good story. All else is dross. Of course, I am not against accuracy,
fairness, information, learning. If you want to read Lessing and
Freytag, Hazlitt and Brunetière, go read them: they will do you no harm.
It is also useful to know something about Shakespeare. But unless you
can make people _read_ your criticisms, you may as well shut up your
shop. And the only way to make them read you is to give them something
exciting.”
“You suggest, then,” I ventured, “a certain—ferocity?”
“I do,” replied my venerable friend. “Read George Henry Lewes, and see
how _he_ did it—sometimes with a bladder on a string, usually with a
meat-axe. Knock somebody on the head every day—if not an actor, then the
author, and if not the author, then the manager. And if the play and the
performance are perfect, then excoriate someone who doesn’t think so—a
fellow critic, a rival manager, the unappreciative public. But make it
hearty; make it hot! The public would rather be the butt itself than
have no butt in the ring. That is Rule Number 1 of American
psychology—and of English, too, but more especially of American. You
must give a good show to get a crowd, and a good show means one with
slaughter in it.”
Destiny soon robbed me of my critical shroud, and I fell into a long
succession of less æsthetic newspaper berths, from that of police
reporter to that of managing editor, but always the advice of my ancient
counselor kept turning over and over in my memory, and as chance offered
I began to act upon it, and whenever I acted upon it I found that it
worked. What is more, I found that other newspaper men acted upon it
too, some of them quite consciously and frankly, and others through a
veil of self-deception, more or less diaphanous. The primary aim of all
of them, no less when they played the secular Iokanaan than when they
played the mere newsmonger, was to please the crowd, to give a good
show; and the way they set about giving that good show was by first
selecting a deserving victim, and then putting him magnificently to the
torture.
This was their method when they were performing for their own profit
only, when their one motive was to make the public read their paper; but
it was still their method when they were battling bravely and
unselfishly for the public good, and so discharging the highest duty of
their profession. They lightened the dull days of midsummer by pursuing
recreant aldermen with bloodhounds and artillery, by muckraking
unsanitary milk-dealers, or by denouncing Sunday liquor-selling in
suburban parks—and they fought constructive campaigns for good
government in exactly the same gothic, melodramatic way. Always their
first aim was to find a concrete target, to visualize their cause in
some definite and defiant opponent. And always their second aim was to
shell that opponent until he dropped his arms and took to ignominious
flight. It was not enough to maintain and to prove: it was necessary
also to pursue and overcome, to lay a specific somebody low, to give the
good show aforesaid.
Does this confession of newspaper practice involve a libel upon the
American people? Perhaps it does—on the theory, let us say, that the
greater the truth, the greater the libel. But I doubt if any reflective
newspaper man, however lofty his professional ideals, will ever deny any
essential part of that truth. He knows very well that a definite limit
is set, not only upon the people’s capacity for grasping intellectual
concepts, but also upon their capacity for grasping moral concepts. He
knows that it is necessary, if he would catch and inflame them, to state
his ethical syllogism in the homely terms of their habitual ethical
thinking. And he knows that this is best done by dramatizing and
vulgarizing it, by filling it with dynamic and emotional significance,
by translating all argument for a principle into rage against a man.
In brief, he knows that it is hard for the plain people to _think_ about
a thing, but easy for them to _feel_. Error, to hold their attention,
must be visualized as a villain, and the villain must proceed swiftly to
his inevitable retribution. They can understand that process; it is
simple, usual, satisfying; it squares with their primitive conception of
justice as a form of revenge. The hero fires them too, but less
certainly, less violently than the villain. His defect is that he offers
thrills at second-hand. It is the merit of the villain, pursued publicly
by a _posse comitatus_, that he makes the public breast the primary seat
of heroism, that he makes every citizen a personal participant in a
glorious act of justice. Wherefore it is ever the aim of the sagacious
journalist to foster that sense of personal participation. The wars that
he wages are always described as the people’s wars, and he himself
affects to be no more than their strategist and _claque_. When the
victory has once been gained, true enough, he may take all the credit
without a blush; but while the fight is going on he always pretends that
every honest yeoman is enlisted, and he is even eager to make it appear
that the yeomanry began it on their own motion, and out of the excess of
their natural virtue.
I assume here, as an axiom too obvious to be argued, that the chief
appeal of a newspaper, in all such holy causes, is not at all to the
educated and reflective minority of citizens, but frankly to the
ignorant and unreflective majority. The truth is that it would usually
get a newspaper nowhere to address its exhortations to the former; for,
in the first place, they are too few in number to make their support of
much value in general engagements, and, in the second place, it is
almost always impossible to convert them into disciplined and useful
soldiers. They are too cantankerous for that, too ready with
embarrassing strategy of their own. One of the principal marks of an
educated man, indeed, is the fact that he does not take his opinions
from newspapers—not, at any rate, from the militant, crusading
newspapers. On the contrary, his attitude toward them is almost always
one of frank cynicism, with indifference as its mildest form and
contempt as its commonest. He knows that they are constantly falling
into false reasoning about the things within his personal
knowledge,—that is, within the narrow circle of his special
education,—and so he assumes that they make the same, or even worse,
errors about other things, whether intellectual or moral. This
assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts.
I know of no subject, in truth, save perhaps baseball, on which the
average American newspaper, even in the larger cities, discourses with
unfailing sense and understanding. Whenever the public journals presume
to illuminate such a matter as municipal taxation, for example, or the
extension of local transportation facilities, or the punishment of
public or private criminals, or the control of public-service
corporations, or the revision of city charters, the chief effect of
their effort is to introduce into it a host of extraneous issues, most
of them wholly emotional, and so they contrive to make it unintelligible
to all earnest seekers after the truth.
But it does not follow thereby that they also make it unintelligible to
their special client, the man in the street. Far from it. What they
actually accomplish is the exact opposite. That is to say, it is
precisely by this process of transmutation and emotionalization that
they bring a given problem down to the level of that man’s
comprehension, and, what is more important, within the range of his
active sympathies. He is not interested in anything that does not stir
him, and he is not stirred by anything that fails to impinge upon his
small stock of customary appetites and attitudes. His daily acts are
ordered, not by any complex process of reasoning, but by a continuous
process of very elemental feeling. He is not at all responsive to purely
intellectual argument, even when its theme is his own ultimate benefit,
for such argument quickly gets beyond his immediate interest and
experience. But he is very responsive to emotional suggestion,
particularly when it is crudely and violently made; and it is to this
weakness that the newspapers must ever address their endeavors. In
brief, they must try to arouse his horror, or indignation, or pity, or
simply his lust for slaughter. Once they have done that, they have him
safely by the nose. He will follow blindly until his emotion wears out.
He will be ready to believe anything, however absurd, so long as he is
in his state of psychic tumescence.
In the reform campaigns which periodically rock our large cities,—and
our small ones, too,—the newspapers habitually make use of this fact.
Such campaigns are not intellectual wars upon erroneous principles, but
emotional wars upon errant men: they always revolve around the pursuit
of some definite, concrete, fugitive malefactor, or group of
malefactors. That is to say, they belong to popular sport rather than to
the science of government; the impulse behind them is always far more
orgiastic than reflective. For good government in the abstract, the
people of the United States seem to have no liking, or, at all events,
no passion. It is impossible to get them stirred up over it, or even to
make them give serious thought to it. They seem to assume that it is a
mere phantasm of theorists, a political will-o’-the-wisp, a utopian
dream—wholly uninteresting, and probably full of dangers and tricks. The
very discussion of it bores them unspeakably, and those papers which
habitually discuss it logically and unemotionally—for example, the _New
York Evening Post_—are diligently avoided by the mob. What the mob
thirsts for is not good government in itself, but the merry chase of a
definite exponent of bad government. The newspaper that discovers such
an exponent—or, more accurately, the newspaper that discovers dramatic
and overwhelming evidence against him—has all the material necessary for
a reform wave of the highest emotional intensity. All that it need do is
to goad the victim into a fight. Once he has formally joined the issue,
the people will do the rest. They are always ready for a man-hunt, and
their favorite quarry is the man of politics. If no such prey is at
hand, they will turn to wealthy debauchees, to fallen Sunday-school
superintendents, to money barons, to white-slave traders, to un-sedulous
chiefs of police. But their first choice is the boss.
In assaulting bosses, however, a newspaper must look carefully to its
ammunition, and to the order and interrelation of its salvos. There is
such a thing, at the start, as overshooting the mark, and the danger
thereof is very serious. The people must be aroused by degrees, gently
at first, and then with more and more ferocity. They are not capable of
reaching the maximum of indignation at one leap: even on the side of
pure emotion they have their rigid limitations. And this, of course, is
because even emotion must have a quasi-intellectual basis, because even
indignation must arise out of facts. One fact at a time! If a newspaper
printed the whole story of a political boss’s misdeeds in a single
article, that article would have scarcely any effect whatever, for it
would be far too long for the average reader to read and absorb. He
would never get to the end of it, and the part he actually traversed
would remain muddled and distasteful in his memory. Far from arousing an
emotion in him, it would arouse only ennui, which is the very antithesis
of emotion. He cannot read more than three columns of any one subject
without tiring: 6,000 words, I should say, is the extreme limit of his
appetite. And the nearer he is pushed to that limit, the greater the
strain upon his psychic digestion. He can absorb a single capital fact,
leaping from a headline, at one colossal gulp; but he could not down a
dissertation in twenty. And the first desideratum in a headline is that
it deal with a single and capital fact. It must be, “McGinnis Steals
$1,257,867.25,” not, “McGinnis Lacks Ethical Sense.”
