THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN IN THE GENERAL SMASH
When we became doubtful, as pioneering drew to a close, that business
served a social end; when, becoming jealous of its great and
irresponsible power, we started to set up an equal or greater authority
in Washington, we followed the line of least resistance; we did the easy
and obvious thing; we had recourse to a one man government.
We magnified the office of President and satisfied that primitive
instinct in us which must see the public welfare and the public safety
personified in a single individual, something visible, tangible,
palpable. The President speaks and you read about him in the daily
press; the President poses and you see him in the movies and feel
assured, as in smaller realms under simpler conditions people were able
to see their monarch dressed and equipaged in ways that connected him
with all the permanence of the past, a symbol of stability, wisdom, and
the divine favor.
If the trappings are lacking, imagination and the emotions supply their
moral equivalent. Of our little temporary king no one must speak evil;
no voice may be raised in criticism.
His wife, up till some fourth of March an elderly country woman grown
dull in the monotony of village life or worn with the task of pushing an
unambitious husband forward to power, looking her most natural when in
the frankness of early morning unpreparedness she ran in her apron
across the street to gossip with the wife of a neighbor, becomes to the
awed eyes of Washington women, quite "beautiful." You hear them say it
of every--let us quote the illuminating phrase--every "first lady of the
land."
When Burke said that aristocracy was the most natural thing in the world
he did not go half far enough. The most natural thing in the world, the
thing which is always repeating itself under no matter whatever form of
government exists, is an autocracy. In national emergencies, in times of
peril, people put their fate in one man's hands; as in the late war when
Mr. Wilson was made by common consent a greater autocrat than any Czar
of all the Russias.
The herd instinctively follows one authority. The mob is single-headed.
All the traditions of the race lead back toward despotism and it is
easier to revert toward something primitive than to go forward toward
something higher in the scale of development.
And, moreover, the vital contacts of our lives are with authority
imposed from above. Our childhood is controlled by the autocracy of the
family. Education disposes of our hours, forces our inclinations,
represses our individuality, and turns us out stamped with a uniform
mark, the finished product of its unvarying course. The single head of
the classroom is the teacher. The single head of the school is the
principal, of all the schools the Superintendent.
More important still, our economic lives are at the disposal of
autocracy. We earn our livings under foremen and managers. Everywhere is
the boss who says to us "Do this or starve." He represents to us not
only authority but wisdom. The organization out of which proceeds to us
the beneficent results of food and clothing operates because he is
endowed with a knowledge which we have not. "He knows about it all, he
knows, he knows."
In all the essential everyday relations of life we have never been able
to evolve any higher organization than that of the chieftain and his
tribe. We read about democracy in the newspapers; once every two years
or every four years we go through certain motions which vaguely relate
to democracy, and which are not convincing motions.
Democracy is an artificial edifice imposed upon a society which is in
all other than its political aspects entirely primitive. All our direct
experiences are of one man power. It is the only organization we
actually know at first hand. We trust to it for the means to live. We
revert to it politically whenever it becomes an issue of life and death,
and even in lesser emergencies.
So it came about that when we determined to have a government at
Washington independent of and better representing the social will,
whatever that might come to be, than the government of business we had
recourse to that one form of rule which is ever present in our
consciousness, the only form under which the race has lived long enough
to have any real faith in it.
The new social ideal had not sufficiently taken form to utilize all the
complex institutions which existed in this country. Business was at that
time intrenched in Congress. It would have been a huge, an impossible
task, to re-make Congress, especially when no one knew definitely what
purpose should animate the re-making. It was so much easier to find one
man than to find many men. It is so much easier for a people which does
not know where it is going but means to go there to choose one man, and
by an act of faith endow him with the divination of leadership, than it
is to have a national will and express it through numerous
representatives.
The amplified executive is a sort of blind pool of the national
purposes. Creating an autocracy is an act of faith; democracy is work.
