PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

having gone sooner, or to get rid of Mr. Burleson, or to improve the
price of wheat, or to lower taxes, or to stop Mr. Daniels from
outbuilding the world, or to help Mr. Harding do the same thing.
And yet a sort of decision emerged; Mr. Harding moved into the White
House. For the least common denominator of all the votes was that the
Democrats should go and the Republicans come in. That was the only
factor remaining after all the contradictions had cancelled each other
out. But that factor was enough to alter policy for four years. The
precise reasons why change was desired on that November day in 1920
are not recorded, not even in the memories of the individual voters.
The reasons are not fixed. They grow and change and melt into other
reasons, so that the public opinions Mr. Harding has to deal with are
not the opinions that elected him. That there is no inevitable
connection between an assortment of opinions and a particular line of
action everyone saw in 1916. Elected apparently on the cry that he
kept us out of war, Mr. Wilson within five months led the country into
war.
The working of the popular will, therefore, has always called for
explanation. Those who have been most impressed by its erratic working
have found a prophet in M. LeBon, and have welcomed generalizations
about what Sir Robert Peel called "that great compound of folly,
weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and
newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion." Others have
concluded that since out of drift and incoherence, settled aims do
appear, there must be a mysterious contrivance at work somewhere over
and above the inhabitants of a nation. They invoke a collective soul,
a national mind, a spirit of the age which imposes order upon random
opinion. An oversoul seems to be needed, for the emotions and ideas in
the members of a group do not disclose anything so simple and so
crystalline as the formula which those same individuals will accept as
a true statement of their Public Opinion.
2
But the facts can, I think, be explained more convincingly without the
help of the oversoul in any of its disguises. After all, the art of
inducing all sorts of people who think differently to vote alike is
practiced in every political campaign. In 1916, for example, the
Republican candidate had to produce Republican votes out of many
different kinds of Republicans. Let us look at Mr. Hughes' first
speech after accepting the nomination. [Footnote: Delivered at Carnegie
Hall, New York City, July 31, 1916.] The context is still clear enough
in our minds to obviate much explanation; yet the issues are no longer
contentious. The candidate was a man of unusually plain speech, who
had been out of politics for several years and was not personally
committed on the issues of the recent past. He had, moreover, none of