THE GHOST IN THE WHITE HOUSE

SOME SUGGESTIONS AS TO HOW A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE (WHO ARE SUPPOSED INA VAGUE, HELPLESS WAY TO HAUNT THE WHITE HOUSE) CAN MAKE THEMSELVES FELTWITH 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, --bya kind of ghost of the nation, called The People_"

NEW YORKE. P. DUTTON & CO. 681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1920BY 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 58XVIII 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 124XVIII Causes of Being Fooled About Oneself 126 XIX Loco-Mindedness 128 XX Flat-Thinking. Thinking in Me Flat 131 XXI Lost-Mindedness 133 XXII 137XXIII 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 203XVIII 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 nextPresident 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 willbe like, of what he will be like as a fellow human being, and I leavethe details--his name, the color of his eyes and the party he belongsto, to be filled in by people later. 

Here is his program, his faith in the people, his vision for the peopleand 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 aconvention can. 

A book can be more public too--can be attended by more people than aconvention. Only a few thousand people can get into a convention. Ahundred million can get into a book. All in the same two hours, bytwenty million lamps thousands of miles apart, the people can crowdinto a book. 

So in this book, as I have said, I am merely acting as the secretary oremployee of the hundred million people. I am writing a book a hundredmillion people would write if they could, expressing for them the kindof President for the next four years of our nation--the most colossalfour years of the world, the people have ordered in their hearts. 

We are weary of politicians' politicians. We want ours. Politicians maynot be so bad but during the war they do not seem to us to have done aswell as most people. In the dead-earnest of the war, with our LibertyLoan and Red Cross and Council of Defense, and our dollar a year men wehave half taken over the government ourselves and we feel no longer awedby the regular political practitioners or government tinkerers. They arenot all alike, of course, but we have turned our national glass on themand have come to see through them--at least the worst ones and manythousands of them--all these busy little worms of public diplomacybuilding their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelieffar far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all bythemselves. 

Unless the more common run of our typical politicians see throughthemselves before the conventions come, and see that the people seethrough them, and see it quick, their days are numbered. 

Instead of patronizing us and whispering to one another behind theirhands about us, their time has come now--in picking out the nextPresident to begin gazing up to the countenance of the people, to beginlistening 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 soonerthey push around behind themselves out of sight all the funny littlewould-be Presidents, and all the little shan't-be politicians runningaround like ants under the high heaven of the faith of a great peoplepicking up tidbits they dare to believe--and put forward instead a livebelieving hot and cold human being, a man who will give up beingPresident for what he believes, the sooner they will find themselveswith a President on their hands that can be elected. Whichever party itis that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the onethat will be underwritten by the people. 

The people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward thegreat coming political conventions and the questions and the men thatwill come up in them. We are on the whole, in spite of the low estimatethe majority of politicians have of us, straight-minded and free-heartedpeople, shrewd, masterful and devout, praying with one hand and keepingfrom being fooled with the other and we want our public men to havecourage and vision for themselves and for us. We give notice thatthousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and fuddlypoliticians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by thepeople, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world. Thisnation is facing the most colossal, most serious and godlike moment anynation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the presence of fortynations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own grim appallinghope, to be trifled with. 

So far as any one can see with the naked eye the quickest and surest wayto get past the politicians, to remind the politicians of the realspirit of the people, to loom up the face of the people before theireyes and make them suddenly take the people more seriously than theytake themselves, is with a book. In a book a President can be nominatedby acclamation--by a kind of silent acclamation. In a book, withoutgiving any name or pointing anybody out at least the soul of a Presidentcan be ordered by a people. 

We will publish upon the housetops the hopes and the prayers and thewills of the people. 

Then let the conventions feel the housetops looking down on them whenthey meet. 

In a book published in a hundred newspapers one week, wedged into coversacross a nation another, the people with one single national stroke canput what they want before the country--a hundred million people in abook can rise to make a motion. 

We will not wait to be cornered by our politicians into a convention towhich 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 totake. The short-cut way for us as the people of this country to take theinitiative with our politicians and to make the politicians toe ourline, instead of toeing theirs, is for the people to blurt out thetruth, write a book, get in early beforehand their quiet word with bothgreat 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 politicallyinnocent-looking thing perhaps, just engaged in being like folks insteadof like politicians, just engaged in being human--in letting a nationspeak and act as a human being speaks and acts, in a great simplesublime human crisis in which with forty nations looking on, we aremaking 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 thepeople?

What shall the new people--people made new by this war, expect ofthemselves and expect of their new President?

What kind of a President, with what kind of a personality or temperamentdo the people feel would be the best kind of a President to pull themtogether, 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 Presidentwill 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 cannotbe done by the President for them, and they are not going to do itthemselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standingaround three thousand miles apart or in any other way than byvoluntarily 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 politicalconventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestionsjust now as to how a hundred million people can strike--make themselvesmore substantial, more important in this country, so that we shall reallyhave in this country in time a hundred million people who, taken as awhole, feel important in it--like a Senator for instance--like SenatorLodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like Trusts that won'ttrust, and Congressmen that won't play and workmen that won't work--I amthinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million people cancome to feel as if it made a very substantial difference to somebody whatthey wanted and what they thought--ways in which the hundred millionpeople shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like aProfiteer, or like a noble agitator, or like a free beautiful laborunion, --get what they want. 

II

THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH

What is going to happen to the next President the day after he isinaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assignedto him, or at least that night?

The Ghost in the White House. 

The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind ofghost of a nation, called the people. 

The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. Theman who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want therewould), has to commune with a Generalization. 

What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out ofhis warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever elseis the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift himover in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live inwedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who NeverWas, 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 Borealisto 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up tothis cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. Itdoes not give any real satisfaction to anybody--either to the hundredmillion people or to the President. 

It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred millionpeople 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 orhope 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 nextfour years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, thatare going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomestjob on earth. 

The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position asthe Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he isexpected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassingidiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would everput 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 millionpeople, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that theEmployer--like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made afool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things byunworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry. 

The man who is conscientious in the White House has an Employer whoseimmediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes inthe 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 thestorm is highest, that he must not butt in. 

The restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer thatone is just being an employee and that one's employer is beingresponsible, is lacking in the White House, where one is practicallyexpected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee andone's own employer. 

But while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in thePresident's Employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerousones for the country. 

I am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done aboutthem. I have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated themoment the Employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits aremaking it for the President to do anything for him. 

Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people aregiving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, isnot only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer solarge, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered aparthe could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It. 

Serving It is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, atrying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, witha fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called thePeople. 

It is this bodilessness in the Employer--this very simple rudimentarywhiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished andaccomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it hardest tobear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly is (once infour years) that he wants him or that he does not want him and even thenhe confides to him that he only half wants him. He says deliberately andout loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people ofother 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 awayabsently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him towork. 

Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer likethis, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and thatcannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and whenone thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of thepeople one is being The Head Employee of (in the other party) expect oneto feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at theutmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one'sEmployer--keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it willbe small wonder if the man in the White House feels he has--especiallythese next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth. 

The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is thehead of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own specialcrowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle upto. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed to ourPresident. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, andbe President of all of us. 

It may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job onearth and, of course, when Theodore Roosevelt had it, the job of beingPresident considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell worldAmerica is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of ournext President, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy, senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappyfactories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nationsabroad, the man we put in the White House next is going to have what willbe the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousandyears--except the one that began in Nazareth--the one the new Presidentis going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way whichlittle, old, queer, bent, eager St. Paul with his prayers in Rome and hissermons in Athens, never dreamed of. 

It does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new Presidentand a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going totry to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just thistime for our President to have a ghost for an Employer. 

All any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make aPresident, is to stop and think. If you have an employer who cannotcollect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, allyou do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make himup--what is there--what deep, searching and conclusive and permanentaction is there, after all, the man in The White House can take in hisemployer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling himwhat he wants and what he is willing to do with what he gets? What canthe man in the White House hope to accomplish for a people with whom itis 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 alonely President the next four years. 

The first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the nextelection a man for the White House a great-hearted direct and free peoplewill not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things thatwill back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand, and notlet him feel lonely with us. 

The feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness--the feeling the Public hasevery day in the White House and in the Senate, of being treated, andtreated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that worksas 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 unfairand untrue and destroy forever the title I have written across the frontof it, "The Ghost in The White House. "

The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself outof date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, totry to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of alltime, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world, from being an inarticulate, shimmering, wavering, gibbering Ghost in itsown House. 

There must be things--broad simple things about Capital and Labor peoplecan do and do every day in this country, that will make a Presidenttimidly stop guessing what they want. 

It ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a President or a seerfor a President to know what the people want. A man of genius--a seer, aman who can read the heart of a nation--especially in politics, comes notonly not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highlyunlikely when he does that the Republican Party, or the Democratic Partyin America will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him inthe White House. 

The best the people can hope for in America now is to have a body--tofind some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions withoutsaying a word--express ourselves so plainly that without saying a wordour President, our Politicians--even the kind of men who seem to put upnaturally with having to be in the Senate--the kind of men who can feelhappy and in their element in a place like Congress will see what thePeople--the real people in this country are like. 

I am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people sothat 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 cando, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able toprove to a President what we are like and what we want--so that each manof us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on aPresident 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 hemeant something and knew what he meant. 

When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch himbewhiffle it. 

When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks ofBusiness he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, andwhen in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in somemysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine ofThe Invisible. 

Business talks bass. Patriotism is an Æolian harp. 

During the war this was changed. We found ourselves every day treatingAmerica, 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 nextfour 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 downin a minute after Château-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, intotreating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, thevision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost--unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless--just a light in its eyes--just a vastnational shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet. 

Millions of people every day in this country are very particular tosalute the flag, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" and ship Bolshevists, but let them speak to you in conversation, of an industrial body like theSteel Trust or the Pennsylvania Railroad and they act as if somethingwere 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 inthis vague, breathy way. 

The next immediate, imperative need of America is to see what can be doneand done in the next President's next four years to make the Body-Politicpeople take the Body-Politic and what happens to the Body-Politic as ifit 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 wepretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the Germans and the restof the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy. 

I believe that the best things the Old World has said about us and hopedfor us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation ofidealists, 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'slong desperate minutes--waiting for America to grow up. 

This nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism andreligion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of itsdaily producing, buying and selling, and no more. Any big beautifulevaporated Body-Politic we have or try to think we can have aside fromthis body--this actual working through of our patriotism, our democracyand our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy, unclean andthreatens 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 everyday in this year of our Lord 1920 in making democracy work, a religionthat loafs off into a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, areligion that cannot be used to run steel mills so that men won't go tohell 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 threehundred thousand disabled and crippled soldiers, who gave up their jobsand sailed six thousand miles to die for them, and that has finallymanaged to get new jobs for just two hundred and seventeen of the threehundred thousand and taken nineteen months to do it, illustrates what itmeans--in just one simple item--for a hundred million people, to try tobe good without a body. 

But it is not only in behalf of its helplessness with the President I amgroping in these pages for a body for the Public. 

The reason that the Public in dealing in its daily business with powerfulpersons 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 Publicis a Ghost. 

Theoretically all powerful persons, predatory Trusts, profiteering laborunions and the wrong kind of politicians always speak respectfully to thePublic, but when they want something that belongs to the Public they findthe Public is an Abstraction and help themselves. They act when with thePublic, as if the Public was not there. 

The only way this is ever going to be stopped is for us to make aspontaneous voluntary popular start in this country toward having a bodyfor people in general, towards giving a hundred million people in dealingwith 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 tolive a whole life four years ago or perhaps four years from now. 

We are being allowed to live in the splendid desperate moment of theworld. 

International war ending to-night. 

To-morrow morning a thousand civil wars breaking out in a thousandnations--between classes--unless we all do our seeing and do our livingswiftly and do it together swiftly to-day. 

When one-tenth of the people of America tell the President of the UnitedStates and nine-tenths of the people that they cannot have any coalunless they do what the one-tenth say; when another one-tenth of thepeople tell the nine-tenths that they cannot have anything to eat, andanother one-tenth tell them that they cannot have anything to wear untilthe one-tenth get what they want, just how much more democratic Americais than Germany it is difficult to say; and just why anybody shouldsuppose the emergency is over it is difficult to say. The idea of gettingwhat you want by hold-up which has been taught to labor by capital, isnow getting ready to be used by labor and capital both, and by everybody. 

The really great immediate universal emergency to-day in America is theholdup. We get rid of one Kaiser other people have three thousand milesaway, to get instead five thousand Kaisers we have to live with next doorhere at home, that we have to ask things of and say "please" to everytime 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 peopleare concerned in meeting it all the time. We have said to one another andto everybody for four years that what we have all been sacrificing forand 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 nowis to make democracy safe for the world. If the Kaiser wanted to dreamhis wildest dream of autocratic sneer and autocratic hate he would havedreamed US; he would have dreamed what we will be unless the men andwomen of America--especially the men and women of America formerly activein the Red Cross, shall meet the emergency and undertake in behalf of thepeople to prove to the people how (if anybody will go about and look itup) industrial democracy in America in distinction from industrialautocracy, really works. 

If it works for some of us in some places, let twenty million people--RedCross people get up and say across this land in every village, town andcity, it shall work now in all places for all of us. And then takesteps--all of them every morning, every afternoon, getting together asthey did in the Red Cross, to see to it that the whole town and everybodyin it does something about it. 

When the soldiers of the American army we were all helping in the RedCross stop fighting the Germans, come home, divide off into classes andbegin fighting one another, why--because now the soldiers we have beenhelping need us more, because now all day every day they need us morethan they ever dreamed of needing us when they were merely fightingGermans--why should we stop helping them?

On the day after the armistice--the very day when our war with justGermans was over, when the deeper, realer, more intimate, more desperatewar Germany had precipitated upon all nations with themselves, begins, why should the men and women who had been working every afternoon for themen of this nation, in the Red Cross, talk about reducing to a peacebasis?

The people in the Red Cross have been having in the last three years thevision of backing up an army of four million men fighting for theliberties of the world, but the vision that is before us now--before thesame people--that we must meet and meet desperately and quickly is thevision of backing up an army of a hundred million men, women and childrenfighting for their own liberties in their own dooryards, fighting for theliberty to eat at their own tables, to sleep in their own beds, and towear clothes on their backs, in a country which we have told the Germansis the greatest machinery of freedom, the greatest engine of democracy inthe world. 

I will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have madethe Red Cross what it was, who have made the Red Cross the trustedrepresentative of American democracy in all nations, who now findthemselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime, most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy to aworld, I will not believe that these men and women are going to losetheir grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty nations, forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters they havehelped before. 

The logical thing at this great moment for the people who made the RedCross to do--the thing they alone have the record, the teamwork-drill, the experience, the machinery, the momentum to do, is to keep onfollowing the fighters, rendering first aid to the fighters moving onwith their first-aid from fighters for the rights of the people not to bebullied by kings, to fighters for the rights of all classes of people notto 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 readlooking over each other's shoulders. I would have two chapters on everysubject. In one chapter I would tell the employer things his workmanwants him to know, and in the next chapter I would tell the workmanthings 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 workmanwould ever know which was which, or which was his chapter, until he hadgot in quite a little way; and I would do my best to have everybody readeach other's chapters all through the book. An employer would be readingalong 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 readingthis!" And then he would turn over the leaf and he would come plump fullhead on into three paragraphs about himself and about how the publicfeels about him, and about how his workmen feel about him, and about whatGod is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my bookare going to help God to do to him, that will make him think. The firstthing he will think of perhaps will be to lay down the book. Then beforehe knows it he will see another of those things he wants his workmen toread softly poking itself out of the page at him. Then he will slap hisleg and think how I am making his workmen think. So he will go throughthe book slapping his leg and shouting "Amen" in one chapter, and sittingstill and thinking in the next. 

This is the gist of what I propose a new organization shall do on anational scale. 

It may seem a rather simple-minded way to describe what I propose a greataggregation of American men and women on the scale of the Red Cross, should do, but the soul, the spirit, the temperament, even the techniqueof what I have in mind--in miniature, is in it. 

It is true that it would be a certain satisfaction of course to an authorto prove to employers and employees that they could get on bettertogether than they could apart, even if they got on together better onlyin a kind of secret and private way in the pages of his own book; and itis true that a book in which I could make an employer and an employeework their minds together through my own little fountain pen would countsome. 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 usewords, is to use words to make his ideas happen. 

Then let him use words about them and write books about them to advertisethat they have happened. 

People are more impressed with things that have happened than they arewith things that are perhaps going to. Instead of having employers andemployees go over the same ideas together in a book, I propose thattwenty million people, in ten thousand cities shall make them go over thesame ideas together in the shop. 

Are capital and labor going to use the holdup on each other to get whatthey 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, doesnot work? What the new League will be for will be to put before theworld, before every nation, before every village and city in its localbranch, a working vision of how different classes and different groups ofpeople can get what they want out of each other by trying things outtogether, by touching each other's imaginations and advertising to eachother instead of blowing out each other's brains. The way to keep inplace our Bolshevists of America is to show them that we the combinedpeople of America, combined and acting together as one in theorganization I am sketching in this book, know what they want, and thatwe can get the thing they essentially want for them better than they canget it. The three great groups in American life--the employing class, thelaboring class, and the consumer--have all belonged to the Red Crosstogether, they have all worked together and sacrificed themselves, andsacrificed their class, to work for the Red Cross. What the New Leaguewill stand for in the name of all of them will be the thing that theyhave already demonstrated in the Red Cross that they can do. Threeclasses 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 neverdreamed of before what the three-class vision is and how it works. Thenwe will have factories dramatize it. Then we will advertise thefactories. 

Then when we have democracy working in a thousand factories, we willadvertise and transplant our working democracy, our factory democracies, abroad. 

People who have learned that democracy works in their daily work can betrusted to believe democracy will work even in their religion, even intheir 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 beingtreated as a ghost--against being whoofed at by Labor unions and trusts. 

Always before this, when incompetent manufacturers and incompetent laborunions, for the mere reason that they had not the patience to try veryhard and were incompetent to understand one another and do their job, held up the whole city--five hundred thousand people--and calmly madethem pay for it, the city of Cleveland like any other city would ventureto step in sweetly and kindly, look spiritual and intangible a minute, suggest wistfully that they did feel capital and labor were not beingquite fair to Cleveland and would they not please stop interruptingCleveland several million dollars a day. All that ever would come of itwould be the yowls of Labor at the Ghost of Cleveland, the noble whinesof 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 bodilyand in behalf of all, with its own lockouts and its own strikes in muchthe same way I am hoping the nation will, according to the news in mypaper this morning. 

With Mr. Paul Pfeiss, an eminently competent manufacturer, recognizingthe incompetence of his own group as partly responsible for the holdupspracticed on the city and with Mr. Warren S. Stone, an eminentlycompetent labor union leader, recognizing the incompetence of his owngroup as being also partly responsible--with these two men, one theofficial representative of the Capital group, and the other the officialrepresentative of the Labor group, both championing the Public group andstanding out for Cleveland against themselves, taking the initiative andacting respectively as President and Secretary of the Public group, theGhost of the city of Cleveland publicly swears off from being a ghost andbegins precipitating a body for itself. 

I do not wish to hamper my own statement of my idea of a body for thepeople of the United States by linking it up with a definite undertakingin Cleveland which may or may not prove to be as good an illustration ofit as I hope, but the spirit and the understanding of what has got tohappen, seems to be in Cleveland--and I stop in the middle of my chapterwith greetings to Paul Pfeiss and to Warren Stone. In my book the Ghostof the People of Cleveland salutes the Ghost of the People of the UnitedStates!

VII

THE GHOST GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS

A body usually begins with an embryo, and the tissue and skeleton comeafterwards. 

A book does, too. I prefer not exposing a skeleton much, myself, and aminclined to feel that the ground plan of a book like the ground plan of aman, should be illustrated and used, should be presented to people withthe 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 aboutdemocracy just now, so much boneless democracy is being offered to them. 

So I begin with the principles--the skeleton of the body of democracy forwhich this book stands. 

The outstanding features of the body of democracy are the brain, theheart 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, somepeople 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 theright to serve a duty is an understatement. I doubt if the people whohave succeeded best and who have really attained the largest amount oftheir three greater rights, have thought of them very often as duties. 

I end this chapter with the three questions America is in the worldto-day to ask, to find out her own personal three answers to in the sightof the nations. 

I am putting with the three questions the three answers I am hoping tohear my country give, before I die. 

What determines what proportion of his right to think, each man shallhave?

His power to get attention and let others think. 

What determines what proportion of his right to live, each man shallhave?

His power to let others live. 

What determines what proportion of his right to be waited on, each manshall have?

His power to serve. 

These are the principles of the new League--the voluntary, spontaneousorganization of the men and women of America to meet the emergency inAmerica of our war with ourselves, on the same scale and in the samespirit 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 amrising to make the motion to form, in this book. 

I put these principles forward as the by-laws of America's faith initself, as the principles that should govern the brain, the heart and thehand of each man in a democracy, toward all other men and that shouldgovern 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 ina year. 

1/100, 000, 000th. 

If I want 2/100, 000, 000ths of President Wilson's time in a year I mustshow him why. I must also show the other 99, 999, 999 people who think Ideserve 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 histime would be one-third of a second once a year. Why should I havetwo-thirds of a second?

I have to show. 

The success of democracy as a working institution turns onsalesmanship--upon every man's selling himself--his right to theattention of the Government. 

A democracy which considers itself a queue of a hundred million peoplestanding before the window of the President's attention to be waited uponby the President in the order in which they are born or in which theycome up, would be a helpless institution. The success of democracy--thatis, the success of a government in serving the will of the hundredmillion people in the queue, turns on sorting people in the queue out, turns on giving attention to what some people in the queue want beforeothers. The man who gets out of line and walks up ahead of people whohave been standing in line longer than he has, must get the permission ofthe queue. He must make the people in the queue feel he represents themwith the President if he steps up ahead. Then they let him have theirturn. They are glad to let him have hours with the President if they feelhe is giving hours' worth of representation to their minutes. All eachman wants to feel is that in letting Gompers, for instance, or Schwab, goup ahead, he is getting with the President a minute an hour long. Milesof people in rows say to a man like this, who can give them and theirinterests with the President a minute an hour long, "You first, please. "

Political democracy, if it works, turns on getting the attention of thequeue 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 makingarrangements for the five thousand men to appreciate each other, appreciate the Firm, and to feel the Firm appreciating them; arrangementsfor having the five thousand men get each other's attention in the rightproportions at the right time so that they work as one. 

The next thing that is coming in industrial democracy is getting skilledcapital and skilled labor to appreciate each other's skill. A skilledcapitalist can not fairly be called a skilled capitalist or, now thatthis war is over, unless he knows how to keep his queue appreciating hisskill, keep his five thousand men standing in line for his attentioncheerfully. 

The difference between an industrial autocracy and an industrialdemocracy is that in an industrial autocracy you keep your queue in linewith a club, or with threats of bread and butter, and in an industrialdemocracy you have your queue of five thousand men, each man in the rowcheering you while he sees you giving one minute a week of your attentionto him and one hour a day of your attention to others. Still you find himcheering you. 

The skilled employer is the employer who so successfully advertises hisskill to his employees and so successfully advertises their skill tothemselves and to one another that they hand over to him in their commoninterest the right to sort them over. They hand over to him deliberately, in other words, in their own interests, the right not to treat themalike. Democracy consists in keeping people in line without a club. Democracy is a queueful of people cutting in ahead of one another fairlyand in a way that the queue stands for. 

If a man standing in a queue before a ticket window wants to cut in aheadof five people, the way for him to do it is to show the five peoplesomething in his hand that makes them say, "You first, please. " He mustshow 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 theticket window in the Northampton station, I noticed on a guess that halfa dozen of the people were standing in line to buy a ticket to New Yorkon the express due in half an hour, and a dozen and a half were standingin line to buy tickets to Springfield on the local going in threeminutes. 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 makedemocracy work, was to jump up on my suitcase and address the queue whowere ahead of me: "Ladies and gentlemen! Eighteen or twenty of you inthis line ahead of me want tickets to Springfield on the train going inthree minutes, and the rest of you want tickets on the train going inhalf an hour. If you people who are hoping you can get your tickets intime to go to Springfield will let me cut in ahead of you out of my turnand get my ticket, I will buy tickets for all of you with this ten dollarbill 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 democracyif I had. 

The whole problem of labor and capital, and of political and industrialfreedom, from now on after this war would have been solved in miniaturebefore that window--if I had. My invention for the future of the RedCross is that it should do what I tried to do at that window, for theAmerican people. 

 * * * * *

Democracy is a form of government in which the people are essentiallyautocrats. The difference between an autocracy and a democracy is thatthe people select their autocrats. The more autocracy the moreefficiency. 

A people can not have the autocracy they need to get what they wantunless they are willing to give over to their representatives thenecessary trust pro tem. , the necessary ex officio right to be autocratsin their behalf. Democracy is autocracy of the people, for the people, bythe people--that is, by the people in spirit to their representatives whoexpress their spirit. 

The representatives of the people can not keep the people's autocracy forthem unless they keep in touch with the people--that is, unless theyadvertise to the people and the people feel that they can advertise tothem. 

In an autocracy the autocracy of the ruler is based on forcing people'sattention. In a democracy the autocracy is based on touching men'simaginations, on making people want to fall into line in the right order. If the Kaiser had done this in Germany, Germany would have been thegreatest democracy in the world and the greatest nation. If the Kaiserhad had the power and genius for advertising of the modern kind, if hehad had the power of making people want things in distinction from makingthem meek and making them take them whether they wanted them or not, hewould have invented and set up a working model for America. 

