ON THE EVENING of April 2, 1917, the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, addressed a joint session of the House and Senate. In this momentous speech, one of the most carefully wrought and deeply pondered of his political career, Wilson urged Congress to authorize entry into Europe’s Great War. He had not reached this resolution lightly. He abhorred the wages of war and had run for reelection in 1916 as an antiwar candidate. But the German navy’s deployment of submarine torpedo boats to sink ships indiscriminately had forced him, reluctantly, he explained, to change his mind.
Still, far more than the safety of the shipping lanes was at stake, Wilson told Congress. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he declared. The United States “shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest to our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”
In this pivotal speech, just what did Woodrow Wilson mean by “democracy”?
It is possible to answer this question with some precision because Wilson was an anomaly: a scholar of politics before he became a politician himself, he had written extensively on the subject of democracy, in academic books, in public lectures, and in extensive manuscripts published only posthumously. Not only that: Wilson was astonishingly consistent in the views he held about modern democracy.
Born into an extended family of Presbyterian ministers in 1856, Wilson grew up in the South but spent most of his adult life in the Northeast. A graduate of Princeton College, with a law degree from the University of Virginia, he abandoned his law practice in order to become a college teacher. In 1886, a year after publishing his first book, Congressional Government, he received a Ph.D. in the new academic field of political science at Johns Hopkins. Four years later, he became a professor of politics at Princeton, eventually becoming the university’s president. (Wilson was the first person with a Ph.D.—and so far the last—to have been elected president of the United States.)
In 1885, shortly after finishing his first book, and while still a student at Johns Hopkins, Wilson produced a rough first draft of an ambitious new book project, which he titled “The Modern Democratic State.” At Hopkins he had learned the scholarly approaches to law and politics then prevalent in England and Germany, where an evolutionary, “organic” outlook on social development was in vogue. “Democracy,” wrote Wilson in his manuscript, “is, of course, wrongly conceived when treated as merely a body of doctrine. It is a stage of development … It is built up by slow habit. Its process is experience, its basis old wont, its meaning national organic oneness and effectual life. It comes, like manhood, as maturity to it is vouchsafed the maturity of freedom and self-control, and no other. It is conduct, and its only stable foundation is character.”
Passages like this show the impact on Wilson of evolutionary social theorists, notably the British scholar Henry Sumner Maine. A historian, jurist, and early student of ethnography, Maine had advanced his most famous thesis in 1861 in Ancient Law, arguing that society makes steady progress toward a clear goal, and that this goal is a social order based on contract rather than kinship or status: “Starting, as from one terminus of history, in which all the relations of Persons are summed up in the relations of Family, we seem to have steadily moved toward a phase of social order in which all these relations arise from the free agreement of Individuals.”
In these years, contradictory claims were being advanced by rival evolutionary social theorists: Karl Marx, for example, attacked Maine’s account of progress, arguing that communism, not a market society based on contract, was the final goal of history.
But Maine posed a specific challenge for the young Woodrow Wilson. Like Max Weber a generation later, Henry Maine argued in his Essays on Popular Government that democracy was not, as so many of his Victorian contemporaries had begun to assume, the goal of modern social development. On the contrary, argued Maine, rule by an elite had historically achieved much better results—and would do so as well in modern market societies based on free agreements among individuals.
Maine’s Essays appeared in late 1885, just as Wilson was setting pen to paper—and he received them as Maine had obviously intended them, as a provocation. Writing to a friend, Wilson explained that he was determined “to answer Sir Henry Maine’s ‘Popular Government,’ by treating modern democratic tendencies from a much more truly historical point of view than he has taken.” Though this specific work never appeared in Wilson’s lifetime, most of its themes recur in various public lectures, and also in his magnum opus, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, published in 1889.
Wilson’s “truly historical point of view” turns out to be astonishingly parochial. What took place in France in 1792—events that rightly preoccupy Maine—Wilson asserts have nothing to do with what had occurred in America up to Wilson’s own day. “Democracy in Europe,” he explains, “has acted always in rebellion, as a destructive force: it can scarcely be said to have, even yet, any period of organic development … Democracy in America, on the other hand … has had, almost from the first, a truly organic growth. There was nothing revolutionary in its movements”—as if the nation had never undergone a civil war. “It had not to overthrow other polities: it had only to organize itself. It had, not to create, but only to expand self-government”—a statement that applied, implicitly, only to America’s white colonists of European ancestry (and not to their slaves, nor to the New World’s indigenous peoples).
For Wilson, democracy was not merely a form of government—it was crucially a matter of customs, habits, and acquired instincts of moral responsibility, “that law written in our hearts which makes us conscious of our oneness as a single personality in the great company of nations.” And while America’s success as a democracy inhered in its specific “experiences as a Teutonic race,” the implications were nonetheless universal, as the political experience of the United States laid bare “the general principles which lie at the foundation of all practicable government by the people” and which ought to inform “the present trend of all political development the world over towards democracy.”
In Wilson’s providential vision, democracy signified a new world, yet to be fully realized, created at first by autonomous, “Teutonic” individuals who were all able to think for themselves; and then similarly enlightened peoples who, following in their footsteps, became capable of self-government; finally forming a concert of democratic nations, each one established through a democratic process of self-determination.
In 1885, Wilson briskly summarized his conception of modern democracy in the form of three consecutive definitions, each one successively lowering the standards for judging a regime democratic.
Democracy “in its most modern sense, as used by practical thinkers of today,” he wrote, means “a form of government which secures absolute equality of status before the law, and under which the decisive, final control of public affairs rests with the whole body of adult males.” By this standard (as Wilson elsewhere acknowledges), the United States has never been a true democracy, since at no point in its history to date has final control of public affairs rested with the whole body of adult males, never mind the whole body of adult citizens.
“More briefly,” Wilson continued, “it is government by universal popular discussion”—a definition that might appeal to contemporary deliberative democratic theorists, but, again, a standard by which the United States has yet to enjoy a true democracy.
“Most briefly,” Wilson concluded, modern democracy “is government by popular opinion.”
Here, at last, it seemed that Wilson had hit on a criterion by which the United States of his own and our day might actually count as a democracy. (Like Condorcet a hundred years earlier, Wilson was serenely optimistic about the enlightenment of the public and its opinions, expressing confidence that “practical political education is everywhere spreading and all nations which have not reached are nearing the adult age of their political development.”)
If one sets to one side the white supremacist assumptions embedded in this manuscript, democracy as the highest form of political evolution sometimes sounds enticing in Wilson’s telling. But he is disarmingly frank about its limits in practice.
For example, though the opinions held by (white) people are notionally sovereign in America, this “sovereignty is of a peculiar sort, unlike the sovereignty of a king, or of a small, easily concerting group of men. It is judicial, not creative. It passes judgment, or gives sanction; it does not direct. It furnishes standards, not policies … The people can only accept the governing act of representatives. They do not and cannot originate measures of policy; they acquiesce in policy which a few have originated … They do not, in any adequate sense of the word, govern.”
Wilson is as adamant on this point as the authors of the Federalist Papers had been one hundred years earlier: America is not a pure democracy like the one that existed in fourth-century Athens. Nor does democracy in Wilson’s view resemble at all the complex network of public assemblies imagined by Condorcet in his democratic draft constitution of 1793.
In fact, as Wilson concedes almost in passing (and apparently unaware that his remark supports, rather than refutes, the views of Henry Sumner Maine), a mature modern democracy must in practice always involve “the many led by the few: the minds of the few disciplined by persuading, and masses of men schooled and directed by being persuaded.” In other words, Wilson’s vision of perfected self-rule is closer to the “natural aristocracy” John Adams preferred than the plebeian democracy of Andrew Jackson.
