Behind the Mirrors Part 5

They are not likely soon to repeat themselves.

Mr. Roosevelt was an extraordinary personality. Only Andrew Jackson, among our Presidents, was as picturesque as he, only Andrew Jackson had a popular following comparable to his.

Both of them represented strong democratic movements,--Jackson the extrusion of the landed aristocracy, in favor of the ma.s.ses, from their preferred position in our political life; Mr. Roosevelt, the similar extrusion of the business aristocracy, in favor of the ma.s.ses from the preferred position they had gained in our political life. Like agitations of the political depths, finding expression in personalities as unusual as those of Jackson and Roosevelt, will give us from time to time executives who may carry everything before them; but only emergencies like this and one other will make the President supreme.

And even then it is easy to overstate the power of the Executive as it was exercised by Mr. Roosevelt. The Colonel lived by picturesque exaggeration. If he went to South America it was to discover a river and find animals that the eye of man never rested on before or since. He read more books than it was humanly possible to read and not become a pallid bookworm. He pursued more interests than mere man can have. He exercised daily as only a pugilist exercises briefly when in training.

He had the gusto of the greatest amateur of all time and enjoyed the immunity which is always granted to amateurs, that of never being measured by professional standards. When you might have been noting a weakness in one direction he was diverting you by an enormous exhibition of versatility in another. He had the capacity of seeming, and the semblance was never penetrated. He seemed to bestride Was.h.i.+ngton like a Colossus. Actually his rule was one long compromise with Aldrich and Cannon, the business leaders of Congress, which he represented as a glorious triumph over them.

One man government was developed much further under Mr. Wilson than under Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Harding's predecessor entered office as the expression of that movement toward a government based on numbers rather than on wealth, which the Colonel had so imperfectly effected. There had been a reaction under Taft; there was a new determination under Wilson, and a new concentration on the executive.

Poor, bookish, without the friends.h.i.+ps in the business world which Mr.

Roosevelt had had, having few contacts with life, Mr. Wilson embraced the idea of putting business in its place pa.s.sionately, where Mr.

Roosevelt played with it as he played with everything else.

Mr. Wilson was by temperament an autocrat. An ill.u.s.tration of how personal was his government was his treatment of his enemies. His bitterness against Huntington Wilson, the Republican Amba.s.sador to Mexico, is well known. A year or two after the dispute was over, Huntington Wilson's son came up for examination to enter the Consular service. He pa.s.sed at the top of the list. President Wilson heard of his success and directed that he should receive no appointment. He carried his enmity to the second generation. The law which would have given young Mr. Wilson a place meant nothing under his personal government.

As Anatole France says of Robespierre, he "_etait optimiste qui croyait a la vertue_." Those who are "optimists and believe in virtue," remarks the French author, end by killing men. Wilson in a revolution would have conducted a Terror, as indeed during the war he did conduct a sort of legal terror among pacifists and radicals. Roosevelt belonged to the other school in the conduct of affairs which Anatole France praises because it never forgets that men are "_des mauvais singes_." In a revolution Roosevelt would have cut off no more heads than would be necessary to make a good show.

Moreover, when Mr. Wilson entered office his party had been long out of power. Its leaders in the House and Senate were not firmly established.

Unlike Cannon and Aldrich, of the Roosevelt day, they did not represent business in the national legislature. They had no authority except the purely fact.i.tious authority created by the accident of seniority. They were easily dominated from the White House.

Coming into power at such a moment, possessing such a temperament, representing such a popular movement, Mr. Wilson readily became the most perfect example of the concentrated executive that we have yet had. But even his one man government was attacked from the outset. His personality proved repellent. An intellectual is so unfamiliar an object in America as to seem almost a monstrosity, and his ascendancy would not have lasted beyond two years if the war had not come.

War is the other great cause that leads to autocracy in popular governments. In times of common danger we revert to the herd with the single leaders.h.i.+p. We resort to the only form of rule of which we have any experience in our daily lives, the only form in which the race has yet developed any lasting faith. From the time when war threatened, with the invasion of Belgium, till the time when it ended with the armistice, Mr. Wilson became what any President may become under like circ.u.mstances, what Mr. Wilson's temperament especially fitted him to become--an absolute dictator.

When we think of the powerful executive as the natural development of the American system, imparting that unity to our government which the makers of the Const.i.tution in their zeal for checks and balances refused to give it, we are over-impressed by the phenomena of Roosevelt and Wilson and do not make sufficient allowances for the conditions which made their power inevitable. So impossible is it for authority to remain permanently in the hands of the executive that we are now witnessing its spontaneous movement away from the White House--toward, well for the moment I should say, toward nowhere.

