Chapter VII: Book I: What the People Expect of the People (2)

The people to get the attention of employers are the employers of the employers.

Every civil war we are having in this country can be settled and the attention of the fighters on both sides can be got, and the country can work as one man in making democracy safe for the world, the moment the employers of the employers whisper.

* * * * *

The way I would like to end this chapter--with the blanks filled in, of course, would be this.

Anybody who wants to be a part of this whisper, who knows of any industry he would like to see a whisper from the people tried in, or who wishes as an Associate Member to join the Air Line League--a League for the direct action of the people in what concerns them all, is invited to send five dollars as membership fee and his name and address, to ----, Treasurer National Office of The Air Line League, Number ---- Street, New York.

But the chapter cannot end in this way.

This is merely the pattern of the way I would like to have it end later, and while I have put the name--The Air Line League--down and am going to use it for the convenience of this book, I only do so, leaving it open to the people who have the vision of The League and who put the vision into action, to change the name if they want to.

XI

THE RIGHT TO WHISPER TOGETHER

Every man like all Gaul is divided into three parts. He is an employee of somebody, an employer of somebody, and a consumer.

The natural employer left to himself is apt to suppose, if he is making shoes, that his consumers ought to pay more for shoes, and that his employees ought to be paid less. As regards hats, and umbrellas, and overcoats, and underwear, the same man is a rather noble impartial person towards employers and employees. He wants them to listen to each other and lower the cost of living by not having strikes and lockouts, and by not fighting each other ten hours a day.

In 999 out of 1000 labor quarrels a consumer is naturally a fair-minded person and the best-located person to control and determine how any particular business shall be run.

The League proposed is planned to operate in its national and local functions as a national Consumers' Club, with working branches in every town which shall be engaged in doing specific things every day toward making the employers and employees in that town listen to each other in the interests of the consumer public.

It is always to the interests of the consumer-public to see to it that people who have particular interests in a business should be compelled to listen to the others' interests.

Consumers naturally prefer experts to run things for them, but if they do not run them for them, they are the natural people to make them do it.

In the last resort the right to control is with the consumers.

We are going to look to them very soon now as the natural Central Telephone Exchange in business. It is the consumers who connect everybody up. They are the switchboard of the World.

XII

THE RIGHT TO TRUST SOMEBODY

Democracy--as perhaps my reader will have heard me say before--democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves.

I try to go to the polls as I should. But I resent being obliged by my dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five men on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world with that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am putting down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this feeling I have--in those few brief miserable moments I spend with the yellow pencil--is the feeling that this country is being governed with.

I met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the country--he went on the general principle that every time he came on the name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other.

As a democrat and as a believer in crowds I resent the idea that being stood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names I cannot know anything about is democracy. It is tyranny. It is a demand that I do something no one has a right to make me do. I have other things every man knows I can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, than knowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket--Smiths and Browns and Smiths and Smiths--it is a thing I want to have done for me, I want experts--engineers in human nature that I and my fellow citizens can hire to pick out my employees, _i.e._, the employees of the state that I want and that I have a right to and that I would have if I had time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way we don't go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest of our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so many subjects and detectives toward so many people.

We don't want to stop doing things we know we know, and know we can do, to vote on expert questions we don't even want to know anything about, huge laundry-lists of people that God only knows or could know and that can only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committees who devote their time to it.

If we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers and watching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons day and night we couldn't keep track or begin to keep track of the people we put in office. It is not our business to, it seems to many of us. Perhaps I should merely speak for myself. I can at least be permitted to say that it is not my business. If the state will give me ten men to watch, men in prominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally and easily, I will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. What I demand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to get things for the people is that these ten men shall look after the other sixty-five and let me attend to business. The other sixty-five have a right to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can do it, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all elect intelligently to do it for us--by men we have all looked through and through and trust.

The last year or so I have been getting about three long communications a week from the ---- Railway which has been trying to make me over into an expert on all the details of its relation to the Government. I wish I had time to know all about it. Some of us will have to. Things are so arranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whose business it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don't take a hand at it for a while and butt in in behalf of both the railroads and the Government, there won't be any railroads or there won't be any Government.

But I resent having this crisis put up to me personally. I resent having a pile a foot high of things I have got to know before I can help the Government to be fair to the railroads--or the railroads to be fair to the Government. I am better anyway at writing books. I don't want to be jerked into a judge--or a corporation lawyer because I am a voter. Railroads always bewilder me. Even the simplest things railroads tell everybody about themselves are hard for me to understand--time-tables for instance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking Sunday trains on Monday afternoon be called on to butt in on an expert auditor's job in this way, beat his Congressman on the head with the poor penitent railroads--with all the details about their poor insides--and with all their back bills and things?

There must be other voters who feel about this as I do.

Is this Democracy?

This is what Democracy is to me--Democracy is a belief in the faithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and their power to select great and true leaders.

The essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of government is supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the face of the earth it trusts people. A democracy that does not trust its leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a monarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can be trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's a kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They have settled down to the idea that this is what we are like--as if the main qualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, of making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. I believe I am living in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, that will take being a statesman seriously--as a special and skilled profession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in getting things out of people, and for people. We are getting ready for great and true leaders in America. Our people are getting ready to stake their fate in picking them out. Even our banks are. Our labor unions are. In our politics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. Anybody can see it. There are particular things and men we want, and the first leader we have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, the people of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, who treats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us and dares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still long enough to do things for us, will show what America is like, in spite of what she looks like, and will bring America out.

And America instead of being a kind of big slovenly adolescent, perpetually thirteen-year-old nation going around with its big innocent mouth open, will be grown up at last among the nations of the earth, will be a great clear-cut, clear-headed, firm-knit, sinewy nation that knows what it wants, and gets it--and does not say much.

XIII

THE RIGHT TO VOTE ALL DAY

This principle which I have applied in this last chapter to political democracy applies still more forcibly to democracy in industry, and to the right of the people to be waited on by skilled labor and by skilled capital.

I do not wish to bother to know everything about how everything I buy every day is made, but I do want to have arrangements made through a national league to which I belong, for instance, so that I can practically know about the conditions under which anything is made, the moment I wish to.

There should be as it were a card catalogue or authority in my town that I can go to and consult, which represents me and a hundred million people. This is my conception of what the National League through its local branches could do and do for everybody. It would only cost a few cents more to have a hundred million men know about a particular article what ten, twenty or a hundred or a thousand know, the moment they happen to need it, by looking it up in the League's national opinion of it and national experience with it, in a card catalogue or what would operate practically as a card catalogue.

We all have the right in this country to spend our money intelligently. If people want to get our thousand dollars a year, or two thousand a year, or three, five, or ten thousand a year, they must show cause why they should have it, dollar for dollar. We want our dollars to help people to help us, laborers who are helping the country and capitalists who are helping the country. Every time I spend ten cents I want to know that I am getting ten cents' worth of democracy, ten cents' worth of skilled capital and skilled labor working for all of us. I propose to vote with my money on the fate of my country and the fate of democracy with silver coins and with dollar bills every day. The other kind of ballot, the paper ballot, I can only use in the nature of the case once or twice a year.

XIV

THE SKILLED CONSUMER

The way to control the world and govern the well-being of men is not through the time they have left over, or the time they choose to lay one side for it, but directly and through their most important engagements and things they do and are sure to do all the time.

A man's first important engagement in this world is with his own breath.

His second engagement is with his own stomach.

His third is with the night and with sleep.

His fourth is with posterity, with the unborn, with his children and children's children.

His fifth is with his ancestors and with God.

In nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand things a man needs to have to keep these engagements--things he has to have if he is alive at all, he is a consumer.

What the new League will say to the consumer is something like this:

"In nine hundred and ninety-nine things out of a thousand you have to have to live, the Air Line League is organized to stand by you, express you and get the attention of everybody to what you want; and in the one thing you make for everybody it is going to express everybody to you and get your attention to what everybody wants of you."

