II
In theory the weight of the majority is with the fit. This is the pleasantest of ideas, but it is not true. It is not true at least in so great a number of contests as to justify any virtuous complacency in the electorate. It is probably no more untrue now than in other years, though the cumulative effect of a long experience of government by the unfit is having its effect upon the nation in discouraging faith in that important and controlling function of government that has to do with the choice and election of candidates. Only rarely—and I speak carefully—do the best men possible for a given office ever reach it. The best men are never even considered for thousands of State, county, and municipal elective offices; they do not offer themselves, either because office-holding is distasteful, or because private business is more lucrative, or because they are aware of no demand for their services on the part of their fellow citizens. By fitness I mean the competence produced by experience and training, fortified with moral character and a sense of responsibility. I should say that a fit man for public office is one who in his private affairs has established a reputation for efficiency and trustworthiness.
In assuming that a democracy like ours presupposes in the electorate a desire, no matter how feeble, to intrust public affairs to men of fitness, to first-rate men, it would seem that with the approach of every presidential campaign numbers of possible candidates would receive consideration as eligible to our highest office. It will be said that just as many candidates were available in 1916 as at any other period in our history, but this is neither conclusive nor heartening: there should be more! It cannot be pretended that public service does not attract thousands of men; it can, however, be complained that the offices fall very largely to the inferior.
We have just witnessed the spectacle of a great republic, which confides the broadest powers to its chief executive, strangely limited in its choice of candidates for the presidency to a handful of men. No new commanding figure had sprung forward from the ranks of either party in the most trying period the country has known in fifty years. If Mr. Wilson’s renomination had not been inevitable, it would be very difficult to name another Democrat who, by virtue of demonstrated strength and public confidence, would have been able to enter the lists against him. Our only Democratic Presidents since the Civil War stepped from a governor’s seat to the higher office; but I know of no Democratic governor who, in 1916, could have entered the national convention supported by any appreciable public demand for his nomination. And no Democratic senator could have debated Mr. Wilson’s claims to further recognition. Speaker Clark, with the prestige of his maximum five hundred and fifty-six votes on the tenth ballot of the Baltimore Convention, might have been able to reappear at St. Louis with a similar showing; but the Democratic range of possibilities certainly had not widened. To be sure, Mr. Bryan would have remained to reckon with; but, deeply as the party and the country is indebted to him for his courageous stand against the bosses at Baltimore, he could hardly have received a fourth nomination.
The Republicans were in no better case when their convention met at Chicago. The Old Guard was stubbornly resolved, not only that Mr. Roosevelt should not be nominated, but that he should not dictate the choice of a Republican candidate. A short distance from the scene of their deliberations, the Progressives, having failed to establish themselves as a permanent contestant of the older parties, tenaciously clung to their leader. Mr. Roosevelt’s effort to interest the Republicans in Senator Lodge as a compromise candidate fell upon deaf ears. Mr. Hughes’s high qualifications may not be seriously questioned. He is a first-rate man, and the lack of enthusiasm with which his nomination was received by the perfectly ordered and controlled body of delegates is not to his discredit. Sore beset, the Old Guard put forth a candidate little to their taste, one who, if elected, would, we must assume, prove quite impatient of the harness fashioned for Presidents by the skilled armorers of the good old days of backward-looking Republicanism.
In taking from the bench a gentleman who was “out of politics” the Republicans emphasized their lamentable lack of available candidates. Nothing was ever sadder than the roll-call of States for the nomination of “favorite sons.” Estimable though these men are, no one could have listened to the nominating speeches and witnessed the subsequent mechanical demonstrations without depression. None of these nominees had the slightest chance; the orators who piped their little lays in praise of them knew they had not; the vast audience that witnessed the proceedings, perfectly aware of the farcical nature of these banalities, knew they had not, and viewed the show with contemptuous amusement.
The heartiness of the reception accorded Messrs. Depew and Cannon, who were called upon to entertain the audience during a lull in the proceedings, was not without its pathos. They dwelt upon the party’s past glories with becoming poignancy. Mr. Borah, tactfully projected as a representative of a newer order of Republicanism, was far less effective. The convention was greatly stirred by no new voice; no new leader flashed upon the stage to quicken it to new and high endeavor. No less inspired or inspiring body of men ever gathered than those who constituted the Republican Convention of 1916.
I asked a successful lawyer the other day how he accounted for the lack of presidential timber. “It’s because the average American would rather be president of the Pennsylvania Railroad than of the United States,” he answered. And it is true, beyond question, that our highest genius is employed in commerce and business rather than in politics. If we, the people, do not seek means of promoting administrative wisdom and efficiency in our government we shall pay one of these days a high price for our indifference. There is danger ahead unless we are disposed to take our politics more seriously, and unless more young men of the best talent and the highest aims can be lured into public life. The present showing is certainly not encouraging as to the future of American statesmanship; and to say that the fit have always been few, is not a particularly consoling answer.
It is true of a period still susceptible of intimate scrutiny—say, from the Civil War—that presidential candidates have been chosen in every case from a small group of potentialities in both parties. We have established (stupidly in any large view of the matter) geographical limitations upon the possible choice that greatly narrow the field. Candidates for the presidency must be chosen with an eye to the local effect, from States essential to success. Though Mr. Blaine’s candidacy was surrounded by unusual circumstances, it emphasizes, nevertheless, the importance to the parties of nominating men from the “pivotal” States. We have had no New England President since Franklin Pierce. This is not because the New England States have not produced men of fitness, but is attributable solely to the small representation of the Northeastern States in the Electoral College.
