TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Misspelled words have been corrected. These are identified by
the ♦ symbol in the text and are shown immediately below the
paragraph in which they appear. Archaic and alternate spellings are
left unchanged (e.g. neurones, synagog).
Other changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE
UNITED STATES
ITS HISTORY AND CAUSES
BY
RABBI LEE J. LEVINGER, Ph.D.
Author of “_A Jewish Chaplain In France_”
[Illustration (publisher logo)]
NEW YORK
BLOCH PUBLISHING CO., Inc.
“_THE JEWISH BOOK CONCERN_”
1925
Copyright, 1925, by
Lee J. Levinger
Printed in the United States
TO MY PARENTS
WHO FIRST TAUGHT ME THE MEANING OF TOLERANCE
_And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too._
William Blake.
PREFACE
This study, which was submitted as one of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, has
meant the assembling of personal and theoretical interests of various
types. It has two chapters of pure theory on which the practical
application is based. To the student of social philosophy or sociology,
then, chapters 1 and 2 will contain the essentials of the study. The
general reader, not interested in the technical basis but in the
conclusions, may prefer to omit these chapters from the reading, and
to proceed from the introduction directly to the applications of this
theory in American history and specifically to the problem of the Jew
in America, as developed in chapters 3 to 9.
Grateful acknowledgments are due to Professor Edgar A. Singer, Jr.,
of the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Julius Drachsler of the
College of the City of New York, and Mr. Leon L. Lewis, Secretary
of the Anti-Defamation League, for their very stimulating aid, both
prior to and during the writing of this study, and to my wife for her
assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.
Lee J. Levinger
_Wilmington, Delaware, May, 1925._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction: A Statement of the Problem 9
I. The “Group Mind,” a Definition and a
Description 18
II. Groups in Contact 32
III. Intolerance 45
IV. American History, a Development of Groups 56
V. The World War and Its Aftermath 67
VI. The Ku Klux Klan and Other Group Reactions 74
VII. Anti-Semitism 85
VIII. The Retort to Anti-Semitism 96
IX. The Future of the American Mind 111
INTRODUCTION
A STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The existence of an anti-Semitic movement in the United States of
America since the World War is a paradox that attracts attention at
once. The most ancient and most pervasive form of intolerance is
now at home in a nation founded by revolution and dedicated to the
principles of freedom and tolerance. How can such a movement exist in
such a nation? The apparent contradiction leads us at once into the
many contradictions of the psychology of large groups of human beings,
which both parallels and contradicts the simpler psychology of their
constituent individuals. This is a leading question, to answer which
we must go as deeply as we can into the mind of the group, into the
relation of groups to the smaller groups of which they are composed
and of those smaller groups to each other, into the genesis and
implications of tolerance and intolerance.
This theoretical study completed, we shall then have to verify the
principles there worked out by application to the difficult and crucial
problem of the present study. If a theory of group and sub-group
can explain the existence and the development of anti-Semitism in
America, it will have solved a problem of exceptional complexity and
significance, one central to the whole field. This will involve a study
of the mind of the American people, in brief outline, with its various
movements of intolerance in their bearing on the present one. It will
also necessitate a slight study of the various anti-Semitic examples,
historic and contemporary, from which the American movement derives
in part. It will conclude with a consideration of the future of the
American people as a united group, taking into view the tendencies of
the sub-groups within the bounds of their common nation, or over-group.
Anti-Semitism is the modern form of the ancient prejudice against the
Jew; it began in Germany in 1871, directly after the Franco-Prussian
War, and bases its opposition to the Jews on the race theory.
Anti-Judaism is, of course, much older, as old as the people against
whom it was directed. In most ancient times, as represented by the
Egyptian taskmasters and the Haman of the Book of Esther, it was like
any other national hatred or prejudice. Later it took on a distinctly
religious coloring, so that we find a Philo going to Rome to appeal
for the Jewish colony in Alexandria or a Josephus writing a defense
of his people against Apion. With the growth of Christianity into a
persecuting body, anti-Judaism became strictly a religious matter,
based on the New Testament story that the Jews were responsible for
the death of Jesus. Medieval laws on the Jews were, then, often
based on the principle of expiation, such as the yellow badge which
distinguished the wearer when he left the compulsory shelter of the
Ghetto. A different form of religious motivation was shown in the
frequent accusations of desecrating the Host or of using the blood
of a Christian child in preparing the unleavened bread of Passover,
which appears in the Canterbury Tales and was revived as recently as
1911 in the notorious Beilis case at Kiev, Russia. Along with this
went occasional mob outbreaks such as occur against the negroes in our
Southern states, and still more rarely decrees of expulsion, which
drove the entire Jewish population from England in 1294, from Spain in
1492, and from other countries at other times, for a longer or shorter
period.
