These three cla.s.ses of spiritual forces are concerned in America in making the people stop being a ghost, in making their American people as an idea, physically fit.
The first thing to be arranged for America to make the people quit being a ghost in The White House, is to form into three bodies or organizations, these three, groups of men--make these three groups of men cla.s.s-conscious, self-conscious, conscious of their own power and purpose in America--and have everybody in America conscious of them. I propose three organizations to stand for these three life-forces, three organizations which will act--each of which will act with the other two and will follow out for a nation, as individuals do for individuals, the law of life--of producing and reproducing the national life.
The minds that are creative will discover and project a national idea for the people--the inventors, will act as one group.
The minds that conceive and bring the idea to the birth, that bring the idea to pa.s.s, called engineers, will act as another, and the minds that teach, bring up, draw out and apply the idea and relate the idea to life--will act as another.
I propose a club of fifty thousand creative men be selected and act together--that a nation may be conceived.
I propose that fifty thousand engineers or how-men, men who think out ways and means, be selected and act together, that the nation that is conceived may be born.
These two Clubs will have their national headquarters together in a skysc.r.a.per hotel of their own in New York and will act together--in bringing an idea for the people into the world.
The third Club--twenty or thirty million people, on the scale of the Red Cross--in ten thousand cities, will apply and educate the idea, bring it up and put it through.
What one"s soul is for, I suppose, is that one can use it when one likes, to contemplate and to enjoy an Idea.
What one has a body for with reference to an idea is to take it up, try it out and put it through.
The Air Line League proposes to coordinate these three functions and operate as a three in one club.
The idea would be to call the first of the clubs, the club of inventors, the Look-Up Club. The second, a club of how-men and engineers, the Try-Out Club, and the third--the operating club of the vast body of the people taking direct action and putting the thing through locally and nationally would be called The Put-Through Clan.
The Air Line League through these three clubs will undertake to help the people to stop being an abstraction, to swear off from being a Ghost in their own house. The great working majority of the American people--of the men and the women who made the Red Cross so effective during the war, which came to the rescue of the people of the nation with the people of other nations, will come to the rescue now, during the war the people are having and that the cla.s.ses of people are having with one another.
IV
THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP
-- 1. _For Instance._
Such a crisis as this nation has now, Springfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, had once.
Springfield a few years ago, all in a few weeks, threw up the chance of being Detroit because two or three automobile men who belonged in Springfield and wanted to make Springfield as prosperous as Detroit, were practically told to go out to Detroit and find the men who would have the imagination to lend them the money--to make Springfield into a Detroit.
Naturally when they found bankers with imagination in Detroit they stayed there.
What happened to Springfield is what is going to happen to America if we do not make immediate national arrangements for getting men who have imagination in business in this country, men who can invent manpower, to know each other and act together.
The twenty-five hundred dollars Frank Cousins of Detroit recognized Henry Ford with, a few years ago, he gave back the other day to Henry Ford for twenty-nine million dollars.
People say as if that was all there was to it, that the fate of this nation to-day turns on our national manpower.
But what does our national man-power turn on?
It turns on people"s knowing and knowing in the nick of time, a man when they see one.
Man-power in a democracy like ours turns on having inventors, bankers and crowds act together.
Sometimes banks hold things back by being afraid to cooperate with inventors or men of practical imagination.
This is called conservatism.
Sometimes it is the crowds and laborers who hold things back by being afraid to cooperate with leaders or men of imagination.
But the fate of all cla.s.ses turns upon our having men of creative imagination believed in by men who furnish money, and believed in by men who furnish labor.
The idea of the Look-Up Club is that men of creative imagination shall be got together, shall be made cla.s.s-conscious, shall feel and use their power themselves and put it where other people can use it.
How much time and how many years of producing-power would it have saved America if Alexander Graham Bell had known or could have had ready to appeal to, America"s first hundred thousand picked men of imagination, when he was trudging around ringing doorbells in Boston, trying to supply people with imagination enough to see money in telephones?
If William G. McAdoo, when he had invented with his tunnels, a really great conception of the greater New York, and was fighting to get people in New York to believe in it, and act on it, had had an organization of one hundred thousand picked men of imagination in the nation at large to appeal to--one hundred thousand men picked out by one another to put a premium on constructive imagination when they saw some, instead of a penalty on it, how much time would it have saved New York and saved McAdoo? How much time would a national Club like this save this nation to-day and from now on in its race with the Germans?
Why should our men of practical creative imagination to-day waste as much time running around and asking permission of people who had none, as McAdoo had to?
If a hundred thousand silver dollars--just ordinary silver dollars--were put together in a row in New York on a sidewalk, everybody going by would have imagination at once about the one hundred thousand silver dollars and what could be done with them.
But put one hundred thousand picked men--or men of exceptional power together in a row in New York--and why is it everybody is apt to feel at first a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around the corner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortal human beings?
I wish people would have as much imagination about what could be done with one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got together from the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundred thousand silver dollars.
This is one of the first things the Look-Up Club is for, to get people to be inspired by a hundred thousand men put together, in the same way that they are by a hundred thousand dollars put together.
I went out last night and walked up the Great White Way and looked at the little flock of hotels that are standing to-day on the site of my faith in these hundred thousand men--the site of the new hotel--the little sleeping shelf in the roar of New York for the hundred thousand men to have on Broadway.
I stood and looked at the five or six hotels now standing there waiting to be torn down for us, and ---- told me that the seventeen parcels of land in the block that he had labored on forty-seven people to get them to make up their minds to put their lots together, were worth only a million and a half of dollars, either to them or to anybody else, while they were making up their minds to let their lots be put together. And now that he had got their minds made up for them and had got all these foolish, distracted seventeen parcels of land together into one, the land instead of being worth one million and a half dollars, was appraised by ---- the other day as worth four and a half million dollars.
The same is true of the hundred thousand men of practical imagination scattered in five thousand cities, twiddling on the fate of a nation alone.
The same thing is going to happen to the value of the men that has happened to the separate lumps of sand and clay they called real estate in New York.
What can I manage to accomplish alone in trying to get to Chicago to-morrow morning?
All I could do alone would be to walk.
As it is, I stand in line a minute at a window in the Grand Central Station, make a little arrangement with several hundred thousand men and with a slip of paper I move to Chicago while I go to sleep.
This power for each man of a hundred thousand men is what I am offering in this little book to the nine hundred and ninety thousand others.