Suchergebnisse

Why do some American citizens fail to vote in any election? Why do others limit their voting to contests in which a president is chosen? And of those who vote, why do a controlling number sometimes support candidate B instead of A? Candidate A may be of unquestioned honesty, superior brains, and broader and more significant experience. Any election provides examples of this sort of thing, and any reader can cite other illustrations from his own observation of recent or not so recent elections.

Governor Pinchot's appointment of followers of two powerful politicians to the Philadelphia magistracy came at a time when the entire magisterial system was facing the stiffest criticism from the higher courts, the state bar association, and the more alert lay opinion that it has faced since Magistrate Perri was convicted of extortion and bribery in 1929. Philadelphia magistrates from time immemorial have been charged with partisanship, ignorance, and corruption; and the temper of the present times has begun actively and militantly to react against these shortcomings of a judicial system that is steeped in politics rather than pervaded with a spirit of justice.

"They asked me my party; I told them Republican. That's Sam Lit's party, ain't it?" The speaker was a small, dark-visaged young man. He had addressed his question to Mr. Lit's partner on the ward committee in the first ward. It was the night of registration day, and the young Italian had just registered. Not only were the genius of the Republican party, its traditional issues, and the great leaders from Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Hoover obliterated, or non-existent, to him, but the important local issues of the impending (1931) mayoralty and councilmanic campaigns as well. The one thing in the party process that mattered was the personality of Sam Lit, the ward committeeman. This potential voter is one of the thousands in America's third city that illustrate the general statement: "We cannot be much interested in, or moved by, the things we do not see. Of public affairs, each of us sees very little, and therefore they remain dull and unappetizing until somebody with the makings of an artist has translated them into a moving picture. …Being flesh and blood, we will not feed on words and names and grey theory."