All in the Day's Work — Chapter 13: Off With the Old - On With the New, Part 2

All this was good for me, cushioned the shock I had suffered, convinced me that at least I had gotten my hands on something permanent, a fundamental factor in my future security—a home—a home capable of feeding me if the worst came to the worst.

But while it was good for me it was not so good for my work on the magazine.

I had believed I could work better in the quiet of the country, but I was discovering that the country was more exciting than the town and the office as I knew it.

Its attractions were proving too much for the difficult task which had been assigned me in the planning for the first year of the _American_.

The task was nothing less than to write a history of the making of our tariff schedules from the Civil War on.

It had been a natural enough selection for me after the experience with the history of the Standard Oil Company for the tariff was quite as much a matter of popular concern at the moment as the trust had been in 1900. There was a growing demand for revision.

How could we get into the fight?

A subject must be found for me.

How about the tariff?

Was a historical treatment possible?

I thought so; at least I so despised the prohibitive tariff that I was willing to try if the magazine was willing to back me.

I suppose most of us have had at various periods of our life homemade remedies for the economic ills we see about us.

When I was a girl in high school I looked on an eight-hour day of productive labor for everybody as the way out.

I was much less worried by the hardships the long day brought working people than the mental and moral deterioration I imagined suffered by people who did not work.

Idleness, not labor, was the scourge of the world.

For me the eight-hour day was a save-the-idle day!

Before I left _The Chautauquan_ I had concluded that there was a trilogy of wrongs—all curable—responsible for our repeated depressions and our poorly distributed wealth: discrimination in transportation; tariffs save for revenue only; private ownership of natural resources.

I was still of that opinion when, largely by accident, I had my chance to strike at number one in my trilogy.

Could I by the method I had followed in that case, and the only one I knew how to use, present a plausible argument against Number Two?

What had particularly aroused me was the way tariff schedules were made, the strength of what we now call pressure groups—the powerful lobbies in wool and cotton and iron and sugar which for twenty-five years I had watched mowing Congress down like a high wind.

There was no concealment of the pressure.

The lobbyists went at it hammer and tongs and battered down opposition with threats, bribes, and unparalleled arrogance.

By these tactics they had overcome Mr. Cleveland’s famous tariff message of 1886, had passed the outrageous McKinley bill of 1890, had ruined the Wilson bill of 1893, had defeated the promise of McKinley and Dingley and Aldrich to lower duties in 1896, and had substituted the highest and most distorted schedules the country had yet seen.

But it looked in 1906 as if the Day of Judgment was near, and I asked nothing better than to be on the jury.

I went into it blindly—on faith, certainly not on knowledge—and I had a handicap that I was far from realizing at the time: that was that, while in the case of the Standard Oil I had spent my life close to the events, the tariff and its makers had never touched my life.

This was something that I had read in a book.

Another handicap was that my indignation was directed towards legal acts.

Congress had adopted these schedules, under coercion if you please, but still it had adopted them.

The beneficiaries had the sanction of law.

It was a different case from challenging railroad discriminations, which were forbidden by law.

As I worked on the _Congressional Record_ and related documents I looked up men still living who had had a part in the struggle on one side or the other.

There were many of them scattered around the country, now out of Congress for the most part, but not averse to talking.

As a rule I got little from them.

The fight which seemed to me so important was a dead issue to them.

They had lost or won.

It was all part of a game.

Fresh from reading the daily discussions in the _Record_, curious about this or that man or argument, I found them hazy, often not particularly interested.

There was little of the righteous indignation which I thought I found in their recorded speeches.

Had that been political, instead of righteous, indignation?

I began to think so.

It was Grover Cleveland who put heart in me.

He had lost none of his righteous indignation over the aid prohibitive tariffs were giving certain trusts, none of his alarm over the growing disparity between industry and agriculture they were fostering.

He felt deeply the wrong of the prices they were inflicting on the farmer, the professional class, the poor.

I got nothing but encouragement from him for the review I had planned.

Luckily I already had a pleasant working relation with Mr. Cleveland.

