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Contents |
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
CHAPTER IX
TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS
A MAN'S success in business to-day turns upon his power of
getting people to believe he has something that they want.
Success in business, in the last analysis, turns upon touching
the imagination of crowds. The reason that preachers in this
present generation are less successful in getting people to want
goodness than business men are in getting them to want motor-
cars, hats, and pianolas, is that business men as a class are more
close and desperate students of human nature, and have boned
down harder to the art of touching the imaginations of crowds.
When one considers what it is that touches a crowd's imagina-
tion and how it does it, one is bound is admit that there is not a
city anywhere which has not hundreds of men in it who could
do more to touch the imagination of crowds with goodness
than any clergyman could. A man of very great gifts in the
pulpit, a man of genius, even an immortal clergyman, could be
outwitted in the art of touching the imagination of crowds with
goodness by a comparatively ordinary man in anyone of several
hundred of our modern business occupations.
There is a certain nation I have in mind as I write, which I do
not like to call by name, because it is struggling with its faults
as the rest of us are with ours. But I do not think it would be
too much to say that this particular nation I have in mind—
and I leave the reader to fill in one for himself, has been deter-
mined in its national character for hundreds of years, and is
being determined to-day—every day, nearly every minute of
everyday, except when all the people are asleep—by a certain
personal habit that the people have. I am persuaded that this
habit of itself alone would have been enough to determine the [129]
fate of the nation as a third-rate power, that it would have made
it always do things with small pullings and haulings, in short
breaths, and hand-to-mouth insights—a little jerk of idealism
one day, and a little jerk of materialism the next—a kind of
national palavering, and see-sawing and gesturing, and talking
excitedly and with little flourishes. It is a nation that is always
shrugging its shoulders, that almost never seems to be capable
of doing a thing with fine directness, with long rhythms of pur-
pose or sustained feeling; and all because every man, woman,
and child in the country—scores of generations of them for
hundreds of years—has been taught that the great spiritual
truth or principle at the bottom of correctly and beautifully
buying a turnip is to begin by saying that you do not want a
turnip at all, that you never eat turnips, and none of your
family, and that they never would. The other man begins by
pointing out that he is never going to sell another turnip as
long as he lives, if he can help it. Gradually the facts are allowed
to edge in until at last, and when each man has taken off God
knows how much from the value of his soul, and spent two
shillings' worth of time on keeping a halfpenny in his pocket,
both parties separate courteously, only to carry out the same
spiritual truth on a radish perhaps or a spool of thread, or it
may be even a house and lot, or a battleship, or a war, or a
rumour of a war, with somebody.
The United States, speaking broadly, is not like this. But
it might have been.
In the United States some forty years ago, being a new
country, and being a country where everything a man did was
in the nature of things, felt to be a first experiment, everybody
felt democratic and independent, and as if he were making the
laws of the universe just for himself as he went along.
There was a period of ten years or so in which every spool of
thread and bit of dress goods—everything that people wore
on their bodies or put in their mouths, and everything that
they read, came up and had to be considered as an original first [130]
proposition, as if there never had been a spool of thread before,
as if each bit of dress goods was, or was capable of being, a new
fresh experiment, with an adventurous price on it; and before
we knew it a moral nagging and edging and hitching had set
in, and was fast becoming in America an American trait, and
fixing itself by daily repetition upon the imagination of the
people.
The shopping of a country is, on the whole, from a psycholo-
gist's point of view, the most spiritual energy, the most irrevo-
cable, most implacable meter there can ever be of the religion
a country really has.
There was no clergyman in America who could have made the
slightest impression on this great national list or trend of always
getting things for less than they were worth—this rut of never
doing as one would be done by. What was there that could
be done with an obstinate, pervasive, unceasing habit of the
people like this?
What was .there that could be done to touch the imagination
of the crowd?
Six thousand women a day were going in and out of A. T.
Stewart's great store on Broadway at that time. A. T. Stewart
announced to New York suddenly in huge letters one day, that
from that day forward there would be one price for everything
sold in his store, and that that price would be paid for it by
everybody.
A. T. Stewart's store was the largest, most successful,
original, and most closely watched store in America.
The six thousand women became one thousand.
Then two thousand. Some of them had found that they
finished their shopping sooner; the better class of women, those
whose time was worth the most, and whose custom was the
largest, gradually found they did not want to shop anywhere
else. The two thousand became three thousand, four thousand,
six thousand, ten thousand, twelve thousand.
Other department stores wanted the twelve thousand to [131]
come to them. They announced the one price.
Hardware stores did it. Groceries announced one price.
Then everybody.
Not all the clergymen in America, preaching every Sun-
day for months, could have done very much in the way of
seriously touching the imagination of the crowd on the moral
unworthiness, the intellectual degradation, the national danger
of picking out the one thing that nearly all the people all do,
and had to do, all day, every day, and making that thing mean,
incompetent, and small. No one had thought out what it would
lead to, and how monstrous and absurd it was and would always
be to have a nation have all its people taking every little thing
all day, every day, that they were buying, or that they
were selling—taking a spool of thread, for instance—and
packing it, or packing their action with it, as full of adulterated
motives and of fresh and original ways of not doing as they
would be done by as they could think up—a little innocent
spool of thread—wreaking all their sins and kinds of sins on it,
breaking everyone of the ten commandments on it as an
offering. . . .
It was A. T. Stewart, a very ordinary-looking, practical man
in a plain, everyday business, who arrested the attention of a
nation and changed the habit of thought and trend of mind
of a great people, and made them a candid, direct people, a
people that went with great sunny prairies and high mountains,
a yea and nay people, straightforward, and free from palavering
forever. A. T. Stewart was accustomed, in his own personal
dealings from day to day, to cut people short when they tried to
heckle with him. He liked to take things for granted, drive
through to the point, and go on to the next one. This might
have ended, of course, in a kind of cut de sac of being a merely
personal trait in a clean-cut, manful, straightforward American
gentleman; and if Stewart had been a snob or a Puritan, or had
felt superior, or if he had thought other people—the great
crowds of them who flocked through his store—could never [132]
expect to be as good as he was, nothing would ever have come
of it.
It is not likely that he was conscious of the long train of
spiritual results he had set in motion; of the way he had taken
the habit of mind, the daily, hourly psychology of a great people,
and had wrought it through with his own spirit; or of the way
he had saved up, and set where it could be used, everyday
religion in America, and had freed the business genius of a
nation for its most characteristic and most effective self-
expression.
He merely was conscious that he could not endure palavering
in doing business himself, and that he would not submit to being
obliged to endure it, and he believed millions of people in
America were as clean-cut and straightforward as he was.
And the millions of people stood by him.
Perhaps A. T. Stewart touched the imagination of the crowd
because he had let the crowd touch his and had seen what
crowds, in spite of appearances, were really like.
The enterprise of touching the imagination of the crowd with
goodness, which is being conducted every day on an enormous
scale around us, has to be carried on, like all huge enterprises,
by men who are in a large degree unconscious of it. There are
few department stores in England or America that would
expect to be called pious, but if one is deeply and obstinately
interested in the Golden Rule, and in getting crowds of people
to believe in it at a time, it is impossible not to think what
sweeps of opportunity department stores would have with
it—with the Golden Rule. With thousands of people flowing
in and out all the week, and with hundreds of clerks to attend
to it, eight hours a day, there would hardly seem to be any limit
to what such a store could do in making the Golden Rule a
direct, a pointed and personal thing, a thing that could not be
evaded and could not be forgotten by thousands of people.
The same people all going in and out of department stores, vast
congregations of them, eight hours a day, which ministers can [133]
only get at in small lots, three hundred or so, twenty minutes
a week, and can only get at with words even then—all of them
being convinced in terms they understand, and in terms they
keenly feel, convinced in hats that they will see over and over
again, convinced in velvets that they are going to put on and
off for years, in laces, in waistcoats, shoes, in dining-room chairs,
convinced in the very underclothes next to their skins, the
clothes they sleep in all night, in the very plates on which they
eat, while all the time they keep remembering, or being re-
minded, just how the things were bought, and just what was
claimed for them and what was not claimed for them, and think-
ing how the claims came true or how they did not.
. . . . . . .
I just saw lying on the table as I came through the hall a
moment ago a hat which (out of all the long rows of hats I can
see faintly reaching across the years) will always be to me a
memorable hat. I am free to say that, after all the ladies it
has been taken off to, my great memory of that hat is now and
always will be, as long as I live, the department store at which
I bought it, and the things the department store, before I got
through with it, managed to make the hat say.
