Every time we elect a new President we learn what a various
creature is the Typical American.
When Mr. Roosevelt was in the White House the Typical American was
gay, robustious, full of the joy of living, an expansive spirit
from the frontier, a picaresque twentieth century middle class
Cavalier. He hit the line hard and did not flinch. And his laugh
shook the skies.
Came Wilson. And the Typical American was troubled about his soul.
Rooted firmly in the church-going past, he carried the banner of
the Lord, Democracy, idealistic, bent on perfecting that old
incorrigible Man, he cuts off the right hand that offends him and
votes for prohibition and woman suffrage, a Round Head in a Ford.
Eight years and we have the perfectly typical American, Warren
Gamaliel Harding of the modern type, the Square Head, typical of
that America whose artistic taste is the movies, who reads and
finds mental satisfaction in the vague inanities of the small town
newspaper, who has faith in America, who is for liberty, virtue,
happiness, prosperity, law and order and all the standard
generalities and holds them a perfect creed; who distrusts anything
new except mechanical inventions, the standardized product of the
syndicate which supplies his nursing bottle, his school books, his
information, his humor in a strip, his art on a screen, with a
quantity production mind, cautious, uniformly hating divergence
from uniformity, jailing it in troublous times, prosperous, who has
his car and his bank account and can sell a bill of goods as well
as the best of them.
People who insist upon having their politics logical demand to know
the why of Harding. Why was a man of so undistinguished a record as
he first chosen as a candidate for President and then elected
President?
As a legislator he had left no mark on legislation. If he had
retired from Congress at the end of his term his name would have
existed only in the old Congressional directories, like that of a
thousand others. As a public speaker he had said nothing that
anybody could remember. He had passed through a Great War and left
no mark on it. He had shared in a fierce debate upon the peace that
followed the war but though you can recall small persons like
McCumber and Kellogg and Moses and McCormick in that discussion you
do not recall Harding. To be sure he made a speech in that debate
which he himself says was a great speech but no newspaper thought
fit to publish it because of its quality, or felt impelled to
publish it in spite of its quality because it had been made by
Harding.
He neither compelled attention by what he said nor by his
personality. Why, then, without fireworks, without distinction of
any sort, without catching the public eye, or especially deserving
to catch it, was Warren Harding elected President of the United
States?
One plausible reason why he was nominated was that given by Senator
Brandegee at Chicago, where he had a great deal to do with the
nomination. "There ain't any first raters this year. This ain't any
1880 or any 1904. We haven't any John Shermans or Theodore
Roosevelts. We've got a lot of second raters and Warren Harding is
the best of the second raters."
Once nominated as a Republican his election of course inevitably
followed. But to accept Mr. Brandegee's plea in avoidance is to
agree to the eternal poverty of American political life, for most
of our presidents have been precisely like Warren G. Harding,
first-class second raters.
Mrs. Harding, a woman of sound sense and much energy, had an
excellent instructive answer to the "why." The pictures of the
house in Marion, the celebrated front porch, herself and her
husband were taken to be exhibited by cinema all over the land. She
said, "I want the people to see these pictures so that they will
know we are just folks like themselves."
Warren Harding is "just folks." A witty woman said of him, alluding
to the small town novel which was popular at the time of his
inauguration, "Main Street has arrived in the White House."
The Average Man has risen up and by seven million majority elected
an Average Man President. His defects were his virtues. He was
chosen rather for what he wasn't than for what he was,--the
inconspicuousness of his achievements. The "just folks" level of
his mind, his small town man's caution, his sense of the security
of the past, his average hopes and fears and practicality, his
standardized Americanism which would enable a people who wanted for
a season to do so to take themselves politically for granted.
The country was tired of the high thinking and rather plain
spiritual living of Woodrow Wilson. It desired the man in the White
House to cause it no more moral overstrain than does the man you
meet in the Pullman smoking compartment or the man who writes the
captions for the movies who employs a sort of Inaugural style,
freed from the inhibitions of statesmanship. It was in a mood
similar to that of Mr. Harding himself when after his election he
took Senators Freylinghuysen, Hale, and Elkins with him on his trip
to Texas. Senator Knox observing his choice is reported to have
said, "I think he is taking those three along because he wanted
complete mental relaxation." All his life Mr. Harding has shown a
predilection for companions who give him complete mental
relaxation, though duty compels him to associate with the Hughes
and the Hoovers. The conflict between duty and complete mental
relaxation establishes a strong bond of sympathy between him and
the average American.
