Page:The Republican Party (1920).djvu/121

 The Democratic platform carped and railed against the Republican party, but in nearly all of its constructive planks was compelled substantially to imitate and adopt the policies which the Republican administration was engaged in pursuing and which the Republican Congress had enacted or was pledged to enact. The party nominated William J. Bryan of Nebraska for President and John W. Kern of Indiana for Vice-President. There were nominations also by the Populist, Prohibition, Socialist, Socialist-Labor and Independence parties. The Republicans won the election with 321 electoral and 7,677,544 popular votes. The Democrats had 162 electoral and 6,405,707 popular votes, the Socialists 420,464, the Prohibitionists 251,660, the Independence party 83,628, the Populists 29,108 and the Social Labor party 14,021 popular votes.

President Taft soon after his inauguration called a special session of Congress to revise the tariff, as the platform had promised. The result was the Payne-Aldrich tariff which Mr. Taft approved and which undoubtedly had many admirable qualities, but which failed to meet the expectations of many members of the party, especially in the West, who complained that it was too largely a revision upward than downward and that it favored too greatly “the Interests,” meaning great trusts and corporations. So considerable was the dissatisfaction with it that in 1910 the Republican party suffered defeat at the polls and lost control of the next