WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF
G. S. L. TO HIMSELF
I
G. S. L. TO HIMSELF
The most important and necessary things a man ever says sometimes, are
the things he feels he must say particularly to himself.
In what I have to say about this nation I have stripped down to myself.
Of course any man in expressing privately his own soul to himself, may
hit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is the
very thing everybody in a nation would do, probably if he had time.
But that may or may not be. All I know is that in this book, and in a
grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what
they ought to do.
A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way
telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to.
I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among
the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody
right.
During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world
gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to
write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself.
I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything
happens to my mind or to my pocket book--in a railway station, in a
trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom--wherever I am, I put
it down--put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me.
As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from
this book to myself.
On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any
further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part
of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has
been written to express certain things a hundred million people want
during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in
view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have
thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the
hundred million people.
I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that if
the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, I
really believe it would be--at least in the main gist and spirit of it,
like mine.
Nearly every man in the hundred million people--in what we call
helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready,
except in his own strike, to write a book like this.
I cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can
prove it and do something that will prove it.
And the two great political parties in their coming conventions--one or
both of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to
try. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go with
people.
And the book is not to them. It is not even for them. This book is to me.
I have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world.
It is easy and light-hearted, but take it off its guard every laugh is a
prayer or a cry.
II
IF I WERE A NATION
Economics, I suspect, are much simpler than they look.
The soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected
up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is.
Why should I propose, if I were a nation--just because I am being a
hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a
human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table--by a really
simple thing like there being so many of me?
I am human--a plain fellow human being--and if the United States would
act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act,
when it is really put up to him--forty nations in his yard waiting for
him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem
would at once become direct and deep and simple.
All that is the matter with it is that so many Senates have sat on it.
Reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a Senate down to
one human being being human--boil it down to a baby even--and what it
would do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep on
being human and close to essentials.
And that is all there is to it.
The other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being
as human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being on
Committees.
* * * * *
The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer away
from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him
home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there.
The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying they
would run the factory themselves.
A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running
the factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house to
ask him to come back to his desk.
He told the Committee he would not return with them. He said that a
committee could not get him. The thousand men had rolled him away through
jeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wanted
him they could come with their wheelbarrow and roll him back.
The thousand came with their wheelbarrow and rolled him back.
The crowds laughed.
But the thousand men and their employer were sober and happy--had some
imagination about each other and went to work.
If I were a nation, the first question I would ask would be, "Why bother
with wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic Russian
way to act an idea all out in order to see it?"
In America we propose to come through to this same idea by being human,
by using our brains on our fellow human beings, by hoeing each other's
imaginations.
The issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which grows
logically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modern
industrial life.
These are the Mahogany Desk and the Cog.
III
WHAT THE MAHOGANY DESK IS GOING TO DO
The old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the
next row with his employee.
The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a
mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing
alongside him in the next row.
To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some
way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what
he does at his desk.
A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious
to a laboring man.
In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has
to do is to find a substitute for hoeing in the next row.
His workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he
is and see the perspiration on his brow.
The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his
mahogany desk sweat. It really does for all practical purposes of course,
but how can he make it look so?
In the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the
first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in
behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a
massive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to
workmen the way they work.
Very soon now, everywhere--much harder than hoeing in the next row--with
the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks
hoeing their workmen's imaginations.
The other main point in the book the hundred million people would write
if they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. I would devote
the second ten chapters I think, not to Mahogany Desks, or to the buttons
on them directing machines, but to Cogs.
The second great point the hundred million people will have to meet and
will have to see a way out for in their book, is the way a Cog feels
about being a Cog.
If a Cog in a big locomotive could take a day off and go around and watch
the drivewheel and pistons--watch the smoke coming out of the smokestack
and the water scooping up from between the rails--watch the three hundred
faces in the train looking out of the windows and the great world booming
by, and if the Cog could then say, "I belong with all this and I am
helping and making it possible for all these people to do and to have all
this!" And if the Cog could then slip back and go on just being a
cog,--the cog would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be.
He would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be in a
democracy-machine in distinction from a king-machine.
What is more, if a Cog did this, or if arrangements were studied out for
some little inkling of a chance to do it, he would be making his job as a
Cog one third easier and happier and three times as efficient.
A man is created to be the kind of Cog that works best when it is allowed
to do its work in this way. God created him when He drove in one rivet to
feel the whole of the ship. It is feeling the whole of the ship that
makes being a Cog worth while.
The great work of the American people in the next four years is to work
out for American industry the fate of the Cog in it.
The fate of democracy turns next on our working out a way of allowing a
Cog some imagination, or some substitute for imagination in its daily
work--something that the rest of the Cog--the whole man in the Cog can
have, which will bring his spirit, his joy and his power to bear on his
daily work.
This is the second of the two main points the hundred million people
would make in their book if they had time.
These two main points--getting labor to see how a mahogany desk
sweats--getting the mahogany desk to put itself in the place of a Cog,
know how a Cog feels and what makes a Cog work--are points which are
going to be made successfully and quickly in proportion as they are taken
up in the right spirit and with a method--a practical human working
method which so expresses and dramatizes that right spirit that it will
be impossible for people not to respond to it.
I am not undertaking in this part of my book to make an inquiry as to
what the right spirit is, or what the right method is that a hundred
million people ought to adopt.
I am a somewhat puzzled and determined person and I am instituting out
loud a searching inquiry as to what I am going to do myself and what the
principles and methods are that I should be governed by in doing my
personal part, and conducting my own mind and judgment toward the
movements and the men about me.
To avoid generalizing, I might as well give my idea the way it came to
me--one man's idea of how one man feels he wants to act when being lied
to.
I do not say in so many words, I _was_ lied to. I do not know. A great
many people every day find themselves in situations where they do not
know. The question I am asking of myself is, how can a man or a public
take a fair human and constructive attitude when one does not know and
cannot know for the time being, all that it is to the point to know?
