If, for example, one man dislikes the
League, another hates Mr. Wilson, and a third fears labor, you may be
able to unite them if you can find some symbol which is the antithesis
of what they all hate. Suppose that symbol is Americanism. The first
man may read it as meaning the preservation of American isolation, or
as he may call it, independence; the second as the rejection of a
politician who clashes with his idea of what an American president
should be, the third as a call to resist revolution. The symbol in
itself signifies literally no one thing in particular, but it can be
associated with almost anything. And because of that it can become the
common bond of common feelings, even though those feelings were
originally attached to disparate ideas.
When political parties or newspapers declare for Americanism,
Progressivism, Law and Order, Justice, Humanity, they hope to
amalgamate the emotion of conflicting factions which would surely
divide, if, instead of these symbols, they were invited to discuss a
specific program. For when a coalition around the symbol has been
effected, feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather than
toward critical scrutiny of the measures. It is, I think, convenient
and technically correct to call multiple phrases like these symbolic.
They do not stand for specific ideas, but for a sort of truce or
junction between ideas.
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