Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

The reason for the opening of newspaper columns to it is commercial. A variety of interests and opinions tends to reflect itself, as at Paris, in a multiplicity of newspapers. The American newspaper proprietor has avoided competition by steadily restricting the expression of opinion first in the news columns and then on the editorial page, so as to offend as few of his readers as possible, and then opening his news columns to opinions which he could not approve on his editorial page, provided they could be disguised as news.

But the faults of public opinion as a governing force do not spring from an uncritical journalism, conducted in haste and under compulsion to be interesting rather than adequate, too little edited by its editors and too much edited by others. The trouble with Thérèse is her lack of mind. In spite of her good sense and habit of giving excellent advice she is bornée et, si l'on veut, stupide. We do not find in her what Rousseau was convinced he found in her, "a deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

We know more about the public mind today than Jefferson did when he wrote about it. We have studied the psychology of the mob and we know that the psychology of the public is not different. Like the mind of Thérèse, the public mind has never grown up; with this difference, that the mind of Thérèse never could grow up and the mind of the public, we hope, will.

The public mind is young. Only for a very few years in the history of the race has there been any such thing as a conscious public. Jefferson was right in thinking that its mind was not the sum of the individual minds: nevertheless, it is not a "deposit for virtue." Men act in a mass quite differently from the way they act as individuals, only unfortunately there is not any necessary divine rightness about the way they act: there is often divine wrongness.

We have built up the machinery for converting one hundred million widely scattered people into a public, for giving it a sense of community, but we have not at an equal rate built up a public mind.

With the telegraph, the wireless telephone, the standardized press, the instant bulletin going everywhere, we can stir the whole people as a mob, make it revert into a frightened herd, but we can not make it think.

The public is too young to have a developed mind. In a hundred generations it may have one.

This experiment in democracy is conducted in the faith that it will have one, that the mass of mankind may be lifted up so that there will be as much freedom of thinking in a democratic society as there once was in an aristocratic society. It is the bravest experiment in history but its success is afar off, Rousseau's belief in Thérèse to the contrary notwithstanding.

In the present state of undeveloped mind and overdeveloped machinery of communication public opinion is a great negative force. It does nothing constructive. It can only be thoroughly aroused by a suggestion of danger. Statesmen are both afraid of it and despise it, and between contempt and fear are reduced to temporary expedients.

So that when we speak of government by public opinion we speak of something that has been as badly shaken as government by business, or executive government or party government or any one of the various governments upon which we once relied. The war has made it almost as intolerable as it made autocracy, as practiced by Mr. Wilson.

Shall official Washington turn to public opinion as its guide? Official Washington is busy all the time with all the arts it used during the war shaping public opinion to its own ends. It must have been hard for a king's minister to believe in the divinity of the monarch he was gulling. And at any moment public opinion may belong to Mr. Hearst.

This new ruler by divine right is not going to be so easy to dethrone as his predecessors. No new Rousseau will discern a new Thérèse. Mr. Walter Lippmann would set up in its place the expert by divine right, but the expert is a palpable pretender.

The best hope for the present moment is perhaps to divide the public. Minorities based on interest will at least be constructive. Organized, they may offer an effective resistance. Out of them may come a development of the public mind.

If Jefferson were writing today he might say that the farm bloc contained the "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." At any rate it tills the soil.

If we break up the threatening mass which the war has taught us to fear, there might be organized a thinkers' bloc. Thinking in this country certainly needs a bloc.

CHAPTER VI

SHALL WE FIND OUR SALVATION SITTING, LIKE MR. MELLON, ON A PILE OF DOLLARS

The conditions which face Mr. Harding are like those which face the administrator of a corporation left by its old head and creator to the direction of an incompetent son. The young man is the nominal master of the business. He lacks confidence in himself and what is worse still his wife and mother lack confidence in him. They have fortified him with a brother-in-law as a right hand man. His brother-in-law knows little of the business and can never forget that he is the creature of his sister and her mother-in-law.

The administrator of this corporation wishes to obtain a decision upon policy. The proprieties require him to consult its nominal head. The young man, unsure of himself, must talk it over with the mentor whom his wife and mother have provided. He in turn proves no final authority but must discuss the question with his sister. Ultimately the widow who owns most of the stock must be approached. She hires others to run the property, wonders why they do not run it. The very fact that the others could reach no decision makes her cautious about reaching one herself. The administrator goes vainly about this circle seeking for a "yes" or "no."

The government was simple when the public had faith in the social purposes of business and public opinion did not differ greatly from business opinion. Parties reflected the will of business. Authority was centered. Whether you said it resided in parties or in business or in public opinion made little difference. There was substantial agreement. A "yes" or "no" was easy.

Suppose Mr. Harding should be in doubt, as he is so often – today. He asks himself what is party opinion, what is business opinion, what is public opinion, or what is the opinion of some powerful minority which may turn an election against him.

His party has no opinion; it exists by virtue of its capacity to think nothing about everything and thus avoid dissensions. Business is of two minds and is moreover afraid of the public. It will assume no responsibility. Public opinion, what is it? Mr. Hearst's newspapers? Or the rest of the press? Or the product of the propaganda conducted from Washington? Or something that Mr. Harding may create himself if he will? Minority opinion is definite, but is it safe? Where is authority?

A return to those happy days when authority did center somewhere, when in conducting the business you did not have to run around the whole circle seeing the young man, his wife, his brother-in-law, and the widow who inherited the property, is our constant dream. Let us get back to party government, exclaimed Mr. Harding; so the nation voted to do so, only to find there were neither parties nor party government.

Let us, then, it is suggested, found some new party that will "stand for something," that will synthesize in one social aim, the common element in the aims of various interests into which the country is divided. But no one can point out the common basis, the principle which the new party shall advocate.

Let us then have a better informed public opinion. Mr. Walter Lippmann in his new book upon the subject, despairing of the press, would put the making of public opinion in the hands of experts, collecting the truth with the impartiality of science.

We seek unity as perhaps the builders of Babel sought it after the confusion of tongues fell upon them.

One favorite hope of attaining it is through a new synthesis of business and politics. Government by business had worked. Let us return to Eden. Let us elect a business man President. One may substitute for President in this last sentence Governor or Mayor or Senator or Congressman, for whatever the office is, this recipe is always suggested.

Thus, so it is piously hoped, we may get back to those good old times before we builded for ourselves this Babel, a government that was independent of business, parties that were independent of everything under the sun, voters that were independent of parties, a press that was independent, a propaganda that was independent, and blocs that knew no rule but their own.

Elect the business man to office, so it is felt, and you will have an important synthesis, an old and tried one, one that worked, business and politics. You will do more. You will import into public life all that wonderful efficiency which we read about in the American Magazine, that will to power, that habit of getting things done, that instant capacity for decision which we romantically associate with commercial life. All this is in the minds of those who urge this method of achieving unity.

We have no greater national illusion than the business man illusion. In any other country a business man is just a business man; in America he is a demigod. Golden words, as Mark Twain said, flow out of his mouth. He performs miracles. He has erected a great industry and amassed a large fortune. Therefore he would make a great public official. We never think of him as merely a specialist having a narrow aptitude for heaping up money.

The reasoning about the business man is this. Success, real success, comes to the jack of all trades, a major premise handed down from pioneer days. "A" is a real success, for he has made several millions. Therefore "A" is a jack of all trades. Therefore he would be as great a President as he is a shoe button manufacturer.

We owe the business-man illusion to the pioneers. In a few years they subjected a continent to our uses. They accumulated for themselves wealth such as the world had never seen. The nation does not think of them as the luckiest of a generation facing such virgin resources as existed on no other continent, at a moment when means of transportation such as the world had never seen before, and machinery for manufacture without parallel were in their hands. The marvelous element was not the opportunity but the men.

One day they were telegraphers, day laborers, railroad section hands and the next they were colossal figures of American enterprise. As their like existed nowhere else they became the American type. They established the tradition of American business.

It has been a tradition profitable to keep alive. The men who by luck, by picking other men's wits, or by the possession of a special talent, useful only in a society like our own, grow vastly rich, love to read how wonderful they are. For their delectation a journalism has grown up to celebrate the epic of their marvelous industry, resourcefulness, efficiency, their god-like insight into the hearts of men; whose praises they pay for liberally in the disposition of advertising. Young men who would be great read this journalism diligently looking for the secret of success. Reading it they resolve not to keep their minds upon five o'clock when the closing whistle blows but to become rich by industry and thrift like its great exemplars; who profit by it not only in having their own praises sung but in getting more work out of their servants.

So much virtue rests upon the business-man illusion that no one would lay an impious finger on it. I merely analyze it to exhibit the contents of our minds when we say "elect a business man President," and to present the picture of a demigod out of the American Magazine in the White House, and a new synthesis of business and politics.

Moreover, we let ourselves be misled by the habit of speaking of the "public business" and accepting without examination the analogy which the word suggests. We say to ourselves, "Well, since government is a business, the proper person to be in charge of it is a business man." But it is not business in any exact sense of the word. If the product of the operation were a mere bookkeeping profit or even mere bookkeeping economies then it might properly be called a business. But that which business efficiency in office, if it could really be obtained, might do well, is the least part of self-government, whose main end must for a long time be the steady building up of the democratic ideal.

But the electing of business men to office does not build up this ideal. On the contrary it is a confession of failure in democracy, an admission that public life in it does not develop men fit for its tasks, that for capacity it is necessary to seek in another world and summon an outsider; establish a sort of receivership in self-government.

And it is a blind sort of receivership. We know little about business men except the noisy disclosures of their press agents. "X" has made a million dollars. If we no longer say, as in the days of Mark Twain, that golden words flow from his mouth, we accept his wealth as proof positive of his extraordinary capacity for affairs. There is no going behind the fact of his vast accumulation, for business is conducted in secret. The law recognizes that it has to be, keeping in confidence facts disclosed through income tax returns.

When we consider a successful business man for office no allowance can be made for the fact that the intelligence responsible for his success may not have been his as head of a successful organization. In no way may it be asked and answered whether all the original force which was in him may not have been spent before he is suggested for office. Senator Knox was an instance of spent force, his energy and ambition being gone when he entered public life.

Luck may explain a commercial career and you cannot elect luck to office. Special talents which are valuable in making money may be out of place in political life.

Moreover commercial success in America has been easier than anywhere else in the world. Opportunities are numerous with the result that competition has not been keen. Nothing has been so over praised or so blindly praised as business success in this country. We may occasionally elect men in public life to office upon false reputations, as we did Vice-President Coolidge, crediting him with a firmness toward the Boston police strikers which had been shown by a subordinate in his absence. But at least the acts of officials are subject to popular scrutiny. Behind success in business we may not look.

Take the case of a Middle Western corporation. Three quarters of its profits came from a subsidiary. The history of the subsidiary is this: The corporation came into possession of certain mineral lands through the foreclosure of a mortgage. A company developing a product from the mineral failed. The head of the corporation acquiring the property by foreclosure thought this product of little value. A subordinate felt that it could by a change of name and judicious advertising be widely sold. He had great difficulty in persuading his employer but in the end obtained the money to make his experiment, whose results fully justified his judgment. The public seeking a business man for office would look no further than at the success of the corporation, which would be proof sufficient of the great talents of its head. Electing him they would not obtain for public service the mind which made the money, even if it be agreed that the talent for making money is a talent for public service.

And this case: A great Eastern trust acquired possession of a piece of property in this way: It uses a mineral product not much found in this country. Some Westerners had a deposit. They went to the Eastern trust, which encouraged them and loaned them $10,000 for its development. They then found that the trust was the only market for the mineral and that it had no intention to buy. Ultimately this deposit passed to the trust by foreclosure of the $10,000 mortgage. The trust thus obtaining ownership, began mining and in the first year cleared $500,000 on its $10,000 investment. The transaction in this instance was not the work of a subordinate; it revealed, however, a peculiar talent in the head of the corporation that would not be serviceable in public life.

To get down to names. Many business men entered the service of the government during the war. Almost none of them left it with enhanced reputations. Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, who served in the Treasury Department, had little success, so the men who surrounded him felt. I am not able to assess the causes of his failure. Perhaps he had assigned to him an impossible task.

Similarly men who had contact with him while financing the Republican campaign of 1916 were disappointed. After his service at Washington he ceased to be head of a great Wall Street bank. What do these adverse circumstances mean regarding Mr. Vanderlip's fitness to be, let us say, Secretary of the Treasury? Precisely nothing, let us admit. And his success for a number of years in banking, the large fortune he accumulated, by the same reasoning, mean no more.

Mr. Vanderlip is one of our best known business men, yet what the public knows about him is nothing. He was the president of a great bank and amassed wealth. An old financial journalist, he has gift of speech and writing, unusual in the business world. His agreeable personality made him liked by editors. He achieved unusual publicity. Was his reputation solidly based or was it newspaper made? The public does not know, cannot know. I use his case by way of illustration. Perhaps he ought to be President of the United States. But choosing a man for office on the basis of his business success, even so well known a man as Mr. Vanderlip, is plainly enough blind gambling.

We have in office now one of the great business men of the country. Mr. Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, who is posed somewhat uneasily upon what is, many say, the highest pile of wealth any one has ever heaped up, except Mr. John D. Rockefeller. I say "somewhat uneasily" because I have in mind Mr. Mellon emerging from a Congressional hearing at the Capitol, flustered and uncomfortable, turning to a subordinate and asking anxiously, "Well, did I make a good impression?" What could a subordinate reply except, "Yes, Mr. Mellon, you did very well."?

But Mr. Mellon does not make a good impression on the witness stand. If he were unjustly accused of a crime he would hang himself by appearing in his own defense, unless the jury sensed in his stammering hesitancy not guilt but an honest inability to express himself.

Mr. Mellon is the shyest and most awkward man who ever rose to power. He is unhappy before Congressional committees, before reporters in the dreadful conferences which are the outward and visible evidence of our democracy, at Cabinet meetings, where the fluent Mr. Hughes casts him terribly in the shade.

At one such meeting the President dragged him forth from silence by turning to him and asking him, "What has the Sphinx here got to say on the subject." Thus impelled, the Secretary of the Treasury replied, unconsciously in the words of Sir Roger de Coverley, "Well, Mr. President, I think there is a good deal to be said on both sides."