"IT has happened as was to have been foreseen," wrote Hamilton,

[Footnote: _Federalist,_ No. 15] "the measures of the Union have

not been executed; the delinquencies of the States have, step by step,

matured themselves to an extreme which has at length arrested all the

wheels of the national government and brought them to an awful

stand."... For "in our case the concurrence of thirteen distinct

sovereign wills is requisite, under the confederation, to the complete

execution of every important measure that proceeds from the Union."

How could it be otherwise, he asked: "The rulers of the respective

members... will undertake to judge of the propriety of the measures

themselves. They will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or

required to their immediate interests or aims; the momentary

conveniences or inconveniences that would attend its adoption. All

this will be done, and in a spirit of interested and suspicious

scrutiny, without that knowledge of national circumstances and reasons

of state which is essential to right judgment, and with that strong

predilection in favor of local objects which can hardly fail to

mislead the decision. The same process must be repeated in every

member of which the body is constituted; and the execution of the

plans framed by the councils of the whole, will always fluctuate on

the discretion of the ill-informed and prejudiced opinion of every

part. Those who have been conversant in the proceedings of popular

assemblies, who have seen how difficult it often is, when there is no

exterior pressure of circumstances, to bring them to harmonious

resolutions on important points, will readily conceive how impossible

it must be to induce a number of such assemblies, deliberating at a

distance from each other, at different times, and under different

impressions, long to coöperate in the same views and pursuits."

Over ten years of storm and stress with a congress that was, as John

Adams said, [Footnote: Ford, _op. cit._, p. 36.] "only a diplomatic

assembly," had furnished the leaders of the revolution "with an

instructive but afflicting lesson" [Footnote: _Federalist_, No. 15.]

in what happens when a number of self-centered communities

are entangled in the same environment. And so, when they went

to Philadelphia in May of 1787, ostensibly to revise the Articles of

Confederation, they were really in full reaction against the

fundamental premise of Eighteenth Century democracy. Not only

were the leaders consciously opposed to the democratic spirit of

the time, feeling, as Madison said, that "democracies have ever

been spectacles of turbulence and contention," but within the

national frontiers they were determined to offset as far as they could

the ideal of self-governing communities in self-contained environments.

The collisions and failures of concave democracy, where men

spontaneously managed all their own affairs, were before their eyes.

The problem as they saw it, was to restore government as against

democracy. They understood government to be the power to make

national decisions and enforce them throughout the nation;

democracy they believed was the insistence of localities and classes

upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate interests

and aims.

They could not consider in their calculations the possibility of such

an organization of knowledge that separate communities would act

simultaneously on the same version of the facts. We just begin to

conceive this possibility for certain parts of the world where there

is free circulation of news and a common language, and then only for

certain aspects of life. The whole idea of a voluntary federalism in

industry and world politics is still so rudimentary, that, as we see

in our own experience, it enters only a little, and only very

modestly, into practical politics. What we, more than a century later,

can only conceive as an incentive to generations of intellectual

effort, the authors of the Constitution had no reason to conceive at

all. In order to set up national government, Hamilton and his

colleagues had to make plans, not on the theory that men would

coöperate because they had a sense of common interest, but on the

theory that men could be governed, if special interests were kept in

equilibrium by a balance of power. "Ambition," Madison said,

[Footnote: _Federalist_, No. 51, cited by Ford, _op. cit._,

p. 60.] "must be made to counteract ambition."

They did not, as some writers have supposed, intend to balance every

interest so that the government would be in a perpetual deadlock. They

intended to deadlock local and class interest to prevent these from

obstructing government. "In framing a government which is to be

administered by men over men," wrote Madison, [Footnote: _Id_.]

"the great difficulty lies in this: _you must first enable the

government to control the governed_, and in the next place, oblige

it to control itself." In one very important sense, then, the doctrine

of checks and balances was the remedy of the federalist leaders for

the problem of public opinion. They saw no other way to substitute

"the mild influence of the magistracy" for the "sanguinary agency of

the sword" [Footnote: _Federalist, No. 15.] except by devising an

ingenious machine to neutralize local opinion. They did not understand

how to manipulate a large electorate, any more than they saw the

possibility of common consent upon the basis of common information. It

is true that Aaron Burr taught Hamilton a lesson which impressed him a

good deal when he seized control of New York City in 1800 by the aid

of Tammany Hall. But Hamilton was killed before he was able to take

account of this new discovery, and, as Mr. Ford says, [Footnote: Ford,

_op. cit._, p. 119.] Burr's pistol blew the brains out of the

Federal party.

2

When the constitution was written, "politics could still be managed by

conference and agreement among gentlemen" [Footnote: _Op. cit._,

p. 144] and it was to the gentry that Hamilton turned for a

government. It was intended that they should manage national affairs

when local prejudice had been brought into equilibrium by the

constitutional checks and balances. No doubt Hamilton, who belonged to

this class by adoption, had a human prejudice in their favor. But that

by itself is a thin explanation of his statecraft. Certainly there can

be no question of his consuming passion for union, and it is, I think,

an inversion of the truth to argue that he made the Union to protect

class privileges, instead of saying that he used class privileges to

make the Union. "We must take man as we find him," Hamilton said, "and

if we expect him to serve the public we must interest his passions in

doing so." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 47] He needed men to govern,

whose passions could be most quickly attached to a national interest.

These were the gentry, the public creditors, manufacturers, shippers,

and traders, [Footnote: Beard, _Economic Interpretation of the

Constitution, passim._] and there is probably no better instance in

history of the adaptation of shrewd means to clear ends, than in the

series of fiscal measures, by which Hamilton attached the provincial

notables to the new government.

Although the constitutional convention worked behind closed doors, and

although ratification was engineered by "a vote of probably not more

than one-sixth of the adult males," [Footnote: Beard, _op. cit._,

p. 325.] there was little or no pretence. The Federalists argued for

union, not for democracy, and even the word republic had an unpleasant

sound to George Washington when he had been for more than two years a

republican president. The constitution was a candid attempt to limit

the sphere of popular rule; the only democratic organ it was intended

the government should possess was the House, based on a suffrage

highly limited by property qualifications. And even at that, the

House, it was believed, would be so licentious a part of the

government, that it was carefully checked and balanced by the Senate,

the electoral college, the Presidential veto, and by judicial

interpretation.

Thus at the moment when the French Revolution was kindling popular

feeling the world over, the American revolutionists of 1776 came under

a constitution which went back, as far as it was expedient, to the

British Monarchy for a model. This conservative reaction could not

endure. The men who had made it were a minority, their motives were

under suspicion, and when Washington went into retirement, the

position of the gentry was not strong enough to survive the inevitable

struggle for the succession. The anomaly between the original plan of

the Fathers and the moral feeling of the age was too wide not to be

capitalized by a good politician.

3

Jefferson referred to his election as "the great revolution of 1800,"

but more than anything else it was a revolution in the mind. No great

policy was altered, but a new tradition was established. For it was

Jefferson who first taught the American people to regard the

Constitution as an instrument of democracy, and he stereotyped the

images, the ideas, and even many of the phrases, in which Americans

ever since have described politics to each other. So complete was the

mental victory, that twenty-five years later de Tocqueville, who was

received in Federalist homes, noted that even those who were "galled

by its continuance"--were not uncommonly heard to "laud the delights

of a republican government, and the advantages of democratic

institutions when they are in public." [Footnote: _Democracy in

America_, Vol. I, Ch. X (Third Edition, 1838), p. 216.]

The Constitutional Fathers with all their sagacity had failed to see

that a frankly undemocratic constitution would not long be tolerated.

The bold denial of popular rule was bound to offer an easy point of

attack to a man, like Jefferson, who so far as his constitutional

opinions ran, was not a bit more ready than Hamilton to turn over

government to the "unrefined" will of the people. [Footnote:

_Cf._ his plan for the Constitution of Virginia, his ideas for a

senate of property holders, and his views on the judicial veto. Beard,

_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, pp. 450 _et

seq._] The Federalist leaders had been men of definite convictions

who stated them bluntly. There was little real discrepancy between

their public and their private views. But Jefferson's mind was a mass

of ambiguities, not solely because of its defects, as Hamilton and his

biographers have thought, but because he believed in a union and he

believed in spontaneous democracies, and in the political science of

his age there was no satisfactory way to reconcile the two. Jefferson

was confused in thought and action because he had a vision of a new

and tremendous idea that no one had thought out in all its bearings.

But though popular sovereignty was not clearly understood by anybody,

it seemed to imply so great an enhancement of human life, that no

constitution could stand which frankly denied it. The frank denials

were therefore expunged from consciousness, and the document, which is

on its face an honest example of limited constitutional democracy, was

talked and thought about as an instrument for direct popular rule.

Jefferson actually reached the point of believing that the Federalists

had perverted the Constitution, of which in his fancy they were no

longer the authors. And so the Constitution was, in spirit, rewritten.

Partly by actual amendment, partly by practice, as in the case of the

electoral college, but chiefly by looking at it through another set of

stereotypes, the facade was no longer permitted to look oligarchic.

The American people came to believe that their Constitution was a

democratic instrument, and treated it as such. They owe that fiction

to the victory of Thomas Jefferson, and a great conservative fiction

it has been. It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded

the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution would have

been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and

loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible. Jefferson

resolved that paradox by teaching the American people to read the

Constitution as an expression of democracy. He himself stopped there.

But in the course of twenty-five years or so social conditions had

changed so radically, that Andrew Jackson carried out the political

revolution for which Jefferson had prepared the tradition. [Footnote:

The reader who has any doubts as to the extent of the revolution that

separated Hamilton's opinions from Jackson's practice should turn to

Mr. Henry Jones Ford's _Rise and Growth of American Politics_.]

4

The political center of that revolution was the question of patronage.

By the men who founded the government public office was regarded as a

species of property, not lightly to be disturbed, and it was

undoubtedly their hope that the offices would remain in the hands of

their social class. But the democratic theory had as one of its main

principles the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen. Therefore, when

people began to look at the Constitution as a democratic instrument,

it was certain that permanence in office would seem undemocratic. The

natural ambitions of men coincided here with the great moral impulse

of their age. Jefferson had popularized the idea without carrying it

ruthlessly into practice, and removals on party grounds were

comparatively few under the Virginian Presidents. It was Jackson who

founded the practice of turning public office into patronage.

Curious as it sounds to us, the principle of rotation in office with

short terms was regarded as a great reform. Not only did it

acknowledge the new dignity of the average man by treating him as fit

for any office, not only did it destroy the monopoly of a small social

class and appear to open careers to talent, but "it had been advocated

for centuries as a sovereign remedy for political corruption," and as

the one way to prevent the creation of a bureaucracy. [Footnote: Ford,

_op. cit._, p. 169.] The practice of rapid change in public

office was the application to a great territory of the image of

democracy derived from the self-contained village.

Naturally it did not have the same results in the nation that it had

in the ideal community on which the democratic theory was based. It

produced quite unexpected results, for it founded a new governing

class to take the place of the submerged federalists. Unintentionally,

patronage did for a large electorate what Hamilton's fiscal measures

had done for the upper classes. We often fail to realize how much of

the stability of our government we owe to patronage. For it was

patronage that weaned natural leaders from too much attachment to the

self-centered community, it was patronage that weakened the local

spirit and brought together in some kind of peaceful cooperation, the

very men who, as provincial celebrities, would, in the absence of a

sense of common interest, have torn the union apart.

But of course, the democratic theory was not supposed to produce a new

governing class, and it has never accommodated itself to the fact.

When the democrat wanted to abolish monopoly of offices, to have

rotation and short terms, he was thinking of the township where anyone

could do a public service, and return humbly to his own farm. The idea

of a special class of politicians was just what the democrat did not

like. But he could not have what he did like, because his theory was

derived from an ideal environment, and he was living in a real one.

The more deeply he felt the moral impulse of democracy, the less ready

he was to see the profound truth of Hamilton's statement that

communities deliberating at a distance and under different impressions

could not long coöperate in the same views and pursuits. For that

truth postpones anything like the full realization of democracy in

public affairs until the art of obtaining common consent has been

radically improved. And so while the revolution under Jefferson and

Jackson produced the patronage which made the two party system, which

created a substitute for the rule of the gentry, and a discipline for

governing the deadlock of the checks and balances, all that happened,

as it were, invisibly.

Thus, rotation in office might be the ostensible theory, in practice

the offices oscillated between the henchmen. Tenure might not be a

permanent monopoly, but the professional politician was permanent.

Government might be, as President Harding once said, a simple thing,

but winning elections was a sophisticated performance. The salaries in

office might be as ostentatiously frugal as Jefferson's home-spun, but

the expenses of party organization and the fruits of victory were in

the grand manner. The stereotype of democracy controlled the visible

government; the corrections, the exceptions and adaptations of the

American people to the real facts of their environment have had to be

invisible, even when everybody knew all about them. It was only the

words of the law, the speeches of politicians, the platforms, and the

formal machinery of administration that have had to conform to the

pristine image of democracy.

5

If one had asked a philosophical democrat how these self-contained

communities were to coöperate, when their public opinions were so

self-centered, he would have pointed to representative government

embodied in the Congress. And nothing would surprise him more than the

discovery of how steadily the prestige of representative government

has declined, while the power of the Presidency has grown.

Some critics have traced this to the custom of sending only local

celebrities to Washington. They have thought that if Congress could

consist of the nationally eminent men, the life of the capital would

be more brilliant. It would be, of course, and it would be a very good

thing if retiring Presidents and Cabinet officers followed the example

of John Quincy Adams. But the absence of these men does not explain

the plight of Congress, for its decline began when it was relatively

the most eminent branch of the government. Indeed it is more probable

that the reverse is true, and that Congress ceased to attract the

eminent as it lost direct influence on the shaping of national policy.

The main reason for the discredit, which is world wide, is, I think,

to be found in the fact that a congress of representatives is

essentially a group of blind men in a vast, unknown world. With some

exceptions, the only method recognized in the Constitution or in the

theory of representative government, by which Congress can inform

itself, is to exchange opinions from the districts. There is no

systematic, adequate, and authorized way for Congress to know what is

going on in the world. The theory is that the best man of each

district brings the best wisdom of his constituents to a central

place, and that all these wisdoms combined are all the wisdom that

Congress needs. Now there is no need to question the value of

expressing local opinions and exchanging them. Congress has great

value as the market-place of a continental nation. In the coatrooms,

the hotel lobbies, the boarding houses of Capitol Hill, at the

tea-parties of the Congressional matrons, and from occasional entries

into the drawing rooms of cosmopolitan Washington, new vistas are

opened, and wider horizons. But even if the theory were applied, and

the districts always sent their wisest men, the sum or a combination

of local impressions is not a wide enough base for national policy,

and no base at all for the control of foreign policy. Since the real

effects of most laws are subtle and hidden, they cannot be understood

by filtering local experiences through local states of mind. They can

be known only by controlled reporting and objective analysis. And just

as the head of a large factory cannot know how efficient it is by

talking to the foreman, but must examine cost sheets and data that

only an accountant can dig out for him, so the lawmaker does not

arrive at a true picture of the state of the union by putting together

a mosaic of local pictures. He needs to know the local pictures, but

unless he possesses instruments for calibrating them, one picture is

as good as the next, and a great deal better.

The President does come to the assistance of Congress by delivering

messages on the state of the Union. He is in a position to do that

because he presides over a vast collection of bureaus and their

agents, which report as well as act. But he tells Congress what he

chooses to tell it. He cannot be heckled, and the censorship as to

what is compatible with the public interest is in his hands. It is a

wholly one-sided and tricky relationship, which sometimes reaches such

heights of absurdity, that Congress, in order to secure an important

document has to thank the enterprise of a Chicago newspaper, or the

calculated indiscretion of a subordinate official. So bad is the

contact of legislators with necessary facts that they are forced to

rely either on private tips or on that legalized atrocity, the

Congressional investigation, where Congressmen, starved of their

legitimate food for thought, go on a wild and feverish man-hunt, and

do not stop at cannibalism.

Except for the little that these investigations yield, the occasional

communications from the executive departments, interested and

disinterested data collected by private persons, such newspapers,

periodicals, and books as Congressmen read, and a new and excellent

practice of calling for help from expert bodies like the Interstate

Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Tariff

Commission, the creation of Congressional opinion is incestuous. From

this it follows either that legislation of a national character is

prepared by a few informed insiders, and put through by partisan

force; or that the legislation is broken up into a collection of local

items, each of which is enacted for a local reason. Tariff schedules,

navy yards, army posts, rivers and harbors, post offices and federal

buildings, pensions and patronage: these are fed out to concave

communities as tangible evidence of the benefits of national life.

Being concave, they can see the white marble building which rises out

of federal funds to raise local realty values and employ local

contractors more readily than they can judge the cumulative cost of

the pork barrel. It is fair to say that in a large assembly of men,

each of whom has practical knowledge only of his own district, laws

dealing with translocal affairs are rejected or accepted by the mass

of Congressmen without creative participation of any kind. They

participate only in making those laws that can be treated as a bundle

of local issues. For a legislature without effective means of

information and analysis must oscillate between blind regularity,

tempered by occasional insurgency, and logrolling. And it is the

logrolling which makes the regularity palatable, because it is by

logrolling that a Congressman proves to his more active constituents

that he is watching their interests as they conceive them.

This is no fault of the individual Congressman's, except when he is

complacent about it. The cleverest and most industrious representative

cannot hope to understand a fraction of the bills on which he votes.

The best he can do is to specialize on a few bills, and take

somebody's word about the rest. I have known Congressmen, when they

were boning up on a subject, to study as they had not studied since

they passed their final examinations, many large cups of black coffee,

wet towels and all. They had to dig for information, sweat over

arranging and verifying facts, which, in any consciously organized

government, should have been easily available in a form suitable for

decision. And even when they really knew a subject, their anxieties

had only begun. For back home the editors, the board of trade, the

central federated union, and the women's clubs had spared themselves

these labors, and were prepared to view the Congressman's performance

through local spectacles.

6

What patronage did to attach political chieftains to the national

government, the infinite variety of local subsidies and privileges do

for self-centered communities. Patronage and pork amalgamate and

stabilize thousands of special opinions, local discontents, private

ambitions. There are but two other alternatives. One is government by

terror and obedience, the other is government based on such a highly

developed system of information, analysis, and self-consciousness that

"the knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state" is

evident to all men. The autocratic system is in decay, the voluntary

system is in its very earliest development; and so, in calculating the

prospects of association among large groups of people, a League of

Nations, industrial government, or a federal union of states, the

degree to which the material for a common consciousness exists,

determines how far cooperation will depend upon force, or upon the

milder alternative to force, which is patronage and privilege. The

secret of great state-builders, like Alexander Hamilton, is that they

know how to calculate these principles.

CHAPTER XIX

THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM: GUILD SOCIALISM.

Whenever the quarrels of self-centered groups become unbearable,

reformers in the past found themselves forced to choose between two

great alternatives. They could take the path to Rome and impose a

Roman peace upon the warring tribes. They could take the path to

isolation, to autonomy and self-sufficiency. Almost always they chose

that path which they had least recently travelled. If they had tried

out the deadening monotony of empire, they cherished above all other

things the simple freedom of their own community. But if they had seen

this simple freedom squandered in parochial jealousies they longed for

the spacious order of a great and powerful state.

