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XX
UP TO THE PEOPLE
There are several reasons which, as it seems to me, show that my plan is not visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill in the way I have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now most needs to be done for high production and team-work in the industries of the country.
1. The consumer class is practically everybody.
2. The consumer class 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 class lead it not only to act fairly but to act energetically. The consumer class as a class 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 analysis, 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, cooeperating with local branches organized in all manufacturing towns and cities. The national headquarters will act as a clearing house for the materials, facts, illustrations 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 class 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 God 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 God 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, "God 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 God.
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 advertisement, eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows they look out of into advertisements 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.
But that may or may not be. All I know is that in this book, and in a grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what they ought to do.
A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to.
I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody right.
During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself.
I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything happens to my mind or to my pocket book—in a railway station, in a trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom—wherever I am, I put it down—put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me.
As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from this book to myself.
On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has been written to express certain things a hundred million people want during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the hundred million people.
I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that if the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, I really believe it would be—at least in the main gist and spirit of it, like mine.
Nearly every man in the hundred million people—in what we call helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready, except in his own strike, to write a book like this.
I cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can prove it and do something that will prove it.
And the two great political parties in their coming conventions—one or both of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to try. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go with people.
And the book is not to them. It is not even for them. This book is to me. I have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world. It is easy and light-hearted, but take it off its guard every laugh is a prayer or a cry.
II
IF I WERE A NATION
Economics, I suspect, are much simpler than they look.
The soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is.
Why should I propose, if I were a nation—just because I am being a hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table—by a really simple thing like there being so many of me?
I am human—a plain fellow human being—and if the United States would act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act, when it is really put up to him—forty nations in his yard waiting for him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem would at once become direct and deep and simple.
All that is the matter with it is that so many Senates have sat on it.
Reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a Senate down to one human being being human—boil it down to a baby even—and what it would do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep on being human and close to essentials.
And that is all there is to it.
The other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being as human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being on Committees.
* * * * *
The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer away from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there.
The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying they would run the factory themselves.
A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running the factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house to ask him to come back to his desk.
He told the Committee he would not return with them. He said that a committee could not get him. The thousand men had rolled him away through jeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wanted him they could come with their wheelbarrow and roll him back.
The thousand came with their wheelbarrow and rolled him back.
The crowds laughed.
But the thousand men and their employer were sober and happy—had some imagination about each other and went to work.
If I were a nation, the first question I would ask would be, "Why bother with wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic Russian way to act an idea all out in order to see it?"
In America we propose to come through to this same idea by being human, by using our brains on our fellow human beings, by hoeing each other's imaginations.
The issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which grows logically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modern industrial life.
These are the Mahogany Desk and the Cog.
III
WHAT THE MAHOGANY DESK IS GOING TO DO
The old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the next row with his employee.
The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing alongside him in the next row.
To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what he does at his desk.
A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious to a laboring man.
In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has to do is to find a substitute for hoeing in the next row.
His workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he is and see the perspiration on his brow.
The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his mahogany desk sweat. It really does for all practical purposes of course, but how can he make it look so?
In the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a massive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to workmen the way they work.
Very soon now, everywhere—much harder than hoeing in the next row—with the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks hoeing their workmen's imaginations.
The other main point in the book the hundred million people would write if they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. I would devote the second ten chapters I think, not to Mahogany Desks, or to the buttons on them directing machines, but to Cogs.
The second great point the hundred million people will have to meet and will have to see a way out for in their book, is the way a Cog feels about being a Cog.
If a Cog in a big locomotive could take a day off and go around and watch the drivewheel and pistons—watch the smoke coming out of the smokestack and the water scooping up from between the rails—watch the three hundred faces in the train looking out of the windows and the great world booming by, and if the Cog could then say, "I belong with all this and I am helping and making it possible for all these people to do and to have all this!" And if the Cog could then slip back and go on just being a cog,—the cog would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be.
He would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be in a democracy-machine in distinction from a king-machine.
What is more, if a Cog did this, or if arrangements were studied out for some little inkling of a chance to do it, he would be making his job as a Cog one third easier and happier and three times as efficient.
A man is created to be the kind of Cog that works best when it is allowed to do its work in this way. God created him when He drove in one rivet to feel the whole of the ship. It is feeling the whole of the ship that makes being a Cog worth while.
The great work of the American people in the next four years is to work out for American industry the fate of the Cog in it.
The fate of democracy turns next on our working out a way of allowing a Cog some imagination, or some substitute for imagination in its daily work—something that the rest of the Cog—the whole man in the Cog can have, which will bring his spirit, his joy and his power to bear on his daily work.
This is the second of the two main points the hundred million people would make in their book if they had time.
These two main points—getting labor to see how a mahogany desk sweats—getting the mahogany desk to put itself in the place of a Cog, know how a Cog feels and what makes a Cog work—are points which are going to be made successfully and quickly in proportion as they are taken up in the right spirit and with a method—a practical human working method which so expresses and dramatizes that right spirit that it will be impossible for people not to respond to it.
