Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

With the organization of minorities Congress becomes important, for it is in Congress that the Fathers in their wisdom provided for the expression of minorities. The Presidency, according to the argument used before in this book, dwindles to a charming embodiment of that great American negative – nationwide public opinion. The only ordinarily available positive – group opinion – finds its play in the Legislature. There will be determined upon whose shoulders the taxes will be shifted, who shall have effective rebates in freight rates, and more important still, who shall use for his group interests the government control of credit. Where these questions are being decided there public attention will concentrate. There will be the stress upon government.

As Congress becomes more important better men will be drawn into it. There will be a gain to public life in this country from emphasis upon the parliamentary side of government. As it is now only one prize in American politics is worth while and that is the Presidency. And there is no known rule by which men may attain to it. Candidates for it are chosen at random, from governing a State, from an obscure position in the Senate, from the army, it may be; in no case does it come as the certain reward of national service.

And if, as happened when Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson were made President, really able men attain the office, they may serve their country only four years, or eight years at most, and then must retire from view. In England, for example, similar men are at the head of the government or leading the opposition for the greater part of a lifetime. English public life would inevitably look richer than ours even were it not richer, for when they breed a statesman in England they use him for years. We discard him after four or eight years. We have not the system for developing statesmen and when by chance we find one we waste him.

We put our faith in the jack-of-all-trades and the amateur. We have the cheerful notion that the "crisis produces the man." This is nothing more than the justice illusion which is lodged in the minds of men, an idea, religious in its origin, that no time of trial would arrive unless the man to meet it were benignantly sent along with it, a denial of human responsibility, an encouragement to the happy-go-lucky notion that everything always comes out right in the end.

The world, in going through the greatest crisis in history has controverted this cheerful belief, for it has not produced "the man" either here or elsewhere. No one appeared big enough to prevent the war. No one appeared big enough to shorten the war. No one appeared big enough to effect a real peace. And no one appeared big enough to guide this country wisely either in the war or in the making of peace, which is still going on.

Only in parliamentary life is there enough permanency and enough opportunity for the breeding of statesmen. We shall never have them while the Presidency with its hazards and its wastes is stressed as it has been in recent years.

And Congress itself must be reformed before it will encourage and develop ability. The seniority rule, to which reference has been made before, must be abolished before talent will have its opportunity in the legislative branch.

One of the first things that aggressive minorities would be likely to do is to reach out for the important committee chairmanships. Already the seniority rule has been broken in the House, when Martin Madden was made Chairman of the Appropriations Committee instead of the senior Republican, an inadequate person from Minnesota.

And in any case the seniority rule will be severely tested in the Senate. If Senator McCumber is defeated in North Dakota and Senator Lodge is defeated or dies, Senator Borah will be in line to be chairman of the important Foreign Relations Committee. When Senator Cummins, who is sick, dies or retires and Senator Townsend is defeated, which now seems likely, Senator LaFollette will be in line to be chairman of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce. Both irregulars will then attain places of vast power unless the seniority rule is abrogated.

Thus even the machine in the Senate will soon be under pressure to do away with the absurd method of awarding mere length of service with power and place.

Minorities when they determine to take the Senate and the House out of the enfeebled grasp of incompetent regularity will inevitably find precedents already established for them.

A richer public life will come from the breakdown of the safeguards of mediocrity and from the stressing of the legislative at the expense of the executive branch of the government. Both these results are likely to follow from the effective appearance of minority interests in Congress.

CHAPTER XII

THE HAPPY ENDING

I have hesitated a long time over writing this last chapter, because of the natural desire to give to my book a happy ending.

One may write critically of America and things American, but only if one ends in a mood of hopeful confidence. There is so much youth, so much latent power here, that one cannot fail to have faith that the spirit of man will gain some enlargement from the experiment in living which we are carrying on in this country.

And even if that were not true, egotism requires us to believe that we are ever going forward to better things; for how should "the forces" have the effrontery to establish so splendid a people as ourselves upon so rich a continent, while reserving for us nothing but a commonplace career, that of one of the many peoples who have from time to time occupied the fairer regions of the earth?

At least we shall fill a place in history alongside Greece and Rome; we feel it as the imaginative young man feels in himself the stirrings of a future Shakespeare, Napoleon, or Lincoln.

The human mind refuses to conceive of so much power coming to ordinary ends. The justice illusion which men have found so indispensable a companion on their way through time requires the happy ending. As it is only right and fair that when the forces send us a crisis they should send us a man equal to it, so it is only right and fair that when they put so great a people as ourselves in the world they should prepare for it a splendid destiny.

I subscribe heartily to this doctrine. It is as convincing as any I have ever seen based on the theory which we all cheerfully accept, that man is not master of his own fate, that he does not need to be, that he had better not be, that he reaps where he does not sow, reaps, indeed, abundant crops.

