WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT
I
THE BIG BROTHER OF THE PEOPLE
If I were writing a book to be used during a Presidential campaign, used
as a handbook of the beliefs of the people--a book in the next few weeks
for a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before their
conventions with, the first belief I would put down for the new President
to run on would be the belief that every man in this country is a bigger,
better and truer man than the present arrangements of our industrial and
social life seem willing to let him express.
We are all practically waiting in crowds to-day, all over this
country--in held-in and held-back crowds, to act better than we look.
This belief is the first belief--the first practical working belief the
next President of this country should have about the people.
Putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working belief
about human nature in America, is going to be the way to get a President
for our next President who shall release the spirit of the nation, and
reveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people of
America are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted a
people as the spent and weary peoples of Europe have hoped we were.
The trouble with America in her own eyes and the eyes of the world
to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the
industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us
express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are.
The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect
arrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made for
their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each class in America,
which now takes the form of telling other men and other classes, they
ought to be good--the goodness in each man which in our present system he
bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good
advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to
the man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quite
safe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the labor
unions or the Manufacturers' Association to make sure he has a right to
be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feels
he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else is
doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now,
and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be.
The mean things we are doing on a large scale to one another just now in
America, are not mean things it is our nature to do. We have let our
machines get on top of us and wave our meanness at people over our heads.
Our machines which capital and labor have for expressing us as employers
and workmen to one another, caricature us.
All one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way in
which our present machines of trusts and labor unions are working
together to make a dollar worth fifty cents.
The reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybody
who has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he owes
it to himself and to his class to furnish as little work for a dollar as
he dares and take a dollar for fifty cents' worth of work.
Each man sees this several times a day, but he belongs to a vast machine
for getting something for nothing. Every man knows in his heart that the
cure for everybody's trying to get something for nothing is everybody's
at once getting to work doing more than he has to for the money. Then the
American dollar will quit being worth fifty cents.
Why doesn't he do it? Because the machinery he belongs with and that
everybody belongs with consists of two great something-for-nothing
machines. Both of these stupendous machines of capital and labor are
geared for backing in producing and not for going forward. All that has
to be done with them is to run them the other way round and we have what
we want.
People on both sides admit in a vague anonymous scattered fashion that
the way to meet a situation in which prices are too high is for everybody
to produce more and to charge less for what he produces.
But labor will not do this if capital does not do it.
Capital will not do this if labor does not do it.
It cannot be done by one man getting up all alone and saying he will get
on with half a profit or half a wage when he sees everybody about him
getting on with twice as much.
The only way it can be done is by organizing, by arranging machines for
mutual frank expression, confession and cooeperation--mutual confession
and cooeperation by the men in each industry saying, "I will if you will,"
until we cover the nation.
This is one of the first things anti-Bolshevik capital and anti-Bolshevik
labor are going to stand for--the organizing and advertising in their own
industry of a voluntary understanding and professional producing among
men who produce.
The men who are increasing the cost of flour by having too high wages in
flour mills, will say to men who are increasing the cost of cotton by too
high wages in cotton mills, "We will make cheaper cotton for you, if you
will make cheaper flour for us."
It is not a matter of meanness in American human nature we are dealing
with, it is a matter of agreement between men--hundreds and thousands and
millions of men, who do not feel mean or want to be mean and who are
trying to slink out of it.
The thing cannot be done without mutual agreement and the agreement
probably cannot be made without voluntary contagious publicity, without
organizing a national "I will if you will" between capital and labor. The
men who produce with their minds will say to those who work with their
hands, "We will agree to take less profits and reduce the prices that you
pay for goods, if you will agree to take less wages and produce more."
Capital will say to labor, "If you will produce ten per cent more, we
will scale down prices, make your dollar buy twenty per cent more. For
every sacrifice by which you make a dollar buy more, we will make twice
the sacrifice."
Having a larger margin and more time to think things out than men who
work with their hands have to think things out, many employers are going
to feel that it is up to them not to ask their men to do anything they do
not do twice as much of themselves. They will have machinery for being
confidential with the men and for letting the men see they are doing it.
