THE ROLL CALL

...On the floor of the House an amendment was offered to increase the amount to $350,000...

...In his first session he introduced a lew pension bills and, of course, a bill to promote a public building undertaking in the principal city of his district...

...The second of these tell-tale votes was on the Payne Bill to repeal the war stamp tax on express receipts, ostensibly because the express companies were evading the law and forcing shippers to pay the tax...

...Will anyone suppose that he would depart from machine subserviency by so much as a hair's breadth except perhaps with express permission from the real powers of Can-nonism granted out of consideration of his re-election...

...After this, it seems superfluous to add that Smith has continued faithful and regular ever since...

...In the tariff session he voted for the Tawney amendments to reduce the tariff on lumber, but against free lumber...

...This bill was reported by littlefield from the Judiciary Committee, so eviscerated as to defeat its purpose...

...Again, at the opening of the tariff session, we find Smith voting with the System organization to elect Cannon and to preserve the Cannon rules...

...At that time Hon walter I. smith was a local judge in the fifteenth Judicial District of Iowa...

...That Congress was made memorable by achievement of an iiresistible public sentiment in forcing from a reluctant, System-controlled congress, in the Hepburn-Dolliver bill, some concessions in railroad publicity and rate regulation...

...At the opening of the 59th Congress, Smith stood shoulder to shoulder with Cannon, Dalzell, Payne, et al.t and voted for Cannon for Speaker, and against every motion looking to any modification of the Cannon rules...

...So Tawney and Smith suffered an attack of "economy"—not the kind of "economy" they experienced when railroad "Special Facilities" grafts and congressional mileage grabs were being appropriated...

...He voted hard and often for the System and for Big Business...

...Verily, the System saves its own...

...Now the secret service was established technically for the protection of the Treasury and the detection of counterfeiting...

...and smith voted to put it on its passage in that form without opportunity for amendment...

...smith has a loud and powerful voice, a voice that became in times of crises a real cannon-aide in the House...

...But the Smiths in Congress were more generous with the public money, and so, by grace of their votes, the railroads get always "a little more...

...no tin cans or broken bottles, in the shape of progressiveism or political indet-pendence, are allowed to accu-mulate therein...

...He resigned, and in november, 1900, was elected to succeed Hon...

...This was a scheme to pay the railroads, in addition to their excessive pay for carrying the mails and an annual rental for postal cars in which it is carried almost equal to the cost of the cars, a special subsidy to certain roads of $167,728 a year for "expediting the mails...

...There may be some who believe that Smith is entitled to some set off against his erstwhile pro-ship-subsidy record, because of a more recent vote against a ship subsidy bill...

...this district contains the city of Council Bluffs...

...It would cost the public about twice as much as competitive shipping, but it meant millions for Special Interests...

...Otherwise he voted at all times with Payne, Cannon, and Dalzell...

...In eight moves he was shifted to the King Row, and at the opening of the prebent ses-sion we find him with cannon and dalzell on the committee on Rules, managing the business of the House of representa-tives for the Interests...

...And is not Smith himself in the King Row, and one of the two most generally regarded as the annointed of the System for the succession...

...The Postoffice Department, which always asks Congress for all the appropriations needed for the service, had consistently refused to endorse this piece of System "rake off...

...It was in this session, too, that Smith voted on a record vote to put through the indefensible "Special Facilities" appropriation in the railroad section of the postoffice bill...

...In this same Congress too, the passage of a resolution by Congress was being urged by the Roosevelt administration to authorize the Attorney General to institute proceedings to forfeit the California-Oregon railroad land grants, because the railroads had violated the obligations and conditions upon which the lands were given them by the government...

...In the 60th Congress, Smith stood with the System management to put through the Vreeland and Aldrich-Vreeland currency bills...

...Smith also voted against an amendment by Congressman Richardson, to send this bill back to the Committee with orders to report it so amended as to reduce the tax $70,000,000 a year on necessaries and to provide for an income tax...

...He voted with them to subserve the interests of Standard Oil in the tariff revision, and he voted with them to force the submission of the Income Tax amendment to the Constitution to state legislatures, where the System hopes to be able to defeat it, rather than to conventions to be chosen by the people upon this single issue...

