The Ghost in the White House Part 27

III

THE CALL OF A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE

The nearest the American people have come to getting their way in other nations--to having a vision and a body with which to do it and deserve to do it--is in the Red Cross, and in our Food Distribution. In both of these organizations we succeeded in getting the attention of others to what we could do for them--and with them--by getting our own attention first and by making our own sacrifice at home first.

We were allowed to administer food abroad because we had shown self-control and sacrifice about food at home and were given headway in emergency and rescue abroad because millions of people here had a vision for others and gave a body to their vision at home.

I have been filled with sorrow over the way millions of men and women in the American Red Cross, their daily lives geared to a great issue, living every day with a national international vision suffusing their minds and hearts and touching everything they said and did, suddenly disappeared as the people that they really were and that they seemed to be, from sight.

I have never understood it, how twenty million men and women out of that one common colossal daily vision of a world, almost in a day, almost in an hour, across a continent as on some great national spring, snapped back into the little life.

I do not know as I would have minded them--three thousand miles of them going back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but I have wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps to move the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they had to go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, and driving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live them daily together.

The necessity of the every-day individual lives we all are interested in living--the necessity of the actual personal things we all are daily trying to do, is a necessity so much more splendid and tragic, so much more vivid, personal and immediate, so much more adapted to a high and exhilarating motive and to a n.o.ble common desire than the rather rudimentary showy stupid necessity the Germans thrust upon us could ever dream of being, that it is hard to understand the way in which the leaders of the Red Cross in the supreme critical moment when the mere war with Germany was being stupendously precipitated into forty wars of forty nations with themselves, at the very moment when with one touch of a b.u.t.ton the new vision of the people could have been turned on instead of the old one and the hundred million people stood there asking them, snapped off the light, dismissed the hundred million people--clapped them back into their ten thousand cities into the common life.

The magnificent self discovery, the colossal single-heartedness lighting up the faces of the people whiffed out by one breath of armistice! Who would have believed it or who can forgive it?... The Red Cross--the redeemer, the big brother of nations, holding steady the nerves of a whole world--not meeting the emergency of a whole world--the whole world yesterday tightened up into war, and to-day falling apart into colossal complicated, innumerable, hemming and hawing, stuttering Peace!

What people used to think wealth was, what they used to think might was, the power of attracting the whole attention of millions of people is.

In the Red Cross a hundred million people--American people, had looked at the same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the same thing at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the same thing in a thousand ways with their hands. In the Red Cross the feet of a hundred million people became as the feet of one man.

The Red Cross had hunted out, acc.u.mulated, mounted up and focused the attention of forty nations. It had in its hands the trigger of a ninety mile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day the armistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking up in its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, a pocket pistol instead. Because the war suddenly was everywhere instead of the north of France, it reduced to a peace basis. At the very moment when it had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment when it had people all over the world all listening to it and believing in it, at the very moment when the forty nations could have been turned on to any problem with it, it let the forty nations go.

If I could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as one man--a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with his opera gla.s.s, if I were sitting next to him I would suggest his turning the screw to the right slowly. I would say, "Do you see better or worse as you turn it to the right?" If I found he saw worse I would tell him to turn it to the left and then I would leave him to try between the two until he found it.

The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. It had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national blank look.

Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out.

It was a Focus--a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had pa.s.sed by, keeping the focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking for it from us, every morning when they get up--asking for it as one man.

To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever known--this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on the screw of our national opera gla.s.s, with its chance to keep a hundred million people from having a blank look, let its chance go.

The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where it stopped, the Red Cross vision--the Red Cross spirit.

The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented as a future for the Red Cross.

The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body for the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division for the Red Cross.

But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for my purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people--the rank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves the soul of it and who would make the soul of anything--particularly the men and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to cool a little--had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set before the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated by the leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us--would have kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active labor in the Red Cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men and women for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the mere stress of merely beating Germans, there had been one before.

IV

THE CALL OF A WORLD

The difference between a first cla.s.s nation and a second cla.s.s nation might be ill.u.s.trated by the history of almost any live man in any live profession.

Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they began filling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them so that they have no teeth to fill.

Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctor used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see a doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands, and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. The next stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers--to keep them from walking too soon.

The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill the germs that decay the teeth.

The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day after the armistice to go back to war germs.

The Red Cross with its branches in every town and every nation in the world would announce that from that day on, through a vast new division, it would occupy itself with germs--with the germs of six inch guns, with the germs of submarines. It would deal with the embryology of war.

The germs of war between nations, breed in wars between cla.s.ses, and the germs of cla.s.s war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs of war between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace with himself.

It is when I am having a hard time getting on with Stanley Lee that I am likely to have a row with Ivy Lee. It is a colossal understatement to say that charity begins at home. Everything does. If a man understands himself he can understand anybody. If he gets on with himself the world will fall into his hands.

The great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop war between capital and labor. This is a feat of personality and of engineering in human nature. It is a home-job, and when we have done it at home we can sow all nations with it. If I wanted to stop a war between Ivy Lee and me I would have to pick out a series of things to do to Ivy Lee and to say to him which he would like to have me do and say to him.

Then I would pick out in myself things that Ivy Lee does not like to have me do to him and say to him, and which possibly when I study on them I will not want to do.

Up to Ivy to do the same to me.

This is a science. It is not merely a vision or a religion. Removing the cause of fighting may be a less exact science of mutual study and self-study, but it is approximately exact. It is also a fascinating and contagious science. We master the embryology of war between persons--the embryology of war between cla.s.ses, and then between nations. The principles which we demonstrate and set up working samples of in one of these problems will prove to be the principles of the others.

If people do not believe in germs enough and are more afraid of fire, I would change the figure.

We are proposing to follow up at once, the Red Cross, which was run as a fire engine to put or help put out fires between nations, with the Air Line League which is to be run as a machine for not letting fires between nations get started.

Edward A. Filene of Boston in trying to have a successful department store found the women behind his counters got very tired standing in the street cars night and morning on the way home and took up with a will getting new rapid transit for Boston. He found he could not get rapid transit for Boston without helping to get a new government and that he could not get a new government without helping to get a new Boston.

He then found he could not help get a new Boston without getting new trade and industrial conditions in Boston and that he could not help get new ideals working in trade and industry in Boston without helping in the ideals of a nation. He then found he could not get a new nation without trying to help make several new nations. Then came the International Chamber of Commerce.

Something like this seems to happen to nearly every man I know who really accomplishes anything.

Or any nation.

Frederick Van Eeden of Holland began life as a painter with marked success but being a lively and interested man he could not help wondering why people were not getting out of paintings in Holland--his own and other people's, what they ought to and what they used to, and became a critic. He found people did not respond to his ideas of how they ought to enjoy things and then won distinction as a poet, but why did not more people get more out of the best poetry? He then wrote one or two novels of high quality which Holland was proud of and which were read in several languages, but why did not the people read novels of a high character as much as they did the poorer ones?

He decided that it was because people were physically underorganized and not whole in body and mind--like the Greeks, and became a physician.

He thought he was being thorough when he became a physician but soon found that he was not getting down to the causes after all, of people's not having whole bodies and fine senses capable of appreciating the finer things and soon came to the conclusion that for the most part what was the matter with their bodies was due to what was wrong in their habits of thought and in their minds, and became an alienist and founded the first psycho-therapeutic hospital in Holland.

He then found that in what was the matter with people's minds, he was still superficial and that people's minds were wrong because of the social and industrial conditions, ideals and inst.i.tutions under which they were conceived and born, and had to live.

He then devoted himself to being a publicist and sociologist, had charge of bread for the poor during the great bread riots in Amsterdam and is now engaged in grappling nationally and internationally with industrial and civil war as the cause of all failures of men and nations to express and fulfill their real selves in the world.

Any nation that wants to be a great nation and to fulfill and express itself and be a first cla.s.s nation will sooner or later find that it has to go on from one individual personal interest to another until it finds it is doing practically what Frederick Van Eeden did.