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A PREFACE TO POLITICS
by
WALTER LIPPMANN
"A God wilt thou create for thyself
out of thy seven devils."
Mitchell Kennerley
New York and London
1914
Copyright, 1913, by
Mitchell Kennerley
_Contents_
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION
I. Routineer and Inventor 1
II. The Taboo 34
III. The Changing Focus 53
IV. The Golden Rule and After 86
V. Well Meaning but Unmeaning: the Chicago Vice Report 122
VI. Some Necessary Iconoclasm 159
VII. The Making of Creeds 204
VIII. The Red Herring 247
IX. Revolution and Culture 273
INTRODUCTION
The most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men
and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter
very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise,
the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts.
Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings
by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public
affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as
silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile
of the people who do not care. Eager to believe that all the world is as
interested as they are, there comes a time when even the reformer is
compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that
politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing. But
such moments of illumination are rare. They appear in writers who realize
how large is the public that doesn't read their books, in reformers who
venture to compare the membership list of their league with the census of
the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight
knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to
their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid,
inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone
they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly private
person."
The reformer is himself not lacking in stolidity if he can believe such a
fiction of a people that crowds about tickers and demands the news of the
day before it happens, that trembles on the verge of a panic over the
unguarded utterance of a financier, and founds a new religion every month
or so. But after a while self-deception ceases to be a comfort. This is
when the reformer notices how indifference to politics is settling upon
some of the most alert minds of our generation, entering into the
attitude of men as capable as any reformer of large and imaginative
interests. For among the keenest minds, among artists, scientists and
philosophers, there is a remarkable inclination to make a virtue of
political indifference. Too passionate an absorption in public affairs is
felt to be a somewhat shallow performance, and the reformer is patronized
as a well-meaning but rather dull fellow. This is the criticism of men
engaged in some genuinely creative labor. Often it is unexpressed, often
as not the artist or scientist will join in a political movement. But in
the depths of his soul there is, I suspect, some feeling which says to
the politician, "Why so hot, my little sir?"
Nothing, too, is more illuminating than the painful way in which many
people cultivate a knowledge of public affairs because they have a
conscience and wish to do a citizen's duty. Having read a number of
articles on the tariff and ploughed through the metaphysics of the
currency question, what do they do? They turn with all the more zest to
some spontaneous human interest. Perhaps they follow, follow, follow
Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through the emotions of a great
battle. But for the affairs of statecraft, for the very policies that a
Roosevelt advocates, the interest is largely perfunctory, maintained out
of a sense of duty and dropped with a sigh of relief.
That reaction may not be as deplorable as it seems. Pick up your
newspaper, read the Congressional Record, run over in your mind the
"issues" of a campaign, and then ask yourself whether the average man is
entirely to blame because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and refuses to
take the politician at his own rhetorical valuation. If men find
statecraft uninteresting, may it not be that statecraft _is_
uninteresting? I have a more or less professional interest in public
affairs; that is to say, I have had opportunity to look at politics from
the point of view of the man who is trying to get the attention of people
in order to carry through some reform. At first it was a hard confession
to make, but the more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I
respected the indifference of the public. There was something
monotonously trivial and irrelevant about our reformist enthusiasm, and
an appalling justice in that half-conscious criticism which refuses to
place politics among the genuine, creative activities of men. Science was
valid, art was valid, the poorest grubber in a laboratory was engaged in
a real labor, anyone who had found expression in some beautiful object
was truly centered. But politics was a personal drama without meaning or
a vague abstraction without substance.
Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable as ever, that public affairs
do have an enormous and intimate effect upon our lives. They make or
unmake us. They are the foundation of that national vigor through which
civilizations mature. City and countryside, factories and play, schools
and the family are powerful influences in every life, and politics is
directly concerned with them. If politics is irrelevant, it is certainly
not because its subject matter is unimportant. Public affairs govern our
thinking and doing with subtlety and persistence.
The trouble, I figured, must be in the way politics is concerned with the
nation's interests. If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its
results are, nevertheless, of the highest consequence. In statecraft the
penalties and rewards are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is distorted.
Perhaps uncriticised assumptions have obscured the real uses of politics.
Perhaps an attitude can be worked out which will engage a fresher
attention. For there are, I believe, blunders in our political thinking
which confuse fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and make it
difficult for men to know where they should enlist. Perhaps if we can see
politics in a different light, it will rivet our creative interests.
These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch an attitude towards
statecraft. I have tried to suggest an approach, to illustrate it
concretely, to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the title "A
Preface to Politics," I have wished to stamp upon the whole book my own
sense that it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have wished to
emphasize that there is nothing in this book which can be drafted into a
legislative proposal and presented to the legislature the day after
to-morrow. It was not written with the notion that these pages would
contain an adequate exposition of modern political method. Much less was
it written to further a concrete program. There are, I hope, no
assumptions put forward as dogmas.
It is a preliminary sketch for a theory of politics, a preface to
thinking. Like all speculation about human affairs, it is the result of a
grapple with problems as they appear in the experience of one man. For
though a personal vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal
language, it is well never to forget that all philosophies are the
language of particular men.
W. L.
46 East 80th Street, NEW YORK CITY, January 1913.
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
CHAPTER I
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
Politics does not exist for the sake of demonstrating the superior
righteousness of anybody. It is not a competition in deportment. In fact,
before you can begin to think about politics at all you have to abandon
the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. That is one
of the great American superstitions. More than any other fetish it has
ruined our sense of political values by glorifying the pharisee with his
vain cruelty to individuals and his unfounded approval of himself. You
have only to look at the Senate of the United States, to see how that
body is capable of turning itself into a court of preliminary hearings
for the Last Judgment, wasting its time and our time and absorbing public
enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For a hundred needs of the nation it
has no thought, but about the precise morality of an historical
transaction eight years old there is a meticulous interest. Whether in
the Presidential Campaign of 1904 Roosevelt was aware that the ancient
tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had not been followed, and
the exact and ultimate measure of the guilt that knowledge would have
implied--this in the year 1912 is enough to start the Senate on a
protracted man-hunt.
Now if one half of the people is bent upon proving how wicked a man is
and the other half is determined to show how good he is, neither half
will think very much about the nation. An innocent paragraph in the New
York Evening Post for August 27, 1912, gives the whole performance away.
It shows as clearly as words could how disastrous the good-and-bad-man
theory is to political thinking:
"Provided the first hearing takes place on September 30, it is expected
that the developments will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel on
the defensive. After the beginning of October, it is pointed out, the
evidence before the Committee should keep him so busy explaining and
denying that the country will not hear much Bull Moose doctrine."
Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or not, there can be no two
opinions about such an abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss,
another attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if politics is merely a
guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not
a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a
melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried,
and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are told
exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak." But even
though we desired it there would be no way of establishing any clear-cut
difference in politics between the angels and the imps. The angels are
largely self-appointed, being somewhat more sensitive to other people's
tar than their own.
But if the issue is not between honesty and dishonesty, where is it?
If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it as black on red, or red on
black, as series of horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which recede
or protrude. The longer you look the more patterns you can trace, and the
more certain it becomes that there is no single way of looking at the
board. So with political issues. There is no obvious cleavage which
everyone recognizes. Many patterns appear in the national life. The
"progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege" and the "People"; the
Socialists, that it is between the "working class" and the "master
class." An apologist for dynamite told me once that society was divided
into the weak and the strong, and there are people who draw a line
between Philistia and Bohemia.
When you rise up and announce that the conflict is between this and that,
you mean that this particular conflict interests you. The issue of
good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion of almost all
others. But experience shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict
and a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must be drawn if we are to
act at all in politics. With nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs is the most important
choice we are called upon to make. In large measure it determines the
rest of our thinking. Now some issues are fertile; some are not. Some
lead to spacious results; others are blind alleys. With this in mind I
wish to suggest that the distinction most worth emphasizing to-day is
between those who regard government as a routine to be administered and
those who regard it as a problem to be solved.
The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives. The man who
will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example
of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service,
in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as
unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the
tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from
under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human,
temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens
above him is nothing but the roof.