According to Wilson, the American president ideally shall be the purest embodiment of popular sovereignty, his authority conveyed in eloquent public speeches, his paramount power confirmed by the periodic votes of “the whole body of adult males.” Enlightened leaders in Congress, attuned, like the president, to public opinion, will ideally formulate policies that reflect the public’s wishes. The proper execution of these policies will require the support of professional civil servants, trained like Wilson in the modern social sciences and with specialized knowledge about various topics (such as health care, the administration of justice, foreign affairs, etc.). Besides consenting to be ruled by their chosen representatives, the people in a modern democratic state will also submit to regulation by a distant army of administrators.
On the one hand, this is completely consistent with the form of democracy America had evolved, and even with the principle of popular sovereignty: a people can choose to elect representatives who ask civil servants to enforce the laws they have passed, just as they can elect a president who promises to expand the reach of government by creating new regulatory institutions. On the other hand, such an expansion of bureaucracy may subsequently come to be rejected by voters who regard it as an illicit usurpation of popular sovereignty by unelected experts. (This is the main reason an American conservative, writing in 2017, could describe Woodrow Wilson as “America’s worst and first fascist President.”)
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WOODROW WILSON ENTERED politics relatively late in his life, after serving as president of Princeton University for eight years (from 1902 to 1910). Elected as governor of New Jersey in 1910, he ran as a fresh face for the Democrats in the presidential campaign of 1912, in a four-way contest with the incumbent, William Howard Taft, running as a Republican; Theodore Roosevelt, running as a third-party candidate for the newly formed Progressive Party; and Eugene V. Debs, running as a Socialist. Because Taft and Roosevelt, formerly a Republican, split votes, Wilson won in a landslide, though with only a 42 percent plurality of the popular vote. This election occurred at the height of the progressive movement in America, with both Wilson and Roosevelt explicitly defending democracy as a regenerative force in American politics. In fact, Roosevelt went further than Wilson in his support for direct democracy in the western states, endorsing the initiative, referendum, and recall. These were all electoral devices that enabled voters to circumvent state legislatures by directly proposing laws, directly endorsing or rejecting laws, and directly dismissing elected officials before their term had expired—though Roosevelt cautioned that such remedies “should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it when ever it becomes misrepresentative.” (Debs in turn went further still, calling for the creation of “an industrial and social democracy,” paving the way for the people themselves to “take control of the people’s industries.”)
In his first term, Wilson took a broad view of his executive powers. He moved swiftly to build up the administrative capacity of the federal government, in part in an effort to limit the power of large corporations and to regulate the conditions under which workers had to labor in the new industrial economy. Wilson persuaded Congress to pass the Federal Reserve Act; the Federal Trade Commission Act; and the Clayton Antitrust Act, expanding on the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. He championed the United States Revenue Act of 1913, which simultaneously lowered tariffs on international trade and reinstated a progressive income tax, in accord with the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which enables the federal government to tax income without having to raise the revenue on an equal per capita basis from each state. In keeping with his convictions about the superiority of the “Teutonic race,” he oversaw a segregation of the federal workforce. He also supported beefing up federal policing and surveillance abilities, in order to be able to identify and imprison outside agitators, residents “born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.”
As the American scholar and New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan drily quipped of Wilson’s federal policing initiatives, “And so the modern age began. Three new institutions had entered American life: Conspiracy, Loyalty, Secrecy. Each had antecedents, but now there was a difference. Each had become institutional; bureaucracies were established to attend to each. In time there would be a Federal Bureau of Investigation to keep track of conspiracy at home, a Central Intelligence Agency to keep tabs abroad, an espionage statute and loyalty boards to root out disloyalty or subversion. And all of this would be maintained, and the national security would be secured, through elaborate regimes of secrecy.”
Yet while Wilson in these years was busy laying the foundation for what some (on both the left and right) now call a “deep” state, unaccountable because largely invisible to the American people, he was at the same time continuing to tout the virtues of democracy as a shared public ideal.
As a young scholar, Wilson had argued that a strong democratic leader should strive to reduce the perceived distance between himself and the people, by acting decisively and openly aiming to embody their general will. “The people,” he speculated, will “feel a keen charm in the knowledge” that the democratic leader, though powerful, derives all of his power from the people. “They are conscious of being represented by him in respect to their greater and soberer aims. They gain in dignity as he gains in beneficent power. To follow him is to realize the greatest possible amount of real political life.” Years later, in an address dedicating Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, he movingly spoke of how, in a democracy, “every door is open, in every hamlet and countryside, in city and wilderness alike, for the ruler to emerge when he will and claim his leadership in the free life … Here, no less, hides the mystery of democracy.”
These sentiments seem apropos of Pericles, who was exemplary in his ability to inspire the ordinary citizens of Athens to do great things. But Wilson’s words also recall Max Weber’s suggestion that a “Führerdemokratie” would enable a charismatic leader to counteract the lethargy associated with the modern administrative state and inspire large masses of people to believe that they were united in a common cause—even if, in fact, the relationship between leader and led was one of pure domination.
Wilson was certainly self-conscious about how he ought to represent his nation’s “greater and soberer aims.” The war speech he delivered to Congress, and the American public, on April 2, 1917, is a fine example of an eloquent demagogue in full oratorical flight. While urging that Congress declare war on Germany, Wilson implicitly speaks for a nation, even as he offers himself, in his resoluteness and in the moral purity of his lofty democratic aims, as an exemplar, someone who perfectly embodies what we, the American people, want. “We shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest to our hearts,” he avows, we shall fight for democracy, for human rights, for a world of peace and universal prosperity, and we shall do so knowing that “America is privileged to spend her blood and her might” for “the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”
The final, Protestant flourish is telling. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson committed America to a high-minded kind of new world order, consecrated in a leap of faith that he assumed would be widely shared, hence representative (and democratic) as well.
Yet democracy itself is “a process that has no endpoint, an argument that has no definite conclusion,” the American political philosopher Michael Walzer observes. “No citizen can ever claim to have persuaded his fellows once and for all.” In a democracy of the sort Wilson imagined, everything, especially how “we” interpret our deepest moral and political convictions, hinges, after all, on public opinion. Unlike Martin Luther, Woodrow Wilson was taking a stand on shifting sands.
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IN 1917, America wasn’t the only nation struggling to realize democratic ideals in fraught circumstances. It is easy to forget that Woodrow Wilson in his war speech to Congress welcomed news of a revolution in Russia. “Does not every American,” he asked, “feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?” He answered his own rhetorical question with praise for Russia’s political potential: “Russia was known by those who knew it best to have always in fact been democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life.”
Some Russian intellectuals were inclined to agree that a nation long ruled by a tsar was “democratic at heart,” in some cases pointing to the mirs, self-governing communities of peasants that the tsarist regime had tried to stamp out, in still other cases pointing to the appearance in 1905 of the soviets in large cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. And in a further irony, one of Woodrow Wilson’s most cherished democratic principles—a right to national self-determination—had been endorsed two decades earlier by an International Socialist Congress meeting in London, and reaffirmed in 1916 by Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, Russia’s most ardent revolutionary party.
