"Our Mary had a little lamb, Her heart was most intent To make its wool, beyond its worth, Bring 56 per cent."

In April, 1890, McKinley presented his act "to equalize the duties upon imports and to reduce the revenues." For five months Congress wrestled with the details of the bill and the issues connected with it. In June it rewarded the soldier allies of the Administration with a Dependent Pension Act which granted pensions to those who could show ninety days of service and present dependence, and which, aided by the previous laws, relieved the surplus of $1,350,000,000 in the next ten years. Early in July the Anti-Trust Act was passed. Two weeks later Congress paused in its tariff deliberations to pass the Sherman Silver Purchase Bill at the demand of Republican Senators from the Rocky Mountain States, who wanted their share of protection in this form and were so numerous as to be able to produce a deadlock.

The tariff that became a law October 1, 1890, was the first success in tariff legislation since the Civil War. It enlarged protection and reduced the revenue. The latter was done by repealing the duty on raw sugar, which had been the most remunerative item of the old tariff, and by substituting a bounty of two cents per pound to the American sugar-grower, which further relieved the surplus. The sugar clause was one of the notable features of the McKinley Bill, and was closely related to a group of duties upon agricultural imports. There had been complaint among the farmers that protection did nothing for them. The agricultural schedule was designed to silence this complaint.

Another novelty in the bill was the extension of protection to unborn industries. In the case of tin plate, the President was empowered to impose a duty whenever he should learn that American mills were ready to manufacture it. This was an application of the principle that went beyond the demands of most advocates of protection.

A final novelty, reciprocity, was the favorite scheme of the Secretary of State. Blaine, in his foreign policy, saw in the tariff wall an obstacle to friendly trade relations, and induced Congress to permit the duties on the chief imports from South America to be admitted on a special basis in return for reciprocal favors. McKinley, as his experience widened, accepted this principle in full, and died with an expression of it upon his lips. But in 1890 most protectionists inclined toward absolute exclusion, regardless of foreign relations, and were ready to raise the rate whenever the imports were large.

In the passage of the McKinley Tariff Bill it was noticed that a third body was sharing largely in such legislation. After each house had passed the bill and disagreements on amendments had been reached, it was sent to a Joint Committee of Conference whose report was, by rule, unamendable. In the Conference Committee the bill was finally shaped, and so shaped that the Republican majority was forced to accept it or none. The party leaders who sat on the Committee of Conference were a third house with almost despotic power, and were, as well, men whose association with manufacturing districts or protected interests raised a fair question as to the impartiality of their decisions. The Republican reply, in their hands, to the assertion that the tariff was the mother of trusts was to raise the tariff still higher and to forbid the trusts to engage in interstate commerce.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The Life of Henry Demarest Lloyd, by C. Lloyd (2 vols., 1912) contains an admirable and sympathetic survey of the growth of anti-trust feeling, and should be supplemented by the writings of H.D. Lloyd, more particularly, "The Story of a Great Monopoly" (in Atlantic Monthly, March, 1881), and Wealth against Commonwealth (1894). The philosophy of Henry George is best stated in his Progress and Poverty (1879), and is presented biographically by H. George, Jr., in his Life of Henry George (1900). The most popular romance of the decade is based upon an economic hypothesis: E. Bellamy, Looking Backward (1887). J.W. Jenks, The Trust Problem (1900, etc.), has become a classic sketch of the economics of industrial concentration. The histories of the Standard Oil Company, by I.M. Tarbell (2 vols., 1904) and G.H. Montague (1903), are based largely upon judicial and congressional investigations. The Sherman Law is discussed in the writings and biographies of Sherman, Hoar, and Edmunds, and in A. H. Walker, History of the Sherman Law (1910). For the election of 1888, consult Stanwood, Andrews, Peck, the Annual Cyclopaedia, the tariff histories, and D.R. Dewey, National Problems, 1885-1897 (in The American Nation, vol. 24, 1907).



CHAPTER XI

THE FARMERS' CAUSE

The Republican protective policy had its strongest supporters among the industrial communities of the East where the profits of manufacture were distributed. In the West, where the agricultural staples had produced a simplicity of interests somewhat resembling those of the Old South in its cotton crop, the advantage of protection was questioned even in Republican communities. The Granger States and the Prairie States were normally Republican, but they had experienced falling prices for their corn and wheat, as the South had for its cotton, in the eighties, and had listened encouragingly to the advocates of tariff reform. Cleveland's Message of 1887 had affected them strongly. Through 1888 and 1889 country papers shifted to the support of revision, while farmers' clubs and agricultural journals began to denounce protection. The Republican leaders felt the discontent, and brought forward the agricultural schedules of the McKinley Bill to appease it, but dissatisfaction increased in 1889 and 1890 through most of the farming sections.

The farmer in the South was directly affected by the falling price of cotton, and retained his hereditary aversion to the protective tariff. He could not believe that either party was working in his interests. The dominant issues of the eighties did not touch his problems. He was not interested in civil service reform, which was a product of a differentiated society, in which professional expertness was recognized and valued. He knew and cared little about administration, and being used to a multitude of different tasks himself saw no reason why the offices should not be passed around. In this view American farmers generally concurred.

The Southern farmer was without interest in the pension system and was prone to criticize it. The Fourteenth Amendment had forced the repudiation of the whole Confederate debt, leaving the Southern veterans compelled to pay taxes that were disbursed for the benefit of Union veterans and debarred from enjoying similar rewards. They could not turn Republican, yet in their own party they saw men who failed to represent them.

In the North agriculture was depressed and the farmers were discontented. In many regions the farms were worn out. Scientific farming was beginning to be talked about to some extent, but was little practiced. The improvements in transportation had brought the younger and more fertile lands of the West into competition with the East for the city markets. Cattle, raised on the plains and slaughtered at Kansas City or Chicago, were offered for sale in New York and Philadelphia. Western fruits of superior quality were competing with the common varieties of the Eastern orchards. Here, as in the South, the farmers saw the parties quarreling over issues that touched the manufacturing classes, but disregarding those of agriculture.

It was in the West, however, that agricultural discontent was keenest. In no other region were uniform conditions to be found over so large an area. The Granger States had shown how uniformity in discontent may bring forth political readjustments. The new region of the late eighties lay west of Missouri and Iowa, where the railroads had stimulated settlement along the farther edge of the arable prairies. Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and the Dakotas had passed into a boom period about 1885, and had pushed new farms into regions that could not in ordinary years produce a crop. Only blinded enthusiasts believed that the climate of the sub-humid plains was changing. In good years crops will grow as far west as the Rockies: in bad, they dry up in eastern Kansas.

It served the interest of the railroads to promote new settlements, and speculation got the better of prudence. The rainfall cooperated for a few years, enabling the newcomers to break the sod and set up their dwellings and barns. The quality of the settlers increased the dangers attendant upon the community.

Under earlier conditions in the westward migration each frontier had been settled, chiefly, by occupants of the preceding frontier, who knew the climate and understood the conditions of successful farming. The greater distances in the farther West, and the ease of access which the railroads gave, brought a less capable class of farmers into the plains settlements. Some were amateurs; others knew a different type of agriculture. The population which had to deal with this new region was less likely to succeed than that of any previous frontier.

The frontier of the eighties presented new obstacles in its doubtful rainfall and its experimental farmers. It contained as well the conditions that had always prevailed along the edge of settlement. Transportation was vital to its life,—as vital as it had been in the Granger States,—yet was nearly as unregulated. The Interstate Commerce Law of 1887 had little noticeable immediate effect. Discrimination, unreasonable rates, and overcapitalization were still grievances that affected the West. The new activity of organized labor, shown in the Western strikes of 1885 and 1886, added another obstacle to the easy prosperity of farmers who needed uninterrupted train service. The germs of an anti-railroad movement were well distributed.

An anti-corporation movement, too, might reasonably be expected in this new frontier. Producing only the raw products of agriculture, its inhabitants bought most of the commodities in use from distant sections. They were impressed with the cost of what they had to buy and the low price of what they sold. They were ready listeners to agitators against the trusts.

