THE ROLL CALL
The Roll Call ON MEN AND MEASURES Humphrey; System Specialist PERSEVERANCE MAY BE A VIRTUE; fidelity in promoting a "cause" may command the admiration of men. Much depends upon the "cause." It...
...voting for the Congressional "mileage grab" of the 58th Congress, on the System theory that it is all right to "dip into" the public treasury if you can do it under forms of law...
...In the last session of Congress, there was introduced by Senator La Follette in the Senate and Congressman Spight in the House a bill asked for by the Seamen's Union of America...
...In May, on the motion of Spight, author of the bill and ranking minority member on the Committee, the Committee directed the subcommittee to report the bill back within two weeks...
...Even in the tariff debate he advocated subsidies...
...So it came about that the first important committee work in which Humphrey participated was the reporting of a bill to create a Merchant Marine Commission, theoretically to investigate and report to Congress upon the means by which a Merchant Marine might be promoted, but, actually for the sole purpose of campaigning for ship subsidies...
...Nevertheless, no less than thirty-four Republican Members of the House, from a dozen different states, voted or "paired" against it, and on the final roll call, the bill was beaten by a vote of 172 "Yeas" to 175 "Nays," Humphrey voting with Dalzell, Payne, Tawney, and Speaker Cannon for its passage...
...Another measure of Humphrey's first regular session to enrich the shipping interests at the public expense was the so-called Frye Bill, requiring the use of American bottoms for the transportation of all supplies and materials for the government...
...The perversion of sentiment and patriotism to subserve System schemes for obtaining public money under false pretenses, as seen in the agitation for shipping subsidies, is without a parallel since the days of the Pacific Railroads legislation...
...Hearings were held in the Committee, and these hearings developed that, while a majority of the committee were in favor of the bill, the Chairman and Humphrey were opposed to it...
...voting for the Dalzell gag rule to prevent revision of the tariff as promised by the Republican Party...
...Never before on a scale so elaborate and so lavishly financed has the manufacture of a false public opinion been prosecuted in behalf of a single Interest...
...In the House, the Seamen's Bill was referred to the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, of which Greene of Massachusetts is Chairman, and Humphrey is the ranking member...
...voting to perpetuate the old ,rules...
...voting against rule reform and for the Fitzgerald resolution as a means of defeating real revision of the rules...
...In each subsequent session of Congress Humphrey has labored early and late for the passage of shipping subsidy legislation...
...He appeared on the floor of the House as an active and aggressive champion of the bill...
...wrote Sibley to Standard Oil...
...In business, it is the Shipping Interest, the Railroad Interest, the Standard Oil Interest, the Iron and Steel Interest, the Textile Interest, the Sugar Interest, the Smelting Interest, the Lumber Interest, the Coal Interest, the Water Power Interest, and all the other Interests that together make up federated Big Business, bound and riveted together by intercorporate ownership and community of interest and control...
...It believes in giving the people the tools of the government—direct nominations, direct legislation, recall and the right to veto on legislative acts...
...Notwithstanding that the officials in charge protested that the enactment of this legislation would increase three-fold the cost of government shipping over its cost under competitive contracts—an increase estimated at $10,000,000 a year—without any added benefit to the government or the public, Humphrey joined forces with the System machine to promote the bill, and, although he was absent from the House at the time it passed, he was "paired" in favor of its passage...
...Legislating for a Special Interest WHEN Humphrey came to Congress the System organization knew what Interest he came to serve, and he was promptly appointed by Speaker Cannon upon the Committee upon Merchant Marine and Fisheries...
...voting against a small appropriation for a government gun foundry to afford the public some protection against the extortions of the Steel Trust...
...voting against free timber, free lumber and free hides...
...But the ardor of Humphrey's championship of subsidies seemed to be in direct proportion to the size of the "swag...
...To the appeal of President Furusets of the Seamen's Union of America that the bill be acted upon in the Committee, and reported to the House, either favorably or adversely, that the House might act upon it according to the will of the majority, it was Humphrey who answered: "Never as long as I can help it...
...Then he appointed, as majority members of the subcommittee, himself, and Humphrey, and Fairchild, of New York...
...voting in the 59th Congress for the incorporation of the Lake Erie and Ohio River Ship Canal Company, with an authorized capitalization of $400,000 per mile, because it was desired by a powerful System Interest in Pennsylvania...
...that no scheme of System plunder can be so bald, as to want a champion in the person of some System-serving "statesman," There is no better illustration of this betrayal of public trust in the interest of Privilege than the record of William E. Humphrey, Representative in Congress from the First District of the State of Washington...
