Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The chief characteristic of the new industrial leader is coming to be
social imagination or the power of seeing the larger industrial values
in human gifts and efficiencies, the more human and intellectual
energies of workmen, the market value of their spirits, their
imaginations, and their good-will. The underpinning and Morganizing work
has been done; the power of instant decision which Mr. Morgan has had,
has been very often based on a lack of imagination about the things that
got in his way; but the things that get in the way now, the big,
little-looking things--are the things on which the new and inspired
millionaires' imagination will find its skill and accumulate its power.
It is men's spirits that are now in the way; they have been piling up
and accumulating under Morgan's regime long enough, and it is now their
turn. Perhaps men's spirits have always been beyond Mr. Morgan, and
perhaps his imagination has been worked largely as a kind of cerebellum
imagination: it is a kind of imagination that sees related and
articulated the physical body of things, the grip on the material tools,
on the gigantic limbs of a world. The man who succeeds Mr. Morgan, and
for whom Mr. Morgan has made the world ready, is the man who has his
imagination in the upper part of his brain, and instead of doing things
by not seeing, and by not being seen, he will swing a light. He will be
himself in his own personality, a little of the nature of a searchlight,
and he will work the way a searchlight works, and will have his will
with things by seeing and lighting, by X-raying his way through them and
not by a kind of colossal world-butting, which is Morgan's way, both
eyes imperiously, implacably shut, his whole being all bent, all crowded
into his vast machine of men, his huge will lifted ... and excavating
blindly, furiously, as through some groping force he knew not, great
sub-cellars for a new heaven and new earth.
The Crowd gets its heroes one at a time. Heroes are the Crowd's tools.
Some are dredges, some are telescopes. The Crowd, by a kind of
instinct--an oversoul or undersoul of which it knows not until
afterward, takes up each tool gropingly--sometimes even against its will
and against its conscience, uses it and drops it.
Then it sees why, suddenly, it has used it.
Then God hands it Another One.
CHAPTER V
THE CROWD AND TOM MANN
I dropped into the London Opera House the other night to see Tom Mann
(the English Bill Heywood), another hero or crowd spy-glass that people
have taken up awhile--thousands of them--to see through to what they
really want. I wanted to hear him speak, and see, if I could, why the
crowd had taken him up, and what it was they were seeing through him.
I am apt to take a dead set at liking a man I do not agree with, if I
can. It gives one a better start in understanding him and in not
agreeing with him to some purpose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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