Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

by Clinton W. Gilbert

We did not think of it thus, as an exhibition of political inertia, as a reversion to an outworn type. On the contrary, we were immensely pleased with our innovation. As usual the United States had made an immense contribution to the art of government. We were repeating the race history of governments, as a child resumes in his life the race history of the human kind. We had got so far as to evolve that oldest of human institutions—autocracy, a mild, denatured autocracy. But we were as proud of it as a boy is when he put on paper with a pencil the very picture which his stone age ancestor cut laboriously into a walrus tooth.

Our President had more power than the King of England, we boasted, more than the Emperor of Germany. The monarchies of Europe were obsolete because they preserved autocracy out of the darkness of the Middle Ages. Our government was in the forefront of progress because it had created autocracy out of the suffrage of the people.

And how clever we were with the restrictions of our written constitution with its exact balance of powers, executive, legislative, and judicial. The Fathers had builded wiser than they knew in writing an instrument by which the carefully distributed authority might be well reconcentrated; as if they were the first to use words whose import depended on the point of view of those who interpreted them!

Acres of space in the newspapers were covered with gratulatory articles proving that the dominating executive was the inevitable unifying principle in our disjointed and not otherwise workable government.

Ours was a government by parties, so the argument ran, and the President was the head of his party. As a matter of fact the writers of the Constitution had not conceived of a government by parties. What they had in mind was what they had before them in the Constitutional Convention of which they were a part, a government by the best and ablest men of the community, who should meet together and select the executive; who should equally through the state legislature choose the Senators. The role of job brokers was the last thing they imagined themselves to be creating. Parties came later. Ours was not originally a government of parties. It is hardly a government by parties today. So there was nothing inevitable about this great reason why the Executive should be the element in our system which would hold it together and make it work.

Nor until the beginning of this century did it ever occur to us that the President was the head of his party. The control of the organization had been in other hands, in Hanna's or Quay's or Cameron's, or divided among a group of men like these three, who represented the interests of business in the parties, and often also in the Senate.

The idea that the executive was the party's head was merely a happy afterthought which was adopted to justify the resort to the line of least resistance in creating a stronger government at Washington, the concentration upon one man to represent the national will. We had simply done what other peoples had so often done in the history of mankind. When the English wished to weaken the rule of the great barons they magnified the office of the King. When we wished to get away from the rule of the barons of business we magnified the office of our elective King, the President. We invented new reasons for an old expedient.

And by making the amplified executive the head of his party, which we did—for the Quays and Hannas speedily disappeared under the new order and left no successors—we set him to sawing off the limb on which he sat. If his authority rested on that of his party then to be firm the authority of the party must be firm. For parties to endure and be strong there must be a certain quality of permanence about them. They must not rest upon personalities but on principles and jobs, principles for the disinterested and for those whose interests are expressed in the principles, and jobs for those whose interests are less large and indirect.

Of parties with the executive as their head nothing remained but their name. The only nexus there could be between the executive and the mass of voters was personal. One year a party was Roosevelt, the next year it was Taft and the distance between Roosevelt and Taft was the distance between East and West. A little later it even changed its name and voted in another column because Roosevelt had adopted a new party name and gone unto a new column. Four years later it split up and much of it went to Wilson, who temporarily rallied a personal following just as Roosevelt had done.

And because the dispensing of jobs was an unseemly occupation for the executive we reduced by law the patronage that was available for the sustenance of parties. Thus we substituted personal caprice for the permanency of parties and at the same time cut down the practical means of holding organizations together. At the same time the decay of government by business left parties no longer an instrument of the economic will of the nation.