The American State
Classes do not march in a straight line to their goals. Sometimes the executive arm of government is completely responsive to the views of the most reactionary section of capitalism, as when Hoover, Harding, Coolidge were President. Sometimes the President is not fully “manageable,” as in the case of President Roosevelt. But he then finds himself pretty well invested by “trustworthy” men; he must accept a John Garner for Vice-President; he must put men like Jesse Jones in his Cabinet. In the same way, Congress may be an easy tool of reactionary interests one term, curbed by public pressure the next. Note the speed with which the last few Congresses have enacted drastic anti-labor legislation and tax bills pouring billions into the coffers of Big Business. If an active public conscience restricts the freedom of executive departments and legislative departments otherwise favorable to Big Business, there are always the courts. When the democrats, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, held the presidency, Martin Van Buren noted that the party of rich-man’s-rule fled to “the judicial department of the government, as to an ark of future safety which the Constitution placed beyond the reach of public opinion.” So today the courts readily grant anti-picketing injunctions to employers despite laws expressly designed to halt such use of the injunction. Below the Federal level, government is even more easily dominated by big capital. The local police are always at hand for strike duty. Governors and mayors dance to Big Business tunes.
Beyond all these departments of government are other tools at the service of the ruling class to help it maintain political dominance, regiment public opinion, terrorize and repress dissenters, employ and reward servants and agents of all kinds, to the end of constantly increasing its profits, intensifying its exploitation of the population and extending its enormous powers. Schools, churches, theaters are manipulated by boards directly selected by leading capitalists. The Morgans and Rockefellers personally oversee, as trustees, the largest universities, public libraries and museums. Radio, moving pictures, and the press—frankly described by their private owners as “opinion-forming industries”—are even more elaborately controlled devices for class rule.
Of all these, the press is the most powerful single force in our time. The United States maintains a public-opinion-forming apparatus unparalleled in history and unequalled in any other land for the sheer weight of “information” hurled at a defenseless public. There is no chance for the public to make up its own mind.