PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

most practiced, and reaches to highest flights. All chiefs everywhere
are now kept painted, by the busy work of numberless publicists, so as
to be mistaken for Napoleons--at a distance....It becomes almost
impossible to displace these Napoleons, whatever their incompetence,
because of the enormous public support created by hiding or glossing
failure, and exaggerating or inventing success.... But the most
insidious and worst effect of this so highly organized falsity is on
the generals themselves: modest and patriotic as they mostly are, and
as most men must be to take up and follow the noble profession of
arms, they themselves are ultimately affected by these universal
illusions, and reading it every morning in the paper, they also grow
persuaded they are thunderbolts of war and infallible, however much
they fail, and that their maintenance in command is an end so sacred
that it justifies the use of any means.... These various conditions,
of which this great deceit is the greatest, at last emancipate all
General Staffs from all control. They no longer live for the nation:
the nation lives, or rather dies, for them. Victory or defeat ceases
to be the prime interest. What matters to these semi-sovereign
corporations is whether dear old Willie or poor old Harry is going to
be at their head, or the Chantilly party prevail over the Boulevard
des Invalides party." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 98, 101-105.]
Yet Captain Wright who can be so eloquent and so discerning about the
dangers of silence is forced nevertheless to approve the silence of
Foch in not publicly destroying the illusions. There is here a
complicated paradox, arising as we shall see more fully later on,
because the traditional democratic view of life is conceived, not for
emergencies and dangers, but for tranquillity and harmony. And so
where masses of people must cooperate in an uncertain and eruptive
environment, it is usually necessary to secure unity and flexibility
without real consent. The symbol does that. It obscures personal
intention, neutralizes discrimination, and obfuscates individual
purpose. It immobilizes personality, yet at the same time it
enormously sharpens the intention of the group and welds that group,
as nothing else in a crisis can weld it, to purposeful action. It
renders the mass mobile though it immobilizes personality. The symbol
is the instrument by which in the short run the mass escapes from its
own inertia, the inertia of indecision, or the inertia of headlong
movement, and is rendered capable of being led along the zigzag of a
complex situation.
2
But in the longer run, the give and take increases between the leaders
and the led. The word most often used to describe the state of mind in
the rank and file about its leaders is morale. That is said to be good
when the individuals do the part allotted to them with all their
energy; when each man's whole strength is evoked by the command from