POLITICAL CONVICTIONS
Political prejudices, preferences, and creeds are often formulated in
highly rational form, but they are grown in highly irrational ways.
When they are seen against the developmental history of the person,
they take on meanings which are quite different from the phrases in
which they are put.
To begin, almost at random, with L. He believes that the United States
ought to join the League of Nations and that our government ought to
lead the world toward conciliation and peace. He is a Republican in
party preference, and possesses well-rationalized judgments on a number
of public questions. It is for none of these reasons that his history
is of special value to the political scientist. What his intimate
history does disclose is an exact parallelism between his political
opinions and those of his father and mother, and, besides that, a
conscious anxiety on his part to conform to the parental pattern of
belief and occupation. He has a strange premonition that if he goes his
own way something terrible will happen. Thus L is not only a simple
conformer, but a compulsive conformer.
He is the youngest of four children. The next older member was a
brother who was killed when L was eight and the brother was seventeen.
Since L was so much younger than the other children, he was at first
petted and spoiled. He slept around with all the members of the family,
but mostly with his mother. A cousin of his own age with whom he
visited provided the immediate point of departure for much exaggerated
sexual fantasy. The cousin initiated him into various sexual practices
when L was seven. He began very early to masturbate, and the habit
stayed with him as a problem until he was through college. A certain
masochistic element appeared when he got erections at an early age
upon being spanked by a girl playmate. He was sexually stimulated when
attending to the natural wants of small children.
L developed his guilty fantasies about his sinful impulses until he
began to fear that grave retribution would be visited upon him or his
family on account of his secret crimes. It was at this time that his
brother, who was his favorite in the family next to the mother, was
killed while out on a boyish escapade. L was profoundly stirred by
this. His forebodings of disaster seemed to have direct confirmation,
and he soon developed whole congeries of compulsive rituals.
When L went to the bathtub, he felt that something terrible would
happen to his family, and especially to his mother, unless he plunged
his head under water and held it there just as long as he had the
breath. He became afraid of taking a bath because of this compulsive
drive to duck his head under the water. Often in the bathroom he had
the same feeling that disaster could be prevented only if he succeeded
in drinking all the water that gushed out of a faucet. At night he
would be seized by the sudden conviction that he must bury his face in
the pillow and keep it there just as long as he possibly could without
suffocating. Once he swallowed a pin after long inner debate over the
efficacy of this measure. Several times he hung over the edge of the
roof on top of the house until he barely had strength enough to swing
back to safety on top of the porch. He felt that he could permit no one
to pass him on the street. Later he thought he must outstare people,
and calculated that if he kept staring until seven out of ten people
dropped their eyes, that all would be well.
His mother was the central figure in L’s anxieties. He evolved quite
independently a theory which had been anticipated many centuries
before by some primitive people and philosophers. He believed that his
mother had a spirit which left her body the moment any member of the
family left her alone, and that this spirit was forced to undergo all
sorts of trials and tests. The spirit would always come back to his
mother’s body before any member of the family spoke to her. In some
magical fashion his own acts relieved the burden which was laid upon
his mother’s spirit. Even in adulthood, he found an occasional fantasy
which was reminiscent of the preoccupations of those years. Not long
ago he was floating on the water in a swimming pool and found himself
thinking that his mother could never hold her head under water as long
as he could hold his foot under water.
With all his timidity, removal to a strange environment was a severe
trial. Just before high-school days his family moved to a new
community, and he never quite overcame his sense of strangeness. He
had always been a coward, shrinking from physical combat. One of his
first memories is of sitting on a curb with an older brother, who
suddenly proposed that he should fight the little brother of another
boy. L began to fight, but was overcome by fear and ran away. Later he
was the center of a small clique of children in his block, all of whom
were very much his junior. One of his group bragged about L’s physical
prowess to the leader of another group, but when the challenge was
issued L backed down. He was worried by his own timidity, but seemed
unable to do anything about it.
He made a handful of friends in the new environment, but was on
intimate terms with no one. With one boy he was able to talk somewhat
freely about sexual fantasies, and L once proposed a sexual experiment
to a neighbor girl. When he was repulsed, his guilt was enormously
increased.
About this time L began to think seriously of entering the ministry,
so that he might always think “pure” thoughts and do “pure” things.
When he went to college he at first roomed with boys from his high
school, but they talked so openly about sex that he felt the atmosphere
was deplorable and demoralizing. Before the month expired, he sought
a new room and went into a solitary retreat. During the first year of
his college life he was acutely religious and besought church services
regularly. He sought guidance from the sermons upon personal and
political questions.
Having developed the idea that he must live up to the family ideal at
any price, L felt that he could never depart from the opinions and
customs of his parents. In politics he was a stout Republican, and
later, when in a religious mood, he heard his preacher espouse the
League. He felt that he ought to support the League, but was plunged
into a serious conflict, because he thought his parents were against
it. Greatly to his relief he discovered that his father and mother had
also been won over to the League by a preacher, and that his lapse from
orthodox Republicanism would not bring dishonor on the family.
His father-hatred fantasies were very oppressive. They took the form
of believing that if only his father were dead, his mother would have
a much easier time of it. L’s father was suffering from a steadily
advancing paralysis. At nine he dreamed that his father was in the
bathtub and that around him were fat, red snakes that were bound to
devour him. L who was standing by in the dream, awoke in a fright. He
often dreamed that his father was away and that his mother was happy
with him.
L still shows many signs of his early neurosis in some of his
ceremonial acts, and in the timid conservatism of his character. The
private meaning of his political convictions is clear enough, for
they are self-imposed obligations to lift his load of guilt for the
murderous and incestuous fantasies which he long struggled to repress.
The opinions of the family were sanctioned as a kind of religion. It is
interesting to see how at first he invented a large array of ceremonial
practices to substitute for his own illicit impulses, and later worked
off his guilt feelings through the religious patterns which were
provided by society, and which were revalidated on the basis of his
private meanings. The acceptance of the political convictions of the
family was on a par with the acceptance of theological dogma.
Among the nonconformists to the family pattern we may choose M, whose
history was taken by Stekel. M was a prominent socialist who agitated
for an economic brotherhood of man, and whose most important private
motive in this particular was a bitter hatred of his own brother.
Most of this hatred was displaced from his brother on to capitalistic
autocracy, and overreacted against by a social ideal of fraternal
equality. His hatred of his own brother was not entirely disposed of by
this displacement, and it was necessary to keep at a distance from him,
and from many of his traits. Thus M despised music because his brother
liked it, followed a style of dress at the opposite pole from his
brother, and nearly walked out on the physician when he discovered that
the physician had treated his own brother.
M spent the years agitating at home and abroad, spending a year and a
half in prison. Thus he succeeded in gratifying his masochistic desire
to be punished for his hatred by provoking society to avenge itself
on him. The motivation in this personality is notably similar to that
which has been more elaborately sketched in the history of A.
Another nonconformist appears in the history of an anarchist who was
once a patient of Stekel. N carried his social doctrine beyond the
sharing of property, insisting that wives should be in common. He took
the initiative by urging his wife to cohabit with the male members
of his anarchistic society, while he demanded access to the wives of
others. His own wife finally fell in love with another man, and asked
N for a divorce. But before arrangements could be made, she became
pregnant by her new partner, who was poor, and asked N to acknowledge
the new child as his own, since this child would fall heir to some
money from its supposed grandfather, the father of N. He consented
to this, as he had to the divorce, but his self-esteem was hurt by
his wife’s desertion. He had always felt elated when his wife came
back to him after each of her erotic adventures, and now he was all
broken up. Stekel believes that N’s espousal of communal principles in
theory and practice was powerfully motivated by an irrational desire
to humiliate his father by playing a generous rôle with his sexual
partner, and substituting the morality of generosity for his father’s
possessive monopoly of the mother. When his wife-mother deserted
him, N’s brilliant career was ruined, and he resorted to opium, and
finally secured a revenge on his father by blocking his ambitions for a
successful son.
A father-hatred (due to unrequited love) of remarkable intensity was
the basis of another career which Stekel examined. O was the young
leader of an anarchist band whose anarchism went beyond precept to
dramatic practice. O had his companions conduct some holdups to get
money to start an anarchist paper. O was an illegitimate child who was
brought up and spoiled by an overindulgent mother. When he realized
that he had a father who was still living, but whose identity was never
divulged, his anger boiled up against his mother upon whose affections
he no longer had monopolistic claim, and against his unknown father,
who refused him love and distinction. For he had no doubt that his
father was a rich and important personage. O displaced much of his
animosity on to remote, abstract symbols of authority, like kings
and capitalists, and devoted himself to destroying them. Much of his
affection was likewise displaced upon abstract ideals of a fatherless
fraternal society, living together without coercion. His sadistic
impulses were by no means entirely sublimated upon remote goals and
harmonious means, for he led his companions on common robberies. O
threw a thick mantle of rationalization over his murderous impulses
and his criminal acts, seeking to justify coercion in the name of a
coercionless ideal which could only be laboriously achieved in the
world.
It is the history of such cases, in which the emotions are peculiarly
intense, which leads one to conclude that political assassins have
hated their fathers with unusual bitterness. E. J. Kempf remarks in his
psychopathology, after reviewing the historical evidence in the cases
of Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, and of Booth, the
assassin of President Lincoln, as follows:
The writer does not hold that every case of severe affective
repression in youth, due to the father’s hatred or a father
equivalent’s, will lead finally to a parricidal or treasonable
compulsion. It is only held that such affective repressions produce
a revolutionary character which, if given an appropriate repressive
setting during maturity, will then converge upon the parricidal
act. Without the rather specific type of affective repression in
his youth, he would be invulnerable to parricidal suggestions later
on.[44]
Illegitimate children, especially when the identity of their father is
undisclosed, carry with them the perpetual query, “Who is my father?”
Indeed, the fantasy of belonging to other parents than those physically
in the family is sufficiently widespread as a disguised hostile reverie
against the actual parents to enable everyone to appreciate in some
measure the mental state of the illegitimate child. “My father may be
rich and powerful.” “My father may be an aristocrat of distinguished
lineage, and he is denying me all my just privileges.” Such fantasies
are taken up and spun out in the reveries of the victim. There is a
presumption that those who suffer from this kind of social inferiority
are especially numerous among those who commit acts of political
violence, as Lombroso held.
P accepted violence, but of a different kind. P is a patriot who proved
his patriotism by volunteering in the late war during the course of
which he was distinguished for bravery in action. His deepest longing
is for war to come again. He is in favor of an aggressive foreign
policy since it increases the chances of war, and war he would welcome
again as he welcomed it before.
P has a younger brother and an older sister. His mother died when he
was six and his relations have been strained with his stepmother, who
entered the family shortly afterward. His father was a very successful
professional man.
P began to fall behind in his schoolwork when he was about seven
years old. This brought him into disrepute at home, for his previous
promise led everyone to expect much from him, and the change seemed
to prove that he was “lazy.” The family has nagged him ever after,
hoping to stimulate him to work harder. Just why he failed to continue
to cope successfully with the demands of school becomes fairly clear
when his reminiscences of the period are recovered. He had loved his
second-grade teacher and had been her special favorite, and both his
marks and his enthusiasm were high. The third-grade teacher impressed
him as stern and cruel, and he soon began to despise the sight of her.
The boy’s work began to crumble, for his mind was full of hostile
fancies about his new teacher, and of yearning fancies for the teacher
whom he had just lost.
His emotional life was further disturbed about this time by the loss
of his nurse. P’s stepmother discharged her as soon as she came. Now
the nurse was the lad’s main love, for his own mother had been ill
for some years before her death. The nurse’s presence gave the child
that stable reassurance which is so necessary if the mind of the child
is to be kept free from morbid fears. In P’s case, there were strong
reasons why this reassurance was necessary. An insane man lived across
the street and terrified the passers-by by screaming at everyone who
passed. Shortly after his mother’s death P went under ether for a minor
operation and was terrified that he would die. The fear of suffocation
reappeared in dreams and nightmares, and he was very timid about
learning to swim.
The stepmother was a disturbing element as a strange and unknown
quantity in the environment, and a competitor for the affection of the
father. When she discharged the nurse, P thought of her as a malignant
influence. His troubles at school were exaggerated by his home changes,
and his mind became preoccupied with fantasies directed against his
stepmother, or some substitute.
P’s father was ambitious for the boy. P remembers him as quick to
reprove and slow to praise. He dreamed of his father’s death, and of
seeing his father in an accident. But his manifest attitude was one of
respectful affection. No matter what happened in the home, he excused
his father by reflecting that the stepmother was to blame. However, on
the deeper level, it appeared that he held his father accountable for
the death of his mother and the disappearance of his nurse.
At school P was popular because of his good physique and his docile
nature. But his studies came hard. Having failed on college-entrance
tests, P bolted and joined the army. The war came along just in time
to give him a dignified retreat from an unbearable personal situation.
He hoped that his father would think about him with pride. He was
bitterly self-accusatory because of his failure to “make good,” and
felt a strong unconscious need of punishment. Under these conditions he
entered army life with enthusiasm, and made a fine record for personal
courage.
Once the war was over, his troubles began again. He succeeded in
entering college, but college felt like a nursery. He felt that his
army experience sophisticated him above schoolboy tasks and chatter.
All his old worries returned, complicated by his longing for a new war.
He had a long series of difficulties in his occupational life.
Seen against this background, his militarism is perfectly intelligible.
War gave him a chance to destroy, wildly and extensively, and also a
chance to work off his guilt feelings by exposing himself to death. His
repressed hatreds were partly turned against himself. An interesting
feature of his ideology is that his longing for personal participation
in war is combined with indignation against the exploitation of
backward peoples by the imperialist powers. He identifies with the
“underdog.”
Q, a contrast to P, is a pacifist and a socialist. His intimate history
shows that relatively simple association of ideas upon which this
depends. From an early age Q showed a morbid fear of blood. Later
on, when he heard that western capitalism meant war and bloodshed,
he experienced a profound emotional revulsion against “capitalism,”
“imperialism,” and their associated concepts, and called himself a
“socialist,” “pacifist,” and “internationalist.”
The blood-phobia itself was a powerful factor in developing his
character. By slow degrees, he was able to push the screened memories
back until he recovered a simple incident which was heavily ladened
with affect, and whose recollection disposed of the blood-phobia, even
though it was not completely analyzed. Q’s father was accustomed to
shave in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon, and Q as a small child
took a great interest in the proceedings. Occasionally the father cut
a pimple on his face with the big razor he was using, and flinched as
the blood spurted out. He immediately swabbed the cut, and presumably
forgot it. But Q did not forget so quickly. He found himself much
engaged in speculating about it, drawing the inference that all the
reddish projections on the body are full of blood, that, indeed, the
body is a reservoir of blood; and that the reddish formations are in
danger of being punctured, so the blood will spurt out and run off.
Q had previously seen his father naked in the bathtub, and he thought
that his father had rubbed soap over his nipples with the palm of his
hand and not with the fingers, from which he concluded that the nipples
must be especially tender, and whenever he washed himself, Q carefully
avoided his own nipples and massaged them most delicately with the palm
of his hand.
His brother had the habit of biting his finger nails until the blood
came, and the family reproached him for it, prophesying that all sorts
of infections might set in. Q began to expect that something disastrous
would happen, and he was not altogether averse to having it happen
because of his jealousy of the brother. But it came with a great shock
when his brother did actually develop an infection, thus confirming his
own suspicions about the necessity for stopping outflows of blood.
About this time Q was playing with his older sister, and in the course
of a scuffle his hand slid down his sister’s body and over her breast.
Q distinctly felt a nipple catch for a moment beneath his fingers, and
he was instantly terrified for fear that his sister would bleed to
death. The breasts, he thought, must be partly filled reservoirs of
blood, since they were soft and yielding.
During his fourth year Q’s grandmother died, and he was horrified to
think of what would happen to one he loved. He had seen a photograph of
a reclining nude with a beatific smile and the caption “Death” beneath.
From this he surmised that people were undressed when they died, and
lowered naked into the ground. But he had seen worms in the ground,
and the worms would attack the body. Since the nipples were prominent
and therefore easy to reach, the nipples would be eaten through first.
He shuddered to think of the worms gnawing away at his grandmother’s
nipples, and sometimes woke up in a fright, having dreamed that the
worms were biting off his own nipples.
Once Q came running into his aunt’s house and discovered a small infant
cousin nursing at the breast. His aunt hastily readjusted her dress.
Because of the care with which the breasts were guarded from exposure
by his mother, sister, and aunt, he leaped to the conclusion that they
had something to do with the secret relations of men and women.
He had all sorts of trouble trying to figure out how these relations
were conducted, but when he was about eight he originated a theory that
temporarily solved the problem. Q figured that a man and woman must lie
on the bed with their faces close together. The male would then squeeze
the breasts, alternately pressing and releasing them, as if they were
balloons. Then they turned over and rubbed their anuses together. Not
long after, he completed his theory of procreation by imagining that
children must be born through a hole in the stomach from which the
blood gushed copiously. The cutting must be very painful and bloody.
Haunted by the fearful prospect of a world which might at any time
knock a hole in his body and deprive him of blood, Q was a bundle of
excessive timidities. He was afraid of his grandmother’s cat, he ran
to his mother if he saw a dog, and he was afraid that a horse would
bite off his hand if he fed it. He hated to watch a ball game for fear
a foul tip would hit him, and he avoided bugs, worms, and lizards
like the plague. Q never put up a fight outside the house, and cried
when the other boys of the neighborhood bullied him. Sometimes he was
taunted as a Jew but he never fought back, much to the disgust of his
father. His forebodings spread to thunder, lightning, fire, redness,
and numerous articles of food.
In marked contrast to his cringing demeanor abroad was his attitude
toward the older brother, ten years his senior. Time after time he
would pick a quarrel and pummel the older youth, until the brother
tired of the situation and gave him a sharp blow. Thereupon he went
to someone for comfort. Q’s father felt that the older boy might be a
little rough, but that the little fellow had something coming to him.
The mother was uniformly comforting, although she reproved both boys
for not behaving as brothers should.
The boys were profoundly hostile to each other, although usually
cordial. The older brother made himself conspicuous for his tenderness
during a serious illness of Q, running errands with alacrity, and
watching constantly by the bedside. When it became clear that Q would
live, the older boy’s devotion stopped abruptly, indicating the
unconscious basis of the exaggerated reaction. He was overreacting
against a death wish against his brother as an intruder between him and
the mother.
Q envied the achievements of his older brother, and often compared
himself unfavorably with him. The older boy not only stood at the
head of his classes, but earned his way by playing the violin.
Although Q stayed at the head of his classes, he was by no means as
self-supporting as his brother. The brother-hatred appeared in such
dreams as:
_Dream 1._--My brother is getting married. He is in a dress suit. A
long line of young men in dress suits are coming up to congratulate
him. As the first one reaches out his hand, he falls backward and
all the others fall over one another like tenpins.
_Dream 2._--My brother and I are walking down the street near
home. I hear a scream. An Italian is chasing a woman with a baby
who seeks refuge in a store. The Italian knocks her down. Then my
brother goes into the store and tries to deal with the Italian, but
is knocked down. I enter and knock down the Italian.
The brother-jealousy is of secondary significance in Q’s history. The
crux of the blood-phobia was a critical experience whose traumatic
effects were due to the strength of the affects which were mobilized
and repressed. Q slept with his father, and the blood-letting incident
aroused his slumbering desire for the death of his father and his own
active fear of suffering mutilation (castration). Blood derived its
significance because it involved a reinstatement of the most acute
phase of the conflict. To escape from it, Q fainted unless he succeeded
in getting out of the sight of blood at once. It is noteworthy that
Q did not at once faint when the razor cut the pimple; it was not
until the elaboration of the fantasy had continued, and the affects
had become greatly concentrated, that the blood came to signalize
an instant and overwhelming emergency from which a kind of suicide
(fainting) was the only escape.
The following terse dream expresses something of the underlying
situation:
_Dream 3._--I am looking down a city street which is covered with
snow and lighted by street lights. The President of the United
States is walking along the street and suddenly slips and falls. My
attention is then called to a place farther down the street where
two tumblers are leaping over a rope stretched across the street.
They are leaping backward and forward with a curious mechanical
motion.
The rhythmic leaping is a pictorial symbol for the pulsations of
genital excitement. The President is an authority substitute for the
father. When the father is out of the way, genital activity will become
safe. Since the father prescribes sexual abstinence (abstinence from
handling the genitals), this expresses a desire to give greater freedom
to the repressed impulses of the subject’s character. The repressed
positive identification with the brother shows itself in opposing two
tumblers instead of one to the father.
_Dream 4._--A goose or ducklike creature is being chased back and
forth across the road by two dogs. The creature has a red bill
and head, a blue back and wing feathers, and a white breast. The
white, fuzzy dogs chase the animal back and forth but do not reach
it because of their overanxiety. After two round-trips the animal,
which moved with a curiously mechanical motion, runs toward a man
who has come to the door and jumps between his legs. The man is
middle-aged and his hair is white. He is in white pajamas. He says,
“My leg is the leg of weakness; my health is hell....” I am in a
winter coat standing outside the house of a friend of my sister’s
in whom I remember having had a mild interest, but which led to
nothing since she was older than I, and not very attractive. I had
just delivered a valentine. The scene is illuminated by a street
light, and is especially clear because snow is on the ground. The
man in the picture is unknown.
The odd creature with the red bill and head symbolizes the penis. The
two dogs (brothers) try to capture it, but the father protects it.
However, the hope of achieving masculinity is not wholly dashed because
the old man is growing weaker.
For some time the productions of Q showed that sexuality was powerfully
linked with death, and that the death was to be his own rather than
that of his father, or simultaneously with the death of his father.
As the castration anxiety lifted, the blood fear abated, and dreams,
word-associations, posture, and other significant reactions altered
toward greater ease and assertiveness.
We have seen that well-rationalized theories and preferences are not
alien fungi on the personality, but an important expression of the
essential trends of the personality. Thus theories are at least as
indicative of the individual who espouses them as of the ostensible
subjects of speculation. Pessimism, for example, is common in old age,
when the sexual powers decline and the individual projects upon the
world the sinfulness which he feels for wanting to indulge beyond his
powers, and defy his inadequacy. The mechanism of this sort of thing
stands out most clearly in extreme cases, such as R. R believed that
the world was going from bad to worse and that wars and rumors of wars
were devastating the earth. He spent so many hours over a plan to
secure the peace of the world forevermore that he developed a confusion
state. He would go out in a park, find a secluded spot and weep over
the troubles of the world as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. One day in
passing a market he saw some chickens in a coop without any water.
The cruelty of this was more than he could bear, so he went home and
went to bed. His ideas were that he had been chosen to work out the
salvation of the world, and that he had been endowed with unusual,
indeed supernatural, understanding of men’s motives, and special power
to heal insanity.
R elaborated a private form of religion. He said that he was worshiping
the sun as God, as a symbol of Christ and truth (actually, of masculine
virility). When it became necessary for him to commune with his spirit,
he was in the habit of facing the sun and repeating a litany of his
invention, which ran:
To the sun, the heart of the world! It warmeth the earth with its
loveliness. Glory to God! It riseth in the east, lighting the dark
corners of ignorance and wickedness. Glory to God! It chaseth the
darkness before it like the host of Syria before the children of
Israel. Glory to God! It chaseth the darkness before it like the
host of Syria before the children of Israel. Glory to God! etc.,
etc.
He began to chant, and then assumed an exalted, heroic pose, with his
arms and head thrown back. Presently he felt that a big storm was
coming that would ruin the world. The world is like a giant serpent, a
serpent asleep.
R’s story is not sufficiently detailed to show much about the
development of those reaction patterns which disposed him to meet
old age in such a way. He was the only child of a poverty-stricken
family who played by himself and got on well with his books. Some
local lawyers took an interest in him and helped him through school.
