Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

“a decline in the quality of the members in general respect, in education, in social position, in morality, in public spirit, in care and deliberation, and, I think, I must add in integrity also.” He finds them subservient to the Boss rather than to public opinion and adds, “To account for this or to say how it is to be mended, is, I admit, very difficult. Few subjects have done more to baffle reformers and investigators. It is the great puzzle of the heartiest friends of Democracy.”

Among people generally there is a failure to agree upon any specific cause for the sad inferiority of our political condition. Some attribute it to human frailty; some to American carelessness or good nature; some to the spirit of the age, some to the inherent weakness of democracy. In a very able and scholarly little book published as late as 1918 by Max Farrand of Yale University entitled The Development of the United States, the writer, after referring to persistent and ineffectual attempts of reformers for the past generation to cleanse politics in this country, makes this significant statement (p. 293): “It is surprising that the people still retain faith in any remedies, but hope springs eternal and every new plan was able to rally ardent supporters. To the thoughtful observer, however, it was evident that the root of the trouble had not been found and that something more radical or something entirely different was necessary.” I find no hint in Farrand’s book as to what this “something” might be. One may suspect that the worthy professor had tracked the bear to his den but did not care to start him; that he preferred to avoid making his book the subject of controversy by giving his opinion as to what is in fact “the root of the trouble.”

However, he states the problem in a nutshell. All efforts to reform and cleanse our politics have failed, something new and different is needed, some remedy that will reach the very source of the political corruption of our time and country. But after all, there need be very little difficulty in finding the “root of the trouble”; it lies exposed, plain enough for all men to see and to stumble over as they pass to and fro. Many no doubt have identified it who prefer to be silent on the subject, though a few prominent men have spoken out. President Woolsey of Yale, for example, frankly says that “universal suffrage does not secure the government of the wisest nor even secures the liberties of a country placed in such a democratic situation, much less secures its order and stability.” (Pol. Science. Vol. I, Sec. 101). In Reemelin’s American Politics (1881) the author says in his chapter on the ballot box that “thickly strewn around us lie the evidences, that governing by the ballot box, based on universal suffrage and universal qualification for office is a failure; but why this is so, and what remedy we should apply is not so intelligible.” (P. 168.) In 1871 the Westminster Review, a British radical magazine, published an article on The American Republic, its Strength and Weakness in which the dangers of manhood suffrage were plainly pointed out, and its institution attributed to the efforts of demagogues, and to a mistaken conception of suffrage as a right instead of as a privilege to be conferred upon those capable of exercising it. The writer sums up the topic by saying that:

“The elevation of the government, laws and institutions of a republic must necessarily depend upon the average intelligence and virtue of its voting population. Hence it is a most dangerous experiment for America to reduce the qualifications of its voters to the level of the lowest, instead of raising the latter to a certain definite standard at which the right of suffrage might with comparative safety be placed in their hands.”

Another writer thus expresses himself:

“It is perfectly idle to attempt to give political power to persons who have no political capacity, who are not intellectual enough to form opinions or who are not high minded enough to act on those opinions.... Lastly the events of the earlier part of the last century show us—demonstrate we may say, to us,—the necessity of retaining a very great share of power in the hands of the wealthier and more instructed classes, of the real rulers of public opinion.” (Bagehot, Parliamentary Reform, p. 316.)

And Lecky predicts that the day will come when the adoption of the theory that the best way to improve the world and secure national progress is to place the government under the control of the least enlightened classes will be regarded as one of the strangest facts in the history of human folly.