The actual applications of this religious anti-Judaism were far too
many to enumerate here, ranging from the prohibition of tilling the
soil to compulsory attendance at a Christian sermon, as in Browning’s
“Holy Cross Day.” Counteracting it were the frequent intercourse and
occasional intermarriage through the Middle Ages, the paid protection
of the Holy Roman Emperor for his {Kammerknechte}, the toleration
of the Moors and later of Holland, finally the emancipation of the
French Revolution on abstract grounds of the Rights of Man. Religious
discrimination was forbidden in the American Constitution, so that
anti-Judaism of the religious type had no footing in the new nation,
strong as it had previously been in several of the colonies. In
addition, the number of Jews in America was very small, so that
discrimination against them might exist in principle but could
have little exercise in practise. And those few were often wealthy
and cultured descendants of the old Spanish Jewry. During the most
of the nineteenth century the Jews entering the country met the same
difficulties as other immigrants, with very little variation.
But then the problem changed; the number of Jews increased from 3,000
in 1800 to 250,000 in 1880. Some of these achieved wealth and began to
associate with non-Jewish social circles. The opposition to them now
became largely social. They were excluded from many hotels and summer
resorts, from clubs, college fraternities and the like. This phase of
the problem was often acute but never important, and is here mentioned
merely in passing, though it will have its bearing on the theory to
be developed. In addition, the religious prejudice continued, similar
to that between Christian denominations but stronger, owing to the
frequent teaching of Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion. These
two aspects of anti-Judaism persisted as the only ones in America until
after the World War, and these were sporadic, and often opposed by the
tendency of our political democracy and by various groups of religious
liberals.
Meanwhile, modern racialism had been born and with it modern
anti-Semitism, the attack on the Jew as a member of a different
race, inferior or at least unassimilable by the Aryan. Writers
against the Jew no longer turned for their weapons to Eisenmenger’s
“Endecktes Judentum” of 1701, with its religious criticism and
personal strictures. The new classics are Werner Sombart’s “Die
Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben” and Drumont’s “La France Juive.” An
elaborate scientific basis has been constructed, on which a movement
of opposition was erected, apparently much the same as that of the
Inquisition or of Apion. One of the conclusions of the present study
will be that it is in fact the same, and that the racial theory can
be almost overlooked in estimating the actual causes and processes
of anti-Semitism. It would be an interesting, though not essential
task, to examine this racial ♦theory in detail and determine how much
scientific authenticity it may possess. In Russia the conditions
of autocracy threatened by liberalism and war led to official
anti-Semitism, with pogroms or massacres of the Jews actually led
by army officers. In Germany the officialism and social stratification
led to discrimination against Jews in the appointment of judges,
university professors and army officers. In France anti-Semitism became
a part of royalism and clericalism, and from the military and royalist
group came the Dreyfus case. In England anti-Semitism was chiefly
literary; Hillaire Belloc proves the Jews to be aliens who should all
be sent to Palestine, while Gilbert K. Chesterton visits Palestine and
reports that the Jews there are terrible creatures and ought to be
excluded from the Holy Land!
♦ “thory” replaced with “theory”
But all this time there was no anti-Semitism, as a literary, political
or economic movement in the United States. That was a product of the
period after the World War. There was merely religious prejudice of
the orthodox and social ostracism of the elite among gentile society.
The Jew had not even attracted the special attention of the various
anti-alien movements in American history, owing to his small numbers
and frequent rapid Americanization. It seemed as though anti-Semitism
was a movement foreign to American life and institutions. Now, however,
the movement exists and may be considered briefly in four phases.
1. The first to be considered is the attempt to limit the percentage
of Jews in American universities. The “numerus clausus,” typical of
Russia under the Czars, has been one of the favorite projects of the
anti-Semitic parties in various European countries, working either
through their representatives in the parliaments or through their
sympathizers in the universities themselves. Whether the motive was to
brand the Jew as inferior mentally, or to make him so through lack of
education, is hard to say—probably it is merely another manifestation
of the process which this paper aims to trace.
In American institutions of higher learning there has been a growing
problem of the increase of entering classes, as well as a growing
perplexity at the number of Jewish immigrants who seek an advanced
education. These young people often lack American manners and
background, standing out from the great mass of the student body,
whether for good or bad is immaterial. What more natural than that
some would attempt to solve the two problems at once by excluding
a certain percentage of these objectionable persons, at the same time
cutting down enrollment? I do not speak of rumors that this purpose
has been achieved in certain institutions by personal interviews,
psychological tests, and the like, even though statistics seem to bear
out this interpretation. I consider only the Harvard incident, which is
public and official.
In June 1922 President Lowell of Harvard, in his address at the
graduation exercises drew attention to the double phase of the problem,
the increase of registration and the danger to the social and personal
standard of the university, and recommended its full investigation by
committees of the faculty and board of trustees of the university.
The sensation caused by this bringing into the open of a subject long
covertly agitated, especially in view of the large Jewish population
of Boston, and fairly large registration at Harvard, was extreme. The
matter came to an end April 9, 1923, when the committee recommendation
was accepted by the Board of Overseers for the University. The report
recommended:
In the administration of rules for admission Harvard College maintains
its traditional policy of freedom from discrimination on grounds
of race or religion. Concerning proportional representation, your
committee is unanimous in recommending that no departure be made
from the policy that has so long approved itself—the policy of equal
opportunity for all, regardless of race or religion. Any action
liable to interpretation as an acceptance of the principle of racial
discrimination would to many seem like a dangerous surrender of
traditional ideals.
The report even avoids recommending any test of personal fitness which
might be interpreted as a cover for racial or religious discrimination.
2. A further expression of anti-Semitism appeared in the form of
books and magazine articles. “The Cause of World Unrest,” an English
book, was reprinted in 1920 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons of New York; “The
Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom” by Small,
Maynard and Co. of Boston in the same year; “The Jews in America” by
Burton J. Hendrick, appeared as a series of articles in the World’s
Work, and was issued later as a book by Doubleday Page and Co. of
New York in 1923. Periodicals such as “The Searchlight” of Atlanta, the
“Fellowship Forum” of Washington, D. C., and “The American Standard” of
New York City (to mention only a few of a large number) conducted an
active campaign against Jews and Catholics, which still continues.
Most conspicuous of all was the long series of articles on the Jewish
problem carried by the Dearborn Independent of Dearborn, Mich., the
personal organ of Mr. Henry Ford. This series began in May, 1920; the
four booklets containing their reprinted form are dated, the first
on November, 1920; the fourth, May 1922. They take ostensibly the
position that international finance, under the leadership of certain
Jews, is endeavoring to rule the world. Actually, however, they use any
anti-Semitic theme that comes to hand, from the race theory to articles
on the “Jewish liquor trust” and “the Jewish aids of Benedict Arnold.”
Their chief arsenal of material is the Protocols of the Learned Elders
of Zion, referred to above, a purported record of secret meetings held
by leaders of world Jewry with the object of overthrowing the gentile
nations and ruling the world themselves. This work first saw the light
in Russia in 1901 and was utilized in 1905 as part of the propaganda
against the abortive revolution of that year; it was the work of
one Serge Nilus. Later study has shown it to be a forgery, largely
copied from a French political pamphlet directed against Napoleon III
and published in Brussels in 1865 by Maurice Joly under the title,
“Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu”! The Russian
editions of this work, and those in German, as well, included virulent
attacks on Britain and America as representatives of liberalism, and
therefore of Judaism; naturally, these have been omitted from the
English versions.
3. This agitation could not remain theoretical—in fact, probably the
theory was itself a late product of a broader tendency. The Johnson
immigration act, setting the quota of immigrants to be admitted to
the United States on the basis of their proportion in this country in
1890, was avowedly planned on a racial basis to encourage immigrants
from northern and western Europe, and exclude those from eastern and
southern Europe and from other continents. Secretly there seems to have
been both anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiment involved, as
certain partisan publications boast quite openly.
By far the most significant expression of anti-Semitism in the United
States is the Ku Klux Klan, which will later be considered in some
detail. At this point it is sufficient to point out that the Klan was
organized in 1915 by William J. Simmons of Atlanta, Ga., and became a
national movement in 1920. Its name and much of its ritual are taken
from the Ku Klux Klan of 1867–71, but its motives are quite different,
for the old Klan was a local movement intended to protect the defeated
Confederacy, to overawe the negroes and to oppose the North; while
the modern Klan is not sectional, but in every section opposes the
negro, the Jew, the Catholic and the foreign-born. Its membership is
exclusively “white, gentile, Protestant American” and it therefore
claims to be the only “one hundred per cent. Americans”. The Klan
defends its purpose and attacks the proscribed groups by business
boycott, political opposition, sometimes even by threats or by physical
violence. The Klan is the most important symptom at hand of the nature
of anti-Semitism in the United States, beside being a most significant
type of social grouping and of social motive.
4. A final type of anti-Semitism in America was a direct importation
from Europe through a group of Russian emigrés, some of them living
in this country as private citizens, others as employees of the
section on Russia of the Department of State. These men were bitterly
anti-Soviet, anti-radical, and (whether for propaganda purposes,
or through the convictions of the Russian aristocracy as a whole)
bitterly anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is an article in the creed of
every reactionary movement in Europe, with the single exception of
the Italian Fascisti, and is strongest of all among the Russians. It
seems to have been these people who persuaded Mr. Henry Ford of the
authenticity of the Protocols, and introduced these to America as a
whole. They seem also to have been active in the anti-radical agitation
of the post-war period, which tried to identify foreigner, radical
and Jew in the mind of the American people, and to attribute the
Russian revolution, the Bolshevist government and the radical groups in
America, alike to insidious Jewish influence.
As this tendency was not as public as the others, I give some proof
of its existence. It was discussed in Hearst’s International Magazine
in 1923 in a series of articles by the editor, Norman Hapgood; and in
the Bnai Brith Magazine of October and November, 1924, in two articles
by Jacob Spolansky, a former agent of the United States Department of
Justice, who was employed to hunt down radicals and if possible to find
Jews among them. As the most official statement, I quote Mr. Louis
Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, in his annual
report to that body, delivered November 13, 1921.[1]
The committee conducted an investigation with a view to discovering
the identity of those who instigated the attacks against the Jews
of America. It was found that they consisted of a group of Russian
emigrés who had wormed themselves into the confidence of some
Americans who, in turn, had succeeded in securing the assistance of
others whose co-operation was given either because they were gullible
and believed the fantastic inventions of men schooled in intrigue in
the Russian police system, or because they already cherished ill-will
against Jews and were ready to assist in any movement through which
they could satisfy real or fancied grudges.
