Part 40

SEC. 22. Upon this statement of principles and policies, the Democratic party asks the intelligent judgment of the American people. It asks a change of administration and a change of party in order that there may be a change of system and a change of methods, thus assuring the maintenance unimpaired of institutions under which the Republic has grown great and powerful.

The platform, as originally reported, contained, instead of the first paragraph of Section 3, the following:

We reiterate the oft-repeated doctrines of the Democratic party that the necessity of the Government is the only justification for taxation, and whenever a tax is unnecessary it is unjustifiable; that when custom-house taxation is levied upon articles of any kind produced in this country, the difference between the cost of labor here and labor abroad, when such a difference exists, fully measures any possible benefits to labor; and the enormous additional impositions of the existing tariff fall with crushing force upon our farmers and workingmen, and, for the mere advantage of the few whom it enriches, exact from labor a grossly unjust share of the expenses of the Government; and we demand such a revision of the tariff laws as will remove their iniquitous inequalities, lighten their oppressions, and put them on a constitutional and equitable basis. But in making reduction in taxes, it is not proposed to injure any domestic industries, but rather to promote their healthy growth. From the foundation of this Government, taxes collected at the custom-house have been the chief source of Federal revenue. Such they must continue to be. Moreover, many industries have come to rely upon legislation for successful continuance, so that any change of law must be at every step regardful of the labor and capital thus involved. The process of reform must be subject in the execution to this plain dictate of justice.

The National Prohibition Convention was held at Cincinnati on the 29th of June, with John P. St. John, of Kansas, as temporary chairman, and Eli Ritter, of Indiana, as permanent chairman. The convention remained in session two days. The following was the only ballot for President:

John Bidwell, Cal. 590 Gideon T. Stewart, Ohio 179 W. J. Demorest, N. Y. 139 Scattering 3

A single ballot was had for Vice-President, as follows:

J. P. Cranfill, Texas 417 Joshua Levering, Md. 351 W. W. Satterlee, Minn. 26 T. R. Carskoden, W. Va. 19

The nominations of Bidwell and Cranfill were made unanimous. The following platform was adopted:

The Prohibition party, in national convention assembled, acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all true government, and His law as the standard to which all human enactments must conform to secure the blessings of peace and prosperity, presents the following declaration of principles:

1. The liquor traffic is a foe to civilization, the arch enemy of popular government, and a public nuisance. It is the citadel of the forces that corrupt politics, promote poverty and crime, degrade the nation’s home life, thwart the will of the people, and deliver our country into the hands of rapacious class interests. All laws that, under the guise of regulation, legalize and protect this traffic, or make the Government share in its ill-gotten gains, are “vicious in principle and powerless as a remedy.”

We declare anew for the entire suppression of the manufacture, sale, importation, exportation, and transportation of alcoholic liquors as a beverage, by Federal and State legislation; and the full powers of the Government should be exerted to secure this result. Any party that fails to recognize the dominant nature of this issue in American politics is undeserving of the support of the people.

2. No citizen should be denied the right to vote on account of sex, and equal labor should receive equal wages, without regard to sex.

3. The money of the country should be gold, silver, and paper, and be issued by the General Government only, and in sufficient quantities to meet the demands of business and give full opportunity for the employment of labor. To this end an increase in the volume of money is demanded, and no individual or corporation should be allowed to make any profit through its issue. It should be made a legal tender for the payment of all debts, public and private. Its volume should be fixed at a definite sum per capita, and made to increase with our increase in population.

4. We favor the free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold. (Rejected by the convention.)

5. Tariffs should be levied only as a defence against foreign governments which put tariffs upon or bar our products from their markets, revenue being incidental. The residue of means necessary to an economical administration of the Government should be raised by levying a burden on what the people possess instead of upon what we consume.

6. Railroad, telegraph, and other public corporations should be controlled by the Government in the interest of the people, and no higher charges allowed than necessary to give fair interest on the capital actually invested.

