Take Back Your Government!

CHAPTER II

How to Start

"Put down your bucket where you are!"

The late Booker T Washington,4 in his life-long attempts to advise his people on how to help themselves, had a favorite anecdote about a sailing ship, becalmed and out of fresh water off the coast of South America. After many days they sighted another ship, a steam ship, and signalled, "Bring us water. We are dying of thirst." The other ship sent back this message, "Put down your bucket where you are!"

They were in the broad mouth of the Amazon, afloat in millions of gallons of fresh water - and did not know it!

Here is how to start in politics:

Get your telephone book. Look up the party of your registration - or, if you are not registered in a party, the party which most nearly fits your views. I don't care what party it is, but let us suppose for illustration that it is the Republican Party. You will find a listing something like Republican County Committee, Associated Republican Clubs, Republican Assembly, or perhaps several such. Telephone one of them.

Say, "My name is Joseph Q. (or Josephine W.) Ivorytower. I am a registered voter at 903 Farflung Avenue. Can you put me in touch with my local club?"

The voice at the other end will say, 'Just a minute. Do you know what ward you are in?"

You say no. (It's at least even money that you don't know, if you are a normal American!)

The voice mutters, "Fairview, Farwest, Farflung - " The owner of the voice is checking a file or a map. Then you hear, in an aside, "Say, Marjorie, gimme the folder on the 13th ward."

"What do you want to know?" says Marjorie. She knows them by heart; she typed them. She is a political secretary and belongs to one of two extreme classes. Either she is a patriot and absolutely incorruptible, or she can be bought and sold like cattle. Either way she knows who the field worker in the 13th ward is.

After a couple of minutes of this backing and filling you are supplied with a name, an address, and a telephone number of a local politician who is probably the secretary of the local club. You may also be supplied with the address and times and dates of meetings of the local club, if it is strong enough to have permanent headquarters. The local club may vary anywhere from a dub in permanent possession of a store frontage on a busy street, with a full time secretary on the premises and a complete ward, precinct, and block organization, to a club which exists largely in the imagination of the secretary and which meets only during campaigns in the homes of the members.

Your next job is to telephone the secretary. This is probably not necessary. If the local organization is any good at all, the secretary of the local club will call^ow, probably the same day. Marjorie will have called him and said, "Get a pencil and paper, Jim. I've got a new sucker for you." Or, if she is not cynical, she may call you a new prospect.

She will have added you to a card file and set the wheels in motion to have your registration checked and to have you placed on several mailing lists. Presently you will start receiving one or more political newspapers - free, despite the subscription price posted on the masthead - and, in due course, you will receive campaign literature from candidates who have the proper connections at headquarters. Your political education will have begun, even if you never bother to become active.

Note that it has not cost you anything so far. The costs need never exceed nickels, dimes, and quarters, even if you become very active. The costs can run as high as you wish, of course. The citizen who is willing to reach for his checkbook to back up his beliefs is always welcome in politics. But such action is not necessary and is not as rare as the citizen who is willing to punch doorbells and lick stamps. Some of the most valuable and respected politicians I have ever known had to be provided with lunch money to permit them to do a full day's volunteer work in any area more than a few blocks from their respective homes.

I know of one case, a retired minister with a microscopic pension just sufficient to buy groceries for himself and his bedridden wife, who became county chairman and leader-in-fact of the party in power in a metropolitan area of more than three million people. He was so poor that he could not afford to attend political breakfasts or dinner. He could never afford to contribute to party funds, nor, on the other hand, was he ever on the party payroll - he never made a thin dime out of politics.

What he did have to contribute was honesty, patriotism, and a willingness to strive for what he thought was right It made him boss of a key county in a key state - when he was past seventy and broke.

I digress. This book will have many digressions; politics is like that, as informal as an old shoe, and the digressions may be the most important part. It is sometimes hard to tell what is important in the practical art of politics. Charles Evans Hughes failed to become president because his manager was on bad terms with a state leader and thereby failed to see to it that the candidate met the local leader on one particular occasion in one California city. The local campaign lost its steam because the local leader's nose was out of joint over the matter.

Mr. Hughes lost the state of California; with its electoral vote he would have become president.5 A switch of less than nineteen hundred votes in the city in which the unfortunate incident occurred would have made Mr. Hughes the war-time president during World War I. The effect on world history is incalculable and enormous. It is entirely possible that we would have been in a League of Nations (not the League - that was Woodrow Wilson's League); it is possible that Hitler would never have come to power; it is possible that World War II would never have occurred and that your nephew who fell at Okinawa would be alive today.

We cannot calculate the consequences. But we do know that world history was enormously affected by a mere handful of votes, less than one percent of one percent -less than one ten-thousandth of the total vote cast.

An active political club6 can expect to deliver to the polls on election day, through unpaid volunteers driving their own cars, as many votes as the number that swung the 1916 presidential election. It could be your club and an organization you helped to build.

Which is why you must now telephone the local club secretary. It may be your chance to prevent, by your own direct and individual action, World War III!

The club secretary, Jim Ballotbox, will not give you the brush off. Even if it is a tight machine organization, founded on graft and special privilege, an honest-to-goodness volunteer who is willing to work is more to be desired than fine gold, yeah, verily! If it is that sort of a club, presently you will be offered cash for your efforts, anywhere from five dollars per precinct per campaign on the west coast, through five dollars per day during the campaign in the middle west, to a sound and secure living month in and month out on the east coast.

(These figures do not refer to the Republican Party, as such, nor to the Democratic Party. They refer to the Machine, no matter what its label.)

Don't take the money. Remain a volunteer. You will be treated with startled response. Every time you turn down money you will automatically be boosted one rung in the party councils. And the progress is very fast.

But, no matter which sort of club it is, you will be welcomed with open arms. You have already caused a minor flurry at the downtown headquarters by volunteering during "peace time"-other than immediately before a campaign. It shocked them but they rose to the occasion and put you in touch with your local leader. They are used to volunteers during campaigns - and are aware that most of them are phonies who expect at least a postmaster's job in return for a promise to work one precinct plus a little handshaking at a few political meetings. If it should happen that you call up during a campaign, you will be treated a litde more warily until you have established that you are in fact a volunteer and not a hopeful patronage hound, but you will be received pleasantly and given a chance to work. This applies to any political club anywhere at any time.

If Jim Ballotbox happens tobe secretary of the other sort of club, the sort unconnected with a powerful, well-financed machine, he will be even happier to see you, although he may not be as schooled in the arts of graciousness as his full-time professional opposite number. His club will be in a chronic state of crisis financially, or even moribund; an enthusiastic new member is manna to him.

He will have plenty for you to do. You can be chairman next term if you want to be and share with him the worries about hall rent, postage, secretarial work, and how to get people out to meetings. At the very least he will place you in charge of one or more precincts (which will make you nervous as a bridegroom; it's too much responsibility too suddenly) and he will unburden his heart to you. You will learn.

There remain two other possibilities which may result from your telephone call to the downtown headquarters. The first is that there may be no dub in your district, in which case you will make your start directly at the downtown headquarters and will meet there the other active party members from your own area. You will join with them in organizing a local club before the next election. It is not hard to do; the process will be discussed in a later chapter.

The last remaining possibility is that your telephone book contains no listings for your political party. This will happen only in small towns or in the country. If you live in a small town or in the country, you already know at least one party leader in your own party - probably Judge Dewlap, who served one term in the state senate and has been throwing his weight around ever since.

Call him up. Tell him you want to work for the party. Perhaps you don't like the old windbag. No matter - he likes you. He likes all voters, especially ones who want to work for the party! He may suggest that you have lunch with him at the Elks' Club and talk over civic conditions. Or he may simply invite you to drop into his real estate office for a chat. But he won't brush you off. From now on you're his boy! - until he finds out he can't dictate to you. But by that time you are a politician in your own right and there is nothing he can do about it

(That knife in your back has Judge Dewlap's finger prints on it.)

We have covered all the possibilities; you are now in politics. As a result of one telephone call you have started. Stay with the club or local organization for several months at least. Attend all the meetings. Help out with the routine work. Don't be afraid to lick stamps, serve on committees, check precinct lists, or distribute political literature. Count on devoting a couple of evenings a month to it for six months or a year. Your expenses during this training period need not exceed a dollar a month. At the end of that time you are a politician.

