The Ghost in the White House Part 37

To the great capitalists who instead of being fellow laborers, are still mooning absent-mindedly about in the last century, still prinking themselves as the owners of their world, and still thinking of themselves as the captains or military leaders of industry--to the labor union Dukes and Dictators that capitalists like this have created to fight them--the hundred million people appointed to run this country, give notice.

I would like if I could to publish this book with blank pages for a few million signatures--and a place for the new President or proposed President to sign, too.

The Presidential candidate we want, would have it in him to put his name down with the rest--with something like this, perhaps--"I do not say I could sign every paragraph in this book, but the general idea and program of organizing and giving body to the will of the people as expressed in this book--the spirit and direction of it and in the main the technique for getting it, I sign for."

I believe that the American people when they know in reality, as they do know at heart, what I am believing in this book, would be inclined in looking up their candidate for President to pick out a President who would have written this book--the gist of it--if he had had time.

At all events here it is--this program or handbook of the beliefs for a people.

I put it forth as being more concrete than political party platforms are--and as a practical and plain way for a nation to look over a President, find him out, and follow him up.

II

THE MAN WHO CARRIES THE BUNCH OF KEYS FOR THE NATION

The crowds have to be unlocked to each other. The temperament of our President for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of the nation, is to be the temperament of unlocking the crowds to each other.

At present it looks as if our President for the next four years would be perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our next President, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people and hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times of being lonely with the people. The people are lonely with one another.

Anybody can go out into the street anywhere in America to-night and be lonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. Any man can take any crowded street and see for himself. He can pa.s.s miles of men who in their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of how to defend America and they have another. If one were to take any ten blocks of Broadway and let all the people walking along stop just where they are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what we ought to do in this war, they will begin thinking they are not Americans, wanting to throw each other off over the edge of the country--part.i.tioning each other off into mollycoddles, traitors, p.u.s.s.y-foots, safety-firsts, bullies, braggarts and Bolshevists and pacifists--and while they might keep up appearances and try to be polite on the surface with strangers, that whole section of Broadway would be mad all through for ten blocks.

One would have ten blocks of feeling superior and despising people--every man looking askance at every other man for having a different idea of America from his idea of America.

If the President were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhear the people, he would feel lonely with them. The only way not to feel lonely on ten blocks of Broadway just now would be to put up signs and labels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people off as they go along, into separate audiences. The League of Nations or the American Federation of Labor would sort out a thousand people on Broadway and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, and the I. W. W.

could sort out another thousand and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a whole hallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful of people, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be each audience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and saying "You are not America. We only are America!"

This makes the President lonely. We elected him a few months ago to be President of all of us. It is slow work being President, being a good mixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and who all turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listen to each other.

The way the President is going to meet this issue and insist until we all thank him for it--on being President of all of us, is with his temperament.

III

THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPERAMENT

If I were writing a book for the next President to run for President on--a thing I have guilty moments of hoping I am doing--the first thing I would arrange for in the book, would be to put down in it two platforms for him to run on--one platform on what he believes and the other platform--the way he believes it and gets other people to believe it.

The way the next President we pick out, does his believing, the way he keeps from believing weakly what he wants to, and from being fooled about his party and about himself, the clean-cutness and honesty of his mind, the tone, the ring in which he believes in himself and gets other people to believe in him, is going to be, from the point of view of his getting for this country at home and abroad, what it wants, the most important thing about him.

The most important part of the next President's platform is going to be, in the eyes of the people, his character, his temperament, the way his personal traits and habits dramatize what he says, the way he lives what he believes.

The American people may not be shrewd about seers, or about historians or philosophers, but they are very likely any minute to be deep about people. When Henry Cabot Lodge draws a rough sketch in chalk of history he wants a hundred million people to help him make, and when he is being fooled about it and is all out of perspective the people may defer to him, may feel Mr. Lodge is too deep for them, but the moment they see Mr.

Lodge being fooled about himself, they find Mr. Lodge easy.

In a trait in human nature like this, with which they are familiar every day, a hundred million people--without trying, are deep.

If a hundred million people could sit down and write a book--a book or open letter addressed in the next two months to those two big vague, whoofy n.o.bodies we call our Political Parties, and tell them in so many words the kind of President the people want and understand--the kind of President the people would sweep in unspeakably into the White House when they saw him, no matter what any politician said, I am inclined to believe it would be found--when the book by the hundred million people was out, that our people feel on the whole that we could not have anything better in our country for our next President than a man who would be a lawyer backwards.

