To the men in this campaign, two potent emotional appeals are being made by the Hoover managers, and the key-words in the incantation are “prosperity” and “efficiency.” Since the days of the first Puritans, “prosperity” has been a sacred word in the American tradition. With the Puritans, their prosperity was the visible evidence of God’s blessing on their virtue. Their great holiday was their “Thanksgiving Day” on which they celebrated their successful harvest and gave thanks for it to God: and their psychology is still preserved in the presidential proclamation setting the date for Thanksgiving Day, as well as in the President’s speeches in which he quotes the statistics of prosperity and praises the creator of the universe because the balance is on the right side of the ledger. The emotion is the same as that of the small boy who has been told that if he is a good little boy and obeys his parents, Santa Claus will remember him with gifts. Prosperity is still, subconsciously, a proof to the good American that his virtue is rewarded, and he has still what is almost a religious reverence for worldly success. He cannot help but look with suspicion on any one who continues in misfortune and bad luck. And he is never so happy as when he is with the winners on the band-wagon.

Prosperity is God’s reward for virtue, and the great virtue that is now rewarded is efficiency. It, too, has come to have an almost religious respect in the mind of the Puritan American. He looks on many of his instinctive impulses as weaknesses that impede him in his career; and inefficiency in himself has largely taken on the aspects of the Old Flesh that he must fight. Efficiency is therefore a virtue in its own right. It is not merely a means to a practical end. It is almost a state of grace. And Hoover has been well-inspired to plead for prohibition that it has promoted national “efficiency” and national “prosperity,” because in the contemporary American subconsciousness those two words seem to have inherited the emotional magic that once existed, for the Puritans, in the words “virtue” and “salvation.”

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

THE doctors answer that in the sub-conscious mind of the average American, the government is Dad. A man’s instinctive attitude to authority is formed in his childhood by his relations with his father. That attitude, set before intelligence fully develops, does not become much more intelligent in later years. By voting dry, the drinker gets the paternal protection of the government, which is put in the place of the stern father forbidding the son to drink; and the son proceeds then to drink with a new gusto, because he is outwitting and disobeying his father mischievously, and because the drink has the added sweetness of stolen fruit. Instead of having to control himself in freedom, he has now shifted his responsibility to the paternal shoulders of the government. He has the childish satisfaction of being protected by the father and of evading the protection. When it comes to voting, he still votes dry, because he feels subconsciously that he needs to be protected from his appetite for alcohol. Having voted, he goes out with a good conscience, to get a drink. It is doubtful, therefore, Whether he will vote for Smith—unless he is convinced that the President has no power to do anything about prohibition, one way or the other.

And there is another aspect of the government-as-Dad theory which affects the emotional currents of the present campaign. The ruler of a country becomes confused with the father-image in the subconscious mind. You see indications of it when Washington is called “The Father of his country” and Lincoln is “Father Abraham” and the Czar of Russia is “Little Father” and so on. Consequently, the older and more fatherly-looking man ought to have an advantage over the young and adventurous-looking one in a campaign for the presidency. President Harding in appearance was the perfect father-image, the symbol of grave protectiveness. Hoover’s managers have wisely emphasized his instinctive feeling for children and his impulsive fight to save the starving children in Belgium during the war and the starving children in Germany after the armistice. They are making a father-image out of him. But Smith, with his brown derby on the side of his head and his cigar in the teeth of a broad smile, is an image not of fatherly protection but of genial adventurousness. That picture of him will not gain him many votes.

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

IN the typical American community, the Jew, the Irish-Catholic and the foreigner are very much in the minority. They are not received on terms of social equality by the governing majority. They are mildly ostracized and looked down upon. They respond with that mixed emotion of resentment and admiration for the ruling caste which any submerged minority is bound to feel. Or, as the doctors say, they develop “an inferiority.” You will find an excellent study of this psychology, as far as concerns the Jew, in Ludwig Lewisohn’s recent novel “The Island Within.” In New York, in Chicago, in Boston, where the Jews and Catholics and foreigners have settled in such numbers that they have a herd of their own to support them against intolerance, their sense of inferiority is passing; and they have “maximated” their egos, as the doctors put it, by obtaining political and financial power and ruling the ruling caste; so that, in these larger cities, it is possible for them to vote for a presidential candidate from their own ranks. But outside of the big towns, you will find what the doctors call “a rationalization” of inferiority in Smith’s natural supporters, showing as a reluctance to foresee him in the White House.

There was recently published a newspaper interview with one of Smith’s boyhood friends who has remained poor and inconspicuous. He had voted for Smith for Governor, he said, but he could not vote to put him in the presidency. That, it seemed to him, was going too far. The same emotion of subconscious inferiority, projected upon Smith, is voluble in the whispered rumors that the Catholic hierarchy are opposed to him because he might not worthily represent his people. He might not “do them proud.” If he were one of the wealthy social leaders of the Catholic circle, it might be different. He is especially criticized for his lapses into poor but popular English. And, at the same time, you will notice that Hoover’s managers are stressing his humble origin, his obscure birth, and the poverty of his childhood, and putting out as a campaign document the photograph of the tumble-down shack in which he was born.

