COLLEGE MEN IN POLITICS

The Chances for Successful Participation Steadily Grow

FORTY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE in Government," wrote Jefferson, "is worth a century of book-reading." Whether or not Jefferson's four-to-ten proportion of practice to study is a valid one, the college man who would really understand our democracy needs to have some political experience in order to fill out his conception of how government works. A fully satisfactory college education should interest every man in his own country and in the way it is governed. More, even, than that: a college man has been especially favored by society. Whether he attended a tax-supported or an endowed college, a large part of the cost of his education has been met by society, and he has, therefore, some obligation beyond that which every citizen has to return a contribution of some part of his time and talents to the public. He expects to make this contribution in wartime; he ought also to expect to do it in peacetime.

Jefferson, even though he came to put a high value upon experience in government, was entitled to compare it with reading, because he had both studied government and worked in it. No man of his generation was more widely read than he; and he began his political career with all the knowledge that a college of his day could give. Colleges offer too much at the present time for any one man to master; yet while no one can again do as Jefferson did—master all the human knowledge of his generation—still college graduates ought to know much more about their country than they do. The recent NewYork Times survey showed a high degree of historical illiteracy, but a similar survey of our information about our government would likely be more depressing. Every college student ought to take at least the fundamental course in political science; and he should take as many more courses as he can, depending upon the kind and extent of the work he expects to do in politics.

It is a commonplace that the increasing complexity of society and o£ government makes more and more necessary the recruitment of college trained men, men of both broad background and specialized training. But we have always had and have today a certain anti-intellectualism in American thinking. At almost any point where a college man may seek to enter politics, he will meet this prejudice. It is greatest in the opposition to professors, which is usually accompanied by some reference to the presumed length of their hair; with a mixture of condescension and contempt, Time recently remarked "some of Time's best friends are professors." The public is quite happy to take some drug invented by a professor to cure a disease, but it will not tolerate a statute written by another professor to cure a social maladjustment. In lesser degree, all college graduates face this same attitude.

The rank and file of politicians are suspicious of college men. Forty years ago George Washington Plunkitt, a sachem of Tammany Hall, sat upon the bootblack stand at City Hall, and out of his experience held forth upon "how to become a statesman." Modestly he asserted that his own success in politics qualified him as an expert on the process. "If you have been to college," he said, "so much the worse for you. You'll have to unlearn all you learned before you can get right down to human nature, and unlearnin' takes a lot of time. Some men can never forget what they learned at college In fact, a young man who has gone through the college course is handicapped at the outset. He may succeed in politics, but the chances are 100 to 1 against him."

The chances are no longer so bad, in spite of what public animus there is against professors and other educated men. Indeed in civil service examinations, it is a positive advantage to be a college graduate, but as Plunkitt said, civil service is "a college professor's nightmare" (to politicians) anyhow. If, in the future, there are fewer opportunities for spectacular financial successes by individuals in business, then careers in the civiL service may come to appeal to college graduates more than they do today.

Civil service positions have always had the appeal of respectability and to some extent of security, although the politicians have developed various devices for getting their friends through the law and for keeping their opponents out. The civil service laws, as Mr. Dooley said, are not so much a barrier to the politicians as a triumphal arch. From all accounts, the federal civil service has been more hospitable to college graduates than have such state and local merit systems as exist. The federal civil service is also supposed to be less infected with partisan politics.

ROAD TO TOP Is LONG

In the upper reaches of the civil service, there is some opportunity for the exercise of discretion, but by and large civil service positions call for the routine performance of duties established by law or regulation. The way to the top is often long and always uncertain, and, once attained, the salaries there will be found to be less generous than those paid in industry for the discharge of duties of equal responsibility. Our country seems destined, no matter which party is in power, to have more government by administrative rule and regulation (bureaucracy, if you wish to call names). The increasing complexity of modern society probably makes the process irresistible. It may well turn out, then, that an increasing amount of authority will be vested in administrators, and, if so, careers in the civil service will be more appealing to college graduates in the future than they are today. No one who has had any experience with civil servants or within a civil service will deny that there is an acute need for men with the breadth of knowledge and the tolerance of the opinions of others that college trained men should possess.

The college man, however, who would like to have more to say about the determination of public policy than a civil service position will permit, must run for public office. Few civil servants, no matter how able or faithful, get mentioned in the history books, have cities named after them, or get their pictures on postage stamps. To make a lasting impression upon the politics of one's generation, it is ordinarily necessary to get elected to office. To seek elective office should be as legitimate an ambition for a college man as any other. "The desire for applause is natural," said Job Hedges, "the desire for influence not abnormal, the seeking of public preferment and public office desperately human." American political traditions, however, do not make it easy for a man to go right from college into politics, as a man may do in England. An American needs to show a record of some sort before he is an acceptable candidate for more than a very minor office.

Some professions and occupations, such as law and real estate, seem to mix with politics better than others, such as teaching, medicine, or engineering. Nevertheless the reader can think of politiciansstatesmen if they are dead—who arose from the most unlikely occupations or professions to success in public life. Wilson said that no man of middle age should despair of becoming President, and no man of any occupation should despair of getting into politics if he wants to get in. The vicissitudes of politics are such, however, that any politician should have some business or profession to which he can turn if fortune does not favor him or his party on the first Tuesday after the first Monday some November.

