business limited to practice in the federal courts. The subtle influences of party control are doubtless more powerful than the gross influences which appear upon the surface.

Equally subtle and elusive is the influence of the press and propaganda. Nearly all newspapers are affiliated with political parties; even the avowedly independent papers are controlled by men affiliated with parties. Most political editorials are written with a party bias or with a view to party advantage. Even the news is colored more or less by party opinions. The emphasis given to events, the headlines, and the method of treatment reflect party influences. During campaigns especially, the political atmosphere is charged with propaganda printed, written, and oral. Even gossip, damaging or advantageous to candidates, sweeps like a whirlwind through party clubs and organizations. Someone has said that a party is "a great political whispering gallery," and the remark is both true and shrewd. The last, but not least, powerful element in party organization is the assistance given to the voters by the machine. Party leaders and workers favor the poor voters by a thousand charitable acts. They give outings, picnics, clam-bakes, and celebrations for them; they help the unemployed to get work with private corporations or in governmental departments; they pay the rent of sick and unfortunate persons about to be dispossessed; they appear in court for those in trouble, and often a word to the magistrate saves the voter from the workhouse or even worse; they remember the children at Christmas; and, in short, they are the ever watchful charity agents for their respective neighborhoods. A kind word and a little money in time of pressing need often will go further than an eloquent tract on civic virtue. Thus politics as it operates through party organization is a serious and desperately determined business activity; it works night and day; it is patient; it gets what it can; it never relaxes.

CHAPTER VIII

THE NOMINATION AND ELECTION OF THE

PRESIDENT

The spectacle of twenty or thirty million people going about the process of nominating and electing a chief executive to preside over them for four years is perhaps the most arresting pageant in the long course of political evolution. It is an operation of the first magnitude, putting at stake the ambitions of individuals, the interests of classes, and the fortunes of the entire country. Everybody in America takes part in it, from the President in the White House, busy re-nominating himself or helping in the selection of his successor, down to the bootblacks and stable-boys who discourse on the merits and demerits of candidates with as much assurance as on the outcome of the latest prize fight or horse race. The performance involves endless discussions, public and private, oratory, tumult, and balloting, the election of thousands of delegates to grand national conventions, the concentration of opinion on a few ambitious leaders, a nation-wide propaganda as the sponsors for various aspirants exhibit the qualifications of their favorites to the multitude, and the expenditure of millions of dollars in publications, meetings, "rounding up delegates," and "seeing that goods are delivered."

This thundering demonstration of democratic power occupying the better part of six months every four years springs from no design of the Fathers who framed the Constitution. They intended to remove the chief executive as far as possible from the passions of the masses; they provided that he should be elected by a small body of electors chosen as the legislatures of the states might decide. They contemplated a quiet, dignified procedure about as decorous as the election of a college president by a board of trustees. Their grand scheme has been upset, however, by the rise of political parties; it is necessary, therefore, to preface a discussion of our quadrennial campaign by a consideration of the extra-legal organization, known as the national convention, which selects the candidate of each party for whom the presidential electors of the party are morally bound to vote.

The Composition of the National Convention

The national convention assembles on the date and at the place fixed by the national committee at a preliminary meeting held on the call of the chairman. Before the convention is formally opened, the committee holds another conference, determines upon the program of proceedings, selects the temporary officers whose names are to be laid before the grand party conclave for its approval, and makes up a provisional roll of delegates from the returns sent in by the proper officers under whose auspices the primaries were held.

Although in theory the national convention is a representative party assembly, the delegates who compose it are not apportioned among the states on the basis of the party vote in each. The Democrats allot each state a quota of delegates equal to twice the number of congressmen to which it is entitled - New York with two Senators and forty-three Representatives has ninety delegates. The principle is invariably followed. A state in the solid South with its triumphant Democracy, receives no more consideration than a Northern state in which the Democrats are in a hopeless minority.

There

This rule was formerly applied by the Republicans. are several states in the South which have only a handful of Republicans and never give an electoral vote to a Republican candidate. In those states, the party machine, or at all events the dominant leaders, are usually federal office-holders who are nominated and can be removed by the President of the United States. Consequently, whenever a Republican President is in the White House, he can handpick the delegates from the Southern states. In this way he may almost dictate his own re-nomination or the choice of his successor, as the case may be. Roosevelt used the Southern delegates to drive through the nomination of Taft in 1908; four years afterward the latter used them at Chicago on his own behalf.

Since that time there have been several changes in the composition of the Republican organization. For the convention of 1916 each state was given its four delegates at large; one delegate instead of two was assigned to each congressional district; and one additional delegate was allotted to each district in which 1 A certain number of delegates is assigned to each territory as a matter of courtesy to party members, although the territory has no voice in electing the President.

at least 7500 Republican votes were cast at the previous election. This rule made a cut in the strength of the Southern states and gave the convention a far more representative character.

Another readjustment was made in the representation of Southern states for the convention of 1920; for the next party assembly the system was again revised. In December, 1923, the Republican national committee, in spite of bitter protests from many quarters, provided that each state should have in the coming convention four delegates-at-large, one delegate for each congressional district, two delegates for each Representative-at-large, and one additional delegate for each district which polled 10,000 or more Republican votes in the previous election. It then redressed the balance somewhat by giving each state which went Republican in the last presidential election three additional delegates-at-large. This made a convention of 1109 delegates and gave the Southern states more delegates than they had four years before.1

The political significance of this apportionment is revealed in the following table which gives the delegations of the Southern states at the Republican conventions of 1920 and 1924 and the Republican vote in them in 1920 as compared with three Northern states:

1 Delegates were allotted to the District of Columbia, Alaska, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

The glaring inequalities in representation produced by the system of apportionment are obvious at a glance, but still too much stress should not be laid on political arithmetic. The vote for President fluctuates from decade to decade and the vote in one election is not always an exact criterion for estimating the probable vote in the next. Moreover, the Republicans, always suffering from the burden of sectionalism, cannot afford to destroy their organization in the states of the far South where they have no strength at present. The future may be different from the past. At all events something is to be said for giving the Southern states a considerable share of power. The amount required by justice and expediency is not easily ascertainable.

For more than half a century the Democratic and Republican parties prescribed different methods for the choice of delegates. The former, regarding the state as the unit of representation, provided that the delegates should be chosen at a state convention or by the state committee. The latter ordered the choice of the four delegates-at-large at the state convention and the remainder at congressional district conventions. The appearance of the direct primary in various forms as a means of choosing delegates, of necessity, forced alterations in party rules; both parties finally acquiesced in the changes wrought in their procedure by state legislation. Some states now order the election of all delegates at primaries; others leave the choice of delegates to state conventions; and others combine a state convention with local congressional district primaries.

In addition to applying the direct primary to the choice of delegates to the national convention, at least twenty states give their voters an opportunity to express at a primary their preference among the aspirants for the presidential nomination. These states are California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Vermont. Naturally the presidential primary laws vary widely in character, but two general methods are employed to give the voters a chance to express an opinion on presidential aspirants as well as on delegates to the national convention. In some states the names of the aspirants are printed on the primary ballot and the voter may indicate his choice by merely making a pencil mark