Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

Coming into power at such a moment, possessing such a temperament, representing such a popular movement, Mr. Wilson readily became the most perfect example of the concentrated executive that we have yet had. But even his one man government was attacked from the outset. His personality proved repellent. An intellectual is so unfamiliar an object in America as to seem almost a monstrosity, and his ascendancy would not have lasted beyond two years if the war had not come.

War is the other great cause that leads to autocracy in popular governments. In times of common danger we revert to the herd with the single leadership. We resort to the only form of rule of which we have any experience in our daily lives, the only form in which the race has yet developed any lasting faith. From the time when war threatened, with the invasion of Belgium, till the time when it ended with the armistice, Mr. Wilson became what any President may become under like circumstances, what Mr. Wilson's temperament especially fitted him to become – an absolute dictator.

When we think of the powerful executive as the natural development of the American system, imparting that unity to our government which the makers of the Constitution in their zeal for checks and balances refused to give it, we are over-impressed by the phenomena of Roosevelt and Wilson and do not make sufficient allowances for the conditions which made their power inevitable. So impossible is it for authority to remain permanently in the hands of the executive that we are now witnessing its spontaneous movement away from the White House – toward, well for the moment I should say, toward nowhere.

A distinguished alienist tells me that the desire for power over your fellow man is an unmistakable sign of paranoia, not necessarily paranoia amounting to insanity, but the same kind of paranoia which makes history amusing. If that is true, then we are in an era of perfect sanity at Washington. No one, no one, in the White House, in the Capitol, in Wall Street, the capitol of business, or back among the home folks, as far as I can learn, wants power – and responsibility.

The picture I have drawn, quoting a bright young observer at the capital of what happens when Business arrives in Washington is the picture of our whole present national political organization. "A bunch of tall-hatted fat boys comes. The governmental nose is thrust out awaiting the guiding hand. The guiding hand is put unostentatiously behind the back." It is the same when the organ of leading is extended from the White House for the hand of leadership at the Capitol, or, as happens, as often the organ of leading at the Capitol awaits the hand of leadership at the White House.

Power is in transition and we do much inconsistent thinking about where it is and where it should be. We deliberately elected a weak executive, to retrieve the blessed days of McKinley, the old equilibrium and co-ordination of the equal and co-ordinate branches of our government. Yet when things go badly in Congress, as they mostly do, the critics exclaim that the President should be firm and "assert his authority" on the hill. Mr. Harding himself said, over and over again, "This is no one man job at Washington." Yet we read that his face assumes a "determined expression" – I have myself never seen it – and he sends for the leaders in Congress.

We haven't executive domination and we haven't anything in its place. We voted to go back to the nineties, but we haven't got there. There is no Mark Hanna speaking for business and for party to make the system work. We have the willessness of the blessed days in our National Heartbreak House, but we haven't the will somewhere else to act and direct. Not even seven million majority is enough to bring back the past. In spite of "landslides" the course is always forward, and I use "forward" not in the necessarily optimistic sense of those who were once so sure of Progress.

The initiative, so far as there is any, has passed to Congress.

And so far as I can see, it is likely to remain with Congress, until some new turn of events brings us back the strong executive. For, after all, Congress chose Mr. Harding. The Senators picked him at Chicago. With party bosses gone, they are about all that remains of the party, and there is no reason why they should not go on naming Presidents. And the power of presidents will not rise much above its source.

The autocratic President goes inevitably the way its prototype the autocrat went. The loins that produce them are sufficiently fertile. Primogeniture brought forth feeble kings. The nominating system called on for a great man every four years yields many feeble ones. There will be many Hardings to one Roosevelt or Wilson. Party government which might reinforce a feeble president is weak. Government by business has lost its confidence and authority. The great discovery of the first decade of this century for making this government of ours work is already in the discard.

So at a critical moment when government by Progress and government by business have broken down, government by one man at Washington has also gone. The war made the autocratic executive in the person of Mr. Wilson intolerable. It also destroyed the basis for national concentration upon the executive.

We need a new picture in our heads of what government should be, what its limits should be when it faces such vital problems as interfering with God's time, and where its authority should center. We have none.

CHAPTER V

LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM – IN THE BOSOM OF THÉRÈSE

We now pursue further the search for authority. We shall surely find "divine right" somewhere, now that business has lost it. Someone certainly has the final word about the pictures to put in our heads. Ah! there is the public, the imputation of a miraculous quality to whose opinion has a curious history.

Everybody agrees that we owe most of the pleasant illusions upon which this democracy of ours is based to Rousseau. This Swiss sentimentalist about humanity, whose ideas have so profoundly affected the history of the last century and a half, was a convinced believer that perfect good sense resided in the bosom of the natural man, the man "born free and equal" of our Declaration of Independence.

Rousseau could find this simple wisdom which was his delight in the most unexpected places. He describes his mistress Thérèse with whom he lived many happy years: "Her mind is what nature has made it; cultivation is without effect. I do not blush to avow that she has never known how to read, although she writes passably. When I went to live in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs I had opposite my windows a clock face on which I tried during several months to teach her to tell time. She can scarcely do it even now. She has never known in their order the twelve months of the year, and she does not know a single figure in spite of all the pains I have taken to explain them to her… But this person, so limited and, if you wish, so stupid, has excellent judgment on occasions of difficulty. Often in my troubles she has seen what I did not see myself; she has given me the best advice to follow. She has pulled me out of dangers into which I rushed blindly… The heart of my Thérèse was the heart of an angel. (Le cœur de ma Thérèse était celui d'un ange.)"

It would be amusing to trace our belief in the good sense of man, in the wisdom and justice of public opinion, back to a philosopher's delight in a female moron; but that would be too great a paradox for a serious discussion of today's crisis in popular government. The truth probably is that Rousseau reached a priori the conclusions about the sound sense of the simple and natural man that captivated a society so simple and natural as our own was in the eighteenth century, and then stumbled upon such convincing evidence in the person of Thérèse that he had to keep it by him all the rest of his days.

And where after all has there been found any better evidence for our belief in the soundness and justice of public opinion than was furnished by the unlettered and unteachable Thérèse, who had "le cœur d'un ange" and "devant les dames du plus haut rang, devant les grands et les princes, ses sentiments, son bon sens, ses réponses et sa conduite lui out tiré l'estime universelle"?

To accept the doctrine of the rightness of public opinion you must believe that there resides in every man, even in the most unpromising man, of the mental level of Thérèse, "si bornée et, si l'on veut, si stupide," the capacity to be, like her, "d'un conseil excellent dans les occasions difficiles."

The doctrine of the rightness of public opinion, however, never required proof. It was a political necessity. The world at the time when modern democracies had their birth accepted government only because it rested upon divine right. The government of men by mere men has always been intolerable.

The new democracies which were to take the place of the old kingdoms had to have some sanction other than the suffrages of the people. Room had to be found in them somewhere for divine right. Those who established the modern system could never have sold self-government to the people as self government. There had to be some miracle about it, something supernatural, like that marvel which turned a mere man into a King and gave him that power of healing by touch which was exercised in Galilee, so that the laying on of his hands cured the king's evil.

The miracle was accomplished somewhere in the process through which your opinion and my opinion and Thérèse's opinion became public opinion. Just as the anointment or the coronation turned a mere human being by a miracle into the chosen of God ruling by divine right, so by some transmutation which does not take place before the eyes, mere human opinion becomes itself the choice of God, ruling by divine right.

If you doubt that the founders of modern democracy had to carry over into their systems the old illusions about divine right, read what Thomas Jefferson, more or less a free thinker, quoted by Mr. Walter Lippmann in his Public Opinion, has to say about the divine basis for popular government: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire which might otherwise escape from the earth."

That "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" was public opinion. Nothing was lost of the sanctions of monarchic government when we changed to popular government.

Since the days of Jefferson we have ceased to be an agricultural people and we can no longer derive the authority of our government from the Rousseauist notion that the farmer, being near to nature, thrusting his hands into the soil, was the choice of God and ruled by a kind of divine right. But "aucune réligion n'est jamais morte, ni ne mourra jamais."

Let us examine the doctrine of Jefferson. Public opinion ruled by divine right because, in this country and in his day, it was the opinion of farmers, who were "the chosen people of God whose breasts He has made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

When we ceased to be a nation of farmers did we abandon the basis of our government in divine right? Not in the least. We broadened our ground to cover the added elements of the community and went along further with Rousseau than Jefferson had need to do; we said that the breasts of all men "He has made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." The art of uncovering their substantial and genuine virtue, this quality in Thérèse which drew down upon her universal esteem for her good sense and her sound sentiments, is the art of arriving at public opinion.

The legend of public opinion is thus accounted for; first, you will observe, it was politically necessary to assert the inspiration of public opinion, for divine right had to reside somewhere. Second, in a democracy the press and public men had to flatter the mass of voters and readers by declaring on every possible occasion that wisdom reposed in their breasts. And third, the public mind differed so from the ordinary thinking mind that, to put its conclusions in a favorable light, men had to assume some supernatural quality, some divine "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

The public did not think, in the ordinary sense, yet its decisions were more right than the carefully elaborated decisions of those who did think; the wonder of Thérèse over again, who "si bornée et si stupide" gave such excellent advice on difficult occasions. No processes by which results were reached could be perceived by the trained mind. The mystery of the public mind was as great as the mystery of intuitions is to the logical or the mystery of poetry is to the prosaic. Clearly, a miracle; clearly, a deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

When modern democracy got its start, kings by their folly had shaken faith in their divine right. In a similar way at this moment, public opinion by its excesses has made men question whether any "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" has been placed in human breasts upon which states may rely for justice and wisdom.

Walter Lippmann's book, Public Opinion, with its destructive analysis of the public mind, is a symptom of those doubts with which the war has left us. The years from 1914 on furnished the most perfect exhibition of public opinion and its workings that the world has ever seen. You saw on a grand scale its miraculous capacity for instant formation and, if you are sufficiently detached now, you look back and doubt whether what was revealed was a "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

Both sides to the conflict resembled nothing so much as prehistoric tribes meeting accidentally in the night and, precipitated into panic, fighting in the belief that each was being attacked by the other.

Public opinion in France and England felt that the war was defensive. Public opinion in Germany was equally sure that Germany was only defending herself. Either the German Thérèse or the French Thérèse and the English Thérèse and the American Thérèse must have been wrong. The fight could not have been defensive on both sides. And if Thérèse is ever so wrong as this, the whole case of the divine rightness of public opinion falls.

And not only do we know that some Thérèse, perhaps all the Thérèses, made a mistake in this instance, but we have come to feel that whenever danger arises Thérèse is inevitably wrong; her mind, such as it is, closes up and she fails to show those sentiments and that bon sens which drew down the applause of the princes and the persons du haut rang who have been praising the deposit of virtue that she carries in her breast.

We have watched the course of Thérèse confronted by other and smaller fears since the close of the war, and we have reached the conclusion that Thérèse always reacts a certain way. In that large range of situations which may be artfully presented to her simple mind as perils she is no longer d'un conseil excellent; her heart d'un ange hardens; she abandons her babies quite unfeelingly at the hospital of the Nouveaux Nés.

Therefore you do not reach the "deposit for virtue" by simply employing an intelligence unencumbered by mental processes. You must at least assure that intelligence against fear, a serious limitation upon the doctrine of an infallible public opinion.

Students of public opinion will for a long time go back to the period of the war for their materials. Opinion was then unmistakable. The methods by which it was formed were clear. In times of great peril men throw off their polite disguises and are frank; so too are institutions.

The making of opinion became an official function in which we all co-operated. We bound ourselves voluntarily not to publish and not to regard any information inconsistent with the state of mind which it was deemed expedient to create and maintain. We probably always in the forming of opinion tacitly impose voluntary censorships, but they are so habitual, so unconscious, so covered with traditional hypocrisy, that it is difficult to bring them into the light.

Conscious self-deception to the good end of keeping ourselves united and determined was during the war a great virtue. Playing upon prejudice, rousing the depths of the primitive mind in man, was a laudable act of patriotism.

What happened then was only an exaggeration of what happens all the time, for war makes no new contributions to the art of self-government. In war we merely throw off the restraints of peace and impose others which operate in the reverse direction. In peace we are shamefaced about direct killing; in war we brag of it. In peace we are shamefaced about manufacturing public opinion; in war it is our patriotic duty.

No, war has made us rather doubtful about Thérèse. After all Rousseau was a prejudiced witness. When you take to your bosom a lady who cannot learn to tell time by the clock, you have to make out a case for her – or for yourself. When like Jefferson and his successors you take to your bosom the public, you have to make out a case for it, for the deposit for substantial and genuine virtue that you rely upon.

The war revealed at once the immense power and the immense dangers of public opinion when its full force is aroused and one hundred million people come to think – thinking is not the word – to feel, as one man. Minorities, the great corrective in democracy, disappeared. They had their choice of going to jail or bowing to the general will.

Few realized this alternative, so irresistible was the mob impulse, awakened by the sense of common danger, even to individuals ordinarily capable of maintaining their detachment. The primitive instinct of self-preservation subdued all capacity for independent thinking, so that one who has ordinarily the habit of making up his own mind, a most difficult habit to maintain in modern society, can not look back on himself during the war without a sense of shame. Romain Rolland, in Clérambeault, pictures the devastating effect of public opinion at its mightiest upon the individual conscience.

