The Daily Alaska Empire

Today and Tomorrow
By WALTER LIPPMANN
Masters of Their Fate
Copyright, 1933, New York Tribune Inc.

If you talk with the men who are directing the movement for recovery you will be given all sorts of theories to explain what they are doing. You will not find, I think, that they are working according to a comprehensive and definite plan. You will not find that there exists a clearly formulated policy embracing and coordinating the many different matters with which the government is concerned. Much is said about the New Deal. But there is no dogmatic creed, enunciated from on high, which everyone believes in who has responsibility in Washington.

Not only in the details of administration, but in the decisions of policy as well, circumstance and personality, individual force and eccentricity, factionalism and favoritism, accident and improvisation, rather than logic and theory and formulae, are usually the deciding elements. To some temperaments a close view of the conduct of affairs will, therefore, be discouraging. Looking for a sense of definite direction and clear purpose, they will find only arguments and practical expedience; they will see not a revolution and a reconstruction but a very active and energetic example of muddling through. To other temperaments the character of this movement will be neither astonishing nor discouraging. They will recall that the method of muddling through is the classic method of the English-speaking peoples, and that using this method these peoples have succeeded, as no other peoples have, in riding out the storms of history and remaining free.

Close doctrine and rigid purposes that apply to a whole nation have to be paid for; their price is the suppression of individuality and the regimentation of opinion. A community of free men, who proceed by argument to leadership and consent, necessarily work out their policies as they go along. Events rather than theories, experience rather than doctrine, supply the reasons by which men are brought into line. They do not advance in a straight line, but forward and backward and sidewise, and most of the time they look as if they did not know what they were doing or where they were going. Sometimes they do not know. But our political traditions teach us that it is better to move irregularly but with the minds of the people participating and convinced, than to impose grandiose logical patterns of conduct upon them, and compel them to obey.

As we look over the spectacular history of the past six months, nothing, it seems to me, is so impressive or so deeply reassuring as the evidence we have had that there are indeed great reserves of political wisdom in a nation habituated by self-government. The knowledge to do this or that particular thing may be lacking. We cannot be certain, for example, that we have chosen the best of all possible monetary policies. We do not know as yet how to adjust our internal measures to the outer world. We cannot see very far ahead as to how the agricultural control will work or what will be the consequences of the N. R. A.

But what we do know is that in the spring we overcame the paralysis of government in Washington, and were able to achieve unity of action. We do know that we were able to sweep aside the obstructions of organized minorities and the influences of private powers. We do know that we have seen new energies, new faces, young enterprising and hopeful minds in the responsible posts. We do know that the national spirit has been revived, that frightened calculation is giving way to confidence and even to magnanimity. Men no longer feel, as they did some months ago, that our society is doomed and that they are impotent; that they are caught in a current of forces which carries them irresistibly along.

Thus, although the statisticians do not show that we have recovered prosperity, though millions of men are still without the decencies of life, we have recovered our courage, our self-respect, our faith in the power of mind and will to determine our fate. While this lasts there can be no doubt as to the outcome. We shall not be destroyed by mistakes. We shall not be saved by bright ideas. We can be destroyed only by demoralization. we can be saved only by our own resolution. As long as the spirit of the nation is as coherent and as temperate, as confident, and as magnanimous as it is today, there is no danger. Decisions can be made, and if they are wrong they can be reversed. Plans can be adopted, and when they don't work they can be changed.

For recovery is not a fitting together of cogs in a broken-down machine; it is a renascence in the energy and character of a people. For whatever the right or the wrong of this or that, in a nation as among individuals, when their spirit is strong they are invincible to circumstance and masters of their fate.

Mr. Lippmann begins his summer vacation today. His articles for "Today and Tomorrow" will be resumed in these columns upon his return.