TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION’S GETTING ITS WAY

CHAPTER I

BIG IN LITTLE

A nation, in order to be a safe nation for itself, or safe for other nations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for getting a world to want it to get its own way.

I am interested in a technique for a nation’s getting its way and deserving to get its way because I want to get mine, and because being human and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the same stuff out of the same mixed hot and cold ingredients as other people’s, I have quite naturally come to think that what works for me, if I cut down to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what I want, will probably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody.

I have thought I would see if I could not work out in this book, a technique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniature as it were a technique for getting and deserving to get one’s own way.

I pick out one man, to try out the principle on, because it is safer and fairer to try out a principle other people are supposed to be asked to risk, on one man first.

Because I happen to know him better than I know anybody else, and because my experience is, he will stand more from me than anybody else, I have picked out myself.

When the technique has been tried out on one man the people who know him will believe it and try it. Then we will try it on one hundred men one after the other. Then as I have been working it out in this book, try it on the body-politic, the soul and body of a nation, try it on a hundred million people.

Then with a technique for having a body and for not being fooled by ourselves and having some substance in what we say and what we do, we would have the spectacle of a hundred million people making themselves felt in political conventions, making themselves felt in The White House and even being noticed perhaps in time at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue by the great I AM, or I CAN’T, or I WON’T tucked under the come of all of us called The United States Senate.

CHAPTER II

CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF BRAIN TRACKS

My experience is that the first thing for me to attend to and know, in getting people to let me have my way, is to know when and how to discover and open up in people new brain tracks and when and how to make my main dependence on their old ones.

Getting what one wants from people turns on seeing the situation the brain track situation in one’s own mind at a particular time, and in other people’s, as it really is.

In other words, the way to get one’s way with people is to know and extend one’s consciousness down deeper into one’s subconsciousness in one’s own mind, so that one draws on the conscious and the subconscious in one’s own mind at will, so that gradually having the habit of drawing on the conscious and the subconscious in one’s own mind at will, one soon makes oneself master of the conscious and the subconscious in the minds of others.

I do not precisely know this, of course, because I have never practiced having my own way with other people as much as I would like, but my theory and my observation of others who have practiced on me leads me, in speaking for all of us to believe this: The way for a man to do who wants to get his own way with people is to heighten his consciousness, deepen his consciousness down into his subconsciousness, live more abundantly in soul and body, deeper down and higher up and further over into himself than others. Then he gets his way with others because everybody wants him to, almost without knowing it or anybody’s else knowing it.

A man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. The indication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer in him does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesian well of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his new brain tracks and old ones together is the secret of getting one’s way for all of us, whether with Nature or with one another.

Of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new brain tracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with other people and with ourselves.

This part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for most of us what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and what people can do to get them.

CHAPTER III

WHAT IS CALLED THINKING

The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common, is that nobody wants them. The way people really act even the best of us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is as if they had no place to put them.

The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are rather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closely what one actually does with one’s own personal listening and what other people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us.

In making as I have tried to make during the last six months, a few special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what I call my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hours each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rational being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago.

The first fact is this:

Nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of ears one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves and really do their living with.

I first came on them on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a young man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a young lecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to be happening to my audiences what they seemed to be doing to themselves, but it was a good many years before I really woke up to what they were doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me.

I would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their outside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them on outside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feel hurt but I did not wake up to what it meant.

As I remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth about ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I could help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman’s Club, or all made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age.

The trouble with a one-sexed audience or a one-classed audience seems to be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes and change to their outside ears all at once and before one’s eyes. In any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it, and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to easy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one’s meaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on, from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When the women go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking to mixed ages. Fewer passages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember, and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do anything else.

I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would not be any worse the psychological clang of it than what they do do. It would merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about the way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls, switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all around one as one goes out of the hall.

What is true of one’s words to people one can keep one’s eye on, is still more true of words in books.

If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping without knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for founding what I have to say in this book about changing people’s minds upon the way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they hear, the way they do not see what they look at, or the way they think, when they think, when they think they think.

(For every time I say “they” in the last paragraph will the reader kindly read “we.”)

