Sec. 7. The Town Fireplace.

The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people—that people see things and do things gregariously. We have herds of fractions of men, acting as fractions of men and not as human beings.

Each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. Being a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country.

Ten differing men can get together and agree.

Ten differing crowds of men—of the same men, will get together and fight.

Crowds are self-hypnotized. A man who would not be hypnotized off into a fraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandth or ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes.

If five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down together around a fireplace and listen to the others—if each crowd of a hundred thousand could feel listened to absolutely—listened to by the other four hundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the world in the morning.

As it is, each crowd sits in Madison Square Garden alone—holds a vast lonely reverie all alone, hypnotizes itself and then goes out and fights.

Of course there are the crowds on paper, too. Ink-mobs roam the streets.

Crowds do not get on as individual persons do, because individual crowds cannot get physically and humanly together.

It has been generally noted that the best radical labor leaders who come into definite personal contact with employers grow quite generally conservative and that the best conservative leaders become what would have once seemed to them radical when they really learn how to lead.

Why is it that when they begin to learn as leaders how things really are, they are so often impeached by the crowds they represent—by capital and labor?

The moment there are conveniences for crowds—for the rank and file of crowds to catch up to their leaders, to see things whole, too—the moment we have the machinery for crowds being able to have the spiritual and personal experiences their leaders have with the other side, crowds will stop dismissing their leaders—the moment they see both sides, and get practical, too.

The purpose of the local chapter of the Put-Through Clan, is to find a means in each town of getting all crowds and groups together regularly as one group revealing themselves, listening and being listened to, and confiding themselves to team-thinking and to doing team-work together.

The Put-Through Clan headquarters in a town will be the Town Fireplace for Crowds. It will be the warmest, liveliest, manliest, most genial resort in town—where all the live men and real men who seek real contacts and care about men who do, will get together. The refreshing and emancipating experience many men had in army camps will be carried on and become a daily force in the daily life of every town in America.

Sec. 8. The Sign on the World.

I looked up yesterday and saw a sign on a church in New York. I like it better every time I go by.

THIS CHURCH IS OPEN ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR PRAYER, MEDITATION AND BUSINESS.

I have been wondering just who the man is who had the horse-sense and piety to take up the secret of business and the grip of religion both, telegraph them into ten words like this, and make a stone church say them at people a thousand a minute, on the busiest part of the busiest street in New York.

Whoever the man is, he stands for the business men we want for the Put-Through Clan first.

One of the first things the Put-Through Clan is going to dramatize is this sign on the Marble Collegiate Church.

The men in America in the next twenty years who are going to carry everything before them in business, drive everybody and everything out of their way, take possession of the great streets and the great factories in the name of God and the people, are the men who practice daily the spirit of this sign, the men in business who refuse to go tumtytumming along in a kind of thoughtless inertia of motion, doing what everybody's doing in business—the men who turn one side (by whatever name they call it) to pray, to snuggle up to God and think.

Men who have success before them in business are the men who have the most imagination in business.

Imagination with most of us consists in taking time to see things before other people do, in connecting up what we do with its larger, deeper, more permanent relations, relating what we do to ourselves, to others, to our time and generation, to the things we have done before and to the things that must be done next.

"Prayer, Meditation and Business."

It is wonderful how these words, when one comes on a man who does not say anything about it and puts them together, tone each other up.

The first thing the Put-Through Clan is going to do in a town in this present tipply and tragic world, is to stand by and help make known to everybody across a continent the men in business who stand by these words—who mix them so people cannot tell them apart.



BOOK VI

WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT



I

THE BIG BROTHER OF THE PEOPLE

If I were writing a book to be used during a Presidential campaign, used as a handbook of the beliefs of the people—a book in the next few weeks for a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before their conventions with, the first belief I would put down for the new President to run on would be the belief that every man in this country is a bigger, better and truer man than the present arrangements of our industrial and social life seem willing to let him express.

We are all practically waiting in crowds to-day, all over this country—in held-in and held-back crowds, to act better than we look.

This belief is the first belief—the first practical working belief the next President of this country should have about the people.

Putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working belief about human nature in America, is going to be the way to get a President for our next President who shall release the spirit of the nation, and reveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people of America are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted a people as the spent and weary peoples of Europe have hoped we were.

The trouble with America in her own eyes and the eyes of the world to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are.

The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect arrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made for their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each class in America, which now takes the form of telling other men and other classes, they ought to be good—the goodness in each man which in our present system he bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to the man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quite safe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the labor unions or the Manufacturers' Association to make sure he has a right to be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feels he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else is doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now, and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be.

The mean things we are doing on a large scale to one another just now in America, are not mean things it is our nature to do. We have let our machines get on top of us and wave our meanness at people over our heads. Our machines which capital and labor have for expressing us as employers and workmen to one another, caricature us.

All one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way in which our present machines of trusts and labor unions are working together to make a dollar worth fifty cents.

The reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybody who has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he owes it to himself and to his class to furnish as little work for a dollar as he dares and take a dollar for fifty cents' worth of work.

Each man sees this several times a day, but he belongs to a vast machine for getting something for nothing. Every man knows in his heart that the cure for everybody's trying to get something for nothing is everybody's at once getting to work doing more than he has to for the money. Then the American dollar will quit being worth fifty cents.

Why doesn't he do it? Because the machinery he belongs with and that everybody belongs with consists of two great something-for-nothing machines. Both of these stupendous machines of capital and labor are geared for backing in producing and not for going forward. All that has to be done with them is to run them the other way round and we have what we want.

People on both sides admit in a vague anonymous scattered fashion that the way to meet a situation in which prices are too high is for everybody to produce more and to charge less for what he produces.

But labor will not do this if capital does not do it.

Capital will not do this if labor does not do it.

It cannot be done by one man getting up all alone and saying he will get on with half a profit or half a wage when he sees everybody about him getting on with twice as much.

The only way it can be done is by organizing, by arranging machines for mutual frank expression, confession and cooeperation—mutual confession and cooeperation by the men in each industry saying, "I will if you will," until we cover the nation.

This is one of the first things anti-Bolshevik capital and anti-Bolshevik labor are going to stand for—the organizing and advertising in their own industry of a voluntary understanding and professional producing among men who produce.

The men who are increasing the cost of flour by having too high wages in flour mills, will say to men who are increasing the cost of cotton by too high wages in cotton mills, "We will make cheaper cotton for you, if you will make cheaper flour for us."

It is not a matter of meanness in American human nature we are dealing with, it is a matter of agreement between men—hundreds and thousands and millions of men, who do not feel mean or want to be mean and who are trying to slink out of it.

The thing cannot be done without mutual agreement and the agreement probably cannot be made without voluntary contagious publicity, without organizing a national "I will if you will" between capital and labor. The men who produce with their minds will say to those who work with their hands, "We will agree to take less profits and reduce the prices that you pay for goods, if you will agree to take less wages and produce more."

Capital will say to labor, "If you will produce ten per cent more, we will scale down prices, make your dollar buy twenty per cent more. For every sacrifice by which you make a dollar buy more, we will make twice the sacrifice."

Having a larger margin and more time to think things out than men who work with their hands have to think things out, many employers are going to feel that it is up to them not to ask their men to do anything they do not do twice as much of themselves. They will have machinery for being confidential with the men and for letting the men see they are doing it.

Instead of having everybody rushing wildly around organizing to say "I won't if you won't" we will arrange to have a hundred thousand picked capitalists and picked laboring men in ten thousand cities, who will set going everywhere a huge public voluntary national "I WILL IF YOU WILL."

Instead of proceeding from now on to assume that we are a mean people in America, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for being meaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other, we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machine together that will express our better natures as well as our present one does our worst ones.

There is one thing we propose to stand out for and that we do not intend to be wheedled out of, in our next two political conventions and during our next President's next four years, and that is that our two great machines in this country, our industrial one and our political one, shall be taken out of the hands of men who are fooled about themselves and who will not listen to others.

We do not believe that there is anything essentially the matter with what is called our capitalistic system or our labor union system except men—the men who think they belong in the front ranks of capital and the front ranks of labor.

The scared men and the men who are fooled about themselves in politics and business and who are trying to fool the rest of us, who are trying to make a great, simple, clean-hearted, clear-eyed, generous country like ours look and act every few weeks or every few days as if all the people in it could really do to express themselves to one another and to the world, was with lockouts, strikes, political deadlocks, minority holdups and party threats—shall be turned out of office by the people and huddled away out of sight.

In our industrial and political expressing and acting machines on every hand we give notice we are going to pick men out, men who shall make our machines express us, our freedom, our justice, our steadiness of heart, and our belief in America, in ourselves, in one another, or our desire to listen to those who disagree with us, our human sporting instinct about our party and ourselves, and the victory of the people, the common sense and good will of common human nature in America and the world.

To the great capitalists who instead of being fellow laborers, are still mooning absent-mindedly about in the last century, still prinking themselves as the owners of their world, and still thinking of themselves as the captains or military leaders of industry—to the labor union Dukes and Dictators that capitalists like this have created to fight them—the hundred million people appointed to run this country, give notice.

* * * * *

I would like if I could to publish this book with blank pages for a few million signatures—and a place for the new President or proposed President to sign, too.

