Chapter XI: Book III: Technique for a Nation's Getting Its Way (2)

It is only for employers who want their own way a great deal--men who are in the habit of feeling masterful and self-masterful in getting their own way--who are shrewd enough, sincere enough to take a short-cut to it, and get it quick.

XII

THE FACTORY THAT LAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT

There is a man at the head of a factory not a thousand miles away, I wish thirty thousand banks and a hundred million people knew, as I know him--and as God and his workmen know him.

Some thirty years ago his father, who was the President of the firm, failed in health, lost his mind slowly and failed in business. The factory went into the hands of a receiver, the family moved from the big house to a little one--one in a row of a mile of little ones down a side street, and the sixteen year old son, who had expected to inherit the business stopped going to school, bought a tin dinner pail and walked back and forth with the tin dinner pail with the other boys in the street he lived in, and became a day laborer in the business he was brought up to own.

In not very many years he worked his way up past four hundred men, earned and took the right to be the President of the business he had expected to have presented to him.

Eight or ten years ago he began to have strikes. His strikes seemed uglier than other people's and singularly hopeless--always with something in them--a kind of secret obstinate something in them, he kept trying in vain to make out. One day when the worst strike of all was just on--or scheduled to come on in two days, as he looked up from his desk about five o'clock and saw four hundred muttering men filing out past his windows, he called in Jim--into his office.

Jim was a foreman--his most intimate friend as a boy when he was sixteen years old. He had lived in the house next door to Jim's and every morning for years they had got out of bed and walked sleepily with their tin dinner pails, to the mill together talking of the heavens and the earth and of what they were going to do when they were men.

The President had some rather wild and supercilious conversation with Jim, about the new strike on in two days and it ended in Jim's dismissing the President from the interview and slamming himself out of the door, only to open it again and stick his head in and say, "The trouble with you, Al, is you've forgotten you ever carried a dinner pail."

The President lay awake that night, came to the works the next morning, called the four hundred men together, asked the other officers to stay away, shut himself up in the room with the four hundred men and told them with a deep feeling, no man present could even mistake or ever forget, what Jim had said to him about himself--that he had forgotten how he felt when he carried a dinner pail, told them that he had lain awake all night thinking that Jim was right, that he wanted to know all the things he had forgotten, that they would be of more use to him and perhaps more use than anything in the world and that if they would be so good as to tell him what the things were that he had forgotten--so good as to get up in that room where they were all alone together and tell him what was the matter with him, he would never forget it as long as he lived. He wanted to see what he could do in the factory from now on to get back all that sixteen-year-old boy with the dinner pail knew, have the use of it in the factory every day from now on to earn and to keep the confidence the sixteen-year-old boy had, and run the factory with it.

Jim got up and made a few more remarks without any door-slamming. Fifteen or twenty more men followed with details.

This was the first meeting that pulled the factory together. In those that followed the President and the men together got at the facts together and worked out the spirit and principles and applied them to details. The meetings were held on company time--at first every few days, then every week, and now quite frequently when some new special application comes up. Nine out of ten of the difficulties disappeared when the new spirit of team work and mutual candor was established and everybody saw how it worked.

No one could conceive now of getting a strike in edgewise to the factory that listened to Jim.

I am not unaccustomed to going about factories with Presidents and it is often a rather stilted and lonely performance. But when I first went through this factory with the President that listened to Jim, stood by benches, talked with him and his men together, felt and saw the unconscious natural and human way conversations were conducted between them, saw ten dollars a day and a hundred dollars a day talking and laughing together and believing and working together, it did not leave very much doubt in my mind as to what the essential qualities are that business men to-day--employers and workingmen--are going to have and have to have to make them successful in producing goods, in leading their rivals in business and in getting their way with one another.

Naturally as a matter of convenience and a short cut for all of us, I would like to see Capital take what is supposed to be its initiative--be the side that leads off and makes the start in the self-discipline, self-confession and conscious control of its own class, which it thinks Labor ought to.

Whichever side in our present desperate crisis attains self-discipline and the full power in sight of the people not to be fooled about itself first, will win the leadership first, and win the loyalty and gratitude and partiality and enthusiasm of the American people for a hundred years.

* * * * *

The first thing for a man to do to get his way with another man--install a new brain track with him that they can use together, is to surprise the man by picking out for him and doing to him the one thing that he knows that you of all others would be the last man to do.

It looks as if the second thing to do is to surprise the man into doing something himself that he knew that he himself anyway of all people in the world, is the last man to do.

First you surprise him with you. Then with himself. After this of course with new people to do things, both on the premises, the habit soon sets in of starting with people all manner of things that everybody knew--who knew anything--knew the people could not do.

This is what the President of the factory not a thousand miles away accomplished all in twenty-four hours by not being fooled about himself. He took a short cut to getting what he wanted to get with his employees, which if ten thousand other employers could hear of and could take to-morrow would make several million American wage earners feel they were in a new world before night.

* * * * *

The thing that seemed to me the most significant and that I liked best about the President of the Company who listened to Jim, was the discovery I made in a few minutes, when I met him, that unlike Henry Ford, whom I met for the first time the same week, he was not a genius. He was a man with a hundred thousand duplicates in America.

Any one of a hundred thousand men we all know in this country would do what he did if he happened on it, if just the right Jim, just the right moment, stuck his head in the door.

Here's to Jim, of course.

But after all not so much credit to Jim. There are more of us probably who could have stuck our heads in the door.

The greater credit should go to the lying awake in the night, to the man who was practical enough to be inspired by a chance to quit and quit sharply in his own business, being fooled by himself and who got four hundred men to help.

Incidentally of course though he did not think of it, and they did not think of it, the four hundred men all in the same tight place he was in of course, of trying not to be fooled about themselves, asked him to help them.

Of course with both sides in a factory in this way pursuing the other side and asking it to help it not to be fooled, everything everybody says counts. There is less waste in truth in a factory. Truth that is asked for and thirsted for, is drunk up. The refreshment of it, the efficiency of it which the people get, goes on the job at once.

XIII

LISTENING TO JIM

(A Note on Collective Bargaining)

I would like to say to begin with that I believe in national collective bargaining as it is going to be in the near future--collective bargaining executed on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in such spirit as shall be determined by the facts--the practical engineering facts in human nature and the way human nature works.

I do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical about human nature so far. The moment that it is, the public and all manner of powerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish or unreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it.

A book entitled "A Few Constructive Reflections on Marriage" by a man who had had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces,--a man whose ex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. A symposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbands would really count more. Most candid people would admit this as a principle.

The same principle seems to hold good about what people think in National Associations of Employers and national associations of workingmen in labor unions.

Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very superficial decisions.

Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of being fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to be right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong about half the time.

The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Other people have it.

When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have some way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But when I am told in a deep bass national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937 is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed and to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At all events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied 2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off to multiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talk to me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word.

Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have been fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by it a good many years.

It is a rather natural un-self-conscious innocent thing to do I suppose, at first, but as the illusion is one which of course does not work or only works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capital or labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time,--especially in the difficulties we are all facing together in America now, to let ourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer.

The difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are all essentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt with by tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up and getting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin, dealing at particular times and in particular places with particular human beings. In the factory that listened to Jim, no order from a national Collective Bargaining Works could have begun to meet the situation as well as Jim did and the factory did.

If Jim had stuck his head in the door by orders from Indianapolis, or if the President of the Company had had a telegram giving him national instructions to lie awake that night, what would it have come to?

I believe in national or collective bargaining as a matter of course, in certain aspects of all difficulties between capital and labor. But the causes of most difficulties in industry are personal and have to be dealt with where the persons are. The more personal things to be done are, the more personally they have to be attended to.