In the report of the same body, October 19, 1919,[2] reference is made
to the hearing before the sub-committee of the Judiciary Committee of
the United States Senate in February 1919, when—
Dr. George Simons, who had been for a number of years in Russia,
testified regarding the alleged activities of Jews in the Bolshevist
movement in Russia and stated that the present conditions there are
due, in large part, to the activities of Yiddish agitators from the
East Side of New York City who went to Russia immediately following
the overthrow of the Czar. Dr. Simons stated further that the
Bolshevist movement in Russia was being supported financially and
morally by certain elements on the East Side of New York City.
There is, then, an anti-Semitic movement in America, and has been since
1919 or 1920. Its philosophy of racialism, exclusiveness and “hundred
per cent.” Americanism, is derived largely from the Voelkische
parties of Germany and other nations of Europe, which lay great stress
on Aryan race and especially on its Nordic or Teutonic branch. The
extreme of this position is found in the apparently well reasoned
position of Burton J. Hendricks, who attempts to prove that the Spanish
and German Jews were desirable because white, but that the Russian
Jews are undesirable immigrants because they are descended from the
Chazars, a Tartar tribe which embraced Judaism in the ninth century.
The premises of this writer seem untenable, and the conclusions do
not necessarily follow on them. Much of this anti-Semitic literature
and public action seems to be based on similar rationalizations of
intolerance, of group prejudice.
In studying this anti-Semitic movement in America as a crucial example
of the relations of group and sub-group, I stand in the contrary
danger, that of rationalizing the inferiority complex of a persecuted
group. My only justification for facing this danger is that nobody can
approach this type of problem without one danger or the other, and the
subject is too vital to be entirely neglected. I can only hope that my
analysis of the underlying problem of the nature of human groups and
of their interrelations may be made in such a scientific spirit that
the application of my theory to the special problem of anti-Semitism in
the United States may be of some value in the clearing up of this great
field of human action.
CHAPTER I.
THE “GROUP MIND”
A DEFINITION AND A DESCRIPTION
The causes of intolerance rest, not in what men say but in what
they do. The reasons alleged for dislike or suspicion of the Jew
are valuable merely for showing a state of mind in the anti-Semite
himself, not for revealing the actual reasons for his attitude. For
that reason I shall disregard these reasons very largely in searching
for the causes of anti-Semitism in America. Instead, I shall turn to
the field of social study to find out how groups of men act toward one
another, and why and under what circumstances intolerance is one of
their by-products. I shall apply to the phenomena of group life the
method of behaviorism, now being adopted by sociology from its original
field of psychology, in such definitions as that of E. C. Lindeman:[3]
“Sociology is the science of collective behavior.”
1.
The prevailing view of students of society seems now to be that society
is a natural phenomenon on the mental plane. Human society is not now
regarded, as by Buckle, as a reflection of environment, even though
the importance of physical background and racial constitution must
be recognized. As Charles A. Ellwood says,[4] “Society is a group of
psychically interacting individuals.” “The essential element in the
social process is the psychical element.”[5] That is to say, mental
material—instincts, emotions, feeling, and ideas—are the plane on which
groups of individuals combine into social structures, operate in social
functions, develop to social progress. Relations between individuals
(except for the limited biological function) are mental relations,
carried on through physical media such as postures, speech and writing.
These mental interactions of human beings are not an artificial
construct from primitive egoism by the social contract or any other
method. William MacDougall is almost alone in holding that the social
sentiments are derived from the self-regarding ones through the
operation of the tender emotion and the parental instinct. Hobhouse
says:[6] “The conception of a primitive egoism on which sociality
is somehow overlaid is without foundation in either biology or
psychology.” John Dewey puts this view most forcibly:
[7]The fact is that the life, the experience, of the individual
man, is already saturated, thoroughly interpenetrated, with social
inheritance and references.... Education, language, and other means of
communication are infinitely more important categories of knowledge
than any of those exploited by absolutists. And as soon as the
methodological battle of instrumentalism is won ... the two services
that will stand to the credit of instrumentalism will be calling
attention first to the connection of intelligence with a genuine
future, and second, to the social constitution of personal, even of
private experience, above all of any experience that has assumed the
knowledge form.
And Ellwood adds—expressing here the general opinion of both
sociologists and modern social philosophers—“All human consciousness
is socially conditioned.... This is as true of the racially inherited
aspects of consciousness—the feeling-instincts—as it is of the acquired
traits.” Man is a social animal and his sociality is one of the few
unescapable things about him. He is born in some kind of a social
group; he gets the most of his ideas from his association with others;
his whole development is a give-and-take in which the take is from the
first, and often remains, the greater element.