When you come to the question of prohibition, you strike another subconscious determinant that is most interesting. “America acts wet but votes dry,” as the politicians say. Or as Will Rogers observed, “You could repeal prohibition, if you could count the breaths instead of the ballots.” Why do you suppose this is so? Why, for instance, before national prohibition was enacted, did heavy drinkers in the Western states go to the polls and vote dry? I asked several of them why they had done it, as long ago as 1915, and they invariably answered that when they got into the polling booths they found themselves unable to vote wet. It did not prevent, them, however, from patronizing the bootlegger thereafter. Why is that?

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

FOR this reason, the Ku Klux Klan has been a perfect picnic for them. The Klan originated in a race hatred of the negro; it quickly expanded to include the anti-foreigners and the hundred-percent Americans in general. In communities where there are no negroes, no Jews, no Catholics, and no foreigners in sufficient numbers to authorize a mass movement, the Klan has functioned in the quarrel between unorganized and union labor. Its inspiration is simply the floating hatred in any community that is animated by subconscious self-hate.

One of the Puritan divines who has been most conspicuous in his leadership of this multitudinous emotion has been reminded by his political opponents that he should be preaching “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” But when a man subconsciously hates himself, the text can only encourage him to love his neighbor as little. To love his neighbor, he must first love himself. He must have tolerance, forgiveness, charity for himself if he is to have it for others. And to the Puritan, tolerance of himself and self-forgiveness are a sort of moral turpitude.

In the present election campaign, all the Puritan American’s self-hate is being projected upon the Democratic candidate. And inevitably so. Smith is a Catholic. He is also wet, and in the Puritan mind sex and alcohol are associated in sin. It is this association that makes prohibition a moral issue. And that is probably the subconscious reason, too, why the Puritan divine inevitably believes and argues that Smith is the friend of prostitution, gambling and all allied social evils. These are regarded by the Puritan as especially the sins of the big town. His hatred of his own animal impulse toward those sins gives him a peculiar animus against the city. Smith was born in the metropolis. His campaign song is “The Sidewalks of New York.” To hear that song will move the out-of-town Puritan to a happy release of accumu-lated venom, which he will discharge against Smith.

All this is also inevitable. It is one of the prices we pay for our successful civilization. As the doctors cheerfully point out, the Puritan, by putting a taboo on his sex instinct, damned up in himself an inexhaustible reservoir of instinctive energy which has found its escape in industry, in business activity, in the enormous psychic drive that has produced our material prosperity. Apparently we cannot have both this urge to industry and the genial contentment of soul that comes of self-forgiveness and the tolerance of our animal instincts. We cannot have both the anxious drive and the milk of human kindness that is secreted by the contented psyche. Or, if we can, the doctors have not yet found the way to arrange it. Anyway, it need not concern us here. For the moment we are attempting only to forecast the subconscious issues in a presidential election. You might suppose that all the Puritan projections of self-hate on Smith would be balanced by the votes of the Jews, Catholics, the foreigners and the wets who are included in the Puritan animosity. It does not seem to work out that way. Other subconscious influences interfere.

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

ALL emotional appeals, whether in wars or elections, are appeals to instinctive impulses. There is no such thing as an emotion arising in the conscious intellect. All emotions are instinctive emotions, welling up from the subconscious mind; and in their origin they are “purposeful to instinct,” as the doctors say. In wartime, of course, the great appeal is to the emotion of patriotism and the impulses of the herd instinct, to fear and hatred of the enemy, and to the egotism that sees itself aggrandized in the glory of its country. In election campaigns a similar appeal is made by waving the flag, by stirring up party loyalty, by arousing fear and hatred of the opposing party, and by identifying the ego of the party-man with the success of the party’s candidate and the glory of the party’s victory. That also is inevitable. The man who objects to it might as well object to the descent of the water at Niagara Falls.

But, in the present campaign between Hoover and Smith, these herd loyalties have been cut across by other emotions. The question of prohibition divides both parties. So does the question of religion. And the problem of farm relief. And the politicians on both sides are seeking emotional appeals that will take advantage of such cross-currents. neutralize them in their own party and inflame them in the ranks of their opponents. Hence the hate, the venomous whisper, the call to religious intolerance, the appeal to prejudice, to factional animosity, to any emotion that may hook a vote out of the conflicting currents that have already so muddied up the pure waters of party faith.

In spite of our admixture of foreign blood, the American people are still predominantly Puritan in their traditions and their ways of thought. The Puritan sets his soul against a powerful instinct in man, the sex instinct. To him, sex is sin. His religion also requires him to frown on his ego instinct, to be meek, to be humble, charitable, forgiving. He never quite makes that grade, but he performs miracles with his taboo on sex. He marks sex as an animal appetite that is hateful in the eyes of God. And it makes him hateful to himself. He sees himself as a miserable sinner, self-convicted by the animal impulses that keep rising in him, distempered with an inner war between the Flesh and the Spirit, and abhorrent to himself because the Spirit can never defeat the Flesh. The more religious, the more Puritanical he is, the more this poisonous self-hatred inwardly accumulates.

