One of the most controversial claims I make about demagoguery is that it isn’t necessarily harmful. When I make that argument, it’s common for someone to disagree with me by pointing out that some specific instance of demagoguery is harmful. But that isn’t refuting my argument because I’m not arguing for a binary of demagoguery being always or never harmful. I’m saying that not every instance of demagoguery is necessarily harmful. Whether demagoguery is harmful depends, I think, on where it lies on multiple axes: how demagogic the text is; how powerful that media is that is promoting the demagoguery; how widespread that kind of demagoguery is.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, that means a 3d map, but I honestly think you need all three axes.)
And the best way to talk about the harmless demagoguery is to talk more about one of the first examples of a failed deliberative process that haunted me. One spring, when I was a child, my family went to Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park. My family mostly tried (and failed) to teach one another bridge, and I wandered around the emerald valley. Having grown up in semi-arid southern California, the forested walks seemed to me magical, and I was enchanted. One evening, my mother took me to a campfire, hosted by a ranger, who told the story of John Muir, a California environmentalist crucial in the preservation of Yosemite National Park. The last part of the ranger’s talk was about Muir’s final political endeavor, his unsuccessful attempt to prevent the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a valley the ranger said was as beautiful as the one by which I had been entranced. The ranger presented the story as a dramatic tragedy of Good (John Muir) versus Evil (the people who wanted to dam and flood the valley), with Evil winning and Muir dying of a broken heart. I was deeply moved, and fascinated. And years later, I would come back to the story when trying to think about whether and how people can argue together on issues with profound disagreement.
The ranger had told the story of Good versus Evil, but that isn’t quite right, in several ways. For one thing, it wasn’t a debate with only two sides (something I have since discovered to be true of most political issues). In this case, it is more accurate to say that there were three sides: the corrupt water company currently supplying San Francisco that wanted to prevent San Francisco getting any publicly-owned water supply; the progressive preservationists like John Muir, who wanted San Francisco to get an outside publicly-owned water supply, but not the Hetch Hetchy; and the progressive conservationists like Gifford Pinchot or Marsden Manson, who wanted an outside publicly-owned water supply that included the Hetch Hetchy.
And a little background on each of the major figures in this issue. Gifford Pinchot was head of the Forest Service, with close political ties to Theodore Roosevelt. Born in 1865, he was a strong advocate of conservation—that is, keeping large parts of land in public ownership, sustainable foresting practices, and what is called “multiple use.” The principle of conservation (as opposed to preservation) is that public lands should be available to as many different uses as possible, such as foresting, hunting, camping, and fishing. The consensus among scholars is that Pinchot’s support for the Hetch Hetchy dam was crucial to its success.
Marsden Manson was far less famous than Pinchot. Born in 1850, he was an engineer (trained at Berkeley), member of the Sierra Club who had camped in Yosemite, and, from 1897 till 1912, was an engineer for the City of San Francisco, first serving on the San Francisco Drainage Committee, then in the Public Works Department, and finally City Engineer. It was in that capacity that he wrote the pamphlet I’ll talk about in a bit. He was an avid conservationist.
John Muir is probably the most famous of the people heavily involved in the controversy, and still a hero among environmentalists. Born in 1838 in Scotland, his family emigrated to the United States when he was around ten, to Wisconsin. He arrived in California in 1868, and promptly went to Yosemite Valley (which was not yet a national park). He stayed there for several years, writing about the Sierras, in what would become articles in popular magazines. His elegant descriptions of the beauties of the Sierra Nevada mountains were influential in persuading people to preserve the area, creating Yosemite National Park. He was the first President of the Sierra Club (formed in the early 1890s) which is still a powerful force in environmentalism. Muir was a preservationist, believing that some public lands should be preserved in as close to a wilderness state as possible.
Perhaps the most important character in the controversy is the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Part of the Yosemite National Park, it was less accessible than Yosemite Valley, and hence far less famous. Like many other valleys in the Sierra Nevada mountains, it was formed by glaciers. Two of its waterfalls are among the tallest waterfalls in North America.
