by Jill Lepore
Lippmann traced the question back to Thomas Jefferson. In Virginia’s 1786 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, Jefferson had stated the principle that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” In Tennessee’s 1925 Act Prohibiting the Teaching of the Evolution Theory, the state legislature had banned “the teaching of the evolution theory in all the universities, normal and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State.”
Bryan, alluding to the principle stated by Jefferson, had asked, “What right has a little irresponsible oligarchy of self-styled intellectuals to demand control of the schools of the United States in which twenty-five millions of children are being educated at an annual expense of ten billions of dollars?” Didn’t their demand for control violate not only the Tennessee statute but religious freedom itself?
Darrow had settled this question in his own mind. “I don’t like onion soup, but you go ahead and have some,” he liked to say. “I wouldn’t force my prejudice on you.”153 Darrow liked to find refuge in an adage. But Lippmann found that formulation wanting, because it wasn’t a matter of one man liking onion soup; it was a matter of the majority of voters liking onion soup, and voting to ban anything but onion soup from any restaurant that received government support. Not to mention, neither revealed religion nor a commitment to reason are onion soup: they are epistemologies.
Lippmann took Bryan’s argument seriously.
“Jefferson had insisted that the people should not have to pay for the teaching of Anglicanism,” he wrote. “Mr. Bryan asked why they should be made to pay for the teaching of agnosticism.”154
What were the implications for democracy? If a majority of voters decided that Charles Darwin was wrong and that evolution shouldn’t be taught in schools, what was everyone else supposed to do? If evolution was a strong and plausible and important theory of how change occurs in nature, how could the minority of people who found the theory persuasive even begin to argue with the majority, which, in a generation, would consist of people who had been taught something else?
Lippmann decided to work through this problem by imagining a dialogue in which Jefferson and Bryan take turns making their case to Socrates, Jefferson arguing for reason and Bryan arguing for religion, but both expressing their enthusiasm for popular rule. Each presents his case and agrees to abide by Socrates’s decision.
JEFFERSON: And what do you conclude from all this?
SOCRATES: That the common people hate reason, and that reason is the religion of an élite, of great gentlemen like yourself.
BRYAN: Reason a religion? What do you mean?
SOCRATES: The common people have always known that reason is a religion. That is why they dislike it so violently.155
If the common people hate reason, Lippmann concluded, there’s no way a government of the people can protect the freedom of thought. The person of faith cannot accept reason as the arbiter of truth without giving up on faith; the person of reason cannot accept that truth lies outside the realm of reason. The citizens being unable to agree on basic matters of fact, they cannot agree on how to educate their children together. “This is the propagandist’s opportunity,” Lippmann wrote.156 With enough money, and with the tools of mass communication, deployed efficiently, the propagandist can turn a political majority into a truth.
Lippmann had talked himself into a corner. He’d thought his way into a problem the Constitution had not anticipated, a problem that suggested that, under these circumstances, people would not be able to rule themselves by reason and choice, as Alexander Hamilton had hoped, but would instead be ruled by accident and force. His mind grew clouded with dread. Efficiency could not solve this problem; efficiency was part of the problem. There had to be a solution.
“Gentlemen, the world is dark,” Clarence Darrow once told a jury, leaning over the jury box with his broad-shouldered bulk. “But it is not hopeless.”157 There remained the question: Where did hope lie?
Eleven
A CONSTITUTION OF THE AIR
A family in Hood River, Oregon, gathers around the radio in 1925.
“OUR WHOLE BUSINESS SYSTEM WOULD BREAK DOWN IN a day if there was not a high sense of moral responsibility in our business world,” said bulldog-faced Herbert Hoover while campaigning for president in 1928, at the age of fifty-three. Hoover had earned the reputation of a savior, along with the nickname “Master of Emergencies,” which was also the title of his campaign film, a chronicle of his relief work in Europe during the war and in Mississippi during the 1927 flood, featuring footage so moving—ashen, hollow children fed, at last—that it reduced theater audiences to tears. One of the most devoted and talented Americans ever to seek the White House, Hoover believed that the philosophy of moral progress that had animated both American politics and American protest since the nation’s founding had come to be best represented by the leaders of American businesses, private citizens who, he thought, possessed a commitment to the public interest as unwavering as his own.1 Nothing so well illustrated his idea of a government-business partnership as radio, an experimental technology in which Hoover, a consummate engineer, invested the hope of American democracy.