If there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds and colors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down and sidling lines printed for people the way they are going to read it, if the sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean passages or could take nice little airy swoops or flights if every line on a page could dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make a perfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going through people’s minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that all these people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives in stops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so.

If the type in the pages in this book dealing with Mr. Burleson could be more responsive, could act the way Mr. Burleson’s mind does when he reads it that is if I could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets the type what Mr. Burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with his mind with each pellucid sentence as it purls even Mr. Burleson himself would be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in my book, he was really carrying away from it.

If in Mr. Burleson’s own personal copy of this book, I were to have this next chapter about him that is going to follow soon especially the sentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practically not read at all printed in invisible ink and there were just those long pale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them to get them so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of nice literary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he would probably carry away more meaning than I or any one could hope for in ordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficial feeling they are reading whether they are reading or not.

CHAPTER IV

LIVING DOWN CELLAR IN ONE’S OWN MIND

What I saw a little three-year-old girl the other day doing with her dolly dragging its flaxen-haired head around on the floor and holding on to it dreamily by the leg, is what the average man’s body can be seen almost any day, doing to his mind.

One feels almost as if one ought to hush it up at first until a few million more men have made similar practical observations in the psychology and physiology of modern life when one comes to see what our civilization is bringing us to what it really is that almost any man one knows, including the man of marked education take him off his guard almost any minute is letting his body do to his mind.

A very large part of even quite intelligent conversation has no origination in it and is just made up of phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record N and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is using his body.

With the average man one meets, his body wags his brain when he talks, as a dog wags his tail. The tongue sends its roots not into the brain but into the stomach. (Probably this is why Saint Paul speaks of it so sadly and respectfully as a mighty member because of its roots.)

The main difficulty a man has in having a new brain track, or in being original or plastic in a process of mind is the way his body tries to bully him when he tries it. The body has certain tracks it has got used to in a mind and that it wants to harden the mind down into and then tumtytum along on comfortably and it does not propose all this blessed meat we carry around on us, to let us think any more than can be helped.

I saw some wooden flowers in a florist’s window on The Avenue the other day four or five big blossoms six inches across real flowers that had been taken from the edge of a volcano in South America real flowers that had chemically turned to wood (probably from having gas administered to them by the volcano!) and I stood there and looked at them thinking how curious it was that spiritual and spirited things like flowers instead of going out and fading away like a spirit, had died into solid wood in that way. Then I turned and walked down the street, watching the souls and bodies of the people and the people were not so different many of them as one looked into their faces, from the wooden flowers, and I could not help seeing, of course, no one can what their bodies thousands of them were apparently doing to their souls. After all the wooden flowers were not really much queerer for flowers than the people many of them were for people.

From the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the human mind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new brain tracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing the body and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it is not a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watch what they are letting their bodies do to them.

Left to itself the body is for all practical purposes so far as the mind is concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concrete mixer for pouring one’s soul in with some Portland Cement and making one’s living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy them in one just as they are. Unless great spiritual pains are taken to keep things moving, the body operates practically as a machine for petrifying spiritual experiences, mummifying ideas or for putting one’s spiritual experiences on to reels and nerves that keep going on forever.

There is ground for belief (and this is what I am trying to have a plan to meet, in these chapters) that the reason that most of us find talking with people and arguing with them and trying to change their minds so unsatisfactory, is that we are not really thorough with them. What we really need to do with people is to go deeper, excavate their sensory impressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have a kidney taken out to convince them. Talk with almost any man of a certain type, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after he is thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. He is not really listening to you when you criticize him or differ with him.

The soul the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscope has a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and like you for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowing all you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his body all in a flash tries to keep him from doing this, hardens over his mind, claps itself down with its lid of habit over him. Then he automatically defends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing more can be said.

What a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with his machine. The very essence of anger is that it is unspirited and automatic. The spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him to listen, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not want to let him hear.

Of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years say for twenty or thirty years the inevitable happens and one soon sees why it is that the majority of people even very attractive people one goes around talking with and living with, after thirty years, become just splendid painted-over effigies of themselves. One has no new way of being fond of them. One looks for nothing one has not had before. They go about even the most elegant of them thinking with their stomachs.

Thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they were fresh from heaven as if they had just been caught passing from the music of the spheres, are all handed up to them on dumb waiters from below.

CHAPTER V

BEING HELPED UP THE CELLAR STAIRS

Most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our leaders and our people.

We realize whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass of the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs.

The question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it the question of how other people a hundred million people can be got to follow in these new brain tracks for a nation these new ways for a nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and national concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for a little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and what kind of people can do it.

The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people’s minds and re-routing and recooerdinating their ideas and are going to be the more important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comes nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing through themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extraordinary work he is doing in London, for people in the way of reeducating and recooerdinating their bodies.

I took home from a bookshop one day not long ago, after reading an article about it by Professor James Harvey Robinson in the Atlantic, Mr. Alexander’s quite extraordinary book, which after starting off with an introduction by Professor John Dewey, of Columbia, leads one into a new world, to the edge, almost the precipitous edge of a new world.

I am inclined to believe that the deepest and most penetrating knowledge of that curious and delicate blend of spirit and clay we call a human being, and the most masterful technique for getting conscious control of it and of the helpless civilization in which it still is trying to live, are going to be found before many years to be in the brain and the hand of Mathias Alexander. It is hard to keep from writing a book about him when one thinks of him, but as I cannot write a book about him in the middle of this one, I am going to touch for a moment on the principle Alexander employs in breaking through new brain tracks in persons, and then try to apply the same principles to breaking through new brain tracks for a nation.

What Mr. Alexander does with people I have already hinted at in what I have said about our having a new profession in America the profession of being a lawyer backward. Of course Mr. Alexander could not say of himself that he was in the profession of being a lawyer backward, but he does practically the same thing in his field that a lawyer backward would do. He makes it his business to change people’s minds for them instead of petting their minds and he does the precise thing I have in mine except that he confines himself in doing it to what he calls psycho-mechanics to a single first relation in which a man’s mind needs to be changed the relation of a man’s mind to his body.

If a man’s mind gets his body right, it will not need to be changed about many other things in which it is wrong. The first thing a man’s mind should be changed about usually is his body.

This is the principle upon which Mathias Alexander in the very extraordinary work he is doing in London, proceeds.

When you are duly accepted as a client and have duly given credentials or shown signs that you want all the truth about yourself that you can get no matter how it hurts, or how it looks, you present yourself at the appointed time in Alexander’s office, or studio, or laboratory, or operating room whatever the name may be you will feel like calling it by, before you are finished, and Alexander stands you up before the back of a chair. Then he takes you in his hands his very powerful, sensitive and discerning hands and begins quite literally begins reshaping you like Phidias. You begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going to be some new beautiful living statue yourself before very long probably.

Then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze at you just as Phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of your body, X-rays down through you with a look through you and all your inner workings from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.

Then he lays hands on you once more and works and you feel him working slowly and subtly on you once more, all the while giving orders to you softly not to help him, not to butt in soul and body on what he is doing to them with your preconceived ideas ideas he is trying to cure you of, of what you think you think when you are thinking with what you suppose is your mind, and what you suppose you are doing with what you suppose is your body. In other words, he gives you most strenuously to understand that the one helpful thing that you can do with what you call your mind or what you call your body is to back away from them both all you can. As it is you and your ideas mostly that are what is the matter with your mind and body, and with the way you admit they are not getting on together, Alexander’s first lessons with you you find are largely occupied in getting your mind your terrible and beautiful mind which does such queer things to you, to back away. What he really wants of you is to have you let him make a present to you outright of certain new psycho-physical experiences, which he cannot possibly get in, if you insist on slipping yours in each time instead. So he keeps working on you, you all the while trying to help in soul and body by being as much like putty a kind of transcendental putty as you can, or as you dare, without falling apart before your own eyes. Then when you have removed all obstructions and preconceptions in your own mind and will stop preventing him from doing it, he places your body in an entirely new position and subjects you to a physical experience in sitting, standing and walking, you have never dreamed you could have before.

This goes on for as many sittings as are necessary and until you walk out of the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling like somebody else like somebody else that has been lent to you to be somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will be allowed to wear or be or whatever it is for the rest of your life. Incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking people you thought were impossible before even including very conveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind about your body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you.

It is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is a putting of the facts in a man’s mind and the facts in his body inextricably together in his consciousness as they should be, in that he is no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swings free, and feels able to stop when he is being fooled about himself.

I have been reading over this chapter and all I can say to my readers is, as a substitute for leaving it out, that I hope it sounds to them like a fairy story. I like to think when I am going on from chapter to chapter in a book I like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are. The principles underlying what Mr. Alexander does with new brain tracks and what I am trying to do can be discussed in this book. The facts can be looked up and are suitable subjects not for books but for affidavits.

CHAPTER VI

REFLECTIONS ON THE STAIRS

It is a not unfamiliar experience for a man to go to a dentist, get into a chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast corner of his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinks he is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower or southwest corner. Then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and the northeast corner toothache is over.

(These figures or rather points of the compass may not be literally right, but the fact that they point to is.) Nearly every man has had things happen to him not very different from this. You have a bad lameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you that you are deceived about the real trouble being in your right knee, calls your attention to a place three and a half feet off way up on the other side of you, says you should have a gold filling put in a tooth there and your right knee will get well.

What seems to be true of people is that though in a less glaring and more subtle fashion, there are very few of us who are not subject either all or part of the time to more or less important and quite unmanageable illusions about things with which we are supposed to be if anybody is the most intimately acquainted. One keeps hearing every few days almost, lately, of how people’s inner organs are not doing what they think they are, of how very often even the most important of them have been mislaid a colon for instance being allowed to do its work three inches lower than it ever ought to be allowed to try, and all manner of other mechanical blunders that are being made, grave mechanical inconveniences which are being daily put up with by people, when they move about or when they lie down, of which they have not the slightest idea.

The sensory impressions of what is really happening to us, of where it is happening and how and why are full in many people of glaring and not infrequently dangerous illusions, but these physical illusions which we have are reflected automatically in our spiritual and intellectual ones. All kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are not seeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresy trials, lockouts and strikes all the irrational things people say and do to each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the way people are being fooled by their own precious insides. Each man is doing things that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because he is off on his facts as to what is going on the first few feet off, because the first hundred and fifty pounds of consciousness which have been assigned to him to know about personally and attend to personally he is letting himself be fooled with every day.

A man who is being fooled near by, regularly all the time, fooled from the sole of his poor tired feet to the poor helpless nib at the top of him which he calls his head, is naturally hard to argue with about the immortality of the soul, or the League of Nations. Reforms and reformers which overlook these facts must not be surprised if they seem to some of us a little superficial.

Of course the moral of all this is as regards changing society or persuading and convincing persons, get down to first principles. Stop flourishing around with fine and noble philosophies and phrases on the surface of men’s souls. See that their souls and their bodies are both intricately divinely stupendously blended together and get at them both together. If you are arguing with a man and do not make much headway, stop arguing with him. Cut out his tonsils.

Or it may be something else. Or send him to Alexander and have his back ironed out, if necessary so that his tonsils will work as they are.

Then argue with him afterwards and quote Shakespeare and the Bible to him, stroke his soul and see how it works.

CHAPTER VII

HELPING OTHER PEOPLE UP THE CELLAR STAIRS

It is getting almost dangerous to talk to me. I lay violent hands on people, when they disagree with me and send them to Alexander.

Everybody, anybody, my wife, my pastor, every now and then an editor, whole shoals of publishers.... I think what it would be like for us all, to ship The United States Senate in a body to him. On every side it keeps coming to me that the short, quick and thorough way for me to install my idea, to get my idea started and to install my idea of new brain tracks, new ways for this nation to get its way and deserve its way, is to have people the minute they don’t agree with me, alexandered, at once.

Here is this book for instance. The proper course for me to take to get a man to accept the new brain track in it, is to send him a copy of the book to say yes or no to. Then if he does not agree with me and I am tempted to argue with him, I will drop the matter with him at once, send him to Alexander, have Alexander set him in a chair, tap him on the back, poke him thoughtfully, psycho-mechanically in the ribs, unlimber his mind from his body, untangle him psycho-physically, put him in shape so that he can think free, listen without obsessions and mental automatism that is, get him so that he can set his mind on a subject instead of setting his stomach on it, and then I will ask him to read my book again.

