THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH
What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night?
The Ghost in the White House.
The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people.
The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization.
What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never Was, and Who Never Is—a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, Terrible Angel called the People.
Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times.
That is all there is to Her.
It is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the Aurora Borealis to 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up to this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. It does not give any real satisfaction to anybody—either to the hundred million people or to the President.
It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a President—to be a Ghost.
It is not efficient.
Naturally—much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or hope to get (however hard he tries) is the Ghost of a President.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE GHOST
There are a number of things about going into the White House the next four years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, that are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest job on earth.
The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position as the Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is expected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassing idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would ever put up with, from any other employer in the world.
Absent-mindedness.
Non-committalness.
Halfness, or double personality.
Bodilessness.
Big, impressive-looking Fool Moments.
Cumulus clouds of Slow Sure Conceit with Sudden Flops of Humility.
General Irresponsibleness.
And perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the Employer—like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made a fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry.
The man who is conscientious in the White House has an Employer whose immediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes in the hope that he will be thanked afterwards.
Once in a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert, as the captain of the ship, has to tell the Owner of the Line, when the storm is highest, that he must not butt in.
The restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer that one is just being an employee and that one's employer is being responsible, is lacking in the White House, where one is practically expected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee and one's own employer.
But while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in the President's Employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerous ones for the country.
I am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done about them. I have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated the moment the Employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits are making it for the President to do anything for him.
Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people are giving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, is not only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer so large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It.
Serving It is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with a fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the People.
It is this bodilessness in the Employer—this very simple rudimentary whiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished and accomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it hardest to bear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly is (once in four years) that he wants him or that he does not want him and even then he confides to him that he only half wants him. He says deliberately and out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people of other nations, "Here is the man I would a little rather have than not." That is all. Then he coops him up in the White House, drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to work.
Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer like this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and when one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of the people one is being The Head Employee of (in the other party) expect one to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at the utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one's Employer—keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it will be small wonder if the man in the White House feels he has—especially these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth.
The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed to our President. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, and be President of all of us.
It may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job on earth and, of course, when Theodore Roosevelt had it, the job of being President considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell world America is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of our next President, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy, senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappy factories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nations abroad, the man we put in the White House next is going to have what will be the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousand years—except the one that began in Nazareth—the one the new President is going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way which little, old, queer, bent, eager St. Paul with his prayers in Rome and his sermons in Athens, never dreamed of.
It does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new President and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this time for our President to have a ghost for an Employer.
All any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make a President, is to stop and think. If you have an employer who cannot collect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, all you do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make him up—what is there—what deep, searching and conclusive and permanent action is there, after all, the man in The White House can take in his employer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling him what he wants and what he is willing to do with what he gets? What can the man in the White House hope to accomplish for a people with whom it is the constitutional and regular thing to be as lonely as this?
I have wanted to consider what can be done, and done now not to have a lonely President the next four years.
The first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the next election a man for the White House a great-hearted direct and free people will not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things that will back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand, and not let him feel lonely with us.
The feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness—the feeling the Public has every day in the White House and in the Senate, of being treated, and treated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that works as badly one way as it does the other.
The President does not want a Ghost.
The people do not want to be treated as a Ghost.
The object of this book is to resent—to expose to everybody as unfair and untrue and destroy forever the title I have written across the front of it, "The Ghost in The White House."
The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all time, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world, from being an inarticulate, shimmering, wavering, gibbering Ghost in its own House.
There must be things—broad simple things about Capital and Labor people can do and do every day in this country, that will make a President timidly stop guessing what they want.
It ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a President or a seer for a President to know what the people want. A man of genius—a seer, a man who can read the heart of a nation—especially in politics, comes not only not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highly unlikely when he does that the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party in America will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him in the White House.
The best the people can hope for in America now is to have a body—to find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without saying a word—express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word our President, our Politicians—even the kind of men who seem to put up naturally with having to be in the Senate—the kind of men who can feel happy and in their element in a place like Congress will see what the People—the real people in this country are like.
