Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabas. Now Barabas was a robber. (John: Chap. xviii, 40.)

On March 4th, 1829, the old Federal régime died with the departure of John Quincy Adams from the White House. The year 1828 is generally taken as the last full year of the old honorable and high-toned political system inaugurated by Washington; the last year at the Federal capitol of real statesmanship, of high ideals and of strict and uncompromising devotion to duty. Manhood suffrage had by this time become established and in operation in almost every state in the Union, and it had succeeded in electing as president of the United States a spoilsman, Andrew Jackson, the apostle of extreme democracy, by whom the former rule of appointments to public office for merit only, and the old doctrine of the continuance of faithful officials in their places were flung to the winds.

The change in the electorate effected by manhood suffrage was not merely superficial, it was radical; what then appeared to many a mere liberalizing of the franchise was in reality a breaking down of the guard wall which had hitherto kept the country from slipping down into the slough. It degraded the practice of American politics from an honorable exercise of patriotism to a sordid business employment; it created a class of professional politicians, self-seeking traffickers in office and the spoils of office; and transferred to them the political control which had theretofore rested in the hands of the gentlemen of the country. This unexpected result of manhood suffrage was due to the fact not sufficiently realized at the time, that it brought into American politics the important element of the controllable vote, to which was speedily applied by the politicians methods of organization, crude and makeshift at first, and afterwards thorough and scientific. The American people did not then foresee the existence of a proletariat city vote, nor the immense possibilities in the organization of floaters. The local politicians of the day, however, saw their chance and seized it; from amateurs they developed into professionals, and they speedily made these floaters the nucleus of a small well-disciplined regular army, by means whereof they seized the machinery of elections and of government, which they have ever since retained.

Let us here stop for a moment to consider and realize what the country lost at one stroke by manhood suffrage in its swift descent from the high character and traditions of that Federal government, the presidency of which, much against his will, John Quincy Adams transferred on March 4th, 1829, to Andrew Jackson. The administrations of Washington and the older Adams had been of rigid integrity; Jefferson, Madison and Monroe had followed in their footsteps. At the time therefore of the election of the second Adams in 1824, the nation had already acquired an established tradition of about as pure an administration of government as was humanly possible. The most valuable political asset of a people consists of its high political standards and traditions; established slowly and imperceptibly and by forces of subtle operation they are elements of the highest importance to its well being. They afford the explanation of many instances of the superior success of one country over another in operating the same political machinery. Already in the United States of 1824 there existed traditions and standards of this high character; among them a belief that men should enter politics if not solely from patriotic motives, then at least from a worthy ambition for honor and power, and in order to further ideas of public policy. This was undoubtedly the doctrine extant at that time; and men could not then as now live and flourish in political life under the scarce denied imputation of being in politics in order to gather political spoils, or for the mere sake of salary or from other sordid motives.

The high national traditions were well maintained and strengthened by John Quincy Adams during his four years’ term from 1825 to 1829. He represented the opposite of the manhood suffrage ideal, he was unflinchingly opposed to government by numbers; to the spoils system, to machine political methods and objects; he was a statesman rather than a politician, and an honest gentleman first of all. His lineage was of the best, his public experience great; his learning deep; his reputation unsullied; he was austere, just and high-minded; his public record was pure and honorable. He was the only president except Washington who obtained the office entirely on his merits, without having done anything to court political support. While president he made appointments to office solely on fitness, applying that test even to his political and personal opponents, keeping them in office provided they were qualified for its duties, and absolutely refusing to use in the slightest degree his executive power so as to procure his renomination. In 1868 a congressional committee reported that having consulted all accessible means of information, they had not learned of a single removal of a subordinate officer except for cause from the beginning of Washington’s administration to the close of that of John Quincy Adams. Under such management and prior to 1829 the average of office holders was generally fair; most of them were men who had led approved lives, had inherited or acquired a good standing in society, and had achieved a certain prominence by a combination of social and political qualities, and through the operation of a kind of civic evolution which had brought them forward in their respective localities. The effect of the property qualification laws, and of the traditionary respect for ability, property and social standing of which those laws were at once a cause and a symptom, was to tend to push such men to the front, and to make it a matter of course that they should be selected as members of Congress, judges, representatives in the legislature, and for similar high offices. They were not required to resort to trickery and intrigue to keep their places. It was by men of that type that the Revolution had been led to success. It was a fatal mistake of a later generation to suppose that a like class of men could be selected by a general vote, and that the good results of what had practically been a system of natural evolution and selection would be attained by an appeal to the suffrages of the unlettered and the unwise.

No doubt there were instances of corruption in American public life long before manhood suffrage was established; bank scandals for instance. Banks are now chartered under a general act. A century ago, however, they were created by special acts of the legislature, and the granting of their charters was sometimes attended with charges of legislative corruption. As early as 1805 at the passage of the New York Merchants Bank charter, in 1812 at the granting of the charter of the New York Bank of America, and again in 1824 when the New York Chemical Bank was organized, such charges were made. Such disclosures were plain warnings of the dangers of laxity in public affairs.

Population and wealth were increasing and so was governmental expenditure. Even as early as 1820 there began to appear in the larger cities a class of idle, vicious, ignorant and therefore purchasable men. The possible means of political corruption and the temptations thereto were therefore all in plain sight; and wisdom would have suggested, especially in view of the continued flood of immigration, that the greatest care be taken to make the source of government in the electorate as pure and efficient as possible. The electorate is the foundation of a free republic, whose political destiny clearly depends on laying well that foundation. Instead of leaving the choice of its materials to hazard and caprice it should have been the subject of conferences of the very wisest among the American statesmen of those days; the silly twaddle of the extremists of the French Revolution about a natural right to vote should have been publicly and systematically discredited; the doctrine that suffrage is not a right but a function should have been formally stated and promulgated with all the authority and prestige of our ablest and most prominent men. The people of the older states should have been warned and warned again by assiduous propaganda against the danger of permitting ignorance and incapacity to lodge at the very bottom of the structure of our government. The people of the newer states should also have been instructed that however permissible as a temporary measure designed to attract settlers to their vacant lands, the practice of universal suffrage is dangerous and should be abolished as soon as society was settled down upon a permanent foundation. Nothing of the kind was done; on the contrary, it was at this critical time, just when in view of the changing conditions active means should have been taken to preserve the purity of politics, that the very opposite course was taken, and the scheme of suffrage extension was put into effect by a heedless majority led by politicians who overruled the wise and disinterested counsels of such able, experienced and far-seeing men as the venerable John Adams of Massachusetts and Chancellor Kent of New York.

The really important result of manhood suffrage and one which was entirely unforeseen and unexpected by most people of the time was the introduction into American politics of the purchasable or controllable element as a permanent feature of the electorate, and the tremendous power thereby acquired by the politicians; and the great defect in the manhood suffrage doctrine lay in its completely ignoring the sinister possibilities of suffrage extension in this direction. The floater or controllable vote speedily became and still is the main reliance of the political oligarchy. Prior to 1828 the activities of politicians had been mostly local. In every village and small town where offices are filled by election there is a field for the political activity of small men of a well known and inferior type, lazy, vociferous and more or less unscrupulous. Under the system of property qualification their activities were much restrained; most of the rabble whom they were able to influence had no votes. With the subsequent growth of the country in wealth and population, the creation of cities of say over thirty thousand inhabitants, and the increasing devotion of industrious citizens to their own affairs, the field for the labors of these political gentry perceptibly widened; but it was manhood suffrage and the election of Jackson which gave them their final triumph and placed them in power all over the land. The secret of this power lies in the organization of this floater vote into small local political societies which combined form at least the nucleus of a species of political army ready to do the bidding of its officers. It consists principally of that considerable body of men who have no political principles and no appreciable pecuniary interest in the community. As they pay no taxes they are quite willing that the government outlay be increased provided that they get a share of the plunder. They include the worthless classes, the very ignorant, the needy and shiftless, drunkards, petty criminals, fools, and loafers. Men with small political ambitions, men who are business failures, men too lazy to work, are attracted to these organizations by hopes of political office or other sinecure employment. In this way, a fairly sufficient nucleus of controllables is obtained. To these may be joined a class of thriftless partisans or followers of the bosses; frequenters of saloons and small local political clubrooms; such men as seek political advantage by cheap means or have a taste for low politics. Bribes are distributed, sometimes in the shape of small loans, sometimes as small jobs or employments for themselves, their relatives, or friends. Their careless habits and want of principle and of fixed belief in anything, their small cynicism and their ignorance of public affairs, make such men easily manageable by certain politicians who are not above dealings of that character. The vote of every man jack of them is as effective as that of a bishop or publicist, and any score of them are much more easily managed and reliable than twenty bishops and publicists would be. The local organization thus formed lives off a traffic in votes and offices; it buys votes, works them up into elective offices and resells them with its trade mark to the highest bidder.

It was the chiefs of such an organized rabble who seizing the electoral machinery rejected Adams in 1828, crying “Away with him, give us Barabas!” and made Jackson, the illiterate spoilsman, President of the United States. Adams’ defeat ended the epoch of high-minded, disinterested statesmanship in the White House. “His retirement” (says Morse) “brought to a close a list of Presidents who deserved to be called statesmen in the highest sense of that term, honorable men, pure patriots, and with perhaps one exception all of the first order of ability in public affairs.” (Life of Adams, p. 214.) But manhood suffrage did more by that stroke than oust Adams; it destroyed the pure political system which he represented, the noble traditions of forty years, and deprived the nation of all future hope of seeing as long as manhood suffrage endures a Washington, a Hamilton or an Adams in high office in this country. “It was” (says Merriam) “by far the most important change made during the Jackson epoch, for it radically altered the foundation of the Republic.” (American Political Theories, p. 193.)

Some of the mischief attendant upon the institution of manhood suffrage must have been apparent to the discerning eye wherever and as soon as it was adopted, but not its full extent. Time was required to get rid of competent and honorable leaders, traditions and standards, to replace them by new ones, and to invent catch words and war cries. But as time went on this downward movement became accelerated. Facilis descensus Averno. At first, little by little, afterwards more rapidly, the ambitions and creeds of the early Republic were everywhere replaced by the sordid cravings and sham sentimentalities of the rabble. In a surprisingly short time we got down into the political mire, where we now miserably splash about making a stench with every effort to escape.