A Preface to Politics

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We pass a law against race-track gambling and add to the profits from
faro. We raid the faro joints, and drive gambling into the home, where
poker and bridge whist are taught to children who follow their parents'
example. We deprive anarchists of free speech by the heavy hand of a
police magistrate, and furnish them with a practical instead of a
theoretical argument against government. We answer strikes with bayonets,
and make treason one of the rights of man.

Everybody knows that when you close the dance halls you fill the parks.
Men who in their youth took part in "crusades" against the Tenderloin now
admit in a crestfallen way that they succeeded merely in sprinkling the
Tenderloin through the whole city. Over twenty years ago we formulated a
sweeping taboo against trusts. Those same twenty years mark the
centralization of industry.

The routineer in a panic turns to the taboo. Whatever does not fit into
his rigid little scheme of things must have its head chopped off. Now
human nature and the changing social forces it generates are the very
material which fit least well into most little schemes of things. A man
cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life
become useless. We employ our instruments and abandon them. But nothing
so simply true as that prevails in politics. When a government routine
conflicts with the nation's purposes--the statesman actually makes a
virtue of his loyalty to the routine. His practice is to ignore human
character and pay no attention to social forces. The shallow presumption
is that undomesticated impulses can be obliterated; that world-wide
economic inventions can be stamped out by jailing millionaires--and
acting in the spirit of Mr. Chesterton's man Fipps "who went mad and ran
about the country with an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever
there were not the same number on both sides." The routineer is, of
course, the first to decry every radical proposal as "against human
nature." But the stand-pat mind has forfeited all right to speak for
human nature. It has devoted the centuries to torturing men's instincts,
stamping on them, passing laws against them, lifting its eyebrows at the
thought of them--doing everything but trying to understand them. The same
people who with daily insistence say that innovators ignore facts are in
the absurd predicament of trying to still human wants with petty taboos.
Social systems like ours, which do not even feed and house men and women,
which deny pleasure, cramp play, ban adventure, propose celibacy and
grind out monotony, are a clear confession of sterility in statesmanship.
And politics, however pretentiously rhetorical about ideals, is
irrelevant if the only method it knows is to ostracize the desires it
cannot manage.

Suppose that statesmen transferred their reverence from the precedents
and mistakes of their ancestors to the human material which they have set
out to govern. Suppose they looked mankind in the face and asked
themselves what was the result of answering evil with a prohibition. Such
an exercise would, I fear, involve a considerable strain on what
reformers call their moral sensibilities. For human nature is a rather
shocking affair if you come to it with ordinary romantic optimism.
Certainly the human nature that figures in most political thinking is a
wraith that never was--not even in the souls of politicians. "Idealism"
creates an abstraction and then shudders at a reality which does not
answer to it. Now statesmen who have set out to deal with actual life
must deal with actual people. They cannot afford an inclusive pessimism
about mankind. Let them have the consistency and good sense to cease
bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically evil. Moral
judgment about the ultimate quality of character is dangerous to a
politician. He is too constantly tempted to call a policeman when he
disapproves.

We must study our failures. Gambling and drink, for example, produce much
misery. But what reformers have to learn is that men don't gamble just
for the sake of violating the law. They do so because something within
them is satisfied by betting or drinking. To erect a ban doesn't stop the
want. It merely prevents its satisfaction. And since this desire for
stimulants or taking a chance at a prize is older and far more deeply
rooted in the nature of men than love of the Prohibition Party or
reverence for laws made at Albany, people will contrive to drink and
gamble in spite of the acts of a legislature.

A man may take liquor for a variety of reasons: he may be thirsty; or
depressed; or unusually happy; he may want the companionship of a saloon,
or he may hope to forget a scolding wife. Perhaps he needs a "bracer" in
a weary hunt for a job. Perhaps he has a terrible craving for alcohol. He
does not take a drink so that he may become an habitual drunkard, or be
locked up in jail, or get into a brawl, or lose his job, or go insane.
These are what he might call the unfortunate by-products of his desire.
If once he could find something which would do for him what liquor does,
without hurting him as liquor does, there would be no problem of drink.
Bernard Shaw says he has found that substitute in going to church when
there's no service. Goethe wrote "The Sorrows of Werther" in order to get
rid of his own. Many an unhappy lover has found peace by expressing his
misery in sonnet form. The problem is to find something for the common
man who is not interested in contemporary churches and who can't write
sonnets.

When the socialists in Milwaukee began to experiment with municipal
dances they were greeted with indignant protests from the "anti-vice"
element and with amused contempt by the newspaper paragraphers. The
dances were discontinued, and so the belief in their failure is complete.
I think, though, that Mayor Seidel's defense would by itself make this
experiment memorable. He admitted freely the worst that can be said
against the ordinary dance hall. So far he was with the petty reformers.
Then he pointed out with considerable vehemence that dance halls were an
urgent social necessity. At that point he had transcended the mind of the
petty reformer completely. "We propose," said Seidel, "to go into
competition with the devil."

Nothing deeper has come from an American mayor in a long, long time. It
is the point that Jane Addams makes in the opening pages of that wisely
sweet book, "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets." She calls
attention to the fact that the modern state has failed to provide for
pleasure. "This stupid experiment," she writes, "of organizing work and
failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge.
The love of pleasure will not be denied, and when it has turned into all
sorts of malignant and vicious appetites, then we, the middle-aged, grow
quite distracted and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures."

For human nature seems to have wants that must be filled. If nobody else
supplies them, the devil will. The demand for pleasure, adventure,
romance has been left to the devil's catering for so long a time that
most people think he inspires the demand. He doesn't. Our neglect is the
devil's opportunity. What we should use, we let him abuse, and the
corruption of the best things, as Hume remarked, produces the worst.
Pleasure in our cities has become tied to lobster palaces, adventure to
exalted murderers, romance to silly, mooning novels. Like the flower girl
in Galsworthy's play, we have made a very considerable confusion of the
life of joy and the joy of life. The first impulse is to abolish all
lobster palaces, melodramas, yellow newspapers, and sentimentally erotic
novels. Why not abolish all the devil's works? the reformer wonders. The
answer is in history. It can't be done that way. It is impossible to
abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men. It is dangerous,
explosively dangerous, to thwart them for any length of time. The
Puritans tried to choke the craving for pleasure in early New England.
They had no theaters, no dances, no festivals. They burned witches
instead.

We rail a good deal against Tammany Hall. Reform tickets make periodic
sallies against it, crying economy, efficiency, and a business
administration. And we all pretend to be enormously surprised when the
"ignorant foreign vote" prefers a corrupt political ring to a party of
well-dressed, grammatical, and high-minded gentlemen. Some of us are even
rather downcast about democracy because the Bowery doesn't take to heart
the admonitions of the Evening Post.

We forget completely the important wants supplied by Tammany Hall. We
forget that this is a lonely country for an immigrant and that the Statue
of Liberty doesn't shed her light with too much warmth. Possessing
nothing but a statistical, inhuman conception of government, the average
municipal reformer looks down contemptuously upon a man like Tim Sullivan
with his clambakes and his dances; his warm and friendly saloons, his
handshaking and funeral-going and baby-christening; his readiness to get
coal for the family, and a job for the husband. But a Tim Sullivan is
closer to the heart of statesmanship than five City Clubs full of people
who want low taxes and orderly bookkeeping. He does things which have to
be done. He humanizes a strange country; he is a friend at court; he
represents the legitimate kindliness of government, standing between the
poor and the impersonal, uninviting majesty of the law. Let no man wonder
that Lorimer's people do not prefer an efficiency expert, that a Tim
Sullivan has power, or that men are loyal to Hinky Dink. The cry raised
against these men by the average reformer is a piece of cold, unreal,
preposterous idealism compared to the solid warm facts of kindliness,
clothes, food and fun.

