Why Have a Labor Party?

by HERBERT AGAR

MANY Americans have grown impatient with their illogical politics. They ask for political parties with clear principles and clear plans. They say the voter should know what he is getting, instead of having to choose between two vague and similar “platforms” which only become lucid when they discuss the vices of the other party. They say the Republicans and Democrats should reshuffle themselves into a progressive and a conservative party, each with a neat philosophy and an appropriate program.

Although this plea for logic and simplification sometimes comes from conservatives, it more often comes from radicals, in which case it usually loads to a demand for a Labor party. And in fact, if we were all to align ourselves ideologically, the emergence of a Labor party would seem inevitable.

In opposition to such a search for clarity and reason one may argue that parties based on ideas and principles may be suitable for a little country like England but would not be suitable here; that our strange form of politics grew up in response to a clear need and has served the country better than its critics admit; and that the substitution of the European type of party (and of political behavior) would alter our whole system of government.

The nature of that system can be suggested by reviewing how and why it came to pass. then vve can deal more cogently with the present.

The Fathers feared the rise of parties as the greatest of evils which might afflict the young Republic. Madison gave a. clear picture of what he hoped would happen as an alternative. Because of the vast size of the country (and the variety of social habits and economic needs imposed by that size) certain pressure groups would form brief alliances when their interests were similar, but would then dissolve and look for new allies on new issues. This would force a healthy conservatism upon American politics, since no faction would be strong enough to govern alone, and when a group of factions came together in a temporary league each of them would have to water down its demands to win the help of the others. Conservatism, compromise, deference to class or regional bias: these would be required by the size and diversity of America. A local group might be as extreme as it liked in its own state or district; but when it joined with other groups to act nationally it would leave its radicalism at home.

Madison was very nearly right. American politics until 1825 can very nearly be made to square with his predictions. The Democratic party which he and Jefferson built was at first little more than a loose alliance of the gentry who controlled the votes of their local factions: the Livingstons, the Clintons, and Aaron Burr in New York State; the two great Virginians; Charles Pinckney in South Carolina; and so on. Although this odd coalition of Southern landowners fiercely devoted to a cause and Northern bosses fiercely devoted to success did not dissolve, the opposing (Federalist) coalition did. From 181816 to 1825 there was in effect only one national party. This meant that there was in effect no national party, since each Democratic faction battled bitterly against the others.

Copyright 1960, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

An observer during the presidencies of Monroe and John Quincy Adams might well have thought Madison‘s predictions were coming true — but not with the benign results which Madison had expected. Every leader conspired for his own advancement with a stealth and bitterness which made the old party feuds seem friendly. Even within Monroe‘s Cabinet the Secretary of the Treasury found “ambitious and crafty and disappointed men on the watch for every mischief, and welcoming every disaster.”

Instead of dividing the country, as the Fathers had feared, the political parties had canalized discontents and cupidities, discouraging the extremes of roguery or perfectionism so as to hold together as many groups as possible for the pursuit of power. Thus they gave a certain form and moderation to politics. And instead of uniting the country, the disappearance of the opposition led to a chaos which could only end in tyranny or in the rebirth of parties. When there is an orderly, respected alternative, a government will discipline itself and work as a team. But the members of Monroe’s Cabinet had nothing to fear except one another, so they spent their time frustrating one another. Except in foreign affairs, the public business did not go forward.

All this was watched and judged by some of the absent politicians America has bred. They saw the old Jeffersonian party, to which everyone was supposed to belong, unopposed and unhealthy, decaying in public and becoming a danger. They saw their chance to build (around the fame of Andrew Jackson) a disciplined opposition; and in the spring of 1825 they set to work. Because of the recent extension of the suffrage, the old-fashioned Jeffersonian alliance of a few gentry would no longer suffice. It was now necessary to reach the mass of the people.

Yet in basic character the new parties (for the Jackson men were soon opposed by a group as weil organized as themselves) were like the old.

They were a bundle of local pressure groups and local machines, concerned first of all with local interests and local victories but prepared to unite to win the prize of federal patronage: the jobs, the contracts, the personal favors which the national government could dispense.

It was no accident that the new parties had as litlie logical coherence as the old, that they stood for no clear idea except that victory is agreeable. The political form was imposed by the facts of a huge federal republic. Butting aside slavery for a moment, there were only three matters of primary concern to the central government: higher or lower tariffs; more or less road and canal building, river and harbor improving, at federal expense; faster or slower disposal of the national domain. Each question stirred fierce regional jealousies. No abstract philosophical principle connected the questions. They could not be divided on any system of Right and Left. They could not be “settled once and for all. If the federal structure was not to he strained and the new experiment in government endangered, they could only be compromised, awkwardly, unsystematically, as the sectional and class pressures on either side waxed or waned.

In the 1820s, for example, when the new parties were beginning, South Carolina and Massachusetts wore changing sides on the matter of tariffs. In the process they nearly plunged the country into secession, until the irrational party system produced an intellectually meaningless compromise which quieted the tariff war from 1833 until Fort Sumter.

2

NEGRO slavery was the one matter of “principle” before the country when our party system was developing. And the system, built to ensure compromise and to prevent regional groups from leaving the main party, tried of course to ignore the principle. Even this may not have been wholly bad, for man tends dangerously to treat all his opinions as principles, and ideological parties on the European model encourage the tendency. And even when the principle is genuine, even when the feeling on both sides is so strong as to preclude concession, there may he a case for the delay which non ideological parties ensure.

John Caldwell Calhoun, the philosopher in polities, early recognized that slavery was a question of principle. So he planned either Constitutional reform to protect slavery, or, if that failed, secession. He was right. No halfway measures would suffice. If slavery was to be saved, the North must give way or the South must secede. By the weight of his intellect and character Calhoun would probably have taken the South out of the Union in 1850, before the North had strength to resist; but he was defeated by a typical political compromiser: Henry Clay.

Clay had always laughed at Calhoun, whom he pictured as forever staring at an abstraction and muttering, “This is indeed a crisis!” Clay did not believe in crises, lie thought “inevitable” issues could always be evaded, or postponed until they lost their interest. So when Calhoun was ready for secession Clay produced the famous “Compromise of 1850,”which did not face the moral issue of slavery but which postponed the Civil War for ten years. By that time the North could win. By his cheerful, perhaps light-minded, feeling that if unpleasant issues were dodged “something would turn up‘” Clay saved the Onion.

One cannot make a principle out of being unprincipled. One cannot defend as a virtue the refusal to face facts. Yet perhaps in the governing of men it is not always wise to push too fast, too furiously, toward the morally ideal. “Government is a very rough business‘" said Sir George Cornewall Lewis; “you must be content with very unsatisfactory results.” Most Americans might agree today that even the Civil War was less “unsatisfactory” than a divided Union. Yet a little more logic and principle, applied a little sooner, would probably have assured disunion.

The truth that our political forms are imposed by the facts of our huge federal empire is also shown in the history of the Republican party. Formed on the eve of the Civil War as a party of pure ideas, pure principle, the Republicans elected Abraham Lincoln. And at once, in order to win the war of principle, Lincoln had to resort to all the conciliatory, dilatory, even devious devices which have characterized federal politics.

In order to keep the slaveholding border states (without which he thought he could not win) he had to say the war had nothing to do with slavery. In order to ward off a revolt of state governors within his party, he had to promise partial emancipation for January 1, 1863. He wheedled and won to the Union side enough important Democrats to frustrate the anti-war party. He cut short or kept quiet the more violent revolts among the men who wished to treat the South as Rome treated Carthage, and who would have lost Lincoln both the border states and the War Democrats. Like Jefferson he seemed to rule with the wand of a magician, and if he had not been murdered the peace might have been worthy of the war.

The unhappy Johnson then took over Lincoln’s policies, Lincoln’s plans for conciliation. But he did not inherit Lincoln’s assuaging magic. So the fanatics took charge in Washington, and the Republican party was subjected again to the men of abstract principle, the men who knew they were right. The result is still a burden upon the Republic.

Under the brave but inept Johnson, under the political baby, Grant, the Republican “radicals” imposed a policy of “thorough”: no compromise, no concessions, nothing but the pure, logical idea. And as usual (since man is not good enough to be so sure of himself) the idea was quickly stained by hate and greed. The appeal to principles ended in the not infrequent combination of the Puritan and the blackleg. The Negro was betrayed in the hour of his deliverance and the while South was set against him for eighty years. The name Republican was made so odious throughout the late Confederacy that the region has been condemned to a one-party system. Yet in 1865 and 1866 there was a large ex-Whig, pro-Union group in the South. If Lincoln the compromiser had lived, the two-party system would have been re-established at once.

Thus ended the stubborn experiment with a party of principle. Beginning with President Hayes in 1877, the Republicans reverted under the pressure of facts to the normal federal process of group bargains and group concessions. By the time of Mark Hanna and McKinley the party was free from the last of its ideological fanatics, and incidentally it was at the height of its power.

3

THIS glance at history seems to show that in our huge federal society the political parties, to endure, must themselves be federations, with the maximum of home rule, which means the maximum of power (even within the party) to block, to delay, to insist on compromise. Thus we see today that the Democrats of the Northern industrial towns cannot impose their will on the Democrats of Mississippi, nor can the Republicans of Pennsylvania force conservatism upon the Republicans of Wisconsin. In the making of national party policy every region and every interest-group must have the right to interpose and to demand at least an abatement if it feels itself threatened.

This is what John Nance Garner had in mind when he said: “Each of the two parties is in a sense a coalition. Any party to serve the country must be a party of all sorts of views.” But how can a party with hard-and-fast, logical principles be also a coalition with “all sorts of views”?

If we turn from the parties to the Congress, we find the same rules of federalism at work. When a bill is sent to committee the first job of the committee is to reach a compromise acceptable to all ihe major interests affected. Each member of the committee may be a statesman to his heart’s content on other occasions; but when a bill affects the beliefs or the money of his constituents he must act as their agent, or look for another job. Who is to protect his district’s interests if he does not? Will a representative from industrial Delaware understand (let alone stir himself to save) the business of a cattleman in parched Arizona or of an asparagus grower in the blazing, irrigated San Joaquin valley?

Even when a bill escapes from committee it may still be unacceptable to some region or some class. But under the system of federal concessions it can then be talked to death in the Senate. The filibuster has lately been called the last refuge of reaction. We should remember, however, that it has often been the last refuge of radicalism. Andrew Jackson‘s defender in the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton, said ho would resort to “any possible extremity” to save unlimited debate. And the elder La Follette fought the moderate cloture rule demanded by Woodrow Wilson, saying that if the rule was accepted “you will have broken down one of the greatest weapons against wrong and oppression that the members of this body possess.” And when Coolidge’s Vice President, Charles G. Dawes, tried to speed the Senate procedure, a national convention of the American Federation of Labor unanimously condemned this “campaign to abolish free speech in . . . the only forum in the world where cloture does not exist and where members can prevent the passage of reactionary legislation.”

The filibuster is an undemocratic veto in a chamber which is undemocratic by constitution. Nevertheless, like the amorphous party system, like the committee system in Congress, it has played a vital role in preserving our federal compromise.

All three of these put together comprise what Calhoun called “the rule of the concurrent majority.” He wished to write it formally into the Constitution: that every major interest in the country, whether regional, economic, or religious, should have the right to veto any political decision which directly concerned it. Such an amendment would have left the government powerless to meet a crisis. Yet in normal times, when the nation does not feel itself in danger, Calhoun’s plan is precisely how our federal system works. The question may be raised whether a very large federation can work in any other way. The proposal to introduce parties of logic and principle, and thus to weaken the power to obstruct, may lead to the more formidable proposal of remolding America into a centralized national state.

However, if we can preserve Our present precarious balance, we may find ourselves with the best of both worlds — with as little government as possible in good times, and as much government as necessary in bad times. For side by side with our devices for obstruction we have invented (in the emergency powers of the President) a device for speed. When the people are roused to a sense of danger, the President can be given the strength of a Roman dictator. And when the sense of danger diminishes, the federal balance revives, and with it the power of a minority to block.

We have been living so long in economic or military emergencies that the federal power to act, rather than the federal power to deny, seems uppermost. This might be a reason for conserving our unique party structure. Neither the Congressional committee system nor the Senate filibuster could survive the rise of ideological politics. It seems fair to say that the parties, which the Fathers feared as the enemy of balanced powers, are today the chief bulwark of all their balances, the last defense of federal compromise.

If the Labor-party plan is to put all the progressives into one camp and all the unprogressives into another, and then to insist on strict majority rule (no matter if the majority lives in a corner of the country lying north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi), the United States will cease to be a true federation or will cease to be united.

If the plan is to build a “third party” for labor, no one could object —except the leaders of labor, who have found they can do nicely by using the present system. Third parties have an honorable role in our history. They are not meant to come to power in Washington; they are meant to dramatize new ideas or neglected grievances. If they catch the public ear throughout the country, their projects will be taken over by both the major parties: witness the Populist party, in the case of neglected grievances, or the Prohibition party, in the case of a new idea.

But labor has won its fight for collective bargaining. It is winning the fight for large labor participation in the planning and in the conduct of business enterprise. It may even be winning the fight to persuade its own ranks that old-fashioned “featherbedding” hurts labor as a producer and scalps labor as a consumer. Labor is of age — economically, politically, and socially. The cry for a Labor party comes chiefly from impatient intellectuals who think such a party would speed their favorite reforms. Less and less does the cry come from labor leaders, who have found that by using the traditional American party system they can win the traditional American benefits.

Finally, if the plan is to build a new party “of all sorts of views” and call it a Labor party, why bother? By the time the nation-wide coalition has been effected it will be found to resemble startlingly the two coalitions which are now called “Democratic” and “Republican.” They are the product of pure professional effort. The fact that they are so much alike in policy is a credit to the profession. Every politician would delight in finding a new set of compromises which would not only win but which would leave his own party clearly distinguishable from the other. It cannot be done. By the time the Republicans have arranged to placate every large group among the hundred and fifty million Americans (except for Alabama and Mississippi) and the Democrats have done the same (except for Maine and Vermont) the chief issue must, be the names they call each other.

We need more than one major party, or how could we turn the rascals out? We need fewer than three major parties, or most of us would be on a political payroll. That seems to leave a two-party system. If people choose to call one of the two parties “Labor,” that can do no harm, so long as the party continues (by endless assuagements) to bring citizens of all sections, incomes, occupations, races, religions, and prejudices into an enjoyable combination for the pursuit of power. But in that case why change the name?