7.
The Maker of Laws
In the United States, the general democratic tendency to crowd competent and self-respecting men out of the public service is exaggerated by a curious constitutional rule, unknown in any other country. This is the rule, embodied in Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of the Constitution and carried over into most of the State constitutions, that a legislator must be an actual resident of the district he represents. Its obvious aim is to preserve for every electoral unit a direct and continuous voice in the government; its actual effect is to fill all the legislative bodies of the land with puerile local politicians, many of them so stupid that they are quite unable to grasp the problems with which government has to deal. In England it is perfectly possible for the remotest division to choose a Morley to represent it, and this, in fact, until the recent rise of the mob, was not infrequently done. But in the United States every congressional district must find its representative within its own borders, and only too often there is no competent man available. Even if one happens to live there—which in large areas of the South and many whole States of the newer West, is extremely improbable—he is usually so enmeshed in operations against the resident imbeciles and their leaders, and hence so unpopular, that his candidacy is out of the question. This is manifestly the case in such States as Tennessee and Mississippi. Neither is without civilized inhabitants, but in neither is it possible to find a civilized inhabitant who is not under the ban of the local Fundamentalist clergy, and per corollary, of the local politicians. Thus both States, save for occasional accidents, are represented in Congress by delegations of pliant and unconscionable jackasses, and their influence upon national legislation is extremely evil. It was the votes of such ignoble fellows, piling in from all the more backward States, that forced the Eighteenth Amendment through both Houses of Congress, and it was the votes of even more degraded noodles, assembled from the backwoods in the State Legislatures, that put the amendment into the Constitution.
If it were possible for a congressional district to choose any man to represent it, as is the case in all other civilized countries, there would be more breaks in the monotony of legislative venality and stupidity, for even the rustic mob, in the absence of strong local antipathies, well fanned by demagogues, might succumb occasionally to the magic of a great name. Thus a Roscoe Pound might be sent to Congress from North Dakota or Nevada, though it is obvious that he could not be sent from the Massachusetts district in which he lives, wherein his independence and intelligence are familiar and hence offensive to his neighbours. But this is forbidden by the constitutional rule, and so North Dakota and Nevada, with few if any first-rate men in them, must turn to such men as they have. The result everywhere is the election of a depressing gang of incompetents, mainly petty lawyers and small-town bankers. The second result is a House of Representatives that, in intelligence, information and integrity, is comparable to a gang of bootleggers—a House so deficient in competent leaders that it can scarcely carry on its business. The third result is the immense power of such corrupt and sinister agencies as the Anti-Saloon League: a Morley would disdain its mandates, but Congressman John J. Balderdash is only too eager to earn its support at home. A glance through the Congressional Directory, which prints autobiographies (often full of voluptuous self-praise) of all Congressmen, is enough to show what scrub stock is in the Lower House. The average Southern member, for example, runs true to a standard type. He got his early education in a hedge school, he proceeded to some preposterous Methodist or Baptist college, and then he served for a time as a schoolteacher in his native swamps, finally reaching the dignity of county superintendent of schools and meanwhile reading law. Admitted to the bar, and having got a taste of county politics as superintendent, he became district attorney, and perhaps, after a while, county judge. Then he began running for Congress, and after three or four vain attempts, finally won a seat. The unfitness of such a man for the responsibilities of a law-maker must be obvious. He is an ignoramus, and he is quite without the common decencies. Having to choose between sense and nonsense, he chooses nonsense almost instinctively. Until he got to Washington, and began to meet lobbyists, bootleggers and the correspondents of the newspapers, he had perhaps never met a single intelligent human being. As a Congressman, he remains below the salt. Officialdom disdains him; he is kept waiting in anterooms by all the fourth assistant secretaries. When he is invited to a party, it is a sign that police sergeants are also invited. He must be in his second or third term before the ushers at the White House so much as remember his face. His dream is to be chosen to go on a congressional junket, i. e., on a drunken holiday at government expense. His daily toil is getting jobs for relatives and retainers. Sometimes he puts a dummy on the pay-roll and collects the dummy’s salary himself. In brief, a knavish and preposterous nonentity, half way between a kleagle of the Ku Klux and a grand worthy bow-wow of the Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin who make the laws of the United States.
The gentlemen of the Upper House are measurably better, if only because they serve for longer terms. A Congressman, with his two-year term, is constantly running for re-election. Scarcely has he got to Washington before he must hurry home and resume his bootlicking of the local bosses. But a Senator, once sworn in, may safely forget them for two or three years, and so, if there is no insuperable impediment in his character, he may show a certain independence, and yet survive. Moreover, he is usually safer than a Congressman, even as his term ends, for his possession of a higher office shows that he is no inconsiderable boss himself. Thus there are Senators who attain to a laudable mastery of the public business, particularly such as lies within the range of their private interests, and even Senators who show the intellectual dignity and vigour of genuine statesmen. But they are surely not numerous. The average Senator, like the average Congressman, is simply a party hack, without ideas and without anything rationally describable as self-respect. His backbone has a sweet resiliency; he knows how to clap on false whiskers; it is quite impossible to forecast his action, even on a matter of the highest principle, without knowing what rewards are offered by the rival sides. Two of the most pretentious Senators, during the Sixty-Ninth Congress, were the gentlemen from Pennsylvania: one of them, indeed, was the successor to the lamented Henry Cabot Lodge as the intellectual snob of the Upper House. Yet both, under pressure, performed such dizzy flops that even the Senate gasped. It was amusing, but there was also a touch of pathos in it. Here were men who plainly preferred their jobs to their dignity. Here, in brief, were men whose private rectitude had yielded to political necessity—the eternal tragedy of democracy. I turn to the testimony of a Senator who stands out clearly from the rest: the able and uncompromisingly independent Reed of Missouri. This is what he said of his colleagues, to their faces, on June 2, 1924:
[The pending measure] will be voted for by cowards who would rather hang on to their present offices than serve their country or defend its Constitution. It would not receive a vote in this body were there not many individuals looking over their shoulders toward the ballot-boxes of November, their poltroon souls aquiver with apprehension lest they may pay the price of courageous duty by the loss of the votes of some bloc, clique, or coterie backing this infamous proposal. My language may seem brutal. If so, it is because it lays on the blistering truth.
Senator Reed, in this startling characterization of his fellow Senators, plainly violated the rules of the Senate, which forbid one member to question the motives of another. But there was no Senator present that day who cared to invoke those rules. They all knew that Reed told the truth. Their answer to him was to slink into the cloak-rooms, and leave him to roar at the Vice-President and the clerks. He not only described the Senate accurately; he also described the whole process of law-making under democracy. Our laws are invented, in the main, by frauds and fanatics, and put upon the statute books by poltroons and scoundrels.