The new democracy

Front matter

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Preface

I SHOULD like to supplement this book by an account of the great mdustrial and poUtical changes of the last two years, changes which form a part of The New Democracy herein sketched. Perhaps, however, it is better to leave the work as it was originally issued and to add nothing but my gratitude for its friendly reception by many thousands of readers.

Book I. The Evolution Of The Plutocracy

I. The Disenchantment op America ,

n. The Shadow-democracy of 1776 .

IIL The Conquest of the Continent

IV. The Individualistic Spirit of America

V. The Sovereign American and his State

VI. The Plutocratic Reorganization

VII. Our Resplendent Plutocracy

VIII. The Plutocracy in Politics

IX. The Plutocracy and Public Opinion

X. Plutocracy and Efficiency

BOOK n. THE BEGINNINGS OF A DEMOCRACY

XI. The New Social Spirit 156

XII. Democracy and the Class War 169

XIII. Democracy and the Social Surplus ..... 191

XIV. The Levels of Democratic Striving .... 209 XV. The Gathering Forces of the Democracy . • . 235

XVI. The Tactics of the Democracy , 255

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X TABLE OP CONTENTS

OHAPTKB PA«B

XVII, The Industrial Program of the Democracy . 278

XVIII. The Political Pboorau op the Democracy . . . 208

XIX. The Social Program of the Democracy . . . 820

XX. Can a Democracy Endure? 348

I

THE NEW DEMOCEACT

I

Chapter I The Disenchantment Of America

AMERICA to-day is in a somber, soul-questioning mood. We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our social conceptions. We are hastily testing all our poUtical ideals. We are profoundly disenchanted with the fruits of a century of independence.

Our visitors from Europe in the early days of independence were obsessed by the unique significance of our democracy. To Uberty or to its excesses they ascribed all American qualities, customs, and accidents. Our native apologists laid equal emphasis upon democracy. In half-ludicrous, half-tragic oratioijg, they acclaimed the rule of the people as the essence and import of the new Republic. America was to be the eternal land of liberty, the refuge of the world^s oppressed, the mentor of Europe. The chosen people of the West were to teach the true creed of democracy, in obedience to a divine command, as explicit as that laid upon the ancient folk of Israel.

Four generations have passed since Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. We have survived the early days of poverty and interstate bickering. We have grown in wealth, power, and prestige. We have issued triumphantly from a great civil war, which put an end forever to chattel slavery. Our institutions have not become less popular; our patriotism,

B 1

2 THE NEW DEMOCRAClr

though less fervid, is perhaps deeper; our hope of equality is not quite dead.

Nevertheless, to millions of men there has come a deep and bitter disillusionment. We are no longer the sole guardians of the Ark of the Covenant. Europe does not learn at our feet the facile lessons of democracy, but in some respects has become our teacher. Foreign observers describe our institutions with a galling lack of enthusiasm, and visitors from monarchical lands applaud their native liberty, while condoHng with us over our political '' bosses, '' our railroad '' kings," and our Senate " oligarchies." A swelling tide of native criticism overtops each foreign detraction.

The shrill political cries which to-day fill the air are in vivid contrast with the stately, sounding phrases of the Declaration of Independence. Men speak (with an exaggeration which is as symptomatic as are the evils it describes) of sensational inequalities of wealth, insane extravagances, strident ostentations ; and, in the same breath, of vast, bossridden cities, with wretched slums peopled by all the world, with pauperism, vice, crime, insanity, and degeneration rampant. We disregard, it is claimed, the lives of our workmen. We muster women into dangerous factories. We enroll in our industrial army, by an infinitely cruel conscription, the anaemic children of the poor. We create hosts of unemployed men, whose sullen tramp ominously echoes through the streets of our relentless cities. Daily we read of the premature death of American babies; of the ravages of consumption and other "poor men's diseases"; of the scrapping of aged workingmen ; of the jostHng of blindly competing races in factory towns ; of the breakdown of municipal government ; of the collusion of politicians, petty thieves, and '' malefactors of great wealth "; of the sharpening of an irreconcilable class conflict; of the spread of a hunger-born degradation, voicing itself in unpunished crimes of violence ; of the spread of a social vice, due in numerous

THK DISENCHANTMENT OF AMERICA 8

instances (according to the Committee of Fourteen) not to passion or to corrupt inclination, but to *'the force of actual physical want." According to some critics — among whom are conservative men with a statistical bent — American democracy is in process of decay.

