The Ghost in the White House | Page 4

thought--ways in which the hundred million people shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like a Profiteer, or like a noble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor union,--get what they want.

II
THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH
What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night?
The Ghost in the White House.
The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people.
The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization.
What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never Was, and Who Never Is--a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, Terrible Angel called the People.
Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times.
That is all there is to Her.
It is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the Aurora Borealis to 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up to this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. It does not give any real satisfaction to anybody--either to the hundred million people or to the President.
It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a President--to be a Ghost.
It is not efficient.
Naturally--much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or hope to get (however hard he tries) is the Ghost of a President.

III
THE PRESIDENT AND THE GHOST
There are a number of things about going into the White House the next four years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, that are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest job on earth.
The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position as the Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is expected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassing idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would ever put up with, from any other employer in the world.
Absent-mindedness.
Non-committalness.
Halfness, or double personality.
Bodilessness.
Big, impressive-looking Fool Moments.
Cumulus clouds of Slow Sure Conceit with Sudden Flops of Humility.
General Irresponsibleness.
And perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the Employer--like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made a fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry.
The man who is conscientious in the White House has an Employer whose immediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes in the hope that he will be thanked afterwards.
Once in a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert, as the captain of the ship, has to tell the Owner of the Line, when the storm is highest, that he must not butt in.
The restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer that one is just being an employee and that one's employer is being responsible, is lacking in the White House, where one is practically expected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee and one's own employer.
But while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in the President's Employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerous ones for the country.
I am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done about them. I have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated the moment the Employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits are making it for the President to do anything for him.
Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people are giving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, is not only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer so large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It.
Serving It is necessarily