I am not undertaking in this part of my book to make an inquiry as to what the right spirit is, or what the right method is that a hundred million people ought to adopt.
I am a somewhat puzzled and determined person and I am instituting out loud a searching inquiry as to what I am going to do myself and what the principles and methods are that I should be governed by in doing my personal part, and conducting my own mind and judgment toward the movements and the men about me.
To avoid generalizing, I might as well give my idea the way it came to me—one man's idea of how one man feels he wants to act when being lied to.
I do not say in so many words, I was lied to. I do not know. A great many people every day find themselves in situations where they do not know. The question I am asking of myself is, how can a man or a public take a fair human and constructive attitude when one does not know and cannot know for the time being, all that it is to the point to know?
A stupendous amount of red-flagism, unrest and expensive unreasonableness would be swept away in this country if we all had in mind to use for ourselves when called for the following rules for being lied to.
(Not that I am going to lumber people's minds up by numbering them as rules out loud. They are all here—in what follows—the spirit of them, and people can make their own rules for themselves as they go along.)
IV
RULES FOR BEING LIED TO
(Charles Schwab or Anybody)
—— dropped in, in the rain the other night, and sat by my fireplace and said: "Charles Schwab is the Prince of Liars. He says one thing about labor and does another." He went on to say things he said other people said.
There are two courses of action to take about Charles Schwab's being the Prince of Liars.
One way is to expose what he says.
The other way is to help him make what he says true.
I would rather do what I can to help Charles Schwab practice what he preaches than to stop his preaching.
Everything turns for the American people to-day on being constructive, on dealing with facts as they are, on using the men we have, and on getting the most out of the men we have.
To get the most out of Charles Schwab throw around him expectation and malediction and then let him take his choice.
Charles Schwab in saying what he says about the new spirit in which capital has got to deal with labor is rendering a great, unexpected, sensational and indispensable service to labor and to capital. It is a pity to throw this public confession of capital to labor, and in behalf of labor away. It would be a still greater pity to see labor itself throwing it away.
If I could let myself be cooped up as a writer in any one class in this country to-day, and if it were my special business to take sides with labor, the thing I would try to do first with Charles Schwab, instead of undermining what he says and making what he says mean nothing—would be to cooeperate with him—back him up—back him up with the public—back him up with the stockholders and the people in his mills, until he makes what he says mean three times as much.
Then I would see to it if I could, that he says four times as much. I would try, if I could, to keep Charles Schwab steadily at it, claiming more and more for labor. Then catching up more and more to Charles Schwab, doing more and more, and compelling his partners to do more and more of what he says.
Charles Schwab has fifty or a hundred thousand or so partners, of course—stockholders he has to educate.
They have to be educated in public. He is not insincere because he has not educated them all in a minute.
V
GETTING ONE MAN RIGHT
There are certain facts which make me believe in Schwab as an asset for the nation and for labor and capital both, that must not be thrown away. There are all manner of facts about Schwab and his mills which I do not yet know which I could look up and use, but the most valuable facts to use and use first, are facts anybody can get and get without looking up, by just sitting down and thinking.
Getting one man right and being fair to one man is the way to begin to be fair to a nation.
If Charles Schwab is what —— says he is, if Charles Schwab is doing or winking while it is being done at the thing —— says he is—he is an incredibly under-witted man—stupid about the public, about labor and about capital—and, what is the most reckless of all—stupid in behalf of himself.
It is rather a hard nut to crack—Charles Schwab's being stupid. I cannot understand why people—why a man like —— would apparently rather believe that Charles Schwab is stupid than to believe that there must be some other way of explaining him and of explaining what he has heard said about him.
If what —— says is true about Mr. Schwab, he is not only a stupid man but a ruined man.
In the colossal outbreak of public knowledge coming to us now, nothing will be able to keep Charles Schwab from to-morrow on, from being a stupendous tragedy as long as he lives, and a by-word after he is dead.
The alternatives are:
The assertions about Mr. Schwab's real attitude toward labor are not true.
If true, they are qualified by facts and by delaying conditions for which all intelligent men whether identified with capital or labor would be glad to allow.
If true they are due to delegated authority.
If a large organization does not hand over authority it is inefficient.
If it does not make experiments with men and methods it is inefficient.
If it does not make a certain proportion of mistakes in its experiments with men and methods its experiments are fake experiments.
People who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who do things.
VI
GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT
My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and reformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extreme radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme conservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and self-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrong the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean—what they are like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like.
The quick way to deal with the industrial situation is to expose the extreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. The quick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come to terms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about one another, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructive job on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic human beings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are held up and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these human beings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, by engineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature.
These personalities to unlock a nation with—to make a hundred million men believe together and act together should be picked out, men like Charles Schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yet everybody ought to look at, and will like to look at when they know them.
Intensive publicity extensively applied.
Then with a printing press and a postage stamp multiply it by a hundred million. Make true beliefs about picked out men—typical men we have thousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives.
If the American people can come to know and interpret fifty men—if they can get fifty sample men right—they will then be able to use these fifty men every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlock team work with, with all the others. People will have something to work from and something to work toward, in judging what they can do with employers and with workmen around them.
Then we will have team work and civilization—we will have a democracy the Germans would like to be asked to belong to.
VII
ENGINEERS IN FOLKS
The most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The other facts than the facts about people—about how people feel and are going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine training and education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people. The facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to get most, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging one another.
We have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are off on their facts about one another. One of the first things business men are going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about human nature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with by experts—by the general recognition and employment of experts in human nature—of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men to one another.
If everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as they really are, our economics in America will be as simple as a primer, before night.
VIII
THE GREAT NEW PROFESSION
En Route, New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R.
January 19, 1920.
Dined at the ——'s last night. Judge —— was there. Two other lawyers. We sat after dinner and talked very late.
Three lawyers are too many for a dinner.
I do not know what it is, but I never spend the evening with a lawyer, without talking back to him in my mind all the next day.
Probably, if at this late date I were picking out what I would be in the world, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick out being a lawyer backwards.
The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in conducting people's fights for them.
My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once be started—a profession in which any man who went into it, would be occupied in being a lawyer backwards.
(I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of—because everybody would see—a whole nation would see all in one unanimous minute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like.)
Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by the things they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuous ad.—their huge national international display ad. just now of what a lawyer is like—of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is the United States Senate.
It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to most people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards—two or three hundred thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts everybody went to, to keep them out of fights.
You see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course he will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it over. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it is not impossible he will make your enemies love you.
My idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what it is worth—not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as a plain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for getting the things done one wants to do, and for getting what one wants.
If I were hiring a man to help me get what I want out of other people and if I had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be the more practical thing for me to do.
If I could go down town and engage a man at so much a year who would be an expert in making me understand myself and in making me make fun of myself, so that I could get myself into fairly good shape for other people to understand, it would be still more practical.
I would soon find myself after the first few seances with the man I was hiring to sit down with me and be a lawyer backwards to me—I would soon find myself having things done to me that would be so plain, so pointed, so sensible, so scientific and matter of fact and thorough that I would be able in a minute to cut down to the quick with any man I met,—cut down to the quick and get what I wanted on any subject I took up, because nobody could fool me, because I couldn't even be fooled by myself.
I do not know how long it is going to take but I do know that if the world is going to be reformed it is going to be by men who—either by doing it personally, or by hiring somebody else to help them do it, have reformed themselves.
My own personal observation is, so far, that when I set out to see things against myself I seem to need somehow, a great deal of assistance.
In such a naturally disagreeable mussy job of course, instead of going to my friends, to people one goes out to dine with, I feel there ought to be some regular professional person one could go to, some more noble refined sort of spiritual hired man—make an appointment by telephone, go down to a room down town on the way to one's office and then just as a plain matter of course be done off for the day, be done over, be put in shape for one's fellow human beings to get on with.
Then one could go out into the midst of the people and keel over a world.
After one had hired some one to be a lawyer backwards to one and got used to it, one would soon be in shape to go to one's employers and let them put in some touches, go to one's employees, go to anybody and everybody right and left. One would soon get so that one could learn something from everybody. One would take points even from relatives.
The main difficulty in a thing like this would be one that would come at the start, the difficulty of getting people to look upon undergoing the truth about themselves, respectfully and seriously and like an operation.
No amateur or friend could get anybody started. The only way to begin is to have some special expert to go to, some special expert with a long string of notable moral patients, men who have succeeded in business by seeing through themselves more, and seeing through themselves quicker and oftener than other people do. You hear of some especially good man who is being a lawyer backwards practicing regularly with great success. You observe his patients from day to day and see how the truth works. Then you go down to his office, plank down your money and get the truth.
* * * * *
The trouble with truth from friends and relatives is that even when they tell it, nobody pays for it. Most people neither take the truth nor anything else in this world seriously if it is free. People get more, the more they want it. And the more they want it, the more they show it by wanting to pay for it.
This is why I suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be a regular profession. There is going to be a tremendous demand for going down town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see how going down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with people in one's work.
The lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies about himself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free a man from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis of himself and present him a world with the truth.
This idea should be presented to people just as plain common sense. People should not be asked to take it up not as an ideal but as an operation. If a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how he has got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to a man's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in order to have any one willing to let him live?
We have operations on all our other inner organs. The things that are done to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personal and intimate things. And if people will let themselves be cut open and operated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men—hundreds of thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to be operated on so that they can earn something to eat? Nine out of ten of the things that keep people from earning a living as they should or as they might, are truths against themselves that have never been operated on.
IX
GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE FACTS
The first thing the man in the White House for the next four years is going to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as they really are.
If I were writing a book for the next president to run for president on, one of the first things I would put into it would be a definite statement of what the president and the government proposed to do and what policy they proposed to adopt to keep Labor and Capital from being off on their facts about each other.
