The Ghost in the White House Part 26

XXI

THE SKILLED CONSUMERS OF PUBLICITY

The trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled.

They are not organized to get what they want.

We should organize the Consumers of Publicity, make it possible for the people of America as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what they want.

We should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizing Skilled Readers' Labor Saving Unions.

The difficulties of attaining a power of national listening together--through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so great that they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our having an organization the members of which join it as they will join the Air Line League for the express purpose not of advertising--but of being advertised to.

The most fundamental activity of the Air Line League in the present crisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising of the ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who have certain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to a specific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as I would have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have these same men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them.

It would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of an organization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to.

I say again--if I may be forgiven for the still small voice of plat.i.tude--a plat.i.tude because n.o.body acts as if he believes it--the most effective advertising is advertising that is asked for.

BOOK IV

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 inst.i.tution,--or rather as an inst.i.tution 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 plat.i.tude 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 cla.s.s prejudices for it--a huge buoyant serious daily vision of action in which all cla.s.ses 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.