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Chapter 20. Underlying Factors 439
compelled even these Northern states to change their franchise rules. The
amendments were accepted and ratified in the Northern states as part of
the Reconstruction program and in order to fortify the Republican party
in the South. If the North had not been so bent upon reforming the South,
it is doubtful whether and when some of the Northern states would have
reformed themselves.^®
Thus the Negroes^ right to vote in the North is not supported by an
uninterrupted historical tradition. But when once the great step was taken,
it seems almost immediately to have been solidified into the traditionally
rooted order of things. The present-day unreserved allegiance to the
principle of political nondiscrimination in the North, which has so success-
fully withstood the increased racial tension due to the huge influx of
Southern Negroes in recent decades, is fundamentally, we believe, a direct
outflow of the American Creed as it has gradually strengthened its hold
upon the American mind. This national ethos undoubtedly has a greater
force in the North than in the South, as may be observed in other spheres
of social life as well. But in most of these other respects, even the North
erner has a split personality. His attitudes toward suffrage and equality
in justice*^ seem, in fact, to be the main exceptions where he acts absolutely
according to the national Creed.
In explaining these exceptions, we have first to take into account the
fact that voting is a rather abstract human relationship between a citizen
and the officials representing society. The Northerner tends to adhere to
the American Creed in abstract, impersonal things and slips away from -it
when it involves personal relations. A substantial part of all discrimination
is closely connected with snobbishness and petty considerations of status
in daily human contacts. When the Northerner gets formal, when he acts
in an assembly or reacts as a citizen on grounds of principles, and, particu-
larly, when the question concerns the relations between the state and the
individual, he will be more likely to follow the American Creed closely.
Another relevant fact in the explanation is that the Negroes in the
North—as well as unpopular immigrant groups—^are clustered mostly in
the big cities where life is anonymous and where people are conditioned
not to be concerned much about one another. These cities have often been
dominated by political machines. The machines find the Negroes and the
immigrant groups tractable. The politicians themselves have, therefore, no
reason to try to eliminate Negro franchise 5
their difficulty is, rather, the
intelligent and independent individual voter. From a conservative point
of view, machine politics has favorable effects, at least in so far as it keeps
those lower status groups in line and protects them from radicalism. The
exploitation of these voters by the machines will, therefore, not be strongly
criticized by conservatives. Liberals, for reasons of principle, are not
• See Part VI.
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