Quotes by John Jay Chapman

It is impossible to regard these matters in too simple a light. Nothing is ever involved except the contagious impulse that makes one man yawn when he sees another man yawn. Both the good and the evil in the world run upon the winds. Moses’ habit of falling upon his face before the congregation, and calling God to witness that he could lead them no longer, was not a political trick done to frighten the people into submission by the threat of abandoning them. It was a sincere act of devotion; but it was also the most powerful form of appeal. He did the act; they followed in it, and thus made him absolute. Lincoln’s anecdotes and fables consisted of nothing but suggestion. They were one source of his power. The first thing a tyrant does is to suppress cartoons. Here we have something that is often sheer pantomime, and yet it is one of the most effective vehicles in the world. It was the only thing Platt could not stand. Within two years he has tried to stop it by legislation. If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people. In literature this is obvious. The more far-reaching any truth is, the shorter grow its hieroglyphics. The great truths can only be given in hints, phrases, and parables. They lie in universal experience, and any comment belittles them. They are like the magnetic poles that can only be pointed out with a needle. Take any profound saying about life, and see if it does not imply short-hand, a sort of telegraphy as the ordinary means of communication between men. “He that loseth his life shall save it.” Here we have a poem, a system of ethics and a psychology. Or take any bit of worldly wisdom, “Money talks.” Here we have the whole philosophy of materialism. Does any one imagine that political bargains are reduced to writing? It would be injurious to the conscience. They are made by the merest hints on all sides. Every one is left free. The extreme case of the power of suggestion is seen in the stock-market, where a rumor that Banker A has dined with Railroad President B drives values up or down.

Then these men will be the first to denounce you; for your act damns them. You can only be true to the public conscience by rebuking your friends. If you fail to do this, your banner is submerged. Let us consider the cause of this weakness in Reform organizations. You wish to appeal to the people with as good a show of names as you can. And so you get a lot of well-known men to indorse you. This is considered practical. Let us see if it is. We are fighting Tammany Hall. But no one will for an instant admit that every Tammany man is dishonest. The corruption we started out to correct was a corruption of the intelligence, a bad habit, a defect of vision. The same defect keeps Republicans in line for Platt, because he is the Party, a recognized agent of the community. The same defect prevents a just man from joining a new movement unless Banker Jones is leading it. The habit of the community is to rely on some one else to govern them. No man trusts himself. The Machine, upon analysis, turns out to be a lack of self-reliance. Wherever you see a man who gives some one else’s corruption, some one else’s prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us. The proof of it is that he will dissuade you from striking the iniquity. He will explain that you can’t try it without doing more harm than good. You will find that at every point of defence, from the arguments of Mr. Croker himself to the arguments of some sainted college president, the reasons given are identical. I cannot find any one who defends stealing. They only deprecate action as being inexpedient. Now, then, if I ask a voter to join my organization, and use as a bait an appeal to this very weakness--his reliance upon other men’s opinion--can I hope to make much headway? I am taking in just so much of Tammany Hall. My whole body becomes an adjunct of Tammany, in the same sense that Mr. Platt’s machine is an adjunct. I am Croker’s last outpost. I stand there calling myself reform, and yet I do not act. Some one else must now come forward and try his hand. This process of ebullition, and thereupon stagnation, has happened again and again. I suppose there are a dozen extant wrecks of reform political organizations in the city.

That is American politics. The whole thing is one gigantic sham, one transcendent fraud. It makes no difference which man is made president; it makes no difference which is governor. There is no choice between McKinley and Bryan, between Republicanism and Democracy. There is no difference between them. They are one thing. They both and all of them are part of the machinery by which the government of a most dishonest nation is carried on, for the financial benefit of certain parties,--certain thousands of men who have bank accounts and eat and drink and bring up their families on the proceeds of this complicated swindle. There is no reality in a single phrase uttered in politics, no meaning in one single word of any of it. There is no man in public life who stands for anything. They are shadows; they are phantasmagoria. At best they cater to the better elements; at worst they frankly subserve the worst. There is no one who stands for his own ideas himself, by himself, a man. If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic party or the Republican party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era,--then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem, and you must be educated and drawn forward towards real life. This process is going on. As the community returns to life, it sees the natural world for a moment and then forgets it. The blood flushes the brain and then recedes. You yourself voted once against both parties, when you thought you could win, and when you were excited. You quoted Isaiah and I know not what poetry, and were out and out committed to principle; but to-day you are cold and hopeless. At present, hope is a mystery to you. Nevertheless the utility of those early reform movements survives. They heated the imagination of the people till the people had a momentary vision of truths which not all of them forgot; and so each year the temperature has been higher, the mind of the community clearer. We must not regard those broken reeds, the renegade leaders of reform movements, as villains; though the mere record of their words and conduct might prove them such. They have been men emerging from a mist.

Now, then, if I ask a voter to join my organization, and use as a bait an appeal to this very weakness--his reliance upon other men’s opinion--can I hope to make much headway? I am taking in just so much of Tammany Hall. My whole body becomes an adjunct of Tammany, in the same sense that Mr. Platt’s machine is an adjunct. I am Croker’s last outpost. I stand there calling myself reform, and yet I do not act. Some one else must now come forward and try his hand. This process of ebullition, and thereupon stagnation, has happened again and again. I suppose there are a dozen extant wrecks of reform political organizations in the city. Many people have despaired altogether. They think it is a law of God that political organizations become corrupt in the second year. The experience is entirely due to the persistent putting of new wine into old bottles. In their names and hopes these bodies have stood for purity, but in their membership they have, even in their inception, stood for prejudice. Then, too, the bottles bore good labels, and bad wine was soon poured into them. A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful. The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: _all_ the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy. It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you. What, then, must the enthusiast do in the way of organization? Let him go ahead and do some particular thing, and ask the public to help him do it. He will thus get behind him whatever force exists at that especial time for that especial purpose. It may not be much; but no amount of letterheads and great seals will increase it. Let him abandon written constitutions. Let him not be bound by a vote nor seek to bind others by a vote. If you have formal procedure, you are tied up, for you will then have to convert six tailors into apostles before you can get at the public.

Mere intellectual assent to your proposition is, even when you can get it, worth nothing. Your object is not to confute, but to stimulate. What you really want is that every man you meet shall drop his business and devote his entire life and energy to your cause. You will accept nothing less than this. Is it not clear that people are not moved by logic? Your conduct must ultimately square with reason and be justified by the laws of the universe and the constitution of other people’s minds; but you must value only that approval which comes from the deeper fibres in men. You need not be concerned about the bickerings of contemporary misunderstanding. Leave these for the historical society. Act first--explain afterwards. That is the way to get heard. Must you show your passport and certificate of birth and legitimacy to every editor and every lackey? They’ll find out who you are by and by. It is easier to knock a man down than to say why you do it. The act is sometimes needed, and wisdom then approves it after the event. People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,--that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it. Such are the practical dictates of agitation. Their justification lies always with events. It may be that you must wait seven centuries for an audience, or it may be that in two years your voice will be heeded. If you are really a forerunner of better times, the times will appear and explain you. It will then turn out that your movement was the keynote of the national life. You really differed from your neighbors only in this,--that your mind had gone faster than theirs along the road all were travelling. We are all slaves of the age; we can only see such principles as society reveals. The philosophy of other ages does us little good. We repeat the old formulas and cry up the prophets; but we see no connection between the truth we know so well in print and its counterpart in real life. The moral commonplaces, as, for instance, “Honesty is the best policy,” “A single just man can influence an entire community,” “Never compromise a principle,” are social truths. They are always true, but they are only obviously true in very virtuous communities.