I
THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION AND ITS PROBLEMS
It is important to recognize that the anti-slavery agitation, the
secession of the South, and the Civil War were, after all, only an
episode in the course of American national development. The episode was
desperately serious. Like the acute illness of a strong man, it almost
killed its victim; and the crisis exposed certain weaknesses in our
political organism, in the absence of which the illness would never have
become acute. But the roots of our national vitality were apparently
untouched by the disease. When the crisis was over, the country resumed
with astonishing celerity the interrupted process of economic expansion.
The germs of a severe disease, to which the Fathers of the Republic had
given a place in the national Constitution, and which had been allowed
to flourish, because of the lack of wholesome cohesion in the body
politic--this alien growth had been cut out by a drastic surgical
operation, and the robust patient soon recovered something like his
normal health. Indeed, being in his own opinion even more robust than he
was before the crisis, he was more eager than ever to convert his good
health into the gold of satisfied desire. The ghost of slavery had been
banished from our national banquet: and, relieved of this terror, the
American people began to show, more aggressively than ever before, their
ability to provide and to consume a bountiful feast. They were no longer
children, grasping at the first fruits of a half-cultivated wilderness.
They were adults, beginning to plan the satisfaction of on appetite
which had been sharpened by self-denial, and made self-conscious by
maturity.
The North, after the war was over, did not have much time for serious
reflection upon its meaning and consequences. The Republican leaders did
just enough thinking to carry them through the crisis; but once the
rebellion was suppressed and the South partly de-nationalized in the
name of reconstruction, the need and desire was for action rather than
for thought. The anti-slavery agitation and the war had interrupted the
process, which from the public point of view, was described as the
economic development of the country, and which from an individual
standpoint meant the making of money. For many years Americans had been
unable, because of the ghost of slavery, to take full advantage of their
liberties and opportunities; and now that the specter was exorcised,
they gladly put aside any anxious political preoccupations. Politics
could be left to the politicians. It was about time to get down to
business. In this happiest of all countries, and under this best of all
governments, which had been preserved at such an awful cost, the good
American was entitled to give his undivided attention to the great work
of molding and equipping the continent for human habitation, and
incidentally to the minor task of securing his share of the rewards. A
lively, even a frenzied, outburst of industrial, commercial, and
speculative activity followed hard upon the restoration of peace. This
activity and its effects have been the most important fact in American
life during the forty years which have supervened; and it has assumed
very different characteristics from those which it had assumed previous
to the War. We must now consider the circumstances, the consequences,
and the meaning of this economic revolution.
Although nobody in 1870 suspected it, the United States was entering
upon a new phase of its economic career; and the new economy was
bringing with it radical social changes. Even before the outbreak of the
Civil War the rich and fertile states of the Middle West had become well
populated. They had passed from an almost exclusively agricultural
economy to one which was much more largely urban and industrial. The
farms had become well-equipped; large cities were being built up;
factories of various kinds were being established; and most important of
all, the whole industrial organization of the country was being adjusted
to transportation by means of the railroad. An industrial community,
which was, comparatively speaking, well-organized and well-furnished
with machinery, was taking the place of the agricultural community of
1830-1840, which was incoherent and scattered and which lacked
everything except energy and opportunity. Such an increase of
organization, capital, and equipment necessarily modified the outlook
and interests of the people of the Middle West. While still retaining
many of their local traits, their point of view had been approaching in
certain respects that of the inhabitants of the East. They had ceased to
be pioneers.
During the two decades after the Civil War, the territory, which was
still in the early stage of agricultural development, was the first and
second tier of states west of the Mississippi River. Missouri, Iowa, and
Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, and finally the Dakotas were being opened
for settlement; but in their case the effect and symptoms of this
condition were not the same as they had been with the earlier pioneer
states. Their economy was from the beginning adjusted to the railroad;
and the railroad had made an essential difference. It worked in favor of
a more comprehensive and definite organization and a more complete
equipment. While the business interests of the new states were and still
are predominantly agricultural, the railroads had transformed the
occupation of farming. After 1870, the pioneer farmer was much less
dependent than he had been upon local conditions and markets, and upon
the unaided exertions of himself and his neighbors. He bought and sold
in the markets of the world. He needed more capital and more machinery.
He had to borrow money and make shrewd business calculations. From every
standpoint his economic environment had become more complicated and more
extended, and his success depended much more upon conditions which were
beyond his control. He never was a pioneer in the sense that the early
inhabitants of the Middle West and South had been pioneers; and he has
never exercised any corresponding influence upon the American national
temper. The pioneer had enjoyed his day, and his day was over. The
Jack-of-all-trades no longer possessed an important economic function.
The average farmer was, of course, still obliged to be many kinds of a
rough mechanic, but for the most part he was nothing more than a farmer.
Unskilled labor began to mean labor which was insignificant and badly
paid. Industrial economy demanded the expert with his high and special
standards of achievement. The railroads and factories could not be
financed and operated without the assistance of well-paid and
well-trained men, who could do one or two things remarkably well, and
who did not pretend to do much of anything else. These men had to retain
great flexibility and an easy adaptability of intelligence, because
American industry and commerce remained very quick in its movements. The
machinery which they handled was less permanent, and was intended to be
less permanent than the machinery which was considered economical in
Europe. But although they had to avoid routine and business rigidity on
the penalty of utter failure, still they belonged essentially to a class
of experts. Like all experts, they had to depend, not upon mere energy,
untutored enthusiasm, and good-will, but upon careful training and
single-minded devotion to a special task, and at the same time proper
provision had to be made for coördinating the results of this highly
specialized work. More complete organization necessarily accompanied
specialization. The expert became a part of a great industrial machine.
His individuality tended to disappear in his work. His interests became
those of a group. Imperative economic necessities began to classify the
individuals composing American society in the same way, if not to the
same extent, that they had been classified in Europe.
This was a result which had never entered into the calculations of the
pioneer Democrat. He had disliked specialization, because, as he
thought, it narrowed and impoverished the individual; and he distrusted
permanent and official forms of organization, because, as he thought,
they hampered the individual. His whole political, social, and economic
outlook embodied a society of energetic, optimistic, and prosperous
democrats, united by much the same interests, occupations, and point of
view. Each of these democrats was to be essentially an all-round man.
His conception of all-round manhood was somewhat limited; but it meant
at least a person who was expansive in feeling, who was enough of a
business man successfully to pursue his own interests, and enough of a
politician to prevent any infringement or perversion of his rights. He
never doubted that the desired combination of business man, politician,
and good fellow constituted an excellent ideal of democratic
individuality, that it was sufficiently realized in the average Western
American of the Jacksonian epoch, that it would continue to be the type
of admirable manhood, and that the good democrats embodying this type
would continue to merit and to obtain substantial and approximately
equal pecuniary rewards. Moreover, for a long time the vision remained
sufficiently true. The typical American democrat described by De
Tocqueville corresponded very well with the vision of the pioneer; and
he did not disappear during the succeeding generation. For many years
millions of Americans of much the same pattern were rewarded for their
democratic virtue in an approximately similar manner. Of course some
people were poor, and some people were rich; but there was no class of
the very rich, and the poverty of the poor was generally their own
fault. Opportunity knocked at the door of every man, and the poor man of
to-day was the prosperous householder of to-morrow. For a long time
American social and economic conditions were not merely fluid, but
consistent and homogeneous, and the vision of the pioneer was fulfilled.
Nevertheless, this condition was essentially transient. It contained
within itself the seeds of its own dissolution and transformation; and
this transformation made headway just as soon as, and just as far as,
economic conditions began to prefer the man who was capable of
specializing his work, and of organizing it with the work of his
fellows.