If the women of America were to organize a Childbirth Labor Union, say next Christmas--and if from next Christmas on, all the personal relations of men and women and husbands and wives--the stipulations and conditions on which women would and would not bear children were regulated by national rules, by courtship rules and connubial orders from Indianapolis, Indiana, it would be about as superficial a way to determine the well-being of the sexes, as foolish and visionary a way for the female class to attempt to reform and regulate the class that has been fenced off by The Creator as the male class, as the present attempt of the labor class to sweep grandly over the spiritual and personal relation of individual employers and individual workmen and substitute for it collective bargaining from Indianapolis.

There is one thing about women. It would never have occurred to the women of this country as it has to the men to get up a contraption for doing a thing nationally that they could not even do at home.

For every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in the most intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of her life is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, the main and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, the one that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distance and from outside.

The whole idea, whether applied to biology or industry is a half dead, mechanical idea and only people who are tired or half alive, are long going to be willing to put up with it.

As the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair,--as the more individualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is what the relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers and employees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, the more individual and personal--that is to say, the more alive it is.

All live men with any gusto or headway in them, or passion for work, all employers and employees with any headway or passion for getting together in them are as impatient of having the way they get together their personal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be in the sexual relation and for the same reasons.

If it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in America get together in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in America get together in another, and pass resolutions of affection at each other, rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, how many men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for a father or mother, would go?

Only anaemic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either make or accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for the conditions of their lives together.

And in twenty years only anaemic employers and anaemic employees and workmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they do together, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eight hours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collective bargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does of it determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality, personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual daily contacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis of determining and of making effective what was right.

XIV

THE NEW COMPANY

I met a wagon coming down the street yesterday, saying across the front of it--half a street away, American Experience Co.

I wanted to get in.

Of course it turned out to be as it got nearer, The American Express Co., but I couldn't help thinking what it would mean if we had an equally well-organized arrangement for rapid transit of boxes--boxes people have got out of or got into, as we have for conveying other boxes people are mixed up with. (Fixes were called boxes when I was a boy. We used to speak of a man having a difficult experience, as being in a box.)

The Air Line League proposes to be The American Experience Company--a big national concern for shipping other people's experiences to people, so that unless they insist on it, they will have the good of them without having to take their time and everybody else's time around them to go through them all over again alone and just for themselves.

Of course there are people who tumtytum along without thinking, who will miss the principle and insist on having a nice private misery of doing it all over again in their own home factory for themselves. But there are many million people with sense in this country--people as good at making sense out of other people as they are in making money out of them, and the Air Line League proposes that to these people who have the sense, when they want them, when they order them, experiences shall be shipped. And when they get orders--they can ship theirs.

If some of the experience the Labor unions in England have had and got over having, could be shipped in the next few weeks, unloaded and taken over by the Americans, anybody can see with a look, ways in which the Air Line League or American Experience Company, if it were existing this minute, could bring home to people what they want to know about what works and what does not, what they long to have advertised to them--at once. Experiences--or date of experiences shipped from England would not only make a short-cut for America in increasing production in this country, lowering the cost of living, but would give America a chance in the same breath by the same act, to win a victory over herself and to turn the fate of a world.

What the Air Line League proposes to do is to act--particularly through the Look-Up Club--as the American Shipping Experience Company.

XV

THE FIFTY-CENT DOLLAR

This book is itself--so far as it goes, a dramatization of the idea of the Look-Up Club.

The thing the book--between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper--a kind of listening together of capital and labor, the Look-Up Club of The Air Line League is planned to do in the nation at large and locally in ten thousand cities--capital, labor and the consumer listening to each other--reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders, studying their personal interests together, working and acting out together the great daily common interest of all of us. The Look-Up Club, acting as it does for the three social groups that make up The Air Line League and having an umpire and not an empire function, operates primarily as a Publicity or Listening organization.

