and
the Democratic organization was pledged to pass it. When Speaker Crisp
made William L. Wilson chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means his
act showed an intention to fulfill the pledge, for which purpose Wilson
brought in his bill early in the regular session of 1893-94. Like
previous bills, this tariff was passed in the House, rewritten in the
Senate, and again changed in conference committee. "The truth is,"
confessed Senator Cullom long after, "we were all--Democrats as well as
Republicans--trying to get in amendments in the interest of protecting
the industries of our respective States." The surplus was no longer an
argument in favor of reduction. The free-trade arguments were flatly
contradicted by a group of Democratic Senators under whose leadership
the bill lost most of its reducing tendency. Out of doors the
Republicans attacked the measure and noisily charged it with having
produced the panic of 1893. Fourteen years later a Republican President
still described it as the measure "under the influence of which wheat
went down below fifty cents." When it finally came to the President it
was so little different from the McKinley Bill that he denounced it
violently. He had tried in vain to hold his party to an honest revision,
and now, in July, 1894, refused to sign the bill. It became a law
without his signature. It contained no novelty but an income tax, which
was a concession to the Populists and which the Supreme Court soon
declared to be unconstitutional.

In the fight over the Wilson Bill, Cleveland affronted Eastern members
of his party as he had the Western members, in 1893, over the Sherman
repeal. In the summer of 1894 he offended the whole body of organized
labor by intervening in a Western strike.

The panic of 1893 had unsettled labor and created a floating element
among the unemployed. These drifted toward Chicago, attracted by the
Columbian Exposition held there during that summer, and worried the
police for many months. About Easter, 1894, an "Army of the Unemployed"
marched on Washington under the command of Jacob S. Coxey. A few weeks
later a strike occurred among the employees of the Pullman Palace Car
Company. The American Railroad Union, under the leadership of Eugene V.
Debs, established a sympathetic boycott against the Pullman cars. The
Knights of Labor indorsed the strike, and railway travel was impeded
over all the West. Around Chicago there was disorder and rioting which
the Gover