The Irritating Qualities of Reformers

I

THE grandiloquent Roscoe Conkling, exasperated by proposals to stiffen the Federal Civil Service requirements, once burst out in the United States Senate, ‘When Dr. Johnson declared that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word “reform.”’ And even the best-behaved citizens, wearied by the aggressiveness or pertinacity of some ‘uplifter,’ have been ready in certain moods to subscribe to Conkling’s sentiments. If the reform which we desire could only be separated from its promoters — if only we could have the Jacqueminot without the thorns! Why is it that the pure in heart are often so unalluring and that transgressors are such good companions? What perversity makes so many of us flee at the approach of the ‘unco guid’ and tread the primrose path of dalliance unashamedly with the damned?

The craving to be ‘let alone’ is one of the first formed and most abiding of human instincts. Any normal child resents being told to wash his hands before dinner, and there is no grown-up who suffers admonishment with pleasure. ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,’ cried Sir Toby to the puritanical Malvolio, ‘there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ This query haunts us when some well-meaning but uninvited fanatic attempts to regulate our diet. The vegetarian is innocuous so long as he confines his theories to his own kitchen, but he may prove a pest if he insists that his neighbors renounce beef and mutton. Although anyone is legally entitled to practise asceticism, he is branded as an intolerable nuisance when he appoints himself a censor morum for his vicinage. If a secret ballot could be arranged, it would be found that very few missionaries are popular among those at whom they are preaching. Professor Barrett Wendell once bestowed upon Whittier the unmistakable compliment of being ‘ the least irritating of the reformers.’ When Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson spoke with admiration of William Lloyd Garrison to Mr. Augustus Aspinwall, the latter, a mild-mannered gentleman with soft blue eyes, merely sipped his claret and said, ‘It may be as you say. I never saw him, but I always supposed him to be a fellow who ought to be hung.’ Even reformers themselves seldom listen patiently to the reproofs of their associates. The late William Jennings Bryan, by whom any indulgence in alcoholic beverages was regarded as a lapse from virtue, was vexed when attention was drawn to his gluttony at the table. After all, that was his own affair!

Unfortunately for our happiness, a passion for effecting conversions is also a basic human attribute, latent in most of us and dominant in many. Those who have benefited by some ‘pain killer’ want others to try it and are readily persuaded to sign testimonials, with their photographs attached. If we are thrilled by some new faith, we are driven to shout its tenets from the housetops. This is a thoroughly natural feeling, resulting from motives psychologists analyze as a puzzling blend of selfishness and altruism; for, as Mr. M. A. DeWolfe Howe has pointed out, the twin qualities of an effective reformer are ‘absolute belief in a cause and, to an equal degree, in one’s self.’ Under favorable conditions it is possible for an enthusiast to imagine himself divinely designated to avert some evil or spread some doctrine. Then we have the invincible crusader, glowing with ardor, capable of amazing sacrifice, strengthened by opposition, and impervious to ridicule or abuse.

It would be grossly uncritical, of course, to put all reformers in the same category. There is a vast gulf, intellectually and morally, between a statesman bent on bringing a lasting peace to a war-burdened world and a fanatic who is trying to remove Voltaire’s Candide from the shelves of libraries. The advocate of more tolerable prison conditions must not be classed with the prohibitionist who believes that the drinking of amontillado is a sin. The modest and gentle Clara Barton, toiling ceaselessly for the relief of suffering, is quite different from the demented Carry Nation, with a tongue ‘hinged in the middle and loose at both ends,’ who knocked cigarettes from the lips of smokers. But the reformer’s career, no matter what changes he hopes to effect, is bound to be nerve-racking. Against him are the cumulative inertia, the sclerotic conservatism, of a society which, oblivious of its shortcomings, is rather smug and anæsthetized. Wherever he steps, he is on somebody’s toes. Whatever he says vexes some supporter of the old order. Soon he discovers that if he continues he will have to face an organized and truculent foe. If he is really a stubborn soul, — and no other should adopt reforming as a vocation, — he grows pachydermatous and, unaffected by ostracism and threats of martyrdom, glories in the wounds received in combat. It is, he perceives, essential for him to be irritating if he is to be efficient. Thus, whether or not we resent his persistency, he wings his darts until we show some reaction to the stimulus of their barbs; and he is likely to estimate his success as proportionate to the volume and intensity of our cries of pain and fury.

