Books: Wordy Warriors

THE POLITICOS—Matthew Josephson— Harcourt, Brace ($4.50).

When they drew up the Constitution, the Founding Fathers carefully designated the various government offices. But they neglected to say how men were to be chosen for them. Madison believed that many political parties would spring up, that safety for the Republic would lie in their cancellations and compromises. Instead, the two-party system became more strongly entrenched in the U. S. than anywhere else. From James Bryce to Charles A. Beard historians have puzzled over this phenomenon, asking almost as many questions as they have answered. How did it happen, for example, that the parties in the U. S., unlike those of the European democracies, were not identified with a particular section or class? How was it possible, Bryce wanted to know, for two great nationwide organizations to fight as bitterly as did the Republicans & Democrats over the Hayes-Tilden election, without plunging the country into civil war?

Last week, with The Politicos, Matthew Josephson joined the ranks of the puzzlers. His contribution was a 760-page volume that attempted a dual task: 1) to trace the careers of the Democratic and Republican parties through the four decades after the Civil War; 2) to draw a composite portrait of the professional politicians, party leaders, spoilsmen, local bosses.

More successful in the second half of this job, Author Josephson has dusted off dozens of half-forgotten heroes: fast-thinking James G. Elaine of Maine; sardonic Roscoe Conkling; crippled Oliver Morton of Indiana, who ran his organization “as the country schoolmaster ran his school”; portly Zachariah Chandler of Detroit, who wanted to “raise a wall of fire” between the U. S. and Great Britain, and who advised Republican wives not to sleep with Democratic husbands.

In his left-wing study of early U. S. capitalists, The Robber Barons (1934), Josephson wrote of men who “spoke little and did much”—Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Collis Huntington, Morgan, Rockefeller. In The Politicos he writes of men who did as little as possible and spoke all too much. For the period after the Civil War saw the flowering of the spellbinders, the men who, when trapped in some snide deal, escaped by waving the bloody shirt, denouncing Jeff Davis, pulling out all the stops in tearful eulogies to the Union dead.

The torrent of talk began with the two months of “masterful turbulence” that accompanied the attempt to impeach Johnson. When the Democrats gained power after the towering scandals of the Grant administration, Elaine baited Southern Democrats so skillfully that he soon had them roaring Confederate defiance, effectively distracting Northern attention from the Whiskey Ring.

But the politicians were not only word-mongers. Behind their rhetoric, Author Josephson finds a logic based on the very structure of the political parties. Before the Civil War, he says, the political party had become a fourth and decisive branch of the American government. Democratic institutions like national party conventions had grown enormously complicated —”a vast mechanical structure of primaries, conventions, committees, whose workings . . . were far too complex to remain subject to the casual will or decisions of the masses of busy workaday citizens.” Soon only experienced professional party workers could function, and only patronage or the promise of patronage could persuade local politicians to carry on the day-to-day drudgery of organizational work. At the end of the Civil War the young Republican party had to find jobs for its vastly increased army of party workers or surrender leadership.

If scoundrels like Grant’s secretary, Babcock, got involved with the Whiskey Ring, intelligent and able men like Elaine were compelled to revive sectional hate to save the party, though they might be personally conciliatory to the South. The task of the politicos, says Josephson, wa not easy. To replace the common impression of politicians enjoying their plunder he gives some graphic pictures of the strain and desperation of their labors Blame collapsing after his audacious defense when he was implicated in a railroad deal; Garfield shaken by the discover that men who had been largely responsible for his election were involved in one of the greatest of U. S. political scandals. A left-winger himself, Matthew Josephson objects to left-wing accounts that picture post-Civil War politicians as agents of budding capitalists. It was not that simple, he says. Millionaires got favors but were alarmed at crises like the Johnson impeachment and the Hayes-Tilden deadlock, complained bitterly about government extravagance. With their confusion, double-dealing and combination of big words and mean ends, the politicos were essentially comic—but the comedy says Josephson, now “seems greatly at our own expense.”