THE PRESIDENT SAYS “LOOK!”
Our American President, if one merely
reads what the Constitution says about him, is a rather
weak-looking character.
The founders of the country did not
intend him to be anybody in particular-if
it could be helped. They were discouraged about
allowing governments to be efficient. Not very
much that was constructive to do was handed over to
him. And the most important power they thought
it would do for him to have was the veto or power
to say “No.”
Possibly if our fathers had believed
in liberty more they would have allowed more people
to have some; or if they had believed in democracy
more, or trusted the people more, they would have thought
it would do to let them have leaders, but they had
just got away. They felt timid about human nature
and decided that the less constructive the government
was and the less chance the government had to be concrete,
to interpret a people, to make opportunities and turn
out events, the better.
Looked at at first sight no more elaborate,
impenetrable, water-tight arrangement for keeping
a government from letting in an idea or ever having
one of its own or ever doing anything for anybody,
could have been conceived than the Constitution of
the United States, as the average President interprets
it.
Each branch of the government is arranged
carefully to keep any other branch from doing anything,
and then the people, every four years, look the whole
country over for some new man they think will probably
leave them alone more than anybody-and
put him in for President.
Looking at it narrowly and by itself,
all that a President selected like this could ever
expect in America to put in his time on, would seem
to be-being the country’s most importantly
helpless man-the man who has been given
the honour of being a somewhat more prominent failure
in America than any one else would be allowed to be.
He stops people for four years.
Other people stop him for four years. Then with
a long happy sigh, at the end of his term, he slips
back into real life and begins to do things.
This has been the more or less sedately
disguised career of the typical American President.
Merely reading the Constitution or the lives of the
Presidents, without looking at what has been happening
to the habits of the people in the last few years,
we might all be asking to-day, “What is there
that is really constructive that President Wilson can
do?” What is there that is going to prevent
him, with all that moral earnestness dammed up in
him, that sense of duty, that Presbyterian sense of
other people’s duties-what is there
that is going to prevent him, with his school-book
habits, his ideals, his volumes of American history,
from being a teachery or preachery person-a
kind of Schoolmaster or Official Clergyman to Business?
News.
The one really important and imperative
thing to the people of this country to-day is News.
In spite of newspapers, authors, College presidents,
Bank presidents, Socialist agitators, Bill Heywoods,
and Trusts, the people are bound to get this news,
and any man who is so placed by his prominence that
he can scoop up the news of a country, hammer its
news together into events the papers will report, express
news in the laws, build news into men who can make
laws and unmake laws, any man who is so placed that
directly or indirectly he takes news, forces it in
by hydraulic pressure where people see it doing things,
who takes news and crowds it into courts, crowds news
into lawyers and into legislatures, pries some of
it even into newspapers, can have, the ordinary American
says to-day, as much leeway in this government as he
likes.
The ordinary American has never been
able to understand the objection important people
have-that nearly everybody has (except ordinary
people) to news-especially editors and publishers.
It is an old story. Every one
must have noticed it. One set of people in this
world, always from the beginning, trying to climb up
on the housetops to tell news, and another set of
people hurrying up always and saying, “Hush,
Hush!” Some days it seems, when I read the papers,
that I hear half the world saying under its breath,
a vast, stentorian, “Shoo! shoo! SHSH!
SHSH!”
Then I realize I live in an editor’s
world. I am expected to be in the world that
editors have decided on the whole to let me be in.
Of course I did not know what to do
at first when this came over me.
I naturally began to try to think
of some way of cutting across lots, of climbing up
to News.
I looked at all the neat little park
paths, with all those artistic curves of truth on
them the editors have laid out for me and for all of
us. Then I looked at the world and asked myself,
“Who are the men in this world, if any, who
are able to walk on the Grass, who cut across the
little park paths when they like?”
And as fate would have it (it was
during the Roosevelt administration), the first two
men I came on who seemed to be stamping about in the
newspapers quite a little as they liked were the Prime
Minister of England and the President of the United
States.
Just how much governing can a President do?
How many columns a day is he good
for, how many acres of attention every morning in
the papers of the country-all these white
fields of attention, these acres of other people’s
thoughts, can he cover?
How many sticks a day can he make
compositors set up of what he thinks?
How many square miles of the people’s
thoughts can he spread out at breakfast tables, lift
up in a thousand thousand trolleys before their faces?
I have seen the white fields of attention
filled with the footprints of his thoughts, of his
will, of his desires!
I have seen that the President is
the Editor of that vast, anonymous, silent newspaper,
written all the night, written all the day, and softly
published across a country-the newspaper
of people’s thoughts.
I have seen the vision of the forests
he has cast down, ground into headlines, into editorials,
into news. Mountains and hills are laid bare
to say what he thinks. Thousands of presses throb
softly and the white reels of wood pulp fly into speech.
Thousands of miles of paper wet with the thoughts
of a people roll dimly under ground in the night.
The President is saying Look! in the night!
The newsboys hasten out in the dawn. They cry
in the streets!