Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (top 10 books to read .txt) 📖

battles, and in November at Cambrai the British armies met a reverse that appalled the troops at the front and the leaders at home. Extreme war weariness pervaded the whole of western Europe.

In effect, the agony and disappointment had jarred loose men’s concentration on the accepted version of the war. Their interests were no longer held by the ordinary official pronouncements, and their attention began to wander, fixing now upon their own suffering, now upon their party and class purposes, now upon general resentments against the governments. That more or less perfect organization of perception by official propaganda, of interest and attention by the stimuli of hope, fear, and hatred, which is called morale, was by way of breaking down. The minds of men everywhere began to search for new attachments that promised relief.

Suddenly they beheld a tremendous drama. On the Eastern front there was a Christmas truce, an end of slaughter, an end of noise, a promise of peace. At Brest-Litovsk the dream of all simple people had come to life: it was possible to negotiate, there was some other way to end the ordeal than by matching lives with the enemy. Timidly, but with rapt attention, people began to turn to the East. Why not, they asked?

What is it all for? Do the politicians know what they are doing? Are we really fighting for what they say? Is it possible, perhaps, to secure it without fighting? Under the ban of the censorship, little of this was allowed to show itself in print, but, when Lord Lansdowne spoke, there was a response from the heart. The earlier symbols of the war had become hackneyed, and had lost their power to unify. Beneath the surface a wide schism was opening up in each Allied country.

Something similar was happening in Central Europe. There too the original impulse of the war was weakened; the union sacr�e was broken.

The vertical cleavages along the battle front were cut across by horizontal divisions running in all kinds of unforeseeable ways. The moral crisis of the war had arrived before the military decision was in sight. All this President Wilson and his advisers realized. They had not, of course, a perfect knowledge of the situation, but what I have sketched they knew.

They knew also that the Allied Governments were bound by a series of engagements that in letter and in spirit ran counter to the popular conception of what the war was about. The resolutions of the Paris Economic Conference were, of course, public property, and the network of secret treaties had been published by the Bolsheviks in November of 1917. [Footnote: President Wilson stated at his conference with the Senators that he had never heard of these treaties until he reached Paris. That statement is perplexing. The Fourteen Points, as the text shows, could not have been formulated without a knowledge of the secret treaties. The substance of those treaties was before the President when he and Colonel House prepared the final published text of the Fourteen Points.] Their terms were only vaguely known to the peoples, but it was definitely believed that they did not comport with the idealistic slogan of self-determination, no annexations and no indemnities. Popular questioning took the form of asking how many thousand English lives Alsace-Lorraine or Dalmatia were worth, how many French lives Poland or Mesopotamia were worth. Nor was such questioning entirely unknown in America. The whole Allied cause had been put on the defensive by the refusal to participate at Brest-Litovsk.

Here was a highly sensitive state of mind which no competent leader could fail to consider. The ideal response would have been joint action by the Allies. That was found to be impossible when it was considered at the Interallied Conference of October. But by December the pressure had become so great that Mr. George and Mr. Wilson were moved independently to make some response. The form selected by the President was a statement of peace terms under fourteen heads. The numbering of them was an artifice to secure precision, and to create at once the impression that here was a business-like document. The idea of stating “peace terms” instead of “war aims” arose from the necessity of establishing a genuine alternative to the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. They were intended to compete for attention by substituting for the spectacle of Russo-German parleys the much grander spectacle of a public world-wide debate.

Having enlisted the interest of the world, it was necessary to hold that interest unified and flexible for all the different possibilities which the situation contained. The terms had to be such that the majority among the Allies would regard them as worth while. They had to meet the national aspirations of each people, and yet to limit those aspirations so that no one nation would regard itself as a catspaw for another. The terms had to satisfy official interests so as not to provoke official disunion, and yet they had to meet popular conceptions so as to prevent the spread of demoralization. They had, in short, to preserve and confirm Allied unity in case the war was to go on.

But they had also to be the terms of a possible peace, so that in case the German center and left were ripe for agitation, they would have a text with which to smite the governing class. The terms had, therefore, to push the Allied governors nearer to their people, drive the German governors away from their people, and establish a line of common understanding between the Allies, the non-official Germans, and the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary. The Fourteen Points were a daring attempt to raise a standard to which almost everyone might repair. If a sufficient number of the enemy people were ready there would be peace; if not, then the Allies would be better prepared to sustain the shock of war.

