Flood the Zone with Knowledgeable Voters
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| Head of a woman, Mycenae, 13th century B.C. |
We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business at all. (Pericles, 430 B.C.)
It's getting pretty hard these days to avoid the idea that the Constitution is broken, and there are many ideas floating around about how to fix it. What I did not know was that proposals to fix the Constitution date back well into the nineteenth century.
I learned this and a lot more from Aziz Rana's new book, The Constitutional Bind. It's a very rich book, and also a very long one. In this story, I'm going to start by focusing on a small slice (mainly chapter 4) that concentrates on the time just before World War I. I've written several stories that focus on this period (Night Lights at Coney Island, The Future Began with a Car Crash). I keep coming back to what we lost with the outbreak of World War I.
Professor Rana has given me another chapter in my chronicle of loss. There was comprehensive planning for constitutional reform before World War I.
History has obscured all this, because the ideas came from the losers, and as we are often told, history is written by the winners. Certainly that was true of the textbooks I read in school. Professor Rana has rescued this story from the trash bin.
In 1912, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) ran Eugene Debs for president. He got 6.0 percent of the vote. William Howard Taft, the sitting president, got 23.2 percent. Theodore Roosevelt, who had served two terms as president, got 27.4 percent. And Woodrow Wilson, the sitting governor of New Jersey and former president of Princeton University, got 41.8 percent. There were also several minor candidates.
The 6 percent that Debs got in 1912 was the high water mark of the Socialist party. (He actually got more votes in 1920, but his percentage was lower because women had just received the right to vote with the 19th amendment, and they voted in substantial numbers.)
Even though he only received 6 percent, Debs and the Socialists were, I think, clearly influencing national politics. All three of the major candidates, including the Republican president (Taft) and the former Republican president (Teddy Roosevelt), referred to their "progressive" bona fides. The formal name of Roosevelt's new party was the Progressive party, although it's generally known as the Bull Moose party. And Roosevelt did have a progressive background as a trust buster, among other things. But I do find it a stretch that William Howard Taft would find the winds from the left so strong that he needed to reach for the progressive mantle. (For the widespread use of the progressive moniker, click here to see "Progressivism and the Presidential Election of 1912" in Teaching American History.)
As Rana writes, looking back from today, "In earlier eras, even if radical agendas did not enjoy majority or near-majority support, they nonetheless often had a substantial influence on the terms of legal-political debate." (P. 564.)
And we know from present-day experience that smaller parties can have a significant influence on the public discourse. Just look at the Democratic Socialists of America and their standard bearers - Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.)
The 1912 Socialist Platform
As Rana notes, "The 1912 SPA platform included a comprehensive set of institutional reforms to the operation of government that could be implemented through popular codification, either by congressional legislation or by formal amendments." (P. 602.)
I was curious to know more about the Socialist Party's 1912 platform, so I hunted a bit and found it online. (For an easy-to-read copy, click here. If you're interested in seeing the platform in its original environment, click here and go to page 196.) The platform is divided into an introduction and then a working program, which is divided into different topics, with numbered planks under each topic.
Here are some selections from the introduction. It turns out that socialists in 1912 didn't like capitalists very much, and they were very candid in expressing their views.
The Socialist party declares that the capitalist system has outgrown its historical function, and has become utterly incapable of meeting the problems now confronting society. We denounce this outgrown system as incompetent and corrupt and the source of unspeakable misery and suffering to the whole working class.
Under this system the industrial equipment of the nation has passed into the absolute control of plutocracy, which exacts an annual tribute of hundreds of millions of dollars from the producers. Unafraid of any organized resistance, it stretches out its greedy hands over the still undeveloped resources of the nation—the land, the mines, the forests and the water-powers of every state in the Union.
In spite of the multiplication of labor-saving machines and improved methods in industry, which cheapen the cost of production, the share of the producers grows ever less, and the prices of all the necessities of life steadily increase. The boasted prosperity of this nation is for the owning class alone. To the rest it means only greater hardship and misery. The high cost of living is felt in every home. Millions of wage-workers have seen the purchasing power of their wages decrease until life has become a desperate battle for mere existence. ...
The farmers in every state are plundered by the increasing prices exacted for tools and machinery and by extortionate rent, freight rates and storage charges.
Capitalist concentration is mercilessly crushing the class of small business men and driving its members into the ranks of propertyless wage-workers. The overwhelming majority of the people of America are being forced under a yoke of bondage by this soulless industrial despotism. ...
