Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

NEWS-MEN

It seems very difficult to get news through as to who we really are to a President. When I look about me and see what the President's ways are of telling news about himself to us, I see that he is not without his advantages. But when I look about to see what conveniences we have as a people for telling our President news about us, I note some curious things. The fears of the American people, the fears and threats of labour and capital are organized and expressed, but their faiths, their wills, the things in them that make them go and that make them American, are not organized and are not expressed.

The labour unions are afraid and say, "We will not work," to their employers, "You cannot make us work." The President hears this. It is about all they say.

The capitalists and employers are afraid and they say, "We will not pay," "You cannot make us pay."

Shall the President act as if these men represent Labor and Capital?

We say, "No."

Neither of these groups of men express real live American labour or real live characteristic American money.

American money is free, bold, manful, generous and courageous to a fault. American money swings out in mighty enterprises, shrewdly believing things, imperiously singing things out of its way.

A singing people want a singing government. How is our President going to hear our labour and our money sing?

Pinchot expressed us, not Ballinger.

Pinchot—an American millionaire with a fortune made out of forests, who is spending the fortune in protecting the forests for the nation, is the kind of American Americans like to set up before a President to say what Americans are like. Millions of men stand by Pinchot. We like the way he makes money sing.

Tom L. Johnson—an American millionaire who made his money in the ordinary humdrum way, by getting valuable street railway franchises out of a city for nothing—has the courage to turn around, spend his fortune and spend it all, in keeping other people from doing it.

America presents Tom L. Johnson to a President with its compliments and says, "This is what America is like."

It may not look always as if Tom L. Johnson were America—America in miniature. But millions of us say he is. He makes money sing.

We want a President—millions of us want him—and this is the most important news about us, who expects money in this country to sing.

We want our money and expect our money in this country to stop saying mean things about us, things that make us ashamed to look a true newspaper in the face, or one another in the face, and that humiliate us before the world.

And now I have come to an awkward place in this book where I hope the reader will help me all he can.

But I have been driven to it. The fact seems to be that I must find at just this point in the book, if I can, a word. And the word will have to be a word, too, that everybody knows, and that conveys a lively sense to everybody the moment it is used—of a certain tone or quality, or hum or murmur of being. No one regrets this more than I, because it is so unwieldy and inconvenient and always bulges out in a sentence or a book or a nation more than it was meant to, but the word ROOSEVELT, R O O S E V E L T, happens to be the word that people in this country, and very largely in other nations, and in all languages have chosen and are using every day to express to one another a certain American quality or tone now abroad in our world—a certain hum, as one might say, or whirr of goodness.

One cannot help wondering why it is that if one wanted to express to the largest number of people in the world a certain quality of goodness, the word Roosevelt would do it best.

I am not dealing for the purpose of this book in what Mr. Roosevelt's goodness is or whether it is what he thinks it is. We might all disagree about that. I am dealing quite strictly in this connection with what even his enemies would say is his almost egregious success in advertising goodness. While we might all disagree as to his goodness being the kind that he or any one ought to love, we would not fail to agree that it is his love of his own goodness, such as it is, and his holding on to it, and his love of other people's and his love of getting his goodness and their goodness together, that has made him the most unconcealed person in modern life. These qualities have established him, with his ability raised to the n^th power of attracting attention to anything he likes, as the world's greatest News Man—the world's greatest living energy to-day in advertising what is good and what is had in our American temperament.

Even the people who disagree with him or dislike him—many of them would have to fall back on using the word roosevelt, or rather the verb to roosevelt.

It does not seem to be because his goodness in itself is extraordinary. It is even, for that matter, in the sense that anybody could have it, or some more just like it, a little common.

His enthusiasm is so great that many people are nonplussed by it. The enthusiasm must really be in spite of appearances about something else, something wicked in behind, they think, and not really about goodness. An entire stranger would not quite believe it. It would be too original in him, they would say, or in anybody, to care so about goodness.

If one could watch the expression in Mr. Roosevelt's face or his manner while he is in the act of having a virtue and if one could not see plainly from where one was, just what it was he was doing, one would at once conclude that it must be some vice he is having. He looks happy and as if it were some stolen secret. There is always that manner of his when he is caught doing right, as if one were to say "Now, at last, I have got it!" He does right like a boy with his mouth full of jam, and this seems to be true not only when, with a whole public following and two or three nations besides, and all the newspapers, he goes off on an orgy of righteousness, makes the grand tour of Europe, and has the time of his life. It is the steady-burning under enthusiasm with him all the while. The spectacle of a good man doing a tremendous good thing affects Theodore Roosevelt like one of the great forces of nature, like Niagara Falls, like the screws of the Mauritania, or any other huge, happy thing that is having its way against fear; against weakness, or against small terrified goodness.