Whichever choice they made, the essential difficulty was the same. If

decisions were decentralized they soon floundered in a chaos of local

opinions. If they were centralized, the policy of the state was based

on the opinions of a small social set at the capital. In any case

force was necessary to defend one local right against another, or to

impose law and order on the localities, or to resist class government

at the center, or to defend the whole society, centralized or

decentralized, against the outer barbarian.

Modern democracy and the industrial system were both born in a time of

reaction against kings, crown government, and a regime of detailed

economic regulation. In the industrial sphere this reaction took the

form of extreme devolution, known as laissez-faire individualism. Each

economic decision was to be made by the man who had title to the

property involved. Since almost everything was owned by somebody,

there would be somebody to manage everything. This was plural

sovereignty with a vengeance.

It was economic government by anybody's economic philosophy, though it

was supposed to be controlled by immutable laws of political economy

that must in the end produce harmony. It produced many splendid

things, but enough sordid and terrible ones to start counter-currents.

One of these was the trust, which established a kind of Roman peace

within industry, and a Roman predatory imperialism outside. People

turned to the legislature for relief. They invoked representative

government, founded on the image of the township farmer, to regulate

the semi-sovereign corporations. The working class turned to labor

organization. There followed a period of increasing centralization and

a sort of race of armaments. The trusts interlocked, the craft unions

federated and combined into a labor movement, the political system

grew stronger at Washington and weaker in the states, as the reformers

tried to match its strength against big business.

In this period practically all the schools of socialist thought from

the Marxian left to the New Nationalists around Theodore Roosevelt,

looked upon centralization as the first stage of an evolution which

would end in the absorption of all the semi-sovereign powers of

business by the political state. The evolution never took place,

except for a few months during the war. That was enough, and there was

a turn of the wheel against the omnivorous state in favor of several

new forms of pluralism. But this time society was to swing back not to

the atomic individualism of Adam Smith's economic man and Thomas

Jefferson's farmer, but to a sort of molecular individualism of

voluntary groups.

One of the interesting things about all these oscillations of theory

is that each in turn promises a world in which no one will have to

follow Machiavelli in order to survive. They are all established by

some form of coercion, they all exercise coercion in order to maintain

themselves, and they are all discarded as a result of coercion. Yet

they do not accept coercion, either physical power or special

position, patronage, or privilege, as part of their ideal. The

individualist said that self-enlightened self-interest would bring

internal and external peace. The socialist is sure that the motives to

aggression will disappear. The new pluralist hopes they

will. [Footnote: See G. D. H. Cole, _Social Theory,_ p. 142.]

Coercion is the surd in almost all social theory, except the

Machiavellian. The temptation to ignore it, because it is absurd,

inexpressible, and unmanageable, becomes overwhelming in any man who

is trying to rationalize human life.

2

The lengths to which a clever man will sometimes go in order to escape

a full recognition of the role of force is shown by Mr. G. D. H.

Cole's book on Guild Socialism. The present state, he says, "is

primarily an instrument of coercion;" [Footnote: Cole, _Guild

Socialism_, p. 107.] in a guild socialist society there will be no

sovereign power, though there will be a coordinating body. He calls

this body the Commune.

He then begins to enumerate the powers of the Commune, which, we

recall, is to be primarily not an instrument of coercion. [Footnote:

_Op. cit._ Ch. VIII.] It settles price disputes. Sometimes it

fixes prices, allocates the surplus or distributes the loss. It

allocates natural resources, and controls the issue of credit. It also

"allocates communal labor-power." It ratifies the budgets of the

guilds and the civil services. It levies taxes. "All questions of

income" fall within its jurisdiction. It "allocates" income to the

non-productive members of the community. It is the final arbiter in

all questions of policy and jurisdiction between the guilds. It passes

constitutional laws fixing the functions of the functional bodies. It

appoints the judges. It confers coercive powers upon the guilds, and

ratifies their by-laws wherever these involve coercion. It declares

war and makes peace. It controls the armed forces. It is the supreme

representative of the nation abroad. It settles boundary questions

within the national state. It calls into existence new functional

bodies, or distributes new functions to old ones. It runs the police.

It makes whatever laws are necessary to regulate personal conduct and

personal property.

These powers are exercised not by one commune, but by a federal

structure of local and provincial communes with a National commune at

the top. Mr. Cole is, of course, welcome to insist that this is not a

sovereign state, but if there is a coercive power now enjoyed by any

modern government for which he has forgotten to make room, I cannot

think of it.

He tells us, however, that Guild society will be non-coercive: "we

want to build a new society which will be conceived in the spirit, not

of coercion, but of free service." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p.

141.] Everyone who shares that hope, as most men and women do, will

therefore look closely to see what there is in the Guild Socialist

plan which promises to reduce coercion to its lowest limits, even

though the Guildsmen of to-day have already reserved for their

communes the widest kind of coercive power. It is acknowledged at once

that the new society cannot be brought into existence by universal

consent. Mr. Cole is too honest to shirk the element of force required

to make the transition. [Footnote: _Cf. op. cit._, Ch. X. ] And

while obviously he cannot predict how much civil war there might be,

he is quite clear that there would have to be a period of direct

action by the trade unions.

3

But leaving aside the problems of transition, and any consideration of

what the effect is on their future action, when men have hacked their

way through to the promised land, let us imagine the Guild Society in

being. What keeps it running as a non-coercive society?

Mr. Cole has two answers to this question. One is the orthodox Marxian

answer that the abolition of capitalist property will remove the

motive to aggression. Yet he does not really believe that, because if

he did, he would care as little as does the average Marxian how the

working class is to run the government, once it is in control. If his

diagnosis were correct, the Marxian would be quite right: if the

disease were the capitalist class and only the capitalist class,

salvation would automatically follow its extinction. But Mr. Cole is

enormously concerned about whether the society which follows the

revolution is to be run by state collectivism, by guilds or

cooperative societies, by a democratic parliament or by functional

representation. In fact, it is as a new theory of representative

government that guild socialism challenges attention.

The guildsmen do not expect a miracle to result from the disappearance

of capitalist property rights. They do expect, and of course quite

rightly, that if equality of income were the rule, social relations

would be profoundly altered. But they differ, as far as I can make

out, from the orthodox Russian communist in this respect: The

communist proposes to establish equality by force of the dictatorship

of the proletariat, believing that if once people were equalized both

in income and in service, they would then lose the incentives to

aggression. The guildsmen also propose to establish equality by force,

but are shrewd enough to see that if an equilibrium is to be

maintained they have to provide institutions for maintaining it.

Guildsmen, therefore, put their faith in what they believe to be a new

theory of democracy.

Their object, says Mr. Cole, is "to get the mechanism right, and to

adjust it as far as possible to the expression of men's social wills."

[Reference: _Op. cit._, p. 16.] These wills need to be given

opportunity for self-expression in self-government "in any and every

form of social action." Behind these words is the true democratic

impulse, the desire to enhance human dignity, as well as the

traditional assumption that this human dignity is impugned, unless

each person's will enters into the management of everything that

affects him. The guildsman, like the earlier democrat therefore, looks

about him for an environment in which this ideal of self-government

can be realized. A hundred years and more have passed since Rousseau

and Jefferson, and the center of interest has shifted from the country

to the city. The new democrat can no longer turn to the idealized

rural township for the image of democracy. He turns now to the

workshop. "The spirit of association must be given free play in the

sphere in which it is best able to find expression. This is manifestly

the factory, in which men have the habit and tradition of working

together. The factory is the natural and fundamental unit of

industrial democracy. This involves, not only that the factory must be

free, as far as possible, to manage its own affairs, but also that the

democratic unit of the factory must be made the basis of the larger

democracy of the Guild, and that the larger organs of Guild

administration and government must be based largely on the principle

of factory representation." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 40.]

Factory is, of course, a very loose word, and Mr. Cole asks us to take

it as meaning mines, shipyards, docks, stations, and every place which

is "a natural center of production." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p.

41] But a factory in this sense is quite a different thing from an

industry. The factory, as Mr. Cole conceives it, is a work place where

men are really in personal contact, an environment small enough to be

known directly to all the workers. "This democracy if it is to be

real, must come home to, and be exercisable directly by, every

individual member of the Guild." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 40.]

This is important, because Mr. Cole, like Jefferson, is seeking a

natural unit of government. The only natural unit is a perfectly

familiar environment. Now a large plant, a railway system, a great

coal field, is not a natural unit in this sense. Unless it is a very

small factory indeed, what Mr. Cole is really thinking about is the

shop. That is where men can be supposed to have "the habit and

tradition of working together." The rest of the plant, the rest of the

industry, is an inferred environment.

4

Anybody can see, and almost everybody will admit, that self-government

in the purely internal affairs of the shop is government of affairs

that "can be taken in at a single view." [Footnote: Aristotle,

_Politics_, Bk. VII, Ch. IV.] But dispute would arise as to what

constitute the internal affairs of a shop. Obviously the biggest

interests, like wages, standards of production, the purchase of

supplies, the marketing of the product, the larger planning of work,

are by no means purely internal. The shop democracy has freedom,

subject to enormous limiting conditions from the outside. It can deal

to a certain extent with the arrangement of work laid out for the

shop, it can deal with the temper and temperament of individuals, it

can administer petty industrial justice, and act as a court of first

instance in somewhat larger individual disputes. Above all it can act

as a unit in dealing with other shops, and perhaps with the plant as a

whole. But isolation is impossible. The unit of industrial democracy

is thoroughly entangled in foreign affairs. And it is the management

of these external relations that constitutes the test of the guild

socialist theory.

