THE ECLIPSE OF THE PUBLIC
Optimism about democracy is to-day under a cloud. We are familiar with
denunciation and criticism which, however, often reveal their emotional
source in their peevish and undiscriminating tone. Many of them suffer
from the same error into which earlier laudations fell. They assume
that democracy is the product of an idea, of a single and consistent
intent. Carlyle was no admirer of democracy, but in a lucid moment
he said: “Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable.”
Add to this: Invent the railway, the telegraph, mass manufacture
and concentration of population in urban centers, and some form of
democratic government is, humanly speaking, inevitable. Political
democracy as it exists to-day calls for adverse criticism in abundance.
But the criticism is only an exhibition of querulousness and spleen or
of a superiority complex, unless it takes cognizance of the conditions
out of which popular government has issued. All intelligent political
criticism is comparative. It deals not with all-or-none situations, but
with practical alternatives; an absolutistic indiscriminate attitude,
whether in praise or blame, testifies to the heat of feeling rather
than the light of thought.
American democratic polity was developed out of genuine community
life, that is, association in local and small centers where industry
was mainly agricultural and where production was carried on mainly
with hand tools. It took form when English political habits and legal
institutions worked under pioneer conditions. The forms of association
were stable, even though their units were mobile and migratory. Pioneer
conditions put a high premium upon personal work, skill, ingenuity,
initiative and adaptability, and upon neighborly sociability. The
township or some not much larger area was the political unit, the
town meeting the political medium, and roads, schools, the peace of
the community, were the political objectives. The state was a sum of
such units, and the national state a federation--unless perchance a
confederation--of states. The imagination of the founders did not
travel far beyond what could be accomplished and understood in a
congeries of self-governing communities. The machinery provided for the
selection of the chief executive of the federal union is illustrative
evidence. The electoral college assumed that citizens would choose men
locally known for their high standing; and that these men when chosen
would gather together for consultation to name some one known to them
for his probity and public spirit and knowledge. The rapidity with
which the scheme fell into disuse is evidence of the transitoriness of
the state of affairs that was predicated. But at the outset there was
no dream of the time when the very names of the presidential electors
would be unknown to the mass of the voters, when they would plump for
a “ticket” arranged in a more or less private caucus, and when the
electoral college would be an impersonal registering machine, such
that it would be treachery to employ the personal judgment which was
originally contemplated as the essence of the affair.
The local conditions under which our institutions took shape is well
indicated by our system, apparently so systemless, of public education.
Any one who has tried to explain it to a European will understand
what is meant. One is asked, say, what method of administration is
followed, what is the course of study and what the authorized methods
of teaching. The American member to the dialogue replies that in this
state, or more likely county, or town, or even some section of a town
called a district, matters stand thus and thus; somewhere else, so and
so. The participant from this side is perhaps thought by the foreigner
to be engaged in concealing his ignorance; and it would certainly take
a veritable cyclopedic knowledge to state the matter in its entirety.
The impossibility of making any moderately generalized reply renders
it almost indispensable to resort to a historical account in order to
be intelligible. A little colony, the members of which are probably
mostly known to one another in advance, settle in what is almost, or
quite, a wilderness. From belief in its benefits and by tradition,
chiefly religious, they wish their children to know at least how to
read, write and figure. Families can only rarely provide a tutor; the
neighbors over a certain area, in New England an area smaller even than
the township, combine in a “school district.” They get a schoolhouse
built, perhaps by their own labor, and hire a teacher by means of a
committee, and the teacher is paid from the taxes. Custom determines
the limited course of study, and tradition the methods of the teacher,
modified by whatever personal insight and skill he may bring to bear.
The wilderness is gradually subdued; a network of highways, then of
railways, unite the previously scattered communities. Large cities grow
up; studies grow more numerous and methods more carefully scrutinized.
The larger unit, the state, but not the federal state, provides schools
for training teachers and their qualifications are more carefully
looked into and tested. But subject to certain quite general conditions
imposed by the state-legislature, but not the national state, local
maintenance and control remain the rule. The community pattern is
more complicated, but is not destroyed. The instance seems richly
instructive as to the state of affairs under which our borrowed,
English, political institutions were reshaped and forwarded.
We have inherited, in short, local town-meeting practices and ideas.
