THE UNCONSCIOUS TREND TOWARD SOCIALISM

In the debate at Leipsic in 1519, Eck, the papal advocate, pointed out the essential similarity between the religious views of Martin Luther and those of Wycliffe and Huss which had been condemned by the Council of Constance as heretical. Luther, who had previously abhorred Huss and Wycliffe, was now forced to admit that the Council had condemned some thoroughly Christian teachings; and so, shortly after the debate, he wrote to friends: "We are all Hussites without knowing it; yes, Paul and St. Augustine were all good Hussites."

Without pressing the analogy too far, the recent development of American politics along three converging lines seems to justify the belief that there is a serious possibility of our becoming good Socialists without knowing it. If the essence of Socialism is the looking to Government for the regulation of everything affecting social welfare, it must be admitted that at least we have been and are still making rapid strides toward the goal of Socialism. This unconscious but significant trend of American politics is revealed in the appearance of the New Federalism, in the increase of the avowedly Socialistic vote, and in the political activity of organized Labor.

The years between the close of Reconstruction in 1876 and the free silver campaign of 1896 constitute a transitional period in the history of American politics. The old issues over a strict or liberal construction of the Constitution, over States' Rights and nationalism, over the questions growing out of the Civil War, over a tariff for protection or a tariff for revenue only these by the year 1896 were either dead or moribund. To the doctrine of liberal constitution construction and to the principle of nationalism, the country had become irrevocably committed. The tariff had ceased to be a burning issue, for the country had become definitively committed to protection.

The new issues forging to the front in 1896 were distinctively questions of an economic and industrial nature. They related to the currency, to banking, to an income tax, to the re

lations of labor and capital, to great corporate combinations, to government ownership, or at least governmental regulation, of railroads and telegraphs. These, and new problems of like nature, are still pressing for solution. They are the issues which have caused within both great parties a cleavage of greater seriousness and significance than the divergent views of official party leaders regarding the solution of these questions.

Of the issues in the impending presidential campaign the most striking characteristic is this: Taken in the aggregate, they invoke an extension of the powers of the Federal Government to a degree not only undreamed of by the Framers of the Constitution but also scarcely thought of at the close of Reconstruction. This extended sphere of Federal activity has been well denominated the New Federalism.

The parent of this New Federalism is the New Sectionalism which appeared in the presidential campaign of 1896. From the close of the Civil War down to the early nineties the western and eastern sections of the country had, in the main, been in close political alliance- the "solid South" standing in political isolation. The New Sectionalism of the early nineties was in reality only the renewal, under different conditions, of an old alliance between the West and the South which had endured for more than a generation before the Civil War. The New Sectionalism represents a cleavage dividing the older, wealthier, more populous, more conservative East from the less populous, less wealthy, less conservative, and younger States of the West acting in combination with the "solid South" where economic and industrial conditions in the early nineties closely resembled those prevailing in the West. Geographically, the New Sectionalism may be defined by a line drawn from the source of the Mississippi to the mouth of the Ohio, up the Ohio to the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, along the southern boundary of Pennsylvania and Maryland eastward to the coast. The eastern section included sixteen States with a population of about thirty-seven millions; the western and southern section, thirty States, having a population of about thirty-six millions. This classification includes in the eastern section the five de

batable States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. '

Chief among the significant characteristics of this new alliance between the South and the West has been, at one period or another, a cry for irredeemable paper money issued by the Federal Government-Greenbackism; loud and insistent demand for the free coinage of silver; persistent opposition to the issue of government bonds; bitter hostility to private banks of all kinds, coupled with a demand for the establishment of postal savings banks; a demand that the rich contribute more largely to the support of government through an income tax; an unrelenting hostility to railroads and to other great corporate combinations of capital, a strenuous advocacy of the so-called rights of labor. But the characteristic of chief significance has been the spontaneous, almost instinctive, looking to the Federal Government as the only source whence might come a panacea for the various maladies afflicting the body politic.

