The construction of a canal proceeded rapidly, once the diplomatic entanglements had been brushed away. The incidental problems of sanitation, labor, supplies, and engineering were solved promptly and effectively. Congress poured money into the enterprise without restraint, the first boats were passed through the locks in 1914, and in 1915 the formal opening of the canal was celebrated by a naval procession at the Isthmus and an Exposition at San Francisco.

Vigor and certainty of purpose marked the conduct of domestic affairs as well as foreign, but the necessity for the concurrence in these by Congress made the former results less striking than the latter. The appointments of President Roosevelt were such as might be expected from one who had himself devoted six years to the Civil Service Commission. Few of them met with opposition from the reform element. In the South he became involved with local public opinion, especially in the cases of a negro postmistress at Indianola, Mississippi, and the negro collector of the port of Charleston, in which he maintained that although federal appointments ought generally to go to persons acceptable in their districts, the door of opportunity must not be shut against the negro. Within a few weeks of his inauguration he precipitated a severe discussion upon the status of the negro by entertaining Booker T. Washington at the White House. He disciplined Republican leaders in the South who endeavored to exclude negroes from the party organization and to build up a "lily-white" Republican machine.

The administrative duties of the United States expanded rapidly after the Spanish War. The extension of scientific functions beginning in the eighties continued until the volume of work forced the creation of new offices. Federal civil employees numbered 107,000 in 1880, 166,000 in 1890, 256,000 in 1900, and 384,000 in 1910. Among the newer scientific activities was included that of the reclamation of the arid or semi-arid lands of the Southwest.

The region between the Missouri River and the Sierra Nevada had been regarded as uninhabitable since the days of Pike. Known as the "American Desert," it figured in the atlases as a place of sand and aridity, and became the home chosen for the Indian tribes between 1825 and 1840. Under the influence of migration to Oregon and California the real character of the Far West became known, but not until the continental railways were finished did many inhabitants enter it. In 1889 and 1890 the "Omnibus" States were admitted, embracing all the northwest half of the old desert. Utah followed in 1896. Arizona and New Mexico and Oklahoma developed rapidly after 1890 and were all demanding statehood in 1902.

The advance of population into the Far West revealed the existence of large areas in which an abundant agriculture could be produced through irrigation. Private means were inadequate for this and the land laws discouraged it. A demand for federal reclamation appeared in the eighties. In 1889 a survey of available sites for reservoirs was made by government engineers, and in 1902 Roosevelt cooperated with the Far-Western Congressmen in securing the passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act. By this bill the proceeds of land sales in the arid States became a fund to be used by the reclamation service for the construction of great public irrigation works. In the succeeding years dams, tunnels, and ditches were undertaken that were rivaled in magnitude only by the railroad tunnels at New York and the excavations at Panama.

The aggressive assurance with which the Roosevelt Administration handled the problems of diplomacy and administration created for the President a wide and unusual popularity, which was strongest in the West. Many critics, also, were created, who distrusted personal influence when injected into government, and who doubted the solidity of Roosevelt's judgment. Personal altercations, in which the President was often the aggressor, were numerous. Among professional politicians dislike was mingled with fear because the President had established personal relations immediately with their constituents. Under President McKinley the state delegations in Congress had controlled the appointive federal offices of their States, and had been secure in their personal standing; under Roosevelt their control of appointments was less secure. When matters of legislation were taken up, this dissatisfaction among members of Congress was a serious obstacle to the attainment of constructive laws.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

After the Spanish War the secondary materials for the history of the United States become fragmentary and unsatisfactory. Peck, Andrews, and J.H. Latane, America as a World Power, 1897-1907 (in The American Nation, vol. 25, 1907), are the best general guides. The facts of campaigns are contained in E. Stanwood's second volume,—History of the Presidency from 1897 to 1909 (1912, with an appendix containing the platforms of 1912), but the Annual Cyclopaedia stopped publication after 1902, and left no good successor. The various year-books should be consulted, and the files of the magazines, which steadily improve in historical value: Nation, Harper's Weekly, Collier's Weekly, Independent, Outlook, Literary Digest, and the Review of Reviews. Articles in these and other periodicals, dealing with episodes occurring after 1898, may be reached through Poole's Indexes. The American Journal of International Law and the American Political Science Review are typical of the new technical periodicals. Extensive contributions to the history of international arbitration have been made by F.W. Holls, J.B. Scott, and W.I. Hull. There is, of course, no critical biography of Theodore Roosevelt, although there are numerous panegyrics by F.E. Leupp, J.A. Riis, J. Morgan, and others, and some autobiographical papers which appeared first in the Outlook (1913), and later as Fifty Years of My Life (1913). The later Messages of McKinley and those of his successors are scattered among the government documents, which are to be found in many libraries. The Second Battle (1900), by W.J. Bryan, is autobiographic, as is A.E. Stevenson, Something of Men I Have Known (1909).



CHAPTER XVIII

BIG BUSINESS

The panic of 1893 ended the first period of the trust problem. The preceding years had been years of formation and experiment. They had been accompanied by an increasing popular distaste for combinations of capital and a growing activity in the organization of labor. The Sherman Law of 1890 had temporarily quieted the anti-trust movement, while economic depression had checked the extravagance of speculation that had been prevalent everywhere. During the years of depression attention was shifted to tariff and currency, but a new era began with the recurrence of prosperity about 1897.

The industrial revival was marked by an extension of the scope of industry, as every similar period had been. After the panic of 1837 the railroad had appeared among the important new activities of American society. Improvements in manufacturing technique followed the panic of 1857. After 1873 the varied applications of electricity to industry and communication gave a new direction to investment. After 1893, with every preceding activity stimulated and extended, there came the first successful construction of a trackless engine—the motor-car—and the rebuilding of the physical plants of cities, railways, and suburban residences. The recovery of confidence came after 1896, and before the end of the century speculation was at full blast.

The drift toward monopoly was marked. The trusts had already shown their profitable character. Concentration had been made possible by the development of communication in the eighties, and grew now on a larger scale than the eighties had imagined. Within the field of transportation the promoters reorganized the railroads after the panic, reduced their number, and gathered their control into the hands of a few men.

The railway system by 1900, with 198,000 miles of track, was directed by a few powerful groups of roads. In the East the New York Central and Pennsylvania systems were dominant. In the West the continental railways formed the basis of new organizations. The keenest interest gathered round the reconstruction of the Union Pacific by Edward H. Harriman, who reorganized its finances after 1897. The Union Pacific had been forced into combination by its location and its neighbors. Running from Omaha to Ogden it was dependent for through traffic upon the Central Pacific that ran from Ogden to San Francisco. When the latter came under the control of the California capitalists who owned the Southern Pacific lines, the Union Pacific was driven to build or buy outlets of its own, and extended into Oregon and Texas as the result. Jay Gould had begun the consolidation in the eighties and Harriman continued it after the panic of 1893. He rebuilt the main line and improved the value and credit of his property. In 1901 his road borrowed money with which to buy a controlling interest in the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific—the Huntington lines,—and thereafter the Harriman system, with two complete railroads from the Mississippi to the Pacific, was beyond the reach of hostile competition.

The Interstate Commerce Law of 1887 stimulated combination among the railroads, since it made pools and rate agreements illegal. The alternative to such agreements was destructive competition, since no two lines were of exactly equal strength. To avoid this, the stronger lines bought or leased the weaker, with which they might not cooperate, but which they might buy outright. Harriman, successful with his Southwestern system, tried in 1901 to buy the Northern Pacific, too, and came into direct conflict with another group of railway owners.

The Northern Pacific had been supplemented after 1893 by the Great Northern, which James J. Hill had built without a subsidy. These two roads, and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, covered the Northwest as Harriman's lines covered the Southwest. They were so placed that with common management they could be more effective than with rivalry. The owners of the Great Northern and the Burlington, James J. Hill and J. Pierpont Morgan, were on the verge of a general consolidation when Harriman tried to buy a control of the Northern Pacific. They struggled to retain it and succeeded, but their competition raised its stock to one thousand per share, causing a stock exchange panic on May 9, 1901. Only the speculators suffered by the panic, but public attention was drawn by it to the gigantic size of the combinations which held arbitrary control over nearly half the United States.

Minor consolidations followed these in 1902 and 1903, but none aroused so much fear as the Northern Securities Company of New Jersey, the holding company in whose hands Hill and Morgan determined to put the control of their lines. The fate of any single company could be determined by the ownership of not over fifty-one per cent of its stock. If this was owned by another corporation, a similar proportion of the stock of the latter would control the whole. The holding company was a machine whereby capital could control property several times its bulk. The Governors of the Northwest States, alarmed at the monopolization of their railways, protested and started suits. It was claimed that this sort of merging of railroads was, after all, a conspiracy in restraint of trade. In March, 1902, President Roosevelt instructed his Attorney-General, Philander C. Knox, to test the Sherman Act of 1890, and bring suit under it for the dissolution of the Northern Securities Company. For several years after 1897 foreign affairs and big business had been dominant in the American mind, which had admired their bigness and activity, but now the social consequences of big business aroused the fears of the nation. In 1903 Congress passed the Elkins Law, forbidding railroads to give rebates to favored customers, and an Expedition Law, to make the wheels of justice move more rapidly when prosecutions under the Sherman and Interstate Commerce Laws were under way.

Industrial consolidation, like that of the railways, began again in 1897, and many of the new corporations assumed a type that marked an evolution for the trust. In the earlier period the aim of the trust had been to eliminate competition by gathering under a single control the whole of a given business. Oil, sugar, steel, whiskey, and tobacco were notable instances in which extreme consolidation had been reached. Competition changed its character as consolidation increased. It ceased to mean a struggle between rivals in the same trade, and came to mean a struggle between successive processes of manufacture. The mine-owner struggled for his profits with the smelter who used his ore. The smelter struggled with the steel manufacturer in the same way. Control of single industries left untouched this newer competition, but an integration of great groups of related processes promised to avoid it.

In 1901 the greatest of the integrated trusts, the United States Steel Corporation, was created. The iron and steel industry had been expanding since the Bessemer and other commercial processes for the manufacture of steel had made it available for railway, bridge, and architectural construction. Andrew Carnegie, with his Pittsburg mills, was the most successful producer. His partnership controlled by 1901 about twenty-five per cent of the output of finished steel. He already included many related and successive processes, but now he allowed his works to be merged with those of his rivals into a large company. The resulting United States Steel Corporation owned and operated the ore deposits and the mines, the necessary coal fields, the local railways and freight steamers, the smelters and the blast furnaces, the rolling mills and the factories in which iron and steel were manufactured into a multitude of shapes for sale. With a New Jersey charter it was capitalized at $1,100,000,000, and drew attention to the industrial phase of the trust problem much as Harriman, Hill, and Morgan had drawn it to the railroads.

Promotion of new trusts, with billions of aggregated capital, was the order of the day from 1897 to 1902. The fear of monopoly was speedily aroused, and in 1898 Congress created an Industrial Commission, whose nineteen volumes of reports contain the facts upon which the history of the trusts must be based. In the fall of 1899 there met in Chicago a great conference on the trusts, where business men, economists, and politicians discussed the economic and social possibilities of the movement. A willingness to hear and perhaps to rely on the judgment of experts was shown in the discussions over the trusts. It marked a change in the American attitude toward government. By 1902 the demand for a solution of the trust problem was heard repeatedly, but there was little agreement as to whether the trusts were good or bad, or whether they should be abolished, regulated, or owned outright by the Government. It was not even certain what powers the United States possessed to regulate general industry, but a group of Supreme Court cases suggested that the power could be found. In the Trans-Missouri Freight Case (1897), the Supreme Court declared that the Sherman Law applied to railway conspiracies, and in the Addystone Pipe Case (1898), a decision against an industrial combination, written by Circuit Judge William H. Taft, was upheld by the court of last appeal. The Northern Securities Case, started in 1902, was pushed to a successful end in 1904, when it became apparent that legal control could be exercised if Congress so desired.

Labor followed the course of industry and transportation, becoming stronger and better united, and showing a keen jealousy of centralized control. The years of trust promotion were years of notable strikes and of episodes which drew attention to the social results of industrial concentration. Sometimes the trust had labor at a disadvantage, as was shown in the strike against the Steel Corporation by the Amalgamated Association in 1901. In 1892 this union had conducted a great strike against the Carnegie Works and had lost public sympathy and the strike. Its men had committed open violence, and an anarchistic sympathizer had tried to murder Carnegie's representative at Homestead, Henry C. Frick. In 1901 the strike affected the unionized mills of the Steel Corporation, but that trust had only to close down the mills involved and transfer pending contracts to other mills, remote and non-unionized. The strike collapsed because of the superior organization of the trust.

More important than the steel strike in its effect upon the public was the strike of the miners in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. In 1900 these workers were organized by the United Mine Workers of America, under the leadership of John Mitchell. They gained concessions in a strike in this year, partly because the strike threatened to disturb political conditions and embarrass the Republican national ticket. The mine-owners, most of whom were Republicans, were persuaded by Hanna and others to end the quarrel.

In the spring of 1902 the strike broke out again, turning largely upon the question of the formal recognition of the union. All through the summer John Mitchell held his followers together, gaining an unusual degree of public sympathy for his cause. In the autumn, with both sides obstinate, a third party, the public, took an interest in the strike. The prospect of a coalless winter alarmed political leaders and citizens in general. It was felt that public interest was superior to the claims of either contestant, but there was neither law nor recognized machinery through which the public could protect itself. At this stage, in October, 1902, President Roosevelt secretly reached the intention "to send in the United States Army to take possession of the coal fields" if necessary. He called the operators and Mitchell to a conference at the White House, spoke to them as a citizen upon their duty to serve the public, and with rising public opinion behind him and supporting him, forced the owners to consent to an arbitration of the points at issue. The men returned to work, pleased with the President, to whose interference they and the public owed industrial peace.

In 1903 another miners' union, the Western Federation of Miners, conducted a great strike in the mines of Cripple Creek. Public opinion in Colorado knew no middle class. The miners and the operators represented the two chief interests of the section. Hard feeling and violence accompanied the strike. The malicious murder of non-union men added to the bitterness, which the presence of the militia and a series of arbitrary arrests could not allay. The strike was complicated by the presence among the workers of a strong element of Socialists, whose ends were political as well as economic. The leaders of the Federation, Moyer and Haywood, were Socialists, and for them the strike was only a beginning of political revolution. The strike lasted until the outraged citizens of Cripple Creek formed a vigilance committee and deported the chief agitators to Kansas.

Socialism played an increasing part in labor discussions after 1897. A Socialist Labor party had presented a ticket and received a few votes in 1892 and 1896, but socialism had not taken a strong hold on the American imagination. The swelling immigration that followed the new prosperity brought new life to socialism. In 1900 a Social Democratic party polled 94,000 votes for Eugene V. Debs for President. In 1904, with the same candidate, it received 402,000 votes. Society was reorganizing amid the industrial changes, while the discontented classes were growing more coherent and constructive.

President Roosevelt met the changes in transportation, industry, and labor with vigor. He invoked the Sherman Law against the Northern Securities Company. He brought suits against certain of the trusts which he stigmatized as the "bad trusts." Not all concentration, he urged, was undesirable. Capital, like labor, had its rights, but it must obey the law. Partly through his efforts Congress created in 1903 a new administrative department of Commerce and Labor. George B. Cortelyou became the first Secretary of this department. Through its Bureaus of Corporations and of Labor there was new activity in the investigation of the facts of the industrial movement.

The vigor with which the President directed foreign relations, interfered in big business, and espoused the cause of labor produced a breach between him and many of the regular leaders of the party. Through two campaigns Marcus A. Hanna had worked on the theory that the Republican party was the party of business, and had attracted to its support all who believed this or had something to make out of it. Many of these Republicans could not understand what Roosevelt was trying to do, and maintained an opposition, silent or open, to his policies.

The popularity of Hanna was used by many Republicans to offset the popularity of Roosevelt. Before 1896 Hanna had taken little part in public politics. Entering the Senate in 1897, he developed great influence. By 1900 he began to speak in public with directness and effect, and to undo the work of the cartoonists who had misrepresented his character. He interfered to bring peace in the anthracite regions in 1900, became interested in the labor problem on its own account, and discovered that he was popular. He was essentially a direct and honest man, who had had no reason to doubt that it was the chief end of government to conserve business. As he came into touch with public affairs he broadened, saw new responsibilities for capital, and had a new understanding of the wants of labor. The only personality that even threatened to rival that of Roosevelt in 1904 was that of "Uncle Mark" Hanna.

Roosevelt had been made Vice-President to get rid of him in New York. The single life that stood between him and the White House was removed by an assassin, and as a President by accident he desired to establish himself and secure a nomination on his own account in 1904. By the summer of 1902 he appreciated the growing interest in the problems of capital and labor. A speaking tour in 1902 gave him a chance to demand a "square deal" for all, and the control of the trusts. From some sections of the West came the suggestion that the way to approach the trusts was through the tariff.

The Dingley Tariff was unpopular with the Republican farmers of the Northwest, and for some years they tolerated it in silence as a test of party loyalty. In 1902 a liberal faction, controlled by Governor Albert B. Cummins, captured the Iowa convention and demanded a revision of the more extreme schedules. The belief that the tariff was the "mother of trusts" was spreading, and the Iowa idea gained wide acceptance. In Congress, in the session of 1902, the Republican organization had shown the stubbornness with which any opening in the tariff wall would be opposed.

Cuba was set free in the spring of 1902, her government having been formed under the guidance of the United States. The duty to aid the young Republic, and in particular to mitigate the severities of the Dingley Tariff impressed the President, who used all his influence to get such legislation from Congress. He failed signally, raising only a new issue by his attempt to coerce Congress. His speeches in the summer showed a willingness to revise the tariff, while his interference in the coal strike in the autumn showed his willingness to oppose the ends of capital. How far he would go in breaking with the leaders of his party was unknown, but their disposition to "stand pat" and do nothing with the tariff was marked before the end of 1902.

