THE GHOST IN THE WHITE HOUSE

SOME SUGGESTIONS AS TO HOW A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE (WHO ARE SUPPOSED IN A VAGUE, HELPLESS WAY TO HAUNT THE WHITE HOUSE) CAN MAKE THEMSELVES FELT WITH A PRESIDENT—HOW THEY CAN BACK HIM UP—EXPRESS THEMSELVES TO HIM, BE EXPRESSED BY HIM, AND GET WHAT THEY WANT

By

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Author of "Crowds" and "Inspired Millionaires"

"The White House is haunted by a vague helpless abstraction,—by a kind of ghost of the nation, called The People"

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & CO.
681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1920
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

First printing        May, 1920

Printed in the United States of America

TO

JENNETTE LEE

CONTENTS

BOOK I

WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE

• Gist3
• The Lonesomest Job on Earth4
• The President and the Ghost6
• Real Folks and the Ghost12
• The Ghost Receives an Invitation16
• What a Body for the Ghost Would be Like20
• The Ghost gets Down to Business25
• Three Rights of Man in a Democracy—The Right to Think27
• The Right to be Waited On32
• The Right to Whisper36
• The Right to Whisper Together39
• The Right to Trust Somebody41
• The Right to Vote All Day46
• The Skilled Consumer48
• Sample Democracies51
• The Town Pendulum54
• The National Listening Machine58
• How the National Listening Machine Will Work62
• Making a Right Start64
• Up to the People66
• The Way for a Nation to Speak Up68

BOOK II

WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF

• G. S. L. to Himself75
• If I Were a Nation78
• What the Mahogany Desk is Going to Do81
• Rules for Being Lied to85
• Getting One Man Right87
• Getting Fifty Men Right89
• Engineers in Folks91
• The Great New Profession92
• Getting People to Notice Facts97
• The Fool Killers100
• The Whisperers102
• Mr. Dooley, Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers103
• Fooling Onseself in Politics108
• Swearing Off from Oneself in Time112
• Technique for not Being Fooled by Oneself117
• The Autobiography of a Letter120
• The Man Fifty Three Thousand Post Offices Failed On124
• Causes of Being Fooled About Oneself126
• Loco-Mindedness128
• Flat-Thinking. Thinking in Me Flat131
• Lost-Mindedness133
•  137
• Self Discipline by Proxy139
• Machine Mindedness142
• New Brain Tracks in Business143

BOOK III

TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY

• Big in Little147
• Conscious Control of Brain Tracks149
• What is Called Thinking151
• Living Down Cellar in One's Own Mind156
• Being Helped up the Cellar Stairs160
• Reflections on the Stairs166
• Helping Other People up the Cellar Stairs169
• Helping a Nation up the Cellar Stairs173
• Technique for Labor in Getting its Way175
• Technique for Capital in Getting its Way179
• Philandering and Alexandering183
• The Factory that Lay Awake All Night185
• Listening to Jim191
• The New Company196
• The Fifty-Cent Dollar198
• The Business Man, the Professional Man and the Artist200
• The News-Man203
• W. J.205
• The Look-Up Club Looks Up207
• Propagandy People211
• The Skilled Consumers of Publicity213

BOOK IV

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY

• Fourth of July All the Year Round217
• The Vision and the Body219
• The Call of a Hundred Million People222
• The Call of a World227
• Missouri232
• A Victory Loan Advertisement236

BOOK V

THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN

• Reconstruction243
• National Biology245
• The Air Line League247
• The Look-Up Club Looks Up250
  • (1) For Instance250
  • (2) Why The Look-Up Club Looks Up255
• The Try-Out Club Tries Out257
  • (1) I + You = We257
  • (2) The Engineer at Work260
  • (3) The Engineer and the Game262
  • (4) The American Business Sport264
• The Put-Through Clan Puts Through270
  • (1) What270
  • (2) How272
  • (3) Psycho-Analysis273
  • (4) Psycho-Analysis for a Town276
  • (5) To-Morrow280
  • (6) Who281
  • (7) The Town Fireplace286
  • (8) The Sign on the World288

BOOK VI

WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT

• The Big Brother of the People293
• The Man Who Carries the Bunch of Keys for the Nation300
• The President's Temperament302
• The President's Religion306
• The Red Flag and the White House309

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 practitioners or government tinkerers. They are not all alike, of course, but we have turned our national glass 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 God.

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 God.

And they are voting to God, 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 godlike 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 noble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor union,—get what they want.

II

THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH

What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night?

The Ghost in the White House.

The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people.

The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization.

What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never Was, and Who Never Is—a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, Terrible Angel called the People.

Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times.

That is all there is to Her.

It is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the Aurora Borealis to 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up to this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. It does not give any real satisfaction to anybody—either to the hundred million people or to the President.

It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a President—to be a Ghost.

It is not efficient.

Naturally—much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or hope to get (however hard he tries) is the Ghost of a President.

III

THE PRESIDENT AND THE GHOST

There are a number of things about going into the White House the next four years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, that are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest job on earth.

The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position as the Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is expected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassing idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would ever put up with, from any other employer in the world.

Absent-mindedness.

Non-committalness.

Halfness, or double personality.

Bodilessness.

Big, impressive-looking Fool Moments.

Cumulus clouds of Slow Sure Conceit with Sudden Flops of Humility.

General Irresponsibleness.

And perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the Employer—like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made a fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry.

The man who is conscientious in the White House has an Employer whose immediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes in the hope that he will be thanked afterwards.

Once in a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert, as the captain of the ship, has to tell the Owner of the Line, when the storm is highest, that he must not butt in.

The restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer that one is just being an employee and that one's employer is being responsible, is lacking in the White House, where one is practically expected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee and one's own employer.

But while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in the President's Employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerous ones for the country.

I am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done about them. I have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated the moment the Employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits are making it for the President to do anything for him.

Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people are giving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, is not only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer so large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It.

Serving It is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with a fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the People.

It is this bodilessness in the Employer—this very simple rudimentary whiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished and accomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it hardest to bear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly is (once in four years) that he wants him or that he does not want him and even then he confides to him that he only half wants him. He says deliberately and out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people of other nations, "Here is the man I would a little rather have than not." That is all. Then he coops him up in the White House, drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to work.

Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer like this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and when one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of the people one is being The Head Employee of (in the other party) expect one to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at the utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one's Employer—keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it will be small wonder if the man in the White House feels he has—especially these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth.

The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed to our President. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, and be President of all of us.

It may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job on earth and, of course, when Theodore Roosevelt had it, the job of being President considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell world America is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of our next President, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy, senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappy factories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nations abroad, the man we put in the White House next is going to have what will be the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousand years—except the one that began in Nazareth—the one the new President is going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way which little, old, queer, bent, eager St. Paul with his prayers in Rome and his sermons in Athens, never dreamed of.

It does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new President and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this time for our President to have a ghost for an Employer.

All any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make a President, is to stop and think. If you have an employer who cannot collect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, all you do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make him up—what is there—what deep, searching and conclusive and permanent action is there, after all, the man in The White House can take in his employer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling him what he wants and what he is willing to do with what he gets? What can the man in the White House hope to accomplish for a people with whom it is the constitutional and regular thing to be as lonely as this?

I have wanted to consider what can be done, and done now not to have a lonely President the next four years.

The first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the next election a man for the White House a great-hearted direct and free people will not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things that will back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand, and not let him feel lonely with us.

The feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness—the feeling the Public has every day in the White House and in the Senate, of being treated, and treated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that works as badly one way as it does the other.

The President does not want a Ghost.

The people do not want to be treated as a Ghost.

The object of this book is to resent—to expose to everybody as unfair and untrue and destroy forever the title I have written across the front of it, "The Ghost in The White House."

The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all time, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world, from being an inarticulate, shimmering, wavering, gibbering Ghost in its own House.

There must be things—broad simple things about Capital and Labor people can do and do every day in this country, that will make a President timidly stop guessing what they want.

It ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a President or a seer for a President to know what the people want. A man of genius—a seer, a man who can read the heart of a nation—especially in politics, comes not only not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highly unlikely when he does that the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party in America will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him in the White House.

The best the people can hope for in America now is to have a body—to find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without saying a word—express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word our President, our Politicians—even the kind of men who seem to put up naturally with having to be in the Senate—the kind of men who can feel happy and in their element in a place like Congress will see what the People—the real people in this country are like.

I am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people so that we the people in America, at last, in the days that lie ahead, instead of being a Ghost in our own House, shall have things that we can do, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able to prove to a President what we are like and what we want—so that each man of us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on a President with—something more than a vague, faint, little ballot to hurl (like an Autumn leaf) at him, once in four years.

IV

REAL FOLKS AND THE GHOST

When a man speaks of The City National Bank he speaks of it as if he meant something and knew what he meant.

When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch him bewhiffle it.

When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of Business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and when in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in some mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of The Invisible.

Business talks bass. Patriotism is an Æolian harp.

During the war this was changed. We found ourselves every day treating America, treating The Country, treating The People as a bodily fact.

I would like to see what can be done now in the next President's next four years, to give America this magnificent sense of a body in peace.

Why is it that we have in America a body for Germans, and then wilt down in a minute after Château-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost—unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless—just a light in its eyes—just a vast national shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet.

Millions of people every day in this country are very particular to salute the flag, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" and ship Bolshevists, but let them speak to you in conversation, of an industrial body like the Steel Trust or the Pennsylvania Railroad and they act as if something were there. Bring up the Body-Politic and it's a whiff.

It ought to be considered treason to think or to speak of The Country in this vague, breathy way.

The next immediate, imperative need of America is to see what can be done and done in the next President's next four years to make the Body-Politic people take the Body-Politic and what happens to the Body-Politic as if it were as substantial as a coal strike—as what happened at Ypres, Cambrai and Château-Thierry.

Otherwise we are a nation of whiners and yearners and are not what we pretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the Germans and the rest of the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy.

I believe that the best things the Old World has said about us and hoped for us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation of idealists, are true to the American character and real.

But they are not actual. We are the world's colossal tragic Adolescent. Forty nations are depending on us—are waiting for us—in the world's long desperate minutes—waiting for America to grow up.

This nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism and religion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of its daily producing, buying and selling, and no more. Any big beautiful evaporated Body-Politic we have or try to think we can have aside from this body—this actual working through of our patriotism, our democracy and our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy, unclean and threatens in its one desperate and critical moment the fate of a world.

All really religious men and all real patriots know this.

In a democracy like ours a religion which is not occupied all day every day in this year of our Lord 1920 in making democracy work, a religion that loafs off into a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, a religion that cannot be used to run steel mills so that men won't go to hell in them and to run coal mines so that men won't be in hell already, is not a religion at all. And a nation that sheds tears over three hundred thousand disabled and crippled soldiers, who gave up their jobs and sailed six thousand miles to die for them, and that has finally managed to get new jobs for just two hundred and seventeen of the three hundred thousand and taken nineteen months to do it, illustrates what it means—in just one simple item—for a hundred million people, to try to be good without a body.

But it is not only in behalf of its helplessness with the President I am groping in these pages for a body for the Public.

The reason that the Public in dealing in its daily business with powerful persons of any kind—whether good or bad, whether a President or anybody, is taken advantage of and does not get what it wants, is that the Public is a Ghost.

Theoretically all powerful persons, predatory Trusts, profiteering labor unions and the wrong kind of politicians always speak respectfully to the Public, but when they want something that belongs to the Public they find the Public is an Abstraction and help themselves. They act when with the Public, as if the Public was not there.

The only way this is ever going to be stopped is for us to make a spontaneous voluntary popular start in this country toward having a body for people in general, towards giving a hundred million people in dealing with their politicians, their trusts and labor unions, less bodilessness. We propose to give a hundred million people a face, a voice, a presence, a backbone, a grip.

Then all the people we ask things of who think we can be whoofed away, will pay attention to us.