If we are now scourged with whips, we are, it is claimed, soon to be scourged with scorpions. Our evils, if uncorrected, must grow with the country's growth. If in a century we have increased from seven to ninety millions, we may well increase, in the coming century, to two or three hundreds of millions. In the lifetime of babes already born, the United States may be a Titanic commonwealth bestriding the world; a nation as superior in power to England or Germany as those countries are to Holland or Denmark. It may be a nation spreading northward to the Polar Seas, southward to the Isthmus, or beyond, and westward to Australia. It may be the greatest single factor, for good or evil, in the destinies of the world.

It is this very vastness of our future that gives us pause. It is because in America we are about to play the game of life with such imprecedentedly enormous stakes that we are at last taking thought of the fearful chances of ill skill or ill luck. If to-day we have individual fortunes of four or five hundreds of millions, whereas in Washington's day we had not a single milhonaire, how overwhelming may not be our fortunes in the year 2000, how overbearing may not be the pressure of poverty upon our hundreds of millions of citizens. Already our free lands are gone, our cheap food is in danger. Soon our high wages may be threatened. It is possible to conceive of a progressive deterioration accompanying an increase in population. We have no guarantee that prosperity, intelligence, discontent, and democracy will be our portion.

To-day, more than ever before in American history, dire prophecies gain credence. Some foretell the dissolution of the Republic and the rise under democratic forms of an absolutist empire, of a malevolent or ''benevolent feudalism" of business princes. Others predict a day of ''civil war, immense bloodshed, and eventually military discipline of the severest type." Grave men hope or fear a sudden destructive cataclysm, in which the ponderous pillars of our society will fall upon a blind and wretched people. Revolutionary and reactionary agitators are alike disillusioned. They no longer place their faith upon our traditional democracy.

Even the mass of men, — that experimental, inventive, but curiously conservative group of average Americans, — though voting instinctively, is beginning to feel that in essential respects the nation "conceived in liberty" has not borne its expected fruits. No one believes after this century of progress that the children of America are endowed with equal opportunities of life, health, education, and fructifying leisure, nor that success depends solely upon individual deserts. The "unalienable rights" have not availed against unemployment or the competition of the stronger. Our liberty is not yet absolute nor universally beneficent; our right to bear arms, our right to trial by jury, our rights of free speech and free assembly have been sensibly abridged. The slums are here ; they cannot be conjured away by any spell of our old democracy. Disenchanted with the gljprious large promises of 76, we are even, like our early European visitors, beginning to ascribe all evils to political institutions, and occasionally the unacknowledged thought arises : " Is democracy after all a failure ? Is not the bureaucratic efficiency of Prussia as good as the democratic laxness and corruption of Pennsylvania ? Are not progress, honesty, security better than the deceptive 'unalienable rights'? Does democracy pay ? "

It is in this moment of misgiving, when men are beginning to doubt the all-efficiency of our old-time democracy, that a new democracy is born. It is a new spirit, critical, concrete,

THE DISENCHANTMENT OF AMERICA 5

insurgent. A clear-eyed discontent is abroad in the land. There is a low-voiced, earnest questioning. There is a not unreverential breaking of the tablets of tradition.

It is not merely the specific insurgent movement in Congress which occupies men's minds. That is but a symptom, but one of a hundred symptoms, of a far broader, subtler, and more general movement of revolt. Men in the Middle West, in the Far West, in the East and South ; men in the factory and on the farm ; men, and also women, — are looking at America with new eyes, as though it were the morning of the first day. They are using old words in strange, new senses ; they are appealing to old moralities in behalf of strange, new doctrines. It is not all ''talk'' of congressmen, for the man who is represented is more insurgent than the man who represents him. There are millions of insurgents who have never been to Washington.

The new spirit is not yet self-conscious. It does not understand its own implications, its own alignments, or its own oppositions. It does not quite know whether to look backward or forward. It is still inchoate. It is still negative.

