[00:00:00] INTRODUCER:
I think that it might be appropriate for me to add a few words of explanation about the Bernard Moses Lectureship before introducing our speaker of the evening. You have been given, I notice, a short bio on entering the room that says something briefly about Bernard Moses. I think it is well for us to understand, even though he is a figure now who is receding into the past, that he occupied a very unique position in the history of social sciences at this institution.
For a considerable period of time after commencing his instruction on this faculty in, I believe, the year eighteen seventy-five. He was the social science department. And apparently, in the early years of his tenure, he covered a wide array of subjects which have since come to be separated out into distinct areas.
He taught, I’m informed, or covered the field of history, the field of economics, the field of political science, and the field of jurisprudence. And I rather suspect that inside of our– the cl– the common meanings of our terms today, that he probably also covered what is the newcomer to this array, namely the area of sociology. Subsequently, some of these fields were divided off, and he remained, I think, in charge of the instruction in the field of history and political science.
He was a noted scholar. His publication record, uh, displays over two hundred items, including a dozen volumes of importance. He was widely recognized outside of the academic field for his knowledge, his competence, and was appointed to a number of rather significant governmental posts.
He played a very great role, I’m told, In helping to choose quite a number of the notable figures in social science who subsequently joined our faculty and contributed to the distinction which our university has built up over the decades in the field of social science. It was in honor of him that the university established the current lecture, the Bernard Moses Lecture, in 1937. I think it is quite well to realize that this lecture, even though perhaps scarcely known, is indeed in a very distinguished lecture series.
So distinguished indeed that since its inauguration in 1937, the utmost care has been exercised in the selection of the scholars who have been invited to present the lectures in the series. Beginning in 1937 down to the present time, a period of some twenty-six years, only ten lectures have been given prior to this evening. And the people who constitute these ten lectures are indeed a very notable group of scholars, including such names as Adolph Miller, who to some of the older members of the faculty, of course, will be recognized as exceedingly eminent.
W. I. Thomas, who is of course quite familiar, is an outstanding sociologist. David Barrows, Professor A.L. Kroeber of anthropology. And I may ask that the most recent lecture in this series, presented now, oddly enough, some eleven years ago, was a very eminent colleague of our speaker this evening, Professor Hans, Hans Kelsen.
This indicates, I think, this array of names which I’ve mentioned indicates the fact that this series actually is an elite series, a very distinguished series. And accordingly, the choice of our speaker this evening, in keeping with what has been the history of the series, evidences the current selection as well as the real honor which it is felt being chosen for this series means. Our speaker this evening is, of course, well known to all of us, and perhaps because of this, it is unnecessary for me to recite much about what is truly an illustrious career.
He has been engaged in the academic profession. At a number of institutions: Columbia University, Ohio State, Amherst, Reed College, where he was president before joining the faculty here. He has established a very eminent record as a scholar, as a research student, and has to his credit, as many of you know, a notable list of publications covering such books as Pressure Politics and Religion and Politics, Democracy in the Modern World, several others whose titles at the moment escape me.
And he is currently working, as he informed me a few minutes ago, on what I’m sure is going to be a volume of– that will constitute a tr– real outstanding contribution, a volume published for– to be published later this year on the American Republic. Professor Odegard has, of course, been given a great deal of acclamation for his work and recognition in the form of many types of professional honors. He has been in the past president of the American Political Science Association and rather prominent in the councils of the International Social Science Association.
He has, as you know, during the past year, enjoyed the distinction of having been selected to present
(cough)
one of the Continental Classroom courses in American, the structure of American government, I think. A television program presented from one end of the land to the other, involving, I’m informed, somewhere close to a regular audience of two million listeners. He has also, in previous years, enjoyed the distinction of being a– the Phi Beta Kappa lecturer.
I need not add, I think, other instances that indicate the genuine position of eminence which he has achieved in the academic field as a government expert, as one who was called on to assist in governmental enterprises, and indeed, as some of you know, in the area of politics himself, For it was only a few years ago that our speaker this evening narrowly escaped the peril of being selected as the Democratic candidate from our state for the United States Senate. To all of these more obvious, more or less pub– matters of public record aspects of him, I think that I may be privileged as the presiding officer this evening to say a few words with regard to my own estimate of him as a scholar. I think that Professor Odegaard embodies really what is best in scholarship.
He has an exceedingly fertile mind, imaginative, well-disciplined, exceedingly careful. And what I think particularly endears him to me is the way in which he addresses his problems or he approaches his empirical task with a broad vision, with a determination to try to actually come to grips with problems of great importance and to handle them in the very best ways which a man of his ingenuity could conceive of. He’s no slave to any scientific ritual.
He is no one who endeavors to spin out, let us say, some scheme of deductive consequences from an abstract model. He is not one who endeavors, let us say, to achieve distinction merely by riding on the waves of the fashions of thought that sweep across the social sciences so frequently, as perhaps their most characteristic feature. He is instead, I would state, in the very best sense of the term, a genuine, empirical, imaginative, careful, probing scholar.