The mechanism by which this state of mind was created was unconcealed. The government reserved to itself the right to suppress truth or to put out untruth for the common good. Private organizations of endless number co-operated to this laudable end. The press submitted itself to a voluntary censorship, passing the responsibility for what it printed over to society whose general end of maintaining unity for the real or imaginary necessities of self-defense it served. A lynch law of opinion was established by common consent.

What went on during the war goes on, though less openly and less formidably, all of the time. Everyone realizes the immense power of public opinion. Many seek to direct its formation. The government conducts all of the time a vast propaganda, always with a certain favor of the press.

We submit always to a certain voluntary censorship, not so conscious as that which existed during the war but none the less real. We receive upon the whole the information which is good for us to receive. We are all a little afraid of public opinion, its tyranny, its excesses, its blind tendencies. We do not find it, as Jefferson thought we should, a "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue," and we are all more or less consciously trying to make it one; that is the process of rendering modern democracy workable; but we may not be all unprejudiced about what the deposit should be or scrupulous about the means of improving it.

The part which the press plays in this process is peculiar. When editors or correspondents meet together the speaker addresses them invariably as, "You makers of public opinion," but the last responsibility which journalism cares to assume is the making of public opinion.

This disinclination began with the exclusion of the editor's opinion from the news columns. Gradually, it extended to the exclusion of his opinion from the editorial pages and finally to its exclusion from his own mind. I am speaking only of tendencies, not of their complete realization, for there are notable exceptions among the greater dailies of this country.

This movement is at its strongest in the nation's capital, for official Washington likes to live in an intellectual vacuum, and journalism strives successfully to please. With the world crashing about his ears the editor of the Star, the best newspaper in the capital, finds this to say:

"The Crown Prince of Japan and the Prince of Wales are young men destined for great parts in world affairs. They are now qualifying for their work.

"Last year the former took his first look around in the occidental world. He was everywhere most cordially received, and returned home informed and refreshed by what he had seen and heard. His vision, necessarily, was considerably enlarged.

"The latter is now taking his first look around in the oriental world. In a few days he will land in Japan and be the guest of the country for a month. The arrangements for his entertainment are elaborate, and insure him with a delightful and a profitable visit. That he will return home informed and refreshed by his travels is certain.

"The war has produced a new world, which in many things must be ordered in new ways. Young men for action; and here are two young men who when they get into action and into their stride will be prominent and important in the world picture."

But if a newspaper rigidly excludes its editor's opinions from its columns, it is singularly hospitable to all other opinions. The President twice a week may edit the papers of the entire country, or Mr. Hughes may do it every day, – or Mr. Hoover or Mr. Daugherty for that matter, even having extended to him the privilege of anonymity which editors used to keep to themselves, as a device for giving force and effect to their ideas.

The President "sees the press" Tuesdays and Fridays, volunteering information or answering questions. Mr. Hughes holds daily receptions. Everyone else big enough to break into print follows the same practice.

A curious modesty prevails. Every public man loves to see his name in the newspapers, yet no one of them at these conferences will assume responsibility for what he says. All of them resort to the editorial practice of anonymity.

The rule is that the correspondents must not quote Mr. Harding or Mr. Hughes or anyone else.

They must not write "Mr. Harding said" or "Mr. Hughes said." They must print what Mr. Harding or Mr. Hughes said as a fact; that is, they must put the authority of their paper behind it or, if they doubt, they must assign for it "a high authority," thus putting the authority of their paper behind it at one remove.

The editor, having excluded his own opinions from his news columns, opens his news columns to Mr. Harding's or Mr. Hughes's opinions, giving no guide to the reader whether he is printing fact or opinion, and, if obviously opinion, as to whose opinion it is.

The rule is, nothing but news in the news column. The news is, "Mr. Harding said so and so." But what is printed is, "so and so is a fact" or, "so and so the paper believes on unimpeachable authority to be a fact."

This official control of news columns goes further. Not only, according to the rules, must the source of certain information be regarded as a confidence but essential facts themselves may not be disclosed.

One of the most remarkable uses of the news columns to create public opinion was that of Attorney-General Palmer whose several announcements of red revolution in the United States startled the country two years ago. A series of sensational plots was described. Very soon every intelligent correspondent felt sure that Mr. Palmer was largely propaganding. But to say so would have been to violate that law against the expression of opinion in news columns, so essential to the truth and accuracy of our press. Moreover, if my memory is correct, somewhere in the series the Attorney-General told the press, in confidence, that he was putting forth his stories of revolution for a purpose. But one does not print confidences.

In this case the news was that Attorney-General Palmer was issuing stories of discovered revolutionary plots to combat a certain radicalism in the labor movement. As printed it was that Attorney-General Palmer said – he permitted his name to be used – that he had discovered revolutionary plots.