As secretary of commerce and undersecretary of everything, Hoover had convened a series of annual radio conferences at the White House between 1922 and 1925, bringing together government agencies, news organizations, and manufacturers, including the fledgling Radio Corporation of America. At the time, there were 220 radio stations in the United States, and 2.5 million radio sets. Telegraph and telephone lines had wired the Republic together by miles of cable, like so many strings of Christmas lights; radio, riding on waves of air, could go anywhere. Nevertheless, early radio sets worked like the telegraph and telephone and were used for point-to-point communication, often ship-to-shore. Hoover understood that the future of radio was in “broadcasting” (a usage coined in 1921), transmitting a message to receivers scattered across great distances, like sowing so many seeds across a field. He rightly anticipated that radio, the nation’s next great mechanical experiment, would radically transform the nature of political communication: radio would make it possible for political candidates and officeholders to speak to voters without the bother and expense of traveling to meet them, and it would also make governing an intimate affair. NBC radio began broadcasting in 1926, CBS in 1928. By the end of the decade, nearly every household would have a wireless—often a homemade one. Hoover promised that broadcasting would make Americans “literally one people.”2
Hoover refused to leave this to chance, or to the public-mindedness of businessmen. The chaos of the early airwaves convinced him that the government had a role to play in regulating the airwaves by issuing licenses to frequencies and by insisting that broadcasters answer to the public interest. “The ether is a public medium,” he insisted, “and its use must be for the public benefit.”3 He pressed for passage of the Federal Radio Act, sometimes called the Constitution of the Air. Passed in 1927, it proved to be one of the most consequential acts of Progressive reform.
Under the terms of the Radio Act, the Federal Radio Commission (later the Federal Communications Commission) adopted an equal-time policy, and debates between political candidates became one of early radio’s most popular features. Hoover would later grow troubled by the world radio had wrought. “Radio lends itself to propaganda far more easily than the press,” he remarked in his memoirs. But his earlier technological utopianism was widely shared: wasn’t radio, after all, the answer to the doubts about mass democracy expressed by the likes of Walter Lippmann? “If the future of our democracy depends upon the intelligence and cooperation of its citizens,” RCA President James G. Harbord wrote in 1929, “radio may contribute to its success more than any other single influence.”4
At the end of the 1920s, the nation’s optimism appeared boundless, and not only about radio. “We in Ameri
ca today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,” Hoover said in the summer of 1928, accepting the Republican nomination. “We shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this earth.” American economic growth seemed unstoppable. “Everything indicates that business continues to make progress with production at a new high record,” the Wall Street Journal reported in July 1928. “And there seems to be nothing in sight to check the upward trend.” Stock market prices kept rising, at a time when stocks were no longer sold only to the wealthy. “Everybody Ought to be Rich,” argued one investor, in a magazine article in which he proposed that Americans without savings buy stocks on an installment plan. By 1929, a quarter of U.S. households owned stocks, compared to less than 1 percent a generation before. When Hoover was elected president in November of 1928, the stock market teetered at a record high; its closing average was three times what it had been in 1918 and twice what it had been in 1924.5
Hoover rode to his inauguration on a rainy Monday in March in a Pierce-Arrow motor car as swank as his top hat. His reign appeared to mark the final triumph of the campaign for efficiency and prosperity, a mass democracy made orderly by public-spirited businessmen and efficiency engineers. “The modern technical mind was for the first time at the head of government,” wrote pioneering New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick. “Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.” But, privately, Hoover worried that the American people believed him “a sort of superman.”6
He set to work with his customary businessman’s briskness. He had a telephone installed on his desk in the Oval Office. He scheduled his appointments at eight-minute intervals. He began reorganizing the federal government. “Back to the mines,” he’d say, after a fifteen-minute lunch break. He worried about the runaway stock market but found himself unable to halt the bulls’ stampede. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had soared to 240 in 1928; in the summer of 1929, it rose past 380.7
On October 21, 1929, Hoover, along with five hundred distinguished guests, including the owners of most of America’s most powerful corporations, met at Henry Ford’s Edison Institute, in Dearborn, Michigan, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of the incandescent lightbulb. Light’s Golden Jubilee was the brainchild of Edward Bernays, whose publicity campaign in advance of the event including sending incandescent lightbulbs to the editors of all of the nation’s newspapers. On the night of the gala, electric companies all over the country shut off their electricity for one minute to honor Thomas Edison. Eighty-two-year-old Edison then re-created the moment when he’d first lit a lightbulb, while on NBC an announcer reported breathlessly: “Mr. Edison has the two wires in his hand. Now he is reaching up to the old lamp; now he is making the connection. It lights!”8
That night, news came by radio that shares on the New York Stock Exchange had begun to fall. It was as if a light, too brightly lit, had shattered.
I.
