PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

CHAPTER XV
LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE
I
BECAUSE of their transcendent practical importance, no successful
leader has ever been too busy to cultivate the symbols which organize
his following. What privileges do within the hierarchy, symbols do for
the rank and file. They conserve unity. From the totem pole to the
national flag, from the wooden idol to God the Invisible King, from
the magic word to some diluted version of Adam Smith or Bentham,
symbols have been cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves
unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences merged.
The detached observer may scorn the "star-spangled" ritual which
hedges the symbol, perhaps as much as the king who told himself that
Paris was worth a few masses. But the leader knows by experience that
only when symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to
move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target,
and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out. No wonder he hates
what he calls destructive criticism, sometimes called by free spirits
the elimination of buncombe. "Above all things," says Bagehot, "our
royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you
cannot reverence it." [Footnote: _The English Constitution,_ p.
127. D. Appleton & Company, 1914.] For poking about with clear
definitions and candid statements serves all high purposes known to
man, except the easy conservation of a common will. Poking about, as
every responsible leader suspects, tends to break the transference of
emotion from the individual mind to the institutional symbol. And the
first result of that is, as he rightly says, a chaos of individualism
and warring sects. The disintegration of a symbol, like Holy Russia,
or the Iron Diaz, is always the beginning of a long upheaval.
These great symbols possess by transference all the minute and
detailed loyalties of an ancient and stereotyped society. They evoke
the feeling that each individual has for the landscape, the furniture,
the faces, the memories that are his first, and in a static society,
his only reality. That core of images and devotions without which he
is unthinkable to himself, is nationality. The great symbols take up
these devotions, and can arouse them without calling forth the
primitive images. The lesser symbols of public debate, the more casual
chatter of politics, are always referred back to these proto-symbols,
and if possible associated with them. The question of a proper fare on
a municipal subway is symbolized as an issue between the People and
the Interests, and then the People is inserted in the symbol American,
so that finally in the heat of a campaign, an eight cent fare becomes
unAmerican. The Revolutionary fathers died to prevent it. Lincoln