7402G3
A
PREFACE TO POLITICS
BY
WALTER LIPPMANN
POPULAR EDITION
NEW YORK ^ ' ^f v>\ -^l
j^^^^-;;^ MITCHELL KENNERLEY c=, p |£
N.
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
-4^
BY
WALTER LI PPM ANN
'A God wilt thou create for thyself
out of thy seven devils."
MITCHEIJL KENNERLEY
NEW YC»K AND LONDCW
1914
THE liEVV YOi.i:
PUBLIC LIBRARY
746263
A8TOR, LENOX AND
TlLDilN FOUNDA- 1CN8
R 19 6 L
COPYRIGHT, 191 3, BY
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
Introduction
Contents
I.
Routineer and Inventor ^^
I
II.
The Taboo l/
The Changing Focus ^ . /
The Golden Rule and After V>
34
III.
53
IV.
86
V.
Well Meaning but Unmeming: the Chicago Vice
Report \J{ w
Some Necessary Iconoclasm U^
122
VI.
159
VII.
The Making of Creeds fc; ^ "^
204
VIII.
The Red Herring , ' L
Revolution and Culture 1
247
IX.
273
INTRODUCTION
THE most incisive comment on politics to-day
is Indifference. When men and women be-
gin to feel that elections and legislatures do not
matter very much, that politics is a rather distant
and unimportant exercise, the reformer might
as well put to himself a few searching doubts.
Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath op-
positions and wranglings by calling the political
method itself into question. Leaders in public
affairs recognize this. They know that no attack
is so disastrous as silence, that no invective is
so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile of
the people who do not care. Eager to believe
that all the world is as interested as they are,
there comes a time when even the reformer is
compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion
of the average man that politics is an exhibition
in which there is much ado about nothing. But
such moments of illumination are rare. They
appear in writers who realize how large is the
public that doesn't read their books, in reformers
INTRODUCTION
who venture to compare the membership list of
their league with the census of the United States.
Whoever has been granted such a moment of in-
sight knows how exquisitely painful it is. To
conquer it men turn generally to their ancient
comforter, self-deception: they complain about
the stolid, inert masses and the apathy of the
people. In a more confidential tone they will
tell you that the ordinary citizen is a ^'hopelessly
private person."
The reformer is himself not lacking in stolidity
if he can believe such a fiction of a people that
crowds about tickers and demands the news of
the day before it happens, that trembles on the
verge of a panic over the unguarded utterance
of a financier, and founds a new religion every
month or so. But after a while self-deception
ceases to be a comfort. This is when the re-
former notices how indifference to politics is set-
tling upon some of the most alert minds of our
generation, entering into the attitude of men as
capable as any reformer of large and imaginative
interests. For among the keenest minds, among
artists, scientists and philosophers, there is a re-
markable inclination to make a virtue of political
indifference. Too passionate an absorption in
public affairs is felt to be a somewhat shallow
INTRODUCTION
performance, and the reformer is patronized as
a well-meaning but rather dull fellow. This Is
the criticism of men engaged In some genuinely
creative labor. Often It Is unexpressed, often as
not the artist or scientist will join In a political
movement. But In the depths of his soul there
is, I suspect, some feeling which says to the
politician, "Why so hot, my little sir?"
Nothing, too, is more illuminating than the
painful way in which many people cultivate a
knowledge of public affairs because they have a
conscience and wish to do a cltizen^s duty. Hav-
ing read a number of articles on the tariff and
ploughed through the metaphysics of the currency
question, what do they do? They turn with all
the more zest to some spontaneous human in-
terest. Perhaps they follow, follow, follow
Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through
the emotions of a great battle. But for the af-
fairs of statecraft, for the very policies that a
Roosevelt advocates, the interest is largely per-
functory, maintained out of a sense of duty and
dropped with a sigh of relief.
That reaction may not be as deplorable as it
seems. Pick up your newspaper, read the Con-
gressional Record, run over in your mind the
"issues" of a campaign, and then ask yourself
INTRODUCTION
whether the average man Is entirely to blame
because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and re-
fuses to take the politician at his own rhetorical
valuation. If men find statecraft uninteresting,
may it not be that statecraft is uninteresting?
I have a more or less professional interest in
public affairs; that is to say, I have had oppor-
tunity to look at politics from the point of view
of the man who is trying to get the attention of
people in order to carry through some reform.
At first it was a hard confession to make, but the
more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I
respected the indifference of the public. There
was something monotonously trivial and irrele-
vant about our reformist enthusiasm, and an ap-
palling justice in that half-conscious criticism
which refuses to place politics among the genuine,
creative activities of men. Science was valid, art
was valid, the poorest grubber in a laboratory
was engaged in a real labor, anyone who had
found expression in some beautiful object was
truly centered. But politics was a personal drama
without meaning or a vague abstraction without
substance.
Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable
as ever, that public affairs do have an enormous
and intimate effect upon our lives. They make
INTRODUCTION
or unmake us. They are the foundation of that
national vigor through which civilizations mature.
City and country-side, factories and play, schools
and the family are powerful influences in every
life, and politics is directly concerned with them.
If politics is irrelevant, it is certainly not be-
cause its subject matter is unimportant. Public
affairs govern our thinking and doing with sub-
tlety and persistence.
The trouble, I figured, must be in the way
politics is concerned with the nation's interests.
If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its
results are, nevertheless, of the highest conse-
quence. In statecraft the penalties and rewards
are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is dis-
torted. Perhaps uncriticised assumptions have
obscured the real uses of politics. Perhaps an
attitude can be worked out which will engage
a fresher attention. For there are, I believe, ^
blunders in our political thinking which confuse
fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and
make it difficult for men to know where they
should enlist. Perhaps if we can see politics in
a different light, it will rivet our creative interests.
These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch
an attitude towards statecraft. I have tried to
suggest an approach, to illustrate it concretely,
INTRODUCTION
to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the
title "A Preface to Politics," I have wished to
stamp upon the whole book my own sense that
it Is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have
wished to emphasize that there is nothing in this
book which can be drafted Into a legislative pro-
posal and presented to the legislature the day
after to-morrow. It was not written with the
notion that these pages would contain an adequate
exposition of modern political method. Much
less was It written to further a concrete program.
There are, I hope, no assumptions put forward
as dogmas.
It Is a preliminary sketch for a theory of
politics, a preface to thinking. Like all specula-
tion about human affairs, it Is the result of a
grapple with problems as they appear In the ex-
perience of one man. For though a personal
vision may at times assume an eloquent and uni-
versal language, it Is well never to forget that
all philosophies are the language of particular
men. W. L.
46 East 80th Street, New York CiTT.lJanuary 1913.
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
CHAPTER I
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
POLITICS does not exist for the sake of
demonstrating the superior righteousness
of anybody. It is not a competition In deport-
ment. In fact, before you can begin to think
about politics at all you have to abandon the no-
tion that there Is a war between good men and bad
men. That is one of the great American supersti-
tions. More than any other fetish it has ruined
our sense of political values by glorifying the
pharlsee with his vain cruelty to individuals and
his unfounded approval of himself. You have
only to look at the Senate of the United States, to
see how that body Is capable of turning itself into
a court of preliminary hearings for the Last Judg-
ment, wasting its time and our time and absorbing
public enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For
a hundred needs of the nation it has no thought,
but about the precise morality of an historical
transaction eight years old there is a meticulous
1
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
interest. Whether in the Presidential Campaign
of 1904 Roosevelt was aware that the ancient
tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had
not been followed, and the exact and ultimate
measure of the guilt that knowledge would have
implied — this in the year 19 12 is enough to start
the Senate on a protracted man-hunt.
Now if one half of the people is bent upon
proving how wicked a man is and the other half
is determined to show how good he is, neither
half will think very much about the nation. An
innocent paragraph in the New York Evening
Post for August 27, 19 1 2, gives the whole per-
formance away. It shows as clearly as words
could how disastrous the good-and-bad-man theory
is to political thinking:
''Provided the first hearing takes place on Sep-
tember 30, it is expected that the developments
will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel
on the defensive. After the beginning of Oc-
tober, it is pointed out, the evidence before the
Committee should keep him so busy explaining
and denying that the country will not hear much
Bull Moose doctrine."
Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or
not, there can be no two opinions about such an
abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss, an-
2
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
Other attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if
politics is merely a guerilla war between the
bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not a
human service but a moral testing ground. It is
a public amusement, a melodrama of real life, in
which a few conspicuous characters are tried, and
it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing
which we are told exists for the high purpose of
detecting a ''yellow streak." But even though we
desired it there would be no way of establishing
any clear-cut difference in politics between the
angels and the imps. The angels are largely self-
appointed, being somewhat more sensitive to
other people's tar than their own.
But if the issue is not between honesty and
dishonesty, where is it?
If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it
as black on red, or red on black, as series of
horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which re-
cede or protrude. The longer you look the more
patterns you can trace, and the more certain it
becomes that there is no single way of looking at
the board. So with political issues. There is
no obvious cleavage which everyone recognizes.
Many patterns appear in the national life. The
"progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege'*
and the "People"; the Socialists, that it is between
3
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
the *VorkIng class" and the "master class." An
apologist for dynamite told me once that society
was divided into the weak and the strong, and
there are people who draw a line between Phil-
istia and Bohemia.