It’s because of those traits, on one hand, and because of the very, very important problem which he is addressing here this evening, that I know that
(cough)
we will be repaid for these very eulogistic but acutely evaluative remarks that I’ve made to him on your behalf They will be repaid, I’m sure, by a very provocative discussion. Professor Odegaard has very kindly consented to entertain questions at the
(cough)
close of his address, and indeed will welcome them to test your own thought against the proposals which he will present to you.
[00:11:03] PROFESSOR BLUMER:
On your behalf, I’m very happy indeed to welcome Professor Odegard to this rostrum as the eleventh holder of the Bernard Moses Lectureship.
(applause)
[00:11:32] PROFESSOR ODEGARD:
Thank you, Professor Blumer. You know, after listening to that introduction, I’m like the man who said, “After hearing that introduction, I can hardly wait to hear what I’m going to say.”
(laughter)
Uh, I was, uh, a little alarmed as Professor Blumer went on,
(laughter)
lest he revealed some things that I think had best to remain unrevealed
(laughter)
about my career, not the least of which is the migratory character of my employment. I was some years ago in Hawaii when I was a bureaucrat in the Treasury Department. And for my sins, I did serve for a period of years as a bureaucrat.
I was in Hawaii. We were out there trying to catch some tax evaders. We caught them, incidentally.
(laughter)
Not all of them, but some.
(coughs)
And, uh, on this occasion, I visited the Big Island, Hawaii, and was going up to a marine rest camp on the shores of, on the– on the slopes of, uh, of Mauna Loa with a, um, army colonel, whose name was Colonel Irish. We were going up in a Jeep. And, you know, as is customary on these occasions, He began telling me who he was.
He was a banker from Portsmouth and gone to Harvard and done so and so and so and so and so and so. And then he asked me about myself, and I began to tell him what I’d done. How I was born in Montana and gone to New York Military Academy and so on and so on.
Then I began telling him about my teaching career. I taught at Columbia and then Williams and Ohio State and Stanford and Minnesota and Harvard. He said, uh, about this point, he said, “My God, you can’t hold a job any place, can you?”
Uh,
(laughter)
And I’m always, I’m always a little alarmed when I, uh, sit here and listen to this longer, because some years ago, Mr. Truman asked me to serve on a commission on migratory labor. And, uh, I’ve always wondered whether there wasn’t just a little bit of, well, uh, something implied in that appointment that the president didn’t reveal to me at the time. Uh, tonight I want to talk about a subject that is, I think, very important, uh, and one concerning which I don’t know very much.
But I’ll share my ignorance with you, and I share my bewilderment with you. Uh, “Governments,” William Penn once said, “are like clocks.” They go from the motion that men give them.”
And like all human institutions, they must adapt to changing circumstances or die. I think the remarkable thing about the American government, and I say this, the Civil War notwithstanding, is its capacity to adapt to the facts of life in a world of constant and, at times, revolutionary change. And I think this is the most remarkable thing when one reflects that the Constitution of the United States has been described as rigid and reactionary, been described as a chain to hobble political power, and not merely a harness to guide and to control it.
Power, it is said, in our system is so divided, so broken into fragments, that government is helpless to deal with the insistent problems of a changing and a dynamic society. Leadership, they say, is sterilized or blinded by a kind of constitutional strabismus. Yet it’s interesting that in spite of this, the scope, the purpose, the process of government in this country have changed dramatically, changed not only by formal amendment, but by custom and convention, by legislation and judicial interpretation, because these are our substitutes not only for formal amendments of our Constitution, but our substitutes for revolution.
We let the Supreme Court make revolutions for us, thank God. And I think it somewhat notable, too, that in every case of these changes, except perhaps the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. For the information of those who may not be familiar with the Constitution, the 22nd Amendment limits the term of the President of the United States to two terms, uh, two full terms.
Except for this amendment, the changes that have taken place in the American Republic have been changes moving it irresistibly in the direction of democracy, toward greater, not less, popular participation in the decision-making process, and toward a much more equitable allocation of rights and privileges, or what my friend Harold Lasswell would call a more equitable allocation of indulgences and deprivations. Uh, the suffrage has been extended. Voters have been given more direct control over political parties, more control over the nomination of candidates for public office, and more control directly over the legislative process itself.
As those of you who know, uh, know who live in California and have to vote on, uh, twenty-five to thirty propositions. The major remaining obstacles in this country to universal suffrage are the discriminations that continue to keep several million otherwise qualified Negroes from the polls. These obstacles, too, the obstacles to Negro suffrage, are falling one by one, and I won’t rehearse them here.
They’re falling in the wake of Supreme Court decisions affecting white primaries, against racial segregation. They’re falling in the face of civil rights legislation. They’re falling, in case you haven’t read the newspapers, in the face of a new militancy among the Negroes themselves, and what I hope is a reawakened conscience on the part of the white population.
Now, no less important than this advance of suffrage has been the movement for a more equitable apportionment of representation. I suppose few people in this country would really quarrel seriously with the equal representation of the states in the United States Senate, because this principle enables what John C. Calhoun called a concurrent majority to implement and stabilize the numerical majority that is embodied in the House of Representatives. But if this numerical majority is to be fairly represented, it’s important that representation be apportioned as nearly as possible in strict proportion to population.
