The discussion of civil service reform, on theoretical grounds, began about 1865, when the evil of removals for party purposes was shown to the Senate. Johnson was trying to use the patronage for his own ends, in opposition to the will of the radicals in Congress. Reformers who maintained the iniquity of this custom now found temporary converts among the Republicans. They got a committee appointed on the civil service in 1866, and President Grant announced his conversion to the principle early in his Administration.

In 1871 Congress tried the experiment of a modest appropriation ($25,000) for a reform of the civil service, and Grant placed the test in the hands of George William Curtis, a leader of the new reform. The commission breasted the whole current of politics, found that Grant would not support it in critical cases, and was abandoned by Congress after a short trial. The demand, however, increased, receiving the support of the independents who were Liberal Republicans in 1872, and who thereafter constituted a menace to party regularity. Schurz, Godkin, and Curtis were their admitted leaders. In 1872 and 1876 they persuaded the great parties to put general pledges for civil service reform into their platforms. Schurz, as Secretary of the Interior under Hayes, put their ideal partly into practice. In 1881 they were a well-recognized body of advocates, with a definite doctrine of non-partisan efficiency, which few politicians denied in principle or liked in fact.

Public attention was focused upon the civil service by the events of 1881. The fight between Garfield and Conkling raised not only the question of the relative rights of President and Senate in appointments, but that of the use of offices for the support of political machines. The frauds uncovered in postal administration by the star-route investigations could hardly have occurred in a department administered by experienced and competent officials. The murder of Garfield by a disappointed office-seeker gave additional emphasis to the need for reform, and these things coming together made possible the passage of a civil service act earlier than its advocates expected.

President Arthur recommended the reform in 1881, and his party, chastened by the fall election of 1882, took up a law in the session of 1882-83. Eaton, one of the leading reformers, and first chairman of the Civil Service Commission, wrote the bill which Congress passed with little real debate. Men who hated the measure knew the unwisdom of opposing it. A board of three commissioners was created in 1883 to classify the civil servants, prepare rules and lists, and conduct examinations. The classified service, removed from politics, began with 13,780 officers in 1884; by 1896 it contained 87,044; by 1911, 227,657. It grew most actively toward the end of each administration, as outgoing Presidents transferred to it the offices that they had filled. Its best recommendation was to be found in the opposition of politicians toward it.

Arthur did better than the reformers had hoped in urging and administering the Civil Service Act. He prosecuted the star-route trials, even among his Stalwart friends.

In 1882 Congress, with Arthur's approval, took up a revision of the tariff. Neither of the great parties had, in 1882, received a clear mandate touching the tariff, although it was true that most Republicans were content with the system in its general outlines, while a considerable number of Democrats were listening to tariff reform and asking for a tariff for revenue only. It had been eighteen years since the last general revision had taken place, and in that period unforeseen conditions had developed, whose tendency was at once to point the need for a readjustment of schedules and to create a class of citizens whose profits would be touched thereby. The course of financial reconstruction between 1865 and 1875 had raised the rate of actual protection beyond the expectations of its advocates.

In 1865 the revenues of the United States, amounting to $322,000,000, and far exceeding the needs of the Treasury in time of peace, came chiefly from the tariff and the internal revenue. The two taxes were dependent upon each other. Each increase in the latter had forced an increase in the former, lest special burdens should be laid upon American manufacture. The ideal of protection had never been lacking, nor had special interests failed to look out for themselves, but the dominant spirit in the war taxes was revenue.

When Congress undertook to reduce the revenue to a peace basis, it found that every approach to the tariff aroused classes of interested manufacturers, while every attack upon the internal revenue was welcomed by the public. As a result, following the line of least resistance, most of the internal taxes were removed by 1870, leaving the tariff rates where they had been, and higher than any protectionist had asked. A large part of the tariff rate had been intended to equalize the internal revenue tax; the removal of the latter created to that extent an incidental protection, which was unexpected but was none the less acceptable. Some few details of the tariff were modified by special acts, and there was a flat reduction of ten per cent in 1872. But the panic of 1873 reduced the revenues and frightened Congress, in 1875, into restoring the ten per cent. In 1882 the rates of 1865 remained substantially unchanged, leaving the protected industries in the enjoyment of an incidental protection never intended for them and created only by accident in the general reduction of revenue.

Spasmodic attacks were made upon the tariff system throughout the seventies, but since few defended it on principle they failed to affect the public. The tariff was not a political issue. Opposition to it was confined to members of the Democratic party, in search for weapons to turn against the Republicans, and to theorists and economists who had little connection with politics. There were free-trade clubs after 1868, though few ever wanted to establish real free trade. All that the free-trader commonly desired was a mitigation of protection and the establishment of reasonable rates. Godkin, Schurz, Sumner of Yale, David A. Wells, Edward Atkinson, and Henry D. Lloyd taught the tariff-for-revenue theory wherever they could find listeners. Wells wrote on "The Creed of Free Trade," in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, and was sure he had found the issue of 1876. But in neither this nor the next campaign did the parties face the issue. In 1880 the tariff figured only as a means of embarrassing Hancock, while Garfield did not even mention it in his inaugural.

The forces that compelled a revision of the tariff in 1882-83 had to do with revenue and expenditures. Following the new prosperity the receipts increased beyond the ability of Congress to spend them. There was a small surplus in 1879. In 1880 it was $68,000,000; in 1881, $101,000,000; in 1882, $145,000,000; in 1883, $132,000,000. The surplus was a constant incentive to extravagance and deranged the currency. If it was allowed to remain in the Treasury, its millions were withheld from circulation, and contraction was the result; if it was applied to the purchase or redemption of bonds, the national bank currency was contracted, for this was founded upon bonds owned by the banks; and it could not be spent without the invention of new channels. The temptation to increase pension payments was strengthened, while public works multiplied without reason.

The waste of money on public works induced Arthur to advertise the need for a reduction of the revenue. The annual River and Harbor Bill had consumed $3,900,000 in 1870, and $8,900,000 in 1880. In 1882 the bill was swollen to over $18,000,000 by greed and log-rolling. Arthur vetoed it as unreasonable and unconstitutional in August, 1882. It passed over his veto, but the defeat of his party in the following November was construed as a vindication of the President. The Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives, Democratic governors were elected in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Indiana, and critics began to ask if this was the beginning of the end of the party. The certainty that party bills could not be passed in the next Congress, with the control divided, stimulated the Republicans to act while they could. The Civil Service Act was passed early in 1883, and on the same day the House took up the consideration of a new tariff.

Arthur, in 1881, had urged that the revenues be reduced and the tariff be revised, and Congress had created a commission to investigate the needed changes, in May, 1882. This committee was in session throughout the following summer, sitting in manufacturing centers all over the East and hearing testimony from all varieties of manufacturers. It had been organized on a conservative basis, containing members familiar with the needs of sheep-raisers and wool manufacturers, and iron and sugar, as well as experts on administration. Its enemies thought that it was pledged to protection at the start. The commission expressed a belief that the country desired to adhere to the general idea of protection, but it early learned the force of the demand for revision and reduction, and sent into the House, in December, 1882, a project for a bill intended to reduce the tariff at least twenty per cent. The bill based on this was reported from the Committee on Ways and Means on January 16, 1883, and was debated until February 20, and then abandoned in the House for a bill which had passed the Senate.

The Senate Bill was in the form of an amendment to an Internal Revenue Bill already before that house. It was passed on February 20 under the leadership of the young Senator from Rhode Island, Nelson W. Aldrich, and was sent to conference by the House a week later. In conference a new bill was substituted for the Senate Bill. This was hurried through both houses in time to receive the signature of Arthur on March 3, 1883.

The tariff of 1883 failed to meet the demand for a revision. Its debates show the difficulties attendant upon the construction of any tariff. Congress was divided upon the theory of protection, both parties including high protectionists as well as tariff-for-revenue men. The revenue-producing side of the tariff increased the complexities, since every change in a rate might affect the standing of the Treasury. In addition to the economic and the fiscal needs, quite serious enough, there was the tireless influence of the lobby of manufacturers, pressing for single rates which should aid this business or that. Few Congressmen were sufficiently detached in interests to be entirely dispassionate as they framed the schedules. Many did not even try to disguise their desire to promote local interests. Neither party had a mandate on the tariff in 1882, but when the act had become a law it was clear that most of the Republican leaders voted cheerfully for all the protection they could get, that the intent to reduce the revenue had failed, and that what little hope of revision remained was in the opposition party. "The kaleidoscope has been turned a hair's breadth," said the Nation, "and the colors transposed a little, but the component parts are the same." It was deliberate bad faith throughout, urged a Democratic leader, and "finished this magnificent shaft [of the tariff policy] which they had been for years erecting, and crowned it with the last stone by repealing the internal tax on playing cards and putting a twenty per cent tax upon the Bible."

