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BEHIND THE MIRRORS
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISINTEGRATION AT WASHINGTON
By the Author of "The Mirrors of Washington"
Le metier superieur de la critique, ce
n'est pas meme, comme le proclamait
Pierre Bayle, de semer des doubtes;
il faut aller plus loin, il faut detruire.
DE GOURMONT
_ILLUSTRATED_
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1922
Copyright, 1922
by
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Made in the United States of America
[Illustration: PRESIDENT WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING]
FOREWORD
"A book like the _Mirrors of Downing Street_ is well enough. It is the
fashion to be interested in English notables. But that sort of thing
won't do here. The American public gets in the newspapers all it wants
about our national politicians. That isn't book material."
An editor said that just a year ago when we told him of the plan for the
_Mirrors of Washington_. And, frankly, it seemed doubtful whether
readers generally cared enough about our national political
personalities to buy a book exclusively concerned with them.
But they did. The _Mirrors of Washington_ became an instantaneous
success. It commanded almost unprecedented attention. It was heartily
damned and vociferously welcomed. By the averagely curious citizen,
eager for insight behind the gilded curtains of press-agentry and
partisanship, it was hailed as a shaft of common-sense sunlight thrown
into a clay-footed wilderness of political pap. And close to one hundred
thousand copies were absorbed by a public evidently genuinely interested
in an uncensored analysis of the people who are running us, or ruining
us, as individual viewpoint may determine.
The _Mirrors of Washington_ was by way of being a pioneer, at least for
America. Overseas, it is habitual enough to exhibit beneath the literary
microscope the politically great and near-great, and even to dissect
them--often enough without anaesthesia. To our mind, such critical
examination is healthily desirable. Here in America, we are
case-hardened to the newspapers, whose appraisal of political personages
is, after all, pretty well confined to the periods of pre-election
campaigning. And we are precious little influenced by this sort of
thing; the pro papers are so pro, and the anti papers so anti, that few
try to determine how much to believe and how much to dismiss as routine
partisan prevarication.
But a book! Political criticism, and personality analyses, frozen into
the so-permanently-appearing dignity of a printed volume--that is
something else again! Even a politician who dismisses with a smile or a
shrug recurrent discompliments in the news columns or the anonymous
editorial pages of the press, is tempted to burst into angry protest
when far less bitter, far more balanced criticism of himself is voiced
in a book. A phenomenon, that, doubtless revisable as time goes on and
the reflections of more book-bound Mirrors brighten the eyes of those
who read and jangle the nerves of those who run--for office.
_Behind the Mirrors_ is another such book. It delves into the
fundamentals at Washington. It is concerned with political tendencies as
well as political personalities. It presents what impresses us as a
genuinely useful and brilliant picture of present-day governmental
psychology and functioning. It is a cross section of things as they are.
The picture behind the mirrors is not as pretty as it might be. Probably
the way to make it prettier is to let ample light in upon it so that the
blemishes, discerned, may be rectified; and to impress those responsible
for its rehabilitation with the necessity of taking advantage of the
opportunities that are theirs.
When President Eliot of Harvard presented to a certain Senator an
honorary degree, he described with inimitable charm and considerable
detail that Senator's literary achievements; and then he mentioned his
political activities, ending with substantially these words: "A man with
great opportunities for public service still inviting him."
The invitation yet holds good. Acceptances are still in order.
