has been, their eagerness, but their eagerness for things that they did
not want, and for things that almost everybody is coming to see that
they did not want.
The moment that the eagerness of our American Trusts is an eagerness for
things that they really want, the Trusts will be seen piling over each
other's heels, asking the government to please investigate them. The
more they can get the people to know about them and about their
eagerness, the more the people will trust them and deal with them.
All that we have been waiting for is a government that sees the part
from the point of view of the whole, which will take up a few specific
Trusts and be specific enough with them to make them think, think hard
what they really want, and what their real eagerness is about, and the
entire face of modern business will change. First the expression will
change and then the face itself.
The moment it is found that the government is a specific government,
all the trusts that know what they really want and know what they really
are doing, will want to be investigated, because they will want
everybody to know that they know. In case of the trusts that do not know
what they want and that do not know what they are doing, the government
will just step in, of course, and investigate them until they find out.
A specific government will not need to be specific many times.
It takes up a particular Trust in its hand, turns it over quietly,
empties its contents out before the people and says to everybody, "This
particular Trust you see here has tried to be a kind of Trust, which it
found out afterward, it did not want to be. It is the kind of Trust
whose officers hide their faces when they think of what it was that they
thought that they thought that they wanted....
"These men you see here, forty silent nations looking on, hundreds and
thousands of self-respecting, self-supporting, public-serving, creative,
successful business men, whom all the world envies looking on, do hereby
beg to declare to all business men who know them and to the people, that
they did not ever really want these things for themselves that their
business says or seems to say they wanted.
"They wish to ask the public to put themselves in their places and to
refuse to believe that they deliberately sat down, seriously thought it
all out, that they had planned to express to everybody what their
natures really were in a blind, brutal, foolish business like this which
we have just been showing you. They beg to have it believed that their
business misrepresents them, that it misrepresents what they want, and
they ask to be again admitted to the good-will, the hope and
forgiveness, the companionship of a great people.
"They declare" (the government will go on) "that they are not the men
they seem. They are merely men in a hurry. They want it understood that
they have merely hurried so fast and hurried so long that they now wake
up at last only to see, see with this terrific plainness what it really
is that has been happening to them all their lives, _viz._: for forty,
fifty, or sixty years they have merely forgot who they were and
overlooked what they were like.
"In hurrying, too, it is only fair to say they have had to use machines
to hurry with and unconsciously, year by year, associating almost
exclusively with machines, their machines (pump handles, trip-hammers,
hydraulic drills, steam shovels and cranes and cash registers) have
grown into them.
"This is the way it has happened. 'Let the nation be merciful to them,'
the government will then say, and dismiss the subject."
* * * * *
What our President seems to be for in America, is to do up a nation in
one specific, particular man who expresses everybody.
This man deals with each other specific man, his aggressions and
services, as a nation would if a nation could be one specific man.
The President of the United States is the Comptroller of the people's
vision, by seeing a part and dealing with a part as a part of a whole,
he governs the people.
He is the Chancellor of the People's Attention.
The business of being a President is the business of focusing the
vision, of flooding the whole desire or will of a people around a man
and letting him have the light of it, to see what he is doing by, and to
be seen by, while he is doing it.
The corporations have expressed or focused the employers of labour. The
Labour Unions have focused or expressed the will of the labourers, and
the government focuses and expresses the will of the consumers, of the
people as a whole, rich and poor, so that Labour and Capital, both
listen to It, understand It and act on It.
The way to deal with a specific sin is to flood it around with the
general vision. Then it does not need to be dealt with. Then strangely,
softly, and almost before we know--out there in the Light, it
automatically deals with itself.
When the Government takes hold quietly of the National Cash Register
Company, turns it up, empties its contents out,--all its methods and its
motives--and all the things It thought It wanted, and then proceeds to
put its president and twenty-nine of its officers into jail, my readers
will perhaps point out to me that this action of the government as a
method of tempting people to be good, while it may have the virtue of
being concrete and the virtue of being specific, certainly does not have
the other virtue that I have laid down, the virtue of being affirmative.
"Certainly" they will say "there is not anything affirmative about
putting twenty-nine big business men in jail." Many people would call it
the most magnificently negative thing a President could have done. Moses
himself would have done it.
It does not seem to me that Moses would have done it, or that it was
essentially negative. It could not unfairly be claimed that in spite of
its negative look on the surface, it was the most massive, significant,
crushing affirmation that a great people has made for years.
By putting the twenty-nine officers of the National Cash Register
Company in jail, the American people affirmed around the world the
nation's championship of the men that had been defeated in the
competition with the National Cash Register Company. They affirmed that
these men who were not afraid of the National Cash Register Company
because they were bigger, and who stood up to them and fought them, were
the kind of men Americans wanted to be like, and that the officers of
the National Cash Register Company were the kind of men Americans did
not want to be like, would not do business with, would not tolerate,
would not envy, would not live on the same continent with, unless they
were kept in jail.
The President of the United States, sitting in Washington, at the head
of this vast affirmative and assertive continent, indicted the Cash
Register Company, that is, by a slight pointed negative action, by
pushing back a button he turned on the great chandelier of a nation and
flooded a nation with light. We, the American people, suddenly, all in a
flash, looked into each other's faces and knew what we were like.
We had hoped we believed in human nature, and in brave men and in men
against machines but we could not prove it.
Suddenly, we stood in a blaze of truth about ourselves. Suddenly, we
could again look with our old stir of joy at our national Flag. If we
liked, we could swing our hats.
Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I had been trying to get this
news for years. It is news I have wanted to live with and do business
with. I have been trying to get my question answered. What are the
American people really like?
The President points at the National Cash Register Company and I find
out. All the people find out.
In the last analysis, the masterful, shrewd, practical, and constructive
part of being a President of the United States--the thing in the
business of being a President that keeps the position from being a
position which only the second rate or No type of man would have time to
take, is the fact that the President is the Head Advertising Manager of
the United States, conducting a huge advertising campaign of what
Americans really want.
He takes up the National Cash Register Company, picks out its
twenty-nine officers, makes it a bill board sky-high across the country.
"Here are the kind of business men that the people of the United States
do not want, and here are the kind of men that we do!"
The thing that makes indicting a trust a positive and affirmative act is
the advertising in it.
Gladstone once wrote a postcard about a little book of Marie
Bashkirtseff's.
Twenty nations read the little book.
Every now and then one watches a man or sees a truth that would make a
nation. One wishes one had some way of being the sort of person or
being in the kind of place where one could make a nation out of it.
One thinks it would be passing wonderful to be President of the United
States. It would be like having a great bell up over the world that one
could reach up to and ring! But it is better than that. One touches a
button at one's desk if one is President of the United States, a nation
looks up. He whispers to twenty thousand newspapers, "Take your eyes
away a minute," he says, "from Jack Johnson and Miss Elkin's engagement,
and look, oh, look, ye People, here is a man in this world like this! He
has been in the world all this while without our suspecting it. Did you
know there was or could be anywhere a man like THIS? And here is a man
like this! Which do you prefer? Which are you really like?"
There is nothing really regal or imperial in a man, nothing that makes a
man feel suddenly like a whole Roman Empire all by himself, in 1913,
like saying "Look! Look!"
Sometimes I think about it. Of course I could take a great reel of paper
and sit down with my fountain pen, say Look for a mile, "Look! look!
look! look!!!--President Wilson says it once and without exclamation
points. Skyscrapers listen to him! Great cities rise and lift themselves
and smite the world. And the faint, sleepy little villages stir in their
dreams."
Moses said, "Thou shalt not!" President Wilson says, "Look!"
Perhaps if Moses had had twenty thousand newspapers like twenty thousand
field-glasses that he could hand out every morning and lend to people to
look through--he would not have had to say, "Thou shalt not."
The precise measure of the governing power a man can get out of the
position of being President of the United States to-day is the amount of
advertising for the people, of the people, and by the people he can
crowd every morning, every week, into the papers of the country.
A President becomes a great President in proportion as he acts
authoritatively, tactfully, economically, and persistently as the Head
Advertising Manager of the ideals of the people. He is the great
central, official editor of what the people are trying to find out--of a
nation's news about itself.
By his being the President of what people think, by his dictating the
subjects the people shall take up, by his sorting out the men whom the
people shall notice, this great ceaseless Meeting of ninety million men
we call the United States--comes to order.
CHAPTER V
THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!"
