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New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

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Books: Public Opinion

W >> Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion




It is doubtful whether instinctive action of this sort figures at all
in the social life of mankind. For as James pointed out: [Footnote:
_Op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 390.] "every instinctive act in an animal
with memory must cease to be 'blind' after being once repeated."
Whatever the equipment at birth, the innate dispositions are from
earliest infancy immersed in experience which determines what shall
excite them as stimulus. "They become capable," as Mr. McDougall
says, [Footnote: Introduction to _Social Psychology_, Fourth
Edition, pp. 31-32.] "of being initiated, not only by the perception
of objects of the kind which directly excite the innate disposition,
the natural or native excitants of the instinct, but also by ideas of
such objects, and by perceptions and by ideas of objects of other
kinds." [Footnote: "Most definitions of instincts and instinctive
actions take account only of their conative aspects... and it is a
common mistake to ignore the cognitive and affective aspects of the
instinctive mental process." Footnote _op. cit._, p. 29.]

It is only the "central part of the disposition" [Footnote: p. 34.]
says Mr. McDougall further, "that retains its specific character and
remains common to all individuals and all situations in which the
instinct is excited." The cognitive processes, and the actual bodily
movements by which the instinct achieves its end may be indefinitely
complicated. In other words, man has an instinct of fear, but what he
will fear and how he will try to escape, is determined not from birth,
but by experience.

If it were not for this variability, it would be difficult to conceive
the inordinate variety of human nature. But when you consider that all
the important tendencies of the creature, his appetites, his loves,
his hates, his curiosity, his sexual cravings, his fears, and
pugnacity, are freely attachable to all sorts of objects as stimulus,
and to all kinds of objects as gratification, the complexity of human
nature is not so inconceivable. And when you think that each new
generation is the casual victim of the way a previous generation was
conditioned, as well as the inheritor of the environment that
resulted, the possible combinations and permutations are enormous.

There is no prima facie case then for supposing that because persons
crave some particular thing, or behave in some particular way, human
nature is fatally constituted to crave that and act thus. The craving
and the action are both learned, and in another generation might be
learned differently. Analytic psychology and social history unite in
supporting this conclusion. Psychology indicates how essentially
casual is the nexus between the particular stimulus and the particular
response. Anthropology in the widest sense reinforces the view by
demonstrating that the things which have excited men's passions, and
the means which they have used to realize them, differ endlessly from
age to age and from place to place.

Men pursue their interest. But how they shall pursue it is not fatally
determined, and, therefore, within whatever limits of time this planet
will continue to support human life, man can set no term upon the
creative energies of men. He can issue no doom of automatism. He can
say, if he must, that for his life there will be no changes which he
can recognize as good. But in saying that he will be confining his
life to what he can see with his eye, rejecting what he might see with
his mind; he will be taking as the measure of good a measure which is
only the one he happens to possess. He can find no ground for
abandoning his highest hopes and relaxing his conscious effort unless
he chooses to regard the unknown as the unknowable, unless he elects
to believe that what no one knows no one will know, and that what
someone has not yet learned no one will ever be able to teach.




PART V

THE MAKING OF A COMMON WILL

CHAPTER 13. THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST
" 14. YES OR NO
" 15. LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE




CHAPTER XIII

THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST

This goes to show that there are many variables in each man's
impressions of the invisible world. The points of contact vary, the
stereotyped expectations vary, the interest enlisted varies most
subtly of all. The living impressions of a large number of people are
to an immeasurable degree personal in each of them, and unmanageably
complex in the mass. How, then, is any practical relationship
established between what is in people's heads and what is out there
beyond their ken in the environment? How in the language of democratic
theory, do great numbers of people feeling each so privately about so
abstract a picture, develop any common will? How does a simple and
constant idea emerge from this complex of variables? How are those
things known as the Will of the People, or the National Purpose, or
Public Opinion crystallized out of such fleeting and casual imagery?

