THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY WITH OTHER NATIONS
I
FOURTH OF JULY ALL THE YEAR ROUND
It would be very convenient for the other nations in the world to-day if
America--being the biggest, the freshest and the most powerful after the
war and having the other nations for the time being most dependent on it,
could be the one that they felt most deserved to lead them and have its
way with them.
It is almost the personal necessity of forty other nations to-day that
America should be a success, that America instead of instantly
disappointing the other nations, should instantly prove itself worthy of
the leadership they would like to place in her hands. "America's success
is the world's success," people keep saying. This has a prettified and
pleasant sound--in speaking of a great, or rather of a big, nation.
But what of it? What is the fact? What do we wish we could believe is the
fact? What is there--either in our own interests or the interests of
others that can really be done and done now about the fact--if it is a
fact--by any real person or body of persons in America? As a practical
and not a Fourth of July institution,--or rather as an institution for
celebrating the Fourth of July all the year round, the Air Line League
looks upon direct action to be taken by the American people to meet the
world's particular situation at this time, as follows:
If America is to get its way--the way, as we like to think, of democracy
and freedom, with other nations, there are certain things about us the
other nations want to know.
The other nations want to know that America has a technique for getting
its way with itself.
The nation that has the most self-control will be the nation that as a
matter of course and of common safety will be asked in the crisis, by the
other nations, to take the lead in controlling order, in controlling or
insuring the self-control of others.
The other nations want to know--if they are going to let us have our way
with them--put over what we like to call our superior democratic open way
upon them, that we have a vision--a vision of human nature and of modern
life which is better, clearer, more practical and timely than their
vision.
The other nations want to know,--if we are to have our way, that we not
only have a vision of what our way is--a national vision, but a technique
for expressing and embodying that national vision. To deserve our way
with them they must know we have a vision which can be proved, which is
historic--the facts of which--specifications, dates, names and places,
can be placed in their hands.
The other nations if they are going to let us have our way with them,
will want to know by observation that America has not only a vision and a
technique for embodying a vision, but that when her vision proves to be
wrong (as during the war) America has a technique for being born again.
II
THE VISION AND THE BODY
I have dwelt already on what a body for the people would be like and how
it would work.
I would now like to touch on two facts--the fact that there is a
particular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the American
people at this time, and the fact that the body to express the vision
grows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to be
had.
The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on
its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations--on its
getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be
expressed.
The technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turns
on a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becoming
self-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision of
action developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth.
This fact is not supposed to be open to argument. It is a biological
fact--the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. Everybody knows, or
thinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here and
there at a time for a short time, in America--inventors, great statesmen,
children and lovers are ever caught acting as if they believed it.
Everything about America that is lively, or powerful, or substantial and
material begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody's
falling in love and becoming conscious of his own desire.
The first thing this nation has to do to have a body is to get its own
attention.
The reason that the people of America in the Red Cross achieved a body,
is that some one had a body for--the vision that if all the different
kinds of people we had in America who had never dreamed of doing a thing
together before, could be got together to do one thing together now the
world war could be won.
This spectral and visionary-looking idea somehow in the Red Cross, was
not only the thing that started the Red Cross, but it was the daily
momentum, the daily mounting up in the hearts of the people that made it
go.
The leaders of the Red Cross--Mr. Davison and the men he gathered about
him had a vision of what could be done which other people did not dare to
have.
The secret of the Red Cross was that it was a vision-machine, a machine
for multiplying one man's vision a millionfold, working out in the sight
of the people three thousand miles a vision greater than the people would
have thought they could have.
This vision which the Red Cross had, which it advertised to people and
made other people have, is what the people liked about it. The people
threw down their jewels for it--for something to believe about themselves
and do with themselves greater than they had believed before. They threw
down their creeds for it. They threw down their class prejudices for
it--a huge buoyant serious daily vision of action in which all classes
and all creeds of people could live and dream and work together every
day.
No more matter of fact conclusive demonstration of the implacable
splendid brutal power of vision, of the power of vision to precipitate
across three thousand miles a body for the souls and the prayers of a
people, could be imagined than the Red Cross during its great days in the
war.
The Red Cross became capable of doing what it did because it touched the
imagination of the average humdrum man rich or poor and made him think of
somebody besides himself. The Red Cross did this by what was practically
an advertising campaign, the advertising of different sets of people, to
all of the others.
The result was what looked and felt like a miracle--a kind of apocalypse
of people who have outdone themselves.
Naturally the people liked it. And naturally people who have watched
themselves and one another outdoing themselves, can do anything.
My own experience is that when I set out to find the real truth about
people whether it pets me in my feeling about them or not, people turn
out to be incredibly alike. They are all more full of good than they seem
to want me to believe. The only difference is that some of them are more
successful in keeping me from believing in them than others.
I have taken some satisfaction in seeing in the Red Cross, a nation
backing me up in this experience with human nature in America.
III
THE CALL OF A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE
The nearest the American people have come to getting their way in other
nations--to having a vision and a body with which to do it and deserve to
do it--is in the Red Cross, and in our Food Distribution. In both of
these organizations we succeeded in getting the attention of others to
what we could do for them--and with them--by getting our own attention
first and by making our own sacrifice at home first.
We were allowed to administer food abroad because we had shown
self-control and sacrifice about food at home and were given headway in
emergency and rescue abroad because millions of people here had a vision
for others and gave a body to their vision at home.
I have been filled with sorrow over the way millions of men and women in
the American Red Cross, their daily lives geared to a great issue, living
every day with a national international vision suffusing their minds and
hearts and touching everything they said and did, suddenly disappeared as
the people that they really were and that they seemed to be, from sight.
I have never understood it, how twenty million men and women out of that
one common colossal daily vision of a world, almost in a day, almost in
an hour, across a continent as on some great national spring, snapped
back into the little life.
I do not know as I would have minded them--three thousand miles of them
going back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but I
have wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps to
move the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they had
to go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, and
driving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live them
daily together.
The necessity of the every-day individual lives we all are interested in
living--the necessity of the actual personal things we all are daily
trying to do, is a necessity so much more splendid and tragic, so much
more vivid, personal and immediate, so much more adapted to a high and
exhilarating motive and to a noble common desire than the rather
rudimentary showy stupid necessity the Germans thrust upon us could ever
dream of being, that it is hard to understand the way in which the
leaders of the Red Cross in the supreme critical moment when the mere war
with Germany was being stupendously precipitated into forty wars of forty
nations with themselves, at the very moment when with one touch of a
button the new vision of the people could have been turned on instead of
the old one and the hundred million people stood there asking them,
snapped off the light, dismissed the hundred million people--clapped them
back into their ten thousand cities into the common life.
The magnificent self discovery, the colossal single-heartedness lighting
up the faces of the people whiffed out by one breath of armistice! Who
would have believed it or who can forgive it?... The Red Cross--the
redeemer, the big brother of nations, holding steady the nerves of a
whole world--not meeting the emergency of a whole world--the whole world
yesterday tightened up into war, and to-day falling apart into colossal
complicated, innumerable, hemming and hawing, stuttering Peace!
What people used to think wealth was, what they used to think might was,
the power of attracting the whole attention of millions of people is.
In the Red Cross a hundred million people--American people, had looked at
the same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the same
thing at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the same
thing in a thousand ways with their hands. In the Red Cross the feet of a
hundred million people became as the feet of one man.
The Red Cross had hunted out, accumulated, mounted up and focused the
attention of forty nations. It had in its hands the trigger of a ninety
mile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day the
armistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking up
in its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, a
pocket pistol instead. Because the war suddenly was everywhere instead of
the north of France, it reduced to a peace basis. At the very moment when
it had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment when
it had people all over the world all listening to it and believing in it,
at the very moment when the forty nations could have been turned on to
any problem with it, it let the forty nations go.
If I could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as one
man--a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with his
opera glass, if I were sitting next to him I would suggest his turning
the screw to the right slowly. I would say, "Do you see better or worse
as you turn it to the right?" If I found he saw worse I would tell him to
turn it to the left and then I would leave him to try between the two
until he found it.
The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. It
had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national
blank look.
Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank
look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out.
