PRACTICAL AGITATION
_By the Same Author_
EMERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS. $1.25.
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES. $1.25.
PRACTICAL AGITATION
BY
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1900
_Copyright, 1900_,
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
DEDICATED
TO
The Memory
OF
THEODORE BACON
PREFACE
This book is an attempt to follow the track of personal influence
across society. The first three chapters are taken up with discussions
of political reform, the fourth chapter with contemporary journalism.
The results of these discussions are then summarized in the chapters
called “Principles.”
I know that there are as many ways of stating the main idea of the
book as there are minds in the world. That idea is, that we can always
do more for mankind by following the good in a straight line than
we can by making concessions to evil. The illusion that it is wise
or necessary to suppress our instinctive love of truth comes from
an imperfect understanding of what that instinctive love of truth
represents, and of what damage happens both to ourselves and to
others when we suppress it. The more closely we look at the facts, the
more serious does this damage appear. And on the other hand, the more
closely we look at the facts, the more trifling, inconsequent, and
absurd do all those reasons appear which strive to make us accept, and
thereby sanctify and preserve, some portion of the conceded evil in the
world.
J. J. C.
NEW YORK, February 5, 1900.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. ELECTION TIME 1
II. BETWEEN ELECTIONS 34
III. THE MASSES 67
IV. LITERATURE 83
V. PRINCIPLES 104
VI. PRINCIPLES (_continued_) 126
VII. CONCLUSION 135
PRACTICAL AGITATION
I
ELECTION TIME
It is the ambition of the agitator to use the machinery of government
to make men more unselfish. In so far as he succeeds in this, he is
creating a living church, the only sort of State church that would
be entirely at one with our system, because it would be merely a
representation in the formal government of a spirit abroad among the
people.
Campaign platforms are merely creeds. “I believe in Civil Service
Reform” is a way of saying “I do not believe in theft,” and the phrase
was a fragmentary and incomplete formulation of the greater truth. It
was the sign that a movement was beginning among the people due to
reawakening instinct, reawakening sensibility. It was the forerunner
of all those changes for the better that have been spreading over
our administrative government during the last thirty years. A quiet
revolution has been going forward under our eyes, recorded step by
step. It is only because our standards have been going up faster than
the reforms came in that we believe the evils are growing worse. Such
changes go on all the time all over the world, but the value and rarity
of this one come from its unity and coherence. Such a thing might
happen in Germany or in England, but you could not disentangle the
forces.
Thirty years ago politics was thought to be no occupation for a
gentleman. It was a matter of bar-rooms, ballot-box-stuffing, rolls of
dirty bills. You had as little to do with it as possible. You voted
your party ticket, you paid your taxes. You bribed the ashman and
the policeman at your uptown house, and the clerk of the court, the
inspector, the custom-house agent, and the commissioner of jurors at
your office.
That subtle change of attitude in the citizen towards his public duty
which is now in progress, has in it something of the religious. The
whole matter becomes comprehensible the moment we cease to think of it
as politics, and see in it a widespread and perfectly natural reaction
against an era of wickedness. Had our framework of government afforded
no outlet to the force, had our ills been irremediably crystallized
into formal tyranny, we should perhaps have witnessed great revivalist
upheavals, sacraments, saints, prophets, prostrations, and adoration.
As it is, we have seen deadly pamphlets, schedules, enactments,
documents which it required our whole attention and our whole time
to understand; and behind each of them a remorseless interrogator
with a white cravat and a face of iron. What motive drives them on?
What oil fills their lamps? Who feeds them? These horrid things they
bring, these instruments forged by unremitting toil, technical,
insufferable,--they are the cure. With such levers, and with them
only, can the stones be lifted off the hearts of men. They are the
alternatives of revolution.
“Reform” may have a thousand meanings, and be used to cover a thousand
projects of doubtful utility. But with us it has a definite meaning.
When the foreigner says, “Ah, but is your reform the right remedy?” he
thinks it is a question of policy, or of the incidence of a tax. He
supposes there is an intellectual question. But with us the problem is
how to protect an attorney against a dishonest judge; how to stop the
sheriff from stealing a fund, pending the litigation.
What we want to do, what we are doing, is to get rid of gross
malpractices, gross theft, gross abuse of public trust. It is waste of
time to expend learned argument on a judge who has been bought. The
litigants must join forces and get rid of that judge before they can
talk. Of course we know that the real trouble with our politics is
that these attorneys have themselves bribed the judge and share in the
division of their clients’ property. It is to questions of this kind
that the conscience of the country has been drawn.
There is nothing peculiarly sacred about politics, but the history of
reform movements during the last few years furnishes such striking and
wonderful illustrations of human nature that it is worth study.