The dominant note, consequently, of the pioneer period was an unformed
national consistency, reached by means of a natural community of feeling
and a general similarity of occupation and well-being. On the other
hand, the dominant note of the period from 1870 until the present day
has been the gradual disintegration of this early national consistency,
brought about by economic forces making for specialization and
organization in all practical affairs, for social classification, and
finally for greater individual distinction. Moreover, the tendency
towards specialization first began to undermine the very corner-stone of
the pioneer's democratic edifice. If private interest and public weal
were to be as harmonious as the pioneer assumed, every economic producer
must be a practical politician, and there must be no deep-lying division
between these primary activities. But the very first result of the
specializing tendency was to send the man of business, the politician,
and the lawyer off on separate tacks. Business interests became so
absorbing that they demanded all of a man's time and energy; and he was
obliged to neglect politics except in so far as politics affected
business. In this same way, the successful lawyers after the War were
less apt than formerly to become politicians and statesmen. They left
public affairs largely to the unsuccessful lawyers. Politics itself
became an occupation which made very exacting demands upon a man's time
and upon his conscience. Public service or military success were no
longer the best roads to public distinction. Men became renowned and
distinguished quite as much, if not more, for achievements in their
private and special occupations. Along with leadership of statesmen and
generals, the American people began to recognize that of financiers,
"captains of industry," corporation lawyers, political and labor
"bosses," and these gentlemen assumed extremely important parts in the
direction of American affairs. Officially, the new leaders were just
like any other American citizen. No titles could be conferred upon them,
and their position brought with it no necessary public responsibilities.
Actually, however, they exercised in many cases more influence upon
American social and political economy than did the official leaders.
They were an intrusion, into the traditional economic political and
social system, for which no provision had been made. Their special
interests, and the necessities of their special tasks, made their manner
of life different from that of other American citizens, and their
peculiar opportunities enabled them to appropriate an unusually large
share of the fruits of American economic development. Thus they
seriously impaired the social and economic homogeneity, which the
pioneer believed to be the essential quality of fruitful Americanism.
II
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BUSINESS SPECIALIST
Before seeking to trace the consequences and the significance of this
specialized organization of American practical affairs, we must examine
its origin with some care. An exact and complete understanding thereof
will in itself afford an unmistakable hint of the way in which its
consequences are to be appraised, and wherever necessary, corrected. The
great and increasing influence of the new unofficial leaders has been
due not only to economic conditions and to individual initiative, but
to the nature of our political ideas and institutions. The traditional
American theory was that the individual should have a free hand. In so
far as he was subject to public regulation and control such control
should be exercised by local authorities, whereof the result would be a
happy combination of individual prosperity and public weal. But this
expectation, as we have seen, has proved to be erroneous. While it has,
indeed, resulted in individual prosperity, the individual who has reaped
most of the prosperity is not the average, but the special man; and
however the public may have benefited from the process, the benefit is
mixed with so many drawbacks that, even if it may not be wholly
condemned, it certainly cannot be wholly approved. The plain fact is
that the individual in freely and energetically pursuing his own private
purposes has not been the inevitable public benefactor assumed by the
traditional American interpretation of democracy. No doubt he has
incidentally accomplished, in the pursuit of his own aggrandizement,
certain manifest public benefits; but wherever public and private
advantages have conflicted, he has naturally preferred the latter. And
under our traditional political system there was, until recently, no
effective way of correcting his preference.
As long as the economic opportunities of American life consisted chiefly
in the appropriation and improvement of uncultivated land, the average
energetic man had no difficulty in obtaining his fair share of the
increasing American economic product; but the time came when such
opportunities, although still important, were dwarfed by other
opportunities, incident to the development of a more mature economic
system. These opportunities, which were, of course, connected with the
manufacturing, industrial, and technical development of the country,
demanded under American conditions a very special type of man--the man
who would bring to his task not merely energy, but unscrupulous
devotion, originality, daring, and in the course of time a large fund of
instructive experience. The early American industrial conditions
differed from those of Europe in that they were fluid, and as a result
of this instability, extremely precarious. Rapid changes in markets,
business methods, and industrial machinery made it very difficult to
build up a safe business. A manufacturer or a merchant could not secure
his business salvation, as in Europe, merely by the adoption of sound
conservative methods. The American business man had greater
opportunities and a freer hand than his European prototype; but he was
also beset by more severe, more unscrupulous, and more dangerous
competition. The industrious and thrifty farmer could be tolerably sure
of a modest competence, due partly to his own efforts, and partly to the
increased value of his land in a more populous community; but the
business man had no such security. In his case it was war to the knife.
He was presented with a choice between aggressive daring business
operations, and financial insignificance or ruin.
No doubt this situation was due as much to the temper of the American
business man as to his economic environment. American energy had been
consecrated to economic development. The business man in seeking to
realize his ambitions and purposes was checked neither by government
control nor social custom. He had nothing to do and nothing to consider
except his own business advancement and success. He was eager,
strenuous, and impatient. He liked the excitement and the risk of large
operations. The capital at his command was generally too small for the
safe and conservative conduct of his business; and he was consequently
obliged to be adventurous, or else to be left behind in the race. He
might well be earning enormous profits one year and skirting bankruptcy
the next. Under such a stress conservatism and caution were suicidal. It
was the instinct of self-preservation, as well as the spirit of business
adventure, which kept him constantly seeking for larger markets,
improved methods, or for some peculiar means of getting ahead of his
competitors. He had no fortress behind which he could hide and enjoy his
conquests. Surrounded as he was by aggressive enemies and undefended
frontiers, his best means of security lay in a policy of constant
innovation and expansion. Moreover, even after he had obtained the
bulwark of sufficient capital and more settled industrial surroundings,
he was under no temptation to quit and enjoy the spoils of his
conquests. The social, intellectual, or even the more vulgar pleasures,
afforded by leisure and wealth, could bring him no thrill, which was
anything like as intense as that derived from the exercise of his
business ability and power. He could not conquer except by virtue of a
strong, tenacious, adventurous, and unscrupulous will; and after he had
conquered, this will had him in complete possession. He had nothing to
do but to play the game to the end--even though his additional profits
were of no living use to him.
If, however, the fluid and fluctuating nature of American economic
conditions and the fierceness of American competitive methods turned
business into a state of dangerous and aggressive warfare, the steady
and enormous expansion of the American markets made the rewards of
victory correspondingly great. Not only was the population of the
country increasing at an enormous rate, but the demand for certain
necessary products, services, and commodities was increasing at a higher
rate than the population. The American people were still a most
homogeneous collection of human beings. They wanted very much the same
things; they wanted more of these things year after year; and they
immediately rewarded any cheapening of the product by buying it in much
larger quantities. The great business opportunities of American life
consisted, consequently, in supplying some popular or necessary article
or service at a cheaper price than that at which any one else could
furnish it; and the great effort of American business men was, of
course, to obtain some advantage over their competitors in producing
such an article or in supplying such a service. The best result of this
condition was a constant improvement in the mechanism of production.
Cheapness was found to depend largely upon the efficient use of
machinery, and the efficient use of machinery was found to depend upon
constant wear and quick replacement by a better machine. But while the
economic advantage of the exhausting use and the constant improvement of
machinery was the most important economic discovery of the American
business man, he was also encouraged by his surroundings to seek
economies in other and less legitimate ways. It was all very well to
multiply machines and make them more efficient, but similar improvements
were open to competitors. The great object was to obtain some advantage
which was denied to your competitors. Then the business man could not
only secure his own position, but utterly rout and annihilate his
adversaries.
At this point the railroads came to the assistance of the aggressive and
unscrupulous business man. They gave such men an advantage over their
competitors by granting them special rates; and inasmuch as this
practice has played a decisive part in American business development,
its effect and its meaning, frequently as they have been pointed out,
must be carefully traced.
The railroads themselves are, perhaps, the most perfect illustration of
the profits which accrue in a rapidly growing country from the
possession of certain advantages in supplying to the public an
indispensable service. They were not built, as in most European states,
under national supervision and regulation, or according to a general
plan which prevented unnecessary competition. Their routes and their
methods were due almost entirely to private enterprise and to local
economic necessities. They originated in local lines radiating from
large cities; and only very slowly did their organization come to
correspond with the great national routes of trade. The process of
building up the leading systems was in the beginning a process of
combining the local roads into important trunk lines. Such combinations
were enormously profitable, because the business of the consolidated
roads increased in a much larger proportion than did the cost of
financing end operating the larger mileage; and after the combinations
were made the owners of the consolidated road were precisely in the
position of men who had obtained a certain strategic advantage in
supplying a necessary service to their fellow-countrymen. Their
terminals, rights of way, and machinery could not be duplicated except
at an increased cost, and their owners were in a position necessarily to
benefit from the growth of the country in industry and population. No
doubt their economic position was in certain respects precarious. They
did not escape the necessity, to which other American business
enterprises had to submit, of fighting for a sufficient share of the
spoils. But in making the fight, they had acquired certain advantages
which, if they were intelligently used, would necessarily result in
victory; and as we all know, these advantages have proved to be
sufficient. The railroads have been the greatest single source of large
American fortunes, and the men who control the large railroad systems
are the most powerful and conspicuous American industrial leaders.
