Butler — for Sherman had died during
the canvass and a new vice-presidential nomination had
been made by the National Committee — received the elec
toral vote of only two States, Utah and Vermont.
Eugene V. Debs, who ran for the presidency on the So
cialist ticket, as he had done since 1900, received 897,000
votes. These were variously interpreted as evidence of
a rising tide of socialism or as the result of the inability of
voters to decide which of the more important leaders to
support. In the Mugwump campaign in 1884 voters dis
gusted with both Cleveland and Blaine voted the Prohibi
tion ticket. Now many similar votes were counted for Debs.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William J. Bryan described the national conventions in A Tale of Two
Conventions (1912), and all of the weekly papers gave much space to the
contest. Collier's Weekly,' closely identified with the Progressive move
ment, wavered during the canvass between Roosevelt and Wilson, and
when its proprietors determined to come out for the former, its editor,
Norman Hapgood, gave up his chair. La Follette's Weekly presents the
point of view of Progressives who felt themselves betrayed by the turn of
events, as does Robert M. La Follette, Autobiography (1913). George
Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher (1915), gives a brief account of the
Wilson movement in 1912. Fred E. Haynes, Third Party Movements since
the Civil War, with Special Reference to Iowa (1916), is a convenient sum
mary of the antecedents of Progressivism. A recent autobiography is
Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (1920).

CHAPTER XLI
WOODROW WILSON
Woodrow Wilson, elected to the presidency in 191 2 by
default, was neither the deliberate choice of the people nor
the political leader of his party. He was a a minority
minority President, successful only because the President
majority party was nullifying its own effort. He had not
been long enough in politics to acquire the devoted follow
ing of a Roosevelt, Bryan, or McKinley. His selection by
his own party was based on the negative merit of availa
bility rather than preference. Among the Intellectuals he
was widely known and appreciated, and as governor of New
Jersey he had shown vigor for reform and promise of leader
ship. But William Jennings Bryan, whom he had a few
years earlier desired to see "knocked into a cocked hat,"
was the controlling ruler of the Democratic Party. His
immediate predecessor, Taft, had suffered because the real
leader, Roosevelt, was alive and active. President Harri
son had been embarrassed because James G. Blaine was a
greater man than he. The chances were all against Wil
son's ability to dominate his own party, and to make that
party lead the country.
The new Cabinet was not announced until after the in
auguration, but the rumor correctly stated the fact that
Bryan was to be Secretary of State. No other Wilson's
Cabinet officer was widely known as a political Cabinet
administrator, and none was identified with the wealthy
and fashionable society that had been visible in Washing
ton under Taft and Roosevelt. William G. McAdoo, Sec
retary of the Treasury, was chiefly known because of the
river tunnels which he had recently provided for New York
City, and his vigorous work in the recent campaign. Jo
sephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, had relatives in
the naval service, but was himself editor of the Raleigh,

404 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
North Carolina, Observer, and without special technical
qualifications for his post. Franklin K. Lane brought to
the Interior Department long experience gained in the
Interstate Commerce Commission. David F. Houston
came directly from the presidency of a Western university
to the Department of Agriculture. WUliam B. Wilson, a
veteran labor leader, took charge of the newly created
Department of Labor. The remaining members had their
reputations still before them, and no member of the Cab
inet had been long identified with the management of
govemment. The Democratic Party, now in power for the first time
since Grover Cleveland, had no specific policy in 1913.
Demoralized by nearly twenty years of opposition, it had
few constructive leaders, and was as badly divided upon
the current issues as the Republican Party. It no longer
adhered to the Cleveland policy of a tariff for revenue only,
but was content with a tariff revision that should eliminate
the most glaring abuses without destroying the principle
of protection. Its last great passion, free silver, had be
come unimportant with the lapse of years.
It was necessary for President Wilson to outline policies
for his party as well as to Improvise its leaders. With no
illusions as to the nature of his election, he saw that per
sonal and party success would depend upon his ability to
carry with him the progressive groups in both great parties.
He might successfully disregard the Bourbon faction of his
own party, which was quite as reactionary as the most
"stand-pat" Republicans, and which might be forced into
caucus and held in line by party pressure; but there could
be only failure for the President who could not see that the
public that desired the Roosevelt policies in 1908 still de
manded them, and with greater definiteness. Between his
election and inauguration Wilson spoke at Staunton, Chi
cago, and Trenton upon the constructive work proposed
for his Administration, and promised that an effort should
be made to settle adequately the three problems outstand
ing for a generation, of tariff, finance, and trusts. There

WOODROW WILSON 405
was no intention in his mind to wait for Congress to act
upon its own initiative, as Taft had done. The theory of
the presidency that Hayes and Cleveland had glimpsed,
and Roosevelt had followed, was that of Wilson. "The
President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as
big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit," he
had written while yet a professor. "He has no means of
compelling Congress except through public opinion."
Congress was summoned to meet in special session on
April 7, 1913, to take up its action in fulfilling party
pledges, as Woodrow Wilson interpreted them. Tariff
In both houses there was a Democratic majority ""evision
for the first time since 1893-95. ^^ the House of Repre
sentatives there was physical reorganization as well . Stead
ily since the Civil War each census had shown an enlarged
population for the country, and Congress had apportioned
Representatives among the States In accordance with it.
The number of seats to be provided had steadily grown
until in the Sixty-Third Congress now assembling there
were 435 members. In the old Hall of Representatives
each member had had his separate desk and chair, and
many of them had spent their time during sessions reading
the newspapers and signing their correspondence. The
Senate, with its smaller membership, retained the sem
blance of a parliamentary body, but the House was noisy,
inattentive, and more badly congested as to space, as each
new apportionment bill increased the number of desks and
chairs to be accommodated . For many years parliamentary
reformers urged a physical reconstruction of the chamber,
that it might become an auditorium large enough to ac
commodate its members, small enough for them to hear
debate, and free from the distractions of members' private
business. The completion of the new office buildings for
the members of the Senate and House removed the last ar
gument in favor of the individual desks. The new Con
gress met in a reconstructed hall with the desks gone, and
with concentric benches facing the Speaker; with a great
table facing him for Oscar W. Underwood, chairman of

406 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the Committee on Ways and Means and leader of the ma
jority, and another for James R. Mann, leader of the
minority. The physical novelty in the reconstructed House was out
classed by the political novelty, when the President re-
Presidential vcrtcd from the usagc of a century to the prac-
leadership ^j^-g ^f Washington and Adams, and appeared
in person to deliver his message. While the House was
growing larger in the last half-century, messages had been
growing longer, and their thousands of words droned by
official readers to an inattentive Congress had lacked in
inspiration and result. By reading the message himself,
President Wilson Invited attention to its content, and by
condensing it to a few hundred words, he made it impossi
ble for any one to ignore his meaning. "It is clear to the
whole country that the tariff duties must be altered," he
said. "They must be changed to meet the radical altera
tion In the conditions of our economic life which the country
has witnessed within the last generation. . . . Consciously
or unconsciously, we have built up a set of privileges and
exemptions from competition behind which it was easy by
any, even the crudest, forms of combination to organize a
monopoly; untU at last nothing is normal, nothing is obliged
to stand the tests of efficiency and economy in our world
of big business, but everything thrives by concerted ar
rangement. . . . We are to deal with the facts of our own
day, with the facts of no other, and to make laws that square
with those facts." He demanded that Congress begin with
a revision of the tariff and served notice that at a later
time he might call their attention "to reforms that should
press close upon the heels of the tariff changes, if not ac
company them, of which the chief is the reform of our bank
ing and currency laws."
The Underwood Bill, ready for introduction when Con-
Underwood- gi'ess convened, was the product of special stud-
Simmons ies in the last session, and of the single schedule
blUs of the preceding Congress. It passed the
House unamended in May as a triumph of party manip-

WOODROW WILSON 407
ulation. Only five Democrats voted against it on final
passage, although a considerably larger number disliked
serious revision. During the debate rumors were heard
that the lobby that had usually accompanied tariff debates
was again on hand, trying to secure special favors in the
schedules. The President immediately made pubhc charge
that such a lobby was interfering with the freedom of de
bate, and In the Senate a committee to investigate the lobby
began its sessions early in June. By these tactics the lobby
was placed at great disadvantage and it was made easier
for Congressmen to be faithful to the party purpose. The
Underwood-Simmons tariff passed the Senate early in Sep
tember with two Progressive Republicans, La Follette and
Poindexter, supporting it, and was everywhere regarded as
a personal victory for the President in holding his party
together. The difficulties in maintaining Democratic unity
were greatest in the case of the sugar schedule, where free
sugar was bitterly opposed by Democratic members from
beet-sugar or cane-sugar areas. The iron rule of the party
caucus was exerted over these. The average rates of tariff
were reduced from a level of about thirty-seven per cent to
that of twenty-seven per cent, and the free list was enlarged
to include wool, cotton, hemp, and flax, and other agricul
tural products. The Sixteenth Amendment authorizing the
levying of an income tax, which was submitted to the
States during the Payne-Aldrich debate, was now in force.
An income tax was accordingly included in the Underwood-
Simmons Bill, based upon a one per cent rate on incomes
over four thousand dollars and rising on incomes above
twenty thousand. The best experience for determining its
probable yield came from Wisconsin, where such a tax had
been effective since 191 1. The principle of an expert tariff
commission, for which Taft and Roosevelt had contended,
was abandoned. It was recalled three years later, when
the World War had changed the course of trade. A Tariff
Commission was created in September, 1916, and placed
under the direction of F. W. Taussig as chairman.
The prestige of the President was high when he signed

4o8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the Underwood-Simmons BUl on October 3, 1913. His
leadership kept the principle of revision downward always
to the front. The protectionists and Democrats, who had
worked against their party In the MUls Bill (1888) and
Wilson BUl (1894) debates, were coerced into party loyalty.
The lobby was discredited, and Investigation of it and of
party campaign funds of recent years emboldened timid
Congressmen to disregard local pressure. The day after
its passage Underwood announced his candidacy for a
vacant seat in the Senate from Alabama, and In the fol
lowing spring, in an election under the new Seventeenth
Amendment, carried his State over Richmond Pearson
Hobson, the hero of the Merrimac, and an advocate of pro
hibition. Congress meanwhile entered upon the second
chapter of its task, the revision of the financial laws.
The Aldrich Monetary Commission, created by Congress
after the panic of 1907, prepared an elaborate series of
Monetary studlcs in the fields of banking, currency, and
investiga- panics, and was forced to terminate its labors
in 1912. Before its final report was ready for
publication so much odium was attached to the name of its
chairman as to destroy the Immediate utility of any recom
mendation he should make. Aldrich had been the great
tariff specialist In the Senate since his entry into that body
in time to participate in making the tariff of 1883. He was
a consistent advocate of high protection, and enjoyed the
steady support of the great manufacturing interests that
came under attack between 1900 and 1908. His participa
tion in the framing of the tariff bill that bore his name made
him a target for Progressive attacks, which were made
worse by his identification with the "stand-pat" group
that insisted upon nominating Taft in 1912. His studies
of the banking situation, more painstaking than those of
any other Congressman, led him to the advocacy of a
central bank; but the idea of a central bank had been
unpopular since Andrew Jackson destroyed the Second
Bank of the United States, and Aldrich's own connection
with big business was such as to make a large portion

WOODROW WILSON 409
of the public suspicious of any scheme that he might rec
ommend. The financial situation was bad and was steadily growing
worse. The control of credit was subject to misuse or
abuse, the currency itself failed to inspire confidence In its
solidity, and there was a strong suspicion that the trust
movement had extended its clutches into the field of finance
as well as into that of industry and transportation. So
far as the currency was concerned, the slight margin by
which free silver was avoided In 1896 frightened sober
thinkers into making serious studies of the money problem.
The ordinary money of exchange — gold, silver, subsidi
ary coinage, gold certificates, silver certificates, Civil War
greenbacks, Sherman Act legal tenders, and national bank
notes — circulated at par only because of the public promise
to redeem it in gold coin. The legal reserve of $150,000,000
was inadequate to meet any real crisis. In the panic of
1907 fear that the Treasury might not maintain the gold
basis was everywhere felt and led to hoarding of all varieties
of currency. In violation of the law, the clearing-houses
were compelled to issue notes of their own, based upon col
lateral, in order to avoid the worse evil of financial collapse.
The national bank notes, instead of providing a flexible
element in the currency were so circumscribed by law as to
have an opposite tendency. There was no elasticity in the
system to provide for seasonal expansion to move the crops
in the fall, or emergency issues to forestall panics. The
Aldrich-Vreeland Bill of 1908 made moderate provision for
this need, but left the question of credit control untouched.
Having no public control, the banks and trust companies
had neither guidance nor restriction in the use of credit.
They operated on a strictly competitive basis, and when in
periods of great speculation It became profitable to deposit
their funds In New York banks where stock gamblers could
use them, thither the money went regardless of the more
prosaic daily requirements of business for commercial
credit. The merchant, who needed to discount his notes
as regularly as he bought his coal or paid his rent, found that

410 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the speculator received preferential treatment at the banks.
The Aldrich Commission, with the assistance of banking ex
perts and economists, worked upon methods whereby the
speculative use of credit might be curtailed in order to make
more certain provision for commerce. There was lack of
flexibility in the control of credit as of currency. Huge
balances were apt to accumulate and lie idle, while Western
farmers were clamoring for credit. There was need for
greater fluidity In order to permit the funds to flow freely
where they were most needed.
The existence of a money trust was made much of by
Progressive leaders, who charged that the control of credit
was monopolized as completely as industry and railroads.
They declared that a few great banks, controlling billions
of deposits and controlled by small groups of directors,
made it Impossible for outsiders to procure the credit to
build new railroads or construct new industries, while
lending it recklessly to Insiders for the further advancement
of existing monopolies. The Progressives charged as well,
and Democrats echoed the charge, that the directors of the
great banks lent the money to themselves In defiance of
sound morality if not of law. It was freely asserted, and
great diagrams were drawn up to prove it, that a system of
interlocking directorates was bringing the whole American
economic life Into one gigantic consolidation at the heart
of which lay the money trust.
The exchange of directors was a common feature in the
financing of the trusts. The steel interests were repre
sented on the railroad boards, the railroads in turn were
represented on the banking directorates, the banks placed
members on the governing bodies of the Industries that did
business with them. It was possible to show by diagram
how a handful of banks in Wall Street were interlocked
with all the great railroads and Industries of the country.
The House Committee on Banking and Currency, under the
chairmanship of A. P. Pujo, of Louisiana, made a detaUed
investigation of the money trust In 191 2, and by its report
added to the resentment felt toward big business and to

WOODROW WILSON 4"
the odium that was attached to the idea of a central bank.
The great financiers themselves either denied the existence
of a money trust or smilingly admitted It and Inquired,
" Can you unscramble eggs? " The problem of business and
financial legislation was to find a means of unscrambling
the eggs without addling them.
The House Committee on Banking and Currency, under
the chairmanship of Carter Glass, of Virginia, began work
upon financial legislation early in 19 1 3, and in- Federal
troduced a banking bill In the later stages of the Reserve Act
tariff legislation. The proposal was to avoid the politically
dangerous central bank and yet secure for the country all
the advantages of such an institution. It was accordingly
proposed to establish a federal reserve system In which the
country should be divided into districts (twelve being later
created), in each of which the local banks should become
members of an association for the erection of a federal re
serve bank. The fedteral reserve banks were to receive on
deposit the reserves of member banks, and it was to be
made less easy for these reserves to accumulate in Wall
Street. Provision was also made for the Issuance of notes
by the federal reserve banks based upon commercial secu
rities and other assets deposited with them by member
banks. The federal reserve banks themselves were to be
under the general oversight of a Federal Reserve Board
composed partly of public officers and partly of financial
appointees serving for a term of twelve years, the board
being closely attached to the Treasury of the United
States. The new financial law was endorsed by the P^-es-
Ident in an address to Congress on June 23, 1913, and
that body plunged into the middle of the federal reserve
debate after the passage of the Underwood-Simmons tariff.
Fatigued by their months of labor on the tariff, they had
hoped for a recess in the autumn, but President Wilson
insisted that Congress stay on the job till it was done. In
December they looked for a recess at Christmas with the
passage of the act postponed untU 1914. Again executive
pressure was exerted to procure legislation at once, with

412 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the result that the Federal Reserve BiU became a law De
cember 23, 1913. " It assumed the character of a political
miracle," wrote one of the leading economists who had
despaired of constructive legislation on finance. Not
more than three financial events in the history of the
United States ranked with it in significance. The assump
tion of the public debt by Hamilton, the destruction of
the Second Bank by Jackson, and the inauguration of the
national banking system by Chase, alone are to be com
pared with it. The banks that protested bitterly through
out the debate against any governmental interference
found that they liked it in its final passage. In the foUow
ing year, under the direction of Secretary McAdoo, the
new law was brought into operation, the country was di
vided into reserve districts, the Federal Board and the
reserve banks began to operate. From the standpoint ot
currency and credit the resources of the country were
better distributed than before, and It was no mean advan
tage of the system that the Treasury of the United States
no longer was forced to go to Wall Street for assistance, but
Wall Street came to it. The act would have been Im
possible without the prolonged financial investigations of
the Roosevelt and Taft Administrations, but its passage by
a Democratic Congress in the first session of a new Admin
istration served to increase the prestige that was attaching
itself to the political leadership of Woodrow Wilson.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William Bayard Hale, Woodrow Wilson: The Story of his Life (1912),
is a campaign biography of the usual type. The monetary discussion has
for its background the admirable studies made for the Aldrich Monetary
Commission. These are reviewed in Wesley C. Mitchell, "The Publica
tions of the National Monetary Commission," in the Quarterly Journal of
Economics, vol. xxv, p. 563. The working of the new law is summed up in
E. W. Kemmerer, The A. B.C. of the Federal Reserve System (3d ed., 1919).
The report of the Pujo Committee contains much valuable subsidiary
material, under the title U.S. Money Trust Investigation Reports (1912-13).
Numerous technical articles on the Tariff and Federal Reserve Acts are to
be found in the standard journals, such as the Journal of Political Economy
and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

CHAPTER XLII
FEDERAL CONTROL
The Sixty-Third Congress, beginning its session on April 7,
1913, sat untU October 24, 1914, making a new record for
Congressional diligence. The Democratic party leaders,
conscious of their uncertain tenure upon political power,
determined to keep busy so long as the going was good, while
their party followers submerged their personal preferences
as they acted upon the maxim of Benjamin Franklin that
they must hang together or hang separately. Instead of
resting, content with the passage of two basic laws, they
were called to renewed efforts when the President ad
dressed them on the subject of the trusts on January 20,
1914. The new Administration, acting through Attorney-
General James C. McReynolds, was no longer spending its
strength upon suits for the dissolution of cor- Anti-trust
porations. It was instead working for an am- pol'cies
icable dissolution of mergers by inducing big business to
readjust its affairs voluntarily in order to come into better
harmony with the Sherman Law. In his address to Congress
Wilson took a course close to that outlined by Senator
La Follette and Louis Brandeis who had gained distinction
in the legal controversy with the trusts. A series of Ad
ministration bills made clear his intent, and included a
better definition of unlawful monopoly and restraint of
trade than the Sherman Act had given; defined a new list
of unfair trade practices and forbade them; provided for
the regulation of corporation directorates and prohibited
their interlocking; and finally created a commission to
stand toward Interstate trade in the relationship already
held by the Interstate Commerce Commission toward trans
portation. The general drift of trust legislation as proposed gives

414 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
evidence to the determination of the President to hold his
party together by strict party discipline and to secure the
enactment, not of party measures, but of the nOn-partlsan
program of the progressive citizens whom he believed to
constitute the bulk of both great parties. The debate over
the trusts was thirty years old. It had produced only one
basic restraining law, whose intent was to abolish the
combinations rather than control them. The renewal of
the debate behind the leadership of Roosevelt had devel
oped doubts as to whether abolition was either wise or
possible, and had brought out a distinction between good
trusts and bad. In their platforms of 191 2 the Demo
cratic and Progressive parties had taken different views
of the problem; the former, adhering to the doctrine of
the Sherman Act, demanded that the law be made more
stringent to restore free competition and break up the
trusts. The Progressives, however, recommended a dis
crimination between the useful and injurious forms of
combination, a definition of unfair practices, and the cre
ation of federal machinery to watch the trusts. It was this
Progressive program that Wilson supported more nearly
than that of his own party.
The financial legislation of 1913 touched a large portion
of the trust problem In the Federal Reserve Act the
Finance banks and the people were reconciled, leaving
and trusts ^j^g j-gg^. q£ ^j^g problem much easier of solution.
In 1914, whUe Congress was debating Its next steps, the
banks were cheerfully preparing to enter into the new
relationship of the federal reserve system. Decentralized
reserves, flexibility of currency, and public control were
established over the financial world.
After eight months of debate the trust legislation was
enacted without encountering partisan opposition. On
Federal September 26, 1914, the Federal Trade Com-
Trade mission was created to represent the Govern-
Commission . . . ,
ment in its oversight of the trusts. It was to
consist of a non-partisan board of five members, the sub
ject-matter of whose control was defined in the Clayton

FEDERAL CONTROL 415
Anti-Trust Law of October 15, 1914. The chief purpose of
this act was to forbid Interlocking directorates in business as
they had already been forbidden in banking; to forbid cor
porations having trustees in common from doing business
with each other; to prohibit unfair trading, and to grant
special privileges to organized labor and to farmers. A
great obstacle in the course of anti-trust legislation was the
attitude of organized labor which desired to see commercial
combinations restricted, but which asserted the right of
labor to combine freely for any purpose. Farmers gen
erally looked upon their own associations, organized for
marketing purposes, as benevolent combinations rather
than Injurious. The insistence of these two groups im
periled the passage of the Clayton Act, until the act was
amended to provide that the restrictions placed upon the
trusts should not be interpreted as applying to labor or to
agriculture. Labor was closer to the Democratic Administration than
it had been to any other. Ever since the failure of Gompers
to induce the Republican Convention of 1908 Department
to adopt the anti-injunction plank that he de- °' Labor
sired, he had tended to work in harmony with the Demo
cratic leaders. The unnatural union contained in the
Department of Commerce and Labor was the subject of
criticism which resulted In its division in 191 3. Taft
signed the bill creating a Department of Labor with re
luctance because of his dislike to enlarge the Cabinet.
William B. Wilson, the first Secretary of Labor, built up
the organization of the new department, having jurisdiction
over not only the old Bureau of Labor, but the related fields
of immigration, naturalization, and the Children's Bureau.
The Children's Bureau, with Julia C. Lathrop as chief,
was created In 191 2 to promote the "welfare of children
and child life." It was fifty years after the time children's
when Congress legislated for the gathering of Bureau
"all information concerning agriculture" before that body
could be induced to take the first steps for the conservation
of the raw material of citizenship. The experience of the

4i6 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
social workers in the congested districts of great cities was
every year making it more apparent that poverty and dis
ease were depriving each generation of a part of its chance
for life. Jane Addams at Hull House In Chicago and
Lillian D. Wald, of the Henry Street Settlement in New
York, were leaders in the demand that a government that
safeguarded the live-stock and the crops ought to value
the welfare of Its children Colonel Roosevelt in 1912
drew much support from leaders like these, who saw in
the Progressive movement a chance of meeting social
needs. Transferred to the Department of Labor as one
of its constituent bureaus, the Children's Bureau rapidly
expanded the scope of Its investigations and administrative
duties for the benefits of its wards. In September, 1916,
Congress passed an act ' ' to prevent interstate commerce
In the products of child labor." Such a law had been de
manded by progressives for ten years on humanitarian
grounds, and received special new support now from man
ufacturing interests in the North and West. Most of the
Northern States had already passed laws prohibiting the
labor of children under fourteen years of age, but in South
ern States where no such law prevailed, cotton mills using
child labor were offering a competition embarrassing to
Northern factories using adult labor. The Keating-Owen
Child Labor Bill, as this was called, remained in force
for less than a year because the Supreme Court in 191 8
declared it to be unconstitutional. The Children's Bureau
by this date had become an active growing concern with
many other matters receiving its attention.
Another of the bureaus of the Department of Labor had
administrative charge of workmen's compensation so far
Workmen's ^^ ^^^ United States was concerned. With the
compensa- progress of Industrial organization, the problem
of the Industrially maimed increased in its im
portance. Employers' liability for injuries received by
workmen was limited by the legal doctrines of contributory
negligence and fellow-servant, while the amount received
by injured workmen had to bear the expensive cost of

FEDERAL CONTROL 417
litigation to secure the awards. The result was that society
In general carried the charge of the Industrial cripples and
their dependent families Instead of the Industries concerned.
In 1908 Congress passed an employers' liability law af
fecting common carriers engaged in Interstate commerce,
replacing an earlier law that the Supreme Court had de
clared unconstitutional. A series of similar laws passed by
the States accepted the principle of workmen's compen
sation according to a definite scale without litigation or
cost to the injured persons. Industry proceeded to insure
its employees against the risk of accident and to inaugurate
a campaign for "safety first" that progressively reduced
both the risk and the accidents. So far as federal em
ployees were concerned, Congress passed a workmen's
compensation act in 1908 to be administered by the old
Department of Labor, which became the Bureau of Labor
Statistics In the new department of 1913. In the fields of
child welfare and industrial accident Congress was engaged
in stretching the limits of its power to regulate interstate
commerce. It was no new thing for Congress to be interested In the
education of citizens. Since 1862 the land-grant colleges,
established under the Morrill Act, had been Educational
concerned with agricultural and industrial edu- g''^"ts
cation. In some of the Western universities successful
attempts were made after 1900 to extend the benefits of
education to the adult population, and extension divisions
were established to carry education to the people. In 1914
the Smith-Lever Act provided for cooperation In agricul
tural extension between the Department of Agriculture and
the land-grant colleges, and the United States assumed a
part of the responsibility for this type of local Instruction.
In February, 191 7, this policy was further extended by an
act that created the Federal Board of Vocational Educa
tion, whose function was to cooperate with the States,
dollar for dollar, in instruction In agriculture, commerce,
industry, and domestic science. In each of these cases a
program of progressive increase was planned and accepted

4i8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
locally. A network of new federal instructional officers,
touching Individual citizens in the most remote districts,
was the outcome.
Still another division of the Department of Labor began
immediately to put together a United States employment
service. The powers for this were derived by implication,
partly from the organic act of the Department, which
specified services to the wage-earner, and partly from the
immigration law of 1907, which gave the Bureau of Immi
gration power to assist In placing immigrants where they
could be used. An emergency call for harvest hands from
Oklahoma In 1914 gave the impetus from which an employ
ment service was developed in the next two years.
Another highly controversial measure concerning the
status of labor was pending in Congress when the anti-
Seamen's trust legislation of 1914 was passed. This was
^'^^ Andrew Furuseth's Seamen's Bill for the im
provement of the conditions of sailors in the merchant serv
ice. The bill represented the aspirations of the seamen's
unions and was designed to revolutionize the relations of
the sailor to his employer. The prevailing practice made
a seaman for the term of his contract bound to his master.
The powers of a captain of a ship at sea, always large, were
buttressed by the fact that his hands could not desert their
jobs when his ship touched port. Supported persistently
by Senator La Follette, the Furuseth Bill was in Congress
for two years. It established physical conditions for the
housing of the crew and their maintenance, effective for aU
merchant ships entering American ports. It provided that
a seaman at any American port might legally demand half
the wages due him, and destroyed the power to bring him
back If he should desert. The power asserted in the law,
which passed in 1915, ran counter to provisions in the com
mercial treaties with most of the maritime powers, by
which their seamen in America were kept under their own
jurisdiction as administered by their consuls. The statute
required the State Department to abrogate these treaties
to this extent, and the Supreme Court In 1920 upheld the

FEDERAL CONTROL 419
constitutionality of the wage requirement. Favored by
labor, the bill was bitterly opposed by the maritime inter
ests, which maintained that it was the last blow against an
American merchant marine, already moribund.
The broadening program of federal activity gave point
to the title of the New Republic that appeared in Novem
ber, 1914, as an organ of progressives. The critical
intellectual leadership of the daily newspapers Journalism
was weakening as the great editors one by one passed off
the stage. Only Henry Watterson survived of that great
group that had made their journals real organs for shap
ing public opinion In the two decades after the Civil War.
The opinions of newspapers .seemed to be counting for
less and less as the years went round, and the appearance
of new weeklies representing different shades of opinion
and uninfluenced by advertising policies, was a conse
quence. Bryan's Commoner (1900) was early in the field,
and was followed in January, 1909, by La Follette's Mag
azine. Colonel Roosevelt became a contributing editor
to the Outlook, and later, the Metropolitan Magazine and
the Kansas City Star, after his retirement from office.
Max Eastman brought out the Masses as a carrier for
Socialist opinions in 191 1, and reincarnated it in 19 18 as
the Liberator. The weekly of radical labor, Solidarity, be
gan its course in January, 1910. The old leadership of the
New York Nation in the formulation of critical opinion
weakened after the withdrawal of E. L. Godkin, who re
tired in 1899. The New Republic in 1914 now added a
deliberate breadth of vision and was serving seventeen
thousand subscribers in its second year. Both it and the
Nation developed so rapidly in their liberalism as to leave
more conservative critics behind, who brought out in 1919
the Review as a protest against "unthinking radicalism";
while in 1920 the weekly Freeman appeared to struggle for
the leadership of radical thought.
The promise of the Democratic platform of 191 2 to re
store freedom to the Filipinos at as early a date as possible
started a discussion in which 1921 was accepted as the ulti-

420 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
mate date. Ever since Bryan had exerted his Influence to
Philippine accomplish the ratification of the Spanish Treaty
government jj^ 1898, this polIcy had been a Democratic doc
trine. In the intervening years steady progress in the
directions of education, self-government, and peace had
been the consequence of American administration. The
Filipino Assembly in 1907 took over the lawmaking power
that the Philippine Commission appointed by the President
had hitherto exercised. A new organic act for the Islands
became a law In August, 191 6, after a vigorous debate. In
the early stages of which Secretary of War Garrison declared
his unwillingness to remain In the Cabinet if the principle
of immediate Independence should be adopted. The new
act provided for replacing the Philippine Commission with
an elective Senate as the superior body in the Philippine
Congress. Nearly three years before its passage the control
of the Commission had been given over to Filipino citizens.
Francis Burton Harrison, sent out as Governor-General in
191 3, had announced the Administration policy of adminis
tering the Philippine Islands as a trustee for the Filipinos
with a view to their ultimate independence, and had prom
ised to take the steps, one at a time as conditions war
ranted them, and to begin by placing power In the hands
of Filipino appointees. A few weeks after the arrival of
Governor Harrison at his post occurred an episode that
Illustrated the interest of the President in his success, as
well as the fact that there was a new regime In Washington.
The military Order of the Carabao was founded at Manila
by the officers engaged in suppressing the insurrection of
Aguinaldo, and established "corrals" at the various army
centers, where from time to time periodical "wallows" gave
an opportunity for members of the Philippine expeditionary
force to renew their friendships and exchange reminiscences.
The society drew its name from the draft animal of the
FUipInos, which was "said to be slower than a camel and
more obstinate than a mule," and whose chief ambition to
lie down in a puddle provided the name for the local meet
ings of the society. In like fashion the roiUtary Order of the

FEDERAL CONTROL 421
Dragon was formed by the officers who served in China,
as the Aztec Club had long since been organized by the con
querors of Mexico. No importance had ever been given to
the songs and burlesques that accompanied their annual
"wallows" In Washington which resembled In character
the meetings of the Gridiron Club or the Clover Club.
In December, 1913, the dinner of the Washington corral
of the Carabao was followed by a burlesque di- Attack on
rected against the naval policies of Secretary Bryap and
Daniels and the interest of Secretary Bryan in
peace and prohibition, and terminated with the famous
"insurrecto song" whose refrain ran,
" Underneath the starry flag
Civilize them with a krag."
By order of the President the officers concerned with the
performance were immediately and publicly rebuked. A
naval commander already detailed to the Asiatic fleet was
transferred, and notification was abruptly served on the
military officers of the United States that it was a gross
impropriety for them to discredit or Interfere with the poli
cies of their Government.
The burlesques of Bryan and Daniels were founded upon
disapproval. Secretary Bryan was already engaged in
negotiation of an elaborate series of peace treaties whose
ideals had been accepted by the Administration. He was
also one of the leading advocates of prohibition, and had
"announced his devotion to the fight to make the United
States dry by constitutional amendment. There was wide
criticism and some serious disapproval of his determination
not to serve wine at his residence, and the supposed hard
ship entailed upon the diplomatic corps when they found
that he had substituted grape-juice became the subject of
humorous squibs without number. The humorous weekly.
Life, took up the joke as though It were serious, and devoted
itself to a campaign of farce against both Bryan and Daniels.
Secretary Daniels came into the Navy Department as a
landsman, as most of his predecessors had done. Shortly

422 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
after his inauguration he approved a recommendation of the
general board over which Admiral Dewey presided, chang
ing the nautical vocabulary from "port" and "starboard"
to "left" and "right." There was resentment already de
veloping because of his avowed determination to improve
the condition of the enlisted man and to introduce reforms
for his education and betterment. The port and starboard
order was too good an opportunity to be overlooked.
Broad comedy was based upon it, and revived the interest
of cartoonists and joke-makers in Gilbert and Sullivan's
Pinafore, whose admiral owed his rise to a determination to
"Stick close to your desk and never go to sea." • The at
tack on Daniels was intensified in 1914 when an order was
issued requiring naval officers to give up their wine mess,
and to conform to the temperance regulations imposed upon
their men. His recommendation that the Government un
dertake the manufacture of armor plate and heavy guns In
order to prevent being gouged by ordnance makers, brought
him unpopularity from another quarter. This culminated
at the Carabao dinner, the aftermath of which revealed the
President fully in support of the members of his official
family. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Louis H. Haney, Business Organization and Combination (1913), is a
general treatise on the trusts. More .special treatments are William Howard
Taft, The Anti-Trust Act and the Supreme Court (1914) ; E. D. Durand, The
Trust Problem (1915); and E. T. B. Pierce, The Story of the Trust Com- _
panics (1916). The Annual Reports of the Federal Trade Commission
and the Department of Labor should be studied. An insular view of the
Philippines is given in M. M. Kalaw, The Case for the Filipinos (1916); and
Self-Government in the Philippines (19 19).

CHAPTER XLIII
WATCHFUL WAITING
The success of President Wilson's policy of settling Im
mediately the tariff, financial, and banking problems
brought a solution by the autumn of 1914 to the Bryan in
question as to whether or not he could be the State
leader of his party. William Jennings Bryan,
whose dominance was unquestioned at the date of the Balti
more Convention, was believed to have It in his power to
wreck the Administration of any other man. His appoint
ment as Secretary of State made it possible for the Admin
istration to use his Influence over Western and Southern
Democrats, while he In the new office showed a willingness
to subordinate himself and cooperate with his chief that
contributed to the ;:uccessful leadership of the latter. The
influence of Bryan was always potent at the Capitol, main
taining party discipline, soothing the discontented, and
facilitating the passage of the statutes of 1913 and 1914.
By the latter date the President was in actual enjoyment of
the party leadership that Bryan had possessed, and there
was no sign of any break between them.
In the administration of the State Department Bryan
contributed no special training and no unusual understand
ing of the problems. Technical matters were carried on
by the permanent staff. Minor officials In the diplomatic
service were promoted and transferred as consistently as the
law allowed. The chief ambassadors and ministers were
as usual allowed to retire, and their successors were ap
pointed directly from civil life. In the more important
posts men of letters or active partisans replaced Republican
predecessors. The editor of World's Work, Walter Hines
Page, was sent to the Court of St. James, Thomas Nelson
Page to Rome, Brand Whitlock to Brussels, Henry van
Dyke to The Hague, and James W. Gerard, a wealthy

424 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
New York judge, to Berlin. It was commonly believed
that the President gave the leading title in his Cabinet
to Bryan, but retained control of the diplomatic policies
of the State Department himself.
A few days before the change In administrations Mexico
underwent another of her periodic revolutions, and a mill-
Mexican tary dictator, Victoriano Huerta, assumed the
Revolution executive power, displacing Francisco I. Madero,
whose own title had been based on successful revolution.
For thirty-five years, until 191 1, Mexico enjoyed toler
able tranquillity under the heavy hand of General POTfirlo
Diaz, dictator and President. In the Diaz regime Mexico
came nearer to the United States as railroads crossed the
Rio Grande and penetrated the highlands of the Latin
Republic. Foreigners were encouraged to take concessions
for the development of Mexican resources. Mining and
railroad construction were promoted, and in later years,
when oil was discovered in the State of Tamaullpas, petro
leum concessions were granted in the Tampico district.
Foreign industry found It possible to do business under the
Diaz regime and the disorder that had formerly existed along
the Rio Grande was rigorously repressed. By a semblance
of popular government Diaz reelected himself term after
term, but In 191 1 he fled the country in the face of an
agrarian Insurrection that brought Madero to the front.
The protests of the Maderists asserted that natural re
sources had been misappropriated, that the common Mex
ican was being driven from his land, and that foreign
capital was dominating the government. The Madero
regime was never peacefully established over the whole re
public. On February 18, 1913, Madero was overturned W
a military conspiracy, and three days later he was murdered
amid circumstances that suggested that the new dictator,
Huerta, was guiltily responsible. Taft took no step re
specting Mexico that might embarrass his successor in
handling the new problem. After the Maderlst revolt he
increased the number of regular troops stationed along the
Rio Grande In order to lessen the border disturbance that

WATCHFUL WAITING 425
invariably accompanied Mexican revolutions. Texan, New
Mexican, and Arizona towns, with considerable Mexican
population, found their peace and safety disturbed as plots
were hatched in them for execution in Mexico, and as
Mexican fugitives and pursuers carried their fighting across
the boundary into the United States.
The murder of Madero gave the Huerta Administration
a bad start, and In one State at least it was repudiated from
the beginning. In Coahuila, General Venustiano -j-j^g Huerta
Carranza refused to recognize the change, and Adminis-
becarfie the nucleus of an anti-Huerta movement.
In March, 1912, under the stimulus of the Mexican revolt.
Congress authorized the President to endeavor to moderate
domestic violence in the Latin republics by forbidding the
export of arms and ammunition. Operating under this law
Taft endeavored to influence the course of the revolution,
with the result that the Mexican revolutionists were driven
to procure their supplies In Europe, where German dealers
were entirely willing to provide them.
One of the first tasks of Secretary Bryan was that of
determining what to do with Huerta. The American ¦
Ambassador in Mexico, Harry Lane Wilson, openly sup
ported the new Government, and returned to Washington
in the summer to report that the alternative for Mexico
was Huetta or chaos. The Administration repudiated his
conduct in the early days of the revolution. He resigned
his post in August, and John Lind, of Minnesota, was sent
to Mexico as a confidential agent to investigate the state of
affairs. On August 27 the President addressed Congress
upon the crisis, indicating his determination not to intervene,
but to exert a ' ' steady pressure of moral force ' ' for the re-
establishment of peace. Mexico was to be allowed to work
out^er own problem, with the United States in a position
of "-vj^atchful waiting" for the outcome. In October the
violent dissolution of the Mexican Congress by Huerta
evoked the announcement that the United States would not
recognize the Huerta Government or accept the approaching
Mexican election as constitutional. An American Charge

426 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
d'Affalres, Nelson O'Shaughnessy, was allowed to remain
informally In Mexico, where all of the other great powers had
already recognized Huerta. The former Ambassador issued
a public attack upon the Mexican policy of the Adminis
tration, and on October 17, 19 13, President Wilson dis
cussed the Latin-American relationships of the United
States In a speech at Mobile.
The "Mobile Doctrine" constituted a new interpretation
of the Doctrine of Monroe. The diplomatic interventions
The " Mobile of the United States In the affairs of Venezuela
Doctrine" ]-,y Cleveland in 1895 and by Roosevelt in 1902
were welcom^ed in Latin America as evidence that the
Monroe Doctrine constituted a safeguard against attack,
but the brusque treatment of Colombia In 1903 and the
prevention of her recovery of Panama aroused deep suspi
cions of the sincerity of the United States when its own ex
pansion was involved. The special missions of Root and
Knox to the Latin Americas were designed to allay these
suspicions, which were revived when American business
Interests, aroused by the Mexican revolution, began to de
mand an intervention "to clean up Mexico." Speaking at
Mobile, President Wilson promised that the United States
would never add a foot to Its territory by conquest, and ex
pressed the hope that law and order might prevail in the
neighboring republics. A large part of the regular army con
tinued in camp along the Rio Grande, where Texas and New
Mexico were continually demanding protection.
Huerta, deprived of recognition by the United States,
was unable to procure substantial aid from other countries
Canal since these were unwilling to interfere In Ameri-
treatywith can problems. As evidence of the sincerity of
the Mobile policy, Bryan signed a treaty with
Colombia on April 7, 19 14, regretting that the relations of
the countries had been marred in 1903, and providing com
pensation to Colombia for the loss of the Canal Zone. The
treaty remained only an evidence of administrative intent,
as the Senate did not ratify it, and two days after Its sig
nature an episode at Tampico tested the self-restraint o{

WATCHFUL WAITING 427
"watchful waiting." An American naval officer with a few
marines was arrested by the Huerta forces, and adequate
apology was not forthcoming. A military and naval demon
stration was at once prepared against Vera Cruz. "There
can In what we do be no thought of aggression or of selfish
aggrandizement," said the President as he announced the
intervention to Congress on April 20, 1914. "We seek to
maintain the dignity and authority of the United States
only because we wish always to keep our great influence un
impaired for the uses of liberty, both In the United States and
wherever else it may be employed for the benefit of man
kind." In both parties impatience with watchful waiting
was pronounced. Henry Watterson declared for war
"because, helpless to help herself, Mexico has become a
menace to us."
With Frank F. Fletcher in command of the fleet and
Frederick Funston in command of the expeditionary force
Vera Cruz was occupied and held for a short Mexican
period. The "A.B.C. "powers— Argentina, Bra- intervention
zil, and Chile — offered their services as mediators between
the United States and Mexico, which were accepted at once.
The formal satisfaction for the Insult at Tampico was never
attained, but the steady pressure upon Huerta accomplished
its result, and he resigned his position on July 15, 1914.
A few days later he set sail for Spain, an exile from his
country. But peace failed to be established. General
Carranza acceded to the presidency, while disorder con
tinued throughout the republic; and along the Rio Grande
life and property remained uncertain because of revolu
tionary turbulence. In the spring of 19 16 a second military
intervention took place in an attempt to capture a notorious
bandit, one Francisco ViUa. This time the whole available
force of the regular army was used, and the National Guard
was called out and mobilized along the border. Villa es
caped, the invading column was drawn back across the
Chihuahua desert to El Paso, and there remained nothing
definite in the Mexican situation except the fixed determi
nation of President Wilson not to take advantage of the

428 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
dissensions in the neighboring republic or to restore order
there by force.
The patience with which the American Government
waited for Mexico to right itself and resume the normal ac
tivities of government was unpopular at home and abroad.
Not only was the revolution pushing across the border en
dangering life and property in the United States, but within
Mexico property was destroyed and lives of foreigners
needlessly sacrificed. The European countries, whose sub
jects were suffering, looked to the United States for diplo
matic guidance. .They did not desire to arouse American
hostility by intervention, yet were not satisfied to watch
the losses and destruction without protest.
The cordial relationships that had existed in 1909 be
tween the United States and the rest of the world were being
undermined. With Japan there was the griev-
isolation of ance against the United States due to the dis-
the United criminations which California desired to exert
States against Japanese subjects with reference to land
tenure. The open protest of the National Administration
was unable to prevent the passage of discriminatory laws,
which Japan believed to be in violation of her treaties.
With Russia there was no treaty in existence to govern com
mercial relationships. That Government had refused to
admit American citizens who happened to be Jews, and in
retaliation the United States denounced the Treaty of
1832, in 191 1. The Imperial Government showed no dis
position to modify its determination not to surrender its
control over aliens admitted into, the empire, and the
United States was unwilling to recognize an explicit dis
crimination against any class of American citizens. The
refusal of the Senate to approve the Taft arbitration treaty
with England was regretted in that country, but was much
less injurious to friendly relationships than the tolls ex
emption clause of the Canal Act of August, 1912.
The United States was drifting into a position of isola
tion when on March 5, 19 14, President Wilson appeared
before Congress with a formal request for the repeal of the

WATCHFUL WAITING 429
tolls exemption clause urging "the justice, the wisdom,
and the large policy of such a repeal with the
utmost earnestness." He asserted his belief Panama*
that the exemption policy was not only unsound *-'^"^' 5°"®
r- r- J j^ exemption
In an economic way, but was "in plain contra
vention ' ' of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. ' ' We are too big,
too powerful, too self-respecting a nation," he urged, "to
interpret with a too strained or refined reading the words of
our own promises just because we have power enough to
give us leave to read them as we please. ... I ask this of
you in support of the foreign policy of the Administration.
I shall not know how to deal with other matters of even
greater delicacy and nearer consequence if you do not
grant it to me In ungrudging measure."
The Inner reasons for this demand on Congress were not
explained, and the public was left to wonder what inter
national catastrophe was Impending. The debate on the
merits of repeal divided Congress without reference to par
ties, and continued bitterly for three months. The ca
nal itself, meanwhile, was finished. On April i, 1914, Gen
eral Goethals became civil governor of the Canal Zone and
a few days later a barge service was Inaugurated through
the canal. The date for the formal opening was set for
August 15.
The tolls repeal act passed the House before the end of
March and in the Senate was officially defended by Hoke
Smith, of Georgia, formerly Secretary of the Interior under
Cleveland. Its ablest support came from Elihu Root,
while the non-partisan nature of the debate was revealed
by the fact that O'Gorman, of New York, chairman of the
Senate Committee on Oceanic Canals led in opposing It.
Some Senators who were reluctant to repeal the clause and
to concede its inequity urged that the matter be referred to
arbitration under the existing treaty with England. On
June 15 the repeal act became a law.
The diplomatic policy Indicated by the MobUe speech and
the repeal of the tolls exemption clause was one of self-
restraint and fair play, which received wider interpretation

430 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
as Secretary Bryan undertook the negotiation of a series of
arbitration treaties with the world at large. Biyan, like
most Americans, was the sort of a friend of peace whom it
was easy for the unthinking critic to confuse with the the
oretical pacifist. In no sense a non-resistant, he believed
war to be always an evil, and that it ought to be avoided
in every possible case. He was sharply at variance with
those who advocated large armies and navies as a means of
defense, maintaining that these were In reality a provoca
tion of war. He urged as a substitute for this type of prepa
ration international good faith based upon arbitral agree
ments. More than thirty nations accepted his proposals
in substance. "The high contracting parties agree," the
opening article of each treaty ran, "that all disputes be
tween them, of every nature whatsoever, shall, when diplo
matic methods of adjustment have failed, be referred for
investigation and report to a permanent international com
mission . . . and agree not to declare war or begin hostUi
ties during such investigation and before the report is sub
mitted." The Senate ratified most of these treaties without delay,
and their negotiator regarded them as a potent means of
maintaining peace. The special arbitration treaty with
Great Britain, due to expire on June 4, 1913, was renewed
for a period of five years.
Diplomatic attempts were made to improve the relations
of the United States with the neighbors in the Caribbean
Central region and resulted in more definite relationships
American with Nicaragua and Haiti. The Colombian
treaty of April 7 was pending in the Senate,
when In August, 1914, a treaty was signed with Nicaragua
inspired In part by the assertion of the Minister from
Nicaragua that the German Government was bidding for
the control of the potential canal route across his country.
In accordance with this agreement the United States, for
the sum of three million dollars in gold, acquired the owner
ship of the Nicaragua right of way between the two oceans.
In addition It acquired the control of islands for naval

WATCHFUL WAITING 431
bases in the Caribbean and of shore rights on the Gulf of
Fonseca. The purchase money was to be administered
jointly "for the advancement of the welfare of Nicaragua,"
and in the control of its expenditure the United States
acquired rights inferior to those of the protectorate plan of
1910, but quite sufficient to influence the course of that
republic. The purchase of the Nicaragua right of way, which the
Senate ratified in 1916, failed to moderate the Central
American suspicion of the United State's. Both Costa
Rica and Salvador had interests in either the right of way
itself or the Gulf of Fonseca at its western end. They
brought suit for redress in the Central American Supreme
Court that the United States had urged them to found, but
got no redress because that body was without jurisdiction
over the United States. It was their claim that Nicaragua
had no power to dispose of a canal right without their con
sent. The Government of Haiti was reestablished as an
American protectorate by a treaty of September 16, 1915.
Its finances were brought under American control, and
American naval forces were called upon to assist in maintain
ing order here as in Santo Domingo, Nicaragua, and Hon
duras. In the Caribbean, as in Mexico, the dilemma
remained unsolved. It was impracticable to secure the
cordial friendship of the Latin-American countries without
treating them as equals and keeping hands off their affairs.
It was impossible for them, with their own resources, to
maintain the standard of public order and security to life
and property prevalent in the United States or Europe. A
growing consciousness that European powers might not
indefinitely tolerate Latin-American disorder made the di
lemma a practical one admitting of no evasion.
While the tolls repeal bill was in its last stages in Congress
and General Goethals was preparing for the inauguration of
commerce through the canal, another great canal opening of
was being brought Into service. At Kiel the ^^^^^^^^^^
German Emperor, William II, opened the en
larged canal between the Baltic and the North Sea. At

432 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the original opening of this canal In 1895, a few ships in the
American White Squadron took part in the celebration. In
the years ensuing the canal became a part of Germany's
naval establishment, and German battleships that could
now take safe refuge in the Baltic were floated In increasing
numbers in conscious rivalry to those of England. The
first battleship of the dreadnaught class placed in commis
sion by England in 1906 made the Kiel Canal obsolete as
an adjunct to warfare because no ship of dreadnaught di
mensions could be passed through Its locks. Its rebuilding
on a larger scale was Immediately undertaken, while the
keels of German dreadnaughts were laid down in the years
after 1906; but until the enlarged canal was ready for use
the power of the German navy was maimed. The formal
reopening in the week ending on July i, 1914, was believed
by Germany to be the forerunner of great events. The
latter days of the festivities, however, were marred by the
news that Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Crown Prince of
Austria, had been murdered at Sarajevo on June 28. The
train of events that this precipitated, made possible, if not
promoted, by the fact that the Kiel Canal was open, brought
new problems in the next few weeks to test the sincerity of
the American Government In its professions of fair play and
peace. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Robinson and West, The Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson (1917),
contains a useful commentary upon the State papers of the Administra
tion. Upon the Mexican problem there is interesting descriptive material
in Edith Coues O'Shaughnessy, A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico (1916), and
Diplomatic Days in Mexico (1917). The Central American topics are
covered in Dana G. Munro, The Five Republics of Central America (1918);
Chester Lloyd Jones, The Caribbean Interests of the United States (1917);
and Joseph B. Bishop, The Panama Gateway (1913). Albert Bushnell
Hart, The Monroe Doctrine (1915), is a judicious and comprehensive sum
mary.