The South, likewise, has long been eliminated from the reckoning. Though born in Virginia Mr. Wilson is distinctly not “a Southern man” in the familiar connotations of that term. In old times the Southern States contributed men of the first rank to both houses of Congress; but, apart from Mr. Underwood (who received one hundred and seventeen and one-half votes at Baltimore) and Mr. John Sharp Williams, there are no Southerners of conspicuous attainments in the present Senate. The Southern bar embraces now, perhaps as truly as at any earlier period, lawyers of distinguished ability, but they apparently do not find public life attractive.
No President has yet been elected from beyond the Mississippi, though Mr. Bryan, thrice a candidate, widened the area of choice westward. In the present year Governor Johnson and Senator Borah were the only trans-Mississippi men mentioned as possibilities, and they cut no figure in the contest. We are still a congeries of States, or groups of States, rather than a nation, with a resulting political provincialism that is disheartening when we consider the economic and political power we wield increasingly in world affairs.
It is a serious commentary upon the talent of recent congresses that the House has developed no men so commanding as to awaken speculation as to their availability for the presidency. No member of the House figured this year in Republican presidential speculations. Why do the second-rate predominate in a body that may be called the most typical of our institutions? Lincoln, Hayes, Garfield, Blaine, McKinley, Bryan, all candidates for the presidency, had been members of the House, but it has become negligible as a training-school for Presidents. A year ago Mr. Mann received an occasional honorable mention, but his petulant fling at the President as “playing politics,” in the grave hour following the despatch of the final note to Germany, effectually silenced his admirers. Admirable as partisanship may be, there are times when even an opposition floor-leader should be able to rise above it! Nor is it possible for Democrats to point to Mr. Kitchin with any degree of pride. Of both these men it may be said that never have leaders failed so lamentably to rise to their opportunities. Mr. Hay, of Virginia, Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, not only yielded reluctantly to the public pressure for preparedness, but established his unfitness to hold any office by tacking on the army bill a “joker” designed to create a place for a personal friend. Mr. Wilson, like Mr. Cleveland, has found his congresses unruly or wabbly or egregiously stupid, manifesting astonishingly little regard for their party principles or policies. The present majority has been distinguished for nothing so much as impotence and parochialism.
Without respect to party, the average representative’s vision is no wider than his district, and he ponders national affairs solely from a selfish standpoint. Through long years we have used him as an errand-boy, a pension agent, a beggar at the national till. His time is spent in demonstrating to his constituency that when “pork” is being served he is on hand with Oliver Twist’s plate. The people of one district, proud of their new post-office, or rejoicing in the appearance of a government contractor’s dredge in their creek, do not consider that their devoted congressman, to insure his own success, has been obliged to assist other members in a like pursuit of spoils and that the whole nation bears the burden.
The member who carries a map of his district with him to Washington, and never broadens his horizon, is a relic of simpler times. In days like these we can ill afford to smile with our old tolerance at the “plain man of the people,” who is likely to be the cheapest kind of demagogue. A frock coat and a kind heart are not in themselves qualifications for a congressman. Eccentricity, proudly vaunted, whimsicalities of speech, lofty scorn of conventions, have all been sadly overworked. Talent of the first order is needed in Congress; it is no place for men who can’t see and think straight.
The Senate preserves at least something of its old competence, and the country respects, I think, the hard work recently performed by it. While its average is low, it contains men—some of them little in the public eye—who are specialists in certain fields. There is, I believe, a general feeling that, with our tremendous industrial and commercial interests, the presence in the upper house of a considerable number of business men and of fewer lawyers would make for a better balanced and more representative body. A first-rate senator need not be an orator. The other day, when Senator Taggart, a new member, protested vigorously against the latest river-and-harbor swindle the country applauded. Refreshing, indeed, to hear a new voice in those sacred precincts raised against waste and plunder! Senator Oliver, of Pennsylvania, a protectionist, of course, is probably as well informed on the tariff as any man in America. I give him the benefit of this advertisement the more cheerfully as I do not agree with his views; but his information is entitled to all respect. The late David Turpie, of Indiana, by nature a recluse, and one of the most unassuming men who ever sat in the Senate, was little known to the country at large. I once heard Mr. Roosevelt and Judge Gray of Delaware engage in a most interesting exchange of anecdotes illustrative of Mr. Turpie’s wide range of information. He was a first-rate man. There is room in the Senate for a great variety of talent, and its efficiency is not injured by the frequent injection of new blood. What the country is impatient of in the upper house is dead men who have little information and no opinions of value on any subject. The election of senators directly by the people will have in November its first trial—another step toward pure democracy. We shall soon be able to judge whether the electorate, acting independently, is more to be trusted than the legislatures.
I should be sorry to apply any words of President Wilson in a quarter where he did not intend them, but a paragraph of his address to the Washington correspondents (May 15) might well be taken to heart by a number of gentlemen occupying seats in the legislative branch of the government.
“I have a profound intellectual contempt for men who cannot see the signs of the times. I have to deal with some men who know no more of the modern processes of politics than if they were living in the eighteenth century, and for them I have a profound and comprehensive intellectual contempt. They are blind; they are hopelessly blind; and the worst of it is I have to spend hours of my time talking to them when I know before I start, quite as though I had finished, that it is absolutely useless to talk to them. I am talking in vacuo.”
There are, indisputably, limitations upon the patience of a first-rate man engaged in the trying occupation of attempting to communicate a first-rate idea to a second-rate mind.