I might illustrate the need the Look-Up Club is planned to meet and how it would operate by suggesting what the Club might do with a particular idea--an idea on which people must really be got together in America before long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all.

Millions of American laborers go to bed every night and get up every morning saying:--

"The American employer is getting more money than he earns. We are going to have our turn now. Nobody can stop us."

Result: Under-production and the Fifty-Cent Dollar.

The cure for the American laboring man's under-production and working merely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that the American employer is working for something besides money--that he is earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job--the way he is saying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can be got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and the lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of the world all going out together.

I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports--men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like.

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 _Saturday 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. Nobody 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 _Saturday 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 assumption 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 astonishing 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, _Saturday Evening Post_ or _Collier's_, which would be read by four million people.

But the _Saturday 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 _Saturday 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.

XIX

THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP

We are drawing in the next few months in America the plans and specifications for a great nation and a new world.

We want a Committee of a Hundred Thousand.

We are proposing to gather a Look-Up Committee of a hundred thousand men of constructive imagination in business and other callings, in ten thousand cities, who will work out together and place before the people, plans and specifications of what this nation proposes to be like--a picture of what a hundred million people want.

The situation we are trying to meet is one of providing new brain tracks for a hundred million people. It will not seem to many people, too much to say that the quick way to do this, is to form a Club--a Committee in this country, of a hundred thousand men to ask to be told about these new brain tracks, who will then tell them to the hundred million.

The Look-Up Club is a Publicity and Educational Organization for the purpose of focusing and mobilizing the vision of the people acting as a clearing house of the vision of the people--gathering, cooerdinating, pooling and determining and distributing the main points in their order of what the American people believe.

The first subject we act in our Publicity Organization as our Listening Conspiracy--our Cooeperative news-service to our members--is the subject of how cooeperation between capital and labor works. Our first news-service will be planned to increase production, decrease the cost of living, stop strikes and lockouts, drive out civil war and substitute cooeperation as a means of getting things in American life.

Every man who is nominated to membership in the Look-Up Club naturally asks four questions.

1. How can I belong?

2. What does it cost?

3. What do I undertake to do for the Club?

4. What do I get--what does the Club do for me?

The idea is for each man who is deeply interested, to pick out, to nominate any fifty men--I put down for instance on my list Franklin P. Lane--among forty-nine others, ask Mr. Lane who the men are he knows in this nation, men he has come on in his business in the course of twenty years, who are characterized either by having creative imagination themselves or by marked power to cooeperate with men who have it.

After Mr. Lane had given me his fifty, I would ask each of Mr. Lane's fifty for their fifty and each in turn for their fifty until we had covered the country and had picked out and introduced to each other from Maine to California the men of creative imagination in America.

Other members will of course be nominated by members of the Air Line League in their respective communities and everybody who is invited to nominate for the Look-Up section of the Air Line League will be asked to nominate in three lists--(1) those he thinks of as representing invention in the nation at large, (2) those he knows or deals with in his own business or line of activity--all over the country, who have creative imagination or power of discovery and planning ideas, and (3) those he knows in his own home-community that he and his neighbors would like to see in the Look-Up Club, on the nation's honor roll of men of vision in the nation representing his own community.

The cost is to be determined by the Club, but is planned as a small nominal sum--nominal dues for expense of correspondence and conducting the activities of the Club.

What a man gets by joining the Club is the association with two or three thousand members from all over the land at any given time who will be in the Club headquarters in a skyscraper hotel of its own, when he comes to New York and the advantage of common action and common looking at the same things at the same time with the other members of the Club, through the activities of the Club by mail.

The Look-Up Club Bulletins, pamphlets and little books containing news of critical importance and timeliness to all members--news not generally known or not available in the same concentrated form in the daily press, will be sent to all members for their own use and for distribution to others at critical times and places and with strategic persons--labor unions and employers and public men.

