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Title: The Ghost in the White House
Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who
are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white
house) can mak
Author: Gerald Stanley Lee
Release Date: August 4, 2007 [EBook #22241]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GHOST IN THE WHITE HOUSE ***
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Author of "Crowds" and "Inspired Millionaires"
"The White House is haunted by a vague helpless abstraction,—by a kind of ghost of the nation, called The People"
| Transcriber's Note: Chapter XXII in Book II was printed without a title. |
CONTENTS
BOOK I
WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE
BOOK II
WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF
BOOK III
TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY
BOOK IV
THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY
BOOK V
THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN
BOOK VI
WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT
THE MOTION BEFORE THE HOUSE
This is a book a hundred million people would write if they had time.
I am nominating in this book—in the presence of the people, the next President of the United States.
The name is left blank.
I am nominating a man not a name.
I am presenting a program and a sketch of what the next President will be like, of what he will be like as a fellow human being, and I leave the details—his name, the color of his eyes and the party he belongs to, to be filled in by people later.
Here is his program, his faith in the people, his vision for the people and his vision for himself.
No one has ever nominated a President in a book before.
I do it because a book can be more quiet, more sensible and thoughtful, more direct and human, and closer to the hearts of the people, than a convention can.
A book can be more public too—can be attended by more people than a convention. Only a few thousand people can get into a convention. A hundred million can get into a book. All in the same two hours, by twenty million lamps thousands of miles apart, the people can crowd into a book.
So in this book, as I have said, I am merely acting as the secretary or employee of the hundred million people. I am writing a book a hundred million people would write if they could, expressing for them the kind of President for the next four years of our nation—the most colossal four years of the world, the people have ordered in their hearts.
We are weary of politicians' politicians. We want ours. Politicians may not be so bad but during the war they do not seem to us to have done as well as most people. In the dead-earnest of the war, with our Liberty Loan and Red Cross and Council of Defense, and our dollar a year men we have half taken over the government ourselves and we feel no longer awed by the regular political practitioners or government tinkerers. They are not all alike, of course, but we have turned our national glass on them and have come to see through them—at least the worst ones and many thousands of them—all these busy little worms of public diplomacy building their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelief far far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all by themselves.
Unless the more common run of our typical politicians see through themselves before the conventions come, and see that the people see through them, and see it quick, their days are numbered.
Instead of patronizing us and whispering to one another behind their hands about us, their time has come now—in picking out the next President to begin gazing up to the countenance of the people, to begin listening to the people's prayer to God.
The people are a new people since the war. Out of the crash of empires, out of threats in every man's door-yard the people are praying to God.
And they are voting to God, too.
The sooner the two great political parties reckon with this, the sooner they push around behind themselves out of sight all the funny little would-be Presidents, and all the little shan't-be politicians running around like ants under the high heaven of the faith of a great people picking up tidbits they dare to believe—and put forward instead a live believing hot and cold human being, a man who will give up being President for what he believes, the sooner they will find themselves with a President on their hands that can be elected. Whichever party it is that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the one that will be underwritten by the people.
The people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward the great coming political conventions and the questions and the men that will come up in them. We are on the whole, in spite of the low estimate the majority of politicians have of us, straight-minded and free-hearted people, shrewd, masterful and devout, praying with one hand and keeping from being fooled with the other and we want our public men to have courage and vision for themselves and for us. We give notice that thousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and fuddly politicians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by the people, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world. This nation is facing the most colossal, most serious and godlike moment any nation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the presence of forty nations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own grim appalling hope, to be trifled with.
So far as any one can see with the naked eye the quickest and surest way to get past the politicians, to remind the politicians of the real spirit of the people, to loom up the face of the people before their eyes and make them suddenly take the people more seriously than they take themselves, is with a book. In a book a President can be nominated by acclamation—by a kind of silent acclamation. In a book, without giving any name or pointing anybody out at least the soul of a President can be ordered by a people.
We will publish upon the housetops the hopes and the prayers and the wills of the people.
Then let the conventions feel the housetops looking down on them when they meet.
In a book published in a hundred newspapers one week, wedged into covers across a nation another, the people with one single national stroke can put what they want before the country—a hundred million people in a book can rise to make a motion.
We will not wait to be cornered by our politicians into a convention to which we cannot go. We will not wait to be told three months too late, to pick out—out of two men we did not want, the man we will have to take. The short-cut way for us as the people of this country to take the initiative with our politicians and to make the politicians toe our line, instead of toeing theirs, is for the people to blurt out the truth, write a book, get in early beforehand their quiet word with both great parties and tell them whatever his name is, whatever his party is, the kind of President they want.
So here it is, such as it is, the book, a little politically innocent-looking thing perhaps, just engaged in being like folks instead of like politicians, just engaged in being human—in letting a nation speak and act as a human being speaks and acts, in a great simple sublime human crisis in which with forty nations looking on, we are making democracy work—making a loophole for the fate of the world.
I am trying to answer three questions.
What shall the new President believe about the people and expect of the people?
What shall the new people—people made new by this war, expect of themselves and expect of their new President?
What kind of a President, with what kind of a personality or temperament do the people feel would be the best kind of a President to pull them together, to help the people do what the people have to do?
I have wanted to bring forward a way in which the things the new President will expect the people to do, can be done by the people.
What the people want done, especially with regard to the Red Flag, predatory capital, predatory labor, and the fifty-cent dollar cannot be done by the President for them, and they are not going to do it themselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standing around three thousand miles apart or in any other way than by voluntarily agreeing to get together and do it together.
I
GIST
The Crowd is my Hero.
The Hero of this book is a hundred million people.
I have come to have the feeling—especially in regard to political conventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestions just now as to how a hundred million people can strike—make themselves more substantial, more important in this country, so that we shall really have in this country in time a hundred million people who, taken as a whole, feel important in it—like a Senator for instance—like Senator Lodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like Trusts that won't trust, and Congressmen that won't play and workmen that won't work—I am thinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million people can come to feel as if it made a very substantial difference to somebody what they wanted and what they thought—ways in which the hundred million people shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like a Profiteer, or like a noble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor union,—get what they want.
II
THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH
What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night?
The Ghost in the White House.
The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people.
The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization.
What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never Was, and Who Never Is—a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, Terrible Angel called the People.
Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times.
That is all there is to Her.
It is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the Aurora Borealis to 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up to this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. It does not give any real satisfaction to anybody—either to the hundred million people or to the President.
It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a President—to be a Ghost.
It is not efficient.
Naturally—much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or hope to get (however hard he tries) is the Ghost of a President.
III
THE PRESIDENT AND THE GHOST
There are a number of things about going into the White House the next four years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, that are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest job on earth.
The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position as the Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is expected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassing idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would ever put up with, from any other employer in the world.
Absent-mindedness.
Non-committalness.
Halfness, or double personality.
Bodilessness.
Big, impressive-looking Fool Moments.
Cumulus clouds of Slow Sure Conceit with Sudden Flops of Humility.
General Irresponsibleness.
And perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the Employer—like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made a fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry.
The man who is conscientious in the White House has an Employer whose immediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes in the hope that he will be thanked afterwards.
Once in a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert, as the captain of the ship, has to tell the Owner of the Line, when the storm is highest, that he must not butt in.
The restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer that one is just being an employee and that one's employer is being responsible, is lacking in the White House, where one is practically expected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee and one's own employer.
But while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in the President's Employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerous ones for the country.
I am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done about them. I have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated the moment the Employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits are making it for the President to do anything for him.
Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people are giving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, is not only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer so large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It.
Serving It is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with a fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the People.
It is this bodilessness in the Employer—this very simple rudimentary whiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished and accomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it hardest to bear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly is (once in four years) that he wants him or that he does not want him and even then he confides to him that he only half wants him. He says deliberately and out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people of other nations, "Here is the man I would a little rather have than not." That is all. Then he coops him up in the White House, drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to work.
Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer like this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and when one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of the people one is being The Head Employee of (in the other party) expect one to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at the utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one's Employer—keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it will be small wonder if the man in the White House feels he has—especially these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth.
The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed to our President. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, and be President of all of us.
It may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job on earth and, of course, when Theodore Roosevelt had it, the job of being President considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell world America is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of our next President, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy, senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappy factories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nations abroad, the man we put in the White House next is going to have what will be the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousand years—except the one that began in Nazareth—the one the new President is going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way which little, old, queer, bent, eager St. Paul with his prayers in Rome and his sermons in Athens, never dreamed of.
It does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new President and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this time for our President to have a ghost for an Employer.
All any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make a President, is to stop and think. If you have an employer who cannot collect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, all you do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make him up—what is there—what deep, searching and conclusive and permanent action is there, after all, the man in The White House can take in his employer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling him what he wants and what he is willing to do with what he gets? What can the man in the White House hope to accomplish for a people with whom it is the constitutional and regular thing to be as lonely as this?
I have wanted to consider what can be done, and done now not to have a lonely President the next four years.
The first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the next election a man for the White House a great-hearted direct and free people will not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things that will back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand, and not let him feel lonely with us.
The feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness—the feeling the Public has every day in the White House and in the Senate, of being treated, and treated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that works as badly one way as it does the other.
The President does not want a Ghost.
The people do not want to be treated as a Ghost.
The object of this book is to resent—to expose to everybody as unfair and untrue and destroy forever the title I have written across the front of it, "The Ghost in The White House."
The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all time, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world, from being an inarticulate, shimmering, wavering, gibbering Ghost in its own House.
There must be things—broad simple things about Capital and Labor people can do and do every day in this country, that will make a President timidly stop guessing what they want.
It ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a President or a seer for a President to know what the people want. A man of genius—a seer, a man who can read the heart of a nation—especially in politics, comes not only not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highly unlikely when he does that the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party in America will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him in the White House.
The best the people can hope for in America now is to have a body—to find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without saying a word—express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word our President, our Politicians—even the kind of men who seem to put up naturally with having to be in the Senate—the kind of men who can feel happy and in their element in a place like Congress will see what the People—the real people in this country are like.
I am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people so that we the people in America, at last, in the days that lie ahead, instead of being a Ghost in our own House, shall have things that we can do, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able to prove to a President what we are like and what we want—so that each man of us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on a President with—something more than a vague, faint, little ballot to hurl (like an Autumn leaf) at him, once in four years.
IV
REAL FOLKS AND THE GHOST
When a man speaks of The City National Bank he speaks of it as if he meant something and knew what he meant.
When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch him bewhiffle it.
When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of Business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and when in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in some mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of The Invisible.
Business talks bass. Patriotism is an Æolian harp.
During the war this was changed. We found ourselves every day treating America, treating The Country, treating The People as a bodily fact.
I would like to see what can be done now in the next President's next four years, to give America this magnificent sense of a body in peace.
Why is it that we have in America a body for Germans, and then wilt down in a minute after Château-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost—unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless—just a light in its eyes—just a vast national shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet.
Millions of people every day in this country are very particular to salute the flag, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" and ship Bolshevists, but let them speak to you in conversation, of an industrial body like the Steel Trust or the Pennsylvania Railroad and they act as if something were there. Bring up the Body-Politic and it's a whiff.
It ought to be considered treason to think or to speak of The Country in this vague, breathy way.
The next immediate, imperative need of America is to see what can be done and done in the next President's next four years to make the Body-Politic people take the Body-Politic and what happens to the Body-Politic as if it were as substantial as a coal strike—as what happened at Ypres, Cambrai and Château-Thierry.
Otherwise we are a nation of whiners and yearners and are not what we pretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the Germans and the rest of the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy.
I believe that the best things the Old World has said about us and hoped for us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation of idealists, are true to the American character and real.
But they are not actual. We are the world's colossal tragic Adolescent. Forty nations are depending on us—are waiting for us—in the world's long desperate minutes—waiting for America to grow up.
This nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism and religion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of its daily producing, buying and selling, and no more. Any big beautiful evaporated Body-Politic we have or try to think we can have aside from this body—this actual working through of our patriotism, our democracy and our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy, unclean and threatens in its one desperate and critical moment the fate of a world.
All really religious men and all real patriots know this.
In a democracy like ours a religion which is not occupied all day every day in this year of our Lord 1920 in making democracy work, a religion that loafs off into a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, a religion that cannot be used to run steel mills so that men won't go to hell in them and to run coal mines so that men won't be in hell already, is not a religion at all. And a nation that sheds tears over three hundred thousand disabled and crippled soldiers, who gave up their jobs and sailed six thousand miles to die for them, and that has finally managed to get new jobs for just two hundred and seventeen of the three hundred thousand and taken nineteen months to do it, illustrates what it means—in just one simple item—for a hundred million people, to try to be good without a body.
But it is not only in behalf of its helplessness with the President I am groping in these pages for a body for the Public.
The reason that the Public in dealing in its daily business with powerful persons of any kind—whether good or bad, whether a President or anybody, is taken advantage of and does not get what it wants, is that the Public is a Ghost.
Theoretically all powerful persons, predatory Trusts, profiteering labor unions and the wrong kind of politicians always speak respectfully to the Public, but when they want something that belongs to the Public they find the Public is an Abstraction and help themselves. They act when with the Public, as if the Public was not there.
The only way this is ever going to be stopped is for us to make a spontaneous voluntary popular start in this country toward having a body for people in general, towards giving a hundred million people in dealing with their politicians, their trusts and labor unions, less bodilessness. We propose to give a hundred million people a face, a voice, a presence, a backbone, a grip.
Then all the people we ask things of who think we can be whoofed away, will pay attention to us.
V
THE GHOST RECEIVES AN INVITATION
Being allowed to live a week to-day means as much as being allowed to live a whole life four years ago or perhaps four years from now.
We are being allowed to live in the splendid desperate moment of the world.
International war ending to-night.
To-morrow morning a thousand civil wars breaking out in a thousand nations—between classes—unless we all do our seeing and do our living swiftly and do it together swiftly to-day.
When one-tenth of the people of America tell the President of the United States and nine-tenths of the people that they cannot have any coal unless they do what the one-tenth say; when another one-tenth of the people tell the nine-tenths that they cannot have anything to eat, and another one-tenth tell them that they cannot have anything to wear until the one-tenth get what they want, just how much more democratic America is than Germany it is difficult to say; and just why anybody should suppose the emergency is over it is difficult to say. The idea of getting what you want by hold-up which has been taught to labor by capital, is now getting ready to be used by labor and capital both, and by everybody.
The really great immediate universal emergency to-day in America is the holdup. We get rid of one Kaiser other people have three thousand miles away, to get instead five thousand Kaisers we have to live with next door here at home, that we have to ask things of and say "please" to every time we cook, every time we eat, every time we buy something to wear.
The emergency is not only immediate but it is universal, all the people are concerned in meeting it all the time. We have said to one another and to everybody for four years that what we have all been sacrificing for and dying for these four years is to make the world safe for democracy.
This was our emergency. We were right. The emergency we are meeting now is to make democracy safe for the world. If the Kaiser wanted to dream his wildest dream of autocratic sneer and autocratic hate he would have dreamed US; he would have dreamed what we will be unless the men and women of America—especially the men and women of America formerly active in the Red Cross, shall meet the emergency and undertake in behalf of the people to prove to the people how (if anybody will go about and look it up) industrial democracy in America in distinction from industrial autocracy, really works.
If it works for some of us in some places, let twenty million people—Red Cross people get up and say across this land in every village, town and city, it shall work now in all places for all of us. And then take steps—all of them every morning, every afternoon, getting together as they did in the Red Cross, to see to it that the whole town and everybody in it does something about it.
When the soldiers of the American army we were all helping in the Red Cross stop fighting the Germans, come home, divide off into classes and begin fighting one another, why—because now the soldiers we have been helping need us more, because now all day every day they need us more than they ever dreamed of needing us when they were merely fighting Germans—why should we stop helping them?
On the day after the armistice—the very day when our war with just Germans was over, when the deeper, realer, more intimate, more desperate war Germany had precipitated upon all nations with themselves, begins, why should the men and women who had been working every afternoon for the men of this nation, in the Red Cross, talk about reducing to a peace basis?
The people in the Red Cross have been having in the last three years the vision of backing up an army of four million men fighting for the liberties of the world, but the vision that is before us now—before the same people—that we must meet and meet desperately and quickly is the vision of backing up an army of a hundred million men, women and children fighting for their own liberties in their own dooryards, fighting for the liberty to eat at their own tables, to sleep in their own beds, and to wear clothes on their backs, in a country which we have told the Germans is the greatest machinery of freedom, the greatest engine of democracy in the world.
I will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have made the Red Cross what it was, who have made the Red Cross the trusted representative of American democracy in all nations, who now find themselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime, most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy to a world, I will not believe that these men and women are going to lose their grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty nations, forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters they have helped before.
The logical thing at this great moment for the people who made the Red Cross to do—the thing they alone have the record, the teamwork-drill, the experience, the machinery, the momentum to do, is to keep on following the fighters, rendering first aid to the fighters moving on with their first-aid from fighters for the rights of the people not to be bullied by kings, to fighters for the rights of all classes of people not to be bullied by everybody, not to be bullied by one another.
VI
WHAT A BODY FOR THE GHOST WOULD BE LIKE
I have always wanted to write a book an employer and a workman could read looking over each other's shoulders. I would have two chapters on every subject. In one chapter I would tell the employer things his workman wants him to know, and in the next chapter I would tell the workman things that for years the employer has been trying to get him to notice. I would begin each chapter in such a way that no employer or workman would ever know which was which, or which was his chapter, until he had got in quite a little way; and I would do my best to have everybody read each other's chapters all through the book. An employer would be reading along in his chapter as innocent as you please, and slap his leg and say, "THAT'S IT! THAT'S IT! It does me good to think my workmen are reading this!" And then he would turn over the leaf and he would come plump full head on into three paragraphs about himself and about how the public feels about him, and about how his workmen feel about him, and about what God is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my book are going to help God to do to him, that will make him think. The first thing he will think of perhaps will be to lay down the book. Then before he knows it he will see another of those things he wants his workmen to read softly poking itself out of the page at him. Then he will slap his leg and think how I am making his workmen think. So he will go through the book slapping his leg and shouting "Amen" in one chapter, and sitting still and thinking in the next.
This is the gist of what I propose a new organization shall do on a national scale.
It may seem a rather simple-minded way to describe what I propose a great aggregation of American men and women on the scale of the Red Cross, should do, but the soul, the spirit, the temperament, even the technique of what I have in mind—in miniature, is in it.
It is true that it would be a certain satisfaction of course to an author to prove to employers and employees that they could get on better together than they could apart, even if they got on together better only in a kind of secret and private way in the pages of his own book; and it is true that a book in which I could make an employer and an employee work their minds together through my own little fountain pen would count some. I would at least be dramatizing my idea in ink.
But people do not believe ideas dramatized in ink.
The thing for an author or a man who has ideas to do if he must use words, is to use words to make his ideas happen.
Then let him use words about them and write books about them to advertise that they have happened.
People are more impressed with things that have happened than they are with things that are perhaps going to. Instead of having employers and employees go over the same ideas together in a book, I propose that twenty million people, in ten thousand cities shall make them go over the same ideas together in the shop.
Are capital and labor going to use the holdup on each other to get what they want when six million dead men, still almost warm in their graves, have died to prove that the holdup, or German way of getting things, does not work? What the new League will be for will be to put before the world, before every nation, before every village and city in its local branch, a working vision of how different classes and different groups of people can get what they want out of each other by trying things out together, by touching each other's imaginations and advertising to each other instead of blowing out each other's brains. The way to keep in place our Bolshevists of America is to show them that we the combined people of America, combined and acting together as one in the organization I am sketching in this book, know what they want, and that we can get the thing they essentially want for them better than they can get it. The three great groups in American life—the employing class, the laboring class, and the consumer—have all belonged to the Red Cross together, they have all worked together and sacrificed themselves, and sacrificed their class, to work for the Red Cross. What the New League will stand for in the name of all of them will be the thing that they have already demonstrated in the Red Cross that they can do. Three classes can get a thing for one class better than one class can get it.
This is the content of the League's vision of action.
The method of it will be advertising with enormous campaigns never dreamed of before what the three-class vision is and how it works. Then we will have factories dramatize it. Then we will advertise the factories.
Then when we have democracy working in a thousand factories, we will advertise and transplant our working democracy, our factory democracies, abroad.
People who have learned that democracy works in their daily work can be trusted to believe democracy will work even in their religion, even in their politics.
The idea I have in mind is already foreshadowed in the city of Cleveland.
The spirit of the people of Cleveland has already rebelled against being treated as a ghost—against being whoofed at by Labor unions and trusts.
Always before this, when incompetent manufacturers and incompetent labor unions, for the mere reason that they had not the patience to try very hard and were incompetent to understand one another and do their job, held up the whole city—five hundred thousand people—and calmly made them pay for it, the city of Cleveland like any other city would venture to step in sweetly and kindly, look spiritual and intangible a minute, suggest wistfully that they did feel capital and labor were not being quite fair to Cleveland and would they not please stop interrupting Cleveland several million dollars a day. All that ever would come of it would be the yowls of Labor at the Ghost of Cleveland, the noble whines of manufacturers at the Ghost of Cleveland.
Cleveland was treated as if it was not there.
Cleveland now swears off from being a ghost and proposes to deal bodily and in behalf of all, with its own lockouts and its own strikes in much the same way I am hoping the nation will, according to the news in my paper this morning.
With Mr. Paul Pfeiss, an eminently competent manufacturer, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as partly responsible for the holdups practiced on the city and with Mr. Warren S. Stone, an eminently competent labor union leader, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as being also partly responsible—with these two men, one the official representative of the Capital group, and the other the official representative of the Labor group, both championing the Public group and standing out for Cleveland against themselves, taking the initiative and acting respectively as President and Secretary of the Public group, the Ghost of the city of Cleveland publicly swears off from being a ghost and begins precipitating a body for itself.
I do not wish to hamper my own statement of my idea of a body for the people of the United States by linking it up with a definite undertaking in Cleveland which may or may not prove to be as good an illustration of it as I hope, but the spirit and the understanding of what has got to happen, seems to be in Cleveland—and I stop in the middle of my chapter with greetings to Paul Pfeiss and to Warren Stone. In my book the Ghost of the People of Cleveland salutes the Ghost of the People of the United States!
VII
THE GHOST GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS
A body usually begins with an embryo, and the tissue and skeleton come afterwards.
A book does, too. I prefer not exposing a skeleton much, myself, and am inclined to feel that the ground plan of a book like the ground plan of a man, should be illustrated and used, should be presented to people with the flesh on, that a skeleton should be treated politely as an inference.
But I am dealing with the body of democracy. And people are nervous about democracy just now, so much boneless democracy is being offered to them.
So I begin with the principles—the skeleton of the body of democracy for which this book stands.
The outstanding features of the body of democracy are the brain, the heart and the hand.
With the brain of democracy goes the right to think.
With the heart goes the right to live.
With the hand goes the right to be waited on.
With these three rights go three greater rights, or three duties, some people call them.
With the right to think goes the right to let others think.
With the right to live goes the right to let others live.
With the right to be waited on, goes the right to serve. To call the right to serve a duty is an understatement. I doubt if the people who have succeeded best and who have really attained the largest amount of their three greater rights, have thought of them very often as duties.
I end this chapter with the three questions America is in the world to-day to ask, to find out her own personal three answers to in the sight of the nations.
I am putting with the three questions the three answers I am hoping to hear my country give, before I die.
What determines what proportion of his right to think, each man shall have?
His power to get attention and let others think.
What determines what proportion of his right to live, each man shall have?
His power to let others live.
What determines what proportion of his right to be waited on, each man shall have?
His power to serve.
These are the principles of the new League—the voluntary, spontaneous organization of the men and women of America to meet the emergency in America of our war with ourselves, on the same scale and in the same spirit as the Red Cross met the emergency of our war with other nations, an organization which I hope to show ought to be formed, and which I am rising to make the motion to form, in this book.
I put these principles forward as the by-laws of America's faith in itself, as the principles that should govern the brain, the heart and the hand of each man in a democracy, toward all other men and that should govern all other men toward him—the skeleton of the body of the people.
VIII
THREE RIGHTS OF MAN IN A DEMOCRACY
I—THE RIGHT TO THINK
I am entitled to one one-hundred millionth of President Wilson's time in a year.
1/100,000,000th.
If I want 2/100,000,000ths of President Wilson's time in a year I must show him why. I must also show the other 99,999,999 people who think I deserve no more than my regular 1/100,000,000th why I should have two. Not allowing for the President's sleeping nights, my precise share of his time would be one-third of a second once a year. Why should I have two-thirds of a second?
I have to show.
The success of democracy as a working institution turns on salesmanship—upon every man's selling himself—his right to the attention of the Government.
A democracy which considers itself a queue of a hundred million people standing before the window of the President's attention to be waited upon by the President in the order in which they are born or in which they come up, would be a helpless institution. The success of democracy—that is, the success of a government in serving the will of the hundred million people in the queue, turns on sorting people in the queue out, turns on giving attention to what some people in the queue want before others. The man who gets out of line and walks up ahead of people who have been standing in line longer than he has, must get the permission of the queue. He must make the people in the queue feel he represents them with the President if he steps up ahead. Then they let him have their turn. They are glad to let him have hours with the President if they feel he is giving hours' worth of representation to their minutes. All each man wants to feel is that in letting Gompers, for instance, or Schwab, go up ahead, he is getting with the President a minute an hour long. Miles of people in rows say to a man like this, who can give them and their interests with the President a minute an hour long, "You first, please."
Political democracy, if it works, turns on getting the attention of the queue and then going with it to the window.
Political democracy, in other words, turns on advertising.
So does industrial democracy.
Industrial democracy in a factory of five thousand men consists in making arrangements for the five thousand men to appreciate each other, appreciate the Firm, and to feel the Firm appreciating them; arrangements for having the five thousand men get each other's attention in the right proportions at the right time so that they work as one.
The next thing that is coming in industrial democracy is getting skilled capital and skilled labor to appreciate each other's skill. A skilled capitalist can not fairly be called a skilled capitalist or, now that this war is over, unless he knows how to keep his queue appreciating his skill, keep his five thousand men standing in line for his attention cheerfully.
The difference between an industrial autocracy and an industrial democracy is that in an industrial autocracy you keep your queue in line with a club, or with threats of bread and butter, and in an industrial democracy you have your queue of five thousand men, each man in the row cheering you while he sees you giving one minute a week of your attention to him and one hour a day of your attention to others. Still you find him cheering you.
The skilled employer is the employer who so successfully advertises his skill to his employees and so successfully advertises their skill to themselves and to one another that they hand over to him in their common interest the right to sort them over. They hand over to him deliberately, in other words, in their own interests, the right not to treat them alike. Democracy consists in keeping people in line without a club. Democracy is a queueful of people cutting in ahead of one another fairly and in a way that the queue stands for.
If a man standing in a queue before a ticket window wants to cut in ahead of five people, the way for him to do it is to show the five people something in his hand that makes them say, "You first, please." He must show why he should go first, and that he is doing it in their interest.
The other day as I was standing in a long line of people before the ticket window in the Northampton station, I noticed on a guess that half a dozen of the people were standing in line to buy a ticket to New York on the express due in half an hour, and a dozen and a half were standing in line to buy tickets to Springfield on the local going in three minutes. I was number thirteen. I wanted to get a ticket for Springfield. The thing for me to do, of course, to rise to the crisis and make democracy work, was to jump up on my suitcase and address the queue who were ahead of me: "Ladies and gentlemen! Eighteen or twenty of you in this line ahead of me want tickets to Springfield on the train going in three minutes, and the rest of you want tickets on the train going in half an hour. If you people who are hoping you can get your tickets in time to go to Springfield will let me cut in ahead of you out of my turn and get my ticket, I will buy tickets for all of you with this ten dollar bill in thirty seconds, and you can get your tickets of me on the train, and in this way we will all catch it."
I did not do it, of course, but it would have been what I call democracy if I had.
The whole problem of labor and capital, and of political and industrial freedom, from now on after this war would have been solved in miniature before that window—if I had. My invention for the future of the Red Cross is that it should do what I tried to do at that window, for the American people.
Democracy is a form of government in which the people are essentially autocrats. The difference between an autocracy and a democracy is that the people select their autocrats. The more autocracy the more efficiency.
A people can not have the autocracy they need to get what they want unless they are willing to give over to their representatives the necessary trust pro tem., the necessary ex officio right to be autocrats in their behalf. Democracy is autocracy of the people, for the people, by the people—that is, by the people in spirit to their representatives who express their spirit.
The representatives of the people can not keep the people's autocracy for them unless they keep in touch with the people—that is, unless they advertise to the people and the people feel that they can advertise to them.
In an autocracy the autocracy of the ruler is based on forcing people's attention. In a democracy the autocracy is based on touching men's imaginations, on making people want to fall into line in the right order. If the Kaiser had done this in Germany, Germany would have been the greatest democracy in the world and the greatest nation. If the Kaiser had had the power and genius for advertising of the modern kind, if he had had the power of making people want things in distinction from making them meek and making them take them whether they wanted them or not, he would have invented and set up a working model for America.
