The Ghost in the White House | Page 5

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 one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a
trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with a
fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the

People.
It is this bodilessness in the Employer--this very simple rudimentary
whiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished
and accomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it
hardest to bear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly
is (once in four years) that he wants him or that he does not want him
and even then he confides to him that he only half wants him. He says
deliberately and out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows
and the people of other nations, "Here is the man I would a little rather
have than not." That is all. Then he coops him up in the White House,
drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and
sets him to work.
Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer like
this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that
cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and
when one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of
the people one is being The Head Employee of (in the other party)
expect one to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and
that at the utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit
one's Employer--keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor,
it will be small wonder if the man in the White House feels he
has--especially these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on
earth.
The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is
the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own
special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to
snuggle up to. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed
to our President. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out,
sternly, and be President of all of us.
It may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job on
earth and, of course, when Theodore Roosevelt had it, the job of being
President considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell world
America is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of our
next President, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy,

senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappy
factories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nations
abroad, the man we put in the White House next is going to have what
will be the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousand
years--except the one that began in Nazareth--the one the new President
is going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way which
little, old, queer, bent, eager St. Paul with his prayers in Rome and his
sermons in Athens, never dreamed of.
It does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new
President and a hundred million people and forty nations are all
together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and
inefficient at just this time for our President to have a ghost for an
Employer.
All any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make a
President, is to stop and think. If you have an employer who cannot
collect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, all you
do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make him
up--what is there--what deep, searching and conclusive and permanent
action is there, after all, the man in The White House can take in his
employer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling
him what he wants and