The Ghost in the White House | Page 2

255 V The Try-Out Club Tries Out 257 (1) I + You = We 257 (2) The Engineer at Work 260 (3) The Engineer and the Game 262 (4) The American Business Sport 264 VI The Put-Through Clan Puts Through 270 (1) What 270 (2) How 272 (3) Psycho-Analysis 273 (4) Psycho-Analysis for a Town 276 (5) To-Morrow 280 (6) Who 281 (7) The Town Fireplace 286 (8) The Sign on the World 288
BOOK VI
WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT
I The Big Brother of the People 293 II The Man Who Carries the Bunch of Keys for the Nation 300 III The President's Temperament 302 IV The President's Religion 306 V The Red Flag and the White House 309

INTRODUCTION
THE MOTION BEFORE THE HOUSE
This is a book a hundred million people would write if they had time.
I am nominating in this book--in the presence of the people, the next President of the United States.
The name is left blank.
I am nominating a man not a name.
I am presenting a program and a sketch of what the next President will be like, of what he will be like as a fellow human being, and I leave the details--his name, the color of his eyes and the party he belongs to, to be filled in by people later.
Here is his program, his faith in the people, his vision for the people and his vision for himself.
* * * * *
No one has ever nominated a President in a book before.
I do it because a book can be more quiet, more sensible and thoughtful, more direct and human, and closer to the hearts of the people, than a convention can.
A book can be more public too--can be attended by more people than a convention. Only a few thousand people can get into a convention. A hundred million can get into a book. All in the same two hours, by twenty million lamps thousands of miles apart, the people can crowd into a book.
So in this book, as I have said, I am merely acting as the secretary or employee of the hundred million people. I am writing a book a hundred million people would write if they could, expressing for them the kind of President for the next four years of our nation--the most colossal four years of the world, the people have ordered in their hearts.
We are weary of politicians' politicians. We want ours. Politicians may not be so bad but during the war they do not seem to us to have done as well as most people. In the dead-earnest of the war, with our Liberty Loan and Red Cross and Council of Defense, and our dollar a year men we have half taken over the government ourselves and we feel no longer awed by the regular political practitioners or government tinkerers. They are not all alike, of course, but we have turned our national glass on them and have come to see through them--at least the worst ones and many thousands of them--all these busy little worms of public diplomacy building their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelief far far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all by themselves.
Unless the more common run of our typical politicians see through themselves before the conventions come, and see that the people see through them, and see it quick, their days are numbered.
Instead of patronizing us and whispering to one another behind their hands about us, their time has come now--in picking out the next President to begin gazing up to the countenance of the people, to begin listening to the people's prayer to God.
The people are a new people since the war. Out of the crash of empires, out of threats in every man's door-yard the people are praying to God.
And they are voting to God, too.
The sooner the two great political parties reckon with this, the sooner they push around behind themselves out of sight all the funny little would-be Presidents, and all the little shan't-be politicians running around like ants under the high heaven of the faith of a great people picking up tidbits they dare to believe--and put forward instead a live believing hot and cold human being, a man who will give up being President for what he believes, the sooner they will find themselves with a President on their hands that can be elected. Whichever party it is that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the one that will be underwritten by the people.
The people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward the great coming political conventions and the questions and the men that will come up in them. We are on the whole, in spite of the low estimate the