Obviously, the more the people desire to form in line the better and more successful all the people in the line will be in getting what they want at the window. The more autocracy people know enough to give their representatives, the better democracy works. In the last analysis the fate of democracy in modern life turns on having autocrats on probation—autocrats selected for their positions by advertising, and kept in position as autocrats as long as they can advertise to the people and as long as the people feel that they can advertise to them.
IX
II—THE RIGHT TO BE WAITED ON
Democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in the way kings are, and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves.
Three Rights to Be Waited on
1. Skilled labor has the right to be waited on by skilled capital.
Skilled labor, being preoccupied as it naturally is by its highly specialized knowledge and skill, can not take the time off to do for itself what skilled capital could do in providing work, and providing markets for skilled labor. It cannot, on the other hand, take the time off to understand skilled capital and what it is doing in detail. Even if it could take the time off, and if five thousand hands in a factory all devoted themselves all day to understanding the work the Office is doing, the five thousand would make poor work of understanding.
Arrangements have got to be made in one way or another for skilled labor's trusting the Office, for its feeling that the autocracy it intrusts to the Office is being used fairly in its interest.
The first and most important skill of skilled capital, of course, is its skill in doing for its employees and for its customers what it is supposed to do.
But the second skill of capital must be skill in being believed in and finding means of being believed in by its employees. The more it is believed in, the more power to serve will be accorded to it. In other words, the second function of skilled capital is advertising to its skilled labor, and in making exchange arrangements with its skilled labor, for being advertised to.
2. Skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled labor.
The first skill of skilled labor must be with its machines and its tools, and in making its product, but the second skill must be its skill in being believed in. The skilled capital it is supposed to be waited on by is preoccupied with its skill, and unless labor makes special and very thorough provision to be understood and to keep understood by skilled capital, and by the public and the people who buy the goods, and unless skilled labor tries to keep in touch all around and do teamwork all around with all concerned so that it can do its work, it can not fairly be called skilled labor at all. Skilled labor has to have skill in putting its skill with others to produce a result.
In other words, the second skill of skilled labor is skill in making arrangements for being believed in and believing in others. Its second skill is in advertising and in being advertised to.
3. The other group concerned in industry is one which I like to call the Skilled Consumers.
The people have a right to have capital skilled in considering them, and labor skilled in considering them, at every point.
The people are the employers of all employers and of all employees.
The saying among business men and merchants in case of quarrel, "The customer is always right," has to be in the long run treated in a democracy as if it were approximately true.
What the consumers have to do in a democracy, however, in a singular degree is to live up to it. The consumers must make, and I believe are going to make, elaborate arrangements for being skilled consumers.
Skilled capital has organized.
Skilled labor has organized.
And now the consumers, or the people, if they are to be skilled, and if they are to get out of skilled capital and skilled labor what they want, will organize their skill to get it. They will organize to help the best skilled capital at the expense of the worst, to help the best skilled labor at the expense of the worst.
In other words, the secret of industrial democracy and of making industrial democracy work, lies in making the people skilled in conveying their wishes to the skilled capital and skilled labor waiting on them.
Skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will support it when it is right and punish it when it is wrong, by the way they buy and sell.
Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will defend it from skilled capital that pretends to be skilled and is not.
True and sincere skilled capital and true and sincere skilled labor cannot keep on doing what they try to do as long as the supposedly skilled consumers they have a right to, back away from their job and lazily and foolishly buy and sell in the markets in such a way as to reward capital for doing wrong to labor, or labor for doing wrong to capital.
In other words, the second function of the skilled consumers after telling skilled capital and labor what they want to eat and wear, is to make arrangements to advertise to capital and labor and to have capital and labor advertise to them, so that they can be skilled in knowing how to help them work together, and skilled in buying in such a way as to help in making capital and labor more skilled instead of less in dealing with themselves and one another and with the people.
I have summed up the three Rights to Be Waited On. All of these rights turn on skilled advertising and on the science of being believed in, the science of being allowed to be autocrats, the science of being allowed by the people to make their democracy work.
I would like to illustrate this in the next chapter.
X
III—THE RIGHT TO WHISPER
The employees in the stockyards in —— have been trying to get the attention of Mr. John Doe, the young man who inherited the business, to the fact that the least a family can live on now is $1388 a year.
Mr. Doe, who has never tried being bitterly poor and whose attention can not be got to what can be done in a year for a wife and five children with $1388 until he tries it, is rather discouraging to deal with.
There is no known way of getting him to try it, and in the meantime he thinks he knows without trying, and he thinks his attention is got when it is not. He tells the workmen that two pairs of shoes ought to last a child a year—and goes home in his limousine.
That is the end of it.
It ought not to be the end of it.
Who can get Mr. Doe's attention?
Why is it that Mr. Doe's employees do not succeed in getting Mr. Doe's attention?
Why is it that Mr. Doe has so little difficulty in getting theirs? Why is it that Mr. Doe's employees, when he speaks of the two pairs of shoes a year, hang on his words?
Because Mr. John Doe is their employer.
Who are the people whose words Mr. Doe would hang on and would be obliged to hang on?
Mr. Doe's employers.
Who are Mr. Doe's employers?
All the people in America who eat meat.
Of course if one had just come from Mars yesterday and was looking about studying things, the first thing one would ask would be, Why do not the people in America who eat meat, and who keep on Mr. Doe in his position, at once mention to him that they wish him to look into the matter of the two pairs of shoes a year?
Because the People Who Eat Meat—Mr. Doe's employers—have no way of mentioning it to Mr. Doe.
If the People Who Eat Meat would but barely whisper to Mr. Doe it would get his attention as much as a whole year's shouting would from his workmen.
But the People Who Eat Meat in America have no whisper. In other words, it is because Mr. Doe's employers are absolutely dumb, and Mr. Doe is absolutely deaf to any one except his employers, that two pairs of shoes are not enough for the workmen's children.
It is for the purpose of letting the People Who Eat Meat in America—whisper and learn to whisper in this country that the new League organized to operate as a kind of People's Advertising Guild or Consumers' Advertising Club, with its national office in New York and its local branches in ten thousand towns and cities, now offers its services to all people who eat meat in America.
The employers of America have organized to do anything with their business, and anything with their workmen, and anything with the country that they like.
The workmen of America have organized to do now, and are deliberately planning to do anything with their work, and anything with their employers, and anything with the country that they like.
The new national League is now to be organized as the voice of the American people, as the whisper of the will of the consumer in every industry in America.
The people to get the attention of employers are the employers of the employers.
Every civil war we are having in this country can be settled and the attention of the fighters on both sides can be got, and the country can work as one man in making democracy safe for the world, the moment the employers of the employers whisper.
The way I would like to end this chapter—with the blanks filled in, of course, would be this.
Anybody who wants to be a part of this whisper, who knows of any industry he would like to see a whisper from the people tried in, or who wishes as an Associate Member to join the Air Line League—a League for the direct action of the people in what concerns them all, is invited to send five dollars as membership fee and his name and address, to ——, Treasurer National Office of The Air Line League, Number —— Street, New York.
But the chapter cannot end in this way.
This is merely the pattern of the way I would like to have it end later, and while I have put the name—The Air Line League—down and am going to use it for the convenience of this book, I only do so, leaving it open to the people who have the vision of The League and who put the vision into action, to change the name if they want to.
XI
THE RIGHT TO WHISPER TOGETHER
Every man like all Gaul is divided into three parts. He is an employee of somebody, an employer of somebody, and a consumer.
The natural employer left to himself is apt to suppose, if he is making shoes, that his consumers ought to pay more for shoes, and that his employees ought to be paid less. As regards hats, and umbrellas, and overcoats, and underwear, the same man is a rather noble impartial person towards employers and employees. He wants them to listen to each other and lower the cost of living by not having strikes and lockouts, and by not fighting each other ten hours a day.
In 999 out of 1000 labor quarrels a consumer is naturally a fair-minded person and the best-located person to control and determine how any particular business shall be run.
The League proposed is planned to operate in its national and local functions as a national Consumers' Club, with working branches in every town which shall be engaged in doing specific things every day toward making the employers and employees in that town listen to each other in the interests of the consumer public.
It is always to the interests of the consumer-public to see to it that people who have particular interests in a business should be compelled to listen to the others' interests.
Consumers naturally prefer experts to run things for them, but if they do not run them for them, they are the natural people to make them do it.
In the last resort the right to control is with the consumers.
We are going to look to them very soon now as the natural Central Telephone Exchange in business. It is the consumers who connect everybody up. They are the switchboard of the World.
XII
THE RIGHT TO TRUST SOMEBODY
Democracy—as perhaps my reader will have heard me say before—democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves.
I try to go to the polls as I should. But I resent being obliged by my dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five men on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world with that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am putting down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this feeling I have—in those few brief miserable moments I spend with the yellow pencil—is the feeling that this country is being governed with.
I met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the country—he went on the general principle that every time he came on the name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other.
As a democrat and as a believer in crowds I resent the idea that being stood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names I cannot know anything about is democracy. It is tyranny. It is a demand that I do something no one has a right to make me do. I have other things every man knows I can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, than knowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket—Smiths and Browns and Smiths and Smiths—it is a thing I want to have done for me, I want experts—engineers in human nature that I and my fellow citizens can hire to pick out my employees, i.e., the employees of the state that I want and that I have a right to and that I would have if I had time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way we don't go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest of our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so many subjects and detectives toward so many people.
We don't want to stop doing things we know we know, and know we can do, to vote on expert questions we don't even want to know anything about, huge laundry-lists of people that God only knows or could know and that can only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committees who devote their time to it.
If we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers and watching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons day and night we couldn't keep track or begin to keep track of the people we put in office. It is not our business to, it seems to many of us. Perhaps I should merely speak for myself. I can at least be permitted to say that it is not my business. If the state will give me ten men to watch, men in prominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally and easily, I will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. What I demand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to get things for the people is that these ten men shall look after the other sixty-five and let me attend to business. The other sixty-five have a right to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can do it, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all elect intelligently to do it for us—by men we have all looked through and through and trust.
The last year or so I have been getting about three long communications a week from the —— Railway which has been trying to make me over into an expert on all the details of its relation to the Government. I wish I had time to know all about it. Some of us will have to. Things are so arranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whose business it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don't take a hand at it for a while and butt in in behalf of both the railroads and the Government, there won't be any railroads or there won't be any Government.
But I resent having this crisis put up to me personally. I resent having a pile a foot high of things I have got to know before I can help the Government to be fair to the railroads—or the railroads to be fair to the Government. I am better anyway at writing books. I don't want to be jerked into a judge—or a corporation lawyer because I am a voter. Railroads always bewilder me. Even the simplest things railroads tell everybody about themselves are hard for me to understand—time-tables for instance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking Sunday trains on Monday afternoon be called on to butt in on an expert auditor's job in this way, beat his Congressman on the head with the poor penitent railroads—with all the details about their poor insides—and with all their back bills and things?
There must be other voters who feel about this as I do.
Is this Democracy?
This is what Democracy is to me—Democracy is a belief in the faithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and their power to select great and true leaders.
The essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of government is supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the face of the earth it trusts people. A democracy that does not trust its leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a monarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can be trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's a kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They have settled down to the idea that this is what we are like—as if the main qualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, of making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. I believe I am living in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, that will take being a statesman seriously—as a special and skilled profession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in getting things out of people, and for people. We are getting ready for great and true leaders in America. Our people are getting ready to stake their fate in picking them out. Even our banks are. Our labor unions are. In our politics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. Anybody can see it. There are particular things and men we want, and the first leader we have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, the people of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, who treats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us and dares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still long enough to do things for us, will show what America is like, in spite of what she looks like, and will bring America out.
And America instead of being a kind of big slovenly adolescent, perpetually thirteen-year-old nation going around with its big innocent mouth open, will be grown up at last among the nations of the earth, will be a great clear-cut, clear-headed, firm-knit, sinewy nation that knows what it wants, and gets it—and does not say much.
XIII
THE RIGHT TO VOTE ALL DAY
This principle which I have applied in this last chapter to political democracy applies still more forcibly to democracy in industry, and to the right of the people to be waited on by skilled labor and by skilled capital.
I do not wish to bother to know everything about how everything I buy every day is made, but I do want to have arrangements made through a national league to which I belong, for instance, so that I can practically know about the conditions under which anything is made, the moment I wish to.
There should be as it were a card catalogue or authority in my town that I can go to and consult, which represents me and a hundred million people. This is my conception of what the National League through its local branches could do and do for everybody. It would only cost a few cents more to have a hundred million men know about a particular article what ten, twenty or a hundred or a thousand know, the moment they happen to need it, by looking it up in the League's national opinion of it and national experience with it, in a card catalogue or what would operate practically as a card catalogue.
We all have the right in this country to spend our money intelligently. If people want to get our thousand dollars a year, or two thousand a year, or three, five, or ten thousand a year, they must show cause why they should have it, dollar for dollar. We want our dollars to help people to help us, laborers who are helping the country and capitalists who are helping the country. Every time I spend ten cents I want to know that I am getting ten cents' worth of democracy, ten cents' worth of skilled capital and skilled labor working for all of us. I propose to vote with my money on the fate of my country and the fate of democracy with silver coins and with dollar bills every day. The other kind of ballot, the paper ballot, I can only use in the nature of the case once or twice a year.
XIV
THE SKILLED CONSUMER
The way to control the world and govern the well-being of men is not through the time they have left over, or the time they choose to lay one side for it, but directly and through their most important engagements and things they do and are sure to do all the time.
A man's first important engagement in this world is with his own breath.
His second engagement is with his own stomach.
His third is with the night and with sleep.
His fourth is with posterity, with the unborn, with his children and children's children.
His fifth is with his ancestors and with God.
In nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand things a man needs to have to keep these engagements—things he has to have if he is alive at all, he is a consumer.
What the new League will say to the consumer is something like this:
"In nine hundred and ninety-nine things out of a thousand you have to have to live, the Air Line League is organized to stand by you, express you and get the attention of everybody to what you want; and in the one thing you make for everybody it is going to express everybody to you and get your attention to what everybody wants of you."
This would seem to most of us to be fair all around.
When one thinks of it, why should one-thousandth part of what a man has and has to have, in order to live his life—the part he makes himself—be seen everywhere in this world in every man's life holding up and bullying, making him pay high prices for, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths?
Let the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of a man's life take possession of the one thousandth part of him. Then we will have a civilization.
Or at least the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of him will persuade the one thousandth of him to coöperate.
We have had autocracy of capital because on the whole in the world until machinery came in, capital kept close enough to labor and to the consumer to know what the workmen and the people wanted.
Now that Capital has lost its grip, Labor announces that it is going to be after this war the autocrat, and represent capital and the consumer.
The Air Line League is here to ask, Why should not the consumer represent himself?
Capital has tried and failed and has said, "Let the public be damned." Now Labor has tried and failed, and is saying hoarsely in a thousand cities, "Let the public be damned."
What the Air Line League is for is to advertise the people together, and let the consumers represent themselves.
What we have been fighting for essentially in this war is the control of the consumers in the world in all nations.
When we speak of democracy and of organizing the will of the people, what we really mean is organizing the will of the consumers.
Organizing the will of the consumers is not a holdup. A holdup by all the people of all the people for all the people is Liberty.
XV
SAMPLE DEMOCRACIES
I do not want to delay or bother people with my definition of democracy, but I do not mind confiding to them where I have seen some.
One is always coming upon bits or dots of democracy in America. It is these bits or dots of rough more or less unfinished democracy we have in America which make most of us believe in the people of this country.
Everybody in America knows of them.
There are at least forty-four dots of democracy—little marked-off places—what might be called safety zones (everybody knows of them), even in New York. There are usually white globes in front of them, and a short name written in long plain slanting white letters across a huge piece of glass.
If anybody wants to see just what democracy is like in business all he has to do is to go into the nearest Childs restaurant, order some griddle-cakes, sit down and eat and think. All he really needs to do is to study the menu, but of course a menu is more thoroughly studied by eating some of it.
One soon finds that a menu may be a little modest every-day magna charta of democracy or it may not.
What a menu has long been for in the typical restaurant is to find a way of browbeating and bewildering a customer into spending more money for his luncheon than he intends to when he comes in.
Rows of grieved and vaguely disturbed people can be seen in restaurants every day—being mowed down by menus.
In a Childs restaurant business success is based on turning the whole idea of a menu around, and instead of the customer's coming in and studying the menu, the menu studies him.
The consumer in a Childs restaurant is there to economize and the restaurant is there to help him do it, the whole menu being constructed by experts in foods for the express purpose of telling the customer more than he knows about his food and his money, persuading him and practically tricking him into spending less money on his luncheon than he intends to.
A business may be said to be a big vital and winning business in any line in proportion as one sees the consumers in it—practically running it—running it in spirit. A democratic business is one which is being run as the consumers would run it if they knew how.
A business may be said to be a democratic business in proportion as one sees experts in it expressing crowds. One sees great crowds going to and fro and up and down in it acting for all practical purposes like geniuses, like skilled angels doing every day offhand inspired and inspiring difficult adventurous things as a matter of course—like tackling the high cost of living.
What the Air Line League is for is to make the consumers of America—the all-class class, class-conscious—is to organize the consumers of America locally and nationally so that the comparative coöperation of crowds and geniuses and experts as in Childs' restaurants, can be assured in all lines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as the label of modern successful business life.
The Air Line League definition of democracy would be this:
A democracy may be said to be a state of society in which the consumers or the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expert attention of the men who make them.
The triumph of America and of the other democracies during the war has been that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended upon to have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to wait on them while they whip the Germans.
What the Air Line League proposes to do (Further details later) is to arrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer of the Germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way to keep this up.
Is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all our experts drop away—permanently drop away from waiting on crowds—are really going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waiting on themselves in just the way the Germans said they would?
What the Air Line League will stand for will be that experts and crowds can be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience and power of waiting on each other during peace as well as war.
Why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences and powers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whipping the Germans and not having them all the while, every day, for ourselves?
XVI
THE TOWN PENDULUM
The Air Line League in its local, national and international branches will act as a Listening Machine.
A Listening Machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward. Worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. When the same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people listen until they understand.
There are people in every town and in every local branch of the League who have what I like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. People in motion are not as reliable and as calculable as brass. People have wills, visions, individual emotions and lurchings of their own. When a man with a pendulum temperament sees a colossal pendulum made of crowds of people—crowds of employers and crowds of workmen—swinging from one extreme to another, the first thing he wants to do as each issue comes up, local or national, is to see to it that his own mind and each other man's mind in these two crowds on each side of the question should go twice through the middle, to going once to the extremes at either end.
In other words, The National Air Line League will act to bring extremes together—twice through the middle to once at each end—and local clubs will act as attention-swinging machines—as attention-forcing machines between classes.
I might give an illustration:
The National League in its central office in New York gets a report from the local branch in the town where Smith safety razors are made that the Smith Works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustained ugliness and inefficiency. The Central Office, after quietly looking into it, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through its local branches reports to the ten million men shaving with Smith blades every morning that the workmen and managers of the Smith factories, who are working a nominal nine hours a day, are spending three hours a day in fighting with each other as to how Smith blades should be made for the public, and six hours a day in making the blades. The consumer is told by the League that he is paying for nine hours' work a day on his blades and only getting six, and that if the employers and employees in the Smith factories could be got to listen to each other and to work together the blades could be had for three cents less apiece.
The League will then proceed through its local branch in the Smith town to arrest the attention of the Smith workmen and the Smith employers. It will suggest that they get each other's point of view and sit down very earnest and hear everything that the other side has to say and everything the other side wants to do, until they find some way of getting together and being efficient and knowing how to make Smith blades.
If necessary in order to get the attention of the workmen and employers at the Smith Works to the desirability of their listening to each other, the users of Smith blades throughout the country will shave themselves with their fathers' razors for three weeks.
If the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America who shave will turn the Government out of office and have the law changed.
A strike by workmen in a particular business is a holdup of all the other workmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and is undemocratic and unfair.
A lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all other employers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair.
In a country of a hundred million people a holdup conducted by a hundred million people for the hundred million people is democracy.
I employ this rather threatening illustration of the possible action of the League in certain cases because it suggests the power of democracy when experts and crowds act together—the fact that democracy can really be made to work, that democracy can be as forcible, as immediate and practical in dealing with autocratic classes, as autocracy can.
But only two or three per cent of what the League in its local and national branches would really do would be like the illustration I have used. The power the League would have to do things like this would make doing them unnecessary.
The regular work of the League would largely consist in accepting invitations from factories, and in supplying and training experts for the purpose of conducting in a factory mutual advertising campaigns, or studies in attention between workmen and employers, adapted to different types of factories.
The way out for democracy in dealing with predatory wealth which organizes to hold up the consumers, and with predatory labor which organizes to hold up the consumers, is for the consumers to organize.
XVII
THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE
People are so much more apt to bear in mind in proportion, the power of an organization to be ugly, than they are its power not to need to be ugly—to get what it wants with people by combining with them instead of fighting them, that perhaps it might be well to dwell a moment on the fact that the power of the consumers of the country as organized in the Air Line League, to make it uncomfortable for predatory labor or predatory capital, will never be abused.
If what an organization is for, is to put the soul and body of a people together it is compelled as a matter of course, to get its own way with the same quietness, dignity and power it is telling other people to. The first business of the Air Line League is going to be, to be believed in by everybody. The way to be believed in by everybody is for the League to do itself the thing that it talks about doing. If in this way the League soon gets itself believed in by everybody, the first thing people will notice about the Air Line League will soon be that it is an organization that can lick anybody in sight with its little finger. The next thing people will notice is that it never gets so low that it has to do it.
The power of labor unions and employers' associations has frequently been abused because they have many of them organized their power for the express purpose of abusing it.
It is highly unlikely that people will need to be afraid of the power of the Air Line League. An organization which exists for the express purpose of driving out of business people who get what they want by holdups, the entire activities of which are devoted to proving to people how much more holding out a hand gets for people in business than sticking out a fist, soon gets its fist trusted.
If the Air Line League abuses its power it will commit suicide so fast that people will feel suddenly safe.
If I were writing a platform for the Air Line League, it might be put perhaps for all practical purposes in one sentence.
Subject—War.
Object—Stopping it.
Predicate—What we believe about war.
Verb—What we propose to do about what we believe about war.
Adverb—How we propose to do it.
Period—Peace.
The main trouble with the sentence forty nations are trying to stutter out now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column of belief.
The spinal column of belief in the Air Line League—the gist of our platform—is this one sentence:
PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET OTHER'S ATTENTION.
Everything we believe and propose to do follows from this.
The way to stop war is to advertise, to provide and set up in full sight and in working order before people who are trying to get what they want by war, a substitute for war which gets what they want for them quicker and better.
The way to keep people who fight from fighting is to stand over them, advertise to them and dramatize to them how much more people can get by listening to each other. Then compel them to listen.
We do not believe in fighting on the one hand nor in an anæmic and temporary thing like arbitration on the other. All that men really do in arbitration is to hire their listening done for them by other people.
Listening which men were created to do themselves, which is done for them by others, only lasts a minute.
The three plain spiritual brutal facts that capital and labor have to reckon with and conform to in dealing with human nature to-day are these:
Disputes can not be fought out—not even by the people themselves.
Disputes can not be arbitrated out by other people for them.
All other people are for in a fight is to compel the fighters to listen to each other.
Doing anything less than compelling the fighters to listen to each other, is visionary, cowardly, temporary and impracticable.
The moment people stop fighting, begin listening to each other and begin feeling listened to, nobody can hire them to organize to fight each other. They organize to listen to each other.
What the Air Line League is for in every nation, in every city, town and village where a branch is set up, is to organize people to listen to each other.
I do not think any one is going to feel obliged to feel afraid of the power of a League, that puts daily before its own face, before everybody's face—before every letter it writes, and before everything it does, across its letter-head, this chapter in nine words.
PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET EACH OTHER'S ATTENTION.
XVIII
HOW THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE WILL WORK
Nine people out of ten who do wrong in business, do it because they feel that if they do not do the wrong to some one else, some one else will do the wrong to them. In the last analysis, some way of bringing about conscription for universal service in business is the only way in which we can be assured that the criminals and exploiters in any particular line of industry will not, at least temporarily, control and ruin the business. What the Air Line League would do practically would be to organize American business-men into a kind of "I Won't If You Won't" Club. A very large majority of men daily see that certain things ought not to be done. It is not right-mindedness in people that is needed so much as the organization of the right-mindedness so that those who are wrong can be crowded out. My idea of the general policy of the Air Line League would be to bring the public to coöperate with the best men in each industry in such a way as to drive the worst ones out. Probably from a publicity point of view the best way to do would be for the League to pick out the nine best factories in the country in which the laborers have a working understanding and a practical listening arrangement with their employers, and help the laborers in these nine factories advertise to other laborers in the country, at specific times and places, and to capital throughout the country, how they like it. One factory in ten, if necessary, could be selected for national discipline. A notorious factory could be picked out in which the laborers had the worst listening arrangement, and in which both the employers and employees were imposing upon each other to their own detriment and the detriment of their customers the most; and could be publicly disciplined by the National League acting through its local clubs everywhere. Cooperating with nine factories and disciplining one would be my idea of the best way to get results. All that would need to be done would be to make a list of all the industries in the country and keep the buyers of the country informed about them through the local Clubs.
Industrial democracy is coming in this country one industry at a time. Each industry is going to work out its own salvation by emancipating and freeing the hands of the men who can run it best in the interests of the public—that is, run it with the lowest prices to the public, the highest prices to the wage earners, and a surplus for improvements, inventions and experiments in rendering its product of more service to all.
I am not in favor of having capitalists try to convince labor as a class, nor having labor try to convince capital as a class. The skilled labor which has been convinced by capital should convince the others through the services of twenty thousand local Clubs, and skilled capital which has succeeded in being believed in by its labor will do the same in convincing other capital.
XIX
MAKING A RIGHT START
It will be seen that the idea I have in mind might be imagined as a kind of civic federation club, a super-consumers' league, and a super-advertising club rolled into one. Rolling these three ideas into one is a temperament, and the men who are full of the vision of what can be done with them rolled into one, and of what is the matter with them if they are not rolled into one, must be the controlling powers in the new organization. The Civic Federation has been a safe plodding vague institution because it has not had a vigorous vision of itself, and has not been conducted by men who have a personal genius for conceiving and carrying out coöperation between capital and labor. It has been weak, theoretical, and full of generalization because it has not had the driving force that such a man as Schwab—some Schwab in publicity instead of steel—could have given it.
The Consumers' League has been a useful, suggestive institution, and has done work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or less nagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision or sense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked the advertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness that puts things through.
The new organizations—as a super-consumers' league, a super-advertising club—will converge these two ideas into a huge momentum, into a national organized drive or vision of making men see together and act together, until we work out social democracy in every man's business, in every man's store, and the daily work of every man's life. Programs which have merely been yearned at before, which have been sleazily groped at and generalized over and guessed at before, will be gathered up, articulated, melted into a huge common national action by men who have the consuming passion and genius for touching the imaginations of others. The selection and articulation of these men in all communities is all that is necessary. Everything is waiting and ready. First we will get the men together who have the fire. Then we will put fire under the boilers of the nation and turn the drive-wheels of a world.
XX
UP TO THE PEOPLE
There are several reasons which, as it seems to me, show that my plan is not visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill in the way I have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now most needs to be done for high production and team-work in the industries of the country.
1. The consumer class is practically everybody.
2. The consumer class is the most disinterested, and is identified with both capital and labor. It is the natural umpire between them. Its line of least resistance is to act fairly.
3. The interests of the consumer class lead it not only to act fairly but to act energetically. The consumer class as a class will want to pay extra for as few quarrels between the people it is paying to make things for it as possible. The consumer always pays for all quarrels, and anything that is good for the employers and employees in the long run can not but be good for the consumer in the long run.
4. In the last analysis, the consumers in any given industry, if duly organized as capital and labor are now, will not only have the disposition to act fairly in a quarrel between the people who are making something that they buy, and the disposition to act quickly and have the fight over with, but they will have as buyers the power as a last resort to choose the factories they will deal with; to do their buying naturally and cheaply, and from factories that are entirely in the business of making goods and not half in the business of making goods and half in the business of making civil war. The nationally organized consumers will naturally advertise to people which firms take the least time off for fighting, and put all their work into the goods they expect the people to pay for.
This national advertising campaign will be operated through national headquarters, coöperating with local branches organized in all manufacturing towns and cities. The national headquarters will act as a clearing house for the materials, facts, illustrations and demonstrations which the local centers collect and distribute and apply, proving that democracy works.
Everything turns, in getting a thing done to-day, on seeing to it that the people who take it up are the people who can best get the attention of others.
The consumer class cannot fail because they are the best people in the country to compel everybody to listen.
The consumers are the best people to get everybody to listen because they are the best listeners.
The consumers are the best people to start anything in America and keep it going because everybody in America cares what the consumers think, wants to be on good terms with them, and to please them, wants to be heard by them and wants to hear what they say.
XXI
THE WAY FOR A NATION TO SPEAK UP
The Air Line League is not visionary. The people of this country have expressed an idea. They can do it again.
Not long after the American part in the war was under way our Government had the idea—which it had not had at all when it began—that if America was going to do her part in defeating the Germans, or if we were to come anywhere near defeating the Germans, it would only be possible through an unexpected degree of self-sacrifice on the part of our people all day, every day until the war was over.
Our people did not believe this idea.
How could our Government get through to each man in America that winning the war depended on him? Get through to each woman and each child that something must be given up by each of us to defeat the Germans? The Government not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately the country needed them—every man of them—but it wanted also to inspire the people and to let the people see their power themselves. They wanted to teach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to the people and to the world how reverently the men, women and children of America could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat the Germans.
I fell asleep in Maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the Grand Central Station. I came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlike Sunday we had during the war.
A single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which I could have had for a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me.
I mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent about human nature. I went over and stood and looked up Madison Avenue and looked down Madison Avenue.
I had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and I found myself upon what seemed to me the loneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place I had ever seen upon the earth—a corner of Madison Avenue. It seemed like a kind of vision to stand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. I looked up at the sign on the corner. It really was Madison Avenue.
It was as if the hand of a hundred million people had reached out three thousand miles. It was as if a hundred million people had met me at the corner and told me—one look, one silence: "Here is this street we offer up that the will of God should go by. We are going to defeat the Germans with the silence on this street."
I stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with the invisible—a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came over me that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, were reaching, while I looked, across the country. I saw my people hushing a thousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of Chicago, of San Francisco and New York like the aisles of churches.
There was no need of church bells the first gasolineless Sunday, reminding one noisily, cheerily, a little thoughtlessly—the way they do—that God was on the earth.
One could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. But the first gasolineless Sunday—five hundred thousand miles of still roads lifted themselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, saying for a hundred million people, "God still reigneth." And twenty million little birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at five hundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what had happened!
I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had when I waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out of communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out of the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, into the long, white silent prayer of my people—and prayed with a hundred million people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets of a nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to God.
We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the war. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, to the great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-four full page ads in a thousand papers could do.
Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people—in advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement, eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows they look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, into prayers for a world—Mr. Garfield had few equals.
To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single stomach in the country.
To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a hundred million people—go in through the kitchen door of every house with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar when they ordered eight.
Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people look out of their windows on streets—thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the Germans!
We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in America, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany—was to interrupt people's personal daily habits.
The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to the people to whom we are trying to express it.
The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalists and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an hour in the day.
The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, in expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is plain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of the working ideas of the Air Line League.
Our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen is not to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wish we would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us to speak to them. Let a hundred million people do something to the people who take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonder what the hundred million people think.
The true way to advertise is to make the people you advertise to, do it. To get an idea over to the Germans do something to them that will make them come over to us—come all the way over to us and extract it. The same principle is going to be applied next by the Public Group in industry. We will do something that will make them—capital and labor—say: "What do you mean?"
Then let them study us and search us and search their own minds and find out.
I
G. S. L. TO HIMSELF
The most important and necessary things a man ever says sometimes, are the things he feels he must say particularly to himself.
In what I have to say about this nation I have stripped down to myself.
Of course any man in expressing privately his own soul to himself, may hit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is the very thing everybody in a nation would do, probably if he had time.
But that may or may not be. All I know is that in this book, and in a grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what they ought to do.
A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to.
I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody right.
During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself.
I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything happens to my mind or to my pocket book—in a railway station, in a trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom—wherever I am, I put it down—put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me.
As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from this book to myself.
On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has been written to express certain things a hundred million people want during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the hundred million people.
I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that if the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, I really believe it would be—at least in the main gist and spirit of it, like mine.
Nearly every man in the hundred million people—in what we call helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready, except in his own strike, to write a book like this.
I cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can prove it and do something that will prove it.
And the two great political parties in their coming conventions—one or both of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to try. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go with people.
And the book is not to them. It is not even for them. This book is to me. I have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world. It is easy and light-hearted, but take it off its guard every laugh is a prayer or a cry.
II
IF I WERE A NATION
Economics, I suspect, are much simpler than they look.
The soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is.
Why should I propose, if I were a nation—just because I am being a hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table—by a really simple thing like there being so many of me?
I am human—a plain fellow human being—and if the United States would act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act, when it is really put up to him—forty nations in his yard waiting for him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem would at once become direct and deep and simple.
All that is the matter with it is that so many Senates have sat on it.
Reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a Senate down to one human being being human—boil it down to a baby even—and what it would do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep on being human and close to essentials.
And that is all there is to it.
The other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being as human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being on Committees.
The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer away from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there.
The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying they would run the factory themselves.
A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running the factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house to ask him to come back to his desk.
He told the Committee he would not return with them. He said that a committee could not get him. The thousand men had rolled him away through jeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wanted him they could come with their wheelbarrow and roll him back.
The thousand came with their wheelbarrow and rolled him back.
The crowds laughed.
But the thousand men and their employer were sober and happy—had some imagination about each other and went to work.
If I were a nation, the first question I would ask would be, "Why bother with wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic Russian way to act an idea all out in order to see it?"
In America we propose to come through to this same idea by being human, by using our brains on our fellow human beings, by hoeing each other's imaginations.
The issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which grows logically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modern industrial life.
These are the Mahogany Desk and the Cog.
III
WHAT THE MAHOGANY DESK IS GOING TO DO
The old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the next row with his employee.
The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing alongside him in the next row.
To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what he does at his desk.
A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious to a laboring man.
In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has to do is to find a substitute for hoeing in the next row.
His workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he is and see the perspiration on his brow.
The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his mahogany desk sweat. It really does for all practical purposes of course, but how can he make it look so?
In the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a massive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to workmen the way they work.
Very soon now, everywhere—much harder than hoeing in the next row—with the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks hoeing their workmen's imaginations.
The other main point in the book the hundred million people would write if they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. I would devote the second ten chapters I think, not to Mahogany Desks, or to the buttons on them directing machines, but to Cogs.
The second great point the hundred million people will have to meet and will have to see a way out for in their book, is the way a Cog feels about being a Cog.
If a Cog in a big locomotive could take a day off and go around and watch the drivewheel and pistons—watch the smoke coming out of the smokestack and the water scooping up from between the rails—watch the three hundred faces in the train looking out of the windows and the great world booming by, and if the Cog could then say, "I belong with all this and I am helping and making it possible for all these people to do and to have all this!" And if the Cog could then slip back and go on just being a cog,—the cog would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be.
He would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be in a democracy-machine in distinction from a king-machine.
What is more, if a Cog did this, or if arrangements were studied out for some little inkling of a chance to do it, he would be making his job as a Cog one third easier and happier and three times as efficient.
A man is created to be the kind of Cog that works best when it is allowed to do its work in this way. God created him when He drove in one rivet to feel the whole of the ship. It is feeling the whole of the ship that makes being a Cog worth while.
The great work of the American people in the next four years is to work out for American industry the fate of the Cog in it.
The fate of democracy turns next on our working out a way of allowing a Cog some imagination, or some substitute for imagination in its daily work—something that the rest of the Cog—the whole man in the Cog can have, which will bring his spirit, his joy and his power to bear on his daily work.
This is the second of the two main points the hundred million people would make in their book if they had time.
These two main points—getting labor to see how a mahogany desk sweats—getting the mahogany desk to put itself in the place of a Cog, know how a Cog feels and what makes a Cog work—are points which are going to be made successfully and quickly in proportion as they are taken up in the right spirit and with a method—a practical human working method which so expresses and dramatizes that right spirit that it will be impossible for people not to respond to it.
I am not undertaking in this part of my book to make an inquiry as to what the right spirit is, or what the right method is that a hundred million people ought to adopt.
I am a somewhat puzzled and determined person and I am instituting out loud a searching inquiry as to what I am going to do myself and what the principles and methods are that I should be governed by in doing my personal part, and conducting my own mind and judgment toward the movements and the men about me.
To avoid generalizing, I might as well give my idea the way it came to me—one man's idea of how one man feels he wants to act when being lied to.
I do not say in so many words, I was lied to. I do not know. A great many people every day find themselves in situations where they do not know. The question I am asking of myself is, how can a man or a public take a fair human and constructive attitude when one does not know and cannot know for the time being, all that it is to the point to know?
A stupendous amount of red-flagism, unrest and expensive unreasonableness would be swept away in this country if we all had in mind to use for ourselves when called for the following rules for being lied to.
(Not that I am going to lumber people's minds up by numbering them as rules out loud. They are all here—in what follows—the spirit of them, and people can make their own rules for themselves as they go along.)
IV
RULES FOR BEING LIED TO
(Charles Schwab or Anybody)
—— dropped in, in the rain the other night, and sat by my fireplace and said: "Charles Schwab is the Prince of Liars. He says one thing about labor and does another." He went on to say things he said other people said.
There are two courses of action to take about Charles Schwab's being the Prince of Liars.
One way is to expose what he says.
The other way is to help him make what he says true.
I would rather do what I can to help Charles Schwab practice what he preaches than to stop his preaching.
Everything turns for the American people to-day on being constructive, on dealing with facts as they are, on using the men we have, and on getting the most out of the men we have.
To get the most out of Charles Schwab throw around him expectation and malediction and then let him take his choice.
Charles Schwab in saying what he says about the new spirit in which capital has got to deal with labor is rendering a great, unexpected, sensational and indispensable service to labor and to capital. It is a pity to throw this public confession of capital to labor, and in behalf of labor away. It would be a still greater pity to see labor itself throwing it away.
If I could let myself be cooped up as a writer in any one class in this country to-day, and if it were my special business to take sides with labor, the thing I would try to do first with Charles Schwab, instead of undermining what he says and making what he says mean nothing—would be to coöperate with him—back him up—back him up with the public—back him up with the stockholders and the people in his mills, until he makes what he says mean three times as much.
Then I would see to it if I could, that he says four times as much. I would try, if I could, to keep Charles Schwab steadily at it, claiming more and more for labor. Then catching up more and more to Charles Schwab, doing more and more, and compelling his partners to do more and more of what he says.
Charles Schwab has fifty or a hundred thousand or so partners, of course—stockholders he has to educate.
They have to be educated in public. He is not insincere because he has not educated them all in a minute.
V
GETTING ONE MAN RIGHT
There are certain facts which make me believe in Schwab as an asset for the nation and for labor and capital both, that must not be thrown away. There are all manner of facts about Schwab and his mills which I do not yet know which I could look up and use, but the most valuable facts to use and use first, are facts anybody can get and get without looking up, by just sitting down and thinking.
Getting one man right and being fair to one man is the way to begin to be fair to a nation.
If Charles Schwab is what —— says he is, if Charles Schwab is doing or winking while it is being done at the thing —— says he is—he is an incredibly under-witted man—stupid about the public, about labor and about capital—and, what is the most reckless of all—stupid in behalf of himself.
It is rather a hard nut to crack—Charles Schwab's being stupid. I cannot understand why people—why a man like —— would apparently rather believe that Charles Schwab is stupid than to believe that there must be some other way of explaining him and of explaining what he has heard said about him.
If what —— says is true about Mr. Schwab, he is not only a stupid man but a ruined man.
In the colossal outbreak of public knowledge coming to us now, nothing will be able to keep Charles Schwab from to-morrow on, from being a stupendous tragedy as long as he lives, and a by-word after he is dead.
The alternatives are:
The assertions about Mr. Schwab's real attitude toward labor are not true.
If true, they are qualified by facts and by delaying conditions for which all intelligent men whether identified with capital or labor would be glad to allow.
If true they are due to delegated authority.
If a large organization does not hand over authority it is inefficient.
If it does not make experiments with men and methods it is inefficient.
If it does not make a certain proportion of mistakes in its experiments with men and methods its experiments are fake experiments.
People who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who do things.
VI
GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT
My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and reformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extreme radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme conservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and self-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrong the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean—what they are like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like.
The quick way to deal with the industrial situation is to expose the extreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. The quick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come to terms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about one another, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructive job on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic human beings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are held up and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these human beings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, by engineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature.
These personalities to unlock a nation with—to make a hundred million men believe together and act together should be picked out, men like Charles Schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yet everybody ought to look at, and will like to look at when they know them.
Intensive publicity extensively applied.
Then with a printing press and a postage stamp multiply it by a hundred million. Make true beliefs about picked out men—typical men we have thousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives.
If the American people can come to know and interpret fifty men—if they can get fifty sample men right—they will then be able to use these fifty men every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlock team work with, with all the others. People will have something to work from and something to work toward, in judging what they can do with employers and with workmen around them.
Then we will have team work and civilization—we will have a democracy the Germans would like to be asked to belong to.
VII
ENGINEERS IN FOLKS
The most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The other facts than the facts about people—about how people feel and are going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine training and education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people. The facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to get most, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging one another.
We have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are off on their facts about one another. One of the first things business men are going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about human nature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with by experts—by the general recognition and employment of experts in human nature—of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men to one another.
If everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as they really are, our economics in America will be as simple as a primer, before night.
VIII
THE GREAT NEW PROFESSION
En Route, New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R.
January 19, 1920.
Dined at the ——'s last night. Judge —— was there. Two other lawyers. We sat after dinner and talked very late.
Three lawyers are too many for a dinner.
I do not know what it is, but I never spend the evening with a lawyer, without talking back to him in my mind all the next day.
Probably, if at this late date I were picking out what I would be in the world, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick out being a lawyer backwards.
The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in conducting people's fights for them.
My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once be started—a profession in which any man who went into it, would be occupied in being a lawyer backwards.
(I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of—because everybody would see—a whole nation would see all in one unanimous minute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like.)
Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by the things they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuous ad.—their huge national international display ad. just now of what a lawyer is like—of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is the United States Senate.
It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to most people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards—two or three hundred thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts everybody went to, to keep them out of fights.
You see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course he will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it over. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it is not impossible he will make your enemies love you.
My idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what it is worth—not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as a plain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for getting the things done one wants to do, and for getting what one wants.
If I were hiring a man to help me get what I want out of other people and if I had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be the more practical thing for me to do.
If I could go down town and engage a man at so much a year who would be an expert in making me understand myself and in making me make fun of myself, so that I could get myself into fairly good shape for other people to understand, it would be still more practical.
I would soon find myself after the first few séances with the man I was hiring to sit down with me and be a lawyer backwards to me—I would soon find myself having things done to me that would be so plain, so pointed, so sensible, so scientific and matter of fact and thorough that I would be able in a minute to cut down to the quick with any man I met,—cut down to the quick and get what I wanted on any subject I took up, because nobody could fool me, because I couldn't even be fooled by myself.
I do not know how long it is going to take but I do know that if the world is going to be reformed it is going to be by men who—either by doing it personally, or by hiring somebody else to help them do it, have reformed themselves.
My own personal observation is, so far, that when I set out to see things against myself I seem to need somehow, a great deal of assistance.
In such a naturally disagreeable mussy job of course, instead of going to my friends, to people one goes out to dine with, I feel there ought to be some regular professional person one could go to, some more noble refined sort of spiritual hired man—make an appointment by telephone, go down to a room down town on the way to one's office and then just as a plain matter of course be done off for the day, be done over, be put in shape for one's fellow human beings to get on with.
Then one could go out into the midst of the people and keel over a world.
After one had hired some one to be a lawyer backwards to one and got used to it, one would soon be in shape to go to one's employers and let them put in some touches, go to one's employees, go to anybody and everybody right and left. One would soon get so that one could learn something from everybody. One would take points even from relatives.
The main difficulty in a thing like this would be one that would come at the start, the difficulty of getting people to look upon undergoing the truth about themselves, respectfully and seriously and like an operation.
No amateur or friend could get anybody started. The only way to begin is to have some special expert to go to, some special expert with a long string of notable moral patients, men who have succeeded in business by seeing through themselves more, and seeing through themselves quicker and oftener than other people do. You hear of some especially good man who is being a lawyer backwards practicing regularly with great success. You observe his patients from day to day and see how the truth works. Then you go down to his office, plank down your money and get the truth.
The trouble with truth from friends and relatives is that even when they tell it, nobody pays for it. Most people neither take the truth nor anything else in this world seriously if it is free. People get more, the more they want it. And the more they want it, the more they show it by wanting to pay for it.
This is why I suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be a regular profession. There is going to be a tremendous demand for going down town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see how going down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with people in one's work.
The lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies about himself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free a man from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis of himself and present him a world with the truth.
This idea should be presented to people just as plain common sense. People should not be asked to take it up not as an ideal but as an operation. If a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how he has got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to a man's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in order to have any one willing to let him live?
We have operations on all our other inner organs. The things that are done to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personal and intimate things. And if people will let themselves be cut open and operated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men—hundreds of thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to be operated on so that they can earn something to eat? Nine out of ten of the things that keep people from earning a living as they should or as they might, are truths against themselves that have never been operated on.
IX
GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE FACTS
The first thing the man in the White House for the next four years is going to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as they really are.
If I were writing a book for the next president to run for president on, one of the first things I would put into it would be a definite statement of what the president and the government proposed to do and what policy they proposed to adopt to keep Labor and Capital from being off on their facts about each other.
There are two policies to choose from.
First Policy: Have Capital tell Labor what is the matter with Labor, and have Labor tell Capital what is the matter with Capital. (Results: Strikes heaped on lockouts and lockouts heaped on strikes.)
Second Policy: Turn the whole truth-telling policy around.
The way to make a truth count is to get the utmost possible attention to it.
The way to get the utmost possible attention to a truth is to have people one does not expect it from telling it. The way to advertise the sins of Capital is to have Capital tell them. Employers and capitalists can attract twenty times as much attention in telling things that are the matter with them, and will be believed forty times as much. And they not only can tell the facts against themselves more fairly, but while they are telling the facts against themselves they are in a position to change them. They can tell facts against themselves with one hand and change them with the other. Or they can begin changing them—begin getting labor to help them change them.
If I had to save the world in a week or rather get assurance in a week that it could be saved, I would get all the people in it to agree for a year to read each other's papers. Have every man read two papers. We would start up for America the national Parallel Column Habit. Each man by himself daily putting his own little world and other people's world alongside until they got used to it, and then together.
There is no limit to what reading the wrong papers would not do for this nation. It is not a matter to argue about. It is a mere plain matter of fact in ordinary every day psychology. The veriest tyro in human engineering can see it,—that the way to get a truth noticed about Capital or Labor, the way to make a truth of some use and get it believed and acted on, is to have the wrong people tell it.
Judge Gary could say some of the things Mr. Gompers is saying a great deal better than Mr. Gompers could.
There is one thing I am going to do when I put this up to the people. I am not going to let them think I am putting it up to them as a Christian. The way to introduce the idea is to speak as a plain practical engineer in folks and in the way human nature works. I don't know as I would mind people having fine religious feelings about it, when they did it, if they liked, but I would prefer to call it and prefer to introduce it as simple, plain, hard-headed publicity.
The most natural quick universal short-cut to peace, to different groups of people in America getting their facts right and getting them quick and dealing with each other as they really are, is to have people go around in America from now on, telling truths everywhere, who have just got them—people the truths look prominent on.
X
THE FOOL KILLERS
The gist of the labor problem simmers down to our making some adequate universally understood provision, generally resorted to by everybody as a matter of course, for people's not being fooled about themselves.
If people do not fool themselves nobody else can fool them.
And they do not go around fooling others.
The next thing employers and employees who are being fooled by themselves and who are trying to fool one another, are going to observe, is that their competitors in their own industry—the employers and employees in their own industry who are not fooled by themselves and who are not taking time to fool one another, are producing more, cheaper and better goods than they can.
Things that take years to straighten out, straighten out in weeks when people on both sides who have stopped fooling themselves, get together and look at the facts over each other's shoulders. All that is necessary is to get the thing started—looking at the facts over each other's shoulders. People who do not want to start to look at facts in this way should call in a specialist until they do.
Labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital human nature another. They both believe on both sides what they want to, unless they go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitable habit started of making a deliberate, desperate effort not to.
The world is not being run from day to day by the truth. It is run by what people believe is the truth. It is what the I. W. W. extremists believe is the truth, which constitutes the important fact—the fact which has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. The truth about Judge Gary's attitude or Charles Schwab's, toward labor unions, makes no difference if nobody believes it, or if the labor unions don't believe it. As long as the labor unions are fooling themselves and believing what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact way to deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. The fundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off on their facts about themselves and believe what they want to about themselves. Naturally having begun with this they branch out and believe what they want to about anybody.
To this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we have obviously got to make provision for in modern American life, is practically a new profession—regular professional persons everywhere in all cities, and in all the different industries and in the highly specialized groups each with their special and different techniques, who are experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves and others of believing what they want to about themselves.
XI
THE WHISPERERS
A very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in the habit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their office doors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves.
A very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in the habit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficient type are whispering around to one another against themselves.
One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people who are shouting would shut up.
But perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout.
The first moment the shouters suspect what the whisperers are whispering,—the whisperers on the other side—they will stop shouting to listen.
The whole industrial situation narrows down to this,—might be put into two words by a hundred million people to-day, to Capital and Labor, "Swap Whispers!"
The tumult and the shouting die.
It is with the whisperers, we will save the world.
XII
MR. DOOLEY, JUDGE GARY AND MR. GOMPERS
The proposal that we have a new profession—a group of specialists to go to, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other people and be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as a kind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almost tragical subject. But something has made me want to begin my idea in this way.
In strained situations between people—situations in which one sees people getting all worked up and fine, noble and wild-eyed about themselves, I am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, most immediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one—some one who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless laugh.
To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or not, would be practical.
Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola.
And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emancipation Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time, in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his God.
I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time—just as Mr. Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went home—stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room—if Mr. Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's Conference might have been saved.
The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen from the point of view of God or of common people, many of the men in it,—most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very funny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could see through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference who conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact about human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would look in a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless lively and equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Labor group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than could be helped.
The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our whole nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp—a state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody thought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at themselves.
When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on, walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was prettiest, about themselves.
Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe about itself.
With Capital not yet grown up—not yet really capable (as the really mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative use of criticism,—incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the same undeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as a national dramatization,—a rather loud and theatrical acting out before an amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country as institutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear, superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonous strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty years, had made us suspect they were!
For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this nation—called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid for carting it away without saying a word.
There are three courses we can take in the Public Group now.
We can try to discipline Capital and Labor into producing together by passing laws and heaping up embarrassments and penalties.
We can let them see how much better they can make things by sticking them on to one another and letting them discipline one another.
We can make fun of both of them quietly to themselves, keep quiet-hearted, matter of fact, full of realism, humor, relaxation and naturalness and deal with Capital and Labor as Lincoln would, by getting laughing and listening started.
Then let them laugh at themselves.
America should arrange to have Judge Gary, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Gompers get together on a desert island and face things out.
A great deal of capital in this country—especially the best of it, is already seeing, and already acting on facts about itself it has not wanted to believe. It is already seeing that it cannot carry off with Labor or with the Public any longer the idea of looking pure and noble, standing before people in a kind of eternal moral-Prince-Albert coat, one's hand in one's bosom, and with the same old pompous-looking face, without looking ridiculous. It is seeing that it would rather laugh at itself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that the only thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific and economic, smile at its airs with Labor and the public, and lay them aside.
If Capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietly for self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, Labor will.
If Labor does it, Capital will.
Whichever side does it first, and does it best,—does it in the most human, attractive and contagious way will find a hundred million people handing over to it the power and the leadership of the country.
To whichever side it comes first, to show the most shrewdness, the most fearlessness, the most generosity in seeing facts against itself, will come the honor of the first victory.
The first victory either side will be allowed by the people, is its victory over itself.
People in this country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capable of self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, can have anything they want.
XIII
FOOLING ONESELF IN POLITICS
The same thing that everybody can see is going to happen in business in this country from now on—the pushing forward—the victory over all others in business of the men who are not fooled about themselves is going to be seen happening ten times over in politics.
The leading symptom of the mood of the people, the magnificent blanket political secret that covers all the other secrets of the coming conventions and elections, the dominating fact of the next man's next four years in The White House, is the thing that is going to be done by the people from to-day on, to politicians who are fooled about themselves.
One has but to mention one or two and a nation sees it.
Any little natural impression my fellow citizens may have had at the beginning of this article that in putting forward my idea of being a lawyer backwards, or the idea that we must all practice at being lawyers backwards to ourselves, I am putting forward just a gay pleasant thoughtlet, instead of a grave and pressing national issue, an issue on which the fate of a people is at stake, fades away when one really begins to think of how the idea would really work out if tried on particular politicians.
Everybody can pick out his own of course, but I am inclined to believe just at the moment, that if there was a good man everybody in this nation knew of who was being a lawyer backwards—say in New York or London—a man who had a big practice and who had a fine record in bracing men up to fight themselves and not to be fooled about themselves, the man that most people in this country would like to take up a national collection for, have sent to him and done over at once, no matter what it cost, would be Henry Cabot Lodge.
For six long weary months now, the main and international fact America and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man called Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself.
Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,—their very cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Washington can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips Henry Cabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to make Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in a lonely back seat of the World.
But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred million people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry Cabot Lodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses his pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to the world after all is that he—Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, has taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international emotion out of it—every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration—into a great national stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty generations like attendant angels hovering around him—around Henry Cabot Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws of a prowling League of Nations!
It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived.
It would be of no use to argue—not even for a hundred million people to argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself.
So it came to pass—a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man magnificently obsessed—a man holding himself ready any minute of any day in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipice of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off....
Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues of nations of his own twenty years ago—who would have believed that a man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a national, into an international helplessness like this?
My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at the present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the psycho-analysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to get things, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and from now on, in the men they choose to get them.
The ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled about themselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, are matched on every side in the world of politics.
The personal trait of great political as well as industrial value for which the people of this country are going to look in the men they allow to be placed over them—the men they give power and command to, is the quality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts in people. What we are going to look for in a man is having an engineering and not a sentimental attitude toward his own mind and the minds of others. We are going to give power and place to the man who has a certain eagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certain suppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. The man we are going to look past everybody for and pick to be a President or a Senator after this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his own party or by his own class, who is not fooled about himself, who keeps without swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunk line of the interests of all of us.
XIV
SWEARING OFF FROM ONESELF IN TIME
Before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is established, and before very many offices have really been opened up where one can go in and have one's mind changed ten dollars' worth instead of having it poured, soothed and petted, a good many of us are going to find it necessary to practice on ourselves and in a humble way as amateurs, do any little odd jobs we can on ourselves at home.
We nearly all of us have it in us—we the hundred million people—to be like Henry Cabot Lodge, on a less national scale, any minute.
I say over to myself breathlessly between these very words while I write them down about Henry Cabot Lodge, that beautiful thought John Bunyan had, "Except for the grace of God" a wife, five friends and a sense of humor, there goes Gerald Stanley Lee!
I have made myself say this over practically every day while writing this article (I have had to write it), and when I was in the same town Henry Cabot Lodge is, last week, saw him snooping around the Senate, so pure and high and from the Back Bay, so serene in his courtly chivalrous dream about himself, I got taken up every time—I do not deny it—on the same monotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the same monotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then I would stand there (He is my own Senator) with his pass for The Senate in my pocket ... I would stand and watch him,—watch him walking through the lordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought John Bunyan had about the murderer, "Except for the grace of God there goes etc., etc." Everybody fill in for himself!
The essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human nature is that all the people who have any are very much alike. The best we can do about it—most of us—is to recognize the fact that in spite of the thought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably are going to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical working difference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselves in the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, more desperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regular arrangements, perhaps,—when something in us starts us up into being Lodges,—for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselves in time.
Here is Charles Evans Hughes for instance, who from the day he was born hates a Socialist from afar off,—a man who never had in his younger days perhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thing Charles Evans Hughes does before anybody can say Jack Robinson, the very first minute he reads in his paper that the New York Assembly has refused to give their seats to five Socialist members because they are Socialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big national jerk draw his national self together, and before the country is half waked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an act of sympathy and protest on behalf of American Socialists from the last man most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that the narrow partisans of the Assembly itching with superiority, sweating with propriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great Chamber in Albany, should take the Socialist members they had waved out of the room simply for belonging to the Socialist party, and conduct them back to their seats as the accredited representatives (until proved individually unfit) of citizens of the United States and let them sit there as a national exhibit of the way in which a great and free people, who are believing in themselves every day, can believe in themselves enough to listen to anybody, to make regular arrangements in Albany and everywhere as a matter of course for listening to people with whom they do not agree, without fear and without frothing at the mouth.
Mr. Hughes is as anxious to do anything he can during one lifetime to discourage Socialism as Henry Cabot Lodge is to discourage Woodrow Wilson, but the reason that the American people have been glad to have Charles Evans Hughes as Justice of the Supreme Court, the reason that they came within three inches of making him President of the United States is that in an eminent degree he is a man who has made elaborate, conclusive and habitual arrangements with his own mind for not being deceived by Charles Evans Hughes, for being a lawyer backwards, for fighting himself, for stepping up out of being a mere lawyer and sitting sternly on the Bench of the Supreme Court, against himself.