It had come about in my last two years on _McClure’s_, when my chief editorial task had been trying to persuade him that it was his duty to write his reminiscences for us, incidentally offering myself as a ghost if he felt that he needed one.

As his letters to me at this time show he was not entirely unfriendly to the project: I want to do the thing; and yet I am afraid the difficulties in the way of doing it are fundamental and inexorable.

You see the project requires me to exploit myself and my doings before the public.

I do not see how I can do this, though I am terribly vain and often bore my friends privately by tiresome reminiscence.

And yet I cannot but think that there are incidents and results in my career, which, by their narration might be of service in stimulating those who aspire to good citizenship—“and there we are.

” This latter consideration hints of duty; but then comes the fear that what seems to me duty is a mere fantastic notion, and thereupon the old disinclination resumes its sway.

* * * * * I have frequently thought no one could help me so much as you; and it has seemed to me more than once that you and I might possibly “cook up something” in a summer vacation’s freedom from distractions.

Nothing came at this time, 1904, of the “Tarbell-Cleveland fantasy,” as Mr. Cleveland gaily dubbed it, and two years later the project was dismissed, but in a letter so friendly that I cannot resist quoting from it: I do not believe a man who has turned the corner of sixty-nine years, is any less vain and self-satisfied than when he was a youth.

At any rate here I am, in this sixty-nine predicament, delighted with the generous things you say of me in the goodness of your heart, and more than halfway deluding myself into the notion that I deserve them.

I want to be very sensible and hard-headed in this affair; but in any event I am entitled to rejoice in your good opinion of me, and your hearty wishes for my welfare and happiness.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for them; and I shall gratefully remember them as long as I live.

Somehow I have an idea that you know me well—and surely I need not afflict myself with the fear of vanity if I have found a friend in you.

With those letters in my files I felt free, when I undertook the tariff work for the _American_, to ask Mr. Cleveland to talk to me about the making of his tariff message in 1886, and the failure of the Wilson bill in 1893. He was most generous, and when I had completed my story of the two episodes I asked him to read the manuscript and give me a candid judgment and of course his corrections and his suggestions.

The chief suggestion that he made showed a sensitiveness to his literary style in public documents which I had not suspected.

Charming letter writer as Mr. Cleveland was, in his public documents he was ponderous.

I must have enlarged a little on this, for I find this paragraph in his letter with which he sent back the proofs: I have ventured to suggest a little toning down of your characterization of my style—thinking perhaps you would be willing to make an alteration to please me if for no other reason.

You know we are all a little sensitive on such a point.

There was another paragraph in that letter which touched me deeply: Your article has caused me to feel again the greatest sorrow and disappointment I have ever suffered in my public career—the failure of my party to discharge its most important duty and its fatuous departure from its appointed mission.

But lean as heavily as I dared on Mr. Cleveland, work as I would and did on the tariff debates of Congress (I can wish my worst enemy no greater punishment than reading them in full), I could not put vitality into my narrative.

It was of the _Congressional Record_—it was secondhand.

It was the making of the Payne-Aldrich bill in 1909 that finally gave a certain life to my narrative.

Here was something belonging to the present, not something of the past.

By all the signs Theodore Roosevelt should have been the St. George to lead in the revision the public was calling so loudly for, particularly after the panic of 1907. Few of his party leaders paid attention.

“Are not all our fellows happy?

” Speaker Joseph Cannon asked as the demand for revision became louder.

Roosevelt himself heard it, but frankly said to his intimates that he did not know anything about the tariff.

He did not and he would not take the time to learn.

He hammered at the effects of privilege, pursued “malefactors of great wealth,” but was not willing to do the hard studying of the causes which produced the malefactors.

Mr. Taft, who followed Roosevelt, had no choice.

The platform on which he was elected called “unequivocally” for tariff reform, and as soon as he was inaugurated he called a special session to do the work.

My chagrin was great when I realized at once that all the ancient technique I had been trying to discredit was repeating itself.

It is, I told myself, the same old circus, the same old gilded chariots, the same old clowns.