In 1902 it became a habit of Republican state conventions to demand the renomination of Roosevelt in 1904. Whatever his effect upon the party leaders, the rank and file liked him and believed in him, while his personal popularity among Democrats led many to think his strength greater than it was. His candidacy was formal and authorized, but his opponents hoped that Hanna might be induced to try to defeat him. In 1903 the Ohio convention, with the consent of Hanna, approved the candidacy of Roosevelt, and early in 1904 the death of Hanna removed the last hope of Roosevelt's Republican opponents. The delegates went to a national convention in Chicago, for which the procedure had all been arranged at the White House, where it had been determined that Elihu Root should be temporary chairman, and that Joseph G. Cannon, the Speaker, should be permanent chairman. Through these the convention registered the renomination of Roosevelt and selected Charles W. Fairbanks, of Indiana, as Vice-President.

In the Democratic party the forces that had dominated in 1896 and 1900 had lost control. William Jennings Bryan, after two defeats, was not a candidate in 1904. He had become a lay preacher on political subjects, lecturing and speaking constantly in all parts of the United States, and reinforcing his political views in the columns of his weekly Commoner, which he founded after his defeat in 1900. Roosevelt had adopted many of his fundamental themes, but Bryan retained an increasing popularity as did the President, and, like the latter, had relations of doubtful cordiality with the leaders of his own party. The Cleveland wing of the Democrats still believed Bryan to be dangerous and unsound upon financial matters, and some of them made overtures to Cleveland to be a candidate for a third term himself. His emphatic refusal to reenter politics compelled the conservatives to find a new candidate. Judge Alton B. Parker, of New York, was their choice. The owner of the most notorious of the sensational newspapers, William Randolph Hearst, offered himself. Several other candidates were presented to the Democratic Convention at Chicago, but Parker received the nomination, over the bitter opposition of Bryan. When a doubt arose as to his status on the silver issue, Judge Parker telegraphed to the convention that he regarded "the gold standard as firmly and irrevocably established." Bryan supported the ticket, Parker and Henry G. Davis of West Virginia, but without enthusiasm.

There was no issue that clearly divided the parties in the campaign of 1904. Roosevelt asked for an indorsement of his Administration and for approval of his general theory of a "square deal," but it was obvious that his party associates were less enthusiastic for reform than he, and that only his great personal popularity prevented some of them from withdrawing their support. The Bryan Democrats were drawn more toward Roosevelt than toward their own party candidate. It was clear that Parker represented, on the whole, the weight of conservatism, while Roosevelt embodied the spirit of progress, and that neither was typical of his party. Parker was driven by the progressive Democrats to insist upon a regulation of the trusts; Roosevelt acquiesced in the desire of the "stand-pat" Republicans and refrained from advocating a lowering of the tariff.

The result of the election was proof of the public confidence in Roosevelt. He carried every State outside the South, and Missouri and Maryland besides. His popular vote was over 7,500,000, while his plurality over Parker was more than 2,500,000. In the last week of the canvass Parker charged that the trusts were supporting Roosevelt, and that the reform demands were only a pose. He pointed out that the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, who had succeeded Hanna, George B. Cortelyou, had been Secretary of Commerce and Labor, and thus in a position to examine the books of corporations. He hinted at a political blackmail of the trusts, and many of the papers that supported him were outspoken in their charges. An indignant denial of blackmail appeared over the President's signature the Saturday before election. Later investigation proved that many of the great corporations had, as usual, contributed to the campaign fund, and that Roosevelt had urged the railroad magnate, Harriman, to contribute toward the campaign in New York.

As soon as the results of the election were known, Roosevelt answered a question that was on the lips of many. His three and a half years constituted his first term. He was now elected for a second term, and he characterized as a "wise custom" the limiting of a President to two terms. "Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination," he declared.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The history of the recent trust movement may be followed in the writings upon the United States Steel Corporation by E.S. Meade and H.L. Wilgus. There is a detailed and gossipy Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company (1903), by J.H. Bridge. W.F. Willoughby has made searching analyses of Concentration and Integration, which may be found in the Yale Review, vol. VII, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. XVI. The prosecution of the Northern Securities Company brought out many typical facts of railroad consolidation, and is best described in B.H. Meyer, A History of the Northern Securities Case (in University of Wisconsin Bulletin, no. 142). More general material upon these topics may be found in E.R. Johnson, American Railway Transportation (1903, etc.); F.A. Cleveland and F.W. Powell, Railway Promotion and Capitalization in the United States (1909, with an admirable bibliography); Poore's Railroad Manual; and the files of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle. The voluminous Report of the Industrial Commission (19 vols., Washington, 1900-02) is a storehouse of facts upon industry; labor conditions are illustrated in the Annual Reports of the United States Commissioner of Labor, who has also special reports upon individual strikes, including that at Cripple Creek in 1903. The history of the campaign fund in 1904 was partially revealed in an investigation in 1912. H. Croly, Marcus A. Hanna, is invaluable for these years.



CHAPTER XIX

THE "MUCK-RAKERS"

Before Roosevelt was inaugurated for his second term, the national "revival," in which he and Bryan and other preachers of civic virtue had played the speaking parts, was sweeping over the country. The menace of the trusts was seen and exaggerated as railways, corporations, and labor availed themselves of the means of cooperation. The connection between the great financial interests and politics was believed to be dangerous to public welfare. All the mechanical reforms for the recovery of government by the people, that had been originated between 1889 and 1897, were revived once more, and there was added to confidence in them a widespread belief in the existence of a malevolent, plundering class.

It was not enough that the trust movement should be explained as an unavoidable development from modern communication. It was believed to constitute more than an economic evolution. The public was prone to place an ethical responsibility upon an individual or groups of individuals, and there came a series of revelations or exposures that appeared, in part, to fix the blame. All the old uprisings against boss-rule were revivified, and capitalistic control was placed upon the Index.

Miss Ida M. Tarbell, an historical student who had gained an audience through popular and discriminating lives of Napoleon and Lincoln, published a history of the Standard Oil Company in McClure's Magazine during 1903. She showed conclusively the connection between transportation and monopoly in the oil industry, revealing the mastery of the tools of transportation, by rebates, by control of tank cars, or by pipe lines, that had enabled John D. Rockefeller to establish his great trust. She showed also the unlovely methods of competition, long common to all business, but magnified by their use in the hands of a monopoly to establish itself. "What we are witnessing," wrote Washington Gladden a little later, "is a new apocalypse, an uncovering of the iniquity of the land.... We have found that no society can march hellward faster than a democracy under the banner of unbridled individualism."

Three years before Miss Tarbell displayed the tendency of the trusts, President Hadley, of Yale, had suggested that social ostracism, or social stigma, might be made an efficient tool for reform. Other writers used the tool. Lincoln Steffens, in a series of articles on "The Shame of the Cities," exposed the connection between graft and politics. Thomas Lawson, with spectacular exaggeration, laid the troubles of society at the feet of "Frenzied Finance." Collier's Weekly undertook to reveal the worthlessness and fraud in the trade in patent medicines. Many of the exposers encroached upon the fields of fiction in their work, while books of avowed fiction exploited the conditions they portrayed. Coniston, by Winston Churchill, was based upon the control of a State by a railroad boss. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the meat-packers.

A new journalism aided and was aided by the zeal to expose and the greed of the public for literature of exposure. In the later nineties city journalism was reorganized under the influence of the "yellow" papers, and sensational news was made a profitable commodity as never before. The range of the daily paper was, however, limited by a few hundred miles, and its influence could not become national. A new periodical literature, resembling the old literary monthlies, but using many timely and journalistic articles, sprang into life and gained national circulation and influence. S.S. McClure was one of its pioneers. Everybody's, the Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, the American, and weeklies like Collier's, the Outlook, and the Independent were among the journals that helped to spread the conclusions and advocate reforms. Besides these a horde of imitators fattened for a time upon exposure.

Journalism had a large part in directing the American revival, and private investigators furnished many of the facts. Public suits marked an attempt to act upon the facts and remedy them. In Missouri Joseph W. Folk conducted a series of prosecutions against grafters in St. Louis that elevated him in a few months to the head of his party and the governorship of his State. The Bureau of Corporations, attached to the new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, made a series of reports the most notable of which showed that the charges against the Standard Oil Company for extorting rebates, and against the meat-packers for unsanitary conditions, were founded upon fact.

The most notable public exposure of indiscretion and wrongdoing in high finance occurred in New York. Here, during 1905, a quarrel over the management of the Equitable Life Insurance Company led to a legislative investigation by a so-called Armstrong Committee. One of the attorneys employed by the committee, Charles E. Hughes, soon became the spirit of the examination. One by one he called insurance officers to the witness stand, and drew from their reluctant lips the story of their relation to banking, to speculative finance, and to politics. He revealed the existence of a group among the bankers not unlike a money trust. He proved that for at least three national campaigns the insurance companies, like other corporations, had given heavy subsidies to the campaign funds, sometimes of both but always of the Republican party.

Whenever an investigator rose above the level and established his reputation for honesty and competence, the aroused public seized upon him for use in politics. In September, 1906, the Democrats of New York nominated the most successful of the sensational journalists, Hearst, for governor. On the same day the Republican Convention, in which no delegate had been instructed for him, nominated Hughes as governor of New York, because public opinion in the party would take no other candidate. Hughes was elected in 1906 and again in 1908, in spite of the hostility of Republican party leaders. His administrations were prophetic of the new spirit that was entering politics.