Our American President, if one merely reads what the Constitution says
about him, is a rather weak-looking character.
The founders of the country did not intend him to be anybody in
particular--if it could be helped. They were discouraged about allowing
governments to be efficient. Not very much that was constructive to do
was handed over to him. And the most important power they thought it
would do for him to have was the veto or power to say "No."
Possibly if our fathers had believed in liberty more they would have
allowed more people to have some; or if they had believed in democracy
more, or trusted the people more, they would have thought it would do to
let them have leaders, but they had just got away. They felt timid about
human nature and decided that the less constructive the government was
and the less chance the government had to be concrete, to interpret a
people, to make opportunities and turn out events, the better.
Looked at at first sight no more elaborate, impenetrable, water-tight
arrangement for keeping a government from letting in an idea or ever
having one of its own or ever doing anything for anybody, could have
been conceived than the Constitution of the United States, as the
average President interprets it.
Each branch of the government is arranged carefully to keep any other
branch from doing anything, and then the people, every four years, look
the whole country over for some new man they think will probably leave
them alone more than anybody--and put him in for President.
Looking at it narrowly and by itself, all that a President selected like
this could ever expect in America to put in his time on, would seem to
be--being the country's most importantly helpless man--the man who has
been given the honour of being a somewhat more prominent failure in
America than any one else would be allowed to be.
He stops people for four years. Other people stop him for four years.
Then with a long happy sigh, at the end of his term, he slips back into
real life and begins to do things.
This has been the more or less sedately disguised career of the typical
American President. Merely reading the Constitution or the lives of the
Presidents, without looking at what has been happening to the habits of
the people in the last few years, we might all be asking to-day, "What
is there that is really constructive that President Wilson can do?" What
is there that is going to prevent him, with all that moral earnestness
dammed up in him, that sense of duty, that Presbyterian sense of other
people's duties--what is there that is going to prevent him, with his
school-book habits, his ideals, his volumes of American history, from
being a teachery or preachery person--a kind of Schoolmaster or Official
Clergyman to Business?
News.
The one really important and imperative thing to the people of this
country to-day is News. In spite of newspapers, authors, College
presidents, Bank presidents, Socialist agitators, Bill Heywoods, and
Trusts, the people are bound to get this news, and any man who is so
placed by his prominence that he can scoop up the news of a country,
hammer its news together into events the papers will report, express
news in the laws, build news into men who can make laws and unmake laws,
any man who is so placed that directly or indirectly he takes news,
forces it in by hydraulic pressure where people see it doing things, who
takes news and crowds it into courts, crowds news into lawyers and into
legislatures, pries some of it even into newspapers, can have, the
ordinary American says to-day, as much leeway in this government as he
likes.
The ordinary American has never been able to understand the objection
important people have--that nearly everybody has (except ordinary
people) to news--especially editors and publishers.
It is an old story. Every one must have noticed it. One set of people in
this world, always from the beginning, trying to climb up on the
housetops to tell news, and another set of people hurrying up always and
saying, "Hush, Hush!" Some days it seems, when I read the papers, that I
hear half the world saying under its breath, a vast, stentorian, "Shoo!
shoo! SHSH! SHSH!"
Then I realize I live in an editor's world. I am expected to be in the
world that editors have decided on the whole to let me be in.
Of course I did not know what to do at first when this came over me.
I naturally began to try to think of some way of cutting across lots, of
climbing up to News.
I looked at all the neat little park paths, with all those artistic
curves of truth on them the editors have laid out for me and for all of
us. Then I looked at the world and asked myself, "Who are the men in
this world, if any, who are able to walk on the Grass, who cut across
the little park paths when they like?"
And as fate would have it (it was during the Roosevelt administration),
the first two men I came on who seemed to be stamping about in the
newspapers quite a little as they liked were the Prime Minister of
England and the President of the United States.
Just how much governing can a President do?
How many columns a day is he good for, how many acres of attention every
morning in the papers of the country--all these white fields of
attention, these acres of other people's thoughts, can he cover?
How many sticks a day can he make compositors set up of what he thinks?
How many square miles of the people's thoughts can he spread out at
breakfast tables, lift up in a thousand thousand trolleys before their
faces?
I have seen the white fields of attention filled with the footprints of
his thoughts, of his will, of his desires!
I have seen that the President is the Editor of that vast, anonymous,
silent newspaper, written all the night, written all the day, and softly
published across a country--the newspaper of people's thoughts.
I have seen the vision of the forests he has cast down, ground into
headlines, into editorials, into news. Mountains and hills are laid bare
to say what he thinks. Thousands of presses throb softly and the white
reels of wood pulp fly into speech. Thousands of miles of paper wet with
the thoughts of a people roll dimly under ground in the night.
The President is saying Look! in the night!
The newsboys hasten out in the dawn. They cry in the streets!
CHAPTER VI
THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE YOU?"
If news is governing, how does the President do his governing?
By being News, himself.
By using his appointing power and putting other men who are News
Themselves, news about American human nature--where all the people will
see it.
By telling the people directly (when he feels especially asked) news
about what is happening in his mind--news about what he believes.
By telling the people sometimes (as candidly as he can without giving
the people's enemies a chance to stop him), what he is going to do next,
sketching out in order of time, and in order of importance, his program
of issues.
By telling the people news about their best business men, the business
men and inventors who, in their daily business, free the energies,
unshackle the minds and emancipate the genius of the people.
By telling these business men news about the people--and interpreting
the people to them.
* * * * *
It is by being news to the people himself that all the other news a
President can get into his government counts.
A man is a man according to the amount of news there is in him.
There are twenty personal traits in a President which of themselves
would all be national news of the first importance if he had them. The
bare fact that a President could have certain traits at all and still
get to be a President in this country, would be news.
One of the most important facts about news is that while it can be
distributed by machines, machines cannot make it, and as a rule they do
not understand it. Important and critical news is almost always fresh
and made by hand the first time. Most of the popular news as to what is
practical in American polities for the last forty years has been
produced by political machines, and of course men who were a good deal
like machines were the best men to finish the ideas off and to carry
them out.
As a result of course, all the really big leaders for the last forty
years, our most powerful and interesting personalities have been shut
out from being President of the United States. The White House was
merely being run as machinery and did not interest them. They watched it
grinding its ideas faithfully out from year to year of what America was
like and what American politicians were like, and finally at last in the
clatter of the machines there rings out suddenly across the land a shot
that no machinery had allowed for. Before any one knows almost there
slips suddenly by the side door into the White House a really
interesting man, and suddenly, all in one minute, almost, this man makes
being President of the United States the most interesting lively and
athletic feat in the country. And now, apparently that the idea has been
worked out in public before everybody, by hand, as it were, that a man
can be alive and interesting all over, can have at least a little touch
of news about him and still be a President in this country, another man
with some news in him has been allowed to us and suddenly politics
throughout all America has become a totally new revealing profession,
and men, instead of being selected because they were blurred
personalities, the ghosts of compromises, would-be everybodies--men who
had not decided who they were, and who could not settle down and let
people know which of their characters they had hit on at last to be
really theirs, men who had no cutting edge to do things, screw-drivers
trying to be chisels--were revealed to our people at last as vague,
mean, other-worldly persons, not fitting into our real American world at
all, and hopelessly visionary and impracticable in American politics.
And now one more hand-made man has been allowed to us.
The machines run very still in the White House.
The people of this country no longer go by the White House on their way
to their business and just hear it humdrumming and humdrumming behind
the windows as of yore. The nation stands in crowds around the gates and
would like to see in. The people wonder. They wonder a million columns a
day what is inside.
What is inside?
An American who governs by being news, himself.
The first thing that the people demand from our President now is that he
shall be news himself. The news that they have selected to know first
during the next four years--have put into the White House to know first
is Woodrow Wilson.
"Who are you, Woodrow Wilson, in God's name?" the steeples and smoking
chimneys, the bells and whistles, the Yales and Harvards, and the little
country schools, the crowds in the streets, and the corn in the fields
all say, "Who Are You?"
Then the people listen. They listen to his "I wills" and "I won'ts" for
news about him. They look for news about him in the headlines he steers
into the papers every morning, in the events he makes happen, in the
editorials he makes men think of, in the men he calls up and puts on the
National Wire--in all these, slowly, daily, hourly they drink up their
long, patient, hopeful answer to their question, "Who Are You, Woodrow
Wilson?"
CHAPTER VII
THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE WE?"