And faith is so much easier than work.
We did not think of it thus, as an exhibition of political inertia, as a
reversion to an outworn type. On the contrary, we were immensely pleased
with our innovation. As usual the United States had made an immense
contribution to the art of government. We were repeating the race
history of governments, as a child resumes in his life the race history
of the human kind. We had got so far as to evolve that oldest of human
institutions--autocracy, a mild, denatured autocracy. But we were as
proud of it as a boy is when he put on paper with a pencil the very
picture which his stone age ancestor cut laboriously into a walrus
tooth.
Our President had more power than the King of England, we boasted, more
than the Emperor of Germany. The monarchies of Europe were obsolete
because they preserved autocracy out of the darkness of the Middle Ages.
Our government was in the forefront of progress because it had created
autocracy out of the suffrage of the people.
And how clever we were with the restrictions of our written constitution
with its exact balance of powers, executive, legislative, and judicial.
The Fathers had builded wiser than they knew in writing an instrument by
which the carefully distributed authority might be well reconcentrated;
as if they were the first to use words whose import depended on the
point of view of those who interpreted them!
Acres of space in the newspapers were covered with gratulatory articles
proving that the dominating executive was the inevitable unifying
principle in our disjointed and not otherwise workable government.
Ours was a government by parties, so the argument ran, and the President
was the head of his party. As a matter of fact the writers of the
Constitution had not conceived of a government by parties. What they had
in mind was what they had before them in the Constitutional Convention
of which they were a part, a government by the best and ablest men of
the community, who should meet together and select the executive; who
should equally through the state legislature choose the Senators. The
role of job brokers was the last thing they imagined themselves to be
creating. Parties came later. Ours was not originally a government of
parties. It is hardly a government by parties today. So there was
nothing inevitable about this great reason why the Executive should be
the element in our system which would hold it together and make it work.
Nor until the beginning of this century did it ever occur to us that the
President was the head of his party. The control of the organization had
been in other hands, in Hanna's or Quay's or Cameron's, or divided among
a group of men like these three, who represented the interests of
business in the parties, and often also in the Senate.
The idea that the executive was the party's head was merely a happy
afterthought which was adopted to justify the resort to the line of
least resistance in creating a stronger government at Washington, the
concentration upon one man to represent the national will. We had simply
done what other peoples had so often done in the history of mankind.
When the English wished to weaken the rule of the great barons they
magnified the office of the King. When we wished to get away from the
rule of the barons of business we magnified the office of our elective
King, the President. We invented new reasons for an old expedient.
And by making the amplified executive the head of his party, which we
did--for the Quays and Hannas speedily disappeared under the new order
and left no successors--we set him to sawing off the limb on which he
sat. If his authority rested on that of his party then to be firm the
authority of the party must be firm. For parties to endure and be strong
there must be a certain quality of permanence about them. They must not
rest upon personalities but on principles and jobs, principles for the
disinterested and for those whose interests are expressed in the
principles, and jobs for those whose interests are less large and
indirect.
Of parties with the executive as their head nothing remained but their
name. The only nexus there could be between the executive and the mass
of voters was personal. One year a party was Roosevelt, the next year it
was Taft and the distance between Roosevelt and Taft was the distance
between East and West. A little later it even changed its name and voted
in another column because Roosevelt had adopted a new party name and
gone unto a new column. Four years later it split up and much of it went
to Wilson, who temporarily rallied a personal following just as
Roosevelt had done.
And because the dispensing of jobs was an unseemly occupation for the
executive we reduced by law the patronage that was available for the
sustenance of parties. Thus we substituted personal caprice for the
permanency of parties and at the same time cut down the practical means
of holding organizations together. At the same time the decay of
government by business left parties no longer an instrument of the
economic will of the nation.
Thus the executive headship was wholly inconsistent with government by
parties, upon which our magnified President was supposed to rest. A
further inconsistency was that we adopted another theory for
strengthening one man power. This was that the President was the leader
of the people. Have we a government by parties there? Not at all; the
power of the executive rests upon something outside of and superior to
parties.
If the legislative did not respond to pressure he might "go to the
people," as it was called, through the newspapers and upon the stump. He
might discipline the recalcitrant by stirring up public sentiment
against them. He might build up a personal following to such an extent
that his party must have it in order to win. He might encourage the
movement away from parties by attaching people to ideas and measures,
policies that the party had declined to accept. In this theory of
executive power it was conceded that parties were not to be trusted. In
the other it was held that they were a necessary link between the
dissociate branches of government.
It is no exaggerated notion that executive control of parties
contributed to the disintegration of party government. It is nothing
more than a statement of what actually happened. Roosevelt broke up the
Republican party nationally. He left it with its name covering an
agglomeration of groups and blocs and personal followings, supporters of
various interests difficult to reconcile, whose votes fluctuate from
year to year.
Mr. Hughes, the same kind of executive and party leader as governor of
New York, left the Republicans of that state in the hands of the little
local banditti. Mr. La Follette, following the same methods as Governor
of Wisconsin, left no one in that state definitely a Republican or a
Democrat. Every voter there is the personal follower of some chieftain.
And what virtue is there in the theory that the Executive alone
represents the national point of view, that he alone speaks "for the
country?" Political inertia always finds good excuses.
There are reasons why the President should try to represent the country
as a whole, since he is elected in a nationwide balloting. But there is
no reason why he should succeed in representing the country as a whole,
why he should have a national point of view.
Why should Mr. Harding have a vast understanding of national problems
and a clear sense of the country's will? A little while ago he was a
Senator, and the supposition that the Executive alone has the national
point of view implies that a Senator has not that point of view. Mr.
Harding is chosen President and immediately upon his election by some
magic virtue of his office he is endowed with insight and imagination
which he did not possess as Senator.
Mr. Harding is a good average President, a typical President, whether of
the United States or of a business corporation, just the kind of man to
put at the head of a going concern where a plodding kind of safeness is
required of the executive. We shall do well, should our standards of
public life remain what they are, if we have three Presidents superior
to Mr. Harding in energy or originality of mind, during the whole of the
coming century. But why should Mr. Harding understand or represent the
national point of view?
Mr. Harding lived his life in the indolent comfortable mental
atmosphere of a small town. His horizon was narrow and there was no
force in him which made him seek to widen it. His public experience
before coming to Washington consisted of brief service in the Ohio State
legislature and a term as Lieutenant-Governor of Ohio. His service in
the Senate at Washington was short and it was beginner's work,
undertaken in the spirit of a man who finds the upper house a pleasant
place in which to pass the latter years of a never strenuous life.
His point of view on national problems was a second-hand point of view.
He knew about them what his party had said about them, in its platforms,
on the stump, in the press. He accepted the accepted opinions. No magic
wrought by election to the Presidency could make of him or of anyone
else a great representative of the national purpose or endow him or
anyone else with deep understanding of national problems.
Of recent Presidents Mr. Taft failed so completely to understand his
people and express its will that after four years in office he could
command the support of only two states when seeking re-election. Mr.
Wilson after four years had so far failed that only the incredible
stupidity of his opponents enabled him to succeed himself; and again so
far, that his second term ended in a tragedy. The floundering of Mr.
Harding is apparent to every eye.
Only under two Presidents has the theory of executive domination of the
Government succeeded, and not completely under them. Congress rose
against Mr. Roosevelt in the last year or two of his administration.
Congress was not of Mr. Wilson's party, and was thus out of his control
in the last two years of his administration. Mr. Taft lacked the will to
rule. Mr. Harding is feebler than Mr. Taft, and party authority, one of
the pillars of executive power and responsibility, is now completely
broken down. A system which is successful only half the time cannot be
called workable.
