The Behavior of Crowds Part 11

In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic inst.i.tutions of the United States does not arise, as is so often a.s.serted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength.... I am not so much alarmed by the excessive liberty which reigns in that country, as by the inadequate securities which one finds against tyranny. When an individual or party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress?

It is in the examination of the exercise of thought in the United States that we clearly perceive how far the power of the majority surpa.s.ses all the powers with which we are acquainted in Europe. At the present time the most absolute monarchs in Europe cannot prevent certain opinions hostile to their authority from circulating in secret through their dominions and even in their courts.

It is not so in America. So long as the majority is undecided, discussion is carried on, but as soon as its decision is announced everyone is silent....

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion. Within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an _auto-da-fe_, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed for ever. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused him. Those who think like him have not the courage to speak out, and abandon him to silence. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.

Fetters and headsmen were coa.r.s.e instruments ... but civilization has perfected despotism itself. Under absolute despotism of one man, the body was attacked to subdue the soul, but the soul escaped the blows and rose superior. Such is not the course adopted in democratic republics; there the body is left free, but the soul is enslaved....

The ruling power in the United States is not to be made game of.

The smallest reproach irritates its sensibilities. The slightest joke which has any foundation in truth renders it indignant.

Everything must be the subject of encomium. No writer, whatever his eminence, can escape paying his tribute of adoration to his fellow citizens.

The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause, and there are certain truths which Americans can only learn from strangers, or from experience. If America has not yet had any great writers, the reason is given in these facts--there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America.

Such pa.s.sages as the above, quoted from the words of a friendly student of American democracy, show the impression which, notwithstanding our popular prattle about freedom, thoughtful foreigners have since the beginning received. And de Tocqueville wrote long before crowd-thinking had reached anything like the development we see at present. To-day the tyrannizing is not confined to the majority-crowd. All sorts of minority-crowds, impatient of waiting until they can by fair means persuade the majority to agree with them, begin to practice coercion upon everyone within reach the minute they fall into possession of some slight advantage which may be used as a weapon. From the industrial side we were first menaced by the "invisible government" of organized vested interests; now, by a growing tendency to government by strikes.

Organized gangs of all sorts have at last learned the amusing trick of pointing a pistol at the public's head and threatening it with starvation, and up go its hands, and the gang gains whatever it wants for itself, regardless of anyone else. But this "hold-up game" is by no means confined to labor. Capitalistic soviets have since the beginning of the war taken advantage of situations to enhance their special crowd-interests. The following, quoted from a letter written during the war to the _Atlantic Monthly_, by a thoroughly American writer, Charles D. Stewart, describes a type of mob rule which existed in almost every part of the nation while we were fighting for freedom abroad:

Carlyle said that "Of all forms of government, a government of busybodies is the worst." This is true. It is worse than Prussianism, because that is one form of government, at least; and worse than Socialism, because Socialism would be run by law, anyway. But government by busybodies has neither head nor tail; working outside the law, it becomes lawless; and having no law to support it, it finally depends for its enforcement upon hoodlums and mob rule. When the respectable and wealthy elements are resorting to this sort of government, abetted by the newspapers and by all sorts of busybody societies intent upon "government by public sentiment," we finally have a new thing in the world and a most obnoxious one--mob rule by the rich; with the able a.s.sistance of the hoodlums--always looking for a chance.

It starts as follows:

The government wishes a certain amount of money. It therefore appeals to local pride; it sets a "quota," which has been apportioned to each locality, and promises of a fine "over-the-top" flag to be hoisted over the courthouse. All well and good; local pride is a very fine thing, compet.i.tion is wholesome.

But the struggle that ensues is not so much local pride as it looks to be.

Milwaukee, for instance, a big manufacturing center, is noted for its German population. This, the local proprietors fear, may affect its trade. It may be boycotted to some extent. A traveling man comes back and says that a certain dealer in stoves refuses to buy stoves made in Milwaukee!

Ha!--Milwaukee must redeem its reputation; it must always go over the top: it must be able to affix this stamp to all its letters.

Now, as the state has a quota, and the county and city has each its quota, so each individual must have his quota. Each individual must be "a.s.sessed" to buy a certain quota [government war loan] of bonds. Success must be made sure: the manufacturers must see the honor of Milwaukee, and Wisconsin, maintained.

