The only way to look out for, or to express oneself is to try to help everybody else to.
The Red Cross at the end of the war in making elaborate and international arrangements to run a pleasant and complimentary ambulance to the relief of disease in society that society was deliberately creating every day, instead of taking advantage at the end of the war of the trust all cla.s.ses had in it, and taking advantage of the attention of forty nations, of society"s best and n.o.blest need, to keep society from causing the disease, chose to be superficial, faced away from its vision, fell behind the people, absconded from the leadership of the world.
The aches and pains of society with which since the war, the Red Cross so politely and elegantly deals, which with white kid gloves and without hurting our feelings it spends our money to relieve are all caused by the things we daily do to each other to make the money.
The vision of the common people in America recognizes this and recognized it instantly at the end of the war. The hearts of the men and women of America to-day, are at once too bitter, too deep and too hopeful not to instantly lose interest in a Red Cross which asks them to help run it as a beautiful superficial ambulance to the evils people are doing to one another instead of as a machine to help them not to do them.
V
MISSOURI
The best service America can render other nations to-day is be herself--fulfill and make the most of herself.
Senator Reed of Missouri would probably agree with me in this.
Where I differ with Senator Reed is in what America should propose to do to make the most of herself.
Senator Reed of Missouri judging from reports of his speeches in the Senate wants America in the present distraction of nations to stop thinking of the others, wizen up and be safe.
It seems to me that if America were to cut herself off from the rest of the world in its hour of need and just shrivel up into thinking of herself she would fail to fulfill herself and be like herself. She would just be like Senator Reed of Missouri.
Nothing could be less safe for America just now than to be like Senator Reed of Missouri.
Senator Reed puts forward a patriotism which is sincere but reckless. In the Senate of fifty states, Reed says "I"m from Missouri." In the congress of nations, Reed says "America uber Alles." "The world for America." "America for Missouri." "Missouri for Me!"
For America just at the present moment in the world it has got to belong to, to turn away and stop being interested in the whole world and in everybody in it and in what everybody is going to do and be kept from doing--is like a man"s shutting himself up in his own stateroom and being interested in his own port hole in a ship that is going down. It seems more sensible for America--even from the point of view of looking out for herself--not to go down with Senator Reed and moon around in his stateroom with him, but to be deeply interested in the whole ship, and in the engines, the wheelhouse and the pumps.
Patriotism that just shuts a nation up into a private stateroom nation by itself or that makes a nation just live with its own life preserver on, to preserve its own life preserver, can end either for Senator Reed or for America in but one way.
It"s going to end in a plunge of the ship.
It is going to end in Senator Reed"s running out, and running up to the deck the last minute.
I do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me that from the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle of Senator Reed of Missouri, tying Missouri like a millstone around his neck and then casting himself, Missouri and all, into the sea, while it may have a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be a practical or business-like example for his country.
I would like to show if I can that Senator Reed is wrong, and to present the alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the Air Line League.
The Germans have said (and have spent forty billion dollars in saying it) that democracy cannot be made to work. They sneered at us during the war and said to England, America and the rest of us that we could not make democracy work in running an army and keep up with Germans in war, and they are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work in industry and keep up with Germans in peace.
Forty nations half-believe that the Germans are right about industrial democracy, about democracy"s not being a real, sincere, every day thing, a thing every man can have the good of all day every day of his life, and a good many people in America--extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the Germans.
If the Germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for America to pay very much attention just now to her industries. If America is living in a world as insane as Germany says it is, the one thing ahead for us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other forty nations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough and grimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations before they murder ours.
Everything must be geared and geared at once to the Germans" being right.
Or it must be geared and geared at once to their being wrong, to challenging the Germans--to telling them that they are as fooled about what industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what it could do in war.
The one thing we can do in America now to get the Germans or anybody else to believe us about industrial democracy is to make American democracy in industry whip German militarism in industry out of sight in our own labor unions and in our own factories. Then we will whip German militarism in industry out of the markets of the world.
If the quickest way for the American people to get a decent world--a world we want to do business in, is to whip German militarism in industry, and if the quickest way to whip German militarism abroad is to whip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up our factories, calling in our money and our men and settling down to work?
What is it that is scaring capital and labor away and holding back money and men?
The fear of the United States Senate.
The fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish money and men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the United States Senate and other governments not to be afraid of war.
The first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stop this fear.
The first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is to stop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know all about us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all day every day are making peace work between cla.s.ses, better than war does.
Making democracy work in business is the first condition, for America and the world of having any business.
It is not merely in behalf of other nations, but in behalf of ourselves, that I am advocating the direct action of the people welded together into one ma.s.s organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the three cla.s.ses together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. The Air Line League is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as a standing-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, the voluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team work and mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all cla.s.ses.
The whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrial democracy--in proving to people by advertising it to them and by dramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works.
It is because the Germans believe that men who have been forced against their wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more and compete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing team work because they understand and want to, that Germany is a second-cla.s.s nation and that the German people have had to put up for forty years with being second-cla.s.s human beings. They have a ruling majority of second-cla.s.s human beings in Germany because they have the most complete and most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, for making second-cla.s.s human beings out of practically anybody--arrangements for howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to do as a subst.i.tute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of making them want to do it.
Taking the line of least resistance--the mechanical course in dealing with human nature, makes America"s being a second-cla.s.s nation a matter of course.
What we have always been hoping for in America is that in due time we are going to be a first-cla.s.s nation--a nation crowded with men and women who, wherever they have come from, or whether or not they were first cla.s.s when they came, have been made first cla.s.s by the way that all day every day in their daily work they have been treated by the rest of us when they come to us, and by the way they treat one another.
VI
A VICTORY LOAN ADVERTIs.e.m.e.nT
May 10, 1919
THE BOY WHO STUCK HIS FOOT IN
A small boy the other day walked up to one of those splendid marble pillars before the The Victory Arch and stuck his foot in.
I went over and stooped down and felt of the crust. It was about an inch and a half thick.
Then I stood in the middle of The Avenue, all New York boiling and swirling round me and looked up at The Arch of Victory--ma.s.sive, majestic white and heavenly and soaring against the sky, and my heart ached!
Something made me feel suddenly close to the small boy.
What he wanted to know with his foot, was what this splendid Victory Arch he had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under, and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amounted to--how deep the glory had struck in.
I thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victory over the Germans ... forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing and eighty-seven million unconquered sullen Germans before our eyes in broad daylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying their bills! ... eighty-seven million Germans we have all got to devote ourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years.