Who will get the credit?
An interior view of the House of Representatives shows Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other. A gigantic man wearing a crown labeled “Protected Trusts” and clothing decorated with dollar signs, his hands resting on a huge club labeled “Protected Tariffs,” sits before them, dwarfing the Speaker’s chair and rostrum. Representative Joseph W. Babcock climbs the club and turns to address Republican colleagues who attempt to flee in fear. The Democrats calmly sit and laugh. Caption: Representative Babcock (to his Republican Associates)–You’d better help me take this club away! The Democrats will do it if you don’t!
Comments and Context
Around the turn of the century, elements in the Republican Party grew enamored of reciprocity as the basis of foreign trade. Not as radical as free trade, but an end to tariff wars; and even the pontiff of protectionism, slowly had been warming to the concept of reciprocity. President Theodore Roosevelt was firm in his agnosticism on the issue: he readily admitted he understood little of economics and he realized that tariff debates were the rocks on which many administrations had foundered. Indeed, there were to be no major tariff revisions in Roosevelt’s seven and a half years in the White House. At the time of this cartoon, Roosevelt had convened a meeting of major Republican figures, experts on protection and trade, to Oyster Bay in hopes of agreeing on a party policy. None was reached. In the meantime, the Wisconsin Representative Joseph W. Babcock startled Congress by introducing a tariff bill based on the “Iowa Idea” and aimed at the steel trust. It basically held that import tariffs that “protected” domestic industries controlled by trusts and monopolies would be eliminated. Bold or naive or both, Babcock’s bill failed passage. It was, however, a ripple of the wave of the future, and Keppler’s brilliant cartoon shows Babcock attempting to add a political-survival argument to his cause.