A few men have a desire, a hope of improving some evil. They stagger
towards it and fall. The impulse is always good. The mistakes made are
progressive. They record the past; they outline the future. If you draw
an arrow through them, it will point north.
If you arrange the reform movements against Tammany Hall in a series,
and consider them minutely, you will find that the earlier ones
are comparatively corrupt, sporadic, disorganized, ignorant, and
shortsighted in purpose. They have steadily become more honest, more
frequent, more coherent, more intelligent and ambitious. If you examine
any one of them, it would be impossible to misplace it in the series.
Looking more closely, you see the reason. The earlier the movement, the
more zealously do its leaders imitate the methods of current politics.
Each movement represents the philosophy of its era. We have had: 1. The
frankly corrupt era (fighting the devil with fire). 2. The compromise
era (buying reform). 3. The educational era, which began two years
ago, after Low was defeated, when people said they were glad of the
movement, in spite of the defeat. Note this, that Low did not lead a
lost cause, nor was any belief in lost causes at the bottom of his
movement. But in making the best of his defeat, many minds stumbled
into philosophy. And this illustrates the progress of an idea. People
will accept it as an explanation of the past before they will take it
as a guide to the future. It glimmers before them at a moment when
they need comfort, and vanishes in the light of a comfortable habit or
prejudice. This apparition of the educational idea flitted across New
York and took root in many minds.
Now the smoky torch of reform has passed from hand to hand, and is
beginning to burn brighter. How could the original darkness give
forth more than a gleam? All progress is experimental. The architects
discovered by practice that the arch would support itself. Their
earlier efforts were tentative. You can see what notion they had in
mind, as they very gradually learned how to subserve the laws of
gravity and tension. Each improvement is qualified by its author’s
limitations, but shows a gain as toward the immediate past. You are
following the steps of the groping and fumbling mind of man, fettered
at every point by his own conceptions, moving each time towards a
bolder generalization, each stride forward exactly proportionate to the
breadth of thought on which it is calculated.
What other method is there? The men who fought the Tweed Ring did what
passed for “politics” in their day. “Votes must be paid for, of course;
but let the people vote right.”
The philosophy of the Strong movement in 1894 showed an advance. “The
plunder must be divided, of course; but let _us_ have it because
we are virtuous.”
The Low movement in 1897 appealed to voters on the ground of
self-interest. Labor had to be conciliated, local politicians of the
worst sort subsidized; $150,000 was spent, four-fifths of it in ways
that did more harm than good. But the methods were delicate.
The battle of the standards goes forward ceaselessly; but all standards
are going up. What the half-way reformer calls “politics,” the idealist
calls chicanery; what the idealist calls politics, the half-way
reformer calls Utopia. But in 1871 they are discussing whether or not
the reformers shall falsify the returns; in 1894 they are discussing
whether or not they shall expose fraud in their own camp.
The men engaged in all these struggles are in perfect ignorance that
they are really leading a religious reaction. They think that since
they are in politics the doctrines of compromise apply. They are
drawn into politics by conscience, but once there, they have only
their business training to guide them,--a training in the art of
subserving material interests. Now if a piece of your land has an
uncertain boundary, you have a right to compromise on any theory you
like, because you own the land. But if you start out with the sole
and avowed purpose of upholding honesty in politics, and you uphold
anything else or subserve any other interest whatever, you are a
deceiver. When you began you did not say “I stand for a readjustment
of political interests. There will be a continuation of many abuses
under my administration, to be sure; but I hope they will not be quite
so bad as heretofore. I shall not insist on the absolutely unselfish
conduct of my office. It is not practical.” If you had said this, you
might have got the friendly support of a few doctrinaires. But you
would never have got the support and approval of the great public. You
would not have been elected. And therefore you did not say it. On the
contrary, what our reformers do is this: They begin, before election,
by promising an absolutely pure administration. They make proclamations
of a new era, and after they have secured a certain following they
proceed to chaffer over how much honesty they will demand and how much
take, as if they were rescuing property.
These men are, then, in their desires a part of the future, and in
their practices of the past. Their desires move society forward, their
practices set it back; and so we have moved forward by jolts, until,
like a people emerging from the deep sea, the water looks clearer
above our heads and we can almost see the sky.
Every advance has cost great effort. It took as much courage for a
Mugwump to renounce his party allegiance in 1884 as it does now for
a man to denounce both national parties as dens of thieves. It took
as much hard thinking some years ago for the leaders of the Reform
Democrats to cut loose from Tammany Hall as it does now for the
Independent to see that there is in all our politics only one machine,
held together by all the bosses and their heelers, and that the whole
thing must be attacked at once.
