They think it's great to be a
Ruritanian
and a communicant of the Hocus-pocus Church.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
The participants are almost entirely political jobholders or patronage beneficiaries, informally compelled to vote and to vote in ways that enable them to hold their benefices.
If it were not for this compulsory voting by beneficiaries, primaries could not be held in most cases.
It is the primaries that give the major parties their legal status. This is because the law of most states stipulates, with no broad dissent, that parties shall hold primaries participated in by party voters for nominating party candidates and officers. The only other way a candidate can get on the ballot is by petition, signed by a certain number of voters, and such a candidate does not run under a party label and has no established organization working for him.
"There could not be a greater mistake" than abstention from primaries, says the able Kent. It is this public abstention that gives the political machine its chance to control the situation, which it does through the precinct executives. "It actually permits the machine to run the country. " Here is the veritable foundation for the various legislative Establishments and for legislation biased in favor of the propertied. It rests on pervasive popular ineptitude.
As there is no other effective way for candidates to get on the ballot, the primary is the political key that unlocks all doors.
"It ought to be plain, then," says Kent, "that so long as the machine controls the primaries, it is in a position to limit the choice of the voters in the general election to its choice in the primaries. That is the real secret of its power, and, so long as it holds that power, it cannot be put out of business. Defeating its candidates in the general election not only does not break its grip, it often does not make even a dent in it. The only place a machine can be beaten is in the primaries. "
As for the candidate who gets on the ballot by petition, "Nothing short of a political tidal wave or revolution can carry an independent candidate to success," Kent points out. "He may pull sufficient votes from one side or the other to bring about the defeat of one of the regular party nominees, but his own election is a thing so rare as to be almost negligible. "
To the established party the primary, which validates it legally, is far more important than the election, which alone seems important to the public. Even if it loses the election, the party organization remains intact owing to patronage--federal, state, county and (over the long term) judicial--gained in past elections. The party organization can, indeed, survive many election defeats. Remaining organized, it is always a threat and draws some deferential attention from the ascendant party which, in fact, helps it out from time to time with "nonpolitical" and "bi-partisan" appointments. The legal parties have much in common, notably their tender joint concern and realistically proper solicitude for their angels, the propertied classes. There are many informal party intermediaries.
The Republican Party long survived in the Deep South despite endless election defeats, owing to its nourishment by federal patronage. Although it held primaries, where federal jobholders voted, it never won state elections or sent members to
Congress. The party delegates, however, often played a determining role in the choice of presidential and vice presidential candidates at Republican national conventions. They had something to sell--their organizational votes.
Although the party organization can survive a long series of election defeats, it could hardly survive a defeat in the primaries and could absolutely not survive two primary defeats. If twice defeated it would be clear that it had been outwitted by rival organizers or an intelligent public to whom recipients of party patronage would turn for protection. Organizers able to outwit an entrenched machine are men obviously more capable of outwitting the opposing party in the coming election.
Sometimes factions contend in primaries--the Old Guard, Reformers and independents. Each puts up a slate, for public office and party office. Each is committed to high-flown party principles, and contends that it can best implement those principles and achieve electoral success. On such a question the general voter in effect has the difficult job of a personnel manager for a large corporation. He must know principles and policy and he must pick out the electorally most plausible man. This, obviously, is usually hard to do. Information is lacking--all the men seem superficially good. If one seems better in some ways the others seem better in other ways. Whose side are they really on? What to do? Here the average voter, who isn't versed anyhow in the ins and outs of the situation, throws up his hands. The primary and its ends baffle him and he stays away. Yet here is the very heart of the electoral process and from now on nature takes its course.
Generally the Old Guard wins owing to its control of patronage. If enough patronage holders are discontented, owing to what the Reformers call poor leadership, they may vote with the Reformers or Independents. In this case party leadership changes, perhaps party policy. What change, actually, has been wrought? Usually it is nothing of broad importance--perhaps only a change from Anglo-Saxon to Irish candidates, from Irish to Italian, from Italian to Puerto Rican. In a changing electoral district the new candidates have more "political sex appeal," are more likely to entice more boobish voters.
An important feature of party primaries often is that they not only nominate party candidates but also party officials: county and state committeemen who elect chairmen. The party chairmen may or may not hold public office, but they are the main part of the continuing party machinery. They are, legally, the party, and they participate in party decisions, convey party views to officeholders. They are men who have immediate access to executive officials, legislators and judges. What they have to say is always very, very important, not to be lightly disregarded.
As Kent points out, by not participating in the primaries the general voter loses at least 50 per cent of the effectiveness of his franchise. He thereby assumes his actual political status--a second-class citizen. As few participate in primaries it may seem, by this token, that virtually everybody is a second-class citizen. But this is not so, for there are those, nonvoters in primaries, who recapture the first-class citizenship at a later stage by contributing to political campaign funds. They "buy in. " They are politically first class. They are rich people in a plutocracy.
Nobody has chased the common man away from the primaries. He just does not feel up to participating. His democratic franchise here he finds just too much to handle. He does not, in fact, have anything to contribute; he is politically empty. As a result, the party apparatus and candidates on both tickets belong to professionals, often men never heard of in the community, usually men of limited outlook. They function behind the scenes. They have the party power. They are American versions of Gromyko, Kosygin, Brezhnev et al. 14
The party managers must find men ready, able and willing to campaign and at the same time men who will be acceptable to a broad, culturally differentiated, intellectually and emotionally low-grade public--Mencken's boobs, Barnum's suckers, Kipling's "muddied oafs. " The party managers are, contrary to common supposition, restricted to a very narrow potential group, with characteristics shared by less than 5 per cent of the population.
Men selected as candidates must, first, have independent financial means or be in occupations that will permit long leaves of absence. Persons dependent on an assured wage or salary would, even if approached, turn down the offer because they could not take a chance on being out of a job if they lost the election, nor could they take a chance on not winning the next election in two to four years. So, most of the labor force is automatically self-excluded. True, here and there somebody at times takes the long chance; but not many. Again, scientists, physicians, surgeons, scholars, engineers cannot be had because even if they won election they would not be able to keep abreast in their professions; only men willing to abandon their specialized life work might be obtained and they are virtually nonexistent among high-level practitioners. Again, successful corporation executives, unless retired, cannot be induced to run because if they won they would be automatically excluded from the line of corporate promotion and extravagant remuneration and if they lost they would probably be out of any job. They would be "controversial. " As it turns out, most of the highly capable men in the country are in sober fact not available to stand as candidates for public office. Either personal economics or professional commitments keep them out. 15 Yet, the inferior types that predominate in politics seem to satisfy the propertied. One can easily make deals with them. They are purchasable.
The political manager, then, must go shopping under conditions of extreme scarcity for prospective candidates. He finds most of them among young lawyers, men with partners willing to see them take long leaves of absence and who, if defeated, can return to the practice of law. Thus Matthews found that among Democrats in the Senate, our supreme political body, 63 per cent were lawyers; among Republicans, 45 per cent. Those who defined themselves as businessmen were 17 per cent among the Democrats and 40 per cent among Republicans. Among the Democrats 7 per cent were farmers, 7 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals; among the Republicans 8 per cent were farmers, 1 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals. 16
The up-and-coming men in politics, then, must be lawyers, men of independent means or in some business they can run by remote control as an adjunct to politics. The lawyers chosen are usually not at the top of their profession either as pleaders, brief specialists or jurisconsults but are men seeking to make their way, hopeful that their political participation will bring big retainers to their law firms--and it will! With nice corporate retainers in the office, however, these public officials develop a sound procorporate point of view. While rhetorically they may swing far to the left or right, when it comes to voting and deciding, they must see things as the corporations do. They must then follow the corporate "party line. " They are at least corporate fellow travelers.
People in Politics: Pop Politics
People in politics all, contrary to popular supposition, work very hard. It is common for a citizen to walk into some public building and, noticing its rather soiled condition and easygoing atmosphere, make an invidious comparison with the trim premises of a tightly run corporation. Here is mute evidence of the difference, he thinks, between shoddy government enterprise and efficient private enterprise. Bank pens work smoothly, post office pens sputter.
The rank and file in the political organizations put in long hours and work hard, often at two or three jobs-and most of them put money in the bank every week, usually sufficiently honest money. Many of their tasks are boring. Others would not perform them. But, in some measure, they carry with them a heady something called power.
In the selection of candidates, however, the political organizer must be careful to select men who will not offend large blocks of voters, As experience has shown, the average mentally handicapped or boobish citizen, his brain in a scramble, attaches vast importance in candidates to religion, race or ethnic grouping, national origin, sex and generally conventional conformist outlook and behavior. He feels grimly punitive toward any sort of deviation from a fixed norm, a stereotype, in his mind. He wants, above all, no independent thinkers--freaks who emit horrible propositions about the importance of intelligence tests, read books--or use three syllable words. 17
Politicians oblige. If the voters wanted men who spoke Sanskrit, dressed in kilts or used the language of mathematics, the politicians would procure them.