The Presidential candidate we want, would have it in him to put his name down with the rest—with something like this, perhaps—"I do not say I could sign every paragraph in this book, but the general idea and program of organizing and giving body to the will of the people as expressed in this book—the spirit and direction of it and in the main the technique for getting it, I sign for."

I believe that the American people when they know in reality, as they do know at heart, what I am believing in this book, would be inclined in looking up their candidate for President to pick out a President who would have written this book—the gist of it—if he had had time.

At all events here it is—this program or handbook of the beliefs for a people.

I put it forth as being more concrete than political party platforms are—and as a practical and plain way for a nation to look over a President, find him out, and follow him up.



II

THE MAN WHO CARRIES THE BUNCH OF KEYS FOR THE NATION

The crowds have to be unlocked to each other. The temperament of our President for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of the nation, is to be the temperament of unlocking the crowds to each other.

At present it looks as if our President for the next four years would be perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our next President, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people and hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times of being lonely with the people. The people are lonely with one another. Anybody can go out into the street anywhere in America to-night and be lonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. Any man can take any crowded street and see for himself. He can pass miles of men who in their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of how to defend America and they have another. If one were to take any ten blocks of Broadway and let all the people walking along stop just where they are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what we ought to do in this war, they will begin thinking they are not Americans, wanting to throw each other off over the edge of the country—partitioning each other off into mollycoddles, traitors, pussy-foots, safety-firsts, bullies, braggarts and Bolshevists and pacifists—and while they might keep up appearances and try to be polite on the surface with strangers, that whole section of Broadway would be mad all through for ten blocks. One would have ten blocks of feeling superior and despising people—every man looking askance at every other man for having a different idea of America from his idea of America.

If the President were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhear the people, he would feel lonely with them. The only way not to feel lonely on ten blocks of Broadway just now would be to put up signs and labels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people off as they go along, into separate audiences. The League of Nations or the American Federation of Labor would sort out a thousand people on Broadway and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, and the I. W. W. could sort out another thousand and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a whole hallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful of people, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be each audience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and saying "You are not America. We only are America!"

This makes the President lonely. We elected him a few months ago to be President of all of us. It is slow work being President, being a good mixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and who all turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listen to each other.

The way the President is going to meet this issue and insist until we all thank him for it—on being President of all of us, is with his temperament.



III

THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPERAMENT

If I were writing a book for the next President to run for President on—a thing I have guilty moments of hoping I am doing—the first thing I would arrange for in the book, would be to put down in it two platforms for him to run on—one platform on what he believes and the other platform—the way he believes it and gets other people to believe it.

The way the next President we pick out, does his believing, the way he keeps from believing weakly what he wants to, and from being fooled about his party and about himself, the clean-cutness and honesty of his mind, the tone, the ring in which he believes in himself and gets other people to believe in him, is going to be, from the point of view of his getting for this country at home and abroad, what it wants, the most important thing about him.

The most important part of the next President's platform is going to be, in the eyes of the people, his character, his temperament, the way his personal traits and habits dramatize what he says, the way he lives what he believes.

The American people may not be shrewd about seers, or about historians or philosophers, but they are very likely any minute to be deep about people. When Henry Cabot Lodge draws a rough sketch in chalk of history he wants a hundred million people to help him make, and when he is being fooled about it and is all out of perspective the people may defer to him, may feel Mr. Lodge is too deep for them, but the moment they see Mr. Lodge being fooled about himself, they find Mr. Lodge easy.

In a trait in human nature like this, with which they are familiar every day, a hundred million people—without trying, are deep.

If a hundred million people could sit down and write a book—a book or open letter addressed in the next two months to those two big vague, whoofy Nobodies we call our Political Parties, and tell them in so many words the kind of President the people want and understand—the kind of President the people would sweep in unspeakably into the White House when they saw him, no matter what any politician said, I am inclined to believe it would be found—when the book by the hundred million people was out, that our people feel on the whole that we could not have anything better in our country for our next President than a man who would be a lawyer backwards.

What the platform of personality we want our next President to have amounts to, is this—Know everything a lawyer knows. Have everything a lawyer has—and just turn it around and use it the other way and be another kind of man about it.

The fate of America and the fate of the world may be said to be turning to-day on the degree during the next four years, during the next President's administration, the American people and all groups of the people, stop believing weakly what they want to believe and face the facts about themselves.

In order to be efficient, in order to be free or even to have enough to eat, millions of American men and women of all groups and classes of the people have got to be capable and show that they are capable of changing their minds about themselves.

Everything we are hoping to do turns upon our recognizing as a people, standing out from the rest and pushing forward to lead us, men who know more than most of us know, men who are practiced in keeping their own minds open and can therefore open ours.