He is the slave of routine. He can boast of somewhat more spiritual
cousins in the men who reverence their ancestors' independence, who feel,
as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather is necessary to a
family's respectability. These are the routineers gifted with historical
sense. They take their forefathers with enormous solemnity. But one
mistake is rarely avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing their
grandfather did, and ignore the originality which enabled him to do it.
If tradition were a reverent record of those crucial moments when men
burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on
which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always
tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the
habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to
the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers' glory--to the
archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth
century contrivance by which for a time it was served. To reverence
Washington they wear a powdered wig; they do honor to Lincoln by
cultivating awkward hands and ungainly feet.
It is fascinating to watch this kind of conservative in action. From
Senator Lodge, for example, we do not expect any new perception of
popular need. We know that probably his deepest sincerity is an attempt
to reproduce the atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago. The
manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility which comes from too much
gazing at bad statues of dead statesmen.
Yet just because a man is in opposition to Senator Lodge there is no
guarantee that he has freed himself from the routineer's habit of mind. A
prejudice against some mannerism or a dislike of pretensions may merely
cloak some other kind of routine. Take the "good government" attitude. No
fresh insight is behind that. It does not promise anything; it does not
offer to contribute new values to human life. The machine which exists is
accepted in all its essentials: the "goo-goo" yearns for a somewhat
smoother rotation.
Often as not the very effort to make the existing machine run more
perfectly merely makes matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is
frequently one of the worst of the routineers. Even machines are not
altogether inflexible, and sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad
deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety attempt to adapt the
machine to changing conditions. Think what would have happened had we
actually remained stolidly faithful to every intention of the Fathers.
Think what would happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer
force of circumstances we have twisted constitutions and laws to some
approximation of our needs. A changing country has managed to live in
spite of a static government machine. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when
he said that "the famous Constitution survives only because whenever any
corner of it gets into the way of the accumulating dollar it is pettishly
knocked off and thrown away. Every social development, however beneficial
and inevitable from the public point of view, is met, not by an
intelligent adaptation of the social structure to its novelties but by a
panic and a cry of Go Back."
I am tempted to go further and put into the same class all those radicals
who wish simply to substitute some other kind of machine for the one we
have. Though not all of them would accept the name, these reformers are
simply utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are more critical than
the ordinary conservatives'. They do see that humanity is badly squeezed
in the existing mould. They have enough imagination to conceive a
different one. But they have an infinite faith in moulds. This routine
they don't believe in, but they believe in their own: if you could put
the country under a new "system," then human affairs would run
automatically for the welfare of all. Some improvement there might be,
but as almost all men are held in an iron devotion to their own
creations, the routine reformers are simply working for another
conservatism, and not for any continuing liberation.
The type of statesman we must oppose to the routineer is one who regards
all social organization as an instrument. Systems, institutions and
mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue of their own: they are
valuable only when they serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of
course, but with a constant sense that men have made them, that new ones
can be devised, that only an effort of the will can keep machinery in its
place. He has no faith whatever in automatic governments. While the
routineers see machinery and precedents revolving with mankind as
puppets, he puts the deliberate, conscious, willing individual at the
center of his philosophy. This reversal is pregnant with a new outlook
for statecraft. I hope to show that it alone can keep step with life; it
alone is humanly relevant; and it alone achieves valuable results.
Call this man a political creator or a political inventor. The essential
quality of him is that he makes that part of existence which has
experience the master of it. He serves the ideals of human feelings, not
the tendencies of mechanical things.
The difference between a phonograph and the human voice is that the
phonograph must sing the song which is stamped upon it. Now there are
days--I suspect the vast majority of them in most of our lives--when we
grind out the thing that is stamped upon us. It may be the governing of a
city, or teaching school, or running a business. We do not get out of bed
in the morning because we are eager for the day; something external--we
often call it our duty--throws off the bed-clothes, complains that the
shaving water isn't hot, puts us into the subway and lands us at our
office in season for punching the time-check. We revolve with the
business for three or four hours, signing letters, answering telephones,
checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve o'clock the prospect of
lunch puts a touch of romance upon life. Then because our days are so
unutterably the same, we turn to the newspapers, we go to the magazines
and read only the "stuff with punch," we seek out a "show" and drive
serious playwrights into the poorhouse. "You can go through contemporary
life," writes Wells, "fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never
really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest
moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with
primary and elementary necessities the sweat of your death-bed."
