The Greater Republic Part 64

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1896.

The presidential election in the fall of 1896 was a remarkable one. The month of September had hardly opened when there were eight presidential tickets in the field. Given in the order of their nominations they were:

Prohibition (May 27th)--Joshua Levering, of Maryland; Hale Johnson, of Illinois.

National Party, Free Silver, Woman-Suffrage offshoot of the regular Prohibition (May 28th)--Charles E. Bentley, of Nebraska; James H.

Southgate, of North Carolina.

Republican (June 18th)--William McKinley, of Ohio; Garret A. Hobart, of New Jersey.

Socialist-Labor (July 4th)--Charles H. Matchett, of New York; Matthew Maguire, of New Jersey.

Democratic (July 10th to 11th)--William Jennings Bryan, of Nebraska; Arthur Sewall, of Maine.

People's Party (July 24th to 25th)--William Jennings Bryan, of Nebraska; Thomas E. Watson, of Georgia.

National Democratic Party (September 8th)--John McAuley Palmer, of Illinois; Simon Boliver Buckner, of Kentucky.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WM. JENNINGS BRYAN. Democratic candidate for President, 1896.]

As usual, the real contest was between the Democrats and Republicans.

The platform of the former demanded the free coinage of silver, which was opposed by the Republicans, who insisted upon preserving the existing gold standard. This question caused a split in each of the leading parties. When the Republican nominating convention inserted the gold and silver plank in its platform, Senator Teller, of Colorado, led thirty-two delegates in their formal withdrawal from the convention. A large majority of those to the National Democratic Convention favored the free coinage of silver in the face of an urgent appeal against it by President Cleveland. They would accept no compromise, and, after "jamming" through their platform and nominating Mr. Bryan, they made Arthur Sewall their candidate for Vice-President, though he was president of a national bank and a believer in the gold standard.

In consequence of this action, the Populists or People's Party refused to accept the candidature of Mr. Sewall, and put in his place the name of Thomas E. Watson, who was an uncompromising Populist.

There was also a revolt among the "Sound Money Democrats," as they were termed. Although they knew they had no earthly chance of winning, they were determined to place themselves on record, and, after all the other tickets were in the field, they put Palmer and Buckner in nomination. In their platform they condemned the platform adopted by the silver men and the tariff policy of the Republicans. They favored tariff for revenue only, the single gold standard, a bank currency under governmental supervision, international arbitration, and the maintenance of the independence and authority of the Supreme Court.

Mr. Bryan threw all his energies into the canva.s.s and displayed wonderful industry and vigor. He made whirlwind tours through the country, speaking several times a day and in the evening, and won many converts. Had the election taken place a few weeks earlier than the regular date, it is quite probable he would have won. Mr. McKinley made no speech-making tours, but talked many times to the crowds who called upon him at his home in Canton, Ohio. The official vote in November was as follows:

McKinley and Hobart, Republican, 7,101,401 popular votes; 271 electoral votes.

Bryan and Sewall, Democrat and Populist, 6,470,656 popular votes; 176 electoral votes.

Levering and Johnson, Prohibition, 132,007 popular votes.

Palmer and Buckner, National Democrat, 133,148 popular votes.

Matchett and Maguire, Socialist-Labor, 36,274 popular votes.

Bentley and Southgate, Free Silver Prohibition, 13,969 popular votes.

Despite the political upheavals that periodically occur throughout our country, it steadily advances in prosperity, progress and growth. Its resources were limitless, and the settlement of the vast fertile areas in the West and Northwest went on at an extraordinary rate. In no section was this so strikingly the fact as in the Northwest. So great indeed was the growth in that respect that the subject warrants the special chapter that follows.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CORNER AT TOP OF STAIRWAY NEW CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY, WAs.h.i.+NGTON, D.C.]

CHAPTER XXIII.

ADMINISTRATION OF CLEVELAND (SECOND-CONCLUDED), 1893-1897.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST.

BY ALBERT SHAW, PH.D.,

_Editor "Review of Reviews," formerly editor of "Minneapolis Tribune."_

Settling the Northwest--The Face of the Country Transformed--Clearing Away the Forests and its Effects--Tree-planting on the Prairies--Pioneer Life in the Seventies--The Granary of the World--The Northwestern Farmer--Transportation and Other Industries--Business Cities and Centres--United Public Action and its Influence--The Indian Question--Other Elements of Population--Society and General Culture.

