The Epidemic of Gooseflesh

THE ATLANTIC

BY GERALD W. JOHNSON

IN THE spring of 1963 the senior senator from California, the Honorable Thomas H. Kuchel, hit the ceiling, thereby becoming, of course, front-page, top-of-column news, for a raving senator is ever the reporters’ pride and joy. It is inexact to say that the Californian was hoist with his own petard, although it was one engineered by members, at least titular members, of his own party. Mr. Kuchel, a Republican, was sprung by the activities of those persons who professed to have found a Communist agent in Dwight D. Eisenhower, a parlor pink in Richard M. Nixon, and in the school segregation decision of a unanimous Supreme Court, obedience to a command from Moscow. These persons — typified by but not confined to the John Birch Society — for the most part profess to be Republicans, of the right wing, to be sure, but still Republicans.

This was the goad that pricked the California senator into fury. He made the point, and supported it with notable plausibility, that they are not Republicans but a terrorist group, True, up to the time of the senator’s speech they had operated exclusively with psychological explosives rather than with “villanous saltpetre,” but the effect, according to Mr. Kuchel, is none the less shattering; and it made him apprehensive for the future of the republic.

It is hardly to be denied that his anxiety was based upon reason. Since no country ever ran itself or ever will, it follows that the national future always hangs upon the quality of the individuals in whom the people repose their confidence. If the fact that a man has brainpower enough to move him to get in out of the rain is, as the terrorists imply, proof positive that he is a Communist or a Communist dupe, it is a necessary inference that, as anti-Communists, we must entrust the conduct of public affairs to the completely brainless. Then, when those who advocate this course insist that they are Republicans, and the only simon-pure, twenty-four-carat Republicans, acute embarrassment is caused those Republicans who retain faith in government by intelligence. But what can they do? Little, it appears, but squirm.

Senator Kuchel was disturbed by this situation. So, indeed, are some others. The Declaration of Independence asserts the right of the people to choose the form of government that “to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The choice is restricted only by the opinion of the people; yet, to persons of like mind with the senator, imbecile leadership seems unlikely, highly unlikely, to effect anybody’s safety and happiness. Nevertheless, the possibility that it may be the people’s choice takes on the look of probability when the wholesalers of terror are doing a thriving business.

At such moments a long memory, often an affliction, becomes consolatory. A citizen of the United States who has endured in a state of partial awareness for more than sixty years has this advantage over youth: whatever damn fool thing comes up, he has seen the like before and has observed that in the long run it didn’t amount to much. The development that agitated Senator Kuchel in 1963 is a case in point. It was the effectiveness, or what he considered the effectiveness, of the work of the terrorists. In this the senator obviously descried evidence of some deterioration in the national character; but to an older American it is merely evidence of the continuing prevalence of Dr. Wirt.

It was in 1934 that Dr. William Albert Wirt, already a pedagogue of some fame, achieved a sudden political notoriety that jarred to their heels such equivalents of Senator Kuchel as then flourished. He laid before Congress information that Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been President of the United States for about a year, was not the leader of a reform movement, as was generally supposed, but was merely a stopgap, comparable to the Russian who held power briefly between the execution of Czar Nicholas Romanov and the advent of Dictator Vladimir Lenin.

But, in measure, as the scale of events had enlarged between 1917 and 1934, it might be assumed that Roosevelt, obviously a bigger man than Kerenski. would presently be ejected to make room for a successor correspondingly bigger than Lenin, one of a redness that would make Lenin’s hue a pale flesh lint by comparison. This information, Dr. Wirt averred, he had from authorities so close to the center of power as to be unimpeachable.

The epidemic of gooseflesh raised by this pronouncement spread from Sandy Hook to the Golden Gate. Its dimensions were such as to bring the ordinarily imperturbable Edmund Wilson onto the scene as an investigator. His report to Scribner’s, published in August, 1934, was doubtless factually correct, but I have never believed that it got at the truth.

The facts as reported by Wilson were that Dr. Wirt, on a business trip to Washington, was entertained at dinner by a former associate who then held a position in a government department. The other guests were three or four minor officials, all of them young and enthusiastic New Dealers. The doctor seized the occasion to promulgate his views on fiscal policy, including certain theories of monetary reform that he was urging at the time. The evening turned into a monologue of four hours’ duration. It was the testimony of the witnesses that nobody mentioned the name of Kerenski; nobody mentioned anything else very much, for the doctor held the floor and brooked no interruption.

