The Political War Over the McKinley Tariff
Conflicting data and fiery rhetoric define the campaign debate over whether protectionist tariffs are protecting or impoverishing the American worker.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
From the ninth annual report of Hon. Charles F. Peck, Democratic commissioner of the New York state bureau of labor statistics: Out of sixty-eight industries, 75 per cent of them show an increased average yearly earning in the year of 1891, while the total average increase of yearly earnings of 285,000 employees was $23.11; the average increase of yearly earnings of the employees in the fifty-one trades showing an increase of $43.96 in 1891, as compared with 1890. The net increase in wages for 1891 over 1890 is $6,377,925. The increase in product during the same period is $31,315,190. Governor Campbell has said that not a single workingman's wages has been raised as a result of the McKinley act. My report shows that there were just 285,000 men whose salaries were raised as the result of this law. I am free to admit that my report is not in harmony with the platform adopted at Chicago in so far as it relates to the subject of the tariff. The report, however, states the condition of affairs as I have found them. From the Democratic platform adopted by the national convention at Chicago, June 22, 1892: We denounce the Republican policy of protection as a fraud on the labor of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of the few. We declare it to be a fundamental principle of the Democratic party that the federal government has no constitutional power to impose and collect tariff duties except for the purposes of revenue only. We denounce the McKinley tariff law enacted by the Fifty-first congress as the culminating atrocity of class legislation, and we promise its repeal as one of the beneficent results that will follow the action of the people in entrusting power to the Democratic party. Since the McKinley tariff went into operation there have been ten reductions of the wages of laboring men to one increase. We deny that there has been any increase of prosperity to the country since that tariff went into operation.
“We denounce the Republican policy of protection as a fraud on the labor of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of the few.”
This 1892 clash over the economic impact of global trade and domestic manufacturing mirrors modern debates regarding tariffs and American industry. Both sides utilized manipulated labor statistics to argue that their party was the true defender of the working class, a rhetorical tradition that continues in modern political discourse.
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