Crowds and Crises

IT is probable that no one who was not in England during the amazing days of early May can ever appreciate or understand that adventure of the human spirit, the General Strike. Nevertheless there are some aspects of it which can be described — which, in the interests of living history, must be described before the emotional excitement has subsided from the observers who, like myself, looked on and played no part.

For it is not as an episode in politics or in economic conflict—not, indeed, as a conflict at all — that the General Strike will remain in our memory, but, to use a dangerous phrase, as a new variety of religious experience. There will be political repercussions, there have been economic losses, it is true; but with such material impoverishment there is the undoubted fact that there has also been an emotional enrichment, that the strike has acted as a cathartic within our minds. And in this aspect let us briefly consider it.

The General Strike is a matter of crowd psychology, and it is therefore to be deplored that so much has been written around that phrase that it has become a cliché and its user a prejudged bore. The mutations of Psyche, the youngest and most human of the immortals, have been many, but they have reached perhaps their lowest depths of stupidity and muddiness in that part of psychology known popularly as crowd psychology.

But if we can forget all that unimaginative sociologists and psychologists have told us about it, what a thing is a crowd! And by a crowd I mean a real one, such as the crowds of the strike week, so different from the crowds of textbooks or of the stage.

A stage crowd can never be natural, for its members know through rehearsal and previous experience what is required of them. How different the crowd in Whitehall and Downing Street on Monday of the fateful week! It was a mass of individuals cemented together by the common fact that they were all thrown off their beat. They were faced with the knowledge that something had happened, something which would soon have tangible and visible results, though as yet it was invisible; and they seemed to be waiting for this thing to reveal itself. Just as everything appeared to the Greek in corporeal form, so these crowds hoped, one might think, by waiting, to see the personified form of chaos or civic strife hover above the street.

They were absolutely silent; for ten minutes no one spoke. Newcomers arrived, taking off their hats as they passed the Cenotaph, pausing like a drop of rain on the window and then, with an almost appreciable jerk, coalescing with the other drops in the crowd. One after another they looked round as if to catch an eye, a wan ghost of a smile ready to break the tension, but they gave up the attempt, and stood, waiting, and watching nothing.

Neither hope nor fear was evident in the Monday crowds, and I believe that if nothing had happened everyone would have been keenly disappointed. The crowd and the coming strike were linked by a bond for which there is only one analogy, the inevitability of childbirth. The pangs could not be stopped, nor would anyone wish them stopped; the crowd felt itself the mother of the strike, incapable of stopping the pain, and not anxious that it should be stopped. And, having nothing to do as yet for the new life, while the old one was already meaningless, it waited without comment.

Rather less than twelve years ago the same crowd stood in the same place — a larger crowd, but as silent. On August 3, 1914, we waited to hear of war. If the members of that crowd waiting for war could have been honest with an inquirer, they would have had to admit that they wanted war simply because they wanted something new to happen. Their silence was a breathless hope rather than a breathless apprehension, a hope that the monotony of life was going to be broken. It is perhaps important that we should consider this, for those who make war on war are apt to overstress the part played by hatred and pugnacity in the days when the crowds stand waiting. I think that the Germans and hatred of them were for long a rationalization, an excuse, which enabled men to throw themselves into action, which broke the decorous but unsatisfying monotony of life.

And the crowds of Tuesday bear out this suggestion. Look at them as they march down this same Whitehall and the parallel Embankment — an army returning from work; returning from work as they have done every workday for all their working lives. Yet what a difference there is in to-day’s return! Not a tram, not a bus, not an underground train; men, shop girls, office girls, everyone walking. Are there signs of resentment? Not at all; everybody is smiling; a broad grin from whosoever may catch your eye. The strike, you would think, has not even brought inconvenience, but rather release from monotony. No happier crowd has ever been seen than the crowd of office workers who walked home on the first day of the General Strike.

