What our President seems to be for in America, is to do up a nation in one specific, particular man who expresses everybody.
This man deals with each other specific man, his aggressions and services, as a nation would if a nation could be one specific man.
The President of the United States is the Comptroller of the people"s vision, by seeing a part and dealing with a part as a part of a whole, he governs the people.
He is the Chancellor of the People"s Attention.
The business of being a President is the business of focusing the vision, of flooding the whole desire or will of a people around a man and letting him have the light of it, to see what he is doing by, and to be seen by, while he is doing it.
The corporations have expressed or focused the employers of labour. The Labour Unions have focused or expressed the will of the labourers, and the government focuses and expresses the will of the consumers, of the people as a whole, rich and poor, so that Labour and Capital, both listen to It, understand It and act on It.
The way to deal with a specific sin is to flood it around with the general vision. Then it does not need to be dealt with. Then strangely, softly, and almost before we know--out there in the Light, it automatically deals with itself.
When the Government takes hold quietly of the National Cash Register Company, turns it up, empties its contents out,--all its methods and its motives--and all the things It thought It wanted, and then proceeds to put its president and twenty-nine of its officers into jail, my readers will perhaps point out to me that this action of the government as a method of tempting people to be good, while it may have the virtue of being concrete and the virtue of being specific, certainly does not have the other virtue that I have laid down, the virtue of being affirmative.
"Certainly" they will say "there is not anything affirmative about putting twenty-nine big business men in jail." Many people would call it the most magnificently negative thing a President could have done. Moses himself would have done it.
It does not seem to me that Moses would have done it, or that it was essentially negative. It could not unfairly be claimed that in spite of its negative look on the surface, it was the most ma.s.sive, significant, crushing affirmation that a great people has made for years.
By putting the twenty-nine officers of the National Cash Register Company in jail, the American people affirmed around the world the nation"s championship of the men that had been defeated in the compet.i.tion with the National Cash Register Company. They affirmed that these men who were not afraid of the National Cash Register Company because they were bigger, and who stood up to them and fought them, were the kind of men Americans wanted to be like, and that the officers of the National Cash Register Company were the kind of men Americans did not want to be like, would not do business with, would not tolerate, would not envy, would not live on the same continent with, unless they were kept in jail.
The President of the United States, sitting in Washington, at the head of this vast affirmative and a.s.sertive continent, indicted the Cash Register Company, that is, by a slight pointed negative action, by pushing back a b.u.t.ton he turned on the great chandelier of a nation and flooded a nation with light. We, the American people, suddenly, all in a flash, looked into each other"s faces and knew what we were like.
We had hoped we believed in human nature, and in brave men and in men against machines but we could not prove it.
Suddenly, we stood in a blaze of truth about ourselves. Suddenly, we could again look with our old stir of joy at our national Flag. If we liked, we could swing our hats.
Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I had been trying to get this news for years. It is news I have wanted to live with and do business with. I have been trying to get my question answered. What are the American people really like?
The President points at the National Cash Register Company and I find out. All the people find out.
In the last a.n.a.lysis, the masterful, shrewd, practical, and constructive part of being a President of the United States--the thing in the business of being a President that keeps the position from being a position which only the second rate or No type of man would have time to take, is the fact that the President is the Head Advertising Manager of the United States, conducting a huge advertising campaign of what Americans really want.
He takes up the National Cash Register Company, picks out its twenty-nine officers, makes it a bill board sky-high across the country.
"Here are the kind of business men that the people of the United States do not want, and here are the kind of men that we do!"
The thing that makes indicting a trust a positive and affirmative act is the advertising in it.
Gladstone once wrote a postcard about a little book of Marie Bashkirtseff"s.
Twenty nations read the little book.
Every now and then one watches a man or sees a truth that would make a nation. One wishes one had some way of being the sort of person or being in the kind of place where one could make a nation out of it.
One thinks it would be pa.s.sing wonderful to be President of the United States. It would be like having a great bell up over the world that one could reach up to and ring! But it is better than that. One touches a b.u.t.ton at one"s desk if one is President of the United States, a nation looks up. He whispers to twenty thousand newspapers, "Take your eyes away a minute," he says, "from Jack Johnson and Miss Elkin"s engagement, and look, oh, look, ye People, here is a man in this world like this! He has been in the world all this while without our suspecting it. Did you know there was or could be anywhere a man like THIS? And here is a man like this! Which do you prefer? Which are you really like?"
There is nothing really regal or imperial in a man, nothing that makes a man feel suddenly like a whole Roman Empire all by himself, in 1913, like saying "Look! Look!"
Sometimes I think about it. Of course I could take a great reel of paper and sit down with my fountain pen, say Look for a mile, "Look! look!
look! look!!!--President Wilson says it once and without exclamation points. Skysc.r.a.pers listen to him! Great cities rise and lift themselves and smite the world. And the faint, sleepy little villages stir in their dreams."
Moses said, "Thou shalt not!" President Wilson says, "Look!"
Perhaps if Moses had had twenty thousand newspapers like twenty thousand field-gla.s.ses that he could hand out every morning and lend to people to look through--he would not have had to say, "Thou shalt not."
The precise measure of the governing power a man can get out of the position of being President of the United States to-day is the amount of advertising for the people, of the people, and by the people he can crowd every morning, every week, into the papers of the country.
A President becomes a great President in proportion as he acts authoritatively, tactfully, economically, and persistently as the Head Advertising Manager of the ideals of the people. He is the great central, official editor of what the people are trying to find out--of a nation"s news about itself.
By his being the President of what people think, by his dictating the subjects the people shall take up, by his sorting out the men whom the people shall notice, this great ceaseless Meeting of ninety million men we call the United States--comes to order.
CHAPTER V
THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!"
Our American President, if one merely reads what the Const.i.tution says about him, is a rather weak-looking character.
The founders of the country did not intend him to be anybody in particular--if it could be helped. They were discouraged about allowing governments to be efficient. Not very much that was constructive to do was handed over to him. And the most important power they thought it would do for him to have was the veto or power to say "No."
Possibly if our fathers had believed in liberty more they would have allowed more people to have some; or if they had believed in democracy more, or trusted the people more, they would have thought it would do to let them have leaders, but they had just got away. They felt timid about human nature and decided that the less constructive the government was and the less chance the government had to be concrete, to interpret a people, to make opportunities and turn out events, the better.
Looked at at first sight no more elaborate, impenetrable, water-tight arrangement for keeping a government from letting in an idea or ever having one of its own or ever doing anything for anybody, could have been conceived than the Const.i.tution of the United States, as the average President interprets it.
Each branch of the government is arranged carefully to keep any other branch from doing anything, and then the people, every four years, look the whole country over for some new man they think will probably leave them alone more than anybody--and put him in for President.
Looking at it narrowly and by itself, all that a President selected like this could ever expect in America to put in his time on, would seem to be--being the country"s most importantly helpless man--the man who has been given the honour of being a somewhat more prominent failure in America than any one else would be allowed to be.
He stops people for four years. Other people stop him for four years.
Then with a long happy sigh, at the end of his term, he slips back into real life and begins to do things.
This has been the more or less sedately disguised career of the typical American President. Merely reading the Const.i.tution or the lives of the Presidents, without looking at what has been happening to the habits of the people in the last few years, we might all be asking to-day, "What is there that is really constructive that President Wilson can do?" What is there that is going to prevent him, with all that moral earnestness dammed up in him, that sense of duty, that Presbyterian sense of other people"s duties--what is there that is going to prevent him, with his school-book habits, his ideals, his volumes of American history, from being a teachery or preachery person--a kind of Schoolmaster or Official Clergyman to Business?
News.
The one really important and imperative thing to the people of this country to-day is News. In spite of newspapers, authors, College presidents, Bank presidents, Socialist agitators, Bill Heywoods, and Trusts, the people are bound to get this news, and any man who is so placed by his prominence that he can scoop up the news of a country, hammer its news together into events the papers will report, express news in the laws, build news into men who can make laws and unmake laws, any man who is so placed that directly or indirectly he takes news, forces it in by hydraulic pressure where people see it doing things, who takes news and crowds it into courts, crowds news into lawyers and into legislatures, pries some of it even into newspapers, can have, the ordinary American says to-day, as much leeway in this government as he likes.
The ordinary American has never been able to understand the objection important people have--that nearly everybody has (except ordinary people) to news--especially editors and publishers.
It is an old story. Every one must have noticed it. One set of people in this world, always from the beginning, trying to climb up on the housetops to tell news, and another set of people hurrying up always and saying, "Hush, Hush!" Some days it seems, when I read the papers, that I hear half the world saying under its breath, a vast, stentorian, "Shoo!
shoo! SHSH! SHSH!"
Then I realize I live in an editor"s world. I am expected to be in the world that editors have decided on the whole to let me be in.
Of course I did not know what to do at first when this came over me.
I naturally began to try to think of some way of cutting across lots, of climbing up to News.