HOOVER AND LAW
OBSERVANCE
HOOVER AND LAW OBSERVANCE
I
To an American citizen profoundly interested in the welfare of his
country, it is all too obvious that the one fundamental question
transcending all others is that of law and the observance of law.
Prosperity may temporarily increase or decline. The manufacturers may
get the extra profits they desire from a prohibitive tariff or they may
not. The farmers, like the intellectual classes, may for a time be out
of adjustment with the earning power of other classes and the general
economic level. America may for a while either accept or refuse its
responsibilities to the world at large. But far more fundamental than
these or any other problems confronting this country at the moment
is the problem of whether the United States is to remain a civilized
nation or come to be ranked with Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the
law.” It is evident that the present situation, which would disgrace
a savage tribe, cannot continue along its indicated curve without
leading directly to a breakdown of government or to a dictatorship.
To a considerable extent, indeed, the government has already broken
down in one of its most essential duties—the protection of the persons
and properties of its citizens; as is evidenced by private policemen,
armed guards, and armored cars, the citizens have had to undertake such
protection for themselves.
So far as I know, Mr. Coolidge, intent on paring budgets, never
troubled himself over the rising tide of crime and lawlessness, beyond
seeing to it that Mrs. Coolidge was accompanied on her shopping by
an armed protector. It is therefore a matter of the most earnest
congratulation that, although Mrs. Hoover has dispensed with a personal
guard, Mr. Hoover is evidently sufficiently impressed by the situation
to have devoted one-quarter of his inaugural address to the topic.
A careful and sympathetic reading of that address, however, leaves
one wondering whether he has the slightest comprehension of the
magnitude and causes of the danger which we face, although a later
public utterance shows some advance. In his Inaugural he said, indeed,
that “the most malign of all these dangers [to the state] to-day is
disregard and disobedience of law,” and every honest citizen must
whole-heartedly agree with him when he goes on to say that “our whole
system of self-government will crumble either if officials elect what
laws they will enforce or citizens elect what laws they will support.
The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect
for all law.”
But what remedy does he suggest, beyond appointing the inevitable
investigating committee which, according to the custom of such bodies,
will probably sit for from one to five years, publish a voluminous
report, with perhaps one or two dissenting reports, and be discharged
with thanks? The only recommendation he can offer is to say that “if
citizens do not like a law, their duty as honest men and women is to
discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal.”
Obviously, from the context in which these passages are found, Mr.
Hoover was thinking mainly of the Eighteenth Amendment, but as he
rightly points out, and as we cannot too strongly stress, the whole
observance of law hangs together. A loose administration which would
allow officials to pick and choose among the laws they enforce, or
citizens to determine at will which laws they obey, could only be
destructive of any real sense of law on the part of the public. The
American problem, though complicated by Prohibition, lies far deeper;
and it is the lack of understanding as to what the problem is that so
greatly diminishes the force of Mr. Hoover’s appeal to us as citizens
anxious to do our duty toward society.
II
It is needless to waste words in painting the situation in our country
to-day. The headlines of any metropolitan newspaper any day do so only
too clearly. Crime of the most desperate sort is so rampant that unless
a robbery runs into six figures or a murder is outstandingly brutal or
intriguing, we no longer even read below the headings. We are no more
interested than in a stock that does not move. We have ceased to expect
criminals to be caught and punished. We accept the statement from the
Chief Justice of the United States that our criminal justice is a
disgrace to civilization with the same lack of reaction with which we
accept the Department of Agriculture’s estimate of the cotton crop as
about the same as was expected. On the other hand, tens of thousands of
reputable citizens, who in all the private relations of life are decent
and trustworthy persons, are daily breaking one law or another. When
a state has ceased to be able to enforce law, when its citizens have
ceased to feel any sense of duty to obey law as law, when they have
lost all respect for law as law, when they have lost all respect for
law enforcement and the courts and officials charged with enforcement,
it is clear that something more than merely one amendment to the
Constitution, however unwise, must be sought for as the cause.
