Part 3
The reasons for believing that the boss system has reached its climax are manifold. Some of them have been stated, others may be noted. In the first place, the railroads are built. Business is growing more settled. The sacking of the country’s natural resources goes on at a slower pace. It is a matter of history, that economic laws did so operate, that the New York Central Railroad controlled the State legislature during the period of the building and consolidation of the many small roads which make up the present great system. But the conditions have changed. Bribery, like any other crime, may be explained by an emergency; but everyone believes that bribery is not a permanent necessity in the running of a railroad, and this general belief will determine the practices of the future. Public opinion will not stand the abuses; and without the abuse where is the profit? In many places, the old system of bribery is still being continued out of habit, and at a loss. The corporations can get what they want more cheaply by legal methods, and they are discovering this. In the second place, the boss system is now very generally understood. The people are no longer deceived. The ratio between party feeling and self-interest is changing rapidly, in the mind of the average man. It was the mania of party feeling that supported the boss system and rendered political progress impossible, and party feeling is dying out. We have seen, for instance, that those men who, by the accident of the war, were shaken in their party loyalty, have been the most politically intelligent class in the nation. The Northern Democrats, who sided with their opponents to save the Union, were the first men to be weaned of party prejudice, and from their ranks, accordingly, came civil service reformers, tariff reformers, etc.
It is noteworthy, also, that the Jewish mind is active in all reform movements. The isolation of the race has saved it from party blindness, and has given scope to its extraordinary intelligence. The Hebrew prophet first put his finger on blackmail, as the curse of the world, and boldly laid the charge at the door of those who profited by the abuse. It was the Jew who perceived that, in the nature of things, the rich and the powerful in a community will be trammelled up and identified with the evils of the times. The wrath of the Hebrew prophets and the arraignments of the New Testament owe part of their eternal power to their recognition of that fact. They record an economic law.
Moreover, time fights for reform. The old voters die off, and the young men care little about party shibboleths. Hence these non-partisan movements. Every election, local or national, which causes a body of men to desert their party is a blow at the boss system. These movements multiply annually. They are emancipating the small towns throughout the Union, even as commerce was once disfranchising them. As party feeling dies out in a man’s mind, it leaves him with a clearer vision. His conscience begins to affect his conduct very seriously, when he sees that a certain course is indefensible. It is from this source that the reform will come.
The voter will see that it is wrong to support the subsidized boss, just as the capitalist has already begun to recoil from the monster which he created. He sees that it is wrong at the very moment when he is beginning to find it unprofitable. The old trademark has lost its value.
The citizens’ movement is, then, a purge to take the money out of politics. The stronger the doses, the quicker the cure. If the citizens maintain absolute standards, the old parties can regain their popular support only by adopting those standards. All citizens’ movements are destined to be temporary; they will vanish, to leave our politics purified. But the work they do is as broad as the nation.
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The question of boss rule is of national importance. The future of the country is at stake. Until this question is settled, all others are in abeyance. The fight against money is a fight for permission to decide questions on their merits. The last presidential election furnished an illustration of this. At a private meeting of capitalists held in New York City, to raise money for the McKinley campaign, a very important man fervidly declared that he had already subscribed $5000 to “buy Indiana,” and that if called on to do so he would subscribe $5000 more! He was greeted with cheers for his patriotism. Many of our best citizens believe not only that money bought that election, but that the money was well spent, because it averted a panic. These men do not believe in republican institutions; they have found something better.
This is precisely the situation in New York city. The men who subscribed to the McKinley campaign fund are the same men who support Tammany Hall. In 1896 they cried, “We cannot afford Bryan and his panic!” In 1897 the same men in New York cried, “We cannot afford Low and reform!” That is what was decided in each case. Yet it is quite possible that the quickest, wisest, and cheapest way of dealing with Bryan would have been to allow him and his panic to come on,--fighting them only with arguments, which immediate consequences would have driven home very forcibly. That is the way to educate the masses and fit them for self-government; and it is the only way.
In this last election the people of New York have crippled Platt. It is a service done to the nation. Its consequences are as yet not understood; for the public sees only the gross fact that Tammany is again in power.
But the election is memorable. It is a sign of the times. The grip of commerce is growing weaker, the voice of conscience louder. A phase in our history is passing away. That phase was predestined from the beginning.
