I.5. The Inner Nature of the Ruling Parties

To the educated central European the American parties are at first a riddle. The very names! I remember the time when I first became interested in politics, how hard I found it to decide for one of the two great parties over there. I knew no more of them than their names. And these pleased me equally well in both, and so the choice became terribly hard for me. Whereas in every other country I found at least one party that had an acceptable name: the “estrema sinistra”, the “radicaux” or the “extrême gauche”, the “Progressive Party”, or even the “Liberal People’s Party”, I stood between the party names of the American parties like Balaam’s ass between the two bundles of hay: “Democratic” I found just as excellent as “Republican”; nor, with the best will in the world, did I discover which of the parties was now the “more radical” (for that my sympathies were to be given to it was settled from the outset). I found: “Democrats” could just as well stand “to the left” of “Republicans” as these “to the left” of those.

The painful feeling of the boy was a thoroughly natural one. To the mature judgement, too, the opposition of those two names must seem enigmatic, and whoever would like to fathom the nature of the two parties must be pained by their official designation. For the designations the parties bear do indeed express not only no antithesis but not even a difference. They are utterly senseless. One will therefore let the names rest and look round among the programmes, in which, if no exclusive antithesis, then surely some difference of standpoint is made known. But whoever cherishes these expectations too will be bitterly disappointed. Of any difference in principle of standpoint towards the most important questions of politics there is no trace in the two American parties.

Customarily one distinguishes them by their position towards the Union and the individual states: one calls the Republicans centralists, the Democrats particularists. But evidently this antithesis too is much more a historical one, and today at most still a theoretical one, than one that would condition a differently constituted practical politics. For a conflict between the interests of the Union and those of the individual states has hardly come to the fore for years. But if one did come, it would still always be questionable how the individual party would decide: it would certainly make its stand depend on whether in the one case or the other it could hope for a greater strengthening of its position. To construct the antithesis of Democrats and Republicans as the antithesis of particularism and centralism says still less about the inner nature of these parties than if one tried by the same scheme to make clear to a foreigner the difference between Conservatives and National Liberals in Germany. That was once. But long, long ago!

In all the other decisive questions of politics, however, the antithesis between Republicans and Democrats is still far slighter.

The parties stood in sharp opposition to each other for a time with regard to the currency question. The Democrats gave in too much to the interests of the owners of silver mines and committed themselves to the free coinage of silver. Today this point no longer forms a distinguishing mark between Republicans and Democrats. Rather, the dispute about the right currency policy (so far as it still exists) has broken out within the ranks of the Democrats themselves: there are gold and silver Democrats.

Now and then it may seem as if the Democratic party inclined more to free trade, the Republican more to protection. But one must not forget that the Democrats stand for free trade, or rather for a mitigation of the protectionist policy, in opposition to the ruling Republican policy. If they themselves had the power of decision, their free-trading conduct would soon undergo a considerable weakening. For it is not to be forgotten: Pennsylvania is protectionist in sentiment because of its iron industry; northern Georgia and southern Tennessee tend for the same reason in the same direction; Louisiana demands the protective tariff in the interest of its sugar industry. The Democratic party owes consideration to these important states. That is why it never commits itself too strongly in the free-trade sense, and demands the reduction of the tariff rather from the standpoint of fiscal policy. On the other side, the number of free-traders in the ranks of the Republicans is by no means small.

In the alcohol question, which so greatly agitates North America, both parties must likewise tack about and may not commit themselves. Each would have to expect painful losses if it wanted to engage itself energetically for the anti-alcohol movement: the drinkers par excellence are the Irish and the Germans. But the former are in their great majority Democrats, the latter Republicans.

Just as undecided is the position of the two parties on the questions of civil service reform (to which they are both equally hostile and to which they both profess their sympathies with equal warmth), of the legal regulation of the trusts and of the railway, telegraph and telephone companies, and on the question of state interference in general. What the “platforms” say in regard to all these and other points are mostly woolly phrases: one will make it one’s concern to give the problem one’s unremitting attention and to try to solve it in a manner that would best correspond to the interests of the community and be in harmony with the sacred traditions of the state. In short: first one talks round the matter, and when it comes to the point one tries to get round it with decency.

