THE OUTLOOK, February 8, 1928. Volume 148, Number 6. Published weekly by The Outlook Company at 120 East 16th Street, New York, N. Y. Subscription price $5.00 a year. Single copies 15 cents each. Foreign subscription to countries in the postal Union, $6.56. Entered as second-class matter, July 21, 1893, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., and December 1, 1926, at the Post Office at Dunellen, N. J., under the Act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1928, by The Outlook Company.

M

OST people like to know something about the writers whose opinions they read in article form. Hendrik Willem Van Loon, for instance-whom every one remembers for his "Story of Mankind"—is now living in Westport, Connecticut, whence he has recently published still another book, "America." His article on "Big Bill" Thompson, which heads this issue, was written at our request.

Arthur Davison Ficke, whose paper continues the discussion of marriage started some time since in The Outlook, is well known as a poet and essayist. His article is the result of reading Dr. Collins's recent paper and being considerably stirred up thereby. He has recently become a New Mexican, and lives near Santa Fé.

Charles Merz is an editorial writer for the New York "World." He surveys life from the high tower of the Pulitzer Building, and of late has taken to penning essays and publishing them in "Harper's," The Outlook, and elsewhere.

THESE three men have written the

leading articles in this issue. But the mere rehearsal of their names makes us wonder whether our readers often reflect on the number of other minds which have busied themselves in making this magazine-men who are studying politics and foreign affairs; women who are spending their time with modern authors and with humble people; critics who are attending concerts, theatres, and movies; journalists who are going to Senatorial debates in Washington, to political meetings in Paris, or motor-boat shows in New York; editors who are weighing current happenings, day by day, and ascertaining the facts sent them from special correspondents from Texas, California, London.

Volume 148

T

HE psychologists have a nice lit

tle game. They mention a word . . . any word at all. .. Coolidge . . . sevenhundredandseventyseven... brown . . . dog-eared, or whathave-you? The patient is supposed to answer those queries with the rapidity of a machine gun. And the professor by means of such an examen rigorosum is able to establish the co-efficient of the patient's grandmother's reaction to the beauty stimulus of the Winged Victory within one-tenth of a centigrade of correctness.

For several years Big Bill Thompson, of Chicago, has been general provider of psychological fun for the politely amused citizens of the Eastern seaboard. Just whisper "Thompson" to anybody that lives east of Buffalo, and he will reply at once: "Big Bill, eh? There is fool for you! A great big, blustering heman. He is making us the laughingstock of the whole world. He is just an ignorant demagogue. All right for a city where everybody carries a gun. But there is nothing to him-just absolutely nothing. He is a false alarm. He has a crowd of followers among the riff-raff of the stockyards. But he is of no importance. Of no importance at all. He will continue to make a little noise for a little while longer, then even his own people will tire of him. No, sir, there's nothing to him but a lot of noise. A few months more, then we shall turn to more serious matters and we shall never hear of him again."

I respectfully beg to disagree with this statement and with this sentiment. My opinion of the Hon. William is not very high. As a matter of fact, I sincerely and honestly believe that we I would be much better off if the Hon. William had gone on one of those distant expeditions of which he is forever talking. But I am afraid of the man. He is no fool. To millions of his neigh

bors he is a hero, and at the next Presidential election he is going to be a serious menace. All of which I hope to prove to you with the minimum of words and a minimum of personal resentment.

I use the word "hero," and I mean the word in its original sense, as one "favored by the gods." The gods in this case are of our own making. They are the slightly spurious deities created by the propaganda bureaus of the Allied and Associated nations during the recent upheaval in Europe. They are the false divinities that were called upon in our hour of need, but which ought to have been relegated back to the limbo of oblivion the moment the German war monster had been sent to the Hohenzollerische Kriegs-Museum,

Big Bill is not a pleasant phenomenon of our present political development. But he is a creature of our own making.

There is no use in getting angry about him or over him or at him.

We will have to bear with him as Germany had to bear with the depreciation of the mark, and as Russia has to bear with the visitation of Bolshevism, and that is that.

WE

HEN the war came, we were on our way to become an "American" people. Don't ask me to give a definition of the word "American." I know what I mean when I write it, and you probably know what I mean when you read it. We were transplanted Europeans, but, unlike other transplanted Europeans in different parts of the world, we had cheerfully and willingly broken the thread that bound us to our diverse fatherlands and mother countries. Some people had broken that thread more successfully than others, but in a general way it was safe to say that we felt that we were, and by rights ought to be, something different from mere "colonials;" that we had a special, al

Number 6

most divine duty to be something different; and that the world in general would be better off if we succeeded in becoming something entirely different.

Then came the war, and all our good resolves came to naught. And right here I must draw your respectful if shocked attention to a development which was as sudden as it was unsuspected. The famous melting-pot, that mysterious caldron of national and racial prejudices which was supposed to distill a million heterogeneous elements into a compact mass of sound American citizenry, suddenly ceased to function. Once more blood threatened to manifest its well-known tendency to prove stronger than the water of the broad ocean which separated us from our conscious past.

Most of our people reverted back to their immediate past. But whereas in the case of the Anglo-Saxon this was regarded as a token of righteousness, it was denounced as a sign of unmistakable wickedness if the suspected citizen happened to bear the name of Mueller or Meier and was the grandson of a humble burgher born in Cologne or of a woman who hailed from Wolffenbuettel.