Like all frontiers, this one was financed on borrowed money. The pioneer was dependent on credit, was hopeful and speculative in his borrowings, built more towns and railroads than he needed, and loaded himself with a mountain of debt that could be met only after a long series of prosperous years.

By necessity he was readily converted by the arguments of inflation. Greenback inflation had run its course, and after the resumption of specie payments in 1879 had been only a political threat without foundation or many followers. A Greenback party, affiliating with labor and anti-monopoly interests, had nominated Weaver in 1880 and Butler in 1884, but even inflationists had not voted for the ticket in large number. A new phase of inflation had become more interesting than the greenbacks, and had led to the demand for the free coinage of silver.

Among the demands of the Western farmer, whose greatest problem was the payment of his debts, none was more often heard than that for more and cheaper money. The Eastern farmer, though less burdened with debt, knew that more money would make higher prices, and believed it would bring larger profits. The Southern farmer, heavily in debt, not so much for purposes of development and permanent improvements, as because he regularly mortgaged his crop in advance and allowed the rural storekeeper to finance him, was also interested in inflation as a common remedy. Together the farmers of all sections kept pressing on the parties for free silver after the passage of the Bland-Allison Bill in 1878. As the price of silver declined the gain which silver inflation would bring them increased, and they were joined by another class of producers whose profits came from mining the silver bullion.

The silver mines furnished important industries in Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California, and were highly valued in most of the Western communities. As their output declined in value after 1873, their owners turned to the United States Government for aid and protection, not differing much from the manufacturers of the East in their hope for aid. The restoration of silver coinage was the method by which they desired their protection, and they asserted that Congress could coin all the silver and yet maintain it at a parity with gold. They were allies with the farmer inflationists so far as means of relief were concerned, and both failed to see how incompatible were their real aims. The miners wanted free silver in order to increase the price of silver and their profits; the farmers wanted it to increase the volume of money and reduce its value. If either was correct in his prophecy as to the result of free coinage, the other was doomed to disappointment. But the combined demand was reiterated through the eighties. While times were good it was not serious, but any shock to the prosperity or credit of the West was likely to stimulate the one movement in which all the discontented concurred.

The crisis which precipitated Western discontent into politics came in 1889 when rainfall declined and crops failed. In the Arkansas Valley, with an average fall of eighteen inches, the total for this year was only thirteen inches. General Miles, who had chased hostile Indians across the plains for more than twenty years, and who had seen the new villages push in, mile by mile, saw the terrible results of drought. First suffering, then mortgage, then foreclosure and eviction, he prophesied. "And should this impending evil continue for a series of years," he wrote, "no one can anticipate what may follow." The glowing promises of the early eighties were falsified, whole towns and counties were deserted, and the farmers turned to the Government for aid.

The Western upheaval followed a period in which both great parties had been attacked as misrepresentative. There was a widely spread belief that politicians were dishonest and that the Government was conducted for the favored classes. It was natural that the discontented should take up one of the agricultural organizations already existing, as the Grangers had done, and convert it to their political purpose.

Since the high day of the Granger movement there had always been associations among the farmers and organizations striving to get their votes. The Grange had itself continued as a social and economic bond after its attack upon the railroads. There had been a Farmers' Union and an Agricultural Wheel. The great success of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor had had imitators who were less successful because farming had been too profitable to give much room for organized discontent, while in times of prosperity the farmer was an individualist. A new activity among the farmers' papers was now an evidence of a growing desire to get the advantage of cooperation.

The greatest farmer organization of the eighties was the Farmers' Alliance, a loose federation of agricultural clubs that reflected local conditions, West and South. In the South, it was noted in 1888 as "growing rapidly," but "only incidentally of political importance." In Dakota, it had been active since 1885, conducting for its members fire and hail insurance, a purchasing department, and an elevator company. In Texas it was building cotton and woolen mills. The machinery of this organization was used by the farmers in stating their common cause, and as their aims broadened it merged, during 1890, into a People's Party. In Kansas, during the summer of this year, the movement broke over the lines of both old parties and had such success that its promoters thought a new political party had been born.

Agricultural discontent, growing with the hard times of 1889, had been noticed, but there had been no means of measuring it until Congress adjourned after the passage of the McKinley Bill and the members came home to conduct the congressional campaign of 1890. They found that the recent law had become the chief issue before them. The so-called popular demand for protection, revealed in the election of 1888, had after all been based upon a minority of the votes cast. The tariff and the way it had been passed were used against them by the Democrats and the Farmers' Alliance.

The act was passed so close to election day that its real influence could not then be seen and its opponents could not be confuted when they told of the evils it would do. Before the election of 1888, as again in 1892, Republican manufacturers frightened their workmen by threats of closing down if free-traders won. This time the tables were turned against them by the recital of prospective high prices.

Corrupt methods in framing the schedules furnished an influential argument throughout the West. Even in the East the tariff reformers asserted that undue favors had been done for greedy interests; that manufacturers who had bought immunity by their contributions to Quay's campaign fund had been rewarded with increased protection. The farmers believed these charges, plausible though unprovable, for they were disposed to believe that both the great parties were interested only in selfish exploitation of the Government to the advantage of politicians.

In every State Republican candidates had to meet this fire as well as the local issues. In Maine, Reed met it and was elected with enlarged majority from a community that wanted protection. In Ohio, McKinley lost his seat, partly from the revulsion of feeling, but more because the Democrats, who controlled the State Legislature, had gerrymandered his district against him. Cannon, of Illinois, who had already served nine terms and was to serve ten more, lost his seat, and LaFollette, of Wisconsin, whom the protectionists had made much of, was checked early in a promising career because of an educational issue in his State. Pennsylvania, protectionist at heart, elected the Democratic ex-governor Pattison again in one of its revulsions against the Quay machine.

The Democrats defeated the Republicans in the East while the Farmers' Alliance undermined them in the West. In Kansas and Nebraska the Alliance controlled the result, sent their own men to Washington, and secured the Kansas Legislature which returned the first Populist Senator. In several States fusion tickets were successful with Democratic and Alliance support. In the South, Democrats found it aided them in winning nomination—for the real Southern election was within this party and not at the polls—to assert that they were and had been farmers.

When the votes were counted the extent of the reaction was realized. The last Congress had contained a safe majority of Republicans in each house. The new Congress, the Fifty-second, chosen in 1890, had lost the high-tariff majority in the lower body. Only 88 Republicans were elected, against 236 Democrats and 8 of the Alliance. The Republicans retained the Senate partly because of the "rotten borough" States, Idaho and Wyoming, which they had just admitted.

The greatest factor in the landslide was the tariff, but this was, largely, only the occasion for an outburst of discontent that had been piling up for a decade. The dominant party was punished because things went wrong, because the trusts throve and labor was uneasy, because prices declined, because there were scandals in the Public Lands and Pension Bureaus, and because the rainfall had diminished on the plains. The new House elected a Georgian, Crisp, as Speaker, and the second half of Harrison's term passed quietly. Among the people, however, there was much conjecture upon the future of the Farmers' Alliance. A convention at Cincinnati, six months after the election, tried to unite the new element and form a third party of importance.



Union between the Knights of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance for political purposes was the aim of the promoters of the People's Party, a party that was to right all the wrongs from which the plain people suffered and restore the Government to their hands. Until the next presidential election they had time to organize for the crusade.

The United States, by 1890, had begun to feel the influence of the agencies of communication in breaking down sectionalism and letting in the light of comparative experience. Men who survived from the generation that flourished before the war found their cherished ideas undermined or shattered. In public life, administration, literature, and religion the old order was being swept away. The United States had become a nation because it could not avoid it. Even the Congregational churches, with whom parish autonomy was vital, had seen fit to erect a National Council. Every important activity of trade had become national, and the only agency that retained its old localism was the law, which must cope with the new order. In many ways the trust problem was the result of an inadequate legal system which left a wide "twilight zone" between the local capacity of the State and the activity of the Nation. Yet the Nation was unfolding and expanding its powers. Railroad control, immigration and labor control, agricultural experiment, irrigation, and reclamation were only samples of the new lines of activity that created new administrative machinery and advanced abreast of the new idea of appointment because of merit and tenure during good behavior. Men who continued to see the center of political gravity in the State Governments were behind the times.