This would seem to most of us to be fair all around.

When one thinks of it, why should one-thousandth part of what a man has and has to have, in order to live his life--the part he makes himself--be seen everywhere in this world in every man's life holding up and bullying, making him pay high prices for, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths?

Let the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of a man's life take possession of the one thousandth part of him. Then we will have a civilization.

Or at least the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of him will persuade the one thousandth of him to cooeperate.

We have had autocracy of capital because on the whole in the world until machinery came in, capital kept close enough to labor and to the consumer to know what the workmen and the people wanted.

Now that Capital has lost its grip, Labor announces that it is going to be after this war the autocrat, and represent capital and the consumer.

The Air Line League is here to ask, Why should not the consumer represent himself?

Capital has tried and failed and has said, "Let the public be damned." Now Labor has tried and failed, and is saying hoarsely in a thousand cities, "Let the public be damned."

What the Air Line League is for is to advertise the people together, and let the consumers represent themselves.

What we have been fighting for essentially in this war is the control of the consumers in the world in all nations.

When we speak of democracy and of organizing the will of the people, what we really mean is organizing the will of the consumers.

Organizing the will of the consumers is not a holdup. A holdup by all the people of all the people for all the people is Liberty.

XV

SAMPLE DEMOCRACIES

I do not want to delay or bother people with my definition of democracy, but I do not mind confiding to them where I have seen some.

One is always coming upon bits or dots of democracy in America. It is these bits or dots of rough more or less unfinished democracy we have in America which make most of us believe in the people of this country.

Everybody in America knows of them.

There are at least forty-four dots of democracy--little marked-off places--what might be called safety zones (everybody knows of them), even in New York. There are usually white globes in front of them, and a short name written in long plain slanting white letters across a huge piece of glass.

If anybody wants to see just what democracy is like in business all he has to do is to go into the nearest Childs restaurant, order some griddle-cakes, sit down and eat and think. All he really needs to do is to study the menu, but of course a menu is more thoroughly studied by eating some of it.

One soon finds that a menu may be a little modest every-day magna charta of democracy or it may not.

What a menu has long been for in the typical restaurant is to find a way of browbeating and bewildering a customer into spending more money for his luncheon than he intends to when he comes in.

Rows of grieved and vaguely disturbed people can be seen in restaurants every day--being mowed down by menus.

In a Childs restaurant business success is based on turning the whole idea of a menu around, and instead of the customer's coming in and studying the menu, the menu studies him.

The consumer in a Childs restaurant is there to economize and the restaurant is there to help him do it, the whole menu being constructed by experts in foods for the express purpose of telling the customer more than he knows about his food and his money, persuading him and practically tricking him into spending less money on his luncheon than he intends to.

A business may be said to be a big vital and winning business in any line in proportion as one sees the consumers in it--practically running it--running it in spirit. A democratic business is one which is being run as the consumers would run it if they knew how.

A business may be said to be a democratic business in proportion as one sees experts in it expressing crowds. One sees great crowds going to and fro and up and down in it acting for all practical purposes like geniuses, like skilled angels doing every day offhand inspired and inspiring difficult adventurous things as a matter of course--like tackling the high cost of living.

What the Air Line League is for is to make the consumers of America--the all-class class, class-conscious--is to organize the consumers of America locally and nationally so that the comparative cooeperation of crowds and geniuses and experts as in Childs' restaurants, can be assured in all lines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as the label of modern successful business life.

The Air Line League definition of democracy would be this:

A democracy may be said to be a state of society in which the consumers or the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expert attention of the men who make them.

The triumph of America and of the other democracies during the war has been that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended upon to have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to wait on them while they whip the Germans.

What the Air Line League proposes to do (Further details later) is to arrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer of the Germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way to keep this up.

Is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all our experts drop away--permanently drop away from waiting on crowds--are really going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waiting on themselves in just the way the Germans said they would?

What the Air Line League will stand for will be that experts and crowds can be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience and power of waiting on each other during peace as well as war.

Why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences and powers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whipping the Germans and not having them all the while, every day, for ourselves?

XVI

THE TOWN PENDULUM

The Air Line League in its local, national and international branches will act as a Listening Machine.

A Listening Machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward. Worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. When the same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people listen until they understand.

There are people in every town and in every local branch of the League who have what I like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. People in motion are not as reliable and as calculable as brass. People have wills, visions, individual emotions and lurchings of their own. When a man with a pendulum temperament sees a colossal pendulum made of crowds of people--crowds of employers and crowds of workmen--swinging from one extreme to another, the first thing he wants to do as each issue comes up, local or national, is to see to it that his own mind and each other man's mind in these two crowds on each side of the question should go twice through the middle, to going once to the extremes at either end.

In other words, The National Air Line League will act to bring extremes together--twice through the middle to once at each end--and local clubs will act as attention-swinging machines--as attention-forcing machines between classes.

I might give an illustration:

The National League in its central office in New York gets a report from the local branch in the town where Smith safety razors are made that the Smith Works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustained ugliness and inefficiency. The Central Office, after quietly looking into it, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through its local branches reports to the ten million men shaving with Smith blades every morning that the workmen and managers of the Smith factories, who are working a nominal nine hours a day, are spending three hours a day in fighting with each other as to how Smith blades should be made for the public, and six hours a day in making the blades. The consumer is told by the League that he is paying for nine hours' work a day on his blades and only getting six, and that if the employers and employees in the Smith factories could be got to listen to each other and to work together the blades could be had for three cents less apiece.

The League will then proceed through its local branch in the Smith town to arrest the attention of the Smith workmen and the Smith employers. It will suggest that they get each other's point of view and sit down very earnest and hear everything that the other side has to say and everything the other side wants to do, until they find some way of getting together and being efficient and knowing how to make Smith blades.

If necessary in order to get the attention of the workmen and employers at the Smith Works to the desirability of their listening to each other, the users of Smith blades throughout the country will shave themselves with their fathers' razors for three weeks.

If the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America who shave will turn the Government out of office and have the law changed.

A strike by workmen in a particular business is a holdup of all the other workmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and is undemocratic and unfair.

A lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all other employers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair.

In a country of a hundred million people a holdup conducted by a hundred million people for the hundred million people is democracy.

I employ this rather threatening illustration of the possible action of the League in certain cases because it suggests the power of democracy when experts and crowds act together--the fact that democracy can really be made to work, that democracy can be as forcible, as immediate and practical in dealing with autocratic classes, as autocracy can.

But only two or three per cent of what the League in its local and national branches would really do would be like the illustration I have used. The power the League would have to do things like this would make doing them unnecessary.

The regular work of the League would largely consist in accepting invitations from factories, and in supplying and training experts for the purpose of conducting in a factory mutual advertising campaigns, or studies in attention between workmen and employers, adapted to different types of factories.

The way out for democracy in dealing with predatory wealth which organizes to hold up the consumers, and with predatory labor which organizes to hold up the consumers, is for the consumers to organize.

XVII

THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE

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' associations 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 substitute 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, nobody 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 analysis, some way of bringing about conscription for universal service in business is the only way in which we can be assured 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 cooeperate 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 emancipating 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 class, nor having labor try to convince capital as a class. 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 institution 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 cooeperation 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 institution, 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 passion 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.

1. The consumer class is practically everybody.

2. The consumer class is the most disinterested, and is identified with both capital and labor. It is the natural umpire between them. Its line of least resistance is to act fairly.

3. The interests of the consumer class lead it not only to act fairly but to act energetically. The consumer class as a class will want to pay extra for as few quarrels between the people it is paying to make things for it as possible. The consumer always pays for all quarrels, and anything that is good for the employers and employees in the long run can not but be good for the consumer in the long run.

