THE ROLL CALL
THE ROLL CALL ON MEN AND MEASURES Will this Probe go Deep? THE CANNON-ALDRICH leadership of the Republican Party is on the defensive. Widely discredited in public opinion, the "Gang" is preparing...
...By the uniform courtesy of the Senate, a Senator moving an original resolution of this kind would be appointed chairman of the investigation committee...
...Crawford will use his position, so far as he may be able, to force a real investigation...
...Evidently the vigorous Senator from West Virginia was found by the Aldrich management to be quite too unreliable, too anxious about his re-election to the Senate, to be intrusted with participation in this important "investigation" to prove that the tariff has not advanced prices...
...The Elkins resolution, modified and approved by the Finance Committee, was finally passed but the committee appointed by the vice-president at the instance of Aldrich was as follows: Mr...
...Gallinger represents practically the same degree of unswerving loyalty to the Aldrich management and to the Aldrich tariff as does Lodge...
...Maybe...
...The new administration was inaugurated...
...Already a great number of such causes have been "discovered...
...It demonstrated to Senator Lodge's satisfaction, presumably, that this movement was due to the increase in the world's supply of gold...
...The subject of accidental scarcity was avoided as thin ice...
...This outrage of public right, this gross betrayal of public trust, is the perfidy of the Payne-Cannon-Aldrich tariff revision...
...It has put itself on trial, but, to make sure of the outcome, it will conduct the trial itself...
...McCUMBER, Mr...
...Defebaugh, head of the lumber lobby and editor of "The American Lumberman," the organ of the lumber interests, that The Lumberman displayed a full-page photograph of the North Carolina Senator and published to the world a superlative editorial, exploiting his statesmanship...
...Like Senators Lodge and Aldrich, he was aggressively interested in behalf of the chief iniquity of the tariff revision, the boosting of the cotton schedule...
...Tried and convicted, the System management of the party appeals...
...During the consideration of the Aldrich tariff bill in the Senate, CRAWFORD voted with notable independence and with an evident desire to serve the interests of his constituency and the public at large...
...In addition it prescribed as possible causes of advancing prices in the United States combinations to advance prices, accidental scarcity, retailers' profits and tariff duties...
...Most of these votes were on amendments of his own proposing to reduce the lumber tariff, North Dakota being a lumber non-producing state and exceedingly earnest for free lumber...
...As for the tariff and its effect on prices, about the only definite conclusion offered was that placing hides on the free list had resulted in raising the price of hides...
...120 times he voted with the chairman of tile Finance Committee...
...On the Republican side of the committee remains but Crawford...
...We opine that they will meet with better success in this undertaking if they can somehow fix things so that the voters and wage earners may in the meantime be permitted to see ocasionally a little of this mysterious metal, which is so abundant, yet so scarce...
...Moreover, their findings, if they make a minority report, will be easily disposed of on the ground of political bias...
...Elkins was not given a place on the committee...
...The System control of the Government is in jeopardy...
...And McCumber is only in a slightly better position than Aldrich and Lodge and Gallinger to "investigate" the cause of high prices and to report that the new tariff, most of which he supported faithfully by vote and argument and for all of which, as a member of the Finance Committee, he is in part answerable, is responsible for these high prices, and thereby to condemn his own record, * * The next member of the "investigating committee" is SMOOT, of Utah, also a member of the Aldrich Finance Committee and also most faithful to the Aldrich program of all the members of the Finance Committee...
...The public would have been glad of an investigation of the advance in the cost of living and the causes of it—an honest investigation—which might be followed with some measures of relief against conditions which are growing intolerable...
...He will struggle with the facts and wrestle with the figures...
...But the tariff was to be revised...
...The general increase in the prices of articles of every-day con-sumptien since the new tariff law became effective, and especially advances in the prices of manufactured products on which the tariff was increased, has been universally attributed by the people and the press primarily to the new tariff law...
...but he declined the "honor" (Sic...
...It has decided to meet the issue—in its own peculiar way...
...But he will prove that the tariff has not raised any prices...
...The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is threatened...
...Senator Elkins of West Virginia, who has a keener sense of public sentiment than most of the Senate leaders, and who also at this particular time is very much interested in public sentiment, originally proposed in the Senate an investigation of the advance in prices and the relation of trusts, monopolies, and the tariff thereto...
...Driven to bay, it is making a last stand from its chief stronghold, the Senate of the United States...
...It announced that there could be no doubt that combinations and retailers' profits had advanced prices...
...Never once in all the tariff session did Smoot vote against Aldrich...