When you rise up and announce that the con-
flict is between this and that, you mean that this
particular conflict interests you. The issue of
good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the ex-
clusion of almost all others. But experience
shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict and
a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must
be drawn if we are to act at all in politics. With
nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
are merely neutral. This cleavage in public af-
fairs is the most important choice we are called
upon to make. In large measure it determines
the rest of our thinking. Now some issues are
fertile; some are not. Some lead to spacious
results; others are blind alleys. With this in
mind I wish to suggest that the distinction most
worth emphasizing to-day is between those who
regard government as a routine to be adminis-
tered and those who regard it as a problem to be
solved.
The class of routineers is larger than the con-
servatives. The man who will follow precedent,
4
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
but never create one, Is merely an obvious ex-
ample of the routineer. You find him desperately
numerous in the civil service, in the official bu-
reaus. To him government is something given
as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill.
He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His
imagination has rarely extricated itself from under
the administrative machine to gain any sense of
what a human, temporary contraption the whole
affair Is. What he thinks is the heavens above
him is nothing but the roof.
He is the slave of routine. He can boast of
somewhat more spiritual cousins in the men who
reverence their ancestors' independence, who
feel, as it were, that a disreputable great-grand-
father is necessary to a family's respectability.
These are the routineers gifted with historical
sense. They take their forefathers with enor-
mous solemnity. But one mistake is rarely
avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing
their grandfather did, and ignore the originaHty
which enabled him to do it.
If tradition were a reverent record of those
crucial moments when men burst through their
habits, a love of the past would not be the butt
on which every sophomoric radical can practice
his wit. But almost always tradition is nothing
5
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
but a record and a machine-made imitation of
the habits that our ancestors created. The aver-
age conservative is a slave to the most incidental
and trivial part of his forefathers' glory — to the
archaic formula which happened to express their
genius or the eighteenth century contrivance by
which for a time it was served. To reverence
Washington they wear a powdered wig; they do
honor to Lincoln by cultivating awkward hands
and ungainly feet.
It is fascinating to watch this kind of con-
servative in action. From Senator Lodge, for
example, we do not expect any new perception
of popular need. We know that probably his
deepest sincerity is an attempt to reproduce the
atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago.
The manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility
which comes from too much gazing at bad statues
of dead statesmen.
Yet just because a man is in opposition to
Senator Lodge there is no guarantee that he has
freed himself from the routineer's habit of mind.
A prejudice against some mannerism or a dislike
of pretensions may merely cloak some other
kind of routine. Take the ''good government"
attitude. No fresh insight is behind that. It
does not promise anything; it does not offer to
6
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
contribute new values to human life. The ma-
chine which exists Is accepted In all Its essentials:
the "goo-goo" yearns for a somewhat smoother
rotation.
Often as not the very effort to make the exist-
ing machine run more perfectly merely makes
matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is
frequently one of the worst of the routineers.
Even machines are not altogether inflexible, and
sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad
deviation from the original plans is a poor
rickety attempt to adapt the machine to changing
conditions. Think what would have happened
had we actually remained stolidly faithful to
every Intention of the Fathers. Think what
would happen If every statute were enforced. By
the sheer force of circumstances we have twisted
constitutions and laws to some approximation of
our needs. A changing country has managed to
live in spite of a static government machine. Per-
haps Bernard Shaw was right when he said that
**the famous Constitution survives only because
whenever any corner of It gets Into the way of
the accumulating dollar it is pettishly knocked
off and thrown away. Every social development,
however beneficial and Inevitable from the public
point of view, Is met, not by an Intelligent adapta-
7
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
tlon of the social structure to its novelties but by
a panic and a cry of Go Back."
I am tempted to go further and put into the
same class all those radicals who wish simply to
substitute some other kind of machine for the
one we have. Though not all of them would
accept the name, these reformers are simply
Utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are
more critical than the ordinary conservatives*.
They do see that humanity is badly squeezed in
the existing mould. They have enough imagina-
tion to conceive a different one. But they have
an infinite faith in moulds. This routine they
don't believe in, but they believe in their own:
if you could put the country under a new "sys-
tem," then human affairs would run auto-
matically for the welfare of all. Some improve-
ment there might be, but as almost all men are
held in an iron devotion to their own creations,
the routine reformers are simply working for
another conservatism, and not for any continuing
liberation.
The type of statesman we must oppose to the
routineer is one who regards all social organiza-
tion as an instrument. Systems, institutions and
mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue
of their own: they are valuable only when they
8
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of
course, but with a constant sense that men have
made them, that new ones can be devised, that
only an effort of the will can keep machinery in
its place. He has no faith whatever in automatic
governments. While the routineers see machinery
and precedents revolving with mankind as pup-
pets, he puts the deliberate, conscious, willing in-
dividual at the center of his philosophy. This
reversal is pregnant with a new outlook for
statecraft. I hope to show that It alone can keep
step with life; It alone Is humanly relevant; and
it alone achieves valuable results.
Call this man a political creator or a political
inventor. The essential quality of him is that he
makes that part of existence which has experience
the master of it. He serves the ideals of human
feelings, not the tendencies of mechanical things.
The difference between a phonograph and the
human voice Is that the phonograph must sing
the song which is stamped upon it. Now there
are days — I suspect the vast majority of them in
most of our lives — when we grind out the thing
that is stamped upon us. It may be the govern-
ing of a city, or teaching school, or running a
business. We do not get out of bed in the morn-
ing because we are eager for the day; something
9
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
external — we often call it our duty — ^throws off
the bed-clothes, complains that the shaving water
isn't hot, puts us into the subway and lands us at
our office in season for punching the time-check.
We revolve with the business for three or four
hours, signing letters, answering telephones,
checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve
o'clock the prospect of lunch puts a touch of ro-
mance upon life. Then because our days are so
unutterably the same, we turn to the newspapers,
we go to the magazines and read only the "stuff
with punch," we seek out a "show" and drive
serious playwrights into the poorhouse. "You
can go through contemporary life," writes Wells,
"fudging and evading, indulging and slacking,
never really hungry nor frightened nor passion-
ately stirred, your highest moment a mere senti-
mental orgasm, and your first real contact with
primary and elementary necessities the sweat of
your death-bed."
The world grinds on : we are a fly on the wheel.
That sense of an impersonal machine going on
with endless reiteration is an experience that!
imaginative politicians face. Often as not they
disguise it under heroic phrases and still louder
affirmation, just as most of us hide our cowardly
submission to monotony under some word like
10
r.
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
duty, loyalty, conscience. If you have ever been
an office-holder or been close to officials, you
must surely have been appalled by the grim way
in which committee-meetings, verbose reports,
flamboyant speeches, requests, and delegations
hold the statesman In a mInd-destroyIng grasp.
Perhaps this Is the reason why It has been neces-
sary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from public
life every now and then In order to give him a
chance to learn something new. Every states-
man like every professor should have his sabbati-
cal year.
The revolt against the service of our own me-
chanical habits Is well known to anyone who has
followed modern thought. As a sharp example
one might point to Thomas Davidson, whom Wil-
liam James called ^'Individualist a outrance" . . .
"Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of my
own on 'Habit,' he said that It was a fixed rule
with him to form no regular habits. When he
found himself in danger of settling into even a
good one, he made a point of interrupting it."
Such men are the sparkling streams that flow
through the dusty stretches of a nation. They
invigorate and emphasize those times in your
own life when each day is new. Then you
are alive, then you drive the world before
11
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself
to your effort; you seem to manage detail with an
inferior part of yourself, while the real soul of
you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought
like an edge of steel and desire like a flame."
Eager with sympathy, you and your work are
reflected from many angles. You have become
luminous.
Some people are predominantly eager and wil-
ful. The world does not huddle and bend them
to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures
of environment, but creators of it. Of other
people's environment they become the most active
part — the part which sets the fashion. What
they initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of
intrinsic prestige. These are the natural leaders
of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as
founder of a religion.
It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively
active towards the world which gives man a mi-
raculous assurance that the world is something
he can make. In creative moments men always
draw upon "some secret spring of certainty, some
fundamental well into which no disturbing glim-
mers penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy,
for the chance is denied by which we can lie back
upon the perfection of some mechanical con-
ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
trivance. Yet in the light of It government be-
comes alert to a process of continual creation, an
unceasing invention of forms to meet constantly
changing needs.
This philosophy is not only difficult to prac-
tice: it is elusive when you come to state it. For
our political language was made to express a
routine conception of government. It comes to
us from the Eighteenth Century. And no matter
how much we talk about the infusion of the
"evolutionary" point of view into all of modern
thought, when the test is made political practice
shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our
theories assume, and our language is fitted to
thinking of government as a frame — Massachu-
setts, I believe, actually calls her fundamental
law the Frame of Government. We picture po-
litical institutions as mechanically constructed
contrivances within which the nation's life is con-
tained and compelled to approximate some ab-
stract idea of justice or liberty. These frames
have very little elasticity, and we take it as an
historical commonplace that sooner or later a
revolution must come to burst the frame apart.
Then a new one is constructed.
Our own Federal Constitution is a striking ex-
ample of this machine conception of government.
Id
A PREFACE TO POLITICS
It IS probably the most Important instance we
have of the deliberate application of a mechani-
cal philosophy to human affairs. Leaving out all