CHAPTER XLIV
NEUTRALITY AND PREPAREDNESS
The murder of the Austrian Archduke was Interpreted as
an .episode in the Pan-Slav struggle in the Balkans to ob
struct the Pan-German pressure toward Con- The Worid
stantinople and the East, with its accompanying ^^"^
idea of a Central Europe under German Influence. By an
nexing Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 the Dual Monarchy
had added fuel to the Slavic grievances in general and those
of Serbia in particular. The suspicion that the murder
was due to a Serbian plot gave pretext for an Austrian at
tack to remove forever the obstacles to Teutonic advance
in the region of the Bosphorus. Great Britain was on the
verge of civil war, with Ulster armed and angry. Russia
appeared to be in the throes of revolutionary movements,
the outgrowth of the partial revolution of 1905. France
gave superficial evidence of decay within her government
and army. The United States, far removed from European
concerns, was on the verge of war with Mexico and perhaps
Japan. An overbearing ultimatum addressed by Austria
to Serbia on July 23, J914, was expected to produce not sat
isfaction, but a cause for war. Five days later the bom
bardment of Belgrade began and within the next few days
the World War became a fact.
One by one the European powers were drawn in. Russia
mobilized in defense of Serbia and France followed to be
prepared for contingencies in the event of a Russian war.
The German Empire, which had approved the ultimatum
in advance and underwritten its consequences, mobilized
against Russia and France, and exerted all its diplomatic
powers to persuade England to stand aloof. The British
fleet, assembled for a great review off Spithead on July 20,
was held together after the review in control of the Eng
lish Channel. The great powers went to war beginning

434 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
August I. On the following day the German forces crossed
the Belgian frontier en route to France.
The invasion of Belgium, a neutralized state, whose sta
tus Germany like the other European powers was under
contract to respect, aroused the world as no other fact since
the Crusades had done. It shifted the Issue at once from
the immediate merits of the controversy between Teutons
and Slavs to the larger issue of world peace, and shifted the
original combatants in the struggle, Austria and Serbia, to
an inferior rank, as the German Empire assumed the position
of aggressor against a peaceful world for the carrying- out of
her military ambitions. The Belgian forts,. Liege and the
rest, retarded Germany's advance enough to spoil the scheme
for a surprise blow upon France and the seizure of Paris be
fore Russia could complete her mobilization. Five weeks
later Joffre checked the German armies at the Marne and
Europe settled down to a war of exhaustion that involved
the world.
The course for the United States to take in this war had
long been established by precedent and theory. The mod-
American ern doctrine of neutrality was an American idea
neutrality ^jj^^ Washington had conceived and Jefferson
phrased in 1793. The American Neutrality Act of 1794
was the foundation of all such acts wherever they existed,
and the progress of international law thereafter was due
largely to the insistence of neutral states, generally under
American leadership and demanding that beUigerents re
spect their rights and property, and leave them alone.
American Insistence upon the rights of neutrals included
also an acceptance of the duties of neutrals to belligerents.
Proclamations of neutrality were issued by the United
States as succeeding powers entered the war, and on
August 18 the President addressed the nation upon its at
titude to the struggle. It was too early to form any clear
view of the general drift of the war, and authentic stories
of its conduct were hardly yet available. It still appeared
to be a war of Europe which Americans might interpret as
the normal outcome of the competitive military prepara-

NEUTRALITY AND PREPAREDNESS 435
tions of the combatants. From the information at hand
the President could say that "It is entirely within our own
choice what its effects upon us wUl be" ; and he went on to
urge American citizens, drawn most of them from the na
tions at war, to keep down their passions, restrain their
partisanship, and think first of the United States, "a nation
that neither sits In judgment upon others, nor is disturbed
In her own councils, and which keeps herself fit and free to
do what is honest and disinterested, and truly serviceable
for the peace of the world."
The first acts of neutrality comprised friendly services
to the belligerents. The American Ambassadors at Lon
don, Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Rome Friendly
were accepted as custodians of the deserted em- services
bassies of the various belligerents, and were at once en
gaged in relief work for the benefit of distressed non-com
batants who found themselves In enemy country when the
war broke out. As the German troops overran Belgium
and the National Government retreated from Brussels,
Brand Whitlock and the Spanish Ambassador remained at
their posts as Washbume had done at Paris in 1870, not
only to represent their nations, but to serve mankind. The
American embassies, undermanned at best, organized emer
gency groups of assistants, picking up Americans who
chanced to be in Europe and using them in the relief work.
Thousands of Americans found themselves stranded in a
world at war. To relieve these an American warship was
immediately dispatched with a store of American gold that
Congress appropriated at once. The relief of belligerent
subjects was hardly started before there began to pour
across the Belgian frontiers and across the Channel into
England a stream of Belgian refugees. Dispossessed by a
lawless invader, with their homes destroyed and lives need
lessly lost, the condition of the Belgians helped to crystallize
neutral opinion as to the merits of the war. The American
relief committee in London was organized under the leader
ship of an American mining engineer, Herbert C. Hoover,
and out of it there developed in October the C.R.B. — the

436 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Commission for the Relief of Belgium — into whose hands
the life of the Belgian civil population was entrusted.
American public opinion was stunned by the fact of war,
and accepted with approval the statements of neutrality.
Censorship whlch were harmonious at once with American
and propa- policy and with the conditions of general Ig-
ganda t^ J' . t- rr • ,
norance respecting European affairs that pre
vailed over most of the United States. It was some months
before Colonel Roosevelt and his friends voiced the con
trary doctrine, that " neutrality Is at best a drab-colored,
selfish, and insignificant virtue, even when It ^5 a virtue; and
it is often a particularly obnoxious vice. " It became difficult
to get authentic facts upon which to form a judgment.
Newspaper correspondents were not welcome in the war
zone, official censors colored the '^tories that were given out,
and the British Government controlled the European cable
terminals and mails. Propaganda took the place of news
so far as the belligerents were concerned, and American
opinion became skeptical as to the reliability of facts as
printed. On August lo a group of Americans of German
ancestry brought out the first issue of the weekly. The
Fatherland, in the interest of the Central .Powers. In a
poem directed to "William II, Prince of Peace," the editor
himself cried out: "But thy great task will not be done
Until thou vanquish utterly
The Norman brother of the Hun,
England, the Serpent of the Sea."
The German propaganda in America devoted itself to a
blackening of the fame of England, and to a unification of
the Germans in the United States. There were of these, in
1910, 8,712,149 either born In Germany or with one parent
born there. Since the visit of Prince Henry of Prussia and
the formation of the National German-American Alliance
In 1902 the organization of this group had been tightened
and extended. The Fatherland attempted to attach to it
on the basis of anti-British feeling the Americans of Irish
extraction, who, since the Fenian movement, had consist-

NEUTRALITY AND PREPAREDNESS 437
ently opposed acts of agreement with Great Britain and
who were already partially organized in the American Truth
Society to fight the rapprochement due to the termination
of a hundred years of peace.
On the other side of the debate centers of influence were
soon visible, a few Inspired by sympathy with England, but
most of them judging the war from the basis of Pro- Allies
the invasion of Belgium, the expulsion of non- °P'"i°n
combatants, the reign of frightfulness at Louvain and else
where, and the deliberate bombardment of the cathedral at
Rheims. For these the cause of the Central Powers was a
wicked cause. When on September 5, 1914, Russia, Great
Britain, and France signed an agreement that none of the
three would ' ' conclude peace separately during the present
war" and became by this fact the Allies, the Americans
who detested the acts of Germany became known as the
"pro-AUies." The great body of Americans in 1914, how
ever, stood aloof from the active controversy of propaganda,
content with their traditional neutrality.
The Great War, coming on top of the canal tolls dispute
and the Mexican crisis, disturbed the tranquillity with
which Congress applied itself to the legislative tasks before
it. In spite of the distractions thus promoted, the anti
trust legislation was advanced to a conclusion, and on
October 24 Congress adjourned after the longest continuous
session on record. The Clayton Anti-Trust Law was com
pleted, and the Federal Trade Commission was immedi
ately launched, while the federal reserve system authorized
the year before was ready to open its reserve banks in
November. The Tariff Act of 1913 was in operation, but called for
unforeseen amendment because of the war in Europe. Im
ports from the Central Powers were immediately ^^j.
restricted by the Allied blockades while Allied revenue
shipping found itself speedily diverted from
American traffic to troop transport and other national serv
ice. American imports fell away and the tariff revenue
derived from them was lessened nearly ninety million dol-

438 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
lars during the fiscal year 1914-15. In anticipation of this
emergency a war revenue bill was put through Congress,
designed to produce one hundred million dollars extra
revenue chiefly by internal taxation, and became a law
October 22. It was preceded in enactment by a ship
registry law Inspired by the war-time crisis, and permitting
merchant ships of foreign ownership to be transferred to
American registry. The war revealed the fact that the
United States was at the mercy of the world for the carriage
of its ocean freights. The cotton crop of 1914 piled up at
Southern terminals because of lack of ships to carry it
abroad. Another shipping bill was Introduced providing
for the erection of a United States Shipping Board with
power to purchase, equip, maintain, and operate a merchant
fleet. This project remained under debate for more than
two years, before its final passage in 191 6; but a war-risk
bill was signed September 2, 1914, authorizing the Treasury
Department to control the extortionate rates of the com
mercial insurance companies by establishing a Bureau of
War Risk Insurance to underwrite these risks at a reason
able price.
Congress adjourned only ten days before the November
election at which the Sixty-Fourth Congress was to be
Democratic Selected. For two years the majority party,
successes, held together by the strictest of discipline, had
enacted the program demanded by progressive
citizens regardless of party. Early in the spring of 1914
the Democratic National Committee, with "unwonted
democratic forehandedness," began the issue of campaign
literature setting forth "a record of achievement." The
Progressive Party had begun to evaporate. Many of Its
members found themselves able to support the Democratic
program and others relapsed into the Republican organiza
tion where they were welcomed back. The Progressive
vote in 1914 was so unimportant as to make the contest one
between the two old parties, and to raise a clear issue as to
whether Democratic control could be founded upon majority
votes. In Pennsylvania, where Roosevelt had carried the

NEUTRALITY AND PREPAREDNESS 439
primaries before him in 191 2, there were three candidates in
a senatorial contest. Boies Penrose, one of the inner group
of "stand-pat" Republicans, gained the election directly
from the people, over the Democrat, A. Mitchell Palmer,
and Gifford Pinchot, the Progressive candidate. The Dem
ocratic leaders In the Congressional election made what
use they could of the World War and the American disposi
tion toward neutrality. They printed on their campaign
literature the text, "War in the East. Peace In the West.
Thank God for Wilson ! ' ' The Democrats became for the
time being a majority party as a result of the election, with
a lead of nearly thirty votes in the House over the combined
Republicans and Progressives, and of fourteen In the Senate.
When the new session opened in December, 1914, further
statements were received from the President as to the effect
of the war upon the United States.
As the leading neutral in the war, and particularly be
cause of American dependence upon foreign merchant
marine, the United States developed a list of American
grievances against the belligerents and notably grievances
against those whose power lay on the high seas. The naval
power of the Allies surrounded the water entrances to Ger
many with a blockade whose effectiveness was soon com
plete, but whose powers were exercised chiefly in connection
with the belligerent rights of contraband and search. The
Declaration of London, formulated in 1909 for the purpose
of codifying the rules of maritime law, had not been ratified,
and the practice of the powers reverted to the unwritten
principles of international law. Under the law of blockade
it would have been permissible for the Allied warships to
cut off all trade with German ports and to confiscate as law
ful prize all vessels attempting to evade the blockade. The
Allies refrained from exercising this privilege because of its
inadequacy. With German ports closed, there developed
at once an Increase in the imports of Italy, Holland, and
Scandinavia, whose ports were not subject to blockade and
from whose territory, by land routes, neutral supplies could
find their way to German and Austrian consumers. Since

440 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
no right to blockade neutral ports was recognized, a block
ade of German ports could at best divert the traffic, but
could not stop it.
The law of contraband was elaborated to suit the needs
of the existing war, and precedents created by the United
States during the Civil War were produced by the Allies
to sustain the correctness of the practice. During the Civil
War American naval vessels had seized munitions en route
from Europe to British ports in the Bahamas, to Havana,
or to Matamoros in northern Mexico. The United States
Supreme Court upheld these seizures as lawful because the
destination of the contraband was clearly to aid the enemy.
The Anglo-British Claims Convention after the Civil War
did not overturn them. They were now cited to justify
the seizure of contraband destined for Germany, though
billed to Copenhagen or Rotterdam or some other neutral
port. When the German Empire perfected its organization
so that the whole nation was mobilized for war, and the
distinction between combatant and non-combatant disap
peared, the Allies enlarged the list of contraband, contend
ing that any supplies destined for the civil population of
Germany were in reality supplies of war. The growing use
of cotton for explosives brought that commodity within the
contraband list.
In addition to the vexatious enlargement of the contra
band list, the Allies exercised the right of search in a new
form, taking neutral vessels into port in order to examine
them, and seizing and searching the mails they carried for
the light they might throw upon enemy operations. Ameri
can protests began early against these practices, and were
continuing with increasing acerbity when Germany ad-.
vanced a view of maritime law whose novelty and horror
forced the Allied excesses into obscurity.
The submarine boat was an American invention that all
countries had adopted as a part of their naval establlsh-
The sub- ments. On February 4, 1915, the German Gov-
marine ernment, having already protested because the
United States failed to compel the Allies to respect the

NEUTRALITY AND PREPAREDNESS 441
American view of neutral rights, so useful to the Central Pow
ers, announced a war zone about the British Isles, within
which, beginning on February 18, they proposed to use sub
marines to sink and destroy "every enemy merchant ship
. . . even if It is impossible to avert dangers which threaten
the crew and passengers." No right of indiscriminate de
struction of merchant shipping has ever existed or been
claimed and this proposed policy was conceded to be in ex
cess of law and was justified only as a retaliation directed
against England. Before it became operative Submarine
the German Government was warned by the ^^"^"^^
United States as to the possible consequences In case
American merchant vessels or American citizens should
be lost. " It is, of course, not necessary to remind the Ger
man Government that the sole right of a belligerent in deal
ing with neutral vessels on the high seas Is limited to visit
and search unless a blockade is proclaimed and effectively
maintained, which this Government does not understand
to be proposed In this case. To declare or exercise a right
to attack and destroy any vessel entering a prescribed area
of the high seas without first determining its belligerent
nationality and the contraband character of Its cargo
would be an act so unprecedented in naval warfare that
this Government is reluctant to believe that the Imperial
Government of Germany in this case contemplates it as
possible." The German Government was warned that it
would be held to "a strict accountability" for " strict
any acts that might result, and that the United account-
States would do what might be necessary "to
safeguard American lives and property and to secure to
American citizens the full enjoyment of their acknowl
edged rights on the high seas."
Three months after the beginning of submarine warfare
the catastrophe that had been foreseen occurred. On May
7, 1915, the British liner, Lusitania, en route to The Lu-
Liverpool, was sunk off the coast of Ireland with- "'''""»
out warning by a German submarine. Among the 1200 lost
were 114 Americans, including women and children, whose

442 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
destruction was denounced that night by Colonel Roosevelt
as "an act of piracy," and convinced the nation of the im
minence of war.
In three notes directed to Germany after the sinking of
the Lusitania President Wilson sought to bring that nation
to an abandonment of her submarine policy and to lead his
country to a clear understanding of the crisis. The second
note, dated June 9, produced the resignation of Bryan from
the Cabinet because of his unwillingness to be responsible
for war, should It occur. ' ' Nothing but actual forcible re
sistance or continued efforts to escape by flight when or
dered to stop," ran the argument of the second note, . . .
has ever been held to forfeit the lives of . . . passengers
or crew. . . . The sinking of passenger ships involves prin
ciples of humanity which throw into the background any
special circumstances of detail .... The Government of
the United States is contending . . . for nothing less high
and sacred than the rights of humanity . . . [and] cannot
admit that the proclamation of a war zone . . . may be
made to operate as in any degree an abbreviation of the
rights ... of American shipmasters or of American citi
zens. . . ." In his third note of July 21, for the replies had
been evasive and unsatisfactory. President Wilson warned
Germany that a repetition of the outrage would be con
strued as "deliberately unfriendly." This was his last
word upon the Lusitania, and on the same day he directed
the Secretaries of War and Navy to take up the prepara
tion of plans for national defense. "Wilson has lost ninety
per cent of the German- American vote," complained The
Fatherland; but the German Government heeded the warn
ing for a time and saw to it that no outrage of similar mag
nitude occurred until the following spring.
The Lusitania affair turned the National Administration
to an advocacy of measures of preparedness, which an
Prepared- earnest minority had discussed since the autumn
ness move- of 1914. The attack on Belgium, coming with-
ment . . , . ,
out provocation, was a warning as to what might
happen to the United States, and new voices were heard in

NEUTRALITY AND PREPAREDNESS 443
Congress demanding a reconsideration of national defense.
"For a dozen years," declared Gardner, of Massachusetts,
who led in the preparedness movement, "I have sat here
like a coward in silence and listened while men have told
us how the United States can safely depend on the state
militia and the naval reserve. All the time I knew that it
was not true."
The fight for preparedness was waged on the floor of
Congress, in the press, and by means of propagandist soci
eties. The National Security League, organized In Decem
ber, 1914, took up a work that the Navy League had been
pressing with little response for a dozen years. In August,
191 5, the more intense members of this society broke away
from it to organize the American Defense Society because
the National Security League was unwilling to denounce
members of the Democratic Administration for failures in
preparedness. The American Rights Committee, formed
in December, 1915, was still more extreme and demanded
instant warfare.
The National Administration was unwilling In the session
of 1914-15 to destroy the effect of its stand for neutrality
by making the menace of warlike preparations. The ad
vocates of preparedness were denounced variously by pro-
Germans, by pacifists, and by Americans who saw In pre
paredness only another aspect of the conspiracy of big busi
ness. Denunciations of the manufacturers of munitions
were used by this last group to meet arguments for national
defense. The Administration stood aloof from the actual
controversy until the discussion of the Lusitania was over.
Thereafter it led the movement. In January, 1916, Presi
dent Wilson took to the stump to urge his policies of pre
paredness. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
W. H. Hobbs, The World War and its Consequences (1919), is one of the
most outspoken summaries of the period of neutrality, is strongly anti-
Wilson, and bears a lavish endorsement from Colonel Roosevelt. James
W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (1917), was published serially in
the newspapers, and acquired great popularity as a war tract. John Bach

444 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
McMaster, The United States in the World War (1918), gives a detailed
study of the forces at play upon public opinion. Roland G. Usher, The
Story of the Great War (1920), is a popular summary of the whole conflict,
as is C. J. H. Hayes, A Brief History of the Great War (1920). Constance
Gardner, Some Letters of Augustus Peabody Gardner (1920), is the record
of an early and consistent advocate of preparedness.

CHAPTER XLV
THE ELECTION OF I916
The debate over preparedness, beginning in the autumn of
1914, extended through the following year as its implica
tions came to be understood, until at last it Pacifist
constituted one of the greatest struggles for the movements
control of American public opinion. The preparedness
societies that took the lead in presenting the case were fol
lowed by propagandist organizations of diverse opinions,
working sometimes in secret and sometimes In the open.
The need for preparedness came as a shock to the bulk of
American opinion, whose pacific tendencies prejudiced it
against the use of force. An American League to Limit
Armaments was organized in December, 1914, under the
leadership of anti-militarists and non-resistants. A year
later the American Union Against Militarism appeared
under much the same leadership, but more completely
under the control of Socialists and pacifists. The Women's
Peace Party, formed In Washington in January, 1915, with
Jane Addams as its head, conducted an active campaign
for theoretical peace, and dispatched its leader to Europe
at the head of a women's delegation to try to stop the war.
Individual leaders of these movements gained access to the
well-known motor manufacturer, Henry Ford, with the re
sult that on December 4, 1915, the Oscar II, chartered by
this philanthropist, sailed for Copenhagen with a great
delegation of peace advocates aboard, "to try to get the
boys out of the trenches and back to their homes by Christ
mas day."
By the end of 191 5 these pacifist societies were left In the
control of Socialists and non-resistants, while the more
constructive members who had started in with League to
them switched their support to a different pro- Enforce
gram, which was launched in Independence Hall
in Philadelphia on June 17, 191 5. In preceding months

446 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
groups of statesmen in England and America worked over
rough drafts for a league of nations which should produce
peace by preventing war, and by providing a substitute
for war as a means of settling international disputes. It
was peace backed by force that the League to Enforce Peace
proposed. Among its leaders were ex- President Taft,
A. Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard University, and
Hamilton Holt, editor of the Independent. The Independ
ence Hall conference Issued "a declaration of interdepend
ence" that was widely accepted during the ensuing months.
A year later, when the league held its annual meeting In
Washington, its general program received the support of
President Wilson. Before the end of 1916 the leaders of
all the responsible belligerents had accepted the principle
of a league of nations.
The bitter debate between peace and preparedness was
made more difficult to follow by the open propaganda of
Munitions German sympathizers and secret intrigue ema
embargoes nating from the German Embassy at Washington,
The former group, adhering to the cause of Germany from
the opening of the war, denounced "perfidious Albion"
and devoted themselves particularly to the attack upon the
conditions produced by the British naval power. Save for a
handful of submarines and an occasional raider, German
vessels were swept from the oceans of the world. The
imports of food and munitions were cut off by a rigorous
blockade that could neither be broken nor evaded. Unable
to avail itself of the right conferred by International law to
buy munitions in neutral countries subject to the right of
the other belligerent to Intercept them, Germany advanced
the novel claim that it was unneutral for neutral countries
to sell such munitions to the other belligerent. To German-
Americans this statement appeared conclusive. It was ac
cepted by a considerable number of pacifists and by many
of the old Progressives who had schooled themselves to a
consistent attack upon the agencies of big business, and
who saw in the munitions trade only the great profits
derived from manufactures from the fact of war.

THE ELECTION OF 1916 447
Congress was under continuous pressure not only to com
pel England to accept the American view of international
law, but to establish an embargo upon shipments to Great
Britain to accomplish this, or to place that country upon an
equality of opportunity with Germany. On January 20,
1 91 5, Secretary Bryan In a long letter to W. J. Stone, chair
man of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, de
fended the neutrality of the American Government and
pointed out that to refuse to permit the Allies to buy muni
tions in America would involve participation by the United
States on the side of Germany, and would be quite as
unneutral as the course complained of. He pointed out,
moreover, the sound basis for the lawfulness of trade in
munitions, not only In International law, but also in the fact
that otherwise the smaller nations, unable to manufacture
their own supplies, would be completely at the mercy of the
military powers. At the end of January a group of embargo
advocates, summoned by Bartholdt, of Missouri, a former
Congressman and an active worker for peace, held a con
ference in Washington and organized there the American
Independence Union. An active part was taken in the
movement by editors of German and Irish papers, and the
enterprise was described by The Fatherland as a great move
ment "to organize the German- American element and all
German and Austro-Hungarian sympathizers." In Con
gress the friends of the embargo movement urged their
resolutions, while citizens outside flooded members with
form letters and telegrams demanding that they support
such action. In June, 191 5, the Friends of Peace Induced
Bryan, who had now left the Cabinet, to denounce prepared
ness, and at the same time Labor's National Peace Council
was floated upon funds that were later shown to have origi
nated in the German Government.
The secret intrigues by which Germany and Austria sought
to prevent the development of an adverse Amer- German
ican opinion were increased after the sinking of ?ecret
the Lusitania had shown how precarious the '" '^"
situation was... The New York Evening Mail was secretly

448 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
bought and converted into an anti-British organ. Societies
like the American Humanity League and the American
Embargo Conference were created or subsidized for the
same purpose. Agents attached to the German and Aus
trian embassies were used for the definite purpose of fo
menting strikes In manufacturing plants engaged in pro
ducing munitions for the Allies and in injuring their output
by means of sabotage. Enough evidence as to the intrigue
was known to the White House to give an ominous char
acter to the Lusitania correspondence, and to induce von
Bernstorff, the German Ambassador, to redouble his efforts
to prevent a breach. In August an American journalist was
arrested by the British at Falmouth while on his way to
the Continent and was found to have in his dispatch cases
correspondence of Dr. Constantin Dumba, the Austrian
Ambassador in Washmgton, recommending a deliberate
program of Industrial Intrigue. The facts of these viola
tions of neutral duties by American citizens were trans
mitted by the English Government to Robert Lansing,
who had succeeded Bryan as Secretary of State, with the
result that the recall of Dumba was demanded in Septem
ber. Two months later the military and naval attaches
to the German Embassy, von Papen and Boy-Ed, were
dismissed because of their proved complicity in unneutral
plots engineered by Buenz, American agent of the Ham
burg-American Line. At the end of the year It became
possible to substantiate the plots with greater definiteness,
for the British found in von Papen's papers at Falmouth
check-books whose incriminating stubs revealed part of
the details of the pro-German plot.
The office of von Papen in New York was occupied after
his departure by Wolf von Igel, who continued the intrigue.
On April i8, 1916, the rooms were raided by officers of the
Department of Justice, and the records in von Igel's safe
were seized. The German Ambassador protested that this
was a violation of diplomatic immunity, but Secretary
Lansing showed that neither the premises nor their occupant
were on the diplomatic list, and Qffered to turn qyer to the

THE ELECTION OF 191 6 449
German Ambassador any documents which he would au
thenticate as his own. Von Bernstorff made no claim to
any of them, for the secret papers here seized provided the
data for federal prosecutions which subsequently exposed in
fuller detail the secret activities of the German Embassy.
The crisis produced by the Lusitania was not followed
by any occurrence of similar magnitude until the Channel
steamer Sussex was sunk by a submarine on Sussex u\-
March 24, 1916, with a loss of two American timatum
lives. There was one course possible for the ^
United States after the warning conveyed In the third
Lusitania note. On April 18 the President transmitted an
ultimatum to Germany which he explained to Congress the
following day. "Unless the Imperial German Government
should now Immediately effect and declare an abandon
ment of Its present methods of warfare against passenger
and freight-carrying vessels, this Government can have no
choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the Govern
ment of the German Empire altogether." A specific pledge
given by Germany to amend its practice postponed the
diplomatic breach, but in Congress and the departments
the program of national defense was pushed ahead against
the organized obstruction of pacifists and German sym
pathizers. The National Defense Act of June, 1916, was the first
great step in the accomplishment of the pre- National
paredness program. In the earlier stages of its Defense Act,
discussion the line was sharply drawn between
those who desired an army organized on the basis of com
pulsory service and those who desired to maintain it upon
the National Guard and the principle of volunteering. The
recommendation of the General Staff was for compulsory
service, which was supported by Senator Chamberlain and
many of the preparedness advocates. The Secretary of
War, Garrison, supported the principle of a continental
army that should be subject to federal control and not
hampered by the ineffectiveness inherent in the National
Guard system. Unable to induce Wilson to take an unal-

450 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
terable stand for his principle of army organization. Garri
son resigned In February, 19 16, and was shortly succeeded
by Newton D. Baker, of Cleveland. The bill was finally
passed, providing an authorized strength for the regular
army of 223,000; the total to be reached in five years. It
provided also for a National Guard of about 450,000 of
ficers and men. The Guard itself was now on service on the
Mexican border supplementing the efforts of the regular
army to put a stop to the marauding work of Villa. The
law also provided for the development of an officers' reserve
corps to be recruited from civil life and trained in summer
camps such as had been begun by General Leonard Wood
while chief of staff and continued with great success at
Plattsburg and elsewhere In 191 5. A revision of the articles
of war, finished later in the summer, was attached to the
Army Appropriation Bill In August.
The Nevada, the Oklahoma, and the Pennsylvania, new
Naval dreadnaughts carrying fourteen-inch guns, were
program brought Into service in the spring of 1916, while
Congress debated the lessons of the European War and
the form that naval defense should take. Among the naval
theorists there was controversy as to the effects of subma
rine warfare upon battleship programs and upon the rela
tive merits of dreadnaughts and the swifter fighting units
known as battle cruisers. Since the Spanish War the naval
building policy had Included the construction of one or two
capital ships every year, but there had been no acceptance
of a general program or an approved naval strength to be
reached at a given date. A proposal for a five-year pro
gram, prepared in the autumn of 1915, was condensed into
three years In the course of the debate upon preparedness.
The Naval Appropriation Act of 1916 carried a larger sum
than had ever before been voted at one time for national
defense, and authorized the building over a term of three
years of ten dreadnaughts and six battle cruisers.
Another type of defense was provided for In August, 1916,
when Congress authorized the creation of a Council of
National Defense to consist of six members of the Cabinet

THE ELECTION OF 1916 451
with the assistance of an Advisory Commission of seven
civilian experts. Such a body as this had been Council of
urged by preparedness advocates for many years National Defense
as a means of drafting plans of defense that might
make easier a complete national mobilization in time of
war. The obvious effect of the World War In tying Into a
compact unit the whole civil and military population of
every belligerent country showed what would be necessary
should the United States become Involved in any great
struggle. Secretary Daniels had already taken a step in
this direction by organizing a Naval Consulting Board in
October, 191 5, to give scientific advice upon the manufac
ture of naval munitions. This body appointed a committee
on industrial preparedness that in the following winter made
a survey of the facilities of existing plants for carrying on
munitions work. The National Academy of Sciences at the
request of the President had also been turned toward the
problems of defense, creating for this purpose a National
Research Council. In September, at the close of the pre
paredness session. Congress created the United States
Shipping Board, urged by the President two years pre
viously, and a Tariff Commission made necessary by the
intricate effects of the World War on foreign trade. Con
gress adjourned on September 8 with the presidential can
vass of 19 1 6 already well advanced.
In the four years since 191 2 Progressives and conserva
tive Republicans had remained as far apart as ever, but
successful efforts had been made to bring them Ropgeveit
back into a common party that might have a and the
chance to elect a President. The national or- "S^'^^^'ves
ganization of the Progressive Party continued to go through
the motions as though it were a reality, but called Its na
tional convention to meet at Chicago on the same day as
the Republican Convention, June 7, 191 6. The leadership
of Colonel Roosevelt over his Progressive followers had
not weakened in the four years. The Progressives who
objected to him and distrusted him continued to object,
but his friends remained firm in their allegiance and hoped

452 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
to win the Republican nomination for him. In an interview
given out from the Island of Trinidad in March, Theodore
Roosevelt declared that "June is a long way off ," and was
held to have announced his candidacy by denying his In
terest in "the political fortunes either of myself or any
other man," and by asserting his interest "In awakening
my fellow-countrymen to the need of facing unpleasant
facts." In the contest for delegates there was no revival of the
bitterness of 191 2, and numerous favorite sons were
^^ . . brought out representing all shades of Republi-
Nomination . . ^ ° ,.,,..
of Hughes can opinion. Ihe emergence of public inter-
Republicans ^^^ ^^ ^^^ character of Justice Charles Evans
Hughes destroyed the chances of all local candi
dates and left the contest for the nomination between him
and Roosevelt. The judicial attitude of mind that made
him a great lawyer and judge made Hughes a candidate
acceptable to conservative Republicans, while the vigor
with which he had pressed his reform measures as governor
of New York gave him a wide following among the Pro
gressives. During the canvass for delegates he remained
at his work in the Supreme Court without uttering a
public word to indicate his interest in the contest. At the
convention he received the support of still other elements
in the party who were as anxious to defeat President
Wilson as any Republicans, and who objected to Colonel
Roosevelt because of the vigor with which he had criticized
the action of Germany in the war.
A few days before the Republican Convention a group of
German-American newspaper editors held a conference at
Chicago and gave out a public statement demanding a
candidate for President, whom they described as with
out passionate attachment to any foreign country. "The
nomination of Justice Hughes means the redemption of
the Republican Party," declared The Fatherland. The an
tipathy of German-Americans to Roosevelt coincided with
that of the conservative Republican group. The Pro
gressive Convention met and nominated Roosevelt in the

THE ELECTION OF 1916 453
hope that the Republicans would concur and avoid a split.
The Republicans, however, nominated Hughes and Fair
banks, and Justice Hughes immediately resigned his seat
on the Supreme Court to enter vigorously upon the canvass.
The unpopularity of Colonel Roosevelt with the German
vote was surpassed only by that of President Wilson, who
was renominated by the Democratic Conven- Hyphenated
tion without contest. The German intrigue to Americans
tie the hands of the United States in the World War ran
parallel to the feelings of Americans of German descent
who were unable to believe the truth of the charges made
against Germany by her enemies. The bitterness with
which they believed that Wilson's policies had favored
England and injured Germany was aggravated by their
resentment at the charges of "hyphenism" made against
them. Some weeks before the outbreak of the war, while
dedicating a monument to a great Irishman, Barry, who
laid the foundations of the American navy In the Revolution,
Wilson had defined the hyphen. "Some Americans," he
said, "need hyphens in their names because only part of
them came over, but when the whole man has come
over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its
own weight out of his name." In his succeeding speeches
upon the Issues of the war he denounced without restraint
the hyphenated Americans who acted in American affairs
not as Americans, but as naturalized Europeans.
The hope of the Progressive Party that its nomination of
Roosevelt would force the Republicans to accept him failed
doubly. The old party nominated Hughes; and Roose
velt declined to run independently, after it was too late to
choose a substitute. His desire to defeat the Democratic
ticket made him unwilling to assist It by dividing the
Republican vote. In the ensuing canvass he gave his
support to Hughes, without quite believing that the latter
deserved to win.
The task of the Republican candidate was to play both
ends against the middle. In his speeches Hughes felt
bound to satisfy the Progressives without alienating the

454 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
conservatives, and to hold the interest of extreme pro-
Allies without forfeiting that of Germans who desired to
punish Wilson. It weakened his chances when it was
learned that he had given audience to Jeremiah A. O'Leary,
a leader in the movement to punish Wilson ; and it helped
Wilson when the President's reply to the overtures of the
same leader was made public : " I should feel deeply morti
fied to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since
you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have
not, I will ask you to convey this message to them." It
injured Hughes also when In California on the stump he
accepted a banquet served by "scab" waiters and left the
State without even meeting Its progressive and popular
governor, Hiram Johnson.
The difficult task of President WUson was to hold to
gether the vote of 1914, and to defeat the united Republi-
Wilson and ^^^ Party, whIch no Democrat had done since
the Adam- the Civil War. He stood on the record of
Democratic achievement and of fundamental
loyalty to America. His followers in the West and South,
sensing the drift of the pro-German or pro-Ally endeavors,
translated this latter issue into the phrase, "He kept us
out of war"; and the women, newly enfranchised in the
Western States, appear to have voted on this phrase. In
August a national calamity in the form of a strike of the
four railway brotherhoods appeared on the horizon, and
such a strike was called for Labor Day. After a conference
with the railroad managers and leaders of the unions,
Wilson exerted his influence over Congress and induced it
to avert the strike by making the principle of the basic
eight-hour day mandatory upon interstate railroads. The
strike was avoided, but the Adamson Law by which Con
gress fixed the wages of the trainmen became a new issue
in the canvass.
The first returns from the election in November, 191 6,
Reelection Indicated that Hughes was the choice, but later
of Wilson returns conveyed the unusual fact that although
he carried every New England State except New Hamp-

THE ELECTION OF 1916 455
shire, all of the Northwest but Ohio, and every Middle
State but Maryland, he was defeated by the accumulated
votes of the farther West and South. Hughes was defeated
by political mismanagement In one or two doubtful States,
but the reelection of Wilson by whatever means, In oppo
sition to the densely populated States of the North and
East, marked a revolution In political influence paralleled
only by the victories of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Jones and Hollister, The German Secret Service in America (1918), and
Count Bernstorff, My Three Years in America (1920), give different ac
counts of the attempts to influence American thought. The Fatherland
(1910-) gloried in its German sympathies, and made no concealment of its
desire to control politics with a German vote. The World's Work and the
Providence (R.I.) Journal contain many articles intended to nullify Ger
man influence, while the New York Times Current History (1914-) is an
invaluable assemblage of documents relating to the war. Of somewhat
direct bearing upon the election are W. L. Ransom, Charles E. Hughes, the
Statesman as Shown in the Opinions of the Jurist (1916) ; Jacob G. Schurman,
Addresses of Charles Evans Hughes, igo6-igi6 (1916); William Howard
Taft, Our Chief Magistrate and his Powers (1916) ; and Speeches of William
Jennings Bryan, Revised and Arranged by Himself ^1911). There is no
compilation to take the place of Stanwood's History ofthe Presidency, whose
second volume ends with the platforms of 1912. F. L. Huidekoper, The
Military Unpreparedness of the United States (1915), is useful upon military
topics, as is the Army and Navy Journal.