7. Foreign immigration has become a burden upon industry, one of the factors in depressing wages and causing discontent; therefore our immigration laws should be revised and strictly enforced. The time of residence for naturalization should be extended, and no naturalized person should be allowed to vote until one year after he becomes a citizen.

8. Non-resident aliens should not be allowed to acquire land in this country, and we favor the limitation of individual and corporate ownership of land. All unearned grants of lands to railroad companies or other corporations should be reclaimed.

9. Years of inaction and treachery on the part of the Republican and Democratic parties have resulted in the present reign of mob law, and we demand that every citizen be protected in the right of trial by constitutional tribunals.

10. All men should be protected by law in their right to one day’s rest in seven.

11. Arbitration is the wisest and most economical and humane method of settling national differences.

12. Speculations in margins, the cornering of grain, money, and products, and the formation of pools, trusts, and combinations for the arbitrary advancement of prices, should be suppressed.

13. We pledge that the Prohibition party if elected to power will ever grant just pensions to disabled veterans of the Union army and navy, their widows and orphans.

14. We stand unequivocally for the American public school, and opposed to any appropriation of public moneys for sectarian schools. We declare that only by united support of such common schools, taught in the English language, can we hope to become and remain an homogeneous and harmonious people.

15. We arraign the Republican and Democratic parties as false to the standards reared by their founders; as faithless to the principles of the illustrious leaders of the past to whom they do homage with the lips; as recreant to the “higher law,” which is as inflexible in political affairs as in personal life; and as no longer embodying the aspirations of the American people, or inviting the confidence of enlightened progressive patriotism. Their protests against the admission of “moral issues” into politics is a confession of their own moral degeneracy. The declaration of an eminent authority, that municipal misrule is “the one conspicuous failure of American politics,” follows as a natural consequence of such degeneracy, and is true alike of cities under Republican and Democratic control. Each accuses the other of extravagance in Congressional appropriations, and both are alike guilty; each protests when out of power against the infraction of the civil service laws, and each when in power violates those laws in letter and spirit; each professes fealty to the interests of the toiling masses, but both covertly truckle to the money power in their administration of public affairs. Even the tariff issue, as represented in the Democratic Mills bill and the Republican McKinley bill, is no longer treated by them as an issue upon great and divergent principles of government, but is a mere catering to different sectional and class interests. The attempt in many States to wrest the Australian ballot system from its true purpose, and to so deform it as to render it extremely difficult for new parties to exercise the rights of suffrage, is an outrage upon popular government. The competition of both the parties for the vote of the slums, and their assiduous courting of the liquor power and subserviency to the money power, have resulted in placing those powers in the position of practical arbiters of the destinies of the nation. We renew our protest against these perilous tendencies, and invite all citizens to join us in the upbuilding of a party that, as shown in five national campaigns, prefers temporary defeat to an abandonment of the claims of justice, sobriety, personal rights, and the protection of American homes.

The only opposition being to the fourth resolution declaring for the free coinage of silver, that was defeated by a vote of 596 to 335.

The campaign of 1892 gave birth to the People’s party, that embraced the old Greenbackers and most of the other odds and ends of former side political organizations, and it proved to be an important factor in the struggle. It held its national convention at Omaha on the 2d of July, with C. H. Ellington, of Georgia, as temporary chairman and H. L. Loucks, of South Dakota, as permanent president. The 1st and only ballot for President resulted as follows:

James B. Weaver, Iowa 995 James H. Kyle, S. D. 265 Scattering 3

Only one ballot was had for Vice-President, as follows:

James G. Field, Virginia 733 Benj. S. Terrell, Texas 554

The nominations of Weaver and Field were made unanimous and the following platform adopted:

Assembled upon the 116th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the People’s party of America, in their first national convention, invoking upon their action the blessing of Almighty God, puts forth, in the name and on behalf of the people of this country, the following preamble and declaration of principles:

The conditions which surround us best justify our co-operation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling-places to prevent universal intimidation or bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes of tramps and millionaires.

