Part 39

We favor the extension of our foreign commerce, the restoration of our mercantile marine by home-built ships, and the creation of a navy for the protection of our national interests and the honor of our flag; the maintenance of the most friendly relations with all foreign powers, entangling alliances with none, and the protection of the rights of our fishermen.

We reaffirm our approval of the Monroe Doctrine, and believe in the achievement of the manifest destiny of the Republic in its broadest sense.

We favor the enactment of more stringent laws and regulations for the restriction of criminal, pauper, and contract immigration.

We favor efficient legislation by Congress to protect the life and limbs of employés of transportation companies engaged in carrying on interstate commerce, and recommend legislation by the respective States that will protect employés engaged in State commerce, in mining, and manufacturing.

The Republican party has always been the champion of the oppressed, and recognizes the dignity of manhood, irrespective of faith, color, or nationality; it sympathizes with the cause of home rule in Ireland, and protests against the persecution of the Jews in Russia.

The ultimate reliance of free popular government is the intelligence of the people and the maintenance of freedom among men. We therefore declare anew our devotion to liberty of thought and conscience, of speech and press, and approve all agencies and instrumentalities which contribute to the education of the children of the land; but, while insisting upon the fullest measure of religious liberty, we are opposed to any union of Church and State.

We reaffirm our opposition, declared in the Republican platform of 1888, to all combinations of capital, organized in trusts or otherwise, to control arbitrarily the condition of trade among our citizens. We heartily endorse the action already taken upon this subject, and ask for such further legislation as may be required to remedy any defects in existing laws, and to render their enforcement more complete and effective.

We approve the policy of extending to towns, villages, and rural communities the advantages of the free delivery service, now enjoyed by the larger cities of the country, and reaffirm the declaration contained in the Republican platform of 1888, pledging the reduction of letter postage to one cent, at the earliest possible moment consistent with the maintenance of the Post-office Department, and the highest class of postal service.

We commend the spirit and evidence of reform in the civil service, and the wise and consistent enforcement by the Republican party of the laws regulating the same.

The construction of the Nicaragua Canal is of the highest importance to the American people, both as a measure of national defence and to build up and maintain American commerce, and it should be controlled by the United States Government.

We favor the admission of the remaining Territories at the earliest practical date, having due regard to the interests of the people of the Territories and of the United States. All the Federal officers appointed for the Territories should be selected from bona fide residents thereof, and the right of self-government should be accorded as far as practicable.

We favor cession, subject to the homestead laws, of the arid public lands to the States and Territories in which they lie, under such Congressional restrictions as to disposition, reclamation, and occupancy by settlers as will secure the maximum benefits to the people.

The World’s Columbian Exposition is a great national undertaking, and Congress should promptly enact such reasonable legislation in aid thereof as will insure a discharge of the expenses and obligations incident thereto, and the attainment of results commensurate with the dignity and progress of the nation.

In temperance we sympathize with all wise and legitimate efforts to lessen and prevent the evils of intemperance and promote morality.

Ever mindful of the services and sacrifices of the men who saved the life of the nation, we pledge anew to the veteran soldiers of the Republic a watchful care and recognition of their just claims upon a grateful people.

We commend the able, patriotic, and thoroughly American administration of President Harrison. Under it the country has enjoyed remarkable prosperity, and the dignity and honor of the nation, at home and abroad, have been faithfully maintained, and we offer the record of pledges kept as a guarantee of faithful performance in the future.

The Democratic National Convention met at Chicago on June 21, and Cleveland was nominated for a third time after the most desperate and acrimonious strife I have ever witnessed in a national convention. It was on that occasion that Bourke Cockran made a speech against Cleveland that gave him national fame, and it was one of extraordinary ability and power. The convention was really adverse to Cleveland’s nomination. Had a majority of the delegates followed their own personal inclinations he would have been defeated, and he was nominated solely by the matchless leadership of William C. Whitney. But for him and his wonderful skill and energy, the convention would have run away from Cleveland at the outset. Never in the history of American politics was there such an achievement as the nomination of Cleveland over the solid and aggressively hostile vote of his own State of New York, that was regarded as the pivotal State of the battle. Tammany had always opposed Cleveland in national conventions, but never before had control of the delegation against him, and a protest was published to the convention signed by every delegate from the State, demanding his defeat.