4. In the last analysis, the consumers in any given industry, if duly organized as capital and labor are now, will not only have the disposition to act fairly in a quarrel between the people who are making something that they buy, and the disposition to act quickly and have the fight over with, but they will have as buyers the power as a last resort to choose the factories they will deal with; to do their buying naturally and cheaply, and from factories that are entirely in the business of making goods and not half in the business of making goods and half in the business of making civil war. The nationally organized consumers will naturally advertise to people which firms take the least time off for fighting, and put all their work into the goods they expect the people to pay for.

This national advertising campaign will be operated through national headquarters, cooeperating with local branches organized in all manufacturing towns and cities. The national headquarters will act as a clearing house for the materials, facts, illustrations and demonstrations which the local centers collect and distribute and apply, proving that democracy works.

Everything turns, in getting a thing done to-day, on seeing to it that the people who take it up are the people who can best get the attention of others.

The consumer class cannot fail because they are the best people in the country to compel everybody to listen.

The consumers are the best people to get everybody to listen because they are the best listeners.

The consumers are the best people to start anything in America and keep it going because everybody in America cares what the consumers think, wants to be on good terms with them, and to please them, wants to be heard by them and wants to hear what they say.

XXI

THE WAY FOR A NATION TO SPEAK UP

The Air Line League is not visionary. The people of this country have expressed an idea. They can do it again.

Not long after the American part in the war was under way our Government had the idea--which it had not had at all when it began--that if America was going to do her part in defeating the Germans, or if we were to come anywhere near defeating the Germans, it would only be possible through an unexpected degree of self-sacrifice on the part of our people all day, every day until the war was over.

Our people did not believe this idea.

How could our Government get through to each man in America that winning the war depended on him? Get through to each woman and each child that something must be given up by each of us to defeat the Germans? The Government not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately the country needed them--every man of them--but it wanted also to inspire the people and to let the people see their power themselves. They wanted to teach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to the people and to the world how reverently the men, women and children of America could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat the Germans.

I fell asleep in Maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the Grand Central Station. I came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlike Sunday we had during the war.

A single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which I could have had for a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me.

I mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent about human nature. I went over and stood and looked up Madison Avenue and looked down Madison Avenue.

I had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and I found myself upon what seemed to me the loneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place I had ever seen upon the earth--a corner of Madison Avenue. It seemed like a kind of vision to stand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. I looked up at the sign on the corner. It really was Madison Avenue.

It was as if the hand of a hundred million people had reached out three thousand miles. It was as if a hundred million people had met me at the corner and told me--one look, one silence: "Here is this street we offer up that the will of God should go by. We are going to defeat the Germans with the silence on this street."

I stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with the invisible--a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came over me that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, were reaching, while I looked, across the country. I saw my people hushing a thousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of Chicago, of San Francisco and New York like the aisles of churches.

There was no need of church bells the first gasolineless Sunday, reminding one noisily, cheerily, a little thoughtlessly--the way they do--that God was on the earth.

One could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. But the first gasolineless Sunday--five hundred thousand miles of still roads lifted themselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, saying for a hundred million people, "God still reigneth." And twenty million little birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at five hundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what had happened!

I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had when I waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out of communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out of the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, into the long, white silent prayer of my people--and prayed with a hundred million people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets of a nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to God.

We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the war. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, to the great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-four full page ads in a thousand papers could do.

Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people--in advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement, eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows they look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, into prayers for a world--Mr. Garfield had few equals.

To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single stomach in the country.

To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a hundred million people--go in through the kitchen door of every house with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar when they ordered eight.

Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people look out of their windows on streets--thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the Germans!

We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in America, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany--was to interrupt people's personal daily habits.

The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to the people to whom we are trying to express it.

The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalists and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an hour in the day.

The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, in expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is plain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of the working ideas of the Air Line League.

Our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen is not to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wish we would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us to speak to them. Let a hundred million people do something to the people who take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonder what the hundred million people think.

The true way to advertise is to make the people you advertise to, do it. To get an idea over to the Germans do something to them that will make them come over to us--come all the way over to us and extract it. The same principle is going to be applied next by the Public Group in industry. We will do something that will make them--capital and labor--say: "What do you mean?"

Then let them study us and search us and search their own minds and find out.