G. P. P.
NEW YORK,
June, 1922.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK. GOD'S TIME AS IT WAS
IN THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 3
II.--GOD'S TIME AS IT IS; AN INGERSOLL THAT REQUIRES MUCH
WINDING 21
III.--GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 36
IV.--THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN IN THE GENERAL SMAS 61
V.--LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM--IN THE BOSOM OF THERESE 80
VI.--SHALL WE FIND OUR SALVATION SITTING, LIKE MR. MELLON,
ON A PILE OF DOLLARS 101
VII.--THE BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET, AND WHAT IS IN THE
BOTTLE 119
VIII.--THE GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR OF MUCH LITTLENESS 142
IX.--CONGRESS AT LAST WITH SOMETHING TO DO HAS NO ONE TO
DO IT 156
X.--INTERLUDE. INTRODUCING A FEW MEMBERS OF THE UPPER
HOUSE BOOBOISIE AND SOME OTHERS 173
XI.--A PEAK OF REALITY THRUSTS UP ON THE LEVEL PLAIN OF
SHAMS 204
XII.--THE HAPPY ENDING 226
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
PRESIDENT WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING _FRONTISPIECE_
UNCLE SAM'S CONFERENCE 26
REPRESENTATIVE FRANK W. MONDELL OF WYOMING 44
LORD RIDDELL 96
ANDREW W. MELLON, SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY 112
ARTHUR BALFOUR 130
ATTORNEY-GENERAL H. M. DAUGHERTY 138
SENATOR JAMES E. WATSON OF INDIANA 160
REPRESENTATIVE FREDERICK H. GILLETT OF MASSACHUSETTS 166
SENATOR JOSEPH S. FRELINGHUYSEN OF NEW JERSEY 180
SENATOR HARRY S. NEW OF INDIANA 188
SENATOR JAMES W. WADSWORTH OF NEW YORK 190
SENATOR WILLIAM M. CALDER OF NEW YORK 192
SENATOR ARTHUR I. CAPPER OF KANSAS 216
GRAY SILVER, THE MAN BEHIND THE FARM BLOC 222
BEHIND THE MIRRORS
CHAPTER I
PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK. GOD'S TIME AS IT WAS IN THE AMERICAN
POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
President Harding had recently to decide the momentous question whether
we should have daylight saving in Washington. He decided it in a
perfectly characteristic way, perfectly characteristic of himself and of
our present political division and unsureness. He ruled that the city
should go to work and quit work an hour earlier, but that it should not
turn back the hands of the clock, should not lay an impious finger upon
God's Time.
That this straddle is typical of our President needs no argument--he
"has to be so careful," as he once pathetically said--but that it is
symptomatic of the present American political consciousness perhaps
needs elucidation.
The clock is one of the problems left to us by the Great War, one of
the innumerable problems thus left to us; it involves our whole attitude
toward men and things.
It represents, rather literally, Mechanism. In the war we adopted
perforce the creed that man was sufficiently master of his own destiny
to adapt Mechanism to his own ends; he could lay a presumptuous hand
upon God's Time. But in peace shall he go on thus boldly? Or shall he
revert to the good old days, the days of McKinley, when the clock was
sacred? Think of all the happiness, all the prosperity, that was ours,
all the duty done and all the destiny abundantly realized, before man
thought to lay a hand upon the clock!
The question what the limits to human government are is involved. What
may man attempt for himself and what should he leave to the great
Mechanism which has, upon the whole, run the world so well, to the Sun
in its courses, to progress, to inevitability? After all the clock was
in the beginning, is now and ever shall be--unless we meddle with
it--and before its cheerful face America was built from a wilderness
into a vast nation, creating wealth, so as to be the third historic
wonder of the ages--the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was
Rome, the dollars that are America.
And not only are we divided as to the limits of government, but where
shall Mr. Harding look for authority to guide him with respect to
clocks? To his party? This is a party government, you remember. But his
party speaks with no clear voice about clocks or about anything else. To
business? Business has only one rule--more clocks in government and less
government in clocks. But business bows to the public. To public opinion
then? The public is divided about clocks; we tend to grow class
conscious about clocks. And clamorously amid all these authorities is
heard the voice of the Farm Bloc exclaiming: "Don't touch God's Time."
So it is decided that Washington may save daylight and save the clock
too, a double saving, a most happy compromise. If all questions touching
Mechanism could only be solved in the direction of such splendid
economies!
I listened a year ago to a most unusual Fourth of July oration. The
speaker, like most of us in this period of breakup following the Great
War, was rather bewildered. He had, moreover, his private reasons for
feeling that life was not easily construed. An illness, perhaps mortal,
afflicted him. Existence had been unclouded until this last cloud came;
why was it to end suddenly and without reason? He had gone through the
Great War a follower of Mr. Wilson's, to see the world scoffing at the
passionate faith it had professed a few months before and sneering at
the leaders it had then exalted. He had echoing in his mind the fine war
phrases, "Brotherhood of Man," "War to End War," "We must be just even
to those to whom we do not wish to be just." Then some monstrous hand
had turned the page and there was Harding, just as in his own life all
success at the bar and in politics, and the joy of being lord of a vast
country estate that had been patented in his family since colonial
times, had suddenly come to an end; the page had turned.
So this is what he said, in a voice that rose not much above a whisper,
"I have told them where to dig a hole and put me, out here on my
pleasant place. I don't know what it means. I don't believe it has any
meaning. The only thing to do is to laugh. You have trouble laughing?
Look about you and you will find plenty to laugh at. Look at your
President and laugh. Look at your Supreme Court and laugh. Not one of
them knows whether he is coming or going. Everything for the moment has
lost its meaning for everyone. If you can't laugh at anything else, just
think how many angels there are who are blank blanks and how many blank
blanks there are who are angels ... and laugh."
The Comic Spirit looking down from some cool distance sees something
like what this lawyer saw. It sees President Harding and the Ku Klux
Klan. The connection between President Harding and the Ku Klux Klan? The
Comic Spirit, perceiving everything, perceives that too. For it Mr.
Harding is but the pious manifestation of a sentiment of which the Ku
Klux Klan is the unconscious and serviceable parody, that instinctive
rush of a people with the world breaking up about it, to seek safety in
the past. Men always shrink thus backward when facing an uncertain
future, just as in moments of great peril they become children again,
call "Mother!" and revert to early practices at her knee. It is one of
the most intelligent things the human race ever does. It is looking
before you leap: the race has no choice but to leap; it draws back to
solid ground in the past for a better take-off into the future. Mr.
Harding represents solid ground, McKinley and the blessed nineties, the
days before men raised a presumptuous hand against the clock.
If utterly in earnest and determined to revive that happy period, you
clothe yourself in that garment which evokes the assured past, the
blessed nineties, the long white night shirt; the long white night shirt
supplemented by the black mask and the tar brush shall surely save you.
The Comic Spirit looking about largely, like our Fourth of July orator,
sees in Mr. Harding a wise shrinking into the safety of the past and in
Mr. William H. Taft, our new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, at once
a regard for the past and an eye for the future. Can anyone tell whether
Mr. Justice Taft is coming or going, as this Fourth of July speaker
asked? He comes and he goes, and like the wind man knows not whence he
cometh or whither he goeth. He is forward looking--when he is not
backward looking. Like Zekle,
"He stands a while on one foot fust,
Then stands a while on t'other;
And on which one he feels the wust,
He can not tell you nuther."
Glance at his public career. He stood upon his future foot with
Roosevelt, the chosen executor of "My Policies." A little later he
stands upon his past foot, alongside of Aldrich and Cannon, doing the
works of perdition and bringing on the battle of Armageddon. Again you
find him standing on his future foot beside Mr. Frank P. Walsh in the
War Labor Board, ranging himself with Mr. Walsh in practically all the
close decisions. Again you see him when all the fine forward looking of
the war was over, scurrying from the Russian revolution as fast as
President Wilson or all the rest of us. And once more on his future foot
with Mr. Wilson for the League of Nations and on his past foot with
President Harding against the League of Nations.
Let us be Freudian and say that the unconscious political self of the
whole nation is responsible for the selection of Mr. Harding and Mr.
Taft. As we shrink back into the past we are aware that it is for the
take-off into the future, and so we have Mr. Taft. We both eat our cake
and have it in the new Chief Justice.