It is not compulsory to give a certain "a.s.sessed" amount to the Y. M. C. A.; and the government does not make a certain quota of bonds compulsory on citizens--oh, no! it is not compulsory, only you must abide by your a.s.sessment. And we will see that you do.

No excuse accepted....

Picture to yourself the following "collection committee"

traveling out of the highly civilized, "kultured" city of Milwaukee.

Twenty-five automobiles containing sixty to seventy respectable citizens of Milwaukee.

One color guard (a flag at the head) with two home guardsmen in citizens' clothes.

Two deputy sheriffs.

One "official" photographer.

One "official" stenographer.

One banker (this personage to make arrangements to lend a farmer the money in case he protests that he has subscribed too much already).

This phalanx, entirely lawless, moves down upon a farmer who is urging two horses along a cloddy furrow, doing his fall plowing.

They form a semicircle about him; the speechmaker says, "Let us salute the flag" (watching him to see that he does it promptly); and while his horses stand there the speechmaker delivers a speech. He must subscribe his "a.s.sessed" amount--no excuses accepted. If he owes for the farm, and has just paid his interest, and has only fifteen dollars to go on with, it makes no difference. He must subscribe the amount of his "a.s.sessment,"

and "sign here."

If not, what happens? The farmer all the time, of course, is probably scared out of his wits, or does not know what to make of this delegation of notables bearing down upon his solitary task in the fields. But if he argues too much, he finds this.

They have a large package of yellow placards reading:

THE OCCUPANT OF THESE PREMISES HAS REFUSED TO TAKE HIS JUST SHARE OF LIBERTY BONDS.

And they put them all over his place. He probably signs.

Now bear in mind that this method is not practiced merely against farmers who have made unpatriotic remarks, or have refused to support the war. It is practiced against a farmer who has taken only one hundred dollars when he was a.s.sessed a hundred and fifty--and this is to make him "come across" with the remainder.

You might ask, Is this comic opera or is it government?

And now we come to the conclusion. Imagine yourself either a workman in Milwaukee, or a farmer out in the country. You are dealt with in this entirely Prussian manner--possibly the committee, which knows little of your financial difficulties in your home, has just a.s.sessed you arbitrarily.

Your const.i.tutional rights do not count. There is no remedy. If you are painted yellow, the District Attorney will pa.s.s the buck--he knows what the manufacturer expects of him, and the financier. The state officers of these drives, Federal representatives, are always Milwaukee bankers.

But for you there is no remedy if you are "a.s.sessed" too high.

With the Y. M. C. A., and other religious society drives, the same a.s.sessment scheme is worked. You cannot give to the Y. M. C. A. You are told right off how much you are to pay.

It would seem that in our democracy freedom consists first of freedom to vote; second, of freedom to make commercial profit; third, of freedom to make propaganda; fourth, of freedom from intellectual and moral responsibility. Each of these "liberties" is little more than a characteristic form of crowd-behavior. The vote, our most highly prized modern right, is nearly always so determined by crowd-thinking that as an exercise of individual choice it is a joke. Men are herded in droves and delivered by counties in almost solid blocks by professional traders of political influence. Before each election a campaign of crowd-making is conducted in which every sort of vulgarity and insincerity has survival value, in which real issues are so lost in partisan propaganda as to become unrecognizable. When the vote is cast it is commonly a choice between professional crowd-leaders whose competency consists in their ability to Billy Sundayize the mob rather than in any marked fitness for the office to which they aspire--also between the horns of a dilemma which wholly misstates the issue involved and is trumped up chiefly for purposes of political advertising. Time and again the franchise thus becomes an agency by which rival crowds may fasten their own tyrannies upon one another.

Freedom to make commercial profit, to get ahead of others in the race for dollars, is what democracy generally means by "opportunity." Nothing is such a give-away of the modern man as the popular use of the word "individualism." It is no longer a philosophy of _becoming_ something genuine and unique, but of _getting_ something and using it according to your own whims and for personal ends regardless of the effect upon others. This pseudo-individualism encourages the rankest selfishness and exploitation to go hand in hand with the most deadly spiritual conformity and inanity. Such "individualism" is, as I have pointed out, a crowd-idea, for it is motivated by a cheaply disguised ideal of personal superiority through the mere fact of possessing things.

Paradoxical as it may appear at first sight, this is really the old crowd notion of "equality," for, great as are the differences of wealth which result, every man may cherish the fiction that he possesses the sort of ability necessary for this kind of social distinction. Such superiority thus has little to do with personal excellence; it is the result of the external accident of success. One man may still be "as good as another."

Against this compet.i.tive struggle now there has grown up a counter-crowd ideal of collectivism. But here also the fiction of universal spiritual equality is maintained; the compet.i.tive struggle is changed from an individual to a gang struggle, while the notion that personal worth is the result of the environment and may be achieved by anyone whose belly is filled still persists. Proletarians for the most part wish, chinch-bug fashion, to crawl into the Elysian fields now occupied by the hated capitalists. The growing tendency to industrial democracy will probably in the near future cut off this freedom to make money, which has been the chief "liberty" of political democracy until now, but whether liberty in general will be the gainer thereby remains to be seen. One rather prominent Socialist in New York declares that liberty is a "myth." He is correct, in so far as the democratic movement, either political or social, is a crowd-phenomenon. Socialist agitators are always demanding "liberty" nevertheless, but the liberty which they demand is little more than freedom to make their own propaganda. And this leads us to the third liberty permitted by modern democracy.

The "freedom of speech" which is everywhere demanded in the name of democracy is not at all freedom in the expression of individual opinion.

It is only the demand for advertising s.p.a.ce on the part of various crowds for the publication of their shibboleths and propaganda. Each crowd, while demanding this freedom for itself, seeks to deny it to other crowds, and all unite in denying it to the non-crowd man wherever possible. The Puritan's "right to worship according to the dictates of a man's own conscience" did not apply to Quakers, Deists, or Catholics.

When Republicans were "black abolitionists" they would have regarded any attempt to suppress _The Liberator_, as edited by William Lloyd Garrison, as an a.s.sault upon the const.i.tutional liberties of the whole nation. But they are not now particularly interested in preserving the const.i.tutional liberties of the nation as represented in the right of circulation of _The Liberator_, edited by Max Eastman. In Jefferson's time, when Democrats were accused of "Jacobinism," they invoked the "spirit of 1776" in opposition to the alien and sedition laws under which their partisan propaganda suffered limitation. To-day, when they are striving to outdo the Republicans in "Americanization propaganda,"

they actually stand sponsor for an espionage law which would have made Jefferson or Andrew Jackson froth at the mouth. Socialists are convinced that liberty is dead because Berger and Debs are convicted of uttering opinions out of harmony with temporarily dominant crowd-ideas of patriotism. But when Theodore Dreiser was put under the ban for the crime of writing one of the few good novels produced in America, I do not recall that Socialists held any meetings of protest in Madison Square Garden. I have myself struggled in vain for three hours or more on a street corner in Green Point trying to tell liberty-loving Socialists the truth about the Gary schools. When the politicians in our legislative a.s.semblies were tricked into pa.s.sing the obviously unliberal Eighteenth Amendment, I was much interested in learning how the bulk of the Socialists in the Cooper Union audiences felt about it. As I had expected, they regarded it as an unpardonable infringement of personal freedom, as a typical piece of American Puritan hypocrisy and pharisaism. But they were, on the whole, in favor of it because they thought it would be an aid to Bolshevist propaganda, since it would make the working cla.s.s still more discontented! Such is liberty in a crowd-governed democracy.... It is nothing but the _liberty of crowds to be crowds_.

The fourth liberty in democratic society to-day is freedom from moral and intellectual responsibility. This is accomplished by the magic of subst.i.tuting the machinery of the law for self-government, bureaucratic meddlesomeness for conscience, crowd-tyranny for personal decency.

Professor f.a.guet has called democracy the "cult of incompetence" and the "dread of responsibility." He is not far wrong, but these epithets apply not so much to democracy as such as to democracy under the heel of the crowd. The original aim of democracy, so far as its philosophical thinkers conceived of it, was to set genius free from the trammels of tradition, realize a maximum of self-government, and make living something of an adventure. But crowds do not so understand democracy.

Every crowd looks upon democracy simply as a scheme whereby it may have its own way. We have seen that the crowd-mind as such is a device for "kidding" ourselves, for representing the easiest path to the enhancement of our self-feeling as something highly moral, for making our personal right appear like universal righteousness, for dressing up our will to lord it over others, as if it were devotion to impersonal principle. As we have seen, the crowd therefore insists upon universal conformity; goodness means only making everyone alike. By taking refuge in the abstract and ready-made system of crowd-ideas, the unconscious will to power is made to appear what it is not; the burden of responsibility is transferred to the group with its fiction of absolute truth. Le Bon noted the fact of the irresponsibility of crowds, but thought that such irresponsibility was due to the fact that the crowd, being an anonymous gathering, the individual could lose his ident.i.ty in the mult.i.tude. The psychology of the unconscious has provided us with what I think is a better explanation, but the fact of irresponsibility remains and is evident in all the influence of crowd-thinking upon democratic inst.i.tutions. The crowd-ideal of society is one in which every individual is protected not only against exploitation, but against temptation--protected therefore _against himself_. The whole tendency of democracy in our times is toward just such inanity. Without the least critical a.n.a.lysis of accepted moral dilemmas, we are all to be made moral in spite of ourselves, regardless of our worth, without effort on our part, moral in the same way that machines are moral, by reducing the will to mere automatic action, leaving no place for choice and uncertainty, having everyone wound up and oiled and regulated to run at the same speed. Each crowd therefore strives to make its own moral ideas the law of the land. Law becomes thus a sort of anthology of various existing crowd-hobbies. In the end moral responsibility is pa.s.sed over to legislatures, commissions, detectives, inspectors, and bureaucrats. Anything that "gets by" the public censor, however rotten, we may wallow in with a perfect feeling of respectability. The right and necessity of choosing our way is superseded by a system of statutory taboos, which as often as not represent the survival values of the meanest little people in the community--the kind who cannot look upon a nude picture without a struggle with their perverted eroticism, or entertain a significant idea without losing their faith.

The effect of all this upon the intellectual progress and the freedom of art in democratic society is obvious, and is just what, to one who understands the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, might be expected. No wonder de Tocqueville said he found less freedom of opinion in America than elsewhere. Explain it as you will, the fact is here staring us in the face. Genius in our democracy is not free. It must beg the permission of little crowd-men for its right to exist. It must stand, hat in hand, at the window of the commissioner of licenses and may gain a permit for only so much of its inspiration as happens to be of use-value to the uninspired. It must play the conformist, pretend to be hydra-headed rather than unique, useful rather than genuine, a servant of the "least of these" rather than their natural master. It must advertise, but it may not prophesy. It may flatter and patronize the stupid, but it may not stand up taller than they. In short, democracy everywhere puts out the eyes of its Samson, cuts off his golden-rayed locks, and makes him grind corn to fill the bellies of the Philistines.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century until now it has been chiefly the business man, the political charlatan, the organizer of trade, the rediscoverer of popular prejudices who have been preferred in our free modern societies. Keats died of a broken heart; Sh.e.l.ley and Wagner were exiled; Beethoven and Schubert were left to starve; Darwin was condemned to h.e.l.l fire; Huxley was denied his professorship; Schopenhauer was ostracized by the elite; Nietzsche ate his heart out in solitude; Walt Whitman had to be fed by a few English admirers, while his poems were prohibited as obscene in free America; Emerson was for the greater part of his life _persona non grata_ at his own college; Ingersoll was denied the political career which his genius merited; Poe lived and died in poverty; Theodore Parker was consigned to perdition; Percival Lowell and Simon Newcomb lived and died almost unrecognized by the American public. Nearly every artist and writer and public teacher is made to understand from the beginning that he will be popular in just the degree that he strangles his genius and becomes a vulgar, commonplace, insincere clown.

On the other hand steel manufacturers and railroad kings, whose business record will often scarcely stand the light, are rewarded with fabulous millions and everyone grovels before them. When one turns from the "commercialism," which everywhere seems to be the dominant and most sincere interest in democratic society, when one seeks for spiritual values to counterbalance this weight of materialism, one finds in the prevailing spirit little more than a cult of nave sentimentality.

It can hardly be denied that if Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Ca.s.sanova, Goethe, Dostoievsky, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Rousseau, St.

Augustine, Milton, Nietzsche, Swinburne, Rossetti, or even Flaubert, were alive and writing his masterpiece in America to-day, he would be instantly silenced by some sort of society for the prevention of vice, and held up to the public scorn and ridicule as a destroyer of our innocence and a corrupter of public morals. The guardians of our characters are ceaselessly expurgating the cla.s.sics lest we come to harm reading them. I often think that the only reason why the Bible is permitted to pa.s.s through our mails is because hardly anyone ever reads it.