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The war did no more than intensify existing conditions, both commercial and political. It gave sharp outlines to certain economic phenomena, and made them dramatic. It is due to the war that we are now able to disentangle the threads and do justice to the nation.
The corruption that we used to denounce so fiercely and understand so little was a phase of the morality of an era which is already vanishing. It was as natural as the virtue which is replacing it; it will be a curiosity almost before we have done studying it. We see that our institutions were particularly susceptible to this disease of commercialism, and that the sickness was acute, but that it was not mortal. Our institutions survived.
SOCIETY
II
SOCIETY
Our institutions have survived, the perils of boss rule are past, and we may look back upon the system with a kind of awe, and recognize how easily the system might have overthrown our institutions and ushered in a period which history would have recorded as the age of the State Tyrants.
Let us imagine that some State like Pennsylvania, on which the boss system had been so firmly fixed that a boss was able to bequeath his seat in the United States Senate to his son, had shown forth an ambitious man, a ruler who realized that his function was not one of business, but one of government; let us imagine that a President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, some man of great capacity, had undertaken to rule the State. He would, by his position as State boss, have been able gradually to do away with the petty bosses and petty abuses. He would give the State a general cities law, good schools, clean streets, speedy justice; every necessary municipal improvement. Gas, water, boulevards would be supplied with an economy positively startling to a generation accustomed to jobs. He would destroy the middlemen as Louis XI. destroyed the nobles, and give to his State, for the first time in the history of the country, good government. A benign tyranny, with every department in the hands of experts, makes the strongest form of government in the world. Every class is satisfied. Pennsylvania would have been famous the world over. Its inhabitants would have been proud of it; foreigners would have written books about it; other States would have imitated it.
Meanwhile the power of self-government would have been lost.
Biennial sessions of the Legislature are already a favorite device for minimizing the evils of Legislatures. But the dictator would have desired to discourage popular assemblies. The whole business world would have backed the boss, in his plan for quinquennial or decennial sessions. Once give way to the laziness, once cater to the inertia and selfishness of the citizen, and he sinks into slumber.
Our feeble and floundering citizens’ movements in New York during the last ten years show us how hard it is to recover the power of self-government when once lost; how gradual the gain, even under the most stimulating conditions of misrule. Given thirty years of able administration by a single man, and the boss system would have sunk so deep into the popular mind, the arctic crust of prejudice and incompetence would have frozen so deep, that it might easily take two hundred years for the community to come to life. Recovery could only come through the creeping in of abuses, through the decentralization of the great tyranny. And as each abuse arose, the population would clamor to the dictator and beg him to correct it. After a while a few thinkers would arise who would see that the only way to revive our institutions was by the painstaking education of the people. The stock in trade of these teachers would be the practical abuses, and very often they would be obliged to urge upon the people a course which would make the abuses temporarily more acute.
We have escaped an age of tyrants, because the eyes of the bosses and their masters were fixed on money. They were not ambitious. Government was an annex to trade. To certain people the boss appears as a ruler of men. If proof were needed that he is a hired man employed to do the dirty work of others, what better proof could we have than this: No one of all the hundreds of bosses thrown up during the last thirty years has ever lifted himself out of his sphere, or even essayed to rule.
That devotion of the individual to his bank account which created the boss and saved us from the dictator must now be traced back into business.
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For the sake of analysis it is convenient now to separate and again not to separate the influences of business proper from the influences of dishonesty, but in real life they are one thing. Dishonesty is a mere result of excessive devotion to money-making. The general and somewhat indefinite body of rules which are considered “honest” change from time to time. I call a thing dishonest when it offends my instinct. The next man may call it honest. The question is settled by society at large. “What can a man do and remain in his club?” That gives the practical standards of a community. The devotion of the individual to his bank account gives the reason why the financier and his agent, the boss, could always find councilmen, legislators, judges, lawyers, to be their jackals, or to put the equation with the other end first, it is the reason why the legislators could always combine to blackmail the capitalist: this political corruption is a mere spur and offshoot of our business corruption. We know more about it, because politics cannot be carried on wholly in the dark. Business can. The main facts are known. Companies organize subsidiary companies to which they vote the money of the larger company--cheating their stockholders. The railroad men get up small roads and sell them to the great roads which they control--cheating their stockholders. The purchasing agents of many great enterprises cheat the companies as a matter of course, not by a recognized system of commissions--like French cooks--but by stealth. So in trade, you cannot sell goods to the retailers, unless you corrupt the proper person. It is all politics. All our politics is business and our business is politics.
There is something you want to do, and the “practical man” is the man who knows the ropes, knows who is the proper person to be “seen.” The slang word gives a picture of the times--to “see” a man means to bribe him.
But let no one think that dishonesty or anything else begins at the top. These big business men were once little business men.
To cut rates, to have a different price for each customer, to substitute one article for another, are the prevailing policies of the seller. To give uncollectible notes, to claim rebates, to make assignments and compromises, to use one shift or another in order to get possession of goods and pay less than the contract price, are the prevailing aims of the buyer.
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It is unquestionably possible for an incorruptible man to succeed in business. But his scruples are an embarrassment. Not everybody wants such a man. He insists on reducing every reckoning to pounds sterling, while the rest of the world is figuring in maravedis. He must make up in ability what he lacks in moral obliquity.
He will no doubt find his nook in time. Honesty is the greatest luxury in the world, and the American looks with awe on the man who can afford it, or insists upon having it. It is right that he should pay for it.
The long and short of the matter is that the sudden creation of wealth in the United States has been too much for our people. We are personally dishonest. The people of the United States are notably and peculiarly dishonest in financial matters.
The effect of this on government is but one of the forms in which the ruling passion is manifest. “What is there in it for me?” is the state of mind in which our people have been existing. Out of this come the popular philosophy, the social life, the architecture, the letters, the temper of the age; all tinged with the passion.
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Let us look at the popular philosophy of the day. An almost ludicrous disbelief that any one can be really disinterested is met at once. Any one who takes an intelligent interest in public affairs becomes a “reformer.” He is liked, if it can be reasonably inferred that he is advancing his own interests. Otherwise he is incomprehensible. He is respected, because it is impossible not to respect him, but he is regarded as a mistaken fellow, a man who interferes with things that are not his business, a meddler.
The unspoken religion of all sensible men inculcates thrift as the first virtue. Business thunders at the young man, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me.” Nor is it a weak threat, for business, when it speaks, means business. The young doctor in the small town who advocates reform loses practice for two reasons: first, because it is imagined that he is not a serious man, not a good doctor, if he gives time to things outside his profession; second, because the carriage-maker does not agree with him and regards it as a moral duty to punish him. The newsdealer in the Arcade at Rector Street lost custom because it was discovered that he was a Bryan man. The bankers would not buy papers of him. Since the days of David, the great luxury of the powerful has been to be free from the annoyance of other persons’ opinions. The professional classes in any community are parasites on the moneyed classes; they attend the distribution. They cannot strike the hand that feeds them. In a country where economic laws tend to throw the money into the hands of a certain type of men, the morality of those men is bound to affect society very seriously.
The world-famous “timidity” of Americans in matters of opinion, is the outward and visible sign of a mental preoccupation. Tocqueville thought it was due to their democratic form of government. It is not due to democracy, but to commercial conditions. In Tocqueville’s day it arose out of the slavery question, solely because that question affected trade.
In describing the social life of Boston, Josiah Quincy says of George Ticknor’s hospitality: “There seemed to be a cosmopolitan spaciousness about his very vestibule. He received company with great ease, and a simple supper was always served to his evening visitors. Prescott, Everett, Webster, Hillard, and other noted Bostonians well mixed with the pick of such strangers as happened to be in the city, furnished a social entertainment of the first quality. Politics, at least American politics, were never mentioned.”
It was at such “entertainments” as this that the foreign publicists received their impressions as to the extinction of free speech in America. Politics could not be mentioned; but this was not due to our democratic form of government, but to the fact that Beacon Street was trading with South Carolina. “Politics” meant slavery, and Beacon Street could not afford to have values disturbed--not even at a dinner party.
We have seen that our more recent misgovernment has not been due to democracy, and we now see that the most striking weakness of our social life is not and never has been due to democracy.
Let us take an example: A party of men meet in a club, and the subject of free trade is launched. Each of these men has been occupied all day in an avocation where silence is golden. Shall he be the one to speak first? Who knows but what some phase of the discussion may touch his pocket? But the matter is deeper. Free speech is a habit. It cannot be expected from such men, because a particular subject is free from danger. Let the subject be dress reform, and the traders will be equally politic.
This pressure of self-interest which prevents a man from speaking his mind comes on top of that familiar moral terrorism of any majority, even a majority of two persons against one, which is one of the ultimate phenomena of human intercourse.
It is difficult to speak out a sentiment that your table companions disapprove of. Even Don Quixote was afraid to confess that it was he who had set the convicts at liberty, because he heard the barber and curate denounce the thing as an outrage. Now the weight of this normal social pressure in any particular case will depend on how closely the individuals composing the majority resemble each other. But men, lighted by the same passion, pursuing one object under the similar conditions, of necessity grow alike. By a process of natural selection, the self-seekers of Europe have for sixty years been poured into the hopper of our great mill. The Suabian and the Pole each drops his costume, his language, and his traditions as he goes in. They come out American business men; and in the second generation they resemble each other more closely in ideals, in aims, and in modes of thought than two brothers who had been bred to different trades in Europe.
The uniformity of occupation, the uniformity of law, the absence of institutions, like the church, the army, family pride, in fact, the uniformity of the present and the sudden evaporation of all the past, have ground the men to a standard.
America turns out only one kind of man. Listen to the conversation of any two men in a street car. They are talking about the price of something--building material, advertising, bonds, cigars.
We have, then, two distinct kinds of pressure, each at its maximum, both due to commerce: the pressure of fear that any unpopular sentiment a man utters will show in his bank account; the pressure of a unified majority who are alike in their opinions, have no private opinions, nor patience with the private opinions of others. Of these two pressures, the latter is by far the more important.
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It cannot be denied that the catchwords of democracy have been used to intensify this tyranny. If the individual must submit when outvoted in politics, he ought to submit when outvoted in ethics, in opinion, or in sentiment. Private opinion is a thing to be stamped out, like private law. A prejudice is aroused by the very fact that a man thinks for himself; he is dangerous; he is anarchistic.
But this misapplication of a dogma is not the cause but the cloak of oppression. It is like the theory of the divine right of Kings--a thing invoked by conservatism to keep itself in control, a shibboleth muttered by men whose cause will not bear argument.
We must never expect to find in a dogma the explanation of the system which it props up. That explanation must be sought for in history. The dogma records but does not explain a supremacy. Therefore, when we hear some one appeal to democratic principle for a justification in suppressing the individual, we have to reflect how firmly must this custom be established, upon what a strong basis of interest must it rest, that it has power so to pervert the ideas of democracy. A distrust of the individual running into something like hatred may be seen reflected in the press of the United States. The main point is that Americans have by business training been growing more alike every day, and have seized upon any and every authority to aid them in disciplining a recusant.
We have then a social life in which caution and formalism prevail, and can see why it is that the gathering at the club was a dull affair.
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We must now add one dreadful fact: Many of these men at the club are dishonest. The banker has come from a Directors’ meeting of a large corporation, where he has voted to buy ten thousand shares of railroad stock which he and his associates bought on foreclosure at seventeen three weeks before, but which now stands at thirty, because the quotations have been rigged. The attorney for the corporation is here talking to Professor Scuddamore about the new citizens’ movement, which the attorney has joined, for he is a great reformer, and lives in horror of the wickedness of the times. Beyond him sits an important man, whose corporation has just given a large sum to a political organization. Next to him is a Judge, who is a Republican, but fond of a chat with political opponents. With them is the editor of a reform paper, whose financial articles are of much importance to the town. A very eminent lawyer is in conversation with him. This lawyer has just received a large fee from the city for work which would not have brought him more than one-fifth of the amount if done for a private client. He is, by the way, a law partner of the latest tribune of the people, a man of stainless reputation. Here is also another type of honor, the middle-aged practitioner of good family, who has one of the best heads in town. He knows what all these other men are, and how they make their money; yet he dines at their houses, and gets business from them. On his left is a man much talked of ten years ago, a rare man to be seen here. He was ambitious, and became the hope of reform. But, unfortunately, he also had a talent for business. He became rich and cynical, and you see that he is looking about, as if in search of another disappointed man to talk to. There also is a great doctor, visiting physician of three hospitals, one of which is in receipt of city funds, and he knows the practice of packing the hospitals before inspection day in order to increase the appropriation. The man who endowed the hospital sits beyond. All these wires end in this club-room. Now start your topic--jest about free silver, make a merry sally on Mayor Jones. Start the question: “Why is not the last reform commissioner of the gas works not in jail?” and see what a jovial crew you are set down with.