Why “Reforms” Do Not Reform
By L. A. S.
In the April number of McClure’s Magazine, Mr. Lincoln Steffens, author of “The Shame of the Cities,” states some interesting facts telling why “reformations” in American municipal and State governments, so frequent in the present stage of American history, do not reform. In brief, it is, he says, because “corruption”—that which must be swept away by reform—is not a thing of one locality, city, party, or organization, but a thing of all places and all spheres of activity, industrial as well as political. Neither does it stand alone in any one place or party, so that to secure reform in a city it is only necessary to overthrow those upholding corruption in that particular place; but it is, everywhere, a part of a system which extends from city to legislature and to Congress, and from politics into business. Mr. Steffens describes it thus:— Every time I attempted to trace to its sources the political corruption of a city ring, the stream of pollution branched off in the most unexpected directions, and spread out in a network of veins and arteries so complex that hardly any part of the body politic seemed clear of it. It flowed out of the majority back into the minority; out of politics into vice and crime; out of business into politics, and back into business; from the boss, down through the police to the prostitute, and up through the practise of law into the courts; and big, throbbing arteries ran out through the country over the State to the nation—and back. No wonder cities can’t get municipal reform! No wonder Minneapolis, having cleaned out its police ring of vice-grafters, now discovers boodle in the council! No wonder Chicago, with council reform and boodle beaten, finds itself a Minneapolis of police and administrative graft! No wonder Pittsburg, when it broke out of its local ring, fell, amazed, into a State ring! No wonder New York, with good government, votes itself back again into Tammany Hall! They are on the wrong track; we are, all of us, on the wrong track. You can’t reform a city by reforming part of it. You can’t reform a city alone. You can’t reform politics alone. And as for corruption and the understanding thereof, we can not run round and round in municipal rings and understand ring corruption; it isn’t a ring thing. We can not remain in one city, or ten, and comprehend municipal corruption; it isn’t a local thing. We can not “stick to a party” and follow party corruption; it isn’t a partizan thing. And I have found that I can not confine myself to politics and grasp all the ramifications of political corruption; it isn’t political corruption. It’s corruption. The corruption of our American politics is our American corruption, political, but financial and industrial, too. Miss Tarbell is showing it in the trust, Mr. Baker in the labor union, and my gropings into the misgovernment of cities have drawn me everywhere, but always out of politics into business, and out of the cities into the State. Business started the corruption of politics in Pittsburg; upholds it in Philadelphia; boomed with it in Chicago, and withered with its reform; and7in New York, business financed the return of Tammany Hall. Here then is our guide out of the labyrinth. Not the political ring, but big business,—that is the crux of the situation. Our political corruption is a system, a regularly established custom of the country, by which our political leaders are hired by bribery, by the license to loot, and by quiet moral support, to conduct the government of city, State, and nation, not for the common good, but for the special interests of private business. Not the politician then, not the bribe taker, but the bribe giver, the man we are so proud of, our successful business man—he is the source and the sustenance of our bad government. The captain of industry is the man to catch. His is the trail to follow. Taking the State of Missouri as an example, where Circuit-Attorney Folk has become conspicuous by his attack upon corruption in its chief city, Mr. Steffens mentions the various classes of citizens concerned in the exposures Mr. Folk has made. He says:— The lid was off in Missouri. The stone Mr. Folk had had so long to leave unturned, was lifted. What was under it? Squirming in the light and writhing off into their dark holes, were State senators and State officers, State committeemen and party leaders; but also there were the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Missouri Pacific Railroad, the St. Louis and San Francisco, the Iron Mountain and Southern, the Wabash; Mr. Folk’s old friend, the St. Louis Transit Company; the breweries, the stock yards, the telephone companies; business men of St. Louis, St. Joseph, and Kansas City—the big business of the whole State. There they were—the “contemptible bribe taker” and the very “respectable” bribe giver, all doing business together. So they still traveled in pairs; and the highway still lay between the deadly parallels—business and politics. The system was indeed bigger than St. Louis; it was the system of Missouri. Of this system Mr. Steffens says further:— This system I have been describing is a form of government; it is the government. We must not be confused by constitutions and charters. The constitution of Missouri describes a governor and his duties, a legislature and the powers lodged in a senate and a house of representatives, etc., etc. This is the paper government. In Missouri this paper government has been superseded by an actual government, and this government is—a lobby, with a combine of legislators, the Democratic State Committee, and State leaders and city bosses for agents. One bribe, two bribes, a hundred bribes, might not be so bad; but what we have seen here is a system of bribery, corruption installed as a motive, the purpose, the spirit of a State government. Thus, at last, is raised in St. Louis and Missouri the plain, great question: Do the people rule? Will they, can they, rule? And the answer of Missouri will be national, almost racial in importance. Reform must begin with the individual, in the heart. The question of national self-government is the question of individual self-government, and reformation which does not reform the individual will not reform the nation. And the true reforming agency, the only one that will do a permanent work, is that agency which reforms the individual, makes him capable of self-government, by giving him a change of heart and breaking the bondage of soul slavery to the passions and lusts of the flesh. Reform by legislation, reform by the ballot-box, does not reform. The corruption, as Mr. Steffens points out, is a system extending beyond politics, beyond the legislature. From such reforms the country has nothing to hope. At the most, they will but touch the surface of things, and the good they accomplish will be but temporary. The evidence of such wide-spread corruption in public and private life as these disclosures by Mr. Steffens afford, shows how great is the need of a true work of reformation at his time, and how great the importance of the reforming message which Seventh-day Adventists are commissioned to bear to the world.