But we live and act and have our being in a continental national
state. We are held together by non-political bonds, and the political
forms are stretched and legal institutions patched in an _ad hoc_
and improvised manner to do the work they have to do. Political
structures fix the channels in which non-political, industrialized
currents flow. Railways, travel and transportation, commerce, the
mails, telegraph and telephone, newspapers, create enough similarity
of ideas and sentiments to keep the thing going as a whole, for they
create interaction and interdependence. The unprecedented thing is that
states, as distinguished from military empires, can exist over such a
wide area. The notion of maintaining a unified state, even nominally
self-governing, over a country as extended as the United States and
consisting of a large and racially diversified population would once
have seemed the wildest of fancies. It was assumed that such a state
could be found only in territories hardly larger than a city-state
and with a homogeneous population. It seemed almost self-evident to
Plato--as to Rousseau later--that a genuine state could hardly be
larger than the number of persons capable of personal acquaintance
with one another. Our modern state-unity is due to the consequences
of technology employed so as to facilitate the rapid and easy
circulation of opinions and information, and so as to generate constant
and intricate interaction far beyond the limits of face-to-face
communities. Political and legal forms have only piece-meal and
haltingly, with great lag, accommodated themselves to the industrial
transformation. The elimination of distance, at the base of which are
physical agencies, has called into being the new form of political
association.
The wonder of the performance is the greater because of the odds
against which it has been achieved. The stream of immigrants which has
poured in is so large and heterogeneous that under conditions which
formerly obtained it would have disrupted any semblance of unity as
surely as the migratory invasion of alien hordes once upset the social
equilibrium of the European continent. No deliberately adopted measures
could have accomplished what has actually happened. Mechanical forces
have operated, and it is no cause for surprise if the effect is more
mechanical than vital. The reception of new elements of population in
large number from heterogeneous peoples, often hostile to one another
at home, and the welding them into even an outward show of unity is an
extraordinary feat. In many respects, the consolidation has occurred so
rapidly and ruthlessly that much of value has been lost which different
peoples might have contributed. The creation of political unity has
also promoted social and intellectual uniformity, a standardization
favorable to mediocrity. Opinion has been regimented as well as outward
behavior. The temper and flavor of the pioneer have evaporated with
extraordinary rapidity; their precipitate, as is often noted, is
apparent only in the wild-west romance and the movie. What Bagehot
called the cake of custom formed with increasing acceleration, and the
cake is too often flat and soggy. Mass production is not confined to
the factory.
The resulting political integration has confounded the expectations of
earlier critics of popular government as much as it must surprise its
early backers if they are gazing from on high upon the present scene.
The critics predicted disintegration, instability. They foresaw the
new society falling apart, dissolving into mutually repellent animated
grains of sand. They, too, took seriously the theory of “Individualism”
as the basis of democratic government. A stratification of society
into immemorial classes within which each person performed his stated
duties according to his fixed position seemed to them the only warrant
of stability. They had no faith that human beings released from the
pressure of this system could hold together in any unity. Hence they
prophesied a flux of governmental régimes, as individuals formed
factions, seized power, and then lost it as some newly improvised
faction proved stronger. Had the facts conformed to the theory of
Individualism, they would doubtless have been right. But, like the
authors of the theory, they ignored the technological forces making for
consolidation.
In spite of attained integration, or rather perhaps because of its
nature, the Public seems to be lost; it is certainly bewildered.[10]
The government, officials and their activities, are plainly with us.
Legislatures make laws with luxurious abandon; subordinate officials
engage in a losing struggle to enforce some of them; judges on the
bench deal as best they can with the steadily mounting pile of disputes
that come before them. But where is the public which these officials
are supposed to represent? How much more is it than geographical names
and official titles? The United States, the state of Ohio or New York,
the county of this and the city of that? Is the public much more than
what a cynical diplomat once called Italy: a geographical expression?
Just as philosophers once imputed a substance to qualities and traits
in order that the latter might have something in which to inhere and
thereby gain a conceptual solidity and consistency which they lacked
on their face, so perhaps our political “common-sense” philosophy
imputes a public only to support and substantiate the behavior of
officials. How can the latter be public officers, we despairingly ask,
unless there is a public? If a public exists, it is surely as uncertain
about its own whereabouts as philosophers since Hume have been about
the residence and make-up of the self. The number of voters who take
advantage of their majestic right is steadily decreasing in proportion
to those who might use it. The ratio of actual to eligible voters is
now about one-half. In spite of somewhat frantic appeal and organized
effort, the endeavor to bring voters to a sense of their privileges
and duties has so far been noted for failure. A few preach the
impotence of all politics; the many nonchalantly practice abstinence
and indulge in indirect action. Skepticism regarding the efficacy of
voting is openly expressed, not only in the theories of intellectuals,
but in the words of lowbrow masses: “What difference does it make
whether I vote or not? Things go on just the same anyway. My vote never
changed anything.” Those somewhat more reflective add: “It is nothing
but a fight between the ins and the outs. The only difference made by
an election is as to who get the jobs, draw the salaries and shake down
the plum tree.”
