Hiram Johnson would have enjoyed the French Revolution, if accident
had made him radical at that time. He would have been stirred by
the rising of the people; he would have given tongue to their
grievances in a voice keyed to lash them to greater fury. He would
have been excited by it as he never has been by the little risings
of the masses which he has made vocal. In all the noisy early
phases of it, he would have made the loudest noise. And he would
have gone to the block when the real business of the revolution
began with the fanatics at its helm.
In the Russian Revolution, he would have been a Kerensky; and he
would have fled when the true believers in change arrived. He is
the orator of emeutes, who is fascinated by a multitude in a
passion.
Johnson is not a revolutionary. Not in the least, not any more than
Henry Cabot Lodge is. But revolution has a fierce attraction for
him. He once said to me, speaking bitterly during the campaign, of
Mr. Harding's prospective election, "The war has set back the
people for a generation. They have bowed to a hundred repressed
acts. They have become slaves to the government. They are
frightened at the excesses in Russia. They are docile; and they
will not recover from being so for many years. The interests which
control the Republican party will make the most of their docility.
In the end, of course, there will be a revolution, but it will not
come in my time."
That "it will not come in my time" was said in a tone of regret. It
was not so much that the Senator wanted revolution. I do not
believe he did. But he wanted his chance, that outburst of popular
resentment which would bring him to the front, with the excitement,
the sense of power that would come from the response of the nation
when his angry voice translated into words its elemental passion.
Turbulent popular feeling is breath in Johnson's nostrils. Twice he
has thoroughly enjoyed its intoxication.
His political life was blank paper when the tumult of popular
indignation swept California at the time Francis J. Heney, who was
prosecuting the San Francisco grafters, was shot in the court room.
He had thought nothing politically, he had felt nothing
politically. He had neither convictions, nor passions, nor morals,
politically speaking. He grew up in soil which does not produce
lofty standards. Something of the mining-camp spirit still hung
over California, which had been settled by adventurers, forty-niners,
gold seekers, men who had left the East to "make a new start" where
there was pay dirt. The State had a wild zest for life which was
untrammeled by Puritanism. San Francisco had its Barbary Coast
and in every restaurant its private dining rooms for women.
Johnson himself was sprung from a father who was a "railroad
lawyer," the agent of privileges in procuring special favors, by
methods once well known, from the state legislature. The atmosphere
of his youth was not one to develop a sensitive conscience or a
high conception of public morals.
Johnson at this time was a practicing attorney, not noted for the
quality of his community service. The administration of San
Francisco had been a scandal for years. Few cared. It was a
"corrupt and contented" city. The corruption grew worse. Lower and
meaner grafters rose to take the place of the earlier and more
robust good fellows who trafficked in the city o' shame. Graft lost
class, and lost caste. It was ultimately exposed in all its
shocking indecency. The light and licentious town developed a
conscience. Public indignation arose and reached its height, when
the grafters ventured too far in the shooting of the attorney
charged with their prosecution.
Johnson then felt for the first time something he had never felt
before--the stirring of the storm of angry popular feeling. It woke
something in him, something that he did not know existed before--his
instinct for the expression of public passion; his love of the
platform with yelling multitudes in front of him.
He threw himself into the fray on the side of civic virtue. The
disturbance to the complacency of San Francisco disturbed the
complacency of the State, which had calmly endured misgovernment
for many years. Misgovernment procured by the railroad, the public
utility corporations, the other combinations of wealth, through
their agents, and through the corrupt politicians. Johnson became
the spokesman of public protest and the reform governor of the
State.
After that came battling for the Lord at Armageddon--the most
intoxicating experience in American political history, for a man of
Johnson's temperament. It was a revolution, not in a government,
but in a party. Bonds were loosed. Immense personal enlargement
came to those who had known the ties of regularity. It was an hour
of freedom, unbridled political passion, unrestrained political
utterance. Docility did not exist. Vast crowds thrilled with new
hopes yelled themselves hoarse over angry words.
Association with Roosevelt on the Progressive ticket lifted Johnson
from a local to a national importance. The whole country was the
audience which leaped at his words. It was a revolution in tittle,
a taste, a sample of what the real thing would be, with its
breaking of restraints, its making of the mob a perfect instrument
to play upon, its unleashing of passion to which to give tongue.
Johnson has felt its wild stimulation and like a man who has used
drugs the habit is upon him.
Moreover, his one chance lies that way. I have said that he is, by
accident, radical. Let us imagine a great outburst of popular
passion for reaction. And suppose that Johnson was, when it
arrived, a political blank, as he was when Heney was shot. Johnson
would have raised his angry voice against radicalism, just as
readily as for it.
The essential thing with him is popular passion, not a political
philosophy. He has no political philosophy. He has no real
convictions. He does not reason or think deeply. His mentality is
slight. He is the voice of many; instinctively he gives tongue to
what the many feel; that is all.
Suppose the strong-lunged Californian were a political blank, just
reaching the national consciousness, when the reaction against
Wilson began and when the public swung to conservatism.
You know those vast tin amplifiers employed in big convention
halls, or in out-door meetings, to carry the voice of the speaker
to the remotest depths of the audience; Johnson is a vast tin
amplifier of the voice of the mass. When the people had become
"docile" he would have thundered "docility" to the uttermost bounds
of the universe, if he had not by earlier utterances been
definitely placed on the side opposed to docility.
