The Ghost in the White House Part 25

XIX

THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP

We are drawing in the next few months in America the plans and specifications for a great nation and a new world.

We want a Committee of a Hundred Thousand.

We are proposing to gather a Look-Up Committee of a hundred thousand men of constructive imagination in business and other callings, in ten thousand cities, who will work out together and place before the people, plans and specifications of what this nation proposes to be like--a picture of what a hundred million people want.

The situation we are trying to meet is one of providing new brain tracks for a hundred million people. It will not seem to many people, too much to say that the quick way to do this, is to form a Club--a Committee in this country, of a hundred thousand men to ask to be told about these new brain tracks, who will then tell them to the hundred million.

The Look-Up Club is a Publicity and Educational Organization for the purpose of focusing and mobilizing the vision of the people acting as a clearing house of the vision of the people--gathering, coordinating, pooling and determining and distributing the main points in their order of what the American people believe.

The first subject we act in our Publicity Organization as our Listening Conspiracy--our Cooperative news-service to our members--is the subject of how cooperation between capital and labor works. Our first news-service will be planned to increase production, decrease the cost of living, stop strikes and lockouts, drive out civil war and subst.i.tute cooperation as a means of getting things in American life.

Every man who is nominated to membership in the Look-Up Club naturally asks four questions.

1. How can I belong?

2. What does it cost?

3. What do I undertake to do for the Club?

4. What do I get--what does the Club do for me?

The idea is for each man who is deeply interested, to pick out, to nominate any fifty men--I put down for instance on my list Franklin P.

Lane--among forty-nine others, ask Mr. Lane who the men are he knows in this nation, men he has come on in his business in the course of twenty years, who are characterized either by having creative imagination themselves or by marked power to cooperate with men who have it.

After Mr. Lane had given me his fifty, I would ask each of Mr. Lane's fifty for their fifty and each in turn for their fifty until we had covered the country and had picked out and introduced to each other from Maine to California the men of creative imagination in America.

Other members will of course be nominated by members of the Air Line League in their respective communities and everybody who is invited to nominate for the Look-Up section of the Air Line League will be asked to nominate in three lists--(1) those he thinks of as representing invention in the nation at large, (2) those he knows or deals with in his own business or line of activity--all over the country, who have creative imagination or power of discovery and planning ideas, and (3) those he knows in his own home-community that he and his neighbors would like to see in the Look-Up Club, on the nation's honor roll of men of vision in the nation representing his own community.

The cost is to be determined by the Club, but is planned as a small nominal sum--nominal dues for expense of correspondence and conducting the activities of the Club.

What a man gets by joining the Club is the a.s.sociation with two or three thousand members from all over the land at any given time who will be in the Club headquarters in a skysc.r.a.per hotel of its own, when he comes to New York and the advantage of common action and common looking at the same things at the same time with the other members of the Club, through the activities of the Club by mail.

The Look-Up Club Bulletins, pamphlets and little books containing news of critical importance and timeliness to all members--news not generally known or not available in the same concentrated form in the daily press, will be sent to all members for their own use and for distribution to others at critical times and places and with strategic persons--labor unions and employers and public men.

What the Look-Up Club does for a man is to give him the benefit of a friendly candid national conspiracy between a hundred thousand men, to get the news and to pa.s.s on the news that counts and to do it all at the same time instead of in scattered and meaningless dabs.

If the thing each man of a hundred thousand sees once a year in a little lonely dab of vision all by himself could be seen by all of us by agreement the same week in the year, we will do the thing we see.

Anything we see will have to happen. The only reason the thing we see does not happen now, is that we make no arrangements to see it together.

Seen together, news that looks like a rainbow acts like a pile driver.

A man becomes a hundred thousand times himself. In the Look-Up Club what a man gets for his own use, is hundred thousand man-power news.

What does a man when he joins the Look-Up Club, undertake to do?

Send in news when he knows some, and use news when he gets it.

I do not undertake to say just what each member of the Look-Up Club will undertake to do with news when he receives it.

When a man receives live news which immediately concerns him and his nation in the same breath, the way he feels about it and acts about it--about real news he applies to himself and to his work and the people around him, will seem to him to come, not under the head of duties to the Club, but under the head of the things the Club will tempt him to do and that he cannot be kept from doing.

If a hundred thousand picked men in this country in all walks of life all get the same news the same week, and then use the news the week they get it, and put it where other people will use it, we will all know and everybody else will know what the Look-Up Club is for.

We will be carrying out in the Look-Up Club what might be called a selective draft of vision.

We will mobilize and bring to action the vision and the will of the people.

XX

PROPAGANDY PEOPLE

I am weary and sad about the word propaganda. I am weary of being propaganded, or rather of being propaganded at and as regards propagandafying others myself, or propagandaizing them, whatever it is publicists and men who are interested in public ideas suppose they do, I am sad at heart. There is a prayer some one prayed once one tired New Year's Eve, which appeals to me.

"Forgive me my Christmases as I forgive them that have Christmased against me."

I could pray the same model outline for a prayer. But for Christmasing, subst.i.tute propagandy-izing.

The word somehow itself in its own unconscious beauty dramatizes the way I feel about it. I have written many hundred pages of what I believe about reformers--about people who are trying to get other people's attention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what I believe now is that most people if they would stop trying to get other people's attention and try to get their own, would do more good.

The advertising in which I believe is the advertising that is asked for.

I believe in getting a few million people to ask to be advertised to and to give particulars.

More good would be done this way than by turning the whole advertising idea around and working it wrong end to as we do now.

For instance at this present moment I want to know everything about myself and against myself, my enemies know. I do not see why I should put up with my enemies being the ones of all others to know things against me that if I knew would be the making of me. What I want to do is to find a way--make arrangements if I can, to get them to tell me--tell me politely--if they can, but tell me.

If every person, or party, or group in America to-day would do this, Capital, Labor, bankers, socialists, Republicans and Democrats, America would quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a great one. People who have organized to be advertised to will read advertising more poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as I would) more desperately.

They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read where now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertising he has asked for and advertising that has b.u.t.ted in on him whether or no the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true.

It is a plat.i.tude.

A plat.i.tude that n.o.body has expressed and that n.o.body has acted on is a great truth.

What the Air Line League is for, one of the things it is for, is to act on this truth.

Through the three branches, the Look-Up Club, the Try-Out Club and the Put-Through Clan, the Air Line League is an organization not for a.s.serting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally sucking advertising. With its thirty million people joining it, asking to be advertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the National Vacuum Cleaner for Truth.