THE TARIFF

The new president sounded like a social-justice progressive in his inaugural address. “We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through.” He promised that the government, which had been too often used for “private and selfish purposes,” would now respond to “the groans and agony of it all.” But Wilson’s legislative program, usually called “the New Freedom,” was rather modest. He led with tariff reform, among the oldest of Democratic causes. Wilson’s dramatic gesture of appearing in person before Congress to make his appeal for tariff reduction grew out of his political theory of expanded executive power and party leadership, but it also revived a practice of George Washington and John Adams. The tariff-reduction program assumed the antebellum argument that a protective tariff was unconstitutional. Some progressives disliked the Democratic position of a tariff for revenue only, since the tariff was a “regressive” tax paid by consumers. They favored an income tax to shift the burden of taxation from the poor to the rich. But the first income tax, made possible by the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, was only slightly more progressive than the 1894 act, exempting income under $3,000 and imposing a top rate of 7 percent on incomes over $500,000.