SURVIVALS OF MILITARISM IN CIVIL GOVERNMENT
We are accustomed to say that the machinery of government incorporated
in the charters of the early American cities, as in the Federal and
State constitutions, was worked out by men who were strongly under the
influence of the historians and doctrinaires of the eighteenth century.
The most significant representative of these men is Thomas Jefferson,
and their most telling phrase, the familiar opening that “all men are
created free and equal.”
We are only now beginning to suspect that the present admitted failure
in municipal administration, the so-called “shame of American cities,”
may be largely due to the inadequacy of those eighteenth-century
ideals, with the breakdown of the machinery which they provided. We
recognize the weakness inherent in the historic and doctrinaire method
when it attempts to deal with growing and human institutions. While
these men were strongly under the influence of peace ideals which were
earnestly advocated, both in France and in America, even in the midst
of their revolutionary periods, and while they read the burning poets
and philosophers of their remarkable century, their idealism, after
all, was largely founded upon theories concerning “the natural man,” a
creature of their sympathetic imaginations.
Because their idealism was of the type that is afraid of experience,
these founders refused to look at the difficulties and blunders which
a self-governing people were sure to encounter, and insisted that,
if only the people had freedom, they would walk continuously in the
paths of justice and righteousness. It was inevitable, therefore, that
they should have remained quite untouched by that worldly wisdom which
counsels us to know life as it is, and by that very modern belief that
if the world is ever to go right at all, it must go right in its own
way.
A man of this generation easily discerns the crudeness of “that
eighteenth-century conception of essentially unprogressive human
nature in all the empty dignity of its ‘inborn rights.’”[4] Because
he has grown familiar with a more passionate human creed, with the
modern evolutionary conception of the slowly advancing race whose
rights are not “inalienable,” but hard-won in the tragic processes of
experience, he realizes that these painfully acquired rights must be
carefully cherished or they may at any moment slip out of our hands.
We know better in America than anywhere else that civilization is
not a broad road, with mile-stones indicating how far each nation
has proceeded upon it, but a complex struggle forward, each race and
nation contributing its quota; that the variety and continuity of this
commingled life afford its charm and value. We would not, if we could,
conform them to one standard. But this modern attitude, which may
even now easily subside into negative tolerance, did not exist among
the founders of the Republic, who, with all their fine talk of the
“natural man” and what he would accomplish when he obtained freedom and
equality, did not really trust the people after all.
They timidly took the English law as their prototype, “whose very root
is in the relation between sovereign and subject, between lawmaker
and those whom the law restrains,” which has traditionally concerned
itself more with the guarding of prerogative and with the rights of
property than with the spontaneous life of the people. They serenely
incorporated laws and survivals which registered the successful
struggle of the barons against the aggressions of the sovereign,
although the new country lacked both nobles and kings. Misled by the
name of government, they founded their new government by an involuntary
reference to a lower social state than that which they actually saw
about them. They depended upon penalties, coercion, compulsion,
remnants of military codes, to hold the community together; and it
may be possible to trace much of the maladministration of our cities
to these survivals, to the fact that our early democracy was a moral
romanticism, rather than a well-grounded belief in social capacity and
in the efficiency of the popular will.
It has further happened that as the machinery, groaning under the
pressure of new social demands put upon it, has broken down that from
time to time, we have mended it by giving more power to administrative
officers, because we still distrusted the will of the people. We are
willing to cut off the dislocated part or to tighten the gearing, but
are afraid to substitute a machine of newer invention and greater
capacity. In the hour of danger we revert to the military and legal
type although they become less and less appropriate to city life in
proportion as the city grows more complex, more varied in resource and
more highly organized, and is, therefore, in greater need of a more
diffused local autonomy.
A little examination will easily show that in spite of the fine phrases
of the founders, the Government became an entity by itself away from
the daily life of the people. There was no intention to ignore them
nor to oppress them. But simply because its machinery was so largely
copied from the traditional European Governments which did distrust
the people, the founders failed to provide the vehicle for a vital
and genuinely organized expression of the popular will. The founders
carefully defined what was germane to government and what was quite
outside its realm, whereas the very crux of local self-government, as
has been well said, is involved in the “right to locally determine the
scope of the local government,” in response to the needs as they arise.