Instead of having everybody rushing wildly around organizing to say "I
won't if you won't" we will arrange to have a hundred thousand picked
capitalists and picked laboring men in ten thousand cities, who will set
going everywhere a huge public voluntary national "I WILL IF YOU WILL."
Instead of proceeding from now on to assume that we are a mean people in
America, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for being
meaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other,
we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machine
together that will express our better natures as well as our present one
does our worst ones.
There is one thing we propose to stand out for and that we do not intend
to be wheedled out of, in our next two political conventions and during
our next President's next four years, and that is that our two great
machines in this country, our industrial one and our political one, shall
be taken out of the hands of men who are fooled about themselves and who
will not listen to others.
We do not believe that there is anything essentially the matter with what
is called our capitalistic system or our labor union system except
men--the men who think they belong in the front ranks of capital and the
front ranks of labor.
The scared men and the men who are fooled about themselves in politics
and business and who are trying to fool the rest of us, who are trying to
make a great, simple, clean-hearted, clear-eyed, generous country like
ours look and act every few weeks or every few days as if all the people
in it could really do to express themselves to one another and to the
world, was with lockouts, strikes, political deadlocks, minority holdups
and party threats--shall be turned out of office by the people and
huddled away out of sight.
In our industrial and political expressing and acting machines on every
hand we give notice we are going to pick men out, men who shall make our
machines express us, our freedom, our justice, our steadiness of heart,
and our belief in America, in ourselves, in one another, or our desire to
listen to those who disagree with us, our human sporting instinct about
our party and ourselves, and the victory of the people, the common sense
and good will of common human nature in America and the world.
To the great capitalists who instead of being fellow laborers, are still
mooning absent-mindedly about in the last century, still prinking
themselves as the owners of their world, and still thinking of themselves
as the captains or military leaders of industry--to the labor union Dukes
and Dictators that capitalists like this have created to fight them--the
hundred million people appointed to run this country, give notice.
* * * * *
I would like if I could to publish this book with blank pages for a few
million signatures--and a place for the new President or proposed
President to sign, too.
The Presidential candidate we want, would have it in him to put his name
down with the rest--with something like this, perhaps--"I do not say I
could sign every paragraph in this book, but the general idea and program
of organizing and giving body to the will of the people as expressed in
this book--the spirit and direction of it and in the main the technique
for getting it, I sign for."
I believe that the American people when they know in reality, as they do
know at heart, what I am believing in this book, would be inclined in
looking up their candidate for President to pick out a President who
would have written this book--the gist of it--if he had had time.
At all events here it is--this program or handbook of the beliefs for a
people.
I put it forth as being more concrete than political party platforms
are--and as a practical and plain way for a nation to look over a
President, find him out, and follow him up.
II
THE MAN WHO CARRIES THE BUNCH OF KEYS FOR THE NATION
The crowds have to be unlocked to each other. The temperament of our
President for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of the
nation, is to be the temperament of unlocking the crowds to each other.
At present it looks as if our President for the next four years would be
perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our next
President, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people and
hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times
of being lonely with the people. The people are lonely with one another.
Anybody can go out into the street anywhere in America to-night and be
lonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. Any man can
take any crowded street and see for himself. He can pass miles of men who
in their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of how
to defend America and they have another. If one were to take any ten
blocks of Broadway and let all the people walking along stop just where
they are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what we
ought to do in this war, they will begin thinking they are not Americans,
wanting to throw each other off over the edge of the country--partitioning
each other off into mollycoddles, traitors, pussy-foots, safety-firsts,
bullies, braggarts and Bolshevists and pacifists--and while they might
keep up appearances and try to be polite on the surface with strangers,
that whole section of Broadway would be mad all through for ten blocks.
One would have ten blocks of feeling superior and despising people--every
man looking askance at every other man for having a different idea of
America from his idea of America.