The United States, like Zekle, is "standing a while on one foot fust,
then standing a while on t'other," moving forward or backward. But not
for long, too large and secure to be permanently cautious, with too much
well-being to be permanently bold, thinking, but with a certain
restraining contempt for thought, instinctive rather than intellectual.
Vast, eupeptic, assimilative, generous, adaptable, the Chief Justice
typifies the American people in its more permanent characteristics.
Mr. Harding as President, Mr. Taft as Chief Justice, the agricultural
bloc, the enfeebled Congress, the one million or so Democratic majority
which becomes in four years a seven-million Republican majority, are
only manifestations. The reality is the man, many millions strong, whose
mental state produces the symptoms at Washington. It will be profitable
to examine the content of his mind as it was in those days before
momentous decisions had to be made about daylight saving, and as it is
today when he hesitates between saving daylight and saving the clock,
and perhaps decides to save both.
I can not better describe his political consciousness as it was than by
saying that it contained three governments--the government of the clock,
the government of the clock-winders, and the government of those who
lived by the clock as religiously minded by the clock-winders. It was an
orderly age, beautifully sure of itself, and the area of these three
governments was nicely delimited. There was only a small place for the
third of these governments.
For the purposes of more common understanding I shall sometimes refer to
the government of the clock as the government of Progress, and the
government of the clock-winders as the government of business, and to
the third government as the government at Washington.
Before the war the American was sure that with each tick of the clock
the world grew richer and better, especially richer. Progress went
inevitably on and on. It never turned backward or rested. Its mechanical
process relieved man of many responsibilities. No one would think of
touching the mechanism; turning back the hands of the clock might rob us
of some boon that was intended in the beginning whose moment of arrival
might be lost by interfering with God's Time.
Born on a continent which only a few years before was a wilderness but
which now was the richest and one of the finest civilizations on the
earth, the American could not fail to believe in progress. The visible
evidences of it were on every hand. His father had been a poor immigrant
seeking the mere chance to live; he was a farmer possessed of many
acres, a business man who had an increasing income already in five
figures, a rising young attorney, or physician. Even from generation to
generation everything got better.
The past had had its unhappy moments. The American looked back at the
past mainly to measure how far he had come and to guess how far moving
forward at a geometrical ratio of increased speed he would go in the not
distant future. History flattered him.
Before his eyes went on the steady conquest over Nature, or perhaps it
is better to say, the steady surrender of Nature. Always there were new
discoveries of science. Always there were new inventions. Forces which a
little while ago were beyond control, whose existence even was
unsuspected, were harnessed to everyday uses. He saw progress in
statistics. Things which were reckoned in millions began to be reckoned
in hundreds of millions, began to be reckoned in billions. We loved to
read the long figures where, in the pleasing extension of ciphers,
wealth grew, debts grew--even debts were a source of pride before they
called for income taxes to meet the annual payments upon them.
Progress would never stop. Tomorrow we should set the sun's rays to some
more practical use than making the earth green and pleasant to look at
and its fruits good to eat. We should employ them like the waters of
Niagara Falls, to turn the wheels of machinery by day and to light soap
and automobile signs on Broadway by night. We should split atoms apart
and release the mighty forces that had held them together since the
beginning, for the production of commodities in greater and greater
quantities at less and less cost.
"We should," I say, but I do our inmost thought a vast injustice.
Rather, Progress would, scientists and inventors being only the
instruments of a Fate which went steadily forward to the accomplishment
of its beneficent purposes. At the right moment, at the appointed hour,
the man would appear. Progress kept the prompter's book and gave him the
cue.
To a people with all these evidences of an irresistible forward movement
in Nature before its eyes, came a prophet who gave it its law, the law
of evolution, the law by which once the monocellular organism had
acquired the mysterious gift of life out of combination and
recombination inevitably came man. It was all the unfolding of the
inevitable, the unrolling of time; the working out of a law.