A stupendous amount of red-flagism, unrest and expensive unreasonableness
would be swept away in this country if we all had in mind to use for
ourselves when called for the following rules for being lied to.
(Not that I am going to lumber people's minds up by numbering them as
rules out loud. They are all here--in what follows--the spirit of them,
and people can make their own rules for themselves as they go along.)
IV
RULES FOR BEING LIED TO
(Charles Schwab or Anybody)
---- dropped in, in the rain the other night, and sat by my fireplace and
said: "Charles Schwab is the Prince of Liars. He says one thing about
labor and does another." He went on to say things he said other people
said.
There are two courses of action to take about Charles Schwab's being the
Prince of Liars.
One way is to expose what he says.
The other way is to help him make what he says true.
I would rather do what I can to help Charles Schwab practice what he
preaches than to stop his preaching.
Everything turns for the American people to-day on being constructive, on
dealing with facts as they are, on using the men we have, and on getting
the most out of the men we have.
To get the most out of Charles Schwab throw around him expectation and
malediction and then let him take his choice.
Charles Schwab in saying what he says about the new spirit in which
capital has got to deal with labor is rendering a great, unexpected,
sensational and indispensable service to labor and to capital. It is a
pity to throw this public confession of capital to labor, and in behalf
of labor away. It would be a still greater pity to see labor itself
throwing it away.
If I could let myself be cooped up as a writer in any one class in this
country to-day, and if it were my special business to take sides with
labor, the thing I would try to do first with Charles Schwab, instead of
undermining what he says and making what he says mean nothing--would be
to cooeperate with him--back him up--back him up with the public--back him
up with the stockholders and the people in his mills, until he makes what
he says mean three times as much.
Then I would see to it if I could, that he says four times as much. I
would try, if I could, to keep Charles Schwab steadily at it, claiming
more and more for labor. Then catching up more and more to Charles
Schwab, doing more and more, and compelling his partners to do more and
more of what he says.
Charles Schwab has fifty or a hundred thousand or so partners, of
course--stockholders he has to educate.
They have to be educated in public. He is not insincere because he has
not educated them all in a minute.
V
GETTING ONE MAN RIGHT
There are certain facts which make me believe in Schwab as an asset for
the nation and for labor and capital both, that must not be thrown away.
There are all manner of facts about Schwab and his mills which I do not
yet know which I could look up and use, but the most valuable facts to
use and use first, are facts anybody can get and get without looking up,
by just sitting down and thinking.
Getting one man right and being fair to one man is the way to begin to be
fair to a nation.
If Charles Schwab is what ---- says he is, if Charles Schwab is doing or
winking while it is being done at the thing ---- says he is--he is an
incredibly under-witted man--stupid about the public, about labor and
about capital--and, what is the most reckless of all--stupid in behalf of
himself.
It is rather a hard nut to crack--Charles Schwab's being stupid. I cannot
understand why people--why a man like ---- would apparently rather
believe that Charles Schwab is stupid than to believe that there must be
some other way of explaining him and of explaining what he has heard said
about him.
If what ---- says is true about Mr. Schwab, he is not only a stupid man
but a ruined man.
In the colossal outbreak of public knowledge coming to us now, nothing
will be able to keep Charles Schwab from to-morrow on, from being a
stupendous tragedy as long as he lives, and a by-word after he is dead.
The alternatives are:
The assertions about Mr. Schwab's real attitude toward labor are not
true.
If true, they are qualified by facts and by delaying conditions for which
all intelligent men whether identified with capital or labor would be
glad to allow.
If true they are due to delegated authority.
If a large organization does not hand over authority it is inefficient.
If it does not make experiments with men and methods it is inefficient.
If it does not make a certain proportion of mistakes in its experiments
with men and methods its experiments are fake experiments.
People who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who do
things.
VI
GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT
My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and
reformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extreme
radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme
conservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and
what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human
nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people
and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and
self-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrong
the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean--what they are
like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like.
The quick way to deal with the industrial situation is to expose the
extreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. The
quick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come to
terms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about one
another, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructive
job on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic human
beings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are held
up and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these human
beings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, by
engineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature.
These personalities to unlock a nation with--to make a hundred million
men believe together and act together should be picked out, men like
Charles Schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yet
everybody ought to look at, and will like to look at when they know them.
Intensive publicity extensively applied.
Then with a printing press and a postage stamp multiply it by a hundred
million. Make true beliefs about picked out men--typical men we have
thousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives.
If the American people can come to know and interpret fifty men--if they
can get fifty sample men right--they will then be able to use these fifty
men every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlock
team work with, with all the others. People will have something to work
from and something to work toward, in judging what they can do with
employers and with workmen around them.
Then we will have team work and civilization--we will have a democracy
the Germans would like to be asked to belong to.
VII
ENGINEERS IN FOLKS
The most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders
people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The
other facts than the facts about people--about how people feel and are
going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable.
Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine training
and education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people.
The facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to get
most, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging one
another.
We have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are off
on their facts about one another. One of the first things business men
are going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about human
nature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with by
experts--by the general recognition and employment of experts in human
nature--of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men to
one another.
If everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as they
really are, our economics in America will be as simple as a primer,
before night.
VIII
THE GREAT NEW PROFESSION
En Route, New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R.
January 19, 1920.
Dined at the ----'s last night. Judge ---- was there. Two other lawyers.
We sat after dinner and talked very late.
Three lawyers are too many for a dinner.
I do not know what it is, but I never spend the evening with a lawyer,
without talking back to him in my mind all the next day.
Probably, if at this late date I were picking out what I would be in the
world, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick out
being a lawyer backwards.
The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in
conducting people's fights for them.
My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the
special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once
be started--a profession in which any man who went into it, would be
occupied in being a lawyer backwards.
(I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most
people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of--because
everybody would see--a whole nation would see all in one unanimous
minute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like.)
Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by the
things they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuous
ad.--their huge national international display ad. just now of what a
lawyer is like--of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is
the United States Senate.
It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to most
people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three
hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards--two or three hundred
thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts
everybody went to, to keep them out of fights.
You see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or
pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course he
will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it
over. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it
is not impossible he will make your enemies love you.
My idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what it
is worth--not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as a
plain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for getting
the things done one wants to do, and for getting what one wants.
If I were hiring a man to help me get what I want out of other people and
if I had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making
people understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making
people afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be the
more practical thing for me to do.
If I could go down town and engage a man at so much a year who would be
an expert in making me understand myself and in making me make fun of
myself, so that I could get myself into fairly good shape for other
people to understand, it would be still more practical.
I would soon find myself after the first few seances with the man I was
hiring to sit down with me and be a lawyer backwards to me--I would soon
find myself having things done to me that would be so plain, so pointed,
so sensible, so scientific and matter of fact and thorough that I would
be able in a minute to cut down to the quick with any man I met,--cut
down to the quick and get what I wanted on any subject I took up, because
nobody could fool me, because I couldn't even be fooled by myself.
I do not know how long it is going to take but I do know that if the
world is going to be reformed it is going to be by men who--either by
doing it personally, or by hiring somebody else to help them do it, have
reformed themselves.
My own personal observation is, so far, that when I set out to see things
against myself I seem to need somehow, a great deal of assistance.
In such a naturally disagreeable mussy job of course, instead of going to
my friends, to people one goes out to dine with, I feel there ought to be
some regular professional person one could go to, some more noble refined
sort of spiritual hired man--make an appointment by telephone, go down to
a room down town on the way to one's office and then just as a plain
matter of course be done off for the day, be done over, be put in shape
for one's fellow human beings to get on with.
Then one could go out into the midst of the people and keel over a world.
After one had hired some one to be a lawyer backwards to one and got used
to it, one would soon be in shape to go to one's employers and let them
put in some touches, go to one's employees, go to anybody and everybody
right and left. One would soon get so that one could learn something from
everybody. One would take points even from relatives.
The main difficulty in a thing like this would be one that would come at
the start, the difficulty of getting people to look upon undergoing the
truth about themselves, respectfully and seriously and like an operation.
No amateur or friend could get anybody started. The only way to begin is
to have some special expert to go to, some special expert with a long
string of notable moral patients, men who have succeeded in business by
seeing through themselves more, and seeing through themselves quicker and
oftener than other people do. You hear of some especially good man who is
being a lawyer backwards practicing regularly with great success. You
observe his patients from day to day and see how the truth works. Then
you go down to his office, plank down your money and get the truth.
* * * * *
The trouble with truth from friends and relatives is that even when they
tell it, nobody pays for it. Most people neither take the truth nor
anything else in this world seriously if it is free. People get more, the
more they want it. And the more they want it, the more they show it by
wanting to pay for it.
This is why I suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be a
regular profession. There is going to be a tremendous demand for going
down town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see how
going down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with people
in one's work.
The lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies about
himself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free a
man from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis of
himself and present him a world with the truth.
This idea should be presented to people just as plain common sense.
People should not be asked to take it up not as an ideal but as an
operation. If a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how he
has got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to a
man's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in order
to have any one willing to let him live?
We have operations on all our other inner organs. The things that are
done to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personal
and intimate things. And if people will let themselves be cut open and
operated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men--hundreds
of thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to be
operated on so that they can earn something to eat? Nine out of ten of
the things that keep people from earning a living as they should or as
they might, are truths against themselves that have never been operated
on.
IX
GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE FACTS
The first thing the man in the White House for the next four years is
going to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as they
really are.
If I were writing a book for the next president to run for president on,
one of the first things I would put into it would be a definite statement
of what the president and the government proposed to do and what policy
they proposed to adopt to keep Labor and Capital from being off on their
facts about each other.
There are two policies to choose from.
First Policy: Have Capital tell Labor what is the matter with Labor, and
have Labor tell Capital what is the matter with Capital. (Results:
Strikes heaped on lockouts and lockouts heaped on strikes.)
Second Policy: Turn the whole truth-telling policy around.
The way to make a truth count is to get the utmost possible attention to
it.
The way to get the utmost possible attention to a truth is to have people
one does not expect it from telling it. The way to advertise the sins of
Capital is to have Capital tell them. Employers and capitalists can
attract twenty times as much attention in telling things that are the
matter with them, and will be believed forty times as much. And they not
only can tell the facts against themselves more fairly, but while they
are telling the facts against themselves they are in a position to change
them. They can tell facts against themselves with one hand and change
them with the other. Or they can begin changing them--begin getting labor
to help them change them.
If I had to save the world in a week or rather get assurance in a week
that it could be saved, I would get all the people in it to agree for a
year to read each other's papers. Have every man read two papers. We
would start up for America the national Parallel Column Habit. Each man
by himself daily putting his own little world and other people's world
alongside until they got used to it, and then together.
There is no limit to what reading the wrong papers would not do for this
nation. It is not a matter to argue about. It is a mere plain matter of
fact in ordinary every day psychology. The veriest tyro in human
engineering can see it,--that the way to get a truth noticed about
Capital or Labor, the way to make a truth of some use and get it believed
and acted on, is to have the wrong people tell it.
Judge Gary could say some of the things Mr. Gompers is saying a great
deal better than Mr. Gompers could.
There is one thing I am going to do when I put this up to the people. I
am not going to let them think I am putting it up to them as a Christian.
The way to introduce the idea is to speak as a plain practical engineer
in folks and in the way human nature works. I don't know as I would mind
people having fine religious feelings about it, when they did it, if they
liked, but I would prefer to call it and prefer to introduce it as
simple, plain, hard-headed publicity.
The most natural quick universal short-cut to peace, to different groups
of people in America getting their facts right and getting them quick and
dealing with each other as they really are, is to have people go around
in America from now on, telling truths everywhere, who have just got
them--people the truths look prominent on.
