Concerning Women

by Suzanne La Follette

The process of assimilation is even now at work; with what effectiveness one may deduce from the strength and determination of the forces arrayed against it. It was no love for the Czar and the Russian nobility that caused the Allied Governments to spend millions of dollars in support of Kolchak, Denikin, and Wrangel, just as it was no love for Louis XVI and the French nobility that sent the Duke of Brunswick into France at the head of the Allies’ army. It was fear of the idea which animates the Bolshevist Government. It was not because the Allied Governments hated Germany less but because they hated the Bolsheviki more that they failed to assent to the Soviet Government’s proposal to surrender Petrograd and Moscow, establish a front in the Ural mountains, and continue the war against Germany. It was not their belief in self-determination, but their desire to interpose a buffer State between the embattled proletariat of Russia and the embattled imperialists of Western Europe, that caused them to erect Poland into an independent State. Nor has anything but the most pressing economic necessity moved any one of the Western Governments to treat with the cynical realists of Moscow, who have repeatedly embarrassed Allied politicians by their persistent abstinence from the hypocritical cant of the diplomat who has predatory designs to justify. Nor was it any sudden access of friendliness for Germany, or any noble superiority to sectional jealousies and nationalist ambitions, that moved these same Governments to sign the agreement of Locarno; it was, rather, a desire to make common cause against a Government whose avowed purpose is to destroy the privileged interests by and for which they themselves exist. Need anyone suppose that they would do all these things if they believed that the Russian idea could be localized? Not even the desire of their privilegees to exploit the natural wealth of Russia could have brought about a Locarno agreement. It was their sense of a common danger that overcame their mutual jealousies and distrust; the danger that the proletarians of their own countries may, as their miseries increase, be moved to emulate the proletarians of Russia, that a sense of class-solidarity may overcome traditional and national antipathies, and move them to unite for the purpose of casting off their chains.

There are tendencies in post-war Europe and America which must be disturbing to the politician who knows how to interpret them, if there be such a politician; tendencies far more significant of future developments than the mere existence of organized revolutionary minorities or the activities of single communists or anarchists, and much more difficult to cope with. Chief among these is a growing disrespect for government; the progress of a healthy cynicism concerning its nature and purpose, and a promising disregard of those sumptuary laws which do not meet with the convictions or desires of citizens. This tendency is by no means confined to any disaffected group or class. The citizen who is most patriotic, and most wholeheartedly with his Government in its attempts to coerce other people, may not scruple to evade its attempts to coerce himself. There is no articulate sentiment in this country, for example, against the income-tax law; yet there are few citizens who will not evade its incidence if possible, and feel themselves quite justified in doing so. Or again, who has not heard people comfortably provided with contraband liquor remark that they believe prohibition to be an excellent thing for the country in general? People may support the policies of a Government who entertain no illusions whatever about the nature of its personnel—or about the policies themselves for that matter—but who support them as a matter of self-interest or because they see nothing better to do. But all this does not augur especially well for the hold of government upon the loyalty or imagination of the governed. It is a truism that the Government which tries to enforce one law to which its citizens do not subscribe, thereby engenders disrespect for all law, and thus weakens its authority. Again, the citizen who supports his Government through self-interest or inertia may oppose it through self-interest or because his inertia has been overcome. If he does not support it through respect, its hold upon him is tenuous and uncertain.

As for the growing numbers of the disaffected, they show their loss of faith in so-called representative government, and their sense of helplessness, by a practice of non-co-operation which is none the less real because it is spontaneous and unorganized. The number of qualified voters who abstain from using the ballot grows with every election; and this is not surprising, since every voter of any intelligence knows precisely what interests control government, and precisely what measure of self-determination his apparent choice between rival candidates involves. Even the old faith in Liberalism, or the belief that the masses may get some voice in government through “putting good men in office,” is not what it once was. Liberalism displayed its true colours during the war, and since the war it has not been able to fool a great many of the people even part of the time. It is worthy of note that every war-Government of 1914 was a Liberal Government except Russia’s. Mr. Wilson was a Liberal if there ever was one; and Mr. Wilson’s Administration led the American people into a costly war which was of practical moment to only an infinitesimal minority of our population, and used the opportunity created by war-hysteria to perpetrate the most high-handed outrages against dissenters from his war-policy. Mr. Wilson may have been sincerely insincere, as one clever critic put it; but whether he was so or not, he gave the American people a thorough, high-priced lesson in the essential hypocrisy of Liberalism. Mr. Wilson, and his fellow-Liberals of Europe, showed the world that the real interests of Liberalism and those of Toryism are identical, and that when those interests are endangered it is impossible to distinguish between Liberal and Tory behaviour.

It has, indeed, become abundantly clear since the war that a realignment of forces is inevitable; a realignment which shall represent not merely two factions differing slightly in regard to the non-essentials of government but one in the fundamental purpose of furthering economic exploitation; but a realignment which shall represent the cleavage which exists already, and will be widened as time goes on, between those who wish to perpetuate economic exploitation and those who wish it abolished. The remark which one frequently hears, that the two great parties in this country represent the same interests, means that they are both maintained by, and directly represent, the interest of monopoly which is engaged in exploiting industry. Their superficial differences, even, are notoriously insignificant, and fundamentally their interests and their source of power are identical. The logical cleavage, therefore, is between members of those two parties with all mere Liberals and reformers, on the one side, and advocates of economic justice on the other. It is really too late for compromise; too late for government to do everything for the exploited masses except get off their backs, as the German Imperial Government did so admirably before the war. Governments have become too corrupt and too ruthless, and the interests behind them too greedy, to perceive the wisdom of such a course. If the policy of coercion is in the ascendancy, if the executive arm of political government is everywhere usurping the function of the legislative arm, if parliamentarism and republicanism seem about to merge into dictatorship, it is because the ruling classes are much more aware of the coming struggle than are those classes whose interests will range them on the other side; and if many people now support government whose interests are against it, it is because they have not yet awakened to a realization of their true position. The increasing cynicism of the governed concerning the nature and purposes of government really marks an important advance toward the new alignment of forces. It is not a long step from the realization that government does not represent the general interest, to a discovery of the direction in which that interest lies.

Along with this cynicism go other signs of a changing attitude. There is a conspicuous falling off of faith in what might be called the unofficial adjuncts of government, namely: the press and the pulpit. The changing attitude towards organized religion was recognized and defined in the Pope’s recent Encyclical Letter condemning the progress of laicism in all the countries of the Christian world, and the accompanying tendency to discuss Christianity as if it were merely one of the historical faiths, like Mohammedanism or Buddhism, instead of the only true, revealed religion. It is recognized also in the attempts to which I have alluded above, by certain Protestant sects in this country to secure laws forbidding the teaching of the theory of evolution. It is true that science and the printing-press have robbed a secularized church of its main source of influence over the minds of men, the one by discovering and proclaiming the natural laws behind those phenomena which ignorance attributed to benign or evil spirits; and the other by facilitating the general dissemination of knowledge. The Church can no longer effectively appeal to fear. For a church which very early became a class-organization, and one of the large-scale promoters and beneficiaries of economic exploitation, this is a serious thing. Its promises and its comminations are becoming alike ineffectual in face of mankind’s growing concern with the spiritual effect of involuntary poverty and wretchedness upon the human spirit in this present world. The modern cynicism towards paternalism in government and industry finds its counterpart in cynicism concerning organized Christianity. In an age which questions the justice of mankind’s arbitrary division into classes, such an Encyclical as that of Pope Leo XIII which enjoined masters to be lenient and the subject masses to be patient is already an anachronism; and the injunction put by the Church of England upon candidates for confirmation to order themselves lowly and reverently unto all their betters is more likely to arouse antagonism than to win compliance. The churches do not understand the new psychology with which they have to deal. They are offering dogmatic creeds to an age which is suspicious of all dogma; they are upholding traditional moral criteria in an age when the foundations of factitious morality are being generally scrutinized by the light of reason and knowledge; they are preaching salvationist doctrine in terms which no longer edify or recommend themselves to serious attention. All this is merely to say that organized religion, like political government, remains static in the midst of flux; and like political government it faces a spontaneous and widespread if entirely unorganized popular movement of non-coöperation.