"Northwest" is a s.h.i.+fting, uncertain designation. The term has been used to cover the whole stretch of country from Pittsburg to Puget Sound, north of the Ohio River and the thirty-seventh parallel of lat.i.tude.

Popularly it signified the old Northwestern Territory--including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin--until about the time of the Civil War. In the decade following the war, Illinois and Iowa were largely in the minds of men who spoke of the Northwest. From 1870 to 1880, Iowa, Kansas, northern Missouri, and Nebraska const.i.tuted the most stirring and favored region--the Northwest _par excellence_. But the past decade has witnessed a remarkable development in the Dakotas; and Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana, with Iowa and Nebraska, are perhaps the States most familiarly comprised in the idea of the Northwest. These States are really in the heart of the continent--midway between oceans; and perhaps by common consent the term Northwest will, a decade hence, have moved on and taken firm possession of Oregon, Was.h.i.+ngton, Idaho, and Wyoming, while ultimately Alaska may succeed to the designation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALBERT SHAW.]

But for the present the Northwest is the great arable wedge lying between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. It is a region that is pretty clearly defined upon a map showing physical characteristics. For the most part, it is a region of great natural fertility, of regular north-temperate climate, of moderate but sufficient rainfall, of scant forests and great prairie expanses, and of high average alt.i.tude without mountains. In a word, it is a region that was adapted by nature to the cultivation of the cereals and leading crops of the temperate zone without arduous and time-consuming processes for subduing the wilderness and redeeming the soil.

SETTLING THE NORTHWEST.

This "New Northwest," in civilization and in all its significant characteristics, is the creature of the vast impulse that the successful termination of the war gave the nation. No other extensive area was ever settled under similar conditions. The homestead laws, the new American system of railroad building, and the unprecedented demand for staple food products in the industrial centres at home and abroad, peopled the prairies as if by magic. Until 1870, fixing the date very roughly, transportation facilities followed colonization. The railroads were built to serve and stimulate a traffic that already existed. The pioneers had done a generation's work before the iron road overtook them. In the past two decades all has been changed. The railroads have been the pioneers and colonizers. They have invaded the solitary wilderness, and the population has followed. Much of the land has belonged to the roads, through subsidy grants, but the greater part of the mileage has been laid without the encouragement of land subsidies or other bonuses, by railway corporations that were willing to look to the future for their reward.

It would be almost impossible to over-estimate the significance of this method of colonization. Within a few years it has transformed the buffalo ranges into the world's most extensive fields of wheat and corn.

A region comprising northern and western Minnesota and the two Dakotas, which contributed practically nothing to the country's wheat supply twelve or fifteen years ago, has, by this system of railroad colonization, reached an annual production of 100,000,000 bushels of wheat alone--about one-fourth of the crop of the entire country. In like manner, parts of western Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, that produced no corn before 1875 or 1880, are now the centre of corn-raising, and yield many hundreds of millions of bushels annually. These regions enter as totally new factors into the world's supply of foods and raw materials.

A great area of this new territory might be defined that was inhabited in 1870 by less than a million people, in 1880 by more than three millions, and in 1899 by from eight to ten millions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A DISPUTE OVER A BRAND.]

Let us imagine a man from the East who has visited the Northwestern States and Territories at some time between the years 1870 and 1875, and who retains a strong impression of what he saw, but who has not been west of Chicago since that time, until, in the World's Fair year, he determines upon a new exploration of Iowa, Nebraska, the Datokas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. However well informed he had tried to keep himself through written descriptions and statistical records of Western progress, he would see what nothing but the evidence of his own eyes could have made him believe to be possible. Iowa in 1870 was already producing a large crop of cereals, and was inhabited by a thriving, though very new, farming population. But the aspect of the country was bare and uninviting, except in the vicinity of the older communities on the Mississippi River. As one advanced across the State the farm-houses were very small, and looked like isolated dry-goods boxes; there were few well-built barns or farm buildings; and the struggling young cottonwood and soft-maple saplings planted in close groves about the tiny houses were so slight an obstruction to the sweep of vision across the open prairie that they only seemed to emphasize the monotonous stretches of fertile, but uninteresting, plain. Now the landscape is wholly transformed. A railroad ride in June through the best parts of Iowa reminds one of a ride through some of the pleasantest farming districts of England. The primitive "claim shanties" of thirty years ago have given place to commodious farm-houses flanked by great barns and hay-ricks, and the well-appointed structures of a prosperous agriculture. In the rich, deep meadows herds of fine-blooded cattle are grazing. What was once a blank, dreary landscape is now garden-like and inviting. The poor little saplings of the earlier days, which seemed to be apologizing to the robust corn-stalks in the neighboring fields, have grown on that deep soil into great, spreading trees. One can easily imagine, as he looks off in every direction and notes a wooded horizon, that he is--as in Ohio, Indiana, or Kentucky--in a farming region which has been cleared out of primeval forests. There are many towns I might mention which twenty-five years ago, with their new, wooden shanties scattered over the bare face of the prairie, seemed the hottest place on earth as the summer sun beat upon their unshaded streets and roofs, and seemed the coldest places on earth when the fierce blizzards of winter swept unchecked across the prairie expanses. To-day the density of shade in those towns is deemed of positive detriment to health, and for several years past there has been a systematic thinning out and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g up of the great, cl.u.s.tering elms. Trees of from six to ten feet in girth are found everywhere by the hundreds of thousands. Each farm-house is sheltered from winter winds by its own dense groves. Many of the farmers are able from the surplus growth of wood upon their estates to provide themselves with a large and regular supply of fuel. If I have dwelt at some length upon this picture of the transformation of the bleak, grain-producing Iowa prairies of thirty years ago into the dairy and live-stock farms of to-day, with their fragrant meadows and ample groves, it is because the picture is one which reveals so much as to the nature and meaning of Northwestern progress.

