George Barr McCutcheon - "Mr. Bingle"

Henry James - "The Point of View"

Marie Corelli - "Innocent"

Joseph Edmund Collins - "Annette, The Metis Spy"

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.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Public Opinion

W >> Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion




That is the radical way. For the troubles of the press, like the
troubles of representative government, be it territorial or
functional, like the troubles of industry, be it capitalist,
cooperative, or communist, go back to a common source: to the failure
of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and
their prejudice, by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of
knowledge. It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable
picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and
churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of
democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the
curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for
sideshows and three legged calves. This is the primary defect of
popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its
other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one.




PART VIII

ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE

CHAPTER XXV. THE ENTERING WEDGE
" XXVI. INTELLIGENCE WORK
" XXVII. THE APPEAL TO THE PUBLIC
" XXVIII. THE APPEAL TO REASON




CHAPTER XXV

THE ENTERING WEDGE

1

If the remedy were interesting, American pioneers like Charles
McCarthy, Robert Valentine, and Frederick W. Taylor would not have had
to fight so hard for a hearing. But it is clear why they had to fight,
and why bureaus of governmental research, industrial audits, budgeting
and the like are the ugly ducklings of reform. They reverse the
process by which interesting public opinions are built up. Instead of
presenting a casual fact, a large screen of stereotypes, and a
dramatic identification, they break down the drama, break through the
stereotypes, and offer men a picture of facts, which is unfamiliar and
to them impersonal. When this is not painful, it is dull, and those to
whom it is painful, the trading politician and the partisan who has
much to conceal, often exploit the dullness that the public feels, in
order to remove the pain that they feel.

2

Yet every complicated community has sought the assistance of special
men, of augurs, priests, elders. Our own democracy, based though it
was on a theory of universal competence, sought lawyers to manage its
government, and to help manage its industry. It was recognized that
the specially trained man was in some dim way oriented to a wider
system of truth than that which arises spontaneously in the amateur's
mind. But experience has shown that the traditional lawyer's equipment
was not enough assistance. The Great Society had grown furiously and
to colossal dimensions by the application of technical knowledge. It
was made by engineers who had learned to use exact measurements and
quantitative analysis. It could not be governed, men began to
discover, by men who thought deductively about rights and wrongs. It
could be brought under human control only by the technic which had
created it. Gradually, then, the more enlightened directing minds have
called in experts who were trained, or had trained themselves, to make
parts of this Great Society intelligible to those who manage it. These
men are known by all kinds of names, as statisticians, accountants,
auditors, industrial counsellors, engineers of many species,
scientific managers, personnel administrators, research men,
"scientists," and sometimes just as plain private secretaries. They
have brought with them each a jargon of his own, as well as filing
cabinets, card catalogues, graphs, loose-leaf contraptions, and above
all the perfectly sound ideal of an executive who sits before a
flat-top desk, one sheet of typewritten paper before him, and decides
on matters of policy presented in a form ready for his rejection or
approval.

This whole development has been the work, not so much of a spontaneous
creative evolution, as of blind natural selection. The statesman, the
executive, the party leader, the head of a voluntary association,
found that if he had to discuss two dozen different subjects in the
course of the day, somebody would have to coach him. He began to
clamor for memoranda. He found he could not read his mail. He demanded
somebody who would blue-pencil the interesting sentences in the
important letters. He found he could not digest the great stacks of
type-written reports that grew mellow on his desk. He demanded
summaries. He found he could not read an unending series of figures.
He embraced the man who made colored pictures of them. He found that
he really did not know one machine from another. He hired engineers to
pick them, and tell him how much they cost and what they could do. He
peeled off one burden after another, as a man will take off first his
hat, then his coat, then his collar, when he is struggling to move an
unwieldy load.