Important, however, as has been the direct effect of big railroad
systems on the industrial economy of the country, their indirect effects
have probably been even more important. In one way or another, they have
been the most effective of all agencies working for the larger
organization of American industries. Probably such an organization was
bound to have come in any event, because the standard economic needs of
millions of thrifty democrats could in the long run be most cheaply
satisfied by means of well-situated and fully equipped industrial plants
of the largest size; but the railroad both hastened this result and
determined its peculiar character. The population of the United States
is so scattered, its distances so huge, and its variations in
topographical level so great, that its industries would necessarily have
remained very local in character, as long as its system of
transportation depended chiefly upon waterways and highways. Some kind
of quick transportation across country was, consequently, an
indispensable condition of the national organization of American
industry and commerce. The railroad not only supplied this need, but
coming as it did pretty much at the beginning of our industrial
development, it largely modified and determined the character thereof.
By considerably increasing the area within which the products of any one
locality could be profitably sold, it worked naturally in favor of the
concentration of a few large factories in peculiarly favorable
locations; and this natural process was accelerated by the policy which
the larger companies adopted in the making of their rates. The rapid
growth of big producing establishments was forced, because of the
rebates granted to them by the railroads. Without such rebates the large
manufacturing corporation controlled by a few individuals might still
have come into existence; but these individuals would have been neither
as powerful as they now are, nor as opulent, nor as much subject to
suspicion.
It is peculiarly desirable to understand, consequently, just how these
rebates came to be granted. It was, apparently, contrary to the interest
of the railroad companies to cut their rates for the benefit of any one
class of customers; and it was, also, an illegal practice, which had to
be carried on by secret and underhand methods. Almost all the state laws
under which corporations engaged in transportation had been organized,
had defined railways, like highways, as public necessities. Such
corporations had usually been granted by the states the power to condemn
land,--and the delegation of such a power to a private company meant, of
course, that it owed certain responsibilities to the public as a common
carrier, among which the responsibility of not allowing special
privileges to any one customer was manifestly to be included. When the
railroad managers have been asked why they cut their published rates and
evaded the laws, they have always contended that they were forced to do
so; and whatever may be thought of the plea, it cannot be lightly set
aside. As we have seen, the trunk lines leading from Chicago to the
coast were the result of the consolidation of local roads. After the
consolidations had taken place, these companies began to compete
fiercely for through freight, and the rebates were an incident in this
competition. The trunk lines in the early years of their existence were
in the position of many other American business enterprises. For the
time being, they were more than competent to carry all the freight
offered at competitive points. Inasmuch as there was not enough to go
around, they fought mercilessly for what business there was. When a
large individual shipper was prepared to guarantee them a certain amount
of freight in return for special rates, they were obliged either to
grant the rates or to lose the business. Of course they submitted, and
defended their submission as a measure of self-preservation.
No great intelligence is required to detect in this situation the
evidence of a vicious circle. The absorption of Americans in business
affairs, and the free hand which the structure and ideals of American
life granted them, had made business competition a fierce and merciless
affair; while at the same time the fluid nature of American economic
conditions made success very precarious. Every shrewd and resolute man
would seek to secure himself against the dangers of this situation by
means of special advantages, and the most effective of all special
advantages would, of course, be special railroad rates. But a shipper
such as John D. Rockefeller could obtain special rates only because the
railroads were in a position similar to his own, and were fighting
strenuously for supremacy. The favored shipper and the railroad both
excused themselves on the ground of self-preservation, and sometimes
even claimed that it was just for a large shipper to obtain better rates
than a small one. This was all very well for the larger shipper and the
railroad, but in the meantime what became of the small shipper, whom Mr.
Rockefeller was enabled to annihilate by means of his contracts with the
railroad companies? The small shipper saw himself forced out of
business, because corporations to whom the state had granted special
privileges as common carriers, had a private interest in doing business
with his bigger, more daring, and unscrupulous competitors.
Of course no such result could have happened, if at any point in this
vicious circle of private interests, there had been asserted a dominant
public interest; and there are several points at which such an interest
might well have been intruded. The circle would have been broken, if,
for instance, the granting of illegal rebates had been effectively
prohibited; but as a matter of fact they could not be effectively
prohibited by the public authorities, to whom either the railroads or
the large shippers were technically responsible. A shipper of oil in
Cleveland, Ohio, would have a difficult time in protesting against
illegal discrimination on the part of a railroad conducting an
inter-state business and organized under the laws of New York. No doubt
he could appeal to the Federal government; but the Federal government
had been, for the time being, disqualified by many different causes from
effective interference. In the first place there was to be overcome the
conventional democratic prejudice against what was called
centralization. A tradition of local control over the machinery of
transit and transportation was dominant during the early period of
railroad construction. The fact that railways would finally become the
all-important vehicles of inter-state commerce was either overlooked or
considered unimportant. The general government did not interfere--except
when, as in the case of the Pacific lines, its interference and
assistance were solicited by private interests. For a long time the idea
that the Federal government had any general responsibility in respect to
the national transportation system was devoid of practical consequences.
In the end an Inter-state Commerce law was passed, in which the
presence of a national interest in respect to the American system of
transportation was recognized. But this law, like our tariff laws, was
framed for the benefit chiefly of a combination of local and special
interests; and it served little to advance any genuine national interest
in relation to the railroads. To be sure it did forbid rebates, but the
machinery for enforcing the prohibition was inefficient, and during
another twenty years the prohibition remained substantially a dead
letter. The provisions of the law forbidding rebates were in truth
merely a bit of legal hypocrisy. Rebates could not be openly defended;
but the business of the country was honeycombed with them, and the
majority of the shippers in whose interest the law was passed did not
want the prohibition enforced. Their influence at Washington was
sufficiently powerful to prevent the adoption of any effective measures
for the abatement of the evil. The Federal Inter-state Commerce
Commission, unlike the local authorities, would have been fully
competent to abolish rebates; but the plain truth was that the effective
public opinion in the business world either supported the evil or
connived at it. The private interests at stake were, for the time being,
too strong for the public interest. The whole American business
tradition was opposed to government interference with prevailing
business practices; and in view of this fact the responsibility for the
rebates cannot be fixed merely upon the railroads and the trusts. The
American system had licensed energetic and unscrupulous individual
aggrandizement as the best means of securing a public benefit; and
rebates were merely a flagrant instance of the extent to which public
opinion permitted the domination of private interests.
The failure of the Federal government to protect the public interest in
a matter over which the state governments had no effective control, has
greatly accelerated the organization of American industries on a
national scale, but for private and special purposes. Certain
individuals controlling certain corporations were enabled to obtain a
decided advantage in supplying certain services and products to the
enormously increasing American market; and once those individuals and
corporations had obtained dominant positions, it was in their interest
to strengthen one another's hands in every possible way. One big
corporation has as a rule preferred to do business with another big
corporation. They were all of them producing some standard commodity or
service, and it is part of the economical conduct of such businesses to
buy and sell so far as possible in large quantities and under long
contracts. Such contracts reduced to a comparatively low level the
necessary uncertainties of business. It enabled the managers of these
corporations to count upon a certain market for their product or a
certain cost for part of their raw material; and it must be remembered
that the chief object of this whole work of industrial organization was
to diminish the hazards of unregulated competition and to subject large
business operations to effective control. A conspicuous instance of the
effect of such interests and motives may be seen in the lease of the ore
lands belonging to the Great Northern Railroad to the United States
Steel Corporation. The railroad company owned the largest body of good
ore in the country outside of the control of the Steel Corporation, and
if these lands had been leased to many small companies, the ability of
the independent steel manufacturers to compete with the big steel
company would have been very much increased. But the Great Northern
Railroad Company found it simpler and more secure to do business with
one large than a number of small companies; and in this way the Steel
Corporation has obtained almost a monopoly of the raw material most
necessary to the production of finished steel. It will be understood,
consequently, how inevitably these big corporations strengthen one
another's hands; and it must be added that they had political as well as
economic motives for so doing. Although the big fellows sometimes
indulge in the luxury of fierce fighting, such fights are always the
prelude to still closer agreements. They are all embarked in the same
boat; and surrounded as they are by an increasing amount of enmity,
provoked by their aggrandizement, they have every reason to lend one
another constant and effective support.
