The Ghost in the White House | Page 8

thousand
nations--between classes--unless we all do our seeing and do our living
swiftly and do it together swiftly to-day.
When one-tenth of the people of America tell the President of the
United States and nine-tenths of the people that they cannot have any
coal unless they do what the one-tenth say; when another one-tenth of
the people tell the nine-tenths that they cannot have anything to eat, and
another one-tenth tell them that they cannot have anything to wear until
the one-tenth get what they want, just how much more democratic
America is than Germany it is difficult to say; and just why anybody
should suppose the emergency is over it is difficult to say. The idea of
getting what you want by hold-up which has been taught to labor by
capital, is now getting ready to be used by labor and capital both, and
by everybody.
The really great immediate universal emergency to-day in America is
the holdup. We get rid of one Kaiser other people have three thousand
miles away, to get instead five thousand Kaisers we have to live with
next door here at home, that we have to ask things of and say "please"
to every time we cook, every time we eat, every time we buy something
to wear.

The emergency is not only immediate but it is universal, all the people
are concerned in meeting it all the time. We have said to one another
and to everybody for four years that what we have all been sacrificing
for and dying for these four years is to make the world safe for
democracy.
This was our emergency. We were right. The emergency we are
meeting now is to make democracy safe for the world. If the Kaiser
wanted to dream his wildest dream of autocratic sneer and autocratic
hate he would have dreamed US; he would have dreamed what we will
be unless the men and women of America--especially the men and
women of America formerly active in the Red Cross, shall meet the
emergency and undertake in behalf of the people to prove to the people
how (if anybody will go about and look it up) industrial democracy in
America in distinction from industrial autocracy, really works.
If it works for some of us in some places, let twenty million
people--Red Cross people get up and say across this land in every
village, town and city, it shall work now in all places for all of us. And
then take steps--all of them every morning, every afternoon, getting
together as they did in the Red Cross, to see to it that the whole town
and everybody in it does something about it.
When the soldiers of the American army we were all helping in the Red
Cross stop fighting the Germans, come home, divide off into classes
and begin fighting one another, why--because now the soldiers we have
been helping need us more, because now all day every day they need us
more than they ever dreamed of needing us when they were merely
fighting Germans--why should we stop helping them?
On the day after the armistice--the very day when our war with just
Germans was over, when the deeper, realer, more intimate, more
desperate war Germany had precipitated upon all nations with
themselves, begins, why should the men and women who had been
working every afternoon for the men of this nation, in the Red Cross,
talk about reducing to a peace basis?
The people in the Red Cross have been having in the last three years

the vision of backing up an army of four million men fighting for the
liberties of the world, but the vision that is before us now--before the
same people--that we must meet and meet desperately and quickly is
the vision of backing up an army of a hundred million men, women and
children fighting for their own liberties in their own dooryards, fighting
for the liberty to eat at their own tables, to sleep in their own beds, and
to wear clothes on their backs, in a country which we have told the
Germans is the greatest machinery of freedom, the greatest engine of
democracy in the world.
I will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have made
the Red Cross what it was, who have made the Red Cross the trusted
representative of American democracy in all nations, who now find
themselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime,
most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy
to a world, I will not believe that these men and women are going to
lose their grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty
nations, forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters
they have