They were anxious to keep the reins of government in the hands of the
good and professedly public-spirited, because, having staked so much
upon the people whom they really knew so little, they became eager
that they should appear well, and should not be given enough power to
enable them really to betray their weaknesses. This was done in the
same spirit in which a kind lady permits herself to give a tramp five
cents, believing that, although he may spend it for drink, he cannot
get very drunk upon so small a sum. In spite of a vague desire to
trust the people, the founders meant to fall back in every crisis upon
the old restraints which government has traditionally enlisted in its
behalf, and were, perhaps, inevitably influenced by the experiences of
the Revolutionary War. Having looked to the sword for independence from
oppressive governmental control, they came to regard the sword as an
essential part of the government they had succeeded in establishing.
Regarded from the traditional standpoint, government has always needed
this force of arms. The king, attempting to control the growing
power of the barons as they wrested one privilege after another from
him, was obliged to use it constantly; the barons later successfully
established themselves in power only to be encroached upon by the
growing strength and capital of the merchant class. These are now, in
turn, calling upon the troops and militia for aid, as they are shorn of
a pittance here and there by the rising power of the proletariat. The
imperial, the feudal, the capitalistic forms of society each created
by revolt against oppression from above, preserved their own forms of
government only by carefully guarding their hardly won charters and
constitutions. But in the very countries where these successive social
forms have developed, full of survivals of the past, some beneficent
and some detrimental, governments are becoming modified more rapidly
than in this democracy where we ostensibly threw off traditional
governmental oppression only to encase ourselves in a theory of
virtuous revolt against oppressive government, which in many instances
has proved more binding than the actual oppression itself.
Did the founders cling too hard to that which they had won through
persecution, hardship, and finally through a war of revolution? Did
these doctrines seem so precious to them that they were determined to
tie men up to them as long as possible, and allow them no chance to go
on to new devices of government, lest they slight these that had been
so hardly won? Did they estimate, not too highly, but by too exclusive
a valuation, that which they had secured through the shedding of blood?
Man has ever overestimated the spoils of war, and tended to lose his
sense of proportion in regard to their value. He has ever surrounded
them with a glamour beyond their deserts. This is quite harmless
when the booty is an enemy’s sword hung over a household fire, or a
battered flag decorating a city hall, but when the spoil of war is
an idea which is bound on the forehead of the victor until it cramps
his growth, a theory which he cherishes in his bosom until it grows so
large and near that it afflicts its possessor with a sort of disease of
responsibility for its preservation, it may easily overshadow the very
people for whose cause the warrior issued forth.
Was this overestimation of the founders the cause of our subsequent
failures? or rather did not the fault lie with their successors, and
does it not now rest with us, that we have wrapped our inheritance
in a napkin and refused to add thereto? The founders fearlessly took
the noblest word of their century and incorporated it into a public
document. They ventured their fortunes and the future of their children
upon its truth. We, with the belief of a progressive, developing human
life, apparently accomplish less than they with their insistence upon
rights and liberties which they so vigorously opposed to mediaeval
restrictions and obligations. We are in that first period of conversion
when we hold a creed which forecasts newer and larger possibilities
for governmental development, without in the least understanding its
spiritual implications. Although we have scrupulously extended the
franchise to the varied immigrants among us, we have not yet admitted
them into real political fellowship.
It is easy to demonstrate that we consider our social and political
problems almost wholly in the light of one wise group whom we call
native Americans, legislating for the members of humbler groups whom
we call immigrants. The first embodies the attitude of contempt or, at
best, the patronage of the successful towards those who have as yet
failed to succeed. We may consider the so-called immigration situation
as an illustration of our failure to treat our growing Republic in the
spirit of a progressive and developing democracy.
The statement is made many times that we, as a nation, are rapidly
reaching the limit of our powers of assimilation, that we receive
further masses of immigrants at the risk of blurring those traits
and characteristics which we are pleased to call American, with
its corollary that the national standard of living is in danger
of permanent debasement. Were we not in the midst of a certain
intellectual dearth and apathy, of a skepticism in regard to the ideals
of self-government which have ceased to charm men, we would see that
we are testing our national life by a tradition too provincial and
limited to meet its present motley and cosmopolitan character; that we
lack mental energy, adequate knowledge, and a sense of the youth of
the earth. The constant cry that American institutions are in danger
betrays a spiritual waste, not due to our infidelity to national
ideals, but arising from the fact that we fail to enlarge those ideals
in accord with our faithful experience of life. Our political machinery
devised for quite other conditions, has not been readjusted and adapted
to the successive changes resulting from our development. The clamor
for the town meeting, for the colonial and early century ideals of
government is in itself significant, for we are apt to cling to the
past through a very paucity of ideas.