...Currency reform was needed...

...Apparently, also, smith came with proper credentials for System preferment...

...His promotion in the house machine was almost unprecedented...

...Smith voted with the regulars of the Cannon machine to let the bill pass...

...In the course of his speech against it, Smith stated that while he had joined in reporting the bill carrying $50,000, he was opposed to any appropriation whatever for this specific purpose...

...Smith voted for the System —to protect the "innocent purchasers...

...The little scheme was to incorporate the word "knowingly"' into the penal section of the bill so that no railroad or railroad official could be convicted for its violation unless it could be proved that the railroad or the official had actual knowledge that the employee in the particular case had been kept on duty in excess of the sixteen consecutive hours allowed by the law...

...President Roosevelt said, in his message to Congress, that failure to provide such an appropriation "would amount to an attack on the law at its most vital point, and would benefit, as nothing else could benefit, those railways which are corruptly and incompetently managed...

...Thus was precipitated by Tawney and Smith and the tools of Big Business in Congress the memorable "secret service fight" on President Roosevelt in his struggle to protect the public domain from exploitation by the "malefactors of great wealth...

...The railroads have their big offices, and the grain combine does business, at Omaha, but their tracks converge, and their elevators for storing and manipulating grain are located across the river in Council bluffs...

...Also in the next Congress Smith voted twice on ship subsidy for the same interests...

...even such doughty systemites as cannon, jenkins, and tawney, dodged the vote and am swered "present...

...Ten years ago the council) Bluffs district was represented in Congress by one smith Mc-pherson, who, having been perfectly "regular" and "reliable" was duly promoted to the federal Bench by appointment, May, 1900, to construe safety appliance, interstate commerce, and other federal laws...

...Finally, however, the friends of railway regulation won, and the amendment increasing the appropriation was adopted in spite of Tawney and Smith and their kind...

...The issue was between the public and the System...

...Against this amendment Tawney and Smith fought for two days...

...But the little scheme did not work...

...He started in being regular with a will...

...Smith voted against an amendment to require the taxes to be paid by the transportation companies directly...

...council Bluffs is the commercial back yard, so to speak, of big Busi-ness centering in omaha...

...Washington to Council Bluffs and return is something over 2,600 miles...

...From the viewpoint of system representation in Congress, from smith mcpherson to walter smith was a transition but not a change, and it was a transition by which the System gained both going and coming...

...He voted also for the Scott amendment for a ten per cent, duty on hides...

...The land and timber and coal and waterpower thieves cursed the "lawlessness" of the government in setting secret service men upon their trails and the "respectable" members of the System protested...

...The bill which they reported carried $50,000 for the work for which the Commission said $700,000 should be allowed...

...In the second session of the 58th Congress, Smith spoke in behalf of the famous Congressional mileage grab of Congress— to pay Congressmen out of the public treasury $145,000 for constructively traveling to their homes during five minutes between two sessions of Congress, at the genei'ous rate of twenty cents per mile, both ways...

...The third of these measures was the McMillan Bill on which Smith recorded at least four votes, giving the Pennsylvania Railroad, under the title "to eliminate grade crossings" in Washington, 34 acres of the finest public parks in Washington, —a gift of $2,900,000 of public money and public property,— a bill which was the entering wedge for the great Washington Union Station railroad graft, which, thanks to a System Congress, was to come after...

...So it came about more recently, in the fight for a reform of the Cannon rules, in which the Insurgents forced the adoption of a new rule for an elective rules committee, that Smith was in the thick of the fray fighting for Cannonism against the people's cause...

...And when Cannon and Cannonism were defeated in the voting in the House and the System servitors declared their determination to retain control of the Rules Committee, and, through their control of a majority in the Republican caucus, to put through a slate of Cannon-System Committeemen, it was found when the votes were counted that Smith headed the list...

...Smith was one of those who voted in the 59th Congress to put through the bill intended to promote the safety of employees and travelers upon railroads, by prohibiting excessive hours for train operatives, in such a form as largely to defeat its purpose...

