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Contents |
BOOK ONE
CROWDS AND MACHINES
CHAPTER V
THE CROWD-MAN—AN INVENTION FOR
MAKING CROWDS SEE
WHEN Wilbur Wright flew around the Statue of Liberty in
New York the other day, his doing it was a big event; but a still
bigger event, as it seems to some of us, was the way he felt
about New York when he did it. All New York could not make
him show off. Hundreds of thousands of people on roofs could
look up at the sky over New York, for him to go by, all that they
liked. He slipped down to Washington without saying any-
thing, on the 3:25 train, to attend to flying as part of the serious
business of the world.
Why fly around a little town like New York, or show your
bright wings in the light, or circle the Statue of Liberty for
fun, when you are reconstructing civilization, and binding a
whole planet together, and wrapping the heavens close down
around the earth, and making railroads everywhere out of the
air? New York is always a little superficial and funny about
itself. All it needs to do, it seems to think, is to snap its fingers
at a man of genius anywhere on this broad world, whisper to
him pleasantly, and he will trot promptly up, of course, and do
his little turn for it.
But not Wilbur Wright. Wilbur Wright would not give two
million people an encore, or even come back to bow. As one
looked over from Mount Tom one could see all New York black
and solid on the tops of its roofs and houses looking up into a
great hole of air for him, and Wilbur Wright slipping quietly
off down to Washington and leaving them there, a whole great
city under the sky, with its heads up!
A little experience like this has been what New York has [59]
needed for a long time. It takes a scientist to do these things.
I wish there were some poet who would do as well. Even a
prophet up above New York—or seer of men and of years—
glinting his wings in the light, the New York Sun and the World
and the Times down below, all their opera-glasses trained on
him, and all those little funny reporters running helplessly
about, all the people pouring out from Doctor Parkhurst's
church to look up. . . . It would be something.
Probably there are very few capitals in the world—Paris,
Berlin, or London—that would not be profoundly stirred and
possibly much improved by having some man suddenly appear
up over them, who would be so interested in what he was doing
that he would forget to notice whether anybody was looking—
who would be capable of slipping off quietly and leaving an
entire city with its heads up, and going on and attending to
business.
There have been times when we would have been relieved,
some of us, if the North Pole could have been discovered in this
way and without large audiences tagging. There are some of
us who will never cease to regret as long as we live that the
North Pole could not have waited a little. We would rather
have had Wilbur Wright discover it. One can imagine how he
would do it: fly gracefully up to it all by himself, and discover it
some pleasant evening, and have it over with, and slip back on
his soft wings in the night, and not say anything about it. It
is this Wilbur Wright spirit that I would like to dwell on in these
pages. It seems to me it is a true modern spirit, the spirit
which alone could make our civilization great, and the spirit
which alone could make crowds great. It was the crowd that
spoiled the way the Pole was discovered—all the millions of
people, vast, thoughtless audiences piling in and making a show
of it. Many people in America, all the vast crowds reading
about it, seemed to feel that they were more important than the
Pole; and when Captain Peary came back, vast crowds of these
same people paid as much as five dollars apiece for the privilege [60]
of being in the same room with him. It was quite impossible
not to contrast Captain Peary in his attitude toward the crowd
and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and there will always
remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole was dis-
covered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it,
and the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to
be a Wilbur Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair.
All the while as he went about the country holding his little
exhibits of the tip of the planet we could not help wishing, many
of us who were in the Audience, that this man who sat there
before us, the man who had the Thing in his hand, who had col-
lected the North Pole, would not notice us, would snub us if
need be a little, and would leave these people, these millions of
people, with their heads up and go quietly on to the South Pole
and collect that. It is because there are thousands of men who
understand just how Wilbur Wright felt when he slipped away
the other day in New York and left the entire city with its
heads up that we have every reason to expect that the crowd
is to produce great leaders, and is to become a great crowd,
great and humble in spirit before God, before the stars, and the
atoms, and the microbes, and before Itself. In the meantime,
however, we see all about us in the world countless would-be
leaders of the crowd, who would perhaps not quite understand
the way Wilbur Wright felt that day when he slipped away from
New York and left the entire city with its heads up. Most
newspaper men—men who are in the habit of writing for a
crowd and regarding a crowd quite respectfully—will have
wondered a little why Wilbur Wright could have let such a
crowd go by. Most actors and theatrical people would have
stayed over a train or so and given one more little performance
with all those wistful people on the roof-tops. There are only
a very few clergymen in England or America to-day who, with
a great audience like that and so many men in it, would ever
have thought of slipping off on the 3:25 train in the way Wilbur
Wright did. The ministers and the politicians of all countries [61]
are still wondering a little—if they ever thought of it—how
Wright did it. Most of the other people in the world wonder
a little, too, but I imagine that the great inventors of the world
who read about it the next morning did not wonder. The
true scientists, in this country and in Germany and in France,
all understood just how Wilbur Wright felt when he left New
York with its heads up. The great artists of the world, in litera-
ture, in painting, and architecture; the great railroad builders,
the city builders, the nation builders, the great statesmen, the
great biologists, and chemists, understood. James J. Hill, with
his face toward the Pacific, understood. Alexander Graham
Bell, out abroad doing the listening and talking and thinking the
the thoughts of eighty million people, understood. Marconi,
making the ships whisper across the sea, and William G.