In the meantime, of course, I should be going to Alexander and rewriting the book.

By the time the gentleman was cured I would have a cured book to send him, we would both be in a position to believe what we don’t want to believe, to listen to each other indefinitely and we would be in a position to do team work together at once and take steps to install new brain tracks for nations immediately.

This brings me to the two horns of my dilemma.

In installing new brain tracks for nations it is not practicable for me to take up people who disagree with me say a hundred million people or so and ship them to Alexander in London and have them done over by Alexander.

What is the best possible substitute arrangement that can be made for having a whole nation put into perfect psycho-mechanical shape by Alexander so that it will take the first new brain tracks kindly?

The principles for giving people new brain tracks toward their own bodies which Mr. Alexander has so successfully demonstrated, are the same principles which I have been trying for a long time to express and apply to ideas and to all phases of the personal and the national life.

Where I have been studying for years as an artist, the art of changing my own mind and other people’s about ideas, of working out new spiritual experiences for myself and other people, Alexander in his workroom in London has been engaged in changing people’s minds toward their bodies, in giving men new brain tracks toward their own bodies.

It is obvious that these principles Alexander’s principles for installing new physical experiences and mine for installing new spiritual ones, must be if they are fundamental or are worth anything, the same.

My own feeling is that if anybody can go to Alexander and can be done over by Alexander personally in London that is the best thing to do. But it is inconvenient for a hundred million people to crowd into Alexander’s office in London, and it is comparatively convenient and roomy for a hundred million people if they want to, to crowd into a book. Before giving the principles, I would like to state the question What are the steps we all can use those of us who are not Alexander to install new brain tracks in this nation?

The principles upon which, as it seems to me, new brain tracks for this nation should be installed and which I would like to deal with are these:

First. Get people first to recognize with regard to new brain tracks, the fact that they do not want them.

Second. Get their attention to what people with new brain tracks seem to be able to do in the way of getting in our present moving world, the things they want. People go to Alexander and ask him for new brain tracks. Something corresponding to this has to be got from people before offering them new brain tracks in a convention or in a book.

Third. Pick out the people next to the people the proposed new brain tracks are for, who seem to be the particular kind of people best calculated to make the necessary excavations in their brains, to loosen up ideas, or any hard gray matter there may be there, so that something can be put in.

The fourth step when we recognize that we want the facts against ourselves and see what we can do with them, is to ask people to let us have them.

CHAPTER VIII

HELPING A NATION UP THE CELLAR STAIRS

The Air Line League is a national organization of millions of American men and women belonging to all classes and all social and industrial groups, who become members of the League for the express purpose of asking people to help to keep them, in their personal and industrial relations, from being off on their facts, from being fooled by their subconscious and automatic selves.

Unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experience telling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for his being objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the most timely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any one man or group of men can ever render another.

The best way to secure the right people for this service is to ask them. The people who do not need to be asked and who would be only too cheerful to do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want them to or not, are not apt to do it in a practical way.

The best way to ask the best people is to place oneself in a position, as in joining the Air Line League, where people will feel asked without any one’s saying anything about it.

This is the first principle we propose to follow in the League. By the act of joining the League, by the bare fact that we are in it, we announce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and as members of a class, or of our capital groups or our Labor groups, we are as a matter of course open and more than open to facts facts from any quarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doing from being fooled about ourselves.

Having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, of being unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are the best people in a nation constituted like ours, to unfool us the most quickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the least trouble to us and to themselves?

CHAPTER IX

TECHNIQUE FOR LABOR IN GETTING ITS WAY

The best people to advertise a truth are the people the truth looks prominent on the people from whom nobody expects it.

In my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently been made and handed up to me, that there are certain books, I do not need to read.

My attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of my reading one of Harold Bell Wright’s novels. But if I heard to-morrow morning that Henry Cabot Lodge and President Wilson during the last few peaceful months had both read through Harold Bell Wright’s last novel, I would read it before I went to bed.

