XIV
THE SKILLED CONSUMER
The way to control the world and govern the well-being of men is not through the time they have left over, or the time they choose to lay one side for it, but directly and through their most important engagements and things they do and are sure to do all the time.
A man's first important engagement in this world is with his own breath.
His second engagement is with his own stomach.
His third is with the night and with sleep.
His fourth is with posterity, with the unborn, with his children and children's children.
His fifth is with his ancestors and with God.
In nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand things a man needs to have to keep these engagements—things he has to have if he is alive at all, he is a consumer.
What the new League will say to the consumer is something like this:
"In nine hundred and ninety-nine things out of a thousand you have to have to live, the Air Line League is organized to stand by you, express you and get the attention of everybody to what you want; and in the one thing you make for everybody it is going to express everybody to you and get your attention to what everybody wants of you."
This would seem to most of us to be fair all around.
When one thinks of it, why should one-thousandth part of what a man has and has to have, in order to live his life—the part he makes himself—be seen everywhere in this world in every man's life holding up and bullying, making him pay high prices for, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths?
Let the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of a man's life take possession of the one thousandth part of him. Then we will have a civilization.
Or at least the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of him will persuade the one thousandth of him to coöperate.
We have had autocracy of capital because on the whole in the world until machinery came in, capital kept close enough to labor and to the consumer to know what the workmen and the people wanted.
Now that Capital has lost its grip, Labor announces that it is going to be after this war the autocrat, and represent capital and the consumer.
The Air Line League is here to ask, Why should not the consumer represent himself?
Capital has tried and failed and has said, "Let the public be damned." Now Labor has tried and failed, and is saying hoarsely in a thousand cities, "Let the public be damned."
What the Air Line League is for is to advertise the people together, and let the consumers represent themselves.
What we have been fighting for essentially in this war is the control of the consumers in the world in all nations.
When we speak of democracy and of organizing the will of the people, what we really mean is organizing the will of the consumers.
Organizing the will of the consumers is not a holdup. A holdup by all the people of all the people for all the people is Liberty.
XV
SAMPLE DEMOCRACIES
I do not want to delay or bother people with my definition of democracy, but I do not mind confiding to them where I have seen some.
One is always coming upon bits or dots of democracy in America. It is these bits or dots of rough more or less unfinished democracy we have in America which make most of us believe in the people of this country.
Everybody in America knows of them.
There are at least forty-four dots of democracy—little marked-off places—what might be called safety zones (everybody knows of them), even in New York. There are usually white globes in front of them, and a short name written in long plain slanting white letters across a huge piece of glass.
If anybody wants to see just what democracy is like in business all he has to do is to go into the nearest Childs restaurant, order some griddle-cakes, sit down and eat and think. All he really needs to do is to study the menu, but of course a menu is more thoroughly studied by eating some of it.
One soon finds that a menu may be a little modest every-day magna charta of democracy or it may not.
What a menu has long been for in the typical restaurant is to find a way of browbeating and bewildering a customer into spending more money for his luncheon than he intends to when he comes in.
Rows of grieved and vaguely disturbed people can be seen in restaurants every day—being mowed down by menus.
In a Childs restaurant business success is based on turning the whole idea of a menu around, and instead of the customer's coming in and studying the menu, the menu studies him.
The consumer in a Childs restaurant is there to economize and the restaurant is there to help him do it, the whole menu being constructed by experts in foods for the express purpose of telling the customer more than he knows about his food and his money, persuading him and practically tricking him into spending less money on his luncheon than he intends to.
A business may be said to be a big vital and winning business in any line in proportion as one sees the consumers in it—practically running it—running it in spirit. A democratic business is one which is being run as the consumers would run it if they knew how.
A business may be said to be a democratic business in proportion as one sees experts in it expressing crowds. One sees great crowds going to and fro and up and down in it acting for all practical purposes like geniuses, like skilled angels doing every day offhand inspired and inspiring difficult adventurous things as a matter of course—like tackling the high cost of living.
What the Air Line League is for is to make the consumers of America—the all-class class, class-conscious—is to organize the consumers of America locally and nationally so that the comparative coöperation of crowds and geniuses and experts as in Childs' restaurants, can be assured in all lines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as the label of modern successful business life.
The Air Line League definition of democracy would be this:
A democracy may be said to be a state of society in which the consumers or the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expert attention of the men who make them.
The triumph of America and of the other democracies during the war has been that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended upon to have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to wait on them while they whip the Germans.
What the Air Line League proposes to do (Further details later) is to arrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer of the Germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way to keep this up.
Is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all our experts drop away—permanently drop away from waiting on crowds—are really going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waiting on themselves in just the way the Germans said they would?
What the Air Line League will stand for will be that experts and crowds can be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience and power of waiting on each other during peace as well as war.
Why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences and powers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whipping the Germans and not having them all the while, every day, for ourselves?
XVI
THE TOWN PENDULUM
The Air Line League in its local, national and international branches will act as a Listening Machine.
A Listening Machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward. Worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. When the same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people listen until they understand.
There are people in every town and in every local branch of the League who have what I like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. People in motion are not as reliable and as calculable as brass. People have wills, visions, individual emotions and lurchings of their own. When a man with a pendulum temperament sees a colossal pendulum made of crowds of people—crowds of employers and crowds of workmen—swinging from one extreme to another, the first thing he wants to do as each issue comes up, local or national, is to see to it that his own mind and each other man's mind in these two crowds on each side of the question should go twice through the middle, to going once to the extremes at either end.
In other words, The National Air Line League will act to bring extremes together—twice through the middle to once at each end—and local clubs will act as attention-swinging machines—as attention-forcing machines between classes.
I might give an illustration:
The National League in its central office in New York gets a report from the local branch in the town where Smith safety razors are made that the Smith Works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustained ugliness and inefficiency. The Central Office, after quietly looking into it, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through its local branches reports to the ten million men shaving with Smith blades every morning that the workmen and managers of the Smith factories, who are working a nominal nine hours a day, are spending three hours a day in fighting with each other as to how Smith blades should be made for the public, and six hours a day in making the blades. The consumer is told by the League that he is paying for nine hours' work a day on his blades and only getting six, and that if the employers and employees in the Smith factories could be got to listen to each other and to work together the blades could be had for three cents less apiece.
The League will then proceed through its local branch in the Smith town to arrest the attention of the Smith workmen and the Smith employers. It will suggest that they get each other's point of view and sit down very earnest and hear everything that the other side has to say and everything the other side wants to do, until they find some way of getting together and being efficient and knowing how to make Smith blades.
If necessary in order to get the attention of the workmen and employers at the Smith Works to the desirability of their listening to each other, the users of Smith blades throughout the country will shave themselves with their fathers' razors for three weeks.
If the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America who shave will turn the Government out of office and have the law changed.
A strike by workmen in a particular business is a holdup of all the other workmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and is undemocratic and unfair.
A lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all other employers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair.
In a country of a hundred million people a holdup conducted by a hundred million people for the hundred million people is democracy.
I employ this rather threatening illustration of the possible action of the League in certain cases because it suggests the power of democracy when experts and crowds act together—the fact that democracy can really be made to work, that democracy can be as forcible, as immediate and practical in dealing with autocratic classes, as autocracy can.
But only two or three per cent of what the League in its local and national branches would really do would be like the illustration I have used. The power the League would have to do things like this would make doing them unnecessary.
The regular work of the League would largely consist in accepting invitations from factories, and in supplying and training experts for the purpose of conducting in a factory mutual advertising campaigns, or studies in attention between workmen and employers, adapted to different types of factories.
The way out for democracy in dealing with predatory wealth which organizes to hold up the consumers, and with predatory labor which organizes to hold up the consumers, is for the consumers to organize.
XVII
THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE
People are so much more apt to bear in mind in proportion, the power of an organization to be ugly, than they are its power not to need to be ugly—to get what it wants with people by combining with them instead of fighting them, that perhaps it might be well to dwell a moment on the fact that the power of the consumers of the country as organized in the Air Line League, to make it uncomfortable for predatory labor or predatory capital, will never be abused.
If what an organization is for, is to put the soul and body of a people together it is compelled as a matter of course, to get its own way with the same quietness, dignity and power it is telling other people to. The first business of the Air Line League is going to be, to be believed in by everybody. The way to be believed in by everybody is for the League to do itself the thing that it talks about doing. If in this way the League soon gets itself believed in by everybody, the first thing people will notice about the Air Line League will soon be that it is an organization that can lick anybody in sight with its little finger. The next thing people will notice is that it never gets so low that it has to do it.
The power of labor unions and employers' associations has frequently been abused because they have many of them organized their power for the express purpose of abusing it.
It is highly unlikely that people will need to be afraid of the power of the Air Line League. An organization which exists for the express purpose of driving out of business people who get what they want by holdups, the entire activities of which are devoted to proving to people how much more holding out a hand gets for people in business than sticking out a fist, soon gets its fist trusted.
If the Air Line League abuses its power it will commit suicide so fast that people will feel suddenly safe.
If I were writing a platform for the Air Line League, it might be put perhaps for all practical purposes in one sentence.
Subject—War.
Object—Stopping it.
Predicate—What we believe about war.
Verb—What we propose to do about what we believe about war.
Adverb—How we propose to do it.
Period—Peace.
The main trouble with the sentence forty nations are trying to stutter out now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column of belief.
The spinal column of belief in the Air Line League—the gist of our platform—is this one sentence:
PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET OTHER'S ATTENTION.
Everything we believe and propose to do follows from this.
The way to stop war is to advertise, to provide and set up in full sight and in working order before people who are trying to get what they want by war, a substitute for war which gets what they want for them quicker and better.
The way to keep people who fight from fighting is to stand over them, advertise to them and dramatize to them how much more people can get by listening to each other. Then compel them to listen.
We do not believe in fighting on the one hand nor in an anæmic and temporary thing like arbitration on the other. All that men really do in arbitration is to hire their listening done for them by other people.
Listening which men were created to do themselves, which is done for them by others, only lasts a minute.
The three plain spiritual brutal facts that capital and labor have to reckon with and conform to in dealing with human nature to-day are these:
Disputes can not be fought out—not even by the people themselves.
Disputes can not be arbitrated out by other people for them.
All other people are for in a fight is to compel the fighters to listen to each other.
Doing anything less than compelling the fighters to listen to each other, is visionary, cowardly, temporary and impracticable.
The moment people stop fighting, begin listening to each other and begin feeling listened to, nobody can hire them to organize to fight each other. They organize to listen to each other.
What the Air Line League is for in every nation, in every city, town and village where a branch is set up, is to organize people to listen to each other.
I do not think any one is going to feel obliged to feel afraid of the power of a League, that puts daily before its own face, before everybody's face—before every letter it writes, and before everything it does, across its letter-head, this chapter in nine words.
PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET EACH OTHER'S ATTENTION.
XVIII
HOW THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE WILL WORK
Nine people out of ten who do wrong in business, do it because they feel that if they do not do the wrong to some one else, some one else will do the wrong to them. In the last analysis, some way of bringing about conscription for universal service in business is the only way in which we can be assured that the criminals and exploiters in any particular line of industry will not, at least temporarily, control and ruin the business. What the Air Line League would do practically would be to organize American business-men into a kind of "I Won't If You Won't" Club. A very large majority of men daily see that certain things ought not to be done. It is not right-mindedness in people that is needed so much as the organization of the right-mindedness so that those who are wrong can be crowded out. My idea of the general policy of the Air Line League would be to bring the public to coöperate with the best men in each industry in such a way as to drive the worst ones out. Probably from a publicity point of view the best way to do would be for the League to pick out the nine best factories in the country in which the laborers have a working understanding and a practical listening arrangement with their employers, and help the laborers in these nine factories advertise to other laborers in the country, at specific times and places, and to capital throughout the country, how they like it. One factory in ten, if necessary, could be selected for national discipline. A notorious factory could be picked out in which the laborers had the worst listening arrangement, and in which both the employers and employees were imposing upon each other to their own detriment and the detriment of their customers the most; and could be publicly disciplined by the National League acting through its local clubs everywhere. Cooperating with nine factories and disciplining one would be my idea of the best way to get results. All that would need to be done would be to make a list of all the industries in the country and keep the buyers of the country informed about them through the local Clubs.