The "why" of Harding is the democratic passion for equality. We are
standardized, turned out like Fords by the hundred million, and we
cannot endure for long anyone who is not standardized. Such an one
casts reflections upon us; why should we by our votes unnecessarily
asperse ourselves? Occasionally we may indulge nationally, as men
do individually, in the romantic belief that we are somebody else,
that we are like Roosevelt or Wilson--and they become typical of
what we would be--but always we come back to the knowledge that we
are nationally like Harding, who is typical of what we are. "Just
folks" Kuppenheimered, movieized, associated pressed folks.
Men debate whether or not Mr. Wilson was a great man and they will
keep on doing so until the last of those passes away whose judgment
of him is clouded by the sense of his personality. But men will
never debate about the greatness of Mr. Harding, not even Mr.
Harding himself. He is modest. He has only two vanities, his vanity
about his personal appearance and his vanity about his literary
style.
The inhibitions of a presidential candidate, bound to speak and say
nothing, irked him.
"Of course I could make better speeches than these" he told a
friend during the campaign, "but I have to be so careful."
In his inaugural address he let himself go, as much as it is
possible for a man so cautious as he is to let himself go. It was a
great speech, an inaugural to place alongside the inaugurals of
Lincoln and Washington, written in his most capable English,
Harding at his best. It is hard for a man to move Marion for years
with big editorials, to receive the daily compliments of Dick
Cressinger and Jim Prendergast, without becoming vain of the power
of his pen. It is his chief vanity and it is one that it is hard
for him who speaks or writes to escape. He has none of that egotism
which makes a self-confident man think himself the favorite of
fortune.
He said after his nomination at Chicago, "We drew to a pair of
deuces and filled." He did not say it boastfully as a man who likes
to draw to a pair of deuces and who always expects to fill. He said
it with surprise and relief. He does not like to hold a pair of
deuces and be forced to draw to them. He has not a large way of
regarding losing and winning as all a part of the game. He hates to
lose. He hated to lose even a friendly game of billiards in the
Marion Club with his old friend Colonel Christian, father of his
secretary, though the stake was only a cigar.
When he was urged to seek the Republican nomination for the
Presidency he is reported to have said, "Why should I. My chances
of winning are not good. If I let you use my name I shall probably
in the end lose the nomination for the Senate. (His term was
expiring.) If I don't run for the Presidency I can stay in the
Senate all my life. I like the Senate. It is a very pleasant
place."
The Senate is like Marion, Ohio, a very pleasant place, for a
certain temperament. And Mr. Harding stayed in Marion all his life
until force--a vis exterior; there is nothing inside Mr. Harding
that urges him on and on--until force of circumstances, of
politics, of other men's ambitions, took him out of Marion and set
him down in Washington, in the Senate.
The process of uprooting him from the pleasant place of Marion is
reported to have been thus described by his political transplanter,
the present Attorney General, Mr. Daugherty: "When it came to
running for the Senate I found him, sunning himself in Florida,
like a turtle on a log and I had to push him into the water and
make him swim."
And a similar thing happened when it came to running for the
Presidency. It is a definite type of man who suns himself on a log,
who is seduced by pleasant places like Marion, Ohio, whom the big
town does not draw into its magnetic field, whose heart is not
excited by the larger chances of life. Is he lazy? Is he lacking in
imagination? Does he hate to lose? Does he want self-confidence? Is
he over modest? Has he no love for life, life as a great adventure?
Whatever he is, Mr. Harding is that kind of man, that kind of man
to start out with.
But this is only the point of departure, that choice to remain in a
pleasant place like Marion, not to risk what you have, your sure
place in society as the son of one of the better families, the
reasonable prospect that the growth of your small town will bring
some accretion to your own fortunes, the decision not to hazard
greatly in New York or Chicago or on the frontier. Life asks little
of you in those pleasant places like Marion and in return for that
little gives generously, especially if you are, to begin with, well
placed, if you are ingratiatingly handsome, if your personality is
agreeable--"The best fellow in the world to play poker with all
Saturday night," as a Marionite feelingly described the President
to me, and if you have a gift of words as handsome and abundant as
your looks.
Mr. Harding is a handsome man, endowed with the gifts that
reinforce the charm of his exterior, a fine voice, a winning smile,
a fluency of which his inaugural is the best instance; an ample
man, you might say. But he is too handsome, too endowed, for his
own good, his own spiritual good. The slight stoop of his
shoulders, the soft figure, the heaviness under the eyes betray in
some measure perhaps the consequences of nature's excessive
generosity. Given all these things you take, it may be, too much
for granted. There is not much to stiffen the mental, moral, and
physical fibers.