And as you know, this simple principle is more honored in the breach than in the observance. Not only are representative districts shamefully gerrymandered, including this state, But they are glaringly unequal in size, so that a vote in one will be worth many times as much as a vote in another. In no less than forty-four states, apportionment at the present time strongly favors rural areas at the expense of the urban centers.
In thirteen states, for example, a third or less of the population, a third or less of the population can elect a majority of both houses of the state legislature. And in only six out of fifty states does it require as much as forty percent of the electorate to choose a majority of the legislature. What is even more important, in 27 states up to 1962, there had been no reapportionment of representation for 25 years or more.
And in the case of Tennessee, which we’ll talk about in a minute, there had been no reapportionment in 60 years. Between 1910 and 1960, the mathematical value of a vote in rural areas increased by over sixty percentage points. And while this was happening, the value of an urban vote declined by some fifteen percent, increasing the spread here by about seventy-five percent.
And of course, the disproportion here in the suburbs is even more glaring than it is in the central cities. Studied neglect and blatant political malpractice in many states, plus the refusal of the courts to interfere, have perpetuated this system of misrepresentation. But then in March nineteen sixty-three, in the case of Baker against Carr, the Supreme Court held that a flagrantly inequitable apportionment of representation in a state legislature, in this case, the state of Tennessee, might violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution of the United States.
And that federal courts have jurisdiction to decide on the merits of cases properly presented this constitutional question. The decision I regard as one of the most important in the entire history of the Supreme Court has opened the way. to a nationwide attack on this problem of representation.
Under fear of judicial disapproval, legislatures in over half of the states have already taken action to remedy some of the worst of these abuses. And in this respect, may I suggest that the American Republic is in transition toward more, not less, democracy. But the result of this may have a much deeper significance for the future of American politics than a mere mathematical change in the ratio of representation to population.
It may end, or at least it may mitigate, the neglect by Congress and state legislatures generally, of the urgent needs of American cities and metropolitan areas. I think it may also have very important effects upon our party system. I’d like to talk about these for a minute.
The rural domination of state legislatures in this country and of certain congressional districts usually means, except in the South, their domination by the Republican Party. On the whole, therefore, the Republican Party stands to lose if apport– reapportionment should give the cities greater representation at the expense of rural areas. Because the cities, as you know, are Democratic strongholds.
In nineteen sixty, presidential year, the Republicans carried less than one-third of the congressional seats in cities with a population of three hundred thousand or more. The Democrats carried over two-thirds of the seats. Out of twenty-six governorships in the states within which these cities are found, the Republicans carried only five out of twenty-six, less than one-fifth.
And they didn’t do much better in nineteen sixty-two. I quote, “The big city problem of the Republican Party remains.” I am quoting now the Republican National Committee, a statement made by the Republican National Committee on March fourth, nineteen sixty-three.
“The big city problem,” they said, “of the Republican Party remains. With few exceptions, the Republican candidates for the House of Representatives, uh, in heavily Democratic cities showed very little change from the level of nineteen fifty-eight.” End quotation.
The suburbs, however, are something else again. Suburbia and exurbia have long been regarded as Republican territory. And it’s these areas that stand to gain most by an honest reapportion.
Consequently, as the Republican National Committee says, and I quote, “The suburbs are increasingly crucial to Republican victories.” in these populous states. My guess is that even in suburbia, Republican hopes may be too high.
According to
(laughter)
You know, I have a hard time. I’m talking from the same platform that I lecture to four hundred students here twice a week, and I have the chairman of the Republican State Central Committee talk to them, and tomorrow I’m having the chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee, and it’s very difficult, uh, for me at times.
(laughter and coughing)
But according to the Republican National Committee, the 1960 vote showed a strong pro-Democratic trend, and even in the suburbs, the shift in votes from nineteen fifty-six to nineteen sixty in seven of the major suburban areas in the country showed Democratic gains as high as ten to one over the Republicans. Nor do I think there is much comfort in the common notion that as Democrats move out of the central city to the suburbs, they somehow become Republicanized. A recent study, for example, of suburban voters in Westport, Connecticut, found that folks who move from the city to the suburbs do not, in fact, change their traditional voting habits.
They carry them with them. You know, the notion is that when, uh, Democrats move into the suburbs, they move into Republican areas, and they take on the protective coloring of the environment like a chameleon. Uh, uh, somehow the evidence for this is very scanty.
Uh, nor do I think these losses that the Republicans are likely to face as a result of reapportionment, uh, are going to be offset by the impressive increase of Republican strength in the Democratic South, where a two-party system seems to be emerging for the first time since the Civil War. And the Republican vote, incidentally, in the South is not confined to presidential elections, but today reaches into congressional, senatorial, and even state and local contests. Between nineteen fifty-eight and nineteen sixty-two, The Republican vote in the South increased by two hundred and forty-four percent in congressional elections, an increase of from six hundred and six thousand to two million eighty-four thousand.
Uh, in Texas, uh, the Republicans have elected seven members of the legislature. This is enough to give you pause. Republican congressmen from the South have increased from a total of seven in nineteen sixty to twelve in nineteen sixty-two.