There may be discerned in this peculiar organization of American
industry an entangling alliance between a wholesome and a baleful
tendency. The purpose which prompted men like John D. Rockefeller to
escape from the savage warfare in which so many American business men
were engaged, was in itself a justifiable and ameliorating purpose.
Competition in American business was insufficiently moderated either by
the state or by the prevailing temper of American life. No sensible and
resourceful man will submit to such a precarious existence without
making some attempt to escape from it; and if the means which Mr.
Rockefeller and others took to secure themselves served to make the
business lives of their competitors still more precarious, such a result
was only the expiation which American business men were obliged to pay
for their own excesses. The concentrated leadership, the partial
control, the thorough organization thereby effected, was not necessarily
a bad thing. It was in some respects a decidedly good thing, because
leadership of any kind has certain intrinsic advantages. The trusts have
certainly succeeded in reducing the amount of waste which was
necessitated by the earlier condition of wholly unregulated competition.
The competitive methods of nature have been, and still are, within
limits indispensable; but the whole effort of civilization has been to
reduce the area within which they are desirably effective; and it is
entirely possible that in the end the American system of industrial
organization will constitute a genuine advance in industrial economy.
Large corporations, which can afford the best machinery; which control
abundant capital, and which can plan with scrupulous economy all the
details of producing and selling an important product or service, are
actually able to reduce the cost of production to a minimum; and in the
cases of certain American corporations such results have actually been
achieved. The new organization of American industry has created an
economic mechanism which is capable of being wonderfully and
indefinitely serviceable to the American people.
On the other hand, its serviceability is much diminished by the special
opportunities it gives a few individuals. These opportunities do not
amount in any case to a monopoly, but they do amount to a species of
economic privilege which enable them to wring profits from the
increasing American market disproportionate to the value of their
economic services. What is still more unfortunate, however, is the
equivocal position of these big corporations in respect to the laws
under which they are organized, and in respect to the public
authorities which are supposed to control them. Many of the large
railway and industrial corporations have reached their present size
partly by an evasion or a defiance of the law. Their organizers took
advantage of the American system of local self-government and the
American disposition to reduce the functions of the Federal government
to a minimum--they took advantage of these legal conditions and
political ideas to organize an industrial machinery which cannot be
effectively reached by local statutes and officials. The favorable
corporation laws of some states have been used as a means of preying
upon the whole country; and the unfavorable corporation laws of other
states have been practically nullified. The big corporations have proved
to be too big and powerful for the laws and officials to which the
American political system has subjected them; and their equivocal legal
position has resulted in the corruption of American public life and in
the serious deterioration of our system of local government.
The net result of the industrial expansion of the United States since
the Civil War has been the establishment in the heart of the American
economic and social system of certain glaring inequalities of condition
and power. The greater American railroad and industrial corporations
control resources and conduct operations on a scale unprecedented in the
economic history of the world. The great American industrial leaders
have accumulated fortunes for which there is also no precedent on the
part of men who exercise no official political power. These inequalities
are the result of the organization of American industry on almost a
national scale,--an organization which was brought about as a means of
escape from the intolerable evils of unregulated competition. Every
aspect of American business methods has helped to make them inevitable,
and the responsibility for them must be distributed over the whole
business and social fabric. But in spite of the fact that they have
originated as the inevitable result of American business methods and
political ideas and institutions, they constitute a serious problem for
a democracy to face; and this problem has many different aspects. Its
most serious aspect is constituted by the sheer size of the resulting
inequalities. The rich men and the big corporations have become too
wealthy and powerful for their official standing in American life. They
have not obeyed the laws. They have attempted to control the official
makers, administrators, and expounders of the law. They have done little
to allay and much to excite the resentment and suspicion. In short,
while their work has been constructive from an economic and industrial
standpoint, it has made for political corruption and social
disintegration. Children, as they are, of the traditional American
individualistic institutions, ideas, and practices, they have turned on
their parents and dealt them an ugly wound. Either these economic
monsters will destroy the system of ideas, institutions, and practices
out of which they have issued or else be destroyed by them.
III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL SPECIALIST
The corporations were able to secure and to exercise an excessive and
corrupt influence on legislation, because their aggrandizement coincided
with a process of deterioration in our local political institutions. We
have seen that the stress of economic competition had specialized the
American business man and made him almost exclusively preoccupied with
the advancement of his own private interests; and one of the first
results of this specialization was an alteration in his attitude towards
the political welfare of his country. Not only did he no longer give as
much time to politics as he formerly did, but as his business increased
in size and scope, he found his own interests by way of conflicting at
many points with the laws of his country and with its well-being. He did
not take this conflict very seriously. He was still reflected in the
mirror of his own mind as a patriotic and a public-spirited citizen; but
at the same time his ambition was to conquer, and he did not scruple to
sacrifice both the law and the public weal to his own prosperity. All
unknowingly he began to testify to a growing and a decisive division
between the two primary interests of American life,--between the
interest of the individual business man and the interest of the body
politic; and he became a living refutation of the amiable theories of
the Jacksonian Democrat that the two must substantially coincide. The
business man had become merely a business man, and the conditions which
had made him less of a politician had also had its effect upon the men
whose business was that of politics. Just as business had become
specialized and organized, so politics also became subject to
specialization and organization. The appearance of the "Captain of
Industry" was almost coincident with the appearance of the "Boss."
There has been a disposition to treat the "Boss" chiefly as the
political creature of the corrupt corporation; and it is undoubtedly
true that one of the most important functions of the municipal and state
"Bosses" has been that of conducting negotiations with the corporations.
But to consider the specialized organization of our local politics as
the direct result of specialized organization of American business is
wholly to misunderstand its significance. The two processes are the
parallel effects of the same conditions and ideas working in different
fields. Business efficiency under the conditions prevailing in our
political and economic fabric demanded the "Captain of Industry."
Political efficiency under our system of local government demanded the
"Boss." The latter is an independent power who has his own special
reasons for existence. He put in an embryonic appearance long before the
large corporations had obtained anything like their existing power in
American politics; and he will survive in some form their reduction to
political insignificance. He has been a genuine and within limits a
useful product of the American democracy; and it would be fatal either
to undervalue or to misunderstand him.
The American system of local self-government encouraged the creation of
the political "Boss," because it required such an enormous amount of
political business. Some one was needed to transact this business, and
the professional politician was developed to supply the need. There was
no reason why such a need should have existed; because the amount of
political business incident to state government could have been very
much economized by a simpler method of organization. But American
democratic ideas during the years when the state governments took form
were wholly opposed to simplicity of organization. The state
constitutions adopted during the period of Jacksonian supremacy seem
designed to make local government costly in time and energy and
irresponsible in action; and they provided the legal scenery in the
midst of which the professional politician became the only effective
hero.
The state constitutions were all very much influenced by the Federal
instrument, but in the copies many attempts were made to improve upon
the model. The Democracy had come to believe that the Federal
Constitution tended to encourage independence and even special
efficiency on the part of Federal officials; and it proposed to correct
such an erroneous tendency in the more thoroughly democratic state
governments. No attempt was, indeed, made to deprive the executive and
the judicial officials of independence by making them the creatures of
the legislative branch; for such a change, although conforming to
earlier democratic ideas, would have looked in the direction of a
concentration of responsibility. The far more insidious course was
adopted of keeping the executive, the judicial, and the legislative
branches of the government technically separate, while at the same time
depriving all three of any genuine independence and efficiency. The term
of the executive, for instance, was not allowed to exceed one or two
years. The importance of his functions was diminished. His power of
appointment was curtailed. Many of his most important executive
assistants were elected by popular vote and made independent of him. In
some few instances he was even deprived of a qualified veto upon
legislation. But the legislature itself was not treated much better.
Instead of deriving its power from a short constitution which conferred
upon it full legislative responsibilities and powers, the tendency has
been to incorporate an enormous mass of special and detailed legislation
in the fundamental law, and so to diminish indefinitely the power of the
legislative branch either to be useful or dangerous. Finally state
judges instead of being appointed for life were usually elected for
limited terms, so that they could scarcely avoid being more "amenable to
public opinion." The tendency in every respect was to multiply elections
and elective officials, divide responsibility and power, and destroy
independence. The more "democratic" these constitutions became, the more
clearly the Democracy showed its disposition to distrust its own
representatives, and to deprive them of any chance of being genuinely
representative.