I had been in the store the day before and selected, in broad
daylight, with a big mirror staring me out of countenance, a hat
which was a quarter of a size too large. To clinch the matter,
I had ordered four ventilating holes to be punched in it, and
had it sent to my rooms to be my hat—implacably my hat as
I supposed, for better for worse, for richer for poorer—always.
The next morning, after standing before a mirror and trying
hopefully for a few minutes to see if I could not look more
intelligent in the hat, I returned to the store firmly. I had
made up my mind that I would keep from looking the way that
that hat made me look, at any cost. The store was not
responsible according to the letter either for the hat or for the
way I looked in it. I had deliberately chosen it, looked at my- [134]
self in cold blood in it, had those dreadful, irremovable, eternal
air-holes dug into it. I would buy a new one. I jumped into
a cab, and a moment after I arrived .I found myself before the
clerk from whom I had bought it, with a new one on my head,
and was just reaching into my pocket for my purse when, to my
astonishment, I heard, or seemed to hear, the great Department
Store Itself, in the gentle accents of a young man with a yellow
moustache, saying: "I'm sorry"—all seven storys of it
gathering itself up softly, apparently, and saying "I'm sorry!"
The young man explained that he was afraid the hat was wrong
the day before, and thought he ought to have told me so, that
the store would not want me to pay for the mistake.
I came home a changed man. I had been hit by the Golden
Rule before in department stores, but always rather subtly—
never with such a broad, beautiful flourish! I made some
faint acknowledgment, I have forgotten what, and rushed out
of the store.
But I have never gone past the store since, on a 'bus, or in
a taxi, or sliding through the walkers on the street, but I have
looked up to it—to its big, quiet windows, its broad, honest
pillars fronting a world.
I take off my hat to it.
But it gave me more than a hat.
I think what a thousand department stores, stationed in a
thousand places on this old planet, could do in touching the
imagination of the world—every day, day by day, cityfuls
at a time.
I had found a department store that had absolutely identified
itself with my interests, that could act about a hat the way a
wife would—a department store that looked forward to a
permanent relation with me—a great live machine that could
be glad and sorry—that really took me in, knew how I felt
about things, cared how I looked as I walked down the street.
Sometimes I think of the poor, wounded, useless thing I took
back to them, those pitiless holes punched in it—just where no [135]
one else would ever have had them. I am human. I always feel
about the store, that great marble and glass Face, when I go by
it now as if, in spite of all the difficulties, it wanted me—to be
beautiful! I at least feel and know that the people who were
the brain, the daily moving consciousness behind the face—
wanted me to be a becoming customer to them. They did not
want to see me coming in, if it could possibly be helped, in that
hat any more!
. . . . . . .
I have told this little history of a gray hat, not because
it is in any way extraordinary, but because it is not. The
thing same, or something quite like it, expressing the same
spirit, might have happened in anyone of the best hundred
department stores in the world.
Most people can remember a time, only a very little while
ago, when clerks in our huge department stores or selling
machines were not expected to be people who would think of
things like this to do, or who would know how, or who would
think to consider them good business if they did.
The department store that based its success on selecting
clerks of a high order of human insight, that paid higher wages to
its clerks for their power of being believed in, for their personal
qualities and their shrewdness in helping people and a gift for
discovering mutual interests with everybody and for founding
permanent human relations with the public, had not been
thought of a little while ago.
All that had been thought of was the appearance of these
things. It was an employer's business, speaking generally,
to get all he could out of his clerks and have them get as little
as possible out of him. It was their business in their turn to
get as much money out of the public as they could get, and to
give the public as little in return as they dared.
The type of employer who liked to do business in this way,
and who believed in it, crowed over the world nearly every- [136]
where as the Practical Man. And for the time being certainly
it has to be admitted that he seemed the most successful.
Naturally there came to be a general impression among the
people that only certain lower orders of life and character could
be employed, or could stand being employed, in the great
department stores.
I used often to go into ____ 's. Everybody remembers it.
I went in, as a rule, in a helpless, waiting, married way, and as
a mere attache of the truly wise and good. All I ever did or
was expected to do was to stand by and look wise and discrim-
inating a minute about dress goods, when spoken to. I used
to put in my time looking behind the counters—all those busy,
pale, yellow-lighted people in little holes or stalls trying to be
human and natural in that long, low, indoor street of theirs,
crowds of women staring by them and picking at things.
