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CHAPTER IV
THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN IN THE GENERAL SMASH

When we became doubtful, as pioneering drew to a close, that business served a social end; when, becoming jealous of its great and irresponsible power, we started to set up an equal or greater authority in Washington, we followed the line of least resistance; we did the easy and obvious thing; we had recourse to a one man government.

We magnified the office of President and satisfied that primitive instinct in us which must see the public welfare and the public safety personified in a single individual, something visible, tangible, palpable. The President speaks and you read about him in the daily press; the President poses and you see him in the movies and feel assured, as in smaller realms under simpler conditions people were able to see their monarch dressed and equipaged in ways that connected him with all the permanence of the past, a symbol of stability, wisdom, and the divine favor.

If the trappings are lacking, imagination and the emotions supply their moral equivalent. Of our little temporary king no one must speak evil; no voice may be raised in criticism.

His wife, up till some fourth of March an elderly country woman grown dull in the monotony of village life or worn with the task of pushing an unambitious husband forward to power, looking her most natural when in the frankness of early morning unpreparedness she ran in her apron across the street to gossip with the wife of a neighbor, becomes to the awed eyes of Washington women, quite "beautiful." You hear them say it of every – let us quote the illuminating phrase – every "first lady of the land."

When Burke said that aristocracy was the most natural thing in the world he did not go half far enough. The most natural thing in the world, the thing which is always repeating itself under no matter whatever form of government exists, is an autocracy. In national emergencies, in times of peril, people put their fate in one man's hands; as in the late war when Mr. Wilson was made by common consent a greater autocrat than any Czar of all the Russias.

The herd instinctively follows one authority. The mob is single-headed. All the traditions of the race lead back toward despotism and it is easier to revert toward something primitive than to go forward toward something higher in the scale of development.

And, moreover, the vital contacts of our lives are with authority imposed from above. Our childhood is controlled by the autocracy of the family. Education disposes of our hours, forces our inclinations, represses our individuality, and turns us out stamped with a uniform mark, the finished product of its unvarying course. The single head of the classroom is the teacher. The single head of the school is the principal, of all the schools the Superintendent.

More important still, our economic lives are at the disposal of autocracy. We earn our livings under foremen and managers. Everywhere is the boss who says to us "Do this or starve." He represents to us not only authority but wisdom. The organization out of which proceeds to us the beneficent results of food and clothing operates because he is endowed with a knowledge which we have not. "He knows about it all, he knows, he knows."

In all the essential everyday relations of life we have never been able to evolve any higher organization than that of the chieftain and his tribe. We read about democracy in the newspapers; once every two years or every four years we go through certain motions which vaguely relate to democracy, and which are not convincing motions.

Democracy is an artificial edifice imposed upon a society which is in all other than its political aspects entirely primitive. All our direct experiences are of one man power. It is the only organization we actually know at first hand. We trust to it for the means to live. We revert to it politically whenever it becomes an issue of life and death, and even in lesser emergencies.

So it came about that when we determined to have a government at Washington independent of and better representing the social will, whatever that might come to be, than the government of business we had recourse to that one form of rule which is ever present in our consciousness, the only form under which the race has lived long enough to have any real faith in it.

The new social ideal had not sufficiently taken form to utilize all the complex institutions which existed in this country. Business was at that time intrenched in Congress. It would have been a huge, an impossible task, to re-make Congress, especially when no one knew definitely what purpose should animate the re-making. It was so much easier to find one man than to find many men. It is so much easier for a people which does not know where it is going but means to go there to choose one man, and by an act of faith endow him with the divination of leadership, than it is to have a national will and express it through numerous representatives.

The amplified executive is a sort of blind pool of the national purposes. Creating an autocracy is an act of faith; democracy is work. And faith is so much easier than work.

We did not think of it thus, as an exhibition of political inertia, as a reversion to an outworn type. On the contrary, we were immensely pleased with our innovation. As usual the United States had made an immense contribution to the art of government. We were repeating the race history of governments, as a child resumes in his life the race history of the human kind. We had got so far as to evolve that oldest of human institutions – autocracy, a mild, denatured autocracy. But we were as proud of it as a boy is when he put on paper with a pencil the very picture which his stone age ancestor cut laboriously into a walrus tooth.

Our President had more power than the King of England, we boasted, more than the Emperor of Germany. The monarchies of Europe were obsolete because they preserved autocracy out of the darkness of the Middle Ages. Our government was in the forefront of progress because it had created autocracy out of the suffrage of the people.

And how clever we were with the restrictions of our written constitution with its exact balance of powers, executive, legislative, and judicial. The Fathers had builded wiser than they knew in writing an instrument by which the carefully distributed authority might be well reconcentrated; as if they were the first to use words whose import depended on the point of view of those who interpreted them!

Acres of space in the newspapers were covered with gratulatory articles proving that the dominating executive was the inevitable unifying principle in our disjointed and not otherwise workable government.

Ours was a government by parties, so the argument ran, and the President was the head of his party. As a matter of fact the writers of the Constitution had not conceived of a government by parties. What they had in mind was what they had before them in the Constitutional Convention of which they were a part, a government by the best and ablest men of the community, who should meet together and select the executive; who should equally through the state legislature choose the Senators. The role of job brokers was the last thing they imagined themselves to be creating. Parties came later. Ours was not originally a government of parties. It is hardly a government by parties today. So there was nothing inevitable about this great reason why the Executive should be the element in our system which would hold it together and make it work.

Nor until the beginning of this century did it ever occur to us that the President was the head of his party. The control of the organization had been in other hands, in Hanna's or Quay's or Cameron's, or divided among a group of men like these three, who represented the interests of business in the parties, and often also in the Senate.

The idea that the executive was the party's head was merely a happy afterthought which was adopted to justify the resort to the line of least resistance in creating a stronger government at Washington, the concentration upon one man to represent the national will. We had simply done what other peoples had so often done in the history of mankind. When the English wished to weaken the rule of the great barons they magnified the office of the King. When we wished to get away from the rule of the barons of business we magnified the office of our elective King, the President. We invented new reasons for an old expedient.

And by making the amplified executive the head of his party, which we did – for the Quays and Hannas speedily disappeared under the new order and left no successors – we set him to sawing off the limb on which he sat. If his authority rested on that of his party then to be firm the authority of the party must be firm. For parties to endure and be strong there must be a certain quality of permanence about them. They must not rest upon personalities but on principles and jobs, principles for the disinterested and for those whose interests are expressed in the principles, and jobs for those whose interests are less large and indirect.

Of parties with the executive as their head nothing remained but their name. The only nexus there could be between the executive and the mass of voters was personal. One year a party was Roosevelt, the next year it was Taft and the distance between Roosevelt and Taft was the distance between East and West. A little later it even changed its name and voted in another column because Roosevelt had adopted a new party name and gone unto a new column. Four years later it split up and much of it went to Wilson, who temporarily rallied a personal following just as Roosevelt had done.

And because the dispensing of jobs was an unseemly occupation for the executive we reduced by law the patronage that was available for the sustenance of parties. Thus we substituted personal caprice for the permanency of parties and at the same time cut down the practical means of holding organizations together. At the same time the decay of government by business left parties no longer an instrument of the economic will of the nation.

Thus the executive headship was wholly inconsistent with government by parties, upon which our magnified President was supposed to rest. A further inconsistency was that we adopted another theory for strengthening one man power. This was that the President was the leader of the people. Have we a government by parties there? Not at all; the power of the executive rests upon something outside of and superior to parties.

If the legislative did not respond to pressure he might "go to the people," as it was called, through the newspapers and upon the stump. He might discipline the recalcitrant by stirring up public sentiment against them. He might build up a personal following to such an extent that his party must have it in order to win. He might encourage the movement away from parties by attaching people to ideas and measures, policies that the party had declined to accept. In this theory of executive power it was conceded that parties were not to be trusted. In the other it was held that they were a necessary link between the dissociate branches of government.

It is no exaggerated notion that executive control of parties contributed to the disintegration of party government. It is nothing more than a statement of what actually happened. Roosevelt broke up the Republican party nationally. He left it with its name covering an agglomeration of groups and blocs and personal followings, supporters of various interests difficult to reconcile, whose votes fluctuate from year to year.

Mr. Hughes, the same kind of executive and party leader as governor of New York, left the Republicans of that state in the hands of the little local banditti. Mr. La Follette, following the same methods as Governor of Wisconsin, left no one in that state definitely a Republican or a Democrat. Every voter there is the personal follower of some chieftain.

And what virtue is there in the theory that the Executive alone represents the national point of view, that he alone speaks "for the country?" Political inertia always finds good excuses.

There are reasons why the President should try to represent the country as a whole, since he is elected in a nationwide balloting. But there is no reason why he should succeed in representing the country as a whole, why he should have a national point of view.

Why should Mr. Harding have a vast understanding of national problems and a clear sense of the country's will? A little while ago he was a Senator, and the supposition that the Executive alone has the national point of view implies that a Senator has not that point of view. Mr. Harding is chosen President and immediately upon his election by some magic virtue of his office he is endowed with insight and imagination which he did not possess as Senator.

Mr. Harding is a good average President, a typical President, whether of the United States or of a business corporation, just the kind of man to put at the head of a going concern where a plodding kind of safeness is required of the executive. We shall do well, should our standards of public life remain what they are, if we have three Presidents superior to Mr. Harding in energy or originality of mind, during the whole of the coming century. But why should Mr. Harding understand or represent the national point of view?

Mr. Harding lived his life in the indolent comfortable mental atmosphere of a small town. His horizon was narrow and there was no force in him which made him seek to widen it. His public experience before coming to Washington consisted of brief service in the Ohio State legislature and a term as Lieutenant-Governor of Ohio. His service in the Senate at Washington was short and it was beginner's work, undertaken in the spirit of a man who finds the upper house a pleasant place in which to pass the latter years of a never strenuous life.

His point of view on national problems was a second-hand point of view. He knew about them what his party had said about them, in its platforms, on the stump, in the press. He accepted the accepted opinions. No magic wrought by election to the Presidency could make of him or of anyone else a great representative of the national purpose or endow him or anyone else with deep understanding of national problems.

Of recent Presidents Mr. Taft failed so completely to understand his people and express its will that after four years in office he could command the support of only two states when seeking re-election. Mr. Wilson after four years had so far failed that only the incredible stupidity of his opponents enabled him to succeed himself; and again so far, that his second term ended in a tragedy. The floundering of Mr. Harding is apparent to every eye.

Only under two Presidents has the theory of executive domination of the Government succeeded, and not completely under them. Congress rose against Mr. Roosevelt in the last year or two of his administration. Congress was not of Mr. Wilson's party, and was thus out of his control in the last two years of his administration. Mr. Taft lacked the will to rule. Mr. Harding is feebler than Mr. Taft, and party authority, one of the pillars of executive power and responsibility, is now completely broken down. A system which is successful only half the time cannot be called workable.

Let us examine the circumstances under which the Executive was able to prevail over Congress and effect a limited sort of one man government. They are not likely soon to repeat themselves.

Mr. Roosevelt was an extraordinary personality. Only Andrew Jackson, among our Presidents, was as picturesque as he, only Andrew Jackson had a popular following comparable to his.

Both of them represented strong democratic movements, – Jackson the extrusion of the landed aristocracy, in favor of the masses, from their preferred position in our political life; Mr. Roosevelt, the similar extrusion of the business aristocracy, in favor of the masses from the preferred position they had gained in our political life. Like agitations of the political depths, finding expression in personalities as unusual as those of Jackson and Roosevelt, will give us from time to time executives who may carry everything before them; but only emergencies like this and one other will make the President supreme.

And even then it is easy to overstate the power of the Executive as it was exercised by Mr. Roosevelt. The Colonel lived by picturesque exaggeration. If he went to South America it was to discover a river and find animals that the eye of man never rested on before or since. He read more books than it was humanly possible to read and not become a pallid bookworm. He pursued more interests than mere man can have. He exercised daily as only a pugilist exercises briefly when in training.

He had the gusto of the greatest amateur of all time and enjoyed the immunity which is always granted to amateurs, that of never being measured by professional standards. When you might have been noting a weakness in one direction he was diverting you by an enormous exhibition of versatility in another. He had the capacity of seeming, and the semblance was never penetrated. He seemed to bestride Washington like a Colossus. Actually his rule was one long compromise with Aldrich and Cannon, the business leaders of Congress, which he represented as a glorious triumph over them.

One man government was developed much further under Mr. Wilson than under Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Harding's predecessor entered office as the expression of that movement toward a government based on numbers rather than on wealth, which the Colonel had so imperfectly effected. There had been a reaction under Taft; there was a new determination under Wilson, and a new concentration on the executive.

Poor, bookish, without the friendships in the business world which Mr. Roosevelt had had, having few contacts with life, Mr. Wilson embraced the idea of putting business in its place passionately, where Mr. Roosevelt played with it as he played with everything else.

Mr. Wilson was by temperament an autocrat. An illustration of how personal was his government was his treatment of his enemies. His bitterness against Huntington Wilson, the Republican Ambassador to Mexico, is well known. A year or two after the dispute was over, Huntington Wilson's son came up for examination to enter the Consular service. He passed at the top of the list. President Wilson heard of his success and directed that he should receive no appointment. He carried his enmity to the second generation. The law which would have given young Mr. Wilson a place meant nothing under his personal government.

As Anatole France says of Robespierre, he "était optimiste qui croyait á la vertue." Those who are "optimists and believe in virtue," remarks the French author, end by killing men. Wilson in a revolution would have conducted a Terror, as indeed during the war he did conduct a sort of legal terror among pacifists and radicals. Roosevelt belonged to the other school in the conduct of affairs which Anatole France praises because it never forgets that men are "des mauvais singes." In a revolution Roosevelt would have cut off no more heads than would be necessary to make a good show.

