CONGRESS AT LAST WITH SOMETHING TO DO HAS NO ONE TO DO IT
When Lazarus was raised from the dead it took him a long time to find
out that he was again alive. His legs were stiff from being so long
extended. His arms were cramped from being decently arranged across his
breast. The circulation starting in his members produced disagreeable
sensations which recalled his mortal illness and the pains of
dissolution. The last thing that this discomfort suggested was life.
Even thus it is with Congress, it has been so long dead that it is hard
for it to realize that it has once again come to life. It suffers from
various unpleasant sensations in its members, from blocs, from lack of
leadership, from indifference to party, from factionalism, from
individualism, from incapacity to do business. They are all vaguely
reminiscent of the pains of dissolution. On the dissolution theory they
are decent and explicable, for death is always decent and explicable.
As signs of life they are scandalous, and everybody body is scandalized
over them for fear that a vital Congress will be something new to reckon
with.
If Congress does realize that it has waked from the dead, who will be
worse scandalized than the senile persons whom the newspapers
respectfully call its "leaders"? What more threatening spectacle for
second childhood is there than first childhood?
Suppose Congress were again a lusty and vigorous creature with the blood
of youth in its veins, how long would Henry Cabot Lodge, aged
seventy-two, remain leader of the Senate? Lodge, the irascible old man,
with worn nerves, who claps his hands for the Senate pages as if they
were not of the same flesh and blood with himself, and who would, if he
could follow his instincts, clap his hands in the same way to summon the
majority Senators, the recluse who is kept alive by old servants who
understand and anticipate every whim, to enjoy greedily the petty
distinctions that have come to him late because the Senate itself was
more than half dead?
And who would be worse scandalized than the ancient committee chairman,
some with one foot in the grave? At one time in the first year of Mr.
Harding's administration the important chairmanships in the Senate were
disposed thus: Finance, the most powerful committee, Senator Penrose, a
dying man; Foreign Relations, Senator Lodge, 72; Interstate Commerce,
Senator Cummins, 72, and broken with illness; Judiciary, Senator
Nelson, 79 and living back in the Civil War in which he served as a
private; Immigration, Senator Colt, 76.
Suppose Congress should come to life and represent the real interests of
the various sections, classes, and, let us say, kinds of property and
business in this country--how long would the Senate remain such a
pleasant place to die in?
When these old gentlemen made their successful fight upon President
Wilson they signed their own death warrants, and began putting an end to
the system that made their tenure possible. Only a Congress which had
long been a subject of public contempt could have fallen into and could
have remained in their hands. Granted that Congress is negligible, it
makes no difference who sits in it or how decrepit its leadership.
But shift power once more to the legislative, and the various
conflicting interests throughout the country will grasp for the offices
now in enfeebled hands. And by taking predominance in foreign relations
away from the Executive and transferring it to themselves, the elderly
and infirm "leaders," who have been tolerated out of half contempt, have
started the avalanche of authority in their direction. It will sweep
them off their unsteady feet.
Let us examine what they have done. When they opposed Mr. Wilson on the
Versailles Treaty they established the power of the Senate to mark out
broadly the foreign policy of the United States, a dangerous enough
beginning for persons who were merely tolerated because Congress was
nearly negligible and it was a matter of little difference to the public
who its managers were. But when they altered Mr. Harding's treaties they
also denied the authority of the Executive as the head of his party to
align them in support of his program.
Party authority vested in the Executive thus impaired, it was not long
before the representatives of agricultural states also denied it, and
began to take their orders from the Farm Bureau Federation instead of
from the White House. Then the House leaders in open defiance of the
"head of the party" prepared and reported a soldiers' bonus bill which
contravened the express purposes of the Executive regarding this
legislation. Here we have the organization joining with the farm bloc in
declaring the legislature to be its own master.
But on what do the octogenarian feet of Mr. Lodge and Mr. Cummins, and
Mr. Colt and Mr. Nelson, and the others, rest except upon party
authority? Not upon representing any real or vital principle in the
national life. Not upon any force of intelligence or personality.
They move in a region of fictions. They represent the Republican party,
when there is no Republican party, no union on principles, no stable
body of voters, no discipline, no clear social end to be served.
When votes for legislation must be had, Senator James Watson circulates
about among the faithless pleading in the name of party loyalty--as well
talk of fealty to Jupiter in the capitol of the Popes!
In extremities the President, as "head of his party," is brought on the
scene,--for all the world like the practice of a certain cult which long
after its founder was dead used to dress up a lay figure to resemble him
and drive it about the marketplace, to reassure the faithful and confirm
the influence of the priests. Mr. Harding is alive enough, but the "head
of his party" is dead and a mere fiction of priests like "Jim" Watson.
Power has passed or is passing from the Executive and has found no one
in Congress to receive it. The arrival of power causes as much
consternation on the hill as the outbreak of war does among the
incompetent swivel chair bureaucrats of an army in a nation that has
been long at peace.
Power is passing to Congress because Congress says who shall pay the
taxes and who may use the public credit. Where there was one interest a
generation ago, there are many interests today, each trying to place the
burden of taxation upon others and reaching for the credit itself.
Taxation and credit are the big stakes today and Congress has them in
its atrophied grasp.
[Illustration: SENATOR JAMES E. WATSON OF INDIANA]
The question what is the matter with Congress has received more answers
than any other question asked about American institutions. For almost
a generation the national legislature has been regarded as the one
great failure in self government. For years it has been the home of
small men concerned with petty things which it approached in a petty
spirit, incompetent, wasteful, and hypocritical, a trial to the
Executive, almost a plague to the country. It has shared with state
legislatures and municipal boards of aldermen the impatience of the
people. In spite of searchings of the public conscience it has gone from
bad to worse till it is at its lowest point today, in personnel, in
organization, in capacity to transact business.
What has brought Congress to this state has been the unimportance of its
work, "doing such little things," as Mr. Root said after his six years
in the Senate. Natural economy prevents the sending of a man on a boy's
errand even if the man would go.
The great power which legislatures have, that over the public purse, has
not been of enough importance to make Congress a great legislature.
Taxes were light and before the war fell so indirectly that the public
gave them little attention. The control of the budget virtually passed
out of the hands of Congress, for executive departments habitually
exceeded their appropriations and Congress always made up the
deficiencies. There was no tax upon incomes. Taxpayers were indifferent.
A few hundred millions more or less was of no account.
Dispensations to business in the shape of protective duties upon
imports, a form of taxation which once made Congress a dominant factor
in national life, had become steadily less important as American
industry grew strong enough to hold its own market against competition
and to compete itself in other markets. With the subsidence of the
tariff as an issue Congress lost its last power to impose taxes in which
the country was deeply interested. Where the control of the public purse
and taxes are unimportant, legislatures are weak, unless executive
authority is vested in a Cabinet formed from among their members.
With the enfeeblement of Congress through the growing unimportance of
the taxing power, its great function, came the tendency to magnify the
Executive. Power has to go somewhere, and it went down Pennsylvania
Avenue. And this movement coincided with the development of
centralization. Congress, which was full of the spirit of localism, was
not a perfect instrument of centralization. The Executive was.
To elevate the President it was necessary to depress Congress. It became
the fashion to speak sneeringly of the Legislative branch, to sympathize
with presidents who "had Congress on their hands," to write of "the
shame of the Senate," and when any issue existed between the two parts
of the government to throw the force of public opinion on the side of
the executive. The press printed endless criticism of the Senate and
the House. Theories of government were invented to reduce Congress to a
subordinate place.
Meanwhile Congress, having regard for the character of its membership,
was agreed that incompetence should suffer no disabilities. All that was
required for political preferment within it was political longevity.
The seniority rule, by which committee chairmanships went not to ability
but to long service, favored mediocrity and second childhood. Even more,
incompetence banded together jealously to protect itself against
competence and shunted it into minor assignments. While the public was
regarding Congress with contempt Congress was well satisfied to make
itself contemptible.
Suppose we had developed a capacity for breeding statesmen in this
country, which we have not, would any man of first-class talents seek a
public career in such an institution as I have described? In the first
place, the people were visiting Congress with indifference, or worse
than indifference, and ambition will not serve under indifference. In
the next place that great power which makes legislatures dominant, the
power to tax and to distribute the fruits of taxation, had become
temporarily unimportant; and again, Congress itself was organized for
self-protection against brains and character.
Senator Root quit the Senate in disgust. Senator Kenyon has just
followed his example in even deeper disgust. A Tammany Congressman after
one term said, "They tie horses to Congressmen in Washington."
Congress is upon the whole a faithful reflection of the American
political consciousness. Democracy is a relatively new thing. It has not
taken hold of the minds and hearts of men. Shadowy and half-unconscious
faiths dispute its place. De Gourmont writing of the persistence of
Paganism in Catholicism, says that no religion ever dies but lives on in
its successor. So no government ever dies but lives on in its successor.