With all his faults, those big, daring, yawning fissures in him, he is news about us, faults and all. Though I may be, as I certainly am much of the time, standing and looking across at him, across an abyss of temperament that God cut down between us thousands of years ago, and while he may have a score of traits I would not like and others that no one would like in any one else, there he is storming out at me with his goodness! It is his way—God help him!—God be praised for him! There he is!

I know an American when I see one. He is a man who is singing.

A man who is singing is a man who is so shrewd about people that he sees more in them than they see in themselves and who does things so shrewdly in behalf of God, that when God looks upon him he delights in him. Then God falls to of course and helps him do them.

So did Theodore Roosevelt become news about Us.

AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT AND GOVERNMENT

I would like to say more specifically what I mean by an American or singing government.

The thing that counts the most in a government is its temperament. A German government succeeds by having the German temperament. An American government must have the American temperament.

If we are fortunate enough to have in America a government with an American temperament what would it be like? And how would it differ from the traditional or conventional temperament, governments are usually allowed to have?

If I were confined to one or two words I would put it like this:

If a government has the conventional temperament, it says "NO."

If it has the American Temperament it says, "YES, BUT ..."

The whole policy and temper of a true American government is summed up in its saying as it looks about it—now to this business man and now to that, just in time, "YES BUT."

Louis Brandeis, of Boston, when he was made attorney for the Gas Company of Boston to defend the company from the criticisms of the people, sent suddenly scores of men all about canvassing the city and looking up people to find fault with the gas.

He spent thousands of dollars a month of the Gas Company's money for a while in helping people to be disagreeable, until they had it attended to and got over it.

The people found they wanted to use four times as much gas.

The Boston Gas Company smiled sweetly.

Boston smiled sweetly.

Not many months had passed and two things had happened in Boston.

The Boston Gas Company, with precisely the same directors in it, had made over the directors into new men, and all the people in Boston (all who used gas) apparently had been made over into new people.

What had happened was Brandeis—a man with an American temperament.

Mr. Brandeis had defended his company from the people by going the people's way and helping them until they helped him.

Mr. Brandeis gave gas a soul in Boston.

Before a gas corporation has a soul, it would be American for a government to treat it in one way. After it has one it would be American to treat it in another. There are two complete sets of conduct, principles, and visions in dealing with a corporation before and after its having a soul.

Preserving the females of the species and killing males as a method of discrimination has been applied to all animals except human beings. This is suggestive of a method of discrimination in dealing with corporations. A corporation that has a soul and that is the most likely to keep reproducing souls in others should be treated in one way, and a corporation that has not should be treated in another.

People are going to be bad if they can.

People are going to be good if they can.

Men who want to arrange laws and adjust life on the assumption that business men will be bad if they can, it seems to some of us, are inefficient and unscientific. It seems to us that they are off on the main and controlling facts in American human nature. It is not true that American business men will be bad if they can. They will be good if they can.

This is my assertion. I cannot prove it.

What we seem to need next in this country in order to be clear-headed and to go ahead, is to prove it. We want a competent census of human nature.

Lacking a census of human nature, the next best thing we can do is to watch the men who seem to know the most about human nature.

We put ourselves in their hands.

These men seem to believe, judging from their actions, that there is really nothing that suits our temperament better in America than being good. If we can manage to have some way of being good that we have thought of ourselves, we like it still better. We dote on goodness when it is ours and when we are allowed to put some punch into it. We want to be good, to express our practical, our doing-idealism, but we will not be driven to being good and people who think they can drive us to being good in a government or out of it are incompetent people. They do not know who we are.

We say they shall not have their way with us.

Let them get us right first. Then they can do other things.

What is our American temperament?

Here are a few American reflections.

And instead of making rules for two hundred pupils because just twenty pupils need them, they will make the rules for just twenty pupils.

Pupils who can use their souls and can do better by telling themselves what to do, will be allowed to do better. Why should two hundred boys who want to be men be bullied into being babies by twenty infants who can scare a school government into rules, i.e., scare their teachers into being small and mean and second-rate?

A government that goes on this principle with business men, and that does it in a spirit of mutual understanding for those who are not yet free from rules, and in a spirit of confidence and expectation and of talking it over, will be a government with an American temperament.

The first trait of a great government is going to be that it will recognize that the basis of a true government in a democracy is privilege and not treating all people alike. It is going to see that is it a cowardly, lazy, brutal, and mechanical-minded thing for a government which is trying to serve a great people—to treat all the people alike. The basis of a great government like the basis of a great man (or even the basis of a good digestion) is discrimination, and the habit of acting according to facts. We will have rules or laws for people who need them, and men in the same business who amount to enough and are American enough to be safe as laws to themselves, will continue to have their initiative and to make their business a profession, a mould, an art form into which they pour their lives. The pouring of the lives of men like this into their business is the one thing that the business and the government want.