Moreover, a newspaper article which presumed to tell the whole of a
thrilling story in one gargantuan installment would lack the dynamic
element, the quality of mystery and suspense. Even if it should achieve
the miracle of arousing the reader to a high pitch of excitement, it
would let him drop again next day. If he is to be kept in his frenzy
long enough for it to be dangerous to the common foe, he must be led
into it gradually. The newspaper in charge of the business must harrow
him, tease him, promise him, hold him. It is thus that his indignation
is transformed from a state of being into a state of gradual and
cumulative becoming; it is thus that reform takes on the character of a
hotly contested game, with the issue agreeably in doubt. And it is
always as a game, of course, that the man in the street views moral
endeavor. Whether its proposed victim be a political boss, a police
captain, a gambler, a fugitive murderer, or a disgraced clergyman, his
interest in it is almost purely a sporting interest. And the intensity
of that interest, of course, depends upon the fierceness of the clash.
The game is fascinating in proportion as the morally pursued puts up a
stubborn defense, and in proportion as the newspaper directing the
pursuit is resourceful and merciless, and in proportion as the eminence
of the quarry is great and his resultant downfall spectacular. A war
against a ward boss seldom attracts much attention, even in the smaller
cities, for he is insignificant to begin with and an inept and cowardly
fellow to end with; but the famous war upon William M. Tweed shook the
whole nation, for he was a man of tremendous power, he was a brave and
enterprising antagonist, and his fall carried a multitude of other men
with him. Here, indeed, was sport royal, and the plain people took to it
with avidity.
But once such a buccaneer is overhauled and manacled, the show is over,
and the people take no further interest in reform. In place of the
fallen boss, a so-called reformer has been set up. He goes into office
with public opinion apparently solidly behind him: there is every
promise that the improvement achieved will be lasting. But experience
shows that it seldom is. Reform does not last. The reformer quickly
loses his public. His usual fate, indeed, is to become the pet butt and
aversion of his public. The very mob that put him into office chases him
out of office. And after all, there is nothing very astonishing about
this change of front, which is really far less a change of front than it
seems. The mob has been fed, for weeks preceding the reformer’s
elevation, upon the blood of big and little bosses; it has acquired a
taste for their chase, and for the chase in general. Now, of a sudden,
it is deprived of that stimulating sport. The old bosses are in retreat;
there are yet no new bosses to belabor and pursue; the newspapers which
elected the reformer are busily apologizing for his amateurish errors—a
dull and dispiriting business. No wonder it now becomes possible for the
old bosses, acting through their inevitable friends on the respectable
side,—the “solid” business men, the takers of favors, the underwriters
of political enterprise, and the newspapers influenced by these pious
fellows,—to start the rabble against the reformer. The trick is quite as
easy as that but lately done. The rabble wants a good show, a game, a
victim: it doesn’t care who that victim may be. How easy to convince it
that the reformer is a scoundrel himself, that he is as bad as any of
the old bosses, that he ought to go to the block for high crimes and
misdemeanors! It never had any actual love for him, or even any faith in
him; his election was a mere incident of the chase of his predecessor.
No wonder that it falls upon him eagerly, butchering him to make a new
holiday!
This is what has happened over and over again in every large American
city—Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburg, New Orleans,
Baltimore, San Francisco, St. Paul, Kansas City. Every one of these
places has had its melodramatic reform campaigns and its inevitable
reactions. The people have leaped to the overthrow of bosses, and then
wearied of the ensuing tedium. A perfectly typical slipping back, to be
matched in a dozen other cities, is going on in Philadelphia to-day
[1914]. Mayor Rudolph Blankenberg, a veteran war-horse of reform, came
into office through the downfall of the old bosses, a catastrophe for
which he had labored and agitated for more than thirty years. But now
the old bosses are getting their revenge by telling the people that he
is a violent and villainous boss himself. Certain newspapers are helping
them; they have concealed but powerful support among financiers and
business men; volunteers have even come forward from other cities—for
example, the Mayor of Baltimore. Slowly but surely this insidious
campaign is making itself felt; the common people show signs of yearning
for another _auto-da-fé_. Mayor Blankenberg, unless I am the worst
prophet unhung, will meet with an overwhelming defeat in 1915.[4] And it
will be a very difficult thing to put even a half-decent man in his
place: the victory of the bosses will be so nearly complete that they
will be under no necessity of offering compromises. Employing a favorite
device of political humor, they may select a harmless blank cartridge, a
respectable numskull, what is commonly called a perfumer. But the
chances are that they will select a frank ringster, and that the people
will elect him with cheers.
Footnote 4:
This was written in 1914. The overthrow of Blankenberg took place as
forecast, and Philadelphia has since enjoyed boss rule again, with
plentiful scandals.—H. L. M.
II
Such is the ebb and flow of emotion in the popular heart—or perhaps, if
we would be more accurate, the popular liver. It does not constitute an
intelligible system of morality, for morality, at bottom, is not at all
an instinctive matter, but a purely intellectual matter: its essence is
the control of impulse by an ideational process, the subordination of
the immediate desire to the distant aim. But such as it is, it is the
only system of morality that the emotional majority is capable of
comprehending and practicing; and so the newspapers, which deal with
majorities quite as frankly as politicians deal with them, have to admit
it into their own system. That is to say, they cannot accomplish
anything by talking down to the public from a moral plane higher than
its own: they must take careful account of its habitual ways of
thinking, its moral thirsts and prejudices, its well-defined
limitations. They must remember clearly, as judges and lawyers have to
remember it, that the morality subscribed to by that public is far from
the stern and arctic morality of professors of the science. On the
contrary, it is a mellower and more human thing; it has room for the
antithetical emotions of sympathy and scorn; it makes no effort to
separate the criminal from his crime.
The higher moralities, running up to that of Puritans and archbishops,
allow no weight to custom, to general reputation, to temptation; they
hold it to be no defense of a ballot-box stuffer, for example, that he
had scores of accomplices and that he is kind to his little children.
But the popular morality regards such a defense as sound and apposite;
it is perfectly willing to convert a trial on a specific charge into a
trial on a general charge. And in giving judgment it is always ready to
let feeling triumph over every idea of abstract justice; and very often
that feeling has its origin and support, not in matters actually in
evidence, but in impressions wholly extraneous and irrelevant.
Hence the need of a careful and wary approach in all newspaper crusades,
particularly on the political side. On the one hand, as I have said, the
astute journalist must remember the public’s incapacity for taking in
more than one thing at a time, and on the other hand, he must remember
its disposition to be swayed by mere feeling, and its habit of founding
that feeling upon general and indefinite impressions. Reduced to a rule
of everyday practice, this means that the campaign against a given
malefactor must begin a good while before the capital accusation—that
is, the accusation upon which a verdict of guilty is sought—is formally
brought forward. There must be a shelling of the fortress before the
assault; suspicion must precede indignation. If this preliminary work is
neglected or ineptly performed, the result is apt to be a collapse of
the campaign. The public is not ready to switch from confidence to doubt
on the instant; if its general attitude toward a man is sympathetic,
that sympathy is likely to survive even a very vigorous attack. The
accomplished mob-master lays his course accordingly. His first aim is to
arouse suspicion, to break down the presumption of innocence—supposing,
of course, that he finds it to exist. He knows that he must plant a
seed, and tend it long and lovingly, before he may pluck his
dragon-flower. He knows that all storms of emotion, however suddenly
they may seem to come up, have their origin over the rim of
consciousness, and that their gathering is really a slow, slow business.
I mix the figures shamelessly, as mob-masters mix their brews!
It is this persistence of an attitude which gives a certain degree of
immunity to all newcomers in office, even in the face of sharp and
resourceful assault. For example, a new president. The majority in favor
of him on Inauguration Day is usually overwhelming, no matter how small
his plurality in the November preceding, for common self-respect demands
that the people magnify his virtues: to deny them would be a confession
of national failure, a destructive criticism of the Republic. And that
benignant disposition commonly survives until his first year in office
is more than half gone. The public prejudice is wholly on his side: his
critics find it difficult to arouse any indignation against him, even
when the offenses they lay to him are in violation of the fundamental
axioms of popular morality. This explains why it was that Mr. Wilson was
so little damaged by the charge of federal interference in the
Diggs-Caminetti case—a charge well supported by the evidence brought
forward, and involving a serious violation of popular notions of virtue.
And this explains, too, why he survived the oratorical pilgrimages of
his Secretary of State at a time of serious international
difficulty—pilgrimages apparently undertaken with his approval, and
hence at his political risk and cost. The people were still in favor of
him, and so he was not brought to irate and drum-head judgment. No roar
of indignation arose to the heavens. The opposition newspapers, with
sure instinct, felt the irresistible force of public opinion on his
side, and so they ceased their clamor very quickly.