A PEAK OF REALITY THRUSTS UP ON THE LEVEL PLAIN OF SHAMS
As well fear blocs and minorities as fear the centrifugal force on the
ground that it is seeking to pull us off the face of the earth.
Minorities are the centrifugal force of politics. They maintain the
balance of forces which makes political existence possible. Without them
the State would become unbearable; it would destroy us or we should be
compelled to destroy it.
We have just passed through a period, the war, in which minorities were
suppressed, in which the general will brooked no resistance, in which
the bodies of men between certain ages and the minds of men and women of
all ages were brought into compulsory service of the State. The mental
draft dodger went to jail just as much as the physical draft dodger.
A Chief of an Industrial Workers of the World Longshoremans' Union was
sentenced for twenty years because he was an I. W. W., although under
his direction his organization handled efficiently all the munitions of
war shipped from Philadelphia. He "obstructed the war" by his thoughts
as an I. W. W., even though his actions as a citizen contributed to
success in the war.
One may tolerate during a national emergency the oppression that results
from the crushing of minorities, but in time of peace it is only in the
balance of political forces that political existence may go on.
All freedom is the work of minorities and so is all change. Respect for
opinion is dearly bought by them. Majority views were all once minority
views. Some political theorists even go so far as to say that all
governments, no matter what apparent precautions are taken to represent
majorities, are really conducted by minorities. Without the effective
resistance of minorities the general will may become tyrannous or
without the stimulus they afford it may become inert.
The blocs and minorities that are appearing in American public life are
accomplishing a measure of decentralization. The highly centralized
government which we recently built up is itself passing into the control
of the various economic subdivisions of society. In them rather than in
it is coming to be final authority.
Take freight rates for an illustration. Originally they were localized,
in the unrestricted control of the railroad managers. Then they were
slightly centralized in the partial control of state and partial
control of national authorities. Then control was wholly centralized in
the Inter-State Commerce Commission at Washington, the States being
denied effective authority even over rates within their own borders.
There you have bureaucracy at its worst, authority in the hands of an
appointive commission, thousands of miles, in many cases, from the place
where it was applied, and a public feeling its impotence, which is the
negation of self-government.
Then comes the first step in decentralization. No locality, no State was
big enough to reach out and get back the authority over its own railroad
service that it once had. But the organized farmers of the whole country
were able to take into their hands the power over the railroads as it
affected them. Nominally the Inter-State Commerce Commission still makes
rates. Practically the farmers, having the balance of power in the House
and Senate, say what rates they want on agricultural products and get
them. That is decentralization.
The division into States which the jealous colonists preserved in
forming the Union has largely lost its significance. Men divide now
according to their interests, not according to boundaries that may be
learned in the school geographies. As the States weakened many of their
powers gradually tended to be centralized in the national government. As
the newer economic subdivisions of society become organized and
self-assertive some of the power thus centralized in Washington
devolves upon them, not legally or formally, but actually and in
practice. They constitute minorities too large to be denied.
It is only through decentralization that popular institutions can be
kept alive, only through it that government remains near enough to the
people to hold their interest and only through it that freedom from an
oppressive State is preserved.
Why should minorities be regarded with such aversion? Why should
President Harding declaim against them so persistently? Our Federal
Constitution is written full of safeguards for minorities. The reservoir
of power is in the minorities, the States, the local subdivisions which
feared the loss of their identity and independence through the central
government they were creating.
Only powers expressly yielded by the local units may be assumed by the
Republic. The States were the minorities; they felt when they joined the
Union that their rights as minorities had to be jealously guarded, in
order that they might have the realities of self-government.
You have in the rule that the small State must have as many Senators as
the large State a sharp assertion of the right of geographical
minorities. If the larger States had not accepted this principle the
smaller States would never have joined the Union.