Yet, I say I’m not at all sure that this tremendous increase of the Republican vote in the South is going to be enough to offset Republican losses elsewhere. In the first place, the Republican vote in the South comes largely, uh, by largely I mean seventy-five to eighty percent of it, from upper and middle class white planters and professional and business groups, whose numbers, of course, have markedly increased in recent decades in the South. The Republican vote in the South follows almost exactly the same pattern that it follows in other parts of the country in terms of the economic and social status of the voters.
Now, the point I would make is that as Southern Negroes who since nineteen thirty-two have been overwhelmingly Democratic, as they win the right to vote, as trade unions in the South begin to expand, and as the habit of voting increases among the low urban workers of the South, the impressive Republican gains among business and professional groups in the South, I believe, will be more than eclipsed by an even greater increase in Democratic strength. But we will have, in the South, a two-party system instead of the one-party monopoly that we’ve had up to now. What then is the outlook for the country’s traditional party alignment?
Well, as you know, both major parties are torn by internal conflict. The Democrats, by the perennial feud between the Southern conservatives on the right and the neo-New Deal, New Frontier, Northern and Western liberals on the left. The Republicans, too, are torn by sharp differences between those commonly classified as liberals and conservatives.
The contrast, for example, between Republican Senator Javits of New York and Republican Senator Tower of Texas could hardly be greater, or between Senator Case of New Jersey and Senator Goldwater of Arizona.
(laughter)
The contrast is, if anything, much greater than that between Southern and Northern Democrats. And because it is the minority party in the country, the rift within Republican ranks is, I believe, more serious and fraught with greater danger than is the rift within the Democratic Party. From the White House to the city hall, the overwhelming majority of elective offices in this country, sixty-five percent or more, are in Democratic hands today.
And a very large majority of registered voters in this country register themselves as Democrats, some sixty percent or more. Now, what all this means to the Democratic Party in terms of political patronage, strategic and logistical strength, uh, one could hardly estimate. It seems obvious to me that barring unforeseen events, it’s always a nice hedge, only a united and a well-organized Republican Party, under able and courageous leadership, can hope to recover any significant amount of the territory now held by the Democrats in this country.
Now, this is not to say, and I don’t want to imply, that tension and conflict within the major parties is something to be deplored. On the contrary, because both parties are coalitions of, shall I say, not always harmonious interests, internal stress is inevitable, and as a matter of fact, can be a sign of great strength and vitality. I have always argued that the great strength of the American party system is as much due to the internal stresses and conflicts within the parties as it is to the rivalry between them.
But the problem here for party leaders is to discover when this internal stress reaches the point where the heat of intraparty strife cause– ceases to produce fusion and begins to produce fission. It’s a neat trick, uh, a nice calculation, and the Republicans in California are really agonizing over this problem at the moment. Now, both parties have experienced this.
As a matter of fact, you know, the Federalist Party experienced it in 1800 when they split apart. The Democrats experienced it in 1860 when the forces of fission exceeded those of fusion, and the party split apart. The Republicans experienced it in 1912 when the same thing happened.
Yet both parties survived. Today, the nature and intensity of the internal conflict, I would suggest, is a greater hazard for the Republicans than it is for the Democrats. Why do I say this?
Because it seems to me present circumstances tend to give to the internal struggle for leadership in the Republican Party an intensity, if not a bitterness, that is born in considerable measure of defeat, weakness, and a sense of frustration. Symptomatic of this are the outcroppings of right-wing extremism in John Birch societies, Minutemen, Christian Crusades against communism, uh, female guerrilla fighters in the Santa Barbara hills uh, in pink stretch pants and Garand rifles. I say these and other such movements, which afford an outlet for authoritarian impulses that in other times found expression in the Ku Klux Klan and the aggressive, convulsive leadership of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy.
In a strange kind of amalgam of xenophobia, racism, extreme economic and social conservatism. These groups have declared war on the United Nations and peace, on social security legislation, on progressive income taxes, on federal appropriations for health, education, and welfare, and all the other components of what they call internationalism and the welfare state. Now, this radical right is neither Republican nor Democratic in any formal sense, but exerts a powerful attraction on fringe members of both major parties.
Indeed, it’s probably most virulent in the Democratic center. But because it levels its heaviest artillery against incumbent Democrats who happen to be in power, the radical right is often confused with the conservative right wing of the Republican Party. And Republican leaders have therefore been at great pains, some of them at least, to dissociate themselves from the more extreme of these groups.
I quote, “The Republican Party,” says Senator Javits of New York, “is not a party of the far right.” It is not a party of big business.” I quote, “Efforts of radicals of the right to infiltrate the Republican Party,” says Senator Javits, “should be repudiated because Republicans generally want to see our party within and not outside the mainstream of constitutional government in this country, knowing that this is the basis of our two-party system.
Some of you who lived in Berkeley will remember the Republican Assembly meeting here in nineteen sixty-two, in which Senator Nixon sponsored a resolution repudiating the John Birch Society and recommending that Republicans dissociate themselves from it. Some of you may even have read the paper recently, a sta– in the paper, a statement by Senator, Republican Senator Kuchel, uh, on the same problem. Now, I’ve dwelt on the Republican dilemma because upon it, I believe, may depend the future of our two-party system.
A system which, in my judgment, along with federalism, the presidency, and judicial review, is one of the great contributions of the American people to the art of government. If I were to name the great contributions of this country to the art of government, I would name the two-party system, the federal system, the presidency, and judicial review. Now just a final word of caution.