Industrial democracy is coming in this country one industry at a time. Each industry is going to work out its own salvation by emancipating and freeing the hands of the men who can run it best in the interests of the public—that is, run it with the lowest prices to the public, the highest prices to the wage earners, and a surplus for improvements, inventions and experiments in rendering its product of more service to all.
I am not in favor of having capitalists try to convince labor as a class, nor having labor try to convince capital as a class. The skilled labor which has been convinced by capital should convince the others through the services of twenty thousand local Clubs, and skilled capital which has succeeded in being believed in by its labor will do the same in convincing other capital.
XIX
MAKING A RIGHT START
It will be seen that the idea I have in mind might be imagined as a kind of civic federation club, a super-consumers' league, and a super-advertising club rolled into one. Rolling these three ideas into one is a temperament, and the men who are full of the vision of what can be done with them rolled into one, and of what is the matter with them if they are not rolled into one, must be the controlling powers in the new organization. The Civic Federation has been a safe plodding vague institution because it has not had a vigorous vision of itself, and has not been conducted by men who have a personal genius for conceiving and carrying out coöperation between capital and labor. It has been weak, theoretical, and full of generalization because it has not had the driving force that such a man as Schwab—some Schwab in publicity instead of steel—could have given it.
The Consumers' League has been a useful, suggestive institution, and has done work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or less nagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision or sense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked the advertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness that puts things through.
The new organizations—as a super-consumers' league, a super-advertising club—will converge these two ideas into a huge momentum, into a national organized drive or vision of making men see together and act together, until we work out social democracy in every man's business, in every man's store, and the daily work of every man's life. Programs which have merely been yearned at before, which have been sleazily groped at and generalized over and guessed at before, will be gathered up, articulated, melted into a huge common national action by men who have the consuming passion and genius for touching the imaginations of others. The selection and articulation of these men in all communities is all that is necessary. Everything is waiting and ready. First we will get the men together who have the fire. Then we will put fire under the boilers of the nation and turn the drive-wheels of a world.
XX
UP TO THE PEOPLE
There are several reasons which, as it seems to me, show that my plan is not visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill in the way I have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now most needs to be done for high production and team-work in the industries of the country.
1. The consumer class is practically everybody.
2. The consumer class is the most disinterested, and is identified with both capital and labor. It is the natural umpire between them. Its line of least resistance is to act fairly.
3. The interests of the consumer class lead it not only to act fairly but to act energetically. The consumer class as a class will want to pay extra for as few quarrels between the people it is paying to make things for it as possible. The consumer always pays for all quarrels, and anything that is good for the employers and employees in the long run can not but be good for the consumer in the long run.
4. In the last analysis, the consumers in any given industry, if duly organized as capital and labor are now, will not only have the disposition to act fairly in a quarrel between the people who are making something that they buy, and the disposition to act quickly and have the fight over with, but they will have as buyers the power as a last resort to choose the factories they will deal with; to do their buying naturally and cheaply, and from factories that are entirely in the business of making goods and not half in the business of making goods and half in the business of making civil war. The nationally organized consumers will naturally advertise to people which firms take the least time off for fighting, and put all their work into the goods they expect the people to pay for.
This national advertising campaign will be operated through national headquarters, coöperating with local branches organized in all manufacturing towns and cities. The national headquarters will act as a clearing house for the materials, facts, illustrations and demonstrations which the local centers collect and distribute and apply, proving that democracy works.
Everything turns, in getting a thing done to-day, on seeing to it that the people who take it up are the people who can best get the attention of others.
The consumer class cannot fail because they are the best people in the country to compel everybody to listen.
The consumers are the best people to get everybody to listen because they are the best listeners.
The consumers are the best people to start anything in America and keep it going because everybody in America cares what the consumers think, wants to be on good terms with them, and to please them, wants to be heard by them and wants to hear what they say.
XXI
THE WAY FOR A NATION TO SPEAK UP
The Air Line League is not visionary. The people of this country have expressed an idea. They can do it again.
Not long after the American part in the war was under way our Government had the idea—which it had not had at all when it began—that if America was going to do her part in defeating the Germans, or if we were to come anywhere near defeating the Germans, it would only be possible through an unexpected degree of self-sacrifice on the part of our people all day, every day until the war was over.
