A Cheerful View of the Election

An Analysis of the Republican Victory

WALTER LIPPMANN

ANY one who likes to believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God is free to engage in the jolly task of explaining the November election. The world will agree with him that the voice was loud and insistent, but about what it meant there will be more than one opinion. For while Mr. Harding carried every state that any Republican could conceivably carry, were he the noblest and the wisest of men, he must feel, if he reflects on such matters, a good deal like the horse that won the Derby after one entry was taken with blind staggers and the other had broken its leg. In fact, there must have been moments on election night, while Mrs. Harding and he sat there reading the statistics of population as they came over the wire disguised as the Republican majority, when he was taken with a sharp pain under his heart as he recollected what unkind things the politicians were saying a year ago about the sort of candidate who could win against the Democrats. It is magnificent to win an election. It is disconcerting beyond words to have it so nearly unanimous that it is mathematically impossible to regard the vote as a vote in favor of Warren G. Harding or the Grand Old Party.

For Republican votes this year were like Russian roubles: they could not possibly represent the number of Republicans they indicate. And no one knows that better than the canny gentlemen who save the nation by running the Republican party. They are by no means so exhilarated as the face of the returns would seem to warrant. They understand what it means to have all of the country that takes part in national elections (the Solid South being disfranchised by the Negro) push its way into the party. It means that the country, acting on the theory that the contest between Cox and Harding was a washout, decided to have its real political quarrel after election. It means that just as Mr. Harding was nominated after losing practically all the primaries, so he has become president without winning a following. It means that, sooner or later, he will have to pass through a genuine test, for in this cruel world nobody can permanently have so easy a time as Mr. Harding has had up to date. All he has had to do so far is to sign blank checks.

Pretty soon some of them will begin to come back with the expectations of his enthusiastic supporters written large upon them. Then politics as we practice it in America will revive. Then Mr. Hays, as the organizer of victory, will begin to understand why the statesmen found the peace ever so much more unpleasant than the war. Then the Republicans will discover that it is one thing to line up their cohorts in perfect order standing still, and quite another to keep them in line and keep them in step when they start to march. They will find that this is especially true when one captain's guess is as good as any other's about where the General is going and how he proposes to get there.

Before election, you could tell Major Taft and Corporal Hoover and every one else that you will consult the best minds in the country. Most people like that and are ready at anytime to be consulted. But somewhen after election, you have to consult somebody, and not consult somebody else, that in itself seriously reduces the list of people who are entitled to feel that they have a best mind, and then all sorts of odious comparisons follow. Now Mr. Harding has yet to learn how many Americans honestly feel that they have better minds than Boies Penrose, Jim Watson, Frank Brandegee, or Henry M. Daugherty. There are probably enough people as conceited as that to make an impression four years hence. But it is not only the unconsulted best minds who have to be considered. Among those consulted there may actually be some whose advice will not be followed. I press the suggestion no further. Mr. Harding, who is a professor of normal science, must dread the response of normal human nature.

Mr. Harding's Ideal World

THUS far Mr. Harding has lived in that ideal world which some philosophers conceive. It is the realm of limitless possibility, the place where you can have your cake and eat it, be all things to all men and yet .have all men the same thing to you. With an invisible helmet and a magic carpet and a wand, you can be everywhere at once, many people at the same time. You can have a league, the League, no league, a court with teeth, a court without sheriffs, an association, a so-called association, disarmament, preparedness, peace, every country ahead of every other, the Root plan, the Knox plan, no plan. By adding together all the people who believe in each of these ideas you have no difficulty in rolling up a majority of six million plus. And the result can be described, if you are willing to use language ingeniously enough, as a united country.

In the realm of the soaring untrammeled spirit it is a united country within a united party. But out there in the pitiless reality where two objects cannot occupy the same point in space, you have to pick one thing and reject many others. But the very stones he rejects will come hurtling back to him, thrown with Republican zeal by men who will feel that, since they voted the Republican ticket, and since the Republicans always fulfill their promises, something or other is mightily wrong. Mr. Harding is in a terrible position. He has been standing out there in No Man's Land fraternizing with both-sides; suddenly the truce is over, the shooting begins, and there he is.

It is no way to be elected president. The way to be elected president is against an opposition tough enough to harden your friends and sort out your enemies, to win after a tremendous fight in which your enemies know they have been beaten and your friends know they have won. When that happens, you can frame programs and make decisions, and appoint subordinates with the assurance that there will be little sniping from the rear. But when the real opposition has melted into your following there is no way of telling what is what. You are enveloped by-an amorphous stickiness which is not approval and not disapproval, but rather portentous expectations impossible to realize.

