Background.

Few issues were discussed, dissected, or dramatized in the Progressive Era more than taxation and tariffs. The questions surrounding taxes and tariffs were highly charged politically and divided people along class, sectional, and partisan lines. The tariff debate enabled insurgent Democrats to rise up and capture the House of Representatives in the 1910 midterm election. After 1910 many Republicans then crossed to vote with the Democrats on several issues. The coalition helped generate a groundswell of support at the state level for the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which established a federal income tax. The new graduated tax on personal incomes provided the federal government with new income to replace the money it had lost by reducing the tariff on goods. The tariff and taxes on consumption generated most of the revenue for the federal government in the early 1910s, but...