DRIFT AND MASTERY
AN ATTEMPT
TO DIAGNOSE THE CURRENT UNREST
BY
WALTER LIPPMANN
_“Men find themselves working and thinking
and feeling in relation to an environment, which
... is without precedent in the history of the
world.”_
--_Graham Wallas, “The Great Society.”_
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
1914
_Copyright 1914 by
Mitchell Kennerley_
CONTENTS
Introduction
_Page xv_
Democracy is a way of life, not simply a revolt against tyrants--Rock
of Ages blasted for us--Rebel program is stated--Chaos of a new
freedom--Need for a vision of what is to come out of unrest--but not an
inclusive utopia--on being practical--Aim of the book.
PART I
Chapter I
THE THEMES OF MUCKRAKING
_Page 1_
American prejudice to-day in favor of accusation--Myths of
muckraking--why did people believe?--Honeymoon period over--Acts
called corrupt--German pedant required to classify them--but picture
would be false--New necessities and new expectations--Themes of
muckraking--why were politicians attacked?--Graft defined--Conservative
or corrupt--Rising price of corruption--Public standards applied
to business--the Persimmon family--developing criticism of private
business.
Chapter II
NEW INCENTIVES
_Page 27_
Profiteering and the professions--Falling prestige of the Economic
Man--Fencing off profit--Are new motives appearing?--General
change of social scale--The Great Industry requires unheard of
equipment--Brandeis against big business--How big?--Science of
administration--Federal business--Little monarchs--Salaried
men--The revolution in business incentives--Professional business
men--Civilizing the Economic Man.
Chapter III
THE MAGIC OF PROPERTY
_Page 50_
An empty shrine--The feebleness of shareholding--Absentee and
transient--Investing a profession--The “money power”--The
rugged virtues of private property--Qualifications for
shareholding--Impotence--Divorce from management--Private property
in trusts an uncertain form of money lending--Public ownership not a
question of private property--but of administration--The fight for the
control of industry.
Chapter IV
CAVEAT EMPTOR
_Page 66_
Consumer ignorant and helpless--Advertising--Buying an intricate
task--Competition makes it no easier--Government aid--“All
the people”--Votes for women--Consumers’ controls--Business
anarchy--Focussing attention--Revolutionary standards.
Chapter V
A KEY TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT
_Page 77_
Employers not worried about labor’s freedom--Richesse oblige--Organized
obstruction--Unions and a servile class--Encroachment of democracy upon
business--Pioneering--The scab--Preliminaries of civilization--When
harmony can begin--Power vs. insurrection--I. W. W.--Revolt rather
than solidarity--“Conscious minority”--Power and peace--The
unorganizable--Being interested in efficiency--Having an interest--A
struggle for power--Share of control--Others who must share--Unions as
experiments in government--The politics of industry--Present realities.
Chapter VI
THE FUNDS OF PROGRESS
_Page 101_
How to finance the costs of progress--What is unearned income?--Latent
panic--The unproductive--Inefficient--Antiquated--Landlords--
Capitalists--No blanket case--The criterion is use--Destroying
incentive--Misapplied incentives to-day--Pressure to improve business--
Commercial adventurers--Necessity and invention--Opportunity of
professional business man--Industrial waste--Wealth exists to pay for
democracy.
Chapter VII
“A NATION OF VILLAGERS”
--_Bernard Shaw._
_Page 121_
Hieroglyphics and the Sherman Act--Systematic enforcement, not
desultory pecking--Anti-trust agitation to preserve commercialism--High
value of lawbreaking--Whipping the trusts--Revolution in American
village life--Bryan as conservative--Wilson--Conflict of head
and heart--His new formula--His old ideal--“The man on the
make”--A halo for small business--What isn’t mentioned in the New
Freedom--Amending the New Freedom--A task for Solomon--The appearance
of magic--Democratic Party and village culture--Accepting the new scale
of endeavor--The untried--Need for a collective mind--Really a deus ex
machina--A problem for human beings alone.
PART II
Chapter VIII
A BIG WORLD AND LITTLE MEN
_Page 149_
The uprooted person--Hunting up the peasants--Slang--Fashions--Real
novelty--Unsettled relations--Precedent made for a different
environment--Out-of-kilter--Breakdown of loyalties--Organized
gossip--Institutions made inconsistent--Schools must educate
for novelty--Churches expected to produce interpretations of
novelty--Courts expected to deal with social change--Political
structure not fitted to modern functions--Decline of geographical
influences--Embryonic governments--International affairs
elude democracy--Can there be a “solution” of the industrial
question?--No better order by decree--Complexity of democratic
undertaking--Disruption in the soul of man.
Chapter IX
DRIFT
_Page 172_
Evil as a lapse from grace--“Oblivescence of the disagreeable”--A
Golden Age--The created past--Thought unnecessary and happiness
inevitable--The salt of the earth--Paradise ahead--Wild dreams and
unimportant deeds--Darlings of evolution--Progressivism by the
calendar--Fatalism in the socialist movement--Panaceas--So much good in
everything--The aliases of drift--Chronic rebellion--Cutting off from
central authority--Protestantism, Romanticism, Democracy--The modern
artist--Loss of certainty--The classicist dream--A diagnosis--Liberty
the beginning of real tasks.
Chapter X
THE ROCK OF AGES
_Page 198_
Opposite conclusions from the same principle--Absolutism as a practical
force--Efficiency of mystics--The search for assurance--Constructive
psychology of the Catholic Church--Spiritual exercises that create
dependence--Decay of authority--We have more responsibility than
capacity--Authority cannot survive--Small comfort in liberalism--The
immigrant as type of the modern man--Our inner chaos.
PART III
Chapter XI
A NOTE ON THE WOMAN’S MOVEMENT
_Page 213_
Liberty not an unmixed blessing--Rights--Women as routineers--Inventing
a new life--Academic dispute about inferiority--Women fight more than
tradition--They fight their own bewilderment--“Single standard” with
two meanings--The amateur male--Economic independence--Upper class
women--The expanding home--Specializing--Earning money--Marrying
to function--Women as enemies of co-operation--Influence of
parents--Aggravating the property instinct--Sense of public
property--About separating parent and child--The superstitious
nursery--Monogamy and the sexual anarchists--The family and the
spread of intelligence--Promiscuity--The “lunatic fringe”--Sexual
sincerity--The promise of women’s awakening.
Chapter XII
BOGEYS
_Page 240_
Waiting for the heavens to fall--Laying a ghost--Where phantoms
live--Terror calls for authority--The regiment of bogeys--Sense
of sin--Purity--Class feeling--Unconventionality--Losing one’s
job--Death--Reputation--Exorcising bogeys and disciplining love of
reality.
Chapter XIII
POVERTY, CHASTITY, OBEDIENCE
_Page 251_
Not the ideals of self government--The democratic substitutes--Surplus
of Wealth--A social minimum--Chastity and lust of the spirit--Realism
about sex--Modern intellect pragmatic--Difficulty of judging by
results--The necessary effort.
Chapter XIV
MASTERY
_Page 264_
Reverence for tradition and social cohesion--Conflicting
traditions--Loyalty to “children’s land”--Common purpose instead of
common tradition--The dreaming quality of life--Reflection--Conscious
living--The return to the unconscious--Intention--Clumsy
meddling--Criticizing the scientific mind--Inner sanctuary of human
power--Emotion of futurity--Science the discipline of democracy.
Chapter XV
MODERN COMMUNION
_Page 277_
What binds together the modern effort?--Need of communion--Focussing
interest--Example of the scientific world--Beginnings of common
method--Spiritual values--Santayana quoted--Discipline and
coöperation--Morality--“State-making” dream--Signs.
Chapter XVI
FACT AND FANCY
_Page 289_
A chilly existence--Hard-headed people may be fantastic--Trying
to generalize--William James’s rule--Science as enemy of life’s
variety--Science and religious dogma--Science in the Catholic
Church--Blindness of young science--New value of tradition--Fear of the
past--The past as emancipator--History as cure for barren hopes--Vision
has an instrument--Science not a passionless pursuit--The rôle of
fantasy--In political economy: Adam Smith, Marx; in leaders: Wilson,
Haywood--The source of ideas--Criticism of desire--The utopias--Dream
of the actual--Visionary and philistine--Creative imagination--Its
severity--Mastery a new turn in human culture--Reaction into fantasy or
routine--The end of rebellion--Our vision far from adequate.
INTRODUCTION
In the early months of 1914 widespread unemployment gave the anarchists
in New York City an unusual opportunity for agitation. The newspapers
and the police became hysterical, men were clubbed and arrested on
the slightest provocation, meetings were dispersed. The issue was
shifted, of course, from unemployment to the elementary rights of free
speech and assemblage. Then suddenly, the city administration, acting
through a new police commissioner, took the matter in hand, suppressed
official lawlessness, and guaranteed the men who were conducting the
agitation their full rights. This had a most disconcerting effect on
the anarchists. They were suddenly stripped of all the dramatic effect
that belongs to a clash with the police. They had to go back to the
real issue of unemployment, and give some message to the men who had
been following them. But they had no message to give: they knew what
they were against but not what they were for, and their intellectual
situation was as uncomfortable as one of those bad dreams in which you
find yourself half-clothed in a public place.
Without a tyrant to attack an immature democracy is always somewhat
bewildered. Yet we have to face the fact in America that what
thwarts the growth of our civilization is not the uncanny, malicious
contrivance of the plutocracy, but the faltering method, the distracted
soul, and the murky vision of what we call grandiloquently the will of
the people. If we flounder, it is not because the old order is strong,
but because the new one is weak. Democracy is more than the absence of
czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of
life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. For republics do
not come in when kings go out, the defeat of a propertied class is
not followed by a coöperative commonwealth, the emancipation of woman
is more than a struggle for rights. A servile community will have a
master, if not a monarch, then a landlord or a boss, and no legal
device will save it. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only
the form of tyranny, for like Christian’s sword, democracy is a weapon
in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it;
in all others it is a rusty piece of junk.
The issues that we face are very different from those of the last
century and a half. The difference, I think, might be summed up
roughly this way: those who went before inherited a conservatism and
overthrew it; we inherit freedom, and have to use it. The sanctity of
property, the patriarchal family, hereditary caste, the dogma of sin,
obedience to authority,--the rock of ages, in brief, has been blasted
for us. Those who are young to-day are born into a world in which the
foundations of the older order survive only as habits or by default.
So Americans can carry through their purposes when they have them. If
the standpatter is still powerful amongst us it is because we have not
learned to use our power, and direct it to fruitful ends. The American
conservative, it seems to me, fills the vacuum where democratic purpose
should be.
So far as we are concerned, then, the case is made out against
absolutism, commercial oligarchy, and unquestioned creeds. _The rebel
program is stated._ Scientific invention and blind social currents
have made the old authority impossible in fact, the artillery fire
of the iconoclasts has shattered its prestige. We inherit a rebel
tradition. The dominant forces in our world are not the sacredness
of property, nor the intellectual leadership of the priest; they are
not the divinity of the constitution, the glory of industrial push,
Victorian sentiment, New England respectability, the Republican Party,
or John D. Rockefeller. Our time, of course, believes in change. The
adjective “progressive” is what we like, and the word “new,” be it the
New Nationalism of Roosevelt, the New Freedom of Wilson, or the New
Socialism of the syndicalists. The conservatives are more lonely than
the pioneers, for almost any prophet to-day can have disciples. The
leading thought of our world has ceased to regard commercialism either
as permanent or desirable, and the only real question among intelligent
people is how business methods are to be altered, not whether they
are to be altered. For no one, unafflicted with invincible ignorance,
desires to preserve our economic system in its existing form.
The business man has stepped down from his shrine; he is no longer an
oracle whose opinion on religion, science, and education is listened to
dumbly as the valuable byproduct of a paying business. We have scotched
the romance of success. In the emerging morality the husband is not
regarded as the proprietor of his wife, nor the parents as autocrats
over the children. We are met by women who are “emancipated”; for what
we hardly know. We are not stifled by a classical tradition in art: in
fact artists to-day are somewhat stunned by the rarefied atmosphere of
their freedom. There is a wide agreement among thinking people that the
body is not a filthy thing, and that to implant in a child the sense of
sin is a poor preparation for a temperate life.
The battle for us, in short, does not lie against crusted prejudice,
but against the chaos of a new freedom.
This chaos is our real problem. So if the younger critics are to meet
the issues of their generation they must give their attention, not so
much to the evils of authority, as to the weaknesses of democracy. But
how is a man to go about doing such a task? He faces an enormously
complicated world, full of stirring and confusion and ferment. He hears
of movements and agitations, criticisms and reforms, knows people who
are devoted to “causes,” feels angry or hopeful at different times,
goes to meetings, reads radical books, and accumulates a sense of
uneasiness and pending change.
He can’t, however, live with any meaning unless he formulates for
himself a vision of what is to come out of the unrest. I have tried in
this book to sketch such a vision for myself. At first thought it must
seem an absurdly presumptuous task. But it is a task that everyone has
to attempt if he is to take part in the work of his time. For in so far
as we can direct the future at all, we shall do it by laying what we
see against what other people see.
This doesn’t mean the constructing of utopias. The kind of vision
which will be fruitful to democratic life is one that is made out of
latent promise in the actual world. There is a future contained in the
trust and the union, the new status of women, and the moral texture of
democracy. It is a future that can in a measure be foreseen and bent
somewhat nearer to our hopes. A knowledge of it gives a sanction to
our efforts, a part in a larger career, and an invaluable sense of
our direction. We make our vision, and hold it ready for any amendment
that experience suggests. It is not a fixed picture, a row of shiny
ideals which we can exhibit to mankind, and say: Achieve these or be
damned. All we can do is to search the world as we find it, extricate
the forces that seem to move it, and surround them with criticism
and suggestion. Such a vision will inevitably reveal the bias of its
author; that is to say it will be a human hypothesis, not an oracular
revelation. But if the hypothesis is honest and alive it should cast a
little light upon our chaos. It should help us to cease revolving in
the mere routine of the present or floating in a private utopia. For a
vision of latent hope would be woven of vigorous strands; it would be
concentrated on the crucial points of contemporary life, on that living
zone where the present is passing into the future. It is the region
where thought and action count. Too far ahead there is nothing but
your dream; just behind, there is nothing but your memory. But in the
unfolding present, man can be creative if his vision is gathered from
the promise of actual things.
The day is past, I believe, when anybody can pretend to have laid down
an inclusive or a final analysis of the democratic problem. Everyone
is compelled to omit infinitely more than he can deal with; everyone
is compelled to meet the fact that a democratic vision must be made by
the progressive collaboration of many people. Thus I have touched upon
the industrial problem at certain points that seem to me of outstanding
importance, but there are vast sections and phases of industrial
enterprise that pass unnoticed. The points I have raised are big in the
world I happen to live in, but obviously they are not the whole world.
It is necessary, also, to inquire how “practical” you can be in a
book of generalizations. That amounts to asking how detailed you can
be. Well, it is impossible when you mention a minimum wage law, for
example, to append a draft of the bill and a concrete set of rules for
its administration. In human problems especially there is a vagueness
which no one can escape entirely. Even the most voluminous study in
three volumes of some legal question does not meet at every point the
actual difficulties of the lawyer in a particular case. Generalization
is always rough, and never entirely accurate. But it can be useful if
it is made with a sense of responsibility to action. I have tried,
therefore, to avoid gratuitously fine sentiments; I have tried to
suggest nothing that with the information at my command doesn’t seem at
least probable.
This book, then, is an attempt to diagnose the current unrest and to
arrive at some sense of what democracy implies. It begins with the
obvious drift of our time and gropes for the conditions of mastery.
I have tried in the essays that follow to enter the American problem
at a few significant points in order to trace a little of the
immense suggestion that radiates from them. I hope the book will
leave the reader, as it does me, with a sense of the varied talents
and opportunities, powers and organizations that may contribute to a
conscious revolution. I have not been able to convince myself that one
policy, one party, one class, or one set of tactics, is as fertile as
human need.
It would be very easy if such a belief were possible. It would save
time and energy and no end of grubbing: just to keep on repeating what
you’ve learnt, eloquent, supremely confident, with the issues clean, a
good fight and an inevitable triumph: Marx, or Lincoln, or Jefferson
with you always as guide, counsellor and friend. All the thinking done
by troubled dead men for the cocksure living; no class to consider but
your own; no work that counts but yours; every party but your party
composed of fools and rascals; only a formula to accept and a specific
fight to win,--it would be easy. It might work on the moon.
W. L.
July 17, 1914.
46 East 80th Street,
New York City.
DRIFT AND MASTERY
PART I
CHAPTER I
The Themes of Muckraking
There is in America to-day a distinct prejudice in favor of those who
make the accusations. Thus if you announced that John D. Rockefeller
was going to vote the Republican ticket it would be regarded at once
as a triumph for the Democrats. Something has happened to our notions
of success: no political party these days enjoys publishing the names
of its campaign contributors, if those names belong to the pillars
of society. The mere statement that George W. Perkins is an active
Progressive has put the whole party somewhat on the defensive. And
there is more than sarcasm in the statement of the New York Times
Annalist that:
“If it be true that the less bankers have to do with a scheme of
banking and currency reform the more acceptable it will be to the
people, it follows that the Administration’s Currency Bill ... must
command popular admiration.”
You have only to write an article about some piece of corruption in
order to find yourself the target of innumerable correspondents,
urging you to publish their wrongs. The sense of conspiracy and secret
scheming which transpire is almost uncanny. “Big Business,” and its
ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy
of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain
of modern life. It is possible to work yourself into a state where
the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is beset with an
alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew--all
the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil
intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes
of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to a
barbarous myth. I know a socialist who seriously believes that the
study of eugenics is a Wall Street scheme for sterilizing working-class
leaders. And the cartoons which pictured Morgan sitting arrogantly
in a chariot drawn by the American people in a harness of ticker
tape,--these are not so much caricatures as pictures of what no end
of fairly sane people believe. Not once but twenty times have I been
told confidentially of a nation-wide scheme by financiers to suppress
every radical and progressive periodical. But even though the most
intelligent muckrakers have always insisted that the picture was
absurd, it remains to this day a very widespread belief. I remember how
often Lincoln Steffens used to deplore the frightened literalness with
which some of his articles were taken. One day in the country he and
I were walking the railroad track. The ties, of course, are not well
spaced for an ordinary stride, and I complained about it. “You see,”
said Mr. Steffens with mock obviousness, “Morgan controls the New Haven
and he prefers to make the people ride.”
Now it is not very illuminating to say that this smear of suspicion
has been worked up by the muckrakers. If business and politics really
served American need, you could never induce people to believe so many
accusations against them. It is said, also, that the muckrakers played
for circulation, as if that proved their insincerity. But the mere fact
that muckraking was what people wanted to hear is in many ways the most
important revelation of the whole campaign.
There is no other way of explaining the quick approval which the
muckrakers won. They weren’t voices crying in a wilderness, or lonely
prophets who were stoned. They demanded a hearing; it was granted.
They asked for belief; they were believed. They cried that something
should be done and there was every appearance of action. There must
have been real causes for dissatisfaction, or the land notorious for
its worship of success would not have turned so savagely upon those
who had achieved it. A happy husband will endure almost anything, but
an unhappy one is capable of flying into a rage if his carpet-slippers
are not in the right place. For America, the willingness to believe
the worst was a strange development in the face of its traditional
optimism, a sign perhaps that the honeymoon was over. For muckraking
flared up at about the time when land was no longer freely available
and large scale industry had begun to throw vast questions across the
horizon. It came when success had ceased to be easily possible for
everyone.
The muckrakers spoke to a public willing to recognize as corrupt an
incredibly varied assortment of conventional acts. That is why there
is nothing mysterious or romantic about the business of exposure,--no
putting on of false hair, breaking into letter-files at midnight,
hypnotizing financiers, or listening at keyholes. The stories of graft,
written and unwritten, are literally innumerable. Often muckraking
consists merely in dressing up a public document with rhetoric and
pictures, translating a court record into journalese, or writing the
complaints of a minority stockholder, a dislodged politician, or a boss
gone “soft.” No journalist need suffer from a want of material.
Now in writing this chapter I started out to visualize this material
in systematic and scholarly fashion by making a list of the graft
revelations in the last ten years. I wished for some quantitative sense
of the number and kinds of act that are called corrupt. But I found
myself trying to classify the industrial, financial, political, foreign
and social relations of the United States, with hundreds of sub-heads,
and a thousand gradations of credibility and exaggeration. It was an
impossible task. The popular press of America is enormous, and for
years it has been filled with “probes” and “amazing revelations.” And
how is a person to classify, say, the impeachment of a Tammany governor
by a Tammany legislature? A mere list of investigations would fill this
book, and I abandoned the attempt with the mental reservation that if
anyone really desired that kind of proof, a few German scholars, young
and in perfect health, should be imported to furnish it.
They could draw up a picture to stagger even a jaded American. Suppose
they began their encyclopedia with the adulteration of foods. There
would follow a neat little volume on the aliases of coffee. The story
of meat would help the vegetarians till the volume on canned foods
appeared. Milk would curdle the blood, bread and butter would raise a
scandal, candy,--the volume would have to be suppressed. If photographs
could convey odors the study of restaurants might be done without
words. The account of patent medicines, quack doctors, beauty parlors,
mining schemes, loan sharks, shyster lawyers, all this riff-raff and
fraud in the cesspool of commercialism would make unendurable reading.
You would rush to the window, cursing the German pedants, grateful for
a breath of that air which filters through in spite of the unenforced
smoke ordinance of your city.
But the story would proceed. Think of your state of mind after you had
read all about the methods of drummers, advertising agents, lobbyists,
publicity men, after you knew adulteration of every description, and
had learned the actual motives and history of political conferences,
of caucuses, and consultations with the boss; suppose you understood
the underground history of legislatures, the miscarriages of justice,
the relations of the police to vice and crime, of newspapers to
advertisers and wealthy citizens, of trade union leaders to their
unions, the whole fetid story of the war between manufacturers and
labor organizations. A study of the public domain in America would
employ a staff of investigators. What railroads have done to the
public, to their employees, what directors do to the stockholders and
the property, the quantitative record of broken trust, the relation of
bankers to the prosperity of business enterprise, of stock gamblers
to capitalization,--taking merely all that is known and could be
illustrated, summed up and seen at once, what a picture it would make.
And yet such a picture would be false and inept. For certainly there
must be some ground for this sudden outburst of candor, some ground
beside a national desire for abstract truth and righteousness. These
charges and counter-charges arose because the world has been altered
radically, not because Americans fell in love with honesty. If we
condemn what we once honored, if we brand as criminal the conventional
acts of twenty years ago, it’s because we have developed new
necessities and new expectations.
They are the clue to the clouds of accusation which hang over American
life. You cannot go very far by reiterating that public officials are
corrupt, that business men break the law. The unbribed official and the
law-abiding business man are not ideals that will hold the imagination
very long. And that is why the earlier kind of muckraking exhausted
itself. There came a time when the search for not-dishonest men ceased
to be interesting. We all know now what tepid failures were those
first opponents of corruption, the men whose only claim to distinction
was that they had done no legal wrong. For without a vivid sense of
what politics and business might be, you cannot wage a very fruitful
campaign.
Now if you study the chief themes of muckraking I think it is possible
to see the outlines of what America has come to expect.
The first wave of exposure insisted upon the dishonesty of politicians.
Close upon it came widespread attack upon big business men, who were
charged with bribing officials and ruining their competitors. Soon
another theme appeared: big business men were accused of grafting
upon the big corporations which they controlled. We are entering upon
another period now: not alone big business, but all business and
farming too, are being criticized for inefficiency, for poor product,
and for exploitation of employees.
This classification is, of course, a very rough one. It would be easy
enough to dispute it, for the details are endlessly complicated and
the exceptions may appear very large to some people. But I think,
nevertheless, that this classification does no essential violence to
the facts. It doesn’t matter for my purposes that some communities
are still in what I call the first period, while others are in the
third. For a nation like ours doesn’t advance at the same rate
everywhere. All I mean to suggest is that popular muckraking in the
last decade has shifted its interest in something like this order:
First, to the corruption of aldermen and mayors and public servants
by the boss acting for a commercial interest, and to the business
methods of those who built up the trusts. Then, muckraking turned,
and began to talk about the milking of railroads by banks, and of
one corporation by another. This period laid great emphasis on the
“interlocking directorate.” Now, muckraking is fastening upon the
waste in management, upon working conditions as in the Steel Mills or
at Lawrence, or upon the quality of service rendered by the larger
corporations. These have been the big themes.
Why should they have been? Why, to begin with, should politicians
have been attacked so fiercely? Some people would say flatly:
because politicians were dishonest. Yet that is an utterly unfounded
generalization. The morals of politicians cannot by any stretch of the
imagination be described as exceptionally bad. Politicians were on the
make. To be sure. But who in this sunny land isn’t? They gave their
relatives and friends pleasant positions. What father doesn’t do that
for his son if he can, and with every feeling of righteousness? They
helped their friends, they were loyal to those who had helped them:
who will say that in private life these are not admirable virtues?
And what were the typical grafts in politics--the grafts for which we
tried to send politicians to jail? The city contracts for work, and the
public official is in league with the contractor; but railroads also
contract for work, and corporation officials are at least as frequently
as politicians, financially interested in the wrong side of the deal.
The city buys real estate, and the city official manages to buy it from
himself or his friends. But railroad directors have been known to sell
their property to the road they govern.
We can see, I think, what people meant by the word graft. They did
not mean robbery. It is rather confused rhetoric to call a grafter a
thief. His crime is not that he filches money from the safe but that
he betrays a trust. The grafter is a man whose loyalty is divided and
whose motives are mixed. A lawyer who takes a fee from both sides in
some case; a public official who serves a private interest; a railroad
director who is also a director in the supply company; a policeman
in league with outlawed vice: those are the relationships which the
American people denounce as “corrupt.” The attempt to serve at the same
time two antagonistic interests is what constitutes “corruption.”
