Clinton Gilbert - Behind the Mirrors - The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

We lived under an illusion. What we called the results of progress was the rapid exhaustion of easily available resources. We used our capital and thought ourselves rich. And we lie under a burden of debt made much heavier by the weapons which progress put into our hands. Progress had not made war too expensive to fight but it had made peace too expensive to be borne. We forgot the law of diminishing returns. We ignored the lessons of history that all ages come to an end, when the struggle for existence once more grows severe until new instruments are found equal to the further conquest over nature. Useful inventions have not kept pace with increasing consumption and rapidly disappearing virgin resources. The process of steadily lowering costs of production has stopped and reverse process has set in. Spectacular inventions like the airplane have deluded us into the belief that Progress, always blessing us, we had the world by the tail. But coal and iron became harder and costlier to mine. Oil neared exhaustion. Timber grew scarcer. Agricultural lands smaller in proportion to population.

Immense possibilities lie before us. So they did before the man with the stone hatchet in his hand, but he waited long for the steam, saw and drill and crusher. An invention which would mean as much in the conquest of nature as did the steam engine would make the war debt as easily borne as the week's account at the grocery store. But when will progress vouchsafe it? Converting coal into power we waste 85 per cent of its energy in coal and call that efficient. But does Progress always respond instantly to our needs with new methods and devices, like a nurse responding to a hungry child? A few years ago we were sure it did, but now we look anxiously at the skies for a sign.

We had another characteristic pleasant illusion during the war. Progress, like the Lord, in all previous conflicts was on our side. Here was a great need of humanity. Surely, according to rule, it should be met by some great invention that would blast the Germans out of their places in the earth and give the sons of light an easy and certain victory. All the familiars of the deity sat about in boards watching for the indication that the engine to meet the needs of civilization had been granted. But it never was.

I do not write this to suggest that men, especially American men, have ceased to believe in Progress. They would be fools if they had. I write to suggest that they have ceased to believe in Progress. They would be fools if they had not. A great illusion is gone, one of the chief dislocations wrought by the war.

What the war has done to our way of thinking has been to lay a new stress upon man as a free and responsible agent. After all the battles were won not by guns, or tanks or gas or airplanes, but as always by the common man offering his breast to the shots of the enemy. The hope of the future is all in human organizations, in societies of nations, in councils and conferences. Men's minds turn once more to governments with renewed expectation. Not only do we think for the first time seriously of a government of the world but we focus more attention on the government at Washington. Groups with special interests to serve reach out openly to control it.

The war laid a new emphasis on government. Not only did the government have our persons and our lives at its command but it assumed authority over our food, it directed our factories and our railroads, it told us what we could manufacture and ship, it decided who could borrow of the general credit and for what purposes, it fixed the prices at which we could buy and sell. It came to occupy a new place in the national consciousness and one which it will never wholly lose. One rival to it, – the belief, having its roots in early religious ideas, and strengthened by scientific theory and the outward results of the great inventions, that moved by some irresistible impulse, life went steadily forward to higher and higher planes, and that man had but little to do but pluck the fruits of progress – has been badly shattered by events.

But men do not change beliefs suddenly. Perhaps after all the war was only the way of progress – to usher in a new and brilliant day. Perhaps the unfolding future has something near in store far greater and better than went before. We shall not trust men too far, men with their obstinate blindness, men with their originally sinful habit of thinking they know better than the forces which rule the world. We want not leaders but weather cocks, who will veer to the kindlier wind that may blow when it is yet only a zephyr.

We turn to men yet, we cling a little to the hope that fate will yet save us. This division in us accounts for Lloyd George and Harding, our own commonplace "best we have on hand" substitute for the infinitely variable Englishman, adjusted to every breath that blows, who having no set purpose of his own offers no serious obstacle to any generous design of fate.

Senator Borah once said to me, "The Administration has no definite policies." And it is not Mr. Harding's fault. If he wanted to form any the people wouldn't let him. They elected him not to have any. They desired in the White House some one who would not look further ahead than the next day until the future became clearer. If he had purposes events might prove them to be wrong.

The same fundamental idea underlay the remark of a member of the Cabinet, at the outset of the recent disarmament and Far Eastern Conference, that "Lloyd George was the hope of the gathering because he had no principles."

The war destroyed many men but it half restored Man. You see how inevitable optimism is. The ways of Progress are indeed past finding out. Governments during it performed the impossible. They even took in hand the vast industrial mechanism which we ordinarily leave to the control of the "forces." We half suspect they might do the impossible in peace but we half hope that some kindlier fate is in store for us than to trust ourselves to human intelligence. We don't know whether to put our money on Man or on Progress; so we put it on Mr. Harding.

Unlike government by Progress, government by business, by the semi-sacred intermediaries between the will to increase and the rest of us, began to disintegrate before the war; which merely completed the process.

Let us consider what has happened in the last few years to government by business, that government which the smoking compartment philosopher has in mind when he says so hopefully of Mr. Harding: " They will see to it that he gets along all right."

The first manifestation of nationality in this country was the nationality of business. Before industry became national nothing was national. The United States was a pleasant congeries of localities. It was held together by reading everywhere the story of the Battle of Bunker Hill in the same school history, which sometimes bore a different author's name but which was always the same history. "Don't fire till you can see the whites of their eyes" and "If we don't hang together we shall all hang separately" were the unifying bond, and they were enough. We had the same sense of identity as an infant has when it becomes aware that the delightful toe and the delightful mouth where it is inserted appertain vaguely to the one ego. The local factory and the local bank subtended the entire arc of economic consciousness. There was one single-track railroad which ran from Podunk to Peopack and another from Peopack to Peoria, unrelated, discontinuous.

In those simple times when business was local the local factory owner, banker, or railroad builder was the hero of his neighborhood. It was he who "put the town on the map." He gave it prosperity. He built it by attracting labor into his employment. He gave it contact with the outside world. If you owned town lots it was he who gave them value and it was he who might take away their value if he was offended. If you had a general store it was he who added to its patronage by adding to the population. If you raised farm products nearby it was he who improved your market. He built the fine house which it was your pride to show visitors. Your success and happiness was bound up in his. He conferred his blessings for a consideration, for you were careful to make no laws which restricted the freedom of his operations. You permitted him a vast unofficial "say" in your local government; you gave him a little the best of it in the assessment for taxes. You felt a little lifted up by his condescension in calling you by your first name and stopping to ask about your family on the street corner. You were jealous of his rights because after all the value of your own depended upon his use of his.