In a sense the enormous and unprecedented moving about over the face
of the earth on the part of all nations is in itself the result of
philosophic dogma of the eighteenth century--of the creed of individual
liberty. The modern system of industry and commerce presupposes freedom
of occupation, of travel, and residence; even more, it unhappily rests
in a large measure upon the assumption of a body of the unemployed and
the unskilled, ready to be absorbed or dropped according to the demands
of production: but back of that, or certainly preceding its later
developments, lies “the natural rights” doctrine of the eighteenth
century. Even so late as 1892 an official treaty of the United States
referred to the “inalienable rights of man to change his residence
and religion.” This dogma of the schoolmen, dramatized in France and
penetrating under a thousand forms into the most backward European
States, is still operating as an obscure force in sending emigrants
to America and in our receiving them here. But in the second century
of its existence it has become too barren and chilly to induce any
really zealous or beneficent activity on behalf of the immigrants after
they arrive. On the other hand those things which we do believe--the
convictions which might be formulated to the immeasurable benefit of
the immigrants, and to the everlasting good of our national life,
have not yet been satisfactorily stated, nor apparently apprehended
by us, in relation to this field. We have no method by which to
discover men, to spiritualize, to understand, to hold intercourse with
aliens and to receive of what they bring. A century-old abstraction
breaks down before this vigorous test of concrete cases and their
demand for sympathetic interpretation. When we are confronted by the
Italian lazzaroni, the peasants from the Carpathian foothills, and the
proscribed traders from Galatia, we have no national ideality founded
upon realism and tested by our growing experience with which to meet
them, but only the platitudes of our crudest youth. The philosophers
and statesmen of the eighteenth century believed that the universal
franchise would cure all ills; that liberty and equality rested only
upon constitutional rights and privileges; that to obtain these two
and to throw off all governmental oppression constituted the full
duty of the progressive patriot. We still keep to this formalization
because the philosophers of this generation give us nothing newer. We
ignore the fact that world-wide problems can no longer be solved by
a political constitution assuring us against opposition, but that we
must frankly face the proposition that the whole situation is more
industrial than political. Did we apprehend this, we might then realize
that the officers of the Government who are dealing with naturalization
papers and testing the knowledge of the immigrants concerning the
Constitution of the United States, are only playing with counters
representing the beliefs of a century ago, while the real issues are
being settled by the great industrial and commercial interests which
are at once the products and the masters of our contemporary life.
As children who are allowed to amuse themselves with poker chips
pay no attention to the real game which their elders play with the
genuine cards in their hands, so we shut our eyes to the exploitation
and industrial debasement of the immigrant, and say, with placid
contentment, that he has been given the rights of an American citizen,
and that, therefore, all our obligations have been fulfilled. It is as
if we should undertake to cure the contemporary political corruption
founded upon a disregard of the Inter-State Commerce Acts, by requiring
the recreant citizens to repeat the Constitution of the United States.
As yet no vigorous effort is made to discover how far our present
system of naturalization, largely resting upon laws enacted in 1802, is
inadequate, although it may have met the requirements of “the fathers.”
These processes were devised to test new citizens who had immigrated to
the United States from political rather than from economic pressure,
although these two have always been in a certain sense coextensive.
Yet the early Irish came to America to seek an opportunity for
self-government, denied them at home; the Germans and Italians started
to come in largest numbers after the absorption of their smaller
States into the larger nations; and the immigrants from Russia are the
conquered Poles, Lithuanians, Finns, and Jews. On some such obscure
notion the processes of naturalization were worked out, and, with a
certain degree of logic, the first immigrants were presented with the
Constitution of the United States as a type and epitome of that which
they had come to seek. So far as they now come in search of political
liberty, as many of them do every day, the test is still valid, but,
in the meantime, we cannot ignore those significant figures which show
emigration to rise with periods of depression in given countries, and
immigration to be checked by periods of depression in America, and we
refuse to see how largely the question has become an economic one.