Voters, it has been found, are also partial to men against women, married men against bachelors, fathers as against the childless, the personable against the less personable, the fluent and expansive against the reflective the generally reassuring, humorous and blandishing against the fellow who raises odd difficulties. They prefer Gorgias to Socrates. They will not, as politicians know, take anybody who lectures to them or even indirectly appears to be lecturing to them, although this is precisely what they need before anything else. They need hard instruction, prolonged, grueling, on the line.
The party leaders, to give them credit, do the best they can in selecting candidates. They do the best they can, too, in seeking to detect hidden aberrancies in a new man, such as penchants for reading, concert-going, tennis-playing or a compulsive desire to speak the exact unvarnished truth at all times--all of which in the budding statesman would spell trouble with the booboisie.
The Role of Money
With the organization now functioning smoothly, something else is needed: money. Here is where the affluent regain their first-class citizenship.
If the organization has not been very successful it must depend on its own resources, mainly "kickbacks" from its successful candidates and appointees. But with victory comes prosperity in the form of campaign contributions, always and almost only from the affluent and well positionedthe wealthy, corporation executives and lawyers, government contractors, brokers, influence-seekers, friends of the candidates, etc. Here and there trade unions are heard from, but for the most part the labor force is now quiescent, not in sight. It is at work, out at the beach or watching television.
Because it is almost entirely the affluent that put up party campaign funds, knowing that some lucre is going to stick to the fingers of political managers, we see here the reason both the Republican and Democratic Parties are, basically and primarily, the parties of the propertied classes--the corporations, the trade associations, the real estate lobbies, the millionaires, the big rich and the super-rich. This is the simple, nonscandalous fact. Money, big money, rules the roost from now on.
Leftist agitators have thundered about this thousands of times from soap boxes at gaping hinds, as though this ought not to be and as though it was sinful. This, as it happens, is the way babies are born in politics--or by even rougher methods as under totalitarianism. They are not brought in by the stork.
The electoral process, owing to the childish nature and behavior of the public, is expensive, and is really paid for by the public in elevated prices. Much is at stake in the
public policy that will be made by officeholders--who will pay most of the taxes in an increasingly expensive welfare-warfare state, who will get contracts of $100 million, $500 million, $1 billion, where $200-million roads and dams will go and where they won't go, etc. This is obviously a game (as most participants see it) for big stakes, far from the pitifully petty concerns of the electorate about the religion of the candidates, whether they are divorced and whether they are hetero-, homo-, bi- or a-sexual.
As the public has the franchise, almost without restriction except for Negroes, if it does not like the way matters are arranged all some eighty million members of the labor force need do is (1) participate intelligently in all primaries and (2) contribute about $5 a year to their party, amounting to about $400 million a year in all. If it did this, the public might have more to say in determining policy--if it knew anything at all about policy.
This is an easy prescription but hard to apply to an engine with some eighty million separate parts. Not only does the public consist of many parts but many of these parts are mutually and irrationally antagonistic on grounds irrelevant to the welfare of each. Their various ethnic, religious, nationalistic, regional, occupational, class, caste and cultural differences have in most cases nothing to do with their personal and mutual welfare. Yet they enjoy indulging these irrelevant infantile predilections as though they mattered--and politicians are solicitously attentive. Where the constituency would not like a Ruritanian on the ticket there is no Ruritanian. Where a Ruritanian would help, there he is. Is he pro-bono publico? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it is electorally irrelevant. And so with all other types.
If the voters participated intelligently in the primaries, their spokesmen would need to find truly representative candidates--not too easy to do. Most likely persons would turn them down for more agreeable pastures.
In any event, the rank-and-file citizen prefers to accept the ready-made pre-financed, pre-fixed parties, in which in most cases he is permanently enrolled as in a religious brotherhood. Most voters ploddingly vote straight tickets, for one party, year after year. They are, as anyone can see, creatures of easy habit with little genuine political discernment. One can count most of their votes in advance. Politicians do.
But here, as elsewhere, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Although each of the major parties is usually (except when befogged by ideology) alert to whatever may transiently pull the handicapped boobs to their banners, they deliver in major matters, always and invariably, for their main financial supporters. Considering the way everybody performs politically and thinks privately, this is the only way it could possibly be. The idea of democracy first killed itself in ancient Greece. In modern times it did it again in the United States.
Left and Right
Much is made by such writers as Professor Seymour M. Lipset of Left and Right and of which of the major parties is the friend of the common man and which of Big Business. 18 In these respects, in fact, there is little to choose. The Democratic Party came by its latter-day reputation as a peculiar friend of the common man because of its purely sensible emphasis since 1932 on federal programs in sagging domestic affairs and on adjusting to some of the dislocations brought about by technological change. Earlier, this one-time party of the southern slave owners had made friends in the North by welcoming the European refugees of the immigration, each of whom had a vote, most of whom were politically snubbed by the well-washed Whigs and Republicans.
The Republican Party has tended, impolitically, to decry recent Democratic emphases and has consequently lost majority support, which it held from 1860 to 1932, as long as
it was able to guarantee low-paid jobs. What money the workers were not paid in those days went, in general, into the sprouting fortunes and for the most part now rests comfortably in trust. The benign Carnegie paid $10 a week for seventy hours and more in the withering heat of the steel mills--a humanist!
But the aims of both political parties, declared and achieved, are to maintain the existing politico-economic system and the same relative distribution of its rewards. This is all Franklin D. Roosevelt ever said he sought to do and all he really did. His main promise was to get the system back in operation and this he did so thoroughly that the 1960's are little different in their externals from the 1920's.
All this is inevitable, as it must be when given the general low-level, don't-know- where-I'm-going-but-I'm-on-my-way outlook of the common citizen. He's bound to be short-changed.
The Dirty End of the Stick
Just what the common man gets by voting the prearranged preferences offered him in elections we may see by looking at the case of Negro Congressman William L. Dawson of Chicago.
Dawson's 90 per cent Negro First Congressional District contains one out of every three Negroes in the state of Illinois. Dawson has ruled it as a private fief for 24 years, and cooperative fellow politicians have continued to change the shape of the district as the Negro population keeps swelling and moving into white neighborhoods. If you are a Negro on the South Side, and you need a job, a favor or a bail bondsman, you see someone from Dawson's organization. His record in Congress is shabby; not a single Chicago journalist can remember a piece of legislation that bears his name. It doesn't matter.
"This man is not interested in politics as a means of helping his constituents," one political writer said. "What he is interested in is staying in power. "
Dawson in power has obtained for his faithful constituents the worst housing conditions in the city, a soaring crime rate, an increase in heroin addiction and the spread of teenage gangs who flock together in vicious packs, preying on strangers, extorting money from businessmen, and killing each other out of boredom. It is a record so marvellous that it should qualify Dawson for an ambassadorship to Haiti. . . .
Dawson stays in power at an age when most men are writing memoirs because he commands an organization that makes good old Tammany Hall seem like a congregation of Ethical Culture teachers. Every one of the 446 precincts in the district has its own captain and two assistants, and if possible a worker for every street. There are seven wards in the district, and each ward office is responsible for controlling the precinct captains. The seven wards in turn answer to the people who run Dawson's own Second Ward office.
Dawson has plenty of what Chicagoans call "clout. " He is vice chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, and Mayor Daley understands perfectly just how important Dawson and his organization are in the general scheme of Chicago politics. In 1963, Daley won reelection by 139,000. Dawson-controlled Negro wards contributed 115,000 of those votes. 19
Representative Adam Clayton Powell, the Negro clergyman-sybarite, for more than twenty years ran a similar district in New York City.
The point here is not to highlight invidiously Negro personalities but to cite two extreme cases as models of what most people more or less get by voting along ethnic, religious, regional and national-origins lines. In almost every case of such widespread
voting, it can be shown that the constituents in the home district or state are in some way getting the dirty end of the stick, not perhaps so blatantly as under Dawson and Powell but perceptibly nevertheless. They get it especially in taxes but also in many other ways. Catholics are rooked by Catholics, Protestants by Protestants, Irish by Irish, Negroes by Negroes, and so on, all very democratically.
In the better-grade suburban, city "silk-stocking," Jewish and advanced farm districts it is different. Only in a diluted sense are the alert constituents there ever let down. For the most part they are served as they intelligently if narrowly understand their interests.
An inflexible rule can be stated here: The further one moves down the socio- economic-cultural scale the less the sweet-talking political organizations deliver on behalf of the broad constituencies, which is one reason politicians are repeatedly found by pollsters to be in popular ill repute. People realize that, somehow, they are short- changed. But it is defective understanding in most of the people themselves in attempting to utilize the popular franchise that is considerably to blame, although plenty of teachers have offered to instruct them. Boobs will not heed, however. They just do not seem to get the point.
They think it's great to be a Ruritanian and a communicant of the Hocus-pocus Church.
Instances of Boobishness
As one out of many thousand instances of widespread boobishness one may cite the abrasively intrusive surveillance by the public over the private life of officials. A senator, photographed at a wedding holding a champagne glass, sought to have the picture suppressed owing to the painful impression it would make on constituents; he would not have minded if it had been a glass of whisky. 20 Deviations from local folkways are not tolerated in politicians by most American constituencies.
What can be done for a public who insist upon bringing irrelevant criteria to bear in voting for officials and who decline to participate in the basic task of seeking out and supporting suitable candidates?
