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
What does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in this
country, if Labor; after the next Fourth of July, started a new national
crusade for four weeks--if the fifty best laborers in the Endicott
Johnson Mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should go
in a body one after the other to a list of Bolshevist factories,
factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitation
of telling what happens to them in their Endicott Johnson mills, an
agitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are like
and how it works until the Bolshevist workmen they come to see are driven
by sheer force of facts into being non-Bolshevist workmen, and their
Bolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force of
facts into being Endicott Johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front of
themselves, who will be Endicott Johnsons for them.
All that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitation
in America to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act of
labor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing that
either of them--either capital or labor--is thinking of somebody,
believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besides
themselves. Millions of individual employers and individual laborers
about have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable and
discriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow human
beings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is to
arrange some signal generous conclusive arresting massive move together
to show it.
This is the kind of work the Air Line League proposes on a national scale
like the Red Cross to arrange for and do.
The common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, the
fellow human being--employer or employee.
The best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for America in
shame and weakness to keep on deporting Bolshevists, is to arrange a
national advertisement, a parade or national procession as it were in
this country soon, of team work in industry and of how--to anybody who
knows the facts--it carries everything before it.
The best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down through
ten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers who
stand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmen
from all over the country who stand up for employers.
Of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds of
times over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring other
laborers into line and of having employers shame other employers into
competence.