American Inquisitors

Walter Lippmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351532686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

American Inquisitors is one of the small gems among Walter Lippmann's larger books. Written in response to the trials of John Scopes and William McAndrew in 1925 and 1927, this volume contains a succinct analysis of a basic problem of democracy: the conflict between intellectual freedom and majority rule. In both cases, the state, acting in the name of popular sovereignty, sought to suppress teaching that was contrary to the tenets of religious fundamentalism and patriotic tradition. In distilling the arguments surrounding both trials, Lippmann sounds a warning against the tyranny of the majority and challenges people to rethink their theories of liberty and democracy.American Inquisitors consists of five related dialogues, each exploring a different dilemma at the heart of democratic political theory. The first two establish the principles of majority rule and freedom of the mind in the persons of William Jennings Bryan and Thomas Jefferson, with Socrates urging a reexamination of all principles..These dialogues debate the will and the rational capacity of the people to rule and demonstrate the relative nature of freedom in democratic society.The third and fourth dialogues set a fundamentalist against a modernist and an Americanist against a scholar. Lippmann resists easy stereotyping and puts challenging insights and plausible arguments into the mouths of all the parties. These dialogues ask whether commitment to community comes before intellectual inquiry, 'or whether the search for truth precedes identity. The final dialogue, between Socrates and a conscientious teacher, attempts to define the mission of teaching and determine when and how to face the consequences of truth. Lippmann concludes that the program of liberty is to deprive the sovereign of absolute and arbitrary rule. Taken as a whole, the dialogues constitute an essential consistency within Lippmann's political thought, and delineate a recurring problem hi American politcal culture. American Inquisit

Chapter I

New Phases of an Ancient Conflict

1. Ballyhoo

As one whose business it is to write about public affairs, I have often been made to feel like a man at the theatre who forgets where he is and shouts at the hero to beware of the villain. For of late it has been our mood in politics to regard ourselves as the spectators at a show rather than as participants in real events. At a show well bred people do not hiss the villain. They enjoy the perfection of his villainy and recognize that he is necessary to the show.

We have become very sophisticated. We have become so sophisticated that we not only refuse to mistake make-believe for reality, but we even insist upon treating reality as make-believe. We are so completely debunked that we have almost persuaded ourselves that all beer is near-beer and that every battle is a sham battle.

That part of the American people which likes to think of itself as the civilized minority has insisted for some years now that no intelligent man can afford to be caught holding the illusion that any public event really matters very much. For public affairs are the serious occupation only of dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads on the one hand, and of opponents of prohibition, motion picture censorship, and the obscenity laws on the other. They assure us that in the main public affairs are insufferably dull. Taxation is dull. The maintenance of peace is dull. Imperial responsibilities are dull. Everything is dull,—if you treat it responsibly. But if you are a man of wit and discernment you will not treat anything responsibly. You will not expect to be edified. You will manage to be entertained. Having convinced yourself that nothing matters much, having forgotten that it is fully as difficult to govern a state as to write an essay, you will find that the spectacle of democracy in action is a glorious farce full of captivating nonsense.

I do not know whether newspaper writers belong to the civilized minority or not. But I do know that they have never been so thoroughly convinced as they are today that the measure of events is not their importance but their value as entertainment. This is the mood of the people. When my friend Mr. Mencken says “I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing,” the democracy replies, or would if it could express itself, “You said it, old man. Everybody ought to have a sense of humor and enjoy himself. We have enjoyed ourselves mightily with half a dozen gorgeous murders, beauty contests, and the inner secrets of a lot of love nests.” For the booboisie and the civilized minority are at one in their conviction that the whole world is a vaudeville stage, and that the purveyors of news are impresarios whose business it is to keep the show going at a fast clip. It is still customary to record the conventionally important affairs of state. But they are like the prescribed courses for freshmen, things which you have to pass in order to pass them by.

The real energies of the enterprising members of my profession have recently gone into the selection, the creation, the staging, and the ballyhooing of one great national act after another. Sometimes it is a sordid act. Sometimes, as in the Lindbergh idyll, it is a beautiful act. What matters is that it should never be a dull act. The technical skill which this requires is great. It is no easy thing to keep the excitement going with never a dull moment, and with intermissions just long enough for the audience to go out into the lobby for a breath of air. It is a new and marvellous profession, this business of entertaining a whole nation at breakfast. It is a profession which the older and more sedate editors look upon much as if they were deacons and had been asked to dance the Black Bottom.

2. Dayton and Chicago

Among the events on which the modern art of ballyhoo has been practised there are two at least which are not likely to be forgotten soon. The world laughed at them, but it has not yet laughed them off. For they are symbols and portents. I refer to the trial of John T. Scopes at Dayton and to the trial of William McAndrew at Chicago. With your permission I propose to discuss these two cases as marking a new phase in the ancient conflict between freedom and authority.

This place is an appropriate one surely to such a discussion. For the University of Virginia is a temple erected by Jefferson to the belief that the conclusions reached by the free use of the human reason should and will prevail over all conclusions guaranteed by custom or revelation or authority. For this boldness Jefferson was, as you know, fiercely attacked as seditious and godless, not only by the Thompsons and the Bryans of his day, but by many of the important leaders of thought. The first appointment to the faculty of this University aroused a storm of protest in the legislature because the Board of Visitors wished to appoint Dr. Cooper, a man who had been prosecuted under the Sedition Law, and was accused as well of being a Unitarian. A century has passed. Legislatures are still ready to be aroused as they were against Dr. Cooper. But Jefferson’s theory has become the acknowledged principle of education in all modern communities. There are no longer educated men anywhere who would openly venture to challenge the principle that there is no higher loyalty for the teacher and the scholar than loyalty to the truth.

And yet this principle is under attack today in all sections of the country. The attacks are made by churchmen and by patriots in the name of God and country. The attack of the churchmen is aimed chiefly at the teaching of the biological sciences, the attack of the patriots at the teaching of history. I need hardly tell you that Dayton and Chicago are exceptional only in the amount of attention they have received. They happened to lend themselves to the art of ballyhoo. They are not unique. They are merely episodes of a wide conflict between scholarship and popular faith, between freedom of thought and popular rule, which irritates American politics with deep discords. The spirit of the Tennessee Statute against the teaching of the theory of evolution is not confined to Tennessee. The purpose behind it has been carried into effect in many American communities either by statute, by administrative ruling, or by the self-denying ordinances of frightened educators. The threat of legislation like that in Tennessee is almost as effective as the actual legislation itself, and that such a threat exists as a determining influence on education in many parts of this country, no one, I think, will deny. The same holds true of the patriotic inquisition which is typified by Mayor Thompson’s crusade against the textbooks of history used in the Chicago schools. Mayor Thompson did not start this crusade. He has merely carried on a little more spectacularly the zealous work which others had begun. There are few communities, therefore, in which there has not been some sort of inquisition recently to find out if the teachers are as religious as Dr. John Roach Straton or as patriotic as Mayor Hylan of New York, Mayor Thompson of Chicago, and Mr. William Randolph Hearst.

These assaults upon the freedom of teaching have been supported by the ignorant part of our population, the spokesmen of these new inquisitions have often been mountebanks, and invariably they have been ignoramuses. As a result, educated men have been disposed, partly because they were sincerely contemptuous, partly because they were prudent, to treat the whole matter as a farce which would soon break down through its own inherent absurdity. It is very easy to make light of the Chicago inquisitor who could not recall in the excitement of his patriotism whether it was Nathan Hale or Ethan Allen who regretted that he had only one life to give for his country. It is fairly funny to read that the Mayor of Chicago has drawn up a list of patriots of Polish, German, and Irish descent, who ought to be celebrated in the Chicago schools. But I am not so sure that it is possible to laugh all this off, and I am not so sure but that at the core of all this confusion there is not something of great importance which it behooves us to understand.

