The Ghost in the White House | Page 4

really have in this country in time a hundred million people who,
taken as a whole, feel important in it--like a Senator for instance--like
Senator Lodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like Trusts that
won't trust, and Congressmen that won't play and workmen that won't
work--I am thinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million
people can come to feel as if it made a very substantial difference to
somebody what they wanted and what they 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