Uh, whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or just a plain ordinary Mugwump, uh, you’ve all heard the definition of a Mugwump. It’s a man who sits on the fence with his, uh, chin on one side and his wump on the other. His mug on one side and his wump on the other.
I say whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or just a plain mugwump, let me suggest to you that it’s much too early to write the Republican Party off, in case you thought of doing so. Back in 1928, authorities on every hand said that the Democrats were dead and all but buried. Matter of fact, they said they were dead, walking around, and should have been buried.
(laughter)
Professor Lindsay Rogers, for example, one of my old mentors, was at that time chairman of Al Smith’s brain trust. He wrote the Democratic National Campaign textbook, and this is what he said after the election of 1928. I quote, “There are no prospects whatever of the Democrats soon getting within measurable distance of the presidency.”
Senator Thomas Walsh, who some of you may remember, led the Democratic assault on the Harding administration, had this to say after 1928. “You couldn’t get a half a dozen prominent Democrats together who could agree upon even a minimum of policies. “My vision,” he says, “is unable to discern any prospect of a return of the Democratic Party to power in this country.”
Yeah, and four years later came 1932. And in the mid-’30s, leaders in both parties took a much dimmer view of Republican, took a similar dimmer, and at that, dim view of Republican prospects. “The New Deal,” they said, “was so entrenched that nothing but a political earthquake could loosen its grip on the country.”
And then came ’46, ’52, and ’56. You remember Eisenhower?
(laughter)
And I ask you to remember also that in nineteen hundred and sixty There’s some of those Santa Barbara women in here.
(laughter)
Um, even in nineteen sixty, the Republican presidential candidate carried more states than Kennedy. Mr. Nixon made a clean sweep, or virtually a clean sweep of the Middle West, the Mountain States, and the Far West, including, in case you’ve forgotten, the sovereign state of California, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than three to two. And in the South, Nixon, who heaven knows was no Eisenhower, polled forty-eight percent of the vote and carried five states.
His total popular vote was two-tenths of one percent less than Kennedy’s, and a switch of 12,000 votes in five states would have made Richard Nixon president.
(laughter)
So before you write the Republican Party off, if you are disposed to do so, I asked you to reflect on these things. And yet the question remains, and a serious one for the Republican Party. If I may just put in a footnote here.
You know, you always never know what to put in a speech and what to leave out of it. Back in nineteen hundred and thirty-six, uh, after the nineteen thirty-two and thirty-four elections, Republicans went into a very s-long period of soul searching
(cough)
under the chairmanship of a great chairman of the Republican National Committee, John D. Hamilton. John Hamilton had appointed a committee under Glenn Frank of the University of Wisconsin
(cough)
to develop policy for the Republican Party. And the Frank Committee made a report that, in my judgment, was almost a model of party statesmanship and vision. This report was rejected, rejected out of hand by the Republican high command.
And they listened instead to a United States senator from New Hampshire by the name of George Moses. And George Moses said to the Republican National Committee and to the Republican Convention: “If the Republican Convention follows the Glenn Frank Report and nominates a liberal to run against Franklin Roosevelt, it might as well commit hara-kiri. “It’s time,” he said, “for the Republican Party to come out as the right-wing party of the country, and this is the only way it can be honest and the only way it can win.”
(cough)
And they took George Moses’ advice and nominated Alf Landon with the results that you know. Uh, He was scarcely a Moses to lead the Republicans out of the New Deal wilderness. Today, the Republican Party is facing a similar choice, And I raise the question as to whether or not the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt can win a majority in Congress and can fight its way back to sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue within the even dimly visible future.
It must face the question of whether to turn right or left, whether it shall turn toward George Moses or Glenn Frank, or the modern surrogates of these Republican leaders, whose names I, I forbear to mention. This, it seems to me, is the dilemma of the Republican Party and of our party system. Now, there are other dilemmas facing the American Republic, and not the least of these arises from the centralization of power in the national government and the concentration of power in the executive branch.
Under its power to regulate commerce, to lay and collect taxes, to raise and maintain armies and navies, not to mention its implied powers, the government of the United States has become vastly more important in nearly every aspect of American civilization than it was one hundred or even fifty years ago. Let me give you one figure to illustrate this challenge. In nineteen two, federal taxes accounted for just under one-third of all the taxes collected in this country.
Two-thirds and more were accounted for by state and local governments. Today, the situation is more than reversed, with approximately seventy-four percent of the total taxes being collected by the federal government and less than 30 percent being collected by state and local units. Now, some commentators find in this trend premonitions of dictatorship and despotism or disaster.
Let me quote one of them. A former colleague of mine, at least at at that time, a beloved colleague. “Under a constant enlargement of federal jurisdiction,” writes Raymond Moley, “almost every aspect of private business and labor is now subject to federal law.
State legislation in many of those fields has become meaningless.” End quote. And echoing these sentiments, the 85th General Assembly of the state of Indiana in 1958, adopted a formal resolution, which I quote: “We are fed up with federal subsidies, grants, and paternalism.
We are no one’s stepchild.” This is the Indiana Legislature, both houses, by a large majority speaking. “We are no one’s stepchild.
