The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1920-10-16
TWO-PARTY SYSTEM
IS Permanent One;
IN AMERICAN VIEW
Henry ]. Haskell in the Outlook

tHenry j. Haskell in the Outlook
1t is futile to rush out every four
years, as many of us are inclined to do
and exclaim: Let us have a new third
party. The old parties do not express
our aspirations. They have lost their
meaning. We must organize a new
party and nominate a leader who
stands for what we believe" Futile,
that is, except as a protest. 1t is
wholly impossible to provide the vast
organization necessary.
In addition, sentiment is a powerful
factor in politics, and the American
people have formed the two-party
habit. After the election of 1914
Theodore Roosevelt thus diagnosed
the situation in a letter TO a friend:
From the night of election two years
ago l have felt that the chances were
overwhelmingly against the perman-
mancnce of the progressive party. The
ana1ogies drawn after election be-
tween us and the early republican
party were not based on fact. The
republican party started in 1854 with
out any. big leader at all, and it was
six years before it developed a big
leader. Yet at the very outset it COM
pletely crushed the whig party and
elected a majority of congress. The
average person who was not a demo-
crat became a republican. We, on the
contrary. elected merely handful OF
congressman in 1912 and not a senator
or governor, and very few local Off
GERS. | beat Taft, but that was all.
The republican party remained as the
leading opposition party.
The average American is deeply
welded to the two-party system. He
wishes to vote with his own party, and
the name has an enormous influence
ever him. When he gets angry with
his own party, he wishes to rebuke it
by voting with the party of the opposi-
ton. When he goes with a third party
it is for temporary and usually for
local reasons. When we failed to es-
tablish ourselves at the very outset as
the second party, it became over
whelmingly probable that politics
would soon sink back into the condi-
tions that had been normal for the
previous half century-that is, into a
two party system, the republicans and
the democrats alternating in the first
and second place. Under such circum
stances it was likely that we would
keep only the men of high principle
end good reasoning power and the
cranks. The men in between us.
That is, we have built a system in
which one political group manages the
government, while the other one the
outside criticizes it and eXerts a salu-
t2ry influence by threatening to
pounce on every mistake and capital
ize it. The one group is conducted by
men who have inherited a certain
rather nebulous set of tendencies. the
other by another group who have in
herited another set of tendencies. In
the course of time each of these
groups has become highly organized
and each has acquired the services of
a large number of men who have be-
come adopts in political procedure,
who have come to look on the part
very much as men look on a church or
lodge.
An organization so humbly based. is
not easily thrown into the discard. Fur
thermore, it is almost as futile, under
ordinary circumstances, to expect such
an organization to award its leadership
to an outsider as to give way to a third
party. The assumption that it will dis
card all its seasoned captains and take