Given such good looks, such favor from nature, and an environment
in which the struggle is not sharp and existence is a species of
mildly purposeful flanerie. You lounge a bit stoop-shoulderedly
forward to success. There is nothing hard about the President. I
once described him in somewhat this fashion to a banker in New York
who was interested in knowing what kind of a President we had.
"You agree," he said, "with a friend of Harding's who came in to
see me a few days ago. This friend said to me 'Warren is the best
fellow in the world. He has wonderful tact. He knows how to make
men work with him and how to get the best out of them. He is
politically adroit. He is conscientious. He has a keen sense of his
responsibilities. He has unusual common sense.' And he named other
similar virtues, 'Well,' I asked him, 'What is his defect?' 'Oh,'
he replied, 'the only trouble with Warren is that he lacks
mentality.'"
The story, like most stories, exaggerates. The President has the
average man's virtues of common sense and conscientiousness with
rather more than the average man's political skill and the average
man's industry or lack of industry. His mentality is not lacking;
it is undisciplined, especially in its higher ranges, by hard
effort. There is a certain softness about him mentally. It is not
an accident that his favorite companions are the least intellectual
members of that house of average intelligence, the Senate. They
remind him of the mental surroundings of Marion, the pleasant but
unstimulating mental atmosphere of the Marion Club, with its
successful small town business men, its local storekeepers, its
banker whose mental horizon is bounded by Marion County, the value
of whose farm lands for mortgages he knows to a penny, the lumber
dealer whose eye rests on the forests of Kentucky and West
Virginia.
The President has never felt the sharpening of competition. He was
a local pundit because he was the editor. He was the editor because
he owned the Republican paper of Marion. There was no effective
rival. No strong intelligence challenged his and made him fight for
his place. He never studied hard or thought deeply on public
questions. A man who stays where he is put by birth tends to accept
authority, and authority is strong in small places. The acceptance
of authority implies few risks. It is like staying in Marion
instead of going to New York or even Cleveland. It is easier, and
often more profitable than studying hard or thinking deeply or
inquiring too much.
And Mr. Harding's is a mind that bows to authority. What his party
says is enough for Mr. Harding. His party is for protection and Mr.
Harding is for protection; the arguments for protection may be
readily assimilated from the editorials of one good big city
newspaper and from a few campaign addresses. His party is for the
remission of tolls on American shipping in the Panama Canal and Mr.
Harding is for the remission of tolls. Mr. Root broke with his
party on tolls and Mr. Harding is as much shocked at Mr. Root's
deviation as the matrons of Marion would be over the public
disregard of the Seventh Commandment by one of their number. His
party became somehow for the payment of Colombia's Panama claims
and Mr. Harding was for their payment.
A story tells just how Senator Kellogg went to the President to
oppose the Colombia treaty. After hearing Mr. Kellogg Mr. Harding
remarked, "Well, Frank, you have something on me. You've evidently
read the treaty. I haven't."
A mind accepting authority favors certain general policies. It is
not sufficiently inquiring to trouble itself with the details. Mr.
Harding is for all sorts of things but is content to be merely for
them. A curious illustration developed in Marion, during the visits
of the best minds. He said to the newspaper men there one day, "I
am for voluntary military training."
"What would you train, Mr. President," asked one of the
journalists, "officers or men?"
The President hesitated. At last he said, "I haven't thought of
that."
"But," said one of his interlocutors, "the colleges are training a
lot of officers now."
This brought no response.
Another who had experience in the Great War remarked, "In the last
war we were lacking in trained non-coms; it would be a good idea to
train a lot of them."
"Yes," rejoined Mr. Harding eagerly, "That would be a good idea."
A more inquiring mind would have gone further than to be "for
voluntary military training." A quicker, less cautious, if no more
thorough mind would have answered the first question, "What would
you train, officers or men?" by answering instantly "Both."
In that colloquy you have revealed all the mental habits of Mr.
Harding. He was asked once, after he had had several conferences
with Senator McCumber, Senator Smoot, Representative Fordney, and
others who would be responsible for financial legislation, "Have
you worked out the larger details of your taxation policy?"
"Naturally not!" was his reply. That "naturally" sprang I suppose
from his habit of believing that somewhere there is authority.
Somewhere there would be authority to determine what the larger
details of the party's financial policy should be.
Now, this authority is not going to be any one man or any two men.