Those still more inclined to generalization assert that the whole
apparatus of political activities is a kind of protective coloration
to conceal the fact that big business rules the governmental roost
in any case. Business is the order of the day, and the attempt to
stop or deflect its course is as futile as Mrs. Partington essaying
to sweep back the tides with a broom. Most of those who hold these
opinions would profess to be shocked if the doctrine of economic
determinism were argumentatively expounded to them, but they act upon
a virtual belief in it. Nor is acceptance of the doctrine limited
to radical socialists. It is implicit in the attitude of men of big
business and financial interests, who revile the former as destructive
“Bolshevists.” For it is their firm belief that “prosperity”--a
word which has taken on religious color--is the great need of the
country, that they are its authors and guardians, and hence by right
the determiners of polity. Their denunciations of the “materialism”
of socialists is based simply upon the fact that the latter want a
different distribution of material force and well-being than that which
satisfies those now in control.
The unfitness of whatever public exists, with respect to the government
which is nominally its organ, is made manifest in the extra-legal
agencies which have grown up. Intermediary groups are closest to the
political conduct of affairs. It is interesting to compare the English
literature of the eighteenth century regarding factions with the
status actually occupied by parties. Factionalism was decried by all
thinkers as the chief enemy to political stability. Their voice of
condemnation is reëchoed in the writing of early nineteenth-century
American writers on politics. Extensive and consolidated factions
under the name of parties are now not only a matter of course, but
popular imagination can conceive of no other way by which officials
may be selected and governmental affairs carried on. The centralizing
movement has reached a point where even a third party can lead only a
spasmodic and precarious existence. Instead of individuals who in the
privacy of their consciousness make choices which are carried into
effect by personal volition, there are citizens who have the blessed
opportunity to vote for a ticket of men mostly unknown to them, and
which is made up for them by an under-cover machine in a caucus whose
operations constitute a kind of political predestination. There are
those who speak as if ability to choose between two tickets were a high
exercise of individual freedom. But it is hardly the kind of liberty
contemplated by the authors of the individualistic doctrine. “Nature
abhors a vacuum.” When the public is as uncertain and obscure as it
is to-day, and hence as remote from government, bosses with their
political machines fill the void between government and the public.
Who pulls the strings which move the bosses and generates power to run
the machines is a matter of surmise rather than of record, save for an
occasional overt scandal.
Quite aside, however, from the allegation that “Big Business” plays
the tune and pulls the strings to which bosses dance, it is true
that parties are not creators of policies to any large extent at the
present time. For parties yield in piece-meal accommodation to social
currents, irrespective of professed principles. As these lines are
written a weekly periodical remarks: “Since the end of the Civil War
practically all the more important measures which have been embodied
in federal legislation have been reached without a national election
which turned upon the issue and which divided the two major parties.”
Reform of civil service, regulation of railways, popular election of
senators, national income tax, suffrage for women, and prohibition are
supported to substantiate the statement. Hence its other remark appears
justified: “American party politics seem at times to be a device for
preventing issues which may excite popular feeling and involve bitter
controversies from being put up to the American people.”
A negatively corroborating fact is seen in the fate of the Child Labor
amendment. The need of giving to Congress power to regulate child
labor, denied it by decisions of the Supreme Court, had been asserted
in the platforms of all political parties; the idea was endorsed by
the last three of the presidents belonging to the party in power. Yet
so far, the proposed amendment to the constitution has not begun to
secure the needed support. Political parties may rule, but they do not
govern. The public is so confused and eclipsed that it cannot even use
the organs through which it is supposed to mediate political action and
polity.