II

For examining worn-out theories, conducting experiments, and jarring the world out of its complacency, the reformer is indispensable. We need him badly. But his belligerency and singleness of purpose, so potent in the clash of wills, are also distasteful to those who have to confront them. The average American of the 1840’s, living at a distance from the Uncle Toms and Simon Legrees of the South, was indignant at the raucous intrusion of Garrison’s ‘ I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard.’ The advocates of votes for women achieved their end partly by becoming so quarrelsome that men yielded in order to secure peace, as a despairing husband makes concessions to a nagging spouse. The trouble is that the reformer allows us no repose. Hardly have we settled back in our armchairs after the day’s routine before he is at us again, with pamphlets and telegrams, insistent, mirthless, and implacable, justifying his impoliteness by the nobility of his cause. Whether we capitulate because of persuasion or because of weariness, he is happy. But even when we surrender we do not like our conqueror.

To function with the maximum of effectiveness, the reformer must take himself very seriously, with the conviction that he is, like Lord Curzon in the famous limerick, ‘a very superior person.’ A sense of humor is distracting as well as fatal to his professional aims. He must conduct himself as solemnly as Charles Sumner, who once confessed that he never assumed in his own study a posture which he would not have taken in the Senate of the United States. An eminently respectable lady, following the recent ‘wet’ triumph in Massachusetts, set Boston laughing by gravely declaring her intention of moving to Florida, where sobriety ruled; and she was apparently unconscious of irony. Nobody with even a primitive appreciation of the ludicrous could have set out to cleanse motion pictures by expurgating the spectacle of a woman sewing a layette or by purifying The Scarlet Letter through the introduction of ‘marriage lines.’ We are reminded of Thomas Bowdler, who emasculated Shakespeare’s works so that they could ‘ be read aloud by a gentleman to a company of ladies,’ or of that exquisite delicacy which, among the Victorians, employed the sanitary euphemisms of ‘ d—n ’ and ‘ d—l ’ for words which were taboo. Colonel Higginson was one of those rare reformers who have dared to laugh at themselves and at their fellow propagandists. The Comstocks and the Sumners, with a deadly earnestness in their eyes, have warded off danger. Nobody is less vulnerable than an opponent who cannot or will not see a joke.

Discriminating men naturally object to the disproportion exhibited by those reformers who, with their gaze focused on one evil, are blind to everything outside or beyond. To extremists like Garrison and Anthony Comstock, black was black and white was white, and there were no intermediate shades. Garrison, although he had never examined conditions on plantations, condemned unsparingly and with equal vehemence all slave owners, regardless of mitigating circumstances; and Comstock denounced with the same ferocity an obscene drawing and the ‘September Morn’ of Paul Chabas, or an obviously pornographic magazine and a medical monograph of scientific significance. The more violent prohibitionist recognizes no distinction between rare old Chambertin and the raw liquor of the bootlegger — both are poison! So the militant moralist perceives no gradations in error, but tilts with exultant rage at both giants and windmills. Careful observers, accustomed to cautious generalizations and to conclusions derived principally from facts, are troubled when a reformer deviates from accuracy. But he has his defense. He knows that he can fulfill his mission most expeditiously and thoroughly through exaggeration. Without the incessant beating of the verbal tomtom and the splash of gaudy color, he cannot attract the attention of those whose support he needs. Because the truth is not sufficiently vivid, he resorts to sensationalism.