Instead of having for the next President of this country a man who braces people, who tightens people up in their convictions, or who drives the old beliefs they want to believe further down into them and makes them believe them harder, we are going to put in our demand for a President who is the engineer of the will of the people, who draws people out, who has the common sense, the reality, the sense of humor and the humanness to look facts and folks in the eyes, who keeps people on all sides who have dealings with him from being fooled about themselves, a man who makes people real when they are with him, who makes them when they even think of him, real with themselves and real with one another, and real in politics.

I mean by a man's being real in politics, being a politician backwards, keeping open to facts acting and preferring to act as children and strong men act, with the deepness and directness of the child.

The hundred million people in the book they would write if they had time, put in their demand for a big simple fellow human being in the White House, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with people and gets things out of people because he makes people feel they know him.

The political parties cannot help themselves the moment the people speak. They would rather slide in a man who does not see through them if they could, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and sees best, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the White House to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep this country as clean as a whistle.



IV

THE PRESIDENT'S RELIGION

I have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, to the old monks of the Middle Ages, who climbed up on mountain tops and lived in monasteries alone with God. If I felt just as they felt about being superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to live the most deeply, intricately religious life I could think of I would refuse to look like a saint and be President of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and would pick out the most difficult business with the most difficult class of men to compete with in the United States. Then I would go into it, put all my money and all my religion together into it.

The principles and standards that actually obtain in competition constitute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. One might say cooeperation of course, but what makes cooeperation powerful and what selects the people who shall lead cooeperation—what gives it character, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires him to find a way to do or not to do certain things—when he competes.

Competition—the way a man threads his way through the men who compete with him—would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of spiritual values—the real monastery of modern life.

All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially, or clap them into jail.

There always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and be fair. The Government, the police and the draft have to deal with them. As for the rest of us, competition—fair, manly, sporting competition, keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and nobler virtue, the knowledge of ourselves and others that make cooeperation a noble as well as practical course of procedure.

The way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to be compared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to the state—to the way he runs an interested enterprise or business.

If I were the rich young man in the New Testament I would not have sold all my goods to feed the poor—as that particular person (being what he was) was advised to. I would hold on to my money—and found a religious order with it. I would make a whip of cords of my money and my brains woven together and would drive out the peddlers, the economic fiddlers, the moral and business idiots out of the Temple. I would do it not by being a pure, sterilized, holy-looking person, but by having more imagination in business, by using higher levels and higher voltage of human motive power in business than they can use, by having more brains about human nature than they have, and by my power to get the public to be religious, i.e., my power as a sheer matter of business, to make the public prefer, as a matter of course, my way of competing in business until it drives out and makes absent-minded, mooning, feeble and shortsighted, theirs.

This is not the kind of thing that I happen to have the natural technique or gift to do—to found a live deep natural religious order like this, but there are thousands of men I know and that other men know in America, who have the natural typical American technique for putting their higher gifts to work in business and who are crowding to the wall men who can only use their lower ones, and the power, the opportunities that go with these men are daily being outlined by events and daily being sketched out before our eyes.

The way to be a prophet and to interpret and establish in a nation is to lead in the business world to-day in establishing principles of competition, which exalt and interpret human nature, free the common sense, the will, the glory and the religion of the people.

The way to be a President, the next four years, is to use the White House and all the resources of the Government to cooeperate with and back up this type of American business man.



V

THE RED FLAG AND THE WHITE HOUSE

The first qualification the next President should run for the Presidency on is his vision or program for the nation with regard to backing up men in American life—democracy and the Red Flag.

The first thing a President should see about the Red Flag is that the Red Flag is up to the people and not up to the White House—up to the people in five hundred thousand factories and offices and stores, up to the people on both sides of a hundred thousand counters, up to everybody who buys a paper of pins or a pound of cheese while they are buying it, up to everybody who buys a house or a watch or a cake of soap, a safety razor or a railroad, up to everybody while he is producing, while he is buying and selling, up to everybody individually and collectively to see that in every ten cents they spend in this country and every ten minutes they work in this country, the Red Flag—the civil war flag, is stamped on.

Only the people can head off the Red Flag—all of the people working on it on their daily job all of the time.

The more our President believes that the work of dealing with the Red Flag in this country is up to the people the more he gets the people to believe it, puts the work off on the people, the better the work will be done, the further the Red Flag will be from getting hold of the country and the longer the President will be in the White House.

We call our President our Chief Executive. What we put him in the White House and make him our chief executive for is that he shall have imagination about a hundred million people besides himself, that he shall have imagination about what the people can do and imagination about getting them to do it.

An executive is a man whose work is making other people work.

We call the place in which we have our President live the Executive Mansion. The best man to elect to live in it is the man who can make a hundred million people work.

THE END