How gradual has been the process of emancipation from intellectual
bondage! How inevitably people are limited by the terms in which
they think! A generation of men has been consumed by the shibboleth
“reform within the party,”--a generation of educated and right-minded
men, who accomplished in their day much good, and left the country
better than they found it, but are floating to-day like hulks in the
trough of the sea of politics, because all their mind and all their
energy were exhausted in discovering certain superficial evils and in
fighting them. Their analysis of political elements left the deeper
causes mysterious. They did not see mere human nature. They still
treated Republicanism and Democracy--empty superstitions--as ideas, and
they handled with reverence the bones of bogus saints, and the whole
apparatus of clap-trap by which they had been governed.
And yet it is owing to the activity of these men that the deeper
political conditions became visible. Men cannot transcend their own
analysis and see themselves under the microscope. The work we do
transforms us into social factors. We are a part of the changes we
bring in. Before we know it, we ourselves are the problem.
The Mugwumps revolt and defeat Blaine. They strengthen the Democratic
party. They again revolt and defeat Bryan, and strengthen the
Republican party. So in the little towns all over the country, on
local issues the Democrats are put out for being dishonest, or the
Republicans are put out for being dishonest. Through this process
the younger generation has been led to note one fact: both parties
are dishonest. “Ah! but,” says the parent, “I am a good Democrat. My
party is not dishonest all the time. It needs discipline.” It is too
late: the young man hates both parties equally. He now looks at his
father, and sees in him a sample of corrupted intelligence, a man able
to repeat meaningless phrases, and he draws hope from the conclusion.
It was natural that the father should have been boss-ridden all his
life, because he could be whistled back to support iniquity by an
appeal to party loyalty. He belonged to a race that had lost the power
of political initiative. They could not act alone. They must daub
themselves with party names or they would catch cold. They had not the
stomach to be merely men.
Thirty years ago one-half of society thought that every Democrat was a
rebel and a scoundrel. The world to that society was composed of two
classes,--Republicans (righteous men), Democrats (villains). Twenty
years of an almost steady growth in the power of self-government or of
what the Germans would call civic consciousness, has barely sufficed to
strike off the adjectives, but it has left mankind still divided, as
before.
Meanwhile there has emerged a group of men who see the whole problem
in a much simpler light. These men have carried forward the analysis
which their fathers, or let us say their elder brothers, had begun,
to such a point that there are no words in it which are meaningless,
no factors which are not reduced to terms of human nature. They did
nothing but add the last link to a chain of logic. Their predecessors
discovered The Machine, and spent their lives in trying to belong to a
party without strengthening its Machine. These latter men discovered
that both parties were ruled by the same Machine. They see one issue,
and only one issue in American politics, namely, the attack on that
Machine.
Moreover, these men have political initiative; that is to say, they
contemplate creating conditions, and not merely making transient use of
visible conditions. Their idea is so simple that any one whose mind is
not warped by the cant of party politics understands it at once.
“All this political corruption is a unity. Vote against it and you will
beat it. Vote for any part of it and you strengthen it.” This sounds
simple. But in practice the prejudices, the interests, the passions and
political temperament of the whole population are against it. Every
argument that the people understand is against this course. Everything
that either party fears or hates in the other party is passionately
pointed out as a reason against independent voting. According to
Republicans, independent voting involves “allowing Croker to extend his
rule over the entire State,” and “enabling Tammany Hall to control the
judiciary,” and “endangering the cause of sound money.” According to
Democrats, it involves the encouraging of Trusts, Tariffs, Pensions,
Expansion and foreign conquest. According to both Democrats and
Republicans, independent voting is “voting in the air,” and is at odds
with the spirit of our institutions, which contemplate two parties and
no more. And, finally, every one condemns the independent because he
violates that thumb rule which slovenly thinkers regard as a summary of
all political philosophy, “Between two evils choose the least.”
Now the answer to all these arguments is that they are the merest
mirage. It makes no difference which of the two evils, Platt or
Croker, has the name of ruling the State. At present they divide the
rule between them. They can do no more. There is no argument that can
be used against Tammany Hall which is powerful enough to make the
Republican Ring trustworthy. There is no argument against Expansion
so excessively convincing that it changes the moral character of the
Democratic Party. These learned arguments are useless, ludicrous,
pathetic, irrational, impotent, contemptible. They do but distract us
from the real issue--which is personal corruption. Where shall a man
cast his vote against it? If I turn out McKinley because he bleeds the
natives, I put in a Democrat to bleed the natives. If the whitewashing
of Alger arouses public indignation, Tammany Hall feeds at the trough.
If Croker’s control of the judiciary arouses popular indignation,
Platt’s pigs feed at the trough. As for sound money, we have already
elected one Congress on the issue in 1895, just as in 1892 we elected a
Congress on the tariff issue. What was done? Why, in each case that was
done which the ring wanted done,--nothing.
Which national party stands for an idea to-day? The only shadow of
reason for believing that either does, is that the Republicans cried
sound money and won. They have done nothing. Had Bryan won, he would
have done nothing, could have done nothing.
There are no issues in American politics save this one issue of common
honesty. You cannot throw an issue into this whirlpool of vice, for
your issue turns to cash by the contact. We need not waste our time
reading the platforms drawn by Platt and Croker. We must not vote for
any man who does not go into public life as their enemy, because we
know that in so far as he is not their enemy he is ours. As for these
dreadful consequences that are always about to follow from a refusal
to support one end of the iniquity, they do not follow. We have the
evils now. We are at the worst. The powers of darkness may conspire and
heap all in ruins, but they must not prevent us from beginning upon a
constructive line to draw together and build up the powers of light.
Nor is there the smallest distinction either in the evil or its cure,
between the case of a village, of a State, or of the whole nation.
Say you live in a town; you can only get a clean school-board by
running men against both the regular parties. There is no other way of
getting rid of Hanna and the Presidential Syndicate than by running
an independent candidate for the Presidency. No form of Bryanism will
oust it,--no rump Democracy nor any kind of Democracy. Democracy is
finished. Republicanism is finished.
This is the zero point of party loyalty. It has been reached very
slowly. It means open war. The citizen is now confronted with a third
ticket, which is a deliberate insult to both the others. No matter
what the conditions, it is an appeal which disintegrates the emotions
of the voter. This is the very elixir of reform. People are forced
to think. It hurts them. They cry out against those who create the
dilemma, but they cannot escape it. The vote you poll will vary. If the
party war-cries are intense and the party candidates promise fairly,
very few men will see the point of your movement. But no one escapes
its influence. Let us say that five thousand vote your ticket. These
are the only men whose response is scheduled. But the political vision
of five hundred thousand has been quickened. No atom of this influence
is lost. The work was done when the vote was cast. Even if it be not
counted at all, it will show in every political camp in the near future.
But do you ever have outward success? Does the time ever come when
the standards of every one are so high that the parties themselves
present candidates as good as your own, and there is no excuse for your
existence? That depends upon the trend of the age. One thing only is
certain, that by pursuing this course you are doing all that you can
do. You are wasting no power. No part of your force is helping the
enemy.
After all, the great discovery is a very simple thing. We have found,
after many experiments, that what we really want is, not the turning
out of officials, not the enactment of laws, but the raising of the
general standards. The way to do this is to set up a standard. Of
course nobody likes to find a foot rule laid against his shortage. Even
the vocabulary of the average man is attacked by such a system. Words
like “courage,” “honesty,” “independence,” “pledge,” “loyalty” pass
current like clipped coin in the language of politics; and the keying
up of words to their biblical value brings out one man a thief and the
next a hypocrite.
All these civic commotions, great and small, that surge up and are
scattered, that form and reform, the People’s Leagues and Citizens’
Unions, are the altruism of the community fighting its way to the
surface through the obstructions, the snares, and the oppressions
of the organized world. No discouragement sets it back. No betrayal
destroys it. The people come forward with ever new faith.
What ceaseless endeavor! What patient trial of various forms of
organization! We live in a society where egoism is so thoroughly
organized that there is hardly a flicker of faith that cannot be made
to heat the devil’s pot. The dragon stands ready to eat up the child
as soon as it shall be born. You cannot hitch your horse to anything
without helping drag the juggernaut. Before you know it, virtue is
pocketed. Take the most obvious case. The reformers imagine they are in
politics and must win at all costs. One enthusiast calls twenty friends
into a room and organizes a club--and the club ties his hands and sells
out to the nearest bidder. Before he knows it he has been organized
back into Tammany Hall. You begin with a call to arms and a plan of
organization. The men come to you in a moment of hope, showing every
shade of intelligence, every stage of opinion,--one because he believes
in your candidate; one because he hates Tammany Hall; one because he
wants prominence; all because they do not expect to be alone. The men
who volunteer have not a clear notion of what they are in for. They
thought it was a movement to clean the streets. In the course of their
campaign it develops into an attack on a bank. They thought it was
a town movement. Some stage of it affects national politics. They
thought it was a Roosevelt movement. It turns out to involve hostility
to Roosevelt. Your muster shows the vague hope of a lot of men who
are utterly incompetent, undisciplined, ignorant. They are merchants,
lawyers, doctors, professors, clergymen, the respectability and
intelligence of the town; and so far as self-government goes they are
the tattered children of tyranny. Good God, what an army! At the first
trumpet they scatter. One sells out, one recants, one disappears. They
are anywhere and nowhere, a ship of fools, a barnyard. The execution of
the one idea for which they were brought together has scattered them
like sheep.