They have to be managed by representative government arranged in a

federal order from the shop to the plant, the plant to the industry,

the industry to the nation, with intervening regional grouping of

representatives. But all this structure derives from the shop, and all

its peculiar virtues are ascribed to this source. The representatives

who choose the representatives who choose the representatives who

finally "coordinate" and "regulate" the shops are elected, Mr. Cole

asserts, by a true democracy. Because they come originally from a

self-governing unit, the whole federal organism will be inspired by

the spirit and the reality of self-government. Representatives will

aim to carry out the workers' "actual will as understood by themselves,"

[Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 42.] that is, as understood by the

individual in the shops.

A government run literally on this principle would, if history is any

guide, be either a perpetual logroll, or a chaos of warring shops. For

while the worker in the shop can have a real opinion about matters

entirely within the shop, his "will" about the relation of that shop

to the plant, the industry, and the nation is subject to all the

limitations of access, stereotype, and self-interest that surround any

other self-centered opinion. His experience in the shop at best brings

only aspects of the whole to his attention. His opinion of what is

right within the shop he can reach by direct knowledge of the

essential facts. His opinion of what is right in the great complicated

environment out of sight is more likely to be wrong than right if it

is a generalization from the experience of the individual shop. As a

matter of experience, the representatives of a guild society would

find, just as the higher trade union officials find today, that on a

great number of questions which they have to decide there is no

"actual will as understood" by the shops.

5

The guildsmen insist, however, that such criticism is blind because it

ignores a great political discovery. You may be quite right, they

would say, in thinking that the representatives of the shops would

have to make up their own minds on many questions about which the

shops have no opinion. But you are simply entangled in an ancient

fallacy: you are looking for somebody to represent a group of people.

He cannot be found. The only representative possible is one who acts

for "some particular function," [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 23-24.]

and therefore each person must help choose as many representatives "as

there are distinct essential groups of functions to be performed."

Assume then that the representatives speak, not for the men in the

shops, but for certain functions in which the men are interested. They

are, mind you, disloyal if they do not carry out the will of the group

about the function, as understood by the group. [Footnote: _Cf._

Part V, "The Making of a Common Will."] These functional

representatives meet. Their business is to coordinate and regulate. By

what standard does each judge the proposals of the other, assuming, as

we must, that there is conflict of opinion between the shops, since if

there were not, there would be no need to coordinate and regulate?

Now the peculiar virtue of functional democracy is supposed to be that

men vote candidly according to their own interests, which it is

assumed they know by daily experience. They can do that within the

self-contained group. But in its external relations the group as a

whole, or its representative, is dealing with matters that transcend

immediate experience. The shop does not arrive spontaneously at a view

of the whole situation. Therefore, the public opinions of a shop about

its rights and duties in the industry and in society, are matters of

education or propaganda, not the automatic product of shop-consciousness.

Whether the guildsmen elect a delegate, or a representative, they do

not escape the problem of the orthodox democrat. Either the group

as a whole, or the elected spokesman, must stretch his mind beyond

the limits of direct experience. He must vote on questions coming up

from other shops, and on matters coming from beyond the frontiers of

the whole industry. The primary interest of the shop does not even

cover the function of a whole industrial vocation. The function of a

vocation, a great industry, a district, a nation is a concept, not an

experience, and has to be imagined, invented, taught and believed.

And even though you define function as carefully as possible, once

you admit that the view of each shop on that function will not

necessarily coincide with the view of other shops, you are saying

that the representative of one interest is concerned in the proposals

made by other interests. You are saying that he must conceive a

common interest. And in voting for him you are choosing a man who

will not simply represent your view of your function, which is all that

you know at first hand, but a man who will represent your views

about other people's views of that function. You are voting as

indefinitely as the orthodox democrat.

6

The guildsmen in their own minds have solved the question of how to

conceive a common interest by playing with the word function. They

imagine a society in which all the main work of the world has been

analysed into functions, and these functions in turn synthesized

harmoniously. [Footnote: _Cf. op. cit._, Ch. XIX.] They suppose

essential agreement about the purposes of society as a whole, and

essential agreement about the role of every organized group in

carrying out those purposes. It was a nice sentiment, therefore, which

led them to take the name of their theory from an institution that

arose in a Catholic feudal society. But they should remember that the

scheme of function which the wise men of that age assumed was not

worked out by mortal man. It is unclear how the guildsmen think the

scheme is going to be worked out and made acceptable in the modern

world. Sometimes they seem to argue that the scheme will develop from

trade union organization, at other times that the communes will define

the constitutional function of the groups. But it makes a considerable

practical difference whether they believe that the groups define their

own functions or not.

In either case, Mr. Cole assumes that society can be carried on by a

social contract based on an accepted idea of "distinct essential

groups of functions." How does one recognize these distinct essential

groups? So far as I can make out, Mr. Cole thinks that a function is

what a group of people are interested in. "The essence of functional

democracy is that a man should count as many times over as there are

functions in which he is interested." [Footnote: _Social Theory,_

p. 102 _et seq._] Now there are at least two meanings to the word

interested. You can use it to mean that a man is involved, or that his

mind is occupied. John Smith, for example, may have been tremendously

interested in the Stillman divorce case. He may have read every word

of the news in every lobster edition. On the other hand, young Guy

Stillman, whose legitimacy was at stake, probably did not trouble

himself at all. John Smith was interested in a suit that did not

affect his "interests," and Guy was uninterested in one that would

determine the whole course of his life. Mr. Cole, I am afraid, leans

towards John Smith. He is answering the "very foolish objection" that

to vote by functions is to be voting very often: "If a man is not

interested enough to vote, and cannot be aroused to interest enough to

make him vote, on, say, a dozen distinct subjects, he waives his right

to vote and the result is no less democratic than if he voted blindly

and without interest."

Mr. Cole thinks that the uninstructed voter "waives his right to

vote." From this it follows that the votes of the instructed reveal

their interest, and their interest defines the function. [Footnote:

_Cf._ Ch. XVIII of this book. "Since everybody was assumed to be

interested enough in important affairs, only those affairs came to

seem important in which everybody was interested."] "Brown, Jones, and

Robinson must therefore have, not one vote each, but as many different

functional votes as there are different questions calling for

associative action in which they are interested." [Footnote: _Guild

Socialism,_ p. 24. ] I am considerably in doubt whether Mr. Cole

thinks that Brown, Jones and Robinson should qualify in any election

where they assert that they are interested, or that somebody else, not

named, picks the functions in which they are entitled to be

interested. If I were asked to say what I believe Mr. Cole thinks, it

would be that he has smoothed over the difficulty by the enormously

strange assumption that it is the uninstructed voter who waives his

right to vote; and has concluded that whether functional voting is

arranged by a higher power, or "from below" on the principle that a

man may vote when it interests him to vote, only the instructed will

be voting anyway, and therefore the institution will work.

But there are two kinds of uninstructed voter. There is the man who

does not know and knows that he does not know. He is generally an

enlightened person. He is the man who waives his right to vote. But

there is also the man who is uninstructed and does not know that he

is, or care. He can always be gotten to the polls, if the party

machinery is working. His vote is the basis of the machine. And since

the communes of the guild society have large powers over taxation,

wages, prices, credit, and natural resources, it would be preposterous

to assume that elections will not be fought at least as passionately

as our own.

The way people exhibit their interest will not then delimit the

functions of a functional society. There are two other ways that

function might be defined. One would be by the trade unions which

fought the battle that brought guild socialism into being. Such a

struggle would harden groups of men together in some sort of

functional relation, and these groups would then become the vested

interests of the guild socialist society. Some of them, like the

miners and railroad men, would be very strong, and probably deeply

attached to the view of their function which they learned from the

battle with capitalism. It is not at all unlikely that certain

favorably placed trade unions would under a socialist state become the

center of coherence and government. But a guild society would

inevitably find them a tough problem to deal with, for direct action

would have revealed their strategic power, and some of their leaders

at least would not offer up this power readily on the altar of

freedom. In order to "coordinate" them, guild society would have to

gather together its strength, and fairly soon one would find, I think,

that the radicals under guild socialism would be asking for communes

strong enough to define the functions of the guilds.

But if you are going to have the government (commune) define

functions, the premise of the theory disappears. It had to suppose

that a scheme of functions was obvious in order that the concave shops

would voluntarily relate themselves to society. If there is no settled

scheme of functions in every voter's head, he has no better way under

guild socialism than under orthodox democracy of turning a

self-centered opinion into a social judgment. And, of course, there

can be no such settled scheme, because, even if Mr. Cole and his

friends devised a good one, the shop democracies from which all power

derives, would judge the scheme in operation by what they learn of it

and by what they can imagine. The guilds would see the same scheme

differently. And so instead of the scheme being the skeleton that

keeps guild society together, the attempt to define what the scheme

ought to be, would be under guild socialism as elsewhere, the main

business of politics. If we could allow Mr. Cole his scheme of

functions we could allow him almost everything. Unfortunately he has

inserted in his premise what he wishes a guild society to

deduce. [Footnote: I have dealt with Mr. Cole's theory rather than with

the experience of Soviet Russia because, while the testimony is

fragmentary, all competent observers seem to agree that Russia in 1921

does not illustrate a communist state in working order. Russia is in

revolution, and what you can learn from Russia is what a revolution is

like. You can learn very little about what a communist society would

be like. It is, however, immensely significant that, first as

practical revolutionists and then as public officials, the Russian

communists have relied not upon the spontaneous democracy of the

Russian people, but on the discipline, special interest and the

noblesse oblige of a specialized class-the loyal and indoctrinated

members of the Communist party. In the "transition," on which no time

limit has been set, I believe, the cure for class government and the

coercive state is strictly homeopathic.