...The shipping interests were opposed to this bill because it gave seamen some protection, possibly at some slight expense to owners and employers, and because it would restrict the manning of vessels with Chinese coolies and require them to be manned by American seamen who could understand the language of their commanding officers...
...voting System program for the passage of the Payne Bill, and for the Payne-Cannon- Aldrich upward tariff revision...
...To prevent action upon this bill, the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries shut up shop and went out of business for the rest of the session...
...In the First Session of the Sixtieth Congress, he again urged legislation for ocean mail subsidies...
...The repeal of some of the archaic provisions of our navigation laws would help greatly...
...There is no money in commutation traffic, and the Pullman Company is losing money every day...
...The day of the rule of money in American politics is passing...
...voting at the end of the first session to glorify Joe Cannon and Jim Sherman by providing them with automobiles at the public expense...
...The character of the legislation was clearly shown in the debate in the House...
...There are ways of building up our merchant marine...
...voting for Cannon, arch-champion of Privilege, for Speaker...
...At this time, the subsidy lobby conceived the idea that it would be a good scheme to have a Congressional commission appointed to propagate the doctrine of ship subsidy at public expense and from a pedestal of official standing...
...Of course, Humphrey was on hand, advocating and voting for the passage of the bill as the shipping interests wanted it...
...But the payment of subsidies is not one of them...
...It may be a bad one...
...Which order the subcommittees ignored...
...The use of "diplomacy" was necessary to prevent the bill being reported to the House for passage...
...Thus, while Humphrey is primarily the champion of subsidies for the Shipping Interest, he is secondarily, but no less faithfully, the champion of all the Interests and adherent to the Cannon System organization of the House...
...His record shows him an ardent "Regular" of the Cannon machine...
...The Ocean Mail Subsidy Bill IN THE Fifty-ninth Congress, the ship-subsidy lobby was on hand as ever...
...voting to increase by millions the free deposits of the people's money in the great System banks, to be loaned out by them for their own profit at Wall Street rates of interest...
...Politics for profit" is the slogan of the System and System Interests...
...let there be no misunderstanding about that...
...while the cost of handling and carrying inland this foreign mail should go to increase the postal deficit— to be made up by taxation...
...When it became apparent that the subcommittee had no intention or reporting the bill, Spight re-introduced his bill, slightly modified, in the House, hoping to get action on it by the full committee, but Green and Humphrey were on guard...
...The opposition of the ship subsidy lobby, of its advocates and of its tools in Congress to legislation along these lines is but additional evidence that the real objective of their propaganda is not the upbuilding of an American merchant marine but the promotion of an American plunder-bund...
...Dedicated to Ship Subsidies HUMPHREY is serving his third term in Congress...
...So when a Congressman is representative for an Interest, he becomes, by exchange of courtesies,—through the log-rolling that obtains in legislation, through the influence of organization,—representative for all the Interests, for the System...
...The railroads, as we know, make nettling by hauling freight...
...In which case, perseverance and fidelity in its promotion are neither virtuous nor admirable...
...In politics, it is the representation of all these Interests, organized in a common cause and cemented together by the cohesive force of public plunder...
...This is the people's country and they are going to run it...
...What is the fascination about railroading that keeps men in it?—Chicago Tribune...
...System Interests must be protected...
...In the Second Session of the Sixtieth Congress, he made another long speech for ship subsidies...
...voting for the Aldrich-Vreeland Currency Bill, to tighten the grip of System Financial Interests upon the country's currency...
...voting for the consolidation of coal entries in Alaska for the Morgan-heims...
...Do you wish to invest in a Senator...
...For a generation of time no other System Interest has so persistently and so successfully begged and bullied its way into the public purse...
...voting to abolish the Civil Service Commission and for the restoration of the spoils system, because the System and the System "statesmen" are for spoils...
...opposing and voting against the conservation of natural resources as embodied in the Pinchot-Roosevelt measure for the creation of national forest reserves in the Appalachian and White Mountains,—because the System is against conservation...
...In this instance perhaps more than in any other, this claim is palpably false...
...humphrey's official service has been dedicated and devoted at all times to the patriotic enterprise of upbuilding an "American Merchant Marine"—by the payment of shipping subsidies...
...Our navigation laws—laws designed and maintained to foster the fortunes of Privilege—forbid and preclude the upbuilding of a merchant marine under the American flag...
...The bill aimed to protect liberty of contract of American seamen, to provide better living conditions aboard ship, and to prevent the undermanning of vessels and to do away with "crimping" and "shanghaiing" of American sailors...