CLEARING AWAY THE FORESTS AND ITS EFFECTS.

Not a little has been written regarding the rapid destruction of the vast white-pine forests with which nature has covered large districts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It is true that this denudation has progressed at a rate with which nothing of a like character in the history of the world is comparable. It is also true, doubtless, that the clearing away of dense forest areas has been attended with some inconvenient climatic results, and particularly with some objectionable effects upon the even distribution of rainfall and the regularity of the flow of rivers. But most persons who have been alarmed at the rapidity of forest destruction in the white-pine belt have wholly overlooked the great compensating facts. It happens that the white-pine region is not especially fertile, and that for some time to come it is not likely to acquire a prosperous agriculture. But adjacent to it and beyond it there was a vast region of country which, though utterly treeless, was endowed with a marvelous richness of soil and with a climate fitted for all the staple productions of the temperate zone. This region embraced parts of Illinois, almost the whole of Iowa, southern Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and parts of Montana--a region of imperial extent. Now, it happens that for every acre of pine land that has been denuded in Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota there are somewhere in the great treeless region further south and west two or three new farm-houses. The railroads, pus.h.i.+ng ahead of settlement out into the open prairie, have carried the white-pine lumber from the gigantic sawmills of the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries; and thus millions of acres of land have been brought under cultivation by farmers who could not have been housed in comfort but for the proximity of the pine forests. The rapid clearing away of timber areas in Wisconsin has simply meant the rapid settlement of North and South Dakota, western Iowa, and Nebraska.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CATHEDRAL SPIRES, COLORADO.]

TREE PLANTING ON THE PRAIRIES.

The settlement of these treeless regions means the successful growth on every farm of at least several hundred trees. Without attempting to be statistical or exact, we might say that an acre of northern Minnesota pine trees makes it possible for a farmer in Dakota or Nebraska to have a house, farm buildings, and fences, with a holding of at least one hundred and sixty acres upon which he will successfully cultivate several acres of forest trees of different kinds. Even if the denuded pine lands of the region south and west of Lake Superior would not readily produce a second growth of dense forest--which, it should be said in pa.s.sing, they certainly will--their loss would be far more than made good by the universal cultivation of forest trees in the prairie States. It is at least comforting to reflect, when the friends of scientific forestry warn us against the ruthless destruction of standing timber, that thus far at least in our Western history we have simply been cutting down trees in order to put a roof over the head of the man who was invading treeless regions for the purpose of planting and nurturing a hundred times as many trees as had been destroyed for his benefit! There is something almost inspiring in the contemplation of millions of families, all the way from Minnesota to Colorado and Texas, living in the shelter of these new pine houses and transforming the plains into a shaded and fruitful empire.

PIONEER LIFE IN THE SEVENTIES.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SLUICE-GATE.]

The enormous expansion of our railway systems will soon have made it quite impossible for any of the younger generation to realize what hards.h.i.+ps were attendant upon such limited colonization of treeless prairie regions as preceded the iron rails. In 1876 I spent the summer in a part of Dakota to which a considerable number of hardy but poor farmers had found their way and taken up claims. They could not easily procure wood for houses, no other ordinary building material was accessible, and they were living in half-underground "dugouts,"