Volume V Part 23 (2/2)
After the Spanish War the question whether the United States should, the inhabitants agreeing, keep any of the territory obtained from Spain, divided the Democratic as well as the Republican ranks. So long as expansion meant merely addition to United States territory and population after the time-honored fas.h.i.+on, and this was at first all that anyone meant by expansion, no end of prominent Democrats were expansionists. But for their devotion to the policy of protection and their determination to continue high protection at all costs, the Republicans might have kept in existence this Democratic schism over expansion.
According to the Const.i.tution as almost unanimously interpreted (the ”insular cases” referred to in the last chapter had not yet been decided), customs duties must be uniform at all United States ports. If Luzon was part of the United States in the usual sense of the words, rates of duty on given articles must be the same at Manila as at New York. If the Philippine Islands and Porto Rico were parts of the United States in the full sense, tariff rates at their ports could not be low unless low in New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and elsewhere.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The Republican National Convention, held in Philadelphia, June 1, 1900.
No considerable or general tariff reduction for the United States proper was to be thought of by the Republicans. But it would not do to maintain in the ports of the new possessions the high duties established by law in the United States proper. Were this done, the United States would in effect be forcing its colonies to buy and sell in the suzerain country alone, as was done by George III. through those Navigation Acts which occasioned the Revolutionary War. Such a system was certain to be condemned. If the expansion policy was to succeed in pleasing our people a plan had to be devised by which duties at the new ports could be reduced to approximate a revenue level while remaining rigidly protective in the old ports.
Out of this dilemma was gradually excogitated the theory, which had been rejected by nearly all interpreters of the Const.i.tution, that the United States can possess ”appurtenant” territory, subject to, but not part of itself, to which the Const.i.tution does not apply save so far as Congress votes that it shall apply. So construed, the Const.i.tution does not ex proprio vigore follow the flag. Under that construction, inhabitants of the acquired islands could not plead a single one of its guaranties unless Congress voted them such a right. If Congress failed to do this, then, so far as concerned the newly acquired populations, the Const.i.tution might as well never have been penned. They were subjects of the United States, not citizens.
The Republican party's first avowal of this ”imperialist” theory and policy was the Porto Rico tariff bill, approved April 12, 1900, establis.h.i.+ng for Porto Rico a line of customs duties differing from that of the United States. This bill was at first disapproved by President McKinley. ”It is our plain duty,” he said, ”to abolish all customs tariffs between the United States and Porto Rico, and give her products free access to our markets.” Until after its pa.s.sage the bill was earnestly opposed both by a number of eminent Republican statesmen besides the President and by nearly all the leading Republican party organs. Every possible plea--const.i.tutional, humanitarian, prudential-- was urged against it. The bill pa.s.sed, nevertheless.
The result was a momentous improvement in Democratic prospects. The schism on expansion which had divided the Democratic party was closed at once, while many Republicans who had deemed the taking over of the Philippines simply a step in the nation's growth similar in nature to all the preceding ones, and had laughed at imperialism as a Democratic ”bogy,” changed their minds and sidled toward the Democratic lines.
In their long and able arguments against the Porto Rico tariff, Republican editors and members of Congress provided the opposite party with a great amount of campaign material. Often as a Republican on the hustings or in the press declared imperialism not an issue, or at any rate not an important one, he was drowned in a flood of recent quotations from the most authoritative Republican sources proving that it was not only an issue, but one of the most important ones which ever agitated the Republic. As Democrats put it, Balaam prophesied in favor of Israel.
Several minor matters were much dwelt upon by campaigners, with a net result favorable to the Democrats. A great many in his own party believed, no doubt wrongly, that the President's policy had in main features been influenced by consideration for powerful financial interests, or that at points these had in effect coerced him to courses contrary to what he considered best. The commissariat scandal in the Spanish War incensed many, as did the growth of army, navy, and ”militarism” incident to the new colonial policy.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Parade of the Sound Money League, New York, 1900. Pa.s.sing the Reviewing Stand.
Then there was the awkwardness with which the Administration had treated the Filipinos. In 1900 it seemed clear that these people could never be brought under the flag otherwise than by coercion. Anti-imperialists were not alone in the conviction that Aguinaldo's followers had been needlessly contemned, hara.s.sed, and exasperated, and that had greater frankness, tact, and forbearance been used toward them they would, of their own accord, have sought the shelter of the Stars and Stripes.
Moreover, our measures toward the Filipinos had alienated Cuba, so that the voluntary adhesion of this island to the United States, so desirable and once so easily within reach, was no longer a possibility; while the coercion of Cuba, in view of our profession when we took up arms for her, would be condemned by all mankind as national perfidy.