There are two policies to choose from.
First Policy: Have Capital tell Labor what is the matter with Labor, and have Labor tell Capital what is the matter with Capital. (Results: Strikes heaped on lockouts and lockouts heaped on strikes.)
Second Policy: Turn the whole truth-telling policy around.
The way to make a truth count is to get the utmost possible attention to it.
The way to get the utmost possible attention to a truth is to have people one does not expect it from telling it. The way to advertise the sins of Capital is to have Capital tell them. Employers and capitalists can attract twenty times as much attention in telling things that are the matter with them, and will be believed forty times as much. And they not only can tell the facts against themselves more fairly, but while they are telling the facts against themselves they are in a position to change them. They can tell facts against themselves with one hand and change them with the other. Or they can begin changing them—begin getting labor to help them change them.
If I had to save the world in a week or rather get assurance in a week that it could be saved, I would get all the people in it to agree for a year to read each other's papers. Have every man read two papers. We would start up for America the national Parallel Column Habit. Each man by himself daily putting his own little world and other people's world alongside until they got used to it, and then together.
There is no limit to what reading the wrong papers would not do for this nation. It is not a matter to argue about. It is a mere plain matter of fact in ordinary every day psychology. The veriest tyro in human engineering can see it,—that the way to get a truth noticed about Capital or Labor, the way to make a truth of some use and get it believed and acted on, is to have the wrong people tell it.
Judge Gary could say some of the things Mr. Gompers is saying a great deal better than Mr. Gompers could.
There is one thing I am going to do when I put this up to the people. I am not going to let them think I am putting it up to them as a Christian. The way to introduce the idea is to speak as a plain practical engineer in folks and in the way human nature works. I don't know as I would mind people having fine religious feelings about it, when they did it, if they liked, but I would prefer to call it and prefer to introduce it as simple, plain, hard-headed publicity.
The most natural quick universal short-cut to peace, to different groups of people in America getting their facts right and getting them quick and dealing with each other as they really are, is to have people go around in America from now on, telling truths everywhere, who have just got them—people the truths look prominent on.
X
THE FOOL KILLERS
The gist of the labor problem simmers down to our making some adequate universally understood provision, generally resorted to by everybody as a matter of course, for people's not being fooled about themselves.
If people do not fool themselves nobody else can fool them.
And they do not go around fooling others.
The next thing employers and employees who are being fooled by themselves and who are trying to fool one another, are going to observe, is that their competitors in their own industry—the employers and employees in their own industry who are not fooled by themselves and who are not taking time to fool one another, are producing more, cheaper and better goods than they can.
Things that take years to straighten out, straighten out in weeks when people on both sides who have stopped fooling themselves, get together and look at the facts over each other's shoulders. All that is necessary is to get the thing started—looking at the facts over each other's shoulders. People who do not want to start to look at facts in this way should call in a specialist until they do.
Labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital human nature another. They both believe on both sides what they want to, unless they go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitable habit started of making a deliberate, desperate effort not to.
The world is not being run from day to day by the truth. It is run by what people believe is the truth. It is what the I. W. W. extremists believe is the truth, which constitutes the important fact—the fact which has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. The truth about Judge Gary's attitude or Charles Schwab's, toward labor unions, makes no difference if nobody believes it, or if the labor unions don't believe it. As long as the labor unions are fooling themselves and believing what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact way to deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. The fundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off on their facts about themselves and believe what they want to about themselves. Naturally having begun with this they branch out and believe what they want to about anybody.
To this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we have obviously got to make provision for in modern American life, is practically a new profession—regular professional persons everywhere in all cities, and in all the different industries and in the highly specialized groups each with their special and different techniques, who are experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves and others of believing what they want to about themselves.
XI
THE WHISPERERS
A very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in the habit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their office doors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves.
A very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in the habit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficient type are whispering around to one another against themselves.
One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people who are shouting would shut up.
But perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout.
The first moment the shouters suspect what the whisperers are whispering,—the whisperers on the other side—they will stop shouting to listen.
The whole industrial situation narrows down to this,—might be put into two words by a hundred million people to-day, to Capital and Labor, "Swap Whispers!"
The tumult and the shouting die.
It is with the whisperers, we will save the world.
XII
MR. DOOLEY, JUDGE GARY AND MR. GOMPERS
The proposal that we have a new profession—a group of specialists to go to, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other people and be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as a kind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almost tragical subject. But something has made me want to begin my idea in this way.
In strained situations between people—situations in which one sees people getting all worked up and fine, noble and wild-eyed about themselves, I am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, most immediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one—some one who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless laugh.
To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or not, would be practical.
Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola.
And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emancipation Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time, in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his God.
I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time—just as Mr. Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went home—stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room—if Mr. Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's Conference might have been saved.
The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen from the point of view of God or of common people, many of the men in it,—most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very funny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could see through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference who conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact about human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would look in a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless lively and equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Labor group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than could be helped.
