The advertising in which I believe is the advertising that is asked for. I believe in getting a few million people to ask to be advertised to and to give particulars.

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

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

If every person, or party, or group in America to-day would do this, Capital, Labor, bankers, socialists, Republicans and Democrats, America would quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a great one. People who have organized to be advertised to will read advertising more poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as I would) more desperately. They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read where now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertising he has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or no the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true.

It is a platitude.

A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a great truth.

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

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



XXI

THE SKILLED CONSUMERS OF PUBLICITY

The trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled. They are not organized to get what they want.

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

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

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

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

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

I say again—if I may be forgiven for the still small voice of platitude—a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it—the most effective advertising is advertising that is asked for.



BOOK IV

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY WITH OTHER NATIONS



I

FOURTH OF JULY ALL THE YEAR ROUND

It would be very convenient for the other nations in the world to-day if America—being the biggest, the freshest and the most powerful after the war and having the other nations for the time being most dependent on it, could be the one that they felt most deserved to lead them and have its way with them.

It is almost the personal necessity of forty other nations to-day that America should be a success, that America instead of instantly disappointing the other nations, should instantly prove itself worthy of the leadership they would like to place in her hands. "America's success is the world's success," people keep saying. This has a prettified and pleasant sound—in speaking of a great, or rather of a big, nation.

But what of it? What is the fact? What do we wish we could believe is the fact? What is there—either in our own interests or the interests of others that can really be done and done now about the fact—if it is a fact—by any real person or body of persons in America? As a practical and not a Fourth of July institution,—or rather as an institution for celebrating the Fourth of July all the year round, the Air Line League looks upon direct action to be taken by the American people to meet the world's particular situation at this time, as follows:

If America is to get its way—the way, as we like to think, of democracy and freedom, with other nations, there are certain things about us the other nations want to know.

The other nations want to know that America has a technique for getting its way with itself.

The nation that has the most self-control will be the nation that as a matter of course and of common safety will be asked in the crisis, by the other nations, to take the lead in controlling order, in controlling or insuring the self-control of others.

The other nations want to know—if they are going to let us have our way with them—put over what we like to call our superior democratic open way upon them, that we have a vision—a vision of human nature and of modern life which is better, clearer, more practical and timely than their vision.

The other nations want to know,—if we are to have our way, that we not only have a vision of what our way is—a national vision, but a technique for expressing and embodying that national vision. To deserve our way with them they must know we have a vision which can be proved, which is historic—the facts of which—specifications, dates, names and places, can be placed in their hands.

The other nations if they are going to let us have our way with them, will want to know by observation that America has not only a vision and a technique for embodying a vision, but that when her vision proves to be wrong (as during the war) America has a technique for being born again.



II

THE VISION AND THE BODY

I have dwelt already on what a body for the people would be like and how it would work.

I would now like to touch on two facts—the fact that there is a particular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the American people at this time, and the fact that the body to express the vision grows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to be had.

The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations—on its getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be expressed.

The technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turns on a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becoming self-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision of action developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth.

This fact is not supposed to be open to argument. It is a biological fact—the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. Everybody knows, or thinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here and there at a time for a short time, in America—inventors, great statesmen, children and lovers are ever caught acting as if they believed it.

Everything about America that is lively, or powerful, or substantial and material begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody's falling in love and becoming conscious of his own desire.

The first thing this nation has to do to have a body is to get its own attention.

The reason that the people of America in the Red Cross achieved a body, is that some one had a body for—the vision that if all the different kinds of people we had in America who had never dreamed of doing a thing together before, could be got together to do one thing together now the world war could be won.

This spectral and visionary-looking idea somehow in the Red Cross, was not only the thing that started the Red Cross, but it was the daily momentum, the daily mounting up in the hearts of the people that made it go.

The leaders of the Red Cross—Mr. Davison and the men he gathered about him had a vision of what could be done which other people did not dare to have.

The secret of the Red Cross was that it was a vision-machine, a machine for multiplying one man's vision a millionfold, working out in the sight of the people three thousand miles a vision greater than the people would have thought they could have.

This vision which the Red Cross had, which it advertised to people and made other people have, is what the people liked about it. The people threw down their jewels for it—for something to believe about themselves and do with themselves greater than they had believed before. They threw down their creeds for it. They threw down their class prejudices for it—a huge buoyant serious daily vision of action in which all classes and all creeds of people could live and dream and work together every day.

No more matter of fact conclusive demonstration of the implacable splendid brutal power of vision, of the power of vision to precipitate across three thousand miles a body for the souls and the prayers of a people, could be imagined than the Red Cross during its great days in the war.

The Red Cross became capable of doing what it did because it touched the imagination of the average humdrum man rich or poor and made him think of somebody besides himself. The Red Cross did this by what was practically an advertising campaign, the advertising of different sets of people, to all of the others.

The result was what looked and felt like a miracle—a kind of apocalypse of people who have outdone themselves.

Naturally the people liked it. And naturally people who have watched themselves and one another outdoing themselves, can do anything.

My own experience is that when I set out to find the real truth about people whether it pets me in my feeling about them or not, people turn out to be incredibly alike. They are all more full of good than they seem to want me to believe. The only difference is that some of them are more successful in keeping me from believing in them than others.

I have taken some satisfaction in seeing in the Red Cross, a nation backing me up in this experience with human nature in America.



III

THE CALL OF A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE

The nearest the American people have come to getting their way in other nations—to having a vision and a body with which to do it and deserve to do it—is in the Red Cross, and in our Food Distribution. In both of these organizations we succeeded in getting the attention of others to what we could do for them—and with them—by getting our own attention first and by making our own sacrifice at home first.

We were allowed to administer food abroad because we had shown self-control and sacrifice about food at home and were given headway in emergency and rescue abroad because millions of people here had a vision for others and gave a body to their vision at home.

I have been filled with sorrow over the way millions of men and women in the American Red Cross, their daily lives geared to a great issue, living every day with a national international vision suffusing their minds and hearts and touching everything they said and did, suddenly disappeared as the people that they really were and that they seemed to be, from sight.

I have never understood it, how twenty million men and women out of that one common colossal daily vision of a world, almost in a day, almost in an hour, across a continent as on some great national spring, snapped back into the little life.

I do not know as I would have minded them—three thousand miles of them going back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but I have wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps to move the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they had to go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, and driving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live them daily together.

The necessity of the every-day individual lives we all are interested in living—the necessity of the actual personal things we all are daily trying to do, is a necessity so much more splendid and tragic, so much more vivid, personal and immediate, so much more adapted to a high and exhilarating motive and to a noble common desire than the rather rudimentary showy stupid necessity the Germans thrust upon us could ever dream of being, that it is hard to understand the way in which the leaders of the Red Cross in the supreme critical moment when the mere war with Germany was being stupendously precipitated into forty wars of forty nations with themselves, at the very moment when with one touch of a button the new vision of the people could have been turned on instead of the old one and the hundred million people stood there asking them, snapped off the light, dismissed the hundred million people—clapped them back into their ten thousand cities into the common life.

The magnificent self discovery, the colossal single-heartedness lighting up the faces of the people whiffed out by one breath of armistice! Who would have believed it or who can forgive it?... The Red Cross—the redeemer, the big brother of nations, holding steady the nerves of a whole world—not meeting the emergency of a whole world—the whole world yesterday tightened up into war, and to-day falling apart into colossal complicated, innumerable, hemming and hawing, stuttering Peace!

What people used to think wealth was, what they used to think might was, the power of attracting the whole attention of millions of people is.

In the Red Cross a hundred million people—American people, had looked at the same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the same thing at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the same thing in a thousand ways with their hands. In the Red Cross the feet of a hundred million people became as the feet of one man.

