使用JQuery动态插入列表项会产生与硬编码列表项不同的结果...为什么？

I created some html that has a couple of different drop down boxes, the first one lets the user select which fields should be viewed in the report, the second one lets them select which months should be viewed on the report. I started out by hard coding the list items for both drop down boxes, and everything worked as expected. I assigned a dummy class to both drop downs called "dropdown-menu" so that they could both be referenced by the same javascript function. For some reason, the "Filter Columns" drop down box won't open in the code snippet I created...but that's not the problem I'm having (so please don't get side tracked on that).I created some html that has a couple of differ