So far as arguments were concerned they might have been taken from the hearings of ’83, of ’88, of ’93, of ’96. Figures were changed, and nobody could deny that these figures of growth were impressive; but they came from interested men.

“They are incapable of judging,” Mr. Carnegie told the committee.

“No judge should be permitted to sit in a cause in which he is interested;

you make the greatest mistake in your life if you attach importance to an interested witness.

” The process which “Sunset” Cox back in the seventies characterized as “reciprocal rapine”—buying votes for the schedule their constituents wanted by voting for schedules they could not justify—was in full swing.

Never was the tariff as the “cause of prosperity” worked harder.

It was the answer of the prohibitive protectionist to the charge that the tariff was a tax.

In all the early years they had called it so—a tax to produce revenue, encourage new industries, protect higher wages, a better standard of living.

But Mr. Cleveland had called it boldly “a vicious, inequitable, illogical tax,” and illustrated his adjectives tellingly.

The effect of his attack was so disastrous that the supporters of prohibitive duties went into a huddle to find a new name.

“The cause of prosperity” was the euphemism they produced.

A repeater that had figured in every tariff bill was the answer of the priests of the dogma to the argument that the poor should be considered.

According to the pictures they drew there were no poor in the United States.

This refusal to recognize poverty was no more discouraging in the making of the bill of 1909 than the indifference to the effect high tariffs were having on the cost of the necessities of life.

In this they ran true to historical precedent.

From the time the business man took charge in the late seventies any attempt to call the attention at hearings to what a duty would do to the price of a necessity of life was ignored or jeered.

Justice Brandeis, then plain lawyer Brandeis, was before a committee considering the Dingley bill.

“And for whom do you appear?

” he was asked.

“For the consumer,” he answered.

The committee, chairman and all, laughed aloud, but they were good enough to say, “Oh, let him run down.

” This old indifference to the effect of higher prices on the living of the poor stirred me to the only article in my series which seemed to “take hold.

” I called it, “Where Every Penny Counts.

” The worth-while thing, from my point of view, was that it reached women.

“I never knew what the tariff meant before,” Jane Addams wrote me.

Here was something which touched those in whom she was interested—wage earners.

She knew from actual contact what the increase of a cent in the price of a quart of milk, a spool of thread, a pound of meat, meant to working girls with their six or eight dollars a week.

She knew that every penny added to the cost of their food, clothes, or coal gave less warmth, less covering.

It was not difficult to show that what they were trying to do in Washington in the making of the Payne-Aldrich bill was just that—a tariff that would add to the cost of things that must be had if people were to live at all.

To my deep satisfaction this effort to make the new tariff bill in the good old way was promptly met by a rousing challenge from a group of progressive Republican Senators, men who had been largely responsible for forcing the promise to reform into the party platform.

When they discovered that there would be no reform if the lobbyists and their friends in Congress could prevent it, they crystallized into one of the most vigorous and intelligent fighting bands that had been seen for many years in Congress.

Insurgents, they were called.

The leader in the revolt, interested in railroad reform rather than the tariff, was La Follette of Wisconsin.

Others were Beveridge of Indiana, Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, Borah of Idaho, and Bristow of Kansas.

They were already familiar figures at the _American_ along with certain members of the House, particularly the salty and peppery William Kent of California—Phillips, Baker and Steffens being in frequent communication with them.

The most brilliant and witty, as well as the most thoroughly informed of the tariff insurgents was the amiable Senator Dolliver from Iowa—twenty years in Congress—always regular—always stoutly supporting the tariff bills turned out by the committee.

“What ails you now?

” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “I had been going on for twenty years taking practically without question what they handed me; but these alliances between the party and industrial interests have at last set me thinking.

I began to understand something of the injustice that was being done to the consumer.

And then we promised to reform the tariff.

” When the insurgents divided up the schedules for study, Schedule K—wool—the most difficult and the most important politically, fell to Senator Dolliver.

He found he had been voting for years for duties which, when he sat down to read the schedule, he could not understand.

He discovered they were a mixture of tricks, evasions, and discriminations—intended to be so, he believed.