The world grinds on: we are a fly on the wheel. That sense of an
impersonal machine going on with endless reiteration is an experience
that imaginative politicians face. Often as not they disguise it under
heroic phrases and still louder affirmation, just as most of us hide our
cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty,
conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to
officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which
committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests, and
delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps this
is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from
public life every now and then in order to give him a chance to learn
something new. Every statesman like every professor should have his
sabbatical year.
The revolt against the service of our own mechanical habits is well known
to anyone who has followed modern thought. As a sharp example one might
point to Thomas Davidson, whom William James called "individualist à
outrance".... "Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of my own on
'Habit,' he said that it was a fixed rule with him to form no regular
habits. When he found himself in danger of settling into even a good one,
he made a point of interrupting it."
Such men are the sparkling streams that flow through the dusty stretches
of a nation. They invigorate and emphasize those times in your own life
when each day is new. Then you are alive, then you drive the world before
you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself to your effort; you
seem to manage detail with an inferior part of yourself, while the real
soul of you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought like an edge of
steel and desire like a flame." Eager with sympathy, you and your work
are reflected from many angles. You have become luminous.
Some people are predominantly eager and wilful. The world does not huddle
and bend them to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures of
environment, but creators of it. Of other people's environment they
become the most active part--the part which sets the fashion. What they
initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of intrinsic prestige. These
are the natural leaders of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as
founder of a religion.
It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively active towards the
world which gives man a miraculous assurance that the world is something
he can make. In creative moments men always draw upon "some secret spring
of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers
penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy, for the chance is denied by
which we can lie back upon the perfection of some mechanical contrivance.
Yet in the light of it government becomes alert to a process of continual
creation, an unceasing invention of forms to meet constantly changing
needs.
This philosophy is not only difficult to practice: it is elusive when you
come to state it. For our political language was made to express a
routine conception of government. It comes to us from the Eighteenth
Century. And no matter how much we talk about the infusion of the
"evolutionary" point of view into all of modern thought, when the test is
made political practice shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our
theories assume, and our language is fitted to thinking of government as
a frame--Massachusetts, I believe, actually calls her fundamental law the
Frame of Government. We picture political institutions as mechanically
constructed contrivances within which the nation's life is contained and
compelled to approximate some abstract idea of justice or liberty. These
frames have very little elasticity, and we take it as an historical
commonplace that sooner or later a revolution must come to burst the
frame apart. Then a new one is constructed.
Our own Federal Constitution is a striking example of this machine
conception of government. It is probably the most important instance we
have of the deliberate application of a mechanical philosophy to human
affairs. Leaving out all question of the Fathers' ideals, looking simply
at the bias which directed their thinking, is there in all the world a
more plain-spoken attempt to contrive an automatic governor--a machine
which would preserve its balance without the need of taking human nature
into account? What other explanation is there for the naïve faith of the
Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature, and judiciary; in
the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with
vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact that power upsets all
mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the natural leaders seems to
have illuminated those historic deliberations. The Fathers had a rather
pale god, they had only a speaking acquaintance with humanity, so they
put their faith in a scaffold, and it has been part of our national piety
to pretend that they succeeded.
They worked with the philosophy of their age. Living in the Eighteenth
Century, they thought in the images of Newton and Montesquieu. "The
Government of the United States," writes Woodrow Wilson, "was constructed
upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of
unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe.... As
Montesquieu pointed out to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way,
they had sought to balance executive, legislative and judiciary off
against one another by a series of checks and counterpoises, which Newton
might readily have recognized as suggestive of the mechanism of the
heavens." No doubt this automatic and balanced theory of government
suited admirably that distrust of the people which seems to have been a
dominant feeling among the Fathers. For they were the conservatives of
their day: between '76 and '89 they had gone the usual way of opportunist
radicals. But had they written the Constitution in the fire of their
youth, they might have made it more democratic,--I doubt whether they
would have made it less mechanical. The rebellious spirit of Tom Paine
expressed itself in logical formulæ as inflexible to the pace of life as
did the more contented Hamilton's. This is a determinant which burrows
beneath our ordinary classification of progressive and reactionary to the
spiritual habits of a period.