I mean it. You will have become acquainted with your local officeholders and political leaders, you will have discovered where several of the bodies are buried, you will have taken part in one local or national campaign and received your first blooding in meeting the public. You will find that you are now reading the newspapers with insight as to the true story behind the published story. You will have grown up about ten years in your knowledge of what makes the world go 'round.

You will either have experienced the warm glow of solid accomplishment that comes from realizing that you performed a necessary part in a successful campaign for a man or an issue, or you will have taken part in the private post-mortem in which you and your colleagues analyze why you lost and what to do about it next time. (The answer is usually to start your precinct organization earlier, with special reference to getting your sure votes registered and to make sure they are dragged to the polls.)

You will feel that you can win next time and probably you will. Politics for the volunteer fireman is not one long succession of lost causes-far from it!

But the point at which you will realize that you are in fact a politician with a definite effect on public life is the time when your friends and neighbors start asking your advice about how to mark their ballots. And they will. Perhaps not about presidential nor gubernatorial candidates, but they will ask. and take your advice about lesser candidates and about the propositions on the ballot

You may discover in the course of the first few months that you are in the wrong dub, or even in the wrong party. This does not matter in the least insofar as your political education is concerned. In fact it is somewhat of an advantage to make a mistake in your first affiliation; you will learn things thereby which you could never possibly learn so well or so rapidly if you had found your own true lodge brothers on your first attempt. It does not matter by what door you enter politics. If you have belonged to the party wrong/or you, by habit or tradition, a few months of active politics will disclose the fact to you. You can then reregister and cross over, bringing with you experience and solid conviction you could hardly have acquired any other way.8

If the trouble lies in your having fallen first into the hands of a gang of unprincipled machine politicians, the mistake is still a valuable one, for you will discover presently that there is a reform element in your party, unaffiliated with the Machine. You can join them, taking with you a knowledge of the practical art of vote-getting which reformers frequently never acquire.

You will be invaluable to your new associates. Most of the techniques of vote-getting are neither dishonest nor honest in themselves, but the machines normally know vastly more about such techniques than do the reform organizations. The honest organizations can afford to copy at least 90% of the machine techniques. It is curiously and wonderfully true that a volunteer, reform organization can use the machine techniques much more effectively than the Machine does, with fewer workers and less money. It is like the difference between the ardor of unselfish love and the simulated passion of prostitution; the unorganized voting public can feel the difference.

Recapitulation-How to start: Take a telephone book. Look up your political party. Telephone, locate your local club. Join it, attend all the meetings, and do volunteer work for several months. At the end of drat time, let your conscience be your guide. You will know enough to know where you belong and what you should do.

I might as well admit right now that the above paragraph is really all this book can tell you. The matter discussed in the later chapters are things which you will learn for yourself in any case, provided you do everything called f or in the paragraph above.

If you have skimmed through this book to this point without, as yet, laying the purchase price on the counter, you can save the price of the book without loss to yourself simply by remembering that one paragraph - and doing it!

On the other hand you might buy the book anyhow and lend it to your loud-mouthed brother-in-law. Aren't you pretty sick of the way he is forever flapping his jaw about the way the country is run? But when has he ever done anything about it except to go down and kill your vote on election day by voting the wrong way? Give him this book, then tell him to put up or shut up!

You can point out to him that he owes it to his three kids to take a responsible part in politics, instead of just beating his gums. If he won't get off his fat backside and get busy in politics but still refuses to stop being a Big Wind, you are then justified in indulging in the pleasure of being rude to him. After all, you have wanted to be for years, haven't you? This is your opportunity; you've got nothing to lose politically since he votes wrong anyhow, when he remembers to vote, and it will come as a relief to be rude for once, now that you are a politician and usually polite to all comers.

Tell him that he is so damned ignorant that he doesn't have any real opinions about politics and so lax in his civic duties that he wouldn't be entitled to opinions if he had any. Tell him to shut up and to quit holding up the bridge game.

The faint sound of cheering you will hear from the distance will be me. I don't like the jerk either, nor any of his tribe.

You may not believe that getting into politics is actually as simple as I have described it. Here is my own case: I returned to my own state after an extended absence. My profession had kept me travelling and it happened to be the first time I had ever been at home during a campaign. I walked into the local street headquarters of my party and said to a woman at a desk, "I have a telephone, an automobile, and a typewriter. What can I do?"

I was referred to another headquarters a couple of miles away - I was so ignorant that I did not know the district boundaries and had gotten into the wrong headquarters.

That very same day, to my utter amazement and confusion, I found myself in charge of seven precincts.

Six weeks later I was a director of die local club.

Six months later I was publishing, in my spare time, a political newspaper of two million circulation.

During the next campaign I was a county commit-teeman, a state committeeman, and a district chairman. Shortly after that campaign I was appointed county organizer for my party. And so on. It does not end. The scope and importance of the political work assigned to a volunteer fireman is limited only by his strength and his willingness to accept responsibility.

Nor is the work futile. The volunteer organization with which I presently became affiliated recalled a mayor, kicked out a district attorney, replaced the governor with one of our own choice, and completely changed the political complexion of one of the largest states - all within four years. I did not do it alone-naturally not, nothing is ever done alone in politics-but it was done by a comparatively small group of unpaid volunteers almost all of whom were as ignorant of politics at the start as I was.

Or let me tell you about Susie. Susie is a wonderful girl. She and her husband volunteered about the same time I did. Susie had a small baby; she packed him into a market basket, stuck him into the back of the family car and went out and did field work.

In the following four years Susie replaced a national committeeman with a candidate of her own choice, elected a congressman, and managed the major portion of the campaign which gave us a new governor. She topped her career finally by being the indispensable key person in nominating a presidential candidate of one of the two major parties. I'll tell more about that later; it's quite a story.

All this time Susie was having babies about every third year. She never accepted a cent for herself, but it became customary, after the house filled up, for the party to see to it that Susie had a maid during a campaign. The rest of the time she kept house, did the cooking, and reared her kids unassisted.

During the war she added riveting on bombers during the night shift to her other activities.

We can't all be Susies. But remember this - all that Susie had to offer was honesty, willingness, and an abiding faith in democracy. She had no money and has none now ... and she had no political connections nor experience when she started.

I could fill a whole book with case histories of people like Susie. Most of them are people of very limited income who are quite busy all day earning that income. One of the commonest excuses from the person who knows that he should take part in civic business is: "I would like to but I am just so tarnation busy making a living for my wife and kids that I can't spare the time, the money, nor the energy."

The middle class in Germany felt the same way; it brought them Hitler, the liquidation of their class, and the destruction of their country. The next time you feel like emulating them, remember Susie and her four kids. Or Gus. Gus drove a truck from four a.m. to noon each day; he had a wife and two kids. By sleeping in the afternoons and catching a nap after midnight he managed to devote many of his evenings to politics. In less than three years he was state chairman of the young people's club of his party and one of the top policy makers in the state organization.

What did he get out of it? Nothing, but the satisfaction of knowing that he had made his state a better place for his kids to live.

The Guses and the Susies in this country are the people who have preserved and are preserving our democracy - not the big city bosses, not the Washington officeholders, and most emphatically not your loud-mouthed and lazy brother-in-law.10

I have said that the rest of the book will tell only things that you will learn anyhow, through experience. They will be recounted in hopes of saving you much time, much bitter experience, and in the expectation that my own experiences may make you more effective more quickly than you otherwise might be. I also hope to brace you against the disappointment and sometimes disheartening disillusionments that are bound to come to anyone participating in this deadly serious game.

One warning I want to include right now, since you may not finish reading this book.

You are entering politics with the definite intention of treating it as a patriotic public service. You intend to pay your own way; you seek neither patronage nor cash. Almost at once you will be offered pay. You will turn it down. Again and again it will be offered and patronage as well.

There will come a day when you are offered pay to campaign for an issue or a man in whom you already believe and most heartily and to whom you are already committed. The offer will come from a man who is sincerely your friend and whom you know to be honest and patriotic. He will argue that the organization expects to pay for the work you are already doing and dial you might as well be paid. He honesdy prefers for you to be on the payroll; it makes the whole affair more orderly.

