“To whose interest was it to have riots and fires, lawlessness and crime?

2. “To whose interest was it to have riots and fires, lawlessness and crime? • To whose advantage was it to have disreputable “deputies” do these things? • Why were only freight cars, largely hospital wrecks, set on fire? • Why have the railroads not yet recovered damages from Cook County, Illinois, for failing to protect their property? Why are they so modest and patient with their suits? • The riots and incendiarism turned defeat into victory for the railroads. They could have won in no other way. They had everything to gain and the strikers everything to lose.” (10) • Perjury & manipulations of court • Mysterious illness of a juror, trial suspended (10-12)

3. The Supreme Court of the United States, consisting wholly of trained and successful corporation lawyers, affirmed the proceedings and President Cleveland says that they have “written the concluding words of this history.” • Did the Supreme Court of the United States write the “concluding words” in the history of chattel slavery when it handed down Chief Justice Taney’s decision that black man had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect”? (7)

4. Sedition Conviction • June 16, 1918, Debs gives speech urging resistance to WWI draft • Wilson calls him “a traitor to his country” • Sentenced to 10 years • President Harding commutes sentence to time served in 1923 • On return to Terre Haute, IN, greeted by crowd of 50,000 and marching bands

5. Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. • Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change—but if possible by peaceable and orderly means, • Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day, and from that time until now my heart has been with the working class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison…”

6. “if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity… • I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all…”

7. “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” • Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan • “This order of things cannot always endure. • Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.”

8. Walter Lippmann • 1889-1974 • Public intellectual • Report & columnist • Two-time Pulitzer winner • A founder of The New Republic • Adviser to Wilson during WWI

9. “It is the thesis of this book that the members of the public, who are the spectators of action, cannot successfully intervene in a controversy on the merits of the case. They must judge externally, and they can act only by supporting one of the interests directly involved.” (93) • For the citizen, public affairs “are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, bu unnamed powers. As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried.” (3) • “In the cold light of his experience he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but does not in fact govern.” (4)

10. Even in presidential elections, less than half of citizens vote. • In a Chicago mayoral election, less than half voted. 70% of those who did not “representing about half a million free and sovereign citizens of this Republic, did not even pretend to have a reason for not voting, which, in effect, was an admission that they did not care about voting.” • Not just in America (6-9)

11. It is commonly argued that education will allow the citizen to engage in politics, but it is not clear “how, while he is earning a living, rearing children and enjoying his life, he is to keep himself informed about the progress of this swarming confusion of problems.” • Example: Taxation, tariffs, international relations • “The citizen gives but a little of his time to public affairs, has but a casual interest in facts and but a poor appetite for theory.” • “Unless he can discover some rational ground for fixing his attention where it will do the most good, and in a way that suits his inherently amateurish equipment, he will be as bewildered as a puppy trying to lick three bones at once.” (14-15)

12. Can morality be the guide? • No. • “It will require more than a good conscience to govern modern society, for conscience is no guide in situations where the essence of the difficulty is to find a guide for the conscience.” • Besides, “there are too many moral codes. • Whose morality would we follow? To appeal to morality only begs the question. • “One of the conditions which engenders politics and makes political organization necessary is the conflict of standards.” • “The order we recognize as good is an order suited to our needs and hopes and habits.” (18-23)

13. Mystical Fallacy • Almost everyone embraces the “mystical fallacy of democracy,” assuming “that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress onward such an ideal.” • Example: California ‘proposition’ system: Prop. 13, mandated spending, and the UC budget • “I think it is a false ideal. I do not mean an undesirable ideal.” • “An ideal should express the true possibilities of the subject. When it does not, it perverts the true possibilities. The ideal of the omnicompetent , sovereign citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal. • It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment.” • “The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen.” (28-29)

14. “Specific opinions give rise to immediate executive acts” • Stay or go, buy or sell, date or dump, etc. • “But general opinions lead only to some sort of expression, such as voting, which do not result in executive acts except in cooperation with the general opinions of large numbers of other persons.” • “Since the general opinions of large numbers of persons are almost certain to be a vague and confusing medley, action cannot be taken until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed and made uniform.” • The public opinion thus “consists essentially in the use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas. Because feelings are much less specific than ideas, and yet more poignant, the leader is able to make a homogenous will out of a heterogeneous mass of desires.” (36-38)

15. “In governing the work of other men by votes or by the expression of opinion [citizens] can only reward or punish a result, accept or reject alternatives presented to them. They can say yes or no to something that has been done, yes or no to a proposal, but they cannot create, administer and actually perform the act they have in mind.” • “To the realm of executive acts, each of us, as a member of the public, remain always external. Our public opinions are always and forever, by their very nature, an attempt to control the actions of others from the outside.” (42)

