Speech 36
DEFENSE OF THE REPUBLICAN  PARTY'S RECORD ON INDUSTRIAL AFFAIRS
FROM LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE TO HON.  J.  G.  CANNON, CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE NOTIFYING MR.  ROOSEVELT OF HIS NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, SEPTEMBER 12, 1904

IN addition to those acts of the Administration which they venture to assail only after misrepresenting them, there are others which they dare not overtly or officially attack, and yet which they covertly bring forward as reasons for the overthrow of the party.  In certain great centres and with certain great interests our opponents make every effort to show that the settlement of the Anthracite Coal Strike by the individual act of the President, and the successful suit against the Northern Securities Company — the Merger suit — undertaken by the Department of Justice, were acts because of which the present Administration should be thrown from power.  Yet they dare not openly condemn either act.  They dare not in any authoritative or formal manner say that in either case wrong was done or error committed in the method of action, or in the choice of instruments for putting that action into effect.  But what they dare not manfully assert in open day, they seek to use furtively and through special agents.  It is perhaps natural that an attack so conducted should be made sometimes on the ground that too much, sometimes on the ground that too little, has been done.  Some of our opponents complain because under the anti-trust and interstate commerce laws suits were undertaken which have been successful; others, because suits were not undertaken which would have been unsuccessful.

The Democratic State Convention in New York dealt with the Anthracite Coal Strike by demanding in deliberate and formal fashion that the National Government should take possession of the coal fields; yet champions of that convention's cause now condemn the fact that there was any action by the President at all — though they must know that it was only this action by the President which prevented the movement for national ownership of the coal fields from gaining what might well have been an irresistible impetus.  Such mutually destructive criticisms furnish an adequate measure of the chance for coherent action or constructive legislation if our opponents should be given power.

So much for what our opponents openly or covertly advance in the way of an attack on the acts of the Administration.  When we come to consider the policies for which they profess to stand we are met with the difficulty always arising when statements of policy are so made that they can be interpreted in different ways.  On some of the vital questions that have confronted the American people in the last decade, our opponents take the position that silence is the best possible way to convey their views.  They contend that their lukewarm attitude of partial acquiescence in what others have accomplished entitles them to be made the custodians of the financial honor and commercial interests which they have hut recently sought to ruin.  Being unable to agree among themselves as to whether the gold standard is a curse or a blessing, and as to whether we ought or ought not to have free and unlimited coinage of silver, they have apparently thought it expedient to avoid any committal on these subjects, and individually each to follow his particular bent.  Their nearest approach to a majority judgment seems to be that it is now inexpedient to assert their convictions one way or the other, and that the establishment of the gold standard by the Republican Party should not be disturbed unless there is an alteration in the relative quantity of production of silver and gold.  Men who hold sincere convictions on vital questions can respect equally sincere men with whose views they radically differ; and men may confess a change of faith without compromising their honor or their self respect.  But it is difficult to respect an attitude of mind such as has been fairly described above; and where there is no respect there can be no trust.  A policy with so slender a basis of principle would not stand the strain of a single year of business adversity.

We, on the contrary, believe in the gold standard as fixed by the usage and verdict of the business world, and in a sound monetary system, as matters of principle; as matters not of momentary political expediency, but of permanent organic policy.  In 1896 and again in 1900 farsighted men, without regard to their party fealty in the past, joined to work against what they regarded as a debased monetary system.  The policies which they championed have been steadfastly adhered to by the Administration; and by the act of March 14, 1900, Congress established the single gold standard as the measure of our monetary value.  This act received the support of every Republican in the House, and of every Republican except one in the Senate.  Of our opponents, eleven supported it in the House and two in the Senate; and one hundred and fifty opposed it in the House and twenty eight in the Senate.  The record of the last seven years proves that the party now in power can be trusted to take the additional action necessary to improve and strengthen our monetary system, and that our opponents can not be so trusted.  The fundamental fact is that in a popular government such as ours no policy is irrevocably settled by law unless the people keep in control of the Government men who believe in that policy as a matter of deep rooted conviction.  Laws can always be revoked; it is the spirit and the purpose of those responsible for their enactment and administration which must be ‘fixed and unchangeable.  It is idle to say that the monetary standard of the Nation is irrevocably fixed so long as the party which at the last election cast approximately forty six per cent of the total vote refuses to put in its platform any statement that the question is settled.  A determination to remain silent can not be accepted as equivalent to a recantation.  Until our opponents as a party explicitly adopt the views which we hold and upon which we have acted and are acting, in the matter of sound currency, the only real way to keep the question from becoming unsettled is to keep the Republican party in power.