Throughout the tariff debate no argument had been used more steadily than that of the protectionists that protection to labor was their aim. The degradation of "pauper labor" in Europe was contrasted repeatedly with that prosperity that was typical of America. The insistence upon the argument revealed the desire to conciliate a class that was being noticed in American society for the first time.

The great labor problem before the Civil War had been that of getting enough laborers and meeting the competition which the abundant free lands of the West had offered. Labor organizations and strikes had been so unusual that public opinion had not yet come to regard them as normal features of society. But the manufacturing development of the sixties in iron and steel, in textiles, and in other machine industries, threw workmen together in increasing number, taught them their interests as a class, and set the scene for an outbreak of strikes when the shops shut down or reduced wages in the depression of the seventies. About 1877 these strikes shocked society by their violence. Neither had the public been educated to the strike itself, nor the labor leaders to that moderation, without which public sympathy cannot be retained or strikes won. A feeling adverse to organized labor swept the country and endangered the existence of the labor movement.

POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION, 1850-1910

(Table and Diagram based upon Thirteenth Census, 1910, Population, Vol. 1, pp. 129, 130.)

Total Foreign Population. and Mixed Foreign Born. Parentage.

1910 91,972,266 18,897,837 13,345,545 1900 75,994,575 15,646,017 10,213,817 1890 62,947,714 11,503,675 9,121,867 1880 50,155,783 8,274,867 6,559,679 1870 39,818,449 5,324,268 5,493,712 1860 31,443,321 4,096,753 1850 23,191,876 2,240,535



The Knights of Labor received the heaviest weight of disfavor. This was an industrial union, founded in 1869, embracing labor of all trades, and held together by a secret organization. Dismissal so often followed admitted membership in a union that secrecy was defensible, but secrecy mystified and frightened the public. The policy of secrecy was abandoned in 1882, after the excesses of the "Molly Maguires" had brought discredit upon all organized labor. Under the leadership of Grand Master Workman Powderly the Knights carried on an open and aggressive campaign of education for labor and inspection laws throughout the Union. The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1881 and reorganized in 1886, aided in this general work, and with the Knights helped to reconcile the public to the principle of unionism.

State bureaus of labor appeared in many States as the result of the general agitation. An eight-hour law, for federal employees, had been gained in 1868, while in 1884 a Commissioner of Labor was created in the Department of the Interior. Arthur was urged to give the post to Powderly, but selected instead an economist less actively identified with the propaganda, Carroll D. Wright, under whose direction the Bureau grew steadily in importance. Its reports became quarries for statistical information on the labor problem, and its success justified its incorporation in the new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903.

The "Army of the Discontented," as Powderly called the workers, demanded education and protective laws, and turned their attention to competition about 1882. The cutting of wages by peasant laborers, newly arrived in America, was a grievance as soon as labor became class-conscious. Opposition to this became virulent in the Far West, where the foreigner was also a Mongolian. The Chinese of the Pacific Slope, more frugal and industrious than Americans, were harried in the early eighties, and violence was done them in many quarters. Garfield had been weakened in 1880 by a forged letter seeming to show that he favored the introduction of more Chinese. So numerous were the persecutors that Congress responded to the demand for a Chinese Exclusion Bill, in spite of the Treaty of 1880, which guaranteed fair treatment. Arthur vetoed the first bill, but accepted a second, less stringent in its terms. After this victory, the labor forces turned upon immigration in general.

No idea had been fixed more firmly in the American mind than that the oppressed of Europe were here to find opportunity. Immigrants had always been welcomed and assimilated, while Congress had, in 1864, organized a bureau to encourage and safeguard immigration. The influx always increased in prosperous, and declined in adverse, years. After 1878 the annual number broke all records. Western railway corporations were inviting immigrants to use their lands, manufacturers called them to the mills, and the total rose from 177,000 in 1879 to 788,000 in 1882. This latter year was the greatest of the century, its newcomers attracting the attention of the press, of the city charities who felt their growing responsibilities, and of the unions who felt their competition. Nearly all the immigrants were producers, a high percentage being able-bodied young men and women. The greatest number came from Great Britain, among whom the Irish settled in the Eastern cities. Next were the Germans, who moved toward Chicago or St. Louis, while the Scandinavians filled up the wheat-lands of the Northwest.

Under the demand of the labor vote, Congress provided, in 1882, for the inspection of immigrants and the deportation of undesirable aliens, and in 1885 it forbade the importation of skilled laborers under contract. As yet the labor movement was largely aristocratic, safeguarding the skilled workmen, but disregarding the common laborers.

The labor and immigration movement in its new aspect widened the field for economic legislation, for few States had factory laws, employers' liability laws, or laws protecting the weak,—the women and the children. It also complicated the situation in politics. The Germans and Scandinavians, settling in centers which had been strongly Unionist in the Civil War, were believed to absorb the doctrines of the Republicans from their compatriots already in America. The Irish were generally Democrats, and the only Republican leader who had a large following among them was Blaine. He had fraternized with the California Irish leader, Dennis Kearney; as Secretary of State he had protected naturalized Irishmen who went home to fight for Home Rule; some of his immediate family were Catholics; and his insistence on an American canal won him friends who were already disposed to hate Great Britain.

The votes of 1876 and 1880 showed that the two parties were nearly even in strength, so that any slight popularity or accident might decide an election. As politicians prepared for 1884 the attitude of naturalized foreigners assumed a new importance which the friends of the various candidates tried to measure. The campaign could not be fought on any of the old issues, but which of the new—civil service, tariff, or labor—was in doubt.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best history of civil service reform is C.R. Fish, The Civil Service and the Patronage (1905). This supplants all previous accounts, and may itself be supplemented in detail by the Annual Reports of the United States Civil Service Commission (1883-), by the Memoirs of Carl Schurz (3 vols., 1907-08), the Writings of Carl Schurz (7 vols., Frederic Bancroft, ed., 1912), the biographies of J.R. Lowell, E.L. Godkin, and George William Curtis, and the files of Harper's Weekly, the Nation, and the North American Review. The general narrative of the eighties is covered by E.E. Sparks, National Development, and D.R. Dewey, National Problems (in The American Nation, vols. 23 and 24, 1907), and E.B. Andrews, The United States in Our Own Time. A thoughtful economic analysis of the period is D.A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes (1890). The Report of the Tariff Commission of 1882 is valuable for the study of tariff revision, as are also the standard tariff histories by E. Stanwood, I.M. Tarbell, and F.W. Taussig. The Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Labor (1884-) are fundamental for the labor problem. Useful monographs are C.D. Wright, An Historical Sketch of the Knights of Labor (in Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. I), T.V. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor (1889), G.E. McNeill, The Labor Movement (1887), and M.A. Aldrich, The American Federation of Labor (in American Economic Association, Economic Studies, vol. III).



CHAPTER VIII

GROVER CLEVELAND

The Administration of Chester A. Arthur proved that the President had never been so discreditable a spoilsman as the reformers had believed, or else that he had changed his spots. The term ended in dignity and Arthur hoped to secure a personal vindication through renomination by his party. His struggle precipitated a contest of leaders, and until the nominations were made, none could say where either party stood.

The independents, chiefly of Republican antecedents, hoped to retain what had been gained in the last Administration. They hoped to extend the reform in the civil service and to focus attention upon the tariff. The failure of downward revision in 1883 had strengthened their hands and increased their hopes. They had dallied with bolting movements and threats so long that party regularity meant little to them. Either party could obtain their support by nominating men who could be trusted to stick to their platform. Arthur was not acceptable to them, and Blaine was anathema.

The candidacy of Arthur was doomed to failure. He had alienated the Stalwarts by his independence, while he had failed to win the reformers because he had not invariably refrained from playing the politician. In the fall of 1882 he had interfered in the campaign in New York, allowing his Secretary of the Treasury, Charles J. Folger, while retaining that office, to be the Republican candidate for governor. This had led to the belief that the patronage was being used for local purposes, and had stirred up an opposition to Folger which defeated him. Arthur's veto of the Chinese Exclusion Bill and the River and Harbor Bill further increased his unpopularity in various sections. He failed to win over the Blaine faction, who regarded him as an intrusive accident and waited impatiently for the next national convention.