Let us take another case. You think that what is needed is to raise a
standard. You call your twenty friends about you. They are not corrupt.
Nevertheless, let us see who they will be. We are not dealing with an
imaginary community, but with American citizens as they exist, with
men every one of whom trusts his instincts to a different extent. Each
man believes in principle in the abstract, but thinks it is sometimes
hopeless to be severely virtuous in politics. This “sometimes” is the
_crux_. “Is it the time? Is this the year? Can you do it this
way?” Now, of course, it is always the year. It is never hopeless.
Absolute honesty is always the way. But an age of corruption destroys
faith. This is the essential injury. This is the disease. You yourself
have a little stronger belief, a little more political enterprise than
your twenty friends. Otherwise it would be they who were summoning you
to a conference. It is certain that their joint wisdom will result in
action less radical than you believe in. They outvote you in council.
The standard they set up is not absolute. But this outcome will prevent
you from making your point at all. If you are to back your friends up
publicly and are honest yourself, all you can say will be, “Here’s
a makeshift.” Now, the public instinct understands this very well
already. Ten per cent of your own faith you have compromised. It has
cost you ninety per cent of your educational power; for the heart of
man will respond only to a true thing.
What is it that has led you to compromise? Why, the age you live in.
You yourself, being afraid to stand alone, have dipped your flag,
with the best intentions, because you cannot see that any other
course is practicable. Yet you yourself can keep your own intellectual
integrity only at the price of destroying your own handiwork. If you
do not destroy it, you are a hypocrite. Here in the room with you were
twenty men, the very flower of the idealism of the town, not chosen
by accident, but coming together by natural selection. Twenty more
like them do not exist in the community, for their activity would have
revealed them. And yet there was not found faith enough among these to
set up an absolute standard. Nay, they hang on your arms and prevent
you from raising one. If you are to do it, you must do it alone. Then
these men will be the first to denounce you; for your act damns them.
You can only be true to the public conscience by rebuking your friends.
If you fail to do this, your banner is submerged.
Let us consider the cause of this weakness in Reform organizations.
You wish to appeal to the people with as good a show of names as you
can. And so you get a lot of well-known men to indorse you. This is
considered practical. Let us see if it is.
We are fighting Tammany Hall. But no one will for an instant admit
that every Tammany man is dishonest. The corruption we started out to
correct was a corruption of the intelligence, a bad habit, a defect of
vision. The same defect keeps Republicans in line for Platt, because
he is the Party, a recognized agent of the community. The same defect
prevents a just man from joining a new movement unless Banker Jones is
leading it. The habit of the community is to rely on some one else to
govern them. No man trusts himself. The Machine, upon analysis, turns
out to be a lack of self-reliance. Wherever you see a man who gives
some one else’s corruption, some one else’s prejudice as a reason for
not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs
us. The proof of it is that he will dissuade you from striking the
iniquity. He will explain that you can’t try it without doing more
harm than good. You will find that at every point of defence, from
the arguments of Mr. Croker himself to the arguments of some sainted
college president, the reasons given are identical. I cannot find
any one who defends stealing. They only deprecate action as being
inexpedient. Now, then, if I ask a voter to join my organization, and
use as a bait an appeal to this very weakness--his reliance upon other
men’s opinion--can I hope to make much headway? I am taking in just so
much of Tammany Hall. My whole body becomes an adjunct of Tammany, in
the same sense that Mr. Platt’s machine is an adjunct. I am Croker’s
last outpost. I stand there calling myself reform, and yet I do not
act. Some one else must now come forward and try his hand.
This process of ebullition, and thereupon stagnation, has happened
again and again. I suppose there are a dozen extant wrecks of reform
political organizations in the city. Many people have despaired
altogether. They think it is a law of God that political organizations
become corrupt in the second year. The experience is entirely due to
the persistent putting of new wine into old bottles. In their names
and hopes these bodies have stood for purity, but in their membership
they have, even in their inception, stood for prejudice. Then, too, the
bottles bore good labels, and bad wine was soon poured into them. A
political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find
a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these
contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.
The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political
agitation is something like this: _all_ the motive power in
all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All
the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else.
Conciliation is the enemy. It is just as impossible to help reform
by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the
enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.
