The Ghost in the White House Part 9

1. The consumer cla.s.s is practically everybody.

2. The consumer cla.s.s is the most disinterested, and is identified with both capital and labor. It is the natural umpire between them. Its line of least resistance is to act fairly.

3. The interests of the consumer cla.s.s lead it not only to act fairly but to act energetically. The consumer cla.s.s as a cla.s.s will want to pay extra for as few quarrels between the people it is paying to make things for it as possible. The consumer always pays for all quarrels, and anything that is good for the employers and employees in the long run can not but be good for the consumer in the long run.

4. In the last a.n.a.lysis, the consumers in any given industry, if duly organized as capital and labor are now, will not only have the disposition to act fairly in a quarrel between the people who are making something that they buy, and the disposition to act quickly and have the fight over with, but they will have as buyers the power as a last resort to choose the factories they will deal with; to do their buying naturally and cheaply, and from factories that are entirely in the business of making goods and not half in the business of making goods and half in the business of making civil war. The nationally organized consumers will naturally advertise to people which firms take the least time off for fighting, and put all their work into the goods they expect the people to pay for.

This national advertising campaign will be operated through national headquarters, cooperating with local branches organized in all manufacturing towns and cities. The national headquarters will act as a clearing house for the materials, facts, ill.u.s.trations and demonstrations which the local centers collect and distribute and apply, proving that democracy works.

Everything turns, in getting a thing done to-day, on seeing to it that the people who take it up are the people who can best get the attention of others.

The consumer cla.s.s cannot fail because they are the best people in the country to compel everybody to listen.

The consumers are the best people to get everybody to listen because they are the best listeners.

The consumers are the best people to start anything in America and keep it going because everybody in America cares what the consumers think, wants to be on good terms with them, and to please them, wants to be heard by them and wants to hear what they say.

XXI

THE WAY FOR A NATION TO SPEAK UP

The Air Line League is not visionary. The people of this country have expressed an idea. They can do it again.

Not long after the American part in the war was under way our Government had the idea--which it had not had at all when it began--that if America was going to do her part in defeating the Germans, or if we were to come anywhere near defeating the Germans, it would only be possible through an unexpected degree of self-sacrifice on the part of our people all day, every day until the war was over.

Our people did not believe this idea.

How could our Government get through to each man in America that winning the war depended on him? Get through to each woman and each child that something must be given up by each of us to defeat the Germans? The Government not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately the country needed them--every man of them--but it wanted also to inspire the people and to let the people see their power themselves. They wanted to teach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to the people and to the world how reverently the men, women and children of America could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat the Germans.

I fell asleep in Maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the Grand Central Station. I came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlike Sunday we had during the war.

A single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which I could have had for a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me.

I mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent about human nature. I went over and stood and looked up Madison Avenue and looked down Madison Avenue.

I had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and I found myself upon what seemed to me the loneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place I had ever seen upon the earth--a corner of Madison Avenue. It seemed like a kind of vision to stand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. I looked up at the sign on the corner. It really was Madison Avenue.

It was as if the hand of a hundred million people had reached out three thousand miles. It was as if a hundred million people had met me at the corner and told me--one look, one silence: "Here is this street we offer up that the will of G.o.d should go by. We are going to defeat the Germans with the silence on this street."

I stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with the invisible--a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came over me that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, were reaching, while I looked, across the country. I saw my people hushing a thousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of Chicago, of San Francisco and New York like the aisles of churches.

There was no need of church bells the first gasolineless Sunday, reminding one noisily, cheerily, a little thoughtlessly--the way they do--that G.o.d was on the earth.

One could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. But the first gasolineless Sunday--five hundred thousand miles of still roads lifted themselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, saying for a hundred million people, "G.o.d still reigneth." And twenty million little birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at five hundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what had happened!

I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had when I waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out of communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out of the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, into the long, white silent prayer of my people--and prayed with a hundred million people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets of a nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to G.o.d.

We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the war. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, to the great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-four full page ads in a thousand papers could do.

Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people--in advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertis.e.m.e.nt, eat advertis.e.m.e.nt, make the very streets they walk on and the windows they look out of into advertis.e.m.e.nts of the fate of their country, into prayers for a world--Mr. Garfield had few equals.

To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single stomach in the country.

To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a hundred million people--go in through the kitchen door of every house with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar when they ordered eight.

Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people look out of their windows on streets--thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the Germans!

We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in America, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany--was to interrupt people's personal daily habits.

The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to the people to whom we are trying to express it.

The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalists and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an hour in the day.

The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, in expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is plain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of the working ideas of the Air Line League.

Our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen is not to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wish we would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us to speak to them. Let a hundred million people do something to the people who take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonder what the hundred million people think.

The true way to advertise is to make the people you advertise to, do it.

To get an idea over to the Germans do something to them that will make them come over to us--come all the way over to us and extract it. The same principle is going to be applied next by the Public Group in industry. We will do something that will make them--capital and labor--say: "What do you mean?"

Then let them study us and search us and search their own minds and find out.

BOOK II

WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF

G. S. L. TO HIMSELF

I

G. S. L. TO HIMSELF

The most important and necessary things a man ever says sometimes, are the things he feels he must say particularly to himself.

In what I have to say about this nation I have stripped down to myself.

Of course any man in expressing privately his own soul to himself, may hit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is the very thing everybody in a nation would do, probably if he had time.