I am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people so that we the people in America, at last, in the days that lie ahead, instead of being a Ghost in our own House, shall have things that we can do, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able to prove to a President what we are like and what we want—so that each man of us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on a President with—something more than a vague, faint, little ballot to hurl (like an Autumn leaf) at him, once in four years.
REAL FOLKS AND THE GHOST
When a man speaks of The City National Bank he speaks of it as if he meant something and knew what he meant.
When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch him bewhiffle it.
When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of Business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and when in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in some mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of The Invisible.
Business talks bass. Patriotism is an Æolian harp.
During the war this was changed. We found ourselves every day treating America, treating The Country, treating The People as a bodily fact.
I would like to see what can be done now in the next President's next four years, to give America this magnificent sense of a body in peace.
Why is it that we have in America a body for Germans, and then wilt down in a minute after Château-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost—unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless—just a light in its eyes—just a vast national shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet.
Millions of people every day in this country are very particular to salute the flag, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" and ship Bolshevists, but let them speak to you in conversation, of an industrial body like the Steel Trust or the Pennsylvania Railroad and they act as if something were there. Bring up the Body-Politic and it's a whiff.
It ought to be considered treason to think or to speak of The Country in this vague, breathy way.
The next immediate, imperative need of America is to see what can be done and done in the next President's next four years to make the Body-Politic people take the Body-Politic and what happens to the Body-Politic as if it were as substantial as a coal strike—as what happened at Ypres, Cambrai and Château-Thierry.
Otherwise we are a nation of whiners and yearners and are not what we pretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the Germans and the rest of the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy.
I believe that the best things the Old World has said about us and hoped for us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation of idealists, are true to the American character and real.
But they are not actual. We are the world's colossal tragic Adolescent. Forty nations are depending on us—are waiting for us—in the world's long desperate minutes—waiting for America to grow up.
This nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism and religion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of its daily producing, buying and selling, and no more. Any big beautiful evaporated Body-Politic we have or try to think we can have aside from this body—this actual working through of our patriotism, our democracy and our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy, unclean and threatens in its one desperate and critical moment the fate of a world.
All really religious men and all real patriots know this.
In a democracy like ours a religion which is not occupied all day every day in this year of our Lord 1920 in making democracy work, a religion that loafs off into a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, a religion that cannot be used to run steel mills so that men won't go to hell in them and to run coal mines so that men won't be in hell already, is not a religion at all. And a nation that sheds tears over three hundred thousand disabled and crippled soldiers, who gave up their jobs and sailed six thousand miles to die for them, and that has finally managed to get new jobs for just two hundred and seventeen of the three hundred thousand and taken nineteen months to do it, illustrates what it means—in just one simple item—for a hundred million people, to try to be good without a body.
But it is not only in behalf of its helplessness with the President I am groping in these pages for a body for the Public.
The reason that the Public in dealing in its daily business with powerful persons of any kind—whether good or bad, whether a President or anybody, is taken advantage of and does not get what it wants, is that the Public is a Ghost.
Theoretically all powerful persons, predatory Trusts, profiteering labor unions and the wrong kind of politicians always speak respectfully to the Public, but when they want something that belongs to the Public they find the Public is an Abstraction and help themselves. They act when with the Public, as if the Public was not there.
The only way this is ever going to be stopped is for us to make a spontaneous voluntary popular start in this country toward having a body for people in general, towards giving a hundred million people in dealing with their politicians, their trusts and labor unions, less bodilessness. We propose to give a hundred million people a face, a voice, a presence, a backbone, a grip.
Then all the people we ask things of who think we can be whoofed away, will pay attention to us.
THE GHOST RECEIVES AN INVITATION
Being allowed to live a week to-day means as much as being allowed to live a whole life four years ago or perhaps four years from now.
We are being allowed to live in the splendid desperate moment of the world.
International war ending to-night.
To-morrow morning a thousand civil wars breaking out in a thousand nations—between classes—unless we all do our seeing and do our living swiftly and do it together swiftly to-day.
When one-tenth of the people of America tell the President of the United States and nine-tenths of the people that they cannot have any coal unless they do what the one-tenth say; when another one-tenth of the people tell the nine-tenths that they cannot have anything to eat, and another one-tenth tell them that they cannot have anything to wear until the one-tenth get what they want, just how much more democratic America is than Germany it is difficult to say; and just why anybody should suppose the emergency is over it is difficult to say. The idea of getting what you want by hold-up which has been taught to labor by capital, is now getting ready to be used by labor and capital both, and by everybody.
The really great immediate universal emergency to-day in America is the holdup. We get rid of one Kaiser other people have three thousand miles away, to get instead five thousand Kaisers we have to live with next door here at home, that we have to ask things of and say "please" to every time we cook, every time we eat, every time we buy something to wear.
The emergency is not only immediate but it is universal, all the people are concerned in meeting it all the time. We have said to one another and to everybody for four years that what we have all been sacrificing for and dying for these four years is to make the world safe for democracy.
This was our emergency. We were right. The emergency we are meeting now is to make democracy safe for the world. If the Kaiser wanted to dream his wildest dream of autocratic sneer and autocratic hate he would have dreamed US; he would have dreamed what we will be unless the men and women of America—especially the men and women of America formerly active in the Red Cross, shall meet the emergency and undertake in behalf of the people to prove to the people how (if anybody will go about and look it up) industrial democracy in America in distinction from industrial autocracy, really works.
If it works for some of us in some places, let twenty million people—Red Cross people get up and say across this land in every village, town and city, it shall work now in all places for all of us. And then take steps—all of them every morning, every afternoon, getting together as they did in the Red Cross, to see to it that the whole town and everybody in it does something about it.
When the soldiers of the American army we were all helping in the Red Cross stop fighting the Germans, come home, divide off into classes and begin fighting one another, why—because now the soldiers we have been helping need us more, because now all day every day they need us more than they ever dreamed of needing us when they were merely fighting Germans—why should we stop helping them?
On the day after the armistice—the very day when our war with just Germans was over, when the deeper, realer, more intimate, more desperate war Germany had precipitated upon all nations with themselves, begins, why should the men and women who had been working every afternoon for the men of this nation, in the Red Cross, talk about reducing to a peace basis?
The people in the Red Cross have been having in the last three years the vision of backing up an army of four million men fighting for the liberties of the world, but the vision that is before us now—before the same people—that we must meet and meet desperately and quickly is the vision of backing up an army of a hundred million men, women and children fighting for their own liberties in their own dooryards, fighting for the liberty to eat at their own tables, to sleep in their own beds, and to wear clothes on their backs, in a country which we have told the Germans is the greatest machinery of freedom, the greatest engine of democracy in the world.
I will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have made the Red Cross what it was, who have made the Red Cross the trusted representative of American democracy in all nations, who now find themselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime, most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy to a world, I will not believe that these men and women are going to lose their grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty nations, forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters they have helped before.
The logical thing at this great moment for the people who made the Red Cross to do—the thing they alone have the record, the teamwork-drill, the experience, the machinery, the momentum to do, is to keep on following the fighters, rendering first aid to the fighters moving on with their first-aid from fighters for the rights of the people not to be bullied by kings, to fighters for the rights of all classes of people not to be bullied by everybody, not to be bullied by one another.
WHAT A BODY FOR THE GHOST WOULD BE LIKE
I have always wanted to write a book an employer and a workman could read looking over each other's shoulders. I would have two chapters on every subject. In one chapter I would tell the employer things his workman wants him to know, and in the next chapter I would tell the workman things that for years the employer has been trying to get him to notice. I would begin each chapter in such a way that no employer or workman would ever know which was which, or which was his chapter, until he had got in quite a little way; and I would do my best to have everybody read each other's chapters all through the book. An employer would be reading along in his chapter as innocent as you please, and slap his leg and say, "THAT'S IT! THAT'S IT! It does me good to think my workmen are reading this!" And then he would turn over the leaf and he would come plump full head on into three paragraphs about himself and about how the public feels about him, and about how his workmen feel about him, and about what God is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my book are going to help God to do to him, that will make him think. The first thing he will think of perhaps will be to lay down the book. Then before he knows it he will see another of those things he wants his workmen to read softly poking itself out of the page at him. Then he will slap his leg and think how I am making his workmen think. So he will go through the book slapping his leg and shouting "Amen" in one chapter, and sitting still and thinking in the next.
This is the gist of what I propose a new organization shall do on a national scale.
It may seem a rather simple-minded way to describe what I propose a great aggregation of American men and women on the scale of the Red Cross, should do, but the soul, the spirit, the temperament, even the technique of what I have in mind—in miniature, is in it.
It is true that it would be a certain satisfaction of course to an author to prove to employers and employees that they could get on better together than they could apart, even if they got on together better only in a kind of secret and private way in the pages of his own book; and it is true that a book in which I could make an employer and an employee work their minds together through my own little fountain pen would count some. I would at least be dramatizing my idea in ink.
But people do not believe ideas dramatized in ink.
The thing for an author or a man who has ideas to do if he must use words, is to use words to make his ideas happen.
Then let him use words about them and write books about them to advertise that they have happened.
People are more impressed with things that have happened than they are with things that are perhaps going to. Instead of having employers and employees go over the same ideas together in a book, I propose that twenty million people, in ten thousand cities shall make them go over the same ideas together in the shop.
Are capital and labor going to use the holdup on each other to get what they want when six million dead men, still almost warm in their graves, have died to prove that the holdup, or German way of getting things, does not work? What the new League will be for will be to put before the world, before every nation, before every village and city in its local branch, a working vision of how different classes and different groups of people can get what they want out of each other by trying things out together, by touching each other's imaginations and advertising to each other instead of blowing out each other's brains. The way to keep in place our Bolshevists of America is to show them that we the combined people of America, combined and acting together as one in the organization I am sketching in this book, know what they want, and that we can get the thing they essentially want for them better than they can get it. The three great groups in American life—the employing class, the laboring class, and the consumer—have all belonged to the Red Cross together, they have all worked together and sacrificed themselves, and sacrificed their class, to work for the Red Cross. What the New League will stand for in the name of all of them will be the thing that they have already demonstrated in the Red Cross that they can do. Three classes can get a thing for one class better than one class can get it.
This is the content of the League's vision of action.
The method of it will be advertising with enormous campaigns never dreamed of before what the three-class vision is and how it works. Then we will have factories dramatize it. Then we will advertise the factories.
Then when we have democracy working in a thousand factories, we will advertise and transplant our working democracy, our factory democracies, abroad.
People who have learned that democracy works in their daily work can be trusted to believe democracy will work even in their religion, even in their politics.
The idea I have in mind is already foreshadowed in the city of Cleveland.
The spirit of the people of Cleveland has already rebelled against being treated as a ghost—against being whoofed at by Labor unions and trusts.
Always before this, when incompetent manufacturers and incompetent labor unions, for the mere reason that they had not the patience to try very hard and were incompetent to understand one another and do their job, held up the whole city—five hundred thousand people—and calmly made them pay for it, the city of Cleveland like any other city would venture to step in sweetly and kindly, look spiritual and intangible a minute, suggest wistfully that they did feel capital and labor were not being quite fair to Cleveland and would they not please stop interrupting Cleveland several million dollars a day. All that ever would come of it would be the yowls of Labor at the Ghost of Cleveland, the noble whines of manufacturers at the Ghost of Cleveland.
Cleveland was treated as if it was not there.
Cleveland now swears off from being a ghost and proposes to deal bodily and in behalf of all, with its own lockouts and its own strikes in much the same way I am hoping the nation will, according to the news in my paper this morning.
With Mr. Paul Pfeiss, an eminently competent manufacturer, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as partly responsible for the holdups practiced on the city and with Mr. Warren S. Stone, an eminently competent labor union leader, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as being also partly responsible—with these two men, one the official representative of the Capital group, and the other the official representative of the Labor group, both championing the Public group and standing out for Cleveland against themselves, taking the initiative and acting respectively as President and Secretary of the Public group, the Ghost of the city of Cleveland publicly swears off from being a ghost and begins precipitating a body for itself.
I do not wish to hamper my own statement of my idea of a body for the people of the United States by linking it up with a definite undertaking in Cleveland which may or may not prove to be as good an illustration of it as I hope, but the spirit and the understanding of what has got to happen, seems to be in Cleveland—and I stop in the middle of my chapter with greetings to Paul Pfeiss and to Warren Stone. In my book the Ghost of the People of Cleveland salutes the Ghost of the People of the United States!
THE GHOST GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS
A body usually begins with an embryo, and the tissue and skeleton come afterwards.
A book does, too. I prefer not exposing a skeleton much, myself, and am inclined to feel that the ground plan of a book like the ground plan of a man, should be illustrated and used, should be presented to people with the flesh on, that a skeleton should be treated politely as an inference.
But I am dealing with the body of democracy. And people are nervous about democracy just now, so much boneless democracy is being offered to them.
So I begin with the principles—the skeleton of the body of democracy for which this book stands.
The outstanding features of the body of democracy are the brain, the heart and the hand.
With the brain of democracy goes the right to think.
With the heart goes the right to live.
With the hand goes the right to be waited on.
With these three rights go three greater rights, or three duties, some people call them.
With the right to think goes the right to let others think.
With the right to live goes the right to let others live.
With the right to be waited on, goes the right to serve. To call the right to serve a duty is an understatement. I doubt if the people who have succeeded best and who have really attained the largest amount of their three greater rights, have thought of them very often as duties.
I end this chapter with the three questions America is in the world to-day to ask, to find out her own personal three answers to in the sight of the nations.
I am putting with the three questions the three answers I am hoping to hear my country give, before I die.
What determines what proportion of his right to think, each man shall have?
His power to get attention and let others think.
What determines what proportion of his right to live, each man shall have?
His power to let others live.
What determines what proportion of his right to be waited on, each man shall have?
His power to serve.
These are the principles of the new League—the voluntary, spontaneous organization of the men and women of America to meet the emergency in America of our war with ourselves, on the same scale and in the same spirit as the Red Cross met the emergency of our war with other nations, an organization which I hope to show ought to be formed, and which I am rising to make the motion to form, in this book.
I put these principles forward as the by-laws of America's faith in itself, as the principles that should govern the brain, the heart and the hand of each man in a democracy, toward all other men and that should govern all other men toward him—the skeleton of the body of the people.
THREE RIGHTS OF MAN IN A DEMOCRACY
I—THE RIGHT TO THINK
I am entitled to one one-hundred millionth of President Wilson's time in a year.
1/100,000,000th.
If I want 2/100,000,000ths of President Wilson's time in a year I must show him why. I must also show the other 99,999,999 people who think I deserve no more than my regular 1/100,000,000th why I should have two. Not allowing for the President's sleeping nights, my precise share of his time would be one-third of a second once a year. Why should I have two-thirds of a second?
I have to show.
The success of democracy as a working institution turns on salesmanship—upon every man's selling himself—his right to the attention of the Government.
A democracy which considers itself a queue of a hundred million people standing before the window of the President's attention to be waited upon by the President in the order in which they are born or in which they come up, would be a helpless institution. The success of democracy—that is, the success of a government in serving the will of the hundred million people in the queue, turns on sorting people in the queue out, turns on giving attention to what some people in the queue want before others. The man who gets out of line and walks up ahead of people who have been standing in line longer than he has, must get the permission of the queue. He must make the people in the queue feel he represents them with the President if he steps up ahead. Then they let him have their turn. They are glad to let him have hours with the President if they feel he is giving hours' worth of representation to their minutes. All each man wants to feel is that in letting Gompers, for instance, or Schwab, go up ahead, he is getting with the President a minute an hour long. Miles of people in rows say to a man like this, who can give them and their interests with the President a minute an hour long, "You first, please."
Political democracy, if it works, turns on getting the attention of the queue and then going with it to the window.
Political democracy, in other words, turns on advertising.
So does industrial democracy.
Industrial democracy in a factory of five thousand men consists in making arrangements for the five thousand men to appreciate each other, appreciate the Firm, and to feel the Firm appreciating them; arrangements for having the five thousand men get each other's attention in the right proportions at the right time so that they work as one.
The next thing that is coming in industrial democracy is getting skilled capital and skilled labor to appreciate each other's skill. A skilled capitalist can not fairly be called a skilled capitalist or, now that this war is over, unless he knows how to keep his queue appreciating his skill, keep his five thousand men standing in line for his attention cheerfully.
The difference between an industrial autocracy and an industrial democracy is that in an industrial autocracy you keep your queue in line with a club, or with threats of bread and butter, and in an industrial democracy you have your queue of five thousand men, each man in the row cheering you while he sees you giving one minute a week of your attention to him and one hour a day of your attention to others. Still you find him cheering you.
The skilled employer is the employer who so successfully advertises his skill to his employees and so successfully advertises their skill to themselves and to one another that they hand over to him in their common interest the right to sort them over. They hand over to him deliberately, in other words, in their own interests, the right not to treat them alike. Democracy consists in keeping people in line without a club. Democracy is a queueful of people cutting in ahead of one another fairly and in a way that the queue stands for.
If a man standing in a queue before a ticket window wants to cut in ahead of five people, the way for him to do it is to show the five people something in his hand that makes them say, "You first, please." He must show why he should go first, and that he is doing it in their interest.
The other day as I was standing in a long line of people before the ticket window in the Northampton station, I noticed on a guess that half a dozen of the people were standing in line to buy a ticket to New York on the express due in half an hour, and a dozen and a half were standing in line to buy tickets to Springfield on the local going in three minutes. I was number thirteen. I wanted to get a ticket for Springfield. The thing for me to do, of course, to rise to the crisis and make democracy work, was to jump up on my suitcase and address the queue who were ahead of me: "Ladies and gentlemen! Eighteen or twenty of you in this line ahead of me want tickets to Springfield on the train going in three minutes, and the rest of you want tickets on the train going in half an hour. If you people who are hoping you can get your tickets in time to go to Springfield will let me cut in ahead of you out of my turn and get my ticket, I will buy tickets for all of you with this ten dollar bill in thirty seconds, and you can get your tickets of me on the train, and in this way we will all catch it."
I did not do it, of course, but it would have been what I call democracy if I had.
The whole problem of labor and capital, and of political and industrial freedom, from now on after this war would have been solved in miniature before that window—if I had. My invention for the future of the Red Cross is that it should do what I tried to do at that window, for the American people.
Democracy is a form of government in which the people are essentially autocrats. The difference between an autocracy and a democracy is that the people select their autocrats. The more autocracy the more efficiency.
A people can not have the autocracy they need to get what they want unless they are willing to give over to their representatives the necessary trust pro tem., the necessary ex officio right to be autocrats in their behalf. Democracy is autocracy of the people, for the people, by the people—that is, by the people in spirit to their representatives who express their spirit.
The representatives of the people can not keep the people's autocracy for them unless they keep in touch with the people—that is, unless they advertise to the people and the people feel that they can advertise to them.
In an autocracy the autocracy of the ruler is based on forcing people's attention. In a democracy the autocracy is based on touching men's imaginations, on making people want to fall into line in the right order. If the Kaiser had done this in Germany, Germany would have been the greatest democracy in the world and the greatest nation. If the Kaiser had had the power and genius for advertising of the modern kind, if he had had the power of making people want things in distinction from making them meek and making them take them whether they wanted them or not, he would have invented and set up a working model for America.
Obviously, the more the people desire to form in line the better and more successful all the people in the line will be in getting what they want at the window. The more autocracy people know enough to give their representatives, the better democracy works. In the last analysis the fate of democracy in modern life turns on having autocrats on probation—autocrats selected for their positions by advertising, and kept in position as autocrats as long as they can advertise to the people and as long as the people feel that they can advertise to them.
II—THE RIGHT TO BE WAITED ON
Democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in the way kings are, and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves.
Three Rights to Be Waited on