16. “A vote is a promise of support. It is a way of saying: I am lined up with these men. I enlist with them. I will follow. I will buy. I will boycott. I will strike. I applaud. I jeer. The force I can exert is placed here, not there.” • “The action of a group as a group is the mobilization of the force it possesses.” • The rule of the majority, democracy, is justified not by moral superiority, but by “the sheer necessity of finding a place in civilized society for the force which resides in the weight of numbers.” • An election is “a sublimated and denatured civil war.” • This is why some things are placed outside of majority rule (46-48)

17. “We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.” (52) • “In estimating the burden which a public can carry, a sound political theory must insist upon the largest factor of safety. It must understate the possibilities of public action.” (53) • “The public will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who is the villain of the piece.” (55)

18. The public “is aroused at evil made manifest by the interruption of a habitual process of life. And finally, a problem ceases to occupy attention not when justice, as we happen to define it, has been done but when a workable adjustment that overcomes the crisis has been made.” (57) • “The ideal of public opinion is to align men during the crisis of a problem in such a way as to favor the action of those individuals who may be able to compose the crisis. The power to discern those individuals is the end of the effort to educate public opinion.” (58)

19. The general public is “a mere phantom. It is an abstraction.” • “The public is not, as I see it, a fixed body of individuals. It is merely those persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.” (67) • The ‘public’ is an entity whose compostion changes according to what problems exist

20. “There is no human point of view here, but only the points of view of men. None is valid for all human beings, none for all of human history, none for all corners of the globe. An opinion of the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, the pleasant and the unpleasant, is dated, is localized, is relative. It applies only to some men at some time in some place under some circumstances.” • The solution to a problem is “little more than that two conflicting interests have found a modus vivendi.” Yet they remain conflicting interests! • “The modus vivendi of any particular historical period, the system of rights and duties, has generally acquired some religious or ideal sanction. • The system under which a people live “will be a reflection of the power that each ancient is able to exert.” (87-92)

21. For public problems, “when nobody any longer objects there is a solution.” • Thus, “the public interest in a problem is limited to this: that there shall be rules, which means that the rules which prevail shall be enforced, and that the unenforceable rules shall be changed according to a settled rule.” • “The is only one common interest: that all special interests shall act according to a settled rule.” • When there is doubt to the validity of a rule, the public requires a simple, objective test • “First, is the rule defective?” • “Second, how shall the agency be recognized which is most likely to mend it?” • These are “the only questions which a member of the public can usefully concern himself is he wishes to avoid ignorant meddling.” (94-98)

22. Making New Rules • The test for which an old rule has been broken justifiably in favor of a new rule is popular assent • One can cite many counter examples from history, but as a matter of course the “dogma that assent is necessary is imperfect, as are most principles, but nevertheless, it is a necessary assumption in society. For if no new rule required assent everyone could make his own rule, and there would be no rules.” • Free public discussion is necessary because it allows the identification of the self-interested and the partisan, as all sides attack one another • Not that these are bad, it’s just useful to know this when deciding who to support • Leaders can be recognized by their ability to mobilize the force of their supporters (106-114)

23. “To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government.” • Ins become bound to a course of action based on former policy, Outs may be more flexible • Very different parties would be bad, as the defeated would always be on the verge of revolt • The role of the public is to approve or disapprove, not to propose or to execute • If the public cannot has no grounds to judge or when only knowledge of the actual fact known by insiders can be used to judged, the public should “keep an open mind and wait to see. The existence of a usable test is itself the test of whether the public ought to intervene.” (115-132)

24. What is the nature of these tests? • “1. Executive action is not for the public. The public acts only by aligning itself as the partisan of some one in a position to act executively. • 2. The in intrinsic merits of a question are not for the public. The public intervenes from the outside upon the work of the insiders. • 3. The anticipation, the analysis and the solution of a question are not for the public. The public’s judgment rests on a small sample of the facts at issue.

25. 4. The specific, technical, intimate criteria required for the handling of a question are not for the public. The public’s criteria are generalized for many problems; they turn essentially on procedure and the overt, external forms of behavior. • 5. What is left is for the public is a judgment as to whether the actors in the controversy are following a settled rule of behavior or their own arbitrary desires. This judgment must be made by sampling an external aspect of the behavior of the insiders. • 6. In order that this sampling shall be pertinent, it is necessary to discover criteria, suitable to the nature of public opinion, which can be relied upon to distinguish between reasonable and arbitrary behavior.

26. 7. For the purposes of social action, reasonable behavior is conduct which follows a settled course whether in making a rule, in enforcing it or in amending it.” (134-135) • “The fundamental difference which matters is that between insiders and outsiders.” • The truth is that “Competence exists only in relation to function; that men are not good, but good for something; that men cannot be educated, but only educated for something.” • “The force that of public opinion is partisan, spasmodic, simple-minded and external.” (140-41)