FOOTNOTES:
[6] The Century, January, 1885.
[7] A few years later a member of the Italian Legation “scored” heavily on one of our least pleasant national peculiarities. An Italian had just been lynched in Colorado, and an Italian paper in New York bitterly denounced the Italian Minister for his supposed apathy in the matter. The member of the Legation in question answered that the accusations were most unjust, for the Minister had worked zealously until he found that the deceased “had taken out his naturalization papers, and was entitled to all the privileges of American citizenship.”
[8] At present, twelve years later, I should say that there was rather less personal corruption in the Legislature; but also less independence and greater subservience to the machine, which is even less responsive to honest and enlightened public opinion.
VI
MACHINE POLITICS IN NEW YORK CITY[9]
In New York city, as in most of our other great municipalities, the direction of political affairs has been for many years mainly in the hands of a class of men who make politics their regular business and means of livelihood. These men are able to keep their grip only by means of the singularly perfect way in which they have succeeded in organizing their respective parties and factions; and it is in consequence of the clock-work regularity and efficiency with which these several organizations play their parts, alike for good and for evil, that they have been nicknamed by outsiders “machines,” while the men who take part in and control, or, as they would themselves say, “run” them, now form a well-recognized and fairly well-defined class in the community, and are familiarly known as machine politicians. It may be of interest to sketch in outline some of the characteristics of these men and of their machines, the methods by which and the objects for which they work, and the reasons for their success in the political field.
The terms machine and machine politician are now undoubtedly used ordinarily in a reproachful sense; but it does not at all follow that this sense is always the right one. On the contrary, the machine is often a very powerful instrument for good; and a machine politician really desirous of doing honest work on behalf of the community, is fifty times as useful an ally as is the average philanthropic outsider. Indeed, it is of course true, that any political organization (and absolutely no good work can be done in politics without an organization) is a machine; and any man who perfects and uses this organization is himself, to a certain extent, a machine politician. In the rough, however, the feeling against machine politics and politicians is tolerably well justified by the facts, although this statement really reflects most severely upon the educated and honest people who largely hold themselves aloof from public life, and show a curious incapacity for fulfilling their public duties.
The organizations that are commonly and distinctively known as machines are those belonging to the two great recognized parties, or to their factional subdivisions; and the reason why the word machine has come to be used, to a certain extent, as a term of opprobrium is to be found in the fact that these organizations are now run by the leaders very largely as business concerns to benefit themselves and their followers, with little regard to the community at large. This is natural enough. The men having control and doing all the work have gradually come to have the same feeling about politics that other men have about the business of a merchant or manufacturer; it was too much to expect that if left entirely to themselves they would continue disinterestedly to work for the benefit of others. Many a machine politician who is to-day a most unwholesome influence in our politics is in private life quite as respectable as anyone else; only he has forgotten that his business affects the state at large, and, regarding it as merely his own private concern, he has carried into it the same selfish spirit that actuates in business matters the majority of the average mercantile community. A merchant or manufacturer works his business, as a rule, purely for his own benefit, without any regard whatever for the community at large. The merchant uses all his influence for a low tariff, and the manufacturer is even more strenuously in favor of protection, not at all from any theory of abstract right, but because of self-interest. Each views such a political question as the tariff, not from the standpoint of how it will affect the nation as a whole, but merely from that of how it will affect him personally. If a community were in favor of protection, but nevertheless permitted all the governmental machinery to fall into the hands of importing merchants, it would be small cause for wonder if the latter shaped the laws to suit themselves, and the chief blame, after all, would rest with the supine and lethargic majority which failed to have enough energy to take charge of their own affairs. Our machine politicians, in actual life act in just this same way; their actions are very often dictated by selfish motives, with but little regard for the people at large though, like the merchants, they often hold a very high standard of honor on certain points; they therefore need continually to be watched and opposed by those who wish to see good government. But, after all, it is hardly to be wondered at that they abuse power which is allowed to fall into their hands owing to the ignorance or timid indifference of those who by rights should themselves keep it.
In a society properly constituted for true democratic government—in a society such as that seen in many of our country towns, for example—machine rule is impossible. But in New York, as well as in most of our other great cities, the conditions favor the growth of ring or boss rule. The chief causes thus operating against good government are the moral and mental attitudes towards politics assumed by different sections of the voters. A large number of these are simply densely ignorant, and, of course, such are apt to fall under the influence of cunning leaders, and even if they do right, it is by hazard merely. The criminal class in a great city is always of some size, while what may be called the potentially criminal class is still larger. Then there is a great class of laboring men, mostly of foreign birth or parentage, who at present both expect too much from legislation and yet at the same time realize too little how powerfully though indirectly they are affected by a bad or corrupt government. In many wards the overwhelming majority of the voters do not realize that heavy taxes fall ultimately upon them, and actually view with perfect complacency burdens laid by their representatives upon the tax-payers, and, if anything, approve of a hostile attitude towards the latter—having a vague feeling of animosity towards them as possessing more than their proper proportion of the world’s good things, and sharing with most other human beings the capacity to bear with philosophic equanimity ills merely affecting one’s neighbors. When powerfully roused on some financial, but still more on some sentimental question, this same laboring class will throw its enormous and usually decisive weight into the scale which it believes inclines to the right; but its members are often curiously and cynically indifferent to charges of corruption against favorite heroes or demagogues, so long as these charges do not imply betrayal of their own real or fancied interests. Thus an alderman or assemblyman representing certain wards may make as much money as he pleases out of corporations without seriously jeopardizing his standing with his constituents; but if he once, whether from honest or dishonest motives, stands by a corporation when the interests of the latter are supposed to conflict with those of “the people,” it is all up with him. These voters are, moreover, very emotional; they value in a public man what we are accustomed to consider virtues only to be taken into account when estimating private character. Thus, if a man is open-handed and warm-hearted, they consider it as a fair offset to his being a little bit shaky when it comes to applying the eighth commandment to affairs of state. I have more than once heard the statement, “He is very liberal to the poor,” advanced as a perfectly satisfactory answer to the charge that a certain public man was corrupt. Moreover, working men, whose lives are passed in one unceasing round of narrow and monotonous toil, are not unnaturally inclined to pay heed to the demagogues and professional labor advocates who promise if elected to try to pass laws to better their condition; they are hardly prepared to understand or approve the American doctrine of government, which is that the state cannot ordinarily attempt to better the condition of a man or a set of men, but can merely see that no wrong is done him or them by anyone else, and that all alike have a fair chance in the struggle for life—a struggle wherein, it may as well at once be freely though sadly acknowledged, very many are bound to fail, no matter how ideally perfect any given system of government may be.
Of course it must be remembered that all these general statements are subject to an immense number of individual exceptions; there are tens of thousands of men who work with their hands for their daily bread and yet put into actual practice that sublime virtue of disinterested adherence to the right, even when it seems likely merely to benefit others, and those others better off than they themselves are; for they vote for honesty and cleanliness, in spite of great temptation to do the opposite, and in spite of their not seeing how any immediate benefit will result to themselves.