CHAPTER XLVI
LABOR
The Adamson Law was enacted on September 3, 1916,
under Administration pressure backed by the threat of a
railroad strike. The four railway brotherhoods involved in
the struggle were among the best organized and most re
sponsible trade unions In the United States. For many
years it had been their boast that they procured their
results by collective bargaining. They defended their
threat to tie up the transportation of the country by the
assertion that the railroads were now so unified In their
policies through interlocking directorates and gentlemen's
agreements that they could maintain a common plan in the
face of demands from their employees.
Wage increases were demanded by the brotherhoods to
meet the rising cost of living. For nearly twenty years the
Wages and Index curve of average retail prices had been
cost of gradually rising, and since the outbreak of the
war In Europe the increase in many directions
had been spectacular. All labor in America was unsettled
because of the demand for workmen and the cost of living.
The double effect of the World War was to stop the an
nual supply of cheap labor from Europe that had averaged
over a million a year for ten years before the war, and to
increase the demand for American goods for Allied con
sumption. The enlargement of munitions plants was only
one aspect of the growing demand for labor. The effects
produced by European causes were intensified by do
mestic developments, such as the Increase in the number of
motor cars in use, that produced new objects for expendi
ture and called for help to supply new needs.
With new opportunities competing for their services and
with the supply of labor no longer increasing, It became
possible for organized labor to gain victories of a sort un-

LABOR 457
usual in preceding years. The Adamson Law was de
nounced by Judge Hughes at Nashville the day The Adam-
after its passage. He pointed out that the meas- ®°" ^^^
ure was enacted under pressure rather than upon its merits
and charged that it was a party move to win the vote of
organized labor. The act as it passed Congress was less
than the program for which the President had asked. He
Insisted upon the recognition of the eight-hour day, but
also asked for powers that would make the repetition of
such a situation improbable, by requiring and giving time
for a public investigation of the controversy at Issue before
permitting such a strike to be precipitated. The demand
of the employees for an eight-hour day was declared to be
a demand for wage increase In disguise, the real intent being
not to limit the working day, but to secure time and a half
for overtime over eight hours. The unions declared that
in the absence of such a law their members were frequently
forced to work sixteen hours or more at a stretch, to their
injury and to the danger of the traveling public.
The law provided that the new working day should be
come effective January i, 191 7. Before that date the rail
roads attacked the law In the courts and procured a district
court decision that It was unconstitutional. They let it be
known that pending a final decision by the Supreme Court
they would not pay the overtime provided by the Adamson
Law, but would hold it in a separate fund for the benefit of
the employees. A new strike to force the raUroads to obey
the law at once was declared in March, 19 17, but was post
poned at the request of the President while a special com
mission consisting of Secretaries Lane and Wilson, and
Daniel Willard, chairman of the Advisory Commission of
the Council of National Defense, brought pressure upon
the railroad companies. These yielded on March 19, and
later in the day the Supreme Court by a vote of five to four
upheld the constitutionality of the act, and asserted in a
dictum that it would have been possible for Congress to
compel the unions to arbitrate their grievance. Among
the five justices making the majority in this decision were

458 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
two new members recently appointed, Louis D. Brandeis,
a liberal lawyer prominent for his advocacy of labor causes
and his leadership against the trusts, and John H. Clarke,
an Ohio associate of Secretary Baker.
Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation
of Labor, denounced that part of the Supreme Court de-
Gompers clsIon that alleged a power to compel the unions
andthe to arbitrate. He maintained the right to' strike
American . . . , , . . .
Federation as inherent in citizenship, and his organization
° ^ ""^ supported the demands of the railway brother
hoods through the controversy just terminated. These
brotherhoods were the only Important organizations of
labor not Included in the American Federation, but there
was cooperation between their several leaders, and the
heads of the brotherhoods addressed the annual convention
of the Federation in 191 6, in an attempt to bring all organ
ized labor into a fight against anti-strike injunctions and
compulsory arbitration. Gompers, now sixty-seven years
of age, and head of the Federation, with the exception of
a single year, since 1882, represented in 1916 an aggregate
of 2,072,802 organized workmen. In the American Feder-
ationist, through which Gompers reached his followers, he
consistently upheld the labor movement and repelled both
the idea of Government control and the undermining at
tempts of labor radicals imbued with the revolutionary
ideas of syndicalism. He kept labor out of politics in the
sense that he espoused no political party and opposed the
formation of a labor party, but he believed In throwing the
vote of wage-earners where it would injure public officials
who opposed the demands of organized labor, and reward
its friends.
The aim of the Socialist Party, directly opposed to that
ot Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, was
Socialist obtainable only with the support of the group
^^¦"'y that Gompers led. There was a rising So
cialist vote after 1900, with here and there a Socialist lo
cally elected to office or to Congress. In the presidential
elections Debs received 87,814 votes in 1900, 402,283 in

LABOR 459
1904, 420,793 In 1908, 901,873 in 1912, and Allan Benson,
editor of the American Socialist, 590,570 in 1916. The
platforms of the Socialist Party reflected the doctrines of
Karl Marx, and the Ideal of a social revolution. Many of
the most active party leaders were naturalized citizens who
had grown to maturity of conviction In their native homes
in Russia, Austria, and Germany. Many of their followers
were foreign-born.
More radical than the organized Socialists and more
dangerous to the settled program of the American Feder
ation were the aims of a small group of labor Syndicalism
leaders who opposed the Idea of collective bar- ^"'^ sabotage
gaining and worked for a social revolution by direct action.
The word "syndicalism," as descriptive of the ideals of this
group, came Into the American vocabulary in 191 2, in the
course of a great strike of unskilled workmen at Lawrence,
Massachusetts. The problem of unskilled labor was in
substance the problem of the unassimllated immigrant.
In the past century the basis of boss rule and corrupt city
government was laid on the political control of the votes of
this class, and among these the extreme social leaders were
now preaching their doctrine. Syndicalism was founded
on the assumption that the workmen are entitled to the
whole product that they create, and that the quickest way
for them to gain possession of the tools of the trade and the
control of industrial life is by direct action to make the
position of capital untenable. It regarded collective bar
gaining as injurious because this made it possible for cap
ital to exist, and taught that agreements ought to be vio
lated whenever convenient. The word sabotage came Into
the vocabulary with syndicalism, describing the process of
breaking the machinery, spoiling the output, and otherwise
injuring the employer. In the strike it was necessary for
the workmen to leave their job and forfeit their pay. By
sabotage they could do just as much harm to their employer
and continue to draw their wages.
The Lawrence strike was accompanied by local violence
and wide publicity. The local violence produced another

46o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
occasion for the use of the militia and for demonstration
of its inadequacy. Since the railroad strikes of 1877 the
National Guard of various States was habitually called Into
active service to attempt to procure order when the local
machinery of the police broke down, and an antipathy of
organized labor toward the National Guard was a conse
quence of this. Labor came to believe that the militia was
only an agency of capitalism. During the Colorado mining
strike of 1903 this belief was Intensified. There was no
money in the Colorado Treasury to pay the expenses of the
militia in the field, yet the local authorities were powerless
to maintain order, and sympathizers of the Western Fed
eration of Miners inaugurated a reign of terror. In this
crisis the mine-owners with large property interests at
stake guaranteed the expenses of the campaign If the gov
ernor would call out the militia. This was done, and it
became possible for radical labor leaders to charge with a
semblance of truth that the militia was hired out to break
the strike.
The ineffectiveness ofthe militia was due to its volun
tary character and lack of discipline. In 1905 Pennsylvania
State con- tried the experiment of creating a State constab-
stabulanes ulary to reenforce the hands of local police au
thorities and to render it unnecessary to use the militia
to curb disorder arising from labor controversies. The
Pennsylvania constabulary was organized along the lines
made famous by the Royal Mounted Police of the Canadian
Northwest. Its success was complete and Immediate, and
the example was followed by New York and other States,
but the unpopularity of the constabulary with organized
labor exceeded that of the militia.
About the time that the Pennsylvania constabulary was
established , the extreme revolutionary labor leaders or-
I d strial ganlzed the Industrial Workers of the World
Workers of in protest against the policies of the American
* ^ °'^ Federation and in favor of social revolution by
direct action. The leaders of the I. W.W. and many of the
members came from the Western Federation of Miners

LABOR 461
whose career had received wide notoriety in the Rocky
Mountain States, and whose strikes had been accompanied
by violence at Coeur d'Alene in Idaho and Cripple Creek
in Colorado. Moyer and Haywood, the leaders, were So
cialists as well as labor agitators, and aimed to divert the
American labor movement into a revolutionary socialistic
organization. They found their most promising material
In the ranks of unskilled labor, which constituted the most
notable defect of the scheme of the American Federation.
The organized trades, working as industrial groups, made
up the Federation, which thus Included the aristocracy of
labor. There was no considerable success In the organ
ization of the unskilled whose illiteracy and miscellaneous
nativity made them hard to approach, and whose migratory
habits made them unreliable for organization purposes.
The I. W.W. appealed to this group with its idea of one big
union that could by direct action plot against activities of
any industry or by general strike tie up society itself.
Public opinion was impressed with the incidental violence
that appeared wherever the I .W.W. was active In the seven
years of its life before it organized the foreign laborers at
Lawrence and brought on the strike of 1912. Moyer and
Haywood gained the appellation of "undesirable citizens"
from Colonel Roosevelt at the time they were under indict
ment for the murder of ex-Governor Stuenenberg, which
occurred in 1905. This murder, apparently gratuitous and
growing out of Western Federation controversies, occasioned
a famous trial at Boise, Idaho, in 1907, in which William
E. Borah first gained national attention as counsel for the
prosecution. The jury failed to convict, but the testimony
revealed the long career of violence associated with the
Western Federation of Miners, and when Haywood became
an active leader of the I. W.W. his reputation helped to
establish that of the new organization.
The cause of organized labor was further Injured by the
activities of structural steel workers in California which
culminated in an attempt to wreck by a bomb the plant
of the Los Angeles Times, and the arrest of the two brothers

462 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
McNamara as responsible for it. The McNamara trial at
Los Angeles in 191 1 was made the occasion for
Namara and a great protest by organized labor that these
Mooney ^^^^ were being railroaded to jail by a conspir
acy of capital. Unions subscribed to the de
fense funds and the American Federation of Labor took up
the cause of the accused. When these confessed on Decem
ber 1,1911, that they had committed the crime and changed
their plea to guUty, they left their supporters feeling be
trayed, and weakened the appeal of labor the next time
it should voice a protest. A year later a group of thirty-
eight labor chiefs were convicted as accomplices In the
McNamara conspiracy.
In July, 1916, there occurred another act of violence to
render more difficult the task of reconciling the aims of
capital and labor and of establishing the proper relation of
Government to each of them. A parade at San Francisco,
organized as a demonstration in favor of national prepared
ness, was interrupted by the explosion of a bomb that killed
several persons. California had been the scene of the
bitterest part of the struggle against the radicals. The
breach between labor and capital was here as wide as any
where in the country. In San Francisco a few weeks later
the Republican candidate for the presidency became so
involved in the controversy as probably to account for his
defeat in November.
The form of demonstration for preparedness so brutally
interrupted at San Francisco was prevalent throughout the
United States In 1916. The public tour of President Wilson
in the early weeks of the year brought the matter clearly to
public attention, and on June 14, whUe the Democratic
Convention that was to renominate him was assembling in
St. Louis, he marched the length of Pennsylvania Avenue
at the head of a preparedness procession, and delivered a
vigorous speech against the hyphen in American politics.
The Socialist labor leaders decried these preparations, and
organized labor in some cases declined to march in simi
lar processions. Preparedness advocates raised a clamor

LABOR 463
against the singing of a popular song, "I did n't raise my
boy to be a soldier." They were denounced in turn as
profiteers. "These patriots for profit — the richest and
most powerful group of men In the United States," declared
a Chicago Congressman, "have their minds set on vastly
increased armaments, and they want no Interference." To
this Senator La Follette added, " If a man dares to Intimate
that he is unwilling to swallow the whole program for pre
paredness — a big army, a big navy, big contracts for muni
tions of war — that man is a fool or a coward or a traitor."
The bomb that exploded In San Francisco on June 22
was an incident in the preparedness debate, and ultimately
Thomas Mooney, a labor leader whose reputation was
already violent and radical, was convicted of murder and
sentenced to be hanged. As in the McNamara case, organ
ized labor showed a tendency to demand the acquittal of
Mooney and to assert that he was the victim of a conspir
acy by the enemies of labor. Most Americans heard his
name for the first time when mobs in Petrograd during
the revolution of March, 1917, gathered around the Amer
ican Embassy to demand his release. The international
prominence given to the Mooney case by Russian revolu
tionary exiles who hurried home in 191 7 forced the Na
tional Government to take an interest in his fate. His
execution was stayed and the sentence was subsequently
commuted to life imprisonment by the governor of Cali
fornia, after repeated attempts to procure his retrial or
pardon had failed.
The growing militancy in the conduct of the labor move
ment, and the depressed and neglected condition of un
skilled labor which made it a safe field for the Americani-
propagation of revolutionary doctrines, were ^t'O"
much before the public in 1916. Congress declined to meet
the former situation by enacting a scheme of compulsory
arbitration, but programs of Americanization were inau
gurated to lessen the danger of un-American propaganda.
The nativist movement that had frequently appeared in the
United States earlier than 1916 now for the first time took

464 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the form of hastening the process of assimilation of natu
ralized citizens. Its earlier phases had confined themselves
largely to legal and political attacks against the foreign-
born as in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the
native American movement of the fifties. In the autumn
of 1915 a national Americanization committee was organ
ized to bring the language and ideals of the United States
into the lives of newcomers of whom more than ten mil
lions had arrived in the past decade. The Americanization
movement took the form of political education and instruc
tion in the English language. The United States Bureau
of Education took an active part in advancing it, and It
speedily entered the field of industry as employers realized
the greater efficiency of English-speaking laborers, and as
the latter became aware of their greater earning power.
Militancy as a means of advancing reform movements
grew more frequent after Its adoption by the advocates of
Woman woman suffrage in England in 1906. In this
suffrage inovement It proved to be a successful means of
advertising and attracting attention where earlier and more
restrained appeals were unavailing. In the United States
the suffrage movement did not become militant until 191 7,
when a faction of the woman's party adopted the English
methods In part. During the Democratic Convention at
St. Louis in 191 6 advocates of woman suffrage in costume
and in silence lined the streets leading to the auditorium.
Leaders of both parties accepted the principle of woman
suffrage before election day. In 191 1 women had the right
to vote in six of the Western States, Wyoming, Colorado,
Utah, Idaho, Washington, and California, and had par
tial suffrage in about half the other States. The American
movement took the double form of working for State suf
frage and advocating a constitutional amendment for the
whole United States. Additional States were gained one
by one between 191 1 and 19 17, while the Susan B. Anthony
amendment was brought forward at every session of Con
gress. In January, 1917, the Congressional Union for
Woman Suffrage began a picketing of the White House to

LABOR 465
influence the President to support the amendment In Con
gress. Two years later Congress yielded, overriding the op
position of the Southern States, and submitted the amend
ment for ratification.
Militancy, radicalism, and reform were all involved in a
political movement that appeared in the Northwest. The
agrarian region west of the Great Lakes and Non-Parti-
north of Texas, in which the Granger and Pop- ®^" League
ulist movements arose and flourished, produced in 1915
the National Non-Partlsan League, which showed its non-
partisanship by seizing the primaries of the Republican
Party and electing a predetermined farmers' ticket in North
Dakota. The grievances behind the appearance of the
Non-Partisan League were economic, due to crop failures
and the belief that the railroads and elevator companies
were running the State for their own advantage. The new
league was held together through the organization of a
paid-up membership, reached by the Non-Partisan Leader,
first published at Fargo, North Dakota, In September,' 191 5.
The League employed Socialist writers to start the Leader,
with the result that the agitation took on a socialistic aspect
that It soon abandoned. The organization was working
for the extension of State agencies of which State owned
elevators, State hail insurance, and State banks were most
discussed. "The members of the non-partisan league are
not angry at anybody ..." asserted the Leader. "The
League seeks to gather together all the forces that stand
for progress, justice, and a square deal for the people of
this state." The Non-Partisan League elected its candi
date for governor, and in the summer of 1917 elected
John M. Baer, cartoonist of the Non-Partisan Leader, to
Congress. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The American Yearbook, and the New International Yearbook, have
increasing value for the more recent years. John R. Commons, Indus
trial Goodwill (1919), gives a sensible summary of labor problems. The
marginal movements in the field of industry are described in John Graham
Brooks, American Syndicalism and the I.W.W. (1913) ; Paul F. Brissenden,

466 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The I.W.W.; a Study of American Syndicalism (1919); Herbert Gaston,
The Nonpartisan League (1920) ; and Charles Edward Russell, The Story
ofthe Nonpartisan League (1920). Roger W. Babson, W.B. Wilson, First
Secretary of Labor (1919), is a laudatory biography by a competent sta
tistical expert.

CHAPTER XLVII
THE WAR OF I917
The pledge given by the German Government after the
sinking of the Sussex was kept during the autumn of 191 6
while the presidential election was in progress, status of
The United States continued Its work in laying *^^ '^^^
the foundations for national defense, but in the diplomatic
field no new developments of Importance occurred until
after the election. Germany, meanwhile, believed that she
had won the war. The Allied blockade remained unbroken,
but the ambition to build up a new central Europe under
German leadership was accomplished. Along the western
front, from the Swiss border north toward Verdun and
thence westerly to the English Channel the opposing lines
of trenches had not been widely shifted since Joffre com
pelled the German retreat at the Marne In 1914. A des
perate attempt of the armies under the Crown Prince to
take Verdun in 1916 was repulsed by France, and an Allied
attempt to break through the trenches along the Somme
failed in the latter half of the year.
On the eastern front German gains were decisive. Dur
ing 191 5 Poland and Gallcia were overrun, and Serbia was
completely crushed, making it possible for the Central
Powers to maintain unimpeded communications with
Constantinople. Roumania entered the war In 1916 and
was occupied by the Central Powers before the year was up.
The hopes of the Pan-German Party, realized in Europe by
the end of 1916, reached out across Asia Minor toward
Egypt and India, and the old catch-phrase "Berlin to Bag
dad" was changed to read "Antwerp to Bombay." The
French historian, Andre Cheradame, pointed out the com
pleteness of the German victory in the East in his "Pan-
German Plot Exposed," and warned the Allies of the im
minence of German peace overtures inspired by a German
hope to consolidate the gains of war.

468 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
On December 12, 1916, Ge*many, acting through the
United States Government, offered peace to the Allies.
German ^^^ terms of the peace were not announced in
peace specific form. At home to the army it was
described as a peace of victory, but to the out
side world it was characterized as a peace "to free the
world." In every Allied country there were factions tired
of war and fearful of national destruction if the exhaustion
should continue. The American Government had come
to the conclusion that the position of the neutral was no
longer tenable. With war as it now existed, involving the
whole strength of each belligerent, and leading each to in
sist upon a belligerent right to monopolize the common
property of the world, the neutral, whose existence de
pended upon the free enjoyment of its rights upon the
high seas on legitimate business, found itself drawn ever
nearer to the state of war.
Six days after the German peace overtures were made,
Secretary Lansing sent notes to all of the belligerents, asking
American ^^^^ " ^^ early occasIon be sought to call out
peace terms from all nations now at war such an avowal of
their respective views as to terms upon which
the war might be concluded ... as would make it possible
frankly to compare them." The note went on to point
out that the official spokesmen of all the belligerents were
claiming to have the same general objects in mind; "each
side desires to make the rights and privileges of weak peo
ples and small states . . . secure against aggression. . . .
Each wishes itself to be made secure in the future. . . .
Never yet have the authoritative statesmen of either side
avowed the precise objects which would if attained satisfy
them and their people that the war had been fought out."
The "war of peace notes," as the London Nation de
scribed It, was continued into the next year. The German
Government ostensibly welcomed the American overtures,
but Instead of reciting precise terms demanded a general
conference to work them out. Simultaneously, on January
19, 1 91 7, it instructed its Minister in Mexico that in the

THE WAR OF 1917 469
event of a war with the United States he was to arrange
for the occupation by Mexico of the territory lost In 1848 In
the region of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, and to in
duce Mexico to invite the adherence of Japan to this end.
The Allied Powers rejected the German overtures at once,
and replied to the American request with a specific recital
of the unprovoked attack by Germany upon the peace of
Europe, the violations of the laws of war, and the inhumane
war practices of the aggressor, and stated terms of peace
based upon a determination to prevent a repetition of the
outrage. On January 22 President Wilson addressed Con
gress upon the terms of peace, and interpreted the answers
to the overtures. He spoke for the neutral powers and from
the standpoint of the peace of the world, and described the
peace that was needed as ' ' peace without victory, ' ' one not
dictated by a victor for his own desires, but constructed for
the purpose of establishing world peace. He asked for a
new and enlarged Monroe Doctrine for all the world, in
which the peaceful nations should join to prevent the dis
turbance of the world by any nation acting for its. own
aggrandizement. Six months earlier he had given his per
sonal support to a project for a league to enforce peace,
and in the autumn had announced that "America must
hereafter be ready as a member of the family of nations to
extend her whole force, moral and physical, to the assertion
of those rights [of humanity] throughout the round globe."
He demanded that the European powers conclude such a
peace as the United States could agree to guarantee.
Ten days after President Wilson spoke in favor of a peace
without victory, the German Government withdrew the
pledges it had given after the sinking of the unrestricted
Sussex, and inaugurated a new submarine policy, submarine
In accordance with which it proposed to sink on
sight all Allied vessels found within the danger zone. The
note announcing the new intention described the waters
surrounding the British Isles, which were thus closed to
neutral commerce; and described as well a narrow lane
leading from the high seas into Falmouth along which it

470 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
was proposed to permit one American vessel to pass each
week each way if painted in gaudy stripes according to
specifications announced. There was to be no search to
determine the belligerent character of the vessel, no at
tempt to convoy it and Its cargo to a home port for trial
before a prize court, and no attempt to safeguard the lives
of non-combatant passengers and crew, whether subjects of
enemies of Germany or of the neutral powers.
This announcement of the proposed resumption of un
restricted submarine warfare brought Into effect the dec-
Breach with laration Issued at the time of the sinking of the
Germany Sussex, that a repetition of the offenses against
neutral rights would be followed by a severance of diplo
matic relations. On February 3, 1917, von Bernstorff was
formally dismissed, and later that afternoon the President
announced the fact to Congress. "'I think that you will
agree with me that . . . this government has no alternative
consistent with the dignity and honor of the United States
but to take the course which, in its note of the eighteenth of
April, 1916, It announced. . . . We do not desire any hostile
conflict with the Imperial German government. We are
the sincere friends of the German people and earnestly
desire to remain at peace with the government which
speaks for them. . . . We . . . seek merely to vindicate our
right to liberty and justice and an unmolested life."
The breach with Germany brought to a focus all the ele
ments in America opposing war in general or this war in
Anti-war partlculai , as the persons and organizations con-
agitation cerned brought pressure upon Congress to pre
vent the opening of hostilities. William J. Bryan led in
the opposition with the advice: "Wire immediately to the
President, your Senators and your Congressman. A few
cents now may save many dollars in taxation and possibly
a son." The pacifist organizations that had grown up
under the names of the American Union against Militarism,
the Women's Peace Party, the American Neutrality League,
and the Anti-Conscription League, opened headquarters in
New York on the Monday following the breach under the

THE WAR OF 1917 471
name of the Emergency Peace Federation. Delegations of
pacifists were appointed to wait upon the President and
advertisements were run In newspapers that had no sym
pathy with the obstructive movement. "Shall we allow
the United States to be dragged into the European quar
rel?" queried one of these, which bore the signatures of
R. S. Bourne, Max Eastman, Paul U. Kellogg, Winthrop D.
Lane, and Amos R. Pinchot.
Within a few days the peace movement took the form of
a demand for a national war referendum. Pilgrimages to
Washington were organized to bring pressure to bear upon
individual Congressmen. "The men and women now so
bustling and multi-vocal In pacifism, the interlocking direc
tors of peace-at-any-prlce societies of many names, are
familiar figures, continually reappearing the same old
'bunch of upllfters,'" said the New York Times.
The expressed hope of the President that the conduct of
Germany would be legs offensive than its declaration, and
that no overt acts would be directed against the Armed mer-
Unlted States to drive the country from non-In- "^^^"^ ^^'p^
tercourse to war, produced a period of delay following the
breach. On February 26 the President appeared before
Congress to ask for specific power to defend merchant ships
in case they should be attacked by submarines In the course
of the unrestricted warfare. The status of the submarine
was no more nearly accepted than it had been when the war
fare against merchant ships began in 1915. The clear rule
of international law, requiring the belligerent to search the
enemy ship before destroying it, and requiring condemna
tion before the prize court as a part of the process, was
flagrantly violated by the submarine blockade. The Al
lied Powers maintained that the submarine blockade, which
was never effective, and at no time stopped the commerce
that it pretended to cut off, was in itself an act of piracy.
International law guarantees safety for the passenger and
crew of the merchant vessel that does not attempt flight
from an enemy warship, and permits the merchant vessel
at Its own risk to flee or to try to defend itself. The exe-

472 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
cution by Germany of Captain Fryatt in 1916 for having
attempted to ram a German submarine that sought to tor
pedo his ship was In violation of accepted law. Allied mer
chantmen were armed by their Governments for the pur
pose of defending themselves against such piratical attacks,
and President Wilson now asked specific authority to defend
American vessels by similar methods. No serious overt
act had yet occurred, but the threat of indiscriminate sink
ings was having the result desired by Germany in that it
intimidated many of the masters of neutral vessels and kept
their ships in port. The aim of the submarine blockade was
to starve the Allied Powers by cutting off their foreign com
merce. Prevention was as useful as destruction.
The bill affirming the power of the President to place
guns and guards on American merchant ships occupied
Senate Congress during the concluding seven days of
fihbuster j^g expiring life. The nearness of the end of the
session made it possible for the opponents of a breach to
delay action so that Congress adjourned on March 4 with
the bill unpassed. The Senate was already engaged In a
general filibuster. The Republican minority desired to
force the President to summon the new Congress in special
session immediately after March 4, 191 7, In order that Con
gress might be on hand to watch whatever international
events might transpire, and to keep the Administration
from playing the whole part. The anti-war filibuster was
directed against the Armed Ship BUl on February 28.
Senator Stone, the chairman of the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations, was unwilling to support the measure,
turning over Its management to Senator Hitchcock, of Ne
braska. On the legislative day of February 28 the Senate
sat for more than twenty-six hours. It sat for twenty-three
hours on March i, thirteen hours on March 2, and for
twenty-six hours on March 3, the final day of Its session.
Temper ran high in the Senate and outside during the bitter
struggle. In Its last hours the supporters of the bill, realiz
ing that they could not pass It, gained the floor and held it
to the exclusion of its opponents until the Congress expired

THE WAR OF 1917 473
at noon on the 4th of March. "When the history of these
days comes to be chronicled," asserted Viereck's (as The
Fatherland had renamed Itself since the breach with Ger
many), "the names of Stone, La Follette, Hearst, and
Bryan wUl shine forth like beacon lights — if our annals
are written by an American pen." That afternoon Presi
dent Wilson gave out a public statement declaring that a
"little group of willful men, representing no opinion but
their own, have rendered the great government of the
United States helpless and contemptible."
The filibuster against the Armed Ship Bill was successful
in defeating that measure, but called attention to the well-
known fact that the rules of the United States Closure rule
Senate permitted any Senator to speak as long '" Senate
as he could and as often as he desired on any pending meas
ure. Strong-willed Senators in the past had repeatedly
held up the will of the majority In the closing days of a
session by speaking for many hours at a stretch, and groups
of such Senators, speaking in relays and yielding the floor
to each other in turn, were able to prolong a filibuster from
hours Into days. The practice was commonly regarded
as an abuse, but Its correction was impossible until public
opinion, now focused on the "little group of wUlful men,"
forced the Senate to take action. Twelve men, seven P.e-
publicans and five Democrats, had used their power to
destroy majority rule. A majority of the Senators, ex
cluded from their power to vote, signed a statement de-
inandlng a closure rule, and the Senate remained in special
session after March 4 to formulate it. On March 8, by a
vote of seventy-six to three, a new rule was adopted pro
viding a procedure by which the majority might force the
termination of a debate.
The failure of the Armed Ship Bill did not affect the de
fense of American shipping, for the Attorney-General ruled
that the power to defend it already existed, and guns with
gunners' crews were installed as opportunity offered.
American public opinion accepted the fact of the immi
nence of war in the weeks following the breach with Ger-

474 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
many. Opponents of the defense measures demanded by
the Administration found themselves temporarily outlawed
and the objects of bitter unpopularity. The country as a
whole reached the conviction that the status of neutrality
had become untenable, and that of the grievances offered
by the two sets of belligerents, the German affront de
manded Immediate action. There were commercial griev
ances against the Allies in connection with which an exas
perated correspondence had been begun, but in all of these
it was certain that In the long run they would either be
agreed upon or submitted to the peaceful process of an ar
bitration. It was impossible to arbitrate the status of
American women and children drowning in the English
Channel. The submarine attack involved not only a limi
tation of the conceded legal rights of neutrals, but the Im
mediate murder of unoffending non-combatants. The hope
that the new rule of February i might somehow or other
fail to be enforced yielded to the national belief that the
United States must associate itself in defense of its rights
with the other enemies of Germany.
The original Allies of 1914, enlarged a little later by the
accession of Japan and Italy, stated their case to the world
Russian m the terms of democracy against military au-
Revoiution tocracy. The invasion of Belgium spread what
might have been a local war In the Balkans, over Europe
and Asia. Many Americans, however, found difficulty in
accepting Russia in the guise of a foe to autocratic govern
ment. These found it easier to see the duty to associate
the United States with the Allies when revolution broke out
in Russia In March, 1917. The Czar Nicholas II was de
posed, and a liberal constitutional govemment was organ
ized with Prince Lvoff as Premier, and Paul Milyukov as
Foreign Secretary. "The greatest tyranny in the world
has fallen," said the London Nation, and liberal opinion in
all of the Allied countries felt more certain as to the ends of '
the war. The United States welcomed the new Russian
Republic. Elihu Root was sent to Petrograd at the head
of a special mission to congratulate the Provisional Govern-

THE WAR OF 191 7 475
ment, and to offer aid and counsel. He was accompanied
by specialists In the fields of industry and war, including
the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Major-Gen
eral Hugh L. Scott. Before he reached Petrograd, other
missions arrived there from the United States to render
Root's success impossible.
The refuge offered by the United States to political Im
migrants from all the world had brought to America In large
numbers Russians after the revolutionary movements of
1905. The Russian Immigrants accumulated in increasing
numbers, their children grasped eagerly the opportunities
for education in the American schools, and the sense of
grievance that had driven them from Russia was directed
against the Government of the land of refuge. The new
Russian Government called the exiles home, and one of
them, Leon Trotzky, speaking in New York before his de
parture, warned the United States against assuming "that
the revolution was necessarily pro-Ally," and avowed that
it was " for an early peace and a better form of government."
Trotzky and his associates carried back into Russia the con
ventional Socialist belief that the United States was a cor
rupt capitalistic nation, and that Root, who had been among
the most prominent of conservative Republicans in 191 2,
was the incarnation of capitalism. When the Root Mission
reached Petrograd it found that anti-American influences
had already been started by the returned exiles. Tom
Mooney was made a hero by the revolutionists, and his
conviction was noisily accepted as a proof of the corruption
of the United States.
The progress of the Russian revolution from constitu
tionalism to Bolshevism was protracted over eight months.
In December, 1917, the provisional Government, In which
Lenine and Trotzky had managed to assume dominant
places, opened negotiations for a separate peace with
Germany; but in the early stages of the revolution the
friends of Russian freedom believed that the alliance was
strengthened by the elimination of the Czar. In the
United States the revolution was the last fact needed to

476 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
convince the country that the cause of the Allies was a
cause of liberty and self-government.
The Sixty-Fifth Congress, elected with Wilson in Novem
ber, 191 6, was convened on AprU 2, 1917. The Democratic
War session Party was able to organize both houses, in
of Congress neither of which, nor In the Administration
itself, did the transition into Wilson's second term make
any considerable break. In the House of Representatives
the most notable novelty was Jeannette Rankin, of Mon
tana, the first woman to be seated in Congress. In the
Senate Philander C. Knox returned after an absence as
Senator from Pennsylvania; and Governor Hiram Johnson
took his seat as Senator from California, after having run
300,000 votes ahead of Hughes in the November elections.
The message of the President, delivered to Congress on the
evening of April 2, recited the grievances of the United
States against the German Govemment, and called for a
declaration of a state of war with "this natural foe to lib
erty. . . . We are glad, now that we see the facts with no
veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ulti
mate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples,
the German people included ; for the rights of nations, great
and small, and the privilege of men everywhere to choose
their way of life and of obedience. The world must be
made safe for democracy."
The war resolution, declaring that a state of war existed
against the Imperial German Government, was passed on
State of April 6, 1917, and was proclaimed by the Presi-
^^'' dent. Congress Immediately took up the varied
tasks of granting emergency powers to the Govemment and
determining the national policies upon which the war should
be maintained. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John Spencer Bassett, Our War ivith Germany (1919), is a careful pre
liminary summary of the war. Useful for reference are A. E. McKinley
(ed.), Collected Materials for the Study of the War (1918); L. P. Ayres, The
War with Germany (1919), which is an official compilation well filled with
tables and graphs and prepared by officers ot the statistical branch of the

THE WAR OF 1917 477
General Staff. Francis A. March, History of the World War (1919), and
Richard J. Beamish and Francis A. March, America's Part in the World
War (1919), are highly popular narratives that have been widely sold.
After May 10, 1917, the best single source for material relating to the activ
ities of the United States is The Official Bulletin, published daily by the
Committee on Public Information.

CHAPTER XLVIII
WAR PREPARATION
"The departments at Washington were never conceived or
organized to meet the modern needs incident to mobilizing
a nation," said the PhUadelphia Public Ledger in comment
upon the rush of citizens to Washington to volunteer their
services. The dismissal of von Bernstorff started a period
of national mobilization for the war that seemed unavoid
able. The Council of National Defense, created in the
preceding summer to assist and direct such mobilization,
completed its organization and that of its Advisory Com
mittee early in February, and sat behind closed doors at
the War Department listening to the reports of Kuhn, late
military attache at Berlin, Hoover, whose experiences in
Belgium revealed the completeness with which the cIvU
populations were organized, and Stettinlus, the New York
banker who had been the American purchasing agent for
the Allies for many months.
The Council of National Defense, an ex-officio body whose
members were all busy with their regular Cabinet depart-
Council of ments, did business through its Advisory Com-
National mission, of whlch Daniel WiUard, president of
Defense the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was made chair
man. The seven civilian experts on the Advisory Com
mission organized as many national committees to deal
with raw materials, supplies, munitions, transportation,
labor, medicine, and education. To assist in running these
committees business men were taken from their offices at
"a dollar a year" or less, and there grew up in Washington,
beside the agencies of peace-time government, a civilian
war machine. The function of the Council of National De
fense was to create and advise rather than administer. Its
numerous committees were brought into existence to meet
needs that were supposed to exist, and if they functioned

WAR PREPARATION 479
usefully were liable to be taken away from the Council that
created them and to be set up independently or attached
to an appropriate branch of the Government. Before the
declaration of war, all of the great committees were In opera
tion. In many instances the experiences of the European
belligerents were drawn upon ; the ihllitary lesson of the war
as thus far seen was that victory would go to the nation
functioning most nearly as a unit.
Samuel Gompers, one of the seven members of the Ad
visory Commission, organized a labor committee in the
latter part of February, and brought to its sup- Labor and
port the full strength of the American Federa- ^^^ '"^'^
tion of Labor and the conservative labor groups. With
armies calling for the military man power of every nation,
and with the mUitary program demanding relentless labor
from the man power left at home, national military strength
was closely connected with the spirit and devotion of wage-
earners in every country. On March 12 the labor com
mittee held a conference at which the representatives of
three million organized workmen were present, and adopted
a manifesto "to stand unreservedly by the standards of
liberty and the safety and preservation of the institutions
and ideals of our republic." The Government accepted
the general principle that the livelihood of the wage-earners
should not be allowed to deteriorate because of the war, and
labor agreed to accept the principles of peaceful settlement
in meeting the adjustments made necessary by the shifting
of labor to war occupations, the congestion of workers in
war plants, and the rising costs of living.
The declaration of war on April 6 was accepted with a
high degree of national unity in which the expressed convic
tions of organized labor had a large share. The Socialist
degree of this unity was measured in part by ^P''*
the roar of condemnation that greeted the action of an
emergency convention of the Socialist Party held at Chi
cago on April 7. Here the majority of the Convention,
presided over by a Russian Immigrant and supported by
other foreign-born leaders, passed resolutions attacking the

480 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
war as a conspiracy of capitalism. A minority of the party
left it on this issue under the leadership of American
Socialists. "The proclamation reads like a speech by
Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg," said John Spargo, one
of the resigning leaders. "It requires language so strong
that it sounds like the Use of epithets to describe the scut
tling of the socialist party by German nationalistic jingoes
and anarchistic Impossibilities at St. Louis," said another.
The pro-war Socialists became one of the most active
groups in interpreting the issues of the war to the aliens
among whom Socialist and radical labor propaganda found
their readiest adherents.
Every private agency for or against the war shouted its
advice at the country during the weeks in which the emer-
Committee gcncy was at Its height. On April 14 President
on Public Wilson added an official voice for the Govern
ment itself by creating a Committee on Public
Information, consisting of the Secretaries of State, War, and
Navy, with George Creel, a journalist, as chairman. The
C.P.I, opened offices across Pennsylvania Avenue from the
White House, and became at once a distributing point for
news of war activities of the Government. Its chairman
devoted his time to lifting the lid of secrecy that all branches
of the Government tended to clamp down because of the
war, and his organization acted upon the assumption that
the more the country knew about the facts of the war and
its causes, the more completely would a united national
opinion stand behind its prosecution. In the Official Bulle
tin, a daily newspaper which the C.P.I, published first on
May 10, 1917, the facts that were released at Washing
ton were reprinted for circulation throughout the country.
As the war went on, pamphlets were issued by the million,
films were produced, patriotic societies were encouraged,
and press agencies were established in neutral and Allied
countries, all for the purpose of laying before the world the
facts relating to the war.
The nature of American participation in the war was
uncertain at the date of its declaration, but was generally

WAR PREPARATION 481
believed to be of economic rather than military character.
There were no ships available to carry troops Emergency
to Europe, even if there had been troops to be Fleet Cor-
transported. "Ships will win the war" was the
first phrase that caught the ear of the public, and was re
enforced by the urging of Lloyd George, the English Prime
Minister, before an American audience in London. Up to
the beginning of 1917 the Allies had lost more than 7,000,-
000 deadweight tons of shipping; 9,500,000 tons more were
to be lost during 19 17. The hopes of Germany were
founded upon her ability to hold her Eastern conquests
while her submarines in unrestricted warfare sunk the ship
ping of the Allies, broke their morale, and starved them
into submission. The frantic efforts of the Allied Powers
to replace their lost tonnage were unable to keep up with the
destruction. During 191 5 and 1916, their needs had brought
unwonted activity to American shipyards, all of whose ship-
ways came into use while new ways were laid down to meet
the foreign demand.
The United States Shipping Board was organized during
the winter of 1917, and during March and April accepted in
a general way the idea of building a "bridge of wooden
ships" across the Atlantic. The yards equipped to build
steel ships were already working at their fullest capacity,
and the time necessary to establish new yards seemed pro
hibitive. The supplies of wood, however, were abundant;
labor was more plentiful in the regions of the Southern and
Northwestern forests than in the Eastern Industrial cen
ters ; the program of quantity production of wooden steam
freight ships of about thirty-five hundred tons capacity was
accepted; Major-General George W. Goethals was drawn
into the service of the Shipping Board to direct the con
struction; and the Emergency Fleet Corporation took out
its charter on April 16, 1917.
The Government-owned corporation, of which the Emer
gency Fleet Corporation was the first, was a new and dis
tinctive contribution of the war to the American science of
government. All of the stock was purchased with funds

482 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
provided by Congress and became the capital of the cor
poration, which was thereafter able to operate with the
freedom of any commercial corporation, unhampered by
the restrictions over expenditure with which Government
agencies are habitually tied up. The members of the Ship
ping Board elected themselves directors and officers of the
corporation, which they thus interlocked with the govern
mental agency, while retaining by the corporation device a
freedom and directness of action otherwise unattainable.
The Emergency Fleet Corporation took up the program
of wooden ships and let contracts for the building of vessels,
the enlargement of existing yards, and the laying-out of new
ones. It developed also the idea of a standardized steel
ship, whose plates and parts were to be made in quantity in
hundreds of factories throughout the country. The parts
were to be entirely standardized and shipped to assembling
plants of which the greatest was built below Philadelphia
on the Delaware, at Hog Island. Here fifty shipways were
provided, with the idea of turning out an endless series of
fabricated steel ships to beat the submarine.
Before May was over General Goethals and Chairman
William Denman of the Shipping Board were in open dis
agreement as to the extent to which the shipping program
should depend upon the construction of wooden ships.
Goethals shortly resigned his position, and Denman was
relieved by the President, but the work of ship construction
continued to expand until the war was over.
The view that the United States could best assist by
supplying the Allies with the means of war rather than by
Food and Contributing armies led to the second of the
the war formulas that "Food wiU win the war." Ger
many, most narrowly encircled by the state of war, had been
driven to create a food dictator In May, 1916, who pro^
ceeded to apply a ration system In order to equalize dis
tribution of food resources. The shortage of which this
policy was the result grew out of the close investment of
Germany by the Allied blockade, and gave rise to the de
mands from German sources for a neutral embargo against

WAR PREPARATION 483
England and for a broadening of the submarine campaign.
In November, 191 6, England was forced to establish a food
controller in the person of the owner of a great chain of
retail groceries, Lord Devonport, and the British Board of
Agriculture undertook a campaign to increase the agricul
tural acreage, to bring women into farm work, and to lessen
the dependence of Britain upon food from overseas.
The CouncU of National Defense early appreciated the
fact that the United States would need organizations to
stimulate food production and to equalize dis- ^^
... 1 1 T^ ¦ i_ J Hoover and
tribution such as the European countries had the Food
established. The need was the more imperative ^f™o|J'^"
because the traditional American practice, as
expressed In the anti-trust laws, demanded free competition
and proscribed the type of combination needed for success
ful national control. The necessities to which England and
Germany had been driven had been exceeded at an earlier
period of the war by those of Belgium, overrun and pros
trate in the invader's hands. Only the Commission for the
Relief of Belgium had saved that country from collapse.
Its American director, Herbert C. Hoover, had learned the
problems of rationing from the standpoints of all the belliger
ents, and had kept Belgium alive with the assistance of large
economic and dietetic staffs. Thework had been diplomatic
in the highest degree, for the employees of the C.R.B. had
been called upon to disregard military frontiers, and to pass
repeatedly through the lines from Belgium to Germany,
France, or England. The fame of this performance made
Hoover the natural food adviser of the United States. He
was In Washington In conference with the Government in
February, 191 7, then he returned to Europe to wind up the
affairs of the C.R.B., whose American assistants were now
forced to leave Belgium, and In April he came back to the
United States to become chairman of a food committee
created by the Council of National Defense. As Goethals
launched the Emergency Fleet Corporation the President
asked Congress for powers with which Hoover might organ
ize the food supply. "The foremost duty of America to-

484 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ward her Allies in this war is to see that they are supplied
with food," said Hoover as he returned to America to take
up this task. When Congress delayed its compliance with
the request for powers in order to debate their nature, the
President on May 19 appointed Hoover as voluntary food
controller with power to organize a Food Administration
at his own expense and without legal sanction. It was
nearly too late to affect the crop of 1917 by any agitation,
for the spring planting was already under way, but. by
advertisement and cooperation with the Department of
Agriculture and the agricultural colleges, the spring wheat
acreage in the Northwest was enlarged, garden areas were
multiplied throughout the United States, and the saving of
food was popularized as a patriotic virtue.
The Council of National Defense continued to act as a
civilian general staff for the planning of agencies to hasten
Raw mate- ^^^ preparations for war. Its committee on
riaisand supplies under Julius Rosenwald, of Chicago,
™""' ' " entered Into cooperation with the army in pre
paring its contracts and awarding them. Bernard M.
Baruch, in charge of raw materials, brought the copper and
steel producers Into closer relationships with the Govern
ment. A General Munitions Board was created on April 9
to assist in the procurement of war supplies, and like the
British Munitions Ministry to decide questions of priority
when the needs of the army and the navy interfered with
those of general industry.
A single munition of war assumed a prominence resulting
in the creation of the Aircraft Production Board on May 16,
Aircraft with Howard E. Coffin, a prominent automo-
program ]-,jjg rnanufacturer, as chairman. Airplanes had
brought great changes In military tactics. Used first for
reconnaissance and observation, they placed a high premium
on concealment of movements behind the lines as an element
of strategy, and brought Into existence the art of camouflage.
Carrying machine guns they had begun to be used for com
bat to attack, first, troops on the ground, and then, each
Other in the air, Carrying bombs, they had been used as

WAR PREPARATION 485
agents of destruction of railways, factories, and magazines,
and had been employed by German forces for the terrorizing
of the civilian towns of England and France. The Aircraft
Production Board proposed to develop the quantity man
ufacture of aircraft, while aviators were trained by the
thousands to manipulate them. From an organization
with 65 commissioned officers and 1120 enlisted men when
the war broke out, the Aviation Section of the Signal
Corps was expanded, said the Secretary of War, until at
the end of 19 17 there were 3900 officers and 82,120 en
listed men. The Liberty engine was designed, adopted,
and put under production, and Congress, on special appeal
to assist in the development of the new arm of the service,
voted $640,000,000 in a single bill in July, 1917.
The myriad activities in preparation for war that were
launched in March and April produced a demand for
immediate funds that resulted in the Loan Act „, ,.
All 111- '*^'' finance
of April 24. A debate upon methods of war
finance began earlier than the war itself, and turned upon
the relative desIrabUity of loans or taxes. Many of the
" stop-the-war " group, as they saw themselves defeated
upon their major issue, turned their efforts to the advocacy
of a "pay-as-you-go" method of war finance, whose pur
pose was to make the well-to-do carry the burden of the
war. One of their leaders explained that a policy of sup
porting the war by means of taxation and by seizing all
incomes above $100,000 a year would have a tendency to
prevent war. Socialists and others who believed that the
war was brought on by capitalists for their own profit
eagerly supported the pay-as-you-go movement. Before
Congress met many of Its members were ready to support
with their votes movements for heavy Income and war-
profit taxation.
Although it was expected that the American effort would
be largely economic, there were no estimates as to the prob
able cost of the first year of war, and Professor Seligman's
conjecture that it would run to the neighborhood of
$10,000,000,000 was "greeted with a smile of incredulity."

486 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The grand total of national appropriations for the twenty
years before the war was less than $17,500,000,000. In no
one year had the total appropriations run much above
$1,000,000,000. It was clear, however, that whatever
theory should finally be accepted for raising the necessary
funds, the United States must resort to borrowing until the
revenue acts should be passed and the funds should become
available. The President recommended that the credits
to be granted be sustained, "so far as they can equitably
be sustained by the present generation, by well-conceived
taxation." The first Loan Bill of the war became a law April 24,
1917. It authorized a bond issue of $5,000,000,000 at
First Lib- three and a half per cent Interest, and in addition
erty Loan ^q ^j^jg ^^ issue of short-term notes of $2,000,-
000,000. It was proposed by the Treasury Department to
sell the short-term notes as money was needed by the Treas
ury and then to receive them back in return for bonds. It
was hoped in this manner to provide for a continuous flow
of funds. About twice In each year it was proposed to have
a vigorous campaign for the sale of bonds to the people at
large, and in anticipation of the first of these drives three
weeks were set aside about the first of June for the first
Liberty Loan campaign in which bonds to the amount of
$2,000,000,000 were offered to the people. A Liberty Loan
organization was built up to aid in bringing the campaign
for funds to the attention of the citizens. Bonds for as
low as fifty dollars were issued so that no one need be unable
to subscribe, and the national morale that supported the
entry into war at once stimulated the sale of Liberty bonds
and was sustained by It. In November the second loan
of $3,800,000,000 was placed.
The Bond Act, passed In the understanding that the
United States was to aid the other enemies of Germany,
Loans to provided that $3,000,000,000 might be loaned
Allies ^y ^],^g Treasury Department to the Allies and
their associates. Until this time the Allies had made heavy
purchases of raw materials in America, paying for them in

WAR PREPARATION 487
turn by their credits in the American banks, by gold shipped
to America to meet the balances, by American securities
sent home to be sold In the open market, and by national
loans offered for subscription In the United States. The
gold in the Treasury, amounting to $1,279,000,000 on July
I, 1914, rose to $2,445,000,000 in AprU, 1917. Hereafter
the Allied purchases were paid for by the proceeds of na
tional loans extended by the United States Government.
Before the end of the war Congress had authorized the
lending of $10,000,000,000, of which $9,300,000,000 were
actually advanced. The first American participation in the
war was as banker for the Allies.
The belief that the American contribution was to be
economic postponed the date at which it was expected to
have military forces available for use, but did officers'
not prevent their preparation. The National training
Defense Act of 1916 was In effect, training
camps had prepared a considerable number of reserve of
ficers, and a new series of training camps was opened May
15, 191 7, to prepare more reserve officers to be used first
as instructors In the organization of new divisions. The
National Guard was recruited to 382,000 men, the regular
army was enlarged by enlistment to 527,000, the navy and
the Marine Corps by enlistment to 75,101, and the General
Staff sent into Congress with the approval of the President
a project for raising the rest of the national army by a
draft. The principle of selective service, as the draft of 19 17 was
called, was supported on two theories. There had been
nothing quite Hke it in American experience. Selective
The Civil War draft had been a method for stim- ^^''^''^^
ulatlng enlistments, not for bringing men to the colors.
The Confederate draft had been a means of coercing a popu
lation. Selective service was to be a means of raising an
army at a time when young men were eager to bear the
responsibility, but to raise it in accordance with the na
tional need rather than individual enthusiasm or patriotism.
Great armies were to be raised, but they were also to be

488 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
provided with military implements and their dependents at
home were to be regarded as entitled to maintenance by the
nation. In England, where the armies had been filled by
volunteers, national Industry had been crippled by the
patriotic spirit that took skilled men from their shops to the
front, and the burden of society had been increased by the
dependent families left behind.
The principle of selective service was debated until the
middle of May, and became a law on the i8th. The office
of the Provost Marshal-General was revived to administer
it, and draft boards were organized throughout the nation
to cooperate in the registration of men of draft age, from
twenty-one to thirty, and in their classification. " If farms,
factories, railroads, and industries were not to be left crip
pled, if not ruined, by the indiscriminate volunteering of
key and pivotal men," said the Provost Marshal-General in
his report upon the new national departure, "then, in the
face of such an enemy as Germany, the total military ef
fectiveness of the nation would have been lessened rather
than strengthened by the assembling of 1,000,000 volun
teers." BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The Annual Reports of the Council of Nationat Defense, the United
States Shipping Board, and the Provost Marshal-General, E. H. Crowder,
are as yet the best sources for the details of war organization. W. F.
Willoughby, Government Organization in War-Time and After (1919), gives
a general survey, which may be checked in some details by F. L. Paxson,
"American War Government, 1917-1918," in American Historical Review,
October, 1920, and by A Handbook of Economic Agencies for the War of
igi7 (1919), which was compiled in the historical branch of the General
Staff. Newton D. Baker, Frontiers of Freedom (1918), is a compilation of
occasional addresses. George Creel, How We Advertised America (1920),
is a history of the Committee on Public Information. Edwin N. McClellan,
The United States Marine Corps in the World War (1920), is an official his
tory, largely statistical. F. W. Halsey, Balfour, Viviani, and Joffre (1917),
gives the story of the British and French military missions. Theodore
Roosevelt, The Foes of Our Own Household (1917), includes the correspond
ence relating to the proposed volunteer division.

