Behind the Mirrors Part 15

Whatever he is like privately, publicly he is placed, rated, catalogued; the general mind is made up. The farm bloc no more turned to him than to Borah for leadership. He will always remain isolated.

Now that party discipline has been broken down, what nonconformist Senators suffer most from is the tyranny of the teapot. Senator Kenyon referred to it when he said Newberry on trial for fitness for his seat "floated back into the Senate on an ocean of tea." An unparliamentary version of the same reference to the social influence is: "The Senate is one long procession of dinners and hootch."

If you are regular politically you are regular socially. Given the habit of voting with the crowd, of putting others at ease by a not too great display of intellect, a good cook, a pre-war cellar, and a not impossible wife, and you belong to the Senatorial middle cla.s.s, the new rich insurance agents, lawyers, miners, and manufacturers who control the fate of the socially ambitious. You may not be invited to the Wadsworths', or may be seldom asked there. But you are accepted by what Mencken might call the wealthy "b.o.o.boisie," the circle Mr. Harding frequented before he was advanced to the White House.

If you don't you are of the Senatorial proletariat. You are invited out seldom or not at all. You have to organize a little set of intellectuals, not found in the Senate, for your wife's tea parties.

Senator Kenyon was a moderate nonconformist. Intellectually he was honest, but not strong, so that an outsider might have thought that his honesty and independence would be overlooked. But he was never accepted by the "b.o.o.boisie." He was virtually cold shouldered out of the Senate, for it was with immense relief that he escaped from teapot ostracism to the securer social area of the Federal bench.

I repeat a bit of gossip about the Iowa Senator without vouching for it.

When he was retiring, it is said, a reporter asked, "What can be done with the Senate?" "Nothing," replied the Iowan, "The only thing to do is to destroy it." If he said this he really flattered the "b.o.o.boisie."

Destruction is reserved for wicked things like Sodom and Gomorrah. But the Senate is not wicked. It is good, honest in the sense of not stealing, well-meaning, timid, petty, tea-drinking, human, commonplace.

You can't destroy it unless you have something to put in its place, and there is nothing. Much better turn it over to the blocs and see what they will do with it.

CHAPTER XI

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 pa.s.sed 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 Longsh.o.r.emans' 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 pa.s.sing 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 ill.u.s.tration. 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-a.s.sertive some of the power thus centralized in Washington devolves upon them, not legally or formally, but actually and in practice. They const.i.tute minorities too large to be denied.

It is only through decentralization that popular inst.i.tutions 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 Const.i.tution 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 ident.i.ty and independence through the central government they were creating.

Only powers expressly yielded by the local units may be a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sertion 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 a.s.sume 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 Const.i.tution 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 "cla.s.s" arouses anxiety over cleavage upon social lines. "Cla.s.s"

calls up the spectre of socialism. "Bloc" moreover is a word of unhappy a.s.sociations. 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 Const.i.tution, 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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 sc.r.a.p 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 circ.u.mstances 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.