In short, one-half of the Nation, the half that socially and financially was the strongest, turned savagely upon the other half, that was supposed to live in beery ignorance among the wilds of Minnesota and Wisconsin and Illinois and Ohio, and set itself up as the spiritual keeper of a newly discerned National virtue that looked for all the world like a statue of Beatrice Lillie posing as Britannia, That those selfish descendants of the Meiers and Muellers made excellent and eager soldiers, that they bought billions of Liberty Bonds, that they were the grandchildren of people who had every reason to detest the German war machine and were willing to do battle upon it to the utmost of their

courage and ability-all those little items were entirely overlooked in the moment of anxiety and panic. The names of those unfortunate pariahs were wrong. They sang the wrong songs. They ate the wrong food. They were apt to consider Goethe a greater man than immortal William. Hence they must be harassed and badgered and called names and threatened and be made to feel that they were only "citizens on probation." Of course, they did not like this at all. But they were helpless. Brother Palmer enrolled a million bright young citizens to act as his spies and agents provocateur. The rest was Leavenworth and silence.

A

LL of which brings us to Big Bill and the "situation" along the banks of Lake Michigan. I shall tell you little about the antecedents of Big Bill. Contrary to the opinion generally held in the East, he is not an ignorant product of the slums. He belongs to an old family of Anglo-Saxon stock. He was never obliged to worry about his daily bread and jam, having been born to a considerable amount of money and leisure. He received a good all-round education. He may torture the King's English upon occasion, but he is familiar with correct usage of the President's vernacular. Also he is ambitious.

As far as I can see, that ambition is the entirely righteous ambition to be elected President of the United States of America.

Now, somewhere in his early youth, Big Bill must have read a life of Henry IV. That shrewd monarch, on changing his religious allegiance, made the famous and practical remark that "Paris was worth going to an occasional mass."

Big Bill does not have to go to mass unless he wants to please his Irish friends. His problem is infinitely easier. All he has to do is to make an occasional clown of himself to gain the instant good will of millions of his fellow-citizens. Surely he is not the first one to discover that the road to the White House does not run through the realm of reason and that one emotion in the hand is worth ten sound facts in the bush.

The emotion in question is as simple as it is fundamental.

Big Bill appeals almost exclusively to the people who have a grievance.

People with a grievance make the best of all possible constituents.

And in the case of Thompson they are the people who during the war were allowed to do their share and who in re

turn for their services were denounced as an inferior grade of citizens and as “undesirable aliens" by thousands of young men with nifty khaki trousers and the agreeable consciousness that for once in their lives they were "gentlemen," even if it had taken an act of Congress to make them so.

THE steamboat lines inform us every

year that almost half a million citizens go to Europe. It is generally supposed that such trips to foreign lands broaden the traveler. Unfortunately, the majority of those trippers do not go to foreign shores to learn, but to teach. They regard themselves as harbingers of good tidings. They are prophets of a new era. They want to instruct the backward tribes of the war-torn Continent in the ways of peace and prosperity, of soda fountains and wardrobe trunks. This does little harm to the nations thus afflicted; they keep the change and continue to gather around the wine bottle and to travel with cardboard boxes and bundles done up in last week's "Figaro." But such pilgrimages devoted

America acted in precisely the same way toward the mother country during the days of the Revolution? Had they not plotted with all the enemies of Great Britain to gain their own independence? Had they not made an alliance with France, the traditional enemy of everything that hailed from across the Channel? Had they not accepted money from the unspeakable Catherine of Russia? Had they not taken loans from Holland and cajoled that country into another and disastrous war with England? And how about that regrettable event in the year 1812, when America made war upon England at the very moment the island was threatened with a French invasion? I am not taking sides in the argument, I am merely trying to show you that those who are the loyal friends of Big Bill (because he is their loyal friend) feel that they have a perfectly good cause. It may seem a bad cause to us, but the ballot-box is impartial and a million Irish votes for the Hon. William are a million votes. Eastern papers please copy.

an understanding of foreign ways of thought among the actual crusaders, and, as a result, while we visit more foreign countries than any other nation, we know less about our neighbors than does the man in the moon.

In times of peace this sublime and proud ignorance does not matter. But when we are at war it becomes a very serious question, and if history or experience could ever teach anybody anything the recent conflict would have shown us the error of our ways.

Take the Irish, who are among the stanchest of the Hon. William's supporters. The professional Anglo-Saxons of the East felt, and continue to feel, that the Irish were miserable traitors to the cause of righteousness; that they used the occasion when the dear mother country was sorely beset by her Teutonic enemies to attack the dear mother country in the back, and that they hoped to gain their own freedom with the help of the German submarines and German machine guns.

The Irish, if I am correctly informed, did not see things in quite that light. In the first place, they flatly refused to regard Great Britain as the mother country. At best it was stepmother, with all the worst features of that sort of synthetic parent. But, even granted that Ireland was a dependency or a colony of England, had not the United States of

of course, is exceptional. For fifty years the honest Teutons had been held up as the paragons of all the civic virtues. The Germans were hard-working. The Germans loved their families. They did not graft. They might not be very ornamental, but they were thorough and thrifty, and during the Rebellion they had enlisted to a man and had borne the brunt of many a desperate battle in the wilderness and in the valley of the Mississippi. Came the war, and overnight those patient plodders became the "enemy in our midst." Their music was proscribed. Their language was denounced as a guttural dialect of Beelzebub. Their books were publicly burned. Their teachers were forced to devote themselves to Spanish ("such a great future before us in Latin America now that the Hun has been driven from the sea!") and to elementary French. Their natural leaders, who had been the open and avowed enemies of "Prussianism" when Theodore Roosevelt went fishing with Kaiser Bill and President Butler, and Brother Ochs in a special number of the "Times" celebrated William II as "the greatest genius of the age," were denounced as hired agents of the unspeakable Potsdam Gang and were either driven into a broken-hearted grave or were tolerated to exist in obscurity while their sons hastened to the nearest recruiting station and contrib