He determined to master them.

And master them he did by months of the severest night work.

He pored over statistics and technical treatises.

He visited mills and importing houses and retail shops.

He sought the aid of experts, and in the end he knew his subject so well that he went onto the floor of the Senate without a manuscript and literally played with Schedule K, and incidentally also with Senator Aldrich, who was said to fly to the cloak room whenever Senator Dolliver rose to speak.

When he had finished his clean, competent dissection, Schedule K lay before the Senate a law without principles or morals; and yet, just as it was, the Senate of the United States passed it, and the President of the United States signed it, and it went on the statute books.

Why?

Neither Mr. Taft nor Mr. Aldrich defended the wool schedule which made the bill odious.

They both were frank in explaining that it was politically necessary, not at all a question of the fairness of the schedule, but a question of what powerful interests demanded.

The wool interests could defeat the bill if they did not get what they wanted.

My conviction about the inequity of Schedule K was so strong that when the _Outlook_ published a long defense of it, plainly an advertisement but not so marked, I protested in a personal letter to its vociferous contributing editor, Theodore Roosevelt, with whom by this time I was on fairly friendly terms.

Just what I said in my letter about the _Herald_ which so stirred his wrath I do not remember, but his answer to my comment is so typically Rooseveltian in temper and reasoning that I think it should be preserved: May 6, 1911 Oh!

Miss Tarbell, Miss Tarbell!

How can you take the view you do of the Herald!

You compare it with the Tribune.

It is perfectly legitimate to compare the Tribune with Mr. Watterson’s paper, the Courier-Journal.

Honest people could agree or disagree about those two papers.

Personally I think that during the last thirty or forty years the Tribune has been infinitely more helpful to good causes than the Courier-Journal, but, as I say, people can differ on such a subject; and I should be very glad to meet at any time either Henry Watterson or Whitelaw Reid.

But to compare either one of them with the Herald is literally and precisely as if I should compare either the American Magazine or The Outlook with Town Topics.

Having expressed his opinion of the _Herald_, he proceeded to an elaborate specious explanation of the matter which had so stirred my ire that I had protested to him.

Now as for what you say about The Outlook’s publishing “The Truth about K. ” In the first place, I admit at once that the title, the type, and the placing of this advertisement _did_ make it look to many readers like an editorial article.

We used the same title, type and placing that had been used for similar articles for twenty years; but our attention was subsequently called to the fact, to which you now call my attention, i. e. , that some people were misled in the matter; and in consequence we at once abandoned this twenty years’ custom.

From now on, every article of the kind will appear under the heading of “Advertising Department” or “Advertising Section,” so that there cannot be any possible mistake in the future.

As for the publication of the article itself, I most emphatically think that it was not only justifiable, but commendable.

The Outlook publishes continually letters from people upholding policies or views with which The Outlook diametrically disagrees.

(For example, The Outlook has on several different occasions published letters taking a very dark view of my own character and achievements, whether at San Juan Hill or elsewhere.

) This particular article by Spencer I should have been glad to see published in the regular section of the Outlook as putting forth his side of the case, just as I am now trying to secure publication in The Outlook of an article from the North Western farmers giving their side of the case against Canadian reciprocity.

Spencer’s article, however, was too long, and such being the case, as I say, I was not merely willing but glad to see it put in.

(I did not know it had been put in, of course, until long after it had appeared; but when I did see it, I was glad that it had been put in.

) Probably you know that on April 8th The Outlook editorially took up this question, stated that the American Woolen Company was entirely justified in printing their article as an advertisement, and that The Outlook violated in no degree the ethics of journalism in admitting the advertisement to its pages and expressed its total disagreement with the views expressed in the article.

I would have gone further than this; I would have stated that The Outlook did not violate the ethics of journalism, but rendered a great and needed service as an example in showing its willingness to accept the statement of a case with which it did not agree, to put it in exactly as it was written, and then itself to comment with absolute freedom, as it has done, upon the arguments made in the advertisement.