Blaine was the leader of the Republican party in 1884, so far as it had a leader, and he possessed all the weaknesses of such a leader as well as personal weaknesses of his own. Rarely has it been possible to nominate or to elect one who has gained a dominant place through party struggles. Such men, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and their kind, have commonly created enough enemies, as they have risen, to make them unavailable as leaders of a national ticket. Blaine was handicapped like these. His prolonged fight against Conkling and the Stalwarts created a breach too deep to fill, while the old questions respecting his honor would not down.

Early in 1884 Blaine was the leading candidate for the nomination in spite of all opposition. The Republican National Committee was in charge of men who sympathized with him. Dorsey had resigned as its secretary after the star-route exposure, though his associate in land speculations, Stephen B. Elkins, remained as one of the managers. The control was in the hands of men who had close affiliation with the old organization, and of the manufacturers who had blocked tariff revision in 1883. It was improbable, in the opinion of many independents, that a tariff reduction could be got from an Administration headed by Blaine; they questioned his sincerity upon civil service reform; and they thought it not right that any man, concerning whose character there was a doubt, should be President. They put forward, within the party, Senator George F. Edmunds, whom they had desired in 1880, and who had since become President of the Senate. Other candidates with local followings were General John A. Logan, of Illinois, John Sherman, and the President himself.

The Chicago Convention of the Republican party, meeting early in June, was the scene of a battle between the two elements in the party. At the outset, the old independents, headed by Curtis, and reinforced by younger men like Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, and Theodore Roosevelt, of New York, broke the slate of the National Committee and seated a chairman of their own choice. But the regulars rallied, controlled the platform, and made the nomination. Blaine and John A. Logan were selected, the former accepting the honor with secret misgivings, for he had a clear understanding of the intensity of the opposition within the party. The reformers went home discouraged, many of them determined not to let party regularity hold them to Blaine.

Out of the nomination of Blaine grew the "Mugwump" movement, whose influence was greater than that of the last bolt. The origin of the name "Mugwump" is not entirely clear, but it was well known as an opprobrious epithet, and was applied now by party regulars to the "holier-than-thou" reformers. One of the regulars later quoted Revelation at them: "Thou art neither hot nor cold ... so, then, I will spew thee out of my mouth." They were more offensive to Republicans than were the Democrats, while the latter were bewildered but cynical. "I know that to-day we are living in a very highly scented atmosphere of political reform," said one of the Democratic Senators a little later, "I know that under the saintly leadership of the Eatonian school of political philosophers we are all ceasing to be partisans, that we no longer recognize party obligations, party duty, party discipline, and party devoirs; that we are all to become reconciled to a life of political monasticism; but I will continue to have one failing, and that is in my humble way to be as watchful and as vigilant of the purposes, designs, and craft of the Republican leaders as I have endeavored to be in the past."

The Mugwumps left Chicago and at once opened negotiations with the Democratic leaders. The Nation and the Evening Post were already with them. Harper's Weekly, which had been a Union journal in the war, and Republican ever since, abandoned the party ticket. George William Curtis, its editor, led in the revolt, and the Mugwumps met at the house of one of the Harpers for organization, on June 17, 1884. Their problem was whether to nominate an independent ticket and be defeated, or to support and help elect a Democratic President, in case the Democrats should be willing to cooperate with them.

Not all the reformers turned from Blaine. Whitelaw Reid, the successor of Horace Greeley on the New York Tribune, remained regular. Lodge went back to Massachusetts and persuaded himself to take part in the canvass. Roosevelt, discouraged by the nomination of Blaine, remained regular, but stepped out of the campaign and began his ranch life in the Far West. With him, as with many others, it was a matter of conviction that reform, to be effective, must be urged within the party. But enough of the reformers went with the Mugwumps to lessen Blaine's chances of election.

When the Mugwumps made overtures for fusion to the Democratic leaders, they had in mind as a candidate a young Democratic lawyer who had appeared as Mayor of Buffalo in 1881 and had been elected as reform Governor of New York in 1882. He had secured the aid of independent reformers in that campaign,—men who resented the candidacy of Folger and the intrusion of the National Administration in local politics. As governor he had speedily established his reputation for stubborn honesty and independent judgment. Grover Cleveland had become, like Tilden, the most promising candidate in a party that had no admitted leader.

The opposition from two elements in his party, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, strengthened Cleveland as the candidate of reform. Ben Butler, who had himself been nominated for the Presidency by an Anti-Monopoly Convention, denounced him as a foe of labor; and such was Butler's reputation that his enmity was one of Cleveland's assets. John Kelly, the chief of Tammany Hall, opposed him, too, having learned to know him as Governor of New York. Well might Cleveland's friends say, "We love him for the enemies he has made." They nominated him on the second ballot, selecting Thomas A. Hendricks, of Indiana, to run with him. Their platform was full of reform, even of the tariff, but on the latter subject it was less specific than the tariff reformers had hoped.

As the parties stood in 1884, personal character meant more than platform or party name. Cleveland possessed qualities that made his appeal to independents quite as strong as it was to Democrats. With older brothers in the army he had supported his mother during the war, and had kept clear of copperheadism. He stood for sound money; he believed in a tariff for revenue; he had proved his devotion to civil service reform; he lacked the factional enemies who weakened the candidacy of a prominent leader like Blaine; and his peculiar appeal to Republican dissenters led the canvass away from issues into the field of personalities.

The charge of the independents upon Blaine's personal honor caused the Republican schism and drove the party regulars into a retort in kind. The private life of the candidates was uncovered to the annoyance of both and to the greater embarrassment of Cleveland. Nothing discreditable to his honesty could be found, but an apparent lapse in his private conduct gave the pretext for wild and dishonest attacks upon his character. A few years later the novelist, Paul Leicester Ford, in a keen study of New York politics entitled The Honorable Peter Stirling, portrayed a situation somewhat resembling that of Cleveland, though disclaiming Cleveland as his model. The Boston Journal led in the exploitation of the charges, and partisans forgot decency on both sides. Nast, having formerly cartooned Blaine in the "Bloody Shirt," now turned to "A Roaring Farce—The Plumed Knight in a Clean Shirt," while others pointed out the fact that the admirer who coined the "plumed knight" epithet had been counsel for the fraudulent star-route contractors.

Attempts were made to appeal to class hatred on both sides. Butler had hesitated for several weeks in his acceptance of the nomination by the Anti-Monopoly Convention. Greenbackers and a few labor leaders made up his following, and it was supposed that they would draw votes from the Democrats. After conference with Republican leaders, Butler agreed to run, and it was freely charged that these leaders financed his campaign to injure Cleveland. Republicans appealed to the Irish vote by recalling Blaine's vigorous diplomacy against Great Britain; their opponents caricatured Blaine by representing him as consorting with Irish thugs and dynamiters. At the very end of the canvass a chance remark may have decided the result.

So much had been said of character in the campaign that both candidates brought out the clergy to give them certificates of excellence. In October a meeting of clergymen of all denominations was held at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to greet Blaine. The oldest minister, Burchard by name, was asked to deliver the address, and while he spoke Blaine thought of other matters. He thus missed a phrase which other hearers caught and which the Democrats immediately advertised. It denounced the Democrats as adherents of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion," and was reported as conveying a gratuitous insult to the Irish vote. How many Irish turned from Blaine to Cleveland in the last week of the campaign cannot be said, but the election was so close that a few votes, swung either way, could have determined it. Cleveland carried New York and won a majority of the electoral college, but his popular plurality over Blaine was only 23,000, while he had some 300,000 fewer than his combined rivals. Butler drew 175,000 votes without defeating Cleveland. Purists, disgusted with the personalities of the campaign, swelled the Prohibition vote to 150,000.

On March 4, 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the first Democrat elected President since James Buchanan. His Cabinet was necessarily filled with men inexperienced in national administration, for the party had been proscribed for six terms. The greatest attention was attracted by the two former Confederates, Garland and Lamar, whose career did much to disprove the "gloomy and baseless superstition" of twenty years, "that one half of the nation had become the irreconcilable enemies of the national unity and the national will." It was an American Administration, and of its chief, James Russell Lowell, who had known men in many lands, wrote, "He is a truly American type of the best kind—a type very dear to me, I confess."

The State Department was entrusted to Thomas F. Bayard, who had been a competitor for the nomination in 1884, and who sustained the tradition that only first-rate men shall fill this office. Bayard proceeded at once to undo the work of the last five years and to reverse a policy of Blaine. A treaty with Nicaragua, negotiated by Frelinghuysen in December, 1884, ran counter to the English treaty of 1850. After a vain attempt to persuade Great Britain to abandon the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty respecting an isthmian canal, Frelinghuysen had disregarded it and acquired a complete right-of-way from Nicaragua. This was pending in the Senate when Cleveland was inaugurated, and was withdrawn at once. The United States reverted to the old Whig policy of a neutralized canal.

In all departments the new Administration was forced to test the strength of its convictions upon civil service reform. During its long years of opposition the party had often voiced a demand for reform, but now in office its workers demanded the usual rewards of success. Cleveland had fought the spoils politicians in New York, and had taken counsel of Carl Schurz after his election as President. In the next four years he nearly doubled the number in the classified service in the face of opposition from his most intimate associates.

The problems of prosperity and national growth, developing in the eighties and culminating between 1885 and 1889, involved administrative efficiency rather than party policy. On every side the Government was forced to expand its activities, and Cleveland was occupied in getting new machinery into operation and meeting conditions for which no precedents existed.

Organized labor had gained concessions from Congress in a Bureau of Labor, in 1884, and an Anti-Contract Labor Law in 1885. These called for sympathetic administration and encouraged labor to hope for more. During 1886 and 1887 the views of labor leaders attracted much attention because of a series of strikes and riots. In the greatest of these the local chapters of the Knights of Labor fought against the Gould railways of the Southwest—the Missouri Pacific and the Texas Pacific. The strike originated in March, 1886, in sympathy with labor organizers who had been discharged by the railroad. Under the leadership of Martin Irons it spread over the Southwest, causing distress in those regions which were dependent upon the railroad for fuel and food and causing disorder in the towns where the idle workmen congregated. Powderly and the other chief officials of the Knights tried to stop the strike, but were ineffective, while the railroad managers shaped events so as to divert the sympathies of the Western people against the strikers. The Knights never recovered from the blow which the loss of the strike inflicted upon them.

In May, 1886, a general demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day was planned and carried out. In Milwaukee riots ensued, the militia was called out by Governor Rusk, and a volley was fired into the mob. In Chicago the union movement was combined with anarchy and socialism, and opponents of all did not discriminate among them. A meeting of the anarchists was broken up by the police, several of whom were killed by the explosion of a bomb thrown in the tumult. In 1887 a group of the anarchist leaders were hanged, having been convicted of what may be called constructive conspiracy. The unrest revealed by the strikes and riots showed that the old period of uniform well-being and satisfaction was over.

The demands made upon politics by organized labor were exceeded by the demands of organized patriotism. The veterans of the Civil War, who were in early manhood in 1865, were now in middle life, were possessed of political influence, and turned to the National Government for personal advantage. Advocates of protection acted upon the theory that for national purposes special advantages ought to be given to manufacturers. The same idea of government readily bestowed these advantages in return for a past service.

The machinery of the veterans was the Grand Army of the Republic, which, from being an unimportant, reminiscent league, had grown to be an instrument for the procuring of pensions. The surplus tempted citizens to make demands upon it; the number of soldier votes encouraged politicians to comply with the demands. In 1879 the movement began with an Arrears of Pensions Act, by which pensioners were entitled to back pay from their mustering-out dates, regardless of the period at which their incapacity set in. The next step involved the issuing of pensions for incapacity and dependence, regardless of their cause, and opened the way for pensions for service only. In 1887 Cleveland vetoed a pension bill of this character, and prevented its passage until the term of his successor, in 1890. He had already offended many of his supporters by guarding the offices; his pension veto offended more by checking the attack of the old soldiers on the Treasury. No one opposed the granting of pensions to soldiers who had been injured in the Civil War, but the demands of the leaders of the Grand Army, supported by the interests of hundreds of attorneys who lived on pension claims, now assumed the appearance of an organized raid on the Treasury. The general laws were supplemented by special private pension laws, of which 1871 were sent to Cleveland in four years. He vetoed 228 of these, often to his political injury. In many cases these made allowances to persons whose claims had been rejected by the Pension Bureau as inadequate or fraudulent. In the course of time Cleveland became "thoroughly tired of disapproving gifts of public money to individuals who in my view have no right or claim to the same." The pension fund, he maintained, was "the soldiers' fund," and should be distributed so as to "exclude perversion as well as to insure a liberal and generous application of grateful and benevolent designs." In the ten years ending in 1889, Congress spent $644,000,000 on pensions; in the next ten it spent $1,350,000,000.

The surplus incited extravagance, and its reduction had been demanded on this ground, the tariff appearing to afford the best method of reduction. When the Democratic party gained control of the House, in 1883, it proceeded at once to discuss revision, and promptly uncovered a difference of opinion among its members. The last Democratic Speaker of the House had been Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who had been trained in the philosophy of Henry Clay and in the interests of a great manufacturing State. He was by conviction and association a protectionist, and was a candidate for his party's nomination as Speaker in the Forty-eighth Congress, which met in December, 1883. From this date he ceased to lead his party in the House and became the leader of an internal faction. John G. Carlisle, of Kentucky, supplanted him, was elected Speaker, and organized the House in the interest of a tariff for revenue only. For the next six years the Democratic organization of the House was pledged to revision, but operated in the face of a growing Republican opposition, and with Randall and the protectionist Democrats attacking from the rear.

The election of Cleveland gave the Democrats control of two branches of the Government, but left the Senate in the hands of the Republicans. It was vain to talk of serious revision or any other party measure in a divided administration, yet the President chafed under his inability to fulfill party pledges. The surplus continued to accumulate, to permit extravagance in Congress, and to arouse the cupidity of citizens. In his message to his second Congress, in 1887, Cleveland startled the country by devoting his undivided attention to this single topic. He set his party a text which could not be evaded, although there was even yet no reason to believe that a tariff bill could pass both houses. He had taken Carlisle into his confidence before sending the message; the latter entrusted the leadership in revision to Roger Q. Mills, of Texas, a free-trader, whom he appointed as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means.

With the opening of the debate on the Mills Bill, in April, 1888, there began "the first serious attempt since the war to reduce toward a peace basis the customs duties imposed during that conflict almost solely for purposes of revenue." Mills and William L. Wilson, who had been a college president in West Virginia, bore the burden of advocacy of a reduction of the revenue to the extent of $50,000,000. They were opposed by a united Republican party, both frightened and gratified because the issue had been made so clear. It was charged that the Committee on Ways and Means had drawn up the bill in secrecy, and that a majority of its Democratic members were Southerners who knew nothing of the needs of manufactures. The danger to American labor from the competition of the pauper labor of Europe was urged against it. It was asserted to be a pro-British measure, and stories were circulated of British gold, coming from the Cobden Club, a free-trade organization, to subvert American institutions. The Democratic organization drove the bill through the House of Representatives in spite of all resistance. In the Senate, with the Republicans in control, the bill never came to a vote, and was used to manufacture campaign materials for the campaign then pending. Many of the advisers of Cleveland had urged him to withhold the tariff message, lest he arouse the enemy and defeat himself, but he had risked personal and party defeat in order to get an issue definitively accepted—the first issue so accepted in politics since 1864.

The Mills Bill fiasco was the most important party measure of Cleveland's Administration, yet it served only to accentuate the difficulties in tariff legislation which had been experienced in 1883, and to provide an issue for the campaign of 1888. The laws that were passed between 1885 and 1889 were generally non-partisan in their character and were of most influence when they helped to readjust federal law to national economic problems. The Federal Government was unfolding and testing powers that had existed since the adoption of the Constitution, but had not been needed hitherto in an agricultural republic. The change that forced the resort to these powers came largely from the completion of a national system of communication.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For the election of 1884, consult, in addition to Stanwood, J.F. Rhodes, "The National Republican Conventions of 1880 and 1884" (Scribner's Magazine, September, 1911), and "Cleveland's Administrations" (Scribner's Magazine, October, 1911). There is an annotated reprint of the "Mulligan Letters" in Harper's Weekly (1884, pp. 643-46). The biographies of Blaine by Hamilton and Stanwood should be examined, as well as the sketches of Cleveland (who left few literary remains), by J.L. Williams, G.F. Parker, and R.W. Gilder. Among partisan party histories, the best are F. Curtis, The Republican Party, (2 vols., 1904), and W.L. Wilson, The National Democratic Party (1888). J.H. Harper recounts details of the Mugwump split in his history of The House of Harper (1912). The standard compilation on the pension system, which has not yet received adequate treatment, is W.H. Glasson, Military Pension Legislation in the United States (in Columbia University Studies, vol. XII). C.F. Adams and W.B. Hale published useful essays on the pension system in World's Work, 1911. H.T. Peck begins his popular Twenty Years of the Republic (1907) with the inauguration of Cleveland in 1885. Consult also Sparks, Dewey, Andrews, and the Annual Cyclopaedia.