What the platform of personality we want our next President to have amounts to, is this--Know everything a lawyer knows. Have everything a lawyer has--and just turn it around and use it the other way and be another kind of man about it.

The fate of America and the fate of the world may be said to be turning to-day on the degree during the next four years, during the next President's administration, the American people and all groups of the people, stop believing weakly what they want to believe and face the facts about themselves.

In order to be efficient, in order to be free or even to have enough to eat, millions of American men and women of all groups and cla.s.ses of the people have got to be capable and show that they are capable of changing their minds about themselves.

Everything we are hoping to do turns upon our recognizing as a people, standing out from the rest and pus.h.i.+ng forward to lead us, men who know more than most of us know, men who are practiced in keeping their own minds open and can therefore open ours.

Instead of having for the next President of this country a man who braces people, who tightens people up in their convictions, or who drives the old beliefs they want to believe further down into them and makes them believe them harder, we are going to put in our demand for a President who is the engineer of the will of the people, who draws people out, who has the common sense, the reality, the sense of humor and the humanness to look facts and folks in the eyes, who keeps people on all sides who have dealings with him from being fooled about themselves, a man who makes people real when they are with him, who makes them when they even think of him, real with themselves and real with one another, and real in politics.

I mean by a man's being real in politics, being a politician backwards, keeping open to facts acting and preferring to act as children and strong men act, with the deepness and directness of the child.

The hundred million people in the book they would write if they had time, put in their demand for a big simple fellow human being in the White House, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with people and gets things out of people because he makes people feel they know him.

The political parties cannot help themselves the moment the people speak.

They would rather slide in a man who does not see through them if they could, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and sees best, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the White House to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep this country as clean as a whistle.

IV

THE PRESIDENT'S RELIGION

I have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, to the old monks of the Middle Ages, who climbed up on mountain tops and lived in monasteries alone with G.o.d. If I felt just as they felt about being superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to live the most deeply, intricately religious life I could think of I would refuse to look like a saint and be President of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and would pick out the most difficult business with the most difficult cla.s.s of men to compete with in the United States. Then I would go into it, put all my money and all my religion together into it.

The principles and standards that actually obtain in compet.i.tion const.i.tute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. One might say cooperation of course, but what makes cooperation powerful and what selects the people who shall lead cooperation--what gives it character, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires him to find a way to do or not to do certain things--when he competes.

Compet.i.tion--the way a man threads his way through the men who compete with him--would const.i.tute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of spiritual values--the real monastery of modern life.

All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially, or clap them into jail.

There always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and be fair. The Government, the police and the draft have to deal with them.

As for the rest of us, compet.i.tion--fair, manly, sporting compet.i.tion, keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and n.o.bler virtue, the knowledge of ourselves and others that make cooperation a n.o.ble as well as practical course of procedure.

The way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to be compared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to the state--to the way he runs an interested enterprise or business.

If I were the rich young man in the New Testament I would not have sold all my goods to feed the poor--as that particular person (being what he was) was advised to. I would hold on to my money--and found a religious order with it. I would make a whip of cords of my money and my brains woven together and would drive out the peddlers, the economic fiddlers, the moral and business idiots out of the Temple. I would do it not by being a pure, sterilized, holy-looking person, but by having more imagination in business, by using higher levels and higher voltage of human motive power in business than they can use, by having more brains about human nature than they have, and by my power to get the public to be religious, _i.e._, my power as a sheer matter of business, to make the public prefer, as a matter of course, my way of competing in business until it drives out and makes absent-minded, mooning, feeble and shortsighted, theirs.

This is not the kind of thing that I happen to have the natural technique or gift to do--to found a live deep natural religious order like this, but there are thousands of men I know and that other men know in America, who have the natural typical American technique for putting their higher gifts to work in business and who are crowding to the wall men who can only use their lower ones, and the power, the opportunities that go with these men are daily being outlined by events and daily being sketched out before our eyes.

The way to be a prophet and to interpret and establish in a nation is to lead in the business world to-day in establis.h.i.+ng principles of compet.i.tion, which exalt and interpret human nature, free the common sense, the will, the glory and the religion of the people.