But the recognition of this fact does not bind us to any one
explanation of it. We do not need to accept the “consciousness of
kind” of Giddings, the “herd instinct” of Trotter, or the “imitation”
of Tarde,—in fact, we may very well consider that there is no one
principle to explain so universal and complex a phenomenon; that
these terms and others like them are in no sense explanations, but
merely different words for the same fact, that man is a naturally
gregarious or social being. We may rather turn to the more generalized
modes of expressing this conception, the group mind or general will, as
developed by Durkheim, Wundt and in our day by Baldwin, MacDougall, and
others.
2.
Before attacking this problem directly, I must clear away several
misconceptions of the “group mind,” which I cannot accept as a part
of this theory. First, this thesis need not exclude the operation of
physical and biological forces on social groups, any more than it
excludes their operation on any individual, who is also a psychological
unit. Society may well be a unit, just as the individual is, in a world
of varying forces—climate, birth rates, and the like. Second, a theory
of group mind may be empirical, and need not necessarily rest on an
idealistic conception of the {Volksgeist}. By adopting the historical
method, rather than the statistical, relying on values to indicate our
problem rather than trying to express it in terms of natural science,
we shall find ourselves treating the theory of the group in a realistic
and empirical way, eschewing the dogmatism of applying a priori
principles to human material, and the equal fallacy of considering
minds in the same terms as chemical elements.[8]
Third, a modern social psychology need not be a literal transcription
of Durkheim or Wundt, relying on an antiquated psychology for its
analogies and its basic conceptions. A theory of group mind today must
recognize that personality is not always a unity, that it is never
a complete unity; the vast field of the unconscious in mental life
has just been opened to view. Both of these conceptions apply to the
mental life of men in great masses as truly as when alone. Neither the
individual nor the group is something hard, fixed and static; neither
can be summed up as a group of faculties or a system of ideas. Both
individual and group must be conceived in process, to take the
words of Lindemann,[9] as “the total equipment with which man responds
to his environment, all that enters into behavior from the side of
human nature.”
Some views of group mind are vitiated for our present purpose by the
narrow limits they impose, or by the one-sided way in which they arrive
at their definitions. This applies especially to those who use the mob
as the typical group and consider “crowd-mindedness” (to use Everett
Dean Martin’s term) as a synonym of sociality. The crowd, the herd,
the mob are various terms for an exceptional type of group of human
beings, bound together by physical presence, transformed by a powerful
emotion, launched finally into unified and often violent action. But as
Baldwin says:[10] “The mind of the crowd is essentially a temporary,
unorganized, ineffective thing.... The mob is a by-product of society,
it is the exaggeration of the normal.” Finally, the group mind need
not be expressed entirely in terms of instinctive adaptation, any
more than the mind of the individual; either may have many types, may
be instinctive or impulsive or rational, may have a growing sense of
rationality and a growing power of independent, deliberate action. In
opposition to MacDougall, with his elaborate system of instincts and
sentiments, we may place the vast majority of students of the problem,
Cooley, Platt, Ellwood, Baldwin, and so on. Even when the members of
a group all use reason to a very high degree, they still constitute a
group if they have organization and some method of reaching a general
decision, as in a congress, a national association of scientists, or a
business corporation.
Obviously, human beings form many kinds of groups, and there would
then, on an empirical basis, be many varieties of group minds.
Individuals fall into many classes, as we all know, primitive and
cultured, ignorant and educated, the infant, the child and the adult,
the moron and the genius. So with the group. There are large and
small groups, from families to nations; temporary and permanent ones,
from the theatre audience to the church; simple and complex, from
town meeting to a Federal union, comprising states, counties, cities
and townships; unorganized and organized; groups founded on physical
presence, like a baseball team, and international bodies of scientists
or philosophers who may form “a school of thought” but may never hold
a meeting. The study of these various types is not only interesting in
itself; it may help us in formulating the principle of the mind of the
group as a whole. To begin with the definition of the primitive group
by Franz Boaz:
[11]There are a number of primitive hordes to whom every stranger not
a member of the horde is an enemy, and where it is right to damage
the enemy to the best of one’s power and ability, and if possible to
kill him. This custom is based largely on the idea of the solidarity
of the horde, and on the feeling that it is the duty of every member
of the horde to destroy all possible enemies.... The feeling of the
fellowship in the horde corresponds to the feeling of unity in the
tribe, to a recognition of bonds established by a neighborhood of
habitat, and further on to the feeling of fellowship among members of
nations.
“He who is not with me is against me,”[12] said Jesus for the religious
group. How far we have proceeded from the horde in our civilized
nations, and how near we are to it still in the essential character of
the mind of the group!
3.
Does the group mind exist? Not as a super-consciousness, external to
the individuals composing it—that view has been discarded long ago. But
as a category which is needed to explain many phenomena, and which we
can then proceed to study and explain in greater detail, a term with
pragmatic value, such as “life” or “mind.” “Life” is no longer used as
a principle of explanation, as a vital principle which is infused into
dead matter, but life exists, for all that, and we can see its effects
and study them. “Mind” is not something separate and distinct from
the body in which it dwells or from the world in which it acts, but
we know that mind is a useful and necessary category in which to
include a whole phase of living being, especially of human life. “Group
Mind” is the same sort of category as these. Just as mind inheres in
the neurones and is coincident with the chemical changes in them, and
yet cannot be summed up by chemical changes; so group mind inheres in
the brains, of individuals and is coincident with individual ideas and
acts, yet cannot be summed up as so many individual responses but as
the unified response of a group of persons at once.
Morris Ginsberg, in his Psychology of Society, opposes any type of
group theory, as he sees only individuals in a social environment; he
holds that the group may have unity of content but not of process, of
ideas and ideals but not of mind. Floyd H. Allport speaks of “The group
fallacy,”[13] “the error of substituting the group as a whole as a
principle of explanation in place of the individuals in the group,” to
which Emory S. Bogardus replies in his discussion that [14]“if there is
a group fallacy, there is also an individual fallacy.”
On the other hand, so radical a behaviorist as E. C. Lindeman remarks,
[15]“The group is a plurality of individuals, but what the group does
is not plural but singular.” [16]“From the purely descriptive point of
view, the group becomes a new quality.” Dr. M. M. Davis puts it this
way: [17]“Millions of brain cells are co-ordinated to think as one
brain. Psychology tries to tell how. Millions of brains co-ordinate
themselves and function in many ways as one brain. The how of that
marvel is for sociology.” Giddings calls the group mind “the concert
of thought, emotion and will” of individual minds. Cooley says:
[18]“The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in
organization.” Ellwood phrases it somewhat differently:
[19]The only unity we have in society is a unity of process.
The individual consciousness is unified both structurally and
functionally.... There is a collective mental life, but no social
mind in the same sense in which there is an individual mind.
Dr. Baldwin sums up his view in the last sentences of the Social
and Ethical Interpretations:
[20]Society is the form of natural organization which ethical
personalities come into in their growth. Ethical personality is the
form of natural development which individuals grow into who live in
social relationships. The true analogy, then, is not that which likens
it to a physiological organism, but rather that which likens it to a
psychological organization.
And so, if this were primarily a historical study, I might go over many
similar and differing theories, which consider the group as a unity on
the mental plane, that is, in one sense or another, as a group mind.
The material is still being collected for this study, the essential
points of view still being defined, and such important factors as
instinct and intelligence are still being redefined with the rapid
progress of science today. As several of the terms cited above suggest,
the difference between the individual as a mind and the group of
individuals as a mind is always given and must always be given in terms
of structure. In the words of Lindeman:
[21]The individual may be viewed as an integration of functioning
organs, and the group merely an integration of functions.... There
can be nothing organic about society or a group; there can be only a
series of relations, the results of specific responses to specific
situations.
Not to cite more opinions on a point on which there seems general
agreement, we may take it for granted that the chief, perhaps the only
difference historically pointed out between the mind of one man and of
a group of men is that the man has a brain and a nervous system, while
the group has neither, but operates apparently through the brains and
nervous systems of its members. But in their functioning, in their
activities, the mind of the man and of the nation or other group are so
similar as to be almost indistinguishable.
Of course, this distinction depends, finally, on the definition of mind
which we are prepared to accept. Dennes gives an adequate summary and
criticism of Durkheim, for instance, who considered collective mind to
consist of the collective ideas or representations of a society;
and of Wundt, who considered mind an integration of processes, not
of ideas, and therefore sought for the group mind in the collective
results of group mental process, in speech, religion and custom. But
Dennes himself seems confused by the need of defining mind without
regard to bodily structure. He says: [22]“Individual minds or persons
have or produce bodies as well as objective mental products. But social
groups are not minds and have no bodies. They are associations of
minds.” MacDougall defines mind as [23]“An organized system of mental
or purposive forces,” and continues, “In the sense so defined, every
highly organized human society may be properly said to possess a group
mind.” While MacDougall’s definition seems circular in nature, it still
recognizes that a functional definition of mind can make no distinction
of structure, whether any particular mind is associated with one or
many bodies. Lindeman calls mind [24]“the total equipment with which
man responds to his environment”, which seems more than one can accept,
for “total equipment” would include hands and feet, as well as mind.
A more precise statement of the same general tenor appears in Dr.
Singer’s Mind as Behavior:
[25]Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it _is_
behavior. Or, more accurately, our belief in consciousness is an
expectation of probable behavior based on an observation of actual
behavior, a belief to be confirmed or refuted by more observation, as
any other belief in a fact is to be tried out.
Thus, any functional definition of mind that has no reference to brain
or nervous system, must apply and does apply in the group of persons
in exactly the same sense as to the single individual. If there is
“unified behavior,” if there is “organized system of purposes,” if
there is “response to environment,” then we have mind, whether the
behavior, response, or purpose dwell in one or two or many bodies.