...A place on the committee was created for a third Democrat and this place was tendered to Chamberlain, of Oregon, a live progressive Democrat...
...The new Congress convened in special session and revised the tariff...
...On 70 roll calls he voted with Aldrich...
...More have been named by others...
...For Smoot, though an apostle in his own right in Utah, is a hewer of wood and a drawer of water in Aldrich's Finance Committee in Washington...
...Less than a dozen times in the whole tariff session he voted against the Aldrich duties...
...Of the Republicans on the committee, Crawford is the only one whom the public will credit with having investigated anything...
...The cost of living advancing year by year, the growing oppression of high prices, the widening disparity between the relative poverty of the many and the growing opulence of the few, with its attendant menace to democratic institutions, the daily and obvious exploitation of the people by great trusts and monopolies operating behind the shelter of an excessive tariff—all these things had operated to crystallize an irresistible public sentiment that the protective tariff must be revised and revised DOWNWARD...
...These fair promises were accepted by the people in good faith, and the Republican Party was returned to power...
...that wage increases in manufacturing industries, where labor organization predominates, has kept pace with the price increase...
...Rightfully this vacancy should have been filled by the appointment thereto of a Republican Senator either from the Middle West, or as Senator Elkins contended, from the South...
...It is doubtless true that in the course of years the increase in the world's supply of gold, as Senator Lodge contends, has operated to advance prices...
...But if this theory is to be applied to price increases since the new tariff law was enacted, then the supply of gold must have taken a very sudden and very remarkable "spurt...
...On 52 roll calls he voted against Aldrich...
...A recognition of this public demand was forced upon a stand-pat Republican organization when it met in Chicago in 1908 to place its platform and its candidates before the voters of the country...
...Senator Simmons, of North Carolina, the first Democrat on the committee, voted fourteen times with Aldbich in the tariff session, and on the lumber schedule, at least, was a better Aldrich Senator than McCumber, a member of the Finance Committee...
...GALLINGER, Mr...
...That the schedules were only juggled with, that the new tariff on the whole was a revision upward is recognized on every hand...
...When Senator Allison, of Iowa, died a vacancy was created upon the Committee on Finance...
...CRAWFORD, Republicans, and Mr...
...In the tariff session it was Smoot who wracked his brains by night and strained his voice by day, in the effort to make a good case out of bad figures and to make wobbly, week-kneed "arguments" in defense of the tariff bill stand erect on the floor of the Senate Smoot, too, will "investigate" high prices and their relation to the tariff...
...Crawford also in his speech in the Senate concluded that the general trend of high prices is due to the increased production of gold...
...It was the usual Lodge effort...
...As with Senator Lodge, Gallinger cannot find, as the result of his "investigation'' of the cost of living, that prices have been advanced by the tariff without convicting himself of a betrayal of public trust...
...New England's domination of the Finance Committee must be "cinched...
...Crawford is a new Senator from South Dakota...
...for, although he voted often against Aldrich and voted against the Aldrich Bill in the Senate, on the final passage of the Payne-Cannon-Aldrich conference bill, which embodied the ultimate tariff revision, he voted "regular...
...It showed that the increase of prices during the past few years—not since the passage of the new tariff law, mind you—was a world-wide movement...
...McCumber, too, has made a speech at this session on the advance of prices, devoting himself principally to the price of food products, arguing very properly that the farmer, although he is receiving higher prices than heretofore for his products, is not receiving more than he is fairly entitled to...
...The Democrats named are not Senators who will be so vigorous in their participation in the "investigation" as to be an embarrassment to the "safe" Aldrich majority...
...It is possible to discover a great many causes which affect prices...
...Like Lodge, only in a slightly less consistent degree, he championed loyally in the Senate the work of Aldrich represented in the tariff revision...
...SIMMONS and Mr...
...Up to the present writing, no champion of the new tariff has discovered that the general advance in prices of cotton -oods of about 25 per cent, since the enactment of the new tariff law has any relation to the enormous profits of the New England cotton mills...
...On this avowal primarily, the party and its candidates went before the people of the country and appealed for votes...
...Widely discredited in public opinion, the "Gang" is preparing to fight to the last ditch...
...Maybe, too, the Payne-Cannon-Aldrich tariff Republicans will be able to convince the voters of the country of this wonderful increase of gold and its mystical workings...
...McCumber, of North Dakota, the third member of the "investigating committee," is, like Lodge, a member of the Finance Committee which made the tariff...
...But he, too, is not entirely free in this respect...