X
THE FOOL KILLERS
The gist of the labor problem simmers down to our making some adequate
universally understood provision, generally resorted to by everybody as a
matter of course, for people's not being fooled about themselves.
If people do not fool themselves nobody else can fool them.
And they do not go around fooling others.
The next thing employers and employees who are being fooled by themselves
and who are trying to fool one another, are going to observe, is that
their competitors in their own industry--the employers and employees in
their own industry who are not fooled by themselves and who are not
taking time to fool one another, are producing more, cheaper and better
goods than they can.
Things that take years to straighten out, straighten out in weeks when
people on both sides who have stopped fooling themselves, get together
and look at the facts over each other's shoulders. All that is necessary
is to get the thing started--looking at the facts over each other's
shoulders. People who do not want to start to look at facts in this way
should call in a specialist until they do.
Labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital human
nature another. They both believe on both sides what they want to, unless
they go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitable
habit started of making a deliberate, desperate effort not to.
The world is not being run from day to day by the truth. It is run by
what people believe is the truth. It is what the I. W. W. extremists
believe is the truth, which constitutes the important fact--the fact
which has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. The truth
about Judge Gary's attitude or Charles Schwab's, toward labor unions,
makes no difference if nobody believes it, or if the labor unions don't
believe it. As long as the labor unions are fooling themselves and
believing what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact way
to deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. The
fundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off on
their facts about themselves and believe what they want to about
themselves. Naturally having begun with this they branch out and believe
what they want to about anybody.
To this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we have
obviously got to make provision for in modern American life, is
practically a new profession--regular professional persons everywhere in
all cities, and in all the different industries and in the highly
specialized groups each with their special and different techniques, who
are experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves and
others of believing what they want to about themselves.
XI
THE WHISPERERS
A very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in the
habit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their office
doors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves.
A very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in the
habit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficient
type are whispering around to one another against themselves.
One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial
deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people
who are shouting would shut up.
But perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout.
The first moment the shouters suspect what the whisperers are
whispering,--the whisperers on the other side--they will stop shouting to
listen.
The whole industrial situation narrows down to this,--might be put into
two words by a hundred million people to-day, to Capital and Labor, "Swap
Whispers!"
The tumult and the shouting die.
It is with the whisperers, we will save the world.
XII
MR. DOOLEY, JUDGE GARY AND MR. GOMPERS
The proposal that we have a new profession--a group of specialists to go
to, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other people
and be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as a
kind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almost
tragical subject. But something has made me want to begin my idea in this
way.
In strained situations between people--situations in which one sees
people getting all worked up and fine, noble and wild-eyed about
themselves, I am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, most
immediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one--some one
who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless
laugh.
To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or
not, would be practical.
Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between
Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola.
And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous
in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever
had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emancipation
Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic
humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time,
in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his God.
I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on
the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice
cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time--just as Mr.
Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they
would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went
home--stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room--if Mr.
Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep
lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's
Conference might have been saved.
The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen from
the point of view of God or of common people, many of the men in
it,--most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very
funny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could see
through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference who
conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact
about human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would look
in a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless lively
and equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Labor
group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to
the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than
could be helped.
The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our whole
nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp--a
state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody
thought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or
the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln
would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people
started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at
themselves.
When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as
if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on,
walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver
Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do
claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark
recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers
and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and
grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages
were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were
not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all
have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the
capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little
girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was
prettiest, about themselves.
Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do
anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's
emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe
about itself.
With Capital not yet grown up--not yet really capable (as the really
mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative
use of criticism,--incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of
making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the same
undeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as a
national dramatization,--a rather loud and theatrical acting out before
an amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country as
institutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear,
superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonous
strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty
years, had made us suspect they were!
For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that
bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral
garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in
what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this
nation--called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid for
carting it away without saying a word.
There are three courses we can take in the Public Group now.
We can try to discipline Capital and Labor into producing together by
passing laws and heaping up embarrassments and penalties.
We can let them see how much better they can make things by sticking them
on to one another and letting them discipline one another.
We can make fun of both of them quietly to themselves, keep
quiet-hearted, matter of fact, full of realism, humor, relaxation and
naturalness and deal with Capital and Labor as Lincoln would, by getting
laughing and listening started.
Then let them laugh at themselves.
America should arrange to have Judge Gary, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Gompers get
together on a desert island and face things out.
A great deal of capital in this country--especially the best of it, is
already seeing, and already acting on facts about itself it has not
wanted to believe. It is already seeing that it cannot carry off with
Labor or with the Public any longer the idea of looking pure and noble,
standing before people in a kind of eternal moral-Prince-Albert coat,
one's hand in one's bosom, and with the same old pompous-looking face,
without looking ridiculous. It is seeing that it would rather laugh at
itself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that the
only thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific and
economic, smile at its airs with Labor and the public, and lay them
aside.
If Capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietly
for self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, Labor will.
If Labor does it, Capital will.
Whichever side does it first, and does it best,--does it in the most
human, attractive and contagious way will find a hundred million people
handing over to it the power and the leadership of the country.
To whichever side it comes first, to show the most shrewdness, the most
fearlessness, the most generosity in seeing facts against itself, will
come the honor of the first victory.
The first victory either side will be allowed by the people, is its
victory over itself.
People in this country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capable
of self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, can have anything
they want.
XIII
FOOLING ONESELF IN POLITICS
The same thing that everybody can see is going to happen in business in
this country from now on--the pushing forward--the victory over all
others in business of the men who are not fooled about themselves is
going to be seen happening ten times over in politics.
The leading symptom of the mood of the people, the magnificent blanket
political secret that covers all the other secrets of the coming
conventions and elections, the dominating fact of the next man's next
four years in The White House, is the thing that is going to be done by
the people from to-day on, to politicians who are fooled about
themselves.
