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319 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1958)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0319 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD

It is part of the genius of the American people that they are able to work their
political and governmental institutions long after the conditions which prompted
them have ceased to exist. Except for the increase in size, the form of the Ameri-
can government is not very different today from that of Washington's first ad-
ministration. The difference, and it is vast, arises less from changes in form than
from changes in the social milieu in which our federal republic operates. While
some observers see in this resistance to change a weakness which may be fatal, it
can hardly be said that the American people as a whole are either dissatisfied with
their government or wish to change it radically.
There are many reasons explaining this equanimity with which Americans view
their government. One of them is the responsiveness which that government has
shown to the wishes and demands of the people themselves. To a certain extent
the political parties have contributed to this responsiveness. Far more important,
though, have been the pressure groups and lobbies, the mass activity of people act-
ing under leadership in the area of policy formation. Unlike the parties, which are
election oriented, the pressure groups concentrate their attention for the most part
on policy, working in, through, and with the political parties when possible, at
arm's length from them when necessary. Exploiting the joining tendency of Ameri-
cans, which De Tocqueville remarked on over a century ago, these voluntary group-
ings of citizens have coalesced around a variety of interests-sectional and regional,
economic and professional, ethnic, religious, and social, until today it is the rare
citizen who is not potentially at least a member of some group. As W. M. Kip-
linger remarked some years ago, if you are not a member of one or two or more
pressure groups, then you are not a very active citizen.
Between Adam Smith's invisible hand and our well-developed system of lobbies
and pressure groups there is a tempting analogy. If the former was the means of
regulating the market, the latter is a means of regulating society. There are other
means of social regulation, too-the family, organized religion, custom and habit,
as well as law, government, and public opinion. But one of the main causes of
the increased regulatory role of government in society is the system of pressure
groups which has developed alongside the formal agencies of government.
There was a time when pressure groups were invisible, venal, and worked under
cover. The old lobby, as E. P. Herring described it thirty years ago, has passed
away, a victim of the muckrakers of Theodore Roosevelt's era, among other things.
And if a conspiracy of silence ofttimes even now seems to muffle their operations,
periodic disclosures of excessive lobbying in Congress, in the regulatory agencies,
in the budget-making process, in the Pentagon, remind the people of the real policy-
determining forces in their government. While the methods of the old lobby
have not been completely abandoned, the new lobby is everywhere respected, ac-
cepted, and causes few editorial writers to thunder. It is not difficult to discover
the reasons-active citizens are themselves caught up in the system while the pas-
sive citizen, if he pays any attention to it at all, sees nothing unusual in it.
This volume deals mainly with American pressure politics. It describes pressure
groups in government-in the Congress, in the bureaucracy, in the administration
of justice. It deals with what are called the big three of pressure politics-man-
lx

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