XIII
LISTENING TO JIM
(A Note on Collective Bargaining)
I would like to say to begin with that I believe in national collective bargaining as it is going to be in the near future—collective bargaining executed on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in such spirit as shall be determined by the facts—the practical engineering facts in human nature and the way human nature works.
I do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical about human nature so far. The moment that it is, the public and all manner of powerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish or unreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it.
A book entitled "A Few Constructive Reflections on Marriage" by a man who had had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces,—a man whose ex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. A symposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbands would really count more. Most candid people would admit this as a principle.
The same principle seems to hold good about what people think in National Associations of Employers and national associations of workingmen in labor unions.
Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very superficial decisions.
Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of being fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to be right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong about half the time.
The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Other people have it.
When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have some way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But when I am told in a deep bass national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937 is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed and to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At all events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied 2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off to multiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talk to me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word.
Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have been fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by it a good many years.
It is a rather natural un-self-conscious innocent thing to do I suppose, at first, but as the illusion is one which of course does not work or only works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capital or labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time,—especially in the difficulties we are all facing together in America now, to let ourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer.
The difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are all essentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt with by tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up and getting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin, dealing at particular times and in particular places with particular human beings. In the factory that listened to Jim, no order from a national Collective Bargaining Works could have begun to meet the situation as well as Jim did and the factory did.
If Jim had stuck his head in the door by orders from Indianapolis, or if the President of the Company had had a telegram giving him national instructions to lie awake that night, what would it have come to?
I believe in national or collective bargaining as a matter of course, in certain aspects of all difficulties between capital and labor. But the causes of most difficulties in industry are personal and have to be dealt with where the persons are. The more personal things to be done are, the more personally they have to be attended to.
If the women of America were to organize a Childbirth Labor Union, say next Christmas—and if from next Christmas on, all the personal relations of men and women and husbands and wives—the stipulations and conditions on which women would and would not bear children were regulated by national rules, by courtship rules and connubial orders from Indianapolis, Indiana, it would be about as superficial a way to determine the well-being of the sexes, as foolish and visionary a way for the female class to attempt to reform and regulate the class that has been fenced off by The Creator as the male class, as the present attempt of the labor class to sweep grandly over the spiritual and personal relation of individual employers and individual workmen and substitute for it collective bargaining from Indianapolis.
There is one thing about women. It would never have occurred to the women of this country as it has to the men to get up a contraption for doing a thing nationally that they could not even do at home.
For every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in the most intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of her life is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, the main and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, the one that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distance and from outside.
The whole idea, whether applied to biology or industry is a half dead, mechanical idea and only people who are tired or half alive, are long going to be willing to put up with it.
As the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair,—as the more individualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is what the relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers and employees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, the more individual and personal—that is to say, the more alive it is.
All live men with any gusto or headway in them, or passion for work, all employers and employees with any headway or passion for getting together in them are as impatient of having the way they get together their personal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be in the sexual relation and for the same reasons.
If it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in America get together in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in America get together in another, and pass resolutions of affection at each other, rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, how many men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for a father or mother, would go?
Only anæmic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either make or accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for the conditions of their lives together.
And in twenty years only anæmic employers and anæmic employees and workmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they do together, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eight hours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collective bargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does of it determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality, personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual daily contacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis of determining and of making effective what was right.
XIV
THE NEW COMPANY
I met a wagon coming down the street yesterday, saying across the front of it—half a street away, American Experience Co.
I wanted to get in.
Of course it turned out to be as it got nearer, The American Express Co., but I couldn't help thinking what it would mean if we had an equally well-organized arrangement for rapid transit of boxes—boxes people have got out of or got into, as we have for conveying other boxes people are mixed up with. (Fixes were called boxes when I was a boy. We used to speak of a man having a difficult experience, as being in a box.)
The Air Line League proposes to be The American Experience Company—a big national concern for shipping other people's experiences to people, so that unless they insist on it, they will have the good of them without having to take their time and everybody else's time around them to go through them all over again alone and just for themselves.
Of course there are people who tumtytum along without thinking, who will miss the principle and insist on having a nice private misery of doing it all over again in their own home factory for themselves. But there are many million people with sense in this country—people as good at making sense out of other people as they are in making money out of them, and the Air Line League proposes that to these people who have the sense, when they want them, when they order them, experiences shall be shipped. And when they get orders—they can ship theirs.
If some of the experience the Labor unions in England have had and got over having, could be shipped in the next few weeks, unloaded and taken over by the Americans, anybody can see with a look, ways in which the Air Line League or American Experience Company, if it were existing this minute, could bring home to people what they want to know about what works and what does not, what they long to have advertised to them—at once. Experiences—or date of experiences shipped from England would not only make a short-cut for America in increasing production in this country, lowering the cost of living, but would give America a chance in the same breath by the same act, to win a victory over herself and to turn the fate of a world.
What the Air Line League proposes to do is to act—particularly through the Look-Up Club—as the American Shipping Experience Company.
XV
THE FIFTY-CENT DOLLAR
This book is itself—so far as it goes, a dramatization of the idea of the Look-Up Club.
The thing the book—between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper—a kind of listening together of capital and labor, the Look-Up Club of The Air Line League is planned to do in the nation at large and locally in ten thousand cities—capital, labor and the consumer listening to each other—reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders, studying their personal interests together, working and acting out together the great daily common interest of all of us. The Look-Up Club, acting as it does for the three social groups that make up The Air Line League and having an umpire and not an empire function, operates primarily as a Publicity or Listening organization.
I might illustrate the need the Look-Up Club is planned to meet and how it would operate by suggesting what the Club might do with a particular idea—an idea on which people must really be got together in America before long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all.
Millions of American laborers go to bed every night and get up every morning saying:—
"The American employer is getting more money than he earns. We are going to have our turn now. Nobody can stop us."
Result: Under-production and the Fifty-Cent Dollar.
The cure for the American laboring man's under-production and working merely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that the American employer is working for something besides money—that he is earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job—the way he is saying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can be got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and the lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of the world all going out together.
I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports—men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like.
If all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what their laborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the face of Labor toward Capital—the face of this country toward the world and toward itself and toward every man in it would be changed in a week.
Suppose I propose to take one of these men and write about him until everybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeing that everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what would be the first thing I would come upon?
The first thing I would come upon would be a convention. It is one of the automatic ideas or conventions of business men—not to believe in themselves.
XVI
THE BUSINESS MAN, THE PROFESSIONAL MAN, AND THE ARTIST
Why is it that if a professional man or an artist does or says a certain thing—people believe him and that if a business man does or says precisely the same thing—most business men are suspicious?
When I say in the first sentence of an article on the front page of theSaturday Evening Post—as I did awhile ago—"I would pay people to read what I am saying on this page,"—everybody believes me. As people read on in one of my articles in thePost, they cannot be kept from seeing how egregiously I am enjoying my work. Anybody can see it—that I would pay up to the limit all the money I can get hold of—my own, or anybody's—to get other people to enjoy reading my stuff as much as I do. Nobody seems inclined to deny that if I could afford to—or, if I had to—I would pay ten cents a word to practically any man, to get him to read what I write.
Precisely the way I feel about an article in theSaturday Evening Postso fortunate as to be by me—or, about a book written by g.s.l., a man I know very well—W. J. —— feels about a house or about a bank created by W. J. ——. But if W. J., a designer—contractor—a builder—pretends he enjoys his creative work in building as much as I enjoy writing—if W. J., a business man, were to go around telling people or revealing to people that he would like to hire them to be his customers by handing back to them twenty, thirty or forty per cent of his agreed upon profits when he gets through (which is what he practically does over and over again) there are very few business men who would not say at first sight that W. J. is a man who ought to be watched.
And he is too, but for precisely turned around reasons most people have to be watched for. W. J. in designing and constructing a house, or a bank for a client, sets as his cost estimate a ten per cent maximum profit for himself, as a margin to work on; aiming at six or five per cent profit for himself, on small contracts and at a four, three or two and one-half per cent profit for himself on million dollar ones. Changes and afterthoughts from his clients in carrying out a contract are inevitable. W. J. wants a margin on which to allow for contingencies and for his customers' afterthought.
The three things that interest W. J. in business are: his work on a perfect house, his work on a perfect customer and his work on making enough money to keep people from bothering his work.
A perfect house is a house built just as he said it would be which comes out costing less than he said it would cost—possibly a check on his client's dinner plate the first night he dines in it.
A perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannot express himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to—who cannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sending everybody to W. J. he can think of.
The tendency of mean typical business men—even men who do this themselves, when I tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what is the matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me.
This is what is the matter with the country—the conventional automatic assumption that millions of men—even men who are not in business merely to make money themselves—make in general, that we must arrange to run a civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day, in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are merely working for money.