That there is a real difficulty here was shown by an angry tilt in the
spring of 1921 between the American Ambassador to England and a very
large number of other Americans. Mr. Harvey, speaking at a British
dinner table, had assured the world without the least sign of
hesitancy what were the motives of Americans in 1917. [Footnote: _New
York Times_, May 20, 1921.] As he described them, they were not the
motives which President Wilson had insisted upon when _he_
enunciated the American mind. Now, of course, neither Mr. Harvey nor
Mr. Wilson, nor the critics and friends of either, nor any one else,
can know quantitatively and qualitatively what went on in thirty or
forty million adult minds. But what everybody knows is that a war was
fought and won by a multitude of efforts, stimulated, no one knows in
what proportion, by the motives of Wilson and the motives of Harvey
and all kinds of hybrids of the two. People enlisted and fought,
worked, paid taxes, sacrificed to a common end, and yet no one can
begin to say exactly what moved each person to do each thing that he
did. It is no use, then, Mr. Harvey telling a soldier who thought this
was a war to end war that the soldier did not think any such thing.
The soldier who thought that _thought that_. And Mr. Harvey, who
thought something else, thought _something else_.

In the same speech Mr. Harvey formulated with equal clarity what the
voters of 1920 had in their minds. That is a rash thing to do, and, if
you simply assume that all who voted your ticket voted as you did,
then it is a disingenuous thing to do. The count shows that sixteen
millions voted Republican, and nine millions Democratic. They voted,
says Mr. Harvey, for and against the League of Nations, and in support
of this claim, he can point to Mr. Wilson's request for a referendum,
and to the undeniable fact that the Democratic party and Mr. Cox
insisted that the League was the issue. But then, saying that the
League was the issue did not make the League the issue, and by
counting the votes on election day you do not know the real division
of opinion about the League. There were, for example, nine million
Democrats. Are you entitled to believe that all of them are staunch
supporters of the League? Certainly you are not. For your knowledge of
American politics tells you that many of the millions voted, as they
always do, to maintain the existing social system in the South, and
that whatever their views on the League, they did not vote to express
their views. Those who wanted the League were no doubt pleased that
the Democratic party wanted it too. Those who disliked the League may
have held their noses as they voted. But both groups of Southerners
voted the same ticket.

Were the Republicans more unanimous? Anybody can pick Republican
voters enough out of his circle of friends to cover the whole gamut of
opinion from the irreconcilability of Senators Johnson and Knox to the
advocacy of Secretary Hoover and Chief Justice Taft. No one can say
definitely how many people felt in any particular way about the
League, nor how many people let their feelings on that subject
determine their vote. When there are only two ways of expressing a
hundred varieties of feeling, there is no certain way of knowing what
the decisive combination was. Senator Borah found in the Republican
ticket a reason for voting Republican, but so did President Lowell.
The Republican majority was composed of men and women who thought a
Republican victory would kill the League, plus those who thought it
the most practical way to secure the League, plus those who thought it
the surest way offered to obtain an amended League. All these voters
were inextricably entangled with their own desire, or the desire of
other voters to improve business, or put labor in its place, or to
punish the Democrats for going to war, or to punish them for not
having gone sooner, or to get rid of Mr. Burleson, or to improve the
price of wheat, or to lower taxes, or to stop Mr. Daniels from
outbuilding the world, or to help Mr. Harding do the same thing.

And yet a sort of decision emerged; Mr. Harding moved into the White
House. For the least common denominator of all the votes was that the
Democrats should go and the Republicans come in. That was the only
factor remaining after all the contradictions had cancelled each other
out. But that factor was enough to alter policy for four years. The
precise reasons why change was desired on that November day in 1920
are not recorded, not even in the memories of the individual voters.
The reasons are not fixed. They grow and change and melt into other
reasons, so that the public opinions Mr. Harding has to deal with are
not the opinions that elected him. That there is no inevitable
connection between an assortment of opinions and a particular line of
action everyone saw in 1916. Elected apparently on the cry that he
kept us out of war, Mr. Wilson within five months led the country into
war.

The working of the popular will, therefore, has always called for
explanation. Those who have been most impressed by its erratic working
have found a prophet in M. LeBon, and have welcomed generalizations
about what Sir Robert Peel called "that great compound of folly,
weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and
newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion." Others have
concluded that since out of drift and incoherence, settled aims do
appear, there must be a mysterious contrivance at work somewhere over
and above the inhabitants of a nation. They invoke a collective soul,
a national mind, a spirit of the age which imposes order upon random
opinion. An oversoul seems to be needed, for the emotions and ideas in
the members of a group do not disclose anything so simple and so
crystalline as the formula which those same individuals will accept as
a true statement of their Public Opinion.