A distinguished alienist tells me that the desire for power over your fellow man is an unmistakable sign of paranoia, not necessarily paranoia amounting to insanity, but the same kind of paranoia which makes history amusing. If that is true, then we are in an era of perfect sanity at Was.h.i.+ngton. No one, no one, in the White House, in the Capitol, in Wall Street, the capitol of business, or back among the home folks, as far as I can learn, wants power--and responsibility.

The picture I have drawn, quoting a bright young observer at the capital of what happens when Business arrives in Was.h.i.+ngton is the picture of our whole present national political organization. "A bunch of tall-hatted fat boys comes. The governmental nose is thrust out awaiting the guiding hand. The guiding hand is put unostentatiously behind the back." It is the same when the organ of leading is extended from the White House for the hand of leaders.h.i.+p at the Capitol, or, as happens, as often the organ of leading at the Capitol awaits the hand of leaders.h.i.+p at the White House.

Power is in transition and we do much inconsistent thinking about where it is and where it should be. We deliberately elected a weak executive, to retrieve the blessed days of McKinley, the old equilibrium and co-ordination of the equal and co-ordinate branches of our government.

Yet when things go badly in Congress, as they mostly do, the critics exclaim that the President should be firm and "a.s.sert his authority" on the hill. Mr. Harding himself said, over and over again, "This is no one man job at Was.h.i.+ngton." Yet we read that his face a.s.sumes a "determined expression"--I have myself never seen it--and he sends for the leaders in Congress.

We haven't executive domination and we haven't anything in its place.

We voted to go back to the nineties, but we haven't got there. There is no Mark Hanna speaking for business and for party to make the system work. We have the willessness of the blessed days in our National Heartbreak House, but we haven't the will somewhere else to act and direct. Not even seven million majority is enough to bring back the past. In spite of "landslides" the course is always forward, and I use "forward" not in the necessarily optimistic sense of those who were once so sure of Progress.

The initiative, so far as there is any, has pa.s.sed to Congress.

And so far as I can see, it is likely to remain with Congress, until some new turn of events brings us back the strong executive. For, after all, Congress chose Mr. Harding. The Senators picked him at Chicago.

With party bosses gone, they are about all that remains of the party, and there is no reason why they should not go on naming Presidents. And the power of presidents will not rise much above its source.

The autocratic President goes inevitably the way its prototype the autocrat went. The loins that produce them are sufficiently fertile.

Primogeniture brought forth feeble kings. The nominating system called on for a great man every four years yields many feeble ones. There will be many Hardings to one Roosevelt or Wilson. Party government which might reinforce a feeble president is weak. Government by business has lost its confidence and authority. The great discovery of the first decade of this century for making this government of ours work is already in the discard.

So at a critical moment when government by Progress and government by business have broken down, government by one man at Was.h.i.+ngton has also gone. The war made the autocratic executive in the person of Mr. Wilson intolerable. It also destroyed the basis for national concentration upon the executive.

We need a new picture in our heads of what government should be, what its limits should be when it faces such vital problems as interfering with G.o.d's time, and where its authority should center. We have none.

CHAPTER V

LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM--IN THE BOSOM OF THeReSE

We now pursue further the search for authority. We shall surely find "divine right" somewhere, now that business has lost it. Someone certainly has the final word about the pictures to put in our heads. Ah!

there is the public, the imputation of a miraculous quality to whose opinion has a curious history.

Everybody agrees that we owe most of the pleasant illusions upon which this democracy of ours is based to Rousseau. This Swiss sentimentalist about humanity, whose ideas have so profoundly affected the history of the last century and a half, was a convinced believer that perfect good sense resided in the bosom of the natural man, the man "born free and equal" of our Declaration of Independence.

Rousseau could find this simple wisdom which was his delight in the most unexpected places. He describes his mistress Therese with whom he lived many happy years: "Her mind is what nature has made it; cultivation is without effect. I do not blush to avow that she has never known how to read, although she writes pa.s.sably. When I went to live in the Rue Neuve des Pet.i.ts Champs I had opposite my windows a clock face on which I tried during several months to teach her to tell time. She can scarcely do it even now. She has never known in their order the twelve months of the year, and she does not know a single figure in spite of all the pains I have taken to explain them to her.... But this person, so limited and, if you wish, so stupid, has excellent judgment on occasions of difficulty. Often in my troubles she has seen what I did not see myself; she has given me the best advice to follow. She has pulled me out of dangers into which I rushed blindly.... The heart of my Therese was the heart of an angel. (_Le coeur de ma Therese etait celui d'un ange._)"

It would be amusing to trace our belief in the good sense of man, in the wisdom and justice of public opinion, back to a philosopher's delight in a female moron; but that would be too great a paradox for a serious discussion of today's crisis in popular government. The truth probably is that Rousseau reached _a priori_ the conclusions about the sound sense of the simple and natural man that captivated a society so simple and natural as our own was in the eighteenth century, and then stumbled upon such convincing evidence in the person of Therese that he had to keep it by him all the rest of his days.