The embarrassment of a huge majority when that majority is a collection of opposites is that sooner or later it generates the feeling of having been betrayed. During the election the Democrats did not fail to note misalliances like the Johnson-Tafts and the BorahHoovers. Had anybody talked about home affairs, he would have pointed out even more glaring contrasts. The party that shelters La Follette, Ladd, Frazier, France, Raymond Robins on the doorstep, while Penrose, Watson, Smoot, Brandegee and Wadsworth sleep in the best beds, is headed either for a knockdown fight or the most extraordinary exhibition of insincerity and time-serving within the memory of man. Mr. Harding will have to choose. And the moment he begins to choose, the amorphous majority will begin to dissolve, the outlines will sharpen, and the governing party will separate itself from the opposition.

There is no escaping this division. Until crystallization takes place, public spirit is distracted, and the nation remains a desultory crowd, responding fitfully to its irritations. Should Mr. Harding attempt, by not offending anybody, to preserve what is called party harmony, he will find himself the victim of the irritated crowd. He, too, will be engulfed, as the Democrats were when their leadership collapsed and they tried to be liberal with the liberals and reactionary with the reactionaries. For then the crusaders of a world made safe for democracy dispersed into a restless crowd, and it is that crowd, the self-demobilized legions of America at war, not the Republican party, which rolled up Mr. Harding's majorities. It is still a crowd, with all the fickleness of a crowd, and until standards are raised to which its components can repair with common purposes, the crowd will pervert all effective government. However impracticable evasion and straddle are in the handling of urgent matters, they are now become even more impracticable psychologically.

The Normalcy of 1890

BUT it is only fair to Mr. Harding to say that his personal sympathies and affiliations are not obscure. It is no secret who his cronies are, nor what tradition he imbibed and believes in. He cannot honestly be accused of deception. The great mass of the people who voted for him were in a position to know perfectly who he is and who surrounds him and what he stands for. In fact, they knew all about him. The voters simply decided to lay the matter on the table for future action, on the theory that they would cross that bridge when they came to it. And since the voters had decided to vote for him, no matter who he was or what he represented, Mr. Harding behaved like a gentleman and said as little as possible to offend them. At any other time, when the electorate was not preoccupied in dislodging an annoyance, the true Harding would have been A B C to the average voter.

The true Harding is perfectly described by his word normalcy. The normal American life to a man of Mr. Harding's age is a country of independent farmers and of pioneer business men. The farmers are prosperous, the business enterprises are comparatively small and competitive, the workmen employed are potential business man. A rough justice, a fair field, and a little kindness are about all the social apparatus needed to make the system work. This is America as Mr. Harding remembers it when Marion was beginning to boom and Warren G. Harding was booming with it. Such a community needs very little governing, and as for foreign affairs, what conceivable relation have they to Marion in 1890? Approximately, this is the picture of "normalcy" in the Harding mind, a picture softened and somewhat retouched by the golden glow of a successful career. And in that picture, Republicans are still the same men who saved the Union, and loyalty to Republicanism is still loyalty to the Republic, and heresy akin to treason. So it was not mere rhetoric which caused Mr. Harding in 1912 to compare Roosevelt with Benedict Arnold. It was an echo of the Civil War that resounded in Marion when Harding was still impressionable. It was a patriot's cri de coeur, or, at any rate, the son of a patriot's.

This sense of a normal America governs-his political life. And back in the innumerable Marions enough of that America persists to be recognizable still. The America which has come since the '90's is, of course, a radically different affair, and has brought with it radically different needs and purposes. Mr. Harding's instinctive response is that this is an abnormal America. Because it is abnormal to him he has never really admitted it into his consciousness, in much the same way as people refuse to think about an unpleasant disease. He proposes to treat it more or less as if it did not exist, to go ahead as if the Marion pattern of 1890 were still the universal pattern. And that means allowing and encouraging undisciplined enterprise to have its way. Now in Marion and on the prairies one undisciplined enterprise could have its way without crashing into all sorts of other undisciplined enterprises. That is not true of congested Chicago, Pittsburgh, or New York. They have complicated themselves to a point where undisciplined enterprise is a nuisance, where only conscious planning and deliberate social organization can make life bearable for the mass of men.

