Behind the Mirrors Part 16

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 a.s.suming, 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 Const.i.tution sought.

You have only to regard the agricultural bloc to perceive the truth of this a.n.a.lysis. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.sume 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 cla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.tration. 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 ma.s.s that has to be moved to a policy of inaction and negation.

In an earlier chapter I a.n.a.lyzed 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 s.p.a.ce and to avoid repet.i.tions 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Mcc.u.mber 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 c.u.mmins, 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.

CHAPTER XII

THE HAPPY ENDING

I have hesitated a long time over writing this last chapter, because of the natural desire to give to my book a happy ending.

One may write critically of America and things American, but only if one ends in a mood of hopeful confidence. There is so much youth, so much latent power here, that one cannot fail to have faith that the spirit of man will gain some enlargement from the experiment in living which we are carrying on in this country.

And even if that were not true, egotism requires us to believe that we are ever going forward to better things; for how should "the forces"

have the effrontery to establish so splendid a people as ourselves upon so rich a continent, while reserving for us nothing but a commonplace career, that of one of the many peoples who have from time to time occupied the fairer regions of the earth?