The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our whole nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp—a state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody thought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at themselves.
When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on, walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was prettiest, about themselves.
Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe about itself.
With Capital not yet grown up—not yet really capable (as the really mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative use of criticism,—incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the same undeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as a national dramatization,—a rather loud and theatrical acting out before an amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country as institutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear, superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonous strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty years, had made us suspect they were!
For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this nation—called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid for carting it away without saying a word.
There are three courses we can take in the Public Group now.
We can try to discipline Capital and Labor into producing together by passing laws and heaping up embarrassments and penalties.
We can let them see how much better they can make things by sticking them on to one another and letting them discipline one another.
We can make fun of both of them quietly to themselves, keep quiet-hearted, matter of fact, full of realism, humor, relaxation and naturalness and deal with Capital and Labor as Lincoln would, by getting laughing and listening started.
Then let them laugh at themselves.
America should arrange to have Judge Gary, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Gompers get together on a desert island and face things out.
A great deal of capital in this country—especially the best of it, is already seeing, and already acting on facts about itself it has not wanted to believe. It is already seeing that it cannot carry off with Labor or with the Public any longer the idea of looking pure and noble, standing before people in a kind of eternal moral-Prince-Albert coat, one's hand in one's bosom, and with the same old pompous-looking face, without looking ridiculous. It is seeing that it would rather laugh at itself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that the only thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific and economic, smile at its airs with Labor and the public, and lay them aside.
If Capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietly for self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, Labor will.
If Labor does it, Capital will.
Whichever side does it first, and does it best,—does it in the most human, attractive and contagious way will find a hundred million people handing over to it the power and the leadership of the country.
To whichever side it comes first, to show the most shrewdness, the most fearlessness, the most generosity in seeing facts against itself, will come the honor of the first victory.
The first victory either side will be allowed by the people, is its victory over itself.
People in this country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capable of self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, can have anything they want.
XIII
FOOLING ONESELF IN POLITICS
The same thing that everybody can see is going to happen in business in this country from now on—the pushing forward—the victory over all others in business of the men who are not fooled about themselves is going to be seen happening ten times over in politics.
The leading symptom of the mood of the people, the magnificent blanket political secret that covers all the other secrets of the coming conventions and elections, the dominating fact of the next man's next four years in The White House, is the thing that is going to be done by the people from to-day on, to politicians who are fooled about themselves.
One has but to mention one or two and a nation sees it.
Any little natural impression my fellow citizens may have had at the beginning of this article that in putting forward my idea of being a lawyer backwards, or the idea that we must all practice at being lawyers backwards to ourselves, I am putting forward just a gay pleasant thoughtlet, instead of a grave and pressing national issue, an issue on which the fate of a people is at stake, fades away when one really begins to think of how the idea would really work out if tried on particular politicians.
Everybody can pick out his own of course, but I am inclined to believe just at the moment, that if there was a good man everybody in this nation knew of who was being a lawyer backwards—say in New York or London—a man who had a big practice and who had a fine record in bracing men up to fight themselves and not to be fooled about themselves, the man that most people in this country would like to take up a national collection for, have sent to him and done over at once, no matter what it cost, would be Henry Cabot Lodge.
For six long weary months now, the main and international fact America and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man called Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself.
Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,—their very cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Washington can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips Henry Cabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to make Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in a lonely back seat of the World.
But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred million people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry Cabot Lodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses his pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to the world after all is that he—Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, has taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international emotion out of it—every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration—into a great national stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty generations like attendant angels hovering around him—around Henry Cabot Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws of a prowling League of Nations!
It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived.
It would be of no use to argue—not even for a hundred million people to argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself.
So it came to pass—a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man magnificently obsessed—a man holding himself ready any minute of any day in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipice of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off....
Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues of nations of his own twenty years ago—who would have believed that a man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a national, into an international helplessness like this?
My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at the present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the psycho-analysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to get things, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and from now on, in the men they choose to get them.
The ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled about themselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, are matched on every side in the world of politics.
The personal trait of great political as well as industrial value for which the people of this country are going to look in the men they allow to be placed over them—the men they give power and command to, is the quality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts in people. What we are going to look for in a man is having an engineering and not a sentimental attitude toward his own mind and the minds of others. We are going to give power and place to the man who has a certain eagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certain suppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. The man we are going to look past everybody for and pick to be a President or a Senator after this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his own party or by his own class, who is not fooled about himself, who keeps without swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunk line of the interests of all of us.
XIV
SWEARING OFF FROM ONESELF IN TIME
Before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is established, and before very many offices have really been opened up where one can go in and have one's mind changed ten dollars' worth instead of having it poured, soothed and petted, a good many of us are going to find it necessary to practice on ourselves and in a humble way as amateurs, do any little odd jobs we can on ourselves at home.
We nearly all of us have it in us—we the hundred million people—to be like Henry Cabot Lodge, on a less national scale, any minute.
