The Nominee was outspoken in his conviction that the tariff should be revised. Said he:
“Tariff duties, as they have employed them, have not been a means of setting up an equitable system of protection. They have been, on the contrary, a method of fostering special privilege. They have made it easy to establish monopoly in our domestic markets. Trusts have owed their origin and their secure power to them. The economic freedom of our people, our prosperity in trade, our untrammeled energy in manufacture depend upon their reconsideration from top to bottom in an entirely different spirit. . . . It is obvious that the changes we make should be made only at such a rate and in such a way as will least interfere with the normal and healthful course of commerce and manufacture. But we shall not on that account act with timidity, as if we did not know our own minds, for we are certain of our ground and of our object. There should be an immediate revision, and it should be downward, unhesitatingly and steadily downward.” . . .
President Wilson made an inspiring campaign, delivering a number of speeches at strategic centers in the various states. The triangular character of the race made it the most interesting in American history since Lincoln's time. Wilson got 6,293,454 of the popular vote; Roosevelt 4,119,538, and Taft 3,484,980, but the New Jersey Executive got an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College, the vote standing thus: Wilson 435, Roosevelt 88, and Taft 8.
The marrow of the man is his sincerity. His carrying out of every pledge made in New Jersey presaged his course as President. He kept the rudder true in his State in a storm that beat its fury upon the Commonwealth and threatened to divide and defeat his party, victorious for the first time in a dozen years. In his inaugural address, in which his sincere and genuine appeal to “all forward-looking men” fell upon ears that were glad to hear the pledge of the New Freedom he had come to inaugurate in our Republic, the new President showed that his campaign pledges were the sacred covenants between the new executive and the people.
His inaugural illustrated the truth that he was sailing by the chart which he himself had prepared in the campaign: After insisting that the change of government meant that the nation now sought to use the Democratic party to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view; after asserting that some old, familiar things have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister, and that some new things have come to assume the aspect of things long believed in and familiar, he declared we had come to a work of restoration, and continued:
“We have itemized with some degree of particularity the things that ought to be altered and here are some of the chief items: A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests; a banking and currency system based upon the necessity of the Government to sell its bonds fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits; an industrial system which, take it on all sides, financial as well as administrative, holds capital in leading strings, restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country; a body of agricultural activities never yet given the efficiency of great business undertakings or served as it should be through the instrumentality of science taken directly to the farm, or afforded the facilities of credit best suited to its practical needs; water-courses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every mine. We have studied as perhaps no other nation has the most effective means of production, but we have not studied cost or economy as we should either as organizers of industry, as statesmen, or as individuals.”
The inaugural address concluded with this appeal for co-operation in the great task upon which he was entering:
“This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!”
When the 63rd Congress was called in extraordinary session the President's proclamation did not limit the purpose to tariff reduction, as many party leaders desired, but it was primarily convened to revise and reduce the tariff. The previous Republican administration had revised but not reduced, and suffered a crushing defeat in the elections of 1910 and 1912. Wilson, moreover, had before his vision the mistakes of the late President Cleveland to aid him in determining to permit no new question or no reasonings to divert him from the paramount duty of responding to the double mandate of the voters to reduce the tariff and unfetter trade. His every utterance emphasized tariff as the first great reform to be carried out. He was in frequent conference with the leaders of the House, both before Congress assembled and when it convened. He led in the Nation in making and invoking public sentiment as he had successfully led when he was Governor of New Jersey. To emphasize his tariff program and impress the argument for genuine reduction, he astonished the country by going in person and reading his message to Congress, reviving an early custom which went into innocuous desuetude because Jefferson, who had no taste and little gift for public speaking, sent his message to be read by a clerk, instead of delivering it in person. There were those who declared this return to an old order suggested a king giving orders to Congress. They predicted that the innovation smacked of a return to Federalism. But on the day that Wilson entered the House to read his message every seat was occupied. Hundreds could not gain admission. Those who witnessed the contrast between the clear enunciation and impressive presentation of his convictions and recommendations, and the old humdrum reading, when clerks droned through a message, and the tense interest when the new leader enunciated his own views and the pledges of the majority party, rejoiced at the new freedom that ushered in the delivery in the flesh of a fresh message to the American people.
Wilson was in direct touch with Mr. Underwood and other members of the Ways and Means Committee and other leaders of the House in the preparation of the Underwood Bill. He did not shirk labor or responsibility, nor assume the duty resting upon others. But, in consonance with the duty which the leadership of the dominant party, to which he had been called, demanded, he helped to shape the character of the legislation on the schedules upon which there was the most difference of opinion. He freely discussed these schedules with those who had a claim upon his consideration of their views. The sugar people were the most active and earnest in trying to secure a reversal of the program of free sugar. They sought to impress the President with the view that a protective duty, which would bring in large revenue, should remain on sugar. He heard, he conferred, he debated, and declared that free sugar must be a part of the bill, and free sugar is in the Underwood-Simmons bill. The famous Schedule K, long called the key to the protection arch, had given so much trouble to the Democrats in the prior Congress that they had to be content to levy some tax on wool, much to the regret of the many who for more than a quarter of a century had been fighting for free wool. The advocates of a tariff on wool wished to enact the same wool schedule that passed the Sixty-second Congress, but the President stood firmly for free wool, as did nearly all the newly elected Congressmen, and free wool is in the bill. The old plan of permitting the beneficiaries of the tariff to write the tariff schedules, which put money in their purses, had come to an end. The President, with the overwhelming majority of his party in Congress, subordinated every local consideration to the passage of a tariff act drafted along the lines indicated in the pre-election promises of the President. In the tariff, as in important matters in which he was interested in New Jersey, he accepted no compromise. The Tariff act of 1913 owes much of its value to the wise and courageous President in the White House. To him is largely due the credit of a united party, with a narrow margin in the Senate, refusing to