Now the doctors have discovered a curious thing about him. Except in the meekest and most pious saints, self-hatred cannot express itself in its own form. The natural egotism of the animal will not let it. It gets itself vented only as a righteous hatred of others—particularly of those who seem to personify the impulses for which the Puritan subconsciously hates himself. Hence the witch-hunts of the early American Puritans and the vice crusades of their modern descendants. Hence also their religious intolerance; for the Puritan, by a peculiar logic of the subconscious, finding himself hateful to his God, gets an easement of his self-hate by projecting it upon all arguable enemies of his God. The original Puritans came to America in search of religious liberty, but when they found it for themselves they denied it to all other sects. They persecuted zealously. They have persecuted ever since. Any appeal to religious bigotry, to righteous moral animosity, is irresistible to them. It gives them the relief of an instinctive satisfaction. It makes them truly happy.

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

WHEN the late world war was first threatening Europe, the socialists predicted confidently that it would be stopped, before it began, by the refusal of the workingmen of France and Germany to kill one another in a quarrel between their employers. And when the French and German workingmen rushed to arms without a moment’s consideration of their “enlightened self-interest,” Max Eastman wrote bitterly in his socialist weekly that it was evident to him men were “governed not by intelligence but by instinct.” How do you suppose Max Eastman ever attained the age of reason without learning this first and most obvious truth about mankind? And if even the most Marxian socialists have learned to apply it to a war, why should we not apply it to the forecast of an election campaign?

Of course, when you say that men are governed by instinct and not by intelligence, or vote by instinct and not intelligently, you are not expressing yourself with any attempt at scientific accuracy. What you mean is that men commonly act upon instinctive impulses, emotionally and automatically, and not upon reasoned conclusions, consciously arrived at after intelligent thought. And the so-called new psychology has a lot to say about that matter, because reasoned conclusions are an affair of conscious intellect, and instinctive impulses come from the subconscious mind; and the doctors discover that conscious intellect has almost no control over ordinary human conduct, whereas the subconscious mind has every control over it; so that in wars and elections, as a matter of fact, people behave exactly as they do at any other time—only more so, as it were.

To pursue the point a little further, one may say, without being too technical, that the instinctive impulses in the subconscious mind seem to divide themselves into two main currents—the impulses of the egotistic instincts and of those that appear altruistic. In the one stream are the instincts of fear, self-preservation, self-love and so on. In the other are the instincts of affection, the sex-instinct, the maternal instinct, the herd instinct, and so through the whole list which William McDougall first made popular in his famous “Introduction to Social Psychology.” On that showing, one might expect “enlightened self-interest” to be an issue of the egotistic instincts, but the catch is in the word “enlightened.” By enlightened self-interest, the socialist means intelligent self-interest—particularly economic self-interest—arriving at a reasoned conclusion that strikes a balance between possible loss and profit in an action and chooses the path that will lead to a margin of gain. Such a consideration of self-interest is not an instinctive operation but an intellectual one. The ego instincts are not that sort of animal at all. Instinctive egotism has no thought of self-interest in any such sense. It will operate with instinctive satisfaction even when the egotism is ruining the egotist. You will find an entertaining psychological study of the process in George Meredith’s novel, “The Egoist.”

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

“A MAN is not elected by his friends but by his opponent’s enemies.” That is an axiom of American politics. And in any election campaign, the professionals on the campaign committees do not worry too much about winning favor for their own candidate; they busy themselves mostly with plans for stirring up animosity against his rival. This is inevitable. It is inevitable because it succeeds. You might as well object to the use of dramatic love-interest in a stage play as resent the appeal to hate and prejudice in an election. The amateur may plead that the campaign should be kept to the issues and the appeal be made to an intelligent electorate to decide each issue on its merits, and all the rest of it; but the practical politicians know that people do not vote with their intellects but with their emotions, and the emotion easiest to arouse in an American community is hatred. Certainly it is much more easy to arouse than any more affectionate or loyal and friendly feeling.

Why? And why is the present contest between Smith and Hoover so largely a campaign of prejudice, a whispering campaign, with appeals to religious enmities and moral animosities, and the use of anti-Irish incitements against Smith and anti-English ones against Hoover? And counting up the currents of hatred on both sides, which candidate will win?

I know that the proper way to make an election forecast is to consider how many farmers will vote for a candidate’s measure of farm-relief, and how many business men will support his tariff, and how many laboring men be won by his record on labor, and how many drys go this way and how many wets the other, and so forth. But this is to suppose that people vote more or less intelligently and in response to considerations of “enlightened self-interest,” as the socialists used to call it. And if the experienced politicians do not act on that belief, why should we? And if the whole socialist program has obviously gone to smash because of this Marxian delusion about “enlightened self-interest” being a ruling motive in man, why should we continue to court on it even in an election forecast?

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928