Cleveland was strong with the people, but weak with the political leaders, and it was only Whitney’s masterful management of the convention that held it to Cleveland. The platform was made by the enemies of Cleveland; the nomination for Vice-President was made over his friends, and the hostility to him was so pronounced that the opposing leaders were confident of his defeat at the polls. The convention sat at night and far on in the morning hours, when Cleveland received 617 votes, just ten more than were necessary to nominate him. Had he not been nominated on that ballot his defeat would have been certain.

The strength of Cleveland’s position before the people was pointedly illustrated by his nomination in a convention that was not specially friendly, but that was forced to make him the candidate because of the overwhelming popular Democratic sentiment that demanded it. A year or so before the convention met, he had written a brief and positive letter against the free coinage of silver, and the Democrats of the South and West almost with one voice declared against him at the time, but when the Democratic people faced the conditions presented by the battle of 1892, the masses came to the support of Cleveland and the leaders were compelled to follow. The cheap-money craze had made serious inroads in both of the great parties, and the Republican platform was a weak and awkward straddle of the whole issue, while the Democratic convention had an honest money plank declaring for bimetallism and the free use of gold and silver with the intrinsic value of the dollar to be maintained.

The Democratic Convention at Chicago was presided over by William C. Owens, of Kentucky, as temporary president, and William L. Wilson, of West Virginia, as permanent president. After a protracted and acrimonious discussion that extended the session of the convention of the second day until long after midnight, the ballot for President was finally reached, resulting as follows:

Grover Cleveland, N. Y. 617-1/3 David B. Hill, N. Y. 114 Horace Boies, Iowa 103 Arthur P. Gorman, Md. 36-1/2 Adlai E. Stevenson, Ill. 16-2/3 John G. Carlisle, Ky. 14 Wm. R. Morrison, Ill. 3 James E. Campbell, Ohio 2 Wm. C. Whitney, N. Y. 1 Wm. E. Russell, Mass. 1 Robert E. Pattison, Penn. 1

There was an animated contest for Vice-President, and the special friends of Cleveland were united in favor of Isaac P. Gray, of Indiana, but they were defeated in their choice, as they were on several vital points of the platform. Only one ballot was had for Vice-President, resulting as follows:

Adlai E. Stevenson, Ill. 402 Isaac P. Gray, Ind. 344 Allen B. Morse, Mich. 86 John L. Mitchell, Wis. 45 Henry Watterson, Ky. 26 Bourke Cockran, N. Y. 5 Lambert Tree, Ill. 1 Horace Boies, Iowa 1

Stevenson had not received the requisite two-thirds, but he so far outstripped the candidate of the Cleveland leaders that they cordially acquiesced, and the nomination of Stevenson was made unanimous. The following platform was adopted after having been amended in open convention, where the tariff plank of the platform was substituted for the more temperate plank reported by the committee, by a vote of 564 to 342.

SECTION 1. The representatives of the Democratic party of the United States, in national convention assembled, do reaffirm their allegiance to the principles of the party as formulated by Jefferson, and exemplified by the long and illustrious line of his successors in Democratic leadership, from Madison to Cleveland; we believe the public welfare demands that these principles be applied to the conduct of the Federal Government through the accession to power of the party that advocates them; and we solemnly declare that the need of a return to these fundamental principles of a free popular government, based on home rule and individual liberty, was never more urgent than now, when the tendency to centralize all power at the Federal capital has become a menace to the reserved rights of the States that strikes at the very roots of our Government under the Constitution as framed by the fathers of the Republic.

SEC. 2. We warn the people of our common country, jealous for the preservation of their free institutions, that the policy of Federal control of elections to which the Republican party has committed itself is fraught with the greatest dangers, scarcely less momentous than would result from a revolution practically establishing monarchy on the ruins of the Republic. It strikes at the North as well as the South, and injures the colored citizen even more than the white. It means a horde of deputy marshals at every polling-place armed with Federal power, returning boards appointed and controlled by Federal authority, the outrage of the electoral rights of the people in the several States, the subjugation of the colored people to the control of the party in power, and the reviving of race antagonisms now happily abated, of the utmost peril to the safety and happiness of all; a measure deliberately and justly described by a leading Republican Senator as “the most infamous bill that ever crossed the threshold of the Senate.” Such a policy, if sanctioned by law, would mean the dominance of a self-perpetuating oligarchy of office-holders, and the party first intrusted with its machinery could be dislodged from power only by an appeal to the reserved right of the people to resist oppression, which is inherent in all self-governing communities. Two years ago, this revolutionary policy was emphatically condemned by the people at the polls; but in contempt of that verdict, the Republican party has defiantly declared in its latest authoritative utterance that its success in the coming elections will mean the enactment of the Force bill, and the usurpation of despotic control over elections in all the States. Believing that the preservation of republican government in the United States is dependent upon the defeat of this policy of legalized force and fraud, we invite the support of all citizens who desire to see the Constitution maintained in its integrity, with the laws pursuant thereto, which have given our country a hundred years of unexampled prosperity; and we pledge the Democratic party, if it be intrusted with power, not only to the defeat of the Force bill, but also to relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure, which in the short space of two years has squandered an enormous surplus, and emptied an overflowing treasury, after piling new burdens of taxation upon the already overtaxed labor of the country.

