The North American Review,Vol. 199, No. 703. pp. 879-892
Jun. 1914

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A New Spirit in Party Organization

Politics in America had become a question of nominations and elections. Patronage was the key to success, and power the handmaiden of the boss. Party lines were drawn, not by issues and policies laid down in platforms to be carried out, but by men who controlled conventions and competed for office. A campaign was impossible without a candidate and a platform impracticable except as a door to a vacant office.

It is now evident that any party which wishes to retain the confidence of the people and have their support at the polls must do something besides mark time between elections, assail rival organizations, nominate and elect candidates, and formulate platforms which are not intended to be programmes. It is evident that to accomplish this there must be a change in political methods which must begin with the party if its representatives in office are to carry out its will intelligently.

There is a growing belief that political parties have been leaving a vital part of their responsibility to volunteer organizations; that, while the power of political parties has increased, their responsibility, efficiency, and integrity have decreased.

A first step in this direction is the assembling of correct information. Men and women the country over are demanding information. They are insisting upon publicity. The enactment of laws governing campaign funds and the reaction against secret contributions are ample proof of this. Lessening the hours of work has released time and energy which a party can well utilize and which now expresses itself in citizens' committees, civic clubs, welfare organizations, denoting an interest and progress woven largely out of margins of time and from surplus energy not needed in the struggle for existence. Women, freed by invention and science and social progress, have leisure, thought, and effort to put into governmental housekeeping in which they are taking a vital interest. Investments in human welfare have never been so generous as now, as the multiplicity of philanthropies indicates.

The question naturally arises—should not this new spirit of helpfulness and this surplus of energy and of resource be brought into party organization? Why should the party, the administrator, and the State depend so largely upon the initiative and recommendations of the voluntary efforts of social-welfare organizations and of benevolent individuals? Why should they not have their own laboratories for ascertaining facts, and their own dynamos for setting the current of public opinion? To an ever-increasing extent government has these in its public offices. But parties, from which these offices are filled, have not hitherto thought this essential or practical. When their representatives were not in power they have spent but little time drilling their army of voters and of potential officeholders and in stimulating the public opinion necessary to make their ideals and ideas effective when they come into power.

National and State laws define and regulate party organization and duties. The party thereby assumes the responsibility of naming public officers and of formulating their policies through platforms, and of directing their activities through the distribution of patronage to its members. It is, in reality, invisible government in the highest sense of that term. The time has, therefore, come to ask whether parties are performing all of the tasks which go with these high and responsible functions.

In addition to managing the routine of public office, social welfare is an increasingly important matter in both administration and legislation. Economic questions are the paramount ones before the country to-day. Industrial conditions are the subject of wide-spread investigation and discussion. The administration of justice in our courts is becoming the personal interest of every layman.

Now the general laboratories in which information is gathered and in which experiments are made in these fields are in the schools and universities, where men and women are trained, and in the thousands of organizations devoted to investigations and social experiments and to relieving the results of the operations of our social and industrial system. Government is only beginning to perfect its laboratory. The idea that enforcement of law and business management of departments is not the whole of the public business is giving way to commissions which are investigating, formulating, and planning future work. The most significant illustration of this was the creation of the Federal Department of Labor, embodying the labor and immigration provisions of the Department of Commerce and Labor, but requiring the new department to investigate and report a year later a plan of final organization. At the same time there was created the Industrial Relations Commission based upon data and the agitation of men and women outside of government ranks. The political party has little connection with these institutions and organizations, except as they voluntarily appeal to it for action. There has consequently grown up the belief that nonpartisan activities are more desirable, more honest, more worthy of broad support, and are of more benefit to society in general than are partisan activities. This results in divorcing the power of the party from its responsibility to the people. The party in power conducts its affairs without reference to non-partisan organizations, often doing work already done or ignoring their recommendations because they are reformers and therefore outside the pale of "regular" politics. In two recent instances bodies of social workers have held conferences, at their own request, with elected officials of high standing and power in the present Administration, and have made valuable recommendations, designed to save the State and country thousands of dollars. In neither case have these disinterested experts been called into consultation, nor have they been asked to submit specific recommendations. Had these recommendations come from a National committee or a State committee, which hold in their hands the power of nomination, the result, I venture to say, would have been wholly different. In fact, some members of these nonpartisan bodies, who are also active party workers, have had their recommendations acted upon, but from a partisan standpoint.

