The Age of Loot

WALTER LIPPMANN

Explaining some of the principal causes of the decline in patriotism during the past decade

Several hours before the last Congress adjourned a Senator from Oklahoma began to make a speech in behalf of the oil producers of his state. He insisted that in order to help these producers sell their oil at a profit the Senate should agree to consider an absolute prohibition of the importation of oil from abroad. Now before the Senator began speaking he knew that Congress would not voluntarily agree to any such thing. Nevertheless he went on to speak. He knew that in the time remaining there was no hope of persuading the legislature by resort to reason. So he set out deliberately to bring the business of the Senate to a standstill by talking about his oil embargo until the clock struck twelve.

The purpose of this filibuster was probably not to take revenge. Nor can it have been to blackmail the Senate. For Mr. Thomas of Oklahoma has been in Washington long enough to know that while the Senate can be cajoled in an exchange of favors it is a very difficult body to move when it is exasperated by threats. His real motive, I take it, was to please the oil men among his constituents at home, to prove to them that in the Hon. Thomas they have a Senator who like Daniel will beard the lions in their den, like Samson will pull down the pillars of the temple, so that Oklahoma oil shall be sold at a profit. The object of the filibuster was, in short, to establish Mr. Thomas as first in the hearts of his countrymen.

A few days before this little incident William Hale Thompson was campaigning for the nomination as Mayor of Chicago on the Republican ticket. His city is on the verge of bankruptcy and its lawlessness is notorious throughout the world. To win the nomination of the dominant party he made no pretence of wishing to remedy the condition of the city. He based his campaigning on the assumption that a majority of the voters cared nothing whatever about the honor and decency of Chicago, that what they wanted was to exploit their ancestral grudges, to express their jealousies and hatreds, to retain the immunities and privileges which a shrewd political management had distributed among them. Big Bill was right in his estimate of the voters. There did not exist on the day of the primary any sufficient impulse for the common good to overcome the assembled appetites for loot and the gratification of prejudice.

In the year preceding the Chicago affair the Congress of the United States was considering a revision of the tariff. The method it employed was to see how many votes could be obtained for an increase of rates on one commodity by the promise of votes to raise rates on other commodities. Each industry had its lobby, each lobby controlled a certain number of votes in the House and in the Senate, and the bill as written was the net result of exchanging and combining these votes. Nobody who did not have a tangible stake in making a profit with governmental assistance had any standing in these transactions. The President was ignored. The petition of the thousand leading economists did not count. The newspapers made no difference. Reasoned pleas on the larger consequences got nowhere. The combined force of definite interests who wanted tangible things from the government swept aside all intangible and disinterested considerations.

For the last ten years in New York City the character of the municipal government and the progress of the city in it gigantic task of making life livable amidst the growth of wealth and population had been bedevilled by the fact that a politician, with that singleminded shrewdness which is so often the gilt of stupid men, has impregnated a majority of the voters with the fixed idea that the five cent fare is one of the inalienable rights of man. It may be that it is good public, policy to maintain the five cent fare by subsidy from the treasury. The point is that the question of policy has not been a matter of argument. It has become an untouchable dogma; the five cents actually deposited in the coinbox has acquired an understandable reality against which no demonstration that the rest of the fare comes from some other pocket can prevail. The visible five cents is what matters. The invisible subsidy ol two or three cents does not. The remoter consequences, such as the freezing of the municipal credit and the arrest of desperately needed public improvements, lie in that realm of the abstract and remote common good which the imagination of a majority tines not readily encompass.

It would be possible to continue indefinitely citing examples like these. They would supply the case histories of such a study of the working of popular government as has not yet been attempted by anyone. But even without profound analysis it is evident that we have here the symptoms of that ancient disease which beset the Romans when their rulers pacified the multitude with bread and circuses. How general the disease is in the United States I do not know enough to say. That it is so advanced as to he incurable 1 do not believe. But that we are suffering from the disease, that it is a dangerous one, and that it is highly contagious 1 have no doubt.

• A possible diagnosis would seem to be something of this sort; in times of peace, general security, and plenty, the individual tends to lose his feeling of belonging to a corporate existence which is superior to himself. In time of war he has that feeling vividly, though in the advanced stages of national decline he may, as the Romans did, lose it even then. But in time of peace his instinctive patriotism is satisfied by a certain amount of rhetoric, sentimentality, record-breaking, and flag-waving. It does not easily extend to the making even of such minor material sacrifices as men hardly (Continued on page 86) stop to consider in time of war. This impoverishment of patriotism in time of peace causes a reversal of the underlying attitude towards government. Instead of the feeling that the nation through its government commands the individual person, there comes the feeling that the government is something to he worked for favors while its exactions are evaded. In a word the individual assumes an attitude of taking rather than giving.

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During the last decade this attitude has, it seems to me, increasingly dominated American public affairs. If one compares the years 1920 to 1930 with the years 1905 to 1915 it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the prevailing tone of public life among politicians and voters alike is distinctly less patriotic and distinctly more acquisitive. The age of Roose velt and Wilson, disregarding all estimate of the soundness of their policies, was one in which public discussion was pitched at a level where everyone professed to he concerned with the common good. In the age of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover that concern is no longer in the front of public discussion. I do not say that there was not some hypocrisy and much selfdelusion in the earlier period, or that in the latter there is not some real gain of forthrightness and unpretentiousness. Nevertheless the criterion of the common good, as something which, however it may he defined, can he acknowledged as transcending the immediate conveniences and profits of the individual, is an absolute necessity in the conduct of human affairs. Its disappearance from public discussion is an omen. For whenever the pretence is abandoned, as Senator Thomas abandoned it in his filibuster, as the authors of the tariff abandoned it. as the veterans' lobby nas aoancloned it, the merely acquisitive instincts have little to check them.

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There is a great deal of cant in talk about service, duty, obligation, patriotism. As often as not this cant is the disguise of peculiarly odious self-seeking. But the phrases which profess some sort of transpersonal allegiance are nevertheless touchstones to remind men that as this world is constituted they cannot live by taking more than they give. The ideal of the common good thrust forward continually in public debate is to the body politic what pride and honor are to an individual, —a force which counteracts the impulse to wallow, to grab and to devour, and finally to sit and settle into fatness and triviality.

It is possible, I think, to specify at least three principal causes of the decline in effective patriotism during this last decade. One was weariness and disillusionment after the war resulting in a violent reaction away from painful sacrifice for remote impersonal ends. Men wanted some happiness here and now after years of frustration.

This mood has been continued among larger masses of the people longer than the effects of the war would have warranted. A principal cause has been national prohibition. It is difficult to estimate the subtle disintegration of loyalty which is resulting from this tragic experiment. But it must be very great. For when millions are engaged in continual personal rebellion against the national constitution, and look upon the agents of the federal government as invaders to he repelled, defeated, or corrupted, it is impossible to believe that the remainder of their loyalty is intact.

Along with the disenchantment of war and the irritation of prohibition there came the policy of deliberate and calculating materialism which the Republican managers adopted in order to elect Warren 'G. Harding. This policy has continued under President Coolidge and President Hoover. The three presidents of the last decade have all held up acquisitiveness as an outstanding ideal of conduct. Let anyone who doubts this examine their speeches. Let him find in them if he can the ardor of Roosevelt for honesty and honor in public life or the passion of Wilson for the fulfillment of an historic destiny. The sense that the nation exists for ends that are more than those of the individual was powerful and persistent in Roosevelt and Wilson. It has not been easily apparent in the last three presidents. They have been talking about normalcy, and low taxes, and how to avoid international responsibility, about radio sets, and electric washing machines and two-car garages. They have not called the people to great action. They have in effect told them to get what they could while the getting was good.

It is against this background of drab acquisitiveness that one must view the accumulating demands of sections, blocs, classes, and special interests for favors and immunities. The official voice of America has for ten years put the seal of approval upon getting and taking and holding and has decried as unmanly idealism or even as a positive peril the sense of obligation by the individual to the nation and by the nation to mankind. Mr. Hoover's vetoes cannot check the tide of acquisitiveness which he and his predecessors have unloosed.

That tide will not be checked by his method of yielding on the tariff and the farm subsidy and then standing stubbornly against subsidies for veterans or victims of the drought. Only a radical change of mood will check this accelerating tendency to exploit the government, and that will come only when the nation begins again to hear from men who have the gift of great men, the capacity to lift a people above itself.