In the preceding chapter, working toward the happy ending, I have brought my characters to the verge of felicity: the perfect union between minorities and majorities, which is the aim of all social order, is in sight.

I have based my minorities upon self-interest, thus introducing into our government the selfish interests banished therefrom twenty years ago. Their banishment was an achievement of virtue. Their reintroduction is the accomplishment of good sense. They are the great reality while the world thinks as it does.

Since someone somewhere, in a treatise on economics probably, penned the phrase "enlightened self-interest," we have all more or less become enamored of the idea that wisdom – enlightenment – reposes in the bosom of selfishness. Justice requires that wisdom should be somewhere. The reasoning runs like this. The world cannot get on without wisdom. Justice demands that the world should get on. Therefore there is wisdom in the world. We know it is not in ourselves or in our neighbors. We feel, therefore, that it must be in the bosom of perfect selfishness. And as we cast our eyes about us we think we know where the bosom of perfect selfishness is, and we feel assured.

Sometimes, of course, we place it in the heads of all mankind, it being a thing that no one man has and no few men have, but which is one of those mysterious properties of the aggregate which does not inhere in the individuals composing the aggregate; a sort of colloidal element that comes from shaking men up together, though all are without it before the mixing and shaking.

Some would place it, as Mr. Wilson seems to in a famous passage on minorities, in the breasts of the enlightened few. When the few disagreed with him, he threw them and their wisdom in jail.

But wherever it is, it is sure to be found in a system which preserved the old parties representing the general mind of the country along with the new vertical political organizations, representing the minorities, thrusting up like volcanoes upon the placid plane of politics that Mr. Harding once delighted to survey.

You have in this combination the spontaneous wisdom of the masses, if that is where wisdom generates. You have the wisdom of the few, if you believe in impregnation from above, and you have the wisdom of selfishness, if you believe as most of us do in the enlightenment of self-interest. And no one ever located wisdom anywhere else than in these three places, for the first, as I might easily demonstrate, is the modern democratic name for the wisdom of God; the second is the wisdom of men; and the third is the wisdom of the serpent; beside which there are no other wisdoms.

This you will admit is moving rapidly and without reserve toward the happy ending. But I think every writer of a novel has stuck his tongue in his cheek as he wrote those benedictory words, "And they lived happy ever after." And I stick my tongue in my cheek as I think of Mr. Gray Silver, the effective director of the farmers' vertical political trust sitting in the Senate, leading it perhaps in place of Senator Lodge of Massachusetts.

To Mr. Lodge's petulant, imperious gesture – the sharp handclap for the pages – would succeed Mr. Silver's fixing gesture, that of a country merchant smoothing out a piece of silk before a customer at a counter. Mr. Silver as he talks performs one constant motion, a gentle slow moving of both hands horizontally, palms down.

Mr. Silver is a lobbyist with the powers of a dictator, or a dictator with the habits of a lobbyist, whichever way you wish to look at it. A former farmer, member of the West Virginia legislature, representative of farm organizations at Washington, he rules the Senate with more power than Mr. Lodge has or Mr. Harding has, but always with the gentle touch of a general-storekeeper, spreading the wrinkles out of a yard of satin.

But even this little lobbyist has a certain definiteness which public men generally lack. His feet are firmly placed upon reality. He speaks for a solid body of opinion. He is a positive rather than a negative force. He represents a fairly united minority which knows what it wants, and men are strong or weak according as they are or are not spokesmen of a cause; and the selfish interest of a group easily takes on the pious aspect of a cause.

It is always better to deal with principals than with agents. Gray Silver, Colonel John H. Taylor, the Apollo of the soldiers' bonus lobby, perfect ladies' man in appearance, who is full of zeal also for a cause, that of those who did not make money out of the war and who should in common justice make it all the rest of their lives out of the peace, and Wayne B. Wheeler, the fanatic leader of the drys, are all more real men than those who do their bidding in the Senate and the House.

No, if I put my tongue in my cheek as I write the words "lived happy ever after," it is because I see only a measure of improvement in the freeing of men from existing political conventions which will come from the effective emergence of minorities. A richer public life will result from increased vitality of the legislative branch. But a rich public life, no; for that requires men. You cannot fashion it out of Lodges, Watsons, Curtises, Gillettes, Mondells, Hardings, Hugheses, and Hoovers, or even Gray Silvers, Taylors, or Wheelers.

And we do not breed men in this country. If the test of a civilization is an unusually high average of national comfort, achieved in a land of unparalleled resources, whose exploitation was cut off from interruption by foreign enemies, then this experiment in living which we have been conducting in America has been a great success; if it is a further freeing of the human spirit, such as finds its expression in the rare individuals who make up the bright spots in all past human history, then its success is still to be achieved.