As for what our opponents say in reference to capital and labor, individual or corporate, here again all we need by way of answer is to point to what we have actually done, and to say that if continued in power we shall continue to carry out the policy we have been pursuing, and to execute the laws as resolutely and fearlessly in the future as we have executed them in the past.  In my speech of acceptance I said:

“We recognize the organization of capital and the organization of labor as natural outcomes of our industrial system.  Each kind of organization is to be favored so long as it acts in a spirit of justice and of regard for the rights of others.  Each is to be granted the full protection of the law, and each in turn is to be held to a strict obedience to the law; for no man is above it and no man below it.  The humblest individual is to have his rights safeguarded as scrupulously as those of the strongest organization, for each is to receive justice, no more and no less.  The problems with which we have to deal in our modern industrial and social life are manifold; but the spirit in which it is necessary to approach their solution is simply the spirit of honesty, of courage, and of common sense."

The action of the Attorney General in enforcing the anti-trust and interstate commerce laws, and the action of the last Congress in enlarging the scope of the interstate commerce law, and in creating the Department of Commerce and Labor, with a Bureau of Corporations, have for the first time opened a chance for the National Government to deal intelligently and adequately with the questions affecting society, whether for good or for evil, because of the accumulation of capital in great corporations, and because of the new relations caused thereby.  These laws are now being administered with entire efficiency; and as, in their working, need is shown for amendment or addition to them — whether better to secure the proper publicity, or better to guarantee the rights of shippers, or in any other direction — this need will be met.  It is now asserted “that the common law, as developed, affords a complete legal remedy against monopolies." But there is no common law of the United States.  Its rules can be enforced only by the State courts and officers.  No Federal court or officer could take any action whatever under them.  It was this fact, coupled with the inability of the States to control trusts and monopolies, which led to the passage of the Federal statutes known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Interstate Commerce Act; and it is only through the exercise of the powers conferred by these acts, and by the statutes of the last Congress supplementing them, that the National Government acquires any jurisdiction over the subject.  To say that action against trusts and monopolies should be limited to the application of the common law is equivalent to saying that the National Government should take no action whatever to regulate them.  Undoubtedly, the multiplication of trusts and their increase in power has been largely due to the “failure of officials charged with the duty of enforcing the law to take the necessary procedure." Such stricture upon the failure of the officials of the National Government to do their duty in this matter is certainly not wholly undeserved as far as the Administration preceding President McKinley's is concerned; but it has no application at all to Republican administration.  It is also undoubtedly true that what is most needed is “officials having both the disposition and the courage to enforce existing law." This is precisely the need that has been met by the consistent and steadily continued action of the Department of Justice under the present Administration.

So far as the rights of the individual wage worker and the individual capitalist are concerned, both as regards one another, as regards the public, and as regards organized capital and labor, the position of the Administration has been so clear that there is no excuse for misrepresenting it, and no ground for opposing it unless misrepresented.  Within the limits defined by the National Constitution the National Administration has sought to secure to each man the full enjoyment of his right to live his life and dispose of his property and his labor as he deems best, so long as he wrongs no one else.  It has shown in effective fashion that in endeavoring to make good this guarantee, it treats all men, rich or poor, whatever their creed, their color, or their birthplace, as standing alike before the law.  Under our form of government the sphere in which the Nation as distinguished from the State can act is narrowly circumscribed; but within that sphere all that could be done has been done.  All thinking men are aware of the restrictions upon the power of action of the National Government in such matters.  Being ourselves mindful of them, we have been scrupulously careful on the one hand to be moderate in our promises.  And on the other hand to keep these promises in letter and in spirit.  Our opponents have been hampered by no such considerations.  They have promised, and many of them now promise, action which they could by no possibility take in the exercise of constitutional power, and which, if attempted, would bring business to a standstill; they have used, and often now use, language of wild invective and appeal to all the baser passions which tend to excite one set of Americans against their fellow Americans; and yet whenever they have had power they have fittingly supplemented this extravagance of promise by absolute nullity in performance.