The crime is serious in proportion to the degree of loyalty that
we expect. A President of the United States who showed himself too
friendly to some private interest would be denounced, though he may
not have made one cent out of the friendship. But where we have not
yet come to expect much loyalty we do very little muckraking. So if
you inquired into the ethics of the buyer in almost any manufacturing
house, you would find him doing things daily that would land the
purchasing agent of a city in jail. Who regards it as especially
corrupt if the selling firm “treats” the buyer, gives him or her a
“present,” perhaps a commission, or at least a “good time”? American
life is saturated with the very relationship which in politics we call
corrupt. The demand for a rake-off penetrates to the kitchen where a
sophisticated cook expects a commission from the butcher, and tampers
with the meat if it is refused; you can find it in the garage where
the chauffeur has an understanding about the purchase of supplies; it
extends to the golf caddie who regards a “lost” ball as his property
and proceeds to sell it to the next man for half the original cost,--it
extends to the man who buys that ball; and it ramifies into the
professions when doctors receive commissions from specialists for
sending patients to them; it saturates the work-a-day world with tips
and fees and “putting you on to a good thing” and “letting you in on
the ground floor.” But in the politician it is mercilessly condemned.
That is because we expect more of the politician. We say in effect that
no public servant must allow himself to follow the economic habits of
his countrymen. The corrupt politician is he who brings into public
service the traditions of a private career. Perhaps that is a cynical
reflection. I do not know how to alter it. When I hear politicians talk
“reform,” I know they are advocating something which most drummers on
the road would regard as the scruples of a prig, and I know that when
business men in a smoking-room are frank, they are taking for granted
acts which in a politician we should call criminal.
For the average American will condemn in an alderman what in his
partner he would consider reason for opening a bottle of champagne. In
literal truth the politician is attacked for displaying the morality
of his constituents. You might if you didn’t understand the current
revolution, consider that hypocrisy. It isn’t: it is one of the hopeful
signs of the age. For it means that unconsciously men regard some of
the interests of life as too important for the intrusion of commercial
ethics.
Run a government to-day, with the same motives and vision that you run
a dry goods store, and watch for the activity of the muckrakers. Pursue
in the post office the methods which made you a founder of colleges,
you will be grateful for a kind word from Mr. Lorimer. Poor as they
are, the standards of public life are so much more social than those
of business that financiers who enter politics regard themselves as
philanthropists. The amount of work and worry without reward is almost
beyond the comprehension of the man whose every act is measured in
profit and loss. The money to be accumulated in politics even by the
cynically corrupt is so small by comparison that able men on the make
go into politics only when their motives are mixed with ambition, a
touch of idealism, vanity, or an imaginative notion of success.
But the fact that a public official took no bribe soon ceased to
shield him from popular attack. Between the honest adherent of machine
politics and the corruptionist himself the muckrakers made no sharp
distinction. And that was because they had in a vague way come to
expect positive action from men in office. They looked for better
school systems, or health campaigns, or a conservation policy, that
is for fairly concrete social measures, and officials who weren’t for
them were lumped together and denounced. The official might have read
too much Adam Smith, or been too much of a lawyer, or taken orders from
the boss, or a bribe from a lobbyist--the rough result was the same: he
wasn’t for what public opinion had come to expect, and the muckrakers
laid their traps for him.
I suppose that from the beginning of the republic people had always
expected their officials to work at a level less self-seeking than
that of ordinary life. So that corruption in politics could never be
carried on with an entirely good conscience. But at the opening of this
century, democratic people had begun to see much greater possibilities
in the government than ever before. They looked to it as a protector
from economic tyranny and as the dispenser of the prime institutions of
democratic life.
But when they went to the government, what they found was a petty and
partisan, slavish and blind, clumsy and rusty instrument for their
expectations. That added to the violence of their attacks. When they
had no vision of what a democratic state might do, it didn’t make
so very much difference if officials took a rake-off. The cost of
corruption was only a little money, and perhaps the official’s immortal
soul. But when men’s vision of government enlarged, then the cost of
corruption and inefficiency rose: for they meant a blighting of the
whole possibility of the state. There has always been corruption in
American politics, but it didn’t worry people very much, so long as the
sphere of government was narrowly limited. Corruption became a real
problem when reform through state action began to take hold of men’s
thought.
