UNITED STATES HISTORY 735 



The passage of the Payne-Aldrich act marked a turning-point in the fortunes of the 

 Republican party. Nineteen Republicans had opposed this party measure in the 

 House, seven in the Senate; and it was soon evident that their course was 

 Dissatisfac- w id e ly approved by the people, especially in the Middle West. It did not 

 Toft's policy, appear that any real attempt had been made to revise the tariff in accord- 

 ance with the pledges of the party platform. The President failed to 

 understand the temper of the country. He declared, on signing the bill, that it was a 

 sincere effort to make a downward revision, and again, somewhat later, that it was 

 " the best customs law that has ever been passed." His attitude separated him from 

 the progressive wing of the party, creating the impression that he had become domi- 

 nated by reactionary influences. The breach became still wider when he laid before 

 Congress, on January 26, 1911, a Reciprocity Agreement with Canada 

 Reciprocity. wn i c h required legislative adoption by both countries. The agreement 

 provided for the free exchange of all primary food products and a reduction 

 of duties upon secondary food products and certain manufactured articles. The 

 progressives denounced it as a discrimination against the farmer: he would receive no 

 real relief from the extortions of American trusts while having to meet the competition 

 of Canadian food-stuffs. Opposed by the progressives for one reason and by the 

 high-tariff Republicans for another, the Tariff bill failed in the Senate; and though the 

 President carried it through the Sixty-second Congress in the spring of 1911, he had 

 to rely mainly on the Democrats. His measure for reciprocity with Canada, with 

 which he had expected to recover the prestige lost in 1909, still further irritated the 

 Northern farmers. As a climax to this bitter disappointment the Canadian Parliament 

 withheld its consent as a result of the election of 1911 (see CANADA), the ever-present 

 fear of absorption by a powerful neighbour weighing heavily in the decision. 



When the Sixty-second Congress convened in 1911 popular disapproval of the Taft 

 administration was written large in the altered composition of the houses. The Demo- 

 crats had a majority of sixty-seven in the House of Representatives and 

 The Demo- W ere only eleven votes below the majority in the Senate. For the first 

 the tariff. time in fourteen years they had broken Republican control of Congress. 

 They had also wrested seven states from the Republicans, electing the 

 governor in Maine for the first time in thirty years and in New York for the first time 

 in eighteen. Since their campaign had been conducted on the tariff issue, they clearly 

 had received a mandate to proceed with the work of revision. Led by Oscar W. Under- 

 wood, 1 chairman of the committee of Ways and Means, and combining with the pro- 

 gressive Republicans in the Senate, they carried through Congress in the special session 

 of 1911 a " farmers' free list bill " (August i) which removed the duties from certain 

 manufactures and food products; a bill which made considerabe reductions in the 

 duties on wool and woollens; and a bill cutting in half the duties on cotton goods. All 

 three the President vetoed, condemning them as '' empirical and haphazard " and 

 holding that Congress should not touch the wool schedule until it received the report 

 of the tariff board. In 1912 he followed the same course, vetoing reductions in the 

 wool, cotton, and metal schedules; and the Democrats could not command the neces- 

 sary majority of two-thirds in the Senate to override the veto. The Senate, in fact, 

 rejected House bills revising the chemical schedule and placing sugar on the free list. 

 Though protesting indignantly, the Democrats were not sorry to have so definite an 

 issue to present to the electorate in the presidential campaign. 



All through his administration President Taft vigorously enforced the Sherman 

 anti-trust act which was passed in 1890 to protect interstate commerce from restraint 



1 Underwood (b. 1862), a native of Kentucky and educated at the University of Virginia' 

 had represented the 9th Alabama district in Congress, since 1895. He was chairman of the 

 state Democratic campaign committee which drafted the constitution of Alabama adopted 

 in 1901. In 1911 W. J. Bryan in his weekly, The Commoner, charged |that Underwood pre- 

 vented the revision of the steel and iron tariff schedules because he was interested in the 

 iron industry in Alabama. Underwood denied this, and in spite of the public break with 

 Bryan retained the party leadership in the House which he had assumed that year. 



