this sort. But even these directly homicidal crowds invariably represent
themselves as motivated by moral idealism and righteous indignation.
Negroes are lynched in order to protect the white womanhood of the
South, also because, once accused, the negro happens to be helpless. If
the colored people were in the ascendancy and the whites helpless we
should doubtless see the reverse of this situation. A community
rationally convinced of the culprit's guilt could well afford to trust
the safety of womanhood to the justice meted out by the courts, but it
is obvious that these "moral" crowds are less interested in seeing that
justice is done than in running no risk of losing their victim, once he
is in their power. A recent development of this spirit is the lynching
in a Southern town of a juror who voted for the acquittal of a black man
accused of a crime.
It may be taken as a general law of crowd-psychology that the
"morality" of the crowd always demands a victim. Is it likely that one
of these mobs would "call off" an interesting lynching party if at the
last minute it were demonstrated that the accused was innocent? The
practice of lynching has been extended, from those cases where the
offense with which the accused is charged is so revolting as justly to
arouse extreme indignation, to offenses which are so trivial that they
merely serve as a pretext for torture and killing.
The homicidal tendencies of the crowd-mind always reveal themselves the
minute the crowd becomes sufficiently developed and powerful to relax
for the time being the usual social controls. Illustrations of this may
be seen in the rioting between the white and the colored
races--epidemics of killing--such as occurred recently in East St.
Louis, and in the cities of Washington, Chicago, and Omaha. The same
thing is evident in the "pogroms" of Russia and Poland, in the acts of
revolutionary mobs of Germany and Russia, in the promptness with which
the Turks took advantage of the situation created by the war to
slaughter the Armenians. This hatred is the specter which forever haunts
the conflict between labor and capital. It is what speedily transformed
the French Revolution from the dawn of an era of "Fraternity" to a day
of terror and intimidation. It is seen again in the curious interest
which the public always has in a sensational murder trial. It is evident
in the hostility, open or suppressed, with which any community regards
the strange, the foreign, the "outlandish"--an example of which is the
frequent bullying and insulting of immigrants in this country since the
war. Much of the "Americanization propaganda" which we have carried on
since the war unfortunately gave the typical crowd-man his opportunity.
One need only listen to the speeches or read the publications of certain
"patriotic" societies to learn why it was that the exhortation to our
foreign neighbors to be loyal did so much more harm than good.
The classic example of the killing crowd is, of course, a nation at war.
There are, to be sure, wars of national self-defense which are due to
political necessity rather than to crowd-thinking, but even in such
cases the phenomena of the crowd are likely to appear to the detriment
of the cause. At such times not only the army but the whole nation
becomes a homicidal crowd. The army, at least while the soldiers are in
service, probably shows the crowd-spirit in a less degree than does the
civilian population. The mental processes of an entire people are
transformed. Every interest--profit-seeking excepted--is subordinated
to the one passion to crush the enemy. The moment when war is declared
is usually hailed with tremendous popular enthusiasm and joy. There is a
general lifting of spirits. There is a sense of release, a nation-wide
exultation, a sigh of relief as we feel the deadening hand of social
control taken from our throats. The homicidal wish-fancy, which in peace
times and in less sovereign crowds exists only as an hypothesis, can now
become a reality. And though it is doubtful if more than one person in a
million can ever give a rational account of just what issue is really at
stake in any war, the conviction is practically unanimous that an
occasion has been found which justifies, even demands, the release of
all the repressed hostility in our natures. The fact that in war time
this crowd hostility may, under certain circumstances, really have
survival value and be both beneficial and necessary to the nation, is to
my mind not a justification of crowd-making. It is rather a revelation
of the need of a more competent leadership in world politics.
Unconsciously every national crowd, I mean the crowd-minded element in
the nation, carries a chip on its shoulder, and swaggers and challenges
its neighbors like a young town-bully on his way home from grammar
school. This swaggering, which is here the "compulsive manifestation" of
unconscious hostility characteristic of every crowd, appears to
consciousness as "national honor." To the consciousness of the
nation-crowd the quarrel for which it has been spoiling for a long time
always appears to have been "forced upon it." Some nations are much more
quarrelsome than others. I cannot believe that our conviction that
Imperial Germany was the aggressor in the great war is due merely to
patriotic conceit on our part. The difference between our national
spirit and that of Imperial Prussia is obvious, but the difference in
this respect, great as it is, is one of degree rather than of kind, and
is due largely to the fact that the political organization of Germany
permitted the Prussian patriots to hold the national mind in a permanent
crowd state to a degree which is even now hardly possible in this
republic. My point is that a nation becomes warlike to precisely the
extent that its people may be made to think and behave as a crowd. Once
a crowd, it is always "in the right" however aggressive and ruthless its
behavior; every act or proposal which is calculated to involve the
nation-crowd in a controversy, which gains some advantage over
neighboring peoples, or intensifies hatred once it is released, is
wildly applauded. Any dissent from the opinions of our particular party
or group is trampled down. He who fails at such a time to be a
crowd-man and our own sort of a crowd-man is a "slacker." Everyone's
patriotism is put under suspicion, political heresy-hunting is the rule,
any personal advantage which can be gained by denouncing as "enemy
sympathizers" rival persons or groups within the nation is sure to be
snatched up by some one. The crowd-mind, even in times of peace,
distorts patriotism so that it is little more than a compulsive
expression and justification of repressed hostility. In war the crowd
succeeds in giving rein to this hostility by first projecting it upon
the enemy.
Freud in his little book, _War and Death_, regards war as a temporary
"regression" in which primitive impulses which are repressed by
civilization, but not eradicated, find their escape. He argues that most
people live psychologically "beyond their means." Hence war could be
regarded, I suppose, as a sort of "spiritual liquidation." But if the
hostility which the war crowd permits to escape is simply a repressed
impulse to cruelty, we should be obliged to explain a large part of
crowd-behavior as "sadistic." This may be the case with crowds of a
certain type, lynching mobs, for instance. But as the homicidal
tendencies of paranoia are not commonly explained as sadism, I can see
no reason why those of the crowd should be. Sadism is a return to an
infantile sex perversion, and in its direct overt forms the resulting
conflicts are conscious and are between the subject and environment. It
is where a tendency unacceptable to consciousness is repressed--and
inadequately--that neurotic conflict ensues. This conflict being inner,
develops certain mechanisms for the defense of the ego-feeling which is
injured. The hatred of the paranoiac is really a defense for his own
injured self-feeling. As the crowd always shows an exaggerated
ego-feeling similar to the paranoiac's delusion of grandeur, and as in
cases of paranoia this inner conflict is always "projected" in the form
of delusions of persecution, may we not hold that the characteristic
hostility of the crowd is also in some way a device for protecting this
inflated self-appreciation from injury? The forms which this hatred
takes certainly have all the appearance of being "compulsive" ideas and
actions.
We have been discussing crowds in which hostility is present in the form
of overt destructive and homicidal acts or other unmistakable
expressions of hatred. But are there not also peaceable crowds, crowds
devoted to religious and moral propaganda, idealist crowds? Yes, all
crowds moralize, all crowds are also idealistic. But the moral
enthusiasm of the crowd always demands a victim. The idealist crowd also
always makes idols of its ideals and worships them with human
sacrifice. The peaceable crowd is only potentially homicidal. The
death-wish exists as a fancy only, or is expressed in symbols so as to
be more or less unrecognizable to ordinary consciousness. I believe that
_every crowd is_ "_against some one_." Almost any crowd will persecute
on occasion--if sufficiently powerful and directly challenged. The crowd
tends ever to carry its ideas to their deadly logical conclusion.
I have already referred to the crowd's interest in games and athletic
events as an innocent symbolization of conflict. How easy it is to
change this friendly rivalry into sudden riot--its real meaning--every
umpire of baseball and football games knows. As an illustration of my
point--namely, that the enthusiasm aroused by athletic contests is the
suppressed hostility of the crowd, I give the following. In this letter
to a New York newspaper, the writer, a loyal "fan," reveals the same
mentality that we find in the sectarian fanatic, or good party man,
whose "principles" have been challenged. The challenge seems in all such
cases to bring the hostility into consciousness as "righteous
indignation."
_To the Editor_:
SIR,--The article under the caption "Giants' Chances for Flag to
be Settled in Week," on the sporting page of the _Tribune_, is
doubtless intended to be humorous.
The section referring to the Cincinnati baseball public is
somewhat overdrawn, to say the least, and does not leave a very
favorable impression on the average Cincinnatian, such as
myself. I have been a reader of your paper for some time, but if
this sort of thing continues I shall feel very much like
discontinuing.
W. L. D.
The extremes to which partisan hatred and jealousy can lead even members
of the United States Senate, the intolerance and sectarian spirit which
frequently characterize crowds, the "bigotry" of reformist crowds, are
matters known to us all. Does anyone doubt that certain members of the
Society for the Prevention of Vice, or of the Prohibitionists, would
persecute if they had power? Have not pacifist mass meetings been known
to break up in a row? The Christian religion is fundamentally a religion
of love, but the Church has seldom been wholly free from the
crowd-spirit, and the Church crowd will persecute as quickly as any
other. In each period of its history when Christian believers have been
organized as dominant crowds the Church has resorted to the severest
forms of persecution. Popular religion always demands some kind of devil
to stand as the permanent object of the believer's hostility. Let an
editor, or lecturer, or clergyman anywhere attack some one, and he at
once gains following and popularity. Evangelists and political orators
are always able to "get" their crowd by resorting to abuse of some one.
Let any mass meeting become a crowd, and this note of hostility
inevitably appears.
Notice the inscriptions which commonly appear on the banners carried in
political or labor parades. On the day after the armistice was signed
with Germany, when the most joyous and spontaneous crowds I have ever
seen filled the streets of New York, I was greatly impressed with those
homemade banners. Though it was the occasion of the most significant and
hard-won victory in human history, there was hardly a reference to the
fact. Though it was the glad moment of peace for which all had longed, I
did not see ten banners bearing the word "Peace," even in the hands of
the element in the city who were known to be almost unpatriotically
pacifist. But within less than an hour I counted on Fifth Avenue more
than a hundred banners bearing the inscription, "To Hell with the
Kaiser."
That the man chiefly responsible for the horrors of the war should be
the object of universal loathing is only to be expected, but the
significant fact is that of all the sentiments which swept into people's
minds on that occasion, this and this alone should have been immediately
seized upon when the crowd spirit began to appear. I doubt if at the
time there was a very clear sense of the enormity of Wilhelm's guilt in
the minds of those laughing people. The Kaiser was hardly more than a
symbol. The antagonist, whoever he be, was "fallen down to hell," our
own sense of triumph was magnified by the depth of his fall. Just so the
Hebrew Prophet cried "Babylon is fallen," so the early Christians
pictured Satan cast into the bottomless pit, so the Jacobins cried "_A
bas les Aristocrats_," our own Revolutionary crowds cried "Down with
George III," and the Union soldiers sang, "Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour
Apple Tree." I repeat that wherever the crowd-mind appears, it will
always be found to be "against" some one.
An interesting fact about the hostility of a crowd is its ability on
occasion to survive the loss of its object. It may reveal the phenomenon
which psychologists call "displacement." That is to say, another object
may be substituted for the original one without greatly changing the
quality of the feeling. A mob in the street, driven back from the object
of its attack, will loot a store or two before it disperses. Or, bent on
lynching a certain negro, it may even substitute an innocent man, if
robbed of its intended victim--as, for instance, the lynching of the
mayor of Omaha. Such facts would seem to show that these hostile acts
are really demanded by mechanisms within the psyche. Many symbolic acts
of the person afflicted with compulsion neurosis show this same _trait
of substitution_. If inhibited in the exercise of one mechanism of
escape, the repressed wish will substitute another. Also anyone
associated by the unconscious reasoning with the hated object, or anyone
who tries to defend him or prove him innocent, may suffer from this
crowd's hatred. Freud has analyzed this phenomenon in his study of
taboo. He who touches the tabooed object himself becomes taboo.
I have said that the hostility of the crowd is a sort of "defense
mechanism." That this is so in certain cases, I think can be easily
demonstrated. The following news item is an example of the manner in
which such hostility may serve as a "defense mechanism" compensating the
self-feeling for certain losses and serving to enhance the feeling of
self-importance:
CHARGES BAKER HAD 57 BRANDS OF ARMY OBJECTOR.
----, OF MINNESOTA, DEFENDING MARINES FATHERS' ASSOCIATION
PROTEST; ASSAILS FREEING OF "SLACKERS."
WASHINGTON, _July 23_.--A bitter partisan quarrel developed in
the House today when Representative ----, of Minnesota, attacked
Secretary Baker and the President for the government's policy
toward conscientious objectors. The attack was the result of
protests by the Marines Fathers' Association of Minneapolis,
Minnesota, representing between 500 and 600 young marines now in
France, all from the Minneapolis high schools and the University
of Minnesota, and many in the famous 6th Regiment of Marines
that took a big part in stopping the Germans at Chateau Thierry.
Upon learning of the treatment accorded conscientious objectors
in this country while their sons were dying in France, the
association asked Representative ---- to fix the responsibility
for the government's policy. Representative ---- fixed it today
as that of Secretary Baker and President Wilson, charging that
they extended the definition of those to be exempted from
military service laid down by Congress in an act of May 17,
1917.
"One variety of conscientious objector was not enough for Mr.
Baker," declared Representative ----. "He had 57 kinds...."
Representative ----, of Arizona, defended Secretary Baker,
asserting that of 20,000 men who were certified as conscientious
objectors, 16,000 ultimately went to war. The case of Sergt.
Alvin C. York, the Tennessee hero, who had conscientious
objections at first, but soon changed his mind, was cited in
defense of the War Department's policy.
Let us pass over the obviously partisan element in this Congressional
debate--a crowd phenomenon in itself, by the way--and consider the
mental state of this Fathers' Association.
In spite of the fact that the treatment of those who refused military
service in this country was so much more severe than the manner with
which the British government is reported to have dealt with this class
of persons, that many people, including the Secretary of War, whose
loyalty except to partisan minds was above suspicion, sought in the name
of humanity to alleviate some of the conditions in our military prisons,
it was not severe enough to satisfy these "fathers." It is doubtful if
anything short of an _auto da fe_ would have met their approval. Now no
one believes that these simple farmers from the Northwest are such
sadists at heart that they enjoy cruelty for its own sake. I imagine
that the processes at work here are somewhat as follows:
The telltale phrase here is that these farmers' sons "were dying in
France." Patriotic motives rightly demanded that fathers yield their
sons to the hardship and danger of battle, and while the sacrifice was
made consciously, with willingness and even with pride in having done
their painful duty, it was not accomplished without struggle--the
unconscious resisted it. It could not be reconciled to so great a
demand. In other words, these fathers, and probably many of their sons
also, were unconsciously "conscientious objectors." Unconsciously they
longed to evade this painful duty, but these longings were put aside,
"repressed" as shameful and cowardly--that is, as unacceptable to
conscious self-feeling. It was necessary to defend the ego against
these longings. Compensation was demanded and found in the nation-wide
recognition of the value of this patriotic sacrifice. Expressions of
patriotic sentiment on the part of others, therefore, compensated the
individual and enhanced his self-feeling.
Successful refusal anywhere to recognize the duty which consciously
motivated this sacrifice strengthened the unconscious desire to evade
it. The unconscious reasoning was something like this: "If those men got
out of this thing, why should not we? Since we had to bear this loss,
they must also. We have suffered for duty's sake. By making them suffer
also, they will be forced to recognize this 'duty' with which we defend
ourselves against our sense of loss and desire to escape it." As a
witness to the values against which the ego of these fathers has to
struggle, the existence of the conscientious objector, in a less degree
of suffering than their own, is as intolerable as their own "shameful
and cowardly" unconscious longings. Hostility to the conscientious
objector is thus a "projection" of their own inner conflict. By becoming
a crowd, the members of this "Fathers' Association" make it mutually
possible to represent their hostility to conscientious objectors as
something highly patriotic. Secretary Baker's alleged leniency to these
hated persons is now not only an affront to these fathers, it is an
affront to the entire nation.
Another and somewhat different example of the function of hatred in the
service of the self-feeling is the following item, which throws some
light on the motives of the race riots in Washington. This is, of
course, a defense of but one of the crowds involved, but it is
interesting psychologically.
NEGRO EDITOR BLAMES WHITES FOR RACE RIOTS.
Dr. W. F. B. DuBois, of 70 Fifth Avenue, editor of _The Crisis_,
a magazine published in connection with the work of the National
Association for the Advancement of the Colored People, yesterday
attributed the race riots in Washington to the irritability of
all people and the unsettling of many ideas caused by the war,
to the influx of a large number of Southerners into Washington,
and to the _presence in that city of many of the representatives
of the educated, well-dressed class of negroes_ which white
racial antagonists dislike.
Washington policemen are notoriously unfriendly to the colored
people, he added. Time and time again they stand by and witness
a dispute between a white man and a negro, and when it is over
and the negro has been beaten they arrest the negro, and not the
white man who caused the trouble in the first place.
The colored editor pointed out the similarity between the
present riots in Washington and the Atlanta riots which occurred
about twelve years ago. In both places, he said, white hoodlums
began rioting and killing negroes. When the latter became
aroused and began to retaliate, the authorities stepped in and
the rioting stopped.
Major J. E. Spingarn, acting treasurer of the National
Association for the Advancement of the Colored People, said the
_soldiers and sailors who have been taking part in the rioting
in Washington resent the new attitude of self-respect which the
negro has assumed because of the part he played in the war_.
"The soldiers," he said, "instead of fighting the negroes
because the latter think better of themselves for having fought
in the war, should respect them for having proved themselves
such good fighters." (The italics are mine.)
It is quite possible that in most communities where such race riots
occur certain members of the colored race are responsible to the extent
that they have made themselves conspicuously offensive to their white
neighbors.
But such individual cases, even where they exist, do not justify attacks
upon hundreds of innocent people. And it must be said that in general
the kind of people whose feelings of personal superiority can find no
other social support than the mere fact that they happen to belong to
the white race--and I think it will be found that the mobs who attack
negroes are uniformly made of people who belong to this
element--naturally find their self-feeling injured "if a nigger puts on
airs." Their fiction is challenged; to accept the challenge would force
upon the consciousness of such people a correct estimate of their own
worth. Such an idea is unacceptable to consciousness. The presumptuous
negroes who serve as such unpleasant reminders "must be put in their
proper place"--that is, so completely under the feet of the white
element in the community that the mere fact of being a white man may
serve as a defense mechanism for just those members of our noble race
who approach more closely to the social position of the colored element
in our midst.
As the moral standards of the community will not permit even this
element of the white race to play the hoodlum with self-approval, some
disguise or "displacement" for this motive must be found whereby the
acts to which it prompts may appear to the consciousness of their
perpetrators as justifiable. A misdeed is committed by a black man;
instantly this element of the white race becomes a crowd. The deed
provides the whites with just the pretext they want. They may now
justify themselves and one another in an assault on the whole colored
community. Here I believe we have the explanation of much that is called
"race prejudice." The hatred between the races, like all crowd-hatred,
is a "defense mechanism" designed to protect the ego in its conflict
with ideas unacceptable to consciousness.