BOOK FIVE

      GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK


      CHAPTER V

      THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!"

      OUR American President, if one merely reads what the Con-
      stitution says about him, is a rather weak-looking character.

      The founders of the country did not intend him to be anybody
      in particular—if it could be helped. They were discouraged
      about allowing governments to be efficient. Not very much
      that was constructive to do was handed over to him. And
      the most important power they thought it would do for him to
      have was the veto or power to say "No."

      Possibly if our fathers had believed in liberty more they
      would have allowed more people to have some; or if they had
      believed in democracy more, or trusted the people more, they
      would have thought it would do to let them have leaders, but
      they had just got away. They felt timid about human
      nature and decided that the less constructive the government
      was and the less chance the government had to be concrete, to
      interpret a people, to make opportunities and turn out events,
      the better.

      Looked at at first sight no more elaborate, impenetrable,
      water-tight arrangement for keeping a government from letting
      in an idea or ever having one of its own or ever doing anything
      for anybody, could have been conceived than the Constitution
      of the United States, as the average President interprets it.

      Each branch of the government is arranged carefully to keep
      any other branch from doing anything, and then the people,
      every four years, look the whole country over for some new man
      they think will probably leave them alone more than anybody
      —and put him in for President.

      Looking at it narrowly and by itself, all that a President [466]
      selected like this could ever expect in America to put in his
      time on, would seem to be—being the country's most impor-
      tantly helpless man—the man who has been given the honour
      of being a somewhat more prominent failure in America than
      anyone else would be allowed to be.

      He stops people for four years. Other people stop him for
      four years. Then with a long happy sigh, at the end of his
      term, he slips back into real life and begins to do things.

      This has been the more or less sedately disguised career of
      the typical American President. Merely reading the Con-
      stitution or the lives of the Presidents, without looking at what
      has been happening to the habits of the people in the last few
      years, we might all be asking to-day, "What is there that is
      really constructive that President Wilson can do?" What is
      there that is going to prevent him, with all that moral earnest-
      ness dammed up in him, that sense of duty, that Presbyterian
      sense of other people's duties—what is there that is going to
      prevent him, with his school-book habits, his ideals, his
      volumes of American history, from being a teachery or preach-
      ery person—a kind of Schoolmaster or Official Clergyman to
      Business?

      News.

      The one really important and imperative thing to the people
      of this country to-day is News. In spite of newspapers, authors,
      College presidents, Bank presidents, Socialist agitators, Bill
      Heywoods, and Trusts, the people are bound to get this news,
      and any man who is so placed by his prominence that he can
      scoop up the news of a country, hammer its news together
      into events the papers will report, express news in the laws,
      build news into men who can make laws and unmake laws, any
      man who is so placed that directly or indirectly he takes
      news, forces it in by hydraulic pressure where people see
      it doing things, who takes news and crowds it into courts,
      crowds news into lawyers and into legislatures, pries some
      of it even into newspapers, can have, the ordinary American [467]
      says to-day, as much leeway in this government as he likes.

      The ordinary American has never been able to understand
      the objection important people have—that nearly everybody
      has (except ordinary people) to news—especially editors and
      publishers.

      It is an old story. Every one must have noticed it. One
      set of people in this world, always from the beginning, trying to
      climb up on the housetops to tell news, and another set of people
      hurrying up always and saying, "Hush, Hush!" Some days it
      seems, when I read the papers, that I hear half the world
      saying under its breath, a vast, stentorian, "Shoo! shoo! SHSH!
      SHSH!"

      Then I realize I live in an editor's world. I am expected to
      be in the world that editors have decided on the whole to let
      me be in.

      Of course I did not know what to do at first when this came
      over me.

      I naturally began to try to think of some way of cutting
      across lots, of climbing up to News.

      I looked at all the neat little park paths, with all those artistic
      curves of truth on them the editors have laid out for me and for
      all of us. Then I looked at the world and asked myself, "Who
      are the men in this world, if any, who are able to walk on the
      Grass, who cut across the little park paths when they like?"

      And as fate would have it (it was during the Roosevelt
      administration), the first two men I came on who seemed to be
      stamping about in the newspapers quite a little as they liked
      were the Prime Minister of England and the President of the
      United States.

      Just how much governing can a President do?

      How many columns a day is he good for, how many acres of
      attention every morning in the papers of the country—all these
      white fields of attention, these acres of other people's thoughts,
      can he cover?

      How many sticks a day can he make compositors set up of [468]
      what he thinks?

      How many square miles of the people's thoughts can he
      spread out at breakfast tables, lift up in a thousand thousand
      trolleys before their faces?

      I have seen the white fields of attention filled with the
      footprints of his thoughts, of his will, of his desires!

      I have seen that the President is the Editor of that vast,
      anonymous, silent newspaper, written all the night, written all
      the day, and softly published across a country—the news-
      paper of people's thoughts.

      I have seen the vision of the forests he has cast down, ground
      into headlines, into editorials, into news. Mountains and hills
      are laid bare to say what he thinks. Thousands of presses throb
      softly and the white reels of wood pulp fly into speech.
      Thousands of miles of paper wet with the thoughts of a people
      roll dimly under ground in the night.

      The President is saying Look! in the night!

      The newsboys hasten out in the dawn. They cry in the
      streets!
 


      CHAPTER VI

      THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE YOU?"

      IF NEWS is governing, how does the President do his
      governing?

      By being News, himself.

      By using his appointing power and putting other men who
      are News Themselves, news about American human nature
      —where all the people will see it.

      By telling the people directly (when he feels especially asked)
      news about what is happening in his mind—news about
      what he believes.