But if the President governs first by being news himself, he governs
second by his appointments, by gathering about him other men who are
news to people, too.
One need not divide people into good and bad, because the true line of
division between good and bad instead of being between one man and
another, is apt to be as a matter of fact and experience cut down
through the middle of each of us.
But for the purposes of public action and decision and getting good
things done, this line does seem to be cut farther over in the middle of
some of us, than it is in others. Taking a life-average in any moral or
social engineering feat, in any correct calculation of structural
strain, how far over this line cuts through in a man, has to be reckoned
with.
The president by appointing certain men to office, saying "I will" and
"I won't" to certain types of men, in saying who shall be studied by the
people, who shall be read as documents of our national life, puts, if
not the most important, at least the most lively and telling news about
his administration into print.
We watch our President acting for us, telling us news about what we are
like, sorting men out around him the way ninety million people would
sort them out if they were there to do it.
The President's appointments may be said to be in a way the breath of
the nation.
A nation has to breathe, and the plain fact seems to be that certain
kinds of people have to be breathed out of a nation and other kinds of
people have to be breathed in. The way a President appoints men to
office is his way of letting a nation breathe.
With all his attractive qualities, perhaps it is because Mr. Taft did
not quite let the nation breathe, and suffocated it a little that there
came such an outbreak at the end. Perhaps it is because Mr. Taft looked
at Mr. Ballinger and then looked at Mr. Pinchot, all the people of the
country all the while looking on, and said, "Ballinger is the kind of
man our people prefer, and Pinchot is not," that the people broke out so
amazingly, so incredibly, and decided by such an enormous majority that
a man who could pick out men for them like this would not do--as things
are just now anyway--for a President of the United States.
CHAPTER VIII
NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT
A nation wakes up every morning and for one minute before it runs to its
work it says to its President, "HERE WE ARE!"
The best a President can do in the way of a plain, everyday
acknowledgment of the presence of the people is News.
The news that the people are demanding from the President to-day is
intensely personal. It is a kind of rough, butting, good-natured
familiarity a great people has with its President, a little heedless,
relentless, like some splendid Child, ready to forgive and expecting to
be forgiven, it jostles in upon him daily, "Here we are! What are you
believing this morning? Did you believe in us yesterday? Did you act as
if you believed in us? Did you get anybody to believe in us? Who are the
men you say are like us? What are they like this morning?
"We have asked a hundred times; we can only ask it once more. How do you
think you are turning out yourself, Mr. President? Are you what you
thought you would be? Do you think it is a good time for us to decide
this morning what you are really like? And, after all, Mr. President--if
you please--who _are_ you? And once more, Mr. President, in God's name,
_who are we?_"
This is always the gist of what it says, "Who are we?"
It is the people's main point, after all, asking a President who they
are, wondering if he can interpret them.
Then he shuts his door and thinks, or he calls his Cabinet and thinks.
Rows of little-great men file by all day. They stand each a few minutes
with his little Speck or Dot of the People in his hands, and they say,
"This is the People."
He listens.
It is very hard to be always President of the People when one is
listening and the little-great go by.
One has to go back a little, in the night perhaps, or when one is quite
alone. He sees again the Child; it is what he is in the White House for,
he remembers, to express this dumb giant, this mighty Child, half weary,
half glad, standing there by day by night, saying, "Who are we?" One
would think it would be hard to be glib with the Child.
Sometimes it is so deep and silent!
Once when It broke in on Lincoln in this way and said, "_Who are we?_"
he prayed.
CHAPTER IX
NEWS-MEN
It seems very difficult to get news through as to who we really are to a
President. When I look about me and see what the President's ways are of
telling news about himself to us, I see that he is not without his
advantages. But when I look about to see what conveniences we have as a
people for telling our President news about us, I note some curious
things. The fears of the American people, the fears and threats of
labour and capital are organized and expressed, but their faiths, their
wills, the things in them that make them go and that make them American,
are not organized and are not expressed.
The labour unions are afraid and say, "We will not work," to their
employers, "You cannot make us work." The President hears this. It is
about all they say.
The capitalists and employers are afraid and they say, "We will not
pay," "You cannot make us pay."
Shall the President act as if these men represent Labor and Capital?
We say, "No."
Neither of these groups of men express real live American labour or real
live characteristic American money.
American money is free, bold, manful, generous and courageous to a
fault. American money swings out in mighty enterprises, shrewdly
believing things, imperiously singing things out of its way.
A singing people want a singing government. How is our President going
to hear our labour and our money sing?
Pinchot expressed us, not Ballinger.
Mr. Pinchot is no mere uplifter or missionary. He is an artist in
expressing America to a President. If we have a President who will not
listen to a man like Pinchot, let us try a President that will.
Pinchot--an American millionaire with a fortune made out of forests, who
is spending the fortune in protecting the forests for the nation, is the
kind of American Americans like to set up before a President to say what
Americans are like. Millions of men stand by Pinchot. We like the way he
makes money sing.
Tom L. Johnson--an American millionaire who made his money in the
ordinary humdrum way, by getting valuable street railway franchises out
of a city for nothing--has the courage to turn around, spend his fortune
and spend it all, in keeping other people from doing it.
America presents Tom L. Johnson to a President with its compliments and
says, "This is what America is like."
It may not look always as if Tom L. Johnson were America--America in
miniature. But millions of us say he is. He makes money sing.
We want a President--millions of us want him--and this is the most
important news about us, who expects money in this country to sing.
We want our money and expect our money in this country to stop saying
mean things about us, things that make us ashamed to look a true
newspaper in the face, or one another in the face, and that humiliate us
before the world.
* * * * *
And now I have come to an awkward place in this book where I hope the
reader will help me all he can.
There is nothing to do but to let out the real truth and face the music.
The fact is, Gentle Reader--perhaps you have suspected it all
along--that if it had not been for fear of mixing my book all up with
him and making it a kind of arena or tournament instead of a book, I
would have mentioned ex-President Roosevelt before this. He has been
getting in or nearly getting in to nearly every chapter so far, but of
course I knew, as any one would, that he would spoil all the calm
equipoise, the quiet onward flowing of the Stream of Thought, and with
one chapter after the other, with each as the crisis came up, though I
scarcely know how, I have managed to keep him out. And now, oh, Gentle
Reader, here he is! I know very well that he is in everything, and right
in the middle of everything, and that in a kind of splendid mixed happy
uproarious way, there somehow has to be a great to-do the moment he
appears. The beautiful clear water, the lucid depth of Thought--will all
become (ah, I know it too well, Gentle Reader) all thunder and spray and
underneath the mighty grinding of the wheels--the wheels of the Nation
and the Mowing Machine of Time, and in the background--in the red
background of the Dawn, there will be the face of Theodore--just the
face of Theodore in this book shining at us--readers and writer and
all--out of a huge rosy mist!
But I have been driven to it. The fact seems to be that I must find at
just this point in the book, if I can, a word. And the word will have to
be a word, too, that everybody knows, and that conveys a lively sense to
everybody the moment it is used--of a certain tone or quality, or hum or
murmur of being. No one regrets this more than I, because it is so
unwieldy and inconvenient and always bulges out in a sentence or a book
or a nation more than it was meant to, but the word ROOSEVELT, R O O S E
V E L T, happens to be the word that people in this country, and very
largely in other nations, and in all languages have chosen and are using
every day to express to one another a certain American quality or tone
now abroad in our world--a certain hum, as one might say, or whirr of
goodness.
This particular hum, or whirr of goodness, which is instantly associated
with the word Roosevelt, expresses, except that of course it
over-expresses, a part of the news to-day about America which we want
our President to read.
One cannot help wondering why it is that if one wanted to express to the
largest number of people in the world a certain quality of goodness, the
word Roosevelt would do it best.
I am not dealing for the purpose of this book in what Mr. Roosevelt's
goodness is or whether it is what he thinks it is. We might all disagree
about that. I am dealing quite strictly in this connection with what
even his enemies would say is his almost egregious success in
advertising goodness. While we might all disagree as to his goodness
being the kind that he or any one ought to love, we would not fail to
agree that it is his love of his own goodness, such as it is, and his
holding on to it, and his love of other people's and his love of getting
his goodness and their goodness together, that has made him the most
unconcealed person in modern life. These qualities have established him,
with his ability raised to the n-th power of attracting attention to
anything he likes, as the world's greatest News Man--the world's
greatest living energy to-day in advertising what is good and what is
had in our American temperament.