Many of the problems raised by the investigations were old and presented only a need for an honest enforcement of the law against law-breakers. Others were simple and prescribed their own methods of treatment. The evil of corporation contributions to campaign funds was met in 1907 by a law forbidding national banks to contribute to any election, or any corporations to contribute to a presidential or congressional election. In 1906 the gift of free railroad passes upon interstate railroads was prohibited by law. The presidential candidates in 1908 pledged themselves to publicity in the matter of contributions, while the complaints of poverty-stricken campaign managers in 1908 and 1912 indicated that the laws were generally obeyed. Still other problems raised large questions of scientific investigation and legislation.

The reaction from the carelessness revealed by the investigation of the meat-packers stimulated a pure-food movement that had had its advocates for many years. With the concentration of food manufacture and the increase in the consumption of "package products," the consumer had given up the preparation of his own food and thrown himself upon the dealer. The numerous domestic industries typical of the American family in 1880 had been sorted out. The sewing had gone to the sweat shop and the factory, the baking had gone to the public baker, the laundry was going, the killing and preservation of meat and the preparation of canned vegetables and fruits were nearly gone. Population followed the industries to work in the factories. Country life lost much of its variety and interest, while the congested masses in the cities were made dependent for their health and strength upon private initiative. Rigorous bills for the inspection of meats at the slaughter houses, and for the proper labeling of manufactured foods and medicines, were carried through Congress in 1906 on the strength of the popular revulsion against the manufacturers. Hereafter the Department of Agriculture stood between the people and their food. James Wilson, of Iowa, had been Secretary since 1897 and remained in the office until 1913. He and his subordinates, notably Dr. Harvey Wiley, in charge of the pure-food work, administered the law amid the proddings of consumers and the protests of manufacturers. With much complaint, but with little difficulty because of the consolidation of control, business adjusted itself to the new requirements and labels in the next few years.

The anti-railroad movement reminded the public that the Interstate Commerce Law of 1887 was an imperfect statute. It had always done less than its framers had intended. Judicial interpretation had limited its scope. The commission did not have power to fix a rate or to compel in the railroads the uniformity of bookkeeping without which no scientific rates could be established. After Roosevelt had directed his speeches of 1903 and 1904 to the subject, Congress responded to the public interest thus aroused with a flood of projected railroad bills. One of these passed the House of Representatives in 1905, but was held up in the Senate while a new investigation of interstate commerce, the most exhaustive since the Cullom investigation of 1885, was undertaken. In 1906 the Hepburn Railway Bill was passed. In its chief provisions it gave the Interstate Commerce Commission power to fix rates and to prescribe uniform bookkeeping, and it forbade railways to issue free passes or to own the freight they carried. The long railroad debate was made notable by the speeches of a new Senator, Robert M. LaFollette, of Wisconsin, who had fought his way to the governorship on this issue and gone through a prolonged fight with the railroads of his own State. He insisted that public rate-making could not succeed without a preliminary physical valuation of the roads that would show the extent of their real capitalization. He talked, often, to empty chairs in the Senate, but he prophesied that the people had a new interest in their affairs, and that many of the seats, vacant because of the indifference of their owners, would soon be filled with Senators of a new type. In vacations he spoke to public audiences on the same subject, reading his "roll-call," and telling the people how their representatives voted for or against commercial privilege. With its enlarged powers the Interstate Commerce Commission made rapid headway against rebates and discrimination.

The popular revival was well advanced by 1905, but was becoming more sensational every month. Led on by an expectant public, the magazines manufactured exposures to supply the market, and hysteria often took the place of investigation. The real needs of reform were in danger of being lost in a flood of denunciation. In the spring of 1906 President Roosevelt spoke out to check the indiscriminate abuse. He drew his topic from Bunyan's "Man with the Muck-Rake," pointed out that blame and exposure had run its course, and demanded that enforcement of the law be taken up, and that efforts be turned from destruction to construction. He had done much himself to "arouse the slumbering conscience of the nation," and turned now to direct it toward a permanent advantage.

The trend of criticism injured the party under whose administration corporate abuse had grown up. The personal popularity of Roosevelt, and his associates, Root, Taft, Knox, and Hughes, saved the party from defeat. In 1906 the congressional campaign was fought on the basis of holding on to prosperity, enforcing the law against all violators, and strengthening the hands of government. Roosevelt wrote the substance of the platform, and his party gained control of its sixth consecutive Congress since 1896. The canvass over, Roosevelt departed from an old precedent, left the territory of the United States, and visited the Isthmus of Panama to inspect the work on the canal.

Six months after the signing of the Panama Treaty in 1903 the United States took possession of the Canal Zone and began to dig. It had to learn lessons of both management and tropical engineering. One by one its chief engineers deserted the enterprise. The choice between a sea-level and a lock canal divided the experts. The legislation by Congress was inadequate. In the spring of 1906 Roosevelt, with the approval of Taft, who had been recalled from the Philippines to be Secretary of War, determined to build a lock canal. The President tramped over the workings in November, 1906, and sent an illustrated message about them to Congress on his return. In 1907 Major George W. Goethals was detailed from the army to be benevolent despot and engineer of the Canal Zone. Inspired and encouraged by repeated visits from Taft, the work now made rapid progress toward completion. Sir Frederick Treves, the great English surgeon, visited the canal in 1908, and found there not only gigantic engineering works, but a triumph for the preventive medicine of Colonel William C. Gorgas, chief of the sanitary officers.

The attention of the world, directed toward the United States since 1898, was held by the canal and by a continuation of a vigorous and open diplomacy. In February, 1904, Russia and Japan, unable to agree upon the conduct of the former in Manchuria, had gone to war. Hostilities had continued until Russian prestige was shattered and Japanese finance was wavering. In June, 1905, the United States directed identical notes to the belligerents, offering a friendly mediation. The invitation was accepted, and during the summer of 1905 the envoys of Russia and Japan met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to conclude a treaty of peace. In 1906 the Nobel Committee awarded to Roosevelt the annual prize for services to peace.

Relations with all the world were friendly between 1905 and 1909. Great Britain contributed to the cordiality by sending to the United States as her ambassador the best-fitted of her subjects, James Bryce. Under his tactful management the next five years were a period of unprecedented friendship. The South American republics, always sensitive about the headship of the United States, were brought to kindlier feelings. There had been two congresses of all the Americas, one in 1889, at the instigation of Blaine, the next in Mexico in 1901. In 1906 the American republics convened at Rio de Janeiro in July. Secretary of State Elihu Root made a plea for friendship before this congress. From Rio he went to other capitals of South America, achieving notable triumphs in his public speeches.

The Pan-American Conference at Rio was an American preliminary to a larger meeting in which the United States played an important part in 1907. During 1904 Roosevelt had agreed to start a movement for a second conference at The Hague. He took up the negotiation during the Russo-Japanese War, deferred it at the instance of the Czar, and then stood aside to let the latter issue the formal invitation. The American delegation at the Second Hague Conference was led by Joseph H. Choate, leader of the American Bar and former ambassador to Great Britain. It forced the discussion throughout the session, tried in vain to produce an agreement to abolish the right of capture of enemy property on the high seas in time of war, and helped to strengthen the permanent court of arbitration. In January, 1906, the United States had sat in conference at Algeciras, over the affairs of Morocco. It had mediated in the Oriental war. It had strengthened its position at home. It was no longer true that the United States was entirely disinterested in the affairs of Europe, for it had become a world power.

A visible emblem of power was afforded to the world in 1907. Since the Treaty of Portsmouth there had been friction with Japan over the treatment of Japanese subjects on the Pacific Coast, and alarmists had drawn pictures of a possible war. Late in 1907 the President announced a practice voyage for the whole effective navy that would carry it around South America and into the Pacific. In December he reviewed the fleet, and saw it off from Hampton Roads. From the Pacific it was ordered round the world, visited Japan and China, and was received with keen interest everywhere. It came home early in 1909, having made a record for holding together without breakdown or accident.

While the fleet was going round the world and business was adjusting itself to the new constructive laws, an old problem was formally ended. The tribal sovereignty, which had made the Indians a problem, was terminated. The Dawes Act of 1887 had substituted severalty for tribal landholdings among the Indians. Out of the first cessions which followed the act Oklahoma Territory had been made in 1890. This had developed more rapidly than any previous Territory because of the railroads that crossed it in every direction. By 1900 it demanded statehood. In 1906 it was enabled, and during 1907 it was admitted, with the longest and most radical of state constitutions. Fear of the activities of corporate wealth and distrust of the agents of government were written into nearly every article.

In the spring of 1908 nearly all of the forty-six governors met with President Roosevelt in the White House and registered another problem upon which agitation and revelation had led to public reflection. The coal strikes of 1900 and 1902 had drawn attention to the possible relation of government to the coal supply of the people. The beginnings of reclamation in 1902 had revealed the fact that public reclamation was impeded by large private and corporate water rights. The natural resources of the country were seen to be following the course of all business and settling into the control of great corporations. The waste of coal and timber and water and land itself was unreasonable. The denudation of the hills led to terrible floods along the rivers. The future was being darkened by the organized selfishness of the present. A movement for conservation grew out of the conference of governors, but Congress for the present would not encourage it.

