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4

The tremendous consequences of Russia's collapse were felt on all the
fronts and among all the peoples. They led directly to a striking
experiment in the crystallization of a common opinion out of the
varieties of opinion churned up by the war. The Fourteen Points were
addressed to all the governments, allied, enemy, neutral, and to all
the peoples. They were an attempt to knit together the chief
imponderables of a world war. Necessarily this was a new departure,
because this was the first great war in which all the deciding
elements of mankind could be brought to think about the same ideas, or
at least about the same names for ideas, simultaneously. Without
cable, radio, telegraph, and daily press, the experiment of the
Fourteen Points would have been impossible. It was an attempt to
exploit the modern machinery of communication to start the return to a
"common consciousness" throughout the world.

But first we must examine some of the circumstances as they presented
themselves at the end of 1917. For in the form which the document
finally assumed, all these considerations are somehow represented.
During the summer and autumn a series of events had occurred which
profoundly affected the temper of the people and the course of the
war. In July the Russians had made a last offensive, had been
disastrously beaten, and the process of demoralization which led to
the Bolshevik revolution of November had begun. Somewhat earlier the
French had suffered a severe and almost disastrous defeat in Champagne
which produced mutinies in the army and a defeatist agitation among
the civilians. England was suffering from the effects of the submarine
raids, from the terrible losses of the Flanders battles, and in
November at Cambrai the British armies met a reverse that appalled the
troops at the front and the leaders at home. Extreme war weariness
pervaded the whole of western Europe.

In effect, the agony and disappointment had jarred loose men's
concentration on the accepted version of the war. Their interests were
no longer held by the ordinary official pronouncements, and their
attention began to wander, fixing now upon their own suffering, now
upon their party and class purposes, now upon general resentments
against the governments. That more or less perfect organization of
perception by official propaganda, of interest and attention by the
stimuli of hope, fear, and hatred, which is called morale, was by way
of breaking down. The minds of men everywhere began to search for new
attachments that promised relief.

Suddenly they beheld a tremendous drama. On the Eastern front there
was a Christmas truce, an end of slaughter, an end of noise, a promise
of peace. At Brest-Litovsk the dream of all simple people had come to
life: it was possible to negotiate, there was some other way to end
the ordeal than by matching lives with the enemy. Timidly, but with
rapt attention, people began to turn to the East. Why not, they asked?
What is it all for? Do the politicians know what they are doing? Are
we really fighting for what they say? Is it possible, perhaps, to
secure it without fighting? Under the ban of the censorship, little of
this was allowed to show itself in print, but, when Lord Lansdowne
spoke, there was a response from the heart. The earlier symbols of the
war had become hackneyed, and had lost their power to unify. Beneath
the surface a wide schism was opening up in each Allied country.

Something similar was happening in Central Europe. There too the
original impulse of the war was weakened; the union sacrée was broken.
The vertical cleavages along the battle front were cut across by
horizontal divisions running in all kinds of unforeseeable ways. The
moral crisis of the war had arrived before the military decision was
in sight. All this President Wilson and his advisers realized. They
had not, of course, a perfect knowledge of the situation, but what I
have sketched they knew.

They knew also that the Allied Governments were bound by a series of
engagements that in letter and in spirit ran counter to the popular
conception of what the war was about. The resolutions of the Paris
Economic Conference were, of course, public property, and the network
of secret treaties had been published by the Bolsheviks in November of
1917. [Footnote: President Wilson stated at his conference with the
Senators that he had never heard of these treaties until he reached
Paris. That statement is perplexing. The Fourteen Points, as the text
shows, could not have been formulated without a knowledge of the
secret treaties. The substance of those treaties was before the
President when he and Colonel House prepared the final published text
of the Fourteen Points.] Their terms were only vaguely known to the
peoples, but it was definitely believed that they did not comport with
the idealistic slogan of self-determination, no annexations and no
indemnities. Popular questioning took the form of asking how many
thousand English lives Alsace-Lorraine or Dalmatia were worth, how
many French lives Poland or Mesopotamia were worth. Nor was such
questioning entirely unknown in America. The whole Allied cause had
been put on the defensive by the refusal to participate at
Brest-Litovsk.

