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
I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had when
I waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out of
communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out
of the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, into
the long, white silent prayer of my people--and prayed with a hundred
million people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets of
a nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to God.
We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the
war. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, to
the great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-four
full page ads in a thousand papers could do.
Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but
in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people--in
advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement,
eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows
they look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, into
prayers for a world--Mr. Garfield had few equals.
To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits
of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like
being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single
stomach in the country.
To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a
hundred million people--go in through the kitchen door of every house
with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar
when they ordered eight.
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.
The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to
the people to whom we are trying to express it.
The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalists
and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and
set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so
that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an
hour in the day.
The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, in
expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is
plain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of
the working ideas of the Air Line League.