One question remains, and a most perplexing one. How can one
distinguish between a group mind and a group purpose, or the accidental
coincidence of many minds and many purposes? A flock of migrating birds
has no group mind—each bird would travel south at the same time and
the same rate of speed, were there no flock at all. Or still lower
forms, such as unicellular organisms, may move simultaneously to warmer
waters. On the other extreme, the hordes of Huns led by Attila had a
group purpose in their migration; the leader gave the word, and the
followers leaped together to their horses’ backs to ride from Asia into
Europe. But when a half million negroes migrate from the southern to
the northern states in a few years, coming family by family, as the
opportunity affords, yet with a steady tendency of drift, is that a
group mind or the accidental agreement of many individuals? Is it mind
or minds? And the same problem is present in a declaration of war, or
the victory of a foot-ball team, or the adoption of a new fashion of
clothes. When does the group act and when the individual members? When
do we have the mind of all, when the mind of each?
To this crucial problem I must present one qualification and one
answer. The qualification is: the group never acts except through
its constituent individuals, any more than the mind acts without its
brain cells and bodily organs. The difference between the act of all
and the act of each is not a complete disjunction but a difference
of emphasis, of interpretation, of purpose. When the army marches,
every soldier goes ahead; when the nation elects its president, the
millions of voters cast their ballots; when the church adopts a creed
or reforms its ritual, the many believers experience a change in their
faith and their hope. Not that group opinion need be unanimous; it is
rather a mode of general consent by which unified action can arise
out of conflicting opinions, by which many individuals are absorbed
into a group mind. Thus in many, perhaps in most cases we cannot say
definitely: this is group mind, not personal preference, or this
is individual action, and the group has nothing to do with it. The
problem is much like that which faced Kant in defining moral action,
when the demands of the universal law may often coincide with personal
preference, perhaps even with the greatest and most appealing happiness.
And our answer may be similar to his. Kant turned to the test case.
We know we have morality, said he, when duty and pleasure are opposed,
and the man obeys the voice of duty. Similarly, we can say: we know
that we have group mind and purpose when the pleasure of the individual
is opposed to the will of the group, and the individual gives up his
purpose for that of the army, the nation, the church. When the soldier
or the martyr gives up his urge for self-preservation and offers his
body to the bullets of the enemy or the stake of the persecutor, then
we know that he has abdicated his individuality and is acting only
as a member of the greater whole. Lindeman, whose study is based on
observation of farmers’ co-operative societies, presents a contrary
view:
[26]It was formerly asserted that the chief significance of a
group consisted in the fact that the individuals comprising it had
sacrificed certain individual prerogatives, rights, privileges, etc.,
in order to achieve the larger collective end. But it could not be
discovered that the farmers who became members of the co-operative
associations had done anything of the sort. On the contrary, they
were chiefly interested in enhancing their own individual interests;
they desired a larger income from the sale of their products and the
co-operative movement promised exactly this.
If this were true, these associations would constitute merely a set of
books, not a group of persons. But we see further on in the same book
that the co-operative associations demanded loyalty even at the cost
of whim or momentary interest; they enforced their contracts with the
farmer by which he agreed to sell only through the association. If he
got tired of waiting for his money, or if a dealer placed a financial
premium on disloyalty, still he was expected to be loyal to the group.
Finally, the group had to take cognizance of other aspects of the human
life of its members besides the sale of their cotton or tobacco; it
built up personal and social groupings for the entire family; it became
a truly unified group mind, through the slow process of integration
of individuals and of local groups, resting on a basis of personal
friendship. Thus, even in an interest group, a true group mind is
developed through participation and sacrifice.
4.
We are now ready to define group mind in the sense in which it will
be understood in this essay. A group mind is the common purpose of
two or more persons, which they accept as their own purpose. The mode
of this acceptance or identification is in behavior, which includes
the reasons given by the individuals—their rationalizations—as well
as their overt acts. The test of this in any particular case is the
test of sacrifice, whether the man acts as a self-preserving being, an
individual pacifist, or as a citizen and soldier, a member of a group
at war; whether the church member acts as an individual thinker, or
subordinates his judgment to the interpretation and the practice of the
church; whether the son acts as a loyal son, a member of the family, to
his own hurt, or goes off to marry against his parents’ will, leaving
them perhaps to suffer want. I have purposely taken examples where
opinion may be divided, as it is not my purpose to attach moral right
or wrong to either group loyalty or individual freedom; either may be
right under given circumstances, or judged by certain standards.
The group mind may be conscious, as a deliberative assembly; or
instinctive and unconscious, as the racial group or the partly
hypnotized mob. The ancient Israelite identified himself with his
people; he did not even expect personal immortality, but desired
sons to carry on his name so that his family and his people might
be immortal. Parents are willing sacrifices for their children, but
sacrifices nevertheless. The patriot volunteers for dangerous duty
consciously, or leaps over the parapet in the blind enthusiasm of a
charge; whether conscious or unconscious of the meaning of his act,
he acts as a soldier, not a self-seeking person. The varieties of the
group mind are almost innumerable. The group mind may be as instinctive
and unorganized as a religious revival, as natural as a nation with
its bonds of language, land, custom and government, as artificial as
a military company without even a name, with only a number, and yet
with a definite morale, a tradition, a personality of its own. The
theater audience has a group mind, while the restaurant crowd has not;
for it is an axiom in the theater that each audience has a character
of its own, that only a full house really abandons itself at a comedy,
while even a smaller crowd may be carried away by a tragedy, and so on;
the individual abandons his own judgment and his inhibitions at least
in part, to react to the performance as a member of the group.