As had happened in 1905, Russia’s democratic revolt began in the dead of winter, in the nation’s capital and second-largest city, Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been renamed in 1914). As before, the army was reeling from military defeats—in 1905 facing Japanese troops, in 1917 fighting in the Great War against German and Austro-Hungarian troops. Once again, the revolt began slowly with peaceful demonstrations—at first, over a lack of food in the stores—but then mushroomed, as workers joined in, and the police stood down. By Saturday, February 25, almost all of the city’s factories had shut down and many shops had shuttered their doors. For the first time, political banners appeared: “Down with the Tsar!” “Down with the War!”
The next day, thousands of people started to stream toward Petrograd’s snow-covered city center. An eyewitness reported that “warnings not to assemble were disregarded,” but that the crowd, to start, “was fairly good-humoured, cheering the soldiers and showing themselves ugly only toward the few visible police.” A festive atmosphere prevailed, as workers, housewives, and children mingled in the streets. There were political activists in the crowd, too—but as one of them sheepishly admitted years later, “the revolution found us, the party members, fast asleep, just like the Foolish Virgins in the Gospel.” (The most famous veterans of 1905 were in exile—Trotsky was in New York City, Lenin was in Zurich.)
As the throng converged on the Nevsky Prospekt shortly after 3:00 p.m., troops raised their rifles. One officer, unable to get his green recruits to fire, grabbed a rifle and fired at will into the crowd. The troops followed suit. Hundreds of demonstrators fell to the ground, and empty cartridge cases littered the blood-spattered snow. After the volleys, police cleared the street, while the crowd stood by, stunned but unflinching. Most showed no animosity toward the soldiers. They expressed sympathy instead: “We are sorry for you … You had to do your duty!”
That evening, mutinous troops joined workers in seizing the city’s arsenal. As dawn broke on Monday, February 27, the tsarist armed forces dispersed in disarray, “disorderly groups of grey greatcoats, mingling and fraternizing openly with the working class crowd and casual passersby.” Many people were now armed, and their ranks were reinforced by a growing number of disloyal soldiers, as well as inmates freed from the city’s prisons. Among those released were the militant leaders of the Workers’ Group of the Central War Industries Committee, who now joined a crowd marching toward the Tauride Palace, the graceful Palladian mansion built for Catherine the Great that, since 1906, had housed the state Duma, Russia’s legislative assembly (created after the general strike of 1905, but without any real power under the tsar).
At 2:00 p.m., a number of local trade union and cooperative movement leaders joined with the members of the Workers’ Group and the left-wing deputies to the Duma, to address a crowd of some twenty-five thousand people that had formed outside the palace. They proclaimed the creation of a Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and announced the first plenary session of the soviet, hastily organized for that evening at 7:00. The soviet itself was to be a representative body, with delegates chosen by the workers of Petrograd; but that night, fewer than fifty delegates appeared, as there had been virtually no time to conduct elections.
The Executive Committee of the Petrograd soviet quickly emerged as a governing body in its own right, organizing shelter and supplies for now homeless military units. The next morning, in the first issue of Izvestiia, the official newspaper of the Petrograd soviet, and the only newspaper to appear that day, the leaders of the soviet issued an appeal to the city’s residents: “In order to conclude successfully the struggle for democracy, the people must organize their power … Let us, all together, fight … for the annihilation of the old regime and the convocation of a constituent national assembly, to be elected by universal, impartial, direct and secret ballot.”
That morning, many more enterprises held elections for deputies to the Petrograd soviet. At 1:00 p.m., the soviet held another plenary session, this one attended by about 120 official participants.
Meanwhile, street fighting continued throughout Petrograd, with an especially bloody skirmish occurring at the city’s largest and most modern hotel, the Astoria, which had been requisitioned for use by Russian officers, their families, and officers of the allied armies. When a sniper on the roof opened fire on a crowd gathered out front, rebellious soldiers mustered three armored cars with machine guns to rake the upper stories of the building with bullets while other armed forces stormed into the lobby, smashing mirrors and chandeliers. “The worst of the fighting took place in the vestibule,” an eyewitness recalled, “and in a short time the big revolving doors were turning round in a pool of blood.”
That evening, a member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, Nikolai Sukhanov, who was attached to the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party, had dinner with Maxim Gorky, a renowned man of letters as well as a friend of Lenin. Gorky was appalled by what he’d witnessed. As Sukhanov recalled, he deplored “the chaos, the disorder, the excesses” and “forecast that the movement would probably collapse in ruin worthy of our Asiatic savagery.”
Sukhanov sharply disagreed: “To me it seemed, on the contrary, self-evident that things were going brilliantly, that the development of the revolution couldn’t have been better, that victory could now be considered secure, and that the excesses, the man-in-the-street’s stupidity, vulgarity, and cowardice … —all this was only what the revolution could not in any circumstances avoid, without which nothing similar had ever happened anywhere.”
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WITHIN A WEEK, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated and been placed under arrest, a new Provisional Government had been formed, and soviets had been established in Moscow, Kiev, and other cities throughout Russia.
The result was a desperate situation, in which two conflicting centers of political power coexisted. In theory, the nation’s Provisional Government bore full responsibility for legislation and administering the Russian state. But in practice, the nation’s soviets, led by the Executive Committee of the Petrograd soviet, now began to legislate and administer as well, independently of the leaders of the Duma.
The Provisional Government wanted to restore law and order and the authority of the Duma as quickly as possible. The social democratic intelligentsia in charge of the Petrograd soviet’s Executive Committee, though they disagreed over tactics, and specifically the extent to which they should coordinate with the Provisional Government, all wanted to constitute a new republic of equals, with power democratically distributed in Russia’s new network of soviets.
From the start, the Petrograd soviet’s Executive Committee had issued various public demands, in effect turning itself into a “controlling organ of revolutionary democracy,” attempting to dictate terms not just to the plenary assembly of the soviet but also to the nation, through the Duma, to the (limited) extent the formal government itself was able, in these circumstances, to exercise centralized authority over Russia as a whole.
As had happened in Paris more than one hundred years earlier, a small group of avowed democrats in this way seized control of a nation’s nascent representative institutions. Most of the members of the Petrograd soviet Executive Committee were hardened conspirators, accustomed to operating in the shadows by the years of clandestine struggle against the tsarist regime. But the soviets themselves, like the Parisian sections in 1792, were the very picture of direct democracy in full bloom.
In Petrograd, the daily sessions of the soviet, which quickly grew to include six hundred delegates duly elected by the workers of Petrograd, soon came to resemble a chaotic village assembly without a fixed agenda. When regiments of soldiers in the city subsequently asked to join the soviet, the delegates resolved unanimously and without a formal vote to create a greatly expanded body, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
The soviet’s voting procedures were ad hoc and arbitrary, so that a small regiment and a large factory might both be invited to elect a delegate, with the soldier representing perhaps twelve men and the worker representing two thousand. Of the three thousand delegates to the enlarged assembly, more than two-thirds were soldiers, even though workers outnumbered soldiers in Petrograd by three or four to one.
Anyone could address the group, and decisions were made by consensus. The deputies debated in front of a standing-room-only crowd of spectators, many of them bystanders and soldiers who didn’t conceal their weapons—or their political views. In March 1917, this is what democracy looked like in the Petrograd soviet.
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AT THE BEGINNING of April, Lenin, the acknowledged leader of the Bolsheviks, the most radical faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, returned to Petrograd. “A man of astounding strength of will,” as Gorky summed him up, “Lenin possessed in the highest degree the best qualities and properties of the revolutionary intelligentsia—self-discipline often amounting to self-torture and self-mutilation, in its most extreme form, amounting to a renunciation of art and to the logic of one of L. Andreyev’s heroes: ‘Other people are living hard lives, and therefore I must live a hard life.’” Untiring and indomitable, Lenin reasserted control of his party by laying out, with ruthless simplicity, a strategy to seize political power immediately.