The Red Cross had hunted out, accumulated, mounted up and focused the attention of forty nations. It had in its hands the trigger of a ninety mile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day the armistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking up in its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, a pocket pistol instead. Because the war suddenly was everywhere instead of the north of France, it reduced to a peace basis. At the very moment when it had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment when it had people all over the world all listening to it and believing in it, at the very moment when the forty nations could have been turned on to any problem with it, it let the forty nations go.

If I could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as one man—a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with his opera glass, if I were sitting next to him I would suggest his turning the screw to the right slowly. I would say, "Do you see better or worse as you turn it to the right?" If I found he saw worse I would tell him to turn it to the left and then I would leave him to try between the two until he found it.

The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. It had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national blank look.

Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out.

It was a Focus—a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking for it from us, every morning when they get up—asking for it as one man.

To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever known—this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred million people from having a blank look, let its chance go.

The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where it stopped, the Red Cross vision—the Red Cross spirit.

The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented as a future for the Red Cross.

The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body for the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division for the Red Cross.

But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for my purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people—the rank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves the soul of it and who would make the soul of anything—particularly the men and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to cool a little—had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set before the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated by the leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us—would have kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active labor in the Red Cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men and women for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the mere stress of merely beating Germans, there had been one before.



IV

THE CALL OF A WORLD

The difference between a first class nation and a second class nation might be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any live profession.

Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they began filling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them so that they have no teeth to fill.

Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctor used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see a doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands, and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. The next stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers—to keep them from walking too soon.

The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill the germs that decay the teeth.

The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day after the armistice to go back to war germs.

The Red Cross with its branches in every town and every nation in the world would announce that from that day on, through a vast new division, it would occupy itself with germs—with the germs of six inch guns, with the germs of submarines. It would deal with the embryology of war.

The germs of war between nations, breed in wars between classes, and the germs of class war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs of war between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace with himself.

It is when I am having a hard time getting on with Stanley Lee that I am likely to have a row with Ivy Lee. It is a colossal understatement to say that charity begins at home. Everything does. If a man understands himself he can understand anybody. If he gets on with himself the world will fall into his hands.

The great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop war between capital and labor. This is a feat of personality and of engineering in human nature. It is a home-job, and when we have done it at home we can sow all nations with it. If I wanted to stop a war between Ivy Lee and me I would have to pick out a series of things to do to Ivy Lee and to say to him which he would like to have me do and say to him. Then I would pick out in myself things that Ivy Lee does not like to have me do to him and say to him, and which possibly when I study on them I will not want to do.

Up to Ivy to do the same to me.

This is a science. It is not merely a vision or a religion. Removing the cause of fighting may be a less exact science of mutual study and self-study, but it is approximately exact. It is also a fascinating and contagious science. We master the embryology of war between persons—the embryology of war between classes, and then between nations. The principles which we demonstrate and set up working samples of in one of these problems will prove to be the principles of the others.

If people do not believe in germs enough and are more afraid of fire, I would change the figure.

We are proposing to follow up at once, the Red Cross, which was run as a fire engine to put or help put out fires between nations, with the Air Line League which is to be run as a machine for not letting fires between nations get started.

Edward A. Filene of Boston in trying to have a successful department store found the women behind his counters got very tired standing in the street cars night and morning on the way home and took up with a will getting new rapid transit for Boston. He found he could not get rapid transit for Boston without helping to get a new government and that he could not get a new government without helping to get a new Boston.

He then found he could not help get a new Boston without getting new trade and industrial conditions in Boston and that he could not help get new ideals working in trade and industry in Boston without helping in the ideals of a nation. He then found he could not get a new nation without trying to help make several new nations. Then came the International Chamber of Commerce.

Something like this seems to happen to nearly every man I know who really accomplishes anything.

Or any nation.

Frederick Van Eeden of Holland began life as a painter with marked success but being a lively and interested man he could not help wondering why people were not getting out of paintings in Holland—his own and other people's, what they ought to and what they used to, and became a critic. He found people did not respond to his ideas of how they ought to enjoy things and then won distinction as a poet, but why did not more people get more out of the best poetry? He then wrote one or two novels of high quality which Holland was proud of and which were read in several languages, but why did not the people read novels of a high character as much as they did the poorer ones?

He decided that it was because people were physically underorganized and not whole in body and mind—like the Greeks, and became a physician.

He thought he was being thorough when he became a physician but soon found that he was not getting down to the causes after all, of people's not having whole bodies and fine senses capable of appreciating the finer things and soon came to the conclusion that for the most part what was the matter with their bodies was due to what was wrong in their habits of thought and in their minds, and became an alienist and founded the first psycho-therapeutic hospital in Holland.

He then found that in what was the matter with people's minds, he was still superficial and that people's minds were wrong because of the social and industrial conditions, ideals and institutions under which they were conceived and born, and had to live.

He then devoted himself to being a publicist and sociologist, had charge of bread for the poor during the great bread riots in Amsterdam and is now engaged in grappling nationally and internationally with industrial and civil war as the cause of all failures of men and nations to express and fulfill their real selves in the world.

Any nation that wants to be a great nation and to fulfill and express itself and be a first class nation will sooner or later find that it has to go on from one individual personal interest to another until it finds it is doing practically what Frederick Van Eeden did.

The only way to look out for, or to express oneself is to try to help everybody else to.

The Red Cross at the end of the war in making elaborate and international arrangements to run a pleasant and complimentary ambulance to the relief of disease in society that society was deliberately creating every day, instead of taking advantage at the end of the war of the trust all classes had in it, and taking advantage of the attention of forty nations, of society's best and noblest need, to keep society from causing the disease, chose to be superficial, faced away from its vision, fell behind the people, absconded from the leadership of the world.

The aches and pains of society with which since the war, the Red Cross so politely and elegantly deals, which with white kid gloves and without hurting our feelings it spends our money to relieve are all caused by the things we daily do to each other to make the money.

The vision of the common people in America recognizes this and recognized it instantly at the end of the war. The hearts of the men and women of America to-day, are at once too bitter, too deep and too hopeful not to instantly lose interest in a Red Cross which asks them to help run it as a beautiful superficial ambulance to the evils people are doing to one another instead of as a machine to help them not to do them.



V

MISSOURI

The best service America can render other nations to-day is be herself—fulfill and make the most of herself.

Senator Reed of Missouri would probably agree with me in this.

Where I differ with Senator Reed is in what America should propose to do to make the most of herself.

Senator Reed of Missouri judging from reports of his speeches in the Senate wants America in the present distraction of nations to stop thinking of the others, wizen up and be safe.

It seems to me that if America were to cut herself off from the rest of the world in its hour of need and just shrivel up into thinking of herself she would fail to fulfill herself and be like herself. She would just be like Senator Reed of Missouri.

Nothing could be less safe for America just now than to be like Senator Reed of Missouri.

Senator Reed puts forward a patriotism which is sincere but reckless. In the Senate of fifty states, Reed says "I'm from Missouri." In the congress of nations, Reed says "America ueber Alles." "The world for America." "America for Missouri." "Missouri for Me!"

For America just at the present moment in the world it has got to belong to, to turn away and stop being interested in the whole world and in everybody in it and in what everybody is going to do and be kept from doing—is like a man's shutting himself up in his own stateroom and being interested in his own port hole in a ship that is going down. It seems more sensible for America—even from the point of view of looking out for herself—not to go down with Senator Reed and moon around in his stateroom with him, but to be deeply interested in the whole ship, and in the engines, the wheelhouse and the pumps.

Patriotism that just shuts a nation up into a private stateroom nation by itself or that makes a nation just live with its own life preserver on, to preserve its own life preserver, can end either for Senator Reed or for America in but one way.

It's going to end in a plunge of the ship.

It is going to end in Senator Reed's running out, and running up to the deck the last minute.

I do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me that from the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle of Senator Reed of Missouri, tying Missouri like a millstone around his neck and then casting himself, Missouri and all, into the sea, while it may have a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be a practical or business-like example for his country.

I would like to show if I can that Senator Reed is wrong, and to present the alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the Air Line League.

The Germans have said (and have spent forty billion dollars in saying it) that democracy cannot be made to work. They sneered at us during the war and said to England, America and the rest of us that we could not make democracy work in running an army and keep up with Germans in war, and they are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work in industry and keep up with Germans in peace.

Forty nations half-believe that the Germans are right about industrial democracy, about democracy's not being a real, sincere, every day thing, a thing every man can have the good of all day every day of his life, and a good many people in America—extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the Germans.

If the Germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for America to pay very much attention just now to her industries. If America is living in a world as insane as Germany says it is, the one thing ahead for us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other forty nations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough and grimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations before they murder ours.

Everything must be geared and geared at once to the Germans' being right.

Or it must be geared and geared at once to their being wrong, to challenging the Germans—to telling them that they are as fooled about what industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what it could do in war.

The one thing we can do in America now to get the Germans or anybody else to believe us about industrial democracy is to make American democracy in industry whip German militarism in industry out of sight in our own labor unions and in our own factories. Then we will whip German militarism in industry out of the markets of the world.

If the quickest way for the American people to get a decent world—a world we want to do business in, is to whip German militarism in industry, and if the quickest way to whip German militarism abroad is to whip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up our factories, calling in our money and our men and settling down to work?

What is it that is scaring capital and labor away and holding back money and men?

The fear of the United States Senate.

The fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish money and men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the United States Senate and other governments not to be afraid of war.

The first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stop this fear.

The first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is to stop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know all about us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all day every day are making peace work between classes, better than war does. Making democracy work in business is the first condition, for America and the world of having any business.

It is not merely in behalf of other nations, but in behalf of ourselves, that I am advocating the direct action of the people welded together into one mass organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the three classes together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. The Air Line League is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as a standing-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, the voluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team work and mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all classes.

The whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrial democracy—in proving to people by advertising it to them and by dramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works.

It is because the Germans believe that men who have been forced against their wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more and compete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing team work because they understand and want to, that Germany is a second-class nation and that the German people have had to put up for forty years with being second-class human beings. They have a ruling majority of second-class human beings in Germany because they have the most complete and most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, for making second-class human beings out of practically anybody—arrangements for howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to do as a substitute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of making them want to do it.

Taking the line of least resistance—the mechanical course in dealing with human nature, makes America's being a second-class nation a matter of course.

What we have always been hoping for in America is that in due time we are going to be a first-class nation—a nation crowded with men and women who, wherever they have come from, or whether or not they were first class when they came, have been made first class by the way that all day every day in their daily work they have been treated by the rest of us when they come to us, and by the way they treat one another.



VI

A VICTORY LOAN ADVERTISEMENT

May 10, 1919

THE BOY WHO STUCK HIS FOOT IN

A small boy the other day walked up to one of those splendid marble pillars before the The Victory Arch and stuck his foot in.

I went over and stooped down and felt of the crust. It was about an inch and a half thick.

Then I stood in the middle of The Avenue, all New York boiling and swirling round me and looked up at The Arch of Victory—massive, majestic white and heavenly and soaring against the sky, and my heart ached!

Something made me feel suddenly close to the small boy.

What he wanted to know with his foot, was what this splendid Victory Arch he had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under, and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amounted to—how deep the glory had struck in.

I thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victory over the Germans ... forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing and eighty-seven million unconquered sullen Germans before our eyes in broad daylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying their bills! ... eighty-seven million Germans we have all got to devote ourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years.

I am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. Millions of Americans though in a politer way are doing it all this week. We want to poke through to the truth. We want something more than a theater property Victory Arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a real one!

We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest—to take down our lath and plaster Arch and put it up in marble instead.

We make this week a wager to the world,—a four and a half billion dollar dare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that the American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and hurrahs and tears and empty watery words—that we will chase Peace up, that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations—into the eternal underpinning of a world.

In the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning Victory Arch, all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake, with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim unconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through!

We will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory no small boy, no Bolshevik nation can stick its foot in!

* * * * *

When I corrected the proof of this advertisement—it was the last advertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York—it was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has melted away into roar.

But the truth I have spoken has not melted away.

What The Air Line League is for in its national and international organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to answer the boy who stuck his foot in.



BOOK V

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN



I

RECONSTRUCTION

I started this book taking the Crowd for my hero—that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the People.

I have proceeded upon two premises.

A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghost trying to have a family.

A body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeing what to do. It is without the spiritual means of self-expression and self-fulfillment. It is like a sewing-machine trying to have a family.

Some of my readers will remember a diagram in "Crowds" in which I divided people off roughly into

Inventors Artists Hewers or or See-ers Engineers Those who work Men who invent Men who invent out and finish things to do. ways and means what the see-ers and make it possible and engineers to do them. have begun.

I have based what I have to say in the next few chapters on this anatomy or rather this biology of a nation's human nature.

In the next few pages I am dealing not with the reconstruction but with the reconception of a nation.

Reconstruction is a dead difficult laborious thing to try to put off on a boundless superabundant ganglion of a hundred million lives like the American people.

In the crisis that confronts America to-day not only the most easy, but the most natural and irresistible way for this nation to be a great nation is to fall in love.

I am enlarging in these next few pages upon how crowds and experts—that is: crowds and their men of vision and engineers can come to an understanding and get together.

I wish to state certain particular things I think are going to be done by the people—that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawn into the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their great hour in history, a great people may be born again.



II

NATIONAL BIOLOGY

A man in being born the first time is the invention of others. Being born again is the finding of oneself, oneself,—the spiritual invention of one's own life.

Being born again is far more intelligent than being born the first time.

All one has to do to see this, is to look about and see the people who have done it.

When one is being born the first time one does not even know it. One is not especially intelligent the first time and could not really help it. And nobody else could help it.

When one is being born again it takes all one can know and all one can know and do, and all everybody around one knows, and all everybody around can do, to help one do it. In 1776 when America was being born first, America did not have the slightest idea of what was happening. It has taken one hundred and forty-four birthdays to guess.

A nation is born the first time with its eyes shut.

But in this terrible 1920 when America is being born again, she can only manage to be born again by knowing all about herself, by disrobing herself to be born again, by a supreme colossal act of self-devotion, self-discovery, self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, naked before God, reading the hearts of forty nations, a thousand years and the unborn, and knowing herself,—slipping off her old self and putting on her new self.



III

THE AIR LINE LEAGUE

The first thing a spirit in this world usually does to find a body is to select a father and mother. The American people if it is to be embodied and have the satisfaction and power of making itself felt and expressing itself, can only do so by following the law of life.

A hundred million people can only get connected with a body, acquire a presence—find itself as a whole, the way each one of the hundred million people did alone.

In a nation's being born again three types of mind are necessarily involved.

The minds in America that create or project, the inventors.

The minds that bring up.

The minds that conceive and bring to the birth.

These three classes of spiritual forces are concerned in America in making the people stop being a ghost, in making their American people as an idea, physically fit.

The first thing to be arranged for America to make the people quit being a ghost in The White House, is to form into three bodies or organizations, these three, groups of men—make these three groups of men class-conscious, self-conscious, conscious of their own power and purpose in America—and have everybody in America conscious of them. I propose three organizations to stand for these three life-forces, three organizations which will act—each of which will act with the other two and will follow out for a nation, as individuals do for individuals, the law of life—of producing and reproducing the national life.

The minds that are creative will discover and project a national idea for the people—the inventors, will act as one group.

The minds that conceive and bring the idea to the birth, that bring the idea to pass, called engineers, will act as another, and the minds that teach, bring up, draw out and apply the idea and relate the idea to life—will act as another.

I propose a club of fifty thousand creative men be selected and act together—that a nation may be conceived.

I propose that fifty thousand engineers or how-men, men who think out ways and means, be selected and act together, that the nation that is conceived may be born.

These two Clubs will have their national headquarters together in a skyscraper hotel of their own in New York and will act together—in bringing an idea for the people into the world.

The third Club—twenty or thirty million people, on the scale of the Red Cross—in ten thousand cities, will apply and educate the idea, bring it up and put it through.

* * * * *

What one's soul is for, I suppose, is that one can use it when one likes, to contemplate and to enjoy an Idea.

What one has a body for with reference to an idea is to take it up, try it out and put it through.

The Air Line League proposes to cooerdinate these three functions and operate as a three in one club.

The idea would be to call the first of the clubs, the club of inventors, the Look-Up Club. The second, a club of how-men and engineers, the Try-Out Club, and the third—the operating club of the vast body of the people taking direct action and putting the thing through locally and nationally would be called The Put-Through Clan.

The Air Line League through these three clubs will undertake to help the people to stop being an abstraction, to swear off from being a Ghost in their own house. The great working majority of the American people—of the men and the women who made the Red Cross so effective during the war, which came to the rescue of the people of the nation with the people of other nations, will come to the rescue now, during the war the people are having and that the classes of people are having with one another.



IV

THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP

Sec. 1. For Instance.

Such a crisis as this nation has now, Springfield, Massachusetts, had once.

Springfield a few years ago, all in a few weeks, threw up the chance of being Detroit because two or three automobile men who belonged in Springfield and wanted to make Springfield as prosperous as Detroit, were practically told to go out to Detroit and find the men who would have the imagination to lend them the money—to make Springfield into a Detroit.

Naturally when they found bankers with imagination in Detroit they stayed there.

What happened to Springfield is what is going to happen to America if we do not make immediate national arrangements for getting men who have imagination in business in this country, men who can invent manpower, to know each other and act together.

The twenty-five hundred dollars Frank Cousins of Detroit recognized Henry Ford with, a few years ago, he gave back the other day to Henry Ford for twenty-nine million dollars.

People say as if that was all there was to it, that the fate of this nation to-day turns on our national manpower.

But what does our national man-power turn on?

It turns on people's knowing and knowing in the nick of time, a man when they see one.

Man-power in a democracy like ours turns on having inventors, bankers and crowds act together.

Sometimes banks hold things back by being afraid to cooeperate with inventors or men of practical imagination.

This is called conservatism.

Sometimes it is the crowds and laborers who hold things back by being afraid to cooeperate with leaders or men of imagination.

But the fate of all classes turns upon our having men of creative imagination believed in by men who furnish money, and believed in by men who furnish labor.

The idea of the Look-Up Club is that men of creative imagination shall be got together, shall be made class-conscious, shall feel and use their power themselves and put it where other people can use it.

How much time and how many years of producing-power would it have saved America if Alexander Graham Bell had known or could have had ready to appeal to, America's first hundred thousand picked men of imagination, when he was trudging around ringing doorbells in Boston, trying to supply people with imagination enough to see money in telephones?

If William G. McAdoo, when he had invented with his tunnels, a really great conception of the greater New York, and was fighting to get people in New York to believe in it, and act on it, had had an organization of one hundred thousand picked men of imagination in the nation at large to appeal to—one hundred thousand men picked out by one another to put a premium on constructive imagination when they saw some, instead of a penalty on it, how much time would it have saved New York and saved McAdoo? How much time would a national Club like this save this nation to-day and from now on in its race with the Germans?

Why should our men of practical creative imagination to-day waste as much time running around and asking permission of people who had none, as McAdoo had to?

* * * * *

If a hundred thousand silver dollars—just ordinary silver dollars—were put together in a row in New York on a sidewalk, everybody going by would have imagination at once about the one hundred thousand silver dollars and what could be done with them.

But put one hundred thousand picked men—or men of exceptional power together in a row in New York—and why is it everybody is apt to feel at first a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around the corner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortal human beings?

I wish people would have as much imagination about what could be done with one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got together from the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundred thousand silver dollars.

This is one of the first things the Look-Up Club is for, to get people to be inspired by a hundred thousand men put together, in the same way that they are by a hundred thousand dollars put together.

* * * * *

I went out last night and walked up the Great White Way and looked at the little flock of hotels that are standing to-day on the site of my faith in these hundred thousand men—the site of the new hotel—the little sleeping shelf in the roar of New York for the hundred thousand men to have on Broadway.

I stood and looked at the five or six hotels now standing there waiting to be torn down for us, and —— told me that the seventeen parcels of land in the block that he had labored on forty-seven people to get them to make up their minds to put their lots together, were worth only a million and a half of dollars, either to them or to anybody else, while they were making up their minds to let their lots be put together. And now that he had got their minds made up for them and had got all these foolish, distracted seventeen parcels of land together into one, the land instead of being worth one million and a half dollars, was appraised by —— the other day as worth four and a half million dollars.

The same is true of the hundred thousand men of practical imagination scattered in five thousand cities, twiddling on the fate of a nation alone.

The same thing is going to happen to the value of the men that has happened to the separate lumps of sand and clay they called real estate in New York.

What can I manage to accomplish alone in trying to get to Chicago to-morrow morning?

All I could do alone would be to walk.

As it is, I stand in line a minute at a window in the Grand Central Station, make a little arrangement with several hundred thousand men and with a slip of paper I move to Chicago while I go to sleep.

This power for each man of a hundred thousand men is what I am offering in this little book to the nine hundred and ninety thousand others.

What will we do, what ideas will we carry out?

Get one hundred thousand picked men together and what can they not do, what ideas can they not carry out?

What is hard, what is priceless, is getting the men and getting the men together. Everybody who has ever done anything knows this.

What we are doing is not to get values together, but the men who keep creating the values.

The men who have created already the values of five thousand cities, shall now create values for a nation.

I am not writing to people—to the hundred thousand men who are going to be nominated to the Look-Up Club—to ask them whether they think this idea of mine—of having the first hundred thousand men of vision of this country in a Club, is going through or not.

I am writing them and asking them if—if it is going through—they want to belong to it.

Very few men can speak with authority—even if they would, as to what the other ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men will possibly do or not do with my idea in this book. But any man can speak with authority and speak immediately when he gets to the end of it, as to how he feels himself, whether he wants or likes the idea, and wants to count one to bring the idea to pass.

I speak up for myself in this book. Anybody can see it. If every man will confine himself in the same way, and will stake off himself and attend to himself at the end of this book and say what he wants—we will all get what we want.

The proposition looks rather big, mathematically, but looked at humanly, it is a simple straight human-nature question. All I really ask of each man who is nominated is,

"If the first hundred thousand men who have imagination in business are being selected and brought together out of all the other business men in America, do you want to be one of them? Who are the ten, twenty or fifty men of practical vision in business—especially young men, you think ought not to be left out?"

It is all an illusion about numbers and sizes of things.

The way to be national is to be personal, for each man to take sides with the best in himself.

Suddenly across a nation we look in a hundred thousand faces.

Sec. 2. Why the Look-Up Club Looks Up.

The Constitution does not provide for an Imagination Department for the United States Government.

It has judicial, executive and legislative departments, but a department made up of men of vision to create, conceive and reconceive, go deeper and see further than law and restraints can go, does not exist in our Government.

We have a Judicial Department to decide on whether what is born has a right to live—a Legislative Department to pass rules under on how it shall be obliged to live—and an Executive Department to make it mind—but the department to create and to conceive for the people is lacking.

