American Politics; 1; Introduction

This is National Educational Television. This is National Educational Television. Washington University and KETC Channel 9, the St. Louis Educational Television Station, present. American Politics, a course for television. With Professor Thomas H. Elliott, Chairman of the Department of Political Science of Washington University. This is the first of the series of lectures about American politics. More exactly, it's about the American political system. All of us whether we like it or not are involved in politics. For politics broadly defined, I suppose, is a struggle for the power of government

or an effort to reach particular goals that can be realized only through governmental action. Government, one way or another, affects us every waking hour of our lives. And so, Willie Nilly, we find ourselves in politics. Every fourth November, at least, I hope, we go to the polls on the 2nd Tuesday, on the 1st Tuesday, after the 2nd Monday. And cast our ballots for the candidates of one party or the other. In the future, as I suppose, I suppose, as, unfortunately, in the past, a few days before election, we're very likely to hear blaring through the streets, allowed speakers saying, next Tuesday is election day. It does not matter how you vote, but vote. What a deplorable slogan. Of course, it matters how you vote.

If it doesn't, you might just as well stay home. I don't mean that it matters to me, at least not now, what candidates you vote for. What concerns me is that each voter, when he goes to the polls, knows what he's doing. He should know enough, at least, to be able to make an intelligent choice. For the struggle for office is not a beauty contest. The party conflict is not a sham battle for a worthless prize, like the battle between Tweedle Dom and Tweedle D. Who wins the prize? Does concern you and me. For the prize is power. And how that power is exercised will affect us for the rest of our lives. That's why it does matter how we vote. And that's why, for our own self-protection, we need when we go to the polls to go there, soberly and thoughtfully, with some comprehension of the American political system, and some understanding of the issues before us. I said a moment ago that the choice that we'd make would be between the candidates of the parties.

Now, I know that analogies are supposed to be dangerous, but let's try one. Let's pretend that the two parties are automobiles, and that we're being offered a lift in each one of them. The journey may be a very long and dangerous one over roads still unmapped and uncharted that extend beyond the hills on the horizon. Therefore, we want to make a pretty cautious, pretty wise choice about which of these cars we're going to accept a ride in. But what do we do about it? I suppose the first thing to do is to look at the cars themselves. Let's see how they are designed. What safety factors have they got in them? I don't believe this one has very many. Let's look at their structure. Let's look at their engine. Let the machinery see how the car runs. How does a political party organize?

What is the political parties structure? What is the political parties machinery? How does the political party operate? The second thing we have to think about in making this choice is the matter of which driver may take us more safely and swiftly to our pointed goal. Now, it's rather difficult to make that choice. We look at the drivers. Here they are to them. And we listen to them and we may be convinced that one seems like a better fella than the other. However, we can't depend entirely on what they say. Voice comes back to me over 20 years reminding us that it is the way we do things, not the way we say things that is nearly always the measure of our sincerity. And so we may be impressed by their promises. But let's think too about what they did getting here these two drivers. If one of them always followed the broad highway,

while the other tried to take shortcuts and got stalled and bogged down in rocky slopes or morasses, then the first of those two drivers might be the safer fellow to accept a ride from rather than the second. Backed politics again. What are the roads by which the parties have reached the positions which they hold on the issues of today? What were the Democrats doing? What were the Republicans doing on those issues? Before they reached the point which they have reached and which face us at this particular time, we want to know where the parties went, where they stood, in years past, as well as where they stand, now and as well as what they promised to do in the future. Candidates, speeches, party platforms may be significant. We listen to them, but we shouldn't make up our mind holly on what they say. And so in this series, our task is first to examine the party structure and its role in American life, and second to analyze the party records on the vital issues recurring again and again and with us now.

I seem to have omitted, however, one important point, perhaps I should have taken up first. It may affect how you vote, it certainly will affect how the people you elect decide questions of policy. Political parties are not the only significant organizations of human beings active in American politics. More and more people are realizing, recognizing that private organizations play a key role. We call these private organizations pressure groups or interest groups. Just for a couple of examples, for one, take our farm legislation, our agricultural legislation. In the main, I think it's fair to say that legislation was written much more by one of the interest groups, namely the American Farm Bureau Federation, but it was by either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Take another omnipresent interest group, the labor group, for many years leaders of that interest group

have tried to persuade their members to support particular candidates for office, and in Washington and in the state capitals have, like others, sought to have particular policies adopted by the men whom we have elected. Any aspirin for office, even though he's a party nominee, even though he may be a very loyal party man, will ordinarily be very happy also to have the open endorsement and support of any respectable interest group. When he gets elected, when he gets to Congress, let us say, he may find himself a spokesman for such an interest group. More likely he's going to find himself rather unhappily torn between two divided loyalties. The party leadership, for instance, may demand that he vote for a particular measure. At the same time, the interest group that has supported him may ask him to vote against that same bill. No analysis of American politics would be anywhere near adequate.

If you don't admit it, the interest groups and the vital role that they play, we must see what they are and how they work, and how they differ from parties and how they often compete with parties for political prizes. Only after we've done that, can we direct our inquiry strictly to what the major parties are and the records that they have compiled over the years. Now, you may ask, why all this talk about parties? I vote for the man, not the party. Well, true or not, perhaps you do. The fact remains that most of us, actually, no matter what we say and how independent we claim to be, do pretty regularly vote on a party basis. Any big politician, any national politician knows that when a presidential election comes up, he can assume that his party will get millions of votes. I could even say tens of millions of votes.

On a party label basis, regardless of who the candidates may be, we hear about winners sweeping the country. We heard about that in 1952 when President Eisenhower won a sweeping victory. Yet, even in that year, four out of five of the people who had voted for Truman in 1948 continued to vote the Democratic ticket. Take another fairly typical example on a local level in a proponderantly Republican part of St. Louis County in Missouri. A few years ago, a number of offices had to be filled at the local election. One of the offices was that of Circuit Judge. A man, a distinguished lawyer who had previously served as judge, ran for that position on the Democratic ticket. He was elected, made a very effective campaign, was elected by a substantial majority. The next day, the papers were full of his victory and were full of the picture of the Republican voters of St. Louis County splitting their tickets, voting the Republican slate except for giving a vote to this one Democratic candidate.

That was the picture one got from reading the papers. And yet, if you applied simple arithmetic to the returns, you'd find that in fact, just one Republican out of 12 had voted for this particular man on the other parties slate. The other 11 had gone right down the ticket from top to bottom for the grand old party. Most of us indeed do have a sense of party affiliation. We show it, if only by what we tell Mr. Gallup and Mr. Roper, when they come around asking questions for their polls. We show it, by the way, we vote. Oh, our parties are not a membership organizations. They're not disciplined units. We have and we make a free choice. But mostly, that free choice does turn out to be a partisan one. Even those who pride themselves, even those who pride themselves on being independent or are forced to be independent because of their membership on the boards of non-partisan organizations let us say like the legal women voters. Even they are likely to vote pretty consistently for Republican or Democratic in the privacy of the polling booth.

I mentioned the public opinion polls. Lately, a new crop of super pollsters has sprung up to which an English editor recently gave the name of Thessowist. I think it spelled like this. And my classical friends tell me that it is a word taken from pebbles, from the Greek word, the pebble. Now, when I think about pebbles in ancient Greece, I seem to see in my mind a picture of domestic needs, the old Athenian politician and Arita, putting pebbles and rattling them around in his mouth as a cure for stammering on his way to becoming the greatest Arita of his time. At least so goes the old old story. Personally, I've never put very much stock in it. It seems like an extraordinarily ineffective way of curing stammering and I doubt it would appeal to the modern psychologist. Maybe he didn't really put the pebbles in his mouth at all.

Maybe Demosthenes simply dropped them in the Athenian equivalent of the ballot box. Because in ancient Athens, the citizens voted with pebbles and hence the invention of this word by the erudite Englishman. The voting behavior specialists here and abroad have for some years been testing hypotheses that were made long, long ago, not just by political scientists but by political practitioners. Hypotheses assumptions about the way groups of people vote. There was a time when American voting was interpreted almost universally in terms of geography, in terms of regions. If you were in the south, you voted one way. If you were in the north, you voted the other. Later regions kind of went out of fashion and interests. The conflict of interests took their place. The urban interest would be lined up in theory with one party, the rural interest with the other.