3

Yet curiously enough, though he knew that he needed help, he was slow
to call in the social scientist. The chemist, the physicist, the
geologist, had a much earlier and more friendly reception.
Laboratories were set up for them, inducements offered, for there was
quick appreciation of the victories over nature. But the scientist who
has human nature as his problem is in a different case. There are many
reasons for this: the chief one, that he has so few victories to
exhibit. He has so few, because unless he deals with the historic
past, he cannot prove his theories before offering them to the public.
The physical scientist can make an hypothesis, test it, revise the
hypothesis hundreds of times, and, if after all that, he is wrong, no
one else has to pay the price. But the social scientist cannot begin
to offer the assurance of a laboratory test, and if his advice is
followed, and he is wrong, the consequences may be incalculable. He is
in the nature of things far more responsible, and far less certain.

But more than that. In the laboratory sciences the student has
conquered the dilemma of thought and action. He brings a sample of the
action to a quiet place, where it can be repeated at will, and
examined at leisure. But the social scientist is constantly being
impaled on a dilemma. If he stays in his library, where he has the
leisure to think, he has to rely upon the exceedingly casual and
meager printed record that comes to him through official reports,
newspapers, and interviews. If he goes out into "the world" where
things are happening, he has to serve a long, often wasteful,
apprenticeship, before he is admitted to the sanctum where they are
being decided. What he cannot do is to dip into action and out again
whenever it suits him. There are no privileged listeners. The man of
affairs, observing that the social scientist knows only from the
outside what he knows, in part at least, from the inside, recognizing
that the social scientist's hypothesis is not in the nature of things
susceptible of laboratory proof, and that verification is possible
only in the "real" world, has developed a rather low opinion of social
scientists who do not share his views of public policy.

In his heart of hearts the social scientist shares this estimate of
himself. He has little inner certainty about his own work. He only
half believes in it, and being sure of nothing, he can find no
compelling reason for insisting on his own freedom of thought. What
can he actually claim for it, in the light of his own conscience?
[Footnote: Cf. Charles E. Merriam, _The Present State of the Study
of Politics_, _American Political Science Review_, Vol. XV.
No. 2, May, 1921.] His data are uncertain, his means of verification
lacking. The very best qualities in him are a source of frustration.
For if he is really critical and saturated in the scientific spirit,
he cannot be doctrinaire, and go to Armageddon against the trustees
and the students and the Civic Federation and the conservative press
for a theory of which he is not sure. If you are going to Armageddon,
you have to battle for the Lord, but the political scientist is always
a little doubtful whether the Lord called him.

Consequently if so much of social science is apologetic rather than
constructive, the explanation lies in the opportunities of social
science, not in "capitalism." The physical scientists achieved their
freedom from clericalism by working out a method that produced
conclusions of a sort that could not be suppressed or ignored. They
convinced themselves and acquired dignity, and knew what they were
fighting for. The social scientist will acquire his dignity and his
strength when he has worked out his method. He will do that by turning
into opportunity the need among directing men of the Great Society for
instruments of analysis by which an invisible and made intelligible.

But as things go now, the social scientist assembles his data out of a
mass of unrelated material. Social processes are recorded
spasmodically, quite often as accidents of administration. A report to
Congress, a debate, an investigation, legal briefs, a census, a
tariff, a tax schedule; the material, like the skull of the Piltdown
man, has to be put together by ingenious inference before the student
obtains any sort of picture of the event he is studying. Though it
deals with the conscious life of his fellow citizens, it is all too
often distressingly opaque, because the man who is trying to
generalize has practically no supervision of the way his data are
collected. Imagine medical research conducted by students who could
rarely go into a hospital, were deprived of animal experiment, and
compelled to draw conclusions from the stories of people who had been
ill, the reports of nurses, each of whom had her own system of
diagnosis, and the statistics compiled by the Bureau of Internal
Revenue on the excess profits of druggists. The social scientist has
usually to make what he can out of categories that were uncritically
in the mind of an official who administered some part of a law, or who
was out to justify, to persuade, to claim, or to prove. The student
knows this, and, as a protection against it, has developed that branch
of scholarship which is an elaborated suspicion about where to
discount his information.