The story the ranger told was between right and wrong, good and evil, and, even though I disagree with the stance Pinchot and Manson took, and believe that the Hetch Hetchy Valley should not have been dammed (and I believe they used some pretty sleazy rhetorical and political tactics to make it happen), I don’t think they were bad people. I don’t think they were selfish or greedy, or even that they didn’t appreciate nature. I think they believed that what they were doing was right, and they had some good arguments and good reasons, and they felt justified in some troubling rhetorical means because they believed their ends were good. I don’t think they were Evil.
After all, San Francisco had long been victimized by a corrupt water company, the Spring Valley Company, with a demonstrated record of exploiting users (particularly during the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake). San Francisco had a legitimate need for a new water supply, and the argument that such public goods should not be subject to the profit motive is a sensible argument. The proponents of the dam argued that turning the valley into a reservoir would increase the public’s access to it, and the ability of the public to benefit. The dam, it was promised, would provide electric power that would be a public utility (that is, not privately owned), thereby benefiting the public directly. Thus, both the preservationists and conservationists were concerned about public good, but they proposed different ways of benefitting the public.
Although John Muir was President and one of the founders of the Sierra Club, not everyone in the organization was certain the dam was a mistake, and so the issue was put to a vote—the Sierra Club at that point had both conservationists and preservationists. Muir wrote the case against, a pamphlet called “The Hetch Hetchy Valley,” which, along with Manson’s argument, “Statements of San Francisco’s Side of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir Matter,” was distributed to members of the Sierra Club, and they were asked to vote.
For Muir’s pamphlet, he reused much of an 1873 article about Hetch Hetchy, originally written to persuade people to visit the Sierras. He kept much (but not all) of his highly poetical description of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, especially its two falls. His argument throughout the pamphlet is that the valley is beautiful, unique and sacred; it isn’t until the end of the pamphlet that he added a section specifically written for the dam controversy, and in that part he resorted to demagoguery, painting his opponents as motivated by greed and an active desire to destroy beauty, in the same category as the Merchants in the Temple of Jerusalem and Satan in the Garden of Eden: “despoiling gainseekers, — mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to supervisors, lumbermen, cattlemen, farmers, etc., eagerly trying to make everything dollarable […] Thus long ago a lot of enterprising merchants made part of the Jerusalem temple into a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves. And earlier still, the Lord’s garden in Eden, and the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was spoiled.” Muir presented the conflict as “part of the universal battle between right and wrong,” and characterized his opponents’ arguments as “curiously like those of the devil devised for the destruction of the first garden — so much of the very best Eden fruit going to waste; so much of the best Tuolumne water.” Muir called his opponents “Temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism,” saying, they “seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the mountains, lift them to dams and town skyscrapers.” And he ended the pamphlet with the rousing peroration:
Dam Hetch-Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man. (John Muir Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. VI, No. 4, January, 1908)
Muir’s argument is demagoguery—he takes a complicated situation (with at least three different positions) and divides it into a binary of good versus evil people. The bad people don’t have arguments; they have bad motives.
But this, too, is a controversial claim on my part, and it actually makes some people really angry with me for me to “criticize” Muir. The common response is that I shouldn’t criticize him because he was a good man and he was fighting for a good cause. In other words, the world is divided into good and bad people, and we shouldn’t criticize good people on our side. And I reject every part of that argument. I think we should criticize people on our side, especially if we agree with their ends (and especially if we’re looking critically at an argument in the past) because that’s how we learn to make better arguments. And I’m not even criticizing Muir in the sense those people mean—they mean I’m saying negative things about him, and that I believe he should have done things differently. The assumption is that demagoguery is bad, so by saying he engaged in demagoguery he’s a bad person.
Like Muir’s argument, that presumes a binary (or even continuum) between good and bad people. Whether there really is such a binary I don’t know, but I’m certain that it isn’t relevant. The debate wasn’t split into good and bad people, and we don’t have to make our heroes untouchable.
And, besides, I’m not criticizing Muir in the sense of saying he did the wrong thing. I’m not sure he did. His demagoguery had no particular harm. While his text (especially the last part) is demagoguery, and he was a powerful rhetor at the time, the kind of demagoguery in which he was engaged (against conservationists) wasn’t very widespread, so he wasn’t contributing to a broad cultural demonizing of some group. And I’m not even sure that his demagoguery did any harm (or benefit) to the effectiveness of his argument.