If we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it does not need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions and that these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulers and the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate of all of us—we would be a new nation in a week.
In a year we would increase production fifty per cent.
This has happened over and over again in factories where this new spirit of putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, has come in.
Naturally, inasmuch as W. J. as all people who know him know, has made a very great business success of running his business on this principle, of making it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things at once than merely making money—running a business like any other big profession, one of the first things I think of doing is to write something that will make everybody know it. Well, as I have said, the first fact I come on is that many business men do not approve of believing in themselves or in business or in what I say about its being a profession, any more than they can help.
XVII
THE NEWS-MAN
I have recently come in my endeavors as a publicist, as a self-appointed, self-paid employee of the American people, upon what seems to me a very astonishing and revolutionary fact.
I have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into two principles.
1. The industrial and financial fate of America and the world turns in the next few years—or even months, on news—on getting certain people to know in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certain things will happen.
2. News, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as a generalization or as a principle. To make news compelling and conclusive one has to say something in particular about somebody in particular.
Here is the fact I have come on in acting on these principles.
When I find news done up in a man to save a nation with, if I make everybody know him, the fact I face about my country is this.
A generalized—that is—a sterilized idea is free. A fertilized or dramatized idea—an idea done up and dramatized in a man so that everybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up.
I am not blaming anybody. I am laying before people and before myself a fact.
Suppose that I think it is stupendously to the point just now to advertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion of profit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would make a new nation for a hundred people to know?
Suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generally invited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kind of spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity—instead of getting off ideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, I insist on making ideas do things and I plan on having my ideas done up solidly in ten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching?
Suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, a man who dramatizes—makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea of increased production or superproducing, seems to the point—suppose I begin with W. J.?
What does anyone suppose would happen?
XVIII
W. J.
If W. J. were dead, or were to die to-morrow, it would be convenient. In bearing upon our present national crisis it would be thoughtful and practical of W. J. to die.
If W. J.'s worst enemy were to push him off the top of the fortieth story of the Equitable Building to-morrow morning all I would have to do would be to write an article about him in some national weekly,Saturday Evening PostorCollier's, which would be read by four million people.
But theSaturday Evening PostorCollier'shas no use for W. J. until he is dead. It would like to have, of course, but it would not be fair to the business men who are paying ten thousand dollars a page to be advertised in it, for theSaturday Evening Postto let any other man—any man who is not dead yet, be advertised in it.
This is the reason for the Look-Up Club, a national body—the gathering together of one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise W. J. to—who will then turn—the hundred thousand men of vision—and advertise him to everybody.
Then other men, strategic men like W. J.—men who are dramatizing other strategic ideas will be selected to follow W. J. for the one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise to a hundred million people.
By writing a book and having my publisher distribute through the bookstores a book, I would reach, at best, only one hundred thousand people, and I am proposing to reach a hundred million people—to organize a hundred thousand salesmen scattered in five thousand cities and reach with my book, the hearts and minds, the daily eight-hour-a-day working lives of a hundred million people.
This is what the Look-Up Club is for. It is an organized flying wedge of one hundred thousand salesmen who have picked each other out for driving into the attention of a nation, national ideas.
The fate of America and the fate of the world at the present moment turns upon free advertising written by men who could not be hired to do it—in books distributed by a hundred thousand men who could not be hired to distribute them. We are setting to work a national committee of a hundred thousand men, to unearth in America, advertise, make the common property of everybody the men who dramatize, who make neighborly and matter-of-fact the beliefs a great people will perish if they do not believe.
XIX
THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP
We are drawing in the next few months in America the plans and specifications for a great nation and a new world.
We want a Committee of a Hundred Thousand.
We are proposing to gather a Look-Up Committee of a hundred thousand men of constructive imagination in business and other callings, in ten thousand cities, who will work out together and place before the people, plans and specifications of what this nation proposes to be like—a picture of what a hundred million people want.
The situation we are trying to meet is one of providing new brain tracks for a hundred million people. It will not seem to many people, too much to say that the quick way to do this, is to form a Club—a Committee in this country, of a hundred thousand men to ask to be told about these new brain tracks, who will then tell them to the hundred million.
The Look-Up Club is a Publicity and Educational Organization for the purpose of focusing and mobilizing the vision of the people acting as a clearing house of the vision of the people—gathering, coördinating, pooling and determining and distributing the main points in their order of what the American people believe.