Protestantism, too, was at first protesting, insurgent, negative, but Protestantism to-day is positive, plenary, and protested against. So our nascent, insurgent, still unfolded democracy, which unites many men in a common hostility to certain broad economic and poUtical developments, is now passing over to a definite constructive program. It is becoming positive through force and circumscription of its own negations.

As it becomes positive the new spirit seeks to explain itself, and in so doing to understand itself. It seeks to test its motives and ideals in their relation to American history and conditions. Is our new democracy merely the old democracy in a new coat ? Is it a return to the past or a turning from the past ? Is it an imported creed or a belief of native growth ? Is it a high-hung Utopia or an attainable end T Is it a destruction, or a fulfillment, of the fundamental law of American development ? Whence does it come ? Whither does it lead ? What is it and what is it to be ? What does it mean, for better or worse, to the common run of us ?

Chapter II

WHEN the course of events is not to our liking, and we long for something that we do not have, our most instinctive argument is an appeal to a former golden age. We claim that we once had this property, this right, or this democracy, which in later evil days has been wrongfully taken from us.

Applied to America, this method of thinking presupposes an earher era of native, full-blown democracy, when men were free and equal, with universal, uncontested pohtical and civil rights. The period of this imagined era is vaguely placed at the dates of the Declaration of Independence and of the adoption of the Federal Constitution. Filled with a zeal for historical orthodoxy, we plead vehemently for the restoration of our one-time equahties and freedoms. Tacitly we assume that the broad and responsible democracy, for which we are now striving, once existed.

What, however, are the facts ? To what extent were the democratic ideals of to-day embodied in the laws of a century ago? What solutions does the wisdom of our ancestors offer to the perplexing problems of their descendants? What, in short, was our original heritage of democracy and how have we added to or taken from it ?

At the time of the Declaration, as during the preceding one hundred and fifty years, there existed in New England, and elsewhere in America, a certain measure of self-rule. The Puritans were by no means ardent democrats, their government, compounded of English and Hebrew tradition, inclining rather to theocracy. The democratic spirit, however, found expression in the town meeting, in which the good citizens came together to build the road, provide for the school, and pass laws against scolds and Sabbath-breakers.

It was a primitive, unrepresentative democracy in a group small, simple, and homogeneous. It differed widely from the larger colonial, and later from the State and national governments, by which the township was subsequently to be overshadowed. It was a democracy of poverty, — of men of small means, — and herein also it differed from modern democracies of wealth, in which enormous fortunes and their getting and keeping involve the clash of gigantic interests.

The poUtical problems of the formative days of Hamilton and Jefferson cannot be likened to those of to-day. Since Washington's inauguration our population has increased twenty- three fold and our national wealth probably over one hundred fold, while the whole structure of society has been metamorphosed by steam, electricity, railroad, and telegraph. When we realize how the poor, simple, and homogeneous community of the eighteenth century has evolved into our present wealth}^, complex, and differentiated society, we need not wonder that we have failed to inherit spontaneously the supposed democratic Utopia of the Declaration. A perfect democracy conceived in 1776 and adapted to those days would not have fitted comfortably upon the men of 1911.

In reality the democracy of 1776 was by no means perfect. The Declaration of Independence was not an organic law, but an appeal — a very special and adroit appeal — to the ^'natural right" of revolution. It was a beautiful ideal, as wonderfully poised in mid-air as is to-day the golden rule among the thrice-armed nations of Europe. The average American was not a true behever in its doctrines. The '^better classes,^' tainted with an interested loyalty to King George, could not abide rebels, petitioners, and ** agitators,'' and among the signers were many conservative men who

I feared 'Hoo much democracy," though they saw the advantage of issuing a ''platform/^ and of hanging together to avoid ^'hanging separately."

Although a revolt against despotism swept through the land ; although the new State constitutions, conceived in the diluted spirit of the Declaration, breathed a distrust of governors, legislators, and judges, — nevertheless a democracy, in the sense of our present hopes, did not exist in the emancipated colonies. Of the ''free and equal" men of 1776, one sixth were chattel slaves. These poor blacks, largely native Americans, were speechless and voteless, were bought and sold, were mortgaged and flogged. Many whites, under the names redemptioners and indentured servants, were also limited in their civil rights, being bound to service and hable to harsh and cruel treatment. A large proportion of adult, white, free males were disfranchised. New Hampshire limited the suffrage to Protestant taxpayers ; South Carolina, to free white men, believing in God, Heaven, and Hell, with a freehold of fifty acres, or a town lot, or who had paid a considerable tax. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and New York the right to vote was based on the ownership of property (usually real estate) or upon the payment of equivalent taxes. In New Jersey no one could vote unless possessed of real estate to the value of fifty pounds.

The qualifications for office were even more excluding. The right to be elected to the Lower House was usually denied to all except Christians (or Protestants) of means. In Delaware the candidate for office was obliged to ''profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost, one God blessed evermore," and to "acknowledge the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, to be given by divine inspiration/* ^ In South Carolina no man

* See John Baoh MoMaster, "The Acquisition of the Political, Social, and Industrial Rights of Man in America." (Cleveland, 1903.)

could be elected to the Lower House unless he owned five hundred acres and ten negro slaves, or real estate worth 150 pounds sterling and clear of all debt. The qualifications for the Upper House, and especially for governor, were still higher. A governor of South Carolina had to be possessed of ten thousand pounds, a property qualification comparable with that of a million dollars or more for the present-day governors of New York or Illinois. Generally speaking, none but a rifch or at least well-to-do Christian was eligible to the office of governor.

The will of the people, aborted by a restricted sufi'rage, was completely nulHfied by the ''rotten politics'^ of the time. The founders of the Republic, be it remembered, were not quiet old gentlemen in stocks, Hving honorable and prophetic lives for the uplifting of us, their putative descendants. They were a very human lot of people who, hking to win, were not overnice as to means. ''In filibustering and gerrymandering,'^ writes Professor McMaster, "in stealing governorships and legislatures, in using force at the polls, in colonizing and in distributing patronage to whom patronage is due, in all the frauds and tricks that go to make up the worst form of practical poUtics, the men who founded our State and national governments were always our equals, and often our masters.''

By such devices the balance of power under the Revolutionary constitutions was held in the hands of the "gentlemen," and kept away from those whom John Adams styled the "simple-men." In most States the mass of the people were compelled to accept a subordinate position. Unrepresented by government, press, or public opinion, largely illiterate and comparatively isolated, they were no match for the able, educated, and often unscrupulous gentlemen who seized political power and the fruits and spoils thereof.

Sharp social distinctions remained. What equality existed was due to a level of poverty, a uniform hard striving, and a most unwelcome simple living. On the Appalachian frontier this rude equality of poor men was most clearly exemplified, but in the East, where were the '^well-born'' and the ** opulent," vestiges of aristocratic gradations lingered. The line between the scholarly or sporting Virginia burgess and the poor white of his district, or between the Madeira-drinking Dutch landlord of Albany and his neighboring shiftless farmer, was as sharp as that to-day between railroad president and railroad engineer. You could not mistake a journeyman shoemaker for his Excellency the Governor. The ill-clad, ill-conditioned, foul-mouthed mobs of the little cities delighted to bespatter mud upon the small clothes and silver-buckled shoes of the gentleman, who responded with a deep scorn for the ''low-born" rascals.

Nor did the economic conditions reflect the freedom and equality which were the American's inalienable rights. True, there was a plenitude of cheap land, offering itself as an alternative to wage labor; but the industrial organization of the revolted colonies was ineffective, commerce was slow and cautious, and the rude labor of even a hard-working farmer produced nothing but an overabundant supply of simple and unvaried food and clothing. As for the landless laborer, he toiled from sun to sun for a wage lower than that to-day earned by a newly arrived Hungarian immigrant. Such a Revolutionary toiler could not be sure when or in what form his wages would be paid, or indeed, whether they would be paid at all ; while, if he fell into debt for a few shillings, he might be cast into a reeking, vermin-infested jail, to fight with half-naked male and female prisoners for the retention of his clothes.

To keep the poor among our free and equal forefathers in their place, a barbarous criminal law, inherited from seventeenth century England, was invoked. Not only was imprisonment for debt universal, but attacks upon property were repelled with savage severity. In Maryland a thief was branded with a T on his left hand, and the rogue or vagabond — the unemployed man — with an R on his shoulder. The sovereign commonwealth of New Hampshire branded burglars on the hand, or, if the crime was committed on Sunday, on the forehead; while in Virginia all ''deceitful bakers, dishonest cooks, cheating fishermen, careless fish dressers" (all of them ''simple-men") were ordered to lose their ears. In Virginia it was a capital crime to obtain goods or money under false pretenses. Branding, whipping, ducking, the cropping of ears, the pillory, and the stock were ordinary punishments for vulgar rogues. A man could be hanged in Pennsylvania in 1776 on a first conviction for any of twenty crimes ; in Virginia twenty-seven crimes were punishable by death. The law fell with especial severity upon the unrepresented, voiceless, and often uneducated "simple-men," who feared the debtor's prison as they feared the omnipresent pillory and lash, or the cloth P which the unfortunate pauper and his wife and children were obliged to wear upon the sleeve. PoUtically, industrially, socially, the "simple-man" was subordinate, and over this extremely imperfect democracy hung the black cloud of an aristocratic South, with its preponderating population and its wealth based upon the enforced labor of benighted negroes.

America in 1776 was not a democracy. It was not even a democracy on paper. ^ It was at best a shadow-democracy.

Nor was the substance of democracy conferred by the federal Constitution. If our modern ideal of democracy does not lead back to the noble eloquence of the Declaration, still less does it revert to the federal Constitution, as it

» Of democracies on paper, Mexico is an admirable example. Our iister republic imitates the forms, rites, and solemn-farcical pretenses of democracy. No one, by merely looking at her unwinking constitution, could surmise that the government Is autooratio, or that peon slaves totl on the sisal grass plantations of Yucatan. The American Oonstltutloo, on the other hand, openly and unblushingly avowed slavery.

THE SHADOW-DEMOCRACY OF 177d 13

iaaued, in 1787, fresh from the Philadelphia Convention. Our newer democracy demands, not that the people forever conform to a rigid; hard-changing Constitution, but that the Constitution change to conform to the people. The Constitution of the United States is the political wisdom of dead America.

So intimately has this Constitution been bound up with our dearest national ideals and with our very sense of national unity, so many have been the gentle traditions which have clustered about this venerable document, that one hesitates to apply to it the ordinary canons of political criticism. For over a century we have piously exclaimed that our Constitution is the last and noblest expression of democracy. But, in truth, the Constitution is not democratic. It was, in intention, and is, in essence, undemocratic. It was conceived in a violent distrust of the common people, and was dedicated to the principle that "the minority of the opulent" must be protected from American sans-culottes.

There was perhaps some excuse for a reactionary document. Things were in a bad way. Thirteen free and very independent States were issuing paper money and were taxing each other's commerce. The central government, under the Articles of Confederation, maintained a precarious and contemptible existence. The domestic debt was not worth a continental, and the interest on the foreign debt (which was falling due) was regularly defaulted. England and Spain were hemming in the disorganized States on north, west, and south. National preservation was all-important, and the Constitution paid more heed to this problem than to the ''unalienable rights" of men.

Some of the men who drew up the instrument frankly preferred a king, and the chief spirit of them all, the brilliant Alexander Hamilton, desired a Ufe-elected president with an absolute veto on all legislation, appointing governors with absolute vetoes over all State laws. That such an abhorrent ideal should have been for a moment entertained indicates the unlimited contempt in which the greatest poUtical leaders of the day held the raw and vociferous American democracy.

No king was set to rule over America. But the Constitution, as presented by the Convention, was more subtly subversive of the popular interest than might have been a dozen Georges. The House of Representatives was conceived to be the sole popular branch of the new government, but even in the choice of this body no provision was made for an extension of the then restricted suffrage. The senators, indirectly elected for long terms and without reference to the population of their districts, were legislators likely to be largely free from popular control. The power and dignity of the Senate were correspondingly augmented. The President by his indirect election (for it was not anticipated that presidential electors would accept instructions) was thought to be even farther removed from the unstable and easily beguiled people, and the Chief Executive was accordingly granted a qualified veto on Congress and enormous powers in peace and war.