Measures designed to secure to the wage earners of this nation as humane and just treatment as is already enjoyed by the wage earners of all other civilized nations have been smothered in committee without debate, and laws ostensibly designed to bring relief to the farmers and general consumers are juggled and transformed into instruments for the exaction of further tribute. ...
In addition to this legislative juggling and this executive connivance, the courts of America have sanctioned and strengthened the hold of this plutocracy as the Dred Scott and other decisions strengthened the slave-power before the civil war. They have been used as instruments for the oppression of the working class and for the suppression of free speech and free assembly. ...
We declare, therefore, that the longer sufferance of these conditions is impossible, and we purpose to end them all. We declare them to be the product of the present system, in which industry is carried on for private greed, instead of for the welfare of society.
We can skip down now to the parts of the platform that deal with reform of the Constitution. These are located in the section entitled Political Demands. I'm just pulling out a few, with their numbers so you can find them easily in the document.
6. The abolition of the Senate and of the veto power of the President.
7. The election of the President and the Vice-President by direct vote of the people.
8. The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of the legislation enacted by Congress. National laws to be repealed only by act of Congress or by a referendum vote of the whole people.
9. The abolition of the present restrictions upon the amendment of the constitution, so that instrument may be made amendable by a majority of the voters in the country.
These are the Socialist party's recommended solutions to the main problems that face us today when we talk about choke points in the Constitution. (See pp. 127-165, 602, 665-666.)
Several other problems were in fact in the process of being addressed in 1912.
2. The adoption of a graduated income tax, the increase of the rates of the present corporation tax and the extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the value of the estate and to nearness of kin—the proceeds of these taxes to be employed in the socialization of industry.
Republicans created the income tax during the Civil War; the tax was repealed in 1872. In 1894, the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act lowered tariffs and reinstituted an income tax. In 1895 the Supreme Court decided the law was unconstitutional. The 16th Amendment, reauthorizing the income tax, became law in 1913.
4. Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.
The 19th Amendment, giving women the same rights to vote as men, became law on August 26, 1920. This measure was first proposed in Congress in 1878.
In addition, the problem of the senate, noted in plank number 6, was partially addressed in 1913, with the 17th Amendment, which called for direct election of senators. This amendment certainly did not solve all the problems inherent in the 1787 design of the Senate, but it was a significant reform in the direction of democracy.
Wilson and World War I
Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, had also called himself a progressive in 1912, but World War I started the year after he took office, and that war did indeed change everything. One thing that I don't recall my childhood textbooks mentioning was his creation of our modern security state.
He did not make his security program out of whole cloth. The U.S. experience in the Philippines was clearly useful on a number of levels.
The Spanish-American war, which started and ended in 1898, turned the U.S. into a global empire almost overnight. Defeating the Spanish was the easy part. It turned out that the Filipinos really liked the idea of being an independent country, and didn't see any need to be ruled by the Americans.
What happened next sounds a lot like a prequel for the Vietnam war. Here's Rana: "By the time President Theodore Roosevelt unilaterally and prematurely declared the Filipino independence fight defeated - on July 4, 1902, no less - a staggering price had been paid for what should have been a relatively simple pacification project: four thousand US soldiers and approximately 50,000 Filipino troops were dead, not to mention upward of a quarter million Filipino civilians. The fighting had featured atrocities on both sides, with the American army resorting to the large-scale use of torture as well as 'reconcentration camps,' where rural populations were forcibly garrisoned in a policy that the historian Paul Kramer describes as 'the deliberate annihilation of the rural economy' through 'the destruction of villages,' 'the burning of rice stores,' and 'the killing of livestock' - all of which led to mass starvation, disease, and death." (P. 168.)
Things didn't actually start to calm down until the Americans decided to change course. This involved moving away from conquest and instead calling themselves liberators, who would only be there for a while until the locals learned how to set up and run a liberal democracy. The Philippines became an independent nation in 1946. (Pp. 168-171, 187-192.)
Meanwhile, many Americans were learning how to run a colony, either through direct military administration, or by other, softer means. And then they came home to America. One of these was a man named August Vollmer.
I'm going to turn here to Sarah A. Seo's Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (2019). She devotes a whole chapter to Vollmer, who began his police career in 1905, when he was elected town marshal in Berkeley, California. He had previously served in the U.S. army in the Philippines in 1898-1899.
Vollmer modernized the Berkeley police (in the process, he became chief of police instead of town marshal). He installed call boxes so officers on foot patrol could communicate with headquarters, and even created a primitive version of the pager (a flashing electric light posted on a telephone poll near the call box indicating that the officer should call in to headquarters). He put officers in squad cars, on motorcycles, on bicycles. He is also credited with creating "the first police school, promoting crime laboratories, and using the lie detector." And he put his officers in uniforms, emphasizing their professionalism as a paramilitary force. His influence came to be national, and he is known as the father of modern policing in the United States. (See Seo, pp. 64-68.)
Vollmer felt that his experience in the Philippines was basic to his work in police science. As he put it later in his career, “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks. After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society and we must never forget that.” (I found this quote in a very interesting article: Julian Go, "The Imperial Origins of American Policing," American Journal of Sociology 125:5, March 2020.)
Seo also gives us an update on William Howard Taft, the former president who, in 1921, became chief justice of the Supreme Court. (He spent the intervening years teaching at Yale's law school.) In 1925, he wrote the court's opinion in Carroll v. United States, creating the famous "automobile exception" for searches. I think we may call this decision the first cut in the gutting of the Fourth Amendment. (Seo, pp. 137-142.)
Perhaps I should add that Taft served as governor of the Philippines between 1900 and 1904. During his tenure he established the Philippine Constabulary, a military police organization that was intended to enforce order with somewhat more finesse than the soldiers of the American army.
The Philippine Constabulary became a model for the state police organizations that were created in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, most notably the Pennsylvania State Police, organized in 1905 as the Pennsylvania State Constabulary and generally considered the first modern state police force. The subjects of their tender ministrations during these years referred to them as the "American Cossacks."
They were called Cossacks because they were normally on horseback, and they used cavalry charges to break up crowds of workers who were engaged in labor disputes with their bosses. The workers often came from eastern Europe and were familiar with the role that Cossacks played in the Russian empire.
John C. Groome, the organization's first superintendent, had served in the Spanish-American war. He advised his men as follows: "One state policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners." An interesting combination of xenophobia and megalomania.
In my opinion, the ideology of what is now called the "thin blue line" starts here.
The influence of the Philippine experience was clearly very important, but I would argue that another source for the security state was domestic. Large corporations had been running company towns, and they developed techniques to watch and control all the residents of the town, not just their employees. They used private police, including the famous Pinkertons. The AFL-CIO is not terribly fond of "the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which was notorious for such activities as infiltrating its agents into unions and breaking strikes - and which at its height had a larger work force than the entire U.S. Army."
(As someone who lives in Pennsylvania, I feel obliged to at least mention the Coal and Iron Police. From the 1860s to the 1930s, Pennsylvania allowed corporations to hire private police forces. And many businesses did so.)
It strikes me that big business may have seen an opportunity to cut its costs by getting the government to at least share in the job of controlling the population. I need to emphasize that this is a pure speculation, but I do think it fits a pattern. Business has often shown interest in socializing costs and privatizing profits.
I haven't found a good source for all this, but I do think Pittsburgh may be a good example. One place to start would be the famous Pittsburgh Survey of 1907-1908, which was a large, ground-breaking sociological survey funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, with the results published initially in magazines and then in a six-volume report. I stumbled across it years ago while researching the photographer Lewis Hine. He was, among other things, the survey's official photographer.
Interestingly, what is now called the FBI had a field office in Pittsburgh by 1914. The FBI tells us that "during its early years the Pittsburgh office handled security matters relating to World War I and the social unrest that followed the end of the conflict."
Government officials used those laws to suppress the Socialist Party of America. One thing they did was throw Eugene Debs into jail for violating the Espionage act. Debs ran for president in 1920 from his jail cell. He was eventually released in December 1921, a year after the act was repealed.
Debs was not the only prominent Socialist to encounter difficulties, Victor Berger of Wisconsin was elected to Congress in 1918, and Congress refused to seat him. In 1919, in a special election to fill the vacant seat, he was elected again, and Congress refused to seat him again. Rana also reports that, in 1920, "the New York State Assembly suspended and then expelled on ideological grounds five SPA politicians who had been elected to the body." (P. 248.) So much for the will of the people.
Having Socialists in elected office clearly made the security state nervous. And I think the myrmidons were right. Teddy Roosevelt talked about the presidency as a bully pulpit. A seat in the New York state legislature would not come with the same size megaphone, but elected office at any level does command a certain respect and attention. Call it, not a bully pulpit, but perhaps a bully soapbox. Well worth suppressing.
Of course, the U.S. was not the only country doing unkind things to its socialists around this time. Antonio Gramsci was a member of the Italian parliament in 1926 when he was arrested and sent to jail. His prosecutor said, "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning." (See Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ed. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 1971, p. lxxxix.)
The Socialist Party of America never recovered from World War I, but it did limp valiantly along. Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister, ran for president six times. One of his most famous quotes apparently comes in several versions. The one I remember from the 1960s is this: "I'd rather be right than president, but I'll take a chance on both."
Gearing Up for a Heavy Lift
I would be remiss if I left matters there. We've been talking a lot about the nuts and bolts of how we could improve the Constitution, but Professor Rana warns us that there are reasons why things have not changed. Perhaps most significantly, they have not changed because a lot of people like the Constitution just the way it is. This includes many political and business leaders, as well as a very large percentage of the electorate.
It's easy enough to understand why the fat cats like the status quo; it basically places them at an advantage in anything they want to do or prevent. But why do ordinary people resist change to the Constitution?
Because, over time, our Constitution has become something other than a practical manual for running a government. It has become a religious document - Rana calls it the creedal constitution. In other words, as a country, we have put our Constitution on the same shelf as the Bible. (Pp. 1-3.)
This shelving process took a long time. Rana starts the story with Abraham Lincoln in 1838, when he addressed the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. The subject of the address was "the perpetuation of our political institutions," and the 28-year-old Lincoln expressed the hope that the Constitution would become "the political religion of the nation." (P. 51.)
Many years later, probably just after he was first elected president in 1860, Lincoln returned to this subject in a brief personal note. He had been wrestling with the relationship between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Echoing Proverbs 25:11, he called the Declaration an "apple of gold" placed in a "picture of silver," which is the Constitution. Referring to the Declaration's statement that "all men are created equal" and have the "unalienable Rights" to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," he asserted that the country would not have fought the revolution without that understanding: "No oppressed people will fight and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters." So, for Lincoln at least, equality rules. And that is how he fought the Civil War. (See p. 58.)
After Lincoln, the sanctification of our founding documents continued. The story here involves some complicated concepts, like the death of settler empire (pp. 172-175, 485, 506-510) and the rise of Henry Luce's American Century (pp. 391-392). For our purposes here, it is enough to know that the Constitution became holy scripture, which is why Supreme Court justices can call themselves "originalists" and claim that their job is simply to figure out what the founders intended. No need to question whether eighteenth-century concepts fit the reality of the twenty-first century, or indeed whether they were the best solution at the time they were written. (For originalism, see pp. 35-36, 615-616, 641-644, 646-648, 772-773 n. 57.)
This strikes me as something like visiting the Delphic oracle in ancient Greece, and then trying figure out what on earth the oracle was talking about. The Greeks actually did this quite a lot.
I'm inclined to think of the Constitution as a useful tool that could use some repair - something like my car. But first we must find a way to demystify the Constitution. It's going to be a heavy lift.
Educate and Organize
How do we fix the Constitution? To adapt a phrase from Steve Bannon, we need to flood the zone with knowledgeable voters. To get there, we need to concentrate on blocking and tackling, or in this case education and organizing. We have made significant progress on both of these fronts recently, but we need to focus on a specific end goal, which is basic reforms of our political structure.
First of all, we are not going to succeed in saving the Republic without permanent mobilization of a mass movement. Voting twice a year is crucial, but it is simply not an adequate contribution. Everybody must do more, and do it regularly.
This army in the field should attack on two mutually supporting fronts - politics and economics. As Rana notes, "the greater the strength mobilized bases develop in one setting - for instance, in the economic realm - the more likely that they will have the organizational capacity to protect their essential rights and pursue their interests in other domains." (Pp. 672-673.)
Lurking in the background of this vision is Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, which mobilized and maintained a coalition that gave the Democrats extraordinary control in Congress. For instance, after the 1936 election (p. 305), the Democrats had 75 of the 96 seats in the Senate and 334 of the 435 seats in the House. FDR himself, running on a de facto socialist platform, got 60.8 percent of the vote. Faced with this legislative and executive phalanx, the Supreme Court caved in 1937 (see pp. 334-335).
Not too shabby. We've done this once. We can do it again.
One final thought, and this one is my own: We need leaders, but I don't think we need another Washington or Lincoln, or the proverbial man on horseback. I think we need the people of Minneapolis. We need a lot more of them, and we need them everywhere.
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| Athena, Piraeus, 4th century B.C. |
See also The Roots of the Republic, Disorder Breeds Bad Law, What the Greeks Knew, Rugged Individualism, Somotomo, The Democrats Need to Fight the War, We Were There All Along.