In the previous months, while still in exile in Switzerland, Lenin had begun writing a book arguing that the Paris Commune of 1871 represented an ideal type of revolutionary regime, a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that was perfectly democratic—and also a suitable vehicle for a successful armed insurrection. By abolishing the distinctions among the legislative, executive, administrative, and judicial functions of a government, and establishing a single, unitary assembly of armed delegates subject to rotation and recall, a federation of municipal and rural councils like the Commune or the Russian soviets could solve several problems simultaneously. It could ensure that the sovereign will of the people prevailed over reactionary factions; it would subject all political officials to direct democratic control; and by empowering ordinary citizens in this way, it could thwart the threat of a counterrevolution engineered by the armed forces of the old regime.
However, to realize all these benefits in the Russian context, it was essential, Lenin argued, following Marx, to “smash” the “bureaucratic-military machine” of the old regime:
The party of the proletariat cannot rest content with a bourgeois parliamentary democratic republic, which throughout the world preserves and strives to perpetuate the monarchist instruments for the oppression of the masses, namely, the police, the standing army, and the privileged bureaucracy.
The party fights for a more democratic workers’ and peasants’ republic, in which the police and the standing army will be abolished and replaced by the universally armed people, by a people’s militia; all officials will be not only elective, but also subject to recall at any time upon the demand of a majority of the electors; all officials, without exception, will be paid at a rate not exceeding the average wage of a competent worker; parliamentary representative institutions will be gradually replaced by Soviets of people’s representatives (from various classes and professions, or from various localities), functioning as both legislative and executive bodies.
“All power to the soviets” became the slogan of the Bolsheviks—and by repeating it incessantly over the following months, Lenin helped his Bolsheviks build a majority among the executive committees of the various councils throughout Russia, including the all-important Petrograd soviet.
Because of their fluid voting procedures and frequent elections, the soviets were sensitive barometers of popular sentiment. But the assemblies were also susceptible, from the start, to control from above, by a handful of leaders in the executive committees. And once Lenin had entered the picture, as a historian of the soviets puts it, “the Russian soviet movement, which had begun as a democratic movement, became the trailblazer for Bolshevik dictatorship.”
The transformation began with a putsch in Petrograd in late October 1917, and was clinched in 1922 by the creation, after a bloody civil war, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—in theory, a proletarian and peasant democracy; in reality, a new state ruled by one party, the Bolsheviks, and, ultimately, by one man.
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AMERICA’S ENTRY into the Great War, combined with the February Revolution in Russia, suddenly turned clashing democratic ideals into matters of global consequence. By then, “liberal” had belatedly entered the political lexicon of the United States and begun to be associated with the kind of strong modern state championed by Woodrow Wilson and intellectual allies like the journalist Walter Lippmann. Wilson had already articulated an expansive global vision of a new league of nations, committed to creating a world made safe for democracy.
This vision of democracy was explicitly internationalist—but so was its Russian rival. In one of his first official acts after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd, Lenin issued a “peace decree,” calling upon “all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace,” deploying a rhetoric (however disingenuous) that owed almost as much to Wilson as to Marx. Wilson responded in kind, on January 8, 1918, by issuing his Fourteen Points, outlining his hopes for peace and offering “to assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty,” by helping Russia to join “the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing.”
That liberals as well as communists were committed in principle to an expansion of democracy suggested some common ground. Wilson and Lenin both seemed to uphold popular sovereignty as a political principle; both also affirmed a people’s political right to self-determination. Yet the extent of active political participation in both the liberal and communist contexts was in practice carefully qualified. Wilson’s administrative state transferred a great deal of power to the federal president and the unelected civil servants who reported to him, while Lenin’s conception of “democratic centralism” concentrated power in the hands of a centralized government controlled by the elite of one party.
There was also some irony in the common embrace of self-determination as a global ideal. After all, the United States and the Soviet Union—like the United Kingdom and France—were de facto imperial powers, however much fealty they now professed to democratic norms. Indeed, almost all of their protectorates and colonies were effectively controlled by armed garrisons and governors who represented the interests of distant capitals and remote rulers.
These contradictions tempered the possibility that four years of carnage and bloody revolts might produce a new world order, but they didn’t prevent Woodrow Wilson from attempting to do just that, by establishing a new League of Nations as part of the peace process in Paris after the United States and its allies had defeated Germany.
On June 28, 1919, Wilson, along with the leaders of England, France, Italy, Japan, and dozens of other nations, as well as representatives from the government of Germany, signed the treaty creating the new League and putting an end to the Great War at the Palace of Versailles, in the Hall of Mirrors. It was a pointed choice of venue. An architectural symbol of absolute sovereignty built during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, the Hall of Mirrors was also the humiliating place where Bismarck had forced France to sign an armistice ending the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.
Two key principles lay behind the covenant of the League of Nations: nonviolent conflict resolution and the facilitation of a slow but steady evolution of all peoples toward self-determination. But in practice, the settlement also transferred formerly German colonies into European hands even as it maintained the colonies of the United Kingdom and France, under the pretext that the nonwhite races needed more time to become fully mature peoples, fit for democratic institutions. The West had a civilizing mission, according to Wilson and his Western allies, and this mission was explicitly racial in its inflections. (When the Japanese mustered majority support at the Paris peace conference for a clause affirming the equality of races, Wilson chose to ignore it.)
For Wilson, the stress in a modern democracy was always on maturity, sobriety, and the peaceful harmonizing of interests. In this context, the focus of socialist militants on open class conflict was more than unwelcome: it represented a kind of blasphemy. America was a light unto the nations of the world, but its democratic promise was a matter of faith, and not an entirely new faith, at that, but one built on “organic” foundations, as the inheritance of a Protestant people of Aryan stock. The Versailles Peace Treaty in effect consecrated Wilson’s soaring faith that democracy was a universal ideal. But for Woodrow Wilson, it was also “—at least for the foreseeable future—the white man’s business.”
Wilson’s willingness to let racism set limits on his democratic convictions was ultimately self-defeating. The language of the League covenant triggered the hopes of subject peoples of all colors and faiths around the world. It encouraged an expectation of self-determination as a new and universal political right. And to the extent that nations like the United States, England, and France continued to flout their own avowed principles in practice, the expectation of self-determination guaranteed not peace and harmony but rather a world of conflict and unending civil war, as one subject nation after another, in the years that followed, fought for the right to join “the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing.”
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IN THE YEARS before and after the Great War, a few social theorists, disregarding the skepticism of scholars like Henry Sumner Maine and Max Weber, continued to produce proposals for creating a more perfectly democratic society, one that could meet the challenges posed by the rise not just of hierarchical political parties but also of factory assembly lines. In 1912, the Dutch astronomer and labor activist Anton Pannekoek, inspired in part by the Russian soviets that had flourished in 1905, suggested that such local councils might represent a viable alternative to parliamentary party organizations. By then, a similar view of a more democratic approach to industrial organization had appeared in the United Kingdom, in the form of Guild Socialism, a movement that coalesced around the essentially romantic idea, first broached in the 1880s by the British textile designer, novelist, and Marxist agitator William Morris, that modern labor should look to medieval standards of craftsmanship in production, and also medieval forms of self-government in the workshop.
The most sophisticated of the Guild Socialist theorists was G.D.H. Cole, a precocious Oxford don and youthful agitator who had cut his teeth in leftist politics by attacking technocratic collectivists—most notably Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who had founded the Fabian Society in Britain in the 1880s as an evolutionary, policy-oriented socialist alternative to orthodox Marxism. In a series of books and pamphlets published between 1913 and 1921, Cole laid out his own alternative hopes for a future Guild Socialist society.