The same lesson is taught by the breakdown of the theory of the
responsibility of elected representatives to the electorate, to say
nothing of their alleged liability to be called before the bar of the
private judgment of individuals. It is at least suggestive that the
terms of the theory are best met in legislation of the “pork-barrel”
type. There a representative may be called to account for failure
to meet local desire, or be rewarded for pertinacity and success in
fulfilling its wishes. But only rarely is the theory borne out in
important matters, although occasionally it works. But the instances
are so infrequent that any skilled political observer could enumerate
them by name. The reason for the lack of personal liability to the
electorate is evident. The latter is composed of rather amorphous
groups. Their political ideas and beliefs are mostly in abeyance
between elections. Even in times of political excitement, artificially
accelerated, their opinions are moved collectively by the current of
the group rather than by independent personal judgment. As a rule, what
decides the fate of a person who comes up for election is neither his
political excellence nor his political defects. The current runs for
or against the party in power and the individual candidate sinks or
swims as runs the current. At times there is a general consensus of
sentiment, a definite trend in favor of “progressive legislation” or
a desire for a “return to normalcy.” But even then only exceptional
candidates get by on any basis of personal responsibility to the
electorate. The “tidal wave” swamps some; the “landslide” carries
others into office. At other times, habit, party funds, the skill of
managers of the machine, the portrait of a candidate with his firm jaw,
his lovely wife and children, and a multitude of other irrelevancies,
determine the issue.
These scattered comments are not made in the belief that they convey
any novel truth. Such things are familiar; they are the common-places
of the political scene. They could be extended indefinitely by
any careful observer of the scene. The significant thing is that
familiarity has bred indifference if not contempt. Indifference is the
evidence of current apathy, and apathy is testimony to the fact that
the public is so bewildered that it cannot find itself. The remarks
are not made with a view to drawing a conclusion. They are offered
with a view to outlining a problem: What is the public? If there is
a public, what are the obstacles in the way of its recognizing and
articulating itself? Is the public a myth? Or does it come into being
only in periods of marked social transition when crucial alternative
issues stand out, such as that between throwing one’s lot in with
the conservation of established institutions or with forwarding new
tendencies? In a reaction against dynastic rule which has come to be
felt as despotically oppressive? In a transfer of social power from
agrarian classes to industrial?
Is not the problem at the present time that of securing experts to
manage administrative matters, other than the framing of policies?
It may be urged that the present confusion and apathy are due to
the fact that the real energy of society is now directed in all
non-political matters by trained specialists who manage things,
while politics are carried on with a machinery and ideas formed in
the past to deal with quite another sort of situation. There is no
particular public concerned in finding expert school instructors,
competent doctors, or business managers. Nothing called a public
intervenes to instruct physicians in the practice of the healing art
or merchants in the art of salesmanship. The conduct of these callings
and others characteristic of our time are decided by science and
pseudo-science. The important governmental affairs at present, it may
be argued, are also technically complicated matters to be conducted
properly by experts. And if at present people are not educated to the
recognition of the importance of finding experts and of entrusting
administration to them, it may plausibly be asserted that the prime
obstruction lies in the superstitious belief that there is a public
concerned to determine the formation and execution of general social
policies. Perhaps the apathy of the electorate is due to the irrelevant
artificiality of the issues with which it is attempted to work up
factitious excitement. Perhaps this artificiality is in turn mainly
due to the survival of political beliefs and machinery from a period
when science and technology were so immature as not to permit of a
definite technique for handling definite social situations and meeting
specific social needs. The attempt to decide by law that the legends
of a primitive Hebrew people regarding the genesis of man are more
authoritative than the results of scientific inquiry might be cited
as a typical example of the sort of thing which is bound to happen
when the accepted doctrine is that a public organized for political
purposes, rather than experts guided by specialized inquiry, is the
final umpire and arbiter of issues.
The questions of most concern at present may be said to be matters
like sanitation, public health, healthful and adequate housing,
transportation, planning of cities, regulation and distribution of
immigrants, selection and management of personnel, right methods
of instruction and preparation of competent teachers, scientific
adjustment of taxation, efficient management of funds, and so on. These
are technical matters, as much so as the construction of an efficient
engine for purposes of traction or locomotion. Like it they are to be
settled by inquiry into facts; and as the inquiry can be carried on
only by those especially equipped, so the results of inquiry can be
utilized only by trained technicians. What has counting heads, decision
by majority and the whole apparatus of traditional government to do
with such things? Given such considerations, and the public and its
organization for political ends is not only a ghost, but a ghost which
walks and talks, and obscures, confuses and misleads governmental
action in a disastrous way.
Personally I am far from thinking that such considerations, pertinent
as they are to administrative activities, cover the entire political
field. They ignore forces which have to be composed and resolved before
technical and specialized action can come into play. But they aid in
giving definiteness and point to a fundamental question: What, after
all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for
its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself?
By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized
into effective political action relevant to present social needs and
opportunities? What has happened to the Public in the century and
a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such
assurance and hope?
