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

"A book like the Mirrors of Downing Street is well enough. It is the fashion to be interested in English notables. But that sort of thing won't do here. The American public gets in the newspapers all it wants about our national politicians. That isn't book material."

An editor said that just a year ago when we told him of the plan for the Mirrors of Washington . And, frankly, it seemed doubtful whether readers generally cared enough about our national political personalities to buy a book exclusively concerned with them.

But they did. The Mirrors of Washington became an instantaneous success. It commanded almost unprecedented attention. It was heartily damned and vociferously welcomed. By the averagely curious citizen, eager for insight behind the gilded curtains of press-agentry and partisanship, it was hailed as a shaft of common-sense sunlight thrown into a clay-footed wilderness of political pap. And close to one hundred thousand copies were absorbed by a public evidently genuinely interested in an uncensored analysis of the people who are running us, or ruining us, as individual viewpoint may determine.

The Mirrors of Washington was by way of being a pioneer, at least for America. Overseas, it is habitual enough to exhibit beneath the literary microscope the politically great and near-great, and even to dissect them – often enough without anæsthesia. To our mind, such critical examination is healthily desirable. Here in America, we are case-hardened to the newspapers, whose appraisal of political personages is, after all, pretty well confined to the periods of pre-election campaigning. And we are precious little influenced by this sort of thing; the pro papers are so pro, and the anti papers so anti, that few try to determine how much to believe and how much to dismiss as routine partisan prevarication.

But a book! Political criticism, and personality analyses, frozen into the so-permanently-appearing dignity of a printed volume – that is something else again! Even a politician who dismisses with a smile or a shrug recurrent discompliments in the news columns or the anonymous editorial pages of the press, is tempted to burst into angry protest when far less bitter, far more balanced criticism of himself is voiced in a book. A phenomenon, that, doubtless revisable as time goes on and the reflections of more book-bound Mirrors brighten the eyes of those who read and jangle the nerves of those who run – for office.

Behind the Mirrors is another such book. It delves into the fundamentals at Washington. It is concerned with political tendencies as well as political personalities. It presents what impresses us as a genuinely useful and brilliant picture of present-day governmental psychology and functioning. It is a cross section of things as they are.

The picture behind the mirrors is not as pretty as it might be. Probably the way to make it prettier is to let ample light in upon it so that the blemishes, discerned, may be rectified; and to impress those responsible for its rehabilitation with the necessity of taking advantage of the opportunities that are theirs.

When President Eliot of Harvard presented to a certain Senator an honorary degree, he described with inimitable charm and considerable detail that Senator's literary achievements; and then he mentioned his political activities, ending with substantially these words: "A man with great opportunities for public service still inviting him."

The invitation yet holds good. Acceptances are still in order.

New York,

June, 1922.

President Harding had recently to decide the momentous question whether we should have daylight saving in Washington. He decided it in a perfectly characteristic way, perfectly characteristic of himself and of our present political division and unsureness. He ruled that the city should go to work and quit work an hour earlier, but that it should not turn back the hands of the clock, should not lay an impious finger upon God's Time.

That this straddle is typical of our President needs no argument – he "has to be so careful," as he once pathetically said – but that it is symptomatic of the present American political consciousness perhaps needs elucidation.

The clock is one of the problems left to us by the Great War, one of the innumerable problems thus left to us; it involves our whole attitude toward men and things.

It represents, rather literally, Mechanism. In the war we adopted perforce the creed that man was sufficiently master of his own destiny to adapt Mechanism to his own ends; he could lay a presumptuous hand upon God's Time. But in peace shall he go on thus boldly? Or shall he revert to the good old days, the days of McKinley, when the clock was sacred? Think of all the happiness, all the prosperity, that was ours, all the duty done and all the destiny abundantly realized, before man thought to lay a hand upon the clock!

The question what the limits to human government are is involved. What may man attempt for himself and what should he leave to the great Mechanism which has, upon the whole, run the world so well, to the Sun in its courses, to progress, to inevitability? After all the clock was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be – unless we meddle with it – and before its cheerful face America was built from a wilderness into a vast nation, creating wealth, so as to be the third historic wonder of the ages – the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the dollars that are America.

And not only are we divided as to the limits of government, but where shall Mr. Harding look for authority to guide him with respect to clocks? To his party? This is a party government, you remember. But his party speaks with no clear voice about clocks or about anything else. To business? Business has only one rule – more clocks in government and less government in clocks. But business bows to the public. To public opinion then? The public is divided about clocks; we tend to grow class conscious about clocks. And clamorously amid all these authorities is heard the voice of the Farm Bloc exclaiming: "Don't touch God's Time."

So it is decided that Washington may save daylight and save the clock too, a double saving, a most happy compromise. If all questions touching Mechanism could only be solved in the direction of such splendid economies!

I listened a year ago to a most unusual Fourth of July oration. The speaker, like most of us in this period of breakup following the Great War, was rather bewildered. He had, moreover, his private reasons for feeling that life was not easily construed. An illness, perhaps mortal, afflicted him. Existence had been unclouded until this last cloud came; why was it to end suddenly and without reason? He had gone through the Great War a follower of Mr. Wilson's, to see the world scoffing at the passionate faith it had professed a few months before and sneering at the leaders it had then exalted. He had echoing in his mind the fine war phrases, "Brotherhood of Man," "War to End War," "We must be just even to those to whom we do not wish to be just." Then some monstrous hand had turned the page and there was Harding, just as in his own life all success at the bar and in politics, and the joy of being lord of a vast country estate that had been patented in his family since colonial times, had suddenly come to an end; the page had turned.