...In the session of Congress just closed, he had climbed to a place of highest System distinction and the measure of the ship subsidy Interest for this Congress is known to the country under the name of the "Humphrey Bill...
...In the session just closed Humphrey served the System with his votes for the amendments to the commerce bill to promote railroad consolidation and monopoly...
...Accordingly, Chairman Greene got authority to refer the bill to a subcommittee ostensibly for the purpose of farther investigation with the view to perfecting the bill in minor details...
...The Record shows him throughout his Congressional service, when not giving himself entirely to his specialty of shipping subsidies, voting generally the System program...
...In the first place, no authority upon this question believes that any amount of subsidies which the people have been asked to pay, or which they will ever consent to pay, can create an American merchant marine...
...A candid study of the Record of Congress leads to the conclusion that no measure for Special Interests can be so bad...
...The insurgent movement is a movement to put the government back into the hands of the people...
...voting against allowing the President to suspend tariff duties on trust-controlled products...
...The Cannon machine was behind it all...
...The enactment of other laws eradicating from the life of American seamen its attributes of human slavery would be another aid...
...and, in the Insurgent uprising of March, Humphrey voted on every roll call, with eminent servility, for Cannon, Cannonism and the System...
...Humphrey's service to the shipping interests in suppressing this measure in the Committee on Merchant Marine was no less faithful, though less spectacular, than his service in securing the report of the Humphrey ship subsidy bill from the same Committee after only two minutes' consideration...
...That the government had for seventeen years been paying approximately a million dollars a year in ocean mail subsidies, without adding a single line to the merchant marine, was proof to the subsidy advocates not of the futility of subsidies but merely that the subsidy paid was too small...
...In another generation the rule of big business will be as dead as the rule of the slave oligarchy.—The Emporia Gazette...
...Again, in the sixty-first Congress, Humphrey is found voting for Cannon for Speaker...
...In the beginning we find him voting to rebuke Bristow for his disclosures of corruption in the Postoffice Department, because those disclosures incidentally touched System Congressmen...
...Voted the System Program THE System is the mobilization of the Special Interests...
...Killing the Seamen's Bill THE demand for subsidies for the shipping Interests, like the demand for excessive tariff duties for other Special Interests, is based, for purposes of propaganda, upon the claim of "benefits for American labor...
...In politics, the System uses its money to make "statesmen," and uses its "statesmen" to make money...
...From the first he has devoted his office to the promotion of schemes of legislation to enrich an interest out of the tax-contributed treasury of the people...
...Laws which require that vessels, to engage in foreign commerce under the Stars and Stripes, shall be built in American ship yards out of materials "protected" by an inordinate tariff—laws which render the first cost of building vessels for an American merchant marine more by a third to twice as much as the cost of like vessels engaged in competition with them in ocean commerce under foreign flags—doom at the outset the hope of an American merchant marine, and render the payment of shipping subsidies an unconscionable and unjustifiable waste of public funds, an expenditure of which the sole beneficiaries are the shipping and shipbuilding Interests...
...The proportion of this $8,000,000 which might be regarded as legitimate pay for carrying mail, and the proportion which would constitute the people's forced contribution to the prosperity of a Special Interest is indicated by the fact that the cost of mail transportation on three Pacific lines under competitive contracts then existing was $180,000 a year, while the cost under the proposed subsidy would be $2,274,000 a year for the same service...
...This time with a bill for an ocean mail subsidy—a ship subsidy to be paid under the pretext of payment for carrying the foreign mails...
...The pressure of party regularity was brought to bear in support of it...
...So it was now proposed that for a period of ten years, the entire revenue from the foreign mail service, amounting to about $8,000,000 a year, should be paid as a subsidy to the shipping interest...
...for the Dalzell gag rule to put through a postal bank bill acceptable to Wall Street finance...
...A third piece of legislation which the shipping interests had for Congress to pass at this session was the so-called Philippine shipping bill to extend the monopoly of the shipping interests under the coast-wise navigation laws to apply to all shipping between the United States and the Philippines...
...In the 60th Congress the Record shows Humphrey voting to maintain System control through the Cannon rules...
...That it is false is proved by the fact that every attempt to couple with subsidy measures legislation in the interests of American seamen has been rejected and defeated by the advocates of subsidy...
...Humphrey supported the merchant marine commission bill in the committee, advocated the commission bill and ship subsidies in debate on the floor of the House, and voted for the bill when it passed the House...
Vol. 2 • September 1910 • No. 36