He read law and was admitted to the bar. After making a precarious
living for a number of years, he was elected to various local offices,
and then to Congress. He was reputed to be an impractical dreamer, and
enjoyed making rather fanciful speeches. His legislative career as
recorded in the _Congressional Record_ was undistinguished, containing
the usual quota of pension bills and “extensions of remarks” during
tariff debates. He was opposed to the annexation of the Philippines,
and hostile to imperialism; in this he went along with his party, and
likewise indulged a personal conviction. He practiced law desultorily,
after having been defeated for the legislature, and devoted himself to
study and writing. His one published volume is a vague disquisition on
human affairs, which accurately reflects the indeterminate, rhetorical,
and meliorative quality of his thinking. He married a woman of his own
age when he was a young man. There were no children.
When the paranoid rather than the manic-depressive strain runs through
the character, nebulous and all-embracing pessimism about the world
is sharpened to specific accusations. Everyone who is prominent in
public life is a potential object of such attacks. One might hazard
the conjecture that the importance of an individual in the community’s
estimation may be measured by the number of “crank” letters to him and
about him. One such crank, S, wrote a trunkful of letters accusing
public men of graft, of being dominated by “Big Biz,” and offering
suggestions to government officials. He complained of being persecuted
and victimized by prominent people, especially by Harry F. Sinclair,
the oil man. This was attributed by him to the fact that he had written
a letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court calling His Honor’s
attention to the Teapot Dome scandal which was being ventilated in the
press, and naming Mr. Sinclair as the responsible party. Since then Mr.
Sinclair had prevented him from getting a job, and paid his own sister
to throw him out on the street. During his divorce proceedings he
wrote to the American Bar Association to protest against the “shyster
lawyers” who were representing his wife, and claims that Mr. Taft and
Mr. Root answered him in the papers the following day. When Mr. John
W. Davis was a presidential candidate he wrote to him, describing the
various attacks to which he, S, had been subjected. Mr. Davis neglected
to reply and did nothing about it, so S prevented his election, and
feels that Mr. Coolidge owes him something for being elected. “I wrote
to Hearst and I believe that turned the trick.” In this letter he
divulged the fact that Mr. Davis was connected with Wall Street, and
this hint was enough to arouse Mr. Hearst. In reply to the routine
question, “What is going on in the world?” he answered, “More deviltry
than there ever was before.”
Unfortunately the history is too meager to explain S’s development,
except by analogy with others who have displayed the same behavior.
Certainly his life-story would, if accessible, reveal the effects of a
disorganizing family environment. We do know that his father was drunk
much of the time, and that the children had an unhappy lot. At five S
went to live with his grandparents who wanted to take him away from
his drunken father. At about fifteen he came back for a while. Shortly
afterward he saved his sister from being strangled to death by their
father, who in a drunken tantrum had her by the neck against the wall.
S became a good mechanic, but disintegrated in later life.
Another “crank” devised an ingenious theory to explain President
Wilson’s conduct. T says that he discovered that Mr. Wilson was not
a citizen of the United States. He first made this revelation on his
draft questionnaire, and when this became generally known, Mr. Wilson
went to France to escape the anger of the enraged citizenry of the
United States; later Mr. Wilson fell ill of a guilty conscience at new
revelations that he made. Mr. Wilson was part of the Masonic conspiracy
which had been hatched against him when he was very young. T’s
stepfather, who was a Shriner, probably furnishes the material for this
delusion. As for T himself, he believed that he descended directly from
Mary, Queen of Scots, and that he had foreknowledge of the approaching
end of the world. The members of the millennium are “a creed and not a
denomination,” and only twenty million people will be saved, over whom
T will rule.
* * * * *
From the excerpts included, it appears that the significance of
political opinions is not to be grasped apart from the private
motives which they symbolize. The degree of insight into objective
relationships is one thing; the extent to which “private meanings” are
accreted to the “public” or “manifest” meanings is another. When we
see the private meaning of public acts, the problem of interpreting
the full significance of political behavior presses itself upon our
attention. Are there any implications for the general theory of
the political process which follow from the intensive scrutiny of
individual subjective (and objective) histories? This is the question
to which we next turn.