Organizing the will of the consumers is not a holdup. A holdup by all the people of all the people for all the people is Liberty.
XV
SAMPLE DEMOCRACIES
I do not want to delay or bother people with my definition of democracy, but I do not mind confiding to them where I have seen some.
One is always coming upon bits or dots of democracy in America. It is these bits or dots of rough more or less unfinished democracy we have in America which make most of us believe in the people of this country.
Everybody in America knows of them.
There are at least forty-four dots of democracy--little marked-off places--what might be called safety zones (everybody knows of them), even in New York. There are usually white globes in front of them, and a short name written in long plain slanting white letters across a huge piece of gla.s.s.
If anybody wants to see just what democracy is like in business all he has to do is to go into the nearest Childs restaurant, order some griddle-cakes, sit down and eat and think. All he really needs to do is to study the menu, but of course a menu is more thoroughly studied by eating some of it.
One soon finds that a menu may be a little modest every-day magna charta of democracy or it may not.
What a menu has long been for in the typical restaurant is to find a way of browbeating and bewildering a customer into spending more money for his luncheon than he intends to when he comes in.
Rows of grieved and vaguely disturbed people can be seen in restaurants every day--being mowed down by menus.
In a Childs restaurant business success is based on turning the whole idea of a menu around, and instead of the customer"s coming in and studying the menu, the menu studies him.
The consumer in a Childs restaurant is there to economize and the restaurant is there to help him do it, the whole menu being constructed by experts in foods for the express purpose of telling the customer more than he knows about his food and his money, persuading him and practically tricking him into spending less money on his luncheon than he intends to.
A business may be said to be a big vital and winning business in any line in proportion as one sees the consumers in it--practically running it--running it in spirit. A democratic business is one which is being run as the consumers would run it if they knew how.
A business may be said to be a democratic business in proportion as one sees experts in it expressing crowds. One sees great crowds going to and fro and up and down in it acting for all practical purposes like geniuses, like skilled angels doing every day offhand inspired and inspiring difficult adventurous things as a matter of course--like tackling the high cost of living.
What the Air Line League is for is to make the consumers of America--the all-cla.s.s cla.s.s, cla.s.s-conscious--is to organize the consumers of America locally and nationally so that the comparative cooperation of crowds and geniuses and experts as in Childs" restaurants, can be a.s.sured in all lines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as the label of modern successful business life.
The Air Line League definition of democracy would be this:
A democracy may be said to be a state of society in which the consumers or the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expert attention of the men who make them.
The triumph of America and of the other democracies during the war has been that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended upon to have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to wait on them while they whip the Germans.
What the Air Line League proposes to do (Further details later) is to arrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer of the Germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way to keep this up.
Is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all our experts drop away--permanently drop away from waiting on crowds--are really going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waiting on themselves in just the way the Germans said they would?
What the Air Line League will stand for will be that experts and crowds can be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience and power of waiting on each other during peace as well as war.
Why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences and powers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whipping the Germans and not having them all the while, every day, for ourselves?
XVI
THE TOWN PENDULUM
The Air Line League in its local, national and international branches will act as a Listening Machine.
A Listening Machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward.
Worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. When the same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people listen until they understand.
There are people in every town and in every local branch of the League who have what I like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. People in motion are not as reliable and as calculable as bra.s.s. People have wills, visions, individual emotions and lurchings of their own. When a man with a pendulum temperament sees a colossal pendulum made of crowds of people--crowds of employers and crowds of workmen--swinging from one extreme to another, the first thing he wants to do as each issue comes up, local or national, is to see to it that his own mind and each other man"s mind in these two crowds on each side of the question should go twice through the middle, to going once to the extremes at either end.
In other words, The National Air Line League will act to bring extremes together--twice through the middle to once at each end--and local clubs will act as attention-swinging machines--as attention-forcing machines between cla.s.ses.
I might give an ill.u.s.tration:
The National League in its central office in New York gets a report from the local branch in the town where Smith safety razors are made that the Smith Works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustained ugliness and inefficiency. The Central Office, after quietly looking into it, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through its local branches reports to the ten million men shaving with Smith blades every morning that the workmen and managers of the Smith factories, who are working a nominal nine hours a day, are spending three hours a day in fighting with each other as to how Smith blades should be made for the public, and six hours a day in making the blades. The consumer is told by the League that he is paying for nine hours" work a day on his blades and only getting six, and that if the employers and employees in the Smith factories could be got to listen to each other and to work together the blades could be had for three cents less apiece.
The League will then proceed through its local branch in the Smith town to arrest the attention of the Smith workmen and the Smith employers. It will suggest that they get each other"s point of view and sit down very earnest and hear everything that the other side has to say and everything the other side wants to do, until they find some way of getting together and being efficient and knowing how to make Smith blades.
If necessary in order to get the attention of the workmen and employers at the Smith Works to the desirability of their listening to each other, the users of Smith blades throughout the country will shave themselves with their fathers" razors for three weeks.
If the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America who shave will turn the Government out of office and have the law changed.
A strike by workmen in a particular business is a holdup of all the other workmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and is undemocratic and unfair.
A lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all other employers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair.
In a country of a hundred million people a holdup conducted by a hundred million people for the hundred million people is democracy.
I employ this rather threatening ill.u.s.tration of the possible action of the League in certain cases because it suggests the power of democracy when experts and crowds act together--the fact that democracy can really be made to work, that democracy can be as forcible, as immediate and practical in dealing with autocratic cla.s.ses, as autocracy can.
But only two or three per cent of what the League in its local and national branches would really do would be like the ill.u.s.tration I have used. The power the League would have to do things like this would make doing them unnecessary.
The regular work of the League would largely consist in accepting invitations from factories, and in supplying and training experts for the purpose of conducting in a factory mutual advertising campaigns, or studies in attention between workmen and employers, adapted to different types of factories.
The way out for democracy in dealing with predatory wealth which organizes to hold up the consumers, and with predatory labor which organizes to hold up the consumers, is for the consumers to organize.
XVII
THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE