Part 7

The democratic politician, facing such plain facts, tries to save his _amour propre_ in a characteristically human way; that is to say, he denies them. We all do that. We convert our degradations into renunciations, our self-seeking into public spirit, our swinishness into heroism. No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way, not even a Prohibition agent or a biter off of puppies’ tails. The democratic politician, confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his master, the mob, tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is really full of rectitude and wisdom. This is the origin of the doctrine that, whatever its transient errors, it always comes to right decisions in the long run. Perhaps--but on what evidence, by what reasoning, and for what motives! Go examine the long history of the anti-slavery agitation in America: it is a truly magnificent record of buncombe, false pretences, and imbecility. This notion that the mob is wise, I fear, is not to be taken seriously: it was invented by mob-masters to save their faces: there was a lot of chatter about it by Roosevelt, but none by Washington, and very little by Jefferson. Whenever democracy, by an accident, produces a genuine statesman, he is found to be proceeding on the assumption that it is not true. And on the assumption that it is difficult, if not impossible to go to the mob for support, and still retain the ordinary decencies. The best democratic statesmanship, like the best non-democratic statesmanship, tends to safeguard the honour of the higher officers of state by relieving them of that degrading necessity. As every schoolboy knows, such was the intent of the Fathers, as expressed in Article II, Sections 1 and 2, of the Constitution. To this day it is a common device, when this or that office becomes steeped in intolerable corruption, to take it out of the gift of the mob, and make it appointive. The aspirant, of course, still has to seek it, for under democracy it is very rare that office seeks the man, but seeking it of the President, or even of the Governor of a State, is felt to be appreciably less humiliating and debasing than seeking it of the mob. The President may be a Coolidge, and the Governor may be a Blease or a Ma Ferguson, but he (or she) is at least able to understand plain English, and need not be put into good humour by the arts of the circus clown or Baptist evangelist.

To sum up: the essential objection to feudalism (the perfect antithesis to democracy) was that it imposed degrading acts and attitudes upon the vassal; the essential objection to democracy is that, with few exceptions, it imposes degrading acts and attitudes upon the men responsible for the welfare and dignity of the state. The former was compelled to do homage to his suzerain, who was very apt to be a brute and an ignoramus. The latter are compelled to do homage to their constituents, who in overwhelming majority are certain to be both.

7.

_The Maker of Laws_

In the United States, the general democratic tendency to crowd competent and self-respecting men out of the public service is exaggerated by a curious constitutional rule, unknown in any other country. This is the rule, embodied in Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of the Constitution and carried over into most of the State constitutions, that a legislator must be an actual resident of the district he represents. Its obvious aim is to preserve for every electoral unit a direct and continuous voice in the government; its actual effect is to fill all the legislative bodies of the land with puerile local politicians, many of them so stupid that they are quite unable to grasp the problems with which government has to deal. In England it is perfectly possible for the remotest division to choose a Morley to represent it, and this, in fact, until the recent rise of the mob, was not infrequently done. But in the United States every congressional district must find its representative within its own borders, and only too often there is no competent man available. Even if one happens to live there--which in large areas of the South and many whole States of the newer West, is extremely improbable--he is usually so enmeshed in operations against the resident imbeciles and their leaders, and hence so unpopular, that his candidacy is out of the question. This is manifestly the case in such States as Tennessee and Mississippi. Neither is without civilized inhabitants, but in neither is it possible to find a civilized inhabitant who is not under the ban of the local Fundamentalist clergy, and _per corollary_, of the local politicians. Thus both States, save for occasional accidents, are represented in Congress by delegations of pliant and unconscionable jackasses, and their influence upon national legislation is extremely evil. It was the votes of such ignoble fellows, piling in from all the more backward States, that forced the Eighteenth Amendment through both Houses of Congress, and it was the votes of even more degraded noodles, assembled from the backwoods in the State Legislatures, that put the amendment into the Constitution.