Even the people who disagree with him or dislike him--many of them would
have to fall back on using the word roosevelt, or rather the verb to
roosevelt.
It does not seem to be because his goodness in itself is extraordinary.
It is even, for that matter, in the sense that anybody could have it, or
some more just like it, a little common.
What seems to be uncommon and really distinguished about Mr. Roosevelt
is the way he feels about his goodness, and the way he grips hold of it,
and the way he makes it grip hold of other people--practically anybody
almost, who is standing by. Even if they are merely going by in
automobiles, sometimes they catch some. I do not imagine that his worst
enemies, however seriously they may question the general desirability or
safety of having so much goodness roosevelting around, would fail to
admit his own real enthusiasm about goodness anywhere he finds it
indiscriminately, whether it is his own or other people's. He grips hold
of it, and grips like a cable car--instantly.
His enthusiasm is so great that many people are nonplussed by it. The
enthusiasm must really be in spite of appearances about something else,
something wicked in behind, they think, and not really about goodness.
An entire stranger would not quite believe it. It would be too original
in him, they would say, or in anybody, to care so about goodness.
If one could watch the expression in Mr. Roosevelt's face or his manner
while he is in the act of having a virtue and if one could not see
plainly from where one was, just what it was he was doing, one would at
once conclude that it must be some vice he is having. He looks happy and
as if it were some stolen secret. There is always that manner of his
when he is caught doing right, as if one were to say "Now, at last, I
have got it!" He does right like a boy with his mouth full of jam, and
this seems to be true not only when, with a whole public following and
two or three nations besides, and all the newspapers, he goes off on an
orgy of righteousness, makes the grand tour of Europe, and has the time
of his life. It is the steady-burning under enthusiasm with him all the
while. The spectacle of a good man doing a tremendous good thing affects
Theodore Roosevelt like one of the great forces of nature, like Niagara
Falls, like the screws of the _Mauritania_, or any other huge, happy
thing that is having its way against fear; against weakness, or against
small terrified goodness.
Mr. Roosevelt in doing right conveys the sense of enjoying it so himself
that he has made almost an art form of public righteousness. He has
found his most complete, his most naïve, instinctive self-expression in
it, and while we have had goodness in public men before, we have had no
man who has been such an international chromo for goodness, who has made
such a big, comfortable "He-who-runs-may-read" bill-poster for doing
right as Roosevelt. Other men have done things that were good to do, but
the very inmost muscle and marrow of goodness itself, goodness with
teeth, with a fist, goodness that smiled, that ha-ha'd, and that leaped
and danced--perpetual motion of goodness, goodness that reeked--has been
reserved for Theodore Roosevelt. We have had goodness that was bland or
proper, and goodness that was pious or sentimental and sang, "Nearer My
God to Thee," or goodness that was kind and mushy, but this goodness
with a glad look and bounding heart, goodness with an iron hand, we have
not had before. It is Mr. Roosevelt's goodness that has made him
interesting in Cairo, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. He has been conducting a
grand tour of goodness. He has been a colossal drummer of goodness,
conducting an advertising campaign. He has proved himself a master
salesman for moral values. And he has put the American character, its
hope, its energy, on the markets and on the credits of the world.
With all his faults, those big, daring, yawning fissures in him, he is
news about us, faults and all. Though I may be, as I certainly am much
of the time, standing and looking across at him, across an abyss of
temperament that God cut down between us thousands of years ago, and
while he may have a score of traits I would not like and others that no
one would like in any one else, there he is storming out at me with his
goodness! It is his way--God help him!--God be praised for him! There he
is!
I know an American when I see one. He is a man who is singing.
A man who is singing is a man who is so shrewd about people that he sees
more in them than they see in themselves and who does things so shrewdly
in behalf of God, that when God looks upon him he delights in him. Then
God falls to of course and helps him do them.
When American men saw that there was a man among them who was taking a
thing like the Presidency of the United States (that most people never
run risks with) and putting it up before everybody, and using it grimly
as a magnificent bet on the people, they looked up. Millions of men
leaped in their hearts and as they saw him they knew that they were like
him!
So did Theodore Roosevelt become news about Us.
CHAPTER X
AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT AND GOVERNMENT
I would like to say more specifically what I mean by an American or
singing government.
The thing that counts the most in a government is its temperament. A
German government succeeds by having the German temperament. An American
government must have the American temperament.
If we are fortunate enough to have in America a government with an
American temperament what would it be like? And how would it differ from
the traditional or conventional temperament, governments are usually
allowed to have?
If I were confined to one or two words I would put it like this:
If a government has the conventional temperament, it says "NO."
If it has the American Temperament it says, "YES, BUT ..."
The whole policy and temper of a true American government is summed up
in its saying as it looks about it--now to this business man and now to
that, just in time, "YES BUT."
Louis Brandeis, of Boston, when he was made attorney for the Gas Company
of Boston to defend the company from the criticisms of the people, sent
suddenly scores of men all about canvassing the city and looking up
people to find fault with the gas.
He spent thousands of dollars a month of the Gas Company's money for a
while in helping people to be disagreeable, until they had it attended
to and got over it.
The Gas Company had the canvassers show the people how they could burn
less gas for what they got for it, and tried to help them cut their
bills in two. Incidentally, of course, they got to thinking about gas
and about what they got for it, and about other ways they could afford
to use it, and began to have the gas habit--used it for cooking and
heating.
The people found they wanted to use four times as much gas.
The Boston Gas Company smiled sweetly.
Boston smiled sweetly.
Not many months had passed and two things had happened in Boston.
The Boston Gas Company, with precisely the same directors in it, had
made over the directors into new men, and all the people in Boston (all
who used gas) apparently had been made over into new people.
What had happened was Brandeis--a man with an American temperament.
Mr. Brandeis had defended his company from the people by going the
people's way and helping them until they helped him.
Mr. Brandeis gave gas a soul in Boston.
Before a gas corporation has a soul, it would be American for a
government to treat it in one way. After it has one it would be American
to treat it in another. There are two complete sets of conduct,
principles, and visions in dealing with a corporation before and after
its having a soul.
Preserving the females of the species and killing males as a method of
discrimination has been applied to all animals except human beings. This
is suggestive of a method of discrimination in dealing with
corporations. A corporation that has a soul and that is the most likely
to keep reproducing souls in others should be treated in one way, and a
corporation that has not should be treated in another.
There are two assumptions underneath everybody's thought, underneath
every action of our government: Which is the American assumption?
People are going to be bad if they can.
People are going to be good if they can.
Men who want to arrange laws and adjust life on the assumption that
business men will be bad if they can, it seems to some of us, are
inefficient and unscientific. It seems to us that they are off on the
main and controlling facts in American human nature. It is not true that
American business men will be bad if they can. They will be good if they
can.
This is my assertion. I cannot prove it.
What we seem to need next in this country in order to be clear-headed
and to go ahead, is to prove it. We want a competent census of human
nature.
Lacking a census of human nature, the next best thing we can do is to
watch the men who seem to know the most about human nature.
We put ourselves in their hands.
These men seem to believe, judging from their actions, that there is
really nothing that suits our temperament better in America than being
good. If we can manage to have some way of being good that we have
thought of ourselves, we like it still better. We dote on goodness when
it is ours and when we are allowed to put some punch into it. We want to
be good, to express our practical, our doing-idealism, but we will not
be driven to being good and people who think they can drive us to being
good in a government or out of it are incompetent people. They do not
know who we are.
We say they shall not have their way with us.
Let them get us right first. Then they can do other things.
What is our American temperament?
Here are a few American reflections.
The government of the next boys' school of importance in this country is
going to determine the cuts and free hours, and privileges not by marks,
but by its genius for seeing through boys.
And instead of making rules for two hundred pupils because just twenty
pupils need them, they will make the rules for just twenty pupils.
Pupils who can use their souls and can do better by telling themselves
what to do, will be allowed to do better. Why should two hundred boys
who want to be men be bullied into being babies by twenty infants who
can scare a school government into rules, _i.e._, scare their teachers
into being small and mean and second-rate?
A government that goes on this principle with business men, and that
does it in a spirit of mutual understanding for those who are not yet
free from rules, and in a spirit of confidence and expectation and of
talking it over, will be a government with an American temperament.
The first trait of a great government is going to be that it will
recognize that the basis of a true government in a democracy is
privilege and not treating all people alike. It is going to see that is
it a cowardly, lazy, brutal, and mechanical-minded thing for a
government which is trying to serve a great people--to treat all the
people alike. The basis of a great government like the basis of a great
man (or even the basis of a good digestion) is discrimination, and the
habit of acting according to facts. We will have rules or laws for
people who need them, and men in the same business who amount to enough
and are American enough to be safe as laws to themselves, will continue
to have their initiative and to make their business a profession, a
mould, an art form into which they pour their lives. The pouring of the
lives of men like this into their business is the one thing that the
business and the government want.
Several things are going to happen when what a good government seeks
each for a man's business, is to let him express himself in it.
When a man has proved conclusively that he has a higher level of
motives, and a higher level of abilities to make his motives work, the
government is going to give him a higher level of rights, liberties, and
immunities. The government will give special liberties on a sliding
scale and with shrewd provision for the future. The government will not
give special liberties to the man with higher motives than other men
have, who has not higher abilities to make his motives work, nor will it
give special liberties to the man who has higher abilities which could
make higher motives work, but who has not the higher motives.
Men who are new kinds and new sizes of men and who have proved that they
can make new kinds and new sizes of bargains, that they can make (for
the same money) new kinds and new sizes of goods, and who incidentally
make new kinds and new sizes of people out of the people who buy the
goods, men who have achieved all these supposed visionary feats by their
own initiative, will be allowed by the government to have all the
initiative they want, and immunities from fretful rules as long as they
resemble themselves and keep on doing what they have shown they can do.
The government will deal with each man according to the facts, the
scientific facts, that he has proved about himself.
The government acts according to scientific facts in everything except
men, in pure food, in cholera, and the next thing the government is
going to do is to be equally efficient in dealing with scientific facts
in men.
It is going to give some men inspected liberty. If these men say they
can be more efficient, as a railroad sometimes is, by being a monopoly,
by being a vast, self-visioned, self-controlled body the government will
have enough character, expert courage and shrewdness about human nature
to provide a way for them to try it.
When the other people come up and ask why they cannot have these
special immunities and why they cannot be a monopoly, or nearly a
monopoly, too, the government will tell them why.
Telling them why will be governing them.
When we once reckon with new kinds and new sizes of men, everything
follows. The first man who organizes a true monopoly for public service
and who does it better than any state could do it, because he thinks of
it himself, glories in it and has a genius for it, will be given a
peerage in England perhaps. But he would not really care. The thing
itself would be a peerage enough and either in America or England he
would rather be rewarded by being singled out by the government for
special rights and distinctions in conducting his business. The best way
a democracy can honour a man who has served it is not to give him a
title or to make a frivolous, idle monument of bronze for him, but to
let him have his own way.
The way to honour any artist or any creative man, any man a country is
in need of especially, is to let him have his own way.
* * * * *
We are told that the way to govern trusts is to untrammel competition.
But the way to untrammel competition is not to try to untrammel it in
its details with lists of things men shall not do.
This is cumbersome.
We would probably find it very much more convenient in specifying 979
detailed things trusts cannot do, if we could think of certain
sum-totals of details.
Then we could deal with the details in a lump.
The best sum totals of details in this world that have ever been
invented yet, are men.
We will pick out a man who has a definite, marked character, who is a
fine, convenient sum-total that any one can see, of things not to do.
We will pick out another man in the same line of business who is a fine,
convenient sum-total of things that people ought to do.
The government will find ways, as the Coach of Business as the Referee
of the Game for the people, to stand by this man until he whips the
other, drives him out of business or makes him play as good a game as he
does.
* * * * *
When a child finds suddenly that his father is not merely keeping him
from doing things, that his father has a soul, the father begins to get
results out of the child.
As a rule a child discovers first that his father has a soul by noticing
that he insists on treating him as if he had one.
Of course a corporation that has not a soul yet does not propose to be
dictated to by a government that has not a soul yet. When corporations
without souls see overwhelmingly that a government has a soul, they will
be filled with a wholesome fear. They will always try at first to
prevent it from having a soul if they can.
But the moment it gets one and shows it, they will be glad. They will
feel on firm ground. They will know what they know. They will act.
In the hospital on the hill not far from my house, one often sees one
attendant going out to walk with twelve insane men. One would think it
would not be safe for twelve insane men to go out to walk with one sane
man, with one man who has his soul on.
The reason it is safe, is, that the moment one insane man or man who has
not his soul on, attacks the man who has a soul, all of the other eleven
men throw themselves upon him and fling him to the ground. Men whose
souls are not on, protect, every time, the man who has his soul on
because the man who has a soul is the only defence they have from the
men who have not.
It is going to be the same with governments. We believe in a
government's having as much courage in America as a ten-dollar-a-week
attendant in an insane asylum. We want a government that sees how
courage works.
We are told in the New Testament that we are all members one of another.
If society has a soul and if every member of it has a soul, what is the
relation of the social soul to the individual soul?
A man's soul is the faculty in him for seeing the Whole in relation to
the part--his vision for others in relation to his vision for himself.
My forefinger's soul in writing with this fountain pen is the sense my
forefinger has of its relation to my arm, my spinal column, and my
brain. The ability and efficiency of my forefinger depends upon its
soul, that is, its sense of relation to the other members of the body.
If my forefinger tries to act like a brain all by itself, as it
sometimes does, nobody reads my writing.
The government in a society is the soul of all the members and it treats
them according to their souls.
The one compulsion a government will use if it has a soul, will be
granting charters in business in such a way as to fix definite
responsibility and definite publicity upon a few men.
If a corporation has a soul, it must show. It must have a face. Anybody
can tell a face off-hand or while going by. Anybody can keep track of a
corporation if it has a face.
The trouble with the average corporation is that all that anybody can
see is its stomach. Even this is anonymous.
Whose Stomach is it? Who is responsible for it? If we hit it, whom will
we hit? Let the government find out. If the time the government is now
spending in making impossibly minute laws for impossibly minute men,
were spent in finding out what size men were, and who they were and then
giving them just as many rights from the people, as they are the right
kind and the right size to handle for the people, it would be an
American government.
If there is one thing rather than another that an American or an
Englishman loves, it is asserting himself or expressing his character in
what he does. The typical dominating Englishman or American is not as
successful as a Frenchman or as an Italian in expressing other things,
as he is in expressing his character.
He cares more about expressing his character and asserting it. If he is
dealing with things, he makes them take the stamp of who he is. If he is
dealing with people, he makes them see and acknowledge who he is. They
must take in the facts about what he is like when they are with him.
They must deal with him as he is.
This trait may have its disadvantages, but if an Englishman or an
American is on this earth for anything, this is what he is for--to
express his character in what he does--in strong, vigorous, manly lines
draw a portrait of himself and show what he is like in what he does.
This may be called on both sides of the sea to-day as we stand front to
front with the more graceful nations, Anglo-Saxon Art.
It is because this particular art in the present crisis of human nature
on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world
that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and
their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our
galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket
of machines and crowds to give us the lead.
And now we are threading a way for nations through the moral wilderness
of the earth.
This position has been accorded us because it goes with our temperament,
because we can be depended upon to insist on asserting ourselves and on
expressing ourselves in what we do. If the present impromptu industrial
machinery which has been handed over to us thoughtlessly and in a hurry,
does not express us, everybody knows that we can be depended on to
assert ourselves and that we will insist on one that will. The nations
that are more polite and that can dance and bow more nicely than we can
in a crisis like this would be dangerous. It is known about us
throughout a world that we are not going to be cowed by wood or by iron
or by steel and that we are not going to be cowed by men who are all
wood and iron and steel inside. If wood, iron, or steel does not express
us, we are Englishmen and we are Americans. We will butt our character
into it until it does.
* * * * *
If the American workman were to insist upon butting his American
temperament into his labour union machinery, what would his labour
machinery in America soon begin to show that an American labourer was
like?
I imagine it might work out something like this:
The thoughtful workman looks about him. He discovers that the workman
pays at least two times as much for coal as he needs to because miners
down in Pennsylvania work one third as hard as they might for the money.
When he comes to think of it, all the labouring men of America are
paying high prices because they have to pay all the other workmen in
America for working as little as they can. He is working one third less
than he can and making his own class pay for it. He sees every workman
about him paying high prices because every other workman in making
things for him to eat and for him to wear, is cheating him--doing a
third less a day for him than he ought.
At this point the capitalists pile in and help. They shove the prices up
still higher because capital is not interested in an industry in which
the workmen do six hours' work in nine. It demands extra profits. So
while the workmen put up the prices by not working, the capitalists put
up the prices because they are afraid the workmen will not work. Half
work, high prices.
Then the American workman thinks. He begins to suppose.
Suppose that the millers' workmen and the workmen in the woollen mills
in America see how prices of supplies for labouring men are going up and
suppose they agree to work as hard as they can? Suppose the wool workers
of the world want cheap bread. The flour mill workers want cheap
clothes. We will say to the bread people, "We will bring down the price
of wool for you if you will bring down the price of bread for us."
Then let Meat and Potatoes do the same for one another. Then two
industries at a time, industries getting brains in pairs, until like the
animals going into the ark, little by little (or rather very fast,
almost piling in, in fact, after the first pair have tried it), at last
our true, spirited, practical minded American workmen will have made
their labour machines as natural and as human and as American as they
are. They will stop trying to lower prices by not working, each workman
joining (in a factory) the leisure classes and making the other workmen
pay for it.
* * * * *
The American workman, as things are organized now, finds himself
confronted with two main problems. One is himself. How can he get
himself to work hard enough to make his food and clothes cheap? The
other is his employer.
What will the American workman do to express his American temperament
through his labour union to his employer? The American workmen will go
to their employers and say: "Instead of doing six hours' work in nine
hours, we will do nine hours' work in nine hours." The millers, for
instance, will say to the flour mill owners: "We will do a third more
work for you, make you a third more profit on our labour if you will
divide your third more profit like this:
"First, by bringing down the price of flour to everybody;
"Second, by bringing up our wages. Third, by taking more money
yourselves."
American labouring men who did this would be acting like Americans. It
is the American temperament.
They will insist on it: The labour men will continue to say to their
employers, "We will divide the proceeds of our extra work into three
sums of money--ours, yours, and everybody's." In return we will soon
find the employers saying the same thing to the labour men. Employers
would like to arrange to be good. If they can get men who earn more,
they want to pay them more.
The labourers would like to be good, _i.e._, work more for employers who
want to pay them more.
But being good has to be arranged for.
Being good is a matter of mutual understanding, a matter of
organization, a matter of butting our American temperament into our
industrial machines.
All that is the matter with these industrial machines is that they are
not like us.
Our machines are acting just now for all the world as if they were the
Americans and as if we were the machines.
Are we for the machines, or are the machines for us?
All that the American labourers and that the American capitalists have
to do is to show what they are really like, organize their news about
themselves so that they get it through to one another, and our present
great daily occupation in America (which each man calls his "business")
all the workmen going down to the mills and all the employers going down
to their offices, and then for six, eight, nine hours a day being chewed
on by machines, will cease.
We make our industrial machines. We are Americans. Our machines must
have our American temperament.
* * * * *
If an American employer were to insist on butting his American
temperament into his industrial machine, what would his industrial
machine, when it is well at work at last, show an American employer's
temperament to be like?
The first thing that would show in his machine, I think, would be its
courage, its acting with boldness and initiative, originality and
freedom, without being cluttered up by precedents or running and asking
Mama, its clear-headedness in what it wants, its short-cut in getting to
it, and above all a kind of ruthless faith in human nature, in the
American people, in its goods and in itself.
The typical American business man of the highest class--the man who is
expressing his American temperament best in his business--is the one who
is expressing in it the most courage for himself and for others and for
his government. He has big beliefs every few minutes a day, and he acts
on them with nonchalance.
If he is running a trust--our most characteristic, recklessly difficult
American invention for a man to show through, and if he tries to get his
American temperament to show through in it, tries to make his trust like
a vast portrait, like a kind of countenance on a country, of what a big
American business is like, what will he do?
He will take a little axiom like this and act as if it were so.
_If in any given case the producers by collusion and combination can be
efficient in lowering wages to employees and raising prices and cheating
the public, this same combination or collusion would be efficient in
raising the wages of employees, lowering prices and serving the public._
He will then, being an American, turn to his government and say "I am a
certain sort of man. If I am allowed to be an exception and to combine
in this matter, I can prove that I can raise wages, lower prices for a
whole nation in these things that I make. I am a certain sort of man. Do
you think I am, or do you think that I am not? I want to know."
The government looks noncommittally at him. It says it cannot
discriminate.
He says nothing for a time, but he thinks in his heart that it is
incompetent and cowardly to run a great government of a great nation as
a vast national sweep or flourish of getting out of brains and of
evading vision. It seems to him lazy and effeminate in a government to
treat all combinations and all monopolies alike. He says: "Look me in
the eyes! I demand of you as a citizen of this country the right to be
looked by my government in the eyes. What sort of man am I? Here are all
my doors open. My safes are your safes and my books are your books. Am I
or am I not a man who can conduct his business as a great profession,
one of the dignities and energies and joys of a great people?
"What am I like inside? Is what I am like inside--my having a small size
or a big size of motive, my having a right kind or a wrong kind of
ability of no consequence to this government? Does the government of
this country really mean that the most important things a country like
this can produce, the daily, ruling motives of the men who are living in
it, have no weight with the government? Am I to understand that the
government does not propose to avail itself of new sizes and new kinds
of men and new sizes and new kinds of abilities in men? What I am trying
to do in my product is to lower the prices and raise the wages for a
nation. Will you let me do it? Will you watch me while I do it?"
This will be the American trust of to-morrow. The average trust of this
country has not yet found itself, but the moral and spiritual history,
the religious message to a government of The Trust That Has Found Itself
will be something like this.
Perhaps when we have a trust that has found itself, we will have a
government that has dared to find itself, that has the courage to use
its insight, its sense of difference between men, as it means of getting
what it wants for the people.
As it is now, the government has not found itself and it falls back on
complex rules or machines for getting out of seeing through people.
Where courage is required, it proceeds as it proceeds with automobile
speeding laws. Everybody knows that one man driving his car three miles
an hour may be more dangerous than another kind of man who is driving
his car thirty.
When our government begins to be a government, begins to express the
American temperament, it will be a government that will devote its
energy, its men, and its money to being expert in divining, and using
differences between men. It will govern as any father, teacher, or
competent business man does by treating some people in one way and
others in another, by giving graded speed licenses in business, to
labour unions, trusts, and business men.
The government will be able to do this by demanding, acquiring, and
employing as the servants of the people, men who are experts in human
nature, masters in not treating men alike--Crowbars, lemonade-straws,
chisels, and marshmallows, powerhouses and Æolian harps by the people,
for the people, and of the people, will be rated for what they are and
will be used for what they are for.
This will be democracy. It will be the American temperament in
government.
* * * * *
Is President Wilson or is he not going to fall back into a mere lawyer
Moseslike way of getting people to be good, or is he going to be a man
like David, half poet, half soldier, who got his way with the nation
half by appreciating the men in it and being a fellow human being with
them, and half by fighting them when they would not let him be a fellow
human being with them, and would not let him appreciate them?
Almost any nation or government can get some kind of Moses to-day but
the men that America is producing would not particularly notice a Moses
probably now. A Moses might do for a Rockefeller, but he could not
really do anything with a man like Theodore N. Vail who has the
telephones and telegraphs of a country talking and ticking to us all,
all night, all day, what kind of a man he is.
A big affirmative, inspirational man like David or even Napoleon who
inspires people with one breath and fights hard with the next, a man who
swings his hat for the world, a man who goes on ahead and says "Come!"
is the only man who can be practical in America to-day in helping real
live American men like McAdoo, like Edison and Acheson,--men who can
express a people in a business--to express them.
The people have spoken. A man in the White House who cannot say "Come"
goes.
We want a poet in the White House. If we can not have a poet for the
White House soon, we want a poet who will make us a poet for the White
House.
I do not believe it is too much to expect a President to be a poet. We
have had a poet for President once in one supreme crisis of this nation
and the crisis that is coming now is so much deeper, so much more human
and world-wide than Lincoln's was that it would almost seem as if a
place like the White House (where one's poetry could really work) would
make a poet out of anybody.
A President who has not a kind of plain, still, homely poetry in him, a
belief about people that sings, in the present appalling crisis of the
world is impracticable or visionary.
So we do not say, "Have we a President that can get our Bells, Edisons,
McAdoos, Achesons to be good by toeing a line?"
We say, "Have we a President who can swing into step, who can join in
the singing, who can catch up?"
Tunnel McAdoo, when he lifted up his will against the sea and against
the seers of Wall Street, was singing. When he conceived those steel
cars, those roaring yellow streaks of light ringing through rocks
beneath the river, streets of people flashing through under the slime
and under the fish and under the ships and under the wide sunshine on
the water, he was singing! He raised millions of dollars singing.
Of course he sang the way Americans usually sing, and had to do as well
as he could in talking to bankers and investors not to look as if he
were singing, but there it all was singing inside him, the seven years
of digging, the seven years of dull thundering on rocks under the city,
and at last the happy steel cars all green and gold, the streams of
people all yellow light hissing and pouring through--those vast pipes
for people beneath the sea!
If we have a President, let him sing like McAdoo, or like Luther
Burbank, or like Theodore N. Vail, or like Colonel Goethals, picking up
a little isthmus like Panama, a string between two continents, playing
on it as if it were a harp; or like Edward Ripley playing with the Santa
Fé Railroad for all the world like Homer with a lute, all his seven
thousand men, all his workmen, all their wives and their children, all
the cities along the line striking up and joining in the chorus or like
Carborundum Acheson, backed up by his little Niagara Falls oiling the
wheels of a world, weaving diamonds into steel, hardening the bones of
the earth into skyscrapers, into railroads, into the mighty thighs of
flying locomotives....
Any man who is seen acting in this world with a thing, as if he believed
in the thing, as if he believed in himself and believed in other people,
is singing.
Moses striking out with a rod, as we are told, a path along the sea for
his people may have done a more showy thing from a religious point of
view, hitting the water on top so, making a great splash with an empty
place in it for people to march through, but he was not essentially more
religious than McAdoo, with all those modest but mighty columns of
figures piling up behind him, with all those splendid, dumb, still
glowing engineers behind him, lifting up his will against cities,
lifting up his will against herds of politicians, haughty newspapers,
against the flocks of silly complacent old ferry-boats waddling in the
bay, against the wind and the rain and the cold on the water, and all
the banks of Wall Street....
When we want to tell News to our President about ourselves in America,
we point to William G. McAdoo.
The first news that we, the American people, must contrive to get into
the White House about ourselves is that we do not want to be improved,
and that we do not like an improving tone in our government. We want to
be expressed the way McAdoos express us. We want a government that
expresses our faith in one another, in what we are doing, and in
ourselves, and in the world.
We are singing over here on this continent. We would not all of us put
it in just this way. But our singing is the main thing we can do, and a
government that is trying to improve us feebly, that is looking askance
at us and looking askance at our money, and at our labour, and that does
not believe in us and join in with us in our singing does not know what
we are like.
Our next national business in America is to get the real news over to
the President of what we are like.
It is news that we want in the White House. A missionary in the White
House, be he ever so humble, will not do.
Mr. Roosevelt, himself, with the word Duty on every milepost as he
whirled past, with suggestions of things for other people to do buzzing
like bees about his head, acquired his tremendous and incredible power
with us as a people because, in spite of his violent way of breaking out
into a missionary every morning and every evening when he talked, it was
not his talking but his singing that made him powerful--his singing, or
doing things as if he believed in people, his I wills and I won'ts, his
assuming every day, his acting every day, as if American men were men.
He sang his way roughly, hoarsely, even a little comically at times into
the hearts of people, stirred up in the nation a mighty heat, put a
great crackling fire under it, put two great parties into the pot,
boiled them, drew off all that was good in them, and at last, to-day, as
I write (February 1913), the prospect of a good square meal in the White
House (with some one else to say grace) is before the people.
The people are waiting to sit down once more in the White House and
refresh themselves.
At least, the soup course is on the table.
Who did it, please? Who bullied the cook and got everybody ready?
Theodore Roosevelt, singing a little roughly, possibly hurrahing "_I
will, I will, I won't, I won't_," and acting as if he believed in the
world.
Bryan in the village of Chicago sitting by at a reporter's table saw him
doing it.
Bryan saw how it worked.
Bryan had it in him too.
Bryan heard the shouts of the people across the land as they gloried in
the fight. He saw the signals from the nations over the sea.
Then Armageddon moved to Baltimore.
* * * * *
And now table is about to be spread.
It is to be Mr. Wilson's soup.
But the soup will have a Roosevelt flavour or tang to it. And we will
wait to see what Mr. Wilson will do with the other courses.
* * * * *
A poet in words, with two or three exceptions, America has not produced.
The only touch of poetry or art as yet that we have in America
is--acting as if we believed in people. This particular art is ours.
Other people may have it, but it is all we have.
This is what makes or may make any moment the common American a poet or
artist.
Speaking in this sense, Mr. Roosevelt is the first poet America has
produced that European peoples and European governments have noticed for
forty years, or had any reason to notice. We respectfully place Mr.
Roosevelt with Mr. McAdoo (and if Mr. Brandeis will pardon us, with Mr.
Brandeis) as a typical American before the eyes of the new President.
We ask him to take Mr. Roosevelt as a very important part of the latest
news about us.
The true imaginative men of our modern life, the poets of crowds and
cities are not to-day our authors, preachers, professors or lawyers or
philosophers. The poets of crowds are our men like this, our
vision-doers, the men who have seen visions and dreamed dreams in the
real and daily things, the daring Governors like Wilson and like Hughes,
the daring inventors of great business houses, the men who have invented
the foundations on which nations can stand, on which railroads can run,
the men whose imaginations, in the name of heaven, have played with the
earth mightily, watered deserts, sailed cities on the seas, the men who
have whistled and who have said "Come!" to empires, who have thought
hundred-year thoughts, taken out nine hundred and ninety-nine year
leases, who have thought of mighty ways for cities to live, for cities
to be cool, to be light, to be dark, who have conceived ways for nations
to talk, who have grasped the earth and the sky like music, like words,
and put them in the hands of the people, and made the people say, "O
earth," and "O sky, thou art great, but we also are great! Come earth
and sky, thou shalt praise God with us!"
Who are these men?
Let the President catch up!
Who are these men? Here is Edward A. Filene, who takes up the pride,
joy, beauty, self-respect, and righteousness of a city, swings it into a
Store, and makes that Store sing about the city up and down the world!
Here is Alexander Cassatt, imperturbable, irrepressible, and like a
great Boy playing leapfrog with a Railroad--Cassatt who makes
quick-hearted, dreamy Philadelphia duck under the Sea, bob up serenely
in the middle of New York and leap across Hell Gate to get to Boston!
Let the parliaments droning on their benches, the Congresses pile out of
their doors and catch up.
Let the lawyers--the little swarms of dark-minded lawyers, wondering and
running to and fro, creeping in offices, who have tried to run our
world, blurred our governments, and buzzed, who have filled the world
with piles of old paper, Congressional Records, with technicalities,
words, droning, weariness, despair, and fear ... let them come out and
look! Let them catch up!
Let a man in this day in the presence of men like these sing. If a man
cannot sing, let him be silent. Only men who are singing things shall do
them.
I go out into the street, I go out and look almost anywhere, listen
anywhere, and the singing rises round me!
It was singing that spread the wireless telegraph like a great web
across the sky.
It was singing that dug the subways under the streets in New York.
It was singing, a kind of iron gladness, hope and faith in men, that has
flung up our skyscrapers into the lower stories of the clouds, and made
them say, "_I will! I will! I will!_" to God.
Ah, how often have I seen them from the harbour, those flocking, crowded
skyscrapers under that little heaven in New York, lifting themselves in
the sunlight and in the starlight, lifting themselves before me,
sometimes, it seems, like crowds of great states, like a great country
piled up, like a nation reaching, like the plains and the hills and the
cities of my people standing up against heaven day by day--all those
flocks of the skyscrapers saying, "_I will! I will! I will!_" to God.
The skyscrapers are news about us to our President. He shall reckon with
skyscraper men. He shall interpret men that belong with skyscrapers.
And as he does so, I shall watch the people answer him, now with a glad
and mighty silence and now with a great solemn shout.
The skyscrapers are their skyscrapers.
The courage, the reaching-up, the steadfastness that is in them is in
the hearts of the people.
If the President does not know us yet in America, does not know McAdoo
as a representative American, we will thunder on the doors of the White
House until he does.
My impression is he would be out in the yard by the gate asking us to
come in.
We are America. We are expressing our joy in the world, our faith in
God, and our love of the sun and the wind in the hearts of our people.
In America the free air breathes about us, and daily the great sun
climbs our hillsides, swings daily past our work. There are ninety
million men with this sun and this wind woven into their bodies, into
their souls. They stand with us.
The skyscrapers stand with us.
All singing stands with us.
Ah, I have waked in the dawn and in the sun and the wind have I seen
them!
That sun and that wind, I say before God, are America! They are the
American temperament.
I will have laws for free men, laws with the sun and the wind in them!
I have waked in the dawn and my heart has been glad with the iron and
poetry in the skyscrapers.
I will have laws for men and for American men, laws with iron and poetry
in them!
The way for a government to get the poetry in is to say "Yes" to
somebody.
The way for a government to get the iron in is not by saying "No." It is
not American in a government to keep saying "No." The best way for our
government in America to say "No" to a man, is to let him stand by and
watch us saying "Yes" to some one else.
Then he will ask why.
Then he will stand face to face with America.
CHAPTER XI
NEWS-BOOKS
The most practical thing that could happen now in the economic world in
America would be a sudden, a great national, contemporary literature.
America, unlike England, has no recognized cultured class, and has no
aristocracy, so called, with which to keep mere rich men suitably
miserable--at least a little humble and wistful. Our greatest need for a
long time has been some big serene, easy way, without half trying, of
snubbing rich men in America. All these overgrown, naughty fellows one
sees everywhere like street boys on the corners or on the curbstones of
society, calling society names and taking liberties with it, tripping
people up; hoodlums with dollars, all these micks of money!--O, that
society had some big, calm, serene way like some huge hearty London
policeman, of taking hold of them--taking hold of them by the seats of
their little trousers if need be, and taking them home to Mother--some
way of setting them down hard in their chairs and making them
thoughtful! Nothing but a national literature will do this. "Life,"
(which is, with one exception, perhaps, the only religious weekly we
have left in America) succeeds a little and has some spiritual value
because it succeeds in making American millionaires look funny, and in
making them want to get away and live in Europe. But "Life" is not
enough; it merely hitches us along from day to day and keeps our courage
up. We want in America a literature, we want the thing done thoroughly
and forever and once for all. We want an Aristophanes, a master who
shall go gloriously laughing through our world, through our chimneys
and blind machines, pot-bellied fortunes, empty successes, all these
tiny, queer little men of wind and bladder, until we have a nation
filled with a divine laughter, with strong, manful, happy visions of
what men are for.
All we have to do is to have a News-book--a bookful of the kind of rich
men we want, then we will have them. We will see men piling over each
other all day to be them. Men have wanted to make money because making
money has been supposed to mean certain things about a man. The moment
it ceases to mean them, they will want to make other things.
Where is the news about what we really want?
----, when I took him to the train yesterday, spoke glowingly of the way
the Standard Oil Trust had reduced oil from twenty-nine cents to eleven
cents.
There was not time to say anything. I just thought a minute of how they
did it.
Why is it that people--so many good people will speak of oil at eleven
cents in this way, as if it were a kind of little kingdom of heaven?
I admit that eleven cents from twenty-nine cents leaves eighteen cents.
I do not deny that the Standard Oil Trust has saved me eighteen cents.
But what have they taken away out of my life and taken out of my sense
of the world and of the way things go in it and out of my faith in human
nature to toss me eighteen cents?
If I could have for myself and others the sense of the world that I had
before, would I not to-day, day after day, over and over, gallon by
gallon, be handing them their eighteen cents back?
What difference does it make to us if we are in a world where we can buy
oil for eleven cents a gallon instead of twenty-nine, if we do not care
whether we are alive or dead in it and do not expect anything from
ourselves or expect anything of anybody else? I submit it to your own
common sense, Gentle Reader. Is it any comfort to buy oil to light a
room in which you do not want to sit, in which you would rather not see
anything, in which you would rather not remember who you are, what you
do, and what your business is like, and what you are afraid your
business is going to be like?
I have passed through all this during the last fifteen years and I have
come out on the other side. But millions of lives of other men are
passing through it now, passing through it daily, bitterly, as they go
to their work and as they fall asleep at night.
The next thing in this world is not reducing the price of oil. It is
raising the price of men and putting a market-value on life.
What makes a man a man is that he knows himself, knows who he is, what
he is for and what he wants. Knowing who he is and knowing what he is
about, he naturally acts like a man, knows what he is about like a man,
and gets things done.
A nation that does not know itself shall not be itself.
A nation that has a muddle-headed literature, a nation that to say
nothing of not being able to express what it has, has not even made a
beginning at expressing what it wants; a nation that has not a great,
eager, glowing literature, a sublime clear-headedness about what it is
for--a nation that cannot put itself into a great book, a nation that
cannot weave itself together even in words into a book that can be
unfurled before the people like a flag where everybody can see it and
everybody can share it, look up to it, live for it, sleep for it, get up
in the morning and work for it--work for the vision of what it wants to
be--cannot be a great nation.
A masterpiece is a book that has a thousand years in it. No man has a
right to say where these thousand years in it shall lie, whether in the
past or in the future. It is the thousand years' worth in it that makes
a masterpiece a masterpiece. In America we may not have the literature
of what we are or of what we have been, but the literature of what we
are bound to be, the literature of what WE WILL, we will have, and we
will have to have it before we can begin being it.
First the Specifications, then the House.
From the practical or literary point of view the one sign we have given
in this country so far, that the stuff of masterpieces is in us and that
we are capable of a great literature, is that America is bored by its
own books.
We let a French parson write a book for us on the simple life. We let a
poor suppressed Russian with one foot in hell reach over and write books
for us about liberty which we greedily read and daily use. We let a
sublimely obstinate Norwegian, breaking away with his life, pulling
himself up out of the beautiful, gloomy, morose bog of romance he was
born in--express our American outbreak for facts, for frank realism in
human nature.
America is bored by its own books because every day it is demanding
gloriously from its authors a literature--books that answer our real
questions, the questions the people are asking every night as they go to
sleep and every morning when they crowd out into the streets--Where are
we going? Who are we? What are we like? What are we for?
* * * * *
A---- C----, the little stoopy cobbler on ---- street in ----, bought
some machines to help him last year before I went away and added two or
three slaves to do the work. I find on coming back that he has moved and
has two show windows now, one with the cobbling slaves in it cobbling,
and the other (a kind of sudden, impromptu room with a show window in
it) seems to be straining to be a shoe store. When you go in and show
C---- in his shirt sleeves,--your old shoes hopefully, he slips over
from his shining leather bench to the shoe-store side and shows you at
the psychological moment a new pair of shoes.
He is in the train now with me this morning, across the aisle, looking
out of the window for dear life, poor fellow, for all the world as if he
could suck up dollars and customers--and people who need shoes--out of
the fields as he goes by, the way the man does mists, by looking hard at
them.
I watched him walking up and down the station platform before I got on,
with that bent, concentrated, meek, ready-to-die-getting-on look. I saw
his future while I looked. I saw, or thought I saw, windows full of
bright black shoes, I saw the cobbler's shop moved out into the ell at
the back, and two great show windows in front. A---- C---- looks like an
edged tool.
Millions of Americans are like A---- C----, like chisels, adzes, saws,
scoops. You talk with them, and if you talk about anything except
scooping and adzing, you are not talking with just a man, but a man who
is for something and who is not for anything else. He is not for being
talked with certainly, and alas! not for being loved. At best he is a
mere feminine convenience--a father or a cash secreter; until he wears
out at last, buzzes softly into a grave.
An Englishman of this type is a little better, would be more like one of
these screw-driver, cork-screw arrangements--a big hollow handle with
all sorts of tools inside.
Is this man a typical American? Does he need to be?
What I want is news about us.
All an American like C---- needs is news. His eagerness is the making of
him. He is merely eager for what he will not want.
All he needs is the world's news about people, about new inventions in
human beings, news about the different and happier kinds of newly
invented men, news about how they were thought of, and how they are
made, and news about how they work.
I demand three things for A---- C----:
I want a novel that he will read which will make him see himself as I
see him.
I want a moving picture of him that he will go to and like and go to
again and again.
I want a play that will send him home from the theatre and keep him
awake with what he might be all that night.
I want a news-book for A---- C----, a news-book for all of us.
* * * * *
I read a book some years ago that seemed a true news-book and which was
the first suggestion I had ever received that a book can be an act of
colossal statesmanship, the making or remaking of a people--a
masterpiece of modern literature, laying the ground plan for the
greatness of a nation.