The Ghost in the White House | Page 3

that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the one that
will be underwritten by the people.
The people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward the
great coming political conventions and the questions and the men that
will come up in them. We are on the whole, in spite of the low estimate
the majority of politicians have of us, straight-minded and free-hearted
people, shrewd, masterful and devout, praying with one hand and
keeping from being fooled with the other and we want our public men
to have courage and vision for themselves and for us. We give notice
that thousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and
fuddly politicians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by
the people, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world.
This nation is facing the most colossal, most serious and godlike
moment any nation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the
presence of forty nations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own
grim appalling hope, to be trifled with.
So far as any one can see with the naked eye the quickest and surest
way to get past the politicians, to remind the politicians of the real spirit
of the people, to loom up the face of the people before their eyes and
make them suddenly take the people more seriously than they take
themselves, is with a book. In a book a President can be nominated by
acclamation--by a kind of silent acclamation. In a book, without giving
any name or pointing anybody out at least the soul of a President can be
ordered by a people.
We will publish upon the housetops the hopes and the prayers and the
wills of the people.

Then let the conventions feel the housetops looking down on them
when they meet.
In a book published in a hundred newspapers one week, wedged into
covers across a nation another, the people with one single national
stroke can put what they want before the country--a hundred million
people in a book can rise to make a motion.
We will not wait to be cornered by our politicians into a convention to
which we cannot go. We will not wait to be told three months too late,
to pick out--out of two men we did not want, the man we will have to
take. The short-cut way for us as the people of this country to take the
initiative with our politicians and to make the politicians toe our line,
instead of toeing theirs, is for the people to blurt out the truth, write a
book, get in early beforehand their quiet word with both great parties
and tell them whatever his name is, whatever his party is, the kind of
President they want.
So here it is, such as it is, the book, a little politically innocent-looking
thing perhaps, just engaged in being like folks instead of like politicians,
just engaged in being human--in letting a nation speak and act as a
human being speaks and acts, in a great simple sublime human crisis in
which with forty nations looking on, we are making democracy
work--making a loophole for the fate of the world.
* * * * *
I am trying to answer three questions.
What shall the new President believe about the people and expect of the
people?
What shall the new people--people made new by this war, expect of
themselves and expect of their new President?
What kind of a President, with what kind of a personality or
temperament do the people feel would be the best kind of a President to
pull them together, to help the people do what the people have to do?

I have wanted to bring forward a way in which the things the new
President will expect the people to do, can be done by the people.
What the people want done, especially with regard to the Red Flag,
predatory capital, predatory labor, and the fifty-cent dollar cannot be
done by the President for them, and they are not going to do it
themselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standing
around three thousand miles apart or in any other way than by
voluntarily agreeing to get together and do it together.

BOOK I
WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE

I
GIST
The Crowd is my Hero.
The Hero of this book is a hundred million people.
I have come to have the feeling--especially in regard to political
conventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestions
just now as to how a hundred million people can strike--make
themselves more substantial, more important in this country, so that we
shall