The object of the Jacksonion Democrat in framing constitutions of this
kind was to keep political power in the hands of the "plain people," and
to forestall the domination of administrative and legislative
specialists. The effect was precisely the opposite. They afforded the
political specialist a wonderful opportunity. The ordinary American
could not pretend to give as much time to politics as the smooth
operation of this complicated machine demanded; and little by little
there emerged in different parts of the country a class of politicians
who spent all their time in nominating and electing candidates to these
numerous offices. The officials so elected, instead of being responsible
to the people, were responsible to the men to whom they owed their
offices; and their own individual official power was usually so small
that they could not put what little independence they possessed to any
good use. As a matter of fact, they used their official powers chiefly
for the benefit of their creators. They appointed to office the men whom
the "Bosses" selected. They passed the measures which the machine
demanded. In this way the professional politician gradually obtained a
stock of political goods wherewith to maintain and increase his power.
Reënforced by the introduction of the spoils system first into the state
and then into the Federal civil services, a process of local political
organization began after 1830 to make rapid headway. Local leaders
appeared in different parts of the country who little by little relieved
the farmer and the business man of the cares and preoccupations of
government. In the beginning the most efficient of these politicians
were usually Jacksonian Democrats, and they ruled both in the name of
the people and by virtue of a sturdy popular following. They gradually
increased in power, until in the years succeeding the war they became
the dominant influence in local American politics, and had won the right
to be called something which they would never have dared to call
themselves, viz. a governing class.
While the local "Boss" nearly always belonged to the political party
dominant in his neighborhood, so that he could in ordinary elections
depend upon the regular party vote, still the real source of his power
consisted in a band of personal retainers; and the means by which such
groups were collected and held together contain a curious mixture of
corruption and democracy. In the first place the local leader had to be
a "good fellow" who lived in the midst of his followers and knew all
about them. His influence was entirely dependent upon personal
kindliness, loyalty, and good-comradeship. He was socially the playmate
and the equal of his followers, and the relations among them were
characterized by many admirable qualities. The group was within limits a
genuine example of social democracy, and was founded on mutual
understanding, good-will, and assistance. The leader used his official
and unofficial power to obtain jobs for his followers. He succored them
when in need; he sometimes protected them against the invidious activity
of the police or the prosecuting attorneys; he provided excursions and
picnics for them in hot weather; he tied them to himself by a thousand
bonds of interest and association; he organized them into a clan, who
supported him blindly at elections in return for a deal of personal
kindliness and a multitude of small services; he became their genuine
representative, whether official or not, because he represented their
most vital interests and satisfied their most pressing and intimate
needs.
The general method of political organization indicated above was
perfected in the two decades succeeding the Civil War. The American
democracy was divided politically into a multitude of small groups,
organized chiefly for the purpose of securing the local and individual
interests of these groups and their leaders, and supported by local and
personal feeling, political patronage, and petty "graft." These groups
were associated with both parties, and merely made the use of partisan
ties and cries to secure the coöperation of more disinterested voters.
The result was that so far as American political representation was
merely local, it was generally corrupt, and it was always selfish. The
leader's power depended absolutely on an appeal to the individual,
neighborhood, and class interests of his followers. They were the
"people"; he was the popular tribune. He could not retain his power for
a month, in case he failed to subordinate every larger interest to the
flattery, cajolery, and nourishment of his local clan. Thus the local
representative system was poisoned at its source. The alderman, the
assemblyman, or the congressman, even if he were an honest man,
represented little more than the political powers controlling his
district; and to be disinterested in local politics was usually
equivalent to being indifferent.
Although these local clans were the basis of American political
organization, they were not, of course, its ultimate fruit. In many of
the cities, large and small, and in some of the states the leaders of
the local groups were subordinated to one of their number who became the
real "Boss" and who strengthened the district organizations by using for
their benefit the municipal, state, and Federal patronage. The relation
of the municipal or state "Boss" to the district leaders was similar to
the relation which the district leader bore to his more important
retainers. The "Boss" first obtained his primacy by means of diplomatic
skill or force of character; and his ability to retain it depended upon
his ability to satisfy the demands of the district leaders for
patronage, while at the same time leading the organization to victory in
the local elections. His special duties as "Boss" required personal
prestige, strength of will, power of persuasive talking, good judgment
of men, loyalty to his promises and his followers, and a complete lack
of scruple. Unlike the district leader, however, the municipal "Boss"
has tended to become a secretive and somewhat lonely person, who carried
on his business behind closed doors, and on whom was visited the odium
incurred by this whole system of political organization. The district
leader either does not incur or is less affected by this odium, because
his social status is precisely that of his followers. The "Boss," on the
other hand, by this wealth and public position would naturally be an
important member of the society in which he lives, whereas as a matter
of fact he has come to be ostracized because of the source of his power
and wealth. His leadership over-reached the district clan, which was
real social basis; and the consequence was that the "Boss" became, to
all appearances, a very unpopular man in the democracy which he ruled.
His secretiveness and his unpopularity point to one of the most
important functions of the municipal and state "Bosses," to which as yet
only incidental reference has been made. The "Boss" became the man who
negotiated with the corporations, and through whom they obtained what
they wanted. We have already seen that the large corporation,
particularly those owning railroad and municipal franchises, have found
that the purchase of a certain amount of political power was a necessary
consequence of their dubious legal position. A traffic of this kind was
not one, of course, to which many people could be admitted. It must be
transmitted in secret, and by people who possessed full authority. An
agreement to secure certain franchises or certain needed legislation in
return for certain personal or party favors was not an agreement which
could be made between a board of directors and a group of district
leaders. If a large number of people were familiar with the details of
such negotiations, something more than a hint thereof would be sure to
leak out; and unquestionably the fact that a traffic of this kind was
part of the political game had much to do with the ability of the
municipal or state "Boss" to obtain and to keep his power. The profits
not only enabled him to increase party funds and to line his own
pockets, but it also furnished him with a useful and abundant source of
patronage. He could get positions for the political henchmen of his
district leaders, not only with the local and state governments, but
with the corporations. Thus every "Boss," even those whose influence did
not extend beyond an election district, was more or less completely
identified with the corporations who occupied within his bailiwick any
important relation to the state.
This alliance between the political machines and the big
corporations--particularly those who operate railroads or control
municipal franchises--was an alliance between two independent and
coördinate powers in the kingdom of American practical affairs. The
political "Boss" did not create the industrial leader for his own good
purposes. Neither did the industrial leader create the machine and its
"Boss," although he has done much to confirm the latter's influence.
Each of them saw an opportunity to turn to his own account the
individualistic "freedom" of American politics and industry. Each of
them was enabled by the character of our political traditions to obtain
an amount of power which the originators of those political ideas never
anticipated, and which, if not illegal, was entirely outside the law.
It so happened that the kind of power which each obtained was very
useful to the other. A corporation which derived its profits from public
franchises, or from a business transacted in many different states,
found the purchase of a local or state machine well within its means and
well according to its interests. The professional politicians who had
embarked in politics as a business and who were making what they could
out of it for themselves and their followers, could not resist this
unexpected and lucrative addition to their market. But it must be
remembered that the alliance was founded on interest rather than
association, on mutual agreement rather than on any effective
subordination one to another. A certain change in conditions might
easily make their separate interests diverge, and abstract all the
profits from their traffic. If anything happened, for instance, to make
inter-state railroad corporations less dependent on the state
governments, they would no longer need the expense of subsidizing the
state machines. There are signs at the present time that these interests
are diverging, and that such alliances will be less dangerous in the
future than they have been in the past. But even if the alliance is
broken, the peculiar unofficial organization of American industry and
politics will persist, and will constitute, both in its consequences and
its significance, two of our most important national problems.
It would be as grave a mistake, however, absolutely to condemn this
process of political organization as it would absolutely to condemn the
process of industrial organization. The huge corporation and the
political machine were both created to satisfy a real and a permanent
need--the needs of specialized leadership and associated action in these
two primary American activities. That in both of these cases the actual
method of organization has threatened vital public interests, and even
the very future of democracy has been due chiefly to the disregard by
the official American political system of the necessity and the
consequences of specialized leadership and associated action. The
political system was based on the assumption that the individualism it
encouraged could be persuaded merely by the power of words to respect
the public interest, that public officials could be deprived of
independence and authority for the real benefit of the "plain people,"
and that the "plain people" would ask nothing from the government but
their legal rights. These assumptions were all erroneous; and when
associated action and specialized leadership became necessary in local
American politics, the leaders and their machine took advantage of the
defective official system to build up an unofficial system, better
suited to actual popular needs. The "people" wanted the government to do
something for them, and the politicians made their living and served
their country by satisfying the want. To be sure, the "people" they
benefited were a small minority of the whole population whose interests
were far from being the public interest; but it was none the less
natural that the people, whoever they were, should want the government
to do more for them than to guarantee certain legal rights, and it was
inevitable that they should select leaders who could satisfy their
positive, if selfish, needs.
