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  In passing it might be added that private schools with church leanings were an indispensable factor in the scientific research that won World War II.

  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 diet 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 hired one of them a little sooner than you had expected; she worked as an unpaid volunteer all through the campaign in your office and turned in nightly reports to the opposition.

  Don't let it throw you. As a politician you must learn to expect such little disappointments. And don't let it shake your faith in human nature. If you take the trouble to count up you will find that you know many more people who are certainly honest than the number who are just as certainly crooked. The crooks just seem more numerous because they get in your hair more.

  I am inclined to believe, although I am not sure, that the average difference in political honesty between men as a group and women as a group in this country is actually considerable and not just a matter of a lower pay scale for corruption on the part of women. As a result of punching thousands of doorbells and talking with many, many men and women I am of the opinion that women usually know less about political issues than men and consequently are less inclined to realize that political issues are of moral consequen
ce. This probably results in part from the fact that most women, in their daily occupations, are not thrown out into the world to the same extent as their men folk and consequently never really find out what makes the wheels go around.17

  Furthermore, the husband is inclined to encourage the little woman to remain in ignorance; it gives him a chance to show off at home how much he knows without betraying just how little it is - since it is still more than she knows.

  In any case, I have heard hundreds of times, in campaigning from door to door, this remark: "Oh, I leave everything of that sort up to my husband!" And she does, too - she doesn't know a filibuster from first base and she thinks an alderman is something to hang clothes on.

  So, when somebody tips her off that she can pick up a few dollars in a campaign year by a little light work in her neighborhood, she is ripe for it, gullible, willing to work for low wages, and so naive she doesn't know that it's loaded. It won't even worry her to work for the candidate George is voting against, because she does not think it matters. She can work in a dozen campaigns and never find out anything about men nor issues; she just knows that State Senator Slotmachine is such a nice man and here is some literature about him and would you like to have a car sent around to take you to the polls?

  Slotmachine is a nice man, too - he's an old hand in this business; his public personality is a work of art. You would enjoy having dinner with him.

  After a while, if she is bright enough to mark a sample ballot, she does notice a few things, but it does not wise her up to what she is doing; it simply makes her utterly cynical about politics. She becomes convinced that the shoddy business she has been associated with is the only brand of politics in existence. Nothing will change her junior-size mind on the subject and she is forever lost to your side.

  So don't hire her and don't bother to try to convert her. The women volunteers who work for you, free, can get ten votes to the one she can round up for Slotmachine.

  All through it she remains a good wife and mother and a respected member of the P.T.A. You can't tell her from an authentic volunteer by sight nor, very quickly, by conversation. There is however one simple touchstone which works in nine cases out often. The sincere volunteers will look you up in person and offer their services; the political prostitutes will telephone, offer their services over the phone, and then ask you to come to see them. (I think they believe it improves their bargaining position.)

  The rule is not infallible, but it will help you to be on your guard. It won't help you much when you encounter this particular bird of prey by chance, on ringing a doorbell, and it won't help you at all when the opposition hires her and then sends her to see you; nevertheless it will save you a lot of grief. After a while you will acquire a sense of smell concerning this sisterhood. In the meantime don't trust too far any volunteer previously unknown to you, who has great enthusiasm for unpaid work but does not seem to grasp the issues in the campaign. Don't put such a person to work in the headquarters; let her (or him) distribute literature - and then make a spot check on its distribution.

  Still another breed of cat is the club woman politician. She organizes women's political clubs. She may not be dishonest; she is usually ambitious and stupid and she is almost never of any use in winning an election, although she may help you lose one and her enmity is to be dreaded. Look, ladies-don't be a woman politician, or a women's politician! Be a politician who happens to be female.'8 You are the equals of men-remember? 11 isn't necessary to go off and form little groups of your own; stay in the main event and start swinging.

  After the above nasty cracks about women in politics I am very happy to be able to say that a sincere and enlightened female volunteer is the best political worker you will find. She is a peai-1 beyond price, but, thank Heaven, not too hard to find. She will average from twice to many times as useful as the general run of sincere male volunteers. She is not nearly as choosy as the men are about what kind of work she will do. She'll punch doorbells, and sweep the office, and type letters, and distribute newspapers, and watch the count, and drive a car on election day.

  She doesn't expect anything out of it but the satisfaction of serving. Somebody told her once that a good citizen finds it a privilege to work for the betterment of her country. She believed it and she still believes.

  Bless her heart - she is the backbone and sinew of every honest political organization in the country.

  "Mother knows best, dear" or "Remember, Father is usually right."

  It is standard practice for the elder generation to harry the younger generation with saws about "older and wiser heads." The youngsters resent it, until they get old enough to pull it on the next crop.

  There is just enough truth in it to keep the practice going. Wisdom mellowed by years is beautiful to see. In public life the occasional George Norris, Henry Stim-son, or Justice Holmes are as breath-takingly inspiring as the Lincoln Memorial. However, in most cases, what passes for the wisdom of age is merely the sophistication of experience, knowledge of precedents, and familiarity with details.

  In politics our senior citizens habitually assume that their years entitle them to respectful attention from their juniors on the assumption that they have mellowed, grown broader, and increased in patriotism and social responsibility through the years.

  It ain't necessarily so! Although there are shining exceptions, the average run of our elder citizens are notably avaricious, self-centered, unpatriotic, and devoid of any notion of social responsibility, as compared with their sons and daughters.19

  Before I am accused of personal bias let me state that I am no longer a youngster myself. I've reached the shady side of the street, short of wind, and fat in the middle. To my regret, young women now call me "sir" and stand when they speak to me.

  And I do not speak primarily of political office holders. I do not refer to the congressional practice whereby senility is an asset rather than a liability in

  reaching key committee posts, nor am I repeating the arguments about "The Nine Old Men." As a matter of fact old men in politics seem to keep young better than their non-political contemporaries. (Try shadowing a seventy-year-old congressman during a campaign; he'll wear you to a frazzle.)

  In any case, the problem of superannuated officeholders is a political issue outside the scope of this book. I am speaking of the ordinary run of elder citizen, your neighbors, your parents, your grandparents. They may be kind to children and dogs and sweet to look upon in church and at family dinner, but politically speaking the average lot of them are the sorriest bunch of old vultures you will find.

  Remember that when you start punching door-bells.I am sorry to say these things. I like Great Aunt Mary's apple pies, her neat grey hair, and her wrinkled smile as well as you do. I had the opinion forced on me.

  For example - several years ago I was covering a district which lay, half and half, on the right side and the wrong side of the tracks. I interviewed young and old, rich and poor, men and women. I expected and found certain trend differences in view point on the two sides of the tracks. But I was surprised to find an amazing and almost unanimous similarity in viewpoint on the part of the elderly rich and the elderly poor.

  Mellowed and altruistic interest in the welfare and future of the whole community? Far from it! The elderly poor wanted $200 every month, or some other pension which would pay them more income than they had ever earned while working, and they didn't give a hoot what it did to the country! The elderly rich wanted the highest possible return from mortgages, rents, dividends, or other investment income, and they didn't give a hoot what it did to the country!

  Naturally they tended to vote for different men and different issues - except when a candidate managed to kid both groups. But the motivation was identical and utterly shameless - blind and narrow selfishness, short range in nature and quite unconcerned with the welfare and future of dieir children and their country.

  Nor were they driven to it by hunger. One can forgive the selfishness of hunger, but
even on the wrong side of the tracks they were neither hungry nor cold, as it happened to be in a state with, possibly, the most favorable and generous welfare conditions in the country. No, it was the greed of old age.

  There appears to come a change in most people somewhere around the age of fifty when they cease to think of the rest of the human race except in terms of what others may be induced to do for them. A divorce from the human race is not a good thing for a man's inner being; it reduces his spiritual life to its lowest common denominator - the animal level. It is absolutely imperative that a man care for something more than for himself for him to remain human. Most tragically, many people, when they have reached the age when their own children are no real responsibility and are thereby not forced to think in terms of the welfare and future of their children, find nothing to replace such interest. The more nearly truly human of us substitute, for a preoccupation widi the needs of our own children, after they are grown, a wider interest in all children everywhere, and the future of the nation and the race.

  An elder citizen who has come safely through this difficult transition is a joy to know and is likely to make your best political worker. He will labor until the day he dies for the public welfare as he sees it, without the slightest expectation of personal reward. He usually has enough free time to be very effective, his views are respected, and the physical labor of politics is within die limits, in most cases, of even the elderly and infirm.

  I remember in particular one old lady who was the mainstay in a dozen campaigns. She lived along on a pittance and was nearly seventy when I met her. Her first name was Laura. (I never dared call her by her first name.) Not only did she work her own precinct and campaign among her friends, she was usually headquarters manager and handled the field workers and the public with cheerful tact.