CHAPTER XXVII PROSPERITY, PANIC, AND SLOW RECOVERY THE LEGISLATIVE RECORD OF THE REPUBLICANS, 1889-1891 Reforms in the rules of forms the House of tatives. Represen By their victory in 1888 the Republicans won not only the presidency but both houses of Congress. Before passing any laws, they undertook to improve the rules of procedure in the House of Representatives. For some years the minority in that body, sometimes Democratic and sometimes Republican, had been in the habit of blocking legislation by means of dilatory motions, that is, motions to consume time, such as motions to adjourn. The custom had grown rapidly in the eighties. Speaker Thomas B. Reed of Maine, placed in the Speaker's chair by the Republicans in 1889, broke up the practice by arbitrarily refusing to put a dilatory motion to the House. Another device of the minority to block legislation had been for the members, though present, to refuse to vote. As it was the parliamentary custom to consider a member absent who did not vote, the minority party was often able in this way to prevent a quorum to do business. Speaker Reed put an end to the practice by counting all silent members as present and thus securing a quorum. When one member denied the Speaker's right to count him as present and desired to "read from parliamentary law on the subject," Reed coolly replied, "The chair is making a statement of fact that the gentleman is present. Does he deny it?" The Speaker was denounced as "tyrant" and "Czar," but lived to see his new rules sustained by the Supreme Court and accepted even by the Democrats as the permanent rules of the House. Law. With their house in order, the Republicans proceeded to constructive legislation. The first measure passed was a concession to the growing sentiment against large business corporations The Sherman or trusts. An Anti-Trust Act, proposed by John Sherman, Anti-Trust United States Senator from Ohio, followed up the Interstate Commerce Commission Act passed in the previous administration. This Sherman Act was entitled "An Act to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies," and provided, first, that "every contract, combination in the form of trust or other wise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal," and second, that "to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several states" was likewise illegal. The act did not forbid every corporation or trust as such, but only those engaged "in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states"; and it did not define what were restraints of trade, and what were monopolies, but left the definition of these terms to the courts. Strange as it may seem, this law was allowed to lie dormant on the statute books for fourteen years, while giant monopolies rapidly developed. Since 1904 it has been enforced with increasing vigor each year, and at the present day, with certain amendments, it is the government's chief weapon against monopolies. The Sherman Silver At about the same time Congress passed another important act of legislation in the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which went farther in the direction of free coinage of silver than had the BlandAllison Act of 1878. The Bland-Allison Act, it will be recalled, had directed the United States to purchase for coinage into silver dollars not less than $2,000,000 nor more than $4,000,000 worth of silver every month. Under its working, during the troubled decade of the eighties, the demand in the West for the free coinage of silver, which it had been the object of the act to satisfy, continued to increase, while the price of silver continued to decline. This demand the Republicans in 1890 deemed it wise to recognize. The Senate, with recently admitted members from several new Western States, was ready to accede to the extreme demand for free silver, but the House of Representatives stood opposed, and the compromise Sherman Silver Purchase Act was the result. This law no longer allowed discretion in the amount of silver to be purchased, but directed the purchase by the government of 4,500,000 ounces of silver every month, an annual amount equivalent to the total silver production of the country in 1890. In payment for this silver the government was to issue treasury notes which were to circulate as money. Still the price of silver continued to decline. The McKinley Tariff Law. That the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, by a party popularly supposed to be friendly to conservative interests, was not without a purpose, was revealed a few months later when the McKinley Tariff Law of 1890 was passed. It was in return for the enactment of the two laws for the benefit of the radicals that the conservative Republicans claimed and secured the support of a sufficient number of radicals to write into the statute books this highest tariff law in the history of the country to that time. The law received its name from William McKinley of Ohio, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives, which framed the bill. Aside from the higher rates imposed, the new act possessed two unique features. First, it placed raw sugar on the free list and offered a bounty of two cents a pound for the production of domestic sugar, while to protect the domestic refineries a duty was placed on refined sugar. Second, through the efforts of James G. Blaine, whom President Harrison had made Secretary of State, the principle of reciprocity, or reciprocal free trade, was embodied in the act. By this plan, certain products, chiefly from the West Indies and Central and South America, such as hides, molasses, tea, and coffee, were put on a provisional free list, the President to have the power of restoring the duty at specified rates for any country if he decided that that country was imposing unfair rates on articles imported from the United States. More than a dozen nations secured the proffered concessions. Others with whom the President could not come to agreement were forced to pay the higher rates in the United States. The Republicans had answered Cleveland's