The Ghost in the White House | Page 7

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 four years to make the
Body-Politic people take the Body-Politic and what happens to the
Body-Politic as if it were as substantial as a coal strike--as what
happened at Ypres, Cambrai and Château-Thierry.
Otherwise we are a nation of whiners and yearners and are not what we
pretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the Germans and the rest
of the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy.
I believe that the best things the Old World has said about us and hoped
for us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation of
idealists, are true to the American character and real.
But they are not actual. We are the world's colossal tragic Adolescent.
Forty nations are depending on us--are waiting for us--in the world's
long desperate minutes--waiting for America to grow up.
This nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism and
religion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of its daily
producing, buying and selling, and no more. Any big beautiful
evaporated Body-Politic we have or try to think we can have aside from
this body--this actual working through of our patriotism, our
democracy and our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy,
unclean and threatens in its one desperate and critical moment the fate

of a world.
All really religious men and all real patriots know this.
In a democracy like ours a religion which is not occupied all day every
day in this year of our Lord 1920 in making democracy work, a religion
that loafs off into a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, a
religion that cannot be used to run steel mills so that men won't go to
hell in them and to run coal mines so that men won't be in hell already,
is not a religion at all. And a nation that sheds tears over three hundred
thousand disabled and crippled soldiers, who gave up their jobs and
sailed six thousand miles to die for them, and that has finally managed
to get new jobs for just two hundred and seventeen of the three hundred
thousand and taken nineteen months to do it, illustrates what it
means--in just one simple item--for a hundred million people, to try to
be good without a body.
But it is not only in behalf of its helplessness with the President I am
groping in these pages for a body for the Public.
The reason that the Public in dealing in its daily business with powerful
persons of any kind--whether good or bad, whether a President or
anybody, is taken advantage of and does not get what it wants, is that
the Public is a Ghost.
Theoretically all powerful persons, predatory Trusts, profiteering labor
unions and the wrong kind of politicians always speak respectfully to
the Public, but when they want something that belongs to the Public
they find the Public is an Abstraction and help themselves. They act
when with the Public, as if the Public was not there.
The only way this is ever going to be stopped is for us to make a
spontaneous voluntary popular start in this country toward having a
body for people in general, towards giving a hundred million people in
dealing with their politicians, their trusts and labor unions, less
bodilessness. We propose to give a hundred million people a face, a
voice, a presence, a backbone, a grip.

Then all the people we ask things of who think we can be whoofed
away, will pay attention to us.

V
THE GHOST RECEIVES AN INVITATION
Being allowed to live a week to-day means as much as being allowed
to live a whole life four years ago or perhaps four years from now.
We are being allowed to live in the splendid desperate moment of the
world.
International war ending to-night.
To-morrow morning a thousand civil wars breaking out in a