Of course I am not writing this article to point out to a hundred million people with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superior I and a hundred million other people are to Henry Cabot Lodge and to the way for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and being internationally fooled about himself. The special point I seek to make is that as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking out into millions of Lodges any minute, that we should make the most of our new national chance of our power as a people just now—just before the two great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong, to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard against ourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to The White House,—from whatever walk of life he comes,—a man who will have himself magnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the people into his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own class, or put down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul—a man who will be the President of all the people everywhere all the time.
When the members of The Bar Association of the City of New York who backed Mr. Hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightened world, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasion and being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fair to divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those who voted to back Mr. Hughes were, and those who did not, were not equally exposed to being fooled about themselves. Mr. Hughes and his followers were probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular and standing arrangements with themselves against themselves and who acted more quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish they had acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes.
In the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next four years to justify democracy—to justify the power of the human spirit to be free, generous, noble and just in self-government, the power of men of differing classes, of differing groups and interests to live in orderly good will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last a great nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot do it,—all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being a blind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our not being full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on what we do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand for seeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men to represent us who shall not be demagogues, who shall lead us as we are, with clear eyes to what we are going to be, men who shall lead us by opening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting us in our sins.
XV
TECHNIQUE FOR NOT BEING FOOLED BY ONESELF
The next twenty-eight pages of this book might be entitled: "An Article that Expected to Appear in the Saturday Evening Post."
When the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to be read in this way, were completed, they were too late to submit to the Post, and too late to change.
The reader is therefore requested to bear in mind (as I do) that he is getting the next eleven chapters for nothing—that they have not been paid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether the Saturday Evening Post would approve or believe what I believe, or feel hurt if other people believe it.
The suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doing what we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs of criticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself.
It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret of increased production in factories, or power over others in business, and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, I say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having or exercising this power of self-criticism?
If the readers of the Saturday Evening Post were to come to me in a body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything, they—the readers of the Saturday Evening Post can do, and do now to acquire a technique—a kind of general amateur technique for not being fooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holding back from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked at all, I have a faint hopeful idea—I feel it at this moment floating about my head—a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought to do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thing off. I cannot believe that only this far—in a few pages or so about it, I have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to them. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in this country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves, the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being fooled by himself—some one man all our people have a perfect passion,—almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make my idea alluring with him.
Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States.
It is true that other readers of the Saturday Evening Post besides Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr. Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people. Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office—everybody who waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be excelled.
I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the technique of self-criticism.
1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself.
2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize him.
3rd. How he could get it. Technique and illustration.
XVI
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LETTER
If the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from Philadelphia to Northampton, Massachusetts, could be written down—if all the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on platforms—what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions—if all the long story of this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the envelope—what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do to Albert Sidney Burleson?
The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every day, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along the Mississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, waving their autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, would point to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave of unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Washington by ten-thirty A.M., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel post to Austin, Texas, before night.
I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker than if he were sent like a mere letter.
Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, the most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can produce.
Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to believe and who keeps fooled about himself.
An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about how money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he was placed by the people at the head of the people's Post Office, he would save their money for the people instead of running their Post Office for them.
This is all that has happened. This was Mr. Burleson's preconception of what he was for and what a Post Office was for and not a hundred million people could pry him out of it. Mr. Burleson ran his Post Office to suit himself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in being suited with their Post Office had to take anything that was left over that they could get after Mr. Burleson was suited with it.
Mr. Burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conception of Albert Sidney Burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and so far as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years in thinking what other people's conceptions of him are.
I am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a Post Office. But I want my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America would agree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to have it, please, deliver our letters for us.
If the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the compositor's hands on Thursday morning—should take as has happened before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one suppose I would do?
Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in another column on Mr. Burleson.
But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of the Post are both going to get out of that extra column.
I am going to do what I have done over and over before.
Instead of mailing as one would suppose this manuscript at nine o'clock Wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery, I am going to go down to the Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon at six o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar ticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire a seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford for the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye.
Then I am going to pay my letter's bill at the Bellevue-Stratford, buy a three dollar ticket to New York and a place in the Pullman for myself, G. S. L. on return, as the human envelope Mr. Burleson has required me to be, ship myself back to New York as the empty, as the container this article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with Albert Sidney Burleson will be over.
Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Station and walked out at the Eighth Avenue end, looked up wistfully at Mr. Burleson's new Greek Palace he puts up in when he comes to New York and I came with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burleson has about himself—four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet high all across the top.
NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.
Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, or Homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to camels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousand mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles of sunsets across the land.
But I must say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read it as I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth to Thirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as I stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I was spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailing for me.
XVII
THE MAN FIFTY-THREE THOUSAND POST OFFICES FAILED ON
There is one thing I find when I am writing in a national magazine, trying to express myself on an idea I would like to believe but do not want to be fooled about, to four or five million people. I can not help feeling that out of all these four or five million people, at the very least anyway there really must be three million and five hundred thousand who are being very much less fooled about me and about my idea than I am. Every day as I sit down to write one more chapter I try to catch up to them. Of course anybody can see I am not equal to it, but it does give one a chance, and it gives the book a chance before I am through, to have some sense in it.
I cannot help thinking what Albert Sidney Burleson, who has a hundred million people to choose from, who has millions of people who are less fooled about him than he is, to catch up to every day, after all these seven long years they have put on him, ought to amount to.
And what his Post Office ought to amount to.
Of course we are all human and know how it is, in a way. We know that the first thought that would come to Mr. Burleson as to any man when he finds he is being criticized—that people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices are criticizing him and acting with him as if he were fooled about himself, is the automatic thought of self-defense. The second thought, which is what one would hope for from a General, even a Postmaster General, is that one resents it in oneself, that in an important opening for a man like being called foolish, one stops all one's thinking-works, and slumps ingloriously, automatically and without a quaver into self-defense.
One would think a man who could get to be a Postmaster General would have the presence of mind when he says "Ouch!" to a nation that steps on his toes, to fix his face quick, smile and say, "Thank you! Thank you! I will see what there is in this!"
Why should a man when God is blessing him as he does Mr. Burleson, even out of the mouths of his enemies, butt in in the way he does and interrupt truths with enough juice in them to make one Burleson, even one Burleson into twenty great men before a nation's eyes?
A whole Cabinet—at least a whole Democratic Cabinet—could have been made time and time again out of the great-man-juice, the truth-pepsin great men are made out of, this country has wasted on Burleson in the past seven years.
XVIII
CAUSES OF BEING FOOLED ABOUT ONESELF
I would like to give a diagnosis of this quite common disease, touch on the causes and see how they can be removed.
There seem to be, speaking roughly and as far as my own observation of psychology goes, six main ways in which the average man is fooled about himself and needs to change his mind about himself.
He is possessed with loco-mindedness or spotty-mindedness, sees things as they look to one kind or group of people—sees things in spotlights of personality, of place or time—all the rest black.
Or he suffers from what one might call Lost-Mindedness—is always getting lost in anything he does, somewhere between the end and the means. He either loses the means in contemplating with unholy contemplation the end, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means.
The Habit of Flat-Thinking—of not thinking things out in four dimensions.
The Habit of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I have to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea out with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson for instance, it would be evaporated thinking.
The Habit of Not Having any Habits—leaving out standardized elements in things and not being machine-minded enough.
Automatism, or Machine-Mindedness.
These six forms of being fooled by oneself all boil down in the end—in their final cause, I suspect to the last one, to automatism or lack of conscious control of the mind.
XIX
LOCO-MINDEDNESS
Loco-mindedness in a Post Office consists in Mr. Burleson's running the Post Office for one kind of people—the kind of people he has noticed.
There are supposed to be various kinds of people who use a Post Office.
There are the people who write hundreds of letters a day—letters that are being waited for accurately and by a particular mail—like telegrams.
There are people who sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, stick out their tongues and chewing on one end of the pen, and slaving away and sweating ink on the other, scrooge out a letter once in three weeks that they have put off six months.
I have no grudge against these people, but it seems to me that running a Post Office exclusively for them as Mr. Burleson does, is a mistake. Even if they constitute ninety-eight per cent of the people, they only mail one-tenth of one per cent of the letters. They may not care whether or not their letters arrive as a matter of course, the way they used to in our Post Office until a little while ago, as accurately as telegrams in their first mail in the morning, but probably they would not feel hurt if they did. But millions of people in business who write scores or hundreds of letters a day, who find themselves being put off with a Post Office that is run apparently for people who write two letters a month, are hurt.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, the letter from New York one used to receive at breakfast, hangs around a junction somewhere now, waits for a letter three hundred miles away—a letter from Pittsburgh to catch up to it, and they both come together sweetly and with Mr. Burleson's smile on after luncheon at half past two in the afternoon.
I do not deny that from the narrower business point of view of running a Post Office the way some women would run—or rather used to run a parlor store—with a bell on the door, there is something to be said for Mr. Burleson's philosophy. Nor do I deny that a store can be run and run successfully and rightly on how much of its customer's money it can save on each purchase.
But the point is that if I go into a store in Northampton and cannot get the things I want there I go into some other store.
I cannot go out from our Post Office in Northampton and go over and get what I want at some other Post Office a little further down the street.
When I and people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices, say Aouch! Mr. Burleson says Pooh!
Business correspondence between Washington and New York which used to be a twenty-four hour affair is now half a week.
Letters thousands of men in New York used to receive in their offices in the early morning before interviews began and when they had time to read letters and to jot an answer to them at the foot of the page, are not received and placed before them for their answers until the late morning or early afternoon when they have other things to do and cannot even read them.
So one's letters wait over a day—a night and a day, or until one gets back from Chicago.
Why is it Mr. Burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of the convenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business in America and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himself points out to people how he has saved them fifty cents?
Why is it that Mr. Burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in our own private business, to save us fifty cents apiece in public?
Who asked him to?
It is true that there are people in America who really prefer to do business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs them. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that lovingly saves one forty cents' worth of money by taking four dollars' worth of one's time.
It is probably true that some people want a cash and carry freight-car Post Office and want Mr. Burleson to save their money for them. Millions of people would make more money by not having their Post Office save money for them. Mr. Burleson insists his business is to save people's money for them whether they can afford to have him save it or not.
The first cause of Mr. Burleson's being fooled about himself is that he is spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the Post Office with reference to one special slow canal-minded kind of America. His mind is jet black about all the rest.
Perhaps Mr. Burleson is not the only one of us in America who is loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business into the ground by noticing only one kind of people.
XX
FLAT-THINKING
THINKING IN ME-FLAT
What nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do their thinking in four dimensions.
The thickness is what I think.
The breadth is what other people think.
The length is what God thinks.
Then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them as a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what I think other people think, and what I think God thinks, and put them together as well as I can, the result is—who I am and what I amount to.
Most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the first or "I think" dimension, stop on the way to God in the "I think" thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "They Think" breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to God at all.
The trouble with the Post Office has been that Mr. Burleson likes to think in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what other people think and skips right past them straight to God.
Probably it would be unfair to say that the Post Office is egotistical, self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate business idea—its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing anything more for the people than can be helped—if Mr. Burleson would stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand Post Offices think.
There have been days—with my half-past two letters when if I had Roger Babson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's Post Office like this:
XXI
LOST-MINDEDNESS
OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS
I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end in the means.
To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things together.
I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.
It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like this, a two-cent stamp means.
Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my country—like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.
As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country, so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.
In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to think three. The country pays for it for him.
America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington as Rock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers.
The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, the patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone system for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and magazines in which a whole nation thinks together—with one huge national thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in New York or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down into their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the people will never forget.
Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a bird's-eye view of the nation like the Literary Digest be fined for it? Why fine the readers of the Review of Reviews or Collier's or Scribner's for living in one place rather than another? I like to think of it Saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in the Youth's Companion.
Every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—that is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness of not being fined for it.
A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul—what he knows and feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a right not to be told he will have to read something published within a rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell—that his soul has got to live with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on.
As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation.
There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay for making men of all classes and of all regions in this country think and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the nation—some place where three million people act as one.
It is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it.
And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a great national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought, holds a meeting once a week together like the Saturday Evening Post, like Collier's—dismisses two or three million people from everywhere who get together there every Saturday night, and tells them to go home and read the Hampshire County Gazette.
It is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end in the means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiring example of what not to do, and of how it works to do it—to lose the end in the means, I have to mention it—not in behalf of Mr. Burleson, but in behalf of all of us.
XXII
I had not intended to illustrate my idea of amateur technique in self-criticism quite so much with Mr. Burleson, especially as I stand for a bi-partisan point of view. I wish there were some way of dealing with Mr. Burleson as a Republican for fifteen minutes and then as a Democrat for fifteen minutes, and in dealing as I am, in what might be called a nationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us, I only hope my Democratic friends will give me credit for making use of Mr. Burleson not as a Democrat (it is just their luck that he's a Democrat), but as a specimen human being I am trying to get hundreds of thousands of Republicans that are just like him, not to be like any longer. I have only used our Postmaster General in this rather personal fashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time when we are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves he constitutes, in plain sight a kind of national Common Denominator of the sins of all of us.
We are all concerned. We all want to know.
It is easy enough to say pleasantly as if it settled something that the reason Mr. Burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most people so through fifty-three thousand Post Offices day after day, all day, and night after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself.
But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can look up and have the benefit of? When we are being fooled about ourselves, when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do?
XXIII
SELF-DISCIPLINE BY PROXY
My own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when I see them in other people.
I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may have moments of being like me in this.
Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in a rather weak and watery way—that is: we usually begin with seeing how unbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin disciplining our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in ourselves.
Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any good. Mr. Burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article, but I am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase them back to their own homes from the Post Office.
There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled about ourselves.
And when we consider how Albert Sidney Burleson has missed his chance, when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand wistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled about himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a little personally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our better business moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most complete exhibit of what is the matter with American business.
I leave with the reader the Thought, that probably the majority of men who have been watching Mr. Burleson for seven years wasting fifty-three thousand Post Offices, and all the fifty-three thousand Post Offices could do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down to their offices next Monday morning, and instead of worming criticism out of everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody who approaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the business to produce the impression that they are perfect and that nobody can tell them anything—will just sit there all glazed over with complacency cemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, as hard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautiful shining porcelain-lined bathtubs.
It would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business for some of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of telling these men—if some warning could be given to us not to bother with them—if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted up so that one could tell them at sight—by their heads looking the way they are—by their being bald—by their having brilliantly non-porous heads—just nice perfectly plain shiny knobs of not-thinking.
One could tell them across a room.
But the man with the most refreshingly eager mind toward new ideas, I know, the mind the most brilliantly open—which fairly glistens inside with eagerness, glistens outside, too.
The only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porous mind, is to try gently—changing it, and see what happens.
XXIV
MACHINE-MINDEDNESS
The various forms I have mentioned of the malady of being fooled by oneself, all practically boil down to one in the end—one cause which we have to recognize and avoid—automatism, the lack of conscious control of the mind—letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one's head.
The main central cause operating with people when they are being fooled about themselves, is machine-mindedness.
A man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes and habits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him a fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how perfect he is.
Everybody knows how it is.
XXV
NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS
Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful in business—the men who give people what they want, and the men who make people want things they have thought they did not want before. Moving pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and locomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and even babies—have all been brought to pass by convincing other human beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to themselves.
I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people different because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything you do to most people that makes them different, improves them.
But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from my good opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men who prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted, are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people more and more and better—things they want already.
The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself and who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am an inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannot remember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I was here, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would be bored to death handing out to people things I know they want, or presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be shallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not make people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask them to do.
On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic economic crisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, are being brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks in business are especially called for—a time when practically millions of people have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, I have thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters that follow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what people who have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find them awkward, can do to get them and to make them work.
I
BIG IN LITTLE
A nation, in order to be a safe nation for itself, or safe for other nations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for getting a world to want it to get—its own way.
I am interested in a technique for a nation's getting its way and deserving to get its way because I want to get mine, and because being human and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the same stuff—out of the same mixed hot and cold ingredients as other people's, I have quite naturally come to think that what works for me, if I cut down to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what I want, will probably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody.
I have thought I would see if I could not work out in this book, a technique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniature as it were—a technique for getting and deserving to get one's own way.
I pick out one man, to try out the principle on, because it is safer and fairer to try out a principle other people are supposed to be asked to risk, on one man first.
Because I happen to know him better than I know anybody else, and because my experience is, he will stand more from me than anybody else, I have picked out myself.
When the technique has been tried out on one man the people who know him will believe it and try it. Then we will try it on one hundred men one after the other. Then as I have been working it out in this book, try it on the body-politic, the soul and body of a nation, try it on a hundred million people.
Then with a technique for having a body and for not being fooled by ourselves and having some substance in what we say and what we do, we would have the spectacle of a hundred million people making themselves felt in political conventions, making themselves felt in The White House and even being noticed perhaps in time at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue by the great I AM, or I CAN'T, or I WON'T tucked under the come of all of us—called The United States Senate.
II
CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF BRAIN TRACKS
My experience is that the first thing for me to attend to and know, in getting people to let me have my way, is to know when and how to discover and open up in people new brain tracks and when and how to make my main dependence on their old ones.
Getting what one wants from people turns on seeing the situation—the brain track situation in one's own mind at a particular time, and in other people's, as it really is.
In other words, the way to get one's way with people is to know and extend one's consciousness down deeper into one's subconsciousness in one's own mind, so that one draws on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, so that gradually having the habit of drawing on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, one soon makes oneself master of the conscious and the subconscious in the minds of others.
I do not precisely know this, of course, because I have never practiced having my own way with other people as much as I would like, but my theory and my observation of others who have practiced on me leads me, in speaking for all of us to believe this: The way for a man to do who wants to get his own way with people is to heighten his consciousness, deepen his consciousness down into his subconsciousness, live more abundantly in soul and body, deeper down and higher up and further over into himself than others. Then he gets his way with others because everybody wants him to, almost without knowing it or anybody's else knowing it.
A man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. The indication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer in him does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesian well of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his new brain tracks and old ones together—is the secret of getting one's way for all of us, whether with Nature or with one another.
Of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new brain tracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with other people and with ourselves.
This part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for most of us—what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and what people can do to get them.
III
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING
The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common, is that nobody wants them. The way people really act—even the best of us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is as if they had no place to put them.
The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are rather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closely what one actually does with one's own personal listening and what other people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us.
In making as I have tried to make during the last six months, a few special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what I call my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hours each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rational being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago.
The first fact is this:
Nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of ears—one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves and really do their living with.
I first came on them—on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a young man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a young lecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to be happening to my audiences—what they seemed to be doing to themselves, but it was a good many years before I really woke up to what they were doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me.
I would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their outside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them—on outside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feel hurt but I did not wake up to what it meant.
As I remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth about ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I could help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or all made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age.
The trouble with a one-sexed audience or a one-classed audience seems to be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes and change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. In any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it, and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to easy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one's meaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on, from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When the women go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking to mixed ages. Fewer passages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember, and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do anything else.
I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would not be any worse—the psychological clang of it—than what they do do. It would merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about the way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls, switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all around one as one goes out of the hall.
What is true of one's words to people one can keep one's eye on, is still more true of words in books.
If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping without knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for founding what I have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon the way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they hear, the way they do not see what they look at, or the way they think, when they think, when they think they think.
(For every time I say "they" in the last paragraph will the reader kindly read "we.")
If there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds and colors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down and sidling lines—printed for people the way they are going to read it, if the sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean passages or could take nice little airy swoops or flights—if every line on a page could dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make a perfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going through people's minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that all these people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives in stops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so.
If the type in the pages in this book dealing with Mr. Burleson could be more responsive, could act the way Mr. Burleson's mind does when he reads it—that is if I could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets the type what Mr. Burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with his mind with each pellucid sentence as it purls—even Mr. Burleson himself would be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in my book, he was really carrying away from it.
If in Mr. Burleson's own personal copy of this book, I were to have this next chapter about him that is going to follow soon—especially the sentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practically not read at all—printed in invisible ink and there were just those long pale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them to get them—so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of nice literary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he would probably carry away more meaning than I or any one could hope for in ordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficial feeling they are reading whether they are reading or not.
IV
LIVING DOWN CELLAR IN ONE'S OWN MIND
What I saw a little three-year-old girl the other day doing with her dolly—dragging its flaxen-haired head around on the floor and holding on to it dreamily by the leg, is what the average man's body can be seen almost any day, doing to his mind.
One feels almost as if one ought to hush it up at first until a few million more men have made similar practical observations in the psychology and physiology of modern life when one comes to see what our civilization is bringing us to—what it really is that almost any man one knows, including the man of marked education—take him off his guard almost any minute—is letting his body do to his mind.
A very large part of even quite intelligent conversation has no origination in it and is just made up of phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is using his body.
With the average man one meets, his body wags his brain when he talks, as a dog wags his tail. The tongue sends its roots not into the brain but into the stomach. (Probably this is why Saint Paul speaks of it so sadly and respectfully as a mighty member—because of its roots.)
The main difficulty a man has in having a new brain track, or in being original or plastic in a process of mind is the way his body tries to bully him when he tries it. The body has certain tracks it has got used to in a mind and that it wants to harden the mind down into and then tumtytum along on comfortably and it does not propose—all this blessed meat we carry around on us, to let us think any more than can be helped.
I saw some wooden flowers in a florist's window on The Avenue the other day—four or five big blossoms six inches across—real flowers that had been taken from the edge of a volcano in South America—real flowers that had chemically turned to wood—(probably from having gas administered to them by the volcano!)—and I stood there and looked at them thinking how curious it was that spiritual and spirited things like flowers instead of going out and fading away like a spirit, had died into solid wood in that way. Then I turned and walked down the street, watching the souls and bodies of the people and the people were not so different many of them as one looked into their faces, from the wooden flowers, and I could not help seeing, of course, no one can—what their bodies—thousands of them—were apparently doing to their souls. After all the wooden flowers were not really much queerer for flowers than the people—many of them—were for people.
From the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the human mind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new brain tracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing the body and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it is not a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watch what they are letting their bodies do to them.
Left to itself the body is for all practical purposes so far as the mind is concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concrete mixer for pouring one's soul in with some Portland Cement and making one's living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy them in one—just as they are. Unless great spiritual pains are taken to keep things moving, the body operates practically as a machine for petrifying spiritual experiences, mummifying ideas or for putting one's spiritual experiences on to reels and nerves that keep going on forever.
There is ground for belief (and this is what I am trying to have a plan to meet, in these chapters) that the reason that most of us find talking with people and arguing with them and trying to change their minds so unsatisfactory, is that we are not really thorough with them. What we really need to do with people is to go deeper, excavate their sensory impressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have a kidney taken out to convince them. Talk with almost any man of a certain type, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after he is thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. He is not really listening to you when you criticize him or differ with him.
The soul—the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscope has a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and like you for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowing all you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his body all in a flash tries to keep him from doing this, hardens over his mind, claps itself down with its lid of habit over him. Then he automatically defends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing more can be said.
What a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with his machine. The very essence of anger is that it is unspirited and automatic. The spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him to listen, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not want to let him hear.
Of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years—say for twenty or thirty years—the inevitable happens and one soon sees why it is that the majority of people—even very attractive people one goes around talking with and living with, after thirty years, become just splendid painted-over effigies of themselves. One has no new way of being fond of them. One looks for nothing one has not had before. They go about—even the most elegant of them—thinking with their stomachs.
Thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they were fresh from heaven—as if they had just been caught passing from the music of the spheres, are all handed up to them on dumb waiters from below.
V
BEING HELPED UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
Most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our leaders and our people.
We realize—whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass of the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs.
The question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it—the question of how other people—a hundred million people can be got to follow in these new brain tracks for a nation—these new ways for a nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and national concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for a little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and what kind of people can do it.
The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's minds and re-routing and recoördinating their ideas and are going to be the more important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comes nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing through themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extraordinary work he is doing in London, for people in the way of reëducating and recoördinating their bodies.
I took home from a bookshop one day not long ago, after reading an article about it by Professor James Harvey Robinson in the Atlantic, Mr. Alexander's quite extraordinary book, which after starting off with an introduction by Professor John Dewey, of Columbia, leads one into a new world, to the edge, almost the precipitous edge of a new world.
I am inclined to believe that the deepest and most penetrating knowledge of that curious and delicate blend of spirit and clay we call a human being, and the most masterful technique for getting conscious control of it and of the helpless civilization in which it still is trying to live, are going to be found before many years to be in the brain and the hand of Mathias Alexander. It is hard to keep from writing a book about him when one thinks of him, but as I cannot write a book about him in the middle of this one, I am going to touch for a moment on the principle Alexander employs in breaking through new brain tracks in persons, and then try to apply the same principles to breaking through new brain tracks for a nation.
What Mr. Alexander does with people I have already hinted at in what I have said about our having a new profession in America—the profession of being a lawyer backward. Of course Mr. Alexander could not say of himself that he was in the profession of being a lawyer backward, but he does practically the same thing in his field that a lawyer backward would do. He makes it his business to change people's minds for them instead of petting their minds and he does the precise thing I have in mine except that he confines himself in doing it to what he calls psycho-mechanics—to a single first relation in which a man's mind needs to be changed—the relation of a man's mind to his body.
If a man's mind gets his body right, it will not need to be changed about many other things in which it is wrong. The first thing a man's mind should be changed about usually is his body.
This is the principle upon which Mathias Alexander in the very extraordinary work he is doing in London, proceeds.
When you are duly accepted as a client and have duly given credentials or shown signs that you want all the truth about yourself that you can get no matter how it hurts, or how it looks, you present yourself at the appointed time in Alexander's office, or studio, or laboratory, or operating room—whatever the name may be you will feel like calling it by, before you are finished, and Alexander stands you up before the back of a chair. Then he takes you in his hands—his very powerful, sensitive and discerning hands and begins—quite literally begins reshaping you like Phidias. You begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going to be some new beautiful living statue yourself before very long probably.
Then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze at you—just as Phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of your body, X-rays down through you with a look—through you and all your inner workings from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.
Then he lays hands on you once more and works and you feel him working slowly and subtly on you once more, all the while giving orders to you softly not to help him, not to butt in soul and body on what he is doing to them with your preconceived ideas—ideas he is trying to cure you of, of what you think you think when you are thinking with what you suppose is your mind, and what you suppose you are doing with what you suppose is your body. In other words, he gives you most strenuously to understand that the one helpful thing that you can do with what you call your mind or what you call your body is to back away from them both all you can. As it is you and your ideas mostly that are what is the matter with your mind and body, and with the way you admit they are not getting on together, Alexander's first lessons with you you find are largely occupied in getting your mind—your terrible and beautiful mind which does such queer things to you, to back away. What he really wants of you is to have you let him make a present to you outright of certain new psycho-physical experiences, which he cannot possibly get in, if you insist on slipping yours in each time instead. So he keeps working on you, you all the while trying to help in soul and body by being as much like putty—a kind of transcendental putty as you can, or as you dare, without falling apart before your own eyes. Then when you have removed all obstructions and preconceptions in your own mind—and will stop preventing him from doing it, he places your body in an entirely new position and subjects you to a physical experience in sitting, standing and walking, you have never dreamed you could have before.
This goes on for as many sittings as are necessary and until you walk out of the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling like somebody else—like somebody else that has been lent to you to be—somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will be allowed to wear or be or whatever it is for the rest of your life. Incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking people you thought were impossible before—even including very conveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind about your body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you.
It is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is a putting of the facts in a man's mind and the facts in his body inextricably together in his consciousness—as they should be, in that he is no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swings free, and feels able to stop when he is being fooled about himself.
I have been reading over this chapter and all I can say to my readers is, as a substitute for leaving it out, that I hope it sounds to them like a fairy story. I like to think when I am going on from chapter to chapter in a book—I like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are. The principles underlying what Mr. Alexander does with new brain tracks and what I am trying to do can be discussed in this book. The facts can be looked up and are suitable subjects not for books but for affidavits.
VI
REFLECTIONS ON THE STAIRS
It is a not unfamiliar experience for a man to go to a dentist, get into a chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast corner of his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinks he is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower or southwest corner. Then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and the northeast corner toothache is over.
(These figures or rather points of the compass may not be literally right, but the fact that they point to is.) Nearly every man has had things happen to him not very different from this. You have a bad lameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you that you are deceived about the real trouble being in your right knee, calls your attention to a place three and a half feet off way up on the other side of you, says you should have a gold filling put in a tooth there and your right knee will get well.
What seems to be true of people is that though in a less glaring and more subtle fashion, there are very few of us who are not subject either all or part of the time to more or less important and quite unmanageable illusions about things with which we are supposed to be—if anybody is—the most intimately acquainted. One keeps hearing every few days almost, lately, of how people's inner organs are not doing what they think they are, of how very often—even the most important of them have been mislaid—a colon for instance being allowed to do its work three inches lower than it ever ought to be allowed to try, and all manner of other mechanical blunders that are being made, grave mechanical inconveniences which are being daily put up with by people, when they move about or when they lie down, of which they have not the slightest idea.
