The Fiction of Majority Rule

I

DURING the fiery frenzy that accompanied the late war for democracy, an official in the New York public schools, pressing forward from obscurity for a moment into the white spotlight that surrounded the witches’ gallows, declared that no teacher who had any doubts about the sacred doctrine of majority rule, that cardinal article of American faith, should be allowed to instruct the youth of the City. Not long afterward, far away on the Pacific Slope, a committee of live, appointed by a state commissioner of secondary schools, headed by a scholar of high standing and composed of sober and competent authorities in the field of American history, placed fourth among seven principles designed to control instruction in the public schools ‘A belief in democratic self-government by majority rule.’ By way of elucidation the committee added: ‘This asserts the Jeffersonian doctrine that ride by the majority, while not ensuring perfection, is more likely to approach it than any other form of rule, and more likely to preserve individual happiness under law.’ Advancing from this declaration, the committee laid down the doctrine that ‘obedience to law . . . has its sanction in majority rule, thus providing reasonable limitations on individual liberty.’ More recently a selfconstituted society of poignant patriots, alarmed by the fact that American officials, from the president of the United States down to the village constables, are being elected by minorities, owing to the indifference of the citizens who remain away from the polls, has appealed for money with which to carry on a propaganda to drag the negligent from their offices and firesides to the ballot box.

As a matter of fact, is the doctrine of majority rule one of the canonical articles of American political faith, without which there is no salvation? Before this question can be answered, an exercise in definitions is necessary. Do those who adhere to the dogma mean that the assent of a majority of the adult population is required to make any act of the government lawful? Evidently they do not, for, until the adoption of woman suffrage on a national scale in 1920, most of the women in the country were ignored in matters of high politics; and at the present time the colored citizens in several Southern states are frequently disregarded when grave issues are submitted to the electorate for a decision.

’Of course,’ the shamans of the political altar will say, ’nobody in his right mind ever meant by “majority rule” anything more than government by the majority of those who are authorized under the existing providential arrangements to cast their ballots in elections.’ But on second thought this proposition as an article in the American credo will not hold water. No constitutional rule requires any such majority, and political practice shows that the application of any such prescription would bring the wheels of American government to a dead stop. Again and again it happens, especially in elections on constitutional amendments, that a majority of the voters abstain from expressing any opinion at all, thus leaving the fate of vital issues to the will of a divided minority. Indeed, in the grand tourney of 1924, when the embattled politicians called upon the American people to save their country, more than one third of the electorate was indifferent to the summons, and the vote which elected Mr. Coolidge was not much, if any, larger than the ‘ stay-at-home vote’ — approximately one third of the citizenry.

‘Naturally,’ retort the more circumspect of the political shamans, ‘majority rule merely means rule by a majority of those who are loyal and patriotic enough to do their duty at general elections by putting their ballots into the box.’ But the case of those who take this horn of the dilemma will not bear examination either. American government is not and could not be managed on any such principle. At all events it is very difficult to muster a majority of the active voters in support of constitutional measures referred to state electorates. Bitter experience with the provision requiring for the adoption of state constitutional amendments a majority of all those voting in some state election has led to the general rejection of this counsel of perfection. Only an extraordinary crisis or special campaign can induce any such portion of the voters to favor any proposition with their suffrages. Hence it is now the common practice to provide that state constitutional amendments and other measures referred to the voters may be carried by a mere majority of those voting on the issues — which majority is often as low as twenty-live or thirty per cent of the active voters of the state.

Likewise with respect to elective offices, the principle that a majority of those who cast their ballots is necessary to victory does not generally operate throughout the United States. Exceptions only prove the rule. Broadly speaking, it is the candidate who receives a plurality of the votes—that is, more than any of his competitors — who is declared elected. Such a plurality may, and frequently does, represent not more than one third of the total number of ballots cast in the election. Nothing but the existence of our two-party system prevents government by pitiful minorities — and that system is not a part of the law of the land.

‘Quite so,’ the very circumspect shamans will admit; ‘what we really mean by majority rule is that in every case not otherwise controlled the candidate who receives more votes than anybody else shall be declared elected and clothed with power.’ That, of course, is a considerable decline from the high pinnacle from which our triumphal procession started, but it seems to be final, frankly conceding the right of the minority to rule, provided it is a plurality. Alas, however, for the pure in spirit, even this doctrine is not of universal application. According to the curious electoral system by which the president of the United States is chosen, a candidate may receive a plurality of all the popular votes cast, even a majority of all such votes, and still be defeated. In 1876, for example, Samuel J. Tilden, according to Republican election statistics, received more votes than Rutherford B. Hayes, the victorious candidate; indeed, a majority of all the ballots cast. Hence it must be conceded that the Constitution of the United Stales, which, according to the Report of the American Bar Association Committee on Citizenship, every loyal American must make as much a part of his life and religion ‘as the Sermon on the Mount,’ far from commanding government by a popular majority or plurality, actually permits government by a president who commands neither but has been duly elected according to established forms.

If one were in a captious mood, one might go further and speak of a system which gives to the state of Nevada, with approximately 80,000 inhabitants, the same power in the United States Senate as New York, with more than 10,000,000 inhabitants, or about the constitutional rule which gives one voter in South Carolina as much weight in a presidential election as fifteen or twenty in certain Northern states; but, as a distinguished Southern statesman once remarked, ‘it is not necessary to make an ass of one’s self in an effort to be logical.’ So, without pressing the argument to the limit, by merely taking note of matters that ought to be obvious to every citizen, it seems safe to say that our governments, local and national, seldom, if ever, represent a majority of the whole voting population and often represent a minority of those who take the trouble to go to the polls. In support of this proposition there are indisputable facts which admit of no question in any court of law or opinion.

II

It is difficult to discover any crucial issues of politics in America that have been settled by a majority of the people lawfully entitled to vote. Let us start with the American Revolution, that process by which the independence of the United States was won. What proportion of the people residing in the thirteen English colonies in 1776 really wanted to overthrow the government of the mother country? History can make no statistical answer. It can only guess. At the outset of the quarrel, the most respectable characters, such as Washington and Franklin, declared that no one thought of revolution. At no time was the question submitted to the voters at the polls, and from beginning to end the members of local, state, and national conventions and congresses, which engineered the revolution, were elected in the most irregular fashion. To make sure that no Tories could obscure their councils, the patriot fathers, after the armed quarrel began as the result of an accident at Lexington, made a practice of excluding their avowed opponents from the balloting — a practice not unknown in other times and places.

When the statistics of elections that have come down to us from the Colonial and the Revolutionary period are analyzed, two cardinal conclusions emerge. The first is that it was very common, both before and after the Revolution, for two thirds of those entitled to vote to remain away from the polls. The second is that even popular leaders, such as Samuel Adams, when thundering in the forum and making decisions of power, often spoke for only about ten or fifteen per cent of the eligible voters. It is not likely that any competent student of the Revolutionary age will deny the conclusion of Lecky, the English historian, that ‘the American Revolution, like most others, was the work of an energetic minority.’

Now let us take the adoption of the Constitution, which, according to oratorical lawyers, was an act of ‘a whole people exercising its first and greatest power.’ Of course, as everybody knows, the Constitution was not submitted directly to the voters for their judgment. It was submitted to state conventions composed of delegates chosen by enfranchised citizens. Our statistics of the several elections are fragmentary, but those which have survived time indicate that the great majority of the eligible voters took no part in the adoption of the Constitution. In the hotly contested election in Philadelphia only about one fourth of the adult males participated. This proportion seems to be fairly typical of the country as a whole. On the most conservative reckoning not more than one hundred thousand men out of approximately six hundred thousand free adult males supported the adoption of the Constitution in 1787-88 by voting for it indirectly. Whether the number represented a majority of those who actually voted in the elections is even open to question. In any event, it must be said that the ratification of the Constitution, like the Revolution, was ‘the work of an energetic minority.’

Passing by such minor incidents as the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, let us consider the War for the Union. It is generally agreed for practical purposes, leaving aside the metaphysical question of destiny, that the election of Lincoln in 1860 precipitated, though it did not cause, the withdrawal of the Southern slates, and thus brought on the armed conflict. What the voters would have done in that year if they could have divined the meaning of their act is not known and can never be discovered, but it is certain that the election of Lincoln in 1860 was the work of a minority. In round numbers, 4,500,000 votes were cast, and of this total Lincoln received 1,800,000, the remaining 2,700,000 votes being distributed among his three opponents, in such a manner as to give the Rail Splitter from Illinois the presidency. Certainly the issue of war or no war, slavery or abolition, was not submitted to the voters. Certainly none of the candidates on any of the platforms obtained the endorsement of a majority of those who took the trouble to vote, to say nothing of the indifferent citizens. And yet by the decision of a minority, which led to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln acquired a dictatorship which Cæsar might have coveted, and a revolution was made in the constitutional system of the United States.

One more case deserves examination by those who are alarmed by infractions of the majority principle. In 1912, owing to divisions in the Republican camp, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, in spite of a majority against him amounting to 2,459,000 votes. As president he started on a course which could have but one logical ending — war against the Central Empires. Even in 1916, when running on a platform of ‘keeping us out of the war,’ Mr. Wilson was 275,000 short of a majority of the active voters. What was decided in that year by this exercise of popular will is one of the Delphic mysteries, but it is certain that there was no majority in favor of any policy — peace, war, or friendly neutrality. And the war came.

It would be easy to multiply minor citations of limits on the doctrine of majority rule in its most restricted form. In fact, a complete list of constitutional amendments adopted and officers elected by twenty or twentyfive per cent of the voting population might be so alarming as to bring down upon the head of the compiler the benevolent attentions of the Department of Justice. At any rate it would give him a top place in the doombook of those who watch the sacred fire, in preparation for the next heroic effort to preserve the right of majority rule. But additional details would only illustrate the general principle that all the great lunges forward along the path from barbarism to civilization have been forced by energetic minorities, against the indifference or the opposition of majorities, using these terms in the correct mathematical sense. With equal justice also it may be said that the backward lunges have been made in the same manner.

III

More than this. High authority can be found in the writings and opinions of the men who established the American constitutional system in the eighteenth century to support the conclusion that the majority of the populace is to be more feared than a monarch and that the rights of persons and property ought never to be placed at the mercy of a mere majority at the polls. Moreover, the frequent custom of requiring some extraordinary process for the adoption of constitutional provisions is evidence that the fear of mere majority rule still obtains and that the American people believe in placing severe limitations on the power of the majority that takes the trouble to go to the polls. ‘Constitutions,’ said President Taft in vetoing a Congressional resolution to admit Arizona with her scheme for judicial recall, ‘are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority.’ If the historicity of this statement is a bit clouded, in any event no one could call it un-American. Indeed, the gravamen of the case against direct government, pressed with such zeal by Mr. Taft and his fraction of the Republican Party, consisted mainly in the argument that direct government meant majority rule at the polls. If a minority, by constitutional provisions, maintains the security of its rights against the majority, does it not govern to that extent at least?

It would be easy to go still deeper into the substance of the majority principle. For example, one might inquire whether in many instances the plurality or even the majority secured according to the canons of lawful propriety is not a mere fiction. Let us say, for example, that a president is, in a given case, elected by a plurality of the voters in the manner required by the fundamental law of the land. Does it follow that the result is necessarily obtained by the plurality? May it not be sometimes supposed, with a show of sanction, that the said plurality has been induced to take its line of action by a minority superior in resources, more powerful in press and propaganda? And if a minority really induces a plurality or majority to act in a given way, then is the plurality or majority more than a shadow? Was the Honorable Elihu Root speaking without authority when he exclaimed, in the New York Constitutional Convention of 1915, that the government of the state had not been in fact the government of the constitution ‘halfway or half the time,’ that ‘Mr. Platt ruled the state — for nigh upon twenty years he ruled it’? Have not several experienced American politicians of high standing declared many times that an invisible government dominated by a minority often operates behind the screen of the lawful plurality or majority? But to press this point would be to obscure the larger issue.

The real upshot of this paper is that, on the showing of the facts, none of the crucial decisions of American politics have enjoyed the sanction of a majority of the electorate expressed at the polls. Conversely, of course, such decisions and actions have been the work of minorities, even on the face of things — minorities ranging sometimes as low as twenty-five per cent of the voting population, if not lower. How, then, can it be said with justification that the cardinal principles of American government include a ’belief in democratic self-government by majority rule’?

As the red tide recedes along the shore of international capitalism, it is probable that less will be heard about majority rule and more about government according to the accepted and established constitutional proprieties of the country, proprieties which look to the preservation of the rights of minorities in persons and goods. Frequently it happens that those who are in political power with the sanction of a plurality are pleased with the processes by which they arrived at their status, while those who are out of power hope to reach that pinnacle by similar route. But if, as in the case of the Southern statesmen in 1860-61, the decision of the plurality seems to be so outrageous as to warrant a revolution, the minority may not accept the rulings of the plurality. Such refusal, of course, is likely to be unconstitutional, especially when carried beyond the forum of the courts, and is usually inexpedient and dangerous.

Yet it would be interesting to inquire just where civilization would now stand if people of ideas, ideals, inventiveness, and superior intelligence had always refused to act on their convictions until they had won a clear majority of their fellow citizens over to their view of the universe. What would happen if all good things wrested from fortune by minorities were condemned as immoral and rejected by the righteous? The answer is almost as frightful to contemplate as a scene from the palæolithic age.