Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

by Clinton W. Gilbert

The Civil War left us with one complex. The European War left us with another. The agricultural bloc touches both, suggesting division and upon European lines. Being agricultural it is vaguely sectional; being the projection of a single interest into national politics so as to cut across parties, it follows European precedents. It moreover derives its name from abroad.

Call it log-rolling by the farmers, however, and it relates to the habitual method of American legislation. It conforms to our best traditions. We never spoke of the groups which filled pork barrels of the past as blocs, but every river and harbor bill was the work of minorities uniting to raid the treasury. The two recent amendments to the Constitution, granting the suffrage to women and prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, were also achieved minorities.

The organized minorities of the past dissolved when their end was obtained. They had a specific rather than a general purpose. Usually it was a moral purpose, the prohibition of alcoholic drinks, or political justice for woman. Never until recently did a minority raise the economic interests of one section of society against those of the rest of society and promise to keep on raising them. The farm bloc is the first permanent economic minority to organize itself effectively for political action.

The phenomenon is not that the bloc impairs our political system; it does not; majority rule is always tempered by minority rule or it becomes either a tyranny or a dead thing. It is that it threatens our pocketbooks. It obtains low railroad rates on farm products. It shifts taxes from farmers to the rest of us. It secures for farmers special aid in the form of government credits.

Nevertheless its appearance is the most hopeful sign in Washington that we may emerge from the governmental bog into which we have sunk. We had centralized to the point of creating an immense and dull bureaucracy headed by a weak Executive and equally weak Congress. Interest in self-government was being destroyed by the mere remoteness and irresponsiveness of the mechanism. "The parties are exactly alike. What difference does it make which is in power?"

We had created an organization too vast for any one to take it in hand. And the only remedy in that case is to break the organization down. Decentralization into States was impossible, for men never go back to outworn forms, and State boundaries had ceased to be the real lines of division in American society. A way out of this difficulty has been found through the seizing of power by occupational organizations, of which the farm bloc is the most famous and most successful.

We could not go on as we are, with an enfeebled Executive and an enfeebled Congress. And, if I have analyzed the situation correctly, we shall have no more strong Executives, until some national emergency unites the people temporarily for the accomplishment of some single purpose. The Executive is the greatest common divisor of a diverse society. Congress, equally, is weak so long as it remains a Congress based upon the present theory of party government, for the party has to be stretched out too thin, has to represent too many different views to have character and purpose. Steadily parties are being driven more and more to pure negation. Wilson was elected the first time on the negative issue, "No more Roosevelt and his radicalism," and the second time on the negative issue, "He kept us out of war," and Harding upon the negative issue, "No more Wilson."

If the two existing parties cannot be positive and constructive, "Why not scrap them both?" asks Mr. Samuel G. Blythe. Why not, indeed? except for the fact that you can find no principle upon which to found a third party. If there were a positive principle upon which a majority of the voters would agree the existing parties would grab for it. They are colorless and negative not by choice but by necessity.

Let us look at the situation. The public is disgusted with the existing parties and becoming indifferent to the possibilities of the suffrage and of popular government, an unhealthy sign. A new party is out of the question, for to succeed any new party must be broad enough to cover all sorts and conditions of men, divergent groups and interests. It must at once have the defects of the old parties.

So long as parties "must be careful," to quote Mr. Harding, executives must "be careful" and Congress organized on the party basis "must be careful." We gravitate toward negation.