At the present moment, as we know, the actual importing of immigrants
is left largely to the energy of steamship companies and to those
agents for contract labor who are keen enough to avoid the restrictive
laws. The business man is here again in the saddle, as he so largely
is in American affairs. From the time that the immigrants first make
the acquaintance of the steamship agent in their own villages, at
least until a grandchild is born on the new soil, they are subjected
to various processes of exploitation from purely commercial and
self-seeking interests. It begins with the representatives of the
transatlantic lines and their allies, who convert the peasant holdings
into money, and provide the prospective emigrants with needless
supplies, such as cartridge belts and bowie knives. The brokers, in
manufactured passports, send their clients by successive stages for
a thousand miles to a port suiting their purposes. On the way the
emigrants’ eyes are treated that they may pass the physical test; they
are taught to read sufficiently well to meet the literacy test; they
are lent enough money to escape the pauper test, and by the time they
have reached America, they are so hopelessly in debt that it requires
months of work to repay all they have received. During this time they
are completely under the control of the last broker in the line, who
has his dingy office in an American city. The exploitation continues
under the employment agency whose operations verge into those of the
politician, through the naturalization henchman, the petty lawyers who
foment their quarrels and grievances by the statement that in a free
country everybody “goes to law,” by the liquor dealers who stimulate a
lively trade among them, and, finally, by the lodging-house keepers and
the landlords who are not obliged to give them the housing which the
American tenant demands. It is a long dreary road, and the immigrant
is successfully exploited at each turn. At moments one looking on is
driven to quote the Titanic plaint of Walt Whitman:
“As I stand aloof and look, there is to me something profoundly
affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do
not believe in men.”
The sinister aspect of this exploitation lies in the fact that it is
carried on by agents whose stock in trade are the counters and terms
of citizenship. It is said that at the present moment there are more
of these agents in Palermo than perhaps in any other European port,
and that those politicians who have found it impossible to stay even
in that corrupt city are engaged in the brokerage of naturalization
papers in the United States. Certainly one effect of the stringent
contract labor laws has been to make the padrones more powerful
because “smuggled alien labor” has become more valuable to American
corporations, and also to make simpler the delivery of immigrant
votes according to the dictates of commercial interests. It becomes a
veritable system of poisoning the notions of decent government; but
because the entire process is carried on in political terms, because
the poker chips are colored red, white, and blue, we are childishly
indifferent to it. An elaborate avoidance of restrictions quickly
adapts itself to changes either in legislation here or at the points
of departure, because none of the legislation is founded upon a real
analysis of the situation. For instance, a new type of broker in Russia
during the Russian-Japanese War made use of the situation in the
interests of young Russian Jews. If one of these men leaves the country
ordinarily, his family is obliged to pay three hundred rubles to the
Government, but if he first joins the army, his family is free from
this obligation for he has passed into the keeping of his sergeant. Out
of four hundred Russian Jews who, during three months, were drafted
into the army at a given recruiting station, only ten reported,
the rest having escaped through immigration. Of course the entire
undertaking is much more hazardous, because the man is a deserter from
the army in addition to his other disabilities; but the brokers merely
put up the price of their services and continue their undertakings.
All these evasions of immigration laws and regulations are simply
possible because the governmental tests do not belong to the current
situation, and because our political ideas are inherited from
governmental conditions not our own. In our refusal to face the
situation, we have persistently ignored the political ideals of the
Celtic, Germanic, Latin, and Slavic immigrants who have successively
come to us; and in our overwhelming ambition to remain Anglo-Saxon, we
have fallen into the Anglo-Saxon temptation of governing all peoples
by one standard. We have failed to work out a democratic government
which should include the experiences and hopes of all the varied
peoples among us. We justify the situation by some such process as that
employed by each English elector who casts a vote for seventy-five
subjects besides himself. He indirectly determines--although he may be
a narrow-minded tradesman or a country squire interested only in his
hounds and horses--the colonial policy, which shall in turn control
the destinies of the Egyptian child toiling in the cotton factory in
Alexandria, and of the half-starved Parsee working the opium fields of
North India. Yet he cannot, in the nature of the case, be informed of
the needs of these far-away people and he would venture to attempt it
only in regard to people whom he considered “inferior.”
