The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1924-02-13
Dictatorship in America

q
constitution as a check upon the House OF Re
personalities, composed of the most conserva-
tive types in American political life, demands
that President Coolidge force Secretary of the
Navy DENLY to resign.
The president cody tells the senators and the
people of the United States who elected them
that the senate has not the power to make such
a demand and that he will ignore it.
Representative government?
Responsibility of elected officials to the cleo
torate?
The president the servant Of the people?
President Coolidge is right. The senate has
no such power because the trainers of the con-
stitution saw to it that the executive alone en-
joys it.
The democratic character of the United
States government is myth. 1t is not respons-
i've to the will of the people as expressed thru
the franchise and was not intended to be.
Our form of government was planned by in
dviduals who represented the privileged classes
of the period in which they lived and who made
/. the most careful arrangements to prevent any
wave of popular protest being reflected IN the
government itself until time had tempered mass
resentment
Congressmen are elected for two years, SEN
ators for six and the president for four. Above
all stands the supreme court appointed for life
the highest tribunal in the land, combining
thru both law and CUSTOM executive, legislative
and judicial authority.
The American form of government is the
most infexible and irresponsible, barring abso-
lutte monarchy, ever devised by man because its
mandate is always conditioned upon issues that
have lapsed before it takes Office. It's personnel
cannot be changed by the popular represent
atves during the term of the president
appontees are HIS and not the peoples I'M
OF the all lntents and
purposes impossibe-is the only recourse
+Io howl
pretense of democratic government, such a
scandal as the Teapot Dome steal would have
forced the resignation of the executive wing
the prime minister and his cabinet President
Coolidge and his official family would have been
kicked out-he and they could not have defed
the demands of elected representatives.
Never in the history of American government
has similar situation arisen and this of course
is taken as proof by the unthinking that it is
an unfortunate affair that will never occur
again. The contrary is true.
The United States has left behind the period
in which government could afford to make some
show of representing the popular will-the
competitive period of American capitalism The
United States is now world power. 1t con-
ducts adventures abroad of which the American
people, badly informed as they are, do not APP
prove.
1t wages ruthless war on native peoples in its
colonies on behalf of financial institutions that
choose and dominate the government. 1t pre-
sents an unyielding front to labor at home and
it finds it ever harder in the face Of popular
discomfort, to protect those who have stolen the
natural resources of the nation.
1t is natural that the dictatorial possibilities
latent in the American form of government
should have been utilized first to force the pop
ulace in 1917 into an mperialist war against
which its opposition had Just been expressed in
popular election-in 1916.
1t is just as natural that the infexibe char
acter Of American government should find its
second expression in the use of its dictatoria
power by President Coolidge to protect his adj
ministration from the righteous wrath of peo-
pie aroused by proof of the corrupt class nature
Of American government indisputably shown
by the Teapot Dome revelations
1t is in such times as these, when the nation
is seething with unrest that reaches up from the
working and farming masses and involves large
sections of the middle class, with American
capitalism in danger-not of revolution but of
far-reaching social and political changes that
would make its task of exploitation more diff
cult by weakening its hold on the mass mind
that the capitalists give thanks for "the far
sightedness Of the founders"-the farsighted-
ness that was shown by James Madison when
he told his fellow-exploiters at the Constitu-
tional Convention
In future time, a great majority of the people
will be without landed any other sort of prop
erty. These will combine under the influence Of
their common suation-in which the rights
Of property and the public liberty will not be
in their hands. There will be. particularly
the distinction between the rich and the poor"+++"
An increase in population will of necessity increase
the proportion of those who will labor under all the
hardships Of life, and secretly sigh for
equal distribution Of its blessings.
The Workers Party contends that the Amer
lean government is a dictatorship of the CAPT.