Read Ebook: Collision Orbit by Beck Clyde Vestal Herman B Illustrator

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Ebook has 325 lines and 18501 words, and 7 pages

What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night?

The Ghost in the White House.

The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people.

The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy , has to commune with a Generalization.

What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never Was, and Who Never Is--a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, Terrible Angel called the People.

Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times.

That is all there is to Her.

It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a President--to be a Ghost.

It is not efficient.

Naturally--much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or hope to get is the Ghost of a President.

THE PRESIDENT AND THE GHOST

There are a number of things about going into the White House the next four years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, that are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest job on earth.

The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position as the Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is expected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassing idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would ever put up with, from any other employer in the world.

Absent-mindedness.

Non-committalness.

Halfness, or double personality.

Bodilessness.

Big, impressive-looking Fool Moments.

Cumulus clouds of Slow Sure Conceit with Sudden Flops of Humility.

General Irresponsibleness.

And perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the Employer--like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made a fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry.

The man who is conscientious in the White House has an Employer whose immediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes in the hope that he will be thanked afterwards.

Once in a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert, as the captain of the ship, has to tell the Owner of the Line, when the storm is highest, that he must not butt in.

The restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer that one is just being an employee and that one's employer is being responsible, is lacking in the White House, where one is practically expected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee and one's own employer.

But while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in the President's Employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerous ones for the country.

I am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done about them. I have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated the moment the Employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits are making it for the President to do anything for him.

Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people are giving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, is not only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer so large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It.

Serving It is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with a fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the People.

It is this bodilessness in the Employer--this very simple rudimentary whiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished and accomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it hardest to bear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly is that he wants him or that he does not want him and even then he confides to him that he only half wants him. He says deliberately and out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people of other nations, "Here is the man I would a little rather have than not." That is all. Then he coops him up in the White House, drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to work.

Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer like this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and when one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of the people one is being The Head Employee of expect one to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at the utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one's Employer--keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it will be small wonder if the man in the White House feels he has--especially these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth.

The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed to our President. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, and be President of all of us.

It may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job on earth and, of course, when Theodore Roosevelt had it, the job of being President considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell world America is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of our next President, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy, senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappy factories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nations abroad, the man we put in the White House next is going to have what will be the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousand years--except the one that began in Nazareth--the one the new President is going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way which little, old, queer, bent, eager St. Paul with his prayers in Rome and his sermons in Athens, never dreamed of.

It does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new President and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this time for our President to have a ghost for an Employer.

All any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make a President, is to stop and think. If you have an employer who cannot collect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, all you do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make him up--what is there--what deep, searching and conclusive and permanent action is there, after all, the man in The White House can take in his employer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling him what he wants and what he is willing to do with what he gets? What can the man in the White House hope to accomplish for a people with whom it is the constitutional and regular thing to be as lonely as this?

I have wanted to consider what can be done, and done now not to have a lonely President the next four years.

The first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the next election a man for the White House a great-hearted direct and free people will not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things that will back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand, and not let him feel lonely with us.

The feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness--the feeling the Public has every day in the White House and in the Senate, of being treated, and treated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that works as badly one way as it does the other.

The President does not want a Ghost.

The people do not want to be treated as a Ghost.

The object of this book is to resent--to expose to everybody as unfair and untrue and destroy forever the title I have written across the front of it, "The Ghost in The White House."

The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all time, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world, from being an inarticulate, shimmering, wavering, gibbering Ghost in its own House.

There must be things--broad simple things about Capital and Labor people can do and do every day in this country, that will make a President timidly stop guessing what they want.

It ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a President or a seer for a President to know what the people want. A man of genius--a seer, a man who can read the heart of a nation--especially in politics, comes not only not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highly unlikely when he does that the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party in America will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him in the White House.

The best the people can hope for in America now is to have a body--to find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without saying a word--express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word our President, our Politicians--even the kind of men who seem to put up naturally with having to be in the Senate--the kind of men who can feel happy and in their element in a place like Congress will see what the People--the real people in this country are like.

I am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people so that we the people in America, at last, in the days that lie ahead, instead of being a Ghost in our own House, shall have things that we can do, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able to prove to a President what we are like and what we want--so that each man of us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on a President with--something more than a vague, faint, little ballot to hurl at him, once in four years.

REAL FOLKS AND THE GHOST

When a man speaks of The City National Bank he speaks of it as if he meant something and knew what he meant.

When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch him bewhiffle it.

When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of Business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and when in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in some mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of The Invisible.

Business talks bass. Patriotism is an AEolian harp.

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