It was a Focus--a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only
of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not
unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the
focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national
daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking
for it from us, every morning when they get up--asking for it as one man.
To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in
getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and
amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever
known--this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its
mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on
the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred
million people from having a blank look, let its chance go.
The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where it
stopped, the Red Cross vision--the Red Cross spirit.
The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented as
a future for the Red Cross.
The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented
for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this
book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body
for the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division for
the Red Cross.
But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for my
purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people--the
rank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves the
soul of it and who would make the soul of anything--particularly the men
and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to
cool a little--had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set
before the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated by
the leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us--would have
kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active
labor in the Red Cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men and
women for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the mere
stress of merely beating Germans, there had been one before.
IV
THE CALL OF A WORLD
The difference between a first class nation and a second class nation
might be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any live
profession.
Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they began
filling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them
so that they have no teeth to fill.
Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctor
used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see a
doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands,
and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. The next
stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones
and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers--to
keep them from walking too soon.
The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill
the germs that decay the teeth.
The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day after
the armistice to go back to war germs.
The Red Cross with its branches in every town and every nation in the
world would announce that from that day on, through a vast new division,
it would occupy itself with germs--with the germs of six inch guns, with
the germs of submarines. It would deal with the embryology of war.
The germs of war between nations, breed in wars between classes, and the
germs of class war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs of
war between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace with
himself.
It is when I am having a hard time getting on with Stanley Lee that I am
likely to have a row with Ivy Lee. It is a colossal understatement to say
that charity begins at home. Everything does. If a man understands
himself he can understand anybody. If he gets on with himself the world
will fall into his hands.
The great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop war
between capital and labor. This is a feat of personality and of
engineering in human nature. It is a home-job, and when we have done it
at home we can sow all nations with it. If I wanted to stop a war between
Ivy Lee and me I would have to pick out a series of things to do to Ivy
Lee and to say to him which he would like to have me do and say to him.
Then I would pick out in myself things that Ivy Lee does not like to have
me do to him and say to him, and which possibly when I study on them I
will not want to do.
Up to Ivy to do the same to me.
This is a science. It is not merely a vision or a religion. Removing the
cause of fighting may be a less exact science of mutual study and
self-study, but it is approximately exact. It is also a fascinating and
contagious science. We master the embryology of war between persons--the
embryology of war between classes, and then between nations. The
principles which we demonstrate and set up working samples of in one of
these problems will prove to be the principles of the others.
If people do not believe in germs enough and are more afraid of fire, I
would change the figure.
We are proposing to follow up at once, the Red Cross, which was run as a
fire engine to put or help put out fires between nations, with the Air
Line League which is to be run as a machine for not letting fires between
nations get started.
Edward A. Filene of Boston in trying to have a successful department
store found the women behind his counters got very tired standing in the
street cars night and morning on the way home and took up with a will
getting new rapid transit for Boston. He found he could not get rapid
transit for Boston without helping to get a new government and that he
could not get a new government without helping to get a new Boston.
He then found he could not help get a new Boston without getting new
trade and industrial conditions in Boston and that he could not help get
new ideals working in trade and industry in Boston without helping in the
ideals of a nation. He then found he could not get a new nation without
trying to help make several new nations. Then came the International
Chamber of Commerce.
Something like this seems to happen to nearly every man I know who really
accomplishes anything.
Or any nation.
Frederick Van Eeden of Holland began life as a painter with marked
success but being a lively and interested man he could not help wondering
why people were not getting out of paintings in Holland--his own and
other people's, what they ought to and what they used to, and became a
critic. He found people did not respond to his ideas of how they ought to
enjoy things and then won distinction as a poet, but why did not more
people get more out of the best poetry? He then wrote one or two novels
of high quality which Holland was proud of and which were read in several
languages, but why did not the people read novels of a high character as
much as they did the poorer ones?
He decided that it was because people were physically underorganized and
not whole in body and mind--like the Greeks, and became a physician.
He thought he was being thorough when he became a physician but soon
found that he was not getting down to the causes after all, of people's
not having whole bodies and fine senses capable of appreciating the finer
things and soon came to the conclusion that for the most part what was
the matter with their bodies was due to what was wrong in their habits of
thought and in their minds, and became an alienist and founded the first
psycho-therapeutic hospital in Holland.
