BY GERALD STANLEY LEE THE SHADOW CHRIST. A Study of the Hebrew Men of Genius. THE LOST ART OF READING. A Sketch of Civilization. THE CHILD AND THE BOOK. A Constructive Criticism of Education. ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH. A Picture of the Good Old Days. ROUND WORLD SERIES: I. THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES. An Introduction to the 20th Century. II. INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES. A Study of Men of Genius in Business. III. CROWDS. A Moving Picture of Democracy. IV. WE. A Recommendation of the First Person Plural for the use of Men and Nations. MOUNT TOM. A Little Look-off on the World. THE AIR-LINE TO LIBERTY A PROSPECTUS FOR ALL NATIONS BY GERALD STANLEY LEE [EDITOR OF "MOUNT TOM"] NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY MCMXVIII n.** COPYRIGHT I918 BY GERALD STANLEY LEE APR 23 1918 ©CU497027 ^^o I TO JENNETTE LEE THIS BOOK AND WITH IT THE ELEVENTH VERSE OF SOLOMON'S SECOND SONG CONTENTS THE AIR-LINE TO LIBERTY I. Liberty for What? II. Who Must Get Out of the Way First? . . . III. Cutting Past the Kaiser IV. In - Under - Up - Over - Around - and Through V. The Art of Making Nations Look VI. Thanks to the Kaiser for Making Us See What We Want VII. Thanks to the Allies for Making Us See What We Want VIII. The Short-Cut to Victory . IX. The Air-Line to Peace X. What People Can Do First XI. End of Advertisement One . 6 ii 13 24 32 42 52 58 69 79 II AMERICA AND GERMANY I. Cross-circuited Newspapers . . 83 II. Winning Away Germany's Initiative . 94 III. Winning the War and Germany To- gether 107 x Contents CHAPTER PAGE IV. Winning the World and Germany Together 114 V. No Halfness, No Hemming and Haw- ing, No Twiddling with Peace . 116 III AMERICA, HER ALLIES AND THE WORLD I. The Kind of America America Wants 127 II. The Kind of America Europe Wants 131 III. The Kind of War Department America Would Like . . 137 IV. A Programme for Getting the Kind of a War Department America Would Like 149 V. Business Men, Advertising Men and War 161 VI. The Anti-Toxin of War . . .165 VII. The Spinal Column of Peace . . 169 VIII. Fighting It Out 173 IV A DECLARATION OF FAITH FOR NATIONS I. A Confession of Peace . 179 II. A Confession of Hope . 185 III. A Confession of Faith . 189 IV. A Definition Before Action 192 V. The Creed of the Salesmen 194 Contents xi V THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN AMERICA CHAPTER I. Mobilizing Newspapers II. Mobilizing Magazines . III. Mobilizing Authors and "Prophets" IV. Mobilizing Government Officials V. Mobilizing Statesmen . VII FIGHTING TO A FINISH I. Finding the Range II. Arming a Hundred Million People III. News Dynamos .... IV. Central Power House . V. The Engineers of Silence . VI. The Lords of Attention ' . PAGE I. The Kaiser is Looking . . . .203 II. The President is Looking . . .207 III. Nations Wait 210 IV. The Hundred Millionth of a Man 213 V. The Nation Takes a Hundred Mil- lion Look 221 VI MAKING DEMOCRACY WORK 225 238 245 268 281 289 295 305 308 3i3 318 xii Contents VIII THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN EUROPE CHAPTER PAGE I. America Goes Calling . . . .321 II. The New World-Game . . . 324 III. The End of the Self-Sufficient Nation 333 IV. A Little Coal Shall Lead Us . . 338 IX THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN GERMANY I. Undelivered Letters . . . .341 II. The Right to Change Each Other's Minds 351 III. Looking and Trying .... 355 IV. Listening 359 V. A Billion Dollars' Worth of Listen- ing 361 VI. The President, the People and the World 362 Note 371 Epilogue Going to Press I THE AIR-LINE TO LIBERTY Chapter I LIBERTY FOR WHAT? A MAN who was reading his paper by the door in the barber shop yesterday, heard his turn called out, threw his paper down, came up to the chair next mine, swung up his feet, settled down his head and said, "I see the Government has borrowed seven- teen billion dollars this year — just for this year — to defend Liberty." The man who was putting a bib on me and counting on cutting my hair, whistled softly. I said nothing. I began thinking. Who is the liberty for? Children. Some of them may live long enough perhaps — may hope to get some of it. 2 The Air-Line to Liberty I began figuring. Liberty comes high since Germany began. Reckoning for children — for children three thousand miles away — the right to be free costs fourteen hundred dollars apiece this year. Reckoning for babies (and practically only children under three will collect on lib- erty) every baby in this country is having five thousand two hundred and sixty-six dollars spent by our Government on his liberty this year. It ought to make a baby thoughtful to know it's costing somebody five thousand two hundred and sixty-six dollars a year. When I came out of the barber shop I came plump on a baby in its go-cart rolling in the sun down Shop Row. "The Government is spending five thousand two hundred and sixty-six dollars a year on you — on your liberty just for this year!" I thought at it as I looked at its little hopeful vague round face. Then I walked on. Liberty for a baby in America one hundred dollars a week! Liberty for What? 3 Any baby. About fifteen dollars a day. Does the baby earn fifteen dollars a day? Who is paying fifteen dollars a day for the baby's liberty? If the war lasts four years the liberty the baby has will cost America — for this particu- lar four years — about twenty-one thousand dollars. Is the baby going to pay the $5,266 a year back? Is the baby's liberty worth $5,266 a year? What will the liberty — all this liberty that is being held on to so tightly for the baby — be like when he gets it? What will he do with it? Will he join the I. W. W. when we have spent — say twenty-one thousand dollars on his liberty? This afternoon I came home through The Public Gardens and near the Pond and around the paths and benches I saw babies everywhere and flocks of go-carts — every one of them — every one in sight having that very hour sixty cents an hour spent on him for his liberty, by 4 The Air-Line to Liberty our Government. Sixty cents an hour asleep or awake! A cent a minute for his liberty be- ing handed out to him asleep or awake, by The United States. Fifteen dollars to-day. Fifteen dollars more to-morrow. Fifteen dollars more day after to-morrow — every day all the year — what is it all for? What are we doing it for? What is America driving at in doing it? This book is to find out. I want to put down in plain black and white if I can, what the liberty is for, and what it is like — at fifteen dollars a day. I am full of enthusiasm for spending the fif- teen dollars a day for the liberty. But liberty for what? What right are American men, women and children spending seventeen billion dollars a year to get? The right to advertise in Germany. This is what it amounts to. The war is over and liberty is secured and held down for all of us the moment we can get certain facts about America and Americans over where the Ger- Liberty for What? 5 mans can see them — the moment we touch the imagination of the German people. What shall we advertise in Germany? First Advertisement. American guns. (Advertisement under Pershing.) "You have said in Germany that you despise us in Amer- ica, that you do not respect us, will not listen to us, will not deal with us except as your inferiors in the material world. We will advertise to you that we are materially fit to take the leadership over you in the modern material world. You will not listen to any other advertisement from America. So here it is." WE CAN WHIP YOU WITH OUR GUNS. This is our first advertisement. Second Advertisement. WE CAN WHIP YOU WITH OUR SOULS. We will advertise to you by the way we carry on and the way we end this war, that we are spiritually, intel- lectually and politically fit to take the precedence of you in the intellectual and political leadership of the world. Third Advertisement. AMERICA'S SUBSTITUTE FOR WAR— AFTER THIS ONE IS ENDED RIGHT 6 Chapter II WHO MUST GET OUT OF THE WAY FIRST? OF course the main difficulty we are go- ing to come up against when we Ameri- cans try to drive our advertising in through to the German people, is that the Kaiser has got his advertising in first. In competing with the Kaiser, we Ameri- cans will have to compete — so far as his local field is concerned — with the best advertising man on earth. No advertising any one ever dreamed of is like the Kaiser's. It is taking twenty nations to whip the Germans because the Kaiser begins his advertising with people when they are babies. Before their fathers and mothers have met, the educating of babies and the advertising of babies begins in Germany. The advertising of obedience in Germany begins in the womb. It is idle to think of Wilhelm II as a splendid national decoration, a kind of royal image for the German people. In his own field he is the greatest nation- engineer, the greatest attention-engineer or statesman the world has known. All day, all Who Must Get Out of the Way First? 7 night, all the years of their lives, the Kaiser touches the imaginations of all of his people. He is the horizon of their news, the sky-line of their thoughts and he has laid mines in the ground, deep underneath their lives. The tone he takes with them, instead of being the- atrical is real. He has obsessed the imagina- tion of the Germans and jammed down his soul on them as the Lid of the Country. The Kaiser stands out to-day as the main fact that the world has to face for the next hundred years because he has believed in ad- vertising. If the people of the other nations, of the great democracies, had a twentieth of the grim spiritual faith in advertising, in touching and gripping men's imaginations, — the imaging, visualizing, driving forces in men, the Kaiser has, we should not be paying as we are in America now, several hundred dollars a year apiece to hold back the imagination of the Germans about Germany, hew it back, and coop it up so that the rest of the world will be worth living in. 8 The Air-Line to Liberty The way for the world to beat Germany is for each nation of the Allies to advertise its own people together as well as the Kaiser has advertised his together. Then we will advertise in Germany. What we are fighting the German people for is to get the German people to let us ad- vertise in Germany. We propose to put be- fore the Germans our advertisement of the kind of modern world we want and how we want to get it, alongside their Kaiser's modern world — the one he is giving them now. On these two great advertisements of worlds — the Kaiser's world and our world side by side, day by day, before the eyes of the German people, civilization to-day hangs by a thread. Is there any possible thing America when she gazes at the Kaiser's advertisement in Germany — the Kaiser's huge billboard two hundred thousand miles square — can do to get her advertisement of a world to the Ger- man people in, under, over or around the Kaiser's advertisement? What is there that America can do and do Who Must Get Out of the Way First? 9 now to arrest, hold and possess the imagina- tion of the German people, remove them for- ever from being a vast, stupid, innocent threat to the world, and establish peace? io Chapter III CUTTING PAST THE KAISER THIS brings me to my invention. The quickest way to get the attention of the German people during this war is to pro- pose a substitute for it. It is also the quickest way to get the atten- tion of all the peoples, and to get all the peoples to act together and to act intelligently, hopefully and implacably against the German Government. I do not ask the reader in this one short chapter to believe that the invention of a sub- stitute for war is possible. But supposing it were possible and that a good working substitute for war had been in- vented and lay in our hands, most of us are agreed that the best, quickest and most pointed thing America could do with a good working substitute for war would be to see that all the nations in this one, know about it at once. The best thing the nations can do with a good working substitute for war when they know of it, is to use it to stop this one. Supposing that America had her invention Cutting Past the Kaiser II of a substitute for war well in hand and be- lieved in it, what would be the best possible way to advertise it to the other nations and to get them to adopt it? The best way for America to get her sub- stitute for war adopted by other nations would be to keep rather still about it, keep from the- orizing or moralizing about it and try it out. Try it out where everybody is looking. It should be introduced in the one nation out of us all that the other nations are watch- ing and studying, the nation in which every- body knows that a substitute for war would work the worst. Then we will make it work. The way for America to get the most and the best advertising among the nations for a substitute for war just now, would be to in- troduce it in Germany. If America will go ahead and set up her substitute for war in Germany and have it working and working successfully in Germany before everybody's eyes, side by side with war and while war is still going on, the adoption of America's substitute for war by the other 12 The Air-Line to Liberty nations when the war stops, will take care of itself. If we can stop a war like this one with it, we can stop any war with it, and everybody will believe in it. The victory we all say we are fighting for, — namely something that will forever take the place of war, will have been won. And not only the war but the war after the war will have been won. The thing that makes us dread peace to-day more than death, the terror that hangs over us all now all day and all night — the huge hiatus of twenty nations hemming and hawing while the peoples perish — will be skipped. Chapter IV 13 IN-UNDER-UP-OVER- AROUND-AND-THROUGH THE most effectual substitute for war for America to propose to the nations will be a substitute that the Germans will be as much interested as we are, in putting through. One way for America and the Allies to do at present is to proceed to crush militar- ism out of Germany all alone, and the other way is for America and the Allies to propose to the Germans (while still crushing) a sub- stitute for militarism which will compel the Germans to help us crush it. It will take five times as long to insist on crushing militarism out of Germany without the Germans to help, as it will with the Ger- mans to help. With half of the Germans to help, mili- tarism can be crushed out of Germany. With- out half of the Germans to help, militarism will have to be nibbled out of Germany. The proposition I have to make to Amer- ica and the Allies, is that from now on we stop nibbling. It is time to begin crushing. It is time to get half of the Germans to help. 14 The Air-Line to Liberty How can America and the Allies get half of the Germans to help? Half of the Germans are fighting for con- quest. The other half are fighting for what they fear we will do to them if they stop. Why not advertise to them what we will do to them if they stop? The American people will cut in past the Kaiser's newspapers, get word through direct to the German people in the cities villages and fields. The American people will not let the German people be put off with what the Kaiser tells them we are fighting for. We will advertise to them what we are fighting for our- selves. America will let every man, woman and child in Germany know that what we are fighting for is to introduce our substitute for war. But I was going to speak of my invention. The invention I want America to adopt and introduce among the nations as America's in- vention for ending this war and for ending all wars, is the exchange — the cooperative and In-under-up-over-around-and-Throngh 15 organized exchange of advertising campaigns between nations. America will propose that the money and the men nations spend in ordinary times on armies and navies and on being ready to mis- understand, be spent on advertising and un- derstanding. America instead of being theoretical and explaining and moralizing and exploterating about this idea, will use it. Germany first. I wish to be specific. Winning this war with Germany is a matter of advertising in Germany what we are going to do with Ger- mans after we win it. What we do to-day, if we do it well, turns on our advertising to Germans what we are going to do to-morrow. What does America think it is going to do to-morrow? That is to say: What is it America is de- ciding is its substitute for war? What is it we are proposing to the Germans to put in the place of what we have now? Let us advertise at home and find out. 1 6 The Air -Line to Liberty Then let us advertise in Germany and let the Germans find out. Germany is not curious what Americans think about everything. But if we have in America a spark of an idea in our minds of a substitute for this war, there will not merely be a strong draught on it in Germany. Germans will stand up in rows all over Germany and blow on it. Some of us in America and among the Al- lies seem to think that it is our victory Ger- many at the present moment is fighting on and fighting on against. But it is not our victory Germany at the present moment is fighting against. It is what she fears we will do with our victory when we get it. The war turns now on our letting Germany know what we will do with our victory when we get it. America's problem in Germany is a prob- lem in advertising while shooting. We will propose and advertise in Germany at once a substitute for war Germany will feel safe with. In-under-up-over-around-and-Through 17 If we let every man, woman and child in Germany know that we are fighting to substi- tute advertisement and experiment between nations for censorship and explosion, half of the Germans will help. Perhaps nine out of ten of the German people — to put it mildly — would prefer this as much as the American people do. If the German people knew clearly that this is what we were fighting for, how hungry and how dead would how many of them want to be, just to keep up their present right not to be listened to by Americans and not to listen to Americans when they like? I am not saying that as a matter of practical working psychology for an American in deal- ing with a German just now, I am in favor of stopping a gun to talk. It would not be tact- ful. The German would misunderstand and the American would blow up. The thing I favor for America just now is double-quick firing — news with one hand and shrapnel with the other. The people of America will send out to the people of the enemy country an in- vitation, — what might be called a shooting in- 1 8 The Air-Line to Liberty vitation to talk. We will say to the Germans, "We are going to shoot at you three, four and five times as hard while we talk, but we invite you to talk." The Germans have repeatedly gone through the form of saying to us in America that they want to talk with us, but the suitable and tact- ful way to consent to talk with Germans now is to shoot our consent at them. We will blast their talk out of them. We will blast our talk into them but we will talk. The way to talk with Germans now is to underline words with howitzers. As long as words with howitzers keep on meaning one thing to a German and the same words without howitzers keep on meaning another, we will keep on having guns enough to say precisely what we mean. We have made up our minds after three years of trying to talk with Germans, that this time we will not be misunderstood. If they misunderstand our advertisements we will face them with the guns. If they mis- understand our guns we will face them with our advertisements. But the guns and the ad- In-under-up-over-around-and-Through 19 vertisements will both be for the same thing — the getting of the attention of Germans. People say we must concentrate on to-day first, that we must concentrate on putting an end to militarism in Germany. I agree that there is nothing else to concen- trate on now, but to put an end to militarism in Germany. But there are two ways to concentrate on putting an end to militarism in Germany. One way is to concentrate on crushing mili- tarism out of Germany in a plain slow stodgy way — with guns. And the other way is to give the Germans something to compare with, crushing to concentrate on advertising in Ger- many a substitute for it, which on comparing notes they may like better and which if ad- vertised on time in Germany and while the crushing is still going on, may make fifty or a hundred billion dollars worth of crushing unnecessary. Most of the problems that centre about get- ting America's first advertisement through into Germany — the news to the Germans about Americans guns, are already well in 20 The Air-Line to Liberty hand. We know how they are coming out and have trusted them to our experts. It is the problems that centre about the other two advertisements — the advertisements that we can whip the Germans with our souls, and the advertisement of our substitute for war, on which we now need to catch up and which we need to put in the hands of experts next. We will make definite arrangements to be- gin shooting not only war but our substitute for war at Germany at the same time. "What America is fighting for" our guns shall say, "is the right of Americans to be listened to in Germany and the right of Germans to be lis- tened to in America." America will get under way her prelimi- nary arrangements to set up her advertising exchanges with nations. America will propose each nation's adver- tising among its own people until it finds out what the things are people do to them which make them want to fight. After their private home-advertising na- tions will get together, pick out the war- In-under-up'Over-around-and-Through 21 causes in each nation, isolate them, put them on a slide, look at them together, find out just how they breed and then take them up point by point, fear by fear, war-germ by war- germ, — the way any scientist in human nature would — and advertise them out of the way. We will advocate making international ar- rangements for doing this mutual advertising on a colossal scale. We will place it in the hands of experts in touching the imaginations of crowds and of great groups of people. We will make moving pictures of nations and plays of cities. Mighty peoples — with the wireless telegraph, the wireless telephone, the phonograph, the moving picture — all our co- lossal modern engines for crowds hearing to- gether and seeing together, all our stupendous inventions for common vision and for common hope, — mighty peoples shall be intimate with each other. But this is another story. To come back to the beginning and get down to Germans, and to talking business with Germans: We will get ready to send over to the German people in their cities and their villages and 22 The Air-Line to Liberty their fields, by air-plane, the first possible minute, some little word direct to the German people as to what we are fighting for. They are shooting us to get territory, and we are shooting them — we will tell them — because they have said it is the way we will have to get their attention first. Your Kaiser has arranged things so that the only way we can advertise to you and get word through to you is to shoot you until you listen to us, or to shoot your Kaiser until he will let you listen to us. Your Kaiser has made up his mind that it is safer for him to stand you up and let us shoot at you than it is for him to let us talk with you. But why do you suppose it is that your Kaiser insists on telling you what we are righting for, himself, insists on telling you privately and in his own words ? Why should we not tell you ourselves — what we are fighting for? Why should you be in danger of being shot if you are caught picking this little advertisement up out of the street or out of the field? Why will your Kaiser be obliged unless he looks out — to mow you Germans down in rows for reading this ? As long as you are afraid of your Kaiser there is noth- ing for us to do but to keep on fighting him and crushing him until you are more afraid of us. In-under-up-over-around-and-Through 23 And this: What we are fighting you for is to propose a substitute to you for what we are doing now. What we are fighting you for is to get you to substitute with us millions of dol- lars worth of advertising a day for millions of dollars worth of killing a day. Which do you prefer — you the German people in deal- ing with us the American people — advertisements or ex- plosions? This is what our guns are saying to you, "Which do you prefer in dealing with us, oh Germans, your German Gutenbergs or your German Krupps? The sons of Washington and Lincoln to the sons of Beethoven, Schiller, Luther, Goethe and Gutenberg send greetings!" 24 Chapter V THE ART OF MAKING NATIONS LOOK THIS war in the last analysis and in its final victory is a competition in adver- tisements. We are attending for the last four years a vast international tournament of na- tions trying to get each other's attention. Why did the Germans take, in one huge, un- speakable battle, a hundred and eighty thou- sand prisoners and fifteen hundred guns from the Italians? Because France and England had not had their imaginations touched about Italy — about what Italy could do and was already doing to cut out Austria from under Germany and end the war. Of course, Italy has touched the imagina- tions of France and England now. But why did Italy wait and sacrifice fifteen hundred guns and a hundred and eighty thou- sand men to do it? Because her campaign was being conducted by specialists in fighting and she had made no equally commanding provision for getting the attention of France and England in time to The Art of Making Nations Look 2$ help. What Italy arranged for was a precise and elaborate touching of the imagination of France and England too late. Italy had invented a way of ending the war but she had invented no way of advertising it so that the invention could be used. Nearly all of the great crises of the war have been (either at home or abroad) — ad- vertising crises. When people have succeeded it was because somebody's attention was got on time and when they have failed it was because they tried to do a thing before enough people's attention had been got to it, to make it work. Most of the blunders of the war have been due to overheated specialists with eyes screwed down to the one idea or to the one place, whose attention could not be got to the other ideas or places until it was too late. The violation of Belgium which was Ger- many's most stupid military blunder, which raised and equipped the soldiers of twenty na- tions against her instead of two, was due to military specialists whose attention could not be got as to how human nature would take striking Belgium in the back. The North 26 The Air-Line to Liberty German Lloyd people in Germany, the big business or salesmen type of men who knew human nature the most, could have prevented Germany's making her greatest blunder, if they could have got the attention of the Ger- man General Staff in time and told the Ger- man General Staff that they were overlooking the inflammable nature of human nature and were deliberately, by touching Belgium, pull- ing on themselves the trigger of the world. If all the great crises of this war have been advertising crises, if all the military successes have been founded on advertising successes and all the big military failures founded on advertising failures, why should not the great nations on both sides take the hint as to what the war really is a competition in, and proceed from now on to take the battle in touching each other's imaginations as seriously as they do the battle of blowing each other up? It is all that we are coming to in the end anyway — advertising. Whatever kind of end we come to and whatever plan we get all na- tions to accept to establish peace, will have to The Art of Making Nations Look 27 depend on advertising to get people to accept it and advertising to operate it. Some of us put our trust in national disarm- ament, but national disarmament will not be safe without advertising to get it, and without advertising how a substitute for national arm- ament can be had, and how it can be operated. Some of us put our trust in reduction of na- tional armaments, but reduced national arma- ments will not be possible without advertising how to reduce, and how much to reduce and what shall be each nation's proportion. Some of us put our trust in international armament or world police, but international armament or world police can only be insti- tuted, backed up and made effectual by keep- ing all peoples informed of mutual interests and showing them what the mutual interests are, that they need to have world police to protect, and making them want to protect them. Some of us put our trust in an International Court to administer the world, but the Inter- national Court which we might use to back up our international police, could only secure its 28 The Air-Line to Liberty appointment, its authority and its working prestige, by being advertised to all peoples — by being believed in enough to work. Some of us put our trust in treaties and in scraps of paper in abstract words written by lawyers, but treaties to establish peace which are not backed up in detail by advertisements removing the causes of war, will be more vis- ionary than they have been before. Before the war, treaties worked after a dull, empty fashion because people believed in them, but nobody believes in treaties now. Their fail- ure has been advertised to the ends of the earth. Some of us put our trust in what we have tried already — a balance of power between two great contending forces among the na- tions. But if a balance of power is going to be made to work in some other way than it has been working the last four years, it can only be made to work by having one great na- tion on each side touch the imagination of all the other nations on its side — and the nations on the other side — so that it will be possible to get a balance of power set up. The Art of Making Nations Look 29 What the war is going to end in is a huge Advertising Clearing House for the World. The nations that discover that this is true and that start the Clearing House first and make it work first, will be the nations that will win for their civilization its way with the world. Advertising will make disarmament safe because it will be a working method of remov- ing the causes of war. Advertising will make International Police safe because we will advertise into being a moral centre of mutual interests the Police can represent. Advertising will make a decision of an In- ternational Court a working decision because it is the only way in which the people who will have to abide by the decisions of an In- ternational Court can be got to see why they should. . • • • • I have tried to express what seem to me good reasons for America's adoption and in- troduction of advertising as a substitute for war in running the affairs of the world. Advertising is essentially an American idea 30 The Air-Line to Liberty — a working method of putting efficiency and liberty together and of getting unity of action without force. I would like to consider the details as to how America can now send over into Germany its first advertisement of advertising as a sub- stitute for war. How can we best manage at just this juncture, to send over into Germany what might be called our shooting invitation to talk? If America can touch the imagination of Germany at just this juncture with what Americans want and what Americans are like one-tenth as well as Germany has touched the imagination of America with what Germans want and with what Germans are like, we will have made our great flank movement on Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the Kaiser and will have found our short-cut to winning the war. But before asking the reader to consider my way of having America advertise in Ger- many perhaps it will be interesting to consider what can be learned by America from the way The Art of Making Nations Look 31 Germany on the one hand and The Allies on the other, have advertised to us. The advertising that we do, now that the world is looking to us, must be advertising that fits definitely in to what has been already done and that brings to its logical climax the advertising that Germany and The Allies have begun. Our advertising must begin where theirs leaves off. Where does theirs leave off? What kind of advertising is it that Germany and The Allies are pointing out to America at just this time, to do or not to do? 32 Chapter VI THANKS TO THE KAISER FOR MAKING US SEE WHAT WE WANT I THANK God every day for the viola- tion of Belgium. All one could do at first was to wonder why He allowed it. But any one who has seen how it works and how it is working every day, can see why now. Only the most stupendous and incredible advertisement of Germany — a billboard as high as a world, announcing the murder of a whole nation, could ever have got the atten- tion of England, France and America to what Germany was really like. There was hardly one of us who knew or who even guessed what Germany was really like, and we all had to be told — everybody even in the remotest corners of the earth had to know and know at once or it would have been too late. It was not merely because Ger- many was hurrying that Belgium was cruci- fied. With His face hid and with a great shout, God was hurrying. None of the nations would have known Thanks to the Kaiser 33 what to do. Every one of them would have felt blurred and scatter-minded about Ger- many. With good-natured muddling and weak hope we would have pottered on. But Germany would not let us potter on. With one sweep, by one swift blow, by her drive through Belgium, Germany hammered together, focussed, made self-conscious and stupendous the soul and the spiritual might of the world. And now at last (any man can look about him and see it now) the whole world all day, all night, every day is noticing God. At last the whole world all together as under one great roof is praying, singing and working with God. It knows what it wants of God. This is the first reason I am grateful for Germany's opening advertisement, — the one in Belgium. Germany has blazed vividly out for me a new idea of the place that religion really has in the affairs of men. I have al- ways believed that the heart of man is sound at the core, that religion is the rock bottom of the world, but I could not prove it. Ger- many has proved it. 34 The Air-Line to Liberty I thank God daily for the violation of Bel- gium by Germany for another reason. It has given me a new and vivid idea of what effi- ciency really is, — of the main element in hu- man nature efficiency has to provide for be- fore it can be called efficient. I have always known that the main element in efficiency is the spirit of man. But I have wanted some one to prove it. Germany has proved it and advertised it. She has proved and advertised that only the spiritual works. Germany would have been in possession of Europe and in practical control of the planet at this moment, if she had not in a weak, frightened way sneaked across to Paris through Belgium. We were prepared in all parts of the world to think well of the Ger- mans and of their superior fitness in certain regards to all of us, and after the first shiver of surprise in attack was over, there were thousands of millions of people in all nations who would not have minded Germany's con- trolling the planet, if she had been what people thought she was — (at least they would not have minded a world's war's worth) but Thanks to the Kaiser 35 when Germany showed herself so visionary and so incompetent about human nature as to offer herself to us all — as judge and ruler of us all by coming out before us and deliber- ately and before our eyes stamping on little Belgium, we all knew at a glance what would have to be done to Germany. It would have to be proved once for all to the Germans and to all mankind that a nation that could do what Germany had done, and had spent forty years in deliberately thinking how it would do it, and in getting ready to do it, was the most colossally inefficient nation on earth. We do not deny that Germany in her little local Central Europe way in dealing right under her own eyes, in Germany with Ger- mans — in dealing with the only kind of people she has ever really noticed yet, is efficient, but the efficiency Germany claims is efficiency in dominating a world and efficiency in dominat- ing a world turns on seeing a world scientifi- cally, on seeing it as it is, and on seeing what will work and what will not work with it. Any tyro in the science of human nature as it exists on this planet at large to-day could 36 The Air-Line to Liberty have told Germany that to begin dominating a world and proving that she was fit to domi- nate a world by showing herself at the start, a coward and a bully, would not work. It left nothing for anybody to live for but to prove to the Germans and to everybody else once for all, that it was a mooning, ego- tistic, absent-minded and visionary thing for Germany to do — to hold up and shoot up a world from behind little Belgium and to shove little Belgium in front of her to protect her while she did it. It has turned out as any matter-of-fact, un- sentimental man outside of Germany would have seen it would turn out. Germany by one telegram pulled the plug out of the world — mobilized a world against her. I do not see how there can hardly be a man left who, after all that has happened, after seeing Germany commit suicide by being un- scientific and sentimental about herself, can seriously keep on calling Germany efficient. The arm chair fighter may. One will occa- sionally come on a man yet sitting in a cosy corner of a club perhaps, who still lets his Thanks to the Kaiser 37 mind keep pattering on about German effi- ciency, but with men who observe facts it is idle now to call Germany a practical nation, when even from a sheer military point of view, for every man she killed in Belgium she raised up as by enchantment a hundred thou- sand soldiers against her — and set their faces — their living or dead faces forever against her. In England, Russia, Italy, America and Japan it was Germany herself who advertised for troops to come out and crush her. "Come and crush me!" she shouted in the same great blind splendid crazy minute in every capital of the world. For herself Germany had raised an army in forty years. For her enemies she raised a hundred armies in a night. It is hard to call this efficient. And what Germany did in a night with the armies of the world she did in the same night with their religions. With one single alarm — one single, awful clang on the little iron soul of Belgium, Germany rang the church bell of the earth and all the religions of the earth came out to meet her. 38 The Air -Line to Liberty The world was flooded with vision in a night. Four hundred million men became prophets in a night. We saw God, we saw right and wrong with a shout. We cheered for God! Of course all nations have had moments of seeing God. Nations had all looked at God separately before. But in Belgium with one look all men in all nations saw God. We saw with one look hell and heaven opened up side by side. And the soul of the world made its plain choice forever. Some of us who like to put in a good deal of our time watching human nature, have come to feel that the reason men and nations are not good and do not do right is on the whole that good and evil are left vague and general and are not made striking enough. Millions of men are full of evil because evil has never been advertised to them alongside the good, has never been dramatized on a stupendous and colossal scale and in unforgettable con- trast placed before them all at once when they were all standing and looking together Thanks to the Kaiser 39 and saw Truth blanching each other's faces.. The main thing I am grateful to Germany for, is that she has performed this great service for our modern world. She has acted as God's Publicity Agent, and got the whole attention of the whole world in all nations at once as to what the Devil is like and just how he does things, or how he would try to do them if he could. The advertisement of good and evil along- side is so clean-cut and plain that the entire planet (except the extreme pacifists, of course) is being good. It was the German idea of efficiency, the idea of getting what one wants by sneaking up and attacking a little nation in the back, that has precipitated a world into being good. America in this war, as it has seemed to me, is now engaged in two great enterprises. One of them is the more obvious one — the easier and quicker one — the task of making the world safe for democracy, and the other (which she is working on desperately all the while underneath), is making democracy safe for the world. 4-0 The Air -Line to Liberty The modus operandi for making democracy- safe for the world is going to be very largely the study and interpretation in all nations of the virtues and vices of Germany. Germany has the attention of the world for a hundred years because she has been thor- ough and worked her sins through to their logical conclusion, to their full logical ex- pression and advertisement. The very thought of Germany for a hun- dred years is going to fill the churches and cathedrals with singing, because with one sheer, naked, grim flash of awful plainness she has made a world conscious of itself, has made a world know what it wants — has made a world — with a whole little nation like Bel- gium stretched on its cross — see God! This war is a competition of advertisements — of self revelations of nations and is going to be won by the nations that can advertise best. The terms of peace are going to be determined and arranged by the nations that can advertise best. If America discovers, reveals, and adver- Thanks to the Kaiser 41 tises herself as honestly as Germany has, the world is safe for democracy. The question that faces America daily now is this. As Germany has touched the imagi- nation of America with her revelation of what was in her soul, how can America touch the imagination of Germany with what is in hers? 42 Chapter VII THANKS TO THE ALLIES FOR MAKING US SEE WHAT WE WANT THE next thing I am thankful for in this war, after Germany's advertisement of her preparedness to betray and attack the world, is the world's advertisement of its un- preparedness. I was not thankful for the world's unpre- paredness at first. But from the point of view of The Allies being awarded at the judgment bar of mankind, a victorious and overwhelm- ing ending to this war I am thankful now. From the point of view of securing for The Allies the right to make a final and authorita- tive settlement of the world, the stupidity, the muddleheaded innocence of The Allies toward Germany — the unpreparedness of The Allies for there being a nation like Ger- many at all, or for there being a people like the Germans, is the most stupendous convin- cing and uncontradictable advertisement Civi- lization has ever had. The innocence and unpreparedness of The Allies in dealing with the treachery Germany Thanks to the Allies 43 had been getting ready for forty years does not look like an advantage at the beginning. A burglar always has an advantage at the be- ginning and always looks much more intelli- gent than other people do, at the beginning. But after all the most intelligent and most important part of a war in which to succeed is the end. The mere beginning of the war — which we admit the Germans were ready for, naturally goes by in time. It is the end now slowly looming up ahead when the nations will all be sitting around the conference table of the world, which is the big end of this war. This strange, new, sudden little neighbor- hood of nations, where now we all live to-day on this sudden, new, one-room little planet with a hundred other nations all whirled to- gether, all hugged-up and crashed together by machines — all unknown to each other, all collided into intimacy with each other in a few minutes, all obliged to learn how to love each other in a few minutes — is going to have before very long now, its First Meeting. In due time we will be sitting down and facing 44 The Air-Line to Liberty each other around the Conference Table of the World. Which nations of us all on the whole by the self-revelations they have made of their powers and their ideas will be decided to be best fitted to conceive and to carry out in be- half of us all the common interests of man- kind? The first thing that is going to happen when we sit down to the table is that the Germans are going to tell everybody that the Ameri- cans and The Allies cannot be trusted, and America and The Allies are going to tell everybody that the Germans cannot be trusted. Who is going to be believed? It is then that the war — the real war back of the war, the one everybody will have to be ready for, is going to come off. The leader- ship of civilization is going to be awarded by the world in favor of the nations which in the conduct of this war have shown the most consideration and justice, the most power to criticise themselves when dealing with others, the most national sense of humor and power to see themselves as others see them, and the Thanks to the Allies 45 most imagination about people different from themselves. The nations which have shown the most self-control and imagination about others than themselves and shown it under the most diffi- cult conditions, will be the nations the world will decide shall be given the lead in con- trolling other nations. America and The Allies will claim that they have shown more self-control and more consideration for the rights of others than Germany and her allies, and Germany and her allies on their side will put forward the claim that they have shown more. The Conference Table of the world is go- ing to be at first a stalemate of nations saying beautiful things about themselves. Probably it is not going to make very much difference what nations say about themselves. It will be the things about nations that any- body can see about them that will decide their fate at the Conference Table of the World. It will be the things they do not need to say. What did Germany and what did The Allies 46 The Air -Line to Liberty take for granted — in the way they have con- ducted this war? Nations and civilizations as well as indi- vidual men and women are only judged in this world at last by the things they take for granted. England, France, Russia and America took it for granted that Germany would not do the things that she has done. Germany took it for granted that England and France and Russia would and that possibly unless she hurried, they would do them first. The de- gree in which England, France, Russia and America are superior to Germany is the de- gree in which they were unprepared for her. Germany's preparedness, the preparedness of every man, woman and baby in Germany to help Germany do what she has done, dooms her. The nations that have had the most unpre- paredness to live in the kind of world Ger- many has been giving us the past four years are the nations that are the most prepared for the end of the war. The fact that Germany was prepared for Thanks to the Allies /\rj just such a world as this of the last four years, shows that it is this kind of world — the one we are sampling now which she deserves to be at the head of. We do not deny — not a single nation of us — that it is the kind of world Ger- many has more imagination and more far- sightedness for, than the rest of us. If it is to be the world of the future, let her have it. We willingly step one side. We do not deny it. In hell we look up to her. She is as good as the rest of us three to one. We boast of being fooled and unprepared in it. We shall boast for a thousand years, of being inferior to Germany in the world we have now. We will tell our children and our children's children that in this kind of a world which Germany after forty years' trying has at last made up, it was only by time and by numbers that other nations could hope to fight their way through. But while we are fighting we think. Germany has made her colossal advertise- ment of a world in which she is superior to us, and when we have fought our way through Germany's world and bring Germany's world 48 The Air-Line to Liberty to a full stop, pull Germany up in a world we understand, in which she will be stupid and in which she will be afraid, a world in which she does not understand anybody but herself, we shall have no difficulty in holding Ger- many back — in keeping Germany where the streets of the world will be safe. Germany has made her advertisement of her superiority in a world of fighting. Her preparedness for it is now her self-confession, her creed and her doom. Our unpreparedness for it is our clean-cut, conclusive advertisement that our civilization is a real civilization, that our ideals are sin- cere, that the faith we have had in human na- ture, even the faith we have had in German human nature, is our title to control the earth. We, the Unprepared Nations, have proved that we have ideals. The bare facts of our preoccupation, of our defenselessness which no man can deny, prove that we have ideals — the ideals that civilization can alone be made out of. The faith that is deep and high enough and matter-of-fact enough to be unprepared for Thanks to the Allies 49 Germany, the faith we have died for, and faced annihilation for has it in it to lead the prayers and hopes and marshal the powers of all true men in all nations, to make a civiliza- tion at last — make a civilization now which until the bitter joy, the awful literalness of its faith had been tested, could only have been dreamed. Germany's preparedness is the most stupen- dous and brutal advertisement of a great na- tion's actual religion, of the precise and literal measure of faith in its own ideals and in other people's that the world has ever seen. In its spy-system covering the earth Germany breathes out its most secret prayer, its bottom- less national fear, its cry to God in the pres- ence of its own bottomless national unbelief, in the presence of its own weakness and treachery — its spiritual pallor in trying to be- lieve in the human heart. The Germans looked in each other's faces and then raised their army. The German army is the most colossal ad- vertisement of the thorough-going and con- 50 The Air-Line to Liberty vinced fear in the heart of a great people that the world has known. The outstanding fact that the world is struggling with to-day is Fear in Germany. It is this fear in Germany, that they have made their advertisement of, to the ends of the earth. It is because this Fear — this spiritual pallor in the Germans — is not in the hearts of the other peoples that we are going to entrust to these other peoples the building of civiliza- tion on the earth. Germany has offered herself as a candidate to rule the earth. The world will not consent to be ruled by the nation in it that is the most afraid. It is to the nation that can believe more than other nations believe that the world looks to-day. It is the nation that is the most quiet and relaxed and assured, the nation that looks in the face of the world and reads the eyes of the world, and is not afraid, that shall lead it. Thanks to the Allies 51 Germany and her Allies and France and England and their Allies for three years now have been putting forward their advertise- ments to the world. We have watched them — the two great groups of nations, colossal, heroic up against the sky for three years as on some vast watershed of Time struggling with one another for the attention of a thou- sand nations, to turn the stream of the world's hope and the world's good will their way. And now that the next move in advertising or in steering the attention of nations seems to have fallen to us I would like to consider the details of what America can do to take up the advertising that Germany and The Allies have already done, bring the war to an over- whelming end and establish peace. How can America advertise what she wants and what she is like to Germany as success- fully and as dramatically as Germany has ad- vertised what she wants and what she is like to us? 52 Chapter VIII THE SHORT-CUT TO VICTORY A SMALL object lies before me on my desk as I write. It is a news-bomb. It weighs two ounces loaded. It has two pieces of twisted wire to hold it together. It has an oil cloth raincoat to keep it dry until it goes off. It is a little over two inches long, has three narrow explosive newspaper col- umns rolled up inside it. It looks when open like a kind of cocoon or pea-pod of news. A little fleet of a hundred Liberty air-planes up over Stuttgart could rain down on the streets and public squares and roofs of the city two tons of news-bombs in two minutes like this one on my desk. It could shower down a million and a half greetings to the people of Stuttgart from the people of New York in two minutes and be off in two minutes more for Leipsic. Such is the news-bomb on my desk. I have been carrying it in my right-hand trousers pocket for weeks, next to my knife. Every now and then when I am going about The Short-Cut to Victory 53 my hand falls on it down in the darkness next to my knife and I feel of it and think of it. I think of what it stands for to me and of what it may mean for the world. I feel like a boy with a new world in his pocket . . . some- times I take it out a minute — the little twisted bit of oil-cloth and wire and hold it in my hand like a new agate. I take a long look at it and try to realize it and what it could do in Germany — the havoc, the astonishment, the new beliefs it could sweep down on Germans out of the sky, standing and looking up in their dooryards. Of course one might light in a lonely field in Germany or under a huckleberry bush or on a roof-gutter instead of a sidewalk. But America will move news on Germany in fleets. She commands all the resources now left on the earth to do in the sky as she likes. She will empty the whole hollow of the air of her enemies. She will not skulk about in heaven weakly and economically and make a kind of pitter-patter of revolution over Ger- many from out of the sky. Millions of bombs will be rained down at once. Many of them 54 The Air -Line to Liberty will expect to be wasted. Thousands of them will be found like Indian arrowheads by farmers, dug up and read a hundred years too late, but out of millions a day showered on cities and villages from the sky a few hun- dred thousand a week would be picked up, opened and read, passed secretly along, talked over by firesides at night and whispered about in the streets. The best advertising in this world is free advertising — the saying things to people in a way they cannot help talking about day or night. Giving people something to guess. Giving people something to look for, to try to hunt out in the grass like four-leaved clo- vers. Making people wonder why. Making people wonder when. Leading people on, luring them with in- credible news to them about themselves. Making them wonder each time more and more if we are sincere, day after day, time af- ter time, until at last our chance comes, we The Short-Cut to Victory 55 act, we do the thing we say, we are the thing we say, we mount to a climax of being be- lieved. Advertising is the science of being believed. We can drop news about ourselves and what we want to do with Germany and what we propose to Germans to do with us, on the side- walks, pelt news down like hail on them in the great Squares, in the village greens and the news even at the risk of life will be read — but how can it be believed? What can we do to the Germans to prove to them out of the sky that we are sincere, to act our sincerity out, to prove to them before each other's eyes while they look that we are the kind of people we say we are, and that we will do what we say we will do? We tell them in our news-bombs that we are not fighting them to kill them but to talk to them. The most striking and convincing thing to do to them would be to stop killing them while we are telling them. We will mark off a special territory right close to them — everywhere above them a mile 56 The Air-Line to Liberty deep up the air — a territory we have the mas- tery of and keep the mastery of up over the earth, where we can kill and where everybody sees we can kill, we will make the sky black with airships and darken the sun with the fear of killing and then we will not kill. Gradually if we do this, I think Germans will creep out from their cellars and notice Americans. We will act like ourselves with the Ger- mans, if not down on the ground near The Somme at least a mile up in the air. We will do things to Germans at least a mile high — as we want to. All over Germany we will spread across the heavens what Americans are like. We will kill men in other airships who attack us out of the air, but mere men and women and babies, helpless under us down on the ground we will talk with. We will do the one thing we have wanted to do with them all along. We will talk with them. First, we will be feared. Then wondered at. Then laughed at. Then wondered at without laughing. Then believed. The Short-Cut to Victory 57 There is no reason why the American peo- ple should not speak straight across to the German people past the Kaiser, if we speak vividly and clearly like this. In clear, plain sight before the workmen, the women and children looking up from the streets and from the fields, we will spell out in big letters up over Germany America's sincerity toward the German people, Ameri- ca's courage and hope for the German people upon the sky. 58 Chapter IX THE AIR-LINE TO PEACE IT is not necessary for America if she is conducting a News-Raid in the air and dropping news-bombs over Germany to adopt precisely the policy I have suggested. News- bombs and bombs of the more usual and more expected kind could be dropped together. I am not narrowing my idea of advertising what America is fighting for in Germany, to drop- ping news-bombs alone. We can do the more conventional and less bold thing that Germans would expect us to do if we find it necessary. I am merely — as a man who has been inter- ested for many years in the psychology of ad- vertising, picking out the most striking and most permanent way for the American people to touch the imagination of a hundred million people in Austria and Germany. A hundred million people who are trying to touch the imagination of a hundred million other people three thousand miles away are undertaking a thing so colossal that they should see that they are doing it when they The Air-Line to Peace 59 start, in the quickest, cheapest, surest and most permanent way. Looking at the matter from a strictly ad- vertising point of view it is obvious that if we are going to drop news-bombs over Ger- many out of airplanes the moment they are first seen by the people in the streets up over a German city, we must make them as sensa- tional as possible. The first thing that a good advertisement provides for is being noticed in the very first word. People cannot be expected to go back and wonder what it was. A good advertise- ment must attack and overwhelm and hold voluntarily the attention of people. The loud- est, most reverberating thing a fleet of air- planes up over a city can think of to do, and to do at once, must be done at once. After all that has been happening of late a fleet of air- planes up over a German city, that did not try to kill a single man, woman or baby in it, would be — as it seems to me, the most arrest- ing kind of advertisement America could use. The next principle after arresting attention that a good advertisement has to provide for 60 The Air-Line to Liberty is keeping it. Attention that has been arrested and dropped is worse than no attention at all. One of the earlier things that an advertising man of the more powerful sort learns about human nature, is that when a man's attention has been got by a trick, his attention drops with a thud. The attack on a man's atten- tion not only has to be held but the boldness must be the kind that can be kept up. A good advertisement seems to be a fuse of ideas, a setting off of a slow mine of culmin- ating events inside people's minds, suspense, anticipation, personal surprise, personal non- surprise, recognition and satisfaction, surprise and more satisfaction. . . . Reading a good advertisement is like living a little life. If an advertisement is good it not only attacks and wins a man's attention, it haunts him. The airplanes up over Germany will wish to bear in mind this principle. The next principle our airplanes up over Germany are going to bear in mind, is that the best advertising is free advertising. All paid advertising is for, is to set free advertis- ing going. We will spend our money lavishly The Air-Line to Peace 61 — on sweeping the sky free, on getting the full mastery of the air and on getting our airplanes up over the Germans, but when once we get them there the one thing the men in them will have to remember, is that what they are there for is not to spend our American time and our American money on advertising to the Ger- mans but on getting the Germans to do our ad- vertising for us and on getting them to do it for nothing. What an airplane is for when it has just been up over a city is to make five hundred thousand people talk. The one question America faces in making a flank movement on the German people through the air, is the se- lecting of things to do and things to say which will set the Germans to doing our advertising for us. The three-inch news-torpedoes we drop on them must have something in them or some- thing about the way they are dropped on them which will keep five hundred thousand Ger- mans sitting up all night talking and whisper- ing about us. We must cover a German city with a spell of wondering about us. The 62 The Air-Line to Liberty wondering must not be a vague, general, cool, public wonder but each man's intimate, des- perate, personal wonder, his own personal fear and hope. To do this, have five hundred thousand helpless people, men, women and little chil- dren running out into the streets and looking up expecting to be killed and then try not kill- ing one of them. First they will wonder what we are up there for. Then they will look at the news-bombs and wish they dared to pick up the news- bombs to see. People will stand around them and watch them at first at a safe distance to see if they blow up. Then they will want to open one and will wonder if they dare. Some man at a distance perhaps will start a fire toward one and try burning it. Then he will try read- ing it. Then everybody will rush up and try reading it. Then everybody will begin find- ing their own and go about reading theirs. If we do this, the first thing the Germans get about us — before they have read a word will be news about us that they would never have believed. They would not have believed that The Air-Line to Peace 63 the people in America with the power to com- mand the sky up over a German city would waste a sky like that and use it just to drop news from. If we strike at the Germans in this way and get them before we have said a word to believing things about us they would never have believed, perhaps they will be disposed when they pick the bombs up, to believe news about themselves they never would have be- lieved. To waste a whole sky up over a German city just to drop news out of it, makes people won- der not only what the news is, but makes them keep wondering what the news is day after day — each time, as long as we keep wasting the sky for it. "What are Americans wast- ing a sky like this to tell us this time?" They will think Americans must believe in news a good deal. And as our belief in news and in what can be done with news is the one specific thing above all others we want to get over to them, prove to them and advertise to them as our substitute and as their substitute for war, we will have made our point with the Ger- mans at the very beginning and will have the 64 The Air-Line to Liberty underhold on their attention, the long reach on their imagination from the start. Germans will be going about everywhere picking up news-vials of American ideas — Americans' ideas about Germans and about what Germans can do with Americans. We will have all Germany agog in a week. The Kaiser will not know what to do with this last silent, vast searchlight from America cast on him and on his government — this vast, beneficent, wilful, self-revelation of the American people to the German people fighting them to the death on the ground — raining peace down on them from out of the sky. I was going to say that the peace from America raining down from dreadnoughts in the sky, — these immense, innumerable, silent men of war in heaven, would be the peace that passeth all understanding. But there is some- thing so remote and beautiful and spiritual- sounding about the expression that I fear peo- ple will get what I say mixed up with religion — and with our supposing we are being supe- rior and beautiful, moral characters. The Air-Line to Peace 65 It is not the goodness of the peace that pass- eth all understanding — men of war in the air letting down doves of peace instead of bombs, which concerns me. It is the shrewdness and practical common sense of presenting peace to people in a way that they do not understand but cannot keep from looking at until they do — which interests me. It is the power of the thing as plain haunting advertising, as get- ting honestly and holding conclusively the at- tention of a great nation and ending the war. The sky, black over their cities with power to wipe them off the earth. . . . Then in their suspense and fear just dropping on them news about them and news about us which will make them not want to fight — which will make them fight not. To a great kindly, beleaguered people imprisoned in their mad-house we will make our way with the sensational news — the true news that their Kaiser has kept from them, which makes their dying for him ten thousand a day, which makes their being Christs for him ten thousand a day — saviours of Hohenzollerns an unspeakable mockery — a pitiful delusion. 