All these checks upon a supposedly democratic House were reenforced by what in practice is an absolute veto inhering in the Supreme Court. This veto was intended to enable a small body of jurists, non-elected, but appointed for life by an indirectly elected President and an indirectly elected Senate, to set aside through a nullifying interpretation or upon the ground of unconstitutionality any federal law, approved by any majority, as well as any State law or State constitution. The supposedly undemocratic federal government was thus to be protected from ebullitions of the democratic spirit in the States and the United States.

Finally the altering of the Constitution was surrounded with almost insuperable difficulties, so that to-day less than one fortieth of the voters could conceivably frustrate the wish for amendment of thirty-nine fortieths. This threw the real power of amendment into the hands of the interpreting body, the same Supreme Court, intended by its composition and the manner of choice and the life tenure of its members to be the most remote of all governmental agencies from the operation of popular control. Popular rights were presumably, for all time, bottled up.

The greatest merit — and the greatest defect — of the Constitution is that it has survived. It might be well if the American people would recast their Constitution every generation.^ We would assuredly do better in 1911 with a twentieth century organic law than with an almost unchangeable constitution, which antedated the railroad, the steamboat, and the French Revolution, and was contemporary with George the Third, Marie Antoinette, and flintlock muskets. In the early days, however, when the States were jealous, exigent, and eternally overvigilant, any bond of union, if only strong enough, was good. Our eighteenth century Constitution was a marvel of judicious compromises and wise evasions, and its ratification was a long step forward towards political autonomy.

This ratification was not a popular one, for the Constitution was never fairly presented for adoption to the people, but was accepted by a small minority during a reactionary year in a fear of foreign aggression and domestic anarchy. Even many who voted for the adoption of the Constitution were opposed to its principles, but by cajolery, logrolling, and questionable tactics the ratification was finally secured. The far-seeing leaders recognized that the Constitution was necessary. With a sop therefore to a jealous people in the form of the first ten amendments, guaranteeing civil and political rights, the dominating, intelligent minority of Americans decided to go ahead.

1 Jefferson, who believed that each generation has a right to formulate its own organic law, advocated a policy of revising constitutions every nineteen years. In this way **the consent of the governed" could be periodically obtained. =

That the Constitution has worked so well and comparatively 80 democratically is due, less to its intrinsic merits, or to the genius of Hamilton and Madison, than to the moderation and political tolerance of succeeding generations of Americans, and to a subsequent rising tide of democracy which has Hberahzed our organic law, overborne it, or evaded it. The almost direct election of the President, the enormous influence of political parties and of public opinion, the widening of the suffrage, the increasingly direct election of senators, are democratic featiu-es which were unpredicted, and would have been undesired, by the authors of the document.

The new government based upon the Constitution fell into the hands of the conservative class. By 1789 thousands of wealthy loyahsts, who had fled in 1775, were reinstated in pubUc esteem, and these men, as well as other ''leading citizens, " had scant sympathy for democratic vagaries and demagogic vaporings. The Federalists, who had made themselves responsible for the Constitution, reahzed that the efficiency of a political instrument depends upon the minds which interpret and the hands which administer it. It was in this spirit that they secured control of the new government. The formative American government thus came to be marked with the stamp of Hamilton, Adams, and, later, of John Marshall, men who had faith in the union of the States, but not in the people who formed their citizenry. These leaders recognized that it was necessary to attach to the nascent federal government the interested loyalty of the moneyed classes, which was done through the levying of a mildly protective tariff, the creation of a national bank, and the assumption of the State debts. Through the strengthening and astute manning of the Supreme Court, they created checks upon the people and upon the State governments, while they widely held aloof from the embraces of revolutionary'' France ajid tried to repress internal disaffection by the ill-ad\ased Alien and Sedition Laws.

The democratic spirit, however, was growing. A few months after the inauguration of President Washington, a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille, and the great French Revolution was launched. When Citizen Gen^t arrived in America, he found many thousands sympathetic to the new democratic doctrines. The Declaration of Independence was also bearing fruit. Suffrage was being extended in the several States; property and religious qualifications were being lessened or removed ; the limitation of officeholding to men of wealth was made less stringent; and the penal law and the conduct of prisons were somewhat humanized. In 1800, the ^^ Jacobin" and 'Reveller," Thomas Jefferson, was elected President, and by 1814, after the disastrous Hartford Convention, the influence of the Federal party was forever gone.