The President, his friends tell us, is jealous of any assumption of
power by any of his advisers. He is unwilling to have the public
think that any other than himself is President. A man as handsome
as Harding, as vain of his literary style as he is, has an ego that
is not capable of total self-effacement. He will bow to impersonal
authority like that of the party, or invoke the anonymous
governance of "best minds," calling rather often on God as a well
established authority, but he will not let authority be personal
and be called Daugherty, or Lodge or Knox or whomever you will.
The President's attitude is rather like that of the average man
during the campaign. If you said to a voter on a Pullman, "Mr.
Harding is a man of small public experience, not known by any large
political accomplishment," he would always answer optimistically,
"Well, they will see to it that he makes good." Asked who "They"
were he was always vague and elusive, gods on the mountain perhaps.
There is an American religion, the average man's faith: it is
"Them." "They" are the fountain of authority.
As Mr. Harding knew little competition in Marion so he has known
little competition in public life which in this country is not
genuinely competitive. Mr. Lloyd George is at the head of the
British government because he is the greatest master of the House
of Commons in a generation and he is chosen by the men who know him
for what he is, his fellow members of the House of Commons. An
American President is selected by the newspapers, which know little
about him, by the politicians, who do not want a master but a
slave, by the delegates to a national convention, tired, with hotel
bills mounting, ready to name anybody in order to go home. The
presidency, the one great prize in American public life, is
attained by no known rules and under conditions which have nothing
in them to make a man work hard or think hard, especially one
endowed with a handsome face and figure, an ingratiating
personality, and a literary style.
The small town man, unimaginative and of restricted mental horizon
does not think in terms of masses of mankind. Masses vaguely appall
him. They exist in the big cities on which he turned his back in
his unaudacious youth. His contacts are with individuals. His
democracy consists in smiling upon the village painter and calling
him "Harry," in always nodding to the village cobbler and calling
him "Bill," in stopping on the street corner with a group, which
has not been invited to join the village club, putting his hand on
the shoulder of one of them and calling them "Fellows."
Politics in the small town is limited to dealing with persons, to
enlisting the support of men with a following at the polls.
Mr. Harding once drew this picture of his idea of politics. "If I
had a policy to put over I should go about it this way," he said.
"You all know the town meeting, if not by experience, by hearsay.
Now if I had a program that I wanted to have adopted by a town
meeting I should go to the three or four most influential men in my
community. I should talk it out with them. I should make
concessions to them until I had got them to agree with me. And then
I should go into the town meeting feeling perfectly confident that
my plan would go through. Well it's the same in the nation as in
the town meeting, or in the whole world, if you will. I should
always go first to the three or four leading men."
Mr. Harding thinks of politics in this personal way. He does not
conceive of it as the force of ideas or the weight of morality
moving the hearts of mankind. Mankind is only a word to him, one
that he often uses,--or perhaps he prefers humanity, which has two
more syllables--a large loose word that he employs to make his
thought look bigger than it really is, something like the stage
device for making an ordinary man seem ten feet tall.
Thus he will never try to move the mass of the people as his
predecessors have. He will not "go to the country." He will not
bring public opinion to bear as a disciplinary force in his
household. He will treat the whole United States as if it were a
Marion, consulting endless "best minds," composing differences,
seeking unity, with the aid of his exceptional tact.
This attitude has its disadvantages. If you have a passion for
ideas and an indifference for persons you can say "yes" or "no"
easily; you may end by being dictatorial and arrogant, as Mr.
Wilson was; but you will not be weak. If, on the contrary, you are
indifferent to ideas and considerate of persons you find it hard to
say "Decided" to any question. And somewhere there must be
authority, the passing of the final judgment and the giving of
orders.
But he compensates for his own defects. Almost as good as greatness
is a knowledge of your own limitations; and Mr. Harding knows his
thoroughly. Out of his modesty, his desire to reinforce himself,
has proceeded the strongest cabinet that Washington has seen in a
generation. He likes to have decisions rest upon the broad base of
more than one intelligence and he has surrounded himself for this
purpose with able associates. His policies will lack imagination,
which is not a composite product, but they will have practicality,
which is the greatest common denomination of several minds; and he,
moreover, is himself unimaginative and practical.
Whatever superstructure of world organization he takes part in,
behind it will be the reality, a private understanding with the
biggest man in sight; for this reason the fall of Lloyd George and
the succession of a Labor government in England will disconcert him
terribly. The democratic passion for equality, which dogs the
tracks of the great, he mollifies by reminding the nation always
that he is "just folks," by opening the White House lawn gates, by
calling everyone by his first name. So constant is his aim to
appease it that I wonder if he is not sometimes betrayed into
addressing his Secretary of State as "Charley."