Proclaim Liberty! Part 13

Sport began to come into its own after Populism and Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal; it is therefore not anti-social and even withstood the prosperity of Harding and Coolidge.

_Means of Communication_

The other elements I have mentioned, movies, radio and a new journalism, are the products of our immediate time. Although the moving picture was exhibited earlier, it began to be vastly popular just before the first World War, and was promptly recognized as a prime instrument of propaganda by Lenin as he began to build the Socialist State in 1917; the moving picture may have been colossal then, but it did not become prodigious, a social engine of incalculable force, until the problems of speech had been mastered.

By that time another pre-war invention, the radio, had established itself in its present commercial base. Radio was first conceived as an instrument of secret communication; it began to be useful, as wireless telegraphy, when the Soviets used it to appeal to peoples over the heads of their governments--although this appeal still had to be printed, the radio receiver did not exist. When the necessary inventions were working (and the tinkering American forced the issue by building his own receivers and his own ham-senders), radio began to serve the public. Among its earliest transmissions were a sermon, the election results in the Harding-c.o.x campaign, crop reports, and music.

The entrance of commerce was easy and natural; and before the crash of 1929 the decisive step was taken: the stations went out of the business of creating programs and sold "time", allowing the buyer to fill it with music or comedy or anything not offensive to the morals of the community.

By the time commercial radio made its first spectacular successes, in the early days of Vallee and Amos and Andy, a new form of publication had established itself, a fresh combination of text and picture, devoted to fact and deriving more entertainment from fact than the old straight fiction magazine had offered.

These three new means of ma.s.s communication are revolutionary inventions of democracy. To use them is the first obligation of statesmanship. They have been seized by dictators; literally, for the first move of a _coup d'etat_ is to take over the radio and the next is to divert the movies into propaganda.

Before these instruments can be used, their nature has to be understood and their meaning to the average man has to be calculated.

_Words and Pictures_

Of the fact and picture publications _Life_ and _Look_ are the best examples; _Time_ and _News-Week_ are fact and ill.u.s.tration magazines which is basically different, although their success is also important. The appet.i.te for fact appears in a nation supposed to be adolescent and given over to the silliest of romantic fictions; _Time_ and the _Readers' Digest_ become the great magazine phenomena of our time, growing in seriousness as they understand better the temper of their readers, learning to present fact forcefully, directing themselves to maturity, and helping to create mature minds. Their faults are private trifles, their basic editorial policies are public services.

The word and picture magazine is not yet completely realized; both its chief examples grow and develop, but the full integration of word and image is yet to come. It is probably the most significant development in communication since the depression struck; it promises to rescue the printed page from the obscurity into which radio, the movies, and conservatism in format were pushing books and magazines and newspapers. It is odd that book publication, the oldest use of quant.i.ty production, should have so long been content with relatively small circulations. Changes now are apparent. The most interesting developments in recent years are mail-order selling (the basis of the book clubs) and ma.s.s selling over the counter, the method of the Pocketbook series. Both withdraw book-sales from the stuffiness of old methods and the artiness of book "shoppes" which always got in the way of good book-sellers.

The text-and-image publication need not be a magazine; the method is especially applicable to argument, to the pamphlet and the report. The art of visualization has progressed in the making of charts and isotypes and in the pure intellectual grasp of the function of the visual. The economic and technical problems of the use of color have been solved and all the effectiveness of images has been multiplied by the contrast and clarity which color provides. A new language is in process of being formed.

Until television-in-color, which exists, becomes common, the need for this new language is great. For neither the movies nor radio can be used for reasoned persuasion; their attack is too immediate, the listener-spectator does not have time for argument and contemplation.

Radio profits positively by its limitation to sound when it works with the right materials; but when President Roosevelt asked his audience to have a map at hand, television supplied the map and the meaning of the map without diverting attention from the speech, which radio could not do. The movies, great pioneer in text and sound, have mastered none of the arts of demonstration or persuasion; they have the immediate gain of a single method and a single objective: appeal to the emotions by absorption in the visual; and the fact that the moving picture's appeal is to a group, means that every element must be over-simplified and every effect is over-multiplied by the group presence. By this the movies also gain when they use the right materials.

The use of the new combination of text and image, growing out of the tabloid and the picture magazine, is, in effect, the creation of a mobile reserve of propaganda. When the radio and the movies have established the facts and aroused the desired emotion, the final battery of argument comes in picture and print; and this, ideally, is carried to the ward meeting, to the after-supper visit, the drugstore soda counter and the lunch hour at the factory--where the action is determined by men and women in private discussion.

_Universal Languages_

Radio, which instantly creates the desired situation, and movies, which so plausibly arouse the desired emotion, are the two great ma.s.s inventions of America. The patents may have been taken out elsewhere, but it was in America that these two forms of ma.s.s communication were instantly placed at the service of all people. The errors of judgment have been gross, but the error of purpose was not made; the movies were kept out of the hands of the aesthete and radio was kept out of the hands of the bureaucrat. For a generation we deplored the vulgarity of movies made for morons' money at the box office, and discovered that the only other effective movies were made by dictators, to falsify history, as the Russians did when the miserable Trotsky was cinematically liquidated, or to stir hate as did every film made by Hitler. For a generation we wept over the commercialism of radio and at the end found that commercial radio had created an audience for statesmen and philosophers; and again the alternative was the hammering of dictators' propaganda, to which one listened under compulsion.

The intermediate occasions, the exceptions, are not significant. Some great inventions in the realm of ideas were made by British radio (which is government owned, but not government operated); some exceptional and important films were made for the few. But the dictators and the businessmen both had the right idea--movies and the radio are for all men; they can be used to entertain, to arouse, to soothe, to persuade; but they must not ever be used without thinking of _all_ the people. This universality lies in the nature of the instruments, in the endless duplication of the films, the unlimited reception of the broadcasts; and only Hitler and Stalin and the sponsors have been happy to understand this.

Like all those who are habituated to the movies, I have suffered much from Hollywood, my pain being all the greater because I am so devoted; like all those who work in radio, I am acutely conscious of its faults; but the faults and the ba.n.a.lities are not in question now. Now we have to take instruments perfected by others, and use them for our purposes. We have to discover what the ignoramus in Hollywood and the businessman in the sponsor's booth have paid for.

The one thing we cannot do is risk the value of the medium. We have to learn how to use popularity; we have to learn why the movies never could carry advertising, and adjust our propaganda accordingly; and why radio can not quickly teach, but can create a receptive situation; and why we may have to use rhetoric instead of demonstrations to accomplish an end. Moreover, we have to study the field so that we know when _not_ to use these instruments, what we must not take from them, in order to preserve their incomparable appeal.

A coordinated use of _all_ the means of persuasion is required; to let the movie makers make movies is good, but the exact function of the movies in the complete effort has to be established, or we will waste time and do badly on the screen what can be done well only in print or most effectively on the air. There are many things to be done; we need excitement and prophecy and cold reason, and they must not come haphazard, but in an order of combined effect; we need news and history and fable and diversion, and each must minister to the other.

If we fail to use the instruments correctly they can destroy us; one ill-timed, but brilliantly made, doc.u.mentary on production rendered futile whole weeks of facts about a lagging program; and one ill-advised news reel shot can undo a dozen radio hours. When the means of communication and entertainment become engines of victory, we have to use each medium only at its highest effectiveness; and we have to use all of them together.

The movies, the radio, the popular publication are so new, they seem to rise on the international horizon of the 1920's, to have no link with our past, to be the same with us as they are all over the world.

With these, it is true, we return to the universals of human expression and communication. But what we have done with them is unique, and their significance as part of our war machinery is based on both the universal and the special qualities they possess. That is why I have treated them separately; because they are powerful and have enormous inertia, the slightest error may acc.u.mulate tremendous consequences, and the instinctively right use of them will be the most complete protection against disaster at home.

We have to study the right use because these tools have never yet been completely used for the purposes of democracy; and with them we have to remind the American people of other tools and instruments they have neglected, so many that it sometimes seems a pa.s.sion with us to invent the best instruments and to hand them over to our enemies to use against us.

CHAPTER XI

The Tools of Democracy

The tools of democracy are certain civil actions, certain inventions, certain habits. They can be used against us--but only if we fail to use them ourselves.

The greatest tools are civil liberties which we have been considering as "rights" or "privileges". The right to free speech is a great one; free speech probably was originally intended to protect property; it preserves liberty; the rights of a.s.sembly, of protest for redress, of a free press all have this double value, that they guarantee the integrity of the private man and protect the State.

The great debate on the war brought back some long forgotten phenomena: broadsides, street meetings, marches, and brawls. Before they began, virtually _all_ the civil rights were being used either by newcomers to America or by enemies of the American system. The poor had no access to the radio; they used a soap box instead and genteel people shrank away; the Bundist and the American Communist a.s.sembled and protested and published and spoke; the believers in America waited for an election to roll around again, and then did nothing about it.

The enemies of the people sent a hundred thousand telegrams to Congressmen, signing the names of dead men to kill the regulation of utilities, but the believer in the democratic process didn't remember the name of his Congressman. Bewildered aliens got their second papers and were inducted into political clubs; the old line Americans never found out how the primaries worked.

_Public Addresses_

A dangerous condition rose. No families from Beacon Street spoke in Boston Common; therefore, whoever spoke on the Common was an enemy of Beacon Street; all over America the well-born (and the well-heeled) retired from direct communication with the people, and all over America the privilege of talking to the citizens fell into the hands of radicals, lunatics, and dangerous enemies of the Republic--so that in time the very fact that one tried to exercise the right of free speech became suspect; and Beacon Street and Park Avenue could think of no way to protect themselves from Boston Common and Union Square--except to abolish free speech entirely. They did not dare to say it, but the remarkable Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City, said it for them: "Whenever I hear anyone talk about civil liberties, I know he's not a good American".

The dreadful humiliation was that it came so close to the truth. The Red and the Bundist, clamoring or conspiring against America, were almost the only ones doing what all Americans had the right to do. We hated cranks, we did not want to be so conspicuous, we hadn't the time, the police would attend to it, if they didn't like it here let them go back ... we allowed our most precious rights to atrophy. When suddenly they were remembered, as they were by the bonus marchers of 1932, we yelled revolution and the President of the United States called out the troops to shoot down the defenders of our country. It was the first time that a pet.i.tion for redress had been offered by good citizens, by veterans, by men of notable American stock--and it frightened us because they were doing what "only foreigners" or "dangerous agitators" used to do; they were in fact being Americans in action.

What is not used, dies. The habit of protecting our freedom was dying in the United States. There was no conspiracy of power against us; there was no need. We were carrying experimental democracy forward so far on several planes--the material and social planes particularly--that we let it go by default on the vital plane of practical politics. We did not go into politics, we did not electioneer, we did not threaten ward bosses or county chairmen, we did not form third parties, we did nothing except vote, if it was a fair day (but not too fair if we meant to play golf). As for private action to defend our liberties, it was unnecessary and vulgar and bothersome.

The depression scared us, but not into free speech; by that time free speech was Red; and the deeper we floundered in the mire of defeatism, the more intimidated we were by shouting Congressmen and super-patriots; it was only after the New Deal pulled us out of our tailspin that we saw the light: we too could have been obscure men speaking at street corners, we did not have to give all the soap boxes to men like Sacco and Vanzetti; we too could have published pamphlets like the dreadful Communists, and held meetings and badgered our Congressmen. Suddenly the people were reincorporated into their government; suddenly the people began to be concerned with government; and the tremendous revitalization of political anger was one of the best symptoms of democratic recovery in our generation.

_Return to Politics_

The merciless pressure of taxation and then the grip of war have pushed us forward and in a generation we will be again as politically aware as our great-grandfathers were when they had one newspaper a week, and only their determination to rule themselves as a principle of action. Perhaps we shall take the trouble they took; they travelled a day's journey to hear a debate and discussed it for a fortnight; they thought about politics and studied the meaning of events. And they quite naturally did their duties as citizens; they dug their neighbors out of snow-blocked roads, they nominated their candidates, they watched and rebuked their representatives. It was not a political Utopia, but it was a more intelligent use of political power than ours has been. The usual excuse for the breakdown of political action in America is that so many "foreigners" came, to whom the politics of freedom were alien. This may have been true of some of the later arrivals; but the Irish were captivated by, and presently captured, city politics wherever they settled; the Germans were the steadiest of citizens and so were the Scandinavians, their studious earnest belief in our inst.i.tutions shaming our flippant disregard. The Southern Slavs, the Russian Jews and the Italians were farthest removed from our political habits; but their pa.s.sion for America was great. It could have been worked into political action, and often was worked into political skulduggery by bosses of a more political bent. Many of these immigrants came after the exhaustion of free lands; many were plunged into slums and sweatshops and steel mills on a twelve hour day; and they emerged on the angry side, as disillusioned with America as some of its most ancient families.