But he had been definitely placed in the battle of Armageddon. A
thousand ennuies located him for all political time. No convictions
hold him where he is in case there be profit in changing sides;
other men habitually conservative would have the preference over
him on the other side. In this sense he is accidently radical,
accidently because he happened to emerge in politics at a radical
moment. That takes into account only the mental background of his
political position. There is an element that was not chance. Public
passion is almost invariably radical, springing as it does from the
resentment of inequality, and Johnson is the tongue of public
passion.
Is he dangerous? He is, only if public passion becomes dangerous
and only up to the point where the speakers of revolution pass from
the stage and the doers of it rig up their chopping blocks. At
present he furnishes the words, the ugly words, which men throw
instead of stones at the objects of their hate. He is the safety
valve of gathering passion. Men listen to him and feel that they
have done something to vindicate their rights. They applaud him to
shake the roof, and vote for Mr. Harding.
It is customary to speak of his magnetism over crowds. He has no
magnetism in personal contact. He walks toward you as if he were
about to deliver a blow, an impression that is strengthened by his
square menacing figure. His voice is unpleasant. His smile is wry.
He not unusually has a complaint to make against the public,
against the press, against fate, against you personally. He is not
interested in people, as Roosevelt was to so an amazing degree, and
as magnetic persons usually are. He is cold, hard, and selfish. His
quarrels are numerous, with the campaign managers of the Armageddon
fight, with his own campaign manager of 1920, with the newspaper
correspondents. He is habitually pessimistic, and pessimism and
magnetism do not go together.
His complaint that the people were docile and would not recover
their confidence and self-assertion in his time, was a bit of his
inevitable gloom. His dark habit of thought hung over his campaign
for the presidential nomination of 1920, preventing his making a
real effort in many states, and lay in the way of his success. He
has few friends, love having been left out of his make-up. I do not
speak of family affection--but love in its larger implications.
Those who surround him--clerks and secretaries--have the air of
repressed, starving personalities.
That which gathers the crowds and sets them shouting is not his
magnetism but the perfect expression of their passion. For them and
for it he is a sounding board. His voice with its hard angry tone,
its mechanical rise and fall, has the ring of a hundred guillotines
in operation. Having little culture, unintellectual, he is
primitive as the mass before him. He talks their language and an
instinct all his own gives him an exact sense of their emotions.
And what he says leaves the impression of tremendous sincerity. His
sincerity does not arise from reasoned convictions but from hatred;
deep and abiding hatred.
Senator Borah once said, "The difference between Johnson and me is
that I regard questions from the point of view of principles while
he regards them from the point of view of personalities. When a man
opposes me I do not become angry at him. On the next issue he may
agree with me. When a man opposes Johnson he hates him. He feels
that the opposition is directed personally against him, not against
the policy that separates them."
Johnson's opponents are the elements of reaction, the malefactors
of great wealth, the supporters of that social inequality which the
crowd resents. They stood in his path in California. They made
impossible his nomination at Chicago. When the bitter enders,
during the treaty fight, planned to send him on a tour of the
country, these monied men closed their pocketbooks, exclaiming to
Senator Knox, "What do you mean to do? Advertise this man Johnson
and make him the Republican candidate for President? Not with our
money."
Only the raising of a fund by Senator McCormick and some of the old
Progressives, gave him his chance to speak. He hates them and when
he attacks them it is with all the force and sincerity of his soul.
It is no mere question of hatred, such as Roosevelt would employ to
dramatize and make personal the issues he was representing to the
people; it is bitter, revengeful detestation. It makes Johnson the
most sincere man before the country to-day. And that pessimistic
strain in his nature causes the darkness of his diatribe to seem
all the more true.
But he swallows for expediency as other men swallow their
convictions for it, and wrath is the bitterer dose. During the 1920
campaign he trafficked with Senator Penrose, the representative of
hated wealth, for support at Chicago, offering, it has not been
disclosed what considerations, for his aid.
He was ready at that time to take back his speech advocating the
government ownership of railroads, a gesture against "the
interests," made at the bidding of Hearst, at the beck of whose
agents he is prone to bestir himself.
It must be an irksome livery, that of Hearst, for he hates all
service and overshadowing. Equally irksome is his service to
regularity under the rod of the Republican party. But he bows to
it, and supports Harding whom he hates. He bobs up like a
Jack-in-the-box and makes his laudatory speech whenever the name of
Roosevelt comes up, though in his heart he must reverence none too
deeply that overshadowing personality.
He has no roots except in the mob and no hope except in its aroused
resentment against inequality. Not being interested in individuals
he has not that personal organization possessed by Roosevelt, with
his army of correspondents, friends and idolators, in every hamlet.
And of course he has little hope of ever controlling his party
organization. He is curiously alone.
"There are only three men in the world whom I trust," he once said
to a friend. There is no reason to regard this as an exaggeration.
His attitude toward his associates in the Senate is this: "If I
were crossing a desert with any one of them and there was only one
water bottle, I should insist upon carrying that bottle."
On such pessimism and distrust it is impossible to build political
success. It can come only when his pessimism and distrust coincide
with like pessimism and distrust in the masses. He waits the day,
but gloomily, without confidence.