Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington
I take it that behind these footlights which we call Washington, just as behind the literal footlights, the actors, if there is to be any lifting of us up, must play a part with which we can identify ourselves in our imagination. He must be articulate. He must get across. Mr. Harding does it admirably. You watch him and you realize that he is the oldest of stage heroes, Everyman. You say to yourself unconsciously, "Only the accident of seven million majority separates him from me." You are lifted up. Ordinary flesh and blood can do this great thing.
Based on this desire to identify ourselves with greatness is our familiar aphorism, "The office makes the man." All that is necessary is the office to "make" the least of us.
Roosevelt played the part even better than Mr. Harding, "an ordinary man raised to the nth power." He strutted to fill the eye. He was the consummation of articulateness. The point is that self-government must be dramatic or it does not carry along the self-governors.
Of course one must not overlook the fact that "the great silent man" is a consolation to common inarticulateness and ineffectiveness, the general belief that where there is a slow tongue profundity is found being one of those pleasant things which we like to think about ourselves – "we could and we would." But after all there is a sense of pity about our kind attribution of hidden power to dullness. We are half aware that we are compensating.
Anyway, even if the great business man is at home upon the stage, which Mr. Mellon is not, the calling of him to office interrupts the drama of self-government. We admit our failure and call in the gods from another world. It is as I have said a staged receivership. We can not identify ourselves with the hero. We are poor worms, not millionaires. We might have the seven million majority but we could not also stand upon a pile of seven million gold dollars. Government ceases to be human. It becomes superhuman. And self-government must be human.
Of course, I exaggerate. Mr. Mellon coming from that other world is not wholly without his human relations. I have alluded to his symbolizing the wish-fulfilment of the inarticulate, and the inarticulate are many. He does more. He fits admirably into what Mr. Walter Lippmann has called in his new book one of our popular stereotypes. We demand a conflict between reality and the stage. We like to see the masks pulled off our actors. One of our best received traditions is that a man who has a fight with the politicians has performed a great service. We like to see our strutters strut in a little fear of us.
But Secretary Mellon's defeat of Representative Fordney, Senator Elkins, and Elmer Dover in their efforts to fill his department with politicians was not so much a sign of power as a measure of the difference between Mr. Mellon's world and theirs.
Mr. Mellon comes into the Treasury from his bank. All he knows is banking, not politics. If he went from the Mellon Bank to the National City Bank of New York he would not discharge all the National City Bank employees and bring in a lot of men who had never seen the inside of a bank before, whom he did not know, who didn't speak the same language that he did. It is only in politics that one finds such perfect faith in man as man.
He goes to one young Democrat in the Department – this actually happened – and he says, "Young man, I like your work. I want you to stay with me," "Ah, but, Mr. Mellon, I can't," plead this Democrat, "You really can't do things that way. It is not done. You will have all the Republican politicians about your ears."
But it was not a sense of power in Mr. Mellon that made him thus defy the conventions. It was merely the instinct of self-protection. He could not live in the atmosphere of politics. He had to do things as he always had done them. The Gods coming down from high Olympus among the sons and daughters of men were probably never as much at ease as the Greeks made them out to be.
With his millions behind him Mr. Mellon was a solid object in his conflict with the politicians. Without them one does not know what would have happened between him and Mr. Fordney, Mr. Elkins, and Mr. Dover.
What is a good Secretary of the Treasury? We have a stereotype about that, too, one slowly and painfully formed. A good Secretary of the Treasury is one who has seen the inside of a bank, who has read the books on finance and knows the rules. Originally our Secretaries of the Treasury were amateurs, like our generals who beat ploughshares into swords. When one got into trouble, he boarded the Congressional Limited for New York and saw Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan came out of his bank holding the safety of the nation in his hands, exhibiting it to reporters who wrote all about it, assuring the public.
At length it was decided to keep the safety of the nation at Washington. And our Secretaries of the Treasury tended to become professional. The young men who tell us whether we have a good Secretary of the Treasury or not are the financial writers of the newspapers. The Secretary acts. The young men look in the books and see that he has conformed to the rules. When he has he leaves nothing to be desired as Secretary.
Mr. Mellon's relation to Alexander Hamilton is the same as Marshal Foch's relation to Napoleon; one knew war from his own head, the other knows it from the teachers. Mr. Mellon's administration is not inspired. In the greatest financial crisis in our history he has no constructive suggestion to make. You would hardly know that Secretary Houston was gone and Mr. Mellon had come. And there is an explanation for this continuity, beside that of the rule books. The hard work of the Department has been done under both administrations by Assistant Secretary S. P. Gilbert, for Mr. Mellon has the successful man's habit of leaning heavily upon an able and industrious subordinate. Mr. Gilbert is an ambitious young lawyer who has mastered the books and who works 18 hours a day. The voice is the voice of Mellon but the hand is the hand of Gilbert.
I have analyzed Mr. Mellon at Washington although only a small fraction of his career is involved and although he operates in the difficult circumstances of an unknown and unfavorable environment. But he is perceptible in Washington, he does appear before Congressional Committees and at newspaper conferences. You can study the Gilberts who surround him. You can estimate the prepossessions that enter into our judgment of him. You can measure him against the standard of public life.
In Pittsburg he is more remote. He is hedged about with the secrecy of business. He is to be seen only through the golden aura of a great fortune, sitting shy and awkward upon an eminence, the product of forces and personalities which can only be guessed at.
He was the son of a banker and inherited a considerable fortune. He operated in a city which expanded fabulously in the course of his lifetime. If he is shy and unbusiness-worldly, he has a brother who has that force of personality which we usually associate with fitness for life. His bank was the chosen instrument of Henry C. Frick, one of the pioneer demigods, who could make the business reputations of men who proved adaptable to his uses.
Thus into the result there enters the power of Frick, the thrust upward of Pittsburg, an industrial volcano, the associated personality of the other Mellon. You have to give a name to all this combination of favoring circumstances and favoring personalities and names are usually given arbitrarily. The name given in this case is Andrew W. Mellon. But how much of it is Andrew W. Mellon and how much of it is Pittsburg, how much of it Frick, how much of it brother Mellon, an electorate seeking a business man for office can not stop to inquire and can not learn if it does inquire.
If the people elect a man like Mr. Mellon to office they do not enlist in the public service the combination of persons and forces which is known by his name. Or if he is all that he seems to be, measured by his great fortune, perhaps they get him after he has spent his force or after his head is turned by success, or at any rate they put him into an unfamiliar milieu and subject him to that corrupting temptation, the desire for a second term or for a higher office.
And to go back to what I have said before, they make self-government go into bankruptcy and ask for a receiver.
The great business-man President is just a romantic development of the great business-man illusion.
CHAPTER VII
THE BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET, AND WHAT IS IN THE BOTTLE
Mr. Mellon's associates in the Cabinet were most of them chosen on substantially the same principles as he was, namely, that success in business or professional life implies fitness for public life. We have no other standard. The present Cabinet is an "exceptionally good" Cabinet. Many of its members are millionaires.
Some of them owe their place to the rule that those who help elect a President are entitled to the honor, the advertising, or the "vindication," of high public office.
That is to say, the same considerations that rule in the selection of Senators rule in their selection. They were recruited from the class from which Senators are recruited. I can not say the mental level of the Cabinet is above that of the Senate. Take out of the upper house its two strongest members, its two weakest, and half a dozen of the average sort, and you construct a body in every way equal to the Cabinet of Mr. Harding in intelligence and public morals.
Most of them, never having been members of the upper house, have not suffered from the depreciation in the public eye which attends service in the legislative branch. They come rather from the wonderful business world.
