The Ghost in the White House Part 8

People are so much more apt to bear in mind in proportion, the power of an organization to be ugly, than they are its power not to need to be ugly--to get what it wants with people by combining with them instead of fighting them, that perhaps it might be well to dwell a moment on the fact that the power of the consumers of the country as organized in the Air Line League, to make it uncomfortable for predatory labor or predatory capital, will never be abused.

If what an organization is for, is to put the soul and body of a people together it is compelled as a matter of course, to get its own way with the same quietness, dignity and power it is telling other people to. The first business of the Air Line League is going to be, to be believed in by everybody. The way to be believed in by everybody is for the League to do itself the thing that it talks about doing. If in this way the League soon gets itself believed in by everybody, the first thing people will notice about the Air Line League will soon be that it is an organization that can lick anybody in sight with its little finger. The next thing people will notice is that it never gets so low that it has to do it.

The power of labor unions and employers' a.s.sociations has frequently been abused because they have many of them organized their power for the express purpose of abusing it.

It is highly unlikely that people will need to be afraid of the power of the Air Line League. An organization which exists for the express purpose of driving out of business people who get what they want by holdups, the entire activities of which are devoted to proving to people how much more holding out a hand gets for people in business than sticking out a fist, soon gets its fist trusted.

If the Air Line League abuses its power it will commit suicide so fast that people will feel suddenly safe.

If I were writing a platform for the Air Line League, it might be put perhaps for all practical purposes in one sentence.

Subject--War.

Object--Stopping it.

Predicate--What we believe about war.

Verb--What we propose to do about what we believe about war.

Adverb--How we propose to do it.

Period--Peace.

The main trouble with the sentence forty nations are trying to stutter out now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column of belief.

The spinal column of belief in the Air Line League--the gist of our platform--is this one sentence:

PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET OTHER'S ATTENTION.

Everything we believe and propose to do follows from this.

The way to stop war is to advertise, to provide and set up in full sight and in working order before people who are trying to get what they want by war, a subst.i.tute for war which gets what they want for them quicker and better.

The way to keep people who fight from fighting is to stand over them, advertise to them and dramatize to them how much more people can get by listening to each other. Then compel them to listen.

We do not believe in fighting on the one hand nor in an anaemic and temporary thing like arbitration on the other. All that men really do in arbitration is to hire their listening done for them by other people.

Listening which men were created to do themselves, which is done for them by others, only lasts a minute.

The three plain spiritual brutal facts that capital and labor have to reckon with and conform to in dealing with human nature to-day are these:

Disputes can not be fought out--not even by the people themselves.

Disputes can not be arbitrated out by other people for them.

All other people are for in a fight is to compel the fighters to listen to each other.

Doing anything less than compelling the fighters to listen to each other, is visionary, cowardly, temporary and impracticable.

The moment people stop fighting, begin listening to each other and begin feeling listened to, n.o.body can hire them to organize to fight each other. They organize to listen to each other.

What the Air Line League is for in every nation, in every city, town and village where a branch is set up, is to organize people to listen to each other.

I do not think any one is going to feel obliged to feel afraid of the power of a League, that puts daily before its own face, before everybody's face--before every letter it writes, and before everything it does, across its letter-head, this chapter in nine words.

PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET EACH OTHER'S ATTENTION.

XVIII

HOW THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE WILL WORK

Nine people out of ten who do wrong in business, do it because they feel that if they do not do the wrong to some one else, some one else will do the wrong to them. In the last a.n.a.lysis, some way of bringing about conscription for universal service in business is the only way in which we can be a.s.sured that the criminals and exploiters in any particular line of industry will not, at least temporarily, control and ruin the business. What the Air Line League would do practically would be to organize American business-men into a kind of "I Won't If You Won't"

Club. A very large majority of men daily see that certain things ought not to be done. It is not right-mindedness in people that is needed so much as the organization of the right-mindedness so that those who are wrong can be crowded out. My idea of the general policy of the Air Line League would be to bring the public to cooperate with the best men in each industry in such a way as to drive the worst ones out. Probably from a publicity point of view the best way to do would be for the League to pick out the nine best factories in the country in which the laborers have a working understanding and a practical listening arrangement with their employers, and help the laborers in these nine factories advertise to other laborers in the country, at specific times and places, and to capital throughout the country, how they like it. One factory in ten, if necessary, could be selected for national discipline. A notorious factory could be picked out in which the laborers had the worst listening arrangement, and in which both the employers and employees were imposing upon each other to their own detriment and the detriment of their customers the most; and could be publicly disciplined by the National League acting through its local clubs everywhere. Cooperating with nine factories and disciplining one would be my idea of the best way to get results. All that would need to be done would be to make a list of all the industries in the country and keep the buyers of the country informed about them through the local Clubs.

Industrial democracy is coming in this country one industry at a time.

Each industry is going to work out its own salvation by emanc.i.p.ating and freeing the hands of the men who can run it best in the interests of the public--that is, run it with the lowest prices to the public, the highest prices to the wage earners, and a surplus for improvements, inventions and experiments in rendering its product of more service to all.

I am not in favor of having capitalists try to convince labor as a cla.s.s, nor having labor try to convince capital as a cla.s.s. The skilled labor which has been convinced by capital should convince the others through the services of twenty thousand local Clubs, and skilled capital which has succeeded in being believed in by its labor will do the same in convincing other capital.

XIX

MAKING A RIGHT START

It will be seen that the idea I have in mind might be imagined as a kind of civic federation club, a super-consumers' league, and a super-advertising club rolled into one. Rolling these three ideas into one is a temperament, and the men who are full of the vision of what can be done with them rolled into one, and of what is the matter with them if they are not rolled into one, must be the controlling powers in the new organization. The Civic Federation has been a safe plodding vague inst.i.tution because it has not had a vigorous vision of itself, and has not been conducted by men who have a personal genius for conceiving and carrying out cooperation between capital and labor. It has been weak, theoretical, and full of generalization because it has not had the driving force that such a man as Schwab--some Schwab in publicity instead of steel--could have given it.

The Consumers' League has been a useful, suggestive inst.i.tution, and has done work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or less nagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision or sense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked the advertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness that puts things through.

The new organizations--as a super-consumers' league, a super-advertising club--will converge these two ideas into a huge momentum, into a national organized drive or vision of making men see together and act together, until we work out social democracy in every man's business, in every man's store, and the daily work of every man's life. Programs which have merely been yearned at before, which have been sleazily groped at and generalized over and guessed at before, will be gathered up, articulated, melted into a huge common national action by men who have the consuming pa.s.sion and genius for touching the imaginations of others. The selection and articulation of these men in all communities is all that is necessary. Everything is waiting and ready. First we will get the men together who have the fire. Then we will put fire under the boilers of the nation and turn the drive-wheels of a world.

XX

UP TO THE PEOPLE

There are several reasons which, as it seems to me, show that my plan is not visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill in the way I have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now most needs to be done for high production and team-work in the industries of the country.