More Democracy or Less? An Inquiry
In my youth no country was so significant to me as the United States, of course, so wonderful, so fully representative of the natural spirit of aspiration in man, his dreams, hopes, superior and constructive possibilities. All that America did, could do, had done, was in line with the noblest and best principles in Nature, as I then understood Nature. And I still believe that this nation might be one of tremendous significance in connection with intellectual development, but some marked changes will need to come about.
Plainly, in a material and (socially speaking) internal organic way, it has accomplished much, even if thus far its intellectual stature has not proved so tremendous. We are, as I see it now, a deeply-illusioned people, concerned solely with material things when they are really no longer very important—certainly not as much so as when the land was new and without material means—and yet we remain almost entirely interested in such things when our minds should be beginning to grasp the wider possibilities of life—still fighting over beef and coal trusts and railroads and cables, the mere money return involved—who is to have the control of them—when we ought to be intensely concerned with the mysteries of chemistry and physics and a more pliable form of government.
Though my personal feeling once was that America was destined to take high rank, if not complete leadership, in the intellectual world, I am now not so sure. At this writing it looks as though it might retrograde, and that speedily, and give place to newer lands—newer in spirit, I mean. It may not, but the signs are somewhat against it. Our literature has plainly developed to the level of the best seller and then stopped. Our art is sporadic, and with a few exceptions lymphatic and strongly suggestive of older forms. The futuristic dream did not originate here. Our science—well, who are our American scientists anyhow? Loeb? Carel? Tesla? Bell? All foreigners.
In architecture, markedly allied, I must say, to mechanics, in which we flourish, we have done better—yes, and in anything and everything which relates, or has, to mechanics, trade, commercial organization. In those things, indeed, we have appeared to do most astoundingly, although I am firmly convinced that the boundless and virgin resources of the land have had as much—more, in fact—to do with this than anything else. We have not had so much to create as to develop, and other countries and other financiers—their trade geniuses—have done quite as well if not better in some instances than have we. I refer to such concerns and individuals as the English East India Company, the Royal Dutch Shell, the Allgemeine Elektrische Gesellschaft, the Cunard, Allen and other such organizations, to say nothing of such individuals as Lord Strathcona, Baron Shibusawa, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cowdray, Alfred Harmsworth, Sir Thomas Lipton, etc.
Indeed the one thing I would like to point out most definitely in passing is this: that the by now ingrown idea in every average American’s mind that all of the most significant inventions and discoveries, mental as well as mechanical, of the last hundred years or more are entirely of American origin is not true by any means. Far from it. Those great prime movers—for instance, the steam engine, the electric motor, and the gas engine (as well as its natural child, the automobile)—came to us from abroad. So did the telegraph, the railroad, radium, X-ray photography and—what is most remarkable, considering that the ironclad came from here—every step in steel manufacture. The telephone was invented by a Scot who was twenty-five years old when he became an emigrant to our country.
Other countries, so I was condescendingly taught—Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, England, Spain (for a little while) and Holland—in times past and even approximating our own day, had been blessed with some opportunities and had done considerable toward fulfilling what I was taught was not so much the material as the spiritual and moral well-being of man—his intellectual and therefore his mental and social happiness. But nevertheless and never before, however (or since), had any country had, or could have, the natural, noble and spiritual impulse, to say nothing of the amazing opportunities, which America, the United States, was enjoying—a vast and fertile soil, an equable climate, engrossing varieties of scenery, a people given over entirely to industry, frugality and proper social and spiritual ideals. In other words America, according to my teachers, was destined to lead the world in thought, truth, beauty, liberty, justice, industry, and what not achievement, among other things.
Well, consider Greece in its day, faced by or placed in a virgin and undiscovered world, To the south and east Egypt and Phœnicia, to the north and west darkness, mystery, an unexplored world. No ships but oared boats—not even the trireme at first—no compass, no machinery, no implements of agriculture, and consider that to-day we quote Galen, Hippocrates and Æsculapius, its doctors; Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus and Aristophanes, its playwrights; Herodotus and Xenophon, its historians; Demosthenes, its orator; Homer, Anacreon, Pindar and Sappho, its poets; Æsop and Helodorus, its writers; Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and twenty others, its philosophers—the greatest in all the world—Solon, Alcibiades, Pericles, Aristides, and ten others, its statesmen. Also we marvel at Praxiteles, Phidias and Skopas, its sculptors; Alexander, Miltiades and Themistocles, its generals; and Archimedes, its mathematician. Nations, like individuals, are apparently born with genius, or they are not. They think, or they do not; they are dull merchants and tricksters like the Carthaginians and Phœnicians, or they are not.
America at the present moment, these United States, suggests nothing so much as the trading Carthaginians and Phœnicians. We have, apparently, no soul for really great things intellectually, and yet we have done a few things, too—fought wars for our own integrity, invented a number of very useful machines—the cotton gin, sewing-machine, flying-machine and U-boat—grown rich and great in size, freed the slaves (which England did in her realm without a war), liberated Cuba (no exploitation since?), struggled with the Philippine problem, the Mexican problem, and some others, but to no definite end as yet, however. And yet our deeds are plainly so incommensurate to our power. For we still have with us the Negroes, the clash and plotting of various rival sectarians, easily allayed by a truly educated race, the growth and almost complete independence of various private interests and individuals—puritanism run all but mad and to the death of genuine intellectuality, artistic or otherwise, etc. And yet to the average American it remains a belief or fact that within our borders, safe under the control and guidance of a human and helpful Constitution or form of government, are all the social, commercial and mental opportunities to which an ambitious citizen of the world may logically aspire—freedom to think, to grow mentally and in every other way, to acquire tremendous wealth and be a person in whom the inventive and constructive processes of Nature can take the liveliest interest. Indeed, whatever may have befallen him socially or economically in recent years, he is still convinced that he is absolutely free—freer than the constituent individuals of any other nation, that he is a great thinker and leader in things intellectual and that America is the best and most carefully administered country in the world, administered entirely, or nearly so, on his behalf.
Well, I have no very great quarrel with that as a theory, a method of expressing one’s private vital force, but is it true? In my personal judgment, America as yet certainly is neither a social nor a democratic success. Its original democratic theory does not work, or has not, and a trust-and a law-frightened people, to say nothing of a cowardly or suborned and in any case helpless press, prove it. Where in any country not dominated by an autocracy has ever a people more pathetically and ridiculously slipped about afraid to voice its views on war, on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the trusts, religion—indeed any honest private conviction that it has? In what country even less free can a man be more thoroughly browbeaten, arrested without trial, denied the privilege of a hearing and held against the written words of the nation’s own Constitution guaranteeing its citizens freedom of speech, of public gathering, of writing and publishing what they honestly feel? In what other lands less free are whole elements held in a caste condition—the Negro, the foreign-born, the Indian?
When one considers the history of American commercial development, the growth of private wealth, of its private leaders—the Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Goulds, Ryans, et al., indeed all the railroad, street-car, land and other lords—a, until the war, practically stationary wage-rate, an ever-increasing rising cost of living, cold legislative conniving and robbery before which the people are absolutely helpless, Tammany Hall, the New York Street Car Monopoly, seven hundred and fifty-three different kinds of trusts that tax people as efficiently and ardently as ever any monarchy or tyranny dreamed of doing—I should really like to know on what authority we base our plea for the transcendent merits of democracy, and I am as good a democrat as most Americans, if not more so.
Government everywhere, in monarchies and republics, as well as tyrannies and despotisms, has, other things being equal, always kept step with the natural development of the intelligence of the mass, a thing which has been as much developed by the goads of tyrannies as by the petting of republics. But could you ever convince a full-fledged American, raised on Fourth of July orations and the wonders and generosities of the American Constitution, of this? For him, of course, liberty began in 1776 at Bunker Hill or somewhere near it. Before that was no light anywhere. Since then we have gone on—doing better and better, making all men richer happier, kinder, wiser.