What, then, must the enthusiast do in the way of organization? Let
him go ahead and do some particular thing, and ask the public to help
him do it. He will thus get behind him whatever force exists at that
especial time for that especial purpose. It may not be much; but no
amount of letterheads and great seals will increase it. Let him abandon
written constitutions. Let him not be bound by a vote nor seek to bind
others by a vote. If you have formal procedure, you are tied up, for
you will then have to convert six tailors into apostles before you can
get at the public. Content yourself more modestly. See a friend or two
and tell them what you intend to do. If they won’t help you, do it
alone. Do not think you are wasting your time, even if no one joins
you. The prejudice against the individual is part of the evil you are
fighting. If you keep on in a consistent line of action, people will
come to you one by one, and your group will grow into a sort of centre
of influence. There will result a unity of method as well as of aim,
which, as your purposes become understood, will enable you to act with
the speed of thought and the force of an avalanche. One great merit of
this method will be that your whole policy will remain an enigma to
every one except those who really want what you want, namely, to raise
the general standards. Only such men will seek you out. Any one else
is a danger. Thus your organization will grow slowly, but will remain
uncapturable, un-get-at-able, an influence, a menace, a standard.
As fast as adherents appear, you can set up centre after centre of
enlightenment, preparatory to your campaigns; debates, pamphlets,
correspondence, the battery of agitation. And in the mean time the
benefit done to the workers themselves is worth all the pains.
By adopting formal machinery you would not only organize the wrong
people in, but you would organize the right people out. New York
City is full of men whose passion for educating can find no vent in
politics, because politics are corrupt, and who run civic leagues,
night-schools, lyceums, and people’s institutes. They are at work in
your cause although they call it by different names. All this zeal is
at your disposal if you will only leave your office doors open and do
something to deserve its support. Do not adopt a scheme that excludes
these men. You cannot impress them into your army, but you do not need
to impress them,--only to know them personally. You cannot make them
district captains, but they are district captains already.
“But,” you say, “are not the votes of your twenty friends as valuable
as your own? Whence this egoism?” It is not egoism. I am ready to
follow any one who wants to do this particular thing, that is, make an
appeal to absolute unselfishness, at no point to conciliate any one.
“But this is anarchy: every man his own party.” On the contrary, it is
consolidation; for should two men arise, proposing this course, they
would coalesce at once.
“But,” you say, “who is to do all the work? How are you to get men
to come forward unless you give them tangible, formulated doctrines,
papers to sign, and words to mumble?” The answer is that the men who
do the work in reform campaigns do not need these things. Literature
and doctrines you will undoubtedly produce. It is not necessary for the
effective distribution of them, that you should adopt the parade of
American party discipline.
Organization, head-quarters, and a distribution of labor you must
develop. But you must not have them on paper faster than they exist in
reality. “But,” you say, “this is not representative government. Where
are your convention, your argument, your vote, your majority, your
loyalty? Our people must have these things.”
The answer is that, in spite of their views on representative
government, our people still remain human beings. As fast as they find
themselves spiritually represented by some person or body, they follow
that influence. It is representative government, but it represents
only the positive and aspiring part of the community,--the part which
never gets represented under your system, because that system insists
upon alloying it with other elements and ruining its power. It is
educational activity in the purest form. By what other means can you
speak to the whole people at once in the language of action? By what
other means can you reach the conscience of the unknown man, who has
not touched politics for twenty years because he could take no part in
it, because he did not understand it,--the disfranchised, scattered,
and dumb men on whose voice the future waits?
Consider what you are trying to do. A party under control of a
machine is held together by an appeal to self-interest. Its caucuses,
affiliations, resources, methods are constructed on that principle.
Your body, whose aim is to increase the unselfishness and intellect
of your fellow-citizens, must be held together at every point by
self-sacrifice.
If the reform body shall blindly do just the opposite of what a party
does, it will pursue practical politics. The regular party is in
theory representative of enrolled voters. You represent the sentiment
of undiscovered people. The party appeals to old forces and extant
conditions. You appeal to new feelings and new voters. The party offers
a gift to every adherent. You must offer him nothing but labor. That
is your protection against traitors. The party accords every man the
weight of his vote in its counsels. You must give him nothing but the
influence of his mind.
“But,” you shout, “this is not politics. You can never hold men
together without bonds.” The fact is otherwise. There is some force
at work in this town which, year after year, brings forward groups of
men who proclaim a new dispensation. They are, in so far as they have
any cohesion, held together without bonds now. All formal bonds will
chain them to the past. For electrical force you must adopt electrical
machinery; for moral force, moral bonds. All this political system
is the harness for the wrong passion. Every scrap of it imprisons
your power. The average American citizen is slow to see that you can
exercise political influence without the current machinery. This is a
part of The Machine in his brain. He cannot see the operation of law
by which virtue always tells. But his ignorance does not affect the
operation of that law, even upon himself.
This elaborate analysis of just how the force of feeling in yourself
can best be used politically, is, after all, only an instance of a
general law. The shortest path between two points always turns out to
be a straight line. People who believe in the complexity of life, and
have theories about crooked lines, want something else beside moral
influence. They want influence through office, or influence toward
special ends, or influence with particular persons. “Can’t you see
you are destroying your influence?” they cry, while every stroke is
telling. “A thinks you are a lunatic.” Praise God. “B has withdrawn his
subscription.” I had not hoped for this so soon. “But he has joined
Platt.” You misstate the case. He was always with Platt, but now he has
revealed it. These refractory molecules are breaking up. See the lines
of force begin to show a clean cleavage. Ten thousand intelligences now
see the man for what he is.