Here was a highly sensitive state of mind which no competent leader
could fail to consider. The ideal response would have been joint
action by the Allies. That was found to be impossible when it was
considered at the Interallied Conference of October. But by December
the pressure had become so great that Mr. George and Mr. Wilson were
moved independently to make some response. The form selected by the
President was a statement of peace terms under fourteen heads. The
numbering of them was an artifice to secure precision, and to create
at once the impression that here was a business-like document. The
idea of stating "peace terms" instead of "war aims" arose from the
necessity of establishing a genuine alternative to the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations. They were intended to compete for attention by
substituting for the spectacle of Russo-German parleys the much
grander spectacle of a public world-wide debate.

Having enlisted the interest of the world, it was necessary to hold
that interest unified and flexible for all the different possibilities
which the situation contained. The terms had to be such that the
majority among the Allies would regard them as worth while. They had
to meet the national aspirations of each people, and yet to limit
those aspirations so that no one nation would regard itself as a
catspaw for another. The terms had to satisfy official interests so as
not to provoke official disunion, and yet they had to meet popular
conceptions so as to prevent the spread of demoralization. They had,
in short, to preserve and confirm Allied unity in case the war was to
go on.

But they had also to be the terms of a possible peace, so that in case
the German center and left were ripe for agitation, they would have a
text with which to smite the governing class. The terms had,
therefore, to push the Allied governors nearer to their people, drive
the German governors away from their people, and establish a line of
common understanding between the Allies, the non-official Germans, and
the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary. The Fourteen Points were a
daring attempt to raise a standard to which almost everyone might
repair. If a sufficient number of the enemy people were ready there
would be peace; if not, then the Allies would be better prepared to
sustain the shock of war.

All these considerations entered into the making of the Fourteen
Points. No one man may have had them all in mind, but all the men
concerned had some of them in mind. Against this background let us
examine certain aspects of the document. The first five points and the
fourteenth deal with "open diplomacy," "freedom of the seas," "equal
trade opportunities," "reduction of armaments," no imperialist
annexation of colonies, and the League of Nations. They might be
described as a statement of the popular generalizations in which
everyone at that time professed to believe. But number three is more
specific. It was aimed consciously and directly at the resolutions of
the Paris Economic Conference, and was meant to relieve the German
people of their fear of suffocation.

Number six is the first point dealing with a particular nation. It was
intended as a reply to Russian suspicion of the Allies, and the
eloquence of its promises was attuned to the drama of Brest-Litovsk.
Number seven deals with Belgium, and is as unqualified in form and
purpose as was the conviction of practically the whole world,
including very large sections of Central Europe. Over number eight we
must pause. It begins with an absolute demand for evacuation and
restoration of French territory, and then passes on to the question of
Alsace-Lorraine. The phrasing of this clause most perfectly
illustrates the character of a public statement which must condense a
vast complex of interests in a few words. "And the wrong done to
France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has
unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be
righted. ..." Every word here was chosen with meticulous care. The
wrong done should be righted; why not say that Alsace-Lorraine should
be restored? It was not said, because it was not certain that all of
the French _at that time_ would fight on indefinitely for
reannexation if they were offered a plebiscite; and because it was
even less certain whether the English and Italians would fight on. The
formula had, therefore, to cover both contingencies. The word
"righted" guaranteed satisfaction to France, but did not read as a
commitment to simple annexation. But why speak of the wrong done by
_Prussia_ in _1871_? The word Prussia was, of course, intended
to remind the South Germans that Alsace-Lorraine belonged not to
them but to Prussia. Why speak of peace unsettled for "fifty years,"
and why the use of "1871"? In the first place, what the French and
the rest of the world remembered was 1871. That was the nodal
point of their grievance. But the formulators of the Fourteen Points
knew that French officialdom planned for more than the Alsace-Lorraine
of 1871. The secret memoranda that had passed between the Czar's
ministers and French officials in 1916 covered the annexation of the
Saar Valley and some sort of dismemberment of the Rhineland. It was
planned to include the Saar Valley under the term "Alsace-Lorraine"
because it had been part of Alsace-Lorraine in 1814, though it had
been detached in 1815, and was no part of the territory at the close
of the Franco-Prussian war. The official French formula for annexing
the Saar was to subsume it under "Alsace-Lorraine" meaning the
Alsace-Lorraine of 1814-1815. By insistence on "1871" the President
was really defining the ultimate boundary between Germany and France,
was adverting to the secret treaty, and was casting it aside.

