Practical Agitation

by John Jay Chapman

After all, the great discovery is a very simple thing. We have found, after many experiments, that what we really want is, not the turning out of officials, not the enactment of laws, but the raising of the general standards. The way to do this is to set up a standard. Of course nobody likes to find a foot rule laid against his shortage. Even the vocabulary of the average man is attacked by such a system. Words like “courage,” “honesty,” “independence,” “pledge,” “loyalty” pass current like clipped coin in the language of politics; and the keying up of words to their biblical value brings out one man a thief and the next a hypocrite.

All these civic commotions, great and small, that surge up and are scattered, that form and reform, the People’s Leagues and Citizens’ Unions, are the altruism of the community fighting its way to the surface through the obstructions, the snares, and the oppressions of the organized world. No discouragement sets it back. No betrayal destroys it. The people come forward with ever new faith.

What ceaseless endeavor! What patient trial of various forms of organization! We live in a society where egoism is so thoroughly organized that there is hardly a flicker of faith that cannot be made to heat the devil’s pot. The dragon stands ready to eat up the child as soon as it shall be born. You cannot hitch your horse to anything without helping drag the juggernaut. Before you know it, virtue is pocketed. Take the most obvious case. The reformers imagine they are in politics and must win at all costs. One enthusiast calls twenty friends into a room and organizes a club—and the club ties his hands and sells out to the nearest bidder. Before he knows it he has been organized back into Tammany Hall. You begin with a call to arms and a plan of organization. The men come to you in a moment of hope, showing every shade of intelligence, every stage of opinion,—one because he believes in your candidate; one because he hates Tammany Hall; one because he wants prominence; all because they do not expect to be alone. The men who volunteer have not a clear notion of what they are in for. They thought it was a movement to clean the streets. In the course of their campaign it develops into an attack on a bank. They thought it was a town movement. Some stage of it affects national politics. They thought it was a Roosevelt movement. It turns out to involve hostility to Roosevelt. Your muster shows the vague hope of a lot of men who are utterly incompetent, undisciplined, ignorant. They are merchants, lawyers, doctors, professors, clergymen, the respectability and intelligence of the town; and so far as self-government goes they are the tattered children of tyranny. Good God, what an army! At the first trumpet they scatter. One sells out, one recants, one disappears. They are anywhere and nowhere, a ship of fools, a barnyard. The execution of the one idea for which they were brought together has scattered them like sheep.

Let us take another case. You think that what is needed is to raise a standard. You call your twenty friends about you. They are not corrupt. Nevertheless, let us see who they will be. We are not dealing with an imaginary community, but with American citizens as they exist, with men every one of whom trusts his instincts to a different extent. Each man believes in principle in the abstract, but thinks it is sometimes hopeless to be severely virtuous in politics. This “sometimes” is the crux. “Is it the time? Is this the year? Can you do it this way?” Now, of course, it is always the year. It is never hopeless. Absolute honesty is always the way. But an age of corruption destroys faith. This is the essential injury. This is the disease. You yourself have a little stronger belief, a little more political enterprise than your twenty friends. Otherwise it would be they who were summoning you to a conference. It is certain that their joint wisdom will result in action less radical than you believe in. They outvote you in council. The standard they set up is not absolute. But this outcome will prevent you from making your point at all. If you are to back your friends up publicly and are honest yourself, all you can say will be, “Here’s a makeshift.” Now, the public instinct understands this very well already. Ten per cent of your own faith you have compromised. It has cost you ninety per cent of your educational power; for the heart of man will respond only to a true thing.

What is it that has led you to compromise? Why, the age you live in. You yourself, being afraid to stand alone, have dipped your flag, with the best intentions, because you cannot see that any other course is practicable. Yet you yourself can keep your own intellectual integrity only at the price of destroying your own handiwork. If you do not destroy it, you are a hypocrite. Here in the room with you were twenty men, the very flower of the idealism of the town, not chosen by accident, but coming together by natural selection. Twenty more like them do not exist in the community, for their activity would have revealed them. And yet there was not found faith enough among these to set up an absolute standard. Nay, they hang on your arms and prevent you from raising one. If you are to do it, you must do it alone. Then these men will be the first to denounce you; for your act damns them. You can only be true to the public conscience by rebuking your friends. If you fail to do this, your banner is submerged.

Let us consider the cause of this weakness in Reform organizations. You wish to appeal to the people with as good a show of names as you can. And so you get a lot of well-known men to indorse you. This is considered practical. Let us see if it is.

We are fighting Tammany Hall. But no one will for an instant admit that every Tammany man is dishonest. The corruption we started out to correct was a corruption of the intelligence, a bad habit, a defect of vision. The same defect keeps Republicans in line for Platt, because he is the Party, a recognized agent of the community. The same defect prevents a just man from joining a new movement unless Banker Jones is leading it. The habit of the community is to rely on some one else to govern them. No man trusts himself. The Machine, upon analysis, turns out to be a lack of self-reliance. Wherever you see a man who gives some one else’s corruption, some one else’s prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us. The proof of it is that he will dissuade you from striking the iniquity. He will explain that you can’t try it without doing more harm than good. You will find that at every point of defence, from the arguments of Mr. Croker himself to the arguments of some sainted college president, the reasons given are identical. I cannot find any one who defends stealing. They only deprecate action as being inexpedient. Now, then, if I ask a voter to join my organization, and use as a bait an appeal to this very weakness—his reliance upon other men’s opinion—can I hope to make much headway? I am taking in just so much of Tammany Hall. My whole body becomes an adjunct of Tammany, in the same sense that Mr. Platt’s machine is an adjunct. I am Croker’s last outpost. I stand there calling myself reform, and yet I do not act. Some one else must now come forward and try his hand.

This process of ebullition, and thereupon stagnation, has happened again and again. I suppose there are a dozen extant wrecks of reform political organizations in the city. Many people have despaired altogether. They think it is a law of God that political organizations become corrupt in the second year. The experience is entirely due to the persistent putting of new wine into old bottles. In their names and hopes these bodies have stood for purity, but in their membership they have, even in their inception, stood for prejudice. Then, too, the bottles bore good labels, and bad wine was soon poured into them. A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy. It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.

What, then, must the enthusiast do in the way of organization? Let him go ahead and do some particular thing, and ask the public to help him do it. He will thus get behind him whatever force exists at that especial time for that especial purpose. It may not be much; but no amount of letterheads and great seals will increase it. Let him abandon written constitutions. Let him not be bound by a vote nor seek to bind others by a vote. If you have formal procedure, you are tied up, for you will then have to convert six tailors into apostles before you can get at the public. Content yourself more modestly. See a friend or two and tell them what you intend to do. If they won’t help you, do it alone. Do not think you are wasting your time, even if no one joins you. The prejudice against the individual is part of the evil you are fighting. If you keep on in a consistent line of action, people will come to you one by one, and your group will grow into a sort of centre of influence. There will result a unity of method as well as of aim, which, as your purposes become understood, will enable you to act with the speed of thought and the force of an avalanche. One great merit of this method will be that your whole policy will remain an enigma to every one except those who really want what you want, namely, to raise the general standards. Only such men will seek you out. Any one else is a danger. Thus your organization will grow slowly, but will remain uncapturable, un-get-at-able, an influence, a menace, a standard. As fast as adherents appear, you can set up centre after centre of enlightenment, preparatory to your campaigns; debates, pamphlets, correspondence, the battery of agitation. And in the mean time the benefit done to the workers themselves is worth all the pains.