As for that large majority of prosperous newspaper-concerns which are stigmatized in socialist literature as the “kept press,” they have been so over-eager in the partisanship of their editorial writing and in the colouring of their news or its manufacture out of whole cloth, that there is discernible a decided change in the popular attitude towards them. The power of the printed word is still great out of all proportion to its weight; but editorial pronouncements, if they are read at all, are by no means swallowed as the undiluted milk of the word, as they were in the day when Horace Greeley used daily in the Tribune to dictate opinion to a large section of the American public. It is significant that since the advertising department has come to take precedence over the editorial department, there has been a decided falling-off in respect for journalism and a marked decrease in the number of honest and able people who take up journalistic work. This was to be expected. The modern newspaper is essentially an advertising medium, and its editorial writing and presentation of news must conform to its general character. Under these circumstances men of intellectual ability and integrity are no longer attracted by such work, as they are no longer, for an analogous reason, attracted to governmental office or to the pulpit. The consequent deterioration in journalistic personnel contributes further to the newspaper’s loss of prestige—again as in the case of the personnel of government and of the churches. As all those institutions lose the power to command respect and allegiance, they progressively lose power to attract able and honest minds to their service; and as they lose this power of attraction, their power to command respect progressively dwindles; and thus by alternate reactions they tend to disintegration. To return to the press, it is symptomatic of the loss of popular faith in its moral and intellectual character that people buy this newspaper or that so largely because of special features—local news, sporting news, this person’s column or that person’s cartoons. It is no exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of Americans look to their newspapers not for information but for entertainment or excitement; a fact which is amply attested by the amount of space devoted to special features, comic strips and cheap stories, and above all by the extraordinary success of a new tabloid type of newspaper devoted almost exclusively to pictures, accompanied by the most sensational kind of backstairs gossip. In the parlance of the street, the modern newspaper is “giving ’em what they want”; and while the preference is a sad reflection on public taste, its gratification is an equally sad reflection on the quality and standing of American journalism. The newspaper, in short, as I have said, no longer informs or guides opinion; it purveys amusement.

The same deterioration, with concomitant loss of prestige, that is proceeding in government, the church and the press, is evident in educational institutions. This is a natural and inevitable development, since education is so largely under political control. The powers which control government are in control of education; and those powers quite naturally will not tolerate any teaching which even implies a revaluation of the existing economic, political or social organization. This intolerance is effective even in institutions not under direct control by the State; for those institutions are largely dependent on wealthy benefactors, and wealth is almost entirely in control of people who have a direct interest in the preservation of the established order. Under these circumstances, the primary purpose of education, which is to develop the mind and help it to independent progress along the paths of truth and reason, is rendered impossible of fulfilment; and our schools have pretty generally substituted for this purpose another and lower one which is calculated neither to embarrass nor offend the powers on which they depend. This is the vocational purpose. Thus they have ceased to be centres of culture, and become centres of training whose object is to turn out graduates who shall resemble one another as closely as possible in all things save in special vocational training. As Professor Jerome Davis recently expressed it, our colleges are turning out machine-made minds. The deterioration in the personnel of the teaching profession is consequently quite as marked as that in government, the churches and the press. Independence of spirit is not tolerated by school-directors and boards of regents. Teaching, moreover, being held in little respect by the State, to whose interests it is obviously inimical if prosecuted intelligently and seriously, is so poorly paid that people who can possibly do better elsewhere are naturally unwilling to become teachers. It is needless to dwell upon the demoralizing and vulgarizing effect of these circumstances on the schools themselves and those who attend them. It is too obvious and has been already too often discussed, to require consideration here. What I do wish to note is the fact that this educational system does not escape criticism and distrust; and that the most interesting and promising manifestation of this distrust is evident not among outsiders or alumni, but among undergraduates. Too much may not be expected of it, but the “youth-movement” which is afoot among students may not be disregarded; it is symptomatic of a critical attitude and a spirit of revolt which may not be wholly without effect.