66 The Air-Line to Liberty We are fighting against Germany a three- story war. Underground, undersea. On top of the ground, on top of the sea. On top of the air. I am in favor as I have said before of doub- ling and redoubling our fighting on the ground and on the western front, but the quick victory and the conclusive victory of our ar- mies in the field is going to be gained by our advertisements through Germany as to what the fighting is about. With fleets of air ships of news we will at- tack the great army of a thousand foolish cities at home, of the millions of fooled men slaving in the weary fields that alone make the Ger- man army at the front possible. The ground must be held and the offensive on the ground must be held, but it is a com- parative waste of money to fight the German army in the slow butting, old-fashioned way we are doing now — merely at the front. Why should we spend all of our seventeen billion dollars in attacking the German army on the one point where it is braced and strongest? The Germans are forty years ahead of us in The Air -Line to Peace 67 shooting and they are forty years behind us in news. We will outflank the German army with news. Instead of biting off slivers of the German army, now one inch and now another inch on one edge of the army at a time, we will go out around it, knock the underpinning out from under it, we will undermine it from below, crowd it down from above, cut it off at home and fight it from behind. We will deal with the hidden and deeper sources of supply. We will cut off their enthusiasm, paralyze their morale, probe through their fighting to the faith that makes them fight. We will be ruth- less with the German army. The lies about us and the lies about themselves, that make them fight and that make us fight, shall be swept with air-ships as with mighty brooms from the sky, out of the path of the world. "The only American help to The Allies we have seriously to reckon with," says Major Hoffre of the German General Staff, "is in the air." Dropping news out of a sky we command, a sky that we use for nothing else — making a 68 The Air-Line to Liberty billboard of heaven for our ideas, and making Germans watch the sky day and night for what Americans think, will be of itself a demonstra- tion that advertising is what we say it is. With one stroke out of the air we will have all Ger- many doing something it never dreamed it would do. If by advertising we can make the Germany that fights us because she will not listen to us, right about face before her own eyes and listen to us and like to listen to us, the Germans will see what advertising can do by what it has done to them and will believe in it as much as we do. Germany will want to advertise to us. She will want to establish mutual advertising campaigns between the na- tions. The war will be transposed from the force of arms to the force of ideas. As this is what the war is about, the object of the war will be attained and the war will end. CHAPTER X 69 WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO FIRST WHAT is there that the American peo- ple can do and do now to bring this programme to pass? See it and want it. Twenty rival motor manufacturers the other day in Washington went into a room and threw down on a table before each other all their private inventions. All the secrets they had been keeping from each other for a lifetime they gave away in a minute for The Liberty Motor. People would have said six months ago that it would be visionary to try to run a war on the idea that ordinary Amer- ican men could be counted on suddenly to act like business angels. Their attention had been got, their imaginations had been touched, they were confronted with the life or death of a nation, they saw what they wanted, saw it all together and went after it. The only thing that is necessary to have America adopt advertising to-day as an inven- tion for cutting across lots and winning this war, is to see what it wants and want it. 70 The Air -Line to Liberty There are four sets of advertising cam- paigns that the American people through the Government's Advertising Department or World Department (to be appointed perhaps by the President) will proceed to make. We will advertise to our Allies so that we can fight together better, we will advertise to the Ger- mans so that they will not want to fight at all. We will advertise to neutrals and to history and the judgment bar of the world what Amer- ica believes in and what America is going to have as a substitute for this German war, and we will advertise to ourselves the Great Hole of Air up over Germany where. all the world can pour in, — what can be done with it, the bombs that can be dropped from it, until The Great Hole of Air up over Germany we have the Kaiser at the bottom of — that we have him cornered in, shall be ours. We will see it all together and we will want it all together and fleets of air planes shall come out of the shops, and crowds of airmen shall flock up from the people and the money shall pour in from the banks and men shall be set to work all over the country, editors, authors, business What People Can Do First Ji men, travelling men, statesmen and attention- engineers furnishing the stuffing for the bombs. In the meantime here is my advertisement of advertising addressed to my people — here in the Saturday Evening Post, that little bill- board of Benjamin Franklin's now grown so great where one sees in spirit as one writes, ten million men go by a week — I have tacked up my hope for my country! I am reading it over a minute before let- ting it go. One does not want to make a mis- take with ten million people. One thinks what could be done with a hope for a country if the ten million people believed it, if they surrounded Congress with it, — if the ten mil- lion people knocked on the door of The White House and backed up the President with it, and crowded around General Squier with money letters, Congressmen and votes when he goes before Congress presently to ask Amer- ica for a billion dollars to buy, own and ad- minister Air over Germany as the fortress of the liberties of the world. I believe that by getting hold of the one hole 72 The Air-Line to Liberty not stopped up into Germany and using it to cut past the Kaiser to the German people, we are shortening the war two years, shortening reconstruction after the war twenty years, sav- ing forty billion dollars of American money, one million American boys and securing and holding for the American people in behalf of all free peoples the casting vote — God helping us — on the fate of the world. I have been hoping that the Saturday Even- ing Post would agree with me that the billion dollars General Squier has announced he is going to ask us for, would be cheap — for what we want to get for it. Down in Independence Square an hour ago, with that little tucked-in Independence Hall, so quaint and so unimportant-looking on the one side and the great proud Curtis Building — where the Post is printed — on the other, I stood and thought. I looked up at the great proud Curtis Building (it looks rather imper- vious sometimes to an Author standing there and holding the attention of its ten million people in the hollow of its hand!) and as I stood before it — heard the dim thunder in it What People Can Do First 73 of millions of magazines — the far tread in the presses of the minds of millions of Americans marching past I looked back and forth, now at the Curtis Building and now at Independ- ence Hall, and I could not help thinking how the great proud Curtis Building in this des- perate moment of my country might possibly do a favor to the quaint unimportant-looking little simple Independence Hall across the Square, how it might help to keep it standing in the thoughts and prayers and wills of men for what it was there for— if the Curtis Build- ing and all the people it carries with it would take a stand for advertising a nation as a na- tion's national defense, would believe as much in advertising as Independence Hall believed in it when it took the man who invented ad- vertising, — Benjamin Franklin a hundred years ago, — sent him over as America's adver- tisement to Paris, touched the imagination and the chivalry of a great people, gathered up France around us and won the war. One of the first letters we would like to have dropped down on Germany — some of us — 74 The Air-Line to Liberty might have for the gist of it something like this: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO THE GER- MAN PEOPLE in the name of our fathers and your fathers and our children and your children, send greetings. On the third day of February our President was speak- ing to the German Government in these words. . . . "I refuse to believe it is the intention of the German authorities to do in fact what they have warned they will feel at liberty to do. I cannot bring myself to believe that they will indeed destroy American ships and take the lives of American citizens, that they will pay no regard to the ancient friendship between their people and our own, or to the solemn obligations which have been ex- changed between us. . . ." On the third day of August our President, who had been saying a little while before "I cannot bring myself to believe . . ." was saying this : "The object of America in this war against Germany is to deliver the free peoples of military establishment, controlled by an irresponsible Government, which, having secretly planned to dominate the world, proceeded to carry out the plan without regard either to the sacred obligations of treaty or the long estab- lished practices and long cherished principles of interna- tional action and honor; which chose its own time for the war, delivered its blow fiercely and suddenly, stopped at no barrier, either of law or mercy, swept a whole conti- nent within the tide of blood — not the blood of soldiers only, but the blood of innocent women and children also What People Can Do First 75 and of the helpless poor ; and now stands, balked but not defeated, the enemy of four-fifths of the world." The difference between these two ways of speaking to the German Government, is what this letter from the American people to the German people is about. We want to tell the German people directly and for ourselves what has happened. All through this war up to the last possible minute the American people have kept up the fight in their minds to believe in Germans. For months and for years — long after to all the rest of the world, we were being criminally patient, we kept on in America through our President fighting to trust you. Inch by inch and point by point you have driven us back from our faith in you. We risked the fate of the world, wagered the souls of our people, put up the lives of our children, up to the last possible minute, to believe in Ger- many. Again and still again — with half the world laugh- ing in our faces, have our people cried out across the sea to your people and there has been no answer from your people to our people . . . the same rattling of the sa- ber . . . the same weary, sad silence. . . . And even now when we are fighting you in every way we know — under the sea, on the sea, on the ground and up in the air — we are fighting you to trust you. We are chopping our way past you, to where we can hew out of you a way to believe you. To-day at last with these air planes we are getting our first word through to you and can say to you directly for ourselves what we are fighting the German people for. We are hunting far and wide and up and down Ger- many for Germans we know we can trust and until our 76 The Air-Line to Liberty last dollar is gone, and until our last man is dead shall we keep on fighting on through Germany not for terri- tory, not for indemnity but for Germans we can trust. As long as the German people put forward in dealing with us men it is only safe to use force with, force will have to be kept up. You are going to keep on shooting and killing off your customers in America and we are going to keep on shooting and killing off people we would rather trade with in Germany, until you put forward to deal with us men something besides shooting can be done with — men whose promises Americans can believe. If you wish to know who these men could probably be picked out from in Germany, the men could be picked out — we should think — by answering two or three simple questions. Who are the men you know of in Germany who shut down their windows or turned away their heads when they heard the bells ringing out in Germany three years ago to celebrate the murder of twelve hundred innocent men, women, babies and neutrals on a passenger liner? (We suspect you were kept from knowing it was a pas- senger liner) but men to represent you with America might be picked out from these. Who are the men who during this war have shown the most courage in behalf of the people with the Govern- ment? We do not agree very many of us in America with Liebknecht but if a man who goes to jail for what he be- lieves should be put forward to make promises for Ger- many to America we would believe him. He would be priceless to you and priceless to us at once. What People Can Do First 77 Who are the men in Germany who if their advice had been asked about getting to Paris by striking on the way a small helpless neutral nation in the back, would have told the Government that it would not work and that it would merely pull on Germany the trigger of the world? Men for America to trust could be picked out from these. We are fighting Germany to plow our way through to men like these. We are hacking our way past the Ger- many we see and that has been fronted up against us so that we have to see, to the Germany we know, to the Ger- many we believe in, the Germany we hope for and the Germany that hopes for us. We will not feel superior to you and give you up ! "This is a people's war" as our President has said — "a war for freedom and justice and self government among all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon it and have made it their own, the German people themselves included. . . . "We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no con- quest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves and no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. . . . We fight for the things we have always carried nearest to our hearts, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Govern- ment, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such concert of free peo- ples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself free. "To such a task we dedicate our lives and our fortunes — everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come 78 The Air-Line to Liberty when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness, and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her she can do no other!" Chapter XI 79 END OF ADVERTISEMENT ONE 1HAVE presented in these chapters for the possible adoption of my country three in- ventions. First: An invention of the physical means of cutting past the Kaiser and of putting our advertisements of what America is fighting for where the Germans can see them and read them. Second : The invention of a proposition for America to make in the advertisements which will make the Germans read them eagerly, namely: a substitute for war Germans would feel safe with and in which Germans would be glad to join with Americans and act with Americans — if Americans could be believed in by Germans. Third: An invention for being believed in by Germans. The invention of the physical means of get- ting the attention of Germans has already been attended to in the air planes of the Air Craft Board, and in the news-torpedo in my pocket 80 The Air-Line to Liberty which has been invented and offered to the Government by Roger Babson. The other two inventions, the invention of advertising as a substitute for war and the in- vention for being believed in by Germans, are not yet attended to and cannot be attended to until they are advertised to the people and the people want them. I hope no reader is going to think, now that we have got to the end of this first introduction or advertisement of my idea, that I am suppos- ing I have got him to believe it. What I have written this first advertisement for is to get him to want to believe it. I do not know how it works with others but it always antagonizes me a little when I catch myself with an idea, wanting to believe it. I at once begin looking around just because I want it, for things it will have to buck up against. I hope my reader is looking around now. The more things an idea has to buck up against the more it thinks and the better it gets. Apparently what makes an idea drive through in the end is the way it likes its diffi- culties and meets details. End of Advertisement One 81 It is only fair to me and to the reader and to my idea, to say that if any man wishes to see this idea bucking up against details so that he can believe it, back it up and get the people to back it up and get the Government to carry it through, he can be sure that he will not be interfered with (except by the author), in reading the chapters ahead. II AMERICA AND GERMANY Chapter I CROSS-CIRCUITED NEWSPAPERS EVERY morning (it is four years now) I get up and read editorials in the New York Times that I have no use for. I admire and believe the editorials but I have no use for them and they have no use for me. At least one out of every five editorials I read in the New York Times, since the war began, neither I nor any other American can do a thing with. I ask myself at the end of it, "What is the one possible thing I can do with this editor- ial?" I sit still and read it over again and wish some German would read it. Then I wonder why the New York Times 83 84 The Air-Line to Liberty is not doing anything about getting some Ger- man to read it. But the New York Times could not get it- self quoted in Germany alone. Even if all of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers who back Mr. Miller's editorials up, were to insist each morning vociferously that the edi- torial they had just read at breakfast must in- stantly be read by the Kaiser, that it must be instantly translated, marconigramed, air- planed and delivered to twenty German cities before night, nothing could be done about it. Only America's World Department could do it. With a bird's-eye view of all the edi- torials in America and command of the air over Germany and of what was needed in Germany that morning, that no single news- paper could hope to have, it could act for all the papers and for all the country to all of Germany at once. • • • • * Now for four years I have watched the Springfield Republican getting up bright and early every morning down on the other side of Mount Tom and telling a hundred thou- Cross-Circuited Newspapers 85 sand men in Springfield what they believe al- ready. I am always coming on an especially fine stirring wise editorial on Germany in the Republican. I think what it would mean if instead of having that editorial wasted on a hundred thousand men in Springfield who be- lieve it already, a hundred Germans in Ger- many could read it. Why do not the New York Times and the Springfield Republican and a few thousand other papers in this country that are trying now in a distant wistful way to supply the world with ideas for this war that only Ger- mans can use, combine to-morrow morning and begin to organize to-morrow morning a huge national mutual campaign to put their ideas for Germans where the Germans can get at them and use them — a campaign for having the New York Times and Springfield Repub- lican editorials read — in spite of the Kaiser in Germany? I believe that it can be done and that it is going to be done, the moment our American newspapers are less modest about themselves, and less satisfied with just whispering about 86 The Air-Line to Liberty Germany to their own subscribers. They will start up — of their own accord — a World De- partment at Washington. Far be it from me not to admit that getting an idea over to a hundred Germans who need it and can do something with it and can start a new Germany with it, costs more than get- ting the same idea over to a hundred thousand Americans in Springfield, Massachusetts. But what are ideas for? They are for the people who do not have them. • • • • • I do not know just how many million dol- lars a week are now being spent in America on laying before me and other Americans news, facts and ideas we have already and which only Germans need, but I do know that if half of the money that is now being spent by our great papers in giving us in America ideas we have already, were being spent by the papers or by the Government on putting their ideas for one week where Germans could have them and use them, victory for The Al- lies would loom up in a month. Cross-Circuited Newspapers 87 If we are sincere in saying what we are always saying in the New York Times and Springfield Republican that the world must be ruled by ideas and not by guns; if we pro- pose to take ideas seriously it will not be long before we will proceed to make national ar- rangements to use military strategy with ideas, to make drives with ideas on the people we want to hit — on the people the ideas will have to hit if they do anything. It will not be long before the New York Times and the Spring- field Republican, all the other papers and all their readers will be asking The United States Government to make provision for deliver- ing papers in Germany. It will be merely a matter of journalism — of plain bare military strategy in ideas for the New York Times and Republican to de- mand that provision be made by The Com- mander in Chief of the American forces to have their kind of explosives brought up to the front and aimed at the enemy at once. Why keep on aiming them vaguely and pleasantly at Americans? If Pershing were to bring over his army as a matter of military 88 The Air-Line to Liberty strategy next week and concentrate on New York, Chicago and San Francisco — and blow up New York, Chicago and San Francisco, the New York Times, the Chicago Daily News and the San Francisco Bulletin would tell Pershing he was absurd. But Pershing would be doing with his kind of ammunition precisely what they are doing with theirs. We have twenty thousand editors, vast regi- ments of editors in America all aiming their idea-howitzers, their news-shrapnel at cities where the ground is covered with news al- ready. News and editorials that should be snowed down on Germany are snowed down on us. All day every day here in America we go about — we Americans — knee-deep in news for Germans. I admit that it will cost money to do what I have in mind and get our news-ammunition over into Germany. I am not denying it is cheaper in handling our news-ammunition for Germany, to dump Cross-Circuited Newspapers 89 it in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Somers, Connecticut. I admit that instead of going to all the trou- ble to get our news-ammunition over to where it counts, it would be cheaper to have our am- munition factories — our Du Pont factories — just go about the country in a kind of reverie of explosions the way our newspapers do and blow each other up. But while it would cost more to get our ideas into Germans, is not that after all the one thing we are shooting them for so expensively — because we want to get them in? And all the time every day while we are shooting harder and making arrangements on a vast scale as I devoutly hope, to shoot still harder, there is at hand a definite workable way in which the American government and newspapers between them can cover Germany with American ideas. I keep thinking every day of this definite workable way to cover Germany with Amer- ican ideas. But American ideas will have to act. It is very hard to stand by and look around 90 The Air-Line to Liberty up here on Mount Tom and watch the huge beautiful national reverie of the American Press going round and round on Itself, with- out interrupting it. Everybody else is watching it too. Every morning — one morning after the other in a kind anxious devoted way — the way people used to begin the morning with family prayers, The Press of America gets up, looks toward Germany and has its Daily Morning Yearn toward Germany. In a wide, gentle, half-awake dream, it gets up and plants every morning German Revo- lutions in America. Why not plant them in Germany? All the American people have to do to have the New York Times and the Springfield Republican delivered in Germany is to get the Times and the Republican and other papers as interested in it as I am. The mo- ment that the Times and the Republican can be got to be less modest about their edi- torials and about the power of ideas, in this war, the ideas will begin ending it. But if the New York Times and the Repub- Cross-Circuited Newspapers 91 lican and the other papers are modest about their ideas, the people do not need to be. The people's government does not need to be. The American papers have the ideas. Let the American people see that they are delivered. Our armies in the field are pointing the Ger- mans to our ideas and when they point them to them, the ideas must be there. The moment our people see that the quick- est short-cut to the victory of our armies in the field turns on New York papers being picked up every day in Germany they will see that suitable arrangements are made through the Government to attend to it. We are shooting the Germans and the Ger- mans are shooting us at incredible expense every day because the Germans have a theory that they do not want our ideas. The first sensible thing to do is to see (while we keep on shooting of course) that arrange- ments are made to have the Germans, in spite of the Kaiser, know what the ideas are. We will soon have the New York papers delivered regularly to the German people until they want to stop shooting, until they wonder why 92 The Air-Line to Liberty they are shooting and letting themselves be shot. The Germans would rather be shot by the Kaiser than by us — when they get their papers. A while ago I read an editorial on The Moral Bankruptcy of Germany, copied in the New York Times from the New York Even- ing Post. I was grateful to the New York Times for appreciating the editorial and copy- ing it and seeing that I read it. But when I read it I could not help feeling how pathetic it was — after all — an editorial like that for sixty-six million Germans, waver- ing around and petering out on me! One German reading it would have been worth a hundred thousand Lees. In a general way I believe — as well as the New York Times and Springfield Republican — that ideas are the forces that rule the world. But I want to see them ruling the world now. I want to see something done now to front up a German with an idea. I want to make Cross-Circuited Newspapers 93 him look into the mouth of the cannon of the idea. If the things that have been said to Ameri- cans ten thousand times a day during this war, had been said to Germans, the war would have been over two years ago. 94 Chapter II WINNING AWAY GERMANY'S INITIATIVE AL O O S E-JOINTED strung-together Force like America and her Allies, can only hope to deal strategically with a massed force like the German people, by studying and picking out the weak points in the German psychology. German efficiency, like any other efficiency, has the defects of its qualities. What can be said to be the chief trait of the German psychology on its weaker side? All that the Germans can ever do with a thing is to drive it through further or screw it up tighter or multiply it. They almost never think of anything of their own to say, but they invent ways of cheap copying and of having more copies than any people on earth. Their minds operate essen- tially like printing presses. And the Germans almost never think of any- thing to do. They just do something some more. The way for Americans to grapple with Germany and to get ahead of Germany quick, Winning Away Germany* s Initiative 95 is for us to do something original — something which the Germans with their machine-like, standardized and ponderous habits of mind would not have thought of and will not be ready for. In all the ways that a burglar who has been planning to break in for forty years, can get ready, Germany is ready for us three to one. The Germans are ready to face us three to one by every route and at every point except Sky and News. It is Germany's initiative, her forty years' start, that has made her terrible in this war. Initiative is Germany's secret. The quick way to defeat Germany is to find the quick way to take away her forty-year ini- tiative. The way to take away her forty-year in- itiative is to pick out something to do at once in which forty years does not count. The world has a right to look to America, coming into the war fresh and strong as she does, to take Germany's initiative away. Very little has been done by America in this war so far which would seem to indicate 96 The Air-Line to Liberty that America is going to take Germany's in- itiative away. We have just been doing things some more. The right of the world to look to us for something original, something that will stand a chance of taking the Germans by sur- prise and of moving the initiative over to the Allies, has not been emphasized in America. I have no question of either the resources or the inventiveness of my country, and I be- lieve that the next thing we are going to plan for in America — plan for almost as if it were all the war were about, — is for taking Ger- many's initiative away. All that America needs to do to proceed at once to make her main drive at taking Ger- many's initiative away, is to stop long enough to think what initiative in a war is, what America might do with initiative if she had it, and what Germany has done with it the last four years. Every way of fighting in this war so far — except the tank, has been selected by Ger- mans. All we have done on our side is to catch up to them, slowly meet them and hold our Winning Away Germany's Initiative 97 own with them — in ways of fighting the Ger- mans have picked out. First, the Germans picked out physical force as a means of deciding the fate of the world, and worked on it forty years in secret. We were not ready for that. Then they picked out the idea of putting treachery and physical force together and of striking an innocent bystander like Belgium in the back. We were not ready for that, but slowly we have held our own. Then they picked out the Zeppelin and abolished the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and killed spectators and women. We were not ready for that. Slowly we caught up to Zeppelins. Then they picked out the submarine and attacked all nations alike, invented the idea of sinking the ships of all nations that did not take sides with them. Gradually we caught up and held our own against the German way of sinking ships. Then she started poisonous gases, Bern- 98 The Air-Line to Liberty storff plottings in America, secret propaganda among neutrals, and advertising everywhere, typhus-germs in Rumania, Zimmermann in Mexico, slavery and deportation, and using women prisoners as barriers for soldiers to fight behind. From the beginning of the war Germany has proposed one thing after another to the rest of the world — that we would have to do to fight her. From the first minute until al- most the other day America and The Allies in this war have done nothing but talking back and catching up. The conscription of men, the conscription of wealth, the government control and dicta- torship in industry, in food and prices and transportation, and in the labor of women — the list can be filled out by anybody indefi- nitely. The one single thing in the war in which The Allies have taken the initiative is the tank. The one single thing in which The Al- lies, in following their time-worn policy of catching up, have gone farther and gone on Winning Away Germany's Initiative 99 ahead of Germany, is in the flying machine and in the command of the air. All of the physical inventions Germany has used against us, are inventions which have been invented by The Allies, and all that Ger- many has invented with them has been a meaner, more