McAdoo, shooting a hundred and seventy thousand people a
day through a hole under the Hudson—understood.
And God when He made the, world. And Columbus when he
discovered America. And Jesus Christ when He was so happy
and so preoccupied over His vision of a new world, over invent-
ing Christianity, that it seemed a very small and incidental thing
to die on the Cross—He understood.
Wilbur Wright's secret was that he had a vision. His vision
was that a human being could be greater and more powerful
than the world had ever believed before.
Just to be there was a great thought, to be allowed to be one
of those admitted, to be present at the first faint beginning, the
first still alighting of the human spirit from the earth upon the
sky. Wilbur Wright made the most ordinary man a genius
a minute. He made him wonder softly who he was—and the
people all about him—who were they? and what would they
think, and what would they do next? The first flash of light on
the wings was a thousand years. It was as if almost for a
moment he saw at last the whole earth about him. History,
churches, factories on it, slipping out of its cocoon at last—its
little, old, faded, tied-down cocoon, and sailing upon the air—[62]
sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories,
and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible,
through the Intangible—out to the Sun. . . .
. . . . . . .
Perhaps the reason that New York was a great city a few
minutes the other day when Wilbur Wright was there was that
Wilbur Wright had a new vision in the presence of all those men
of something that they could do. He touched the imagination
of men about themselves. They were profoundly moved be-
cause they saw him in their presence inventing a new kind and
new size of human being. He raised the standard of impos-
sibility, and built an annex on,to the planet while they looked;
took a great strip off of space three miles wide and folded it
softly on to the planet all the way round before their eyes. For
three miles more—three miles farther up above the ground—
there was a space where human beings would have to stop say-
ing, "I can't," and "You can't," and "We can't." If people
want to say "I can't," and "You can't," they will have to say
it farther and farther away from this planet now. Let them
try Mars. The modern imagination takes to impossibilities
naturally with Wilbur Wright against the horizon. The thing
we next cannot believe is the next thing to expect.
Nobody would have believed ten years ago that an architect
could be invented who would tell a man that his house would
cost him thirty thousand dollars, and then hand him back two
thousand dollars when he had finished it. But the man had
been invented—he invented himself.
He represents the owner, and does as the owner would be done
by if he did it himself—if he had the technical knowledge and
the time to do it.
Nobody would have believed a few years ago that a railway
president, when he had occasion to reduce the wages of several
thousand employees 10 per cent, would begin by reducing his
I own salary 30 per cent, and the salary of all the officials all the [63]
I way down 15 per cent, or 20 per cent.
Nobody would have believed some time ago that an organiz-
ing inventor would be evolved who would meet his directors and
tell them that, if they would have their work done in their
mills in three shifts instead of two, the men would work so much
better that it would not cost the Company more than 10 per
cent, more to offer the better conditions. But such an organizing
inventor has been invented, and has proved his case.
Luther Burbank has made a chestnut tree eighteen months
old bear chestnuts; and it has always taken from ten to twenty-
five years to make a tree furnish its first chestnut before.
About the same time that Luther Burbank had succeeded
in doing this with chestnuts a similar type of man, who was not
particularly interested in chestnuts and wanted to do something
with human nature, who believed that human nature could
really be made to work, found a certain staple article that every-
body needs every day in a state of anarchy in the market. The
producers were not making anything on it. The wholesalers
dealt in it without a profit, and the retailers sold it without a
profit, and merely because the other things they sold were
worthless without it.
____, who was the leading wholesale dealer and in the best
position to act, pointed out that, if the business was organized
and everybody in it would combine with everybody else and
make it a monopoly, the price could be made lower, and every-
body would make money.
Of course this was a platitude.
It was also a platitude that human nature was not good
enough, and could not be trusted to work properly in a mo-
nopoly.
____ then proceeded to invent a monopoly—a kind of
monopoly in which human nature could be trusted.
He used a very simple device.
He began by being trusted himself.
Having personally and directly proved that human nature in [64]
a monopoly could be trusted by being trusted himself, all he
had to do was to capitalize his knowledge of human nature, use
the enormous market value of the trust people had in him to
gather people about him in the business who had a good prac-
tical business genius for being trusted too and for keeping
trusted: everybody else was shut out.
The letter with which the monopoly was started (after deal-
ing duly with the technical details of the business) ended like
this:
" . . . the soundest lines of business—viz., fair prices,
fair profits, fair division of profits, fair recognition of service
do as you would be done by, money back where it is practicable,
one's profit so small as to make competition not worth while,
open dealing, and open books."
He had invented a monopoly which shared its profits with
the people, and which the people trusted. He was a Luther
Burbank in money and people instead of chestnuts. He raised
the standard of impossibility in people, and invented a new way
for human nature to work.
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