If it were possible for a congressional district to choose any man to represent it, as is the case in all other civilized countries, there would be more breaks in the monotony of legislative venality and stupidity, for even the rustic mob, in the absence of strong local antipathies, well fanned by demagogues, might succumb occasionally to the magic of a great name. Thus a Roscoe Pound might be sent to Congress from North Dakota or Nevada, though it is obvious that he could not be sent from the Massachusetts district in which he lives, wherein his independence and intelligence are familiar and hence offensive to his neighbours. But this is forbidden by the constitutional rule, and so North Dakota and Nevada, with few if any first-rate men in them, must turn to such men as they have. The result everywhere is the election of a depressing gang of incompetents, mainly petty lawyers and small-town bankers. The second result is a House of Representatives that, in intelligence, information and integrity, is comparable to a gang of bootleggers--a House so deficient in competent leaders that it can scarcely carry on its business. The third result is the immense power of such corrupt and sinister agencies as the Anti-Saloon League: a Morley would disdain its mandates, but Congressman John J. Balderdash is only too eager to earn its support at home. A glance through the Congressional Directory, which prints autobiographies (often full of voluptuous self-praise) of all Congressmen, is enough to show what scrub stock is in the Lower House. The average Southern member, for example, runs true to a standard type. He got his early education in a hedge school, he proceeded to some preposterous Methodist or Baptist college, and then he served for a time as a schoolteacher in his native swamps, finally reaching the dignity of county superintendent of schools and meanwhile reading law. Admitted to the bar, and having got a taste of county politics as superintendent, he became district attorney, and perhaps, after a while, county judge. Then he began running for Congress, and after three or four vain attempts, finally won a seat. The unfitness of such a man for the responsibilities of a law-maker must be obvious. He is an ignoramus, and he is quite without the common decencies. Having to choose between sense and nonsense, he chooses nonsense almost instinctively. Until he got to Washington, and began to meet lobbyists, bootleggers and the correspondents of the newspapers, he had perhaps never met a single intelligent human being. As a Congressman, he remains below the salt. Officialdom disdains him; he is kept waiting in anterooms by all the fourth assistant secretaries. When he is invited to a party, it is a sign that police sergeants are also invited. He must be in his second or third term before the ushers at the White House so much as remember his face. His dream is to be chosen to go on a congressional junket, _i. e._, on a drunken holiday at government expense. His daily toil is getting jobs for relatives and retainers. Sometimes he puts a dummy on the pay-roll and collects the dummy’s salary himself. In brief, a knavish and preposterous nonentity, half way between a kleagle of the Ku Klux and a grand worthy bow-wow of the Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin who make the laws of the United States.

The gentlemen of the Upper House are measurably better, if only because they serve for longer terms. A Congressman, with his two-year term, is constantly running for re-election. Scarcely has he got to Washington before he must hurry home and resume his bootlicking of the local bosses. But a Senator, once sworn in, may safely forget them for two or three years, and so, if there is no insuperable impediment in his character, he may show a certain independence, and yet survive. Moreover, he is usually safer than a Congressman, even as his term ends, for his possession of a higher office shows that he is no inconsiderable boss himself. Thus there are Senators who attain to a laudable mastery of the public business, particularly such as lies within the range of their private interests, and even Senators who show the intellectual dignity and vigour of genuine statesmen. But they are surely not numerous. The average Senator, like the average Congressman, is simply a party hack, without ideas and without anything rationally describable as self-respect. His backbone has a sweet resiliency; he knows how to clap on false whiskers; it is quite impossible to forecast his action, even on a matter of the highest principle, without knowing what rewards are offered by the rival sides. Two of the most pretentious Senators, during the Sixty-Ninth Congress, were the gentlemen from Pennsylvania: one of them, indeed, was the successor to the lamented Henry Cabot Lodge as the intellectual snob of the Upper House. Yet both, under pressure, performed such dizzy flops that even the Senate gasped. It was amusing, but there was also a touch of pathos in it. Here were men who plainly preferred their jobs to their dignity. Here, in brief, were men whose private rectitude had yielded to political necessity--the eternal tragedy of democracy. I turn to the testimony of a Senator who stands out clearly from the rest: the able and uncompromisingly independent Reed of Missouri. This is what he said of his colleagues, to their faces, on June 2, 1924:

[The pending measure] will be voted for by cowards who would rather hang on to their present offices than serve their country or defend its Constitution. It would not receive a vote in this body were there not many individuals looking over their shoulders toward the ballot-boxes of November, their poltroon souls aquiver with apprehension lest they may pay the price of courageous duty by the loss of the votes of some _bloc_, clique, or coterie backing this infamous proposal. My language may seem brutal. If so, it is because it lays on the blistering truth.

Senator Reed, in this startling characterization of his fellow Senators, plainly violated the rules of the Senate, which forbid one member to question the motives of another. But there was no Senator present that day who cared to invoke those rules. They all knew that Reed told the truth. Their answer to him was to slink into the cloak-rooms, and leave him to roar at the Vice-President and the clerks. He not only described the Senate accurately; he also described the whole process of law-making under democracy. Our laws are invented, in the main, by frauds and fanatics, and put upon the statute books by poltroons and scoundrels.

