The Literature of Exposure

THE old-time exhorlers who made uncomfortable the youth of our fathers had as a special object of their efforts the awakening of the “conviction of sin.” To them man was, in his natural and unconverted state, a vile thing, and the hope for his future lay in his recognizing his vileness, his spiritual unworthiness. The last stage of the old-time conversion was reached when a previously comfortable and contented soul felt itself, under the new process of regeneration, tortured and lost in a morass of personal obliquity, when all past shortcomings and sins of omission and commission loomed big and black before it; when it shivered with the thought of the frightful future which must be the inevitable punishment for an evil past.

In the course of time theology learned that the methods and theories of the old religious exhorters were not only weak, but fundamentally wrong. It learned that the true way of making men better was not by telling them that they were only worms in the eyes of the Almighty, bnt by teaching them that they were made in his image; that there was a nobility in life itself, and that in the roughest and lowest of human creatures there was a touch of the Divine, the seed at least of immortal worthiness. The hard, unlovely and unloving spiritual leaders of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ time told men of their sins and iniquities, made them conscious of their spiritual sores and ulcers, the rags in their raiment, humbled and depressed them. They were destructive critics of life. To-day the spiritual teachers who are doing most for the moral health of the world are still critics, but constructive rather than destructive in their attitude toward life. They are teachers who believe that man attains his spirilual stature most readily by being spoken to less of what he is not and more of what he is, and that the greatest amount of spiritual strength can be developed by interesting man in the things the doing of which makes life worth living. These teachers find that the simplest and best way to help men to escape evil ways is not by eternal threats and warnings but by getting them to concentrate the greatest possible amount of moral energy on doing something positive and worth while. Hell has dropped out of our modern theology, not so much because we have ceased to believe in it, as because its insufficiency as an instrument for permanent moral regeneration has with the passage of time become more and more apparent; for, while we are sometimes strongly moved by what we hate and fear, we are perpetually influenced by what we love.

In the past decade there has grown up in this country a school of incomplete idealists, social reformers, who, in their methods and theories, seem to have gone back to the old-time theology. They seek to apply to society as a whole the methods which failed with the individual. From one branch of this cult has come the modern literature of “exposure.” They show us our social sore spots, like the three cheerful friends of Job. They expose in countless pages of magazines and newspapers the sordid and depressing rottenness of our politics; the hopeless apathy of our good citizens; the remorseless corruption of our great financiers and businessmen, who are bribing our legislatures, swindling the public with fraudulent stock schemes, adulterating our food, speculating with trust funds, combining in great monopolies to oppress and destroy small competitors and raise prices, who are breaking laws and buying judges and juries. They show us the growth of business “graft,” the gangrene of personal dishonesty among an honorable people, the depressing increase in the number of bribe-takers and bribe-givers. They tell us of the riotous extravagance of the rich, and the growth of poverty. These exposures form the typical current literature of our daily life. As our appetite grows jaded and surfeited, the stories become more sensational so as to retain our attention. Titus Oates and his plot live again in the amazing historian of modern finance. The achievement of the constructive elements of society has been neglected to give space to these spicy stories of graft and greed.

There are two points in the literature of exposure worthy of note. The first is its extraordinary copiousness, and the second is that so few of the writers who so cleverly point out to us our social sores seem to have any kind of salve in their hands. “Exposure” has become a peculiar art, which, like some other arts, seems to exist for its own sake.

The editorials and articles which make up the literature of exposure rarely include, and then in a very small measure, any useful or careful analysis of bad social conditions or of those defects in law and its administration through which opportunities for unjust enrichment are afforded to the keen, the unscrupulous, and the overtempted. These writers do not belong to that class of social critics whose purposeful and devoted studies of economic conditions, of the history of business systems, have given us so many suggestions of ways and means for progress. The literature of exposure is not criticism in any such sense, and in comparison is simple indeed. For it exposes, not the opportunities which create temptations, but the individuals who succumb. It seems to arraign, not the defects in the social system, but humanity itself, by the denunciation of a countless number of individuals who do real or fancied wrongs. It takes the whole burden of moral responsibility from the shoulders of society, and throws it all on the individual, instead of making a just apportionment of the load.

There is comparatively little which is constructive about this kind of work, and it is for the most part merely disheartening. Its copiousness and its frequent exaggeration have a strong tendency to make sober and sane citizens believe that our political and business evils cannot be grappled with successfully, not because they are in themselves too great, but because the moral fibre of the people has deteriorated, — a heresy more dangerous, if adopted, than all the national perils which confront us to-day, combined.

In the writer’s birthplace, the local undertaker was considered one of the worst men in town. He suffered from having become incompletely converted. The work of grace with him had gone far enough to convince him that he was an utter wretch and sinner and so absolutely unregenerate that there was nothing which could be done about it. His awakened sense of sin kept him a sinner. The literary exhorter whose sole argument is human wickedness and depravity is far too likely to produce the same kind of convert.

As every teamster knows, there is a limit to the amount of extra effort which can be got out of a horse with a whip. In the same way with the community, the sense of its own shortcomings fails as a permanent incentive to improvement. It is as important to the community as it is to the individual that its capacity for being shocked with itself should remain unimpaired. Nothing worse can happen to it than to have its moral cuticle hardened by much drubbing, and made insensitive to criticism. The inherent defect with much of the literature of exposure is that it exists merely for the shock it gives, and is of no further profit to the community.

We have in this country an almost superstitious reverence for publicity, as though it were a panacea for political and social evils. Give the people the facts, is our comfortable doctrine, and conditions will remedy themselves. But there is as much difference between diagnosis and cure as applied to printers’ ink as to medicine, and the time will come, even if the writer be wrong in thinking it is now with us, when the feeblest of tonics will do us more good than the most drastic of these modern literary emetics.