I say over to myself breathlessly between these very words while I write them down about Henry Cabot Lodge, that beautiful thought John Bunyan had, "Except for the grace of God" a wife, five friends and a sense of humor, there goes Gerald Stanley Lee!
I have made myself say this over practically every day while writing this article (I have had to write it), and when I was in the same town Henry Cabot Lodge is, last week, saw him snooping around the Senate, so pure and high and from the Back Bay, so serene in his courtly chivalrous dream about himself, I got taken up every time—I do not deny it—on the same monotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the same monotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then I would stand there (He is my own Senator) with his pass for The Senate in my pocket ... I would stand and watch him,—watch him walking through the lordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought John Bunyan had about the murderer, "Except for the grace of God there goes etc., etc." Everybody fill in for himself!
The essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human nature is that all the people who have any are very much alike. The best we can do about it—most of us—is to recognize the fact that in spite of the thought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably are going to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical working difference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselves in the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, more desperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regular arrangements, perhaps,—when something in us starts us up into being Lodges,—for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselves in time.
Here is Charles Evans Hughes for instance, who from the day he was born hates a Socialist from afar off,—a man who never had in his younger days perhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thing Charles Evans Hughes does before anybody can say Jack Robinson, the very first minute he reads in his paper that the New York Assembly has refused to give their seats to five Socialist members because they are Socialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big national jerk draw his national self together, and before the country is half waked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an act of sympathy and protest on behalf of American Socialists from the last man most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that the narrow partisans of the Assembly itching with superiority, sweating with propriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great Chamber in Albany, should take the Socialist members they had waved out of the room simply for belonging to the Socialist party, and conduct them back to their seats as the accredited representatives (until proved individually unfit) of citizens of the United States and let them sit there as a national exhibit of the way in which a great and free people, who are believing in themselves every day, can believe in themselves enough to listen to anybody, to make regular arrangements in Albany and everywhere as a matter of course for listening to people with whom they do not agree, without fear and without frothing at the mouth.
Mr. Hughes is as anxious to do anything he can during one lifetime to discourage Socialism as Henry Cabot Lodge is to discourage Woodrow Wilson, but the reason that the American people have been glad to have Charles Evans Hughes as Justice of the Supreme Court, the reason that they came within three inches of making him President of the United States is that in an eminent degree he is a man who has made elaborate, conclusive and habitual arrangements with his own mind for not being deceived by Charles Evans Hughes, for being a lawyer backwards, for fighting himself, for stepping up out of being a mere lawyer and sitting sternly on the Bench of the Supreme Court, against himself.
Of course I am not writing this article to point out to a hundred million people with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superior I and a hundred million other people are to Henry Cabot Lodge and to the way for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and being internationally fooled about himself. The special point I seek to make is that as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking out into millions of Lodges any minute, that we should make the most of our new national chance of our power as a people just now—just before the two great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong, to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard against ourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to The White House,—from whatever walk of life he comes,—a man who will have himself magnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the people into his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own class, or put down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul—a man who will be the President of all the people everywhere all the time.
When the members of The Bar Association of the City of New York who backed Mr. Hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightened world, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasion and being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fair to divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those who voted to back Mr. Hughes were, and those who did not, were not equally exposed to being fooled about themselves. Mr. Hughes and his followers were probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular and standing arrangements with themselves against themselves and who acted more quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish they had acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes.
In the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next four years to justify democracy—to justify the power of the human spirit to be free, generous, noble and just in self-government, the power of men of differing classes, of differing groups and interests to live in orderly good will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last a great nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot do it,—all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being a blind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our not being full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on what we do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand for seeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men to represent us who shall not be demagogues, who shall lead us as we are, with clear eyes to what we are going to be, men who shall lead us by opening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting us in our sins.
XV
TECHNIQUE FOR NOT BEING FOOLED BY ONESELF
The next twenty-eight pages of this book might be entitled: "An Article that Expected to Appear in the Saturday Evening Post."
When the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to be read in this way, were completed, they were too late to submit to the Post, and too late to change.
The reader is therefore requested to bear in mind (as I do) that he is getting the next eleven chapters for nothing—that they have not been paid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether the Saturday Evening Post would approve or believe what I believe, or feel hurt if other people believe it.
* * * * *
The suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doing what we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs of criticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself.
It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret of increased production in factories, or power over others in business, and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, I say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having or exercising this power of self-criticism?
If the readers of the Saturday Evening Post were to come to me in a body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything, they—the readers of the Saturday Evening Post can do, and do now to acquire a technique—a kind of general amateur technique for not being fooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holding back from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked at all, I have a faint hopeful idea—I feel it at this moment floating about my head—a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought to do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thing off. I cannot believe that only this far—in a few pages or so about it, I have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to them. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in this country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves, the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being fooled by himself—some one man all our people have a perfect passion,—almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make my idea alluring with him.
Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States.
It is true that other readers of the Saturday Evening Post besides Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr. Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people. Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office—everybody who waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be excelled.
I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the technique of self-criticism.
1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself.
2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize him.
3rd. How he could get it. Technique and illustration.
XVI
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LETTER
If the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from Philadelphia to Northampton, Massachusetts, could be written down—if all the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on platforms—what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions—if all the long story of this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the envelope—what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do to Albert Sidney Burleson?
The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every day, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along the Mississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, waving their autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, would point to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave of unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Washington by ten-thirty A.M., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel post to Austin, Texas, before night.
I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker than if he were sent like a mere letter.
Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, the most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can produce.
Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to believe and who keeps fooled about himself.
An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about how money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he was placed by the people at the head of the people's Post Office, he would save their money for the people instead of running their Post Office for them.
This is all that has happened. This was Mr. Burleson's preconception of what he was for and what a Post Office was for and not a hundred million people could pry him out of it. Mr. Burleson ran his Post Office to suit himself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in being suited with their Post Office had to take anything that was left over that they could get after Mr. Burleson was suited with it.
Mr. Burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conception of Albert Sidney Burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and so far as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years in thinking what other people's conceptions of him are.
I am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a Post Office. But I want my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America would agree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to have it, please, deliver our letters for us.
If the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the compositor's hands on Thursday morning—should take as has happened before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one suppose I would do?
Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in another column on Mr. Burleson.
But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of the Post are both going to get out of that extra column.
I am going to do what I have done over and over before.
Instead of mailing as one would suppose this manuscript at nine o'clock Wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery, I am going to go down to the Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon at six o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar ticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire a seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford for the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye.
Then I am going to pay my letter's bill at the Bellevue-Stratford, buy a three dollar ticket to New York and a place in the Pullman for myself, G. S. L. on return, as the human envelope Mr. Burleson has required me to be, ship myself back to New York as the empty, as the container this article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with Albert Sidney Burleson will be over.
Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Station and walked out at the Eighth Avenue end, looked up wistfully at Mr. Burleson's new Greek Palace he puts up in when he comes to New York and I came with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burleson has about himself—four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet high all across the top.
NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.
Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, or Homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to camels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousand mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles of sunsets across the land.
But I must say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read it as I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth to Thirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as I stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I was spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailing for me.
XVII
THE MAN FIFTY-THREE THOUSAND POST OFFICES FAILED ON
There is one thing I find when I am writing in a national magazine, trying to express myself on an idea I would like to believe but do not want to be fooled about, to four or five million people. I can not help feeling that out of all these four or five million people, at the very least anyway there really must be three million and five hundred thousand who are being very much less fooled about me and about my idea than I am. Every day as I sit down to write one more chapter I try to catch up to them. Of course anybody can see I am not equal to it, but it does give one a chance, and it gives the book a chance before I am through, to have some sense in it.
I cannot help thinking what Albert Sidney Burleson, who has a hundred million people to choose from, who has millions of people who are less fooled about him than he is, to catch up to every day, after all these seven long years they have put on him, ought to amount to.
And what his Post Office ought to amount to.
Of course we are all human and know how it is, in a way. We know that the first thought that would come to Mr. Burleson as to any man when he finds he is being criticized—that people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices are criticizing him and acting with him as if he were fooled about himself, is the automatic thought of self-defense. The second thought, which is what one would hope for from a General, even a Postmaster General, is that one resents it in oneself, that in an important opening for a man like being called foolish, one stops all one's thinking-works, and slumps ingloriously, automatically and without a quaver into self-defense.
One would think a man who could get to be a Postmaster General would have the presence of mind when he says "Ouch!" to a nation that steps on his toes, to fix his face quick, smile and say, "Thank you! Thank you! I will see what there is in this!"
Why should a man when God is blessing him as he does Mr. Burleson, even out of the mouths of his enemies, butt in in the way he does and interrupt truths with enough juice in them to make one Burleson, even one Burleson into twenty great men before a nation's eyes?
A whole Cabinet—at least a whole Democratic Cabinet—could have been made time and time again out of the great-man-juice, the truth-pepsin great men are made out of, this country has wasted on Burleson in the past seven years.
XVIII
CAUSES OF BEING FOOLED ABOUT ONESELF
I would like to give a diagnosis of this quite common disease, touch on the causes and see how they can be removed.
There seem to be, speaking roughly and as far as my own observation of psychology goes, six main ways in which the average man is fooled about himself and needs to change his mind about himself.
He is possessed with loco-mindedness or spotty-mindedness, sees things as they look to one kind or group of people—sees things in spotlights of personality, of place or time—all the rest black.
Or he suffers from what one might call Lost-Mindedness—is always getting lost in anything he does, somewhere between the end and the means. He either loses the means in contemplating with unholy contemplation the end, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means.
The Habit of Flat-Thinking—of not thinking things out in four dimensions.
The Habit of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I have to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea out with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson for instance, it would be evaporated thinking.