This Wilson chronicled, obviously in good faith, and there is no reason to doubt that it was literal truth; but that it was the effective truth I. for one, will never believe. It is simply not congruent with the spirit of the early New Deal, and I doubt that any social event in Washington in that period was entirely unaffected by the spirit of the time. It was blithe, adventurous, and intellectually alive, even to excess. In 1934, Washington was hell on solemn asses, and to assume that Dr. Wirt escaped unscathed strains credulity beyond the breaking point.

I shall go to the grave believing that Wirt did have authority for his statement and that he did regard it as unimpeachable. He was trapped by a constitutional inability to comprehend sarcasm. The probability, so great as to approximate mathematical certainty, is that by the time the monologue was well into its third hour some young New Dealer, bored beyond endurance, interjected a comment so obviously satirical as to pass unnoticed by the rest — and so, forgotten — but which was swallowed at a gulp by the doctor.

THE reader, who is certainly rational or he would not be reading these lines, may be tempted to reject this as incredible; but it is a hasty judgment that he will retract after brief consideration. He has only to ask himself. Why was Dr. Wirt there at all? The answer, common knowledge at the time, excited no startled comment: Dr. Wirt was there to advise the government on its very serious monetary problems.

The fact that this occasioned no astonishment reveals, on analysis, one of the chief fascinations of life in the United States during the first sixty years of the twentieth century. It alone might persuade one to echo Adlai Stevenson’s remark that he is glad to have lived at this time, for it touches a folk belief intensely American and florid enough to match anything in any of Frazer’s twelve volumes.

Dr. Wirt in Washington was a reiteration of faith in an American myth noted by nearly all observers but most aptly named by Walter Lippmann “the myth of the omnicompetent citizen.” From Tocqueville through Bryce down to Maurois and Brogan, visitors from other countries have been struck by the curious belief of Americans that excellence is not so much an acquired characteristic as a status, a level in the psychic hierarchy comparable to the peerage in the British social hierarchy. Even as the British hold that if a man is a duke, he is totally a duke and cannot be other than ducal, so Americans hold that if a man is able, he is totally able, and it is not admissible that the same man can philosophize on one subject and merely bray on another. If experience shows us that it is possible, so much the worse for experience.

Hence, if one appeared among us demonstrating such superlative ability at the painting of barber poles that never in recorded history had there been another who could approach him as a painter of barber poles, it is a moral certainty that in the spring of the next election year someone would propose the painter for President of the United States. Have we not seen advocates of Henry Ford, J. Edgar Hoover, and Will Rogers for the White House?

Now, Dr. Wirt in early and middle life had been a dominie of note, not merely agile enough in body to dodge spitballs and fragments of chalk, but also agile enough in mind to devise a system of shifting pupils in such wise as to increase the operational capacity of schoolhouses impressively — he claimed by 40 percent — and to speed up the educational process by 20 percent. This system, first applied in the steelmaking town of Gary, Indiana, and known to educationists as the Gary Plan, seems to have been an adaptation of assembly-line technique to the tutorial process.

The Gary Plan so elevated its inventor in the esteem of his fellow citizens that few saw any incongruity in his appearance at Washington to advise Treasury officials on monetary theory and fiscal policy. If a rose is a rose is a rose, then surely a wizard is a wizard is a wizard, and butter must be good for the works of a watch provided it is the very best butter. A genius capable of adapting mass production to scholarship ought to have no trouble at all with a relatively simple problem, such as stabilization of the currency.

As for the young New Dealers who apparently stuffed the doctor with chaff, one may say of them as of Hamlet’s players, “They do but jest, poison in jest; no offence i’ th’ world.” Presumably they were of one mind with Senator Kuchel; they could not understand how such stuff could be swallowed by any rational man. It did not occur to them that he would accept it avidly; like the senator, they fell into the common error of assuming that fear is consistently unpleasant, therefore avoided by all but the abnormal.

But as a matter of fact the discomfort of fear is relative. Boredom is a worse affliction. When people’s lives are sufficiently dull, they may invite fear as a break in the monotony. If nothing else scares them, they will scare themselves. Why else does the world delight in ghost stories? Unwittingly, no doubt, but obviously, Dr. Wirt came to Washington determined to be scared, and the young New Dealers only saved him the trouble of devising means to scare himself.

Senator Kuchel’s agitation might have persisted, but hardly with the same intensity, if he had borne this fact in mind. The people of the extreme right experience a delicious horror in discovering in Eisenhower a Communist dupe, and in the Chief Justice a commissar in disguise. Shock relieves the tedium of an otherwise empty existence and so is not entirely unwelcome.

Suppose, though, that such people became so numerous as to constitute a majority able to take over the government. Was not the senator justified in assuming that such an event would signalize the end of the republic as we have known it? That hardly admits of a doubt; but two comments on the possibility would seem to be relevant. The first is that it is remote; a large proportion of vacuous minds conjure up their bugaboos outside the field of politics. The second is, Who wants the republic as we know it to survive indefinitely?