An adamant pluralist, he argued that a good society, even after the abolition of capitalism, would consist of many diverse and decentralized institutions, all claiming loyalty from assorted individuals. Since everyone in such a society had an interest simultaneously in more than one institution, a society could be truly democratic only if every person “should have as many distinct, and separately exercised, votes, as he has distinct social purposes,” so that a coal miner, for example, might participate in a coal-mining guild; as an avid music lover, he might also join a Cultural Council; as a user of electricity and public transport, he might also participate in a Utilities Council; while as a citizen, he would have a direct say in a town Commune and could elect delegates to a regional Commune and also a National Commune (as Cole called what was left of a centralized state in his ideal society). Moreover, because the Guild Socialist participated in each of these arenas only as his interests dictated, his voice and votes would not be blind but must be informed by his sincere concern for the matters at hand.
Since the citizens of this ideal society would obviously be spending a great many evenings at one meeting or another, it represented Oscar Wilde’s worst nightmare come true (“The trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings,” he had reputedly quipped). In Cole’s ideal society, it seemed as if everyone would be constantly debating and voting about everything. But Cole took it for granted that everyone naturally yearned for active involvement in public affairs, and that only a democratic society could give its members “that maximum opportunity for personal and social self-expression which is requisite to real freedom.”
He additionally assumed that the greater the levels of participation in a democratic society, the wider and more enlightened the views of participants would become. “For democracy in industry and in every sphere of social life has for its supreme justification its power to call out in the mass of men the creative, scientific and artistic impulses which capitalism suppresses or perverts, and to enable the now stifled civic spirit to work wonders in the regeneration of the good things of life.”
Still, Cole had to concede that not everyone would be eagerly rushing to an endless round of meetings. Anticipating the objection that this would vitiate the legitimacy of the guild scheme, Cole argued that if a “man is not interested enough to vote, and cannot be roused to interest enough to make him vote, on, say, a dozen distinct subjects, he waives his right to vote, and the result is no less democratic than if he voted blindly and without interest.” This was a slightly peculiar conclusion, since Cole acknowledged that in an ideal democracy “many and keen voters are best of all”—but he also insisted that “few and keen voters are next best,” and certainly preferable to a “vast and uninstructed electorate voting on a general and undefined issue,” which is the sorry state of affairs “we call democracy to-day.”
Cole’s vision of a better future—along with his ardent support for workers’ control—was appealing to some rank-and-file British trade unionists during the Great War. A few British unions even passed resolutions in support of Guild Socialist policies. When news of the Petrograd uprising of February 1917 reached London, Oxford, and Cambridge, it “had been welcomed with shouts of delight, by democrats, liberals, and socialists of every shade of opinion,” one eyewitness recalled—and, for a moment, the Russian experiment with soviets seemed to confirm the value of the Guild Socialist model.
But the rapid appearance in Russia of a one-party state under Bolshevik control soon enough dampened the enthusiasm of British democrats for the soviet model. Even worse, the relative ease with which a few militants were able to take control of the Russian soviets suggested, among other things, that such decentralized, directly democratic councils were paradoxically vulnerable to domination by charismatic (and formally unaccountable) leaders.
The formation in 1920 of the Communist Party of Great Britain coincided with the disintegration of Guild Socialism as an intellectual and political movement. Some members of the movement, admiring the insurrectionist élan of the Bolsheviks, joined the Communist Party. Others, like Cole, abstained, recognizing that the putative “democratic centralism” of Lenin’s party completely contradicted the kind of decentralized, pluralistic society of self-governing institutions that he imagined as the proper goal of a properly democratic form of socialism.
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BUT PERHAPS TECHNOCRATS like the Webbs and Woodrow Wilson—and even Lenin, with his stress on the need for elite political leadership—were simply being realistic about the limits of what a “civic spirit” could accomplish. Was it really possible to create the kind of robust democracy that G.D.H. Cole imagined in a complex, modern industrial society—even one that, like Cole’s guild utopia, was hypothetically no longer riven by class conflicts?
By taking this question seriously, and examining carefully some of the core assumptions that Cole shared with other proponents of more direct forms of modern self-government, Walter Lippmann produced perhaps the most challenging inquiry yet into the limits of modern democracy, Public Opinion, published in 1922. It was, to an unusual degree, the fruit of firsthand experience, refracted through a first-rate intelligence.
For almost a half century a prominent political commentator and confidant of American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson, Lippmann had begun his political career as a twenty-year-old convert to socialism. Forming a Harvard chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1908, Lippmann joined a group of student agitators that included John Reed, subsequently the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, the first eyewitness account by an American of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia.
There was a viable Socialist Party in the United States in these years, led by Eugene V. Debs, with strong support in a number of the larger cities, both on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and there was also an independent union movement in America, the Industrial Workers of the World, a militant association of syndicalist unions, mainly covering laborers in the extractive industries, concentrated in the West.
At college, Lippmann was drawn not just to native socialist agitators, but even more strongly to the British intellectuals who in 1884 had formed the Fabian Society. Lippmann became a card-carrying Fabian, joining in 1909, and paying his £1 annual dues.
The next year, in his last semester at Harvard, Lippmann jumped at the chance to take a seminar with Graham Wallas, a founding member (along with the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw) of the Fabians. The son of an Anglican clergyman who had converted to the classicizing kind of democratic idealism fashionable in Oxford in the 1880s, Wallas arguably had the best mind of a very brilliant group, though he eventually broke with them, in part over the role democratic processes should play in a good society. As Wallas wrote to Shaw in 1903, “I know of no better way than democracy of securing that the ‘end’ of the State shall be the good of all and not the good of some.”
In 1908, two years before he met Lippmann, Wallas had published Human Nature in Politics, “the first time that democracy had been discussed by a man amply acquainted with psychological research,” as the British political theorist Harold Laski put it. “The political opinions of most men are the result,” Wallas wrote, “not of reasoning tested by experience, but of unconscious and half-conscious inference fixed by habit.” But despite acknowledging that the democratic movement of his own day “was inspired largely by a purely intellectual conception of human nature which is becoming every year more unreal to us,” this lapsed Anglican never surrendered his faith in democracy, preferring instead to “increase the margin of safety in our democracy” by pressing for “moral and educational changes” that would improve the capacity of ordinary citizens to meet the challenges of helping to govern a complex modern society.
“Socialism stands or falls by its fruits in practice,” Walter Lippmann wrote in 1910, shortly after his formative encounter with Graham Wallas. “If it can be shown that public enterprise, where tried under democratic conditions, fails to produce a beneficent effect on the health, happiness and general culture of a community, or that private enterprise is more beneficent, then the socialist case collapses.”
Uncommonly open to the possibility that his own political convictions might in fact prove groundless, Lippmann went to work as a reporter, first for a Boston paper, then as a research assistant for the veteran muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who was writing an exposé of financial corruption on Wall Street (plus ça change). Still active in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, Lippmann also started writing for the American left-wing press, including the International and the Masses.
He was one of the leading young members of the American socialist movement at the most promising moment yet in its history: in 1910, Socialists were mayors of thirty-three American cities, and Debs’s national party continued to attract new members. For a few months in 1912, Lippmann served an abortive term as an aide to George Lunn, the newly elected Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York. But the more Lippmann saw of socialism and democracy in practice, the more skeptical he became.