CHAPTER XLIX
LAUNCHING THE A.E.F.
The Selective Service Act became a law on May i8. Upon
signing it the President announced that John J. Pershing,
junior major-general on the active list, would be General
sent to France at the earliest possible date in P«''shmg
command of a small contingent of American troops, and
that a great army would be raised as soon thereafter as possi
ble. A few days later the orders issued to the commander
of the American expeditionary forces reminded him that
" the underlying Idea must be kept in view that the forces
of the United States are a distinct and separate component
of the combined forces." At the date of his appointment
Pershing was in command of the American troops on the
Mexican Border, where he had succeeded the late Major-
General Frederick A. Funston- His earlier military career
had been most Intimately associated with the Philippine
Islands, where his successes as a junior officer inspired Pres
ident Roosevelt In 1905 to promote him over 902 seniors
on the army list to be a brigadier-general. So far as he had
party affiliations, he was known as the son-in-law of Sena
tor Francis E. Warren, a Republican of Wyoming. Among
his seniors were Hugh L. Scott, Chief of Staff, who was
abroad with the mission to Russia; Tasker H. Bliss, who
was acting Chief of Staff; and Leonard Wood, a former
Chief of Staff.
The decision to send an expeditionary force to France
was a departure from the views that had prevailed In Wash
ington a few weeks before. When the original joffre and
plan for raising the army was designed In April, Balfour
"there was no intention whatever of sending any troops
abroad until March, 1918." The Quartermaster-General,
with the assistance of the Council of National Defense,
placed his first orders with this in view. The change in

490 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
intention came within a few hours after a French warship
passed In at the Capes of the Chesapeake on April 24 bear
ing Marshal Joffre, Viviani, and a French mUitary mission
for a conference with the United States. "Let the Ameri
can soldier come now" was the message they brought from
France who had borne the heaviest impact of the war for
thirty-three months, and whose morale needed the stimulus
of a visible aid from America if it was to hold until the
American weight could be brought upon the line. A. J.
Balfour with a British mission arriving about the same time
told the same story. As a result of their arguments "it
was determined to begin at once the dispatch of an expedi
tionary force of the American army to France."
The naval participation of the United States had become
a fact two weeks before the appointment of Pershing was
Naval par- announced. In anticipation of the state of war
ticipation Rg^j. Admiral WUliam S. Sims, president of the
Naval War College at Newport, was ordered to England at
the end of March to cooperate with the British naval forces
in the blockade of Germany. A flotilla of destroyers fol
lowed him in April, and arrived at Queenstown May 4.
"When will you be ready for business? " inquired the British
naval officer as he greeted their commander after his voy
age across the Atlantic. "We will start at once," was the
reply. In addition to maintaining an increasing fleet of destroy
ers on the blockade and on convoy duty, the navy added
a squadron of battleships and undertook to close the North
Sea by a barrage of mines In order to prevent the egress
of submarines. A new type of contact mine was subse
quently invented, manufactured, and transported; and
56,611 such mines were planted by American mine-layers
between the Orkney Islands and the coast of Norway, con
stituting four fifths of the whole barrage which extended
across two hundred and thirty miles of sea. Small de
stroyers were built by scores to watch for submarines.
After a few days spent' In Washington, Pershing with a
little staff went quietly to England, and th^n to Frang^,

' '"I'Vi'iylif ''y Intel iiiitnuin! film Serrtce, Inc.
GENERAL JOHN J, PERSHING AT A FRENCH PORT, 1917

LAUNCHING THE A.E.F. 491
where on June 26, 191 7, he was joined by units of the first
division, regular army troops, who had arrived Pershing
at Brest. On July 4 he marched the troops '"France
that Joffre had called for through the streets of Paris.
The headquarters of the A.E.F. were maintained at Paris
for a few weeks while Pershing studied the military situa
tion on the westem front and made his plans for American
the organization, training, and operation of his base in
forces. At the end of August he moved his head
quarters halfway across France to the ancient town of
Chaumont where he was within easy striking distance of
his sector on the western front, and the training areas pro
vided for the American divisions.
The western front of 191 7 was battered but unbroken
after three years of war. Each side had repeatedly shown
that it was possible to bend the line, but neither had pos
sessed the continued power to break through. The un
willingness of the United States to permit its troops to be
used for replacements In the British and French armies, as
the Allies would have preferred, made it necessary to assign
a sector to the forces under Pershing. England was already
in possession of the northern end of the line with her sup
plies in the rear connected by her network of military rail
roads with the French and Belgian Channel ports. It
could not be suggested that she entrust the defense of the
Channel to another force or abandon the short lines of com
munication between her armies and London. For France
the vital strategic factor was the defense of Paris, and from
that city the net of railroads to her front was such that no
foreign military force could be thrust In and be of service.
The American forces had not even been assembled when
Pershing took up the question of their disposition with the
English and the French. He received as his assignment the
quiet sector between the great fortresses of Belfort and Ver
dun. Here the American armies could do the least damage
if ineffective, and here they could be supplied without bring
ing disorder to the British and French lines of communi
cation north of Paris.

492 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED .STATES
The same reasons that assigned Pershing to the region
of Chaumont required him to utilize as seaport bases the
French shore south of Brest. There was equal determina
tion that the American forces should remain a unit and that
they should not constitute a burden upon France. The
collier Jupiter, laden with ten thousand tons of wheat, pre
ceded the arrival of the first contingents In France, and
engineer regiments, railroad regiments, and forestry regi
ments followed to take possession of the seaport towns.
They dredged the harbors, and opened channels up the
tidal rivers. They built docks and constructed railway
sidings where their gantry cranes could lift their cargoes
from the steamship hold to the waiting freight-car. They
constructed assembling plants where the freight-cars and
the locomotives as they came from the United States were
put together. They rebuilt the light French railroads to
carry heavy American rolling stock from Brest to Le Mans,
from Saint-Nazalre, La Pallice, and Bordeaux to Tours,
and thence across France south of Paris to the Chaumont
region, where the main lines were sprayed out in branches
toward the battle front.
At Tours Pershing erected a secondary headquarters for
the Services of Supply. All along the lines of communi
cation from the seaboard bases through the intermediate
regions to the zone of advance, cantonments were erected
and schools prepared to house and train the troops as they
should come, while the departments In Washington were
Instructed to forward the materials of war upon tables of
automatic supply. Each increment of twenty-five thou
sand troops was to bring with it an initial equipment and
every month thereafter for each similar number of troops
overseas supplies were to be forwarded in accordance with
the tables. The correspondent of the London Times who
inspected the American plant in France In February, 191 8,
declared that there was "no question that the General Staff
of the army Is delivering supplies and material upon the
longest lines of communication in the annals of war."
The preparations for an independent army, powerful

494 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
enough to turn the balance on the western front, retarded
Divisions the development of an imposing force of combat
of 1917 troops. Before 191 7 was ended there were only
five divisions on the soil of France, the ist and 2d, composed
of units selected from the regular army ; the 26th, made out
of the National Guard of New England; the 42d, or Rain
bow Division, composed of picked units from the National
Guard of all the States, and the 41st, which never had
a combat record, but remained a depot and replacement
division through whose units 227,000 replacement troops
passed on their journey to the front. The 32d Division of
Wisconsin and Michigan National Guardsmen was added
in February; and In March, 191 8, there were 250,000
American troops In France, more than half of whom were
technical troops devoted to the construction of the American
plant. It was the belief in April, 1917, that American troops
would not be needed in large numbers, and that if needed
they could not be transported. In anticipation of their
coming the German submarine campaign was pushed to its
highest effectiveness. In August, 191 7, an American em
barkation service was organized to take charge of the troops
and freight as they were presented at Atlantic ports for
transportation. From a modest beginning of 131,000 dead
weight tons in August, 1917, the transport fleet grew to
2,700,000 dead-weight tons in the final month of the war,
and when In the spring of 191 8 the need came for immediate
American assistance the embarkation service, with the aid
of British ships, carried safely to France or England nearly
ten thousand troops a day for five consecutive months.
While Pershing was laying the foundations for the A.E.F.,
the units of the regular army and the National Guard were
Nation- being raised to their full quotas by the induc-
al Army |.Jqj^ ^f Volunteers. It was possible to use these
existing military units as training schools for the new re
cruits until such time as it might be practicable to proceed
In the formation of new units. The division of about
twenty-seven thousand officers and men became the unit for

LAUNCHING THE A.E.F. 495
training. It was decided to rearrange the whole existing
force and to assimilate the drafted men In a single army
organization of which the divisions numbering one to
twenty-five should be founded upon regular army units, the
numbers twenty-six to seventy-five were reserved for divi
sions made out of the National Guard, while those num
bered seventy-six and higher were to be entirely new and
made up of National Army men. In the summer of 191 8
the distinctions existing between the different varieties of
divisions were abolished, and all were merged in the single
Army of the United States and wore the same insignia.
Few of the divisions long retained much of the local char
acter with which some of them started out. In every divi
sion gaps were filled by replacements without reference to
their origin. Units and individuals were constantly trans
ferred from one division to another. The small number of
regular soldiers in the service in April, 1917, were scattered
so widely throughout the whole force that the so-called
regular divisions were regular only in name. The National
Guard divisions retained their identity a little longer, but
only seven of the seventeen divisions organized from this
source contained less than twenty-five per cent of draft
members when they sailed for France, and all of them tended
as the war went on to approximate more closely the other
divisions of the National Army.
The determination to raise an army of Indefinite size
by means of a draft made it necessary to provide hous
ing accommodations to be ready as soon as the ^, , ,
• 1 I 1 /-^ • • J T T"^ draft
recruits assembled. On registration day, June and officers'
5, 1917, 9,586,508 men enrolled themselves as *^^"'s^
liable to service. In the ensuing three months
they were arranged in sequence in their several districts,
with their order of liability fixed by a lottery that took place
on July 20, in anticipation of the calling of the first quotas
to duty in September. While this work was going on with
the assistance of 4557 local draft boards, the selection of
cantonment sites was being followed by the adoption of
standardized plans for barracks and other buildings, by

496 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the letting of contracts, and the hurried mobilization of
armies of workmen in the building trades to get ready for
the arrival of the first half-million men. The regular di
visions were put together at posts throughout the South,
and sixteen temporary cantonments were provided in the
South for as many divisions of the National Guard. In
addition to these the 42d or Rainbow Division was as
sembled at Camp Mills on Long Island and started over
seas In October, 19 17. For the sixteen divisions of the
National Army first organized, sixteen permanent camps
were built, most of them In the Eastern States, and scat
tered from Camp Devens in Massachusetts to Camp Travis
in Texas. These camps were buUt of wood and later pos
sessed an average capacity of 48,000 men. In addition to
the thirty-three new divisional camps numerous smaller
camps were brought into existence for tite specialized serv
ices, artillery, aviation, engineer corps, and others, and
for embarkation near New York and Newport News. The
construction division that prepared this physical plant was
conducted by officers, mostly commissioned directly from
civil life, from the ranks of engineers and contractors.
The officers' training camps opened in May, 1917, and
graduated In August their first class of first and second
lieutenants. They were followed by a second series on Au
gust 27, and a third in January, 1918. In no earlier war
had the United States safeguarded the health and comfort
of its soldiers by requiring that line command should be
exercised only by men with some specialized training for
the task. The boys accepted as candidates for commis
sions included the pick of the college classes of 1917 and
1918. In the fourth series of camps organized in May,
1918, the emergency need for officers had been met, and
most of the candidates were drawn directly from the ranks
of men already in the service. The graduates of the offi
cers' training camps were assigned to the new, divisions as
these were formed, but this was only the beginning of their
training. When they arrived in France every one was sent
to school, the enlisted men to the infantry and artiUery

LAUNCHING THE A.E.F. 497
training areas, while their officers were detailed to the
specialized schools for the innumerable new services that
had become a part of the operation of an army.
The principles of selective service and special training for
line command were emphasized by the refusal of President
WUson to permit the private recruiting that had j^^ Roose-
been a part of every earlier American war. velt Divi-
Colonel Roosevelt's desire to be allowed to raise
a division and to command one of Its infantry brigades was
widely discussed whUe the Draft Law was in Congress. In
the Spanish War his regiment of "Rough Riders," which
Leonard Wood and he commanded In turn, had shown
private recruiting at Its best. At the end of the Santiago
campaign he was a colonel commanding an infantry brigade,
and he now wished to reenter the service at this rank.
It was believed by many that the inspiration derived from
Roosevelt at the front would have sustained the morale of
the Allied cause, for no other American was so universally
admired or so widely known. His friends in Congress
sought to make it mandatory upon the President to permit
him to recruit a division. The law passed authorizing, but
not commanding, such a course. As he signed the bill
President Wilson stated that he would not avail himself of
the authorization. "This is not the time or the occasion,"
he declared, "for a compliment or for any action not cal
culated to contribute to the immediate success of the war.
The business now in hand Is undramatic, practical, and of
scientific definiteness and precision. I shall act with regard
to it at every step and in every particular under expert and
professional advice, from both sides of the water. . . . The
first troops sent to France will be taken from the present
forces of the regular army and will be under the command
of trained soldiers only."
In the Espionage Act of June 15, 191 7, the United States
Government was given powers to combat any attempt that
might be made to obstruct the administration TheEspi-
of the draft or to weaken the morale of troops °"^se Act
while training. There was wide difference of opinion as to

498 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the extent of sedition and the proper measures for its sup
pression. The European countries had become used to
censorship In all of its forms, and bills were introduced
in Congress conferring on the Government powers for the
censorship of the press. These powers were never granted
and no censorship of the press existed except one of volun
tary character in which the newspapers of the country, under
the leadership of the Committee on Public Information, co
operated In the preservation of military secrets. The Espi
onage Act forbade aid to the enemy and the spreading of
Information Intended to cause insubordination, disloyalty,
or mutiny in the military forces. The Postmaster-General
was given power to rescind the mailing privileges of news
papers and individuals offending against the act. The
prosecutions In enforcement of the Espionage Law were
few In comparison with the number of Americans of alien
origin who might have been supposed likely to need watch
ing. The greatest difficulties were with Socialist and
other radical leaders whose normal political language be
came menacing in war-times. The Department of Justice
organized a volunteer association, the American Protective
League, that grew to have two hundred and fifty thousand
associates pledged to report evidence as to disloyalty. In
ternment camps received a few thousand Germans believed
to be dangerous, the federal jails a few more charged with
resisting the draft and other crimes, but In general the Se
lective Service Act enforced itself because it had public
opinion behind It.
As the draft was administered, exemption from mihtary
service was accorded to men of mUitary age because of
physical and mental defects, dependent families, and the
importance of their civil occupations. In the first quotas
called for September, 191 7, speed was imperative, for the
new. machinery was as yet imperfect and the men were
needed in the camps. In December, 1917, all registrants
still In civil life were rearranged by a system of question
naires In a new classification based upon industrial impor
tance, and subsequent calls were thereafter taken from men

LAUNCHING THE A.E.F. 499
in Class I, who were generally liable to service and without
dependents. For the benefit of dependent families of men who vol
unteered and to fulfill the national obligation to the men
themselves due to the risks of war. Congress ^Var risk
extended the principle of employers' liability and allow-
over the armed forces in October, 191 7. The
history of pension legislation since the Civil War told the
story of national obligation and of the difficulties of meeting
it by subsequent legislation. The new law attempted to
anticipate or to avoid the problems. By rigorous physical
examination men of unsound physique, liable to collapse
under military strain, were excluded from the forces. If
men with families dependent upon them entered the service,
they were required to make allotments from their pay for
the benefit of the family, while the United States added
to this a family allowance based upon nearness of kin and
number of dependents. The Bureau of War Risk Insur
ance of the Treasury Department was enlarged to insure
the whole military force, with provisions for payments in
the event of death or complete disability and of proportional
amounts for partial disability. The maimed soldier was
promised, in addition to this, reeducation at the national
expense In case he returned from war shell-shocked or
crippled and unable to resume his former place. The
Federal Board for Vocational Education was given charge
of the administration of this guarantee. In addition to
the liability that the United States assumed toward every
soldier, the latter was permitted if he desired to take out
life insurance at cost to the maximum of ten thousand dol
lars, and in all of the cantonments insurance officers were
appointed to persuade the men to take out the maximum
with premiums charged against their pay. By the time the
war risk legislation was enacted Congress had completed a
summer of prolonged discussion, and had laid down the
fundamental policies upon which the United States was to
fight the war.

50O RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The Final Report of General John J. Pershing, Commander-in-Chief,
American Expeditionary Forces (1919), is well illustrated with official
maps, and provides an excellent guide to the military operations. Fred
erick Palmer, America in France (1918), is the work of a trained journalist
who was attached to G.H.Q. for historical work. Isaac F. Marcosson,
S.O.S. (1919), gives a description of the services of supply that were di
rected from Tours, William Crozier, Ordnance and the World War (1920),
relates to a single aspect of war preparation. Katherine Mayo, "That
Damn Y" (1920), is the result of an investigation of the work of the
Y.M.C.A. On the navy, consult William S. Sims, The American Navy in
the War (1920); John L. Leighton, " Simsadus: London": At U.S. Naval
Headquarters Abroad (1920); and Navy Ordnance Activities: World War
igi7-igi8 (1920), which is an official history of the Bureau of Naval
Ordnance.

CHAPTER L
WAR POLICIES
The American legislation of 191 7 divides itself roughly Into
two classes, one having to do chiefly with emergencies that
must be met without delay, and the other comprising poli
cies whose full effect could come only with the lapse of time.
The authorization of the first Liberty Loan and the deter
mination to finance the Allies belong to the emergency
measures that were enacted without prolonged debate.
In this class also falls the Selective Service Act, in whose
acceptance there was an almost unanimous agreement.
While Congress was enacting the emergency laws, its com
mittees were discussing permanent policies for bringing the
full strength of the United States into the war.
The World War brought into existence new weapons that
changed the character of strategy and altered the position
of both the non-combatant and the neutral. New con-
Aircraft, tte submarine, poison gases, and the ditions of
tanks were all added into the arsenal of physical
weapons. Propaganda and the censorship were brought
to play upon men's minds, to weaken the resistance of
the enemy, or to encourage the spirit of the nation using
it. Before the United States was drawn into the war the
position of the neutral had been made almost unbearable
by "a new war weapon against Germany — a noiseless and
unseen weapon." This was the embargo.
The anciently admitted right of the belligerent to block
ade or invest his enemy and starve him Into submission
carried with it a right never denied by neutrals Neutral
to search merchant vessels on the high seas, to ^'^^'^^
seize contraband goods where they could be found, and to
seize both the cargo and the vessel carrying it in an attempt
to violate a blockade. The inconvenience caused by these
conceded rights would have been great enough to disor-

502 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ganize the life of neutral nations if no additional means of
restricting trade with the enemy had been discovered. The
Allies before 191 7 relied chiefly upon the law of contraband
and the doctrine of ultimate enemy destination in their
attempts to bring economic pressure upon the Central
Powers. Friction and Inconvenience resulted, but since
the Allies were ready to purchase most of the cargoes they
intercepted, and since their assertions of enemy destination
were generally well founded, no neutral nation offered to
defend its immunity in trade with a belligerent by going to
war about it. As the war progressed the Allies discovered
attempts to evade the consequences of enemy destination.
The people of Holland and Denmark shipped their butter
fats to Germany and themselves consumed oleo that they
purchased in Allied countries. In many ways it was found
possible to sell the Central Powers a commodity originating
in Continental neutral countries and to replace it with an
Allied or other neutral commodity. The effect of this was
identical with that of the method of direct importation by
way of the Allied countries, and it left the enemies of Ger
many in the situation of provisioning her through the con
nivance of neutrals. The Allied blockade brpke up the
direct maritime trade with Germany, and then the indirect
trade upon the principle of enemy destination, and finally
the Allied Governments undertook to prohibit trade with
the neutrals unless assured that the commodities so imported
would not release others for the benefit of Germany.
The United States suffered from loss of the profitable
trade with Germany and European neutrals that might
have been enjoyed had the Allies permitted it, or had Great
Britain been willing to furnish her own ships to carry it.
Since the United States had little merchant marine and
American exports had been habitually carried in the ships of
countries now at war, there had been much inconvenience
and considerable hard feeling due to the pressure of the
Allied embargo. As a tool of war, however, the weapon was
both permissible and effective, and the Espionage Act of
June 15, 1917, carried a provision for the control of exports.

WAR POLICIES 503
Vance McCormick, who had been chairman of the
Democratic National Committee in 1916, was made chair
man of the Exports Administrative Board, appointed under
this act. The exports of the United States were to be con
trolled by a system of licenses for the purpose of preventing
their reaching the enemy, and conserving them for the use
of the United States and its associates In the war. Neutrals
were not to be hampered in their reasonable needs so far as
these could be provided without Injury to the Allied cause
or without aiding the enemy. As the summer advanced the
number of commodities affected was increased through ex
tensions of the prohibited list and the exports conservation
list, and to these there was added the control of bunker coal.
By refusing to sell coal to neutral vessels in American ports
until these contracted to refrain from carrying cargoes use
ful to the enemy and agreed to a trade acceptable to the
United States, it was possible to extend the influence over
the war trade
Power to control imports into the United States was
voted In August, and on October 6 Congress brought to
gether other provisions relating to the embargo The War
in the Trading with the Enemy Act. The War Trade Board
Trade Board, of which McCormick remained the chairman,
took over and enlarged upon the work of the Exports
Administrative Board to stop all trade with the enemy,
to conserve American exports, and to restrict the imports.
Tonnage was so short that it could not be spared for un
necessary cargoes. All imports were under license by
February, 1918, and the technical bureaus of the War
Trade Board issued the licenses as it was shown that the
imports could not be done without or replaced by similar
commodities of American origin.
In breaking up trade with the enemy, the War Trade
Board undertook to stop the trade with enemy subjects
wherever they might reside, and created an intelligence di
vision to gather information, which was embodied in lists
of enemy firms with whom trade was prohibited. The office
of Alien Property Custodian, created by the same act, was;

504 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
administered by A. Mitchell Palmer, who took possession
as public trustee of the property of enemies or others re
siding in enemy countries. The property of enemy aliens
residing in the United States and not violating the law was
not interfered with.
Before the full organization of war trade had taken place.
Congress had passed other measures for the conservation of
Food and food and fuel in the Lever Act of August lo,
fuel control jgj-,_ The additional powcrs to Stimulate the
production of food and to control Its disposition within the
United States were asked for in April, but were not granted
until August. The debates over the Food and Fuel Act
revealed the permanence of the distrust of combinations
that pervaded the Progressive movement. Fear that the
power to control the necessities of life might be misused for
the advantage of a few citizens, inspired protracted opposi
tion to the bill. While the debate was pending the Depart
ment of Agriculture used Its existing organization to en
courage the planting of larger crops than usual, and asked
for an appropriation to make a food inventory of the United
States. The voluntary Food Administration under Hoover
was created In May, when it seemed likely that the debate
would Indefinitely postpone the grant of the desired power
to bring the food industry under license. The danger of
sugar, flour, and potato famines, accompanied by hoarding
and extortionate prices, were among the visible reasons for
granting the powers. There was no danger that the United
States would starve, but there was need to conserve to the
uttermost in order to increase the surplus for export to the
Allies, and to prevent improper hoarding and speculation.
Upon the passage of the Lever Act, Hoover was ap
pointed Food Administrator, and on August 23 President
Harry A. Garfield, of Williams College, was made Fuel
Administrator, after sitting on a commission that fixed the
price of wheat at $2.20 a bushel. The Grain Corporation
took out a charter from the State of Delaware with officers
provided by the Food Administration, and with a capital
stock of fifty million dollars owned by the Government.

WAR POLICIES 505
Its duty was to buy and distribute the crop of 191 7, and
administer the established price. A year later the Sugar
Equalization Board was similarly Incorporated to stabilize
the price of sugar and equalize its distribution. The per
capita consumption of wheat in the United States was re
duced from 5.3 bushels per year to 4.12 bushels In the first
year of war. The reduction was brought about by the
campaign for conservation and the use of substitutes, with
wheatless days and meatless days popularized through the
cooperation of the State Food Administrations, and with a
resulting surplus of food released for shipment to the Allies.
The Fuel Administration took over work that had been
begun by one of the committees of the Council of National
Defense and used Its powers to increase the activities of the
mines and to meet the demands of mining labor. Its effec
tiveness was Involved with that of the railroads of the coun
try, because In many of the mines there were no facilities
fo.r storage, and the output was dependent upon the ability
of the railroads to provide empty coal cars at the mine
mouth. There were no available figures on the capacity of
either the railroads to provide the cars or the mines to fill
them, and the work of the Fuel Administration was forced
to include a new economic study of the Industry In which the
experts of the Bureau of Mines played an active part.
The oil division of the Fuel Administration was added in
January, 191 8, because ofthe growing importance of fuel
oil and gasoline. This was a motorized war, with armies
moving by motor truck and with aircraft propelled by
gasoline engines. The varying requirements of different
kinds of motors made the question of specifications inter
national in character, while the need arose to conserve the
particular grades of gasoline most valuable for the use of
aircraft, and ultimately to limit the use of any kind of
gasoline for pleasure purposes.
The debate in Congress upon war policies, whether of
emergency or permanent character, began before Revenue
the declaration of war and was continuous untU ^'^^ °^ '9i7
Congress adjourned on October 6. It ranged from the merits

5o6 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
of the war itself to the treatment of sedition, the freedom
of the press, the management of armies, and the national
control of trade. On October 3 a War Revenue Act was
passed, after the most persistent of the discussions which
involved theories of finance. The Revenue Act of 1917
was not constructed with reference solely to the finances
of the war. There was a wide agreement that taxes must
be increased not only to the extent at which they would
cover the normal running expenses of the Government to
gether with Interest and sinking-fund charges upon the
debt, but beyond that until they should carry a considera
ble portion of the current expenses of war. The great de
bate over the proportion of military expenses to be borne
directly by taxation was colored by the demands of leaders
who, having opposed the war, wished to make it unpopular;
of others who, believing the war to be due to a conspiracy of
wealth, wanted to punish the holders of wealth; and of still
others who saw an opportunity to correct Inequalities in the
distribution of wealth or to destroy certain types of wealth
entirely. The demand for taxes ranged from a minimum
that would carry only the fixed permanent charges to a
maximum that would confiscate enough of the accumula
tions of the frugal and the fortunate to pay the whole of the
war expense out of current revenue. Socialist leaders,
agrarian politicians, and progressive farmers who had long
been warring upon accumulated wealth, led the attack
against bond issues and in favor of taxation. They were
supported by what remained of the organized pro-German
sentiment. Of the available sources for taxation, the tariff, formerly
the chief reliance of the nation, had lost much of its impor
tance. Its revenues were uncertain because of the war
time interruption of foreign trade and the deliberate efforts
of such agencies as the War Trade Board to reduce It to its
lowest terms. There remained the excise and the income
tax, over whose details the debate proceeded. The great
controversy came over the amount of the normal income
tax and Its exemption limit, and the rate to be applied to

WAR POLICIES 507
the particular forms of income due directly to the war. It
was obvious that huge fortunes were accruing to some citi
zens because of their war contracts, and to others who were
able to profiteer because of the increased demands for the
necessities of life. The degree to which these persons
should be allowed to enjoy profits because of the war was
always present in the discussion, with each side attacking
the motive of the others. The act as passed was based upon
a graduated excess profits tax, ranging from twenty to sixty
per cent of the war excess over the profits of the pre-war
years, 1911-13. It included an income tax beginning with
a rate of four per cent upon individual incomes over a
thousand dollars, and heavy increases in the excise taxes
upon tobacco and alcoholic drinks, transportation, luxuries
and amusements, and letter postage. The final measure
was opposed by representatives of business who said that it
took too much, and by pay-as-you-go advocates, who said
that it took too little. The revenues received under the
law in 1918 were $3,696,000,000.
The debate on war taxation was only begun when the
Revenue Act of 19 17 was passed, after six months' debate.
In the spring of 1918 Secretary McAdoo invited Congress to
begin upon a revision that might be expected to raise in 1919
a third of the total current cost of the war, and a bill de
signed to raise approximately six billion dollars by taxation
was before Congress, for eight more months of the same
type of debate that prevailed in 191 7. The extremists who
thought the law of 1917 inadequate were much comforted
by the demand of the Administration for even heavier rates
than they had urged, and proceeded to advocate more ad
vanced proposals for the conscription of private property.
This Revenue Act was not passed until February, 1919.
The money raised by taxation during the war period,
April, 1917, to October, 1919, aggregating $11,- ^^^^^ ^^
280,000,000, fell far short of the expenditures expendi-'
of the same period, which ran to $26,007,000,- [^^^^^' ^"<^
000, not including $9,406,000,000 lent to the
Allies. The grand total raised and expended or lent during

5o8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
these three years, $35,413,000,000, made necessary the de
velopment of McAdoo's system of continuous revenue and
the floating of five great national loans. The continuous
revenue device made It possible for the Treasury to meet
the financial needs as they arose without withdrawing
greater amounts of capital from Industry than were im
mediately needed. At intervals of about two weeks the
banks of the country, reached through the federal reserve
system, were invited to buy short-term certificates of in
debtedness. In a fixed percentage of their total assets. As
the Liberty Loan drives produced subscriptions for the long-
term bonds, these payments were deposited in the banks,
and the latter paid the Treasury for the bonds as Issued
with their accumulations of certificates. Four Liberty Loan
drives were conducted in June and November, 191 7, and
May and September, 1918. They were followed by a fifth
"Victory" drive in AprU, 1919. They brought into the
Treasury the savings of more than sixty-five miUion sub
scribers, and funds as follows:
I — $2,000,000,000
II— 3,808,766,150
III— 4,176,516,850
IV— 6,964,524,650
V— 4,498,312,650
The total of the five loans amounted to $21,448,120,300.
The repeated campaigns for the sale of Liberty bonds
served not only as a means of raising needed funds, but
Civilian played an unmeasured part in sustaining the
cooperation public opinion of the United States, in populariz
ing the aims of the war, and in suppressing opposition to it.
The Liberty Loan organization, directed by the Treasury
Department, was based upon committees In the federal
reserve districts, and these in turn on similar bodies in the
several States and in their cities and counties. Members of
these committees, drawn Into Government service during
the drives, educated themselves as well as their fellow-citi
zens to whom they sold their bonds. Masses of explanatory

WAR POLICIES 509
literature were prepared for their use, flying squadrons of
speakers were sent throughout the country to explain the
loans. The Committee on Public Information published
pamphlets by the million in a dozen languages : How the War
Came to America, The War Message and the Facts Behind It,
The President's Flag Day Speech, German War Practices,
The War Cyclopedia, Conquest and Kultur. The Four-
Minute Men were organized by the Committee on Public
Information to speak in motion-picture theaters, and in
cluded, by the autumn of 1918, 43,000 volunteer orators,
whose message it was impossible for the most indifferent to
evade. The work of these cooperative organizations In unifying
public opinion was further extended by the State Councils
of Defense. These were formed everywhere upon recom
mendation of the Council of National Defense, and built up
local systems of county councils, which sometimes reached
down into ward and precinct committees. The Food Ad
ministration added a similar network of committees of its
own ; the American Red Cross, reorganized for war in May,
1917, added still another organization and called for volun
tary contributions by the hundred million. By the autumn
of 191 7 service flags appeared spontaneously throughout
the country, boasting by their stars the members of each
household that were with the colors. The window emblem
of the Liberty Loans advertised the subscribers to the patri
otic funds, and the banner of the Red Cross took its place
by the side of these, while the pledge cards of the Food Ad
ministration were added to the group. The citizen work
ing at war tasks wore the numerous buttons of his or
ganizations, and every day national understanding of the
causes of the war became clearer, and it was more difficult
for disloyalty, stupidity, or dissent to hold Its own.
Congress closed Its war session in October, and at the
same time occurred the last of the open mani- peopk's
festations of disapproval of the war. The anti- Council for
, , , , Democracy
war group, never very large, became more stub
born and persistent as it lost its audience. It received a

510 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
new Inspiration from the progress of the Russian Revo
lution, which in the spring of 191 7 demanded a speedy
peace based upon a doctrine of "no annexation, no in
demnities." An international conference of Socialists was
summoned to meet at Stockholm during the summer, to
bring about a peace in spite of the Governments, and was
supported by the Governments in Russia and the Central
Powers. In the United States the People's Council for
Democracy and Terms of Peace was organized by a So
cialist-pacifist combination at Madison Square Garden on
May 30. It began a propaganda for Immediate peace that
was continued for the next three months. The American
Alliance for Labor and Democracy was organized by the
leaders of the American Federation of Labor and the pro-
war Socialists, and in September the debate came to a crisis
and end In Minnesota.
The center of disaffection with the war lay In the upper
Mississippi Valley, drawing many of its supporters from
National the German populations In Illinois andWiscon-
unanimity gjj^^ ^j^^j ^j^g radical farmers of Iowa, Minnesota,
and North Dakota. The People's CouncU proposed to hold
a national convention at Minneapolis, whither it was in
vited by the Socialist mayor of that city. The special
train that started from New York with the delegates to the
council — the "rabbit special" as its critics called it — re
ceived a different sort of publicity from that which it desired.
The American Alliance for Labor and Democracy trailed it
with a special train carrying supporters of the war. The
governor of Minnesota refused to let the pacifist meeting
take place within his State, and the baffled opponents of the
war, instead of setting the prairies aflame for peace, drifted
back to their homes, excluded from auditoriums and hotels.
Hereafter the movements In opposition were less conspicu
ous. The Postmaster-General barred from the maUs So
cialist papers like the Milwaukee Leader and the Masses,
and friends of free speech complained of a national intol
erance that refused to listen to dissent or allow it a public
hearing. But the same intolerance revealed substantial

WAR POLICIES 511
national unanimity and a fixed determination to see the
war through to a victorious conclusion. The opposition in
Congress confined itself to a criticism of war policies In de
bate. On the final passage of the war measures few cared
to vote in the negative. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Louis E. Van Norman, War-Time Control of Commerce (1919), describes
the workings of the War Trade Board ; further details of operations are in
The Journal of the War Trade Board. A supplement to the American
Economic Review, March, 1919, is entitled "War Finance," and contains
special technical papers on that theme. The Annual Reports of the Secre
tary of the Treasury, 1917-19, are ol course valuable. The continuous
revenue device is treated in Jacob H. Hollander, War Borrowing: A Study
of Treasury Certificates of Indebtedness ofthe United States (1919). See also
Z. Chandler, Freedom of Speech (1920).

CHAPTER LI
CONSERVATION
In the winter of 1917-18 the war passed into its darkest
period, in which the victory of Germany seemed to be al-
The winter most complete and there was reason to fear that
of 1917-18 ^-]^g United States had joined too late. On the
western front in the spring the German army had somewhat
shortened Its length of trenches by retiring to the Hinden-
burg Line between Arras and Soissons. Three timesduring
the year the British forces tried In vain to break the position.
On the Italian front an Austrian drive under German leader
ship poured down the slopes of the Alps from the Isonzo
across the Tagliamento to the Piave. The Russian Revo
lution ended the active fighting on the eastern front, and
released German divisions for a new effort in 19 18 to destroy
the power of the Allies before American troops could be
available. In the United States, as this darkest period of the war
approached, there prevailed everywhere noisy congestion
and confusion, with new programs In every line of war
activity in operation, with none of them complete, and with
many of them encroaching on each other. Conservation was
the dominant note of the approaching winter, with priority
as its most Important element.
The word "priority" acquired significance in the United
States when it became apparent that war needs would require
Control of more railroad cars, more tons of coal and steel,
priorities ^j^j j^^j-g i^bor than the land possessed and
when It became impossible to permit each agency of Govern
ment and every private business to serve its own needs in
the open market to the exclusion of the national program.
There was not yet, In 1917, a real national program, but
lessons were being learned that entered Into the making of
one. In August Congress prepared to meet the crisis by

CONSERVATION 513
authorizing the President to give preference to such rail
way traffic as appeared to be essential for national defense.
Under this act Judge Robert S. Lovett was appointed
director of priority and began his work by giving coal ship
ments to Lake Erie ports preference over all other freight
in order to meet the Northwest need for winter coal. In
subsequent priority circulars he classified the freight that
presented itself for shipment and gave the right of way to
that belonging to the army, the navy, or the Emergency
Fleet Corporation. His work marks the beginning of ac
tual Government control over industry, as distinguished
from the earlier mobilization of industry to meet the needs
of war.
The War Industries Board was created In July, 1917, to
hasten the mobilization of industry and its control, and was
the outgrowth of a series of experiments that -phe War
had been begun in the Council of National Industries
. Board
Defense early in the year. The various com
mittees created by the Advisory Commission were in con
tinuous cooperation with the Government In the early
weeks of the war, and one of them, on Munitions Standards,
sought to work out an approach to uniformity In the require
ments of the various fighting units. This committee on
April 9 was reorganized as the General Munitions Board
with Frank A. Scott as chairman, and set out to formulate
"a system for clearing the needs of the army and navy, and
for having the needs brought before the people. " For the
next three months the General Munitions Board worked with
the cooperative committees of industry of the CouncU of
National Defense on the one hand, and the buying agents
of the army, navy, and Emergency Fleet Corporation on
the other. There was necessary confusion in the work be
cause of the great number of independent agencies author
ized by law to buy for the Government, and because of the
lack of legal power in the General Munitions Board to com
pel coordination. In the navy there existed already a con
solidated buying system, but in the army each of the sepa
rate services had been allowed to purchase for itself, with

514 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the result that the Chief of Ordnance, the Chief of Engineers,
the Chief Signal Officer, the Quartermaster-General, and
the Surgeon-General entered the crowded markets to bid
against each other for supplies of the same type. The en
suing competition raised the price to the Government and
to the Allies, who were buying in American markets with
American funds, and it favored the trade of the contract
broker, who took Government contracts, expecting not to
fulfill them, but to sublet them. The Council of National
Defense sought to keep track of the contracts as they were
let, and to prepare some kind of a picture of the military
contracts of the United States. Its statistical division
formed for this purpose was subsequently taken Into the
army as the statistical branch of the General Staff.
Before the Government had proceeded far with the let
ting of contracts, Washington filled up with agents seeking
them, and with disappointed bidders complaining at their
misfortune. The system of sub-committees came under
fire because it often happened that committeemen chosen
by Baruch or Rosenwald because of their expert knowledge
of raw materials or supplies were forced to pass upon bids
tendered by the very companies that had released them
for Government service. The services of the doUar-a-year
man were in many Instances given to the Government by
his former employer who continued to pay his salary. The
disappointed bidder, falling to secure his Government con
tract, was enabled to charge that It had been awarded to a
rival firm through favoritism. Other complaints were due
to the newness of the committee system and the inexperi
ence of many of the committeemen with Washington habits
of business and the law. In their discussions of the Food
and Fuel Act pending In Congress opponents of food con
trol denounced the work of the sub-committees, and incorpo
rated in the act passed on August lo a clause forbidding
agents of Government to act in the award of contracts in
which they had any financial interest.
Before this act was passed the General Munitions Board
was rearranged on July 28 and became the War Industries

CONSERVATION 515
Board with Scott still chairman. The new board was
designed to concentrate and standardize buying methods.
It included. In addition to the chairman, representatives of
the army and navy, Baruch in charge of raw materials,
Brookings for finished products, Hugh Frayne, a representa
tive of labor, and Judge Lovett, commissioner of priorities.
The sub-committee system inaugurated by the Council of
National Defense was gradually reorganized between the
creation of the War Industries Board in July and the disso
lution of the committees on supplies in November. Scott,
who retired as chairman of the War Industries Board be
cause of ill-health, was succeeded by Daniel Willard in
November, whose position was somewhat similar to that of
chief of a Munitions Ministry.
A new arrangement for bringing the resources of indus
try to the service of the nation was inaugurated in Decem
ber, 19 1 7, at the instance of the United States War service
Chamber of Commerce. Since it had proved committees
impracticable to permit contracts to be awarded by men
who were on temporary leave from their industries, the
Chamber of Commerce recommended at its annual meeting
in September that the several industries organize themselves
and create war service committees, voluntarily empowered
to bind each its whole industry in dealing with the Govern
ment. Upon the initiative of the Chamber of Commerce
more than five hundred such committees were formed based
upon the cooperation of the rival members in every indus
try. The committees came to Washington to aid the Gov
ernment. Some of them, like the Iron and Steel Institute,
the Tanners' Council, the Textile Alliance, and the Chemi
cal Alliance (for their titles were by no means uniform)
opened elaborate central offices in Washington to keep the
trade and the Government In continuous contact. The
committees helped to award contracts and with equal
readiness abolished unnecessary styles, standardized their
output, consented to curtailments of output, and in some
cases to discontinuance as non-essential.
To cooperate with the war service committees the War

5i6 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Industries Board organized a long list of commodities sec
tions directed by managers who were compelled to separate
themselves from business. In the commodities sections the
production, needs, and statistics of the various trades were
assembled and studied, and when any of the other agencies
of Government needed to be brought in contact with a
given industry, the meetings took place at the War Indus
tries Board in the presence of the commodity chief and the
war service committee of the industry.
The new organization of the War Industries Board and
war service committees was developed between December,
Congestion ^9^7, and February, 1918, when the air was full
of transport q£ omInous threats that the organization was too
late, and that military preparation had already broken down.
The most visible sign of the breakdown was congestion on
the railroads with loaded freight-cars crowding the tracks
around the ports of embarkation, and munition or shipyard
plants, and with shippers throughout the United States
clamoring for cars they could not get. In every field of
war preparation contracts had been let by guesswork in
the previous spring, since no branch of the Government
had ever been empowered to determine a schedule of re
quirements. In the early summer the factories made their
readjustments to make war supplies, ships, guns, railroad
materials, explosives, automobiles, aeroplanes, uniforms,
and the other thousands of items needed in the war. New
factories were estabhshed and added to the confusion by
demanding building materials and labor to construct their
plants. In the autumn of 1917 finished supplies began to
leave their factories for delivery at the shipping points or
at the assembling plants of the Fleet Corporation. Their
sudden pressure upon the railroads came in the worst
months of the severest winter known in a generation.
The American railroad plant was underbuilt and in bad
repair when the war broke out. For several years railroad
companies had been ground between the upper millstone
of Inflexible rates fixed by public authority and the lower
millstone of rising costs, The fifteen-year fight for Gov-

CONSERVATION 517
emment control had placed the common carriers under
minute public regulation. The margin of profit in opera
tion, out of which the railroads were accustomed to main
tain their plants and make their betterments, was cut down.
With Income thus reduced. It became more difficult to bor
row at a reasonable figure, for lenders insisted upon a
reasonable return, which the best-managed railroads could
not guarantee. In passing the Adamson Law in 1916, Con
gress added to the financial burdens of the carriers without
providing extra revenues to meet them
The Army Act of 1916, contemplating that In the event
of war it might be necessary for the Government to operate
the railroads, granted such power to the Presi- Railroads'
dent ; but he refrained from using the power in ^^'^ Board
the early months of the war. The American Railway
Association was called Into conference with the Council
of National Defense in February and acted as a Transporta
tion Committee for the Council. On April 11 It organized
a Railroads' War Board with Fairfax Harrison, president of
the Southern Railway, as chairman. This body took charge
of the tracks and rolling stock of all the lines and directed
their operation without reference to their ownership. A
few weeks later, on May 29, Congress directed the Inter
state Commerce Commission to organize a Bureau of Car
Service with power to regulate the use of rolling stock which
included about 2,300,000 freight-cars, without reference to
their ownership; while the legislation of August legalized
the control of priorities and shipments.
Through the summer of 191 7 the Railroads' War Board
fought against the difficulties of car and equipment short
age, finance and labor. The unevenness of military manu
facture brought factories Into full production before facilities
for storage at the ports were ready, and increasing thousands
of loaded cars waiting to be unloaded made the confusion
worse. Toward the end of the year the trainmen presented
demands for forty per cent wage Increase to meet the rising
costs of living, and the railroad owners felt that private
management had broken down.