The first subject we act in our Publicity Organization as our Listening Conspiracy—our Coöperative news-service to our members—is the subject of how coöperation between capital and labor works. Our first news-service will be planned to increase production, decrease the cost of living, stop strikes and lockouts, drive out civil war and substitute coöperation as a means of getting things in American life.
Every man who is nominated to membership in the Look-Up Club naturally asks four questions.
1. How can I belong?
2. What does it cost?
3. What do I undertake to do for the Club?
4. What do I get—what does the Club do for me?
The idea is for each man who is deeply interested, to pick out, to nominate any fifty men—I put down for instance on my list Franklin P. Lane—among forty-nine others, ask Mr. Lane who the men are he knows in this nation, men he has come on in his business in the course of twenty years, who are characterized either by having creative imagination themselves or by marked power to coöperate with men who have it.
After Mr. Lane had given me his fifty, I would ask each of Mr. Lane's fifty for their fifty and each in turn for their fifty until we had covered the country and had picked out and introduced to each other from Maine to California the men of creative imagination in America.
Other members will of course be nominated by members of the Air Line League in their respective communities and everybody who is invited to nominate for the Look-Up section of the Air Line League will be asked to nominate in three lists—(1) those he thinks of as representing invention in the nation at large, (2) those he knows or deals with in his own business or line of activity—all over the country, who have creative imagination or power of discovery and planning ideas, and (3) those he knows in his own home-community that he and his neighbors would like to see in the Look-Up Club, on the nation's honor roll of men of vision in the nation representing his own community.
The cost is to be determined by the Club, but is planned as a small nominal sum—nominal dues for expense of correspondence and conducting the activities of the Club.
What a man gets by joining the Club is the association with two or three thousand members from all over the land at any given time who will be in the Club headquarters in a skyscraper hotel of its own, when he comes to New York and the advantage of common action and common looking at the same things at the same time with the other members of the Club, through the activities of the Club by mail.
The Look-Up Club Bulletins, pamphlets and little books containing news of critical importance and timeliness to all members—news not generally known or not available in the same concentrated form in the daily press, will be sent to all members for their own use and for distribution to others at critical times and places and with strategic persons—labor unions and employers and public men.
What the Look-Up Club does for a man is to give him the benefit of a friendly candid national conspiracy between a hundred thousand men, to get the news and to pass on the news that counts and to do it all at the same time instead of in scattered and meaningless dabs.
If the thing each man of a hundred thousand sees once a year in a little lonely dab of vision all by himself could be seen by all of us by agreement the same week in the year, we will do the thing we see.
Anything we see will have to happen. The only reason the thing we see does not happen now, is that we make no arrangements to see it together.
Seen together, news that looks like a rainbow acts like a pile driver.
A man becomes a hundred thousand times himself. In the Look-Up Club what a man gets for his own use, is hundred thousand man-power news.
What does a man when he joins the Look-Up Club, undertake to do?
Send in news when he knows some, and use news when he gets it.
I do not undertake to say just what each member of the Look-Up Club will undertake to do with news when he receives it.
When a man receives live news which immediately concerns him and his nation in the same breath, the way he feels about it and acts about it—about real news he applies to himself and to his work and the people around him, will seem to him to come, not under the head of duties to the Club, but under the head of the things the Club will tempt him to do and that he cannot be kept from doing.
If a hundred thousand picked men in this country in all walks of life all get the same news the same week, and then use the news the week they get it, and put it where other people will use it, we will all know and everybody else will know what the Look-Up Club is for.
We will be carrying out in the Look-Up Club what might be called a selective draft of vision.
We will mobilize and bring to action the vision and the will of the people.
XX
PROPAGANDY PEOPLE
I am weary and sad about the word propaganda. I am weary of being propaganded, or rather of being propaganded at and as regards propagandafying others myself, or propagandaizing them, whatever it is publicists and men who are interested in public ideas suppose they do, I am sad at heart. There is a prayer some one prayed once one tired New Year's Eve, which appeals to me.
"Forgive me my Christmases as I forgive them that have Christmased against me."
I could pray the same model outline for a prayer. But for Christmasing, substitute propagandy-izing.
The word somehow itself in its own unconscious beauty dramatizes the way I feel about it. I have written many hundred pages of what I believe about reformers—about people who are trying to get other people's attention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what I believe now is that most people if they would stop trying to get other people's attention and try to get their own, would do more good.
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.
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.