An indigenous literature was rising in the United States. Dickens had lived long enough to recognize the spirit of a new school in The Luck of Roaring Camp, and The Outcasts of Poker Flat, which appeared in 1868. Before 1890 the fame of their author, Bret Harte, was secure. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), too, had seen the native field and had exploited it. The New England school, Emerson and Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, lived into or through the eighties, but were less robust in their American flavor than their younger contemporaries who picked subjects from the border. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and the Connecticut Yankee were life as well as art. Another writer of the generation, William Dean Howells, gave The Rise of Silas Lapham to the world in 1885, and revealed a different stratum of the new society, while the vogue of Little Lord Fauntleroy tells less of the life therein described than of the outlook of American readers.

Pure literature was in 1890 turning more and more to American subjects; applied literature was searching for causes and explanations. The writings of Henry George, particularly his Progress and Poverty, brought him from obscurity to prominence in six years, and by 1885 had "formed a noteworthy epoch in the history of economic thought." The success of Bellamy's utopian romance proved the avidity of the reading public. Parkman and Bancroft, of the older generation, Henry Adams, McMaster, and Rhodes, of the younger, led the way through history to an understanding of American conditions. Economics, sociology, and government were beginning to have a literature of their own, the last receiving its strongest impulse from the thoughtful American Commonwealth of James Bryce.

In the field of periodical literature the rising American taste was supporting a wider range of magazines. The old and dignified North American Review was still an arena for political discussion. During 1890 it printed an important interchange of views between William E. Gladstone and James G. Blaine, on the merits of a protective tariff. Harper's Monthly and the Atlantic had given employment to the leading men of letters since before the Civil War. Leslie's and Harper's Weeklies had added illustration to news, making their place during the sixties, while the Independent held its own as the leading religious newspaper and the Nation appeared as a journal of criticism. Scribner's and the Century had been added more recently to the list of monthlies, the latter running its great series of reminiscences of the battles and leaders of the Civil War and its life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay. Improvements in typography and illustration, combined with greater ease in collecting the news and distributing the product, made all the periodicals more nearly national.

The periodicals, in a measure, took the place as national leaders that the newspapers had before. The newspaper as a personal expression was passing away, as the great editors of Horace Greeley's generation died. The younger editors were making investments rather than journalistic tools out of their papers. Trade and advertisement used this vehicle to approach their customers. News collecting became more prompt and adequate, but the opinion of the papers dwindled. They bought their news from syndicates or associations, as they bought paper or ink. The counting-house was coming to outrank the editorial room in their management.

Through the new literature the changing nature of American life was portrayed, and as the life reshaped itself under nationalizing influences theology lost much of its old narrowness. Among religious novels Robert Elsmere was perhaps most widely read. The struggle between orthodoxy and the new criticism had got out of the control of the professional theologians and had permeated the laity. A revised version of the Old and New Testaments gave new basis for textual discussion. The influence of the scientific generalizations of Darwin and his school had reached the Church and forced upon it a rephrasing of its views. It was becoming less dangerous for men to admit their belief in scientific process. The orthodox churches lost nothing in popularity as the struggle advanced, and outside them new teachers proclaimed new religions as they had ever done in America.

The greatest of the new religions was that of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, in whose teachings may be found a religious parallel to the political revolt of the People's Party. Christian Science was a reaction from the "vertebrate Jehovah" of the Puritans to a more comfortable and responsive Deity. It was the outgrowth of a well-fed and prosperous society, presenting itself to the ordinary mind as "primarily a religion of healing."

Intellectual, spiritual, economic, and political revolt were common in America in 1890, as they must have been after the industrial revolution of the last ten years. The whole nation was once more acting as a unit, for the South had outlived the worst results of war and reorganization and was again developing on independent lines. The immediate problem was the effect of the revolt upon political control.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The materials upon the unrest of the later eighties are yet uncollected, and must be pursued through the files of the journals, many of which are named above in the text. The new scientific periodicals: Quarterly Journal of Economics, Political Science Quarterly, Yale Review, Journal of Political Economy, etc., devoted much space to current economic and social analysis. F.L. McVey, The Populist Movement (in American Economic Association, Economic Studies, vol. I), is useful but only fragmentary. The materials on free silver are mentioned in the note to chapter XIV, below. A.B. Paine, Mark Twain, gives many cross-references to the literary life of the decade. J.F. Jameson discusses the fertile field of American religious history in "The American Acta Sanctorum" (in the American Historical Review, 1908).



CHAPTER XII

THE NEW SOUTH

The Old South, in which two parties had always struggled on fairly equal terms, was destroyed during the period of the Civil War, while reconstruction failed completely to revive it. The New South, in politics, had but one party of consequence. With few exceptions white men of respectability voted with the Democrats because of the influence of the race question which negro suffrage had raised. From the reestablishment of Southern home rule until the advent in politics of the Farmers' Alliance no issue appeared in the Southern States that even threatened to split the dominant vote. But under the economic pressure of the late eighties the old white leaders parted company and even contended with each other for the negro vote to aid their plans.

The political influence of the Alliance cannot be measured at the polls in the South as easily as in the West. In most States, in 1888 and 1890, Alliance tickets were promoted, often in fusion with the Republican party. The greater influence, however, was within Democratic lines, at the primaries or conventions of that party. Here, among the candidates who presented themselves for nomination, the professional politician found himself an object of suspicion. The lawyer lost some of his political availability. Men who could claim to be close to the soil had an advantage.

The value placed upon the dissatisfied farmer vote is shown in the autobiographical sketches which Senators and Representatives wrote for the Congressional Directory of the Fifty-second Congress. Some who had never before held office stated the fact with apparent pride. One, who appeared from the Texas district which John H. Reagan had represented through eight Congresses, announced that he "became a member of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, and took an active interest in advocating the cause of progress among his fellow laborers; is now Overseer of the Texas State Grange and President of the Texas Farmer Cooperative Publishing Association." From Georgia came several Representatives of this type. One "has devoted his time exclusively [since 1886] to agricultural interests, and is a member of the Farmers' Alliance." Another was elected "as an Alliance man and Democrat." A third "was Vice-President of the Georgia State Agricultural Society for eleven years, and President of the same for four years; he is now President of the Georgia State Alliance." A fourth, Thomas E. Watson, lawyer, editor, historian, and leader of the new movement, "has been, and still is, largely interested in farming." A South Carolina Representative covered himself with the generous assertion that he was "member of all the organizations in his State designed to benefit agriculture."

The agricultural bases of the Southern political disturbance lay in the changes in tenure and finance that had recently appeared. The South was not without a pioneer immigration resembling that of the West. Many of the carpet-baggers had undertaken to develop farms there. There was much opportunity for rural speculation that increased in attractiveness as the area of free Western lands diminished. So far as this went, it produced a debtor class and prepared the way for inflation.

But the development of new areas in the South was less significant than the method of its industry. The disintegration of plantations continued steadily through the seventies and eighties. The figures of the census, showing tenure for the first time in 1880, and color in 1890, exaggerated this, since many of the small holdings there enumerated were to all intents farmed by hired labor and were only matters of bookkeeping. Yet there was a marked diminution in the size of the estates. A class of negro owners was slowly developing to account for a part of the diminution. Frugality and industry appeared in enough of the freedmen to bring into negro ownership in 1900, within the slave area, 149,000 farms, averaging 55 acres. There were at this time 2,700,000 farms in the South, and 5,700,000 in the whole United States. Negro renters and negro croppers, many of whom labored under the direct supervision of the white landlords, increased the number of individual farmers, and like the rest lived upon the proceeds of the cotton crop that was not yet grown.

Much of the capital that was used in Southern agriculture came from the North through the manufacturers and wholesalers who supplied the retail merchants of the South. These merchants advanced credit to their customers, measuring it by the estimated value of the next crop. Once the bargain had been struck, the farmer bought all his supplies from his banker-merchant, paying such prices as the latter saw fit to charge. There could be little competition among merchants under this system, since the burden of his debt kept the planter from seeking the cheapest market. The double weight of extortionate prices and heavy interest impressed a large section of the South with the scarcity of cash and the evils of existing finance.