There is another important fact which the demeanor of that Tuesday crowd confirmed: London becomes at moments of crisis, and particularly at moments of industrial crisis, supremely unimportant. It falls into the background, it becomes exceptional rather than typical, its crowds do not understand or feel the significance of what is happening. This is not true, of course, of a war crisis, because then London and the Government are the centre and the crowds the symbol of a national unity; but in a strike it is perfectly true. It would matter little to the conduct of a great strike if every worker in London refused to obey the order to cease work, and a unanimous strike in London, such as occurred in May, can only bring inconvenience, and not great impoverishment of industry. And so the Tuesday crowd in London was more interesting to the observer than a crowd in South Wales, or Lancashire, or Glasgow, simply because it was care-free; it had nothing in the world of daily bread to gain or to lose by the strike, no starvation or poverty to fear, and so the strike brought it merely a boon, the boon of new and unconventional action.

Meanwhile, with those whose nature was antagonistic to the self-annihilation of crowds, affairs began to produce a very deep depression. Partly, this depression was rational and due to a knowledge that, things were drifting on to dangerous rocks. But there was more in it than that: if you sink yourself bodily into a crowd and yet keep your thoughts and emotions free from the waves of feeling around you, you will become full of resentment at your own isolation. Such depression is due to feeling that there is something important happening and that you are out of it. If a man finds himself at an uncongenial play which is heartily received by everyone else in the audience, he is not merely bored, but melancholy; and the stimulus for his black bile comes not across the footlights so much as from his neighbors. That is why intelligent people shrink from crises in a democracy and why they abdicate their authority if a crisis comes.

And on Wednesday an act of God, so it seemed, provided the fit environment for such depression; for a thick yellow and black mantle of fog suddenly swooped down on the city at midday and turned it into one of those satanic landscapes which all Americans believe permanent in London, though they occur actually only about five times in a year. It would be difficult to recall the horror and yet the appropriateness of those two hours; it was as if the weather had determined to reflect all moods — the week gave us sun, rain, cold, and wind in succession — and not to forget even the mood of the individualists who had resisted the crowd emotions.

By Thursday the crowds had changed their mood again; the novelty of walking had worn thin sooner than the shoe leather under the unwonted strain, and, moreover, certain realities of the situation had become apparent. Just as crowds wait about in silence long before the crisis begins, so they fail to recognize its existence for long after. But by Thursday another emotional necessity had begun to show itself: people felt they must ‘do something.’ The vast majority, of course, were answering the Government’s call for volunteers, for special constabulary, for drivers; but this was not so much from ‘loyalty’ as from a determination to play a part.

One business man summed up the feeling of a great many brokers: ‘I think both sides are wrong, and I have very little sympathy with either, but if there is anything I can do to help or hinder either side, I am perfectly willing to do it.’ Many people volunteered to help the Government and, finding nothing to do, volunteered to help the Trades Union Council; and vice versa.

And along with new activities came new human associations; yet again we saw a human society which, like all societies, spends most of its time in normal days building up and maintaining conventions, barriers, and divisions between man and man, seizing upon the welcome opportunity to destroy and ignore these very fabrications. Motorists everywhere pasted notices on their windscreens, offering pedestrians lifts to various distant destinations, and girls stood at corners where once they would have caught a bus in order to hail a more cheerful driver in a less costly vehicle.

The visitor to America is early surprised and delighted at the frequency with which he is offered a lift by passing automobiles. Not so in England. Very few are the drivers who willingly raise up a deserving pedestrian. Owing to the appalling number of motor vehicles which litter their continent, Americans have evolved rules, conventions, and courtesies in the motoring sphere which have not yet appeared in England; and one of them is this rule of hospitality which links the new nomadism to the caravans of the Ancient World.

In this matter, then, we may say that the General Strike led to a temporary Americanization of Londoners; but in another direction it accentuated a trait which is thoroughly un-American. Walking down Fifth Avenue, in my capacity of detached observer of human nature, I have noted that the charm of the better-dressed crowds of American girls is diminished by the fact that they never catch your eye as you pass. In Oxford Street it is very different: people smile at one another and even accept invitations to tea from perfect strangers. This is reprehensible, doubtless, but it is also human nature in Oxford Street. ‘Picking-up’ is an English virtue practised by many respectable people in normal times and requiring nothing more than a sense of social geography, — for there are sections of London where such genial friendliness might be misconstrued into a request for what the Victorian Age called ‘bought kisses,’ — but there never has been so remarkable an example of mass picking-up as during the General Strike. And we must add to the credit side of that event the opportunities it gave to shy men to meet and be friendly to new feminine faces.

Moreover, the habit soon became universal. One of the surprises of the strike was the way in which the taxi men joined unanimously in a movement which they as owner-drivers could not be expected to support; but quite early in the first day mass picking-up produced a situation wherein there were more empty taxis than full, despite the complete absence of all other vehicles plying for hire in the streets; and it is hard to imagine that this fact had no part in their apparently cordial support of the strike, for now that they are back again fares are still scarce, so easy has it been to acquire the habit of expecting free transport from strangers.

Friday came with new emotions added to all these: people began to be tired and annoyed. Moreover, rumors of how crowds were pulling girls and others off blackleg buses began to increase the general irritation. Perhaps the most significant new thing was the constancy with which people expressed their sympathy with the miners, and this suggests another factor in the emotional make-up of ordinary men.

Crowds upon whom action has been forced require something against which they can exert themselves; this is the genesis of hatred. In a crowd, sooner or later you must hate; but as human beings are by nature generous and friendly long before they are hostile and cruel, crowds limit their hatred as far as is possible. Thus, in the war, crowds were sedulously taught to hate Germans; but their hatred extended to Austrians, Bulgarians, and Turks only in the most attenuated form. Had there been no General Strike the miners would probably not have become objects of sympathy, but since the General Strike absorbed the emotion of hatred like blotting paper, people were well enough disposed to the other and lesser struggle.

And yet it remains a mystery why so little hatred was aroused. Chief constables in many districts reported that the conduct of the strikers was exemplary; police and strike pickets everywhere helped one another to carry out their difficult work; billiard tournaments were arranged between the special constables and strikers; the crowds were quiet and good-humored. At Hammersmith trouble was reported, but all that it proved to be was the pulling of some volunteer drivers off buses, and the yelling of ‘scab’ and ‘blackleg,’ and general booing by strikers and their sympathizers.

Why was this? It was not because the strike was unpopular with the men themselves: very early it became clear that it was a rank and file movement, spontaneous and determined. Unions came out before they were called by their leaders, and we have yet to learn if they are going to answer the call to return without delay.

Some will attribute the general goodwill to the absence of inflammatory newspapers; they will probably be wrong, but the absence of newspapers was undoubtedly one of the most significant new phases of social experience, and the possibilities for the future in this direction are many.

It must not be forgotten that the General Strike began as a newspaper strike, and it could not have had a more surprising beginning. On Monday one of the most read of the London daily papers did not appear; workers in the printing department, on their own initiative and with instructions from nobody, refused to print an article which they considered unfair and inflammatory. Apart altogether from the question of the justice of such an action, it was at least sensational; but even more sensational was what happened on Monday afternoon. The neighborhood of Leicester Square is occupied by many news vendors, whose chief trade in evening papers is with the betting fraternity and its customers. A van appears, a bundle of papers is thrown out; the air becomes raucous with shouts of ‘2.30 Winner!’ and the street gaudy with placards screaming in yellow and red, ‘2.30 Winner.’

To-day it was different: the news vendors did not even unfurl their placards or call their wares; if requested, they sold a newspaper furtively, unwillingly; the papers were few and they were keeping them for their regular customers. The evening papers, all three, had been stopped by the printers; direct action was upon us with a vengeance.

From that moment newspapers ceased to exist, seeing that the little sheets produced from day to day carried none of the associations of the usual paper; and for the first time the crowds found themselves without their Greatest Common Measure, the daily press. The hastily improvised official British Gazette and the trade-union bulletin, the British Worker, in no way filled the gap, and the way was cleared for the final victory of the youngest of man’s great inventions. The old lady nodding over her crystal receiver and listening-in to the Savoy Havana Band scarcely realized all the things which had happened to her. The grandson who put the set up during the Christ mas holidays with an enthusiasm for the machine-making which would flag after half an hour’s experience of its use — he did not realize either. Nor yet did that happy family of wireless ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ who succeed night after night in being natural while engaged in the ludicrous task of talking into a little box behind which crouch two million hidden auditors — an act of faith surely unrivaled in the history of religion. None of us realized what had happened until the General Strike.

