Interviewed by Professor E.L. Youman’s in the Fall of 1882, Englishman Herbert Spencer waxed frankly on his “estimate of American tendencies.” The New York Tribune described his words as “one of the profoundest studies of American life ever made,” though no one here seemed to learn anything from it.
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
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Puppeteers of a Sovereign People:
“After pondering over what I have seen of [America’s] vast manufacturing and trading establishments, the rush of traffic in your streetcars and elevated railways, your gigantic hotels and Fifth Avenue palaces, I was suddenly reminded of the Italian republics of the Middle Ages; and recalled the fact that while there was growing up in them great commercial activity, a development of the arts, which made them the envy of Europe, and a building of princely mansions, which continue to be the admiration of travelers, their people were gradually losing their freedom.”
“Do you mean this as a suggestion that we are doing the like?”
“It seems that you are. You retain the forms of freedom; but so far as I can gather, there has been a considerable loss of the substance. It is true that those who rule you do not do it be means of retainers armed with swords; but they do it through regiments of men armed with voting papers who obey the word of command as loyally as did the dependents of feudal nobles, and who thus enable their leaders to override the general will and make the community submit to their exactions as effectually as their prototypes of old.
It is doubtless true that that each of your citizens votes for the candidate he chooses for this or that office, from President downwards; but his hand is guided by an agency behind which leaves him scarcely any choice. “Use your political power as we tell you, or else throw it away,” is the alternative offered to the citizen. The political machinery as it is now worked has little resemblance to that contemplated at the outset of your political life. Manifestly, those who framed your Constitution never dreamed that twenty thousand citizens would go to the poll led by a “boss.” America exemplifies at the other end of the social scale a change analogous to that which has taken place under sundry despotisms.
You know that in Japan, before the recent revolution, the divine rule, the Mikado, nominally supreme, was practically a puppet in the hands of his chief minister, the Shogun. Here it seems to me that “the sovereign people” is fast becoming a puppet which moves and speaks as wire-pullers determine.”
(Herbert Spencer, An Interview with Dr. Youmans, America Through British Eyes, Allan Nevins, editor, Oxford University Press, 1948, pp. 350-351)
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