The impact of the Marion system upon modern industrialism is certain to provoke enormous reactions. They will come variously, I imagine, for normalcy is irretrievably alien to the modern phase of industrialism. There will be a reaction of all those great groups whose interests cluster around foreign trade—the international bankers, exporters, the creditors of Europe, for the protective system to which Mr. Harding i$ wedded and the isolation which in him is innate, are profoundly opposed to their needs and their views. There will also be a reaction, I suspect, from those agricultural communities which find it difficult to deal on terms of equality with the great industrial interests. There will be a reaction from the small business men, the living exemplars of the Marion system, who will find that when that system is universally applied, it is the small and weak who are crushed. There will be a reaction, of course, from ihe wage earners, as their employers attempt to revert to normalcy by destroying the power of the unions. And there will be a reaction by the intelligence of America at the spiritual tone of Washington. For Mr. Harding has the misfortune to succeed Roosevelt and Wilson, two of the most considerable individuals of modern times.

Progressivism at a Discount

I CANNOT, of course, pretend to believe that the country is in good hands. The election of Mr. Harding is to me a temporary, though complete, return to a political system which seemed thoroughly discredited by the agitation of both Roosevelt and Wilson. It would have remained discredited, I suppose, but for the unsettling experiences of a nation inexperienced in war, censorship, and propaganda. What the Harding revival proves is that the lessons of the progressive movement were not thoroughly learned, perhaps because the movement was interrupted and frustrated before it had borne its fruit.

If that is so, then the election of Mr. Harding may turn out to be a rigorous and costly, but useful, bit of schooling. For in Harding and his friends we have an unadulterated version of the kind of reaction which millions of people have been longing for during the stress of war and under the threats of the bolsheviks. For the last two years, reaction has been at a premium and progressivism at a discount. That being the case, any attempt to foist progressivism upon the country would be a mistake. It is wholly appropriate that the next Administration should be composed of men who unmistakably represent the prevailing mood. They have ample majorities in both houses of Congress and complete control of the executive machinery. They will even secure control of the higher judiciary. All that remains to make the experiment perfect is for Mr. Harding to throw his campaign speeches into the waste-basket, and govern as Penrose, Watson, Daugherty and the others suggest.

No one could ask for a freer field or a fairer chance. Mr. Harding and his friends start out with every ounce of power with which the American system can provide a national administration. They can displace all the incompetents they have denounced. They can pack off all the idealists, the visionaries, the faddists, and they can pack in practical men everywhere. They can put only the accredited people on guard. And then they can reduce taxes as they have promised to do, and turn the governmental departments into models of efficiency. They can reduce the cost of living. They can make railroads serviceable. They can reorganize the Post Office. They can bring peace to the business man, contentment to the worker, prosperity to the farmer. Like Monte Cristo, the world is theirs for awhile.

It is for them to see that in practising normalcy they do not leave the world any less orderly than they found it. That is not asking much. And yet there are in the vicinity of the Harding administration groups of gentlemen who badly want what they want when they want it. They expect great things from Mr. Harding. They are without the slightest suspicion of a doubt that what they want is what George Washington intended them to have. They now mean to have what they want, and they are supremely convinced that their wishes are the national will. It will be for Mr. Harding to decide whether these intransigents are to prevail, or whether more cautious men shall call the tune. The temper of the country four years hence will depend largely on whether Mr. Harding listens to those who want to revert violently to normalcy in the United States and Mexico, or to those who want to revert in a conciliatory spirit.

But, in either case, an attempt at reversion is to take place. The attempt will be subject to vigilant scrutiny and careful public record. Beyond that, progressives have no mandate at present. They cannot and will not obstruct. They are out of power. Mr. Harding is in power. The whole responsibility, the whole glory or the whole discredit, belongs from March fourth to the Republican party and to those who share its views. They stand before the country invested with all the prerogatives of office.

There is nothing confusing about that, and when democracy is unconfused, it is extraordinarily dependable. If reactionary policy can produce the blessings which it promises, if it can introduce peace, plenty, harmony, that will be splendid, and the progressives, if. they are honest, will be delighted to acknowledge that they were wrong. And if reactionary policy does not produce peace, plenty, harmony, then for quite a while we shall certainly know that reactionary policy does not produce peace, plenty, and harmony. It will be somebody else's turn to try. And his success will depend upon how well the progressives have used the time ahead of them now, the time when they are out of power, to learn the lessons of their previous failures, and to store up wisdom for the opportunities that are bound to come.

I have called this a cheerful view of the election. But down deep I cannot help regretting more than ever before that instead of responsible government we elect our officials for an immutable term of years.