This tendency toward overstatement is noticeable in the explosive language to which a thwarted reformer will sometimes have recourse in periods of excitement. Anybody who resists him is transformed at once into an enemy, to be feared and upbraided. No matter how sensitive he may be in his own conscience, he seldom tolerates a similar tenderness in men who have views different from his own. And why should he? If he is honestly convinced that he is infallible, why should he listen with forbearance to dissenters? It is only rarely that a so-called ‘moral issue’ is fairly debated. The prejudices involved are too strong.

When Charles Remond, the Negro agitator, said to Wendell Phillips, ‘George Washington was a villain,’ the latter replied, ‘Charles, the epithet is infelicitous.’ But Phillips himself, far from being distinguished by courtesy toward his adversaries, habitually indulged in billingsgate and, aristocrat though he was by birth and breeding, won an unenviable reputation for immoderate language. Senator Hoar once wrote of him, ‘If he failed to make an impression by argument, he took to invective. If vinegar would not answer, he resorted to cayenne pepper. If that failed, he tried to throw vitriol in the eyes of the men whom he hated.’ Most of the radical abolitionists of the 1850’s resembled Phillips in preferring epithets to logic as a means of expounding their gospel. Daniel Webster was peculiarly the object of their scurrility. Garrison, embittered by the Seventh of March Speech, responded, not by refuting its conclusions, but by depicting its author as an ‘enemy of the human race’ and ‘ the personification of all that is vile,’ and by asserting that the Massachusetts Senator kept a harem of colored women, some of them ‘ big black wenches, as ugly and vulgar as Webster himself.’ Only a few days after Webster’s funeral in 1852, a Christian clergyman, the Reverend Theodore Parker, delivered from a Boston pulpit a sermon which was a long series of falsehoods, in which he compared the statesman with Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr and described him as a ‘ keeper of slavery’s dogs.’ The same vindictive spirit led Carry Nation to picture clubmen as ‘diamondstudded, gold-fobbed rummies whose bodies are reeking masses of corruption.’ Some of the abuse bestowed today by irate ‘drys’ upon the ‘wets’ further illustrates the axiom that hell hath no fury like a reformer contradicted. With the certainty that God is on his side, he regards all opposition as emanating from the Devil and declines to treat it with anything but contempt.

Nor, in all fairness, can it be claimed that the ‘wets’ are guiltless of exaggerations and excesses. In these days they perhaps may be regarded as constituting a reforming party, and they certainly have their fanatics, their Garrisons and Parkers. Their incessant wailing over the invasion of their personal liberties and their daily predictions of disaster may, because of their very extravagance, be just as offensive as the ostentatious virtue of the ‘drys.’ How can an extremist retain his judgment? And how can a man of judgment become and remain an extremist?

III

Convinced that the movement to which he is consecrated transcends everything else in importance, the reformer can be frankly indifferent to any incidental damage which he may wreak while swinging his bludgeon. In all our history there have been few more dramatic incidents than Garrison’s appearance on Independence Day, 1854, in the public square at Framingham, Massachusetts, when he set fire to a copy of the Constitution of the United States, crying, ‘So perish all compromises with tyranny!’ In his unrestraint, he called it a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell,’ and became as openly a secessionist as Jefferson Davis. Characteristically enough, he never explained how the dissolution of the Federal compact would set the black man free. Ignoring all the feasible methods of abolishing slavery, he refused to cast a ballot or to shoulder arms, but merely kept up his ceaseless agitation. It is undoubtedly difficult for a high-minded idealist not to be partisan on moral questions; but these so-called moral questions are not altogether one-sided. Furthermore, even the most sincere reformers have their disagreements as to policies.