Previous discussion has brought to light some conditions out of which
the public is generated. It has also set forth some of the causes
through which a “new age of human relationships” has been brought
into being. These two arguments form the premises which, when they
are related to each other, will provide our answer to the questions
just raised. Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of
conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having
a common interest in controlling these consequences. But the machine
age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated
the scope of the indirect consequences, have formed such immense and
consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community
basis, that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish
itself. And this discovery is obviously an antecedent condition of
any effective organization on its part. Such is our thesis regarding
the eclipse which the public idea and interest have undergone. There
are too many publics and too much of public concern for our existing
resources to cope with. The problem of a democratically organized
public is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem, in a
degree to which the political affairs of prior ages offer no parallel.
Our concern at this time is to state how it is that the machine age in
developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated
the small communities of former times without generating a Great
Community. The facts are familiar enough; our especial affair is
to point out their connections with the difficulties under which
the organization of a democratic public is laboring. For the very
familiarity with the phenomena conceals their significance and blinds
us to their relation to immediate political problems.
The scope of the Great War furnishes an urgent as well as convenient
starting point for the discussion. The extent of that war is
unparalleled, because the conditions involved in it are so new. The
dynastic conflicts of the seventeenth century are called by the same
name: we have only one word, “war.” The sameness of the word too easily
conceals from us the difference in significance. We think of all wars
as much the same thing, only the last one was horrible beyond others.
Colonies were drawn in: self-governing ones entered voluntarily;
possessions were levied upon for troops; alliances were formed with
remote countries in spite of diversities of race and culture, as in
the cases of Great Britain and Japan, Germany and Turkey. Literally
every continent upon the globe was involved. Indirect effects were as
broad as direct. Not merely soldiers, but finance, industry and opinion
were mobilized and consolidated. Neutrality was a precarious affair.
There was a critical epoch in the history of the world when the Roman
Empire assembled in itself the lands and peoples of the Mediterranean
basin. The World War stands out as an indubitable proof that what then
happened for a region has now happened for the world, only there is now
no comprehensive political organization to include the various divided
yet interdependent countries. Any one who even partially visualizes the
scene has a convincing reminder of the meaning of the Great Society:
that it exists, and that it is not integrated.
Extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of
the conjoint activity of a comparatively few persons traverse the
globe. The similes of the stone cast into the pool, ninepins in a row,
the spark which kindles a vast conflagration, are pale in comparison
with the reality. The spread of the war seemed like the movement of
an uncontrolled natural catastrophe. The consolidation of peoples in
enclosed, nominally independent, national states has its counterpart in
the fact that their acts affect groups and individuals in other states
all over the world. The connections and ties which transferred energies
set in motion in one spot to all parts of the earth were not tangible
and visible; they do not stand out as do politically bounded states.
But the war is there to show that they are as real, and to prove
that they are not organized and regulated. It suggests that existing
political and legal forms and arrangements are incompetent to deal with
the situation. For the latter is the joint product of the existing
constitution of the political state and the working of non-political
forces not adjusted to political forms. We cannot expect the causes of
a disease to combine effectually to cure the disease they create. The
need is that the non-political forces organize themselves to transform
existing political structures: that the divided and troubled publics
integrate.
In general, the non-political forces are the expressions of a
technological age injected into an inherited political scheme which
operates to deflect and distort their normal operation. The industrial
and commercial relations that created the situation of which the war
is a manifestation are as evident in small things as great. They were
exhibited, not only in the struggle for raw materials, for distant
markets, and in staggering national debts, but in local and unimportant
phenomena. Travelers finding themselves away from home could not
get their letters of credit cashed even in countries not then at
war. Stock-markets closed on one hand, and profiteers piled up their
millions on the other. One instance may be cited from domestic affairs.
The plight of the farmer since the war has created a domestic political
issue. A great demand was generated for food and other agricultural
products; prices rose. In addition to this economic stimulus, farmers
were objects of constant political exhortation to increase their crops.
Inflation and temporary prosperity followed. The end of active warfare
came. Impoverished countries could not buy and pay for foodstuffs up to
even a pre-war level. Taxes were enormously increased. Currencies were
depreciated; the world’s gold supply centered here. The stimulus of war
and of national extravagance piled up the inventories of factories and
merchants. Wages and the prices of agricultural implements increased.
When deflation came it found a restricted market, increased costs of
production, and farmers burdened with mortgages lightly assumed during
the period of frenzied expansion.
