The Confessions Of A Reformer
Frederic C. Howe
[Part 5 of 11]
CHAPTER 15 / MARK HANNA
...Mark Hanna had a feudal idea of society. "Some mean
must rule; the great mass of men must be ruled. Some men must own;
the great mass of men must work for those who own." The men
to do the ruling were the men who owned. The men to do the serving
were those who worked. ...[p.147]
...Senator Hanna along with Foraker, of Cincinnati, ...ruled the
State.[p.148]
With the nomination of Mr. Bryan in 1896, Mark Hanna became a
national figure. His management of the McKinley campaign put the
politics of America on a money basis and shocked ever so slightly
the conscience of the nation. He made McKinley President and had
himself appointed to the United States Senate, ...[pp.148-149]
Mark Hanna wanted power. Money was the symbol of power in his
world. It had no other symbol. Money controlled banks; it controlled
public opinion; it controlled the State. So he sought money.
Unerring instinct told him, as it told John D. Rockefeller and Tom
Johnson, that the easy way to make huge sums of money was not
through mills and factories, which were subject to competition, but
through the seizure and protection by law of natural resources,
railways, and public-utility corporations. Law-made wealth, he saw,
was easy and sure.[pp.150-151]
The ethics of these men was clan ethics. They cared for the
opinions of their particular herd. They craved the approval of
members of the Union Club of the Chamber of Commerce, and the board
of directors of the bank. If the quickest way to do business was by
bribery, then, since business demands results, that was the "natural,"
the businesslike, way to proceed. That street-corner orators
denounced them as corrupt meant nothing to them unless that plain
and ugly word got to their families, where it had to be explained.
With the press under their control, district attorneys members of
their clubs, and judges men of their selection, they had little fear
of criminal proceedings. Difficult to initiate and easily
suppressed, such proceedings were frowned down by public opinion,
which counted them harmful to business and to the good name of the
community.[p.154]
The code of business in relation to labor ran something like this.
By the superior intelligence of the employer a certain amount
of wealth is produced, of which capital gets less if labor gets
more. Without the employer labor would starve. Organized labor is
the enemy of capital. Strike-leaders must be gotten out of the way,
by bribery or otherwise.[p.154]
Free immigration provides a labor surplus. Immigrants can be
worked twelve hours a day; by mixing nationalities they can be
hindered from organizing; when they are maimed or worn out, others
take their places. They need not be supported during hard times;
when injured they can be sent to public hospitals for repair.
Handled intelligently, ignorant men are cheaper than machines. And
out of a labor surplus come strike-breakers.[pp.154-155]
CHAPTER 16 / MAKING LAWS AT COLUMBUS
The struggle for A City on the Hill failed because the
city was not free. It had only the shadow of self-government. It
could not own or operate things, or control private property; it
could not levy taxes as it willed. It could only borrow a limited
amount of money and for limited uses; it could not control its own
employees. The city was little more than a big policeman. Its people
were bound like Gulliver by endless thongs written into the
constitution and laws of the State. They were helpless before the
bosses and business interests that controlled the government. Laws
which crippled democracy were written by corporation lawyers.
Privileged business defeated demands for home rule; it would not
permit the city to own anything or to do anything that interfered
with private property. The city could perform only perfunctory
things and perform them only as the laws defined. It could give away
things easily enough but could not own anything that was valuable,
could not control property in the interest of all the people.[p.157]
With three other men from Cleveland I was elected to the State
Senate on the reform wave. The Democratic platform was clear-cut. It
gave home rule to cities, gave them power to own and operate
public-utility corporations, and do practically anything else that
the people desired. It taxed railroads and public-utility
corporations the same as other property. It committed us to a simple
direct primary law, to the initiative and referendum, and the
recall.[p.160]
I believed fervently in this platform. We would have great cities
-- the city was always my passion -- in America if the people were
given power. They had shown in Cleveland their willingness to follow
a leader. But we had been thwarted by bad laws, an inflexible
constitution, by out-of-date charters. We had failed because we were
manacled by laws. Our first task was to get freed from the
legislature. And I fully expected that we should succeed. We had a
progressive governor, a progressive majority in the Senate, and the
best Lower House that had been elected for years. We had the support
of the Scripps-McRae papers. Apparently ours was a complete mandate
from the people. There was no reason why our legislation should not
go through in every detail. I confided my expectations to Ed Doty,
who had long been the clerk of the House of Representatives. He
laughed cynically. "You'll be lucky," he said, "if
you get one bill through."[p.161]
All of our measures were immediately introduced and referred to
committees. Public hearings were called. I prepared what seemed to
me conclusive briefs on railroad taxation and the initiative and
referendum, expecting that early action would be taken on them. But
the bills were not reported. They could not be gotten out of
committees. We could not get a quorum. ...[pp.162-163]
I came away from the legislature with scant respect for the laws
of the land. I had seen how they were made. Some were frankly bought
and paid for. Many were passed the last day. Only occasionally were
bills in the public interest forced through by the pressure of
public opinion. And these were so crippled with amendments that they
were of little value. A great part of the laws was so much
rubbish.[p.166]
CHAPTER 17 / I THROW AWAY BALLAST
I decided to take stock of my political philosophy. ...My early
beliefs in the business man had been shattered by experience in the
city council. The Constitution was the Ark of the Covenant in my
eyes. Must that too be questioned?[p.168]
I sat down with reluctance to examine my conception of the
political state. It meant going back to the men whom I revered most,
whose authority on the Constitution and on politics was infallible.
