The Ghost in the White House Part 15

I say over to myself breathlessly between these very words while I write them down about Henry Cabot Lodge, that beautiful thought John Bunyan had, "Except for the grace of G.o.d" a wife, five friends and a sense of humor, there goes Gerald Stanley Lee!

I have made myself say this over practically every day while writing this article (I have had to write it), and when I was in the same town Henry Cabot Lodge is, last week, saw him snooping around the Senate, so pure and high and from the Back Bay, so serene in his courtly chivalrous dream about himself, I got taken up every time--I do not deny it--on the same monotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the same monotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then I would stand there (He is my own Senator) with his pa.s.s for The Senate in my pocket ... I would stand and watch him,--watch him walking through the lordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought John Bunyan had about the murderer, "Except for the grace of G.o.d there goes etc., etc." Everybody fill in for himself!

The essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human nature is that all the people who have any are very much alike. The best we can do about it--most of us--is to recognize the fact that in spite of the thought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably are going to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical working difference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselves in the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, more desperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regular arrangements, perhaps,--when something in us starts us up into being Lodges,--for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselves in time.

Here is Charles Evans Hughes for instance, who from the day he was born hates a Socialist from afar off,--a man who never had in his younger days perhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thing Charles Evans Hughes does before anybody can say Jack Robinson, the very first minute he reads in his paper that the New York a.s.sembly has refused to give their seats to five Socialist members because they are Socialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big national jerk draw his national self together, and before the country is half waked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an act of sympathy and protest on behalf of American Socialists from the last man most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that the narrow partisans of the a.s.sembly itching with superiority, sweating with propriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great Chamber in Albany, should take the Socialist members they had waved out of the room simply for belonging to the Socialist party, and conduct them back to their seats as the accredited representatives (until proved individually unfit) of citizens of the United States and let them sit there as a national exhibit of the way in which a great and free people, who are believing in themselves every day, can believe in themselves enough to listen to anybody, to make regular arrangements in Albany and everywhere as a matter of course for listening to people with whom they do not agree, without fear and without frothing at the mouth.

Mr. Hughes is as anxious to do anything he can during one lifetime to discourage Socialism as Henry Cabot Lodge is to discourage Woodrow Wilson, but the reason that the American people have been glad to have Charles Evans Hughes as Justice of the Supreme Court, the reason that they came within three inches of making him President of the United States is that in an eminent degree he is a man who has made elaborate, conclusive and habitual arrangements with his own mind for not being deceived by Charles Evans Hughes, for being a lawyer backwards, for fighting himself, for stepping up out of being a mere lawyer and sitting sternly on the Bench of the Supreme Court, against himself.

Of course I am not writing this article to point out to a hundred million people with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superior I and a hundred million other people are to Henry Cabot Lodge and to the way for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and being internationally fooled about himself. The special point I seek to make is that as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking out into millions of Lodges any minute, that we should make the most of our new national chance of our power as a people just now--just before the two great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong, to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard against ourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to The White House,--from whatever walk of life he comes,--a man who will have himself magnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the people into his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own cla.s.s, or put down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul--a man who will be the President of all the people everywhere all the time.

When the members of The Bar a.s.sociation of the City of New York who backed Mr. Hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightened world, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasion and being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fair to divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those who voted to back Mr. Hughes were, and those who did not, were not equally exposed to being fooled about themselves. Mr. Hughes and his followers were probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular and standing arrangements with themselves against themselves and who acted more quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish they had acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes.

In the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next four years to justify democracy--to justify the power of the human spirit to be free, generous, n.o.ble and just in self-government, the power of men of differing cla.s.ses, of differing groups and interests to live in orderly good will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last a great nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot do it,--all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being a blind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our not being full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on what we do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand for seeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men to represent us who shall not be demagogues, who shall lead us as we are, with clear eyes to what we are going to be, men who shall lead us by opening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting us in our sins.

XV

TECHNIQUE FOR NOT BEING FOOLED BY ONESELF

The next twenty-eight pages of this book might be ent.i.tled: "An Article that Expected to Appear in the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_."

When the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to be read in this way, were completed, they were too late to submit to the _Post_, and too late to change.

The reader is therefore requested to bear in mind (as I do) that he is getting the next eleven chapters for nothing--that they have not been paid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ would approve or believe what I believe, or feel hurt if other people believe it.

The suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doing what we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs of criticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself.

It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret of increased production in factories, or power over others in business, and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmans.h.i.+p, I say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having or exercising this power of self-criticism?

If the readers of the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ were to come to me in a body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything, they--the readers of the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ can do, and do now to acquire a technique--a kind of general amateur technique for not being fooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holding back from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked at all, I have a faint hopeful idea--I feel it at this moment floating about my head--a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought to do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thing off. I cannot believe that only this far--in a few pages or so about it, I have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to them. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in this country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves, the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being fooled by himself--some one man all our people have a perfect pa.s.sion,--almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make my idea alluring with him.

Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States.

It is true that other readers of the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ besides Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr.

Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people.

Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office--everybody who waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be excelled.

I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the technique of self-criticism.

1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself.

2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize him.

3rd. How he could get it. Technique and ill.u.s.tration.

XVI

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LETTER

If the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from Philadelphia to Northampton, Ma.s.sachusetts, could be written down--if all the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on platforms--what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions--if all the long story of this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the envelope--what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do to Albert Sidney Burleson?

The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every day, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along the Mississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, waving their autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, would point to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave of unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Was.h.i.+ngton by ten-thirty A.M., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel post to Austin, Texas, before night.

I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker than if he were sent like a mere letter.

Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, the most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can produce.

Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to believe and who keeps fooled about himself.

An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about how money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he was placed by the people at the head of the people's Post Office, he would save their money for the people instead of running their Post Office for them.

This is all that has happened. This was Mr. Burleson's preconception of what he was for and what a Post Office was for and not a hundred million people could pry him out of it. Mr. Burleson ran his Post Office to suit himself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in being suited with their Post Office had to take anything that was left over that they could get after Mr. Burleson was suited with it.

Mr. Burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conception of Albert Sidney Burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and so far as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years in thinking what other people's conceptions of him are.

I am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a Post Office. But I want my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America would agree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to have it, please, deliver our letters for us.

If the ma.n.u.script of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the compositor's hands on Thursday morning--should take as has happened before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one suppose I would do?

Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in another column on Mr. Burleson.

But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of the _Post_ are both going to get out of that extra column.

I am going to do what I have done over and over before.

Instead of mailing as one would suppose this ma.n.u.script at nine o'clock Wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery, I am going to go down to the Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon at six o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar ticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire a seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford for the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye.

Then I am going to pay my letter's bill at the Bellevue-Stratford, buy a three dollar ticket to New York and a place in the Pullman for myself, G.

S. L. on return, as the human envelope Mr. Burleson has required me to be, s.h.i.+p myself back to New York as the empty, as the container this article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with Albert Sidney Burleson will be over.

Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Station and walked out at the Eighth Avenue end, looked up wistfully at Mr.

Burleson's new Greek Palace he puts up in when he comes to New York and I came with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burleson has about himself--four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet high all across the top.

NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.

Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, or Homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to camels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousand mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles of sunsets across the land.

But I must say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read it as I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth to Thirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as I stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I was spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailing for me.