If the President were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhear
the people, he would feel lonely with them. The only way not to feel
lonely on ten blocks of Broadway just now would be to put up signs and
labels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people off
as they go along, into separate audiences. The League of Nations or the
American Federation of Labor would sort out a thousand people on Broadway
and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, and the I. W. W.
could sort out another thousand and coop them up in a hall to agree with
each other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a whole
hallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful of
people, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be each
audience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and saying "You are
not America. We only are America!"
This makes the President lonely. We elected him a few months ago to be
President of all of us. It is slow work being President, being a good
mixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and who
all turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listen
to each other.
The way the President is going to meet this issue and insist until we all
thank him for it--on being President of all of us, is with his
temperament.
III
THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPERAMENT
If I were writing a book for the next President to run for President
on--a thing I have guilty moments of hoping I am doing--the first thing I
would arrange for in the book, would be to put down in it two platforms
for him to run on--one platform on what he believes and the other
platform--the way he believes it and gets other people to believe it.
The way the next President we pick out, does his believing, the way he
keeps from believing weakly what he wants to, and from being fooled about
his party and about himself, the clean-cutness and honesty of his mind,
the tone, the ring in which he believes in himself and gets other people
to believe in him, is going to be, from the point of view of his getting
for this country at home and abroad, what it wants, the most important
thing about him.
The most important part of the next President's platform is going to be,
in the eyes of the people, his character, his temperament, the way his
personal traits and habits dramatize what he says, the way he lives what
he believes.
The American people may not be shrewd about seers, or about historians or
philosophers, but they are very likely any minute to be deep about
people. When Henry Cabot Lodge draws a rough sketch in chalk of history
he wants a hundred million people to help him make, and when he is being
fooled about it and is all out of perspective the people may defer to
him, may feel Mr. Lodge is too deep for them, but the moment they see Mr.
Lodge being fooled about himself, they find Mr. Lodge easy.
In a trait in human nature like this, with which they are familiar every
day, a hundred million people--without trying, are deep.
If a hundred million people could sit down and write a book--a book or
open letter addressed in the next two months to those two big vague,
whoofy Nobodies we call our Political Parties, and tell them in so many
words the kind of President the people want and understand--the kind of
President the people would sweep in unspeakably into the White House when
they saw him, no matter what any politician said, I am inclined to
believe it would be found--when the book by the hundred million people
was out, that our people feel on the whole that we could not have
anything better in our country for our next President than a man who
would be a lawyer backwards.
What the platform of personality we want our next President to have
amounts to, is this--Know everything a lawyer knows. Have everything a
lawyer has--and just turn it around and use it the other way and be
another kind of man about it.
The fate of America and the fate of the world may be said to be turning
to-day on the degree during the next four years, during the next
President's administration, the American people and all groups of the
people, stop believing weakly what they want to believe and face the
facts about themselves.
In order to be efficient, in order to be free or even to have enough to
eat, millions of American men and women of all groups and classes of the
people have got to be capable and show that they are capable of changing
their minds about themselves.
Everything we are hoping to do turns upon our recognizing as a people,
standing out from the rest and pushing forward to lead us, men who know
more than most of us know, men who are practiced in keeping their own
minds open and can therefore open ours.
Instead of having for the next President of this country a man who braces
people, who tightens people up in their convictions, or who drives the
old beliefs they want to believe further down into them and makes them
believe them harder, we are going to put in our demand for a President
who is the engineer of the will of the people, who draws people out, who
has the common sense, the reality, the sense of humor and the humanness
to look facts and folks in the eyes, who keeps people on all sides who
have dealings with him from being fooled about themselves, a man who
makes people real when they are with him, who makes them when they even
think of him, real with themselves and real with one another, and real in
politics.
I mean by a man's being real in politics, being a politician backwards,
keeping open to facts acting and preferring to act as children and strong
men act, with the deepness and directness of the child.
The hundred million people in the book they would write if they had time,
put in their demand for a big simple fellow human being in the White
House, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with people
and gets things out of people because he makes people feel they know him.
The political parties cannot help themselves the moment the people speak.
They would rather slide in a man who does not see through them if they
could, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and sees
best, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the White
House to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep this
country as clean as a whistle.
IV
THE PRESIDENT'S RELIGION
I have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, to
the old monks of the Middle Ages, who climbed up on mountain tops and
lived in monasteries alone with God. If I felt just as they felt about
being superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to live
the most deeply, intricately religious life I could think of I would
refuse to look like a saint and be President of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and would pick out the most difficult
business with the most difficult class of men to compete with in the
United States. Then I would go into it, put all my money and all my
religion together into it.
The principles and standards that actually obtain in competition
constitute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. One
might say cooeperation of course, but what makes cooeperation powerful and
what selects the people who shall lead cooeperation--what gives it
character, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires him
to find a way to do or not to do certain things--when he competes.
Competition--the way a man threads his way through the men who compete
with him--would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of
spiritual values--the real monastery of modern life.
All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to
refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially,
or clap them into jail.
There always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and
be fair. The Government, the police and the draft have to deal with them.
As for the rest of us, competition--fair, manly, sporting competition,
keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and nobler virtue, the knowledge
of ourselves and others that make cooeperation a noble as well as
practical course of procedure.
The way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to be
compared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to the
state--to the way he runs an interested enterprise or business.
If I were the rich young man in the New Testament I would not have sold
all my goods to feed the poor--as that particular person (being what he
was) was advised to. I would hold on to my money--and found a religious
order with it. I would make a whip of cords of my money and my brains
woven together and would drive out the peddlers, the economic fiddlers,
the moral and business idiots out of the Temple. I would do it not by
being a pure, sterilized, holy-looking person, but by having more
imagination in business, by using higher levels and higher voltage of
human motive power in business than they can use, by having more brains
about human nature than they have, and by my power to get the public to
be religious, _i.e._, my power as a sheer matter of business, to make the
public prefer, as a matter of course, my way of competing in business
until it drives out and makes absent-minded, mooning, feeble and
shortsighted, theirs.
This is not the kind of thing that I happen to have the natural technique
or gift to do--to found a live deep natural religious order like this,
but there are thousands of men I know and that other men know in America,
who have the natural typical American technique for putting their higher
gifts to work in business and who are crowding to the wall men who can
only use their lower ones, and the power, the opportunities that go with
these men are daily being outlined by events and daily being sketched out
before our eyes.
The way to be a prophet and to interpret and establish in a nation is to
lead in the business world to-day in establishing principles of
competition, which exalt and interpret human nature, free the common
sense, the will, the glory and the religion of the people.
The way to be a President, the next four years, is to use the White House
and all the resources of the Government to cooeperate with and back up
this type of American business man.
V
THE RED FLAG AND THE WHITE HOUSE
The first qualification the next President should run for the Presidency
on is his vision or program for the nation with regard to backing up men
in American life--democracy and the Red Flag.
The first thing a President should see about the Red Flag is that the Red
Flag is up to the people and not up to the White House--up to the people
in five hundred thousand factories and offices and stores, up to the
people on both sides of a hundred thousand counters, up to everybody who
buys a paper of pins or a pound of cheese while they are buying it, up to
everybody who buys a house or a watch or a cake of soap, a safety razor
or a railroad, up to everybody while he is producing, while he is buying
and selling, up to everybody individually and collectively to see that in
every ten cents they spend in this country and every ten minutes they
work in this country, the Red Flag--the civil war flag, is stamped on.
Only the people can head off the Red Flag--all of the people working on
it on their daily job all of the time.
The more our President believes that the work of dealing with the Red
Flag in this country is up to the people the more he gets the people to
believe it, puts the work off on the people, the better the work will be
done, the further the Red Flag will be from getting hold of the country
and the longer the President will be in the White House.
We call our President our Chief Executive. What we put him in the White
House and make him our chief executive for is that he shall have
imagination about a hundred million people besides himself, that he shall
have imagination about what the people can do and imagination about
getting them to do it.
An executive is a man whose work is making other people work.
We call the place in which we have our President live the Executive
Mansion. The best man to elect to live in it is the man who can make a
hundred million people work.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Ghost in the White House, by Gerald Stanley Lee