It meant sitting in judgment on James Bryce and Woodrow Wilson and
on their disciple -- myself. When I left Johns Hopkins I accepted
without question the oft-quoted statement of Mr. Gladstone's, that
the American Constitution was "the most wonderful work ever
struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."
It was sacrosanct, near to being divinely inspired; it would remain
unchanged for all time. To question its perfection or the
disinterested motives of the men who framed it was sacrilege. And
its chief distinction was that it distributed powers into three
categories: the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary --
this and the detachment of officials from popular clamor. These
provisions were said to insure calm and dispassionate consideration.
Passion was checked, judgment suspended, and intelligent action
insured. Under this distribution there was discussion in the
committees and then on the floor of the two houses. Before a measure
passed beyond control it had to win the approval of the government.
Then it had to be tested out in the courts. The co-operation of many
minds was expected to bring forth the best possible results. This
was "government by discussion," as described in the
text-books. It was government by representatives of the people. It
was assumed that men in public office wanted only to ascertain the
public good and to act upon it; they were detached from private
interests and sought by contemplative study to ascertain only the
truth on public questions.[p.169]
I cherished this belief in popular government, in the value of
discussion, in the marvelous prevision of the makers of the
Constitution. But I had been for three years a member of a
legislative body in which no one listened to discussions. ...[p.169]
Business men and bosses showed no respect for the Constitution
that I had been taught to revere. It had no sanctity in their eyes.
The laws they wanted could be driven through it with a coach and
four. It was only referred to when some labor measure was to be
defeated. Liberal laws for the protection of women and children in
industry were always discovered to be unconstitutional, while
fifty-year grants to street-railways were upheld. Attempts to
regulate tenements or to require safety devices in mines were held
to violate sacred property rights, while monopoly powers assumed by
private corporations were sustained as in line with progress. The
courts constituted themselves judges of what was constitutional and
what was not. Their decisions were in the interest of one class and
against another. ...The State and the city could give things away
without restraint, but when they attempted to own something that
made money, or to do something for the welfare of the people, the
hand of the court was raised against them.[p.170]
Obviously the Constitution was not what I had believed it to be.
It was an instrument that worked easily and well for one class and
interest only. Government was something outside it.[p.170]
Continuing my inquiry into the Constitution, I went back to a
study of the debates that preceded its adoption. I read the opinions
of Alexander Hamilton and his associates and the proposals they
made. They did not conceal their desire for an aristocratic form of
government. They distrusted democracy and they did everything
possible to make the government as undemocratic as possible. They
made it complicated and difficult to understand; they introduced
divided responsibility, checks and balances -- confusion all along
the line. That was their purpose. At the university I had thought of
Hamilton as a great statesman -- as the man who had saved the early
government from bankruptcy, dissolution, and anarchy. I remembered
now that he was a corporation lawyer. His ideas about property and
the state were much the same as those of Mark Hanna. Alexander
Hamilton feared democracy. He wanted to give the people an
appearance of power, no more. To this end officials were made as
irresponsible as possible. They were elected for different periods.
An electoral college selected the President and Vice President,
while State legislatures elected members of the United States
Senate. The system was so complex that people could not follow it.
They could not register their will. Some one had to give all his
time to Politics just to make the machinery work. Hamilton urged
these complications. He sought to create an even more aristocratic
system. ...[p.174]
At the university we had studied the writings of Aristotle and
Plato, of Grotius, of Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, of Alexander
Hamilton and Jefferson. We knew the theories of the state from
Greece to Washington, yet the actual political state under which we
lived and in the shadow of which we had studied ... was referred to
only by muck-rakers, whom we held in contempt, and in the yellow
newspapers, which were not permitted in the university
library.[p.175]
CHAPTER 18 / RECASTING MY BELIEFS
My text-book government had to be discarded; my worship of the
Constitution scrapped. The state that I had believed in with
religious fervor was gone. Like the anthropomorphic God of my
childhood it had never existed. But crashing beliefs cleared the
air. I saw that democracy had not failed; it had never been tried.
We had created confusion and had called it democracy. ...[p.176]
I set down for myself principles that would constitute democracy.