He then found that in what was the matter with people's minds, he was
still superficial and that people's minds were wrong because of the
social and industrial conditions, ideals and institutions under which
they were conceived and born, and had to live.
He then devoted himself to being a publicist and sociologist, had charge
of bread for the poor during the great bread riots in Amsterdam and is
now engaged in grappling nationally and internationally with industrial
and civil war as the cause of all failures of men and nations to express
and fulfill their real selves in the world.
Any nation that wants to be a great nation and to fulfill and express
itself and be a first class nation will sooner or later find that it has
to go on from one individual personal interest to another until it finds
it is doing practically what Frederick Van Eeden did.
The only way to look out for, or to express oneself is to try to help
everybody else to.
The Red Cross at the end of the war in making elaborate and international
arrangements to run a pleasant and complimentary ambulance to the relief
of disease in society that society was deliberately creating every day,
instead of taking advantage at the end of the war of the trust all
classes had in it, and taking advantage of the attention of forty
nations, of society's best and noblest need, to keep society from causing
the disease, chose to be superficial, faced away from its vision, fell
behind the people, absconded from the leadership of the world.
The aches and pains of society with which since the war, the Red Cross so
politely and elegantly deals, which with white kid gloves and without
hurting our feelings it spends our money to relieve are all caused by the
things we daily do to each other to make the money.
The vision of the common people in America recognizes this and recognized
it instantly at the end of the war. The hearts of the men and women of
America to-day, are at once too bitter, too deep and too hopeful not to
instantly lose interest in a Red Cross which asks them to help run it as
a beautiful superficial ambulance to the evils people are doing to one
another instead of as a machine to help them not to do them.
V
MISSOURI
The best service America can render other nations to-day is be
herself--fulfill and make the most of herself.
Senator Reed of Missouri would probably agree with me in this.
Where I differ with Senator Reed is in what America should propose to do
to make the most of herself.
Senator Reed of Missouri judging from reports of his speeches in the
Senate wants America in the present distraction of nations to stop
thinking of the others, wizen up and be safe.
It seems to me that if America were to cut herself off from the rest of
the world in its hour of need and just shrivel up into thinking of
herself she would fail to fulfill herself and be like herself. She would
just be like Senator Reed of Missouri.
Nothing could be less safe for America just now than to be like Senator
Reed of Missouri.
Senator Reed puts forward a patriotism which is sincere but reckless. In
the Senate of fifty states, Reed says "I'm from Missouri." In the
congress of nations, Reed says "America ueber Alles." "The world for
America." "America for Missouri." "Missouri for Me!"
For America just at the present moment in the world it has got to belong
to, to turn away and stop being interested in the whole world and in
everybody in it and in what everybody is going to do and be kept from
doing--is like a man's shutting himself up in his own stateroom and being
interested in his own port hole in a ship that is going down. It seems
more sensible for America--even from the point of view of looking out for
herself--not to go down with Senator Reed and moon around in his
stateroom with him, but to be deeply interested in the whole ship, and in
the engines, the wheelhouse and the pumps.
Patriotism that just shuts a nation up into a private stateroom nation by
itself or that makes a nation just live with its own life preserver on,
to preserve its own life preserver, can end either for Senator Reed or
for America in but one way.
It's going to end in a plunge of the ship.
It is going to end in Senator Reed's running out, and running up to the
deck the last minute.
I do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me that
from the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle of
Senator Reed of Missouri, tying Missouri like a millstone around his neck
and then casting himself, Missouri and all, into the sea, while it may
have a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be a
practical or business-like example for his country.
I would like to show if I can that Senator Reed is wrong, and to present
the alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the Air Line
League.
The Germans have said (and have spent forty billion dollars in saying it)
that democracy cannot be made to work. They sneered at us during the war
and said to England, America and the rest of us that we could not make
democracy work in running an army and keep up with Germans in war, and
they are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work in
industry and keep up with Germans in peace.
