THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
Howe, Fredric C.
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE As Heard in the Recent Elections By FREDERIC C. HOWE ELECTIONS are the periodic expressions of the psychology of the people. They are cross sections of the mental attitude...
...They are democracy's barometer...
...Certainly Judge Gaynor has always been a courageous, forceful and persistent enemy of the things for which privilege and Tammany stand...
...The fusion-Hearst forces captured all of the other important offices, endorsed by the anti-Tammany Democrats and the Republicans...
...Do they indicate progress or reaction...
...It is national...
...The clear-cut issue was the tariff...
...For the public service interests are the forces back of Tammany...
...They are cross sections of the mental attitude of the nation...
...Whether wisely or unwisely remains to be seen...
...New York City is the last city in America from which to expect reform...
...We personify politics in a man and in so doing frequently miss the movement of the mass of the people...
...The task is colossal...
...During the next four years, New York may acquire such a distaste for Tammany misrule as to save it from future relapse...
...In Boston the people showed rare discernment in the choice of a charter, while in all of the cities the fusion and reform forces manifested an understanding of the nature of the situation and a determination in their fight that assures ultimate if not early victory...
...But they could not control the electorate...
...Massachusetts endorsed the insurgency of the West and repudiated the action of its senators, Lodge and Crane, by reducing the Republican majority of sixty thousand of a year ago to eight thousand...
...The result was unequivocal...
...In many ways the Massachusetts election was the most significant of all...
...Yet the voters of New York City did discriminate...
...But it is the movement of the whole people or of an idea that is really important...
...It is not confined to the minority members of the Republican party in Congress...
...The population is fugitive...
...For Cincinnati reduced the usual Cox majority to from one third to one-half its normal size...
...Disheartening as were the results in Cleveland, San Francisco and elsewhere, where the reform candidates were defeated, the movement of democracy was decidedly forward...
...In Philadelphia the reformers were united as they never had been before...
...The Massachusetts election demonstrates that insurgency is not a sectional thing...
...The awarding of contracts, the control of the administration and of the legal department of the city have been wrested from Tammany Hall and placed in the hands of men of respectability and alleged sympathy with honest and efficient administration...
...We are accustomed to measure success by majorities...
...They also control the daily press...
...Are the recent elections encouraging or the reverse...
...The cotton and woolen monopolists of New England were all powerful in the Senate, more powerful than the claims of eighty millions of consumers...
...The forces of privilege and vice are so closely identified...
...It is shared by the Republican voters in every part of the country...
...The increased cost of living which has followed the Aldrich bill shows that the inarticulate, so-called "mythical ultimate consumer" can be very articulate at the polls...
Vol. 1 • September 1909 • No. 46