5i8 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
On December 26 President Wilson took over the control
of the railways and appointed Secretary of the Treasury
Railroad McAdoo as Dlrector-Gcneral of the United
adminis- States Railroad Administration, in control of
2905 companies, with 397,014 miles of track.
At the beginning of 19 18 Congress set to work upon the
passage of an act to regulate the compensation to the rail
roads during the period of Government control. This
became a law March 21, with compensation based upon
the three-year average, 1 914-17. The Director-General of
Railroads operated them as a single system, but decentral
ized their management in the hands of regional directors.
The 'operative officers of the roads were relieved of their
duties, but were in many instances taken into Government
service with different assignments. Competition among the
roads for traffic was abolished, consolidated ticket offices
were opened in the various large cities, needless trains and
parlor cars were dropped from the schedules, and the public
was urged to stay at home.
Before the Railroad Administration had time to show its
capacity, the month of January, with extreme cold weather
Fuelless and heavy snowfalls, blocked the tracks around
^^y^ the Eastern ports and froze the contents of the
open cars into solid masses of ice and freight. The coal
supply of the cities and the ordnance plants ran low. On
January 17, while the Railroad Administration was main
taining an embargo on freight in order to clear its lines, the
Fuel Administrator tightened the regulations on the use
of bunker coal by neutral vessels and ordered all factories
except those engaged in Indispensable war operations to
shut down for the next five days, and thereafter for ten suc
cessive Mondays. "The Garfield fuel order was a call of all
hands to the lifeboats," said the Outlook; while injured in
dustry complained to the President. Wilson upheld the
Fuel Administrator with the grim comment, "We are on
a war footing." On Tuesday, January 22, Colonel Roose
velt arrived In Washington with the slogan on his lips, "TeU
the truth and speed up the war."

CONSERVATION 519
Congestion and despondency in the United States coin
cided with the rumors that Germany was preparing for a
final drive upon the western front to force a
peace. In both parties there were critics of the oTamber-
war measures that had been passed and the way '^'"'^,
they had been administered, who recited in Con
gress facts that they had gathered from the factories and
the cantonments that seemed to show delay and failure.
On January 19 Senator G. E. Chamberlain, Democratic
chairman of the Committee on MUitary Affairs, attended
a luncheon of the National Security League in New York,
and there "undertook to show that since the battle of
Bunker Hill we had never had a proper military organiza
tion or policy." In conclusion, he said that "the military
establishment of America has fallen down. There is no use
to be optimistic about a thing that does not exist. It has
almost stopped functioning . . . because of inefficiency in
every bureau and In every department of the government
of the United States."
The charge of Senator Chamberlain evoked an indignant
and point-blank denial from the President, who asserted
that it was "an astonishing and absolutely unjustifiable dis
tortion of the truth. As a matter of fact, the War Depart
ment has performed a task of unparalleled magnitude and
difficulty with extraordinary promptness and efficiency."
A few days later Secretary Baker appeared before the Com
mittee on Military Affairs with an impressive statement of
the work done and doing. Senator Chamberlain introduced
a bill for the creation of a Munitions Ministry, which re
ceived support in principle from Colonel Roosevelt, many
of the preparedness organizations, and many members in
both parties. An attempt was made by Senator Stone to
show that the demand for a Munitions Ministry was in
effect a censure of the President Inspired by partisan poli
tics. The President announced that he would veto any
measure that attempted to take from him or lessen his re
sponsibility for the conduct of the war.
When the advocates of a Munitions Ministry insisted

520 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
that the existing laws on military coordination were inade-
The Over- quate, he suggested that, if they desired to speed
man Act ^p ^j^g ^^j-^ they should give him power to re
arrange the agencies of government as need should indi
cate. On February 6 a bill was introduced in the Senate
by Overman, of North Carolina, giving the President power
for the period of the war to create new agencies of govern
ment, and to alter existing ones and to transfer their powers
and unexpended appropriations according to his judgment
and the need. It was difficult for advocates of a Munitions
Ministry to oppose the Overman Bill, that went so much
further In the direction of the consolidation of sweeping
powers In the hands of the President. Chamberlain's bill
was dropped, and on May 20, 1918, the Overman Bill be
came a law, "to coordinate or consolidate executive bu
reaus, agencies, and offices."
For the remainder of the war President Wilson had
dictatorial powers, limited only by the size of available
appropriations and specific prohibitions fixed by law. He
exercised his new powers Immediately. An Air Service was
created, taking powers away from the Signal Corps and
granting them to a new Bureau of Aircraft Production, over
which John D. Ryan became civilian chief. A Chemical
Warfare Service was added to the army, and the War Indus
tries Board, which had existed thus far as a sub-committee
of the Council of National Defense, and which had wavered
In the balance as Congress debated the Munitions Ministry
that might supersede it, was made an independent agency of
the Government. Other powers of less consequence were
transferred from one department to another.
During the debate on the Overman Bill, the American
equivalent of a Munitions Ministry came Into existence.
A "War There had now been created six tremendous new
Cabinet .^^^j. agencies that were familiarly described as
the "war boards," the Shipping Board under Hurley, the
Food Administration under Hoover, the Fuel Administra
tion under Garfield, the War Trade Board under McCor
mick. the Railroad Administration under McAdoo, and

CONSERVATION 521
finally the War Industries Board under Baruch, who took
charge on March 4, 1918. Upon'the afternoon of March 20
the President called Into conference the Secretary of the
Navy and Benedict Crowell from the War Department, for
Secretary Baker was in France, and the six heads of the
war boards. Popularly known as the "war cabinet," this
body held weekly meetings until the end of the war, serving
as a clearing-house for the conservation of American re
sources and the fulfillment of war demands.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
C. R. Van Hise, Conservation and Regulation in the United States during
the World War (1917), was designed as a preliminary study to a larger
work whose full execution was prevented by his untimely death. Two
statements upon the status of war preparations were made by Secretary
of War Baker in January, 1918, and may be found in the Official Bulletin,
January lo, 29, 1918. Benedict Crowell, America's Munitions (1919), is
a well-illustrated official report upon the mobilization of industry for pro
curement of supplies. The materials have not yet been assembled for a
judicious decision upon the success or failure of war preparation after the
date of the declaration.

CHAPTER LII
WAR AIMS
The conduct of the war thus far was investigated by the
Senate Committee on Military Affairs In December and
Peace over- January; and just as the interest in the war or-
tures of ganization was approaching its height. President
Wilson appeared unexpectedly before Congress,
on January 8, 1918, and delivered an address upon the aims
of the war. A year earlier, on January 22, 191 7, he had dis
cussed these aims in the last weeks of American neutrality,
and had described the "peace without victory" that he be
lieved the United States willing to endorse. In the ensuing
twelve months the United States went to war convinced
there could be no peace without the destruction of the Ger
man military power. At frequent intervals leaders of all
countries reverted in general terms to their war aims, but
until the Russian Revolutionary Government called for a
formal statement of these in the Interests of an early peace,
no compulsion was felt to define the terms before the danger
of defeat was averted. The overtures of Pope Benedict XV
for peace and disarmament In August, 191 7, kept the dis
cussion alive, while President Wilson's reply to this on
August 27 showed a faith in the German people as distin
guished from their Government, and pointed out that a
peace based upon reciprocal condonation, which the Pope
requested, would contain no guarantee against another un
provoked attack by a nation with unfulfilled military am
bitions. The overtures of the Pope were without avail, as
were the demands of the Russian revolutionists, but the
informal discussion of war aims did not subside.
The only possible program that President Wilson could
.pj^g see he described as (i) "open covenants of
"Fourteen peace Openly arrived at"; (2) freedom of the
roints . ,. ...
seas; (3) equality of trade conditions; (4) re
duction of armaments; (5) adjustment of colonial claims,

WAR AIMS 523
giving equal weight to the interests of the populations
concerned, and the equitable claims of their Governments;
(6) evacuation of all Russian territory; (7) evacuation and
restoration of free Belgium ; (8) evacuation and restoration
of invaded France and restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to
right the wrong of 1871; (9) readjustment of Italian fron
tiers along lines of nationality; (10) autonomous develop
ment for Austro-Hungarian peoples; (11) Balkan recon
struction and restoration with a free and secure access to
the sea for Serbia; (12) freedom of the Dardanelles and of
foreign nationalities under Turkish rule; (13) independence
for the indisputable Polish population, with access to the
sea; and (14) an association of nations to afford "mutual
guarantee of political Independence and territorial integrity
to great and small states alike." Commenting upon these
"fourteen points," the London Spectator remarked, "it may
truly be said now that the minimum terms of the Allies
have been stated."
The defection of Russia from the Allies because of her
internal collapse and her Socialist revolution weakened the
opposition to Germany. It removed one great set of armies
from the field and aroused aspirations in the labor classes
of all Allied countries. Unless these could be shown that
the World War was essentially a struggle for democracy in
the interests of the common people, there was danger that
the ability to wage it would be sapped by the defection of the
masses of the Allied peoples. The demand of the Russian
leaders in May, 191 7, for peace without annexation or In
demnities was accepted in words by a resolution in the
German Reichstag on June 19, and thereafter the utterances
of the extreme Socialists of Germany were given wide pub
licity by the Imperial Government, and German funds were
made available for the use of the revolutionary Socialists In
Russia who spoke the same political language. The Rus
sian Constitutionalists who had precipitated the revolution
in March were forced out in July, when Kerensky came
into power. He in turn was attacked by the Bolsheviki
Party that admitted no national allegiance, accepted finan-

524 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
cial aid from Germany, and urged a program of complete
social revolution and of proletarian dictatorship, and that
satisfied the demands of the peasants of Russia by promis
ing a division of the crown lands and commons and the
great estates.
The international conference of Socialists called to meet at
Stockholm aroused the interests of anti-war Socialists in all
The Stock- Countries, and received the enthusiastic endorse-
holm Con- ment of the German Socialists. The Allied Gov-
ernments denounced it as German propaganda,
and refused to permit their subjects to attend it, but in all
the Allied countries demands arose for some definite state
ment of war aims, and for guarantees that the war was not
a menace to the future prosperity of the working classes.
The British Labor movement led in the formulation of
terms of peace and reconstruction. As in other countries
British there was in England an anti-war Socialist
Labor minority, but the Labor Party was already
Manifesto , , • t-. y- i .
strongly represented in Parliament, and its rep
resentatives sat in the war cabinet. "The Labor party,"
said the London Nation, "has from the beginning kept the
country to the best of its w^r aims." Its leader, Arthur
Henderson, broke with the Government on the treatment
of the proposed Stockholm Conference, but the Labor Party
continued to believe In the war, and in December adopted
a memorandum on war aims that commanded attention
from political leaders everywhere.
The policies embodied in the "fourteen points" were re
ceived with remarkable unanimity in the United States,
The Brest- ^'^^ ^^^^ approved by liberal leaders in all the
Litovsk Allied countries. The London Saturday Review,
speaking the voice of reaction, complained: "in
stead of twaddling about democracy, if Messrs. Wilson
and George would talk the only universal language, viz.
£, s., d., the Germans would respond immediately." The
United States became the diplomatic spokesman for the
Allies, and the danger of disunity through the detachment
of Labor from its support to the Allies was avoided. The

WAR AIMS 525
success of the Bolsheviki in the November revolution
brought Lenine and Trotsky to the top in Russia with power
to carry out their purpose of a separate peace. In the nego
tiations at Brest-Litovsk, which began In December, the
German Socialists, who had been allowed to talk about
peace aspirations, were conspicuously absent, while the mil
itary leaders who dictated the peace substituted for the
doctrine of no annexations a new view of voluntary separa
tion under which Finland, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukrai-
nia were separated from helpless Russia. The Insincerity of
the German overtures was clear before the program of the
"fourteen points" was announced. "The year 191 7, with
its great battles," as an Amsterdam dispatch quoted the
Kaiser, ' ' has proved the German people has In the Lord of
Creation above an unconditional and avowed ally on whom
it can absolutely rely."
In the ensuing weeks the war aims of the United States
received the approval of the Allies. Von Hertling, the
German Chancellor, discussed them. Count Czernin ac
cepted them in general so far as Austria was concerned, but
the Central Powers continued to give a more reliable Inter
pretation of their practices as they imposed their will upon
Russia at Brest-Litovsk. The United States had declared
war upon Austria-Hungary on December 7, 191 7. In com
menting upon the Austrian and German reactions to the
"fourteen points," President WUson still further stressed
the hostUity of the Allies to the German Military Gov
ernment, rather than to the German or Austro-Hungarian
peoples, and held out hopes to both of these that a revolt
against the German dictatorship would end the war without
their destruction. The Allied campaign of propaganda in
side the Central Powers against the German Government
was carried on by spies sent in, by advertising In the papers
of neutral countries circulating In Germany, and by the dis
tribution on the western front from balloons and aeroplanes
of tracts and pamphlets that described the war aims of
the Allies and the autocratic practices of the masters of
Germany.

526 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The war failed to slacken in spite of the discussion of the
aims of peace. The German response In the field was a
"Force with- renewal of large-scale hostilities. On April 6, as
out hmit" ]-^g opened the third Liberty Loan drive at Bal
timore, the President closed the discussion for the present.
"Germany has once more said that force, and force alone,
shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the
affairs of men . . . there Is therefore but one response possi
ble from us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint
or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall
make right the law of the world, and cast every selfish
dominion down In the dust."
The expression of war aims in which the United States
took the lead was possible in 1918 because, for the first time
since the war broke out in Europe, the AUies had brought
into existence machinery for continuous discussion of their
policies. The leadership of the United States was pro
nounced In the creation of this machinery.
The determination of Congress in April, 1917, to lend
money to the Allies to cover their supplies bought in Amer-
AUies Pur- ^^^ placed new responsibility upon the Treas-
chasing ury Department, in which the loans were made.
A few hours after the law was passed, Great
Britain borrowed two hundred million dollars. The busi
ness continued until nearly aU of the ten billion dollars au
thorized had been thus disposed of. An Immediate conse
quence of these loans was greater freedom in American
purchases for all the borrowers who had come nearly to the
limit of their avaUable funds. American markets "sky
rocketed" in the early summer of 1917, as the numerous
buying agencies of the United States Government bid
against each other in the open market for war supplies, and
as each of the Allied missions added to the competition on
their own account. The War Industries Board, organized
July 28 to simplify American buying, had no power to con
trol the acts of the Allied buyers who were In the market;
but since the Allied buyers were spending American funds,
it was possible to exert pressure from other sources, with

WAR AIMS 527
the result that an agreement was signed in August, bring
ing into existence an American Purchasing Commission for
the Allies. The United States promised that prices should
be the same, whether for Government or Allied account
or for private consumption, and three officials of the War
Industries Board, Baruch, Brookings, and Lovett, consti
tuted the new commission. To this commission the Al-
Hed Governments brought their requirements, which were
placed, like the American requirements, through the agen
cies of the War Industries Board.
A second embarrassment arising from the policy of loans
was the discrimination necessary to be made In placing
them. The loans were by law available for all intg^-Ally
countries associated In the war against Germany, Finance
and all these in turn brought their demands to
the Treasury Department. It was an Invidious task to de
cide upon the relative merits of the demands of two asso
ciates, and in the absence of an avowed war policy there
was occasional room for suspicion that the aims were con
tradictory and that the United States was being asked to
finance both sides of a controversy. This was particularly
true of the demands from the eastern Mediterranean and
the Balkans. Early in the summer the suggestion was made
that an Inter-Ally Council on War Purchases and Finance
ought to be created to pass upon the merits of demands for
loans, leaving to the United States the more formal duty of
meeting the requisitions. Not only were the smaller Allies
somewhat divergent in their aims, but the larger Allies, bor
rowing by billions, were conducting on their own account
in Europe independent lending campaigns to the lesser na
tions. The loans of the United States were making these
lesser sub-loans possible, and gave to the American Govern
ment a legitimate interest in Allied war finance that was
recognized In the early autumn of 1917, when it was agreed
to hold an Inter-AUIed Conference at London In Novem
ber and there formally organize the needed financial com
mission under an American chairman. The leadership of
the United States in avowing war aims was warranted by

528 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the relative detachment of the United States from selfish
Interest in the details of the outcome, and by the financial
advances that were making the continuance of the war
possible. In September it was announced that Colonel E. M.
House, of Texas, had been asked by the President to begin
Colonel ^^^ assembling of data to be used by the Ameri-
House's can commissioners when the time should come
to talk about a peace. Colonel House had been
an influential adviser of President Wilson since the begin
ning of his Administration, and had performed functions
that might reasonably have been expected of the State
Department. He had been In Europe during the spring of
1914 visiting with royalty as a distinguished traveler, and
returned to America about the time of the murder of the
Archduke Ferdinand. In the spring of 191 5 he was sent
abroad as confidential agent of the President, and visited
the various belligerent capitals, but the chief thing that
Americans learned from his visit was the fact that he would
not talk. He arrived home this time just after the sinking
of the Lusitania, fresh from conferences with the American
ambassadors and European statesmen. At the end of the
year he went abroad again, and spent the early weeks of
1916 in contact with the European Governments, the re
sults of which he brought back to the White House in the
interval between the resignation of Secretary Garrison and
the appointment of Secretary Baker. By this time he pos
sessed advantages unique among diplomats In that he had
had intimate intercourse with the belligerent statesmen on
both sides of the World War. His frequent appearance at
the White House as the President's guest on the eve of
announcement of important diplomatic policies gave foun
dation to the growing belief that the President relied on his
advice. His selection to gather materials to be used at the
Peace Conference involved an overlapping with the func
tions of the State Department, but was natural In the Hght
of his wide European acquaintance. The work of the
"House inquiry" was organized In the autumn of 1917 with

WAR AIMS 529
the cooperation of historians and economists, who had been
in the service of the Committee on Public Information and
the State Department since early in the war. Before they
had outlined their tasks it was announced that Colonel
House would shortly proceed to Europe at the head of the
American delegation to the Inter-Allied Conference.
The Inter-AUIed Conference opened In Paris November
29, 1917, with the United States represented by a delega
tion that included the Chief of Staff of the army, inter-Allied
Bliss; the Chief of the Naval Operations, Ben- Conference
son; an assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Crosby; a
member of the Shipping Board, Colby; the chairman of
the War Trade Board, McCormick; a delegate of the Food
Administration, Taylor; a representative of the Priorities
Commission, Perkins; with their several staffs. Before
opening the formal sessions in Paris, Colonel House and
his associates spent several days in London in conference
with the British Government. Here on November 18 Colo
nel House made public his instructions from the President
to support the doctrine of unity of control at the forth
coming Paris Conference.
The American experience in financing the Allied cause
and starting a train of events that moved toward unity of
policy was reenforced by the Austro-German gypreme
drive that plunged down the Alps into the plains War Coun-
Cil
of Lombardy on October 24, 1917. Sweeping
away in a few hours all of the gains that Italy had labori
ously put together in two years of war, the Central Powers
threatened not only to capture Venice, but to overrun Italy
as they had overrun Serbia and Roumania. The Ital
ian Government called for aid from her allies, and Lloyd
George and Painleve hastened from London and Paris for
an immediate conference with Orlando. The three premiers
met on November 6 in conference at Rapallo where they
agreed that a Supreme War Council should be erected to
sit continuously and advise the Allied Powers on their
military policy. The German drive was checked in course
of time, but the movement that it started joined forces

530 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
with the naovement originating in the United States. In a
speech at Paris, as he returned from Rapallo, Lloyd George
talked with brutal frankness upon the failure of the Allies to
coordinate their military policy and explained the Supreme
War Council which was to consist of the Prime Minister
and one of his associates from each of the Great Powers,
and to meet monthly at Versailles in conjunction with the
permanent mUitary staff that was to be maintained there.
The Bolshevist victory in Russia in November made the
need for Allied cooperation more Imperative by the time the
Allied Powers met for their Paris conference. Upon motion
of the American delegation, the conference divided into
separate committees upon finance, munitions, ocean ton
nage, and food, and spent Its time not upon oratory, but
upon a comparison of the several national programs. The
American experts gathered the Information needed to guide
the United States in its military contribution of 1918. On
December i the Premiers assembled at Versailles for the
formal opening of the Supreme War Council, and a few days
later the American delegation started home.
The Inter-Ally Council on War Purchases and Finance
began its work at London In the middle of December under
the presidency of Oscar T. Crosby. Its experl-
Munitions, ences In coordinating the demands of the several
cf^ ^°i\f Allies stimulated an Inter-AUIed cooperation in
other fields similar to the unification of resources
that the war was forcing upon every country. The Allied
Naval Council, agreed upon at Paris, went into continuous
session to direct the blockade of the Central Powers. In
March, 1918, the Allied Maritime Transport CouncU began
business in London with sub-sections representing the mer
chant marine of England, Italy, France, and the United
States, and worked for a better utilization of ocean tonnage.
In July the Munitions Council was convened In Paris with
Edward A. Stettinlus present as the American represent
ative, and the various food controllers came together in
London to complete the pooling of food resources for the
use of the Allies.

WAR AIMS 531
The unity of conduct which the Allies had not evolved
before the end of 1917 was the object of continuous pressure
from the United States, and became a reality as the great
councils built up their organization in 1918. The Supreme
War Council, meanwhile, was developing In the same direc
tion under the influence of the logic of events. At the end of
January the Premiers were again at Versailles for a renewal
of their discussions. France and Italy were now asking that
the Council be expanded Into a new Inter-Allied General
Staff with one general in command of all the armies. In
England there was violent attack upon Lloyd George be
cause of his Paris speech and the reluctance of the British
army officials to subordinate their independence of com
mand to any foreign commander. The fear of such inter
ference brought about the resignation of the British Chief
of Staff, Sir William Robertson, but did not prevent the
steady evolution of the Supreme War Council toward a real
command. The Council at this meeting discussed whether
the American troops should be used as a unit or merged
with French and British organizations. However they were
to be used, General Haig believed they could not be avail
able as a force in 1918.
The Supreme War Council met again in March when the
determination of Germany for a peace by conquest had
been fully revealed. While the discussion of the Drive of
"fourteen points" had sounded as though peace ^^is
might be near, preparations were being completed for a new
drive along the Somme In the hope of breaking through the
line near the junction point of the British and the French.
The new drive, put in motion on March 21, 191 8, com
pleted the process begun in November at Rapallo. On the
26th, at the village of DouUens, a little north of Amiens
on the endangered front, the military and political leaders
signed a momentous document "to coordinate the action
of the AUied armies on the western front," and ^-^^ ^^^
placed the French general Ferdinand Foch in a supreme
° , . r 1 1 J. command
position of supreme command . A few hours later
General Pershing, with four divisions ready for the field,

532 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
offered them all to the new commander to be used as needed.
", If we must have one commander," said the London Na
tion, "and we still doubt the necessity or suitability from
a political point of view, we could have no one better than
Foch." BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A. D.Howden Smith, The Real Colonel House (1918), is a journalistic work.
The utterances ol President Wilson upon the basis of peace are in news
papers, as well as in the Congressional Record into which they were in
variably introduced by some Congressman within a day or two. There
has not been any adequate historical treatment of the Supreme War Coun
cil or the inter-Allied conferences, although there is much scattered material
upon them. The dissemination of the American point of view was en
trusted in part to the Division of Military Intelligence of the Army, and
in part to the Committee on Public Information, and is discussed in Heber
Blankenhorn, Adventures in Propaganda (1919), and Vira B. Whitehouse,
A Year as a Government Agent (1920).

CHAPTER LIII
WORK OR FIGHT
The German Friedensturm was designed by Ludendorff to
be a final stroke to break the power of the Allies before the
promised American aid should come. The mag- Battle of
nitude of American preparations indicated that '^'^
it might soon be too late to break the Allies, and the sub
marines, on which reliance had been placed In 191 7, had
faUed to starve England or to crush her spirit. On March
21 the German divisions advanced in the first phase of the
greatest battle In history, whose active front extended from
Verdun to the North Sea, and which lasted in its succeeding
phases until November 1 1 . The Immediate front on which
the activities commenced was some fifty miles wide across
its line of advance from the vicinity of Cambral toward
Amiens and the estuary of the Somme. The apparent pur
pose was to split the English and French armies, crumple
the former on its narrow footing along the Channel, and
then sweep to the left for an attack on Paris. The blow
struck the British front at its right end, and on the days
following March 21 the German machine pushed back all
resistance at a rate of from five to seven miles a day until at
the end of the first week there was a gap at the point of
junction, and the British Fifth Army on the extreme right
was stretched to the breaking point If not beyond. ' ' Where
the wave struck it was bound to wash something away,"
wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That the wave was checked
on its seventh day, and that Amiens did not fall, were due
to that law of diminishing returns that affects all drives
after their earliest stages and to the gallantry of a scratch
division composed in part of American engineer troops and
other miscellaneous units not directly prepared for fight
ing, that was organized in the very face of the advance
and that not only resisted it, but drove it back. The

534 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
installation of Foch on March 26 introduced a unifying
element into the resistance; but the word came out of
France to America to hurry up the preparations before it
was too late.
In the United States the reorganization of the war ma
chine was approaching completion. The noisy debate over
a Munitions Ministry had two more months to run, but
within the Government noiseless changes were being made
as defects were realized. The last great elements to be
brought within the scheme of conservation, labor and
finance, occasioned the creation of new machinery in April
and May.
No earlier war had brought into such sharp prominence
the essential importance of labor. The huge armies both
Labor in reduced the man power of the nation and in-
the war creased the demand for industrial production.
The industries, depleted of their workmen, even after all the
practicable principles of selection had been followed in the
draft, were called upon for a larger output than before the
war. New war industries more than made up for the aban
donment of non-essential ones. In the United States the la
bor market was additionally depleted by the disappearance
of Immigrant labor, with a deficit of nearly a million work
men a year since 1914. In every country it had required a
large part of the time of the Government to see to it that
the morale of labor was upheld, and to make the continu
ous adjustments of wage and working conditions that were
made unavoidable by the rising cost of living. Early in
19 1 7 the American Government accepted the principle that
labor standards should not be allowed to suffer from the
war, and representatives of labor agreed to settle disputes
where possible without interruption of work. Women were
introduced into factories in large numbers, and the scarcity
of skilled labor was In part made up by diluting it with
unskilled assistants working at routine tasks.
The Importance placed upon the effectiveness of labor was
revealed when President Wilson in November, 1917, left
Washington to address the annual meeting of the American

WORK OR FIGHT 535
Federation at Buffalo, where he laid before the representa
tives of labor the same body of doctrine that he
later elaborated into the "fourteen points." The states Em-
black weeks that ensued from the Italian col- P'oyp^ntservice
lapse to the opening of the Somme drive (No
vember, 19 17 -March, 191 8) inspired new efforts toward
the conservation of labor as of everything else. Congress
appropriated $250,000 for the Employment Service In the
Department of Labor, and to this the President added
$825,000 from his special fund. The Employment Serv
ice was reorganized in January, 1918, and extended its
network of offices throughout the United States until, on
August I , by executive order all private employment agen
cies were closed, and the recruiting and placing of un
skilled labor were taken over by the National Government.
Nearly as many men were placed by the United States
Employment Service as were recruited for the armies.
The other services of the Department of Labor like the
Children's Bureau and the Woman in Industry Service were
enlarged in 191 8, and In May the housing of Government
labor became one of the functions of the depart- housing
ment. The shortage of housing accommodations was
brought to the attention of the Council of National Defense
and Investigated by one of Its committees In the autumn of
1917. The new munitions factories and shipyard plants
were calling for laborers by tens of thousands in regions
where there were no houses, and contractors were unable to
fulfill their guarantees because their workmen had no place
to live. The Emergency Fleet Corporation joined the
Council of National Defense In demanding provisions for
housing. In places like Hog Island and Sparrow Point its
program could not move until its men were housed. The
ordnance plants, like those near Charlestown in West
Virginia, or Hopewell, or Perryville, were in the same
position. In March Congress made an appropriation for
shipyard housing, and followed it with another in May to
be expended by the Department of Labor. Under the
latter the United States Housing Corporation was organ-

536 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ized in July on the principle of the Government-owned cor
poration, and proceeded to manipulate Its forces of archi
tects and draftsmen and to undertake great housing proj
ects where the need was worst. On the Plaza In front of
the Union Station in Washington there arose a group of
Government hotels to house the young women drawn to
Washington for war work in the enlarged departments and
war boards, for whom the overflowing homes of Washington
offered no accommodation.
A conference board was created at the end of February,
191 8, to consider a permanent war basis for capital and
National labor, the organized unions contributing part of
War Labor its members and the employers the rest. The
joint chairmen of this board were ex- President
Taft and Frank P. Walsh, who led their colleagues In a
unanimous report, as the result of which the President ap
pointed them to be a National War Labor Board on April 8.
This board was to be a supreme court for labor disputes,
handling none until all local resources had been exhausted,
but then to be called in to make a final judgment while the
work proceeded. On May 13 a War Labor Policies Board,
with Felix Frankfurter as chairman, was appointed to repre
sent all Government departments employing labor, to elim
inate confusion and standardize the conditions of labor.
When Bridgeport machinists in August refused to accept
the judgment of the National War Labor Board, the Presi
dent focused public attention upon their refusal to abide
by their agreement and brought them back to work. When
the Smith and Wesson ordnance plant refused to recognize
another award, he commandeered their plant.
The organization of labor was nearly completed by the
1st of August, with the doctrine of conservation close to
"Worker its logical extreme as expressed In the principle
fight" Qf "work or fight." On May 17 the Provost
Marshal-General Issued a new ruling under the Selective
Service Act to minimize the disturbance in industry caused
by the draft. He listed occupations in the order of their
social importance and ruled that loafers and idlers, or men

WORK OR FIGHT 537
engaged in useless employments or non-productive personal
service, should not be entitled to deferred classification
on grounds of dependency. These men must get a useful
job and work or fight. In September the War Industries
Board, now thoroughly reorganized, emphasized this prin
ciple by another classification of industries which cut off the
supplies of fuel, steel, transportation, and labor from in
dustries not essential to the winning of the war.
Bernard M. Baruch became chairman of the War Indus
tries Board, succeeding Daniel Willard, on March 4, 1918,
after It had become clear that Congress would not garuch and
pass any measure similar to that urged by Sen- War Indus-
ator Chamberlain. "Barney Baruch had more
power during the war than any other man in the world,"
wrote the chairman of the committee that later investi
gated his work. His powers as chairman were based upon
a sweeping letter from the President, asking him to "act
as the general eye of all supply departments In the field of
industry." His reorganized board became, In the words of
the Chief of Staff, "the great coordinating factor of the
government." When the Overman Bill became a law, the
War Industries Board was made independent of the Council
of National Defense and was already well along on its task
of industrial correlation.
The organization of the War Industries Board was never
rigorously defined. It was kept flexible until the end of the
war, with the chairman more interested in re
sults than in organization charts. It was so flex- ments,
ible that at times it was difficult for citizens to Priorities"'^
find out "with which departments to do business.
Its most fundamental processes were brought together in
the Requirements Division that was formally organized to
ward the end of March. The duty of the Requirements
Division was to determine the priorities In which materials
were to be delivered for Government use. Every branch
of the War Government was called upon to organize its own
requirements section in which its material needs should be
placed on a schedule week by week as far in advance as they

538 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
could be conceived. From each of these sections an agent
was sent to represent that Interest In the Requirements
Division, over which Alexander Legge presided as the agent
of Baruch. The army and navy were there, the Fleet Cor
poration and the Railroad Administration, with other repre
sentatives, whose information and judgment were needed in
order to determine, from the assembled list of all the require
ments, which should be aUowed and the order in which they
should be satisfied.
For the assistance of the Requirements Division Judge
Edwin B. Parker was appointed Priorities Commissioner,
working through a Priorities Board, for the special study of
the factors determining the order in which contracts should
be delivered. The relative supply of material, facilities,
fuel, transportation, labor and capital was taken Into con
sideration, and preference list number i, dated April 6, 1918,
began a series of classifications culminating in the more
elaborate lists of September.
In the determination of the various problems before the
Requirements Division, price was often an important fac
tor. With the exception of food prices, which were already
in the charge of the Food Administration, the duty of fixing
prices was assigned directly by the President to Robert
S. Brookings and his Price-Fixing Committee. This body
was independent of, but Interlocked with, the War Indus
tries Board, and represented all the other war boards as well
as the Trade and Tariff Commissions. The statistical staff
of the Federal Trade Commission was used for the determi
nation of production costs, while prices based upon these
costs were adjusted for short periods, with the idea of
stabilizing industry and securing a maximum production.
After the various needs of the United States and the
AUies had been presented in the Requirements Division,
and had run the gauntlet of the Price-Fixing and Priorities
Committees, the contracts were authorized and recorded
In the Clearance Committee of the War Industries Board.
In many cases the award of contracts was so huge as to
disarrange the normal market. A Conservation Division

WORK OR FIGHT 539
that grew out of the earlier commercial economy board of
the Council of National Defense worked with the commodi
ties sections and the trades concerned to get a fair distribu
tion of the materials left after meeting the war demands.
A Resources and Conversion Section was created in May,
to reorganize the industries not directly engaged in a war
production and make them useful. It divided the United
States into twenty districts where regional advisers and
local war resources committees applied the principles of the
War Industries Board to local affairs. A Facilities Division
created in August brought representatives of all depart
ments of Government together to coordinate their work In
the new construction needed for war purposes, while a Non-
War Construction Section formed at the same time brought
all building In the United States to a stop, unless definitely
approved by the War Industries Board.
The resources of the United States were strained in every
direction by the needs of war. The demand for capital
to be lent directly to the Government in the ^^j. pj_
form of Liberty bonds was matched by a demand nance Cor-
from war industry for its commercial credits.
The supply of available capital was limited, and In Janu
ary, 1918, voluntary capital issues committees were formed
in each of the federal reserve districts to do in the field
of finance what the conservation and priorities divisions
were doing for industry. The capital Issues committees dis
couraged the use of credit for purposes not connected with
the war. They were directly legalized by an act of Con
gress in April, which at the same time authorized the Treas
ury Department to create a War Finance Corporation with
a capital stock of $500,000,000, Government-owned, with
power to sell bonds In order to raise more capital, and with
authority to lend these funds to banks to cover loans made
by the latter for the benefit of war Industries.
The Government grip, tightening on Industry and finance,
was tightened on trade as weU. Final steps pittman
were taken in February to bring all foreign trade ^'''^^¦' ^'^^ ''
under license from the War Trade Board, The Shipping

540 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Board, in conjunction with the other boards, undertook with
new seriousness the study of allocation and conservation
of tonnage, and of essential needs for imports and exports.
Shipping in American harbors was brought under the auto
cratic control of their Shipping Control Committee; divi
sions of planning and statistics were formed to look into the
future in an attempt to have supplies ready when the de
mand for them should come. The ancient silver question
took on a new aspect when the Oriental demand for silver bul
lion raised the price until it neared $1.2929 at which price
it would resume the old ratio of sixteen to one to gold. The
Pittman Act of April 23, 1918, authorized the replacement
of the silver dollars and certificates by federal reserve bank
notes, and the sale of the silver bullion to be used in the Far
East to stiffen the exchange rate. When the price of silver
a little later arose above the ratio of sixteen to one, there
was little silver left In circulation to be hoarded because of
its superior value.
The development of the war machine brought great new
powers into the hands of men of affairs. Baruch was su
preme in the field of war Industries. On April 16 the Presi
dent commandeered the services of Charles M. Schwab
as Director-General of the Emergency Fleet Corporation.
A few days later John D. Ryan was brought into the War
Department to reorganize and inspire aircraft production.
George W. Goethals at the same time became the chief
reliance of the War Department in the fields of purchase,
storage, and traffic.
A reorganization of the War Department and of the Gen
eral Staff had been continuous throughout the war. The
selection of a staff for Pershing in 1917 left the
^^a.r De- .
partment Washington offices, already undermanned, with
reorgani- £g.^ officers available for staff service. The
zation absence of Major-General Hugh L. Scott on
the Russian mission deprived the Department of the ad
vice of a Chief of Staff. When General Scott was retired
in September, his understudy, Major-General Tasker H.
Bliss, succeeded him, but was soon sent to the Paris Con-

WORK OR FIGHT 541
ference with Colonel House. The preparations for training
and outfitting the armies and the performance at wholesale
of tasks that no officer In the regular army had ever been
allowed to anticipate led to continuous error and Improve
ment. While the advocates of a Munitions Ministry were
demanding a change in the conduct of the war, the War
Department itself was reorganizing its services and concen
trating in single offices all of the similar services hereto
fore exercised independently in each division of the army.
General Goethals became Chief of a Storage and ^ .
Traffic Service In December; Edward R. StettI- Goethals,
10 r^ 1 r T-) u Division of
nius was made Surveyor-General of Purchases purchase,
in January. In April the Division of Purchase, ^torage, and
Storage, and Traffic combined these two estab
lishments under Goethals, and brought War Department
methods into harmony with those of the War Industries
Board, while Stettinlus became an assistant Secretary of
War; specializing In matters of purchase and supply, and
was sent to Paris In the summer to represent the United
States on the Inter-Allied Munitions CouncU.
The internal structure of the General Staff was reor
ganized in February and again In August with Increasingly
sharper definition of function. On March 4 Peyton C.
March, after European experience as Chief of Artillery with
General Pershing, assumed the duties of Chief of Staff; a
few weeks later he was elevated to the rank of general.. In
the next six months the war machine, that had creaked
and rumbled through Its year of construction, gained ever-
increasing momentum, while the elevation of Foch pro
duced the unity of command desired by the United States
and the various Inter-AUIed councils improved the coor
dination of war aims and practices.
The message brought back by Colonel House from the
Paris Conference called for an increase In the scale of Amer
ican preparations, and the outbreak of the Ger- Eighteen to
man drive In March made it imperative that forty-five
troops be sent at once. " It will be humanly im
possible to get 250,000 men on the French territory within

542 RECENT HISTORY OP THE UNITED STATES
a year ' ' was the regretful opinion of the Washington Post
in July, 1917. But by the first of the following July more
than four times that number had sailed for France, and in
the two months, May and June, more than half a million
men were transported across the Atlantic. As the American
divisions one by one left their cantonments, "for an Atlan
tic port," their places were taken by new men called in
under the draft, while new plans were prepared for the or
ganization of the whole man power of the country. Con
gress authorized the calling-out of troops as needed without
limit, and the General Staff prepared plans to have eighty
divisions in the field for the campaign of 19 19. On Au
gust 31a Man Power Act was passed extending the draft
ages to include the years eighteen to forty-five, and Increas
ing the total number of military registrants to 24,234,021.
The nation was completing its organization upon the ba
sis of "work or fight" as the battle of 191 8 entered into Its
second phase and tested the mettle of the Americans in
France. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The technical journals of political economy contain numerous articles
on war regulation. Among them may be mentioned L. H. Haney, "Price
Fixing in the United States During the War," in Political Science Quarterly
(1919), and F. W. Taussig, "Price-Fixing as Seen by a Price-Fixer," in
Quarterly Journal of Economics (1919). The Federal Reserve Bulletin con
tains most of the financial documents, as well as news and comment. The
report of Judge Hughes upon the aircraft situation is in the Official Bulle
tin, November 6, 1918. Data for many judgments upon other aspects of
the military program may be found in the numerous volumes of Hearings
before the Select Committee on Expenditures in the War Department,
(Washington, 1920).

CHAPTER LIV
THE AMERICANS IN FRANCE
The training program of the A.E.F. distributed the Ameri
can divisions as they arrived in France in cantonments
behind the line, where officers and men were put Training
through courses of specialized study before the program of
components of each division were brought to
gether again for maneuver as a unit. After this course of
schooling the divisions were transferred to quiet sectors on
the western front, generally between Verdun and the Swiss
border, and there relieved French divisions and received
their final training for active operations.
Four American divisions were ready for the active front
when the German drive began, March 21, 1918, and were
turned over to Foch to be used where needed. The ist
and 2d Divisions were built up, each around a nucleus of
regular army troops; the 26th (Yankee) Division Included
the National Guard of New England ; the 42d (Rainbow)
Division represented the National Guard of most of the
States. All of these were attached to the British or French
armies, and brought Into action in the early spring, while
the strident call went out to America to hurry up more
troops. The transport service, increased by British vessels
taken away from their task of carrying food to England, for
defeat was wavering in the balance and was a greater men
ace than starvation, rushed new divisions to France. In
addition to the four divisions ready for the front when the
drive began, there were four more In the training areas;
and additional divisions arrived, one in April, nine in May,
seven in June, four in July, six In August, four in September,
and three in October, until in the end there were forty-two
divisions on the soil of France. In addition to these were
special troops, not attached to any division, that swelled
the American total which reached 1,000,000 in July and

544 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
2,000,000 In November. Two thirds of them were to see
active service in the front line before the armistice, while
twenty-nine of the divisions engaged In combat.
The quality of the American troops, despised by Germany
in their turn as "Kitchener's contemptibles " had been.
Quality of ^^^ ^ matter of uneasiness In the Supreme War
American CouncIl. The American army was composed of
physically fit young men, with little military
training before the war. The men themselves were drawn
directly from their civil occupations, whether they entered
the service through the regular army, the National Guard,
or the draft. Of 200,000 commissioned officers, who trained
them, less than 10,000 were In the service when war was
declared ; of this five per cent, upon whose training and
initiative the fate of the army depended, only 5791 were
professional officers in the regular army, and more than
half of these were young men fresh from their studies at
West Point, with little more than the age and maturity of
a college senior. There were not over 3000 officers of rea
sonable maturity to assemble, train, and operate the army,
and until the earliest division had met the enemy there was
a question as to the success of the American experiment In
war. The Yankee Division, stationed In line on the south
side of the Saint-Mihiel salient near the village of Seiche-
prey, took part in the first engagement that could be called
a battle. Its trenches were raided by the Germans on
April 20, 191 8, and were retaken by American troops on
the following day.
The German armies retained the choice of time and
place for the first four months of the battle of 191 8. Re-
German enforced by divisions from the Russian front,
drives Ludendorff and Hindenburg used all their re
sources to force a victory. The first phase of the offensive.
In the valley of the Somme, continued for two weeks after
March 21 until the German line was stabilized near Amiens
and Montdidier. On April 9 the thrust was shifted in a new
direction, this time in the valley of the Lys, from the direc
tion of Lille and Armentieres toward the shoulder in th^

546 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
British line at Ypres and the great supply stations around
Hazebrouck. Here again the line swayed, but held. On
May 27 the Germans felt for a third time for a soft spot on
the Allied front, and this time struck at the Chemin des
Dames, north of the Alsne River, between the towns of
Soissons and Rheims, and again bent the Allied line and
stretched it to the breaking point.
The American divisions, brigaded with the English and
French armies, and growing more numerous every month.
Staff saw a routine service all along the battered front
supervision fj-Qj^ March tin May. To the 1st Division, sta
tioned south of Amiens near Montdidier, came the earliest
opportunity for an engagement arranged and executed by
its own officers. The success of the training of divisional
staffs was as much a question as that of the field effective
ness of the troops. From G.H.Q. at Chaumont relentless
supervision was maintained over officers entrusted with
command. Inspectors with the black braid of the General
Staff descended anywhere at any moment. The giant limou
sine with four stars on its windshield was liable to appear
with General Pershing himself without warning, and the
lack of officers of proved experience was somewhat made up
by the summary removal of officers of whatever rank who
appeared to waver in a crisis. The returning troop trans
ports soon began to bring to the United States officers from
division commanders down, for whom Pershing had no use,
while the officers who remained on duty never escaped the
spur of staff pressure.
On May 28 the ist Division, commanded by Hunter
Liggett, took the village of Cantigny, near Montdidier.
^ . With neatness and dispatch the plan of opera-
Cantigny . ' ' \
tions worked out to a complete success, and the
growing suspicion that the raw material of the American
troops was good enough to atone for under-preparation was
confirmed. From every corner of the front there came de
mands to Foch for more of the American divisions, whose
vigor and enthusiasm wherever they appeared brought
stimulation to the tired divisions on the French and Brit-

THE AMERICANS IN FRANCE 547
ish sectors. War was an old story to troops that had been
in it through four campaigns, and needed the crusading
spirit of the American divisions; while the repute the ist
Division gained at Cantigny came just in time. The third
phase of the German offensive, beginning the day before,
swept away resistance along the Chemin des Dames, pushed
across the Aisne, and then the Vesle, and drove everything
before it along a front of thirty miles or more, as It ad
vanced southward between Soissons and Rheims toward
the Marne at Chiteau-Thlerry and the road to Paris.
From the first hours of the new advance the critical na
ture of the emergency was clear. The scene itself was a
surprise, and the first divisions dislodged by the chiteau-
Germans on the Chemin des Dames were British Thierry
troops who had been sent there for rest. The fortifications
around Rheims could not be reduced by the invader, but those
at Soissons yielded a little,' and between the two shoulders
thus created, the apex of the salient forced Itself to the
south. Every available American division was brought up
by motor train to support the French. On the afternoon of
the fifth day of the advance. May 31, a battalion of motor
ized machine-gunners belonging to the 3d American Divi
sion came up from the south, crossed the Marne on the
bridge at Chateau-Thierry, and pushed through that city
to its northern rim against the stream of refugees and re
treating troops. Here It took its station and helped to hold
back the advance of German troops until the French forces
had been brought across the Marne. The next day It with
drew Itself to the southern bank and stuck there until the
rest of the 3d Division came up behind it, and the 2d Divi
sion took station on Its left. "The American gunners,"
wrote a French correspondent who saw them there, "are
handsome chaps, with long, muscular legs and supple move
ments, in whom a certain seeming nonchalance follows con
cise action which goes directly to the point."
The German tide slacked at Chateau-Thierry with a raw
American division standing between It and Paris. The
2d Division, under Bundy, instead of going into training

548 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
camp was sent to position along the Parls-Vaux road,
where Its first units came to rest on June i. There was no
line left to be taken over. Between their outposts and the
advancing Germans there was nothing but a procession of
French troops In full retrfeat. By Sunday moming, June 2,
parts of the 2d Division, including a brigade of marines, had
chosen their own line and were dug in. Late that afternoon
the German columns In full pursuit were broken by Ameri
can fire at Hill 165. Four days later the 2d Division took
the offensive to clean the German machine-gunners out of
the hill pockets and brush concealments of Belleau Wood.
In the next four weeks the margins of the Marne salient
were consolidated as Foch awaited a renewal of the German
drive. At daybreak on July 15 the German offensive opened
up once more upon a long front from Chateau-Thierry to
The second Rheims and beyond Rheims to the edge of the
Marne forest of the Argonne. The strategic situation
of Rheims and the Importance of the railway
lines behind it made it important to remove this obstruction
at once. There were now new American divisions awaiting
behind the line, but the 3d Division at the extreme left of
the assailed area held its own at Chateau-Thierry, under
General Dickman, when the Germans advanced again.
Eight divisions in all played their part in this engage
ment: — the 1st, 2d, 3d, and 4th, 26th, 28th (Iron Division,
of Pennsylvania troops), 93d (colored), and the 42d.
The German General Staff knew In its heart that this
was Its last offensive. Following the defensive scheme of
Foch's coun- P^tain, Foch yielded a little to take up the shock
ter-attack q£ ^^le Impact, and on July 18 countered with
his left between Soissons and the Mame. The German suc
cess had thrust a sharp salient with three sides exposed
south of the Aisne. Foch, who had devoted the first weeks
of his supreme command to taking an Inventory of his
strength and to meeting immediate emergencies as they
appeared, was watching for his opportunity to endanger
the salient by striking near its base, and to take the aggres-

THE AMERICANS IN FRANCE 549
sive into his own hands. His twenty-five-mile front ex
tended from Belleau Wood to the Aisne below Soissons.
The 1st and 2d Divisions operated near his left, the 4th and
26th were stationed near his right. As the counter-attack
was developed into an Allied offensive, the 3d Division
was brought In, then the 42d and the 32d (Wisconsin and
Michigan National Guard). The counter-attack was suc
cessful beyond expectation. For a few days it looked as
though the whole German army might be caught In the
pocket it had Itself created This hope was not realized, but
on August 4 Fismes, on the Vesle, was occupied and the
Marne pocket was entirely gone. From the Vesle to the
Aisne the line pushed on through August. On October 4 a
German shell hit the dismantled cathedral at Rheims for
the last time, and Foch had brought additional pressure to
bear at five other points.
On August 8, following the elimination of the Marne
salient, Haig was allowed to advance In the third battle of
the Somme. With Amiens in his rear and with Allied
the front between Albert and Montdidier im- offensives
mediately before him, he gained seven miles at once on a
twenty -five-mile fiont and pushed on in a war of movement
after long and tedious months of defensive actions. The
27th and 33d Divisions of Americans operated with him.
By the i8th of August this salient had gone like that at
Chateau-Thierry. On August 18 and 19 two more thrusts
were made against the German line, one at the junction of
the Aisne and Oise against what was now a German salient
after the elimination of the Marne and Picardy pockets.
With Mangin In charge, Noyon and La Fere became the ob
jectives, and on its seventh day the German forces began a
strategic retreat upon the Oise, whUe on August 30 the 32d
Division at Juvigny, after fighting, as Retain cited it, "for
three days without stopping, without rest, and almost with
out food," gained control of the western approaches to
the Chemin des Dames. Simultaneously on August 19 the
British in Flanders renewed their operations on the extreme
German right.