With regard to the increase of crime of one type and the failure
of the American state to protect its citizens, I can from personal
experiences date a marked change with some accuracy. I was in Wall
Street in business until about 1912. From about 1900 to that date I was
usually the one in my office, first as manager and then as partner,
who saw daily to getting the securities from the safe deposit vault to
the office in the morning and back again at night. The value of the
negotiable securities and cash sometimes ran to a couple of millions.
Unarmed and unguarded, with only an office boy to carry the boxes,
it never once occurred to me or to anyone else in that period that
there was any danger to the securities or to myself in so carrying
them through the public streets. About 1908 or 1909, I think it was,
New York State passed a new law taxing the securities of non-resident
decedents if the securities were in a New York safe deposit at the
time of death. In order to avoid this extra taxation, a member of my
family, a resident of New Jersey, decided to transfer his securities
to Hoboken. I did it for him by the simple method of putting about two
hundred thousand dollars’ worth of coupon bonds in a suit case and
carrying it, unguarded and, indeed, unaccompanied from Wall Street
down to the old Hoboken Ferry, over the Ferry, through the streets of
Hoboken, along the river front to the Trust Company in that city,—again
without thought of risk or danger.
Let us note the difference today. Going abroad to stay for a
considerable period, I decided last December (1928) to transfer my
securities from bank vaults at practically the corner of Hanover and
Wall Streets, to a bank which would keep them in custody for me,
cutting coupons, and so on without trouble to me. I first thought of
transferring them to an institution just over the river in Brooklyn.
On asking the Vice-president how, in view of modern crime conditions,
the actual physical transfer would be made, he answered as follows:
“We have our own armored car, with three men in it. We are, of course,
very careful in selecting them in the first place, but we always have a
detective who keeps track of them. The chauffeur sits in front of the
car, and behind him we have a guard who keeps his revolver in his hand
so that if the chauffeur starts any tricks he has a gun in his neck at
once. In the back of the car sits the third man, who keeps his foot on
a valve which by pressure would shut off the supply of gas at once. If
a fracas should start between the other two, he would stop the car.
If you would care to do so, you could also come in the car with your
securities.” I decided finally on a trust company in Wall Street, very
near the vault where the securities were, and where I would have to
walk only a block. There it was agreed that two armed guards would meet
me when I was ready to make the transfer. One day, with my wife and
sister, who also had securities, I went to the vault. In my innocence
I suggested that I would telephone to the trust company to send over
the guards. The official at the vault hesitated, and then said: “If I
were you I would go to the trust company and get them, so as to be sure
that no one is listening in, and that the men who come are really the
men sent by the company.” So I went to the company, got the men, and
with my wife and sister in front, one guard carrying the bags beside me
and the second following with his hand on his revolver in his pocket,
the procession formed to carry my worldly goods a few hundred feet
past the U. S. Subtreasury and the office of J. P. Morgan and Company!
To elaborate on this feature of modern American life would seem to be
needless. Yet a curious feature about it is that American business
men themselves do not seem to realize what an appalling situation has
developed when the state has completely broken down in its function of
protecting its citizens and making the streets of the largest city in
the country safe to walk in. When I mentioned this topic of armored
cars in an article in _The Atlantic Monthly_, among the usual crop of
letters from indignant citizens came one from a technical expert of one
of the leading American corporations with an office in the very heart
of the Wall Street district. He said that I was seeing ghosts; that he
had had his office in Wall Street for fifteen years and neither he nor
any of his friends had ever seen an armored car! I do not question his
honesty, but there was a business man with a scientifically trained
mind who indignantly denied my statement because he had never seen
what it seems incredible he could help seeing. Every time I have been
in Wall Street since, I have never failed to see from one to five of
these cars. On receiving his letter I called up the several companies
which provide armored-car service and was informed by them that,
between them, they operated one hundred and fifty armored cars in the
metropolitan district alone. Just think what that means. A hundred and
fifty armored cars (and the number has increased since) to handle the
ordinary daily business of New York City when not one is required in
all Europe. There are three most astounding points to be noted. One is
the appalling prevalence of criminals; second, the equally appalling
breakdown in the performance of its primary function by government; and
third, the blindness of the American business man to what is happening
under his nose and his utter satisfaction and complacency with respect
to it.