DARKNESS HAD ALREADY fallen on Europe, which was well into a depression by 1928, a consequence of the political settlement that had ended the First World War. Before the autumn of 1929, the United States had appeared beyond the reach of that shadow. But then, over three weeks, the Dow Jones fell from 326 to 198. Stocks lost nearly 40 percent of their value. At first, the market rallied; by March 1930, stocks traded on the Dow Jones had regained nearly 75 percent of the value they’d lost. Still, the economy teetered and then it tottered, a depression set in, and by late spring stock prices were once again plummeting.9
Hoover, master of emergencies, steered the country through the crash, but when the Depression began he did very little except to wait for a recovery and attempt to reassure a panicked public. He believed in charity, but he did not believe in government relief, arguing that if the United States were to provide it the nation would be “plunged into socialism and collectivism.”10
Dorothea Lange photographed farmers on relief in California’s Imperial Valley in 1936. When Hoover did act, it was to sever the United States from Europe: he pulled up America’s last financial drawbridge by convincing Congress to pass a new, punitive trade bill, the 1930 Tariff Act. Other nations, retaliating, soon passed their own trade restrictions. Up came their drawbridges. World trade shrank by a quarter. U.S. imports fell. In 1929, the United States had imported $4.4 billion in foreign products; in 1930 imports declined to $3.1. Then U.S. exports fell. To protect American wheat farmers, the tariff on imported grain had been increased by almost 50 percent. But by 1931, American farmers found themselves able to sell only about 10 percent of their crops. Creditors seized farms and sold them off at auction. Foreign debtors, unable to sell their goods in the United States, proved unable to pay back their debts to American creditors.
Between 1929 and 1932, one in five American banks failed. The unemployment rate climbed from 9 percent in 1930, to 16 percent in 1931, to 23 percent in 1932, by which time nearly twelve million Americans—a number equal to the entire population of the state of New York—were out of work. By 1932, national income, $87.4 billion in 1929, had fallen to $41.7 billion. In many homes, family income fell to zero. One in four Americans suffered from want of food.11
Factories closed; farms were abandoned. Even the weather conspired to reduce Americans to want: a drought plagued the plains, sowing despair and reaping death. Soil turned to dust and blew away. Schools shut their doors, children grew thin, and even thinner, and babies died in their cradles. Farm families, displaced by debt and drought, wandered westward, carrying what they could in dust-covered jalopies. The experiment in democracy that had begun with American independence seemed on the very edge of defeat.
“At no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today,” was the proclamation of the New Republic, introducing a series on the future of self-government. All over the world, democracies were collapsing under the weight of the masses. The Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian Empires had fallen apart, producing, by 1918, more than a dozen new states, many of which, like Lithuania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland, experimented with democracy but did not endure as democracies. The tally was bleak and, each year, bleaker, as one European nation after another turned to fascism or another form of authoritarianism.12
The long nineteenth-century’s movement toward constitutional government, the rule of law, representative assemblies, and the abdication of dictatorship—the application to modern life of eighteenth-century ideas about reason and debate, inquiry and equality—had come to a halt, and begun a reversal. Hardly a week passed without another learned commentator declaring the experiment a failure. “Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the legal scholar Felix Frankfurter remarked in 1930. “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work,” the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee observed that fateful year. “Representative democracy seems to have ended in a cul-de-sac,” wrote the political theorist Harold Laski in 1932.13
The last peace had created the conditions for the next war. Out of want came fear, out of fear came fury. By 1930, more than three million Germans were unemployed and Nazi Party membership had doubled. Adolf Hitler, as addled as he was ruthless, came to power in 1933, invaded the Rhineland in 1936, Poland in 1939. The bells of history tolled a tragedy of ages. Japan, whose expansion had been prohibited by the League of Nations, invaded Manchuria in 1931 and Shanghai in 1937. Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, thirsting for glory and for the triumphs and trophies of war, invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Tyrants ruled with the terror of lies, led by the Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda. Mussolini predicted: “The liberal state is destined to perish.”14
Much appeared to rest on the fate of the United States and its search for a new way, a third way, between laissez-faire capitalism and a state-run economy. “It has fall
en to us to live in one of those conjunctures of human affairs which mark a crisis in the habits, the customs, the routine, the inherited method and the traditional ideas of mankind,” Walter Lippmann announced in a speech in Berkeley in 1933. “The old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared,” he said. “The fixed points by which our fathers steered the ship of state have vanished.”15
Was the ship of state lost at sea? “We are still, all of us, more or less, primitive men—as lynchings illustrate dramatically and Fascism systematically,” the historian Charles Beard wrote bitterly in 1934. The great masses of the people had insisted on their right to rule, but their rule, it turned out, was dangerous, so easily were they deceived by propaganda. “The liberal culture of modernity is quite unable to give guidance and direction to a confused generation which faces the disintegration of a social system and the task of building a new one,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that year, in the aptly titled Reflections on the End of an Era.16
One set of political arrangements had come to an end; it remained to be seen what set of arrangements would replace them. After the stock market crash, voters rejected both Hoover’s leadership and that of his party. In the 1930 midterm elections, Republicans lost fifty-two seats in the House. Advisers urged Hoover to address the nation in weekly ten-minute radio broadcasts, to offer comfort and solace and direction; he refused.
Few voices were less well suited to the new medium. Hoover spoke on the radio ninety-five times during his presidency but during the handful of broadcasts in which he did more than issue a strained greeting, he read from a script in a dreadful monotone. “No one with a spark of human sympathy can contemplate unmoved the possibilities of suffering that can crush many of our unfortunate fellow Americans if we shall fail them,” he said once, reading a well-written and even stirring speech but sounding like an overworked principal at a middle-school graduation listlessly announcing the names of graduating students from a lectern in a gray-green auditorium.17