Public Opinion - Walter Lippmann (ebook reader txt) 📗

correct the confusion. [Footnote: The American interpretation of the fourteen points was explained to the allied statesmen just before the armistice.] And so, when the day of settlement came, everybody expected everything. The European authors of the treaty had a large choice, and they chose to realize those expectations which were held by those of their countrymen who wielded the most power at home.

They came down the hierarchy from the Rights of Humanity to the Rights of France, Britain and Italy. They did not abandon the use of symbols.

They abandoned only those which after the war had no permanent roots in the imagination of their constituents. They preserved the unity of France by the use of symbolism, but they would not risk anything for the unity of Europe. The symbol France was deeply attached, the symbol Europe had only a recent history. Nevertheless the distinction between an omnibus like Europe and a symbol like France is not sharp. The history of states and empires reveals times when the scope of the unifying idea increases and also times when it shrinks. One cannot say that men have moved consistently from smaller loyalties to larger ones, because the facts will not bear out the claim. The Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire bellied out further than those national unifications in the Nineteenth Century from which believers in a World State argue by analogy. Nevertheless, it is probably true that the real integration has increased regardless of the temporary inflation and deflation of empires.

6

Such a real integration has undoubtedly occurred in American history.

In the decade before 1789 most men, it seems, felt that their state and their community were real, but that the confederation of states was unreal. The idea of their state, its flag, its most conspicuous leaders, or whatever it was that represented Massachusetts, or Virginia, were genuine symbols. That is to say, they were fed by actual experiences from childhood, occupation, residence, and the like. The span of men’s experience had rarely traversed the imaginary boundaries of their states. The word Virginian was related to pretty nearly everything that most Virginians had ever known or felt. It was the most extensive political idea which had genuine contact with their experience.

Their experience, not their needs. For their needs arose out of their real environment, which in those days was at least as large as the thirteen colonies. They needed a common defense. They needed a financial and economic regime as extensive as the Confederation. But as long as the pseudo-environment of the state encompassed them, the state symbols exhausted their political interest. An interstate idea, like the Confederation, represented a powerless abstraction. It was an omnibus, rather than a symbol, and the harmony among divergent groups, which the omnibus creates, is transient.

I have said that the idea of confederation was a powerless abstraction. Yet the need of unity existed in the decade before the Constitution was adopted. The need existed, in the sense that affairs were askew unless the need of unity was taken into account. Gradually certain classes in each colony began to break through the state experience. Their personal interests led across the state lines to interstate experiences, and gradually there was constructed in their minds a picture of the American environment which was truly national in scope. For them the idea of federation became a true symbol, and ceased to be an omnibus. The most imaginative of these men was Alexander Hamilton. It happened that he had no primitive attachment to any one state, for he was born in the West Indies, and had, from the very beginning of his active life, been associated with the common interests of all the states. Thus to most men of the time the question of whether the capital should be in Virginia or in Philadelphia was of enormous importance, because they were locally minded. To Hamilton this question was of no emotional consequence; what he wanted was the assumption of the state debts because they would further nationalize the proposed union. So he gladly traded the site of the capitol for two necessary votes from men who represented the Potomac district. To Hamilton the Union was a symbol that represented all his interests and his whole experience; to White and Lee from the Potomac, the symbol of their province was the highest political entity they served, and they served it though they hated to pay the price. They agreed, says Jefferson, to change their votes, “White with a revulsion of stomach almost convulsive.” [Footnote: Works, Vol. IX, p. 87. Cited by Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, p. 172.]

In the crystallizing of a common will, there is always an Alexander Hamilton at work.

CHAPTER XIV

YES OR NO

1

Symbols are often so useful and so mysteriously powerful that the word itself exhales a magical glamor. In thinking about symbols it is tempting to treat them as if they possessed independent energy. Yet no end of symbols which once provoked ecstasy have quite ceased to affect anybody. The museums and the books of folklore are full of dead emblems and incantations, since there is no power in the symbol, except that which it acquires by association in the human mind. The symbols that have lost their power, and the symbols incessantly suggested which fail to take root, remind us that if we were patient enough to study in detail the circulation of a symbol, we should behold an entirely secular history.

In the Hughes campaign speech, in the Fourteen Points, in Hamilton’s project, symbols are employed. But they are employed by somebody at a particular moment. The words themselves do not crystallize random feeling. The words must be spoken by people who are strategically placed, and they must be spoken at the opportune moment. Otherwise they are mere wind. The symbols must be earmarked. For in themselves they mean nothing, and the choice of possible symbols is always so great that we should, like the donkey who stood equidistant between two bales of hay, perish from sheer indecision among the symbols that compete for our attention.

Here, for example, are the reasons for their vote as stated by certain private citizens to a newspaper just before the election of 1920.

For Harding:

“The patriotic men and women of to-day, who cast their ballots for Harding and Coolidge will be held by posterity to have signed our Second Declaration of Independence.”

Mr. Wilmot—, inventor.

“He will see to it that the United States does not enter into ‘entangling alliances,’ Washington as a city will benefit by changing the control of the government from the Democrats to the Republicans.”

Mr. Clarence—, salesman.

For Cox:

“The people of the United States realize that it is our duty pledged on the fields of France, to join the League of Nations. We must shoulder our share of the burden of enforcing peace throughout the world.”

Miss Marie—, stenographer.

“We should lose our own respect and the respect of other nations were we to refuse to enter the League of Nations in obtaining international peace.”

Mr. Spencer—, statistician.

The two sets of phrases are equally noble, equally true, and almost reversible. Would Clarence and Wilmot have admitted for an instant that they intended to default in our duty pledged on the fields of France; or that they did not desire international peace? Certainly not. Would Marie and Spencer have admitted that they were in favor of entangling alliances or the surrender of American independence? They would have argued with you that the League was, as President Wilson called it, a disentangling alliance, as well as a Declaration of Independence for all the world, plus a Monroe Doctrine for the planet.

2

Since the offering of symbols is so generous, and the meaning that can be imputed is so elastic, how does any particular symbol take root in any particular person’s mind? It is planted there by another human being whom we recognize as authoritative. If it is planted deeply enough, it may be that later we shall call the person authoritative who waves that symbol at us. But in the first instance symbols are made congenial and important because they are introduced to us by congenial and important people.

For we are not born out of an egg at the age of eighteen with a realistic imagination; we are still, as Mr. Shaw recalls, in the era of Burge and Lubin, where in infancy we are dependent upon older beings for our contacts. And so we make our connections with the outer world through certain beloved and authoritative persons. They are the first bridge to the invisible world. And though we may gradually master for ourselves many phases of that larger environment, there always remains a vaster one that is unknown. To that we still relate ourselves through authorities. Where all the facts are out of sight a true report and a plausible error read alike, sound alike, feel alike.

Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters. [Footnote: See an interesting, rather quaint old book: George Cornewall Lewis, An Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion.]

Theoretically we ought to choose the most expert on each subject. But the choice of the expert, though a good deal easier than the choice of truth, is still too difficult and often impracticable. The experts themselves are not in the least certain who among them is the most expert. And at that, the expert, even when we can identify him, is, likely as not, too busy to be consulted, or impossible to get at. But there are people whom we can identify easily enough because they are the people who are at the head of affairs. Parents, teachers, and masterful friends are the first people of this sort we encounter. Into the difficult question of why children trust one parent rather than another, the history teacher rather than the Sunday school teacher, we need not try to enter. Nor how trust gradually spreads through a newspaper or an acquaintance who is interested in public affairs to public personages. The literature of psychoanalysis is rich in suggestive hypothesis.

At any rate we do find ourselves trusting certain people, who constitute our means of junction with pretty nearly the whole realm of unknown things. Strangely enough, this fact is sometimes regarded as inherently undignified, as evidence of our sheep-like, ape-like nature. But complete independence in the universe is simply unthinkable. If we could not take practically everything for granted, we should spend our lives in utter triviality. The nearest thing to a wholly independent adult is a hermit, and the range of a hermit’s action is very short. Acting entirely for himself, he can act only within a tiny radius and for simple ends. If he has time to think great thoughts we can be certain that he has accepted without question, before he went in for being a hermit, a whole repertory of painfully acquired information about how to keep warm and how to keep from being hungry, and also about what the great questions are.

On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing. As congenital amateurs our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction. In such a debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has brought into the argument. We shall see later how the democratic theory proceeds on the opposite assumption and assumes