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York is a case very much in point. Professor Lipset as of 1960 thought it more likely "that Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican Governor of New York, will ultimately prove to be the true representative of the revived pattern of direct participation in politics by members of the upper class-participation through their traditional party, the Republican" rather than upper-class people like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, G. Mennen Williams, John F. Kennedy and Averell Harriman in the Democratic Party. At the time all politicians conceded that Rockefeller, had he forced his own nomination as he could have, would have beaten John F. Kennedy hands down.
Yet Lipset's Republican hope was buried in political ashes for years owing largely to his subsequent divorce and remarriage. By reason of this purely personal action, which could not affect a man's managerial capability, a large section of the small-town Republican Party followership turned against him. As far as the presidency is concerned, Rockefeller was long pronounced dead by politicians but was at least tentatively exhumed as 1968 approached. Now many sophisticated observers such as Walter Lippmann and Gore Vidal began looking upon him as the nation's single hope of escape from Johnsonian realpolitik.
Wealthy party supporters proceed quite otherwise. If a man votes right in committees, on the legislative floor, makes the big decisions in favor of property, they are behind him no matter what he does privately. They could not care less if he maintained a string of supple mistresses of all colors, shapes, religions and sizes and smoked opium. All that would bother them about this sort of thing in a sound legislator or decision maker
would be the danger of the public getting wind of it. But the man's private life, if he was politically on the beam, would be strictly his own business. He could listen to string quartets and detest baseball for all they cared. He could even be civilized! --the ultimate of extreme democratic tolerance.
The common run of voter, a person nobody pays any attention to most of his life, when it comes to casting his ballot suddenly feels that he has some power: Intolerant of all differences, he intends to use his paltry power to the hilt. As anticipated by the politicians, he looks the candidates over and compares them with a mental cartoon of the perfect philistine and asks himself these questions: Is he baptized? Does he belong to the right Christian sect? Does he go to church regularly? What is his race? Does he show the least sign of being superior, uppity, in any way, such as by seriously using long words? Does he seem to enjoy himself in some unorthodox way?
Has he at any time stepped out of a petty conventional mold? Does he ever say anything original? The wrong answers to such questions, as politicians know, will usually swing large decisive blocks of votes and will cause ordinary boobs to break party regularity.
Aside from party regulars, most voters, in the belief of politicians, vote punitively. What they are voting against, furthermore, is not ordinarily some disliked policy but, usually, some personal characteristic of the man. He may, like Adlai Stevenson, be too witty. In this way the boobs, calling upon all other boobs to join with them, work off a good deal of their frustrated hostility. What their vote will do for them taxwise they have no idea. They don't know most of them are already paying 50 to 80 per cent more taxes under Democratic "leftism" than they ought to be paying under an equitable arrangement.
For some time to come, Negro politicians are going to have an easy task snaring boobish Negro votes. They are, borrowing a leaf from southern white colleagues, simply going to talk tough about the white man. They are not, however, going to overcome the white man. They are going to make deals with him, for their personal benefit, behind the scenes. Their Negro constituents meanwhile are going to continue more or less to eat humble pie in one form or other, like their white fellow-democrats. Adam Clayton Powell and William L. Dawson and the late Oscar De Priest of Chicago are merely precursors of a long line of coming Negro politicians who, under enlarging liberalized attitudes toward Negroes, will have found the road to Upward Social Mobility. They will have money in the bank, possibly a lively white mistress--or two-- under the bed.
As to his ethnicity or national origin a politician cannot usually deceive his public. If he is a Ruritanian he has to admit it and bray loudly that he is inordinately proud of it, thus securing the votes at least of nitwit Ruritanians. On the score of religion, except for sect, it is another matter. Being for the most part intelligent men, most politicians, although conspicuous church-goers, unquestionably have no more conventional religious belief than Lenin, Marx or Robert Ingersoll. True, most of them probably believe also that organized religion is a good thing for keeping the boobs in line, joining here the thought of Plato in his Laws. But it is almost a certainty that, tested under the influence of a truth serum, most politicians would admit they themselves had little or no religious belief. Indeed, every significant action of their lives shows most of them are devoid even of natural piety. Not only do most of them have little genuine respect for people, hesitating not at sending tender youth into trackless jungles on sleeveless errands of death; they clearly show they have no respect even for the universe; they do not hesitate to pollute the atmosphere with lethal dust. They are simply low-grade
technicians, in outlook so many plumbers (although it is probably an insult to hardworking plumbers to say so).
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Reasonably sure of most of their men after election, the propertied elements-- inheritors, nouveaux riches and their many power-elite agents--unlike the general public do not sit back and wait to see what is brewing in the halls of government. Through lobbyists and other intermediaries they forcefully intervene at any and all times in the legislative and administrative processes, leaving nothing to chance.
They also prudently keep a close and constant watch at all times on their elected representatives through the medium of the corporate press, trade press and private reporters. Many trade associations and corporations maintain these private reporters in Washington and the state capitals, women as well as men who move about, mingle, socialize, listen, observe and write long regular reports. In distant files dossiers build up on all or on the key men in relation to general or special interests. Into these dossiers goes everything, including gossip, carefully labeled as such. All of this information is useful when it comes to making nominating or appointive recommendations, campaign contributions, "reaching" a man or developing a public offensive against some recalcitrant official. In a very real sense officials are captives of these elements.
Public office, said Grover Cleveland, is a public trust. But big property owners, having large stakes, do not allow their trust officers, either in finance or politics, to get far out of sight. Heeding Jefferson, they believe in being vigilant and forehanded in defense of their profitable liberties. As to trust officers in finance, although they are carefully selected, thoroughly screened and carefully watched by stages through the years, they are nevertheless heavily bonded. This ultimate precaution makes sense because one can be most thoroughly betrayed only by someone one trusts most implicitly. One can never tell when any man may slip a neuron and dip into the till or cook the books. Strange chemical reactions sometimes take place when a trust officer encounters a nymph or a betting agent.
Public officers, however, are not ordinarily bonded. They can, though, be carefully watched, monitored, consulted, instructed, advised and personally assisted--in brief, surrounded. This they are, but only with respect to the specific felt interests of the propertied. The ordinary public, members of the labor force, cannot maintain such close vigilance and must depend on newspapers and the occasional reports of large organizations. Most of the electorate, in fact, does not even read these, preferring the sports pages, comics, crime sensations. Roll-call votes do not interest them unless they are about school prayers,
What the public learns about its representatives is only what appears in the newspapers or hostile pamphlets. It may learn to its dismay that their senator loves "the purr of a Cadillac, the genial clink of ice cubes late at night, the company of lovely ladies. . . . " 21 By means of such trivia, which might easily have applied to George Washington (who liked fast horses rather than Cadillacs but was fond of the ladies and a touch of the grape), home sentiment is raised to an angry simmer.
Any legislator who, perhaps seeking higher office, levels a lance at some large propertied interest, like the late Senator Estes Kefauver, instantly raises against himself formidable under-the-surface forces. And crusades such as Kefauver's against politically protected crime syndicates, high drug prices and monopoly are, beyond doubt, educational, informative and entertaining, and they do produce some temporary modifications. But in the long run matters settle back pretty much as they were, awaiting the appearance of another nine-day giant-killer.
Most people in politics--organization types--do not aim at being the Number One Man. And most who do, know that the spot is more easily attained deviously than by appearing as a fierce tribune of the people. For this reason crusaders are few and far between. But anyone in politics who feels neglected can always step into the crusading role. For this reason, among others, the propertied interests try to see that nobody feels neglected, everybody instead feels facilitated. "Don't stir up the animals," is the working maxim.
It should always be remembered that the man in office, even before he is approached by minions of the propertied, does not feel angry at any established interest. He is, usually, already in some degree a man of property himself, perhaps with glowing prospects ahead. While public promises he may rashly have made may be forgotten or disregarded, there being nobody immediately present to hold him to his duty, he is always in contact with those to whom he has made private promises. These must always be kept unless he is "let off the hook" for good reasons he can show.
The common erroneous assumption of the voters is that anyone of their ethnic or national-origin number, class, fraternal order, religion or region is sympathetically inclined toward them. Such a representative, they believe, "understands" them better. Yet, as the record shows, such voters have pretty consistently been let down in their day-to-day interests all the way down the line. Money cancels all prior obligations.
It is not necessarily that the politicians intend it this way, which is merely the way the ball bounces, the cookie crumbles, the rainbow disintegrates. It is simply that intelligent pressure and attention directed on them come mainly from the propertied. The nonpropertied are either absent or are interested chiefly in a long line of irrelevant nonsense like school prayers and ritual conformity to shopworn shibboleths. What can one do for people who believe their true friends are characters like the Reverend Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Archbishop Fulton Sheen and Francis Cardinal Spellman? It costs a politician or his moneyed supporters nothing to declare in favor of school prayers; it may sound commendable to many. But, whether the prayers are held or not, they make no difference as between poverty and affluence.
It should not be thought, however, that a tight leash is kept on officials by the propertied. For it is not. The watchers are always sensitively aware that officials must play peekaboo with the larger public and must sometimes vote or act in ways that are thoroughly unsound from a propertied point of view. Such grandstand action is seldom resented by the watchers unless it is felt to be gratuitous and avoidable.