Now, law has a quite extraordinary effect upon men's minds. The more Law
there is the less Man there is. The more man spells Law with a capital
letter the more he spells himself with a small letter. Man was no longer
the special creation of God. God, instead of making Adam and Eve his
wife, fashioned a grain of star dust and gave it a grain of star dust to
wife, leaving the rest to Progress. Man who had been a little lower than
the angels became, by an immense act of faith, a little higher than the
earthworm. The old doctrine of the Fall of Man took on a reverse twist.
Man had not fallen but he had risen from such debased beginnings that he
had not got far. He was in about the same place where he would have been
if he had fallen.
It was easy to turn upside down our belief in the Fall of Man. We always
knew there was something wrong with him, but we did not know what it was
until evolution explained his unregenerate character so satisfactorily.
Still the thought that Man did not move forward as fast as things, was
less the special ward of Progress than automobiles, elevators and
bathtubs, was vaguely disturbing.
The Greeks had left us records which showed that the human mind was as
good three thousand years ago as it is today, or better. We shut our
eyes to this bit of evidence by abandoning the study of the classics and
excluding all allusion to them in the oratory of our Congress. And
Mr. Wells in his History has since justified us by proving that
the Greeks were after all only the common run of small-town
folk--over-press-agented, perhaps, by some fellows in the Middle Ages
who had got tired of the Church and who therefore pretended that there
was something bigger and better in the world than it was.
So we pinned our hopes on the Martians and spent our time frantically
signalling to the nearby planet, asking whether, when the earth grew as
cold as King David when his physicians "prescribed by way of poultice a
young belle," and responded only weakly to the caress of the Sun, when
its oceans dried up and only a trickle of water came down through its
valleys from the melting ice at its poles, we should not, like the
fancied inhabitants of the nearest celestial body, have evolved at last
into super-beings. We wanted some evidence from our neighbors that, in
spite of the Greeks, by merely watching the clock we should arrive at a
higher estate.
The point I am trying to make is that we have been conducting the most
interesting of Time's experiments in the government of men at a period
when Man has been at a greater discount than usual in his own mind, when
self-government faced too much competition from government by the clock.
When I speak of government by the clock, I should, perhaps, use capital
letters to indicate that I have in mind that timepiece on which is
recorded God's Time; whose ticking is the forward march of progress.
Clocks as they touch our lives require human intervention. The winders
of these clocks perform something that may be described as an office.
You recall the place the clock filled in our households a generation
ago. Father wound it once a week, at a stated time, as regularly as he
went to church. The winding of it was a function. No other hand but
father's touched the key; if one had, the whole institution of family
life would have been imperiled. Father is a symbol for the government of
the clock-winders, those sacred persons who translated Progress into
terms of common utility.
When we descended from the regions of theocratic power to those of human
institutions, we found ourselves in America to be workers in one vast
countrywide workshop. The workshop touches us more directly and more
importantly than does the nation. Out of the workshop comes our bread
and butter. When the workshop closes down we suffer and form on line at
the soup kitchens.
Three meals a day concern us more than do post-offices and federal
buildings, of however white marble or however noble facades. What we
have to eat and to wear, what we may put in the bank, what real freedom
we enjoy, our position in the eyes of men, our happiness and
unhappiness, depend on our relations to the national workshop, not on
our relations to the national government.
We conceived of it vaguely as a thing which produced prosperity, not
prosperity in its larger and more permanent aspects--that was ours
through the beneficence of Progress and the immortal luck of our
country--but prosperity in its more immediate details.
A lot of confused thinking in which survived political ideas as old as
the race, converted into modern forms, entered into our conception of
it. It was a thing of gods and demigods, with legends of golden fleeces
and of Hercules holding up the skies. It was feudal in its privileges
and immunities. It enjoyed the divine right of kings. Yet it operated
under laws not made by man.
When it failed to effect prosperity, it was because of a certain law
that at the end of ever so many years of fatness it must produce a
famine. At such times men, demigods, stepped out of banks with sacks of
gold on their shoulders and mitigated the rigors of its failure.
