IV
RULES FOR BEING LIED TO
(Charles Schwab or Anybody)
—— dropped in, in the rain the other night, and sat by my fireplace and said: "Charles Schwab is the Prince of Liars. He says one thing about labor and does another." He went on to say things he said other people said.
There are two courses of action to take about Charles Schwab's being the Prince of Liars.
One way is to expose what he says.
The other way is to help him make what he says true.
I would rather do what I can to help Charles Schwab practice what he preaches than to stop his preaching.
Everything turns for the American people to-day on being constructive, on dealing with facts as they are, on using the men we have, and on getting the most out of the men we have.
To get the most out of Charles Schwab throw around him expectation and malediction and then let him take his choice.
Charles Schwab in saying what he says about the new spirit in which capital has got to deal with labor is rendering a great, unexpected, sensational and indispensable service to labor and to capital. It is a pity to throw this public confession of capital to labor, and in behalf of labor away. It would be a still greater pity to see labor itself throwing it away.
If I could let myself be cooped up as a writer in any one class in this country to-day, and if it were my special business to take sides with labor, the thing I would try to do first with Charles Schwab, instead of undermining what he says and making what he says mean nothing—would be to coöperate with him—back him up—back him up with the public—back him up with the stockholders and the people in his mills, until he makes what he says mean three times as much.
Then I would see to it if I could, that he says four times as much. I would try, if I could, to keep Charles Schwab steadily at it, claiming more and more for labor. Then catching up more and more to Charles Schwab, doing more and more, and compelling his partners to do more and more of what he says.
Charles Schwab has fifty or a hundred thousand or so partners, of course—stockholders he has to educate.
They have to be educated in public. He is not insincere because he has not educated them all in a minute.
V
GETTING ONE MAN RIGHT
There are certain facts which make me believe in Schwab as an asset for the nation and for labor and capital both, that must not be thrown away. There are all manner of facts about Schwab and his mills which I do not yet know which I could look up and use, but the most valuable facts to use and use first, are facts anybody can get and get without looking up, by just sitting down and thinking.
Getting one man right and being fair to one man is the way to begin to be fair to a nation.
If Charles Schwab is what —— says he is, if Charles Schwab is doing or winking while it is being done at the thing —— says he is—he is an incredibly under-witted man—stupid about the public, about labor and about capital—and, what is the most reckless of all—stupid in behalf of himself.
It is rather a hard nut to crack—Charles Schwab's being stupid. I cannot understand why people—why a man like —— would apparently rather believe that Charles Schwab is stupid than to believe that there must be some other way of explaining him and of explaining what he has heard said about him.
If what —— says is true about Mr. Schwab, he is not only a stupid man but a ruined man.
In the colossal outbreak of public knowledge coming to us now, nothing will be able to keep Charles Schwab from to-morrow on, from being a stupendous tragedy as long as he lives, and a by-word after he is dead.
The alternatives are:
The assertions about Mr. Schwab's real attitude toward labor are not true.
If true, they are qualified by facts and by delaying conditions for which all intelligent men whether identified with capital or labor would be glad to allow.
If true they are due to delegated authority.
If a large organization does not hand over authority it is inefficient.
If it does not make experiments with men and methods it is inefficient.
If it does not make a certain proportion of mistakes in its experiments with men and methods its experiments are fake experiments.
People who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who do things.
VI
GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT
My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and reformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extreme radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme conservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and self-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrong the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean—what they are like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like.
The quick way to deal with the industrial situation is to expose the extreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. The quick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come to terms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about one another, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructive job on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic human beings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are held up and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these human beings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, by engineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature.
These personalities to unlock a nation with—to make a hundred million men believe together and act together should be picked out, men like Charles Schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yet everybody ought to look at, and will like to look at when they know them.
Intensive publicity extensively applied.
Then with a printing press and a postage stamp multiply it by a hundred million. Make true beliefs about picked out men—typical men we have thousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives.
If the American people can come to know and interpret fifty men—if they can get fifty sample men right—they will then be able to use these fifty men every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlock team work with, with all the others. People will have something to work from and something to work toward, in judging what they can do with employers and with workmen around them.
Then we will have team work and civilization—we will have a democracy the Germans would like to be asked to belong to.
VII
ENGINEERS IN FOLKS
The most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The other facts than the facts about people—about how people feel and are going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine training and education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people. The facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to get most, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging one another.
We have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are off on their facts about one another. One of the first things business men are going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about human nature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with by experts—by the general recognition and employment of experts in human nature—of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men to one another.
If everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as they really are, our economics in America will be as simple as a primer, before night.
VIII
THE GREAT NEW PROFESSION
En Route, New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R.
January 19, 1920.
Dined at the ——'s last night. Judge —— was there. Two other lawyers. We sat after dinner and talked very late.
Three lawyers are too many for a dinner.
I do not know what it is, but I never spend the evening with a lawyer, without talking back to him in my mind all the next day.
Probably, if at this late date I were picking out what I would be in the world, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick out being a lawyer backwards.
The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in conducting people's fights for them.
My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once be started—a profession in which any man who went into it, would be occupied in being a lawyer backwards.
(I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of—because everybody would see—a whole nation would see all in one unanimous minute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like.)
Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by the things they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuous ad.—their huge national international display ad. just now of what a lawyer is like—of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is the United States Senate.
It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to most people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards—two or three hundred thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts everybody went to, to keep them out of fights.
You see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course he will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it over. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it is not impossible he will make your enemies love you.
My idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what it is worth—not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as a plain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for getting the things done one wants to do, and for getting what one wants.
If I were hiring a man to help me get what I want out of other people and if I had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be the more practical thing for me to do.
If I could go down town and engage a man at so much a year who would be an expert in making me understand myself and in making me make fun of myself, so that I could get myself into fairly good shape for other people to understand, it would be still more practical.
I would soon find myself after the first few séances with the man I was hiring to sit down with me and be a lawyer backwards to me—I would soon find myself having things done to me that would be so plain, so pointed, so sensible, so scientific and matter of fact and thorough that I would be able in a minute to cut down to the quick with any man I met,—cut down to the quick and get what I wanted on any subject I took up, because nobody could fool me, because I couldn't even be fooled by myself.
I do not know how long it is going to take but I do know that if the world is going to be reformed it is going to be by men who—either by doing it personally, or by hiring somebody else to help them do it, have reformed themselves.
My own personal observation is, so far, that when I set out to see things against myself I seem to need somehow, a great deal of assistance.
In such a naturally disagreeable mussy job of course, instead of going to my friends, to people one goes out to dine with, I feel there ought to be some regular professional person one could go to, some more noble refined sort of spiritual hired man—make an appointment by telephone, go down to a room down town on the way to one's office and then just as a plain matter of course be done off for the day, be done over, be put in shape for one's fellow human beings to get on with.
Then one could go out into the midst of the people and keel over a world.
After one had hired some one to be a lawyer backwards to one and got used to it, one would soon be in shape to go to one's employers and let them put in some touches, go to one's employees, go to anybody and everybody right and left. One would soon get so that one could learn something from everybody. One would take points even from relatives.
The main difficulty in a thing like this would be one that would come at the start, the difficulty of getting people to look upon undergoing the truth about themselves, respectfully and seriously and like an operation.
No amateur or friend could get anybody started. The only way to begin is to have some special expert to go to, some special expert with a long string of notable moral patients, men who have succeeded in business by seeing through themselves more, and seeing through themselves quicker and oftener than other people do. You hear of some especially good man who is being a lawyer backwards practicing regularly with great success. You observe his patients from day to day and see how the truth works. Then you go down to his office, plank down your money and get the truth.
The trouble with truth from friends and relatives is that even when they tell it, nobody pays for it. Most people neither take the truth nor anything else in this world seriously if it is free. People get more, the more they want it. And the more they want it, the more they show it by wanting to pay for it.
This is why I suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be a regular profession. There is going to be a tremendous demand for going down town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see how going down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with people in one's work.
The lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies about himself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free a man from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis of himself and present him a world with the truth.
This idea should be presented to people just as plain common sense. People should not be asked to take it up not as an ideal but as an operation. If a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how he has got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to a man's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in order to have any one willing to let him live?
We have operations on all our other inner organs. The things that are done to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personal and intimate things. And if people will let themselves be cut open and operated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men—hundreds of thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to be operated on so that they can earn something to eat? Nine out of ten of the things that keep people from earning a living as they should or as they might, are truths against themselves that have never been operated on.
IX
GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE FACTS
The first thing the man in the White House for the next four years is going to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as they really are.
If I were writing a book for the next president to run for president on, one of the first things I would put into it would be a definite statement of what the president and the government proposed to do and what policy they proposed to adopt to keep Labor and Capital from being off on their facts about each other.
There are two policies to choose from.
First Policy: Have Capital tell Labor what is the matter with Labor, and have Labor tell Capital what is the matter with Capital. (Results: Strikes heaped on lockouts and lockouts heaped on strikes.)
Second Policy: Turn the whole truth-telling policy around.
The way to make a truth count is to get the utmost possible attention to it.
The way to get the utmost possible attention to a truth is to have people one does not expect it from telling it. The way to advertise the sins of Capital is to have Capital tell them. Employers and capitalists can attract twenty times as much attention in telling things that are the matter with them, and will be believed forty times as much. And they not only can tell the facts against themselves more fairly, but while they are telling the facts against themselves they are in a position to change them. They can tell facts against themselves with one hand and change them with the other. Or they can begin changing them—begin getting labor to help them change them.
If I had to save the world in a week or rather get assurance in a week that it could be saved, I would get all the people in it to agree for a year to read each other's papers. Have every man read two papers. We would start up for America the national Parallel Column Habit. Each man by himself daily putting his own little world and other people's world alongside until they got used to it, and then together.
There is no limit to what reading the wrong papers would not do for this nation. It is not a matter to argue about. It is a mere plain matter of fact in ordinary every day psychology. The veriest tyro in human engineering can see it,—that the way to get a truth noticed about Capital or Labor, the way to make a truth of some use and get it believed and acted on, is to have the wrong people tell it.
Judge Gary could say some of the things Mr. Gompers is saying a great deal better than Mr. Gompers could.
There is one thing I am going to do when I put this up to the people. I am not going to let them think I am putting it up to them as a Christian. The way to introduce the idea is to speak as a plain practical engineer in folks and in the way human nature works. I don't know as I would mind people having fine religious feelings about it, when they did it, if they liked, but I would prefer to call it and prefer to introduce it as simple, plain, hard-headed publicity.
The most natural quick universal short-cut to peace, to different groups of people in America getting their facts right and getting them quick and dealing with each other as they really are, is to have people go around in America from now on, telling truths everywhere, who have just got them—people the truths look prominent on.
X
THE FOOL KILLERS
The gist of the labor problem simmers down to our making some adequate universally understood provision, generally resorted to by everybody as a matter of course, for people's not being fooled about themselves.
If people do not fool themselves nobody else can fool them.
And they do not go around fooling others.
The next thing employers and employees who are being fooled by themselves and who are trying to fool one another, are going to observe, is that their competitors in their own industry—the employers and employees in their own industry who are not fooled by themselves and who are not taking time to fool one another, are producing more, cheaper and better goods than they can.
Things that take years to straighten out, straighten out in weeks when people on both sides who have stopped fooling themselves, get together and look at the facts over each other's shoulders. All that is necessary is to get the thing started—looking at the facts over each other's shoulders. People who do not want to start to look at facts in this way should call in a specialist until they do.
Labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital human nature another. They both believe on both sides what they want to, unless they go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitable habit started of making a deliberate, desperate effort not to.
The world is not being run from day to day by the truth. It is run by what people believe is the truth. It is what the I. W. W. extremists believe is the truth, which constitutes the important fact—the fact which has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. The truth about Judge Gary's attitude or Charles Schwab's, toward labor unions, makes no difference if nobody believes it, or if the labor unions don't believe it. As long as the labor unions are fooling themselves and believing what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact way to deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. The fundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off on their facts about themselves and believe what they want to about themselves. Naturally having begun with this they branch out and believe what they want to about anybody.
To this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we have obviously got to make provision for in modern American life, is practically a new profession—regular professional persons everywhere in all cities, and in all the different industries and in the highly specialized groups each with their special and different techniques, who are experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves and others of believing what they want to about themselves.
XI
THE WHISPERERS
A very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in the habit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their office doors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves.
A very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in the habit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficient type are whispering around to one another against themselves.
One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people who are shouting would shut up.
But perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout.
The first moment the shouters suspect what the whisperers are whispering,—the whisperers on the other side—they will stop shouting to listen.
The whole industrial situation narrows down to this,—might be put into two words by a hundred million people to-day, to Capital and Labor, "Swap Whispers!"
The tumult and the shouting die.
It is with the whisperers, we will save the world.
XII
MR. DOOLEY, JUDGE GARY AND MR. GOMPERS
The proposal that we have a new profession—a group of specialists to go to, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other people and be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as a kind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almost tragical subject. But something has made me want to begin my idea in this way.
In strained situations between people—situations in which one sees people getting all worked up and fine, noble and wild-eyed about themselves, I am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, most immediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one—some one who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless laugh.
To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or not, would be practical.
Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola.
And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emancipation Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time, in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his God.
I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time—just as Mr. Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went home—stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room—if Mr. Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's Conference might have been saved.
The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen from the point of view of God or of common people, many of the men in it,—most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very funny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could see through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference who conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact about human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would look in a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless lively and equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Labor group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than could be helped.
The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our whole nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp—a state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody thought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at themselves.
When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on, walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was prettiest, about themselves.
Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe about itself.
With Capital not yet grown up—not yet really capable (as the really mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative use of criticism,—incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the same undeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as a national dramatization,—a rather loud and theatrical acting out before an amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country as institutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear, superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonous strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty years, had made us suspect they were!
For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this nation—called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid for carting it away without saying a word.
There are three courses we can take in the Public Group now.
We can try to discipline Capital and Labor into producing together by passing laws and heaping up embarrassments and penalties.
We can let them see how much better they can make things by sticking them on to one another and letting them discipline one another.
We can make fun of both of them quietly to themselves, keep quiet-hearted, matter of fact, full of realism, humor, relaxation and naturalness and deal with Capital and Labor as Lincoln would, by getting laughing and listening started.
Then let them laugh at themselves.
America should arrange to have Judge Gary, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Gompers get together on a desert island and face things out.
A great deal of capital in this country—especially the best of it, is already seeing, and already acting on facts about itself it has not wanted to believe. It is already seeing that it cannot carry off with Labor or with the Public any longer the idea of looking pure and noble, standing before people in a kind of eternal moral-Prince-Albert coat, one's hand in one's bosom, and with the same old pompous-looking face, without looking ridiculous. It is seeing that it would rather laugh at itself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that the only thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific and economic, smile at its airs with Labor and the public, and lay them aside.
If Capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietly for self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, Labor will.
If Labor does it, Capital will.
Whichever side does it first, and does it best,—does it in the most human, attractive and contagious way will find a hundred million people handing over to it the power and the leadership of the country.
To whichever side it comes first, to show the most shrewdness, the most fearlessness, the most generosity in seeing facts against itself, will come the honor of the first victory.
The first victory either side will be allowed by the people, is its victory over itself.
People in this country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capable of self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, can have anything they want.
XIII
FOOLING ONESELF IN POLITICS
The same thing that everybody can see is going to happen in business in this country from now on—the pushing forward—the victory over all others in business of the men who are not fooled about themselves is going to be seen happening ten times over in politics.
The leading symptom of the mood of the people, the magnificent blanket political secret that covers all the other secrets of the coming conventions and elections, the dominating fact of the next man's next four years in The White House, is the thing that is going to be done by the people from to-day on, to politicians who are fooled about themselves.
One has but to mention one or two and a nation sees it.
Any little natural impression my fellow citizens may have had at the beginning of this article that in putting forward my idea of being a lawyer backwards, or the idea that we must all practice at being lawyers backwards to ourselves, I am putting forward just a gay pleasant thoughtlet, instead of a grave and pressing national issue, an issue on which the fate of a people is at stake, fades away when one really begins to think of how the idea would really work out if tried on particular politicians.
Everybody can pick out his own of course, but I am inclined to believe just at the moment, that if there was a good man everybody in this nation knew of who was being a lawyer backwards—say in New York or London—a man who had a big practice and who had a fine record in bracing men up to fight themselves and not to be fooled about themselves, the man that most people in this country would like to take up a national collection for, have sent to him and done over at once, no matter what it cost, would be Henry Cabot Lodge.
For six long weary months now, the main and international fact America and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man called Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself.
Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,—their very cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Washington can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips Henry Cabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to make Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in a lonely back seat of the World.
But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred million people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry Cabot Lodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses his pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to the world after all is that he—Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, has taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international emotion out of it—every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration—into a great national stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty generations like attendant angels hovering around him—around Henry Cabot Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws of a prowling League of Nations!
It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived.
It would be of no use to argue—not even for a hundred million people to argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself.
So it came to pass—a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man magnificently obsessed—a man holding himself ready any minute of any day in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipice of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off....
Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues of nations of his own twenty years ago—who would have believed that a man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a national, into an international helplessness like this?
My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at the present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the psycho-analysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to get things, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and from now on, in the men they choose to get them.
The ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled about themselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, are matched on every side in the world of politics.
The personal trait of great political as well as industrial value for which the people of this country are going to look in the men they allow to be placed over them—the men they give power and command to, is the quality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts in people. What we are going to look for in a man is having an engineering and not a sentimental attitude toward his own mind and the minds of others. We are going to give power and place to the man who has a certain eagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certain suppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. The man we are going to look past everybody for and pick to be a President or a Senator after this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his own party or by his own class, who is not fooled about himself, who keeps without swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunk line of the interests of all of us.
XIV
SWEARING OFF FROM ONESELF IN TIME
Before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is established, and before very many offices have really been opened up where one can go in and have one's mind changed ten dollars' worth instead of having it poured, soothed and petted, a good many of us are going to find it necessary to practice on ourselves and in a humble way as amateurs, do any little odd jobs we can on ourselves at home.
We nearly all of us have it in us—we the hundred million people—to be like Henry Cabot Lodge, on a less national scale, any minute.
I say over to myself breathlessly between these very words while I write them down about Henry Cabot Lodge, that beautiful thought John Bunyan had, "Except for the grace of God" a wife, five friends and a sense of humor, there goes Gerald Stanley Lee!
I have made myself say this over practically every day while writing this article (I have had to write it), and when I was in the same town Henry Cabot Lodge is, last week, saw him snooping around the Senate, so pure and high and from the Back Bay, so serene in his courtly chivalrous dream about himself, I got taken up every time—I do not deny it—on the same monotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the same monotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then I would stand there (He is my own Senator) with his pass for The Senate in my pocket ... I would stand and watch him,—watch him walking through the lordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought John Bunyan had about the murderer, "Except for the grace of God there goes etc., etc." Everybody fill in for himself!
The essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human nature is that all the people who have any are very much alike. The best we can do about it—most of us—is to recognize the fact that in spite of the thought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably are going to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical working difference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselves in the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, more desperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regular arrangements, perhaps,—when something in us starts us up into being Lodges,—for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselves in time.
Here is Charles Evans Hughes for instance, who from the day he was born hates a Socialist from afar off,—a man who never had in his younger days perhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thing Charles Evans Hughes does before anybody can say Jack Robinson, the very first minute he reads in his paper that the New York Assembly has refused to give their seats to five Socialist members because they are Socialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big national jerk draw his national self together, and before the country is half waked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an act of sympathy and protest on behalf of American Socialists from the last man most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that the narrow partisans of the Assembly itching with superiority, sweating with propriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great Chamber in Albany, should take the Socialist members they had waved out of the room simply for belonging to the Socialist party, and conduct them back to their seats as the accredited representatives (until proved individually unfit) of citizens of the United States and let them sit there as a national exhibit of the way in which a great and free people, who are believing in themselves every day, can believe in themselves enough to listen to anybody, to make regular arrangements in Albany and everywhere as a matter of course for listening to people with whom they do not agree, without fear and without frothing at the mouth.
Mr. Hughes is as anxious to do anything he can during one lifetime to discourage Socialism as Henry Cabot Lodge is to discourage Woodrow Wilson, but the reason that the American people have been glad to have Charles Evans Hughes as Justice of the Supreme Court, the reason that they came within three inches of making him President of the United States is that in an eminent degree he is a man who has made elaborate, conclusive and habitual arrangements with his own mind for not being deceived by Charles Evans Hughes, for being a lawyer backwards, for fighting himself, for stepping up out of being a mere lawyer and sitting sternly on the Bench of the Supreme Court, against himself.
Of course I am not writing this article to point out to a hundred million people with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superior I and a hundred million other people are to Henry Cabot Lodge and to the way for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and being internationally fooled about himself. The special point I seek to make is that as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking out into millions of Lodges any minute, that we should make the most of our new national chance of our power as a people just now—just before the two great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong, to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard against ourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to The White House,—from whatever walk of life he comes,—a man who will have himself magnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the people into his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own class, or put down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul—a man who will be the President of all the people everywhere all the time.
When the members of The Bar Association of the City of New York who backed Mr. Hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightened world, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasion and being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fair to divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those who voted to back Mr. Hughes were, and those who did not, were not equally exposed to being fooled about themselves. Mr. Hughes and his followers were probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular and standing arrangements with themselves against themselves and who acted more quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish they had acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes.
In the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next four years to justify democracy—to justify the power of the human spirit to be free, generous, noble and just in self-government, the power of men of differing classes, of differing groups and interests to live in orderly good will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last a great nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot do it,—all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being a blind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our not being full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on what we do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand for seeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men to represent us who shall not be demagogues, who shall lead us as we are, with clear eyes to what we are going to be, men who shall lead us by opening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting us in our sins.