To what extent, for example, are they warranted in using deception in order to expose vice? Is it right to employ the bait of falsehood in order to catch the carp of truth? Anthony Comstock, we are told, sent out decoy letters with forged signatures, and, having induced a suspect to sell forbidden wares, produced the evidence thus obtained as a means of securing a conviction. The Massachusetts Watch and Ward Society, in a recent trial, acknowledged that, in its capacity as a protector of public morals, it occasionally relied on fraud and deceit for the detection of alleged indecent literature. Doubtless there are sincere prohibitionists who consider Carry Nation’s ‘ hatchetation ’ of saloons as justified by its effectiveness, and who are equally sympathetic with the summary procedure adopted by some contemporary enforcement officers in apprehending violators of the Volstead Act. To many respectable and law-abiding Americans, however, such practices are abhorrent. The problem as to what is permissible in the arrest and conviction of offenders is not easily settled, even by clergymen and judges.

One mistake lies in the supposition that the true reformer wishes to weigh evidence or to make a neat audit of the good or evil involved in a course of conduct. The power of his ideas lies much more in their emotional appeal than in their rationality, and he understands instinctively that it is easier to make people feel than to make them think. Some of our modern social crusaders are actuated by a spirit of the same potency as that which, in the Middle Ages, drove pilgrims on a mad journey to the Holy Land. Only a few months ago, an American socialist, Michael Gold, in a savage review of

The Woman of Andros, berated Thornton Wilder because the latter did not happen in his philosophy to be a disciple of Karl Marx; and the partisans of the ill-fated Sacco and Vanzetti burst out periodically in repudiation of the legal system which brought about their execution. Much of this venting of spleen is healthful enough, if only because it is the harmless release of pent-up emotions which, if denied a safety valve, might become hazardous to the state. Its untamed rhetoric, however, is disturbing to persons who are seriously occupied with the quest for truth, and who are confused, not convinced, by invective. Upton Sinclair’s superlatives, although sometimes based on facts, are resented by investigators who are doing their best, under many difficulties, to preserve a judicial attitude. Even when reformers are right, they may be irritating, especially to men who prefer to reach conclusions through their reason rather than through their intuitions.

Reformers, being lovers of publicity, ignore none of the recognized advertising channels and love to lecture and to write. Their clamorous egotism finds expression in such spots as Hyde Park, where on every Sunday morning voluble orators declaim hopefully on vivisection, birth control, pacifism, the single tax, vegetarianism, spiritualism, and anarchy. The prohibition controversy has released a torrent of eloquence from proselytizers seeking a place in the limelight. A reader of a newspaper like the New York Times soon grows familiar with the names of certain ‘cranks’ who address the editor at frequent intervals to elucidate their solutions of current problems. The freedom with which they bestow gratuitous advice upon an indifferent world is one of the most fascinating phenomena of our generation.

Most reformers are disposed to accept innovations without subjecting them to scrutiny. Garrison, typical in this as well as in other respects, was naïvely credulous, especially regarding patent medicines, and, to alleviate his physical ailments, would swallow draft after draft of the latest panacea. Everywhere in his house were boxes of pills and powders. Once, when he declared that an anti-scrofulous compound had permeated his system ‘in the most delightful manner,’ a friend commented, ‘Why, it was the first time he had taken a glass of grog, and he did n’t know how good it was!’ So, too, he accepted uncritically almost every suggested cure for the maladies of society and was so willing to sponsor any plausible theory that he was accused by one of his supporters of picking up ‘every infidel fanaticism afloat.’ Lowell, himself an abolitionist, once said of his associates, taken as a class, ‘They treat ideas as ignorant persons do cherries. They think them unwholesome unless they are swallowed, stones and all.’ There is a striking contrast between two such men as Webster and Garrison: the first practical and skeptical, always able to see both sides of a discussion and hesitant about changes; the other an avowed individualist, strongly prejudiced, gullible, and restless of intellect. Garrison was a ceaseless agitator, no sooner well occupied with one project than he had started another. When he was not condemning the use of tobacco, he was dallying with phrenology and clairvoyance; and, in his leisure moments, he denounced international boat races and pleaded with his adherents not to subscribe to the endowment of the college of which the ‘traitor’ Robert E. Lee was president.