When we take up the great question of the tariff we are at once confronted by the doubt as to whether our opponents do or do not mean what they say.  They say that “protection is robbery,” and promises to carry themselves accordingly if they are given power.  Yet prominent persons among them assert that they do not really mean this and that if they come into power they will adopt our policy as regards the tariff; while others seem anxious to prove that it is safe to give them partial power, because the power would be only partial, and therefore they would not be able to do mischief.  The last is certainly a curious plea to advance on behalf of a party seeking to obtain control of the Government.

At the outset it is worth while to say a word as to the attempt to identify the question of tariff revision or tariff reduction with a solution of the trust question.  This is always a sign of desire to avoid any real effort to deal adequately with the trust question.  In speaking on this point at Minneapolis, on April 4, 1903, I said:

“The question of tariff revision, speaking broadly, stands wholly apart from the question of dealing with the trusts.  No change in tariff duties can have any substantial effect in solving the so called trust problem.  Certain great trusts or great corporations are wholly unaffected by the tariff.  Almost all the others that are of any importance have as a matter of fact numbers of smaller American competitors; and of course a change in the tariff which would work injury to the large corporation would work not merely injury but destruction to its smaller competitors; and equally of course such a change would mean disaster to all the wage workers connected with either the large or the small corporations.  From the standpoint of those interested in the solution of the trust problem such a change would therefore merely mean that the trust was relieved of the competition of its weaker American competitors, and thrown only into competition with foreign competitors; and that the first effort to meet this new competition would be made by cutting down wages, and would therefore be primarily at the cost of labor.  In the case of some of our greatest trusts such a change might confer upon them a positive benefit.  Speaking broadly, it is evident that the changes in the tariff will affect the trusts for weal or for woe simply as they affect the whole country.  The tariff affects trusts only as it affects all other interests.  It makes all these interests, large or small, profitable; and its benefits can be taken from the large only under penalty of taking them from the small also."

There is little for me to add to this.  It is but ten years since the last attempt was made, by means of lowering the tariff, to prevent some people from prospering too much.  The attempt was entirely successful.  The tariff law of that year was among the causes which in that year and for some time afterward effectually prevented anybody from prospering too much, and labor from prospering at all.  Undoubtedly it would be possible at the present time to prevent any of the trusts from remaining prosperous by the simple expedient of making such a sweeping change in the tariff as to paralyze the industries of the country.  The trusts would cease to prosper; but their smaller competitors would be ruined, and the wage workers would starve, while it would not pay the farmer to haul his produce to market.  The evils connected with the trusts can be reached only by rational effort, step by step, along the lines taken by Congress and the Executive during the past three years.  If a tariff law is passed under which the country prospers, as the country has prospered under the present tariff law, then all classes will share in the prosperity.  If a tariff law is passed aimed at preventing the prosperity of some of our people, it is as certain as anything can be that this aim will be achieved only by cutting down the prosperity of all of our people.

Of course, if our opponents are not sincere in their proposal to abolish the system of a protective tariff, there is no use in arguing the matter at all, save by pointing out again that if on one great issue they do not mean what they say, it is hardly safe to trust them on any other issue.  But if they are sincere in this matter, then their advent to power would mean domestic misfortune and misery as widespread and far reaching as that which we saw ten years ago.  When they speak of protection as " robbery," they of course must mean that it is immoral to enact a tariff designed (as is the present protective tariff) to secure to the American wage worker the benefit of the high standard of living which we desire to see kept up in this country.  Now to speak of the tariff in this sense as “robbery," thereby giving it a moral relation, is not merely rhetorical; it is on its face false.  The question of what tariff is best for our people is primarily one of expediency, to be determined not on abstract academic grounds, but in the light of experience.  It is a matter of business; for fundamentally ours is a business people — manufacturers, merchants, farmers, wage workers, professional men, all alike.  Our experience as a people in the past has certainly not shown us that we could afford in this matter to follow those professional counselors who have confined themselves to study in the closet; for the actual working of the tariff has emphatically contradicted their theories.  From time to time schedules must undoubtedly be rearranged and readjusted to meet the shifting needs of the country; but this can with safety be done only by those who are committed to the cause of the protective system.  To uproot and destroy that system would be to ensure the prostration of business, the closing of factories, the impoverishment of the farmer, the ruin of the capitalist, and the starvation of the wage worker.  Yet, if protection is indeed “robbery," and if our opponents really believe what they say, then it is precisely to the destruction and uprooting of the tariff, and therefore of our business and industry, that they are pledged.  When our opponents last obtained power it was on a platform declaring a protective tariff “unconstitutional "; and the effort to put this declaration into practice was one of the causes of the general national prostration lasting from 1893 to 1897.  If a protective tariff is either " unconstitutional" or " robbery," then it is just as unconstitutional, just as much robbery, to revise it down, still leaving it protective, as it would be to enact it.  In other words, our opponents have committed themselves to the destruction of the protective principle in the tariff; using words which if honestly used forbid them from permitting this principle to obtain in even the smallest degree.