In agricultural method as well as in finance the South was oppressed by its system. The merchant wanted cotton, for cotton was marketable, and could not be consumed by a tricky debtor. Single cropping was thus unduly encouraged; diversified agriculture and rotation of crops made little progress. The use of commercial fertilizers was greatly stimulated, but agriculture as a whole could not advance.

Tied fast to a system nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation movement that allied the South and West in the demand for cheaper money and more of it. The Farmers' Alliance, with its demands for railroad control, trust regulation, banking reform, and free silver, was the logical vehicle for the expression of Southern discontent.

The white population of the South, undivided since the Civil War, was confronted in 1890 by an issue that bore no relation to race and that divided society into debtor and creditor classes. For twenty years, by common agreement in which the North had tacitly concurred, the negro had been suppressed outside the law. Occasional negroes had got into office and even to Congress in reconstruction days. One, who described himself as "a bright mulatto," sat in the Fifty-first and Fifty-second Congresses, but in most regions of the South the negro had not been allowed to vote or had been "counted out" at the polls, while only in sporadic cases, mostly in the mountain sections, was the Republican party able to get enough votes to elect its candidates.

The Farmers' Alliance split the white vote and gave to the negro an unusual power. From being suppressed by all to being courted by many involved a change that raised his hopes only to destroy them. The South no sooner saw the possibility that the negro vote might hold a balance of power between two equal white factions than it took steps to remove itself from temptation and to disfranchise the undesired class.

The purpose of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been to raise the freedmen to civil equality and protect them there. Pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress passed, in 1875, a Civil Rights Bill, which forbade discrimination against any citizen in "the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement." It was restrained from imposing coeducation of the races only by Northern philanthropists who were interested in Southern education. Its compulsion was disregarded at the South, where social equality between the races could not be attained. Innkeepers and railroads continued to separate their customers, and in time a few of them were haled into court to answer for violating the law. Their defense was that the Fourteenth Amendment forbade discrimination by the States, but did not touch the private act of any citizen; that it protected the rights of citizens, but that these rights, complete before the law, did not extend to social relations,—that attendance at a theater is not a civil right at all, and may properly be regulated by the police power without conflict with the Constitution. In the Civil Rights Cases, decided in 1883, the Supreme Court released the defendants, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment was too narrow in its intention to justify Congress in the passage of a code of social relations at the South. This part of reconstruction thus broke down, leaving the negro population at the discretion of its white neighbors.

The Fifteenth Amendment, too, had been limited in its protecting force before 1890. It forbade a denial of the right to vote by any State. The Supreme Court easily determined that no violation could occur when a hostile mob excluded negroes from the polls. It had been settled before 1890 that the negro was defenseless against personal discrimination. It remained to be seen whether he could be disfranchised by law and yet have no redress. Not till the South found some of its people appealing for the negro vote in the crisis of the Farmers' Alliance did it take the last steps in the undoing of reconstruction.

The Fifteenth Amendment was not explicit. Instead of asserting the right of the negro to vote, it said, by negation, that the right should not be denied on account of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The three qualities of race, color, and servitude separated the races, but the South learned that they were separated by other qualities that were not proscribed by the amendment as a basis for the franchise. The negro was generally poor, and any qualification based on property would exclude him. He was shiftless, and often vagrant, and hence could be touched by poll-tax and residence requirements. He was illiterate, and was unable to meet an educational test. Tired of using force or fraud, the South began in 1890 a system of legal evasion of the Fifteenth Amendment.

The State of Mississippi, in a new constitution framed in 1890, defined the franchise in terms that bore heavily upon the negro. In the debates of its convention members talked frankly and freely of their intention to disqualify the race; the clause bore no mention of discrimination. It permitted persons to vote who, being male citizens over twenty-one, and having reasonable residence qualifications, had paid a poll or other tax for two years preceding the election, and could read, or understand and interpret when read to them, any section of the constitution of the State. Under this clause, between the cumulative tax and the large discretionary powers vested in the officers of enrollment, the negro electorate was reduced until it was negligible in Mississippi; and it was a subject of admiration for other Southern States, which proceeded to imitate it.

All of the cotton States but Florida and Texas, and most of the old slave States, revised their electoral clauses in the next twenty years. Arkansas, in 1893, based the franchise on a one-year poll-tax. South Carolina, in 1895, used residence, enrollment, and poll-tax, while the convention called to disfranchise the negro passed resolutions of sympathy for Cuban independence. Delaware, in 1897, established an educational test. Louisiana, in 1898, established education and a poll-tax; North Carolina, in 1900, did the same. Alabama, in 1901, made use of residence, registry, and poll-tax. Virginia based the suffrage on property, literacy, or poll-tax in 1902. Georgia did the same in 1908, and the new State of Oklahoma followed the Southern custom in 1910.

It was relatively easy to exclude most of the negroes by means of qualifications such as these, but every convention was embarrassed by the fact that each qualification excluded, as well, some of the white voters. In nearly every case revisions were accompanied by a determination to save the whites, and for this purpose a temporary basis of enrollment was created in addition to the permanent. Louisiana devised the favorite method in 1898. Her constitution provided that, for a given period, persons who could not qualify under the general clause might be placed upon the roll of voters if they had voted in the State before 1867 or were descended from such voters. The "grandfather clause," as this was immediately called, saved the poor whites, and was imitated by North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Georgia. The governor of Louisiana, in 1898, sang the praises of the new invention: "The white supremacy for which we have so long struggled at the cost of so much precious blood and treasure is now crystallized into the constitution as a fundamental part and parcel of that organic instrument, and that, too, by no subterfuge or evasions. With this great principle thus firmly embedded in the constitution and honestly enforced, there need be no longer any fear as to the honesty and purity of our future elections." The Supreme Court, in Williams vs. Mississippi (1898), and Giles vs. Teasley (1903), declined to go behind the innocent phraseology of the clauses, and refused to overthrow them.

Before the courts had shown their unwillingness to interfere, Congress had done the same. Two methods of redress were discussed during the years of Republican ascendancy, 1889-91. One of these contemplated a reduction of the Southern representation in the House, under that part of the Fourteenth Amendment that requires such reduction in proportion to the number of citizens who are disfranchised. Although urged angrily more than once, this action was not taken, and would not have affected cases in which the denial was by force and not by law. To meet the former situation the Republican party pledged itself in 1888. A Force Bill, placing the control of Southern elections in federal hands was considered. It received the enthusiastic support of Henry Cabot Lodge, and was the occasion for another waving of the "bloody shirt." It passed the House, with the aid of Speaker Reed, but in the Senate was abandoned by the caucus and allowed to die in 1891. The South was left alone with its negro problem. In the words of a Southern governor, "There are only two flags—the white and the black. Under which will you enlist?"

The New South removed the negro from politics, but he remained, in industry and society, a problem to whose solution an increasing attention was paid. At the time of emancipation he was almost universally illiterate and lived in a bankrupt community. Northern philanthropy saw an opportunity here. The teachers sent south by the Freedmen's Bureau stirred up interest by their letters home. In 1867 George Peabody, already noted for his benefactions in England and in Baltimore, created a large fund for the relief of illiteracy in the destitute region. His board of trustees became a clearing-house for educational efforts. Ex-President Hayes became, in 1882, the head of a similar fund created by John F. Slater, of Connecticut. Through the rest of the century these boards, in close cooperation, studied and relieved the educational necessities of the South. In 1901 the men who directed them organized a Southern Educational Board for the propagation of knowledge, while in 1903 Congress incorporated a General Education Board, to which John D. Rockefeller gave many millions for the subsidizing of educational attempts.

The negro advanced in literacy under the pressure of the new influences. In 1880 seventy per cent of the American negroes over ten years old were illiterate, but the proportion was reduced in the next ten years to fifty-seven per cent; to forty-five per cent by 1900; and to thirty per cent by 1910. As the negro advanced, his own leaders, as well as his white friends, differed in the status to which they would raise him and in the methods to be pursued. Some of his ablest representatives, W.E.B. DuBois among them, resented the discrimination and disfranchisement from which they suffered, and insisted upon equality as a preliminary. Others, like Booker T. Washington, who founded a notable trade school in Alabama in 1881, worried little over discrimination, and hoped to solve their problem through common and technical education which might lead the race to self-respect and independence.

Friction increased between the races at the South after emancipation. Freedom and political pressure demoralized many of the negroes, whose new feeling of independence exasperated many of the whites. Southern society still possessed many border traits. Men went armed and fought on slight provocation. The duel and the public assault aroused little serious criticism even in the eighties, and the freedmen lived in a society in which self-restraint had never been the dominant virtue. In Alabama, in 1880, the assessed value of guns, dirks, and pistols was nearly twice that of the libraries and five times that of the farm implements of the State. The distribution of the races varied exceedingly, from the Black Belt, where in the Yazoo bottom lands the negroes outnumbered the whites fifteen or more to one, to the uplands and mountains, where the proportions were reversed. But everywhere the less reputable of both races retarded society by their excesses.

In spite of its unsolvable race problem the South was reviving in the eighties and was changing under the influence of the industrial revolution. Northern capital was a mainstay of its agriculture. Transportation, manufacture, and city development found stimulation from the same source. In 1884 the National Planters' Association promoted a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the export of the first American cotton. In a great exposition at New Orleans they showed how far the New South had gone in its development.

In the twenty years after 1880 the South became a modern industrial community. Its coal mines increased their annual output from 6,000,000 tons to 50,000,000; its output of pig iron grew from 397,000 tons to 2,500,000; its manufactures rose in annual value from $338,000,000 to $1,173,000,000, with a pay roll swelling from $76,000,000 to $350,000,000. The spindles in its cotton mills were increased from 610,000 to 4,298,000. With the industrial changes there came a shifting of Southern population. The census maps show a tendency in the black population to concentrate in the Black Belt, and in the white population to increase near the deposits of coal and iron. Factory towns appeared in the Piedmont, where cheap power could be obtained, and drew their operatives from the rural population of the neighborhood. Unembarrassed by the child-labor and factory laws of the North, the new Southern mills exploited the women and children, and were consuming one seventh of the cotton crop by 1900. In Alabama, Birmingham became a second Pittsburg.

The Southern railway system was completely rebuilt after the Civil War. In 1860 it included about one third of the thirty thousand miles of track in the United States, but war and neglect reduced it to ruin. Partly under federal auspices it was restored in the later sixties. After 1878 it suddenly expanded as did all the American railway systems.

Texas experienced the most thorough change in the fifty years after the Civil War. From 307 miles her railways expanded to more than 14,000 miles. Only one of the Confederate States, Arkansas, had a slighter mileage in 1860, but in 1910 no one had half as much as Texas. The totals for the Confederate area rose from 11,000 miles in 1870 to 17,000 in 1880, to 36,000 in 1890, to 45,000 in 1900, and to 63,000 in 1910. After 1880 no Confederate State equaled Texas, whose vast area, suddenly brought within reach of railway service, poured forth cotton until by the end of the century she alone raised one fourth of the American crop. Through the expanding transportation system the area of profitable cotton culture rose more rapidly than the demand for cotton, and in overproduction may be found one of the reasons for the decline in cotton values in the early nineties. In the decline may be found an incentive toward diversified agriculture. When cotton went down, farmers tried other crops. The corn acreage in the ten cotton States passed the cotton acreage before 1899, and with the diversification came no decrease in the total cotton output, but an increase in general agricultural prosperity. In many regions fruit culture and truck-raising forced their way to the front among profitable types of agriculture.

In spite of the changes in industry and transportation the South remained in 1910 a rural community when compared with the rest of the United States. Out of 114 cities of 50,000 population in 1910, only 15 were in the Confederate area. But when compared with its own past the South was developing cities at a rapid rate. Only New Orleans and Richmond, in 1880, had 50,000 inhabitants. Atlanta, Charleston, Memphis, and Nashville were added to this class by 1890. Texas had no city of this size until 1900. But in 1910 she possessed four, Dallas, Forth Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. As the cities increased in number, bound together, and bound to the cities of the rest of the United States by the ties of trade and society, the localisms of the South diminished. The essential fear of negro control remained untouched, but in superficial ways the Southerner came to resemble his fellow citizen of whatever section.

The sectionalism which had made a political unit of the South before the war was weakened. In the tariff debates of 1883 and later a group of Southern protectionists made common cause with Northern Republicans. Sugar, iron, and cotton manufactures converted them from the old regional devotion to free trade. A fear of national power had kept the old South generally opposed to internal improvements at the public cost. The Pacific railroads had been postponed somewhat because of this. But this repugnance had died away, and in the Mississippi River the United States found a field for work that was welcomed in the South.

The Mississippi never fully recovered the dominance that it had possessed before the war, but it remained an important highway for the Western cotton States. The whimsical torrent, washing away its banks, cutting new channels at will, flooding millions of acres every spring, was too great to be controlled by States that had been impoverished by war and reconstruction. In 1879 Congress created a Mississippi River Commission. Unusual floods in 1882 attracted attention to the danger, and thereafter Congress found the money for a levee system that restrained the river between its banks from Cairo to the Gulf.

The mouth of the river, always choked by mud flats, was opened by the United States in 1879. A Western engineer, James B. Eads, devised a scheme by which the current scoured out its own channel and converted itself into an ocean-going highway. He had already proved his power over the Father of Waters by building the railroad bridge that was opened at St. Louis in 1874. In 1892 other engineers completed a bridge at Memphis.

The active development of the New South lessened the difference between it and the rest of the United States, and brought it within the general industrial revolution. By 1884 the trend was not noticeable. By 1890 the white population had divided over a political issue like the North and West. In the years immediately following 1890 Populism was as much a problem in the South as anywhere.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Most of the books relating to the South are partisan. The most useful economic analyses are to be found in the writings of W.L. Fleming, U.B. Phillips, and A.H. Stone. Special points of view are presented in A.B. Hart, The Southern South (1911), E.G. Murphy, Problems of the Present South (1904), E.A. Alderman and A.C. Gordon, Life of J.L.M. Curry (1911), J.L.M. Curry, A Brief Sketch of George Peabody (1898), J.E. Cutler, Lynch Law (1905), B.T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1905), W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (1903), and J.L. Mathews, Remaking the Mississippi (1909). The Annual Cyclopaedia is full of useful details. The Annual Reports of the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund, and the United States Commissioner of Education contain statistics and discussions upon Southern society. The Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S. Reports) give the best treatment of the legal status of the negro, and are supplemented by J.C. Rose, "Negro Suffrage" (in American Political Science Review, vol. I, pp. 17-43,—a partial sketch only), and J.M. Mathews, Legislative and Judicial History of the Fifteenth Amendment (in Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. XXVII). There were interesting articles on the New Orleans Exposition, by E.V. Smalley, in the Century Magazine for April and May, 1885.



CHAPTER XIII

POPULISM

The election of 1890 stunned and bewildered both old parties. The Republicans lost their control of the Lower House, while the Democrats paid for their victory the price of a partial alliance with a new movement whose weight they could only estimate. Populism was engendered by local troubles in the West and South, but its name now acquired a national usage and its leaders were encouraged to attempt a national organization.

In a series of conventions, held between 1889 and 1892, the People's Party developed into a finished organization with state delegations and a national committee. At St. Louis, in December, 1889, the Farmers' Alliance held a national convention and considered the basis for wider growth. The outcome was an attempt to combine in one party organized labor, organized agriculture, and believers in the single tax. The leaders of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor were not averse to such common action, although the latter preferred their own Federation to any party. The dangers of political action, seen in the decline of the National Labor Union of 1866, did not check the desires of the Knights in 1889, although the leaders found it easier then, as later, to promise the support of organized labor than to deliver it at the polls. After the St. Louis Convention the name Farmers' Alliance merged into the broader name of the People's Party, though the attempt to win the rank and file of the unions failed.

