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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 1. A General American Pattern
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Chapter 39. Improvement and Protest Organizations 81 i
social ideals. In so far as party politics is corrupt, it becomes the more
understandable why the American wants to keep his efforts for worthy
causes ^^outside party politics.”* The huge amount of organizational activity
is thus partly a sort of substitute satisfaction for the Americans’ lively
political interests which they find so thwarted in the American practice of
government.
The lack of people’s movements with broad well-integrated goals is part
of this American setting.** The improvement and reform organizations
usually have specialized aims, and an American who is using them to define
himself with regard to his political leanings will have to—and often does
—
belong to a great number of them. In addition to such splits on issues, there
Is also a large overlapping of, and consequently competition between, organ-
izations. Belonging to these organizations is, further, predominantly an
upper and middle class pattern. The lower classes do not join organizations
to the same extent. The organizations they do join are more likely to be
merely social or religious.
No improvement or reform organization has ever developed a mass
following for any length of time. If an organization should be able to build
up a real mass following and keep it for any length of time, this would, of
course, mean the formation of a new type of political party If this hap-
pened to a significant number of reform groups at the same time and if they
came to join together in broader formations, it would effect a change in the
political system. Natural outlets would be created for people’s public inter-
ests, and most of the betterment organizations would have lost their excuse
for existence. But the actual situation has never been thus.
In this setting the organizations actually have more of a ^Tunction” for
the citizens’ viewpoint than they would have in a system of democratic
politics with more popular participation. Organizations are, in a sense, the
salt of American politics. As there Is so little idealism and, indeed, so few
issues in ordinary party politics in America and, instead, often so much
corruption, the ideals have to be pressed upon government from the out-
side. ‘Tressure groups” belong to this political system, where ideals and
broad interests are so unsatisfactorily integrated into the democratic process.
This general American pattern will have to be kept in mind when we
survey the Negro protest and Improvement organizations. We shall find
that, as usual, the Negro culture follows closely the American pattern with
some differences in details, explainable in terms of the singular circum-
stances in which the Negro people live. As In other Instances, those dif-
ferences are of a type to make the Negro appear as an exaggerated Ameri-
can.
On the one hand, the Negroes must feel more frustrated in the American
• See Chapter i, Section xo.
**
Sec Chapter 33.
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