The Put-Through Clan headquarters in a town will be the Town Fireplace for Crowds. It will be the warmest, liveliest, manliest, most genial resort in town--where all the live men and real men who seek real contacts and care about men who do, will get together. The refreshing and emanc.i.p.ating experience many men had in army camps will be carried on and become a daily force in the daily life of every town in America.
-- 8. _The Sign on the World._
I looked up yesterday and saw a sign on a church in New York. I like it better every time I go by.
THIS CHURCH IS OPEN ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR PRAYER, MEDITATION AND BUSINESS.
I have been wondering just who the man is who had the horse-sense and piety to take up the secret of business and the grip of religion both, telegraph them into ten words like this, and make a stone church say them at people a thousand a minute, on the busiest part of the busiest street in New York.
Whoever the man is, he stands for the business men we want for the Put-Through Clan first.
One of the first things the Put-Through Clan is going to dramatize is this sign on the Marble Collegiate Church.
The men in America in the next twenty years who are going to carry everything before them in business, drive everybody and everything out of their way, take possession of the great streets and the great factories in the name of G.o.d and the people, are the men who practice daily the spirit of this sign, the men in business who refuse to go tumtytumming along in a kind of thoughtless inertia of motion, doing what everybody"s doing in business--the men who turn one side (by whatever name they call it) to pray, to snuggle up to G.o.d and think.
Men who have success before them in business are the men who have the most imagination in business.
Imagination with most of us consists in taking time to see things before other people do, in connecting up what we do with its larger, deeper, more permanent relations, relating what we do to ourselves, to others, to our time and generation, to the things we have done before and to the things that must be done next.
"Prayer, Meditation and Business."
It is wonderful how these words, when one comes on a man who does not say anything about it and puts them together, tone each other up.
The first thing the Put-Through Clan is going to do in a town in this present tipply and tragic world, is to stand by and help make known to everybody across a continent the men in business who stand by these words--who mix them so people cannot tell them apart.
BOOK VI
WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT
I
THE BIG BROTHER OF THE PEOPLE
If I were writing a book to be used during a Presidential campaign, used as a handbook of the beliefs of the people--a book in the next few weeks for a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before their conventions with, the first belief I would put down for the new President to run on would be the belief that every man in this country is a bigger, better and truer man than the present arrangements of our industrial and social life seem willing to let him express.
We are all practically waiting in crowds to-day, all over this country--in held-in and held-back crowds, to act better than we look.
This belief is the first belief--the first practical working belief the next President of this country should have about the people.
Putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working belief about human nature in America, is going to be the way to get a President for our next President who shall release the spirit of the nation, and reveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people of America are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted a people as the spent and weary peoples of Europe have hoped we were.
The trouble with America in her own eyes and the eyes of the world to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are.
The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect arrangements are made for people"s being good as are now being made for their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each cla.s.s in America, which now takes the form of telling other men and other cla.s.ses, they ought to be good--the goodness in each man which in our present system he bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to the man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quite safe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the labor unions or the Manufacturers" a.s.sociation to make sure he has a right to be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feels he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because n.o.body else is doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now, and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be.
The mean things we are doing on a large scale to one another just now in America, are not mean things it is our nature to do. We have let our machines get on top of us and wave our meanness at people over our heads.
Our machines which capital and labor have for expressing us as employers and workmen to one another, caricature us.
All one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way in which our present machines of trusts and labor unions are working together to make a dollar worth fifty cents.
The reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybody who has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he owes it to himself and to his cla.s.s to furnish as little work for a dollar as he dares and take a dollar for fifty cents" worth of work.
Each man sees this several times a day, but he belongs to a vast machine for getting something for nothing. Every man knows in his heart that the cure for everybody"s trying to get something for nothing is everybody"s at once getting to work doing more than he has to for the money. Then the American dollar will quit being worth fifty cents.
Why doesn"t he do it? Because the machinery he belongs with and that everybody belongs with consists of two great something-for-nothing machines. Both of these stupendous machines of capital and labor are geared for backing in producing and not for going forward. All that has to be done with them is to run them the other way round and we have what we want.
People on both sides admit in a vague anonymous scattered fashion that the way to meet a situation in which prices are too high is for everybody to produce more and to charge less for what he produces.
But labor will not do this if capital does not do it.
Capital will not do this if labor does not do it.
It cannot be done by one man getting up all alone and saying he will get on with half a profit or half a wage when he sees everybody about him getting on with twice as much.
The only way it can be done is by organizing, by arranging machines for mutual frank expression, confession and cooperation--mutual confession and cooperation by the men in each industry saying, "I will if you will,"
until we cover the nation.
This is one of the first things anti-Bolshevik capital and anti-Bolshevik labor are going to stand for--the organizing and advertising in their own industry of a voluntary understanding and professional producing among men who produce.
The men who are increasing the cost of flour by having too high wages in flour mills, will say to men who are increasing the cost of cotton by too high wages in cotton mills, "We will make cheaper cotton for you, if you will make cheaper flour for us."
It is not a matter of meanness in American human nature we are dealing with, it is a matter of agreement between men--hundreds and thousands and millions of men, who do not feel mean or want to be mean and who are trying to slink out of it.
The thing cannot be done without mutual agreement and the agreement probably cannot be made without voluntary contagious publicity, without organizing a national "I will if you will" between capital and labor. The men who produce with their minds will say to those who work with their hands, "We will agree to take less profits and reduce the prices that you pay for goods, if you will agree to take less wages and produce more."
Capital will say to labor, "If you will produce ten per cent more, we will scale down prices, make your dollar buy twenty per cent more. For every sacrifice by which you make a dollar buy more, we will make twice the sacrifice."
Having a larger margin and more time to think things out than men who work with their hands have to think things out, many employers are going to feel that it is up to them not to ask their men to do anything they do not do twice as much of themselves. They will have machinery for being confidential with the men and for letting the men see they are doing it.
Instead of having everybody rushing wildly around organizing to say "I won"t if you won"t" we will arrange to have a hundred thousand picked capitalists and picked laboring men in ten thousand cities, who will set going everywhere a huge public voluntary national "I WILL IF YOU WILL."
Instead of proceeding from now on to a.s.sume that we are a mean people in America, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for being meaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other, we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machine together that will express our better natures as well as our present one does our worst ones.
There is one thing we propose to stand out for and that we do not intend to be wheedled out of, in our next two political conventions and during our next President"s next four years, and that is that our two great machines in this country, our industrial one and our political one, shall be taken out of the hands of men who are fooled about themselves and who will not listen to others.
We do not believe that there is anything essentially the matter with what is called our capitalistic system or our labor union system except men--the men who think they belong in the front ranks of capital and the front ranks of labor.
The scared men and the men who are fooled about themselves in politics and business and who are trying to fool the rest of us, who are trying to make a great, simple, clean-hearted, clear-eyed, generous country like ours look and act every few weeks or every few days as if all the people in it could really do to express themselves to one another and to the world, was with lockouts, strikes, political deadlocks, minority holdups and party threats--shall be turned out of office by the people and huddled away out of sight.
In our industrial and political expressing and acting machines on every hand we give notice we are going to pick men out, men who shall make our machines express us, our freedom, our justice, our steadiness of heart, and our belief in America, in ourselves, in one another, or our desire to listen to those who disagree with us, our human sporting instinct about our party and ourselves, and the victory of the people, the common sense and good will of common human nature in America and the world.