In December, 1890, the farmers met at Ocala, Florida, to rejoice over the congressional victory and to plan for 1892. Since each of the great parties was believed to be indifferent to the people and corrupt, a permanent third party was a matter of conviction, and in May, 1891, this party was formally created in a mass convention at Cincinnati. Miscellaneous reforms were insisted upon here, but were overshadowed by the demands of the inflationists. James B. Weaver, of Iowa, the old presidential candidate of the Greenbackers, was a leading spirit at Cincinnati. His best-known aide was Ignatius Donnelly, of Minnesota, a devotee of the Baconian theory and of the "Lost Atlantis," who was now devoting his active mind to the support of free silver. A national committee was created after another meeting, at St. Louis in February, 1892, and on July 2, 1892, the party met in that city in its first national nominating convention.

The platform of the People's Party was based on calamity. "We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin," it declared. "Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized.... The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists."

The greatest of the evils in sight was "the vast conspiracy against mankind," which had demonetized silver, added to the purchasing power of gold, and abridged the supply of money "to fatten usurers." To correct the financial evils the platform demanded "the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one," and an issue of legal-tender currency until the circulation should reach an average of fifty dollars per capita. Postal savings banks, a graduated income tax, and economy in government were the subsidiary demands.

No demand of the Populists attracted so much attention as this for free silver, but its platform touched reform at every angle. In the field of transportation it asked for government ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and telephones. It asked that land monopolies be prevented, that the public lands be in part regained, and that alien ownership be forbidden. It wanted the Australian ballot, liberal pensions, restriction of immigration, an eight-hour day, a single term for President and Vice-President, direct election of United States Senators, abolition of the Pinkerton detectives, and was curious about the initiative and referendum. It was in many respects a prophecy as to the workings of reform for the next twenty years.

The People's Party entered the campaign of 1892 with this platform and with the support of advanced reformers, with a considerable following in the West and South, and with James B. Weaver and James G. Field as candidates. Few of the workers for its ticket were politicians of known standing, and its voters had a preponderance of youth. In several Western States the Democratic party supported it with fusion tickets. In the South it often cooperated with the Republicans. From the first the third party found it harder to stand alone than to unite with the weaker local party.

The disrupting force of hard times was increased by the acts of the Republican party. Harrison's first Congress had passed a series of laws that provoked opposition and criticism. The Interstate Commerce Law was still new when he took office. In quick succession in 1890 came the new States, and Oklahoma Territory, the Dependent Pensions Bill, the Sherman Anti-Trust Bill, the Silver Purchase Bill, and the McKinley Tariff. The dominant majority had used arbitrary methods to enforce its will and had given to its enemies more than one text. After 1891 the Democratic majority in the House reduced the Administration to the political incompetence that had prevailed from 1883 to 1889.

Benjamin Harrison gained little prestige as the result of the Administration. He had been nominated for his availability, and the campaign songs had said as much of his illustrious grandfather, the hero of Tippecanoe, as of himself. His appointments had pleased neither the politicians nor the reformers, while there was much laughter at the presence in the offices of numerous personal friends and relatives. The most notable of his appointments was the most embarrassing.

James G. Blaine, as Secretary of State, found no topic in foreign relations as interesting as the canal had been in his earlier term. The wranglings with Great Britain and Germany over their treatment of naturalized Americans had subsided. The fisheries of the North Atlantic had been temporarily settled by President Cleveland. The regulation of the seal fisheries of Bering Sea brought no new glory to Blaine.

There was no doubt that the seal herd of the Pacific was being rapidly destroyed by careless and wasteful hunters from most of the countries bordering on that ocean. On the American islands the herds could be protected, and here they gathered every summer to mate and breed. But the men who hunted with guns at sea, instead of with clubs on land, could not be controlled unless the world would consent to an American police beyond the three-mile limit. In an arbitration with Great Britain, at Paris, Blaine tried to prove that the seals were American, and entitled to protection on the high seas, and that the waters of the northern Pacific were mare clausum. The arbitration went against him on every material point.

The only episode that threatened war occurred in Chile. Here Harrison had sent as Minister Patrick Egan, a newly naturalized Irishman and follower of Blaine. In a revolution of 1891 Egan sided with the conservative party that lost. His enemies charged him with improper interest in contracts and with instinctive antagonism to British interests in Chile. After the revolution a mob in Valparaiso showed its dislike for Americans by attacking sailors on shore leave. Egan's extreme demands for summary punishment of the rioters were upheld by Harrison, who prepared the navy for war. Finally the Chilean Government was forced to make complete apologies.

In the same year an American mob in New Orleans lynched several Italians, and Blaine repelled with indignation the demand that indemnity be accorded before trial and conviction. He could not even promise trial because of the helplessness of the United States in local criminal proceedings. The Italian Minister, Baron Fava, was withdrawn from Washington on this account, and returned only when Congress had healed the breach by making provision for the families of the sufferers.

The internal relations of the Administration were not happier than the external. Harrison chafed under the influence of Blaine, and alienated so many of the regular Republican leaders that it became doubtful whether he could secure his own renomination. Both Quay and Platt had been offended, and the former had resigned his chairmanship of the National Committee after the failure of a political bank in Philadelphia. No one was anxious to manage the President's campaign, and he showed little skill in managing it himself. The future was still in doubt when, on June 4, 1892, three days before the meeting of the convention at Minneapolis, Blaine resigned his position without a word of explanation. Whether he was only sick and unhappy, or whether he desired the nomination, was uncertain.

The strength of Blaine and the rising influence of William McKinley were apparent in the Republican Convention. Harrison was renominated on the first ballot, but Blaine and McKinley received more than one hundred and eighty votes apiece. The former had reached the end of his career, and died the next winter. The latter was now Governor of Ohio. McKinley had lost his seat in the election of 1890, but had been raised to the governorship in the next year. He was chairman of the convention that renominated Harrison, reaffirmed the "American doctrine of protection," and evaded the issue of free silver.

The Democratic party had bred no national leader but Grover Cleveland since the Civil War, and he had earned the dislike of the organization before his defeat in 1888. His insistence upon the tariff offended the protectionist wing of his party, and he left office unpopular and lonely. He retired to New York City, where he took up the practice of law and regained the confidence of the people. Demands upon him for public speeches in 1891 revealed the recovery of his popularity. His friends began to organize in his behalf during 1892, and David B. Hill aided by his opposition.

The strength of Hill, who had been elected Governor of New York, and who was now Senator, was based upon Tammany Hall and those elements in the New York Democracy that reformers were constantly attacking. He was believed to have defeated Cleveland in 1888 by entering into a deal with the Republican machine by which Harrison received the electoral and he the gubernatorial vote of New York. Early in 1892, as interest in Cleveland revived, Hill called a "snap" convention and secured the indorsement of New York for his own candidacy. The solid New York delegation shouting for Hill was an item in Cleveland's favor at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. With tariff reformers in control, denouncing "Republican protection as a fraud, a robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of a few," and reasserting Cleveland's phrase that "public office is a public trust," the convention selected Cleveland and Adlai E. Stevenson, of Illinois, as the party candidates. Its coinage plank, like that of the Republicans, meant what the voter chose to read into it.

There were two debates in the campaign of 1892. On the surface was the renewed discussion of the tariff, with the Republicans fighting for the McKinley Bill all the more earnestly because there was danger of its repeal, and the Democrats officially demanding reduction. "I would rather have seen Cleveland defeated than to have had that fool free-trade plank adopted," said one of the Eastern Democrats to "Tom" Johnson after the convention. But the Democratic protectionists were forced into surly acquiescence so long as Cleveland was the candidate and William L. Wilson the chairman of the convention. The partial insincerity of the tariff debate aided the Populists, who were directing a discussion upon the general basis of reform.

Cleveland was elected with a majority of electoral votes and a plurality of popular votes, but the vote for Weaver and Field measured the extent of the revolt against both parties. The Populists carried Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Kansas, gained twenty-two electoral votes, and polled over a million popular votes. Their protest, based on local hard times and discontent, probably defeated Harrison, while their organization was ready to receive a large following should the hard times spread.