But any elected official who consistently goes against the grain of the propertied interests is quickly tagged "anti-business," tantamount to being labeled an anti-party deviationist in the Soviet Union. The man so labeled has been marked for political destruction, will have to fight to the hilt for his political life. Anti-labor he may be and live, anti-immigrant, anti-farmer, anti-intellectual and even anti-veteran. But if he consistently gives the watchful lobbyists a hard time he must depend strictly on his own resources and ingenuity to gain and hold electoral support. Very few have succeeded at it.
Public Discontent: How Deep Is It?
Most Americans, most of the time, nevertheless live in a state of mild semicontent in the substandard habitations that compose substandard residential areas of the richest industrial country on earth. Where there is positive discontent it is usually not very thoroughgoing and could usually be easily removed. Almost any person questioned, of course, would usually like a better job, perhaps a more lively or varied one; somewhat better pay but not necessarily a great deal more; a somewhat better neighborhood to live in, perhaps less noise, soot and crowding in the region; somewhat better schools for the
children but nothing outstanding; a longer vacation; not necessarily shorter hours but perhaps somewhat lower taxes (but not very much lower); possibly somewhat lower prices in general; a new car (possibly a Thunderbird); a color television set or even two; maybe a little fishing shack in the country but nothing fancy; some new or additional electric appliances for the home; possibly less crowded transportation to and from work; some deferred dental work; and the like. There is little among an average American's visualized needs, including medical, that would not be taken care of by just a little more money. As to cultural quality there is little felt need. Culturally, everything is thought to be good enough.
I am not referring here, of course, to the lower 20 to 25 per cent, too stupefied by its condition to look for anything better or even to complain. Some at this level do remark plaintively, true enough, of rats infesting their scabrous homes or leaks in the roof and seem to hope that somebody will some day come and remove them. Unable to qualify for readily available jobs because of low intelligence, lack of training, psychic depression, uncouth manners or general debility (hereditary or acquired), lack of accurate information and personal neglect, often concentrated in regions to which they have earlier been enticed at temporarily good pay for now-abandoned mining or industrial processes under what economists blithely call Labor Mobility, they listlessly sit and vaguely hope that something new will turn up. What would suit them as well as anything else would be a first-class war for which they could get good wages making ammunition. In the meantime, forehanded fly-by-night, freedom-loving entrepreneurs extract from them whatever they may have in cash, usually public relief money, by means of conscientious overcharges for rent, food, clothing and dispensable gadgets dispensed on the basis of free misrepresentation.
Little noticed about the habitual poor is the fact that most of them are poorest of all in spirit. Most are from unusually large families in which they have been pointedly depreciated and "put down" by habitually irritated parents or, when such is not the case, they have come to see themselves as an operative cause of the harsh family condition-- another troublesome mouth to feed. Contrasting with the low sense of self-esteem among the poor is a correspondingly high sense of quiet self-esteem among the established rich, a reflex to their having usually been catered to by parents and servants and always spoken of as entitled to the best--in clothes, in food, in schools, in marriage, in trips to Europe and the like. The habitual rich do not place a high value upon self merely because they have money (as is often thought) but because in most cases they have been conditioned to being highly valued or overvalued by everybody around them. In many among poor as well as rich there is a noticeable reaction-formation to these basic feelings of value and nonvalue. Many of the poor react by assertively proclaiming their high value (which they do not really feel) and respond approvingly to the assertions of clergy, democratic ideologists and politicians about their superlative value: "God must love the poor because He made so many of them. " Some no doubt feel in their bones that it is a fairy tale--but it is a pleasant one. The rich, per contra, react by developing an outward mien of modesty, unassumingness, tentativeness and self- deprecation. Everybody remarks: "What a nice democratic guy! He'll talk with anybody, real friendly. Who'd ever think he was worth $100 million? A real gentleman. "
But, whether overassertive or submissive in attitude, most of the poor feel marked down. From birth onward their entire experience, with only unusual exceptions, has underlined and emphasized their lowliness and dispensability. Here, indeed, is the purely human difference between most of the rich and the poor, which F. Scott Fitzgerald correctly sensed in noting that the rich were different and which Ernest Hemingway failed to register when he observed in response that the only difference was that the rich had more money. Money, indeed, is the least of the differences, man for
man and pound for pound, between the rich and the poor, always allowing for exceptional cases on both sides of the fence. The broad difference lies in self-valuation-- too low in one case, too high in the other.
Two things the working American dreads but seldom talks about: loss of his health and loss of his job, which loss of health by itself usually entails. "Thank God for your health," it is commonly said reprovingly to complainers unless they are on their last legs.
Without the ownership of income-producing property, holding at most some small savings, some life insurance and possibly some equity in a mediocre mortgaged home, 90 per cent of Americans (as we have seen) are completely dependent on wages or salary. Relatively few hold jobs under tenure or long-term contract. If the jobs are removed the jugular vein is severed, not only on the means of livelihood but on self- esteem. Most Americans out of a job, no matter how they got that way, feel beaten. If joblessness continues very long they begin to be looked at askance by family and friends. Are they flat tires in the land of success? They begin to wonder themselves.
Full-scale employment is a prime basic aim of American public policy, supported by both parties. It has been recognized since the massive layoffs of the 1930's that here, if nowhere else, is a problem that could generate really big political upheaval. Although the labor force has grown with the population, unemployment remains and a number work part time as well as some at two jobs. Those the political managers have not been able to absorb into the labor force they have tried to provide for by (1) prolonged routine schooling, (2) the maintenance of a German-style standing army of more than three million men and (3) paid retirement at ages 62 to 65. Anyone retired, in the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe or in school is obviously not unemployed. Yet approximately one-third cannot qualify for military service for physical or mental reasons; many of the same group plus others cannot absorb available schooling--a problem.
By way of providing for the inexorably growing labor force, the political parties foster schemes of government-subsidized capital expansion at home-- economic growth"--and investment abroad--"economic imperialism"under military protection.
There is present, then, especially as population growth has not even been tardily curbed, an obviously explosive situation--what professors are prone to call "a dynamic configuration. " This last implies only that almost anything can happen.
As long as they are employed at fairly reasonable wages Americans, far less politicalized than their European counterparts, are sufficiently content. Only low prices for farmers, low wages or unemployment, as history shows, can put a noticeable number of them into serious political motion and make them start thinking, reading and talking about their plight. Even then their political expression in the form of dissident parties has never amounted to a considerable percentage of the popular vote. As long as there seems any hope simply of bottom-level, hand-to-mouth employment, they remain glued to one of the prefabricated parties. In this they are very much like the diligent Germans who, as history attests, will go any way politically that the jobs lie. Perhaps this is only reasonable.
Popular Gratitude
Americans, moderately content (except for certain minority blocs in times of crisis), are almost to a man grateful for living in such a marvelous political and economic situation, extending liberty and equal justice to all--the last in part a reflex attitude to propaganda that begins early in the public schools. Those rank-and-file Americans who do not feel grateful tend to feel guilty over their lack of gratitude for such a reputedly fine system.
The intense gratitude felt by many is well illustrated by a case cited by Drew Pearson: Nick Galinfianakis, a lawyer, Duke University professor and member of the North Carolina state legislature, stood as a candidate for Congress in 1966 against Smith Bagley, young grandson of R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco tycoon. Pearson noted that Galinfianakis got into politics when friends put up $18 to file his name as a candidate for the state legislature. Said Galinfianakis to Pearson:
"With a name as monstrous as mine I thought it was a joke. I didn't think anyone would vote for a name like mine. However, my father was born in Crete and had a sense of gratitude toward this country. He used to run water out of a spigot and say, 'Look at the clean water we have to drink. We couldn't get that back in Greece! ' My father ran a little hot dog stand, and he felt a deep obligation to this country. I feel that in the Legislature I've been discharging his obligation--and mine. " 22
This is far from an isolated instance but typifies, I have found, a general attitude especially among immigrant groups down to the third generation and among recent refugees from Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism. Second- and third-generation children of immigrant families have in millions of cases been told, when complaining of anything, to "be grateful you have a roof over your head," "be grateful you have something at all to eat. " "Be grateful. . . . "
In most of the immigrant families, and among many of the earlier native frontier families, there remains a family tradition about some sort of distant, life-sapping and perhaps nameless hardship that has been narrowly escaped. The descendants of those who escaped that hardship, whatever it was, are repeatedly told to be grateful for living in a country of so many opportunities, such wide liberties, such bountiful fields, such clean water, such blue skies. The children owe gratitude above all to parents for choosing such a country. Examples of poor boys who have "made good," from Rockefeller and Carnegie to Everett M. Dirksen and Lyndon B. Johnson, are often cited and the mass media can run the list up into the thousands, the ten thousands. But, and here is the dazzling moment of truth, they can't run it up to a million, not to 500,000, not perhaps even to 100,000. There are enough showcase examples of "successes," however, who have made it to become the biggest used-car-lot operator in all history, to overwhelm most dissenters. The unconvinced are merely carpers. Whatever is amiss, it is implied, will soon be rectified, perhaps after the next big election.
