The Ghost in the White House Part 2

IV

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 ba.s.s. Patriotism is an aeolian 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 Chateau-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 Chateau-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 h.e.l.l in them and to run coal mines so that men won't be in h.e.l.l 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, ill.u.s.trates 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.

V

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 cla.s.ses--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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses of people not to be bullied by everybody, not to be bullied by one another.

VI

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 G.o.d is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my book are going to help G.o.d 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.