The increased duties of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act marked a shift in the policies of President William Howard Taft from progressive reform toward a more conservative, business-oriented politics. Upon leaving the office of president, Theodore Roosevelt had charged Taft, his chosen successor, with continuing the progressive reform agenda that he had initiated during his two terms as president. When Taft entered office in 1909, he continued many of the progressive reforms that his predecessor had established, but he was not entirely comfortable in the role of reformer. A natural conservative, Taft sanctified private property and revered the process of the law. Still, President Taft was aggressive in attempting to deflate in one term the power held by trusts that Roosevelt had attempted in his two terms as president.
By 1909 the Republican Party was torn on how to respond to the demands of the Progressive movement. While the movement lacked a coherent, unifying element, it tended to speak for the need to better regulate and control the economic power held by the corporate elite. Progressives considered protective tariffs a major factor in the consolidation of economic power that had contributed to the decline of competition in the American marketplace. Instead of protective tariffs, which often closed the American market to less-expensive imported products, Progressives argued for a revenue tariff that would allow the federal government to generate needed revenues but that did not entirely close the American market to foreign products. Despite advocating a progressive agenda during his presidential campaign, President Taft annoyed many Progressives when he signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff in 1909.
When he entered office, Taft had favored lowering tariffs on a broad range of commodities. In a relatively short amount of time, the House passed a bill that lowered the tariff on a number of products and goods, but the Senate took a different position from the House. The chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Nelson W. Aldrich, guided through the Senate a bill that drastically revised and enlarged the tariff on more than 800 items. The tariff created an acrimonious debate in the Senate, with Midwestern Republicans charging that the legislation was a throwback to the days when the Republican Party served the interests of industry without question. Taft, who had initially supported lowering the tariff, came to support the
Payne-Aldrich Tariff for fear that, if he did otherwise, it would cause a split within the Republican Party. Unwilling to interfere in the legislative process, Taft signed the bill and steadily drifted into the orbit of the Republican Old Guard. Accordingly, President Taft quickly alienated the progressive wing of his party, causing it to actually split, with the formation of the Progressive Party, by the next presidential election in 1912.
See also progressivism.
Further reading: Edward S. Kaplan, Prelude to Trade Wars: American Tariff Policy, 1890-1922 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994).
—David R. Smith
World History
