A Preface to Politics

W >> Walter Lippmann >> A Preface to Politics

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

To perform that staggering list of things that "should" be done you
find--what?--the police power, federal, state, municipal. Note how vague
and general are the chance constructive suggestions; how precise and
definite the taboos. Surely I am not misstating its position when I say
that forcible suppression was the creed of this Commission. Nor is there
any need of insisting again that the ultimate ideal of annihilating
prostitution has nothing to expect from the concrete proposals that were
made. The millennial goal was one thing; the immediate method quite
another. For ideals, a pious phrase; in practice, the police.

Are we not told that "if the citizens cannot depend upon the men
appointed to protect their property, and to maintain order, then chaos
and disorganization resulting in vice and crime must follow?" Yet of all
the reeds that civilization leans upon, surely the police is the
frailest. Anyone who has had the smallest experience of municipal
politics knows that the corruption of the police is directly
proportionate to the severity of the taboos it is asked to enforce. Tom
Johnson saw this as Mayor of Cleveland; he knew that strict law
enforcement against saloons, brothels, and gambling houses would not stop
vice, but would corrupt the police. I recommend the recent spectacle in
New York where the most sensational raider of gambling houses has turned
out to be in crooked alliance with the gamblers. And I suggest as a hint
that the Commission's recommendations enforced for one year will lay the
foundation of an organized system of blackmail and "protection," secrecy
and underground chicanery, the like of which Chicago has not yet seen.
But the Commission need only have read its own report, have studied its
own cases. There is an illuminating chapter on "The Social Evil and the
Police." In the summary, the Commission says that "officers on the beat
are bold and open in their neglect of duty, drinking in saloons while in
uniform, ignoring the solicitations by prostitutes in rear rooms and on
the streets, selling tickets at dances frequented by professional and
semi-professional prostitutes; protecting 'cadets,' prostitutes and
saloon-keepers of disorderly places."

Some suspicion that the police could not carry the burden of suppressing
the social evil must have dawned on the Commission.

It felt the need of re-enforcement. Hence the special morals police
squad; hence the investigation of the police of one district by the
police from another; and hence, in type as black as that of the ideal
itself and directly beneath it, the call for "the appointment of a morals
commission" and "the establishment of a morals court." Now this
commission consists of the Health Officer, a physician and three citizens
who serve without pay. It is appointed by the Mayor and approved by the
City Council. Its business is to prosecute vice and to help enforce the
law.

Just what would happen if the Morals Commission didn't prosecute hard
enough I do not know. Conceivably the Governor might be induced to
appoint a Commission on Moral Commissions in Cities. But why the men and
women who framed the report made this particular recommendation is an
interesting question. With federal, state, and municipal authorities in
existence, with courts, district attorneys, police all operating, they
create another arm of prosecution. Possibly they were somewhat
disillusioned about the present instruments of the taboo; perhaps
they imagined that a new broom would sweep clean. But I suspect an
inner reason. The Commission may have imagined that the four
appointees--unpaid--would be four men like themselves--who knows, perhaps
four men from among themselves? The whole tenor of their thinking is to
set somebody watching everybody and somebody else to watching him. What
is more natural than that they should be the Ultimate Watchers?

Spying, informing, constant investigations of everybody and everything
must become the rule where there is a forcible attempt to moralize
society from the top. Nobody's heart is in the work very long; nobody's
but those fanatical and morbid guardians of morality who make it a life's
specialty. The aroused public opinion which the Commission asks for
cannot be held if all it has to fix upon is an elaborate series of
taboos. Sensational disclosures will often make the public flare up
spasmodically; but the mass of men is soon bored by intricate rules and
tangles of red tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melodrama of real
life--interesting, but easily forgotten.

The method proposed ignores the human source: by a kind of poetic justice
the great crowd of men will ignore the method. If you want to impose a
taboo upon a whole community, you must do it autocratically, you must
make it part of the prevailing superstitions. You must never let it reach
any public analysis. For it will fail, it will receive only a shallow
support from what we call an "enlightened public opinion." That opinion
is largely determined by the real impulses of men; and genuine character
rejects or at least rebels against foreign, unnatural impositions. This
is one of the great virtues of democracy--that it makes alien laws more
and more difficult to enforce. The tyrant can use the taboo a thousand
times more effectively than the citizens of a republic. When he speaks,
it is with a prestige that dumbs questioning and makes obedience a habit.
Let that infallibility come to be doubted, as in Russia to-day, and
natural impulses reassert themselves, the great impositions begin to
weaken. The methods of the Chicago Commission would require a tyranny, a
powerful, centralized sovereignty which could command with majesty and
silence the rebel. In our shirt-sleeved republic no such power exists.
The strongest force we have is that of organized money, and that
sovereignty is too closely connected with the social evil, too dependent
upon it in a hundred different ways, to undertake the task of
suppression.

For the purposes of the Commission democracy is an inefficient weapon.
Nothing but disappointment is in store for men who expect a people to
outrage its own character. A large part of the unfaith in democracy, of
the desire to ignore "the mob," limit the franchise, and confine power to
the few is the result of an unsuccessful attempt to make republics act
like old-fashioned monarchies. Almost every "crusade" leaves behind it a
trail of yearning royalists; many "good-government" clubs are little
would-be oligarchies.

When the mass of men emerged from slavish obedience and made democracy
inevitable, the taboo entered upon its final illness. For the more
self-governing a people becomes, the less possible it is to prescribe
external restrictions. The gap between want and ought, between nature and
ideals cannot be maintained. The only practical ideals in a democracy are
a fine expression of natural wants. This happens to be a thoroughly Greek
attitude. But I learned it first from the Bowery. Chuck Connors is
reported to have said that "a gentleman is a bloke as can do whatever he
wants to do." If Chuck said that, he went straight to the heart of that
democratic morality on which a new statecraft must ultimately rest. His
gentleman is not the battlefield of wants and prohibitions; in him
impulses flow freely through beneficent channels.

The same notion lies imbedded in the phrase: "government must serve the
people." That means a good deal more than that elected officials must
rule for the majority. For the majority in these semi-democratic times is
often as not a cloak for the ruling oligarchy. Representatives who
"serve" some majorities may in reality order the nation about. To serve
the people means to provide it with services--with clean streets and
water, with education, with opportunity, with beneficent channels for its
desires, with moral equivalents for evil. The task is turned from the
damming and restricting of wants to the creation of fine environments for
them. And the environment of an impulse extends all the way from the
human body, through family life and education out into the streets of the
city.

Had the Commission worked along democratic lines, we should have had
recommendations about the hygiene and early training of children, their
education, the houses they live in and the streets in which they play;
changes would have been suggested in the industrial conditions they face;
plans would have been drawn for recreation; hints would have been
collected for transmuting the sex impulse into art, into social endeavor,
into religion. That is the constructive approach to the problem. I note
that the Commission calls upon the churches for help. Its obvious
intention was to down sex with religion. What was not realized, it seems,
is that this very sex impulse, so largely degraded into vice, is the
dynamic force in religious feeling. One need not call in the testimony of
the psychologists, the students of religion, the aestheticians or even of
Plato, who in the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love from the
body to the "whole sea of beauty." Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the
truth by her own wide experience, and she has written what the Commission
might easily have read,--that "in failing to diffuse and utilize this
fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, we not only
inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the
most precious implements for ministering to life's highest needs. There
is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily
vast stores of vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature
manifestations which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping
process. All high school boys and girls know the difference between the
concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would be
hopelessly bewildered by the use of terms. They will declare one of their
companions to be 'in love' if his fancy is occupied by the image of a
single person about whom all the new-found values gather, and without
whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if the stimulus does not
appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the
world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and
significance in many things--he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of
nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal.
Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and
value of diffusion."

It is then not only impossible to confine sex to mere reproduction; it
would be a stupid denial of the finest values of civilization. Having
seen that the impulse is a necessary part of character, we must not hold
to it grudgingly as a necessary evil. It is, on the contrary, the very
source of good. Whoever has visited Hull House can see for himself the
earnest effort Miss Addams has made to treat sex with dignity and joy.
For Hull House differs from most settlements in that it is full of
pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere is light; you feel none
of that moral oppression which hangs over the usual settlement as over a
gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not only made Hull House a
beautiful place; she has stocked it with curious and interesting objects.
The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts, games and dances--they
are some of those "other methods of expression which lust can seek." It
is no accident that Hull House is the most successful settlement in
America.

Yet who does not feel its isolation in that brutal city? A little Athens
in a vast barbarism--you wonder how much of Chicago Hull House can
civilize. As you walk those grim streets and look into the stifling
houses, or picture the relentless stockyards, the conviction that vice
and its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and Morals Commissions,
the feeling that spying and inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the
marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout at the forcible moralizer:
"so long as you acquiesce in the degradation of your city, so long as
work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery and every instinct of joy is
mocked by dirt and cheapness and brutality,--just so long will your
efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and prosecute, even though
you make Comstock the Czar of Chicago."

But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred lives can be changed,
and for the rest it is a guide to the imagination. Like all utopias, it
cannot succeed, but it may point the way to success. If Hull House is
unable to civilize Chicago, it at least shows Chicago and America what a
civilization might be like. Friendly, where our cities are friendless,
beautiful, where they are ugly; sociable and open, where our daily life
is furtive; work a craft; art a participation--it is in miniature the
goal of statesmanship. If Chicago were like Hull House, we say to
ourselves, then vice would be no problem--it would dwindle, what was left
would be the Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia could worry
over that jolly and redeeming coarseness.