Government at best is practically a dear uncle or dear maiden-aunt institution.

Government as a physical expression is without functions of reproduction.

Government—contrary to the theory of the Germans—from the point of view of sheer power in projecting and determining the nature and well-being of men—the fate of men and the world—is superficial, is a staid, standardized, unoriginal affair—devoted to ready-made ideas like the Red Cross during the war.

This is what is the matter with a Government's posing in this or any other nation as a live body for the people.

The spontaneous uprising of business men during the war—the spectacle of the dollar a year men overwhelming and taking over the government, the breaking in of the National Council of Defense—the spontaneous combustion of millions of free individuals into one colossal unit like the Red Cross—all the other outbreaks of the creative vital power of the superior people of the nation, all point to the fact that when new brain tracks are called for, the natural irresistible way is to find individual persons who have them, who make them catching to other individual persons, and who then give body to them across the nation.

Its whole nature and action of a Government tend to make Government and most of the people in it mechanical.

In the nature of things and especially in the nature of human nature, this nation—if its new ideas and its new brain tracks are to come to anything at all, they must have a spontaneous willful and comparatively free origin and organization of their own.

Hence the Look-Up Club cooeperating with the Try-Out Club to act as an informal Imagination Department for the United States.



V

THE TRY-OUT CLUB TRIES OUT

Sec. 1. I + You = We.

If Darius the Great had put the eunuchs of his court in charge as Special Commissioners for controlling the social evil in Babylon, they would have made very sad work of what they had to do because they would not have understood what it was all about. They would not have had the insight necessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project in human nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles and go ahead.

What makes a man a man is the way he takes all the knowledge, the penetrating lively enriching knowledge his selfishness gives—his vision of what he wants for himself, and all the broadening enriching knowledge his unselfishness gives—his imagination about what he wants for others, and pours the two visions together.

The law of business is the law of biology—action—reaction—interaction. I + You = We.

It is getting to be reckless for the people in other nations to sit around and gossip about how bad it is for the Germans to be so selfish. It is reckless for capital to gossip about how selfish labor is—and for labor to putter away trying to make capital pure and noble like a labor union.

There are far worse things than selfishness in people.

Being fooled about oneself is worse because it is more difficult to get at, meaner, more cowardly and far more dangerous for others.

* * * * *

This chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket while inhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twenty other men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. When I was swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled off with me—a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write this chapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt and then suddenly saw I might want it too and passed it to me.

He summed up in three seconds the whole situation of what democracy is, the whole question between the Germans and the other peoples of the earth.

With one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of a world.

His selfishness, his own personal accumulated experience with an egg, made him see that he wanted salt in it.

His unselfishness made him see that I must be sitting there wanting salt in an egg as much as he did.

So he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what his unselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had the salt together.

Incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as I was wishing somebody would before I handed it in) the idea I am trying to express in it. This in a small way is a perfect working model of what I call civilization. Unselfishness in business is not a civilization at all. It is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven.

Imagination about other people based upon imagination about what one wants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules the world.

The appetites in people which make them selfish supply them with such a rich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if they really use this equipment in a big business way for getting it for them, no one can compete with them.

A righteous man if he has any juice in him at all and is not a mere giver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating, self-give-up, self-go-without person—is a selfish person and an unselfish person mixed. What he calls his character is the proportion in which he chooses to mix himself.

Half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the passions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking the selfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way other antagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together.

People in other nations are as selfish in their way as the Germans are in theirs—capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. The fundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility that makes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose, in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give them what they want.

It takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slump down without noticing him into being an altruist with him. Any man can be a selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist—if he does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man has and all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of God and the love of one's kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to give something to and leave alone.

This is what I call the soul of true business and of live salesmanship.

I put it forward as the moral or spiritual basis on which the engineers in the Try-Out Club, of the Air Line League, propose to act.

The way for America to meet the German militaristic and competitive idea of business and of the business executive—the idea that brought on the war, is for America and the rest of the world to put forward something and put forward something quick, as a substitute for it, sell to themselves, sell to one another and to the Germans before it is too late, a substitute for it.

The American engineers of business or great executives—the how-men and inventors of how to bring things to pass, must put forward the pursuit of mutual interests in the largest sense, pursuit of mutual interests generously and finely conceived, the selfishness and unselfishness mixed, as this substitute.

Sec. 2. The Engineer At Work.

The crowning glory of a nation is the independence and the spiritedness of its labor.

I rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made it impossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who do not love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who have nothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the job catching—who cannot get men to work for them except by offering them more money than they can earn.

The fact that no man is so cheap he can be had by merely being paid money—the fact that no man is so unimportant but he has to be approached as a fellow human being and has to be persuaded—and given something human and real, is the first faint flush of hope for our modern world. It lets in an inkling at last that the industrial world is going to be a civilization.

* * * * *

If men were made of india-rubber, or reinforced concrete, or wood or steel, no one could hope for better or more efficient men to manage big business than the typical big business men of the phase of American industry now coming to an end.

But of course in the crisis business is facing now, which turns on the putting forward of men who understand and can play masterfully upon the motives, temptations and powers of ordinary human nature the typical man we know at the Mahogany Desk, who has a machine imagination, who sees men as dots and dreams between piles of dollars and rows of machines, is a singularly helpless person and can only hold his own in his own business by giving way and putting forward in place of himself, men who are masters in human nature, experts and inventors in making men want to work.

The difference between the business world that is passing out and the one that is coming in, is that the masters of the world who have been proud before, to be called the captains of industry, are going to think of themselves and want others to think of them as the fathers of industry. The man who orders can no longer order. People will only work and work hard for the man who fills them with new conceptions, who stirs the depths of their lives with desire and hope.

The reason that reactionary capital is having trouble with labor, is that it is putting forward men who order instead of putting forward fathers and inventors.

The reason that the I. W. W. and other labor organizations are having trouble with capital, is that their leaders are not inventors. They are tired conventional men governed by automatic preconceptions, merely doing over again more loudly and meanly against society, the things that capital has already tried and has had to give up because it could not make them work.

Only inventors—executives who invent and fertilize opportunity for others—men who invent ways of making men see values—men who create values and who present people with values they want to work out, are going to get anything—either money or work, from now on, out of anybody.

Sec. 3. The Engineer and the Game.

The time has gone by when a man can say any longer he is not in business for the fun of it. He finds he cannot long compete with the men about him who are, with engineers and others who are in business for the great game of producing results, of doing difficult things, of testing their knowledge, their skill and their strength.

Making men want to work has come to be the secret of success in modern business and the employer who has nothing but wages to offer, nothing in his own passion for work which he can make catching to others, can only get second-rate, half-hearted men and plodders about him. A factory in which the workmen merely work for wages, cannot hope to compete with a factory fitted up with picked men proud of their work.

It is not going to be necessary to scold people into not being selfish, or whine people into loving their work. A man who is so thin-blooded that the one way he can get work out of himself is to make money—the man who grows rich by ordering, by gobbling, and by hiring gobblers and plodders, cannot function under the new conditions. The guarantee that we are going to have a civilization now, that business with joy in it and personal initiative and motive in the work itself, is going to take possession of the markets of the world is based on the fact that labor has to have its imagination touched in order to work efficiently, and an entirely new level and new type of man—the man who can touch men's imaginations, is being put forward in business to do it.

The Engineer is going to have somewhat the quieting effect upon institutions and upon the spirit of unrest in the people, when he is known to be in control of the great employers and has made them dependent on him, that the matter of fact and rather conclusive taxi meter in a cab has on the man inside, who wants to quarrel with his cabman.

A business world largely in control of men who have the spirit and the technique of engineers will make unrest more awkward, will make the red flag look stranger, feel stranger and lonelier every day.

Sec. 4. The American Business Sport.

If any man ever again in this world finds like Methuselah, the secret of eternal youth, the secret will be found to consist in being, I suspect, what the best American business man already is—what I would call a fine all-round religious sport.

Sport has certain well-known disadvantages. So has religion. The man who once grasps the secret of modern life as practiced by a really big engineering genius, insists upon having his business allowed all the advantages of sport and religion both.

To have something on which one spends ten hours a day, which has all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a sport, and all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a religion, is a find.

The typical engineer, like any other thorough-going man treats what he does as a sport. That is, he puts his religion for the fun of it into his business. His business becomes the continual lark of making his religion work. He dramatizes in it his belief in human nature and in God, his belief that human nature is not crazy and that God has not been outwitted in allowing so much of it to exist.

It has looked especially reckless during the last four years for God to let human nature try to keep on being human nature any longer. Now is the time of all others, and Germany is now the country of all others, to show with a whole world looking on how essentially sound human nature really is, and how being human (especially being human in a thing which everybody cares about and which everybody notices, like business) really works.

There has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before in history, the chance America has now of dramatizing to Germans, and dramatizing through the Germans to everybody, an idea of business efficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its very substance, peace come into the world.

People shall not put up with mere leagues and truces, arbitration boards, fight-dove-tailings. They shall not sit at tables and twirl laws at people—to make them peaceful....

* * * * *

The only men in modern business who can now hope to get to the top are the men who are in a position to hire men who do not work for wages.

Making men want to work is the secret of the engineer in production.

The secret of modern industry is the secret of the man who loves his work. To the sporting man, the gentleman, the man who loves the game, the prize goes now in competition with Gobblers and Plodders.

The Engineer or Winner instead of the Compeller of Men is going to draw out new kinds and new sizes of laboring men in industry at every point. The Engineer we count on in the Try-Out Club is the man who superimposes upon the normal and suitable motive in his business of being selfish enough to make money to keep the business up, the motive of the gentleman, the professional man, the artist, the engineer, the sport—the motive of doing a thing for its own sake, and because one likes it.

The expression "I am not in business for the fun of it" is going by.

What we are going to do with the mere half-alive profit-plodders—the mere wage gobblers, is not to improve them by making moral eyes at them, or discipline them by putting down lids of laws over them or by firing taxes at them. We are going to discipline men like these by driving them into the back streets of business, as anaemic, second-rate and inefficient men in bringing things to pass.

A man who in a tremendous and absorbing adventure like real business is so thin-blooded or thick-headed that all he can get work out of himself for is money, will only be able to get the plodding kind of second-rate workers to work for him, i.e., he will be able to get only plodders who merely work for money, by paying higher wages than other people have to—by paying higher wages than they can earn.

In other words, civilized business, business with joy in it and personal initiative and human interest in the work itself, is going to drive uncivilized plodding half-hearted business out of the markets of the world.

The men who are expressing through the hearts of the people their best, more lasting and more powerful selves, in business, who are gathering around them other people who are doing it, the men who try out their best selves in business—who invent ways as executives to make their best selves work for them and for others, are having to-day before our eyes, the world placed in their hands. Men who represent vital forces like these, are as solid, unconquerable in human life as the force of gravity, the multiplication table they are. They find themselves dominating like radium, penetrating like fresh air, drawing all things to them like the sky, the stars, like spring, like the love of women and of children and the love of Christ.

The idea of having imagination about a customer and studying a customer as a means of winning his trade, his personal enthusiasm and confidence, is not considered sentimental.

Having imagination about one's employees so that they will work in the same spirit as the other partners, is no longer considered sentimental except by the type of employer now being driven to the wall because he has no technique for making anybody want to work for him. As things go to-day it is the leader in industry who is trying to keep up a fine comfortable feeling of being a captain of industry—the man who feels he owns everything and owns everybody in sight, who is visionary and sentimental, who is the Don Quixote of business now.

The employer who feels superior to individuals, who looks at men as dots and dreams—and who expects to deal with a man subconsciously and get on with him as if he were not there—the employer who is an absentee in soul and body, and who gives an order to his men and then goes off and leaves them like pumps, hydraulic rams, that of course cannot help slaving away for him until they are stopped—the employer who during the first stupid stages of our new machine-industry, has been allowed to be prominent for a time, now stands exposed as too wooden and incompetent to conduct the intimately personal, difficult and human institution a factory has got to be if it succeeds (in a country with men like ours) in producing goods.

From now on the big man in business is the man who gets work out of people that money cannot buy. The man who cannot get the work that money cannot buy in a few years now, is not going to stand the ghost of a chance.

People will not believe you if you tell them what the world was like when he did.

* * * * *

Mastering others so that they have to do what one says is superficial, merely a momentarily successful-looking way a man has of being a failure. This master has been tried. He has failed. He is the half-inventor of Bolshevism.

The real master is not the man who masters men, but who makes them master themselves. The masterful man in getting out of people what he wants, is the man who makes the people want him to have what he wants—makes them keep giving it to him fresh out of their hearts every day.

The wholesale national and international criticism the Red Cross workers made in the latter months of the Red Cross activities, of the touch-the-button and hand-down-the-order methods of many of the business men who controlled the activities at home and abroad—of the millions of workers in the Red Cross, has been itself a kind of national education in what certain types of American business men placed in power fell inadvertently into, in trying to treat millions of free people on the employer and employee plan.

But these men and their whole idea are going by. We are getting down to the quick, to the personal and the human, to the sense all good workers have of listening and being listened to and of not being overridden. Big business after this is going to be big in proportion as it makes people feel—employees and customers both, that they are listened to, that they are being dealt with as individual human beings and not as fractions of individuals, or as part of some big vague bloodless lump of humanity.

Studying one's customers so as to make them want to trade with one is here to stay.

To speak of studying with the best expert skill in the country one's employees so as to make them want to work, as humanity, is not quite bright. It is not humanity. It is business.

Making people trade with one instead of making them want to trade with one is recognized as second-rate business. So is making people work for one instead of making them want to work. The business man who depends for his business, on customers, or on workers who want to get away and are going to the first minute they can, naturally goes under first.



VI

THE PUT-THROUGH CLAN PUTS THROUGH

Sec. 1. What.

We are a people who think in action. Our way of making other nations think and of thinking ourselves is to do things.

The people who swept into and took over the Red Cross, who dramatized the American people in the war abroad—are the people who are going to make war at home impossible.

The big spiritual or material fact about the Red Cross is that it has been a dramatic organization, that for four years it has been an organization for acting out the feelings, desires, wills and beliefs of a great people toward men who were fighting for liberty.

The Red Cross has been a great emotional epic play, an expression in action, of the heart and brain of a mighty nation.

Emotions by great peoples have been spectacular before, and they have been sentimental and they have been occupied with enjoying themselves.

But in the Red Cross twenty million people have been as inspired as Saint Francis and as practical as a Steel Trust in the same breath.

The vision of the future of the Put-Through Clan that lies ahead is that it shall keep on dramatizing these qualities in the American character at home, selecting things to do which shall dramatize our people to one another, to themselves and to the people of other nations.

* * * * *

The way to make democracy work is for the people to use their brains, their spirit and their imagination to do team-work with the inventors and engineers who help express their democracy for them.

The platform of the Put-Through Clan is the right of all to be waited on.

Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled capital.

Skilled capital has a right to skilled labor in return.

The new and stupendous force in modern life from now on is to be the skilled consumer—the organization of the consumer-group to cooeperate with skilled capital and skilled labor, to make it impossible as it is now, for unskilled capital, capital which has not the skill to win the public, or to win its own labor, and for unskilled labor, labor which cannot earn its money and takes it whether it earns it or not, to compel the consumer by force and by holdups to buy goods they do not want at prices they are not worth from men with whom they do not want to deal. The skilled consumer will organize his skill and deal with the people he wants.