These are negative signs of progress, if one will, but none the less impressive for that. They indicate a growing sense of discomfort in the environment provided by established institutions, and a loss of faith in those institutions as they deteriorate under the spread of their own corruption. On the positive side one may cite the growing power of economic organization, and its tendency to displace political organization. The appearance in the American Congress of a group known as the “farm-bloc” is an interesting instance of this tendency. Here is a group of political representatives with whom an economic interest is frankly placed ahead of political affiliation. They are primarily neither Democrats nor Republicans, neither conservatives nor progressives; they are primarily representative of a producing group. As such, they stand for a departure from the theory of representative political government, which assumes that representation shall be not industrial but geographic. According to this theory, the representatives from each arbitrarily fixed geographical unit are supposed to represent the interests of all the citizens within that unit. This evidently leaves out of account not only the fact that economic interests are primarily industrial or occupational and only secondarily and fortuitously sectional, but also the fact that the economic interests within a given area may be mutually inimical. In practice, of course, political representatives have really represented the dominant economic interest within their allotted territory, the interest which has exercised the strongest political influence; but since in theory they must represent all interests, they have not been able to represent that dominant interest openly, but have had to resort to subterfuge and dishonesty. Even the members of the farm-bloc, were they representing districts where agriculture was not the dominant industry, would no doubt be less open in their espousal of its interest. None the less they have dared, in disregard of party-discipline, to form a bloc which stands squarely for the interest of a producing class; and in doing so they have taken a step towards the system of industrial representation which has of late made great strides in European countries, more especially in Russia and Germany. Although the group which has taken this step may be unimportant politically, save when a close division chances to throw the balance of power into its hands, the step it has taken is of the utmost importance; for if economic representation should proceed until it eventually superseded geographical representation, the change would not only involve the destruction of the bipartisan machine which controls government in this country; it would naturally bring about an open alignment of the producing interests against the interests of exploitation, and thus make clear the final and fundamental issue of which I have spoken—the question whether economic exploitation is to be perpetuated or abolished.

A good deal of non-political organization shows the same trend. The growth of co-operation, for example, in production, marketing, and consumption, is evidence of an attempt to evade through group-action those exactions of government’s beneficiaries against which the single individual is powerless to protect himself. The growth of offensive and defensive organization among capitalists on the one side and workers on the other, not only implies recognition of the primary importance of economic interests and the value of co-operation among groups whose economic interests are identical; it implies also an acknowledgment that neither capital nor labour receives from government what it will accept as adequate protection of its interests—as, of course, neither can, since the interest that government exists to protect—the interest of monopoly—is directly inimical to both. Moreover, as this organization becomes international in scope it constitutes a negation of the political differences which bolster up rival national organizations. That it has not yet become strong enough to prevent nationalistic wars, is true; but this is because the fact that war is a clash, not of rival producing interests, but of rival exploiting interests has not yet become sufficiently clear to overcome a specious patriotism and the traditional distrust and prejudice which governments have assiduously inculcated upon the governed. The producing classes are really behind the exploiting classes in discovering that their interests are pretty much the same, whatever their various nationalities may be. Governments have always co-operated when any rebellious move by the governed in any country threatened the established economic and political order; as they co-operated in the Holy Alliance against France, or in a similar alliance against Russia, and as they are now co-operating in the League of Nations against the exploited classes in all countries. When the exploited classes understand their own position as clearly as the exploiting classes have understood theirs, organization for defense and offense will no longer be national and vertical but horizontal and international. The real issue will be drawn at last. Hence the tendency of capital and labour toward international organization along the lines of economic interest is an extremely hopeful sign that the producing classes are beginning to realize that their major interests are not political but economic, and that the quarrels of Governments are injurious to those interests; that they are beginning to outgrow the narrow nationalism which has facilitated their exploitation in the past, and made it possible to pit them against one another in the quarrels of rival exploiting classes.