Obviously, the more the people desire to form in line the better and moresuccessful all the people in the line will be in getting what they wantat the window. The more autocracy people know enough to give theirrepresentatives, the better democracy works. In the last analysis thefate of democracy in modern life turns on having autocrats onprobation--autocrats selected for their positions by advertising, andkept in position as autocrats as long as they can advertise to the peopleand 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 bewaited on in the way kings are, and in which the people arrange to havethings done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work andtake 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 highlyspecialized knowledge and skill, can not take the time off to do foritself what skilled capital could do in providing work, and providingmarkets for skilled labor. It cannot, on the other hand, take the timeoff to understand skilled capital and what it is doing in detail. Even ifit could take the time off, and if five thousand hands in a factory alldevoted 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 skilledlabor's trusting the Office, for its feeling that the autocracy itintrusts to the Office is being used fairly in its interest. 

The first and most important skill of skilled capital, of course, is itsskill in doing for its employees and for its customers what it issupposed to do. 

But the second skill of capital must be skill in being believed in andfinding means of being believed in by its employees. The more it isbelieved in, the more power to serve will be accorded to it. In otherwords, the second function of skilled capital is advertising to itsskilled labor, and in making exchange arrangements with its skilledlabor, 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 inbeing believed in. The skilled capital it is supposed to be waited on byis preoccupied with its skill, and unless labor makes special and verythorough provision to be understood and to keep understood by skilledcapital, and by the public and the people who buy the goods, and unlessskilled labor tries to keep in touch all around and do teamwork allaround with all concerned so that it can do its work, it can not fairlybe called skilled labor at all. Skilled labor has to have skill inputting its skill with others to produce a result. 

In other words, the second skill of skilled labor is skill in makingarrangements for being believed in and believing in others. Its secondskill is in advertising and in being advertised to. 

3. The other group concerned in industry is one which I like to call theSkilled Consumers. 

The people have a right to have capital skilled in considering them, andlabor 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, "Thecustomer is always right, " has to be in the long run treated in ademocracy as if it were approximately true. 

What the consumers have to do in a democracy, however, in a singulardegree is to live up to it. The consumers must make, and I believe aregoing 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 ifthey 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 bestskilled capital at the expense of the worst, to help the best skilledlabor at the expense of the worst. 

In other words, the secret of industrial democracy and of makingindustrial democracy work, lies in making the people skilled in conveyingtheir wishes to the skilled capital and skilled labor waiting on them. 

Skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, whowill support it when it is right and punish it when it is wrong, by theway they buy and sell. 

Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who willdefend it from skilled capital that pretends to be skilled and is not. 

True and sincere skilled capital and true and sincere skilled laborcannot keep on doing what they try to do as long as the supposedlyskilled consumers they have a right to, back away from their job andlazily and foolishly buy and sell in the markets in such a way as toreward capital for doing wrong to labor, or labor for doing wrong tocapital. 

In other words, the second function of the skilled consumers aftertelling skilled capital and labor what they want to eat and wear, is tomake arrangements to advertise to capital and labor and to have capitaland labor advertise to them, so that they can be skilled in knowing howto help them work together, and skilled in buying in such a way as tohelp in making capital and labor more skilled instead of less in dealingwith themselves and one another and with the people. 

I have summed up the three Rights to Be Waited On. All of these rightsturn on skilled advertising and on the science of being believed in, thescience of being allowed to be autocrats, the science of being allowed bythe 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 theattention of Mr. John Doe, the young man who inherited the business, tothe 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 cannot be got to what can be done in a year for a wife and five childrenwith $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 hethinks he knows without trying, and he thinks his attention is got whenit is not. He tells the workmen that two pairs of shoes ought to last achild 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'sattention?

Why is it that Mr. Doe has so little difficulty in getting theirs? Why isit that Mr. Doe's employees, when he speaks of the two pairs of shoes ayear, 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 obligedto 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 aboutstudying things, the first thing one would ask would be, Why do not thepeople 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 thetwo pairs of shoes a year?

Because the People Who Eat Meat--Mr. Doe's employers--have no way ofmentioning it to Mr. Doe. 

If the People Who Eat Meat would but barely whisper to Mr. Doe it wouldget his attention as much as a whole year's shouting would from hisworkmen. 

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 isabsolutely deaf to any one except his employers, that two pairs of shoesare not enough for the workmen's children. 

It is for the purpose of letting the People Who Eat Meat inAmerica--whisper and learn to whisper in this country that the new Leagueorganized to operate as a kind of People's Advertising Guild orConsumers' Advertising Club, with its national office in New York and itslocal branches in ten thousand towns and cities, now offers its servicesto all people who eat meat in America. 

The employers of America have organized to do anything with theirbusiness, and anything with their workmen, and anything with the countrythat they like. 

The workmen of America have organized to do now, and are deliberatelyplanning to do anything with their work, and anything with theiremployers, and anything with the country that they like. 

The new national League is now to be organized as the voice of theAmerican people, as the whisper of the will of the consumer in everyindustry in America. 

The people to get the attention of employers are the employers of theemployers. 

Every civil war we are having in this country can be settled and theattention of the fighters on both sides can be got, and the country canwork as one man in making democracy safe for the world, the moment theemployers of the employers whisper. 

 * * * * *

The way I would like to end this chapter--with the blanks filled in, ofcourse, would be this. 

Anybody who wants to be a part of this whisper, who knows of any industryhe would like to see a whisper from the people tried in, or who wishes asan Associate Member to join the Air Line League--a League for the directaction of the people in what concerns them all, is invited to send fivedollars as membership fee and his name and address, to ----, TreasurerNational 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 touse it for the convenience of this book, I only do so, leaving it open tothe people who have the vision of The League and who put the vision intoaction, 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 ofsomebody, an employer of somebody, and a consumer. 

The natural employer left to himself is apt to suppose, if he is makingshoes, that his consumers ought to pay more for shoes, and that hisemployees ought to be paid less. As regards hats, and umbrellas, andovercoats, and underwear, the same man is a rather noble impartial persontowards employers and employees. He wants them to listen to each otherand lower the cost of living by not having strikes and lockouts, and bynot fighting each other ten hours a day. 

In 999 out of 1000 labor quarrels a consumer is naturally a fair-mindedperson and the best-located person to control and determine how anyparticular business shall be run. 

The League proposed is planned to operate in its national and localfunctions as a national Consumers' Club, with working branches in everytown which shall be engaged in doing specific things every day towardmaking the employers and employees in that town listen to each other inthe interests of the consumer public. 

It is always to the interests of the consumer-public to see to it thatpeople who have particular interests in a business should be compelled tolisten to the others' interests. 

Consumers naturally prefer experts to run things for them, but if they donot 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 CentralTelephone Exchange in business. It is the consumers who connect everybodyup. They are the switchboard of the World. 

XII

THE RIGHT TO TRUST SOMEBODY

Democracy--as perhaps my reader will have heard me say before--democracyis a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited onin just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have thingsdone for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take thetime off to do them themselves. 

I try to go to the polls as I should. But I resent being obliged by mydear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead penciland know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-fivemen on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world withthat yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am puttingdown crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that thisfeeling I have--in those few brief miserable moments I spend with theyellow 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 whosomebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the generalprinciple when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and wasbeing stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule thecountry--he went on the general principle that every time he came on thename 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 beingstood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names I cannot knowanything about is democracy. It is tyranny. It is a demand that I dosomething no one has a right to make me do. I have other things every manknows I can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, thanknowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket--Smithsand Browns and Smiths and Smiths--it is a thing I want to have done forme, I want experts--engineers in human nature that I and my fellowcitizens can hire to pick out my employees, _i. E. _, the employees of thestate that I want and that I have a right to and that I would have if Ihad time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way wedon't go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest ofour intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward somany 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 thatcan only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committeeswho devote their time to it. 

If we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers andwatching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons dayand night we couldn't keep track or begin to keep track of the people weput in office. It is not our business to, it seems to many of us. PerhapsI should merely speak for myself. I can at least be permitted to say thatit is not my business. If the state will give me ten men to watch, men inprominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally andeasily, I will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. What Idemand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to getthings for the people is that these ten men shall look after the othersixty-five and let me attend to business. The other sixty-five have aright to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can doit, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all electintelligently to do it for us--by men we have all looked through andthrough and trust. 

The last year or so I have been getting about three long communications aweek from the ---- Railway which has been trying to make me over into anexpert on all the details of its relation to the Government. I wish I hadtime to know all about it. Some of us will have to. Things are soarranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whosebusiness it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don'ttake a hand at it for a while and butt in in behalf of both the railroadsand the Government, there won't be any railroads or there won't be anyGovernment. 

But I resent having this crisis put up to me personally. I resent havinga pile a foot high of things I have got to know before I can help theGovernment to be fair to the railroads--or the railroads to be fair tothe Government. I am better anyway at writing books. I don't want to bejerked into a judge--or a corporation lawyer because I am a voter. Railroads always bewilder me. Even the simplest things railroads telleverybody about themselves are hard for me to understand--time-tables forinstance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking Sundaytrains on Monday afternoon be called on to butt in on an expert auditor'sjob in this way, beat his Congressman on the head with the poor penitentrailroads--with all the details about their poor insides--and with alltheir 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 thefaithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and theirpower to select great and true leaders. 

The essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of governmentis supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the faceof the earth it trusts people. A democracy that does not trust itsleaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as amonarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can betrusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's akind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They havesettled down to the idea that this is what we are like--as if the mainqualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, ofmaking in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. I believe I amliving in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, thatwill take being a statesman seriously--as a special and skilledprofession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in gettingthings out of people, and for people. We are getting ready for great andtrue leaders in America. Our people are getting ready to stake their fatein picking them out. Even our banks are. Our labor unions are. In ourpolitics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. Anybody cansee it. There are particular things and men we want, and the first leaderwe have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, thepeople of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, whotreats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us anddares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still longenough to do things for us, will show what America is like, in spite ofwhat 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 innocentmouth open, will be grown up at last among the nations of the earth, willbe a great clear-cut, clear-headed, firm-knit, sinewy nation that knowswhat 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 politicaldemocracy applies still more forcibly to democracy in industry, and tothe right of the people to be waited on by skilled labor and by skilledcapital. 

I do not wish to bother to know everything about how everything I buyevery day is made, but I do want to have arrangements made through anational league to which I belong, for instance, so that I canpractically know about the conditions under which anything is made, themoment I wish to. 

There should be as it were a card catalogue or authority in my town thatI can go to and consult, which represents me and a hundred millionpeople. This is my conception of what the National League through itslocal branches could do and do for everybody. It would only cost a fewcents more to have a hundred million men know about a particular articlewhat ten, twenty or a hundred or a thousand know, the moment they happento need it, by looking it up in the League's national opinion of it andnational experience with it, in a card catalogue or what would operatepractically 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 ayear, or three, five, or ten thousand a year, they must show cause whythey should have it, dollar for dollar. We want our dollars to helppeople to help us, laborers who are helping the country and capitalistswho are helping the country. Every time I spend ten cents I want to knowthat I am getting ten cents' worth of democracy, ten cents' worth ofskilled capital and skilled labor working for all of us. I propose tovote with my money on the fate of my country and the fate of democracywith silver coins and with dollar bills every day. The other kind ofballot, the paper ballot, I can only use in the nature of the case onceor twice a year. 

XIV

THE SKILLED CONSUMER

The way to control the world and govern the well-being of men is notthrough the time they have left over, or the time they choose to lay oneside for it, but directly and through their most important engagementsand 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 andchildren'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 tohave to keep these engagements--things he has to have if he is alive atall, 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 tohave to live, the Air Line League is organized to stand by you, expressyou and get the attention of everybody to what you want; and in the onething you make for everybody it is going to express everybody to you andget 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 hasand has to have, in order to live his life--the part he makes himself--beseen everywhere in this world in every man's life holding up andbullying, making him pay high prices for, the other nine hundred andninety-nine thousandths?

Let the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of a man's life takepossession of the one thousandth part of him. Then we will have acivilization. 

Or at least the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of him willpersuade the one thousandth of him to coöperate. 

We have had autocracy of capital because on the whole in the world untilmachinery came in, capital kept close enough to labor and to the consumerto know what the workmen and the people wanted. 

Now that Capital has lost its grip, Labor announces that it is going tobe after this war the autocrat, and represent capital and the consumer. 

The Air Line League is here to ask, Why should not the consumer representhimself?

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 thousandcities, "Let the public be damned. "

What the Air Line League is for is to advertise the people together, andlet the consumers represent themselves. 

What we have been fighting for essentially in this war is the control ofthe consumers in the world in all nations. 

When we speak of democracy and of organizing the will of the people, whatwe really mean is organizing the will of the consumers. 

Organizing the will of the consumers is not a holdup. A holdup by all thepeople 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 isthese bits or dots of rough more or less unfinished democracy we have inAmerica 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-offplaces--what might be called safety zones (everybody knows of them), evenin New York. There are usually white globes in front of them, and a shortname written in long plain slanting white letters across a huge piece ofglass. 

If anybody wants to see just what democracy is like in business all hehas to do is to go into the nearest Childs restaurant, order somegriddle-cakes, sit down and eat and think. All he really needs to do isto study the menu, but of course a menu is more thoroughly studied byeating some of it. 

One soon finds that a menu may be a little modest every-day magna chartaof democracy or it may not. 

What a menu has long been for in the typical restaurant is to find a wayof browbeating and bewildering a customer into spending more money forhis luncheon than he intends to when he comes in. 

Rows of grieved and vaguely disturbed people can be seen in restaurantsevery day--being mowed down by menus. 

In a Childs restaurant business success is based on turning the wholeidea of a menu around, and instead of the customer's coming in andstudying the menu, the menu studies him. 

The consumer in a Childs restaurant is there to economize and therestaurant is there to help him do it, the whole menu being constructedby experts in foods for the express purpose of telling the customer morethan he knows about his food and his money, persuading him andpractically tricking him into spending less money on his luncheon than heintends to. 

A business may be said to be a big vital and winning business in any linein proportion as one sees the consumers in it--practically runningit--running it in spirit. A democratic business is one which is being runas the consumers would run it if they knew how. 

A business may be said to be a democratic business in proportion as onesees experts in it expressing crowds. One sees great crowds going to andfro and up and down in it acting for all practical purposes likegeniuses, like skilled angels doing every day offhand inspired andinspiring difficult adventurous things as a matter of course--liketackling the high cost of living. 

What the Air Line League is for is to make the consumers of America--theall-class class, class-conscious--is to organize the consumers of Americalocally and nationally so that the comparative coöperation of crowds andgeniuses and experts as in Childs' restaurants, can be assured in alllines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as thelabel 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 consumersor the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expertattention of the men who make them. 

The triumph of America and of the other democracies during the war hasbeen that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended uponto have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to waiton them while they whip the Germans. 

What the Air Line League proposes to do (Further details later) is toarrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer ofthe Germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way tokeep this up. 

Is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all ourexperts drop away--permanently drop away from waiting on crowds--arereally going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waitingon themselves in just the way the Germans said they would?

What the Air Line League will stand for will be that experts and crowdscan be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience andpower of waiting on each other during peace as well as war. 

Why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences andpowers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whippingthe 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 brancheswill 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 thesame machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes peoplelisten until they understand. 

There are people in every town and in every local branch of the Leaguewho have what I like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. People inmotion are not as reliable and as calculable as brass. People have wills, visions, individual emotions and lurchings of their own. When a man witha pendulum temperament sees a colossal pendulum made of crowds ofpeople--crowds of employers and crowds of workmen--swinging from oneextreme to another, the first thing he wants to do as each issue comesup, local or national, is to see to it that his own mind and each otherman's mind in these two crowds on each side of the question should gotwice through the middle, to going once to the extremes at either end. 

In other words, The National Air Line League will act to bring extremestogether--twice through the middle to once at each end--and local clubswill act as attention-swinging machines--as attention-forcing machinesbetween classes. 

I might give an illustration:

The National League in its central office in New York gets a report fromthe local branch in the town where Smith safety razors are made that theSmith Works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustainedugliness and inefficiency. The Central Office, after quietly looking intoit, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through itslocal branches reports to the ten million men shaving with Smith bladesevery morning that the workmen and managers of the Smith factories, whoare working a nominal nine hours a day, are spending three hours a day infighting with each other as to how Smith blades should be made for thepublic, and six hours a day in making the blades. The consumer is told bythe League that he is paying for nine hours' work a day on his blades andonly getting six, and that if the employers and employees in the Smithfactories could be got to listen to each other and to work together theblades could be had for three cents less apiece. 

The League will then proceed through its local branch in the Smith townto arrest the attention of the Smith workmen and the Smith employers. Itwill suggest that they get each other's point of view and sit down veryearnest and hear everything that the other side has to say and everythingthe other side wants to do, until they find some way of getting togetherand being efficient and knowing how to make Smith blades. 

If necessary in order to get the attention of the workmen and employersat the Smith Works to the desirability of their listening to each other, the users of Smith blades throughout the country will shave themselveswith their fathers' razors for three weeks. 

If the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up afactory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to theconsumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America whoshave 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 otherworkmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and isundemocratic and unfair. 

A lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all otheremployers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair. 

In a country of a hundred million people a holdup conducted by a hundredmillion people for the hundred million people is democracy. 

I employ this rather threatening illustration of the possible action ofthe League in certain cases because it suggests the power of democracywhen experts and crowds act together--the fact that democracy can reallybe made to work, that democracy can be as forcible, as immediate andpractical in dealing with autocratic classes, as autocracy can. 

But only two or three per cent of what the League in its local andnational branches would really do would be like the illustration I haveused. The power the League would have to do things like this would makedoing them unnecessary. 

The regular work of the League would largely consist in acceptinginvitations from factories, and in supplying and training experts for thepurpose of conducting in a factory mutual advertising campaigns, orstudies in attention between workmen and employers, adapted to differenttypes of factories. 

The way out for democracy in dealing with predatory wealth whichorganizes to hold up the consumers, and with predatory labor whichorganizes 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 ofan organization to be ugly, than they are its power not to need to beugly--to get what it wants with people by combining with them instead offighting them, that perhaps it might be well to dwell a moment on thefact that the power of the consumers of the country as organized in theAir Line League, to make it uncomfortable for predatory labor orpredatory capital, will never be abused. 

If what an organization is for, is to put the soul and body of a peopletogether it is compelled as a matter of course, to get its own way withthe same quietness, dignity and power it is telling other people to. Thefirst business of the Air Line League is going to be, to be believed inby everybody. The way to be believed in by everybody is for the League todo itself the thing that it talks about doing. If in this way the Leaguesoon gets itself believed in by everybody, the first thing people willnotice about the Air Line League will soon be that it is an organizationthat can lick anybody in sight with its little finger. The next thingpeople 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 beenabused because they have many of them organized their power for theexpress purpose of abusing it. 

It is highly unlikely that people will need to be afraid of the power ofthe Air Line League. An organization which exists for the express purposeof driving out of business people who get what they want by holdups, theentire activities of which are devoted to proving to people how much moreholding 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 fastthat people will feel suddenly safe. 

 * * * * *

If I were writing a platform for the Air Line League, it might be putperhaps 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 stutterout now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column ofbelief. 

The spinal column of belief in the Air Line League--the gist of ourplatform--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 sightand in working order before people who are trying to get what they wantby war, a substitute for war which gets what they want for them quickerand 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 bylistening to each other. Then compel them to listen. 

We do not believe in fighting on the one hand nor in an anæmic andtemporary thing like arbitration on the other. All that men really do inarbitration is to hire their listening done for them by other people. 

Listening which men were created to do themselves, which is done for themby others, only lasts a minute. 

The three plain spiritual brutal facts that capital and labor have toreckon 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 listento 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 beginfeeling listened to, nobody can hire them to organize to fight eachother. They organize to listen to each other. 

What the Air Line League is for in every nation, in every city, town andvillage where a branch is set up, is to organize people to listen to eachother. 

I do not think any one is going to feel obliged to feel afraid of thepower of a League, that puts daily before its own face, beforeeverybody's face--before every letter it writes, and before everything itdoes, 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 feelthat if they do not do the wrong to some one else, some one else will dothe wrong to them. In the last analysis, some way of bringing aboutconscription for universal service in business is the only way in whichwe can be assured that the criminals and exploiters in any particularline of industry will not, at least temporarily, control and ruin thebusiness. What the Air Line League would do practically would be toorganize 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 oughtnot to be done. It is not right-mindedness in people that is needed somuch as the organization of the right-mindedness so that those who arewrong can be crowded out. My idea of the general policy of the Air LineLeague would be to bring the public to coöperate with the best men ineach industry in such a way as to drive the worst ones out. Probably froma publicity point of view the best way to do would be for the League topick out the nine best factories in the country in which the laborershave a working understanding and a practical listening arrangement withtheir employers, and help the laborers in these nine factories advertiseto other laborers in the country, at specific times and places, and tocapital throughout the country, how they like it. One factory in ten, ifnecessary, could be selected for national discipline. A notorious factorycould be picked out in which the laborers had the worst listeningarrangement, and in which both the employers and employees were imposingupon each other to their own detriment and the detriment of theircustomers the most; and could be publicly disciplined by the NationalLeague acting through its local clubs everywhere. Cooperating with ninefactories and disciplining one would be my idea of the best way to getresults. All that would need to be done would be to make a list of allthe industries in the country and keep the buyers of the country informedabout 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 andfreeing the hands of the men who can run it best in the interests of thepublic--that is, run it with the lowest prices to the public, the highestprices to the wage earners, and a surplus for improvements, inventionsand 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 laborwhich has been convinced by capital should convince the others throughthe services of twenty thousand local Clubs, and skilled capital whichhas succeeded in being believed in by its labor will do the same inconvincing other capital. 

XIX

MAKING A RIGHT START

It will be seen that the idea I have in mind might be imagined as a kindof civic federation club, a super-consumers' league, and asuper-advertising club rolled into one. Rolling these three ideas intoone is a temperament, and the men who are full of the vision of what canbe done with them rolled into one, and of what is the matter with them ifthey are not rolled into one, must be the controlling powers in the neworganization. The Civic Federation has been a safe plodding vagueinstitution because it has not had a vigorous vision of itself, and hasnot been conducted by men who have a personal genius for conceiving andcarrying out coöperation between capital and labor. It has been weak, theoretical, and full of generalization because it has not had thedriving force that such a man as Schwab--some Schwab in publicity insteadof steel--could have given it. 

The Consumers' League has been a useful, suggestive institution, and hasdone work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or lessnagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision orsense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked theadvertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness thatputs things through. 

The new organizations--as a super-consumers' league, a super-advertisingclub--will converge these two ideas into a huge momentum, into a nationalorganized drive or vision of making men see together and act together, until we work out social democracy in every man's business, in everyman's store, and the daily work of every man's life. Programs which havemerely been yearned at before, which have been sleazily groped at andgeneralized over and guessed at before, will be gathered up, articulated, melted into a huge common national action by men who have the consumingpassion and genius for touching the imaginations of others. The selectionand articulation of these men in all communities is all that isnecessary. Everything is waiting and ready. First we will get the mentogether who have the fire. Then we will put fire under the boilers ofthe 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 isnot visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill inthe way I have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now mostneeds to be done for high production and team-work in the industries ofthe country. 

1. The consumer class is practically everybody. 

2. The consumer class is the most disinterested, and is identified withboth capital and labor. It is the natural umpire between them. Its lineof least resistance is to act fairly. 

3. The interests of the consumer class lead it not only to act fairly butto act energetically. The consumer class as a class will want to payextra for as few quarrels between the people it is paying to make thingsfor it as possible. The consumer always pays for all quarrels, andanything that is good for the employers and employees in the long run cannot but be good for the consumer in the long run. 

4. In the last analysis, the consumers in any given industry, if dulyorganized as capital and labor are now, will not only have thedisposition to act fairly in a quarrel between the people who are makingsomething that they buy, and the disposition to act quickly and have thefight over with, but they will have as buyers the power as a last resortto choose the factories they will deal with; to do their buying naturallyand cheaply, and from factories that are entirely in the business ofmaking goods and not half in the business of making goods and half in thebusiness of making civil war. The nationally organized consumers willnaturally advertise to people which firms take the least time off forfighting, and put all their work into the goods they expect the people topay for. 

This national advertising campaign will be operated through nationalheadquarters, coöperating with local branches organized in allmanufacturing towns and cities. The national headquarters will act as aclearing house for the materials, facts, illustrations and demonstrationswhich the local centers collect and distribute and apply, proving thatdemocracy works. 

Everything turns, in getting a thing done to-day, on seeing to it thatthe people who take it up are the people who can best get the attentionof others. 

The consumer class cannot fail because they are the best people in thecountry to compel everybody to listen. 

The consumers are the best people to get everybody to listen because theyare the best listeners. 

The consumers are the best people to start anything in America and keepit going because everybody in America cares what the consumers think, wants to be on good terms with them, and to please them, wants to beheard 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 haveexpressed an idea. They can do it again. 

Not long after the American part in the war was under way our Governmenthad the idea--which it had not had at all when it began--that if Americawas going to do her part in defeating the Germans, or if we were to comeanywhere near defeating the Germans, it would only be possible through anunexpected 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 winningthe war depended on him? Get through to each woman and each child thatsomething must be given up by each of us to defeat the Germans? TheGovernment not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately thecountry needed them--every man of them--but it wanted also to inspire thepeople and to let the people see their power themselves. They wanted toteach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to thepeople and to the world how reverently the men, women and children ofAmerica could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat theGermans. 

I fell asleep in Maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the GrandCentral Station. I came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlikeSunday we had during the war. 

A single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which I could have hadfor a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me. 

I mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent abouthuman nature. I went over and stood and looked up Madison Avenue andlooked down Madison Avenue. 

I had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundredthousand lonely spruces, and I found myself upon what seemed to me theloneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place I had ever seen uponthe earth--a corner of Madison Avenue. It seemed like a kind of vision tostand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. Ilooked 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 threethousand miles. It was as if a hundred million people had met me at thecorner and told me--one look, one silence: "Here is this street we offerup that the will of God should go by. We are going to defeat the Germanswith the silence on this street. "

I stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with theinvisible--a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came overme that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, werereaching, while I looked, across the country. I saw my people hushing athousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of Chicago, of SanFrancisco 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 theydo--that God was on the earth. 

One could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. But the firstgasolineless Sunday--five hundred thousand miles of still roads liftedthemselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, sayingfor a hundred million people, "God still reigneth. " And twenty millionlittle birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at fivehundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what hadhappened!

I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had whenI waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out ofcommuning with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and outof the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, intothe long, white silent prayer of my people--and prayed with a hundredmillion people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets ofa nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to God. 

We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during thewar. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, tothe great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-fourfull page ads in a thousand papers could do. 

Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, butin undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people--inadvertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement, eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windowsthey look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, intoprayers for a world--Mr. Garfield had few equals. 

To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habitsof a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or likebeing sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a singlestomach in the country. 

To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to ahundred million people--go in through the kitchen door of every housewith ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugarwhen they ordered eight. 

Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinkingof the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make peoplelook out of their windows on streets--thousands of miles of streets thatstretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeatthe Germans!

We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundredmillion people, the way to turn our own attention in America, theattention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany--was to interruptpeople's personal daily habits. 

The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it tothe people to whom we are trying to express it. 

The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalistsand laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up andset at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, sothat the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly anhour in the day. 

The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, inexpressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, isplain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one ofthe working ideas of the Air Line League. 

Our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen isnot to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wishwe would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us tospeak to them. Let a hundred million people do something to the peoplewho take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonderwhat 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 makethem come over to us--come all the way over to us and extract it. Thesame principle is going to be applied next by the Public Group inindustry. We will do something that will make them--capital andlabor--say: "What do you mean?"

Then let them study us and search us and search their own minds and findout. 

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, arethe 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, mayhit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is thevery 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 agrave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people whatthey ought to do. 

A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the waytelling 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 amongthe worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybodyright. 

During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the worldgets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me towrite 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 anythinghappens to my mind or to my pocket book--in a railway station, in atrolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom--wherever I am, I putit 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 fromthis book to myself. 

On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes anyfurther and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather partof a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It hasbeen written to express certain things a hundred million people wantduring the next four years from the next President, and with the end inview of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I havethought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were thehundred million people. 

I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that ifthe hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, Ireally 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 callhelplessly "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 canprove it and do something that will prove it. 

And the two great political parties in their coming conventions--one orboth of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance totry. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go withpeople. 

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 aprayer 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 connectedup 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 ahundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as ahuman being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table--by a reallysimple thing like there being so many of me?

I am human--a plain fellow human being--and if the United States wouldact 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 forhim to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problemwould 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 toone human being being human--boil it down to a baby even--and what itwould do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep onbeing 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 beingas human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being onCommittees. 

 * * * * *

The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer awayfrom his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled himhome through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there. 

The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying theywould run the factory themselves. 

A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried runningthe factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house toask him to come back to his desk. 

He told the Committee he would not return with them. He said that acommittee could not get him. The thousand men had rolled him away throughjeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wantedhim 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 someimagination about each other and went to work. 

If I were a nation, the first question I would ask would be, "Why botherwith wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic Russianway 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'simaginations. 

The issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which growslogically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modernindustrial 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 thenext row with his employee. 

The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at amahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeingalongside him in the next row. 

To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find someway of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of whathe does at his desk. 

A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laboriousto a laboring man. 

In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer hasto 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 heis and see the perspiration on his brow. 

The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make hismahogany 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, thefirst ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing inbehalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on amassive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize toworkmen the way they work. 

Very soon now, everywhere--much harder than hoeing in the next row--withthe sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their deskshoeing their workmen's imaginations. 

The other main point in the book the hundred million people would writeif they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. I would devotethe second ten chapters I think, not to Mahogany Desks, or to the buttonson them directing machines, but to Cogs. 

The second great point the hundred million people will have to meet andwill have to see a way out for in their book, is the way a Cog feelsabout being a Cog. 

If a Cog in a big locomotive could take a day off and go around and watchthe drivewheel and pistons--watch the smoke coming out of the smokestackand the water scooping up from between the rails--watch the three hundredfaces in the train looking out of the windows and the great world boomingby, and if the Cog could then say, "I belong with all this and I amhelping and making it possible for all these people to do and to have allthis!" And if the Cog could then slip back and go on just being acog, --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 ademocracy-machine in distinction from a king-machine. 

What is more, if a Cog did this, or if arrangements were studied out forsome little inkling of a chance to do it, he would be making his job as aCog 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 allowedto do its work in this way. God created him when He drove in one rivet tofeel the whole of the ship. It is feeling the whole of the ship thatmakes being a Cog worth while. 

The great work of the American people in the next four years is to workout for American industry the fate of the Cog in it. 

The fate of democracy turns next on our working out a way of allowing aCog some imagination, or some substitute for imagination in its dailywork--something that the rest of the Cog--the whole man in the Cog canhave, which will bring his spirit, his joy and his power to bear on hisdaily work. 

This is the second of the two main points the hundred million peoplewould make in their book if they had time. 

These two main points--getting labor to see how a mahogany desksweats--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 aregoing to be made successfully and quickly in proportion as they are takenup in the right spirit and with a method--a practical human workingmethod which so expresses and dramatizes that right spirit that it willbe impossible for people not to respond to it. 

I am not undertaking in this part of my book to make an inquiry as towhat the right spirit is, or what the right method is that a hundredmillion people ought to adopt. 

I am a somewhat puzzled and determined person and I am instituting outloud a searching inquiry as to what I am going to do myself and what theprinciples and methods are that I should be governed by in doing mypersonal part, and conducting my own mind and judgment toward themovements and the men about me. 

To avoid generalizing, I might as well give my idea the way it came tome--one man's idea of how one man feels he wants to act when being liedto. 

I do not say in so many words, I _was_ lied to. I do not know. A greatmany people every day find themselves in situations where they do notknow. The question I am asking of myself is, how can a man or a publictake a fair human and constructive attitude when one does not know andcannot know for the time being, all that it is to the point to know?

A stupendous amount of red-flagism, unrest and expensive unreasonablenesswould be swept away in this country if we all had in mind to use forourselves when called for the following rules for being lied to. 

(Not that I am going to lumber people's minds up by numbering them asrules 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 andsaid: "Charles Schwab is the Prince of Liars. He says one thing aboutlabor and does another. " He went on to say things he said other peoplesaid. 

There are two courses of action to take about Charles Schwab's being thePrince 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 hepreaches than to stop his preaching. 

Everything turns for the American people to-day on being constructive, ondealing with facts as they are, on using the men we have, and on gettingthe most out of the men we have. 

To get the most out of Charles Schwab throw around him expectation andmalediction and then let him take his choice. 

Charles Schwab in saying what he says about the new spirit in whichcapital has got to deal with labor is rendering a great, unexpected, sensational and indispensable service to labor and to capital. It is apity to throw this public confession of capital to labor, and in behalfof labor away. It would be a still greater pity to see labor itselfthrowing it away. 

If I could let myself be cooped up as a writer in any one class in thiscountry to-day, and if it were my special business to take sides withlabor, the thing I would try to do first with Charles Schwab, instead ofundermining what he says and making what he says mean nothing--would beto coöperate with him--back him up--back him up with the public--back himup with the stockholders and the people in his mills, until he makes whathe says mean three times as much. 

Then I would see to it if I could, that he says four times as much. Iwould try, if I could, to keep Charles Schwab steadily at it, claimingmore and more for labor. Then catching up more and more to CharlesSchwab, doing more and more, and compelling his partners to do more andmore of what he says. 

Charles Schwab has fifty or a hundred thousand or so partners, ofcourse--stockholders he has to educate. 

They have to be educated in public. He is not insincere because he hasnot educated them all in a minute. 

V

GETTING ONE MAN RIGHT

There are certain facts which make me believe in Schwab as an asset forthe 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 notyet know which I could look up and use, but the most valuable facts touse 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 befair to a nation. 

If Charles Schwab is what ---- says he is, if Charles Schwab is doing orwinking while it is being done at the thing ---- says he is--he is anincredibly under-witted man--stupid about the public, about labor andabout capital--and, what is the most reckless of all--stupid in behalf ofhimself. 

It is rather a hard nut to crack--Charles Schwab's being stupid. I cannotunderstand why people--why a man like ---- would apparently ratherbelieve that Charles Schwab is stupid than to believe that there must besome other way of explaining him and of explaining what he has heard saidabout him. 

If what ---- says is true about Mr. Schwab, he is not only a stupid manbut a ruined man. 

In the colossal outbreak of public knowledge coming to us now, nothingwill be able to keep Charles Schwab from to-morrow on, from being astupendous 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 nottrue. 

If true, they are qualified by facts and by delaying conditions for whichall intelligent men whether identified with capital or labor would beglad 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 experimentswith men and methods its experiments are fake experiments. 

People who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who dothings. 

VI

GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT

My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals andreformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extremeradical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extremeconservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to andwhat a man does, viz. : his intuition and judgment with regard to humannature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked peopleand make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh andself-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrongthe cold actual facts as to what particular people mean--what they arelike, 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 theextreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. Thequick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come toterms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about oneanother, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructivejob on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic humanbeings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are heldup and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these humanbeings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, byengineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature. 

These personalities to unlock a nation with--to make a hundred millionmen believe together and act together should be picked out, men likeCharles Schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yeteverybody 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 hundredmillion. Make true beliefs about picked out men--typical men we havethousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives. 

If the American people can come to know and interpret fifty men--if theycan get fifty sample men right--they will then be able to use these fiftymen every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlockteam work with, with all the others. People will have something to workfrom and something to work toward, in judging what they can do withemployers and with workmen around them. 

Then we will have team work and civilization--we will have a democracythe Germans would like to be asked to belong to. 

VII

ENGINEERS IN FOLKS

The most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunderspeople make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. Theother facts than the facts about people--about how people feel and aregoing to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine trainingand education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people. The facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to getmost, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging oneanother. 

We have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are offon their facts about one another. One of the first things business menare going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about humannature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with byexperts--by the general recognition and employment of experts in humannature--of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men toone another. 

If everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as theyreally 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 theworld, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick outbeing a lawyer backwards. 

The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert inconducting people's fights for them. 

My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in thespecial state the world is in just now, a new profession should at oncebe started--a profession in which any man who went into it, would beoccupied in being a lawyer backwards. 

(I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to mostpeople, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of--becauseeverybody would see--a whole nation would see all in one unanimousminute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like. )

Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by thethings they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuousad. --their huge national international display ad. Just now of what alawyer is like--of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, isthe United States Senate. 

It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to mostpeople, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or threehundred thousand men being lawyers backwards--two or three hundredthousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as expertseverybody 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, orpay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course hewill change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put itover. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, itis not impossible he will make your enemies love you. 

My idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what itis worth--not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as aplain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for gettingthe 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 andif I had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in makingpeople understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in makingpeople afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be themore practical thing for me to do. 

If I could go down town and engage a man at so much a year who would bean expert in making me understand myself and in making me make fun ofmyself, so that I could get myself into fairly good shape for otherpeople to understand, it would be still more practical. 

I would soon find myself after the first few séances with the man I washiring to sit down with me and be a lawyer backwards to me--I would soonfind 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 wouldbe able in a minute to cut down to the quick with any man I met, --cutdown to the quick and get what I wanted on any subject I took up, becausenobody 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 theworld is going to be reformed it is going to be by men who--either bydoing it personally, or by hiring somebody else to help them do it, havereformed themselves. 

My own personal observation is, so far, that when I set out to see thingsagainst myself I seem to need somehow, a great deal of assistance. 

In such a naturally disagreeable mussy job of course, instead of going tomy friends, to people one goes out to dine with, I feel there ought to besome regular professional person one could go to, some more noble refinedsort of spiritual hired man--make an appointment by telephone, go down toa room down town on the way to one's office and then just as a plainmatter of course be done off for the day, be done over, be put in shapefor 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 usedto it, one would soon be in shape to go to one's employers and let themput in some touches, go to one's employees, go to anybody and everybodyright and left. One would soon get so that one could learn something fromeverybody. One would take points even from relatives. 

The main difficulty in a thing like this would be one that would come atthe start, the difficulty of getting people to look upon undergoing thetruth about themselves, respectfully and seriously and like an operation. 

No amateur or friend could get anybody started. The only way to begin isto have some special expert to go to, some special expert with a longstring of notable moral patients, men who have succeeded in business byseeing through themselves more, and seeing through themselves quicker andoftener than other people do. You hear of some especially good man who isbeing a lawyer backwards practicing regularly with great success. Youobserve his patients from day to day and see how the truth works. Thenyou 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 theytell it, nobody pays for it. Most people neither take the truth noranything else in this world seriously if it is free. People get more, themore they want it. And the more they want it, the more they show it bywanting to pay for it. 

This is why I suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be aregular profession. There is going to be a tremendous demand for goingdown town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see howgoing down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with peoplein one's work. 

The lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies abouthimself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free aman from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis ofhimself 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 anoperation. If a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how hehas got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to aman's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in orderto have any one willing to let him live?

We have operations on all our other inner organs. The things that aredone to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personaland intimate things. And if people will let themselves be cut open andoperated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men--hundredsof thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to beoperated on so that they can earn something to eat? Nine out of ten ofthe things that keep people from earning a living as they should or asthey might, are truths against themselves that have never been operatedon. 

IX

GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE FACTS

The first thing the man in the White House for the next four years isgoing to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as theyreally 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 statementof what the president and the government proposed to do and what policythey proposed to adopt to keep Labor and Capital from being off on theirfacts about each other. 

There are two policies to choose from. 

First Policy: Have Capital tell Labor what is the matter with Labor, andhave 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 toit. 

The way to get the utmost possible attention to a truth is to have peopleone does not expect it from telling it. The way to advertise the sins ofCapital is to have Capital tell them. Employers and capitalists canattract twenty times as much attention in telling things that are thematter with them, and will be believed forty times as much. And they notonly can tell the facts against themselves more fairly, but while theyare telling the facts against themselves they are in a position to changethem. They can tell facts against themselves with one hand and changethem with the other. Or they can begin changing them--begin getting laborto help them change them. 

If I had to save the world in a week or rather get assurance in a weekthat it could be saved, I would get all the people in it to agree for ayear to read each other's papers. Have every man read two papers. Wewould start up for America the national Parallel Column Habit. Each manby himself daily putting his own little world and other people's worldalongside until they got used to it, and then together. 

There is no limit to what reading the wrong papers would not do for thisnation. It is not a matter to argue about. It is a mere plain matter offact in ordinary every day psychology. The veriest tyro in humanengineering can see it, --that the way to get a truth noticed aboutCapital or Labor, the way to make a truth of some use and get it believedand acted on, is to have the wrong people tell it. 

Judge Gary could say some of the things Mr. Gompers is saying a greatdeal better than Mr. Gompers could. 

There is one thing I am going to do when I put this up to the people. Iam 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 engineerin folks and in the way human nature works. I don't know as I would mindpeople having fine religious feelings about it, when they did it, if theyliked, but I would prefer to call it and prefer to introduce it assimple, plain, hard-headed publicity. 

The most natural quick universal short-cut to peace, to different groupsof people in America getting their facts right and getting them quick anddealing with each other as they really are, is to have people go aroundin America from now on, telling truths everywhere, who have just gotthem--people the truths look prominent on. 

X

THE FOOL KILLERS

The gist of the labor problem simmers down to our making some adequateuniversally understood provision, generally resorted to by everybody as amatter 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 themselvesand who are trying to fool one another, are going to observe, is thattheir competitors in their own industry--the employers and employees intheir own industry who are not fooled by themselves and who are nottaking time to fool one another, are producing more, cheaper and bettergoods than they can. 

Things that take years to straighten out, straighten out in weeks whenpeople on both sides who have stopped fooling themselves, get togetherand look at the facts over each other's shoulders. All that is necessaryis to get the thing started--looking at the facts over each other'sshoulders. People who do not want to start to look at facts in this wayshould call in a specialist until they do. 

Labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital humannature another. They both believe on both sides what they want to, unlessthey go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitablehabit 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 bywhat people believe is the truth. It is what the I. W. W. Extremistsbelieve is the truth, which constitutes the important fact--the factwhich has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. The truthabout Judge Gary's attitude or Charles Schwab's, toward labor unions, makes no difference if nobody believes it, or if the labor unions don'tbelieve it. As long as the labor unions are fooling themselves andbelieving what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact wayto deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. Thefundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off ontheir facts about themselves and believe what they want to aboutthemselves. Naturally having begun with this they branch out and believewhat they want to about anybody. 

To this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we haveobviously got to make provision for in modern American life, ispractically a new profession--regular professional persons everywhere inall cities, and in all the different industries and in the highlyspecialized groups each with their special and different techniques, whoare experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves andothers of believing what they want to about themselves. 

XI

THE WHISPERERS

A very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in thehabit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their officedoors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves. 

A very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in thehabit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficienttype are whispering around to one another against themselves. 

One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrialdeadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the peoplewho 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 arewhispering, --the whisperers on the other side--they will stop shouting tolisten. 

The whole industrial situation narrows down to this, --might be put intotwo words by a hundred million people to-day, to Capital and Labor, "SwapWhispers!"

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 goto, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other peopleand be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as akind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almosttragical subject. But something has made me want to begin my idea in thisway. 

In strained situations between people--situations in which one seespeople getting all worked up and fine, noble and wild-eyed aboutthemselves, I am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, mostimmediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one--some onewho feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and carelesslaugh. 

To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed ornot, would be practical. 

Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation betweenCapital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola. 

And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolousin Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation everhad, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his EmancipationProclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetichumanness, 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 onthe President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nicecosy 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 theywould not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and wenthome--stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room--if Mr. Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deeplighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President'sConference might have been saved. 

The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen fromthe point of view of God or of common people, many of the men init, --most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being veryfunny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could seethrough the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference whoconducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of factabout human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would lookin a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless livelyand equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Laborgroup, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look tothe public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings thancould be helped. 

The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our wholenation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp--astate in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybodythought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, orthe willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincolnwould have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got peoplestarted laughing at one another until they got caught laughing atthemselves. 

When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, asif 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 OliverHerford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I doclaim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remarkrecalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompersand the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic andgrand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ageswere not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they werenot making history at all, or that the history they were making would allhave to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about thecapital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear littlegirls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought wasprettiest, about themselves. 

Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not doanything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor'semotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believeabout itself. 

With Capital not yet grown up--not yet really capable (as the reallymature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creativeuse of criticism, --incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and ofmaking fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the sameundeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as anational dramatization, --a rather loud and theatrical acting out beforean amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country asinstitutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear, superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonousstrikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for fortyyears, had made us suspect they were!

For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things thatbothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moralgarbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them inwhat seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on thisnation--called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid forcarting 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 bypassing laws and heaping up embarrassments and penalties. 

We can let them see how much better they can make things by sticking themon to one another and letting them discipline one another. 

We can make fun of both of them quietly to themselves, keepquiet-hearted, matter of fact, full of realism, humor, relaxation andnaturalness and deal with Capital and Labor as Lincoln would, by gettinglaughing and listening started. 

Then let them laugh at themselves. 

America should arrange to have Judge Gary, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Gompers gettogether on a desert island and face things out. 

A great deal of capital in this country--especially the best of it, isalready seeing, and already acting on facts about itself it has notwanted to believe. It is already seeing that it cannot carry off withLabor 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 atitself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that theonly thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific andeconomic, smile at its airs with Labor and the public, and lay themaside. 

If Capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietlyfor 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 mosthuman, attractive and contagious way will find a hundred million peoplehanding over to it the power and the leadership of the country. 

To whichever side it comes first, to show the most shrewdness, the mostfearlessness, the most generosity in seeing facts against itself, willcome the honor of the first victory. 

The first victory either side will be allowed by the people, is itsvictory over itself. 

People in this country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capableof self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, can have anythingthey want. 

XIII

FOOLING ONESELF IN POLITICS

The same thing that everybody can see is going to happen in business inthis country from now on--the pushing forward--the victory over allothers in business of the men who are not fooled about themselves isgoing to be seen happening ten times over in politics. 

The leading symptom of the mood of the people, the magnificent blanketpolitical secret that covers all the other secrets of the comingconventions and elections, the dominating fact of the next man's nextfour years in The White House, is the thing that is going to be done bythe people from to-day on, to politicians who are fooled aboutthemselves. 

One has but to mention one or two and a nation sees it. 

Any little natural impression my fellow citizens may have had at thebeginning of this article that in putting forward my idea of being alawyer backwards, or the idea that we must all practice at being lawyersbackwards to ourselves, I am putting forward just a gay pleasantthoughtlet, instead of a grave and pressing national issue, an issue onwhich the fate of a people is at stake, fades away when one really beginsto think of how the idea would really work out if tried on particularpoliticians. 

Everybody can pick out his own of course, but I am inclined to believejust at the moment, that if there was a good man everybody in this nationknew of who was being a lawyer backwards--say in New York or London--aman who had a big practice and who had a fine record in bracing men up tofight themselves and not to be fooled about themselves, the man that mostpeople 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 beHenry Cabot Lodge. 

For six long weary months now, the main and international fact Americaand the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a mancalled Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself. 

Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see, --their verycats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Washingtoncan see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips HenryCabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire tomake Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in alonely back seat of the World. 

But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundredmillion people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry CabotLodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles likean aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses hispale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentionsWilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or tothe world after all is that he--Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, hastaken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire tosit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and internationalemotion out of it--every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration--into a greatnational stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twentygenerations like attendant angels hovering around him--around Henry CabotLodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him forsaving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jawsof a prowling League of Nations!

It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and publicmoment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of onesingle man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soulbefore the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived. 

It would be of no use to argue--not even for a hundred million people toargue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to doto argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge'sidea 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, aman who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a manmagnificently obsessed--a man holding himself ready any minute of any dayin the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipiceof 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 wasmeasuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leaguesof nations of his own twenty years ago--who would have believed that aman with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind inthis way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its owndesires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of hisnation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into anational, into an international helplessness like this?

My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at thepresent moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in thepsycho-analysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to getthings, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and fromnow on, in the men they choose to get them. 

The ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled aboutthemselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, arematched on every side in the world of politics. 

The personal trait of great political as well as industrial value forwhich the people of this country are going to look in the men they allowto be placed over them--the men they give power and command to, is thequality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts inpeople. What we are going to look for in a man is having an engineeringand not a sentimental attitude toward his own mind and the minds ofothers. We are going to give power and place to the man who has a certaineagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certainsuppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. The man we aregoing to look past everybody for and pick to be a President or a Senatorafter this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his ownparty or by his own class, who is not fooled about himself, who keepswithout swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunkline 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, andbefore very many offices have really been opened up where one can go inand have one's mind changed ten dollars' worth instead of having itpoured, soothed and petted, a good many of us are going to find itnecessary to practice on ourselves and in a humble way as amateurs, doany little odd jobs we can on ourselves at home. 

We nearly all of us have it in us--we the hundred million people--to belike Henry Cabot Lodge, on a less national scale, any minute. 

I say over to myself breathlessly between these very words while I writethem down about Henry Cabot Lodge, that beautiful thought John Bunyanhad, "Except for the grace of God" a wife, five friends and a sense ofhumor, there goes Gerald Stanley Lee!

I have made myself say this over practically every day while writing thisarticle (I have had to write it), and when I was in the same town HenryCabot Lodge is, last week, saw him snooping around the Senate, so pureand high and from the Back Bay, so serene in his courtly chivalrous dreamabout himself, I got taken up every time--I do not deny it--on the samemonotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the samemonotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then I wouldstand there (He is my own Senator) with his pass for The Senate in mypocket . .. I would stand and watch him, --watch him walking through thelordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought JohnBunyan had about the murderer, "Except for the grace of God there goesetc. , etc. " Everybody fill in for himself!

The essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human natureis that all the people who have any are very much alike. The best we cando about it--most of us--is to recognize the fact that in spite of thethought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably aregoing to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical workingdifference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselvesin the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, moredesperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regulararrangements, perhaps, --when something in us starts us up into beingLodges, --for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselvesin time. 

Here is Charles Evans Hughes for instance, who from the day he was bornhates a Socialist from afar off, --a man who never had in his younger daysperhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thingCharles Evans Hughes does before anybody can say Jack Robinson, the veryfirst minute he reads in his paper that the New York Assembly has refusedto give their seats to five Socialist members because they areSocialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big nationaljerk draw his national self together, and before the country is halfwaked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an actof sympathy and protest on behalf of American Socialists from the lastman most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that thenarrow partisans of the Assembly itching with superiority, sweating withpropriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great Chamberin Albany, should take the Socialist members they had waved out of theroom simply for belonging to the Socialist party, and conduct them backto their seats as the accredited representatives (until provedindividually unfit) of citizens of the United States and let them sitthere as a national exhibit of the way in which a great and free people, who are believing in themselves every day, can believe in themselvesenough to listen to anybody, to make regular arrangements in Albany andeverywhere as a matter of course for listening to people with whom theydo not agree, without fear and without frothing at the mouth. 

Mr. Hughes is as anxious to do anything he can during one lifetime todiscourage Socialism as Henry Cabot Lodge is to discourage WoodrowWilson, but the reason that the American people have been glad to haveCharles Evans Hughes as Justice of the Supreme Court, the reason thatthey came within three inches of making him President of the UnitedStates is that in an eminent degree he is a man who has made elaborate, conclusive and habitual arrangements with his own mind for not beingdeceived by Charles Evans Hughes, for being a lawyer backwards, forfighting himself, for stepping up out of being a mere lawyer and sittingsternly on the Bench of the Supreme Court, against himself. 

Of course I am not writing this article to point out to a hundred millionpeople with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superiorI and a hundred million other people are to Henry Cabot Lodge and to theway for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and beinginternationally fooled about himself. The special point I seek to make isthat as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking outinto millions of Lodges any minute, that we should make the most of ournew national chance of our power as a people just now--just before thetwo great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong, to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard againstourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to The WhiteHouse, --from whatever walk of life he comes, --a man who will have himselfmagnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the peopleinto his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own class, orput down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul--a manwho 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 whobacked Mr. Hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightenedworld, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasionand being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fairto divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those whovoted to back Mr. Hughes were, and those who did not, were not equallyexposed to being fooled about themselves. Mr. Hughes and his followerswere probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular andstanding arrangements with themselves against themselves and who actedmore quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish theyhad acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes. 

In the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next fouryears to justify democracy--to justify the power of the human spirit tobe free, generous, noble and just in self-government, the power of men ofdiffering classes, of differing groups and interests to live in orderlygood will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last agreat nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot doit, --all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being ablind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our notbeing full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on whatwe do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand forseeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men torepresent 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 byopening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting usin our sins. 

XV

TECHNIQUE FOR NOT BEING FOOLED BY ONESELF

The next twenty-eight pages of this book might be entitled: "An Articlethat Expected to Appear in the _Saturday Evening Post_. "

When the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to beread 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 isgetting the next eleven chapters for nothing--that they have not beenpaid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether the_Saturday Evening Post_ would approve or believe what I believe, orfeel hurt if other people believe it. 

 * * * * *

The suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwardsis started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doingwhat we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs ofcriticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matterof an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself. 

It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power ofself-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secretof increased production in factories, or power over others in business, and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, Isay it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about havingor exercising this power of self-criticism?

If the readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ were to come to me in abody 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 toacquire a technique--a kind of general amateur technique for not beingfooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holdingback from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked atall, I have a faint hopeful idea--I feel it at this moment floating aboutmy head--a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they oughtto do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thingoff. 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 tothem. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in thiscountry 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 countryeverybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not beingfooled by himself--some one man all our people have a perfectpassion, --almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to makemy idea alluring with him. 

Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson ofAustin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States. 

It is true that other readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ besidesMr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr. Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great dailycommon intimate personal experience of a hundred million people. Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office--everybody whowaits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through withthem, 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 otherpeople do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly beexcelled. 

I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example ofthree things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in thetechnique of self-criticism. 

1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself. 

2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticizehim. 

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 fromPhiladelphia to Northampton, Massachusetts, could be written down--if allthe details of just what happened to it slumped into corners onplatforms--what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, inmail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silentsidings in the night, in depots, in junctions--if all the long story ofthis one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nailand could be put in that little hole of information stamped on theenvelope--what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would doto Albert Sidney Burleson?

The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it everyday, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along theMississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, wavingtheir autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, wouldpoint to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave ofunanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Washington byten-thirty A. M. , start him off from the station by his own rural parcelpost to Austin, Texas, before night. 

I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quickerthan if he were sent like a mere letter. 

Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these presentquarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all ina minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the mostnational thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would beto take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, themost splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country canproduce. 

Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants tobelieve and who keeps fooled about himself. 

An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas abouthow money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he wasplaced by the people at the head of the people's Post Office, he wouldsave their money for the people instead of running their Post Office forthem. 

This is all that has happened. This was Mr. Burleson's preconception ofwhat he was for and what a Post Office was for and not a hundred millionpeople could pry him out of it. Mr. Burleson ran his Post Office to suithimself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in beingsuited with their Post Office had to take anything that was left overthat they could get after Mr. Burleson was suited with it. 

Mr. Burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conceptionof Albert Sidney Burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and sofar as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years inthinking 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 Iwant my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America wouldagree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to haveit, please, deliver our letters for us. 

If the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the lastminute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesdaynight and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in thecompositor's hands on Thursday morning--should take as has happenedbefore, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with itsspecial ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any onesuppose I would do?

Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in anothercolumn on Mr. Burleson. 

But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of the _Post_ areboth 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'clockWednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the nextmorning 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 sixo'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollarticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire aseat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford forthe night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in themorning, 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 athree 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 tobe, ship myself back to New York as the empty, as the container thisarticle came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars andthirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with AlbertSidney Burleson will be over. 

Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Stationand 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 Icame with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burlesonhas about himself--four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feethigh all across the top. 

NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERSFROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS. 

Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, orHomer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably tocamels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousandmighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand milesof sunsets across the land. 

But I must say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read itas I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth toThirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as Istood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I wasspending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailingfor 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 notwant to be fooled about, to four or five million people. I can not helpfeeling that out of all these four or five million people, at the veryleast anyway there really must be three million and five hundred thousandwho 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 tothem. Of course anybody can see I am not equal to it, but it does giveone a chance, and it gives the book a chance before I am through, to havesome sense in it. 

I cannot help thinking what Albert Sidney Burleson, who has a hundredmillion people to choose from, who has millions of people who are lessfooled about him than he is, to catch up to every day, after all theseseven 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 thefirst thought that would come to Mr. Burleson as to any man when he findshe is being criticized--that people in fifty-three thousand Post Officesare criticizing him and acting with him as if he were fooled abouthimself, is the automatic thought of self-defense. The second thought, which is what one would hope for from a General, even a PostmasterGeneral, is that one resents it in oneself, that in an important openingfor a man like being called foolish, one stops all one's thinking-works, and slumps ingloriously, automatically and without a quaver intoself-defense. 

One would think a man who could get to be a Postmaster General would havethe presence of mind when he says "Ouch!" to a nation that steps on histoes, to fix his face quick, smile and say, "Thank you! Thank you! I willsee what there is in this!"

Why should a man when God is blessing him as he does Mr. Burleson, evenout of the mouths of his enemies, butt in in the way he does andinterrupt truths with enough juice in them to make one Burleson, even oneBurleson into twenty great men before a nation's eyes?

A whole Cabinet--at least a whole Democratic Cabinet--could have beenmade time and time again out of the great-man-juice, the truth-pepsingreat men are made out of, this country has wasted on Burleson in thepast seven years. 

XVIII

CAUSES OF BEING FOOLED ABOUT ONESELF

I would like to give a diagnosis of this quite common disease, touch onthe causes and see how they can be removed. 

There seem to be, speaking roughly and as far as my own observation ofpsychology goes, six main ways in which the average man is fooled abouthimself and needs to change his mind about himself. 

He is possessed with loco-mindedness or spotty-mindedness, sees things asthey look to one kind or group of people--sees things in spotlights ofpersonality, of place or time--all the rest black. 

Or he suffers from what one might call Lost-Mindedness--is always gettinglost in anything he does, somewhere between the end and the means. Heeither loses the means in contemplating with unholy contemplation theend, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means. 

The Habit of Flat-Thinking--of not thinking things out in fourdimensions. 

The Habit of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I haveto say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my ideaout with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson forinstance, it would be evaporated thinking. 

The Habit of Not Having any Habits--leaving out standardized elements inthings and not being machine-minded enough. 

Automatism, or Machine-Mindedness. 

These six forms of being fooled by oneself all boil down in the end--intheir final cause, I suspect to the last one, to automatism or lack ofconscious control of the mind. 

XIX

LOCO-MINDEDNESS

Loco-mindedness in a Post Office consists in Mr. Burleson's running thePost 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 thatare 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 outtheir tongues and chewing on one end of the pen, and slaving away andsweating ink on the other, scrooge out a letter once in three weeks thatthey have put off six months. 

I have no grudge against these people, but it seems to me that running aPost Office exclusively for them as Mr. Burleson does, is a mistake. Evenif they constitute ninety-eight per cent of the people, they only mailone-tenth of one per cent of the letters. They may not care whether ornot their letters arrive as a matter of course, the way they used to inour Post Office until a little while ago, as accurately as telegrams intheir first mail in the morning, but probably they would not feel hurt ifthey did. But millions of people in business who write scores or hundredsof letters a day, who find themselves being put off with a Post Officethat is run apparently for people who write two letters a month, arehurt. 

In Northampton, Massachusetts, the letter from New York one used toreceive at breakfast, hangs around a junction somewhere now, waits for aletter three hundred miles away--a letter from Pittsburgh to catch up toit, and they both come together sweetly and with Mr. Burleson's smile onafter luncheon at half past two in the afternoon. 

I do not deny that from the narrower business point of view of running aPost Office the way some women would run--or rather used to run a parlorstore--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 runsuccessfully and rightly on how much of its customer's money it can saveon each purchase. 

But the point is that if I go into a store in Northampton and cannot getthe things I want there I go into some other store. 

I cannot go out from our Post Office in Northampton and go over and getwhat 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 bea twenty-four hour affair is now half a week. 

Letters thousands of men in New York used to receive in their offices inthe early morning before interviews began and when they had time to readletters and to jot an answer to them at the foot of the page, are notreceived and placed before them for their answers until the late morningor early afternoon when they have other things to do and cannot even readthem. 

So one's letters wait over a day--a night and a day, or until one getsback from Chicago. 

Why is it Mr. Burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of theconvenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business inAmerica and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himselfpoints out to people how he has saved them fifty cents?

Why is it that Mr. Burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in ourown 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 dobusiness at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it coststhem. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store thatlovingly 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-carPost Office and want Mr. Burleson to save their money for them. Millionsof people would make more money by not having their Post Office savemoney for them. Mr. Burleson insists his business is to save people'smoney 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 heis spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the PostOffice 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 isloco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his businessinto 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 dotheir 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 themas a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what Ithink other people think, and what I think God thinks, and put themtogether 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 thefirst 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 tothink in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what otherpeople 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 andself-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy andwinning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem asif it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-ratebusiness idea--its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doinganything more for the people than can be helped--if Mr. Burleson wouldstop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousandPost Offices think. 

There have been days--with my half-past two letters when if I had RogerBabson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's PostOffice 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 aboutthemselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the endin the means. 

To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my ideaonce more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of uswhich we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many thingstogether. 

I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit downseriously 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 aboutthe two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country likethis, a two-cent stamp means. 

Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look atit before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stampbelieves. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for mycountry--like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature ofthe 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 firstone, 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 welllocated as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents. 

In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it hasto put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles fromNew York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking isconcerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than tothink three. The country pays for it for him. 

America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp thatit is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have everyman, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freightfor his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington asRock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers. 

The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, thepatriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and whenAlbert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone systemfor ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers andmagazines in which a whole nation thinks together--with one huge nationalthoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes tenthousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in NewYork or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down intotheir own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all thesethousand 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 nationalthinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, thesingle-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling tothink together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, thepeople will never forget. 

Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation hasgot to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking abird'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 thinkof it Saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand milesreading 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--thatis to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happinessof not being fined for it. 

A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with theinconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul--what he knows andfeels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to betold it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has aright not to be told he will have to read something published within arim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell--that his soul has got tolive with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on. 

As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, theflag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, butit does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the littlehumble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make peoplefeel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were inthe one same big room together, in the one great living-room of thenation. 

There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to payfor making men of all classes and of all regions in this country thinkand hope and pray together in the one great living-room of thenation--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 thingcan be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a greatnational magazine where three million people can show they are doing it. 

And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a greatnational 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 everywherewho get together there every Saturday night, and tells them to go homeand read the _Hampshire County Gazette_. 

It is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end inthe means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiringexample of what not to do, and of how it works to do it--to lose the endin the means, I have to mention it--not in behalf of Mr. Burleson, but inbehalf of all of us. 

XXII

I had not intended to illustrate my idea of amateur technique inself-criticism quite so much with Mr. Burleson, especially as I stand fora bi-partisan point of view. I wish there were some way of dealing withMr. Burleson as a Republican for fifteen minutes and then as a Democratfor fifteen minutes, and in dealing as I am, in what might be called anationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us, I only hope my Democratic friends will give me credit for making use ofMr. Burleson not as a Democrat (it is just their luck that he's aDemocrat), but as a specimen human being I am trying to get hundreds ofthousands of Republicans that are just like him, not to be like anylonger. I have only used our Postmaster General in this rather personalfashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time whenwe are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves heconstitutes, in plain sight a kind of national Common Denominator of thesins 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 thereason Mr. Burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most peopleso through fifty-three thousand Post Offices day after day, all day, andnight after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself. 

But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can lookup 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 changeour 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 seethem in other people. 

I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six millionpeople who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a fewscattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they mayhave moments of being like me in this. 

Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in arather weak and watery way--that is: we usually begin with seeing howunbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin discipliningour faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and thenbefore we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in otherpeople we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone inourselves. 

Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does anygood. 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 soperhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chasethem back to their own homes from the Post Office. 

There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, andcertain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooledabout 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 thousandwistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooledabout himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a littlepersonally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our betterbusiness moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most completeexhibit of what is the matter with American business. 

I leave with the reader the Thought, that probably the majority of menwho have been watching Mr. Burleson for seven years wasting fifty-threethousand Post Offices, and all the fifty-three thousand Post Officescould do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down totheir offices next Monday morning, and instead of worming criticism outof everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody whoapproaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the businessto produce the impression that they are perfect and that nobody can tellthem anything--will just sit there all glazed over with complacencycemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, ashard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautifulshining porcelain-lined bathtubs. 

 * * * * *

It would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business forsome of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of tellingthese men--if some warning could be given to us not to bother withthem--if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted upso that one could tell them at sight--by their heads looking the way theyare--by their being bald--by their having brilliantly non-porousheads--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, Iknow, the mind the most brilliantly open--which fairly glistens insidewith eagerness, glistens outside, too. 

The only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porousmind, 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 byoneself, all practically boil down to one in the end--one cause which wehave to recognize and avoid--automatism, the lack of conscious control ofthe mind--letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one'shead. 

The main central cause operating with people when they are being fooledabout themselves, is machine-mindedness. 

A man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes andhabits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him afool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of beingfooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mindback into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as arational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconsciousself take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody howperfect he is. 

Everybody knows how it is. 

XXV

NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS

Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successfulin business--the men who give people what they want, and the men who makepeople want things they have thought they did not want before. Movingpictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines andlocomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas andeven babies--have all been brought to pass by convincing other humanbeings that they do not know what they want, by a process which isessentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affectionwhich arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves tothemselves. 

I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making peopledifferent because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anythingyou do to most people that makes them different, improves them. 

But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from mygood opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men whoprosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted, are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on peoplemore and more and better--things they want already. 

The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge ofhimself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himselfand who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am aninventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannotremember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I washere, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would bebored to death handing out to people things I know they want, orpresenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would beshallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not makepeople want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are notsuccessful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the stateand are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if itwas a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would askthem to do. 

On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic economiccrisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, arebeing brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks inbusiness are especially called for--a time when practically millions ofpeople have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, Ihave thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters thatfollow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what peoplewho have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find themawkward, 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 othernations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for gettinga world to want it to get--its own way. 

I am interested in a technique for a nation's getting its way anddeserving to get its way because I want to get mine, and because beinghuman and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the samestuff--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 cutdown to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what I want, willprobably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody. 

I have thought I would see if I could not work out in this book, atechnique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniatureas 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 andfairer to try out a principle other people are supposed to be asked torisk, on one man first. 

Because I happen to know him better than I know anybody else, and becausemy experience is, he will stand more from me than anybody else, I havepicked out myself. 

When the technique has been tried out on one man the people who know himwill believe it and try it. Then we will try it on one hundred men oneafter the other. Then as I have been working it out in this book, try iton the body-politic, the soul and body of a nation, try it on a hundredmillion people. 

Then with a technique for having a body and for not being fooled byourselves and having some substance in what we say and what we do, wewould have the spectacle of a hundred million people making themselvesfelt in political conventions, making themselves felt in The White Houseand even being noticed perhaps in time at the other end of PennsylvaniaAvenue by the great I AM, or I CAN'T, or I WON'T tucked under the come ofall 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, ingetting people to let me have my way, is to know when and how to discoverand open up in people new brain tracks and when and how to make my maindependence on their old ones. 

Getting what one wants from people turns on seeing the situation--thebrain track situation in one's own mind at a particular time, and inother people's, as it really is. 

In other words, the way to get one's way with people is to know andextend one's consciousness down deeper into one's subconsciousness inone's own mind, so that one draws on the conscious and the subconsciousin one's own mind at will, so that gradually having the habit of drawingon the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, one soonmakes oneself master of the conscious and the subconscious in the mindsof others. 

I do not precisely know this, of course, because I have never practicedhaving my own way with other people as much as I would like, but mytheory and my observation of others who have practiced on me leads me, inspeaking for all of us to believe this: The way for a man to do who wantsto get his own way with people is to heighten his consciousness, deepenhis consciousness down into his subconsciousness, live more abundantly insoul and body, deeper down and higher up and further over into himselfthan others. Then he gets his way with others because everybody wants himto, almost without knowing it or anybody's else knowing it. 

A man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. Theindication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer inhim does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesianwell of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his newbrain tracks and old ones together--is the secret of getting one's wayfor all of us, whether with Nature or with one another. 

Of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new braintracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with otherpeople and with ourselves. 

This part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for mostof us--what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and whatpeople 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 ofus, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, isas if they had no place to put them. 

The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them arerather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closelywhat one actually does with one's own personal listening and what otherpeople, 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 fewspecial studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what Icall my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hourseach day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and hisother enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rationalbeing 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 tothe fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets ofears--one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showilybefore everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real setinside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselvesand really do their living with. 

I first came on them--on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as ayoung man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a younglecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to behappening 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 weredoing 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 sentenceshutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding theiroutside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them--onoutside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feelhurt 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 truthabout ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I couldhelp it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or allmade up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or ofvery 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 tobe that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimesand change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. Inany audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it, and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, onecan keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men andwomen both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up toeasy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one'smeaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on, from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When thewomen go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking tomixed ages. Fewer passages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember, and look forward in listening always help in an audience because theyseem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by peoplewho have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not doanything else. 

I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far aswhat people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of ahall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it wouldnot be any worse--the psychological clang of it--than what they do do. Itwould merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about theway 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, inthree adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they arelistening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing orexpecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere allaround 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 stillmore true of words in books. 

If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock ormusic box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skippingwithout knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for foundingwhat I have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon theway people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what theyhear, 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 kindlyread "we. ")

If there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds andcolors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down andsidling lines--printed for people the way they are going to read it, ifthe sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean passagesor could take nice little airy swoops or flights--if every line on a pagecould dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make aperfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going throughpeople's minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that allthese people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives instops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so. 

If the type in the pages in this book dealing with Mr. Burleson could bemore responsive, could act the way Mr. Burleson's mind does when he readsit--that is if I could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets thetype what Mr. Burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with hismind with each pellucid sentence as it purls--even Mr. Burleson himselfwould be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in mybook, he was really carrying away from it. 

If in Mr. Burleson's own personal copy of this book, I were to have thisnext chapter about him that is going to follow soon--especially thesentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practicallynot read at all--printed in invisible ink and there were just those longpale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them toget them--so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of niceliterary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he wouldprobably carry away more meaning than I or any one could hope for inordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficialfeeling 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 herdolly--dragging its flaxen-haired head around on the floor and holding onto it dreamily by the leg, is what the average man's body can be seenalmost any day, doing to his mind. 

One feels almost as if one ought to hush it up at first until a fewmillion more men have made similar practical observations in thepsychology and physiology of modern life when one comes to see what ourcivilization is bringing us to--what it really is that almost any man oneknows, including the man of marked education--take him off his guardalmost any minute--is letting his body do to his mind. 

A very large part of even quite intelligent conversation has noorigination in it and is just made up of phonograph records. You say athing 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. Hejust tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he isselling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body thatis 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, asa dog wags his tail. The tongue sends its roots not into the brain butinto the stomach. (Probably this is why Saint Paul speaks of it so sadlyand respectfully as a mighty member--because of its roots. )

The main difficulty a man has in having a new brain track, or in beingoriginal or plastic in a process of mind is the way his body tries tobully him when he tries it. The body has certain tracks it has got usedto in a mind and that it wants to harden the mind down into and thentumtytum along on comfortably and it does not propose--all this blessedmeat 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 otherday--four or five big blossoms six inches across--real flowers that hadbeen taken from the edge of a volcano in South America--real flowers thathad chemically turned to wood--(probably from having gas administered tothem by the volcano!)--and I stood there and looked at them thinking howcurious it was that spiritual and spirited things like flowers instead ofgoing out and fading away like a spirit, had died into solid wood in thatway. Then I turned and walked down the street, watching the souls andbodies of the people and the people were not so different many of them asone looked into their faces, from the wooden flowers, and I could nothelp seeing, of course, no one can--what their bodies--thousands ofthem--were apparently doing to their souls. After all the wooden flowerswere not really much queerer for flowers than the people--many ofthem--were for people. 

From the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the humanmind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new braintracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing thebody and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it isnot a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watchwhat they are letting their bodies do to them. 

Left to itself the body is for all practical purposes so far as the mindis concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concretemixer for pouring one's soul in with some Portland Cement and makingone's living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy themin one--just as they are. Unless great spiritual pains are taken to keepthings moving, the body operates practically as a machine for petrifyingspiritual experiences, mummifying ideas or for putting one's spiritualexperiences 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 planto meet, in these chapters) that the reason that most of us find talkingwith people and arguing with them and trying to change their minds sounsatisfactory, is that we are not really thorough with them. What wereally need to do with people is to go deeper, excavate their sensoryimpressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have akidney taken out to convince them. Talk with almost any man of a certaintype, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after heis thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. He is notreally listening to you when you criticize him or differ with him. 

The soul--the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscopehas a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and likeyou for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowingall you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his bodyall 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 automaticallydefends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing morecan be said. 

What a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with hismachine. The very essence of anger is that it is unspirited andautomatic. The spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him tolisten, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not wantto let him hear. 

Of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years--sayfor twenty or thirty years--the inevitable happens and one soon sees whyit is that the majority of people--even very attractive people one goesaround talking with and living with, after thirty years, become justsplendid painted-over effigies of themselves. One has no new way of beingfond of them. One looks for nothing one has not had before. They goabout--even the most elegant of them--thinking with their stomachs. 

Thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they werefresh from heaven--as if they had just been caught passing from the musicof 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 asingular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for ourleaders and our people. 

We realize--whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass ofthe driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its newopportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, frompicked men here and there in every business and in every calling, whoinsist 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 moreof their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it--thequestion of how other people--a hundred million people can be got tofollow in these new brain tracks for a nation--these new ways for anation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal andnational concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for alittle what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation andwhat kind of people can do it. 

The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through theautomaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's mindsand re-routing and recoördinating their ideas and are going to be themore important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comesnearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyerbackward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations inbelieving what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeingthrough themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extraordinary work heis doing in London, for people in the way of reëducating andrecoördinating their bodies. 

I took home from a bookshop one day not long ago, after reading anarticle about it by Professor James Harvey Robinson in the _Atlantic_, Mr. Alexander's quite extraordinary book, which after starting off withan introduction by Professor John Dewey, of Columbia, leads one into anew world, to the edge, almost the precipitous edge of a new world. 

I am inclined to believe that the deepest and most penetrating knowledgeof that curious and delicate blend of spirit and clay we call a humanbeing, and the most masterful technique for getting conscious control ofit 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 handof Mathias Alexander. It is hard to keep from writing a book about himwhen one thinks of him, but as I cannot write a book about him in themiddle of this one, I am going to touch for a moment on the principleAlexander employs in breaking through new brain tracks in persons, andthen try to apply the same principles to breaking through new braintracks for a nation. 

What Mr. Alexander does with people I have already hinted at in what Ihave said about our having a new profession in America--the profession ofbeing a lawyer backward. Of course Mr. Alexander could not say of himselfthat he was in the profession of being a lawyer backward, but he doespractically 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 ofpetting their minds and he does the precise thing I have in mine exceptthat he confines himself in doing it to what he calls psycho-mechanics--toa single first relation in which a man's mind needs to be changed--therelation of a man's mind to his body. 

If a man's mind gets his body right, it will not need to be changed aboutmany other things in which it is wrong. The first thing a man's mindshould be changed about usually is his body. 

This is the principle upon which Mathias Alexander in the very extraordinarywork he is doing in London, proceeds. 

When you are duly accepted as a client and have duly given credentials orshown signs that you want all the truth about yourself that you can getno matter how it hurts, or how it looks, you present yourself at theappointed time in Alexander's office, or studio, or laboratory, oroperating room--whatever the name may be you will feel like calling itby, before you are finished, and Alexander stands you up before the backof a chair. Then he takes you in his hands--his very powerful, sensitiveand discerning hands and begins--quite literally begins reshaping youlike Phidias. You begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going tobe some new beautiful living statue yourself before very long probably. 