Muir was trying to get the majority of people in the Sierra Club—perhaps even all of them—to condemn the Hetch Hetchy scheme on preservationist grounds, so he already had the votes of preservationists like himself. What he had to do rhetorically is to move conservationists (or, at least, people drawn to that position) over to the preservationist side, at least in regard to the Hetch Hetchy Valley.
A useful step in an argument is identifying what, exactly, is the issue (or are the issues): why are we disagreeing? Called the “stasis” in classical rhetorical theory, the “hinge” of an argument points to the paradox that a productive disagreement requires agreement on several points—including on the geography of the argument: what is at the center, how broad an area can/should the argument cover, what areas are out of bounds? The stasis is the main issue in the argument, and arguments often go wrong because people disagree about what it is. In the case of the Hetch Hetchy, an ideal argument about the topic would be about whether damming and flooding that valley was the best long-term option for everyone who uses the valley—such a debate would require that people talk honestly and accurately about the actual costs, the various options, and as usefully as possible about the benefits (of all sorts) to be had from preserving the valley for camping (this is a big issue in California, in which camping is very popular).
It’s conventional in rhetoric to say that you have to argue from your opposition’s premises to persuade your opposition, and that would have necessitated Muir arguing on the premises that informed conservation.
Muir’s rhetorical options included:
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- condemning conservationism in the abstract, and trying to persuade his conservationist audience to abandon an important value;
- arguing that conservationism is not a useful value in this particular case, and that this is a time when preservationism is a better route;
- arguing that damming and flooding the valley does not really enact conservationist values (e.g., it’s actually expensive).
But, to do any of those strategies effectively, he’d have to make the case on the conservationist premise that it’s appropriate to think about natural resources in terms of costs and benefits. And Muir’s stance about nature—his whole career—was grounded in the perception that such a way of looking at nature is a unethical.
Muir paraphrases (in quotes) the conservationist mantra: “Utilization of beneficent natural resources, that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation grow great.” While I’ve never found any conservationist text that has that precise wording, it’s a fair representation of the basic principle of conservation; i.e., “greatest good for the greatest number.” And, certainly, conservationists did (and do) believe that there is no point in preserving any wilderness areas—all forests should be harvested, all lakes should be used, all areas should be open to hunting. But they didn’t do this out of a desire for financial gain, as much as from a different (and I would say wrong-headed) perception of how to define “the public.”
The conservationist argument in this case was pretty much bad faith, in that they claimed that they would improve the beauty of the valley by making it a lake. Muir argued they would destroy it. I agree with Muir, as it happens, and so my argument is not that Muir is factually wrong; the valley was destroyed by the damming. I also think some of the dam proponents—specifically Manson–knew that it would be destroyed, and Manson was lying when he described a road, increased camping, and other features that, as an engineer, he must have known were impossible. But many of the people drawn to the conservationist plan didn’t know that Manson was describing technologically impossible conditions, and they believed the proponents’ argument that the resulting reservoir would not only benefit San Franciscans (by providing safe cheap water and electric power) but it would have no impact on camping; it would, the conservationists claim, increase the accessibility of the area without interfering with the beauty of the valley at all. Again, that isn’t true, but it’s what people believed. And part of Aristotle’s point about rhetoric, and its reliance on the enthymeme, is that rhetoric begins with what people believe.
Manson’s response was fairly straightforward, and grounded, he insisted repeatedly, on facts. He argued:
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- San Francisco owned the valley floor.
- Construction would not begin on the Hetch Hetchy dam until and unless San Francisco first developed Lake Eleanor (a water source not disputed by the preservationists) and then found that water source inadequate.
- A photo he presented showed what the lake would look like when dammed and flooded—very little of the valley flooded, with no obstruction of the falls that Muir praised so heavily, a road around the edge enabling visitors to see more of the valley—so, he said, the valley will be more beautiful, reflecting the magnificent granite walls.
- Keeping the reservoir water pure will not inhibit camping in any way.
- The Hetch Hetchy plan is the least expensive option, and it will provide energy, thereby breaking the current energy monopoly.
Muir’s arguments, he says, “are not in reality based upon true and correct facts” (435).
