The Old Guard Passes

...Back in the merry days of the Reconstruction, when the southern states were readmitted to participation in the federal government, the party leaders were alarmed at the prospect that the senators and representatives from the late Confederacy would imperil the Republican majorities in Congress...

...All of these descriptions are outgrowths of the same psychology as that which led Joseph R. Grundy of Pennsylvania-the animated flag of Old Guard protectionism-to read his recent lecture to the "backward commonwealths" of the West and South on the propriety of "talking darn small" when they "haven't any chips in the [tariff rate-fixing] game...

...Inevitably, in the opinion of some observers, this tendency must result in the formation of a new political party...

...There is also a third obstacle from a legislative standpoint: namely, that the congestion of population in the industrial regions gives the conservative element a large majority in the House of Representatives, a majority which is to be increased in the next congressional reapportionment...

...It means that the Senate has emerged definitely as the more liberal- more radical, if you please-of the two houses of Congress, a situation which doubtless has disturbed the peaceful slumbers of some of the framers of this nation's constitution...

...But the prosaic atmosphere surrounding the enactment of a tariff bill, a thing composed of ad valorem and specific rates, of countervailing duties, of drawbacks, of export debentures and flexible provisions, is not stimulating to the romantic instinct...

...Having made the South permanently Democratic by constitutional amendments -the Fourteenth and Fifteenth-the northern leaders were forced to seek methods of neutralizing the southern Democratic vote...

...The meaning of the change in election methods can be illustrated by considering the cases of two prominent Republican senators who vote against their party more frequently than with it: Borah of Idaho and Norris of Nebraska...

...One may have no sympathy with the aristocratic feudalism of pre-Revo-lutionary France, but it is hard to restrain some feeling of admiration for the aristocrats themselves en route to the guillotine, breathing contempt for their executioners...

...Revolutionary movements are traditionally more effective as opponents that as proponents...

...In other words, it is hardly realized yet that the debacle of the Old Guard on the Hawley-Smoot tariff bill really means that control of the Senate has shifted from the strongholds of eastern economic conservatism to the agrarian West and South...

...Perhaps that is why Senator Moses of New Hampshire felt safe in calling the Insurgents "sons of the wild jackass," why Senator Reed of Pennsylvania termed them "worse than Communists," and why Senator Fess of Ohio classified them as "pseudo-Republicans...

...Perhaps the first-named factor is the less important, because the race issue is of no great moment politically in the agricultural states, while it is becoming increasingly em-harassing in the industrial centres...

...So far as can be judged from the rather disadvantageous observation point of the national capital, the public was not greatly concerned...

...Perhaps that is why there has been little of glamour surrounding the overthrow of the Republican Old Guard in the United States Senate...

...It must be said for the Old Guard that in the heyday of its power in the Senate it was a smoothly functioning machine that got things done...

...But the lack of adequate financial support is a real hindrance, inasmuch as the party funds of both of the major parties have heretofore come from the industrial centres of the eastern states...

...This generation has become a bit suspicious that the traditional Old Guard policies work more to the advantage of the East than to that of the West, and their votes in Congress reflect that suspicion...

...But be that as it may, the situation is here...

...It is the system of popular elections that makes it possible for senators, with impunity, to break with their own national party organizations...

...But year by year the Union veterans have died off, and in the meantime there has grown up a new generation more interested in their own economic status than in waving the traditional bloody shirt of a forgotten struggle...

...Back of that development there are two factors: the constitutional provision guaranteeing equal representation in the Senate to every state, however small or large, and the more recent amendment providing for the popular election of senators...

...Perhaps in the long run that may prove to be an undesirable thing, leading to a multiplicity of legislative blocs not well adapted to the American federal system...

...That overthrow has been just as definite, and probably just as irrevocable, as the abolition of the veto power of the House of Lords, but to the general public it seems to have been just so much political maneuvering...

...Money can be put up only by those who have it, which meant that even in states predominantly agricultural, the political organization was nearly always on the side of the industrial interests-frequently interests affiliated with eastern capitalist groups...

...Whether or not the new-born coalition that now controls the Senate can function as a real working majority remains to be seen...

...Senators so situated can afford to be independent of their party when they choose, and they do so choose frequently...

...It always seems a pity that such courage should be wasted...

...Both are veterans in the Senate, and during their incumbencies there have been several occasions when their respective state legislatures were hostile to them...

...It may be that this consideration has encouraged the Senate Old Guard in the gestures of defiance which have accompanied its overthrow...

...So long as senators were chosen by state legislatures, their selection, in practice, amounted to designation by state political machines...

...Gradually there has come a realization that the economic interests of the agricultural West coincide more nearly with those of the agricultural South than with those of the industrial East, and this realization has crystallized in the Democratic-Insurgent coalition that has wrecked the Old Guard tariff bill in the Senate...

...The result was the admission of numerous new states in the Northwest, peopled- in so far as they were peopled at all-chiefly by former Union soldiers who could be counted upon to vote the straight Republican ticket...

...In the case of Norris, his state has even gone Democratic, but that did not interrupt his tenure of office...

...It costs money to run political machines, hence the machines are always on the side of those who put up the money...

...So long as control of these new-born commonwealths remained in the hands of Union veterans, the scheme worked...

...Such a development has been prevented so far by two important obstacles: the race issue in the South, and lack of adequate financing...

...There is, to be sure, a certain element of poetic justice in the discomfiture of the Old Guard at the hands of western Insurgents of their own party...

...By virtue of the first factor, the agricultural sections have had it in their power for many years to wrest control of the Senate from the industrial states of the East, but it was not until they began electing their own senators that the people of those sections actually began to recognize their real power...

...But that day is gone and will not soon return...