CHAPTER IX

THE LAST OF THE FRONTIER

Five statutes that received the signature of Grover Cleveland are documentary proof of the new problems and the changing attitude of the National Administration during the eighties. They indicate that the chief function of the National Government had ceased to be to moderate among a group of self-sufficient States and had come to be the direction of such interests as were national in importance or extent. On February 4, 1887, the Interstate Commerce Law was passed in recognition of a transportation system that had become national; and four days later the Dawes Bill, providing that lands should be issued to Indians in severalty, marked the disappearance of the wild Indian from the border. In 1889 a Department of Agriculture, with a seat in the Cabinet, and a law for the survey of irrigation sites in the Far West, mark the interest of a nation in the prosperity of its whole area and population; while laws of 1889 and 1890 admitting six new States extended the chain of commonwealths for the first time from ocean to ocean. A process that had been under way since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock had culminated in the occupation of the whole breadth of the continent.

The first continental railroad, the Union Pacific, chartered in 1862 and finished in 1869, was admittedly a national project. Its purpose was to bind the Pacific Slope to the East in a period when sectionalism was a menace to national unity. Its opening was the first step in the completion of an intricate system of lines extending to the Pacific. Direct federal aid was given to the road in the form of land grants, right of way, and a loan of bonds.

Other continental railroads were authorized in the later sixties. In 1864 a Northern Pacific, to connect Lake Superior and Puget Sound, made its appearance. In 1866 the Atlantic & Pacific was given the right to run from a southwestern terminal at Springfield, Missouri, to southern California. In 1871 the Texas Pacific was designed to connect the head of navigation on the Red River, near Shreveport and Texarkana, with Fort Yuma and San Diego. Additional lines with continental possibilities received charters from the Western States,—the Denver & Rio Grande, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe,—and received indirectly a share of the public domain as an inducement to build. Congress stopped making land grants for this purpose in 1871, but not until more lines than could be used for twenty years had been allowed.

All the continental railways were begun before 1873, were checked by the five years of depression, and were revived about 1878. When they began again to build there was associated with them a new project for an old continental route.

The interoceanic canal had been foreseen ever since the first white man stood on the Isthmus and gazed at the Pacific. Its construction had been stimulated by the gold discoveries and the California emigration of 1848-49, and had been arranged for in a treaty signed with Great Britain in 1850. No means to build the canal were found, however, and the project drifted along until De Lesseps finished his canal at Suez, and the new interest in continental communication in America resuscitated the canal at Panama. In 1878 a French company, with De Lesseps at its head, obtained a concession from Colombia. It began work in 1880, at once arousing the jealousy of the United States which was shown in the efforts of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and procure for the United States a free hand at the Isthmus. Cleveland reverted to the policy of a neutralized canal in 1885, but interest on either side was premature, since no canal was built for thirty years.

The continental railways aroused keen interest in problems of transportation by their completion between 1881 and 1885. The Northern Pacific was finished under the direction of Henry Villard, a German journalist who had been a correspondent in the Civil War and had managed the interests of foreign investors after 1873. He gained control of the partly finished Northern Pacific and the local lines of Oregon through a holding company known as the Oregon & Transcontinental. In September, 1883, he took a special train, full of distinguished visitors, over his lines to witness the driving of the last spike near Helena, Montana. On the way out, they stopped at Bismarck to help lay the corner-stone for an ambitious new capitol of the Territory of Dakota. From Duluth to Tacoma the new line brought in immigrants whose freight made its chief business.

South of the Northern Pacific, the original main line of the Union Pacific ran from Omaha up the Platte Trail through Cheyenne to Ogden, with a branch from Kansas City to Denver and Cheyenne. Between the main line and the branch the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy constructed a road that reached Denver in May, 1882. Here it met, in 1883, the Denver & Rio Grande, a narrow-gauge road that penetrated the divide by way of the canyon of the Arkansas River, and extended to the Great Salt Lake. The two roads together offered a competition to the Union Pacific for its whole length from the Missouri River to Ogden, and drove that road to extend feeder branches south to the Gulf and north into Oregon.

Farther south the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe stretched the whole length of Kansas and followed the old trail to Santa Fe and the Rio Grande, and thence to Old Mexico. Its owners cooperated with the owners of the Atlantic & Pacific franchise, and the Southern Pacific of California, to build a connecting link between the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe at Albuquerque and the Colorado River at the Needles. From this point the Southern Pacific traversed the valleys of California. In October, 1883, trains were running from San Francisco to St. Louis over this road.



The Southern Pacific of California met the other continental lines at the Fort Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. The Texas Pacific had got only to Fort Worth before the panic of 1873. It now built across Texas toward El Paso. Subsidiary corporations owned by the Southern Pacific men built the line between El Paso and Fort Yuma, and enabled a through service to start to St. Louis in January, and to New Orleans in October, 1882. Yet another Southern Pacific line was opened through San Antonio and Houston, tapping the commerce of the Gulf shore, and running trains to New Orleans in February, 1883.

The opening of great lines in the United States in the early eighties was part of a similar movement throughout the world. In Canada, Sir Donald Smith, later raised to the peerage as Lord Strathcona, was beginning the Canadian Pacific from Port Arthur to Vancouver, while on the Continent of Europe the first train of the "Orient Express" left Paris for Constantinople in June, 1883. In November, 1883, the American railroads, realizing that they were a national system, agreed upon a scheme of standard time by which to run their trains. Heretofore every road had followed what local time it chose, to the confusion of the traveling public.

Most of the continental railways had extensive land grants, of from twenty to forty sections per mile of track, but whether they had lands to sell or not they were vitally interested in the settlement of the regions through which they ran. Each encouraged immigration and colonization. Their literature, scattered over Europe, was one factor in the heavy drift of population that started after 1878. Six new Western States were created in the ten years after their completion.

The youngest American Territory in the eighties was Wyoming, created in 1868, and the youngest State was Colorado, admitted in 1876. After Colorado, the political division of the West embraced eight organized Territories: Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington along the Canadian line, Wyoming and Utah in the middle, Arizona and New Mexico on the Mexican border. Besides these Territories there was the unorganized remnant of the Indian country known as Indian Territory, and attracting the covetous glances of frontiersmen in all the near-by Western States.

Agriculture was the main reliance of the wave of pioneers that poured over the plains along the lines of the railroads. In the valley of the Red River of the North, wheat-farming was their staple industry. As the Old South had devoted itself to the staple crop of cotton, so this new region took up the single crop of wheat, bringing to its cultivation great machines, white labor, and a modified factory system. South of the wheat country, corn dominated in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, and went to market either as grain or in the converted form of hogs or stock. In Texas the cotton-fields pushed into new areas. The farm lands completely surrounded the Indian Territory, in which a diversified agriculture was known to be both possible and profitable.

Across the United States, from Canada to Mexico, the advance line of farms pushed from the well-watered bottoms of the Mississippi Valley into the plains that rise toward the Rocky Mountains. Near the ninety-seventh meridian the rainfall of this region becomes insufficient for general farming in ordinary years. But the solicitations of land-sellers brought settlers into the sub-humid region, while for a few years in the eighties the rainfall was greater than the average. Permanent climatic changes were imagined by the hopeful. A Governor of Kansas stated, in 1886, "with absolute certainty, that great areas in the Western third of Kansas are becoming more fertile," while an Eastern Senator, who was generally well informed, believed in 1888 that "the whole Territory of Dakota is as capable of sustaining population as Iowa."

Between the farming frontier and the mountains the cattlemen expanded the grazing industry, with profits that were enlarged because of the markets that the railroads brought them. The "long drive" from Texas to Montana became a familiar idea on the border, while the cowboys in their lonely watches developed a folk-song literature that is typically American. Between the cattlemen and the sheepmen there was permanent war, for the sheep injured the grass they grazed over. Although both industries were trespassers on the public lands the herders resented the appearance of the flocks as an intrusion upon their domain.

Kansas City rose suddenly to prominence as the meeting-place of the railways of the West and Southwest with those of the East. Near to the line that divided steady agriculture from the nomadic life of the plains it became a convenient market for both. Here the packers developed the traffic in fresh beef that the new railways with their refrigerator cars made possible. The cities of the East, in need of more fresh meat than the local farmers could provide, found their supply on the plains of the Far West.

