The men I have mentioned were, generally speaking, poor men, and the next generation found it much more comfortable and profitable to practise law or engage in business than to enter politics. I am grieved by my inability to offer substantial proof that ideals of public service in the Western provinces are higher than they were fifty or twenty years ago. I record my opinion that they are not, and that we are less ably served in the Congress than formerly, frankly to invite criticism; for these times call for a great searching for the weaknesses of democracy and, if the best talent is not finding its way into the lawmaking, administrative, and judicial branches of our State and federal governments, an obligation rests upon every citizen to find the reason and supply the remedy.
No Westerner who is devoted to the best interests of his country will encourage the belief that there is any real hostility between East and West, or that the West is incapable of viewing social and political movements in the light of reason and experience. It stood steadfastly against the extension of slavery and for the Union through years of fiery trial, and its leaders expressed the national thought and held the lines firm against opposition, concealed and open, that was kept down only by ceaseless vigilance. Even in times of financial stress it refused to hearken to the cry of the demagogue, and Greenbackism died, just as later Populism died. More significant was the failure of Mr. Bryan to win the support of the West that was essential to his success in three campaigns. We may say that it was a narrow escape, and that the West was responsible for a serious menace and a peril not too easily averted, but Mr. Bryan precipitated a storm that was bound to break and that left the air clearer. He “threw a scare” into the country just when it needed to be aroused, and some of his admonitions have borne good fruit on soil least friendly to him.
The West likes to be “preached at,” and it admires a courageous evangelist even when it declines his invitation to the mourners’ bench. The West liked and still likes Mr. Roosevelt, and no other American can so instantly gain the ear of the West as he. In my pilgrimages of the past year nothing has been more surprising than the change of tone with reference to the former President among Western Republicans, who declared in 1912 and reiterated in 1916 that never, never again would they countenance him.[E]
IV
One may find in the Mississippi valley, as in the Connecticut valley or anywhere else in America, just about what one wishes to find. A New England correspondent complains with some bitterness of the political conservatism he encountered in a journey through the West; he had expected to find radicalism everywhere rampant, and was disappointed that he was unable to substantiate his preconceived impression by actual contacts with the people.
If I may delicately suggest the point without making too great a concession, the West is really quite human. It has its own “slant”—its tastes and preferences that differ in ways from those of the East, the South, or the farther West; and radicals are distributed through the corn belt in about the same proportion as elsewhere. The bread-and-butter Western Folks are pretty sensible, taken in the long run, and not at all anxious to pull down the social pillars just to make a noise. They will impiously carve them a little—yes, and occasionally stick an incongruous patch on the wall of the sanctuary of democracy; but they are never wilfully destructive. And it cannot be denied that some of their architectural and decorative efforts have improved the original design. The West has saved other sections a good deal of trouble by boldly experimenting with devices it had “thought up” amid the free airs of the plains; but the West, no more than the East, will give storage to a contrivance that has been proved worthless.
The vindictive spirit that was very marked in the Western attitude toward the railroads for many years was not a gratuitous and unfounded hatred of corporations, but had a real basis in discriminations that touched vitally the life of the farmer and the struggling towns to which he carried his products. The railroads were the only corporations the West knew before the great industrial development. A railroad represented “capital,” and “capital” was therefore a thing to chastise whenever opportunity offered. It has been said in bitterness of late that the hostile legislation demanded by the West “ruined the railroads.” This is not a subject for discussion here, but it can hardly be denied that the railroads invited the war that was made upon them by injustices and discriminations of which the obscure shipper had a right to complain. The antagonism to railroads inspired a great deal of radicalism aimed at capital generally, and “corporate greed,” “the encroachments of capital,” “the money devils of Wall Street,” and “special privilege” burned fiercely in our political terminology. Our experiment with government control as a war measure has, of course, given a new twist to the whole transportation problem.
The West likes to play with novelties. It has been hospitable to such devices as the initiative, the referendum, and the recall, multiplied agencies for State supervision in many directions, and it has shown in general a confidence in automatic machinery popularly designed to correct all evils. The West probably infected the rest of the country with the fallacy that the passing of a law is a complete transaction without reference to its enforcement, and Western statute-books are littered with legislation often frivolous or ill considered. There has, however, been a marked reaction and the demand is rather for less legislation and better administration. A Western governor said to me despairingly that his State is “commissioned” to death, and that he is constantly embarrassed by the difficulty of persuading competent men to accept places on his many bipartisan regulative boards.
There is a virtue in our very size as a nation and the multiplicity of interests represented by the one hundred million that make it possible for the majority to watch, as from a huge amphitheatre, the experiments in some particular arena. A new agrarian movement that originated in North Dakota in 1915 has attained formidable proportions. The Non-Partisan League (it is really a political party) seems to have sprung full-panoplied from the Equity Society, and is a successor of the Farmers’ Alliance and Populism. The despised middleman was the first object of its animosity, and it began with a comprehensive programme of State-owned elevators and flour-mills, packing-houses and cold-storage plants. The League carried North Dakota in 1916, electing a governor who immediately vetoed a bill providing for a State-owned terminal elevator because the League leaders “raised their sights” as soon as they got into the trenches. They demanded unlimited bonding-power and a complete new programme embodying a radical form of State socialism. “Class struggle,” says Mr. Elmer T. Peterson, an authority on the League’s history, “is the key-note of its propaganda.” The student of current political tendencies will do well to keep an eye on the League, as it has gained a strong foothold in the Northwest, and the co-operative features of its platform satisfy an old craving of the farmer for State assistance in the management of his business.
The League is now thoroughly organized in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, Idaho, and Colorado and is actively at work in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Governor Burnquist of Minnesota addressed a letter to its executive secretary during the primary campaign last summer in which he said: