American Politics; 15; Our Federal Union

This is National Educational Television. This is National Educational Television. Washington University and KETC Channel 9, the St. Louis Educational Television Station, present... American Policy, of course, for television, with Professor Thomas H. Elliott, chairman of the Department of Political Hands of Washington University. When our Constitution was drafted long ago, the most novel thing about it was its invention of federalism, and it's about that and aspects of that that I want to talk in this lecture. Federalism is a system under which each of us lives under the ultimate control of two governments, each of which has the final power to control our actions with respect to particular matters.

The National, or as we now usually call it, the federal government, is given the power, for instance, specifically, to raise an army, which means to draft us into the army, to conduct our foreign affairs, and to regulate foreign and interstate commerce, which today, in effect, means to regulate the conditions under which goods are produced, which goods are going to be sold across states. Conversely, the states reserve the power that they do not give to the federal government, the power, for instance, to prevent or to punish local crime, to run public schools, to promote in various ways the health and safety and welfare of the inhabitants of the particular state. However, the Constitution does not always specifically describe the limits of national power and the scope of state's rights, and from that great document's brevity and inevitable vagueness, and even from its silence, as Abraham Lincoln said long, long go,

have sprung many of our most important and almost insoluble constitutional disputes. More important still, from this issue, which we can roughly put under the general heading of states' rights, this question about the nature of our federal union, have seemed to arise many major political conflicts, and certainly did arise, one terrible and tragic war. I propose now, however, to question whether these struggles, aside from the Civil War perhaps, were primarily caused by differences over the theory of federalism. I would suggest, the thesis, instead, that states' rights has often served as a cover for the real issues, sometimes serving us in the past and usually in the present day.

Let's recognize, of course, that in olden times many people certainly did have genuine emotional attachment to the state of their birth, and I assure that some people have that home feeling today. Emotional traditional loyalties do play at some part, sometimes quite a significant part, in our ordinary political thinking. My suggestion is that a loyalty to a state as such, as opposed to the national government, usually plays a very small part now, and perhaps such loyalties were never of really transcendental significance, save only in 1861. Now to test these suggestions, let's examine three areas, three areas of political conflict in which in past centuries, and again in the middle of the 20th century, the state's rights banner has been sincerely or insincerely raised.

The first of these three issues pertains to civil liberties, the right to dissent. To recall, in 1798, Congress passed the alien and sedition laws, which were intended to suppress criticism, adverse criticism of the administration, then in power. It was the aim of the majority in Congress to silence the opposition party, the original Jeffersonian Democrats. Among the Jeffersonian leaders, you will recall, was the man who often is called the father of the Constitution, James Madison. In 1798, James Madison, a Virginia, persuaded the Virginia legislature to adopt resolutions drafted by him, asserting that the Constitution was nothing more than a compact between the states, and that the state had the right to interpose its own power between the national government and the ordinary citizen,

whenever the state believed that the action taken by Congress transcended federal power granted by the Constitution. This was, and we hear the echoes of it today, so I might as well say it still is, and obviously extreme assertion of the principle of states' rights. Now, the odd thing is that in the Constitutional Convention, only 11 years earlier, James Madison at one point had proposed that the Congress should supervise all state legislation, and when he was advocating the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, he was urging that the national government was given by the Constitution, the power to overrule any state action which the Congress deemed inconsistent with the Constitution. 17 years later than the time that I was just speaking about, the time of the alien and sedition laws, Mr. Madison, as President, construed the national power very broadly, broadly enough to justify his reincorporation of the national bank.

Inevitably, one wonders whether Madison's Virginia resolutions were really based on a theory of states' rights, doesn't it seem more probable that the real cause was Madison's indignation over the alien and sedition laws, and his real purpose and his intense design was simply to render those hated statutes now and void. Now let's jump to 1956. The Supreme Court of the United States, as many of you will recall, recently held unconstitutional, a Pennsylvania statute designed to punish subversion. Subversion, or I suppose you can say, in the old vernacular, revolutionary dissent.

The Supreme Court said that Congress, by passing the Smith Act in 1940, had made the punishment of subversive speech or subversive action, a national matter, and that at least until Congress gave them permission to do so, no state could legislate on that same subject matter. Instantly, as you will recall, a loud cry of states' rights went up. Bills were introduced in the Congress to permit the states to act, but more particularly, the Supreme Court was bitterly criticized for its decision. And yet you know, for a century and more, the Supreme Court has made similar decisions with respect to the nature of the powers of Congress and the states, without incurring any such wrath. In matters pertaining, for instance, to commerce, the length of trains off as a safety measure, the number of people that should work on trains, all the regulations and prices surrounding the sale of milk, for instance. And so on, the Court has found from time to time that the national government having, as the Court says, occupied the field, the states cannot act.

And when that, when they did that until now, nobody made any great uproar about states' rights. Again, it seems like a workable hypothesis to assert that the states' rights cry may be nothing much more than a rationalization. The real concern was about subversion. The Court was really assailed because it struck down an anti-subversion statute. Just as Madison really assailed this addition law long ago, because it was attempting to suppress free speech. Now let's turn to a second grade issue. The greatest issue, I suppose, in terms of the context of this lecture. Certainly the greatest in terms of the effectiveness of the states' rights slowly. I refer, of course, to Negro slavery in the 19th century and to the drive for equal rights regardless of color in the 20th.

Now, we must be very fair and moderate here and not ride this particular horse too hard. Emotional state loyal, okay, I say again, cannot be ignored, especially in its historical context. General Robert E. Lee's decision that he was a Virginia first in an American second, struck a responsive note in 1861. The similar decision in 1956 of the Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner, that he's a Mississifian first in an American second, probably has surprised a great many people, far more than Lee's decision did nearly a century ago. Although I assume, of course, in making that choice, Mr. Faulkner himself is perfectly sincere. It isn't just a question of General Lee, more than that. In the North, the transcendent issue in 1861 was not slavery.

It was the preservation of the Union. Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers not to wipe out slavery, but to save the Union. The existence of the Union was not in any sense a rationalization or a phony issue. Nevertheless, nevertheless, I think a strong argument can be made that the real Southern cause probably was based not on theory and certainly is not now primarily a question of theory. Not primarily an issue concerning the role of the states in the American federal system. Surely, the overwhelming issue in the South, the century ago, was human slavery or human freedom. Surely, the overwhelming issue in the South today is segregation or desegregation. And so when John C. Calhoun built a very elaborate theory supporting states' rights. Southerners followed him with enthusiasm, not, I think, because of the supposedly inexorable logic of his reasoning, but because his theory gave some intellectual justification for what they wanted to do, which was, of course, very simply to maintain the system of slavery.

Today, when Southern states pass interposition laws and Southern politicians assail the Supreme Court sometimes with virtually unbridled fury, the significant motivation is not defense of states' rights. It is, I suggest, defense of the system of segregation. Now, the third area that we should examine is, I think, that of economic regulation by government, laws concerning the running of commerce and industry. For our 19th century example, to follow the pattern of these other two examples, for our 19th century example, let's take the so-called tariff of abominations passed in the year 1828.

The state of South Carolina at that time felt that its cotton export trade would be savagely hurt by that tariff. Very upon it claimed the right to nullify the tariff, to prevent the enforcement of that law in the ports of South Carolina. It was on that occasion you'll recall that President Andrew Jackson gave his ringing toast. The Federal Union, it must be preserved. Here, indeed, in case of Jackson, is one instance where the issue from one standpoint was, again, not a phony one, it was very decidedly, the nature of the Union. But underlying South Carolina's threatened revolt was the fear of economic disadvantage. Not state sovereignty, but the cotton trade was the real bone of contention.

Now, discussion of other examples of modern times, about economic issues, I think should be preceded, required, in fact, a few words of introduction. We have heard a great deal in recent years about centralization, the creation of the supposed creation of a super state in Washington, and the simultaneous dwindling or withering away of the state and local governance. Sometimes this issue has been posed even more luridly. It's been posed as one of dictatorial or socialistic centralizers on the one hand. There was a party platform that said something pretty close to that, as recently as 1952, of centralizing socialists on the one hand, and liberty-loving libertarian local government enthusiasts, stateswriters on the other. It has been said that the parties have swapped their historic positions. The Democrats, under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman allegedly betrayed the state's rights philosophy of the founder of the Democratic party, Thomas Jefferson.

The Republicans that has said have likewise deserted the strong centralist or federalist principles of their ideological forefathers, John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton. This picture is too simple, I think, and a little too lurid, too picturesque to be quite true. In the first place, state and local governments are not withering on the vine. They are more active, do more, and spend more money than ever in our history. Federal grants in aid for welfare, for instance, or for the construction of hospitals or the building of highways, do influence the decisions made by the states as to what programs they wish to embark upon. But actually, such grants increase the scope of state action. Actually, these grants in aid have been asked for or at least welcomed by the states.

And they have been heartily endorsed, in most cases, by both of our major parties. Now, the states and local governments are not withering one bill. They employ together five times as many people today as this thing we think of as our monstrous government in Washington, as far as civilian personnel is concerned. If you leave the people in the armed forces out, and even if you put all the federal armed force people in to your formula, you still have twice as many people working for the state and local governments as you do for the national government, including the Army and the Navy and the Air Force. The notion of centralization arises, I think, in really, from the fact that the apparent necessity for national action has greatly increased the size of government, including the central government. Depression and war accelerated this trend toward more government, not so much a shift of power from state capitals to Washington, as a host of new tasks to be performed in both the state capitals and in Washington, and in particularly in Washington.

Now, the greatest increase in the national government, the spirit, as I say, by depression and war, the greatest increase I suppose in our history, did take place in the 20 years of democratic administrations from 1933 until 1953. And yet, since 1953, only in a very few areas have the Republicans appeared intent upon attempting to reverse this so-called centralizing trend. Now, it seems likely that in the 30s, the democratic majorities, with pretty substantial Republican backing, as we have seen, past such national laws as old age and survivors' insurance or the original national labor relations act, not because of any sinister or burning desire to centralize the government, not because of any fiendish scorn of the states and power of the people to govern themselves. But simply, because they wanted a workable old age insurance system and didn't think that any system lasting a man's lifetime was likely to work for 60 million people unless it was on a national basis, and they wished across the country, not just state by state, to protect the rights of working people, to the join the union of their choice.

In the same way today, I think that one may assume that the objective of some Republican programs where the state's rights is mentioned in them or not, is not so much to restore state's sovereignty as such as to achieve particular economic ends. Why were the New Deal water power policies that we discussed a while ago? Why were those New Deal water power policies fought so bitter because they ignored state's rights? Of course not. It was because they put government into the electric business. It was because they put government into the electric business in a big way and brought power-private power companies face-to-face with low cost government competition.

So the recent talk about partnership between the states and the national government in the field of water power development is really, I think, advocacy of a withdrawal from that kind of competition. Which many people think is bad in principle, and other people think regardless of the general socialistic claim of the people against it, think at least is unfair to the private power companies. The issue is one of profits, not theory. Why did labor fight the Taft Hartley Act, the law which amended and more or less replaced the original National Labor Relations Act? Why did the Taft Hartley Act include provisions permitting states to take particular action limiting the scope of union power? Did the Labor Man who opposed the law oppose it because it gave some rights to the states? Did the Labor Man leaders who opposed Taft Hartley oppose it because they themselves were dyed in the walls, Hamiltonian centralists, followers of Alexander Hamilton? Of course not.

Nonsense. It was in, in part, because the Taft Hartley Act specifically permitted states to outlaw the union shop by passing what are called right to work laws in the states. Why did Republicans and Southern Democrats support that provision? Because of their devotion to states rights? Or rather was it because they couldn't get a majority in Congress to outlaw the union shop? Or if they could, they feared the political repercussions if they did so? And still, they wanted the union shop outlaw wherever any group was willing to take that responsibility. Let me, let me sum up. Through history, political leaders and political parties have talked the language of political theory. They have versed in, for example, different concepts of our federal system, of our federal union. For four score and seven years, this was from time to time a vital issue.

Then it was settled. Even before the Civil War, the cry of states rights was effective, not just because of traditional loyalties, but because of social and economic goals, which were furthered by that slogan. Since the Civil War, and especially in our own time, it is, I think, at most a secondary slogan. The same people, for instance, may be against centralization, as they call it one moment, and for it the next. What they really care about is the substantial goal, political power, or social status, or economic advantage. The road to one of their particular goals may lead through the state capitals. And at the next moment, the road to another of those goals may lead through the capital at Washington. Far, far more significant, I think, in American politics, is the conception of the role not of the state's vis-à-vis the federal government, but the role of government itself, any government, federal, state, or local.

How far should people's government go in regulating, in promoting, in managing all our segments of the economy? Is it's direct action, intervening in the economic life of the community? Condusive to the greatest good of the greatest number? Is it conducive to expanded security and freedom? Or are the apparent short-run gains that this direct action seems to produce deceptive? Do they really contain the seeds of eventual economic atrophy? And finally, surftive to the state. Now these are real questions. And it's in that framework in this series of lectures, really, that we have been examining the party records on domestic issues.

We have found some fairly consistent differences, I think, between the parties, on most of those issues. We know, though, and those differences, I may say, very largely, stem from the way the dominant forces in the party have looked at this particular problem, not of state's rights in the nature of the union, but of the role of government, whether the people can control their government and make it work for them, or whether they shouldn't try to make it work for them, but should keep it weak for fear that it would adversely control. And subjugate them. And it's the different viewpoints on that attitude, on that question, that very largely seems to me to explain what differences we could find in the way that the party records indicate party differences. We know, though, that the parties themselves are seldom, if ever, unified. We remember from, I think it was the second lecture in this series, that great economic pressure groups with no immediate political responsibility have a continuing, powerful influence on the parties and on policy formation by the government.

And our picture of the party battle is further blurred by the seeming impossibility of fitting the most important issue of all today, foreign policy, into any picture of consistent partisan conflict. One thing surely we have learned, American politics is anything but cut and drive. The roads to effective action may be devious, but they are many. The one short road that everybody knows is the one that leads to the polling booth. If this series of 15 lectures has enabled anyone, when he goes to the polling booth, to vote with a clearer understanding of the real issues and to better comprehension of the meaning of that party label that appears upon the ballot, then this series has been, at least for me, with what? Thank you and goodbye.

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