I applied biological processes to it. From some source or other I
had come to believe that Nature was very wise, and that her rules,
by which billions upon billions of creatures were able to live, must
be a reasonably good guide for the organized state. I took the
pnvate corporation as a guide. Business had succeeded in America and
it worked with very simple machinery. It was not bothered by a
constitution; it was not balked by checks and balances; it was not
compelled to wait for years to achieve what it wanted. Its acts were
not supervised by a distant supreme court. The freedom of a private
corporation was close to license; what its officials wanted done was
done. ...[p.176]
...We had freed the individual but imprisoned the community. We
had given power to the corporation but not to the state. The
text-books talked of political sovereignty, but what we really had
was business sovereignty. And because the business corporation had
power while the political corporation had not, the business
corporation had become the state.[p.177]
Nor had we followed what nature had to teach. We violated the
instincts of man. Politics offered no returns to the man of talent,
who wanted to see the fruit of his efforts. If business had been
organized like the state, it would have been palsied. Business would
have gone bankrupt under the confusion, the complexity, the endless
delays which were demanded by the political state.[p.177]
Taking the private corporation as a model, I evolved three basic
principles; they were: Government should be easily understood and
easily worked; it should respond immediately to the decision of the
majority; the people should always rule.[p.177]
Elaborated into a Programme of constitutional change, these
principles involved:
(1) The easy nomination of all candidates by petition. There
should be no conventions. Direct primaries are the fountainhead of
democracy.
(2) Candidates should print their platforms in a few lines on the
election ballots. Voters would then know what a man stood for.
(3) The short ballot.
(4) The recall of all elective officials, including judges.[p.177]
(5) The initiative and referendum on the Constitution, on laws,
and on city ordinances.
(6) Complete home rule for cities. The city should be a state by
itself, with power to do anything of a local nature that the people
wanted done. A free city would be like the cities of ancient Greece,
like the mediaeval Italian republics, like the cities of Germany
to-day. It would inspire patriotism. Able men would be attracted to
the task of administering it.
(7) The State Assembly should consist of but one body of not more
than fifty members. It should be in continuous session for a
four-year term, the governor sitting with it and responsible to it
for the exercise of wide powers.
(8) The courts should have merely civil and criminal jurisdiction.
They should have no power to interfere with legislation. Congress
and the State legislatures should be the sole judges of the
constitutionality of their acts. The British Parliament and the
legislative bodies of other countries are supreme. America alone has
created a third assembly-chamber that has an absolute veto of the
popular will.
Such a government would be simple and easily understood. There
would be no confusion, no delays. In such a state the people would
be free. And they would be sovereign. Under the existing system they
were neither sovereign nor free. We had stripped the state of
sovereignty; the first thing to do was to restore it. Under such a
system we could have a boss if we wanted one. Certainly we should
have leaders. But we could hold the leader to responsibility. Things
would be done in the open. We should not be living the lie of the
existing system, which was not democracy but economic
oligarchy.[p.178]
...Public opinion in Cleveland could be aroused over the
appointment of an unknown person to the park board. The people were
jealous of their parks; they took pride in the public library and
the schools, in the grouping of public buildings. But they took no
pride in the city council or any of its works. They showed no
concern over the election of a corrupt man to the city council or
even to the mayoralty.
Why this anomaly?
It seemed that the only men who cared about politics were those
who got something out of it. Some of them were at the top -- they
got privileges; others were at the bottom -- they got jobs. There
was no enthusiasm for the State or the city on the part of the great
majority of voters.[p.179]
I had studied municipal administration in England and Germany and
had found there a new type of men in city politics and a burning
interest in the city on the part of voters. Men of distinction, of
irreproachable honesty served as mayors and councilmen. The cities
owned and operated street-railways, gas, water, and
electric-lighting services; they owned markets and other business
agencies. The big municipal industries were owned by the city and
operated on a high scale of efficiency. The city was the most
important corporation in the community.[pp.179-180]
Here, possibly, was the clew that explained everything -- concern
and indifference, honesty and corruption, political dignity and
debasement. In England and Germany voters were alert, because the
city was a big thing, every one had to give attention to it. Because
it was a big enterprise, men of ability wanted to run it, as they
want to run banks, factories, business undertakings. They were able
to do so because there were no more big profits to be gotten out of
grants and franchises. Their purse was no longer at war with their
patriotism. Tom Johnson was always saying that a street-railway
franchise would corrupt the Twelve Apostles if they were councilmen.
England had formerly invited corruption, as had we, by giving away
colossal prizes in the form of franchises to men through the control
of politics. Acting like an expert in hygiene, she went to the
source of the disease: she took the profit herself. The same men who
had previously profited by the gifts of the city were now anxious to
serve it. They liked to do big things; they hungered for public
places without other emolument than the distinction of important
work well done.[pp.180-181]
Our business men were no whit different from Englishmen. The
trouble was not with the American people, as Mr. Bryce had said, it
was with American institutions. We had made the state so unimportant
that the people were indifferent. They left it to bosses and to
business because it did not serve them. Our failures were not
traceable to too much democracy, but to too little. We had built our
political system on distrust. ...Business men have bent the
political state, cumbersome, unwieldy, unresponsive to its professed
uses, to their private gain. But let the state be restored to
sovereignty, let it become an important thing, and they would enter
its service.[p.181]
My philosophy was recast. Beginning with the sanctity of a
document conceived in the past, it ended with a belief in democracy
yet to be born.[p.181]