That is a virtue, but it becomes a very thin virtue when it is merely
a corrective for the unwholesome position of social science. For the
scholar is condemned to guess as shrewdly as he can why in a situation
not clearly understood something or other may have happened. But the
expert who is employed as the mediator among representatives, and as
the mirror and measure of administration, has a very different control
of the facts. Instead of being the man who generalizes from the facts
dropped to him by the men of action, he becomes the man who prepares
the facts for the men of action. This is a profound change in his
strategic position. He no longer stands outside, chewing the cud
provided by busy men of affairs, but he takes his place in front of
decision instead of behind it. To-day the sequence is that the man of
affairs finds his facts, and decides on the basis of them; then, some
time later, the social scientist deduces excellent reasons why he did
or did not decide wisely. This ex post facto relationship is academic
in the bad sense of that fine word. The real sequence should be one
where the disinterested expert first finds and formulates the facts
for the man of action, and later makes what wisdom he can out of
comparison between the decision, which he understands, and the facts,
which he organized.

4

For the physical sciences this change in strategic position began
slowly, and then accelerated rapidly. There was a time when the
inventor and the engineer were romantic half-starved outsiders,
treated as cranks. The business man and the artisan knew all the
mysteries of their craft. Then the mysteries grew more mysterious, and
at last industry began to depend upon physical laws and chemical
combinations that no eye could see, and only a trained mind could
conceive. The scientist moved from his noble garret in the Latin
Quarter into office buildings and laboratories. For he alone could
construct a working image of the reality on which industry rested.
From the new relationship he took as much as he gave, perhaps more:
pure science developed faster than applied, though it drew its
economic support, a great deal of its inspiration, and even more of
its relevancy, from constant contact with practical decision. But
physical science still labored under the enormous limitation that the
men who made decisions had only their commonsense to guide them. They
administered without scientific aid a world complicated by scientists.
Again they had to deal with facts they could not apprehend, and as
once they had to call in engineers, they now have to call in
statisticians, accountants, experts of all sorts.

These practical students are the true pioneers of a new social
science. They are "in mesh with the driving wheels" [Footnote: Cf. The
Address of the President of the American Philosophical Association,
Mr. Ralph Barton Perry, Dec. 28, 1920. Published in the Proceedings of
the Twentieth Annual Meeting.] and from this practical engagement of
science and action, both will benefit radically: action by the
clarification of its beliefs; beliefs by a continuing test in action.
We are in the earliest beginnings. But if it is conceded that all
large forms of human association must, because of sheer practical
difficulty, contain men who will come to see the need for an expert
reporting of their particular environment, then the imagination has a
premise on which to work. In the exchange of technic and result among
expert staffs, one can see, I think, the beginning of experimental
method in social science. When each school district and budget, and
health department, and factory, and tariff schedule, is the material
of knowledge for every other, the number of comparable experiences
begins to approach the dimensions of genuine experiment. In
forty-eight states, and 2400 cities, and 277,000 school houses,
270,000 manufacturing establishments, 27,000 mines and quarries, there
is a wealth of experience, if only it were recorded and available. And
there is, too, opportunity for trial and error at such slight risk
that any reasonable hypothesis might be given a fair test without
shaking the foundations of society.

The wedge has been driven, not only by some directors of industry and
some statesmen who had to have help, but by the bureaus of municipal
research, [Footnote: The number of these organizations in the United
States is very great. Some are alive, some half dead. They are in
rapid flux. Lists of them supplied to me by Dr. L. D. Upson of the
Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, Miss Rebecca B. Rankin of the
Municipal Reference Library of New York City, Mr. Edward A.
Fitzpatrick, Secretary of the State Board of Education (Wisconsin),
Mr. Savel Zimand of the Bureau of Industrial Research (New York City),
run into the hundreds.] the legislative reference libraries, the
specialized lobbies of corporations and trade unions and public
causes, and by voluntary organizations like the League of Women
Voters, the Consumers' League, the Manufacturers' Associations: by
hundreds of trade associations, and citizens' unions; by publications
like the _Searchlight on Congress_ and the _Survey_; and by
foundations like the General Education Board. Not all by any means are
disinterested. That is not the point. All of them do begin to
demonstrate the need for interposing some form of expertness between
the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled.