In popular education, in initiation of new administrative policies, and in the passage of constructive laws efforts were being made to adjust government to the needs of modern industry and to safeguard society. The business interests affected by the changes obstructed the process when they could, and were intensified in their opposition by the series of prosecutions brought by Attorney-General Knox, and his successor Charles J. Bonaparte, under the Sherman Law. At no time in the earlier history of this law had there been a strong disposition to test its merit, and no one of the notorious trusts had been attacked before the Northern Securities case. In later years it was turned against the Standard Oil Company, the beef-packers, the Tobacco Trust, the Sugar Trust, and the United States Steel Corporation, while railways and smaller corporations, in great number, were prosecuted. The enforcement of the law aroused blind opposition among many of the victims, and stimulated queries as to whether or not any attempt to limit the size of business was sound public policy. The debate upon regulation, as against prohibition of trusts and monopolies, ran on with no sign of victory for either side of the argument. Personal hostility against the Administration for applying the law gave color to the last two years of Roosevelt's Administration.

By 1907 there had been ten years of the prosperity that had begun with the election of McKinley. Finance had developed with industry and trade. The needs of corporations dealing in millions and hundreds of millions of capital had induced the consolidation of banks and the concentration of financial power in the hands of a small group of men. The holding companies were great aids in the furtherance of this concentration. J. Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were best known as representative of the inner circle. Their speculations and investments were embarrassed by the weakening of public confidence. It was certain there would come a time when the whole surplus capital of the United States would be invested in permanent improvements. Such periods had followed eras of boom in 1837, 1857, and 1873. It was too probable that some accident occurring in the period of liquidation would create a panic. Suspicion had been directed against the controlling agents of business by the revelations of 1902-07. It was exaggerated by sensational journalism. It reached a climax in the fall of 1907 when a group of banks, reputed strong, failed through dishonesty and speculative management. The failure of the Mercantile National Bank and the suspension of the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York brought the crisis on October 22, 1907. The loss to the public was lessened by resolute and sympathetic cooperation among the clearing-houses, Morgan, Rockefeller, and the United States Treasury, but a period of enforced economy was begun for all.

The managers of big business attributed the panic to "Theodore the Meddler." They claimed that business was sound and honest, and the upheaval was caused by the agitation of demagogues. The President, they asserted, had destroyed confidence by his attack on the commercial class. Federal prosecutions, new laws, and the enforcement of inquisitorial pure-food regulations had made it impossible for business to live. "Let us alone," they cried.

They convinced only themselves, a small minority of the people of the United States. Since 1902 the people as a body, regardless of the great parties, had opened their eyes to the trend of business and had decided that public authority must be summoned to the defense of democracy. The independent vote broke away from each party in increasingly numerous cases. The old American view that democracy meant unrestrained individualism had given way to the newer view that democratic opportunity was dependent upon the restriction of monopoly. The ostensible leaders, from the President down, were only the mouths that spoke the new language. Without them the same condition would have existed in large degree. The attack of the financial interests and Wall Street upon the President only convinced the people that the Roosevelt policies were, on the whole, their policies, and that individual interest and party machinery must give way to their attainment.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The periodicals and special articles alluded to in this chapter constitute the best sources as yet available for the period. There were numerous investigations by committees of Congress that furnished facts in their reports. Certain of the departments of government, notably the Bureau of Corporations and the Department of Agriculture, were active in the publication of facts. Thoughtful surveys of society in the United States may be found in E.A. Ross, Changing America (1912); H. Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909); A.B. Hart, National Ideals Historically Traced (in The American Nation, vol. 26, 1907). The autobiography of R.M. LaFollette is of considerable value. A great number of books upon America by foreign visitors bring out special viewpoints. Among these are F. Klein, In the Land of the Strenuous Life (1905); A. Bennett, Your United States (1912); W. Archer, America To-Day (1899); Anon., As a Chinaman Saw Us (1904); and James Bryce has revised and brought down to date his American Commonwealth.



CHAPTER XX

NEW NATIONALISM

The process of adjusting national administration and laws, to meet the needs of life and business that knew no state lines, had been begun during the Roosevelt period. For its completion it was necessary that a successor be found, convinced of the Roosevelt policies and able to carry them out. Three Republicans of this type were often mentioned for the Presidency in 1908. Elihu Root had been the legal mainstay of three administrations, and had received the public commendation of Roosevelt often and without restraint. His availability for the elective office was, however, weakened by his prominence as a corporation lawyer, which would be urged against him in a campaign. William H. Taft, Secretary of War, had a wider popularity than Root; had, as federal judge, long been identified with the enforcement of law, and had been used repeatedly as the spokesman of the President. He knew the colonies as no other American knew them, and was in touch with every detail of the Panama Canal. Neither he nor Root had won a leadership in competitive politics as had the third candidate, Charles E. Hughes, who, as Governor of New York, had shown his capacity to fight professional politicians on their own ground.

In 1907, President Roosevelt announced his preference for Judge Taft, and fought off, as he had often done, suggestions that he accept another term himself. He controlled the Republican convention at Chicago, where his candidate was nominated on the first ballot. A Republican Representative from New York, James S. Sherman, was nominated for the Vice-Presidency, and the party leaders were driven to a platform of enthusiastic indorsement of the Roosevelt policies.

The Democratic party, meeting at Denver in 1908, was again under the control of the radical element, and nominated William J. Bryan for the third time. The career of Roosevelt had modified the emphasis of the Bryan reforms. "Any Republican who, after following Roosevelt, should object to Bryan as a radical, would simply be laughed at consumedly," said one of the weeklies. In the ensuing campaign both candidates professed ends that were nearly identical, and their advocates were forced to explain whether the Roosevelt policies would have a better chance under Bryan or Taft. There was no clear issue, and in each party there was a powerful minority that wanted neither of the candidates. The election of Taft had been discounted throughout the campaign, but it was accompanied by a demonstration of independent voting that revealed the weakness of party ties. Four Democratic governors were elected in States that were carried by the Republican national ticket.

The Administration of President Taft was greeted with cordial good will by the progressive elements in both parties. His courage and sincerity had never been questioned. Roosevelt was unlimited in his praise. His judicial training made impossible for him types of political activity that had made enemies for his predecessor among many conservatives, yet his devotion to policies of administrative reform was beyond dispute. He immediately fulfilled one pledge of the Republican platform by summoning Congress to meet on March 15, 1909, to revise the tariff, and on this subject he had for several years avowed a desire that revision should be downward, to remove all trace of special tariff privilege.

The movement for tariff reform had begun in the Middle West about 1902, and had spread with the feeling against the trusts. Roosevelt had indicated a sympathy with it in 1902 and 1903, and had fought Congress for tariff modification in the interest of Cuban reciprocity. But most of the party leaders had opposed tampering with the protective system. Speaker Cannon was an avowed protectionist and defended the attitude of the stand-pat tariff advocates. After 1904 the President had ceased to discuss the tariff, confining himself to other schemes for reform. He left the problem of revision to his successor.

The tariff of 1909 bore the names of Sereno E. Payne, of New York, chairman of the House Committee of Ways and Means, and Nelson W. Aldrich, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance. As it passed the House it embodied numerous reductions from the Dingley rates. In the Senate it was reframed and became an instrument of even greater protection than the existing law. It was debated in a stronger glare of public interest than any other tariff, and its details were explained and fought by a group of Republicans who refused to accept the control of the inner circle of the party, and who were determined that the revision should be downward and sincere. They did less to affect the bill, however, than President Taft, who forced the conference committee to accept a few reductions in the rates, notably on hides and lumber, and to include a provision for levying an income tax on corporations. A constitutional amendment, authorizing a general income tax, was a part of the agreement. The bill became a law in August, 1909. "The bill, in its final form," said the Outlook, which inclined toward free trade, "is by far the most enlightened protectionist measure ever enacted in the history of the country." "I think that the present tariff," wrote Roosevelt, who had returned to private life, "is better than the last, and considerably better than the one before the last."

Whatever its relation to earlier tariffs the Payne-Aldrich Act was distasteful to the country, which had since 1897 become critical of the methods of tariff legislation. Seven Republican Senators and twenty Representatives voted against it on its final passage. These represented the Middle West and the new generation, and returned home to find their constituents generally with them in denouncing the measure as an instrument of privilege. Some of them had broken with President Taft during the debate, and the breach was deepened when the latter spoke in the West, at Winona, Minnesota, and defended the act as a compliance with the party pledge. It became apparent that the new President was unable to procure party legislation and to maintain at the same time an appearance of harmony in the party. Roosevelt had dissatisfied but had overriden the conservative wing; Taft failed to satisfy the most progressive wing and failed to silence them.

