Chapter 9 CONGRESS AT LAST WITH SOMETHING TO DO HAS NO ONE TO DO IT

When Lazarus was raised from the dead it took him a long time to find out that he was again alive. His legs were stiff from being so long extended. His arms were cramped from being decently arranged across his breast. The circulation starting in his members produced disagreeable sensations which recalled his mortal illness and the pains of dissolution. The last thing that this discomfort suggested was life.

Even thus it is with Congress, it has been so long dead that it is hard for it to realize that it has once again come to life. It suffers from various unpleasant sensations in its members, from blocs, from lack of leadership, from indifference to party, from factionalism, from individualism, from incapacity to do business. They are all vaguely reminiscent of the pains of dissolution. On the dissolution theory they are decent and explicable, for death is always decent and explicable.

As signs of life they are scandalous, and everybody body is scandalized over them for fear that a vital Congress will be something new to reckon with.

If Congress does realize that it has waked from the dead, who will be worse scandalized than the senile persons whom the newspapers respectfully call its "leaders"? What more threatening spectacle for second childhood is there than first childhood?

Suppose Congress were again a lusty and vigorous creature with the blood of youth in its veins, how long would Henry Cabot Lodge, aged seventy-two, remain leader of the Senate? Lodge, the irascible old man, with worn nerves, who claps his hands for the Senate pages as if they were not of the same flesh and blood with himself, and who would, if he could follow his instincts, clap his hands in the same way to summon the majority Senators, the recluse who is kept alive by old servants who understand and anticipate every whim, to enjoy greedily the petty distinctions that have come to him late because the Senate itself was more than half dead?

And who would be worse scandalized than the ancient committee chairman, some with one foot in the grave? At one time in the first year of Mr. Harding's administration the important chairmanships in the Senate were disposed thus: Finance, the most powerful committee, Senator Penrose, a dying man; Foreign Relations, Senator Lodge, 72; Interstate Commerce, Senator Cummins, 72, and broken with illness; Judiciary, Senator Nelson, 79 and living back in the Civil War in which he served as a private; Immigration, Senator Colt, 76.

Suppose Congress should come to life and represent the real interests of the various sections, classes, and, let us say, kinds of property and business in this country-how long would the Senate remain such a pleasant place to die in?

When these old gentlemen made their successful fight upon President Wilson they signed their own death warrants, and began putting an end to the system that made their tenure possible. Only a Congress which had long been a subject of public contempt could have fallen into and could have remained in their hands. Granted that Congress is negligible, it makes no difference who sits in it or how decrepit its leadership.

But shift power once more to the legislative, and the various conflicting interests throughout the country will grasp for the offices now in enfeebled hands. And by taking predominance in foreign relations away from the Executive and transferring it to themselves, the elderly and infirm "leaders," who have been tolerated out of half contempt, have started the avalanche of authority in their direction. It will sweep them off their unsteady feet.

Let us examine what they have done. When they opposed Mr. Wilson on the Versailles Treaty they established the power of the Senate to mark out broadly the foreign policy of the United States, a dangerous enough beginning for persons who were merely tolerated because Congress was nearly negligible and it was a matter of little difference to the public who its managers were. But when they altered Mr. Harding's treaties they also denied the authority of the Executive as the head of his party to align them in support of his program.

Party authority vested in the Executive thus impaired, it was not long before the representatives of agricultural states also denied it, and began to take their orders from the Farm Bureau Federation instead of from the White House. Then the House leaders in open defiance of the "head of the party" prepared and reported a soldiers' bonus bill which contravened the express purposes of the Executive regarding this legislation. Here we have the organization joining with the farm bloc in declaring the legislature to be its own master.

But on what do the octogenarian feet of Mr. Lodge and Mr. Cummins, and Mr. Colt and Mr. Nelson, and the others, rest except upon party authority? Not upon representing any real or vital principle in the national life. Not upon any force of intelligence or personality.

They move in a region of fictions. They represent the Republican party, when there is no Republican party, no union on principles, no stable body of voters, no discipline, no clear social end to be served.

When votes for legislation must be had, Senator James Watson circulates about among the faithless pleading in the name of party loyalty-as well talk of fealty to Jupiter in the capitol of the Popes!

In extremities the President, as "head of his party," is brought on the scene,-for all the world like the practice of a certain cult which long after its founder was dead used to dress up a lay figure to resemble him and drive it about the marketplace, to reassure the faithful and confirm the influence of the priests. Mr. Harding is alive enough, but the "head of his party" is dead and a mere fiction of priests like "Jim" Watson.

Power has passed or is passing from the Executive and has found no one in Congress to receive it. The arrival of power causes as much consternation on the hill as the outbreak of war does among the incompetent swivel chair bureaucrats of an army in a nation that has been long at peace.

Power is passing to Congress because Congress says who shall pay the taxes and who may use the public credit. Where there was one interest a generation ago, there are many interests today, each trying to place the burden of taxation upon others and reaching for the credit itself. Taxation and credit are the big stakes today and Congress has them in its atrophied grasp.

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SENATOR JAMES E. WATSON OF INDIANA

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The question what is the matter with Congress has received more answers than any other question asked about American institutions. For almost a generation the national legislature has been regarded as the one great failure in self government. For years it has been the home of small men concerned with petty things which it approached in a petty spirit, incompetent, wasteful, and hypocritical, a trial to the Executive, almost a plague to the country. It has shared with state legislatures and municipal boards of aldermen the impatience of the people. In spite of searchings of the public conscience it has gone from bad to worse till it is at its lowest point today, in personnel, in organization, in capacity to transact business.

What has brought Congress to this state has been the unimportance of its work, "doing such little things," as Mr. Root said after his six years in the Senate. Natural economy prevents the sending of a man on a boy's errand even if the man would go.

The great power which legislatures have, that over the public purse, has not been of enough importance to make Congress a great legislature. Taxes were light and before the war fell so indirectly that the public gave them little attention. The control of the budget virtually passed out of the hands of Congress, for executive departments habitually exceeded their appropriations and Congress always made up the deficiencies. There was no tax upon incomes. Taxpayers were indifferent. A few hundred millions more or less was of no account.

Dispensations to business in the shape of protective duties upon imports, a form of taxation which once made Congress a dominant factor in national life, had become steadily less important as American industry grew strong enough to hold its own market against competition and to compete itself in other markets. With the subsidence of the tariff as an issue Congress lost its last power to impose taxes in which the country was deeply interested. Where the control of the public purse and taxes are unimportant, legislatures are weak, unless executive authority is vested in a Cabinet formed from among their members.

With the enfeeblement of Congress through the growing unimportance of the taxing power, its great function, came the tendency to magnify the Executive. Power has to go somewhere, and it went down Pennsylvania Avenue. And this movement coincided with the development of centralization. Congress, which was full of the spirit of localism, was not a perfect instrument of centralization. The Executive was.

To elevate the President it was necessary to depress Congress. It became the fashion to speak sneeringly of the Legislative branch, to sympathize with presidents who "had Congress on their hands," to write of "the shame of the Senate," and when any issue existed between the two parts of the government to throw the force of public opinion on the side of the executive. The press printed endless criticism of the Senate and the House. Theories of government were invented to reduce Congress to a subordinate place.

Meanwhile Congress, having regard for the character of its membership, was agreed that incompetence should suffer no disabilities. All that was required for political preferment within it was political longevity.

The seniority rule, by which committee chairmanships went not to ability but to long service, favored mediocrity and second childhood. Even more, incompetence banded together jealously to protect itself against competence and shunted it into minor assignments. While the public was regarding Congress with contempt Congress was well satisfied to make itself contemptible.

Suppose we had developed a capacity for breeding statesmen in this country, which we have not, would any man of first-class talents seek a public career in such an institution as I have described? In the first place, the people were visiting Congress with indifference, or worse than indifference, and ambition will not serve under indifference. In the next place that great power which makes legislatures dominant, the power to tax and to distribute the fruits of taxation, had become temporarily unimportant; and again, Congress itself was organized for self-protection against brains and character.

Senator Root quit the Senate in disgust. Senator Kenyon has just followed his example in even deeper disgust. A Tammany Congressman after one term said, "They tie horses to Congressmen in Washington."

Congress is upon the whole a faithful reflection of the American political consciousness. Democracy is a relatively new thing. It has not taken hold of the minds and hearts of men. Shadowy and half-unconscious faiths dispute its place. De Gourmont writing of the persistence of Paganism in Catholicism, says that no religion ever dies but lives on in its successor. So no government ever dies but lives on in its successor. Why take the trouble to govern yourselves when your vital interests are so well directed by the higher governments, of Progress, of economic Forces, of heroes and captains of industry who ruled by a sort of divine right? The less you try to muddle through by means of poor human instruments in this well-ordered world the better.

For the limited tasks of self-government, why should special talents be required? We are still near enough the pioneer age to adhere to pioneer conceptions. Roosevelt, unfortunately, is the national ideal.

We look hopefully for great amateurs like him among insurance agents, building contractors, lawyers, country editors, bankers, retiring, with modest fortunes made, into public life. We put the jack of all trades everywhere. Into the Presidency-and I don't know why we should not in that office, for it is a waste of material and a misdirection of effort in self-government to throw away a first-class public man on a four-year job. Into the Senate and the House, into the Cabinet, where a lawyer without previous experience of international affairs conducts our foreign relations in the most difficult period of the world's history, matching the power of his country against the wits of other countries' practiced representatives, and thus obtaining a certain forbearance of their extreme skill.

Into the diplomatic posts, where an editor, Colonel Harvey, noted only for his audacity, holds the most important ambassadorship. Those who have seen the Colonel at meetings of the Supreme Council tell the amazing story that he was a silent and uneasy figure in the conferences of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Briand, perhaps because he is only an observer, perhaps also because he was in the company of practiced statesmen and diplomats.

However, our system has its compensations. The picture of the robustious Colonel uneasy in Zion is one of them.

In another great diplomatic post is Mr. Richard Washburn Child, a quantity producer of fiction, or sort of literary Henry Ford. In another, Paris, the second most important in the world, Mr. Myron Herrick, a retired business man. Senator Foraker said of him, at a critical moment of his public career, "De mortuis nil." "Don't you wish to finish that quotation, 'nisi bonum,'" asked the reporter who was seeking a statement. "No," said the Senator sharply; "De mortuis nil." Of the ambassador to France nil, except that he comes from Ohio.

But when we, given all these causes for the weakness of Congress, the frail hold which the idea of self-government has upon the popular mind, the unimportance of the taxing power, the tendency to concentrate on the executive at the expense of the legislative, the obstacles to ability which mediocrity has erected in Congress, we have not explained the present extraordinary confusion and demoralization in the legislative branch. Most of these causes have been operating for some time, yet Congress has been able to function. Only since Mr. Harding became President has the breakdown of Congress been marked.

If you ask observers in Washington why the last Congress failed more completely than any of its predecessors, with one voice they reply: "Lack of leadership." Everybody cackles of leadership as if lack of leadership were a cause and not a symptom. What is it that makes a leader and followers unless it is a common purpose?

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REPRESENTATIVE FREDERICK H. GILLETT OF MASSACHUSETTS

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The weakness of Mr. Harding, Mr. Lodge, Speaker Gillett, Mr. Mondell lies partly in themselves, but it is made more apparent by the difficulties that confront them. It traces back to the uncertainties in the national mind. Who could lead representatives of taxpayers staggering under the costs of the war and representatives of soldiers striving to lay an added burden on the taxpayers? Who could lead representatives of farmers who demand that a large share of the credit available in this country be mobilized by the government for the subvention of agriculture and representatives of commerce and manufacture who wish to keep the government from competing with them for the stock of credit? Or labor which insists that the way to improve business is by stimulating demand at home through liberal wages, increasing consumption; and the other classes which insist that the way to restore business is by making increased consumption possible to them through lower prices only to be accomplished through lower wages? The conflict runs across party lines. The old rallying cries fall on deaf ears.

The Republican party was based on the common belief that government favors delivered at the top percolated down, by a kind of gravity that operated with rough justice, to all levels of society, like water from a reservoir on a hill reaching all the homes of a city. When you called for loyalty to that you called for loyalty to everybody's stomach, expressed in the half-forgotten phrase: "The full dinner pail."

Now, the various elements of society are doubtful of what may reach them by the force of gravity from the top. Each insists that government favor shall enter at its level and be diffused from that center. Would you make the nation happy and rich, give the soldiers a five-billion-dollar bonus and start them buying? Give the farmers a several-billion-dollar guarantee of their staples and start prosperity on the farm. Give labor high wages and start prosperity there by stimulating consumption. Give the consumer lower prices by cutting wages and start prosperity there. Shift the burden of taxation somewhat from wealth and start prosperity once more in the good old way by favors at the top.

One might compare the breakup that has occurred in this country to the breakup that took place in Russia after the first revolution, the peaceful and ineffective revolution of 1905. All parties in Russia united against absolutism. A measure of representative government being established and the main object of the revolution being achieved, all parties fell to quarrelling among themselves as to which should profit most by the new institutions.

Under Mr. Roosevelt and his successors a mild revolution was accomplished. People turned against economic absolutism. They had begun to question the unregulated descent of favors from the top. They doubted the force of gravity that used to fill dinner pails. They demanded some representation in the process of filling dinner pails. They set up a government at Washington to control credit and transportation.

And now they have fallen apart over who shall pay the taxes, who shall have use of the credit, who shall profit by lowered freight rates, rebates in principle, special favors in transportation, under a new name.

When men today deplore the lack of leadership they are comparing Mr. Harding with Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Lodge and Mr. Mondell with Senator Hanna and Senator Aldrich. Today's chiefs of state are of smaller stature. Mr. Harding has been a drifter all his life; he has not the native force of Mr. Roosevelt, the sheer vitality which gloried in overcoming obstacles. He has not the will of Mr. Wilson. The petulant Lodge is not the same order of being as the brutal, thick-necked Hanna, or the more finished but still robust Aldrich.

But beyond this personal superiority which the leaders of the past had, they enjoyed the advantage of standing upon sure ground. Mr. Hanna belonged to that fortunate generation which never doubted, whether it was in religion or morals or politics. He may not have put it so to himself, but behind everything that he did lay the tacit assumption that the business system was divinely ordained. The hand of Providence was conspicuous everywhere in America's rise, but nowhere more than in the rapid turning, unprecedented in the world's history, of minerals and forests into a civilization.

In times of daily miracles it is easy to believe. Mr. Hanna believed, the public believed, Congress believed. Mr. Hanna spoke for this divinely ordained system which was developing an undeveloped continent as one had never been in the memory of man, making us all richer, with a certain rough justice, according to our deserts.

He himself was a pioneer. He himself had created wealth. He knew the creators of wealth. He delivered the commandments handed down to him on the mountain. With God so much on his side a much lesser man than Hanna would have been a great leader. God isn't on the side of Mr. Lodge. That is the difference.

Mr. Aldrich represented a less pure faith. What had been a primitive religion had become an established church. He had behind him a power of organization in business and Congress that Hanna had not. The public may have been less faithful; still the religion he represented was the official religion.

Like Hanna, he was rich and a creator of wealth; in addition he was connected by marriage with the richest family in the United States. He was the spokesman of business, and even if faith was decaying no one seriously questioned the sacred character of business as the instrument of Providence for making America great, rich, and free.

The chief aim was the creation of wealth. No one could doubt that the business organization was accomplishing it with unparalleled success. Perhaps the heads of the business organization kept a little too much of the newly created wealth to themselves, but at least everyone shared in it and it was wise to let well enough alone. Where there is such substantial unity as existed at that time, no great personal qualities are required for leadership.

And Mr. Aldrich was not endowed with great personal qualities. He has been gone from Washington only a dozen years, and yet no tradition of him survives except that he managed the Senate machine efficiently. In type he was the business executive. He represented more fully than anyone else in the Senate the one great interest of the country. He stood for a reality, and it gave him tremendous power.

His mind was one of ordinary range. He traded in tariff schedules and erected majorities upon the dispensing of favors. He bestowed public buildings and river improvements in return for votes. Leaders have not now these things to give or have them in insufficient quantities and on too unimportant a scale.

No great piece of constructive legislation serves to recall him. Primarily a man of business, he nevertheless attached his name to the grotesque Aldrich-Vreeland currency act. The work of the monetary commission of which he was the head, and which led to the present Federal Reserve Law, was the work of college professors and economists.

Naturally a better leader than Mr. Lodge because he met men more easily upon a common ground and had more vitality than the Massachusetts Senator has, he was no better leader than any one of half a dozen present Senators would be if the aim of business were accepted today by the country as the great social aim, as it was in his day, and if any one of the six now spoke for business in the Senate as in his time he did.

Give Mr. Brandegee or Mr. Lenroot or Mr. Wadsworth a people accepting that distribution which worked out from extending to the heads of the business organization every possible favor and immunity, as the distribution best serving the interests of all, and add unto him plenty of public buildings and river improvements, and he could lead as well as Mr. Aldrich.

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