Page:The Hero in History.djvu/88

88 The degree of interrelatedness between historical events is an empirical matter. When we assert a specific interrelatedness between events, we mean that they are confirming instances of empirical laws that function as hypotheses in the specific problem under inquiry. One way of testing the extent of the interrelation or the validity of the laws is to ask a relevant “if” question. When an answer to the “if” question tells us that the course of events would have followed substantially the same pattern even if the particular occurrence we ask about had not taken place, we may conclude that there is no integral connection between this occurrence and the constellation in which it figures. For example, if Alfred E. Smith had been President in 1928 instead of Hoover, what would the state of American economy have been like during the presidential term? Without any fear of contradiction we can safely answer that it would have been very much like what it was under Hoover. The phases of the business cycle do not depend upon presidential policy. We might even go so far as to say that, no matter who had occupied the White House, in all likelihood the crisis of 1929 and its consequences would have occurred approximately when they did.

On the other hand, suppose we ask whether the social welfare legislation and the business restrictions associated with the New Deal from 1933 to 1938—measures that banished the era of relatively uncontrolled big business—would have been adopted if, by some chance, John Nance Garner had been President during these years. There is no reason to believe that they would have been adopted in anything like their entirety. We can justifiably assert, however, that the failure to adopt remedial economic measures would have resulted in a tremendous growth of indigenous Fascist sentiments and movements out of which a Huey Long could have made great political capital. Sometimes what counts most is the situation, sometimes the man. In 1929 Roosevelt would have been as helpless as Hoover; in 1933 he had his opportunity. He threw his campaign platform of 1932 away because the situation gave him freedom of action, just as Willkie if elected would have thrown away his campaign platform of 1940 because the situation did not give him freedom of action.

Citizen Drouet was a modest French provincial who, by dragging a cart across an arched gateway near the bridge at