Crowds Part 60

The American workman, as things are organized now, finds himself confronted with two main problems. One is himself. How can he get himself to work hard enough to make his food and clothes cheap? The other is his employer.

What will the American workman do to express his American temperament through his labour union to his employer? The American workmen will go to their employers and say: "Instead of doing six hours' work in nine hours, we will do nine hours' work in nine hours." The millers, for instance, will say to the flour mill owners: "We will do a third more work for you, make you a third more profit on our labour if you will divide your third more profit like this:

"First, by bringing down the price of flour to everybody;

"Second, by bringing up our wages. Third, by taking more money yourselves."

American labouring men who did this would be acting like Americans. It is the American temperament.

They will insist on it: The labour men will continue to say to their employers, "We will divide the proceeds of our extra work into three sums of money--ours, yours, and everybody's." In return we will soon find the employers saying the same thing to the labour men. Employers would like to arrange to be good. If they can get men who earn more, they want to pay them more.

The labourers would like to be good, _i.e._, work more for employers who want to pay them more.

But being good has to be arranged for.

Being good is a matter of mutual understanding, a matter of organization, a matter of b.u.t.ting our American temperament into our industrial machines.

All that is the matter with these industrial machines is that they are not like us.

Our machines are acting just now for all the world as if they were the Americans and as if we were the machines.

Are we for the machines, or are the machines for us?

All that the American labourers and that the American capitalists have to do is to show what they are really like, organize their news about themselves so that they get it through to one another, and our present great daily occupation in America (which each man calls his "business") all the workmen going down to the mills and all the employers going down to their offices, and then for six, eight, nine hours a day being chewed on by machines, will cease.

We make our industrial machines. We are Americans. Our machines must have our American temperament.

If an American employer were to insist on b.u.t.ting his American temperament into his industrial machine, what would his industrial machine, when it is well at work at last, show an American employer's temperament to be like?

The first thing that would show in his machine, I think, would be its courage, its acting with boldness and initiative, originality and freedom, without being cluttered up by precedents or running and asking Mama, its clear-headedness in what it wants, its short-cut in getting to it, and above all a kind of ruthless faith in human nature, in the American people, in its goods and in itself.

The typical American business man of the highest cla.s.s--the man who is expressing his American temperament best in his business--is the one who is expressing in it the most courage for himself and for others and for his government. He has big beliefs every few minutes a day, and he acts on them with nonchalance.

If he is running a trust--our most characteristic, recklessly difficult American invention for a man to show through, and if he tries to get his American temperament to show through in it, tries to make his trust like a vast portrait, like a kind of countenance on a country, of what a big American business is like, what will he do?

He will take a little axiom like this and act as if it were so.

_If in any given case the producers by collusion and combination can be efficient in lowering wages to employees and raising prices and cheating the public, this same combination or collusion would be efficient in raising the wages of employees, lowering prices and serving the public._

He will then, being an American, turn to his government and say "I am a certain sort of man. If I am allowed to be an exception and to combine in this matter, I can prove that I can raise wages, lower prices for a whole nation in these things that I make. I am a certain sort of man. Do you think I am, or do you think that I am not? I want to know."

The government looks noncommittally at him. It says it cannot discriminate.

He says nothing for a time, but he thinks in his heart that it is incompetent and cowardly to run a great government of a great nation as a vast national sweep or flourish of getting out of brains and of evading vision. It seems to him lazy and effeminate in a government to treat all combinations and all monopolies alike. He says: "Look me in the eyes! I demand of you as a citizen of this country the right to be looked by my government in the eyes. What sort of man am I? Here are all my doors open. My safes are your safes and my books are your books. Am I or am I not a man who can conduct his business as a great profession, one of the dignities and energies and joys of a great people?

"What am I like inside? Is what I am like inside--my having a small size or a big size of motive, my having a right kind or a wrong kind of ability of no consequence to this government? Does the government of this country really mean that the most important things a country like this can produce, the daily, ruling motives of the men who are living in it, have no weight with the government? Am I to understand that the government does not propose to avail itself of new sizes and new kinds of men and new sizes and new kinds of abilities in men? What I am trying to do in my product is to lower the prices and raise the wages for a nation. Will you let me do it? Will you watch me while I do it?"

This will be the American trust of to-morrow. The average trust of this country has not yet found itself, but the moral and spiritual history, the religious message to a government of The Trust That Has Found Itself will be something like this.

Perhaps when we have a trust that has found itself, we will have a government that has dared to find itself, that has the courage to use its insight, its sense of difference between men, as it means of getting what it wants for the people.

As it is now, the government has not found itself and it falls back on complex rules or machines for getting out of seeing through people.