2

But the facts can, I think, be explained more convincingly without the
help of the oversoul in any of its disguises. After all, the art of
inducing all sorts of people who think differently to vote alike is
practiced in every political campaign. In 1916, for example, the
Republican candidate had to produce Republican votes out of many
different kinds of Republicans. Let us look at Mr. Hughes' first
speech after accepting the nomination. [Footnote: Delivered at Carnegie
Hall, New York City, July 31, 1916.] The context is still clear enough
in our minds to obviate much explanation; yet the issues are no longer
contentious. The candidate was a man of unusually plain speech, who
had been out of politics for several years and was not personally
committed on the issues of the recent past. He had, moreover, none of
that wizardry which popular leaders like Roosevelt, Wilson, or Lloyd
George possess, none of that histrionic gift by which such men
impersonate the feelings of their followers. From that aspect of
politics he was by temperament and by training remote. But yet he knew
by calculation what the politician's technic is. He was one of those
people who know just how to do a thing, but who can not quite do it
themselves. They are often better teachers than the virtuoso to whom
the art is so much second nature that he himself does not know how he
does it. The statement that those who can, do; those who cannot,
teach, is not nearly so much of a reflection on the teacher as it
sounds.

Mr. Hughes knew the occasion was momentous, and he had prepared his
manuscript carefully. In a box sat Theodore Roosevelt just back from
Missouri. All over the house sat the veterans of Armageddon in various
stages of doubt and dismay. On the platform and in the other boxes the
ex-whited sepulchres and ex-second-story men of 1912 were to be seen,
obviously in the best of health and in a melting mood. Out beyond the
hall there were powerful pro-Germans and powerful pro-Allies; a war
party in the East and in the big cities; a peace party in the middle
and far West. There was strong feeling about Mexico. Mr. Hughes had to
form a majority against the Democrats out of people divided into all
sorts of combinations on Taft vs. Roosevelt, pro-Germans vs.
pro-Allies, war vs. neutrality, Mexican intervention vs.
non-intervention.

About the morality or the wisdom of the affair we are, of course, not
concerned here. Our only interest is in the method by which a leader
of heterogeneous opinion goes about the business of securing a
homogeneous vote.

"This _representative_ gathering is a happy augury. It means the
strength of _reunion._ It means that the party of _Lincoln_
is restored...."

The italicized words are binders: _Lincoln_ in such a speech has
of course, no relation to Abraham Lincoln. It is merely a stereotype
by which the piety which surrounds that name can be transferred to the
Republican candidate who now stands in his shoes. Lincoln reminds the
Republicans, Bull Moose and Old Guard, that before the schism they had
a common history. About the schism no one can afford to speak. But it
is there, as yet unhealed.

The speaker must heal it. Now the schism of 1912 had arisen over
domestic questions; the reunion of 1916 was, as Mr. Roosevelt had
declared, to be based on a common indignation against Mr. Wilson's
conduct of international affairs. But international affairs were also
a dangerous source of conflict. It was necessary to find an opening
subject which would not only ignore 1912 but would avoid also the
explosive conflicts of 1916. The speaker skilfully selected the spoils
system in diplomatic appointments. "Deserving Democrats" was a
discrediting phrase, and Mr. Hughes at once evokes it. The record
being indefensible, there is no hesitation in the vigor of the attack.
Logically it was an ideal introduction to a common mood.

Mr. Hughes then turns to Mexico, beginning with an historical review.
He had to consider the general sentiment that affairs were going badly
in Mexico; also, a no less general sentiment that war should be
avoided; and two powerful currents of opinion, one of which said
President Wilson was right in not recognizing Huerta, the other which
preferred Huerta to Carranza, and intervention to both. Huerta was the
first sore spot in the record...

"He was certainly in fact the head of the Government in Mexico."

But the moralists who regarded Huerta as a drunken murderer had to be
placated.

"Whether or not he should be recognized was a question to be
determined in the exercise of a sound discretion, but according to
correct principles."