The sympathy of official Republicanism with the British in the Boer War tended to solidify the Irish vote as Democratic, but--and it was among the novelties of the campaign--Republicans no longer feared to alienate the Irish. The Government's apparent apathy toward the Boers also drove into the Democratic ranks for the time a great number of Dutch and German Republicans. Colored voters were in this hegira, believing that the adoption of the ”subject-races” notion into American public law and policy would be the negro's despair. The championing of this movement by the Republican party they regarded as a renunciation of all its friends.h.i.+p for human liberty.
The Republican campaign watchword was ”Protection.” Press and platform dilated on the fat years of McKinley's administration as amply vindicating the Dingley Act. ”The full dinner pail,” said they, ”is the paramount issue.” Trusts and monopolies they denounced, as their opponents did, but they declared that these ”had nothing to do with the tariff.” There was wide and intense hostility toward monopolistic organizations. They were decried on all hands as depressing wages, crus.h.i.+ng small producers, raising the prices of their own products and lowering those of what they bought, depriving business officials and business travellers of positions, and working a world of other mischief politically, economically, and socially. They had rapidly multiplied since the Republicans last came into power, and nothing had been done to check the formation of them or to control them.
Why, then, was not Democracy triumphant in the campaign of 1900? When the lines were first drawn a majority of the people probably disapproved the Administration's departure into fields of conquest, colonialism, and empire. Republicans themselves denied that a ”full dinner pail” was the most fundamental of considerations. Few Republican anti-imperialists were saved to the party by the venerable Senator h.o.a.r's faith that after a while it would surely retrieve the one mistake marring its record. Nor was it that men like Andrew Carnegie could never stomach the Kansas City and Chicago heresies, or that the Republicans had ample money, or yet that votes were attracted to the Administration because of its war record and its martial face. Agriculture had, to be sure, been remunerative. Also, before election, the strike in the Pennsylvania hard coal regions had, at the earnest instance of Republican leaders, been settled favorably to the miners, thus enlisting extensive labor forces in support of the status quo; but these causes also, whether by themselves or in conjunction with the others named, were wholly insufficient to explain why the election went as it did.
A partial cause of Mr. Bryan's defeat in 1900 was the incipient waning of anti-imperialism, the conviction growing, even among such as had doubted this long and seriously, that the Administration painfully faulty as were some of its measures in the new lands, was pursuing there absolutely the only honorable or benevolent course open to it under the wholly novel and very peculiar circ.u.mstances.
A deeper cause--the decisive one, if any single cause may be p.r.o.nounced such--was the fact that Mr. Bryan primarily, and then, mainly owing to his strong influence, also his party, misjudged the fundamental meaning of the country's demand for monetary reform. The conjunction of good times with increase in the volume of hard money made possible by the world's huge new output of gold, might have been justly taken as vindicating the quant.i.ty theory of money value, prosperity being precisely the result which the silver people of 1896 prophesied as certain in case the stock of hard money were amplified. Bimetallists could solace themselves that if they had, with all other people, erred touching the geology of the money question, in not believing there would ever be gold enough to stay the fall of prices, their main and essential reasonings on the question had proved perfectly correct. Good fortune, it might have been held, had removed the silver question from politics and remanded it back to academic political economy.
Probably a majority of the Democrats in 1900 felt this. At any rate the Kansas City convention would have been quite satisfied with a formal reaffirmation of the Chicago platform had not Mr. Bryan flatly refused to run without an explicit platform restatement of the 1896 position.
His hope, no doubt, was to hold Western Democrats, Populists, and Silver Republicans, his anti-imperialism meanwhile attracting Gold Democrats and Republicans, especially at the East, who emphatically agreed with him on that paramount issue. But it appeared as if most of this, besides much else that was quite as well worth while, could have been accomplished by frankly acknowledging and carefully explaining that gold alone had done or bade fair to do substantially the service for which silver had been supposed necessary; for which, besides, it would really have been required but for the unexpected and immense increase in the world's gold crop through a long succession of years.
The Republican leaders gauged the situation better. Mr. McKinley, to a superficial view inconsistent on the silver question, was on this point fundamentally consistent throughout. With all the more conservative monetary reformers he merely wished the fall of prices stopped, and such increment to the hard money supply as would effect that result. The metal, the kind of money producing the needed increase was of no consequence. When it became practically certain that gold alone, at least for an indefinite time, would answer the end, he was willing to relinquish silver except for subsidiary coinage.
The law of March 14, 1900, put our paper currency, save the silver certificates, and also all national bonds, upon a gold basis, providing an ample gold reserve. Silver certificates were to replace the treasury notes, and gold certificates to be issued so long as the reserve was not under the legal minimum. If it ever fell below that the Secretary of the Treasury had discretion.
Other notable features of this law were its provision for refunding the national debt in two per cent. gold bonds--a bold, but, as it proved, safe a.s.sumption that the national credit was the best in the world--and the clause allowing national banks to issue circulating notes to the par value of their bonds.
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