turn into a genuine break with the State ideal. The Declaration of
Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not
only with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but
also with the Divine Right of the State. If all governments derive
their authority from the consent of the governed, and if a people is
entitled, at any time that it becomes oppressive, to overthrow it and
institute one more nearly conformable to their interests and ideals,
the old idea of the sovereignty of the State is destroyed. The State is
reduced to the homely work of an instrument for carrying out popular
policies. If revolution is justifiable a State may be even criminal
sometimes in resisting its own extinction. The sovereignty of the
people is no mere phrase. It is a direct challenge to the historic
tradition of the State. For it implies that the ultimate sanctity
resides not in the State at all or in its agent, the government, but in
the nation, that is, in the country viewed as a cultural group and not
specifically as a king-dominated herd. The State then becomes a mere
instrument, the servant of this popular will, or of the constructive
needs of the cultural group. The Revolution had in it, therefore,
the makings of a very daring modern experiment--the founding of a
free nation which should use the State to effect its vast purposes of
subduing a continent just as the colonists’ armies had used arms to
detach their society from the irresponsible rule of an overseas king
and his frivolous ministers. The history of the State might have ended
in 1776 as far as the American colonies were concerned, and the modern
nation which is still striving to materialize itself have been born.
For awhile it seemed almost as if the State was dead. But men who
are freed rarely know what to do with their liberty. In each colony
the fatal seed of the State had been sown; it could not disappear.
Rival prestiges and interests began to make themselves felt. Fear
of foreign States, economic distress, discord between classes, the
inevitable physical exhaustion and prostration of idealism which
follows a protracted war--all combined to put the responsible classes
of the new States into the mood for a regression to the State ideal.
Ostensibly there is no reason why the mere lack of a centralized State
should have destroyed the possibility of progress in the new liberated
America, provided the inter-state jealousy and rivalry could have been
destroyed. But there were no leaders for this anti-State nationalism.
The sentiments of the Declaration remained mere sentiments. No
constructive political scheme was built on them. The State ideal, on
the other hand, had ambitious leaders of the financial classes, who
saw in the excessive decentralization of the Confederation too much
opportunity for the control of society by the democratic lower-class
elements. They were menaced by imperialistic powers without and by
democracy within. Through their fear of the former they tended to
exaggerate the impossibility of the latter. There was no inclination
to make the new State a school where democratic experiments could
be worked out as they should be. They were unwilling to give
reconstruction the term that might have been necessary to build up this
truly democratic nationalism. Six years is a short time to reconstruct
an agricultural country devastated by a six years’ war. The popular
elements in the new States had time only to show their turbulence; they
were given no time to grow. The ambitious leaders of the financial
classes got a convention called to discuss the controversies and
maladjustments of the States, which were making them clamor for a
revision of the Articles of Confederation, and then, by one of the most
successful _coups d’état_ in history, turned their assembly into the
manufacture of a new government on the strongest lines of the old State
ideal.
This new constitution, manufactured in secret session by the leaders
of the propertied and ruling classes, was then submitted to an
approval of the electors which only by the most expert manipulation
was obtained, but which was sufficient to override the indignant
undercurrent of protest from those popular elements who saw the fruits
of the Revolution slipping away from them. Universal suffrage would
have killed it forever. Had the liberated colonies had the advantage of
the French experience before them, the promulgation of the Constitution
would undoubtedly have been followed by a new revolution, as very
nearly happened later against Washington and the Federalists. But the
ironical ineptitude of Fate put the machinery of the new Federalist
constitutional government in operation just at the moment that the
French Revolution began, and by the time those great waves of Jacobin
feeling reached North America, the new Federalist State was firmly
enough on its course to weather the gale and the turmoil.
The new State was therefore not the happy political symbol of a united
people, who in order to form a more perfect union, etc., but the
imposition of a State on a loose and growing nationalism, which was
in a condition of unstable equilibrium and needed perhaps only to be
fertilized from abroad to develop a genuine political experiment in
democracy. The preamble to the Constitution, as was soon shown in the
hostile popular vote and later in the revolt against the Federalists,
was a pious hope rather than actuality, a blessedness to be realized
when by the force of government pressure, the creation of idealism,
and mere social habit, the population should be welded and kneaded
into a State. That this is what has actually happened, is seen in the
fact that the somewhat shockingly undemocratic origins of the American
State have been almost completely glossed over and the unveiling is
bitterly resented, by none so bitterly as the significant classes who
have been most industrious in cultivating patriotic myth and legend.