Our opponents assert that they believe in reciprocity.  Their action on the most important reciprocity treaty recently negotiated — that with Cuba — does not bear out this assertion.  Moreover, there can be no reciprocity unless there is a substantial tariff; free trade and reciprocity are not compatible.  We are on record as favoring arrangements for reciprocal trade relations with other countries, these arrangements to be on an equitable basis of benefit to both the contracting parties.  The Republican party stands pledged to every wise and consistent method of increasing the foreign commerce of the country.  That it has kept its pledge is proven by the fact that while the domestic trade of this country exceeds in volume the entire export and import trade of all the nations of the world, the United States has in addition secured more than an eighth of the export trade of the world, standing first among the nations in this respect.  The United States has exported during the last seven years nearly ten billions of dollars' worth of goods — on an average half as much again annually as during the previous four years, when many of our people were consuming nothing but necessaries, and some of them a scanty supply even of these.

Two years ago, in speaking at Logansport, Indiana, I said:

“The one consideration which must never be omitted in a tariff change is the imperative need of preserving the American standard of living for the American workingman.  The tariff rate must never fall below that which will protect the American workingman by allowing for the difference between the general labor cost here and abroad, so as at least to equalize the conditions arising from the difference in the standard of labor here and abroad — a difference which it should be our aim to foster in so far as it represents the needs of better educated, better paid, better fed, and better clothed workingmen of a higher type than any to be found in a foreign country.  At all hazards, and no matter what else is sought for or accomplished by changes of the tariff, the American workingman must be protected in his standard of wages, that is, in his standard of living, and must be secured the fullest opportunity of employment.  Our laws should in no event afford advantage to foreign industries over American industries.  They should in no event do less than equalize the difference in conditions at home and abroad."

It is a matter of regret that the protective tariff policy, which, during the last forty odd years, has become part of the very fibre of the country, is not now accepted as definitely established.  Surely we have a right to say that it has passed beyond the domain of theory, and a right to expect that not only its original advocates but those who at one time distrusted it on theoretic grounds should now acquiesce in the results that have been proved over and over again by actual experience.  These forty odd years have been the most prosperous years this Nation has ever seen; more prosperous years than any other nation has ever seen.  Beyond question this prosperity could not have come if the American people had not possessed the necessary thrift, energy, and business intelligence to turn their vast material resources to account.  But it is no less true that it is our economic policy as regards the tariff and finance which has enabled us as a nation to make such good use of the individual capacities of our citizens, and the natural resources of our country.  Every class of our people is benefited by the protective tariff.  During the last few years the merchant has seen the export trade of this country grow faster than ever in our previous history.  The manufacturer could not keep his factory running if it were not for the protective tariff.  The wage worker would do well to remember that if protection is “robbery," and is to be punished accordingly, he will be the first to pay the penalty: for either he will be turned adrift entirely, or his wages will be cut down to the starvation point.  As conclusively shown by the bulletins of the Bureau of Labor, the purchasing power of the average wage received by the wage worker has grown faster than the cost of living, and this in spite of the continual shortening of working hours.  The accumulated savings of the workingmen of the country, as shown by the deposits in the savings banks, have increased by leaps and bounds.  At no time in the history of this or any other country has there been an era so produtcive of material benefit alike to workingman and employer as during the seven years that have just passed.

