A book can be more public too--can be attended by more people than a convention. Only a few thousand people can get into a convention. A hundred million can get into a book. All in the same two hours, by twenty million lamps thousands of miles apart, the people can crowd into a book.
So in this book, as I have said, I am merely acting as the secretary or employee of the hundred million people. I am writing a book a hundred million people would write if they could, expressing for them the kind of President for the next four years of our nation--the most colossal four years of the world, the people have ordered in their hearts.
We are weary of politicians' politicians. We want ours. Politicians may not be so bad but during the war they do not seem to us to have done as well as most people. In the dead-earnest of the war, with our Liberty Loan and Red Cross and Council of Defense, and our dollar a year men we have half taken over the government ourselves and we feel no longer awed by the regular political practitioners or government tinkerers. They are not all alike, of course, but we have turned our national glass on them and have come to see through them--at least the worst ones and many thousands of them--all these busy little worms of public diplomacy building their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelief far far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all by themselves.
Unless the more common run of our typical politicians see through themselves before the conventions come, and see that the people see through them, and see it quick, their days are numbered.
Instead of patronizing us and whispering to one another behind their hands about us, their time has come now--in picking out the next President to begin gazing up to the countenance of the people, to begin listening to the people's prayer to God.
The people are a new people since the war. Out of the crash of empires, out of threats in every man's door-yard the people are praying to God.
And they are voting to God, too.
The sooner the two great political parties reckon with this, the sooner they push around behind themselves out of sight all the funny little would-be Presidents, and all the little shan't-be politicians running around like ants under the high heaven of the faith of a great people picking up tidbits they dare to believe--and put forward instead a live believing hot and cold human being, a man who will give up being President for what he believes, the sooner they will find themselves with a President on their hands that can be elected. Whichever party it is that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the one that will be underwritten by the people.
The people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward the great coming political conventions and the questions and the men that will come up in them. We are on the whole, in spite of the low estimate the majority of politicians have of us, straight-minded and free-hearted people, shrewd, masterful and devout, praying with one hand and keeping from being fooled with the other and we want our public men to have courage and vision for themselves and for us. We give notice that thousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and fuddly politicians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by the people, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world. This nation is facing the most colossal, most serious and godlike moment any nation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the presence of forty nations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own grim appalling hope, to be trifled with.
So far as any one can see with the naked eye the quickest and surest way to get past the politicians, to remind the politicians of the real spirit of the people, to loom up the face of the people before their eyes and make them suddenly take the people more seriously than they take themselves, is with a book. In a book a President can be nominated by acclamation--by a kind of silent acclamation. In a book, without giving any name or pointing anybody out at least the soul of a President can be ordered by a people.
We will publish upon the housetops the hopes and the prayers and the wills of the people.
Then let the conventions feel the housetops looking down on them when they meet.
In a book published in a hundred newspapers one week, wedged into covers across a nation another, the people with one single national stroke can put what they want before the country--a hundred million people in a book can rise to make a motion.
We will not wait to be cornered by our politicians into a convention to which we cannot go. We will not wait to be told three months too late, to pick out--out of two men we did not want, the man we will have to take. The short-cut way for us as the people of this country to take the initiative with our politicians and to make the politicians toe our line, instead of toeing theirs, is for the people to blurt out the truth, write a book, get in early beforehand their quiet word with both great parties and tell them whatever his name is, whatever his party is, the kind of President they want.
So here it is, such as it is, the book, a little politically innocent-looking thing perhaps, just engaged in being like folks instead of like politicians, just engaged in being human--in letting a nation speak and act as a human being speaks and acts, in a great simple sublime human crisis in which with forty nations looking on, we are making democracy work--making a loophole for the fate of the world.
What kind of a President, with what kind of a personality or temperament do the people feel would be the best kind of a President to pull them together, to help the people do what the people have to do?
I have wanted to bring forward a way in which the things the new President will expect the people to do, can be done by the people.
What the people want done, especially with regard to the Red Flag, predatory capital, predatory labor, and the fifty-cent dollar cannot be done by the President for them, and they are not going to do it themselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standing around three thousand miles apart or in any other way than by voluntarily agreeing to get together and do it together.
I have come to have the feeling--especially in regard to political conventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestions just now as to how a hundred million people can strike--make themselves more substantial, more important in this country, so that we shall really have in this country in time a hundred million people who, taken as a whole, feel important in it--like a Senator for instance--like Senator Lodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like Trusts that won't trust, and Congressmen that won't play and workmen that won't work--I am thinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million people can come to feel as if it made a very substantial difference to somebody what they wanted and what they thought--ways in which the hundred million people shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like a Profiteer, or like a noble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor union,--get what they want.
The Lonesomest Job on Earth
What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night?
The Ghost in the White House.
The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people.
The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization.
What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never Was, and Who Never Is--a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, Terrible Angel called the People.
Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times.
That is all there is to Her.
It is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the Aurora Borealis to 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up to this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. It does not give any real satisfaction to anybody--either to the hundred million people or to the President.
It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a President--to be a Ghost.
It is not efficient.
Naturally--much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or hope to get (however hard he tries) is the Ghost of a President.
The President and the Ghost
There are a number of things about going into the White House the next four years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, that are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest job on earth.
The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position as the Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is expected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassing idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would ever put up with, from any other employer in the world.
Absent-mindedness.
Non-committalness.
Halfness, or double personality.
Bodilessness.
Big, impressive-looking Fool Moments.
Cumulus clouds of Slow Sure Conceit with Sudden Flops of Humility.
General Irresponsibleness.
And perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the Employer--like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made a fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry.