      By telling the people sometimes (as candidly as he can
      without giving the people's enemies a chance to stop him),
      what he is going to do next, sketching out in order of time,
      and in order of importance, his program of issues.

      By telling the people news about their best business men,
      the business men and inventors who, in their daily business,
      free the energies, unshackle the minds and emancipate the
      genius of the people.

      By telling these business men news about the people—and
      interpreting the people to them.

      . . . . . . .

      It is by being news to the people himself that all the other
      news a President can get into his government counts.

      A man is a man according to the amount of news there is
      in him.

      There are twenty personal traits in a President which of
      themselves would all be national news of the first importance
      if he had them. The bare fact that a President could have
      certain traits at all and still get to be a President in this country, 
      [470]
      would be news.

      One of the most important facts about news is that while it
      can be distributed by machines, machines cannot make it,
      and as a rule they do not understand it. Important and
      critical news is almost always fresh and made by hand the
      first time. Most of the popular news as to what is practical
      in American politics for the last forty years has been produced
      by political machines, and of course men who were a good
      deal like machines were the best men to finish the ideas off and
      to carry them out.

      As a result of course, all the really big leaders for the last
      forty years, our most powerful and interesting personalities
      have been shut out from being President of the United States.
      The White House was merely being run as machinery and did
      not interest them. They watched it grinding its ideas faithfully
      out from year to year of what America was like and what
      American politicians were like, and finally at last in the clatter of
      the machines there rings out suddenly across the land a shot that
      no machinery had allowed for. Before anyone knows almost
      there slips suddenly by the side door into the White House a
      really interesting man, and suddenly, all in one minute, almost,
      this man makes being President of the United States the most in-
      teresting lively and athletic feat in the country. And now, ap-
      parently that the idea has been worked out in public before every-
      body, by hand, as it were, that a man can be alive and interesting
      all over, can have at least a little touch of news about him and
      still be a President in this country, another man with some news
      in him has been allowed to us and suddenly politics throughout
      all America has become a totally new revealing profession, and
      men, instead of being selected because they were blurred per-
      sonalities, the ghosts of compromises, would-be everybodies—
      men who had not decided who they were, and who could not
      settle down and let people know which of their characters
      they had hit on at last to be really theirs, men who had no
      cutting edge to do things, screw-drivers trying to be chisels—[471]
      were revealed to our people at last as vague, mean, other-
      worldly persons, not fitting into our real American world at all,
      and hopelessly visionary and impracticable in American politics.

      And now one more handmade man has been allowed to us.

      The machines run very still in the White House.

      The people of this country no longer go by the White House
      on their way to their business and just hear it humdrumming
      and humdrumming behind the windows as of yore. The nation
      stands in crowds around the gates and would like to see in.
      The people wonder. They wonder a million columns a day
      what is inside.

      What is inside?

      An American who governs by being news, himself.

      The first thing that the people demand from our President
      now is that he shall be news himself. The news that they
      have selected to know first during the next four years—have
      put into the White House to know first is Woodrow Wilson.

      "Who are you, Woodrow Wilson, in God's name?" the
      steeples and smoking chimneys, the bells and whistles, the
      Yales and Harvards, and the little country schools, the crowds
      in the streets, and the corn in the fields all say, "Who Are
      You?"

      Then the people listen. They listen to his "I wills" and
      "I won'ts" for news about him. They look for news about
      him in the headlines he steers into the papers every morning,
      in the events he makes happen, in the editorials he makes men
      think of, in the men he calls up and puts on the National Wire
      —in all these, slowly, daily, hourly they drink up their long.
      patient, hopeful answer to their question. "Who Are You,
      Woodrow Wilson?"
 


      CHAPTER VII

      THE PEOPLE SAY" WHO ARE WE?"

      BUT if the President governs first by being news himself,
      he governs second by his appointments, by gathering about
      him other men who are news to people, too.

      One need not divide people into good and bad, because the
      true line of division between good and bad instead of being
      between one man and another, is apt to be as a matter of fact
      and experience cut down through the middle of each of us.

      But for the purposes of public action and decision and getting
      good things done, this line does seem to be cut farther over in
      the middle of some of us, than it is in others. Taking a life-
      average in any moral or social engineering feat, in any correct
      calculation of structural strain, how far over this line cuts
      through in a man, has to be reckoned with.

      The president by appointing certain men to office, saying
      "I will" and "I won't" to certain types of men, in saying who
      shall be studied by the people, who shall be read as documents
      of our national life, puts, if not the most important, at least
      the most lively and telling news about his administration into
      print.

      We watch our President acting for us, telling us news
      about what we are like, sorting men out around him the way
      ninety million people would sort them out if they were there
      to do it.

      The President's appointments may be said to be in a way
      the breath of the nation.

      A nation has to breathe, and the plain fact seems to be that
      certain kinds of people have to be breathed out of a nation and
      other kinds of people have to be breathed in. The way a Presi- [473]
      dent appoints men to office is his way of letting a nation breathe.

      With all his attractive qualities, perhaps it is because Mr.
      Taft did not quite let the nation breathe, and suffocated it
      a little that there came such an outbreak at the end. Perhaps it
      is because Mr. Taft looked at Mr. Ballinger and then looked at
      Mr. Pinchot, all the people of the country all the while looking
      on, and said, "Ballinger is the kind of man our people prefer,
      and Pinchot is not," that the people broke out so amazingly, so
      incredibly, and decided by such an enormous majority that a
      man who could pick out men for them like this would not do
      —as things are just now anyway—for a President of the
      United States.