The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bondholders; a vast public debt, payable in legal tender currency, has been funded into gold-bearing bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the people. Silver, which has been accepted as coin since the dawn of history, has been demonetized to add to the purchasing power of gold by decreasing the value of all forms of property as well as human labor; and the supply of currency is purposely abridged to fatten usurers, bankrupt enterprise, and enslave industry. A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once, it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism.

We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful condition to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore in the campaign every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver, and the oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.

Assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand general chief who established our independence, we seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of “the plain people,” with whose class it originated. We assert our purposes to be identical with the purposes of the national Constitution, “to form a more perfect union and establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” We declare that this Republic can only endure as a free Government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other and for the nation; that it cannot be pinned together by bayonets; that the civil war is over, and that every passion and resentment which grew out of it must die with it; and that we must be in fact, as we are in name, one united brotherhood of freemen.

Our country finds itself confronted by conditions for which there is no precedent in the history of the world: our annual agricultural productions amount to billions of dollars in value, which must, within a few weeks or months, be exchanged for billions of dollars of commodities consumed in their production; the existing currency supply is wholly inadequate to make this exchange; the results are falling prices, the formation of combines and rings, the impoverishment of the producing class. We pledge ourselves, if given power, we will labor to correct these evils by wise and reasonable legislation, in accordance with the terms of our platform. We believe that the powers of Government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.

While our sympathies as a party of reform are naturally upon the side of every proposition which will tend to make men intelligent, virtuous, and temperate, we nevertheless regard these questions—important as they are—as secondary to the great issues now pressing for solution, and upon which not only our individual prosperity but the very existence of free institutions depends; and we ask all men to first help us to determine whether we are to have a Republic to administer before we differ as to the conditions upon which it is to be administered; believing that the forces of reform this day organized will never cease to move forward until every wrong is remedied, and equal rights and equal privileges securely established for all the men and women of this country.

We declare, therefore—

First. That the union of the labor forces of the United States this day consummated shall be permanent and perpetual; may its spirit enter all hearts for the salvation of the Republic and the uplifting of mankind!

Second. Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civic labor are the same; their enemies are identical.

Third. We believe that the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads; and, should the Government enter upon the work of owning and managing all railroads, we should favor an amendment to the Constitution by which all persons engaged in the Government service shall be placed under a civil service regulation of the most rigid character, so as to prevent the increase of the power of the national administration by the use of such additional Government employés.

We demand—

First, A national currency, safe, sound, and flexible, issued by the General Government only, a full legal tender for all debts, public and private, and that, without the use of banking corporations, a just, equitable, and efficient means of distribution direct to the people, at a tax not to exceed two per cent. per annum, to be provided as set forth in the sub-treasury plan of the Farmers’ Alliance, or a better system; also, by payments in discharge of its obligations for public improvements.

(_a_) We demand free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one.

(_b_) We demand that the amount of circulating medium be speedily increased to not less than fifty dollars per capita.

(_c_) We demand a graduated income tax.

(_d_) We believe that the money of the country should be kept as much as possible in the hands of the people, and hence we demand that all State and national revenues shall be limited to the necessary expenses of the Government economically and honestly administered.

(_e_) We demand that postal savings banks be established by the Government for the safe deposit of the earnings of the people and to facilitate exchange.

Second, Transportation. Transportation being a means of exchange and a public necessity, the Government should own and operate the railroads in the interest of the people.

(_a_) The telegraph and telephone, like the post-office system, being a necessity for the transmission of news, should be owned and operated by the Government in the interest of the people.

Third, Land. The land, including all the natural sources of wealth, is the heritage of the people, and should not be monopolized for speculative purposes, and alien ownership of land should be prohibited. All land now held by railroads and other corporations in excess of their actual needs, and all lands now owned by aliens, should be reclaimed by the Government and held for actual settlers only.