In an essay published in the International, he decried the “cult of democracy” for assuming “that the people have all the virtues and then pretend, when they don’t exhibit them, that it is somebody else’s fault.” Like Woodrow Wilson, but in the context of the Socialist Party of Debs, Lippmann was concluding that managing the complexities of modern politics required realistic and tough-minded leadership, not just somehow organizing the spontaneous impulses of ordinary citizens.
In the years that followed, Lippmann published a pugnacious first book, A Preface to Politics, which was meant, in part, to popularize the ideas of his mentor Graham Wallas. He helped Herbert Croly launch The New Republic in 1914 as a new weekly American journal meant to “brighten the coinage of American opinion.” He became fascinated with psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud, and he sailed to England to meet more of his Fabian heroes face-to-face. While he was there, he got to see G.D.H. Cole and his young Guild Socialist friends disrupt a Fabian conference.
The Great War came. By then, Lippmann was widely admired as a writer and thinker, and in September 1917, he was asked to work on a secret project for President Woodrow Wilson, code-named “The Inquiry,” meant to develop concrete terms for a postwar peace anchored by a new League of Nations. A memo Lippmann prepared became the basis for Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech to Congress and, subsequently, the Versailles Peace Treaty.
Lippmann then spent several months in Paris writing propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind enemy lines. Unhappy about the direction negotiations were taking, he returned to The New Republic with a wealth of experience—and fresh doubts about the capacity not just of ordinary citizens but also of their elected leaders to meet the challenges of governing a complex society.
Despite his own intimate involvement in the early stages of the Versailles peace process, Lippmann joined with the other editors of The New Republic in denouncing the signed treaty as an abject capitulation to old-world imperialists, and merely “the prelude to quarrels in a deeply divided and hideously embittered Europe.”
In a series of essays published in 1920 as a book, Liberty and the News, Lippmann highlighted the increasingly critical role played by the news media in modern societies, by disseminating reliable information to ordinary citizens. As a veteran reporter, presidential memo writer, and propagandist for the U.S. military, Lippmann knew from the inside what it was like to filter, select, and simplify complicated facts in a form that people could quickly absorb. He had become a critic of Wilson after the president turned to censorship and the suppression of civil liberties, in conjunction with what Lippmann regarded as crudely jingoistic propaganda. Liberty and the News consisted of a lengthy analysis of The New York Times’s coverage of the Russian Revolution, which led Lippmann to conclude that “the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see … The chief censor and the chief protagonist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.”
This was a disheartening conclusion for anyone who believed, as Lippmann still did in 1920, that “the reliability of the news is the premise on which democracy proceeds.” But reporters and editors were only human. As a consequence of the efforts of newsmen like Lippmann himself, who summarized and simplified the events of the day, “all news comes at second-hand.” At the same time, utterly uninformed opinions were circulated as well, in the media and in face-to-face conversations. As a result, “all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.”
Indeed, it was just as hard for America’s elected representatives to grasp “the realities themselves,” one reason Lippmann applauded the “establishment of more or less semi-official institutes of government research.” (The American Bureau of Labor Statistics founded in 1884, the National Institute of Standards and Technology created in 1901, the reorganized Public Health Services expanded under Wilson in 1912, and the National Science Foundation launched in 1950 are all good examples of what Lippmann envisioned.)
But to imply that a bevy of objective facts, if faithfully relayed to the general public, or even to its elected representatives, would solve the problem of public opinion was profoundly misleading—and Lippmann knew it.
For the defects of public opinion were caused not just by biased newspapers, or blinkered reporters, or a lack of government-sponsored research institutes, or even by the growing number of secrets being kept by the American administrative state—the deepest problems were caused by the way people, all people, selected what they wanted to see and hear, filtering information through unavoidable “stereotypes,” a word that Lippmann introduced into the lexicon of American social science. Building on the work of Graham Wallas, and also aware of Freud’s findings, Lippmann in effect anticipated more recent research about “bounded rationality” (and the unavoidable cognitive errors that arise from what the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called “heuristics and biases”).
In Public Opinion, published in 1922, Lippmann explored the implications of these limits to human rationality for what Woodrow Wilson had called “government by popular opinion.” Unlike Robert Michels, who focused on the institutional limits of modern democracy, Lippmann analyzed its psychological limits. In a complex environment, where only disconnected bits of information are available to the average citizen, it was almost impossible for the public’s opinion on any matter of moment to be either cogent or coherent.
The book’s epigraph is Plato’s famous image, in the Republic, of inhabitants in a cave bewitched by shadows and unaware of the real world outside. What follows suggests that the great majority of modern men are inescapably prisoners of shadowy and unexamined assumptions, immersed in private lives involving the pursuit of various personal interests, with limited time, and even less attention to give to public affairs. This bleak account renders moot the dreams of Enlightenment democrats like Condorcet, who had hoped that citizens in the future would “approach a condition in which everyone will have the knowledge necessary to conduct himself in the ordinary affairs of life, according to the light of his own reason, to preserve his mind free from prejudice, to understand his rights and to exercise them in accordance with his conscience and his creed.”
Lippmann concedes that in a simple, self-contained community it might be plausible to assume that one man was as competent as another to manage “simple and self-contained affairs”—he seems to have in mind New England towns with their annual town meetings. But the evolution of modern society turns that “democratic stereotype” into a dangerous cliché, insofar as men now “looked at a complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.” And insofar as modern American democracy under the direction of figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had evolved into a centralized administrative state designed, in part, to regulate and curtail the semi-sovereign powers of modern corporations and banks, the facts of governance had grown ever more remote from the simple interactions of a few individuals in a small rural community.
At the same time, Lippmann, as a former Socialist, knew perfectly well that some democratic theorists hoped to meet the challenges of a modern industrial society by replacing the image of the idealized rural township with that of a self-governing workshop, and by acknowledging the complexity of social interests in a modern society by producing a correspondingly complex scheme of self-government.
The problem, he argues in a climactic chapter on the Guild Socialism of G.D.H. Cole, is that the Guild scheme rests on hopelessly unrealistic assumptions about the capacity of ordinary citizens immersed in work, or leisure pursuits, to transform “a self-centered opinion into a social judgment.” Cole’s theory “presupposes an unceasing, untiring round of civic duties, an enormous complication of the political interests that are already much too complicated.”
Lippmann’s conclusion is most bluntly stated in The Phantom Public, his sequel to the opinion book: “The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs.” As a result, the common interests, he concludes, “can be managed only by a specialized class”—informed commentators like Lippmann himself, and trained civil servants with an in-depth knowledge of the facts pertinent to formulating reasonable public policies.
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IN A DISCERNING REVIEW of Public Opinion for The New Republic, the American philosopher John Dewey praised Lippmann for throwing “into clearer relief than any other writer the fundamental difficulty of democracy.” He followed up with a book of his own, The Public and Its Problems, in 1927. In it, Dewey conceded the empirical accuracy of Lippmann’s account. But he also reaffirmed his long-standing conviction, which he shared with Woodrow Wilson, that democracy was the rational goal of historical development, a natural result of evolution—and also a matter of shared faith.
Throughout his long life—born in 1859, he died in 1952—Dewey tried to inspire his readers with a can-do confidence in the possibility of scientific social reforms, animated by a serene faith in the value of a strong form of democracy. Knowledge, he argued, was an evolving product, the result of active experimentation in constantly changing historical circumstances. Rejecting authoritarian approaches to education, Dewey hoped to instill flexible habits and a sturdy sense of self-reliance in his students, helping them to become independent and active citizens. Applying similar principles to his own political commitments, he lent his support to the progressive voluntary associations of his day, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In the pages of The New Republic and other liberal publications, he tirelessly expounded his faith in the value of unfettered inquiry and the institutions of democracy, with lasting effect on the ideals held by many American educators, and also on philosophers like the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, whose account of deliberative democracy owes a large debt to Dewey and his pragmatic allies.