What the Look-Up Club does for a man is to give him the benefit of a friendly candid national conspiracy between a hundred thousand men, to get the news and to pass on the news that counts and to do it all at the same time instead of in scattered and meaningless dabs.

If the thing each man of a hundred thousand sees once a year in a little lonely dab of vision all by himself could be seen by all of us by agreement the same week in the year, we will do the thing we see.

Anything we see will have to happen. The only reason the thing we see does not happen now, is that we make no arrangements to see it together.

Seen together, news that looks like a rainbow acts like a pile driver.

A man becomes a hundred thousand times himself. In the Look-Up Club what a man gets for his own use, is hundred thousand man-power news.

What does a man when he joins the Look-Up Club, undertake to do?

Send in news when he knows some, and use news when he gets it.

I do not undertake to say just what each member of the Look-Up Club will undertake to do with news when he receives it.

When a man receives live news which immediately concerns him and his nation in the same breath, the way he feels about it and acts about it--about real news he applies to himself and to his work and the people around him, will seem to him to come, not under the head of duties to the Club, but under the head of the things the Club will tempt him to do and that he cannot be kept from doing.

If a hundred thousand picked men in this country in all walks of life all get the same news the same week, and then use the news the week they get it, and put it where other people will use it, we will all know and everybody else will know what the Look-Up Club is for.

We will be carrying out in the Look-Up Club what might be called a selective draft of vision.

We will mobilize and bring to action the vision and the will of the people.

XX

PROPAGANDY PEOPLE

I am weary and sad about the word propaganda. I am weary of being propaganded, or rather of being propaganded at and as regards propagandafying others myself, or propagandaizing them, whatever it is publicists and men who are interested in public ideas suppose they do, I am sad at heart. There is a prayer some one prayed once one tired New Year's Eve, which appeals to me.

"Forgive me my Christmases as I forgive them that have Christmased against me."

I could pray the same model outline for a prayer. But for Christmasing, substitute propagandy-izing.

The word somehow itself in its own unconscious beauty dramatizes the way I feel about it. I have written many hundred pages of what I believe about reformers--about people who are trying to get other people's attention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what I believe now is that most people if they would stop trying to get other people's attention and try to get their own, would do more good.

The advertising in which I believe is the advertising that is asked for. I believe in getting a few million people to ask to be advertised to and to give particulars.

More good would be done this way than by turning the whole advertising idea around and working it wrong end to as we do now.

For instance at this present moment I want to know everything about myself and against myself, my enemies know. I do not see why I should put up with my enemies being the ones of all others to know things against me that if I knew would be the making of me. What I want to do is to find a way--make arrangements if I can, to get them to tell me--tell me politely--if they can, but tell me.

If every person, or party, or group in America to-day would do this, Capital, Labor, bankers, socialists, Republicans and Democrats, America would quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a great one. People who have organized to be advertised to will read advertising more poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as I would) more desperately. They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read where now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertising he has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or no the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true.

It is a platitude.

A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a great truth.

What the Air Line League is for, one of the things it is for, is to act on this truth.

Through the three branches, the Look-Up Club, the Try-Out Club and the Put-Through Clan, the Air Line League is an organization not for asserting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally sucking advertising. With its thirty million people joining it, asking to be advertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the National Vacuum Cleaner for Truth.

XXI

THE SKILLED CONSUMERS OF PUBLICITY

The trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled. They are not organized to get what they want.

We should organize the Consumers of Publicity, make it possible for the people of America as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what they want.

We should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizing Skilled Readers' Labor Saving Unions.

The difficulties of attaining a power of national listening together--through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so great that they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our having an organization the members of which join it as they will join the Air Line League for the express purpose not of advertising--but of being advertised to.

The most fundamental activity of the Air Line League in the present crisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising of the ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who have certain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to a specific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as I would have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have these same men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them.

It would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of an organization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to.

I say again--if I may be forgiven for the still small voice of platitude--a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it--the most effective advertising is advertising that is asked for.