When a man has proved conclusively that he has a higher level of motives, and a higher level of abilities to make his motives work, the government is going to give him a higher level of rights, liberties, and immunities. The government will give special liberties on a sliding scale and with shrewd provision for the future. The government will not give special liberties to the man with higher motives than other men have, who has not higher abilities to make his motives work, nor will it give special liberties to the man who has higher abilities which could make higher motives work, but who has not the higher motives.

Men who are new kinds and new sizes of men and who have proved that they can make new kinds and new sizes of bargains, that they can make (for the same money) new kinds and new sizes of goods, and who incidentally make new kinds and new sizes of people out of the people who buy the goods, men who have achieved all these supposed visionary feats by their own initiative, will be allowed by the government to have all the initiative they want, and immunities from fretful rules as long as they resemble themselves and keep on doing what they have shown they can do. The government will deal with each man according to the facts, the scientific facts, that he has proved about himself.

The government acts according to scientific facts in everything except men, in pure food, in cholera, and the next thing the government is going to do is to be equally efficient in dealing with scientific facts in men.

It is going to give some men inspected liberty. If these men say they can be more efficient, as a railroad sometimes is, by being a monopoly, by being a vast, self-visioned, self-controlled body the government will have enough character, expert courage and shrewdness about human nature to provide a way for them to try it.

Telling them why will be governing them.

When we once reckon with new kinds and new sizes of men, everything follows. The first man who organizes a true monopoly for public service and who does it better than any state could do it, because he thinks of it himself, glories in it and has a genius for it, will be given a peerage in England perhaps. But he would not really care. The thing itself would be a peerage enough and either in America or England he would rather be rewarded by being singled out by the government for special rights and distinctions in conducting his business. The best way a democracy can honour a man who has served it is not to give him a title or to make a frivolous, idle monument of bronze for him, but to let him have his own way.

The way to honour any artist or any creative man, any man a country is in need of especially, is to let him have his own way.

We are told that the way to govern trusts is to untrammel competition.

But the way to untrammel competition is not to try to untrammel it in its details with lists of things men shall not do.

This is cumbersome.

We would probably find it very much more convenient in specifying 979 detailed things trusts cannot do, if we could think of certain sum-totals of details.

Then we could deal with the details in a lump.

The best sum totals of details in this world that have ever been invented yet, are men.

We will pick out a man who has a definite, marked character, who is a fine, convenient sum-total that any one can see, of things not to do.

We will pick out another man in the same line of business who is a fine, convenient sum-total of things that people ought to do.

When a child finds suddenly that his father is not merely keeping him from doing things, that his father has a soul, the father begins to get results out of the child.

As a rule a child discovers first that his father has a soul by noticing that he insists on treating him as if he had one.

Of course a corporation that has not a soul yet does not propose to be dictated to by a government that has not a soul yet. When corporations without souls see overwhelmingly that a government has a soul, they will be filled with a wholesome fear. They will always try at first to prevent it from having a soul if they can.

But the moment it gets one and shows it, they will be glad. They will feel on firm ground. They will know what they know. They will act.

In the hospital on the hill not far from my house, one often sees one attendant going out to walk with twelve insane men. One would think it would not be safe for twelve insane men to go out to walk with one sane man, with one man who has his soul on.

The reason it is safe, is, that the moment one insane man or man who has not his soul on, attacks the man who has a soul, all of the other eleven men throw themselves upon him and fling him to the ground. Men whose souls are not on, protect, every time, the man who has his soul on because the man who has a soul is the only defence they have from the men who have not.

It is going to be the same with governments. We believe in a government's having as much courage in America as a ten-dollar-a-week attendant in an insane asylum. We want a government that sees how courage works.

If society has a soul and if every member of it has a soul, what is the relation of the social soul to the individual soul?

A man's soul is the faculty in him for seeing the Whole in relation to the part—his vision for others in relation to his vision for himself.

My forefinger's soul in writing with this fountain pen is the sense my forefinger has of its relation to my arm, my spinal column, and my brain. The ability and efficiency of my forefinger depends upon its soul, that is, its sense of relation to the other members of the body. If my forefinger tries to act like a brain all by itself, as it sometimes does, nobody reads my writing.

The government in a society is the soul of all the members and it treats them according to their souls.

The one compulsion a government will use if it has a soul, will be granting charters in business in such a way as to fix definite responsibility and definite publicity upon a few men.

If a corporation has a soul, it must show. It must have a face. Anybody can tell a face off-hand or while going by. Anybody can keep track of a corporation if it has a face.

The trouble with the average corporation is that all that anybody can see is its stomach. Even this is anonymous.

Whose Stomach is it? Who is responsible for it? If we hit it, whom will we hit? Let the government find out. If the time the government is now spending in making impossibly minute laws for impossibly minute men, were spent in finding out what size men were, and who they were and then giving them just as many rights from the people, as they are the right kind and the right size to handle for the people, it would be an American government.

He cares more about expressing his character and asserting it. If he is dealing with things, he makes them take the stamp of who he is. If he is dealing with people, he makes them see and acknowledge who he is. They must take in the facts about what he is like when they are with him. They must deal with him as he is.

This trait may have its disadvantages, but if an Englishman or an American is on this earth for anything, this is what he is for—to express his character in what he does—in strong, vigorous, manly lines draw a portrait of himself and show what he is like in what he does. This may be called on both sides of the sea to-day as we stand front to front with the more graceful nations, Anglo-Saxon Art.

It is because this particular art in the present crisis of human nature on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket of machines and crowds to give us the lead.

And now we are threading a way for nations through the moral wilderness of the earth.

If the American workman were to insist upon butting his American temperament into his labour union machinery, what would his labour machinery in America soon begin to show that an American labourer was like?

I imagine it might work out something like this:

The thoughtful workman looks about him. He discovers that the workman pays at least two times as much for coal as he needs to because miners down in Pennsylvania work one third as hard as they might for the money.

When he comes to think of it, all the labouring men of America are paying high prices because they have to pay all the other workmen in America for working as little as they can. He is working one third less than he can and making his own class pay for it. He sees every workman about him paying high prices because every other workman in making things for him to eat and for him to wear, is cheating him—doing a third less a day for him than he ought.

At this point the capitalists pile in and help. They shove the prices up still higher because capital is not interested in an industry in which the workmen do six hours' work in nine. It demands extra profits. So while the workmen put up the prices by not working, the capitalists put up the prices because they are afraid the workmen will not work. Half work, high prices.

Then the American workman thinks. He begins to suppose.

Then let Meat and Potatoes do the same for one another. Then two industries at a time, industries getting brains in pairs, until like the animals going into the ark, little by little (or rather very fast, almost piling in, in fact, after the first pair have tried it), at last our true, spirited, practical minded American workmen will have made their labour machines as natural and as human and as American as they are. They will stop trying to lower prices by not working, each workman joining (in a factory) the leisure classes and making the other workmen pay for it.

The American workman, as things are organized now, finds himself confronted with two main problems. One is himself. How can he get himself to work hard enough to make his food and clothes cheap? The other is his employer.

What will the American workman do to express his American temperament through his labour union to his employer? The American workmen will go to their employers and say: "Instead of doing six hours' work in nine hours, we will do nine hours' work in nine hours." The millers, for instance, will say to the flour mill owners: "We will do a third more work for you, make you a third more profit on our labour if you will divide your third more profit like this:

"First, by bringing down the price of flour to everybody;

"Second, by bringing up our wages. Third, by taking more money yourselves."

They will insist on it: The labour men will continue to say to their employers, "We will divide the proceeds of our extra work into three sums of money—ours, yours, and everybody's." In return we will soon find the employers saying the same thing to the labour men. Employers would like to arrange to be good. If they can get men who earn more, they want to pay them more.

The labourers would like to be good, i.e., work more for employers who want to pay them more.

But being good has to be arranged for.

Being good is a matter of mutual understanding, a matter of organization, a matter of butting our American temperament into our industrial machines.

All that is the matter with these industrial machines is that they are not like us.

Our machines are acting just now for all the world as if they were the Americans and as if we were the machines.

Are we for the machines, or are the machines for us?

All that the American labourers and that the American capitalists have to do is to show what they are really like, organize their news about themselves so that they get it through to one another, and our present great daily occupation in America (which each man calls his "business") all the workmen going down to the mills and all the employers going down to their offices, and then for six, eight, nine hours a day being chewed on by machines, will cease.

We make our industrial machines. We are Americans. Our machines must have our American temperament.

If an American employer were to insist on butting his American temperament into his industrial machine, what would his industrial machine, when it is well at work at last, show an American employer's temperament to be like?

The typical American business man of the highest class—the man who is expressing his American temperament best in his business—is the one who is expressing in it the most courage for himself and for others and for his government. He has big beliefs every few minutes a day, and he acts on them with nonchalance.

If he is running a trust—our most characteristic, recklessly difficult American invention for a man to show through, and if he tries to get his American temperament to show through in it, tries to make his trust like a vast portrait, like a kind of countenance on a country, of what a big American business is like, what will he do?

He will take a little axiom like this and act as if it were so.

