William Allen White, The Growth of Democracy in America, 1910

From William Allen White. The Old Order Changeth. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910. 50-57.

It was twenty years ago that Senator Ingalls of Kansas, one of the cleanest men in public life that day, looking ahead to the limit of his vision, said: "The purification of politics is an iridescent dream."

But the secret ballot, the direct primary, and the purged party-which are now fairly well assured in American politics-do not set the metes and bounds of progress toward self-government in this country. They are fundamental reforms, it is true, and they are steps that are necessary before there may be any real forward movement. For it will be seen that each one of these movements is a leveling process, a tendency to make money, capital, property, wealth, or financial distinction count for nothing save as an indirect influence in the ballot box. Each of these innovations, the secret ballot, the primary, and the reformed party, is a step toward democracy-a step toward the Declaration of Independence and away from the Constitution, which so feared majority rule that the majority was hedged about with checks and balances at every possible point. In the early days of the republic, the people annulled the Constitution by getting a direct vote on the President, and thus obtained the executive branch of the government. Now they are capturing the legislative branch through the primary, which today puts over half the United States senators under the direct vote of the people. When one stops to think that in Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, California, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey and Kentucky, United States senators at the next election will go directly to the people for nominations, and not to the railroads and the public service corporations of their respective states; in short, not to capital as they did ten years ago, one realizes how revolutionary are the changes that are coming to our system. The democracy that was gathering in strength in the days of Hanna is beginning to move in the nation.

Indeed, the growth of fundamental democracy in this country is astonishing. Thirty years ago the secret ballot was regarded as a passing craze by professional politicians. Twenty years ago it was a vital issue in nearly every American state. Today, the secret ballot is universal in American politics. Ten years ago the direct primary was the subject of an academic discussion in the University of Michigan by a young man named La Follette of Wisconsin. Now it is in active operation in over two-thirds of our American states, and over half of the American people use the direct primary as a weapon of self-government. Five years ago the recall was a piece of freak legislation in Oregon. Today more American citizens are living under laws giving them the power of recall than were living under the secret ballot when Garfield came to the White House, and many times more people have the power to recall certain public officers today than had the advantages of the direct primary form of party nominations when Theodore Roosevelt came to Washington. The referendum is only five years behind the primary. Prophecy with these facts before one becomes something more than a rash guess.

The democracy has the executive and the legislative branches of the state and federal government under its direct control; for in the nomination of a majority of the members of the House and the Senate the personification of property is unimportant. By making the party a legalized state institution, by paying for the party primaries with state taxes, by requiring candidates at primaries to file their expense accounts and a list of their contributors (as is done in some states), by limiting the amount spent (as in done in certain states), and by guaranteeing a secret vote and a fair count, the state has broken the power of money in politics. Capital is not eliminated from politics, but it is hampered and circumscribed and is not the dominant force that it was ten years ago. Then the political machine was financed by capital invested in public partnership. Then the political machine quietly sold special privileges to public service corporations. Now the political machine is in a fair way to be reduced to mere political scrap iron by the rise of the people. . . .

The people are finding a way around the legislative veto of the state courts. And this they are doing more generally than may be realized by many people. The voters are taking two methods of circumventing the legislative veto of the courts: first, by amending their state constitution, or making new constitutions; and, second, by direct legislation, or the modification of it known as the initiative and referendum. State courts are elective and therefore are afraid of majorities. They cannot declare constitutional amendments unconstitutional, and they handle laws adopted by a direct vote of the people with great care. Hence the prevalence of the constitutional amendment in American states and the growth of the initiative and referendum from Maine to California. . . .

The value of the initiative and referendum depends also upon the point from which it is viewed. In certain quarters politics is considered the science of government of the many by the few. Also, a government is considered excellent when it protects investment, when it makes the right of contract more important than the welfare of citizens, when it protects vested rights even when they become vested wrongs. In those quarters the initiative and the referendum, which is coming into American government as surely as the secret ballot came, will be deemed a dangerous menace to our institutions. Certainly it is a departure from the idea of a government by the few which inspired the fathers of the federal Constitution when Chief Justice John Marshall gave the federal judiciary the final veto on all laws passed by the state or national legislatures. And the issue should be met candidly. The friends of the movement for direct legislation should admit frankly that the purpose of their cause is twofold: first, to compel legislatures to act quickly and without evasion; and second, to circumvent the veto of such courts as are elective and hence dependent upon popular majorities, and to put whatever righteousness there is in a definitely registered expression of popular will before such courts as we are not elective to stay them in their vetoes. For the veto power of the American courts over the legislation-under the assumed right to declare legislation "unconstitutional"-is one of the most ruthless checks upon democracy permitted by any civilized people. European kings and courts do not have such reactionary power; yet in the end it seems to make for righteousness. Because under that power in America people have developed a patience and a conscience and a patriotic self-abnegation which fits then to progress in the light of the vision within them. So the initiative and referendum-a most outlandish phrase-which is coming into state governments and city governments all over the country will be the instrument of a self-restrained people. It will not be the weapon of a mob.