Tariff Schedules: Hearings Before the Committee on Ways and Means, House of ...
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To Reduce the Duties on Wool and Manufactures of Wool ... Report
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Report. To Accompany H.r. 3321: A Bill To Reduce Tariff Duties, To Provide Revenue For The Government, And For Other Purposes, Together With Views Of Minority And Statistical Data, Volumes 17-119
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The Pilgrims of Plymouth. an Address At Plymouth, Massachusetts, December 21, 1920, on the Three Hundredth Anniversary of Their Landing, by Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator Briggs, Professor in Harvard University ...
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The Career and the Words of Washington ... Address of Hon. Oscar W. Underwood, of Alabama, Delivered at the Annual Banquet of the State Society of the ... on Washington's Birthday, February 22, 1912
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Oscar Wilder Underwood was an American lawyer and politician from Alabama. He was also a candidate for President of the United States in 1912 and 1924.
Background
Oscar Wilder Underwood was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Eugene Underwood and the latter's second wife, Frederica Virginia (Smith) Wilder Underwood. His earliest paternal ancestor in America, Thomas William (or William Thomas) Underwood, born c. 1675 near Norfolk, England, came to Virginia as a boy and his grandfather, Joseph Rogers Underwood, a native of Virginia, was representative and senator from Kentucky. When Oscar was three years old, his parents took him with them to St. Paul, Minnesota, and he spent the next decade at that frontier outpost. In 1875 his father and mother returned to Louisville.
Education
He attended the common schools and the Rugby School at Louisville. He was a student at the University of Virginia from 1881 to 1884, and was elected to the presidency of the Jefferson Society, one of the highest honors within the gift of the student body.
Career
In 1884 Underwood was admitted to the bar. After a brief period of practice in Minnesota, he removed to Birmingham, Alabama, then a small but growing town. In 1894 he announced his candidacy for the House of Representatives from the Birmingham district. He took his seat in March of the following year and served until June 1896, when he was succeeded by Truman H. Aldrich, who had contested his election.
He was then elected to the nine succeeding Congresses, and served continuously from March 4, 1897, until March 3, 1915. The following day he took his seat in the Senate, where he remained for two terms (1915 - 27). Early in his career as a congressman Underwood proclaimed his belief in the principle of a tariff for revenue only enunciated by President Grover Cleveland. The fact that he stood on this platform was evidence of his independence of mind, for Birmingham was already a center of the iron and steel industry, an industry which believed in protection. In no sense a spectacular figure, Underwood forged to the front by virtue of his high character, his winning personality, and his unflagging industry.
Those who knew him best respected him most, and after the Democrats captured control of the House in the elections of 1910, he was chosen by his party as floor leader (1911 - 15). At the same time he became chairman of the powerful ways and means committee. In the years immediately preceding, the Democrats had given little evidence of a coherent policy, and there was some uneasiness in the country as to whether Underwood, who was without great experience as a party helmsman, could mold them into a compact fighting force. Not only was he able to convince his party and the public of his ability to lead, but at the same time his detailed knowledge of the tariff, gained through years of close study, was an invaluable asset. The tariff was the issue of the hour.
President Taft called Congress in special session in 1911 to act on his Canadian reciprocity program. Putting aside narrow partisanship, Underwood gave unstinted support to reciprocity, since he felt it to be to a considerable degree compatible with the principles and purposes of the Democratic party. But at the same time he took the lead in revising many of the tariff schedules downward. This tariff legislation was all vetoed by President Taft. Thus was created an outstanding issue of the presidential campaign of 1912.
Underwood's leadership at the special session of 1911 met and overcame a serious challenge from the powerful William Jennings Bryan. Bryan charged him publicly with protecting certain interests in his tariff schedules. Underwood abandoned his usual suavity as he lashed back at the Commoner in denial of the accusation (Congressional Record, 62 Cong. , 1 Sess. , pp. 3510-12), and his colleagues of the ways and means committee came to the floor of the House and supported him. The episode was a boomerang for Bryan, for the applause that greeted the Underwood statement left no doubt as to the attitude of the House. Underwood conducted himself with such conspicuous ability in Congress that by the time the Democrats convened at Baltimore in 1912 to nominate a candidate for the presidency, he was among the leading contenders. In fact William F. McCombs, manager for Woodrow Wilson, felt when the convention opened that Underwood had the greatest potential strength of any of the aspirants (McCombs, post, p. 138).