Pending a recent election, a Chicago reformer begged his hearers to
throw away all selfish thoughts of themselves when they went to the
polls and to vote in behalf of the poor and ignorant foreigners of the
city. It would be difficult to suggest anything which would result
in a more serious confusion than to have each man, without personal
knowledge and experiences, consider the interests of the newly arrived
immigrant. The voter would have to give himself over to a veritable
debauch of altruism in order to persuade himself that his vote would be
of the least value to those men of whom he knew so little, and whom
he considered so remote and alien to himself. In truth the attitude of
the advising reformer was in reality so contemptuous that he had never
considered the immigrants really partakers and molders of the political
life of his country.
This attitude of contempt, of provincialism, this survival of
the spirit of the conqueror toward an inferior people, has many
manifestations, but none so harmful as when it becomes absorbed and
imitated and is finally evinced by the children of the foreigners
toward their own parents.
We are constantly told of the increase of criminals in the second
generation of immigrants, and, day after day, one sees lads of twelve
and fourteen throwing off the restraint of family life and striking
out for themselves. The break has come thus early, partly from the
forced development of the child under city conditions, partly because
the parents have had no chance of following, even remotely, this
development, but largely because the Americanized child has copied the
contemptuous attitude towards the foreigner which he sees all about
him. The revolt has in it something of the city impatience of country
standards, but much more of America against Poland or Italy. It is all
wretchedly sordid with bitterness on the part of the parents, and
hardhearted indifference and recklessness on the part of the boy. Only
occasionally can the latter be appealed to by filial affection after
the first break has once been thoroughly made; and yet, sometimes,
even these lads see the pathos of the situation. A probation officer
from Hull-House one day surprised three truants who were sitting by
a bonfire which they had built near the river. Sheltered by an empty
freight car, the officer was able to listen to their conversation. The
Pole, the Italian, and the Bohemian boys who had broken the law by
staying away from school, by building a fire in dangerous proximity to
freight cars, and by “swiping” the potatoes which they were roasting,
seemed to have settled down into an almost halcyon moment of gentleness
and reminiscence. The Italian boy commiserated his parents because they
hated the cold and the snow and “couldn’t seem to get used to it;” the
Pole said that his father missed seeing folks that he knew and was
“sore on this country;” the Bohemian lad really grew quite tender about
his old grandmother and the “stacks of relations” who came to see her
every Sunday in the old country, where, in contrast to her loneliness
here, she evidently had been a person of consequence. All of them felt
the pathos of the situation, but the predominant note was the cheap
contempt of the new American for foreigners, even though they are of
his own blood. The weakening of the tie which connects one generation
with another may be called the domestic results of the contemptuous
attitude. But the social results of the contemptuous attitude are even
more serious and nowhere so grave as in the modern city.
Men are there brought together by multitudes in response to the
concentration of industry and commerce without bringing with them
the natural social and family ties or the guild relationships which
distinguished the mediaeval cities and held even so late as the
eighteenth century, when the country people came to town in response
to the normal and slowly formed ties of domestic service, family
affection, and apprenticeship. Men who come to a modern city by
immigration break all these older ties and the national bond in
addition. There is all the more necessity to develop that cosmopolitan
bond which forms their substitute. The immigrants will be ready to
adapt themselves to a new and vigorous civic life founded upon the
recognition of their needs if the Government which is at present
administered in our cities, will only admit that these needs are
germane to its functions. The framers of the carefully prepared
charters, upon which the cities are founded, did not foresee that
after the universal franchise had once been granted, social needs
and ideals were bound to enter in as legitimate objects of political
action. Neither did these framers realize, on the other hand, that the
only people in a democracy who can legitimately become the objects
of repressive government, are those people who are too undeveloped
to use their liberty or those who have forfeited their right to full
citizenship. We have, therefore, a municipal administration in America
which concerns itself only grudgingly with the social needs of the
people, and is largely reduced to the administration of restrictive
measures. The people who come most directly in contact with the
executive officials, who are the legitimate objects of their control,
are the vicious, who need to be repressed; and the semi-dependent
poor, who appeal to them in their dire need; or, for quite the reverse
reason, those who are trying to avoid an undue taxation, resenting the
fact that they should be made to support a government which, from the
nature of the case, is too barren to excite their real enthusiasm.