And these splendid personages might set going again that which law
stopped. We bowed patiently and unquestioningly to its periodic
eccentricity as part of the Fate that fell upon the original sinner, and
watched hopefully the powerful men who might in their pleasure or their
wisdom end our sufferings.
We were taught to regard it as a thing distinct from political
authority, so that the less governors and lawmakers interfered with it
the better for the general welfare. Back in our past is a thorough
contempt for human intelligence which relates somehow to the religious
precept against questioning the wisdom of God. Whatever ordinary men did
in the field of economics was sure to be wrong and to check the flow of
goods upon which the well-being of society depended. We were all, except
the familiars of the great forces, impotent pieces of the game economic
law played upon this checker-board of nights and days.
I have said that this government of the national workshop in which we
were all laborers or foremen or superintendents or masters sometimes
seemed to our consciousness a government of laws and sometimes a
government of men. In any primitive faith priests played a large part,
and probably the primitive worshippers before them much of the time did
not think beyond the priests, while sometimes they did--when it was
convenient for the priests that they should.
When famines or plagues came it was because the gods were angry. When
they are averted it is the priests who have averted them. When economic
panics came it was because we had sinned against economic law; when they
were averted it was because men had averted them, men who lived on
intimate terms with economic law and understood its mysterious ways, and
enjoyed its favor, as their great possessions testified.
Naturally, we are immensely more directly and more constantly concerned
with this government than with the government at Washington. Besides, we
were mostly business men, or hoped to be. It was our government more
truly than was the government at Washington.
Only a limited area in the political consciousness was left for
self-government. You descended from the heights to the broad flat plain
of man's contempt for man. It was there, rooted firmly in the
constitution, that the government at Washington reared its head.
Self-government is a new thing; no myth has gathered about it. It was
established among men who believed in the doctrine of the original sin,
and it had been carried by their successors, who had abandoned the
sinner Adam as the progenitor of their kind for the sinless but
inglorious earthworm. The inferiority complex which is the race's most
persistent heritage from the past was written all over it.
I suppose it was Adam Smith who made self-government possible by
discovering that the things really essential to our welfare would take
care of themselves if we only let them alone and that the more we let
them alone the better they would take care of themselves, under eternal
and immutable laws. Ah, the happy thought occurred, if the really
essential things are thus beneficially regulated why shouldn't we have
the fun of managing the non-essentials ourselves?
Progress ruled the world kindly and well. It might be trusted to see
that all went for the best. The government of business functioned
effectively for the general weal. The future was in the hands of a force
that made the world richer and better. The present, in all that
concerned man most vitally with regards food and shelter, was directed
by enlightened self-interest represented by men who personified success.
It was impossible not to be optimistic when existence was so well
ordered. There was no sorry scheme of things to be seized entire. Life
was a sort of tropics without tropical discomforts. The tropics do not
produce men. They produce things.
The Mechanism worked, as it seemed to us, in those happy days. We were
satisfied with the clock and the clock-winders. We were not divided in
our minds as to whether we should turn back its hands. The less men
meddled the better. There was little work for human government to do.
There was no call for men.
The picture in our heads, to use Mr. Graham Wallas's phrase, was of a
world well ruled by a will from the beginning, whose purpose was
increase; of some superior men having semi-sacred relations with the
will who acted as intermediaries between the will and the rest of us;
and of the rest of us as being rewarded by the will, through its
intermediaries, according to our timidity and submissiveness.
It was, the world, over the great age of the racial inferiority complex,
for which Science had furnished a new and convincing basis. I might
maintain that the Great War was modern society's effort to compensate
for the evolution complex; man wanted to show what he could do, in spite
of his slimy origin. Anyway, it broke the picture in our heads. Being
economical, like Mr. Harding, we are trying both to save the pieces of
the picture and put them together again, and to form, out of them
unfortunately, a new picture; which accounts for our confusion.
But the picture in our heads before the war, such as it was, is the
reason for our present inadequacy. You could not form much of a
self-government or develop men for one, with that complex in your soul.