I think one will do justice to the two great political parties of the United States only if one first frees oneself from all the ideas one has formed of the nature of the political party on the basis of European conditions. That is: one must not see in the American parties groups of people who have united to represent common political principles. That they perhaps were once, in their beginnings. It is perhaps rightly assumed that in the first decades of the republic the representatives of a more centralist tendency and those of a more state-particularist, anti-centralist policy held to the party of the “Federalists” or to that of the “Republicans” (Democratic Republicans) respectively, or else: that the former inclined more to the ideal of “order”, the latter more to that of “liberty”, as Bryce would like to construe the antithesis. Be that as it may: whatever antithesis of principle may have existed, by the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century, about the year 1820, it certainly already belonged to the past. When Van Buren organised the opposition in 1824 against the newly elected John Quincy Adams, he was already at a loss for a cause to fight for. He finally found it in the defence of the allegedly endangered “State rights”, which in reality, however, were threatened by no one. He raised Jackson, as is well known, upon the shield, and understood masterfully how to kindle out of nothing an enthusiasm for the new man: Jackson soon appeared as the champion of “the sacred rights of the people” (which his opponent of course recognised just as much as he did). One might now suppose that the stronger democratic tendencies had after all found expression in the new party formation. But there was again no question of that. The opponents never thought of leaving the democratic phrase unused for themselves. Van Buren was to experience this on his own body. He followed Jackson in the presidency, and his opposing candidate was Harrison. And now it happened that Harrison was played off by his supporters as the “man of the people” against Van Buren, quite as Van Buren himself had done with Jackson against Adams. Harrison was the “log cabin” candidate, the man of the people, who led a frugal, simple life and cultivated all the virtues of the simple man, while Van Buren lived in a palace and ate with golden knives and forks, and so on.

That is to say: the reasons that had originally called the various parties into life had lost their efficacy. The raison d’être of the party had disappeared. The parties ought consistently to have dissolved if they had wanted to be really only champions of definite political principles. But they did not dissolve, thanks to their own power of persistence and in view of the other purpose that a political organisation can serve in a democratic commonwealth: in view of the hunt for office.

The organisation that had not come to power now recognised as its sole task to come to power itself, in order to be able to distribute the “booty” among its members. Since the population had been divided from the beginning (for inner reasons) into two camps, there resulted for the future too a twofold division of the political organisations (which in itself would not have been necessary with the unprincipled character of the parties; there need have been only one guild of place-hunters; their double existence rests, as has been said, on historical “accident”).

Then — at the time of the Civil War — a change came: the position on the slavery question gave occasion at last once again to quarrel about “principles”. The Republican party came into life with a sharply outlined programme, whose core was the ruthless fight against slavery. But still more quickly than in the first decades of the republic, and still more radically, this ground for party antithesis disappeared. With the abolition of slavery the Republican party would at once have had to vanish from the scene. Again it did not vanish. And now the complete unprincipledness of the two great parties first came glaringly to light. They are in fact today only organisations for the purpose of the common hunt for office: “all has been lost, except office or the hope of it” (Bryce) and “politics is merely a means for getting and distributing places” (Ostrogorski). This comes out especially clearly in the fact that the United States — the democracy par excellence — knows no “party government”. In the Congress at Washington there are at bottom no “parties” any more. The strict discipline that rules the elections ends at the threshold of parliament. Here individual deputies act at their own discretion. Politics dissolves into a sum of private transactions that the individual deputies see fit to conclude, be it with the government, be it with the various interest groups of the population, each of which has its representatives in the parliaments. Hence too the decisive resolutions are taken in the half-darkness of the committees, while the plenary debates have sunk to complete insignificance. Connected with these facts, then, is the phenomenon, most strange by European notions, that the executive and the legislative majority belong as often to different “parties” as to the same. From Jackson’s retirement to the end of the century (with the exception of the years of the Civil War, in which, however, the opposing states were not represented in Congress at all) the President and the majority of Congress have not belonged to one and the same party throughout a single presidential term. Rather, after the second year of the presidency a majority “hostile” to the President is mostly sent to Congress.

Just as little, now, as the two great parties are distinguished from each other by political principles do they bear a definite class colouring. Let it remain undecided how far class interests originally helped to determine the formation of the political parties — it seems as if the “Federalists” were more the party of commercial and industrial capital in the New England states, the “Republicans” of that time more the party of the small farmers — this division by class marks was certainly already strongly blurred at the time of Jackson (as we indeed already find the “anti-capitalist” note in the one party as in the other) and it was completely done away with by the new formation of the Republican party at the time of the Civil War. Even if one wanted to make the attempt (which, however, seems to me to have always failed so far and must necessarily fail) to construe the whole movement that led to the emancipation of the slaves and to the Civil War as one staged exclusively by class interests, and to apply to it the formulas, borrowed from old Europe, of the struggle between capitalism and feudalism, so that the Republicans would have to be addressed as the champions of the capitalist class, that antagonism would nevertheless have become quite void today. For precisely the “Negro question” has extinguished the class character of the two parties and has brought it about that the grouping takes place much more by geographical areas than by class membership.