Or the labor interest would be voting for one ticket, the capital interest voting for the opposite one. Lately, all those are certain amount of good common sense, I think, in these broad assumptions. The interest, the focus of interest has changed. As the social scientists, and I don't mean to be kidding them too much, but I can't help it a little, being one myself. As the social scientists have developed the art of the depth interview to the point where it can obtain the answers to every conceivable question. They are naturally focusing strictly on the interviewee, the individual, what makes him, what makes you, vote as you do. Is it filial piety, family influence, neighborhood influence, what the boys down at the bowling alley say, is it social, cultural, environmental factors, and while we're dealing in this technical jargon, what about charisma? Now this is not a course in Greek, but this is another word taken from the ancient Greek, and I suppose it was invented because there isn't any English word that succinctly says of what it is supposed to mean.

I'm not perfectly sure that I know what it means myself. It seems to mean whatever it was that General Eisenhower had in 1952 that made millions of people vote for him simply because he was General Eisenhower. In my own younger days, in the, in the, in the days of Clara Ball on the silent screen, I think that the equivalent term that we used for that was political it. You know, I, I think I rather like it's better than charisma. Why you was an individual, tend to vote as you do me as a matter of fact, be a question beyond capacities of the social ordinary social scientist solve. Maybe it's problem for the psychoanalyst, if it's worth solving by a psychoanalyst which I doubt. You may stand on your doorstep, and it perfectly candidly, frankly, tell the pollster that you're a Republican, because you're father words, or because you believe it's the party of sound business principles. But you know on the, on the couch of a more searching interviewer, an analyst, you might reveal that there's a little child, back, say, a night.

You unconsciously identified the grave and pursue visage of the Republican nominee of that year. Child Evans, use with your infantil notion of the appearance of God. Let's, let's leave it. Let's leave it to the Sessowists and the poll takers to find out if they can why we as statistical units among a mass of voters make the choices that we do. As individuals, we have a task which concerns us and not them. We have the job of voting intelligently. I said intelligently, that does not necessarily mean voting, quote, independently, unquote. It may be a fine thing to vote for the man not the party, but it may be a good thing to, to vote for the party. To have able men in office is certainly important, but to have strong and responsible parties is of significance in a democracy as well.

Democracy won't work well if third graders run the government, but neither will it work well as we know full well if we look across the sea to France, if the parties splinter into warring factions, a great number of small splinter parties that war with each other each striving primarily for its own uncompromising advantage. We the people obviously can't pass directly on all the multitudinous issues that come before the people whom we send to legislative office. All we can do is to try to hold responsible the people whom we elect. When there is a substantial unity in one party and a substantial unity in the other, when the parties are strong and have a fairly consistent following among their own leaders, among their own members, then we find it much easier to perform this vital task of self-government of holding our elected representatives responsible.

The party label, in other words, then means something. And it's important that it should, because as I've already indicated on election day, apparently it certainly means a very great deal. And thus to be true to himself to do his job as a citizen, each person ought to make doubly sure that the label which he prefers is indeed the right label for him. We cannot confidently comprehend a party's position today nor predict what it will be tomorrow without knowing what it has been in the past. Let's, therefore, as Al Smith used to say, let's look at the record. Let's look at the record of actual achievement in Washington. Bills past and defeated, wars fought or avoided, principles or dogmas, defended or discarded. And so we'll look back into political history.

What did the Republicans do? How did the Democrats vote? On the great issues, old questions which are renewed or reflected, at least, in our own time. You know, few with any of the major issues of today are really wholly new. Many are mere projections of struggles, of contests which our forefathers tried to settle, usually fortunately at the polls, in the past. Mr. Justice Holmes once said, continuity with the past is not a duty, but a necessity. We, we need not be antiquarians, we need not dwell at length on, on old unhappy far off things and battles long ago. Yet it may repay us to go back, to go back for a few decades at least, and observe the development of today's problems and the party's treatment of them. At the end, will we find that the parties do not consistently stand for anything at all? Perhaps, yet even so, and it may not be so, we may find that they at least dimly reflect different trends and attitudes about American life, that they at least faintly indicate varying probabilities of what will happen when they are in power.

In any event, let's free ourselves from the bondage to the label on the package, and look at the contents of the package. If after we do that, we still share for the label, then at least we'll know what we're doing. Let me sum up. We'll start at the beginning, and I mean the beginning, we'll start with George Washington. George Washington and his warning that factions might disrupt, divide, or even destroy the young republic. We'll find that the faction of which George Washington spoke has, in the course of years, developed along two quite different lines.

