The Ghost in the White House.
by Gerald Stanley Lee.
INTRODUCTION
THE MOTION BEFORE THE HOUSE
This is a book a hundred million people would write if they had time.
I am nominating in this book--in the presence of the people, the next President of the United States.
The name is left blank.
I am nominating a man not a name.
I am presenting a program and a sketch of what the next President will be like, of what he will be like as a fellow human being, and I leave the details--his name, the color of his eyes and the party he belongs to, to be filled in by people later.
Here is his program, his faith in the people, his vision for the people and his vision for himself.
No one has ever nominated a President in a book before.
I do it because a book can be more quiet, more sensible and thoughtful, more direct and human, and closer to the hearts of the people, than a convention can.
A book can be more public too--can be attended by more people than a convention. Only a few thousand people can get into a convention. A hundred million can get into a book. All in the same two hours, by twenty million lamps thousands of miles apart, the people can crowd into a book.
So in this book, as I have said, I am merely acting as the secretary or employee of the hundred million people. I am writing a book a hundred million people would write if they could, expressing for them the kind of President for the next four years of our nation--the most colossal four years of the world, the people have ordered in their hearts.
We are weary of politicians" politicians. We want ours. Politicians may not be so bad but during the war they do not seem to us to have done as well as most people. In the dead-earnest of the war, with our Liberty Loan and Red Cross and Council of Defense, and our dollar a year men we have half taken over the government ourselves and we feel no longer awed by the regular political pract.i.tioners or government tinkerers. They are not all alike, of course, but we have turned our national gla.s.s on them and have come to see through them--at least the worst ones and many thousands of them--all these busy little worms of public diplomacy building their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelief far far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all by themselves.
Unless the more common run of our typical politicians see through themselves before the conventions come, and see that the people see through them, and see it quick, their days are numbered.
Instead of patronizing us and whispering to one another behind their hands about us, their time has come now--in picking out the next President to begin gazing up to the countenance of the people, to begin listening to the people"s prayer to G.o.d.
The people are a new people since the war. Out of the crash of empires, out of threats in every man"s door-yard the people are praying to G.o.d.
And they are voting to G.o.d, too.
The sooner the two great political parties reckon with this, the sooner they push around behind themselves out of sight all the funny little would-be Presidents, and all the little shan"t-be politicians running around like ants under the high heaven of the faith of a great people picking up tidbits they dare to believe--and put forward instead a live believing hot and cold human being, a man who will give up being President for what he believes, the sooner they will find themselves with a President on their hands that can be elected. Whichever party it is that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the one that will be underwritten by the people.
The people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward the great coming political conventions and the questions and the men that will come up in them. We are on the whole, in spite of the low estimate the majority of politicians have of us, straight-minded and free-hearted people, shrewd, masterful and devout, praying with one hand and keeping from being fooled with the other and we want our public men to have courage and vision for themselves and for us. We give notice that thousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and fuddly politicians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by the people, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world. This nation is facing the most colossal, most serious and G.o.dlike moment any nation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the presence of forty nations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own grim appalling hope, to be trifled with.
So far as any one can see with the naked eye the quickest and surest way to get past the politicians, to remind the politicians of the real spirit of the people, to loom up the face of the people before their eyes and make them suddenly take the people more seriously than they take themselves, is with a book. In a book a President can be nominated by acclamation--by a kind of silent acclamation. In a book, without giving any name or pointing anybody out at least the soul of a President can be ordered by a people.
We will publish upon the housetops the hopes and the prayers and the wills of the people.
Then let the conventions feel the housetops looking down on them when they meet.
In a book published in a hundred newspapers one week, wedged into covers across a nation another, the people with one single national stroke can put what they want before the country--a hundred million people in a book can rise to make a motion.
We will not wait to be cornered by our politicians into a convention to which we cannot go. We will not wait to be told three months too late, to pick out--out of two men we did not want, the man we will have to take. The short-cut way for us as the people of this country to take the initiative with our politicians and to make the politicians toe our line, instead of toeing theirs, is for the people to blurt out the truth, write a book, get in early beforehand their quiet word with both great parties and tell them whatever his name is, whatever his party is, the kind of President they want.
So here it is, such as it is, the book, a little politically innocent-looking thing perhaps, just engaged in being like folks instead of like politicians, just engaged in being human--in letting a nation speak and act as a human being speaks and acts, in a great simple sublime human crisis in which with forty nations looking on, we are making democracy work--making a loophole for the fate of the world.
I am trying to answer three questions.
What shall the new President believe about the people and expect of the people?
What shall the new people--people made new by this war, expect of themselves and expect of their new President?
What kind of a President, with what kind of a personality or temperament do the people feel would be the best kind of a President to pull them together, to help the people do what the people have to do?
I have wanted to bring forward a way in which the things the new President will expect the people to do, can be done by the people.
What the people want done, especially with regard to the Red Flag, predatory capital, predatory labor, and the fifty-cent dollar cannot be done by the President for them, and they are not going to do it themselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standing around three thousand miles apart or in any other way than by voluntarily agreeing to get together and do it together.
BOOK I
WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE
I
GIST
The Crowd is my Hero.
The Hero of this book is a hundred million people.
I have come to have the feeling--especially in regard to political conventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestions just now as to how a hundred million people can strike--make themselves more substantial, more important in this country, so that we shall really have in this country in time a hundred million people who, taken as a whole, feel important in it--like a Senator for instance--like Senator Lodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like Trusts that won"t trust, and Congressmen that won"t play and workmen that won"t work--I am thinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million people can come to feel as if it made a very substantial difference to somebody what they wanted and what they thought--ways in which the hundred million people shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like a Profiteer, or like a n.o.ble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor union,--get what they want.
II
THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH