The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
John Stuart Mill · en
Are capital and labor going to use the holdup on each other to get what
they want when six million dead men, still almost warm in their graves,
have died to prove that the holdup, or German way of getting things, does
not work? 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. The way to keep in
place our Bolshevists of America is to show them that we the combined
people of America, combined and acting together as one in the
organization I am sketching in this book, know what they want, and that
we can get the thing they essentially want for them better than they can
get it. The three great groups in American life--the employing class, the
laboring class, and the consumer--have all belonged to the Red Cross
together, they have all worked together and sacrificed themselves, and
sacrificed their class, to work for the Red Cross. What the New League
will stand for in the name of all of them will be the thing that they
have already demonstrated in the Red Cross that they can do. Three
classes can get a thing for one class better than one class can get it.
This is the content of the League's vision of action.
The method of it will be advertising with enormous campaigns never
dreamed of before what the three-class vision is and how it works. Then
we will have factories dramatize it. Then we will advertise the
factories.
Then when we have democracy working in a thousand factories, we will
advertise and transplant our working democracy, our factory democracies,
abroad.
People who have learned that democracy works in their daily work can be
trusted to believe democracy will work even in their religion, even in
their politics.
* * * * *
The idea I have in mind is already foreshadowed in the city of Cleveland.
The spirit of the people of Cleveland has already rebelled against being
treated as a ghost--against being whoofed at by Labor unions and trusts.