thorough, frightful way of us- ing them — a kind of moral boundlessness. Her sole invention has been her meanness, her de- liberate religious faith in the meanness. In everything but the air-plane her meanness — the massiveness of her meanness has kept the initiative in her hands. This seems to point to the air-plane made on a massive scale and applied to the sky and to news on a massive scale, as America's quick- est and surest way of taking the initiative out of the hands of Germans. We cannot get into Germany on the sea or on the ground for a long time, but we will take possession of the free and empty air up over Germany, of the air she breathes — of her stars and sunshine . . . we will make the sky our fortress. The sky which Wilbur Wright has made ioo The Air-Line to Liberty swing like a great open door over her as wide as from France to Russia shall be ours. There are two things we will arrange for at once. We will arrange for getting into Germany by Germany's weakest route. And then we will arrange for using when we get there, the explosive Germany is least used to. This means Sky and News. The sky in Germany is their weakest front. News in Germany, especially news from the outside, is an explosive Germans have almost never heard of and against which (as things go in Germany) neither the German govern- ment nor the German people would have the slightest idea what to do. Why does the London Times cost in Ger- many since the war began from $1.00 up to $50.00 a copy? Because it is the explosive the German gov- ernment is afraid of most. The moment we get the news into the coun- try which the Government is running an enor- mous blockade to keep out, and the moment the German people begin reading it and begin hearing at last, blowing up all around them, Winning Away Germany's Initiative ioi facts about the German people and facts about the American people they have never had the remotest idea could be true, the Germans will be stunned and staggered into our hands. Truths that the rest of the world have been taking in painfully and been getting used to for years, the Germans will have to get used to in a week. News that America, England and France had months to rehearse and years to learn how to handle, — four years' worth of news all at once, will undermine the vision and honeycomb the wills of the German people. The discovery by the German people of the way the German Kaiser has allowed the truth to be kept from them, has kept whole worlds- ful of it dammed up in foreign countries where Germans could not get a trickle, where the enemies of the German people alone could have the use of it, reap the benefit of it, alone could get ready for it, get the start in living with it — the discovery of this in one blow all over Germany will strip the Kaiser naked be- fore his people, shame him, wither him, un- man him before the world. Attacked by the Sky-and-News Route, Ger- 102 The Air -Line to Liberty many is going to be at a disadvantage, — a heaped up, tragic, culminating, colossal dis- advantage no nation in this modern open- doored, free-printed world has ever dreamed of, ever been hunted into or cornered before. There is one other reason why the plan of taking away the initiative of Germany by a news-raid in the air is a comparatively prac- ticable one for America. A frank, open democracy like America, fighting a vast Secret Society like Germany, cannot hope to keep secret from the Germans long what her main plan of attack will be. She will have to get ready for the attack out loud, and by interesting all her people in it, her billions of dollars, her hundreds of thou- sands of flying machines, her flocks of flying men, and the plan in which America's getting ready out loud will make the least difference, will be the best one to adopt. If we pick out the sky for our route, and pick out news for our explosives we will have picked out a way of fighting the Germans in which the Germans, no matter how much they Winning Away Germany's Initiative 103 know about what we are going to do, cannot get ready to meet us. Germans do not tem- peramentally understand sky-and-air fighting nor do they temperamentally understand fight- ing foreign news in Germany, and even if they did, they cannot get the men now and the ma- terial now, nor the facts and news now, as the world stands to-day, one-tenth as well as America and her Allies. America will have taken the initiative at last which will grip the quickest, which will hold the longest, which will hold after the war is over, the one initiative in which a tight- mouthed and secret nation, a plotting, slink- ing, submarine, spy nation like Germany can never hope to catch up. We will open the clouds wide over Ger- many, rain down on all Germany the wrath, the undreamed of new religion, the new sing- ing of the beliefs of all nations. It shall be as music, as a great storm to Germany, the thun- der of the hopes of the world rolling above her head. We will run the gamut of a peo- ple. We will play on Germany, on the cities and fields of Germany as on great chords. 104 The Air-Line to Liberty We will sweep the keyboard of a nation, of the hopes and fears of a people with huge, long, peaceful strokes of news across the sky. Then the next day we will do it again. In the papers of New York and Chicago, London, Paris and Rome, each morning at the top of the first page there will be published by wireless, bulletins and headlines like this: HERE IS TO-DAY'S NEWS-BOMB FROM FIVE HUNDRED GERMAN CITIES TO- DAY or this THIS MORNING'S WORD FROM FRANCE Hundreds of German soldiers, General Pershing cables, are being caught and shot for reading the news-bombs being dropped in the German trenches this week. But the news drives through. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred can be watched and can be kept from reading a news- bomb, but the one out of the hundred who does read it cannot be watched and kept from whispering. General Pershing reports that the advertisement of the President, that all German soldiers who would come over to our side and take a stand with us for liberty in Germany and the world against the Kaiser would be ranked as comrades instead of prisoners, is taking effect. In the confusion of the drive last Thursday fifteen hundred Germans, whole Winning Away Germany's Initiative 105 companies at a time, some with their officers, crossed the lines. Or this The circulation of our American Aerial News or Air Gazette, being delivered in German cities by our Sky- News-Boys this week is estimated at million copies. If the German press does not suit us in Germany we will have one of our own. By delivering the real news — the secret news out of sky, we will drive the Kaiser's newspapers out of business. If America will have the imagination, the masterfulness, courage and self-sacrifice to amass and mobilize a vast fleet of airships, take absolute control of the air over the world, the future of the world is in her hands. The future of the world which to-day Amer- ica holds in the hollow of her hand is The Hollow of the Sky. The sky is the World's Hand now. The wireless and the airship have become the weapons of the human spirit. The Kaiser's funny little old-fashioned hope for 106 The Air-Line to Liberty his funny little freedom of the seas or for a mere humdrum taking of Paris with soldiers down on the ground, like a mere Napoleon left over from a hundred years ago, has gone by. | || We will hold our own on the ground, of course, and a little more so as to keep him from doing what he is trying to do, but the constructive, converging, conquering drive, the massive initiative for America and her Allies shall be in the air. Chapter III 107 WINNING THE WAR AND GERMANY TOGETHER AN advertisement for Germany just at this time, which is constructed without a clamp on it — an advertisement which any min- ute might slip back, will not work. Whatever we may say or do now to get Germany to listen — whatever advertisement we put for- ward now to make Germany believe us, must be constructed with a ratchet, so that day by day we can roll it up tighter and make them believe us more. The moment that in the informal, impromptu action of events there comes a little slack, we must be sure we have chosen an advertisement in Germany that will hold with a mighty grip. The best ratchet on our advertising we can have in Germany, is to do what we say we will do while we are saying it — even before we say it. To have the under-grip with the Germans we must get our word to hold. The only pos- sible under-grip we can have with the Ger- mans is to select something to do and some- thing to say that will make them trust us. We must dare to get them to trust us. Noth- 108 The Air-Line to Liberty ing would make more of a sensation in Ger- many now and get more attention in Germany now than somebody from outside going about all over Germany being trusted. A great peo- ple from the outside just now, even if they have to be crowded off up into the sky to do it, that would go about Germany doing things and saying things that would make Germans want to trust them — will soon be in a posi- tion to take the lead and keep the lead in end- ing the war and in arranging the world when it is ended. I am a little jealous to have this nation, my own nation — if it is compatible with the inter- ests of the world — and to this end I hope that America in making its great offensive on Ger- many, its air-news-raid on Germany, will do it on such a scale and in such a spirit that it will be in a position to advertise its substitute for war in Germany — by using the most arrest- ing, disarming, jiu-jitsu, baffling way of all — to the Germans — advertising without shooting. If we say to them in our advertisement that we are fighting them to trust them and to get them to trust us, we must do something while Winning the War and Germany 109 we say it that will make our idea of trusting visible to them, that will dramatize trusting to them. To say that we are introducing ad- vertising as a substitute for shooting and then shoot them from the very airships in which we say it, will not dramatize trusting, to Ger- mans. The accepted way to do with a man who is crazy and who is going about striking out at people, is to get hold of him by main force, hold him down, get his arms under him and his legs under him, fold him up and talk to him. The way to win a man's respect and get his permanent attention, is to use one's power over him to hold him and not to injure him, any more than is necessary to hold him. This is apparently what the sky is for up over Germany in this war — to America. The sky, the air-plane, and the advertise- ment afford America not only her most bold and original offensive against the Germans but her most natural and expressive one. In- stead of fighting the Germans in their way, the way they have given us orders to fight them, instead of doing what they have forced us to do, as we do on the ground, up in the no The Air-Line to Liberty air we will fight in a way we have chosen ourselves, a way that quite accurately and hon- estly expresses us. Poisonous gases and sub- marines and howitzers may be able to express just now German ideas and Germans, if they insist on making us believe it, but we do not feel that poisonous gases, submarines and how- itzers quite express our ideas — as yet — or that they can quite do justice to us. Any place where we can keep from using them and can use something that expresses us better, we will. There is another reason why America in putting over her three great advertisements to the Germans — "We can whip you with our guns," "We can whip you with our souls," and our substitute for war — will find it good advertising to avoid reprisals. If we tell the Germans that we are fighting for the right of peoples to govern themselves, the only sure way to show them just how much we mean by it, is to govern ourselves while we are doing it. If democracy cannot exercise a higher self- control than an autocracy can, and cannot ex- Winning the War and Germany Hi ercise it in the very teeth of autocracy, what good is it going to do us to advertise through- out Germany to the Germans that we can whip them with our souls? The cheapest, quickest way to advertise self- government in Germany is going to be to show them some — to give them, across the whole sky up over their country where they can see it any time they look — the sight of a great people controlling themselves. There is another reason why we in America — in advertising to the Germans that we can whip their souls with our souls, must do it while we are talking about it. The wording of the advertisement "We can whip you with our souls," may express in a rough way the core of the idea this war with Germany is for, but perhaps it is unnecessary to say that this particular advertisement can- not be called practicable from the point of view of good advertising psychology unless it is delivered over to the Germans with a shrewd knowledge and a relentless criticism of our- selves. The only way to be practical in putting over 112 The Air-Line to Liberty a necessary colossal insolent advertisement like this on a people like the German people is to be religious with it. In making the announce- ment to the Germans that our souls are going to whip their souls, the first thing we will have to arrange for is to have something about our souls which while we do it will make the Ger- mans half-believe it. This war is the sacrament of the free peo- ples. With hunger and sacrifice and prayer and death we bow ourselves before our God and the Germans' God. With confessions on our lips we rush into battle. By conquer- ing ourselves we will conquer God. Then we will conquer Germans. The sins in Germans which we have faced and had a death-gaze at in ourselves, and had a death-honesty with in ourselves, and which in the last grim battle we have conquered for the time in ourselves, only these sins will we know how to aim at in Germans and know how to conquer in Ger- mans. In our own souls we will all have gone over the whole ground, rehearsed our battle with the Germans. With humbleness for our own sins and security and victory and Winning the War and Germany 113 forgiveness for theirs, we go forth to hew out of Germans and out of ourselves a new world. The spirit of the men of America shall chal- lenge the spirit of the men of Germany. If we are humble and honest with ourselves, if we do what we say we do, ourselves, I see that our enemies shall melt before us as stubble. Our spirit shall be mightier in the earth than their spirit, and our world shall overcome their world, and I see or seem to see even now as I write the day not far off, when the Germans' souls shall salute our souls, when the Germans' souls shall gather around our souls and help us overcome it. ii4 Chapter IV WINNING THE WORLD AND GERMANY TOGETHER THERE is one more reason I would like to give for America's commanding the sky over Germany without reprisals, and for our conducting ourselves in the sky in a way that expresses the vision, the will and the hope of a great people. Every advertisement America undertakes in Germany will be intended to advertise or drive its way through to the attainment of two objects. Our first object will be to advertise Amer- ica in Germany in such a way as to get the Germans to believe in us and to trust what we promise and what we propose to do. Our second object will be to get the world and a hundred other nations, by the way we deal with Germany, to believe in us and trust what we promise and what we propose to do. As the oldest democracy, America has made herself at least a candidate for taking the lead- ing part in reconstructing the world after the war. Winning the World and Germany 115 Our friends in the hundred other nations with whom we shall have to cooperate after the war is over, to run a world, are going to know us best and trust us quickest by seeing how we handle our most difficult problem. Our friends will feel safe with us, or not safe with us, after watching us with our ene- mies. The supreme and decisive test of America in this war is going to turn on the things it sees to do and the things it sees it can afford to do, in dealing with her enemies. And America's place in the world is going to be earned, revealed and accorded to her by all nations, by the way America gets the atten- tion and conquers the trust of the German people. The nations will watch us with Germany and study our spirit and our power in dealing with Germany. "So will America do with all of us" they will say. n6 Chapter V NO HALFNESS, NO HEMMING AND HAWING, NO TWIDDLING WITH PEACE ^ I^HE reader will remember perhaps that I ■*- have assumed all along since the first chapter that the only idea we can hope to get the attention of Germans with adequately and at first, is with the idea that we can whip them and that we have whipped them with our guns. Our second advertisement — the idea that we can whip them with our souls, while it comes second in order of time comes first in order of importance because whipping the Germans with our souls is our only way of be- ing thorough in this war, of getting out of the war what we want out of it, and fighting Ger- mans to a finish. The sooner we get ready to do it and the sooner we gather our souls together and see just how our souls are going to do it, and go- ing to be fit to do it, the sooner the war is over. After all, all there is to the war, is mak- ing Germans want to listen. Guns are merely a detail in our main drive of making Germans want to listen. They are our opening volley No Halfness, No Hemming 117 — our stupid necessary roar before we speak. If America gathers all its fighting spirit from now on, into a tremendous overwhelming and battering campaign of making the Ger- mans want to listen — if America will govern everything it selects to say to Germany and to do to Germany from guns up, to the one great main drive of making Germans wonder what we think and making Germans ask us what we want to do, America will be the na- tion that will first discover and first lead the way along the one possible short-cut to the peace of the world. I would like to go over with the reader a few of the proposed substitutes for this policy — the policy of advertising while fighting — which will not work. The first substitute was hinted at by Lloyd George some time ago when he said that the world must make Germany free or powerless. England and France and America can bat- ter away on Germany a thousand years to make her free. She can only be made free by making herself free, and the only possible way to make Germany make herself free, is for the n8 The Air-Line to Liberty people of the rest of the world who have some freedom, to take some — some real, honest, hu- man, democratic freedom — move some of it over into Germany where Germans cannot help seeing it, and advertise it to Germans un- til they want it. When Lloyd George puts forward as a sub- stitute for advertising freedom in Germany, making Germany powerless, he puts forward a substitute which will not work. It is as necessary to us as it is to Germany that the wound that Germany has made in the world shall be cured. If Germany could be removed, like an ap- pendix, it would be different. But Germany is not an appendix. Germany (if I may use a homely figure) is at least two feet of the twenty-four feet of the Ali- mentary Canal of the world. She is nothing to herself without the other twenty-two feet and we are not good for much — for a very long time — without her. If a stupid and discouraged thing like mak- ing Germany powerless, is all that America No Halfness, No Hemming 119 and The Allies can do with her after this war, we are whipped. A powerless Germany — that is — a sick Ger- many — a Germany that is not doing her part as a member or organ in the body of the world, will make the world sick. The world will have to go to bed with her — or carry Germany around with her for centuries as chronic peri- tonitis. The world can bluster vaguely and bigly all it likes about amputating Germany, but it can- not stand the operation. The only possible way out for the world lies in having the sick organ healed. The healing of Germany is a matter (as in most localized disease) of circulation, of the whole body gathering around the sick part and making itself felt in it, — pouring out and pour- ing in — advertising. It is by the whole body's gathering around and advertising the whole body to the sick part, that the sick part becomes whole. When Lloyd George gives the world its choice and says that the world will have to 120 The Air-Line to Liberty make Germany either free or powerless, he does not offer us a choice at all. If instead of evoking health out of Germany and advertising and circulating health into Germany the world attempts in a last, fool- ish, weak, desperate way to end everything by making Germany powerless, the world is committing suicide. It is a thing that Germany might have thought of. I like to think that America has too much courage to back down into mutilat- ing the world she has to live in by making a hundred million people powerless on it — by emasculating a nation. An emasculated Germany would be a greater danger to the world than the kind of Germany we have now. The world cannot afford to have an impo- tent Germany. We do not want a Germany impotent to do wrong. A Germany impotent to do wrong will be impotent to do right. Germany will have to be carried by the world like some splendid moral pauper for five hundred years. The world wants to make a free run ahead No Halfness, No Hemming 121 the next five hundred years. It does not want to have to load up on its back at the very start after this war, a great workhouse for nations. Another substitute for the plan of getting the attention of nations as a practical working method of keeping them reasonable and peace- ful, was proposed the other day by the Kaiser. The Kaiser told the Pope that Germany would like to see peace after this war based on the reduction of national armaments. Making Germany powerless as a cure for militarism will not work. Neither will mak- ing the world powerless. The only possible way to cure militarism now that it is in its present advanced stage is to operate on it — to be radical. The only way to get millions of people at a time to do a radi- cal thing or to have a new idea, is to adver- tise. Why should America with a weapon to be independent with, which is as natural to her as advertising, allow herself to be put off at the end of this war with a mean, discouraged, 122 The Air-Line to Liberty insipid, little war-cure like the Kaiser's reduc- tion of national armaments? Instead of advertising the Kaiser's war-cure we will advertise ours. Fighting about how large our national ar- mies shall be, as a substitute for not having national armies at all, strikes us as a limp, effeminate, unmanly form of peace. Peace based on a peevish, haggling reduc- tion of national armaments instead of on inter- national armament or world police, will be half-way war. America will not waste her money nor throw away the lives of her sons and then after it is all over have handed out to her a half-way war proposed by militarists or a half-way peace proposed by pacifists. We have had halfness enough. It was halfness that brought on the war. Half of each nation wanted peace and half of each nation wanted war until they were all so afraid of themselves they had to fight each other. And it was not only halfness that brought on the war but it is halfness that is keeping it up. No Halfness, No Hemming 123 And now that the war is to be ended we pro- pose to see to it in America that it is ended all one way or all the other. America will not yield to the higgling of the pacifists to end the war with a half-cured Germany. It seems to America that negotiating for peace with Ger- many before Germany is operated on — cut- ting Germany open to take out her war appen- dix and then sewing her up while it is still in, is fair neither to Germany nor to the world. If Germany will not remove her appendix herself we will. Germany is the sickest na- tion the earth has ever dreamed of — so sick that it has made all the rest of the world sick to have her in it, and it is not the pacifists who are believing in Germany and who are being fair and human with Germany. The people who are standing out for Germany to- day are the people who are making it possible for her to be her real self and who are fighting for her real self. The Germany beyond and ahead is all right. The trouble with Germany is her Hohenzollern appendix. She has been letting her appendix be her colon for forty years. 124 The Air-Line to Liberty America does not want to be, in ending this war, as superficial about human nature as the Kaiser was in starting it. Conquering men, as a way of getting what one wants out of them — which was the Kai- ser's idea — is superficial. Making men want to let us have what we want, is a manlier, more thorough and more practical measure and is being practised daily and constantly on an enormous scale in the sight of all men by the advertising of business men. Millions of people every day in Amer- ica are being made to want things that they have thought they did not want. We will do with Germany what daily we are doing with one another. When our statesmen begin reading the back pages of magazines the way ordinary people do and take a leaf from them, we will turn each other's advertising men loose on each other instead of soldiers, spies, poisonous gases, censors, submarines and lawyers. Na- tions will protect themselves the way banks do, by keeping lighted up all night. No Halfness, No Hemming 125 The nations that do their advertising best — that is to say, the nations that conform most closely to the law of advertising and select things to say and things to do which arrest attention the most and hold it the longest, will be the ones that will win the war. They will be the nations that for themselves and others will get what they want. A nation that cannot arrest attention is powerless. A nation that arrests it and cannot hold it is powerless. The disposal of everything at the end of the war — the making of the will of the world will fall to the nation that arrests and holds the at- tention of the other nations the longest. The nation that holds the attention of the other nations the longest, is going to be the nation that holds it the most willingly. How can a nation hold the attention of an- other nation the most willingly? By picking out things the other nation wants to have advertised in it, things which the other nation wants to know and keeps wanting to know and advertising them. By picking out 126 The Air-Line to Liberty and advertising to the people concerned in each nation their mutual interests with people of the other nation, until the people see them as they are. When the mutual interests of nations are seen scientifically and as they are, by the ex- perts in mutual interests, and are then adver- tised so that everybody sees them, the natural war antitoxin will have been discovered, will have been introduced by advertising in each nation, administered by advertising in each nation, and war will be at an end. Ill AMERICA, HER ALLIES AND THE WORLD Chapter I THE KIND OF AMERICA AMERICA WANTS I WOULD like to see my country at the present moment stop hemming and hawing and looking every which way before the Fire — leap to the rescue of Europe and make some great national drive for the future of the world. I like to think it is natural to my country at heart to do a thing in the way a man I saw in the Pennsylvania Station the other day would do it. I saw him on the moving stairway running up the running steps two steps at a time. There was something about it — about his running his own running on top of the running the steps 127 128 The Air-Line to Liberty were doing for him besides, which made me feel about him the way I would like to feel about my country. I shall never see him again I suppose, but as he flashed up past me and as I saw him flying out through that hole of light that was 34th Street, I wanted to follow him and know him. He was not content as other people were with sogging back on a single step and letting himself be hauled up into New York on a kind of crowd-windlass — hauled up like so much merchandise or like meat taken off of himself or like flour on a belt. I do not deny that there are people who nat- urally ride in everything. I am not unaware that there are people who if all our sidewalks everywhere were moving sidewalks, would bring out their ottomans and their crickets with them when they came out of the house. They would walk through the streets sitting down. One has to allow for people in every nation who are born passengers on events and who instead of adding to events or picking out a few extra ones and making them happen on top of the regular machine-ones, like my friend in the Pennsylvania Station, would ex- The Kind of America America Wants 129 pect to be carried. They expect to be rolled on casters into History. But I will not admit that these people are typical Americans in a great crisis of the world. And yet for the moment why do they seem to be? And yet for the moment, why is it I was obliged for months to watch my country wait- ing week after week, morning after morning, to be driven into the war on a technicality, or to be kept out of the war on a rule or precedent, or a piece of moral machinery or international law, instead of being eager and full of some new constructive desire of her own, which made her run with vision to the rescue of the future of the world. We are being more spir- ited now, of course, but at our best we are only being spirited in a kind of glorious hand-to- mouth way. We are spirited about stopping Germany, but as a mass or a people we are not showing our spirit in a grim, passionate vision about what America wants to do with Germany, or wants to do for the world, when Germany is stopped. i3° The Air-Line to Liberty And what America wants to do when Ger- many is stopped is all that this war is about, is what the seventeen billion dollars are for and the flocks of young men's faces flashing past us to die. Why is it one does not see any one in America, at least hardly any one ex- cept the President, going to the top of the Hill and looking off? Chapter II 131 THE KIND OF AMERICA EUROPE WANTS I WOULD like to state in this chapter my programme of what America can do and do now to stand out at last, reveal herself to the other nations and take her share in the struggle we are all going to have after the war is over, for the existence of the world. But before stating a programme of what we will do, I would like to put down in two para- graphs a little programme of what we will not do. We will not take any course of action which puts us in the position toward other nations of moralizing and idealizing and giving good ad- vice. For the American people just at the present moment to sit down deliberately and calmly on an immense chest of money they have made out of the sufferings and sacrifices of other people and shout to them across the sea good advice and moral precepts about how they ought to love one another, would be a tragi- cal mistake. It would be better just now for America to 132 The Air-Line to Liberty get up off its chest and fight the European na- tions. It would be better and safer and more thoughtful for us to fight all the European na- tions at once and fight them indiscriminately than to give them good advice. They would understand our fighting them with guns better. Our fighting them with guns at least would not be a mean, cold, comfort- able, underhanded way of fighting, like stand- ing in perfect safety where no one can hit back and across a huge gulf of sorrow and yearning and despair, shouting worsted peace-mottoes at them and telling them like innocent thoughtless children, like little prigs playing dolls in a nursery, what we would do if we were they. Any invention this nation may have to pro- pose to nations abroad, it will first propose and first set working at home. If the older nations want to give good advice to us we would nat- urally expect them to give us good advice they have used and we would naturally expect too to watch them using it for awhile and see how it worked. Then we could ask them for their good advice. Of course if this principle The Kind of America Europe Wants 133 works one way it works the other and the first thing America will arrange for with any good advice it may have haunting it, which it might like to hand out to other people, will be to first work out its good advice on itself. In the old days, people who were trying to be prophets — whole nations of them at once, do not seem to have had very much success, because they had so little sense of humor. They seemed to think it would work to begin practising at once on other nations, but if we are going to be prophets in America we would rather make our start in a small way at first and begin by practising at being prophets on ourselves. This is the first of the things we will not do. America in dealing with other nations will hold back as from the jaws of hell itself, from giving them good advice. Another thing America will hold back from, in dealing with other nations, as from the jaws of hell itself, will be pretending that she is one kind of a nation when she knows, and everybody knows, that nearly half of her is another. 134 The Air-Line to Liberty America is a democracy. For America to adopt a plan of national defense, or national partnership in world defense, when fifteen or twenty people more want it than do not want it, or when fifteen or twenty thousand more people or two or three million more peo- ple in the country want it than do not want it, would be superficial and autocratic. A na- tion cannot hope to express itself powerfully except by expressing itself as it is. Any pro- gramme America may adopt will have to work out some way of expressing its majority and minority both and of being honest with other nations and with her own people about them. It is unscientific, ineffectual and unpractical in expressing a nation to leave nearly half of it out. The older and more sedate nations of Eu- rope are apt to look upon us, not without a cer- tain justice, as a more or less childlike people and the last thing we want to do — because we happen to be by a technicality the oldest republic — is to take a sudden grown-up tone with our worldly-wise Allies, tell them just how we want them to combine with us, pick The Kind of America Europe Wants 135 out ways they will be allowed to help and an- nounce to them glibly America's programme for reconstructing the world to-morrow morn- ing. The first requisite of any programme Amer- ica may seek to initiate for herself and her Al- lies for the permanent peace of the world, will be its modesty and tentativeness. Probably the best way for a big, overgrown, helplessly young nation of one hundred mil- lion people, stepping for the first time, in this strange solemn moment into the presence of the older nations of the world, to be modest will be to announce a programme which is natural and instinctive for her, which is for herself alone at first and which is provisional and experimental even for herself. The other nations can stand by and look on if they like — can watch the Children playing in children's serious way with their programme — with what they like and what is natural to them; and perhaps it will turn out and perhaps not (as has been the way of children in this weary world before) that we have something for our elders. 136 The Air-Line to Liberty They can take it or leave it. I have felt that the programme I am about to propose as a possible one for America and eventually for her Allies if they want it, will have these advantages. I like it because it seems to me to be indigenous, to be natural to our American genius, and because in a new country like ours it takes us as we are, and uses the kind of men we have. Chapter III 137 THE KIND OF WAR DEPARTMENT AMERICA WOULD LIKE ANY particular war that any particular nation may have at a particular time, with any other nation is based on a row of particular illusions the two nations have about each other, and if instead of mooning and gen- eralizing either one of these nations will go to work, pick each of these illusions out, dis- entangle it, isolate it, excavate it like the ty- phoid germ in Havana, war in the world in due time, like typhoid in Havana now, will never get a chance to start. Business men and scientific men remove il- lusions every day. They make all their money out of removing illusions. I wish our War Department, instead of de- pending so much on a few generals and ad- mirals and asking them how to defend the country, would call in Sears & Roebuck of Chicago and ask them how they would do it. If a few days were spent by our War De- partment or Preparedness Department in ask- ing the Childs Restaurants or the Ten Cent 138 The Air-Line to Liberty Stores or the Filenes of Boston how they man- age to strike up mutual interests with people and serve them and be served by them and how they manage to keep up a glorious and profitable peace with them so that everybody who has anything to do with them runs in to help them, I venture to say that before many months we would find ourselves with a War Department in America that would arrest the attention and respect and command the hope and the immediate expectation of all the na- tions of the world. I do not yield to any one in appreciating General Leonard Wood and Admiral Sims and I am not in favor of abol- ishing armament offhand, but I do believe (and I do believe it can be proved so that we will all believe it) that Mr. Liggett of the Liggett chain of drugstores can be got to do more, if he will once give his mind to it, for the defense of this country from Germany or from Japan or Mexico than General Leonard Wood can. National self-defense and good business are a good deal alike. Good business consists in removing from War Department America Would Like 139 people illusions that they do not want to buy. In every large permanent business that we have built up in this country, we have based our success upon the shrewd, aggressive re- moval from people of illusions they seem to have that we cannot serve them and that they cannot serve us, and upon a deliberate, pro- gressive, persistent and good-natured substi- tuting for this illusion they have about us, a daily habit and conviction that their interests and our interests which look different are really mutual. Peace is mutual attention and the way to gain peace and keep it, is for men to get each other's attention. The moment people get each other's attention, peace is automatic. The problem of preparedness in America is the problem of making other nations look. We can propose to defend ourselves in America in three ways: By armored plate, helmets and fortresses. By being more aggressive and shooting na- tions that shoot us. By being still more aggressive and by get- ting the attention of nations who shoot us, to 140 The Air-Line to Liberty their own interests and to mutual interests so that they will not want to shoot. I submit that this more aggressive and mas- terful form of self-defense is not only the one that is most worthy of a great country like ours, but that it is the one that goes best with our natural gifts and the one that the world expects and hopes for from us. I submit also that the science of defending this nation by a campaign abroad of getting the attention of other nations, and by a campaign at home of letting them have our attention, is not only the most original but the most permanent, eco- nomical, and conclusive way for our War De- partment to secure a suitable and practical na- tional preparedness. Mr. Bryan has strung together a few treaties to defend us and the Government is now hur- rying up dreadnoughts and armies, and in advancing my idea of national defense, I do not want to be understood as taking a stand against either armies or treaties as far as they go, but I do submit it to the American people that treaties and armies are weak and conven- tional, that they are not aggressive enough for War Department America Would Like 141 a country like ours, that treaties and armies as compared with the Childs Restaurants and Sears, Roebuck & Company and the Filenes of Boston are effeminate, timid and superfi- cial in dealing with human nature, in mas- tering and commanding the desires and ac- tions of crowds of people. They totally over- look the principles, the science and the psy- chology of crowds and the methods and prin- ciples of getting the attention, of winning the good will and the peaceful and active cooper- ation of great masses of men. Peace is mutual attention between peoples. Getting the attention of other peoples and deliberately presenting them with our atten- tion, is a problem that calls for the recognition and enlistment by our War Department of men who have the training and the genius our typical American business men have for get- ting people who do not want anything to do with them and who will not notice them, to notice them and deal with them. Let our War Department call in Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck & Company, tell him that it is going to run a Preparedness-With Section 142 The Air-Line to Liberty alongside its Preparedness-Against Section and ask him to do it. The only thorough way peace can be brought to pass is in the same way that Sears & Roebuck of Chicago struck up a mutual interest with millions of lonely farmhouses out in the country thousands of miles away and made every farmhouse feel just around the corner from Michigan Avenue. No farm- er would ever have believed until Sears & Roebuck came along, that any particular direct permanent daily connection between his own kitchen and farmyard and Michigan Avenue existed or could be worked up, and no farmer or cottager would ever have believed that liv- ing by postal card, living with a kind of cata- logue or big loose bible of what one was go- ing to want at one's elbow, would ever come to anything as a practical method of life. But Sears & Roebuck believed it. They had the salesman and advertising attitude to- ward their belief — a kind of prehensile faith in the mutual interests of Michigan Avenue and the lonely roads of this country, and they organized ways, by advertising and drama* War Department America Would Like 143 tizing their idea, of making everybody believe them. Before anybody quite knew what had happened, Sears & Roebuck, out of nothing except a state of mind and a few personal ideas in their private minds of how their interests and other people's belonged together, had con- structed a vast web of mutual desire and of mutual help for a whole people. They had made the United States, from Maine to Cali- fornia, a kind of big country village. With parcel post, with postal cards, lists, catalogues and telephones, all America could be seen at last dropping in quietly every day on Michi- gan Avenue, Chicago. The problem of making war impossible by removing its causes and by deliberately sub- stituting before everybody's eyes and with ev- erybody's consent a daily working programme of mutual attention or peace is, both in its essence and its method, a distinctly advertising problem. Nothing less strenuous, less patient, indefatigable and penetrating, less hopeful and persistent than the way advertising men and salesmen pursue a mutual interest until they get one and make it a permanent one and set 144 The Air -Line to Liberty it to work, is going to be equal to the task of defending our nation from war. The way for two nations that are afraid of fighting each other and are raising armaments against each other, to be at peace is to swap advertising campaigns and say to one another with big appropriations back of them: "If you will let all your people know certain good things about us, we will let all our people know certain good things about you." The reason that treaties are treated like scraps of paper is that nobody excepting a law- yer here and there ever notices a treaty or ever takes a treaty seriously as a part of his daily life. No treaty has ever attracted the at- tention of a nation like a safety razor or made itself a part of the daily working belief of the people like a breakfast food. Treaties are insipid, frail, unread, cold, lonesome, legal documents and have no grip in them and do not have and cannot get the attention and the personal interest of all of the people. Breakfast foods and soaps succeed in being taken more seriously than treaties because they are based on aggressive good-natured grit in War Department America Would Like 145 making people listen and in faith in what will happen if they do, and because at last they strike up a daily mutual interest with people which keeps people interested in them day af- ter day. When Sears & Roebuck or somebody like them are once put in charge of what might be called the Preparedness-With Section of our War Department in distinction from the Pre- paredness-Against Section, and when they have proceeded to lay out their campaign of discovering and establishing daily mutual in- terests of Germans and Americans, and Mex- icans and Americans, with the same persist- ence and precision they employed between lonely farmhouses and Michigan Avenue, what will soon begin to happen? I do not want to boast too early, but I am willing to guess for one that the big business genuises and the gifted salesmen we all are watching to-day traipsing off to Plattsburg to learn to shoot and to learn to march, will soon be ask- ing to be moved over, great platoons of them, by Mr. Newton D. Baker from the Prepared- 146 The Air-Line to Liberty ness-Against Section of the War Department to the Preparedness-With Section. We all want preparedness. We only rush to Plattsburg because we want to rush some- where and because our War Department is a lopsided, old-fashioned contrivance for self- defense, a weak and negative affair which has arranged fighting interests and not mutual in- terests for us to rush to. I submit it to our War Department that the captains, lieuten- ants, majors and admirals of mutual interests, as well as fighting interests, should have a Plattsburg, too. It is not necessary to crow in advance over what business men of our more creative American type can do to make our War De- partment efficient and always ahead of its job instead of always behind, and I am not claim- ing that Julius Rosenwald of Sears & Roe- buck or other men who have our typical American salesmanlike genius, who have proved themselves experts in the science of discovering and organizing mutual interests, will do better in defending the country than War Department America Would Like 147 General Leonard Wood or Admiral Sims. The only claim I make is that this more American idea of self-defense shall be tried out by our War Department alongside the old or European one, and that for every dreadnought and army corps added to our national defense, Mr. Baker should let us have one dreadnought's worth and one army corps' worth of what Sears & Roebuck could do in the way of advertising campaigns, mutual-business-building campaigns, and in the scientific breaking down and removing of the illusions of lonely nations as they have removed the illusions of lonely farmers. The country has a right to have placed alongside one another these two methods of prepared- ness — advertising and shooting (or looking ready to shoot) where we can all watch them and see how they work. When we have given advertising and attention-steering as fair and as expensive a trial as we have already given gun-practice, submarines and asphyxiating gases, America will have a matter-of-fact, common-sense, demonstrated basis for deter- mining at last what kind of preparedness it 148 The Air -Line to Liberty wants in its War Department and in what proportions it wants it. The enormous sums of money our War Department is asking us all to pay will then be divided off between the Preparedness-Against Section and the Preparedness-With Section as the people think best. When we have seen how the two sections work side by side and have seen which section does the most with the least money and which section is the more thorough and re- moves war the farthest, our Preparedness- Against Department will naturally by com- mon consent and without risk cost us less and less. We are all agreed about this. Almost nobody wants a Preparedness-Against Section in our War Department if it can be helped. Why should it not be helped? Why should not our War Department help organize among the business men, salesmen and adver- tising men of this country a program of mak- ing General Wood and Admiral Sims, as they themselves would most profoundly desire, every year less necessary and less expensive? Chapter IV 149 A PROGRAMME FOR GETTING THE KIND OF WAR DEPARTMENT AMERICA WOULD LIKE THE programme for national self-expres- sion which as it seems to me would set America right with the world and with her- self, and which could be acted on without delay is as follows: First: I propose that our War Department, whether we drop the name "War Depart- ment" or not — for the present — be practically treated by our people, and practically organ- ized, as a National Defense Department. The National Defense Department may be expected to defend us in every possible way a nation can be defended and will be divided into two sections — one section to be called the Military Section and the other the Mutual Section. The first section shall be conducted by soldiers and natural fighters. The second by business or advertising men or natural co-workers. The Mutual Section which could be manned by men who have shown genius in the organization of the better type of trusts and who have gifts in putting through large 150 The Air -Line to Liberty business deals based on the discovery and pursuit of the mutual interests of men and classes — shall devote itself in dealing with nations to combining mutual interests and to what might be called Preparedness-with. The Military Section in dealing with nations shall devote itself in the conventional way to Preparedness-against. Second: I propose that the appropriations for the Preparedness-against Section of the National Defense Department be made by Congress in proportion to the size of the ma- jority in America that seems to depend on it and believe in it. I propose that the Pre- paredness-with Section — the advertising and business section of the Defense Department — be given an appropriation to carry on its work in proportion to the size of the minority that believes in it. Third: I propose that in announcing to other nations that she has organized her National Defense Department in two sections (The Mutual or Constructing Section and the Military orDestroyingSection) America shall say explicitly to the other nations that there Programme for Getting War Department 151 are more people just at this moment in America who put their faith in the Destroy- ing Section than in the Constructing Section and that even the people who believe in the Constructing Section do not believe in having as much money spent on the Constructing Section as is spent on the other. They are not numerous enough — at least during the German menace as it stands to-day — to de- mand that for every fifteen million dollar dreadnought the nation allows for its Destroy- ing Section, a dreadnought's worth of nation- advertising and nation-dramatizing shall be allowed to the Constructing Section. The minority, in having its tax money spent on the kind of defense it believes in, may be wrong for the moment (or at least until the present special German scare is over) in sup- posing that it is nearly as large as the majority and that it ought to spend nearly as much of the money; but if for every whole dread- nought's worth of looking terrible and as if we were going to shoot, half a dreadnought's worth is spent by our people on understand- ing and being understood, the appropriation 152 The Air-Line to Liberty will be large enough to give a fair test and to prove to the nation very soon which gives back to it the most for its money — its Under- standing Army or its Standing Army. Fourth: In the meantime the majority in America will make a definite announcement to the world. But in a period of panic and while Ger- many is still threatening the world, the ma- jority in America will announce that it is not ready to have the National Defense Depart- ment spend as much money on its Construct- ing Section, or Section for getting nations to do things with us, as on our Section for mak- ing them afraid of us. But in emphasizing the Military Section more and the Mutual Section less, the majority will tell the world that it hopes it is wrong, that it is allowing deliberate and elaborate arrangements to be made to prove that it is wrong. Fifth: There is not a nation on earth that does not wish that some great nation that is rich and strong enough and has time and freedom enough would act at once as a kind of public National Laboratory of Self-defense, Programme for Getting War Department 153 loaned to all nations, paying the bill itself, and having the courage and running the risk and furnishing the men itself, and slowly working out in the sight of all, the new and more modern method of national safety in which all the world believes already in its heart and which it will believe in its mind, the first moment some really great nation will have the spirit and give the time, money and men to try the experiment out. I have seen that America will no longer stand idle or look askance at the present struggle of the world because she cannot make up her mind. She will make up her mind to make up her mind and will instantly start the experiments through which alone she can act on the facts, and act at last as a great single- hearted, clear-headed nation would like to act in her own behalf and in behalf of all, on the faith she has stopped mooning over — the faith she has worked out. From the men of twenty nations bowed down in battle, the cry comes back to the men of America that we shall hammer out a work- 1^4 The Air-Line to Liberty ing faith for a nation that shall bring an end tojbattles forever. I have seen that America will get up off the money chest she has been sitting on in this war — the money chest the other nations have been pouring their last blood and treasure into four years, and with deep shame and with sublime hope begin at once spending the money in the sight of all in a shrewd, believ- ing, unstinted experiment in behalf of every nation on earth to prove once for all that a Cooperating Department set up in a nation alongside a War Department can defend it better than a War Department, that a Coop- erating and Mutual-Interest Department once set up in a nation and once in full swing along- side a War Department will in a few years make a War Department look as left over, as lumbering, extravagant and absurd to poli- ticians and diplomats as it does now to human beings. There is not room in this bird's-eye view of the programme I want to give in this chapter to give the concrete details through which the experiment I have in mind could be worked Programme for Getting War Department 155 out, made substantial and convincing, but there is reason to believe that the nation that wins its trade by advertising in other nations and by making other nations understand it, can win peace and other things it wants from the nations, too. There is reason to believe that the specialists, students and experts in nation-advertising and nation-dramatizing America will employ and develop in the Co- operating Section of its Defense Department — the men who conceive ways of expressing nations in actions and in words, and of touch- ing the imaginations of the peoples of other nations, will work out such effective means of making nations listen to us, and of our listen- ing to other nations, and will prove so success- ful in advertising the things our people feel toward other peoples and the things we want to do with them, and get them to do with us, that wars and the causes of wars with America will be hunted out, anticipated and under- mined throughout the earth. Gradually the Cooperating Section of our National Defense Department will leave the fighting or Dreadnought Section so little to 156 The Air-Line to Liberty be afraid of, so little to do and so little to think of to get ready to do, that it will be sloughed of! in the affections and the imagina- tions of the people. Sixth: As fast as the imaginations and ex- pectations of the people move over from the Dreadnought Section to the Cooperating Sec- tion, the appropriations of the people will move over with them. Seventh: When the exploding section of our Defense Department, as compared with the combining or cooperating section, has proved itself unnecessary the term "War De- partment" which we now have for our Na- tional Defense Department will not only seem quaint and odd to us — but in a very few years even the new term I have just proposed, "The National Defense Department," will seem small to us and will be dropped. Our depart- ment of preparedness for what the world may do to us will have become our department for what we can do for the world and with the world, and we will want it called our World Department. Our people will see that a nation that is Programme for Getting War Department 157 nationally engaged in protecting the interests of the world will be safe from all nations. National defense will at last be recognized as a by-product of world defense. Our depart- ment of world peace will be operated as America's national mirror — its national expert authority set up in Washington before which every act of business and every act of journal- ism or literature — or any form whatever of expressing America to other people and of making other people trust us or fight us — can be referred. "How will this thing we are proposing make America look?" each business firm will come down to Washington and ask. Eighth: Everything I have said about America's having a world department in two sections for her own self-defense applies to every other nation's problem of self-defense. When the mutual end of America's World Department has sloughed off the military end, other nations less fortunately situated to try the experiment than we are will be in a posi- tion to avail themselves of the results. In due time the world will have forty World Departments — in as many nations — a 158 The Air-Line to Liberty national mirror in each nation for looking at itself from the point of view of the interests of others. And when the mutual end of America's World Department has made the military end of no use to her she can give her army and navy away if she wants to, to the World League to Enforce Peace, or she can put it on the world's scrap heap. Of course after World Departments are generally in- stalled nobody will want our army and navy. Every other nation will have an army and navy to give away. Ninth: When each nation has an expert world department or a corps of specialists de- voted to studying everything the people of the nation do, from the point of view of the mutual interests of all the other nations, it is obvious that the thirty or forty World De- partments will naturally get together and that having the habit of looking at things for a nation from a world point of view, they will naturally form the World Government in three branches: the World Legislature — a Clearing House for discussing the common problems of nations — the World Executive Programme for Getting War Department 159 for administering the world's will, and the World's Court for administering international justice; and back of the World's Court, as long as is necessary, the World Police or world's international army made up of all the nations' private armies — denationalized and presented outright to the Central Police Station of the United States of the World, and controlled exclusively by the United States of the World for the restraint and con- fining of mob-nations and for the subordina- tion and segregation of nations which after all our world arrangements have been made and our world police installed still insist upon carrying weapons in the Street of the World and on having stupid lonely private armies of their own. Tenth: It would add to the straightfor- wardness and gusto and clear-headedness of such action as America may propose to take, if the proposition I have made in this chapter, through the action of Congress and the Presi- dent, could be put to the vote of the people at the polls. If the gist of the idea or some such modification of it as might seem best 160 The Air-Line to Liberty could be put into two or three short sentences and by special referendum submitted to the people it would add in the eyes of the world to what we mean by it. There would be some- thing characteristic and nationally individual, almost temperamental, about a great democ- racy at just this time having its people all speak up in this way. We are not all mili- tarists in America and we are not all pacifists, but we are reasonable people and I think it would mean a good deal to us and to other nations, too, to have our people say just how reasonable they want to be. Would they like to have America establish a provisional experimental Two Section Na- tional Defense Department or would they not? Would they like to see in a reasonable way the two kinds of national defense they hear so much about frankly tried out along- side to see which works best or would they not? Chapter V 161 BUSINESS MEN, ADVERTISING MEN, AND WAR THE other day in New York a man was asked if he would write twelve adver- tisements of a little more than one hundred words each for twenty-four thousand dollars. He declined because the idea of making ten million people instead of five million use this particular article did not fill him with enthu- siasm. Why was he offered this sum of money — about two hundred dollars a word — for work he could have done in a few days? It was because a group of hard-headed business men who had tried the thing out over and over again had learned that attracting the attention and touching the imagination of a nation and changing the personal hopes and personal desires of millions of people is a great science and a more or less exact science and that it pays many times over the money that is put into it. All we have to do to defend ourselves from Mexico is to go at the attention of the Mexi- can peoples in the same dogged way Ivory Soap would. 