Beyond the plains, the mountain regions changed less from the advent of the railways than any other section of the remote West. They had attracted population to their camps during the Civil War, and now they grew in size and permanence. But only such regions reached permanent importance as had valleys to be irrigated and fields to be cultivated. Without agriculture no important region has flourished in the West.

Toward the end of the eighties the pressure of the population for more homestead lands brought about the opening of Oklahoma. Here, for over half a century, the Indian tribes had lived in full possession. After the Civil War the plains tribes had been colonized here too. Now, as the lands were awarded to the Indians in severalty under the Dawes Act, the old tribal holdings were surrendered and large areas were offered to white settlement. After ten years of ejectment and restraint the Oklahoma boomers were let into the country in 1889. Guthrie and Oklahoma City were created overnight, and in 1890 the Territory of Oklahoma received permanent organization.

Before the last continental railway was finished, the Territories were asking for statehood and were showing advance in population to justify it. When Villard aided in the corner-stone laying at Bismarck in 1883 there were already three clearly defined groups of population in Dakota and an ultimate division had been determined upon by the settlers. Repeatedly, in the decade, the Dakota colonists framed constitutions and signed petitions, and the Republicans in Congress sought to give them statehood. The Democratic House, which prevailed from 1883 to 1889, saw no reason for creating more Republican States, as these would likely be, and found pretexts for holding up the bills. Montana, less advanced than Dakota, and Idaho and Wyoming which were yet more primitive, joined the forces of the statehood advocates. Arizona and New Mexico did the same, and Utah had been a suitor since 1850. Washington, with a growing population on Puget Sound and in the Spokane country, was obviously not long to be denied.

For party purposes, the Democrats resisted the demands for statehood until the election of 1888 insured Republican control through every branch of the United States Government. Thereafter there was no point to resistance, and Cleveland, in 1889, signed an "omnibus" bill under which North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington were admitted. Idaho and Wyoming, defeated at this time, were let in by the Republicans in 1890. The unorganized frontier was now all but gone, and the pioneers of these new States used Pullman cars and read the monthly magazines like any other citizens.

Arizona and New Mexico were excluded from the new States of 1889 and 1890 because a Republican Congress expected them to be Democratic, and both remained Territories for more than twenty succeeding years. Utah, with ample population, was kept where the Federal Government could control it because of the practices taught by its Church. The Mormons had made a prosperous Territory in Utah by 1850. They had flourished ever since, but their institution of polygamy frightened the United States and created permanent hostility to their admission. In 1882 the Territory was placed under a commission, and thereafter polygamous citizens were brought to punishment. In 1890 the Church gave up the fight and formally abandoned the obnoxious doctrine, but the surrender came too late to accomplish admission at this time.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, 1789-1904

The large rectangle represents the total land area of the United States, excluding Alaska and the Islands

1,902,000,000 Acres

+ -+ -+ Land area of the thirteen original states and Maine, Vermont, West Public lands remaining in the possession Virginia, of the United States in 1904 Kentucky, about 700,000,000 Acres Tennessee, and Texas, in none of which has the public domain ever existed + -+ + + -+ Area Land grants Donations Sales to companies 460,000,000 given to for to the or individuals Acres individuals internal states for under preemption in the improvements education and general laws, (Diagram form of and and and private land based upon homesteads railroads other claims allowed the Report or local of the allotments purposes Public Lands Commission and the 122,000,000 137,000,000 164,000,000 319,000,000 Report of the Acres Acres Acres Acres Commissioner of the Land area of the twenty-nine states constituting the General Land public domain. 1,442,000,000 Acres Office, 1905) + -+ -+

By 1890 the good agricultural lands of the United States were nearly all in private hands. Their occupation had been hastened in the last five years by facility of access and the efforts of the railways. With the disappearance of free lands a new period in America began, as was recognized at the time, and has become clearer ever since.

Out of forty-eight States comprising the United States in 1912, and including about 1,902,000,000 acres, twenty-nine with 1,442,000,000 acres had been erected in the public domain to which Congress had once owned title. By cession, purchase, or conquest this domain had been acquired between 1781 and 1853; it had been treated as a national asset and governed with what efficiency Congress possessed. By 1903 the United States had transferred to individuals about half its public land and nearly all its farm land. It retained many millions of acres, but these were mountain or desert, and were not usable by the individual farmer who had been the typical unit in the occupation of the West.

Already, by 1880, the statisticians had recognized that the period of free land was at an end, and had turned their attention to the abuses which had arisen in the administration of the estate. From the beginning, it had been difficult to compel the West to respect national land laws. The squatter who occupied lands without title had always been an obstacle to uniform administration. Evasion of the law had rarely been frowned upon by Western opinion, which had hoped to get the public lands into private hands by the quickest route. In the region where the laws had to be enforced, opinion prevented it, while the National Administration, before the adoption of civil service reform, was incapable of directing with accuracy and uniform policy any administrative scheme which must be so highly technical as a land office. The Preemption, Homestead, and Timber Culture Laws were all framed in the interest of the small holder, but were all perverted by fraud and collusion. The United States invited much of the fraud by making no provision by which those industries which had a valid need for a large acreage could get it legally.

Among the special abuses that were observed now that it was too late to remedy them were the violations of the law and the lawless seizures of the public lands. The cattle companies took and fenced what they needed and drove out "trespassers" by force. Mail contractors complained of illegal inclosures which they dare not cross, but which diverted the United States mail from its lawful course. Yet such was the general land law that against all but the United States Government the possessors could maintain their possession. If the Government could not or would not interfere, there was no redress.

These abuses had been noticed for many years, and were specially advertised in the early eighties by the enormous holdings of a few British noblemen. The problem of absentee landlordism was exciting Ireland in these years. When Cleveland became President his Commissioner of the General Land Office, Sparks, turned cheerfully and vigorously to reform, and denounced the discreditable condition the more readily because it had appeared under Republican administration. He held up the granting of homestead and preemption titles for the purpose of examination and inspection, and demanded the repeal of the Preemption Law. He was successful in recovering some of the lands that had been offered to the railways to aid in their construction.

The railway land grants were notorious because the railways had rarely been done on contract time, and had in theory forfeited their grants. The estimated area offered them was about 214,000,000 acres, and the question arose as to the extent to which forfeiture should be imposed upon them. The spectacular completion of their lines and their efforts to bring a population into the West, and the vast size of the corporations that owned them, had aroused a hostile opinion that supported the Democratic Administration in its efforts to save what lands it could. Some fifty million acres were restored to the domain by this fight, but the restoration only emphasized the fact that most of the good lands were gone.

Out of the demand for the reform of the public lands grew a new interest in the condition of the lands that were left. The Department of Agriculture was created at the end of Cleveland's term, and Governor Jeremiah Rusk was appointed as its first Secretary by Harrison. Rusk accepted cheerfully his place as "the tail of the Cabinet," asserting that as such he was expected "to keep the flies off," and set about rearranging or organizing a group of scientific bureaus. Since most of the remaining lands could not be used without irrigation, the surveys undertaken by Congress started a new phase of public science, and led ultimately to the rise of a positive theory of conservation.

The problems of national communication, Western settlement, and public lands resulted from the completion of the continental railways, while the railways themselves gave a new significance to transportation in America. During the years of the Granger movement the doctrine had been established that railroads are quasi-public and are subject to regulation by public authority. In the Granger Cases in 1877 the Supreme Court recognized the right of the States to establish rates by law, even when these rates, by becoming part of a through rate, had an incidental effect upon interstate commerce. The problem had been viewed as local or regional during the seventies. Most of the States had passed railway laws and had proceeded to accumulate a volume of statistical information upon the railway business, that was increased by such public investigations as the Windom and Hepburn Reports and by lawsuits that revealed the nature of special favors and rebates.

Before the States had gone far in the direction of railway regulation it was discovered that no State could regulate an interstate railway with precision and justice. The great systems built up by Villard and Gould and Vanderbilt and Huntington dominated whole regions and precipitated the question of the effectiveness of state action. The continental lines, necessarily long and traversing several States, emphasized the inequality between the powers of a State and the problem to be met. Their national character pointed to national control.

In Congress there were repeated attempts after 1873 to secure the passage of an Interstate Commerce Act. In continuation of this campaign a committee headed by Senator Shelby M. Cullom, of Illinois, made a new investigation in 1885, and reported early in 1886 that supervision and publicity were required, and that these could best be obtained through a federal commission with large powers of taking testimony and examining books. The committee was convinced, as the public was already convinced, that the problem had become national.