In the preceding chapter I dealt with that heritage of lawlessness
in America which is the historical background to any discussion of
the question. I tried to show how, from the first settlement in the
seventeenth century to the last rioting in Chicago, we have, for one
reason and another—often political, sometimes racial, occasionally
geographic, usually economic—developed a disrespect for law. Granted
that background and granted, as must be, the truth of what Mr. Hoover
says, what is the situation in which the patriotic citizen, anxious to
obey the law of the land, finds himself to-day?
In the first place, there is the infinite number of laws and
ordinances—Federal, state, municipal—which Congress and forty-eight
state legislatures, not to mention lesser bodies, are turning out
literally by thousands every year. I have seen the statement that
taking all the law-, ordinance-, and regulation-making bodies in the
country together, over twenty thousand statutes were passed in one year
regarding railroads alone. Despite the fact that state boundaries are
imaginary lines which have ceased to have any meaning for us in daily
life, the laws of every state vary. The metropolitan area of New York
City lies within three states. For some years I lived in New Jersey
and worked in New York. I spent half my waking hours in one state
and half in the other, and I lived under two different sets of laws
relating to inheritance, taxation, and to innumerable other matters of
daily concern. Had I commuted to Connecticut instead of to New Jersey,
I should have had to learn an entirely new set of laws and regulations,
for ignorance of the law is no excuse for disobedience.
This anomalous condition is found throughout the country; in countless
minor matters it is impossible to tell whether one is obeying the law
or not. Motoring from New London to Providence, one must not run at
_more_ than thirty miles an hour, I believe it is, if there is now any
speed limit, in Connecticut; but as soon as one has crossed into Rhode
Island it is against the law to run at _less_ than thirty. Traveling
on the train from Buffalo to Chicago, it is legal to buy cigarettes
for the first hour or two; but after crossing into Ohio (no one knows
when or where) it becomes illegal for two or three hours until one has
again reached the safety of Indiana. Before Prohibition, it used to
be legal for one to have a flask of whisky while going by train from
Denver to Dallas—up to the imaginary line which separated some county
in Texas from another, at which point one was a lawbreaker, and, as
occasionally happened, could be hauled from the train and jailed.
Ignorance of the law, as we have said, is considered to be no excuse.
A law-abiding citizen who finds himself frequently breaking such laws
feels none of the emotions which a reputable citizen should feel in
such circumstances, and the fact that the situation is so obviously
absurd insidiously breaks down the feeling that law as law should be
implicitly obeyed.
Again, many laws are passed merely because it is the easiest way for
lazy or supine legislators to rid themselves of noisy and fanatical
minorities; likewise they may be passed by legislators who are simply
ignorant or have some racial ax to grind. As instances we may cite
the law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in Tennessee; the law
recently passed by one of the Southern states, prohibiting the presence
in any public or school library of any book “defining evolution” (which
would rule out all dictionaries and encyclopedias); or the several
so-called “pure history laws,” penalizing the critical writing of
American history. Included also in this group are the broad censorship
laws of various places, such as that which in St. Louis resulted in the
seizure and destruction of a collector’s rare edition of Boccaccio,
and that which makes it illegal for bookstores in Boston to sell a
considerable number of current volumes sold almost everywhere else in
the United States. As I write these lines my attention is called to the
latest limitation of my liberty. I have in my library here that finest
of all war books, _All Quiet on the Western Front_. The author comes
nearer to telling the truth, the whole horrible stench of truth, about
war than has anyone else. War is brutal, and it would be well if people
could know how brutal. One or two incidents are brutally told, but
there is nothing pornographic in the whole book. Yet I discover it can
be published in America only in an expurgated form and that if I take
my copy home it will be confiscated. My government will not allow me to
read what any European in any country is free to do, and I am faced by
the dilemma of either having to destroy or give away a fine book which
I have bought here quite legally and with entire honesty of mind, or
having to break the law of my native land and smuggle it in.
