Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The way to deal with a specific sin is to flood it around with the
general vision. Then it does not need to be dealt with. Then strangely,
softly, and almost before we know--out there in the Light, it
automatically deals with itself.
When the Government takes hold quietly of the National Cash Register
Company, turns it up, empties its contents out,--all its methods and its
motives--and all the things It thought It wanted, and then proceeds to
put its president and twenty-nine of its officers into jail, my readers
will perhaps point out to me that this action of the government as a
method of tempting people to be good, while it may have the virtue of
being concrete and the virtue of being specific, certainly does not have
the other virtue that I have laid down, the virtue of being affirmative.
"Certainly" they will say "there is not anything affirmative about
putting twenty-nine big business men in jail." Many people would call it
the most magnificently negative thing a President could have done. Moses
himself would have done it.
It does not seem to me that Moses would have done it, or that it was
essentially negative. It could not unfairly be claimed that in spite of
its negative look on the surface, it was the most massive, significant,
crushing affirmation that a great people has made for years.
By putting the twenty-nine officers of the National Cash Register
Company in jail, the American people affirmed around the world the
nation's championship of the men that had been defeated in the
competition with the National Cash Register Company. They affirmed that
these men who were not afraid of the National Cash Register Company
because they were bigger, and who stood up to them and fought them, were
the kind of men Americans wanted to be like, and that the officers of
the National Cash Register Company were the kind of men Americans did
not want to be like, would not do business with, would not tolerate,
would not envy, would not live on the same continent with, unless they
were kept in jail.
The President of the United States, sitting in Washington, at the head
of this vast affirmative and assertive continent, indicted the Cash
Register Company, that is, by a slight pointed negative action, by
pushing back a button he turned on the great chandelier of a nation and
flooded a nation with light. We, the American people, suddenly, all in a
flash, looked into each other's faces and knew what we were like.
We had hoped we believed in human nature, and in brave men and in men
against machines but we could not prove it.
Suddenly, we stood in a blaze of truth about ourselves. Suddenly, we
could again look with our old stir of joy at our national Flag. If we
liked, we could swing our hats.
Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I had been trying to get this
news for years. It is news I have wanted to live with and do business
with. I have been trying to get my question answered. What are the
American people really like?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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