Rarely has a political philosopher been so explicit about the religious motives behind an ostensibly scientific theory. “The next religious prophet who will have a permanent and real influence on men’s lives,” Dewey declared with disarming candor in 1893, “will be the man who succeeds in pointing out the religious meaning of democracy.”
For Dewey, an egalitarian training in what he called “the method of intelligence,” combined with intense engagement in a face-to-face community of similarly enlightened and self-governing friends, promised a kind of this-worldly redemption: the Kingdom of God, embodied in a perfect democracy.
By “democracy,” Dewey did not mean simply a form of government. He rather meant to evoke a kind of church writ large, a communion of souls sharing the same faith in freedom and equality and fraternity, a congregation of individuals with unique talents, who had all been properly educated to think for themselves and empowered politically to rule themselves with dignity and intelligence. Democracy for Dewey was thus “a form of moral and spiritual association,” a society, as he wrote in a youthful essay, while still an observant New England Congregationalist, in which “the distinction between the spiritual and secular has ceased, and as in Greek theory, and as in the Christian theory of the Kingdom of God, the church and the state, the divine and the human organization of society are one.”
In 1893, at a time when Woodrow Wilson was treating the actually existing American state as the very apotheosis of democracy in practice, Dewey had declared that “democracy is still untried”—and in his understanding of democracy as a salvific form of life, that was certainly true. It was still true in 1927, when Dewey, in the conclusion to The Public and Its Problems, strikingly reaffirmed his political credo: “We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.”
Of course, this was no refutation of Lippmann’s empirical analysis of public opinion. This was Emerson and Whitman redux: democracy in America as a “state of vision,” an elusive dream, a redemptive ideal, yet still worth struggling toward, even against the current of events.
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IN THESE YEARS, Lippmann’s work had also drawn the attention of Edward Bernays, a young man who fancied himself the father of modern public relations. Born in Vienna in 1892, Bernays had immigrated with his family to New York City the following year. A double nephew of Sigmund Freud (his mother was Freud’s sister and his father’s sister became Freud’s wife), Bernays got his start as a publicist for the Ballets Russes and the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. He designed an early media campaign to raise awareness of venereal disease and also served on America’s Committee of Public Information, the Orwellian name for Woodrow Wilson’s main propaganda operation during the Great War. He worked for the buccaneering book publisher Horace Liveright, who founded the Modern Library and also published top-tier American authors like T. S. Eliot. There Bernays ballyhooed the publication of each new book, no matter how highbrow, like the opening of a Broadway show. He also arranged for Liveright to publish the first American edition of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
Sensing an opportunity to promote public relations as a respectable profession after the impact made by Lippmann’s Public Opinion in 1922, Bernays suggested to Liveright that he write a book called Crystallizing Public Opinion—the title itself was lifted from Lippmann’s text. Since Lippmann had in fact criticized the proliferation of corporate publicists and government press officers, lamenting their self-serving communication of highly selective information, Bernays had his work cut out for him. (To paraphrase Lippmann, those who hire a publicist control him—even worse, they ask him to blur the line between offering the public something it wants and helping to construct a public that will take whatever it gets.)
Bernays was brazen in his claims. Taking as his premise Lippmann’s observations about the unexamined assumptions held by most people, he defended the conscious manipulation of information as one way to dissolve blind prejudices. “The average citizen,” Bernays claims, “is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts.” As a result, the “public relations counselor” (Bernays’s preferred title for his line of work) is, counterintuitively and in contradiction to Lippmann’s views, an agent of potential enlightenment. His propaganda represents “a purposeful, directed effort to overcome censorship—the censorship of the group mind and the herd reaction.”
Competing lobbyists offer the public competing new sources of information, and in this way they help expand the horizons of each citizen. The public relations counselor, knowing that “there is a different set of facts on every subject for each man,” marshals coherent sets of “alternative facts,” so to speak, and in this very way fulfills an invaluable, and impeccably liberal, public service:
Society cannot wait to find absolute truth. It cannot weigh every issue carefully before making a judgment. The result is that the so-called truths by which society lives are born of compromise among conflicting desires and of interpretation by many minds. They are accepted and intolerantly maintained once they have been determined. In the struggle among ideas, the only test is the one which Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court pointed out—the power of thought to get itself accepted in the open competition of the market.
In his account of “the mirrors of the public mind,” Bernays delighted in documenting the growing power of media, both new and old, to form public opinion. Lippmann, by contrast, despaired of the same trend: “under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables.” One potential casualty, Lippmann worried, was the very idea of truth. If consultants like Bernays had their way, public opinion would become a hall of mirrors.
At Versailles, the Hall of Mirrors was a symbol of absolute power, with the long corridor of mirrors reflecting a controlled landscape that, seen through the windows on the other side, seemed to stretch to infinity. What Bernays had called the “mirrors of the public mind” evoked not Versailles but a funhouse maze. As arranged by promoters and political publicists, these “mirrors” could produce disorientation and distorted reflections, with no reference at all to the world outside.
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BY THE TIME Bernays began to publish his disingenuous justifications of propaganda as an enlivening contribution to the marketplace of ideas, new methods had been developed to sample political opinion, deploying statistical techniques far beyond the capacities of an imaginative huckster like Bernays.
Since the nineteenth century, American newspapers and magazines had published “straw polls” to get a sense of voters’ preferences before an election. In the 1920s and 1930s, the most famous of these straw polls was organized by The Literary Digest, the largest-circulation newsmagazine of its era, which sent postcard ballots to millions of Americans who listed a telephone number or owned an automobile. At the height of its reach, in 1930, the Digest mailed more than twenty million ballots, and tabulated almost five million straw votes. (It was renowned for its straw polls not just on political campaigns but also on single issues, such as Prohibition.)
By then, trained statisticians had discovered that a self-selecting poll of millions was much less reliable than a far smaller but more rigorously selected random sample of a few hundred people. The first scientific use of house-to-house interviewing to ascertain attitudes in the United States occurred in 1916. By 1928, a bibliography listed nearly three thousand opinion surveys of Americans (though most of these fell short of the kinds of probability sampling refined by later survey researchers).
In 1936, the first statistical samples of the political preferences of American voters appeared in American newspapers and magazines. Three polls—conducted by Archibald Crossley (for the Hearst papers), Elmo Roper (for Fortune magazine), and George Gallup (for a syndicated column published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers)—tracked preferences in that year’s presidential campaign between Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and Republican Alf Landon (Roosevelt won in a landslide).
The most famous of these polls was the one conducted by Gallup, who promoted his techniques by making a bold bet with the editors of The Literary Digest: Gallup wagered that his rigorous sample of a few thousand American voters would more accurately predict the outcome of the 1936 presidential election than the millions of postcard ballots processed by the Digest. By winning this bet, Gallup helped launch public opinion polling as an entirely new feature of modern democracies.
As Gallup saw things, he was taking “the pulse of democracy”—the title of his 1940 book on how polling could determine what “the common man is thinking.” Even more, Gallup believed that he was perfecting democracy, and taking it to a new stage, by fulfilling the prophecy of the British scholar James Bryce that a new political era would dawn “if the will of the majority of citizens were to become ascertainable at all times, and without the need of its passing through a body of representatives, possibly even without the need of voting machinery at all.”