In constantly passing back and forth from Europe, I am continually
confronted by similar problems. In all enlightened countries over here
not only are treatises on birth control by medical authorities to be
had in the bookshops of any city, but frequently public instruction
is given in free clinics. If I take any such book home to New York, I
become a lawbreaker and am liable, I believe, to a year in prison or
five thousand dollars’ fine. I am interested in modern literature and,
although greatly disliking the book, I realize that Joyce’s _Ulysses_
is a landmark in its development. For the purposes of an article I am
now writing I can readily buy _Ulysses_ for five dollars in Paris or
here in London (where I am working at the moment), but if I take it to
New York to use there, I shall again be a lawbreaker and shall again be
liable to a year in prison or five thousand dollars’ fine.
Recently the Federal authorities in Boston ruled that it was illegal
to import copies of that classic, Voltaire’s _Candide_, which is
required reading for the students at Harvard, Radcliffe and, I believe,
Wellesley. The boys and girls are thus faced at the outset of their
careers as citizens with the delightful dilemma as to which they will
obey, the Harvard and Radcliffe authorities or the Customs Officers
clothed with Federal authority. If they do not buy the book they are
refusing to do required college work; if they do, they are breaking the
Customs laws. Thus early does a paternal government gently lead youth
on the path of lawbreaking and laughing disrespect for law. Living
under laws like these, is it any wonder that the sober, law-abiding
citizen has little respect for law as law?
III
But let us consider such a citizen facing some concrete problems.
Personally I agree heartily with all that Mr. Hoover says. I have
keen respect for law and believe that such a respect is an essential
element in building up any civilization. But what is the situation in
America that confronts such a normal, law-abiding citizen? Is a citizen
of Boston who wishes to know what is being written in contemporary
American literature bound to deprive himself of knowing anything about
a dozen or so important titles because it is illegal for a bookseller
to furnish him with them? Or shall he surreptitiously import them from
New York, or break the law and buy them furtively from a “book-legger”?
Shall a teacher in the state which prohibits dictionaries and
encyclopedias in its schools and libraries throw those books out of the
windows, or shall he give the students illegal use of copies hid in
closets? Shall a man interested in Italian literature and the culture
of the Renaissance leave a hole in his knowledge where Boccaccio should
be, or shall he break the law and buy a copy? Shall I destroy the books
which I buy in Europe or take them home? Shall the Harvard students
read _Candide_ or obey the law and flunk their work?
Consider the question of possessing firearms in New York State. Any
thug can readily procure a revolver by the simple process of going
across the river to New Jersey and buying one; but it has become
increasingly difficult and in many instances impossible for the
law-abiding citizen who wishes to protect his home from the thug to get
a permit. The Constitution of the United States says that the right
of the citizen to bear arms shall not be abridged, but this has been
abrogated by the “police power” of the states, so that we now have a
situation in which any thug can get a gun, but the sober citizen often
cannot. In fact, in a recent skirmish in New York which resulted in
the killing of a policeman by thugs, it was found that the officer was
acting as “gun-toter” for a rival gang of thugs who had no desire to
be caught with the tools of their trade—three guns—on their persons.
Some years ago a concern with which I had relations had its pay roll
of about five thousand dollars brought to the factory through a bad
neighborhood every Saturday by a trusted employee. (This was before the
breakdown in government had become so complete as to make it profitable
for private companies owning armored cars to perform that service
for business men.) Since there had been many holdups, the company
attempted, unsuccessfully, to get a permit for the messenger to carry
a revolver. After a while it was discovered that the difficulty lay in
omitting to tender the usual fifteen-dollar bribe to the police captain
of the precinct. There was no use in carrying the matter higher. The
company could not prefer charges, for in such situations there is never
any proof. It had three options: to risk its five thousand and its
employee’s life by leaving him undefended; to break the law by bribing
a police official; or to break it by having the messenger carry a gun
without a license.
Recently one of my friends, driving a motor car in a large American
city, was overhauled by a motorcycle policeman who told him, with
foul language, that he had been speeding. As a matter of fact this
accusation was not true, but it was the habit of this particular
policeman to allow a car to get ahead and then, by speeding after, to
show a high rate on his own speedometer. My friend would have had no
case had he gone to court and, what he minded more than a possible
fine, a black mark would have gone against his driver’s license.
Knowing the situation, he immediately placed his hand on his wallet
pocket. “Mind you,” said the policeman, “I’m not asking for anything.”
“All right,” said my friend, handing him ten dollars. The cop smiled
and speeded off to wait for his next victim and bill. It must have been
a profitable business. Another friend of mine in a large contracting
firm operating in a certain large city tells me that to their bids for
every sizeable job they add, as do their competitors, an item of five
hundred dollars. This is for the policeman on the beat, about fifty
dollars a week being handed to him so that he shall not be constantly
bothering them with unjustified complaints about obstructing the
sidewalk by their operations. If the money is not paid, an official of
the company has constantly to waste his time appearing in the police
court to answer summonses. It is easy to say that, instead of breaking
the law by bribing officers, my friends should have reported them. All
I can say in reply to any enterprising private citizen is: let him try
single-handed to clean up the police department of any large American
city and see how far he will get.
Let us take another example. Let us suppose a person has some
pre-Prohibition brandy in his house. Such possession is quite legal;
but his father, living across the street, has a sudden heart attack
and the family telephones over for the brandy. If the man takes it
over, under the last law passed by Congress on the subject, he becomes
a felon and is liable to ten thousand dollars’ fine or five years in
prison—or both. Should he leave his father to die while waiting for
the law to be repealed, or should he become a felon in the eyes of
the law? For the reasons noted above, we have ceased to have much
respect for ordinary laws; and now, under the teaching of Congress,
we are likely to have no fear of even felony. The effect is subtle.
Heretofore no self-respecting man could have borne to think of himself
as genuinely a legal felon, for this term was applied only to those
who committed arson, rape, homicide, and similar crimes. But no man
is going to think that by breaking the Eighteenth Amendment he places
himself in that category, although the law declares that such is his
classification. The result will be to make the word “felon” lose its
damning character.
IV
When laws are just and wise, they ought to be obeyed and are likely to
be; but when they are not, they open very genuine problems in ethics
for the decent citizen. I wonder if Mr. Hoover himself, with his love
of efficiency, his sense of organization and efficient government, to
say nothing of his racial pride, would under all circumstances insist
upon an absolute observance of the Fifteenth Amendment? Should the
negro race largely outnumber the white in any state (in Mississippi
there are already 935,000 negroes to 854,000 whites), would he insist
upon a strict observance of that amendment, even if it resulted in a
negro government permanently set up over the whites? The situation,
being a local one, would hardly result in a nation-wide repeal of the
constitutional amendment. If Mr. Hoover were a resident of the state,
what would he do? Would he live under the negroes, would he move away,
or would he disobey the law? Many cannot move away, and even if they
could, I doubt if Mr. Hoover would willingly abandon any considerable
number of states to negro republics.
Prediction is dangerous work but I think there is one prediction
not hard to make. That is, that our having so unthinkingly written
unenforceable prohibition into the Constitution, and our then insisting
upon the sanctity of that Constitution, is going to result in time in
the awakened negroes’ insisting upon the observance of the Fifteenth
Amendment. If Prohibition is sacred and inviolable because it is a
constitutional amendment, how about negro suffrage? There are already
rumblings being heard, and in my opinion the fanatical wets have not
only split our country into bitterly opposed factions and decreased
respect for the Constitution, but they have, without giving the matter
a thought, brought the crisis of racial hostility nearer to us than
it could ever have been brought in any other way. The time is rapidly
coming, if the Methodists and Baptists and W.C.T.U. and all the
other Prohibition forces insist upon the sanctity of the Eighteenth
Amendment, when the fifteen million negroes, fast growing in wealth,
education and racial self-consciousness and assertiveness, will insist
upon the sanctity of the Fifteenth.
But we may also ask Mr. Hoover about the Fourth Amendment, which the
officials of his government are constantly violating, certainly in
spirit. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unwarrantable searches and seizures, shall
not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Yet, without
warrant and without probable cause, the agents of Mr. Hoover’s own
government have stopped, seized, searched and even murdered citizen
after citizen in yacht or motor car within the past few months. Let
Mr. Hoover and Mr. Mellon talk of law enforcement to the shades of
John Adams and James Otis! What is the law-abiding citizen to do when
driving his car on a lonely road with his wife or children he is told
to halt by an un-uniformed man? How is he to tell whether the man is
a thug who will rob him if he stops, or a legal officer of the United
States government acting unconstitutionally? If he stops, he may be
robbed or worse; if he does not stop, the agents of the United States
government, as they have done time after time lately, may ruthlessly
murder him. This is not a hypothetical case. It is an actual situation
that confronts every citizen who has a car or a boat, and which has
already resulted in the slaying of many innocent and law-abiding
persons. Their wrongs and deaths have been thundered from the halls of
Congress, but the government calmly says it will uphold its agents.
Mr. Hoover speaks easily of the right of citizens who disapprove any
law “openly to work for its repeal,” but he must realize the inherent
difficulty of this for unorganized individuals. In the first place,
for some obscure reason in the American character, laws are rarely
repealed; they are allowed simply to lapse in observance. It is far
more difficult to get any legislature, including Congress, to take an
interest and initiative in repealing a law than it is to enact one.
Getting a law repealed may mean no less than educating an entire state,
which may take a long time and which most certainly will require a
large expenditure of money. In the second place, many of the laws to
which the law-abiding citizen objects were originally passed either
through ignorance of the electorate and the legislature or through the
influence of an organized minority whose crusade was well supplied with
funds by some fanatic angel. It is notorious how politically effective
even a small minority may be if sufficiently active, well organized,
and wealthy; and in most instances, the opposition—the people who feel
oppressed by some law passed by the efforts of a minority—are both
unorganized and without adequate funds. To overcome these handicaps
takes time—a long time.
To-day the power of the individual is largely lost. An enormous amount
of money is necessary to place any movement before the public, as may
be proved by a glance at the sums spent by the Republicans in the last
campaign to elect even Mr. Hoover. Let me illustrate by an example. For
a while I had an apartment overlooking the harbor in Brooklyn. The view
was superb, but I soon found, as all others do there, that the place
was rendered impossible by the clouds of oily, black smoke blown into
our windows from the tugs and steamers in the river. Complaining of the
situation, I was asked why I did not start a movement to remove the
nuisance, and take advantage of the law which makes burning soft coal
in the harbor an offense punishable by a five hundred dollar fine. The
answer was obvious. I had to earn my living, and heading such a crusade
was a full-time job. I should have had to abandon my work, organize
a publicity bureau, spend large sums on postage and stationery, form
committees, and so on through the whole usual business. The help to
be derived from the city authorities was well indicated from the fact
that the Municipal Building itself appeared to be, and I was told
was, one of the worst offenders in the use of the illegal fuel! It is
against the law in New York to drive a car with the muffler cut out,
yet Sunday afternoons in my apartment were rendered hideous for an hour
or two Sunday after Sunday by a car running at top speed up and down
several blocks, passing under my windows. Apparently the crew were
merely cooling themselves off in the hot weather, and enjoying the
noise and speed. Could I do anything? The car was part of the apparatus
of the fire company a few blocks away. How far would I get in trying to
enforce the municipal regulations against the municipality itself?