Everydiing he says is perfecdy true; it is honest pay, from a clean source, for honest work in which you believe. It happens doat just that moment a litde extra money would come in mighty handy. What should you do?

Don't take it!

If you take it, it is almost certain to mark die end of your climb toward the top in the policy-making councils of your party. You are likely to remain a two-bit, or at best a four-bit, ward heeler the rest of your life. A volunteer fireman need not have money to be influential in public affairs, but he must not accept money, even when it is clean money, honestly earned. If you take it you are a hired man and hired men carry very litde weight anywhere.11

There is a corny old story about a sugar daddy and a stylish and beautiful young society matron. The s.d. offered her five thousand dollars to spend a week at Atlantic City with him. After due consideration she accepted. He then offered her fifty dollars instead. In great indignation she said, "Sir, what kind of a woman do you think I am?"

"We settled that," he told her. "Now we're haggling over die price."

Don't make the mistake she did. There is however some sense in haggling over die conditions. If you reach die point where your party wants you to accept a state or national party post, for full-time work in a position of authority, or your government asks the same diing of you, under circumstances where it is evident that you must surrender your usual means of livelihood, go ahead and take it, if you honesdy believe that your services are needed and that you can do the best job that could be done by any of die available candidates. It is well understood in political circles diat public office or major party office is almost always badly underpaid for the talent and experience die jobs need. The salaries, therefore, are regarded simply as retainers to permit the holder to eat while serving die public. But don't be a paid ward heeler!

On the other hand, it is not wise to hold the petty hired man in the party in contempt. You will have to work widi many of them no matter what party you are in. The biggest reform movements in this country include areas where the Machine is dominant; the most perfectly oiled political machines include areas where all the work is volunteer and unpaid. You will find the paid precinct or headquarters worker as honest and as conscientious as employees usually are; almost invariably he or she will be sincerely loyal to the party employing him. They usually do more work dian their wages justify. Remember diis, and be careful what you say to them or about them. Most of them are as honest as you are and just as anxious for your man to win.

But don't become one of them if you expect to have any major effect on the future of this country.

Well, then, if you are never to accept pay, except under remote circumstances in which the job even widi pay is likely to be a financial sacrifice, what can you expect to get out of it?

The rewards are intangible but very pleasing to an adult mind. The drawbacks are easier to see. You must expect to be regarded with amusement and even suspicion by some of your acquaintances. Most of the station-wagon crowd you used to run around with will be certain that you are in it for what you can get out of it, for that is the only reason their unmatured minds can imagine. They are the free riders in the body politic; despite the fact they do nothing to make our form of government work, they serenely believe that the wheels go around by their gracious consent and think that gives them the privilege of caustic and ignorant criticism of the laborers in the vineyard.

Moreover, you won't be seeing so much of them from now on. You will find that you are beginning to select your social contacts, your dinner guests and your golf partners from among your political acquaintances. You will do this because you find more intelligence, more brilliant conversation, and more worthwhile solid human values among your political acquaintances than you found among the free riders. You won't plan it that way, but it will work itself out.

You will play less bridge. Bridge is a good game, but it is dull and tasteless when compared with politics.

Your brother-in-law will shun your company. That's clear gain!

There will come to you the warm satisfaction of being in on the know every time you pick up your newspaper. News stories that once were dull will be filled with zest for you, because you will know what they mean.

From the stand point of sheer recreation you will have discovered the greatest sport in the world. Horse racing, gambling, football, the fights, all of these things are childish and trite compared with this greatest sport! Politics is a game where you always play for keeps, where the game is continuous, always fresh and full of surprises. It will take all of your intelligence and wit and all that you have ever learned or can learn to play it well. The stakes are the highest conceivable, the lives and the futures of every living creature on this planet. How well you play it can make the difference between freedom or a firing squad, civilization or atomic conflagration. For this is the day of decision, the hour of the knife, and none but yourself can choose for you the correct path in the maze.

Over and above the joy of playing for high stakes is the greatest and most adult joy of all, the continuous and sustaining knowledge that you have broken with childish ways and come at last into your full heritage as a free citizen, integrated into the life of the land of your birth or your choice, and carrying your share of adult responsibility for the future thereof!