8.

_The Rewards of Virtue_

I have spoken of the difficulties confronting an intelligent and honourable man who aspires to public office under this system. If he succeeds, it is only by a suspension of natural laws, and his success is seldom more than transient: his first term is commonly his last. And if, favoured by luck again, he goes on, it is only in the face of opposition of an almost incredible bitterness. The case of the Senator I have just mentioned is aptly in point. He is a man of obvious ability and integrity, but in his last campaign in Missouri he was opposed by a combination of all the parties and all their factions, with the waspish ghost of the late Dr. Wilson hanging over the battlefield. It was only his own amazing talents as a popular orator, aided by the post-war _Katzenjammer_ and a local delight in vigorous, rough-and-ready-fighters, that overcame the tremendous odds against him. In most other American States he would have been defeated easily; in many of them his defeat would have been overwhelming. Only in the newer States and in the border States have such men any chance at all. Where party fidelity has run strong for years they are barred from public life completely. No Senator of any genuine dignity and ability could come out of the Georgia of to-day, and none could come out of the Vermont. Such States must be content with party hacks, and the country as a whole must submit to their depressing imbecilities and ignoble contortions. All of them are men who have trimmed and fawned. All of them are forbidden a frank and competent discussion of most of the principal issues facing the nation.

But there is something yet worse, and that is the assumption of his cowardice and venality that lies upon even the most honourable man, brought into public office by a miracle. The mob is quite unable to grasp the concept of honour, and that incapacity is naturally shared by the vast majority of politicians. Thus the acts of a public man of genuine rectitude are almost always ascribed, under democracy, to sordid and degrading motives, _i. e._, to the sort of motives that would animate his more orthodox colleagues if they were capable of his acts. I believe that the fact is more potent in keeping decent men out of public life in the United States than even the practical difficulties that I have rehearsed, and that it is mainly responsible for the astounding timorousness of our politics. Its effects were brilliantly displayed during the final stages of the battle over the Eighteenth Amendment. The Prohibitionist leaders, being mainly men of wide experience in playing upon the prejudices and emotions of the mob, developed a technique of terrorization that was almost irresistible. The moment a politician ventured to speak against them he was accused of the grossest baseness. It was whispered that he was a secret drunkard and eager to safeguard his tipple; it was covertly hinted that he was in the pay of the Whiskey Ring, the Beer Trust, or some other such bugaboo. The event showed that the shoe was actually on the other foot--that many of the principal supporters of Prohibition were on the pay-roll of the Anti-Saloon League, and that judges, attorneys-general and other high officers of justice afterward joined them there. But the accusations served their purpose. The plain people, unable to imagine a man entering public life with any other motive than that which would have moved them themselves if they had been in his boots--that is to say, unable to imagine any other motive save a yearning for private advantage--reacted to the charges as if they had been proved, and so more than one man of relatively high decency, as decency goes in American life, was driven out of office. Upon those who escaped the lesson was not lost. It was five or six years before any considerable faction of politicians mustered up courage enough to defy the Prohibitionists, and even then what animated them was not any positive access of resolution but simply the fact that the Anti-Saloon League was obviously far gone in corruption, with some of its chief agents in revolt against its methods, and others in prison for grave crimes and misdemeanours.

I am, myself, not cursed with the itch for public office, but I have been engaged for years in the discussion of public questions, and so I may be forgiven, I hope, for intruding my own experience here. That experience may be described briefly: there has never been a time when, attacking this or that current theory, I have not been accused of being in the pay of its interested opponents, and I believe that there has never been a time when this accusation was not generally believed. Years ago, when the Prohibitionists were first coming to power, they charged me with taking money from the brewers and distillers, and to-day they charge me with some sort of corrupt arrangement with the bootleggers, despite the plain fact that the latter are not their opponents at all, but their allies. The former accusation seemed so plausible to most Americans that even the brewers finally gave it credit: they actually offered to put me on their pay-roll, and were vastly surprised when I declined. It was simply impossible for them, as low-caste Americans, to imagine a man attempting to discharge a public duty disinterestedly; they believed that I had to be paid, as their rapidly dwindling _bloc_ of Congressmen had to be paid. So in all other directions. When, fifteen or twenty years ago, I began exposing the quackeries of osteopaths, chiropractors and other such frauds, they resorted instantly to the device of accusing me of taking a retainer from the mythical Medical Trust, _i. e._, from such men as the Mayo brothers, Dr. George Crile, and the faculty of the Johns Hopkins. Later on, venturing to denounce the nefarious political activity of the Methodist Church, and of its ally, the Ku Klux Klan, I was accused by spokesmen for the former of receiving bribes from the Vatican. The comstocks went even further. When I protested against their sinister and dishonest censorship of literature, they charged me publicly with being engaged in the circulation of pornography, and actually made a vain and ill-starred attempt to railroad me to jail on that charge.