challenge to lower the tariff and bring less revenue into the national treasury by boldly enacting a law to raise the rates and bring in more revenue. Heavy na penditures. A programme of heavy national expenditures was the Republican solution of the surplus. The Dependent Pension Law, similar to a bill vetoed by Cleveland, was passed, under which the annual outlay of $88,000,000 for pensions in 1889, rose to $159,- tional ex000,000 in 1893. From 1889 to 1893 the annual expenditures for the navy rose from $21,000,000 to $30,000,000. So heavy did the expenditures of the central government become that the Democrats in derision, and to sound a note of alarm, styled this Congress of 1889-1891 "a billion-dollar Congress." The charge was true that the appropriations of this Congress reached one billion dollars, but Speaker Reed retorted for the Republicans that the United States was "a billion-dollar country." As a result of high protection, heavy national expenditures on pensions, the navy, public buildings, rivers and harbors, and other improvements, have remained the Republican policy. Few Congresses in time of peace have passed such an array of important laws as were passed by this first Congress of the administration of Benjamin Harrison. These, as we have seen, Other embraced laws on the trusts, silver, the tariff, pensions, and the navy. In addition an Anti-Lottery Law excluded lottery tickets from the mails, another law compelled the land-grant Republican measures. railroads, which had not made use of their lands, to restore these to the government, and another made minor changes in the regulation of immigration. More new states in the West. The same Congress (1889-1891) admitted into the Union six new states, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington in 1889, and Wyoming and Idaho in 1890. No other twelve months in the history of the country have witnessed the creation of so many new states. At the close of the War of 1812, when the frontier lay in the basin of the Mississippi in the interior of the continent, it was considered rapid progress when five states were admitted in as many years, but during this industrial era at the end of the century the West was enjoying an unprecedented growth. The admission of Utah followed in 1896. A second Pacific Railroad aided the Union Pacific in moving the human tide to the new communities. This new road was the Northern Pacific, completed in 1883 after more than ten years' work, from Duluth on Lake Superior to Helena, Montana, The North ern Pacific Railroad. and in 1893 to Tacoma on Puget Sound. Within the decade of the eighties at least 800,000 took up their residence along its route. It was like the movements of population that had followed the completion of the Erie Canal and the Union Pacific Railroad. The progress of the West is represented graphically by the following table: Rapid changes in the West. A writer of the time declared concerning the rapid changes: "Living men, not very old yet, have seen the Indians on the war-path, the buffaloes stopping the trains, the cowboy driving his cattle, the herder watching his sheep, the government irrigation dam, and the automobile — have seen every one of these slides which progress puts for a moment into its magic lantern and removes to replace with a new one." Says another writer, who compares the peopling of the United States with the expansion of Russia over Siberia, "The development of the original thirteen states into the present Union, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Mexico to Canada, remains one of the most marvelous achievements of human history." The settle ment of Oklahoma. Farther south, a part of Indian Territory under the name of Oklahoma, "the beautiful land," was thrown open to white settlement by a proclamation of the President, April 22, 1889. For many years the whites had coveted the rich lands of this reservation, but had been warded off by the government till it could acquire for them a legal title to the lands. The opening was picturesque. Fifty thousand people were waiting for the signal to advance over the boundary line and make their choice of the rich lands. Many were successful and many failed. "Whole outfits for towns, including portable houses, were shipped by rail, and individual families, in picturesque, primitive, white-covered wagons journeyed forward, stretching out for miles in an unbroken line. . . The blast of a bugle at noon on a beautiful spring day was a signal for the wild rush across the borders. Men on horseback and on foot, in every conceivable vehicle, sought homes with the utmost speed, and before nightfall town sites were laid out for several thousand inhabitants each." By three o'clock in the afternoon of the opening day the town of Guthrie was already laid out, with four business streets lined with shops and offices installed in tents. There was even a bank with a capital of $50,000 and a daily paper. By four o'clock a city council had been elected. A census at the end of the year revealed the presence of 60,000 people in the territory. Rapid growth of In 1891 there was another rush into a second part of the forming state, and again into a third part in 1893. The population of Oklahoma in 1900 was 790,000, in 1907, when it was admitted into the Union as the forty-sixth state, 1,114,000, and in 1910, 1,650,000. The population of Oklahoma City rose from 4000 in 1890 to 10,000 in 1900 and to 64,000 in 1910, a gain of five hundred and thirty-nine per cent in a single decade and the most rapid gain of any city in the nation during that period. the territory. With the rapid filling of the western lands there came a revolutionary change in the government's method of dealing with its Indian charges. Reservations for them had first been set aside The Indian in the early part of the nineteenth century, under a loose reservations. construction of that clause of the Constitution which gives Congress the power "to regulate commerce with the Indian tribes." Indian Territory had been assigned to them when Georgia was ridding itself |