Practical Agitation

by John Jay Chapman

Politics gives what the chemists call a “mirror,” and shows the ingredients in the average man’s composition. But you must take your mind off politics if you want to understand America. You must take up the lives of individuals and follow them out, as they play against each other in counterpoint. As soon as you do this you will not be able to determine where politics begins and where it stops. It is all politics: it is all social intercourse: it is all business. Any square foot of this soil will give you the whole fauna and flora of the land. Where will you put in your wedge of reform? There is not a cranny anywhere. The mass is like crude copper ore that cannot be blasted. It blows out the charge.

We think that political agitation must show political results. This is like trying to alter the shape of a shadow without touching its object. The hope is not only mistaken, it is absurd. The results to be obtained from reform movements cannot show in the political field till they have passed through the social world.

“But, after all, what you want is votes, is it not?” “It would be so encouraging to see virtue win, that everybody would vote for you thereafter. Why don’t you manage it somehow?” This sort of talk is the best record of incompetence which corruption has imprinted. Enlighten this class and you have saved the Republic. Why, my friend, you are so lost, you are so much a mere product of tyranny that you do not know what a vote is. True, we want votes, but the votes we want must be cast spontaneously. We do not want them so badly as to buy them. A vote is only important because it is an opinion. Even a dictator cannot force opinions upon his subjects by six months of rule; and yet the complaint is that decency gets few votes after a year of effort by a handful of radicals who are despised by the community. We only enter the field of politics because we can there get a hearing. The candidates in reform movements are tools. They are like crowbars that break open the mind of the age. They cannot be dodged, concealed, or laughed away. Every one is aroused from his lethargy by seeing a real man walk on the scene, amid all the stage properties and marionettes of conventional politics. “No fair!” the people cry. They do not vote for him, of course, but they talk about the portent with a vigor no mere doctrine could call forth, and the discussion blossoms at a later date into a new public spirit, a new and genuine demand for better things.

It is apparent that between the initial political activity of reformers and their ultimate political accomplishments, there must intervene the real agitation, the part that does the work, which goes on in the brains and souls of individual men, and which can only be observed in social life, in manners and conversation.

Now let us take up the steps by which, in practical life, the reaction is set going. Enter the nearest coterie of radicals and listen to the quarrel. Reformers proverbially disagree, and ‘their sects mince themselves almost to atoms.’ With us the quarrel always arises over the same point. “Can we afford, under these particular circumstances, to tell the exact truth?” I have never known a reform movement in which this discussion did not rage from start to finish, nor have I known one where any other point was involved. You are a citizens’ committee. The parties offer to give you half a loaf. Well and good. But this is not their main object. They want you to call it a whole loaf. They want to dissipate your agitation by getting you to tell the public that you are satisfied. What they hate is the standard. The war between you and them is a spiritual game of chess. They must get you to say they are right. It is their only means of retaining their power.

Thus the apple of discord falls into the Reform camp. Half its members take the bait. In New York City our politics have been so picturesque, the pleas of the politician so shallow, the lies demanded from the reformers so obvious, that the eternal principles of the situation have been revealed in their elemental simplicity. It is just because the impulse towards better things carries no material content—we do not want any particular thing, but we want an improvement in everything—it is just because the whole movement is purely moral, that the same questions always arise.

We ought not to grieve over the discussion, over the heart-burn and heated argument that start from a knot of radicals and run through the community, setting men against each other. The quarrel in the executive committee of this reform body is the initiative of much wholesome life. They are no more responsible for it, they can no more avoid it, the community can no more advance to higher standards before they have had it, than a child can skate before it can walk.

The executive committee is discussing the schools. In consequence of a recent agitation, the politicians have put up a candidate who will give new plumbing, even if he does steal the books, and the question is whether the School Association shall indorse this candidate. If it does, he wins. If it does not, both plumbing and books are likely to remain the prey of the other party, and the Lord knows how bad that is. The fight rages in the committee, and some sincere old gentleman is prophesying typhoid.

The practical question is: “Do you want good plumbing, or do you want the truth?” You cannot have both this year. If the association goes out and tells the public exactly what it knows, it will get itself laughed at, insult the candidate, and elect his opponent. If it tells the truth, it might as well run a candidate of its own as a protest and an advertisement of that truth. It can buy good plumbing with a lie, and the old gentleman thinks it ought to do so. The reformers are going to endorse the candidate, and upon their heads will be visited his theft of the books. They have sold out the little public confidence they held. Had they stood out for another year, under the practical régime which they had already endured for twenty, and had they devoted themselves to augmenting the public interest in the school question, both parties would have offered them plumbing and books to allay the excitement. The parties might, perhaps, have relaxed their grip on the whole school system rather than meet the issue.

But the Association does not understand this. It does not, as yet, clearly know its own mind. All this procedure, this going forward and back, is necessary. The community must pass through these experiences before it discovers that the shortest road to good schools is truth. A few men learn by each turn of the wheel, and these men tend to consolidate. They become a sort of school of political thought. They see that they do not care a whit more about the schools than they do about the parks; that the school agitation is a handy way to make the citizens take notice of maladministration in all departments; that the parties may be left to reform themselves, and to choose the most telling bid for popular favor; that the parties must do this and will do this, in so far as the public demands it, and will not do it under any other circumstances.