If you look into the early utopias of Fourier and Saint-Simon, or better
still into the early trade unions, this same faith that a government can
be made to work mechanically is predominant everywhere. All the devices
of rotation in office, short terms, undelegated authority are simply
attempts to defeat the half-perceived fact that power will not long stay
diffused. It is characteristic of these primitive democracies that they
worship Man and distrust men. They cling to some arrangement, hoping
against experience that a government freed from human nature will
automatically produce human benefits. To-day within the Socialist Party
there is perhaps the greatest surviving example of the desire to offset
natural leadership by artificial contrivance. It is an article of faith
among orthodox socialists that personalities do not count, and I
sincerely believe I am not exaggerating the case when I say that their
ideal of government is like Gordon Craig's ideal of the theater--the
acting is to be done by a row of supermarionettes. There is a myth among
socialists to which all are expected to subscribe, that initiative
springs anonymously out of the mass of the people,--that there are no
"leaders," that the conspicuous figures are no more influential than the
figurehead on the prow of a ship.
This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement--that it loves a
crowd and fears the individuals who compose it--that the religion of
humanity should have had no faith in human beings. Jealous of all
individuals, democracies have turned to machines. They have tried to blot
out human prestige, to minimize the influence of personality. That there
is historical justification for this fear is plain enough. To put it
briefly, democracy is afraid of the tyrant. That explains, but does not
justify. Governments have to be carried on by men, however much we
distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically beneficent
sovereign.
Democracy has put an unfounded faith in automatic contrivances. Because
it left personality out of its speculation, it rested in the empty faith
that it had excluded it from reality. But in the actual stress of life
these frictions do not survive ten minutes. Public officials do not
become political marionettes, though people pretend that they are. When
theory runs against the grain of living forces, the result is a deceptive
theory of politics. If the real government of the United States "had, in
fact," as Woodrow Wilson says, "been a machine governed by mechanically
automatic balances, it would have had no history; but it was not, and its
history has been rich with the influence and personalities of the men who
have conducted it and made it a living reality." Only by violating the
very spirit of the constitution have we been able to preserve the letter
of it. For behind that balanced plan there grew up what Senator Beveridge
has called so brilliantly the "invisible government," an empire of
natural groups about natural leaders. Parties are such groups: they have
had a power out of all proportion to the intentions of the Fathers.
Behind the parties has grown up the "political machine"--falsely called a
machine, the very opposite of one in fact, a natural sovereignty, I
believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter behind
which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real government that has defeated
a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a strange and monstrous
excrescence. Its structure and the laws of its life are, I believe,
typical of all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany duplicated
wherever there is a social group to be governed--in trade unions, in
clubs, in boys' gangs, in the Four Hundred, in the Socialist Party. It is
an accretion of power around a center of influence, cemented by
patronage, graft, favors, friendship, loyalties, habits,--a human
grouping, a natural pyramid.
Only recently have we begun to see that the "political ring" is not
something confined to public life. It was Lincoln Steffens, I believe,
who first perceived that fact. For a time it was my privilege to work
under him on an investigation of the "Money Power." The leading idea was
different from customary "muckraking." We were looking not for the evils
of Big Business, but for its anatomy. Mr. Steffens came to the subject
with a first-hand knowledge of politics. He knew the "invisible
government" of cities, states, and the nation. He knew how the boss
worked, how he organized his power. When Mr. Steffens approached the vast
confusion and complication of big business, he needed some hypothesis to
guide him through that maze of facts. He made a bold and brilliant guess,
an hypothesis. To govern a life insurance company, Mr. Steffens argued,
was just as much "government" as to run a city. What if political methods
existed in the realm of business? The investigation was never carried
through completely, but we did study the methods by which several life
and fire insurance companies, banks, two or three railroads, and several
industrials are controlled. We found that the anatomy of Big Business was
strikingly like that of Tammany Hall: the same pyramiding of influence,
the same tendency of power to center on individuals who did not
necessarily sit in the official seats, the same effort of human
organization to grow independently of legal arrangements. Thus in the
life insurance companies, and the Hughes investigation supports this, the
real power was held not by the president, not by the voters or
policy-holders, but by men who were not even directors. After a while we
took it as a matter of course that the head of a company was an
administrative dummy, with a dependence on unofficial power similar to
that of Governor Dix on Boss Murphy. That seems to be typical of the
whole economic life of this country. It is controlled by groups of men
whose influence extends like a web to smaller, tributary groups, cutting
across all official boundaries and designations, making short work of all
legal formulæ, and exercising sovereignty regardless of the little fences
we erect to keep it in bounds.
A glimpse into the labor world revealed very much the same condition. The
boss, and the bosslet, the heeler--the men who are "it"--all are there
exercising the real power, the power that independently of charters and
elections decides what shall happen. I don't wish to have this regarded
as necessarily malign. It seems so now because we put our faith in the
ideal arrangements which it disturbs. But if we could come to face it
squarely--to see that that is what sovereignty is--that if we are to use
human power for human purposes we must turn to the realities of it, then
we shall have gone far towards leaving behind us the futile hopes of
mechanical perfection so constantly blasted by natural facts.
The invisible government is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the
fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution.
What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and
are compelled to submit to it. The nature of political power we shall not
change. If that is the way human societies organize sovereignty, the
sooner we face that fact the better. For the object of democracy is not
to imitate the rhythm of the stars but to harness political power to the
nation's need. If corporations and governments have indeed gone on a joy
ride the business of reform is not to set up fences, Sherman Acts and
injunctions into which they can bump, but to take the wheel and to steer.
The corruption of which we hear so much is certainly not accounted for
when you have called it dishonesty. It is too widespread for any such
glib explanation. When you see how business controls politics, it
certainly is not very illuminating to call the successful business men of
a nation criminals. Yet I suppose that all of them violate the law. May
not this constant dodging or hurdling of statutes be a sign that there is
something the matter with the statutes? Is it not possible that graft is
the cracking and bursting of the receptacles in which we have tried to
constrain the business of this country? It seems possible that business
has had to control politics because its laws were so stupidly
obstructive. In the trust agitation this is especially plausible. For
there is every reason to believe that concentration is a world-wide
tendency, made possible at first by mechanical inventions, fostered by
the disastrous experiences of competition, and accepted by business men
through contagion and imitation. Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever
politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and
struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political
conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not
checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated
that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all
the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a
profound impetus in the business world--an impetus which certainly cannot
be obliterated, even if anyone were foolish enough to wish it. I venture
to suggest that much of what is called "corruption" is the odor of a
decaying political system done to death by an economic growth.
It is our desperate adherence to an old method that has produced the
confusion of political life. Because we have insisted upon looking at
government as a frame and governing as a routine, because in short we
have been static in our theories, politics has such an unreal relation to
actual conditions. Feckless--that is what our politics is. It is
literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically instead of
vitally. We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have
hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and
leadership, when life was crying that its inventive abilities should be
freed.
Roosevelt in his term did much to center government truly. For a time
natural leadership and nominal position coincided, and the administration
became in a measure a real sovereignty. The routine conception dwindled,
and the Roosevelt appointees went at issues as problems to be solved.
They may have been mistaken: Roosevelt may be uncritical in his
judgments. But the fact remains that the Roosevelt régime gave a new
prestige to the Presidency by effecting through it the greatest release
of political invention in a generation. Contrast it with the Taft
administration, and the quality is set in relief. Taft was the perfect
routineer trying to run government as automatically as possible. His
sincerity consisted in utter respect for form: he denied himself whatever
leadership he was capable of, and outwardly at least he tried to
"balance" the government. His greatest passions seem to be purely
administrative and legal. The people did not like it. They said it was
dead. They were right. They had grown accustomed to a humanly liberating
atmosphere in which formality was an instrument instead of an idol. They
had seen the Roosevelt influence adding to the resources of
life--irrigation, and waterways, conservation, the Panama Canal, the
"country life" movement. They knew these things were achieved through
initiative that burst through formal restrictions, and they applauded
wildly. It was only a taste, but it was a taste, a taste of what
government might be like.
