Election By Emotion Part 7
CERTAINLY not among the women. And especially not among the women of the typical American community. To them, such a picture of Smith is a picture of the bad boy, grown up, who used to live “across the tracks.” They would as soon think of voting to put such a figure in the White House as of bringing the bad boy into their homes to corrupt their always-innocent sons. Indeed, in the subconscious minds of the women who have become reformers, this bad boy, grown up, is the typical corruptionist against whom they have been waging war in order to protect their husbands as they have protected their sons. Smith’s connection with Tammany Hall makes the identification complete, and no intelligent discussion of his relations with Tammany Hall or of his record as an independent while he was Governor of New York state, will make any difference to the situation. The thing is not conscious and intelligent but subconscious and emotional. Arguments will not affect it.
It is among the women, then, that the whispering campaign will be most successful, and now that women vote we must expect whispering campaigns to become increasingly important in electioneering. Campaigns of the sort have been notoriously effective, for years past, in the women-suffrage states of the West. With woman suffrage become national, the whisper will inevitably play its useful part in contests for the presidency. The men are not so moved by it. In Wilson’s last campaign the organized use of scandalous stories against him rather helped him with the men. You could hear the smoking-room gossips everywhere saying, “Well, I’d no idea he was such a regular fellah!” The women do not react so forgivingly. And for obvious reasons. A boy, in bis response to a charge of scandal against his father, is never so horrified as his sister; the erring father is guilty of an infidelity to the daughter as well as to the wife. The woman who is consciously voting for a father-image in the presidency will find her candidate destroyed in her heart by the whisper of scandal. The man will merely find his political father-hero brought down off the pedestal to a level nearer his own. Scandal-mongering among men has commonly had that inspiration; it serves the ends of amiable envy; it comforts a natural inferiority by making a man feel that his hero is not so much better than he. The women are the predestined victims of scandal. It is a real poison to them. And they are more addicted to it because it gives them the instinctive satisfaction which men obtain from risque stories. In Puritanic American communities, consequently, the whispering campaign will always be popular and effective among women, for subconscious reasons over which they have no intelligent control.
Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928
Related posts:
- Election By Emotion Part 6
- Election By Emotion Part 9
- Election By Emotion Part 1
- Election By Emotion Part 2
- Election By Emotion Part 4
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