Marsden Manson was City Engineer for San Francisco, and had done thorough reports on the issue. And so he had to know that almost all of what he was saying was “not in reality based upon true and correct facts.” San Francisco had bought the land, but, since it was within a national park, the seller had no right to sell it. Construction would begin immediately on the dam, flooding the entire valley, making the entire valley inaccessible, including the famous falls. It was not possible to build the roads that Manson drew on the photo and, being an engineer, he must have known that. The reservoir inhibited camping, and, most important, the Hetch Hetchy plan was the most expensive option available to San Francisco. Manson had muddled the numbers to make it appear less expensive.
In other words, either Manson lied, or he was muddled, uninformed, bad at arithmetic, and not a very good engineer.
Manson’s motives in all this are complicated, and ultimately irrelevant. He may have expected to benefit personally by the approval of the dam project, as he may have thought he would build it. But it would have been a benefit of glory but not money; I’ve never read anything to suggest that he was motivated by anything other than a sense that dominating nature is glorious, and that public projects providing water and power are better than preserving valleys. (He is reputed to have suggested damming and flooding Yosemite Valley.)
In other words, what presented itself as the pragmatic option was just as ideologically driven as what was rejected as the emotional one (I think the same thing happens now with arguments about the death penalty, welfare “reform,” the war on drugs, foreign policy, the deficit—there is a side that manages to be taken as more practical, but it might actually be the most ideologically driven).
Muir’s rhetorical options were limited by his opponent, an engineer, making claims about engineering issues that neither Muir nor his supporters had the expertise to refute. It took years for someone to look at the San Francisco reports and determine that the numbers were bad; preservationists didn’t know (and, presumably, many supporters of the dam didn’t know) that the numbers were misleading, and it was the most expensive option.
But would Muir have argued on such grounds anyway? To argue on the grounds of cost would have confirmed the Major Premise that public projects should be determined by cost—to say that the Hetch Hetchy should not be built because it is the most expensive would seem to confirm the perception that you can make natural cathedrals “dollarable” in Muir’s words. In other words, Muir rejected the very terms by which the conservationist argument was made—he rejected the premises. To argue on premises (except in rare circumstances) seems to confirm them, and so he would, in order to win the Hetch Hetchy argument, have argued against what he had spent a lifetime arguing for: that we should not look at nature in terms of money. Wilderness areas are, he insisted, sacred. And so he railed against his opposition.
As I mentioned above, I’m often attacked by people who think I’m attacking Muir. And I think that misunderstanding arises because of a particular perception of what the discipline of rhetoric is for: rhetorical analysis is often seen as implicitly normative; we do an analysis to say what a person should do or should have done. So, to say that Muir’s rhetorical strategies didn’t work is to say his rhetoric was bad, and it should have been different. Coupled with the notion that good people promote good things, if I say that Muir’s rhetoric was “demagoguery,” then I am saying he cannot have been a good person. There is, here, a theory of identity: that people are either good or bad; that good people say good things, and that bad people say bad things; that demagoguery is something only bad people do. That whole model of discourse and identity is wrong in too many ways to count, and I am not endorsing it.
I think Muir was a good man–he is a personal hero of mine—but that doesn’t mean he was perfect, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t learn from him. Muir did well within the Sierra Club (the Sierra Club vote was about 80% on Muir’s side and 20% in favor of the dam) , but ultimately lost the argument. And I think what we learn from his failure to persuade all conservationists to vote against the Hetch Hetchy project is not about Muir’s personal qualities or failings, but about rhetorical constraints and models of persuasion.
I’m arguing that, for Muir to have persuaded his opposition, he would have had to rely on premises that he rejected. This is sometimes called the “sincerity problem” in rhetoric. To what extent, and under what circumstances, should we make arguments we don’t believe in order to achieve an end in which we do believe? Muir didn’t argue from insincere premises; that may have weakened his effectiveness in the moment. But it definitely strengthened his effectiveness in the long run. His Hetch Hetchy pamphlet continues to be powerfully motivating for people, perhaps more motivating than it would have been had he compromised his rhetoric in order to be effective in the short-term. Muir’s demagoguery did no harm, and it may have even done some good. Demagoguery isn’t necessary harmful.
[image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy#/media/File:Hetch_Hetchy_Valley.jpg]