All the people of this country—the consumers (the real employers of all employers) have to do, is to whisper in one national whisper through a hundred thousand grocery stores and other stores what kind of employers and workmen, what kind of goods and factories they like, and the buyers and consumers of America instead of taking what is poked out at them because they have to, and being the fools and the slaves of capital and labor, will get with a whisper what they request, and we will return and will let employers and workmen return, to the status of human beings.

Sec. 2. How.

The test of a man's truth is his technique.

What Mathias Alexander believes about conscious control and making self-discipline work is true because he does not have to say it. He dramatizes it.

Alexander is right in his fundamental idea of giving conscious control to people through new brain tracks toward their bodies because they get up and walk away from him when they have been with him, with their new brain tracks on. New habits—new psycho-physical habits, like Culebra cuts are put right through them.

The man who conceives or invents may be wrong, the man who experiments or tries out, may need to be watched, but the man who puts through is inviolable.

The program, the spirit and the function of the Put-Through Clan in a town, is to embody truth so baldly and with such a shameless plainness that no matter how hard they try, people cannot tug away from it.

* * * * *

There are three courses we might take in the Put-Through Clan in dealing with our town. (1) We can stand for disciplining capital and labor into shape by passing laws and heaping up penalties. (2) We can let them see how much better they can make things by sicking them on to each other and having them discipline each other. (3) We can make fun of both of them until they make fun of themselves and each class begins disciplining itself. Then general self-discipline will set in. We propose to indulge—each group of us in the Put-Through Clan—the labor group in the town, the employer group and the public group, in self-disciplining ourselves, until the thing is made catching out of sheer shame and decency in others.

Sec. 3. Psycho-Analysis.

The scientific basis for psycho-analysis for a town, or for a labor union, or for a Republican or Democratic Party, is found in the facts that have been stated by Mathias Alexander in his book and demonstrated by his work.

Professor John Dewey in his introduction to Mr. Alexander's book speaks of what Mr. Alexander stands for, as Completed Psycho-analysis.

As Alexander's technique for pulling one particular man, soul and body, together, is precisely the technique I have in mind for pulling a nation together, I want to dwell on it a moment longer before applying it to the Put-Through Clan.

The first thing a man is always fooled about is his own body and in everything else he is fooled about, he just branches out from that.

The Put-Through Clan proceeds upon the idea that this is as true of his political or social or industrial body to which he belongs as it is of his first one.

Reform must be self-reform first.

If it is true that the majority of ideas and decisions most people think they make with their minds are really made for them and handed up to them by their bodies—if it is true that what people quite commonly use their minds for is to keep up appearances, to give rational-looking excuses and reasons for their wanting what their stomachs and livers and nerves make them want, the way to persuade people nowadays is to do what Christ did—get their minds out from under the domination of their bodies.

If it is true that when a man goes to his dentist with a toothache, he finds he does not know which side of his mouth it is on, it is likely to be still more true of all the rest of his ideas about himself—his ideas about his ideas.

If everything about us, about most of us is more or less like this, as Alexander says—wires or nerves all twisted, sensory impressions upside down, half of what is inside our bodies mislaid half the time, the way to change people's minds is to change them toward the bodies they are with and that they are nearest to, first. Then we can branch out and educate others—even educate ourselves.

Millions of grown people, in religion, business and politics to-day in America can be seen thinking automatically of the world about them in the terms of themselves, in the terms of their own souls sadly mixed up with their own bodies. We all know such people. The world is just an extension, a kind of annex or wing, built out from themselves full of reflections from their own livers, and fitted up throughout with air castles, dungeons, twilights, sunrises, after-glows, from their own precious interior decorations and bowels and mercies.

The basic fact about human nature the Put-Through Clan acts on is the simplest thing in the world. We are always having moments of seeing it. We all see how true it is in babies we have personally known. We recognize it without a qualm in a baby, that his emotions and reflections about life, about Time and Eternity, and about things in general are just reflections of a milk bottle he has just had, or of a milk bottle he has not just had and wants to know why.

I have often tried to translate a baby's cry in his crib, into English. As near as I can come to it, it is

"I don't think my mother knows WHO I AM!"

What a baby is really doing is disciplining other people.

Not so very different after all from Senator Lodge pivoting as he has for six months a whole world on himself and on his having his own little way with it, disciplining the rest of the Senate, forty nations and a President, and everybody in sight—except himself.

If a patient nation could put him in a crib, everybody would understand. Many people apparently are deceived by his beard, or by his degree at Harvard, or other clothes. But it is the same thing. What is really happening to him—to Senator Lodge is really a kind of spiritual neuritis. He is cramped, or as the vulgar more perspicuously and therefore more fittingly and elegantly put it, his mind is stuck on himself. He is imbedded in his own mereness and now as anybody can see there is nothing that can be done by anybody with anything, not with a whole world for a crowbar, to pry Lodge off himself.

Most of us know other people like this. Most of us have moments and subjects on which as we have remembered afterwards we have needed to be pried off. The same is true, of course, of a political body like the Republican or Democratic Party, or of a labor union.

The best that most of us—whole towns of us—can do is to get up as we propose for a whole town to do in the Put-Through Clan on the same platform, stand there cheerfully all together on the great general platform and admit in chorus sweetly, that we are all probably this blessed moment and every day being especially fooled more or less by ourselves about ourselves, about the things nearest to us—especially our own personal bodies and political and industrial souls and bodies. The only difference between people who are put into insane asylums and those of us who are still allowed from day to day a little longer to stay out, is that we can manage, if we try, some of us, to be more limber about calling ourselves fools in time. For all practical purposes in this world, it may be said that the people who are wise and deep about keeping themselves reminded that they may be crazy any minute, are sane.

What happens to people—to most people when they are grown up is that they stop being simple and honest like a baby. But they all have practically the same essential thought when they are being disagreeable. They are trying to make the world around them toe the line to their own interior decorations. What they think, what they feel, what they do in the little back parlors of their own minds must be daubed on the ceiling of the world.

The joy of toleration, of new ideas, of rows and tiers of their non-selves, and of their yet-selves reaching away around them that they can still know and share and can still take over and have the use of in addition to the mere self they already have, they hold off from.

This is where the baby has the advantage of them.

Sec. 4. Psycho-Analysis for a Town.

When a man thinks of himself and wants other people to think of him as an institution—as a kind of church—of course it makes him very unhappy to believe he is wrong, but the minute he thinks of himself as a means to an end, thinks of his personality as a tool placed in his hand for getting what he wants or what a world wants—the minute a man thinks of himself as a kind of spirit-auger, or chisel of the soul, or as a can-opener to truth, which if it is a little changed one way or the other, or held differently, will suddenly work—changing himself toward himself, and believing what he would rather not, becomes like any other invention or discovery, a creative pleasure.

In saying that the main thing the Put-Through Clan is for in a town, is to act as town-headquarters for the town's seeing through itself, as a means of making the town the best, the happiest town in the state—as a means of making it a town that deserves anything it wants, I am merely saying that the act of self-invention—the act of recreation once entered into as a habit is so refreshing and so extraordinary in itself, and so practical in its results, that when people once see how it really works—when towns and parties and industrial groups get once started in self-discipline, in self-confession, in psycho-analysis and in taking advantage of opposite ideas—there is going to be an epidemic in this country, a flu of truth.

A whole city or a whole town indulging in psycho-analysis finds it less embarrassing and not more embarrassing than one man does.

When it becomes the thing for a city or for a capital or labor group to see through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the main thought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about it will be a wonder they had not thought of it and done it before.

And it will be economical, too, if people take the seeing through them that has to be done by some one, and do it themselves.

Three per cent of the conveniences—the public X-ray machines for keeping people from being fooled about themselves will be enough.

