Evening Star Newspaper, July 24, 1932, Page 59

THE Lenin of Red Russia, a combination of the agitator, theorist and administrator types of politician. BY MARJORIE VAN DE W ATER. HAT makes the politician what he is? From the President himself down to the soap-box orator on the street cormer, ardent wet and zealous dry, anarchist and bureaucrat, Sen- ator and ward boss—what was the obscure turning point which brought them to their present paths? It occurred to Prof. Harold D. Lasswell, who teaches political science at the University of Chicago, that the answer might be found in a thorough study of the previous lives of these men—a study as searching as that made by the psychiatrist. If the physician, by delving into the obscur- ities of the youth of his patient, can find out what broughgt him to the insane hospital, why shouldn’t a similar search into the history of the normal man reveal what brought him into Congress or the White House? Accordingly, Prof. Lasswell undertook to make such studies following the methods of Freud. In this he had the assistance of many promm%t psychiatrists who approved his meth- ods, altHough some conventional psychologists may disagree with them. A few such detailed histories were ready- made at hand, because some politicians had at one time or another been patients in mental hospitals. In other cases, the politicians wol- unteered to make their private histories avail- able because they realzed that knowledge of human nature in politics would be advanced if normal persons were studied with the same care as that bestowed on the abnormal, T was not Prof. Lasswell’'s purpose to prove that politicians are insane or to catalog the symptoms of such prominent men. “We have not finished when we know that SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JULY 24, 1932. — —————————— et e Why Do Men Make Speeches and Take Up “Causes” and Run for Of fice ‘—3cience Finds Some Interesting Facts, After an Exhaustive Study of the Private Lives of Politicians. modern Alexanders, Caesars, and Bluchers are alcoholic, that a modern Bismarck is hyster- ical; that a modern Lincoln shows depsessive pathology: or that a modern Marat suffers from arthritis, diabetes and eczema,” Prof, Lasswell says in his report which has been published by the University of Chicago in a book entitled “Psychopathology and Politics.” Rather his purpose was to examine the whole of the private lives of these individuals and discover what experiences were significant in developng the traits and interests of the politician—what were the psychologcal turning points of his life. Politiclans, he found, may be divided on the basis of personality into three main types—the administrator, the agitator and the theorist. President Hoover, he cites as an example of the first type. the administrator pure and sim- ple. The Old Testament prophets were good exampies of the agitator. And the theorist is best typified in Karl Marx. There are, of course, many composites of two or more of these types. Lenin, the hero of Soviet Russia, for example, is described by Prof. Lasswell as a combination of all three types—administrator, agitator and theorist. ROM his study of these three types and the various composites, Prof. Lasswell even has worked out a very definite formula to express the personality of the politician. Here it is: p) d) r equals p. Where p, he says, represents private motives; d represents displacement onto a public object; r represents rationalism in terms of public interest; p represents the political man; and ) represents “transformed into.” Suppose we translate all this into more un- derstandable language by fitting the formula to a special case. Johnny Jones as a small boy owned and was very fond of a pet dog. The dog died as a result of the cruelty of some neighborhood urchins. Johnny developed a profound love for dogs and also perhaps a parallel hatred for gangs. This love and this hate comprised his “private motives.” As he grows up, if he were to be an ordinary citizen, he might start a farm to raise dogs. But Johnny is to be a politician of the agi- tator type. So instead of surrounding himself with real live dogs, his interest is displaced onto dogs in general. He founds a society for the prevention of cruelty to dogs. He interests himself in legislation forbidding the keeping of dogs in the city or forbidding the dissection of dogs for scientific purposes, and so on. HE next step is to rationalize his attitude in terms of public interest. He builds up arguments showing that dogs are essential to the public welfare. He writes pamphlets de- scribing the good that dogs do in protecting human life, in leading the blind, in returning affection for kindness. The big difference between Johnny and his non-political brother is then that the object of Johnny's emotional interest has been en- tirely changed. It is no longer the bark and nuzzling nose and the pathetic wag of a stubby tail that appeal to him; it is the idea of a dog in the abstract that he is crusading for. Among the agitators studied by Prof. Lass- well, one trait seemed to be so very common as to be characteristic. This is what psycholo- gists term narcissism, an excellently descriptive word derived from the name of the Greek youth Narcissus, who gazed into a placid pool one day and fell in love with the beautiful image of himself he saw there reflected. Agitators, Prof. Lasswell tells us, have their affections equally centered on themselves. And this is often because as children they were “spoiled” by their parents or made the center of an admiring family group. The agitator, he says, may also have been hindered by some obstacle from developing a normal love affair. The ordinary person's de- sire to impress and bz loved by a definite indi- vidual becomes in the agitator a more gener- alized desire to impress and arouse the crowd. The amazing depths of emotional zeal which the agitator often is able to expend on the abstraction of his cause is well shown by the following quotation from the writings of Eugene Debs. In connection with his early work with labor organizations, he said: 11| WAS filled with enthusiasm and my blood leaped in my veins. Day and night I worked for the brotherhood. To see its watch- fires glow and observe the increase of its sturdy members were the sunshine and shower of my President Hoover, an example of the administrator iype. The late Eugene Debs, who showed how the agitator can expend emotional zeal on his cause. life. To attend the ‘meeting’ was my supreme joy. and for 10 years I was not once absen$ when the faithful assembled.” You might think that the political theorist, the developer of political creeds, like Marx, would not be of interest from the point of view of Prof. Lasswell's study. But he has found that the history of the individual counts here. “Political prejudices, preferences and creeds are often formulated in highly rational form, but they are grown in highly rational ways,” he says. “When they are seen against the develope mental history of the person, they take on meanings which are quite different from the phrases in which they are put.” Nature Curbs "Hoppers ATURE has her own system of checks and balances, Take the situation from the grasshoppers’ point of view. The tremendous egg layving of last year threatened one of the most setous attacks of all times of these ine sects on the grain crops of the Middle West, However, the heavy rainfall of this Spring was fatal to untold millions of the freshly, hatched hoppers, which naturally was a dee cided benefit to the grain farmer. This same heavy rain, from the hoppers’ standpoint, was highly beneficial to the hoppers which sure vived and brought a luxuriant growth of grass in which the hoppers were able to feed. If conditions of weather remain good, therc again may be a heavy laying of eggs for next yess's crop of hoppers.