Robert Anson Heinlein. Take Back Your Government! A Puke (TM) Audiobook

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Robert Anson Heinlein.
Take Back Your Government!
INTRODUCTION.
Jerry Pournelle.
This is a book for every American who wants to reclaim the political process. Are you mad as Hell and not going to take it anymore? Have you tried to participate in the traditional political process only to discover that the traditional political parties have no place for you, won't listen, and don't much matter anyway? Have you turned to the Perot movement as a remedy? Do you want to see a fundamental change in the American political system?
If so, you need this book.
If you have never thought about politics, and hate the whole idea, you really need this book. As Pericles of Athens was fond of observing, because you take no interest in politics is no guarantee that politics will not take an interest in you.
If you look to H Ross Perot to lead the nation to salvation, you particularly need this book.
I say this in full knowledge that much of the book, indeed its very heart, seems to be badly out of date. Ironically, being "out of date" is one of the book's major values. This book was written in a very different era of American politics; in a time when ordinary people could and did participate effectively in the political scene. This was a manual to show them how to do that there were many such manuals. This one was unique in that Robert Heinlein both had practical experience in politics and was one of the dearest, and most entertaining) writers of the era. Reading this book will be good for you, but the good news is that it's fun.
Heinlein offers a number of timeless insights, but many of his details are seriously out of date. That, however, is not a defect but a feature: because in describing how to operate in a political world that vanished during the "reforms" of the sixties and seventies, Heinlein describes a working democracy: not as a dead world of the past, but as the dynamic living world he knew and lived in and loved.
It is a world we could reclaim. A world we must reclaim. The United States went a long way down the wrong road during the Cold War. It is time we return to more familiar territory. This book can be vital to that return.
Democracy, Robert Heinlein says, "is not an automatic condition resulting from laws and constitutions. It is a living, dynamic process which must be worked at by you yourself, or it ceases to be a democracy, even if the shell and form remain." That was written in 1946, at the close of World War Two, before the Cold War; before the federalization of much of American life.
When we look around at the disaster area that American politics has become, it is all too clear that Robert was correct. The shell and form of American democracy remain, but much of what Robert understood about American democracy has vanished.
When Heinlein wrote, the typical professional politician was what was then known as a political boss. Most local, district, and county party leaders were unpaid volunteers. Professional political managers were distrusted.
While some state legislators and congressmen were returned to office year after year, most were not, and those who were, though powerful through the seniority system, were often the butts of political jokes, and were quite aware that they could easily be turned out of office, either in a primary or a general election. It was a government by amateurs in a true sense, in that everyone had to live under the laws they passed. They worked hard, too. Heinlein could (and does) complain that members of Congress, and of the State Legislature, were underpaid and had too few perks of office; and offer the opinion that the main reason people went to their city council, or state capital, or Washington, and endured the hardships of public office, was patriotism.
It was all true in those days. Some politicians might have been motivated by greed, or a lust for power, but most thought of themselves as, and were seen by their constituents to be, public servants, sacrificing some of their productive years to the political process. Today things are different. However the professional politicians see themselves, poll after poll shows that the American people think they are a self-perpetuating elite motivated mostly by the desire to retain power.
Since Heinlein wrote this book, most states have changed from a part-time amateur legislature of citizens who approved laws they would have to live with and make a living under, to full-time paid professionals who spend most of their time in the state capital rather than in their home districts, exempt themselves from the laws and regulations they impose on others, and who, far from making a living under the laws they make, are paid by the state and sometimes prevented by conflict-of-interest laws from outside work. A noted exception is, of course, lawyers, who have been allowed to retain their partnerships in law firms even if the firm does business with the government. They did that in Heinlein's day too. Their idea of making a living is not yours.
It's doubly true of the Congress of the United States, which has multiplied its perks while invariably exempting itself from such laws as the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Wage/Hours Act, most of the reporting laws, and nearly all federal regulations. Far from a largely citizen body, the Congress has become a governing elite with high job security. Since this book was written, Congress went from an assembly of the people to an institution with 98 percent incumbency-a lower turnover than Britain's hereditary House of Lords. While private industry loses jobs, Congress multiplies its staff: there are over 30,000 "Hill Rats," as congressional staff are called in Washington. They serve 535 senators and representatives. Do you have nearly 50 people to mind details and run errands for you? Each of your legislators in Washington does, all paid with your taxes. Think about that before you contemplate running for office. Each congressman commands a political patronage machine that the old ward bosses would have envied.
Other things have changed. The budget has grown enormously.
Government (federal, state, and local) now spends nearly half the money generated in this country. The national debt went from an irritation to an impending disaster. The civil service at all levels has grown well beyond anyone's ability to predict in 1946. Government, in a word, has become very big business indeed, while what we used to fear as "the big business interest" has faded into the background. I could multiply examples endlessly, but surely the point is made. Somewhere between 1946 and the present the American democracy as Heinlein knew it disappeared, to be replaced with our present system in which our local affairs are governed by Washington, a city that can't govern itself, but has no qualms about telling the rest of us how we should live.
The Opportunity We have a new situation in this year of grace 1992 and of the independence of these United States the 216th. To say that the American people have come to distrust their government is a silly understatement. The polls show that they hate our present political system. They're mad as Hell and they aren't going to take it anymore. There is a movement to take back control, and it may work. For the first time in our lifetimes there is an alternative. Millions of Americans, disgusted with politics as usual, have turned to a man who, as I write this, is still legally only an "undeclared candidate for President", but who, as I write this, is the likely winner of the Presidency. In the state of New Jersey both houses of the legislature went from a majority by one party to a veto-proof majority of the other. As I write this we can predict that there will be at least 100 new faces among the 435 members of the House of Representatives; and it is entirely possible that there will be many more, perhaps even a majority of new faces.
There will be equally profound changes at the state and local level.
Everywhere there is an opportunity to, in the words of the old political rallying cry, Turn the Rascals Out. We can change the system. We very likely will. With what, then, shall we replace the system of professional politicians?