Then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze atyou--just as Phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of yourbody, X-rays down through you with a look--through you and all your innerworkings 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 workingslowly and subtly on you once more, all the while giving orders to yousoftly not to help him, not to butt in soul and body on what he is doingto 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 supposeis your mind, and what you suppose you are doing with what you suppose isyour body. In other words, he gives you most strenuously to understandthat the one helpful thing that you can do with what you call your mindor what you call your body is to back away from them both all you can. Asit is you and your ideas mostly that are what is the matter with yourmind and body, and with the way you admit they are not getting ontogether, Alexander's first lessons with you you find are largelyoccupied in getting your mind--your terrible and beautiful mind whichdoes such queer things to you, to back away. What he really wants of youis to have you let him make a present to you outright of certain newpsycho-physical experiences, which he cannot possibly get in, if youinsist on slipping yours in each time instead. So he keeps working onyou, you all the while trying to help in soul and body by being as muchlike putty--a kind of transcendental putty as you can, or as you dare, without falling apart before your own eyes. Then when you have removedall obstructions and preconceptions in your own mind--and will stoppreventing him from doing it, he places your body in an entirely newposition and subjects you to a physical experience in sitting, standingand walking, you have never dreamed you could have before. 

This goes on for as many sittings as are necessary and until you walk outof the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling likesomebody else--like somebody else that has been lent to you tobe--somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will beallowed 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 anew way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you findyourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, likingpeople you thought were impossible before--even including veryconveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind aboutyour body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doingwith your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you. 

It is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor apurely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is aputting of the facts in a man's mind and the facts in his bodyinextricably together in his consciousness--as they should be, in that heis no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swingsfree, 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 afairy story. I like to think when I am going on from chapter to chapterin a book--I like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are. The principles underlying what Mr. Alexander does with new brain tracksand what I am trying to do can be discussed in this book. The facts canbe 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 intoa chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast cornerof his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinkshe is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower orsouthwest corner. Then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and thenortheast corner toothache is over. 

(These figures or rather points of the compass may not be literallyright, but the fact that they point to is. ) Nearly every man has hadthings happen to him not very different from this. You have a badlameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you thatyou are deceived about the real trouble being in your right knee, callsyour attention to a place three and a half feet off way up on the otherside of you, says you should have a gold filling put in a tooth there andyour right knee will get well. 

What seems to be true of people is that though in a less glaring and moresubtle fashion, there are very few of us who are not subject either allor part of the time to more or less important and quite unmanageableillusions about things with which we are supposed to be--if anybodyis--the most intimately acquainted. One keeps hearing every few daysalmost, lately, of how people's inner organs are not doing what theythink they are, of how very often--even the most important of them havebeen mislaid--a colon for instance being allowed to do its work threeinches lower than it ever ought to be allowed to try, and all manner ofother mechanical blunders that are being made, grave mechanicalinconveniences which are being daily put up with by people, when theymove about or when they lie down, of which they have not the slightestidea. 

The sensory impressions of what is really happening to us, of where it ishappening and how and why are full--in many people of glaring and notinfrequently dangerous illusions, but these physical illusions which wehave are reflected automatically in our spiritual and intellectual ones. All kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are notseeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresytrials, lockouts and strikes--all the irrational things people say and doto each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the waypeople are being fooled by their own precious insides. Each man is doingthings that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because he isoff on his facts as to what is going on the first few feet off, becausethe first hundred and fifty pounds of consciousness which have beenassigned to him to know about personally and attend to personally he isletting himself be fooled with every day. 

A man who is being fooled near by, regularly all the time, fooled fromthe sole of his poor tired feet to the poor helpless nib at the top ofhim which he calls his head, is naturally hard to argue with about theimmortality of the soul, or the League of Nations. Reforms and reformerswhich overlook these facts must not be surprised if they seem to some ofus a little superficial. 

Of course the moral of all this is--as regards changing society orpersuading and convincing persons, get down to first principles. Stopflourishing around with fine and noble philosophies and phrases on thesurface of men's souls. See that their souls and their bodies are bothintricately divinely stupendously blended together and get at them bothtogether. 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 backironed out, if necessary so that his tonsils will work as they are. 

Then argue with him afterwards and quote Shakespeare and the Bible tohim, 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 onpeople, 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 keepscoming to me that the short, quick and thorough way for me to install myidea, 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 havepeople 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 aman to accept the new brain track in it, is to send him a copy of thebook to say yes or no to. Then if he does not agree with me and I amtempted to argue with him, I will drop the matter with him at once, sendhim to Alexander, have Alexander set him in a chair, tap him on the back, poke him thoughtfully, psycho-mechanically in the ribs, unlimber his mindfrom his body, untangle him psycho-physically, put him in shape so thathe can think free, listen without obsessions and mental automatism--thatis, get him so that he can set his mind on a subject instead of settinghis 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 rewritingthe book. 

By the time the gentleman was cured I would have a cured book to sendhim, we would both be in a position to believe what we don't want tobelieve, to listen to each other indefinitely and we would be in aposition to do team work together at once and take steps to install newbrain 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 meto take up people who disagree with me--say a hundred million people orso and ship them to Alexander in London and have them done over byAlexander. 

What is the best possible substitute arrangement that can be made forhaving a whole nation put into perfect psycho-mechanical shape byAlexander so that it will take the first new brain tracks kindly?

The principles for giving people new brain tracks toward their own bodieswhich Mr. Alexander has so successfully demonstrated, are the sameprinciples which I have been trying for a long time to express and applyto 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 myown mind and other people's about ideas, of working out new spiritualexperiences for myself and other people, Alexander in his workroom inLondon 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 forinstalling new physical experiences and mine for installing new spiritualones, 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 doneover by Alexander personally in London that is the best thing to do. Butit is inconvenient for a hundred million people to crowd into Alexander'soffice in London, and it is comparatively convenient and roomy for ahundred million people if they want to, to crowd into a book. Beforegiving the principles, I would like to state the question--What are thesteps we all can use--those of us who are not Alexander--to install newbrain tracks in this nation?

The principles upon which, as it seems to me, new brain tracks for thisnation 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, thefact that they do not want them. 

Second. Get their attention to what people with new brain tracks seem tobe able to do in the way of getting in our present moving world, thethings they want. People go to Alexander and ask him for new braintracks. Something corresponding to this has to be got from people beforeoffering them new brain tracks in a convention or in a book. 

Third. Pick out the people next to the people the proposed new braintracks are for, who seem to be the particular kind of people bestcalculated to make the necessary excavations in their brains, to loosenup ideas, or any hard gray matter there may be there, so that somethingcan be put in. 

The fourth step when we recognize that we want the facts againstourselves and see what we can do with them, is to ask people to let ushave them. 

VIII

HELPING A NATION UP THE CELLAR STAIRS

The Air Line League is a national organization of millions of Americanmen and women belonging to all classes and all social and industrialgroups, who become members of the League for the express purpose ofasking people to help to keep them, in their personal and industrialrelations, from being off on their facts, from being fooled by theirsubconscious and automatic selves. 

Unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experiencetelling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for hisbeing objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the mosttimely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any oneman 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 cheerfulto do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want themto 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, asin joining the Air Line League, where people will feel asked without anyone's saying anything about it. 

This is the first principle we propose to follow in the League. By theact of joining the League, by the bare fact that we are in it, weannounce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and asmembers of a class, or of our capital groups or our Labor groups, we areas a matter of course open and more than open to facts--facts from anyquarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doingfrom being fooled about ourselves. 

Having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, ofbeing unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are thebest people in a nation constituted like ours, to unfool us the mostquickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the leasttrouble 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 looksprominent on--the people from whom nobody expects it. 

In my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently beenmade and handed up to me, that there are certain books, I do not need toread. 

My attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of myreading one of Harold Bell Wright's novels. But if I heard to-morrowmorning that Henry Cabot Lodge and President Wilson during the last fewpeaceful months had both read through Harold Bell Wright's last novel, Iwould read it before I went to bed. 

Or Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers. Any common experience which I heard in thelast few weeks Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers had had, a novel by Harold BellWright or anything--I would look into, a whole nation would look intoit--the moment they heard of it--at once. 

The first thing to do in making a start for new brain tracks for Americais to pick out persons and brain tracks that set each other off. 

Even an idea nobody would care about one way or the other becomessuddenly and nationally interesting to us when we find people we wouldnot think would believe it, are believing it hard and trying to get us tobelieve it. 

Suppose for instance that next Fourth of July (I pick out this day forwhat I want to have happen because I have so longed for years to havesomething strong and sincere said or done on it that would reallycelebrate it)--suppose for instance that next Fourth of July, beginningearly in the morning all the Labor leaders of America from Maine toCalifornia, acting as one man broke away--just took one day off, fromdoing the old humdrum advertising everybody expects from them--supposethey proceeded to do something that would attract attention--somethingthat would interest their friends and disappoint their enemies--just fortwenty-four hours? Suppose just for one day all the Labor leaders insteadof going about advertising to themselves and to everybody the bademployers and how bad employers are in this country would devote theFourth of July to advertising a few good ones?

Then suppose they follow it up--that Labor do something with initiativein it--the initiative its enemies say it cannot have, somethingunexpected and original, true and sensationally fair, something thatwould make a nation look and that a hundred million people would neverforget?

What does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in thiscountry, if Labor; after the next Fourth of July, started a new nationalcrusade for four weeks--if the fifty best laborers in the EndicottJohnson Mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should goin a body one after the other to a list of Bolshevist factories, factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitationof telling what happens to them in their Endicott Johnson mills, anagitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are likeand how it works until the Bolshevist workmen they come to see are drivenby sheer force of facts into being non-Bolshevist workmen, and theirBolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force offacts into being Endicott Johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front ofthemselves, who will be Endicott Johnsons for them. 

All that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitationin America to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act oflabor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing thateither of them--either capital or labor--is thinking of somebody, believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besidesthemselves. Millions of individual employers and individual laborersabout have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable anddiscriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow humanbeings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is toarrange some signal generous conclusive arresting massive move togetherto show it. 

This is the kind of work the Air Line League proposes on a national scalelike the Red Cross to arrange for and do. 

The common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, thefellow human being--employer or employee. 

The best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for America inshame and weakness to keep on deporting Bolshevists, is to arrange anational advertisement, a parade or national procession as it were inthis country soon, of team work in industry and of how--to anybody whoknows the facts--it carries everything before it. 

The best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down throughten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers whostand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmenfrom all over the country who stand up for employers. 

Of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds oftimes over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring otherlaborers into line and of having employers shame other employers intocompetence. 

The best substitute for this national demonstration, this nationalphysical getting together like this, is as I have said before, a bookread by all, by employers and employees looking over each other'sshoulders, 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 thatsomething has got to be done at last which goes to the bottom, slinkingoff privately and confessing its sins to God. 

I would rather see a confession of the sins of Capital toward Labor forthe last forty years and of its sins to-day made by Capital in person toLabor. 

God will get it anyway--the confession--and it will mean ten times asmuch 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 highlydesirable should be confessed and naturally Capital thinks that a goodway to open the exercises would be with a confession from Labor toCapital to the effect that Labor admits that Labor like the Trusts beforeit 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 hateto believe of it--of the bully and the liar. 

Not only the Capital Group but the Public Group feel that a confessionfrom Labor before we go on to arrange things better is highly to bedesired. 

But the practical question that faces us is--supposing that what iswanted next by all, is a confession from Labor, what is the practical wayfrom 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 oldestone has my temper and is making it catching to the other sons, what wouldany ordinary observer say is the practical course for the poor wicked oldfather to take with the boy's temper of which he has made the boy apresent?

My feeling is when my boy loses his temper with me at dinner for instancein the presence of the other boys, that poking a verse in a Bible feeblyout at him and saying to him, "He that keepeth his temper is greater thanhe that taketh a city, " would be rude. The way for me to give him goodadvice about losing his temper is to sit there quietly with him while heis losing his, and keep mine. 

If Capital wants to get its way with Labor--and thinks that the way tobegin with the industrial situation in this country, after all that hashappened, is with a vast national spectacle of Labor confessing its sins, the most practical thing to do is for Capital to give Labor anillustration of what confessing sins is like, and how it works. 

The capitalists among us who are the least deceived by their subconsciousor automatic minds, are at the present moment not at all incapable ofconfiding 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 specificthing that Capital has taught it to do and has done for forty years withthe scarcity of money and jobs. 

It seems to me visionary and sentimental and impracticable for Capital totry to fix things up now and give things a new start now, by slinking offand 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 desperatecrisis of a nation, with the question of the very existence of societyand the existence of business staring us in the face, it really must beadmitted that as a practical short cut to getting something done, our allgoing out into a kind of moral backyard behind the barn and confessingour sins to God, is weak-looking and dreamy as compared with our allstanding up like men at our own front doors, looking each other in theeye and confessing our sins to one another. 

I am not saying this because I am a moral person. I am not whining atthirty thousand banks pulling them by the sleeves and saying please tothem and telling them that this is what they ought to do. 

I am a practical matter of fact person, speaking as an engineer in humannature and in what works with human nature and saying that whencapitalists and employers stop being sentimental and off on their factsabout themselves and about other people, when they propose to bepractical and serious, and really get their way with other people theyare 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 lastshot at the Germans, the only way a man is going to long get his way isto be more human than other people, have a genius for being human inbusiness, for being human quick and human to the point where others havetalent. 

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 itis, some one person--or some one thing, which either by natural gift orby natural position is qualified to help one to be extremely disagreeableto 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 properlyapproached, or when they make the approach themselves, that they makemistakes and that they are poor miserable sinners. Everybody is. Theyrather revel in it, some of them, in being in a nice safe way, miserablesinners. The trouble comes in ever going into the particulars with them, in finding any particular time and place one can edge in in which theyare not perfect. 

This fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capitaland labor in general, brings out and illustrates another generalprinciple in making the necessary excavations in one's own mind and otherpeople's for new brain tracks--another working principle of technique fora man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get itsway. 

There are various Alexandering stages in the technique of not beingfooled 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'sown group or party--is to look over the entire field--the way one wouldon other subjects than being fooled by one's own side, strip down to thebare facts about oneself and facts about others for one's vision ofaction and fit them together and act. 

In getting one's way quickly, thoroughly, personally--_i. E. _, so thatother people will feel one deserves it and will practically hand it overto one, and want one to have it, the best technique seems to be not onlyto utilize self-criticism or self-confession, as a part of getting one'sway, but self-confession screwed up a little tighter--screwed up intoself-confession to others. 

I need not say that I am not throwing this idea out right and left toemployers with any hopeful notion that it will be generally acted onoffhand. 

It is merely thrown out for employers who want to get their way withtheir employees--get team work and increased production out of theiremployees before their rivals do. 

It is only for employers who want their own way a great deal--men who arein the habit of feeling masterful and self-masterful in getting their ownway--who are shrewd enough, sincere enough to take a short-cut to it, andget 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 wishthirty thousand banks and a hundred million people knew, as I knowhim--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. Thefactory went into the hands of a receiver, the family moved from the bighouse to a little one--one in a row of a mile of little ones down a sidestreet, and the sixteen year old son, who had expected to inherit thebusiness stopped going to school, bought a tin dinner pail and walkedback and forth with the tin dinner pail with the other boys in the streethe lived in, and became a day laborer in the business he was brought upto own. 

In not very many years he worked his way up past four hundred men, earnedand took the right to be the President of the business he had expected tohave presented to him. 

Eight or ten years ago he began to have strikes. His strikes seemeduglier than other people's and singularly hopeless--always with somethingin them--a kind of secret obstinate something in them, he kept trying invain to make out. One day when the worst strike of all was just on--orscheduled to come on in two days, as he looked up from his desk aboutfive o'clock and saw four hundred muttering men filing out past hiswindows, he called in Jim--into his office. 

Jim was a foreman--his most intimate friend as a boy when he was sixteenyears old. He had lived in the house next door to Jim's and every morningfor years they had got out of bed and walked sleepily with their tindinner pails, to the mill together talking of the heavens and the earthand of what they were going to do when they were men. 

The President had some rather wild and supercilious conversation withJim, about the new strike on in two days and it ended in Jim's dismissingthe 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 withyou, 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 stayaway, shut himself up in the room with the four hundred men and told themwith 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 feltwhen he carried a dinner pail, told them that he had lain awake all nightthinking that Jim was right, that he wanted to know all the things he hadforgotten, that they would be of more use to him and perhaps more usethan anything in the world and that if they would be so good as to tellhim what the things were that he had forgotten--so good as to get up inthat room where they were all alone together and tell him what was thematter with him, he would never forget it as long as he lived. He wantedto see what he could do in the factory from now on to get back all thatsixteen-year-old boy with the dinner pail knew, have the use of it in thefactory every day from now on to earn and to keep the confidence thesixteen-year-old boy had, and run the factory with it. 

Jim got up and made a few more remarks without any door-slamming. Fifteenor twenty more men followed with details. 

This was the first meeting that pulled the factory together. In thosethat followed the President and the men together got at the factstogether and worked out the spirit and principles and applied them todetails. The meetings were held on company time--at first every few days, then every week, and now quite frequently when some new specialapplication comes up. Nine out of ten of the difficulties disappearedwhen the new spirit of team work and mutual candor was established andeverybody saw how it worked. 

No one could conceive now of getting a strike in edgewise to the factorythat listened to Jim. 

I am not unaccustomed to going about factories with Presidents and it isoften a rather stilted and lonely performance. But when I first wentthrough this factory with the President that listened to Jim, stood bybenches, talked with him and his men together, felt and saw theunconscious natural and human way conversations were conducted betweenthem, saw ten dollars a day and a hundred dollars a day talking andlaughing together and believing and working together, it did not leavevery much doubt in my mind as to what the essential qualities are thatbusiness men to-day--employers and workingmen--are going to have and haveto have to make them successful in producing goods, in leading theirrivals in business and in getting their way with one another. 

Naturally as a matter of convenience and a short cut for all of us, Iwould like to see Capital take what is supposed to be its initiative--bethe side that leads off and makes the start in the self-discipline, self-confession and conscious control of its own class, which it thinksLabor ought to. 

Whichever side in our present desperate crisis attains self-disciplineand the full power in sight of the people not to be fooled about itselffirst, will win the leadership first, and win the loyalty and gratitudeand 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--installa new brain track with him that they can use together, is to surprise theman by picking out for him and doing to him the one thing that he knowsthat 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 doingsomething himself that he knew that he himself anyway of all people inthe world, is the last man to do. 

First you surprise him with you. Then with himself. After this of coursewith new people to do things, both on the premises, the habit soon setsin of starting with people all manner of things that everybody knew--whoknew anything--knew the people could not do. 

This is what the President of the factory not a thousand miles awayaccomplished 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 taketo-morrow would make several million American wage earners feel they werein a new world before night. 

 * * * * *

The thing that seemed to me the most significant and that I liked bestabout the President of the Company who listened to Jim, was the discoveryI made in a few minutes, when I met him, that unlike Henry Ford, whom Imet for the first time the same week, he was not a genius. He was a manwith a hundred thousand duplicates in America. 

Any one of a hundred thousand men we all know in this country would dowhat he did if he happened on it, if just the right Jim, just the rightmoment, 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 probablywho could have stuck our heads in the door. 

The greater credit should go to the lying awake in the night, to the manwho was practical enough to be inspired by a chance to quit and quitsharply in his own business, being fooled by himself and who got fourhundred men to help. 

Incidentally of course though he did not think of it, and they did notthink of it, the four hundred men all in the same tight place he was inof course, of trying not to be fooled about themselves, asked him to helpthem. 

Of course with both sides in a factory in this way pursuing the otherside and asking it to help it not to be fooled, everything everybody sayscounts. There is less waste in truth in a factory. Truth that is askedfor and thirsted for, is drunk up. The refreshment of it, the efficiencyof 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 collectivebargaining as it is going to be in the near future--collective bargainingexecuted on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in suchspirit as shall be determined by the facts--the practical engineeringfacts in human nature and the way human nature works. 

I do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical abouthuman nature so far. The moment that it is, the public and all manner ofpowerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish orunreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it. 

A book entitled "A Few Constructive Reflections on Marriage" by a man whohad had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces, --a man whoseex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. Asymposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbandswould really count more. Most candid people would admit this as aprinciple. 

The same principle seems to hold good about what people think in NationalAssociations of Employers and national associations of workingmen inlabor unions. 

Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is beingdone by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on atwo-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to verysuperficial decisions. 

Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, ofbeing fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to beright, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrongabout half the time. 

The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content withthe people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Otherpeople have it. 

When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two timestwo equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have someway of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But whenI am told in a deep bass national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed andto feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At allevents, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going totake a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off tomultiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talkto me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word. 

Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have beenfooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled byit 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 oronly works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capitalor labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time, --especiallyin the difficulties we are all facing together in America now, to letourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer. 

The difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are allessentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt withby tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up andgetting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin, dealing at particular times and in particular places with particularhuman beings. In the factory that listened to Jim, no order from anational Collective Bargaining Works could have begun to meet thesituation as well as Jim did and the factory did. 

If Jim had stuck his head in the door by orders from Indianapolis, or ifthe President of the Company had had a telegram giving him nationalinstructions to lie awake that night, what would it have come to?

I believe in national or collective bargaining as a matter of course, incertain aspects of all difficulties between capital and labor. But thecauses of most difficulties in industry are personal and have to be dealtwith where the persons are. The more personal things to be done are, themore personally they have to be attended to. 

If the women of America were to organize a Childbirth Labor Union, saynext Christmas--and if from next Christmas on, all the personal relationsof men and women and husbands and wives--the stipulations and conditionson which women would and would not bear children were regulated bynational rules, by courtship rules and connubial orders fromIndianapolis, Indiana, it would be about as superficial a way todetermine the well-being of the sexes, as foolish and visionary a way forthe female class to attempt to reform and regulate the class that hasbeen fenced off by The Creator as the male class, as the present attemptof the labor class to sweep grandly over the spiritual and personalrelation of individual employers and individual workmen and substitutefor it collective bargaining from Indianapolis. 

There is one thing about women. It would never have occurred to the womenof this country as it has to the men to get up a contraption for doing athing nationally that they could not even do at home. 

For every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in themost intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of herlife is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, themain and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, theone that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distanceand 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 longgoing to be willing to put up with it. 

As the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair, --as the moreindividualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is whatthe relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers andemployees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, themore 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, allemployers and employees with any headway or passion for getting togetherin them are as impatient of having the way they get together theirpersonal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be inthe sexual relation and for the same reasons. 

If it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in America gettogether in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in America gettogether in another, and pass resolutions of affection at each other, rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, howmany men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for afather or mother, would go?

Only anæmic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either makeor accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for theconditions of their lives together. 

And in twenty years only anæmic employers and anæmic employees andworkmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they dotogether, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eighthours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collectivebargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does ofit determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality, personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual dailycontacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis ofdetermining and of making effective what was right. 

XIV

THE NEW COMPANY

I met a wagon coming down the street yesterday, saying across the frontof 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 equallywell-organized arrangement for rapid transit of boxes--boxes people havegot out of or got into, as we have for conveying other boxes people aremixed up with. (Fixes were called boxes when I was a boy. We used tospeak of a man having a difficult experience, as being in a box. )

The Air Line League proposes to be The American Experience Company--a bignational concern for shipping other people's experiences to people, sothat unless they insist on it, they will have the good of them withouthaving to take their time and everybody else's time around them to gothrough them all over again alone and just for themselves. 

Of course there are people who tumtytum along without thinking, who willmiss the principle and insist on having a nice private misery of doing itall over again in their own home factory for themselves. But there aremany million people with sense in this country--people as good at makingsense out of other people as they are in making money out of them, andthe 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 gotover having, could be shipped in the next few weeks, unloaded and takenover by the Americans, anybody can see with a look, ways in which the AirLine League or American Experience Company, if it were existing thisminute, could bring home to people what they want to know about whatworks and what does not, what they long to have advertised to them--atonce. Experiences--or date of experiences shipped from England would notonly make a short-cut for America in increasing production in thiscountry, lowering the cost of living, but would give America a chance inthe same breath by the same act, to win a victory over herself and toturn the fate of a world. 

What the Air Line League proposes to do is to act--particularly throughthe 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 ofthe Look-Up Club. 

The thing the book--between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper--akind of listening together of capital and labor, the Look-Up Club of TheAir Line League is planned to do in the nation at large and locally inten thousand cities--capital, labor and the consumer listening to eachother--reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders, studying their personal interests together, working and acting outtogether 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 LineLeague and having an umpire and not an empire function, operatesprimarily as a Publicity or Listening organization. 

I might illustrate the need the Look-Up Club is planned to meet and howit would operate by suggesting what the Club might do with a particularidea--an idea on which people must really be got together in Americabefore long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all. 

Millions of American laborers go to bed every night and get up everymorning saying:--

"The American employer is getting more money than he earns. We are goingto 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 workingmerely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that theAmerican employer is working for something besides money--that he isearning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job--the way he issaying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can begot to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike andthe lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of theworld all going out together. 

I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employerswho look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees asgentlemen and sports--men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means ofexpressing themselves, making their business a self-expression andputting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward othersinto their business as they like. 

If all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what theirlaborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the faceof Labor toward Capital--the face of this country toward the world andtoward 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 untileverybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeingthat everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what wouldbe the first thing I would come upon?

The first thing I would come upon would be a convention. It is one of theautomatic ideas or conventions of business men--not to believe inthemselves. 

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 certainthing--people believe him and that if a business man does or saysprecisely 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 readwhat I am saying on this page, "--everybody believes me. As people read onin one of my articles in the _Post_, they cannot be kept from seeing howegregiously I am enjoying my work. Anybody can see it--that I would payup to the limit all the money I can get hold of--my own, or anybody's--toget other people to enjoy reading my stuff as much as I do. Nobody seemsinclined to deny that if I could afford to--or, if I had to--I would payten 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 Iknow very well--W. J. ---- feels about a house or about a bank created byW. J. ----. But if W. J. , a designer--contractor--a builder--pretends heenjoys 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 topeople that he would like to hire them to be his customers by handingback to them twenty, thirty or forty per cent of his agreed upon profitswhen he gets through (which is what he practically does over and overagain) there are very few business men who would not say at first sightthat W. J. Is a man who ought to be watched. 