The minute we begin turning the X-ray outfit around and begin trying it modestly on ourselves, a small cheap outfit will do.

It is a mere phonograph-record to say that nobody likes self-discipline. What people do not like, is trying it, or getting started.

There is a sense in which it is possible for a town like Northampton—twenty-five thousand people, to have—if it once gets started, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. It is easier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole town disciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, Would be easier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it.

Why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himself is doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorry for him?

No one really thinks of being sorry for Marconi or Edison or Wilbur Wright, or Bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detective like Sherlock Holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is the way he steals a march on himself.

The very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or a discoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way he keeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looks back into the windows he has looked out of all his life.

People must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who does this and of thinking he is being noble and doing right.

It has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble when they are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward in the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful idea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all over the country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as a substitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of originality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving to get everything one wants. I am offering self-discipline because it works. People who get so low in their minds and who so little see how self-discipline works that they actually have the face to feel noble and beautiful about it when they are having some, cannot make it work. They must be leaving most of theirs out....

The psychology of self-discipline is the psychology of the inventor.

The inventor is the man who lives in the daily habit of criticising his own mind, and disciplining himself. The source of his creative and original power is that more than other men he keeps facing necessities in himself, keeps casting off old selves, old preconceptions and breaking through to new ones.

The spiritual and intellectual source of the grip of the inventor upon modern life, is that he is a scientist in managing his own human nature and his own mind, that he had a relentless rejoicing habit of disciplining himself.

In every renaissance, revival or self-renewal the world has had, people have had the time of their lives. The great days of history have been the eras of great candid truth-facing, self-discipline. Self-discipline and self-discovery go together.

There is a greater return on the investment in being born again, in getting what one wants, than in anything else in the world.

If one sees through himself, he can see through anybody. It explains and clears up one's enemies and clears one's own life for action.

Sec. 5. To-morrow.

I am not writing a beautiful wistful work on how I wish human nature would work or hope it is going to work, in America.

I am recording a grim, matter-of-fact, irresistible, implacable law in the biology of progress.

I am not nagging, teasing or apologizing. I am not saying what I say as religion or as the Lord said unto Moses, or even "as it seems to me."

I am not dealing in what I want to have happen.

I am dealing in truth as a force and not as a property.

I am foretelling what has got to happen. People who do not believe it will have to get out of the way of it.

The conscious control of capital, the conscious control of labor, the conscious control of the public group—the arrival and the victory of the men who get their way by self-control and who are invited by all to have control of others because they have control of themselves, is a law of nature.

I am not preaching or teasing.

I am not asking people's permission in this book for certain events.

This book is not an attempt to answer the question, "What is day after to-morrow's news?"

It is put forth as a prospectus of what has got to happen.

The truth is taking hold of us and is seizing us all.

It is for us to say.

This book is a scenario of a play for a hundred million people to put on the stage, and for five hundred million people to act.

Sec. 6. Who.

People will be unfair to themselves and unfair to me and will cheat a nation if any attempt should ever be made to take this book as a program—a program for anybody—and not a spirit.

The spirit is the program, and the people who naturally gather around the spirit and who secrete it will have to be the ones to embody and give it in the Put-Through Clan, its local and its national expression.

Picked persons, picked out by all for their known temperament and gift for team-work—that is for their put-through spirit or spirit of thoroughness in getting the victory over themselves and combining themselves with others, will need to be the dominating people.

The essence of the Clan is that it is to be vivified and penetrated throughout with personality, and with respect for personality.

This means automatically that the Put-Through Clan is not going to be dominated by people who will make it a moral-advice, do-you-good, hand-you-down-welfare institution.

The essential point in its program is self-discipline and any discipline there may be for others will wait until it is asked for and will be a by-product of the discipline we are giving ourselves.

In the operation of the Clan there are certain persons and types of persons to whom the Clan is always going to be distinctly partial. It is never going to treat people alike. People are not—for the time being—alike and are going to be treated as they are.

Democracy is impossible as long as people are not treated with discrimination—as long as people cannot feel and do not like to feel that what they are, makes a difference in what they get.

It is obvious that to begin with that the Put-Through Clan, composed as it is to be of the leading people in all groups—the people whose time has a premium placed on it in their own private business, will have a regular practice of giving the most attention and giving the most power, approval and backing to those persons with whom the least time brings the greatest return.

This means automatically extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists in industry in getting what they want through the Put-Through Clan, will have to stand further down the queue than others.

I am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, as representative—possibly more possibly less of others in the Clan. Any scintilla or fleck of truth I can pick off from a revolutionary, I take but I will not take him. The same is true of a standpatter or reactionary. I want to know all he knows. If I take his truth I can use it, if I take him I will find him cumbersome. Life is too short to spend ten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one who could listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts and actions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions.

People who do not listen—extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backing they want in the Put-Through Clan, to have what comes last and what is left over from the day's work.

It is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as a little attention goes a great way.

If people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. Besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen—to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others—people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous.

People who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally be picked out by the Put-Through Clan as the last people they will hurry with.

Extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have to be carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritual town farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen of thinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat the rest of us as fellow human beings.

* * * * *

On the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, the Put-Through Clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving its backing to people—to capital groups and labor groups in proportion as they are spirited.

The people who give the most return on the investment—the people who give the most quick thorough and spirited response—in the general interests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones who shall be waited on first.

I have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that people who have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enough spirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited.

I would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, labor which thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead of merely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of its own emotion about what it does not want.

Spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom it disagrees and wants to come to terms.

Revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytumming people—who do not want to think.

I am not saying that spiritually tired people are to blame for being tired. I am pointing out a fact to be acted on.

Tired people always want the same thing. They want a thing to stay as it is—or they want it to stay just as it is—upside down. The same inefficiency, fear and weakness, meanness—merely another set of people running the inefficiency and trying to make fear, weakness, meanness work.

This is where the Put-Through Clan of the Air Line League comes in. The Put-Through Clan will throw the local and national influence of twenty million consumers on to the side of spirited or team-work capital and labor, and will discourage, make ridiculous and impossible, the scared fighting capital and the scared fighting labor with which we are now being troubled.

The real line of demarcation in modern industry is not between capital and labor, but between spirited capital and labor that want to work, create and construct, on the one hand, and unspirited capital and labor, working as little and thinking as little as they can, on the other.

The majority of revolutionaries are people who without taking any trouble to study or understand anything, or to change anything, just turn it thoughtlessly upside down—substitute their inefficiency for the other man's.

Extreme revolutionaries generally talk about freedom, but until they can get us to believe they are going to allow freedom to others, the world is not going to let them—of all people, have any.

The bottom fact about revolutionary labor like revolutionary capital is that it is tired. Revolutionary labor is not spirited. It is as soggy-minded, thoughtless and automatic to be a revolutionist to-day as it is to be a Louis XVI.

It takes originality to construct and to change things and change the hearts and minds of people and the spirit of a nation.

Anybody can be a revolutionist or a reactionary. All one has to do is to stop thinking and sag, or stop thinking and slash.

* * * * *

The mills of the gods grind slowly because they grind fine. The main difference between men and the gods is that when men do things on a large scale they are apt to slur things over and be mechanical, do things in huge empty swoops—pass over details and particular persons, and the gods when they do things on a large scale pay more attention to details, to microbes and to particular persons than ever.

* * * * *

In national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers and workmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smaller scale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale instead of a two or three million scale, would be treated by the Air Line League as probably weighty and conclusive. Those classes of employers and employees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains to understand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons in view themselves, must expect to have their national opinions about national labor and national capital discounted by the Clan. The Put-Through Clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of the demands of industrial groups upon the assumption that people who slur over what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that are further away.