The instinctive protest against this mechanical method of civic
control, with the lack of adjustment between the natural democratic
impulse and the fixed external condition, inevitably produces the
indifferent citizen, and the so-called “professional politician.” The
first, because he is not vicious, feels that the real processes of
government do not concern him and wishes only to be let alone. The
latter easily adapts himself to an illegal avoidance of the external
fixed conditions by assuming that these conditions have been settled
by doctrinaires who did not in the least understand the people,
while he, the politician, makes his appeal beyond the conditions to
the real desires of the people themselves. He is thus not only “the
people’s friend,” but their interpreter. It is interesting to note
how often simple people refer to “them,” meaning the good and great
who govern but do not understand, and to “him,” meaning the alderman,
who represents them in these incomprehensible halls of State, as an
ambassador to a foreign country to whose borders they themselves could
not possibly penetrate, and whose language they do not speak.
In addition to this difficulty inherent in the difference between the
traditional and actual situation, there is another, which constantly
arises on the purely administrative side. The traditional governments
which the founders had copied, in proceeding by fixed standards to
separate the vicious from the good, and then to legislate against the
vicious, had enforced these restrictive measures by trained officials,
usually with a military background. In a democracy, however,
the officers entrusted with the enforcement of this restrictive
legislation, if not actually elected by the people themselves, are
still the appointments of those thus elected and are, therefore,
good-natured men who have made friends by their kindness and social
qualities. This is only decreasingly true even in those cities where
appointments are made by civil service examinations. The carrying out
of repressive legislation, the remnant of a military state of society,
in a democracy is at last put into the hands of men who have attained
office because of political pull. The repressive measures must be
enforced by those sympathizing with the people and belonging to those
against whom the measures operate. This anomalous situation produces
almost inevitably one result: that the police authorities themselves
are turned into allies of vice and crime. This may be illustrated
from almost any of the large American cities in the relation existing
between the police force and the gambling and other illicit life. The
officers are often flatly told that the enforcement of an ordinance
which the better element of the city has insisted upon passing, is
impossible; that they are expected to control only the robbery and
crime that so often associate themselves with vice. As Mr. Wilcox[5]
has recently pointed out, public sentiment itself assumes a certain
hypocrisy, and in the end we have “the abnormal conditions which are
created when vice is protected by the authorities,” and in the very
worst cases there develops a sort of municipal blackmail in which
the administration itself profits by the violation of law. The very
governmental agencies which were designed to protect the citizen
from vice, foster and protect him in its pursuance because everybody
involved is thoroughly confused by the human element in the situation.
Further than this, the officer’s very kindness and human understanding
is that which leads to his downfall, for he is forced to uphold the
remnant of a military discipline in a self-governing community. It is
not remarkable, perhaps, that the police department, the most vigorous
survival of militarism to be found in American cities, has always
been responsible for the most exaggerated types of civic corruption.
It is sad, however, that this corruption has largely been due to the
kindliness of the officers and to their lack of military training.
There is no doubt that the reasonableness of keeping the saloons in
lower New York open on Sunday was apparent to the policemen of the East
Side force long before it dawned upon the reform administration; and
yet, that the policemen allowed themselves to connive at law-breaking,
was the beginning of their disgraceful downfall. Because kindness to an
enemy may mean death or the annihilation of the army which he guards,
all kindness is illicit on the part of the military sentinel on duty;
but to bring that code over bodily into a peaceful social state is to
break down the morals of both sides, of the enforcer of the ill-adapted
law, as well as of those against whom it is so maladroitly directed.
In order to meet this situation, there is almost inevitably developed
a politician of the corrupt type so familiar in American cities, the
politician who has become successful because he has made friends
with the vicious. The semi-criminal, who are constantly brought in
contact with administrative government are naturally much interested
in its operations. Having much at stake, as a matter of course, they
attend the primaries and all the other election processes which so
quickly tire the good citizens whose interest in the government is a
self-imposed duty. To illustrate: it is a matter of much moment to a
gambler whether there is to be a “wide-open town” or not; it means the
success or failure of his business; it involves, not only the pleasure,
but the livelihood, of all his friends. He naturally attends to the
election of the alderman, to the appointment and retention of the
policeman. He is found at the caucus “every time,” and would be much
amused if he were praised for the performance of his civic duty; but,
because he and the others who are concerned in semi-illicit business do
attend the primaries, the corrupt politician is nominated over and over
again.