What stands between Chicago and civilization? No one can doubt that to
abolish prostitution means to abolish the slum and the dirty alley, to
stop overwork, underpay, the sweating and the torturing monotony of
business, to breathe a new life into education, ventilate society with
frankness, and fill life with play and art, with games, with passions
which hold and suffuse the imagination.

It is a revolutionary task, and like all real revolutions it will not be
done in a day or a decade because someone orders it to be done. A change
in the whole quality of life is something that neither the policeman's
club nor an insurrectionary raid can achieve. If you want a revolution
that shall really matter in human life--and what sane man can help
desiring it?--you must look to the infinitely complicated results of the
dynamic movements in society. These revolutions require a rare
combination of personal audacity and social patience. The best agents of
such a revolution are men who are bold in their plans because they
realize how deep and enormous is the task.

Many people have sought an analogy in our Civil War. They have said that
as "black slavery" went, so must "white slavery." In the various
agitations of vigilance committees and alliances for the suppression of
the traffic they profess to see continued a work which the abolitionists
began.

In A. M. Simons' brilliant book on "Social Forces in American History"
much help can be found. For example: "Massachusetts abolished slavery at
an early date, and we have it on the authority of John Adams
that:--'argument might have had some weight in the abolition of slavery
in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring
white people, who would not longer suffer the rich to employ these sable
rivals so much to their injury.'" No one to-day doubts that white labor
in the North and slavery in the South were not due to the moral
superiority of the North. Yet just in the North we find the abolition
sentiment strongest. That the Civil War was not a clash of good men and
bad men is admitted by every reputable historian. The war did not come
when moral fervor had risen to the exploding point; the moral fervor came
rather when the economic interests of the South collided with those of
the North. That the abolitionists clarified the economic interests of the
North and gave them an ideal sanction is true enough. But the fact
remains that by 1860 some of the aspirations of Phillips and Garrison had
become the economic destiny of this country.

You can have a Hull House established by private initiative and
maintained by individual genius, just as you had planters who freed their
slaves or as you have employers to-day who humanize their factories. But
the fine example is not readily imitated when industrial forces fight
against it. So even if the Commission had drawn splendid plans for
housing, work conditions, education, and play it would have done only
part of the task of statesmanship. We should then know what to do, but
not how to get it done.

An ideal suspended in a vacuum is ineffective: it must point a dynamic
current. Only then does it gather power, only then does it enter into
life. That forces exist to-day which carry with them solutions is evident
to anyone who has watched the labor movement and the woman's awakening.
Even the interests of business give power to the cause. The discovery of
manufacturers that degradation spoils industrial efficiency must not be
cast aside by the radical because the motive is larger profits. The
discovery, whatever the motive, will inevitably humanize industry a good
deal. For it happens that in this case the interests of capitalism and of
humanity coincide. A propaganda like the single-tax will undoubtedly find
increasing support among business men. They see in it a relief from the
burden of rent imposed by that older tyrant--the landlord. But the
taxation of unimproved property happens at the same time to be a splendid
weapon against the slum.

Only when the abolition of "white slavery" becomes part of the social
currents of the time will it bear any interesting analogy to the
so-called freeing of the slaves. Even then for many enthusiasts the
comparison is misleading. They are likely to regard the Emancipation
Proclamation as the end of chattel slavery. It wasn't. That historic
document broke a legal bond but not a social one. The process of negro
emancipation is infinitely slower and it is not accomplished yet.
Likewise no statute can end "white slavery." Only vast and complicated
changes in the whole texture of social life will achieve such an end. If
by some magic every taboo of the commission could be enforced the
abolition of sex slavery would not have come one step nearer to reality.
Cities and factories, schools and homes, theaters and games, manners and
thought will have to be transformed before sex can find a better
expression. Living forces, not statutes or clubs, must work that change.
The power of emancipation is in the social movements which alone can
effect any deep reform in a nation. So it is and has been with the negro.
I do not think the Abolitionists saw facts truly when they disbanded
their organization a few years after the civil war. They found too much
comfort in a change of legal status. Profound economic forces brought
about the beginning of the end of chattel slavery. But the reality of
freedom was not achieved by proclamation. For that the revolution had to
go on: the industrial life of the nation had to change its character,
social customs had to be replaced, the whole outlook of men had to be
transformed. And whether it is negro slavery or a vicious sexual bondage,
the actual advance comes from substitutions injected into society by
dynamic social forces.