Number nine, a little less subtly, does the same thing in respect to
Italy. "Clearly recognizable lines of nationality" are exactly what
the lines of the Treaty of London were not. Those lines were partly
strategic, partly economic, partly imperialistic, partly ethnic. The
only part of them that could possibly procure allied sympathy was that
which would recover the genuine Italia Irredenta. All the rest, as
everyone who was informed knew, merely delayed the impending Jugoslav
revolt.

5

It would be a mistake to suppose that the apparently unanimous
enthusiasm which greeted the Fourteen Points represented agreement on
a program. Everyone seemed to find something that he liked and
stressed this aspect and that detail. But no one risked a discussion.
The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the
civilized world, were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but
they evoked a common emotion. And to that extent they played a part in
rallying the western peoples for the desperate ten months of war which
they had still to endure.

As long as the Fourteen Points dealt with that hazy and happy future
when the agony was to be over, the real conflicts of interpretation
were not made manifest. They were plans for the settlement of a wholly
invisible environment, and because these plans inspired all groups
each with its own private hope, all hopes ran together as a public
hope. For harmonization, as we saw in Mr. Hughes's speech, is a
hierarchy of symbols. As you ascend the hierarchy in order to include
more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional
connection though you lose the intellectual. But even the emotion
becomes thinner. As you go further away from experience, you go higher
into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw
more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached
the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made
Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little. Yet
the people whose emotions are entrained do not remain passive. As the
public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the
emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private
meanings are given a universal application. Whatever you want badly is
the Rights of Humanity. For the phrase, ever more vacant, capable of
meaning almost anything, soon comes to mean pretty nearly everything.
Mr. Wilson's phrases were understood in endlessly different ways in
every corner of the earth. No document negotiated and made of public
record existed to correct the confusion. [Footnote: The American
interpretation of the fourteen points was explained to the allied
statesmen just before the armistice.] And so, when the day of
settlement came, everybody expected everything. The European authors
of the treaty had a large choice, and they chose to realize those
expectations which were held by those of their countrymen who wielded
the most power at home.

They came down the hierarchy from the Rights of Humanity to the Rights
of France, Britain and Italy. They did not abandon the use of symbols.
They abandoned only those which after the war had no permanent roots
in the imagination of their constituents. They preserved the unity of
France by the use of symbolism, but they would not risk anything for
the unity of Europe. The symbol France was deeply attached, the symbol
Europe had only a recent history. Nevertheless the distinction between
an omnibus like Europe and a symbol like France is not sharp. The
history of states and empires reveals times when the scope of the
unifying idea increases and also times when it shrinks. One cannot say
that men have moved consistently from smaller loyalties to larger
ones, because the facts will not bear out the claim. The Roman Empire
and the Holy Roman Empire bellied out further than those national
unifications in the Nineteenth Century from which believers in a World
State argue by analogy. Nevertheless, it is probably true that the
real integration has increased regardless of the temporary inflation
and deflation of empires.

