Election By Emotion Part 5

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

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