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
(Table and Diagram based upon Thirteenth Census, 1910, Population,
Vol. 1, pp. 129, 130.)
Total Foreign
Population. and Mixed Foreign Born.
Parentage.
1910 91,972,266 18,897,837 13,345,545
1900 75,994,575 15,646,017 10,213,817
1890 62,947,714 11,503,675 9,121,867
1880 50,155,783 8,274,867 6,559,679
1870 39,818,449 5,324,268 5,493,712
1860 31,443,321 4,096,753
1850 23,191,876 2,240,535
[Illustration: graph]
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
The best history of civil service reform is C.R. Fish, _The Civil
Service and the Patronage_ (1905). This supplants all previous accounts,
and may itself be supplemented in detail by the Annual Reports of the
United States Civil Service Commission (1883-), by the _Memoirs of Carl
Schurz_ (3 vols., 1907-08), the _Writings of Carl Schurz_ (7 vols.,
Frederic Bancroft, _ed._, 1912), the biographies of J.R. Lowell, E.L.
Godkin, and George William Curtis, and the files of _Harper's Weekly_,
the _Nation_, and the _North American Review_. The general narrative of
the eighties is covered by E.E. Sparks, _National Development_, and D.R.
Dewey, _National Problems_ (in _The American Nation_, vols. 23 and 24,
1907), and E.B. Andrews, _The United States in Our Own Time_. A
thoughtful economic analysis of the period is D.A. Wells, _Recent
Economic Changes_ (1890). The Report of the Tariff Commission of 1882 is
valuable for the study of tariff revision, as are also the standard
tariff histories by E. Stanwood, I.M. Tarbell, and F.W. Taussig. The
Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Labor (1884-) are fundamental for
the labor problem. Useful monographs are C.D. Wright, _An Historical
Sketch of the Knights of Labor_ (in _Quarterly Journal of Economics_,
vol. I), T.V. Powderly, _Thirty Years of Labor_ (1889), G.E. McNeill,
_The Labor Movement_ (1887), and M.A. Aldrich, _The American Federation
of Labor_ (in American Economic Association, Economic Studies, vol.
III).