We want the government to come home, and we call upon our sister states and good citizens everywhere to join with us to restore the American Republic to the foundations built by our fathers,” end quotation. Unhappily, these brave words brought no response. Indiana’s sister states Didn’t see the lights.
And even the sovereign state of Indiana, which had adopted this brave resolution, in that year, was a recipient of nearly $100 million of federal grants, which they did not refuse. Nor is this surprising. The fact is, and I apologize to– for making these obvious remarks, and I wouldn’t make them if the papers weren’t full of so much nonsense.
The fact is that the relations between the federal and state governments are not those of lord and vassal, master and servant, but of partners striving toward the common goals that are set forth in the preamble to the Constitution. I think it’s easy, too, to exaggerate federal centralization. It is true that the United States collects two-thirds or more of all taxes.
But this overlooks the fact that seventy percent or more of these federal funds go to finance national defense and foreign policy, functions of government which not even the most extreme states’ rights advocates, not even the John Birch Society, if I may suggest it, would relinquish to the states. And what these figures also conceal is the meteoric growth in both state and local government. A recent study by the National Industrial Conference Board, for example, just released, shows that since nineteen forty-six, while federal expenditures grew a modest sixty-nine percent, state and local expenditures have increased upwards of four hundred percent.
State and local government, in fact, account for from fifty to a hundred percent of those governmental activities that touch the individual citizen most closely and continuously. Education and health and sanitation, police and fire protection, law enforcement, recreation, and leisure time activities, Public services like water supply, rapid transit, garbage disposal, streets, parkways, parking places are provided for either directly by state and local governments or under their regulation and control. The vast bulk of social and economic relations in this country are governed insofar as they are governed at all at the state and local level, and this includes domestic relations, including marriage and divorce, and it includes the licensing and regulation of practically all occupations, professions, and business activities.
Now, I cite these very well-known, but too often forgotten items, not to deny the increasing role of the federal government in American life, but to correct the notion that in its relations to the states, the central government is like a timber wolf in a dovecote, or that the states are now pale and feeble remnants of once proud and sovereign powers. This is, if I may suggest it, ladies and gentlemen, nonsense, or as David Hume put it years ago, nonsense on stilts.
(laughter)
The reports of the vanishing powers of the states, like the premature reports of Mark Twain’s death, have been exaggerated. Never before in our history have state and local government– under the Constitution, have state and local governments played a more vital role in American life. And we ought not to be so blinded by moon rockets, spaceships, and guided missiles as to forget that it is largely under the aegis of our state and local governments that we live our daily lives and earn our daily bread.
Now, it is true that the increasing integration of our economic and social life, with a corresponding increase in centralized decision-making in great corporations, trade unions, and other private power structures. And believe me, decisions about General Motors are made centrally, so in U.S. Steel, and so in the other great corporations. Decisions, I’m told, are made fairly centrally in the Teamsters Union.
Uh, and the centralization of decision-making in these great private power structures is bound to result increasing centralization in decision-making in government. But more than that, even decisions affecting transportation and communication, water supply, air and stream pollution, education and recreation, health and welfare, even race relations and civil liberties are no longer within the effective span of control of traditional state and local governments. And you can expect increasing centralization of decision-making in this country.
Now, if, as Alexis de Tocqueville argued in his Democracy in America, local governments, and I quote him, “constitute the strength of free nations.” If this is true, we need very soon to review and to revise our state and local political institutions if they’re to meet the needs of the kind of world in which we live. And just a few things that I think we need to do.
First, we need a revision of our state constitutions to provide for more representative legislatures, a single strong executive, and improved standards of public administration and personnel. You know, I once said that our state constitutions, by and large, are almost models of what constitutions ought not to be. Secondly, we need a reorganization of local governments to stop the proliferation of special districts and to create new forms of metropolitan government which can reconcile local autonomy with area-wide needs.
And third, we need to do further experimentation with regional authorities like TVA, interstate compacts, and so on, to combine the advantages of decision-making on a regional basis with close and continuous ties to local units of government within the region. Now, all of these changes, which I believe are inevitable, can serve as countervailing tendencies to check greater centralization in Washington. And if we want to do something more than just wring our hands about this, this is what we will proceed to do.
Now, the centralizing forces at work in our federal system have contributed also to the concentration of power in the presidency. “Political power in the Western world,” says Amaury de Riencourt in his book The Coming Caesars. He says, “Political power has become increasingly concentrated in the United States, political power in the Western world.
And in the United States, it has become concentrated in the president. The President of the United States,” says this author, “is the only statesman in the Western world who can make major decisions alone in an emergency.” Now, this fact, coupled with the President’s expansible and undefined powers over foreign affairs and as Commander-in-Chief, and nobody knows the limits of these powers, places at the command of the President of the United States half the economic and technical power in the civilized world, and places in his hands and at his command, weapons whose power for death and destruction defy description.
Now, contributing to his formal powers is the growth of mass democracy, of government by public opinion. Because the president, more than any officer in the world, perhaps, is the master of public opinion. And I refuse here to get drawn in, unle-unless you insist on it, into the talk about managed news.