But have we? Is our land and its progress so absolutely flawless? Aside from love of country and individual vanity which might make us want to think so, have we not developed as many flaws, anachronisms, social and governmental irritations and oppressions as any other country? I call attention to the deliberation and ease with which the trusts organize our legislatures, dictate to the jurists of the land, deny even the permanence or sacredness of contract when it concerns them; rob, pillage and tax to their hearts’ content while a pitiful mass at the bottom march to and fro wondering where or to whom to turn for relief. And, on the other hand, life here, as much as elsewhere—the struggling mass—is as savagely pushed by necessity as any mass anywhere. Our labor unrest is as great, our poverty as keen; five per cent, or so it is alleged, of the population controlling ninety-five per cent of the wealth; thirteen per cent of the population illiterate; at the top gorgons of financiers as fat and comfortable and dictatorial as any the world has ever seen and as unpatriotic and un-American, in so far as its original theory goes, as may be. Worse yet, it is absolutely true that ours is, or was, materially at least, a rich land, boundless in its opportunities at first, which latter fact has contributed greatly to our optimism but not to our comfort. More rapidly here than anywhere in the world the rich have divided themselves from the poor, and now here as elsewhere necessity and pain are and will remain no doubt the goads to comparative ease. Yet the tramping American when he utters the marvelous word democracy believes that he has it, and when he is not complaining and the newspapers tell him so, believes that he is perfectly happy.
At the same time, considering our aggressive and progressive financial leaders—and heaven forbid (on humanitarian grounds, at least) that I should defend them, for a more selfish, cruel and undemocratic pack never lived (consider the packers, the street-car corporations, the railroads alone, not to mention a thousand others)—there is this to be said, that although nearly every crime in the decalogue may be charged to them, bribery, perjury, murder, even a total indifference to individual welfare (twelve and a half cents an hour, for instance, up to six years ago for hard, grinding day labor on a railroad or in a canning factory), as well as greed, love of power, and lust after it—still much if not all of America’s boasted financial supremacy is due to them and to none other. We jeer at John D. Rockefeller at home perhaps, or Morgan, but when abroad among envious strangers who is first to thrust out his chest and boast of what America has done—its financial leaders, no less? Who? The average American? You know so. Such being the case one often wonders what is to be done with a country or a people that can so readily blow hot and cold out of the same mouth. Can it be made to follow an austere democratic program—the sharp, taut socialization of everything—or will it succumb to autocratic or to financial domination, and if so, which? At the present moment the air hums with the rival theories. To me the chief problem in connection with America, if it has one, and as I see it, is that of finding itself mentally as well as finding a formula that will allow and encourage leadership without submitting to the abuses which in the past and even the present the latter tends to give rise. For here as much as anywhere else the average small American is as much a petty tyrant as may be found. Consider only the food profiteer, the small dealers, jobbers and wholesalers. And here, as elsewhere, are all the petty tyrannies of small and large enterprises in regard to wage-earners, the scorns, the brutalities, the exactions. Can these be outrivaled if readily duplicated in any autocracy or democracy ruled by a dictator anywhere? At the same time, is it not true that, if the country is to succeed or at least progress materially, a place must be made for the selfish, self-aggrandizing individual either as leader politically or as creator? Will life go forward without some such process or opportunities for immense rewards or honors to the individual—the right to satisfy his feverish if ridiculous ambition for supremacy? Will patriotism, love of country, alone do it? Can it be discovered?
What made Rome great? Senatus populusque Romanus. The Senate supplied the leadership, the people the impulse and force, which spread the dominion of the shepherds of the Seven Hills until it ruled the world from Scotland to the Nubian Desert and the confines of India. What is the secret of the Roman church’s preëminence? Leadership? Autocracy? In the early Christian church these were lacking. Think or say what you will of its results, but consider it. In so far as the early Christians were concerned they were all “brethren,” like the Russians of to-day and the citizens of the French Revolution. Each early Christian community elected its deacons; the deacons elected the priests; the priests elected the bishops; the bishops elected the cardinals; and the cardinals the pope. Before the Catholic church began to attain to its strength, however, the process was reversed: the pope appointed the cardinal, he the bishop, the bishop the priest. Then the deacons were selected by the priest, in certain cases some deacons were elective, but then the priest and deacon, appointed by the bishop, constituted the majority of the board. It was then, and then only, that the Roman church began to flourish truly. The ambition of man had full scope, his vanity. Apparently the world hitherto has not been able to do or live without it. On the authorization basis of leadership the Roman church, the most impressive organization in human history, has stood for seventeen centuries.
