Part 4

The reasons for believing that the boss system has reached its climax are manifold. Some of them have been stated, others may be noted. In the first place, the railroads are built. Business is growing more settled. The sacking of the country’s natural resources goes on at a slower pace. It is a matter of history, that economic laws did so operate, that the New York Central Railroad controlled the State legislature during the period of the building and consolidation of the many small roads which make up the present great system. But the conditions have changed. Bribery, like any other crime, may be explained by an emergency; but everyone believes that bribery is not a permanent necessity in the running of a railroad, and this general belief will determine the practices of the future. Public opinion will not stand the abuses; and without the abuse where is the profit? In many places, the old system of bribery is still being continued out of habit, and at a loss. The corporations can get what they want more cheaply by legal methods, and they are discovering this. In the second place, the boss system is now very generally understood. The people are no longer deceived. The ratio between party feeling and self-interest is changing rapidly, in the mind of the average man. It was the mania of party feeling that supported the boss system and rendered political progress impossible, and party feeling is dying out. We have seen, for instance, that those men who, by the accident of the war, were shaken in their party loyalty, have been the most politically intelligent class in the nation. The Northern Democrats, who sided with their opponents to save the Union, were the first men to be weaned of party prejudice, and from their ranks, accordingly, came civil service reformers, tariff reformers, etc.

It is noteworthy, also, that the Jewish mind is active in all reform movements. The isolation of the race has saved it from party blindness, and has given scope to its extraordinary intelligence. The Hebrew prophet first put his finger on blackmail, as the curse of the world, and boldly laid the charge at the door of those who profited by the abuse. It was the Jew who perceived that, in the nature of things, the rich and the powerful in a community will be trammelled up and identified with the evils of the times. The wrath of the Hebrew prophets and the arraignments of the New Testament owe part of their eternal power to their recognition of that fact. They record an economic law.

Moreover, time fights for reform. The old voters die off, and the young men care little about party shibboleths. Hence these non-partisan movements. Every election, local or national, which causes a body of men to desert their party is a blow at the boss system. These movements multiply annually. They are emancipating the small towns throughout the Union, even as commerce was once disfranchising them. As party feeling dies out in a man’s mind, it leaves him with a clearer vision. His conscience begins to affect his conduct very seriously, when he sees that a certain course is indefensible. It is from this source that the reform will come.

The voter will see that it is wrong to support the subsidized boss, just as the capitalist has already begun to recoil from the monster which he created. He sees that it is wrong at the very moment when he is beginning to find it unprofitable. The old trademark has lost its value.

The citizens’ movement is, then, a purge to take the money out of politics. The stronger the doses, the quicker the cure. If the citizens maintain absolute standards, the old parties can regain their popular support only by adopting those standards. All citizens’ movements are destined to be temporary; they will vanish, to leave our politics purified. But the work they do is as broad as the nation.

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The question of boss rule is of national importance. The future of the country is at stake. Until this question is settled, all others are in abeyance. The fight against money is a fight for permission to decide questions on their merits. The last presidential election furnished an illustration of this. At a private meeting of capitalists held in New York City, to raise money for the McKinley campaign, a very important man fervidly declared that he had already subscribed $5000 to “buy Indiana,” and that if called on to do so he would subscribe $5000 more! He was greeted with cheers for his patriotism. Many of our best citizens believe not only that money bought that election, but that the money was well spent, because it averted a panic. These men do not believe in republican institutions; they have found something better.

This is precisely the situation in New York city. The men who subscribed to the McKinley campaign fund are the same men who support Tammany Hall. In 1896 they cried, “We cannot afford Bryan and his panic!” In 1897 the same men in New York cried, “We cannot afford Low and reform!” That is what was decided in each case. Yet it is quite possible that the quickest, wisest, and cheapest way of dealing with Bryan would have been to allow him and his panic to come on,--fighting them only with arguments, which immediate consequences would have driven home very forcibly. That is the way to educate the masses and fit them for self-government; and it is the only way.

In this last election the people of New York have crippled Platt. It is a service done to the nation. Its consequences are as yet not understood; for the public sees only the gross fact that Tammany is again in power.

But the election is memorable. It is a sign of the times. The grip of commerce is growing weaker, the voice of conscience louder. A phase in our history is passing away. That phase was predestined from the beginning.

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The war did no more than intensify existing conditions, both commercial and political. It gave sharp outlines to certain economic phenomena, and made them dramatic. It is due to the war that we are now able to disentangle the threads and do justice to the nation.

The corruption that we used to denounce so fiercely and understand so little was a phase of the morality of an era which is already vanishing. It was as natural as the virtue which is replacing it; it will be a curiosity almost before we have done studying it. We see that our institutions were particularly susceptible to this disease of commercialism, and that the sickness was acute, but that it was not mortal. Our institutions survived.

SOCIETY

SOCIETY

Our institutions have survived, the perils of boss rule are past, and we may look back upon the system with a kind of awe, and recognize how easily the system might have overthrown our institutions and ushered in a period which history would have recorded as the age of the State Tyrants.

Let us imagine that some State like Pennsylvania, on which the boss system had been so firmly fixed that a boss was able to bequeath his seat in the United States Senate to his son, had shown forth an ambitious man, a ruler who realized that his function was not one of business, but one of government; let us imagine that a President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, some man of great capacity, had undertaken to rule the State. He would, by his position as State boss, have been able gradually to do away with the petty bosses and petty abuses. He would give the State a general cities law, good schools, clean streets, speedy justice; every necessary municipal improvement. Gas, water, boulevards would be supplied with an economy positively startling to a generation accustomed to jobs. He would destroy the middlemen as Louis XI. destroyed the nobles, and give to his State, for the first time in the history of the country, good government. A benign tyranny, with every department in the hands of experts, makes the strongest form of government in the world. Every class is satisfied. Pennsylvania would have been famous the world over. Its inhabitants would have been proud of it; foreigners would have written books about it; other States would have imitated it.

Meanwhile the power of self-government would have been lost.

Biennial sessions of the Legislature are already a favorite device for minimizing the evils of Legislatures. But the dictator would have desired to discourage popular assemblies. The whole business world would have backed the boss, in his plan for quinquennial or decennial sessions. Once give way to the laziness, once cater to the inertia and selfishness of the citizen, and he sinks into slumber.

Our feeble and floundering citizens’ movements in New York during the last ten years show us how hard it is to recover the power of self-government when once lost; how gradual the gain, even under the most stimulating conditions of misrule. Given thirty years of able administration by a single man, and the boss system would have sunk so deep into the popular mind, the arctic crust of prejudice and incompetence would have frozen so deep, that it might easily take two hundred years for the community to come to life. Recovery could only come through the creeping in of abuses, through the decentralization of the great tyranny. And as each abuse arose, the population would clamor to the dictator and beg him to correct it. After a while a few thinkers would arise who would see that the only way to revive our institutions was by the painstaking education of the people. The stock in trade of these teachers would be the practical abuses, and very often they would be obliged to urge upon the people a course which would make the abuses temporarily more acute.

We have escaped an age of tyrants, because the eyes of the bosses and their masters were fixed on money. They were not ambitious. Government was an annex to trade. To certain people the boss appears as a ruler of men. If proof were needed that he is a hired man employed to do the dirty work of others, what better proof could we have than this: No one of all the hundreds of bosses thrown up during the last thirty years has ever lifted himself out of his sphere, or even essayed to rule.

That devotion of the individual to his bank account which created the boss and saved us from the dictator must now be traced back into business.

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For the sake of analysis it is convenient now to separate and again not to separate the influences of business proper from the influences of dishonesty, but in real life they are one thing. Dishonesty is a mere result of excessive devotion to money-making. The general and somewhat indefinite body of rules which are considered “honest” change from time to time. I call a thing dishonest when it offends my instinct. The next man may call it honest. The question is settled by society at large. “What can a man do and remain in his club?” That gives the practical standards of a community. The devotion of the individual to his bank account gives the reason why the financier and his agent, the boss, could always find councilmen, legislators, judges, lawyers, to be their jackals, or to put the equation with the other end first, it is the reason why the legislators could always combine to blackmail the capitalist: this political corruption is a mere spur and offshoot of our business corruption. We know more about it, because politics cannot be carried on wholly in the dark. Business can. The main facts are known. Companies organize subsidiary companies to which they vote the money of the larger company--cheating their stockholders. The railroad men get up small roads and sell them to the great roads which they control--cheating their stockholders. The purchasing agents of many great enterprises cheat the companies as a matter of course, not by a recognized system of commissions--like French cooks--but by stealth. So in trade, you cannot sell goods to the retailers, unless you corrupt the proper person. It is all politics. All our politics is business and our business is politics.

There is something you want to do, and the “practical man” is the man who knows the ropes, knows who is the proper person to be “seen.” The slang word gives a picture of the times--to “see” a man means to bribe him.

But let no one think that dishonesty or anything else begins at the top. These big business men were once little business men.

To cut rates, to have a different price for each customer, to substitute one article for another, are the prevailing policies of the seller. To give uncollectible notes, to claim rebates, to make assignments and compromises, to use one shift or another in order to get possession of goods and pay less than the contract price, are the prevailing aims of the buyer.

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