The Direct Primary--a Failure and a Threat
I
To win the Republican senatorial nomination from Illinois, Ruth Hanna McCormick spent in her 1930 primary campaign over $250,000, most of it her own money. The prize was a $10,000a-year job. In the 1926 primaries in Pennsylvania, the Vare-Beidleman ticket expended $785,000. Large as they are, such expenditures are by no means unusual; money has been poured out with a lavish hand in many another primary contest. In 1922 the Senate condemned the expenditure of $195,000 in behalf of former Senator Truman H. Newberry of Michigan as contrary ‘to sound public policy, harmful to the honor and dignity of the Senate, and dangerous to the perpetuity of a free government.’
If condemnation rests on an arithmetical yardstick, Ruth Hanna McCormick and Bill Vare were a much greater threat to our free institutions than Mr. Newberry, whose outlay brought so solemn a warning from the Senate. Yet these candidates do not belong in the class of ‘ malefactors of great wealth.’ They were merely victims of as stupid a nominating system as has ever taken root under the camouflaged exterior of popular government. The system is so vicious, the money power has come into politics so brazenly, to so great a degree has it undermined the institutions of representative government, that the direct primary has recently come under fire from two men so fundamentally different in their political philosophy as Alfred E. Smith, product of East Side New York, and Will R. Wood, of the little town of Lafayette, Indiana, chairman of the Appropriations Committee of the House. Former Governor Smith came out squarely for its abolition. And Mr. Wood said specifically, ‘The evils and failure of the popular primary system . . . are the most important subject confronting the American people.’
Not only has the direct primary failed to accomplish the reforms which its backers so blithely predicted for it, but it has contributed on its own score to the debasement of American politics. The establishment of the direct primary system was in part a response to the demand of the voter for a more direct hand in public affairs, a reflection of the growing individualism of the times. In part it grew out of a widespread discontent with political conditions, notably the convention system, with its boss control, the trading of delegates, and the too frequent betrayal of public trust, if not actual corruption. It was to correct these evils, and to give the electorate a more direct voice in government, that the popular primary, endorsed in their day by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt among others, was adopted by state after state. Through it, for twenty years, most states have made their nominations for public office.
The bill of indictment against the direct primary contains many counts. It has not given the people any greater control over their affairs. It has increased the cost of candidacy; it has tended to promote the demagogic type of office seeker, has swelled the tribe of politicians living off the public purse, has undermined party responsibility; and at a time when self-government has been compassed about as never before with difficulties, because of the increasing complexities of our economic and social structure, it has injected into the body politic a new form of mass action which has added materially to the embarrassments already existing.
The present system has greatly increased the cost of candidacy. A candidate who enters the primary in one of the larger states with his eye on a seat in the Senate must use the methods of big business. He must hire organizers to get out the vote, buy newspaper advertising liberally, publish campaign literature, and foot the postage bills to send it out to thousands of prospective voters. He must rent halls, arrange for time on the air, often one of the most expensive of the items, and must find the money, too, to pay many a pretty bill for the traveling expenses of his workers.
So practical a politician as Ruth McCormick reflected the specializing spirit of the age by setting up a foreign-language bureau, a woman’s bureau, a bureau for colored voters, a labor bureau, and so on. Small wonder that it cost her more than a quarter of a million dollars to win the Republican primary nomination in Illinois, or that many another sizable fortune has gone into a single primary campaign. The financial burden does not fall upon the candidate alone. The Nye Investigating Committee went into Tennessee a few months ago. There it was told that the 1930 Tennessee primaries cost the state $115,000, wholly apart from the expenditures of the various candidates for public office. Other states would tell much the same story.
To advertise a safety razor, a new kind of soap, or a motor car costs money. It may cost as much or more to advertise a candidate. His running mates in Pennsylvania, where over $600,000 was spent last year on the Brown-Davis ticket, rather enviously commented on the fact that James J. Davis, now Senator, needed little advertising. Other aspirants may not be so fortunate. Either they must be prepared to reach far down into their own pockets, or else they must tie up with big interests willing to finance their campaigns. Ruth McCormick frankly described the two alternatives in her testimony before the Nye Committee: ‘A candidate may either pay campaign expenses out of his own pocket, or he may collect money from individuals, or groups, or organizations for campaign purposes. In the latter case, he places himself under obligations which may hinder his freedom of action in the public service in the event of his election.’ The man without money, or without influential backers, knocks at the door in vain. Plutocracy rules, not democracy.
II
It is an old maxim of American politics that the office should seek the man, not the man the office. The direct primary tends to bring about just the opposite result. It has planted the seeds of ambition in those who have absolutely no qualification for positions of public trust. By making the road so easy, it has encouraged the office seeker. Nebraska has recently offered a case in point, the Nye Committee bringing out the facts. Conservative Republicans of that state, who have never cherished any excess love for George W. Norris, persuaded a Broken Bow grocer of the same name to leave a $4200 position and enter the primaries against the independent Senator. Though the plot came to naught and the Broken Bow man was later forced to withdraw, the moral is none the less plain. A person with no qualifications at all can enter the field under the direct primary. A batch of signatures for nearly every document can be had for the asking, and, if fate smiles upon him, it is within the cards for the tyro to run off with the nomination.
Insincerity and political claptrap go hand in hand with the direct primary. The system favors the demagogue, the vote snatcher, and the coiner of pretty phrases. Men of the breed of J. Thomas Heflin have fattened for years off the direct primary, with their appeals to the religious, racial, and sectional prejudices of their constituents. The demagogue has always been with us, but never have conditions been so favorable to the practice of his trade as they are to-day.
No larger public interest in politics has followed in the wake of the direct primary. Here again there has been no fulfillment of earlier promises. The votes of but 3 or 4 per cent of the electorate of a district have often been enough to nominate a candidate. Where a live issue is before the people, as it was in Massachusetts last year, with prohibition the central issue between the Republican senatorial candidates, a fair-sized vote may be rolled up. Yet this is far from being the rule; quite as often the turnout at the polls is surprisingly small. Unless there is some issue to prick into action his natural inertia and indifference, the voter is often content enough to let the professional politicians settle the matter. The total vote cast in the Pennsylvania primaries in 1930, when a battle of giants was under way, was only 1,630,870. Compare this with the total vote of over 3,100,000 cast in the 1928 national election and it will be seen that about half the voters took no part in the decision at all.
Even if the voter does go to the polls in the primary, a real difficulty may face him there. Carrying as it does many names, candidates for both administrative and policy-making offices, the jungle ballot makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the voter to make an intelligent choice. On the merits of two or three of the candidates he may be able to come to some sort of judgment; about the qualifications of the others he must often be wholly in the dark. Professor Karl F. Geiser of Oberlin reminds us that in the 1922 primary the Republican voters of Cleveland were asked to choose candidates for 43 offices from a list of some 175 names. Caprice, fancy, and guesswork, under such conditions, rather than an informed knowledge, inevitably characterize the voter’s judgment.
By saddling the country with a double dose of political activity, the direct primary again has made confusion worse confounded. In November, every other year, the voters must choose one third of the Senate and all the membership of the House, together with a vast army of state, city, and local officials. The primaries precede the elections from one or two to six or eight months. After he takes the oath of office, a member of the House has hardly donned his harness before he must gird himself for the next primary contest. In states like Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and often in the smaller states as well, a primary may be as bitterly contested, and involve factional warfare on as large a scale, as the election itself, even if the actual vote may be considerably less. Not only has the volume of political agitation been greatly increased, but there has been a corresponding extension in the span of its duration. Whether or not any issues exist to demand the attention of the electorate, politics can never be adjourned. The direct primary has doubled our dose of politics — yet nothing has been done to enlarge the digestive capacity of the patient.
Upon no group does the burden fall more heavily than upon members of Congress. If a Congressman is efficiently to represent his district at Washington, and if his stewardship of its interests is to be a vigilant one, his job has never been more exacting in its requirements than it is to-day. Congress handles vastly greater sums of money than ever before, and the Federal Government never touched the people at so many points. The relentless pressure of the primary nevertheless makes it difficult for a Congressman to forget the dangers of the home sector; behind every bush there may be a plot in the hatching. To concentrate for long on the business of national legislation is seldom easy, for possible primary opponents demand much of his time and thought.
A Northeastern Congressman last year decided to enter the senatorial primary from his state. He knew that he had a fight on his hands, and that to win he must put his best foot forward. Early in the year, when Congress still had four or five months of the long session to go, the legislator remarked to the writer that he was going home to organize his campaign, and that, if no important developments occurred in the Capital, he did not intend to return except for an occasional day or so. The primary contest was henceforth to absorb his efforts, not his duties as a Federal legislator.
Parallel cases would not be hard to find. Soon after the Christmas holidays every other year, in the middle of the long session, with the approach of the primary season the fever strikes Capitol Hill. Congressmen run home by the score to instruct their lieutenants and to direct personally the disposition of their troops. The absentees may be away a few days, or many weeks. Public business goes by the board, just as Wall and State streets forget about the stock market the day of the YaleHarvard football game. Congressional leaders have more than once been hard put to it to muster a quorum for the passage of an important bill. Quorum calls weigh lightly in the scales when there are political fences to be mended at home.
III
With all its faults, and there were many, the convention system held a disciplinary whip over those whom it selected to carry the party standards on the field of battle. The conventions were made up of practical politicians, men whose business it was to win votes for the ticket and thus keep the party in power. As a vote-getting instrumentality, they set great store on the platform. Once the platform was adopted, the convention expected the candidates to stick pretty closely to the policies laid down in that document. If they rode forth on independent missions of their own, espousing strange causes, riding roughshod over the platform and its planks, the sharp rod of discipline was often invoked. To secure renomination a candidate had to go before the convention. There his record was carefully scrutinized by men to whom party responsibility was a solemn thing. If the record revealed that the candidate had wandered too far and too often from the party reservation, renomination might be refused, and the toga might go to someone else.
Under the direct primary the platform has become as often as not a meaningless set of platitudes. The candidate chooses his own issues in the primary, snapping his fingers, if he so pleases, at the pledges and commitments of the party. The bond of discipline has been broken, for the voters in their mass and collective capacity have neither the power nor the inclination to impose disciplinary measures.
Would not William E. Borah have strayed still further from the path of party regularity these past years had not Idaho in 1924 returned to the convention system in selecting its senatorial candidates? The question is a pertinent one. Borah came up for renomination in 1924; to secure this he needed the endorsementof a convention made up largely of regular Republicans. Campaigning zealously for Calvin Coolidge, even though the elder La Follette was making a third-party fight on issues that might be expected to appeal to Borah’s liberalism, Borah in 1924 wore the clothes of a regular Republican. Once reëlected and back in the Senate for SLX years more, he quickly resumed his irregular habits, and was a pretty consistent thorn in the side of the Republican administration. In 1930, Borah was again to come up for renomination, and again he needed the endorsement of the convention of Idaho Republicans. This may explain why, in 1928, he supported the Republican nominee, Mr. Hoover, though for several years before that it was the toss of a coin whether or not Borah, on any given administration measure, would not be found in the camp of its foes. Signs of a greater regularity were noted, and the convention again renominated him as the Republican candidate for the Senate.
Idaho this year has gone back to the primary system; Borah is free from his chains, and hereafter he will not have to go before the convention as a suppliant for the nomination. Hardly had Idaho voted to return to the primary when its senior Senator appeared before the radical legislative conference in Washington as one of the headliners in its programme. Borah is so well known, his personality carries so great an appeal to the voters of his state, that no matter how many lances he hurls at the Republican President and his legislative policies, he is virtually certain to win the Republican nomination in the primaries of Idaho as long as he wants to stay in public life. There are those who believe that hereafter, now that he has been freed from convention control, he will steer a course even more sharply divergent from the policies of the party whose label he wears when he seeks public office.
What is true of Borah holds for other members of the insurgent group in House and Senate, who, though elected as Republicans, regard campaign promises and party platfonns as having no greater validity than the articles of an outworn creed. Thanks to the direct primary, they are free agents. They write their own platforms, choose their own issues, pitch their tents on ground of their own selection. Knights-errant of politics, as long as they can corral the necessary votes they are rulers of a kingdom of their own.
IV
Instead of giving power back to the people, the direct primary has turned it over to special groups and cliques. Through the liberal expenditure of money, and an aptitude for political organization that would have done credit to her father, Mark Hanna, Ruth McCormick built for herself a smooth-working machine that took the measure of the rival Deneen organization. In Pennsylvania the Vare and the anti-Vare organizations contend for mastery in the primaries; in New Jersey we have the Democratic machine that acknowledges as its tsar and master Frank Hague, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee; in California the Johnson and anti-Johnson factions have waged many a merry battle; in Wisconsin the La Follette and anti-La Follette groups struggle for control; in Chicago the Thompson and anti-Thompson machines, and so on.
Rival machines come to grips in many a primary contest; behind the shouting and the speech making lie the spoils of victory, the rackets, patronage, graft, and other prerequisites which go to the winning faction. While we have politics we shall have professional politicians, and the professional applies himself just as scientifically to win a primary victory as he does to win any other election. Election day always finds the politicians and their crews on the job, even if the intelligentsia are on the golf links. The bootlegging and other rackets of our generation offer to its Al Capones no smaller prizes than came to the professional politicians of pre-primary days as the spoils of victory. Staged as they are between those who profess allegiance to the same party, these primary contests with their factional wrangling, their personal abuse and invectives, leave behind them a heritage of bitterness that extends over into the election period, thus contributing still further to the breakdown of party spirit and loyalty, and undermining still further party responsibility. A faction with an eye upon the spoils of office and the patronage of power can easily enough find a candidate to carry its banner in the primary. If boss control of conventions was bad, the scrambling of power among half-a-dozen snarling factions certainly is no better.
Clique control does not end with the political machine. Organized minorities share in the plunder by resorting to the methods of political coercion. These groups thrive mightily off the direct primary; lobbies have entrenched themselves under the shadow of the Capitol dome by the scores, most of them digging in since the advent of the popular system of nominations. The Anti-Saloon League has stood out among these groups. When the tumult and shouting over prohibition dies down, — and some day there may be a definitive decision, — the future historian may well find that the encouragement which the success of the Anti-Saloon League has given to other organized minorities to wield the club of political coercion over the heads of our lawmakers is the biggest item on the debit side of the ledger of the ‘great and noble experiment,’ national prohibition.
Ohio, cradle of the Anti-Saloon League, offers also one of the best illustrations of the methods through which it fastened its political tentacles on the American people. When the late Myron T. Herrick was governor of that state, he emasculated a localoption bill supported by the Ohio branch of the League, then directed by Wayne B. Wheeler. It was in Ohio that Wheeler built up his reputation as the smartest politician ever developed in the ranks of the Drys. By Wheeler’s own estimate, there were only 400,000 Dry votes among the 1,250,000 voters of Ohio. His support was rated as being worth 20,000 votes to any candidate for office. Drawing upon this bloc of votes, he entered each district where the Wet then in office showed any signs of political weakness, knocking off the Wets one by one, until he had won a majority in the legislature — though the Drys in the state as a whole were, by his own admission, only a minority. Though Herrick had the backing of the Republican organization, Wheeler was able in the same way to retire him to private life as a punishment for refusing to do the bidding of the Anti-Saloon League, Wheeler and his machine used the same methods later in imposing their will upon the national Congress, a power resting not so much on the large number of votes controlled as on the skillful, ruthless use of an organized group in each district to defeat legislator after legislator who refused to vote for the programme of the League.
Other organized minorities have followed the example of the Anti-Saloon League. With aggressive leadership, a clearly defined programme, and a disciplined but not necessarily large body of followers, many an organization has succeeded in beating a state legislature or Congress into submission. In a close primary election, such a group often wields the balance of power, and the tide of victory will often go to that candidate who has promised to do its bidding. In the words of John R. Coen, chairman of the Republican State Committee of Colorado, in his testimony before the Nye Committee: —
The primary is absolutely destroying our political system in this state— the cure for the evil is worse than the evil itself; we are building up a system where every candidate is subject to attack and in danger of retaliation from all sorts of groups, large and small. We now have a system where we are corrupting the entire electorate of the state.
V
As it has operated during the past two decades, the primary has tended to subvert and destroy our representative system of government. Under the theory of the founding fathers, ours was to be a representative government. We have now replaced it with the mass action of the voters, mass action that is uninformed, emotional in its motivation, often directed by caprice and prejudice. The direct primary has broken down the spirit of Congress, has undermined its independence of thought, and injected into its proceedings the paralyzing element of fear. Under the whip and spur of the organized minorities now afield, rare is the legislator who can call his soul his own. Embracing a programme that may be contrary to the interests of the people as a whole, but that represents the price which an organized minority asks for its support, many a newcomer has taken the seat of a tried and experienced legislator, riding into power through the direct primary. You will often hear a Congressman admit in private conversation that he never votes against a bill which any group among his constituents strongly support, for he knows by experience that to do so inevitably lays him open to attack by opponents who are quick to capitalize the opposition of the offended elements.
Thus fear rules Congress as never before. It was fear of the soldiers’ vote that caused so many members of Congress to vote for the loan bill over the veto of the President, and over the protests of many a veteran. It was fear that drove so many members to vote for the debenture and other forms of farm relief, knowing that if they failed to follow the orders of the lobbyists of the farm organizations they would face a candidate endorsed by the farm lobby at the next primary. It was fear again that caused so many legislators to do the bidding of the Anti-Saloon League, knowing that if they did not do so the next primary would probably be their Waterloo.
Whether or not the direct primary has brought about any dilution in the calibre of our public men is one of those questions for which a scientific and exact answer can hardly be given. Much depends on the yardstick and definition used. To the Anti-Saloon League every legislator that carried out its orders was a statesman of the first order. Even a boss-ruled convention has selected many an able man as its party’s candidate for the Senate, and, by the same token, ‘bad’ as well as ‘good’ candidates have fought their way to victory under the direct system of nominations. One thing, however, is plain enough. Since the direct primary there has been a weakening in the moral tone and fibre of Congress. Thanks to the political coercion of the organized minorities, there is a conspicuous lack of courage and backbone. Congress legislates far too much in the interest of special groups. Political expediency, rather than principles of broad public policy, determines far too many of its decisions, and will continue to do so as long as members must win votes in the primaries.
The blight has fallen with special severity upon the Senate. The founding fathers meant the upper chamber to be one of the pivotal elements in the admirable system of checks and balances of the Constitution. By providing that members of the House should be elected popularly every two years, they obviously intended that the lower chamber should reflect pretty closely the ebb and flow of public opinion through the country. The Senate, on the other hand, was to be a safety valve against sudden gusts of popular emotion, a check on the excessas of a democracy gone wild. This was to be brought about in two ways: first, by giving a Senator a six-year term, thus clothing him with a little greater protection against the sudden whims of the electorate; secondly, by giving the legislature of each state the duty of electing its Senators, rather than providing for direct election by the people, thus placing a further safeguard against mobocracy around the Senate. A Senator’s term of office still remains six years, but the system of popular elections and the direct primary have now exposed the upper chamber just as directly to popular pressure and to dictation by organized minorities as the House.
The safeguards have vanished, and the Senate has been cut loose from its ancient moorings. The dignity and distinction of the upper chamber have departed. It has merely become a smaller House; and because a Senator is one member in a body of 96, instead of one in 435, with a vote that carries a correspondingly greater weight, the organized minorities now turn their heaviest guns against the Senate, rather than against the more ‘popular’ chamber.
VI
Finally, — and perhaps the most damning count in the bill of indictment, — the direct primary has broken down party responsibility. A strong two-party system is indispensable to the successful operation of a representative government, whose efficiency is ordinarily in proportion to that of the two-party system. In those states where one party has dominated politics, without the salutary check of a strong opposition, graft, corruption, and maladministration are more likely to exist. The best guarantee of efficient government yet devised is a strong, active, intelligently led minority party, ready to come into office if the ruling party fails in its stewardship. Party responsibility rests foursquare on the twoparty system, which assigns to the party certain extralegal activities, such as the nomination of candidates for public office, the conduct of the campaign, the formulation of political issues, and the bringing about of harmony between the various branches of the government. By taking these important functions out of the hands of the parties and turning them over to the people, and by shifting public attention from parties to factions and individuals, the direct primary has broken down party responsibility. Candidates can now select their own issues, make their own platforms, defy their state and national conventions, and, if successful in getting the necessary votes, can come to Washington to continue their independent rôles. To men like Borah, Brookhart, Norris, La Follette, and many others, party responsibility means nothing.
If President Hoover is renominated next year, he will go before the country on a platform written by the convention which elects him as the Republican nominee. His Democratic opponent will make his campaign on the platform written by the Democratic convention. Yet neither, short of a miracle, will be able after election to translate that platform in terms of legislation, for under the direct primary a large group in Congress who theoretically belong to the party given power will feel free to vote for or against any bill formulated by the administration in fulfilling the pledges with which it came into office.
These are the conditions which imperil the two-party system; in its place we are moving toward a government by blocs and combinations, the domination of politics by special groups, the piling up of appropriations like Pelion on Ossa, and a weakening of party discipline. The failure of the direct primary to perform what had been promised for it is bad enough, but even more serious are the evils which it has brought with it, evils which threaten the institutions of government upon which the greatness of the Republic has been built.