If in any given case the producers by collusion and combination can be efficient in lowering wages to employees and raising prices and cheating the public, this same combination or collusion would be efficient in raising the wages of employees, lowering prices and serving the public.

He will then, being an American, turn to his government and say "I am a certain sort of man. If I am allowed to be an exception and to combine in this matter, I can prove that I can raise wages, lower prices for a whole nation in these things that I make. I am a certain sort of man. Do you think I am, or do you think that I am not? I want to know."

The government looks noncommittally at him. It says it cannot discriminate.

"What am I like inside? Is what I am like inside—my having a small size or a big size of motive, my having a right kind or a wrong kind of ability of no consequence to this government? Does the government of this country really mean that the most important things a country like this can produce, the daily, ruling motives of the men who are living in it, have no weight with the government? Am I to understand that the government does not propose to avail itself of new sizes and new kinds of men and new sizes and new kinds of abilities in men? What I am trying to do in my product is to lower the prices and raise the wages for a nation. Will you let me do it? Will you watch me while I do it?"

This will be the American trust of to-morrow. The average trust of this country has not yet found itself, but the moral and spiritual history, the religious message to a government of The Trust That Has Found Itself will be something like this.

Perhaps when we have a trust that has found itself, we will have a government that has dared to find itself, that has the courage to use its insight, its sense of difference between men, as it means of getting what it wants for the people.

As it is now, the government has not found itself and it falls back on complex rules or machines for getting out of seeing through people.

When our government begins to be a government, begins to express the American temperament, it will be a government that will devote its energy, its men, and its money to being expert in divining, and using differences between men. It will govern as any father, teacher, or competent business man does by treating some people in one way and others in another, by giving graded speed licenses in business, to labour unions, trusts, and business men.

The government will be able to do this by demanding, acquiring, and employing as the servants of the people, men who are experts in human nature, masters in not treating men alike—Crowbars, lemonade-straws, chisels, and marshmallows, powerhouses and Æolian harps by the people, for the people, and of the people, will be rated for what they are and will be used for what they are for.

This will be democracy. It will be the American temperament in government.

Is President Wilson or is he not going to fall back into a mere lawyer Moseslike way of getting people to be good, or is he going to be a man like David, half poet, half soldier, who got his way with the nation half by appreciating the men in it and being a fellow human being with them, and half by fighting them when they would not let him be a fellow human being with them, and would not let him appreciate them?

Almost any nation or government can get some kind of Moses to-day but the men that America is producing would not particularly notice a Moses probably now. A Moses might do for a Rockefeller, but he could not really do anything with a man like Theodore N. Vail who has the telephones and telegraphs of a country talking and ticking to us all, all night, all day, what kind of a man he is.

The people have spoken. A man in the White House who cannot say "Come" goes.

We want a poet in the White House. If we can not have a poet for the White House soon, we want a poet who will make us a poet for the White House.

I do not believe it is too much to expect a President to be a poet. We have had a poet for President once in one supreme crisis of this nation and the crisis that is coming now is so much deeper, so much more human and world-wide than Lincoln's was that it would almost seem as if a place like the White House (where one's poetry could really work) would make a poet out of anybody.

A President who has not a kind of plain, still, homely poetry in him, a belief about people that sings, in the present appalling crisis of the world is impracticable or visionary.

So we do not say, "Have we a President that can get our Bells, Edisons, McAdoos, Achesons to be good by toeing a line?"

We say, "Have we a President who can swing into step, who can join in the singing, who can catch up?"

Tunnel McAdoo, when he lifted up his will against the sea and against the seers of Wall Street, was singing. When he conceived those steel cars, those roaring yellow streaks of light ringing through rocks beneath the river, streets of people flashing through under the slime and under the fish and under the ships and under the wide sunshine on the water, he was singing! He raised millions of dollars singing.

If we have a President, let him sing like McAdoo, or like Luther Burbank, or like Theodore N. Vail, or like Colonel Goethals, picking up a little isthmus like Panama, a string between two continents, playing on it as if it were a harp; or like Edward Ripley playing with the Santa Fé Railroad for all the world like Homer with a lute, all his seven thousand men, all his workmen, all their wives and their children, all the cities along the line striking up and joining in the chorus or like Carborundum Acheson, backed up by his little Niagara Falls oiling the wheels of a world, weaving diamonds into steel, hardening the bones of the earth into skyscrapers, into railroads, into the mighty thighs of flying locomotives....

Any man who is seen acting in this world with a thing, as if he believed in the thing, as if he believed in himself and believed in other people, is singing.

Moses striking out with a rod, as we are told, a path along the sea for his people may have done a more showy thing from a religious point of view, hitting the water on top so, making a great splash with an empty place in it for people to march through, but he was not essentially more religious than McAdoo, with all those modest but mighty columns of figures piling up behind him, with all those splendid, dumb, still glowing engineers behind him, lifting up his will against cities, lifting up his will against herds of politicians, haughty newspapers, against the flocks of silly complacent old ferry-boats waddling in the bay, against the wind and the rain and the cold on the water, and all the banks of Wall Street....

When we want to tell News to our President about ourselves in America, we point to William G. McAdoo.

We are singing over here on this continent. We would not all of us put it in just this way. But our singing is the main thing we can do, and a government that is trying to improve us feebly, that is looking askance at us and looking askance at our money, and at our labour, and that does not believe in us and join in with us in our singing does not know what we are like.

Our next national business in America is to get the real news over to the President of what we are like.

It is news that we want in the White House. A missionary in the White House, be he ever so humble, will not do.

Mr. Roosevelt, himself, with the word Duty on every milepost as he whirled past, with suggestions of things for other people to do buzzing like bees about his head, acquired his tremendous and incredible power with us as a people because, in spite of his violent way of breaking out into a missionary every morning and every evening when he talked, it was not his talking but his singing that made him powerful—his singing, or doing things as if he believed in people, his I wills and I won'ts, his assuming every day, his acting every day, as if American men were men. He sang his way roughly, hoarsely, even a little comically at times into the hearts of people, stirred up in the nation a mighty heat, put a great crackling fire under it, put two great parties into the pot, boiled them, drew off all that was good in them, and at last, to-day, as I write (February 1913), the prospect of a good square meal in the White House (with some one else to say grace) is before the people.

The people are waiting to sit down once more in the White House and refresh themselves.

Who did it, please? Who bullied the cook and got everybody ready?

Theodore Roosevelt, singing a little roughly, possibly hurrahing "I will, I will, I won't, I won't," and acting as if he believed in the world.

Bryan in the village of Chicago sitting by at a reporter's table saw him doing it.

Bryan saw how it worked.

Bryan had it in him too.

Bryan heard the shouts of the people across the land as they gloried in the fight. He saw the signals from the nations over the sea.

Then Armageddon moved to Baltimore.

And now table is about to be spread.

It is to be Mr. Wilson's soup.

But the soup will have a Roosevelt flavour or tang to it. And we will wait to see what Mr. Wilson will do with the other courses.

A poet in words, with two or three exceptions, America has not produced.

The only touch of poetry or art as yet that we have in America is—acting as if we believed in people. This particular art is ours. Other people may have it, but it is all we have.

This is what makes or may make any moment the common American a poet or artist.

The true imaginative men of our modern life, the poets of crowds and cities are not to-day our authors, preachers, professors or lawyers or philosophers. The poets of crowds are our men like this, our vision-doers, the men who have seen visions and dreamed dreams in the real and daily things, the daring Governors like Wilson and like Hughes, the daring inventors of great business houses, the men who have invented the foundations on which nations can stand, on which railroads can run, the men whose imaginations, in the name of heaven, have played with the earth mightily, watered deserts, sailed cities on the seas, the men who have whistled and who have said "Come!" to empires, who have thought hundred-year thoughts, taken out nine hundred and ninety-nine year leases, who have thought of mighty ways for cities to live, for cities to be cool, to be light, to be dark, who have conceived ways for nations to talk, who have grasped the earth and the sky like music, like words, and put them in the hands of the people, and made the people say, "O earth," and "O sky, thou art great, but we also are great! Come earth and sky, thou shalt praise God with us!"

Who are these men?

Let the President catch up!

Who are these men? Here is Edward A. Filene, who takes up the pride, joy, beauty, self-respect, and righteousness of a city, swings it into a Store, and makes that Store sing about the city up and down the world! Here is Alexander Cassatt, imperturbable, irrepressible, and like a great Boy playing leapfrog with a Railroad—Cassatt who makes quick-hearted, dreamy Philadelphia duck under the Sea, bob up serenely in the middle of New York and leap across Hell Gate to get to Boston! Let the parliaments droning on their benches, the Congresses pile out of their doors and catch up.

Let a man in this day in the presence of men like these sing. If a man cannot sing, let him be silent. Only men who are singing things shall do them.

I go out into the street, I go out and look almost anywhere, listen anywhere, and the singing rises round me!

It was singing that spread the wireless telegraph like a great web across the sky.

It was singing that dug the subways under the streets in New York.

It was singing, a kind of iron gladness, hope and faith in men, that has flung up our skyscrapers into the lower stories of the clouds, and made them say, "I will! I will! I will!" to God.