The Habit of Not Having any Habits—leaving out standardized elements in things and not being machine-minded enough.
Automatism, or Machine-Mindedness.
These six forms of being fooled by oneself all boil down in the end—in their final cause, I suspect to the last one, to automatism or lack of conscious control of the mind.
XIX
LOCO-MINDEDNESS
Loco-mindedness in a Post Office consists in Mr. Burleson's running the Post Office for one kind of people—the kind of people he has noticed.
There are supposed to be various kinds of people who use a Post Office.
There are the people who write hundreds of letters a day—letters that are being waited for accurately and by a particular mail—like telegrams.
There are people who sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, stick out their tongues and chewing on one end of the pen, and slaving away and sweating ink on the other, scrooge out a letter once in three weeks that they have put off six months.
I have no grudge against these people, but it seems to me that running a Post Office exclusively for them as Mr. Burleson does, is a mistake. Even if they constitute ninety-eight per cent of the people, they only mail one-tenth of one per cent of the letters. They may not care whether or not their letters arrive as a matter of course, the way they used to in our Post Office until a little while ago, as accurately as telegrams in their first mail in the morning, but probably they would not feel hurt if they did. But millions of people in business who write scores or hundreds of letters a day, who find themselves being put off with a Post Office that is run apparently for people who write two letters a month, are hurt.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, the letter from New York one used to receive at breakfast, hangs around a junction somewhere now, waits for a letter three hundred miles away—a letter from Pittsburgh to catch up to it, and they both come together sweetly and with Mr. Burleson's smile on after luncheon at half past two in the afternoon.
I do not deny that from the narrower business point of view of running a Post Office the way some women would run—or rather used to run a parlor store—with a bell on the door, there is something to be said for Mr. Burleson's philosophy. Nor do I deny that a store can be run and run successfully and rightly on how much of its customer's money it can save on each purchase.
But the point is that if I go into a store in Northampton and cannot get the things I want there I go into some other store.
I cannot go out from our Post Office in Northampton and go over and get what I want at some other Post Office a little further down the street.
When I and people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices, say Aouch! Mr. Burleson says Pooh!
Business correspondence between Washington and New York which used to be a twenty-four hour affair is now half a week.
Letters thousands of men in New York used to receive in their offices in the early morning before interviews began and when they had time to read letters and to jot an answer to them at the foot of the page, are not received and placed before them for their answers until the late morning or early afternoon when they have other things to do and cannot even read them.
So one's letters wait over a day—a night and a day, or until one gets back from Chicago.
Why is it Mr. Burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of the convenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business in America and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himself points out to people how he has saved them fifty cents?
Why is it that Mr. Burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in our own private business, to save us fifty cents apiece in public?
Who asked him to?
It is true that there are people in America who really prefer to do business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs them. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that lovingly saves one forty cents' worth of money by taking four dollars' worth of one's time.
It is probably true that some people want a cash and carry freight-car Post Office and want Mr. Burleson to save their money for them. Millions of people would make more money by not having their Post Office save money for them. Mr. Burleson insists his business is to save people's money for them whether they can afford to have him save it or not.
The first cause of Mr. Burleson's being fooled about himself is that he is spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the Post Office with reference to one special slow canal-minded kind of America. His mind is jet black about all the rest.
Perhaps Mr. Burleson is not the only one of us in America who is loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business into the ground by noticing only one kind of people.
XX
FLAT-THINKING
THINKING IN ME-FLAT
What nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do their thinking in four dimensions.
The thickness is what I think.
The breadth is what other people think.
The length is what God thinks.
Then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them as a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what I think other people think, and what I think God thinks, and put them together as well as I can, the result is—who I am and what I amount to.
Most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the first or "I think" dimension, stop on the way to God in the "I think" thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "They Think" breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to God at all.
The trouble with the Post Office has been that Mr. Burleson likes to think in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what other people think and skips right past them straight to God.
Probably it would be unfair to say that the Post Office is egotistical, self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate business idea—its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing anything more for the people than can be helped—if Mr. Burleson would stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand Post Offices think.
There have been days—with my half-past two letters when if I had Roger Babson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's Post Office like this:
[Illustration: - - - - - - U.S. ME The P.O. People]
XXI
LOST-MINDEDNESS
OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS
I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end in the means.
To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things together.
I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.
It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like this, a two-cent stamp means.
Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my country—like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.
As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country, so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.
In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to think three. The country pays for it for him.
America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington as Rock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers.
The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, the patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone system for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and magazines in which a whole nation thinks together—with one huge national thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in New York or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down into their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the people will never forget.
Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a bird's-eye view of the nation like the Literary Digest be fined for it? Why fine the readers of the Review of Reviews or Collier's or Scribner's for living in one place rather than another? I like to think of it Saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in the Youth's Companion.
Every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—that is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness of not being fined for it.
A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul—what he knows and feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a right not to be told he will have to read something published within a rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell—that his soul has got to live with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on.
As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation. |
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