The sensory impressions of what is really happening to us, of where it is happening and how and why are full—in many people of glaring and not infrequently dangerous illusions, but these physical illusions which we have are reflected automatically in our spiritual and intellectual ones. All kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are not seeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresy trials, lockouts and strikes—all the irrational things people say and do to each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the way people are being fooled by their own precious insides. Each man is doing things that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because he is off on his facts as to what is going on the first few feet off, because the first hundred and fifty pounds of consciousness which have been assigned to him to know about personally and attend to personally he is letting himself be fooled with every day.
A man who is being fooled near by, regularly all the time, fooled from the sole of his poor tired feet to the poor helpless nib at the top of him which he calls his head, is naturally hard to argue with about the immortality of the soul, or the League of Nations. Reforms and reformers which overlook these facts must not be surprised if they seem to some of us a little superficial.
Of course the moral of all this is—as regards changing society or persuading and convincing persons, get down to first principles. Stop flourishing around with fine and noble philosophies and phrases on the surface of men's souls. See that their souls and their bodies are both intricately divinely stupendously blended together and get at them both together. If you are arguing with a man and do not make much headway, stop arguing with him. Cut out his tonsils.
Or it may be something else. Or send him to Alexander and have his back ironed out, if necessary so that his tonsils will work as they are.
Then argue with him afterwards and quote Shakespeare and the Bible to him, stroke his soul and see how it works.
VII
HELPING OTHER PEOPLE UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
It is getting almost dangerous to talk to me. I lay violent hands on people, when they disagree with me and send them to Alexander.
Everybody, anybody, my wife, my pastor, every now and then an editor, whole shoals of publishers.... I think what it would be like for us all, to ship The United States Senate in a body to him. On every side it keeps coming to me that the short, quick and thorough way for me to install my idea, to get my idea started and to install my idea of new brain tracks, new ways for this nation to get its way and deserve its way, is to have people the minute they don't agree with me, alexandered, at once.
Here is this book for instance. The proper course for me to take to get a man to accept the new brain track in it, is to send him a copy of the book to say yes or no to. Then if he does not agree with me and I am tempted to argue with him, I will drop the matter with him at once, send him to Alexander, have Alexander set him in a chair, tap him on the back, poke him thoughtfully, psycho-mechanically in the ribs, unlimber his mind from his body, untangle him psycho-physically, put him in shape so that he can think free, listen without obsessions and mental automatism—that is, get him so that he can set his mind on a subject instead of setting his stomach on it, and then I will ask him to read my book again.
In the meantime, of course, I should be going to Alexander and rewriting the book.
By the time the gentleman was cured I would have a cured book to send him, we would both be in a position to believe what we don't want to believe, to listen to each other indefinitely and we would be in a position to do team work together at once and take steps to install new brain tracks for nations immediately.
This brings me to the two horns of my dilemma.
In installing new brain tracks for nations it is not practicable for me to take up people who disagree with me—say a hundred million people or so and ship them to Alexander in London and have them done over by Alexander.
What is the best possible substitute arrangement that can be made for having a whole nation put into perfect psycho-mechanical shape by Alexander so that it will take the first new brain tracks kindly?
The principles for giving people new brain tracks toward their own bodies which Mr. Alexander has so successfully demonstrated, are the same principles which I have been trying for a long time to express and apply to ideas and to all phases of the personal and the national life.
Where I have been studying for years as an artist, the art of changing my own mind and other people's about ideas, of working out new spiritual experiences for myself and other people, Alexander in his workroom in London has been engaged in changing people's minds toward their bodies, in giving men new brain tracks toward their own bodies.
It is obvious that these principles—Alexander's principles for installing new physical experiences and mine for installing new spiritual ones, must be if they are fundamental or are worth anything, the same.
My own feeling is that if anybody can go to Alexander and can be done over by Alexander personally in London that is the best thing to do. But it is inconvenient for a hundred million people to crowd into Alexander's office in London, and it is comparatively convenient and roomy for a hundred million people if they want to, to crowd into a book. Before giving the principles, I would like to state the question—What are the steps we all can use—those of us who are not Alexander—to install new brain tracks in this nation?
The principles upon which, as it seems to me, new brain tracks for this nation should be installed and which I would like to deal with are these:
First. Get people first to recognize with regard to new brain tracks, the fact that they do not want them.
Second. Get their attention to what people with new brain tracks seem to be able to do in the way of getting in our present moving world, the things they want. People go to Alexander and ask him for new brain tracks. Something corresponding to this has to be got from people before offering them new brain tracks in a convention or in a book.
Third. Pick out the people next to the people the proposed new brain tracks are for, who seem to be the particular kind of people best calculated to make the necessary excavations in their brains, to loosen up ideas, or any hard gray matter there may be there, so that something can be put in.
The fourth step when we recognize that we want the facts against ourselves and see what we can do with them, is to ask people to let us have them.
VIII
HELPING A NATION UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
The Air Line League is a national organization of millions of American men and women belonging to all classes and all social and industrial groups, who become members of the League for the express purpose of asking people to help to keep them, in their personal and industrial relations, from being off on their facts, from being fooled by their subconscious and automatic selves.
Unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experience telling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for his being objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the most timely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any one man or group of men can ever render another.
The best way to secure the right people for this service is to ask them. The people who do not need to be asked and who would be only too cheerful to do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want them to or not, are not apt to do it in a practical way.
The best way to ask the best people is to place oneself in a position, as in joining the Air Line League, where people will feel asked without any one's saying anything about it.
This is the first principle we propose to follow in the League. By the act of joining the League, by the bare fact that we are in it, we announce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and as members of a class, or of our capital groups or our Labor groups, we are as a matter of course open and more than open to facts—facts from any quarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doing from being fooled about ourselves.
Having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, of being unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are the best people in a nation constituted like ours, to unfool us the most quickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the least trouble to us and to themselves?
IX
TECHNIQUE FOR LABOR IN GETTING ITS WAY
The best people to advertise a truth are the people the truth looks prominent on—the people from whom nobody expects it.
In my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently been made and handed up to me, that there are certain books, I do not need to read.
My attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of my reading one of Harold Bell Wright's novels. But if I heard to-morrow morning that Henry Cabot Lodge and President Wilson during the last few peaceful months had both read through Harold Bell Wright's last novel, I would read it before I went to bed.
Or Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers. Any common experience which I heard in the last few weeks Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers had had, a novel by Harold Bell Wright or anything—I would look into, a whole nation would look into it—the moment they heard of it—at once.
The first thing to do in making a start for new brain tracks for America is to pick out persons and brain tracks that set each other off.
Even an idea nobody would care about one way or the other becomes suddenly and nationally interesting to us when we find people we would not think would believe it, are believing it hard and trying to get us to believe it.
Suppose for instance that next Fourth of July (I pick out this day for what I want to have happen because I have so longed for years to have something strong and sincere said or done on it that would really celebrate it)—suppose for instance that next Fourth of July, beginning early in the morning all the Labor leaders of America from Maine to California, acting as one man broke away—just took one day off, from doing the old humdrum advertising everybody expects from them—suppose they proceeded to do something that would attract attention—something that would interest their friends and disappoint their enemies—just for twenty-four hours? Suppose just for one day all the Labor leaders instead of going about advertising to themselves and to everybody the bad employers and how bad employers are in this country would devote the Fourth of July to advertising a few good ones?
Then suppose they follow it up—that Labor do something with initiative in it—the initiative its enemies say it cannot have, something unexpected and original, true and sensationally fair, something that would make a nation look and that a hundred million people would never forget?
What does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in this country, if Labor; after the next Fourth of July, started a new national crusade for four weeks—if the fifty best laborers in the Endicott Johnson Mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should go in a body one after the other to a list of Bolshevist factories, factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitation of telling what happens to them in their Endicott Johnson mills, an agitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are like and how it works until the Bolshevist workmen they come to see are driven by sheer force of facts into being non-Bolshevist workmen, and their Bolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force of facts into being Endicott Johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front of themselves, who will be Endicott Johnsons for them.
All that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitation in America to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act of labor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing that either of them—either capital or labor—is thinking of somebody, believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besides themselves. Millions of individual employers and individual laborers about have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable and discriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow human beings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is to arrange some signal generous conclusive arresting massive move together to show it.
This is the kind of work the Air Line League proposes on a national scale like the Red Cross to arrange for and do.
The common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, the fellow human being—employer or employee.
The best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for America in shame and weakness to keep on deporting Bolshevists, is to arrange a national advertisement, a parade or national procession as it were in this country soon, of team work in industry and of how—to anybody who knows the facts—it carries everything before it.
The best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down through ten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers who stand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmen from all over the country who stand up for employers.
Of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds of times over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring other laborers into line and of having employers shame other employers into competence.
The best substitute for this national demonstration, this national physical getting together like this, is as I have said before, a book read by all, by employers and employees looking over each other's shoulders, each conscious as he reads that the other knows he reads, knows what he knows and is reading what he knows.
X
TECHNIQUE FOR CAPITAL IN GETTING ITS WAY
I should hate to see Capital, in the form of a National Manufacturers' Association, realizing the desperateness of the labor situation and that something has got to be done at last which goes to the bottom, slinking off privately and confessing its sins to God.
I would rather see a confession of the sins of Capital toward Labor for the last forty years and of its sins to-day made by Capital in person to Labor.
God will get it anyway—the confession—and it will mean ten times as much to Him and to everybody if He overhears it being given to Labor.
Of course Labor has been doing of late wrong things that it is highly desirable should be confessed and naturally Capital thinks that a good way to open the exercises would be with a confession from Labor to Capital to the effect that Labor admits that Labor like the Trusts before it had had moments or seizures in which it has held up the country, broken its word, betrayed the people and acted the part the people hate to believe of it—of the bully and the liar.
Not only the Capital Group but the Public Group feel that a confession from Labor before we go on to arrange things better is highly to be desired.
But the practical question that faces us is—supposing that what is wanted next by all, is a confession from Labor, what is the practical way from now on, to get Labor to confess?
Some supposing might be done a minute.
Suppose I have a very quick temper and five sons and suppose the oldest one has my temper and is making it catching to the other sons, what would any ordinary observer say is the practical course for the poor wicked old father to take with the boy's temper of which he has made the boy a present?
My feeling is when my boy loses his temper with me at dinner for instance in the presence of the other boys, that poking a verse in a Bible feebly out at him and saying to him, "He that keepeth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city," would be rude. The way for me to give him good advice about losing his temper is to sit there quietly with him while he is losing his, and keep mine.
If Capital wants to get its way with Labor—and thinks that the way to begin with the industrial situation in this country, after all that has happened, is with a vast national spectacle of Labor confessing its sins, the most practical thing to do is for Capital to give Labor an illustration of what confessing sins is like, and how it works.
The capitalists among us who are the least deceived by their subconscious or automatic minds, are at the present moment not at all incapable of confiding to each other behind locked doors that the one single place, extreme labor to-day has got its autocracy from, is from them.
Labor is merely doing now with the scarcity of labor, the one specific thing that Capital has taught it to do and has done for forty years with the scarcity of money and jobs.
It seems to me visionary and sentimental and impracticable for Capital to try to fix things up now and give things a new start now, by slinking off and confessing its sins to God.
Labor will slink off and confess its sins to God, too.
That will be the end of it.
It may be excellent as far as it goes, but in the present desperate crisis of a nation, with the question of the very existence of society and the existence of business staring us in the face, it really must be admitted that as a practical short cut to getting something done, our all going out into a kind of moral backyard behind the barn and confessing our sins to God, is weak-looking and dreamy as compared with our all standing up like men at our own front doors, looking each other in the eye and confessing our sins to one another.
I am not saying this because I am a moral person. I am not whining at thirty thousand banks pulling them by the sleeves and saying please to them and telling them that this is what they ought to do.
I am a practical matter of fact person, speaking as an engineer in human nature and in what works with human nature and saying that when capitalists and employers stop being sentimental and off on their facts about themselves and about other people, when they propose to be practical and serious, and really get their way with other people they are going to begin by being imperfect, by talking and acting with labor, like fellow-imperfect human beings.
In the new business world that began the other day—the day of our last shot at the Germans, the only way a man is going to long get his way is to be more human than other people, have a genius for being human in business, for being human quick and human to the point where others have talent.
XI
PHILANDERING AND ALEXANDERING
By philandering I mean fooling oneself with self-love.
By Alexandering I mean going to one's Alexander whoever he or she or it is, some one person—or some one thing, which either by natural gift or by natural position is qualified to help one to be extremely disagreeable to oneself—and ask to be done over—now one subject and now another.
Nearly all men admit—or at least they like to say when they are properly approached, or when they make the approach themselves, that they make mistakes and that they are poor miserable sinners. Everybody is. They rather revel in it, some of them, in being in a nice safe way, miserable sinners. The trouble comes in ever going into the particulars with them, in finding any particular time and place one can edge in in which they are not perfect.
This fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capital and labor in general, brings out and illustrates another general principle in making the necessary excavations in one's own mind and other people's for new brain tracks—another working principle of technique for a man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get its way.
There are various Alexandering stages in the technique of not being fooled by oneself.
Self-criticism.
Asking others to help—one's nearest Alexander.
Self-confession to oneself.
Self-discipline.
Asking others to help.
The way to keep from philandering with one's own self-love or with one's own group or party—is to look over the entire field—the way one would on other subjects than being fooled by one's own side, strip down to the bare facts about oneself and facts about others for one's vision of action and fit them together and act.
In getting one's way quickly, thoroughly, personally—i.e., so that other people will feel one deserves it and will practically hand it over to one, and want one to have it, the best technique seems to be not only to utilize self-criticism or self-confession, as a part of getting one's way, but self-confession screwed up a little tighter—screwed up into self-confession to others.
I need not say that I am not throwing this idea out right and left to employers with any hopeful notion that it will be generally acted on offhand.
It is merely thrown out for employers who want to get their way with their employees—get team work and increased production out of their employees before their rivals do.
It is only for employers who want their own way a great deal—men who are in the habit of feeling masterful and self-masterful in getting their own way—who are shrewd enough, sincere enough to take a short-cut to it, and get it quick.
XII
THE FACTORY THAT LAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT
There is a man at the head of a factory not a thousand miles away, I wish thirty thousand banks and a hundred million people knew, as I know him—and as God and his workmen know him.
Some thirty years ago his father, who was the President of the firm, failed in health, lost his mind slowly and failed in business. The factory went into the hands of a receiver, the family moved from the big house to a little one—one in a row of a mile of little ones down a side street, and the sixteen year old son, who had expected to inherit the business stopped going to school, bought a tin dinner pail and walked back and forth with the tin dinner pail with the other boys in the street he lived in, and became a day laborer in the business he was brought up to own.
In not very many years he worked his way up past four hundred men, earned and took the right to be the President of the business he had expected to have presented to him.
Eight or ten years ago he began to have strikes. His strikes seemed uglier than other people's and singularly hopeless—always with something in them—a kind of secret obstinate something in them, he kept trying in vain to make out. One day when the worst strike of all was just on—or scheduled to come on in two days, as he looked up from his desk about five o'clock and saw four hundred muttering men filing out past his windows, he called in Jim—into his office.
Jim was a foreman—his most intimate friend as a boy when he was sixteen years old. He had lived in the house next door to Jim's and every morning for years they had got out of bed and walked sleepily with their tin dinner pails, to the mill together talking of the heavens and the earth and of what they were going to do when they were men.
The President had some rather wild and supercilious conversation with Jim, about the new strike on in two days and it ended in Jim's dismissing the President from the interview and slamming himself out of the door, only to open it again and stick his head in and say, "The trouble with you, Al, is you've forgotten you ever carried a dinner pail."
The President lay awake that night, came to the works the next morning, called the four hundred men together, asked the other officers to stay away, shut himself up in the room with the four hundred men and told them with a deep feeling, no man present could even mistake or ever forget, what Jim had said to him about himself—that he had forgotten how he felt when he carried a dinner pail, told them that he had lain awake all night thinking that Jim was right, that he wanted to know all the things he had forgotten, that they would be of more use to him and perhaps more use than anything in the world and that if they would be so good as to tell him what the things were that he had forgotten—so good as to get up in that room where they were all alone together and tell him what was the matter with him, he would never forget it as long as he lived. He wanted to see what he could do in the factory from now on to get back all that sixteen-year-old boy with the dinner pail knew, have the use of it in the factory every day from now on to earn and to keep the confidence the sixteen-year-old boy had, and run the factory with it.
Jim got up and made a few more remarks without any door-slamming. Fifteen or twenty more men followed with details.
This was the first meeting that pulled the factory together. In those that followed the President and the men together got at the facts together and worked out the spirit and principles and applied them to details. The meetings were held on company time—at first every few days, then every week, and now quite frequently when some new special application comes up. Nine out of ten of the difficulties disappeared when the new spirit of team work and mutual candor was established and everybody saw how it worked.
No one could conceive now of getting a strike in edgewise to the factory that listened to Jim.
I am not unaccustomed to going about factories with Presidents and it is often a rather stilted and lonely performance. But when I first went through this factory with the President that listened to Jim, stood by benches, talked with him and his men together, felt and saw the unconscious natural and human way conversations were conducted between them, saw ten dollars a day and a hundred dollars a day talking and laughing together and believing and working together, it did not leave very much doubt in my mind as to what the essential qualities are that business men to-day—employers and workingmen—are going to have and have to have to make them successful in producing goods, in leading their rivals in business and in getting their way with one another.
Naturally as a matter of convenience and a short cut for all of us, I would like to see Capital take what is supposed to be its initiative—be the side that leads off and makes the start in the self-discipline, self-confession and conscious control of its own class, which it thinks Labor ought to.
Whichever side in our present desperate crisis attains self-discipline and the full power in sight of the people not to be fooled about itself first, will win the leadership first, and win the loyalty and gratitude and partiality and enthusiasm of the American people for a hundred years.
The first thing for a man to do to get his way with another man—install a new brain track with him that they can use together, is to surprise the man by picking out for him and doing to him the one thing that he knows that you of all others would be the last man to do.
It looks as if the second thing to do is to surprise the man into doing something himself that he knew that he himself anyway of all people in the world, is the last man to do.
First you surprise him with you. Then with himself. After this of course with new people to do things, both on the premises, the habit soon sets in of starting with people all manner of things that everybody knew—who knew anything—knew the people could not do.
This is what the President of the factory not a thousand miles away accomplished all in twenty-four hours by not being fooled about himself. He took a short cut to getting what he wanted to get with his employees, which if ten thousand other employers could hear of and could take to-morrow would make several million American wage earners feel they were in a new world before night.
The thing that seemed to me the most significant and that I liked best about the President of the Company who listened to Jim, was the discovery I made in a few minutes, when I met him, that unlike Henry Ford, whom I met for the first time the same week, he was not a genius. He was a man with a hundred thousand duplicates in America.
Any one of a hundred thousand men we all know in this country would do what he did if he happened on it, if just the right Jim, just the right moment, stuck his head in the door.
Here's to Jim, of course.
But after all not so much credit to Jim. There are more of us probably who could have stuck our heads in the door.
The greater credit should go to the lying awake in the night, to the man who was practical enough to be inspired by a chance to quit and quit sharply in his own business, being fooled by himself and who got four hundred men to help.
Incidentally of course though he did not think of it, and they did not think of it, the four hundred men all in the same tight place he was in of course, of trying not to be fooled about themselves, asked him to help them.
Of course with both sides in a factory in this way pursuing the other side and asking it to help it not to be fooled, everything everybody says counts. There is less waste in truth in a factory. Truth that is asked for and thirsted for, is drunk up. The refreshment of it, the efficiency of it which the people get, goes on the job at once.
XIII
LISTENING TO JIM
(A Note on Collective Bargaining)
I would like to say to begin with that I believe in national collective bargaining as it is going to be in the near future—collective bargaining executed on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in such spirit as shall be determined by the facts—the practical engineering facts in human nature and the way human nature works.
I do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical about human nature so far. The moment that it is, the public and all manner of powerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish or unreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it.
A book entitled "A Few Constructive Reflections on Marriage" by a man who had had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces,—a man whose ex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. A symposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbands would really count more. Most candid people would admit this as a principle.
The same principle seems to hold good about what people think in National Associations of Employers and national associations of workingmen in labor unions.
Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very superficial decisions.
Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of being fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to be right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong about half the time.
The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Other people have it.
When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have some way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But when I am told in a deep bass national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937 is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed and to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At all events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied 2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off to multiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talk to me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word.
Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have been fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by it a good many years.
It is a rather natural un-self-conscious innocent thing to do I suppose, at first, but as the illusion is one which of course does not work or only works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capital or labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time,—especially in the difficulties we are all facing together in America now, to let ourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer.
The difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are all essentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt with by tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up and getting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin, dealing at particular times and in particular places with particular human beings. In the factory that listened to Jim, no order from a national Collective Bargaining Works could have begun to meet the situation as well as Jim did and the factory did.
If Jim had stuck his head in the door by orders from Indianapolis, or if the President of the Company had had a telegram giving him national instructions to lie awake that night, what would it have come to?
I believe in national or collective bargaining as a matter of course, in certain aspects of all difficulties between capital and labor. But the causes of most difficulties in industry are personal and have to be dealt with where the persons are. The more personal things to be done are, the more personally they have to be attended to.
If the women of America were to organize a Childbirth Labor Union, say next Christmas—and if from next Christmas on, all the personal relations of men and women and husbands and wives—the stipulations and conditions on which women would and would not bear children were regulated by national rules, by courtship rules and connubial orders from Indianapolis, Indiana, it would be about as superficial a way to determine the well-being of the sexes, as foolish and visionary a way for the female class to attempt to reform and regulate the class that has been fenced off by The Creator as the male class, as the present attempt of the labor class to sweep grandly over the spiritual and personal relation of individual employers and individual workmen and substitute for it collective bargaining from Indianapolis.
There is one thing about women. It would never have occurred to the women of this country as it has to the men to get up a contraption for doing a thing nationally that they could not even do at home.
For every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in the most intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of her life is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, the main and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, the one that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distance and from outside.
The whole idea, whether applied to biology or industry is a half dead, mechanical idea and only people who are tired or half alive, are long going to be willing to put up with it.
As the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair,—as the more individualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is what the relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers and employees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, the more individual and personal—that is to say, the more alive it is.
All live men with any gusto or headway in them, or passion for work, all employers and employees with any headway or passion for getting together in them are as impatient of having the way they get together their personal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be in the sexual relation and for the same reasons.
If it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in America get together in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in America get together in another, and pass resolutions of affection at each other, rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, how many men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for a father or mother, would go?
Only anæmic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either make or accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for the conditions of their lives together.
And in twenty years only anæmic employers and anæmic employees and workmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they do together, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eight hours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collective bargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does of it determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality, personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual daily contacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis of determining and of making effective what was right.
XIV
THE NEW COMPANY
I met a wagon coming down the street yesterday, saying across the front of it—half a street away, American Experience Co.
I wanted to get in.
Of course it turned out to be as it got nearer, The American Express Co., but I couldn't help thinking what it would mean if we had an equally well-organized arrangement for rapid transit of boxes—boxes people have got out of or got into, as we have for conveying other boxes people are mixed up with. (Fixes were called boxes when I was a boy. We used to speak of a man having a difficult experience, as being in a box.)
The Air Line League proposes to be The American Experience Company—a big national concern for shipping other people's experiences to people, so that unless they insist on it, they will have the good of them without having to take their time and everybody else's time around them to go through them all over again alone and just for themselves.
Of course there are people who tumtytum along without thinking, who will miss the principle and insist on having a nice private misery of doing it all over again in their own home factory for themselves. But there are many million people with sense in this country—people as good at making sense out of other people as they are in making money out of them, and the Air Line League proposes that to these people who have the sense, when they want them, when they order them, experiences shall be shipped. And when they get orders—they can ship theirs.
If some of the experience the Labor unions in England have had and got over having, could be shipped in the next few weeks, unloaded and taken over by the Americans, anybody can see with a look, ways in which the Air Line League or American Experience Company, if it were existing this minute, could bring home to people what they want to know about what works and what does not, what they long to have advertised to them—at once. Experiences—or date of experiences shipped from England would not only make a short-cut for America in increasing production in this country, lowering the cost of living, but would give America a chance in the same breath by the same act, to win a victory over herself and to turn the fate of a world.
What the Air Line League proposes to do is to act—particularly through the Look-Up Club—as the American Shipping Experience Company.
XV
THE FIFTY-CENT DOLLAR
This book is itself—so far as it goes, a dramatization of the idea of the Look-Up Club.
The thing the book—between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper—a kind of listening together of capital and labor, the Look-Up Club of The Air Line League is planned to do in the nation at large and locally in ten thousand cities—capital, labor and the consumer listening to each other—reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders, studying their personal interests together, working and acting out together the great daily common interest of all of us. The Look-Up Club, acting as it does for the three social groups that make up The Air Line League and having an umpire and not an empire function, operates primarily as a Publicity or Listening organization.
I might illustrate the need the Look-Up Club is planned to meet and how it would operate by suggesting what the Club might do with a particular idea—an idea on which people must really be got together in America before long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all.
Millions of American laborers go to bed every night and get up every morning saying:—
"The American employer is getting more money than he earns. We are going to have our turn now. Nobody can stop us."
Result: Under-production and the Fifty-Cent Dollar.
The cure for the American laboring man's under-production and working merely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that the American employer is working for something besides money—that he is earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job—the way he is saying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can be got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and the lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of the world all going out together.
I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports—men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like.
If all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what their laborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the face of Labor toward Capital—the face of this country toward the world and toward itself and toward every man in it would be changed in a week.
Suppose I propose to take one of these men and write about him until everybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeing that everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what would be the first thing I would come upon?
The first thing I would come upon would be a convention. It is one of the automatic ideas or conventions of business men—not to believe in themselves.
XVI
THE BUSINESS MAN, THE PROFESSIONAL MAN, AND THE ARTIST
Why is it that if a professional man or an artist does or says a certain thing—people believe him and that if a business man does or says precisely the same thing—most business men are suspicious?
When I say in the first sentence of an article on the front page of the Saturday Evening Post—as I did awhile ago—"I would pay people to read what I am saying on this page,"—everybody believes me. As people read on in one of my articles in the Post, they cannot be kept from seeing how egregiously I am enjoying my work. Anybody can see it—that I would pay up to the limit all the money I can get hold of—my own, or anybody's—to get other people to enjoy reading my stuff as much as I do. Nobody seems inclined to deny that if I could afford to—or, if I had to—I would pay ten cents a word to practically any man, to get him to read what I write.
Precisely the way I feel about an article in the Saturday Evening Post so fortunate as to be by me—or, about a book written by g.s.l., a man I know very well—W. J. —— feels about a house or about a bank created by W. J. ——. But if W. J., a designer—contractor—a builder—pretends he enjoys his creative work in building as much as I enjoy writing—if W. J., a business man, were to go around telling people or revealing to people that he would like to hire them to be his customers by handing back to them twenty, thirty or forty per cent of his agreed upon profits when he gets through (which is what he practically does over and over again) there are very few business men who would not say at first sight that W. J. is a man who ought to be watched.
And he is too, but for precisely turned around reasons most people have to be watched for. W. J. in designing and constructing a house, or a bank for a client, sets as his cost estimate a ten per cent maximum profit for himself, as a margin to work on; aiming at six or five per cent profit for himself, on small contracts and at a four, three or two and one-half per cent profit for himself on million dollar ones. Changes and afterthoughts from his clients in carrying out a contract are inevitable. W. J. wants a margin on which to allow for contingencies and for his customers' afterthought.
The three things that interest W. J. in business are: his work on a perfect house, his work on a perfect customer and his work on making enough money to keep people from bothering his work.
A perfect house is a house built just as he said it would be which comes out costing less than he said it would cost—possibly a check on his client's dinner plate the first night he dines in it.
A perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannot express himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to—who cannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sending everybody to W. J. he can think of.
The tendency of mean typical business men—even men who do this themselves, when I tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what is the matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me.
This is what is the matter with the country—the conventional automatic assumption that millions of men—even men who are not in business merely to make money themselves—make in general, that we must arrange to run a civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day, in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are merely working for money.
If we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it does not need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions and that these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulers and the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate of all of us—we would be a new nation in a week.
In a year we would increase production fifty per cent.
This has happened over and over again in factories where this new spirit of putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, has come in.
Naturally, inasmuch as W. J. as all people who know him know, has made a very great business success of running his business on this principle, of making it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things at once than merely making money—running a business like any other big profession, one of the first things I think of doing is to write something that will make everybody know it. Well, as I have said, the first fact I come on is that many business men do not approve of believing in themselves or in business or in what I say about its being a profession, any more than they can help.
XVII
THE NEWS-MAN
I have recently come in my endeavors as a publicist, as a self-appointed, self-paid employee of the American people, upon what seems to me a very astonishing and revolutionary fact.
I have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into two principles.
1. The industrial and financial fate of America and the world turns in the next few years—or even months, on news—on getting certain people to know in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certain things will happen.
2. News, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as a generalization or as a principle. To make news compelling and conclusive one has to say something in particular about somebody in particular.
Here is the fact I have come on in acting on these principles.
When I find news done up in a man to save a nation with, if I make everybody know him, the fact I face about my country is this.
A generalized—that is—a sterilized idea is free. A fertilized or dramatized idea—an idea done up and dramatized in a man so that everybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up.
I am not blaming anybody. I am laying before people and before myself a fact.
Suppose that I think it is stupendously to the point just now to advertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion of profit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would make a new nation for a hundred people to know?
Suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generally invited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kind of spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity—instead of getting off ideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, I insist on making ideas do things and I plan on having my ideas done up solidly in ten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching?
Suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, a man who dramatizes—makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea of increased production or superproducing, seems to the point—suppose I begin with W. J.?
What does anyone suppose would happen?
XVIII
W. J.
If W. J. were dead, or were to die to-morrow, it would be convenient. In bearing upon our present national crisis it would be thoughtful and practical of W. J. to die.
If W. J.'s worst enemy were to push him off the top of the fortieth story of the Equitable Building to-morrow morning all I would have to do would be to write an article about him in some national weekly, Saturday Evening Post or Collier's, which would be read by four million people.
But the Saturday Evening Post or Collier's has no use for W. J. until he is dead. It would like to have, of course, but it would not be fair to the business men who are paying ten thousand dollars a page to be advertised in it, for the Saturday Evening Post to let any other man—any man who is not dead yet, be advertised in it.
This is the reason for the Look-Up Club, a national body—the gathering together of one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise W. J. to—who will then turn—the hundred thousand men of vision—and advertise him to everybody.
Then other men, strategic men like W. J.—men who are dramatizing other strategic ideas will be selected to follow W. J. for the one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise to a hundred million people.
By writing a book and having my publisher distribute through the bookstores a book, I would reach, at best, only one hundred thousand people, and I am proposing to reach a hundred million people—to organize a hundred thousand salesmen scattered in five thousand cities and reach with my book, the hearts and minds, the daily eight-hour-a-day working lives of a hundred million people.
This is what the Look-Up Club is for. It is an organized flying wedge of one hundred thousand salesmen who have picked each other out for driving into the attention of a nation, national ideas.
The fate of America and the fate of the world at the present moment turns upon free advertising written by men who could not be hired to do it—in books distributed by a hundred thousand men who could not be hired to distribute them. We are setting to work a national committee of a hundred thousand men, to unearth in America, advertise, make the common property of everybody the men who dramatize, who make neighborly and matter-of-fact the beliefs a great people will perish if they do not believe.
XIX
THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP
We are drawing in the next few months in America the plans and specifications for a great nation and a new world.
We want a Committee of a Hundred Thousand.
We are proposing to gather a Look-Up Committee of a hundred thousand men of constructive imagination in business and other callings, in ten thousand cities, who will work out together and place before the people, plans and specifications of what this nation proposes to be like—a picture of what a hundred million people want.
The situation we are trying to meet is one of providing new brain tracks for a hundred million people. It will not seem to many people, too much to say that the quick way to do this, is to form a Club—a Committee in this country, of a hundred thousand men to ask to be told about these new brain tracks, who will then tell them to the hundred million.
The Look-Up Club is a Publicity and Educational Organization for the purpose of focusing and mobilizing the vision of the people acting as a clearing house of the vision of the people—gathering, coördinating, pooling and determining and distributing the main points in their order of what the American people believe.
The first subject we act in our Publicity Organization as our Listening Conspiracy—our Coöperative news-service to our members—is the subject of how coöperation between capital and labor works. Our first news-service will be planned to increase production, decrease the cost of living, stop strikes and lockouts, drive out civil war and substitute coöperation as a means of getting things in American life.
Every man who is nominated to membership in the Look-Up Club naturally asks four questions.
1. How can I belong?
2. What does it cost?
3. What do I undertake to do for the Club?
4. What do I get—what does the Club do for me?
The idea is for each man who is deeply interested, to pick out, to nominate any fifty men—I put down for instance on my list Franklin P. Lane—among forty-nine others, ask Mr. Lane who the men are he knows in this nation, men he has come on in his business in the course of twenty years, who are characterized either by having creative imagination themselves or by marked power to coöperate with men who have it.
After Mr. Lane had given me his fifty, I would ask each of Mr. Lane's fifty for their fifty and each in turn for their fifty until we had covered the country and had picked out and introduced to each other from Maine to California the men of creative imagination in America.
Other members will of course be nominated by members of the Air Line League in their respective communities and everybody who is invited to nominate for the Look-Up section of the Air Line League will be asked to nominate in three lists—(1) those he thinks of as representing invention in the nation at large, (2) those he knows or deals with in his own business or line of activity—all over the country, who have creative imagination or power of discovery and planning ideas, and (3) those he knows in his own home-community that he and his neighbors would like to see in the Look-Up Club, on the nation's honor roll of men of vision in the nation representing his own community.
The cost is to be determined by the Club, but is planned as a small nominal sum—nominal dues for expense of correspondence and conducting the activities of the Club.
What a man gets by joining the Club is the association with two or three thousand members from all over the land at any given time who will be in the Club headquarters in a skyscraper hotel of its own, when he comes to New York and the advantage of common action and common looking at the same things at the same time with the other members of the Club, through the activities of the Club by mail.
The Look-Up Club Bulletins, pamphlets and little books containing news of critical importance and timeliness to all members—news not generally known or not available in the same concentrated form in the daily press, will be sent to all members for their own use and for distribution to others at critical times and places and with strategic persons—labor unions and employers and public men.
What the Look-Up Club does for a man is to give him the benefit of a friendly candid national conspiracy between a hundred thousand men, to get the news and to pass on the news that counts and to do it all at the same time instead of in scattered and meaningless dabs.
If the thing each man of a hundred thousand sees once a year in a little lonely dab of vision all by himself could be seen by all of us by agreement the same week in the year, we will do the thing we see.
Anything we see will have to happen. The only reason the thing we see does not happen now, is that we make no arrangements to see it together.
Seen together, news that looks like a rainbow acts like a pile driver.
A man becomes a hundred thousand times himself. In the Look-Up Club what a man gets for his own use, is hundred thousand man-power news.
What does a man when he joins the Look-Up Club, undertake to do?
Send in news when he knows some, and use news when he gets it.
I do not undertake to say just what each member of the Look-Up Club will undertake to do with news when he receives it.
When a man receives live news which immediately concerns him and his nation in the same breath, the way he feels about it and acts about it—about real news he applies to himself and to his work and the people around him, will seem to him to come, not under the head of duties to the Club, but under the head of the things the Club will tempt him to do and that he cannot be kept from doing.
If a hundred thousand picked men in this country in all walks of life all get the same news the same week, and then use the news the week they get it, and put it where other people will use it, we will all know and everybody else will know what the Look-Up Club is for.
We will be carrying out in the Look-Up Club what might be called a selective draft of vision.
We will mobilize and bring to action the vision and the will of the people.
XX
PROPAGANDY PEOPLE
I am weary and sad about the word propaganda. I am weary of being propaganded, or rather of being propaganded at and as regards propagandafying others myself, or propagandaizing them, whatever it is publicists and men who are interested in public ideas suppose they do, I am sad at heart. There is a prayer some one prayed once one tired New Year's Eve, which appeals to me.
"Forgive me my Christmases as I forgive them that have Christmased against me."
I could pray the same model outline for a prayer. But for Christmasing, substitute propagandy-izing.
The word somehow itself in its own unconscious beauty dramatizes the way I feel about it. I have written many hundred pages of what I believe about reformers—about people who are trying to get other people's attention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what I believe now is that most people if they would stop trying to get other people's attention and try to get their own, would do more good.
The advertising in which I believe is the advertising that is asked for. I believe in getting a few million people to ask to be advertised to and to give particulars.
More good would be done this way than by turning the whole advertising idea around and working it wrong end to as we do now.
For instance at this present moment I want to know everything about myself and against myself, my enemies know. I do not see why I should put up with my enemies being the ones of all others to know things against me that if I knew would be the making of me. What I want to do is to find a way—make arrangements if I can, to get them to tell me—tell me politely—if they can, but tell me.
If every person, or party, or group in America to-day would do this, Capital, Labor, bankers, socialists, Republicans and Democrats, America would quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a great one. People who have organized to be advertised to will read advertising more poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as I would) more desperately. They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read where now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertising he has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or no the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true.
It is a platitude.
A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a great truth.
What the Air Line League is for, one of the things it is for, is to act on this truth.
Through the three branches, the Look-Up Club, the Try-Out Club and the Put-Through Clan, the Air Line League is an organization not for asserting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally sucking advertising. With its thirty million people joining it, asking to be advertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the National Vacuum Cleaner for Truth.
XXI
THE SKILLED CONSUMERS OF PUBLICITY
The trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled. They are not organized to get what they want.
We should organize the Consumers of Publicity, make it possible for the people of America as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what they want.
We should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizing Skilled Readers' Labor Saving Unions.
The difficulties of attaining a power of national listening together—through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so great that they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our having an organization the members of which join it as they will join the Air Line League for the express purpose not of advertising—but of being advertised to.
The most fundamental activity of the Air Line League in the present crisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising of the ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who have certain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to a specific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as I would have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have these same men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them.
It would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of an organization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to.
I say again—if I may be forgiven for the still small voice of platitude—a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it—the most effective advertising is advertising that is asked for.
I
FOURTH OF JULY ALL THE YEAR ROUND
It would be very convenient for the other nations in the world to-day if America—being the biggest, the freshest and the most powerful after the war and having the other nations for the time being most dependent on it, could be the one that they felt most deserved to lead them and have its way with them.
It is almost the personal necessity of forty other nations to-day that America should be a success, that America instead of instantly disappointing the other nations, should instantly prove itself worthy of the leadership they would like to place in her hands. "America's success is the world's success," people keep saying. This has a prettified and pleasant sound—in speaking of a great, or rather of a big, nation.
But what of it? What is the fact? What do we wish we could believe is the fact? What is there—either in our own interests or the interests of others that can really be done and done now about the fact—if it is a fact—by any real person or body of persons in America? As a practical and not a Fourth of July institution,—or rather as an institution for celebrating the Fourth of July all the year round, the Air Line League looks upon direct action to be taken by the American people to meet the world's particular situation at this time, as follows:
If America is to get its way—the way, as we like to think, of democracy and freedom, with other nations, there are certain things about us the other nations want to know.
The other nations want to know that America has a technique for getting its way with itself.
The nation that has the most self-control will be the nation that as a matter of course and of common safety will be asked in the crisis, by the other nations, to take the lead in controlling order, in controlling or insuring the self-control of others.
The other nations want to know—if they are going to let us have our way with them—put over what we like to call our superior democratic open way upon them, that we have a vision—a vision of human nature and of modern life which is better, clearer, more practical and timely than their vision.
The other nations want to know,—if we are to have our way, that we not only have a vision of what our way is—a national vision, but a technique for expressing and embodying that national vision. To deserve our way with them they must know we have a vision which can be proved, which is historic—the facts of which—specifications, dates, names and places, can be placed in their hands.
The other nations if they are going to let us have our way with them, will want to know by observation that America has not only a vision and a technique for embodying a vision, but that when her vision proves to be wrong (as during the war) America has a technique for being born again.
II
THE VISION AND THE BODY
I have dwelt already on what a body for the people would be like and how it would work.
I would now like to touch on two facts—the fact that there is a particular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the American people at this time, and the fact that the body to express the vision grows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to be had.
The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations—on its getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be expressed.
The technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turns on a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becoming self-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision of action developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth.
This fact is not supposed to be open to argument. It is a biological fact—the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. Everybody knows, or thinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here and there at a time for a short time, in America—inventors, great statesmen, children and lovers are ever caught acting as if they believed it.
Everything about America that is lively, or powerful, or substantial and material begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody's falling in love and becoming conscious of his own desire.
The first thing this nation has to do to have a body is to get its own attention.
The reason that the people of America in the Red Cross achieved a body, is that some one had a body for—the vision that if all the different kinds of people we had in America who had never dreamed of doing a thing together before, could be got together to do one thing together now the world war could be won.
This spectral and visionary-looking idea somehow in the Red Cross, was not only the thing that started the Red Cross, but it was the daily momentum, the daily mounting up in the hearts of the people that made it go.
The leaders of the Red Cross—Mr. Davison and the men he gathered about him had a vision of what could be done which other people did not dare to have.
The secret of the Red Cross was that it was a vision-machine, a machine for multiplying one man's vision a millionfold, working out in the sight of the people three thousand miles a vision greater than the people would have thought they could have.
This vision which the Red Cross had, which it advertised to people and made other people have, is what the people liked about it. The people threw down their jewels for it—for something to believe about themselves and do with themselves greater than they had believed before. They threw down their creeds for it. They threw down their class prejudices for it—a huge buoyant serious daily vision of action in which all classes and all creeds of people could live and dream and work together every day.
No more matter of fact conclusive demonstration of the implacable splendid brutal power of vision, of the power of vision to precipitate across three thousand miles a body for the souls and the prayers of a people, could be imagined than the Red Cross during its great days in the war.
The Red Cross became capable of doing what it did because it touched the imagination of the average humdrum man rich or poor and made him think of somebody besides himself. The Red Cross did this by what was practically an advertising campaign, the advertising of different sets of people, to all of the others.
The result was what looked and felt like a miracle—a kind of apocalypse of people who have outdone themselves.
Naturally the people liked it. And naturally people who have watched themselves and one another outdoing themselves, can do anything.
My own experience is that when I set out to find the real truth about people whether it pets me in my feeling about them or not, people turn out to be incredibly alike. They are all more full of good than they seem to want me to believe. The only difference is that some of them are more successful in keeping me from believing in them than others.
I have taken some satisfaction in seeing in the Red Cross, a nation backing me up in this experience with human nature in America.
III
THE CALL OF A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE
The nearest the American people have come to getting their way in other nations—to having a vision and a body with which to do it and deserve to do it—is in the Red Cross, and in our Food Distribution. In both of these organizations we succeeded in getting the attention of others to what we could do for them—and with them—by getting our own attention first and by making our own sacrifice at home first.
We were allowed to administer food abroad because we had shown self-control and sacrifice about food at home and were given headway in emergency and rescue abroad because millions of people here had a vision for others and gave a body to their vision at home.
I have been filled with sorrow over the way millions of men and women in the American Red Cross, their daily lives geared to a great issue, living every day with a national international vision suffusing their minds and hearts and touching everything they said and did, suddenly disappeared as the people that they really were and that they seemed to be, from sight.
I have never understood it, how twenty million men and women out of that one common colossal daily vision of a world, almost in a day, almost in an hour, across a continent as on some great national spring, snapped back into the little life.
I do not know as I would have minded them—three thousand miles of them going back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but I have wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps to move the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they had to go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, and driving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live them daily together.
The necessity of the every-day individual lives we all are interested in living—the necessity of the actual personal things we all are daily trying to do, is a necessity so much more splendid and tragic, so much more vivid, personal and immediate, so much more adapted to a high and exhilarating motive and to a noble common desire than the rather rudimentary showy stupid necessity the Germans thrust upon us could ever dream of being, that it is hard to understand the way in which the leaders of the Red Cross in the supreme critical moment when the mere war with Germany was being stupendously precipitated into forty wars of forty nations with themselves, at the very moment when with one touch of a button the new vision of the people could have been turned on instead of the old one and the hundred million people stood there asking them, snapped off the light, dismissed the hundred million people—clapped them back into their ten thousand cities into the common life.
The magnificent self discovery, the colossal single-heartedness lighting up the faces of the people whiffed out by one breath of armistice! Who would have believed it or who can forgive it?... The Red Cross—the redeemer, the big brother of nations, holding steady the nerves of a whole world—not meeting the emergency of a whole world—the whole world yesterday tightened up into war, and to-day falling apart into colossal complicated, innumerable, hemming and hawing, stuttering Peace!
What people used to think wealth was, what they used to think might was, the power of attracting the whole attention of millions of people is.
In the Red Cross a hundred million people—American people, had looked at the same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the same thing at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the same thing in a thousand ways with their hands. In the Red Cross the feet of a hundred million people became as the feet of one man.
The Red Cross had hunted out, accumulated, mounted up and focused the attention of forty nations. It had in its hands the trigger of a ninety mile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day the armistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking up in its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, a pocket pistol instead. Because the war suddenly was everywhere instead of the north of France, it reduced to a peace basis. At the very moment when it had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment when it had people all over the world all listening to it and believing in it, at the very moment when the forty nations could have been turned on to any problem with it, it let the forty nations go.
If I could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as one man—a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with his opera glass, if I were sitting next to him I would suggest his turning the screw to the right slowly. I would say, "Do you see better or worse as you turn it to the right?" If I found he saw worse I would tell him to turn it to the left and then I would leave him to try between the two until he found it.
The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. It had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national blank look.
Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out.
It was a Focus—a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking for it from us, every morning when they get up—asking for it as one man.
To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever known—this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred million people from having a blank look, let its chance go.
The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where it stopped, the Red Cross vision—the Red Cross spirit.
The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented as a future for the Red Cross.
The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body for the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division for the Red Cross.
But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for my purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people—the rank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves the soul of it and who would make the soul of anything—particularly the men and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to cool a little—had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set before the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated by the leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us—would have kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active labor in the Red Cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men and women for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the mere stress of merely beating Germans, there had been one before.
IV
THE CALL OF A WORLD
The difference between a first class nation and a second class nation might be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any live profession.
Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they began filling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them so that they have no teeth to fill.
Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctor used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see a doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands, and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. The next stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers—to keep them from walking too soon.
The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill the germs that decay the teeth.
The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day after the armistice to go back to war germs.
The Red Cross with its branches in every town and every nation in the world would announce that from that day on, through a vast new division, it would occupy itself with germs—with the germs of six inch guns, with the germs of submarines. It would deal with the embryology of war.
The germs of war between nations, breed in wars between classes, and the germs of class war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs of war between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace with himself.
It is when I am having a hard time getting on with Stanley Lee that I am likely to have a row with Ivy Lee. It is a colossal understatement to say that charity begins at home. Everything does. If a man understands himself he can understand anybody. If he gets on with himself the world will fall into his hands.
The great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop war between capital and labor. This is a feat of personality and of engineering in human nature. It is a home-job, and when we have done it at home we can sow all nations with it. If I wanted to stop a war between Ivy Lee and me I would have to pick out a series of things to do to Ivy Lee and to say to him which he would like to have me do and say to him. Then I would pick out in myself things that Ivy Lee does not like to have me do to him and say to him, and which possibly when I study on them I will not want to do.
Up to Ivy to do the same to me.
This is a science. It is not merely a vision or a religion. Removing the cause of fighting may be a less exact science of mutual study and self-study, but it is approximately exact. It is also a fascinating and contagious science. We master the embryology of war between persons—the embryology of war between classes, and then between nations. The principles which we demonstrate and set up working samples of in one of these problems will prove to be the principles of the others.
If people do not believe in germs enough and are more afraid of fire, I would change the figure.
We are proposing to follow up at once, the Red Cross, which was run as a fire engine to put or help put out fires between nations, with the Air Line League which is to be run as a machine for not letting fires between nations get started.
Edward A. Filene of Boston in trying to have a successful department store found the women behind his counters got very tired standing in the street cars night and morning on the way home and took up with a will getting new rapid transit for Boston. He found he could not get rapid transit for Boston without helping to get a new government and that he could not get a new government without helping to get a new Boston.
He then found he could not help get a new Boston without getting new trade and industrial conditions in Boston and that he could not help get new ideals working in trade and industry in Boston without helping in the ideals of a nation. He then found he could not get a new nation without trying to help make several new nations. Then came the International Chamber of Commerce.
Something like this seems to happen to nearly every man I know who really accomplishes anything.
Or any nation.
Frederick Van Eeden of Holland began life as a painter with marked success but being a lively and interested man he could not help wondering why people were not getting out of paintings in Holland—his own and other people's, what they ought to and what they used to, and became a critic. He found people did not respond to his ideas of how they ought to enjoy things and then won distinction as a poet, but why did not more people get more out of the best poetry? He then wrote one or two novels of high quality which Holland was proud of and which were read in several languages, but why did not the people read novels of a high character as much as they did the poorer ones?
He decided that it was because people were physically underorganized and not whole in body and mind—like the Greeks, and became a physician.
He thought he was being thorough when he became a physician but soon found that he was not getting down to the causes after all, of people's not having whole bodies and fine senses capable of appreciating the finer things and soon came to the conclusion that for the most part what was the matter with their bodies was due to what was wrong in their habits of thought and in their minds, and became an alienist and founded the first psycho-therapeutic hospital in Holland.
He then found that in what was the matter with people's minds, he was still superficial and that people's minds were wrong because of the social and industrial conditions, ideals and institutions under which they were conceived and born, and had to live.
He then devoted himself to being a publicist and sociologist, had charge of bread for the poor during the great bread riots in Amsterdam and is now engaged in grappling nationally and internationally with industrial and civil war as the cause of all failures of men and nations to express and fulfill their real selves in the world.
Any nation that wants to be a great nation and to fulfill and express itself and be a first class nation will sooner or later find that it has to go on from one individual personal interest to another until it finds it is doing practically what Frederick Van Eeden did.
The only way to look out for, or to express oneself is to try to help everybody else to.
The Red Cross at the end of the war in making elaborate and international arrangements to run a pleasant and complimentary ambulance to the relief of disease in society that society was deliberately creating every day, instead of taking advantage at the end of the war of the trust all classes had in it, and taking advantage of the attention of forty nations, of society's best and noblest need, to keep society from causing the disease, chose to be superficial, faced away from its vision, fell behind the people, absconded from the leadership of the world.
The aches and pains of society with which since the war, the Red Cross so politely and elegantly deals, which with white kid gloves and without hurting our feelings it spends our money to relieve are all caused by the things we daily do to each other to make the money.
The vision of the common people in America recognizes this and recognized it instantly at the end of the war. The hearts of the men and women of America to-day, are at once too bitter, too deep and too hopeful not to instantly lose interest in a Red Cross which asks them to help run it as a beautiful superficial ambulance to the evils people are doing to one another instead of as a machine to help them not to do them.
V
MISSOURI
The best service America can render other nations to-day is be herself—fulfill and make the most of herself.
Senator Reed of Missouri would probably agree with me in this.
Where I differ with Senator Reed is in what America should propose to do to make the most of herself.
Senator Reed of Missouri judging from reports of his speeches in the Senate wants America in the present distraction of nations to stop thinking of the others, wizen up and be safe.
It seems to me that if America were to cut herself off from the rest of the world in its hour of need and just shrivel up into thinking of herself she would fail to fulfill herself and be like herself. She would just be like Senator Reed of Missouri.
Nothing could be less safe for America just now than to be like Senator Reed of Missouri.
Senator Reed puts forward a patriotism which is sincere but reckless. In the Senate of fifty states, Reed says "I'm from Missouri." In the congress of nations, Reed says "America über Alles." "The world for America." "America for Missouri." "Missouri for Me!"
For America just at the present moment in the world it has got to belong to, to turn away and stop being interested in the whole world and in everybody in it and in what everybody is going to do and be kept from doing—is like a man's shutting himself up in his own stateroom and being interested in his own port hole in a ship that is going down. It seems more sensible for America—even from the point of view of looking out for herself—not to go down with Senator Reed and moon around in his stateroom with him, but to be deeply interested in the whole ship, and in the engines, the wheelhouse and the pumps.
Patriotism that just shuts a nation up into a private stateroom nation by itself or that makes a nation just live with its own life preserver on, to preserve its own life preserver, can end either for Senator Reed or for America in but one way.
It's going to end in a plunge of the ship.
It is going to end in Senator Reed's running out, and running up to the deck the last minute.
I do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me that from the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle of Senator Reed of Missouri, tying Missouri like a millstone around his neck and then casting himself, Missouri and all, into the sea, while it may have a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be a practical or business-like example for his country.
I would like to show if I can that Senator Reed is wrong, and to present the alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the Air Line League.
The Germans have said (and have spent forty billion dollars in saying it) that democracy cannot be made to work. They sneered at us during the war and said to England, America and the rest of us that we could not make democracy work in running an army and keep up with Germans in war, and they are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work in industry and keep up with Germans in peace.
Forty nations half-believe that the Germans are right about industrial democracy, about democracy's not being a real, sincere, every day thing, a thing every man can have the good of all day every day of his life, and a good many people in America—extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the Germans.
If the Germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for America to pay very much attention just now to her industries. If America is living in a world as insane as Germany says it is, the one thing ahead for us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other forty nations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough and grimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations before they murder ours.
Everything must be geared and geared at once to the Germans' being right.
Or it must be geared and geared at once to their being wrong, to challenging the Germans—to telling them that they are as fooled about what industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what it could do in war.
The one thing we can do in America now to get the Germans or anybody else to believe us about industrial democracy is to make American democracy in industry whip German militarism in industry out of sight in our own labor unions and in our own factories. Then we will whip German militarism in industry out of the markets of the world.
If the quickest way for the American people to get a decent world—a world we want to do business in, is to whip German militarism in industry, and if the quickest way to whip German militarism abroad is to whip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up our factories, calling in our money and our men and settling down to work?
What is it that is scaring capital and labor away and holding back money and men?
The fear of the United States Senate.
The fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish money and men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the United States Senate and other governments not to be afraid of war.
The first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stop this fear.
The first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is to stop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know all about us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all day every day are making peace work between classes, better than war does. Making democracy work in business is the first condition, for America and the world of having any business.
It is not merely in behalf of other nations, but in behalf of ourselves, that I am advocating the direct action of the people welded together into one mass organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the three classes together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. The Air Line League is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as a standing-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, the voluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team work and mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all classes.
The whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrial democracy—in proving to people by advertising it to them and by dramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works.
It is because the Germans believe that men who have been forced against their wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more and compete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing team work because they understand and want to, that Germany is a second-class nation and that the German people have had to put up for forty years with being second-class human beings. They have a ruling majority of second-class human beings in Germany because they have the most complete and most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, for making second-class human beings out of practically anybody—arrangements for howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to do as a substitute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of making them want to do it.
Taking the line of least resistance—the mechanical course in dealing with human nature, makes America's being a second-class nation a matter of course.
What we have always been hoping for in America is that in due time we are going to be a first-class nation—a nation crowded with men and women who, wherever they have come from, or whether or not they were first class when they came, have been made first class by the way that all day every day in their daily work they have been treated by the rest of us when they come to us, and by the way they treat one another.
VI
A VICTORY LOAN ADVERTISEMENT
May 10, 1919
THE BOY WHO STUCK HIS FOOT IN
A small boy the other day walked up to one of those splendid marble pillars before the The Victory Arch and stuck his foot in.
I went over and stooped down and felt of the crust. It was about an inch and a half thick.
Then I stood in the middle of The Avenue, all New York boiling and swirling round me and looked up at The Arch of Victory—massive, majestic white and heavenly and soaring against the sky, and my heart ached!
Something made me feel suddenly close to the small boy.
What he wanted to know with his foot, was what this splendid Victory Arch he had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under, and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amounted to—how deep the glory had struck in.
I thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victory over the Germans ... forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing and eighty-seven million unconquered sullen Germans before our eyes in broad daylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying their bills! ... eighty-seven million Germans we have all got to devote ourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years.
I am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. Millions of Americans though in a politer way are doing it all this week. We want to poke through to the truth. We want something more than a theater property Victory Arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a real one!
We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest—to take down our lath and plaster Arch and put it up in marble instead.
We make this week a wager to the world,—a four and a half billion dollar dare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that the American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and hurrahs and tears and empty watery words—that we will chase Peace up, that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations—into the eternal underpinning of a world.
In the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning Victory Arch, all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake, with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim unconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through!
We will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory no small boy, no Bolshevik nation can stick its foot in!
When I corrected the proof of this advertisement—it was the last advertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York—it was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has melted away into roar.
But the truth I have spoken has not melted away.
What The Air Line League is for in its national and international organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to answer the boy who stuck his foot in.
RECONSTRUCTION
I started this book taking the Crowd for my hero—that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the People.
I have proceeded upon two premises.
A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghost trying to have a family.
A body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeing what to do. It is without the spiritual means of self-expression and self-fulfillment. It is like a sewing-machine trying to have a family.
Some of my readers will remember a diagram in "Crowds" in which I divided people off roughly into
|
Inventors
or See-ers |
Artists
or Engineers |
Hewers |
| Men who invent things to do. | Men who invent ways and means and make it possible to do them. | Those who work out and finish what the see-ers and engineers have begun. |
I have based what I have to say in the next few chapters on this anatomy or rather this biology of a nation's human nature.
In the next few pages I am dealing not with the reconstruction but with the reconception of a nation.
Reconstruction is a dead difficult laborious thing to try to put off on a boundless superabundant ganglion of a hundred million lives like the American people.