Ah, how often have I seen them from the harbour, those flocking, crowded skyscrapers under that little heaven in New York, lifting themselves in the sunlight and in the starlight, lifting themselves before me, sometimes, it seems, like crowds of great states, like a great country piled up, like a nation reaching, like the plains and the hills and the cities of my people standing up against heaven day by day—all those flocks of the skyscrapers saying, "I will! I will! I will!" to God.

The skyscrapers are news about us to our President. He shall reckon with skyscraper men. He shall interpret men that belong with skyscrapers.

And as he does so, I shall watch the people answer him, now with a glad and mighty silence and now with a great solemn shout.

The skyscrapers are their skyscrapers.

If the President does not know us yet in America, does not know McAdoo as a representative American, we will thunder on the doors of the White House until he does.

My impression is he would be out in the yard by the gate asking us to come in.

We are America. We are expressing our joy in the world, our faith in God, and our love of the sun and the wind in the hearts of our people.

In America the free air breathes about us, and daily the great sun climbs our hillsides, swings daily past our work. There are ninety million men with this sun and this wind woven into their bodies, into their souls. They stand with us.

The skyscrapers stand with us.

All singing stands with us.

Ah, I have waked in the dawn and in the sun and the wind have I seen them!

That sun and that wind, I say before God, are America! They are the American temperament.

I will have laws for free men, laws with the sun and the wind in them!

I have waked in the dawn and my heart has been glad with the iron and poetry in the skyscrapers.

I will have laws for men and for American men, laws with iron and poetry in them!

The way for a government to get the poetry in is to say "Yes" to somebody.

The way for a government to get the iron in is not by saying "No." It is not American in a government to keep saying "No." The best way for our government in America to say "No" to a man, is to let him stand by and watch us saying "Yes" to some one else.

Then he will ask why.

Then he will stand face to face with America.

NEWS-BOOKS

The most practical thing that could happen now in the economic world in America would be a sudden, a great national, contemporary literature.

All we have to do is to have a News-book—a bookful of the kind of rich men we want, then we will have them. We will see men piling over each other all day to be them. Men have wanted to make money because making money has been supposed to mean certain things about a man. The moment it ceases to mean them, they will want to make other things.

Where is the news about what we really want?

——, when I took him to the train yesterday, spoke glowingly of the way the Standard Oil Trust had reduced oil from twenty-nine cents to eleven cents.

There was not time to say anything. I just thought a minute of how they did it.

Why is it that people—so many good people will speak of oil at eleven cents in this way, as if it were a kind of little kingdom of heaven?

I admit that eleven cents from twenty-nine cents leaves eighteen cents.

I do not deny that the Standard Oil Trust has saved me eighteen cents. But what have they taken away out of my life and taken out of my sense of the world and of the way things go in it and out of my faith in human nature to toss me eighteen cents?

If I could have for myself and others the sense of the world that I had before, would I not to-day, day after day, over and over, gallon by gallon, be handing them their eighteen cents back?

I have passed through all this during the last fifteen years and I have come out on the other side. But millions of lives of other men are passing through it now, passing through it daily, bitterly, as they go to their work and as they fall asleep at night.

The next thing in this world is not reducing the price of oil. It is raising the price of men and putting a market-value on life.

What makes a man a man is that he knows himself, knows who he is, what he is for and what he wants. Knowing who he is and knowing what he is about, he naturally acts like a man, knows what he is about like a man, and gets things done.

A nation that does not know itself shall not be itself.

A nation that has a muddle-headed literature, a nation that to say nothing of not being able to express what it has, has not even made a beginning at expressing what it wants; a nation that has not a great, eager, glowing literature, a sublime clear-headedness about what it is for—a nation that cannot put itself into a great book, a nation that cannot weave itself together even in words into a book that can be unfurled before the people like a flag where everybody can see it and everybody can share it, look up to it, live for it, sleep for it, get up in the morning and work for it—work for the vision of what it wants to be—cannot be a great nation.

First the Specifications, then the House.

From the practical or literary point of view the one sign we have given in this country so far, that the stuff of masterpieces is in us and that we are capable of a great literature, is that America is bored by its own books.

We let a French parson write a book for us on the simple life. We let a poor suppressed Russian with one foot in hell reach over and write books for us about liberty which we greedily read and daily use. We let a sublimely obstinate Norwegian, breaking away with his life, pulling himself up out of the beautiful, gloomy, morose bog of romance he was born in—express our American outbreak for facts, for frank realism in human nature.

America is bored by its own books because every day it is demanding gloriously from its authors a literature—books that answer our real questions, the questions the people are asking every night as they go to sleep and every morning when they crowd out into the streets—Where are we going? Who are we? What are we like? What are we for?

