Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

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.

But the uncritical reader does not ask himself whether the Attorney-General may not be lying. And even if he were inclined to do so the headline throws him off his guard, for in the limited space available for captions, mere assertions tend to become facts. As it reached the reader's mind the fact that Mr. Palmer was avowedly issuing propaganda became the fact that evidences of a great Bolshevist plot against our institutions were being discovered almost daily.

There are disadvantages in the official editing of news columns. The official does not always escape by shifting responsibility to the editor. The British during the Washington Conference introduced an improvement. They put out propaganda which had no authority at all. This the newspapers either had to leave out or to print on their own authority.

Lord Riddell had "no official connection with the British delegation." He had moreover a perfect alibi. There was Sir Arthur Willert, the official spokesman, who knew nothing and told nothing. Riddell's was a private enterprise. He was just a journalist willing to share with other journalists what information he collected. Just a journalist? Well, it was true that "Lloyd George had asked him to stay on" when he was on the point of departing. But that was a confidence and under the rules the press does not print confidences.

Riddell's disclosures were perfectly timed. The best of them came out in the morning when afternoon correspondents must either rush them through as facts – they could not even say "on the highest authority" – or explain to their editors why they had been beaten by their rivals.

Riddell is one of the British Premier's intimates. A lawyer turned newspaper proprietor, he brings out the News of the World, a London Sunday publication, sensational and trashy, of which 3,500,000 copies or some such preposterous number are sold. He started in during the war as a spokesman for the British Premier. He kept it up at the Paris Conference. And at Washington he scored his greatest success.

What he had said at his seance was, "Now, of course, I don't know, but I imagine the Conference will do thus and so." He was delightfully irresponsible, having no official connection. He could leak when he had anything to leak. He could guess, near the truth or far from the truth, for, after all, he was only "imagining." He joked. He indulged in buffoonery. He put out propaganda when he wished. But he mixed enough truth with it all so that the correspondents thronged his meetings. So far as there was publicity at the Conference, he was that publicity.

There was nothing of the great man about him. He did not pretend to be a statesman. He did not take himself seriously. He reached out for his public in the same undress way that he does in his Sunday newspaper. "Ex-tra-ter-ri-to-ri-al-ity," he would say, "that's a long word. I never heard it before I came here." "Kow Loon, where is the place anyway?" You felt that for the British Empire these places and issues were trivialities.

He was familiar, quite inoffensively. "The highly intelligent seal of the Associated Press – was it Mr. Hood here? – must have been under the table in the committee room when he got this story. He knows more about it than I do." He was humorous. "The Conference means to do good and, according to the well known rule – what is it? – Oh, yes! 'Cast your bread upon the waters' – and by – er – a certain repercussion we all expect to benefit."

It was not said cynically. It was no effort to be funny. It was natural and inevitable. Lord Riddell himself did good to the press, and by a certain repercussion the British Empire benefited. It was a publicity "stunt" that has never been equalled. Never before did one man have world opinion so much in his hands. Only Riddell's personality, his friendliness, his apparent disingenuousness, his trifling, enabled him to exercise his power – these and the immense demand for publicity, where aside from his there was little.

The hospitality of news columns is not extended to officials alone. A vast industry second only to that of news collecting has been built up for the purpose of conveying opinions to readers in the guise of news. Its constant growth is a proof of its success.