The problems confronting the legislator and the administrator are increasingly complex. Both are in office too short a time to become experts in any of the fields requiring their attention. The philanthropic organizations are uncorrelated and highly specialized. There are few national philanthropic bodies equipped to deal with matters of national interest (with a few exceptions, notably, such as child labor). The officeholder, genuinely in earnest in his work, must, per­ force, appeal to different and wide-spread organizations on different subjects, and in some cases they do not exist at all. Furthermore, in the important matter of appoint­ ments, these organizations exercise but small influence in proportion to their resources, and in many of them there is distinct opposition to this form of activity. These organi­ zations, partly because of their fear of politics, because of their belief that in non-partisanship lies their strength, be­ cause of differences of political opinion among their direct­ ors, can be of little value in campaigns. One result is that contributors to these organizations are required to give to campaign funds to duplicate work, such as furnishing speakers and publishing literature often of an inferior sort when the material for these exists in these institutions.

Social-welfare organizations are tending in the direction of great multiplicity, elaboration, and increasing expense and duplication. We now set a society or citizens committee at considerable cost to watch a department, and call it, by courtesy, co-operation. This method is giving way to the official advisory board of citizens serving with power and responsibility.

Probably the most important matter before government to-day next to social and industrial justice is efficient, eco­nomical administration. In this the State can learn little from social-welfare organizations other than bureaus of municipal research (which are laboratories and will soon be an organic part of municipal administration). It is, there­ fore, increasingly important that the party which makes economy its war-cry should have the laboratory to carry on the war to success.

It is perfectly clear to the public administrator that philan­thropic organizations, even granting his ability to locate and use them, are inadequate for his purposes. They do not effectively compete, as at present organized, with party in­ fluence. They are not an organic part of the new political organization, and probably will be most effective if they do not become so. The departments upon which he may call are not equipped to give him adequate assistance; they are manned by men rewarded as a political favor whom he cannot trust, and the scientific spirit of inquiry does not yet prevail. Twenty-one States have legislative reference divisions, but of these only about five are well organized and properly financed.

It would seem that the party organization of the future must necessarily include two correlated fields—each indispensable to the other. The first will be, as now, defined by statute law and will deal with campaigns and elections, comprising a more or less uniform number of mechanical details, and will be largely supported by State funds and taxation. This field will be characterized by a restriction of powers. The direct primary, the abolition of conventions, fusion in municipal affairs, the commission form of government and similar movements are making the party less powerful. If the party is to survive as an instrument of power and as a means of expressing the will of the people there must be an expansion elsewhere. The second field will be defined by scientific laws and will consist of a party laboratory, manned by experts. Social research will be its method and it will constitute a general clearing-house for information, as well as a power for the most intelligent and courageous governmental action. This work will be supported by contributions or assessments. No party can much longer delay a reorganization to include the application of such scientific principles. It is this second and as yet comparatively undeveloped phase of party organization with which we are here primarily concerned.

Political science hereby assumes an importance which makes it necessary to emphasize its essential characteristics, and becomes inseparable from the social sciences. To be effective, a political laboratory must be as scientific, as thorough, as dispassionate in its personnel, methods, and findings as are the laboratories of other sciences. It must be free from political influences as these are generally understood, and yet advance the party as the vehicle for accomplishing its ends. Its scope is necessarily the party platform. To cover the whole range of social and economic life without some such limitation would result in as much chaos as to combine biological, physical, and metaphysical sciences.

Social research is the observing and recording of social relations of mankind, and is concerned with the enumeration and determination of their various manifestations. It pursues with regard to social relations the same kind of inquiry that mathematical inquiries pursue with regard to numbers, quantity, and space, and the physical sciences pursue with regard to matter and its manifestations, substituting for their subject-matter the thoughts, feelings, and activities of mankind. The fact that at present it is little more than a mass of disorganized, numberless, separate investigations, which have little correlation with lawmaking bodies or the needs of the public, need not discourage us.

The subject-matter of social research—thought, feeling, and action of mankind— is infinitely more complicated than that of the natural sciences. Matter and its properties have no sentiments, no reputations, no honor, no aspirations, no temptations, virtues or vices, or families to be considered. If matter is consumed in the process of an experiment or changed into some other form or converted into other uses, no great harm has been done and great benefit to progress may result. The reaction of the various properties of matter to stimuli entails no consequences comparable to those resulting from the response of feeling, thinking human beings.

Notwithstanding the difficulties presented, the four essen­tial principles of all research, the discovery of truth being its main object, are applicable to the political field, and in­clude sequence, accuracy, impartiality, and dispassionate­ ness. These prevail in the scientific world, by diligent, la­borious, continuous, and systematic inquiry made by trained persons whose remuneration does not depend on the char­ acter of the results obtained.

In social research, statistics occupy much the same place that mathematics do in the various sciences. Hence, the methodology in both fields consists of the observing, record­ing, and verifying of data which comprise facts with which repeated experiments and comparisons may be made, and when so related constitute an investigation or study.

The mechanical equipment of scientific laboratories con­ sists of instruments and processes, uniform or tending to uniformity, and standardized so the results in one labora­tory (all the factors, including surroundings, being con­stant) can be compared with those of other laboratories, or be used as a finished piece of work, or for further experiments. The social-research laboratory consists practically of the whole range of thought, feeling, and activity of persons in social relations, or such parts of it as the investigator may select. Its mechanical equipment consists at present largely of schedules, questionnaires, and testimony sheets, having little similarity. These data are reduced as nearly as may be to statistical tables, charts, and formulas such as are used to express the findings of the scientific laboratory, which are based upon standardized equipment, uniform conditions, and repeated experiments. This equipment is being steadily enlarged from the physical and psychological laboratories, until to-day we have at our command the resources for gathering information in most fields of social research.

Now, applying the principles of social research to political organization, what is the immediate result? First, while the platform defines the limits of the laboratory, it is realized, restricted, or expanded in accordance with the laboratory findings. If, for instance, the laboratory shows such a plank as mothers' pensions to be unworkable in practice, by bringing together the experience of the country, the evidence is presented and a substitute measure recommended. Platforms worked out in this way would leave the candidate little excuse for not living up to his pledges, and would make political activity wholly intelligent. Second, the findings of the laboratory must be made of practical value. A government laboratory may suppress findings for expediency or party reasons; the welfare organization may be content to give its findings to the world for any one to use or not as it sees fit, but the party laboratory conducted as here conceived is bound to vitalize its members. It does this by having a legislative division where the man or woman interested in laws can get models, briefs, data, and speakers for hearings; by furnishing speakers and literature to those interested in meetings; by sending programmes and lecturers to clubs and to those desiring to introduce the social element. Now high as the note of the present organization of parties may sound, as at present constituted, the key-note is always to get something—the dominant note of this supplemental organization is to give something. Giving is the motive, and we then have within the party itself a complete organization receiving and expending irrespective of the capture of offices. Hitherto parties have stagnated and deteriorated between elections because they have believed they had nothing to give. This then should be designated the service idea in party organization.

We can, perhaps, best illustrate the success of the method as applied to parties by its achievements. The National Progressive Party has a Progressive Service Department which is the embodiment of scientific party organization supplementing the legal political organization.

It has been in existence but a year and is as yet crude and defective, meeting intolerance and opposition, and is held by many to be a menace to party organization. It is attacked as an unnecessary duplication of work, and as ‘‘ impractical,’’ that greatest of political sins. This is inevitable in so radical a departure from all standard party organization.

The Service divides the party platform into what are known as four platform departments—Social and Industrial Justice, Conservation, Popular Government, and Cost of Living and Corporation Control. Each of these departments is divided into sub-committees in charge of the very best experts the Service can muster. Under Social and Industrial Justice these committees are Men’s Labor, Women’s Labor, Immigration, Social Insurance, and Child Welfare. Under Conservation, the committees are Natural Resources, Country Life, Health, Productive Efficiency, and Practical Training for Public Service. Under Popular Government, the committees are Direct Legislation (including the Initiative and Referendum and Recall), Equal Suffrage, and Judiciary Reform. Under Cost of Living and Corporation Control, the committees are Cost of Living, Trusts and Corporations, and Tariff and Taxation. Every plank of the platform is in charge of some committee of experts. These committees consist exclusively of experts and authorities and are actively engaged in studying these subjects, presenting their findings and making experiments.

As illustrations, the Social and Industrial Justice department has completed, as its year’s work, an analysis of work­ men’s compensation laws, social insurance, and standards for labor departments. The Committee on Direct Legisla­tion has prepared and sent out a questionnaire on the initia­tive and referendum. The laboratory work as a whole is of course limited by the inadequate facilities of a new organization and by its finances.

The way in which the national legislation of the Progressive Party has been formulated shows the next step. There are twelve bills which have been prepared by the legislative committee of the Service in co-operation with a committee of six of the Progressive Congressmen. No bills are presented as party measures which have not the indorsement of these two committees. These bills have been printed with a compendium and sent out to the voters for suggestions for amendments—an organized referendum to the people of the formulation and execution of the programme they have outlined before its enactment.

In the matter of State Legislation twenty-seven States have legislative committees and twenty-one States have State services which do for each State what the National Service does for the country in acting as their clearing-house between States.

Now the drafting or passage of a law often represents the greatest advance which the subject has reached, and unless the public understands that proposal or law, sympathizes with it, and believes in it, the best administrator in the world cannot enforce it. The understanding and vision of members of a party range all the way from the kindergarten to the seminar in the matter of their conception of needs, and of remedies, and a party to have unanimity on its platform utterances and execution must have publicity, education, speakers, lectures, moving pictures, and every device possible, to enable it to reiterate the story many times to obtain this. Therefore the laboratory must have its publicity, lyceum, speakers, and publications department for the country, covering its whole platform.

Now in the absence of such a laboratory system what is the prevailing method? State executives and legislators are called upon to-day to pass upon the most complex social problems—minimum wage, various forms of State pensions, workmen's compensation, and frequently to decide upon the merits of conflicting bills upon the same subjects. To whom can they turn? Hitherto to non-partisan, philanthropic organizations, if they had no prejudice against them as "reformers"; but generally to party managers and lawyers. The lawyer by the very nature of his training and deference for precedents is the very opposite of a disinterested investigator. He has no faculties for other than an examination of legalities. Even where executives retain a permanent counsel, they are rarely persons with a social point of view or with an aptitude for acquiring a large amount of social data bearing on the subject; their judgments are legal rather than social. They are more concerned with what the law will permit than with what men require. The result is that the great majority of legislators, honest men, often from fields of toil remote from these perplexing questions, who want to vote right on the various bills, have no way of commanding the knowledge enabling them to do so. The enterprising, self-interested corporation, knowing the value of such data, systematically and effectively sees that legislators get what it wants them to know.