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM has tried often enough to take over, and sometimes its efforts have been strong enough to alarm the judicious. When the late Joseph McCarthy was raging, some highly intelligent men were half persuaded, momentarily, that he had won over a majority. It was an illusion. The event proved that his real followers, as distinguished from the gaping bystanders, had never been numerically strong; it was vocally that they were overwhelming.

This has been true of earlier aberrations comparable with McCarthyism, back to the Know-Nothings and the Anti-Masons of the early nineteenth century. There is reason to believe that Huey Long came much closer than McCarthy to winning a national majority, but even the Kingfish fell far short of the mark. True, there must be a first time for everything, and the eventual appearance of an American Cleon is possible. But that it is fairly distant seems likely because it is contingent on one, or both, of two developments, either of which must be a rather long process. Some master demagogue may sweep the country, but not until the American people have slipped back from their present level of political maturity, or until the art of demagoguery has been perfected to a degree beyond the capacity of McCarthy, Long, or any other known practitioner.

Against this, one must balance the possibility that our level of political maturity instead of sinking may rise, in which case success of the demagogue would tend to become less and less probable. I am persuaded that this has been the tendency since adoption of the Constitution. It is admittedly a guess, and some formidable authorities have guessed the contrary — the Adams brothers, for instance, and even Justice Holmes, in moments of exceptional acerbity. But the great men were guessing, too, and the latest guesser has the advantage over all predecessors that with each passing year there is more evidence on which to base a guess. Hence, there is no logical necessity that some future McCarthy or Long will take over the White House; and it may be plausibly argued that the trend is in the direction of making such an event less probable every year.

But the survival of the republic as we have known it is a proposition of a different order. The word “survive” as applied to any part except the name of the United States of America is a semantic sin. What is left of the government over which George Washington presided is hardly visible to the naked eye. The United States has not survived, it has evolved — a completely different concept. That its evolution will continue seems to me as near to mathematical certainty as any political prediction can come.

Theoretically, it might evolve into a monstrosity comparable to a saurian of the Mesozoic, whose sheer dimensions guaranteed its extinction in a changing environment; or it may evolve into something admirable but indescribable because it has no historical referent. Neither outcome can be precisely described as survival. When my father built his house in Thomasville, North Carolina, there was before it a sapling no taller than a schoolboy. Now, sixty years later, the spot is occupied by a large hickory tree, an ornament to the property but emphatically not a sapling. The sapling is not there, although it never died; no more is the republic that existed when Washington was inaugurated as its first President existent now; and it is a reasonable assumption that the republic I know will not be existent when my youngest grandson is as old as I am now.

Obviously, living men fall into two classifications as they regard this prospect gloomily or serenely. Since nobody lacking the gift of prophecy can by any process of thought determine which is the more probable outcome, the class into which one falls, optimist or pessimist, is presumably a matter of temperament. Yet who will admit it? All of us believe implicitly and usually explicitly that, whatever may be true of others, our attitude is determined by logical cogitation. Hence philosophy.

It seems that Bertrand Russell, as age crept upon him, grew more rather than less cheerful. He always was contrary. For instance, at eighty plus, he said, “We are equal to all that we can understand.” I feel sure that at sixty he would have said, “We are equal to no more than we can understand,” and at forty, “We are equal only to what we can understand. which is precious little.” Since the quantity of truth that each of these sayings would assay is indeterminate, I choose to adhere to his lordship in his eighties and, on the theory that we are equal to all that we can understand, hazard the prediction that this nation will be equal to more and more as understanding widens with the passage of the generations. Perhaps it will eventually be equal to what Kant called the greatest task facing humanity — to wit, creation of civic order based on justice rather than on force.

But to date it has never been equal to that task, perhaps because the task has never been understood. I am hopeful, therefore, that the United States as I know it will not survive through an indefinite future. It is not that good. In the assurance that it will evolve I can cheerfully face the possibility that it might evolve monstrously, seeing that it is equally possible that it may evolve beautifully, whereas mere survival would mean no change. If the time had come when we could be assured that the United States would never be appreciably better than it is now, a man of sense should attempt to make a reservation in the next space capsule, for all that makes it tolerable would be extracted from terrestrial existence.

I do not flatter myself that this kind of rationalizing will do much to relieve Senator Kuchel’s distress at finding himself in intimate, unwanted contact with political grotesques; but it may help if he can be assured that his personal discomfort is not necessarily the prelude to national disaster. Which is really about all that can be done for a man luckless enough to be kissed by the intellectually slobbery.