Part 39

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.