The farmers are organized for social purposes, for the distribution of information among themselves, for coöperation in buying and selling, for maintaining a lobby at Washington and finally for political action. Political action crowns an organization which serves all the purposes for which union is required.
Practically every other interest is organized to the point of maintaining a lobby at Washington. Only the farmers have developed organization in Congress. Only they have adapted their organization to all their needs, social and political. Only they have the perfect vertical trust running straight up from the weekly entertainment in the union or bureau to the Senate in Washington, where their Senators do the bidding of their agent, Mr. Gray Silver.
Indispensable to effective special interest representation seems to be an organization for other than political purposes which brings the voters of a class or occupation together. Labor has such an organization in its unions. Business has it perhaps in its Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade. Either of them has the means at its disposal for imitating the farmers and developing a bloc in the national legislature.
It is natural that the farm interest should be the first to push its way beyond the lobby or propaganda stage at Washington to that of organized representation on the floor of Congress. Agriculture is the single interest or the immensely predominating interest in many States. A Senator or Representative from such a state may safely consider himself a representative of agriculture. But in a more fully developed community there is a diversity of interests. Where there is capital there is also labor. Moreover most of the industrial States have also their agricultural interest. It is not safe for an Eastern Senator or Representative, as the situation now stands, to identify himself with any minority. He must at least pretend to "represent the whole people."
If the vertical movement in politics proceeds, as it almost inevitably must, it will manifest itself effectively first in the lower house. Congress districts are small units. In an industrial State one district may be prevailingly agricultural, another prevailingly labor, another prevailingly commercial. Groups operating within a party will tend to parcel out the districts among themselves holding their support of each other's candidates, as the Liberal and Labor parties have often done in England.
The Senate will be less responsive. States are large units and, except in farming regions, are not prevailingly of one interest. But a division may be effected like that which now gives one Senator to the eastern and another to the western, or one to the urban and another to the rural part of the State. One Senator may go to business and another to agriculture or to labor as the case may be.
What I have just written is by way of illustration. I have spoken of agricultural, labor and business blocs not because these are the only divisions of society that may be organized for political purpose but because they already have the basic machinery and seem certain to thrust upwards till they are prominently represented in Congress. Other minority interests are already showing themselves, as for example the soldiers of the late war and the inland waterways group. These and others like them, some permanent and some temporary, will cut across the main subdivisions, so that men who are divided on one interest will be united on another and thus furnish a further cement in the body politic in addition to the necessity of joint action upon the presidency.
Thus there is less danger of our being ruled by minorities than there is of minorities having to surrender too much of their purposes for the sake of unity among themselves and of our thus being in spite of their organization little better off than we are now, reduced by the sheer mass that has to be moved to a policy of inaction and negation.
In an earlier chapter I analyzed the Senate to show how weak and will-less it is and how inferior is its personnel, how prostrate it lies before any powerful minority which has a purpose and the will to carry it out. I used the Senate as typical of Congress; a desire to save space and to avoid repetitions kept me from a similar study of the House. In the same way the parties lie ready for the uses of minorities. They are will-less. They have no aim and express no unity because when the old pioneer will to exploit as quickly as possible the national resources without regard to waste, physical or social, ceased to operate, there was no unity, except, as I have explained, for temporary purposes, for social defense under Roosevelt and for national defense under Wilson, two essentially negative ends.
Mr. Will H. Hays trying to tell the Republican senate how to vote on the League covenant, was a less powerful figure than was Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler ordering it to vote that more than one half of one per cent of alcohol in a beverage was intoxicating, or Mr. Gray Silver forcing it to extend credits to farmers, or Colonel Taylor frightening it into voting for a soldiers' bonus.