One has but to mention one or two and a nation sees it.
Any little natural impression my fellow citizens may have had at the
beginning of this article that in putting forward my idea of being a
lawyer backwards, or the idea that we must all practice at being lawyers
backwards to ourselves, I am putting forward just a gay pleasant
thoughtlet, instead of a grave and pressing national issue, an issue on
which the fate of a people is at stake, fades away when one really begins
to think of how the idea would really work out if tried on particular
politicians.
Everybody can pick out his own of course, but I am inclined to believe
just at the moment, that if there was a good man everybody in this nation
knew of who was being a lawyer backwards--say in New York or London--a
man who had a big practice and who had a fine record in bracing men up to
fight themselves and not to be fooled about themselves, the man that most
people in this country would like to take up a national collection for,
have sent to him and done over at once, no matter what it cost, would be
Henry Cabot Lodge.
For six long weary months now, the main and international fact America
and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man
called Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself.
Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,--their very
cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Washington
can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips Henry
Cabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to
make Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in a
lonely back seat of the World.
But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred
million people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry Cabot
Lodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like
an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses his
pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions
Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to
the world after all is that he--Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, has
taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to
sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international
emotion out of it--every day one more morning he gets out of bed,
elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration--into a great
national stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty
generations like attendant angels hovering around him--around Henry Cabot
Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for
saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws
of a prowling League of Nations!
It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public
moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one
single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul
before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived.
It would be of no use to argue--not even for a hundred million people to
argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do
to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's
idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself.
So it came to pass--a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a
man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man
magnificently obsessed--a man holding himself ready any minute of any day
in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipice
of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off....
Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was
measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues
of nations of his own twenty years ago--who would have believed that a
man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in
this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own
desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his
nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a
national, into an international helplessness like this?
My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at the
present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the
psycho-analysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to get
things, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and from
now on, in the men they choose to get them.
The ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled about
themselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, are
matched on every side in the world of politics.
The personal trait of great political as well as industrial value for
which the people of this country are going to look in the men they allow
to be placed over them--the men they give power and command to, is the
quality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts in
people. What we are going to look for in a man is having an engineering
and not a sentimental attitude toward his own mind and the minds of
others. We are going to give power and place to the man who has a certain
eagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certain
suppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. The man we are
going to look past everybody for and pick to be a President or a Senator
after this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his own
party or by his own class, who is not fooled about himself, who keeps
without swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunk
line of the interests of all of us.
XIV
SWEARING OFF FROM ONESELF IN TIME
Before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is established, and
before very many offices have really been opened up where one can go in
and have one's mind changed ten dollars' worth instead of having it
poured, soothed and petted, a good many of us are going to find it
necessary to practice on ourselves and in a humble way as amateurs, do
any little odd jobs we can on ourselves at home.
We nearly all of us have it in us--we the hundred million people--to be
like Henry Cabot Lodge, on a less national scale, any minute.
I say over to myself breathlessly between these very words while I write
them down about Henry Cabot Lodge, that beautiful thought John Bunyan
had, "Except for the grace of God" a wife, five friends and a sense of
humor, there goes Gerald Stanley Lee!
I have made myself say this over practically every day while writing this
article (I have had to write it), and when I was in the same town Henry
Cabot Lodge is, last week, saw him snooping around the Senate, so pure
and high and from the Back Bay, so serene in his courtly chivalrous dream
about himself, I got taken up every time--I do not deny it--on the same
monotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the same
monotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then I would
stand there (He is my own Senator) with his pass for The Senate in my
pocket ... I would stand and watch him,--watch him walking through the
lordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought John
Bunyan had about the murderer, "Except for the grace of God there goes
etc., etc." Everybody fill in for himself!
The essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human nature
is that all the people who have any are very much alike. The best we can
do about it--most of us--is to recognize the fact that in spite of the
thought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably are
going to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical working
difference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselves
in the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, more
desperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regular
arrangements, perhaps,--when something in us starts us up into being
Lodges,--for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselves
in time.
Here is Charles Evans Hughes for instance, who from the day he was born
hates a Socialist from afar off,--a man who never had in his younger days
perhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thing
Charles Evans Hughes does before anybody can say Jack Robinson, the very
first minute he reads in his paper that the New York Assembly has refused
to give their seats to five Socialist members because they are
Socialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big national
jerk draw his national self together, and before the country is half
waked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an act
of sympathy and protest on behalf of American Socialists from the last
man most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that the
narrow partisans of the Assembly itching with superiority, sweating with
propriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great Chamber
in Albany, should take the Socialist members they had waved out of the
room simply for belonging to the Socialist party, and conduct them back
to their seats as the accredited representatives (until proved
individually unfit) of citizens of the United States and let them sit
there as a national exhibit of the way in which a great and free people,
who are believing in themselves every day, can believe in themselves
enough to listen to anybody, to make regular arrangements in Albany and
everywhere as a matter of course for listening to people with whom they
do not agree, without fear and without frothing at the mouth.
Mr. Hughes is as anxious to do anything he can during one lifetime to
discourage Socialism as Henry Cabot Lodge is to discourage Woodrow
Wilson, but the reason that the American people have been glad to have
Charles Evans Hughes as Justice of the Supreme Court, the reason that
they came within three inches of making him President of the United
States is that in an eminent degree he is a man who has made elaborate,
conclusive and habitual arrangements with his own mind for not being
deceived by Charles Evans Hughes, for being a lawyer backwards, for
fighting himself, for stepping up out of being a mere lawyer and sitting
sternly on the Bench of the Supreme Court, against himself.
Of course I am not writing this article to point out to a hundred million
people with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superior
I and a hundred million other people are to Henry Cabot Lodge and to the
way for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and being
internationally fooled about himself. The special point I seek to make is
that as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking out
into millions of Lodges any minute, that we should make the most of our
new national chance of our power as a people just now--just before the
two great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong,
to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard against
ourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to The White
House,--from whatever walk of life he comes,--a man who will have himself
magnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the people
into his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own class, or
put down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul--a man
who will be the President of all the people everywhere all the time.