American history, as far as it has entered into the general popular
emotion, runs along this line: The Colonies are freed by the Revolution
from a tyrannous King and become free and independent States; there
follow six years of impotent peace, during which the Colonies quarrel
among themselves and reveal the hopeless weakness of the principle
under which they are working together; in desperation the people then
create a new instrument, and launch a free and democratic republic,
which was and remains--especially since it withstood the shock of
civil war--the most perfect form of democratic government known
to man, perfectly adequate to be promulgated as an example in the
twentieth century to all people, and to be spread by propaganda, and,
if necessary, the sword, in all unregenerately Imperial regions. Modern
historians reveal the avowedly undemocratic personnel and opinions of
the Convention. They show that the members not only had an unconscious
economic interest but a frank political interest in founding a State
which should protect the propertied classes against the hostility of
the people. They show how, from one point of view, the new government
became almost a mechanism for overcoming the repudiation of debts, for
putting back into their place a farmer and small trader class whom
the unsettled times of reconstruction had threatened to liberate, for
reëstablishing on the securest basis of the sanctity of property and
the State, their class-supremacy menaced by a democracy that had
drunk too deeply at the fount of Revolution. But all this makes little
impression on the other legend of the popular mind, because it disturbs
the sense of the sanctity of the State and it is this rock to which the
herd-wish must cling.
Every little school boy is trained to recite the weaknesses and
inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. It is taken as
axiomatic that under them the new nation was falling into anarchy
and was only saved by the wisdom and energy of the Convention. These
hapless articles have had to bear the infamy cast upon the untried
by the radiantly successful. The nation had to be strong to repel
invasion, strong to pay to the last loved copper penny the debts of
the propertied and the provident ones, strong to keep the unpropertied
and improvident from ever using the government to ensure their own
prosperity at the expense of moneyed capital. Under the Articles
the new States were obviously trying to reconstruct themselves in
an alarming tenderness for the common man impoverished by the war.
No one suggests that the anxiety of the leaders of the heretofore
unquestioned ruling classes desired the revision of the Articles and
labored so weightily over a new instrument not because the nation was
failing under the Articles but because it was succeeding only too
well. Without intervention from the leaders, reconstruction threatened
in time to turn the new nation into an agrarian and proletarian
democracy. It is impossible to predict what would have been worked out
in time, whether the democratic idealism implicit in the Declaration
of Independence would have materialized into a form of society very
much modified from the ancient State. All we know is that at a time
when the current of political progress was in the direction of agrarian
and proletarian democracy, a force hostile to it gripped the nation
and imposed upon it a powerful form against which it was never to
succeed in doing more than blindly struggle. The liberating virus of
the Revolution was definitely expunged, and henceforth if it worked at
all it had to work against the State, in opposition to the armed and
respectable power of the nation.
The propertied classes, seated firmly in the saddle by their
Constitutional _coup d’état_, have, of course, never lost their
ascendancy. The particular group of Federalists who had engineered
the new machinery and enjoyed the privilege of setting it in motion,
were turned out in a dozen years by the “Jeffersonian democracy” whom
their manner had so deeply offended. But the Jeffersonian democracy
never meant in practice any more than the substitution of the rule
of the country gentleman for the rule of the town capitalist. The
true hostility between their interests was small as compared with the
hostility of both towards the common man. When both were swept away
by the irruption of the Western democracy under Andrew Jackson and
the rule of the common man appeared for awhile in its least desirable
forms, it was comparatively easy for the two propertied classes to form
a tacit coalition against them. The new West achieved an extension of
suffrage and a jovial sense of having come politically into its own,
but the rule of the ancient classes was not seriously challenged. Their
squabbles over the tariff were family affairs, for the tariff could not
materially affect the common man of either East or West. The Eastern
and Northern capitalists soon saw the advantage of supporting Southern
country gentleman slave-power as against the free-soil pioneer. Bad
generalship on the part of this coalition allowed a Western free-soil
minority President to slip into office and brought on the Civil War,
which smashed the slave-power and left Northern capital in undisputed
possession of a field against which the pioneer could make only
sporadic and ineffective revolts.
From the Civil War to the death of Mark Hanna, the propertied
capitalist industrial classes ran a triumphal career in possession of
the State. At various times, as in 1896, the country had to be saved
for them from disillusioned, rebellious hordes of small farmers and
traders and democratic idealists, who had in the overflow of prosperity
been squeezed down into the small end of the horn. But except for
these occasional menaces, business, that is to say, aggressive
expansionist capitalism, had nearly forty years in which to direct the
American republic as a private preserve, or laboratory, experimenting,
developing, wasting, subjugating, to its heart’s content, in the midst
of a vast somnolence of complacency such as has never been seen
and contrasts strangely with the spiritual dissent and constructive
revolutionary thought which went on at the same time in England and the
Continent.