Harrison was not unwilling to surrender the Government to Cleveland in March, 1893, for he had been struggling for weeks to conceal the financial weakness of the United States and to avoid a panic. The great surplus that had been a motive for legislation for more than ten years had nearly become a deficit. Continuous prosperity had tempted Congress to make lavish appropriations. The McKinley Bill had reduced the revenue through changes in the sugar schedule. The Pension Bill had used other millions. Internal improvements had been distributed to every section. The surplus, which had been at $105,000,000 for 1890, fell to $37,000,000 in 1891, and in the next two years to $9,900,000 and to $2,300,000. In the spring of 1893 the Treasury was so reduced that any unexpected shock might cause a suspension. Cleveland's first duty was with causes and cures.

The surplus had been affected both by increase in expenditures and by decrease in revenues. The latter had been due in part to the hard times, which had forced a curtailment of imports, with a resulting shrinkage in tariff receipts. At the same time an increasing nervousness, based upon the deterioration in quality of the assets of the United States, showed itself. The fear of free silver was hastening the day of panic.

Silver and gold had always been traditional American coins, but since 1834 little of the former had been coined or circulated, while between 1862 and 1879 neither variety of specie was ordinarily used as money. In 1873 a codification of coinage laws had omitted from the standard list the silver dollar, which had been unimportant for nearly forty years; and when, shortly thereafter, the decline in the price of silver made its coinage at the ratio of sixteen to one profitable, it was impossible. The demand for a restoration of silver coinage began with the silver miners who desired a stimulated market for their output. Some believed coinage would raise the price of bullion; others thought the Government would keep up the value of the silver coins, as it did the greenbacks, by redemption in gold. In 1878 a Free Coinage Act, pushed by R.P. Bland, was converted into the limited Bland-Allison Act. Under this the Treasury bought the minimum amount of silver bullion (two million dollars' worth) every month for twelve years, and protested continually that the silver coined from it was increasing the burden of redemption on the gold reserve. As the price of silver fell farther, the demand of the miners increased, and toward 1890 it was reinforced by the demands of inflationists who desired it for another reason.

In 1890 the free-silver movement was not political in the sense that parties had declared for or against it. In each great party it had supporters, and few politicians were actively opposing it. A movement in its favor, with the support of the Senate, was reshaped under the influence of Sherman, and became a law in July, 1890. Under this the Treasury was forced to buy 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, and to pay for it in a new issue of treasury notes. For the next three years the United States kept at par with gold the Civil War greenbacks, the Bland-Allison silver dollars, and the treasury notes of 1890. Only by its constant willingness to pay out any form of money at the option of the customer could it prevent the Gresham Law from operating and the currency from declining to the bullion value of silver.

Every creditor feared the establishment of the silver basis because of the loss which it would entail upon him. His dollars would shrink from their gold value to their silver value. A depreciated currency was bad enough when unavoidable, but the deliberate adoption of it would be frank repudiation. Continually, after 1890, popular apprehension of this grew more acute, discouraging the undertaking of new enterprises and leading to the insertion of "gold clauses" in contracts. Gold was hoarded whenever possible. The receipts at the New York Custom-House, which had been mostly gold before 1890, contained less than four per cent of gold in the winter of 1892-93. As the Treasury found its expenditures nearing its receipts, and the proportion of gold in its assets lessening, business men were badly worried over the future of the currency, and an actual limit of available capital appeared.

For fourteen years there had been prosperity in the United States. Financial and economic disturbances had been relatively slight, and every year had seen a greater business expansion than the last. Investment for permanent improvement had passed the amount of annual savings, and before 1893 the United States as a community had approached the point at which its economic surplus would be exhausted and an enforced liquidation would be due. As banks curtailed in 1893 to save themselves, stringency became general, and depression turned to panic. In April the gold reserve in the Treasury, on which the whole volume of silver and paper depended, passed below $100,000,000, which business had come to regard as the limit of safety. In the summer Great Britain closed her Indian mints to silver and that bullion dropped farther in value. Before July there was panic and failure everywhere in the United States.

Panic had been imminent before Harrison left office and remained for Cleveland to confront. Already Cleveland had taken a solid stand against free silver and the silver basis. He saw in the Sherman Silver Purchase Act the most striking cause of danger, and summoned Congress to meet in August, 1893, to repeal it, while he maintained the gold reserve for the next two years by borrowing on bonds. For the first time since the Civil War his party controlled every branch of the Government, yet it now met an issue on which it had not been elected and over which it broke to pieces.

An angry minority opposed the Message in which Cleveland described the financial dangers and demanded the repeal of the Sherman Law. It was a sectional minority that included Western Representatives from both parties and many Democrats from the South. Men who had fought the Populists since 1890 now fraternized with them and raised their strength beyond their hopes. The President refused compromise, even to save his party from destruction, and found a majority for repeal among Easterners of both parties. The Sherman Law was repealed in November, and the liquidation following the crisis was effected during the next three years.

It was a bad beginning for tariff revision, to split the party at its first session and to drive into opposition those Democrats who were most genuinely interested in tariff reform. Cleveland had lost his influence with Western Democrats before the repeal of the McKinley Act was undertaken, and they, like the Populists, had decided that he was the tool of the corporations and the "gold-bugs" of the East. The anti-corporation feelings of the West were increased by the accident which threw the corporations and the farmers into different sides upon the silver question.

A tariff for revenue had been the winning issue in 1890 and 1892, and the Democratic organization was pledged to pass it. When Speaker Crisp made William L. Wilson chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means his act showed an intention to fulfill the pledge, for which purpose Wilson brought in his bill early in the regular session of 1893-94. Like previous bills, this tariff was passed in the House, rewritten in the Senate, and again changed in conference committee. "The truth is," confessed Senator Cullom long after, "we were all—Democrats as well as Republicans—trying to get in amendments in the interest of protecting the industries of our respective States." The surplus was no longer an argument in favor of reduction. The free-trade arguments were flatly contradicted by a group of Democratic Senators under whose leadership the bill lost most of its reducing tendency. Out of doors the Republicans attacked the measure and noisily charged it with having produced the panic of 1893. Fourteen years later a Republican President still described it as the measure "under the influence of which wheat went down below fifty cents." When it finally came to the President it was so little different from the McKinley Bill that he denounced it violently. He had tried in vain to hold his party to an honest revision, and now, in July, 1894, refused to sign the bill. It became a law without his signature. It contained no novelty but an income tax, which was a concession to the Populists and which the Supreme Court soon declared to be unconstitutional.

In the fight over the Wilson Bill, Cleveland affronted Eastern members of his party as he had the Western members, in 1893, over the Sherman repeal. In the summer of 1894 he offended the whole body of organized labor by intervening in a Western strike.

The panic of 1893 had unsettled labor and created a floating element among the unemployed. These drifted toward Chicago, attracted by the Columbian Exposition held there during that summer, and worried the police for many months. About Easter, 1894, an "Army of the Unemployed" marched on Washington under the command of Jacob S. Coxey. A few weeks later a strike occurred among the employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company. The American Railroad Union, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs, established a sympathetic boycott against the Pullman cars. The Knights of Labor indorsed the strike, and railway travel was impeded over all the West. Around Chicago there was disorder and rioting which the Governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, did not suppress. He held the militia in readiness, but had not intervened when Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to remove obstructions to the carriage of the mails.

This federal intervention offended those who still adhered to the doctrine of state rights, and angered the strikers and organized labor as a whole. They believed the President was a tool of the railroads, and believed the same of the courts when a federal judge issued an injunction to Debs forbidding him to interfere in the strike. In the end the strikers lost, leaving Cleveland's conduct in maintaining the peace in sharp contrast with that of the Populist Governor of Colorado, who intervened in a great miners' strike at Cripple Creek to arrest, not the strikers who had seized control of the mines, but the sheriff and his posse who wished to dislodge them. "It is better, infinitely better," Governor Waite had declared, "that the blood should flow to the horses' bridles than that our national liberties should be destroyed." Congress made Labor Day a legal holiday in 1894, but failed to placate the unions.