You cannot beat the bosses with the reformer's taboo. You will not get
far on the Bowery with the cost unit system and low taxes. And I don't
blame the Bowery. You can beat Tammany Hall permanently in one way--by
making the government of a city as human, as kindly, as jolly as Tammany
Hall. I am aware of the contract-grafts, the franchise-steals, the dirty
streets, the bribing and the blackmail, the vice-and-crime partnerships,
the Big Business alliances of Tammany Hall. And yet it seems to me that
Tammany has a better perception of human need, and comes nearer to being
what a government should be, than any scheme yet proposed by a group of
"uptown good government" enthusiasts. Tammany is not a satanic instrument
of deception, cleverly devised to thwart "the will of the people." It is
a crude and largely unconscious answer to certain immediate needs, and
without those needs its power would crumble. That is why I ventured in
the preceding chapter to describe it as a natural sovereignty which had
grown up behind a mechanical form of government. It is a poor weed
compared to what government might be. But it is a real government that
has power and serves a want, and not a frame imposed upon men from on
top.

The taboo--the merely negative law--is the emptiest of all the
impositions from on top. In its long record of failure, in the
comparative success of Tammany, those who are aiming at social changes
can see a profound lesson; the impulses, cravings and wants of men must
be employed. You can employ them well or ill, but you must employ them. A
group of reformers lounging at a club cannot, dare not, decide to close
up another man's club because it is called a saloon. Unless the reformer
can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive
vices, he will fail. He will fail because human nature abhors the vacuum
created by the taboo.

An incident in the international peace propaganda illuminates this point.
Not long ago a meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, to forward peace among
nations broke up in great disorder. Thousands of people who hate the
waste and futility of war as much as any of the orators of that evening
were filled with an unholy glee. They chuckled with delight at the idea
of a riot in a peace meeting. Though it would have seemed perverse to the
ordinary pacificist, this sentiment sprang from a respectable source. It
had the same ground as the instinctive feeling of nine men in ten that
Roosevelt has more right to talk about peace than William Howard Taft.
James made it articulate in his essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War."
James was a great advocate of peace, but he understood Theodore Roosevelt
and he spoke for the military man when he wrote of war that: "Its
'horrors' are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative
supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and
zo-ophily, of 'consumers' leagues' and 'associated charities,' of
industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness,
no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!"

And he added: "So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no
healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking
of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and
human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks
or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a
type of military character which everyone feels that the race should
never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority."

So William James proposed not the abolition of war, but a moral
equivalent for it. He dreamed of "a conscription of the whole youthful
population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army
enlisted against _Nature_.... The military ideals of hardihood and
discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one
would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's
relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard
foundations of his higher life." Now we are not concerned here over the
question of this particular proposal. The telling point in my opinion is
this: that when a wise man, a student of human nature, and a reformer met
in the same person, the taboo was abandoned. James has given us a lasting
phrase when he speaks of the "moral equivalent" of evil. We can use it, I
believe, as a guide post to statesmanship. Rightly understood, the idea
behind the words contains all that is valuable in conservatism, and, for
the first time, gives a reputable meaning to that tortured epithet
"constructive."

"The military feelings," says James, "are too deeply grounded to abdicate
their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered ...
such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have
required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in
the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military
party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.... So far, war has been
the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an
equivalent discipline is organized I believe that war must have its way.
But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social
man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing
such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as
effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time,
of skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic
opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war."

To find for evil its moral equivalent is to be conservative about values
and radical about forms, to turn to the establishment of positively good
things instead of trying simply to check bad ones, to emphasize the
additions to life, instead of the restrictions upon it, to substitute, if
you like, the love of heaven for the fear of hell. Such a program means
the dignified utilization of the whole nature of man. It will recognize
as the first test of all political systems and moral codes whether or not
they are "against human nature." It will insist that they be cut to fit
the whole man, not merely a part of him. For there are utopian proposals
made every day which cover about as much of a human being as a beautiful
hat does.

Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect them. Instead of
trying to crush badness we must turn the power behind it to good account.
The assumption is that every lust is capable of some civilized
expression.

We say, in effect, that evil is a way by which desire expresses itself.
The older moralists, the taboo philosophers believed that the desires
themselves were inherently evil. To us they are the energies of the soul,
neither good nor bad in themselves. Like dynamite, they are capable of
all sorts of uses, and it is the business of civilization, through the
family and the school, religion, art, science, and all institutions, to
transmute these energies into fine values. Behind evil there is power,
and it is folly,--wasting and disappointing folly,--to ignore this power
because it has found an evil issue. All that is dynamic in human
character is in these rooted lusts. The great error of the taboo has been
just this: that it believed each desire had only one expression, that if
that expression was evil the desire itself was evil. We know a little
better to-day. We know that it is possible to harness desire to many
interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.

This supplies us with a standard for judging reforms, and so makes clear
what "constructive" action really is. When it was discovered recently
that the boys' gang was not an unmitigated nuisance to be chased by a
policeman, but a force that could be made valuable to civilization
through the Boy Scouts, a really constructive reform was given to the
world. The effervescence of boys on the street, wasted and perverted
through neglect or persecution, was drained and applied to fine uses.
When Percy MacKaye pleads for pageants in which the people themselves
participate, he offers an opportunity for expressing some of the lusts of
the city in the form of an art. The Freudian school of psychologists
calls this "sublimation." They have brought forward a wealth of material
which gives us every reason to believe that the theory of "moral
equivalents" is soundly based, that much the same energies produce crime
and civilization, art, vice, insanity, love, lust, and religion. In each
individual the original differences are small. Training and opportunity
decide in the main how men's lust shall emerge. Left to themselves, or
ignorantly tabooed, they break forth in some barbaric or morbid form.
Only by supplying our passions with civilized interests can we escape
their destructive force.

I have put it negatively, as a counsel of prudence. But he who has the
courage of existence will put it triumphantly, crying "yea" as Nietzsche
did, and recognizing that all the passions of men are the motive powers
of a fine life.

For the roads that lead to heaven and hell are one until they part.

CHAPTER III

THE CHANGING FOCUS

The taboo, however useless, is at least concrete. Although it achieves
little besides mischief, it has all the appearance of practical action,
and consequently enlists the enthusiasm of those people whom Wells
describes as rushing about the country shouting: "For Gawd's sake let's
_do_ something _now_." There are weight and solidity in a policeman's
club, while a "moral equivalent" happens to be pale like the stuff of
which dreams are made. To the politician whose daily life consists in
dodging the thousand and one conflicting prejudices of his constituents,
in bickering with committees, intriguing and playing for the vote; to the
business man harassed on four sides by the trust, the union, the law, and
public opinion,--distrustful of any wide scheme because the stupidity of
his shipping clerk is the most vivid item in his mind, all this
discussion about politics and the inner life will sound like so much
fine-spun nonsense.

I, for one, am not disposed to blame the politicians and the business
men. They govern the nation, it is true, but they do it in a rather
absentminded fashion. Those revolutionists who see the misery of the
country as a deliberate and fiendish plot overestimate the bad will, the
intelligence and the singleness of purpose in the ruling classes.
Business and political leaders don't mean badly; the trouble with them is
that most of the time they don't mean anything. They picture themselves
as very "practical," which in practice amounts to saying that nothing
makes them feel so spiritually homeless as the discussion of values and
an invitation to examine first principles. Ideas, most of the time, cause
them genuine distress, and are as disconcerting as an idle office boy, or
a squeaky telephone.

I do not underestimate the troubles of the man of affairs. I have lived
with politicians,--with socialist politicians whose good-will was
abundant and intentions constructive. The petty vexations pile up into
mountains; the distracting details scatter the attention and break up
thinking, while the mere problem of exercising power crowds out
speculation about what to do with it. Personal jealousies interrupt
co-ordinated effort; committee sessions wear out nerves by their aimless
drifting; constant speech-making turns a man back upon a convenient
little store of platitudes--misunderstanding and distortion dry up the
imagination, make thought timid and expression flat, the atmosphere of
publicity requires a mask which soon becomes the reality. Politicians
tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate
the journalism which describes him. You cannot blame politicians if their
perceptions are few and their thinking crude.

Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to
expect solutions in a political campaign. Woodrow Wilson brought to
public life an exceedingly flexible mind,--many of us when he first
emerged rejoiced at the clean and athletic quality of his thinking. But
even he under the stress of a campaign slackened into commonplace
reiteration, accepting a futile and intellectually dishonest platform,
closing his eyes to facts, misrepresenting his opponents, abandoning, in
short, the very qualities which distinguished him. It is understandable.
When a National Committee puts a megaphone to a man's mouth and tells him
to yell, it is difficult for him to hear anything.

If a nation's destiny were really bound up with the politics reported in
newspapers, the impasse would be discouraging. If the important
sovereignty of a country were in what is called its parliamentary life,
then the day of Plato's philosopher-kings would be far off indeed.
Certainly nobody expects our politicians to become philosophers. When
they do they hide the fact. And when philosophers try to be politicians
they generally cease to be philosophers. But the truth is that we
overestimate enormously the importance of nominations, campaigns, and
office-holding. If we are discouraged it is because we tend to identify
statecraft with that official government which is merely one of its
instruments. Vastly over-advertised, we have mistaken an inflated fragment
for the real political life of the country.

For if you think of men and their welfare, government appears at once as
nothing but an agent among many others. The task of civilizing our
impulses by creating fine opportunities for their expression cannot be
accomplished through the City Hall alone. All the influences of social
life are needed. The eggs do not lie in one basket. Thus the issues in
the trade unions may be far more directly important to statecraft than
the destiny of the Republican Party. The power that workingmen generate
when they unite--the demands they will make and the tactics they will
pursue--how they are educating themselves and the nation--these are
genuine issues which bear upon the future. So with the policies of
business men. Whether financiers are to be sullen and stupid like
Archbold, defiant like Morgan, or well-intentioned like Perkins is a
question that enters deeply into the industrial issues. The whole
business problem takes on a new complexion if the representatives of
capital are to be men with the temper of Louis Brandeis or William C.
Redfield. For when business careers are made professional, new motives
enter into the situation; it will make a world of difference if the
leadership of industry is in the hands of men interested in production as
a creative art instead of as a brute exploitation. The economic conflicts
are at once raised to a plane of research, experiment and honest
deliberation. For on the level of hate and mean-seeking no solution is
possible. That subtle fact,--the change of business motives, the
demonstration that industry can be conducted as medicine is,--may
civilize the whole class conflict.

Obviously statecraft is concerned with such a change, extra-political
though it is. And wherever the politician through his prestige or the
government through its universities can stimulate a revolution in
business motives, it should do so. That is genuinely constructive work,
and will do more to a humane solution of the class struggle than all the
jails and state constabularies that ever betrayed the barbarism of the
Twentieth Century. It is no wonder that business is such a sordid affair.
We have done our best to exclude from it every passionate interest that
is capable of lighting up activity with eagerness and joy.
"Unbusinesslike" we have called the devotion of craftsmen and scientists.
We have actually pretended that the work of extracting a living from
nature could be done most successfully by short-sighted money-makers
encouraged by their money-spending wives. We are learning better to-day.
We are beginning to know that this nation for all its boasts has not
touched the real possibilities of business success, that nature and good
luck have done most of our work, that our achievements come in spite of
our ignorance. And so no man can gauge the civilizing possibilities of a
new set of motives in business. That it will add to the dignity and value
of millions of careers is only one of its blessings. Given a nation of
men trained to think scientifically about their work and feel about it as
craftsmen, and you have a people released from a stupid fixation upon the
silly little ideals of accumulating dollars and filling their neighbor's
eye. We preach against commercialism but without great result. And the
reason for our failure is: that we merely say "you ought not" instead of
offering a new interest. Instead of telling business men not to be
greedy, we should tell them to be industrial statesmen, applied
scientists, and members of a craft. Politics can aid that revolution in a
hundred Ways: by advocating it, by furnishing schools that teach,
laboratories that demonstrate, by putting business on the same plane of
interest as the Health Service.

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