There is also the question of why I selected Mr. Cole's books rather

than the much more closely reasoned "Constitution for the Socialist

Commonwealth of Great Britain" by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. I admire

that book very much; but I have not been able to convince myself that

it is not an intellectual tour de force. Mr. Cole seems to me far more

authentically in the spirit of the socialist movement, and therefore,

a better witness.]

CHAPTER XX

A NEW IMAGE

1

THE lesson is, I think, a fairly clear one. In the absence of

institutions and education by which the environment is so successfully

reported that the realities of public life stand out sharply against

self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude public

opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose

personal interests reach beyond the locality. This class is

irresponsible, for it acts upon information that is not common

property, in situations that the public at large does not conceive,

and it can be held to account only on the accomplished fact.

The democratic theory by failing to admit that self-centered opinions

are not sufficient to procure good government, is involved in

perpetual conflict between theory and practice. According to the

theory, the full dignity of man requires that his will should be, as

Mr. Cole says, expressed "in any and every form of social action." It

is supposed that the expression of their will is the consuming passion

of men, for they are assumed to possess by instinct the art of

government. But as a matter of plain experience, self-determination is

only one of the many interests of a human personality. The desire to

be the master of one's own destiny is a strong desire, but it has to

adjust itself to other equally strong desires, such as the desire for

a good life, for peace, for relief from burdens. In the original

assumptions of democracy it was held that the expression of each man's

will would spontaneously satisfy not only his desire for

self-expression, but his desire for a good life, because the instinct

to express one's self in a good life was innate.

The emphasis, therefore, has always been on the mechanism for

expressing the will. The democratic El Dorado has always been some

perfect environment, and some perfect system of voting and

representation, where the innate good will and instinctive

statesmanship of every man could be translated into action. In limited

areas and for brief periods the environment has been so favorable,

that is to say so isolated, and so rich in opportunity, that the

theory worked well enough to confirm men in thinking that it was sound

for all time and everywhere. Then when the isolation ended, and

society became complex, and men had to adjust themselves closely to

one another, the democrat spent his time trying to devise more perfect

units of voting, in the hope that somehow he would, as Mr. Cole says,

"get the mechanism right, and adjust it as far as possible to men's

social wills." But while the democratic theorist was busy at this, he

was far away from the actual interests of human nature. He was

absorbed by one interest: self-government. Mankind was interested in

all kinds of other things, in order, in its rights, in prosperity, in

sights and sounds and in not being bored. In so far as spontaneous

democracy does not satisfy their other interests, it seems to most men

most of the time to be an empty thing. Because the art of successful

self-government is not instinctive, men do not long desire

self-government for its own sake. They desire it for the sake of the

results. That is why the impulse to self-government is always

strongest as a protest against bad conditions.

The democratic fallacy has been its preoccupation with the origin of

government rather than with the processes and results. The democrat

has always assumed that if political power could be derived in the

right way, it would be beneficent. His whole attention has been on the

source of power, since he is hypnotized by the belief that the great

thing is to express the will of the people, first because expression

is the highest interest of man, and second because the will is

instinctively good. But no amount of regulation at the source of a

river will completely control its behavior, and while democrats have

been absorbed in trying to find a good mechanism for originating

social power, that is to say a good mechanism of voting and

representation, they neglected almost every other interest of men. For

no matter how power originates, the crucial interest is in how power

is exercised. What determines the quality of civilization is the use

made of power. And that use cannot be controlled at the source.

If you try to control government wholly at the source, you inevitably

make all the vital decisions invisible. For since there is no instinct

which automatically makes political decisions that produce a good

life, the men who actually exercise power not only fail to express the

will of the people, because on most questions no will exists, but they

exercise power according to opinions which are hidden from the

electorate.

If, then, you root out of the democratic philosophy the whole

assumption in all its ramifications that government is instinctive,

and that therefore it can be managed by self-centered opinions, what

becomes of the democratic faith in the dignity of man? It takes a

fresh lease of life by associating itself with the whole personality

instead of with a meager aspect of it. For the traditional democrat

risked the dignity of man on one very precarious assumption, that he

would exhibit that dignity instinctively in wise laws and good

government. Voters did not do that, and so the democrat was forever

being made to look a little silly by tough-minded men. But if, instead

of hanging human dignity on the one assumption about self-government,

you insist that man's dignity requires a standard of living, in which

his capacities are properly exercised, the whole problem changes. The

criteria which you then apply to government are whether it is

producing a certain minimum of health, of decent housing, of material

necessities, of education, of freedom, of pleasures, of beauty, not

simply whether at the sacrifice of all these things, it vibrates to

the self-centered opinions that happen to be floating around in men's

minds. In the degree to which these criteria can be made exact and

objective, political decision, which is inevitably the concern of

comparatively few people, is actually brought into relation with the

interests of men.

There is no prospect, in any time which we can conceive, that the

whole invisible environment will be so clear to all men that they will

spontaneously arrive at sound public opinions on the whole business of

government. And even if there were a prospect, it is extremely

doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered, or would take

the time to form an opinion on "any and every form of social action"

which affects us. The only prospect which is not visionary is that

each of us in his own sphere will act more and more on a realistic

picture of the invisible world, and that we shall develop more and

more men who are expert in keeping these pictures realistic. Outside

the rather narrow range of our own possible attention, social control

depends upon devising standards of living and methods of audit by

which the acts of public officials and industrial directors are

measured. We cannot ourselves inspire or guide all these acts, as the

mystical democrat has always imagined. But we can steadily increase

our real control over these acts by insisting that all of them shall

be plainly recorded, and their results objectively measured. I should

say, perhaps, that we can progressively hope to insist. For the

working out of such standards and of such audits has only begun.

PART VII

NEWSPAPERS

CHAPTER XXI. THE BUYING PUBLIC

" XXII. THE CONSTANT READER

" XXIII. THE NATURE OF NEWS

" XXIV. NEWS, TRUTH, AND A CONCLUSION

CHAPTER XXI

THE BUYING PUBLIC

1

THE idea that men have to go forth and study the world in order to

govern it, has played a very minor part in political thought. It could

figure very little, because the machinery for reporting the world in

any way useful to government made comparatively little progress from

the time of Aristotle to the age in which the premises of democracy

were established.

Therefore, if you had asked a pioneer democrat where the information

was to come from on which the will of the people was to be based, he

would have been puzzled by the question. It would have seemed a little

as if you had asked him where his life or his soul came from. The will

of the people, he almost always assumed, exists at all times; the duty

of political science was to work out the inventions of the ballot and

representative government. If they were properly worked out and

applied under the right conditions, such as exist in the

self-contained village or the self-contained shop, the mechanism would

somehow overcome the brevity of attention which Aristotle had

observed, and the narrowness of its range, which the theory of a

self-contained community tacitly acknowledged. We have seen how even

at this late date the guild socialists are transfixed by the notion

that if only you can build on the right unit of voting and

representation, an intricate cooperative commonwealth is possible.

Convinced that the wisdom was there if only you could find it,

democrats have treated the problem of making public opinions as a

problem in civil liberties. [Footnote: The best study is Prof.

Zechariah Chafee's, _Freedom of Speech_.] "Who ever knew Truth

put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" [Footnote: Milton,

_Areopagitica_, cited at the opening of Mr. Chafee's book. For

comment on this classic doctrine of liberty as stated by Milton, John

Stuart Mill, and Mr. Bertrand Russel, see my _Liberty and the

News_, Ch. II.] Supposing that no one has ever seen it put to the

worse, are we to believe then that the truth is generated by the

encounter, like fire by rubbing two sticks? Behind this classic

doctrine of liberty, which American democrats embodied in their Bill

of Rights, there are, in fact, several different theories of the

origin of truth. One is a faith that in the competition of opinions,

the truest will win because there is a peculiar strength in the truth.

This is probably sound if you allow the competition to extend over a

sufficiently long time. When men argue in this vein they have in mind

the verdict of history, and they think specifically of heretics

persecuted when they lived, canonized after they were dead. Milton's

question rests also on a belief that the capacity to recognize truth

is inherent in all men, and that truth freely put in circulation will

win acceptance. It derives no less from the experience, which has

shown that men are not likely to discover truth if they cannot speak

it, except under the eye of an uncomprehending policeman.

No one can possibly overestimate the practical value of these civil

liberties, nor the importance of maintaining them. When they are in

jeopardy, the human spirit is in jeopardy, and should there come a

time when they have to be curtailed, as during a war, the suppression

of thought is a risk to civilization which might prevent its recovery

from the effects of war, if the hysterics, who exploit the necessity,

were numerous enough to carry over into peace the taboos of war.

Fortunately, the mass of men is too tolerant long to enjoy the

professional inquisitors, as gradually, under the criticism of men not

willing to be terrorized, they are revealed as mean-spirited creatures

who nine-tenths of the time do not know what they are talking

about. [Footnote: _Cf._ for example, the publications of the Lusk

Committee in New York, and the public statements and prophecies of Mr.

Mitchell Palmer, who was Attorney-General of the United States during

the period of President Wilson's illness.]

But in spite of its fundamental importance, civil liberty in this

sense does not guarantee public opinion in the modern world. For it

always assumes, either that truth is spontaneous, or that the means of

securing truth exist when there is no external interference. But when

you are dealing with an invisible environment, the assumption is

false. The truth about distant or complex matters is not self-evident,

and the machinery for assembling information is technical and

expensive. Yet political science, and especially democratic political

science, has never freed itself from the original assumption of

Aristotle's politics sufficiently to restate the premises, so that

political thought might come to grips with the problem of how to make

the invisible world visible to the citizens of a modern state.