And he is too, but for precisely turned around reasons most people haveto be watched for. W. J. In designing and constructing a house, or a bankfor a client, sets as his cost estimate a ten per cent maximum profit forhimself, as a margin to work on; aiming at six or five per cent profitfor himself, on small contracts and at a four, three or two and one-halfper cent profit for himself on million dollar ones. Changes andafterthoughts from his clients in carrying out a contract are inevitable. W. J. Wants a margin on which to allow for contingencies and for hiscustomers' afterthought. 

The three things that interest W. J. In business are: his work on aperfect house, his work on a perfect customer and his work on makingenough money to keep people from bothering his work. 

A perfect house is a house built just as he said it would be which comesout costing less than he said it would cost--possibly a check on hisclient's dinner plate the first night he dines in it. 

A perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannotexpress himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to--whocannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sendingeverybody to W. J. He can think of. 

The tendency of mean typical business men--even men who do thisthemselves, when I tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what isthe matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me. 

This is what is the matter with the country--the conventional automaticassumption that millions of men--even men who are not in business merelyto make money themselves--make in general, that we must arrange to run acivilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day, in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so littleinterested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they aremerely working for money. 

If we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it doesnot need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions andthat these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulersand the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate ofall 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 spiritof putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, hascome in. 

Naturally, inasmuch as W. J. As all people who know him know, has made avery great business success of running his business on this principle, ofmaking it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things atonce than merely making money--running a business like any other bigprofession, one of the first things I think of doing is to writesomething that will make everybody know it. Well, as I have said, thefirst fact I come on is that many business men do not approve ofbelieving in themselves or in business or in what I say about its being aprofession, 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 veryastonishing and revolutionary fact. 

I have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into twoprinciples. 

1. The industrial and financial fate of America and the world turns inthe next few years--or even months, on news--on getting certain people toknow in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certainthings will happen. 

2. News, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as ageneralization or as a principle. To make news compelling and conclusiveone 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 makeeverybody know him, the fact I face about my country is this. 

A generalized--that is--a sterilized idea is free. A fertilized ordramatized idea--an idea done up and dramatized in a man so thateverybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up. 

I am not blaming anybody. I am laying before people and before myself afact. 

Suppose that I think it is stupendously to the point just now toadvertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion ofprofit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would makea new nation for a hundred people to know?

Suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generallyinvited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kindof spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity--instead of getting offideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, I insist onmaking ideas do things and I plan on having my ideas done up solidly inten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching?

Suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, aman who dramatizes--makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea ofincreased production or superproducing, seems to the point--suppose Ibegin 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. Inbearing upon our present national crisis it would be thoughtful andpractical of W. J. To die. 

If W. J. 's worst enemy were to push him off the top of the fortieth storyof the Equitable Building to-morrow morning all I would have to do wouldbe to write an article about him in some national weekly, _SaturdayEvening 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. Untilhe is dead. It would like to have, of course, but it would not be fair tothe business men who are paying ten thousand dollars a page to beadvertised in it, for the _Saturday Evening Post_ to let any otherman--any man who is not dead yet, be advertised in it. 

This is the reason for the Look-Up Club, a national body--the gatheringtogether of one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise W. J. To--whowill then turn--the hundred thousand men of vision--and advertise him toeverybody. 

Then other men, strategic men like W. J. --men who are dramatizing otherstrategic ideas will be selected to follow W. J. For the one hundredthousand men of vision to advertise to a hundred million people. 

By writing a book and having my publisher distribute through thebookstores a book, I would reach, at best, only one hundred thousandpeople, and I am proposing to reach a hundred million people--to organizea hundred thousand salesmen scattered in five thousand cities and reachwith my book, the hearts and minds, the daily eight-hour-a-day workinglives of a hundred million people. 

This is what the Look-Up Club is for. It is an organized flying wedge ofone hundred thousand salesmen who have picked each other out for drivinginto the attention of a nation, national ideas. 

The fate of America and the fate of the world at the present moment turnsupon free advertising written by men who could not be hired to do it--inbooks distributed by a hundred thousand men who could not be hired todistribute them. We are setting to work a national committee of a hundredthousand men, to unearth in America, advertise, make the common propertyof everybody the men who dramatize, who make neighborly andmatter-of-fact the beliefs a great people will perish if they do notbelieve. 

XIX

THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP

We are drawing in the next few months in America the plans andspecifications 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 menof constructive imagination in business and other callings, in tenthousand cities, who will work out together and place before the people, plans and specifications of what this nation proposes to be like--apicture of what a hundred million people want. 

The situation we are trying to meet is one of providing new brain tracksfor a hundred million people. It will not seem to many people, too muchto say that the quick way to do this, is to form a Club--a Committee inthis country, of a hundred thousand men to ask to be told about these newbrain tracks, who will then tell them to the hundred million. 

The Look-Up Club is a Publicity and Educational Organization for thepurpose of focusing and mobilizing the vision of the people acting as aclearing house of the vision of the people--gathering, coördinating, pooling and determining and distributing the main points in their orderof what the American people believe. 

The first subject we act in our Publicity Organization as our ListeningConspiracy--our Coöperative news-service to our members--is the subjectof how coöperation between capital and labor works. Our first news-servicewill be planned to increase production, decrease the cost of living, stopstrikes and lockouts, drive out civil war and substitute coöperation as ameans of getting things in American life. 

Every man who is nominated to membership in the Look-Up Club naturallyasks 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, tonominate 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 inthis nation, men he has come on in his business in the course of twentyyears, who are characterized either by having creative imaginationthemselves 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'sfifty for their fifty and each in turn for their fifty until we hadcovered the country and had picked out and introduced to each other fromMaine to California the men of creative imagination in America. 

Other members will of course be nominated by members of the Air LineLeague in their respective communities and everybody who is invited tonominate for the Look-Up section of the Air Line League will be asked tonominate in three lists--(1) those he thinks of as representing inventionin the nation at large, (2) those he knows or deals with in his ownbusiness or line of activity--all over the country, who have creativeimagination or power of discovery and planning ideas, and (3) those heknows in his own home-community that he and his neighbors would like tosee in the Look-Up Club, on the nation's honor roll of men of vision inthe nation representing his own community. 

The cost is to be determined by the Club, but is planned as a smallnominal sum--nominal dues for expense of correspondence and conductingthe activities of the Club. 

What a man gets by joining the Club is the association with two or threethousand members from all over the land at any given time who will be inthe Club headquarters in a skyscraper hotel of its own, when he comes toNew York and the advantage of common action and common looking at thesame things at the same time with the other members of the Club, throughthe activities of the Club by mail. 

The Look-Up Club Bulletins, pamphlets and little books containing news ofcritical importance and timeliness to all members--news not generallyknown 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 toothers at critical times and places and with strategic persons--laborunions and employers and public men. 

What the Look-Up Club does for a man is to give him the benefit of afriendly candid national conspiracy between a hundred thousand men, toget the news and to pass on the news that counts and to do it all at thesame time instead of in scattered and meaningless dabs. 

If the thing each man of a hundred thousand sees once a year in a littlelonely dab of vision all by himself could be seen by all of us byagreement 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 seedoes 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 whata 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 willundertake to do with news when he receives it. 

When a man receives live news which immediately concerns him and hisnation in the same breath, the way he feels about it and acts aboutit--about real news he applies to himself and to his work and the peoplearound him, will seem to him to come, not under the head of duties to theClub, but under the head of the things the Club will tempt him to do andthat he cannot be kept from doing. 

If a hundred thousand picked men in this country in all walks of life allget the same news the same week, and then use the news the week they getit, and put it where other people will use it, we will all know andeverybody else will know what the Look-Up Club is for. 

We will be carrying out in the Look-Up Club what might be called aselective draft of vision. 

We will mobilize and bring to action the vision and the will of thepeople. 

XX

PROPAGANDY PEOPLE

I am weary and sad about the word propaganda. I am weary of beingpropaganded, or rather of being propaganded at and as regardspropagandafying others myself, or propagandaizing them, whatever it ispublicists and men who are interested in public ideas suppose they do, Iam sad at heart. There is a prayer some one prayed once one tired NewYear's Eve, which appeals to me. 

"Forgive me my Christmases as I forgive them that have Christmasedagainst 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 wayI feel about it. I have written many hundred pages of what I believeabout reformers--about people who are trying to get other people'sattention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what I believe now isthat most people if they would stop trying to get other people'sattention 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 andto give particulars. 

More good would be done this way than by turning the whole advertisingidea around and working it wrong end to as we do now. 

For instance at this present moment I want to know everything aboutmyself and against myself, my enemies know. I do not see why I should putup with my enemies being the ones of all others to know things against methat if I knew would be the making of me. What I want to do is to find away--make arrangements if I can, to get them to tell me--tell mepolitely--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, Americawould quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a greatone. People who have organized to be advertised to will read advertisingmore poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as I would) more desperately. They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they readwhere now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertisinghe has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or nothe same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt aboutthem 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 agreat truth. 

What the Air Line League is for, one of the things it is for, is to acton this truth. 

Through the three branches, the Look-Up Club, the Try-Out Club and thePut-Through Clan, the Air Line League is an organization not forasserting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally suckingadvertising. With its thirty million people joining it, asking to beadvertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the National VacuumCleaner 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 thepeople of America as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what theywant. 

We should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizingSkilled Readers' Labor Saving Unions. 

The difficulties of attaining a power of national listeningtogether--through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so greatthat they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our havingan organization the members of which join it as they will join the AirLine League for the express purpose not of advertising--but of beingadvertised to. 

The most fundamental activity of the Air Line League in the presentcrisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising ofthe ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who havecertain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to aspecific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as Iwould have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have thesesame men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them. 

It would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of anorganization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to. 

I say again--if I may be forgiven for the still small voice ofplatitude--a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it--the mosteffective 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 ifAmerica--being the biggest, the freshest and the most powerful after thewar 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 itsway with them. 

It is almost the personal necessity of forty other nations to-day thatAmerica should be a success, that America instead of instantlydisappointing the other nations, should instantly prove itself worthy ofthe leadership they would like to place in her hands. "America's successis the world's success, " people keep saying. This has a prettified andpleasant 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 thefact? What is there--either in our own interests or the interests ofothers that can really be done and done now about the fact--if it is afact--by any real person or body of persons in America? As a practicaland not a Fourth of July institution, --or rather as an institution forcelebrating the Fourth of July all the year round, the Air Line Leaguelooks upon direct action to be taken by the American people to meet theworld's particular situation at this time, as follows:

If America is to get its way--the way, as we like to think, of democracyand freedom, with other nations, there are certain things about us theother nations want to know. 

The other nations want to know that America has a technique for gettingits way with itself. 

The nation that has the most self-control will be the nation that as amatter of course and of common safety will be asked in the crisis, by theother nations, to take the lead in controlling order, in controlling orinsuring the self-control of others. 

The other nations want to know--if they are going to let us have our waywith them--put over what we like to call our superior democratic open wayupon them, that we have a vision--a vision of human nature and of modernlife which is better, clearer, more practical and timely than theirvision. 

The other nations want to know, --if we are to have our way, that we notonly have a vision of what our way is--a national vision, but a techniquefor expressing and embodying that national vision. To deserve our waywith them they must know we have a vision which can be proved, which ishistoric--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 atechnique for embodying a vision, but that when her vision proves to bewrong (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 howit would work. 

I would now like to touch on two facts--the fact that there is aparticular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the Americanpeople at this time, and the fact that the body to express the visiongrows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to behad. 

The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns onits having a technique for getting the attention of other nations--on itsgetting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really beexpressed. 

The technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turnson a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becomingself-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision ofaction developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth. 

This fact is not supposed to be open to argument. It is a biologicalfact--the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. Everybody knows, orthinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here andthere 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 andmaterial begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody'sfalling 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 ownattention. 

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 differentkinds of people we had in America who had never dreamed of doing a thingtogether before, could be got together to do one thing together now theworld war could be won. 

This spectral and visionary-looking idea somehow in the Red Cross, wasnot only the thing that started the Red Cross, but it was the dailymomentum, the daily mounting up in the hearts of the people that made itgo. 

The leaders of the Red Cross--Mr. Davison and the men he gathered abouthim had a vision of what could be done which other people did not dare tohave. 

The secret of the Red Cross was that it was a vision-machine, a machinefor multiplying one man's vision a millionfold, working out in the sightof the people three thousand miles a vision greater than the people wouldhave thought they could have. 

This vision which the Red Cross had, which it advertised to people andmade other people have, is what the people liked about it. The peoplethrew down their jewels for it--for something to believe about themselvesand do with themselves greater than they had believed before. They threwdown their creeds for it. They threw down their class prejudices forit--a huge buoyant serious daily vision of action in which all classesand all creeds of people could live and dream and work together everyday. 

No more matter of fact conclusive demonstration of the implacablesplendid brutal power of vision, of the power of vision to precipitateacross three thousand miles a body for the souls and the prayers of apeople, could be imagined than the Red Cross during its great days in thewar. 

The Red Cross became capable of doing what it did because it touched theimagination of the average humdrum man rich or poor and made him think ofsomebody besides himself. The Red Cross did this by what was practicallyan advertising campaign, the advertising of different sets of people, toall of the others. 

The result was what looked and felt like a miracle--a kind of apocalypseof people who have outdone themselves. 

Naturally the people liked it. And naturally people who have watchedthemselves and one another outdoing themselves, can do anything. 

My own experience is that when I set out to find the real truth aboutpeople whether it pets me in my feeling about them or not, people turnout to be incredibly alike. They are all more full of good than they seemto want me to believe. The only difference is that some of them are moresuccessful in keeping me from believing in them than others. 

I have taken some satisfaction in seeing in the Red Cross, a nationbacking 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 othernations--to having a vision and a body with which to do it and deserve todo it--is in the Red Cross, and in our Food Distribution. In both ofthese organizations we succeeded in getting the attention of others towhat we could do for them--and with them--by getting our own attentionfirst and by making our own sacrifice at home first. 

We were allowed to administer food abroad because we had shownself-control and sacrifice about food at home and were given headway inemergency and rescue abroad because millions of people here had a visionfor others and gave a body to their vision at home. 

I have been filled with sorrow over the way millions of men and women inthe American Red Cross, their daily lives geared to a great issue, livingevery day with a national international vision suffusing their minds andhearts and touching everything they said and did, suddenly disappeared asthe 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 thatone common colossal daily vision of a world, almost in a day, almost inan hour, across a continent as on some great national spring, snappedback into the little life. 

I do not know as I would have minded them--three thousand miles of themgoing back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but Ihave wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps tomove the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they hadto go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, anddriving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live themdaily together. 

The necessity of the every-day individual lives we all are interested inliving--the necessity of the actual personal things we all are dailytrying to do, is a necessity so much more splendid and tragic, so muchmore vivid, personal and immediate, so much more adapted to a high andexhilarating motive and to a noble common desire than the ratherrudimentary showy stupid necessity the Germans thrust upon us could everdream of being, that it is hard to understand the way in which theleaders of the Red Cross in the supreme critical moment when the mere warwith Germany was being stupendously precipitated into forty wars of fortynations with themselves, at the very moment when with one touch of abutton the new vision of the people could have been turned on instead ofthe old one and the hundred million people stood there asking them, snapped off the light, dismissed the hundred million people--clapped themback into their ten thousand cities into the common life. 

The magnificent self discovery, the colossal single-heartedness lightingup the faces of the people whiffed out by one breath of armistice! Whowould have believed it or who can forgive it?. .. The Red Cross--theredeemer, the big brother of nations, holding steady the nerves of awhole world--not meeting the emergency of a whole world--the whole worldyesterday tightened up into war, and to-day falling apart into colossalcomplicated, 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 atthe same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the samething at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the samething in a thousand ways with their hands. In the Red Cross the feet of ahundred million people became as the feet of one man. 

The Red Cross had hunted out, accumulated, mounted up and focused theattention of forty nations. It had in its hands the trigger of a ninetymile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day thearmistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking upin its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, apocket pistol instead. Because the war suddenly was everywhere instead ofthe north of France, it reduced to a peace basis. At the very moment whenit had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment whenit 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 toany problem with it, it let the forty nations go. 

If I could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as oneman--a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with hisopera glass, if I were sitting next to him I would suggest his turningthe screw to the right slowly. I would say, "Do you see better or worseas you turn it to the right?" If I found he saw worse I would tell him toturn it to the left and then I would leave him to try between the twountil he found it. 

The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. Ithad the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the nationalblank look. 

Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blanklook, 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 onlyof bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and notunnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping thefocus, stopping the national blank look has become the great nationaldaily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen askingfor 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 ingetting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous andamazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has everknown--this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with itsmighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger onthe screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundredmillion people from having a blank look, let its chance go. 

The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where itstopped, the Red Cross vision--the Red Cross spirit. 

The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented asa future for the Red Cross. 

The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future inventedfor it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in thisbook as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a bodyfor the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division forthe Red Cross. 

But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for mypurpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people--therank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves thesoul of it and who would make the soul of anything--particularly the menand women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come tocool a little--had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to setbefore the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated bythe leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us--would havekept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily activelabor in the Red Cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men andwomen for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the merestress 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 nationmight be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any liveprofession. 

Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they beganfilling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping themso that they have no teeth to fill. 

Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctorused to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see adoctor 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 nextstage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bonesand bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers--tokeep them from walking too soon. 

The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now killthe germs that decay the teeth. 

The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day afterthe armistice to go back to war germs. 

The Red Cross with its branches in every town and every nation in theworld 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, withthe germs of submarines. It would deal with the embryology of war. 

The germs of war between nations, breed in wars between classes, and thegerms of class war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs ofwar between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace withhimself. 

It is when I am having a hard time getting on with Stanley Lee that I amlikely to have a row with Ivy Lee. It is a colossal understatement to saythat charity begins at home. Everything does. If a man understandshimself he can understand anybody. If he gets on with himself the worldwill fall into his hands. 

The great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop warbetween capital and labor. This is a feat of personality and ofengineering in human nature. It is a home-job, and when we have done itat home we can sow all nations with it. If I wanted to stop a war betweenIvy Lee and me I would have to pick out a series of things to do to IvyLee 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 haveme do to him and say to him, and which possibly when I study on them Iwill 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 thecause of fighting may be a less exact science of mutual study andself-study, but it is approximately exact. It is also a fascinating andcontagious science. We master the embryology of war between persons--theembryology of war between classes, and then between nations. Theprinciples which we demonstrate and set up working samples of in one ofthese problems will prove to be the principles of the others. 

If people do not believe in germs enough and are more afraid of fire, Iwould change the figure. 

We are proposing to follow up at once, the Red Cross, which was run as afire engine to put or help put out fires between nations, with the AirLine League which is to be run as a machine for not letting fires betweennations get started. 

Edward A. Filene of Boston in trying to have a successful departmentstore found the women behind his counters got very tired standing in thestreet cars night and morning on the way home and took up with a willgetting new rapid transit for Boston. He found he could not get rapidtransit for Boston without helping to get a new government and that hecould 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 newtrade and industrial conditions in Boston and that he could not help getnew ideals working in trade and industry in Boston without helping in theideals of a nation. He then found he could not get a new nation withouttrying to help make several new nations. Then came the InternationalChamber of Commerce. 

Something like this seems to happen to nearly every man I know who reallyaccomplishes anything. 

Or any nation. 

Frederick Van Eeden of Holland began life as a painter with markedsuccess but being a lively and interested man he could not help wonderingwhy people were not getting out of paintings in Holland--his own andother people's, what they ought to and what they used to, and became acritic. He found people did not respond to his ideas of how they ought toenjoy things and then won distinction as a poet, but why did not morepeople get more out of the best poetry? He then wrote one or two novelsof high quality which Holland was proud of and which were read in severallanguages, but why did not the people read novels of a high character asmuch as they did the poorer ones?

He decided that it was because people were physically underorganized andnot whole in body and mind--like the Greeks, and became a physician. 

He thought he was being thorough when he became a physician but soonfound that he was not getting down to the causes after all, of people'snot having whole bodies and fine senses capable of appreciating the finerthings and soon came to the conclusion that for the most part what wasthe matter with their bodies was due to what was wrong in their habits ofthought and in their minds, and became an alienist and founded the firstpsycho-therapeutic hospital in Holland. 

He then found that in what was the matter with people's minds, he wasstill superficial and that people's minds were wrong because of thesocial and industrial conditions, ideals and institutions under whichthey were conceived and born, and had to live. 

He then devoted himself to being a publicist and sociologist, had chargeof bread for the poor during the great bread riots in Amsterdam and isnow engaged in grappling nationally and internationally with industrialand civil war as the cause of all failures of men and nations to expressand fulfill their real selves in the world. 

Any nation that wants to be a great nation and to fulfill and expressitself and be a first class nation will sooner or later find that it hasto go on from one individual personal interest to another until it findsit is doing practically what Frederick Van Eeden did. 

The only way to look out for, or to express oneself is to try to helpeverybody else to. 

The Red Cross at the end of the war in making elaborate and internationalarrangements to run a pleasant and complimentary ambulance to the reliefof disease in society that society was deliberately creating every day, instead of taking advantage at the end of the war of the trust allclasses had in it, and taking advantage of the attention of fortynations, of society's best and noblest need, to keep society from causingthe disease, chose to be superficial, faced away from its vision, fellbehind the people, absconded from the leadership of the world. 

The aches and pains of society with which since the war, the Red Cross sopolitely and elegantly deals, which with white kid gloves and withouthurting our feelings it spends our money to relieve are all caused by thethings we daily do to each other to make the money. 

The vision of the common people in America recognizes this and recognizedit instantly at the end of the war. The hearts of the men and women ofAmerica to-day, are at once too bitter, too deep and too hopeful not toinstantly lose interest in a Red Cross which asks them to help run it asa beautiful superficial ambulance to the evils people are doing to oneanother 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 beherself--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 doto make the most of herself. 

Senator Reed of Missouri judging from reports of his speeches in theSenate wants America in the present distraction of nations to stopthinking of the others, wizen up and be safe. 

It seems to me that if America were to cut herself off from the rest ofthe world in its hour of need and just shrivel up into thinking ofherself she would fail to fulfill herself and be like herself. She wouldjust be like Senator Reed of Missouri. 

Nothing could be less safe for America just now than to be like SenatorReed of Missouri. 

Senator Reed puts forward a patriotism which is sincere but reckless. Inthe Senate of fifty states, Reed says "I'm from Missouri. " In thecongress of nations, Reed says "America über Alles. " "The world forAmerica. " "America for Missouri. " "Missouri for Me!"

For America just at the present moment in the world it has got to belongto, to turn away and stop being interested in the whole world and ineverybody in it and in what everybody is going to do and be kept fromdoing--is like a man's shutting himself up in his own stateroom and beinginterested in his own port hole in a ship that is going down. It seemsmore sensible for America--even from the point of view of looking out forherself--not to go down with Senator Reed and moon around in hisstateroom with him, but to be deeply interested in the whole ship, and inthe engines, the wheelhouse and the pumps. 

Patriotism that just shuts a nation up into a private stateroom nation byitself 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 orfor 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 thedeck the last minute. 

I do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me thatfrom the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle ofSenator Reed of Missouri, tying Missouri like a millstone around his neckand then casting himself, Missouri and all, into the sea, while it mayhave a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be apractical or business-like example for his country. 

I would like to show if I can that Senator Reed is wrong, and to presentthe alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the Air LineLeague. 

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 warand said to England, America and the rest of us that we could not makedemocracy work in running an army and keep up with Germans in war, andthey are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work inindustry and keep up with Germans in peace. 

Forty nations half-believe that the Germans are right about industrialdemocracy, 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, anda good many people in America--extreme reactionaries and extremeradicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the Germans. 

If the Germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for Americato pay very much attention just now to her industries. If America isliving in a world as insane as Germany says it is, the one thing aheadfor us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other fortynations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough andgrimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations beforethey 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, tochallenging the Germans--to telling them that they are as fooled aboutwhat industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what itcould do in war. 

The one thing we can do in America now to get the Germans or anybody elseto believe us about industrial democracy is to make American democracy inindustry whip German militarism in industry out of sight in our own laborunions and in our own factories. Then we will whip German militarism inindustry out of the markets of the world. 

If the quickest way for the American people to get a decent world--aworld we want to do business in, is to whip German militarism inindustry, and if the quickest way to whip German militarism abroad is towhip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up ourfactories, 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 moneyand men?

The fear of the United States Senate. 

The fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish moneyand men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the United States Senateand other governments not to be afraid of war. 

The first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stopthis fear. 

The first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is tostop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know allabout us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all dayevery day are making peace work between classes, better than war does. Making democracy work in business is the first condition, for America andthe 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 intoone mass organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the threeclasses together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. TheAir Line League is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as astanding-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, thevoluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team workand mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all classes. 

The whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrialdemocracy--in proving to people by advertising it to them and bydramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works. 

It is because the Germans believe that men who have been forced againsttheir wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more andcompete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing teamwork because they understand and want to, that Germany is a second-classnation and that the German people have had to put up for forty years withbeing second-class human beings. They have a ruling majority ofsecond-class human beings in Germany because they have the most completeand most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, formaking second-class human beings out of practically anybody--arrangementsfor howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to doas a substitute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of makingthem want to do it. 

Taking the line of least resistance--the mechanical course in dealingwith human nature, makes America's being a second-class nation a matterof course. 

