Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

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 amœba-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 coöperate.

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.

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 coöperation 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 coöperation 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.