So deep is the tradition, that until quite recently, for example,

political science was taught in our colleges as if newspapers did not

exist. I am not referring to schools of journalism, for they are trade

schools, intended to prepare men and women for a career. I am

referring to political science as expounded to future business men,

lawyers, public officials, and citizens at large. In that science a

study of the press and the sources of popular information found no

place. It is a curious fact. To anyone not immersed in the routine

interests of political science, it is almost inexplicable that no

American student of government, no American sociologist, has ever

written a book on news-gathering. There are occasional references to

the press, and statements that it is not, or that it ought to be,

"free" and "truthful." But I can find almost nothing else. And this

disdain of the professionals finds its counterpart in public opinions.

Universally it is admitted that the press is the chief means of

contact with the unseen environment. And practically everywhere it is

assumed that the press should do spontaneously for us what primitive

democracy imagined each of us could do spontaneously for himself, that

every day and twice a day it will present us with a true picture of

all the outer world in which we are interested.

2

This insistent and ancient belief that truth is not earned, but

inspired, revealed, supplied gratis, comes out very plainly in our

economic prejudices as readers of newspapers. We expect the newspaper

to serve us with truth however unprofitable the truth may be. For this

difficult and often dangerous service, which we recognize as

fundamental, we expected to pay until recently the smallest coin

turned out by the mint. We have accustomed ourselves now to paying two

and even three cents on weekdays, and on Sundays, for an illustrated

encyclopedia and vaudeville entertainment attached, we have screwed

ourselves up to paying a nickel or even a dime. Nobody thinks for a

moment that he ought to pay for his newspaper. He expects the

fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or

moral, involving any risk, cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a

nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits

him, will turn to another paper when that suits him. Somebody has said

quite aptly that the newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.

This casual and one-sided relationship between readers and press is an

anomaly of our civilization. There is nothing else quite like it, and

it is, therefore, hard to compare the press with any other business or

institution. It is not a business pure and simple, partly because the

product is regularly sold below cost, but chiefly because the

community applies one ethical measure to the press and another to

trade or manufacture. Ethically a newspaper is judged as if it were a

church or a school. But if you try to compare it with these you fail;

the taxpayer pays for the public school, the private school is endowed

or supported by tuition fees, there are subsidies and collections for

the church. You cannot compare journalism with law, medicine or

engineering, for in every one of these professions the consumer pays

for the service. A free press, if you judge by the attitude of the

readers, means newspapers that are virtually given away.

Yet the critics of the press are merely voicing the moral standards of

the community, when they expect such an institution to live on the

same plane as that on which the school, the church, and the

disinterested professions are supposed to live. This illustrates again

the concave character of democracy. No need for artificially acquired

information is felt to exist. The information must come naturally,

that is to say gratis, if not out of the heart of the citizen, then

gratis out of the newspaper. The citizen will pay for his telephone,

his railroad rides, his motor car, his entertainment. But he does not

pay openly for his news.

He will, however, pay handsomely for the privilege of having someone

read about him. He will pay directly to advertise. And he will pay

indirectly for the advertisements of other people, because that

payment, being concealed in the price of commodities is part of an

invisible environment that he does not effectively comprehend. It

would be regarded as an outrage to have to pay openly the price of a

good ice cream soda for all the news of the world, though the public

will pay that and more when it buys the advertised commodities. The

public pays for the press, but only when the payment is concealed.

3

Circulation is, therefore, the means to an end. It becomes an asset

only when it can be sold to the advertiser, who buys it with revenues

secured through indirect taxation of the reader. [Footnote: "An

established newspaper is entitled to fix its advertising rates so that

its net receipts from circulation may be left on the credit side of

the profit and loss account. To arrive at net receipts, I would deduct

from the gross the cost of promotion, distribution, and other expenses

incidental to circulation." From an address by Mr. Adolph S. Ochs,

publisher of _the New York Times,_ at the Philadelphia Convention

of the Associated Advertising Clubs of The World, June 26, 1916.

Cited, Elmer Davis, _History of The New York Times,_ 1851-1921,

pp. 397-398.] The kind of circulation which the advertiser will buy

depends on what he has to sell. It may be "quality" or "mass." On the

whole there is no sharp dividing line, for in respect to most

commodities sold by advertising, the customers are neither the small

class of the very rich nor the very poor. They are the people with

enough surplus over bare necessities to exercise discretion in their

buying. The paper, therefore, which goes into the homes of the fairly

prosperous is by and large the one which offers most to the

advertiser. It may also go into the homes of the poor, but except for

certain lines of goods, an analytical advertising agent does not rate

that circulation as a great asset, unless, as seems to be the case

with certain of Mr. Hearst's properties, the circulation is enormous.

A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through

advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one

ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space

in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future

customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported

scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really

significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many

critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of

a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be

capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to

manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to

capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is

bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for

this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for

without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout

an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest,

but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable

asset of its existence.

Mr. John L. Given, [Footnote: _Making a Newspaper_, p. 13. This

is the best technical book I know, and should be read by everyone who

undertakes to discuss the press. Mr. G. B. Diblee, who wrote the

volume on _The Newspaper_ in the Home University Library says (p.

253), that "on the press for pressmen I only know of one good book,

Mr. Given's."] formerly of the New York Evening Sun, stated in 1914

that out of over two thousand three hundred dailies published in the

United States, there were about one hundred and seventy-five printed

in cities having over one hundred thousand inhabitants. These

constitute the press for "general news." They are the key papers which

collect the news dealing with great events, and even the people who do

not read any one of the one hundred and seventy-five depend ultimately

upon them for news of the outer world. For they make up the great

press associations which coöperate in the exchange of news. Each is,

therefore, not only the informant of its own readers, but it is the

local reporter for the newspapers of other cities. The rural press and

the special press by and large, take their general news from these key

papers. And among these there are some very much richer than others,

so that for international news, in the main, the whole press of the

nation may depend upon the reports of the press associations and the

special services of a few metropolitan dailies.

Roughly speaking, the economic support for general news gathering is

in the price paid for advertised goods by the fairly prosperous

sections of cities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants.

These buying publics are composed of the members of families, who

depend for their income chiefly on trade, merchandising, the direction

of manufacture, and finance. They are the clientele among whom it pays

best to advertise in a newspaper. They wield a concentrated purchasing

power, which may be less in volume than the aggregate for farmers and

workingmen; but within the radius covered by a daily newspaper they

are the quickest assets.

4

They have, moreover, a double claim to attention. They are not only

the best customers for the advertiser, they include the advertisers.

Therefore the impression made by the newspapers on this public matters

deeply. Fortunately this public is not unanimous. It may be

"capitalistic" but it contains divergent views on what capitalism is,

and how it is to be run. Except in times of danger, this respectable

opinion is sufficiently divided to permit of considerable differences

of policy. These would be greater still if it were not that publishers

are themselves usually members of these urban communities, and

honestly see the world through the lenses of their associates and

friends.

They are engaged in a speculative business, [Footnote: Sometimes so

speculative that in order to secure credit the publisher has to go

into bondage to his creditors. Information on this point is very

difficult to obtain, and for that reason its general importance is

often much exaggerated.] which depends on the general condition of

trade, and more peculiarly on a circulation based not on a marriage

contract with their readers, but on free love. The object of every

publisher is, therefore, to turn his circulation from a medley of

catch-as-catch-can news stand buyers into a devoted band of constant

readers. A newspaper that can really depend upon the loyalty of its

readers is as independent as a newspaper can be, given the economics

of modern journalism. [Footnote: "It is an axiom in newspaper

publishing--'more readers, more independence of the influence of

advertisers; fewer readers and more dependence on the advertiser' It

may seem like a contradiction (yet it is the truth) to assert: the

greater the number of advertisers, the less influence they are

individually able to exercise with the publisher." Adolph S. Ochs,

_of. supra._] A body of readers who stay by it through thick and

thin is a power greater than any which the individual advertiser can

wield, and a power great enough to break up a combination of

advertisers. Therefore, whenever you find a newspaper betraying its

readers for the sake of an advertiser, you can be fairly certain

either that the publisher sincerely shares the views of the

advertiser, or that he thinks, perhaps mistakenly, he cannot count

upon the support of his readers if he openly resists dictation. It is

a question of whether the readers, who do not pay in cash for their

news, will pay for it in loyalty.

CHAPTER XXII

THE CONSTANT READER

I

THE loyalty of the buying public to a newspaper is not stipulated in

any bond. In almost every other enterprise the person who expects to

be served enters into an agreement that controls his passing whims. At

least he pays for what he obtains. In the publishing of periodicals

the nearest approach to an agreement for a definite time is the paid

subscription, and that is not, I believe, a great factor in the

economy of a metropolitan daily. The reader is the sole and the daily

judge of his loyalty, and there can be no suit against him for breach

of promise or nonsupport.

Though everything turns on the constancy of the reader, there does not

exist even a vague tradition to call that fact to the reader's mind.

His constancy depends on how he happens to feel, or on his habits. And

these depend not simply on the quality of the news, but more often on

a number of obscure elements that in our casual relation to the press,

we hardly take the trouble to make conscious. The most important of

these is that each of us tends to judge a newspaper, if we judge it at

all, by its treatment of that part of the news in which we feel

ourselves involved. The newspaper deals with a multitude of events

beyond our experience. But it deals also with some events within our

experience. And by its handling of those events we most frequently

decide to like it or dislike it, to trust it or refuse to have the

sheet in the house. If the newspaper gives a satisfactory account of

that which we think we know, our business, our church, our party, it

is fairly certain to be immune from violent criticism by us. What

better criterion does the man at the breakfast table possess than that

the newspaper version checks up with his own opinion? Therefore, most

men tend to hold the newspaper most strictly accountable in their

capacity, not of general readers, but of special pleaders on matters

of their own experience.