If times are bad or uncertain they will sooner or later improve.
It is the primaries that give the major parties their legal status. This is because the law of most states stipulates, with no broad dissent, that parties shall hold primaries participated in by party voters for nominating party candidates and officers. The only other way a candidate can get on the ballot is by petition, signed by a certain number of voters, and such a candidate does not run under a party label and has no established organization working for him.
"There could not be a greater mistake" than abstention from primaries, says the able Kent. It is this public abstention that gives the political machine its chance to control the situation, which it does through the precinct executives. "It actually permits the machine to run the country. " Here is the veritable foundation for the various legislative Establishments and for legislation biased in favor of the propertied. It rests on pervasive popular ineptitude.
As there is no other effective way for candidates to get on the ballot, the primary is the political key that unlocks all doors.
"It ought to be plain, then," says Kent, "that so long as the machine controls the primaries, it is in a position to limit the choice of the voters in the general election to its choice in the primaries. That is the real secret of its power, and, so long as it holds that power, it cannot be put out of business. Defeating its candidates in the general election not only does not break its grip, it often does not make even a dent in it. The only place a machine can be beaten is in the primaries. "
As for the candidate who gets on the ballot by petition, "Nothing short of a political tidal wave or revolution can carry an independent candidate to success," Kent points out. "He may pull sufficient votes from one side or the other to bring about the defeat of one of the regular party nominees, but his own election is a thing so rare as to be almost negligible. "
To the established party the primary, which validates it legally, is far more important than the election, which alone seems important to the public. Even if it loses the election, the party organization remains intact owing to patronage--federal, state, county and (over the long term) judicial--gained in past elections. The party organization can, indeed, survive many election defeats. Remaining organized, it is always a threat and draws some deferential attention from the ascendant party which, in fact, helps it out from time to time with "nonpolitical" and "bi-partisan" appointments. The legal parties have much in common, notably their tender joint concern and realistically proper solicitude for their angels, the propertied classes. There are many informal party intermediaries.
The Republican Party long survived in the Deep South despite endless election defeats, owing to its nourishment by federal patronage. Although it held primaries, where federal jobholders voted, it never won state elections or sent members to
Congress. The party delegates, however, often played a determining role in the choice of presidential and vice presidential candidates at Republican national conventions. They had something to sell--their organizational votes.
Although the party organization can survive a long series of election defeats, it could hardly survive a defeat in the primaries and could absolutely not survive two primary defeats. If twice defeated it would be clear that it had been outwitted by rival organizers or an intelligent public to whom recipients of party patronage would turn for protection. Organizers able to outwit an entrenched machine are men obviously more capable of outwitting the opposing party in the coming election.
Sometimes factions contend in primaries--the Old Guard, Reformers and independents. Each puts up a slate, for public office and party office. Each is committed to high-flown party principles, and contends that it can best implement those principles and achieve electoral success. On such a question the general voter in effect has the difficult job of a personnel manager for a large corporation. He must know principles and policy and he must pick out the electorally most plausible man. This, obviously, is usually hard to do. Information is lacking--all the men seem superficially good. If one seems better in some ways the others seem better in other ways. Whose side are they really on? What to do? Here the average voter, who isn't versed anyhow in the ins and outs of the situation, throws up his hands. The primary and its ends baffle him and he stays away. Yet here is the very heart of the electoral process and from now on nature takes its course.
Generally the Old Guard wins owing to its control of patronage. If enough patronage holders are discontented, owing to what the Reformers call poor leadership, they may vote with the Reformers or Independents. In this case party leadership changes, perhaps party policy. What change, actually, has been wrought? Usually it is nothing of broad importance--perhaps only a change from Anglo-Saxon to Irish candidates, from Irish to Italian, from Italian to Puerto Rican. In a changing electoral district the new candidates have more "political sex appeal," are more likely to entice more boobish voters.
An important feature of party primaries often is that they not only nominate party candidates but also party officials: county and state committeemen who elect chairmen. The party chairmen may or may not hold public office, but they are the main part of the continuing party machinery. They are, legally, the party, and they participate in party decisions, convey party views to officeholders. They are men who have immediate access to executive officials, legislators and judges. What they have to say is always very, very important, not to be lightly disregarded.
As Kent points out, by not participating in the primaries the general voter loses at least 50 per cent of the effectiveness of his franchise. He thereby assumes his actual political status--a second-class citizen. As few participate in primaries it may seem, by this token, that virtually everybody is a second-class citizen. But this is not so, for there are those, nonvoters in primaries, who recapture the first-class citizenship at a later stage by contributing to political campaign funds. They "buy in. " They are politically first class. They are rich people in a plutocracy.
Nobody has chased the common man away from the primaries. He just does not feel up to participating. His democratic franchise here he finds just too much to handle. He does not, in fact, have anything to contribute; he is politically empty. As a result, the party apparatus and candidates on both tickets belong to professionals, often men never heard of in the community, usually men of limited outlook. They function behind the scenes. They have the party power. They are American versions of Gromyko, Kosygin, Brezhnev et al. 14
The party managers must find men ready, able and willing to campaign and at the same time men who will be acceptable to a broad, culturally differentiated, intellectually and emotionally low-grade public--Mencken's boobs, Barnum's suckers, Kipling's "muddied oafs. " The party managers are, contrary to common supposition, restricted to a very narrow potential group, with characteristics shared by less than 5 per cent of the population.
Men selected as candidates must, first, have independent financial means or be in occupations that will permit long leaves of absence. Persons dependent on an assured wage or salary would, even if approached, turn down the offer because they could not take a chance on being out of a job if they lost the election, nor could they take a chance on not winning the next election in two to four years. So, most of the labor force is automatically self-excluded. True, here and there somebody at times takes the long chance; but not many. Again, scientists, physicians, surgeons, scholars, engineers cannot be had because even if they won election they would not be able to keep abreast in their professions; only men willing to abandon their specialized life work might be obtained and they are virtually nonexistent among high-level practitioners. Again, successful corporation executives, unless retired, cannot be induced to run because if they won they would be automatically excluded from the line of corporate promotion and extravagant remuneration and if they lost they would probably be out of any job. They would be "controversial. " As it turns out, most of the highly capable men in the country are in sober fact not available to stand as candidates for public office. Either personal economics or professional commitments keep them out. 15 Yet, the inferior types that predominate in politics seem to satisfy the propertied. One can easily make deals with them. They are purchasable.
The political manager, then, must go shopping under conditions of extreme scarcity for prospective candidates. He finds most of them among young lawyers, men with partners willing to see them take long leaves of absence and who, if defeated, can return to the practice of law. Thus Matthews found that among Democrats in the Senate, our supreme political body, 63 per cent were lawyers; among Republicans, 45 per cent. Those who defined themselves as businessmen were 17 per cent among the Democrats and 40 per cent among Republicans. Among the Democrats 7 per cent were farmers, 7 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals; among the Republicans 8 per cent were farmers, 1 per cent professors and 5 per cent other professionals. 16
The up-and-coming men in politics, then, must be lawyers, men of independent means or in some business they can run by remote control as an adjunct to politics. The lawyers chosen are usually not at the top of their profession either as pleaders, brief specialists or jurisconsults but are men seeking to make their way, hopeful that their political participation will bring big retainers to their law firms--and it will! With nice corporate retainers in the office, however, these public officials develop a sound procorporate point of view. While rhetorically they may swing far to the left or right, when it comes to voting and deciding, they must see things as the corporations do. They must then follow the corporate "party line. " They are at least corporate fellow travelers.
People in Politics: Pop Politics
People in politics all, contrary to popular supposition, work very hard. It is common for a citizen to walk into some public building and, noticing its rather soiled condition and easygoing atmosphere, make an invidious comparison with the trim premises of a tightly run corporation. Here is mute evidence of the difference, he thinks, between shoddy government enterprise and efficient private enterprise. Bank pens work smoothly, post office pens sputter.
The rank and file in the political organizations put in long hours and work hard, often at two or three jobs-and most of them put money in the bank every week, usually sufficiently honest money. Many of their tasks are boring. Others would not perform them. But, in some measure, they carry with them a heady something called power.
In the selection of candidates, however, the political organizer must be careful to select men who will not offend large blocks of voters, As experience has shown, the average mentally handicapped or boobish citizen, his brain in a scramble, attaches vast importance in candidates to religion, race or ethnic grouping, national origin, sex and generally conventional conformist outlook and behavior. He feels grimly punitive toward any sort of deviation from a fixed norm, a stereotype, in his mind. He wants, above all, no independent thinkers--freaks who emit horrible propositions about the importance of intelligence tests, read books--or use three syllable words. 17
Politicians oblige. If the voters wanted men who spoke Sanskrit, dressed in kilts or used the language of mathematics, the politicians would procure them.
Voters, it has been found, are also partial to men against women, married men against bachelors, fathers as against the childless, the personable against the less personable, the fluent and expansive against the reflective the generally reassuring, humorous and blandishing against the fellow who raises odd difficulties. They prefer Gorgias to Socrates. They will not, as politicians know, take anybody who lectures to them or even indirectly appears to be lecturing to them, although this is precisely what they need before anything else. They need hard instruction, prolonged, grueling, on the line.