Or Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers. Any common experience which I heard in the last few weeks Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers had had, a novel by Harold Bell Wright or anything I would look into, a whole nation would look into it the moment they heard of it at once.

The first thing to do in making a start for new brain tracks for America is to pick out persons and brain tracks that set each other off.

Even an idea nobody would care about one way or the other becomes suddenly and nationally interesting to us when we find people we would not think would believe it, are believing it hard and trying to get us to believe it.

Suppose for instance that next Fourth of July (I pick out this day for what I want to have happen because I have so longed for years to have something strong and sincere said or done on it that would really celebrate it) suppose for instance that next Fourth of July, beginning early in the morning all the Labor leaders of America from Maine to California, acting as one man broke away just took one day off, from doing the old humdrum advertising everybody expects from them suppose they proceeded to do something that would attract attention something that would interest their friends and disappoint their enemies just for twenty-four hours? Suppose just for one day all the Labor leaders instead of going about advertising to themselves and to everybody the bad employers and how bad employers are in this country would devote the Fourth of July to advertising a few good ones?

Then suppose they follow it up that Labor do something with initiative in it the initiative its enemies say it cannot have, something unexpected and original, true and sensationally fair, something that would make a nation look and that a hundred million people would never forget?

What does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in this country, if Labor; after the next Fourth of July, started a new national crusade for four weeks if the fifty best laborers in the Endicott Johnson Mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should go in a body one after the other to a list of Bolshevist factories, factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitation of telling what happens to them in their Endicott Johnson mills, an agitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are like and how it works until the Bolshevist workmen they come to see are driven by sheer force of facts into being non-Bolshevist workmen, and their Bolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force of facts into being Endicott Johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front of themselves, who will be Endicott Johnsons for them.

All that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitation in America to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act of labor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing that either of them either capital or labor is thinking of somebody, believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besides themselves. Millions of individual employers and individual laborers about have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable and discriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow human beings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is to arrange some signal generous conclusive arresting massive move together to show it.

This is the kind of work the Air Line League proposes on a national scale like the Red Cross to arrange for and do.

The common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, the fellow human being employer or employee.

The best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for America in shame and weakness to keep on deporting Bolshevists, is to arrange a national advertisement, a parade or national procession as it were in this country soon, of team work in industry and of how to anybody who knows the facts it carries everything before it.

The best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down through ten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers who stand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmen from all over the country who stand up for employers.

Of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds of times over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring other laborers into line and of having employers shame other employers into competence.

The best substitute for this national demonstration, this national physical getting together like this, is as I have said before, a book read by all, by employers and employees looking over each other’s shoulders, each conscious as he reads that the other knows he reads, knows what he knows and is reading what he knows.

CHAPTER X

TECHNIQUE FOR CAPITAL IN GETTING ITS WAY

I should hate to see Capital, in the form of a National Manufacturers’ Association, realizing the desperateness of the labor situation and that something has got to be done at last which goes to the bottom, slinking off privately and confessing its sins to God.

I would rather see a confession of the sins of Capital toward Labor for the last forty years and of its sins to-day made by Capital in person to Labor.

God will get it anyway the confession and it will mean ten times as much to Him and to everybody if He overhears it being given to Labor.

Of course Labor has been doing of late wrong things that it is highly desirable should be confessed and naturally Capital thinks that a good way to open the exercises would be with a confession from Labor to Capital to the effect that Labor admits that Labor like the Trusts before it had had moments or seizures in which it has held up the country, broken its word, betrayed the people and acted the part the people hate to believe of it of the bully and the liar.

Not only the Capital Group but the Public Group feel that a confession from Labor before we go on to arrange things better is highly to be desired.

But the practical question that faces us is supposing that what is wanted next by all, is a confession from Labor, what is the practical way from now on, to get Labor to confess?

Some supposing might be done a minute.

Suppose I have a very quick temper and five sons and suppose the oldest one has my temper and is making it catching to the other sons, what would any ordinary observer say is the practical course for the poor wicked old father to take with the boy’s temper of which he has made the boy a present?

My feeling is when my boy loses his temper with me at dinner for instance in the presence of the other boys, that poking a verse in a Bible feebly out at him and saying to him, “He that keepeth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city,” would be rude. The way for me to give him good advice about losing his temper is to sit there quietly with him while he is losing his, and keep mine.

If Capital wants to get its way with Labor and thinks that the way to begin with the industrial situation in this country, after all that has happened, is with a vast national spectacle of Labor confessing its sins, the most practical thing to do is for Capital to give Labor an illustration of what confessing sins is like, and how it works.

The capitalists among us who are the least deceived by their subconscious or automatic minds, are at the present moment not at all incapable of confiding to each other behind locked doors that the one single place, extreme labor to-day has got its autocracy from, is from them.

Labor is merely doing now with the scarcity of labor, the one specific thing that Capital has taught it to do and has done for forty years with the scarcity of money and jobs.

It seems to me visionary and sentimental and impracticable for Capital to try to fix things up now and give things a new start now, by slinking off and confessing its sins to God.

Labor will slink off and confess its sins to God, too.

That will be the end of it.

It may be excellent as far as it goes, but in the present desperate crisis of a nation, with the question of the very existence of society and the existence of business staring us in the face, it really must be admitted that as a practical short cut to getting something done, our all going out into a kind of moral backyard behind the barn and confessing our sins to God, is weak-looking and dreamy as compared with our all standing up like men at our own front doors, looking each other in the eye and confessing our sins to one another.

I am not saying this because I am a moral person. I am not whining at thirty thousand banks pulling them by the sleeves and saying please to them and telling them that this is what they ought to do.

I am a practical matter of fact person, speaking as an engineer in human nature and in what works with human nature and saying that when capitalists and employers stop being sentimental and off on their facts about themselves and about other people, when they propose to be practical and serious, and really get their way with other people they are going to begin by being imperfect, by talking and acting with labor, like fellow-imperfect human beings.

In the new business world that began the other day the day of our last shot at the Germans, the only way a man is going to long get his way is to be more human than other people, have a genius for being human in business, for being human quick and human to the point where others have talent.

CHAPTER XI

PHILANDERING AND ALEXANDERING

By philandering I mean fooling oneself with self-love.

By Alexandering I mean going to one’s Alexander whoever he or she or it is, some one person or some one thing, which either by natural gift or by natural position is qualified to help one to be extremely disagreeable to oneself and ask to be done over now one subject and now another.

Nearly all men admit or at least they like to say when they are properly approached, or when they make the approach themselves, that they make mistakes and that they are poor miserable sinners. Everybody is. They rather revel in it, some of them, in being in a nice safe way, miserable sinners. The trouble comes in ever going into the particulars with them, in finding any particular time and place one can edge in in which they are not perfect.

This fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capital and labor in general, brings out and illustrates another general principle in making the necessary excavations in one’s own mind and other people’s for new brain tracks another working principle of technique for a man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get its way.

There are various Alexandering stages in the technique of not being fooled by oneself.

Self-criticism.

Asking others to help one’s nearest Alexander.

Self-confession to oneself.

Self-discipline.

Asking others to help.

The way to keep from philandering with one’s own self-love or with one’s own group or party is to look over the entire field the way one would on other subjects than being fooled by one’s own side, strip down to the bare facts about oneself and facts about others for one’s vision of action and fit them together and act.

In getting one’s way quickly, thoroughly, personally i.e., so that other people will feel one deserves it and will practically hand it over to one, and want one to have it, the best technique seems to be not only to utilize self-criticism or self-confession, as a part of getting one’s way, but self-confession screwed up a little tighter screwed up into self-confession to others.

I need not say that I am not throwing this idea out right and left to employers with any hopeful notion that it will be generally acted on offhand.

It is merely thrown out for employers who want to get their way with their employees get team work and increased production out of their employees before their rivals do.

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.

CHAPTER 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.

CHAPTER 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 anæmic 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 anæmic employers and anæmic 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.

CHAPTER 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.

CHAPTER 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.

CHAPTER 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.

CHAPTER 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?

CHAPTER 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.

CHAPTER 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.

CHAPTER 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.

CHAPTER 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.