So instead of saying that Huerta should have been recognized, the
candidate says that correct principles ought to be applied. Everybody
believes in correct principles, and everybody, of course, believes he
possesses them. To blur the issue still further President Wilson's
policy is described as "intervention." It was that in law, perhaps,
but not in the sense then currently meant by the word. By stretching
the word to cover what Mr. Wilson had done, as well as what the real
interventionists wanted, the issue between the two factions was to be
repressed.

Having got by the two explosive points "_Huerta_" and
"_intervention_" by letting the words mean all things to all men,
the speech passes for a while to safer ground. The candidate tells the
story of Tampico, Vera Cruz, Villa, Santa Ysabel, Columbus and
Carrizal. Mr. Hughes is specific, either because the facts as known
from the newspapers are irritating, or because the true explanation
is, as for example in regard to Tampico, too complicated. No contrary
passions could be aroused by such a record. But at the end the
candidate had to take a position. His audience expected it. The
indictment was Mr. Roosevelt's. Would Mr. Hughes adopt his remedy,
intervention?

"The nation has no policy of aggression toward Mexico. We have no
desire for any part of her territory. We wish her to have peace,
stability and prosperity. We should be ready to aid her in binding up
her wounds, in relieving her from starvation and distress, in giving
her in every practicable way the benefits of our disinterested
friendship. The conduct of this administration has created
difficulties which we shall have to surmount.... _We shall have to
adopt a new policy,_ a policy of _firmness_ and consistency
through which alone we can promote an enduring _friendship._"

The theme friendship is for the non-interventionists, the theme "new
policy" and "firmness" is for the interventionists. On the
non-contentious record, the detail is overwhelming; on the issue
everything is cloudy.

Concerning the European war Mr. Hughes employed an ingenious formula:

"I stand for the unflinching maintenance of _all_ American rights
on land and sea."

In order to understand the force of that statement at the time it was
spoken, we must remember how each faction during the period of
neutrality believed that the nations it opposed in Europe were alone
violating American rights. Mr. Hughes seemed to say to the pro-Allies:
I would have coerced Germany. But the pro-Germans had been insisting
that British sea power was violating most of our rights. The formula
covers two diametrically opposed purposes by the symbolic phrase
"American rights."

But there was the Lusitania. Like the 1912 schism, it was an
invincible obstacle to harmony.

"... I am confident that there would have been no destruction of
American lives by the sinking of the Lusitania."

Thus, what cannot be compromised must be obliterated, when there is a
question on which we cannot all hope to get together, let us pretend
that it does not exist. About the future of American relations with
Europe Mr. Hughes was silent. Nothing he could say would possibly
please the two irreconcilable factions for whose support he was
bidding.

It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Hughes did not invent this
technic and did not employ it with the utmost success. But he
illustrated how a public opinion constituted out of divergent opinions
is clouded; how its meaning approaches the neutral tint formed out of
the blending of many colors. Where superficial harmony is the aim and
conflict the fact, obscurantism in a public appeal is the usual
result. Almost always vagueness at a crucial point in public debate is
a symptom of cross-purposes.

3

But how is it that a vague idea so often has the power to unite deeply
felt opinions? These opinions, we recall, however deeply they may be
felt, are not in continual and pungent contact with the facts they
profess to treat. On the unseen environment, Mexico, the European war,
our grip is slight though our feeling may be intense. The original
pictures and words which aroused it have not anything like the force
of the feeling itself. The account of what has happened out of sight
and hearing in a place where we have never been, has not and never can
have, except briefly as in a dream or fantasy, all the dimensions of
reality. But it can arouse all, and sometimes even more emotion than
the reality. For the trigger can be pulled by more than one stimulus.

