Davis was connected with Wall Street, and this hint was enough to arouse Mr. Hearst. In reply to the routine question, “What is going on in the world?” he answered, “More deviltry than there ever was before.” Unfortunately the history is too meager to explain S’s development, except by analogy with others who have displayed the same behavior. Certainly his life-story would, if accessible, reveal the effects of a disorganizing family environment. We do know that his father was drunk much of the time, and that the children had an unhappy lot. At five S went to live with his grandparents who wanted to take him away from his drunken father. At about fifteen he came back for a while. Shortly afterward he saved his sister from being strangled to death by their father, who in a drunken tantrum had her by the neck against the wall. S became a good mechanic, but disintegrated in later life. Another “crank” devised an ingenious theory to explain President Wilson’s conduct. T says that he discovered that Mr. Wilson was not a citizen of the United States. He first made this revelation on his draft questionnaire, and when this became generally known, Mr. Wilson went to France to escape the anger of the enraged citizenry of the United States; later Mr. Wilson fell ill of a guilty conscience at new revelations that he made. Mr. Wilson was part of the Masonic conspiracy which had been hatched against him when he was very young. T’s stepfather, who was a Shriner, probably furnishes the material for this delusion. As for T himself, he believed that he descended directly from Mary, Queen of Scots, and that he had foreknowledge of the approaching end of the world. The members of the millennium are “a creed and not a denomination,” and only twenty million people will be saved, over whom T will rule. * * * * * From the excerpts included, it appears that the significance of political opinions is not to be grasped apart from the private motives which they symbolize. The degree of insight into objective relationships is one thing; the extent to which “private meanings” are accreted to the “public” or “manifest” meanings is another. When we see the private meaning of public acts, the problem of interpreting the full significance of political behavior presses itself upon our attention. Are there any implications for the general theory of the political process which follow from the intensive scrutiny of individual subjective (and objective) histories? This is the question to which we next turn. CHAPTER X THE POLITICS OF PREVENTION