CHAPTER XXVI

INTELLIGENCE WORK

1

THE practice of democracy has been ahead of its theory. For the theory
holds that the adult electors taken together make decisions out of a
will that is in them. But just as there grew up governing hierarchies
which were invisible in theory, so there has been a large amount of
constructive adaptation, also unaccounted for in the image of
democracy. Ways have been found to represent many interests and
functions that are normally out of sight.

We are most conscious of this in our theory of the courts, when we
explain their legislative powers and their vetoes on the theory that
there are interests to be guarded which might be forgotten by the
elected officials. But the Census Bureau, when it counts, classifies,
and correlates people, things, and changes, is also speaking for
unseen factors in the environment. The Geological Survey makes mineral
resources evident, the Department of Agriculture represents in the
councils of the nation factors of which each farmer sees only an
infinitesimal part. School authorities, the Tariff Commission, the
consular service, the Bureau of Internal Revenue give representation
to persons, ideas, and objects which would never automatically find
themselves represented in this perspective by an election. The
Children's Bureau is the spokesman of a whole complex of interests and
functions not ordinarily visible to the voter, and, therefore,
incapable of becoming spontaneously a part of his public opinions.
Thus the printing of comparative statistics of infant mortality is
often followed by a reduction of the death rate of babies. Municipal
officials and voters did not have, before publication, a place in
their picture of the environment for those babies. The statistics made
them visible, as visible as if the babies had elected an alderman to
air their grievances.

In the State Department the government maintains a Division of Far
Eastern Affairs. What is it for? The Japanese and the Chinese
Governments both maintain ambassadors in Washington. Are they not
qualified to speak for the Far East? They are its representatives. Yet
nobody would argue that the American Government could learn all that
it needed to know about the Far East by consulting these ambassadors.
Supposing them to be as candid as they know how to be, they are still
limited channels of information. Therefore, to supplement them we
maintain embassies in Tokio and Peking, and consular agents at many
points. Also, I assume, some secret agents. These people are supposed
to send reports which pass through the Division of Far Eastern Affairs
to the Secretary of State. Now what does the Secretary expect of the
Division? I know one who expected it to spend its appropriation. But
there are Secretaries to whom special revelation is denied, and they
turn to their divisions for help. The last thing they expect to find
is a neat argument justifying the American position.

What they demand is that the experts shall bring the Far East to the
Secretary's desk, with all the elements in such relation that it is as
if he were in contact with the Far East itself. The expert must
translate, simplify, generalize, but the inference from the result
must apply in the East, not merely on the premises of the report. If
the Secretary is worth his salt, the very last thing he will tolerate
in his experts is the suspicion that they have a "policy." He does not
want to know from them whether they like Japanese policy in China. He
wants to know what different classes of Chinese and Japanese, English,
Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians, think about it, and what they are
likely to do because of what they think. He wants all that represented
to him as the basis of his decision. The more faithfully the Division
represents what is not otherwise represented, either by the Japanese
or American ambassadors, or the Senators and Congressmen from the
Pacific coast, the better Secretary of State he will be. He may decide
to take his policy from the Pacific Coast, but he will take his view
of Japan from Japan.

2

It is no accident that the best diplomatic service in the world is the
one in which the divorce between the assembling of knowledge and the
control of policy is most perfect. During the war in many British
Embassies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always
men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite
successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the
rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and
pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left
that to the political chiefs. But in an American Embassy I once heard
an ambassador say that he never reported anything to Washington which
would not cheer up the folks at home. He charmed all those who met
him, helped many a stranded war worker, and was superb when he
unveiled a monument.

