The Ghost in the White House Part 24

If all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what their laborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the face of Labor toward Capital--the face of this country toward the world and toward itself and toward every man in it would be changed in a week.

Suppose I propose to take one of these men and write about him until everybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeing that everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what would be the first thing I would come upon?

The first thing I would come upon would be a convention. It is one of the automatic ideas or conventions of business men--not to believe in themselves.

XVI

THE BUSINESS MAN, THE PROFESSIONAL MAN, AND THE ARTIST

Why is it that if a professional man or an artist does or says a certain thing--people believe him and that if a business man does or says precisely the same thing--most business men are suspicious?

When I say in the first sentence of an article on the front page of the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_--as I did awhile ago--"I would pay people to read what I am saying on this page,"--everybody believes me. As people read on in one of my articles in the _Post_, they cannot be kept from seeing how egregiously I am enjoying my work. Anybody can see it--that I would pay up to the limit all the money I can get hold of--my own, or anybody's--to get other people to enjoy reading my stuff as much as I do. n.o.body seems inclined to deny that if I could afford to--or, if I had to--I would pay ten cents a word to practically any man, to get him to read what I write.

Precisely the way I feel about an article in the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ so fortunate as to be by me--or, about a book written by g.s.l., a man I know very well--W. J. ---- feels about a house or about a bank created by W. J. ----. But if W. J., a designer--contractor--a builder--pretends he enjoys his creative work in building as much as I enjoy writing--if W.

J., a business man, were to go around telling people or revealing to people that he would like to hire them to be his customers by handing back to them twenty, thirty or forty per cent of his agreed upon profits when he gets through (which is what he practically does over and over again) there are very few business men who would not say at first sight that W. J. is a man who ought to be watched.

And he is too, but for precisely turned around reasons most people have to be watched for. W. J. in designing and constructing a house, or a bank for a client, sets as his cost estimate a ten per cent maximum profit for himself, as a margin to work on; aiming at six or five per cent profit for himself, on small contracts and at a four, three or two and one-half per cent profit for himself on million dollar ones. Changes and afterthoughts from his clients in carrying out a contract are inevitable.

W. J. wants a margin on which to allow for contingencies and for his customers' afterthought.

The three things that interest W. J. in business are: his work on a perfect house, his work on a perfect customer and his work on making enough money to keep people from bothering his work.

A perfect house is a house built just as he said it would be which comes out costing less than he said it would cost--possibly a check on his client's dinner plate the first night he dines in it.

A perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannot express himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to--who cannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sending everybody to W. J. he can think of.

The tendency of mean typical business men--even men who do this themselves, when I tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what is the matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me.

This is what is the matter with the country--the conventional automatic a.s.sumption that millions of men--even men who are not in business merely to make money themselves--make in general, that we must arrange to run a civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day, in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are merely working for money.

If we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it does not need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions and that these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulers and the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate of all of us--we would be a new nation in a week.

In a year we would increase production fifty per cent.

This has happened over and over again in factories where this new spirit of putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, has come in.

Naturally, inasmuch as W. J. as all people who know him know, has made a very great business success of running his business on this principle, of making it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things at once than merely making money--running a business like any other big profession, one of the first things I think of doing is to write something that will make everybody know it. Well, as I have said, the first fact I come on is that many business men do not approve of believing in themselves or in business or in what I say about its being a profession, any more than they can help.

XVII

THE NEWS-MAN

I have recently come in my endeavors as a publicist, as a self-appointed, self-paid employee of the American people, upon what seems to me a very astonis.h.i.+ng and revolutionary fact.

I have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into two principles.

1. The industrial and financial fate of America and the world turns in the next few years--or even months, on news--on getting certain people to know in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certain things will happen.

2. News, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as a generalization or as a principle. To make news compelling and conclusive one has to say something in particular about somebody in particular.

Here is the fact I have come on in acting on these principles.

When I find news done up in a man to save a nation with, if I make everybody know him, the fact I face about my country is this.

A generalized--that is--a sterilized idea is free. A fertilized or dramatized idea--an idea done up and dramatized in a man so that everybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up.

I am not blaming anybody. I am laying before people and before myself a fact.

Suppose that I think it is stupendously to the point just now to advertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion of profit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would make a new nation for a hundred people to know?

Suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generally invited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kind of spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity--instead of getting off ideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, I insist on making ideas do things and I plan on having my ideas done up solidly in ten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching?

Suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, a man who dramatizes--makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea of increased production or superproducing, seems to the point--suppose I begin with W. J.?

What does anyone suppose would happen?

XVIII

W. J.

If W. J. were dead, or were to die to-morrow, it would be convenient. In bearing upon our present national crisis it would be thoughtful and practical of W. J. to die.

If W. J.'s worst enemy were to push him off the top of the fortieth story of the Equitable Building to-morrow morning all I would have to do would be to write an article about him in some national weekly, _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ or _Collier's_, which would be read by four million people.

But the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ or _Collier's_ has no use for W. J. until he is dead. It would like to have, of course, but it would not be fair to the business men who are paying ten thousand dollars a page to be advertised in it, for the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ to let any other man--any man who is not dead yet, be advertised in it.

This is the reason for the Look-Up Club, a national body--the gathering together of one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise W. J. to--who will then turn--the hundred thousand men of vision--and advertise him to everybody.

Then other men, strategic men like W. J.--men who are dramatizing other strategic ideas will be selected to follow W. J. for the one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise to a hundred million people.

By writing a book and having my publisher distribute through the bookstores a book, I would reach, at best, only one hundred thousand people, and I am proposing to reach a hundred million people--to organize a hundred thousand salesmen scattered in five thousand cities and reach with my book, the hearts and minds, the daily eight-hour-a-day working lives of a hundred million people.

This is what the Look-Up Club is for. It is an organized flying wedge of one hundred thousand salesmen who have picked each other out for driving into the attention of a nation, national ideas.

The fate of America and the fate of the world at the present moment turns upon free advertising written by men who could not be hired to do it--in books distributed by a hundred thousand men who could not be hired to distribute them. We are setting to work a national committee of a hundred thousand men, to unearth in America, advertise, make the common property of everybody the men who dramatize, who make neighborly and matter-of-fact the beliefs a great people will perish if they do not believe.