Let us examine the circumstances under which the Executive was able to
prevail over Congress and effect a limited sort of one man government.
They are not likely soon to repeat themselves.
Mr. Roosevelt was an extraordinary personality. Only Andrew Jackson,
among our Presidents, was as picturesque as he, only Andrew Jackson had
a popular following comparable to his.
Both of them represented strong democratic movements,--Jackson the
extrusion of the landed aristocracy, in favor of the masses, from their
preferred position in our political life; Mr. Roosevelt, the similar
extrusion of the business aristocracy, in favor of the masses from the
preferred position they had gained in our political life. Like
agitations of the political depths, finding expression in personalities
as unusual as those of Jackson and Roosevelt, will give us from time to
time executives who may carry everything before them; but only
emergencies like this and one other will make the President supreme.
And even then it is easy to overstate the power of the Executive as it
was exercised by Mr. Roosevelt. The Colonel lived by picturesque
exaggeration. If he went to South America it was to discover a river and
find animals that the eye of man never rested on before or since. He
read more books than it was humanly possible to read and not become a
pallid bookworm. He pursued more interests than mere man can have. He
exercised daily as only a pugilist exercises briefly when in training.
He had the gusto of the greatest amateur of all time and enjoyed the
immunity which is always granted to amateurs, that of never being
measured by professional standards. When you might have been noting a
weakness in one direction he was diverting you by an enormous exhibition
of versatility in another. He had the capacity of seeming, and the
semblance was never penetrated. He seemed to bestride Washington like a
Colossus. Actually his rule was one long compromise with Aldrich and
Cannon, the business leaders of Congress, which he represented as a
glorious triumph over them.
One man government was developed much further under Mr. Wilson than
under Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Harding's predecessor entered office as the
expression of that movement toward a government based on numbers rather
than on wealth, which the Colonel had so imperfectly effected. There had
been a reaction under Taft; there was a new determination under Wilson,
and a new concentration on the executive.
Poor, bookish, without the friendships in the business world which Mr.
Roosevelt had had, having few contacts with life, Mr. Wilson embraced
the idea of putting business in its place passionately, where Mr.
Roosevelt played with it as he played with everything else.
Mr. Wilson was by temperament an autocrat. An illustration of how
personal was his government was his treatment of his enemies. His
bitterness against Huntington Wilson, the Republican Ambassador to
Mexico, is well known. A year or two after the dispute was over,
Huntington Wilson's son came up for examination to enter the Consular
service. He passed at the top of the list. President Wilson heard of his
success and directed that he should receive no appointment. He carried
his enmity to the second generation. The law which would have given
young Mr. Wilson a place meant nothing under his personal government.
As Anatole France says of Robespierre, he "_etait optimiste qui croyait
a la vertue_." Those who are "optimists and believe in virtue," remarks
the French author, end by killing men. Wilson in a revolution would have
conducted a Terror, as indeed during the war he did conduct a sort of
legal terror among pacifists and radicals. Roosevelt belonged to the
other school in the conduct of affairs which Anatole France praises
because it never forgets that men are "_des mauvais singes_." In a
revolution Roosevelt would have cut off no more heads than would be
necessary to make a good show.
Moreover, when Mr. Wilson entered office his party had been long out of
power. Its leaders in the House and Senate were not firmly established.
Unlike Cannon and Aldrich, of the Roosevelt day, they did not represent
business in the national legislature. They had no authority except the
purely factitious authority created by the accident of seniority. They
were easily dominated from the White House.
Coming into power at such a moment, possessing such a temperament,
representing such a popular movement, Mr. Wilson readily became the most
perfect example of the concentrated executive that we have yet had. But
even his one man government was attacked from the outset. His
personality proved repellent. An intellectual is so unfamiliar an object
in America as to seem almost a monstrosity, and his ascendancy would not
have lasted beyond two years if the war had not come.