SEC. 3. We denounce the Republican protection as a fraud, a robbery 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, and we demand that the collection of such taxes shall be limited to the necessities of the Government when honestly and economically administered.

We denounce the McKinley Tariff law enacted by the Fifty-first Congress as the culminating atrocity of class legislation; we endorse the efforts made by the Democrats of the present Congress to modify its most oppressive features in the direction of free raw materials and cheaper manufactured goods that enter into general consumption, and we promise its repeal as one of the beneficent results that will follow the action of the people in intrusting 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, and we point to the dulness and distress, the wage reductions and strikes in the iron trade, as the best possible evidence that no such prosperity has resulted from the McKinley act.

We call the attention of thoughtful Americans to the fact that, after thirty years of restrictive taxes against the importation of foreign wealth in exchange for our agricultural surplus, the homes and farms of the country have become burdened with a real estate mortgage debt of over $2,500,000,000, exclusive of all other forms of indebtedness; that in one of the chief agricultural States of the West there appears a real estate mortgage debt averaging $165 per capita of the total population, and that similar conditions and tendencies are shown to exist in the other agricultural exporting States. We denounce a policy which fosters no industry so much as it does that of the sheriff.

SEC. 4. Trade interchange on the basis of reciprocal advantage to the countries participating is a time-honored doctrine of the Democratic faith; but we denounce the sham reciprocity which juggles with the people’s desire for enlarged foreign markets and freer exchanges by pretending to establish closer trade relations for a country whose articles of export are almost exclusively agricultural products with other countries that are also agricultural, while erecting a custom-house barrier of prohibitive tariff taxes against the richest countries of the world, that stand ready to take our entire surplus of products, and to exchange therefor commodities which are necessaries and comforts of life among our own people.

SEC. 5. We recognize, in the trusts and combinations which are designed to enable capital to secure more than its just share of the joint product of capital and labor, a natural consequence of the prohibitive taxes which prevent the free competition which is the life of honest trade, but we believe their worst evils can be abated by law; and we demand the rigid enforcement of the laws made to prevent and control them, together with such further legislation in restraint of their abuses as experience may show to be necessary.

SEC. 6. The Republican party, while professing a policy of reserving the public land for small holdings by actual settlers, has given away the people’s heritage, till now a few railroad and non-resident aliens, individual and corporate, possess a larger area than that of all our farms between the two seas. The last Democratic administration reversed the improvident and unwise policy of the Republican party touching the public domain, and reclaimed from corporations and syndicates, alien and domestic, and restored to the people, nearly 100,000,000 acres of valuable land, to be sacredly held as homesteads for our citizens, and we pledge ourselves to continue this policy until every acre of land so unlawfully held shall be reclaimed and restored to the people.

SEC. 7. We denounce the Republican legislation known as the Sherman act of 1890 as a cowardly makeshift, fraught with possibilities of danger in the future which should make all of its supporters, as well as its author, anxious for its speedy repeal. We hold to the use of both gold and silver as the standard money of the country, and to the coinage of both gold and silver without discrimination against either metal or charge for mintage; but the dollar unit of coinage of both metals must be of equal intrinsic and exchangeable value, or be adjusted through international agreement, or by such safeguards of legislation as shall insure the maintenance of the parity of the two metals, and the equal power of every dollar at all times in the markets and in the payment of debts; and we demand that all paper currency shall be kept at par with and redeemable in such coin. We insist upon this policy as especially necessary for the protection of the farmers and laboring classes, the first and most defenceless victims of unstable money and a fluctuating currency.

SEC. 8. We recommend that the prohibitory ten per cent. tax on State bank issues be repealed.