It's no good "reforming" the system only to abandon it to a new crew of professional politicians. That cure could easily be worse than the disease. We must Turn the Rascals Out, but we must rebuild our system of citizen controlled government.
That, I submit, is the great value of this book. It's all in here. In this book,
Robert Heinlein describes, lovingly and in great detail, the system of government which worked for this republic for nearly two hundred years.
This isn't a blueprint, and it's not a treatise on political science. We will need those and they will come; but this is a love story.
Jerry Pournelle Hollywood, California July 1992.

Robert Anson Heinlein.
Preface, In which the defendant pleads guilty to the charge of being a politician but offers a statement in his defense.

This is intended to be a practical manual of instruction for the American layman who has taken no regular part in politics, has no personal political ambitions, and no desire to make money out of politics, but who, nevertheless, would like to do something to make his chosen form of government work better. If you have a gnawing, uneasy feeling that you should be doing something to preserve our freedoms and to protect and improve our way of life but have been held back by lack of time, lack of money, or the helpless feeling that you individually could not do enough to make the effort worthwhile, then this book was written for you.
The individual, unpaid and inexperienced volunteer citizen in politics, who is short on both time and money, can take this country away from the machine politicians and run it to suit himself, if he knows how to go about it.
This book is a discussion of how to go about it, with no reference to particular political issues. I have my own set of political opinions and some of them are almost bitter in their intensity, but, still more strongly, I have an abiding faith in the good sense and decency of the American people. Many are urging you daily as to what you should do politically; I hope only to show some of the details of how you can do it-the mechanics of the art There are thousands of books for the citizen interested in public affairs, books on city planning, economics, political history, civics, Washington gossip, foreign affairs, sociology, political science, and the like. There are many books by or about major figures in public life, such as James A Parley's instructive and interesting autobiography, or that inspiring life of Mister Justice Holmes, the Yankee from Olympus. I have even seen a clever, sardonic book about machine politicians called How to Take a Bribe. But I have never seen a book intended to show a private citizen, with limited time and money, how he can be a major force in politics.
This book is the result of my own mistakes and sad experiences and is written in the hope that you may thereby be saved some of them. If it accomplishes that purpose, I hope that you will be tolerant of its shortcomings. A decent respect for your opinions requires that I show my credentials for writing this book. A plumber has his license; a doctor hangs up his diploma; a politician can only cite his record, I have done the things I discuss.
I have been a precinct worker, punching doorbells for my ticket. I have organized political clubs, managed campaigns, run for office, been a county committee man, a state committeeman, attended conventions including national conventions, been a county organizer, published political newspapers, made speeches, posted signs, raised campaign funds, licked stamps, dispensed patronage, run headquarters, cluttered up "smoke-filled rooms," and have had my telephone tapped.
I suppose that makes me a politician. I do know that it has proved to me that a single citizen, possessed of the right to speak and the right to vote, can make himself felt whenever he takes the trouble to exercise those twin rights.
Robert Anson Heinlein April, 1946.

Chapter one.
Why Touch the Dirty Business?
"He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled there with." Ecclesiastes Thirteen verse one. And the Pharisees asked Jesus: "Why do you eat and drink with the publicans and sinners'?" Luke Five, Verse thirty.
This book is on the mechanics and techniques of practical politics, and is based on the idea that democracy is worth the trouble and can be made to work by ordinary people.
If you can go along with me on that I don't care what party you belong to.
I am registered in one of the two major parties, so chances are at least fifty-fifty that you can guess my affiliation, but any party bias I let creep into this book will be an oversight. The techniques of politicking are not the property of any party.
From politics I have come to believe the following:
(1) Most people are basically honest, kind, and decent.
(2) The American people are wise enough to run their own affairs. They do not need Fuehrers, Strong Men, Technocrats, Commissars, Silver Shirts, Theocrats, or any other sort of dictator.
(3) Americans have a compatible community of ambitions. Most of them don't want to be rich but do want enough economic security to permit them to raise families in decent comfort without fear of the future. They want the least government necessary to this purpose and don't greatly mind what the other fellow does as long as it does not interfere with them living their own lives.
As a people we are neither money mad nor prying; we are easy-going and anarchistic. We may want to keep up with the Joneses, but not with the Vanderbilts. We don't like cops.
(4) Democracy is not an automatic condition resulting from laws and constitutions. It is a living, dynamic process which must be worked at by you yourself, or it ceases to be democracy, even if the shell and form remain.
(5) One way or another, any government which remains in power is a representative government. If your city government is a crooked machine, then it is because you and your neighbors prefer it that way, prefer it to the effort of running your own affairs. Hitler's government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise.
(6) Democracy is the most efficient form of government ever invented by the human race. On the record, it has worked better in peace and in war than fascism, communism, or any other form of dictatorship. As for the mythical yardstick of "benevolent" monarchy or dictatorship, there ain't no such animal!
(7) A single citizen, with no political connections and no money, can be extremely effective in politics.
I left the most important proposition to the last, on purpose. It is contrary to the beliefs of many but it happens to be true. You yourself can be a strong political force at less cost per evening spent in politics than spending that same evening at the movies and at less effort than it takes to be a scoutmaster, a good bridge player, or a radio hobbyist, about the effort it takes to be a Sunday School teacher, an active ETA member, or stamp collector.
You may possibly think me unrealistic in some of the opinions expressed above. I may be self-deluded but I got those opinions from active politics through many campaigns. If your own experience in politics is really extensive you are certainly entitled to contradict me, but I don't think you will!
If active politics is fairly new to you, if, let us say, you have taken part in no more than one or two campaigns and have been left disheartened thereby, I ask that you suspend judgment for the time being.
I am puzzled by persons who take exception to the first proposition and seem to believe that crookedness is commoner than honesty. I can see how a citizen too long exposed to a corrupt machine might come to think the whole world is dishonest, but I am afraid that when I hear a man complain that everybody is crooked it makes me suspect that he himself is dishonest, especially if he complains that an honest man can't make a living in his line of business. I have met crooks, of course, but for every dishonest man I have met dozens, scores, of men so honest it hurt, both in and out of politics.
Any banker can confirm this. Ask your banker how many good checks come into the bank for every bad check. The figures will give you a warm glow of pleasure.
However, the occasional crook will band together with his kind and take your government away from you if you let him. It is very soothing to the conscience to tell yourself that, after all, you can't do anything to change the sorry state of things. It is much easier to sit in your living room, skim the headlines, and then make bitter remarks about those no-good crooks in the city hall, or the state capital, or Washington, and to complain about how they pay no attention to the welfare of the ordinary citizen (meaning yourself) than it is to put on your hat, go out in your neighborhood, and round up a few votes. What do you expect for free? Chimes? If you wanted to round up a big order of yard goods, you wouldn't expect to accomplish it with your feet on your desk. This is just as important. Or have you forgotten that income tax form you made out? And your nephew who the die at Okinawa because you let some senile congressman stay in office rather than bother with politics?
Why should the average citizen bother with politics? Why touch the dirty business? Isn't politics loaded up with crooks you wouldn't want to eat with and crackpots you wouldn't want to have in your house? "Loaded" is hardly the word, but you will find plenty of each and they will almost drive you nuts.
Besides that, and worse, your respectable friends, people who wouldn't be caught dead in a political club, will assume that you are in it for what you can get out of it they will be very sure of it, for that is the only reason their peanut heads can imagine!
Then why bother? Why expose yourself to bad companions and snide remarks simply to make a single-handed attempt to clean the Augean stables, to bail the ocean, to clear the forest?
Because you are needed. Because the task is not hopeless.
Democracy is normally in perpetual crisis. It requires the same constant, alert attention to keep it from going to pot that an automobile does when driven through downtown traffic. If you do not yourself pay attention to the driving, year in and year out, the crooks, or scoundrels, or nincompoops will take over the wheel and drive it in a direction you don't fancy, or wreck it completely.
When you pick yourself up out of the wreckage, you and your wife and your kids, don't talk about what "They" did to you. You did it, compatriot, because you preferred to sit in the back seat and snooze. Because you thought your taxes bought you a bus ticket and a guaranteed safe arrival, when all your taxes bought you was a part ownership in a joint enterprise, on a share the cost and share-the-driving plan.
But the crisis is more than usually acute this year, the traffic is thicker, the curves more blind, the traffic signals less reliable, and there are a lot of places where the pavement is out which have not been marked on any map. More than ever your own welfare demands that you be alert and responsible.
Do you favor peacetime conscriptions? How did your congressman vote on it? Have you got any sons under twenty-one? Should the budget be balanced on a pay-as-you-go plan? If so, are you willing to vote to raise your own taxes? Or would you rather cut the budget for the army, the navy, and for veterans' benefits? Is there some other way to do it?
Should coal miners be forbidden to strike? Can you mine coal with bayonets? What would your rent be in a free market? Or are you still sleeping on a borrowed couch? When will a home be built for you and your kids? Can you afford it when it is built, if ever? Does your town have a building code which prevents the use of new materials and new construction methods? How do you feel about a loan to Great Britain? To France? To Russia? Are you willing to go on rationing to keep Germans from starving? How long should the occupation of Japan continue? Why? How did your congressman vote on FEPC? Do you know what FEPC is? How does it affect you?
The Filipinos become independent this year, should we let Philippine sugar in duty free? Do you live in the Colorado sugar beet country? Is a Senate filibuster a legitimate defense of states' rights, or a piece of tyranny?
Should an oil man be in charge of military and naval oil reserves? Was Secretary Fall an oil operator? Does it make any difference?
Should we insist that Russia give us free access and uncensored news reports so that we will know what she is up to? Is it worth fighting about?
How about the Big Five Veto power? Does it make for peace or war?
Should Russia get out of Iran? Should Britain get out of Egypt? Should we get out of Korea? Are the three cases parallel? Or very different? Is a Manchurian communist the same thing as a Brooklyn communist? Why?
Why not? Should a sharecropper be a Republican or a Democrat? Should a stockholder be a Democrat or a Republican? What is the American Way of Life? Does it mean the same thing on the Main Line as it does on Skid Row?
Are you sure about that last answer? Aren't we all in the same boat? Will an atomic bomb discriminate between bank account, or party labels?
Now we are getting down to cases. All the other problems were of the simple, easy sort that we have blundered our way through, not too badly, for the past hundred and seventy years.
We have a double-edged crisis this year, more acute on both its edges than any we have ever faced before, more acute, even, than Pearl Harbor, or the terrible War between the States.
The first crisis is political and economic. Our way of life is being challenged by a revolutionary upsurge in all corners of the globe. We can meet it with hysteria, persecution, and a new isolationism, or we can define our way of life in action and defend it by practical accomplishment. An American who is well housed, well fed, and holding a good job is poor pickings for an agitator. But let him miss seven meals,
The second crisis is amorphous but of even more deadly danger. We have entered the Atomic Era, but we are not yet used to the idea.
Have you read the Smyth Report?
Do you know what the Smyth Report is? It is the War Department's report on the atom bomb and is titled Atomic Energy for Military Purposes by H D Smyth. It is available in any bookstore and most newsstands at a buck twenty five. It is dull reading but quite understandable and is easily the most important document to the human race since the Sermon on the Mount.
I won't try to tell you what it should mean to you. That's up to you. You are a free American citizen, for a while yet, at least. With good luck you should live another five or ten years. Whether or not you and your kids live longer than that depends on how you interpret the Smyth Report. But you must interpret it for yourself, no guardian angel will help you.
Get it and read it. Then get a copy of your own precinct list and start investigating this year's crop of candidates. If your interpretation of the Smyth Report and the world events behind it is correct, there is still a chance that the Star-Spangled Banner will continue to wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Just a chance, that's all. But get busy, neighbor. There's work to be done.

CHAPTER TWO.
How to Start.
"Put down your bucket where you are!"
The late Booker T Washington, in his life-long attempts to advise his people on how to help themselves, had a favorite anecdote about a sailing ship, becalmed and out of fresh water off the coast of South America. After many days they sighted another ship, a steam ship, and signaled, "Bring us water. We are dying of thirst." The other ship sent back this message, "Put down your bucket where you are!"
They were in the broad mouth of the Amazon, afloat in millions of gallons of fresh water, and did not know it!
Here is how to start in politics:
Get your telephone book. Look up the party of your registration, or, if you are not registered in a party, the party which most nearly fits your views.
I don't care what party it is, but let us suppose for illustration that it is the Republican Party. You will find a listing something like Republican County Committee, Associated Republican Clubs, Republican Assembly, or perhaps several such. Telephone one of them.
Say, "My name is Joseph Q, or Josephine W, Ivory tower. I am a registered voter at 903 Farflung Avenue. Can you put me in touch with my local club?"
The voice at the other end will say, “Just a minute. Do you know what ward you are in?"
You say no, it’s at least even money that you don't know, if you are a normal American!
The voice mutters, "Fairview, Farwest, Farflung," The owner of the voice is checking a file or a map. Then you hear, in an aside, "Say, Marjorie, gimme the folder on the 13th ward."
"What do you want to know?" says Marjorie. She knows them by heart; she typed them. She is a political secretary and belongs to one of two extreme classes. Either she is a patriot and absolutely incorruptible, or she can be bought and sold like cattle. Either way she knows who the field worker in the 13th ward is.
After a couple of minutes of this backing and filling you are supplied with a name, an address, and a telephone number of a local politician who is probably the secretary of the local club. You may also be supplied with the address and times and dates of meetings of the local club, if it is strong enough to have permanent headquarters. The local club may vary anywhere from a club in permanent possession of a store frontage on a busy street, with a full time secretary on the premises and a complete ward, precinct, and block organization, to a club which exists largely in the imagination of the secretary and which meets only during campaigns in the homes of the members.
Your next job is to telephone the secretary. This is probably not necessary. If the local organization is any good at all, the secretary of the local club will callow, probably the same day. Marjorie will have called him and said, "Get a pencil and paper, Jim. I've got a new sucker for you." Or, if she is not cynical, she may call you a new prospect.
She will have added you to a card file and set the wheels in motion to have your registration checked and to have you placed on several mailing lists. Presently you will start receiving one or more political newspapers, free, despite the subscription price posted on the masthead, and, in due course, you will receive campaign literature from candidates who have the proper connections at headquarters. Your political education will have begun, even if you never bother to become active.
Note that it has not cost you anything so far. The costs need never exceed nickels, dimes, and quarters, even if you become very active. The costs can run as high as you wish, of course. The citizen who is willing to reach for his checkbook to back up his beliefs is always welcome in politics. But such action is not necessary and is not as rare as the citizen who is willing to punch doorbells and lick stamps. Some of the most valuable and respected politicians I have ever known had to be provided with lunch money to permit them to do a full day's volunteer work in any area more than a few blocks from their respective homes.
I know of one case, a retired minister with a microscopic pension just sufficient to buy groceries for himself and his bedridden wife, who became county chairman and leader-in-fact of the party in power in a metropolitan area of more than three million people. He was so poor that he could not afford to attend political breakfasts or dinner. He could never afford to contribute to party funds, nor, on the other hand, was he ever on the party payroll, he never made a thin dime out of politics.
What he did have to contribute was honesty, patriotism, and a willingness to strive for what he thought was right It made him boss of a key county in a key state, when he was past seventy and broke.
I digress. This book will have many digressions; politics is like that, as informal as an old shoe, and the digressions may be the most important part.
It is sometimes hard to tell what is important in the practical art of politics.
Charles Evans Hughes failed to become president because his manager was on bad terms with a state leader and thereby failed to see to it that the candidate met the local leader on one particular occasion in one California city. The local campaign lost its steam because the local leader's nose was out of joint over the matter.
Mister Hughes lost the state of California; with its electoral vote he would have become president. A switch of less than nineteen hundred votes in the city in which the unfortunate incident occurred would have made Mister Hughes the war-time president during World War one. The effect on world history is incalculable and enormous. It is entirely possible that we would have been in a League of Nations (not the League, that was Woodrow Wilson's League); it is possible that Hitler would never have come to power; it is possible that World War Two would never have occurred and that your nephew who fell at Okinawa would be alive today.
We cannot calculate the consequences. But we do know that world history was enormously affected by a mere handful of votes, less than one percent of one percent, less than one ten-thousandth of the total vote cast.
An active political club can expect to deliver to the polls on election day, through unpaid volunteers driving their own cars, as many votes as the number that swung the 1916 presidential election. It could be your club and an organization you helped to build.
Which is why you must now telephone the local club secretary. It may be your chance to prevent, by your own direct and individual action, World War Three!
The club secretary, Jim Ballot box, will not give you the brush off. Even if it is a tight machine organization, founded on graft and special privilege, an honest-to-goodness volunteer who is willing to work is more to be desired than fine gold, yeah, verily! If it is that sort of a club, presently you will be offered cash for your efforts, anywhere from five dollars per precinct per campaign on the west coast, through five dollars per day during the campaign in the Middle West, to a sound and secure living month in and month out on the east coast.
These figures do not refer to the Republican Party, as such, nor to the Democratic Party. They refer to the Machine, no matter what its label.
Don't take the money. Remain a volunteer. You will be treated with startled response. Every time you turn down money you will automatically be boosted one rung in the party councils. And the progress is very fast.
But, no matter which sort of club it is, you will be welcomed with open arms. You have already caused a minor flurry at the downtown headquarters by volunteering during "peace time", other than immediately before a campaign. It shocked them but they rose to the occasion and put you in touch with your local leader. They are used to volunteers during campaigns, and are aware that most of them are phonies who expect at least a postmaster's job in return for a promise to work one precinct plus a little handshaking at a few political meetings. If it should happen that you call up during a campaign, you will be treated a little more warily until you have established that you are in fact a volunteer and not a hopeful patronage hound, but you will be received pleasantly and given a chance to work. This applies to any political club anywhere at any time.
If Jim Ballot box happens to be secretary of the other sort of club, the sort unconnected with a powerful, well-financed machine, he will be even happier to see you, although he may not be as schooled in the arts of graciousness as his full-time professional opposite number. His club will be in a chronic state of crisis financially, or even moribund; an enthusiastic new member is manna to him.
He will have plenty for you to do. You can be chairman next term if you want to be and share with him the worries about hall rent, postage, secretarial work, and how to get people out to meetings. At the very least he will place you in charge of one or more precincts, which will make you nervous as a bridegroom; it's too much responsibility too suddenly, and he will unburden his heart to you. You will learn.
There remain two other possibilities which may result from your telephone call to the downtown headquarters. The first is that there may be no club in your district, in which case you will make your start directly at the downtown headquarters and will meet there the other active party members from your own area. You will join with them in organizing a local club before the next election. It is not hard to do; the process will be discussed in a later chapter.
The last remaining possibility is that your telephone book contains no listings for your political party. This will happen only in small towns or in the country. If you live in a small town or in the country, you already know at least one party leader in your own party, probably Judge Dewlap, who served one term in the state senate and has been throwing his weight around ever since.
Call him up. Tell him you want to work for the party. Perhaps you don't like the old windbag. No matter, he likes you. He likes all voters, especially ones who want to work for the party! He may suggest that you have lunch with him at the Elks' Club and talk over civic conditions. Or he may simply invite you to drop into his real estate office for a chat. But he won't brush you off. From now on you're his boy! Until he finds out he can't dictate to you.
But by that time you are a politician in your own right and there is nothing he can do about it. That knife in your back has Judge Dewlap's finger prints on it.
We have covered all the possibilities; you are now in politics. As a result of one telephone call you have started. Stay with the club or local organization for several months at least. Attend all the meetings. Help out with the routine work. Don't be afraid to lick stamps, serve on committees, check precinct lists, or distribute political literature. Count on devoting a couple of evenings a month to it for six months or a year. Your expenses during this training period need not exceed a dollar a month. At the end of that time you are a politician.
I mean it. You will have become acquainted with your local officeholders and political leaders, you will have discovered where several of the bodies are buried, you will have taken part in one local or national campaign and received your first blooding in meeting the public. You will find that you are now reading the newspapers with insight as to the true story behind the published story. You will have grown up about ten years in your knowledge of what makes the world go 'round.
You will either have experienced the warm glow of solid accomplishment that comes from realizing that you performed a necessary part in a successful campaign for a man or an issue, or you will have taken part in the private post-mortem in which you and your colleagues analyze why you lost and what to do about it next time. The answer is usually to start your precinct organization earlier, with special reference to getting your sure votes registered and to make sure they are dragged to the polls.
You will feel that you can win next time and probably you will. Politics for the volunteer fireman is not one long succession of lost causes-far from it!
But the point at which you will realize that you are in fact a politician with a definite effect on public life is the time when your friends and neighbors start asking your advice about how to mark their ballots. And they will.
Perhaps not about presidential nor gubernatorial candidates, but they will ask and take your advice about lesser candidates and about the propositions on the ballot you may discover in the course of the first few months that you are in the wrong club, or even in the wrong party. This does not matter in the least insofar as your political education is concerned. In fact it is somewhat of an advantage to make a mistake in your first affiliation; you will learn things thereby which you could never possibly learn so well or so rapidly if you had found your own true lodge brothers on your first attempt. It does not matter by what door you enter politics. If you have belonged to the party wrong/or you, by habit or tradition, a few months of active politics will disclose the fact to you. You can then reregister and cross over, bringing with you experience and solid conviction you could hardly have acquired any other way.
If the trouble lies in your having fallen first into the hands of a gang of unprincipled machine politicians, the mistake is still a valuable one, for you will discover presently that there is a reform element in your party, unaffiliated with the Machine. You can join them, taking with you a knowledge of the practical art of vote-getting which reformers frequently never acquire.
You will be invaluable to your new associates. Most of the techniques of vote-getting are neither dishonest nor honest in themselves, but the machines normally know vastly more about such techniques than do the reform organizations. The honest organizations can afford to copy at least 90 Percent of the machine techniques. It is curiously and wonderfully true that a volunteer, reform organization can use the machine techniques much more effectively than the Machine does, with fewer workers and less money. It is like the difference between the ardor of unselfish love and the simulated passion of prostitution; the unorganized voting public can feel the difference.
Recapitulation-How to start: Take a telephone book. Look up your political party. Telephone, locate your local club. Join it, attend all the meetings, and do volunteer work for several months. At the end of drat time, let your conscience be your guide. You will know enough to know where you belong and what you should do.
I might as well admit right now that the above paragraph is really all this book can tell you. The matter discussed in the later chapters are things which you will learn for yourself in any case, provided you do everything called f or in the paragraph above.
If you have skimmed through this book to this point without, as yet, laying the purchase price on the counter, you can save the price of the book without loss to yourself simply by remembering that one paragraph, and doing it!
On the other hand you might buy the book anyhow and lend it to your loud-mouthed brother-in-law. Aren't you pretty sick of the way he is forever flapping his jaw about the way the country is run? But when has he ever done anything about it except to go down and kill your vote on election day by voting the wrong way? Give him this book, then tell him to put up or shut up!
You can point out to him that he owes it to his three kids to take a responsible part in politics, instead of just beating his gums. If he won't get off his fat backside and get busy in politics but still refuses to stop being a Big Wind, you are then justified in indulging in the pleasure of being rude to him.
After all, you have wanted to be for years, haven't you? This is your opportunity; you've got nothing to lose politically since he votes wrong anyhow, when he remembers to vote, and it will come as a relief to be rude for once, now that you are a politician and usually polite to all comers.
Tell him that he is so damned ignorant that he doesn't have any real opinions about politics and so lax in his civic duties that he wouldn't be entitled to opinions if he had any. Tell him to shut up and to quit holding up the bridge game.
The faint sound of cheering you will hear from the distance will be me. I don't like the jerk either, nor any of his tribe.
You may not believe that getting into politics is actually as simple as I have described it. Here is my own case: I returned to my own state after an extended absence. My profession had kept me travelling and it happened to be the first time I had ever been at home during a campaign. I walked into the local street headquarters of my party and said to a woman at a desk, "I have a telephone, an automobile, and a typewriter. What can I do?"
I was referred to another headquarters a couple of miles away, I was so ignorant that I did not know the district boundaries and had gotten into the wrong headquarters.
That very same day, to my utter amazement and confusion, I found myself in charge of seven precincts.
Six weeks later I was a director of the local club.
Six months later I was publishing, in my spare time, a political newspaper of two million circulation.
During the next campaign I was a county committeeman, a state committeeman, and a district chairman. Shortly after that campaign I was appointed county organizer for my party. And so on. It does not end. The scope and importance of the political work assigned to a volunteer fireman is limited only by his strength and his willingness to accept responsibility.
Nor is the work futile. The volunteer organization with which I presently became affiliated recalled a mayor, kicked out a district attorney, replaced the governor with one of our own choice, and completely changed the political complexion of one of the largest states, all within four years. I did not do it alone-naturally not, nothing is ever done alone in politics-but it was done by a comparatively small group of unpaid volunteers almost all of whom were as ignorant of politics at the start as I was.
Or let me tell you about Susie. Susie is a wonderful girl. She and her husband volunteered about the same time I did. Susie had a small baby; she packed him into a market basket, stuck him into the back of the family car and went out and did field work.
In the following four years Susie replaced a national committeeman with a candidate of her own choice, elected a congressman, and managed the major portion of the campaign which gave us a new governor. She topped her career finally by being the indispensable key person in nominating a presidential candidate of one of the two major parties. I'll tell more about that later; it's quite a story.
All this time Susie was having babies about every third year. She never accepted a cent for herself, but it became customary, after the house filled up, for the party to see to it that Susie had a maid during a campaign. The rest of the time she kept house, did the cooking, and reared her kids unassisted.
During the war she added riveting on bombers during the night shift to her other activities.
We can't all be Susies. But remember this, all that Susie had to offer was honesty, willingness, and an abiding faith in democracy. She had no money and has none now, and she had no political connections nor experience when she started.
I could fill a whole book with case histories of people like Susie. Most of them are people of very limited income who are quite busy all day earning that income. One of the commonest excuses from the person who knows that he should take part in civic business is: "I would like to but I am just so tarnation busy making a living for my wife and kids that I can't spare the time, the money, nor the energy."
The middle class in Germany felt the same way; it brought them Hitler, the liquidation of their class, and the destruction of their country. The next time you feel like emulating them, remember Susie and her four kids. Or Gus.
Gus drove a truck from four a.m. to noon each day; he had a wife and two kids. By sleeping in the afternoons and catching a nap after midnight he managed to devote many of his evenings to politics. In less than three years he was state chairman of the young people's club of his party and one of the top policy makers in the state organization.
What did he get out of it? Nothing, but the satisfaction of knowing that he had made his state a better place for his kids to live.
The Guses and the Susies in this country are the people who have preserved and are preserving our democracy, not the big city bosses, not the Washington officeholders, and most emphatically not your loud-mouthed and lazy brother-in-law.
I have said that the rest of the book will tell only things that you will learn anyhow, through experience. They will be recounted in hopes of saving you much time, much bitter experience, and in the expectation that my own experiences may make you more effective more quickly than you otherwise might be. I also hope to brace you against the disappointment and sometimes disheartening disillusionments that are bound to come to anyone participating in this deadly serious game.
One warning I want to include right now, since you may not finish reading this book.
You are entering politics with the definite intention of treating it as a patriotic public service. You intend to pay your own way; you seek neither patronage nor cash. Almost at once you will be offered pay. You will turn it down. Again and again it will be offered and patronage as well.
There will come a day when you are offered pay to campaign for an issue or a man in whom you already believe and most heartily and to whom you are already committed. The offer will come from a man who is sincerely your friend and whom you know to be honest and patriotic. He will argue that the organization expects to pay for the work you are already doing and that you might as well be paid. He honestly prefers for you to be on the payroll; it makes the whole affair more orderly.
Everything he says is perfectly true; it is honest pay, from a clean source, for honest work in which you believe. It happens that just that moment a little extra money would come in mighty handy. What should you do?
Don't take it!
If you take it, it is almost certain to mark the end of your climb toward the top in the policy-making councils of your party. You are likely to remain a two-bit, or at best a four-bit, ward heeler the rest of your life. A volunteer fireman need not have money to be influential in public affairs, but he must not accept money, even when it is clean money, honestly earned. If you take it you are a hired man and hired men carry very little weight anywhere.
There is a corny old story about a sugar daddy and a stylish and beautiful young society matron. The s.d. offered her five thousand dollars to spend a week at Atlantic City with him. After due consideration she accepted. He then offered her fifty dollars instead. In great indignation she said, "Sir, what kind of a woman do you think I am?"
"We settled that," he told her. "Now we're haggling over the price."