550 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
The Allied crisis from March until July delayed the final
steps in the organization of the A.E.F. as a separate force.
First Amer- but gave to the early divisions brigaded with
ican Army ^j^g English and the French intimate experience,
first with defensive fighting, then with offensive. The Allied
divisions had of necessity become past-masters of defense.
The American troops were indoctrinated with the idea of
an offensive campaign, and in their training camps continu
ous bayonet drill kept them alive to their special mission.
Early in August, as the divisions could be released from
their services elsewhere, they were transferred to -the Im
mediate command of General Pershing, and were organized
in the First American Field Army, which remained for the
time being under the Immediate direction of the command
er-in-chief. There were eighteen divisions in the three
army corps of the First Army. The selective process and
field experience of the colonels and brigadier-generals of the
old regular army were the basis for the selection of the di
vision commanders, and from these In turn were selected
the commanders for each army corps. The 1st Corps under
Hunter Liggett was partially organized before the 1st of
June, and fought under his command at Chateau-Thierry,
and In due time Liggett was elevated to the command of
the First Field Army. The announcement of the creation of
this army was followed by so suspicious a silence upon the
doings of the American divisions as to arouse surmises that
larger operations were In view. Each day brought to Foch
greater freedom for the selection of his field of operations.
With armies operating continuously along the Aisne, the
Oise, the Somme, and the Lys, the German salients created
in the first phase of the battle of 191 8 yielded to Foch in
the second phase that began July 18, and had disappeared
early in September.
The long curve of the western front from Ostend on the
Channel to the Swiss border was in September broken only
Saint- by the sharp hook lying southeast of Verdun
Mihiel ajj^ known as the Saint-Mihiel salient. As the
German armies advanced upon Belgium and France in

THE AMERICANS IN FRANCE 551
1 91 4, Verdun had held, although the line beyond it swung
far west to the Marne. Verdun continued to hold when
the Crown Prince drove against it In 1916. Flanked by the
Saint-Mihiel salient it continued to be the defense of France,
and the salient itself had been fortified by Germany for
permanent occupation. Here were great memorial ceme
teries to the German dead, with granite tombs and concrete
decorations, which gave every evidence of having been con
structed to remain German forever as a Denkmal for future
generations. The Saint-Mihiel salient lay directly In front of the sector
chosen for American operations, and was selected to test
the capacity of the First Field Army. On September 12,
in cooperation with the French, but with plans of his own
making, Pershing reduced the salient. In two days' fight
ing, directed simultaneously on both flanks of the salient,
the obstruction of four years' standing was removed, the
whole Allied front was smooth, and directly before the
American forces lay the city of Metz and the coal-fields of
the Briey district. Twelve thousand German prisoners were
reported on the first day, while a German retreat, slow but
stubborn, was soon in motion along the whole front.
The American success at Saint-Mihiel revealed both the
capacity of the American troops and the strategic strength
of Foch. Before the week was over an Allied drive was
begun in the valley of the Vardar above SalonikI on the
Bulgarian front. In three days more Allenby In Palestine
broke up the Turkish armies between the Jordan and the
sea, and took the town of Nazareth, eliminating Turkey
from the war. A little later, on October 24, on the anni
versary of the Austro-German drive, Italy was let loose
upon her Austrian front, and Austria made haste to ask for
terms of peace.
While Foch was clearing the Germans from the pocket on
the Marne, the United States prepared its eighty-division
program for 1919 and increased the limits of the draft.
New divisions were organized, and the War Industries Board
made ready to take even more complete control of the ma-

552 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
chinery of economic life. The successes of Foch brought a
new possibility to the attention of the Supreme War Coun
cil. The second miUion of American troops was on its road
to France, the advance divisions had shown their mettle,
and there now appeared a chance, with the German armies
all In retreat, to end the war in 191 8. The British kept up
their pressure in front of Ypres, and with the French pushed
toward Cambral and Saint-Quentin. The American forces
after Saint-Mihiel were shifted west of the Meuse between
Verdun and the Argonne Forest, and there in conjunction
with French forces between the Argonne and Rheims were
headed down the Meuse toward the city of Sedan.
On September 26 the battle of the Meuse-Argonne
began, the third phase of the battle of 1918, with nine
Meuse- American divisions participating in the first ad-
Argonne vance. The territory In front of them was not
surpassed by any on the active front in Its adap
tability for defense. Crowded with ravines and hills and
river valleys, obscured by forests and dense undergrowth,
and almost without roads, there was no terrain more diffi
cult to take by force. Only two of the nine divisions had
seen heavy fighting before they were plunged into this new
battle. The veteran divisions had all been used at Saint-
Mihiel and were not reorganized for operations until the
Argonne was in Its second phase, but before the forty-
seven days of continuous fighting were over twenty-one
divisions had been used.
Bulgaria quit the war on September 30, the fifth day of
the Argonne drive, and surrendered unconditionally. On
Central October 5 the German Government officially
Powers asked for terms of peace, and with Austria
avowed a devotion to the "fourteen points"
that had been spurned In January. The overtures were
made through the United States, and were met by the sharp
inquiry: For whom do you pretend to speak, the German
peoples or their rulers? The correspondence thus begun
continued through October, with German armies yielding
as slowly as they could, and with German diplomats strug-

THE AMERICANS IN FRANCE 553
gling to hurry an armistice before complete collapse. The
drive of Foch, from being a series of related attacks, be
came a great strategic movement threatening on its left the
German forces in Belgium and northern France, and on Its
right the great railway system upon which the whole Ger
man front depended. With their backs against the forest
of the Ardennes, and the Belgian highlands, the German
forces foresaw complete destruction when Sedan should fall.
The various Allied columns pressed upon the German rear
In the hope of forcing a collapse, and toward the end of
October the United States transmitted the appeal for peace
to the Supreme War Council.
On October 31, when the Supreme War Council formally
assembled to consider the terms of the armistice to be
granted to Germany, Turkey was in the act of German
signing an unconditional surrender In the field armistice
and Austria was in negotiation for one that was signed
November 3. In the correspondence preceding the meet
ing It was brought out that there could be no cessation of
hostUities until the Supreme War Council was satisfied in a
military way that Germany had been deprived of power to
resume the war. The Supreme War Council debated the
terms of German disarmament, and on November 5 the
United States transmitted their reply to Germany. They
were ready to make peace upon the basis of the "fourteen
points," except as to the freedom of the seas, upon which
they reserved to themselves complete freedom, and the
evacuation and restoration of Invaded territory, as to which
"they understand that compensation will be made by Ger
many for all damage done to the civilian population of the
Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by
land, by sea, and from the air." The German Govern
ment was informed that Marshal Foch would receive their
representatives and communicate the military terms of the
armistice. The war was over; Germany was in open revolution;
WiUiam II abdicated on November 9; and on November 11
the German envoys signed an armistice that was in sub-

554 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
stance an almost unconditional surrender. They began at
once the withdrawal of their troops from the invaded area,
while a few days later the army of occupation followed them
to the Rhine and took station at Cologne, Coblenz, and
Mainz. The American forces, which the armistice had
found along the Meuse above Sedan, marched down the
Moselle to headquarters at Coblenz.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
General Pershing's summary of operations in his Final Report (1919),
may be supplemented by the semi-official Frederick Palmer, America in
France (1918), and Our Greatest Battle (1919). Jennings C. Wise, The
Turn of the Tide (1920), and R. M. Johnston, First Reflections on the Cam
paign of igi8 (1919), are special in their treatment. The final operations
are covered in the second volume of John Bach McMaster, The United
States in the World War (1920). Other works of interest, in the absence
of definitive studies, are A. W Page, The Truth About Our no Days'
Fighting (1919) ; de Chambrun and de Marenches, The American Army in
the European Conflict (1919), and Erich von Ludendorff, Ludendorff' s
Own Story, August igi4-November igi8 (1919).

CHAPTER LV
PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
The closing weeks of the battle of 191 8 brought peace to
Europe and relieved the tension of the world. Between
September 15, when Austria made her open ap- congres-
peal for a cessation of hostilities, and Novem- sional elec-
ber 1 1 , when the armistice terms were signed, the '""^ ° '^'
alliance of the Central Powers fell apart. Bulgaria and
Turkey capitulated, the Dual Monarchy disintegrated and
collapsed, and the military rulers of Germany were deposed.
The fear of possible defeat disappeared from the mind of the
Allies, and in its place arose inconsistent hopes of recouping
the losses of the war, of strengthening national defenses
against the next war, of punishing Germany, and of realiz
ing those Ideals whose clear enunciation by President Wilson
held the associates together during the final year of war.
Whether conservative or radical, the citizens of the victor
nations ceased to fear and turned to the future. The fact
that they were free to do so was the most Important feature
of the Congressional campaign then In progress In the United
States. Only in the United States had the Government in power
at the outbreak of the war survived the upheavals of opin
ion and the shifting fates and remained In office until the
armistice. In England, France, and Italy there had ap
peared war coalition Governments. Lloyd George, Clemen
ceau, and Orlando, their premiers, were in office with a
backing of sagacious and practical politicians, whose accept
ance of the "fourteen points" and the political llberaUsm
that these embodied was less a matter of conviction than
of expediency. In America the author of this formula re
mained in power because of the constitutional provision for
a four-year term, and no war issue could have driven him
out because America has no responsible government in the

556 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
European sense. Critics of his Administration and partisan
opponents of his party were forced during the war to re
strain their active political opposition, for this could have
no effect but to hinder the prosecution of war measures and
perhaps wound the obstructionists on the rebound. "Poli
tics Is adjourned," the President himself declared. Public
opinion treated alike Republicans and Democrats believed
to be obstructive of the war. With national defense holding
the whole of the mind of the nation, the parties had pre
pared to elect a Congress in 1918 The Republican minor
ity found Itself bound hand and foot by the necessities of
patriotic unity.
The reorganization of the Republican Party after the
defeats of 1910, 1912, 1914, and 1916 was accomplished in
Republican February, 1918, when WiU H. Hays, of Indiana,
Party re- was made chairman of the National Committee.
Hays was already favorably known as a healer of
factional differences, and replaced a chairman whose war
record was poor, in order to bring into solid front all the
factions whose controversy since 1912 disrupted the party.
The only basis of attack open to Republicans was to charge
the Administration with inefficiency and lukewarm pros
ecution of the war. The Munitions Ministry debate
received most of its support from Republican leaders.
Defects In war preparation were charged against the Gov
ernment, and Democratic opponents of the war were pic
tured as the real Democrats. But the assignment of Judge
Hughes to investigate the aircraft scandal and the appoint
ment of ex- President Taft as chairman of the National War
Labor Board broke the force of these attacks. To offset
Roosevelt and Wood, who were set aside, the friends of
the Administration could point to the important duties
of Pershing, Sims, March, and Hoover, all of whom were
Republicans. The canvass of 191 8 was unimportant until
in October the beginning of the discussion of the armistice
made It clear that the danger had passed. Immediately the
demand for "unconditional surrender" was raised by Re
publicans, the Administration was charged with an inten-

PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 557
tion to accept a peace of negotiation, and the interna
tional tendency of the "fourteen points" was "Uncon-
denounced. Lodge and Poindexter led in the ditional
attack, and Roosevelt, who had consistently op
posed the program of the League to Enforce Peace, raised
his voice against a League of Nations. Unconditional sur
render for Germany and Independence for America became
the war-cry of the canvass. When on October 25 the
President issued an open letter asking for the election of a
Democratic Congress so that he might be assured of assist
ance in negotiating the sort of peace he had promised the
nation, his action was criticized as unnecessarily partisan.
Henry Ford, who was running for the Senate In Michigan,
and Secretary of War Baker were described as pacifists.
The day of election was the day that President Wilson
transmitted to Germany the decision of the Supreme War
Council to receive the German envoys begging peace. The
war was over, and the votes that were cast that day Insured
the return of the Republican Party to power in Congress,
with easy control of the House and a probable majority in
the Senate. "In no other free country in the world to
day would Mr. Wilson be in office" was the comment of
Roosevelt upon the election.
The disbanding of the army of the LTnited States began
within a few hours of the signing of the armistice. The Third
Field Army, which had been organized by Pershing during
the battle of the Argonne, was designated to march Into
Germany as a part of the army of occupation ; but prepa
rations were made to send all the other troops home as
rapidly as transportation could be provided, and the Ameri
can camps were emptied within the next few weeks. The
restrictions upon Industry that had been administered by
the War Industries Board were relaxed at once, and when
Congress met on December 2 the President spoke with con
fidence of the speedy resumption of the ordinary course of
life. Two days later he set sail on the army transport,
George Washington, for Brest and the Peace Conference.
The American Commission to Negotiate Peace had at its

558 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
head the President of the United States, as the commission
of each other Allied country was presided over
Commission by Its most important political official. Assist-
to Negoti- jjjg j^ jj,jj .^^gj.g fQm- other members : Robert Lan-
ate Peace °
sing, the Secretary of State; Edward M. House,
who had acted since 19 14 as confidential agent; General
Tasker H. Bliss, who had represented the United States on
the Supreme War Council from Its formation; and Henry
White, whose diplomatic service had Included many years at
Vienna, London, Rome, and Paris. There was no Senator
on the commission, and, in spite of the result of the Novem
ber election, no active member of the party that was to dom
inate the Congress to which the peace treaty would have
to be submitted. There were, however, some hundreds
of other assistants representing the State Department, the
"House Inquiry," and the various war boards whose mem
bers, had acquired useful Information upon the status of
world affairs.
Only a few of the better informed among European
leaders knew enough of American Institutions to appreciate
the fact that a President serves out his term whatever the
result of a Congressional election. The additional fact
that the adverse Congress would not meet earlier than
December, 1919, unless specially summoned, served to ob
scure the vote of dissatisfaction that Wilson had received.
To most of Europe he was in office, and hence in full power.
His had been the decisive leadership whose democratic
Idealism held the Allies together and disintegrated the
morale of the enemy. Europe, when he "touched its
shores," wrote an old and keen observer of world politics,
E. J. Dillon, "was as clay ready for the creative potter.
Never before were the nations so eager to follow a Moses
who would take them to the long-promised land where wars
are prohibited and blockades unknown. ... In France men
bowed down before him in awe and affection. . . . To the
working classes of Italy his name was a heavenly clarion
at the sound of which the earth would be renewed. . . . The
Germans regarded hira and his humane doctrine as their

PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 559
sheet-anchor of safety. ... In German Austria his fame was
that of a savior." But In the United States he had lost his
power ; and the politicians of the Old World knew that if they
could withstand the pressure of their own liberal classes
until national suspicion should supersede the wave of ideal
ism, they could prevent the writing of the Wilson doctrine
into the Peace of Versailles.
It was perhaps because of this official willingness to let
the wave subside that the Peace Conference was unready
to begin its sessions when the American delega- Europe and
tion arrived. The Supreme War Council was ^^^ P^'^^
yet at work upon the detaUs of the execution of the armi
stice, and the courts of Europe clamored for visits from
the President of the United States. Arriving at Brest on
December 13, he proceeded to Paris, where he was wel
comed with a succession of ceremonious greetings. Christ
mas was spent at Chaumont with the army. London was
visited the next week, and Rome just after the new year.
Before Wilson returned to Paris Herbert C. Hoover was
made Director ot the Supreme Council of Supply and Re
lief, for the relief of the devastated region ; and the Govern
ment of Lloyd George had been confirmed in Its powers by
huge majorities after a parliamentary campaign in which
England had been promised that Germany should pay for
the war. Clemenceau, at the same time, asked and re
ceived from his parliament an approval of his avowed
determination to work for a new and useful system of
alliances in the approaching meeting. On January 12,
1919, the formal preparations for the Peace Conference
were begun, and six days later the first plenary session was
held at the French Foreign Office, with Clemenceau as
president. The hopes and aspirations of the little nations for a new
world order In which their weight would equal that of the
larger powers began to wane with the opening of the con
ference. Seats were provided for nearly seventy delegates
from the twenty-eight nations associated against Ger
many, but their assignment was made, not by the confer-

56o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ence, but by an inner and dominant circle, the Supreme
War Council, as modified by the arrival of Wilson. The
President, with the three premiers of England, France, and
Italy, and their foreign secretaries, and two delegates from
Japan, constituted a Council of Ten from whose decisions It
was useless to appeal. As the weeks ran on and debate
protracted the discussions, the Council of Ten was reduced
first by the elimination of the foreign secretaries, and
then by the elimination of the Japanese, until at the end
a Council of Four, or the "Big Four," sat together in In
formal conference day after day, hearing appeals and reach
ing decisions which the Peace Conference was allowed to
approve and enact at Its various plenary sessions.
It will long remain a matter of dispute how far Wil
son, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando individually
Wilson, affected the decisions of the "Big Four." But
Lloyd the earliest action taken was the course pro-
Oeorge, . ¦ , ^
Clemenceau, posed by the American President. The peace
and Orlando ^j^^^ j^^ ^^^ pledged to work for was one that
might tend to end war by removing its causes. The "peace
without victory" that he advocated in 19 17 had become a
"peace of justice" in his later utterances, and had In sub
stance received acceptance as expressed In his "fourteen
points." In his mind the recurrence of war could be pre
vented in two ways: by maintaining the Allied military
power on such a scale that resistance would be impossible,
or by making a generous peace which all nations, enemy
or Allied, would be interested In upholding. The latter
alternative involved the creation of a League of Nations
through which common decisions could be reached and the
common power be exerted for the benefit of all. His critics
at home demanded peace first, and then, if at all, negotia
tion for a league. To him it appeared necessary to have
first a league whose promise would make it possible to have
a stable peace. At the second plenary session of the Peace
Conference, January 25, Wilson spoke on behalf of a League
of Nations; the conference agreed to proceed to Its formula
tion and created a Commission on the League of Nations to

PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 561
that end ; and three weeks later the covenant of the League
was reported back to the conference for adoption.
The machinery of the Peace Conference was complicated
because of the multitude of problems pressing for solution.
Every nation and e\'ery faction with a grievance appeared
with a delegation to demand hearing under the principle of
"self-determination," and when the interests of rival groups
inevitably clashed there was only unpopularity to be gained,
whatever the decision. At the same time the administra
tion of relief was taxing the resources of the Allies, while the
mUitary authorities were watching with minute suspicion
the conduct of Germany under the armistice. Russia was
still at war, with a Bolshevist Government at the head of a
new system of Soviets, and was threatening the world with
proletarian revolution. If Germany was left prostrate
there was danger of her infection with Bolshevism that she
might pass on to westem Europe. If she were allowed to
survive in comfort there was danger of the revival of mili
tarism. In addition to the Commission on the League of
Nations, created on January 25, the Peace Conference ap
pointed a Commission on Responsibility for the W^ar, and
other Commissions on Reparations, Labor, and Transpor
tation. A Supreme Economic Council was organized Feb
ruary 8, to administer such matters as finance, food, ship
ping, blockade, and raw materials.
The draft of the covenant for the League of Nations was
presented by President Wilson to the whole conference at
the third plenary session, February 14, 1919. It
went beyond the type of international court that of the
had been discussed at the two Hague Confer- ^Ttfons"'
ences, and created Instead a large assembly for
the discussion of international problems, and a small coun
cU for the formulation of decisions. The guarantees were
so sweeping as to make unnecessary the mUitary staff which
France urged for her own defense. Like the old Congress
under the Articles of Confederation, the Council could take
important action only when unanimous. The powers of
the League went far enough to raise fair questions as to

562 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
their jurisdiction over problems that nations might regard
as domestic and within their own control. The Peace Con
ference accepted the draft at once, and the next day Wilson
saUed from Brest for a brief visit to Washington where his
last Democratic Congress was winding up its work.
Reaction in the United States followed close upon the
exaltation of spirit that accompanied the exertions to
place the nation upon a "work-or- fight" basis. For most
Americans it was a new accomplishment to think seriously
or consecutively on European or world affairs. While the
war was on, and American divisions appeared to be adding
the definitive weight for victory, it was easy to think of
permanent participation in world politics. But the political
habits of a century and a quarter were so tough that they
could not be destroyed by a single experience, and, with the
fighting over, it was easy to revert to the habit of regarding
America as apart from the rest of the world. The counsels
of Washington and Monroe recurred to the American mind,
and were the more welcome since the new course promised
trouble and expense, and perhaps some loss of national
freedom of action. The deep resentment at being disturbed
by foreign matters that was displayed between 1914 and
1 91 7 reappeared, and Americans made haste to resume the
business that had been Interrupted by the excursion into
war. Demobilization of the armed forces progressed rapidly.
On the day of the armistice there were 3,703,273 men and
Demobili- women In the army of the United States. More
zation in than half of these were with the expeditionary
forces,, and were parts of a machine that needed
now to be reversed in order to bring them home. In nearly
every other country the stages of demobilization had been
under serious study since early in the war, in order that in
dustry should not be upset and huge numbers of released
soldiers turned loose upon the street. No such prepara
tion was made in America, though the Council of National
Defense and the General Staff both talked about it. The
military units were broken up and disbanded one by one,

PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 563
and by the summer of 1919 discharges had been issued to
2,736,654. As the divisions came back they were greeted
with civic and national welcome; the officers and men re
ceived the sixty-dollar bonus that Congress voted them,
sewed the red chevron of discharge upon their sleeves, and
passed back into civil life.
During May, 1919, the men themselves prepared to per
petuate the memory of their service, and held in St. Louis a
representative convention out of which the American Legion
emerged as the most important military society of the
war. A few officers and men started the movement in Paris
earlier In the year, mindful of the dignity of the Grand Army
of the Republic and anxious to become a force at an earlier
date than the G.A.R. had been. In November, on the first
anniversary of the armistice, the first formal convention of
the order was held in Minneapolis. The Grand Army had
found it impossible to avoid the elevation of the pension
problem as its noisiest task. Soldiers' bonus bills were
already in evidence before the meeting of the American
Legion, and attempts were In the making to turn it into a
machine for gaining bonus votes.
The shapeless demobilization of the army and of war
Industry, which took place in the same months In which
the War Department canceled Its outstanding contracts,
caused unemployment in the cities. The United States
Employment Service exerted itself to maintain a census of
employment conditions, and to improve them, until Con
gress abolished its appropriation after July, 1919. The
Official Bulletin, which had been the only reliable means of
following Government actions through the war, had been
discontinued in the preceding March. The War Trade
Board was reduced to the status of a section of the State
Department, and the Food and Fuel Administrations found
that the backing for their work was gone. Government
guidance was abolished and industry was left to shift for
itself. Congress devoted the short session of 1918-19 to the com
pletion of the revision of the Revenue Law that had been

564 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
before It since the passage of the War Act of September,
1917. The statute, which proposed to raise $6,000,000,000
in the next fiscal year, was awaiting the signature of the
President when he arrived in Boston on February 24. The
Victory Liberty Loan of $4,500,000,000 was floated In May
to provide funds for the period until the new act should
be productive. McAdoo had ceased to be Secretary of the
Treasury, his place being taken by Carter Glass, of Vir
ginia, who had played a leading part in the enactment of
the Federal Reserve Act in 191 3.
In the absence of legislation to give form and program
to the period of demobilization. Secretary of Commerce
Redfield created In February, 1919, an Industrial Board
which proposed to do Informally what the war boards had
accomplished during active warfare. The experiment was a
failure. The patriotic incentive to cooperation was gone.
Business now demanded to be let alone ; wlUing to scold the
Government for inconveniences it had suffered, it was not
ready to make a voluntary sacrifice for the general good.
The members of the Industrial Board resigned In a body in
May, after their attempt to fix, and lower, the price of steel
had been ruled upon by Attorney-General Palmer as prob
ably Ulegal. The anti-agreement provisions of the trust
laws became once more effective with the cessation of hos
tilities, and the combinations which the government had
compelled for military purposes became illegal again.
Congress developed no new leadership to face the prob
lems of peace. The end of Democratic ascendancy was
approaching with the expiration of the Sixty-Fifth Congress
on March 4, 1919, and there was no spirit for the advo
cacy of measures that could not pass. The absence of the
President in Paris during most of the session further de
moralized the departing majority. For six years Wilson's
leadership had been coercive or persuasive at every point,
and with each success in his program there had been a
tendency to make the next measure more completely his.
In his absence his party associates could not feel his im
pressive leadership ; his Cabinet found Itself without a head

PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 565
and working at cross-purposes, while the Republican mi
nority promised great and practical things for the future
and watched with complacency every event that revealed
the inconvenience of doing business without the President
or that could plausibly be ascribed to his or his party's
shortcomings. The return of Wilson to Washington In February was
necessary in order to wind up the affairs of the session, but
produced no change in the course of administra- ^jigo^ ^^^^^.^^
tion. He was greeted with open defiance by in Washing-
Republican members of the Senate, who were to
sit in the next session as part of the majority. These had
opened a debate on the League of Nations while he was on
the ocean, and at the close of the session thirty-seven of
them, more than enough to defeat any treaty, signed a man
ifesto declaring their unwillingness to vote for the cove
nant that he brought from Paris. Unshaken by their op
position, and heartened by the open support of Taft and
many other Republicans, Wilson performed his necessary
tasks in Washington and on March 5 set sail again for Paris
to complete his work at the Peace Conference.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William E. Dodd, Woodrow Wilson and His Work (1920), is a critical
and appreciative biography by a Virginia historian, and is probably as
reliable as can be written until the confidential files are opened. George
Creel, The War, the World, and Wilson (1920), is a panegyric, but by a war
worker who was in a position to know many facts. Ray Stannard Baker,
What Wilson Did at Paris (19-19), is by the chief of the American press
bureau at Paris during the treaty deliberations. Robert Lansing, The
Peace Negotiations, a Personal Narrative (1921), is the earliest account
published by one of the principal negotiators. J. M. Keynes, Economic
Consequences of the Peace (1919), is a violent attack upon the treaty, sup
ported by a mass of statistical material accumulated by the writer during
his service with the British delegation, it should be checked by Bernard
M. Baruch, The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the
Treaty (1920), and C. H. Haskins and R. H. Lord, Some Problems of the
Peace Conference (1920). Edward J Dillon, The Inside Story of the Peace
Conference (1920), contains less confidential material than its title suggests.
A tract much used by opponents of the treaty is W. C. Bullitt, The Bullitt
Mission to Russia. Testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations,
United States Senate, of W- C. Bullitt (1919,^

CHAPTER LVI
RECONSTRUCTION
The word "reconstruction" was a misnomer In 19 19 as it
had been in 1865. In the period following the Civil War its
The un- "^^ makes It easy 'to obscure the fact that the
settled South Underwent an economic and social revolu
tion while in the North the rural basis of society
gave way to industrial. The plans then made and the
statutes passed with reconstruction In view failed to effect
it, and society proceeded to readjust itself to changed con
ditions In spite of the advice of its political guardians.
In 1919 the world was full of talk of reconstruction, and in
many countries programs were evolved fitting each individ
ual and every group into a prearranged niche in a more or
less logical structure. The diplomats at Paris manipulated
the boundaries and balance of international powers; par
liaments tried to house their people and to put the citizen
to work where he belonged; party leaders promulgated
doctrines with as much assurance as though their followers
accepted them. But the tired world was no longer plastic.
Russia was In evolutionary revolt and not able or wUling to
respect the usages of nations. The "backward nations"
were everywhere restive at the control they had to endure.
Germany was beaten to the ground, but only the blind
could think of keeping her there forever. The working
classes among the Allies, conscious that their effort made
victory possible, were enjoying the economic improve
ment that had come to them through the accident of war,
and were determined to Increase rather than diminish their
future share In the output of the world. Unsettlement,
national and international, contained Its unrevealed prom
ise of evolution, while hold-over leaders of the pre-war age
professed to reconstruct society.
President Wilson arrived back in Paris on March 14,

RECONSTRUCTION 567
19 1 9, with the ominous threat of the Senate leaders to
wreck the treaty ringing in his ears; with his wilson in
opponents spurred on by his defiance, that Pans again
"when that treaty comes back gentlemen on this side will
find the covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the
treaty tied to the covenant, that you cannot dissect the
covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole
vital structure"; and with the knowledge that his ranking
adviser, Secretary of State Lansing, was in thorough disap
proval of both the protracted negotiations, and the nature
of the projected league. During his absence, he found, the
other American delegates had consented to shelve the League
in the Interest of Immediate peace. He learned as well
that France was unwilling to accept the League as sufficient
guarantee along the Rhine frontier, and that Italy was un
willing to sign the German peace untU assured that her own
claims to territory along the Adriatic would be protected.
Secret treaties signed in the darkest period of the war were
openly brought forth pledging the Allies to support Italy
against Austria and Jugo-Slavia, and Japan as conqueror
of and successor to German rights In China. America
was no party to these, but their European signers brought
into danger the doctrines of self-determination and open
covenants. Germany was threatened with annihilation
through the medium of reparations that were in effect
punitive indemnities, and unbearable at that. The free
dom of the seas was not even discussed. Equality of na
tions had been forgotten. And the peace that was to end
wars because of its essential moderation and justice was
fading away. There was even fair question whether the
associates could be brought to agree to any peace at all.
The burden and complexity of the negotiations hastened
the concentration of power in the Peace Conference in the
hands of Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, with Or
lando generally a fourth. Every attack was focused upon
Wilson, since he alone, by conviction, stood against a peace
of barter and balance of power, and struggled to rescue some
of the liberalism that had made the last year of war look like

568 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the dawning of a new age of international fair play. Early
in April the ravage of influenza, that had washed over the
world in the winter of 1918-19, laid him prostrate; and the
conferences of the "Big Four" in his Paris residence were
held with him In the adjacent sick-room. He had planned a
one-man task, and what he could not himself accomplish no
one could do for him. He met the critics of the covenant by
obtaining a recognition of the Monroe Doctrine, and pre
vented the Inclusion of the racial equality demanded by Ja
pan. The latter victory was paid for by his reluctant accept
ance of Japan as the inheritor of Germany In Shantung; with
the result that China felt herself betrayed and every weaker
nation lost confidence in the fairness of the peace.
What Wilson saved qf his liberal program he saved by
compromise or threat. On April 6 he ordered the George
Compromises Washington to Brest, and by this intimation of
of the Peace his willingness to abandon the Peace Conference
held his associates to their work. He refused to
assent to the binding force of the secret Italian treaty of
191 5; but was Induced to agree to a compromise whereby
France was enabled to secure the mineral output of the
Saar Valley whose population was almost entirely German.
The treaty as it was submitted to the fourth plenary ses
sion of the Peace Conference on April 28 was the best
treaty that the five Great Powers could be induced to sign
unanimously, but departed far from the altruism of the
" fourteen points." It contained as its most promising fea
ture, so far as the peace of the world was concerned, a re
vised covenant for the League of Nations. In this organi
zation, working through the council of nine — the five Great
Powers and Belgium, Brazil, Greece, and Spain- — it would
be possible to negotiate the undoing of the worst features of
the treaty itself, as passions should subside with the pass
ing of the years.
The treaty was handed to the German delegates on May
7, by Clemenceau, who recalled the last occasion when
German and French envoys had met in the palace at Ver
sailles. For him the treaty was the victory of his philosophy

RECONSTRUCTION 569
of force ; for them it was the last stage of the bitterness of
complete defeat. They signed It, with slight modifications,
on June 28, 1 91 9; and on the same day Lloyd George and
Wilson signed treaties with the French providing for the
defense of the left bank of the Rhine In case Germany
should endanger It. The President left Paris that night,
sailed for New York immediately, and on July 10 pre
sented the treaty and the covenant to the Senate In open
executive session.
The stubbornness of the Senate that showed Itself when
John Hay negotiated his first treaty with Lord Pauncefote,
In 1900, as well as when Cleveland, Roosevelt, -j.^^ gen-
and Taft concluded their successive treaties for ate and
international arbitration, endangers the success
of any American treaty that Is not one-sided In favoring the
United States. The Spanish Treaty of 1898 was ratified
only because the leader of the opposition, who himself de
cried the annexation of Island colonies, brought his influence
to prevent the defeat of peace. Under the Constitution the
President has power, "by and with the advice and consent
of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the
senators present concur," but the minority of the body that
is thus enabled to defeat any treaty is under constant temp
tation to be influenced more by party jealousies and indi
vidual antipathies than by the non-partisan view of national
Interest that ought to prevail in international affairs. Be
fore the President presented the treaty in person, a copy of
the document had been brought to Washington by a jour
nalist who managed to obtain it privately in Paris. Its text
was read Into the Congressional Record by Borah, of Idaho,
on June 9, and the general debate that had begun in Febru
ary became more specific. The thirty-seven signers of the
Lodge manifesto were still determined, and one of them,
Harding, of Ohio, declared that "at the present time the
preservation of American nationality rests with the Senate
of the United States. And . . . the Senate is not going to
fall you."
President Wilson demanded the ratification of the treaty

570 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
without amendment, on the grounds that (i) peace could
not be restored until the document was ratified
to^the' '°" and proclaimed, (2) any American amendment
Treaty of -would force the reopening of the whole con
ference, since no change in the text would be
binding until approved by every signatory, and (3) any
modifications upon which agreement could be reached at
all could be obtained best through the League of Nations
which the ratification of the treaty would bring into exist
ence. His opponents Included those who thought the docu
ment too lenient in its treatment of Germany and those
who believed it too harsh. Germans in the United States
generally opposed It on the latter ground, while the Irish
disliked it because England had gained control of a con
siderable number of former German colonies through the
system of mandatories created in the treaty. Liberals and
radicals, who had been close to the President in support of
his program of the "fourteen points," turned against him
because compromise and balance of power, instead of inter
nationalism, had prevailed at Paris. Conservatives took
the opposite position and declared that American inde
pendence had been sacrificed to the League of Nations,
and that under Article X of the covenant the United States
could be forced to go to war over European controversies
and counter to the constitutional provision requiring declar
ations of war to be made by Congress. Between those who
thought the treaty too reactionary, and those who saw it as
a document of national surrender, a temporary alliance was
made to defeat it. The Nation and the New Republic, the
Socialists, the Irish, and the Germans found strong support
among great bodies of Americans who had had enough of
war in Europe and desired to draw back to the isolated
and complete independence of the Monroe Doctrine. The
irreconcilable opposition was led in the Senate by men as
far apart on other matters as Hiram Johnson, Robert M. La
Follette, William E. Borah, and MUes Poindexter, on the
one hand, and Philander C. Knox, Frank B. Brandegee,
George H. Moses, and Lawrence Y. Sherman, on the other.

RECONSTRUCTION 571
The Sixty -Sixth Congress, elected in November, 1918,
met May 19, 1919, upon proclamation cabled by Wilson
from Paris. The work before It included several -pjjg treaty
of the ordinary supply bills, whose passage at the session of
last regular session had been blocked by a Re- "S""*^^^
publican filibuster, and the new treaty. In the House the
Republican majority had no difficulty in setting aside
James R. Mann, of Illinois, Its former leader, and selecting
as Speaker Frederick H. Gillett, of Massachusetts. Mann
was deposed because of party revolt against his war record
and his attitude prior to American entry, during which he
had described the Lusitania victims as "joy-riders." The
control of the Senate was In doubt until the last minute.
Of the ninety-six Senators only a bare majority (forty-
nine) could be claimed for the Republicans, and this only by
including La Follette who had flaunted the regular organi
zation and voted Independently for years, and Newberry,
newly elected from Michigan. The latter defeated Henry
Ford In the preceding November, after a bitter contest in
which huge funds were expended by the victor and his
friends, and in which Ford was denounced as pacifist and
anti-American. Newberry was later convicted and sen
tenced under the Federal Corrupt Practices Act which the
Supreme Court, on appeal, declared unconstitutional. But
he was allowed to retain his seat in the Senate while under
indictment, making part of the shaky majority that organ
ized the body May 19, 1919, and made possible the appoint
ment of Henry Cabot Lodge as chairman of the Committee
on Foreign Relations, with a group of colleagues known to
be opposed to the ratification of the treaty as signed.
The Treaty of Versailles was ratified by enough European
signers to enable its proclamation January 10, 1920, and the
first meeting of the Council of the League of Na- Fight over
tions six days later; while In the United States ratification
its approval, with or without amendments or reservations,
was still pending in the Senate. The President insisted
that the good faith as well as the interests of the United
States were involved in Its acceptance. Early In Sep tem-

572 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ber he left Washington for a speaking tour of the Western
States, In an attempt to arouse enthusiasm for it. In his
own party there were out-spoken opponents of the treaty,
while its Republican advocates were becoming more will
ing to qualify their acceptance. The country as a whole
had lost faith in the possibility of rejuvenating the world,
and was becoming increasingly absorbed in the affairs of
its own existence. Wilson opened his tour September 4, a
week before the Committee on Foreign Relations reported
the treaty to the Senate with reservations. He crossed the
country near the northern border, invaded the States of
Reed, Borah, Poindexter, and Johnson, all irreconcilables,
and was on his way home through the Middle West with
the result of his campaign uncertain, when on September
26 his physicians ended the tour abruptly and sent him
back to the White House a sick and broken man.
The precise nature of the disease and the degree of the
incapacity were not revealed to the country, and once
Collapse of more, as in the summer of 1881, when Garfield
Wilson j^y Qjj jjjg deathbed, the failure of the Consti
tution to provide for such contingency was noticed and de
plored. On October 14 Secretary Lansing began to hold in
formal meetings of the Cabinet with the supposed approval
of the Invalid, but was dismissed by Wilson on this ground
four months later. Not until February, 1920, did the Pres
ident resume active work of any sort, and then under con
ditions that suggested the end of his political control of his
party. Bryan at a meeting of the Democratic National
Committee opposed Wilson's desire to make the next elec
tion a "solemn referendum " on the treaty; members of his
Cabinet dropped out or were dismissed until by April there
were five new heads.
The treaty had a varied career. It was tabled In the
Senate November 19, 1919, because of the impossibility of
ratifying it with or without reservations. In February,
1920, It was taken up again In the hope of finding a com
promise, but failed of the necessary two thirds on March 19.
In May an effort was made to terminate the state of war by

RECONSTRUCTION 573
joint resolution repealing the declaration of April 6, 1917;
but this was prevented by presidential veto, as an "in
effaceable stain upon the gallantry and honor of the United
States." With the rest of the world struggling to get back
to peace, the United States remained technically at war
with Germany and dissociated from the League of Nations
eighteen months after hostilities had ceased.
Internal peace, as well as international, was disturbed
during the Senate fight over the treaty. From a state of
war, with elaborate Government control over
every relationship of life, there had been the and labor^
sharp transition into non-war, if not real peace, ""^eule-
wlth Individual competition resumed and with
world shortage disturbing the equilibrium of every industry.
Extravagance and scarcity, high prices and labor unsettle
ment, unfulfilled hopes of a millennium and opportunities for
successful greed, profiteering in material things and effort to
gain advantage for panaceas of reform, crowded before a
public that was wearied with efforts and lacked admitted
leaders. Roosevelt, whose generation was over, Had laid
down his powers early in 1919, and though the simple grave
at Oyster Bay attracted pilgrims by thousands the voice
was silent. Wilson was sick, and among a multitude of
noisy advisers of the public there was none that gained its
ear as he had done. Labor in particular, always first to feel
a change in the conditions of life, was restive. Flattered by
the attentions received during the war and somewhat daz
zled by proletarian successes In Russia, its status was now
challenged by its ancient enemies, and its leaders seized
the occasion to reassert its claim.
In the • basic fields of transportation, coal, and steel,
strikes were impending during the summer of 1919. The
railroad workers had received less increase than most other
union men. In 1916 the Adamson Act fixed for them the
basic eight-hour day, which the Supreme Court upheld in
the following March. This improved their condition, but
failed to keep pace with rising prices. When the war began
no other industry suffered more than theirs. The railroad

574 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
regiments, and enlistments for other line duty, depleted their
numbers. Troop movements and the great mass of war
freights called for military precision In their work. The
public took the sound attitude that a railroad strike would
amount to treason, and the Railroad Administration did
what it could during 1918 to equalize their pay. But there
was no practical way to give them relief against the rising
prices after the armistice. A threatened strike in the sum
mer of 19 19 was deferred upon appeal from Wilson to wait
for six months In order to allow his plans for lowering prices
to become effective. In the following winter he was too
sick to initiate measures of relief, although A. Mitchell
Palmer, the Attorney-General, administered what remained
of the powers under the Food and Fuel Act of 19 17,
and organized fair-price committees and sought evidence
against profiteers. But prices continued to rise, and In the
spring of 1920 the public demand for goods persisted in spite
of them. The six-months period expired, and the railroad
men were next asked to await the decision of Congress as
to the future control of the railroads, and to bring their re
quest to their future employers. Their protracted uneasi
ness made it hard for the roads to procure labor, lowered
the efficiency of all railroad service, and encouraged other
groups to more stubborn struggles.
A great steel strike was started on September 22, 1919,
aiming to force the United States Steel Corporation to rec-
Steel strike ognize the unlons. The leaders that directed it
of 1919 belonged to the radical group, and were charac
terized by their opponents as socialist, anarchist, bolshevist,
and I.W.W. There had been no great strike in this indus
try since the two failures at Homestead in 1892 and 1901.
Gary, Indiana, the company town of the Steel Corporation,
was the center of the strike, which lasted officially until
January 8, 1920. Long before it was called off it was a fail
ure. Steel orders had passed their peak, and high prices
were discouraging to new construction. The steel mills were
able to get non-union labor for what work they had to do.
Public opinion turned against the strike because a demand

RECONSTRUCTION 575
by the workers to share in the direction of their industries
looked like the beginnings of sovietism, and this aversion
obscured public notice of the repudiation of collective bar
gaining and the refusal to let union men hire halls or dehver
public lectures
The coal strike oegan in the Indiana fields on November
I, 1919, in spite of notice from the President that such a
strike would be regarded as illegal under the Food and Fuel
Act that forbade conspiracies to hinder production while
the state of war lasted. The Government immediately
procured a mandatory order upon the officers of the United
Mine Workers directing them to recall the strike. This they
complied with, under protest, and in the American Federa
tion of Labor the voice of Gompers was raised against the
doctrine that any strike could be forbidden as contrary to
public interest. A federal commission was named In Decem
ber to adjust the wage matter; and a year later, when the
anthracite miners became discontented, they profited by
the experience of 1919, and declared no strike. The men
concerned merely took a concerted "vacation" against
which no legal action was possible. A strike of the police
force in Boston gave special emphasis to the claim of labor
to the unlimited right to strike. Governor Calvin Coolidge
denied that public guardians possessed this right. He was
reelected in November, 1919, largely upon this issue, and
though a Republican received a warm letter of congratula
tion from President Wilson
The American delay in ratifying the peace treaty was
emphasized when on October 29, 1919, the international
labor conference arranged for at Paris convened Labor con-
in Washington to draw up a general platform for ferences and
labor betterment. One attempt to do this for
the United States had already failed. An Industrial con
ference, meeting on October 6, had broken up in less than
three weeks because of the Inability of the delegates of capi
tal, labor, and the general public to find common ground for
discussion. A second industrial conference, likewise called
by the President, met on December I, with Herbert C.