For since the Negroes — “out of old attachment to their liberators” — vote almost without exception Republican, it is self-evident that all the elements of the population in the southern states belonging to “good society” — be they white farmers, peasants as well as landowners, or industrial or commercial employers, be they of the petty bourgeoisie or of the liberal professions — vote Democratic. In other words: the “ruling class”, which perhaps inclines more to the Republican party in the northern and middle states, belongs in the southern states to the Democratic party.

Besides these geographical differences, the differences of nationality among the immigrants play a part in the grouping of parties. The Irish are almost without exception Democrats: whether because as Catholics they were repelled by the (originally) strict Puritan observance of the Republicans, or because in New York, where they first settled, this was already in the hands of the Democratic party. The Germans, on the other hand, opt predominantly for the Republicans: because in natural opposition to the Irish they sought out the “other” party, say some, or because — as others probably rightly think — as farmers they settled the middle and western states, where they found a Republican majority already present, which they simply joined.

Enough: one may turn and twist the matter as one likes: with the best will in the world one can no longer discover any definite class colouring in the two great parties of America today.

The peculiarity of the “great” parties, as I have tried to describe it in the preceding pages — their outward organisation as well as their want of principle, as well as their social mixture — is now, however, of decisive importance for the question that interests us here: it evidently influences strongly the inner relations between the old parties and the proletariat. And that, first, in the direction of making it uncommonly easy for the proletariat to belong to those traditional parties. Because it need see in them no class organisation, no representation of a specific class interest, but essentially indifferent associations for purposes from which, as we saw, the representatives of the proletariat too by no means stand far (the hunt for office!), even the “class-conscious” worker still needs no sacrificium intellectus to join one of the two parties. One of the two: for the wage-earning class too is represented, according to local accidents, in the one party as much as in the other.

But not only is the position of the proletariat towards the old parties made different by their character from what it would be in any European state: conversely, the position of the parties towards the proletariat is also essentially influenced by them in the sense that a good understanding is produced between the latter and the old parties, or rather that the traditional good understanding is maintained.

Without doubt both great parties have a strongly popular trait in their nature. Not only that each of them can point in its history to epochs in which it stepped expressly into the breach for some “oppressed” class of the people. In the wreath of fame of the Republican party the leaf of its stand for the slaves has still not withered. The Democrats have taken up the cause of the exploited farmers, and so on.

More important is that in the present they have their roots, by their whole organisation, in the mass of the people. Their “managers”, the great majority of the “workers”, have come from the lower classes and often enough risen to leading party positions: it is the system of the Catholic Church that does its work here too: the hierarchy of the party organisation, resting on a purely democratic basis, preserves for it the confidence of the people. It associates with its own kind when it lets the worker treat it in the saloon and knows that the party bigwig, the “boss”, too has come out of its ranks. This confidence, however, seems to me the most essential factor for all party formation. It is infinitely more important than the best-devised programme. Just as, for example, the great power of attraction of Social Democracy in Germany rests in good part on the confidence that the masses place in their leaders, especially those whom they have seen suffer for them: hence the great force, still working today, of the Anti-Socialist Law as a party-forming factor.

Now, however, things do not rest with this sympathy of feeling between the people and the appointed representatives of the party. These must rather, for reasons of prudence, systematically strive to keep the masses in good humour. For naturally their success at the elections depends on the votes of the great mass. And here the proletariat (like all the lower strata of the people) now profits from the accidental circumstance that two great parties stand in competition with each other. This fact has quite naturally had the consequence that both parties have made it their concern to earn or to keep the favour of this class of voters by skilful operating — that is, essentially, by concessions to the wage-earning class, which (at least in many districts) turns the scale.

To exploit still further this position of constraint in which the ruling parties find themselves, a quite special “system” has lately been applied by the representatives of the workers’ interests: the “system of questioning candidates”, which its opponents (the adherents of the socialist parties) seek to make contemptible with the somewhat disrespectful name of “begging policy”, but which today seems to enjoy great popularity with the great mass of the organised workers of America. It consists in this, that the representatives of the workers’ interests — that is, the leaders of the trade unions or of the great trade-union cartels — lay before the candidates who depend on the workers’ votes a carefully worked-out questionnaire, and make their decision whether to vote for him or not depend on the outcome of the questioning.

So far as I know, this “system” was applied for the first time in the middle of the 1890s in Winnetka, Ill. (hence it is also called the “Winnetka system”), and not, indeed, in order to further the interests of a definite group of the population, but in order with its help to give “the whole” a share in the supposed advantages of “direct legislation by the people”. People saw in the procedure mentioned “a system by which the people can secure the practical application of direct legislation without any change in the written constitution of the state or the local charter”. In 1901 the A. F. of L. took it up. It was resolved to issue an extra number of the Federationist in which the system was to be explained and recommended. This number appeared in January 1902 and found a wide circulation.

Since then the “system” has been applied in various cities and states, it is asserted, with success. It was, however, made an integral part of trade-union policy in a comprehensive way only in 1904. On 15 July, namely, the Executive Council of the A. F. of L. sent to all affiliated central bodies and local unions a circular in which they were urgently admonished to introduce the Winnetka system in their electoral districts. To the letter were attached two model questionnaires for members of Congress and members of the state legislature, in which at the same time the points were indicated to which the policy of the A. F. of L. and of its members was first to be concentrated uniformly. They are these:

The questionnaire for the candidates for the state legislatures accordingly ran as follows (see page 68):

The hopes that the anti-socialist trade-union leaders attach to this system are very great. They do not doubt that they have thereby definitively removed the threatening danger of an independent (socialist) workers’ party. Others see in the introduction of this system of questioning the beginning of the end of the old state of affairs, because they assume that the failures that, in their opinion, the working class will experience will, now that its participation in politics as a class has been sanctioned precisely by the system, drive it of necessity to turn away from the old parties. I have not to take a position on this question in this place, where I do not wish to set out the probable development in the future, but only to uncover the reasons that have so far held back the rise of a vigorous socialist workers’ party in the United States. Among these, however, belongs without doubt in the first place the circumstance that the working class, even after it had begun to pursue “independent politics”, lived in the belief (and for the purpose pursued here that alone matters) that by skilful exploitation of the old two-party politics it could procure for itself all the advantages it strives for. This belief, which has always animated it instinctively and which found its nourishment precisely in the peculiarity of American party relations described, has now only undergone its dogmatic fixing in the introduction of the Winnetka system. And for this reason I had to make mention of this system here, although its effects belong not to the past but to the future.

…… 1904.

Hon. ……, Candidate for the Legislature,

Dear Sir:

You are asking the people of the district to select you as their representative in the Legislature. This entitles them to ask you as to your attitude on the issues in which they are interested and by which they are affected — the burning questions of the day. Preparatory to doing this permit us to outline the basis of the political evils, which we do in the accompanying address and questions to candidates for Congress, which we invite you to read, and to do so at once, that you may realize the far-reaching importance of the questions we are to ask.

The burning questions of the day are national, for our country has developed to where the railroads and all the other great corporations are interstate, therefore nothing short of interstate law will suffice.

In the settlement of these great national issues the members of the Legislatures are vital factors. They elect United States Senators and therefore can pledge them to vote to abolish government by injunction and to install the eight-hour day in government contract work and to install the advisory initiative and advisory referendum; secondly, the members of the Legislature can instruct the hold-over Senators — instruct them to vote for these three measures; and, thirdly, the members of the Legislature can vote to establish by State law the machinery for verifying signatures to national petitions and for taking a referendum vote whenever Congress shall so decide. To that end we ask you, sir —

QUESTION No. 1. — If elected, will you vote only for such candidate or candidates for the United States Senate as have promised in writing to vote to abolish government by injunction, to install the eight-hour day in government contract work and to install the advisory initiative and advisory referendum, the details to conform to the measures we herewith enclose, subject to such minor changes in last-mentioned system as may be agreed to by the Legislative Committees of the A. F. of L. and the National Grange?

Answer ……

QUESTION No. 2. — If elected, will you vote to instruct the hold-over Senators — instruct them to vote for the above-described measures?

Answer ……

QUESTION No. 3. — If elected, will you help to enact a statute whereby five per cent of the voters of the State calculated on the basis of the last vote for governor, may call a special election for a referendum vote on a proposition to instruct United States Senators if one or both of them shall fail to obey the Legislature’s instruction?

Answer ……

QUESTION No. 4. — Do you promise that if elected you will help to enact a statute that shall supply the machinery for verifying signatures to national petitions, and the taking of a referendum vote when so decided by Congress, the details to conform to the measure we herewith submit, subject to such minor changes as may be agreed to by the Legislative Committees of the A. F. of L. and the National Grange?

Answer ……

To each of the questions asked we would like a clear-cut “yes” or “no.” If you or any other candidate refuses to come out for the people, squarely and openly, in writing, signed by yourself, we shall take the steps described in our letter to Congressional candidates.

Please let us hear from you at your earliest opportunity. A refusal to reply during the next ten days will be a negative to our questions and we shall govern ourselves accordingly.

Respectfully yours, …… By …… Chairman Legislative Committee.

…… 1904. Mr. ……

Dear Sir: Replying to the questions in your letter I desire to make the following answers:

To question No. 1, my answer is …… Question No. 2 …… Question No. 3 …… Question No. 4 ……

I remain, sir, very respectfully yours, …… Candidate for the Senate (House), For the …… District of ……