But take our own Standard Oil Company. Who built it? Who used to caution all his lieutenants never to talk, to keep everything a secret, particularly its prosperity? And has not the blessing of cheap oil been extended to all the world? Who selected strong, ambitious men and set them to planning the monopoly of oil for their personal and private benefit, dickered with the railroads and cut the throats of his rivals via the rebate? Does his name have to be written here? Call him a scoundrel, scoff at autocracy and high and mighty plutocrats. After all, can a man or a woman become a safe or dictatorial plutocrat without having something to offer which makes his plutocracy and his dictatorship bearable? Have mere dull tyrants anywhere ever lasted long? Have they ever had brains enough? Most of Rome’s worst emperors were slain in anywhere from three to five years. The tyrants of Asia and Africa last, if they do, because the people are as dull as themselves, or their rule is agreeable to them.
Every great business corporation, as we know, is built about the personality, the leadership, the autocracy, of one man. We hear of love of country, of putting the needs of the mass, one’s country—all countries—above that of one’s personal or private needs. There are noble examples no doubt (off-hand few occur to me) of unselfish public sacrifice of many, many private lives, but are they the rule or the exception? Does not the average individual now as heretofore consult his own interest, his advantage, his purse, his survival, his fame? Once one is large and secure, easy in the possession of fame, money, love even, it is possible, of course—and even with a grandiose air—to do generously, to give freely, to seek the advantage of the mass. Scarcely any other avenue of personal satisfaction remains open. I am not sneering; I am contemplating a possibly chemic, physic or psychic law. Who knows?
Taking the average individual, with life (necessity, hunger, drouths of one kind and another) pressing upon him as fiercely as it does, and contemplating America as it is and the world as it is, is it not fair to ask whether it is possible to make over man—his ambitions, his soul, into the likeness of what is suggested by the average modern democratic or republican or socialistic program? Can he be adjusted to it? Haven’t we just had two thousand years of an attempt in one form? Possibly he can, but is it wise that he should? Are not striking, centralizing figures more important and, save during extremely patriotic moments, when some danger, say, threatens the national organism as a whole, is it not extremely difficult to cause the average individual to enthuse over a crowd or the needs of a crowd? And on the contrary, is it not most pathetically easy to cause him to enthuse over a man or a woman—to cause any of us so to do? It would almost look as though it were Nature’s way, would it not—the love of the mass for leaders, for grandiose, grandiloquent figures? Is not life, in the main, personal, individual? Think how we insist on identifying God as an individual. Will not such leadership as was offered by Alexander, Hannibal, Mohammed, Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln, always be popular? The leadership of lesser or more self-aggrandizing individuals—such as, for instance, that of the late James J. Hill, of the Great Northern Railway; E. H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific; Cornelius Vanderbilt, of the New York Central; Jay Gould, of the Missouri Pacific; Jay Cooke, of Civil War Finance; Armour, Field, Leiter, Morgan, or, to come down to the present moment, John H. Patterson, of the National Cash Register; Henry Ford, of the jitney; F. W. Woolworth, of the five-and-ten-cent store—if never popular, still does it not remain necessary? Must not some one lead even in the home and all forms of private commercial adventure? It may not be an absolutely invariable rule, but is it not near enough to make it seem so? I am not quarreling with the possibilities of love, generosity, self-sacrifice, public and private. We all hope for them, do we not? In various minor ways at least, and even in some public and large ways, they exist. But how about self-interest, cold, savage and yet constructive if feverish self-interest? Has that been abrogated?