Rarely is anyone but the interested party able to test the accuracy of

a report. If the news is local, and if there is competition, the

editor knows that he will probably hear from the man who thinks his

portrait unfair and inaccurate. But if the news is not local, the

corrective diminishes as the subject matter recedes into the distance.

The only people who can correct what they think is a false picture of

themselves printed in another city are members of groups well enough

organized to hire publicity men.

Now it is interesting to note that the general reader of a newspaper

has no standing in law if he thinks he is being misled by the news. It

is only the aggrieved party who can sue for slander or libel, and he

has to prove a material injury to himself. The law embodies the

tradition that general news is not a matter of common concern,

[Footnote: The reader will not mistake this as a plea for censorship.

It might, however, be a good thing if there were competent tribunals,

preferably not official ones, where charges of untruthfulness and

unfairness in the general news could be sifted. _Cf. Liberty and the

News,_ pp. 73-76. ] except as to matter which is vaguely described

as immoral or seditious.

But the body of the news, though unchecked as a whole by the

disinterested reader, consists of items about which some readers have

very definite preconceptions. Those items are the data of his

judgment, and news which men read without this personal criterion,

they judge by some other standard than their standard of accuracy.

They are dealing here with a subject matter which to them is

indistinguishable from fiction. The canon of truth cannot be applied.

They do not boggle over such news if it conforms to their stereotypes,

and they continue to read it if it interests them. [Footnote: Note, for

example, how absent is indignation in Mr. Upton Sinclair against

socialist papers, even those which are as malignantly unfair to

employers as certain of the papers cited by him are unfair to

radicals.]

2

There are newspapers, even in large cities, edited on the principle

that the readers wish to read about themselves. The theory is that if

enough people see their own names in the paper often enough, can read

about their weddings, funerals, sociables, foreign travels, lodge

meetings, school prizes, their fiftieth birthdays, their sixtieth

birthdays, their silver weddings, their outings and clambakes, they

will make a reliable circulation.

The classic formula for such a newspaper is contained in a letter

written by Horace Greeley on April 3, 1860, to "Friend Fletcher" who

was about to start a country newspaper: [Footnote: Cited, James Melvin

Lee, _The History of American Journalism,_ p. 405.]

"I. Begin with a clear conception that the subject of deepest interest

to an average human being is himself; next to that he is most

concerned about his neighbors. Asia and the Tongo Islands stand a long

way after these in his regard.... Do not let a new church be

organized, or new members be added to one already existing, a farm be

sold, a new house raised, a mill set in motion, a store opened, nor

anything of interest to a dozen families occur, without having the

fact duly, though briefly, chronicled in your columns. If a farmer

cuts a big tree, or grows a mammoth beet, or harvests a bounteous

yield of wheat or corn, set forth the fact as concisely and

unexceptionally as possible."

The function of becoming, as Mr. Lee puts it, "the printed diary of

the home town" is one that every newspaper no matter where it is

published must in some measure fill. And where, as in a great city

like New York, the general newspapers circulated broadcast cannot fill

it, there exist small newspapers published on Greeley's pattern for

sections of the city. In the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx there

are perhaps twice as many local dailies as there are general

newspapers. [Footnote: _Cf._ John L. Given, _Making a Newspaper,_

p. 13.] And they are supplemented by all kinds of special publications for

trades, religions, nationalities.

These diaries are published for people who find their own lives

interesting. But there are also great numbers of people who find their

own lives dull, and wish, like Hedda Gabler, to live a more thrilling

life. For them there are published a few whole newspapers, and

sections of others, devoted to the personal lives of a set of

imaginary people, with whose gorgeous vices the reader can in his

fancy safely identify himself. Mr. Hearst's unflagging interest in

high society caters to people who never hope to be in high society,

and yet manage to derive some enhancement out of the vague feeling

that they are part of the life that they read about. In the great

cities "the printed diary of the home town" tends to be the printed

diary of a smart set.

And it is, as we have already noted, the dailies of the cities which

carry the burden of bringing distant news to the private citizen. But

it is not primarily their political and social news which holds the

circulation. The interest in that is intermittent, and few publishers

can bank on it alone. The newspaper, therefore, takes to itself a

variety of other features, all primarily designed to hold a body of

readers together, who so far as big news is concerned, are not able to

be critical. Moreover, in big news the competition in any one

community is not very serious. The press services standardize the main

events; it is only once in a while that a great scoop is made; there

is apparently not a very great reading public for such massive

reporting as has made the New York Times of recent years indispensable

to men of all shades of opinion. In order to differentiate themselves

and collect a steady public most papers have to go outside the field

of general news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal

and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn,

highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts,

chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not

because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news,

but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged

host of passionately interested readers, who are supposed by some

critics of the press to be clamoring for the truth and nothing but the

truth.

The newspaper editor occupies a strange position. His enterprises

depend upon indirect taxation levied by his advertisers upon his

readers; the patronage of the advertisers depends upon the editor's

skill in holding together an effective group of customers. These

customers deliver judgment according to their private experiences and

their stereotyped expectations, for in the nature of things they have

no independent knowledge of most news they read. If the judgment is

not unfavorable, the editor is at least within range of a circulation

that pays. But in order to secure that circulation, he cannot rely

wholly upon news of the greater environment. He handles that as

interestingly as he can, of course, but the quality of the general

news, especially about public affairs, is not in itself sufficient to

cause very large numbers of readers to discriminate among the dailies.

This somewhat left-handed relationship between newspapers and public

information is reflected in the salaries of newspaper men. Reporting,

which theoretically constitutes the foundation of the whole

institution, is the most poorly paid branch of newspaper work, and is

the least regarded. By and large, able men go into it only by

necessity or for experience, and with the definite intention of being

graduated as soon as possible. For straight reporting is not a career

that offers many great rewards. The rewards in journalism go to

specialty work, to signed correspondence which has editorial quality,

to executives, and to men with a knack and flavor of their own. This

is due, no doubt, to what economists call the rent of ability. But

this economic principle operates with such peculiar violence in

journalism that newsgathering does not attract to itself anything like

the number of trained and able men which its public importance would

seem to demand. The fact that the able men take up "straight

reporting" with the intention of leaving it as soon as possible is, I

think, the chief reason why it has never developed in sufficient

measure those corporate traditions that give to a profession prestige

and a jealous self-respect. For it is these corporate traditions which

engender the pride of craft, which tend to raise the standards of

admission, punish breaches of the code, and give men the strength to

insist upon their status in society.

3

Yet all this does not go to the root of the matter. For while the

economics of journalism is such as to depress the value of news

reporting, it is, I am certain, a false determinism which would

abandon the analysis at that point. The intrinsic power of the

reporter appears to be so great, the number of very able men who pass

through reporting is so large, that there must be some deeper reason

why, comparatively speaking, so little serious effort has gone into

raising the vocation to the level say of medicine, engineering, or

law.

Mr. Upton Sinclair speaks for a large body of opinion in

America, [Footnote: Mr. Hilaire Belloc makes practically the same

analysis for English newspapers. _Cf. The Free Press._] when he

claims that in what he calls "The Brass Check" he has found this

deeper reason:

"The Brass Check is found in your pay envelope every week--you who

write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass

check is the price of your shame--you who take the fair body of truth

and sell it in the market place, who betray the virgin hopes of

mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business." [Footnote: Upton

Sinclair, _The Brass Check. A Study of American Journalism._ p.

116.]

It would seem from this that there exists a body of known truth, and a

set of well founded hopes, which are prostituted by a more or less

conscious conspiracy of the rich owners of newspapers. If this theory

is correct, then a certain conclusion follows. It is that the fair

body of truth would be inviolate in a press not in any way connected

with Big Business. For if it should happen that a press not controlled

by, and not even friendly with, Big Business somehow failed to contain

the fair body of truth, something would be wrong with Mr. Sinclair's

theory.

There is such a press. Strange to say, in proposing a remedy Mr.

Sinclair does not advise his readers to subscribe to the nearest

radical newspaper. Why not? If the troubles of American journalism go

back to the Brass Check of Big Business why does not the remedy lie in

reading the papers that do not in any remote way accept the Brass

Check? Why subsidize a "National News" with a large board of directors

"of all creeds or causes" to print a paper full of facts "regardless

of what is injured, the Steel Trust or the I. W. W., the Standard Oil

Company or the Socialist Party?" If the trouble is Big Business, that

is, the Steel Trust, Standard Oil and the like, why not urge everybody

to read I. W. W. or Socialist papers? Mr. Sinclair does not say why

not. But the reason is simple. He cannot convince anybody, not even

himself, that the anti-capitalist press is the remedy for the

capitalist press. He ignores the anti-capitalist press both in his

theory of the Brass Check and in his constructive proposal. But if you

are diagnosing American journalism you cannot ignore it. If what you

care about is "the fair body of truth," you do not commit the gross

logical error of assembling all the instances of unfairness and lying

you can find in one set of newspapers, ignore all the instances you

could easily find in another set, and then assign as the cause of the

lying, the one supposedly common characteristic of the press to which

you have confined your investigation. If you are going to blame

"capitalism" for the faults of the press, you are compelled to prove

that those faults do not exist except where capitalism controls. That

Mr. Sinclair cannot do this, is shown by the fact that while in his

diagnosis he traces everything to capitalism, in his prescription he

ignores both capitalism and anti-capitalism.

One would have supposed that the inability to take any non-capitalist

paper as a model of truthfulness and competence would have caused Mr.

Sinclair, and those who agree with him, to look somewhat more

critically at their assumptions. They would have asked themselves, for

example, where is the fair body of truth, that Big Business

prostitutes, but anti-Big Business does not seem to obtain? For that

question leads, I believe, to the heart of the matter, to the question

of what is news.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE NATURE OF NEWS

1

ALL the reporters in the world working all the hours of the day could

not witness all the happenings in the world. There are not a great

many reporters. And none of them has the power to be in more than one

place at a time. Reporters are not clairvoyant, they do not gaze into

a crystal ball and see the world at will, they are not assisted by

thought-transference. Yet the range of subjects these comparatively

few men manage to cover would be a miracle indeed, if it were not a

standardized routine.