...So, Lodge was appointed, Lodge being from Massachusetts, which is the head of the cotton goods industry, and the cotton schedule requiring revision in the interest of that industry, and Lodge's profession being "that of literature," and the cotton goods schedule requiring some literary touches...
...SMOOT, Mr...
...Crawford, too, at the present session, addressed the Senate on the subject of advanced prices...
...The whole country now knows the character of that revision...
...And this is about as near as Senator Lodge is likely to come by the process of his proposed "investigation" to convicting himself on his tariff record...
...Public sentiment in Massachusetts, because of the extensive boot and shoe industry, being "clamorous" for free hides just once, when Aldrich proposed to impose a duty of 15 per cent, on hides, which the House had made free, Lodge, presumably just to see how it would feel,—because of course he could not be influenced by "public clamor''—voted against the chairman of the Finance Committee...
...Up to the present writing Aldrich has not been able to pick a third Democrat who will serve...
...Among them are "extravagance," "labor organizations," "freight rates," "private-car lines," "cold storage warehouses," the "trend of population from farm to city," "wasteful and unscientific farming methods," "depletion of natural resources," false education of the "American hen" along commercial lines, so that she lays smaller eggs, excessive profits of wholesalers and retailers" and the increased output of gold, etc., etc., ad lib...
...Lodge made the first extended speech in the Senate on the advance of prices...
...Throughout the tariff session Lodge was the faithful and consistent supporter of the Aldrich tariff-boosting program, except only once, when the Aldrich duty on hides was before the Senate...
...From one end of the country to the other conservative agencies of public intelligence, Republican newspapers and magazines, as well as conservative Republican business men in all lines of commerce and industry, men of intelligence, discernment and peculiar knowledge of conditions,—all supporters and advocates of the party and its candidates in the election, all in sympathy with the national administration,—joined in an overwhelming accord in admitting—nay, in proclaiming—that the paynecannon-aldrich tariff revision was a mockery and a betrayal of the party pledges...
...It seeks to escape condemnation on a technicality...
...Democrats on such a committee can only be chiefly ornamental at best...
...CLARKE (of Arkansas), Democrats...
...A few of them were named by Senator Lodge...
...The Aldrich-Cannon management has had recourse to measures which are heroic, if not desperate...
...and that the increased prices which the farmer is receiving have only a remote connection with the enormous prices which the consumer is paying...
...The stand-pat party leaders have been forced on the defensive...
...Only thrice out of 127 roll calls on the tariff bill did Gallinger dissent from Al-drich's program...
...So McCumber was allowed to offer his amendments and vote for them, while Aldrich and the rest of the "bund" sat smilingly by and voted them down...
...Senator Gallinger, of New Hampshire, is the second member from New England...
...He will prove it...
...But Mr...
...LODGE, Chairman, Mr...
...and if he shall dissent from his stand-pat Republican colleagues on the committee and report the true facts as he finds them, he will render that public service for which his appointment affords the opportunity...
...Under the modest name of an "investigation of the cost of living," the Aldrich machine has instituted with elaborate formality a SENATORIAL INVESTIGATION TO PREPARE POLITICAL CAMPAIGN MATERIAL TO PROVE THAT THE NEW TARIFF HAS NOT ADVANCED PRICES...
...He spoke from statistics which he had obtained from the Department of Commerce and Labor, He took the position that this fund of available information was sufficient to inform Congress of the advance of prices and the causes, and that no investigation by Congress was necessary...
...that it is for Congress now rather to be directing its attention to some proper measure which will secure an increase of wages and salaries in other lines of employment and in the government service...
...Simmons' conspicuous service in the Senate for the lumber interests as a southern Democrat advocating a high tariff on lumber so impressed Mr...
...In such an investigation the public would have been interested...
...Clarke, of Arkansas, is a fine type of the old southern gentleman,—honest and high-principled and at peace with the world, and whose predilection for that enviable state is too strong to allow him to take measures which would seriously disturb or deflect the course of the steam roller...
...that the tariff was revised upward...
...It is to be hoped that Mr...
...As for the Democrats on the committee, little need be said...
...Of the offenses of which the Cannon-Aldrich management stands convicted in public judgment there is one indictment which stands out above all others, clear-cut, well understood, and conclusively proved by the daily experience of the people...
...Crawford is the one Republican of the committee who is not absolutely bound by his record to exonerate the tariff at all events...
...He has got to...
...More frankly, more honestly, and more fully was it recognized and accepted in the campaign by the party's candidate for the Presidency...
Vol. 2 • February 1910 • No. 8