The same thing is true of the courts. When the test of a law is made the arguments are limited largely to what lawyers present. The result is that oftentimes a court has no information presented to it concerning the intricate, underlying social and economic conditions it is sought to remedy. The time is not far distant when courts will not be content with arguments, and with the appearance of the representatives of clients and of litigants. They will receive data in conformity with scientific laws in addition to those now received in accordance with procedure. Experts of the State, who will be its representatives, will appear and present facts, and will be subject to recall if they do not impartially present accurate findings.

Heads of departments are called upon to administer laws and enforce regulations which have no meaning for them. Rarely does a statement of the conditions leading to the enactment of the law accompany it to the official charged with its enforcement. Formerly, government agencies were created primarily to deal with the affairs of property. Many of the existing departments of government, and practically every new department which has been added within the last decade, deal primarily with the social and industrial relations of men.

There is no one way in this country at the present time that the legislators and executives of one State, in their direst need, can find out the experience of a neighboring State. This is where national political organization laboratories can render a service, and where the non-partisan philanthropic organization generally fails. The National Child Labor Committee can furnish information on child-labor matters, but where can the harried legislator, who has introduced a bill on old-age pensions, on mothers' pensions, on minimum wage, on immigration distribution agencies, or on regulation of employment agencies, turn to find both the advocate and the information to support his bill? Where are the data on which his bill should be founded, to be practicable? It is scattered among half a hundred different organizations or it is buried in foreign-government documents, or it is not compiled in any form. With thousands of bills to vote upon, the legislator cannot stop to get this information nor would he know where to turn, and, therefore, cannot enlighten his fellow-members.

The Progressive Service, in addition to its research equipment, has created two bureaus, one on legislation, already described, and the other a bureau of education. To illustrate again the application of scientific principles to political organization in the field of education: The great agent in formulating public opinion is publicity. In the party field there is no bureau of publicity not concerned primarily with attacks on rival parties or engaged in putting the best light possible on its own efforts. The publication of truth is not expected from a political headquarters, and, therefore, such information is discredited. Now it is not only conceivable, but it is a fact that the publicity of a party organization can be organized so as to furnish speakers whose statements are reliable, lecturers whose knowledge of their subjects is known to be complete and authentic, scenarios for moving pictures which present facts, newspaper releases which popularize technical information, and literature that will stand a literary and veracity test. The Progressive Service has a Lyceum Bureau which runs its speakers' division the year round, places its own lecturers and furnishes illustrated lectures, and whose publications and interviews must stand the tests applied to such work in other fields. The Lyceum Service routes its lecturers to the places which most need education from the social-welfare point of view. This routing is based upon a careful study of the localities—their institutions, surroundings, demands, and current events determining their need of political education. The speakers' bureau not only furnishes speakers, but supplies them with material for their subjects, with bibliographies and literature. The literature department issues its publications in serial form, which gives them a dignity and accuracy wholly lacking in the usual campaign documents.

A clearing-house for information as a stimulus to action requires not only a heterogeneous mass of people bound together on Election Day, partly by devotion to principles, partly by loyalty to leaders, partly by sentiment, but, to become effective, it needs to be an organized medium. In each State the educational elements within the party are organized into State Progressive Services, having departments and bureaus corresponding to the National organization. The State Service is a part of the State Committee, and the chief of Service is responsible to the State chairman; the one carries the political organization required by law; the other the educational work necessary to give the people opportunity for service the year round. In the absence of a campaign the Service work prepares the way and does its hardest work. In times of campaign its material and resources are placed at the disposal of candidates and speakers, are used to formulate platforms and to win supporters to carry on party work as a whole.

Perhaps not the least interesting thing in the Service is its financial organization, which provides for a budget, detailed expense accounts of employees, and monthly and special reports of all officers, which make it possible to analyze the cost of any given piece of work and to judge of its economy or waste. The Service believes that there is no item of expense which should not be thus accounted for, and that the returns eventually will be as definite and determinable as in any other educational or business enterprise.