When the members of The Bar Association of the City of New York who
backed Mr. Hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightened
world, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasion
and being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fair
to divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those who
voted to back Mr. Hughes were, and those who did not, were not equally
exposed to being fooled about themselves. Mr. Hughes and his followers
were probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular and
standing arrangements with themselves against themselves and who acted
more quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish they
had acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes.
In the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next four
years to justify democracy--to justify the power of the human spirit to
be free, generous, noble and just in self-government, the power of men of
differing classes, of differing groups and interests to live in orderly
good will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last a
great nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot do
it,--all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being a
blind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our not
being full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on what
we do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand for
seeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men to
represent us who shall not be demagogues, who shall lead us as we are,
with clear eyes to what we are going to be, men who shall lead us by
opening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting us
in our sins.
XV
TECHNIQUE FOR NOT BEING FOOLED BY ONESELF
The next twenty-eight pages of this book might be entitled: "An Article
that Expected to Appear in the _Saturday Evening Post_."
When the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to be
read in this way, were completed, they were too late to submit to the
_Post_, and too late to change.
The reader is therefore requested to bear in mind (as I do) that he is
getting the next eleven chapters for nothing--that they have not been
paid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether the
_Saturday Evening Post_ would approve or believe what I believe, or
feel hurt if other people believe it.
* * * * *
The suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards
is started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doing
what we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs of
criticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter
of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself.
It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of
self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret
of increased production in factories, or power over others in business,
and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, I
say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having
or exercising this power of self-criticism?
If the readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ were to come to me in a
body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything,
they--the readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ can do, and do now to
acquire a technique--a kind of general amateur technique for not being
fooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holding
back from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked at
all, I have a faint hopeful idea--I feel it at this moment floating about
my head--a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought
to do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thing
off. I cannot believe that only this far--in a few pages or so about it,
I have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to
them. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in this
country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves,
the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country
everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being
fooled by himself--some one man all our people have a perfect
passion,--almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make
my idea alluring with him.
Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of
Austin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States.
It is true that other readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ besides
Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr.
Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily
common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people.
Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office--everybody who
waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with
them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin,
Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other
people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be
excelled.
I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of
three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the
technique of self-criticism.
1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself.
2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize
him.
3rd. How he could get it. Technique and illustration.
XVI
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LETTER
If the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from
Philadelphia to Northampton, Massachusetts, could be written down--if all
the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on
platforms--what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in
mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent
sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions--if all the long story of
this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail
and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the
envelope--what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do
to Albert Sidney Burleson?
The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every
day, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along the
Mississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, waving
their autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, would
point to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave of
unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Washington by
ten-thirty A.M., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel
post to Austin, Texas, before night.
I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker
than if he were sent like a mere letter.
Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present
quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in
a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most
national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be
to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, the
most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can
produce.
Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to
believe and who keeps fooled about himself.
An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about
how money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he was
placed by the people at the head of the people's Post Office, he would
save their money for the people instead of running their Post Office for
them.
This is all that has happened. This was Mr. Burleson's preconception of
what he was for and what a Post Office was for and not a hundred million
people could pry him out of it. Mr. Burleson ran his Post Office to suit
himself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in being
suited with their Post Office had to take anything that was left over
that they could get after Mr. Burleson was suited with it.
Mr. Burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conception
of Albert Sidney Burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and so
far as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years in
thinking what other people's conceptions of him are.
I am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a Post Office. But I
want my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America would
agree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to have
it, please, deliver our letters for us.
If the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last
minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday
night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the
compositor's hands on Thursday morning--should take as has happened
before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its
special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one
suppose I would do?
Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in another
column on Mr. Burleson.
But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of the _Post_ are
both going to get out of that extra column.
I am going to do what I have done over and over before.
Instead of mailing as one would suppose this manuscript at nine o'clock
Wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next
morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery,
I am going to go down to the Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon at six
o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar
ticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire a
seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford for
the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the
morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye.
Then I am going to pay my letter's bill at the Bellevue-Stratford, buy a
three dollar ticket to New York and a place in the Pullman for myself, G.
S. L. on return, as the human envelope Mr. Burleson has required me to
be, ship myself back to New York as the empty, as the container this
article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and
thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with Albert
Sidney Burleson will be over.
Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Station
and walked out at the Eighth Avenue end, looked up wistfully at Mr.
Burleson's new Greek Palace he puts up in when he comes to New York and I
came with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burleson
has about himself--four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet
high all across the top.
NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS
FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.
Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, or
Homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to
camels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousand
mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles
of sunsets across the land.
But I must say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read it
as I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth to
Thirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as I
stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I was
spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailing
for me.
XVII
THE MAN FIFTY-THREE THOUSAND POST OFFICES FAILED ON
There is one thing I find when I am writing in a national magazine,
trying to express myself on an idea I would like to believe but do not
want to be fooled about, to four or five million people. I can not help
feeling that out of all these four or five million people, at the very
least anyway there really must be three million and five hundred thousand
who are being very much less fooled about me and about my idea than I am.
Every day as I sit down to write one more chapter I try to catch up to
them. Of course anybody can see I am not equal to it, but it does give
one a chance, and it gives the book a chance before I am through, to have
some sense in it.
I cannot help thinking what Albert Sidney Burleson, who has a hundred
million people to choose from, who has millions of people who are less
fooled about him than he is, to catch up to every day, after all these
seven long years they have put on him, ought to amount to.
And what his Post Office ought to amount to.