This instance is not cited because it is peculiarly important in
comparison with other consequences which have happened, especially
in Europe. It is relatively insignificant by contrast with them,
and in contrast with the arousal of nationalistic sentiments which
has everywhere taken place since the war in so-called backward
countries. But it shows the ramifying consequences of our intricate and
interdependent economic relations, and it shows how little prevision
and regulation exist. The farming population could hardly have acted
with knowledge of the consequences of the fundamental relations in
which they were implicated. They could make a momentary and improvised
response to them, but they could not manage their affairs in controlled
adaptation to the course of events. They present themselves as hapless
subjects of overwhelming operations with which they were hardly
acquainted and over which they had no more control than over the
vicissitudes of climate.
The illustration cannot be objected to on the ground that it rests
upon the abnormal situation of war. The war itself was a normal
manifestation of the underlying unintegrated state of society. The
local face-to-face community has been invaded by forces so vast,
so remote in initiation, so far-reaching in scope and so complexly
indirect in operation, that they are, from the standpoint of the
members of local social units, unknown. Man, as has been often
remarked, has difficulty in getting on either with or without his
fellows, even in neighborhoods. He is not more successful in getting
on with them when they act at a great distance in ways invisible to
him. An inchoate public is capable of organization only when indirect
consequences are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies
which order their occurrence. At present, many consequences are felt
rather than perceived; they are suffered, but they cannot be said to
be known, for they are not, by those who experience them, referred to
their origins. It goes, then, without saying that agencies are not
established which canalize the streams of social action and thereby
regulate them. Hence the publics are amorphous and unarticulated.
There was a time when a man might entertain a few general political
principles and apply them with some confidence. A citizen believed in
states’ rights or in a centralized federal government; in free trade or
protection. It did not involve much mental strain to imagine that by
throwing in his lot with one party or another he could so express his
views that his belief would count in government. For the average voter
to-day the tariff question is a complicated medley of infinite detail,
schedules of rates specific and _ad valorem_ on countless things, many
of which he does not recognize by name, and with respect to which he
can form no judgment. Probably not one voter in a thousand even reads
the scores of pages in which the rates of toll are enumerated and he
would not be much wiser if he did. The average man gives it up as a bad
job. At election time, appeal to some time-worn slogan may galvanize
him into a temporary notion that he has convictions on an important
subject, but except for manufacturers and dealers who have some
interest at stake in this or that schedule, belief lacks the qualities
which attach to beliefs about matters of personal concern. Industry is
too complex and intricate.
Again the voter may by personal predilection or inherited belief
incline towards magnifying the scope of local governments and
inveigh against the evils of centralization. But he is vehemently
sure of social evils attending the liquor traffic. He finds that
the prohibitory law of his locality, township, county or state, is
largely nullified by the importation of liquor from outside, made easy
by modern means of transportation. So he becomes an advocate of a
national amendment giving the central government power to regulate the
manufacture and sale of intoxicating drinks. This brings in its train
a necessary extension of federal officials and powers. Thus to-day,
the south, the traditional home of the states’ rights doctrine, is
the chief supporter of national prohibition and Volstead Act. It would
not be possible to say how many voters have thought of the relation
between their professed general principle and their special position on
the liquor question: probably not many. On the other hand, life-long
Hamiltonians, proclaimers of the dangers of particularistic local
autonomy, are opposed to prohibition. Hence they play a tune _ad hoc_
on the Jeffersonian flute. Gibes at inconsistency are, however, as
irrelevant as they are easy. The social situation has been so changed
by the factors of an industrial age that traditional general principles
have little practical meaning. They persist as emotional cries rather
than as reasoned ideas.
The same criss-crossing occurs with reference to regulation of
railways. The opponent of a strong federal government finds, being a
farmer or shipper, that rates are too high; he also finds that railways
pay little attention to state boundaries, that lines once local are
parts of vast systems and that state legislation and administration are
ineffectual for his purpose. He calls for national regulation. Some
partisan of the powers of the central government, on the other hand,
being an investor in stocks and bonds, finds that his income is likely
to be unfavorably affected by federal action and he promptly protests
against the vexatious tendency to appeal to national aid, which has now
become in his eyes a foolish paternalism. The developments of industry
and commerce have so complicated affairs that a clear-cut, generally
applicable, standard of judgment becomes practically impossible. The
forest cannot be seen for the trees nor the trees for the forest.