At what point in the progress of this movement will people begin to
see that it is practical politics of the most effective kind? Some
people see it now. The first people to feel the strain are the men
whose livelihood depends on the outcome. The last illustration of
this was given in Roosevelt’s campaign against Van Wyck in New York
State. In this case, as generally happens, the real battle was fought
in committee rooms before the forces were in the field. It was the
struggle for position. Roosevelt was to be Republican candidate for
governor, and was sure of election. The fight came over the minor
offices. Our New York form of ballot practically forces a man to
vote for a “straight” ticket, and half a dozen independents put up a
complete ticket with Roosevelt at the head of it. Their purpose was to
prevent the Republicans from using Roosevelt’s military popularity to
sweep into office a lot of henchmen. Within ten days the Republican
henchmen all over the State were taken with convulsions. Every crank
of the Machine trembled. It turned its awful power upon Roosevelt and
ordered him to get off the Independent ticket. He obeyed and protected
the henchmen. The episode illustrates the practical power of a few
independents who can act quickly. The panic in the Republican camp
was entirely justified. If three tickets had remained in the field
with Roosevelt at the head of two of them, thousands of Democrats and
thousands of Republicans would have voted for the Reform ticket. The
Republican ticket would have polled merely the dyed-in-the-wool machine
Republicans.
The rumpus among the Republican heelers--following so slight a cause
as the action of five or six citizens who took the field with a ticket
of their own--resembled the action of a geyser when a cake of soap is
thrown into it--rumbling--followed by terrific vomiting.
A little practical discipline among the reformers is all that is
required to make them formidable,--the discipline of experience, of
acting together, of personal trust. This is to be acquired only in the
field of action.
It is encouraging to find how small a body of men it takes--even at the
present moment--to upset the calculations of the politicians. The force
that made the Republicans afraid did not lie in the parcel of men who
threw in the soap. It came from the great public. The episode showed
that the Republicans were afraid to appeal to the country. They knew
that their cabal was almost as much hated as Tammany Hall.
There is always great difficulty in this world as to who shall bell the
cat; but conventions of mice do not further the matter. The way to do
it is for a parcel of mice to take their political lives in their hands
and proceed to do it.
* * * * *
The real meaning of all these movements will not be perceived till
their work has been done. As history, the cause and course of them will
be so plain that a word will suffice to explain them. In the light
of history it will be clear that the improvement in the personnel of
our public life was due to the demands of the public--expressed in
citizen’s movements. We have already reached a point where neither
party dares appeal to the public--as they did ten years ago--on purely
party grounds. Roosevelt and Van Wyck both claimed to be men superior
to the average partisan. The advance of political thought has already
made the dullest man perceive the Machine within his own party, and
every day spreads the news that there is only a single machine in all
our politics. The destruction of this machine will not be like the
destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII., but it will consist in
the substitution of new timber for old in the parties themselves.
Any one who looks for an expulsion of Tammany Hall like the expulsion
of the Moors from Spain, will be disappointed. There will always be a
Tammany Hall. But it will be run by respectable men, who will look back
with wonder and disgust upon this period, and who will give the public
an honest administration because the public has demanded it.
II
BETWEEN ELECTIONS
An election is like a flash of lightning at midnight. You get an
instantaneous photograph of what every man is doing. You see his real
relation toward his government. But an election happens only once a
year. Government goes on day and night.
It is hard breaking down the popular fallacy that there is such a
thing as “politics,” governed by peculiar conditions, which must be
understood and respected; that the whole thing is a mystic avocation,
run as a trade by high priests and low priests, and is remote from
our daily life. Our system of party government has been developed
with the aim of keeping the control in the hands of professionals.
Technicalities have been multiplied, and the rules of the game
have become more and more complex. There exists, consequently, an
unformulated belief that the corruption of politics is something by
itself. Yet there probably never was a civilization where the mesh
of all powers and interests was so close. It is like the interlocking
of roots in a swamp. Such density and cohesion were never seen in any
epoch, such a mat and tangle of personalities, where every man is tied
up with the fibres of every other. If you take an axe or a saw, and
cut a clean piece out of it anywhere, you will maim every member of
society. How idle, then, even to think of politics as a subject by
itself, or of the corruptions of the times as localized!