Moreover, when Mr. Wilson entered office his party had been long out of power. Its leaders in the House and Senate were not firmly established. Unlike Cannon and Aldrich, of the Roosevelt day, they did not represent business in the national legislature. They had no authority except the purely factitious authority created by the accident of seniority. They were easily dominated from the White House.

Coming into power at such a moment, possessing such a temperament, representing such a popular movement, Mr. Wilson readily became the most perfect example of the concentrated executive that we have yet had. But even his one man government was attacked from the outset. His personality proved repellent. An intellectual is so unfamiliar an object in America as to seem almost a monstrosity, and his ascendancy would not have lasted beyond two years if the war had not come.

War is the other great cause that leads to autocracy in popular governments. In times of common danger we revert to the herd with the single leadership. We resort to the only form of rule of which we have any experience in our daily lives, the only form in which the race has yet developed any lasting faith. From the time when war threatened, with the invasion of Belgium, till the time when it ended with the armistice, Mr. Wilson became what any President may become under like circumstances, what Mr. Wilson's temperament especially fitted him to become – an absolute dictator.

When we think of the powerful executive as the natural development of the American system, imparting that unity to our government which the makers of the Constitution in their zeal for checks and balances refused to give it, we are over-impressed by the phenomena of Roosevelt and Wilson and do not make sufficient allowances for the conditions which made their power inevitable. So impossible is it for authority to remain permanently in the hands of the executive that we are now witnessing its spontaneous movement away from the White House – toward, well for the moment I should say, toward nowhere.

A distinguished alienist tells me that the desire for power over your fellow man is an unmistakable sign of paranoia, not necessarily paranoia amounting to insanity, but the same kind of paranoia which makes history amusing. If that is true, then we are in an era of perfect sanity at Washington. No one, no one, in the White House, in the Capitol, in Wall Street, the capitol of business, or back among the home folks, as far as I can learn, wants power – and responsibility.

The picture I have drawn, quoting a bright young observer at the capital of what happens when Business arrives in Washington is the picture of our whole present national political organization. "A bunch of tall-hatted fat boys comes. The governmental nose is thrust out awaiting the guiding hand. The guiding hand is put unostentatiously behind the back." It is the same when the organ of leading is extended from the White House for the hand of leadership at the Capitol, or, as happens, as often the organ of leading at the Capitol awaits the hand of leadership at the White House.

Power is in transition and we do much inconsistent thinking about where it is and where it should be. We deliberately elected a weak executive, to retrieve the blessed days of McKinley, the old equilibrium and co-ordination of the equal and co-ordinate branches of our government. Yet when things go badly in Congress, as they mostly do, the critics exclaim that the President should be firm and "assert his authority" on the hill. Mr. Harding himself said, over and over again, "This is no one man job at Washington." Yet we read that his face assumes a "determined expression" – I have myself never seen it – and he sends for the leaders in Congress.

We haven't executive domination and we haven't anything in its place. We voted to go back to the nineties, but we haven't got there. There is no Mark Hanna speaking for business and for party to make the system work. We have the willessness of the blessed days in our National Heartbreak House, but we haven't the will somewhere else to act and direct. Not even seven million majority is enough to bring back the past. In spite of "landslides" the course is always forward, and I use "forward" not in the necessarily optimistic sense of those who were once so sure of Progress.

The initiative, so far as there is any, has passed to Congress.

And so far as I can see, it is likely to remain with Congress, until some new turn of events brings us back the strong executive. For, after all, Congress chose Mr. Harding. The Senators picked him at Chicago. With party bosses gone, they are about all that remains of the party, and there is no reason why they should not go on naming Presidents. And the power of presidents will not rise much above its source.

The autocratic President goes inevitably the way its prototype the autocrat went. The loins that produce them are sufficiently fertile. Primogeniture brought forth feeble kings. The nominating system called on for a great man every four years yields many feeble ones. There will be many Hardings to one Roosevelt or Wilson. Party government which might reinforce a feeble president is weak. Government by business has lost its confidence and authority. The great discovery of the first decade of this century for making this government of ours work is already in the discard.

So at a critical moment when government by Progress and government by business have broken down, government by one man at Washington has also gone. The war made the autocratic executive in the person of Mr. Wilson intolerable. It also destroyed the basis for national concentration upon the executive.

We need a new picture in our heads of what government should be, what its limits should be when it faces such vital problems as interfering with God's time, and where its authority should center. We have none.