Of course news is managed. The only trouble with Mr. Sylvester, incidentally, was that he was denounced by the newspapers for telling the truth. The press, television, motion pictures, every medium of mass communication and mass incitation are at the president’s beck and call.
The sovereign public finds the issues of politics complex, mysterious, even ominous. And in a state of continuing emergency, important information is inaccessible to any but a select few, and fully accessible only to the President. Hence, in addition to the natural impulse of people to personalize or to anthropomorphize, if you please, public issues.
The public looks to the president as the only one who really knows, who has at his fingertips, as they would say, the real dope. Very much as a child looks to his father. And this perception of the president as a father image, enriched by the notion that he sees all and knows all, creates a confidence or at least a reliance on presidential leadership that is impossible to conceive in Congress or in the courts.
Who ever heard of a Congress as a hero? With that mystic quality of heroes called charisma. Congress, heaven knows, has no charisma.
(laughter)
But a president can have charisma, especially if he has a sense of style that conveys at one and the same time, the glamour of a royal family-
(laughter)
the image of a common man-
(laughter)
and the qualities of a Tammany district leader.
(laughter)
As Tribune of the People, Leader and Spokesman of Public Opinion, Evangel of the American Way of Life, the President can accomplish things concerning which his constitutional powers are silent. One among many illustrations of how presidential influence may transcend presidential power is President Kennedy’s struggle in nineteen sixty-two with that colossus of the private power structure, the steel industry. From Tuesday, April tenth, when he learned of U.S. Steel’s decision to raise prices, until the next Wednesday evening, the President, without any formal legal power to alter Big Steel’s decision, nevertheless had done the following things.
First, he had rallied public opinion against the steel companies. Second, compare, for example, the president’s command of the channels of communication with those of Mr. Blough.
[01:06:14] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Remember?
[01:06:16] PROFESSOR ODEGARD:
Secondly, he had divided the steel industry and big business against itself by appealing not only to their loyalty, but to their fears of radical shifts in defense procurement policies. Third, he had initiated antitrust investigations by Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice. And fourth, he had used FBI agents to knock on the doors in the dim hours of the morning of newsmen, to confirm reports of dissension within Big Steel itself.
Now, Monsieur de Riencourt, in his book, “The Coming Caesars,” would no doubt see in all this another song of, and I quote him, “Mass democracy, which ends in the concentration of supreme power in the hands of one man.” Perhaps we, in retrospect, will see this whole episode, again, as simply another example of how a vigorous president can nudge or inspire the nation or any part of it to deeds of valor or acts of abnegation in the public interest. The almost awesome dimensions of these powers, when coupled with those over foreign affairs and the armed forces, were revealed again in the Cuban crisis of 1962.
And as the importance of foreign policy expands, so too will the power and glory of the presidency, an office once characterized by Henry Jones Ford as an elective kingship. I think it nevertheless would be a mistake to assume that there are no countervailing powers at work to check this trend. It is well to remember that when President Truman in nineteen fifty-two, with the nation waging a de facto war in Korea, sought to seize the strike-bound steel industry, he was stopped short by the Supreme Court of the United States.
And besides the constitutional checks on the president, there are informal political checks. There are signs that even President Kennedy sees his triumph over steel in 1962 as, shall I say, a Pyrrhic victory when in 1963, he decided not to contest Big Steel’s decision to raise prices. A wise president will know that public opinion in a free society can not only sustain, but can also restrain presidential power.
And it was to prevent the abuse of power, not only by public officials, but by public opinion itself, that the Founding Fathers divided power among several branches of government, as well as between the central government and the states. In this way, as Madison put it, ambition must be made to counteract ambition. Even a president having the monumental stature of Abraham Lincoln was brought to heel by Congress and the Supreme Court.
The Constitution, said the Court in the Milligan case, is a r– law of rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and it covers with the shield of its protection, all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. And then the Court went on to say, no doctrine more pernicious was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine, said the Court, leads directly to despotism.
Unfortunately, I think unfortunately, the Court forgot these words when in Korematsu against the United States, the Court upheld President Roosevelt’s order to transport and confine in concentration camps a hundred and ten thousand persons of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were citizens of the United States in 1941. I suppose one could argue, although the facts are by no means analogous, that the decision in the Kahanamoku case in 1946 returned the Court to the sounder doctrine of the Milligan case. The Kahanamoku case involved the declaration of martial law in Hawaii, and the Court held that the declaration of martial law in Hawaii was unconstitutional, even though it was justified as being in the face of imminent invasion.
Now, it isn’t my purpose here to review the history of checks and balances under the American Constitution, but only to emphasize that against the trend toward concentration of power in the president, there are countervailing powers built into the government itself. Now, not a few commentators have found in these countervailing powers what they are pleased to call a deadlock of democracy. In recent years, presidential proposals for tax revision, Medical care for the aged, federal aid to education, reform of independent administrative agencies, a new Department of Urban Affairs, and many others have suffered amendment, mutilation, or death at the hands of a Congress in which the President’s own party has a large majority.
This situation makes many critics of our complex system most unhappy. Some of them would scrap the separation of powers for the more highly integrated parliamentary or cabinet system. Others propose more moderate remedies, including a four-year term for members of Congress to correspond with the coming in and going out of the President, and in this way increase congressional dependence upon the President.