Politics gives what the chemists call a “mirror,” and shows the
ingredients in the average man’s composition. But you must take your
mind off politics if you want to understand America. You must take up
the lives of individuals and follow them out, as they play against each
other in counterpoint. As soon as you do this you will not be able to
determine where politics begins and where it stops. It is all politics:
it is all social intercourse: it is all business. Any square foot of
this soil will give you the whole fauna and flora of the land. Where
will you put in your wedge of reform? There is not a cranny anywhere.
The mass is like crude copper ore that cannot be blasted. It blows out
the charge.
We think that political agitation must show political results. This is
like trying to alter the shape of a shadow without touching its object.
The hope is not only mistaken, it is absurd. The results to be obtained
from reform movements cannot show in the political field till they have
passed through the social world.
“But, after all, what you want is votes, is it not?” “It would be
so encouraging to see virtue win, that everybody would vote for you
thereafter. Why don’t you manage it somehow?” This sort of talk is the
best record of incompetence which corruption has imprinted. Enlighten
this class and you have saved the Republic. Why, my friend, you are so
lost, you are so much a mere product of tyranny that you do not know
what a vote is. True, we want votes, but the votes we want must be cast
spontaneously. We do not want them so badly as to buy them. A vote is
only important because it is an opinion. Even a dictator cannot force
opinions upon his subjects by six months of rule; and yet the complaint
is that decency gets few votes after a year of effort by a handful of
radicals who are despised by the community. We only enter the field of
politics because we can there get a hearing. The candidates in reform
movements are tools. They are like crowbars that break open the mind of
the age. They cannot be dodged, concealed, or laughed away. Every one
is aroused from his lethargy by seeing a real man walk on the scene,
amid all the stage properties and marionettes of conventional politics.
“No fair!” the people cry. They do not vote for him, of course, but
they talk about the portent with a vigor no mere doctrine could call
forth, and the discussion blossoms at a later date into a new public
spirit, a new and genuine demand for better things.
It is apparent that between the initial political activity of reformers
and their ultimate political accomplishments, there must intervene
the real agitation, the part that does the work, which goes on in the
brains and souls of individual men, and which can only be observed in
social life, in manners and conversation.
Now let us take up the steps by which, in practical life, the reaction
is set going. Enter the nearest coterie of radicals and listen to
the quarrel. Reformers proverbially disagree, and ‘their sects mince
themselves almost to atoms.’ With us the quarrel always arises over the
same point. “Can we afford, under these particular circumstances, to
tell the exact truth?” I have never known a reform movement in which
this discussion did not rage from start to finish, nor have I known one
where any other point was involved. You are a citizens’ committee. The
parties offer to give you half a loaf. Well and good. But this is not
their main object. They want you to call it a whole loaf. They want to
dissipate your agitation by getting you to tell the public that you are
satisfied. What they hate is the standard. The war between you and them
is a spiritual game of chess. They must get you to say they are right.
It is their only means of retaining their power.
Thus the apple of discord falls into the Reform camp. Half its members
take the bait. In New York City our politics have been so picturesque,
the pleas of the politician so shallow, the lies demanded from the
reformers so obvious, that the eternal principles of the situation have
been revealed in their elemental simplicity. It is just because the
impulse towards better things carries no material content--we do not
want any particular thing, but we want an improvement in everything--it
is just because the whole movement is purely moral, that the same
questions always arise.
We ought not to grieve over the discussion, over the heart-burn and
heated argument that start from a knot of radicals and run through the
community, setting men against each other. The quarrel in the executive
committee of this reform body is the initiative of much wholesome life.
They are no more responsible for it, they can no more avoid it, the
community can no more advance to higher standards before they have had
it, than a child can skate before it can walk.
The executive committee is discussing the schools. In consequence of
a recent agitation, the politicians have put up a candidate who will
give new plumbing, even if he does steal the books, and the question
is whether the School Association shall indorse this candidate. If it
does, he wins. If it does not, both plumbing and books are likely to
remain the prey of the other party, and the Lord knows how bad that is.
The fight rages in the committee, and some sincere old gentleman is
prophesying typhoid.
The practical question is: “Do you want good plumbing, or do you want
the truth?” You cannot have both this year. If the association goes
out and tells the public exactly what it knows, it will get itself
laughed at, insult the candidate, and elect his opponent. If it tells
the truth, it might as well run a candidate of its own as a protest
and an advertisement of that truth. It can buy good plumbing with a
lie, and the old gentleman thinks it ought to do so. The reformers are
going to endorse the candidate, and upon their heads will be visited
his theft of the books. They have sold out the little public confidence
they held. Had they stood out for another year, under the practical
régime which they had already endured for twenty, and had they devoted
themselves to augmenting the public interest in the school question,
both parties would have offered them plumbing and books to allay the
excitement. The parties might, perhaps, have relaxed their grip on the
whole school system rather than meet the issue.