He did not understand that the power of the expert depends upon
separating himself from those who make the decisions, upon not caring,
in his expert self, what decision is made. The man who, like the
ambassador, takes a line, and meddles with the decision, is soon
discounted. There he is, just one more on that side of the question.
For when he begins to care too much, he begins to see what he wishes
to see, and by that fact ceases to see what he is there to see. He is
there to represent the unseen. He represents people who are not
voters, functions of voters that are not evident, events that are out
of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and
people. He has a constituency of intangibles. And intangibles cannot
be used to form a political majority, because voting is in the last
analysis a test of strength, a sublimated battle, and the expert
represents no strength available in the immediate. But he can exercise
force by disturbing the line up of the forces. By making the invisible
visible, he confronts the people who exercise material force with a
new environment, sets ideas and feelings at work in them, throws them
out of position, and so, in the profoundest way, affects the decision.

Men cannot long act in a way that they know is a contradiction of the
environment as they conceive it. If they are bent on acting in a
certain way they have to reconceive the environment, they have to
censor out, to rationalize. But if in their presence, there is an
insistent fact which is so obtrusive that they cannot explain it away,
one of three courses is open. They can perversely ignore it, though
they will cripple themselves in the process, will overact their part
and come to grief. They can take it into account but refuse to act.
They pay in internal discomfort and frustration. Or, and I believe
this to be the most frequent case, they adjust their whole behavior to
the enlarged environment.

The idea that the expert is an ineffectual person because he lets
others make the decisions is quite contrary to experience. The more
subtle the elements that enter into the decision, the more
irresponsible power the expert wields. He is certain, moreover, to
exercise more power in the future than ever he did before, because
increasingly the relevant facts will elude the voter and the
administrator. All governing agencies will tend to organize bodies of
research and information, which will throw out tentacles and expand,
as have the intelligence departments of all the armies in the world.
But the experts will remain human beings. They will enjoy power, and
their temptation will be to appoint themselves censors, and so absorb
the real function of decision. Unless their function is correctly
defined they will tend to pass on the facts they think appropriate,
and to pass down the decisions they approve. They will tend, in short,
to become a bureaucracy.

The only institutional safeguard is to separate as absolutely as it is
possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which
investigates. The two should be parallel but quite distinct bodies of
men, recruited differently, paid if possible from separate funds,
responsible to different heads, intrinsically uninterested in each
other's personal success. In industry, the auditors, accountants, and
inspectors should be independent of the manager, the superintendents,
foremen, and in time, I believe, we shall come to see that in order to
bring industry under social control the machinery of record will have
to be independent of the boards of directors and the shareholders.

3

But in building the intelligence sections of industry and politics, we
do not start on cleared ground. And, apart from insisting on this
basic separation of function, it would be cumbersome to insist too
precisely on the form which in any particular instance the principle
shall take. There are men who believe in intelligence work, and will
adopt it; there are men who do not understand it, but cannot do their
work without it; there are men who will resist. But provided the
principle has a foothold somewhere in every social agency it will make
progress, and the way to begin is to begin. In the federal government,
for example, it is not necessary to straighten out the administrative
tangle and the illogical duplications of a century's growth in order
to find a neat place for the intelligence bureaus which Washington so
badly needs. Before election you can promise to rush bravely into the
breach. But when you arrive there all out of breath, you find that
each absurdity is invested with habits, strong interests, and chummy
Congressmen. Attack all along the line and you engage every force of
reaction. You go forth to battle, as the poet said, and you always
fall. You can lop off an antiquated bureau here, a covey of clerks
there, you can combine two bureaus. And by that time you are busy with
the tariff and the railroads, and the era of reform is over. Besides,
in order to effect a truly logical reorganization of the government,
such as all candidates always promise, you would have to disturb more
passions than you have time to quell. And any new scheme, supposing
you had one ready, would require officials to man it. Say what one
will about officeholders, even Soviet Russia was glad to get many of
the old ones back; and these old officials, if they are too ruthlessly
treated, will sabotage Utopia itself.