THE NEW ISSUES

Garfield died before he met his first Congress, the Forty-seventh, which was elected with him in 1880, but he lived long enough to foresee the first chance to do party business that had appeared since 1875. When Grant lost the lower house at the election of 1874, the Democrats gained control of that body and Michael C. Kerr, of Indiana, supplanted Blaine as Speaker. On Kerr's death in 1876, Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, took the place, and was continued in it through the next two Congresses, in the latter of which, the Forty-sixth, his party controlled the Senate too. It had been impossible to produce an agreement between the Senate, the House, and the President on important new matters. They could not always agree even on appropriations, and all Republicans felt with Mrs. Blaine when she wrote, after the election of 1880, "Do you take in that the House is Republican, and the Senate a tie, which gives the casting vote to the Republican V.P.? Oh, how good it is to win and to be on the strong side!"

When the new Congress organized, Randall ceased to be Speaker and became leader of the minority, while J. Warren Keifer, of Ohio, took his place, with a small Republican majority behind him. In the Senate the predictions of Mrs. Blaine were fulfilled, although the accident which made a President of Arthur left the Senate without a Vice-President. In the even division of the Senate, the two independent members controlled the whole. Judge David Davis, transferred "from the Supreme Bench to the Fence," became the presiding officer, and generally voted with the Republicans, though elected as a Democrat. Mahone, of Virginia, an Irishman and an ex-Confederate, called himself a "Readjuster," and voted with the Administration. These two men made it possible to carry party measures through Congress.

Shortly after Congress met in 1881, Arthur reorganized his Cabinet, allowing the friends of Garfield to resign and putting his own Stalwart friends in their places. The new Secretary of State, Frelinghuysen, took up Blaine's policies and mangled them. He adhered to the general view of an American canal, as Blaine had done. He pushed the influence of the United States in Europe as far as he could, keeping Lowell, in England, busy in behalf of Irish-Americans whose lust for Home Rule got them into trouble with the British police. But he dropped the South American policy, recalled the invitations to the Pan-American Congress, and kept hands off the Chilean war. Blaine protested in vain against this humiliating reversal.

The decision of Arthur to take counsel from the Stalwarts aroused fears among others of the party that his would be the administration of a spoilsman. His first message, however, somewhat allayed these fears, for it dwelt at length upon the unsatisfactory status of the civil service, and the need for a merit system that should govern removals and appointments. He promised his support to measures even more thoroughgoing than the reformers had asked, and, in January, 1883, signed the "magna carta" of civil service reform.

The use of public offices for party purposes had been regarded as a scandal by independents of both parties for four administrations. The long list of breaches of trust, revealed in the seventies, had made reformers feel that incompetence and spoils endangered the life of the nation. As late as 1880, they had heard a delegate in the Republican Convention, when asked to vote for a civil service plank, exclaim indignantly: "Mr. President, Texas has had quite enough of the civil service.... We are not here, sir, for the purpose of providing offices for the Democracy.... After we have won the race, as we will, we will give those who are entitled to positions office. What are we up here for?" And they had become used to the silent or outspoken resistance to their demands from men in "practical" politics.

The history of the civil servants of the United States falls into three periods: Before 1829, 1829-65, and 1865-83. In the first period they were commonly treated as permanent officials. Rarely had they been removed for partisan purposes, although it had been the wail of Jefferson that "few die, and none resign." Appointments had often been given as the reward for past services, but none had felt a need for a general proscription of officials upon the entry of a new President.

Andrew Jackson brought a new practice into use in 1829. His election followed a political revolution, in which it was believed by his supporters that the National Republican party had become corrupt. It was a matter of faith and pledge to turn the incumbents out of office. Hungry patriots crowded round the jobs, while Jackson's advisers included men who in New York and Pennsylvania had already learned how to use the offices as retainers for future service. Advocacy of the Democratic principle of rotation in office was in practice easily converted into the maintenance of the maxim that "to the victors belong the spoils."

Every President after Jackson used the offices for partisan purposes, and few objected to the practice on theoretical grounds. The simplicity of the National Government made the habit less destructive than it otherwise would have been. The spoils system did not enter the army or navy, the only extensive technical departments of the United States. In other branches of the Government a large majority of the officials were unskilled penmen, whose places could easily be filled with others as little skilled as themselves. Always a few clerks who knew the business were saved to guide the recruits, and the departments were generally working again before a President met his first Congress.

Lincoln was not different from his predecessors in the use of offices. He permitted the most complete sweep that had yet been made, being forced to an unusually high percentage of new appointments by the necessity of removing Southerners. In his hands the patronage became an additional weapon for the Union, upholding the leaders in Congress, and striking at the backsliders. In the election of 1864 the Union party carried all the branches of the Government, and it had a vision of four years of complete control of the offices when the death of Lincoln brought a Tennessee Democrat into the White. House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION, 1850-1910
Click on image for larger version
(Table and Diagram based upon Thirteenth Census, 1910, Population,
Vol. 1, pp. 129, 130.)

population

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE