Gerald Stanley Lee

“ The scared men and the men who are fooled about themselves in politics and business and who are trying to fool the rest of us, who are trying to make a great, simple, clean-hearted, clear-eyed, generous country like ours look and act every few weeks or every few days as if all the people in it could really do to express themselves to one another and to the world, was with lockouts, strikes, political deadlocks, minority holdups and party threats—shall be turned out of office by the people and huddled away out of sight. ”

“ All the people of this country—the consumers (the real employers of all employers) have to do, is to whisper in one national whisper through a hundred thousand grocery stores and other stores what kind of employers and workmen, what kind of goods and factories they like, and the buyers and consumers of America instead of taking what is poked out at them because they have to, and being the fools and the slaves of capital and labor, will get with a whisper what they request, and we will return and will let employers and workmen return, to the status of human beings. ”

“ We make this week a wager to the world,—a four and a half billion dollar dare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that the American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and hurrahs and tears and empty watery words—that we will chase Peace up, that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations—into the eternal underpinning of a world. ”

“ The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all time, with forty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. ”

“ I will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have made the Red Cross what it was, who have made the Red Cross the trusted representative of American democracy in all nations, who now find themselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime, most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy to a world, I will not believe that these men and women are going to lose their grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty nations, forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters they have helped before. ”

“ It has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble when they are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward in the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful idea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all over the country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as a substitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of originality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving to get everything one wants. ”

“ There has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before in history, the chance America has now of dramatizing to Germans, and dramatizing through the Germans to everybody, an idea of business efficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its very substance, peace come into the world.
People shall not put up with mere leagues and truces, arbitration boards, fight-dove-tailings. They shall not sit at tables and twirl laws at people—to make them peaceful.... ”

“ Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues of nations of his own twenty years ago—who would have believed that a man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a national, into an international helplessness like this? ”

“ Industrial democracy is coming in this country one industry at a time. Each industry is going to work out its own salvation by emancipating and freeing the hands of the men who can run it best in the interests of the public—that is, run it with the lowest prices to the public, the highest prices to the wage earners, and a surplus for improvements, inventions and experiments in rendering its product of more service to all.
I am not in favor of having capitalists try to convince labor as a class, nor having labor try to convince capital as a class. ”

“ It is seeing that it would rather laugh at itself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that the only thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific and economic, smile at its airs with Labor and the public, and lay them aside.
If Capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietly for self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, Labor will. ”

“ As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation. ”

“ Most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our leaders and our people.
We realize—whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass of the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs. ”

“ It was a Focus—a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking for it from us, every morning when they get up—asking for it as one man. ”

“ The crowning glory of a nation is the independence and the spiritedness of its labor.
I rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made it impossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who do not love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who have nothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the job catching—who cannot get men to work for them except by offering them more money than they can earn. ”

“ I put these principles forward as the by-laws of America's faith in itself, as the principles that should govern the brain, the heart and the hand of each man in a democracy, toward all other men and that should govern all other men toward him—the skeleton of the body of the people. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We give notice that thousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and fuddly politicians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by the people, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world. This nation is facing the most colossal, most serious and godlike moment any nation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the presence of forty nations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own grim appalling hope, to be trifled with. ”

“ Naturally as a matter of convenience and a short cut for all of us, I would like to see Capital take what is supposed to be its initiative—be the side that leads off and makes the start in the self-discipline, self-confession and conscious control of its own class, which it thinks Labor ought to.
Whichever side in our present desperate crisis attains self-discipline and the full power in sight of the people not to be fooled about itself first, will win the leadership first, and win the loyalty and gratitude and partiality and enthusiasm of the American people for a hundred years. ”

“ Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people look out of their windows on streets—thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the Germans!
We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in America, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany—was to interrupt people's personal daily habits. ”

“ I would now like to touch on two facts—the fact that there is a particular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the American people at this time, and the fact that the body to express the vision grows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to be had.
The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations—on its getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be expressed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The soul—the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscope has a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and like you for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowing all you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his body all in a flash tries to keep him from doing this, hardens over his mind, claps itself down with its lid of habit over him. Then he automatically defends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing more can be said. ”

“ A democratic business is one which is being run as the consumers would run it if they knew how.
A business may be said to be a democratic business in proportion as one sees experts in it expressing crowds. One sees great crowds going to and fro and up and down in it acting for all practical purposes like geniuses, like skilled angels doing every day offhand inspired and inspiring difficult adventurous things as a matter of course—like tackling the high cost of living. ”

“ To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever known—this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred million people from having a blank look, let its chance go. ”

“ A democracy that does not trust its leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a monarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can be trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's a kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They have settled down to the idea that this is what we are like—as if the main qualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, of making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. ”

“ But I resent being obliged by my dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five men on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world with that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am putting down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this feeling I have—in those few brief miserable moments I spend with the yellow pencil—is the feeling that this country is being governed with. ”

“ To the great capitalists who instead of being fellow laborers, are still mooning absent-mindedly about in the last century, still prinking themselves as the owners of their world, and still thinking of themselves as the captains or military leaders of industry—to the labor union Dukes and Dictators that capitalists like this have created to fight them—the hundred million people appointed to run this country, give notice. ”

“ What the new League will be for will be to put before the world, before every nation, before every village and city in its local branch, a working vision of how different classes and different groups of people can get what they want out of each other by trying things out together, by touching each other's imaginations and advertising to each other instead of blowing out each other's brains. ”

“ If the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America who shave will turn the Government out of office and have the law changed.
A strike by workmen in a particular business is a holdup of all the other workmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and is undemocratic and unfair.
A lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all other employers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair. ”

“ The crowds have to be unlocked to each other. The temperament of our President for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of the nation, is to be the temperament of unlocking the crowds to each other.
At present it looks as if our President for the next four years would be perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our next President, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people and hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times of being lonely with the people. The people are lonely with one another. ”

“ There always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and be fair. The Government, the police and the draft have to deal with them. As for the rest of us, competition—fair, manly, sporting competition, keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and nobler virtue, the knowledge of ourselves and others that make coöperation a noble as well as practical course of procedure.
The way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to be compared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to the state—to the way he runs an interested enterprise or business. ”

“ Why should I propose, if I were a nation—just because I am being a hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table—by a really simple thing like there being so many of me?
I am human—a plain fellow human being—and if the United States would act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act, when it is really put up to him—forty nations in his yard waiting for him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem would at once become direct and deep and simple. ”

“ Incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking people you thought were impossible before—even including very conveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind about your body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you. ”

“ But put one hundred thousand picked men—or men of exceptional power together in a row in New York—and why is it everybody is apt to feel at first a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around the corner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortal human beings?
I wish people would have as much imagination about what could be done with one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got together from the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundred thousand silver dollars. ”