Our people did not believe this idea.
How could our Government get through to each man in America that winning the war depended on him? Get through to each woman and each child that something must be given up by each of us to defeat the Germans? The Government not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately the country needed them—every man of them—but it wanted also to inspire the people and to let the people see their power themselves. They wanted to teach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to the people and to the world how reverently the men, women and children of America could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat the Germans.
I fell asleep in Maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the Grand Central Station. I came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlike Sunday we had during the war.
A single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which I could have had for a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me.
I mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent about human nature. I went over and stood and looked up Madison Avenue and looked down Madison Avenue.
I had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and I found myself upon what seemed to me the loneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place I had ever seen upon the earth—a corner of Madison Avenue. It seemed like a kind of vision to stand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. I looked up at the sign on the corner. It really was Madison Avenue.
It was as if the hand of a hundred million people had reached out three thousand miles. It was as if a hundred million people had met me at the corner and told me—one look, one silence: "Here is this street we offer up that the will of God should go by. We are going to defeat the Germans with the silence on this street."
I stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with the invisible—a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came over me that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, were reaching, while I looked, across the country. I saw my people hushing a thousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of Chicago, of San Francisco and New York like the aisles of churches.
There was no need of church bells the first gasolineless Sunday, reminding one noisily, cheerily, a little thoughtlessly—the way they do—that God was on the earth.
One could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. But the first gasolineless Sunday—five hundred thousand miles of still roads lifted themselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, saying for a hundred million people, "God still reigneth." And twenty million little birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at five hundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what had happened!
I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had when I waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out of communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out of the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, into the long, white silent prayer of my people—and prayed with a hundred million people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets of a nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to God.
We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the war. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, to the great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-four full page ads in a thousand papers could do.
Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people—in advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement, eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows they look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, into prayers for a world—Mr. Garfield had few equals.
To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single stomach in the country.
To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a hundred million people—go in through the kitchen door of every house with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar when they ordered eight.
Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people look out of their windows on streets—thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the Germans!
We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in America, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany—was to interrupt people's personal daily habits.
The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to the people to whom we are trying to express it.
The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalists and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an hour in the day.
The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, in expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is plain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of the working ideas of the Air Line League.
Our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen is not to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wish we would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us to speak to them. Let a hundred million people do something to the people who take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonder what the hundred million people think.
The true way to advertise is to make the people you advertise to, do it. To get an idea over to the Germans do something to them that will make them come over to us—come all the way over to us and extract it. The same principle is going to be applied next by the Public Group in industry. We will do something that will make them—capital and labor—say: "What do you mean?"
Then let them study us and search us and search their own minds and find out.
I
G. S. L. TO HIMSELF
The most important and necessary things a man ever says sometimes, are the things he feels he must say particularly to himself.
In what I have to say about this nation I have stripped down to myself.
Of course any man in expressing privately his own soul to himself, may hit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is the very thing everybody in a nation would do, probably if he had time.
But that may or may not be. All I know is that in this book, and in a grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what they ought to do.
A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to.
I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody right.
During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself.
I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything happens to my mind or to my pocket book—in a railway station, in a trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom—wherever I am, I put it down—put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me.
As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from this book to myself.
On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has been written to express certain things a hundred million people want during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the hundred million people.
I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that if the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, I really believe it would be—at least in the main gist and spirit of it, like mine.
Nearly every man in the hundred million people—in what we call helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready, except in his own strike, to write a book like this.
I cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can prove it and do something that will prove it.
And the two great political parties in their coming conventions—one or both of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to try. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go with people.
And the book is not to them. It is not even for them. This book is to me. I have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world. It is easy and light-hearted, but take it off its guard every laugh is a prayer or a cry.
II
IF I WERE A NATION
Economics, I suspect, are much simpler than they look.
The soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is.
Why should I propose, if I were a nation—just because I am being a hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table—by a really simple thing like there being so many of me?
I am human—a plain fellow human being—and if the United States would act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act, when it is really put up to him—forty nations in his yard waiting for him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem would at once become direct and deep and simple.
All that is the matter with it is that so many Senates have sat on it.
Reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a Senate down to one human being being human—boil it down to a baby even—and what it would do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep on being human and close to essentials.