576 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Hoover as its dominant personality. A manifesto on in
dustrial relations,', published by this body some months
later, was swallowed up in the presidential campaign.
A menace of revolutionary radicalism was believed by
many to be connected with the labor troubles. About Sep
tember I, 1919, the Socialist Party split, and a "left wing,"
which the regulars later expelled, formed itself Into the
Communist Party, and proclaimed allegiance to the Social
ist Internationale that had recently sat at Moscow. Leaders
of this party were later tried and convicted under the Espi
onage Act, which remained enforceable even after hostilities
ceased. A general cry against socialism and the " reds" was
heard throughout the country, and the Department of Jus
tice proceeded, under the Alien Deportation Act, to round
up foreign agitators who were believed to be dangerous. At
Christmas the transport Buford sailed for Finland with a
cargo of such aliens, who were thus carried back to the Rus
sia of their revolutionary hopes. Victor L. Berger was made
a national figure during the reaction against socialism. He
had attained some fame in 1910 as the first Socialist to sit
in Congress. In 1919 he was convicted of a conspiracy to
obstruct the draft, and although reelected to Congress in
191 8 was not allowed to take his seat. At a special election
after his unseating his Milwaukee constituency elected him
again; and again in January, 1920, the House held that he
was not entitled to take his oath. His district this time
remained without a representative.
In New York five Socialists who had been chosen to the
Assembly were expelled on the avowed ground that mem
bers of their party could not be both consistent and loyal ;
and when these were reelected to succeed themselves, three
of them were again unseated in September, 1920. Charles
Evans Hughes protested against the expulsion, with the
support of both the Tribune and the World, and Lieutenant-
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., made a similar protest In
his maiden speech In the New York Assembly. Uneasy rad
icalism struggled against reaction throughout the country,
while the deadlocked Senate kept the ri?ition out of peace.

RECONSTRUCTION 577

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
In the absence of reliable books dealing with the immediate past, the
student must turn to periodical literature. The Weekly Review (May,
1919-) was started to combat "unthinking liberalism" and entered upon
weekly arguments with the Nation, the New Republic, and the Freeman.
The standard economic periodicals contain many articles on current labor
and industry. William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike (1920), is a highly
partisan account by a professional labor organizer; The Interchurch Report
on the Steel Strike (1920) is based on sympathetic and scientific investiga
tion. Much material upon the treaty is in E. M. House and C. Sey
mour (Eds.), What Really Happened at Paris (1921), and "Treaty of Peace
with Germany. Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations,
United States Senate" (66th Cong., ist Sess., Sen. Doc. 106).

CHAPTER LVII
THE ELECTION OF 1920
The year 1920 may well be remembered because the Con
stitution of the League of Nations then became effective
with the promulgation of the peace treaty, and
and Nhie- the Constitution of the United States, whose
A^"''d provisions were invoked by opponents of ratifica
tion In America, was modified by the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Amendments. The Sixteenth and Seven
teenth Amendments, one authorizing the levy of an income
tax and the other providing for the direct election of United
States Senators, were proclaimed seven years earlier, in
the opening weeks of the Wilson Administration. The new
amendments established prohibition and granted full suf
frage to women. Together they worked a greater change
in the purport of the Federal Constitution than had been
brought about by all the preceding amendments since Its
original adoption.
The Eighteenth, or "dry" Amendment, went Into effect
on the same day that the Council of the League of Nations
held its first session, January 16, — a year after Its accept
ance by the last of the thirty-six States whose approval
was necessary to Its adoption. When the amendment was
proposed by Congress, many States were already dry by
their own enactment, and the prolonged fight for prohibi
tion had been taken up by the managers of Industry and the
leaders of the South. Since 1872 there had been a National
Prohibition Party, with a ticket in the field every four years,
and for a generation before 1872 the temperance movement
had flourished In local and spasmodic waves. War, with
the need for conservation of grain as well as for temperate
labor, accelerated the movement. Under the provisions of
a war-time prohibition act of November, 1918, the United
States was made dry after July i, 1919, for the duration of

THE ELECTION OF 1920 579
the war; and in the following October the Volstead Act for
the enforcement of prohibition became a law over the veto
of the President, who thought the justification had disap
peared with the cessation of fighting. But great-majorities
in both houses gave evidence of the satisfaction of the peo
ple at the approach of prohibition, by whatever means, and
when the amendment came into effect the noisy scolding of
the wet interests had no great influence.
The movement for woman suffrage attained success later
in 1920. Like prohibition. It had been adopted in the
Western States and was sweeping toward the East. The
demand for sex equality that Lucretia Mott and Susan B.
Anthony voiced in the middle of the century gained its
first victories in the frontier States where the qualifications
for the franchise had been systematically lowered since the
first migrations. Anna Howard Shaw, who Inherited the
leadership of Miss Anthony, died within a few days of the
proposal of the amendment by Congress, in 1919, but lived
long enough to see her measure approved by the responsible
leaders of all parties and started toward a sure success.
For months, during the crisis of the war, a group of militant
women picketed the White House and cast what discredit
they could upon the President for his failure to procure the
immediate suffrage they demanded. The ratification of
the Nineteenth Amendment took only a year, and in the
spring of 1920 there was a scramble among the leaders of
both great parties to make It possible for women to vote
in the presidential election. The amendment was pro
claimed in August, 1920, each party claiming credit for the
act. The artificial state of war, prolonged in the United States
by the failure of the peace treaty, did not prevent steps
toward the restoration of normal conditions. lu^erna-
The series of loans, by which the United States tional
supplemented her military effort in the war, was
stopped with nearly all the authorized ten billion dollars
advanced to the Allies. "The United States could not. If it
would, assume the burdens of all the earth," said Secretary

58o RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Houston when he announced that loans would cease. The
balance of trade had not only created great debts owed to
the United States, but It had caused alarming decline in
foreign exchange that acted as an automatic embargo on the
American export trade. On February 4, 1920, the pound
sterling could be bought In New York for $3.19 instead of its
ordinary $4.84; and French and Belgian francs fell to be
tween seven and eight cents, while the German mark, under
the influence of defeat as well as balance of trade, invited
speculation at over forty to the dollar, instead of four.
After February the foreign condition gradually improved,
as Europe got again to work. But American prices re
mained at the peak caused by the various forces' of actual
scarcity, high cost of labor, Impeded transportation. In
flation of the currency, and the spendable savings of citizens
whose Liberty bonds were thrown on the market now the
emergency was over. Retail food prices averaged 207 in
the first six months of 1920 as against 146 in 191 7, and 100
in 1913.
The continuance of high prices exasperated citizens, who
felt that they were in some way the fault of the Administra
tion, and gave basis for the renewed demands of workers
in every field for higher pay. In the schools and colleges,
where salaries were low at best, a fear of the decay of
scholarship and instruction inspired a general effort to cor
rect the pay schedules. The railroad workers, whose de
mands had been put off from month to month, renewed their
pressure, and fought the plans of Congress for terminating
the Railroad Administration.
The Plumb plan for railroad control was advanced by
the unions during the summer of 1919, and contemplated a
Railroad representation of the workmen upon the direc-
Control Act torates of the lines. Many of the unionists
hoped that Government control might be permanent, and.
might develop Into actual Government ownership, but the
obvious impossibility at this time of passing any law for ex
tending Government activities turned the movement into
one that guaranteed the workers a share in the manage-

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THE ELECTION OF 1920 581
ment. Under the Railroad Act of 191 8, which fixed the
terms of Government control, it was provided that the
roads must be returned to their owners twenty-one months
after the end of the war. Director-General McAdoo asked
to have this period lengthened in order to have an oppor
tunity to test the system In times of peace. This was re
fused by Congress, which seemed indisposed either to allow
Government control or to turn the roads back. Under the
stimulus of presidential threat to deliver the roads to their
owners at the earliest date unless Congress should act,
the Esch-Cummlns Bill was passed in February, for the re
turn of the roads on March i, 1920. The Interstate Com
merce Commission was given large new powers over railroad
finance, and a Railroad Labor Board was created to ad
just wage disputes. This body granted large increases in
pay during the next summer, and adopted a policy of refus
ing to confer with the leaders of outlaw strikes. The Inter
state Commerce Commission allowed the carriers to Increase
their rates in order to earn the increased pay. Organized
labor in general opposed the Esch-Cummins Act, and as
sisted in defeating Esch himself for reelection In November.
Before the return of the railroads was accomplished, the
preliminaries of the new presidential campaign were so
far advanced that all public acts were directly Wilson and
affected by it. It was the wish of President the "solemn
Wilson that public attention should be kept
fixed upon the treaty and the League of Nations, making
the election a "solemn referendum" on that issue. "The
United States enjoyed the spiritual leadership of the
world," he wrote, "until the Senate of the United States
failed to ratify the treaty by which the belligerent nations
sought to effect the settlements for which they had fought
throughout the war." His own health was too uncertain to
permit him to take any active part in the struggle, and in the
absence of his aggressive leadership his party ranged in
opinion from those who supported his views to those who
accepted Bryan's policy of ratification with any amend
ments that might be needed to secure action, and even to

582 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
those who believed with Reed, of Missouri, that there
should be no league at all. Among the Republicans opin
ion was equally divided, with a tendency for the treaty op
ponents to receive support from League advocates who
thought the failure of the treaty due to the stubbornness
of Wilson.
In this uncertainty the candidacy of Herbert Hoover
had an Immediate appeal when his friends announced it in
.pi^g January. As a mining engineer, living much
Hoover outslde the United States, Hoover had no known
political affiliations. The Democratic New
York World supported him none the less, as did the liberal
New Republic, the Republican Philadelphia Public Ledger,
and the non-partisan but ubiquitous Saturday Evening Post.
His supporters came largely from those who were unor
ganized In politics, the women and college professors, and
business men, large and small. He appeared to represent a
wave of thought that was tired of politicians and wanted
the National Government administered upon the same high
and impartial Ideals that had made the Commission for the
Relief of Belgium an International triumph. Moreover, he
wanted a League of Nations, and was a proper continuator
of American war policies.
The Hoover boom came to nought. Its supporters lacked
cohesion and experience, and the powerful cement that comes
from wanting something for themselves. So long as Hoover
remained outside both parties he could expect no aid from
active politicians. So soon as he was forced to admit that
It was the Republican nomination he desired, he lost at
once the support of such Democrats as had been wiUing to
adopt him. The Republican leaders did not want him,
as they had not wanted Roosevelt In 1900. They pre
ferred instead some one in harmony with the senatorial
associates who had fought the treaty under the leadership
of Lodge. Instead of Hoover, the opponents of WUson
gathered around the names of Leonard Wood, who was
supposed to embody something of the spirit of Roosevelt;
Hiram Johnson, who ha^d made himself the personification

THE ELECTION OF 1920 583
of irreconcilable opposition to any league; or Governor
Frank O. Lowden, of Illinois, whose appeal was that of a
business man turned Into an admirable executive. The
Republican Party, still divided as In 1916, needed a candi
date who could be supported by opponents of the League as
well as friends, by German-Americans who hated the treaty
and Irish-Americans who hated England, by the remnants
of the Roosevelt Progressives and the survivors of the "Old
Guard" who wanted to get back to the conditions of 1896.
"Any good republican can be nominated for president
and can defeat any democrat," said Senator Boies Penrose,
who knew as much as any one about the organi- Harding
zation of the party. By the time the convention and
met in Chicago in June, Hoover was out of the
running. Wood and Lowden were weakened by revelations
as to the large funds expended by their admirers to pro
cure their nomination, and Johnson was too outspoken to
meet the party need. Lodge, the temporary chairman, in
his keynote speech, urged the ousting of the Wilson dynasty
and the defeat of the Wilson league. The platform, adopted
before the candidate was chosen, was a compromise designed
to hold the Johnson faction in the party. The candidate.
Senator Warren G. Harding, of Ohio, was a reservationist
upon the treaty, a new member of the Senate, steady, well-
liked, and conciliatory. His companion on the ticket was
Governor Calvin Coolidge, of Massachusetts, whose behav
ior in the Boston policemen's strike had identified him with
the maintenance of law and order.
Congress brought Its regular session to a close a few days
before the Republican Convention met. It had failed to
end the state of war. On March 19 the treaty had been
defeated for the second time, and on May 27 WUson had
vetoed a joint resolution repealing the war declaration.
The session had done less in reconstruction than the Repub
lican advocates had promised In the campaign of 191 8, and
had spent months of time in patient though fruitless search
for official misconduct in the war. Since March It had
engaged in a naval investigation growing out of criticisms

584 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
advanced by Sims. The Investigation of the War Depart
ment, begun a year earlier, brought forth much testimony
to the unreadiness of the country when war came, and
to the blundering and waste that accompanied the hur
ried mobilization of industry and society. But no scandals
were uncovered equal to those that followed the war with
Spain. Appropriations were pared down to bring expendi
tures to a peace basis, and at the very end of the session
laws were approved relating to the army and the merchant
marine. The Army Act of June 4, 1920, revised the National
Defense Act of 191 6 in the light of the experience of the
The Army years of war. It authorized a strength of about
Act, 1920 three hundred thousand for the regular army,
and left the organization of the forces largely in the hands of
the War Department. The General Staff was directed to
confine itself more strictly to coordination than had been
the practice during the war, but was left large enough to
operate, and able to conduct the various schemes of pro
fessional education that had been found indispensable in
the A.E.F. The post-graduate courses developed in the
Roosevelt-Root administration of the army had justified
themselves, and were now made the basis of advancement
for all officers. For the enlisted men new schemes of educa
tion and specialized training were provided. Compulsory
service or training in peace-time failed to find a majority.
The National Guard was continued, but In closer and more
organic relations with the regular army than ever before.
And the three field armies, which the armistice had found in
Germany, were perpetuated in a new military arrangement
for the United States under which the old departments were
to disappear.
The Jones Merchant Marine Act, passed June 5, 1920,
rearranged the powers of the United States Shipping Board
The Jones ^^<^ withdrew many of the emergency pow-
Merchant ers granted for the time of war. It left the
Marine Act - , . r , r^, . .
emergency fleet at the control of the Shipping
Board, and made provision for the encouragement of the

THE ELECTION OF 1 920 585
carriage of American freights in American vessels. In cer
tain of its provisions, which Wilson declined to enforce on
the ground that they went beyond the capacity of Congress,
it ran counter to the treaty agreements existing with most
of the nations having shipping in American ports. In the
same spirit the Republican Convention adopted a plank
reopening the Panama Canal tolls controversy, and favoring
the repeal of the law secured by President Wilson in 19 14
whereby the merchant ships of all nations were put upon an
even footing.
The Democratic Administration was under continuous
attack by the Republican majorities in both houses of Con
gress, and only occasionally did President Wilson -j-j^^ Oemo-
intervene openly from his seclusion in the White cratic
-T TT 1 1 • r 1 • candidates
House. He announced no choice for his succes
sor, but It was believed that WUliam G. McAdoo would be a
welcome selection. The criticism of McAdoo as "son-in-
law" and "crown prince" weakened his availability as a
candidate, and although many delegates to the convention
were in favor of him he did not at any time become more
than a receptive candidate. A. Mitchell Palmer was an
aggressive aspirant for the nomination. As Alien Property
Custodian during the war, and as Attorney-General after
it, he had gained much prominence. Under his direction
the federal anti-red campaign was waged, and an attack
was made upon the profiteers. He was opposed by most of
the radical Democrats on the ground that he had gone be
yond reasonable limits in the restriction of freedom of speech
and opinion. Outside the Administration group were Gov
ernor Edwards, of New Jersey, with aspirations founded
upon his defense of "personal liberty" in his opposition to
the Eighteenth Amendment, and Governor James D. Cox,
of Ohio, who had the distinction of three elections to that
office in a doubtful State.
WUliam J. Bryan was again a leading figure at the Demo
cratic Convention, held in San Francisco at the end of June;
not as a candidate, but as the champion of peace and pro
hibition. He failed to secure action for the latter cause, for

586 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
this convention, like the Republican, treated the "dry"
amendment as a closed issue and said nothing to stir up
either side of the long fight. Ireland was present at San
Francisco, as it had been at Chicago, demanding planks in
support of the pretensions of the Sinn Fein Republic to
independence. Since the Easter revolt of 191 6 the Irish in
dependents had organized what they claimed to be a govern
ment and had kept the island In a state of chronic disorder.
American Irishmen, headed by Frank Walsh and Governor
Dunne, had presented the claims of their former country
to the "Big Four" at Paris, without avail; and Eamonn
De Valera, as president of the revolutionary government,
maintained American headquarters and supervised the sale
of Irish bonds. On March 18, 1920, the Senate passed a
resolution of sympathy with Ireland; and the organized
Irish devoted themselves to the defeat of the peace treaty
because of its failure to recognize their self-determination.
The threat to swing the usual Irish Democratic vote to
Harding resembled the hyphenated threat to swing the
German vote to Hughes In 191 6. The Democratic platform
included a resolution of sympathy with the Irish cause.
The deadlock of the Democratic Convention over the
leading candidates lasted longer than It had done at Chi-
Cox and cago. In each case no one of the leaders could
Roosevelt command the support of the tested professional
politicians of the party; and as the Republican Senators
swung to Harding at the end, so the Democratic city poli
ticians swung the convention to Cox on the forty-fourth
ballot, and gave him the two thirds needful for a nomina
tion. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the
Navy, was named for Vice-President.
The passions aroused in the canvass of 1920 were in
spired less by the candidates than by the idea of punish-
Third-party ing either the President for his arrogance or the
movements Senate for its defeat of the treaty. The hopes
of third-party reformers were aroused by the apathy of the
campaign. An attempt was made in July, by a commit
tee of forty-eight progressives, to unite the labor parties.

THE ELECTION OF 1920 587
the Non-Partisan League, and all the other discontented
elements In a new party of reform. The Socialists had
already nominated Eugene V. Debs for the fifth time, al
though he was now behind the bars in the Atlanta peniten
tiary. The other dissenting groups proved non-fusible; the
farmers captured the convention of the " Forty-EIghters "
and made so radical a platform that most of the callers of
the convention repudiated the result. La Follette declined
to accept a nomination from the group, and P. P. Chrlsten-
son, of Utah, headed their ticket.
Labor continued uneasy during the summer of 1920,
with many outlaw strikes, which labor leaders could not
or would not restrain. Farmers were in protest gygingsg
against the fall of prices that became visible conditions
after July. To them the conduct of the Federal ^" ^° ' "^^
Reserve Board in raising the discount rate, and In refusing
credit to borrowers who wanted it for the purpose of hoard
ing necessities for a higher price, was a sort of treason. But
the Federal Reserve Board justified its creation by prevent
ing panic as prices started back to normal. Sugar, which
had been extensively hoarded, dropped from thirty-five to
under ten cents per pound. In the early summer the textile
mills noted a decline in orders and laid off hands. When
Henry Ford cut his prices to a pre-war basis in the autumn
there was no resulting crisis, although the act was generally
accepted as proof of the post-war price decline.
The debate of 1920 centered upon the League of Nations,
but with a majority of voters determined to vote without
reference to its logic. Cox supported the League with en
thusiasm, visiting nearly every State. Harding, speak
ing generally from his front porch In manner reminiscent
of the campaign of 1896, varied his emphasis from day to
day in the determination not to offend beyond recall either
Root and Taft who wanted the League, or Borah and John
son to whom it was anathema. But whatever he said, the
underlying current was that of the majority party deter
mined to return to power after two administrations of self-
incurred defeat. In his favor were the habitual Republi-

588 RECENT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
can votes, the anti-Wilson votes, and the support of the
multitude of Americans who had chafed under the unusual
restrictions and penetrating taxation of the World War.
Harding and Coolidge were elected in November, with
a popular plurality of 6,998,964 over Cox and Roosevelt,
Election with every Northern State supporting them, and
of Harding .^^^^ Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennes
see, and all the border States, except Kentucky and Vir
ginia, in the Republican column. Debs ran third, but a
better third than ever because of the radical reaction against
war restraint and the protest against suppression of opinion.
His votes measure in part the lack of interest in the two
great parties. In both houses of Congress the Repubhcan
majorities were greatly increased. Like the Civil War, but
for different reasons, the World War had driven the Dem
ocratic Party out of power, and left the future, whose out
lines were but faintly visible, in the hands of the party 01
the North and West. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best of the biographies read during the campaign is William E.
Dodd, Woodrow Wilson and his Work (1920) ; other books having a bearing
on the election are Roger W. Babson, Cox — The Man (1920); James M.
Beck, The Passing of the New Freedom (1920); Walter Lippmann, Liberty
and the News (1920); and David Karsner, Debs: His Authorized Life and
Letters (1920). A new survey of the American system at the close of the
war is Everett Kimball, The National Government of the United States
(1920). Much miscellaneous data may be culled from " Presidential Cam
paign Expenses" (Hearing pursuant to Sen. Res. 357, 66th Cong., 2d
Sess.), and "Victor L. Berger" (Hearings under House Res. 6, 66th Cong.,
1st Sess.).

INDEX

Abbott, Lyman, 25
"A. B. C." Powers, 427
Adams, Henry, 33
Adams, Henry Carter, 330
Adamson Law, 454, 456, 517, 573
Addams, Jane, 133, 400, 416, 445
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The, 30
Adventures of Tom Saivyer, 28
Agriculture, Department of, 114
Agricultural colleges, 8
Agricultural machinery, improved, 69
Aguinaldo, Emilio, 242, 259, 272, 289, 420
Air Service, 520.
Aircraft Production Board, 484, 485
Aisne River, 548
Alaska, 15, 379
Aldrich, Senator, 328, 367
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 27
Aldrich Monetary Commission, 408
Aldrich-Vreeland Act, 335, 409
Algeciras Conference, 347
Alger, Russell .\., 139, 227, 243
Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, 464
Alien Deportation Act, 576
Alien Property Custodian, 503
Allenby, General, 551
AlUed Maritime 'Transport Council, S30
Allied Naval Council, 530
Allied offensives, 549
Allies Purchasing Commission, 526
Allison, Senator, 139
Altgeld, John P., 200, 204
Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel
Worlcers, 199, 281
Amateur sports, 122
Amendments to the Constitution, Civil War,
71, 180; sixteenth, 407, 578; seventeenth,
376, 578; eighteenth, 578; nineteenth, 579
America's Cup, the, 119
Amer'ican, The, 30
American Alliance for Labor and Democracy,
510
American base in France, 491
American Commission to Negotiate Peace,
557
American CommoniveaUh, 386, 399
American Defense Society, 443
American Expeditionary Force, 491, 543
American Federationisi, 458
American Federation of Labor, 127, 129, 131,
28r, 360, 458, 479, 510, 534, 575
American foreign policy, 54
American Historical Association, 33
American Jockey Club, 119
American League to Limit Armaments, 445
American Legion, 563
American literature in the nineteenth cen
tury, 27
American neutrality, 434
American Neutrality League, 470
American peace terms inquiry of 1916, 468
American Protective League, 498

American Purchasing Commission for the
Allies, 527
American Red Cross, 509
American Rights Committee, 443
American Socialist, 459
American system, Clay's, 136, 215
American troops, quality of, 544
"American Truth Society," 386, 437
American Union, 68
American Union against Militarism, 445, 470
Americanization, 463. See also Immigration
and Naturalization
Amundsen, Roald, 391
"Ananias Club," 329
Anarchy and socialism, 128
Anthony, Susan B., 579
Anthracite coal strike, 1902, 303
Anti-Conscription League, 470
Anti-imperialism, 260, 269
Anti-monopoly movement, 151
Anti-Rebate Act, 301
Anti-Trust Bill, Sherman, 152
Anti-trust legislation, 300, 325, 437; policies,
413
Anti-war agitation, 470, 472
Arbitration of international disputes, 387;
with Great Britain, 211, 394, 430
Arbitration treaties, 430. See also Peace
Treaties.
Arc light, perfected, 69
Argonne, Forest, 548
Arizona, admission of, 378
Armed merchant ships, 471
Armistice, 256
Armstrong Committee of New York Legis
lature, 357
Army, U. S., health of, 255; in 1894, 202
Army Act of 1916, 517; of 1920, 584
Army Appropriation Bill, 450
Army bills, deadlock over, 14
Army divisions of 191 7, 494
Army legislation, 243
Army reduction, urged by the South, 17
Array War College, 290
Arnold, Matthew, 32
Arthur, Chester A., 47, 54; Congressional
elections of 1882, 76 ; tariff revision, 77 ;
significant political acts of his administra
tion, 82
Arthur, P. M., 21
Article X, 570
Assassination of Archduke Frands Ferdi
nand, 432
Astor, John Jacob, 72
Astor, William Waldorf, 183
Atchison, Topeka and Santa F^ Railroad, 38,
57, 58, 108, 156, 294, 378
Athenczum, The, 30
Atkinson, Edward, 79
Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, 57, 102; tele
graph, 68
Atlantic City, 74

590

INDEX

Atlantic fleet, the, 245
Atlantic Monthly, 26, 27, 28, 314
AustraUan ballot, 144
Austria, 551
Aviation, 390
Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, 485
Baer, George F., 303
Baer, John M., 465
Baker, Newton D., 450, 5x9, 557
Balfour, A. J., 490
Ballinger, Richard A., 370, 379
Ballot, secret, 143
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, strike of 1877,
18, 22; an oil road, 67, 478
Bancroft, George, 29, 33
Barker, Wharton, 268, 360
Barnard, F. A. P., 7
Barnum, P. T., 118
Barry, John, 453
Bartholdt, Richard, 447
Baruch, Bernard M., 484, 514, 537, 540
Baseball, 121
Bates, John C, 345
Battle of the Marne, in 19x4, 467
Battle-fleet, cruise of, 343
Battleships and cruisers, early modern,
238
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 314
Bayard, Thomas F., Secretary of State, 96,
226
Belgium, invasion of, 434, 474
Bell, Alexander Graham, 68
Bell, J. Franklin, 345'
Bellamy, Edward, 131, 152, 267
Belleau Wood, 548
Ben Hur, 30
Benedict XV, 522
Benson, Allen, 459
Benson, William S., 344
Berger, Victor L., 389, 576
"Berhn to Bagdad," 467
Beverldge, Albert J., 373
Bicycle, the, 123
Big business, attack upon, 312
"Big Four," 560, 586
"Big Stick," The, 383
Biglow Papers, The, 32
Bimetallism, 35, 170, 265. See also Free Silver,
and Silver
Blaine, JamesG., criticizes Hayes' policies, 3;
upon home rule in the South, 6; a leader of
the Half-Breed faction of the Republicans,
46; becomes Garfield's Secretary of State,
51; candidate for presidential nomination,
87; denounces free trade, 136; eliminated
from campaign for nomination, 138; upon
trade relations with South America, 149;
relations with President Harrison, 177,
403; retirement from Cabinet and death,
r78; views upon protective tariff, 366
Bland-Allison Act, 1878, 39, 44, 103, 150,
184, 190
Bl^riot, Louis, 390
Bhss, Tasker H., 290, 489, 540, 558
"Blocks of five," 142
Bolsheviki, 523; victory, 530
Bolshevism, 475
Bolshevist government, 561
Bond issue, of 1894, 207

Book-Buyer, The, 27
Bookman, The, 27
Boone and Crockett Club, 117, 276
Borah, William E., 376, 461, 569, 570, 572,
587 . .
Boss rule, in cities, 230
Boston University, 8
Bourne, Jonathan, 393
"Boxer" rebellion in China, 284
Boxing, 120
Boy-Ed, Captain, 448
Brady, Thomas J., 63
Bragg, General, 93
Brandegee, Frank B., 570
Brandeis, Louis, 413, 458
Breach with Germany, 470
Bread-Winners, The, 259
Brest-Litovsk Peace, 524
Brewster, Benjamin Harrison, 64
Brice, Calvin, 208
Bridges, use of steel in constructing, 58
Brinton, General, 23
Bristow, Senator, 376
British arbitration. Lord Bryce's efforts
toward, 386
British Board of Agriculture, 483
British Labor Manifesto, 524
British Munitions Ministry, 484
Brookings, Robert S., 538
Brooklyn Bridge, 70
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, 19, 2 1
Brotherhood of the Footboard, 21
Brown University, 7
Bryan, William Jennings, beaten in the
Democratic Convention, 193; advocates
an income tax, 209; nominated for Presi
dent, 1896, 220; supports free silver, 220;
against imperialism, 262; nominated for
President, 1900, 268 ; views upon constitu
tion of Oklahoma, 333; in control of the
Democratic convention, 359, 400; Wilson's
opinion of, 403; Secretary of State under
President Wilson, 421, 423; letter upon
American neutrality, 447; against war
with Germany, 470; opposes "solemn
referendum " upon treaty, 5 72 ; for ratifica^
tion of treaty without amendment, 581;
a leading figure at Democratic convention,
1920, 585
Bryce, James, 32, 386
Bryn Mawr College, 9
Buck Stove and Range Case, 361
Buckner, Simon B., 222
Buenz, 448
"Buffalo Bill" (William F. Cody), 117
Bulgaria, 555
Bull moose emblem, 400
Bunau-Varilla, 351
Buntline, Ned, 30
Bureau of Aircraft Production, 520
Bureau of Animal Husbandry, 331
Bureau of Animal Industry, 114
Bureau of Car Service, 517
Bureau of Corporations, 301, 325, 338
Bureau of Immigration, 325, 418
Bureau of Labor, 127, 325, 415
Bureau of Mines, 34X, 378, 505
Bureau of Naval Operations, 344
Bureau of War Risk Insurance, 438, 499
Burlington Railroad, 156, 295

INDEX

591

Burrows, Julius C. 147, 206, 243
Business, and politics, 265, 587; depression
in, after 1884, 130: supervision of, 342;
of government, changes and growth, 332
Butler. Gen. B. F., 43, 86, 94
Butler. Nicholas Murray, 321. 402
Cabinet, Arthur's, 54; Cleveland's, 96, 182;
Garfield's, 51 ; Harrison's, 145 ; Hayes's, 2,3;
McKinley's, 225; Roosevelt's, 276; Taft's,
365; Wilson's, 403
Cable, George W., 31
Call, the New York, 360
Cambon, Jules, 256
Camera, development of, 69
Cameron, Don, 2, 3, 264
Cameron, Simon, 2, 3
Campaign funds, charges of blackmail in,
310
Campaignof 1876, 2; of 1880, 49; of 1884, 86
of 1888, 138; of 1892, r74; of 1896, 216
of 1900, 268; of 1904, 308; of 1908, 356
of 1912, 396; of 1916, 452; of 1920, 582.
Canada, 14, 15
Canadian fisheries dispute, 385
Canadian Pacific Railroad, 107
Canadian reciprocity, 389
Canal Act of r9i2, 428
Canal Zone, 383. See also Panama
Cannon, Joseph G., 146, 307, 355, 369, 373
Cantigny, 545
Cantonments, 496
Cape May, 74
Capital and Labor, enmity between, Horace
Greeley's comment, 20; struggles between,
280. See also American Federation of
Labor, and Labor
Carey, Gen. Sam F., 42
Caribbean Sea, 431
Carleton College, 8
Carlisle, John G., 86, 96, 137, r82, 184
Carnegie, Andrew, 73, 151, 197, 296, 320
Carnegie Corporation, 320
Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, 320
Carnegie Foundation, 320
Carnegie Institution, 320
Carnegie Steel Company, 199
Carranza, Venustiano, 425, 427
Carter, Nick, 30
Cattle Kings, 106
Censorship during World War, 436
Centennial Exposition, the, 33
Central American relations, 430
Central American Supreme Court, 431
Central Pacific Railroad, 58, 293
Central Powers collapse, 552
Century Magazine, 27, 105, 143, 227, 314
Cervera, Admiral, 245, 254
Chaffee, Gen. Adna R., 245, 284, 345
Chamberlain, David H., 4
Chamberlain, Senator G. E., 449, 519, 537
Chandler, William E., 43
Chandler, Zachary, 2, 49
Charity, new theory of, 134
Chateau-Thierry, 547, 548
Chemical Warfare Service, 520
Cheradame, Andr^, 467
Chicago, Buriington and Quincy Railroad,
60, 29s, 326

Chicago stockyards, 108
Chief Joseph, 18
Child labor, 416
Children's Bureau, 415, 535
Chile, ultimatum to, 176
China, 283, 346, 568
Chinese Exclusion Bill, vetoed by Arthur,
82
Choate. Joseph H., 348
Christenson, P. P.. 587
Christian Union, The, 25, 182, 3x9
Churchill, Winston, 315
Cienfuegos, 247
City life problems, X32, 182
City political organizations, X32, 230
Civil government in the Philippines, 289
Civil Rights Cases of X884, 71
Civil Service Commission, 141, 177
Civil service reform, 82
Civil War pensions, 97
Clark, Champ, 388, 398, 400
Clarke, John H., 458
Class interests, 194
Clayton Anti-Trust Law, 4x4, 437
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 54, 96, 285
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 26, 69, 339
Clermont, 390
Cleveland, Grover, nominated for Governor
of New York, 76; nominated for President,
92 ; elected, 95 ; views upon the tariff, X3S,
178; defeated by Harrison, 142; second
election as President, X74, x8i; considered
as Democratic candidate against Roose
velt, 310; death, 359; unsuccessful efforts
for arbitration treaty with Great Britain,
386; intervention in Venezuela, 426
Closure rule, 473
Coal strike of X902, 280, 303; of 1919, S7S
Coblenz, 554
Co-education, xo
Coercion Act, of x88x, 89
Coeur d'Alene, Miners' strike at, 461
Coffin, Howard E. 484
Coinage laws revised, 36
Coinage planks in party platforms, 218
College education, decline in middle of nine
teenth century, 7
Collegiate Alumnas, Association of, 10
Collier's Weekly, 3x5, 370
CoUins, Patrick A., X38
Cologne, 554
Colombia, Republic of, 349, 385, 426
Colonial system, no desire for, 259
Columbia University, 7, 321
Commerce and Labor, Department of, 301
Commercial, the Cincinnati, 42
Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 39
Commission for the Relief of Belgium, 436,
483, 582
Commission form of government, 305
Commission on the League of Nations, 560
Commissioner of Labor, X27
Commissioner of Pensions, 98
Committee on Foreign Relations, 571
Committee on Public Information, 480, 498,
509, 529
Commoner, 419
Commonivealtk, Topeka, 104
Communist Party, 576
Coney Island, 74

592

INDEX

Confidence in stability and credit of govern
ment restored, 56
Congestion in cities, how inventions in
creased, 70
Congestion of transport, 5x6
Congress, Fifty-First, 145; Fifty-Second, 192 ;
Fifty-Third, 209; Fifty-Fourth, 215; Fifty-
Fifth, 227; Fifty-Sixth,265;Fifty-Seventh,
306; Fifty-Eighth, 328; Fifty-Ninth, 337;
Sixtieth, 354; Sixty-First, 364; Sixty-Sec
ond, 381; Sixty-Third, 4x3; Sixty-Fourth,
438; Sixty-Fifth, 476, 564; war session of
19x7, 476; Sixty-Sixth, 57X; treaty session
of, 571.
Congressional elections of X882, 76; of 1898,
260; of X902, 304; of X9X8, 555
Congressional Globe, the, 90
Congressional Government, 34, 399
Congressional Record, 569
Coniston, 3x5
Conkling, Roscoe, 2, 3, 46, 52
Conservation of national resources, 335; con
ference, 340, 369, 378, 5x2
Control of Credit, 409
Convention System, 397
Cooke, Jay, 59, x88
Cooley, Thomas M., XX4, 330
Coolidge, Calvin, 575, 583, 588
Cooper, James Fenimore, 1x6
Cooper, Peter, 42
Cooperation between army and navy, in the
war with Spain, 249
Cornell, Alonzo, 47
Cornell, Ezra, 8
Corporation activities, extension of, 280
Corporation incomes, tax on, 368
Corrupt Practices Act, 393
Cortelyou, George B., 301
Cosmopolitan Magazine, 3x4
Costa Rica, 431
Cotton States' Exposition, 7X
Council of Four, 560
Council of National Defense, 450, 457, 478,
483, 484, 489, 505, 509, S13, 520, 562
Council of Ten, 560
Council of the League of Nations, 568, 57X
Courier-Journal, Louisville, 377
Court, in American system of government, 20X
Cox, James D., 585
" Coxey's Army," 205
Crane, Senator Murray, 369
Credit system, of the South, 71
Creel, George, 480
Cricket, 122
"Crime of 1873," the, 37
Cripple Creek, miners' strike at, 280, 461
Crisp, Charles F., 175, 192
Critic, TAe, 27
Croker, Richard, 265
Croquet, X23
Cuba, 233, 346, 358, 384
Cuban coasts, patrol of, 246
Cuban constitutional convention, 289
Cuban independence, 288
Cuban junta in New York, 235
Cullom, Shelby M., X12, 181
Cummins, Albert B., 306, 373, 380
Currency Act of 1900, 266, 334
Current Literature, 27
Curtis, George W., 84, 92, 136

Custer, General. 17
Cycles of prosperity and panic, 187
Czernin. Count, 525
Daily Mail, London, 233
Dakota Territory, 38; division into states,
158
Daniels, Josephus, 403, 42X, 451
Dawes Act, 162
Day, William R., 226, 258
Debs, Eugene V., 200, 267, 311, 360, 402,
S87, 588
Declaration of London, 349, 439
Declaration of war against Germany, 476
Delaware, Lackawatma and Western Rail
road, strike of X877, 23 ; an oil road, 67
De Lima vs. Bidwell, 288
Demobilization in America, 562
Democracy in America, 386
Democratic governments in the South, up
held by local public opinion, 5
Demonetization of silver, X7S
Denman, William, 482
Denominational colleges, 8
Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, 38, 60
Dependents' Pension Bill, X50
Depew, Chauncey M., X37, X39, 153
Depression, 191, X9S
De Valera, Eamonn, 586
Devens, Charles E., Attorney-General, 2
Dewey, George, 239, 248, 287, 422
Dial, rfe, 27
Diaz, Porfirio, provisional president of Mex
ico, X5; dictator and president, 424
Dickman, General, 548
Dillon, E. J., 558
Dingley Tariff, the, 228, 272
Diplomatic isolation of the United States,
428
Direct elections, 393
Direct primaries, the, 231, 376, 393
Director-General of Railroads, 5x8
Director of the Supreme Council of Supply
and Relief, 559
Discontent, voiced by Populist platform, X74
Disfranchisement of negroes, 7X, 180, 362.
See also Negroes
Division of Purchase, Storage and Traffic,
541
Dix, Governor, 382
"Dollar a Year" men, 478
DoUiver, Senator, 371
Dominion Act, 15
Donnelly, Ignatius, 172, X92, 268
Dorsey, Stephen W., 51, 63
Dorsey and Brady, acquittal of, 64
Downes vs. BidweU, 288
Draft boards, 495
Draft of 19x7, 487, 495 ; of X9X8, S4X
Drago doctrine, 349
Dramatic standards, 3x6
Dreadnaught battleships, 291, 344, 450
Drought, in Kansas, 168
Dudley, W. W., X42
Dumba, Dr. Constantin, 448
Dupuy de L6me, 237
Eaton, Dorman B., 84
Edison, Thomas A., 69
Edmunds, George F., 92

INDEX

593

Edmunds Act, 82, 163
Education, in America, early njirrowness of,
7; its part in reconstruction, 10; recognized
as the underlying problem ot self-govern
ment, 6, U. S. Bureau of, xx
Educational renascence alter X876, 6
Educational test for suffrage in the South, 71
Edwards, Edward I., 585
Egan, Patrick, 89, X38, 176
Eight-hour day, an objective ot the National
Labor Union, 19, 457
El Caney, 252
Election frauds, 43
Electoral Commission, 4
Electoral returns, duplicate, from Southern
States, 4
Electric lighting, beginnings of, 69
Elevated railroads, 70
Eliot, Charles W., ix
Elkins, Stephen B., 209
Emergency Fleet Corporation, 481, 5x3, 535,
538, 540
Emergency Peace Federation, 471
Employer's liability for injuries, 4x6
England, disputes with, 385; negotiations
with, upon Panama Canal, 349. See also
Great Britain
English understanding of America, 3x6
Erie Railroad, 67
Esch-Cummins Act, 581
Esch-Townsend Act, 328
Espionage Act of X917, 497, 502, 576
"Ethiopiomania," 31
Evans, Robley D., 343
Evarts, WiUiam M., Secretary of State, 2
Evening Mail, New York, 447
Expedition Act, 300, 325
Exports, control of, 502
Exposure, literature of, 3x3
Failures, Commercial, 190
Fairbanks, Charies W., 355, 453
Falling prices, 225
Farm life, influence upon American char
acter, 1x6
Farmers' Alliance, x66, 171, 175
Fatherland, The, 436, 442, 447, 452, 473
Federal Board of Vocational Education, 417,
499
Federal civil service, 323
Federal Corrupt Practices Act, S7x
Federal Reserve Act, 4x1, 414, 564
Federal Reserve Board, 4xx, 587
Federal Reserve System, 411
Federal Trade Commission, 4x4, 437, 538
Federal troops in the South, 4, 5
Federalist, The, 386
Fenian raids into Canada, 15
Fifteenth Amendment, 4, 71
Filibuster, Senate anti-war, 472
Filipino Assembly, 346, 358, 420. See also
Philippines
Finance and trusts, 4x4
Financial Credit, Hayes pledged to restore,
36 .
Financial measures, 39
Financial reconstruction, 78
Financial situation in 19x3, 409
First American Field Army, 550; First Corps
of, 550; First Division of, 494, 548

Fletcher, Frank F., 427
Flour industry, 107
Foch, Gen. Ferdinand, 531, 534, S4I, S48, SSi.
553
Folger, Charles A., 76
Folk, Joseph W., 3x6, 398
Fonseca, Gulf of, 431
Food, retail prices of, 580
Food Administration, 484, 504, 509, 538, 563
Food-supply, X06
"Food will win the War," 482
Food and Fuel Act, 504, 5x4, 574, 575
Fool's Errand, A, 3X
Foraker, J. B., X39, 141, 216, 264, 270, 276,
288, 355, 362
"Force without limit," 526
Ford, Henry, 445, 557, 571, 587
Ford, Patrick, 129, X38
Ford, Paul Leicester, X32
Ford, Worthington C, 228
Foreign Concessions in China, 283
Forest reserves, 339
Forestry and Reclamation Services, 342.
See also Conservation
Fort Leavenworth, 29X , 345
Forty-second ("Rainbow") Division of
American Expeditionary Force, 494, 543,
548
Foster, John W., 16
"Fourteen Points," 522, 552, 557, 568, 570
Fourteenth Amendment, 71
Fourth Division of A. E. F., 54
Frankfurter, Felix, 536
Frauds, in mail "Star-routes," 62; in land
claims, xox
Free Silver, movement advanced by mining
booms, 37; arguments for "bimetaUism,"
170; class interests, and party views, 195;
issue weakened by rise of "anti-imperial
ism," 269, 271, 404; induces serious con
sideration of monetary matters, 409. See
also Silver.
Freedman's Bureau schools, 10
Freeman, 419
Freeman, Edward A., 32
French Canal Company, 349
Frenzied Finance, 3x5
Frick, Henry Clay, X99
Friedensturm, 533
Friends of Peace, 447
Frontier, disappearance of, 57, 60; closed,
X06; 116; its advance chedied, 156; 158,
336
Fryatt, Captain, 472
Fuel Administration, 505
Fuelless days, 5x8
Fuller, MelviUe W., 388
Funston, Frederick, 289, 427, 489
Furuseth, Andrew, 418
Gage, Lyman P., 227
Gardner, Augustus P., 443
Garfield, Harry A., 504
Garfield, James A., nominated, 50; elected
President, 51; relations with the Senate,
52; assassinated, 53
Garfield, James R., 30X
Garrison, Lindley M., 449
Gary, Indiana, 574
General Education Board, 321

594

INDEX

General Electric Company, 338
General Land OfiSce, 61, 99, 341
General Munitions Board, 484, 513, 514
General Staff, for the Army, 291, 344, 449,
541, 562, 584
Geological Survey, 1x5
George, Henry, X29, x8o, 305
Gerard, James W., 423
German armistice, 553
German drives of 19x8, 544
German Empire mobiUzed, 433
German Government, tJ. S. grievance
against, 476
German interests in Morocco, 348; in Nicara
gua, 430
German intrigue in America, 447, 453
German Navy League, 241
German Peace overtures of X9X6, 468
German propaganda in America, 436
German rivalry, 383
German Socialists, influence of, 19, 524, 525
German tariff of 1879, 8x
German-American Alliance, 287
Germany, state of war with, 476, 566; sug
gestion as to Philippines, 260; threatened
breach with, 287
Gilder, Richard Watson, 27
Gillett, Frederick H., 571
Gilman, Daniel Coit, ix
Gladden, Washington, 316
Glass, Carter, 41X, 564
Glavis, Louis R., 370
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, 26, 84, 136, 2x0,
268, 4x9
Goethals, George B., 352, 383, 429, 431, 48X,
540, 541
"Gold Democrats," 222
Gold standard, X89, 2x4, 222, 265, 27X, 276.
See also Bimetallism, and Silver
Golf, X23
Gomez, General, 234
Gompers, Samuel, 129, 281, 360, 4x5, 458,
479, 575. See also American Federation
of Labor
"G.O.P.," the, 224, 400
Gorgas, William C, 289, 352, 383
Gorman, Arthur P., 180, 208
Gould, Jay, 68, 73, 130, 294
Government by injunction, 20X
Government control, extension of, 325
Government housing, 535
Gowen, Franklin M., 21
Grain Corporation, 504
Grand Army of the Republic, 92, 97, 563
Grandissimes, The, 3X
Granger movement, the, 112, x66, 299, 328,
373, 465
Grant, Gen. U. S., renewed regard for, 48;
death of, X04
Grant and Ward, failure of, 103, x88
Graves, Henry S., 378
Great American Desert, X57
Great Britain, settlements with, 14
Great Northern Railroad, 295, 326
"Greatest Show on Earth," xx8
Greeley, Horace, 20, 44
Greenback and Labor Parties, fusion of, 86
Greenbacks, issuance necessary during Civil
War, 36; at close of Civil War, 40
Greenbackers of X876, xg