By the summer of 1894 Cleveland's party was split beyond repair, and his friends were mostly among the Republicans. Consistent in his belief in sound money, tariff revision, and law and order, he had been forced by events to alienate the West, the East, and organized labor. His course had aided the Populist party by widening the belief that the Democrats had no interest in their welfare. The panic had aided it yet more, by multiplying the discontented who might be converted to the new faith. Every month the Populist party increased in strength, the East watching it with mingled fear and contempt and ignorance. The comic papers pictured as the typical Populist the raw-boned, booted, unkempt farmer, in shirt-sleeves and with flowing beard. It could not see the foundation of real reforms on which the movement stood. A satirist pictured the Populist as "The Kansas Bandit," declaiming

"The People's Party, to Which me native instinct draws me because it Loves the rule of mediocrity, is now on top. I Love the rule of Ignorance."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

F.J. Turner discussed "The Problems of the West," in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1896, and C. Becker has interpreted a similar point of view under the title "Kansas" in the Turner Essays (1910). Wildman and McVey are valuable guides. The external facts of the Populist movement are accessible in the Annual Cyclopaedia; Stanwood, History of the Presidency; Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury; and Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Standard writings on the silver problem are J.L. Laughlin, History of Bimetallism in the United States (1886, etc.), and F. W. Taussig, Silver Situation in the United States (1893). Useful details are added in the biographies of Blaine, Bland, Sherman, and Vance. W.E. Connelley, Ingalls of Kansas (1909), has included much material upon Populism, including E. Ware's satirical verses, Alonzo, or the Kansas Bandit. Light is thrown upon Governor J.P. Altgeld and his influence in the Democratic party by B. Whitlock, "Forty Years of It" (1914), and C. Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd. The Memoirs of a Varied Career, William F. Draper (1908), gives a glimpse of the rigid protectionist attitude. A stimulating novel, based upon municipal politics in the nineties, is P.L. Ford's The Honorable Peter Stirling (1894).



CHAPTER XIV

FREE SILVER

Serious students of finance are almost unanimous in their belief that the adoption of free silver would have brought into operation the Gresham Law and would have resulted in a reduction of the value of the dollar. But the motives which divided the United States were less economic law than personal interest. The creditor foresaw the shrinkage of his property, and feared it. The debtor saw the lightening of his debt, and easily convinced himself that the ethics of the case required such relief for him.

It appeared to the West that the declining prices of the eighties had been due not so much to overproduction and mechanical invention as to an appreciation of the dollar. The silver advocate claimed that the money supply was inadequate to the demands of increasing business, that the overworked dollars were acquiring a scarcity value, and that their increase in value was placing an unfair burden upon every person with a debt to pay. It was the old attitude of the Greenback Northwest, brought out by a period of debt and depression. In accounting for the scarcity of money the Act of 1873 seemed important to the West. The demonetization of silver became a crime, and justice from the Western standpoint demanded the restoration of the dollar to its old value,—the value of its silver. Before 1893 the discontent was serious, but had not come to be the primary interest of the West. Men were not yet willing to leave their parties for the sake of silver. The panic drove them to the final step.

Through the campaign of 1892 the major parties had dodged the issue of free silver by adopting evasive planks, while the general ignorance respecting the laws of money prevented the evasion from being seen. Until 1890 neither organization had been unfavorably disposed towards free silver and Congressmen catered to the movement when they dared. As its accomplishment became more probable, the selfish interests that would be adversely affected, and the economists who saw its theoretical danger, and the moralists who disliked repudiation, made common cause in a wide campaign of education.

With the exception of extreme inflationists, all had declared that they wanted "honest" or "sound" money, and both parties insisted, in 1892, that all dollars, of whatever sort, must remain equal in value and interchangeable. They insisted, too, that silver must be used as well as gold, and neither platform saw that the demands were either inconsistent or improbable of realization. The pledge of equality pleased the creditor East, while that of equal use of both metals satisfied the debtor West and South.

Bimetallism was a cry of many who disliked free silver, yet feared that a demand for the gold standard would wreck the party. As long as the traditional ratio of sixteen to one remained the commercial ratio, the free use of both metals was theoretically possible, but the experience of the United States showed that a slight variation in the commercial ratio inevitably drove the more valuable dollar into retirement and left the cheaper in use. The truth of Gresham's Law was believed by most economists, who doubted whether the commercial ratio was ever sufficiently permanent to make bimetallism possible. With the silver declining rapidly it was out of the question. If the silver in circulation ever got beyond the power of the government to control it through redemption in gold nothing could avoid the silver standard. No law of the United States could prevent it. There was only a bare possibility that an international agreement always to regard sixteen ounces of silver as worth one ounce of gold might establish the ratio, but to this straw the bimetallist turned, trying to ward off the demand for free silver with his plea for international bimetallism.



The panic of 1893, the decline of silver, and the repeal of the Sherman Law stimulated the activities of those who believed in free silver and produced formal steps to bring it into politics. A silver convention, held in Chicago in August, 1893, denounced the "Crime of 1873," and Governor Waite recommended to the Colorado Legislature that it open a mint of its own for the coinage of legal-tender silver dollars. At state conventions, in 1893 and 1894, both parties adopted silver planks. The Nebraska Democrats rejected such a plank in 1893, but in 1894, after a caucus of free-silver Democrats in Omaha, they adopted a demand for the immediate restoration of free-silver coinage "without waiting for the aid or consent of any nation on earth."

At the congressional election of 1894 the Republicans regained control of both Senate and House and many of the silver candidates were left at home. Some thirty, who had sat in the Fifty-third Congress, joined in March, 1895, in a call for the adoption of free silver as a party measure. To the iniquity alleged to exist in the gold standard was added the aggravating fact that its defenders had wealth and were often directors of corporations. The measure had become a class contest. Its textbook was found in Coin's Financial School, a little book with simple dialogue and graphic illustration, that popularized the Western view of free silver and reached hundreds of thousands with its apparent frankness. Free silver had by 1895 outgrown the Populists, and had overshadowed other measures of reform before either party had taken a frank attitude respecting it. "I have been more than usually despondent," wrote the originator of the Wilson Bill, who had lost his seat in 1894, "as I see how the folly of our Southern people, in taking up a false and destructive issue, and assaulting the very foundations of public and private credit, are throwing away the solid fruits of the great victory, solidifying the North as it never was solid in the burning days of reconstruction, and condemning the South to a position of inferiority and lessening influence in the Union she has never before reached."

When the Fifty-fourth Congress met in 1895, Reed was again enthroned as Speaker, but the spread of silver sentiment had undermined party loyalty. Cleveland's annual Message contained the usual range of items upon government and foreign relations, and devoted several pages to a resume of the financial operations of the Treasury and the currency problem. It closed with an appeal to the enthusiastic multitude that approved free coinage to reexamine their views "in the light of patriotic reason and familiar experience." It gave no hint that any other topic was likely to pass free silver in the public view. Fifteen days later, on December 17, 1895, the President sent a special Message to Congress, in reference to an old dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela, that startled the world, upset the stock markets, and brought to life once more the Monroe Doctrine.

For many years the unsettled boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana had been a source of irritation. The pretensions of both claimants were great and vague, while the continuous encroachment of British miners alarmed the weaker country. For nearly twenty years Venezuela had vainly appealed to the United States, asking that the dispute be arbitrated. The United States had taken a mild interest in the wrangle, but no one before Cleveland had felt vitally concerned. He undertook, in the summer of 1895, to persuade Great Britain to accept an arbitration, and pressed Lord Salisbury in a series of notes drafted by Richard Olney, Secretary of State.

The contention of Olney was that the dispute was suitable for arbitration because of the difference in physical strength between the two countries, and that the United States had an interest in an equitable territorial adjustment. He stated the doctrine that John Quincy Adams had advanced in the Administration of Monroe, that interference with the destiny of the South American Republics affects the United States, and asserted that this was now a part of the public law of the United States. He listed the precedents in which it had been advanced since 1823, finding none in which it had been flatly checked. His long arguments upon the interests and proper supremacy of the United States in all American questions failed to convince the British Foreign Office, which denied both Olney's correctness in applying the Monroe Doctrine and the binding force of the doctrine itself. Arbitration was declined, and Cleveland, in submitting the correspondence to Congress, urged that an American court be created to ascertain the true boundary and that the United States afterward maintain it. "In making these recommendations," he admitted, "I am fully alive to the responsibility incurred and keenly realize all the consequences that may follow."