And that is all there is to it.
The other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being as human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being on Committees.
The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer away from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there.
The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying they would run the factory themselves.
A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running the factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house to ask him to come back to his desk.
He told the Committee he would not return with them. He said that a committee could not get him. The thousand men had rolled him away through jeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wanted him they could come with their wheelbarrow and roll him back.
The thousand came with their wheelbarrow and rolled him back.
The crowds laughed.
But the thousand men and their employer were sober and happy—had some imagination about each other and went to work.
If I were a nation, the first question I would ask would be, "Why bother with wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic Russian way to act an idea all out in order to see it?"
In America we propose to come through to this same idea by being human, by using our brains on our fellow human beings, by hoeing each other's imaginations.
The issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which grows logically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modern industrial life.
These are the Mahogany Desk and the Cog.
III
WHAT THE MAHOGANY DESK IS GOING TO DO
The old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the next row with his employee.
The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing alongside him in the next row.
To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what he does at his desk.
A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious to a laboring man.
In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has to do is to find a substitute for hoeing in the next row.
His workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he is and see the perspiration on his brow.
The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his mahogany desk sweat. It really does for all practical purposes of course, but how can he make it look so?
In the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a massive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to workmen the way they work.
Very soon now, everywhere—much harder than hoeing in the next row—with the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks hoeing their workmen's imaginations.
The other main point in the book the hundred million people would write if they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. I would devote the second ten chapters I think, not to Mahogany Desks, or to the buttons on them directing machines, but to Cogs.
The second great point the hundred million people will have to meet and will have to see a way out for in their book, is the way a Cog feels about being a Cog.
If a Cog in a big locomotive could take a day off and go around and watch the drivewheel and pistons—watch the smoke coming out of the smokestack and the water scooping up from between the rails—watch the three hundred faces in the train looking out of the windows and the great world booming by, and if the Cog could then say, "I belong with all this and I am helping and making it possible for all these people to do and to have all this!" And if the Cog could then slip back and go on just being a cog,—the cog would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be.
He would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be in a democracy-machine in distinction from a king-machine.
What is more, if a Cog did this, or if arrangements were studied out for some little inkling of a chance to do it, he would be making his job as a Cog one third easier and happier and three times as efficient.
A man is created to be the kind of Cog that works best when it is allowed to do its work in this way. God created him when He drove in one rivet to feel the whole of the ship. It is feeling the whole of the ship that makes being a Cog worth while.
The great work of the American people in the next four years is to work out for American industry the fate of the Cog in it.
The fate of democracy turns next on our working out a way of allowing a Cog some imagination, or some substitute for imagination in its daily work—something that the rest of the Cog—the whole man in the Cog can have, which will bring his spirit, his joy and his power to bear on his daily work.
This is the second of the two main points the hundred million people would make in their book if they had time.
These two main points—getting labor to see how a mahogany desk sweats—getting the mahogany desk to put itself in the place of a Cog, know how a Cog feels and what makes a Cog work—are points which are going to be made successfully and quickly in proportion as they are taken up in the right spirit and with a method—a practical human working method which so expresses and dramatizes that right spirit that it will be impossible for people not to respond to it.
I am not undertaking in this part of my book to make an inquiry as to what the right spirit is, or what the right method is that a hundred million people ought to adopt.
I am a somewhat puzzled and determined person and I am instituting out loud a searching inquiry as to what I am going to do myself and what the principles and methods are that I should be governed by in doing my personal part, and conducting my own mind and judgment toward the movements and the men about me.
To avoid generalizing, I might as well give my idea the way it came to me—one man's idea of how one man feels he wants to act when being lied to.
I do not say in so many words, Iwaslied to. I do not know. A great many people every day find themselves in situations where they do not know. The question I am asking of myself is, how can a man or a public take a fair human and constructive attitude when one does not know and cannot know for the time being, all that it is to the point to know?
A stupendous amount of red-flagism, unrest and expensive unreasonableness would be swept away in this country if we all had in mind to use for ourselves when called for the following rules for being lied to.
(Not that I am going to lumber people's minds up by numbering them as rules out loud. They are all here—in what follows—the spirit of them, and people can make their own rules for themselves as they go along.)