The Supreme Court reached the same opinion in 1886 when it handed down a new decision in the case of the Wabash Railway Company vs. Illinois. Here it reversed or modified its own decision in the Granger Cases. In 1877 it had ruled that railways are subject to regulation and that the States under their police powers may regulate. It now adhered to its major premise, but declared that such regulation as affected an interstate rate is exclusively a federal function. In effect it determined that if there was to be regulation of the great systems it could only be at the hands of Congress.

The regulation of interstate commerce was not a party measure. It had its advocates in both parties, and found its opponents in the railroad lobby that resented any public interference with the business of the roads. The railway owners and directors were slower than the public in accepting the doctrine of the quasi-public nature of their business. It was a powerful argument against them that their size and influence were such that they could and did ruin or enrich individual customers, and that they could make or destroy whole regions of the West. Enough positive proof of favoritism existed to give point to the demand that the business must cease to discriminate.

The Interstate Commerce Act became a law February 4, 1887. It created a commission of five, with a six-year term and the proviso that not more than three of the commissioners should belong to one party. It forbade a group of practices which had resulted in unfair discrimination and gave to the commission considerable powers in investigation and interference. The later interpretation of the law deprived the commission of some of the powers that, it was thought, had been given to it, but during the next nineteen years the Interstate Commerce Commission was a central figure in the solution of the railroad problem. The work of this commission, like the work of irrigation and agriculture, was technical, calling for expert service, and aiding in the process that was changing the character of the National Administration as one function after another was called into service for the first time.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In 1893 F.J. Turner called attention to the Significance of the Frontier in American History (in American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1893). His theory has been elaborated by F.L. Paxson, The Last American Frontier (1910), and K. Coman, Economic Beginnings of the Far West (1912). There is no good account of the public lands. T. Donaldson, The Public Domain (1881), is inaccurate, antiquated, and clumsy, but has not been supplanted. Many useful tables are in the report of the Public Lands Commission created by President Roosevelt (in 58th Congress, 3d session, Senate Document, No. 189, Serial No. 4766). The general spirit of the frontier in the eighties has been appreciated by Owen Wister, in The Virginian (1902), and Members of the Family (1911), and by E. Talbot, in My People of the Plains (1906). J.A. Lomax has preserved some of its folklore in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). The best narratives on the continental railways are J.P. Davis, Union Pacific Railway (1894), and E.V. Smalley, The Northern Pacific Railroad (1883). Many contributory details are in H. Villard, Memoirs (2 vols., 1904), E.P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke (2 vols., 1907), and in the appropriate volumes of H.H. Bancroft, Works. L.H. Haney has compiled the formal documents in his Congressional History of Railroads (in Bulletins of the University of Wisconsin, Nos. 211 and 342). The debate over the Isthmian Canal may be read in J.D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents; the Foreign relations Reports, 1879-83; L.M. Keasbey, The Nicaragua Canal and the Monroe Doctrine (1896); J.B. Henderson, American Diplomatic Questions (1901); and J. Latane, Diplomatic Relations of the United States and Spanish America (1900).



CHAPTER X

NATIONAL BUSINESS

Transportation was a fundamental factor in the two greatest problems of the eighties. In the case of the disappearance of free land and the frontier, it produced phenomena that were most clearly visible in the West, although affecting the whole United States. In the case of concentration of capital and the growth of trusts, its phenomena were mostly in the East, where were to be found the accumulations of capital, the great markets, and the supply of labor.

Through the improvements in communication it became possible to conduct an efficient business in every State and direct it from a single head office. Not only railroad and telegraph helped in this, but telephone, typewriter, the improved processes in photography and printing, and the organization of express service were of importance and touched every aspect of life. Journalism both broadened and concentrated. The effective range of the weeklies and monthlies and even of the city dailies was widened, while the resulting competition tended to weed out the weaker and more local. Illustrations improved and changed the physical appearance of periodical literature.

Social organizations of national scope or ambition took advantage of the new communication. Trade unions, benevolent associations, and professional societies multiplied their annual congresses and conventions, and increased the proportion of the population that knew something of the whole Union. A few periodicals and pattern-makers began to circulate styles, which clothing manufacturers imitated and local shopkeepers sold at retail. Mail-order business was aided by the same conditions. A new uniformity in appearance began to enter American life, weakening the old localisms in dress, speech, and conduct. Until within a few years it had been possible here and there to sit down to dinner "with a gentleman in the dress of the early century—ruffles, even bag-wig complete"; but the new standards were the standards of the mass, and it became increasingly more difficult to keep up an aristocratic seclusion or a style of life much different from that of the community.

With the growth of national uniformity went also the concentration of control. As the field of competition widened, the number of possible winners declined. Men measured strength, not only in their town or State, but across the continent, and the handful of leaders used the facilities of communication as the basis for the further expansion of their industries. Business was extended because it was possible and because it was thought to pay.

Many of the economies of consolidation were so obvious as to need no argument. If a single firm could do the business of five,—or fifty—it increased its profit through larger and better plants, greater division of labor, and a more careful use of its by-products. It could cut down expenses by reducing the army of competing salesmen and by lessening the duplication of administrative offices. The same economics in management which had driven the Old South to the large plantation as a type drove American industrial society toward economic consolidation and the trusts.

The technical form of organization of the trust was unimportant. Strictly speaking, it was a combination of competing concerns, in which the control of all was vested in a group of trustees for the purpose of uniformity. The name was thus derived, but it spread in popular usage until it was regarded as generally descriptive of any business so large that it affected the course of the whole trade of which it was a part. The logical outcome of the trust was monopoly, and trusts appeared first in those industries in which there existed a predisposition to monopoly, an excessive loss through competition, or a controlling patent or trade secret.

The first trust to arouse public notice was concerned in the transportation and manufacture of petroleum and its products. Commercial processes for refining petroleum became available in the sixties, enabling improvements in domestic illumination that insured an increasing market for the product. The industry was speculative by nature because of the low cost of crude petroleum at the well and the high cost of delivering it to the consumer. Slight rises in price caused the market to be swamped by overproduction, and threw the control of the industry into the hands of those who controlled its transportation.

Once above ground, the cheap and bulky oil had to be hauled first to the refiner and then to the consumer. The receptacles were expensive, and the methods of transportation that were cheapest in operation had the greatest initial cost. Barrels were relatively cheap to buy, but were costly to handle. Tank-cars were more expensive, but repaid those who could afford them. Pipe-lines were beyond the means of the individual, but brought in greater returns to the corporations that owned them.

It was inevitable that some of the dealers who competed in the oil-fields of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia in the sixties should realize the strategic value of the control of transportation and profit by it. John D. Rockefeller happened to be more successful than others in manipulating transportation. His refineries grew in size, as they bought out or crushed their rivals, until by 1882 most of the traffic in petroleum was under his control. Economy and sagacity had much to do with the success, but were less significant than transportation. Railway rates were yet unfixed by law and every road sold transportation as best it could. Rockefeller learned to bargain in freight rates, and through a system of special rates and rebates gained advantages over every competitor. His lobby made it difficult to weaken him through legislative measures, while his attorneys were generally more skillful than his prosecutors before the courts. The recognition of the existence of rebates did much to hasten the passage of the Interstate Commerce Law. The group of corporations that flourished because of them became the greatest of the trusts. By 1882 the affiliated Rockefeller companies were so numerous and complicated that they were given into the hands of a group of trustees to be managed as a single business.

The Whiskey and Sugar Trusts, formed in 1887, had to do with commodities in which transportation was not the controlling element. These industries suffered from overproduction and ruinous competition, to eliminate which the distilleries and sugar refineries entered into trust agreements like that of the Standard Oil companies. Other lines of manufacture followed as best they could. Before Cleveland was inaugurated the trend was noticed and attacked.

Most of the agitation against the trusts came from individuals whose lives were touched by them. Competition was ruthless and often unscrupulous. Every man who was crushed by it hated his destroyer. There was much changing of occupations as firms merged and reorganized and as plants grew in size and ingenuity. Perhaps more workers changed the character of their occupation in the eighties than in any other decade. As each individual readjusted himself to his new environment, he added to the mass of public opinion that believed the trusts to be a menace to society.