To this day, professional students of public opinion take understandable pride (to quote a statement from the American Association for Public Opinion Research) that “to the extent that polls also are accurate in characterizing the attitudes, beliefs, and motivations of the electorate, we believe that pollsters, and the news media that use their poll findings, provide a great service to democracy by placing the opinions and preferences of the public in the forefront of the electoral process.”
Still, it is worth remembering just how simplifying most survey questions are, and how small the samples are: at most a few thousand people out of tens of millions of eligible voters. When polling was still a novelty in the 1930s, the response rates—the percentage of people in a sample who participated in a survey—were quite high, often 90 percent; but in the decades since, response rates have plummeted, forcing researchers to contact ever more people, which costs ever more money, and also to devise statistically reliable ways to correct for differing rates of nonresponse.
As a result of such problems, the reliability of survey research remains highly variable, depending on the specific methods used by the researcher.
In any case, the impact of survey research on politics has not been quite as benign as Gallup had hoped. Although publicizing poll data may focus attention on public opinion, it also turns the data presented into part of a feedback loop that may in turn influence opinion (what professionals call the “bandwagon effect”). That is one reason why the publication of polls is outlawed in some European states in the days before an election occurs. The more refined such data, the greater its potential to manipulate decision making.
As one historian has summed up the situation, acidly but accurately, by the 1980s, corporations and governments “were increasingly listening to what people had on their minds—and increasingly listening (thanks to the new mass feedback technologies) whether people intended to tell them or not.” Thanks to the Internet and the capacity it has created for companies like Google and Facebook to aggregate large amounts of information about the individual preferences and attitudes of millions of people, this is truer in the twenty-first century than ever before.
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IT SHOULD NOT BE a surprise that the United States pioneered the application of market survey research to politics. The land of Whitman’s democratic vistas was also a commercial republic of free individuals, who defined themselves by the things they possessed, the clothes they bought, the cultural goods they consumed—and these material preferences, as survey research revealed, could be roughly correlated with political preferences. Politics and capitalism could converge in ways unforeseen by Karl Marx.
In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter, an economist who had been born in Moravia and raised in Vienna before moving to the United States in 1932 to teach at Harvard University, accurately depicted the strange results of merging a democratic faith with marketing methods refined by behavioral scientists. “What we are confronted with in the analysis of political processes,” he wrote, “is largely not a genuine but a manufactured will. And often this artifact is all that in reality corresponds to the volonté générale of the classical doctrine … The ways in which issues and the popular will on any issue are being manufactured is exactly analogous to the ways of commercial advertising.” The analogy fails, Schumpeter conceded, in one crucial respect: “The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette. There is no equally effective safeguard in the case of political decisions.”
These observations are the prelude to Schumpeter’s famous “realist” redefinition of modern democracy, which was built in part on the previous findings of political sociologists like Moisey Ostrogorski and Robert Michels. Setting aside, as Max Weber had, all previous accounts of democracy as a form of government embodying the will of a people, Schumpeter advanced his own “view that the role of the people is to produce a government, or else an intermediate body which in turn will produce a national executive or government. And we define: the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” Democracy in modern societies like America, as it actually exists, involves voters selecting the least objectionable of the available candidates chosen by rival political parties to rule over them. In other words, democracy is not the rule of a people—instead, “democracy is the rule of the politician,” someone skilled at winning elections whose power is chiefly balanced by his need to stand for reelection, and the requirement that he leave office peacefully, should he lose the vote.
Schumpeter was writing in the midst of World War II, which had led to the total mobilization of the civilian population in all combatant states. Worldwide, this unprecedented mobilization led to the unprecedented slaughter of sixty million souls, the majority of them civilians, and six million of them Jews. In the United States, it entailed a dramatic increase in the powers of the administrative state and of the state’s armed forces; it also triggered a concomitant rise in the perceived need to keep key political deliberations and decisions concealed from the public.
Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Schumpeter himself was pessimistic about future political prospects, fearing that a “socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be more of a sham than capitalist democracy ever was.”
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AND YET, as World War II unfolded, just as had happened during the Great War that preceded it, there was a paradoxical resurgence of democratic idealism, inspired by Allied claims that their victory would help forge a world “made safe for democracy,” just as Woodrow Wilson had promised two generations earlier. In 1941, shortly before America’s entry into the war, the British prime minister Winston Churchill and American president Franklin Roosevelt had issued a press release, the so-called Atlantic Charter, solemnly vowing to restore self-government in all countries that had been occupied during the war, and reaffirming the democratic right of all peoples to choose their own form of government.
After savoring the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, and learning of the horrors of the Nazi genocide of Jews, many hoped that the peoples of the world would never again resort to violence on this industrial scale. After some hesitation, and with compromising caveats similar to those that undermined the League of Nations covenant—above all, a continuing effort to protect the imperial and racial prerogatives of the great powers—the victors agreed to create a new international organization, the United Nations. This time, communists as well as social democrats participated in planning the new international body, alongside liberals and conservatives from the representative democracies of Great Britain, France, and the United States. One result was the active involvement of a broad range of divergent intellectual and political interlocutors in drafting one of the body’s most prominent founding documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948.
It is easy to minimize the import of a normative political document arrived at after long deliberation and issued with no means of enforcing the norms it proclaimed. Yet the language of the Declaration helped to inspire later human rights movements. And Article 21 of the Declaration explicitly affirms that
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
To the extent that nations like the United States and the Soviet Union thus committed themselves to democratic principles, and yet continued to flout these principles in practice, the expectation of popular sovereignty gave a warrant to recurrent protest movements and revolts, demanding the right of everyone to take part more fully in the government of his or her country.
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HERE IS A KEY IRONY of the modern world. To this day, democracy as a form of government in most actually existing regimes is more or less a sham, even according to the criteria laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and just as Schumpeter said.
And yet, this “sham” also represents an epochal transformation: in the early twenty-first century, very few regimes, unlike most of those that existed in the early eighteenth century, can rule over a subject population with impunity. On the contrary: the rulers of every contemporary regime that professes democratic values, however feebly realized, must periodically face the mundane threat posed by ordinary citizens, however uninformed, periodically queuing at a polling station, to exercise their right to vote, and so to transfer power, if they choose, to an entirely new set of political leaders.
This is, as the Cambridge historian John Dunn puts it in the dyspeptic but accurate conclusion to his 2005 history of democracy, “a world in which faith, deference, and even loyalty have largely passed away, and the keenest of personal admiration seldom lasts for long”—a wan description of what the modern democratic spirit has wrought.
Yet this is also a world where the ideal of democracy is more universally honored than ever before in human history, and sometimes taken quite seriously, for better or worse.
For example, in the decades since the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the world has seen most American presidents and diplomats try to follow in Woodrow Wilson’s footsteps by promoting liberal democratic expectations around the world, sometimes at gunpoint.
It has seen the election of demagogues who can appeal to the visceral impulses of ordinary citizens, and the emergence of political parties that are vehemently hostile to remote elites—even as these elites in most places retain their grip on power, as a few superrich individuals and families just keep getting richer and ever more insulated from the accidents of fate that define everyday life for the remaining 99 percent of the globe’s population.
Under these circumstances, it’s perhaps not surprising that our world has also witnessed, in virtually every single country, both poor and developed, socialist or communist, autocratic or liberal, a fitful, sometimes futile series of popular uprisings and protests, when crowds of ordinary people unite to demand a fairer share of the common wealth—and to claim for themselves a larger share in more truly democratic institutions, come what may.