The following supplemental report was made, not to be regarded as a part of the party platform, but as expressive of the opinion of the party, as follows:

_Whereas_, Other questions have been presented for our consideration, we hereby submit the following, not as a part of the platform of the People’s party, but as resolutions expressive of the sentiment of this convention.

1. _Resolved_, That we demand a free ballot and a fair count in all elections, and pledge ourselves to secure it to every legal voter without federal intervention, through the adoption by the States of the unperverted Australian or secret ballot system.

2. _Resolved_, That the revenue derived from a graduated income tax should be applied to the reduction of the burden of taxation now resting upon the domestic industries of this country.

3. _Resolved_, That we pledge our support to fair and liberal pensions to ex-Union soldiers and sailors.

4. _Resolved_, That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world, and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable immigration.

5. _Resolved_, That we cordially sympathize with the efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of labor, and demand a rigid enforcement of the existing eight-hour law on Government work, and ask that a penalty clause be added to the said law.

6. _Resolved_, That we regard the maintenance of a large standing army of mercenaries, known as the Pinkerton system, as a menace to our liberties, and we demand its abolition; and we condemn the recent invasion of the Territory of Wyoming by the hired assassins of plutocracy, assisted by Federal officials.

7. _Resolved_, That we commend to the favorable consideration of the people and the reform press the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum.

8. _Resolved_, That we favor a constitutional provision limiting the office of President and Vice-President to one term, and providing for the election of Senators of the United States by a direct vote of the people.

9. _Resolved_, That we oppose any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation for any purpose.

The convention was a mass assembly, as Texas cast more votes than New York and nearly thrice the vote of Pennsylvania.

The Socialists’ Labor Convention met at New York on the 28th of August, and nominated Simon Wing, of Massachusetts, for President and Charles H. Machett, of New York, for Vice-President, and adopted the following platform:

_Social Demands_: 1. Reduction of the hours of labor in proportion to the progress of production.

2. The United States shall obtain possession of the railroads, canals, telegraphs, telephones, and all other means of public transportation and communication.

3. The municipalities to obtain possession of the local railroads, ferries, water-works, gas-works, electric plants, and all industries requiring municipal franchises.

4. The public lands to be declared inalienable. Revocation of all land grants to corporations or individuals, the conditions of which have not been complied with.

5. Legal incorporation by the States of local trade unions which have no national organization.

6. The United States to have the exclusive right to issue money.

7. Congressional legislation providing for the scientific management of forests and waterways, and prohibiting the waste of the natural resources of the country.

8. Inventions to be free to all; the inventors to be remunerated by the nation.

9. Progressive income tax and tax on inheritances; the smaller incomes to be exempt.

10. School education of all children under fourteen years of age to be compulsory, gratuitous, and accessible to all by public assistance in meals, clothing, books, etc., where necessary.

11. Repeal of all pauper, tramp, conspiracy, and sumptuary laws. Unabridged right of combination.

12. Official statistics concerning the condition of labor. Prohibition of the employment of children of school age, and of the employment of female labor in occupations detrimental to health or morality. Abolition of the convict labor contract system.

13. All wages to be paid in lawful money of the United States. Equalization of women’s wages with those of men where equal service is performed.

14. Laws for the protection of life and limb in all occupations, and an efficient employers’ liability law.

_Political Demands_: 1. The people to have the right to propose laws and to vote upon all measures of importance, according to the referendum principle.

2. Abolition of the Presidency, Vice-Presidency, and Senate of the United States. An Executive Board to be established, whose members are to be elected, and may at any time be recalled, by the House of Representatives, as the only legislative body. The States and municipalities to adopt corresponding amendments to their constitutions and statutes.

3. Municipal self-government.

4. Direct vote and secret ballots in all elections. Universal and equal right of suffrage, without regard to color, creed, or sex. Election days to be legal holidays. The principle of minority representation to be introduced.

5. All public officers to be subject to recall by their respective constituencies.

6. Uniform civil and criminal law throughout the United States. Administration of justice to be free of charge. Abolition of capital punishment.