According to this definition, the individual also may have a group
mind, as his diverse purposes are summed up in one supreme purpose, or
as he has inner conflicts, the far-sighted against the narrow view, the
better ideal against the worse. The reasons or motives which animate
the various members of a group mind need not always be the same; they
may range from deliberate choice to compulsion by public opinion or the
blind following of herd instinct, the desire to “run with the crowd,”
to “be on the band wagon.” There is always a margin of unassimilated
purpose in either the individual or the group; neither mind ever quite
attains perfect unity. Durkheim makes the pregnant suggestion, (not
without its critics, it is true,) that the most unified mind was that
of the primitive horde, where unity was achieved by identity; while
developed societies achieve unity through organization and division of
function, thus including the most diverse elements in a genuine unity
of co-operation and purpose.
The group mind, then, is an empirical fact, which can be perceived in
many practical ways. The intellectual content, the emotional coloring,
group habits which we call custom, group ideas which we call tradition,
group organization by which a consensus of opinion is ascertained for
the purpose of unified action—all are characteristics of the group
mind, just as the parallel factors of ideas, emotion, and will are
the phases into which we analyze the mind of the individual. There is
a difference in every one of these factors between the group mind of
America and of China, between that of ancient Greece and of medieval
Italy. And the difference lies not only in factors such as language,
religion and history, which are constitutive to the group, but external
to the individual. It lies also in subtler matters of opinion, of
emotions, which seem to be within the individual and yet must be
absorbed from the environment, because they differ so strikingly from
group to group. I shall go carefully into the reasons further on which
impel me to consider that the Jewish people possess a group mind, even
though they have no common government, language or land, and have even
many divisions on questions of faith and religious practice. Here it
is sufficient to note that the Jewish people act as one under attack;
that a pogrom in Russia arouses the very different Jews of France,
England and America to a feeling of unity and acts of relief and of
defense. Labor and capital are becoming “class conscious” in opposition
to each other; that is, group minds are in process of formation. The
group mind appears in the behavior of the group through its constituent
individuals, whether the group be a static one, dominated by the fixed
habits of custom, or a dynamic one, with a great wave of progress; for
behavior includes both custom and progress.
One more point comes properly under the definition of the group
mind—the wide-spread conception of a general will, or more precisely a
common will. According to the viewpoint of this study, the general will
is no mystical entity, overpowering the wills of the individuals; nor
is it an arithmetical average, in which personal opinions cancel each
other out. Neither of these theories covers a willing mind. The group
will is a resultant, not an average; one element in it is tradition,
another is leadership, a third is the interaction of the various
sub-groups. In the final result, the negative element is often actually
erased, the wavering members accept the winning opinion as a whole, and
the consequent group action is a unity, almost a unanimity of response.
After war is declared the peace party practically disappears. In less
clear-cut issues, we see the workings of compromise, which again
appears in the behavior of the group as a whole.
Group consciousness exists when the individuals identify themselves
with the group, not merely accepting its purpose but losing their own
purposes in it. Consciousness implies also intelligence, as it does
in the individual; it may co-exist with a high emotional tone but
must have a rational element as well. MacDougall utters a view in
consonance with that held here when he says:
[27]It is the extension of the self-regarding sentiment of each
member to the group as a whole that binds the group together and
renders it a collective individual capable of collective volition.
But when he holds [28]that groups are self-conscious according to the
degree that the idea of them is present in the minds of the individuals
composing them, then we must agree with Dennes that:
[29]to say that a group mind possesses self-consciousness in the
sense that its nature is consciously apprehended, by individual minds
distinct from it, is the utterance of a contradiction.
It will then be necessary to posit group consciousness as we posit
individual consciousness, not distributively but collectively. We
have group mind and group will when the group acts as one or behaves
as one; but we have group consciousness when the group thinks as one.
Not that this action can possibly take place outside of the individual
minds; MacDougall is undoubtedly right in his citation of E. Barker:
[30]“There is no group mind existing apart from the minds of the
members of the group; the group mind exists only in the minds of its
members. But nevertheless it exists.” Yet the group mind must include
the individual minds in a unified purpose, to which they relinquish
their own wills, willingly or with a struggle, whose ideas are their
ideas, whose consciousness is, to a certain extent at least, their
consciousness. If it is possible, in ordinary speech, to recognize
that a man acts now personally, again as a churchman, a citizen, or a
committee member, it should be possible to accept this fact as a part
of our theory and to embody it as one phase of the theory itself. The
individual and the group are not mutually exclusive; neither exists
without the other; the group is a part of the individual mind as much
as the individual is a part of the group mind.