The stimulus which originally pulled the trigger may have been a
series of pictures in the mind aroused by printed or spoken words.
These pictures fade and are hard to keep steady; their contours and
their pulse fluctuate. Gradually the process sets in of knowing what
you feel without being entirely certain why you feel it. The fading
pictures are displaced by other pictures, and then by names or
symbols. But the emotion goes on, capable now of being aroused by the
substituted images and names. Even in severe thinking these
substitutions take place, for if a man is trying to compare two
complicated situations, he soon finds exhausting the attempt to hold
both fully in mind in all their detail. He employs a shorthand of
names and signs and samples. He has to do this if he is to advance at
all, because he cannot carry the whole baggage in every phrase through
every step he takes. But if he forgets that he has substituted and
simplified, he soon lapses into verbalism, and begins to talk about
names regardless of objects. And then he has no way of knowing when
the name divorced from its first thing is carrying on a misalliance
with some other thing. It is more difficult still to guard against
changelings in casual politics.

For by what is known to psychologists as conditioned response, an
emotion is not attached merely to one idea. There are no end of things
which can arouse the emotion, and no end of things which can satisfy
it. This is particularly true where the stimulus is only dimly and
indirectly perceived, and where the objective is likewise indirect.
For you can associate an emotion, say fear, first with something
immediately dangerous, then with the idea of that thing, then with
something similar to that idea, and so on and on. The whole structure
of human culture is in one respect an elaboration of the stimuli and
responses of which the original emotional capacities remain a fairly
fixed center. No doubt the quality of emotion has changed in the
course of history, but with nothing like the speed, or elaboration,
that has characterized the conditioning of it.

People differ widely in their susceptibility to ideas. There are some
in whom the idea of a starving child in Russia is practically as vivid
as a starving child within sight. There are others who are almost
incapable of being excited by a distant idea. There are many
gradations between. And there are people who are insensitive to facts,
and aroused only by ideas. But though the emotion is aroused by the
idea, we are unable to satisfy the emotion by acting ourselves upon
the scene itself. The idea of the starving Russian child evokes a
desire to feed the child. But the person so aroused cannot feed it. He
can only give money to an impersonal organization, or to a
personification which he calls Mr. Hoover. His money does not reach
that child. It goes to a general pool from which a mass of children
are fed. And so just as the idea is second hand, so are the effects of
the action second hand. The cognition is indirect, the conation is
indirect, only the effect is immediate. Of the three parts of the
process, the stimulus comes from somewhere out of sight, the response
reaches somewhere out of sight, only the emotion exists entirely
within the person. Of the child's hunger he has only an idea, of the
child's relief he has only an idea, but of his own desire to help he
has a real experience. It is the central fact of the business, the
emotion within himself, which is first hand.

Within limits that vary, the emotion is transferable both as regards
stimulus and response. Therefore, if among a number of people,
possessing various tendencies to respond, you can find a stimulus
which will arouse the same emotion in many of them, you can substitute
it for the original stimuli. If, for example, one man dislikes the
League, another hates Mr. Wilson, and a third fears labor, you may be
able to unite them if you can find some symbol which is the antithesis
of what they all hate. Suppose that symbol is Americanism. The first
man may read it as meaning the preservation of American isolation, or
as he may call it, independence; the second as the rejection of a
politician who clashes with his idea of what an American president
should be, the third as a call to resist revolution. The symbol in
itself signifies literally no one thing in particular, but it can be
associated with almost anything. And because of that it can become the
common bond of common feelings, even though those feelings were
originally attached to disparate ideas.

When political parties or newspapers declare for Americanism,
Progressivism, Law and Order, Justice, Humanity, they hope to
amalgamate the emotion of conflicting factions which would surely
divide, if, instead of these symbols, they were invited to discuss a
specific program. For when a coalition around the symbol has been
effected, feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather than
toward critical scrutiny of the measures. It is, I think, convenient
and technically correct to call multiple phrases like these symbolic.
They do not stand for specific ideas, but for a sort of truce or
junction between ideas. They are like a strategic railroad center
where many roads converge regardless of their ultimate origin or their
ultimate destination. But he who captures the symbols by which public
feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the
approaches of public policy. And as long as a particular symbol has
the power of coalition, ambitious factions will fight for possession.
Think, for example, of Lincoln's name or of Roosevelt's. A leader or
an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master
of the current situation. There are limits, of course. Too violent
abuse of the actualities which groups of people think the symbol
represents, or too great resistance in the name of that symbol to new
purposes, will, so to speak, burst the symbol. In this manner, during
the year 1917, the imposing symbol of Holy Russia and the Little
Father burst under the impact of suffering and defeat.