He polled 1171/2 votes on the first ballot, but his candidacy was opposed bitterly by Bryan, and his potential strength was never realized. He declined to be considered for the nomination for vice-president after Wilson had been named to head the ticket. Following Wilson's election, Underwood cooperated to the fullest in carrying out the new President's legislative program. His work in framing the important tariff bill which bears his name and in holding the Democratic majority in line behind the Federal Reserve act was especially noteworthy.
Taking his seat in the Senate in 1915, he was recognized as one of its most influential members. As a member of the appropriations committee during the World War, he had charge of some highly important appropriation bills during the illness of Senator Thomas S. Martin. In the Senate fight over the League of Nations, Underwood stood with Wilson, although he personally was of the opinion that the President ought to have agreed to certain mild reservations. He was strongly dissatisfied with the Senate rules, and in 1923, after two years as floor leader, he declined to offer for that position again.
His acceptance of President Harding's appointment as one of the four representatives of the United States at the conference on limitation of armament in 1921-22, and his work in securing the ratification of the treaties drafted there, was looked at askance by his more partisan colleagues. He would probably have had opposition if he had sought the post of floor leader again. In 1923 he announced that he was going to give the South a chance to select a Southerner to carry the banner of Democracy in the presidential election of the following year.
The Ku Klux Klan was sweeping the country, and was in control in many states, especially in the South, where much of Underwood's strength lay. He was strongly advised to say nothing to offend the Klan, but that organization seemed to him fundamentally un-American, and he felt in duty bound to denounce it in no uncertain terms. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in New York City, he declared that the Klan would be the paramount issue, and when the convention met he and others failed by a margin of only one vote to have an anti-Klan plank included in the platform.
After the prolonged deadlock between the forces of William G. McAdoo and Alfred E. Smith had continued for fifty ballots, it is said that Smith offered to throw all his strength to Underwood if he could get the support of two Southern states, in addition to Alabama (Kent, post, p. 494). However, Underwood's uncompromising hostility to the Klan and national prohibition had alienated the South, so there was slight chance of his becoming a real contender.
Before the expiration of his second senatorial term in 1927, he announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection, and at the close of the term he retired to his handsome estate, "Woodlawn, " near "Mount Vernon" in Virginia.
He was nearly sixty-five years of age and anxious to spend his remaining years in literary and other congenial pursuits. During his retirement he wrote Drifting Sands of Party Politics (1928), in which he discussed governmental principles. In the pages of this book he revealed himself as a devout follower of Thomas Jefferson, an advocate of a minimum of government and a maximum of personal liberty. He elaborated upon his oft-expressed opposition to sumptuary legislation, particularly the Eighteenth Amendment, as well as his objections to federal regulation of child labor. His strong aversion to all extensions of the federal authority caused him to be regarded by many as an ultra-conservative.
Later Underwood was offered an appointment to the United States Supreme Court by President Harding (New York Times, Jan. 26, 1929; information from family), but such a position was not congenial to his temperament. He accepted two appointments from President Coolidge, one in 1927 as a member of the international commission between the United States and France, under the treaty of September 15, 1914, and the other in 1928 as a delegate to the sixth international conference of American states held in Havana, Cuba, in that year.
He attended this conference, but his health was beginning to fail, and in December he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. This was followed by a paralytic stroke which proved fatal. Word of his death was received with unaffected and sincere expressions of sorrow in official Washington. His body was taken to Birmingham for burial, and the demonstrations which marked the obsequies there had seldom been equaled in the history of the state.
Underwood was married on October 8, 1885, to Eugenia Massie of Charlottesville, Virginia, who died in 1900. On September 10, 1904, he married Bertha Woodward of Birmingham. He had two sons by his first marriage.