The farmer has benefited quite as much as the manufacturer, the merchant, and the wage worker.  The most welcome and impressive fact established by the last census is the wide and even distribution of wealth among all classes of our countrymen.  The chief agencies in producing this distribution are shown by the census to be the development of manufactures, and the application of new inventions to universal use.  The result has been an increasing interdependence of agriculture and manufactures.  Agriculture is now, as it always has been, the basis of civilization.  The six million farms of the United States, operated by men who, as a class, are steadfast, single minded, and industrious, form the basis of all the other achievements of the American people and are more fruitful than all their other resources.  The men on those six million farms receive from the protective tariff what they most need, and that is the best of all possible markets.  All other classes depend upon the farmer, but the farmer in turn depends upon the market they furnish him for his produce.  The annual output of our agricultural products is nearly four billions of dollars.  Their increase in value has been prodigious, although agriculture has languished in most other countries; and the main factor in this increase is the corresponding increase of our manufacturing industries.  American farmers have prospered because the growth of their market has kept pace with the growth of their farms.  The additional market continually furnished for agricultural products by domestic manufacturers has been far in excess of the outlet to other lands.  An export trade in farm products is necessary to dispose of our surplus ; and the export trade of the farmers, both in animal products and in plant products, has very largely increased.  Without the enlarged home market to keep this surplus down, we should have to reduce production or else feed the world at less than the cost of production.  In the forty years ending in 1900 the total value of farm property increased twelve and a half billions of dollars; the farmer gaining even more during this period than the manufacturer.  Long ago over production would have checked the marvelous development of our national agriculture, but for the steadily increasing demand of American manufacturers for farm products required as raw materials for steadily expanding industries.  The farmer has become dependent upon the manufacturer to utilize that portion of his produce which does not go directly to food supply.  In 1900 fifty two per cent, or a little over half, of the total value of the farm products of the Nation was consumed in manufacturing industries as the raw materials of the factories.  Evidently the manufacturer is the farmer's best and most direct customer.  Moreover, the American manufacturer purchases his farm supplies almost exclusively in his own country.  Nine tenths of all the raw materials of every kind and description consumed in American manufactories are of American production.  The manufacturing establishments tend steadily to migrate into the heart of the great agricultural districts.  The centre of the manufacturing industry in 1900 was near the middle of Ohio, and it is moving westward at the rate of about thirty miles in every decade; and this movement is invariably accompanied by a marked increase in the value of farm lands.  Local causes, notably the competition between new farm lands and old farm lands, tend here and there to obscure what is happening; but it is as certain as the operation of any economic law that in the country as a whole farm values will continue to increase as the partnership between manufacturer and farmer grows more intimate through further advance of industrial science.  The American manufacturer never could have placed this Nation at the head of the manufacturing nations of the world if he had not had behind him, securing him every variety of raw material, the exhaustless resources of the American farm, developed by the skill and the enterprise of intelligent and educated American farmers.  On the other hand, the debt of the farmers to the manufacturers is equally heavy, and the future of American agriculture is bound up in the future of American manufactures.  The two industries have become, under the economic policy of our Government, so closely interwoven, so mutually interdependent, that neither can hope to maintain itself at the high water mark of progress without the other.  Whatever makes to the advantage of one is equally to the advantage of the other.

So it is as between the capitalist and the wage worker.  Here and there there may be an unequal sharing as between the two in the benefits that have come by protection; but benefits have come to both; and a reversal in policy would mean damage to both; and while the damage would be heavy to all, it would be heaviest, and it would fall soonest, upon those who are paid in the form of wages each week or each month for that week's or that month's work.

Conditions change and the laws must be modified from time to time to fit new exigencies.  But the genuine underlying principle of protection, as it has been embodied in all but one of the American tariff laws for the last forty years, has worked out results so beneficent, so evenly and widely spread, so advantageous alike to farmers and capitalists and workingmen, to commerce and trade of every kind, that the American people, if they show their usual practical business sense, will insist that when these laws are modified they shall be modified with the utmost care and conservatism, and by the friends and not the enemies of the protective system.  They can not afford to trust the modification to those who treat protection and robbery as synonymous terms.