The party leaders, to give them credit, do the best they can in selecting candidates. They do the best they can, too, in seeking to detect hidden aberrancies in a new man, such as penchants for reading, concert-going, tennis-playing or a compulsive desire to speak the exact unvarnished truth at all times--all of which in the budding statesman would spell trouble with the booboisie.
The Role of Money
With the organization now functioning smoothly, something else is needed: money. Here is where the affluent regain their first-class citizenship.
If the organization has not been very successful it must depend on its own resources, mainly "kickbacks" from its successful candidates and appointees. But with victory comes prosperity in the form of campaign contributions, always and almost only from the affluent and well positionedthe wealthy, corporation executives and lawyers, government contractors, brokers, influence-seekers, friends of the candidates, etc. Here and there trade unions are heard from, but for the most part the labor force is now quiescent, not in sight. It is at work, out at the beach or watching television.
Because it is almost entirely the affluent that put up party campaign funds, knowing that some lucre is going to stick to the fingers of political managers, we see here the reason both the Republican and Democratic Parties are, basically and primarily, the parties of the propertied classes--the corporations, the trade associations, the real estate lobbies, the millionaires, the big rich and the super-rich. This is the simple, nonscandalous fact. Money, big money, rules the roost from now on.
Leftist agitators have thundered about this thousands of times from soap boxes at gaping hinds, as though this ought not to be and as though it was sinful. This, as it happens, is the way babies are born in politics--or by even rougher methods as under totalitarianism. They are not brought in by the stork.
The electoral process, owing to the childish nature and behavior of the public, is expensive, and is really paid for by the public in elevated prices. Much is at stake in the
public policy that will be made by officeholders--who will pay most of the taxes in an increasingly expensive welfare-warfare state, who will get contracts of $100 million, $500 million, $1 billion, where $200-million roads and dams will go and where they won't go, etc. This is obviously a game (as most participants see it) for big stakes, far from the pitifully petty concerns of the electorate about the religion of the candidates, whether they are divorced and whether they are hetero-, homo-, bi- or a-sexual.
As the public has the franchise, almost without restriction except for Negroes, if it does not like the way matters are arranged all some eighty million members of the labor force need do is (1) participate intelligently in all primaries and (2) contribute about $5 a year to their party, amounting to about $400 million a year in all. If it did this, the public might have more to say in determining policy--if it knew anything at all about policy.
This is an easy prescription but hard to apply to an engine with some eighty million separate parts. Not only does the public consist of many parts but many of these parts are mutually and irrationally antagonistic on grounds irrelevant to the welfare of each. Their various ethnic, religious, nationalistic, regional, occupational, class, caste and cultural differences have in most cases nothing to do with their personal and mutual welfare. Yet they enjoy indulging these irrelevant infantile predilections as though they mattered--and politicians are solicitously attentive. Where the constituency would not like a Ruritanian on the ticket there is no Ruritanian. Where a Ruritanian would help, there he is. Is he pro-bono publico? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it is electorally irrelevant. And so with all other types.
If the voters participated intelligently in the primaries, their spokesmen would need to find truly representative candidates--not too easy to do. Most likely persons would turn them down for more agreeable pastures.
In any event, the rank-and-file citizen prefers to accept the ready-made pre-financed, pre-fixed parties, in which in most cases he is permanently enrolled as in a religious brotherhood. Most voters ploddingly vote straight tickets, for one party, year after year. They are, as anyone can see, creatures of easy habit with little genuine political discernment. One can count most of their votes in advance. Politicians do.
But here, as elsewhere, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Although each of the major parties is usually (except when befogged by ideology) alert to whatever may transiently pull the handicapped boobs to their banners, they deliver in major matters, always and invariably, for their main financial supporters. Considering the way everybody performs politically and thinks privately, this is the only way it could possibly be. The idea of democracy first killed itself in ancient Greece. In modern times it did it again in the United States.
Left and Right
Much is made by such writers as Professor Seymour M. Lipset of Left and Right and of which of the major parties is the friend of the common man and which of Big Business. 18 In these respects, in fact, there is little to choose. The Democratic Party came by its latter-day reputation as a peculiar friend of the common man because of its purely sensible emphasis since 1932 on federal programs in sagging domestic affairs and on adjusting to some of the dislocations brought about by technological change. Earlier, this one-time party of the southern slave owners had made friends in the North by welcoming the European refugees of the immigration, each of whom had a vote, most of whom were politically snubbed by the well-washed Whigs and Republicans.
The Republican Party has tended, impolitically, to decry recent Democratic emphases and has consequently lost majority support, which it held from 1860 to 1932, as long as
it was able to guarantee low-paid jobs. What money the workers were not paid in those days went, in general, into the sprouting fortunes and for the most part now rests comfortably in trust. The benign Carnegie paid $10 a week for seventy hours and more in the withering heat of the steel mills--a humanist!
But the aims of both political parties, declared and achieved, are to maintain the existing politico-economic system and the same relative distribution of its rewards. This is all Franklin D. Roosevelt ever said he sought to do and all he really did. His main promise was to get the system back in operation and this he did so thoroughly that the 1960's are little different in their externals from the 1920's.
All this is inevitable, as it must be when given the general low-level, don't-know- where-I'm-going-but-I'm-on-my-way outlook of the common citizen. He's bound to be short-changed.
The Dirty End of the Stick
Just what the common man gets by voting the prearranged preferences offered him in elections we may see by looking at the case of Negro Congressman William L. Dawson of Chicago.
Dawson's 90 per cent Negro First Congressional District contains one out of every three Negroes in the state of Illinois. Dawson has ruled it as a private fief for 24 years, and cooperative fellow politicians have continued to change the shape of the district as the Negro population keeps swelling and moving into white neighborhoods. If you are a Negro on the South Side, and you need a job, a favor or a bail bondsman, you see someone from Dawson's organization. His record in Congress is shabby; not a single Chicago journalist can remember a piece of legislation that bears his name. It doesn't matter.
"This man is not interested in politics as a means of helping his constituents," one political writer said. "What he is interested in is staying in power. "
Dawson in power has obtained for his faithful constituents the worst housing conditions in the city, a soaring crime rate, an increase in heroin addiction and the spread of teenage gangs who flock together in vicious packs, preying on strangers, extorting money from businessmen, and killing each other out of boredom. It is a record so marvellous that it should qualify Dawson for an ambassadorship to Haiti. . . .
Dawson stays in power at an age when most men are writing memoirs because he commands an organization that makes good old Tammany Hall seem like a congregation of Ethical Culture teachers. Every one of the 446 precincts in the district has its own captain and two assistants, and if possible a worker for every street. There are seven wards in the district, and each ward office is responsible for controlling the precinct captains. The seven wards in turn answer to the people who run Dawson's own Second Ward office.
Dawson has plenty of what Chicagoans call "clout. " He is vice chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, and Mayor Daley understands perfectly just how important Dawson and his organization are in the general scheme of Chicago politics. In 1963, Daley won reelection by 139,000. Dawson-controlled Negro wards contributed 115,000 of those votes. 19
Representative Adam Clayton Powell, the Negro clergyman-sybarite, for more than twenty years ran a similar district in New York City.
The point here is not to highlight invidiously Negro personalities but to cite two extreme cases as models of what most people more or less get by voting along ethnic, religious, regional and national-origins lines. In almost every case of such widespread
voting, it can be shown that the constituents in the home district or state are in some way getting the dirty end of the stick, not perhaps so blatantly as under Dawson and Powell but perceptibly nevertheless. They get it especially in taxes but also in many other ways. Catholics are rooked by Catholics, Protestants by Protestants, Irish by Irish, Negroes by Negroes, and so on, all very democratically.
In the better-grade suburban, city "silk-stocking," Jewish and advanced farm districts it is different. Only in a diluted sense are the alert constituents there ever let down. For the most part they are served as they intelligently if narrowly understand their interests.
An inflexible rule can be stated here: The further one moves down the socio- economic-cultural scale the less the sweet-talking political organizations deliver on behalf of the broad constituencies, which is one reason politicians are repeatedly found by pollsters to be in popular ill repute. People realize that, somehow, they are short- changed. But it is defective understanding in most of the people themselves in attempting to utilize the popular franchise that is considerably to blame, although plenty of teachers have offered to instruct them. Boobs will not heed, however. They just do not seem to get the point.
They think it's great to be a Ruritanian and a communicant of the Hocus-pocus Church.
Instances of Boobishness
As one out of many thousand instances of widespread boobishness one may cite the abrasively intrusive surveillance by the public over the private life of officials. A senator, photographed at a wedding holding a champagne glass, sought to have the picture suppressed owing to the painful impression it would make on constituents; he would not have minded if it had been a glass of whisky. 20 Deviations from local folkways are not tolerated in politicians by most American constituencies.
What can be done for a public who insist upon bringing irrelevant criteria to bear in voting for officials and who decline to participate in the basic task of seeking out and supporting suitable candidates?