What we have always been hoping for in America is that in due time we aregoing to be a first-class nation--a nation crowded with men and womenwho, wherever they have come from, or whether or not they were firstclass when they came, have been made first class by the way that all dayevery day in their daily work they have been treated by the rest of uswhen 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 marblepillars 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 inchand a half thick. 

Then I stood in the middle of The Avenue, all New York boiling andswirling round me and looked up at The Arch of Victory--massive, majesticwhite 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 Archhe had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under, and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amountedto--how deep the glory had struck in. 

I thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victoryover the Germans . .. Forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing andeighty-seven million unconquered sullen Germans before our eyes in broaddaylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying theirbills! . .. Eighty-seven million Germans we have all got to devoteourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years. 

I am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. Millions of Americansthough in a politer way are doing it all this week. We want to pokethrough to the truth. We want something more than a theater propertyVictory Arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a realone!

We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest--totake 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 dollardare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that theAmerican people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar andhurrahs and tears and empty watery words--that we will chase Peace up, that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations--intothe 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 grimunconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through!

We will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory nosmall boy, no Bolshevik nation can stick its foot in!

 * * * * *

When I corrected the proof of this advertisement--it was the lastadvertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York--itwas not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over theGermans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square hasmelted away into roar. 

But the truth I have spoken has not melted away. 

What The Air Line League is for in its national and internationalorganization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is toanswer 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 bodilessphantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called thePeople. 

I have proceeded upon two premises. 

A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without themechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghosttrying to have a family. 

A body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeingwhat to do. It is without the spiritual means of self-expression andself-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 dividedpeople 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 anatomyor rather this biology of a nation's human nature. 

In the next few pages I am dealing not with the reconstruction but withthe reconception of a nation. 

Reconstruction is a dead difficult laborious thing to try to put off on aboundless superabundant ganglion of a hundred million lives like theAmerican people. 

In the crisis that confronts America to-day not only the most easy, butthe most natural and irresistible way for this nation to be a greatnation is to fall in love. 

I am enlarging in these next few pages upon how crowds and experts--thatis: crowds and their men of vision and engineers can come to anunderstanding and get together. 

I wish to state certain particular things I think are going to be done bythe people--that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawninto the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their greathour 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 bornagain is the finding of oneself, oneself, --the spiritual invention ofone'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 whohave done it. 

When one is being born the first time one does not even know it. One isnot 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 canknow and do, and all everybody around one knows, and all everybody aroundcan 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 hastaken 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 onlymanage to be born again by knowing all about herself, by disrobingherself to be born again, by a supreme colossal act of self-devotion, self-discovery, self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, nakedbefore God, reading the hearts of forty nations, a thousand years and theunborn, and knowing herself, --slipping off her old self and putting onher new self. 

III

THE AIR LINE LEAGUE

The first thing a spirit in this world usually does to find a body is toselect a father and mother. The American people if it is to be embodiedand have the satisfaction and power of making itself felt and expressingitself, can only do so by following the law of life. 

A hundred million people can only get connected with a body, acquire apresence--find itself as a whole, the way each one of the hundred millionpeople did alone. 

In a nation's being born again three types of mind are necessarilyinvolved. 

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 inmaking the people stop being a ghost, in making their American people asan idea, physically fit. 

The first thing to be arranged for America to make the people quit beinga ghost in The White House, is to form into three bodies ororganizations, these three, groups of men--make these three groups of menclass-conscious, self-conscious, conscious of their own power and purposein America--and have everybody in America conscious of them. I proposethree organizations to stand for these three life-forces, threeorganizations which will act--each of which will act with the other twoand will follow out for a nation, as individuals do for individuals, thelaw of life--of producing and reproducing the national life. 

The minds that are creative will discover and project a national idea forthe people--the inventors, will act as one group. 

The minds that conceive and bring the idea to the birth, that bring theidea to pass, called engineers, will act as another, and the minds thatteach, bring up, draw out and apply the idea and relate the idea tolife--will act as another. 

I propose a club of fifty thousand creative men be selected and acttogether--that a nation may be conceived. 

I propose that fifty thousand engineers or how-men, men who think outways and means, be selected and act together, that the nation that isconceived may be born. 

These two Clubs will have their national headquarters together in askyscraper hotel of their own in New York and will act together--inbringing an idea for the people into the world. 

The third Club--twenty or thirty million people, on the scale of the RedCross--in ten thousand cities, will apply and educate the idea, bring itup 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, tryit out and put it through. 

The Air Line League proposes to coördinate these three functions andoperate 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, theTry-Out Club, and the third--the operating club of the vast body of thepeople taking direct action and putting the thing through locally andnationally would be called The Put-Through Clan. 

The Air Line League through these three clubs will undertake to help thepeople to stop being an abstraction, to swear off from being a Ghost intheir own house. The great working majority of the American people--ofthe 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 ofother nations, will come to the rescue now, during the war the people arehaving 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, hadonce. 

Springfield a few years ago, all in a few weeks, threw up the chance ofbeing Detroit because two or three automobile men who belonged inSpringfield and wanted to make Springfield as prosperous as Detroit, werepractically told to go out to Detroit and find the men who would have theimagination to lend them the money--to make Springfield into a Detroit. 

Naturally when they found bankers with imagination in Detroit they stayedthere. 

What happened to Springfield is what is going to happen to America if wedo not make immediate national arrangements for getting men who haveimagination in business in this country, men who can invent manpower, toknow each other and act together. 

The twenty-five hundred dollars Frank Cousins of Detroit recognized HenryFord with, a few years ago, he gave back the other day to Henry Ford fortwenty-nine million dollars. 

People say as if that was all there was to it, that the fate of thisnation 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 whenthey see one. 

Man-power in a democracy like ours turns on having inventors, bankers andcrowds act together. 

Sometimes banks hold things back by being afraid to coöperate withinventors or men of practical imagination. 

This is called conservatism. 

Sometimes it is the crowds and laborers who hold things back by beingafraid to coöperate with leaders or men of imagination. 

But the fate of all classes turns upon our having men of creativeimagination believed in by men who furnish money, and believed in by menwho furnish labor. 

The idea of the Look-Up Club is that men of creative imagination shall begot together, shall be made class-conscious, shall feel and use theirpower themselves and put it where other people can use it. 

How much time and how many years of producing-power would it have savedAmerica if Alexander Graham Bell had known or could have had ready toappeal to, America's first hundred thousand picked men of imagination, when he was trudging around ringing doorbells in Boston, trying to supplypeople with imagination enough to see money in telephones?

If William G. McAdoo, when he had invented with his tunnels, a reallygreat conception of the greater New York, and was fighting to get peoplein New York to believe in it, and act on it, had had an organization ofone hundred thousand picked men of imagination in the nation at large toappeal to--one hundred thousand men picked out by one another to put apremium on constructive imagination when they saw some, instead of apenalty on it, how much time would it have saved New York and savedMcAdoo? How much time would a national Club like this save this nationto-day and from now on in its race with the Germans?

Why should our men of practical creative imagination to-day waste as muchtime running around and asking permission of people who had none, asMcAdoo had to?

 * * * * *

If a hundred thousand silver dollars--just ordinary silver dollars--wereput together in a row in New York on a sidewalk, everybody going by wouldhave imagination at once about the one hundred thousand silver dollarsand what could be done with them. 

But put one hundred thousand picked men--or men of exceptional powertogether in a row in New York--and why is it everybody is apt to feel atfirst a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around thecorner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortalhuman beings?

I wish people would have as much imagination about what could be donewith one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got togetherfrom the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundredthousand silver dollars. 

This is one of the first things the Look-Up Club is for, to get people tobe inspired by a hundred thousand men put together, in the same way thatthey are by a hundred thousand dollars put together. 

 * * * * *

I went out last night and walked up the Great White Way and looked at thelittle flock of hotels that are standing to-day on the site of my faithin these hundred thousand men--the site of the new hotel--the littlesleeping shelf in the roar of New York for the hundred thousand men tohave on Broadway. 

I stood and looked at the five or six hotels now standing there waitingto be torn down for us, and ---- told me that the seventeen parcels ofland in the block that he had labored on forty-seven people to get themto make up their minds to put their lots together, were worth only amillion and a half of dollars, either to them or to anybody else, whilethey were making up their minds to let their lots be put together. Andnow that he had got their minds made up for them and had got all thesefoolish, distracted seventeen parcels of land together into one, the landinstead 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 imaginationscattered in five thousand cities, twiddling on the fate of a nationalone. 

The same thing is going to happen to the value of the men that hashappened to the separate lumps of sand and clay they called real estatein New York. 

What can I manage to accomplish alone in trying to get to Chicagoto-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 CentralStation, make a little arrangement with several hundred thousand men andwith 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 offeringin 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 mentogether. Everybody who has ever done anything knows this. 

What we are doing is not to get values together, but the men who keepcreating 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 tobe nominated to the Look-Up Club--to ask them whether they think thisidea of mine--of having the first hundred thousand men of vision of thiscountry in a Club, is going through or not. 

I am writing them and asking them if--if it is going through--they wantto belong to it. 

Very few men can speak with authority--even if they would, as to what theother ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men will possiblydo or not do with my idea in this book. But any man can speak withauthority and speak immediately when he gets to the end of it, as to howhe feels himself, whether he wants or likes the idea, and wants to countone to bring the idea to pass. 

I speak up for myself in this book. Anybody can see it. If every man willconfine himself in the same way, and will stake off himself and attend tohimself at the end of this book and say what he wants--we will all getwhat 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 eachman who is nominated is, "If the first hundred thousand men who have imagination in business arebeing selected and brought together out of all the other business men inAmerica, do you want to be one of them? Who are the ten, twenty or fiftymen of practical vision in business--especially young men, you thinkought 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 withthe 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 theUnited States Government. 

It has judicial, executive and legislative departments, but a departmentmade up of men of vision to create, conceive and reconceive, go deeperand see further than law and restraints can go, does not exist in ourGovernment. 

We have a Judicial Department to decide on whether what is born has aright to live--a Legislative Department to pass rules under on how itshall be obliged to live--and an Executive Department to make itmind--but the department to create and to conceive for the people islacking. 

Government at best is practically a dear uncle or dear maiden-auntinstitution. 

Government as a physical expression is without functions of reproduction. 

Government--contrary to the theory of the Germans--from the point of viewof sheer power in projecting and determining the nature and well-being ofmen--the fate of men and the world--is superficial, is a staid, standardized, unoriginal affair--devoted to ready-made ideas like the RedCross during the war. 

This is what is the matter with a Government's posing in this or anyother nation as a live body for the people. 

The spontaneous uprising of business men during the war--the spectacle ofthe dollar a year men overwhelming and taking over the government, thebreaking in of the National Council of Defense--the spontaneouscombustion of millions of free individuals into one colossal unit likethe Red Cross--all the other outbreaks of the creative vital power of thesuperior people of the nation, all point to the fact that when new braintracks are called for, the natural irresistible way is to find individualpersons who have them, who make them catching to other individualpersons, and who then give body to them across the nation. 

Its whole nature and action of a Government tend to make Government andmost 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 toanything at all, they must have a spontaneous willful and comparativelyfree origin and organization of their own. 

Hence the Look-Up Club coöperating with the Try-Out Club to act as aninformal 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 SpecialCommissioners for controlling the social evil in Babylon, they would havemade very sad work of what they had to do because they would not haveunderstood what it was all about. They would not have had the insightnecessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project inhuman nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles andgo ahead. 

What makes a man a man is the way he takes all the knowledge, thepenetrating lively enriching knowledge his selfishness gives--his visionof what he wants for himself, and all the broadening enriching knowledgehis 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 sitaround 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 forlabor to putter away trying to make capital pure and noble like a laborunion. 

There are far worse things than selfishness in people. 

Being fooled about oneself is worse because it is more difficult to getat, meaner, more cowardly and far more dangerous for others. 

 * * * * *

This chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket whileinhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twentyother men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. When Iwas swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled offwith me--a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write thischapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt andthen 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 theearth. 

With one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of aworld. 

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 saltin an egg as much as he did. 

So he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what hisunselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had thesalt together. 

Incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as I waswishing somebody would before I handed it in) the idea I am trying toexpress in it. This in a small way is a perfect working model of what Icall civilization. Unselfishness in business is not a civilization atall. It is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven. 

Imagination about other people based upon imagination about what onewants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules theworld. 

The appetites in people which make them selfish supply them with such arich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if theyreally 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 meregiver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating, self-give-up, self-go-without person--is a selfish person and anunselfish person mixed. What he calls his character is the proportion inwhich he chooses to mix himself. 

Half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-dayis that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight intothe kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurizedpersons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing thepassions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking theselfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way otherantagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together. 

People in other nations are as selfish in their way as the Germans are intheirs--capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. Thefundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility thatmakes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose, in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give themwhat they want. 

It takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slumpdown without noticing him into being an altruist with him. Any man can bea selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist--ifhe does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man hasand all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of God and the loveof one's kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to givesomething 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 engineersin the Try-Out Club, of the Air Line League, propose to act. 

The way for America to meet the German militaristic and competitive ideaof business and of the business executive--the idea that brought on thewar, is for America and the rest of the world to put forward somethingand put forward something quick, as a substitute for it, sell tothemselves, 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 andinventors of how to bring things to pass, must put forward the pursuit ofmutual interests in the largest sense, pursuit of mutual interestsgenerously 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 spiritednessof its labor. 

I rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made itimpossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who donot love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who havenothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the jobcatching--who cannot get men to work for them except by offering themmore money than they can earn. 

The fact that no man is so cheap he can be had by merely being paidmoney--the fact that no man is so unimportant but he has to be approachedas a fellow human being and has to be persuaded--and given somethinghuman and real, is the first faint flush of hope for our modern world. Itlets in an inkling at last that the industrial world is going to be acivilization. 

 * * * * *

If men were made of india-rubber, or reinforced concrete, or wood orsteel, no one could hope for better or more efficient men to manage bigbusiness than the typical big business men of the phase of Americanindustry now coming to an end. 

But of course in the crisis business is facing now, which turns on theputting forward of men who understand and can play masterfully upon themotives, temptations and powers of ordinary human nature the typical manwe know at the Mahogany Desk, who has a machine imagination, who sees menas dots and dreams between piles of dollars and rows of machines, is asingularly helpless person and can only hold his own in his own businessby giving way and putting forward in place of himself, men who aremasters in human nature, experts and inventors in making men want towork. 

The difference between the business world that is passing out and the onethat is coming in, is that the masters of the world who have been proudbefore, to be called the captains of industry, are going to think ofthemselves 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 workhard for the man who fills them with new conceptions, who stirs thedepths of their lives with desire and hope. 

The reason that reactionary capital is having trouble with labor, is thatit is putting forward men who order instead of putting forward fathersand inventors. 

The reason that the I. W. W. And other labor organizations are havingtrouble with capital, is that their leaders are not inventors. They aretired conventional men governed by automatic preconceptions, merely doingover again more loudly and meanly against society, the things thatcapital has already tried and has had to give up because it could notmake them work. 

Only inventors--executives who invent and fertilize opportunity forothers--men who invent ways of making men see values--men who createvalues and who present people with values they want to work out, aregoing 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 businessfor the fun of it. He finds he cannot long compete with the men about himwho are, with engineers and others who are in business for the great gameof producing results, of doing difficult things, of testing theirknowledge, their skill and their strength. 

Making men want to work has come to be the secret of success in modernbusiness and the employer who has nothing but wages to offer, nothing inhis own passion for work which he can make catching to others, can onlyget second-rate, half-hearted men and plodders about him. A factory inwhich the workmen merely work for wages, cannot hope to compete with afactory 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 thatthe one way he can get work out of himself is to make money--the man whogrows rich by ordering, by gobbling, and by hiring gobblers and plodders, cannot function under the new conditions. The guarantee that we are goingto have a civilization now, that business with joy in it and personalinitiative and motive in the work itself, is going to take possession ofthe markets of the world is based on the fact that labor has to have itsimagination touched in order to work efficiently, and an entirely newlevel and new type of man--the man who can touch men's imaginations, isbeing put forward in business to do it. 

The Engineer is going to have somewhat the quieting effect uponinstitutions and upon the spirit of unrest in the people, when he isknown to be in control of the great employers and has made them dependenton him, that the matter of fact and rather conclusive taxi meter in a cabhas on the man inside, who wants to quarrel with his cabman. 

A business world largely in control of men who have the spirit and thetechnique of engineers will make unrest more awkward, will make the redflag 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 ofeternal 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 fineall-round religious sport. 

Sport has certain well-known disadvantages. So has religion. The man whoonce grasps the secret of modern life as practiced by a really bigengineering genius, insists upon having his business allowed all theadvantages of sport and religion both. 

To have something on which one spends ten hours a day, which has all theadvantages without the disadvantages of being a sport, and all theadvantages without the disadvantages of being a religion, is a find. 

The typical engineer, like any other thorough-going man treats what hedoes as a sport. That is, he puts his religion for the fun of it into hisbusiness. His business becomes the continual lark of making his religionwork. He dramatizes in it his belief in human nature and in God, hisbelief that human nature is not crazy and that God has not been outwittedin allowing so much of it to exist. 

It has looked especially reckless during the last four years for God tolet human nature try to keep on being human nature any longer. Now is thetime of all others, and Germany is now the country of all others, to showwith a whole world looking on how essentially sound human nature reallyis, and how being human (especially being human in a thing whicheverybody cares about and which everybody notices, like business) reallyworks. 

There has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before inhistory, the chance America has now of dramatizing to Germans, anddramatizing through the Germans to everybody, an idea of businessefficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its verysubstance, 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 atpeople--to make them peaceful. .. . 

 * * * * *

The only men in modern business who can now hope to get to the top arethe 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 hiswork. To the sporting man, the gentleman, the man who loves the game, theprize goes now in competition with Gobblers and Plodders. 

The Engineer or Winner instead of the Compeller of Men is going to drawout 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 superimposesupon the normal and suitable motive in his business of being selfishenough to make money to keep the business up, the motive of thegentleman, the professional man, the artist, the engineer, the sport--themotive 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--themere 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 firingtaxes at them. We are going to discipline men like these by driving theminto the back streets of business, as anæmic, second-rate and inefficientmen in bringing things to pass. 

A man who in a tremendous and absorbing adventure like real business isso thin-blooded or thick-headed that all he can get work out of himselffor is money, will only be able to get the plodding kind of second-rateworkers to work for him, _i. E. _, he will be able to get only plodders whomerely work for money, by paying higher wages than other people haveto--by paying higher wages than they can earn. 

In other words, civilized business, business with joy in it and personalinitiative and human interest in the work itself, is going to driveuncivilized plodding half-hearted business out of the markets of theworld. 

The men who are expressing through the hearts of the people their best, more lasting and more powerful selves, in business, who are gatheringaround them other people who are doing it, the men who try out their bestselves in business--who invent ways as executives to make their bestselves work for them and for others, are having to-day before our eyes, the world placed in their hands. Men who represent vital forces likethese, are as solid, unconquerable in human life as the force of gravity, the multiplication table they are. They find themselves dominating likeradium, penetrating like fresh air, drawing all things to them like thesky, the stars, like spring, like the love of women and of children andthe love of Christ. 

The idea of having imagination about a customer and studying a customeras 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 thesame spirit as the other partners, is no longer considered sentimentalexcept by the type of employer now being driven to the wall because hehas no technique for making anybody want to work for him. As things goto-day it is the leader in industry who is trying to keep up a finecomfortable feeling of being a captain of industry--the man who feels heowns everything and owns everybody in sight, who is visionary andsentimental, who is the Don Quixote of business now. 

The employer who feels superior to individuals, who looks at men as dotsand dreams--and who expects to deal with a man subconsciously and get onwith him as if he were not there--the employer who is an absentee in souland body, and who gives an order to his men and then goes off and leavesthem like pumps, hydraulic rams, that of course cannot help slaving awayfor him until they are stopped--the employer who during the first stupidstages of our new machine-industry, has been allowed to be prominent fora time, now stands exposed as too wooden and incompetent to conduct theintimately personal, difficult and human institution a factory has got tobe 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 ofpeople that money cannot buy. The man who cannot get the work that moneycannot buy in a few years now, is not going to stand the ghost of achance. 

People will not believe you if you tell them what the world was like whenhe 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 ofBolshevism. 

The real master is not the man who masters men, but who makes them masterthemselves. The masterful man in getting out of people what he wants, isthe man who makes the people want him to have what he wants--makes themkeep giving it to him fresh out of their hearts every day. 

The wholesale national and international criticism the Red Cross workersmade in the latter months of the Red Cross activities, of thetouch-the-button and hand-down-the-order methods of many of the businessmen who controlled the activities at home and abroad--of the millions ofworkers in the Red Cross, has been itself a kind of national education inwhat certain types of American business men placed in power fellinadvertently into, in trying to treat millions of free people on theemployer and employee plan. 

But these men and their whole idea are going by. We are getting down tothe quick, to the personal and the human, to the sense all good workershave of listening and being listened to and of not being overridden. Bigbusiness after this is going to be big in proportion as it makes peoplefeel--employees and customers both, that they are listened to, that theyare being dealt with as individual human beings and not as fractions ofindividuals, 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 ishere to stay. 

To speak of studying with the best expert skill in the country one'semployees so as to make them want to work, as humanity, is not quitebright. It is not humanity. It is business. 

Making people trade with one instead of making them want to trade withone is recognized as second-rate business. So is making people work forone instead of making them want to work. The business man who depends forhis business, on customers, or on workers who want to get away and aregoing 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 nationsthink and of thinking ourselves is to do things. 

The people who swept into and took over the Red Cross, who dramatized theAmerican people in the war abroad--are the people who are going to makewar at home impossible. 

The big spiritual or material fact about the Red Cross is that it hasbeen a dramatic organization, that for four years it has been anorganization for acting out the feelings, desires, wills and beliefs of agreat people toward men who were fighting for liberty. 

The Red Cross has been a great emotional epic play, an expression inaction, of the heart and brain of a mighty nation. 

Emotions by great peoples have been spectacular before, and they havebeen sentimental and they have been occupied with enjoying themselves. 

But in the Red Cross twenty million people have been as inspired as SaintFrancis 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 thatit shall keep on dramatizing these qualities in the American character athome, selecting things to do which shall dramatize our people to oneanother, 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 andengineers 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 theskilled consumer--the organization of the consumer-group to coöperatewith skilled capital and skilled labor, to make it impossible as it isnow, for unskilled capital, capital which has not the skill to win thepublic, or to win its own labor, and for unskilled labor, labor whichcannot earn its money and takes it whether it earns it or not, to compelthe consumer by force and by holdups to buy goods they do not want atprices 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 hewants. 

All the people of this country--the consumers (the real employers of allemployers) have to do, is to whisper in one national whisper through ahundred thousand grocery stores and other stores what kind of employersand workmen, what kind of goods and factories they like, and the buyersand consumers of America instead of taking what is poked out at thembecause they have to, and being the fools and the slaves of capital andlabor, will get with a whisper what they request, and we will return andwill 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 makingself-discipline work is true because he does not have to say it. Hedramatizes it. 

Alexander is right in his fundamental idea of giving conscious control topeople through new brain tracks toward their bodies because they get upand walk away from him when they have been with him, with their new braintracks on. New habits--new psycho-physical habits, like Culebra cuts areput right through them. 

The man who conceives or invents may be wrong, the man who experiments ortries out, may need to be watched, but the man who puts through isinviolable. 

The program, the spirit and the function of the Put-Through Clan in atown, is to embody truth so baldly and with such a shameless plainnessthat 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 dealingwith our town. (1) We can stand for disciplining capital and labor intoshape by passing laws and heaping up penalties. (2) We can let them seehow much better they can make things by sicking them on to each other andhaving them discipline each other. (3) We can make fun of both of themuntil they make fun of themselves and each class begins discipliningitself. Then general self-discipline will set in. We propose toindulge--each group of us in the Put-Through Clan--the labor group in thetown, the employer group and the public group, in self-discipliningourselves, until the thing is made catching out of sheer shame anddecency in others. 

§ 3. _Psycho-Analysis. _

The scientific basis for psycho-analysis for a town, or for a laborunion, or for a Republican or Democratic Party, is found in the factsthat have been stated by Mathias Alexander in his book and demonstratedby his work. 

Professor John Dewey in his introduction to Mr. Alexander's book speaksof 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 nationtogether, I want to dwell on it a moment longer before applying it to thePut-Through Clan. 

The first thing a man is always fooled about is his own body and ineverything 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 hispolitical or social or industrial body to which he belongs as it is ofhis first one. 

Reform must be self-reform first. 

If it is true that the majority of ideas and decisions most people thinkthey make with their minds are really made for them and handed up to themby their bodies--if it is true that what people quite commonly use theirminds for is to keep up appearances, to give rational-looking excuses andreasons for their wanting what their stomachs and livers and nerves makethem want, the way to persuade people nowadays is to do what Christdid--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, hefinds he does not know which side of his mouth it is on, it is likely tobe still more true of all the rest of his ideas about himself--his ideasabout his ideas. 

If everything about us, about most of us is more or less like this, asAlexander says--wires or nerves all twisted, sensory impressions upsidedown, half of what is inside our bodies mislaid half the time, the way tochange people's minds is to change them toward the bodies they are withand that they are nearest to, first. Then we can branch out and educateothers--even educate ourselves. 

Millions of grown people, in religion, business and politics to-day inAmerica can be seen thinking automatically of the world about them in theterms of themselves, in the terms of their own souls sadly mixed up withtheir own bodies. We all know such people. The world is just anextension, a kind of annex or wing, built out from themselves full ofreflections from their own livers, and fitted up throughout with aircastles, dungeons, twilights, sunrises, after-glows, from their ownprecious interior decorations and bowels and mercies. 

