A Preface to Politics | Page 7

not
become political marionettes, though people pretend that they are.
When theory runs against the grain of living forces, the result is a
deceptive theory of politics. If the real government of the United States
"had, in fact," as Woodrow Wilson says, "been a machine governed by
mechanically automatic balances, it would have had no history; but it
was not, and its history has been rich with the influence and
personalities of the men who have conducted it and made it a living
reality." Only by violating the very spirit of the constitution have we
been able to preserve the letter of it. For behind that balanced plan there
grew up what Senator Beveridge has called so brilliantly the "invisible
government," an empire of natural groups about natural leaders. Parties
are such groups: they have had a power out of all proportion to the
intentions of the Fathers. Behind the parties has grown up the "political
machine"--falsely called a machine, the very opposite of one in fact, a
natural sovereignty, I believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is
the charter behind which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real
government that has defeated a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a
freak, a strange and monstrous excrescence. Its structure and the laws
of its life are, I believe, typical of all real sovereignties. You can find
Tammany duplicated wherever there is a social group to be
governed--in trade unions, in clubs, in boys' gangs, in the Four Hundred,
in the Socialist Party. It is an accretion of power around a center of
influence, cemented by patronage, graft, favors, friendship, loyalties,
habits,--a human grouping, a natural pyramid.
Only recently have we begun to see that the "political ring" is not
something confined to public life. It was Lincoln Steffens, I believe,
who first perceived that fact. For a time it was my privilege to work
under him on an investigation of the "Money Power." The leading idea
was different from customary "muckraking." We were looking not for
the evils of Big Business, but for its anatomy. Mr. Steffens came to the

subject with a first-hand knowledge of politics. He knew the "invisible
government" of cities, states, and the nation. He knew how the boss
worked, how he organized his power. When Mr. Steffens approached
the vast confusion and complication of big business, he needed some
hypothesis to guide him through that maze of facts. He made a bold and
brilliant guess, an hypothesis. To govern a life insurance company, Mr.
Steffens argued, was just as much "government" as to run a city. What
if political methods existed in the realm of business? The investigation
was never carried through completely, but we did study the methods by
which several life and fire insurance companies, banks, two or three
railroads, and several industrials are controlled. We found that the
anatomy of Big Business was strikingly like that of Tammany Hall: the
same pyramiding of influence, the same tendency of power to center on
individuals who did not necessarily sit in the official seats, the same
effort of human organization to grow independently of legal
arrangements. Thus in the life insurance companies, and the Hughes
investigation supports this, the real power was held not by the president,
not by the voters or policy-holders, but by men who were not even
directors. After a while we took it as a matter of course that the head of
a company was an administrative dummy, with a dependence on
unofficial power similar to that of Governor Dix on Boss Murphy. That
seems to be typical of the whole economic life of this country. It is
controlled by groups of men whose influence extends like a web to
smaller, tributary groups, cutting across all official boundaries and
designations, making short work of all legal formulæ, and exercising
sovereignty regardless of the little fences we erect to keep it in bounds.
A glimpse into the labor world revealed very much the same condition.
The boss, and the bosslet, the heeler--the men who are "it"--all are there
exercising the real power, the power that independently of charters and
elections decides what shall happen. I don't wish to have this regarded
as necessarily malign. It seems so now because we put our faith in the
ideal arrangements which it disturbs. But if we could come to face it
squarely--to see that that is what sovereignty is--that if we are to use
human power for human purposes we must turn to the realities of it,
then we shall have gone far towards leaving behind us the futile hopes
of mechanical perfection so constantly blasted by natural facts.

The invisible government is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the
fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution.
What is dangerous