'No Pulse of Words of Their Own'

Nadezhda Mandelstam writing of the Soviet Union in the 1930’s in the second volume of her memoirs, Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), and sounding rather as though she were describing the United States in 2020:

“A mob assembled in a public square or hall and welded into one compact whole is not the same as the crowds of human beings scattered around—on city streets and country roads, in houses and apartments. It is the dispersed crowds who really constitute ‘society,’ but in this country there is nothing to bind them together, since all the forms of association that arose historically have been destroyed; at the same time the compact, howling mobs, the ‘masses,’ have no pulse of words of their own—they are completely under the sway of their ‘leaders’ (or ‘demagogues,’ as they used to be called).”

Is a “dispersed crowd” still a crowd? I think Mandelstam means something like regular, non-aligned people, citizens, loose aggregates of relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow parishioners and coworkers. Burke called such associations “little platoons.” Nothing is more natural or less official. Such gatherings are always watched suspiciously by busybody governments and mobs. The private realm, where humanity flourishes, is too dangerous to be left alone.

The family I grew up in was not notably social. We weren’t churchgoers. My parents were Democrats of the Roosevelt sub-species and belonged to city-wide bowling leagues. They played poker with one set of friends and canasta with another. My father was a longtime member of Ironworkers Local No. 17 in Cleveland and, after the war, helped organize a social club of high-school buddies who called themselves the Royal Azures (picnic in summer, Christmas party for the kids). The thought of joining a mob or paying serious attention to a demagogue never entered their minds. Come to think of it, the only organizations I’ve ever joined were the Newspaper Guild (AFL-CIO) and the American Automobile Association. I’ve never defined myself by what I belonged to or any other superfluous demographic category. Mandelstam writes:

“The crowd easily loses touch with the past and does not see the future . . . [It] has a short memory, but something human always survives in it; hence the distress it feels whenever it is egged on to wanton violence by its leaders. The frenzied mobs at the beginning of our era were terrifying, but they were not as hideous as the submissive crowds who later, at public meetings, voted the death penalty for fellow citizens.”