And far from accidental is this spontaneous appeal to the Federal Government on the part of the West. To understand the nature of this appeal, let us review the conditions which evoked it. Between 1887 and 1890 the West suffered a succession of crop failures. Farm products at the same time so declined in price that the western farmer's income was reduced to a minimum. Mortgages upon his farm could not be met when they matured. To prevent foreclosure the farmer would go to some bank in the vicinity to negotiate a loan. He was told that the demand for money was so great and the security which he had to offer so poor, that a loan could be made only at an extraordinary rate of interest, a rate which, to the farmer ignorant of the laws of the money market, appeared exorbitant. Short crops and low prices, coincident with exorbitant interest rates, naturally led the farmer to "reason why." Evidently the amount of money in the country was insufficient for the ordinary needs of the plain people. Therefore, said the farmer, let the Government issue more money, and keep on issuing it until there should be sufficient amount, say, $50 per capita. Then

See an article entitled "The New Sectionalism," by F. E. Haynes, in Tenth Quarterly Journal of Economics, 269 (1896.)

there were the great railroad corporations, now grown from mere pigmies into giant monopolies under the fostering and pampering care of the Federal as well as State governments. In both state and national politics they had long been actively interfering, corrupting State Legislators and Congressmen as well, until legislation had been secured behind which they were robbing the farmer of a large percentage of his hard-earned profits through excessive freight rates or by unjust discriminations between the large and the small shipper, between competitive and non-competitive shipping points. Therefore, reasoned the farmer, let the railroads be owned by the Federal Government and managed in the interest of the plain people and not for the private emolument of a corrupt and grasping plutocracy.

Heretofore, when hard times had brought distress upon the Western farmer, all that he had to do was to let his farm go upon foreclosure proceedings, and then pack up and start for the more remote West and there, for a mere song, stake out a new claim on the great public domain and begin life anew. But that avenue of escape from economic distress was practically closed in the early nineties. The steady and rapid westward movement of population had reduced to a minimum the area of public lands available to the home-seeker. This served to aggravate the other causes of discontent. Had not the Government granted vast areas of public land to the now hated railroads? Had not the equally hated capitalists of the eastern cities bought up vast tracts of public land which they were now holding out of reach of the bankrupt homeseeker? Were they not merely waiting for a rise in price? In the meantime they were not lifting a finger for the improvement of the land. From such conditions little relief could be expected from State legislatures. In the Federal Government alone hope seemed to rest. And Coxey's army moved on Washington.

Out of these conditions which the old party leaders could not or would not bestir themselves to alleviate, there emerged the Farmers Alliance, the Populist, and the Free Silver move

Over the West and the South swept these movements in the early nineties, capturing the national organization of the Democratic party in 1896, striking terror into the hearts of the

Republican organization and melting old party lines as had no third party movement since the Civil War.

The readiness resembling the quickness of instinct with which these new movements appealed to the Federal Government is not difficult to explain. And the explanation of it will assist in disclosing the true significance of the New Federalism.

In the development of the life and thought of the West, the Federal Government has been most conspicuous. In the eyes of that section the importance of the national government has been magnified by federal legislation as in no other section. That there might be more and more land for the rapidly increasing number of westward emigrants, the Federal Government from the beginning has steadily sought to extinguish the Indian land titles and to secure the removal of Indian tribes farther and farther West. As the West grew in population a successful appeal was made to the Federal Government for aid in the construction of means of communication and transportation between the East and the West. As a result we have the great National Road from the Potomac to the Mississippi, constructed at national expense; Federal aid, direct and indirect to canal and turnpike and railroad companies; the construction of lighthouses and the dredging of rivers and harbors; the erection of vast levees along the lower Mississippi. Later, the West saw the Union Pacific railroad built across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by means of a government endowment of a land grant and a loan of millions of dollars. With peculiar joy the West hailed the enactment of federal preëmption and homestead laws, granting virtually free homes to the ambitious and energetic western emigrant. Government endowments of public land for the support of education have accompanied the creation of State after State. Tariff after tariff the West has seen enacted by the Federal Government, not merely to protect the eastern manufacturer but to afford a home market for the products of the western farmer. For the relief of Western debts, it has seen the Federal Government retaining as legal tender the greenbacks of the Civil War. The greenback agitation had scarcely died away when, amid the travail of hard times, ap