A Presidential Scolding from the Old Guard
Richard Olney, former Attorney General, blasts Charles Evans Hughes for political cowardice regarding the eight-hour workday law.
No American can speak with higher authority on the issues of this campaign than Richard Olney, who served as President Cleveland’s attorney general during the 1894 railroad strike. Discussing the passage of the Adamson eight-hour law, Mr. Olney points out that if Republican senators had really wished more time for the bill's consideration, they could have used a filibuster. He writes: 'Why did not the Republican senators resort to it? What was Candidate Hughes doing that he did not make the wires hot with messages to Washington—warning against the law the seventy-four Republican representatives who voted for it? But neither he nor the Republican leaders had the nerve. A pettier and more ignoble game of politics never was conceived.'
“A pettier and more ignoble game of politics never was conceived.”
This 1916 political maneuvering over labor rights mirrors modern legislative gridlock, where politicians often perform outrage for the cameras while declining to use the procedural tools actually at their disposal to stop (or save) controversial bills.
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