Don't make the mistake she did. There is however some sense in haggling over the conditions. If you reach the point where your party wants you to accept a state or national party post, for full-time work in a position of authority, or your government asks the same thing of you, under circumstances where it is evident that you must surrender your usual means of livelihood, go ahead and take it, if you honestly believe that your services are needed and that you can do the best job that could be done by any of the available candidates. It is well understood in political circles that public office or major party office is almost always badly underpaid for the talent and experience the jobs need. The salaries, therefore, are regarded simply as retainers to permit the holder to eat while serving the public. But don't be a paid ward heeler!
On the other hand, it is not wise to hold the petty hired man in the party in contempt. You will have to work with many of them no matter what party you are in. The biggest reform movements in this country include areas where the Machine is dominant; the most perfectly oiled political machines include areas where all the work is volunteer and unpaid. You will find the paid precinct or headquarters worker as honest and as conscientious as employees usually are; almost invariably he or she will be sincerely loyal to the party employing him. They usually do more work than their wages justify.
Remember this, and be careful what you say to them or about them. Most of them are as honest as you are and just as anxious for your man to win.
But don't become one of them if you expect to have any major effect on the future of this country.
Well, then, if you are never to accept pay, except under remote circumstances in which the job even with pay is likely to be a financial sacrifice, what can you expect to get out of it?
The rewards are intangible but very pleasing to an adult mind. The drawbacks are easier to see. You must expect to be regarded with amusement and even suspicion by some of your acquaintances. Most of the station-wagon crowd you used to run around with will be certain that you are in it for what you can get out of it, for that is the only reason their un-matured minds can imagine. They are the free riders in the body politic; despite the fact they do nothing to make our form of government work, they serenely believe that the wheels go around by their gracious consent and think that gives them the privilege of caustic and ignorant criticism of the laborers in the vineyard.
Moreover, you won't be seeing so much of them from now on. You will find that you are beginning to select your social contacts, your dinner guests and your golf partners from among your political acquaintances. You will do this because you find more intelligence, more brilliant conversation, and more worthwhile solid human values among your political acquaintances than you found among the free riders. You won't plan it that way, but it will work itself out.
You will play less bridge. Bridge is a good game, but it is dull and tasteless when compared with politics.
Your brother-in-law will shun your company. That's clear gain!
There will come to you the warm satisfaction of being in on the know every time you pick up your newspaper. News stories that once were dull will be filled with zest for you, because you will know what they mean.
From the stand point of sheer recreation you will have discovered the greatest sport in the world. Horse racing, gambling, football, the fights, all of these things are childish and trite compared with this greatest sport! Politics is a game where you always play for keeps, where the game is continuous, always fresh and full of surprises. It will take all of your intelligence and wit and all that you have ever learned or can learn to play it well. The stakes are the highest conceivable, the lives and the futures of every living creature on this planet. How well you play it can make the difference between freedom or a firing squad, civilization or atomic conflagration. For this is the day of decision, the hour of the knife, and none but yourself can choose for you the correct path in the maze.
Over and above the joy of playing for high stakes is the greatest and most adult joy of all, the continuous and sustaining knowledge that you have broken with childish ways and come at last into your full heritage as a free citizen, integrated into the life of the land of your birth or your choice, and carrying your share of adult responsibility for the future thereof!

CHAPTER THREE.
"It Ain't Necessarily So!"
This chapter will be devoted to smearing a few cherished illusions.
I do not suppose that you are suffering from all of the misapprehensions listed herein; however, if you are typically American and have not had extensive political experience, it is likely that you are subject to one or more of them. Before we go ahead with detailed discussion of the practical art of politics it is well to correct the record with respect to many items in the Great American Credo, items which happen to be wrong and which have to do with politics. It will save your time and mine in later discussion.
With the possible exceptions of love and religion probably more guff is talked and believed about politics than about any other subject. I am going to discuss some of that guff and try to puncture it. Most of the items I have chosen because I myself have had to change my opinions through bitter experience in politics.
My present opinions are subject to human error. However, they are based on the scientific method of observation of facts; they are not armchair speculation. If you don't believe me, go take a look, several looks! For yourself. But I suggest that you will save yourself a lot of the mistakes I made if you assume that what I say is true until through your own experience you reach a different opinion.
Warning! Every generalization I make about groups of people is subject to exceptions. You must meet each citizen with an open mind. For example, there is no natural law which prevents club women from being intelligent and quite a few of them are.
Now let's let our hair down and speak plainly. We are going to discuss a lot of sacred cows and then kick them in the slats. We are going to mention a lot of unmentionable subjects, using everything but Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. We are going to discuss Catholics and Communists and Jews and Negroes, women in politics, reformers, school teachers, the nobility of the Irish, civil service vs. patronage, and whether Father was right. I will try to tell the truth as I have seen it. I hope I won't splash any mud in your direction but I may.
"One should never consider a man's religion in connection with politics."
This is a fine credo, based on the American ideal of freedom of religion. It happens to be cockeyed and results from mushy thinking. One should always consider a candidate's religious beliefs; it is one of the most important things about him. Whether a man is a Catholic, a Protestant, a Communist, a Mormon, or a Jew has a very strong bearing on how he will perform his duties in certain jobs. Communism is, of course, classed with the religions more about that later. The important thing to remember is to consider a man's religion objectively, in relation to what you expect of him, and not in an attitude of blind prejudice.
There is nothing discriminatory nor un-American in scrutinizing a man's religious beliefs in connection with politics. A man's religion is a matter of free choice, even though most people remain in the faiths to which they were born. A Catholic can become a Jew; a Communist can become a Quaker. A man's religious beliefs offer a strong clue to his attitudes, values, and prejudices and you are entitled to consider them when he is in public life.
For example, let us suppose that you live in a mythical community where the school board can, at its discretion, assign public funds to the support of private schools which are open to the public, parochial schools, of course.
Let us suppose that you believe that public funds should be used only for state-controlled schools. Two tickets of candidates are before you, one Catholic, one non-Catholic, all equally well qualified, good men and true.
Should you vote for the ticket which will support your own opinion, or should you ignore what you know about the candidates and vote for the one with the pretty blue eyes?