The basic fact about human nature the Put-Through Clan acts on is thesimplest 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. Werecognize it without a qualm in a baby, that his emotions and reflectionsabout life, about Time and Eternity, and about things in general are justreflections of a milk bottle he has just had, or of a milk bottle he hasnot 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 forsix months a whole world on himself and on his having his own little waywith it, disciplining the rest of the Senate, forty nations and aPresident, 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 atHarvard, or other clothes. But it is the same thing. What is reallyhappening to him--to Senator Lodge is really a kind of spiritualneuritis. He is cramped, or as the vulgar more perspicuously andtherefore more fittingly and elegantly put it, his mind is stuck onhimself. He is imbedded in his own mereness and now as anybody can seethere is nothing that can be done by anybody with anything, not with awhole world for a crowbar, to pry Lodge off himself. 

Most of us know other people like this. Most of us have moments andsubjects on which as we have remembered afterwards we have needed to bepried off. The same is true, of course, of a political body like theRepublican 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 wepropose for a whole town to do in the Put-Through Clan on the sameplatform, stand there cheerfully all together on the great generalplatform and admit in chorus sweetly, that we are all probably thisblessed moment and every day being especially fooled more or less byourselves about ourselves, about the things nearest to us--especially ourown personal bodies and political and industrial souls and bodies. Theonly difference between people who are put into insane asylums and thoseof 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 aboutcalling ourselves fools in time. For all practical purposes in thisworld, it may be said that the people who are wise and deep about keepingthemselves reminded that they may be crazy any minute, are sane. 

What happens to people--to most people when they are grown up is thatthey stop being simple and honest like a baby. But they all havepractically the same essential thought when they are being disagreeable. They are trying to make the world around them toe the line to their owninterior decorations. What they think, what they feel, what they do inthe little back parlors of their own minds must be daubed on the ceilingof the world. 

The joy of toleration, of new ideas, of rows and tiers of theirnon-selves, and of their yet-selves reaching away around them that theycan still know and share and can still take over and have the use of inaddition 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 aninstitution--as a kind of church--of course it makes him very unhappy tobelieve he is wrong, but the minute he thinks of himself as a means to anend, thinks of his personality as a tool placed in his hand for gettingwhat he wants or what a world wants--the minute a man thinks of himselfas a kind of spirit-auger, or chisel of the soul, or as a can-opener totruth, which if it is a little changed one way or the other, or helddifferently, will suddenly work--changing himself toward himself, andbelieving what he would rather not, becomes like any other invention ordiscovery, a creative pleasure. 

In saying that the main thing the Put-Through Clan is for in a town, isto act as town-headquarters for the town's seeing through itself, as ameans of making the town the best, the happiest town in the state--as ameans of making it a town that deserves anything it wants, I am merelysaying that the act of self-invention--the act of recreation once enteredinto as a habit is so refreshing and so extraordinary in itself, and sopractical in its results, that when people once see how it reallyworks--when towns and parties and industrial groups get once started inself-discipline, in self-confession, in psycho-analysis and in takingadvantage of opposite ideas--there is going to be an epidemic in thiscountry, a flu of truth. 

A whole city or a whole town indulging in psycho-analysis finds it lessembarrassing and not more embarrassing than one man does. 

When it becomes the thing for a city or for a capital or labor group tosee through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the mainthought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about itwill 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 themthat has to be done by some one, and do it themselves. 

Three per cent of the conveniences--the public X-ray machines for keepingpeople from being fooled about themselves will be enough. 

The minute we begin turning the X-ray outfit around and begin trying itmodestly 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 likeNorthampton--twenty-five thousand people, to have--if it once getsstarted, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. It iseasier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole towndisciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, Would beeasier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it. 

Why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himselfis doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorryfor him?

No one really thinks of being sorry for Marconi or Edison or WilburWright, or Bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detectivelike Sherlock Holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is theway he steals a march on himself. 

The very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or adiscoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way hekeeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looksback into the windows he has looked out of all his life. 

People must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who doesthis and of thinking he is being noble and doing right. 

It has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble whenthey are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward inthe present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, ofself-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistfulidea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all overthe country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as asubstitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source oforiginality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving toget everything one wants. I am offering self-discipline because it works. People who get so low in their minds and who so little see howself-discipline works that they actually have the face to feel noble andbeautiful about it when they are having some, cannot make it work. Theymust 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 hisown mind, and disciplining himself. The source of his creative andoriginal power is that more than other men he keeps facing necessities inhimself, keeps casting off old selves, old preconceptions and breakingthrough to new ones. 

The spiritual and intellectual source of the grip of the inventor uponmodern life, is that he is a scientist in managing his own human natureand his own mind, that he had a relentless rejoicing habit ofdisciplining himself. 

In every renaissance, revival or self-renewal the world has had, peoplehave had the time of their lives. The great days of history have been theeras of great candid truth-facing, self-discipline. Self-discipline andself-discovery go together. 

There is a greater return on the investment in being born again, ingetting what one wants, than in anything else in the world. 

If one sees through himself, he can see through anybody. It explains andclears 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 naturewould work or hope it is going to work, in America. 

I am recording a grim, matter-of-fact, irresistible, implacable law inthe biology of progress. 

I am not nagging, teasing or apologizing. I am not saying what I say asreligion 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 itwill have to get out of the way of it. 

The conscious control of capital, the conscious control of labor, theconscious control of the public group--the arrival and the victory of themen who get their way by self-control and who are invited by all to havecontrol of others because they have control of themselves, is a law ofnature. 

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 afterto-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 onthe stage, and for five hundred million people to act. 

§ 6. _Who. _

People will be unfair to themselves and unfair to me and will cheat anation if any attempt should ever be made to take this book as aprogram--a program for anybody--and not a spirit. 

The spirit is the program, and the people who naturally gather around thespirit and who secrete it will have to be the ones to embody and give itin the Put-Through Clan, its local and its national expression. 

Picked persons, picked out by all for their known temperament and giftfor team-work--that is for their put-through spirit or spirit ofthoroughness in getting the victory over themselves and combiningthemselves with others, will need to be the dominating people. 

The essence of the Clan is that it is to be vivified and penetratedthroughout with personality, and with respect for personality. 

This means automatically that the Put-Through Clan is not going to bedominated 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 disciplinethere may be for others will wait until it is asked for and will be aby-product of the discipline we are giving ourselves. 

In the operation of the Clan there are certain persons and types ofpersons to whom the Clan is always going to be distinctly partial. It isnever going to treat people alike. People are not--for the timebeing--alike and are going to be treated as they are. 

Democracy is impossible as long as people are not treated withdiscrimination--as long as people cannot feel and do not like to feelthat what they are, makes a difference in what they get. 

It is obvious that to begin with that the Put-Through Clan, composed asit is to be of the leading people in all groups--the people whose timehas a premium placed on it in their own private business, will have aregular practice of giving the most attention and giving the most power, approval and backing to those persons with whom the least time bringsthe greatest return. 

This means automatically extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionistsin industry in getting what they want through the Put-Through Clan, willhave to stand further down the queue than others. 

I am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, asrepresentative--possibly more possibly less of others in the Clan. Anyscintilla or fleck of truth I can pick off from a revolutionary, I takebut I will not take him. The same is true of a standpatter orreactionary. I want to know all he knows. If I take his truth I can useit, if I take him I will find him cumbersome. Life is too short to spendten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one whocould listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts andactions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions. 

People who do not listen--extreme reactionaries and extremerevolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backingthey want in the Put-Through Clan, to have what comes last and what isleft over from the day's work. 

It is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as alittle attention goes a great way. 

If people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. Besideswhich, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen--topeople who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice orconsider others--people who are always getting up and going out, who movein an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous. 

People who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally bepicked out by the Put-Through Clan as the last people they will hurrywith. 

Extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have tobe carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritualtown farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen ofthinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat therest of us as fellow human beings. 

 * * * * *

On the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, thePut-Through Clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving itsbacking to people--to capital groups and labor groups in proportion asthey are spirited. 

The people who give the most return on the investment--the people whogive the most quick thorough and spirited response--in the generalinterests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones whoshall be waited on first. 

I have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that peoplewho have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enoughspirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited. 

I would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, laborwhich thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead ofmerely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of itsown emotion about what it does not want. 

Spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom itdisagrees and wants to come to terms. 

Revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytummingpeople--who do not want to think. 

I am not saying that spiritually tired people are to blame for beingtired. I am pointing out a fact to be acted on. 

Tired people always want the same thing. They want a thing to stay as itis--or they want it to stay just as it is--upside down. The sameinefficiency, fear and weakness, meanness--merely another set of peoplerunning the inefficiency and trying to make fear, weakness, meannesswork. 

This is where the Put-Through Clan of the Air Line League comes in. ThePut-Through Clan will throw the local and national influence of twentymillion consumers on to the side of spirited or team-work capital andlabor, and will discourage, make ridiculous and impossible, the scaredfighting capital and the scared fighting labor with which we are nowbeing troubled. 

The real line of demarcation in modern industry is not between capitaland 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 troubleto study or understand anything, or to change anything, just turn itthoughtlessly upside down--substitute their inefficiency for the otherman's. 

Extreme revolutionaries generally talk about freedom, but until they canget us to believe they are going to allow freedom to others, the world isnot going to let them--of all people, have any. 

The bottom fact about revolutionary labor like revolutionary capital isthat it is tired. Revolutionary labor is not spirited. It is assoggy-minded, thoughtless and automatic to be a revolutionist to-day asit is to be a Louis XVI. 

It takes originality to construct and to change things and change thehearts and minds of people and the spirit of a nation. 

Anybody can be a revolutionist or a reactionary. All one has to do is tostop thinking and sag, or stop thinking and slash. 

 * * * * *

The mills of the gods grind slowly because they grind fine. The maindifference between men and the gods is that when men do things on a largescale they are apt to slur things over and be mechanical, do things inhuge empty swoops--pass over details and particular persons, and the godswhen they do things on a large scale pay more attention to details, tomicrobes and to particular persons than ever. 

 * * * * *

In national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers andworkmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smallerscale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale insteadof a two or three million scale, would be treated by the Air Line Leagueas probably weighty and conclusive. Those classes of employers andemployees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains tounderstand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons inview themselves, must expect to have their national opinions aboutnational labor and national capital discounted by the Clan. ThePut-Through Clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of thedemands of industrial groups upon the assumption that people who slurover what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that arefurther away. 

§ 7. _The Town Fireplace. _

The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and itstroubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people--that people seethings 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. Beinga 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 andfight. 

Crowds are self-hypnotized. A man who would not be hypnotized off into afraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandthor ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes. 

If five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down togetheraround a fireplace and listen to the others--if each crowd of a hundredthousand could feel listened to absolutely--listened to by the other fourhundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the worldin the morning. 

As it is, each crowd sits in Madison Square Garden alone--holds a vastlonely 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 crowdscannot get physically and humanly together. 

It has been generally noted that the best radical labor leaders who comeinto definite personal contact with employers grow quite generallyconservative and that the best conservative leaders become what wouldhave 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 andlabor?

The moment there are conveniences for crowds--for the rank and file ofcrowds to catch up to their leaders, to see things whole, too--the momentwe have the machinery for crowds being able to have the spiritual andpersonal experiences their leaders have with the other side, crowds willstop dismissing their leaders--the moment they see both sides, and getpractical, too. 

The purpose of the local chapter of the Put-Through Clan, is to find ameans in each town of getting all crowds and groups together regularly asone group revealing themselves, listening and being listened to, andconfiding themselves to team-thinking and to doing team-work together. 

The Put-Through Clan headquarters in a town will be the Town Fireplacefor Crowds. It will be the warmest, liveliest, manliest, most genialresort in town--where all the live men and real men who seek realcontacts and care about men who do, will get together. The refreshing andemancipating experience many men had in army camps will be carried on andbecome 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 itbetter every time I go by. 

THIS CHURCH IS OPEN ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR PRAYER, MEDITATION ANDBUSINESS. 

I have been wondering just who the man is who had the horse-sense andpiety 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 themat people a thousand a minute, on the busiest part of the busiest streetin New York. 

Whoever the man is, he stands for the business men we want for thePut-Through Clan first. 

One of the first things the Put-Through Clan is going to dramatize isthis sign on the Marble Collegiate Church. 

The men in America in the next twenty years who are going to carryeverything before them in business, drive everybody and everything out oftheir way, take possession of the great streets and the great factoriesin the name of God and the people, are the men who practice daily thespirit of this sign, the men in business who refuse to go tumtytummingalong in a kind of thoughtless inertia of motion, doing what everybody'sdoing in business--the men who turn one side (by whatever name they callit) to pray, to snuggle up to God and think. 

Men who have success before them in business are the men who have themost imagination in business. 

Imagination with most of us consists in taking time to see things beforeother people do, in connecting up what we do with its larger, deeper, more permanent relations, relating what we do to ourselves, to others, toour time and generation, to the things we have done before and to thethings that must be done next. 

"Prayer, Meditation and Business. "

It is wonderful how these words, when one comes on a man who does not sayanything 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 thispresent tipply and tragic world, is to stand by and help make known toeverybody across a continent the men in business who stand by thesewords--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, usedas a handbook of the beliefs of the people--a book in the next few weeksfor a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before theirconventions with, the first belief I would put down for the new Presidentto 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 andsocial life seem willing to let him express. 

We are all practically waiting in crowds to-day, all over thiscountry--in held-in and held-back crowds, to act better than we look. 

This belief is the first belief--the first practical working belief thenext President of this country should have about the people. 

Putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working beliefabout human nature in America, is going to be the way to get a Presidentfor our next President who shall release the spirit of the nation, andreveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people ofAmerica are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted apeople 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 worldto-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that theindustrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let usexpress ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are. 

The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfectarrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made fortheir 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, theyought to be good--the goodness in each man which in our present system hebottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into goodadvice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed tothe man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quitesafe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the laborunions or the Manufacturers' Association to make sure he has a right tobe as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feelshe can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else isdoing 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 inAmerica, are not mean things it is our nature to do. We have let ourmachines 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 employersand workmen to one another, caricature us. 

All one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way inwhich our present machines of trusts and labor unions are workingtogether to make a dollar worth fifty cents. 

The reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybodywho has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he owesit to himself and to his class to furnish as little work for a dollar ashe 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 machinefor getting something for nothing. Every man knows in his heart that thecure for everybody's trying to get something for nothing is everybody'sat once getting to work doing more than he has to for the money. Then theAmerican dollar will quit being worth fifty cents. 

Why doesn't he do it? Because the machinery he belongs with and thateverybody belongs with consists of two great something-for-nothingmachines. Both of these stupendous machines of capital and labor aregeared for backing in producing and not for going forward. All that hasto be done with them is to run them the other way round and we have whatwe want. 

People on both sides admit in a vague anonymous scattered fashion thatthe way to meet a situation in which prices are too high is for everybodyto 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 geton with half a profit or half a wage when he sees everybody about himgetting on with twice as much. 

The only way it can be done is by organizing, by arranging machines formutual frank expression, confession and coöperation--mutual confessionand 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-Bolsheviklabor are going to stand for--the organizing and advertising in their ownindustry of a voluntary understanding and professional producing amongmen who produce. 

The men who are increasing the cost of flour by having too high wages inflour mills, will say to men who are increasing the cost of cotton by toohigh wages in cotton mills, "We will make cheaper cotton for you, if youwill make cheaper flour for us. "

It is not a matter of meanness in American human nature we are dealingwith, it is a matter of agreement between men--hundreds and thousands andmillions of men, who do not feel mean or want to be mean and who aretrying to slink out of it. 

The thing cannot be done without mutual agreement and the agreementprobably cannot be made without voluntary contagious publicity, withoutorganizing a national "I will if you will" between capital and labor. Themen who produce with their minds will say to those who work with theirhands, "We will agree to take less profits and reduce the prices that youpay 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, wewill scale down prices, make your dollar buy twenty per cent more. Forevery sacrifice by which you make a dollar buy more, we will make twicethe sacrifice. "

Having a larger margin and more time to think things out than men whowork with their hands have to think things out, many employers are goingto feel that it is up to them not to ask their men to do anything they donot do twice as much of themselves. They will have machinery for beingconfidential with the men and for letting the men see they are doing it. 

Instead of having everybody rushing wildly around organizing to say "Iwon't if you won't" we will arrange to have a hundred thousand pickedcapitalists and picked laboring men in ten thousand cities, who will setgoing 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 inAmerica, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for beingmeaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other, we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machinetogether that will express our better natures as well as our present onedoes our worst ones. 

There is one thing we propose to stand out for and that we do not intendto be wheedled out of, in our next two political conventions and duringour next President's next four years, and that is that our two greatmachines in this country, our industrial one and our political one, shallbe taken out of the hands of men who are fooled about themselves and whowill not listen to others. 

We do not believe that there is anything essentially the matter with whatis called our capitalistic system or our labor union system exceptmen--the men who think they belong in the front ranks of capital and thefront ranks of labor. 

The scared men and the men who are fooled about themselves in politicsand business and who are trying to fool the rest of us, who are trying tomake a great, simple, clean-hearted, clear-eyed, generous country likeours look and act every few weeks or every few days as if all the peoplein it could really do to express themselves to one another and to theworld, was with lockouts, strikes, political deadlocks, minority holdupsand party threats--shall be turned out of office by the people andhuddled away out of sight. 

In our industrial and political expressing and acting machines on everyhand we give notice we are going to pick men out, men who shall make ourmachines express us, our freedom, our justice, our steadiness of heart, and our belief in America, in ourselves, in one another, or our desire tolisten to those who disagree with us, our human sporting instinct aboutour party and ourselves, and the victory of the people, the common senseand good will of common human nature in America and the world. 

To the great capitalists who instead of being fellow laborers, are stillmooning absent-mindedly about in the last century, still prinkingthemselves as the owners of their world, and still thinking of themselvesas the captains or military leaders of industry--to the labor union Dukesand Dictators that capitalists like this have created to fight them--thehundred million people appointed to run this country, give notice. 

 * * * * *

I would like if I could to publish this book with blank pages for a fewmillion signatures--and a place for the new President or proposedPresident to sign, too. 

The Presidential candidate we want, would have it in him to put his namedown with the rest--with something like this, perhaps--"I do not say Icould sign every paragraph in this book, but the general idea and programof organizing and giving body to the will of the people as expressed inthis book--the spirit and direction of it and in the main the techniquefor getting it, I sign for. "

I believe that the American people when they know in reality, as they doknow at heart, what I am believing in this book, would be inclined inlooking up their candidate for President to pick out a President whowould 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 apeople. 

I put it forth as being more concrete than political party platformsare--and as a practical and plain way for a nation to look over aPresident, 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 ourPresident for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of thenation, 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 beperhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our nextPresident, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people andhears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have timesof 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 belonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. Any man cantake any crowded street and see for himself. He can pass miles of men whoin their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of howto defend America and they have another. If one were to take any tenblocks of Broadway and let all the people walking along stop just wherethey are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what weought 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--partitioningeach other off into mollycoddles, traitors, pussy-foots, safety-firsts, bullies, braggarts and Bolshevists and pacifists--and while they mightkeep 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--everyman looking askance at every other man for having a different idea ofAmerica from his idea of America. 

If the President were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhearthe people, he would feel lonely with them. The only way not to feellonely on ten blocks of Broadway just now would be to put up signs andlabels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people offas they go along, into separate audiences. The League of Nations or theAmerican Federation of Labor would sort out a thousand people on Broadwayand 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 witheach other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a wholehallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful ofpeople, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be eachaudience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and saying "You arenot America. We only are America!"

This makes the President lonely. We elected him a few months ago to bePresident of all of us. It is slow work being President, being a goodmixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and whoall turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listento each other. 

The way the President is going to meet this issue and insist until we allthank him for it--on being President of all of us, is with histemperament. 

III

THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPERAMENT

If I were writing a book for the next President to run for Presidenton--a thing I have guilty moments of hoping I am doing--the first thing Iwould arrange for in the book, would be to put down in it two platformsfor him to run on--one platform on what he believes and the otherplatform--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 hekeeps from believing weakly what he wants to, and from being fooled abouthis 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 peopleto believe in him, is going to be, from the point of view of his gettingfor this country at home and abroad, what it wants, the most importantthing 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 hispersonal traits and habits dramatize what he says, the way he lives whathe believes. 

The American people may not be shrewd about seers, or about historians orphilosophers, but they are very likely any minute to be deep aboutpeople. When Henry Cabot Lodge draws a rough sketch in chalk of historyhe wants a hundred million people to help him make, and when he is beingfooled about it and is all out of perspective the people may defer tohim, 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 everyday, a hundred million people--without trying, are deep. 

If a hundred million people could sit down and write a book--a book oropen letter addressed in the next two months to those two big vague, whoofy Nobodies we call our Political Parties, and tell them in so manywords the kind of President the people want and understand--the kind ofPresident the people would sweep in unspeakably into the White House whenthey saw him, no matter what any politician said, I am inclined tobelieve it would be found--when the book by the hundred million peoplewas out, that our people feel on the whole that we could not haveanything better in our country for our next President than a man whowould be a lawyer backwards. 

What the platform of personality we want our next President to haveamounts to, is this--Know everything a lawyer knows. Have everything alawyer has--and just turn it around and use it the other way and beanother kind of man about it. 

The fate of America and the fate of the world may be said to be turningto-day on the degree during the next four years, during the nextPresident's administration, the American people and all groups of thepeople, stop believing weakly what they want to believe and face thefacts about themselves. 

In order to be efficient, in order to be free or even to have enough toeat, millions of American men and women of all groups and classes of thepeople have got to be capable and show that they are capable of changingtheir 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 knowmore than most of us know, men who are practiced in keeping their ownminds open and can therefore open ours. 

Instead of having for the next President of this country a man who bracespeople, who tightens people up in their convictions, or who drives theold beliefs they want to believe further down into them and makes thembelieve them harder, we are going to put in our demand for a Presidentwho is the engineer of the will of the people, who draws people out, whohas the common sense, the reality, the sense of humor and the humannessto look facts and folks in the eyes, who keeps people on all sides whohave dealings with him from being fooled about themselves, a man whomakes people real when they are with him, who makes them when they eventhink of him, real with themselves and real with one another, and real inpolitics. 

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 strongmen 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 WhiteHouse, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with peopleand 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 theycould, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and seesbest, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the WhiteHouse to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep thiscountry as clean as a whistle. 

IV

THE PRESIDENT'S RELIGION

I have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, tothe old monks of the Middle Ages, who climbed up on mountain tops andlived in monasteries alone with God. If I felt just as they felt aboutbeing superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to livethe most deeply, intricately religious life I could think of I wouldrefuse to look like a saint and be President of the American Board ofCommissioners for Foreign Missions, and would pick out the most difficultbusiness with the most difficult class of men to compete with in theUnited States. Then I would go into it, put all my money and all myreligion together into it. 

The principles and standards that actually obtain in competitionconstitute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. Onemight say coöperation of course, but what makes coöperation powerful andwhat selects the people who shall lead coöperation--what gives itcharacter, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires himto 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 competewith him--would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense ofspiritual values--the real monastery of modern life. 

All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either torefuse 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 andbe 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 knowledgeof ourselves and others that make coöperation a noble as well aspractical course of procedure. 

The way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to becompared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to thestate--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 soldall my goods to feed the poor--as that particular person (being what hewas) was advised to. I would hold on to my money--and found a religiousorder with it. I would make a whip of cords of my money and my brainswoven together and would drive out the peddlers, the economic fiddlers, the moral and business idiots out of the Temple. I would do it not bybeing a pure, sterilized, holy-looking person, but by having moreimagination in business, by using higher levels and higher voltage ofhuman motive power in business than they can use, by having more brainsabout human nature than they have, and by my power to get the public tobe religious, _i. E. _, my power as a sheer matter of business, to make thepublic prefer, as a matter of course, my way of competing in businessuntil it drives out and makes absent-minded, mooning, feeble andshortsighted, theirs. 

This is not the kind of thing that I happen to have the natural techniqueor 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 highergifts to work in business and who are crowding to the wall men who canonly use their lower ones, and the power, the opportunities that go withthese men are daily being outlined by events and daily being sketched outbefore our eyes. 

The way to be a prophet and to interpret and establish in a nation is tolead in the business world to-day in establishing principles ofcompetition, which exalt and interpret human nature, free the commonsense, 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 Houseand all the resources of the Government to coöperate with and back upthis type of American business man. 

V

THE RED FLAG AND THE WHITE HOUSE

The first qualification the next President should run for the Presidencyon is his vision or program for the nation with regard to backing up menin American life--democracy and the Red Flag. 

The first thing a President should see about the Red Flag is that the RedFlag is up to the people and not up to the White House--up to the peoplein five hundred thousand factories and offices and stores, up to thepeople on both sides of a hundred thousand counters, up to everybody whobuys a paper of pins or a pound of cheese while they are buying it, up toeverybody who buys a house or a watch or a cake of soap, a safety razoror a railroad, up to everybody while he is producing, while he is buyingand selling, up to everybody individually and collectively to see that inevery ten cents they spend in this country and every ten minutes theywork 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 onit on their daily job all of the time. 

The more our President believes that the work of dealing with the RedFlag in this country is up to the people the more he gets the people tobelieve it, puts the work off on the people, the better the work will bedone, the further the Red Flag will be from getting hold of the countryand the longer the President will be in the White House. 

We call our President our Chief Executive. What we put him in the WhiteHouse and make him our chief executive for is that he shall haveimagination about a hundred million people besides himself, that he shallhave imagination about what the people can do and imagination aboutgetting 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 ExecutiveMansion. The best man to elect to live in it is the man who can make ahundred million people work. 

THE END