Newspapers do not try to keep an eye on all mankind. [Footnote: See the

illuminating chapter in Mr. John L. Given's book, already cited, on

"Uncovering the News," Ch. V.] They have watchers stationed at certain

places, like Police Headquarters, the Coroner's Office, the County

Clerk's Office, City Hall, the White House, the Senate, House of

Representatives, and so forth. They watch, or rather in the majority

of cases they belong to associations which employ men who watch "a

comparatively small number of places where it is made known when the

life of anyone... departs from ordinary paths, or when events worth

telling about occur. For example, John Smith, let it be supposed,

becomes a broker. For ten years he pursues the even tenor of his way

and except for his customers and his friends no one gives him a

thought. To the newspapers he is as if he were not. But in the

eleventh year he suffers heavy losses and, at last, his resources all

gone, summons his lawyer and arranges for the making of an assignment.

The lawyer posts off to the County Clerk's office, and a clerk there

makes the necessary entries in the official docket. Here in step the

newspapers. While the clerk is writing Smith's business obituary a

reporter glances over his shoulder and a few minutes later the

reporters know Smith's troubles and are as well informed concerning

his business status as they would be had they kept a reporter at his

door every day for over ten years. [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 57.]

When Mr. Given says that the newspapers know "Smith's troubles" and

"his business status," he does not mean that they know them as Smith

knows them, or as Mr. Arnold Bennett would know them if he had made

Smith the hero of a three volume novel. The newspapers know only "in a

few minutes" the bald facts which are recorded in the County Clerk's

Office. That overt act "uncovers" the news about Smith. Whether the

news will be followed up or not is another matter. The point is that

before a series of events become news they have usually to make

themselves noticeable in some more or less overt act. Generally too,

in a crudely overt act. Smith's friends may have known for years that

he was taking risks, rumors may even have reached the financial editor

if Smith's friends were talkative. But apart from the fact that none

of this could be published because it would be libel, there is in

these rumors nothing definite on which to peg a story. Something

definite must occur that has unmistakable form. It may be the act of

going into bankruptcy, it may be a fire, a collision, an assault, a

riot, an arrest, a denunciation, the introduction of a bill, a speech,

a vote, a meeting, the expressed opinion of a well known citizen, an

editorial in a newspaper, a sale, a wage-schedule, a price change, the

proposal to build a bridge.... There must be a manifestation. The

course of events must assume a certain definable shape, and until it

is in a phase where some aspect is an accomplished fact, news does not

separate itself from the ocean of possible truth.

2

Naturally there is room for wide difference of opinion as to when

events have a shape that can be reported. A good journalist will find

news oftener than a hack. If he sees a building with a dangerous list,

he does not have to wait until it falls into the street in order to

recognize news. It was a great reporter who guessed the name of the

next Indian Viceroy when he heard that Lord So-and-So was inquiring

about climates. There are lucky shots but the number of men who can

make them is small. Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an

event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news. The most

obvious place is where people's affairs touch public authority. De

minimis non curat lex. It is at these places that marriages, births,

deaths, contracts, failures, arrivals, departures, lawsuits,

disorders, epidemics and calamities are made known.

In the first instance, therefore, the news is not a mirror of social

conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself. The

news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground, but

it may tell you when the first sprout breaks through the surface. It

may even tell you what somebody says is happening to the seed under

ground. It may tell you that the sprout did not come up at the time it

was expected. The more points, then, at which any happening can be

fixed, objectified, measured, named, the more points there are at

which news can occur.

So, if some day a legislature, having exhausted all other ways of

improving mankind, should forbid the scoring of baseball games, it

might still be possible to play some sort of game in which the umpire

decided according to his own sense of fair play how long the game

should last, when each team should go to bat, and who should be

regarded as the winner. If that game were reported in the newspapers

it would consist of a record of the umpire's decisions, plus the

reporter's impression of the hoots and cheers of the crowd, plus at

best a vague account of how certain men, who had no specified position

on the field moved around for a few hours on an unmarked piece of sod.

The more you try to imagine the logic of so absurd a predicament, the

more clear it becomes that for the purposes of newsgathering, (let

alone the purposes of playing the game) it is impossible to do much

without an apparatus and rules for naming, scoring, recording. Because

that machinery is far from perfect, the umpire's life is often a

distracted one. Many crucial plays he has to judge by eye. The last

vestige of dispute could be taken out of the game, as it has been

taken out of chess when people obey the rules, if somebody thought it

worth his while to photograph every play. It was the moving pictures

which finally settled a real doubt in many reporters' minds, owing to

the slowness of the human eye, as to just what blow of Dempsey's

knocked out Carpentier.

Wherever there is a good machinery of record, the modern news service

works with great precision. There is one on the stock exchange, and

the news of price movements is flashed over tickers with dependable

accuracy. There is a machinery for election returns, and when the

counting and tabulating are well done, the result of a national

election is usually known on the night of the election. In civilized

communities deaths, births, marriages and divorces are recorded, and

are known accurately except where there is concealment or neglect. The

machinery exists for some, and only some, aspects of industry and

government, in varying degrees of precision for securities, money and

staples, bank clearances, realty transactions, wage scales. It exists

for imports and exports because they pass through a custom house and

can be directly recorded. It exists in nothing like the same degree

for internal trade, and especially for trade over the counter.

It will be found, I think, that there is a very direct relation

between the certainty of news and the system of record. If you call to

mind the topics which form the principal indictment by reformers

against the press, you find they are subjects in which the newspaper

occupies the position of the umpire in the unscored baseball game. All

news about states of mind is of this character: so are all

descriptions of personalities, of sincerity, aspiration, motive,

intention, of mass feeling, of national feeling, of public opinion,

the policies of foreign governments. So is much news about what is

going to happen. So are questions turning on private profit, private

income, wages, working conditions, the efficiency of labor,

educational opportunity, unemployment, [Footnote: Think of what guess

work went into the Reports of Unemployment in 1921.] monotony, health,

discrimination, unfairness, restraint of trade, waste, "backward

peoples," conservatism, imperialism, radicalism, liberty, honor,

righteousness. All involve data that are at best spasmodically

recorded. The data may be hidden because of a censorship or a

tradition of privacy, they may not exist because nobody thinks record

important, because he thinks it red tape, or because nobody has yet

invented an objective system of measurement. Then the news on these

subjects is bound to be debatable, when it is not wholly neglected.

The events which are not scored are reported either as personal and

conventional opinions, or they are not news. They do not take shape

until somebody protests, or somebody investigates, or somebody

publicly, in the etymological meaning of the word, makes an

_issue_ of them.

This is the underlying reason for the existence of the press agent.

The enormous discretion as to what facts and what impressions shall be

reported is steadily convincing every organized group of people that

whether it wishes to secure publicity or to avoid it, the exercise of

discretion cannot be left to the reporter. It is safer to hire a press

agent who stands between the group and the newspapers. Having hired

him, the temptation to exploit his strategic position is very great.

"Shortly before the war," says Mr. Frank Cobb, "the newspapers of New

York took a census of the press agents who were regularly employed and

regularly accredited and found that there were about twelve hundred of

them. How many there are now (1919) I do not pretend to know, but what

I do know is that many of the direct channels to news have been closed

and the information for the public is first filtered through publicity

agents. The great corporations have them, the banks have them, the

railroads have them, all the organizations of business and of social

and political activity have them, and they are the media through which

news comes. Even statesmen have them." [Footnote: Address before the

Women's City Club of New York, Dec. 11, 1919. Reprinted, _New

Republic_, Dec. 31, 1919, p. 44.]

Were reporting the simple recovery of obvious facts, the press agent

would be little more than a clerk. But since, in respect to most of

the big topics of news, the facts are not simple, and not at all

obvious, but subject to choice and opinion, it is natural that

everyone should wish to make his own choice of facts for the

newspapers to print. The publicity man does that. And in doing it, he

certainly saves the reporter much trouble, by presenting him a clear

picture of a situation out of which he might otherwise make neither

head nor tail. But it follows that the picture which the publicity man

makes for the reporter is the one he wishes the public to see. He is

censor and propagandist, responsible only to his employers, and to the

whole truth responsible only as it accords with the employers'

conception of his own interests.

The development of the publicity man is a clear sign that the facts of

modern life do not spontaneously take a shape in which they can be

known. They must be given a shape by somebody, and since in the daily

routine reporters cannot give a shape to facts, and since there is

little disinterested organization of intelligence, the need for some

formulation is being met by the interested parties.

3

The good press agent understands that the virtues of his cause are not

news, unless they are such strange virtues that they jut right out of

the routine of life. This is not because the newspapers do not like

virtue, but because it is not worth while to say that nothing has

happened when nobody expected anything to happen. So if the publicity

man wishes free publicity he has, speaking quite accurately, to start

something. He arranges a stunt: obstructs the traffic, teases the

police, somehow manages to entangle his client or his cause with an

event that is already news. The suffragists knew this, did not

particularly enjoy the knowledge but acted on it, and kept suffrage in

the news long after the arguments pro and con were straw in their

mouths, and people were about to settle down to thinking of the

suffrage movement as one of the established institutions of American

life. [Footnote: _Cf._ Inez Haynes Irwin, _The Story of the

Woman's Party._ It is not only a good account of a vital part of a

great agitation, but a reservoir of material on successful,

non-revolutionary, non-conspiring agitation under modern conditions of

public attention, public interest, and political habit.]