The opposition was instructive. Apart from those who feared Roosevelt for
selfish reasons, his enemies were men who loved an orderly adherence to
traditional methods. They shivered in the emotional gale; they obstructed
and the gale became destructive. They felt that, along with obviously
good things, this sudden national fertility might breed a monster--that a
leadership like Roosevelt's might indeed prove dangerous, as giving birth
may lead to death.
What the methodically-minded do not see is that the sterility of a
routine is far more appalling. Not everyone may feel that to push out
into the untried, and take risks for big prizes, is worth while. Men will
tell you that government has no business to undertake an adventure, to
make experiments. They think that safety lies in repetition, that if you
do nothing, nothing will be done to you. It's a mistake due to poverty of
imagination and inability to learn from experience. Even the timidest
soul dare not "stand pat." The indictment against mere routine in
government is a staggering one.
For while statesmen are pottering along doing the same thing year in,
year out, putting up the tariff one year and down the next, passing
appropriation bills and recodifying laws, the real forces in the country
do not stand still. Vast changes, economic and psychological, take place,
and these changes demand new guidance. But the routineers are always
unprepared. It has become one of the grim trade jokes of innovators that
the one thing you can count upon is that the rulers will come to think
that they are the apex of human development. For a queer effect of
responsibility on men is that it makes them try to be as much like
machines as possible. Tammany itself becomes rigid when it is too
successful, and only defeat seems to give it new life. Success makes men
rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired
of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. But
conditions change whether statesmen wish them to or not; society must
have new institutions to fit new wants, and all that rigid conservatism
can do is to make the transitions difficult. Violent revolutions may be
charged up to the unreadiness of statesmen. It is because they will not
see, or cannot see, that feudalism is dead, that chattel slavery is
antiquated; it is because they have not the wisdom and the audacity to
anticipate these great social changes; it is because they insist upon
standing pat that we have French Revolutions and Civil Wars.
But statesmen who had decided that at last men were to be the masters of
their own history, instead of its victims, would face politics in a truly
revolutionary manner. It would give a new outlook to statesmanship,
turning it from the mere preservation of order, the administration of
political machinery and the guarding of ancient privilege to the
invention of new political forms, the prevision of social wants, and the
preparation for new economic growths.
Such a statesmanship would in the '80's have prepared for the trust
movement. There would have been nothing miraculous in such foresight.
Standard Oil was dominant by the beginning of the '80's, and
concentration had begun in sugar, steel and other basic industries. Here
was an economic tendency of revolutionary significance--the organization
of business in a way that was bound to change the outlook of a whole
nation. It had vast potentialities for good and evil--all it wanted was
harnessing and directing. But the new thing did not fit into the little
outlines and verbosities which served as a philosophy for our political
hacks. So they gaped at it and let it run wild, called it names, and
threw stones at it. And by that time the force was too big for them. An
alert statesmanship would have facilitated the process of concentration;
would have made provision for those who were cast aside; would have been
an ally of trust building, and by that very fact it would have had an
internal grip on the trust--it would have kept the trust's inner workings
public; it could have bent the trust to social uses.
This is not mere wisdom after the event. In the '80's there were hundreds
of thousands of people in the world who understood that the trust was a
natural economic growth. Karl Marx had proclaimed it some thirty years
before, and it was a widely circulated idea. Is it asking too much of a
statesman if we expect him to know political theory and to balance it
with the facts he sees? By the '90's surely, the egregious folly of a
Sherman Anti-Trust Law should have been evident to any man who pretended
to political leadership. Yet here it is the year 1912 and that monument
of economic ignorance and superstition is still worshiped with the lips
by two out of the three big national parties.
Another movement--like that of the trust--is gathering strength to-day.
It is the unification of wage-workers. We stand in relation to it as the
men of the '80's did to the trusts. It is the complement of that problem.
It also has vast potentialities for good and evil. It, too, demands
understanding and direction. It, too, will not be stopped by hard names
or injunctions.
What we loosely call "syndicalism" is a tendency that no statesman can
overlook to-day without earning the jeers of his children. This labor
movement has a destructive and constructive energy within it. On its
beneficent side it promises a new professional interest in work,
self-education, and the co-operative management of industry. But this
creative power is constantly choked off because the unions are compelled
to fight for their lives--the more opposition they meet the more you are
likely to see of sabotage, direct action, the grève perlée--the less
chance there is for the educative forces to show themselves. Then, the
more violent syndicalism proves itself to be, the more hysterically we
bait it in the usual vicious circle of ignorance.