A—— C——, the little stoopy cobbler on —— street in ——, bought some machines to help him last year before I went away and added two or three slaves to do the work. I find on coming back that he has moved and has two show windows now, one with the cobbling slaves in it cobbling, and the other (a kind of sudden, impromptu room with a show window in it) seems to be straining to be a shoe store. When you go in and show C—— in his shirt sleeves,—your old shoes hopefully, he slips over from his shining leather bench to the shoe-store side and shows you at the psychological moment a new pair of shoes.

I watched him walking up and down the station platform before I got on, with that bent, concentrated, meek, ready-to-die-getting-on look. I saw his future while I looked. I saw, or thought I saw, windows full of bright black shoes, I saw the cobbler's shop moved out into the ell at the back, and two great show windows in front. A—— C—— looks like an edged tool.

Millions of Americans are like A—— C——, like chisels, adzes, saws, scoops. You talk with them, and if you talk about anything except scooping and adzing, you are not talking with just a man, but a man who is for something and who is not for anything else. He is not for being talked with certainly, and alas! not for being loved. At best he is a mere feminine convenience—a father or a cash secreter; until he wears out at last, buzzes softly into a grave.

An Englishman of this type is a little better, would be more like one of these screw-driver, cork-screw arrangements—a big hollow handle with all sorts of tools inside.

Is this man a typical American? Does he need to be?

What I want is news about us.

All an American like C—— needs is news. His eagerness is the making of him. He is merely eager for what he will not want.

All he needs is the world's news about people, about new inventions in human beings, news about the different and happier kinds of newly invented men, news about how they were thought of, and how they are made, and news about how they work.

I demand three things for A—— C——:

I want a novel that he will read which will make him see himself as I see him.

I want a play that will send him home from the theatre and keep him awake with what he might be all that night.

I want a news-book for A—— C——, a news-book for all of us.

I read a book some years ago that seemed a true news-book and which was the first suggestion I had ever received that a book can be an act of colossal statesmanship, the making or remaking of a people—a masterpiece of modern literature, laying the ground plan for the greatness of a nation.

When I had read it, I wanted to rush outdoors and go down the street stopping people I met and telling them about it. Once in a very great while one does come on a book like this. One wants to write letters to the reviews. One does not know what one would not do to go down the long aimless Midway Plaisance of the modern books, to call attention to it. One wishes there were a great bell up over the world.... One would reach up to it, and would say to all the men and the women and to the flocks of the smoking cities, "Where are you all?" The bell would boom out, "What are you doing? Why are you not reading this book?" One wonders if one could not get a coloured page in the middle of the Atlantic or the North American Review or Everybody's and at least make a great book as prominent as a great soap—almost make it loom up in a country like a Felt Mattress or a Toothbrush.

The book that has made me feel like this the most is Charles Ferguson's "Religion of Democracy." I have always wondered why only people here and there responded to it. The things it made me vaguely see, all those huge masses of real things, gigantic, half-godlike, looming like towers or mountains in a mist.... Well, it must have been a little like this that Columbus felt that first morning!

But for the time being Charles Ferguson's book—all those glorious generalizings in behalf of being individual, all those beautiful, intoned, chanted abstractions in behalf of being concrete—came to me in my speechless, happy gratitude as a kind of first sign in the heavens, as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, up over the place in the waste of water where land, Land! At last! Land again! will have to be.

If we ever have a literature in America, it will be found somewhere when the mist rolls away, right under Charles Ferguson's book.

It may be too soon just now in this time of transition in our land of piles and of derricks against the sky, for the book. All we are competent for now is to say that we want such a book, that we see what it will do for us.

When we want it, we will get it. Let the American people put in their order now.

In the meantime the Piles and the Derricks.

All these young and mighty derricks against the sky, all these soaring steel girders with the blue through them—America!

Ah, my God! is it not a hoping nation? Three thousand miles of Hope, from Eastport, Maine, to San Francisco—does not the very sun itself racing across it take three hours to get one look at our Hope?

Here it is!—Our World.

Let me, for one, say what I want.

It is already as if I had seen it—one big, heroic imagination at work at last like a sea upon our world, poetry grappling with the great cities, with their labour, with their creative might, full of their vast joys and sorrows, full of their tussle with the sea and with the powers of the air and with the iron in the earth!—the big, speechless cities that no one has spoken for yet, so splendid, and so eager, and so silent about their souls!

Behold the Derricks like mighty Youths!

In our glorious adolescence so sublime, so ugly, so believing, will no one sing a hymn to the Derricks?

Where are the dear little Poets? Where are they hiding?

Playing Indian perhaps, or making Parthenons out of blocks.

Perhaps they might begin faintly and modestly at first.

Some dear, hopeful, modest American poet might creep up from under them, out from under the great believing, dumb Derricks standing on tiptoe of faith against the sky, and write a book and call it "Beliefs American Poets Would Like to Believe if They Could."