GENERAL PRIVATE AND PUBLIC CONDEMNATION BY THE INTELLIGENT CLASSES
OF MANHOOD SUFFRAGE POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES;
AND HEREIN OF WATCH DOGS AND YELLOW DOGS.
A good test of the character of a man or an institution is public
reputation; let us apply that test in this case. Manhood suffrage, its
methods, its politics, and its officialdom are generally not merely
distrusted, but scorned, held in utter contempt and openly repudiated by
the most intelligent classes of Americans. With the exception of a few
among them who consider it their bounden duty to do civic missionary
work, those classes take no active part in politics; many of them do not
even vote, others only vote for president, entirely disregarding state
and local elections; most of them totally neglect the primaries; many of
them do not even know the names of their representatives in Congress. As
for the obscure politicians who sit in the city and state legislatures
they are absolutely beneath the social or political vision of most of
our well-to-do and well-educated people. No really worldly wise American
father recommends his son to enter public life; its snares and dangers
and the lack of esteem in which public officials are held are too well
known. Of course to many ambitious and inexperienced young men there is
much temptation in a political career. The prospect of addressing
political meetings, of being called “Senator” or “Judge,” of receiving
mail addressed “Hon.,” of dealing with public measures, and of figuring
in the newspapers, is alluring to many a young college graduate; while
poor young lawyers are often tempted to struggle for public office by
the salary attached thereto. They find later that the reward of
politics is Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes on the lips; even the
successful ones are usually disappointed; the pay is small; it is part
of the manhood suffrage meanness to court the applause of the low-waged
rabble or the no-wage loafers by keeping down official salaries; the
incidental expenses are many and annoying, including small loans to
hangers on and other petty exactions; to get money out of politics it is
necessary to be crafty and more or less dishonest. The young adventurer
is disappointed in his aspirations for glory; the newspaper notices are
few and frequently uncomplimentary; he finds that the platform at public
meetings is usually reserved either for a notoriety of some sort or a
blatherskite; and instead of enjoying public respect he encounters a
pushing familiarity, which is most offensive even when it comes
disguised as flattery from obsequious job hunters. Probably no business
or profession has been in such disrepute, or has offered so much that is
mean, sordid and repulsive to a noble nature, as has politics since
manhood suffrage was ordained in this country.
Under the property qualification régime young politicians had the
inspiration of great and highly respected leaders, and the incentive of
a prospect of ultimately filling their places. Among such leaders in New
York in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were Alexander
Hamilton; John Jay; James Kent; De Witt Clinton; John Lansing; Rufus
King; Gouverneur Morris; Robert R. Livingston; Brockholst Livingston;
William W. Van Ness; Daniel D. Tompkins; Nicholas Fish; Erastus Root;
John C. Spencer and William L. Marcy; fifteen distinguished names; a
number proportionately according to population equivalent to one hundred
and fifty at the present time. Each of them was eminent in something;
most of them in several things; and all are still illustrious in the
annals of the state. Some of their political acts are open to criticism,
but they were all men of superior mentality, for the old system put the
best brains we had into politics, while the present system inevitably
puts into public place the cheapest and poorest, so that we are now, as
Bagehot says, “deprived of the tangible benefits we derive from the
application to politics of thoroughly cultivated minds.”
The present public attitude towards officialdom not only indicates a
steady consciousness of its inferiority, but a disbelief in its honesty
and a plain distrust of its intentions. By many persons, officialdom and
the people are supposed to be engaged in chronic warfare, and office
holders as soon as chosen are assumed to be potential rascals; so that
it becomes the presumptive duty of every patriotic organization and of
every public-spirited citizen to watch their every movement and to sound
the alarm at each of their expected attacks on the rights of the people.
Eternal vigilance is popularly urged as the only means of security
against the misconduct or calamitous blundering of the office-holding
politicians. Nor is this attitude confined to the upper classes.
Politicians are fond of pretending affection for the working people and
that the manhood suffrage was a gift especially to that class. But none
more than the wage earners mistrust politicians; they are the first to
suspect official misconduct, and the most outspoken in its denunciation.
Listen to their comments when a public question comes up in which they
are concerned. They are not then heard to say that their interests are
safe in the hands of the good officials chosen by the people; they are
more apt to complain of improper influence, “frame-ups,” bribery
actually suspected or expected, “playing politics” and the like. Many of
them in despair of democracy have become socialists, and find in the
rascality and inefficiency of the manhood suffrage government of the day
ample material for argument. The remainder unable to see any possibility
of a remedy usually assume an attitude of resignation, evincing a desire
to profit by whatever little pickings may be had from the political
feasts of the more fortunate. The attitude of the intelligent middle
classes is more frankly hostile and aggressive than that of the wage
earners; it does not, unfortunately, take the shape of a demand for a
higher basis for suffrage, but of a persistent opposition to the
characteristic operations of manhood suffrage government, such as
appropriation of the spoils, and to its various political expedients to
please the rabble or bamboozle the public. It is practically assumed by
the middle class citizen, that officialdom is inimical to the public
welfare; and, especially in the great cities, there is a steady and
outspoken demand for a remedy for the present notorious misgovernment;
that something be done to protect Society against its enemies, the
politicians in and out of office.
This feeling of American distrust of our own public servants is
frequently apparent in legislation enacted as a result of agitation
following one of the numerous revelations of official misconduct. Thus,
in some cities the police power has been taken entirely out of the hands
of the local authorities and lodged in the government of the state. One
reform city charter of St. Louis provided that the mayor elected for
four years could not remove any official till his own third year in
office. These and many similar statutes are in effect formal assertions
of the complete breakdown of manhood suffrage; that the elected
municipal officials cannot be trusted either to police the city or to
remove or appoint subordinate officers. The mayor under such a system
has to manage the best he can with deputies over whom he has little or
no control. It seems as if political imbecility could go no farther than
to create a system under which the mayor of the city is certain to be
untrustworthy and must therefore be deprived of power to control his
subordinates. And yet no doubt these provisions were but the recognition
of the desperate situation of a manhood suffrage municipality. In one of
the instances just referred to the object of the city charter seems to
have been to vary the misery; two years chaos and two years ring-rule,
turnabout.
This feeling of despondent suspicion is constantly being voiced by the
middle-class newspapers and by groups of prominent citizens, by
committees of fifty, of one hundred, etc., in circular appeals
distributed by the ten thousand to all men of any standing in the
community, urging them to “fight” as it is called, day and night, to
save the town, city, county, state and nation from disaster. A stranger
reading one of these urgent calls would naturally ask with curiosity for
the names of the enemies to be thus attacked; are they Huns, Bolsheviki,
hoodlums, gunmen, rioters or what? The grotesquely pathetic answer is
that they are all our neighbors, our fellow citizens, nay, our
“Honorable” fellow citizens; elected by ourselves by large majorities
last year, last month, or yesterday perhaps, or appointed by men whom we
have ourselves recently elected; they are his honor the mayor; honorable
members of the city or state legislature; of boards of supervisors; of
Congress; of this and that public commission; of the state governments;
officials of every class, both elective and appointed, county, city,
state, and federal. It is not against hostile outsiders or natural
adversaries, but against our own manhood suffrage officials that we have
to “fight”; it is these officials and their associates, agents, and
party superiors or “bosses” who we are told by press and pulpit, in
newspaper, book and magazine, in private conversation and in public
address, and above all at the meetings of independent citizens and
reformers, are the actual or potential enemies, furtive or open,
conscious or unconscious, of good government, of our pocket-books, our
health, our comfort, and our lives. We are urgently reminded that our
manhood suffrage government is by no means to be trusted; that the only
hope of tolerable government is to arouse every good citizen to an
attitude and a habit of constant distrust of our chosen representatives
and rulers and to regard them with sleepless jealousy and suspicion. It
is not enough to vote; you must attend primaries; nay more, you must
anticipate the primaries and plan to elect certain primary candidates
and to defeat others; even when your own men are chosen, you cannot
safely trust them; you must doubt every member of Congress, every
legislator and every official, including those just seated by your own
vote; you must suspect every new proposal, every legislative bill,
every municipal ordinance; a good citizen will watch them all; he will
at private expense procure advance copies of all of them; he will if he
can employ a lawyer to study them; he will join all kinds of political
organizations and attend all their meetings, and will use constant
vigilance to see that these organizations are not “captured” or
purchased by the politicians, and that he himself is not captured
without suspecting it, so wily are these political experts and so
cunning and numerous are the snares and temptations of political life.
Nor is even this all; he must work up and join deputations to the
sessions of the municipal administration and to those of the town and
county authorities, to the state capitol, to Washington; he must write
to the newspapers, he and others must at times bombard Congress and the
state legislature and their committees with letters and telegrams. In
short the system is this: you select the incapable and worthless for
office and then wear your soul out in efforts to keep them from
blundering and plundering. Common sense would suggest the selection in
the first place of men who could be trusted; and if the method of
selection failed, to replace it by a better one; but this cannot be
done; manhood suffrage though rotten is sacred, and those who have the
patience and courage continue their endeavors to make a marble temple of
justice out of a mud electorate.
This widespread attitude of suspicion and resentment toward public
officials, originally private and individual, has of late years become
open, formal and public through the systematic activities of clubs and
associations of supposedly disinterested and public-spirited citizens
principally located in large cities; non-partisan in character, and
organized for the purpose of preventing or undoing the more flagrant of
the illegal, immoral and improper operations of state and local
governments. In plain words, just as we have detectives to watch
thieves, so we have voluntary associations to watch public officials.
This sounds queer, but it is true. And these societies founded on
contempt and distrust of officialdom are not made up of eccentrics;
they include some of the most intelligent men in their respective
communities; they are kept busily employed a large part of every year;
and are sustained by the best public opinion in their open opposition to
the measures proposed by the manhood suffrage officials, and in their
frequent active hostility to the officials themselves. These
associations may well be called “watch dog” societies, their function
being to protect the community from political wolves; to bark loudly on
any attempt of theirs to rob the sheepfold and thus either to scare them
off or to give such warning as will result in their designs being
frustrated. Thus we have in almost every city and town “Taxpayers
Associations”; “Citizens Associations”; “Good Government Clubs”; “Public
Welfare Societies”; “Patriotic Societies”; “Security Leagues”; and the
like; some temporary but others permanent bodies, formed for general
supervision and bringing to book of legislators and public officials.
These watch dog societies are always on the alert; ready to receive
complaints from any source; to investigate them through committees, and
to attack anybody and anything in what they may choose to consider the
public interest. They even employ private detectives and lawyers in
these enterprises, just as in pursuit of criminal offenders; and they
are usually able to get newspapers to support them and to publish bitter
attacks not merely upon individual office holders but on entire boards,
departments, committees, legislatures and congresses, and sometimes the
courts; whereby the public are told over and over again that these
official bodies, composed as they are of from five to five hundred men
each, are inefficient and corrupt. There is no pretence on the part of
some of these societies of concealment of their mean opinion of the
office holders, especially those elected by the popular vote. One of
them, the New York Citizens Union, publishes an annual statement
containing notes of the character and record of each of the local
representatives in the state legislature, some of them far from
complimentary, and all critical and superior in tone, like the report
of a master of a reform school on the behavior of the pupils. In fact,
though these watch dogs do not directly attack the institution of
manhood suffrage, their attitude towards its creatures in state and city
government is that of a policeman toward a professional criminal. This
practice of auxiliary and supervisory government by organized meddlers
is well expounded in a book ably written by W. H. Allen of New York,
Director of the Bureau of Municipal Research; a man of sufficient
experience in political life to have learned its diseased condition, and
to earnestly desire a palliative of its evil symptoms, but who is
without apparent hope of discovering or extirpating the cause of the
disease. He wrote the book for the purpose of inducing citizens,
especially women, to attend to their civic duties, and he urges his
readers to join one or more of these watch dog organizations and to
actively prosecute their work. (_Woman’s Part in Government._)
Examples of the operations of these societies are easily found, since
they by no means hide their lights. It will be sufficient here to refer
to a recent one as a sample. In January 1917, and again in April 1917,
one of the best known of the associations, the City Club of New York,
filed with the Governor a complaint against the District Attorney,
charging him in effect with gross misconduct in connection with certain
prosecutions for homicide. The Club employed lawyers to prosecute the
charges and there was a furious, scandalous and prolonged controversy in
the courts, in the public press and before the Governor, involving
beside the District Attorney himself some of his assistants and others.
Another powerful watchdog association is the well-known Chicago Voters
League, established in 1896. The League claims that at that time of the
sixty-eight members of the Chicago City Council only ten were even
liable to a suspicion of honesty, while the rest were organized into a
gang for plunder and blackmail. To correct this situation the League was
established and still operates. Its self-perpetuating Executive
Committee of Nine publicly opposes and condemns candidates for the City
Council and directs the citizens how to vote. This, of course, amounts
to a qualified oligarchy; in conformity with the usual tendency of
manhood suffrage, to create ring government in one way or another.
The whole attitude of these watch dog associations towards the
constituted civil authorities is most extraordinary, in view of the
respectability of most of their membership, and strikingly illustrates
the deplorable results of manhood suffrage. Their general scheme of
action is founded on the open assumption of each of them that its
members are superior in wisdom, honesty, patriotism and knowledge of
public affairs to the officials whom they denounce, lecture and
admonish; and, by implication that these members are superior also to
the constituents who elected these office holders. The state legislature
and other public bodies are watched closely, and when a measure in which
any of these societies or their controlling members actually have or
choose to feign a great interest is before any legislative body or
official board for action or determination, the agents of the interested
association begin to interfere; the public officials having the matter
in hand are not allowed to deliberate and decide impartially and coolly
even should they desire to do so; they are scolded, coaxed, threatened,
bullied and wheedled into doing what the association desires. Some of
these private associations have funds subscribed by individuals, or
arising from the collection of dues; they are therefore able to employ
lawyers to prepare arguments and briefs and political agents to go about
soliciting signatures; arrangements are made for a systematic campaign
directed towards the officials concerned, who are bombarded with
letters, telegrams, postal cards and petitions; sometimes public
meetings large or small are organized, and resolutions couched in
peremptory language are passed and presented at the proper quarters.
Should the officials prove refractory, they are apt to find their
motives impugned, their “records” and personal history unearthed, and
their characters publicly assailed, all from the same source. All this,
which often amounts to coercion, is so frequently practised upon public
bodies and their members as to have become a recognized feature of
American public life.
A large addition to the list of political scandals contained in this
book might be made by recourse to the archives of these watch dog
associations and to the published reports of the charges made by them
from time to time against the membership of the state and city
legislative and administrative bodies, and to the evidence collected by
them in support thereof, but space will not permit even the most
condensed recital of this material. Let it suffice to present here the
societies themselves, composed as they are of thousands of our citizens
of best standing and information, as witnesses to the bad character and
reputation of manhood suffrage. By their very existence they go far to
establish the significant fact that the manhood suffrage state and local
governments of the United States have utterly forfeited the respect and
confidence of the American people.
It must not be supposed that by the work of these watch dog associations
the evil of manhood suffrage operations is sensibly alleviated. On the
contrary, when carefully considered, that work, though presumably well
intended, must be considered as a public misfortune, and as resulting in
an aggravation rather than a diminution of the evils of our
misgovernment. In an individual instance their efforts may produce good
effects limited to that special transaction, just as might be said of
any voluntary interference with constituted authority; but in theory and
in principle and in the large and final results, the practice of such
interference is and must be politically noxious, and the case to justify
it even in one instance must be indeed extreme. The public-spirited
citizens who form an important part of their membership probably do not
realize just what they are doing when they coerce the will of the chosen
representatives of the people. They would be horrified at the suggestion
of using physical force or physical threats upon legislators to compel
them to deviate from their own best judgment; and yet they do not
scruple to use what they call moral force to the same purpose, and such
moral force as almost amounts to physical stress and coercion. The
difference in effect between threatening a member of the legislature
with a cudgel or with printed defamation issued by a powerful clique or
league is not always appreciable. In either case the general result is
the adoption of measures or modifications thereof reflecting rather the
views of the threatening meddler than those of the public official in
question or of the majority who elected him. This is a clear usurpation
of power. Again, the watch dog operations do not offer any permanent
result in return for this trampling down of popular government; their
programme includes no method of improving the quality of our officials
but only one for watching and nagging them. Third, it offers no security
whatever that the volunteer or self-appointed government censors shall
themselves be competent or worthy, or that they shall be anything more
than idle and presumptuous fools or designing hypocrites. Fourth, others
less worthy and disinterested, are by the example of these societies
encouraged to similar acts. So that the final result of the watch dog
plan is likely to amount to no more or other than this actual situation:
A number of corrupt, weak and worthless legislatures, town boards, city
councils, boards of supervisors, etc., constantly nagged, worried,
insulted and pulled this way and that, by all kinds of people, including
watch dog associations and their officers, newspaper men, cranks,
fanatics, busybodies generally and possibly scamps and adventurers. Even
suppose we make the extravagant supposition that no knaves or fools
whatever, but only the better type of citizens do and will respond to
the appeal to organize to boss the bosses, the system is still
impracticable, and if practicable would be mischievous; since it would
result in oligarchical tyranny. For the work proposed for these civic
organizations and for their members would be enormous; it would require
an acquaintance with legislative and other political methods far beyond
that possible to any one who has any other business; it would
necessitate among other things the careful scrutiny and thorough
understanding of every bill or resolution introduced into the state or
municipal legislature, and a steady watch from day to day of each of
these bills, and of the members of the bodies where they may be pending,
and especially of those of the committees having them under
consideration. Besides this it involves the defense of every step taken,
at the cost of endless controversy. As the ordinary citizen cannot
possibly undertake this labor of supervising oversight of government
activities, it is evident that if done at all by this volunteer method,
it must fall to a comparatively few people who have means and leisure,
or who have special interests to serve; or more likely, to hirelings
employed by those people.
The result of the watch dog programme even if successfully carried out,
would therefore be the creation of an _imperium in imperio_; an
irresponsible self-created governing oligarchy acting through the
present class of worthless and corrupt politicians. A more complicated
and mischievous political system nor one more likely to produce tyranny
and public scandals could scarcely be devised. But though the watch dog
scheme cannot be approved, its actual existence is a strong argument
against manhood suffrage; for though bad reputation is not of itself
proof of misconduct, yet it usually accompanies wrong doing; and when
evidence of evil reputation is here added to the general as well as
particular proof already furnished of the mischiefs resulting from
manhood suffrage, the case against that system can hardly fail to be so
materially strengthened as to be practically unanswerable.
The weakness and inferiority of our public officials afford opportunity
for interference by another set of meddlers in public affairs who are of
inferior breed to the watch dogs, and for the infusion of eccentric and
fanatical ideas and theories into legislation and administration, such
as would not occur in a well-founded governmental system. The class
referred to is composed of political adventurers, eccentrics, cranks,
and fanatics; people whose mental vision is inaccurate; who are out of
harmony with nature and its operations, and whose undisciplined minds
are filled with impracticable theories. Many of them are well-to-do
idlers able to give time to the agitation of any cause they may happen
to espouse. Compared with the watch dogs they are as the yellow dogs of
politics. They function in every state as promoters of crank
legislation, the history whereof in the United States would no doubt
make, if compiled, a very interesting volume, containing many surprises
to the general reader. While sane and prudent men are content to confine
their attention to their private affairs, and while modest men, be they
ever so well informed, are apt to doubt their own capacity in affairs of
state, a certain class of cranks are always eager to meddle with
politics; full of conceit they are not troubled with doubts as to the
correctness of their own opinions. When one such takes up a fad,
religious, moral, political or social, he becomes more and more
engrossed in it; nothing else matters to him half so much; family and
business are neglected; he writes for the newspapers; he attends and
organizes public meetings; he serves on committees; he makes speeches;
he circulates literature; he contributes to the cause within his means,
which sometimes are large, and collects for it from others. When a
“movement” as it is called is once fairly started it is sure to be
joined by many with ulterior motives, impelled by vanity, by mere love
of notoriety, by fondness for excitement; by those who seek the pleasure
of serving on committees, of speaking in public, or of seeing their
names in print; others come to make new acquaintances; to escape ennui;
to become politically important. Under a strong and intelligent
government these collections of faddists, adventurers, humbugs and fools
would do little more harm than so many debating societies; but when, as
now, those in power are of mediocre ability, weak calibre or politically
timid, such societies are potent for mischief. The ordinary politician
holding an office obtained perhaps by a majority of a few votes, or
otherwise precarious in its tenure is easily frightened by a show of
organization. Where the proposed new measure is one opposed to the
pecuniary or political interests of the bosses the cranks get but slight
attention; but where there are only principles involved their chances
for success are often very good indeed. The fact that they are armed
with theories however foolish, makes them appear mysterious and
redoubtable antagonists to small politicians, who cannot understand
principles or the motives of people professing principles. The official
finds himself confronted and baited by an inexorable pack of those
yellow dogs, small in number, but terrible in noise and clamor, who give
him no rest; while on the other hand the sane and sensible folk of his
constituency are not only silent and apparently indifferent but scarcely
seem aware (as indeed most of them are not) of his name or existence.
Getting no orders from his boss, who takes no interest in the matter one
way or another, what wonder if the weary legislator or administrator,
either becomes half convinced by the din of arguments which he is too
weak or ignorant to answer, or frightened by the criticism he is
receiving, yields at last with a sigh of relief. And so the crank
project often goes through without public notice except the applause of
the agitators, who print a triumphant account in the newspapers of the
adoption of another “reform measure” and get one of their members to
write it up in some magazine with a laudatory reference to himself and
his associates. The effect of “crank” or yellow dog influence upon our
weak state governments is another of the evil results of manhood
suffrage.