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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience - 10. The Faltering Judicial Order
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iS An American Dilemma
important factors. For example, it cannot be conducive to the highest
respect for the legal system that the federal government is forced to carry
out important social legislation under the fiction that it is regulating ^‘inter-
state commerce,” or that federal prosecuting agencies punish dangerous
gangsters for income tax evasion rather than for the felonies they have
committed.
So this idealistic America also became the country of legalistic formalism.
Contrary to America’s basic ideology of natural law and its strong practical
sense, “the letter of the law,” as opposed to its “spirit,” came to have an
excessive importance. The weak bureaucracy^ became tangled up in “red
tape.” The clever lawyer came to play a large and unsavory role in politics,
in business, and in the everyday life of the citizens. The Americans thus
got a judicial order which is in many respects contrary to all their inclina-
tions.
Under the influence of all these and many other factors the common
American citizen has acquired a comparatively low degree of personal
identification with the state and the legal machinery. An American, when
he accidentally comes by the Scene of a crime or of an attempt by the police
to seize an offender, is, on the average, more inclined to hurry on in order
not to get involved in something unpleasant, and less inclined to stop and
help the arm of the law, than a Britisher or a Scandinavian would be under
similar circumstances. He is more likely to look on his country’s and his
community’s politics and administration as something to be indulged and
tolerated, as outside his own responsibility, and less likely to think and act
as a would-be legislator, in a cooperative endeavor to organize a decent
social life.*^ He is even inclined to dissociate himself from politics as some-
thing unworthy and to take measures to keep the worthy things “out of
politics.” This is part of what Lord Bryce called “the fatalism of the
multitude” in America. This political fatalism and the lack of identification
and participation work as a vicious circle, being both cause and effect of
corruption and political machine rule.
The authorities, when not relying upon the idealistic appeal, will most
often meet the citizen’s individualistic inclinations by trying to educate him
to obey the law less in terms of collective interest than in terms of self-
interest. They try to tell the young that “crime does not pay,” which, in
some areas, is a statement of doubtful truth.
In the exploitation of the new continent business leaders were not
particular about whether or not the means they used corresponded either
with the natural law or with the specific laws of the nation or the states.
This became of greater importance because of the central position of busi-
ness in the formation of national aspirations and ideals. When Theodore
* Sec Chapter 20, Section 2.
**The low degree of participation will be discussed in Chapter 33.
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