The Air Line League is a national organization of millions of American men and women belonging to all cla.s.ses and all social and industrial groups, who become members of the League for the express purpose of asking people to help to keep them, in their personal and industrial relations, from being off on their facts, from being fooled by their subconscious and automatic selves.
Unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experience telling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for his being objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the most timely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any one man or group of men can ever render another.
The best way to secure the right people for this service is to ask them.
The people who do not need to be asked and who would be only too cheerful to do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want them to or not, are not apt to do it in a practical way.
The best way to ask the best people is to place oneself in a position, as in joining the Air Line League, where people will feel asked without any one"s saying anything about it.
This is the first principle we propose to follow in the League. By the act of joining the League, by the bare fact that we are in it, we announce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and as members of a cla.s.s, or of our capital groups or our Labor groups, we are as a matter of course open and more than open to facts--facts from any quarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doing from being fooled about ourselves.
Having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, of being unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are the best people in a nation const.i.tuted like ours, to unfool us the most quickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the least trouble to us and to themselves?
IX
TECHNIQUE FOR LABOR IN GETTING ITS WAY
The best people to advertise a truth are the people the truth looks prominent on--the people from whom n.o.body expects it.
In my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently been made and handed up to me, that there are certain books, I do not need to read.
My attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of my reading one of Harold Bell Wright"s novels. But if I heard to-morrow morning that Henry Cabot Lodge and President Wilson during the last few peaceful months had both read through Harold Bell Wright"s last novel, I would read it before I went to bed.
Or Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers. Any common experience which I heard in the last few weeks Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers had had, a novel by Harold Bell Wright or anything--I would look into, a whole nation would look into it--the moment they heard of it--at once.
The first thing to do in making a start for new brain tracks for America is to pick out persons and brain tracks that set each other off.
Even an idea n.o.body would care about one way or the other becomes suddenly and nationally interesting to us when we find people we would not think would believe it, are believing it hard and trying to get us to believe it.
Suppose for instance that next Fourth of July (I pick out this day for what I want to have happen because I have so longed for years to have something strong and sincere said or done on it that would really celebrate it)--suppose for instance that next Fourth of July, beginning early in the morning all the Labor leaders of America from Maine to California, acting as one man broke away--just took one day off, from doing the old humdrum advertising everybody expects from them--suppose they proceeded to do something that would attract attention--something that would interest their friends and disappoint their enemies--just for twenty-four hours? Suppose just for one day all the Labor leaders instead of going about advertising to themselves and to everybody the bad employers and how bad employers are in this country would devote the Fourth of July to advertising a few good ones?
Then suppose they follow it up--that Labor do something with initiative in it--the initiative its enemies say it cannot have, something unexpected and original, true and sensationally fair, something that would make a nation look and that a hundred million people would never forget?
What does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in this country, if Labor; after the next Fourth of July, started a new national crusade for four weeks--if the fifty best laborers in the Endicott Johnson Mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should go in a body one after the other to a list of Bolshevist factories, factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitation of telling what happens to them in their Endicott Johnson mills, an agitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are like and how it works until the Bolshevist workmen they come to see are driven by sheer force of facts into being non-Bolshevist workmen, and their Bolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force of facts into being Endicott Johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front of themselves, who will be Endicott Johnsons for them.
All that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitation in America to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act of labor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing that either of them--either capital or labor--is thinking of somebody, believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besides themselves. Millions of individual employers and individual laborers about have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable and discriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow human beings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is to arrange some signal generous conclusive arresting ma.s.sive move together to show it.
This is the kind of work the Air Line League proposes on a national scale like the Red Cross to arrange for and do.
The common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, the fellow human being--employer or employee.
The best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for America in shame and weakness to keep on deporting Bolshevists, is to arrange a national advertis.e.m.e.nt, a parade or national procession as it were in this country soon, of team work in industry and of how--to anybody who knows the facts--it carries everything before it.
The best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down through ten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers who stand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmen from all over the country who stand up for employers.
Of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds of times over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring other laborers into line and of having employers shame other employers into competence.
The best subst.i.tute for this national demonstration, this national physical getting together like this, is as I have said before, a book read by all, by employers and employees looking over each other"s shoulders, each conscious as he reads that the other knows he reads, knows what he knows and is reading what he knows.
X
TECHNIQUE FOR CAPITAL IN GETTING ITS WAY
I should hate to see Capital, in the form of a National Manufacturers"
a.s.sociation, realizing the desperateness of the labor situation and that something has got to be done at last which goes to the bottom, slinking off privately and confessing its sins to G.o.d.
I would rather see a confession of the sins of Capital toward Labor for the last forty years and of its sins to-day made by Capital in person to Labor.
G.o.d will get it anyway--the confession--and it will mean ten times as much to Him and to everybody if He overhears it being given to Labor.
Of course Labor has been doing of late wrong things that it is highly desirable should be confessed and naturally Capital thinks that a good way to open the exercises would be with a confession from Labor to Capital to the effect that Labor admits that Labor like the Trusts before it had had moments or seizures in which it has held up the country, broken its word, betrayed the people and acted the part the people hate to believe of it--of the bully and the liar.
Not only the Capital Group but the Public Group feel that a confession from Labor before we go on to arrange things better is highly to be desired.
But the practical question that faces us is--supposing that what is wanted next by all, is a confession from Labor, what is the practical way from now on, to get Labor to confess?
Some supposing might be done a minute.
Suppose I have a very quick temper and five sons and suppose the oldest one has my temper and is making it catching to the other sons, what would any ordinary observer say is the practical course for the poor wicked old father to take with the boy"s temper of which he has made the boy a present?
My feeling is when my boy loses his temper with me at dinner for instance in the presence of the other boys, that poking a verse in a Bible feebly out at him and saying to him, "He that keepeth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city," would be rude. The way for me to give him good advice about losing his temper is to sit there quietly with him while he is losing his, and keep mine.
If Capital wants to get its way with Labor--and thinks that the way to begin with the industrial situation in this country, after all that has happened, is with a vast national spectacle of Labor confessing its sins, the most practical thing to do is for Capital to give Labor an ill.u.s.tration of what confessing sins is like, and how it works.
The capitalists among us who are the least deceived by their subconscious or automatic minds, are at the present moment not at all incapable of confiding to each other behind locked doors that the one single place, extreme labor to-day has got its autocracy from, is from them.
Labor is merely doing now with the scarcity of labor, the one specific thing that Capital has taught it to do and has done for forty years with the scarcity of money and jobs.
It seems to me visionary and sentimental and impracticable for Capital to try to fix things up now and give things a new start now, by slinking off and confessing its sins to G.o.d.
Labor will slink off and confess its sins to G.o.d, too.
That will be the end of it.
It may be excellent as far as it goes, but in the present desperate crisis of a nation, with the question of the very existence of society and the existence of business staring us in the face, it really must be admitted that as a practical short cut to getting something done, our all going out into a kind of moral backyard behind the barn and confessing our sins to G.o.d, is weak-looking and dreamy as compared with our all standing up like men at our own front doors, looking each other in the eye and confessing our sins to one another.
I am not saying this because I am a moral person. I am not whining at thirty thousand banks pulling them by the sleeves and saying please to them and telling them that this is what they ought to do.
I am a practical matter of fact person, speaking as an engineer in human nature and in what works with human nature and saying that when capitalists and employers stop being sentimental and off on their facts about themselves and about other people, when they propose to be practical and serious, and really get their way with other people they are going to begin by being imperfect, by talking and acting with labor, like fellow-imperfect human beings.
In the new business world that began the other day--the day of our last shot at the Germans, the only way a man is going to long get his way is to be more human than other people, have a genius for being human in business, for being human quick and human to the point where others have talent.