That political action dwindled after the great immigrations is true; but it was not the immigrant who refused to act; it was the old family and the typical American; the grafting politicians and the sidewalk radical both kept politics alive; the real Americans were slowly smothering politics. We shall never quite repay our debt to Tammany Hall and the Communists; between them political machines and saintly radicals managed to keep the instruments of democratic action from rusting. Now we have to take them back and learn how to use them again. Fortunately we have no choice. We neglected our rights because we wanted to sidestep our duties; today the war makes our duties inescapable and we are already beginning to use our rights. For in spite of censorship and regimentation, we will use more of our instruments of democracy than ever; we will because we are fighting for them and they have become valuable to us.

The radio, the movies, and popular print are the three tools by which we can create democratic action. The action itself will be appropriate to our time and our conditions; we will not travel ten miles to hear a debate, so long as the radio lasts; but we will have to form units of self-protection in bombed cities; we may need other a.s.sociations, to apportion food, to house the homeless, to support the bereaved. We will have to learn how to live together, to share what was once as private as a motor car, to elect a village constable who may have our lives in his hands a dozen times a day. In the process we will be reverting to old and good democratic habits--in a city block in Atlanta or in a prairie village outside Emporia, or in a chic suburb along Lake Michigan. Something like the town-meeting is taking place in a thousand apartment houses where air-raid precautions and the disposal of waste paper are discussed and mothers who have to work trade time with wives who want to go to the movies; the farmers have, since 1932, been meeting; the suburbanites are discussing trains and creation of bus-routes. We are making the discovery that it is our country and we can decide its destiny. We are not to let others rule us; for in this emergency every man must rule himself; the man who neglects his political duty is as dangerous today as the man who leaves his lights on in a blackout.

In the early months of the war our democratic processes were muscle-bound. We hadn't been doing things together; whenever we had organized, it was against some one else; we didn't fall naturally into a simple cooperative effort. And within two months we were breaking into hostile particles, until, in desperation, we discovered that men can work together. The obstructionist manufacturer and the stubborn labor leader could hold up an entire industry; but two men, one from each side, could set each factory going again. The creation of the labor-management committees of two was the first light in the darkness of our domestic policy.

Still to come was the spontaneous outbreak of fervor and the cold organization for victory. We had forgotten the tools of democracy which we had to work together, as simply as men had to work on a s...o...b..und country road together. In a small town of Ohio a pleasant event occurred which had a stir of promise; Dorothy Thompson's report was:

"They got together in the old-fashioned American way: in the old opera house. They warmed and instilled enthusiasm and resolution into one another, by the ma.s.s of their presence, and by music, and prayer.

"Mr. Sweet had put the F.F.A. (The Future Farmers of America and the older brothers of the Four-H clubs) to work, and they had made a survey of the existing resources of the community, in trucks, autos, combines, tractors. And he proposed to them that they use these resources, _as a community_, getting the greatest work out of them with the greatest conservation of them; organizing transportation to the factory where war production was going on, so that no auto travelled for its owner alone, but for as many workers as it could carry."

_Democratic Action_

There is a field of endeavor in war time where this sort of spontaneous, amateur organization is best; and our Government will be wise if it prevents the inexpert from building bombers but lets them, as far as possible, get children to and from school by local effort.

We want to feel that we are being used, that our powers are working for the common good. So far we have been irritated by sudden demands, and frightened by long indifference to our offers--until an angry man has done something, as Mr. Fred Sweet did in Mt. Gilead. A government determined to win this war will create the opportunities for democratic action without waiting for angry men. The combination of maximum control (the single head of production) and maximum dispersion (two men in each factory solving the local problem) is exactly what we understand; to translate civilian emotion into terms of maximum use is the next step.

Already this is happening to us: on one side we are grouping ourselves into smaller units; on the other we are discovering that we are parts of the whole nation. It is a tremendous release of energies for us; we are discovering what we had hoped--that America is of indescribable significance to us and that we for the first time signify in America--we, not bosses or financiers or critics or cliques or groups or movements--but we ourselves. Something almost dead stirs again and we know that we shall be able to work with our fellowmen, and work with our Government, and watch those we chose to speak for us, and challenge corruption, and see to it that we, who are the people, are not betrayed. We may not revive the _forms_ of democracy as they existed in Lincoln's time, but we will never again let the _spirit_ of his democracy come so near to being beyond all revival.