Gradually these geographical minorities lost their importance in the
public consciousness. Our people had come and kept coming to this
country from the ends of the earth. Arriving here they continued to be
nomads, sweeping over the West in search of new pasture lands or more
fertile soil, moving from the farm to the city and thrusting their roots
in nowhere. No difference of language or customs set up arbitrary
frontiers.
Moreover we were the first people to settle a land where modern methods
of locomotion destroyed the use and wont of limited localities. Instead
of being citizens of New York united with the citizens of New Jersey,
Connecticut, and the rest of them for the common defense, as our
forefathers imagined, we became citizens of the United States, which was
divided into New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and the rest for
purposes of policing, road-making, and other functions that could be
better managed at home than from Washington.
A State began to assume about the same place in the Union that a county
does in a State.
The basic reality for our forefathers was the State, the Union existing
for the convenience of the States. The basic reality for us is the
Union, the States existing for the convenience of the Union, which is
too vast to administer everything from a central point.
As the geographical subdivisions lost their significance economic
subdivisions rose to take their place. The farmer of Kansas began to
have more in common with the farmer of Iowa than he had with the coal
miner of his own State. The nationwide organization of farmers resulted,
and it is a more real unit in the political consciousness than is that
unit on which the Fathers laid such stress, the State. It is a minority
that has no reserve rights under the Constitution but which achieves its
rights by force of numbers and organization.
These economic subdivisions are the reality today. The United States is
a union of the State of Agriculture, the State of Labor, the State of
Manufacturing, and a dozen other occupational States of greater or less
importance. And after all why should not Agriculture, Manufacturing,
Labor, Foreign, and Domestic Commerce form a union for the national
defense, carefully reserving essential powers to themselves as States,
just as the thirteen original colonies did? Why should we let this new
political organism keep us awake nights?
Nationally we have a complex on the subject of disunion. Fortunate
perhaps is the country which is subject to the pressure of a foreign
enemy on its border, as France is, for example, to that of Germany. If
you have a convenient foe to be afraid of you do not have to be afraid
of yourselves. It seems to be the rule that nations like individuals
must have fears and the American phobia is that this country will
proceed amoeba-wise by scission, into several countries. When we feel
a weakening at the center we feel a horror in the peripheries.
We fought one great war to prevent a breaking up of the Union and
whenever we hear the word "section," we become apprehensive. And just as
"section" fills our minds with fear of cleavage upon geographical lines,
so "class" arouses anxiety over cleavage upon social lines. "Class"
calls up the spectre of socialism. "Bloc" moreover is a word of unhappy
associations. It brings into the imagination Europe with all its turmoil
and its final catastrophe.
The Civil War left us with one complex. The European War left us with
another. The agricultural bloc touches both, suggesting division and
upon European lines. Being agricultural it is vaguely sectional; being
the projection of a single interest into national politics so as to cut
across parties, it follows European precedents. It moreover derives its
name from abroad.
Call it log-rolling by the farmers, however, and it relates to the
habitual method of American legislation. It conforms to our best
traditions. We never spoke of the groups which filled pork barrels of
the past as blocs, but every river and harbor bill was the work of
minorities uniting to raid the treasury. The two recent amendments to
the Constitution, granting the suffrage to women and prohibiting the
manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, were also achieved
minorities.
The organized minorities of the past dissolved when their end was
obtained. They had a specific rather than a general purpose. Usually it
was a moral purpose, the prohibition of alcoholic drinks, or political
justice for woman. Never until recently did a minority raise the
economic interests of one section of society against those of the rest
of society and promise to keep on raising them. The farm bloc is the
first permanent economic minority to organize itself effectively for
political action.
The phenomenon is not that the bloc impairs our political system; it
does not; majority rule is always tempered by minority rule or it
becomes either a tyranny or a dead thing. It is that it threatens our
pocketbooks. It obtains low railroad rates on farm products. It shifts
taxes from farmers to the rest of us. It secures for farmers special aid
in the form of government credits.