Indeed, but little political discernment is required to enable one to realize the fatal mischiefs attendant upon the plan of according a place in the electorate to females generally and to the ignorant, idle, unthrifty, purchasable, vicious and anti-social males. It is not difficult to see that such a scheme is erroneous in principle, antagonistic to civilization, and to society as the agent of civilization. History informs us that manhood suffrage is contrary to our best traditions; that it has been mischievous and unclean in practise; that it has filled the body politic with the foulest corruption; that it is largely responsible for the Civil War and other serious blunders and mischiefs; that it has cost thousands of millions to the American people in money stolen and squandered. Reason plainly teaches us that the suffrage is not a natural right, but a function in the social system belonging only to those who by the process of natural selection are qualified as men of education and property to take a part in government; that unlimited universal or manhood suffrage is dangerous for the future and if not overthrown may ultimately cause our national destruction. There is not therefore after all any real difficulty in determining that universal suffrage is the political disease under which America is suffering. Its specific cause is the virus of the rabble vote; men without character and destitute of achievement should be excluded from the suffrage; they are by nature political nonentities, and were they content to mark zero on their ballots thus indicating the real extent of their political value and sagacity they would be harmless; but they are too often the willing tools of scamps and demagogues, and though individually zeros they attach themselves to real figures to give them a fictitious and in this case a maleficent influence. Nor is the remedy far to seek, though so many political writers have been rather shy in hinting it. It is possible by very simple means, by a mere return to the original American principle and American practice of a property qualification for voters to so reform our entire governmental system from the foundation upwards that it will become efficient and enduring and capable of defying all the political madness of the times. The democratic theory would thus be retained, but it would be purified and strengthened by a return to the principles of the fathers of the republic. We have failed because we have attempted in defiance of those principles to create a democracy founded on numbers and on nothing but numbers. The resulting product has not been a true democracy; it has not properly represented and does not properly represent the American nation, which consists not merely of population but of American intelligence and industry. The manhood suffrage democracy of numbers merely is too narrow; it does not afford a broad enough foundation for the national superstructure; and that foundation should he widened to include the American character and American achievement.

The real difficulty in the case lies then not in ascertaining the source of American political ills, nor in prescribing the remedy; the difficulty lies in obtaining leadership or even advocacy of a movement which to most men appears to promise little in the way of personal advancement and much in the way of hostile criticism. As to the masses in private life, most are indifferent and the remainder voiceless. All the organs of public opinion are muzzled, controlled or terrified into silence by the politicians; and but few in public life whether newspaper men, clergymen, judges, politicians, teachers or public servants or officials; but few of those merely dependent upon or connected with politics or government, whether bankers, lawyers, physicians in hospitals, officers of public utilities or the like, have heretofore dared more than whisper to their closest friends their real hatred of the political despotism under which we are living today in the United States. Now, however, the present menace of the political madness known as Bolshevism affords a new and compelling motive to every true American to arouse himself, and there is a hope that in the presence of a new peril, good citizens may be moved to realize the inherent weakness and danger of our present political system, and to undertake the establishment of a suffrage based upon such qualifications as will insure the creation and continuance of a government in this country so strong, determined, intelligent and devoted to the interests of civilization that under it our whole political life may be purified and made efficient; one which may be relied upon not merely to crush Bolshevism in the United States but to extirpate it from this country forever.

The proposal to establish a property qualification for voters throughout the United States may seem novel and even startling to many Americans, but there is no other way out of the political mess in which we find ourselves. As will be shown in detail in subsequent pages the corrupt rule of the low professional politicians of this country is made secure by the vote of the thriftless and controllable class; until that vote is expurgated there can be no purification of the body politic; without purification there can be no efficiency; and unless the administration of our public affairs is purified and made efficient we cannot either answer the charges of the enemies of our institutions or repel their attacks. We cannot depend upon the electorate as at present made up; it has already shown its capacity to breed and encourage bad government; the thriftless classes are all ready to accept Bolshevism or any other economical and political absurdity; they are no more able to understand the scheme of civilization and the value and importance of accumulations of earnings and creation of property in furtherance of that scheme than they are able to understand a musical symphony or a problem in the higher mathematics. And after all there is nothing sacred about the doctrine of unlimited suffrage; it is only a political experiment like another; and the well known record of its complete and dismal failure is summarized in these pages where it is shown that it has not been an instrument of progress nor a means of freedom, but that its tendency has been and is towards reaction and despotism; that it is anti-social and hostile to civilization. The proposal to make property accumulations the basis of government, though it is sanctioned by ancient practise, is not reactionary; it is progressive, as every return to old and sound principles is progressive. Nor will it create or tend to create a narrow or exclusive electorate; it will on the contrary have a broadening effect and will tend to furnish a truly popular government, one resting directly on the consent and the votes of most of the population, and utilizing qualities of virtue and manhood now denied their proper effect in politics. It will represent directly or indirectly every element of value in the nation; everything on which a democratic government depends for its best support; namely, the industry, thrift, wealth, intelligence, character and honest independence of its people. The change will appear in the overthrow of the rule of brute force and the curbing of the present despotism of numbers. Do what we will, the passions and prejudices of the unthinking and uninstructed will always affect political action; but if our democracy is to survive their power must be checked and modified by associating with the sway of numbers the powers of intelligence, of character, and of industry which working together constitute efficiency.