A friend of mine in another city, which passed an ordinance prohibiting
the use of soft coal, spent several thousand dollars installing
smoke-consuming apparatus in his plant. One day, sitting at his open
window and being covered with soot from the three chimneys of an ice
plant not far away, he decided to try his hand at law enforcement. He
called up police headquarters and, after explaining the situation,
received as answer, “You mind your damned business and we’ll mind
ours.” The plant was owned by local politicians.
It is all right for Mr. Hoover to say obey the law or work for its
repeal; but what is a tug-boat captain to do if all his competitors are
saving money by burning soft coal, and if the government authorities
not only do not enforce the law but break it themselves? Is he to
abandon his business in order to organize an almost hopeless crusade
to get the law changed or enforced, or is he to give up his business
entirely? Is he to burn hard coal in competition with soft, or is he to
break the law himself?
Time to organize committees, money to make their work efficient—few
people have either. And both are futile if the opposition is
corrupt—and in power. No, Mr. Hoover, obeying the law until you can get
it repealed is not so simple a way out in the America of to-day as your
speech would imply.
The subject can take us even further. The theory of our government—that
the majority shall rule—cannot safely be stretched too far. It broke
down in 1860, and may again. Indeed, in several respects it is not
even the theory. A very considerable part of the legislation under
which the people of our country live and do business has, in the last
resort, been the determination of a single judge of the Supreme Court
passing upon the constitutionality of laws by votes of five to four. It
was shown lately that owing to the method of repealing clauses in our
Constitution, three million people strategically located in the right
states could block the will of all the rest of the nation. In such a
case would it be the duty of the nation to obey the law?
Theoretically there is no justice in the doctrine of majority rule. It
is a useful and practical method of carrying on popular government, but
that is all. No better method has been devised, but there is something
abhorrent in the idea of fifty-one per cent of the population being
able to force its ideas on forty-nine per cent—of sixty-one million
people governing fifty-nine million. The fact is that it cannot be done
without the acquiescence of the forty-nine per cent, or, indeed, any
considerable minority. Fortunately the minority usually does acquiesce,
for it realizes that the importance of carrying on the government is
greater than any temporary discomfort or even oppression caused by the
decision of the majority. But we must not lose sight of the fact that
in the American system sovereignty is supposed to reside in the people
at large, and that majority rule is merely an expedient for determining
the will of the people. But if the will of a sufficiently large
minority is deliberately and persistently thwarted by the majority,
revolt of some sort is inevitable.
V
In America revolt always takes one of two forms—nullification of the
law or armed rebellion. We have had the American Revolution, Shay’s
Rebellion, the Whisky Insurrection, and the Civil War. The other
method—nullification—has been used so often as to make it useless to
catalogue even the more noted instances. No one believes for a moment
that Prohibition will result in civil war; but it is obvious that this
particular law is against the will of so large a minority, if it _is_
a minority, of the people that thorough and impartial enforcement is
impossible, and that the old American weapon of nullification will
continue to be used against it. It is evident that not even the United
States government can patrol eight thousand miles of boundary and put
a policeman in every one of twenty million homes. A very considerable
number of our people consider the law to be unwise, unjust, and
tyrannical. Throughout the whole of English and American history there
have always been men who had the courage to defy such laws, and,
largely depending upon their ultimate success, history has recorded
them as patriots or malefactors. I do not say that the Eighteenth
Amendment is of such a character as to warrant infringement of it in
the name of patriotism, but I do believe that is unwise and unjust,
and it does seem to me to come perilously near being tyrannical.