It is a curious fact that, when we speak of publicity and its value, we have in mind publicity in its narrow and restricted sense, as the searchlight of public knowledge thrown upon something which is wrong. We make it serve as a sort of social scavenger, as though that, were its great function instead of its very least. As though that great instrument of civilization was being employed at its best task when engaged in probing, with a prying-hook, our social garbage barrels.

The lives and doings of bad men are too much with us for our own good. Somehow we have conceived the notion that it is more important for us to have copious information about the grafter and the frenzied financier, than about the men who, while doing equally, if not more, important things, are violating no statute or moral law. We need an enlarged conception of the higher possibilities of publicity as an aid and encouragement for right living. We need a change by which the honest merchant, banker, or professional man will feel himself less helplessly isolated through his honesty than he might reasonably conceive himself to be from what he gets to read at the news stands. What the Bible says about the inadvisability of man being alone has special application to the honest man. It is not well for him to be alone, and the kind of publicity which makes him feel lonesome in his honesty is not likely to have a very bracing effect on the honesty itself.

It has got so with us that, in affairs of state, the surest way to public notice open to an ambitious politician is to be either a corruptionist or a blunderer. For, through these exaggerations of the importance of publicity about the apparently destructive elements in social or political life, we have come to a point where they are the ones most exploited. This attitude is hostile to progress, because mere opposition is never progress. It is as true in the world of affairs as in that of sport that a community whose energies are devoted to playing a merely defensive game seldom wins any substantial victory. This is the main lesson to be drawn from the general history of reform movements in American municipalities. These movements have, until very recent years, originated almost uniformly in the moral delinquencies of the political organization entrenched in office, which have aroused the conscience of the best citizens to revolt. It has been mere revolt. The results of these movements have rarely been permanent, because their progress usually seems to stop after putting the rascals out. The ranks of reform are filled with strenuous house-wreckers, but they contain few builders. The builders are not there, very largely because the community itself seems to offer less encouragement than it should to those who work for it. We have become so accustomed to criticising or denouncing our public men, and to devoting so much of our public print to their mistakes or misdeeds, that silence seems to our exhausted energies a sufficient tribute to the faithful public servant. A friend of the writer’s unconsciously expressed this spirit in speaking of a. young lawyer who was running for his second term in the State Assembly. “ — made a good record there last term. He did not get a single newspaper roast through the entire session.” A success which has to be measured by abuse which has been escaped rather than by recognition gained is a doubtful prize. Until the time comes when the useful work of constructive statesmanship will entitle a public servant to the same amount of public attention as is to be received by engineering a railroad or gas grab, the quality of our statesmanship will remain low.

It is accepted as a truism among educators that no child can be made permanently good simply by scolding. The overscolded child is made worse by the process, and the overscolded politician is equally likely to deteriorate, and for the same reason. Even a good dog will try to earn a bad name, if he has it thrust too often upon him. Probably it would be an exaggerated statement to say that the essential spirit of reform in this country is the spirit of the scolding parent, but it resembles it too often.

In New York, for example, many of the most active of the reform organizations of the city have committees which are empowered on their own responsibility and without affirmative action from the general body of their associates to oppose with strong language and peppery protest legislation which they deem it proper to oppose in the name of their respective organizations. They have, however, no power whatever to endorse or support anything without some express permission from the bodies by which they are created, a permission to be obtained, if at all, only after considerable delay and much debating.

The ability to point out with disagreeable clearness social evils and public perils is not alone enough justly to entitle a man to any great amount of public esteem. Cassandras in breeches or petticoats are of no more real service to-day than in the heroic age; and the miracle about the lady herself was not so much that the Greeks paid no attention to her forebodings and warnings, but that some impatient hero who had work to do did not wring her dismal neck.

There has never been a time when our country has needed to have ideals of service made more fresh and attractive, or when the real work of the world, done by its sane, healthy, and kind-hearted workers, needed greater recognition. It is the good rather than the bad in us which needs encouragement and exposure, and if it once finds work to do, the bad in us will be far less noticeable or troublesome. It is a poor gardener who devotes too much time to the weeds at the expense of the vegetables and flowers.

A story which the present writer heard some years ago, and which has an obvious point in connection with what he is trying to say here, was told by one of the lobbyists who had been engaged in pushing a “grab” bill through the New York Legislature. The bill failed to pass, and the reform organizations and newspapers of New York city, which had denounced it and its sponsors in unmeasured terms, regarded its failure as one of those rare triumphs of aroused public sentiment to which the corrupt legislators had bent and bowed. The lobbyist had a curiously different version of the matter. He said the bill was killed by a little parish priest in one of the slum districts of New York, who somehow had got interested in the measure, and had come up to Albany, and apparently with amazing innocence had asked the ringleader of strike legislation, who was one of the active promoters of this particular bill, to use his influence against it. The little priest knew nothing about politics, and read the papers but little; but he had known for a lifetime this particular politician, and knew intimately a side of him not familiar to newspaper readers. He believed in him implicitly, and in absolutely good faith asked him to use his influence against the bill, and succeeded. According to the lobbyist, who presumably knew what he was talking about, the little priest had been more powerful in his influence against the legislation which he opposed than all the newspapers and reform bodies in New York together. He was more powerful, because he was better armed. He knew the good side of a bad man, and how to appeal to it. For it is as true of any of the rest of us as it was of the spoilsman, that we are willing to do more to justify and keep the good opinion of our friends who are wrong, than to avoid the detraction of our enemies whom we know in our hearts to be right.