Nevertheless its appearance is the most hopeful sign in Washington that
we may emerge from the governmental bog into which we have sunk. We had
centralized to the point of creating an immense and dull bureaucracy
headed by a weak Executive and equally weak Congress. Interest in
self-government was being destroyed by the mere remoteness and
irresponsiveness of the mechanism. "The parties are exactly alike. What
difference does it make which is in power?"
We had created an organization too vast for any one to take it in hand.
And the only remedy in that case is to break the organization down.
Decentralization into States was impossible, for men never go back to
outworn forms, and State boundaries had ceased to be the real lines of
division in American society. A way out of this difficulty has been
found through the seizing of power by occupational organizations, of
which the farm bloc is the most famous and most successful.
We could not go on as we are, with an enfeebled Executive and an
enfeebled Congress. And, if I have analyzed the situation correctly, we
shall have no more strong Executives, until some national emergency
unites the people temporarily for the accomplishment of some single
purpose. The Executive is the greatest common divisor of a diverse
society. Congress, equally, is weak so long as it remains a Congress
based upon the present theory of party government, for the party has to
be stretched out too thin, has to represent too many different views to
have character and purpose. Steadily parties are being driven more and
more to pure negation. Wilson was elected the first time on the negative
issue, "No more Roosevelt and his radicalism," and the second time on
the negative issue, "He kept us out of war," and Harding upon the
negative issue, "No more Wilson."
If the two existing parties cannot be positive and constructive, "Why
not scrap them both?" asks Mr. Samuel G. Blythe. Why not, indeed?
except for the fact that you can find no principle upon which to found a
third party. If there were a positive principle upon which a majority of
the voters would agree the existing parties would grab for it. They are
colorless and negative not by choice but by necessity.
Let us look at the situation. The public is disgusted with the existing
parties and becoming indifferent to the possibilities of the suffrage
and of popular government, an unhealthy sign. A new party is out of the
question, for to succeed any new party must be broad enough to cover all
sorts and conditions of men, divergent groups and interests. It must at
once have the defects of the old parties.
So long as parties "must be careful," to quote Mr. Harding, executives
must "be careful" and Congress organized on the party basis "must be
careful." We gravitate toward negation.
We face in government perhaps what it is said we face in industry and in
war, organization on such a scale that men are no longer masters of it.
Under such circumstances there is nothing to do but to break it up into
its component parts. That is what the group or bloc system is, a
resolution into component parts.
It is precisely what will happen in the industrial field if the great
combinations of twenty years ago prove too unwieldy. The vertical trust,
the single industry, organized like the Stinnes group or like the Henry
Ford industry from the raw material to the finished product but seeking
no monopoly, promises to take the place of the horizontal trust of
monopolistic tendency. The bloc is a vertical organization appearing in
the field of politics, which hitherto has been dominated by the
horizontal organization of the parties.
A vertical organization, like everything vertical in this world, tends
to rest upon the solid earth. It has its base in reality. The bloc
introduces reality into public life. It will be represented by men who
are not ashamed to stand frankly for the selfish interests of their
group.
When we banished selfish interests from the government a few years ago
we banished all interests--and even all interest, too--leaving very
little but hypocrisy and timidity. The representatives of a group will
not have to be all things to all men as our party men are, but only one
thing to one kind of men.
If we cannot get our present parties to stand for anything, if for the
same reason we cannot form a new party to stand for anything, we can at
least introduce principles into politics through the force of group
support. Blocs will be positive, not merely negative as the parties have
become. They do not have to please everybody. They can and must be
constructive.
The clash of ideas which we miss between parties may take place between
blocs. I am assuming, as everyone in Washington does, that the farm
bloc is only a forerunner of other similar political efforts, for every
economic interest which is organized among the voters may extend itself
vertically into Congress.
There will be a gain in decentralization, there will be a gain in
honesty, there will be a gain in constructive political effort through
the direct representation of the real interests of society in Congress.
Nor does there appear any danger of the break up into utterly unrelated
minorities such as has taken place, let us say, in France and Germany.
We have what most European countries has not, an elected Executive who
plays an important part in legislation, the President with his veto
power. So long as the presidential office retains this function, and it
is always likely to retain it, there must be national parties within
which the minorities, interests, or occupational groups, must cooperate.
Groups will not be able in this country as in Europe to elect members of
the national legislature independently, then form a combination and pick
their own Executive. They are under compulsion to elect the Executive at
large by the votes of the whole people; they must hold together enough
for that purpose.
The centrifugal tendency of minorities in the American system is thus
effectively restrained. Groups must work within the parties, as the
agricultural bloc has done and as the proposed liberal workers bloc
promises to do. A handful of seats in Congress alone is not worth
fighting for: that is why all third party movements have failed. A
handful of seats in a European parliament is worth having; it may
dictate the choice of the Executive; that is why parties are numerous
abroad. In other words "bloc" is a useful name as indicating a radical
departure in our political system but it contains no threat for this
country of the political disintegration prevailing in Europe.
The names Republican and Democrat are likely to last as convenient
designations of the accord reached for national purposes between the
vertical organizations which represent economic or other group interests
of the people. Unity is thus preserved as well as diversity, which is
what upon geographical lines, the Father of the Constitution sought.
You have only to regard the agricultural bloc to perceive the truth of
this analysis. Primarily its members are Republicans or Democrats and
only secondarily representatives of agriculture. They have rejected
leadership of a separatist tendency, choosing the moderate guidance of
Mr. Kenyon and Mr. Capper rather than the more individualistic
generalship of Mr. Borah or Mr. La Follette. Some day their successors
may be primarily representatives of agriculture and only secondarily
Republicans or Democrats, but in one of the two big parties they must
retain their standing, or share the fate of third parties, a fate
made inevitable by the necessity electing of a chief executive at
large.
[Illustration: SENATOR ARTHUR I CAPPER OF KANSAS]
When the farmer votes for legislators who will represent primarily the
farm interest, and the laborer for legislators who will represent
primarily the labor interest and the business man for legislators who
will represent the business interests self-government will assume a new
importance, even though all of these interests will have to be
subordinated to the general interest for the sake of cooperation with a
party in the choice of an Executive.
I have compared the group organization to the vertical trust of the
industrial world. The resemblance is striking. Take the instance of Herr
Stinness, the most interesting figure in manufacturing today. Originally
he was a coal mine owner. Instead of spreading laterally to monopolize
coal he builds upward from his raw material to finished products. He
adds iron to his holdings and manufactures electrical supplies and
electricity. He owns his own ships for the carrying of his products. He
would buy railroads from the German government for the transporting of
them. He owns newspapers for political action. And the whole
organization culminates with himself in the Reichstag, and in
international relations where he is almost as significant a figure as
the German government itself.
Mr. Henry Ford, a lesser person, started at the other end and organized
downward to the raw material. He now owns his own mines, his railroads
for shipping, his raw material and products, his steel foundries, the
factories which turn out his finished products, his weekly newspaper,
and he is himself a political figure of no one yet knows how much
importance.
The farmers are organized for social purposes, for the distribution of
information among themselves, for cooperation in buying and selling, for
maintaining a lobby at Washington and finally for political action.
Political action crowns an organization which serves all the purposes
for which union is required.
Practically every other interest is organized to the point of
maintaining a lobby at Washington. Only the farmers have developed
organization in Congress. Only they have adapted their organization to
all their needs, social and political. Only they have the perfect
vertical trust running straight up from the weekly entertainment in the
union or bureau to the Senate in Washington, where their Senators do the
bidding of their agent, Mr. Gray Silver.
Indispensable to effective special interest representation seems to be
an organization for other than political purposes which brings the
voters of a class or occupation together. Labor has such an organization
in its unions. Business has it perhaps in its Chambers of Commerce and
Boards of Trade. Either of them has the means at its disposal for
imitating the farmers and developing a bloc in the national legislature.
It is natural that the farm interest should be the first to push its way
beyond the lobby or propaganda stage at Washington to that of organized
representation on the floor of Congress. Agriculture is the single
interest or the immensely predominating interest in many States. A
Senator or Representative from such a state may safely consider himself
a representative of agriculture. But in a more fully developed community
there is a diversity of interests. Where there is capital there is also
labor. Moreover most of the industrial States have also their
agricultural interest. It is not safe for an Eastern Senator or
Representative, as the situation now stands, to identify himself with
any minority. He must at least pretend to "represent the whole people."
If the vertical movement in politics proceeds, as it almost inevitably
must, it will manifest itself effectively first in the lower house.
Congress districts are small units. In an industrial State one district
may be prevailingly agricultural, another prevailingly labor, another
prevailingly commercial. Groups operating within a party will tend to
parcel out the districts among themselves holding their support of each
other's candidates, as the Liberal and Labor parties have often done in
England.
The Senate will be less responsive. States are large units and, except
in farming regions, are not prevailingly of one interest. But a division
may be effected like that which now gives one Senator to the eastern and
another to the western, or one to the urban and another to the rural
part of the State. One Senator may go to business and another to
agriculture or to labor as the case may be.
What I have just written is by way of illustration. I have spoken of
agricultural, labor and business blocs not because these are the only
divisions of society that may be organized for political purpose but
because they already have the basic machinery and seem certain to thrust
upwards till they are prominently represented in Congress. Other
minority interests are already showing themselves, as for example the
soldiers of the late war and the inland waterways group. These and
others like them, some permanent and some temporary, will cut across the
main subdivisions, so that men who are divided on one interest will be
united on another and thus furnish a further cement in the body politic
in addition to the necessity of joint action upon the presidency.
Thus there is less danger of our being ruled by minorities than there is
of minorities having to surrender too much of their purposes for the
sake of unity among themselves and of our thus being in spite of their
organization little better off than we are now, reduced by the sheer
mass that has to be moved to a policy of inaction and negation.
In an earlier chapter I analyzed the Senate to show how weak and
will-less it is and how inferior is its personnel, how prostrate it lies
before any powerful minority which has a purpose and the will to carry
it out. I used the Senate as typical of Congress; a desire to save space
and to avoid repetitions kept me from a similar study of the House. In
the same way the parties lie ready for the uses of minorities. They are
will-less. They have no aim and express no unity because when the old
pioneer will to exploit as quickly as possible the national resources
without regard to waste, physical or social, ceased to operate, there
was no unity, except, as I have explained, for temporary purposes, for
social defense under Roosevelt and for national defense under Wilson,
two essentially negative ends.
Mr. Will H. Hays trying to tell the Republican senate how to vote on the
League covenant, was a less powerful figure than was Mr. Wayne B.
Wheeler ordering it to vote that more than one half of one per cent of
alcohol in a beverage was intoxicating, or Mr. Gray Silver forcing it to
extend credits to farmers, or Colonel Taylor frightening it into voting
for a soldiers' bonus.
The old party bosses are dead. No machine leader will control as many
delegates in the next national convention as will Mr. Gray Silver. So
far as delegates are now led they are led by Senators and
Representatives. A Senate group chose Mr. Harding at Chicago. And
Senators and Representatives lie at the mercy of organized minorities.
The Republican party in 1920 was an agglomeration of minorities, held
together by no better binder than the negation of Wilsonism. There were
the German vote, the Irish vote and the other foreign votes; the farmer
vote, the business vote, the old American vote, the frightened vote, the
herd vote and every conceivable kind of vote. It was in effect a bloc,
in the European sense of that word, a combination of small parties.