The point is that such accusations are generally believed, especially when they are leveled at a candidate for office. The average American knows what he would do in like case, and he believes quite naturally that every other man is willing and eager to do the same. At the start of my bout with the comstocks, just mentioned, many American newspapers assumed as a matter of course that I was guilty as charged, and some of them, having said so, were forced into elaborate explanations afterward to purge themselves of libel. Of the rest, most concluded that the whole combat was a sham battle, provoked on my own motion to give me what they regarded as profitable publicity. When I speak of newspapers, of course, I speak of concrete men, their editors. These editors, under democracy, constitute an extremely powerful class. Their very lack of sound knowledge and genuine intelligence gives them a special fitness for influencing the mob, and it is augmented by their happy obtuseness to notions of honour. Their daily toil consists in part of praising men and ideas that are obviously fraudulent, and in part of denouncing men and ideas that are respected by their betters. The typical American editor, save in a few of the larger towns, may be described succinctly as one who has written a million words in favour of Coolidge and half a million against Darwin. He is, like the politician, an adept trimmer and flatterer. His job is far more to him than his self-respect. It must be plain that the influence of such men upon public affairs is generally evil--that their weight is almost always thrown against the public man of dignity and courage--that such a public man cannot hope to be understood by them, or to get any useful support from them. Even when they are friendly they are apt to be so for preposterous and embarrassing reasons. Thus they give their aid to the sublime democratic process of eliminating all sense and decency from public life. Coming out of the mob, they voice the ideas of the mob. The first of those ideas is that a fraud is somehow charming and reassuring--in the common phrase, that he is a regular fellow. The second is that an honest and candid man is dangerous--or, perhaps more accurately, that there is no such animal.

The newspaper editor who rises above this level encounters the same incredulous hostility from his fellows and his public that is encountered by the superior politician, cast into public life by accident. If he is not dismissed at once as what is now called a Bolshevik, _i. e._, one harbouring an occult and unintelligible yearning to put down the Republic and pull God off His throne, he is assumed to be engaged in some nefarious scheme of personal aggrandizement. I point, as examples, to the cases of Fremont Older, of San Francisco, and Julian Harris, of Columbus, Ga., two honest, able and courageous men, and both opposed by the vast majority of their colleagues. The democratic process, indeed, is furiously inimical to all honourable motives. It favours the man who is without them, and it puts heavy burdens upon the man who has them. Going further, it is even opposed to mere competence. The public servant who masters his job gains nothing thereby. His natural impatience with the incapacity and slacking of his fellows makes them his implacable enemies, and he is viewed with suspicion by the great mass of democrats. But here I enter upon a subject already discussed at length by a competent French critic, the late Emile Faguet, of the French Academy, who gave a whole book to it, translated into English as “The Cult of Incompetence.” Under democracy, says Faguet, the business of law-making becomes a series of panics--government by orgy and orgasm. And the public service becomes a mere refuge for prehensile morons--get yours, and run.

9.

_Footnote on Lame Ducks_

Faguet makes no mention of one of the curious and unpleasant by-products of democracy, of great potency for evil in both England and the United States: perhaps, for some unknown reason, it is less a nuisance in France. I allude to the sinister activity of professional politicians who, in the eternal struggle for office and its rewards, have suffered crushing defeats, and are full of rage and bitterness. All politics, under democracy, resolves itself into a series of dynastic questions: the objective is always the job, not the principle. The defeated candidate commonly takes his failure very badly, for it leaves him stripped bare. In most cases his fellow professionals take pity on him and put him into some more or less gaudy appointive office, to preserve his livelihood and save his face: the Federal commissions that harass the land are full of such lame ducks, and they are not unknown on the Federal bench. But now and then there appears one whose wounds are too painful to be assuaged by such devices, or for whom no suitable office can be found. This majestic victim not infrequently seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation as a whole, and becomes a chronic maker of trouble. The names of Burr, Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, Blaine, Greeley, Frémont, Roosevelt and Bryan will occur to every attentive student of American history. There have been many similar warlocks on lower levels; they are familiar in the politics of every American county.