Read Ebook: The Ghost in the White House Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president how they can back him up express themselves to him be expressed by Lee Gerald Stanley

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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.

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.

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.

BOOK II

WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF

G. S. L. TO HIMSELF

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.

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