The Ghost in the White House | Page 6

what he is willing to do with what he gets?
What can the man in the White House hope to accomplish for a people
with whom it is the constitutional and regular thing to be as lonely as
this?
I have wanted to consider what can be done, and done now not to have
a lonely President the next four years.
The first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the next
election a man for the White House a great-hearted direct and free
people will not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things
that will back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand,
and not let 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The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of
date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to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 Æolian 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 Château-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves,
into treating