As early as 1881 there was a market for anti-trust literature, for in March of that year the Atlantic Monthly printed the "Story of a Great Monopoly," by Henry Demarest Lloyd, who became one of the leaders in the attack. It had been fashionable to regard success as a vindication of Yankee cleverness and worthy of emulation, without much examination of the methods by which it was attained. The Standard Oil Company, attracting attention to itself, raised the question of the effect of industry upon society.

The evils ascribed to the trusts were social or political. In a social way they were believed to check individualism and to create too large a proportion of subordinates to independent producers. As monopolies, they were believed to threaten extortion through high price. It was strongly suspected of the largest trusts that having destroyed all competition they could fix prices at pleasure. Economists pointed out that such price could hardly be high and yet remunerative to the trusts, because the latter did not dare to check consumption. But fear of oppression could not be dispelled by any economic law.

The trust was believed to have an evil influence in politics, and to obtain special favors through bribery or pressure. The United States was used to the influence of money in politics, and distrusted public officials. The state constitutions framed in this period were being expanded into codes of specific law in the hope of safeguarding public interests. There was little belief that corrupt overtures, if made by the trusts, would be resisted.

Lloyd, and men of his type, believed in regulation and control. Some of them became socialists. Others hoped to restore a competitive basis by law. The greatest impression on the public was made by one of their literary allies, Edward Bellamy.

Early in 1888 Edward Bellamy published a romance entitled Looking Backward, in which his hero, Mr. Julian West, went to sleep in 1887, with labor controversy and trust denunciation sounding in his ears, to awake in the year 2000 A.D. The socialized state into which the hero was reborn was a picture of an end to which industry was perhaps drifting. It caught public attention. Clubs of enthusiasts tried to hasten the day of nationalization by forming Bellamistic societies. Those who were repelled by a future in which the trusts and the State were merged became more active in their demand for regulation.

The legislative side of trust regulation, like that of railway regulation, was made more difficult because of the division of powers between Congress and the States. It was an interesting question whether one State could control a monopoly as large as the nation. But the States passed anti-trust laws by the score, as they had passed the railway laws. As in the earlier case they found their model in the common law, which had long prohibited conspiracies in restraint of trade. One of the States, Ohio, with only the common law to go upon, brought suit against the Standard Oil Trust and secured a prohibition against it in 1892. It was relatively easy to attack the formal organization of the trust, but in spite of such attacks concentration continued to produce ever greater combinations, as though it were fulfilling some fundamental economic law.

Those of the anti-monopolists who were also tariff reformers had a weapon to urge besides that of regulation. They maintained that part of the power of the corporations was due to the needless favors of protection, which deprived the United States of the aid that competition from European manufacturers might have given. They insisted that a revision of the tariff would do much to remove the burden of the trusts. The House ordered an investigation of the trusts while it was engaged on the futile Mills Bill in 1888, but it was the latter that furnished the text for the ensuing presidential campaign.

So far as the parties were concerned the Republicans took the aggressive in 1888. Cleveland's emphasis upon tariff reduction was personal and never had the cheerful support of the whole party. The manufacturers, however, were thoroughly scared by the continued threats of revision. As they had come, by supporting the party in power, to support the Republicans, so they now organized within that party to save themselves. Their leaders sang a new note in 1888, no longer apologizing for the tariff or urging reduction, but defending it on principle,—on Clay's old principle of an American system,—and asking that it be made more comprehensive. From Florence, and then from Paris, Blaine replied to Cleveland's Message of 1887, and his friends continued to urge his nomination for the Presidency. Only after his positive refusal to be a candidate did the Republican Convention at Chicago make its choice from a list of candidates including Sherman, Gresham, Depew, Alger, Harrison, and Allison. The ticket finally nominated consisted of Benjamin Harrison, a Senator from Indiana, and Levi P. Morton, a New York banker. The platform was "uncompromisingly in favor of the American system of protection." It denounced Cleveland and the revisionists as serving "the interests of Europe," and condemned "the Mills Bill as destructive to the general business, the labor, and the farming interests of the country."

The Democrats, as is usual for the party in power, had already held their convention before the Republicans met. They had renominated Grover Cleveland by acclamation, and Allen G. Thurman, of Ohio, as Vice-President, and had indorsed, not the Mills Bill by name, but the views of Cleveland and the efforts of the President and Representatives in Congress to secure a reduction. For many of the Democrats the need to defend tariff reform was so distasteful that they left the party, blaming Cleveland as the cause of their defection.

The canvass of 1888 was not marred by the personalities of 1884. The issue of protection was discussed earnestly by both parties, Blaine, who returned from Europe, leading the Republican attack. The only exciting incidents of the campaign had to do with the "Murchison Letter" and the campaign fund.

Matthew S. Quay, whose career as Treasurer of Pennsylvania had not been above reproach, was chairman of the Republican campaign committee. During the contest it was asserted that he was assessing the protected manufacturers and guaranteeing them immunity in case of a Republican victory. He was at least able to play upon their fears and bring a vigorous support to the protective promises of his party. His committee circulated stories of the un-Americanism of Cleveland, charging that free-trade was pro-British, and making capital out of the pension vetoes. Toward the end of the canvass Sir Lionel Sackville-West, the British Minister, fell into a Republican trap and wrote to a pretended naturalized Englishman, who called himself Murchison, that a vote for Cleveland would best serve Great Britain. His tactless blunder caused his summary dismissal from Washington and aided the Republican cause much as the Burchard affair had injured it four years before.

Harrison was elected in November as a minority President, Cleveland actually receiving more popular though fewer electoral votes. He came into office with a Republican Senate and a Republican House, able to carry out party intentions for the first time since 1883.

Benjamin Harrison was never a leader of his party. He had a good war record and had been Senator for a single term. His nomination was not due to his strength, but to his availability. Coming from the doubtful State of Indiana, he was likely to carry it, particularly since the Republican candidate for governor was a leader of the Grand Army of the Republic. Harrison's personal character and piety were valuable assets in a time when party leaders were under fire. Once in office he had a cold abruptness that made it easy to lose the support of associates who felt that their own importance was greater than his.

Blaine, the greatest of these associates, became Secretary of State, and soon had the satisfaction of meeting the Pan-American Congress that he had called eight years before. In his interest in larger American affairs he lost some of his keenness as a protectionist and acquired a zeal for foreign trade. With England he had another unsuccessful tilt, this time over the seals of Bering Sea.

In some of the appointments Harrison paid the party debts. Windom came back to the Treasury, although ex-Senator Platt, of New York, claimed that he had been promised it. John Wanamaker, who had raised large sums in Philadelphia to aid Quay in the campaign, became Postmaster-General. The Pension Bureau, important through the alliance with the soldiers, went to a leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, one "Corporal" Tanner, whose most famous utterance related to his intentions: "God save the surplus!"

The Fifty-first Congress, convening in December, 1889, took up with enthusiasm the mandate of the election, as the Republicans saw it, to revise the tariff in the interest of protection. It chose as Speaker Thomas B. Reed, of Maine, and revised its rules so as to expedite legislation. William McKinley prepared a revision of the tariff in the House, while another Ohioan, John Sherman, took up the matter of the trusts in the Senate.

The Sherman Anti-Trust Law was enacted in July, 1890, after nearly ten years of general discussion. Although formulated by Republicans—Sherman, Edmunds, and Hoar—it was not more distinctly a party measure than the Interstate Commerce Act had been. It relied upon the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution as its authority to declare illegal "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations," and it provided suitable penalties for violation. The most significant debate in connection with it occurred upon an amendment offered by Representative Richard P. Bland, of Missouri, who desired to extend the scope of the prohibition, specifically, to railroads. The Senate excluded the amendment on the ground that the law was general, covering the railroads without special enumeration. The full meaning of the law remained in doubt for nearly fifteen years, for few private suitors invoked it and the Attorneys-General were not hostile to the ordinary practices of business. A great financial depression which appeared in 1893 acted well as a temporary deterrent of trusts. There was a suspicion that the law had been intended not to be enforced, but to act as a popular antidote to the McKinley Tariff Bill which was pending while it passed.

There were two reasons for a revision of the tariff in 1890. The surplus, still a reason, added $105,000,000 in 1889, and continued to embarrass the Treasury with a wealth of riches. Secondly, the election of 1888 had gone Republican, and party leaders chose to regard this as a popular condemnation of Cleveland and tariff reform, and a popular mandate for higher protection, in spite of the fact that more Americans voted for Cleveland than for Harrison. A third reason, alleged by the opposition, was the necessity of fulfilling the pledges given by Quay and the campaign managers to the manufacturers who contributed to the campaign fund,—manufacturers who were parodied as "Mary":—