1 62 The Air-Line to Liberty We are told in our high chairs and by Colonel Roosevelt that it is a man's doing a thing that counts and not his saying a thing. But if one man by saying a thing makes twenty million men do a thing, the man's saying it counts and it counts to get him to say it. Words if they are picked out by the right man are actions and if they are picked out by a salesman they are money. When people who have social ideas believe in words as much as men who have business ideas believe in words they will begin to get their ideas carried out. The business men I have just spoken of did not care as much as might be wished perhaps for words as words, but they had found what words could do and as they were going to spend a million dollars in buying up large tracts of paper throughout the country to put a few words in, they naturally took great pains to select a man to say which words should be used. They wanted a man who would choose the words that would attract and hold the most attention. The idea was that words picked out and Business Men, Advertising Men, War 163 arranged by one man if they could attract twice as much attention as words picked out by another, would only make it necessary to pay for half as much space in the papers. If the right man picked out the words, five hun- dred thousand dollars' worth of space in the papers would be as good as a million dollars' worth. Of course if by picking out words a man could earn or save for other men five hundred thousand dollars, most men would call it an action for him to save them the five hundred thousand dollars. Paying him twenty-four thousand out of the five hundred thousand he saved for them would not necessarily seem too much. Attracting men's attention and touching their imaginations so that they act and feel in a way no one could have expected them to, is not only action but it is the wth power of action. All I am contending for in this chapter is that the American government should believe in the science of convincing nations as the most powerful American business men do. 164 The Air-Line to Liberty The specific causes of war in each nation America deals with should be taken up by our government in a scientific spirit, point by point, worked through as on a block signal system, and point by point advertised out of existence. I do not think I am claiming very much for peace in this chapter. I merely would be glad to get peace to have as much courage about itself and as much faith in itself as al- most any soap would. I feel that peace should at least come up to the standard of a cracker in believing in itself and in spending money on itself. Until peace comes up to the standard of a cracker in its idea of convincing a nation, it is not peace. Chapter VI 165 THE ANTI-TOXIN OF WAR npHE idea of having our government install -*- an advertising and dramatizing section in our Department of National Defense de- pends for its value upon what I mean by the words advertising and dramatizing. As I mean new things by them and as advertising is at present a new art which our so-called advertising men have developed only about five per cent, and as nation-dramatizing is an art which does not yet exist and is not even old enough to be new, I ask my reader to let his final judgment of my programme hold over until I can give the details of lines of ac- tion I have in mind which the government might take up. One or two things have al- ready happened which the reader may think are pointing my way. In the early weeks of the war Lord Kitch- ener, by composing and putting on billboards before the men of England an amazing series of advertisements of the needs of the nation, advertised an army of two hundred thousand men into an army of three million. The fate 1 66 The Air-Line to Liberty of England and the fate of the world turned for a few short weeks on an advertising man Lord Kitchener employed to express the needs of England to her people. America would not need to be confined to advertising for recruits. If we had a corps of experts in our defense department studying things we want other nations to believe and how to get them to believe them, we would probably find it cheaper to send out advertise- ments to those who are against us than to send out dreadnoughts against them. At least it would seem wise to try at least a dreadnought's worth of advertisements first. And dramatizing is still better than adver- tising in the hands of government experts. Not many years ago America thought of something to do in China which with the single stroke made four hundred million peo- ple marvel at her, understand her, love and trust her for a thousand years. She returned the Boxer indemnity China owed her and had paid her, and dramatized what Americans are like. One way to do with an idea is to express it The Anti-Toxin of War 167 or advertise it in words and the other way is to dramatize it or express it in action. People in Mexico want to fight us, because ideas about us that make them want to fight us have been advertised and dramatized in Mexico. The way for our War Department to defend us from war with Mexico is to advertise and dramatize ideas about America that will keep them from wanting to fight us. This may faintly suggest what I mean by having a dramatizing section in our Defense Department — a corps of experts in thinking of things for America and American business men to do that will touch the imaginations of nations. It is through their imaginations that men come to make war and it is only through touching their imaginations and keeping them touched that war can be stopped. The corps of national experts, psychologists and specialists in touching the imagination of nations to be called into service by the govern- ment and employed by the Mutual Section of our National Defense Department will pro- ceed in dealing with each suspicious nation to plan, organize and carry out the following 1 68 The Air-Line to Liberty programme. The programme which would do equally well in getting capital and labor to- gether, or classes or individuals, and which would plan to remove microbes of latent war between two peoples as scientifically and ac- curately as typhoid fever was removed in Havana, would consist of four main ideas or stages : First: Discovering a mutual interest. Second: Inventing a way of making the mutual interest work. Third: Advertising the mutual interest so that people will want to believe in it and will want to make it work. Fourth : Dramatizing the mutual interest so that people will have to believe in it and will have to make it work. Chapter VII 169 THE SPINAL COLUMN OF PEACE AMERICA claims that what she is fight- ing for in this war is her national ideal. Advertising is the spinal column of ideal- ism. The only way a man with an ideal can be anything other than an anaemic or wistful person is by expert cool studied advertising — by grim hard work in getting attention — by inventing a way of precisely, scientifically and culminatingly touching the imaginations of men with the way his ideals work. Of course advertising in this sense includes spending money, energy and genius in demonstrating an ideal, in dramatizing it in miniature or pre- senting a working model of it. A man who has a peace ideal, who believes in peace as a working method to be substituted for war, who is not occupied in 1918 in the science of touching men's imaginations, who is not scientific about his ideals and who does not and cannot treat them daily as driving forces in men's lives is not an idealist. An idealist who does not and cannot show how 170 The Air-Line to Liberty his ideals work is a yearner and a shirk. If peace is mutual attention, the only way to secure peace is by inventing ways without force to compel attention. Advertising, which is the science of compelling attention, is the science of peace. The League to Enforce Peace will be a League to Enforce Attention. People fight because they will not listen, because no man is shrewd enough to listen to them and make them listen to him, because expert scientific ways of making people want to listen have not been worked out by large trained bodies of men as dreadnoughts and armies have. The first thing the League to Enforce Peace will have to do will be to keep people any longer from thinking of peace as a vague, helpless, floppy, white dove, as a kind of stained-glass effect on real life or as a rose window some dear people want put into this serious business-factory and gov- ernment-factory of a world. Through the science of compelling men to listen, peace shall come to be regarded as a kind of radio- activity of the human mind in getting what it The Spinal Column of Peace iji wants. Peace, instead of being a show, a kind of spiritual flourish, is going to be the com- mon human sense of men raised to the wth power in getting what they want of other men. World-peace or world-team-play is the only way a world can be made to work. It is the poeticalness of peace that is holding it back. Until peace is conceived and presented in at least one wing of the League to Enforce Peace as a stern shrewd implacable substitute for war, it is worse than nothing. If the League to Enforce Peace is going to avail itself of this stupendous and unique op- portunity to represent and converge the visions of a whole people into a single and concerted action it will probably find it better to let the different kinds of people enforce peace in their own way and organize them and help them to do it. The League will try to get hold of every- body it can possibly get hold of in this coun- try who has any way of enforcing peace that he sees vividly and concretely. It will provide for people to work at once in enforcing peace in the particular ways they see to enforce it. 172 The Air-Line to Liberty It will be especially careful to make the most of those pacifists who have shown that they have courage. I believe that all pacifists who have any fight in them and who have some other idea of peace than going about stopping people will be needed by the League to Enforce Peace. Pacifists who can make people go must not be wasted. Chapter VIII 173 FIGHTING IT OUT IF the League to Enforce Peace is to begin by making a drive for typical, character- istic and American ideas for defending a nation from war, I imagine that the first rea- son it will find for shaping out such a sample Defense Department for a nation as I have outlined will be its implicit trust in the fol- lowing axiom: A fire department which specializes on being ready to put fires out when it has al- lowed them to get going, which is precisely what our War Department is supposed to do with wars, would be admitted by us all to be a second-rate fire department even in putting fires out. Nine-tenths of our fire organization and effective fire-fighting to-day in America has been transferred from measures for putting fires out to measures for not letting fires start. Why should not the War Department of the United States of America take steps to begin to run itself on as intelligent a principle as the Fire Department in almost any back 174 The Air-Line to Liberty county town in this country? Why should our American War Department keep on try- ing to defend this country from wars in the same way that people not many years ago were defending it from flies? We fought flies for fifty years in America by arranging little mountains of manure everywhere all about us for flies to be conceived in and born in, and then spreading molasses on paper for the flies to stick in and die in. We felt efficient about flies and did not propose to submit to flies and proposed to show flies we could fight them. With garbage piled up around our doors we used to have those elaborate little cages or what might be called chandeliers of dying and struggling flies, hanging up over our eating tables for flies to get caught in the buzz in while we ate. This is what our War Department does with war. We are not doing things like this with flies now and why should our American War De- partment be run, and run exclusively, on this old manure-and-fly-paper garbage-and-buzz principle in defending the country from wars Fighting it Out 175 it does not do, or arrange to do, a single thing to prevent from breeding all around it? The problem of fighting flies has been essentially solved in America. It was a scientific prob- lem, partly advertising, partly biology and partly legislation, which put the fly on a new basis in American life, and it is going to be the same with wars — partly a scientific prob- lem, an expert study in international human nature and in international advertising and dramatizing our national idea, and partly a matter of international law and of police work at home and abroad with the people who make America look as if somebody would have to fight her. A state of suspicion between two countries can be as scientifically, implacably and relent- lessly dealt with as typhoid fever in Havana. The study and the mastery of the attention of men who suspect us because they will not listen to us, is as accurate and precise a science as bridge building and as electrifying of rail- roads. We create in this way spiritual rail- roads or a system of rapid transit between 176 The Air-Line to Liberty minds. The American people could begin in the case of Carranza and the people behind him by saying: "We do not wonder that you suspect us but we are not willing because some of us can be justly suspected that all of us should be dragged into the war. Who are these people among us that you suspect? What are their names? Let us deal with them one by one and prove to you that they do not represent us and that instead of fighting you we will fight them. Where we are wrong, we will remove the wrong. Where you are wrong, we will remove and pay to remove among your people the look of being wrong. We do not wonder that you Mexicans suspect us. We admit that there has been every rea- son in the past that you should. It is up to us with a record such as we have had, or such a record as irresponsible Americans in Mex- ico have made us have, to prove to you that the suspicions which we have allowed to be aroused about us are only true of a part of us. We can prove to you that we are going to take hold of this part, keep it in hand, and that Fighting it Out 177 there will be no further cause for disturb- ance." We are a proud, foolish, reckless nation in the way we have allowed America to be rep- resented in Mexico, particularly by our busi- ness interests. The government will now take hold and make our business interests in Mex- ico dramatize to the people what Americans as a whole are like. The world has been a good deal disturbed and shocked at the secret service system the Germans have employed around the world and the spy system which has been used in all nations against them by the Germans in time of peace. America will establish what might be called perhaps a kind of reverse spy sys- tem and establish in America thousands of spies-for, instead of spies-against the Mexican people. We will do this with all other nations. It might be said that the various activities of the nation which will advertise and drama- tize it to other nations are already being attended to in a scattered, inarticulated way by the various secretaries and departments of 178 The Air-Line to Liberty the Government. They could still be so con- ducted. But while of course the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of the Interior, and Labor, and Commerce, would all be concerned in it, the controlling power — the power that puts all these powers together — should be kept in the hands of the Defense Department, or as it would come to be called, the World Depart- ment, which looks at all activities in the nation from the point of view of advertising our nation to other nations and from the point of view of making our nation understood by other people and of defending the peace of the nation and the fate of the world; and what is still more true — it is important that the two ideas of National Defense — the cooperating and the fighting ideas — should both be tried out side by side in the same department — in marked contrast, where all the people could see how things were going at a glance. IV A DECLARATION OF FAITH FOR NATIONS Chapter I A CONFESSION OF PEACE THIS is the declaration of the belief of one man speaking for himself — speaking for that little nation in miniature that he — like every man — carries around in his own mind. But down underneath it is a part of his be- lief that a hundred million other men believe it, that it expresses gropingly the temper, the subconscious power of a people, that the hun- dred million people are going to hammer out of it, and hammer out of it soon, a working faith for themselves and a candidate-faith for all nations. The best way to organize a nation is to find 179 180 The Air -Line to Liberty some fundamental honest principle of division between the men in it and divide them of! into groups where they can all be themselves. What we need in America next, to prepare for action, is to take an inventory of the men in it. We will take a long thorough look over the country. We will ask all the men in this coun- try who have things they would die for and fight for to get together into one great group, and all those who stand for safety-first to get together in another. We will then proceed to look over the group that has things it will die for, and we will let each man decide which way he can fight best, and we will all proceed to divide off as fighters into the group of men and into the kind of fighting, in which our gifts and temperaments count the most. The great fundamental line of cleavage in this country between men is that some men have some sense of adventure and some fight in them in getting what they want for this country and the world and the other men are mere yearners. The American crisis turns on getting our yearners who belong in all politi- A Confession of Peace 181 cal parties sorted out and got out of the way and put in a great yearning party by them- selves where they can do all the yearning they want, in just the way they like to yearn, with- out being mixed up with the rest of us, where they will not have to act as they do now with men who hate them for yearning and who want to strike out and do things. Mr. Ford's peace ship was wrong because instead of creating something, it yearned to stop something. The proposed International Stockholm Peace Conference was wrong be- cause it was negative, because all the men be- hind it planned for, and saw, was to yearn and stop something. Lord Lansdowne's proposed diplomatic haggling with Germany was wrong because the utmost he yearned for was to stop something. If this war is going to be stopped by people who do not see any further than just stopping it, life in this world for the next hundred years will consist of nothing for all of us but preparation to begin another. The only way to stop war is to stop yearn- ing for the end of war and create something 182 The Air-Line to Liberty better, drive into the situation a substitute for war which makes war ridiculous, which makes war look pale and impractical. There is no object in peace. A peace which is just being peace and which is not a manly, vigorous, conclusive, implacable substitute for war will not do. The peace that will do, is not a peace that stops fighting, but a peace that fights harder and fights better, that makes war feel small, mean, lonely and left out of the world. We propose to stop the war with a substitute for war. The substitute shall be a militant, massive, uncompromising, terrific massing in advertising of the sublime mutual listening and mutual self-assertions of nations, the setting up of agreeing-engines, of peace- and-understanding-machinery, the supreme daily statement of the wills, of the shrewd sub- lime hopes, of the mutual visions of all peo- ples of the world. The peace that is going to be established after the war by stoppers, by men whose minds are operating merely as war-corks, will not be peace. It will be a breathlessness waiting A Confession of Peace 183 to fight, unless we gain a conclusive, physical victory over the Germans. The peace we will have without victory is going to be negative. I find my face is set against all such pro- posals as Lord Lansdowne's diplomacy prop- osition to stimulate the liberal party and the democratic propaganda in Germany. If America skips her gun-advertisement and tries to get the other ones in first it will merely result in a patched up and bargained peace, based on Germany's essential military victory. The victory we want with Germany is vic- tory with our guns first, then a permanent peace based on a permanent substitute for war. What we are fighting for is not a mere victory and not a mere peace but for the adoption of a programme for the world which shall bring peace and which shall make possible for The Allies a big, generous, fair, many-sided vic- tory over all war, a victory not merely for The Allies, but for all the world. World peace is like anything else that people do not quite yet know they want. 184 The Air-Line to Liberty It has to be advertised to them until they know they want it. The present war is a very good advertisement for world peace. Every- body practically in all nations concerned has been got to agree to it. Especially the nations that are fighting, agree to it. What people have not been got to agree to is how to get it. How to get it is a question which will never be settled until we all arrange advertisements and experiments to find out. Nothing but ad- vertising what we know, and experimenting what we do not know, will bring peace. Chapter II 185 A CONFESSION OF HOPE 1 WOULD like to say to myself and to my reader in this chapter what I want to do in this book. I want to act as the salesman of a substitute for war. I want to sell advertising to twenty nations as a substitute for this war and as an organized and permanent substitute for all wars. Unless I can sell advertising to the twenty nations as a substitute the twenty na- tions will feel safe with — sell it to the twenty nations and sell it now and sell it in advance, I believe in having every one of the twenty nations, especially America, armed to the teeth. The only peace I believe in is the kind of peace that has the gusto in it to work out and work through a substitute for war. If a more practical substitute cannot actually be proposed and actually adopted, I want arma- ment. There is one other thing that I apparently want, in this book. I do not want to be shoved off into being an author. 1 86 The Air-Line to Liberty I do not want to waste my time and my reader's time in it in talking about what can be done with advertising. I want to do it. And I want with my reader's help to get one hundred million people to help me do it. I will not generalize. I will not explain. I will not give good advice. I will not yearn. If I cannot do the thing I am talking about doing, and get one hundred million people here in this book in plain sight to help me do it, my talking about it means nothing. I propose in these pages to set up between nations a huge international Central Power House and Agreeing-Engine for a planet, put one thousand understanding-motors in it and run the world, and if I cannot get my own people to read the book I propose it in, if I cannot make my own small paper-model agreeing-engine work, if I cannot even adver- tise my idea in my own book, get my own people to agree with my idea, why should I try to get up on my small tucked-in mountain on this planet, like Mount Tom, and pipe A Confession of Hope 187 away to sixty million Germans and to two hundred million Russians? The reader and I, between us, in these pages before we drop the matter of advertising must make advertising do what we say it can do. It is up to the reader and to me, and to what the reader and I can manage to do together — this little book. It is the most colossally unfinished book ever written. It takes one hundred million people to finish it. It is as good as I can do so far, all alone, until the hundred million people help. Are we men in spirit or are we not? Are we salesmen in spirit or are we not? Do we believe in advertising, that is, in the salesman- ship of ideas? Do we believe in getting Ger- mans to take and to take quickly ideas that they think they do not want? We keep saying every day, a hundred mil- lion people of us, to Germans and to Turks, that we will not and do not believe in mere material might as settling things, that we be- lieve the world is ruled by ideas and not by 1 88 The Air-Line to Liberty force. Then we proceed to handle and mar- shal ideas toward Germany as if they were only wistful, helpless and pretty things. We treat ideas and the matter of organizing ideas as if there were something queer and different and not quite serious about ideas as compared with other explosives. We act as if ideas underlying a nation's action were a kind of dainty or luxury for a nation, an intangible effluence, as if ideas were fogs, angel cake or marshmallows, instead of what they are as a matter of fact — revolution-radium — spirit- ual gases for exalting or suffocating great peoples. Chapter III 189 A CONFESSION OF FAITH 1 WOULD like to say what I mean by ad- vertising. I am using the word in a highly energized sense and I do not mean by it what ninety- five per cent, of the back pages of the mag- azines groping on our pocketbooks mean by it. The back pages of the magazines may be doing better than the churches in getting at people and better than artists and authors, and they may serve very well as a point of de- parture, a place for our advertising to start from, but as superior as they are, to most that is being written in America to-day, they would not do as models for the greater, more desper- ate, sublime advertising twenty nations daily, nightly facing, — one day more, one night more, — the suicide of the world, must do now. All really effective advertisements have to be conceived and written by men who are specialists in the ideas to be advertised. Advertising campaigns for commercial ideas are best conceived and best written by men who have a creative passion for commer- 190 The Air-Line to Liberty rial ideas and for attracting attention to per- sonal and interested ideas. Advertising campaigns for nations, of na- tional and disinterested ideas, must be con- ceived and written by the men who have a creative passion for national disinterested ideas and for attracting attention to national and disinterested ideas. Advertising a nation calls for the same genius and the same attitude and driving power as advertising other things, but in a different field. I like to use the word advertising for what I mean because it stands at its best for some- thing that is homely, real, aggressive, insist- ent and manful — because it is full of the juice of human nature — and because raised to the wth power and with radium in it, the word advertisement conveys more of what I mean than the word education does. Education is conceived as a system. Education is laid out. And advertising as I see it for my people is a kind of overwhelming, resistless, driving- vision — a vision-dynamo, the drive wheel of a nation, of a nation's hope and of a nation's A Confession of Faith 191 will. Advertising a nation is advertising that will have to be written out of the heart, the flesh and blood of a people's literature, out of the singing of a people's religion, out of the prayers of strong men, out of the fight of a nation to live, and out of the fight of a nation to see a hundred years ahead. For such crises as we are facing now, in times gone by great peoples wrote Bibles. 192 Chapter IV A DEFINITION BEFORE ACTION MY definition of advertising as applied to the Advertising Department, the Na- tional Defense Department or World Depart- ment which I hope America is going to set up, is as follows : Advertising is the science of being believed. Advertising is the selection of words and the picking out of actions which make people believe. It consists in picking out words which peo- ple would like to believe if proved and the selecting of actions which prove them. A national advertisement is a row of a nation's ideas so expressed that people will want to take them up, and so dramatized that they will not want to let them go. Advertising consists in finding words or actions that express or dramatize the idea so that not only the people who are having the idea have it, but the people who stand by watching them have it, have it by watching them have it, and experience it by watching them experience it. A Definition Before Action 193 An idea advertised is an idea in the act of being experienced. Advertising is the art of precipitating an experience, of touching the imaginations of men and making human nature go. I have given my definition of what adver- tising is. Here is my application of the definition to winning the war. Advertising to end the war means selecting things for the nation to say and things for the nation to do, and things for it pointedly not to do, which underline the wills and uncover the souls of the people. This is what a World Department, when America has one, will help to do. 194 Chapter V THE CREED OF THE SALESMEN THE Secretary of America's Advertising Department, if he sat down to write out a kind of creed or statement of belief as to what he was for, and as to what his depart- ment was for, to post in his office and in the offices of his assistants, would probably write something like this. He would express it differently if it were to be hung up and so would I if I knew it was going to be hung up over the desks of thou- sands of attention engineers in Washington and throughout the country (and I will some- time), but perhaps what follows will do as a rough outline from which a creed for an at- tention engineer could be made up. The science of touching the imagination of men and of making human nature go is ap- proximately an exact science. It is exact the way corn is. Corn may be a week or so late or early/but it can be counted on and is loosely calculable. Advertising is exact in spirit and in prin- ciple. The Creed of the Salesmen 195 Certain means applied to human-beings produce certain ends. Planting ideas and planting corn are both sciences. World-peace is a problem in the science of human nature. When human nature is recognized as the main scientific problem in the science of peace we will have peace. The other sciences — outside of human na- ture — have all been recognized as sciences, one by one, by the Scholar. The man who is coming nearest to-day, nearest to recognizing human nature as a science is the Salesman. He is the savior of society. The Salesman is to be the savior of society to-day, because he sees and daily has the habit of seeing that changing a man's mind about something is a branch of the science of human nature. The salesman may be changing a man's mind about a soap or a baking powder, instead of about a God or about the fate of twenty nations, but he has the root of nation-advertising, nation- engineering in him. He has a regular habit in a problem of changing a man's mind, of going at the man man-fashion. He takes it for granted as a matter of course that there must 196 The Air-Line to Liberty be a definite, expert, scientific way of chang- ing a man's mind. He finds out in each case just what the way is. Then he does it. A great statesman to-day is modelled on the spiritual lines of the typical salesman of the finer kind, a great salesman of national ideas instead of commercial ideas; he is a scientist in the picking out and the pursuing of the mutual interests of the people with whom he deals. He has the salesman's spiritual habit toward national ideas. He acts on the assump- tion that a spiritual problem in international human nature — a spiritual problem in human nature between two people, two parties or two great nations can be treated by a strict scien- tific method, can be analyzed, its elements enumerated, isolated, grouped, classified, taken up in order and that the core of the mis- understanding or obsession or mutual hallu- cination can be cut around and can be re- moved. To a statesman or wth-power salesman all that is lacking in people or nations when they are suffering from an understanding- lesion is the disposition to have it cured. The Creed of the Salesmen 197 The first thing to do seems to be to adver- tise out of them their indisposition to have the misunderstanding cured and advertise into them a disposition to let it be cured if it can. Most pessimistic observation about being understood is made by people who do not even want to try. Making people want to try to understand and be understood is a science as much as chemistry or biology. This is merely another way of saying that psychology is as serious and practical a science as physics or physi- ology or electricity and engineering. Real men who are doing real things and who are as deeply interested in human-beings as other people are in bugs, acids and ma- chines, and who have worked as hard on human nature and on making human nature work the way they want it to, as they have on making the rest of nature work the way they want it to, believe to-day that at least as much can be done with human beings as can be done with bugs, acids and machines. A great states- man is a man who has a daily working faith that all that has to be done to get as scientific 198 The Air-Line to Liberty results with human-beings as we do with bugs, acids and machines is to apply equally scien- tific methods to human-beings, and to get poli- ticians to stop treating human-beings as the inferiors of bugs, acids and machines. All war and all standing armament is based on the superficial, lazy, vague conception of human nature — as a kind of hopeless muss or chaos underneath the magnificent, wonderful, or- derly ideas and the superior impulses of bugs and acids and machines. . . . Regarding human nature in a time of war as a kind of lower stratum or bog of disorder- liness in nature and not yet developed enough to have operative laws or determining organs and functions, is unmanly. It does not satisfy the more wilful, dogged, scientific spirit of the modern man. We are proposing from now on in this world, after this war, to apply the scientific method to being human and to ourselves, and not merely to bugs, acids and machines. The moment we do this we know we shall begin to get as good results in the science of being human as we do in the other sciences. The Creed of the Salesmen 199 The scientific method of being human and of making human nature work is the science of attention-engineering and of advertising — the implacable process, by natural law, of get- ting the attention and touching the imagina- tion of men. • • • • • There are days when I feel, with this idea of a World Department, or of international advertising as a substitute for war, as if it invented the next five hundred years! If what I am trying to say about attention- engineering in these pages, about the more or less approximately exact science of making history happen the way we want it to happen, is welcomed by the American people within the next few months, if the invention I have in mind is adopted and introduced by the American Government as America's invention for ending the war and bringing Germany to terms and reconstructing a world, any kind of next five hundred years the world wants can be ordered and can be had, and we will at once proceed to carry out our national and international arrangements for having the next 200 The Air-Line to Liberty five hundred years delivered to us in a row approximately as we want them and propose to have them. I believe that we are going to give our ideas for the Germans to Germany, that we are going to snow down ideas for Germans on Germans, instead of getting up every morn- ing as we do now from Maine to California in America and wading about knee-deep in our ideas for Germany ourselves. I prophesy a school of prophets, of trained experts in the science of changing men's minds. I believe we are coming together socially through men who can express either in words or actions contagious or commanding ideas, the salesmen of great beliefs. I believe that just as we have hundreds of thousands of salesmen for material products, who are studying the salesmanship of material products, we will have a hundred thousand men in America studying human nature, to protect and get control not only of what men make out of iron and wood and cotton and cloth, but what they make out of themselves. The Creed of the Salesmen 201 I believe that modern life is evolving on the law of psychology that all power turns in the power of attracting and holding attention. It is a new profession we face, a profession of professions, the profession of changing men's minds. We take the word prophet seriously once more in the present crisis of the world. With our faces haggard with war, we master the weapons of the spirit. THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN AMERICA Chapter I THE KAISER IS LOOKING GERMANY is acting in our modern life as the Executioner of the sin and ineffi- ciency of free peoples. Germany gloats with her axe in her hand. The blow has fallen. "See Democracy!" Ger- many cries. "Oh, see Democracy now! run- ning around like a hen with her head off!" "See how Democracy cannot collect its wits!" Germany says. Germany is amused with us while murder- ing us. Looking from behind her mailed fist, Ger- many watches — one day, then one more day, 20J 204 The Air-Line to Liberty the people governing themselves. Every night she goes to bed gleeful over some new mind-wandering, soul-wobbling, strong, inno- cent, majestic stupidity of crowds. The way Russia looks to us we look to Ger- many. At the very best, to the higher type of Ger- man, Democracy is a great tragic Samson to- day, with his eyes out, standing by the pillar before he pulls down the world around a Kaiser's head. • . • • . Democracy is essentially a religious institu- tion and without religion, that is, without ad- vertising. Without the advertising of high desires and of great personalities to the people and the advertising of the people to one an- other, only a fool can hope to believe in it. Nearly all the things the Germans say against democracy are true — as long as democracy tries to exist without advertising. It is all bombast, vagueness and lying — what we believe in America about democracy, fraternity and liberty — unless democracy, fra- ternity and liberty advertise. I agree with the The Kaiser is Looking 205 Germans, that democracy, liberty and fra- ternity are wistful and anaemic institutions, that they are too good for human nature un- less they are immediately and masterfully ad- vertised. Liberty, fraternity and democracy are new inventions for general use by millions of peo- ple. They have not been introduced yet. They have not been tried. They are water- colors. They have been sketched out. But until they have been worked out, they are bet- ter for schoolgirls and politicians than for men. We are fighting in this war for the suprem- acy of ideas as forces. Ideas as forces will not take the place of material things as forces unless they advertise as well, as skilfully and conclusively as ma- terial things do and as material men do. Ideas are not finished and are not expressed and do not exist until they are organized in spiritual armies, outface irrational things, grapple with irrational men and rule the world. From the point of view of organizing ideas in propor- tion to our education, America is worse than Russia. 