Gresham, Walter Q., 139, X74, 182
Gresham law, 35, 170, X90, 194
Grey, Viscount, 387
Guantanamo Bay, 248
Hadley, Arthur T., 267
Hague tribunals, 287, 347, 348, 385, 387
Haig, Sir Douglas, 549
Haiti, 430, 43X
"Half-i3reed," group in Republican Party,
46
Half Moon, 390
Half-tone process of making illustrations, 69
Halifax award of X877, 385
Hall of Representatives, reconstruction of,
405
Hamilton, Alexander, 35, 386, 4x2
Hampton, Gen. Wade, 4
Hancock, Gen. W. S., 50, 80
Hanna, Marcus A., 215, 222, 226, 233, 264,
269, 272, 278, 307, 328, 354, 366
Hard times, following panic of X873, 79
Harding, Warren G., 569, 583, 588
Harmon, Governor, 382, 398
Harmsworth, Alfred Charles, 233
Harper, Jesse, X67
Harper's Monthly, 27, 3x4
Harper's Weekly, 49, 84, 92, X45,399
Harper's Young People, 3X
Harriman, Edward H., 293, 329
Harris, Joel Chandler, 3X
Harrison, Benjamin, X39, X42, X45; adminis
tration of, 175
Harrison, Francis Burton, 420
Hartranft, Governor, 2x, 23
Harvey, George, 399
Haverly's Mastodon Minstrels, 3x
Hawaii becomes a Territory of the United
States, 242,344
Hay, John, Ambassador to London, 226;
member of peace commission to Paris,
X898, 258; extends American ideals across
Pacific, 272; Secretary of State under
McKinley, 283; efforts to safeguard China
during Russo-Japanese War, 346; note
about Second Hague Conference, 348;
negotiations with French Canal Company,
349-
Hay-Herran Treaty, 350
Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 285, 384, 429, 569
Hayes, John L., 80
Hayes, Rutherford B., inauguration of, x,
Cabinet and Congress, 2 ; promises, 3 ;
home rule in the South, 3; sodal unrest,
x8; railroad strikes, 21; spede payments,
35; Democratic charges against, 43; break
with the Stalwarts, 48
Haymarket riots in Chicago, 129
Hays, WiU H., 556
Haywood, William D., 46X
Hearst, William Randolph, 223, 309, 3S7,
360, 362
Henderson, David B., 146, 306
Henry Street Settlement, 4x6
Hepburn Railroad Law, 329
Hepburn Report, XX3
Herald, New York, 47, 77, 80
Herbert, Hilary A., 182
Hewitt, Abram S., X29
High prices, 573, 580

INDEX

595

"HiUx65,"S48HiU, David B., 138, X42, X57, x8o, 268, 309
HiU, James J., 295, 326
History, new school of writers of, 33
History of the People of the United States, 33
History of the Standard Oil Company, 3x5
History of the United States since the Com
promise of 1850, 34
Hoar, Senator George Frisbie, 262
Hobart, Garrett A., 2x7, 238, 269
Hobson, Richmond P., 249, 408
Hog Island, 482, 535
Holland, J. G., 27
Holt, Hamilton, 446
Home rule, promise of restoration to the
South, 3
Homestead Law, the, 99, xoo, xxo, 336, 34X;
system, 8
Homestead Works, strike at, 197, X99, 280
Honduras, 384, 431
Honorable Peter Stirling, The, X32
Hoover, Herbert C, 435, 478, 483, 504, 556,
559. 576, 582
House, Edward M., 528, 54X, 558
House on Henry Street, The, X33
Houston, David F., 404, 580
How the Other Half Lives, 133
Howard, Gen. 0. O., X7
Howells, William Dean, 30
Hubbard, Governor, quoted, 16
HubbeU letter, the, 63; 77
Hudson-Fulton celebration, 390
Huerta, Victoriano, 424, 427
Hughes, Charles E., 3x6, 356, 388, 452, 476,
556, 576
Hull House, X33, 416
Hunting Trips of a Ranchinan, 275
Huntington, CoUis P., 294
Huxley, Thomas, 6, 32
Hyphenated Americans, 453
Idaho Avalanche, The, 99
Illegal enclosures of pubhc lands, loi
Immigrants, influence in the war of classes,
24; the unassimllated, 459
Immigration, and education, 6; from Europe,
56, 88; increase after X878, 128; law of
1907,418; problems of, 325, 4'is. See also
A mericanization
Imperialism, 241, 271. See also Anti-
imperialists
Imports, power to control, 503
Incandescent light, invented, 69
Income Tax Amendment, 368
Independent, New York, 5, 319
Indian Bureau, 84
Indian Territory, 161
Indian Wars, X7
Industrial Board created, 564
Industrial confidence, 27X
Industrial reorganization, 70
Industrial unrest, 204
Industrial Workers of the World, 460
Influence of Sea-Power upon History, 212
IngaUs, John J., 172
IngersoU, Robert, 56
Initiative and referendum, the, 231, 375; and
recall, 393
Injunction, government by, 20X
Inland Waterways Commission, 339

Innocents A broad. The, 29
Insurrection in Cuba, X89S, 234
Inter-Allied Conference, 529
Inter-AUied General Staff, 53X
Inter-Allied Munitions Council, 541
Inter-Ally Coundl on War Purchases and
Finance, 527
Inter-Ocean, Chicago, the, 35, 63, 89
"Interests," in pohtics, 230
Interior, Department of the, 371
Internal revenues, 78
International conference on silver, 44
International law, 47X; American view of,
447 .
International peace, American Share in, 348,
387. See also The Hague, and Arbitration
Interstate Commerce, early investigation of,
1x2
Interstate Commerce Act, XX4, 327, 380
Interstate Commerce Commission, 114, 327,
379, 404, 413
Intimidation of negro voters, 4. See also
Negroes
"Iowa idea," the, 305, 366
Irish Land League, 89
Irish vote, 88
Irish World, X29
Irons, Martin, X30
Irrigation, 337, 379
Italy, controversy with, 176; enters World
War, 474
Jackson, Andrew, 35, 82, 4x2
James, Henry, 30
Japan, a possible rival in the Pacific, 344;
war with Russia, 346; relations with China,
356; immigration to LT. S., 356; Taft's visit
to, 358; grievances against U. S., 428;
joins the Alhes against Germany, 474
Jenckes, Thomas A., 84
Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog, 29
Joan of Arc, The Personal Recollections of, 30
Joffre, Marshal, 490
Johns Hopkins University, 11, 321
Johnson, Andrew, 83
Johnson, Senator Hiram W., 400, 454, 476,
570, 572, 582, 587
Johnson, Robert Underwood, 27
Johnson, Tom, x8o, 305
Johnston, Gen. Joseph E., 2
Jones, B. F., 93
Jones, "Golden Rule," 305
Jones Merchant Marine Act, 584
Journal, New York, 233
Journalism, new types of, 3x3, 419
Jungle, The, 3x5
Kansas City Star, 4x9
Kansas Pacific Railroad, 73, 156
Keating-Owen Child Labor Bill, 416
Kelley, "Pig Iron," X37
Kemble, William H., 49
Keokuk, dam at, 338
Kerensky, Alexander, 523
Kern, John W., 360
Kerosene, 66
Key, David M., Postmaster-General, 2
Keyes, Col. E. W., 47
Kiau-chau, 241, 283
Kiel Canal, Opening of, 431

596

INDEX

King, Clarence, xx5
Klondike gold fields, 225
Knickerbocker Trust Company, 334
Knights of Labor, the, 24, 127, X30, x68,
192
Knox, Senator Philander C, 300, 383, 384,
426, 476, 570
Labor and politics, 361 ; and the world war,
479, 534
Labor conferences, 575
Labor, Department of, 404, 535
Labor movement, a stratification 01 society,
19
Labor problem, new importance of, X26
Labor problems, 280
Labor, unsettled condition of, 573
Labor's National Peace Council, 447
Lady of the Aroostook, The, 30
La Follette, Robert M., 23X, 308, 328, 373,
375, 394. 396, 407, 413. 418, 463, 570, 587
La Follette's Magazine, 419
Lamar, Justice, 388
Lamont, Daniel, X82
Land distribution, 99
Land grants to colleges, 8, 4x7 ; to railroads,
57, 102
Lane, Franklin K., 404
Lansing, Robert, 448, 558, 567, 572
Las Guasimas, battle of, 249
Lathrop, Julia C, 4x5
Latin America, relations with, 384
Law of Contraband, 440
Lawrence strike, 459
Lawson, Thomas, 3x5
Leader, Milwaukee, 5x0
Leadville, Colo., 39
League of Nations, 557, 560; covenant of,
56X ; debate upon, 565, 573
League to Enforce Peace, 446, 557
Lee, Fitzhugh, 236
Legge, Alexander, 538
Legislative assembly in the Philippines, first,
290. See also Filipinos, and Philippines
Lenine, Nicolai, 475, 525
Leo XIII, 24
Leslie's, 48, 129, 2xx, 268
Leupp, Frands E., 308
Lever Act, 504 _
Lexow Commission, 202
Liberator, 4x9
Liberty engine, 485
Liberty Loans, first, 486; drives, 508
Life, 421
Life on the Mississippi, 26, ZZ9
Liggett, Gen. Hunter, 550
Lincoln, Territory of, bill to establish, 38
Lind, John, 425
Literature, transition in, 30
Literary standards, 316
Literary theories about 1866, the accepted, 29
Literature, the "immortals" of, 29
Little Big Horn River, 17
Little Lord Fauntleroy, 31
Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, 90
Lloyd George, David, 48X
Lloyd, Henry D., 66, 201, 298
Loan Act, 485
Loans to Allies, 486, 579
Local color in American literature, 30

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 9X, x8i, 262, 387, 557;
manifesto of, 569, S7x, 582
Logan, Gen. John A., 92
"Long drive," the, xo8, xxi
Long, John D., 238, 269
"Long-and-short-haul clause," the, 114
Looking Backivard, 131, 267
Lorillard, Pierre, 74
Lorimer, Wilham, 376
Louvain, 437
Lovett, Robert S., 5x3
Low, Seth, 305
Lowden, Frank 0., 583
Lowell, A. Lawrence, 446
Lowell Institute, 32
Lowell, James Russell, 26, 149
Luce, Stephen B., 212
Lurton, Justice, 388
Lusitania, the, 441, 528
MacDonald, Sir John A., 15
MacVeagh, Wayne, 5X, x82
McAdoo, William G., 403, 4x2, 507, 518, 564,
581, 585
McClellan, George B., 7, 18
McClure's Magazine, 3x4
McCormick, Vance, 503
McCrary, George W., Secretary of War, 2
McKinley, William, early study of the tariff,
79; minority leader in House of Represen
tatives, 137; a candidate for Presidential
nomination, 139, X78; tariff bill, 146, 214;
elected President, 222; relations with Con
gress, 264; public opinion upon the issues,
271; assassinated, 272
McKinley Bill of X890, 214, 366
McMaster, John Bach, 33
McNamara brothers, 462
McParlan, James, 21
McReynolds, James C, 413
Madero, Francisco I., 424
Mahan, A. T., 2x2, 238, 245
Mail service to the frontier, 61
Maine, destruction of battleship, 237
Mainz, 554
Mandatories, 570
Mangin, Gen., 549
Manila Bay, battle of, 240
Manila, city taken by assault, 242
Mann, Horace, 7
Mann, James "R., 406, 571
Mann-Elkins Act, 380
Manning, Daniel, 96
Manning, Van H., 378
March, Gen. Peyton C, 541, 556
Marcy, WiUiam H., 82
Marines in the War, 548
Marne, second battle of the, 548
Marroquin, President, 350
Marshall, 'Thomas R., 398, 400
Martlne, James, 399
Marx, Karl, X28, 459
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 6, 8
Masses, The, 4x9, 5x0
Mechanical progress, 390
Mergers, railroad, 294
Merit system, 84
Merritt, Gen. Wesley, 242
Metropolitan Magazi'ne, 419
Meuse-Argonne, battle of, 552

INDEX

597

Mexico, friction with, i6, 348; intervention
in, 427
Mexican occupation, 469
Mexican policy of President Hayes, 17
Mexican revolution of 1876, 15
Mexican revolution of 19x2, 424
Michigan AgriculturzJ College, 8
"Middle-of-the-road" Populists, 268, 309.
Miles, Gen. Nelson A., 18, 17X, 203, 243, 256,
291
Military missions from France and Great
Britain, 490
MiUtia, and regular army, 202
MiUs BiU, 408
MiUs, Roger Q., 137, 139, 146
Miners' movement for free silver, 43
Mines, North Sea barrage, 490
Mining, 37, 379
Mississippi River, 70, 339
Missouri Padfic Railroad, 130
Mr. Isaacs, 30
MitcheU, John, 281, 303
"MobUe Doctrine," 426
Modern Instance, A, 30
"Molly Maguires," the, 20, 281
Monetary conference, X89
Monetary investigations, 408
Money kings, 71
Money trust, 410
Monopolies, 67
Monroe Doctrine. 210, 286, 426, 568, 570
Moody and Sankey, 133
Mooney, Thomas, 463, 47s
Morgan, J. Pierpont, 207, 295
Morgan, Senator John Tyler, 350
Mormons, in Utah, 163
Morocco, crisis in, 347
MorriU Act, 8, 417
Morrill Tariff of 1861, 77
Morse, Samuel F. B., 68
Morton, J. S., X93
Morton, Levi P., 139
Moses, George H., 570
Motor cars, 392
Mott, Lucretia, 579
"Movies," the, 317
Moyer, 461
"Muckraking," 313
Mugwumps, the, gx, 139, 402
Mulligan Letters, the, 90, 139
Munitions embargoes, 446
Munn vs. IlUnois, case of, 113
Munsey, Frank A., 397
Munse'y's Magazine, 314
Murchlson letter, the, 142, 215
Music, 318
Nasby, Petroleum V., 32
Nashville Normal College, 10
Nation, The, New York, 27, 84, 92, 103, 173,
184, 193, 197, 206, 210, 223, 301, 376, 394,
419. 570
Nation, London, 468, 474, S32
National Academy of Sdences, 451
National Army, 494
National banking system, 412
National Conservation Commission, 340
National Defense Act of 1916, 449. 487. S84
National defense, appropriation for, 244
National Farmers' Alliance, 166

National German-American Alliance, 436
National Guard, 460
National Labor Congress of 1868, 20
National Labor Party, 20
National Labor Union, 19, 127
National Museum, 381
National Non-Partisan League, 465
National politics, loss of hold upon people, 56
National Progressive Republican League,
393
National Prohibition Party, 20
National Research Council, 45X
National Security League, 443, 519
National Silver Party, 221
National unity in 1876, the problem of, 6
National War Labor Board, 536, 556
Nationalist Republican Party, 172
Naturalization problems, 415. See also
Americanization and Immigration
Naval Appropriation Act of 1916, 450
Naval architecture, X98
Naval Consulting Board, 45X
Naval participation in World War, 490
Naval Program, of 19x6, 450
Naval War College, 2x2
Naval War of 1812, 275
Navigation, inland, 339
Navy, the new, 21 x
Navy League, 443
Negroes, education of, xo, 71, 180, 362
Neo-RepubUcanism, 136
Neutral trade, 501
Neutrahty at opening of World War, 435
New Mexico, admission of, 378
"New Nationalism," 38X, 395
New Republic, 4x9, 570, 582
New York Central Railroad, 23, 67, 72
New York College Settlement, X33
New York mayoralty campaign of 1886, X29
New York Yacht Club, 120
Newberry, Senator Truman H., 57X
Newlands, Francis G., 337
Nez Percys Indians, 17
Nicaragua, 384, 430; right of way, 431
Nicholas II of Russia, 474
Nicholls, Frands T., 4
Nicolay and Hay's Life of Lincoln, 227, 259,
314
Ninety-third Division, A. E. F., 548
Non-Partisan Leader, 465
Non-Partisan League, 465
Norris, Frank, 315
Norris, George W., 377
North American Review, X28, 138, 151
North Pole, discovery of, 391
North Sea, 490
Northern Padfic Railroad, 57, 59, 107, iio,
157, 29s, 326, 334
Northern Securities Company, 299, 326
Northwest Ordinance, pledges public aid to
common schools, 6
Nye, Bill, 32
Observer, 404
Octopus, The, 3x5
Office-holders in politics, 47
Officers' Training Camps, 487, 49S
Official Bulletin, 480, 563
O'Gorman, James A., 429
Ohio Constitutional Convention, 395

598

INDEX

"Ohio idea," the, 41
Ohio Life and Trust Company, x88
Ohio statesmen, the, 2x6
Oil business, combination in, 67
Oil, discovery of, 424
Oklahoma, x6i ; opening of, X62, 332, 378
"Old Guard," 583
O'Leary, Jeremiah A., 454
Olney, Richard, X82
"Omnibus States," admission of the, 155
"Open door," in China, 283
Opera, 3x8
Ord, Gen., X7
Order of the Carabao, 420
Order of the Dragon, 420
Oregon and Trans-Continental Co., 59
Oregon Railway and Navigation Co., 59
Organization of railroad employees, 21
O'Shaughnessy, Nelson, 426
Outlook, X93, 300, 306, 307, 367, 368, 4x9, 5x8
Overman BiU, 520, 537
Overproduction, agricultural, 165
Overproduction, in x888, 136
Pacifist movements, 445, 471
Packard, Stephen B., 4
Packing houses, rise of, X09
Page, Thomas Nelson, 423
Page, Walter Hines, 423
Palace of Peace, 387
Palmer, A. Mitchell, 439, 504, 574, 585
Palmer, John M., 222
Pan-American Congress, considered, 54, X49
Pan-German Plot Exposed, 467
Pan-Germanism, 433
Panama, secession from Colombia, 35X
Panama Canal, Goethals's work upon, 383;
necessity for, 54, 242, 272, 285, 349, 352,
358; opening of, 43X ; repeal of tolls exemp
tion, 429; tolls controversy, 585; treaty
with Colombia, 426
Panic of X857, x88; of X873, x8, 4X, x88; of
X884, X03; ot X893, X84, x86, 293; of X907,
334, 343, 409
Paris, Treaty of, 283, 288, 345
Parker, Alton B., 309, 359
Parker, Edwin B., 538
Parkman, Francis, 33
Party heresies, 306
Passes, abolition of free railroad, 330
Patronage and the Senate, 52
Patrons of Husbandry, XX2
Pauncefote, Lord, 569
Payne, Henry C, 309
Payne, Sereno E., 367
Payne-Aldrich Tariff, 367, 374, 382, 390, 407
Peabody, George, xo
Peace Commission, 258
Peace Conference, 567; compromises of the,
568
Peace, European opinion of the, 559
"Peace of Justice," 560
Peace overtures of 1917, 522
Peace treaties, 420. See also Arbitration
treaties
Peace Treaty of xgig, delay in ratifying, 575
"Peace without victory," 560
Peary, Robert E., 39X
Pembina, Territory of, discussed, 38
Pendleton, George W., 84

Pennsylvania constabulary, 460
Pennsylvania Railroad strike of 1877, 18;
an oil road, 67, 72, 73, X52
Pennsylvania State College, 8
Penrose, Senator Boies, 264, 328, 369, 439,
583
Pension laws, X50
People's Council for Democracy and Terms
of Peace, 5x0
People's Party, the, organized, 1891, X72;
platform, X74: for free coinage of silver and
gold, X89; success in elections of X892, 205;
gathering power in 1896, 2x4; waning
hopes, 22x; leads Republican party to
counter-reformation, 229. See also Popu
list Party
Perkins, George W., 3x0
Pershing, Gen. John J., 489, 545, 556
Personal Memoirs, Gen. Grant's, X05
Retain, Gen., 548
Petroleum industry, beginnings of, 66
Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, strike
of 1877, 2X
Phihppine Islands, 259, 289, 344, 345, 358,
368, 420
PhiUips, Wendell, 2, 42
Phonograph, invented, 69
Photographic dry plate, invented, 69
Pinafore, 422
Pinchot, Gifford, 339, 370, 376, 395, 439
Pipe-lines, for oil, 67
Pitney, Justice, 388
Pittman Silver Act, 539
Pittsburgh, rioting in, 23
Piatt Amendment, 384
Piatt, Thomas C, 2, 47, 53, 145, 264, 268,
270, 328
Plattsburg, 450
Plumb plan, 580
Poindexter, Senator Miles, 407, 557, 570, 572
Police Strike in Boston, 575
Pomeroy's Democrat, 42
Population, increase of dty, 132
Populism, 165, 221, 268, 305, 309, 368, 465
Populist Party, the, organized, 1891, 172;
platform, X74; Populist vote throws vic
tory to Democrats, X892, 181; practical
disappearance of, 360; first to discuss
initiative and referendum, 375; advocate
of Postal Savings Act, 380; original planks
largely adopted by the older parties, 401.
See also People's Party
"PorkopoUs," X06
Port Arthur, 283
Porto Rico, 256, 259. 288
Portsmouth, Treaty of, 346
Post, Washington, 542
Post-Office Department, 6x
Postal Savings Act, 380
Potter, Clarkson N., 43
Potter, Henry C, X3x
Potter Law, of Wisconsin, 113
Powderly, 'Terence V., X2g, X69, X92
Powell, J. W., XX5
Pre-dreadnaught battleships, 2gi
Preemption Laws, 100, xxo, 115
Preparedness movement, 442
President, the office of, 278
Presidential leadership, 406
Presidential patronage, 83

INDEX

599

Price-Fixing Committee, 538
Prices of Commodities, cause of decrease in,
37
Primary, the direct, 23X, 396
Prince, L. B., 48
Prince and the Pauper, The, 30
Princeton University, 321
Priorities, control of, 5x2, 537
Private fortunes, accumulation ot, 71
Problem of the Philippines, 259
Professional education, 10
Progress and Poverty, 129, 305
Progressive Party, the, 395, 398, 453; and
Roosevelt, 400, 45X
Prohibition, 94, 42X, 578
Propaganda, during World War, 436
Property and politics, 224
Prosperity, after- resumption of specie pay
ments, in X879, 76; era of, 56, 334; in the
eighties, 7g; revival of, 266
Protection and the gold standard, 2x4; in
Canada, 8x; the "Chinese wall" of, X49;
varying views upon, 8x . See also Bimetal
lism and Tarijf
Protective tariff, 86, 276
Protocol of X898, 258
Provindalism, 32
Provost-Marshal-General, 488, 536
Public Land frauds, gg
Public Ledger, Philadelphia, 478, 582
Public opinion, 3x2
Puck, 27s
Pujo, A. P., 410
Pullman strike, the, 200, 280, 361
Pure Food Act, 331
Quay, Matthew S., 23, X40, 264, 270, 304, 328
Quick, Herbert, 395
Radchffe College, 10
Radical Republicans, embittered by Presi
dent Hayes's Cabinet appointments, 2
Radicalism, revolutionary, 575, 576
Railroad Act of xgxo, 380
Railroad administration, during the war, 518
Railroad Brotherhoods, strike of, 454
Railroad construction, x5
Railroad Control Act, 580
Railroad Labor Board, 581
RaUroad regulation, xx2, 377
Railroad reorganization, 293
Railroad riots of 1877, a sign of a new indus
trial epoch, 23
Railroad strikes of 1877, 21, 24, 129, 460
Railroads, expansion of, 57
Railroads War Board, 5x7
Ramona, 3X
Ranches, cattle, xio
Randall, Samuel J., 43
Rankin, Jeannette, 476
Rapid transit, 70
Ratification of Treaty of peace with Spain,
262
Ratio between values of gold and silver, 35
Reading Railroad, xgi
Recall of judges, 379
Reciprocity with Canada, 388, 389, 3g4
Reciprocity with Cuba, 302
Reclamation fund, 337
Recognition, demanded by Diaz, x5

Reconstruction, 566
Recreation, popular, 74
Redemption of greenbacks, demands for, 4x
Reed, 'Thomas B., supports McKinley tariff,
137; Republican leader in House of Repre
sentatives, X46; Speaker of the House, X78,
xg2: defeated for Presidential nomina
tion, 2x7; re-elected speaker, 228; retires
from Congress, 306; leader in revision of
House rules, 373
Referendum, the, 23X
Reform, appeal for, 77
Reform Program, 374
Reid, Whitdaw, 178
Religious spirit, 319
Remsen, Ira, ix, 32X
Repeal of Sherman Silver Purchase Act, 191
Representation, two theories of, 276
Representatives, House of, change in rules,
376; anxious to embarrass President
Hayes, 3
Republic, 391
Republican factions, 46
Republican governments in the South, sup
ported by President Grant, 5
Republican Party, reformed to appeal to the
people, 230; reorganized, 556
Rerdell, M.C., 64
Resumption, Act of 1875, 41, 76, 207, 226
Revenue Act of 19x7, 505, 564
Review, The Weekly, 4x9
Rheims, 437, 548
Rhodes, James Ford, 34
Rights of Neutrals, 434, 474
Riis, Jacob, X33, 308
Riley, James Whitcomb, 32
Rise of Silas Lapham, 30, 74
Rising prices, 225
Robin Hood, The Merry Adventures of, 3X
Rockefeller, John D., 8, 66, 73, 296, 320
Rockefeller Foundation, 321
RockefeUer Institute, 32X
Roller skate, the, 123
Roman Church, attitude toward SodaHsm, 24
Roosevelt, the. Admiral Peary's boat, 3gx
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 586
Roosevelt, Theodore, Sr., nomination as Col
lector of New York not confirmed by Sen
ate, 47
Roosevelt, Theodore, a leader against the
nomination of Blaine, gi ; a cattle ranch
man, xxo; member of the Boone and Crock
ett Club, XX7; interest ir_ boxing, 121 ; nom
inated for mayor of New York, 130; urges
reform in election system, X43 ; appointed
to Civil Service Commission by Pres. Harri
son, 177 ; Police Commissioner of New York
City, 202 ; Assistant Secretary of the Navy,
238 ; supports Wood in raising the " Rough
Riders," 243 ; at battle of San Juan, 254; the
"round robin" at Santiago, 256; a national
figure in politics, 26x; Governor of New
York, 270; Vice-President, 27X ; succeeds to
Presidency, 274; early political career, 274;
varied activities, 275; open door in China,
284; Panama Canal Problems, 285; inter
vention in Venezuela, 286; administration
of colonies, 288; urges reform of mihtary
education, 291; railroad reorganization,
293; by business, 296; presidential cam-

6oo

INDEX

paign of 1904, 302; attitude toward big
business, Cuba and the anthracite coal
strike, 302 ; attack upon Judge Parker, 3xx ;
interest in immigration problems, 325;
panic of xgo7, 334; attitude upon conser
vation, irrigation, and water powers, 335;
cruise of the battle-fleet, 343; changes in
War Department, 345; wins Nobel Peace
Prize, 346; mediator between Japan and
Russia, 347; call tor Second Hague Con
ference, 348; the Panama Revolution, 351;
attitude toward third term, 355; hunting
trip to Africa, 364; views upon tariff revi
sion, 366; Pinchot's letter, 372; insurgent
revolt against Taft, 373 ; statement of party
principles, 375; return from Africa, 380;
Nobel prize address, 381 ; efiect of policies
upon South America, 383; opposes arbitra
tion with Great Britain, 387; National Pro
gressive Republican League, 393; pressure
of friends to accept nomination, 395 ; nomi
nated by Progressive Party for President,
400; attempted assassination,'4ox ; defeated
in Presidential election, 402 ; upon Ameri
can neutrality, 436; continued political
leadership, 451; the "Roosevelt Division,"
497; opposes program of League to Enforce
Peace, 557; death, 573
Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 576
Roosevelt-Root administration of the army,
584
Root, Elihu, reorganization of War Depart
ment, 269, 272, 288, 2gx, 345; Roosevelt's
opinion of, 356; leadership in establishing
Central American court of arbitration, 384;
negotiates arbitration treaty with Great
Britain, 386 ; chairman of Repubhcan Con
vention, 3g8; mission to South America,
426; supports League of Nations, 587
Rosen, Baron, 348
Rosenwald, Julius, 484, 5x4
"Rough Riders," the, 243, 250, 254, 4g7
"Round robin," before Santiago, 256
Royal Mounted Pohce, 18
"Rum, Romanism, and RebeUion," Bur
chard's use of the phrase, 94
Rusk, Jeremiah M., XX4
Russia, 346, 428; revolution of 19x7, 474;
of 1918, 5X2, 561, 566, 573
Revolutionary Government, 522
Russo-Japanese War, 346
Ryan, John D., 520, 540
Saar VaUey, 568
Sabotage, 459
Sackville-West, Sir Lionel, X42, 215
"Safety First" Campaign, 417
Sagasta, Ministry of, 236
St. John, Governor, g4
St. Lawrence fisheries, arbitration upon, 14
Saint-Mihiel, 550
St. Nicholas, 31
Salvador, 43X
Salvation Army, 133
Sampson, W. T., 238, 245, 255
Sanitation of Canal Zone, 352
Santiago, blockade of, 247 ; naval battie, 254
Santo Domingo, 384, 43X
Sarajevo, 432
Saturday Evening Post, 582

Saturday Review, London, 524
Scandals, caused by corruption in national
and local poUtics, 46
Schedule K, 394
Schley, W. S., 245, 255
Schurman commission in the Philippines, 289
Schurz, Carl, 2, 3, 46, 84, 136, 182
Schwab, Charles M., 540
Sdence, demand for recognition in educa
tion, 7; and religion, warfare of, 12; and
scholarship, as the "new education," 11
Scientific progress, 390
Scott, Frank A., 5x3
Scott, Hugh L., 345, 475, 489, 540
Scott, Thomas A., 23, 73
Scribner's Magazine, 27
Scribner's Monthly, 27, 314
Seamen's Act, 418
Second Division, 494, 547, 548
Sedan, 552
Selective Service Act, 498, 536
Senators, U. S., direct election of, S78
Separate peace, 437
Services of Supply, 492
Settlements, social, 133
SeweU, Arthur, 221
Sewing machines, development of, 69
Shafter, WiUiam R., 17, 244, 249, 255
Shame of Ihe Cities, 315
Shantung, 568
Shaw, Anna Howard, 579
Sheridan, Gen., prophecy of continental ex
pansion, 60
Sherman, James Schoolcraft, 359, 381, 389,
398, 402
Sherman, John, Secretary of the Treasury
under Hayes, 2 ; author of bill for resump
tion of spede payments, 41 ; a leader of the
Half-Breed Group of Republicans, 46;
ambitions for Presidential nomination, 88,
139, 216; Secretary of State under McKin
ley, 226, 233; retirement, 256. See also
Silver Purchase Act
Sherman, Lawrence Y., S70
Sherman, WiUiam T., 14
Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 297, 358, 364, 377,
413
Shimonosekl, Treaty of, 346
"Shin-plasters," 36
Shipping Control Committee, S40
Sholes, Charles Latham, 68
Significance of the Frontier in American His
tory, 34
Silver, dedine in, 36; demonetization of, 175;
free coinage of, 150, 2x8. See also Bimet
allism and Free Silver
Silver money, cheap, 103
Silver Purchase Act, Sherman's, 149, 155,
X70, X84, x8g, igx, 205, 206
Sims, William S., 490, 556, 584
Sinclair, Upton, 3x5
Sinn Fein Republic, 586
Sioux Indians, X7
Sitting BuU, 17
"Sixteen to One," 2x8
Sky-scrapers, 198
Slater, John F., 10
Slums, problem of the, 132
Smith CoUege, 9
Smith, Goldwin, sp, 149

INDEX

6oi

Smith, Hoke, 429
Smith-Lever Act, 417
Sodal spirit and religion, 319
Sodal unrest in 1877, 18
Sodal welfare, higher level of, 187
Sodalism in Europe, 24, 524, 576
Sodalist Party, 267, 458; emergency con
vention in Chicago, 479; split in party,
479. 576
Sodology, the new sdence of, 134
Soissons, 548
" Solemn referendum," 581
Solidarity, 419
Somme, third battle of, 549
Sons of Vulcan, igg
South, development of the, 71
Southern Dakota Railroad, 159
Southern Education Board, 320
Southern Padfic Railroad, 16, 58, 152;
merger, 293, 378
Spain and the Cuban insurrection, 235; war
with, 239
Spanish Treaty of 1898, 569
Spargo, John, 480
Spectator, London, 523
Spencer, Herbert, 32
Spoils system, 82
Spooner, Senator, 328
Sport, rise of, xxg
"Stalwarts," collapse of, 46
"Stand-pat " tariff policy, 394
"Stand-pat" RepubUcans, 354, 365, 369,
371, 404, 408, 439
Standard Oil Company, 66, 74, 296, 362
Standard time, 61
Stanford, Leland, 294
"Star routes," for mail, 62
State constabularies, 460
State Coundls of Defense, 509
State Food Administrations, 505
"Steam RoUer," 398
Stedman, E. C, 29
Steel, X97, 296
Steel strike of 1919, 574
Steffens, Lincoln, 315
Stettinius, Edward R., S4i
Stevenson, Adlai E., 180
Stewart, A. T., 72
Stewart, WilUam M., 36, 174
Stimson, Henry L., 381
Stockholm coiiference, the, 524
Stone, W. J., 447
Storage and Traffic Service, 541
"Strict accountability," 441
Strikes, in the Southwest, X30; of 1892, Pitts
burgh, 197; of 1893, 202. See also Capi
tal and Labor
Stuenenberg, Ex-Govemor, 461
Submarine boat, 440
Submarine warfare, 441 ; unrestricted, 469
Sugar Equalization Board, 505
Sugar Trust, 366
Sumner, WiUiam Graham, 79
Sun, New York, 50, 73, gx, 94, 334
Supreme War Coundl, 529, 552, 553, SS9
Surveyor-General of Purchases, 541
Sussex, the, 449, 467, 469
Swarthmore College, 8
SyndicaUsm, 459

Taft, William Howard, chairman of Philip
pine Commission, 289; prominent in anti
trust cases, 298; critidzes constitution of
Oklahoma, 333; Secretary of War under
Roosevelt, 345; visits to Panama, 352;
supported by Roosevelt for Presidential
nomination, 357; elected President, 362;
inaugural address, 364; insurgents, 369,
373; Cabinet, 373; tariff revision, 365;
BalUnger controversy, 370; conservation,
371; insurgent revolt, 373; constructive
legislatian, 377; railroad act of igxo, 380;
Panama Canal, 383; relations with Latin
America, 384; Canadian fisheries dispute,
385; British arbitration, 386; reorganized
Supreme Court, 388; Champ Clark and
the Democratic program, 388; Canadian
redprodty, 38g; party split, 3g3; tariff
policy, 3g4; National Repubhcan Com
mittee contests, 3g7; renominated for
President, 398; defeated by Wilson, 402:
attiiude toward Mexican revolution, 424;
President of League to Enforce Peace, 446:
joint-chairman National War Labor
Board, 536, 356; supports League of
Nations, 565, 587
Tammany Democrats, 93
Tank-cars, invented, 67
Tanner, Corporal, 98, 145, 150
TarbeU, Ida M., 3x4
Tariff, of x86i (Morrill), 77; of 1883, 81; of
X890 (McKlinley), X47, 151; of 1894 (Wil
son), 208; of X897 (Dingley), 228; of 1909
(Payne-AJdrich), 367; of 1913 (Underwood-
Simmons), 406, 437; the, and poUtics, 86;
and the "Iowa idea," 305; biUs of Under
wood-La FoUette combination, 394; Cleve
land's reform ideas on, 137, 404; commis
sion, expert, 407; commission of 1882, 80;
commission of 1916, 45X ; the issue in 1888,
135; revision of, 77, 306, 365, 377,405. See
also Protection and Reciprocity
Taussig, F. W., 407
Taxation, War, 507
Taxes before X865, 78
Taylor, Hannis. 236
Telegraph, invented, 68
Telephone, invented, 68
TeUer, Henry M., 2x9
Tennis, 124
Tenure of Office BiU, the, 83
Texas border, measures to protect, 16
"Texas idea," the, 305
Texas Padfic RaUroad, 57, 58, 73, 102, 294
The Man Roosevelt, 308
Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen, 308
Theoiy of the land laws, xoo
Third Division, A. E. F., 547, 548
Third Field Army, A. E. F., 557
Third parties in xgo8, 360
Third-Party movements, 586
Thirty-second Division, A. E. F., 4g4, 549
Thirty-third Division, A. E. F., 549
Thompson, Richard M., Secretary of the
Navy, 2
Thorpe, F. N., 160
Thurman, Allen G., 138
Times, London, 492
Times, Los Angeles, 461
Times, New York, 471

602

INDEX

Times-Democrat, New Orleans, 173
Titanic, the, 391
Tom Sawyer, 26, 339
Toynbee, Arnold, X33
Trade unions, organization of national, 19
Tramp Abroad, A, 29
Trans-Missouri freight cases, 299
Transport fleet, 494
Transport service, 543
Transportation system, a national, 57
Treasury, state of, in X893, X84; in 1894, 207
Treaty of peace with Spain, 260, 283
Treaty of Versailles, opposition to, 570;
ratified by European Powers, 57X; rati
fication refused by U. S. Senate, 572
Treaty of Washington, X4
Treves, Sir Frederick, 352
Tribune, Chicago, 37, 47, 50, 140, X73, 395
Tribune, New York, 3, 42, 43, 5x, 80, 8g, 145,
313, 364, 576
Trolley-car, experiments upon, 70
Trotzky, Leon, 475, 525
Trust legislation, 4x3
Trust movement, revival of, 267, 40g
Trust problem, economics of, 327
Trusts, control of, 312; expansion of, 302;
economic arguments against, 151 ; exchange
of directors, 4x0; interlocking directorates,
415
Truth, New York, 51
Turkey. 55X, 555
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 34
Tuskegee Institute, xo
Tuxedo Park, 74
Twain, Mark. See Clemens, Samuel Langhorne
Tweed, exploits of, 46
Twenty-Eighth (Iron) Division, A. E. F.,548
Twenty-Seventh Division, A. E. F., 54g
Twenty-Sixth (Yankee) Division, A. E. F.,
494, 543, 544, 548
Twenty Years of Congress, 54, 88
"Twihght of the Poets." 2g
Typesetting machine, 69
Typewriter, invented, 68
Uncle Remus, 31
Underwood, Oscar W., 389, 398, 405
Underwood-Simmons Act, 406, 4XX
Unemployment, a cause of the railroad
strikes of X877, 22
Union Labor Party, X67
Union Pacific Railway, 57, 73, X07, X56,
293
Union Party, the, 83
Unionism, secrecy of, 20
United Empire Loyalists, X4
United Labor Party, 130
United Mine Workers of America, 280, 303,
575
United States grievances while a neutral, 439
United States Bureau of Education, 464
United States Geological Survey, 337
United States Housing Corporation, 535
United States Railroad Administration, 518,
538, 574, 580
United States Shipping Board, 438, 45X, 481,
584
United States Steel Corporation, 282, 296,
320, 574
United States war loans, 527

University of California, 8; of Chicago, 8; of
Illinois, 8; of Minnesota, 8; of the South,
8; of Wisconsin, 8, 32X
Unrost, industrial, 194, 566, 573. See also
Strikes
Utah, X63
Vail, Theodore N., 68
Van Devanter, Justice, 388
Van Dyke, Henry, 423
Van Hise, Charles Richard, 321
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 72
Vanderbilt, WiUiam H., 23, 68
Vanderbilt, WiUiam K., 72
Vassar College, 6, 9
Vaudeville, 317
Venezuela dispute, 2x0, 286, 348, 384
Vera Cruz, 427
Verdun, 467, 551
Victory Loan, 508, 564
Viereck's, 473
Vilas, WiUiam F., Postmaster-General, 96
ViUa, Francesco, 427, 450
ViUard, Henry, 59, x88, 295
Vincent, George E., 321
Virgin Soil, x8
Viviani, Rene, 490
Volstead Act, 579
Von Bernstorff, Count Johann, 449, 470, 478
Von Hertling, Chancellor, 525
Von Igel, Wolf, 448
Von Papen, 448
Vote, the negroes right to, 71. See also
Disfranchisement
Wabash system, the, 73, X30
Wages, reduction of railroad, in X877, 18;
and prices in X890, 126
Waite, David H., X92
Wald, Lillian D., X33, 4x6
Waldorf Hotel, X83
Walking, 120
Walsh, Frank P., 536
Wanamaker, John, X45, 2x5
"War Cabinet," 520
War coahtion governments, 555
War College, 345
War Department, reorganization of, 2go, 344,
540
War finance, 485
War Finance Corporation, 53g
War Industries Board, 5x3, 520, 526, 537,
538, 539, 551. .
War Labor Policies Board, 536
War message, McKinley's, 238 ; Wilson's, 476
War revenue legislation, 437
War risk, 4gg
War service committees, 5x5
War Trade Board, 503, 506, 563
Ward, Artemus, 32
Warfare, new conditions of, 501
Warren, Francis E., 48g
Washington, Booker T,, 10, 279
Watchful Waiting, 423, 425
Water powers, control of, 338
Watson, Thomas E., 175, 22X, 360
Watterson, Henry, 377, 4xg, 427
Wayland, Frands, 7
Wealth against Commonwealth, 201, 298
Weaver, James B., 50, 172. 174

INDEX

603

Wei-Hai-Wd, 283
Weller, Lemuel H., 167, 360
WeUesley College, 9
WeUs, David A., 79
Wells, H. G., 267
West Point, 7, 29X
West, women's education in, 9
Western Federation of Miners, 360, 460
Western sentiment upon conservation, 371
Western Union Telegraph Company, the, 68
Westinghouse Electric Company, 33 8
Weyler, Gen. Valeriano, 234
Wharton, Joseph, 79
Wheat industry, X06
When the Sleeper Wakes, 267
White, Edward Douglass, 388
White, Henry, 558
A\"hite, Horace, 92
Whitlock, Brand, 305, 423, 435
Whitney, WiUiam C, gi6, 180
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 28
"Wild West" shows, 117
WUde, Oscar, 33
WiUard, Daniel, 537
WiUiam II of Germany, abdication of, SS3
Wilson, Henry Lane, 425
WUson, William B., 404, 4x5
Wikon Tariff of X894, 208, 228, 368, 408
Wilson, Woodrow, Congressional Govern
ment, 34; President of Princeton Univer
sity, 321; Governor of New Jersey, 382;
prominent at Democratic Convention, 398;
nominated for President, 400; elected as a
minority President, 403; promises of con
structive work, 404; Cabinet, 404; theory
of the Presidency, 405; tariff revision, 405;
presidential leadership, 406; Underwood-
Simmons Act, 406; monetary investiga
tions, 408; anti-trust polides, 4x3; Fed
eral Trade Commission, 4x4; Children's
Bureau, 4x5; labor problems, 4x5, 456;
Workmen's Compensation, 4x6; Philippine
government, 420; watchful waiting, 423;
Mexican Revolution, 424; "MobUe Doc
trine," the, 426; Canal treaty with Co
lombia, 426; Mexican intervention, 427;
diplomatic isolation ot U. S.. 428; repeal of
Panama Canal toUs exemption, 42g; Cen
tral American relations, 430; opening ot
Panama Canal, 431; neutrality and
preparedness, 433; Democratic successes,
438; "Strict accountability," 441; hy
phenated Americans. 453; Adamson Bill,
the, 454; reelected President, 454; Law
rence strike, the, 45g; terms of peace with
Germany, 46g; armed merchant ships, 472 ;

anti-war filibuster, 472; war message, 476;
war preparation, 478; American partici
pation in the war, 489; Espionage Act,
497; war polides, 50X ; Liberty Loans, 507;
conservation, 512; railroad administration,
5x8; Senator Chamberlain's attack, 5x9;
"Fourteen Points," the, 522; "Force with
out limit," 526; Colonel House's inquiry,
528; labor in the war, 534; "Work or
fight," 536; requirements, prices, and
priorities, 537; War Department reorgan
ization, 540; Congressional election of xgi8,
555; "Unconditional surrender," 558;
American Commission to Negotiate Peace,
558; "Big Four," the, 560; covenant of
the League of Nations, 561; demobihza-
tion in America, 562 ; return to Washing
ton, 566; Compromises of the Peace Con
ference, 568; treaty session of Congress,
571; the President's collapse, 572 ; "solemn
referendum," the, S8x; Army Act of 1920,
584; Jones Merchant Marine Act, 584
Windom, W. L., 52, X45
Windom Report, XX3
Winning of the West, 1x7, 243, 275
Wireless, 39X
"Wisconsin idea," the, 309
Wister, Owen, 160
Woman in Industry Service, 535
Woman suffrage, 164, 400, 464, 579
Women's education, 9
Women's Peace Party, 445, 470
Women's rights, and the National Labor
Union, xg
Wood, Fernando, 79
Wood, Leonard, 243, 250, 288, 345, 450, 489,
497, 556, 582
Woodford, Stewart L., 235
"Work or fight," 536
Workmen's compensation, 4x6
World, New York, X7g, 576, 582
World War, the, 433
World's Fair, Chicago, X83, X96
World's Work, 423
Wotherspoon, Wilham W., 345
Wright, CarroU D., 128
Wright, Orville, 390
Wright, Wilbur, 3go
Yachting, X20
YeUow fever, control of, 288
Y. M. C. A., 3xg
Young, Gen. S. B. M., 2gi, 345
Y.W.C.A.,3xg
Zeppelin, Count, 391

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

YALE UNIVERSITY

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