A striking example of the shift of the actual tenor of doctrines--that
is, of their consequences in application--is presented in the history
of the doctrine of Individualism, interpreted to signify a minimum of
governmental “interference” with industry and trade. At the outset, it
was held by “progressives,” by those who were protesting against the
inherited régime of rules of law and administration. Vested interests,
on the contrary, were mainly in favor of the old status. To-day the
industrial-property régime being established, the doctrine is the
intellectual bulwark of the standpatter and reactionary. He it is that
now wants to be let alone, and who utters the war-cry of liberty for
private industry, thrift, contract and their pecuniary fruit. In the
United States the name “liberal,” as a party designation, is still
employed to designate a progressive in political matters. In most other
countries, the “liberal” party is that which represents established
and vested commercial and financial interests in protest against
governmental regulation. The irony of history is nowhere more evident
than in the reversal of the practical meaning of the term “liberalism”
in spite of a literal continuity of theory.
Political apathy, which is a natural product of the discrepancies
between actual practices and traditional machinery, ensues from
inability to identify one’s self with definite issues. These are hard
to find and locate in the vast complexities of current life. When
traditional war-cries have lost their import in practical policies
which are consonant with them, they are readily dismissed as bunk. Only
habit and tradition, rather than reasoned conviction, together with a
vague faith in doing one’s civic duty, send to the polls a considerable
percentage of the fifty per cent. who still vote. And of them it is a
common remark that a large number vote against something or somebody
rather than for anything or anybody, except when powerful agencies
create a scare. The old principles do not fit contemporary life as it
is lived, however well they may have expressed the vital interests of
the times in which they arose. Thousands feel their hollowness even
if they cannot make their feeling articulate. The confusion which has
resulted from the size and ramifications of social activities has
rendered men skeptical of the efficiency of political action. Who is
sufficient unto these things? Men feel that they are caught in the
sweep of forces too vast to understand or master. Thought is brought
to a standstill and action paralyzed. Even the specialist finds it
difficult to trace the chain of “cause and effect”; and even he
operates only after the event, looking backward, while meantime social
activities have moved on to effect a new state of affairs.
Similar considerations account for depreciation of the machinery of
democratic political action in contrast with a rising appreciation of
the need of expert administrators. For example, one of the by-products
of the war was the investment of the government at Muscle Shoals for
the manufacture of nitrogen, a chemical product of great importance
to the farmer, as well as to armies in the field. The disposition and
utilization of the plant have become matters of political dispute.
The questions involved, questions of science, agriculture, industry
and finance, are highly technical. How many voters are competent to
measure all the factors involved in arriving at a decision? And if they
were competent after studying it, how many have the time to devote to
it? It is true that this matter does not come before the electorate
directly, but the technical difficulty of the problem is reflected
in the confused paralysis of the legislators whose business it is to
deal with it. The confused situation is further complicated by the
invention of other and cheaper methods of producing nitrates. Again,
the rapid development of hydro-electric and super-power is a matter of
public concern. In the long run, few questions exceed it in importance.
Aside from business corporations which have a direct interest in it
and some engineers, how many citizens have the data or the ability to
secure and estimate the facts involved in its settlement? One further
illustration: Two things which intimately concern a local public are
street-railway transportation and the marketing of food products. But
the history of municipal politics shows in most cases a flare-up of
intense interest followed by a period of indifference. Results come
home to the masses of the people. But the very size, heterogeneity
and nobility of urban populations, the vast capital required, the
technical character of the engineering problems involved, soon tire
the attention of the average voter. I think the three instances are
fairly typical. The ramification of the issues before the public is so
wide and intricate, the technical matters involved are so specialized,
the details are so many and so shifting, that the public cannot for
any length of time identify and hold itself. It is not that there is
no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the
consequences of social transactions. There is too much public, a public
too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there
are too many publics, for conjoint actions which have indirect, serious
and enduring consequences are multitudinous beyond comparison, and
each one of them crosses the others and generates its own group of
persons especially affected with little to hold these different publics
together in an integrated whole.
The picture is not complete without taking into account the many
competitors with effective political interest. Political concerns
have, of course, always had strong rivals. Persons have always been,
for the most part, taken up with their more immediate work and play.
The power of “bread and the circus” to divert attention from public
matters is an old story. But now the industrial conditions which
have enlarged, complicated and multiplied public interests have also
multiplied and intensified formidable rivals to them. In countries
where political life has been most successfully conducted in the past,
there was a class specially set aside, as it were, who made political
affairs their special business. Aristotle could not conceive a body of
citizens competent to carry on politics consisting of others than those
who had leisure, that is, of those who were relieved from all other
preoccupations, especially that of making a livelihood. Political life,
till recent times, bore out his belief. Those who took an active part
in politics were “gentlemen,” persons who had had property and money
long enough, and enough of it, so that its further pursuit was vulgar
and beneath their station. To-day, so great and powerful is the sweep
of the industrial current, the person of leisure is usually an idle
person. Persons have their own business to attend to, and “business”
has its own precise and specialized meaning. Politics thus tends to
become just another “business”: the especial concern of bosses and the
managers of the machine.