Turning back again to the more general question, however, I cannot
agree with Mr. Hoover that the solution of the lawlessness of America,
with the peril that it brings to our form of government, lies in so
simple a formula as “obey every law on the statute book or get it
repealed.” Criminals are not going to obey any laws that are not
enforced, and the governments—federal, state, and municipal—have
largely abandoned their duty of law enforcement. Last autumn the _New
York Telegram_ reported that “Chicago racketeers boast of 215 murders
in two years without a single conviction.” In London in six months,
with more than twice the population, there were eighteen murders
and every single murderer either paid the legal penalty promptly or
committed suicide before he was caught. But even law-abiding citizens
will not obey laws which are but partially and unjustly enforced.
Our whole history has proved that. Would one-tenth of the merchants
of New York pay duties on their goods if they knew that the other
nine-tenths were allowed to import free? Year after year, on returning
home, I have scrupulously listed all my purchases for the customs men
on the dock, and, I will add, have usually been treated courteously by
them. But what incentive is there to do so when, as last year, in the
cabin before landing, one heard the names of twelve Irish and Hebrew
gentlemen, otherwise never heard before, called out as having been
given the freedom of the port? For two hours I had to keep my wife, who
was ill, on the dock in sweltering heat while these friends of somebody
in the Treasury Department had whirled off at once to their hotels or
homes without paying a cent or having a key of their baggage turned.
Does not that sort of thing, encountered at every turn in America in
relation to governments, city, state and national, tend to make a good
citizen feel rather like a conscientious idiot than like an upholder of
the wise and honest laws of his country? Can respect for law continue
when its daily enforcement is a matter of friendship and favoritism?
No—nor will citizens obey, nor as juries enforce, laws with unjust
penalties. How many juries under the Jones Act will find a man guilty
of taking a drink if the penalty is the same as for homicide? Nor will
citizens obey laws, such as the smoke ordinances, which the government
itself breaks. Nor will they obey laws which they believe thoroughly
unjust and infringing on personal liberty. If disobedience to just laws
leads to anarchy, obedience to unjust laws leads to tyranny, as our
forefathers well understood and implored us to remember.
No, Mr. Hoover’s formula will not do. The task is far greater. We shall
not develop obedience to law in America until we have educated both our
electorate and our legislators to a knowledge of the nature of law, to
the limits of laws, and to their effects; until we have educated them
both to a tolerance and a practical wisdom in the art of governing;
until we have cleaned the Augean stables of our public life of their
accumulated filth, and the governments themselves—municipal, state, and
federal—obey and impartially enforce the law; until public opinion and
public prosecutors demand the punishment of millionaires and of highly
placed officials in Washington with the same rigor as would be meted
out to the ordinary criminal; until the ideal of quickly accumulated
wealth, by any means whatever, is made subordinate to the ideal of
private and public virtue.
If Mr. Hoover merely tells the American people to obey every absurd
law, every unenforced law, every unequally and unjustly enforced law,
every unenforceable law, that is now on the statute books of the nation
and our forty-eight sovereign states, he will get nowhere. If, on the
other hand, he will undertake to show the people what underlies their
problem, and assume the leadership in a crusade to reform the very
foundations of their life—the rotten foundations that are at the bottom
of the problem of our lawlessness—then he will prove the leader for
whom America waits, and patriotism and nobility may again rise above
efficiency and wealth. By that path only can America regain respect
for law and for herself. Nor is it a question only of respect. Far
down the path which America is now treading, at the end of the vista,
in the shadow of the future, but all too clearly visible to the eye
of the historian, stands, biding his time, the sinister figure of the
man on horseback, the dictator who inevitably “saves society” when
social insubordination and disintegration have become intolerable,
when order has given place to chaos. We must rule or be ruled. Cæsar,
Cromwell, Napoleon, Mussolini—the line is long and the sequence
inevitable. America can be saved, but it must be by regeneration, not
by efficiency. May Mr. Hoover ponder the problem and face the issue!