I am inclined to think that Dayton and Chicago are landmarks at which it is profitable to pause and ask ourselves whether the theory of liberty which we inherit is adequate. I do not find it adequate. My own experience as a controversial journalist during the last ten years has convinced me that while the intelligence and the wit of the community are opposed to these clerical and patriotic inquisitions, there exists no logically consistent philosophy of liberty with which to combat them. I am thoroughly persuaded that if Mr. Bryan at Dayton had been as acute as his opponents, he would have conquered them in debate. Given his premises, the logic of his po’sition was unassailable. I am no less persuaded that the objects of Mayor Thompson’s crusade could be stated in a way which would compel the respectful attention of every thinking man.

I know perfectly well that Mayor Thompson cannot state them in such a fashion. But I see no advantage in winning a cheap victory just because the opposition has a poor lawyer. I propose, therefore, to ignore as irrelevant all the superficial absurdities of the attacks on learning, to ignore the discreditable motives which sometimes confuse the issue, to ignore above all the squalid ignorance which surrounds these controversies, and instead to examine them sympathetically and dispassionately, not in their weakness and folly, but in their strength. I propose, if you please, to be the Devil’s Advocate.

Need I remind you that the real title of that official is Promoter of the Faith?

3. A Curious Coincidence

I should like at the outset to invite your attention to a curious coincidence. I have before me a copy of Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. This bill, as you know, was accepted in 1786 with a few unimportant changes by the General Assembly of Virginia. It has been called the first law ever passed by a popular assembly giving perfect freedom of conscience, and by common consent it is regarded as one of the great charters of human liberty. I have before me also the text of the bill which was passed by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee on March 13, 1925, entitled An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of the Evolution Theory.

No two laws could be further apart in spirit and in purpose than these two. And yet at one point there is a strange agreement between them. On one vital matter both laws appeal to the same principle although they aim at diametrically opposite ends. The Virginia statute says that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.” The Tennessee statute prohibits “the teaching of the evolution theory in all the universities, normal and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State” You will note that the Tennessee statute does not prohibit the teaching of the evolution theory in Tennessee. It merely prohibits the teaching of that theory in schools to which the people of Tennessee are compelled by law to contribute money. Jefferson had said that it was sinful and tyrannical to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves. The Tennessee legislators representing the people of their state were merely applying this principle. They disbelieved in the evolution theory, and they set out to free their constituents of the sinful and tyrannical compulsion to pay for the propagation of an opinion which they disbelieved. The late Mr. Bryan made this quite clear :

“What right,” he asked, “has a little irresponsible oligarchy of self-styled intellectuals to demand control of the schools of the United States in which twenty-five millions of children are being educated at an annual expense of ten billions of dollars?”

Some time ago I pointed out this disturbing coincidence to a friend of mine who has devoted many years of his life to the study of Jefferson. After a few remarks about the devil quoting Scripture, he said that the coincidence shows how dangerous it is to use too broad a principle in justifying a practical aim. That of course is true. Jefferson, like other enlightened men of his time, believed in the separation of church and state. He wished to disestablish the church, which was then supported out of public funds, and so he declared that taxation for the propagation of opinions in which a man disbelieved was tyranny. But while he said ‘opinions,’ he really meant theological opinions. For ardently as he desired to disestablish the church, he no less ardently desired to establish a system of public education. He thought it quite proper to tax the people to support the public schools. For he believed that “by advancing the minds of our youth with the growing science of the times” the public schools would be elevating them “to the practice of the social duties and functions of self-government.”

One hundred and forty years later the political leader who in his generation professed to be Jefferson’s most loyal disciple, asked whether, if it is wrong to compel people to support a creed they disbelieve, it is not also wrong to compel them to support teaching which impugns the creed in which they do believe. Jefferson .had insisted that the people should not have to pay for the teaching of Anglicanism. Mr. Bryan asked why they sho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Chapter I. New Phases of an Ancient Conflict
• Chapter II. Fundamentalism
• Chapter III. The Teacher and the Rule of Majorities
• Chapter IV Coda