Let me repeat that if The Outlook had had space, which it unfortunately did not have, I should have been glad to see Spencer’s article inserted, not as an advertisement, but as a communication signed by Spencer, and avowedly stating his side of the case.

Sincerely yours THEODORE ROOSEVELT

I felt that I had won my case with Mr. Roosevelt’s assurance that henceforth every article of the kind would appear under the head of “Advertising Department.

” When the Payne-Aldrich bill was finally passed with Mr. Taft’s and Mr. Aldrich’s brutally frank explanations, I was done with the tariff as a subject for further study and writing.

Four years later came the Democratic effort to make a revision.

I had only the most casual interest.

It was the same old method.

They might make a better bill, I told myself, but there never could be a fair one as long as tariffs were set by a Congress under the thumb of people personally interested.

One thing seemed to me clear which is still clearer now, the combined prohibitive tariff industries were digging their own grave.

Foreign markets they had to have; but they refused to buy from those to whom they wanted to sell.

What the gentlemen did not realize was that by this procedure they were practically forcing nations not naturally industrial to copy their methods, industrialize themselves.

These nations soon were succeeding with such skill that in spite of the boosting of the tariff again and again the foreigners continued to undersell us.

But the prohibitive protectionists were building a future competitor threatening to be stronger than foreign trade.

This in the realm of politics.

There had been no more hearty and conscienceless supporters of prohibitive tariffs than certain groups of organized labor, conspicuously the Amalgamated Steel and Iron Workers under John Jarrett.

They were not a numerous body, but with the cry of the full dinner pail they were able to back the demands of the employers.

They had a body of votes that no political party dared defy.

But in teaching organized labor the power of political pressure the industrialists gave them a weapon that they did not see might one day be turned against themselves.

Back in the eighties one of the wisest and soundest economists we have produced, David A. Wells, said in substance of the victory of the tariff lobbies: “This is a revolution.

It will take another revolution to overthrow the leadership now established by business men.

” I felt after the bill of 1909 that there was nothing for an outsider like me to do but wait for that revolution.

I felt this so deeply that when President Wilson invited me to be a member of the Tariff Commission he formed in December, 1916, I refused.

I was pleased, of course, that Mr. Wilson thought me fit for such a place.

I knew that I should find the associations interesting.

The dean of tariff students in the United States—Dr. Taussig of Harvard—was the chairman.

To be under him would be an education that would be worth the taking, but I did not hesitate.

First, there was my personal situation—my obligations.

I had no right to give up my profession for a connection of that sort, in its nature temporary.

Then I realized my own unfitness as Mr. Wilson could not.

I

had had no experience in the kind of work this required.

I was an observer and reporter, not a negotiator.

I am not a good fighter in a group; I forget my duty in watching the contestants.

But primarily there was my hopelessness about the service the Tariff Commission might render.

Its researches and its conclusions, however sound, would stand no chance in Congress when a wool or iron and steel or sugar lobby appeared.

A Tariff Commission was hamstrung from the start.

Of course it was not only my interest and work on the tariff that had led Mr. Wilson to offer me the position.

He was looking about for women to whom he could give recognition.

He was an outspoken advocate of suffrage and wanted to use women when he thought them qualified.

Jane Addams pleaded with me to accept “for the sake of women,” but I did not feel that women were served merely by an appointment to office.

Women, like men, serve in proportion to their fitness for office, to the actual fact they have something to contribute.

I had no enthusiasm for the task, did not even respect it greatly.

I believed, too, that harm is done all around by undertaking technical jobs without proper scientific training.

The cause of women is not to be advanced by putting them into positions for which they are untrained.

The press comments on the idea of a woman on this commission were not unfriendly, as far as I saw them; but they were a little surprised and, as I was to find later, protests were made to Mr. Wilson.

My friend Ray Stannard Baker, working on the Wilson papers, came across an answer of the President on December 27, 1916, to one protesting gentleman which I am not too modest to print: As a matter of fact, she has written more good sense, good plain common sense, about the tariff than any man I know of, and is a student of industrial conditions in this country of the most serious and sensible sort.