The Ghost in the White House Part 29

I am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. Millions of Americans though in a politer way are doing it all this week. We want to poke through to the truth. We want something more than a theater property Victory Arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a real one!

We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest--to take down our lath and plaster Arch and put it up in marble instead.

We make this week a wager to the world,--a four and a half billion dollar dare or cry to G.o.d that we are not a superficial people, that the American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and hurrahs and tears and empty watery words--that we will chase Peace up, that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations--into the eternal underpinning of a world.

In the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning Victory Arch, all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake, with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim unconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through!

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

When I corrected the proof of this advertis.e.m.e.nt--it was the last advertis.e.m.e.nt of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York--it was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has melted away into roar.

But the truth I have spoken has not melted away.

What The Air Line League is for in its national and international organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to answer the boy who stuck his foot in.

BOOK V

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN

I

RECONSTRUCTION

I started this book taking the Crowd for my hero--that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the People.

I have proceeded upon two premises.

A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghost trying to have a family.

A body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeing what to do. It is without the spiritual means of self-expression and self-fulfillment. It is like a sewing-machine trying to have a family.

Some of my readers will remember a diagram in "Crowds" in which I divided people off roughly into

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

I have based what I have to say in the next few chapters on this anatomy or rather this biology of a nation's human nature.

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

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

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

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

I wish to state certain particular things I think are going to be done by the people--that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawn into the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their great hour in history, a great people may be born again.

II

NATIONAL BIOLOGY

A man in being born the first time is the invention of others. Being born again is the finding of oneself, oneself,--the spiritual invention of one's own life.

Being born again is far more intelligent than being born the first time.

All one has to do to see this, is to look about and see the people who have done it.

When one is being born the first time one does not even know it. One is not especially intelligent the first time and could not really help it.

And n.o.body else could help it.

When one is being born again it takes all one can know and all one can know and do, and all everybody around one knows, and all everybody around can do, to help one do it. In 1776 when America was being born first, America did not have the slightest idea of what was happening. It has taken one hundred and forty-four birthdays to guess.

A nation is born the first time with its eyes shut.

But in this terrible 1920 when America is being born again, she can only manage to be born again by knowing all about herself, by disrobing herself to be born again, by a supreme colossal act of self-devotion, self-discovery, self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, naked before G.o.d, reading the hearts of forty nations, a thousand years and the unborn, and knowing herself,--slipping off her old self and putting on her new self.

III

THE AIR LINE LEAGUE

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

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

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

The minds in America that create or project, the inventors.

The minds that bring up.

The minds that conceive and bring to the birth.