TEMPERAMENTAL TIDES

Calvin Coolidge and Charles Lindberg left Washington on the same day, the one headed west to repair his fortunes, the other in a north and easterly direction to receive the plaudits proper to fame. The President off for his summer vacation in the Black Hills was given a column on the first page of the second section of so sedate and well-balanced a paper as the New York Times, while Colonel Lindberg in his journey up Broadway received all the space, except the unprinted margins, in the first five pages of the same issue.

Yet the President and the Colonel are not so far apart as these circumstances would indicate. The pomp of office and the prestige of daring are alike playthings of the press and the public. There is an incessant pulse in the nation: and ebb follows flow and flow succeeds ebb with deadly certainty.

Yet the real wonder is the height to which American enthusiasm can toss a man from the very tip and foam of its intermost wave and, likewise, the abysmal depth of the trough into which it can forthwith plunge him. There have been newly-elected presidents: and there have been x-presidents. There are heros of the hour and there are men, and women too, who have had their famous moments. Fickle and feverish attention is the vice of a child. There is much material for the sociologist in the childishness of the American public. The tabloids have exploited it professionally. Walter Lippmann and Professor Abbott have touched upon it philosophically. Realistic novelists have for several decades past been turning it to hand in one form or another. Still the impression persists that only the surface phenomena have been observed, and that in a chosen analysis of the mind of the public, individually and collectively, lies much that is illuminating with regard to American civilization.