Of course we are all human and know how it is, in a way. We know that the
first thought that would come to Mr. Burleson as to any man when he finds
he is being criticized--that people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices
are criticizing him and acting with him as if he were fooled about
himself, is the automatic thought of self-defense. The second thought,
which is what one would hope for from a General, even a Postmaster
General, is that one resents it in oneself, that in an important opening
for a man like being called foolish, one stops all one's thinking-works,
and slumps ingloriously, automatically and without a quaver into
self-defense.
One would think a man who could get to be a Postmaster General would have
the presence of mind when he says "Ouch!" to a nation that steps on his
toes, to fix his face quick, smile and say, "Thank you! Thank you! I will
see what there is in this!"
Why should a man when God is blessing him as he does Mr. Burleson, even
out of the mouths of his enemies, butt in in the way he does and
interrupt truths with enough juice in them to make one Burleson, even one
Burleson into twenty great men before a nation's eyes?
A whole Cabinet--at least a whole Democratic Cabinet--could have been
made time and time again out of the great-man-juice, the truth-pepsin
great men are made out of, this country has wasted on Burleson in the
past seven years.
XVIII
CAUSES OF BEING FOOLED ABOUT ONESELF
I would like to give a diagnosis of this quite common disease, touch on
the causes and see how they can be removed.
There seem to be, speaking roughly and as far as my own observation of
psychology goes, six main ways in which the average man is fooled about
himself and needs to change his mind about himself.
He is possessed with loco-mindedness or spotty-mindedness, sees things as
they look to one kind or group of people--sees things in spotlights of
personality, of place or time--all the rest black.
Or he suffers from what one might call Lost-Mindedness--is always getting
lost in anything he does, somewhere between the end and the means. He
either loses the means in contemplating with unholy contemplation the
end, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means.
The Habit of Flat-Thinking--of not thinking things out in four
dimensions.
The Habit of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I have
to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea
out with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson for
instance, it would be evaporated thinking.
The Habit of Not Having any Habits--leaving out standardized elements in
things and not being machine-minded enough.
Automatism, or Machine-Mindedness.
These six forms of being fooled by oneself all boil down in the end--in
their final cause, I suspect to the last one, to automatism or lack of
conscious control of the mind.
XIX
LOCO-MINDEDNESS
Loco-mindedness in a Post Office consists in Mr. Burleson's running the
Post Office for one kind of people--the kind of people he has noticed.
There are supposed to be various kinds of people who use a Post Office.
There are the people who write hundreds of letters a day--letters that
are being waited for accurately and by a particular mail--like telegrams.
There are people who sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, stick out
their tongues and chewing on one end of the pen, and slaving away and
sweating ink on the other, scrooge out a letter once in three weeks that
they have put off six months.
I have no grudge against these people, but it seems to me that running a
Post Office exclusively for them as Mr. Burleson does, is a mistake. Even
if they constitute ninety-eight per cent of the people, they only mail
one-tenth of one per cent of the letters. They may not care whether or
not their letters arrive as a matter of course, the way they used to in
our Post Office until a little while ago, as accurately as telegrams in
their first mail in the morning, but probably they would not feel hurt if
they did. But millions of people in business who write scores or hundreds
of letters a day, who find themselves being put off with a Post Office
that is run apparently for people who write two letters a month, are
hurt.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, the letter from New York one used to
receive at breakfast, hangs around a junction somewhere now, waits for a
letter three hundred miles away--a letter from Pittsburgh to catch up to
it, and they both come together sweetly and with Mr. Burleson's smile on
after luncheon at half past two in the afternoon.
I do not deny that from the narrower business point of view of running a
Post Office the way some women would run--or rather used to run a parlor
store--with a bell on the door, there is something to be said for Mr.
Burleson's philosophy. Nor do I deny that a store can be run and run
successfully and rightly on how much of its customer's money it can save
on each purchase.
But the point is that if I go into a store in Northampton and cannot get
the things I want there I go into some other store.
I cannot go out from our Post Office in Northampton and go over and get
what I want at some other Post Office a little further down the street.
When I and people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices, say Aouch! Mr.
Burleson says Pooh!
Business correspondence between Washington and New York which used to be
a twenty-four hour affair is now half a week.
Letters thousands of men in New York used to receive in their offices in
the early morning before interviews began and when they had time to read
letters and to jot an answer to them at the foot of the page, are not
received and placed before them for their answers until the late morning
or early afternoon when they have other things to do and cannot even read
them.
So one's letters wait over a day--a night and a day, or until one gets
back from Chicago.
Why is it Mr. Burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of the
convenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business in
America and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himself
points out to people how he has saved them fifty cents?
Why is it that Mr. Burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in our
own private business, to save us fifty cents apiece in public?
Who asked him to?
It is true that there are people in America who really prefer to do
business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs
them. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that
lovingly saves one forty cents' worth of money by taking four dollars'
worth of one's time.
It is probably true that some people want a cash and carry freight-car
Post Office and want Mr. Burleson to save their money for them. Millions
of people would make more money by not having their Post Office save
money for them. Mr. Burleson insists his business is to save people's
money for them whether they can afford to have him save it or not.
The first cause of Mr. Burleson's being fooled about himself is that he
is spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the Post
Office with reference to one special slow canal-minded kind of America.
His mind is jet black about all the rest.
Perhaps Mr. Burleson is not the only one of us in America who is
loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business
into the ground by noticing only one kind of people.
XX
FLAT-THINKING
THINKING IN ME-FLAT
What nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do
their thinking in four dimensions.
The thickness is what I think.
The breadth is what other people think.
The length is what God thinks.
Then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them
as a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what I
think other people think, and what I think God thinks, and put them
together as well as I can, the result is--who I am and what I amount to.
Most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the
first or "I think" dimension, stop on the way to God in the "I think"
thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "They Think"
breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to God at all.
The trouble with the Post Office has been that Mr. Burleson likes to
think in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what other
people think and skips right past them straight to God.