The increase in the number, variety and cheapness of amusements
represents a powerful diversion from political concern. The members
of an inchoate public have too many ways of enjoyment, as well as of
work, to give much thought to organization into an effective public.
Man is a consuming and sportive animal as well as a political one.
What is significant is that access to means of amusement has been
rendered easy and cheap beyond anything known in the past. The present
era of “prosperity” may not be enduring. But the movie, radio, cheap
reading matter and motor car with all they stand for have come to stay.
That they did not originate in deliberate desire to divert attention
from political interests does not lessen their effectiveness in that
direction. The political elements in the constitution of the human
being, those having to do with citizenship, are crowded to one side.
In most circles it is hard work to sustain conversation on a political
theme; and once initiated, it is quickly dismissed with a yawn. Let
there be introduced the topic of the mechanism and accomplishment of
various makes of motor cars or the respective merits of actresses, and
the dialogue goes on at a lively pace. The thing to be remembered is
that this cheapened and multiplied access to amusement is the product
of the machine age, intensified by the business tradition which causes
provision of means for an enjoyable passing of time to be one of the
most profitable of occupations.
One phase of the workings of a technological age, with its
unprecedented command of natural energies, while it is implied in what
has been said, needs explicit attention. The older publics, in being
local communities, largely homogeneous with one another, were also, as
the phrase goes, static. They changed, of course, but barring war,
catastrophe and great migrations, the modifications were gradual. They
proceeded slowly and were largely unperceived by those undergoing them.
The newer forces have created mobile and fluctuating associational
forms. The common complaints of the disintegration of family life may
be placed in evidence. The movement from rural to urban assemblies is
also the result and proof of this mobility. Nothing stays long put,
not even the associations by which business and industry are carried
on. The mania for motion and speed is a symptom of the restless
instability of social life, and it operates to intensify the causes
from which it springs. Steel replaces wood and masonry for buildings;
ferro-concrete modifies steel, and some invention may work a further
revolution. Muscle Shoals was acquired to produce nitrogen, and new
methods have already made antiquated the supposed need of great
accumulation of water power. Any selected illustration suffers because
of the heterogeneous mass of cases to select from. How can a public
be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place?
Only deep issues or those which can be made to appear such can find a
common denominator among all the shifting and unstable relationships.
Attachment is a very different function of life from affection.
Affections will continue as long as the heart beats. But attachment
requires something more than organic causes. The very things which
stimulate and intensify affections may undermine attachments. For
these are bred in tranquil stability; they are nourished in constant
relationships. Acceleration of mobility disturbs them at their root.
And without abiding attachments associations are too shifting and
shaken to permit a public readily to locate and identify itself.
The new era of human relationships in which we live is one marked by
mass production for remote markets, by cable and telephone, by cheap
printing, by railway and steam navigation. Only geographically did
Columbus discover a new world. The actual new world has been generated
in the last hundred years. Steam and electricity have done more to
alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the
agencies which affected human relationships before our time. There
are those who lay the blame for all the evils of our lives on steam,
electricity and machinery. It is always convenient to have a devil as
well as a savior to bear the responsibilities of humanity. In reality,
the trouble springs rather from the ideas and absence of ideas in
connection with which technological factors operate. Mental and moral
beliefs and ideals change more slowly than outward conditions. If
the ideals associated with the higher life of our cultural past have
been impaired, the fault is primarily with them. Ideals and standards
formed without regard to the means by which they are to be achieved
and incarnated in flesh are bound to be thin and wavering. Since the
aims, desires and purposes created by a machine age do not connect
with tradition, there are two sets of rival ideals, and those which
have actual instrumentalities at their disposal have the advantage.
Because the two are rivals and because the older ones retain their
glamor and sentimental prestige in literature and religion, the newer
ones are perforce harsh and narrow. For the older symbols of ideal life
still engage thought and command loyalty. Conditions have changed,
but every aspect of life, from religion and education to property and
trade, shows that nothing approaching a transformation has taken place
in ideas and ideals. Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the
new age has no symbols consonant with its activities. Intellectual
instrumentalities for the formation of an organized public are more
inadequate than its overt means. The ties which hold men together in
action are numerous, tough and subtle. But they are invisible and
intangible. We have the physical tools of communication as never
before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not
communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication the
public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for
itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance.
Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the
Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great
community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols
without which shared experience is impossible.