That era ended in 1904 like the crack of doom, which woke a whole
people into a modern day which they had far overslept, and for which
they had no guiding principles or philosophy to conduct them about.
They suddenly became acutely and painfully aware of the evils of
the society in which they had slumbered and they snatched at one
after the other idea, programme, movement, ideal, to uplift them out
of the slough in which they had slept. The glory of those shining
figures--captains of industry--went out in a sulphuric gloom. The head
of the State, who made up in dogmatism what he lacked in philosophy,
increased the confusion by reviving the Ten Commandments for
political purposes, and belaboring the wicked with them. The American
world tossed in a state of doubt, of reawakened social conscience,
of pragmatic effort for the salvation of society. The ruling
classes--annoyed, bewildered, harassed--pretended with much bemoaning
that they were losing their grip on the State. Their inspired prophets
uttered solemn warnings against political novelty and the abandonment
of the tried and tested fruits of experience.
These classes actually had little to fear. A political system which
had been founded in the interests of property by their own spiritual
and economic ancestors, which had become ingrained in the country’s
life through a function of 120 years, which was buttressed by a legal
system which went back without a break to the early English monarchy
was not likely to crumble before the anger of a few muck-rakers, the
disillusionment of a few radical sociologists, or the assaults of
proletarian minorities. Those who bided their time through the Taft
interregnum, which merely continued the Presidency until there could
be found a statesman to fill it, were rewarded by the appearance of
the exigency of a war, in which business organization was imperatively
needed. They were thus able to make a neat and almost noiseless
coalition with the Government. The mass of the worried middle-classes,
riddled by the campaign against American failings, which at times
extended almost to a skepticism of the American State itself, were
only too glad to sink back to a glorification of the State ideal, to
feel about them in war, the old protecting arms, to return to the old
primitive robust sense of the omnipotence of the State, its matchless
virtue, honor and beauty, driving away all the foul old doubts and
dismays.
That the same class which imposed its constitution on the nascent
proletarian and agrarian democracy has maintained itself to this day
indicates how slight was the real effect of the Revolution. When that
political change was consolidated in the new government, it was found
that there had been a mere transfer of ruling-class power across the
seas, or rather that a ruling commercial class in the colonies had
been able to remove through a war fought largely by the masses a
vexatious over-lordship of the irresponsible coterie of ministers that
surrounded George III. The colonies merely exchanged a system run in
the interest of the overseas trade of English wealth for a system run
in the interest of New England and Philadelphia merchanthood, and later
of Southern slavocracy. The daring innovation of getting rid of a king
and setting up a kingless State did not apparently impress the hard
headed farmers and small traders with as much force as it has their
patriotic defenders. The animus of the Convention was so obviously
monarchical that any executive they devised could be only a very thinly
disguised king. The compromise by which the presidency was created
proved but to be the means by which very nearly the whole mass of
traditional royal prerogatives was brought over and lodged in the new
State.
The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected
has proved to be of far less significance in the course of political
evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king. It was the
intention of the founders of the Constitution that he be elected by a
small body of notables, representing the ruling propertied classes,
who could check him up every four years in a new election. This was
no innovation. Kings have often been selected in this way in European
history, and the Roman Emperor was regularly chosen by election. That
the American President’s term was limited merely shows the confidence
which the founders felt in the buttressing force of their instrument.
His election would never pass out of the hands of the notables, and so
the office would be guaranteed to be held by a faithful representative
of upper-class demands. What he was most obviously to represent was
the interests of that body which elected him, and not the mass of the
people who were still disfranchised. For the new State started with
no Quixotic belief in universal suffrage. The property qualifications
which were in effect in every colony were continued. Government was
frankly a function of those who held a concrete interest in the public
weal, in the shape of visible property. The responsibility for the
security of property rights could safely lie only with those who had
something to secure. The “stake” in the commonwealth which those who
held office must possess was obviously larger.
One of the larger errors of political insight which the sage founders
of the Constitution committed was to assume that the enfranchised
watch-dogs of property and the public order would remain a homogeneous
class. Washington, acting strictly as the mouthpiece of the unified
State ideal, deprecated the growth of parties and of factions which
horridly keep the State in turbulence or threaten to rend it asunder.