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York is a case very much in point. Professor Lipset as of 1960 thought it more likely "that Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican Governor of New York, will ultimately prove to be the true representative of the revived pattern of direct participation in politics by members of the upper class-participation through their traditional party, the Republican" rather than upper-class people like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, G. Mennen Williams, John F. Kennedy and Averell Harriman in the Democratic Party. At the time all politicians conceded that Rockefeller, had he forced his own nomination as he could have, would have beaten John F. Kennedy hands down.
Yet Lipset's Republican hope was buried in political ashes for years owing largely to his subsequent divorce and remarriage. By reason of this purely personal action, which could not affect a man's managerial capability, a large section of the small-town Republican Party followership turned against him. As far as the presidency is concerned, Rockefeller was long pronounced dead by politicians but was at least tentatively exhumed as 1968 approached. Now many sophisticated observers such as Walter Lippmann and Gore Vidal began looking upon him as the nation's single hope of escape from Johnsonian realpolitik.
Wealthy party supporters proceed quite otherwise. If a man votes right in committees, on the legislative floor, makes the big decisions in favor of property, they are behind him no matter what he does privately. They could not care less if he maintained a string of supple mistresses of all colors, shapes, religions and sizes and smoked opium. All that would bother them about this sort of thing in a sound legislator or decision maker
would be the danger of the public getting wind of it. But the man's private life, if he was politically on the beam, would be strictly his own business. He could listen to string quartets and detest baseball for all they cared. He could even be civilized! --the ultimate of extreme democratic tolerance.
The common run of voter, a person nobody pays any attention to most of his life, when it comes to casting his ballot suddenly feels that he has some power: Intolerant of all differences, he intends to use his paltry power to the hilt. As anticipated by the politicians, he looks the candidates over and compares them with a mental cartoon of the perfect philistine and asks himself these questions: Is he baptized? Does he belong to the right Christian sect? Does he go to church regularly? What is his race? Does he show the least sign of being superior, uppity, in any way, such as by seriously using long words? Does he seem to enjoy himself in some unorthodox way?
Has he at any time stepped out of a petty conventional mold? Does he ever say anything original? The wrong answers to such questions, as politicians know, will usually swing large decisive blocks of votes and will cause ordinary boobs to break party regularity.
Aside from party regulars, most voters, in the belief of politicians, vote punitively. What they are voting against, furthermore, is not ordinarily some disliked policy but, usually, some personal characteristic of the man. He may, like Adlai Stevenson, be too witty. In this way the boobs, calling upon all other boobs to join with them, work off a good deal of their frustrated hostility. What their vote will do for them taxwise they have no idea. They don't know most of them are already paying 50 to 80 per cent more taxes under Democratic "leftism" than they ought to be paying under an equitable arrangement.
For some time to come, Negro politicians are going to have an easy task snaring boobish Negro votes. They are, borrowing a leaf from southern white colleagues, simply going to talk tough about the white man. They are not, however, going to overcome the white man. They are going to make deals with him, for their personal benefit, behind the scenes. Their Negro constituents meanwhile are going to continue more or less to eat humble pie in one form or other, like their white fellow-democrats. Adam Clayton Powell and William L. Dawson and the late Oscar De Priest of Chicago are merely precursors of a long line of coming Negro politicians who, under enlarging liberalized attitudes toward Negroes, will have found the road to Upward Social Mobility. They will have money in the bank, possibly a lively white mistress--or two-- under the bed.
As to his ethnicity or national origin a politician cannot usually deceive his public. If he is a Ruritanian he has to admit it and bray loudly that he is inordinately proud of it, thus securing the votes at least of nitwit Ruritanians. On the score of religion, except for sect, it is another matter. Being for the most part intelligent men, most politicians, although conspicuous church-goers, unquestionably have no more conventional religious belief than Lenin, Marx or Robert Ingersoll. True, most of them probably believe also that organized religion is a good thing for keeping the boobs in line, joining here the thought of Plato in his Laws. But it is almost a certainty that, tested under the influence of a truth serum, most politicians would admit they themselves had little or no religious belief. Indeed, every significant action of their lives shows most of them are devoid even of natural piety. Not only do most of them have little genuine respect for people, hesitating not at sending tender youth into trackless jungles on sleeveless errands of death; they clearly show they have no respect even for the universe; they do not hesitate to pollute the atmosphere with lethal dust. They are simply low-grade
technicians, in outlook so many plumbers (although it is probably an insult to hardworking plumbers to say so).
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Reasonably sure of most of their men after election, the propertied elements-- inheritors, nouveaux riches and their many power-elite agents--unlike the general public do not sit back and wait to see what is brewing in the halls of government. Through lobbyists and other intermediaries they forcefully intervene at any and all times in the legislative and administrative processes, leaving nothing to chance.
They also prudently keep a close and constant watch at all times on their elected representatives through the medium of the corporate press, trade press and private reporters. Many trade associations and corporations maintain these private reporters in Washington and the state capitals, women as well as men who move about, mingle, socialize, listen, observe and write long regular reports. In distant files dossiers build up on all or on the key men in relation to general or special interests. Into these dossiers goes everything, including gossip, carefully labeled as such. All of this information is useful when it comes to making nominating or appointive recommendations, campaign contributions, "reaching" a man or developing a public offensive against some recalcitrant official. In a very real sense officials are captives of these elements.
Public office, said Grover Cleveland, is a public trust. But big property owners, having large stakes, do not allow their trust officers, either in finance or politics, to get far out of sight. Heeding Jefferson, they believe in being vigilant and forehanded in defense of their profitable liberties. As to trust officers in finance, although they are carefully selected, thoroughly screened and carefully watched by stages through the years, they are nevertheless heavily bonded. This ultimate precaution makes sense because one can be most thoroughly betrayed only by someone one trusts most implicitly. One can never tell when any man may slip a neuron and dip into the till or cook the books. Strange chemical reactions sometimes take place when a trust officer encounters a nymph or a betting agent.
Public officers, however, are not ordinarily bonded. They can, though, be carefully watched, monitored, consulted, instructed, advised and personally assisted--in brief, surrounded. This they are, but only with respect to the specific felt interests of the propertied. The ordinary public, members of the labor force, cannot maintain such close vigilance and must depend on newspapers and the occasional reports of large organizations. Most of the electorate, in fact, does not even read these, preferring the sports pages, comics, crime sensations. Roll-call votes do not interest them unless they are about school prayers,
What the public learns about its representatives is only what appears in the newspapers or hostile pamphlets. It may learn to its dismay that their senator loves "the purr of a Cadillac, the genial clink of ice cubes late at night, the company of lovely ladies. . . . " 21 By means of such trivia, which might easily have applied to George Washington (who liked fast horses rather than Cadillacs but was fond of the ladies and a touch of the grape), home sentiment is raised to an angry simmer.
Any legislator who, perhaps seeking higher office, levels a lance at some large propertied interest, like the late Senator Estes Kefauver, instantly raises against himself formidable under-the-surface forces. And crusades such as Kefauver's against politically protected crime syndicates, high drug prices and monopoly are, beyond doubt, educational, informative and entertaining, and they do produce some temporary modifications. But in the long run matters settle back pretty much as they were, awaiting the appearance of another nine-day giant-killer.
Most people in politics--organization types--do not aim at being the Number One Man. And most who do, know that the spot is more easily attained deviously than by appearing as a fierce tribune of the people. For this reason crusaders are few and far between. But anyone in politics who feels neglected can always step into the crusading role. For this reason, among others, the propertied interests try to see that nobody feels neglected, everybody instead feels facilitated. "Don't stir up the animals," is the working maxim.
It should always be remembered that the man in office, even before he is approached by minions of the propertied, does not feel angry at any established interest. He is, usually, already in some degree a man of property himself, perhaps with glowing prospects ahead. While public promises he may rashly have made may be forgotten or disregarded, there being nobody immediately present to hold him to his duty, he is always in contact with those to whom he has made private promises. These must always be kept unless he is "let off the hook" for good reasons he can show.
The common erroneous assumption of the voters is that anyone of their ethnic or national-origin number, class, fraternal order, religion or region is sympathetically inclined toward them. Such a representative, they believe, "understands" them better. Yet, as the record shows, such voters have pretty consistently been let down in their day-to-day interests all the way down the line. Money cancels all prior obligations.
It is not necessarily that the politicians intend it this way, which is merely the way the ball bounces, the cookie crumbles, the rainbow disintegrates. It is simply that intelligent pressure and attention directed on them come mainly from the propertied. The nonpropertied are either absent or are interested chiefly in a long line of irrelevant nonsense like school prayers and ritual conformity to shopworn shibboleths. What can one do for people who believe their true friends are characters like the Reverend Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Archbishop Fulton Sheen and Francis Cardinal Spellman? It costs a politician or his moneyed supporters nothing to declare in favor of school prayers; it may sound commendable to many. But, whether the prayers are held or not, they make no difference as between poverty and affluence.
It should not be thought, however, that a tight leash is kept on officials by the propertied. For it is not. The watchers are always sensitively aware that officials must play peekaboo with the larger public and must sometimes vote or act in ways that are thoroughly unsound from a propertied point of view. Such grandstand action is seldom resented by the watchers unless it is felt to be gratuitous and avoidable.
But any elected official who consistently goes against the grain of the propertied interests is quickly tagged "anti-business," tantamount to being labeled an anti-party deviationist in the Soviet Union. The man so labeled has been marked for political destruction, will have to fight to the hilt for his political life. Anti-labor he may be and live, anti-immigrant, anti-farmer, anti-intellectual and even anti-veteran. But if he consistently gives the watchful lobbyists a hard time he must depend strictly on his own resources and ingenuity to gain and hold electoral support. Very few have succeeded at it.
Public Discontent: How Deep Is It?
Most Americans, most of the time, nevertheless live in a state of mild semicontent in the substandard habitations that compose substandard residential areas of the richest industrial country on earth. Where there is positive discontent it is usually not very thoroughgoing and could usually be easily removed. Almost any person questioned, of course, would usually like a better job, perhaps a more lively or varied one; somewhat better pay but not necessarily a great deal more; a somewhat better neighborhood to live in, perhaps less noise, soot and crowding in the region; somewhat better schools for the
children but nothing outstanding; a longer vacation; not necessarily shorter hours but perhaps somewhat lower taxes (but not very much lower); possibly somewhat lower prices in general; a new car (possibly a Thunderbird); a color television set or even two; maybe a little fishing shack in the country but nothing fancy; some new or additional electric appliances for the home; possibly less crowded transportation to and from work; some deferred dental work; and the like. There is little among an average American's visualized needs, including medical, that would not be taken care of by just a little more money. As to cultural quality there is little felt need. Culturally, everything is thought to be good enough.
I am not referring here, of course, to the lower 20 to 25 per cent, too stupefied by its condition to look for anything better or even to complain. Some at this level do remark plaintively, true enough, of rats infesting their scabrous homes or leaks in the roof and seem to hope that somebody will some day come and remove them. Unable to qualify for readily available jobs because of low intelligence, lack of training, psychic depression, uncouth manners or general debility (hereditary or acquired), lack of accurate information and personal neglect, often concentrated in regions to which they have earlier been enticed at temporarily good pay for now-abandoned mining or industrial processes under what economists blithely call Labor Mobility, they listlessly sit and vaguely hope that something new will turn up. What would suit them as well as anything else would be a first-class war for which they could get good wages making ammunition. In the meantime, forehanded fly-by-night, freedom-loving entrepreneurs extract from them whatever they may have in cash, usually public relief money, by means of conscientious overcharges for rent, food, clothing and dispensable gadgets dispensed on the basis of free misrepresentation.
Little noticed about the habitual poor is the fact that most of them are poorest of all in spirit. Most are from unusually large families in which they have been pointedly depreciated and "put down" by habitually irritated parents or, when such is not the case, they have come to see themselves as an operative cause of the harsh family condition-- another troublesome mouth to feed. Contrasting with the low sense of self-esteem among the poor is a correspondingly high sense of quiet self-esteem among the established rich, a reflex to their having usually been catered to by parents and servants and always spoken of as entitled to the best--in clothes, in food, in schools, in marriage, in trips to Europe and the like. The habitual rich do not place a high value upon self merely because they have money (as is often thought) but because in most cases they have been conditioned to being highly valued or overvalued by everybody around them. In many among poor as well as rich there is a noticeable reaction-formation to these basic feelings of value and nonvalue. Many of the poor react by assertively proclaiming their high value (which they do not really feel) and respond approvingly to the assertions of clergy, democratic ideologists and politicians about their superlative value: "God must love the poor because He made so many of them. " Some no doubt feel in their bones that it is a fairy tale--but it is a pleasant one. The rich, per contra, react by developing an outward mien of modesty, unassumingness, tentativeness and self- deprecation. Everybody remarks: "What a nice democratic guy! He'll talk with anybody, real friendly. Who'd ever think he was worth $100 million? A real gentleman. "
But, whether overassertive or submissive in attitude, most of the poor feel marked down. From birth onward their entire experience, with only unusual exceptions, has underlined and emphasized their lowliness and dispensability. Here, indeed, is the purely human difference between most of the rich and the poor, which F. Scott Fitzgerald correctly sensed in noting that the rich were different and which Ernest Hemingway failed to register when he observed in response that the only difference was that the rich had more money. Money, indeed, is the least of the differences, man for
man and pound for pound, between the rich and the poor, always allowing for exceptional cases on both sides of the fence. The broad difference lies in self-valuation-- too low in one case, too high in the other.
Two things the working American dreads but seldom talks about: loss of his health and loss of his job, which loss of health by itself usually entails. "Thank God for your health," it is commonly said reprovingly to complainers unless they are on their last legs.
Without the ownership of income-producing property, holding at most some small savings, some life insurance and possibly some equity in a mediocre mortgaged home, 90 per cent of Americans (as we have seen) are completely dependent on wages or salary. Relatively few hold jobs under tenure or long-term contract. If the jobs are removed the jugular vein is severed, not only on the means of livelihood but on self- esteem. Most Americans out of a job, no matter how they got that way, feel beaten. If joblessness continues very long they begin to be looked at askance by family and friends. Are they flat tires in the land of success? They begin to wonder themselves.
Full-scale employment is a prime basic aim of American public policy, supported by both parties. It has been recognized since the massive layoffs of the 1930's that here, if nowhere else, is a problem that could generate really big political upheaval. Although the labor force has grown with the population, unemployment remains and a number work part time as well as some at two jobs. Those the political managers have not been able to absorb into the labor force they have tried to provide for by (1) prolonged routine schooling, (2) the maintenance of a German-style standing army of more than three million men and (3) paid retirement at ages 62 to 65. Anyone retired, in the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe or in school is obviously not unemployed. Yet approximately one-third cannot qualify for military service for physical or mental reasons; many of the same group plus others cannot absorb available schooling--a problem.
By way of providing for the inexorably growing labor force, the political parties foster schemes of government-subsidized capital expansion at home-- economic growth"--and investment abroad--"economic imperialism"under military protection.
There is present, then, especially as population growth has not even been tardily curbed, an obviously explosive situation--what professors are prone to call "a dynamic configuration. " This last implies only that almost anything can happen.
As long as they are employed at fairly reasonable wages Americans, far less politicalized than their European counterparts, are sufficiently content. Only low prices for farmers, low wages or unemployment, as history shows, can put a noticeable number of them into serious political motion and make them start thinking, reading and talking about their plight. Even then their political expression in the form of dissident parties has never amounted to a considerable percentage of the popular vote. As long as there seems any hope simply of bottom-level, hand-to-mouth employment, they remain glued to one of the prefabricated parties. In this they are very much like the diligent Germans who, as history attests, will go any way politically that the jobs lie. Perhaps this is only reasonable.
Popular Gratitude
Americans, moderately content (except for certain minority blocs in times of crisis), are almost to a man grateful for living in such a marvelous political and economic situation, extending liberty and equal justice to all--the last in part a reflex attitude to propaganda that begins early in the public schools. Those rank-and-file Americans who do not feel grateful tend to feel guilty over their lack of gratitude for such a reputedly fine system.
The intense gratitude felt by many is well illustrated by a case cited by Drew Pearson: Nick Galinfianakis, a lawyer, Duke University professor and member of the North Carolina state legislature, stood as a candidate for Congress in 1966 against Smith Bagley, young grandson of R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco tycoon. Pearson noted that Galinfianakis got into politics when friends put up $18 to file his name as a candidate for the state legislature. Said Galinfianakis to Pearson:
"With a name as monstrous as mine I thought it was a joke. I didn't think anyone would vote for a name like mine. However, my father was born in Crete and had a sense of gratitude toward this country. He used to run water out of a spigot and say, 'Look at the clean water we have to drink. We couldn't get that back in Greece! ' My father ran a little hot dog stand, and he felt a deep obligation to this country. I feel that in the Legislature I've been discharging his obligation--and mine. " 22
This is far from an isolated instance but typifies, I have found, a general attitude especially among immigrant groups down to the third generation and among recent refugees from Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism. Second- and third-generation children of immigrant families have in millions of cases been told, when complaining of anything, to "be grateful you have a roof over your head," "be grateful you have something at all to eat. " "Be grateful. . . . "
In most of the immigrant families, and among many of the earlier native frontier families, there remains a family tradition about some sort of distant, life-sapping and perhaps nameless hardship that has been narrowly escaped. The descendants of those who escaped that hardship, whatever it was, are repeatedly told to be grateful for living in a country of so many opportunities, such wide liberties, such bountiful fields, such clean water, such blue skies. The children owe gratitude above all to parents for choosing such a country. Examples of poor boys who have "made good," from Rockefeller and Carnegie to Everett M. Dirksen and Lyndon B. Johnson, are often cited and the mass media can run the list up into the thousands, the ten thousands. But, and here is the dazzling moment of truth, they can't run it up to a million, not to 500,000, not perhaps even to 100,000. There are enough showcase examples of "successes," however, who have made it to become the biggest used-car-lot operator in all history, to overwhelm most dissenters. The unconvinced are merely carpers. Whatever is amiss, it is implied, will soon be rectified, perhaps after the next big election.
If times are bad or uncertain they will sooner or later improve.