Why take the trouble to govern yourselves when your vital interests are
so well directed by the higher governments, of Progress, of economic
Forces, of heroes and captains of industry who ruled by a sort of divine
right? The less you try to muddle through by means of poor human
instruments in this well-ordered world the better.
For the limited tasks of self-government, why should special talents be
required? We are still near enough the pioneer age to adhere to pioneer
conceptions. Roosevelt, unfortunately, is the national ideal.
We look hopefully for great amateurs like him among insurance agents,
building contractors, lawyers, country editors, bankers, retiring, with
modest fortunes made, into public life. We put the jack of all trades
everywhere. Into the Presidency--and I don't know why we should not in
that office, for it is a waste of material and a misdirection of effort
in self-government to throw away a first-class public man on a four-year
job. Into the Senate and the House, into the Cabinet, where a lawyer
without previous experience of international affairs conducts our
foreign relations in the most difficult period of the world's history,
matching the power of his country against the wits of other countries'
practiced representatives, and thus obtaining a certain forbearance of
their extreme skill.
Into the diplomatic posts, where an editor, Colonel Harvey, noted only
for his audacity, holds the most important ambassadorship. Those who
have seen the Colonel at meetings of the Supreme Council tell the
amazing story that he was a silent and uneasy figure in the conferences
of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Briand, perhaps because he is only an
observer, perhaps also because he was in the company of practiced
statesmen and diplomats.
However, our system has its compensations. The picture of the robustious
Colonel uneasy in Zion is one of them.
In another great diplomatic post is Mr. Richard Washburn Child, a
quantity producer of fiction, or sort of literary Henry Ford. In
another, Paris, the second most important in the world, Mr. Myron
Herrick, a retired business man. Senator Foraker said of him, at a
critical moment of his public career, "_De mortuis nil_." "Don't you
wish to finish that quotation, 'nisi bonum,'" asked the reporter who was
seeking a statement. "No," said the Senator sharply; "De mortuis nil."
Of the ambassador to France nil, except that he comes from Ohio.
But when we, given all these causes for the weakness of Congress, the
frail hold which the idea of self-government has upon the popular mind,
the unimportance of the taxing power, the tendency to concentrate on the
executive at the expense of the legislative, the obstacles to ability
which mediocrity has erected in Congress, we have not explained the
present extraordinary confusion and demoralization in the legislative
branch. Most of these causes have been operating for some time, yet
Congress has been able to function. Only since Mr. Harding became
President has the breakdown of Congress been marked.
If you ask observers in Washington why the last Congress failed more
completely than any of its predecessors, with one voice they reply:
"Lack of leadership." Everybody cackles of leadership as if lack of
leadership were a cause and not a symptom. What is it that makes a
leader and followers unless it is a common purpose?
[Illustration: REPRESENTATIVE FREDERICK H. GILLETT OF MASSACHUSETTS]
The weakness of Mr. Harding, Mr. Lodge, Speaker Gillett, Mr. Mondell
lies partly in themselves, but it is made more apparent by the
difficulties that confront them. It traces back to the uncertainties
in the national mind. Who could lead representatives of taxpayers
staggering under the costs of the war and representatives of soldiers
striving to lay an added burden on the taxpayers? Who could lead
representatives of farmers who demand that a large share of the credit
available in this country be mobilized by the government for the
subvention of agriculture and representatives of commerce and
manufacture who wish to keep the government from competing with them for
the stock of credit? Or labor which insists that the way to improve
business is by stimulating demand at home through liberal wages,
increasing consumption; and the other classes which insist that the way
to restore business is by making increased consumption possible to them
through lower prices only to be accomplished through lower wages? The
conflict runs across party lines. The old rallying cries fall on deaf
ears.
The Republican party was based on the common belief that government
favors delivered at the top percolated down, by a kind of gravity that
operated with rough justice, to all levels of society, like water from a
reservoir on a hill reaching all the homes of a city. When you called
for loyalty to that you called for loyalty to everybody's stomach,
expressed in the half-forgotten phrase: "The full dinner pail."
Now, the various elements of society are doubtful of what may reach them
by the force of gravity from the top. Each insists that government
favor shall enter at its level and be diffused from that center. Would
you make the nation happy and rich, give the soldiers a
five-billion-dollar bonus and start them buying? Give the farmers a
several-billion-dollar guarantee of their staples and start prosperity
on the farm. Give labor high wages and start prosperity there by
stimulating consumption. Give the consumer lower prices by cutting wages
and start prosperity there. Shift the burden of taxation somewhat from
wealth and start prosperity once more in the good old way by favors at
the top.