6

Such a real integration has undoubtedly occurred in American history.
In the decade before 1789 most men, it seems, felt that their state
and their community were real, but that the confederation of states
was unreal. The idea of their state, its flag, its most conspicuous
leaders, or whatever it was that represented Massachusetts, or
Virginia, were genuine symbols. That is to say, they were fed by
actual experiences from childhood, occupation, residence, and the
like. The span of men's experience had rarely traversed the imaginary
boundaries of their states. The word Virginian was related to pretty
nearly everything that most Virginians had ever known or felt. It was
the most extensive political idea which had genuine contact with their
experience.

Their experience, not their needs. For their needs arose out of their
real environment, which in those days was at least as large as the
thirteen colonies. They needed a common defense. They needed a
financial and economic regime as extensive as the Confederation. But
as long as the pseudo-environment of the state encompassed them, the
state symbols exhausted their political interest. An interstate idea,
like the Confederation, represented a powerless abstraction. It was an
omnibus, rather than a symbol, and the harmony among divergent groups,
which the omnibus creates, is transient.

I have said that the idea of confederation was a powerless
abstraction. Yet the need of unity existed in the decade before the
Constitution was adopted. The need existed, in the sense that affairs
were askew unless the need of unity was taken into account. Gradually
certain classes in each colony began to break through the state
experience. Their personal interests led across the state lines to
interstate experiences, and gradually there was constructed in their
minds a picture of the American environment which was truly national
in scope. For them the idea of federation became a true symbol, and
ceased to be an omnibus. The most imaginative of these men was
Alexander Hamilton. It happened that he had no primitive attachment to
any one state, for he was born in the West Indies, and had, from the
very beginning of his active life, been associated with the common
interests of all the states. Thus to most men of the time the question
of whether the capital should be in Virginia or in Philadelphia was of
enormous importance, because they were locally minded. To Hamilton
this question was of no emotional consequence; what he wanted was the
assumption of the state debts because they would further nationalize
the proposed union. So he gladly traded the site of the capitol for
two necessary votes from men who represented the Potomac district. To
Hamilton the Union was a symbol that represented all his interests and
his whole experience; to White and Lee from the Potomac, the symbol of
their province was the highest political entity they served, and they
served it though they hated to pay the price. They agreed, says
Jefferson, to change their votes, "White with a revulsion of stomach
almost convulsive." [Footnote: _Works,_ Vol. IX, p. 87. Cited by
Beard, _Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy,_ p. 172.]

In the crystallizing of a common will, there is always an Alexander
Hamilton at work.

CHAPTER XIV

YES OR NO

1

Symbols are often so useful and so mysteriously powerful that the word
itself exhales a magical glamor. In thinking about symbols it is
tempting to treat them as if they possessed independent energy. Yet no
end of symbols which once provoked ecstasy have quite ceased to affect
anybody. The museums and the books of folklore are full of dead
emblems and incantations, since there is no power in the symbol,
except that which it acquires by association in the human mind. The
symbols that have lost their power, and the symbols incessantly
suggested which fail to take root, remind us that if we were patient
enough to study in detail the circulation of a symbol, we should
behold an entirely secular history.

In the Hughes campaign speech, in the Fourteen Points, in Hamilton's
project, symbols are employed. But they are employed by somebody at a
particular moment. The words themselves do not crystallize random
feeling. The words must be spoken by people who are strategically
placed, and they must be spoken at the opportune moment. Otherwise
they are mere wind. The symbols must be earmarked. For in themselves
they mean nothing, and the choice of possible symbols is always so
great that we should, like the donkey who stood equidistant between
two bales of hay, perish from sheer indecision among the symbols that
compete for our attention.

Here, for example, are the reasons for their vote as stated by certain
private citizens to a newspaper just before the election of 1920.

For Harding:

"The patriotic men and women of to-day, who cast their ballots for
Harding and Coolidge will be held by posterity to have signed our
Second Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilmot--, inventor.

