The Ghost in the White House | Page 6

him feel lonely with us.
The feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness--the feeling the Public has every day in the White House and in the Senate, of being treated, and treated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that works as badly one way as it does the other.
The President does not want a Ghost.
The people do not want to be treated as a Ghost.
The object of this book is to resent--to expose to everybody as unfair and untrue and destroy forever the title I have written across the front of it, "The Ghost in The White House."
The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all time, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world, from being an inarticulate, shimmering, wavering, gibbering Ghost in its own House.
There must be things--broad simple things about Capital and Labor people can do and do every day in this country, that will make a President timidly stop guessing what they want.
It ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a President or a seer for a President to know what the people want. A man of genius--a seer, a man who can read the heart of a nation--especially in politics, comes not only not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highly unlikely when he does that the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party in America will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him in the White House.
The best the people can hope for in America now is to have a body--to find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without saying a word--express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word our President, our Politicians--even the kind of men who seem to put up naturally with having to be in the Senate--the kind of men who can feel happy and in their element in a place like Congress will see what the People--the real people in this country are like.
I am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people so that we the people in America, at last, in the days that lie ahead, instead of being a Ghost in our own House, shall have things that we can do, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able to prove to a President what we are like and what we want--so that each man of us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on a President with--something more than a vague, faint, little ballot to hurl (like an Autumn leaf) at him, once in four years.

IV
REAL FOLKS AND THE GHOST
When a man speaks of The City National Bank he speaks of it as if he meant something and knew what he meant.
When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch him bewhiffle it.
When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of Business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and when in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in some mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of The Invisible.
Business talks bass. Patriotism is an ?olian harp.
During the war this was changed. We found ourselves every day treating America, treating The Country, treating The People as a bodily fact.
I would like to see what can be done now in the next President's next four years, to give America this magnificent sense of a body in peace.
Why is it that we have in America a body for Germans, and then wilt down in a minute after Chateau-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost--unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless--just a light in its eyes--just a vast national shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet.
Millions of people every day in this country are very particular to salute the flag, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" and ship Bolshevists, but let them speak to you in conversation, of an industrial body like the Steel Trust or the Pennsylvania Railroad and they act as if something were there. Bring up the Body-Politic and it's a whiff.
It ought to be considered treason to think or to speak of The Country in this vague, breathy way.
The next immediate, imperative need of America is to see what can be done and done in the next President's next