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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 MAKE THEMSELVES FELT
WITH A PRESIDENT--HOW THEY CAN BACK HIM UP--EXPRESS THEMSELVES TO HIM,
BE EXPRESSED BY HIM, AND GET WHAT THEY WANT



By

GERALD STANLEY LEE

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_"


NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & CO.
681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1920
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All Rights Reserved_

First printing        May, 1920

Printed in the United States of America



TO

JENNETTE LEE



Transcriber's Note: Chapter XXII in Book II was printed without a title.




CONTENTS


BOOK I

WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE

    I Gist                                                          3
   II The Lonesomest Job on Earth                                   4
  III The President and the Ghost                                   6
   IV Real Folks and the Ghost                                     12
    V The Ghost Receives an Invitation                             16
   VI What a Body for the Ghost Would be Like                      20
  VII The Ghost gets Down to Business                              25
 VIII Three Rights of Man in a Democracy--The Right to Think       27
   IX The Right to be Waited On                                    32
    X The Right to Whisper                                         36
   XI The Right to Whisper Together                                39
  XII The Right to Trust Somebody                                  41
 XIII The Right to Vote All Day                                    46
  XIV The Skilled Consumer                                         48
   XV Sample Democracies                                           51
  XVI The Town Pendulum                                            54
 XVII The National Listening Machine                               58
XVIII How the National Listening Machine Will Work                 62
  XIX Making a Right Start                                         64
   XX Up to the People                                             66
  XXI The Way for a Nation to Speak Up                             68


BOOK II

WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF

    I G. S. L. to Himself                                          75
   II If I Were a Nation                                           78
  III What the Mahogany Desk is Going to Do                        81
   IV Rules for Being Lied to                                      85
    V Getting One Man Right                                        87
   VI Getting Fifty Men Right                                      89
  VII Engineers in Folks                                           91
 VIII The Great New Profession                                     92
   IX Getting People to Notice Facts                               97
    X The Fool Killers                                            100
   XI The Whisperers                                              102
  XII Mr. Dooley, Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers                      103
 XIII Fooling Onseself in Politics                                108
  XIV Swearing Off from Oneself in Time                           112
   XV Technique for not Being Fooled by Oneself                   117
  XVI The Autobiography of a Letter                               120
 XVII The Man Fifty Three Thousand Post Offices Failed On         124
XVIII Causes of Being Fooled About Oneself                        126
  XIX Loco-Mindedness                                             128
   XX Flat-Thinking. Thinking in Me Flat                          131
  XXI Lost-Mindedness                                             133
 XXII                                                             137
XXIII Self-Discipline by Proxy                                    139
 XXIV Machine Mindedness                                          142
  XXV New Brain Tracks in Business                                143


BOOK III

TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY

    I Big in Little                                               147
   II Conscious Control of Brain Tracks                           149
  III What is Called Thinking                                     151
   IV Living Down Cellar in One's Own Mind                        156
    V Being Helped up the Cellar Stairs                           160
   VI Reflections on the Stairs                                   166
  VII Helping Other People up the Cellar Stairs                   169
 VIII Helping a Nation up the Cellar Stairs                       173
   IX Technique for Labor in Getting its Way                      175
    X Technique for Capital in Getting its Way                    179
   XI Philandering and Alexandering                               183
  XII The Factory that Lay Awake All Night                        185
 XIII Listening to Jim                                            191
  XIV The New Company                                             196
   XV The Fifty-Cent Dollar                                       198
  XVI The Business Man, the Professional Man and the Artist       200
 XVII The News-Man                                                203
XVIII W. J.                                                       205
  XIX The Look-Up Club Looks Up                                   207
   XX Propagandy People                                           211
  XXI The Skilled Consumers of Publicity                          213


BOOK IV

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY

    I Fourth of July All the Year Round                           217
   II The Vision and the Body                                     219
  III The Call of a Hundred Million People                        222
   IV The Call of a World                                         227
    V Missouri                                                    232
   VI A Victory Loan Advertisement                                236


BOOK V

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN

    I Reconstruction                                              243
   II National Biology                                            245
  III The Air Line League                                         247
   IV The Look-Up Club Looks Up                                   250
      (1) For Instance                                            250
      (2) Why The Look-Up Club Looks Up                           255
    V The Try-Out Club Tries Out                                  257
      (1) I + You = We                                            257
      (2) The Engineer at Work                                    260
      (3) The Engineer and the Game                               262
      (4) The American Business Sport                             264
   VI The Put-Through Clan Puts Through                           270
      (1) What                                                    270
      (2) How                                                     272
      (3) Psycho-Analysis                                         273
      (4) Psycho-Analysis for a Town                              276
      (5) To-Morrow                                               280
      (6) Who                                                     281
      (7) The Town Fireplace                                      286
      (8) The Sign on the World                                   288


BOOK VI

WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT

    I The Big Brother of the People                               293
   II The Man Who Carries the Bunch of Keys for the Nation        300
  III The President's Temperament                                 302
   IV The President's Religion                                    306
    V The Red Flag and the White House                            309




INTRODUCTION

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.




BOOK I

WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE




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.




BOOK II

WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF

G. S. L. TO HIMSELF




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:

[Illustration:
                    |-----|
                    |     |
                    |     |
                    |     |
                    |     |
                    |     |
                    |     |
                    |     |
      |-----|       |     |
      |     |       |     |
      |     |       |     |
      |     |       |     |
      |     |       |     |
      |     |       |     |
      |     |       |     |
      |     |       |     |
      |     |       |     |       |-----|
      |     |       |     |       |     |
      |     |       |     |       |     |
      |-----|       |-----|       |-----|
        U.S.           ME           The
        P.O.                       People]




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.




BOOK III

TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY




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.




BOOK IV

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY WITH OTHER NATIONS




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.




BOOK V

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN




I

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          Artists               Hewers
          or                or
       See-ers           Engineers
                                              Those who work
    Men who invent    Men who invent          out and finish
    things to do.     ways and means          what the see-ers
                      and make it possible    and engineers
                      to do them.             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.




BOOK VI

WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT




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






End of Project Gutenberg's The Ghost in the White House, by Gerald Stanley Lee