There are, moreover, few of them compared to Senators. Smallness of numbers suggests careful selection, superior qualifications.
And the secrecy of Cabinet meetings makes them impressive. If reporters were present, the public would realize that the Cabinet as a Cabinet was mostly occupied with little things.
The records prove it.
The biweekly meetings of the Cabinet are commonly followed by the announcement: "The Cabinet had a short session today. Nothing of importance was discussed"; or, "Details of administration were discussed." Now, of course, reasons of state may occasionally restrain the disclosure of what actually was the subject before the Cabinet. Yet Mr. Harding's administration has been in office more than a year, and how many important policies has it adopted? How much wisdom has emerged from the biweekly meetings?
Sample announcements of the Cabinet meetings run like this: "The Cabinet listened to the Postmaster General, explaining how much it would facilitate the handling of the mails if people would distribute the mailing of their letters throughout the day, instead of keeping most of them to mail late in the afternoon when they are leaving their offices. The Postmaster General pointed out that the government departments were offenders in this respect." Useful; but why should the whole nation worry about who advises with the President over the inveterate bad habits of the people as letter writers?
Or this: "The Cabinet spent an hour and a half today discussing what to do with the property left in the government's hands by the war. There are millions of dollars' worth of such property." A mere detail of administration, but it came before the Cabinet as a whole because more than one department was left in control of the property.
Moreover, you may estimate the importance of cabinets from the fact that, after all, every administration takes its color from the President. Mr. Wilson's administration was precisely Mr. Wilson. Mr. Harding's is precisely Mr. Harding.
Listen to the experience of a Cabinet adviser. One of the most important Secretaries was explaining to some friends a critical situation. "But," interjected one of the listeners, "does President Harding understand that?" "The President," replied the Secretary, "never has time really to understand anything."
And remember how Secretary Hughes told the President that the Four Power Pact covered with its guarantees the home islands of Japan, and how a couple of days later Mr. Harding informed the press that it did not cover the home islands of Japan; when it transpired that the information of Mr. Hughes on this point had effected no lodgement in the President's mind.
The Presidential mind; that is the bottle neck through which everything has to pass.
Suppose we had today the greatest statesman that this country has ever produced as Secretary of State. Let us say Alexander Hamilton, for example. What could Alexander Hamilton do as the head of Mr. Harding's Cabinet? We shall assume that Alexander Hamilton had the mind to grasp the problem of this country's relations to the world and of its interest in the world's recovery from the havoc and the hatreds of the war, and the constructive imagination to reach a solution of it. What could Alexander Hamilton do? His avenue of approach to world problems would be Mr. Harding. All that was in the mind of Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of State, would have to pass through the mind of Warren G. Harding, President, before it would become effective.
The passage through would be blocked by many obstacles, for Mr. Harding has a perfectly conventional mind; that is why he is President. One of the pictures in Mr. Harding's head is the mechanistic, the God's Time picture. "Things left to themselves will somehow come out all right." Another is the racial inferiority complex. "Man is inadequate to attempt control of his own destiny. There are the forces to be considered." A third is the great business-man illusion. Mr. Morgan going abroad to consider reparations may accomplish the wonders which mere statesmen can not. All these induce avoidance of responsibility, and Mr. Harding has the human liking for avoiding responsibility. Pressed by Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Harding would say: "But I can not move the Senate." Pressed further, he would say: "There is Public Opinion. We shall lose the election if we become involved in European affairs. You and I know those Allied war debts are worthless, but how can we make the people realize that they are worthless?"
Like the rest of us, Mr. Harding perhaps has none of these pictures so firmly in his head as before the war; but the damage to the pictures only makes him more vacillating. I am assuming in all this that Mr. Hamilton has a free mind, which he had, relatively, when he operated a century and a half ago. At that time he had not to think much of Public Opinion or of parties. And the mechanistic theory of Progress, that things come out all right with the least possible human intervention or only the intervention of the business man, had not then assumed its present importance.
"Mind," says a nameless writer in the London Nation, "is incorrigibly creative." It has created so many vast illusions like those above in the last century and a half that like the American spirit in Kipling's poem:
"Elbowed out by sloven friends,It camps, at sufferance, on the stoop."Where our actual Secretary's mind falls short of our supposititious Secretary's mind is in the valuable quality of common sense. I am even prepared to maintain that as a measure of reality Mr. Hughes's mind is distinctly inferior to Mr. Harding's, which is one reason why he never did become President and Mr. Harding did. I can not better explain what I mean than on the basis of this quotation from a recent book of Mr. Orage, the British critic:
"Common sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in its outcome it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion and all the senses; when, in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality."
Mr. Hughes has only one criterion of reality, his mind, which has been developed at the expense of all his other means of approach to the truth. He lives in a region of facts, principles, and logical deductions. He does not sense anything. And only men who sense reality have common sense. For Mr. Hughes facts are solid; you can make two nice, orderly little piles of them and build a logical bridge over the interval between them. A true statesman builds a bridge resting on nothing palpable, and nevertheless he crosses over it.
Mr. Hughes's mind operates in a region of perfect demonstration; he even demonstrates things to himself. A true statesman never succeeds in demonstrating anything to himself; he uses demonstration only in dealing with others. Yet he arrives in other than logical ways at a sureness for himself which is never Mr. Hughes's. For the Secretary of State statesmanship is an intellectual exercise, for the true statesman it is the exercise of a dozen other faculties. An extraordinary but limited mind, Mr. Hughes impresses us as the boy lightning calculator does, and leaves us unsatisfied.
Take Mr. Hughes's handling of Mexican relations as an example of what I have called statesmanship made a purely intellectual exercise. The practical result which was to be desired when Mr. Hughes took office was stability and order in Mexico, the safety of American property there, and a restoration of diplomatic intercourse.
Mr. Hughes does not seek to obtain these results. Instead he works out the following problem: a + b = c, in which a is the fact that Carranza had issued a decree making possible the confiscation of American property in Mexico, b is the principle of international law that at the basis of relations between peoples must be safety of alien property, and c is a note to Mexico.
Mr. Hughes was excited over the perfection of this intellectual operation. He read his note with all the jubilance of the Greek philosopher who, having discovered an important principle of physics, exclaimed: "Eureka." Mr. Hughes's Eureka is always a piece of paper. He is a lawyer whose triumphs are briefs and contracts.
Now the facts were not merely that Carranza had made an offensive gesture, issuing the famous decree; but that Mexico had not confiscated American property and lived in such fear of her strong neighbor that she was never likely to do so, that the Mexican supreme court had ruled confiscation to be illegal, that the Obregon government was as stable and as good a government as Mexico was likely to have, and that it was to our interest to support it morally rather than encourage further revolution there. They all pointed to recognition.
The validity of the piece of paper that Mr. Hughes demanded of Obregon would rest upon international law. But so did the validity of our right to have our property in Mexico respected. We should not be in any stronger legal position to intervene in Mexico if she violated the contract Mr. Hughes wanted, than if she violated our property rights there unfortified by such a piece of paper. Both rested on one and the same law.
Furthermore, Mexico being weak and sensitive, an arbitrary demand that she "take the pledge," such as Mr. Hughes made, was sure to offend her pride, and delay the consummation everyone wished – stability across the border and a restoration of good relations. Yet Mr. Hughes was immensely satisfied with his intellectual exercise a + b = c, c being not a solution of the Mexican problem, which at this writing is still afar off, but a piece of paper, a note to Mexico. The sheer logical triumph of the deduction of c from a and b is to Mr. Hughes an end in itself.
Now, of course, it is not wholly overdevelopment of mind at the expense of the other criteria of reality which leads Mr. Hughes to vain exercises like a + b = c. He has what a recent writer has described as "an inflamed legal sense." He has, moreover, by an association of ideas all his own oddly transferred to law that sacredness with which he was brought up to regard the Bible. "Sanctity of contracts," is his favorite phrase, the word "sanctity" being highly significant. He has, besides, Mr. Harding over him, and the Senate to reckon with. And in the case of Mexico he has as a fellow Cabinet member, Mr. Fall, the picture in whose head is of a "white man" teaching a "greaser" to respect him. He has to think of winning elections, of his own political ambitions. All these inhibitory influences which generally produce negation do not estop Mr. Hughes. His mind is too vigorous for that. It pursues its way energetically to results, such as a + b = c.
Now, of course, the handling of Mexican relations is not Mr. Hughes's major achievement. But even his major achievement, the Washington conference with its resultant nine pieces of paper, was more or less a lawyer's plea in avoidance.
The major problem which confronted Mr. Hughes was this: The Great War had been followed, as Mr. H. G. Wells aptly says, by the Petty Peace. It was threatening, and still threatens, to flame up again. The problem of a real peace confronted Mr. Hughes, because Mr. Wilson had sought to establish one and failed, and had thus set a certain standard of effort for his successor. Moreover, Mr. Hughes had said that every man, woman, and child in the United States was vitally interested in the economic recovery of Europe.
Mr. Hughes had either to face this task or divert the mind of the court to some other issue. He chose to find his a + b = c elsewhere. The problem of establishing peace where there was war was difficult; perhaps it was too hard for any man, but has not humanity – I say humanity because it is Mr. Harding's favorite word – has not humanity the right to ask of its statesmen something more than timidity and avoidance? The problem of establishing peace where there was peace, in the Orient, was relatively easy.
The war had left the great sea powers with excessive navies and insupportable naval budgets. All wanted naval limitation. It was only necessary to propose an agreement for reduction to have it accepted.
Even the dramatic method of making the proposal, with details of the tonnage to be scrapped, was not Mr. Hughes's idea. Let us do the man in the White House justice. He conceived it on the Mayflower; read it to Senator James Watson who was with him, and wirelessed it to the State Department.
There was the further problem, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Mr. Hughes wanted it ended. Japan and England wanted it substituted by a compact which should be signed by its two signatories and the United States.
All that Mr. Hughes had to do to establish peace where there was peace was to offer an agreement upon naval armament and accept the Anglo-Japanese plan for a wider pact in the Pacific. The details would involve discussion, but the success of the general program was assured in advance.
The conference was called, hurriedly, because, as Mr. Harding once explained, if he had not hastened someone else would have anticipated him in calling it. This shows how obvious was the expedient. The idea of naval limitation was no more original than the idea of the conference. Mr. Borah had proposed it. Lord Lee had proposed it, in the British Parliament. The idea of the Four Power Pact was made in England – it had long been discussed there – and brought over by Mr., now Lord, Balfour. He laid it at Mr. Hughes's feet.
Mr. Balfour sought no triumphs. They should all go to Mr. Hughes. He has the art of inconspicuousness, the result of many generations of fine breeding. As you saw him in the plenary sessions clutching the lapels of his coat with both hands and modestly struggling for utterance after an immense flow of words from our chief delegate, you could not help feeling patriotic pride in the contrast.
Besides, Mr. Balfour was captivated. He became, for the nonce, perfectly American. Mr. H. Wickham Steed said to me, hearing the chief British delegate speak: "It is a new Balfour at this conference." Certainly as you heard the voice, moved and moving, emotional perhaps for the first time in his life, you realized that it was not Mr. Balfour, "proceeding on his faded way" as the London Nation expressed it, who was speaking. It was Mr. Balfour as he might be at a great revival meeting, such as Mr. Hughes in his youth must have often attended.
On the Four Power Pact the best comment ever made was Mr. Frank Simonds's, "It was invented to save the British Empire from committing bigamy."