Now contrast this organization, which is running every day in the year independent of the question of candidates and elections, with prevailing political methods in other great parties. Speakers are not only sent out during campaigns, with no attempt at their education or direction, but many are paid for their service and have chiefly a commercial interest in their work. They are gathered hastily together, never trained, and when the campaign closes they are dropped as quickly as they were assembled. Literature so-called is thrown together, facts are distorted or are wholly lacking, and most of it will not bear a careful scrutiny away from the light of a campaign fire. People are gorged in a few weeks with reading material which might mean something if it came regularly to them. Political clubs spring up like mushrooms, collect money, and spend it without regard to ascertainable returns, and work without system or effect.

Now these speakers and the thousands of young men and women in such clubs will be the public administrators of next year. Is it not, therefore, the paramount duty of the political organization to be interested in the training and the ideals of these young men and women? Not only is this true for the campaign, but for fundamental training. On this ground a responsible political organization, whether in power or not, should be interested in the courses of instruction in State institutions, receiving State aid, and in general educational methods in practical politics in the new sense of the word, which spells efficiency and honesty instead of feasibility and trickery.

The Progressive Service meets this by having a committee which is studying the equipment of schools and colleges for public service, with a view to submitting recommendations for increased training to such institutions.

It is significant that the old methods of organizing for campaigns and of strengthening party organization by means only of candidates and offices are rapidly disappearing. The old political headquarters, maintained as smoking and drinking quarters, where men met to arrange deals and where the basis of association was an interest in winning an election or dividing the spoils of office, are giving way to headquarters open the year round between campaigns, where men and women meet to discuss political issues and social and economic conditions, and where men are not ashamed to talk openly of party policies. The borough and city and county platform has made its appearance and is the basis for such meetings.

Such meeting-rooms are now the haunts of the scholar and of the statesman, and of the business and working men and women. The politician, as the public has been taught to see him, is disappearing as the leader at such headquarters. Men and women are beginning to realize that here in these thousands of places policies are determined upon and matters concerning their welfare debated and settled even before the primary selects the candidate to carry them out. These headquarters and their activities are as important to the adult thinking men and women to-day as is the school to the child. The school of politics run by the Progressive club is an established institution. The Service idea in politics is abroad in many guises. It is organized as yet only superficially. It is in the state of electricity and steam when first discovered—it is unharnessed and its power ungauged. In Massachusetts it is expressed in the Federation of Progressive Women; in Kentucky, in the Woman's Progressive League; in many States, in Progres­sive clubs with service committees; among minors, with Boys' Progressive clubs; in twenty-one States, in Service boards; in other States, in staffs of Service correspondents. Its forerunners have been the thousands of non-partisan organi­zations which have plowed the fields, and the courageous individuals who have stood alone battling for progressive ideas. The Service is training new men, interesting new people in politics, and discovering new ways of making poli­ tics interesting. Not the least of its possible contributions will be inducing able men to take office. Once the Service element is established in party organization, men who have shunned office will no longer fear its effects and will assume this last burden of responsible citizenship.

The successful party of tomorrow must meet the demands of this new spirit by new methods; of this thirst for knowledge by information; of this demand for service by real opportunities for work; of this appeal for the recognition of the individual by consideration of his capacities and temptations; and of this need of organization by system.

To the old-time party politician a scientific party or­ganization has little meaning. The practical politician fears the party will become academic and discussion will supplant action. Many who see the needs of government ignore the needs of the party. The reforms in government begin in the party. There can be no reform in government adminis­tration without corresponding reform in parties. If the one is based on spoils, the other will be. An administrator may rise above his party, but his work will not endure if his party is too far in arrears. The work of Governor Hughes of New York was in advance of his party and of the Demo­cratic party now in power, and much of his work is now to be done over because of it. Scientific organization based upon measures to supplement legal political organization is therefore likely to become a final test of the supremacy and endurance of political parties.

Frances A. Kellor