Chapter Twelve
Free Trade in Sugar Abandoned
During a twenty-five year period beginning in 1898, the Michigan sugar industry had a powerful friend in Congress. He was Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, then and now, one of the most powerful positions in Congress and next to the President and the Speaker of the House, doubtlessly, one of the most important positions in the country. He was Joseph Warren Fordney, elected from Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District , forty-first in line of succession to the imminent post of Chairman. A Republican who earned his fortune in the lumber industry, Fordney served eleven consecutive terms from a district that had a long history of vacillating between Republicans and Democrats for its Congressional representative. To his Congressional colleagues, he was a different breed of cat.
Fordney’s education and life experiences were as far removed from those of the predecessor chairs as are aliens from a distant galaxy. Three of them, James Polk, Millard Fillmore,…show more content… By the time, he settled into the duties and responsibilities of a newly elected Congressman, Michigan was home to nine such factories. The Cuban Reciprocity Treaty, proposed during his first term of office, threatened the existence of those nine factories and would likely cool ardor for constructing more of them. In addition, the factories already present in the state had a combined producing capacity of 425,000 thousand tons of beets in a single season worth $1,700,000 (thirty-four million in modern terms). Clearly, Michigan had found a renewable source of income to replace the lumber industry that having depleted the state’s forests had moved on to Wisconsin. In addition, in states other than Michigan, twenty-two beet factories came into existence and more were in the planning stage. By 1902, there were 42 factories in the United States, and 48 by