But who amongst us is optimistic enough to hope that the men who sit in
the mighty positions are going to make a better show of themselves than
their predecessors did over the trust problem? It strains hope a little
too much. Those men in Washington, most of them lawyers, are so educated
that they are practically incapable of meeting a new condition. All their
training plus all their natural ossification of mind is hostile to
invention. You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the
jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.
The thought-processes in Washington are too lumbering for the needs of
this nation. Against that evil muckraking ought to be directed. Those
senators and representatives are largely irrelevant; they are not
concerned with realities. Their dishonesties are comparatively
insignificant. The scorn of the public should be turned upon the
emptiness of political thought, upon the fact that those men seem without
even a conception of the nation's needs. And while they maunder along
they stifle the forces of life which are trying to break through. It was
nothing but the insolence of the routineer that forced Gifford Pinchot
out of the Forest Service. Pinchot in respect to his subject was a fine
political inventor. But routine forced him out--into what?--into the moil
and toil of fighting for offices, and there he has cut a poor figure
indeed. You may say that he has had to spend his energy trying to find a
chance to use his power. What a wanton waste of talent is that for a
civilized nation! Wiley is another case of the creative mind harassed by
the routineers. Judge Lindsey is another--a fine, constructive children's
judge compelled to be a politician. And of our misuse of the Rockefellers
and Carnegies--the retrospect is appalling. Here was industrial genius
unquestionably beyond the ordinary. What did this nation do with it? It
found no public use for talent. It left that to operate in darkness--then
opinion rose in an empty fury, made an outlaw of one and a platitudinous
philanthropist of the other. It could lynch one as a moral monster, when
as a matter of fact his ideals were commonplace; it could proclaim one a
great benefactor when in truth he was a rather dull old gentleman. Abused
out of all reason or praised irrelevantly--the one thing this nation has
not been able to do with these men is to use their genius. It is this
life-sapping quality of our politics that should be fought--its wanton
waste of the initiatives we have--its stupid indifference.
We need a new sense of political values. These times require a different
order of thinking. We cannot expect to meet our problems with a few
inherited ideas, uncriticised assumptions, a foggy vocabulary, and a
machine philosophy. Our political thinking needs the infusion of
contemporary insights. The enormous vitality that is regenerating other
interests can be brought into the service of politics. Our primary care
must be to keep the habits of the mind flexible and adapted to the
movement of real life. The only way to control our destiny is to work
with it. In politics, at least, we stoop to conquer. There is no use, no
heroism, in butting against the inevitable, yet nothing is entirely
inevitable. There is always some choice, some opportunity for human
direction.
It is not easy. It is far easier to treat life as if it were dead, men as
if they were dolls. It is everlastingly difficult to keep the mind
flexible and alert. The rule of thumb is not here. To follow the pace of
living requires enormous vigilance and sympathy. No one can write
conclusively about it. Compared with this creative statesmanship, the
administering of a routine or the battle for a platitude is a very simple
affair. But genuine politics is not an inhuman task. Part of the
genuineness is its unpretentious humanity. I am not creating the figure
of an ideal statesman out of some inner fancy. That is just the deepest
error of our political thinking--to talk of politics without reference to
human beings. The creative men appear in public life in spite of the cold
blanket the politicians throw over them. Really statesmanlike things are
done, inventions are made. But this real achievement comes to us
confused, mixed with much that is contradictory. Political inventors are
to-day largely unconscious of their purpose, and, so, defenceless against
the distraction of their routineer enemies.
Lacking a philosophy they are defenceless against their own inner
tendency to sink into repetition. As a witty Frenchman remarked, many
geniuses become their own disciples. This is true when the attention is
slack, and effort has lost its direction. We have elaborate governmental
mechanisms--like the tariff, for example, which we go on making more
"scientific" year in, year out--having long since lost sight of their
human purpose. They may be defeating the very ends they were meant to
serve. We cling to constitutions out of "loyalty." We trudge in the
treadmill and call it love of our ancient institutions. We emulate the
mule, that greatest of all routineers.