Political parties and business interests will continue to dominate us until we learn new methods of association. Men follow party dictates not because of any worship of party but simply because they have not yet any will of their own. Until they have, they will be used and manipulated and artificially stimulated by those who can command sufficient money to engage leaders for that purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until we are roused to claim our own creative power. The promise for the future is the power for working together which lies latent in the great rank and file of men and women today, and which must be brought clearly to their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful future for our political life under the present scheme of party domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial life under the present class domination, then some plan must be devised for the will of the people to control the life of the people. Fighting abuses is not our role, but the full understanding that such fighting is a tilting at windmills. The abuses in themselves amount to nothing. Our role is to leave them alone and build up our own life with our power of creative citizenship. We need today: (1) an active citizenship, (2) a responsible citizenship, (3) a creative citizenship—a citizenship building its own world, creating its own political and social structure, constructing its own life forever.
Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men have this creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite consists in our capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth a group idea, to create the common life. But we have at present no machinery for a constructive life. The organization of neighborhood groups will give us this machinery.
Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a genuine public opinion.
First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local, intimate, personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting will give way to the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting. These common interests will become the political issues. Then, and not till then, politics, external at no point to any vital need, will represent the life of our people. Then when we see clearly that the affairs of city and state are our affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or indifferent in regard to politics. We all are interested in our own affairs. When our daily needs become the basis of politics, then party will no longer be left in control because politics bore us, because we feel that they have nothing to do with us.
Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of government through the increased social legislation of all our states during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was organized with social legislation as part of its platform. The introduction of social programs into party platforms means that a powerful influence is at work to change American politics from a machine to a living thing. When the political questions were chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency, closely as these questions affected the lives of people, there was so little general knowledge in regard to them that most of us could contribute little to their solution. The social legislation of the last few years has taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a great deal about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen’s compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis, mothers’ pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment agencies etc.
Tammany is built up on the most intimate local work: no family, no child, is unknown to its organization. And it is founded on the long view: votes are not crudely bought—always; the boy is found a job, the father is helped through his illness, the worn-out mother is sent for a holiday to the country. As politics comes to mean state employment bureaus, sickness and accident insurance, mothers’ pensions, Tammany is being shorn of much of its power.
We are sometimes told, however, that while it is conceded that campaign issues should be made up from our intimate, everyday needs, yet it is feared that on each question a different split would come, and thus politics would be too confusing and could not be “handled.” Neighborhood organization is going to help us meet this difficulty. In nonpartisan neighborhood associations we shall have different alignments on every question. Moreover, we shall have different alignments on the same question in different years. Thus the rigidity of the party organization disappears. The party meeting is to the neighborhood meeting what the victrola is to the human voice: the partisan assembly utters what has been impressed upon it, you hear the machine beating its own rhythm; the neighborhood meeting will give the fresh ever-varied voices from the hearts of men. The party system and the genuine group system is the difference between machine-made and man-made. And this may be true of a good government organization as well as of a Tammany organization—it is true wherever the machine is put above the man. We can get no force without freshness, and you cannot get freshness from a machine, only from living men. Just the very thing which costs the party money—keeping its members together—is its condemnation. Men will make up their minds on question after question in their neighborhood groups. Then they will vote according to these conclusions. Party dictation will never cease until we get group conviction. If our political life is going to show any greater sensitiveness to our real wants and needs than it has shown in the past, there must be some provision made for considering and voting on questions irrespective of party: you can not join a different party every day, but you can separate political issues from partisanship and vote for the thing you