In the crisis that confronts America to-day not only the most easy, but the most natural and irresistible way for this nation to be a great nation is to fall in love.
I am enlarging in these next few pages upon how crowds and experts—that is: crowds and their men of vision and engineers can come to an understanding and get together.
I wish to state certain particular things I think are going to be done by the people—that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawn into the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their great hour in history, a great people may be born again.
II
NATIONAL BIOLOGY
A man in being born the first time is the invention of others. Being born again is the finding of oneself, oneself,—the spiritual invention of one's own life.
Being born again is far more intelligent than being born the first time.
All one has to do to see this, is to look about and see the people who have done it.
When one is being born the first time one does not even know it. One is not especially intelligent the first time and could not really help it. And nobody else could help it.
When one is being born again it takes all one can know and all one can know and do, and all everybody around one knows, and all everybody around can do, to help one do it. In 1776 when America was being born first, America did not have the slightest idea of what was happening. It has taken one hundred and forty-four birthdays to guess.
A nation is born the first time with its eyes shut.
But in this terrible 1920 when America is being born again, she can only manage to be born again by knowing all about herself, by disrobing herself to be born again, by a supreme colossal act of self-devotion, self-discovery, self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, naked before God, reading the hearts of forty nations, a thousand years and the unborn, and knowing herself,—slipping off her old self and putting on her new self.
III
THE AIR LINE LEAGUE
The first thing a spirit in this world usually does to find a body is to select a father and mother. The American people if it is to be embodied and have the satisfaction and power of making itself felt and expressing itself, can only do so by following the law of life.
A hundred million people can only get connected with a body, acquire a presence—find itself as a whole, the way each one of the hundred million people did alone.
In a nation's being born again three types of mind are necessarily involved.
The minds in America that create or project, the inventors.
The minds that bring up.
The minds that conceive and bring to the birth.
These three classes of spiritual forces are concerned in America in making the people stop being a ghost, in making their American people as an idea, physically fit.
The first thing to be arranged for America to make the people quit being a ghost in The White House, is to form into three bodies or organizations, these three, groups of men—make these three groups of men class-conscious, self-conscious, conscious of their own power and purpose in America—and have everybody in America conscious of them. I propose three organizations to stand for these three life-forces, three organizations which will act—each of which will act with the other two and will follow out for a nation, as individuals do for individuals, the law of life—of producing and reproducing the national life.
The minds that are creative will discover and project a national idea for the people—the inventors, will act as one group.
The minds that conceive and bring the idea to the birth, that bring the idea to pass, called engineers, will act as another, and the minds that teach, bring up, draw out and apply the idea and relate the idea to life—will act as another.
I propose a club of fifty thousand creative men be selected and act together—that a nation may be conceived.
I propose that fifty thousand engineers or how-men, men who think out ways and means, be selected and act together, that the nation that is conceived may be born.
These two Clubs will have their national headquarters together in a skyscraper hotel of their own in New York and will act together—in bringing an idea for the people into the world.
The third Club—twenty or thirty million people, on the scale of the Red Cross—in ten thousand cities, will apply and educate the idea, bring it up and put it through.
What one's soul is for, I suppose, is that one can use it when one likes, to contemplate and to enjoy an Idea.
What one has a body for with reference to an idea is to take it up, try it out and put it through.
The Air Line League proposes to coördinate these three functions and operate as a three in one club.
The idea would be to call the first of the clubs, the club of inventors, the Look-Up Club. The second, a club of how-men and engineers, the Try-Out Club, and the third—the operating club of the vast body of the people taking direct action and putting the thing through locally and nationally would be called The Put-Through Clan.
The Air Line League through these three clubs will undertake to help the people to stop being an abstraction, to swear off from being a Ghost in their own house. The great working majority of the American people—of the men and the women who made the Red Cross so effective during the war, which came to the rescue of the people of the nation with the people of other nations, will come to the rescue now, during the war the people are having and that the classes of people are having with one another.
IV
THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP
§ 1. For Instance.
Such a crisis as this nation has now, Springfield, Massachusetts, had once.
Springfield a few years ago, all in a few weeks, threw up the chance of being Detroit because two or three automobile men who belonged in Springfield and wanted to make Springfield as prosperous as Detroit, were practically told to go out to Detroit and find the men who would have the imagination to lend them the money—to make Springfield into a Detroit.
Naturally when they found bankers with imagination in Detroit they stayed there.
What happened to Springfield is what is going to happen to America if we do not make immediate national arrangements for getting men who have imagination in business in this country, men who can invent manpower, to know each other and act together.
The twenty-five hundred dollars Frank Cousins of Detroit recognized Henry Ford with, a few years ago, he gave back the other day to Henry Ford for twenty-nine million dollars.
People say as if that was all there was to it, that the fate of this nation to-day turns on our national manpower.
But what does our national man-power turn on?
It turns on people's knowing and knowing in the nick of time, a man when they see one.
Man-power in a democracy like ours turns on having inventors, bankers and crowds act together.
Sometimes banks hold things back by being afraid to coöperate with inventors or men of practical imagination.
This is called conservatism.
Sometimes it is the crowds and laborers who hold things back by being afraid to coöperate with leaders or men of imagination.
But the fate of all classes turns upon our having men of creative imagination believed in by men who furnish money, and believed in by men who furnish labor.
The idea of the Look-Up Club is that men of creative imagination shall be got together, shall be made class-conscious, shall feel and use their power themselves and put it where other people can use it.
How much time and how many years of producing-power would it have saved America if Alexander Graham Bell had known or could have had ready to appeal to, America's first hundred thousand picked men of imagination, when he was trudging around ringing doorbells in Boston, trying to supply people with imagination enough to see money in telephones?
If William G. McAdoo, when he had invented with his tunnels, a really great conception of the greater New York, and was fighting to get people in New York to believe in it, and act on it, had had an organization of one hundred thousand picked men of imagination in the nation at large to appeal to—one hundred thousand men picked out by one another to put a premium on constructive imagination when they saw some, instead of a penalty on it, how much time would it have saved New York and saved McAdoo? How much time would a national Club like this save this nation to-day and from now on in its race with the Germans?
Why should our men of practical creative imagination to-day waste as much time running around and asking permission of people who had none, as McAdoo had to?
If a hundred thousand silver dollars—just ordinary silver dollars—were put together in a row in New York on a sidewalk, everybody going by would have imagination at once about the one hundred thousand silver dollars and what could be done with them.
But put one hundred thousand picked men—or men of exceptional power together in a row in New York—and why is it everybody is apt to feel at first a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around the corner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortal human beings?
I wish people would have as much imagination about what could be done with one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got together from the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundred thousand silver dollars.
This is one of the first things the Look-Up Club is for, to get people to be inspired by a hundred thousand men put together, in the same way that they are by a hundred thousand dollars put together.
I went out last night and walked up the Great White Way and looked at the little flock of hotels that are standing to-day on the site of my faith in these hundred thousand men—the site of the new hotel—the little sleeping shelf in the roar of New York for the hundred thousand men to have on Broadway.
I stood and looked at the five or six hotels now standing there waiting to be torn down for us, and —— told me that the seventeen parcels of land in the block that he had labored on forty-seven people to get them to make up their minds to put their lots together, were worth only a million and a half of dollars, either to them or to anybody else, while they were making up their minds to let their lots be put together. And now that he had got their minds made up for them and had got all these foolish, distracted seventeen parcels of land together into one, the land instead of being worth one million and a half dollars, was appraised by —— the other day as worth four and a half million dollars.
The same is true of the hundred thousand men of practical imagination scattered in five thousand cities, twiddling on the fate of a nation alone.
The same thing is going to happen to the value of the men that has happened to the separate lumps of sand and clay they called real estate in New York.
What can I manage to accomplish alone in trying to get to Chicago to-morrow morning?
All I could do alone would be to walk.
As it is, I stand in line a minute at a window in the Grand Central Station, make a little arrangement with several hundred thousand men and with a slip of paper I move to Chicago while I go to sleep.
This power for each man of a hundred thousand men is what I am offering in this little book to the nine hundred and ninety thousand others.
What will we do, what ideas will we carry out?
Get one hundred thousand picked men together and what can they not do, what ideas can they not carry out?
What is hard, what is priceless, is getting the men and getting the men together. Everybody who has ever done anything knows this.
What we are doing is not to get values together, but the men who keep creating the values.
The men who have created already the values of five thousand cities, shall now create values for a nation.
I am not writing to people—to the hundred thousand men who are going to be nominated to the Look-Up Club—to ask them whether they think this idea of mine—of having the first hundred thousand men of vision of this country in a Club, is going through or not.
I am writing them and asking them if—if it is going through—they want to belong to it.
Very few men can speak with authority—even if they would, as to what the other ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men will possibly do or not do with my idea in this book. But any man can speak with authority and speak immediately when he gets to the end of it, as to how he feels himself, whether he wants or likes the idea, and wants to count one to bring the idea to pass.
I speak up for myself in this book. Anybody can see it. If every man will confine himself in the same way, and will stake off himself and attend to himself at the end of this book and say what he wants—we will all get what we want.
The proposition looks rather big, mathematically, but looked at humanly, it is a simple straight human-nature question. All I really ask of each man who is nominated is,
"If the first hundred thousand men who have imagination in business are being selected and brought together out of all the other business men in America, do you want to be one of them? Who are the ten, twenty or fifty men of practical vision in business—especially young men, you think ought not to be left out?"
It is all an illusion about numbers and sizes of things.
The way to be national is to be personal, for each man to take sides with the best in himself.
Suddenly across a nation we look in a hundred thousand faces.
§ 2. Why the Look-Up Club Looks Up.
The Constitution does not provide for an Imagination Department for the United States Government.
It has judicial, executive and legislative departments, but a department made up of men of vision to create, conceive and reconceive, go deeper and see further than law and restraints can go, does not exist in our Government.
We have a Judicial Department to decide on whether what is born has a right to live—a Legislative Department to pass rules under on how it shall be obliged to live—and an Executive Department to make it mind—but the department to create and to conceive for the people is lacking.
Government at best is practically a dear uncle or dear maiden-aunt institution.
Government as a physical expression is without functions of reproduction.
Government—contrary to the theory of the Germans—from the point of view of sheer power in projecting and determining the nature and well-being of men—the fate of men and the world—is superficial, is a staid, standardized, unoriginal affair—devoted to ready-made ideas like the Red Cross during the war.
This is what is the matter with a Government's posing in this or any other nation as a live body for the people.
The spontaneous uprising of business men during the war—the spectacle of the dollar a year men overwhelming and taking over the government, the breaking in of the National Council of Defense—the spontaneous combustion of millions of free individuals into one colossal unit like the Red Cross—all the other outbreaks of the creative vital power of the superior people of the nation, all point to the fact that when new brain tracks are called for, the natural irresistible way is to find individual persons who have them, who make them catching to other individual persons, and who then give body to them across the nation.
Its whole nature and action of a Government tend to make Government and most of the people in it mechanical.
In the nature of things and especially in the nature of human nature, this nation—if its new ideas and its new brain tracks are to come to anything at all, they must have a spontaneous willful and comparatively free origin and organization of their own.
Hence the Look-Up Club coöperating with the Try-Out Club to act as an informal Imagination Department for the United States.
V
THE TRY-OUT CLUB TRIES OUT
§ 1. I + You = We.
If Darius the Great had put the eunuchs of his court in charge as Special Commissioners for controlling the social evil in Babylon, they would have made very sad work of what they had to do because they would not have understood what it was all about. They would not have had the insight necessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project in human nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles and go ahead.
What makes a man a man is the way he takes all the knowledge, the penetrating lively enriching knowledge his selfishness gives—his vision of what he wants for himself, and all the broadening enriching knowledge his unselfishness gives—his imagination about what he wants for others, and pours the two visions together.
The law of business is the law of biology—action—reaction—interaction. I + You = We.
It is getting to be reckless for the people in other nations to sit around and gossip about how bad it is for the Germans to be so selfish. It is reckless for capital to gossip about how selfish labor is—and for labor to putter away trying to make capital pure and noble like a labor union.
There are far worse things than selfishness in people.
Being fooled about oneself is worse because it is more difficult to get at, meaner, more cowardly and far more dangerous for others.
This chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket while inhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twenty other men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. When I was swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled off with me—a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write this chapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt and then suddenly saw I might want it too and passed it to me.
He summed up in three seconds the whole situation of what democracy is, the whole question between the Germans and the other peoples of the earth.
With one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of a world.
His selfishness, his own personal accumulated experience with an egg, made him see that he wanted salt in it.
His unselfishness made him see that I must be sitting there wanting salt in an egg as much as he did.
So he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what his unselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had the salt together.
Incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as I was wishing somebody would before I handed it in) the idea I am trying to express in it. This in a small way is a perfect working model of what I call civilization. Unselfishness in business is not a civilization at all. It is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven.
Imagination about other people based upon imagination about what one wants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules the world.
The appetites in people which make them selfish supply them with such a rich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if they really use this equipment in a big business way for getting it for them, no one can compete with them.
A righteous man if he has any juice in him at all and is not a mere giver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating, self-give-up, self-go-without person—is a selfish person and an unselfish person mixed. What he calls his character is the proportion in which he chooses to mix himself.
Half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the passions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking the selfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way other antagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together.
People in other nations are as selfish in their way as the Germans are in theirs—capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. The fundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility that makes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose, in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give them what they want.
It takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slump down without noticing him into being an altruist with him. Any man can be a selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist—if he does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man has and all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of God and the love of one's kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to give something to and leave alone.
This is what I call the soul of true business and of live salesmanship.
I put it forward as the moral or spiritual basis on which the engineers in the Try-Out Club, of the Air Line League, propose to act.
The way for America to meet the German militaristic and competitive idea of business and of the business executive—the idea that brought on the war, is for America and the rest of the world to put forward something and put forward something quick, as a substitute for it, sell to themselves, sell to one another and to the Germans before it is too late, a substitute for it.
The American engineers of business or great executives—the how-men and inventors of how to bring things to pass, must put forward the pursuit of mutual interests in the largest sense, pursuit of mutual interests generously and finely conceived, the selfishness and unselfishness mixed, as this substitute.
§ 2. The Engineer At Work.
The crowning glory of a nation is the independence and the spiritedness of its labor.
I rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made it impossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who do not love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who have nothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the job catching—who cannot get men to work for them except by offering them more money than they can earn.
The fact that no man is so cheap he can be had by merely being paid money—the fact that no man is so unimportant but he has to be approached as a fellow human being and has to be persuaded—and given something human and real, is the first faint flush of hope for our modern world. It lets in an inkling at last that the industrial world is going to be a civilization.
If men were made of india-rubber, or reinforced concrete, or wood or steel, no one could hope for better or more efficient men to manage big business than the typical big business men of the phase of American industry now coming to an end.
But of course in the crisis business is facing now, which turns on the putting forward of men who understand and can play masterfully upon the motives, temptations and powers of ordinary human nature the typical man we know at the Mahogany Desk, who has a machine imagination, who sees men as dots and dreams between piles of dollars and rows of machines, is a singularly helpless person and can only hold his own in his own business by giving way and putting forward in place of himself, men who are masters in human nature, experts and inventors in making men want to work.
The difference between the business world that is passing out and the one that is coming in, is that the masters of the world who have been proud before, to be called the captains of industry, are going to think of themselves and want others to think of them as the fathers of industry. The man who orders can no longer order. People will only work and work hard for the man who fills them with new conceptions, who stirs the depths of their lives with desire and hope.
The reason that reactionary capital is having trouble with labor, is that it is putting forward men who order instead of putting forward fathers and inventors.
The reason that the I. W. W. and other labor organizations are having trouble with capital, is that their leaders are not inventors. They are tired conventional men governed by automatic preconceptions, merely doing over again more loudly and meanly against society, the things that capital has already tried and has had to give up because it could not make them work.
Only inventors—executives who invent and fertilize opportunity for others—men who invent ways of making men see values—men who create values and who present people with values they want to work out, are going to get anything—either money or work, from now on, out of anybody.
§ 3. The Engineer and the Game.
The time has gone by when a man can say any longer he is not in business for the fun of it. He finds he cannot long compete with the men about him who are, with engineers and others who are in business for the great game of producing results, of doing difficult things, of testing their knowledge, their skill and their strength.
Making men want to work has come to be the secret of success in modern business and the employer who has nothing but wages to offer, nothing in his own passion for work which he can make catching to others, can only get second-rate, half-hearted men and plodders about him. A factory in which the workmen merely work for wages, cannot hope to compete with a factory fitted up with picked men proud of their work.
It is not going to be necessary to scold people into not being selfish, or whine people into loving their work. A man who is so thin-blooded that the one way he can get work out of himself is to make money—the man who grows rich by ordering, by gobbling, and by hiring gobblers and plodders, cannot function under the new conditions. The guarantee that we are going to have a civilization now, that business with joy in it and personal initiative and motive in the work itself, is going to take possession of the markets of the world is based on the fact that labor has to have its imagination touched in order to work efficiently, and an entirely new level and new type of man—the man who can touch men's imaginations, is being put forward in business to do it.
The Engineer is going to have somewhat the quieting effect upon institutions and upon the spirit of unrest in the people, when he is known to be in control of the great employers and has made them dependent on him, that the matter of fact and rather conclusive taxi meter in a cab has on the man inside, who wants to quarrel with his cabman.
A business world largely in control of men who have the spirit and the technique of engineers will make unrest more awkward, will make the red flag look stranger, feel stranger and lonelier every day.
§ 4. The American Business Sport.
If any man ever again in this world finds like Methuselah, the secret of eternal youth, the secret will be found to consist in being, I suspect, what the best American business man already is—what I would call a fine all-round religious sport.
Sport has certain well-known disadvantages. So has religion. The man who once grasps the secret of modern life as practiced by a really big engineering genius, insists upon having his business allowed all the advantages of sport and religion both.
To have something on which one spends ten hours a day, which has all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a sport, and all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a religion, is a find.
The typical engineer, like any other thorough-going man treats what he does as a sport. That is, he puts his religion for the fun of it into his business. His business becomes the continual lark of making his religion work. He dramatizes in it his belief in human nature and in God, his belief that human nature is not crazy and that God has not been outwitted in allowing so much of it to exist.
It has looked especially reckless during the last four years for God to let human nature try to keep on being human nature any longer. Now is the time of all others, and Germany is now the country of all others, to show with a whole world looking on how essentially sound human nature really is, and how being human (especially being human in a thing which everybody cares about and which everybody notices, like business) really works.
There has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before in history, the chance America has now of dramatizing to Germans, and dramatizing through the Germans to everybody, an idea of business efficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its very substance, peace come into the world.
People shall not put up with mere leagues and truces, arbitration boards, fight-dove-tailings. They shall not sit at tables and twirl laws at people—to make them peaceful....
The only men in modern business who can now hope to get to the top are the men who are in a position to hire men who do not work for wages.
Making men want to work is the secret of the engineer in production.
The secret of modern industry is the secret of the man who loves his work. To the sporting man, the gentleman, the man who loves the game, the prize goes now in competition with Gobblers and Plodders.
The Engineer or Winner instead of the Compeller of Men is going to draw out new kinds and new sizes of laboring men in industry at every point. The Engineer we count on in the Try-Out Club is the man who superimposes upon the normal and suitable motive in his business of being selfish enough to make money to keep the business up, the motive of the gentleman, the professional man, the artist, the engineer, the sport—the motive of doing a thing for its own sake, and because one likes it.
The expression "I am not in business for the fun of it" is going by.
What we are going to do with the mere half-alive profit-plodders—the mere wage gobblers, is not to improve them by making moral eyes at them, or discipline them by putting down lids of laws over them or by firing taxes at them. We are going to discipline men like these by driving them into the back streets of business, as anæmic, second-rate and inefficient men in bringing things to pass.
A man who in a tremendous and absorbing adventure like real business is so thin-blooded or thick-headed that all he can get work out of himself for is money, will only be able to get the plodding kind of second-rate workers to work for him, i.e., he will be able to get only plodders who merely work for money, by paying higher wages than other people have to—by paying higher wages than they can earn.
In other words, civilized business, business with joy in it and personal initiative and human interest in the work itself, is going to drive uncivilized plodding half-hearted business out of the markets of the world.
The men who are expressing through the hearts of the people their best, more lasting and more powerful selves, in business, who are gathering around them other people who are doing it, the men who try out their best selves in business—who invent ways as executives to make their best selves work for them and for others, are having to-day before our eyes, the world placed in their hands. Men who represent vital forces like these, are as solid, unconquerable in human life as the force of gravity, the multiplication table they are. They find themselves dominating like radium, penetrating like fresh air, drawing all things to them like the sky, the stars, like spring, like the love of women and of children and the love of Christ.
The idea of having imagination about a customer and studying a customer as a means of winning his trade, his personal enthusiasm and confidence, is not considered sentimental.
Having imagination about one's employees so that they will work in the same spirit as the other partners, is no longer considered sentimental except by the type of employer now being driven to the wall because he has no technique for making anybody want to work for him. As things go to-day it is the leader in industry who is trying to keep up a fine comfortable feeling of being a captain of industry—the man who feels he owns everything and owns everybody in sight, who is visionary and sentimental, who is the Don Quixote of business now.
The employer who feels superior to individuals, who looks at men as dots and dreams—and who expects to deal with a man subconsciously and get on with him as if he were not there—the employer who is an absentee in soul and body, and who gives an order to his men and then goes off and leaves them like pumps, hydraulic rams, that of course cannot help slaving away for him until they are stopped—the employer who during the first stupid stages of our new machine-industry, has been allowed to be prominent for a time, now stands exposed as too wooden and incompetent to conduct the intimately personal, difficult and human institution a factory has got to be if it succeeds (in a country with men like ours) in producing goods.
From now on the big man in business is the man who gets work out of people that money cannot buy. The man who cannot get the work that money cannot buy in a few years now, is not going to stand the ghost of a chance.
People will not believe you if you tell them what the world was like when he did.
Mastering others so that they have to do what one says is superficial, merely a momentarily successful-looking way a man has of being a failure. This master has been tried. He has failed. He is the half-inventor of Bolshevism.
The real master is not the man who masters men, but who makes them master themselves. The masterful man in getting out of people what he wants, is the man who makes the people want him to have what he wants—makes them keep giving it to him fresh out of their hearts every day.
The wholesale national and international criticism the Red Cross workers made in the latter months of the Red Cross activities, of the touch-the-button and hand-down-the-order methods of many of the business men who controlled the activities at home and abroad—of the millions of workers in the Red Cross, has been itself a kind of national education in what certain types of American business men placed in power fell inadvertently into, in trying to treat millions of free people on the employer and employee plan.
But these men and their whole idea are going by. We are getting down to the quick, to the personal and the human, to the sense all good workers have of listening and being listened to and of not being overridden. Big business after this is going to be big in proportion as it makes people feel—employees and customers both, that they are listened to, that they are being dealt with as individual human beings and not as fractions of individuals, or as part of some big vague bloodless lump of humanity.
Studying one's customers so as to make them want to trade with one is here to stay.
To speak of studying with the best expert skill in the country one's employees so as to make them want to work, as humanity, is not quite bright. It is not humanity. It is business.
Making people trade with one instead of making them want to trade with one is recognized as second-rate business. So is making people work for one instead of making them want to work. The business man who depends for his business, on customers, or on workers who want to get away and are going to the first minute they can, naturally goes under first.
VI
THE PUT-THROUGH CLAN PUTS THROUGH
§ 1. What.
We are a people who think in action. Our way of making other nations think and of thinking ourselves is to do things.
The people who swept into and took over the Red Cross, who dramatized the American people in the war abroad—are the people who are going to make war at home impossible.
The big spiritual or material fact about the Red Cross is that it has been a dramatic organization, that for four years it has been an organization for acting out the feelings, desires, wills and beliefs of a great people toward men who were fighting for liberty.
The Red Cross has been a great emotional epic play, an expression in action, of the heart and brain of a mighty nation.
Emotions by great peoples have been spectacular before, and they have been sentimental and they have been occupied with enjoying themselves.
But in the Red Cross twenty million people have been as inspired as Saint Francis and as practical as a Steel Trust in the same breath.
The vision of the future of the Put-Through Clan that lies ahead is that it shall keep on dramatizing these qualities in the American character at home, selecting things to do which shall dramatize our people to one another, to themselves and to the people of other nations.
The way to make democracy work is for the people to use their brains, their spirit and their imagination to do team-work with the inventors and engineers who help express their democracy for them.
The platform of the Put-Through Clan is the right of all to be waited on.
Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled capital.
Skilled capital has a right to skilled labor in return.
The new and stupendous force in modern life from now on is to be the skilled consumer—the organization of the consumer-group to coöperate with skilled capital and skilled labor, to make it impossible as it is now, for unskilled capital, capital which has not the skill to win the public, or to win its own labor, and for unskilled labor, labor which cannot earn its money and takes it whether it earns it or not, to compel the consumer by force and by holdups to buy goods they do not want at prices they are not worth from men with whom they do not want to deal. The skilled consumer will organize his skill and deal with the people he wants.
All the people of this country—the consumers (the real employers of all employers) have to do, is to whisper in one national whisper through a hundred thousand grocery stores and other stores what kind of employers and workmen, what kind of goods and factories they like, and the buyers and consumers of America instead of taking what is poked out at them because they have to, and being the fools and the slaves of capital and labor, will get with a whisper what they request, and we will return and will let employers and workmen return, to the status of human beings.
§ 2. How.
The test of a man's truth is his technique.
What Mathias Alexander believes about conscious control and making self-discipline work is true because he does not have to say it. He dramatizes it.
Alexander is right in his fundamental idea of giving conscious control to people through new brain tracks toward their bodies because they get up and walk away from him when they have been with him, with their new brain tracks on. New habits—new psycho-physical habits, like Culebra cuts are put right through them.
The man who conceives or invents may be wrong, the man who experiments or tries out, may need to be watched, but the man who puts through is inviolable.
The program, the spirit and the function of the Put-Through Clan in a town, is to embody truth so baldly and with such a shameless plainness that no matter how hard they try, people cannot tug away from it.
There are three courses we might take in the Put-Through Clan in dealing with our town. (1) We can stand for disciplining capital and labor into shape by passing laws and heaping up penalties. (2) We can let them see how much better they can make things by sicking them on to each other and having them discipline each other. (3) We can make fun of both of them until they make fun of themselves and each class begins disciplining itself. Then general self-discipline will set in. We propose to indulge—each group of us in the Put-Through Clan—the labor group in the town, the employer group and the public group, in self-disciplining ourselves, until the thing is made catching out of sheer shame and decency in others.
§ 3. Psycho-Analysis.
The scientific basis for psycho-analysis for a town, or for a labor union, or for a Republican or Democratic Party, is found in the facts that have been stated by Mathias Alexander in his book and demonstrated by his work.
Professor John Dewey in his introduction to Mr. Alexander's book speaks of what Mr. Alexander stands for, as Completed Psycho-analysis.
As Alexander's technique for pulling one particular man, soul and body, together, is precisely the technique I have in mind for pulling a nation together, I want to dwell on it a moment longer before applying it to the Put-Through Clan.
The first thing a man is always fooled about is his own body and in everything else he is fooled about, he just branches out from that.
The Put-Through Clan proceeds upon the idea that this is as true of his political or social or industrial body to which he belongs as it is of his first one.
Reform must be self-reform first.
If it is true that the majority of ideas and decisions most people think they make with their minds are really made for them and handed up to them by their bodies—if it is true that what people quite commonly use their minds for is to keep up appearances, to give rational-looking excuses and reasons for their wanting what their stomachs and livers and nerves make them want, the way to persuade people nowadays is to do what Christ did—get their minds out from under the domination of their bodies.
If it is true that when a man goes to his dentist with a toothache, he finds he does not know which side of his mouth it is on, it is likely to be still more true of all the rest of his ideas about himself—his ideas about his ideas.
If everything about us, about most of us is more or less like this, as Alexander says—wires or nerves all twisted, sensory impressions upside down, half of what is inside our bodies mislaid half the time, the way to change people's minds is to change them toward the bodies they are with and that they are nearest to, first. Then we can branch out and educate others—even educate ourselves.
Millions of grown people, in religion, business and politics to-day in America can be seen thinking automatically of the world about them in the terms of themselves, in the terms of their own souls sadly mixed up with their own bodies. We all know such people. The world is just an extension, a kind of annex or wing, built out from themselves full of reflections from their own livers, and fitted up throughout with air castles, dungeons, twilights, sunrises, after-glows, from their own precious interior decorations and bowels and mercies.
The basic fact about human nature the Put-Through Clan acts on is the simplest thing in the world. We are always having moments of seeing it. We all see how true it is in babies we have personally known. We recognize it without a qualm in a baby, that his emotions and reflections about life, about Time and Eternity, and about things in general are just reflections of a milk bottle he has just had, or of a milk bottle he has not just had and wants to know why.
I have often tried to translate a baby's cry in his crib, into English. As near as I can come to it, it is
"I don't think my mother knows WHO I AM!"
What a baby is really doing is disciplining other people.