"He will see to it that the United States does not enter into
'entangling alliances,' Washington as a city will benefit by changing
the control of the government from the Democrats to the Republicans."

Mr. Clarence--, salesman.

For Cox:

"The people of the United States realize that it is our duty pledged
on the fields of France, to join the League of Nations. We must
shoulder our share of the burden of enforcing peace throughout the
world."

Miss Marie--, stenographer.

"We should lose our own respect and the respect of other nations were
we to refuse to enter the League of Nations in obtaining international
peace."

Mr. Spencer--, statistician.

The two sets of phrases are equally noble, equally true, and almost
reversible. Would Clarence and Wilmot have admitted for an instant
that they intended to default in our duty pledged on the fields of
France; or that they did not desire international peace? Certainly
not. Would Marie and Spencer have admitted that they were in favor of
entangling alliances or the surrender of American independence? They
would have argued with you that the League was, as President Wilson
called it, a disentangling alliance, as well as a Declaration of
Independence for all the world, plus a Monroe Doctrine for the planet.

2

Since the offering of symbols is so generous, and the meaning that can
be imputed is so elastic, how does any particular symbol take root in
any particular person's mind? It is planted there by another human
being whom we recognize as authoritative. If it is planted deeply
enough, it may be that later we shall call the person authoritative
who waves that symbol at us. But in the first instance symbols are
made congenial and important because they are introduced to us by
congenial and important people.

For we are not born out of an egg at the age of eighteen with a
realistic imagination; we are still, as Mr. Shaw recalls, in the era
of Burge and Lubin, where in infancy we are dependent upon older
beings for our contacts. And so we make our connections with the outer
world through certain beloved and authoritative persons. They are the
first bridge to the invisible world. And though we may gradually
master for ourselves many phases of that larger environment, there
always remains a vaster one that is unknown. To that we still relate
ourselves through authorities. Where all the facts are out of sight a
true report and a plausible error read alike, sound alike, feel alike.

Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot
choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between
trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters. [Footnote: See an
interesting, rather quaint old book: George Cornewall Lewis, _An
Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion_.]

Theoretically we ought to choose the most expert on each subject. But
the choice of the expert, though a good deal easier than the choice of
truth, is still too difficult and often impracticable. The experts
themselves are not in the least certain who among them is the most
expert. And at that, the expert, even when we can identify him, is,
likely as not, too busy to be consulted, or impossible to get at. But
there are people whom we can identify easily enough because they are
the people who are at the head of affairs. Parents, teachers, and
masterful friends are the first people of this sort we encounter. Into
the difficult question of why children trust one parent rather than
another, the history teacher rather than the Sunday school teacher, we
need not try to enter. Nor how trust gradually spreads through a
newspaper or an acquaintance who is interested in public affairs to
public personages. The literature of psychoanalysis is rich in
suggestive hypothesis.

At any rate we do find ourselves trusting certain people, who
constitute our means of junction with pretty nearly the whole realm of
unknown things. Strangely enough, this fact is sometimes regarded as
inherently undignified, as evidence of our sheep-like, ape-like
nature. But complete independence in the universe is simply
unthinkable. If we could not take practically everything for granted,
we should spend our lives in utter triviality. The nearest thing to a
wholly independent adult is a hermit, and the range of a hermit's
action is very short. Acting entirely for himself, he can act only
within a tiny radius and for simple ends. If he has time to think
great thoughts we can be certain that he has accepted without
question, before he went in for being a hermit, a whole repertory of
painfully acquired information about how to keep warm and how to keep
from being hungry, and also about what the great questions are.

On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the
utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the
authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing. As congenital amateurs
our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing
them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction. In such a
debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we
are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the
debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has
brought into the argument. We shall see later how the democratic
theory proceeds on the opposite assumption and assumes for the
purposes of government an unlimited supply of self-sufficient
individuals.

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