BOOK FIVE

      GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK


      CHAPTER VIII

      NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT

      A nation wakes up every morning and for one minute before
      it runs to its work it says to its President, "HERE WE ARE !"

      The best a President can do in the way of a plain, everyday
      acknowledgment of the presence of the people is News.

      The news that the people are demanding from the President
      to-day is intensely personal. It is a kind of rough, butting,
      good-natured familiarity a great people has with its President,
      a little heedless, relentless, like some splendid Child, ready to
      forgive and expecting to be forgiven, it jostles in upon him
      daily, "Here we are! What are you believing this morning?
      Did you believe in us yesterday? Did you act as if you believed
      in us? Did you get anybody to believe in us? Who are
      the men you say are like us? What are they like this
      morning?

      "We have asked a hundred times; we can only ask it once
      more. How do you think you are turning out yourself, Mr.
      President? Are you what you thought you would be? Do
      you think it is a good time for us to decide this morning what
      you are really like? And, after all, Mr. President—if you
      please—who are you? And once more, Mr. President, in
      God's name, who are we?"

      This is always the gist of what it says, "Who are we?"

      It is the people's main point, after all, asking a President
      who they are, wondering if he can interpret them.

      Then he shuts his door and thinks, or he calls his Cabinet
      and thinks.

      Rows of little-great men file by all day. They stand each
      a few minutes with his little Speck or Dot of the People in his [475]
      hands, and they say, "This is the People."

      He listens.

      It is very hard to be always President of the People when one
      is listening and the little-great go by.

      One has to go back a little, in the night perhaps, or when one
      is quite alone. He sees again the Child; it is what he is in
      the White House for, he remembers, to express this dumb giant,
      this mighty Child, half weary, half glad, standing there by day
      by night, saying, "Who are we?" One would think it would
      be hard to be glib with the Child.

      Sometimes it is so deep and silent!

      Once when It broke in on Lincoln in this way and said, "Who
      are we?" he prayed.
 


      CHAPTER IX

      NEWS-MEN

      IT SEEMS very difficult to get news through as to who we
      really are to a President. When I look about me and see what
      the President's ways are of telling news about himself to us,
      I see that he is not without his advantages. But when I look
      about to see what conveniences we have as a people for telling
      our President news about us, I note some curious things. The
      fears of the American people, the fears and threats of labour
      and capital are organized and expressed, but their faiths, their
      wills, the things in them that make them go and that make
      them America, are not organized and are not expressed.

      The labour unions are afraid and say, "We will not work,"
      to their employers, "You cannot make us work." The Presi-
      dent hears this. It is about all they say.

      The capitalists and employers are afraid and they say, "We
      will not pay," "You cannot make us pay."

      Shall the President act as if these men represent Labor and
      Capital?

      We say, "No."

      Neither of these groups of men express real live American
      labour or real live characteristic American money.

      American money is free, bold, manful, generous and courage-
      ous to a fault. American money swings out in mighty enter-
      prises, shrewdly believing things, imperiously singing things
      out of its way.

      A singing people want a singing government. How is our
      President going to hear our labour and our money sing?

      Pinchot expressed us, not Ballinger.

      Mr. Pinchot is no mere uplifter or missionary. He is an [477]
      artist in expressing America to a President. If we have a
      President who will not listen to a man like Pinchot, let us try
      a President that will.

      Pinchot—an American millionaire with a fortune made
      out of forests, who is spending the fortune in protecting the
      forests for the nation, is the kind of American Americans like to
      set up before a President to say what Americans are like.
      Millions of men stand by Pinchot. We like the way he makes
      money sing.

      Tom L. Johnson—an American millionaire who made his
      money in the ordinary humdrum way, by getting valuable
      street railway franchises out of a city for nothing—has the
      courage to turn around, spend his fortune and spend it all, in
      keeping other people from doing it.

      America presents Tom L. Johnson to a President with its
      compliments and says, "This is what America is like."