206 The Air-Line to Liberty They have in Russia anarchy in material things and in machinery. Russia's legs and arms have locomotor ataxia. But in America we have anarchy in what we see. We are roll- ing our eyes. What is worse for America and more dangerous for the world, we are rolling our eyes piously. How can we stop in this war rolling our eyes piously? How are we going to prove to Germany that we are not what she thinks and what she says we are, that our ideals are not water-colors for schoolgirls and politicians? By making the ideals work. By organizing attention. By organizing by national action, the vision and the wills of the people. Chapter II 207 THE PRESIDENT IS LOOKING THE only thing on which national atten- tion is organized, and on which all Americans stand man to man and shoulder to shoulder, is our first advertisement to Germany — We can whip you with our guns. As to the other two advertisements for Ger- many — We can whip you with our souls, and what we propose for the world after some big, vague, generalized, pompous victory is won, America as it seems to me is bewilderingly at a loss. If the average citizen of America were to act just as he feels underneath during this war from day to day we would begin to see to-morrow morning in the Lost and Found columns of our newspapers from Maine to California advertisements like this: LOST AND FOUND "LOST! Somewhere near the great Four Corners of the world, on or about Sunday, August 2, 1914, my Na- tive Country — America. Any person who knows where America is, or who has seen America or anything that looks like America anywhere since above date, will please 208 The Air-Line to Liberty report to Woodrow Wilson, the White House, Wash- ington, D. C, or to William Hohenzollern, Potsdam, Germany, at earliest possible moment. John Doe." President Wilson, in this first year of his new administration, is taking up the most stu- pendous task that History has ever thrown — almost as if she were in despair — at the feet of one man. Daily as he sits at his desk he faces a thousand years — for us and for the world. There are millions of men in America and in all nations who are hoping that in a crisis like the present one, so great as almost to drive a man — even a lesser man — into great- ness, our President is going to prove to be a great President. But he cannot be a great President all alone, and at present our Presi- dent is perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. I think he must be espe- cially lonely now with the people when he sees — with all the eagerness to which he has brought them — how little they see ahead. And yet for the moment, why is it I was obliged for months to watch my country wait- ing week after week, morning after morning, to be driven into the war on a technicality, or The President is Looking 209 to be kept out of the war on a rule or prece- dent, or a piece of moral machinery or inter- national law, instead of being eager and full of some new constructive desire of her own, which made her run with vision to the rescue of the future of the world? We are being more spirited now, of course, but at our best we are only being spirited in a kind of glori- ous hand-to-mouth way. We are spirited about stopping Germany, but as a mass or a people we are not showing the spirit in a grim, passionate vision about what America wants to do with Germany or wants to do for the world when Germany is stopped. And what America wants to do when Ger- many is stopped is all that this war is about, is what the seventeen billion dollars are for and the flocks of young men's faces flashing past to die. Why is it one does not see any one in America, at least hardly any one except the President, going to the top of the Hill and looking off? 210 Chapter III NATIONS WAIT THE present moment is our only moment to consider the question which will haunt our history for a thousand years — the question of what we mean by going into this war. The force of an action consists in two parts. There is the action itself and there is what people mean by the action. About one-tenth of the effectiveness of a war is the fighting in it. About nine-tenths of what a war does and about ninety-nine hundredths of its efficiency while it is doing it and after it is through doing it, is what people mean by it. We may have hell if we have war r and we may have hell if we have peace. But if we have no vision for what we do, we have hell anyway. We will be the people hell is made of. The first three inches of our vision for going into the war is this: A crazed and desperate nation is running wild with firearms up and down the street of the world, and America as a great pacific nation, as an ordinary decent citizen-nation is Nations Wait 21 1 coming to the rescue of order and becoming an extemporized part of the Police Force of the world. We do not believe in force and we do not commit ourselves to force, and in the same thought and in the same breath we are getting ready to visualize and organize our nation's plan never to need to use force again; but in the meantime as we would do with those we pity and with those we love when they are running insane in the streets, we use force — we answer our hurry-call to help the over- whelmed Police. But this is merely a Policeman vision — a vision three inches ahead, for stopping Ger- mans. What is our constructive vision for the world and America? We will advertise to ourselves, get our own attention and find out. We will discover America in America. When America has been discovered in America it will be discovered in Europe. They are looking for America now. Four hundred years ago Europe sent over one man to try to discover America. Now every day, 212 The Air-Line to Liberty every new morning, every new night, in twenty spent and desperate nations, millions of spent and desperate men are looking toward the west — trying to discover America. Chapter IV 213 THE HUNDRED MILLIONTH OF A MAN A MAN is only a hundred millionth of himself without a hundred million men to help. If I were a colossal being capable of lift- ing around continents and tucking them in on a planet just where I thought best, and capable of arranging them when I had once put them in place, in any way I liked, and if God were then to place in my hand, like jack- straws, a hundred thousand pieces of ready- made railway track each a mile long; and if I then took my hundred thousand pieces of railway track and tossed them way up above the air across America and let each mile of railway come fluttering down to be a mile of railway all by itself just where it happened to light, I would be doing what this nation is doing to-day in laying out the purposes and ideals of its national life and in determining its vision and its will upon the earth. America is streaked all over with little na- tional ideals in one-mile lengths and we shall never come to ourselves and be a grown-up 214 The Air-Line to Liberty nation in the world until we piece our one- mile ideals together, swing across our country in a few great simple trunk lines of purpose of vision and of will, face our destiny with one long deep look together and begin to live. Without a plain clear-cut idea of what this country is for and where it is going and of what it is to do among the nations, the time is soon at hand when America is going to be felt in history by the livelier, more spiritual nations as she is felt already by many of them to-day, as some vague unwaked anonymous stupid placid bigness sogging back on the fate of the world. We have everything. We can do everything. We are not lacking in either visions or in powers. We have a kind of reck- less, almost foolish abundance of all the ele- ments a nation needs to be great, but because we do not take a few days off from heaping up other things to heap up attention to what we want and to focus our vision on where we are going, we are merely a big nation to-day, big with that same old vague windy bigness for which we are known and smiled at through all the earth. The Hundred Millionth of a Man 215 And now that it has come to pass that for the first time in history the other nations of the earth instead of smiling at us, are looking at us seriously and almost desperately and now that in their death struggle for the liberty we have a statue of — the liberty we have orations on and blow up firecrackers to — they turn at last sublime, tragic, and full of wonder and fear to us as the one great free people that could hope to save the remnant of their world, they find we are not ready. If America had seriously been trying for years to have a vision of her place in the world and had failed, I would be discouraged. It is because she has not tried and because she has not failed that the stupendous chance she now has to lift herself up out of her dissatisfaction with her own people, and her loneliness with other peoples is presented to her. It is not because we are really without ideals in America but because our ideals are with- out junctions that we are so vague and slow and disappointing to the world and to our- selves. 2i 6 The Air-Line to Liberty If one would take a one-mile piece of the New Haven Railway — the busiest mile near New York — and suddenly jerk it up with all its trains and engines on it and drop it down in the woods of Aroostook County, Maine, the one-mile piece of railway would feel in Aroos- took County, Maine, the way an idealist or a man with a vision feels about his ideals in America. Nearly every man of us in this country for three years has been feeling his ideals for his country tugging at his heart strings and nag- ging at his mind day after day. Day after day he looks about at the other men in the country and wonders why, if they have ideals, they are not making the country do something with them. He falls into despair about the ideals of other people. They fall into despair about his. The reason that Americans are discouraged about America and about Democracy, is that each American has his own lonely one-mile piece of a great ideal. One-mile pieces of a great ideal would dis- courage anybody. The Hundred Millionth of a Man 217 I have seen that when each man in Amer- ica begins seeing his own little one-mile ideal as a part of a three-thousand mile stretch of ideals, he will find himself a new man in a new country. Almost magically, almost the first moment some one flashes our visions to- gether and connects up the trunk lines of our souls each man of us will be a new man in a new country. The next thing our nation has to do is to organize national attention — make an Atten- tion Trust for the people — build trunk lines for our desires, great terminals for our souls — organize prophecy and vision in the way we have organized kerosene, transportation and harvesting machines. The American people are making a sorry showing toward Europe because our leaders in religion, literature and affairs are present- ing to us no trunk lines of vision on which to mobilize the daily lives of our people, because no Union Pacific has ever been designed or even proposed to carry the souls of the people to their destinations as it now carries their freight. 218 The Air -Line to Liberty If America as the one great nation not fiercely exhausted by the war will see to it that she has a plan ready to make what the war accomplishes last forever, America will be doing the one thing that Lord Grey and Lord Rosebery and other Englishmen have said the heart of the world expects from her. If she devotes herself to welding her faith, to focusing her vision, to having a plan ready, America at the end of this war instead of be- ing the most lonely nation, will have made herself not only the most understood, the most eagerly welcomed, but the most necessary of all nations to the other nations weary and dazed and coming out of battle. Our battle in America now is to fight our way through to a vision — to draw up our pro- visional candidate-vision for a new world and make ourselves ready to render as great a service in this new world as England, Russia and France have rendered in getting rid of the old one. The vision of saving the world by ending the war has been and is being concentrated The Hundred Millionth of a Man 219 upon by The Allies. We all have been asked to fall in. The vision of what can be done after the war is over — the vision of saving the world by peace and by establishing peace — is thrust upon us to create. To every man in America the cry of his country in behalf of the world goes out to- day. The country is almost calling for a draft of vision — a conscription of each man's soul that it shall gather his vision around him, clear his eyes before him, make a way for his people. I have seen that we will be a nation of prophets. We will spend our days — thousands of us a day from now on, in seeing the world straight and in seeing the world whole. We will have a World Department which will break us away from our little indifferences, from our little selfish fears, stop our hemming and hawing and yearning — swing us off from our little separate back-villages of belief, make us flock together, force us to come out into the open, look in each other's eyes, shape our vision as a whole people of a whole world, weld our passions together and lay down in 220 The Air-Line to Liberty the sight of all the trunk lines of our vision and our hope. After all when one thinks of it, it is a stu- pendous thing that the breathless, righting, fiercely preoccupied nations bent down to their work, want from us and that they must have from us. For to them America has been free. She has not been until the other day stripped and in the hold and manning the guns. She has been alone, free-hearted, serene, up under the sky, out in the cool night . . . America has been the Deck Watch on the Ship, looking ahead! We must bring with us, now that we come to them, our vision. Chapter V 221 THE NATION TAKES A HUNDRED MILLION LOOK ATTENTION in America, the attention of the people, is divided off into many huge national private parks or attention-pre- serves. The Saturday Evening Post has one attention-preserve. There are ten million people whose attention belongs to the Curtis Publishing Company. Mr. Collier has an- other attention-preserve. Mr. Hearst has an- other. And there are all the others. I was asking a journalist in New York, the other day, about the best way to get the idea in this book before all the newspapers and magazines of the country where it could have national discussion and reach all the people in America and reach them at once. He thought that if I put the idea in a book — a quick emergency book, and published it, a book would prove perhaps to be general public ground — a kind of Common of Atten- tion and would stand so far as the magazines were concerned a better chance of general dis- cussion before the people, but he thought that 222 The Air-Line to Liberty it might be a little dangerous, if I wanted uni- versal attention to my belief, to have it appear in any particular magazine or to let it be iden- tified with any particular attention-preserve. Probably it was unfair, but the question he put to me was a very natural one. "If you let it appear in the Magazine will the — Magazine have anything to do with it, or notice it?" There are a great many ex- ceptions no doubt, but there is enough truth in it to call it a good average truth — a truth America will have to face — that if an idea of saving the country appears in one attention- preserve in this country, the other preserves will not seem to care very much, some of them, suddenly, whether the country is saved or not. They will hope it can be saved in some other way. If this is not true, and I am not ready to admit that in the present crisis it is true, every American can think of something like it that is. The evening papers in the city of if they would unite to deliver their papers to subscribers in all parts of the city would save Nation Takes Hundred Million Look 223 a million a year, but they are too American to pull themselves together, and do it. They have been trying to plaintively for years. Sometimes one paper and sometimes another, always slips out at the last minute. To say nothing of organizing to distribute their ideas and make their ideas express and save a na- tion, the papers cannot organize to distribute the wood pulp they are printed on. One need not multiply instances. There are hundreds of thousands known to us. They make one feel that unless some powerful national ar- rangement is made for team-work-attention in America, we are going to have a very long and desperate struggle to get American at- tention organized and American vision fo- cused to subdue Germany and save the world. What America is looking for now and wants now is a John D. Rockefeller of at- tention. As John D. Rockefeller organized oil for America some one will have to organize attention for America. Organizing by the people and for the people, to get the attention of the people is the one way now left open to us if we are going to hope in America to com- 224 The Air-Line to Liberty pete with a nation which organizes attention like Germany. The only way we can make democracy work from now on — make it intelligent, self- confident and masterful — is to proceed to ar- range in it as rapidly as possible three Atten- tion Trusts — one for the people's getting the attention of the Government, one for the Gov- ernment's getting the attention of the people and one for America's getting the attention of other nations. The Secretary of our World Department (who ought to be made one of the important members of the cabinet) should have three under-secretaries, or attention-engi- neers, who would operate in behalf of the lib- erty and the power of a great, free people, these three great attention-machines, a ma- chine for making the Government listen, a machine for making the people listen, and a machine for holding the attention of a world. VI MAKING DEMOCRACY WORK Chapter I MOBILIZING NEWSPAPERS I Rapid Transit Facilities THERE are three courses for a democracy, to-day. It can take its choice. First: we will make it more efficient than autocracy. Or Second, we will drive autocracy by force out of competiton with democracy and make the world safe for democracies to be as in- efficient as they like. We will take the ground that on a basis of sheer efficiency, democracy cannot compete with autocracy at all, that de- mocracy is by its nature and destiny a school, 225 226 The Air-Line to Liberty that government by, for and of the people must be like a George Junior Republic — a kind of play-government run by children and pupils, which is engaged half in doing what governments are supposed to do and half in teaching people how to do it. Or Third, we can steer a middle course. I believe America should take the first course. All a democracy has to do to be as efficient as an autocracy for people, as an autocracy is for the people to recognize the principle of employing authorities and experts. We can- not do this all at once. We will choose the fields of action in which we will as voters and citizens delegate and hand over our au- thority to experts, to be employed for us as they see fit, and we will select other fields to be run by amateurs. I would like to begin with what a de- mocracy can do — by mobilizing its news- papers. The newspapers are the spiritual railroads of the country. Rapid Transit Facilities 227 The only reason that the Government (on the same almost universally accepted princi- ple) has not taken over rapid transit between ideas, for defense of the nation, in the same way that it has taken over gasoline, sugar, iron, coal and hogs, is that the American peo- ple (including the editors of many news- papers) do not see that the democracy and the defense of democracy depends as much upon mobilizing what America sees to do, as it does upon mobilizing what America sees to eat. It takes brains and the mobilizing of brains as well as sugar and hogs — to defeat an enemy like the Germans. If we have rapid transit in this country for sugar and hogs, and no brains can get through from one part of the country to another, be mobilized and massed in the nick of time in each crisis against the brains of Germany, we are going to lose the fight. Unless the newspapers or spiritual railroads of America make very swift and conclusive arrangements among themselves, for the rapid transit of ideas, inventions, of the enthusiasms 228 The Air-Line to Liberty of the people from one part of the country to another so that the whole country can act at once, the Government will soon have to take the newspapers over in the same way and for precisely the same reasons — the same abso- lutely inescapable reasons, that they have taken over — with the enthusiastic consent of nearly all Americans, the country's railroads for sugar and coal. People are tired of getting their sugar, two pounds at a time and their coal by the bagful, and they have seen how much they want sugar and coal. What Americans needed to be told about the value of sugar and coal and hogs in this crisis, was told to everybody especially, one at at time, in their own cellars and kitchens and was told all at once, and the incredible revolu- tion for America, of having its fifty thousand miles of railway all taken over in a few min- utes, with all of the people looking on and cheering, took place without a ripple. Three hundred years were crowded into three days. The same is going to happen to the news- Rapid Transit Facilities 229 papers except that the editors of the country, unlike the presidents of the railroads with their stockholders hanging like millstones around their necks, are going to get together as I firmly believe and are going to organ- ize the rapid transit of ideas for America themselves, mobilizing the spiritual enthusi- asms, the brains, the shrewdness and the love of the republic — the hope, wrath and expectation and religion of the people, front them up, mass them, and hurl them into the three advertisements that every day — day by day — we are hurling against Germany — "We Can Whip You with Our Guns, We Can Whip You With Our Souls, and Here is a Substitute for War That Will Make You Stop This One." All the newspapers have to do, is to save the Government the trouble. If the Government takes over the news- papers of this country it will do it because it sees what can be done with newspapers in making the country impregnable and uncon- querable, better than the newspapers do. The Government will do it because it sees that editing a newspaper in a time of war is 230 The Air-Line to Liberty practically a greater, more noble and more powerful profession than editors do. The editors of the spiritual railroads of the country will do what the railroad presidents would have done ten years ago, if they had had a good reminder of how important they and their railroads are, and would have done much better probably than the Government in a moment of haste and desperate need can do it now. The spiritual railroads of the country in- stead of waiting to have a Government Head appointed to run them as one railroad, will soon find themselves getting together if they are not already doing so, to embrace their op- portunity themselves to mobilize the ideas of America. They will offer to cooperate with such a World Department as I have outlined — and begin to select the men to operate it. Every- body would rather have them. Self-control is a higher and more effectual form of power and interests and will utilize men of a higher and more masterful genius, than government control. Junctions 231 The editors of the country will probably prefer to get together, organize and select the best man they have to the Government World Department to act as General Passenger and Freight Agent, or as Superintendent of Motor Power for Ideas in America. As Traffic Manager of the souls of a hun- dred million people, he will mass the inven- tiveness and individuality of their thinking into the world's mightiest weapon, into a massive colossal, spiritual and intellectual en- gine or heart. The heart shall be heard beat- ing around the world, and every throb shall be heard in Germany. 2 Junctions As long as America has a mere marrow or mush of publicity instead of a spinal column of publicity America will have to pick out second-rate anaemic, morally-tired things to do. Any monarchy can whip us as long as we do not advertise ourselves to ourselves. The only way to have the world safe for democracy, is 232 The Air-Line to Liberty to make a democracy that is safe for the world to have. A democracy suffering as ours is, from a chronic spinal meningitis of news, a democ- racy which is provided with no coherent backbone of things it makes all the people know, a democracy in which the daily press which is not seen as a matter of course lifting the nation along every day, is not safe. A de- mocracy which is not placing facts and visions out before its people daily where the people can go to work on them and keep going to work on them is not safe. A monarchy that controls publicity — a monarchy that governs a nation by daily touching the imagination of the people and daily invoking the enthusiasm and marshall- ing the team-work of its people is safer for the world than a democracy that does not. If such an autocracy has bad ideas they will soon show and soon work out, and it will come to smash. It will not wobble and potter along as we do. It will have the energy to die. Publicity control is the Nervous System of a nation. It pulls its soul and body together Junctions 233 and makes a living, unconquerable, command- ing, hundred-million man-power personality of a nation. This is what is being done every day by our salesman of ideas. Nine million out of ten million dollars we spend a week in America on getting people to believe things, is spent on the people who believe the things already. The reason that material things are better run by business men than spiritual things are by so-called spiritual men is that men who handle material things are virile salesmen. . . . They are men with ideas — spend nearly their whole time in finding out who the peo- ple are who do not want the ideas and in get- ting them to want them. What our World Department will do with the ideas of our American newspapers, with the spiritual forces and spiritual products which make America what it is, will be to mass them, study out a campaign for them and sell them in Germany, make the Germans want them whether they happen to know whether they want them or not. When an editor sits down to write an edi- 234 The Air-Line to Liberty torial he will have not only the inspiration of a hundred million people listening to him in New York, and ten thousand country editors listening and copying, but he will know he is being read, not casually by men here and there in Washington, but by the American World Department which, if it thinks best, will mo- bilize his editorials at once for Stuttgart, Potsdam, Dresden, and for the Imperial Headquarters at the front. While he is writing his editorial he will feel the editorial perhaps the moment the paper is out, being caught up by the wireless, being translated into German over night, being de- livered before the next night by airplane in Germany, being read by the General Staff at headquarters at the front, and by lamps in back parlors in Berlin. The World Department may make quicker time or slower time of course according to the nature of the exigency, the turn of affairs in peace or in war that may take place any min- ute. Way Stations 235 3 Way Stations What would anybody think of a man who believed in whole wheat bread if he got all the people who are already using it together into a church, into a kind of culinary church every Sunday, and told them all over again Sunday after Sunday about it and never said a word to people flocking by a hundred a min- ute in the street outside, who had never tasted whole wheat bread? But this is what newspapers and other lit- tle provinces and churches of opinion are do- ing every day. I have thought several times during this war that one of the first things I would do if I had time, would be to organize what might be called "The Wrong Subscriber Move- ment." This country could be saved and fronted up against a world in a very short time, if all the people in it could be organized and made after the right fashion, partly tact and partly patriotism, to read each other's papers. From the point of view of a nation's act- 236 The Air-Line to Liberty ing, of its carrying out ideas with directness and power, nothing can be expected of it un- less it takes ideas as matters of life and death and advertises its ideas as matters of life and death. If one thinks of ideas accurately and in a matter-of-fact way as living things — as valu- able but more or less perishable goods, which must be disposed of to people, or wasted — if one treats ideas as seriously as bread in a jar or meat in a refrigerator or eggs which must be thrown away if people cannot be got to use them, one soon comes to see that our pre- vailing arrangements for expressing ideas in nations or our usual tepid arrangements for distributing and marketing ideas in nations and to nations, are reckless beyond belief. The fate of the world for the next five hun- dred years depends upon getting all of the people in America to reading, and reading as quickly as possible, the