'Without Gloves', 'Without Grease', 'The Great Game of Politics' and 'Political Behavior' by Frank R Kent
Why read Frank Kent? He worked with Mencken on the Baltimore Sun, wrote in Mencken's 'American Mercury', did the standard book on practical politics of the 1920's-30's, 'The Great Game of Politics', had a column in Time magazine till he died in the 1950's. His best was written in the twenties and thirties and he never claimed to write for all time.
Politicians paraphrased him. When FDR spoke against 'Fat Cats', I thought he was talking about rich people generally. In Frank Kent 'Fat Cat' is a term of art for
'Men of large means, who having reached middle age, having achieved success in finance or business and there being no further sense in the mere piling up of millions, develop a yearning for some sort of public honor or prestige.
...Such men are known in political circles as 'Fat Cats and they are as welcome in the organization as flowers in May. This can be accepted as fact- any 'Fat Cat' able and willing to spend as much as necessary can get what he want in state politics, provided he has not exercised the excessively bad judgment of picking a party hopelessly in the minority in his state. In other words, while under normal circumstances the nominations for higher offices go to the men who have come up the escalator, when a 'Fat Cat' appears on the horizon, there is a rush to take him'.
So FDR was partly attacking the rich as such and partly attacking rich men who wanted to get into politics, say Orange Hitler 2015.
When Churchill said 'Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others', he was paraphrasing Frank Kent's 'Machine Politics is the worst form of government except all the others'.
In 1923 when Kent wrote 'The Great Game of Politics', there were States Rights D from the Southland, big city D like Tammany, Progressive R like Teddy Roosevelt, and machine city R. Reservation Indians, Southern blacks, new immigrants and felons had no vote.
Before reading Kent, I thought FDR was a big government D from the start. In Kent, FRD won 1932 as a small government States Rights Democrat against the spendy busybody big government Hoover. FDR started out firing 100K R federal employees, then switched gears, hired 500K D federal employees and got millions of voters taking federal money for declaring loyalty to D FDR. This was the death of the old R machine, which was heavily dependent on Federal patronage- they had to turn into States Rights supporters, their enemies since the Civil War. Also, since Hoover disliked black people and told them so, the black vote had kind of moved to D in 1932. Even before Hoover, R had been losing black support, mostly because of R white politicoes in the South.
'The thing that keeps him [the black voter] out, as much as anything else, is the attitude of the white R politicians in those [Southern] states. These men all hold Federal offices. They are not in politics for their health. They are in it solely and entirely for the federal patronage. It is a business for them. Distinctly it is not their interest to build up a virile, fighting R party in these [southern] states. Such a party would develop competition for control and candidates for their jobs. That is the last thing that they want.'
As it became clear that FDR actually wanted black voters enough to support black people getting federal jobs, the black vote moved heavily D, though I think it was still competitive until Affirmative Action.
But these are sidelines for Kent. His main point is that machine politics is is the fault of voters not voting in primaries, and that bad as machine politics is it's still better than anything else in the real world so far. Again, he expects high levels of humbug in all political speech, -bad, but better than no free speech:
'Primaries are really the key to politics. There is no way for party candidates to get on the general ballot except through the primaries. Control of that gate in any community means control of the political situation in that community... The potent thing about these machine men is that they vote .. But the overwhelmingly big thing is that they are primary-election voters, not just general-election voters.
. . .It is an undeniable fact that, all over the country, the great bulk of men and women who do vote are practically dragged to the polls by the machine workers, and it is a good thing for the individual communities and the country as a whole that this is true. If the machines did not work and pull and haul to get enough voters out in the primaries to put over the machine candidates, the present state of indifference and ignorance of the average citizen would permit out candidates to be be chosen for us by the freaks and fanatics who abound in every community, and are constantly and zealously stirred to political activity in behalf of their half-baked schemes for saving the world.'
'Humbuggery in Every Campaign' and 'Why the Newspapers do not print all the facts' are chapter headings in Kent.
'Men do not blurt out everything in their souls when dealing with other men. It would be a terrible world if they did. We are all humbugs to a certain extent. The difference is that when a man -even the best and highest types we have- enters public life and begins to seek votes, he is forced into a position where he must humbug a great deal more than in private life. He is faced with the necessity of making a favorable impression upon a large number of widely scattered, highly diversified groups of voters, notoriously swayed by prejudice, who are being fished for from every conceivable angle by his opponent. He has to watch his step with the utmost care. He has to hide facts, in themselves harmless, and he has to guard and weigh his words on the minor issues and on matters of no real importance, for fear a blast from the opposing camp that will scatter his carefully herded voters like a covey of partridges at the sound of a gun. Moreover, he is forced to fit his public views and utterances into the prejudices of the elements back of him and, also, to some extent at least, into the notions of the men who have put up the money for his campaign.'
Kent wrote when D and R were both about even. Things changed when FDR got a huge chunk of voters on federal patronage, and since Lyndon Johnson doubled down R has been a shadow of a party. If a controlled press and fifty million ringers give us a one party state things will change again.