In the autumn of 1909 began a series of administrative misunderstandings that greatly embarrassed the Taft Administration. A prospective minister to China was dismissed abruptly before he left the United States, on account of a supposed indiscretion. In the Department of Agriculture there was dissension between the Secretary, James Wilson, and the chemist engaged in the enforcement of the Pure Food Law, Harvey W. Wiley. The chief of the forestry service, Gifford Pinchot, quarreled openly with the Secretary of the Interior, Richard A. Ballinger, and raised the question of the future of the policy of conservation.

The work of the forestry and reclamation services was at the center of the scheme for conservation of natural resources that had grown out of Roosevelt's conference with the governors in 1908. A subordinate of the forestry service attacked the Secretary of the Interior in 1909, charging favoritism and lack of interest in conservation. He was dismissed in September, upon order of President Taft, whereupon Collier's Weekly undertook an attack upon the President as an enemy of conservation, receiving the moral support of many of the progressives who disliked the tariff act. In January, 1910, the growing controversy led the President to dismiss Pinchot from the service, for insubordination, and Congress to erect a joint committee to investigate the Pinchot-Ballinger dispute.

The Ballinger committee ultimately vindicated the Secretary of the Interior, but the testimony taken brought out a fundamental difference between the theory of Taft, that the President could act only in accordance with the law, and that of Roosevelt, that he could do whatever was not forbidden by law. Although Taft stood by his subordinate, claiming that he and Ballinger were both active in conservation, a large section of the public believed that the aggressive movement for reform had lost momentum. What Roosevelt thought of it was impossible to learn, since he had gone to Africa in 1909, and remained outside the sphere of American politics until the summer of 1910.

The progressive Republicans revolted in 1909 and 1910 against the domination of the "stand-pat" group, and received the name "Insurgents." Senators LaFollette and Cummins, both of whom desired to be President, were the avowed leaders. In the House of Representatives, in March, 1910, the Insurgents cooperated with the Democratic minority, defeated a ruling of Speaker Cannon, and modified the House rules in order to curtail the autocracy of the presiding officer. They asked the country to believe that Taft had ceased to be progressive and had become the ally of the stand-pat interests. The split in the Republican party enabled the Democrats to carry the country in 1910, and to obtain a large majority in the House of Representatives. Champ Clark, of Missouri, and Oscar Underwood, of Alabama, both aspirants for the Democratic presidential nomination, became, respectively, Speaker and chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means in the new House. No one man controlled or led either party by his personality as Theodore Roosevelt had done; the rivalry of lesser leaders destroyed the harmony of both parties, and neither party even approached unanimity in regard to the great policies of the future. In January, 1911, the Insurgent Republicans organized a Progressive Republican League for the purpose of capturing the nomination in 1912 for one of their number, presumably Senator LaFollette.

The Taft policies differed from those of his predecessor chiefly in the method of their advocacy. Like Roosevelt, Taft had trouble in getting them enacted, and unlike Roosevelt, he failed to magnetize the people and carry them with him. He procured, however, funds for the creation of a board of tariff experts to aid in future revisions of schedules, and for a commerce court, to handle appeals in interstate commerce cases. The income tax amendment secured his support. He used his influence to prevent the seating of William Lorimer, a Senator elected from Illinois under conditions of grave scandal. The Interstate Commerce Law was revised and strengthened in 1910. An enabling act for Arizona and New Mexico was passed in 1910, under which both of these Territories became States in 1912. He continued the series of anti-trust suits begun under Roosevelt, and procured decisions ordering the dissolution of the Southern Pacific merger, the Standard Oil Company, and the Tobacco Trust, and the penalizing of many others.

In the field of administration President Taft showed an instinct for orderly and economical government. He urged upon Congress the adoption of a budget system for expenditures, and employed a body of experts to aid in reducing the cost and inefficiency of the executive departments. He extended the civil service until in 1912 only 56,000 of the 334,000 federal employees were still outside the classified service.

The foreign negotiations of the Taft Administration were most distinguished in respect to Latin-American trade, to arbitration, to neutrality, and to reciprocity. With the Latin-Americas he continued the policy of friendly support, through Philander C. Knox, his Secretary of State. The critics of this policy stigmatized it as "dollar diplomacy," but Taft and Knox defended it as leading these republics through sound finance to stable government. A protracted revolution in Mexico led to the expulsion of President Porfirio Diaz in 1911, and was followed by counter-revolutions in 1912. Throughout the disturbance Taft maintained a rigid neutrality, and induced Congress to permit him to prohibit the export of arms for sale to the belligerents. This constituted an advance upon the customary practice of neutrals, who are permitted under international law to sell munitions of war to either belligerent.

In 1908, Roosevelt had signed general arbitration treaties with Great Britain and other countries, containing the usual reservations of cases involving honor or national existence. In 1911, Taft signed yet broader treaties with Great Britain and France, providing for the arbitration of all justiciable disputes, and for a commission to determine whether disputed cases were justiciable or not. The Senate declined to ratify these agreements.

Canadian reciprocity was a part of Taft's tariff program. In 1911, he called Congress in special session to approve an agreement for a modification of the Payne-Aldrich rates with Canada. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives supported this measure, as did enough of the regular Republicans to insure its passage. But the Insurgents opposed it as likely to injure the interests of the farmer. In September, 1911, Canada rejected the whole measure after a general election in which a fear of annexation by the United States was an important motive.

The Taft policies failed to thrill the party or the people. They were less spectacular than the evils which the muck-rakers had portrayed. They were constructive and detailed, and aroused as opponents many who had joined in the general clamor for reform. They interested the party leaders little, for these were more concerned with their own personal fates, and were not overshadowed by the President as they had been for eight preceding years. They were all conceived in the spirit of a lawyer and judge, and were passed in an alliance with the wing of the Republican party that was most impervious to the new reforms, and were hence open to the attack that they were in spirit and intent reactionary.

In June, 1910, with the Republican schism well advanced, Theodore Roosevelt returned to the United States. A few weeks later he made a speaking trip in the West, and at Osawatomie, Kansas, he laid down a platform of reform that he called "New Nationalism." This was in substance an evolution from the history of forty years. It assumed the fact of the development of business and society along national lines, and demanded that the Government meet the new problems. It believed that constitutional power already existed for most of the needed functions of government, and demanded that where the power was lacking it should be obtained by constitutional amendment. The platform was received with equally violent commendation and attack. Many Progressives hailed it as an exposition of their faith. Conservatives were prone to call it socialistic or revolutionary. It restored Roosevelt to a position of consequence in public affairs, and emphasized the fact that Taft had developed no power of popular leadership comparable to that of his friend and predecessor. It gave the Progressives hope that Roosevelt, debarred from the Presidency by his pledge and by the unwritten third-term tradition, would aid them in forcing the Republican party to nominate a Progressive in 1912.

The concrete principles of the Progressive group embraced a series of policies looking toward the destruction of ring-controlled politics. They demanded and generally concurred in the initiative and referendum, the direct primary, and the direct election of delegates to national conventions, and the direct election of United States Senators. Many of them believed in a new doctrine, the recall, which was to be applied to administrative officials, to judges, and even to judicial decisions. Woman suffrage was commonly acceptable to them.

The cause of woman suffrage had made great progress since Idaho became, in 1896, the fourth suffrage State. A modified form of suffrage in local or school elections had been allowed in many States. A new period of agitation for unrestricted woman suffrage had begun in England about 1906, and had been given advertisement by the deliberate violations of law and order by the militant suffragettes. The agitation, though not the excess, had spread to the United States. In 1910, Washington, and in 1911, California, had become woman suffrage States. By 1914, the total was raised to twelve by the addition of Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Illinois,[2] Nevada, and Montana.

In the winter of 1911-12, the prospect of Republican success in the next national campaign was slight. The Democrats had gained the House in 1910, and they, with the aid of Progressive Republican votes, had passed and sent up to the President several tariff bills, reducing the rates, schedule by schedule. Everyone of these had been vetoed, each veto tending to convince the Progressives that Taft was conservative, if not stand-pat in his sentiments. The Progressive Republicans were pledged to work against the renomination of Taft, and were unlikely to support him vigorously, if renominated. Many regular Republicans believed he could not be reelected. The section of the party that desired a Progressive President became larger than the group that believed in LaFollette, and demands that Roosevelt return were heard from many sources.

[Footnote 2: In Illinois the right was somewhat restricted, yet included the voting for presidential electors and for local officials.]

In February, 1912, an appeal signed by seven Republican governors, all of whom dwelt in States now likely to go Democratic, urged Roosevelt to withdraw his pledge and become a candidate for the nomination. The demand was concurred in by admirers who believed that only he could bring about the new nationalism, by Progressives who distrusted LaFollette's capacity to win, and by Republicans who wanted to win at any price and saw only defeat through Taft. On February 24, Roosevelt announced his willingness to accept the nomination, explained that his previous refusal to accept another term had meant another consecutive term, and entered upon a canvass for delegates to the Republican National Convention.

The campaign before the primaries was made difficult because in most States the Republican machinery was in the hands of politicians who disliked Roosevelt, whether they cared for Taft or not. It began too late for the voters to overturn the state and national committees, or to register through the existing party machinery their new desire. It brought out the defects in methods of nomination which direct primaries were expected to remedy, and in some States public opinion was strong enough to compel a hasty passage of primary laws to permit the overturn of the convention system. The LaFollette candidacy was deprived of most of its supporters, through the superior popularity of Roosevelt.