Another reform would abolish or severely limit the seniority rule, which now operates to put stand-pat political dinosaurs from one-party districts in control of most committees. A more liberal discharge rule to compel committees after a reasonable interval to report legislation has been proposed, along with some more effective limitation on Senate filibusters. Above all, most critics call for more effective party organization in both houses to enforce discipline on party members under pain of losing precious patronage and preferment.
Now some or all of these reforms may one day be adopted to increase the power of the presidential over the congressional party. But I think it’s well to remember that, except for the cabinet system, and I may I suggest that you not hold your breath until we adopt this, uh, and except for the four-year term for congressmen, all of the reforms proposed could be adopted tomorrow by the major parties in Congress without any formal change in the Constitution at all. These parties, however, and their customs, have roots so deep in our far-flung and variegated empire that any substantial reform is likely to take some time, and I would suggest you not hold your breath for many of them either.
Especially is this the case since most party leaders in this country are not yet persuaded that a de Gaullist presidency with a sterile and servile Congress is either desirable or necessary. Life, heaven knows, is hard for an American president intent upon social change. But that’s the way the Framers wanted it.
They wanted it that way so that ambition could check ambition in the hope that in the end, reason and the public interest would prevent it. And who can say that they were wrong? An impartial re– observer might point out that the United States has not done too badly, even under the existing arrangements.
perhaps has done as well as other great powers with much more streamlined constitutions. Save only for the tragic failure of the Civil War, the American Republic has not only survived great crises, but has emerged as the acknowledged leader of the Western world. Now, one need not subscribe to all this, to sound a somewhat more hopeful note than that which is recorded in such books as The Deadlock of Democracy.
Nor am I persuaded, if I may say so, that formal changes in the structure or process of government can make great presidents, or for that matter, great prime ministers out of weak and fearful men. And we ought not to confuse the failure of leadership with deficiencies in structure or in process. Some curb, if I may suggest it, for impatience may be found in the record of the American Republic as it moves toward greater democracy, and with it, an increasing use of government for the expansion of both freedom and equality, both at home and abroad.
Dozens of projections point to a continuation of this trend, and I forbear to give you a bill of particulars, which I should be glad to do if we had time. One of these projections is the report of President Eisenhower’s Commission on National Goals, a book which I commend to you. In nearly every section of this report on education, scientific research and development.
Incidentally, the government of the United States now provides seventy percent of the funds for scientific research and development in this country. For housing, for health and welfare, government is seen as playing a larger and larger role. Already,
(cough)
expenditures by federal, state, and local agencies account for
(cough)
approximately one-third of our gross national product, and there are no signs that this will decline in the near future. Now, back in 1884, Herbert Spencer, a great English sociologist, protested vigorously against acts of Parliament restricting the employment of women and children in open-air bleaching, requiring vaccination against smallpox, giving local authorities power to provide jobs for those out of work, and especially iniquitous, he said, were laws to provide schools for the poor at public expense. All of these things, said Herbert Spencer, were portents of what he called the coming slavery.
Now, there are many in America who profess to share Herbert Spencer’s fears. To them, as to Lord Macaulay long ago, the American Republic is not a democracy in deadlock, anything but. Lord Macaulay regarded it as democracy run rampant.
“Your constitution,” said that noble lord, “is all sail and no anchor.” Is it? Or is it, as certain contemporary critics say, all anchor and no sail?
Reason would suggest that it is neither the one nor the other, but rather a government in transition from a representative republic to a representative democracy, a democracy intent upon achieving the goals that are set forth in the most important part of the Constitution, by all odds, the Preamble. The goals toward a more perfect union, to establish justice, to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide for the general welfare, and to ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. This is what I mean by the American Republic in transition.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
Here and acknowledge them, and I– There’s a gentleman way back there in the room. Okay. Way back, okay.
[01:21:14] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Professor, would you think that, uh, the introduction of a system of discipline, uh, say, uh, modeled on the British, uh, where you have the Chief Whip who would add to, uh, presidential maneuvering in the legislative process?
[01:21:31] PROFESSOR ODEGARD:
Well, of course, we have a chief whip. Uh, Hubert Humphrey is the chief whip of the Democratic Party. Uh, we have a chief whip.
Uh, the chief whip, uh, operates in a, in a somewhat different way. I would suggest a very simple solution. Uh, I would suggest that the Democrats, when they come to power, adopt the policies of the Republicans.
Mr. James, I, I don’t mean the public policies, I mean the party policies. Uh, some of you here are old enough to remember, uh, well, some of you are young enough
(laughter)
to remember a certain senator from the state of Oregon who decided in 1952 that he could not support the Republican nominee for president, General Eisenhower, and he bolted the party. And what happened to him when he went back to Washington? He was excluded from the Republican conference.
He was stripped of his committee assignments. They didn’t hesitate to do it a minute. And even before that, back in nineteen hundred and twenty-four, when Senator La Follette, uh, and certain other Republican senators bolted the Republican Party and they got back to Washington, they were excluded from the conference, denied committee posts.
And yet when the Democrats came into power in nineteen hundred and sixty-one, Um, yeah, I’ll say this. Uh
(laughter)
The Democrats came into power in 1961 with a large majority in both houses.