The Ghost in the White House | Page 9

helped before.
The logical thing at this great moment for the people who made the
Red Cross to do--the thing they alone have the record, the
teamwork-drill, the experience, the machinery, the momentum to do, is
to keep on following the fighters, rendering first aid to the fighters
moving on with their first-aid from fighters for the rights of the people
not to be bullied by kings, to fighters for the rights of all classes of
people not to be bullied by everybody, not to be bullied by one another.

VI
WHAT A BODY FOR THE GHOST WOULD BE LIKE
I have always wanted to write a book an employer and a workman
could read looking over each other's shoulders. I would have two
chapters on every subject. In one chapter I would tell the employer
things his workman wants him to know, and in the next chapter I would

tell the workman things that for years the employer has been trying to
get him to notice. I would begin each chapter in such a way that no
employer or workman would ever know which was which, or which
was his chapter, until he had got in quite a little way; and I would do
my best to have everybody read each other's chapters all through the
book. An employer would be reading along in his chapter as innocent
as you please, and slap his leg and say, "THAT'S IT! THAT'S IT! It
does me good to think my workmen are reading this!" And then he
would turn over the leaf and he would come plump full head on into
three paragraphs about himself and about how the public feels about
him, and about how his workmen feel about him, and about what God
is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my book
are going to help God to do to him, that will make him think. The first
thing he will think of perhaps will be to lay down the book. Then
before he knows it he will see another of those things he wants his
workmen to read softly poking itself out of the page at him. Then he
will slap his leg and think how I am making his workmen think. So he
will go through the book slapping his leg and shouting "Amen" in one
chapter, and sitting still and thinking in the next.
This is the gist of what I propose a new organization shall do on a
national scale.
It may seem a rather simple-minded way to describe what I propose a
great aggregation of American men and women on the scale of the Red
Cross, should do, but the soul, the spirit, the temperament, even the
technique of what I have in mind--in miniature, is in it.
It is true that it would be a certain satisfaction of course to an author to
prove to employers and employees that they could get on better
together than they could apart, even if they got on together better only
in a kind of secret and private way in the pages of his own book; and it
is true that a book in which I could make an employer and an employee
work their minds together through my own little fountain pen would
count some. I would at least be dramatizing my idea in ink.
But people do not believe ideas dramatized in ink.

The thing for an author or a man who has ideas to do if he must use
words, is to use words to make his ideas happen.
Then let him use words about them and write books about them to
advertise that they have happened.
People are more impressed with things that have happened than they
are with things that are perhaps going to. Instead of having employers
and employees go over the same ideas together in a book, I propose
that twenty million people, in ten thousand cities shall make them go
over the same ideas together in the shop.
Are capital and labor going to use the holdup on each other to get what
they want when six million dead men, still almost warm in their graves,
have died to prove that the holdup, or German way of getting things,
does not work? What the new League will be for will be to put before
the world, before every nation, before every village and city in its local
branch, a working vision of how different classes and different groups
of people can get what they want out of each other by trying things out
together, by touching each other's imaginations and advertising to each
other instead of blowing out each other's brains. The way to keep in
place our Bolshevists of America is to