All these considerations entered into the making of the Fourteen Points. No one man may have had them all in mind, but all the men concerned had some of them in mind. Against this background let us examine certain aspects of the document. The first five points and the fourteenth deal with “open diplomacy,” “freedom of the seas,” “equal trade opportunities,” “reduction of armaments,” no imperialist annexation of colonies, and the League of Nations. They might be described as a statement of the popular generalizations in which everyone at that time professed to believe. But number three is more specific. It was aimed consciously and directly at the resolutions of the Paris Economic Conference, and was meant to relieve the German people of their fear of suffocation.

Number six is the first point dealing with a particular nation. It was intended as a reply to Russian suspicion of the Allies, and the eloquence of its promises was attuned to the drama of Brest-Litovsk.

Number seven deals with Belgium, and is as unqualified in form and purpose as was the conviction of practically the whole world, including very large sections of Central Europe. Over number eight we must pause. It begins with an absolute demand for evacuation and restoration of French territory, and then passes on to the question of Alsace-Lorraine. The phrasing of this clause most perfectly illustrates the character of a public statement which must condense a vast complex of interests in a few words. “And the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted. ...” Every word here was chosen with meticulous care. The wrong done should be righted; why not say that Alsace-Lorraine should be restored? It was not said, because it was not certain that all of the French at that time would fight on indefinitely for reannexation if they were offered a plebiscite; and because it was even less certain whether the English and Italians would fight on. The formula had, therefore, to cover both contingencies. The word “righted” guaranteed satisfaction to France, but did not read as a commitment to simple annexation. But why speak of the wrong done by Prussia in 1871? The word Prussia was, of course, intended to remind the South Germans that Alsace-Lorraine belonged not to them but to Prussia. Why speak of peace unsettled for “fifty years,”

and why the use of “1871”? In the first place, what the French and the rest of the world remembered was 1871. That was the nodal point of their grievance. But the formulators of the Fourteen Points knew that French officialdom planned for more than the Alsace-Lorraine of 1871. The secret memoranda that had passed between the Czar’s ministers and French officials in 1916 covered the annexation of the Saar Valley and some sort of dismemberment of the Rhineland. It was planned to include the Saar Valley under the term “Alsace-Lorraine”

because it had been part of Alsace-Lorraine in 1814, though it had been detached in 1815, and was no part of the territory at the close of the Franco-Prussian war. The official French formula for annexing the Saar was to subsume it under “Alsace-Lorraine” meaning the Alsace-Lorraine of 1814-1815. By insistence on “1871″ the President was really defining the ultimate boundary between Germany and France, was adverting to the secret treaty, and was casting it aside.

Number nine, a little less subtly, does the same thing in respect to Italy. “Clearly recognizable lines of nationality” are exactly what the lines of the Treaty of London were not. Those lines were partly strategic, partly economic, partly imperialistic, partly ethnic. The only part of them that could possibly procure allied sympathy was that which would recover the genuine Italia Irredenta. All the rest, as everyone who was informed knew, merely delayed the impending Jugoslav revolt.

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It would be a mistake to suppose that the apparently unanimous enthusiasm which greeted the Fourteen Points represented agreement on a program. Everyone seemed to find something that he liked and stressed this aspect and that detail. But no one risked a discussion.

The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the civilized world, were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but they evoked a common emotion. And to that extent they played a part in rallying the western peoples for the desperate ten months of war which they had still to endure.

As long as the Fourteen Points dealt with that hazy and happy future when the agony was to be over, the real conflicts of interpretation were not made manifest. They were plans for the settlement of a wholly invisible environment, and because these plans inspired all groups each with its own private hope, all hopes ran together as a public hope. For harmonization, as we saw in Mr. Hughes’s speech, is a hierarchy of symbols. As you ascend the hierarchy in order to include more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional connection though you lose the intellectual. But even the emotion becomes thinner. As you go further away from experience, you go higher into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little. Yet the people whose emotions are entrained do not remain passive. As the public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private meanings are given a universal application. Whatever you want badly is the Rights of Humanity. For the phrase, ever more vacant, capable of meaning almost anything, soon comes to mean pretty nearly everything.

Mr. Wilson’s phrases were understood in endlessly different ways in every corner of the earth. No document negotiated and made of public record existed to