Yet, in a phrase, wireless has transported us out of the days of imperial obesity into the days of the city-state of the Greeks and the Romans, for the simple reason that once more we are members of a state whose boundaries are narrow enough to permit the gathering of all its citizens within the sound of one voice. We realize that now, for when the caprice of the political arena had shuffled away from us the old cement of crowds, the newspapers, the reality of the new crowd, the radio crowd, impressed itself upon our consciousness with a new force.

And what can we prophesy of this new crowd? It will be less emotional and more thoughtful: for while in the old crowd feelings became accentuated and thoughts were canceled out, in the radio crowd the process may be reversed, since radio is inimical to feeling — witness the sad fate that befalls a broadcast joke. Nobody ever laughs at a joke until he has heard others beginning to laugh, and so a joke which comes to us on the radio is a failure though hundreds of thousands may have heard it, simply because we have not heard them. Surely, in the radio crowd, feeling is at a discount.

This, then, was a new human experience; without warning, without expectation, without hope, millions of people, unseen, unknown, a crowd whose members were all alone, or nearly so, heard a voice say: ‘The following notice is official: “The General Strike is at an end.”’

Later news said that the announcement was received calmly, which may be interpreted as meaning thoughtfully rather than emotionally. Is, then, the radio crowd not a crowd at all? Since, apparently, with it feelings are not accentuated and thoughts not canceled out, does it not belong in the least to the devious paths of crowd psychology? Perhaps we can hope for a new and portentous thing from it : a crowd which by reason of its strange combination of multitude and solitude feels like the old crowd, yet keeps that feeling insulated, keeps it from discharging itself. meaninglessly into the ground or air, through those curious explosions of useless energy, human laughter and tears, keeps it until it can be used at a future date for good and useful action. This would indeed be a great contribution to social possibilities.

There is one other lasting result of the General Strike which we must mention: it is the adoption as a national hymn of William Blake’s poem, ‘Jerusalem.’ Measured by some quite permissible standards this is the most remarkable thing that could have happened. For some years the verses, cryptic though they be, have found a place in the songbooks of adult schools, Labor choirs, and various places where they sing ‘The Red Flag,’ the ‘Internationale,’ and the marching songs of William Morris.

Only a week or so before the strike a Conservative M. P. drew down upon himself the derisive wrath of his Labor opponents by quoting it in the House of Commons. Then, on the first Sunday of the strike, it was sung at the service broadcast from St. Martin’sin-the-Fields. Together with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon, it was heard by hundreds of thousands; and then, when the news of the sudden peace dropped down upon us from the radio, after messages from King and Prime Minister calling upon the nation to build a better world for all, the announcer, in a voice of emotion, recited it to the invisible crowds from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s; the wireless orchestra struck up the tune, the wireless staff and choir sang it, and, as it came through on loud speakers, waiting groups everywhere joined in.

A stranger application of great poetry has never been; and we may be perfectly certain that the thousands of people who have so suddenly accepted the new hymn have not the remotest idea what Blake meant. For the verses occur in the preface to the long prophetic book, Milton, in which he teaches that there is only one good, love and imagination, and one evil, law and realism; and here is the passage which precedes them: ‘Rouse up, O young men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the camp, the court, and the university, who would, if they could, forever depress mental and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ and His apostles that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. Me do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live forever in Jesus our Lord.’

And that is the revolutionary hymn with which we greeted the sudden vanishing of a revolution — a strange thing, perhaps, but one which is in keeping with the emotional immensity of our recent experience. For there is something bizarre about the whole of this affair: a nation of more than forty millions completely paralyzed, civicstrife involving everyone, high feeling, passion. And news came through that, on one afternoon of that week, in Paris some royalist demonstrators, sentimental adherents of a lost cause, clashed with the police; and in half an hour more people were injured than in all England during our week of conflict. A few bottles thrown, some tramlines deranged, broken glass and half a dozen broken heads —and yet we know that the shadow of death has passed very near the dream of life in which we live, and that even now we are pausing before the real labor of forging a better dream for the future. Well did Blake append to the verses which have become our new Marseillaise a quotation from the Book of Numbers: ‘Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets.’