But the monarchical and repressive policies of Washington’s own friends
promptly generated an opposition democratic party representing the
landed interests of the ruling classes, and the party system was
fastened on the country. By the time the electorate had succeeded in
reducing the electoral college to a mere recorder of the popular vote,
or in other words, had broadened the class of notables to the whole
property-holding electorate, the parties were firmly established to
carry on the selective and refining and securing work of the electoral
college. The party leadership then became, and has remained ever since,
the nucleus of notables who determine the presidency. The electorate
having won an apparently democratic victory in the destruction of the
notables, finds itself reduced to the rôle of mere ratification or
selection between two or three candidates, in whose choice they have
only a nominal share. The electoral college which stood between even
the propertied electorate and the executive with the prerogatives
of a king, gave place to a body which was just as genuinely a bar
to democratic expression, and far less responsible for its acts.
The nucleus of party councils which became, after the reduction of
the Electoral College, the real choosers of the Presidents, were
unofficial, quasi-anonymous, utterly unchecked by the populace whose
rulers they chose. More or less self-chosen, or chosen by local groups
whom they dominated, they provided a far more secure guarantee that
the State should remain in the hands of the ruling classes than the
old electoral college. The party councils could be loosely organized
entirely outside of the governmental organization, without oversight
by the State or check from the electorate. They could be composed of
the leaders of the propertied classes themselves or their lieutenants,
who could retain their power indefinitely, or at least until they were
unseated by rivals within the same charmed domain. They were at least
entirely safe from attack by the officially constituted electorate,
who, as the party system became more and more firmly established, found
they could vote only on the slates set up for them by unknown councils
behind an imposing and all-powerful “Party.”
As soon as this system was organized into a hierarchy extending from
national down to state and county politics, it became perfectly safe
to broaden the electorate. The clamors of the unpropertied or the less
propertied to share in the selection of their democratic republican
government could be graciously acceded to without endangering in the
least the supremacy of those classes which the founders had meant to
be supreme. The minority were now even more effectually protected from
the majority than under the old system, however indirect the election
might be. The electorate was now reduced to a ratifier of slates, and
as a ratifier of slates, or a chooser between two slates, both of
which were pledged to upper-class domination, the electorate could
have the freest, most universal suffrage, for any mass-desire for
political change, any determined will to shift the class-balance, would
be obliged to register itself through the party machinery. It could
make no frontal attack on the Government. And the party machinery was
directly devised to absorb and neutralize this popular shock, handing
out to the disgruntled electorate a disguised stone when it asked for
political bread, and effectually smashing any third party which ever
avariciously tried to reach government except through the regular
two-party system.
The party system succeeded, of course, beyond the wildest dreams of
its creators. It relegated the founders of the Constitution to the
rôle of doctrinaire theorists, political amateurs. Just because it
grew up slowly to meet the needs of ambitious politicians and was not
imposed by ruling-class fiat, as was the Constitution, did it have a
chance to become assimilated, worked into the political intelligence
and instinct of the people, and be adopted gladly and universally
as a genuine political form, expressive both of popular need and
ruling-class demand. It satisfied the popular demand for democracy.
The enormous sense of victory which followed the sweeping away of
property qualifications of suffrage, the tangible evidence that now
every citizen was participating in public affairs, and that the entire
manhood democracy was now self-governing, created a mood of political
complacency that lasted uninterruptedly into the twentieth century. The
party system was thus the means of removing political grievance from
the greater part of the populace, and of giving to the ruling classes
the hidden but genuine permanence of control which the Constitution had
tried openly to give them. It supplemented and repaired the ineptitudes
of the Constitution. It became the unofficial but real government, the
instrument which used the Constitution as its instrument.
Only in two cases did the party system seem to lose its grip, was it
thrown off its base by the inception of a new party from without--in
the elections of Jackson and of Lincoln. Jackson came in as the
representative of a new democratic West which had no tradition of
suffrage qualifications, and Lincoln as a minority candidate in a
time of factional and sectional strife. But the discomfiture of the
party politicians was short. The party system proved perfectly capable
of assimilating both of these new movements. Jackson’s insurrection
was soon captured by the old machinery and fed the slavocracy, and
Lincoln’s party became the property of the new bonanza capitalism.
Neither Jackson or Lincoln made the slightest deflection in the
triumphal march of the party system. In practically no other contests
has the electorate had for all practical purposes a choice except
between two candidates, identical as far as their political rôle
would be as representatives of the significant classes in the State.
Campaigns such as Bryan’s, where one of the parties is captured by an
element which seeks a real transference of power from the significant
to the less significant classes, split the party, and sporadic third
party attacks merely throw the scale one way or the other between the
big parties, or, if threatening enough, produce a virtual coalition
against them.