As muckraking developed, it began to apply the standards of public
life to certain parts of the business world. Naturally the so-called
public service corporation was the first to feel the pressure. There is
obviously a great difference in outlook between the Vanderbilt policy
of “the public be damned” and the McAdoo policy of “the public be
pleased.” The old sense of private property is very much modified: few
railroad men to-day would deny that they are conducting a quasi-public
enterprise, and that something more is demanded of them than private
exploitation. Thus President Mellen of the New Haven railroad could
not have been handled more roughly by the people of New England if
they had elected him to office. And his successor, President Howard
Elliott, finds it necessary to remind the people that “the railroad
is a public servant in fact as well as in name and that the service
which it renders depends largely upon the treatment which it receives
from its master.” Mr. Elliott’s grandfather would, I think, have said
that his descendant lacked a sense of private property. That is
true: Mr. Elliott’s remark is a recognition that the cultural basis
of property is radically altered, however much the law may lag behind
in recognizing the change. So if the stockholders think they are the
ultimate owners of the Pennsylvania railroad, they are colossally
mistaken. Whatever the law may be, the people have no such notion. And
the men who are connected with these essential properties cannot escape
the fact that they are expected to act increasingly as public officials.
That expectation has filtered into the larger industrial corporations.
I have here, for example, a statement by Roger Babson, a recognized
financial expert:
“Suppose the mayor of a town should appoint his brother police
commissioner; his daughter’s husband, fire commissioner; his uncle,
superintendent of the water works; and put his son in charge of the
street cleaning department. How long would it be before the good
citizens would hold an indignation meeting? It would not be long.
No city in America would stand that kind of graft. Yet pick up the
letterhead of a private corporation and what are you likely to find? It
usually reads something like this: Quincy Persimmon, president; Quincy
Persimmon, Jr., vice-president; Persimmon Quincy, treasurer; Howard
Lemon, secretary. The presence of Howard Lemon in this select family
circle is somewhat puzzling until one learns that Prunella Quincy
Persimmon is the wife of Howard Lemon. Then all is clear. To be sure,
the general manager of the concern, who is the man to see on any matter
of special importance, is a man named Hobbs or Smith or Hogan, but
it soon appears that the salary of the general manager is just about
what it costs young Lemon to run his motor for one year.... Has there
ever been an American mayor who dared to run his city as this private
corporation is run? In their leisure moments the Persimmons, Quincys
and the Lemons are constantly advising their fellow citizens of the
danger of permitting an American city to advance one step toward the
sort of municipal work which is done by a great many foreign cities
with success. The reason against this is given as the graft in public
life.”[1]
Now when the Persimmons are muckraked, what puzzles them beyond words
is that anyone should presume to meddle with _their_ business. What
they will learn is that it is no longer altogether _their_ business.
The law may not have realized this, but the fact is being accomplished,
and it’s a fact grounded deeper than statutes. Big business men who are
at all intelligent recognize this. They are talking more and more about
their “responsibilities,” their “stewardship.” It is the swan-song of
the old commercial profiteering and a dim recognition that the motives
in business are undergoing a revolution.
But muckraking has grown in scope, which is another way of saying that
it has come to expect still more. We hear now about the inefficiency
of business. Men like Brandeis, Redfield, Taylor have taken the lead
in this criticism. Try if you can to imagine a merchant in the ’70’s
subject to criticism on a national scale because he didn’t know how
to run his business. He would have sputtered and exploded at the
impudence of such a suggestion. As a matter of fact some remnants of
that age have sputtered and exploded at the impudence of Mr. Brandeis.
But in the main the younger business men have been willing to listen.
They do not think it a preposterous notion when the Secretary of
Commerce suggests that if they are to conduct business they must do
it efficiently. Then too, the farmers are being criticized. They are
no longer deluged with adulation: they are being told quite frankly
that they have a very great deal to learn from the government and
the universities. And now there is a tremendous agitation about the
quality of the goods and the conditions of labor under which they are
produced.
Why all this has happened: why there are new standards for business
men, why the nature of property is altered, why the workers and the
purchasers are making new demands,--all this muckraking never made
very clear. It was itself considerably more of an effect than a
sign of leadership. It expressed a change, and consequently it is
impossible to say that muckraking was either progressive or reactionary
in its tendency. The attack upon business men was listened to by
their defeated competitors as well as by those who looked forward
to some better order of industrial life. Muckraking is full of the
voices of the beaten, of the bewildered, and then again it is shot
through with some fine anticipation. It has pointed to a revolution in
business motives; it has hinted at the emerging power of labor and the
consumer--we can take those suggestions, perhaps, and by analyzing
them, and following them through, gather for ourselves some sense of
what moves beneath the troubled surface of events.