And where after all has there been found any better evidence for our belief in the soundness and justice of public opinion than was furnished by the unlettered and unteachable Therese, who had "le c?ur d'un ange"

and "devant les dames du plus haut rang, devant les grands et les princes, ses sentiments, son bon sens, ses reponses et sa conduite lui out tire l'estime universelle"?

To accept the doctrine of the rightness of public opinion you must believe that there resides in every man, even in the most unpromising man, of the mental level of Therese, "si bornee et, si l'on veut, si stupide," the capacity to be, like her, "d'un conseil excellent dans les occasions difficiles."

The doctrine of the rightness of public opinion, however, never required proof. It was a political necessity. The world at the time when modern democracies had their birth accepted government only because it rested upon divine right. The government of men by mere men has always been intolerable.

The new democracies which were to take the place of the old kingdoms had to have some sanction other than the suffrages of the people. Room had to be found in them somewhere for divine right. Those who established the modern system could never have sold self-government to the people as self government. There had to be some miracle about it, something supernatural, like that marvel which turned a mere man into a King and gave him that power of healing by touch which was exercised in Galilee, so that the laying on of his hands cured the king's evil.

The miracle was accomplished somewhere in the process through which your opinion and my opinion and Therese's opinion became public opinion. Just as the anointment or the coronation turned a mere human being by a miracle into the chosen of G.o.d ruling by divine right, so by some trans.m.u.tation which does not take place before the eyes, mere human opinion becomes itself the choice of G.o.d, ruling by divine right.

If you doubt that the founders of modern democracy had to carry over into their systems the old illusions about divine right, read what Thomas Jefferson, more or less a free thinker, quoted by Mr. Walter Lippmann in his _Public Opinion_, has to say about the divine basis for popular government: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of G.o.d, if ever He had a chosen people, whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire which might otherwise escape from the earth."

That "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" was public opinion.

Nothing was lost of the sanctions of monarchic government when we changed to popular government.

Since the days of Jefferson we have ceased to be an agricultural people and we can no longer derive the authority of our government from the Rousseauist notion that the farmer, being near to nature, thrusting his hands into the soil, was the choice of G.o.d and ruled by a kind of divine right. But "aucune religion n'est jamais morte, ni ne mourra jamais."

Let us examine the doctrine of Jefferson. Public opinion ruled by divine right because, in this country and in his day, it was the opinion of farmers, who were "the chosen people of G.o.d whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s He has made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

When we ceased to be a nation of farmers did we abandon the basis of our government in divine right? Not in the least. We broadened our ground to cover the added elements of the community and went along further with Rousseau than Jefferson had need to do; we said that the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of all men "He has made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." The art of uncovering their substantial and genuine virtue, this quality in Therese which drew down upon her universal esteem for her good sense and her sound sentiments, is the art of arriving at public opinion.

The legend of public opinion is thus accounted for; first, you will observe, it was politically necessary to a.s.sert the inspiration of public opinion, for divine right had to reside somewhere. Second, in a democracy the press and public men had to flatter the ma.s.s of voters and readers by declaring on every possible occasion that wisdom reposed in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And third, the public mind differed so from the ordinary thinking mind that, to put its conclusions in a favorable light, men had to a.s.sume some supernatural quality, some divine "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

The public did not think, in the ordinary sense, yet its decisions were more right than the carefully elaborated decisions of those who did think; the wonder of Therese over again, who "si bornee et si stupide"

gave such excellent advice on difficult occasions. No processes by which results were reached could be perceived by the trained mind. The mystery of the public mind was as great as the mystery of intuitions is to the logical or the mystery of poetry is to the prosaic. Clearly, a miracle; clearly, a deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

When modern democracy got its start, kings by their folly had shaken faith in their divine right. In a similar way at this moment, public opinion by its excesses has made men question whether any "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" has been placed in human b.r.e.a.s.t.s upon which states may rely for justice and wisdom.

Walter Lippmann's book, _Public Opinion_, with its destructive a.n.a.lysis of the public mind, is a symptom of those doubts with which the war has left us. The years from 1914 on furnished the most perfect exhibition of public opinion and its workings that the world has ever seen. You saw on a grand scale its miraculous capacity for instant formation and, if you are sufficiently detached now, you look back and doubt whether what was revealed was a "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

Both sides to the conflict resembled nothing so much as prehistoric tribes meeting accidentally in the night and, precipitated into panic, fighting in the belief that each was being attacked by the other.