These minorities were mostly unorganized in 1920 or imperfectly
organized; their development vertically is now going on. Some of them
will appear as definitely upon the floor of the 1924 convention as the
agricultural group has upon the floor of Congress.
With the organization of minorities Congress becomes important, for it
is in Congress that the Fathers in their wisdom provided for the
expression of minorities. The Presidency, according to the argument used
before in this book, dwindles to a charming embodiment of that great
American negative--nationwide public opinion. The only ordinarily
available positive--group opinion--finds its play in the Legislature.
There will be determined upon whose shoulders the taxes will be shifted,
who shall have effective rebates in freight rates, and more important
still, who shall use for his group interests the government control of
credit. Where these questions are being decided there public
attention will concentrate. There will be the stress upon government.
[Illustration: GREY SILVER, THE MAN BEHIND THE FARM BLOC]
As Congress becomes more important better men will be drawn into it.
There will be a gain to public life in this country from emphasis upon
the parliamentary side of government. As it is now only one prize in
American politics is worth while and that is the Presidency. And there
is no known rule by which men may attain to it. Candidates for it are
chosen at random, from governing a State, from an obscure position in
the Senate, from the army, it may be; in no case does it come as the
certain reward of national service.
And if, as happened when Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson were made
President, really able men attain the office, they may serve their
country only four years, or eight years at most, and then must retire
from view. In England, for example, similar men are at the head of the
government or leading the opposition for the greater part of a lifetime.
English public life would inevitably look richer than ours even were it
not richer, for when they breed a statesman in England they use him for
years. We discard him after four or eight years. We have not the system
for developing statesmen and when by chance we find one we waste him.
We put our faith in the jack-of-all-trades and the amateur. We have the
cheerful notion that the "crisis produces the man." This is nothing
more than the justice illusion which is lodged in the minds of men, an
idea, religious in its origin, that no time of trial would arrive unless
the man to meet it were benignantly sent along with it, a denial of
human responsibility, an encouragement to the happy-go-lucky notion that
everything always comes out right in the end.
The world, in going through the greatest crisis in history has
controverted this cheerful belief, for it has not produced "the man"
either here or elsewhere. No one appeared big enough to prevent the war.
No one appeared big enough to shorten the war. No one appeared big
enough to effect a real peace. And no one appeared big enough to guide
this country wisely either in the war or in the making of peace, which
is still going on.
Only in parliamentary life is there enough permanency and enough
opportunity for the breeding of statesmen. We shall never have them
while the Presidency with its hazards and its wastes is stressed as it
has been in recent years.
And Congress itself must be reformed before it will encourage and
develop ability. The seniority rule, to which reference has been made
before, must be abolished before talent will have its opportunity in the
legislative branch.
One of the first things that aggressive minorities would be likely to do
is to reach out for the important committee chairmanships. Already the
seniority rule has been broken in the House, when Martin Madden was
made Chairman of the Appropriations Committee instead of the senior
Republican, an inadequate person from Minnesota.
And in any case the seniority rule will be severely tested in the
Senate. If Senator McCumber is defeated in North Dakota and Senator
Lodge is defeated or dies, Senator Borah will be in line to be chairman
of the important Foreign Relations Committee. When Senator Cummins, who
is sick, dies or retires and Senator Townsend is defeated, which now
seems likely, Senator LaFollette will be in line to be chairman of the
Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce. Both irregulars will then
attain places of vast power unless the seniority rule is abrogated.
Thus even the machine in the Senate will soon be under pressure to do
away with the absurd method of awarding mere length of service with
power and place.
Minorities when they determine to take the Senate and the House out of
the enfeebled grasp of incompetent regularity will inevitably find
precedents already established for them.
A richer public life will come from the breakdown of the safeguards of
mediocrity and from the stressing of the legislative at the expense of
the executive branch of the government. Both these results are likely to
follow from the effective appearance of minority interests in Congress.