Indeed, ought not we Americans, of all people, learn, and learn quickly, that autocracy in whatever form you find it—absolute or otherwise—is never real autocracy, not absolute, and that on the other hand so-called democracy is never real democracy but always something tempered by private autocracy in a thousand—nay, in a million—forms? For after all, who tells such people as Rockefeller and Woolworth, to say nothing of kings and emperors—fallible and seeking souls, all—how, what, why, they must do?—how far they may go? What to interest themselves in? Consider the fall of the French kings, Charles I., the late Czar. They deal with the mass, and therefore to a certain extent they must respect it. They cannot escape it. It is their fate. At the same time, in attempting so to do, to whom do they not listen really for sound advice?—often to the least of their subjects or hirelings. The stockholders in any modern corporation—are they any more as to voice and weight in that which their money makes possible than the people out in the street of a republic or a kingdom with their ultimate veto power? They elect a board of directors as we elect a senate, or a monarchy, a legislature. And this leadership perpetuates itself, or at any rate holds things together, as does officialdom at Washington, until a leader appears. A weak king or emperor is run by strong men, a weak President is dictated to by a strong Senate or House. When the Roman Senate was strong the dictators were weak, and vice versa. In calm, peaceful days leadership is not necessary. It is or may be a disturbing factor. But when changes are coming, when Nature is brewing a storm—then. So life, with its endless brewing of storms and leaders, ought to give a hint to republics or democracies or corporate organizations.
And, having said so much, is it not plain that room must be made always for the leader, the passing autocrat, if you will? Must he not be given—if he have brains—the right of initiative and power, for after all is he not also a slave to life, chance, labor, the time-spirit? It is to be assumed, of course, that men shall demand first that he command their admiration and loyalty, as he certainly will if he is a real leader. Rome admired her Cæsar, France her Napoleon; Germany evidently liked her Kaiser, France her Clemenceau, England her Lloyd George. They thought them, apparently, necessary and great leaders. In our contest with Germany we perhaps, for one nation, were fighting to make her dislike something which she craved and needed, could not probably very well do without.
The trouble, as I see it, is that too often, in spite of all the current palaver and enthusiasm of some for special individuals, we have too little real or popular leadership. Middleweight idealists and theorists are too often at the steering-gear here as well as elsewhere. In this country we have the crowd, the extraordinarily well-educated (or we think so) and disciplined crowd, willing and eager for leadership. But what leadership? As it stands, all democracies are organized with elaborate systems of checks—legislative, executive—which are intended to and do tie the hands of all possible leaders, until a very, very great emergency arises. In the ordinary run of days and events only the ordinary politician or parlor-diplomat need apply. But when an extreme necessity calls, these minors must give way, but does the true leader always appear in time? Will he? Did the Allies have a truly able anti-Teutonic leader in the recent great struggle? Joffre? Asquith? Lloyd George? Kerensky? Wilson? Nicholas Romanoff?
Our Federal Constitution, theoretically at least, gives us a crowd government; only, owing to the wholly undemocratic character of the American people, this has long since been replaced by money or trust government, the rule of the wealthy by right of subornation. And our state and municipal governments, modeled on that of the nation, have gone the same way. Even such little individuality and leadership for the mass as might possibly exist under these conditions is lost or discarded nearly every two or four years in the regular and money-controlled changes of administration. The old and experienced are replaced with the new and untried. Perhaps under conditions as they are this is best. I am not sure. But for efficiency, after the manner of the great successful private corporations, is it? Personally, I think not—not yet, at any rate. As yet democracy does not take sufficient interest in itself, is too indifferent to its real interests and needs. It is too easy-going, not sufficiently self compelling. Every one wants to be his own boss and to be a great, undemocratic, individual success, hence there is very little true effective organization outside private institutions and what they compel in a public way. We make no provision for the continuation of leadership even under emergency.
Personally, I think the defect cannot forever go on unremedied. Democracy must do at least as well as autocracy, or it ought to shut up shop. And if it cannot obtain the efficiency exemplified by the private corporation it will, and it will deserve to. Perhaps our recent sad experiences in meeting the expanded demands on governmental efficiency should show us how to lay a new basis for that efficiency in modifications of our governmental structure. But will they? What I think is that more autocracy, behind which should be a livelier sense of power and control on the part of the people, should come into our democracy, or our democracy will really cease to be. The present drift toward money control cannot go unchecked. Our leaders will either become much more forceful, and the mass more watchful and jealous, as it should be, or we will have no democracy of any kind. There is scarcely any now. Congress should be used more against the President and the Supreme Court, and the latter against both, only the judges should be plainly responsible to the people, closely and fearsomely beholden to them—as much so, at any rate, as they now are to the corporations and wealth. Both the leaders and their weapons—the laws—should become more vigorous. Democracy will have to step up, and step lively. Then will it be any more of a democracy than some of the older and more historic autocracies and monarchies? Will it?