War is the other great cause that leads to autocracy in popular
governments. In times of common danger we revert to the herd with the
single leadership. We resort to the only form of rule of which we have
any experience in our daily lives, the only form in which the race has
yet developed any lasting faith. From the time when war threatened, with
the invasion of Belgium, till the time when it ended with the armistice,
Mr. Wilson became what any President may become under like
circumstances, what Mr. Wilson's temperament especially fitted him to
become--an absolute dictator.
When we think of the powerful executive as the natural development of
the American system, imparting that unity to our government which the
makers of the Constitution in their zeal for checks and balances refused
to give it, we are over-impressed by the phenomena of Roosevelt and
Wilson and do not make sufficient allowances for the conditions which
made their power inevitable. So impossible is it for authority to remain
permanently in the hands of the executive that we are now witnessing its
spontaneous movement away from the White House--toward, well for the
moment I should say, toward nowhere.
A distinguished alienist tells me that the desire for power over your
fellow man is an unmistakable sign of paranoia, not necessarily paranoia
amounting to insanity, but the same kind of paranoia which makes history
amusing. If that is true, then we are in an era of perfect sanity at
Washington. No one, no one, in the White House, in the Capitol, in Wall
Street, the capitol of business, or back among the home folks, as far
as I can learn, wants power--and responsibility.
The picture I have drawn, quoting a bright young observer at the capital
of what happens when Business arrives in Washington is the picture of
our whole present national political organization. "A bunch of
tall-hatted fat boys comes. The governmental nose is thrust out awaiting
the guiding hand. The guiding hand is put unostentatiously behind the
back." It is the same when the organ of leading is extended from the
White House for the hand of leadership at the Capitol, or, as happens,
as often the organ of leading at the Capitol awaits the hand of
leadership at the White House.
Power is in transition and we do much inconsistent thinking about where
it is and where it should be. We deliberately elected a weak executive,
to retrieve the blessed days of McKinley, the old equilibrium and
co-ordination of the equal and co-ordinate branches of our government.
Yet when things go badly in Congress, as they mostly do, the critics
exclaim that the President should be firm and "assert his authority" on
the hill. Mr. Harding himself said, over and over again, "This is no one
man job at Washington." Yet we read that his face assumes a "determined
expression"--I have myself never seen it--and he sends for the leaders
in Congress.
We haven't executive domination and we haven't anything in its place.
We voted to go back to the nineties, but we haven't got there. There is
no Mark Hanna speaking for business and for party to make the system
work. We have the willessness of the blessed days in our National
Heartbreak House, but we haven't the will somewhere else to act and
direct. Not even seven million majority is enough to bring back the
past. In spite of "landslides" the course is always forward, and I use
"forward" not in the necessarily optimistic sense of those who were once
so sure of Progress.
The initiative, so far as there is any, has passed to Congress.
And so far as I can see, it is likely to remain with Congress, until
some new turn of events brings us back the strong executive. For, after
all, Congress chose Mr. Harding. The Senators picked him at Chicago.
With party bosses gone, they are about all that remains of the party,
and there is no reason why they should not go on naming Presidents. And
the power of presidents will not rise much above its source.
The autocratic President goes inevitably the way its prototype the
autocrat went. The loins that produce them are sufficiently fertile.
Primogeniture brought forth feeble kings. The nominating system called
on for a great man every four years yields many feeble ones. There will
be many Hardings to one Roosevelt or Wilson. Party government which
might reinforce a feeble president is weak. Government by business has
lost its confidence and authority. The great discovery of the first
decade of this century for making this government of ours work is
already in the discard.
So at a critical moment when government by Progress and government by
business have broken down, government by one man at Washington has also
gone. The war made the autocratic executive in the person of Mr. Wilson
intolerable. It also destroyed the basis for national concentration upon
the executive.
We need a new picture in our heads of what government should be, what
its limits should be when it faces such vital problems as interfering
with God's time, and where its authority should center. We have none.