Election By Emotion Part 8

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

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