      It may not look always as if Tom L. Johnson were America—
      America in miniature. But millions of us say he is. He makes
      money sing.

      We want a President—millions of us want him—and this
      is the most important news about us, who expects money in
      this country to sing.

      We want our money and expect our money in this country
      to stop saying mean things about us, things that make us
      ashamed to look a true newspaper in the face, or one another
      in the face, and that humiliate us before the world.

      . . . . . . .

      And now I have come to an awkward place in this book where
      I hope the reader will help me all he can.

      There is nothing to do but to let out the real truth and face
      the music. The fact is, Gentle Reader—perhaps you have
      suspected it all along—that if it had not been for fear of
      mixing my book all up with him and making it a kind of arena
      or tournament instead of a book, I would have mentioned [478]
      ex-President Roosevelt before this. He has been getting in or
      nearly getting in to nearly every chapter so far, but of course
      I knew, as anyone would, that he would spoil all the calm
      equipoise, the quiet onward flowing of the Stream of Thought,
      and with one chapter after the other, with each as the crisis
      came up, though I scarcely know how, I have managed to keep
      him out. And now, oh, Gentle Reader, here he is! I know
      very well that he is in everything, and right in the middle of
      everything, and that in a kind of splendid mixed happy up-
      roarious way, there somehow has to be a great to-do the moment
      he appears. The beautiful clear water, the lucid depth of
      Thought—will all become (ah, I know it too well, Gentle
      Reader) all thunder and spray and underneath the mighty
      grinding of the wheels—the wheels of the Nation and the
      Mowing Machine of Time, and in the background—in the
      red background of the Dawn, there will be the face of Theo-
      dore—just the face of Theodore in this book shining at us
      —readers and writer and all—out of a huge rosy mist!

      But I have been driven to it. The fact seems to be that
      I must find at just this point in the book, if I can, a word.
      And the word will have to be a word, too, that everybody knows,
      and that conveys a lively sense to everybody the moment it is
      used—of certain tone or quality, or hum or murmur of being.
      No one regrets this more than I, because it is so unwieldy
      and inconvenient and always bulges out in a sentence or a
      book or a nation more than it was meant to, but the word
      ROOSEVELT, R O O S E V E L T, happens to be the word that
      people in this country, and very largely in other nations, and in
      all languages have chosen and are using every day to express to
      one another a certain American quality or tone now abroad in
      our world—a certain hum, as one might say, or whirr of
      goodness.

      This particular hum, or whirr of goodness, which is instantly
      associated with the word Roosevelt, expresses, except that of
      course it over-expresses, a part of the news to-day about [479]
      America which we want our President to read.

      One cannot help wondering why it is that if one wanted to
      express to the largest number of people in the world a certain
      quality of goodness, the word Roosevelt would do it best.

      I am not dealing for the purpose of this book in what Mr.
      Roosevelt's goodness is or whether it is what he thinks it is.
      We might all disagree about that. I am dealing quite strictly
      in this connection with what even his enemies would say is his
      almost egregious success in advertising goodness. While we
      might all disagree as to his goodness being the kind that he
      or anyone ought to love, we would not fail to agree that it
      is his love of his own goodness, such as it is, and his holding
      on to it, and his love of other people's and his love of getting
      his goodness and their goodness together, that has made him
      the most unconcealed person in modern life. These qualities
      have established him, with his ability raised to the nth power
      of attracting attention to anything he likes, as the world's
      greatest News Man—the world's greatest living energy to-day
      in advertising what is good and what is bad in our American
      temperament.

      Even the people who disagree with him or dislike him—many
      of them would have to fall back on using the word roosevelt,
      or rather the verb to roosevelt.

      It does not seem to be because his goodness in itself is extra-
      ordinary. It is even, for that matter, in the sense that anybody
      could have it, or some more just like it, a little common.