I do not wish to press the analogy or over-emphasize the particular
problems. I am not engaged in drawing up the plans for a reconstruction
or in telling just what should be done. Only the co-operation of expert
minds can do that. The place for a special propaganda is elsewhere. If
these essays succeed in suggesting a method of looking at politics, if
they draw attention to what is real in social reforms and make somewhat
more evident the traps and the blind-alleys of an uncritical approach,
they will have done their work. That the report of the Chicago Vice
Commission figures so prominently in this chapter is not due to any
preoccupation with Chicago, the Commission or with vice. It is a text and
nothing else. The report happens to embody what I conceive to be most of
the faults of a political method now decadent. Its failure to put human
impulses at the center of thought produced remedies valueless to human
nature; its false interest in a particular expression of
sex--vice--caused it to taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability
to see that wants require fine satisfactions and not prohibitions drove
it into an undemocratic tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of
our age shut off the motive power for any reform.

The Commission's method was poor, not its intentions. It was an average
body of American citizens aroused to action by an obvious evil. But
something slipped in to falsify vision. It was, I believe, an array of
idols disguised as ideals. They are typical American idols, and they
deserve some study.

CHAPTER VI

SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM

The Commission "has kept constantly in mind that to offer a
contribution of any value such an offering must be, first, moral;
second, reasonable and practical; third, possible under the
Constitutional powers of our Courts; fourth, that which will square
with the public conscience of the American people."--The Vice
Commission of Chicago--Introduction to Report on the Social Evil.

Having adjusted such spectacles the Commission proceeded to look at "this
curse which is more blasting than any plague or epidemic," at an evil
"which spells only ruin to the race." In dealing with what it regards as
the greatest calamity in the world, a calamity as old as civilization,
the Commission lays it down beforehand that the remedy must be "moral,"
constitutional, and satisfactory to the public conscience. I wonder in
all seriousness what the Commission would have done had it discovered a
genuine cure for prostitution which happened, let us say, to conflict
with the constitutional powers of our courts. I wonder how the Commission
would have acted if a humble following of the facts had led them to a
conviction out of tune with the existing public conscience of America.
Such a conflict is not only possible; it is highly probable. When you
come to think of it, the conflict appears a certainty. For the
Constitution is a legal expression of the conditions under which
prostitution has flourished; the social evil is rooted in institutions
and manners which have promoted it, in property relations and business
practice which have gathered about them a halo of reason and
practicality, of morality and conscience. Any change so vast as the
abolition of vice is of necessity a change in morals, practice, law and
conscience.

A scientist who began an investigation by saying that his results must be
moral or constitutional would be a joke. We have had scientists like
that, men who insisted that research must confirm the Biblical theory of
creation. We have had economists who set out with the preconceived idea
of justifying the factory system. The world has recently begun to see
through this kind of intellectual fraud. If a doctor should appear who
offered a cure for tuberculosis on the ground that it was justified by
the Bible and that it conformed to the opinions of that great mass of the
American people who believe that fresh air is the devil, we should
promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous quack. When the negroes of
Kansas were said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves against
Halley's Comet, they were doing something which appeared to them as
eminently practical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we read of the
savage way in which a leper was treated out West; his leprosy was not
regarded as a disease, but as the curse of God, and, if I remember
correctly, the Bible was quoted in court as an authority on leprosy. The
treatment seemed entirely moral and squared very well with the conscience
of that community.

I have heard reputable physicians condemn a certain method of
psychotherapy because it was "immoral." A woman once told me that she had
let her son grow up ignorant of his sexual life because "a mother should
never mention anything 'embarrassing' to her child." Many of us are still
blushing for the way America treated Gorki when it found that Russian
morals did not square with the public conscience of America. And the time
is not yet passed when we punish the offspring of illicit love, and visit
vengeance unto the third and fourth generations. One reads in the report
of the Vice Commission that many public hospitals in Chicago refuse to
care for venereal diseases. The examples are endless. They run from the
absurd to the monstrous. But always the source is the same. Idols are set
up to which all the living must bow; we decide beforehand that things
must fit a few preconceived ideas. And when they don't, which is most of
the time, we deny truth, falsify facts, and prefer the coddling of our
theory to any deeper understanding of the real problem before us.

It seems as if a theory were never so active as when the reality behind
it has disappeared. The empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an
authority that is appalling. When you think of the blood that has been
shed in the name of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Roman Empire,
"neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the constitutional phrases that
cloak all sorts of thievery, of the common law precedents that tyrannize
over us, history begins to look almost like the struggle of man to
emancipate himself from phrase-worship. The devil can quote Scripture,
and law, and morality and reason and practicality. The devil can use the
public conscience of his time. He does in wars, in racial and religious
persecutions; he did in the Spain of the Inquisition; he does in the
American lynching.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16