Always that moving sidewalk of questions—that dull, eager
stream of consciousness sweeping by. No sunlight—just the
crowds of covetousness and shrewdness. I used to wonder
about the clerks, many of them, and what they would be like
at home or under an apple tree or each with a bit of blue sky
to go with them. They used to seem in those days, as I looked,
mostly poor, underground creatures living in a sort of Subway
of Things in a hateful, hard, little world of clothes, each with
his little study or trick or knack of appearances, standing there
and selling people their good looks day after day at so much
yard.
To-day, in a hundred cities one can go into department shops
where one would get, standing and looking on idly, totally
different impressions. There are hundreds of thousands of
young men and women who have made being a clerk a new
thing in the world. The public has already had its imagination
touched by them, and is beginning to deal with clerks, as a
class, on a different level.
This has been brought to pass because the employer has been
thought of, or has thought of himself, who engages and pays for [137]
in clerks the highest qualities in human nature that he can get.
He picks out and puts in power, and persuades to be clerks, peo-
ple who would have felt superior to it in days gone by—men
and women who habitually depend for their efficiency in show-
ing and selling goods upon their more generous emotions and
insights, their imaginations about other people. They gather
in their new customers, and keep up their long lists of old and
regular customers, through shrewd visions of service to people,
and through a technical gift for making the Golden Rule work.
When one looks at it practically, and from the point of view of
all the consequences, a bargain is the most spiritual, conclusive,
most self-revealing experience that people can have together.
Every bargain is a cross-section in three tenses of a man. A
bargain tells everything about people—who they are, and
what they are like. It also tells what they are going to be like
unless they take pains; and it tells what they are not going
to be like too sometimes, and why.
The man who comes nearest in modern life to being a Pope, is
the man who determines in what spirit and by what method the
people under him shall conduct his bargains and deal with his
customers. ____, at the head of his department store, has a
parish behind his counters of twenty-five hundred men and
women. He is in the business of determining their religion, the
way they make their religion work, eight hours a day, six days a
week. He seems to me to be engaged in the most ceaseless, most
penetrating, most powerful, and most spiritual activity of the
world. He is really getting at the imaginations of people with
his idea of goodness. If he does not work his way through to a
man's imagination one minute or one day, he does the next.
If he cannot open up a man's imagination with one line of goods,
he does it with another. If he cannot make him see things, and
do as he would be done by, with one kind of customer, another
is moved in front of him presently, and another, and another—
the man's inner substance is being attacked and changed nearly
every minute every day. There is nothing he can do, or keep [138]
from doing, in which his employer's idea of goodness does not
surround, besiege, or pursue him. Every officer of the staff,
every customer who slips softly up to the counter in front of
him makes him think of the Golden Rule in a new way or in
some shading of a new way—confronts him with the will, with
the expectation, with the religion of his employer.
In ____'s store (where I looked in a moment yesterday)
one thousand of the two thousand five hundred clerks are men.
If I were a minister wondering nearly every day how to work in
for my religion a fair chance at men, I should often look wist-
fully from over the edge of my pulpit, I imagine, to the head of
____'s department store, sitting at that quiet, calm,
empty looking desk of his in his little office at the top of his big
building in ____ Street, with nothing but those little six or
seven buttons he softly puts this thumbs on connecting him
with a thousand men.
And he does not even need the buttons. Every man knows
and feels, personally and intimately, what the man at the desk
is asking him to do with a particular customer who stands
before him at the moment. As soon as the customer is there,
the man at the desk practically is there too. His religion
works by wireless, and goes automatically, and as from a huge
stored-up reservoir, to all that happens in the place. He
makes regularly with his idea of goodness anywhere from twenty
to sixty pastoral calls (with every sale they make) on a thousand
men a day. He is not dependent, as the ordinary minister
often is, on their dying, or on their babies, or on their wives, for
a chance to get at men with his religion.
If I wanted to take a spiritual census of modern civilization
and get at the actual scientific facts, what we would have to
call, probably the foot-tons of religion in the world to-day, I
would not look for them in the year-books of the churches, I
would get them by going about in the great department stores,
by moving among the men and women in them day after day,
and standing by and looking on invisibly. Like a shadow or a [139]
light I would watch them registering their goodness daily,
hourly, on their counters, over their counters, measuring out
their souls before God in dress goods, shoes, boas, hats, silk,
and bread and butter!
This may not be true of the Orient, but it is true, and getting
to be more true every day, of Europe and America.
It is especially true of America. In the things which we
borrow in America, we are far behind the rest of the world.
It is to the things that we create, that we must look alone, for
our larger destiny, and our world-service.
Naturally, in so far as civilization is a race of borrowing,
nations like England and France and Germany a few hundred
miles apart from one another, set the pace for a nation that is
three thousand miles away from where it can borrow, like the
United States. It is a far cry from the land of the Greeks with
their still sunny temples and dreams, and from England with
its quiet-singing churches, to New York with its practical sky-
scraping hewing prayer!
New York—scooping its will out of the very heavens!
New York—the World's last, most stern, perhaps most man-
ful prayer of all—half-asking and half-grasping out of the
hand of God!
Here is America's religion! Half afraid at first, half glad,
slowly, solemnly triumphant, as on the edge of an abyss, I
have seen America's religion! I have seen my brother Ameri-
cans hewing it out—day by day, night by night, have I seen
them—in these huge steel sub-cellars of the sky!
I have accepted the challenge.
If it is not a religion, then it shall be to us a religion to make it
a religion.
The Metropolitan Tower with its big clock dial, with its
three stories of telling what time it is, and its great bell singing
hymns above the dizzy flocks of the skyscrapers, is the soul of
New York, to me.
If one could see a soul—if one could see the soul of New [140]
York, it would look more like the Metropolitan Tower than
anything else.
It seems to be trying to speak away up there in the white-
ness and the light, the very soul of the young resistless iron-
hearted city.
I write as an American. To me there is something about
it as I come up the harbour that fills my heart with a big ring-
ing, as if all the world were ringing, ringing once more—ringing
all over again—up in this white tower of ours in its new bit of
blue sky! I glory in England with it, in Greece, in Bethlehem.
It is as an outpost on Space and Time, for all of us gathering
up all history in it softly—once more and pointing it to God!
It is the last, the youngest-minded, the most buoyant tower
—the mighty Child among the steeples of the world. The
lonely towers of Cologne stretching with that grave and empty
nave against the sky, out of that old and faded region of religion,
far away, tremulously send greetings to it—to this white
tower in the west—to where it goes up with its crowds of
people in it, with business and with daily living and hoping and
dying in it, and strikes heaven!
It may be perhaps only the American blood in me. Perhaps
it is raw and new to be so happy. I do not know. I only
know that to me the Metropolitan Tower is saying something
that has been never quite said before—something that has
been given in some special sense to us as a trust from the world.
It is to me the steeple of democracy—of our democracy, Eng-
land's democracy—the world's democracy. The hollow
domes of Sts. Peter and Paul, and all the rest with their
vague, airy other-worldliness, all soaring and tugging like so
many balloons of religion and goodness, trying to get away from
this world—are not to me so splendid, so magnificently wilful
as the Metropolitan Tower—as the souls of these modern,
heaven-striking men, taking the world itself, at last, its streets
of stone, of steel, its very tunnels and lifting them up as blind
offerings, as unbounded instincts, as prayers, as songs to [141]
heaven!
I worship my country, my people, my city when I hear the
big bell in it and when I look up to where the tower is in that
still place like a sea—look up to where that little white coun-
try belfry sits in the light, in the dark above the vast and
roaring city!
To me, the Metropolitan Tower, sweeping up its prayer out
of the streets the way it does, and doing it, too, right beside that
little safe, tucked-in, trim, Sunday religion of the Madison
Square Presbyterian Church, lifts itself up as one of the mighty
signs and portents of our time. Have I not heard the bell
tolling to the people in the midst of business and singing great
hymns? A great city lifts itself and prays in it—prays while
it sings and clangs so absent-looking below.
I like to go out before going to sleep and take a look at it—
one more look before I sleep, upon the tower, strong, unyield-
ing, alive, sinewy, imperturbable, lifting up within itself the
steel and soul of the world. I am content to go to sleep.
It is a kind of steeple of the business of this world. I would
never have said that business needed a steeple before until I
saw the Metropolitan Tower and heard it singing above the
streets. But I had always wanted (without knowing it), in a
modern office building, a great solemn bell to remind us what
the common day was. I like to hear it striking a common
hour and what can be done in it. I stop in the street to listen
—to listen while that great hive of people tolls—tolls not the
reveries of monks above the roofs of the skyscrapers, but the
religion of business—of the real and daily things, the serious-
ness of the mighty street and the faces of the men and the
women.
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