      What seems to be uncommon and really distinguished about
      Mr. Roosevelt is the way he feels about his goodness, and the
      way he grips hold of it, and the way he makes it grip hold of
      other people—practically anybody almost, who is standing
      by. Even if they are merely going by in automobiles, sometimes
      they catch some. I do not imagine that his worst enemies,
      however seriously they may question the general desirability
      or safety of having so much goodness roosevelting around,
      would fail to admit his own real enthusiasm about goodness [480]
      anywhere he finds it indiscriminately, whether it is his own or
      other people's. He grips hold of it, and grips like a cable
      car—instantly.

      His enthusiasm is so great that many people are nonplussed
      by it. The enthusiasm must really be in spite of appearances
      about something else, something wicked in behind, they think,
      and not really about goodness. An entire stranger would not
      quite believe it. It would be too original in him, they would
      say, or in anybody, to care so about goodness.

      If one could watch the expression in Mr. Roosevelt's face or
      his manner while he is in the act of having a virtue and if one
      could not see plainly from where one was, just what it was he
      was doing, one would at once conclude that it must be some
      vice he is having. He looks happy and as if it were some stolen
      secret. There is always that manner of his when he is caught
      doing right, as if one were to say "Now, at last, I have got it!"

      He does right like a boy with his mouth full of jam, and this
      seems to be true not only when, with a whole public following
      and two or three nations besides, and all the newspapers, he
      goes off on an orgy of righteousness, makes the grand tour of
      Europe, and has the time of his life. It is the steady-burning
      under enthusiasm with him all the while. The spectacle of
      a good man doing a tremendous good thing affects Theodore
      Roosevelt like one of the great forces of nature, like Niagara
      Falls, like the screws of the Mauretania, or any other huge,
      happy thing that is having its way against fear; against weak-
      ness, or against small terrified goodness.

      Mr. Roosevelt in doing right conveys the sense of enjoying
      it so himself that he has made almost an art form of public
      righteousness. He has found his most complete, his most
      naive, instinctive self-expression in it, and while we have had
      goodness in public men before, we have had no man who has
      been such an international chromo for goodness, who has made
      such a big, comfortable "He-who-runs-may-read" bill-poster
      for doing right as Roosevelt. Other men have done things [481]
      that were good to do, but the very inmost muscle and marrow
      of goodness itself, goodness with teeth, with a fist, goodness
      that smiled, that ha-ha'd, and that leaped and danced—per-
      petual motion of goodness, goodness that reeked—has been
      reserved for Theodore Roosevelt. We have had goodness
      that was bland or proper, and goodness that was pious
      or sentimental and sang, "Nearer My God to Thee," or
      goodness that was kind and mushy, but this goodness with a
      glad look and bounding heart, goodness with an iron hand, we
      have not had before. It is Mr. Roosevelt's goodness that has
      made him interesting in Cairo, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. He
      has been conducting a grand tour of goodness. He has been
      a colossal drummer of goodness, conducting an advertising
      campaign. He has proved himself a master salesman for
      moral values. And he has put the American character,
      its hope, its energy, on the markets and on the credits of the
      world.

      With all his faults, those big, daring, yawning fissures in him,
      he is news about us, faults and all. Though I may be, as I cer-
      tainly am much of the time, standing and looking across at
      him, across an abyss of temperament that God cut down be-
      tween us thousands of years ago, and while he may have a
      score of traits I would not like and others that no one would
      like in anyone else, there he is storming out at me with his
      goodness! It is his way—God help him!—God be praised for
      him! There he is!

      I know an American when I see one. He is a man who is
      singing.

      A man who is singing is a man who is so shrewd about people
      that he sees more in them than they see in themselves and who
      does things so shrewdly in behalf of God, that when God looks
      upon him he delights in him. Then God falls to of course
      and helps him do them.

      When American men saw that there was a man among them
      who was taking a thing like the Presidency of the United States [482]
      (that most people never run risks with) and putting it up before
      everybody, and using it grimly as a magnificent bet on the
      people, they looked up. Millions of men leaped in their hearts
      and as they saw him they knew that they were like him!

      So did Theodore Roosevelt become news about Us.