Where courage is required, it proceeds as it proceeds with automobile speeding laws. Everybody knows that one man driving his car three miles an hour may be more dangerous than another kind of man who is driving his car thirty.

When our government begins to be a government, begins to express the American temperament, it will be a government that will devote its energy, its men, and its money to being expert in divining, and using differences between men. It will govern as any father, teacher, or competent business man does by treating some people in one way and others in another, by giving graded speed licenses in business, to labour unions, trusts, and business men.

The government will be able to do this by demanding, acquiring, and employing as the servants of the people, men who are experts in human nature, masters in not treating men alike--Crowbars, lemonade-straws, chisels, and marshmallows, powerhouses and aeolian harps by the people, for the people, and of the people, will be rated for what they are and will be used for what they are for.

This will be democracy. It will be the American temperament in government.

Is President Wilson or is he not going to fall back into a mere lawyer Moseslike way of getting people to be good, or is he going to be a man like David, half poet, half soldier, who got his way with the nation half by appreciating the men in it and being a fellow human being with them, and half by fighting them when they would not let him be a fellow human being with them, and would not let him appreciate them?

Almost any nation or government can get some kind of Moses to-day but the men that America is producing would not particularly notice a Moses probably now. A Moses might do for a Rockefeller, but he could not really do anything with a man like Theodore N. Vail who has the telephones and telegraphs of a country talking and ticking to us all, all night, all day, what kind of a man he is.

A big affirmative, inspirational man like David or even Napoleon who inspires people with one breath and fights hard with the next, a man who swings his hat for the world, a man who goes on ahead and says "Come!"

is the only man who can be practical in America to-day in helping real live American men like McAdoo, like Edison and Acheson,--men who can express a people in a business--to express them.

The people have spoken. A man in the White House who cannot say "Come"

goes.

We want a poet in the White House. If we can not have a poet for the White House soon, we want a poet who will make us a poet for the White House.

I do not believe it is too much to expect a President to be a poet. We have had a poet for President once in one supreme crisis of this nation and the crisis that is coming now is so much deeper, so much more human and world-wide than Lincoln's was that it would almost seem as if a place like the White House (where one's poetry could really work) would make a poet out of anybody.

A President who has not a kind of plain, still, homely poetry in him, a belief about people that sings, in the present appalling crisis of the world is impracticable or visionary.

So we do not say, "Have we a President that can get our Bells, Edisons, McAdoos, Achesons to be good by toeing a line?"

We say, "Have we a President who can swing into step, who can join in the singing, who can catch up?"

Tunnel McAdoo, when he lifted up his will against the sea and against the seers of Wall Street, was singing. When he conceived those steel cars, those roaring yellow streaks of light ringing through rocks beneath the river, streets of people flas.h.i.+ng through under the slime and under the fish and under the s.h.i.+ps and under the wide suns.h.i.+ne on the water, he was singing! He raised millions of dollars singing.

Of course he sang the way Americans usually sing, and had to do as well as he could in talking to bankers and investors not to look as if he were singing, but there it all was singing inside him, the seven years of digging, the seven years of dull thundering on rocks under the city, and at last the happy steel cars all green and gold, the streams of people all yellow light hissing and pouring through--those vast pipes for people beneath the sea!

If we have a President, let him sing like McAdoo, or like Luther Burbank, or like Theodore N. Vail, or like Colonel Goethals, picking up a little isthmus like Panama, a string between two continents, playing on it as if it were a harp; or like Edward Ripley playing with the Santa Fe Railroad for all the world like Homer with a lute, all his seven thousand men, all his workmen, all their wives and their children, all the cities along the line striking up and joining in the chorus or like Carborundum Acheson, backed up by his little Niagara Falls oiling the wheels of a world, weaving diamonds into steel, hardening the bones of the earth into skysc.r.a.pers, into railroads, into the mighty thighs of flying locomotives....

Any man who is seen acting in this world with a thing, as if he believed in the thing, as if he believed in himself and believed in other people, is singing.

Moses striking out with a rod, as we are told, a path along the sea for his people may have done a more showy thing from a religious point of view, hitting the water on top so, making a great splash with an empty place in it for people to march through, but he was not essentially more religious than McAdoo, with all those modest but mighty columns of figures piling up behind him, with all those splendid, dumb, still glowing engineers behind him, lifting up his will against cities, lifting up his will against herds of politicians, haughty newspapers, against the flocks of silly complacent old ferry-boats waddling in the bay, against the wind and the rain and the cold on the water, and all the banks of Wall Street....

When we want to tell News to our President about ourselves in America, we point to William G. McAdoo.