Or let us suppose, same election; same town, that you are a non-Catholic who believes that tax money should support popular education but that the government should not be allowed to determine the nature of that education, except, perhaps, for the three R's. It is your belief that the individual parents should control the training received by their children; you fear state domination. Whom should you vote for?
Or suppose you are a Catholic but believe that public funds for support of Catholic schools would be the first step toward state control of those schools.
Which way do you vote?
The problem can become still more complicated. Congress is considering subsidizing scientific research; many of the best colleges and universities in this country are controlled or dominated by members of a particular faith.
Would you refuse a research subsidy to Notre Dame but allow it to some state-owned college in Tennessee, the state where biology is subject to the vote of the state legislature? Or how about the great University of Southern California? It was a Methodist college once; there has been a divorce of sorts but the influence is still there. Can USC be trusted with a subsidy in mechanical engineering, or does nothing less than outright atheism meet your standards for freedom of thought?
In passing it might be added that private schools with church leanings were an indispensable factor in the scientific research that won World War Two.
What bearing does all this have on the problem of tax funds for parochial schools? It obviously has some bearing and you yourself will have to consider the factors when you decide whether to campaign for the ticket made up of Catholics or the one made up of non-Catholics.
In my home state recently there were introduced in the legislature a group of bills concerning birth control and a group of bills concerning liquor licensing, local option, and prohibition. The governor received hundreds of letters about these two groups. Analysis showed that practically all of the letters about the birth control measures came from Catholic groups, whereas the letters about liquor measures came almost exclusively from Protestant church groups.
Is it not obvious, then, that you have a legitimate interest in the religious persuasion of your state legislator, your state senator, and your state governor?
Suppose you are a Christian Scientist; how do you feel about socialized medicine? Suppose instead that you are strong for socialized medicine; is it of interest to you that a candidate for the legislature is a Christian Scientist? Or should you ignore it?
Is a Jewish congressman more likely or less likely to vote to open the United States to any and all displaced persons in Europe? Who is the more likely to put a rider concerning Palestine on a bill to end money to Britain, a non-Zionist Jew or an Irish Catholic from Boston?
The ramifications of the political effect of a man's religious beliefs are endless. I do not intend to suggest answers to any of these questions; I simply mean to make it clear that to shut your eyes to this factor is to handicap yourself grossly in the analysis of men and issues. To vote always for a person of your own religious persuasion, or, at the other extreme, always to ignore a candidate's religious beliefs, is equally stupid and unrealistic. The first attitude is narrow and un-American; the second is custard-headed. Call 'em as you see 'em!
Now let us discuss church groups.
(Before shouts of dirty red, fascist, papist, Jew, atheist, or whatever, start coming in, let me put this on record: Like all my great grandparents, I am native born, an American mixture, principally Irish, with a dash of English and French and a pinch of German. My name is Bavarian Catholic in origin; I was brought up in the Methodist faith. I believe in democracy, personal liberty, and religious freedom.)
American church groups as a whole are frequent sources of corruption and confusion in politics. This is a regrettable but observable fact which runs counter to the strong credo that if only the church people would get together and assert their strength we could run all those dirty crooks out of town. In fact, the church members of any community, voting as a bloc, could swing any election, institute any reforms they wished, and make them stick.
It does not work out that way.
I do not question that we are more moral, more charitable and more civilized as a result of church instruction and the labors of priests, ministers, rabbis, and countless devout laymen. Nor do I question the political good intent of church groups. The evil consequences result from good intentions applied in too limited a field.
Only rarely do churches become interested in the way in which paving contracts are awarded, how the oral examinations for civil service are conducted, or the fashion in which real estate values are assessed for tax purposes. Towing fees for stolen cars, the allocation of gasoline tax monies between city, county, and state, or the awarding of public utility franchises are likely to be too "political" for discussion from the pulpit.
Instead church groups are likely to demand laws which prohibit practices contrary to various religious codes of morals. A crooked political machine is happy to oblige each church as such laws do not hamper the machine; they help it-first, by providing new fields of graft and corruption, second, by insuring the votes of the madams, bookies, etc., engaged in these fields, and third, by obtaining support from the very church groups which demanded the legislation.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
If your conscience requires that you support legislation of the type referred to above, then you must realize that your overall problem of keeping honest officials in office to enforce the laws is made much more difficult and that you must work several times as hard and be much more alert if you are to have an honest government.
As an amateur, unpaid, volunteer politician interested in certain reforms, don't expect any real help from the churches even in accomplishing the moral objectives of the churches, or you will be due for a terrible disappointment.
Women in Politics We were told, when Votes-for-Women was new, that women would bring higher moral standards and would eliminate the graft and corruption which the nasty old men had tolerated.
Women have had an effect, they caused the installation of a powder room in the Senate's sacred halls; they changed the atmosphere of conventions from that of a prize fight to something more like a college reunion, and they broadened the refreshments at political doings from a simple the t of beer and pigs knuckles to a point where the menu now includes ice cream and cake, little fancy sandwiches, coffee, and wine cooler. The change in refreshments is a distinct improvement; I don't like pigs knuckles. They have also brought political corruption to a new low.
Whoops! Easy, girls, please! Quiet down. There are exceptions to all rules-you may be the exception to this one. That is for you to determine.
Judge yourself.
A great many women are willing to go to hell in a wheel barrow. Their husbands may be politically just as dishonest but the gentle sex are usually willing to sell out at a lower price. They go in for cut-rate corruption. If you file for office, or become the manager of a candidate, you will quickly be besieged by telephone calls from women who want to help in your campaign.
They sound like enthusiastic volunteers; you will find very quickly that they are political streetwalkers who will support any candidate and any issue, without compunction, for a very low price.
Brush them off, but politely, a practical politician should never go out of his way to make anyone sore; your purpose is to win elections, not arguments.
Let the opposition hire them. They are hardly worth the low price they charge, even to him. Later on in the campaign you will find that he hi