SENATOR JAMES E. WATSON OF INDIANA
The question what is the matter with Congress has received more answers than any other question asked about American institutions. For almost a generation the national legislature has been regarded as the one great failure in self government. For years it has been the home of small men concerned with petty things which it approached in a petty spirit, incompetent, wasteful, and hypocritical, a trial to the Executive, almost a plague to the country. It has shared with state legislatures and municipal boards of aldermen the impatience of the people. In spite of searchings of the public conscience it has gone from bad to worse till it is at its lowest point today, in personnel, in organization, in capacity to transact business.
What has brought Congress to this state has been the unimportance of its work, "doing such little things," as Mr. Root said after his six years in the Senate. Natural economy prevents the sending of a man on a boy's errand even if the man would go.
The great power which legislatures have, that over the public purse, has not been of enough importance to make Congress a great legislature. Taxes were light and before the war fell so indirectly that the public gave them little attention. The control of the budget virtually passed out of the hands of Congress, for executive departments habitually exceeded their appropriations and Congress always made up the deficiencies. There was no tax upon incomes. Taxpayers were indifferent. A few hundred millions more or less was of no account.
Dispensations to business in the shape of protective duties upon imports, a form of taxation which once made Congress a dominant factor in national life, had become steadily less important as American industry grew strong enough to hold its own market against competition and to compete itself in other markets. With the subsidence of the tariff as an issue Congress lost its last power to impose taxes in which the country was deeply interested. Where the control of the public purse and taxes are unimportant, legislatures are weak, unless executive authority is vested in a Cabinet formed from among their members.
With the enfeeblement of Congress through the growing unimportance of the taxing power, its great function, came the tendency to magnify the Executive. Power has to go somewhere, and it went down Pennsylvania Avenue. And this movement coincided with the development of centralization. Congress, which was full of the spirit of localism, was not a perfect instrument of centralization. The Executive was.
To elevate the President it was necessary to depress Congress. It became the fashion to speak sneeringly of the Legislative branch, to sympathize with presidents who "had Congress on their hands," to write of "the shame of the Senate," and when any issue existed between the two parts of the government to throw the force of public opinion on the side of the executive. The press printed endless criticism of the Senate and the House. Theories of government were invented to reduce Congress to a subordinate place.
Meanwhile Congress, having regard for the character of its membership, was agreed that incompetence should suffer no disabilities. All that was required for political preferment within it was political longevity.
The seniority rule, by which committee chairmanships went not to ability but to long service, favored mediocrity and second childhood. Even more, incompetence banded together jealously to protect itself against competence and shunted it into minor assignments. While the public was regarding Congress with contempt Congress was well satisfied to make itself contemptible.
Suppose we had developed a capacity for breeding statesmen in this country, which we have not, would any man of first-class talents seek a public career in such an institution as I have described? In the first place, the people were visiting Congress with indifference, or worse than indifference, and ambition will not serve under indifference. In the next place that great power which makes legislatures dominant, the power to tax and to distribute the fruits of taxation, had become temporarily unimportant; and again, Congress itself was organized for self-protection against brains and character.
Senator Root quit the Senate in disgust. Senator Kenyon has just followed his example in even deeper disgust. A Tammany Congressman after one term said, "They tie horses to Congressmen in Washington."
Congress is upon the whole a faithful reflection of the American political consciousness. Democracy is a relatively new thing. It has not taken hold of the minds and hearts of men. Shadowy and half-unconscious faiths dispute its place. De Gourmont writing of the persistence of Paganism in Catholicism, says that no religion ever dies but lives on in its successor. So no government ever dies but lives on in its successor. Why take the trouble to govern yourselves when your vital interests are so well directed by the higher governments, of Progress, of economic Forces, of heroes and captains of industry who ruled by a sort of divine right? The less you try to muddle through by means of poor human instruments in this well-ordered world the better.
For the limited tasks of self-government, why should special talents be required? We are still near enough the pioneer age to adhere to pioneer conceptions. Roosevelt, unfortunately, is the national ideal.
We look hopefully for great amateurs like him among insurance agents, building contractors, lawyers, country editors, bankers, retiring, with modest fortunes made, into public life. We put the jack of all trades everywhere. Into the Presidency—and I don't know why we should not in that office, for it is a waste of material and a misdirection of effort in self-government to throw away a first-class public man on a four-year job. Into the Senate and the House, into the Cabinet, where a lawyer without previous experience of international affairs conducts our foreign relations in the most difficult period of the world's history, matching the power of his country against the wits of other countries' practiced representatives, and thus obtaining a certain forbearance of their extreme skill.
Into the diplomatic posts, where an editor, Colonel Harvey, noted only for his audacity, holds the most important ambassadorship. Those who have seen the Colonel at meetings of the Supreme Council tell the amazing story that he was a silent and uneasy figure in the conferences of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Briand, perhaps because he is only an observer, perhaps also because he was in the company of practiced statesmen and diplomats.
However, our system has its compensations. The picture of the robustious Colonel uneasy in Zion is one of them.
In another great diplomatic post is Mr. Richard Washburn Child, a quantity producer of fiction, or sort of literary Henry Ford. In another, Paris, the second most important in the world, Mr. Myron Herrick, a retired business man. Senator Foraker said of him, at a critical moment of his public career, "De mortuis nil." "Don't you wish to finish that quotation, 'nisi bonum,'" asked the reporter who was seeking a statement. "No," said the Senator sharply; "De mortuis nil." Of the ambassador to France nil, except that he comes from Ohio.
But when we, given all these causes for the weakness of Congress, the frail hold which the idea of self-government has upon the popular mind, the unimportance of the taxing power, the tendency to concentrate on the executive at the expense of the legislative, the obstacles to ability which mediocrity has erected in Congress, we have not explained the present extraordinary confusion and demoralization in the legislative branch. Most of these causes have been operating for some time, yet Congress has been able to function. Only since Mr. Harding became President has the breakdown of Congress been marked.
If you ask observers in Washington why the last Congress failed more completely than any of its predecessors, with one voice they reply: "Lack of leadership." Everybody cackles of leadership as if lack of leadership were a cause and not a symptom. What is it that makes a leader and followers unless it is a common purpose?