Probably it would be unfair to say that the Post Office is egotistical,
self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and
self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and
winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as
if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate
business idea--its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing
anything more for the people than can be helped--if Mr. Burleson would
stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand
Post Offices think.
There have been days--with my half-past two letters when if I had Roger
Babson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's Post
Office like this:
[Illustration:
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U.S. ME The
P.O. People]
XXI
LOST-MINDEDNESS
OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS
I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about
themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end
in the means.
To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea
once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us
which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things
together.
I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down
seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.
It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about
the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like
this, a two-cent stamp means.
Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at
it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp
believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my
country--like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of
the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.
As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first
one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country,
so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well
located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.
In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has
to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from
New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is
concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to
think three. The country pays for it for him.
America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that
it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every
man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight
for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington as
Rock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers.
The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, the
patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when
Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone system
for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and
magazines in which a whole nation thinks together--with one huge national
thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten
thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in New
York or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down into
their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these
thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are,
villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national
thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the
single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to
think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the
people will never forget.
Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has
got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a
bird's-eye view of the nation like the _Literary Digest_ be fined for it?
Why fine the readers of the _Review of Reviews_ or _Collier's_ or
_Scribner's_ for living in one place rather than another? I like to think
of it Saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles
reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in the
_Youth's Companion_.
Every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--that
is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness
of not being fined for it.
A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the
inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul--what he knows and
feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be
told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a
right not to be told he will have to read something published within a
rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell--that his soul has got to
live with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on.
As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the
flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but
it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little
humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people
feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in
the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the
nation.
There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay
for making men of all classes and of all regions in this country think
and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the
nation--some place where three million people act as one.
It is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing
can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great
national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it.
And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a great
national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought,
holds a meeting once a week together like the _Saturday Evening Post_,
like _Collier's_--dismisses two or three million people from everywhere
who get together there every Saturday night, and tells them to go home
and read the _Hampshire County Gazette_.
It is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end in
the means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiring
example of what not to do, and of how it works to do it--to lose the end
in the means, I have to mention it--not in behalf of Mr. Burleson, but in
behalf of all of us.
XXII
I had not intended to illustrate my idea of amateur technique in
self-criticism quite so much with Mr. Burleson, especially as I stand for
a bi-partisan point of view. I wish there were some way of dealing with
Mr. Burleson as a Republican for fifteen minutes and then as a Democrat
for fifteen minutes, and in dealing as I am, in what might be called a
nationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us,
I only hope my Democratic friends will give me credit for making use of
Mr. Burleson not as a Democrat (it is just their luck that he's a
Democrat), but as a specimen human being I am trying to get hundreds of
thousands of Republicans that are just like him, not to be like any
longer. I have only used our Postmaster General in this rather personal
fashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time when
we are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves he
constitutes, in plain sight a kind of national Common Denominator of the
sins of all of us.
We are all concerned. We all want to know.
It is easy enough to say pleasantly as if it settled something that the
reason Mr. Burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most people
so through fifty-three thousand Post Offices day after day, all day, and
night after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself.
But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can look
up and have the benefit of? When we are being fooled about ourselves,
when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change
our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do?
XXIII
SELF-DISCIPLINE BY PROXY
My own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when I see
them in other people.
I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million
people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few
scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may
have moments of being like me in this.
Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in a
rather weak and watery way--that is: we usually begin with seeing how
unbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin disciplining
our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then
before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other
people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in
ourselves.
Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any
good. Mr. Burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article,
but I am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so
perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase
them back to their own homes from the Post Office.
There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and
certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled
about ourselves.
And when we consider how Albert Sidney Burleson has missed his chance,
when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand
wistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled
about himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a little
personally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our better
business moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most complete
exhibit of what is the matter with American business.
I leave with the reader the Thought, that probably the majority of men
who have been watching Mr. Burleson for seven years wasting fifty-three
thousand Post Offices, and all the fifty-three thousand Post Offices
could do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down to
their offices next Monday morning, and instead of worming criticism out
of everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody who
approaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the business
to produce the impression that they are perfect and that nobody can tell
them anything--will just sit there all glazed over with complacency
cemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, as
hard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautiful
shining porcelain-lined bathtubs.
* * * * *
It would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business for
some of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of telling
these men--if some warning could be given to us not to bother with
them--if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted up
so that one could tell them at sight--by their heads looking the way they
are--by their being bald--by their having brilliantly non-porous
heads--just nice perfectly plain shiny knobs of not-thinking.
One could tell them across a room.
But the man with the most refreshingly eager mind toward new ideas, I
know, the mind the most brilliantly open--which fairly glistens inside
with eagerness, glistens outside, too.
The only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porous
mind, is to try gently--changing it, and see what happens.
XXIV
MACHINE-MINDEDNESS
The various forms I have mentioned of the malady of being fooled by
oneself, all practically boil down to one in the end--one cause which we
have to recognize and avoid--automatism, the lack of conscious control of
the mind--letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one's
head.
The main central cause operating with people when they are being fooled
about themselves, is machine-mindedness.
A man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes and
habits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him a
fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being
fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind
back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a
rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious
self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how
perfect he is.
Everybody knows how it is.
XXV
NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS
Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful
in business--the men who give people what they want, and the men who make
people want things they have thought they did not want before. Moving
pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and
locomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and
even babies--have all been brought to pass by convincing other human
beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is
essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection
which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to
themselves.
I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people
different because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything
you do to most people that makes them different, improves them.
But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from my
good opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men who
prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted,
are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people
more and more and better--things they want already.
The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of
himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself
and who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am an
inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannot
remember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I was
here, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would be
bored to death handing out to people things I know they want, or
presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be
shallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not make
people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not
successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state
and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it
was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask
them to do.
On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic economic
crisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, are
being brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks in
business are especially called for--a time when practically millions of
people have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, I
have thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters that
follow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what people
who have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find them
awkward, can do to get them and to make them work.