Plain Talk on Recall

A PLAIN TALK ABOUT

THE RECALL

WHAT IT MEANS AS APPLIED IN A COMMON-SENSE WHAT TO THE

BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT

BY FRANK A. MUNSEY

WHAT is the recall, which is now provoking so wide and heated a discussion from one end of this country to the other ? How many of us actually know what it means in kindergarten simplicity ?

I ask these questions because of a very confused idea of the recall that I find among my friends and acquaintances and the general public, and the horror with which it is commonly regarded.

The discussion of the recall is not con. fined to the Republican party alone. It is nation-wide, and has its grip on the Democratic party and on all voters of whatever political faith.

The recall is a comparatively new idea in American politics, though it has been in force for several years in some of our far Western States. Is it so dreadful and dangerous a thing as it is pictured, and are the people who contend for it as mad as those who oppose it consider them?

Let us see what it is like. Every woman who employs a cook practices the recall. All women who have servants practice the recall, and always have practiced it with regard to their servants.

No woman who manages her home wisely and well would retain a cook in her employ for very long if that cook could not produce satisfactory food for the table, or if she were dishonest, intemperate, or in any way incapable. To discharge this inefficient cook is to recall her -- nothing more, nothing less.

Every man who employs other men practice the recall, and all employers in all time have practiced the recall. No man is clever enough to select with unerring certainty the right man in every case for a particular job. When he finds he has made a mistake, what does he do? Does he let the inefficient employee remain on the job, and let the job go to pieces, or does he recall the man and put some one else on the job who will measure up to it and can handle it successfully?

The answer is too plain to necessitate any considerable discussion. The fact is that, under conditions like these, either the incapable man is recalled, or the head of the house is recalled. The recall of the head of the house may be through the bankruptcy courts, or through some other less drastic method of being driven out of business. One or the other is sure to happen.

This is just what has been going on for centuries in the industrial and business world, and just what will go on throughout time. It applies alike in all phases of industry and activity? applies on the farm as well as in the counting-room, applies in railroading and shipping, in manufactures, in banking, in commerce, in the educational world, and in the religious world.

There is no place under the sun where it does not apply outside of governmental jobs, and even here it has always been applied to some extent, though in a roundabout and less efficient way. Its application in official and political life is shown in the recall of an incapable or morally unsound man at the expiration of the term for which he was elected. He fails of reelection, and this is, in effect, the recall.

But here we find a difference between official and private or corporate business. In either of the latter, a wise and capable management applies the recall immediately to the inefficient man, as soon as his inefficiency has been clearly demonstrated. The employer does not wait two or three or half a dozen years, till a term expires, as is the case in politics.

If a contract has been made between a business house and an employee, the management does not let the job suffer because of the contract in force. It makes the best compromise it can, places the man on some other work, or lets him go altogether. Anything is better and cheaper than destroying the job for the sake of getting something out of the contract.

In most business concerns, a contract for any specified time between employer and employee is avoided, chiefly for the reason that the employer cannot possibly be sure that the man will work out satisfactorily in the particular place for which he is engaged.

What the advocates of the recall are seeking to accomplish is to bring the business of town, county, municipality, State, and nation up to the same standard of efficiency as that of a well-managed business institution. There is, and can be, no disagreement on the desirability of this result.

Last fall I had an interesting talk with the Governor of Oregon, a State where the recall has been in force for a considerable. time. He told me, in a word that the system had very greatly increased the efficiency of the public service, and that it has proved a wise and thoroughly practicable measure.

Moreover, it is a fact that the charters of more than one hundred and fifty cities, scattered through about half of the States, provide for their government under the commission plan, of which the recall is a part. In these cities, all the elective officers are subject to recall by the voters at any time.

The recall is a very important, if not essential, feature of the commission plan of city government. Under this system, a few officials are elected and v vested with great powers. Without the recall, it would be extremely dangerous to give such tremendous scope to a few men.

It is widely objected to the recall that in a community enjoying the privilege of discharging its elective officials at will there would be continual turmoil because some faction would be busy all the time trying to get somebody recalled from office. The experience of commission - governed cities proves quite the contrary. The recall has seldom been invoked. The very fact that public officials know such a power to be in the hands of the people makes them the more concerned to shape their course with reference to gaining and holding the approval of the people.

The recall in the business world is nothing new. It has been with us since man began the employment of man, and will be with us so long as man employs man. True, we have not known the practice as the recall. We have called it by another name we have " discharged," not " recalled " men. Every one knows what it means to discharge a person; no one has known, until comparatively recently, what it means to recall a person. And yet the two are one and the same thing. The discharge is applied to household servants, to farm-hands, to employees in manufacturing establishments, to banking, to railroading, to shipping, to business generally, and is in force everywhere except in the public service.

The contention of those favoring the recall is that it should apply to public servants as well as to private and corporate interests. There is nothing unreasonable or dangerous in this. It would seem to be one hundred per cent common sense, all common sense.

' Impeachment, as a practical measure, is a failure. It does not furnish the necessary relief. It has proved to be unworkable. As a result, it is rarely brought into use— never, indeed, except in cases of extreme disloyalty, or the grossest kind of unfitness. To be impeached, a man must be so much worse than the worst of our officials and public servants that impeachment finds almost no victims.

Moreover, impeachment damns a man for life. It brands him as so worthless or so vile a creature that he never has a chance again. It makes him an outcast beyond the pale of decency.

To be recalled, on the other hand, does not by any means utterly damn a man. It simply implies that he has failed to make good on the particular job on which he had been tried out.

There are many men liable to the recall, and who should properly be recalled; but there are very few to whom impeachment could be successfully applied, or wisely or humanely applied. The recall is a workable, practical, common - sense, just measure, while impeachment is an utter failure.

In this discussion I have been considering the recall as applied to public life and public service, entirely apart from the judicial bench. In what I have said I have in no sense had in mind our judiciary.

The intense feeling over the recall, it seems to me, is mainly due to a total misunderstanding on the part of the general public as to the scope and intent of its application. Lawyers, as a class, business men generally, and all the ultraconservatives, are jumping clean over the vast expanse to which the system would be applied, if it were adopted, and are talking only of the recall of the judiciary, for which few, except in the Far West, are contending.

Mr. Roosevelt distinctly said, in his speech at Carnegie Hall, that he did not advocate the recall of judges. He argued for the recall of a certain class of decisions namely, those having to do with social and industrial problems; but he did not wish the recall to apply to decisions in criminal cases, or in cases involving a difference between man and man.

The accentuated difference of opinion between the advocates and the opponents of the recall is, I am convinced, largely due to this error in regarding it as applying to the judiciary, instead of to the other branches of the government service, to which it should be limited, at least until we know a good deal more about its outworking than we know now.

One cannot compass a mountain in a single step. The summit is gained more surely by a steady, persistent upward tread than by frantic leaps and bounds.

Ten years hence we may have a different view of the recall than we now have. It isn't wise to try to settle these problems of statesmanship too far in the perspective. As we draw closer to them, we can better judge what is or is not advisable.

This discussion is not meant to favor or oppose Mr. Roosevelt or to favor or oppose Mr. Taft. The recall is one of the most discussed themes in the world at this time, so it very properly commands a place as a timely subject in MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE. The present article may, and I hope will, throw some light on the recall, a light that will pierce the fog surrounding the issue.