He may make politics his full-time work when he gets in, or make it a sort of avocation. The states and the nation need more college men for city councils, for legislatures, for Congress, and for all the other elective offices—totaling thousandsthat we have. It is hard, indeed, to see how democracy can be made to work unless it attracts the best brains and training it has.

No CAREER FOR THE LAZY

Politics as a career is no lazy man's work. Let any one who thinks it is sit in a governor's office all day while five telephones ring constantly, while stenographers hammer away, while mail and telegrams are delivered by the bushel, and while dozens of impatient visitors demand this or that of any one who will listen. Nor does the work stop at night. Then there are meetings to attend, speeches to prepare, or reports to be studied. In varying degree, every holder of an office has this pressure of work. A senator has as much to do, a President immensely more. No man in an important office has as much time as he needs; there are not enough hours. A man who likes to get to his office at nine and to go home at four should seek to become a banker, not a statesman.

Hard as the work is, any man in office realizes—or should realize—that the quality o£ his performance will probably have little relation to his reelection. Many an able and well-liked Democrat went out of office in the landslide of 1920; many an able Republican in 1933—and the few who survived that avalanche were lost in 1936. A conscientious man will do what he can for his district, his state, or his country, and he will let the future take care of itself. And it is a fact that to have held an office with credit, whether the voters were impressed or not, opens many a door of professional or business opportunity. Perhaps Job Hedges overvalued the experience, but he had the right idea when he wrote: "Occupancy of executive or administrative positions furnishes more experience within a few years than individuals ordinarily get in half of or even an entire lifetime otherwise."

The experience of campaigning is in itself an education for a college graduate. It should be a sort of graduate course in his study of his country. He will learn what the mass of his fellow citizens, most of whom did not go to college, really think and want. He will see how they behave away from their work, at clambakes and corn roasts. He will get acquainted with many other voters whom he would never otherwise meet—people whose names end in ski, o, or i. The experience should be very good for him, win or lose. He should learn to talk the language of the voter. As Plunkitt advised, "Don't try to show how the situation is by quotin' Shakspere. Shakspere was all right in his way, but he didn't know anything about Fifteenth District politics I know it's an awful temptation, the hankerin' to show off your learnin'. I've felt it myself, but I always resist it. I know the awful consequences."

For the man who is determined to pursue his business or profession and who does not wish to be drawn into full-time political work, there is plenty of opportunity for the pursuit of politics as a hobby, an avocation. It will both help to keep him in touch with the realities of American life and thought, and it will give him some opportunity to make a contribution to the public welfare. The hours or some of them that might otherwise be devoted to golf or bridge or stamp collecting, if devoted to party work or to the administration of some part-time or local office, will repay any man in experience and satisfaction. He will not be among those who constantly complain about how the country is run and yet never do anything about it. But there is this danger in part-time political activity: it is as easy to be bitten by the political bug in one activity as in another, and few men, once bitten, are ever able to throw off the virus when it gets in their blood. A lawyer or doctor may just dabble in politics as a public duty or because he likes it; before long and before he is aware of his condition, he is badly infected and he is running for the Senate. It is that fascinating.

There was a time when our politics was pretty much shaped by the political parties. Increasingly our public purposes are being molded by extra-governmental associations, sometimes called pressure groups, sometimes lobbies. There must be few college graduates indeed who do not belong to one or more of these groups. For example, the present war will either produce a new veterans' association or greatly increase the membership of existing ones. To work within any such association is to engage in politics, perhaps in a miniature politics, but one not otherwise essentially different from that in a county or a state. The intelligent graduate may, within the associations to which he belongs, influence them toward better public policies for state and nation—or at least he may lend his weight to restraining such groups from disregarding the public interest in their determination to forward their own. Incidentally, it is often easy to move from being an officer in some important group into practical politics.

An ideal democracy would be one in whose politics every citizen could take an active and personal part, as in the Greek city state, or in the New England town meeting. But a democracy o£ a hundred millions cannot be organized on such a basis; the best that can be done with it is to set it up as a representative system and to hope that able men of each generation will be attracted to its service, each acc ording to the time that he can spare. This service has its headaches, but it also has its satisfactions. For there is no more fascinating adventure than the endless adventure of governing men.

PROF. DAYTON D. McKEAN, author of this stimulating article on politics.

MIDST GREENLAND'S ICY MOUNTAINS, Major Corey Ford '19— (right) and Col. Bernt Balchen, noted explorer, look over a map. They are co-authors of a recent "Collier's" article on "War in the Arctic." Major Ford and Capt. H. M. Briggs, USN, former commanding officer of the Navy Indoctrination School at Dartmouth, give the Class of 19— a perfect record on military service and an unparalleled record on rank.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

Professor McKean's article on college men in politics is written against a background of experience in the real thing. He was a Democratic member of the New Jersey Assembly in 1933-34, a member of the New Jersey Social Security Commission in 1935-36, and from 1941 to 1943 was on leave from Dartmouth to serve as deputy commissioner of finance under Governor Edison of New Jersey, in which post he engaged in one long battle with the Hague machine. Professor McKean is the author of The Boss: The Hague Machine inAction and taught at Princeton before coming to Dartmouth.