Not so very different after all from Senator Lodge pivoting as he has for six months a whole world on himself and on his having his own little way with it, disciplining the rest of the Senate, forty nations and a President, and everybody in sight—except himself.
If a patient nation could put him in a crib, everybody would understand. Many people apparently are deceived by his beard, or by his degree at Harvard, or other clothes. But it is the same thing. What is really happening to him—to Senator Lodge is really a kind of spiritual neuritis. He is cramped, or as the vulgar more perspicuously and therefore more fittingly and elegantly put it, his mind is stuck on himself. He is imbedded in his own mereness and now as anybody can see there is nothing that can be done by anybody with anything, not with a whole world for a crowbar, to pry Lodge off himself.
Most of us know other people like this. Most of us have moments and subjects on which as we have remembered afterwards we have needed to be pried off. The same is true, of course, of a political body like the Republican or Democratic Party, or of a labor union.
The best that most of us—whole towns of us—can do is to get up as we propose for a whole town to do in the Put-Through Clan on the same platform, stand there cheerfully all together on the great general platform and admit in chorus sweetly, that we are all probably this blessed moment and every day being especially fooled more or less by ourselves about ourselves, about the things nearest to us—especially our own personal bodies and political and industrial souls and bodies. The only difference between people who are put into insane asylums and those of us who are still allowed from day to day a little longer to stay out, is that we can manage, if we try, some of us, to be more limber about calling ourselves fools in time. For all practical purposes in this world, it may be said that the people who are wise and deep about keeping themselves reminded that they may be crazy any minute, are sane.
What happens to people—to most people when they are grown up is that they stop being simple and honest like a baby. But they all have practically the same essential thought when they are being disagreeable. They are trying to make the world around them toe the line to their own interior decorations. What they think, what they feel, what they do in the little back parlors of their own minds must be daubed on the ceiling of the world.
The joy of toleration, of new ideas, of rows and tiers of their non-selves, and of their yet-selves reaching away around them that they can still know and share and can still take over and have the use of in addition to the mere self they already have, they hold off from.
This is where the baby has the advantage of them.
§ 4. Psycho-Analysis for a Town.
When a man thinks of himself and wants other people to think of him as an institution—as a kind of church—of course it makes him very unhappy to believe he is wrong, but the minute he thinks of himself as a means to an end, thinks of his personality as a tool placed in his hand for getting what he wants or what a world wants—the minute a man thinks of himself as a kind of spirit-auger, or chisel of the soul, or as a can-opener to truth, which if it is a little changed one way or the other, or held differently, will suddenly work—changing himself toward himself, and believing what he would rather not, becomes like any other invention or discovery, a creative pleasure.
In saying that the main thing the Put-Through Clan is for in a town, is to act as town-headquarters for the town's seeing through itself, as a means of making the town the best, the happiest town in the state—as a means of making it a town that deserves anything it wants, I am merely saying that the act of self-invention—the act of recreation once entered into as a habit is so refreshing and so extraordinary in itself, and so practical in its results, that when people once see how it really works—when towns and parties and industrial groups get once started in self-discipline, in self-confession, in psycho-analysis and in taking advantage of opposite ideas—there is going to be an epidemic in this country, a flu of truth.
A whole city or a whole town indulging in psycho-analysis finds it less embarrassing and not more embarrassing than one man does.
When it becomes the thing for a city or for a capital or labor group to see through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the main thought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about it will be a wonder they had not thought of it and done it before.
And it will be economical, too, if people take the seeing through them that has to be done by some one, and do it themselves.
Three per cent of the conveniences—the public X-ray machines for keeping people from being fooled about themselves will be enough.
The minute we begin turning the X-ray outfit around and begin trying it modestly on ourselves, a small cheap outfit will do.
It is a mere phonograph-record to say that nobody likes self-discipline. What people do not like, is trying it, or getting started.
There is a sense in which it is possible for a town like Northampton—twenty-five thousand people, to have—if it once gets started, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. It is easier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole town disciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, Would be easier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it.
Why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himself is doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorry for him?
No one really thinks of being sorry for Marconi or Edison or Wilbur Wright, or Bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detective like Sherlock Holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is the way he steals a march on himself.
The very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or a discoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way he keeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looks back into the windows he has looked out of all his life.
People must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who does this and of thinking he is being noble and doing right.
It has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble when they are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward in the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful idea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all over the country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as a substitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of originality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving to get everything one wants. I am offering self-discipline because it works. People who get so low in their minds and who so little see how self-discipline works that they actually have the face to feel noble and beautiful about it when they are having some, cannot make it work. They must be leaving most of theirs out....
The psychology of self-discipline is the psychology of the inventor.
The inventor is the man who lives in the daily habit of criticising his own mind, and disciplining himself. The source of his creative and original power is that more than other men he keeps facing necessities in himself, keeps casting off old selves, old preconceptions and breaking through to new ones.
The spiritual and intellectual source of the grip of the inventor upon modern life, is that he is a scientist in managing his own human nature and his own mind, that he had a relentless rejoicing habit of disciplining himself.
In every renaissance, revival or self-renewal the world has had, people have had the time of their lives. The great days of history have been the eras of great candid truth-facing, self-discipline. Self-discipline and self-discovery go together.
There is a greater return on the investment in being born again, in getting what one wants, than in anything else in the world.
If one sees through himself, he can see through anybody. It explains and clears up one's enemies and clears one's own life for action.
§ 5. To-morrow.
I am not writing a beautiful wistful work on how I wish human nature would work or hope it is going to work, in America.
I am recording a grim, matter-of-fact, irresistible, implacable law in the biology of progress.
I am not nagging, teasing or apologizing. I am not saying what I say as religion or as the Lord said unto Moses, or even "as it seems to me."
I am not dealing in what I want to have happen.
I am dealing in truth as a force and not as a property.
I am foretelling what has got to happen. People who do not believe it will have to get out of the way of it.
The conscious control of capital, the conscious control of labor, the conscious control of the public group—the arrival and the victory of the men who get their way by self-control and who are invited by all to have control of others because they have control of themselves, is a law of nature.
I am not preaching or teasing.
I am not asking people's permission in this book for certain events.
This book is not an attempt to answer the question, "What is day after to-morrow's news?"
It is put forth as a prospectus of what has got to happen.
The truth is taking hold of us and is seizing us all.
It is for us to say.
This book is a scenario of a play for a hundred million people to put on the stage, and for five hundred million people to act.
§ 6. Who.
People will be unfair to themselves and unfair to me and will cheat a nation if any attempt should ever be made to take this book as a program—a program for anybody—and not a spirit.
The spirit is the program, and the people who naturally gather around the spirit and who secrete it will have to be the ones to embody and give it in the Put-Through Clan, its local and its national expression.
Picked persons, picked out by all for their known temperament and gift for team-work—that is for their put-through spirit or spirit of thoroughness in getting the victory over themselves and combining themselves with others, will need to be the dominating people.
The essence of the Clan is that it is to be vivified and penetrated throughout with personality, and with respect for personality.
This means automatically that the Put-Through Clan is not going to be dominated by people who will make it a moral-advice, do-you-good, hand-you-down-welfare institution.
The essential point in its program is self-discipline and any discipline there may be for others will wait until it is asked for and will be a by-product of the discipline we are giving ourselves.
In the operation of the Clan there are certain persons and types of persons to whom the Clan is always going to be distinctly partial. It is never going to treat people alike. People are not—for the time being—alike and are going to be treated as they are.
Democracy is impossible as long as people are not treated with discrimination—as long as people cannot feel and do not like to feel that what they are, makes a difference in what they get.
It is obvious that to begin with that the Put-Through Clan, composed as it is to be of the leading people in all groups—the people whose time has a premium placed on it in their own private business, will have a regular practice of giving the most attention and giving the most power, approval and backing to those persons with whom the least time brings the greatest return.
This means automatically extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists in industry in getting what they want through the Put-Through Clan, will have to stand further down the queue than others.
I am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, as representative—possibly more possibly less of others in the Clan. Any scintilla or fleck of truth I can pick off from a revolutionary, I take but I will not take him. The same is true of a standpatter or reactionary. I want to know all he knows. If I take his truth I can use it, if I take him I will find him cumbersome. Life is too short to spend ten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one who could listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts and actions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions.
People who do not listen—extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backing they want in the Put-Through Clan, to have what comes last and what is left over from the day's work.
It is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as a little attention goes a great way.
If people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. Besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen—to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others—people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous.
People who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally be picked out by the Put-Through Clan as the last people they will hurry with.
Extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have to be carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritual town farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen of thinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat the rest of us as fellow human beings.
On the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, the Put-Through Clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving its backing to people—to capital groups and labor groups in proportion as they are spirited.
The people who give the most return on the investment—the people who give the most quick thorough and spirited response—in the general interests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones who shall be waited on first.
I have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that people who have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enough spirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited.
I would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, labor which thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead of merely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of its own emotion about what it does not want.
Spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom it disagrees and wants to come to terms.
Revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytumming people—who do not want to think.
I am not saying that spiritually tired people are to blame for being tired. I am pointing out a fact to be acted on.
Tired people always want the same thing. They want a thing to stay as it is—or they want it to stay just as it is—upside down. The same inefficiency, fear and weakness, meanness—merely another set of people running the inefficiency and trying to make fear, weakness, meanness work.
This is where the Put-Through Clan of the Air Line League comes in. The Put-Through Clan will throw the local and national influence of twenty million consumers on to the side of spirited or team-work capital and labor, and will discourage, make ridiculous and impossible, the scared fighting capital and the scared fighting labor with which we are now being troubled.
The real line of demarcation in modern industry is not between capital and labor, but between spirited capital and labor that want to work, create and construct, on the one hand, and unspirited capital and labor, working as little and thinking as little as they can, on the other.
The majority of revolutionaries are people who without taking any trouble to study or understand anything, or to change anything, just turn it thoughtlessly upside down—substitute their inefficiency for the other man's.
Extreme revolutionaries generally talk about freedom, but until they can get us to believe they are going to allow freedom to others, the world is not going to let them—of all people, have any.
The bottom fact about revolutionary labor like revolutionary capital is that it is tired. Revolutionary labor is not spirited. It is as soggy-minded, thoughtless and automatic to be a revolutionist to-day as it is to be a Louis XVI.
It takes originality to construct and to change things and change the hearts and minds of people and the spirit of a nation.
Anybody can be a revolutionist or a reactionary. All one has to do is to stop thinking and sag, or stop thinking and slash.
The mills of the gods grind slowly because they grind fine. The main difference between men and the gods is that when men do things on a large scale they are apt to slur things over and be mechanical, do things in huge empty swoops—pass over details and particular persons, and the gods when they do things on a large scale pay more attention to details, to microbes and to particular persons than ever.
In national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers and workmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smaller scale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale instead of a two or three million scale, would be treated by the Air Line League as probably weighty and conclusive. Those classes of employers and employees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains to understand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons in view themselves, must expect to have their national opinions about national labor and national capital discounted by the Clan. The Put-Through Clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of the demands of industrial groups upon the assumption that people who slur over what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that are further away.
§ 7. The Town Fireplace.
The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people—that people see things and do things gregariously. We have herds of fractions of men, acting as fractions of men and not as human beings.
Each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. Being a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country.
Ten differing men can get together and agree.
Ten differing crowds of men—of the same men, will get together and fight.
Crowds are self-hypnotized. A man who would not be hypnotized off into a fraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandth or ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes.
If five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down together around a fireplace and listen to the others—if each crowd of a hundred thousand could feel listened to absolutely—listened to by the other four hundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the world in the morning.
As it is, each crowd sits in Madison Square Garden alone—holds a vast lonely reverie all alone, hypnotizes itself and then goes out and fights.
Of course there are the crowds on paper, too. Ink-mobs roam the streets.
Crowds do not get on as individual persons do, because individual crowds cannot get physically and humanly together.
It has been generally noted that the best radical labor leaders who come into definite personal contact with employers grow quite generally conservative and that the best conservative leaders become what would have once seemed to them radical when they really learn how to lead.
Why is it that when they begin to learn as leaders how things really are, they are so often impeached by the crowds they represent—by capital and labor?
The moment there are conveniences for crowds—for the rank and file of crowds to catch up to their leaders, to see things whole, too—the moment we have the machinery for crowds being able to have the spiritual and personal experiences their leaders have with the other side, crowds will stop dismissing their leaders—the moment they see both sides, and get practical, too.
The purpose of the local chapter of the Put-Through Clan, is to find a means in each town of getting all crowds and groups together regularly as one group revealing themselves, listening and being listened to, and confiding themselves to team-thinking and to doing team-work together.
The Put-Through Clan headquarters in a town will be the Town Fireplace for Crowds. It will be the warmest, liveliest, manliest, most genial resort in town—where all the live men and real men who seek real contacts and care about men who do, will get together. The refreshing and emancipating experience many men had in army camps will be carried on and become a daily force in the daily life of every town in America.
§ 8. The Sign on the World.
I looked up yesterday and saw a sign on a church in New York. I like it better every time I go by.
THIS CHURCH IS OPEN ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR PRAYER, MEDITATION AND BUSINESS.
I have been wondering just who the man is who had the horse-sense and piety to take up the secret of business and the grip of religion both, telegraph them into ten words like this, and make a stone church say them at people a thousand a minute, on the busiest part of the busiest street in New York.
Whoever the man is, he stands for the business men we want for the Put-Through Clan first.
One of the first things the Put-Through Clan is going to dramatize is this sign on the Marble Collegiate Church.
The men in America in the next twenty years who are going to carry everything before them in business, drive everybody and everything out of their way, take possession of the great streets and the great factories in the name of God and the people, are the men who practice daily the spirit of this sign, the men in business who refuse to go tumtytumming along in a kind of thoughtless inertia of motion, doing what everybody's doing in business—the men who turn one side (by whatever name they call it) to pray, to snuggle up to God and think.
Men who have success before them in business are the men who have the most imagination in business.
Imagination with most of us consists in taking time to see things before other people do, in connecting up what we do with its larger, deeper, more permanent relations, relating what we do to ourselves, to others, to our time and generation, to the things we have done before and to the things that must be done next.
"Prayer, Meditation and Business."
It is wonderful how these words, when one comes on a man who does not say anything about it and puts them together, tone each other up.
The first thing the Put-Through Clan is going to do in a town in this present tipply and tragic world, is to stand by and help make known to everybody across a continent the men in business who stand by these words—who mix them so people cannot tell them apart.
I
THE BIG BROTHER OF THE PEOPLE
If I were writing a book to be used during a Presidential campaign, used as a handbook of the beliefs of the people—a book in the next few weeks for a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before their conventions with, the first belief I would put down for the new President to run on would be the belief that every man in this country is a bigger, better and truer man than the present arrangements of our industrial and social life seem willing to let him express.
We are all practically waiting in crowds to-day, all over this country—in held-in and held-back crowds, to act better than we look.
This belief is the first belief—the first practical working belief the next President of this country should have about the people.
Putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working belief about human nature in America, is going to be the way to get a President for our next President who shall release the spirit of the nation, and reveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people of America are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted a people as the spent and weary peoples of Europe have hoped we were.
The trouble with America in her own eyes and the eyes of the world to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are.
The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect arrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made for their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each class in America, which now takes the form of telling other men and other classes, they ought to be good—the goodness in each man which in our present system he bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to the man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quite safe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the labor unions or the Manufacturers' Association to make sure he has a right to be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feels he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else is doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now, and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be.
The mean things we are doing on a large scale to one another just now in America, are not mean things it is our nature to do. We have let our machines get on top of us and wave our meanness at people over our heads. Our machines which capital and labor have for expressing us as employers and workmen to one another, caricature us.
All one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way in which our present machines of trusts and labor unions are working together to make a dollar worth fifty cents.
The reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybody who has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he owes it to himself and to his class to furnish as little work for a dollar as he dares and take a dollar for fifty cents' worth of work.
Each man sees this several times a day, but he belongs to a vast machine for getting something for nothing. Every man knows in his heart that the cure for everybody's trying to get something for nothing is everybody's at once getting to work doing more than he has to for the money. Then the American dollar will quit being worth fifty cents.
Why doesn't he do it? Because the machinery he belongs with and that everybody belongs with consists of two great something-for-nothing machines. Both of these stupendous machines of capital and labor are geared for backing in producing and not for going forward. All that has to be done with them is to run them the other way round and we have what we want.
People on both sides admit in a vague anonymous scattered fashion that the way to meet a situation in which prices are too high is for everybody to produce more and to charge less for what he produces.
But labor will not do this if capital does not do it.
Capital will not do this if labor does not do it.
It cannot be done by one man getting up all alone and saying he will get on with half a profit or half a wage when he sees everybody about him getting on with twice as much.
The only way it can be done is by organizing, by arranging machines for mutual frank expression, confession and coöperation—mutual confession and coöperation by the men in each industry saying, "I will if you will," until we cover the nation.
This is one of the first things anti-Bolshevik capital and anti-Bolshevik labor are going to stand for—the organizing and advertising in their own industry of a voluntary understanding and professional producing among men who produce.
The men who are increasing the cost of flour by having too high wages in flour mills, will say to men who are increasing the cost of cotton by too high wages in cotton mills, "We will make cheaper cotton for you, if you will make cheaper flour for us."
It is not a matter of meanness in American human nature we are dealing with, it is a matter of agreement between men—hundreds and thousands and millions of men, who do not feel mean or want to be mean and who are trying to slink out of it.
The thing cannot be done without mutual agreement and the agreement probably cannot be made without voluntary contagious publicity, without organizing a national "I will if you will" between capital and labor. The men who produce with their minds will say to those who work with their hands, "We will agree to take less profits and reduce the prices that you pay for goods, if you will agree to take less wages and produce more."
Capital will say to labor, "If you will produce ten per cent more, we will scale down prices, make your dollar buy twenty per cent more. For every sacrifice by which you make a dollar buy more, we will make twice the sacrifice."
Having a larger margin and more time to think things out than men who work with their hands have to think things out, many employers are going to feel that it is up to them not to ask their men to do anything they do not do twice as much of themselves. They will have machinery for being confidential with the men and for letting the men see they are doing it.
Instead of having everybody rushing wildly around organizing to say "I won't if you won't" we will arrange to have a hundred thousand picked capitalists and picked laboring men in ten thousand cities, who will set going everywhere a huge public voluntary national "I WILL IF YOU WILL."
Instead of proceeding from now on to assume that we are a mean people in America, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for being meaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other, we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machine together that will express our better natures as well as our present one does our worst ones.
There is one thing we propose to stand out for and that we do not intend to be wheedled out of, in our next two political conventions and during our next President's next four years, and that is that our two great machines in this country, our industrial one and our political one, shall be taken out of the hands of men who are fooled about themselves and who will not listen to others.
We do not believe that there is anything essentially the matter with what is called our capitalistic system or our labor union system except men—the men who think they belong in the front ranks of capital and the front ranks of labor.
The scared men and the men who are fooled about themselves in politics and business and who are trying to fool the rest of us, who are trying to make a great, simple, clean-hearted, clear-eyed, generous country like ours look and act every few weeks or every few days as if all the people in it could really do to express themselves to one another and to the world, was with lockouts, strikes, political deadlocks, minority holdups and party threats—shall be turned out of office by the people and huddled away out of sight.
In our industrial and political expressing and acting machines on every hand we give notice we are going to pick men out, men who shall make our machines express us, our freedom, our justice, our steadiness of heart, and our belief in America, in ourselves, in one another, or our desire to listen to those who disagree with us, our human sporting instinct about our party and ourselves, and the victory of the people, the common sense and good will of common human nature in America and the world.
To the great capitalists who instead of being fellow laborers, are still mooning absent-mindedly about in the last century, still prinking themselves as the owners of their world, and still thinking of themselves as the captains or military leaders of industry—to the labor union Dukes and Dictators that capitalists like this have created to fight them—the hundred million people appointed to run this country, give notice.
I would like if I could to publish this book with blank pages for a few million signatures—and a place for the new President or proposed President to sign, too.
The Presidential candidate we want, would have it in him to put his name down with the rest—with something like this, perhaps—"I do not say I could sign every paragraph in this book, but the general idea and program of organizing and giving body to the will of the people as expressed in this book—the spirit and direction of it and in the main the technique for getting it, I sign for."
I believe that the American people when they know in reality, as they do know at heart, what I am believing in this book, would be inclined in looking up their candidate for President to pick out a President who would have written this book—the gist of it—if he had had time.
At all events here it is—this program or handbook of the beliefs for a people.
I put it forth as being more concrete than political party platforms are—and as a practical and plain way for a nation to look over a President, find him out, and follow him up.
II
THE MAN WHO CARRIES THE BUNCH OF KEYS FOR THE NATION
The crowds have to be unlocked to each other. The temperament of our President for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of the nation, is to be the temperament of unlocking the crowds to each other.
At present it looks as if our President for the next four years would be perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our next President, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people and hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times of being lonely with the people. The people are lonely with one another. Anybody can go out into the street anywhere in America to-night and be lonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. Any man can take any crowded street and see for himself. He can pass miles of men who in their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of how to defend America and they have another. If one were to take any ten blocks of Broadway and let all the people walking along stop just where they are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what we ought to do in this war, they will begin thinking they are not Americans, wanting to throw each other off over the edge of the country—partitioning each other off into mollycoddles, traitors, pussy-foots, safety-firsts, bullies, braggarts and Bolshevists and pacifists—and while they might keep up appearances and try to be polite on the surface with strangers, that whole section of Broadway would be mad all through for ten blocks. One would have ten blocks of feeling superior and despising people—every man looking askance at every other man for having a different idea of America from his idea of America.
If the President were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhear the people, he would feel lonely with them. The only way not to feel lonely on ten blocks of Broadway just now would be to put up signs and labels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people off as they go along, into separate audiences. The League of Nations or the American Federation of Labor would sort out a thousand people on Broadway and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, and the I. W. W. could sort out another thousand and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a whole hallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful of people, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be each audience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and saying "You are not America. We only are America!"
This makes the President lonely. We elected him a few months ago to be President of all of us. It is slow work being President, being a good mixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and who all turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listen to each other.
The way the President is going to meet this issue and insist until we all thank him for it—on being President of all of us, is with his temperament.
III
THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPERAMENT
If I were writing a book for the next President to run for President on—a thing I have guilty moments of hoping I am doing—the first thing I would arrange for in the book, would be to put down in it two platforms for him to run on—one platform on what he believes and the other platform—the way he believes it and gets other people to believe it.
The way the next President we pick out, does his believing, the way he keeps from believing weakly what he wants to, and from being fooled about his party and about himself, the clean-cutness and honesty of his mind, the tone, the ring in which he believes in himself and gets other people to believe in him, is going to be, from the point of view of his getting for this country at home and abroad, what it wants, the most important thing about him.
The most important part of the next President's platform is going to be, in the eyes of the people, his character, his temperament, the way his personal traits and habits dramatize what he says, the way he lives what he believes.
The American people may not be shrewd about seers, or about historians or philosophers, but they are very likely any minute to be deep about people. When Henry Cabot Lodge draws a rough sketch in chalk of history he wants a hundred million people to help him make, and when he is being fooled about it and is all out of perspective the people may defer to him, may feel Mr. Lodge is too deep for them, but the moment they see Mr. Lodge being fooled about himself, they find Mr. Lodge easy.
In a trait in human nature like this, with which they are familiar every day, a hundred million people—without trying, are deep.
If a hundred million people could sit down and write a book—a book or open letter addressed in the next two months to those two big vague, whoofy Nobodies we call our Political Parties, and tell them in so many words the kind of President the people want and understand—the kind of President the people would sweep in unspeakably into the White House when they saw him, no matter what any politician said, I am inclined to believe it would be found—when the book by the hundred million people was out, that our people feel on the whole that we could not have anything better in our country for our next President than a man who would be a lawyer backwards.
What the platform of personality we want our next President to have amounts to, is this—Know everything a lawyer knows. Have everything a lawyer has—and just turn it around and use it the other way and be another kind of man about it.
The fate of America and the fate of the world may be said to be turning to-day on the degree during the next four years, during the next President's administration, the American people and all groups of the people, stop believing weakly what they want to believe and face the facts about themselves.
In order to be efficient, in order to be free or even to have enough to eat, millions of American men and women of all groups and classes of the people have got to be capable and show that they are capable of changing their minds about themselves.
Everything we are hoping to do turns upon our recognizing as a people, standing out from the rest and pushing forward to lead us, men who know more than most of us know, men who are practiced in keeping their own minds open and can therefore open ours.
Instead of having for the next President of this country a man who braces people, who tightens people up in their convictions, or who drives the old beliefs they want to believe further down into them and makes them believe them harder, we are going to put in our demand for a President who is the engineer of the will of the people, who draws people out, who has the common sense, the reality, the sense of humor and the humanness to look facts and folks in the eyes, who keeps people on all sides who have dealings with him from being fooled about themselves, a man who makes people real when they are with him, who makes them when they even think of him, real with themselves and real with one another, and real in politics.
I mean by a man's being real in politics, being a politician backwards, keeping open to facts acting and preferring to act as children and strong men act, with the deepness and directness of the child.
The hundred million people in the book they would write if they had time, put in their demand for a big simple fellow human being in the White House, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with people and gets things out of people because he makes people feel they know him.
The political parties cannot help themselves the moment the people speak. They would rather slide in a man who does not see through them if they could, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and sees best, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the White House to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep this country as clean as a whistle.
IV
THE PRESIDENT'S RELIGION
I have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, to the old monks of the Middle Ages, who climbed up on mountain tops and lived in monasteries alone with God. If I felt just as they felt about being superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to live the most deeply, intricately religious life I could think of I would refuse to look like a saint and be President of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and would pick out the most difficult business with the most difficult class of men to compete with in the United States. Then I would go into it, put all my money and all my religion together into it.
The principles and standards that actually obtain in competition constitute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. One might say coöperation of course, but what makes coöperation powerful and what selects the people who shall lead coöperation—what gives it character, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires him to find a way to do or not to do certain things—when he competes.
Competition—the way a man threads his way through the men who compete with him—would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of spiritual values—the real monastery of modern life.
All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially, or clap them into jail.
There always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and be fair. The Government, the police and the draft have to deal with them. As for the rest of us, competition—fair, manly, sporting competition, keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and nobler virtue, the knowledge of ourselves and others that make coöperation a noble as well as practical course of procedure.
The way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to be compared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to the state—to the way he runs an interested enterprise or business.
If I were the rich young man in the New Testament I would not have sold all my goods to feed the poor—as that particular person (being what he was) was advised to. I would hold on to my money—and found a religious order with it. I would make a whip of cords of my money and my brains woven together and would drive out the peddlers, the economic fiddlers, the moral and business idiots out of the Temple. I would do it not by being a pure, sterilized, holy-looking person, but by having more imagination in business, by using higher levels and higher voltage of human motive power in business than they can use, by having more brains about human nature than they have, and by my power to get the public to be religious, i.e., my power as a sheer matter of business, to make the public prefer, as a matter of course, my way of competing in business until it drives out and makes absent-minded, mooning, feeble and shortsighted, theirs.
This is not the kind of thing that I happen to have the natural technique or gift to do—to found a live deep natural religious order like this, but there are thousands of men I know and that other men know in America, who have the natural typical American technique for putting their higher gifts to work in business and who are crowding to the wall men who can only use their lower ones, and the power, the opportunities that go with these men are daily being outlined by events and daily being sketched out before our eyes.
The way to be a prophet and to interpret and establish in a nation is to lead in the business world to-day in establishing principles of competition, which exalt and interpret human nature, free the common sense, the will, the glory and the religion of the people.
The way to be a President, the next four years, is to use the White House and all the resources of the Government to coöperate with and back up this type of American business man.
V
THE RED FLAG AND THE WHITE HOUSE
The first qualification the next President should run for the Presidency on is his vision or program for the nation with regard to backing up men in American life—democracy and the Red Flag.
The first thing a President should see about the Red Flag is that the Red Flag is up to the people and not up to the White House—up to the people in five hundred thousand factories and offices and stores, up to the people on both sides of a hundred thousand counters, up to everybody who buys a paper of pins or a pound of cheese while they are buying it, up to everybody who buys a house or a watch or a cake of soap, a safety razor or a railroad, up to everybody while he is producing, while he is buying and selling, up to everybody individually and collectively to see that in every ten cents they spend in this country and every ten minutes they work in this country, the Red Flag—the civil war flag, is stamped on.
Only the people can head off the Red Flag—all of the people working on it on their daily job all of the time.
The more our President believes that the work of dealing with the Red Flag in this country is up to the people the more he gets the people to believe it, puts the work off on the people, the better the work will be done, the further the Red Flag will be from getting hold of the country and the longer the President will be in the White House.
We call our President our Chief Executive. What we put him in the White House and make him our chief executive for is that he shall have imagination about a hundred million people besides himself, that he shall have imagination about what the people can do and imagination about getting them to do it.
An executive is a man whose work is making other people work.
We call the place in which we have our President live the Executive Mansion. The best man to elect to live in it is the man who can make a hundred million people work.
THE END
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