One might compare the breakup that has occurred in this country to the
breakup that took place in Russia after the first revolution, the
peaceful and ineffective revolution of 1905. All parties in Russia
united against absolutism. A measure of representative government being
established and the main object of the revolution being achieved, all
parties fell to quarrelling among themselves as to which should profit
most by the new institutions.
Under Mr. Roosevelt and his successors a mild revolution was
accomplished. People turned against economic absolutism. They had begun
to question the unregulated descent of favors from the top. They doubted
the force of gravity that used to fill dinner pails. They demanded some
representation in the process of filling dinner pails. They set up a
government at Washington to control credit and transportation.
And now they have fallen apart over who shall pay the taxes, who shall
have use of the credit, who shall profit by lowered freight rates,
rebates in principle, special favors in transportation, under a new
name.
When men today deplore the lack of leadership they are comparing Mr.
Harding with Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Lodge and Mr. Mondell
with Senator Hanna and Senator Aldrich. Today's chiefs of state are of
smaller stature. Mr. Harding has been a drifter all his life; he has not
the native force of Mr. Roosevelt, the sheer vitality which gloried in
overcoming obstacles. He has not the will of Mr. Wilson. The petulant
Lodge is not the same order of being as the brutal, thick-necked Hanna,
or the more finished but still robust Aldrich.
But beyond this personal superiority which the leaders of the past had,
they enjoyed the advantage of standing upon sure ground. Mr. Hanna
belonged to that fortunate generation which never doubted, whether it
was in religion or morals or politics. He may not have put it so to
himself, but behind everything that he did lay the tacit assumption that
the business system was divinely ordained. The hand of Providence was
conspicuous everywhere in America's rise, but nowhere more than in the
rapid turning, unprecedented in the world's history, of minerals and
forests into a civilization.
In times of daily miracles it is easy to believe. Mr. Hanna believed,
the public believed, Congress believed. Mr. Hanna spoke for this
divinely ordained system which was developing an undeveloped continent
as one had never been in the memory of man, making us all richer, with a
certain rough justice, according to our deserts.
He himself was a pioneer. He himself had created wealth. He knew the
creators of wealth. He delivered the commandments handed down to him on
the mountain. With God so much on his side a much lesser man than Hanna
would have been a great leader. God isn't on the side of Mr. Lodge. That
is the difference.
Mr. Aldrich represented a less pure faith. What had been a primitive
religion had become an established church. He had behind him a power of
organization in business and Congress that Hanna had not. The public may
have been less faithful; still the religion he represented was the
official religion.
Like Hanna, he was rich and a creator of wealth; in addition he was
connected by marriage with the richest family in the United States. He
was the spokesman of business, and even if faith was decaying no one
seriously questioned the sacred character of business as the instrument
of Providence for making America great, rich, and free.
The chief aim was the creation of wealth. No one could doubt that the
business organization was accomplishing it with unparalleled success.
Perhaps the heads of the business organization kept a little too much of
the newly created wealth to themselves, but at least everyone shared in
it and it was wise to let well enough alone. Where there is such
substantial unity as existed at that time, no great personal qualities
are required for leadership.
And Mr. Aldrich was not endowed with great personal qualities. He has
been gone from Washington only a dozen years, and yet no tradition of
him survives except that he managed the Senate machine efficiently. In
type he was the business executive. He represented more fully than
anyone else in the Senate the one great interest of the country. He
stood for a reality, and it gave him tremendous power.
His mind was one of ordinary range. He traded in tariff schedules and
erected majorities upon the dispensing of favors. He bestowed public
buildings and river improvements in return for votes. Leaders have not
now these things to give or have them in insufficient quantities and on
too unimportant a scale.
No great piece of constructive legislation serves to recall him.
Primarily a man of business, he nevertheless attached his name to the
grotesque Aldrich-Vreeland currency act. The work of the monetary
commission of which he was the head, and which led to the present
Federal Reserve Law, was the work of college professors and economists.
Naturally a better leader than Mr. Lodge because he met men more easily
upon a common ground and had more vitality than the Massachusetts
Senator has, he was no better leader than any one of half a dozen
present Senators would be if the aim of business were accepted today by
the country as the great social aim, as it was in his day, and if any
one of the six now spoke for business in the Senate as in his time he
did.
Give Mr. Brandegee or Mr. Lenroot or Mr. Wadsworth a people accepting
that distribution which worked out from extending to the heads of the
business organization every possible favor and immunity, as the
distribution best serving the interests of all, and add unto him plenty
of public buildings and river improvements, and he could lead as well as
Mr. Aldrich.