Viewed from a sufficient remoteness in time or space, reformers may look picturesque, but most of them have been difficult to live with. They have usually been too self-centred and preoccupied. Frances Willard, the champion of woman’s rights and prohibition, once wrote, ‘I have always wanted to react upon the world about me to my utmost ounce of power; to be widely known, loved, and believed in — the more widely the better.’ A similar desire for domination affected Anthony Comstock, who managed every trivial detail of his wife’s housekeeping, checking her on even the smallest expenditure. The helpmeets of reformers must have moments when they regret the unofficial sainthood to which their husbands are dedicated.

Every conspicuous advance in civilization inevitably attracts, not alone its sincere and high-minded leaders, but also what Colonel Higginson called a body of ‘unbalanced and crotchety people,’ who, through their grotesque antics and utterances, sometimes almost nullify the work of those in control. Emerson, attending a gathering in 1840 of ‘the Friends of Universal Reform,’ wrote that the delegates were distinguished by ‘a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak,’ and was amused by the tumult in which various ‘queer’ persons drifted successively to the top — ‘madmen, mad women, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers.’ Such assemblies invariably become a refuge for weird obsessions and perversions, for esoteric creeds and isms. One such pugnacious extremist moved in an abolitionist conclave in 1841 that ‘the church and clergy of the United States, as a whole, constitute a GREAT BROTHERHOOD OF THIEVES’; and another, a woman, presented before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society a resolution asserting that ‘the sectarian organizations called churches are combinations of thieves, robbers, adulterers, pirates, and murderers.’ Each year a graduate of one of our colleges writes to its president, protesting against the smoking of cigars and cigarettes at the alumni dinner and describing graphically the deleterious effects of nicotine on the lungs and heart. The president, blessed with an unfailing sense of humor, merely smiles and dictates a courteous answer, pointing out the futility of trying to restrain his ‘old boys’ in their genial vices, and then secretes the complaint with its predecessors in his files.

The simplest defensive weapon against such eccentricities is doubtless ridicule or mild irony. The reformer’s appalling seriousness can best be dissipated by a laugh. But if such letters arrived every week, they would goad the recipient ultimately to some form of retaliation. Those who were so fortunate as to see Strange Interlude in New York were momentarily diverted at its suppression in Boston and at the discomfiture of their friends who had bought tickets; but that type of censorship, if persisted in, is most distasteful to sane and intelligent persons. Every once in a while, because of peculiar local conditions, some hero insists that the dozens of blue lawrs on the statute books shall be enforced to the letter; and at once groups of outraged voters rise up spontaneously in protest. No community will endure fanatical reformers beyond a certain point. When its patience is exhausted, it turns articulate, swings its mailed fist, and smites the censor — all of which means that it resolves, in matters of food and drink and amusement, to do what it. pleases.

Radical reformers, though much good may be ascribed to them, probably accomplish less than is commonly supposed. They inspire, it is true, but they do not always lead. In its permanent results, a violent revolution is not so operative as the slow growth produced less spectacularly by education. Among Webster’s most profound observations is a remark made quite casually at an almost forgotten Independence Day celebration in Barre, Massachusetts: ‘The exercise of political power for moral ends is worse than useless if it go in advance of popular approbation.’ It is this ‘popular approbation ’ which, especially in a democracy, cannot be ignored or overborne. The Negro was finally emancipated, not through methods approved by Garrison, but through those of Webster as they shaped themselves in the sagacious mind of Abraham Lincoln. Many respectable Americans are convinced that our nation was well on its way to temperance at the moment when, during the World War, prohibition was imposed upon a country not yet prepared for it. It may be a legitimate and beneficial duty of reformers to keep us uneasy, not only by closing miniature golf courses and motion pictures on Sunday, but also by purifying the drama and fumigating our literature. They will indubitably succeed in arousing our anger. But, whatever their victories in the past, — and that they have won victories no one can deny, — their work is more likely to endure when it is accomplished by persuasion rather than by force, and when their violence and exaggeration are curbed by the gentle rein of common sense.