Many blame the dullness and general averageness which afflicts us upon democracy. There is democracy and there is timidity and stupidity; there is the appeal to low intelligence; the compulsion to be a best seller rests upon us all. Post hoc propter hoc.

I am going to blame it upon the mistake Euclid made in his theorem about two parallel lines. This was an error of Euclid's, modern mathematics proves, unless you assume space to be infinite. Having committed ourselves to Euclid, we committed ourselves to a space that was infinite. Space being regarded as infinite, man was little, relatively.

Euclid having made his mistake about the parallels, it followed inevitably that Mr. Harding should be little.

I use Mr. Harding only by way of illustration. You may fill any other name you like of the Washington gallery into that statement of inevitability and do it no violence. And this very interchangeability of names suggests that you must go further back than democracy to find the cause of today's sterility.

Besides, we have had infinite space, in our minds; but have we ever had democracy there? De Gourmont writes that no religion ever dies, but it rather lives on in its successor. Similarly, no form of government ever dies; it survives in its successor. A nation does not become a democracy by writing on a bit of paper, "resolved that we are a democracy, with a government consisting of executive, legislative, and judicial branches chosen by majority vote."

Government, however organized, is what exists in the minds of the people, and in that mind is stored up a dozen superstitions, handed down from primitive days, gathering force from time to time as new names are given to them and new "scientific" bases are found for them.

We laugh at the divine right of kings, but we could not accept self-government without bestowing on it an element of divinity. We have the divine right of Public Opinion. We can hardly print these words without the reverence of capital letters. The founders of modern democracy knew there could be no government without a miraculous quality. Formerly one mere man by virtue of ruling became something divine. The miracle grew difficult to swallow. You could regard this one man and see that he was a fool and had too many mistresses. He was the least divine-looking thing that could be imagined. Very well then, put the divine quality into something remote. All men by virtue of ruling themselves became divine.

An immense inertia develops between theoretical self-government and the practical reluctance of humanity to be governed by anything short of the heavenly hosts. I don't know whether this reluctance springs from racial modesty, the feeling that man is not good enough to govern himself, or from racial egotism, the belief that nothing is too good to govern him; but it is a great reality. The little men at Washington are will-less in the conflict.

To overcome this inertia, minorities whose interests cannot wait upon the slow benevolent processes of determinism or upon the divine rightness of public opinion, form to prod the constitutional organs of government into action. Mr. Gray Silver, the silk smoother, and Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler, the Puritan fanatic, are both just as much parts of the government as is Mr. Harding. So, too, is every one of the hundred and more lobbies which issue publicity at Washington. We recognize this plurality of our institutions in our common speech. We refer habitually to the "invisible government," to "government by business," to "party government," to "government by public opinion." We have little but inertia, except as outside pressure is applied to it.

The little men at Washington live in all this confusion of an excessively plural government. They are pushed hither and yon by all these forces, organized and unorganized, mental and physical, real and imaginary, that inhibit and impel self-government. They lean heavily upon parties only to find parties bending beneath their weight. They yield to blocs and lobbies. They watch publicity and put out their own publicity to counteract it.

Like the ministers of crowned fools, they gull the present embodiment of divine right and cringe before it. They are everything but the effective realization of a democratic will.

All this sounds as if I were getting far from my happy ending, and you begin to see me asking the old question, "Is democracy a failure?" But no, it is too soon to ask it. Wait a thousand years until democracy has had a real chance. A revolution – no really optimistic prognosis can be written which does not have the world revolution in it – a revolution will have to take place in men's minds before this is a democracy.

I would absolve myself from the taboo of this word. Property is a grand form of clothes. A property revolution, such as the Socialists recommend, would be little more important in setting men's minds free for self-government, than would putting women in trousers be in setting women's minds free for the achievement of sex equality.

Some German – I think it was Spengler – writing about some "Niedergang," I think it was of western civilization – all Germans like to write about Niedergangs – demonstrated that every new civilization starts with a new theory of the universe, of space and time. That is, it starts with a real revolution.

Well, then, here is the true happy ending; Einstein is giving us a new theory of the universe, knocking the mathematical props from under infinity, teaching us that man largely fashions the world out of his own mind.

Man again tends to become what the old Greek radical called him, "The measure of all things." Once he is, and it will take a long time for him to admit that he is, there may be a real chance for democracy and for the emergence of great individuals, who are after all the best evidence of civilization.

You see the happy ending is Einstein and not the farm bloc.

Meanwhile we have the farm bloc, one sign of vitality amid much deadness, a reassertion of the principle which the Fathers of the Constitution held, that there must be room for the play of minorities in our political system.