Albert J. Beveridge, 26th President of the United States - Source: Wiki Commons
Part 3: Half-Staff
Chapter VII: To Pacific Shores: Beveridge and Imperial Normalcy
Upon learning of his defeat at the hands of the very symbol of imperialist expansion, President William J. Bryan was profoundly devastated. Bryan believed that he could not fail as long as the public supported him, and often said he deserved to fail without their support. Once the total presidential popular vote count confirmed his loss by several hundred thousand votes, Bryan had no choice but to accept that his position was not favored by the American public he so relied on. In a short and nonchalant concession address, the president stated, "My faith lies in popular democracy, and this faith is unshaken.
Eugene Debs, who like Bryan depended entirely on mass public support, learned that regardless of the size of his audiences and his tireless association of democratic socialism with a fulfillment of American democratic promise, the Social Democrats were unable to circumvent the reality of the electorate. He arrived in a distant fourth place in the election, behind Prohibitionist John Woolley, and collected a subpar 103,000 votes. He officially ended his candidacy with a bittersweet message. "Thus closes the campaign - and the results show that we got everything except votes. I am serene for two reasons: 1st. I did the very best I could for the party that nominated me and for its principles. 2nd. The working class will get in full measure what they voted for. And so we begin the campaign of 1904."
Three groups in particular were ecstatic over the final election results: The Republican Old-Guard, the Bourbon Democrats, and the big business community. Republicans, as one may imagine, were thrilled to win back control over the federal government for the first time since Grover Cleveland took office in 1893. They celebrated the occasion as a return to rational normality: a reactionary beckoning of past greatness. To Republican politicians and voters, the back-to-back terms of Cleveland and Bryan proved the chaotic and incapable nature of Democratic rule as opposed to the sagacious GOP.
For the Bourbons, analogous sentiment was shared. Holding such a degree of quiet disdain for President Bryan and the turmoil he had unleashed onto their once-Jeffersonian political party, conservative Democrats had even more reason to celebrate than the Republicans. Bourbons were indisputably significant in the toppling of Bryan from his Washington residence and they attributed immensely to the fundraising efforts by the Beveridge Campaign. Mark Hanna's enormously successful solicitation for campaign funds was matched by former Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle and former Wisconsin Senator William F. Vilas, who similarly worked to sway entrepreneurial types like Andrew Carnegie to participate in the political game. Due to the work of Carlisle, Vilas, and others in that vein, it is estimated that Bourbons contributed almost one half of Beveridge's entire war chest in the 1900 election.
Indeed, even affluent members of the American Anti-Imperialist League like Andrew Carnegie and John Carlisle preferred an expansionist like Beveridge to the populist mania of Bryan. In fact, the entire corporate community rallied hard behind the Republican candidate from the get-go, and, as such, they were positively ecstatic when news arrived of Bryan's downfall. The stock market leaped in reaction to the election results as industrialists excitedly awaited their new overseas opportunities. Although, as previously inferred, the economy did not plummet whatsoever once Bryan ascended to the presidency, it did certainly rocket upward with Beveridge taking office.
Albert J. Beveridge was officially inaugurated as the 26th President of the United States on March 4th, 1901. Once completing the Oath of Office, as administered by Chief Justice Fuller, the new president unleashed a powerful speech to a captive audience.
The next great business reform we must have to steadily increase American prosperity is to change the method of building our tariffs. The tariff must be taken out of politics and treated as a business question instead of as a political question. Heretofore, we have done just the other thing. That is why American business is upset every few years by unnecessary tariff upheavals and is weakened by uncertainty in the periods between. [...] Our greatest fiscal need is a genuine, permanent, non-partisan tariff commission.
Child labor in factories, mills, mines and sweat-shops must be ended throughout the Republic. Such labor is a crime against childhood because it prevents the growth of normal manhood and womanhood. It is a crime against the Nation because it prevents the growth of a host of children into strong, patriotic and intelligent citizens. Only the nation can stop this industrial vice.
Another market for our surplus requires no reciprocity except decent international treatment; and yet it is the greatest unexploited market on the globe - the market of China and the Orient. To that market we are carried by the development of another principle as natural as that of industrial combination - the principle of expansion. It is a principle universal, and manifests itself in the life of every individual, the progress of every business firm and sweeps onward through the whole range of human activity to the policies of nations.
As the old Whig party resisted American expansion of California, and went to its death; so the late Democratic party resisted American expansion over sea and went to its death. And now [the Democrats] demand that America turn away. Why should we, then, in the very hour when Commercial expansion is swiftly becoming our mortal need, abandon this prospect; give up the mastery of the Pacific and the control of the Orient? It is a policy of decrepitude, a proposition of disgrace.
We will be consoled, too, with the fact that opposition has confronted every onward movement of the Republic from its opening hour until now, but without success. The Republic has marched on and on, and its step has exalted freedom and humanity. We are undergoing the same ordeal as did our predecessors nearly a century ago. We are following the course they blazed. They triumphed.
Albert Beveridge, Inaugural Address Excerpt, March 4th, 1901