CHAPTER VIII
NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT
A nation wakes up every morning and for one minute before it runs to its work it says to its President, "HERE WE ARE!"
The best a President can do in the way of a plain, everyday acknowledgment of the presence of the people is News.
The news that the people are demanding from the President to-day is intensely personal. It is a kind of rough, b.u.t.ting, good-natured familiarity a great people has with its President, a little heedless, relentless, like some splendid Child, ready to forgive and expecting to be forgiven, it jostles in upon him daily, "Here we are! What are you believing this morning? Did you believe in us yesterday? Did you act as if you believed in us? Did you get anybody to believe in us? Who are the men you say are like us? What are they like this morning?
"We have asked a hundred times; we can only ask it once more. How do you think you are turning out yourself, Mr. President? Are you what you thought you would be? Do you think it is a good time for us to decide this morning what you are really like? And, after all, Mr. President--if you please--who _are_ you? And once more, Mr. President, in G.o.d"s name, _who are we?_"
This is always the gist of what it says, "Who are we?"
It is the people"s main point, after all, asking a President who they are, wondering if he can interpret them.
Then he shuts his door and thinks, or he calls his Cabinet and thinks.
Rows of little-great men file by all day. They stand each a few minutes with his little Speck or Dot of the People in his hands, and they say, "This is the People."
He listens.
It is very hard to be always President of the People when one is listening and the little-great go by.
One has to go back a little, in the night perhaps, or when one is quite alone. He sees again the Child; it is what he is in the White House for, he remembers, to express this dumb giant, this mighty Child, half weary, half glad, standing there by day by night, saying, "Who are we?" One would think it would be hard to be glib with the Child.
Sometimes it is so deep and silent!
Once when It broke in on Lincoln in this way and said, "_Who are we?_"
he prayed.
CHAPTER IX
NEWS-MEN
It seems very difficult to get news through as to who we really are to a President. When I look about me and see what the President"s ways are of telling news about himself to us, I see that he is not without his advantages. But when I look about to see what conveniences we have as a people for telling our President news about us, I note some curious things. The fears of the American people, the fears and threats of labour and capital are organized and expressed, but their faiths, their wills, the things in them that make them go and that make them American, are not organized and are not expressed.
The labour unions are afraid and say, "We will not work," to their employers, "You cannot make us work." The President hears this. It is about all they say.
The capitalists and employers are afraid and they say, "We will not pay," "You cannot make us pay."
Shall the President act as if these men represent Labor and Capital?
We say, "No."
Neither of these groups of men express real live American labour or real live characteristic American money.
American money is free, bold, manful, generous and courageous to a fault. American money swings out in mighty enterprises, shrewdly believing things, imperiously singing things out of its way.
A singing people want a singing government. How is our President going to hear our labour and our money sing?
Pinchot expressed us, not Ballinger.
Mr. Pinchot is no mere uplifter or missionary. He is an artist in expressing America to a President. If we have a President who will not listen to a man like Pinchot, let us try a President that will.
Pinchot--an American millionaire with a fortune made out of forests, who is spending the fortune in protecting the forests for the nation, is the kind of American Americans like to set up before a President to say what Americans are like. Millions of men stand by Pinchot. We like the way he makes money sing.
Tom L. Johnson--an American millionaire who made his money in the ordinary humdrum way, by getting valuable street railway franchises out of a city for nothing--has the courage to turn around, spend his fortune and spend it all, in keeping other people from doing it.
America presents Tom L. Johnson to a President with its compliments and says, "This is what America is like."
It may not look always as if Tom L. Johnson were America--America in miniature. But millions of us say he is. He makes money sing.
We want a President--millions of us want him--and this is the most important news about us, who expects money in this country to sing.
We want our money and expect our money in this country to stop saying mean things about us, things that make us ashamed to look a true newspaper in the face, or one another in the face, and that humiliate us before the world.
And now I have come to an awkward place in this book where I hope the reader will help me all he can.
There is nothing to do but to let out the real truth and face the music.
The fact is, Gentle Reader--perhaps you have suspected it all along--that if it had not been for fear of mixing my book all up with him and making it a kind of arena or tournament instead of a book, I would have mentioned ex-President Roosevelt before this. He has been getting in or nearly getting in to nearly every chapter so far, but of course I knew, as any one would, that he would spoil all the calm equipoise, the quiet onward flowing of the Stream of Thought, and with one chapter after the other, with each as the crisis came up, though I scarcely know how, I have managed to keep him out. And now, oh, Gentle Reader, here he is! I know very well that he is in everything, and right in the middle of everything, and that in a kind of splendid mixed happy uproarious way, there somehow has to be a great to-do the moment he appears. The beautiful clear water, the lucid depth of Thought--will all become (ah, I know it too well, Gentle Reader) all thunder and spray and underneath the mighty grinding of the wheels--the wheels of the Nation and the Mowing Machine of Time, and in the background--in the red background of the Dawn, there will be the face of Theodore--just the face of Theodore in this book shining at us--readers and writer and all--out of a huge rosy mist!
But I have been driven to it. The fact seems to be that I must find at just this point in the book, if I can, a word. And the word will have to be a word, too, that everybody knows, and that conveys a lively sense to everybody the moment it is used--of a certain tone or quality, or hum or murmur of being. No one regrets this more than I, because it is so unwieldy and inconvenient and always bulges out in a sentence or a book or a nation more than it was meant to, but the word ROOSEVELT, R O O S E V E L T, happens to be the word that people in this country, and very largely in other nations, and in all languages have chosen and are using every day to express to one another a certain American quality or tone now abroad in our world--a certain hum, as one might say, or whirr of goodness.
This particular hum, or whirr of goodness, which is instantly a.s.sociated with the word Roosevelt, expresses, except that of course it over-expresses, a part of the news to-day about America which we want our President to read.
One cannot help wondering why it is that if one wanted to express to the largest number of people in the world a certain quality of goodness, the word Roosevelt would do it best.
I am not dealing for the purpose of this book in what Mr. Roosevelt"s goodness is or whether it is what he thinks it is. We might all disagree about that. I am dealing quite strictly in this connection with what even his enemies would say is his almost egregious success in advertising goodness. While we might all disagree as to his goodness being the kind that he or any one ought to love, we would not fail to agree that it is his love of his own goodness, such as it is, and his holding on to it, and his love of other people"s and his love of getting his goodness and their goodness together, that has made him the most unconcealed person in modern life. These qualities have established him, with his ability raised to the n-th power of attracting attention to anything he likes, as the world"s greatest News Man--the world"s greatest living energy to-day in advertising what is good and what is had in our American temperament.
Even the people who disagree with him or dislike him--many of them would have to fall back on using the word roosevelt, or rather the verb to roosevelt.
It does not seem to be because his goodness in itself is extraordinary.
It is even, for that matter, in the sense that anybody could have it, or some more just like it, a little common.
What seems to be uncommon and really distinguished about Mr. Roosevelt is the way he feels about his goodness, and the way he grips hold of it, and the way he makes it grip hold of other people--practically anybody almost, who is standing by. Even if they are merely going by in automobiles, sometimes they catch some. I do not imagine that his worst enemies, however seriously they may question the general desirability or safety of having so much goodness roosevelting around, would fail to admit his own real enthusiasm about goodness anywhere he finds it indiscriminately, whether it is his own or other people"s. He grips hold of it, and grips like a cable car--instantly.
His enthusiasm is so great that many people are nonplussed by it. The enthusiasm must really be in spite of appearances about something else, something wicked in behind, they think, and not really about goodness.
An entire stranger would not quite believe it. It would be too original in him, they would say, or in anybody, to care so about goodness.
If one could watch the expression in Mr. Roosevelt"s face or his manner while he is in the act of having a virtue and if one could not see plainly from where one was, just what it was he was doing, one would at once conclude that it must be some vice he is having. He looks happy and as if it were some stolen secret. There is always that manner of his when he is caught doing right, as if one were to say "Now, at last, I have got it!" He does right like a boy with his mouth full of jam, and this seems to be true not only when, with a whole public following and two or three nations besides, and all the newspapers, he goes off on an orgy of righteousness, makes the grand tour of Europe, and has the time of his life. It is the steady-burning under enthusiasm with him all the while. The spectacle of a good man doing a tremendous good thing affects Theodore Roosevelt like one of the great forces of nature, like Niagara Falls, like the screws of the _Mauritania_, or any other huge, happy thing that is having its way against fear; against weakness, or against small terrified goodness.
Mr. Roosevelt in doing right conveys the sense of enjoying it so himself that he has made almost an art form of public righteousness. He has found his most complete, his most nave, instinctive self-expression in it, and while we have had goodness in public men before, we have had no man who has been such an international chromo for goodness, who has made such a big, comfortable "He-who-runs-may-read" bill-poster for doing right as Roosevelt. Other men have done things that were good to do, but the very inmost muscle and marrow of goodness itself, goodness with teeth, with a fist, goodness that smiled, that ha-ha"d, and that leaped and danced--perpetual motion of goodness, goodness that reeked--has been reserved for Theodore Roosevelt. We have had goodness that was bland or proper, and goodness that was pious or sentimental and sang, "Nearer My G.o.d to Thee," or goodness that was kind and mushy, but this goodness with a glad look and bounding heart, goodness with an iron hand, we have not had before. It is Mr. Roosevelt"s goodness that has made him interesting in Cairo, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. He has been conducting a grand tour of goodness. He has been a colossal drummer of goodness, conducting an advertising campaign. He has proved himself a master salesman for moral values. And he has put the American character, its hope, its energy, on the markets and on the credits of the world.