As this type of politician is successful from his alliance with crime,
there also inevitably arises from time to time a so-called reformer
who is shocked to discover the state of affairs, the easy partnership
between vice and administrative government. He dramatically uncovers
the situation and arouses great indignation against it on the part of
good citizens. If this indignation is enough, he creates a political
fervor which is translated into a claim upon public gratitude. In
portraying the evil he is fighting, he does not recognize, or at least
does not make clear, all the human kindness upon which it has grown.
In his speeches he inevitably offends a popular audience, who know
that the evil of corruption exists in all degrees and forms of human
weakness, but who also know that these evils are by no means always
hideous, and sometimes even are lovable. They resent his over-drawn
pictures of vice and of the life of the vicious; their sense of
fair play, their deep-rooted desire for charity and justice, are all
outraged.
To illustrate from a personal experience: Some years ago a famous New
York reformer came to Chicago to tell us of his phenomenal success,
his trenchant methods of dealing with the city “gambling-hells,” as
he chose to call them. He proceeded to describe the criminals of
lower New York in terms and phrases which struck at least one of his
auditors as sheer blasphemy against our common human nature. I thought
of the criminals whom I knew, of the gambler for whom each Saturday
I regularly collected his weekly wage of $24.00, keeping $18.00 for
his wife and children and giving him $6.00 on Monday morning. His
despairing statement, “the thing is growing on me, and I can never give
it up,” was certainly not the cry of a man living in hell, but of him
who, through much tribulation had at least kept the loyal intention.
I remembered the three girls who had come to me with a paltry sum of
money collected from the pawn and sale of their tawdry finery in order
that one of their number might be spared a death in the almshouse and
that she might have the wretched comfort during the closing weeks of
her life of knowing that, although she was an outcast, she was not a
pauper. I recalled the first murderer whom I had ever known, a young
man who was singing his baby to sleep and stopped to lay it in its
cradle before he rushed downstairs into his father’s saloon to scatter
the gang of boys who were teasing the old man by giving him English
orders. The old man could not understand English and the boys were
refusing to pay for the drinks they had consumed, but technically had
not ordered.
For one short moment I saw the situation from the point of view of
humbler people, who sin often through weakness and passion, but seldom
through hardness of heart, and I felt that in a democratic community
such sweeping condemnations and conclusions as the speaker was pouring
forth could never be accounted for righteousness.
As the policeman who makes terms with vice, and almost inevitably
slides into making gain from vice, merely represents the type of
politician who is living off the weakness of his fellows, so the
over-zealous reformer who exaggerates vice until the public is scared
and awestruck, represents the type of politician who is living off the
timidity of his fellows. With the lack of civic machinery for simple
democratic expression, for a direct dealing with human nature as it is,
we seem doomed to one type or the other--corruptionists or anti-crime
committees.
And one sort or the other we will continue to have so long as we
distrust the very energy of existence, the craving for enjoyment,
the pushing of vital forces, the very right of every citizen to be
what he is without pretense or assumption of virtue. Too often he
does not really admire these virtues, but he imagines them somewhere
as a standard adopted by the virtuous whom he does not know. That
old Frankenstein, the ideal man of the eighteenth century, is still
haunting us, although he never existed save in the brain of the
doctrinaire.
This dramatic and feverish triumph of the self-seeker, see-sawing
with that of the interested reformer, does more than anything else,
perhaps, to keep the American citizen away from the ideals of genuine
evolutionary democracy. Whereas repressive government, from the
nature of the case, has to do with the wicked who are happily always
in a minority in the community, a normal democratic government would
naturally have to do with the great majority of the population in their
normal relations to each other.
After all, the so-called “slum politician” ventures his success upon an
appeal to human sentiment and generosity. This venture often results in
an alliance between the popular politician and the humblest citizens,
quite as naturally as the reformer who stands for honest business
administration usually becomes allied with the type of business man
whose chief concern it is to guard his treasure and to prevent a rise
in taxation. The community is again insensibly divided into two camps,
the repressed, who is dimly conscious that he has no adequate outlet
for his normal life and the repressive, represented by the cautious,
careful citizen holding fast to his own,--once more the conqueror and
his humble people.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] “The Spirit of Modern Philosophy,” Josiah Royce, page 275.
[5] The American City, Dr. Delos F. Wilcox, page 200.