Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 October 1900 — TRUST PROPOSITIONS [ARTICLE]

TRUST PROPOSITIONS

Facts Showing That Bryanites Are Not Genuinely Hostile. In a recent address Hon. William Dudley Foulke thus exposed the hypocrisy of the Bryauite outcry against trusts: "The deelarations of .Mr. Bryan and the Democratic party in opposition to tlie trusts are made moje Jor the piirpose oj catching votes than on account of genuine hostility. We have the proof of tills net only in the action of Democratic congressmen respecting the’proposed Jjut xve Live it also in the fact t hat many‘of those who are most prominent in the councils of the Democratic party are beneficiaries of the most oppressive form of trust monopoly. A trust can haruly be conceived which bears more cruelly upon the poor who have to pass the sweltering summer days in Crowded tenements in New York city thau a trust which makes it expensive and difficult for suffering women and children as well as for laborers to procure the necessary supply of ice during the summer months, and yet the great leaders of the New York Democracy who supported Mr. Bryan’s faction of the Democratic party at Kansas City against David B. Hill are participants in this infamous trust—Mr. Croker, Mayor Van Wyck and many others who are now prominent in a party which denounces the industrial combinations to which they themselves belong. But it is not in New York alone that .prominent .Democrats are tarred with the same stick with which they seek to best! irch their political antagonists. In the west the increase of the coinage value of silver bullion would support one of tlie greatest monopolies that ever existed if it could be put into operation by Mr. Bryan. And the operation of the smelter trust, a corporation that includes all the plants for working silver ores in the country except those controlled by Senator Clark and the Guggenheims, contains among the holders of its securities such men as ex-Governor Grant, Senator Teller and other leaders of the forces supporting Mr. Bryan, and so powerful has been their Influence that they have choked off every effort In the Colorado legislature to enact antitrust laws. Then there Is the cotton baling monopoly organized in Wall street, In which Senator Jones is a shareholder. And if you could go through the records of the great trusts you would find that a considerable number of their stockholders and managers are prominent in the Democratic party. Mr. Bryan in his article in the North American Review a few months ngo stated that the trust magnates have now all left the Democrat!' parly. That statement was a littl premature.”