124 THIRTY-FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 



$6 per year. The measure was enacted after a great contest running 

 from the Fifty-sixth to the Fifty-seventh Congress. The entire country 

 became interested in the discussion. The agricultural interest was 

 almost solidly for the bill. I presented to the House Committee on 

 Agriculture a petition for its passage from 133 agricultural papers. The 

 National Dairy Union, of which Governor W. D. Hoard was President, 

 and Charles Y. Knight of Chicago Secretary, scattered 3,000,000 pieces of 

 literature advocating the 10 cent tax. 



The oleomargarine people claimed that the dairymen were trying to 

 destroy their industry, and that the proposed law would destroy it. 

 Both statements were untrue. The dairymen wanted to tax the fraud 

 out of oleomargarine. The oleomargarine people wanted to keep it in. 

 The dairymen did not object to the sale of oleomargarine under its own 

 name and color. They did object to a cheap counterfeit masquerading in 

 the markets in the livery of butter. In the beginning there was little 

 sentiment in the House for the bill. In the end it passed that body by 

 100 majority. The Congressmen had heard from their districts. If 

 there is anything that can turn seven thousand somersaults in a minute, 

 it is a Congressman whose constituents go after him. We were entirely 

 right in our contention from every standpoint and it was very annoying 

 to have members of Congress say, as some did when the vote was 

 taken, that the bill was a fraud, but they voted for it because the cow 

 could control more votes than the steer. It is always exasperating to 

 hear wrong reasons given for the right things. The South opposed the 

 bill. The members from that section imagined it to be a blow at the 

 cottonseed oil interest, when, as a matter of fact, it would touch it lightly 

 if at all. And, more than this, the dairy interests of the south and the 

 interests of consumers greatly outweighed the value of all the cotton- 

 seed oil that goes into oleomargarine. The southerners also have a lin- 

 gering reverence for their old hobby of State rights, and do not like 

 an additional exercise of Federal power in the States unless there is an 

 appropriation for something like the improvement of the Mississippi 

 river, a New Orleans Exposition or the destruction of the boll weevil 

 in Texas. Constitutional quibbles usually fade in the effulgent splendor 

 of an appropriation. As in 1886, when Hatch of Minnesota, that grand 

 old Democrat, made his splendid fight that placed the first oleomargarine 

 tax laws upon the statute books, the friends of the counterfeit succeeded 

 in getting a large support from labor organizations. This was possible 

 because the labor organizations were deceived as to the possible effect 

 of the law. It was a spectacle for gods and men to see a representative 

 of a labor organization from Pennsylvania standing before the Senate 

 Committee on Agriculture and reading an alleged argument against 

 the bill, which had been written for him by an oleomargarine lobbyist. 

 He could hardly read it, mispronounced some of the words and caused 

 consternation in the ranks of the lobby. One manufacturer expressed 

 his disgust to me with a profanity which cannot be repeated. 



If there is any class of men which is surely benefited by the 10 cent 