When the convention met at Chicago on June 18, 1912, there were some 411 Roosevelt delegates among the 1078, and more than 250 more who, though instructed for Taft, were contested by Roosevelt delegations. When the national committee overruled the claims of these, Roosevelt denounced their action as "naked theft." He had definitely allied himself with the wing of the party that opposed Taft. When the convention, presided over by Elihu Root, and supported by nearly all the men whom Roosevelt had brought into public prominence, finally renominated Taft and Sherman, Roosevelt asserted that no honest man could vote for a ticket based upon dishonor. The Roosevelt Republicans did not bolt the convention, but when it adjourned they held a mass convention of their own, were addressed by their candidate, and went home to organize a new Progressive party.

The Democratic counsels were affected by the break-up of the Republican party and the success of its conservative wing at Chicago. They met at Baltimore the next week, with Bryan present and active, but not himself a candidate. They had to choose among Clark, the Speaker, Underwood, the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, and Governors Harmon, of Ohio, Marshall, of Indiana, and Woodrow Wilson, of New Jersey.

The last of these had risen into national politics since 1910. He had long been known as a brilliant essayist and historian. He was of Virginian birth, and had left the presidency of Princeton University to become Democratic candidate for Governor of New Jersey in 1910. He had shown as governor great capacity to lead his party in the direction of the progressive reforms. He differed in these less from Roosevelt and LaFollette than he or they did from the reactionaries in their own parties. "The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience," he had written long ago, "to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit.... He has no means of compelling Congress except through public opinion." Unembarrassed by previous attachment to any faction of the Democratic party, with a clear record against special privilege and corporation influence in politics, and supported obstinately by Bryan and the young men who had urged his candidacy, Woodrow Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot, with Governor Thomas Marshall for Vice-President. The conservative nomination by the Republicans had thrown the Democrats into the hands of their radical wing.

The Progressives held a convention in Chicago on August 5, and nominated Theodore Roosevelt and Governor Hiram Johnson, of California. Their platform included every important reform seriously urged, and was built around the idea of social justice and human rights. They denied that either of the old parties was fitted to carry on the work of progress. In the campaign their candidates and speakers revealed the vigor and the bitterness of the former Insurgents.

The schism threw the election into the hands of the Democrats, who retained the House, gained the Senate, and elected Wilson, though the latter received fewer votes than Bryan had received in each of his three attempts. The struggle was one of personalities, since few openly attacked the avowed aim of progressive legislation. The popularity of Roosevelt detached many Democratic votes from Wilson, but his unpopularity among Republicans who feared him and Progressive Republicans who resented his return to politics, drove to Wilson votes that would otherwise have gone to Taft. Taft received only eight electoral votes in November, and ran far behind both his rivals in the popular count. More than four million votes were polled by the new third party in an independent movement that was without precedent. The Socialist vote for Debs rose from 420,000 in 1908 to 895,000 in 1912.

The last year of the administration of President Taft was overshadowed by the party war, and reduced in effectiveness by the Democratic control of the House. The prosecutions of the trusts were continued, a parcel post was established as a postal savings bank had been, the income tax amendment became part of the Constitution, and an amendment for the direct election of Senators made progress.

When Woodrow Wilson succeeded to the Presidency he formed a cabinet headed by William J. Bryan as Secretary of State, and including only Democrats of progressive antecedents. He called Congress in April, 1913, to revise the tariff once more, and overturned a precedent of a century by delivering to it his message in person. With almost no breathing space for eighteen months, he kept Congress at its task of fulfilling his party's pledges as he interpreted them.

Tariff, currency, and trust control were the main topics upon which the Democrats had avowed positive convictions, and upon which the great mass of progressive citizens, regardless of party affiliation, demanded legislation. One by one these were taken up, the President revealing powers of coercive leadership hitherto unseen in his office. Only the fact that non-partisan opinion was generally with him made possible the mass of constructive legislation that was placed upon the books. The tariff, which became a law on October 3, 1913, was a revision whose downward tendency was beyond dispute. The Federal Reserve Act, revising the banking laws in the interest of flexibility and decentralization, was signed on December 23 of the same year. In January, 1914, President Wilson laid before Congress his plan of trust control, advocating a commission with powers over trade coordinate with those of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and an elaboration of the anti-trust laws to deal with unfair practices and interlocking directorates. The Federal Trade Commission and Clayton Anti-Trust bills fulfilled these recommendations in the autumn of 1914. The Panama Canal Act of 1912 had meanwhile been revised so as to eliminate a preference in rates to American vessels which the President believed to be in violation of the guaranty of equal treatment pledged in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. With a more portentous list of constructive laws than had been passed by any Congress since 1890, the Democratic majority allowed an adjournment on October 24, 1914, and its members went home to sound their constituents upon the state of the Union.

The passage of economic laws had called for tact and force upon the part of the President, whose party, like the Republican party, was without a clear vision of its policy and included many reactionaries. Added embarrassments were found in the continuance of civil strife in Mexico. Here, shortly before the inauguration of President Wilson, there had been another revolution, followed by the elevation by the army of General Victoriano Huerta to the Presidency. The followers of the deposed Madero went into revolt at once, and the new Government was refused recognition by the United States on the ground that it was not a Government de facto, and that its title was smirched with blood. Patiently and stubbornly the United States held to its refusal to recognize the results of conspiracy in Mexico. In April, 1914, Vera Cruz was occupied by American forces in retaliation for acts of insult on the part of the Huerta regime, and in July the steady pressure of "watchful waiting" brought about the resignation of the dictator. The Constitutionalists, succeeding him, quarreled shortly among themselves, but the danger from Mexico appeared to be lessening as the year advanced.



From Europe came other embarrassments in August. Here, the policy of national armament which had been adopted in the middle of the nineteenth century, reached its logical outcome in a great war which was precipitated by Austria in an attack upon Servia. Russia immediately came to the aid of her Slavonic kinsmen, and upon her Germany declared war on August 1. In a few more days Great Britain and France had joined Russia against the German-Austrian alliance, and most of Europe was at war. To bring home the thousands of American tourists whom the war had reduced to suffering was the first work of the administration. The American ministers in Europe became the custodians of the affairs of the belligerents in every enemy country, and with the aid of all the belligerent nations Americans were carried home. After this came the problems of neutrality and American business. Suffering, due to the stoppage of the export trade, particularly that of cotton, brought wide depression throughout the United States. A new law for the transfer of foreign-built vessels to American registry, and another for federal insurance against war risks, were hurriedly passed, and the question of a public-owned line of merchant ships was discussed. All these problems were distracting the attention of the United States when Congress brought to an end its prolonged labors, and adjourned.

The congressional election of 1914 was profoundly affected by the European war. Early in the year it appeared that conservative opposition to the Democratic program was growing, and that the Democratic majority was likely to be cut down. The Progressive party appeared to be weakening, and the control of the Republican party was settling back among those Republicans against whom the Insurgents had made their protest. But President Wilson's precise neutrality won the confidence of all parties, and although conservatives like Cannon, of Illinois, and Penrose, of Pennsylvania, won over Democrats and Progressives alike in a few cases, he retained for the Sixty-fourth Congress a working majority in the House and an enlarged majority in the Senate. His election in 1912 had been, in part, due to the dispersion of Republican strength caused by the Progressive schism; in 1914, the influence of the Progressives was negligible and the Democrats retained their power in the face of the whole Republican attack.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Between 1909 and 1914, the Outlook, to which Theodore Roosevelt had been an occasional contributor, and which had been a strong supporter of Republican policies since 1898, was the regular organ through which Mr. Roosevelt addressed the public, over his signature as Contributing Editor. In a similar way William J. Bryan reached his followers through the Commoner (1900-), and Robert M. LaFollette through his LaFollette's Weekly (1909-). Collier's Weekly became a center of the adverse criticism of President Taft. All of these, as well as the more general periodicals, are indispensable sources for the period, but are so highly partisan as to need constant correction for prejudice. The election of 1908 is treated in Stanwood's History of the Presidency from 1897 to 1909, while that of 1912 is excellently described in the New International Year Book for 1912. The theories of the new nationalism are in T. Roosevelt, The New Nationalism (1910).



INDEX

Adams, Charles Francis, 55, 56.

Agricultural colleges, beginning of, 17.

Agriculture, changes in, 14, 15; in the South after the War, 39, 40; Department of, created, 142, 157; main reliance of Western pioneers, 149, 151; discontent in North and West, 178, 179, 184; depression of, in South, 195; diversified by decline of cotton values, 204, 205.

Aguinaldo, Emilio, 267, 278.

Alabama Claims, the, 55, 56.

Alaska, gold mines in, 241; settlement of boundary, 284, 285.

Aldrich, Nelson W., 118, 326.

Algeciras, United States in conference at, 318.

Alger, Russell A., 253, 274.

Allison, William B., 89, 255.

Altgeld, Gov. John P., 222, 279.

Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice, 285, 286.

Amendment, the Thirteenth, 33, 42, 48.

Amendment, the Fourteenth, 42, 43, 48, 196, 197.

Amendment, the Fifteenth, 46, 47, 48, 196, 198.

American diplomacy, 286.

American Federation of Labor, 121, 183, 208.

American Railroad Union, 222.

Ames, Adelbert, 47.

Angell, James B., 60.

Anti-Contract Labor Law, 135.

Anti-imperialism, 278, 279.

Anti-monopolists, 168, 169.

Anti-trust literature, 166.

Arbitration, 255, 256; treaties refused by Senate, 331, 332.

Arizona, a Territory, 21, 152, 154; becomes a State, 330.

Army of the United States, at outbreak of Spanish War, 266; in poor condition during the war, 269-72, 274; later service in Cuba, 282.

Arrears of Pension Act, 137.

Arthur, Chester A., removed from office by Hayes, 87, 98, 103; Vice-President with Garfield, 99; opposes Garfield, 103; as President, reorganizes his Cabinet, 106, 109; his first message, 109, 110; recommends civil service reform, 113, 114; approves revision of the tariff, 114; vetoes River and Harbor Bill, 117, 127; hopes for renomination, 126; reasons for failure of his candidacy, 126, 127; and the Panama Canal, 144.

Australian ballot, 248.

Ballinger, Richard A., 328, 329.

Ballot reform, 248, 249.

Bayard, Thomas F., 134.

Belknap, William W., 62.

Bellamy, Edward, 167, 168, 188.

Benton, Thomas H., 21.

Bimetallism, 226; plea for international, 227, 234.

Black Belt, the, 202, 203.

Blaine, James G., improper official conduct of, 62, 81; the Mulligan letters, 82; and the proposal to extend pardon to Jefferson Davis, 83; candidate for Presidential nomination (1880), 98; his personal following large, 102; Secretary of State under Garfield, 102, 103, 106; plans for Pan-American Congress, 106; his large following among Irish, 124, 133; nominated for President (1884), 127, 128; and the Mugwumps, 130; caricatures of, 132; defeated, 133; replies to Cleveland's message on tariff reduction (1887), 169; refuses to be Presidential candidate again, 169; Secretary of State under Harrison, 171, 172; urges reciprocity, 175; exchanges views with Gladstone on protective tariff, 189; in the seal fisheries controversy, 212; resigns Secretaryship, 213; death, 214.

Blair, Francis P., Jr., 31.

Bland, Richard P., 88, 89, 173, 217.

Bland-Allison Bill, 181, 217, 218.

"Bloody shirt," the, 83, 100, 201.

Bonaparte, Charles J., 320.

"Boss," the, 245, 246; power of, 247, 248.

Boxer outbreak in China, 281.

Brady, Thomas J., 104, 105.

Bristow, Benjamin, 81.

Brown, B. Gratz, 56.

Bryan, William Jennings, nominated for President, 237; wages vigorous campaign, 238; defeated, 240; colonel in Spanish War, 266; renominated for President, 279; denounces imperialism, 279; again defeated, 280; a lay preacher on political subjects, 305; nominated for Presidency third time, 325; made Secretary of State by Wilson, 338.

Bryce, James, his American Commonwealth, 188, 189, 246; influence of, 247; ambassador from Great Britain, 318.

Buckner, Simon B., 238.

Burchard, Rev. Samuel D., 133.

Bureau of Corporations, valuable reports of, 311, 312.

Butler, Benjamin F., advocates the Greenback movement, 30, 66; aims at Governorship of Massachusetts, 61; his relation to the "salary grab," 62; Anti-Monopoly candidate for Presidency, 131, 132.

Canadian reciprocity, 332.

Cannon, Joseph G., defeated for Congress, 185; Speaker of the House, 304, 305; a stand-pat protectionist, 327; ruling as Speaker defeated, 329; returned to Congress, 342.

Carlisle, John G., 138, 139.

Carnegie, Andrew, 297.

"Carpet-baggers," 43, 45, 49, 194.

Centennial Exposition, at Philadelphia, 73.

Cervera, Admiral, 267, 268, 271, 272.

Chase, Salmon P., wishes to be President, 3, 4, 31, 56; urges creation of bonded debt to provide for war expenses, 5; inaugurates a system of national banks, 27.

Chile, threatened war with, 212, 213.

Chinese, coolies imported into California, 25; and Irish, 94; harried, 122.

Chinese Exclusion Bill, 122, 127.

Choate, Joseph H., 318.

Christian Science, rise of, 190.

Churchill, Winston, writes Coniston, 310, 311.

Cities, growth of, 14; in the New South, 205; government of, 246.

Civil Rights Bill, 196, 197.

Civil Service Act, 113, 117.

Civil Service reform, 86, 110; growth of, 112, 113, 114; further extended by Cleveland, 134, 235; and by Taft, 331.

Civil War, the, influence of its military successes, 1; benefits of the four years of, 18; new type brought into politics by, 78; veterans of, 136.

Clark, Champ, 329, 330, 336.

Clayton Anti-trust Bill, 339.

Clayton-Bulwer treaty, 134, 144; inadequate, 286.

Cleveland, Grover, Mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York, 130; favored by the Independents, 130, 131; nominated for Presidency, 131; his character attacked, 132; elected and inaugurated, 133; his Cabinet, 133; Lowell's tribute to, 134; meets new problems, 135; vetoes pension bills, 137; troubled by divided administration, 138, 139, 140; signs "omnibus" bill for new States, 152; his emphasis on tariff reduction, 169; renominated, 170; defeated by Harrison, 171; again nominated for Presidency, 214, 215; and elected, 215; opposes free silver and the silver basis, 219, 229, 230; loses influence with Western Democrats, 220; refuses to sign Wilson Bill, 221; sends federal troops to Chicago, 221, 222; splits Democratic party, 223; in Venezuela boundary dispute, 230, 231; abandoned by his party, 235; dies in Princeton, 236; tries to maintain neutrality in Cuban revolt, 261, 262.

Cobden Club, and British gold, 139.

Coin's Financial School, 229.

Colfax, Schuyler, Vice-President with Grant, 37, 57, 61.

Colorado, Territory, 20; becomes a State, 73, 74, 149.

Commissioner of Labor, 122.

Conkling, Roscoe, 81, 87; disciplined by Hayes, 98; fights for Grant, 99; resigns from Senate, 103.

Conservation movement, 320, 328.

Consumers' League, the, 250.

Cooke, Jay, his connection with panic of 1873, 62, 63, 64.

Cornell, Alonzo B., 98, 103.

Cortelyou, George B., 302, 306.

Cotton, the staple crop of the Old South, 149; hundredth anniversary of first export celebrated, 203; overproduction, 204.

Cowboys, develop a folk-song literature, 150.

Coxey, Jacob S., 222.

Credit Mobilier, scandal of, 61.

Cripple Creek, great miners' strike at, 301.

Crisp, Charles F., 186, 220.

Cuba, insurrections in, 258; revolutionary government in New York, 260; number of Spanish troops in, 260; filibustering parties, 261; Congress favors recognition of belligerency, 262; autonomy proposed, 263; Congress recognizes independence of, 264; blockaded, 267, 268; freed from Spain, 273; sanitary improvement in, 282; adopts a constitution, 282; makes reciprocity treaty with United States, 283.

Cullom, Shelby M., 158, 221.

Cummins, Gov. Albert B., 303; leader of Insurgent Republicans, 329.

Curtis, George William, leader in civil-service reform, 112, 128; a Mugwump, 129.

Custer, Gen. George A., 86.

Czar of Russia, calls conference on disarmament, 283.

Dakota Territory, 21; made into two States, 152.

Darwin, Charles, his influence on religious thought, 190.

Davenport, Homer C., 252.

Davis, Judge David, 109.

Davis, Henry G., 306.

Davis, Jefferson, 83, 106.

Dawes Act, the, awarding lands to Indians in severalty, 142, 151, 319.

Day, William R., 253, 273.

Debs, Eugene V., 222; Social Democratic candidate for President, 301, 338.

De Lesseps, Ferdinand M., 144.

DeLome, Senor, criticizes McKinley, 263, 264.

Democratic party, the, differences in, during the Civil War, 2, 3; Chicago convention (1864), 4, 5; nominates Seymour (1868), 31; gains control of readmitted Southern States, 52, 54; nominates Greeley (1872), 57; weakened by its past, 79; nominates Tilden (1876), 80, 81; gets plurality of popular vote, 83; gains control of the House (1874), 87; nominates Hancock (1880), 99; gains the Senate (1878), 108; loses the House (1880), 108; regains it (1882), 117; elects Cleveland (1884), 130-133; on tariff revision, 138, 220, 221; resists demands for statehood, 152; casts plurality of votes in 1888, but loses all branches of government, 171; regains the House (1890), 186; reelects Cleveland and wins the Senate (1892), 215; split by free silver and tariff questions, 228, 229, 232; loses both Senate and House (1894), 229; nominates Bryan on free-silver platform (1896), 237; denounces imperialism and renominates Bryan (1900), 279; nominates Parker on conservative platform (1904), 305, 306; nominates Bryan for third time (1908), 325; regains the House (1910), 329, 330; elects Wilson (1912), 337, 338.