The Ghost in the White House Part 14

In strained situations between people--situations in which one sees people getting all worked up and fine, n.o.ble and wild-eyed about themselves, I am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, most immediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one--some one who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless laugh.

To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or not, would be practical.

Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola.

And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic humanness, the profound statesmans.h.i.+p of the loneliest man of his time, in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his G.o.d.

I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time--just as Mr.

Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went home--stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room--if Mr.

Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's Conference might have been saved.

The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen from the point of view of G.o.d or of common people, many of the men in it,--most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very funny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could see through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference who conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact about human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would look in a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless lively and equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Labor group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than could be helped.

The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our whole nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp--a state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody thought, and n.o.body had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at themselves.

When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on, walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was prettiest, about themselves.

Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe about itself.

With Capital not yet grown up--not yet really capable (as the really mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative use of criticism,--incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the same undeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as a national dramatization,--a rather loud and theatrical acting out before an amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country as inst.i.tutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear, superst.i.tions and childishness about one another as the monotonous strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty years, had made us suspect they were!

For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this nation--called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid for carting it away without saying a word.

There are three courses we can take in the Public Group now.

We can try to discipline Capital and Labor into producing together by pa.s.sing laws and heaping up embarra.s.sments and penalties.

We can let them see how much better they can make things by sticking them on to one another and letting them discipline one another.

We can make fun of both of them quietly to themselves, keep quiet-hearted, matter of fact, full of realism, humor, relaxation and naturalness and deal with Capital and Labor as Lincoln would, by getting laughing and listening started.

Then let them laugh at themselves.

America should arrange to have Judge Gary, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Gompers get together on a desert island and face things out.

A great deal of capital in this country--especially the best of it, is already seeing, and already acting on facts about itself it has not wanted to believe. It is already seeing that it cannot carry off with Labor or with the Public any longer the idea of looking pure and n.o.ble, standing before people in a kind of eternal moral-Prince-Albert coat, one's hand in one's bosom, and with the same old pompous-looking face, without looking ridiculous. It is seeing that it would rather laugh at itself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that the only thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific and economic, smile at its airs with Labor and the public, and lay them aside.

If Capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietly for self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, Labor will.

If Labor does it, Capital will.

Whichever side does it first, and does it best,--does it in the most human, attractive and contagious way will find a hundred million people handing over to it the power and the leaders.h.i.+p of the country.

To whichever side it comes first, to show the most shrewdness, the most fearlessness, the most generosity in seeing facts against itself, will come the honor of the first victory.

The first victory either side will be allowed by the people, is its victory over itself.

People in this country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capable of self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, can have anything they want.

XIII

FOOLING ONESELF IN POLITICS

The same thing that everybody can see is going to happen in business in this country from now on--the pus.h.i.+ng forward--the victory over all others in business of the men who are not fooled about themselves is going to be seen happening ten times over in politics.

The leading symptom of the mood of the people, the magnificent blanket political secret that covers all the other secrets of the coming conventions and elections, the dominating fact of the next man's next four years in The White House, is the thing that is going to be done by the people from to-day on, to politicians who are fooled about themselves.

One has but to mention one or two and a nation sees it.

Any little natural impression my fellow citizens may have had at the beginning of this article that in putting forward my idea of being a lawyer backwards, or the idea that we must all practice at being lawyers backwards to ourselves, I am putting forward just a gay pleasant thoughtlet, instead of a grave and pressing national issue, an issue on which the fate of a people is at stake, fades away when one really begins to think of how the idea would really work out if tried on particular politicians.

Everybody can pick out his own of course, but I am inclined to believe just at the moment, that if there was a good man everybody in this nation knew of who was being a lawyer backwards--say in New York or London--a man who had a big practice and who had a fine record in bracing men up to fight themselves and not to be fooled about themselves, the man that most people in this country would like to take up a national collection for, have sent to him and done over at once, no matter what it cost, would be Henry Cabot Lodge.

For six long weary months now, the main and international fact America and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man called Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself.

Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,--their very cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Was.h.i.+ngton can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips Henry Cabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to make Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in a lonely back seat of the World.

But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred million people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry Cabot Lodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses his pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to the world after all is that he--Henry Cabot Lodge, of Ma.s.sachusetts, has taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international emotion out of it--every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration--into a great national stained-gla.s.s window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty generations like attendant angels hovering around him--around Henry Cabot Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws of a prowling League of Nations!

It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with G.o.d and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived.

It would be of no use to argue--not even for a hundred million people to argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself.

So it came to pa.s.s--a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man magnificently obsessed--a man holding himself ready any minute of any day in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipice of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off....

Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues of nations of his own twenty years ago--who would have believed that a man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own pa.s.sions and its own desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a national, into an international helplessness like this?

My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at the present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the psycho-a.n.a.lysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to get things, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and from now on, in the men they choose to get them.

The ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled about themselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, are matched on every side in the world of politics.

The personal trait of great political as well as industrial value for which the people of this country are going to look in the men they allow to be placed over them--the men they give power and command to, is the quality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts in people. What we are going to look for in a man is having an engineering and not a sentimental att.i.tude toward his own mind and the minds of others. We are going to give power and place to the man who has a certain eagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certain suppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. The man we are going to look past everybody for and pick to be a President or a Senator after this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his own party or by his own cla.s.s, who is not fooled about himself, who keeps without swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunk line of the interests of all of us.

XIV

SWEARING OFF FROM ONESELF IN TIME

Before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is established, and before very many offices have really been opened up where one can go in and have one's mind changed ten dollars' worth instead of having it poured, soothed and petted, a good many of us are going to find it necessary to practice on ourselves and in a humble way as amateurs, do any little odd jobs we can on ourselves at home.

We nearly all of us have it in us--we the hundred million people--to be like Henry Cabot Lodge, on a less national scale, any minute.