The consequence has been, however, a separation of actual political
power from official political responsibility. The public officers are
still technically responsible for the good government of the states,
even if, as individuals, they have not been granted the necessary
authority effectively to perform their task. But their actual power is
even smaller than their official authority. They are almost completely
controlled by the machine which secures their election or appointment.
The leader or leaders of that machine are the rulers of the community,
even though they occupy no offices and cannot be held in any way
publicly responsible. Here, again, as in the case of the
multi-millionaire, we have an example of a dangerous inequality in the
distribution of power, and one which tends to maintain and perpetuate
itself. The professional politician is frequently beaten and is being
vigorously fought; but he himself understands how necessary he is under
the existing local political organization, and how difficult it will be
to dislodge him. Beaten though he be again and again, he constantly
recovers his influence, because he is performing a necessary political
task and because he is genuinely representative of the needs of his
followers. Organizations such as Tammany in New York City are founded on
a deeply rooted political tradition, a group of popular ideas,
prejudices, and interests, and a species of genuine democratic
association which are a guarantee of a long and tenacious life. They
will survive much of the reforming machinery which is being created for
their extirpation.
IV
THE LABOR UNION AND THE DEMOCRATIC TRADITION
One other decisive instance of this specialized organization of American
activity remains to be considered--that of the labor unions. The power
which the unions have obtained in certain industrial centers and the
tightness of their organization would have seemed anomalous to the good
Jacksonian Democrat. From his point of view the whole American democracy
was a kind of labor union whose political constitution provided for a
substantially equal division of the products of labor; and if the United
States had remained as much of an agricultural community as it was in
1830, the Jacksonian system would have preserved a much higher degree of
serviceability.
Except in the case of certain local Granger and Populist movements, the
American farmers have never felt the necessity of organization to
advance either their economic or their political interests. But when the
mechanic or the day-laborer gathered into the cities, he soon discovered
that life in a democratic state by no means deprived him of special
class interests. No doubt he was at worst paid better than his European
analogues, because the demand for labor in a new country was continually
outrunning the supply; but on occasions he was, like his employer,
threatened with merciless competition. The large and continuous stream
of foreign immigrants, whose standards of living were in the beginning
lower than those which prevailed in this country, were, particularly in
hard times, a constant menace not merely to his advancement, but to the
stability of his economic situation; and he began to organize partly for
the purpose of protecting himself against such competition. During the
past thirty years the work of organization has made enormous strides;
and it has been much accelerated by the increasing industrial power of
huge corporations. The mechanic and the laborer have come to believe
that they must meet organization with organization, and discipline with
discipline. Their object in forming trade associations has been
militant. Their purpose has been to conquer a larger share of the
economic product by aggressive associated action.
They have been very successful in accomplishing their object. In spite
of the flood of alien immigration the American laborer has been able to
earn an almost constantly increasing wage, and he devoutly thinks that
his unions have been the chief agency of his stronger economic position.
He believes in unionism, consequently, as he believes in nothing else.
He is, indeed, far more aggressively preoccupied with his class, as
contrasted with his individual interests, than are his employers. He has
no respect for the traditional American individualism as applied to his
own social and economic standing. Whenever he has had the power, he has
suppressed competition as ruthlessly as have his employers. Every kind
of contumelious reproach is heaped on the heads of the working men who
dare to replace him when he strikes; and he does not scruple to use
under such conditions weapons more convincing than the most opprobrious
epithets. His own personality is merged in that of the union. No
individual has any rights as opposed to the interests of the union. He
fully believes, of course, in competition among employers, just as the
employers are extremely enthusiastic over the individual liberty of the
working man. But in his own trade he has no use for individuality of any
kind. The union is to be composed of so many equal units who will work
the same number of hours for the some wages, and no one of whom is to
receive more pay even for more work. The unionist, that is, has come to
depend upon his union for that material prosperity and advancement
which, according to the American tradition, was to be the inevitable
result of American political ideas and institutions. His attachment to
his union has come to be the most important attachment of his life--more
important in most cases than his attachment to the American ideal and to
the national interest.
Some of the labor unions, like some of the corporations, have taken
advantage of the infirmities of local and state governments to become
arrogant and lawless. On the occasion of a great strike the strikers are
often just as disorderly as they are permitted to be by the local
police. When the police prevent them from resisting the employment of
strike-breakers by force, they apparently believe that the political
system of the country has been pressed into the service of their
enemies; and they begin to wonder whether it will not be necessary for
them to control such an inimical political organization. The average
union laborer, even though he might hesitate himself to assault a
"scab," warmly sympathizes with such assaults, and believes that in the
existing state of industrial warfare they are morally justifiable. In
these and in other respects he places his allegiance to his union and to
his class above his allegiance to his state and to his country. He
becomes in the interests of his organization a bad citizen, and at times
an inhuman animal, who is ready to maim or even to kill another man and
for the supposed benefit of himself and his fellows.
The most serious danger to the American democratic future which may
issue from aggressive and unscrupulous unionism consists in the state of
mind of which mob-violence is only one expression. The militant
unionists are beginning to talk and believe as if they were at war with
the existing social and political order--as if the American political
system was as inimical to their interests as would be that of any
European monarchy or aristocracy. The idea is being systematically
propagated that the American government is one which favors the
millionaire rather than the wage-earner; and the facts which either
superficially or really support this view are sufficiently numerous to
win for it an apparently increasing number of adherents. The union
laborer is tending to become suspicious, not merely of his employer, but
of the constitution of American society. His morals are becoming those
of men engaged in a struggle for life. The manifestations of this state
of mind in notion are not very numerous, although on many occasions they
have worn a sufficiently sinister aspect. But they are numerous enough
to demand serious attention, for the literature popular among the
unionists is a literature, not merely of discontent, but sometimes of
revolt.
Whether this aggressive unionism will ever become popular enough to
endanger the foundations of the American political and social order, I
shall not pretend to predict. The practical dangers resulting from it at
any one time are largely neutralized by the mere size of the country and
its extremely complicated social and industrial economy. The menace it
contains to the nation as a whole can hardly become very critical as
long as so large a proportion of the American voters are land-owning
farmers. But while the general national well-being seems sufficiently
protected for the present against the aggressive assertion of the class
interests of the unionists, the legal public interest of particular
states and cities cannot be considered as anywhere near so secure; and
in any event the existence of aggressive discontent on that part of the
unionists must constitute a serious problem for the American legislator
and statesman. Is there any ground for such aggressive discontent? How
has it come to pass that the American political system, which was
designed to guarantee the welfare and prosperity of the people, is the
subject of such violent popular suspicion? Can these suspicions be
allayed merely by curbing the somewhat excessive opportunities of the
rich man and by the diminution of his influence upon the government? Or
does the discontent indicate the existence of more radical economic
evils or the necessity of more radical economic reforms?
However the foregoing questions ought to be answered, there can be no
doubt as to the nature of the answers, proposed by the unionists
themselves. The unionist leaders frequently offer verbal homage to the
great American principle of equal rights, but what they really demand is
the abandonment of that principle. What they want is an economic and
political order which will discriminate in favor of union labor and
against non-union labor; and they want it on the ground that the unions
have proved to be the most effective agency on behalf of economic and
social amelioration of the wage-earner. The unions, that is, are helping
most effectively to accomplish the task, traditionally attributed to the
American democratic political system--the task of raising the general
standard of living; and the unionists claim that they deserve on this
ground recognition by the state and active encouragement. Obviously,
however, such encouragement could not go very far without violating both
the Federal and many state constitutions--the result being that there is
a profound antagonism between our existing political system and what the
unionists consider to be a perfectly fair demand. Like all good
Americans, while verbally asking for nothing but equal rights, they
interpret the phrase so that equal rights become equivalent to special
rights.
Of all the hard blows which the course of American political and
economic development has dealt the traditional system of political ideas
and institutions, perhaps the hardest is this demand for discrimination
on behalf of union labor. It means that the more intelligent and
progressive American workingmen are coming to believe that the American
political and economic organization does not sufficiently secure the
material improvement of the wage-earner. This conviction may be to a
large extent erroneous. Certain it is that the wages of unorganized farm
laborers have been increasing as rapidly during the past thirty years as
have the wages of the organized mechanics. But whether erroneous or not,
it is widespread and deep-rooted; and whatever danger it possesses is
derived from the fact that it affords to a substantially revolutionary
purpose a large and increasing popular following. The other instances of
organization for special purposes which have been remarked, have
superficially, at least, been making for conservatism. The millionaire
and the professional politician want above all things to be let alone,
and to be allowed to enjoy the benefit of their conquests. But the labor
organizations cannot exercise the power necessary in their opinion to
their interests without certain radical changes in the political and
economic order; and inasmuch as their power is likely to increase rather
than diminish, the American people are confronted with the prospect of
persistent, unscrupulous, and increasing agitation on behalf of an
economic and political reorganization in favor of one class of citizens.
The large corporations and the unions occupy in certain respects a
similar relation to the American political system. Their advocates both
believe in associated action for themselves and in competition for their
adversaries. They both demand governmental protection and recognition,
but resent the notion of efficient governmental regulation. They have
both reached their existing power, partly because of the weakness of the
state governments, to which they are legally subject, and they both are
opposed to any interference by the Federal government--except
exclusively on their own behalf. Yet they both have become so very
powerful that they are frequently too strong for the state governments,
and in different ways they both traffic for their own benefit with the
politicians, who so often control those governments. Here, of course,
the parallelism ends and the divergence begins. The corporations have
apparently the best of the situation because existing institutions are
more favorable to the interests of the corporations than to the
interests of the unionists; but on the other hand, the unions have the
immense advantage of a great and increasing numerical strength. They are
beginning to use the suffrage to promote a class interest, though how
far they will travel on this perilous path remains doubtful. In any
event, it is obvious that the development in this country of two such
powerful and unscrupulous and well-organized special interests has
created a condition which the founders of the Republic never
anticipated, and which demands as a counterpoise a more effective body
of national opinion, and a more powerful organization of the national
interest.
V
GOVERNMENT BY LAWYERS
The corporation, the politician, and the union laborer are all
illustrations of the organization of men representing fundamental
interests for special purposes. The specialization of American society
has not, however, stopped with its specialized organization. A similar
process has been taking place in the different professions, arts, and
trades; and of these much the most important is the gradual
transformation of the function of the lawyer in the American political
system. He no longer either performs the same office or occupies the
same place in the public mind as he did before the Civil War; and the
nature and meaning of this change cannot be understood without some
preliminary consideration of the important part which American lawyers
have played in American political history.
The importance of that part is both considerable and peculiar--as is the
debt of gratitude which the American people owe to American lawyers.
They founded the Republic, and they have always governed it. Some few
generals, and even one colonel, have been elected to the Presidency of
the United States; and occasionally business men of one kind or another
have prevailed in local politics; but really important political action
in our country has almost always been taken under the influence of
lawyers. On the whole, American laws have been made by lawyers; they
have been executed by lawyers; and, of course, they have been expounded
by lawyers. Their predominance has been practically complete; and so far
as I know, it has been unprecedented. No other great people, either in
classic, mediæval, or modern times, has ever allowed such a professional
monopoly of governmental functions. Certain religious bodies have
submitted for a while to the dominion of ecclesiastical lawyers; but the
lawyer has rarely been allowed to interfere either in the executive or
the legislative branches of the government. The lawyer phrased the laws
and he expounded them for the benefit of litigants. The construction
which he has placed upon bodies of customary law, particularly in
England, has sometimes been equivalent to the most permanent and
fruitful legislation. But the people responsible for the government of
European countries have rarely been trained lawyers, whereas American
statesmen, untrained in the law, are palpable exceptions. This dominion
of lawyers is so defiant of precedent that it must be due to certain
novel and peremptory American conditions.
The American would claim, of course, that the unprecedented prominence
of the lawyer in American politics is to be explained on the ground that
the American government is a government by law. The lawyer is
necessarily of subordinate importance in any political system tending
towards absolutism. He is even of subordinate importance in a liberal
system such as that of Great Britain, where Crown and Parliament, acting
together, have the power to enact any desired legislation. The Federal
Constitution, on the other hand, by establishing the Supreme Court as
the interpreter of the Fundamental Law, and as a separate and
independent department of the government, really made the American
lawyer responsible for the future of the country. In so far as the
Constitution continues to prevail, the Supreme Court becomes the final
arbiter of the destinies of the United States. Whenever its action can
be legally invoked, it can, if necessary, declare the will of either or
both the President and Congress of no effect; and inasmuch as almost
every important question of public policy raises corresponding questions
of Constitutional interpretation, its possible or actual influence
dominates American political discussion. Thus the lawyer, when
consecrated as Justice of the Supreme Court, has become the High Priest
of our political faith. He sits in the sanctuary and guards the sacred
rights which have been enshrined in the ark of the Constitution.
The importance of lawyers as legislators and executives in the actual
work of American government has been an indirect consequence of the
peculiar function of the Supreme Court in the American political system.
The state constitutions confer a corresponding function on the highest
state courts, although they make no similar provision for the
independence of the state judiciary. The whole business of American
government is so entangled in a network of legal conditions that a
training in the law is the beet education which an American public man
can receive. The first question asked of any important legislative
project, whether state or Federal, concerns its constitutionality; and
the question of its wisdom is necessarily subordinate to these
fundamental legal considerations. The statesman, who is not a lawyer,
suffers under many disadvantages--not the least of which is the
suspicion wherewith he is regarded by his legal fellow-statesmen. When
they talk about a government by law, they really mean a government by
lawyers; and they are by way of believing that government by anybody but
lawyers is really unsafe.
The Constitution bestowed upon the American lawyer a constructive
political function; and this function has been confirmed and even
enlarged by American political custom and practice. The work of finally
interpreting the Federal Constitution has rarely been either conceived
or executed in a merely negative spirit. The construction, which
successive generations of Supreme Court Justices have placed upon the
instrument, has tended to enlarge its scope, and make it a legal
garment, which was being better cut to fit the American political and
economic organism. In its original form, and to a certain extent in its
present form, the Constitution was in many respects an ambiguous
document which might have been interpreted along several different
lines; and the Supreme Court in its official expositions has been
influenced by other than strictly legal and verbal reasons--by
considerations of public welfare or by general political ideas. But such
constructive interpretations have been most cautiously and discreetly
admitted. In proclaiming them, the Supreme Court has usually represented
a substantial consensus of the better legal opinion of the time; and
constructions of this kind are accepted and confirmed only when any
particular decision is the expression of some permanent advance or
achievement in political thinking by the American lawyer. It becomes
consequently of the utmost importance that American lawyers should
really represent the current of national political opinion. The Supreme
Court has been, on the whole, one of the great successes of the American
political system, because the lawyers, whom it represented, were
themselves representative of the ideas and interests of the bulk of
their fellow-countrymen; and if for any reason they become less
representative, a dangerous division would be created between the body
of American public opinion and its official and final legal expositors.
If the lawyers have any reason to misinterpret a serious political
problem, the difficulty of dealing therewith is much increased, because
in addition to the ordinary risks of political therapeutics there will
be added that of a false diagnosis by the family doctor. The adequacy of
the lawyers' training, the disinterestedness of their political motives,
the fairness of their mental outlook, and the closeness of their contact
with the national public opinion--all become matters of grave public
concern.
It can be fairly asserted that the qualifications of the American lawyer
for his traditional task as the official interpreter and guide of
American constitutional democracy have been considerably impaired.
Whatever his qualifications have been for the task (and they have,
perhaps, been over-estimated) they are no longer as substantial as they
were. Not only has the average lawyer become a less representative
citizen, but a strictly legal training has become a less desirable
preparation for the candid consideration of contemporary political
problems.
Since 1870 the lawyer has been traveling in the same path as the
business man and the politician. He has tended to become a professional
specialist, and to give all his time to his specialty. The greatest and
most successful American lawyers no longer become legislators and
statesmen as they did in the time of Daniel Webster. They no longer
obtain the experience of men and affairs which an active political life
brings with it. Their professional practice, whenever they are
successful, is so remunerative and so exacting that they cannot afford
either the time or the money which a political career demands. The most
eminent American lawyers usually remain lawyers all their lives; and if
they abandon private practice at all, it is generally for the purpose of
taking a seat on the Bench. Like nearly all other Americans they have
found rigid specialization a condition of success.
A considerable proportion of our legislators and executives continue to
be lawyers, but the difference is that now they are more likely to be
less successful lawyers. Knowledge of the law and a legal habit of mind
still have a great practical value in political work; and the
professional politicians, who are themselves rarely men of legal
training, need the services of lawyers whose legal methods are not
attenuated by scruples. Lawyers of this class occupy the same relation
to the local political "Bosses" as the European lawyer used to occupy in
the court of the absolute monarch. He phrases the legislation which the
ruler decides to be of private or public benefit; and he acts frequently
as his employer's official mouthpiece and special pleader.
No doubt many excellent and even eminent lawyers continue to play an
important and an honorable part in American politics. Mr. Elihu Root is
a conspicuous example of a lawyer, who has sacrificed a most lucrative
private practice for the purpose of giving his country the benefit of
his great abilities. Mr. Taft was, of course, a lawyer before he was an
administrator, though he had made no professional success corresponding
to that of Mr. Root. Mr. Hughes, also, was a successful lawyer. The
reform movement has brought into prominence many public-spirited
lawyers, who, either as attorney-generals or as district attorneys, have
sought vigorously to enforce the law and punish its violators. The
lawyers, like every class of business and professional men, have felt
the influence of the reforming ideas, which have become so conspicuous
in American practical politics, and they have performed admirable and
essential work on behalf of reform.
But it is equally true that the most prominent and thorough-going
reformers, such as Roosevelt, Bryan, and Hearst, are not lawyers by
profession, and that the majority of prominent American lawyers are not
reformers. The tendency of the legally trained mind is inevitably and
extremely conservative. So far as reform consists in the enforcement of
the law, it is, of course, supported by the majority of successful
lawyers; but so far as reform has come to mean a tendency to political
or economic reorganization, it has to face the opposition of the bulk of
American legal opinion. The existing political order has been created by
lawyers; and they naturally believe somewhat obsequiously in a system
for which they are responsible, and from which they benefit. This
government by law, of which they boast, is not only a government by
lawyers, but is a government in the interest of litigation. It makes
legal advice more constantly essential to the corporation and the
individual than any European political system. The lawyer, just as much
as the millionaire and the politician, has reaped a bountiful harvest
from the inefficiency and irresponsibility of American state
governments, and from the worship of individual rights.
They have corporations in Europe, but they have nothing corresponding to
the American corporation lawyer. The ablest American lawyers have been
retained by the special interests. In some cases they have been retained
to perform tasks which must have been repugnant to honest men; but that
is not the most serious aspect of the situation. The retainer which the
American legal profession has accepted from the corporations inevitably
increases its natural tendency to a blind conservatism; and its
influence has been used not for the purpose of extricating the large
corporations from their dubious and dangerous legal situation, but for
the purpose of keeping them entangled in its meshes. At a time when the
public interest needs a candid reconsideration of the basis and the
purpose of the American legal system, they have either opposed or
contributed little to the essential work, and in adopting this course
they have betrayed the interests of their more profitable clients--the
large corporations themselves--whose one chance of perpetuation depends
upon political and legal reconstruction.
The conservative believer in the existing American political system
will doubtless reply that the lawyer, in so far as he opposes radical
reform or reorganization, is merely remaining true to his function as
the High Priest of American constitutional democracy. And no doubt it is
begging the question at the present stage of this discussion, to assert
that American lawyers as such are not so well qualified as they were to
guide American political thought and action. But it can at least be
maintained that, assuming some radical reorganization to be necessary,
the existing prejudices, interests, and mental outlook of the American
lawyer disqualify him for the task. The legal profession is risking its
traditional position as the mouthpiece of the American political creed
and faith upon the adequacy of the existing political system. If there
is any thorough-going reorganization needed, it will be brought about in
spite of the opposition of the legal profession. They occupy in relation
to the modern economic and political problem a position similar to that
of the Constitutional Unionists previous to the Civil War. Those
estimable gentlemen believed devoutly that the Constitution, which
created the problem of slavery and provoked the anti-slavery agitation,
was adequate to its solution. In the same spirit learned lawyers now
affirm that the existing problems can easily be solved, if only American
public opinion remain faithful to the Constitution. But it may be that
the Constitution, as well as the system of local political government
built up around the Federal Constitution, is itself partly responsible
for some of the existing abuses, evils, and problems; and if so, the
American lawyer may be useful, as he was before the Civil War, in
evading our difficulties; but he will not be very useful in settling
them. He may try to settle them by decisions of the Supreme Court; but
such decisions,--assuming, of course, that the problem is as inexorable
as was that of the legal existence of slavery in a democratic
nation,--such decisions would have precisely the same effect on public
opinion as did the Dred Scott decision. They would merely excite a
crisis, which they were intended to allay, and strengthen the hands of
the more radical critics of the existing political system.
VI
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
The changes which have been taking place in industrial and political and
social conditions have all tended to impair the consistency of feeling
characteristic of the first phase of American national democracy.
Americans are divided from one another much more than they were during
the Middle Period by differences of interest, of intellectual outlook,
of moral and technical standards, and of manner of life. Grave
inequalities of power and deep-lying differences of purpose have
developed in relation of the several primary American activities. The
millionaire, the "Boss," the union laborer, and the lawyer, have all
taken advantage of the loose American political organization to promote
somewhat unscrupulously their own interests, and to obtain special
sources of power and profit at the expense of a wholesome national
balance. But the foregoing examples of specialized organization and
purposes do not stand alone. They are the most conspicuous and the most
troublesome because of the power wielded by those particular classes,
and because they can claim for their purposes the support of certain
aspects of the American national tradition. Yet the same process has
been taking place in all the other departments of American social and
intellectual life. Technical experts of all kinds--engineers, men of
letters, and artists--have all of them been asserting much more
vigorously their own special interests and purposes. In so asserting
themselves they cannot claim the support of the American national
democratic convention. On the contrary, the proclamation of high
technical standards and of insistent individual purposes is equivalent
to a revolt from the traditions of the Middle Period, which were all in
favor of cheap work and the average worker. But different as is the
situation of these technical experts, the fundamental meaning of their
self-assertion is analogous to that of the millionaire and the "Boss."
The vast incoherent mass of the American people is falling into definite
social groups, which restrict and define the mental outlook and social
experience of their members. The all-round man of the innocent Middle
Period has become the exception. The earlier homogeneity of American
society has been impaired, and no authoritative and edifying, but
conscious, social ideal has as yet taken its place.
The specialized organization of American industry, politics, and labor,
and the increasingly severe special discipline imposed upon the
individual, are not to be considered as evils. On the contrary, they are
indications of greater practical efficiency, and they contain a promise
of individual moral and intellectual emancipation. But they have their
serious and perilous aspects, because no sufficient provision has been
made for them in the national democratic tradition. What it means is
that the American nation is being confronted by a problem which the
earlier national democracy expected to avoid--the social problem. By the
social problem is usually meant the problem of poverty; but grave
inequalities of wealth are merely the most dangerous and distressing
expression of fundamental differences among the members of a society of
interest and of intellectual and moral standards. In its deepest aspect,
consequently, the social problem is the problem of preventing such
divisions from dissolving the society into which they enter--of keeping
such a highly differentiated society fundamentally sound and whole.
In this country the solution of the social problem demands the
substitution of a conscious social ideal for the earlier instinctive
homogeneity of the American nation. That homogeneity has disappeared
never to return. We should not want it to return, because it was
dependent upon too many sacrifices of individual purpose and
achievement. But a democracy cannot dispense with the solidarity which
it imparted to American life, and in one way or another such solidarity
must be restored. There is only one way in which it can be restored, and
that is by means of a democratic social ideal, which shall give
consistency to American social life, without entailing any essential
sacrifice of desirable individual and class distinctions. I have used
the word "restoration" to describe this binding and healing process; but
the consistency which would result from the loyal realization of a
comprehensive coherent democratic social ideal would differ radically
from the earlier American homogeneity of feeling. The solidarity which
it would impart to American society would have its basis in feeling and
its results in good fellowship; but it must always remain a promise and
constructive ideal rather than a finished performance. The social
problem must, as long as societies continue to endure, be solved afresh
by almost every generation; and the one chance of progress depends both
upon an invincible loyalty to a constructive social ideal and upon a
current understanding by the new generation of the actual experience of
its predecessors.