On the one side is the unofficial private organization playing a powerful part in our political life, the so-called Interest Group. To remind us of the powers of such groups, think for a moment of the 18th Amendment, which would never have come to pass, but for the organization of one of these Interest Groups, the old anti-Saloon League. Today we have powerful groups like the Farm Bureau that I mentioned, the American Medical Association, the oil companies, the CIO and the AFL, and many more. We need to look at what keeps those groups together, what makes them effective, how they operate, to win their goals, how they deal through the parties, how they compete with the parties. And that will lead us to the other development from that original faction that Washington feared. The organized political party that is now in almost every state, perhaps every state of the Union, a recognized and a legal part of the statutory electoral process in that state.

We'll see, as I've said, if we can find out just exactly what the party is, is it a nefarious group of self-seekers, anxious only for brutal, for patronage and health, or is it a group of high-minded men seeking a particular noble goal? We'll turn to the question that I just mentioned as indicated by what the statutes in the state say, the statutes that recognize the major parties as having a regular part legal part to play in nominating candidates for office. What is that nominating function? And how does it work? Well, we know roughly that most nominations, I suppose, on numerical basis, are by popular primaries. Are they popular primaries? Have they given the people a better selection of nominees? Have they increased the scope of popular government? Or defeating the hopes of the original sponsors of the primary has the primary developed in a different direction, actually strengthening the hands of the party machines and the party bosses?

While we're talking about primaries, we should discuss too briefly the different kinds of primaries that are held in different states, somewhere that people have to say openly what party they belong to, and some people seem to think that's terrible thing to have to do. And other states where they can keep quiet and are handed the ballots of both parties and can mark any choice that they like regardless of party consistent. While we're on nominations too, let's turn, let's not forget the most important ones of all, the nominations for the president and vice president of the United States. Are the national conventions that make those selections a rational, a rational means for deciding whom the people will ultimately choose? Or are those conventions simply super television shows where the delegates are nothing more than puppets?

They are strings being pulled by the bosses in the back room. Then we'll turn to a question that's basic in any democracy. Can we really govern ourselves if we the voters find it impossible fairly to hold responsible, the lawmakers whom we have elected, to hold them responsible to us? Now if there were no pressure groups and if we had too strictly disciplined parties, the task might be easy but we would have a clear cut choice. The president's party for instance, a united group, would back his program, the opposition party, would consistently oppose it. If at the time that the people came up for re-election, we liked the program and how it had worked, then we would re-elect the party in power. And if we didn't like it, we would throw them out. As I say, we'd have a clear cut choice and that would make it fairly easy to feel that we were holding our representatives responsible. The trouble is that is not exactly the situation.

As I've already hinted, the interest groups cut across party lines and are not themselves possible to be held responsible because their representatives do not come up for election. And the parties themselves too are not these strictly unified ideological armies, disciplined units all the way. How then can we, if we haven't got a clear cut choice, how then can we affect policy by our votes? And if we can't affect it, why have an election at all? Why not just toss a coin? That takes us I think directly into the second half of our series. Can we, after all that I've just said, nevertheless, design some real policy differences that distinguish the Democrats from the Republicans? Foreign policy and defense raise issues that certainly are vital to our survival, not only our country's survival, but perhaps the survival of mankind. Where have the parties stood on that? Agriculture, to put it bluntly, the price of hogs, is there a Democratic and a Republican farm program over the years, or is it indeed an interest group program and nothing more? There's been a lot of talk about giveaways of natural resources.

It's conservation, a policy that can be fairly labeled either Republican or Democratic, turned to labor and management. As we know for a good while, many of the leading labor spokesmen have been solidly in the Democratic corner. Nevertheless, in 1952 millions of wage earners voted the Republican ticket to put it in the vernacular. How come? There are civil liberties and civil rights, searing vital issues that some people say should be kept out of politics. Certainly they should be kept out of irresponsible debate, but they are political issues for all that. Finally there is a question of how our federal system should operate. A hundred years ago, state's rights was a partisan issue and to last a fighting issue. Is it still a partisan issue? And if so, have the parties simply switched sides with the Republicans now, the state's rights grew. We cannot cover all the ground that we would like, the lectures are few and short. But if within these limitations we gain any new insights, any clearer understanding of American politics, then surely we can play our own part in the political system better. That part may be simply going to the polls and voting.

All right, the greatness of a free democracy depends on each of us playing at least that part well. This is national educational television. This is national educational television. Thank you.