Forty nations half-believe that the Germans are right about industrial
democracy, about democracy's not being a real, sincere, every day thing,
a thing every man can have the good of all day every day of his life, and
a good many people in America--extreme reactionaries and extreme
radicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the Germans.
If the Germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for America
to pay very much attention just now to her industries. If America is
living in a world as insane as Germany says it is, the one thing ahead
for us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other forty
nations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough and
grimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations before
they murder ours.
Everything must be geared and geared at once to the Germans' being right.
Or it must be geared and geared at once to their being wrong, to
challenging the Germans--to telling them that they are as fooled about
what industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what it
could do in war.
The one thing we can do in America now to get the Germans or anybody else
to believe us about industrial democracy is to make American democracy in
industry whip German militarism in industry out of sight in our own labor
unions and in our own factories. Then we will whip German militarism in
industry out of the markets of the world.
If the quickest way for the American people to get a decent world--a
world we want to do business in, is to whip German militarism in
industry, and if the quickest way to whip German militarism abroad is to
whip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up our
factories, calling in our money and our men and settling down to work?
What is it that is scaring capital and labor away and holding back money
and men?
The fear of the United States Senate.
The fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish money
and men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the United States Senate
and other governments not to be afraid of war.
The first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stop
this fear.
The first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is to
stop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know all
about us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all day
every day are making peace work between classes, better than war does.
Making democracy work in business is the first condition, for America and
the world of having any business.
It is not merely in behalf of other nations, but in behalf of ourselves,
that I am advocating the direct action of the people welded together into
one mass organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the three
classes together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. The
Air Line League is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as a
standing-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, the
voluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team work
and mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all classes.
The whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrial
democracy--in proving to people by advertising it to them and by
dramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works.
It is because the Germans believe that men who have been forced against
their wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more and
compete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing team
work because they understand and want to, that Germany is a second-class
nation and that the German people have had to put up for forty years with
being second-class human beings. They have a ruling majority of
second-class human beings in Germany because they have the most complete
and most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, for
making second-class human beings out of practically anybody--arrangements
for howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to do
as a substitute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of making
them want to do it.
Taking the line of least resistance--the mechanical course in dealing
with human nature, makes America's being a second-class nation a matter
of course.
What we have always been hoping for in America is that in due time we are
going to be a first-class nation--a nation crowded with men and women
who, wherever they have come from, or whether or not they were first
class when they came, have been made first class by the way that all day
every day in their daily work they have been treated by the rest of us
when they come to us, and by the way they treat one another.
VI
A VICTORY LOAN ADVERTISEMENT
May 10, 1919
THE BOY WHO STUCK HIS FOOT IN
A small boy the other day walked up to one of those splendid marble
pillars before the The Victory Arch and stuck his foot in.
I went over and stooped down and felt of the crust. It was about an inch
and a half thick.
Then I stood in the middle of The Avenue, all New York boiling and
swirling round me and looked up at The Arch of Victory--massive, majestic
white and heavenly and soaring against the sky, and my heart ached!
Something made me feel suddenly close to the small boy.
What he wanted to know with his foot, was what this splendid Victory Arch
he had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under,
and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amounted
to--how deep the glory had struck in.
I thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victory
over the Germans ... forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing and
eighty-seven million unconquered sullen Germans before our eyes in broad
daylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying their
bills! ... eighty-seven million Germans we have all got to devote
ourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years.
I am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. Millions of Americans
though in a politer way are doing it all this week. We want to poke
through to the truth. We want something more than a theater property
Victory Arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a real
one!
We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest--to
take down our lath and plaster Arch and put it up in marble instead.
We make this week a wager to the world,--a four and a half billion dollar
dare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that the
American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and
hurrahs and tears and empty watery words--that we will chase Peace up,
that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations--into
the eternal underpinning of a world.
In the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning Victory Arch,
all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake,
with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim
unconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through!
We will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory no
small boy, no Bolshevik nation can stick its foot in!
* * * * *
When I corrected the proof of this advertisement--it was the last
advertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York--it
was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the
Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has
melted away into roar.
But the truth I have spoken has not melted away.
What The Air Line League is for in its national and international
organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to
answer the boy who stuck his foot in.