...and Big Business is careful about its back yards...

...His ability, and also his reliability, commended him to the "leaders...

...Apparently he accepted the System leadership of his ptity in the House, without question...

...During smith's first session in the House of Representatives, his votes on three measures show how thoroughly he was already imbued with "the divine right of big Business to rule...

...It is an important railroad terminal and grain elevator center...

...It was sought in the House, over the protests of the President and the Attorney General to incorporate in the resolution a provision to protect these "innocent purchasers" and to prevent the recovery of the lands which they had obtained through violation of law...

...Hence the System was against this measure...

...But the railroads and express companies, you know, are very Special Interests...

...Of all the System schemes to get into the Treasury of the United States for subsidies, bonuses, and grafts for "American Shipping" not the least subtle nor the least reprehensible was the shipping bill of the second session of the 58th Congress to give the shipping combine a monopoly of all ocean transportation of government freights...

...And they stood together in the Committee, where the public could not witness, to defeat an adequate appropriation to enforce the law which they had voted for when an intelligent public sentiment was watching Congress...

...Smith voted for the Special Interests...

...Naturally, with his record in favor of land, coal, oil, and asphalt grabbing by the System he wanted Cannon to have the power to pack the Committee to "investigate" the conservation fight...

...after a few sessions he began to make System speeches...

...Naturally too, he was keenly interested in the preservation intact of the prerogatives of the House Czarship...

...And of course, Tawney and Smith and the System reliables of the Appropriations Committee responded with a proviso in the appropriations bill to the effect that no part of the appropriation should be available if secret service men were detailed any more in this objectionable way...

...smith mcpherson in the House of Representatives, and took his seat a month later...

...Such are welcome to their views, but the credit if any should go principally to Smith's intelligence in recognizing finally that there are some things that even one in the very King Row on the System's congressional chess board, cannot do always, and continue in a position to abuse the confidence of an Iowa constituency of growing political understanding...

...In the present session he fought to prevent an invasion of the Speaker's power of committee appointment in the selection of the Ballingee-Pinchot Investigating Committee...

...On every roll call in that stubborn fight, in which Iowa furnished six good Insurgent votes, Smith voted with Cannon and Cannonism...

...The operations of land thieves and violators of law in those days were being made hazardous under the Roosevelt administration by the activities of government secret service men who were detailed to special service in these directions...

...So Wall Street found it a good time to use its Smiths in Congress to put through the kind of "currency reform" that would tighten the grip of Morgan and Standard Oil upon the commercial, industrial and financial life of the country...

...Is not the System about at the point of being obliged to dump Speaker Cannon...

...smith's beginning in Congress was ordinary, as it was also regular...

...The Commission appeared before the Tawney Committee on Appropriations of which Smith is a member, to urge the necessity of a substantial appropriation to enable this section of the law to be enforced...

...In the second session of his service, Smith voted to perpetuate in an Indian Appropriation Bill the "good thing" of the Asphalt crowd in the asphaltum and gilsonite deposits of the Uintah Indian Reservation...

...The most important feature of the bill was Section 20, providing for uniform railroad accounting and publicity under the supervision of the Interstate Commerce Commission...

...The first of these measures was the ridgely Bill to restrict the definition of "unlawful conspiracy," as applied to labor unions, and to prevent the abuse of the power of injunction in labor disputes...

...Small wonder, in the face of this unblemished record of System service, that Cannon's first act in the organization of the House for the new Congress, was in placing Smith beside himself and Dalzell upon the Committee on Rules, the governing body of the House...

...But "those railways which are corruptly and incompetently managed," and also those railways which by concealment are able to rob the people through extortionate transportation charges, are of the System...

...And Smith was willing...

...Enormous tracts of these lands had been transferred, mostly in violation of law, to System syndicates and to people who "stood in" with a view to defeating the rights of the public...

...council Bluffs is that part of Omaha which is on the east side of the Missouri River, in Iowa...

...Along the same line were his votes in the same Congress to facilitate coal land grabbing in Alaska, and to double the amount of land which could be taken under one claim in so-called semi-arid sections of the West...