SEC. 9. Public office is a public trust. We reaffirm the declaration of the Democratic National Convention of 1876 for the reform of the civil service, and we call for the honest enforcement of all laws regulating the same. The nomination of a President, as in the recent Republican convention, by delegations composed largely of his appointees, holding office at his pleasure, is a scandalous satire upon free popular institutions, and a startling illustration of the methods by which a President may gratify his ambition. We denounce a policy under which Federal office-holders usurp control of party conventions in the States, and we pledge the Democratic party to the reform of these and all other abuses which threaten individual liberty and local self-government.

SEC. 10. The Democratic party is the only party that has ever given the country a foreign policy consistent and vigorous, compelling respect abroad and inspiring confidence at home. While avoiding entangling alliances, it has aimed to cultivate friendly relations with other nations, and especially with our American neighbors on the American continent whose destiny is closely linked with our own, and we view with alarm the tendency to a policy of irritation and bluster which is liable at any time to confront us with the alternative of humiliation or war. We favor the maintenance of a navy strong enough for all purposes of national defence, and to properly maintain the honor and dignity of the country abroad.

SEC. 11. This country has always been the refuge of the oppressed from every land—exiles for conscience’ sake; and in the spirit of the founders of our Government, we condemn the oppression practised by the Russian Government upon its Lutheran and Jewish subjects, and we call upon our National Government, in the interest of justice and humanity, by all just and proper means, to use its prompt and best efforts to bring about a cessation of these cruel persecutions in the dominions of the Czar, and to secure to the oppressed equal rights. We tender our profound and earnest sympathy to those lovers of freedom who are struggling for home rule and the great cause of local self-government in Ireland.

SEC. 12. We heartily approve all legitimate efforts to prevent the United States from being used as the dumping-ground for the known criminals and professional paupers of Europe; and we demand the rigid enforcement of the laws against Chinese immigration, or the importation of foreign workmen under contract, to degrade American labor and lessen its wages; but we condemn and denounce any and all attempts to restrict the immigration of the industrious and worthy of foreign lands.

SEC. 13. This convention hereby renews the expression of appreciation of the patriotism of the soldiers and sailors of the Union in the war for its preservation, and we favor just and liberal pensions for all disabled Union soldiers, their widows and dependents; but we demand that the work of the Pension Office shall be done industriously, impartially, and honestly. We denounce the present administration of that office as incompetent, corrupt, disgraceful, and dishonest.

SEC. 14. The Federal Government should care for and improve the Mississippi River and other great waterways of the Republic, so as to secure for the interior States easy and cheap transportation to the tidewater. When any waterway of the Republic is of sufficient importance to demand the aid of the Government, such aid should be extended for a definite plan of continuous work until permanent improvement is secured.

SEC. 15. For purposes of national defence and the promotion of commerce between the States, we recognize the early construction of the Nicaragua Canal, and its protection against foreign control, as of great importance to the United States.

SEC. 16. Recognizing the World’s Columbian Exposition as a national undertaking of vast importance, in which the General Government has invited the co-operation of all the powers of the world, and appreciating the acceptance by many of such powers of the invitation extended, and the broadest liberal efforts being made by them to contribute to the grandeur of the undertaking, we are of the opinion that Congress should make such necessary financial provision as shall be requisite to the maintenance of the national honor and public faith.

SEC. 17. Popular education being the only safe basis of popular suffrage, we recommend to the several States most liberal appropriations for the public schools. Free common schools are the nursery of good government, and they have always received the fostering care of the Democratic party, which favors every means of increasing intelligence. Freedom of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty, as well as a necessity for the development of intelligence, must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever. We are opposed to State interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children, as an infringement of the fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.

SEC. 18. We approve the action of the present House of Representatives in passing bills for the admission into the Union as States of the Territories of New Mexico and Arizona, and we favor the early admission of all the Territories having necessary population and resources to admit them to Statehood; and, while they remain Territories, we hold that the officials appointed to administer the government of any Territory, together with the Districts of Columbia and Alaska, should be _bonâ fide_ residents of the Territory or district in which their duties are to be performed. The Democratic party believes in home rule, and the control of their own affairs by the people of the vicinage.

SEC. 19. We favor legislation by Congress and State Legislatures to protect the lives and limbs of railway employees, and those of other hazardous transportation companies, and denounce the inactivity of the Republican party, and particularly the Republican Senate, for causing the defeat of measures beneficial and protective to this class of wageworkers.

SEC. 20. We are in favor of the enactment by the States of laws for abolishing the notorious sweating system, for abolishing contract convict labor, and for prohibiting the employment in factories of children under fifteen years of age.

SEC. 21. We are opposed to all sumptuary laws as an interference with the individual rights of the citizen.