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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 20. Underlying Factors - 1. The Negro in American Politics and as a Political Issue - 2. The Wave of Democracy and the Need for Bureaucracy
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432 An American Dilemma
have considered a number of dynamic factors which are bound to Influence
the future development both in the South and in the nation at large.
2. The Wave of Democracy and the Need for Bureaucracy
In order to understand why the vote, or the lack of it, has such a para-
mount importance for the daily welfare of the Negro people in America,
we have to view the problem in broad perspective. The vote would be of
less importance to a group of citizens In this country if America had what
it does not have, namely, the tradition of an independent and law-abiding
administration of local and national public affairs. By this we mean a body
of public officials who are independent In two directions: personally, as
they are holding office under permanent tenure, being appointed and pro-
moted strictly according to merit, and, consequently, vested with economic
security and high social prestige j
and officially, as they are trusted with
authority to put the laws into effect without political interference in indi-
vidual cases. In such an order the political branches of government, legis-
lative as well as executive, would, in the main, be restricted to two func-
tions: ( i) to supervise and control the administration as to its efficiency and
adherence to the laws and (2) to change the laws and other general instruc-
tions when they wished to redirect the course of administration. Such a
governmental system is foreign to American traditions. Americans are
conditioned by their history to look upon administration as itself a branch
of political government: as within ^‘politics.” Not only their constitutions
federal and state—^but their political philosophies, and what the citizen in
various states of sophistication takes for granted, are dominated by this
idea.
The struggle of the American colonies against the English Crown and
its often corrupt bureaucracy first set this pattern. The rights upheld in
this struggle were those of the people and their elected representatives, the
colonial legislatures, against the administration. Incidentally, the tradition
of sending lawyer-advocates as representatives to the legislatures instead
of average persons from the midst of the electorate—farmers, workers,
preachers, teachers, and businessmen—began in this same period when the
legislatures were not sovereign but merely the pleaders against the English
Crown, the London Parliament, and the colonial bureaucracy. The lawyer-
politicians got such a strong foothold in public affairs in America that they
have kept it into the present time.
Out of this struggle emerged not only the fierce American insistence upon
the rights and liberties of the individual citizen, but also the American
dislike and distrust of state authority. Both were carried forward into
the new independent Republic, the latter tendency strengthened by the
very disruption of authority during the interregnum of the Revolution,
during which the old administration and a great portion of the ruling
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