wrong papers — the papers that they think are published for other people. If all the people of America who read the paper they like, would suddenly begin to- Way Stations 237 morrow reading the papers of the people who disagree with them, the country would soon be reeking with thinkers, with mixers, and with men who do things for a nation, and who know how to act together. This is one of the first things our World Department — when we have one, will attend to. It will pour the publics of one paper over into the public of the other papers and run the flood of the news and the reek of the people together. The people who do not know about whole wheat bread in ideas would soon all be eating it a little and trying to, and all busy liking it, or learning to like it. 238 Chapter II MOBILIZING MAGAZINES THERE are not a few exceptions, and I do not wish to seem to lump a whole class of men struggling with enormous difficulties, together, but I would like to express in the present desperate need of our nation for pull- ing its mind and its soul together, and striking through into a keen, swift powerful national presence of mind, I would like to be permitted to say — if I may be tolerated and forgiven a moment, a frank word about the American magazines. I do not see how they can meet their part of the crisis, unless they think more of what they can do for the country and less of what they can do for themselves. They are already doing this of course and anybody can see some of them doing it. They are rising to a new motive and a new courage and they have got their chins a little higher than usual up over the counter they sell magazines on, but for the most part our magazines — with a national audience— addressing Seattle, New Orleans and Boston all in a breath, have an opportu- Mobilizing Magazines 239 nity to bring the country to a massive focus that can not hope to be approached by any other of the human, spiritual resources of the country. I do not see how the magazines can rise to their opportunity unless they have more cour- age, and more personality and sense of lead- ership and think less of themselves and are less jealous of one another. I do not see quite why the people should take them seriously as a part of America's great weapon in the war or why any one should want to write for them as they are. I do not see how a magazine in a crisis of democracy like this can hope to be a great magazine unless it looks up to the people, and unless it expects in the present crisis, at least a greater degree of intelligence, insight, hope, common sense, and eagerness to understand and willingness to be gathered in and to help, than many of our magazines are manifesting now. I believe that if the editors of the magazines of America would expect twice as much of their subscribers, in certain directions they 240 The Air -Line to Liberty would have twice as many of them. They would be sure to have twice as many of them if they stopped wheedling, if they got so inter- ested in what they were doing for the nation and for the people and for Europe that they forgot whether they had any subscribers or not. There is nothing that subscribers like bet- ter than being overlooked — that they like bet- ter than being looked past — at some great surging spectacle of the world. I believe that the editors of the magazines of America as a class, like the Presidents of railroads, and the makers of motors, are go- ing to break out before this war is over, into doing with American national ideas for America, what James J. Hill did with rail- roads. But I do not see how they can do it as long as they are representing the owners of the stock so much more than they are representing the country. Of course this is just a personal conviction which I am bringing to bear in a moment of Mobilizing Magazines 241 desperate national need — and anybody can take it or leave it. From the point of view of how masterful magazines a whole people take can be, — at the present moment with marked exceptions mag- azine life is as watery and insipid and as lack- ing in tang and leadership as political life was fifteen years ago. Political life has been com- paratively rescued from nonentity and disre- pute because powerful personalities have ap- peared in it and ventilated it, and anybody can see that the more a man takes the liberty of being himself in American public life and of expecting people to let him be himself, the more people will follow him and the more practical and powerful a politician he be- comes. The politician who feels so superior to the people that he thinks he ought not to act as if people knew anything or as if people would put up with his acting as if he knew anything, is being delegated to back seats and to less prominent places in public affairs. The people are being represented more and more every day in political life by real men. And real men 242 The Air-Line to Liberty who formerly kept aloof are considering poli- tics worth while. If some one would now pro- ceed to do for the editors of America what Mr. Roosevelt has done for the politicians — if some one would get up somewhere in this country, blow a breeze and a steam whistle through the editorial chairs and magazine of- fices as Mr. Roosevelt did through convention halls and legislatures, the magazines would soon begin to be seen filing in, in America, and taking the front place that belongs to them as one of the great, frank self-revelations, one of the stupendous self-defenses of a people. American magazines instead of being practi- cally ignored would be translated into all lan- guages, would be as familiar on German tables and in German libraries as they are now on ours. The Germans would be compelled to read the American magazines because the American magazines would authoritatively represent the people. As at the present mo- ment our magazines do not represent anybody, not even the editors, it is no wonder they are finding it hard to get people to read them even in English. Mobilizing Magazines 243 The moment editors of this country will stop feeling secretly superior to their sub- scribers — will stop knuckling under to the editorial theory that people do not want their editors to be anybody in particular or to con- duct their magazines as if they were, or as if they dared to peep — magazines in America will begin to be taken seriously. The people keep having hopes of soon watching editors waking up and making a stir, but in the mean- time, with the millstone of the fear of their stockholders around their necks and the iron anklets of their subscribers around their feet from month to month and from year to year, the people stand and watch them yearning and diddering. It is one of the things that is going to come next through a huge object lesson of one cour- ageous magazine looming up for scared ones to see — this emancipation of the editors of the magazines. Through the emancipation of editorial personalities — men who in them- selves sum up and symbolize and express the people or types of the people — the final full- heartedness and candor and nobility, the gusto 244 The Air-Line to Liberty and will of a free and great people shall be nationally expressed. Men who are afraid cannot express to Ger- many and England even the bare daily com- mon facts of American human nature and American life. Even an ocean cannot try to express itself on a faint little penny-whistle without being a little absurd. And no wistful yearning high tenor editor pouring out before the people (as any one can see) his one single beautiful longing for more subscribers can ex- press America or what America is like to, a world. Chapter III 245 MOBILIZING AUTHORS AND "PROPHETS" What Prophets are hike PEOPLE who think they are not inter- ested in prophets will please begin skip- ping in this chapter after the next paragraph. The people who are not interested in prophets to-day are the very people of all others who, if a real live prophet were pointed out right next door to them, would be inter- ested in him the most. Many people flatter themselves they are not religious, who are. The fundamentally religious people in this world are the people who expect things, the people who expect shrewdly, who expect hard, who expect now and who expect to the point. The fundamentally irreligious people in this world (thousands of them in Prince Al- bert coats flocking to church this very morn- ing) expect no more of prophets than people did three thousand years ago. 246 The Air-Line to Liberty Prophets may be vastly inferior men now- adays, and have a kind of plain look morally and religiously, but they can do more. With the invention of the scientific metho with expression-experiment and advertising- psychology, with the printing press to swing out into the world with, and with the wireless that makes all the world sit around the same breakfast table in the morning, a prophet be- comes or may become any minute an imme- diate absorbing personal interest — a man with a vision for a nation. The stock-markets of twenty nations watch him. And whether he is wrong or right. Kerensky, for instance or Hoover — anybody with a vision — a working vision for a hundred million people, and who is expressing it, is a prophet. It is mostly clothes that make people think they are not interested in prophets now. They think of them with their arms up, with sheets on, and with a beautiful gone look hovering about on ceilings in the Boston Public Library. People should drop all this and should think of Mr. Hoover, digging out events be- What Prophets Used to Like to Do 247 fore our eyes, digging out hope, excavating out of the stolidity and listlessness of a hun- dred million people a new world. When I speak of prophets in this book, I mean Hoovers— men in all callings and of all types and all professions who by selecting things to do or by selecting things to say, change people's minds and right-about-face their lives— advertising men— Mr. Wilson, Mr. Franklin K. Lane, Mr. Ford, Mr. Van- derlip, Mr. Gompers. It must not be forgot- ten by any live man to-day, that a prophet may be— any minute now,— with sublime and friendly truth, spoken of as "Mr." Having duly said what I mean by the word prophet, I am not going to wince any longer or feel other people wincing in this book, when I use it. 2 What Prophets Used to Like to Do Taking history as a whole nobody ever seems to pay very much attention to what a prophet thinks. He has been thrown off into "Mere Literature" or into writing bibles for two reasons. First because he always skipped 248 The Air-Line to Liberty the first twenty-five years of his truth, and second because he would never do team work with other prophets. Given a prophet who does not skip the first twenty-five years of his truth, and who has a kind of splendid fury for team work and all the pious discouraged notions people have about prophets not amounting to anything un- til after they are dead, go by. The best copy of advertising a nation that ever has been written was Isaiah's. It was so good that it advertised and has kept on adver- tising the Hebrew nation three thousand years. Isaiah keeps a nation that was never born, alive. I think it can be shown that Isaiah failed or rather did not succeed as an advertising statesman until thousands of years too late be- cause he was really contented as a prophet to be put off with posterity. Isaiah did not hope to make the people he was fronted up with believe him. He did not write as a scien- tist, as in our modern time he might have written. He did not write with the grim stern expectation of being believed by the peo- What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 249 pie on the spot he would have liked to be be- lieved by. In a kind of glorious and beauti- ful way before their own eyes, he gave them up. And they stood by and watched him giv- ing them up. With the coming in of the scientific method, and with the discovery of the social spirit the more religious a prophet is to-day the more determined and particular he is about convincing people before his own eyes, and about the first twenty-five years of his truth. If Isaiah were in America to-day I believe he would not only believe in prophecy but he would be making the present war efficient by putting back of it the daily orderly progres- sive vision of a people. 3 What Prophets Would Like to Do Now I have been looking at James Montgomery Flagg's picture of Uncle Sam pointing at me everywhere saying or seeming to say "1 mean you! 2^o The Air-Line to Liberty I wonder what Uncle Sam means when he addresses me in this way. I have been trying to find out what he means and what I can do. The main conclusion I have come to is this: I think that what Uncle Sam ought to have back of all that look of his at me and back of all that pointing at me, is an enlistment blank to hand to me to sign which I feel en- lists me and enlists the whole of me, which counts me in for the kind of man I am, — an enlistment blank that makes a demand upon me to do the kind of things that I have been trained to do for a country. Kreisler is a better shot with his violin than he is with his rifle, and when his country let him give up active service in the field and he came over to America and began playing hap- piness into the hearts of crowds of people and playing their money out of their pockets into Austria, he stood out suddenly in the battle field for Austria as a thousand men. I feel that if I am better at hitting my enemy in the mind than I am at hitting him in the stomach, the Government should send me an enlistment What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 2$ I blank that will let me enlist for hitting him in the mind. I ought to belong to a National Attention Corps and not be wavering about at attention all alone in the dark by myself. I have a right to directors and leaders and ef- fective action in an Attention Corps. I do not want my attention-work to be tolerated by my government. I want it organized and used as seriously as power to shoot is used. If my aim in getting a man to agree with me in his mind is more accurate and deadly and more trained than my aim ever was or ever will be at the outside of his head, if I have been getting ready for forty years to use this way of hitting a man or of aiming at a nation, I cannot help feeling that some arrangement ought to be made by our War Department, to let me enlist in the kind of fighting I know something about. A War Department should organize and mobilize all kinds of fighting a country can produce. If a man is a soldier in this country and gets his gun and learns to shoot, the Govern- ment keeps him from shooting in the air and 252 The Air-Line to Liberty instantly arranges to make every shot count. But as things stand — at least for the mo- ment, an author if he is ready to be mobilized for his country with his kind of explosive, is expected to walk around anywhere and look around anywhere and shoot alone. I do not imagine this is going to be true very long under our present administration, if our President feels himself backed up by Congress and by the country in what I con- ceive to be his own personal vision of what could be done in America by organizing the imagination and the will of the people. I have been thinking what could happen or be made to happen if a few authors with national convictions and national insights in sympathy with the President, could have con- fided to them the order and the emphasis in which the President wanted them expressed. At this present moment for instance probably a thousand authors in this country have eight or ten pamphlets or little quick books which they desire to write and apply to the national situation, but we are all in the air about them. Fifty other men may be writing them and we What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 253 do not know which should come first and there is no existing system of pamphleteering rec- ognized and set in motion by the Government in which what we do, can at once be made to count. Which train of thought should have the right of way? Authors in America just now want a Traf- fic Officer. A Bureau of Interpretation and Vision is as much needed in connecting up the Government with the people as a Bureau of Information? If the Government arranges for pouring facts before the people, should it not arrange for their seeing the facts in their order and relation so that they can act on them? Out of a hundred million people ninety-nine million will have to have their imaginations touched about America as the imaginations of Germans are touched about Germany, before Americans can be efficient in the war. Ger- many is efficient and is all but whipping a world because the Government begins touch- ing the imaginations of Germans about Ger- many when they are babies. I get up every morning feeling the need 254 The Air-Line to Liberty all over again as I read the papers and watch the scattered dabs our papers make at the at- tention of our people. . . . Boston. ... St. Louis. . . . Seattle. . . . New Orleans. . . . As I see it, a series of drives not only upon the attention but upon the imagination of the American people, with certain facts and cer- tain principles must be made before we can efficiently make a series of drives by air, sea and land on Germany. We must organize the vision of our people and put it back of our guns. We must organize their vision even to get the guns. The vision of a people can only be organ- ized by a series of repeated culminating drives upon the attention of the people. Pa- pers have only a piecemeal attention and books and bookstores are too slow and only a system of door to door pamphlets rapidly mo- bilized by the Government, and possibly car- ried up and down the streets to each man's house by voluntary canvassers, can establish a direct intimate authoritative connection be- tween the vision of the people and the actions and proposed actions of the Government. What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 255 The details would be worked out in several of many ways as might seem best, but I believe that it can be proved in this war that the pam- phlet is the natural art-form for national emer- gency, for facing or producing revolutions and changing nations' minds. A government mobilized Milton once, and Kipling and Wells have been mobilized into definite books by England, but the thing I have in mind for America is that a Government which recognizes that it has an essentially re- ligious task in waking up a people should in- stitutionalize seeing and the see-er — should mobilize prophecy and vision of a nation as seriously as it does its guns. One does not want to make too much of the word seer. One would rather use a hyphen with it and call it see-er, but one cannot but feel that the see-er, too, should have an army the Government will let him belong to. Mr. Wilson has plenty of things for an Elijah to do just now in this war, for this country. Where there seems to be one Elijah or semi-Elijah, there would soon be a hun- dred if the Government was showing what 256 The Air-Line to Liberty they could do, and was giving them positions in which to do them. With the coming in of the scientific spirit and the social spirit, and particularly with the advent of a Woodrow Wilson, the old Ahab-Elijah convention for governments and prophets has gone by. The real prophet is wanted to-day in America. The real prophet to-day sits on the Council of National Defense without anybody's think- ing he is a prophet at all, or he publishes Weekly Bulletins like Roger Babson which bankers have to read. And when he is an au- thor he wants to cooperate with his Govern- ment and express his Government instead of being treated by the Government in the pres- ent crisis of the nation — as a kind of literary Aurora Borealis. A series of planned progressive culminating assaults upon the vision and the wills of our people will have to be made and there is really no way that authors can do their share in making it, without the central cooperation of the Government. I have believed that the Government, the first moment it can get to it, is going to organize and operate in all sec- What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 257 tions of the country large squads of pam- phleteers, who shall write what might be called door-bell pamphlets, which shall have the authority and unity of the Government back of them, and in which, as it were, the United States shall ring the doorbell every few days of every citizen in the land, sit down and talk with him by his fireside, confide to him what it is trying to do to-day, trying to do to-morrow, and ask him to understand and to help. The Government on a vast scale will or- ganize and centralize the weapons of the spirit as it has all other weapons. The Government will arrange to let the men who are in the business of touching the im- aginations of men and of kindling their ideals and desires, do team-work for the nation like other citizens. The best way to mobilize authors in pam- phlets and rapid-fire books, as it seems to me, would be to have it done as a branch-work, by the Government's World Department which I have been suggesting. There is reason to believe that with the 258 The Air-Line to Liberty daily press in the state of anarchy and com- petition in which it now is, no better plan could be devised than this for the Govern- ment's securing promptly and handling a full free confidential control of the personal at- tention of all of the people. If the Government can deal daily in this direct way with the people and can get atten- tion-control, all the other controls it needs, — money, enthusiasm, prompt understanding of national moves, a magnificent national sin- gle-heartedness — will come of themselves. 4 A Hope Held Out for Authors When I have just been getting off what seems to me a platitude, some one always gets up in the country and tells me that I am being visionary, and when (in a book or some other hidden modest place) I have just caught my- self getting off something that seems to me visionary, some one gets up (in the Smart Set, or Vanity Fair, perhaps) and tells me I am platitudinous. I do not want what I have been saying about A Hope Held Out for Authors 259 prophets dismissed, if it can be helped, in either of these ways. It does not seem to me it can be called visionary to advocate the use of prophets by a nation just now. What would be visionary for a nation, in a desperate time like this, would be for it to suppose that it could pos- sibly do what it wants to do, without them. Of course by prophets I mean men who are experts in getting attention — advertising men. The nations are fighting with each other because they cannot get each other's attention. The people in each nation are fighting with the people in their own nation about how to fight the other nations. Peace consists in knowing how to listen and make people listen. A hundred thousand drummers could de- fend America from our having another war with Germany better than a hundred thousand soldiers. A little regiment of a thousand newspaper men really mobilized to get Ger- mans to listen to Americans and Americans to listen to Germans would defend us a year 260 The Air-Line to Liberty for what it costs us to run a dreadnought a day. If our War Department were to mobilize a little company of say a hundred authors and have them each aim a book a year at nations that think they think they want to fight us, and if our War Department were then to adver- tise for five million people to read their books until it got them — in the same way that Eng- land's War Department advertised for five million soldiers until it got them — and if the people of America were once to see this being done, and put in definite operation before their eyes, the whole question of national prepared- ness, of America's safety and America's self- respect would be put on a new basis. The bare announcement that a hundred authors were going out against German illusions about America and American illusions about Ger- many and that as much money was being spent by our Government per day in getting foreign people to look at our hundred authors' books as is now being spent per day in getting them to be afraid of our dreadnoughts . . . the bare announcement that our War Department A Hope Held Out for Authors 261 was mobilizing and planning to mobilize ideas in this nation with precisely the same efficiency and same expense it has employed in mob- ilizing less powerful explosives, would put a new face in a week on our national talking and planning about permanent armament after the war. It is because people quite reason- ably want to see something being done that they have been betrayed into their present ap- pearance of helpless and grudging belief in big armament after the war. The moment their attention is got by the Government through advertising men, to what can be done by advertising men to provide a working substitute for armament, and the moment people see the advertising men doing at home the thing they talk about doing abroad, namely, getting people to listen, the American people will expect things of authors as seriously as I do. In a less serious time than this, it would not be modest for an author to stand hopefully as I am doing now with his explosives in his hand and suggest to a War Department how useful he could be to his country. Perhaps I can 262 The Air-Line to Liberty make my point better by pointing out how much harm I could do to it without a War Department to tell me when and where to fire. Treitschke, by writing a book, recruited five million men in England and elsewhere and set them fighting his country to the death. The five million men, after hearing about Treitschke's book and about Treitschke's ideals for Germany, were willing to die to keep the book from coming true. Nietzsche's books exposed Germany to twenty nations and to a firing line two thousand miles long, of men who believed Nietzsche's advertisement of what Germans and Germany were like. How many million German lives would it have saved if the German General Staff could have thought of it in time or known enough to think of it in time and prevented Treitsch- ke's book from coming out, from slumber- ing on bookshelves like a fuse and then blow- ing up his country? I wish the people of my country and the authors of my country before this gigantic task of lifting and firing the imaginations of a world would take authors seriously. A Hope Held Out for Authors 263 An author may be any minute for America, a very serious form of explosive unless the War Department keeps him, acting innocently and all alone, from going off in the wrong place or at the wrong time. Ideas have been making good all along in this war as explosives. They have raised all the money for the other kinds of explosives. I have seen that we are going to get ideas as explosives on our side in America and that we are going to use them as explosives on some colossal scale and in a highly organized way to defend us in America, from our en- emies, and from ourselves, and blast out for us a new world. I do not yield my ground in my belief in prophets because there is not a man reading this book who cannot give me the names of a hundred prophets who have been stoned in- stead of taking government positions, and who have never efficiently defended anybody from anything, and who have never even defended themselves. But it is mere history. It is not history we are facing now. We 264 The Air-Line to Liberty face ourselves. We distinguish the new prophets and the old ones. Before Galileo and the birth of the scientific spirit, — in a day when prophets cannot get people's attention they are starved. But when as nowadays, they can get people's attention, and when they make people glad they have got it, people pay them for it. Before science came in and the spirit of applied knowledge, prophecy was a kind of rosy spray of truth. Truth is a hydrant now. Niagara Falls, instead of being a geographi- cal decoration and being looked at, lights the eyes of a hundred cities all night, carries five hundred thousand people home to supper and in a thousand miles of buildings on a million wheels turns the wills, hopes and desires of millions of men. In Niagara Falls God is turning a Turbine Wheel. That concentrated look in Uncle Sam's eyes, gazing at us out of all our streets, is the Twen- tieth-Century look on the face of the world. It is daily doing things to our arts, to our A Hope Held Out for Authors 265 literature and to us — that look in Uncle Sam's eyes. Formerly we had literature. To-day we are in a transition stage and until we ar- rive somewhere we are having for the most part in America what might be called Liter- ature-To. We have invented a form of art- expression which in a rare degree looks a man in the eye between the words (like James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam) and says while one stands transfixed on the sidewalk, "I mean you!" This is what has happened to prophecy since Isaiah. Isaiah did not look very much like James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam, I imagine, in his sermons! I wish there were something more — a kind of exaltation in Uncle Sam's face when he asks me — when he asks us all. . . . I feel it is there, though. He keeps it in behind, to do things with. The Germans have scornfully called us a nation of shopkeepers and salesmen. All that America needs to do with this state- 266 The Air-Line to Liberty ment is to take the scorn out of it, make being a salesman a new thing, use the genius and tem- per of salesmanship to advertise democracy, sell liberty to all nations, and drive the Ger- many that defies it off the face of the earth. Getting people to do things which they do not want to do and which we hope they will be glad we got them to do afterwards in our national temperament. We are not naturally (as they are in some of the older nations) political historians or states- men or artists. We are workers in wills and changers of people's minds and our main in- terest is in getting — without going to jail for it — what we want. This is the gift America must dedicate to the world, in dealing with Germany. The literature of a people if it is true and alive is a nobler and finer statement of their essential genius and of their typical ordinary men. I have written this chapter with a kind of jealousy and hope for the authors of my coun- try, that we may take our place with the other salesmen, that in the present first entrance of A Hope Held Out for Authors 267 America into the literature and life and his- tory of Europe, we may take upon our lips the accents of our own people — that we the au- thors of America may prove ourselves true prophets, salesmen of liberty and hope to a world. Here's hoping we are going to have a World Department in America that prophets can work for and work with! A prophet can be a prophet in one place, a minute at a time, all alone but if we have a Government Machine for arranging it he can be a prophet the same minute, everywhere all the time. 268 Chapter IV MOBILIZING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS Conveniences for Being Allowed to be Original WITH a machine for getting a hun- dred million people to help, the American Government can conceive at home and carry through abroad a high-spirited, original world policy for ending the war and rebuilding the world. With advertising — a policy that a genius or seer of a hundred years might think of, could be adopted by America. We could act as from the point of view of history, a whole nation looking back or looking forward and being inspired. With advertising, the Gov- ernment could act as a great man would act and carry through great conceptions, visions that would fill a nation with a kind of singing- fighting. Without advertising, the Govern- ment will have to take comparatively the earliest, quickest, cheapest course the people will let it take, the course that takes the least for granted of American men. America, in- Conveniences for Being Original 269 stead of announcing and adopting in behalf of the world a course that takes the most for granted, that takes for granted high-motived and high-powered men, will have to take the course anybody can think of that anybody can carry out and that a hundred million indiffer- ent, half-noticing people like without trying. One can see crossroads everywhere in busi- ness or politics where naturally a high grade mutual team-work course can be taken by mutual educating, and by mutual confessing and advertising, and a low grade course with people asleep or just as they are, without it. The best spring-board or momentum for a nation to plunge into world politics with is one hundred million people who have just changed their minds, who have been adver- tised into an inspiration. This nation cannot hope to bring as its offer- ing to the grave, older nations, its experience. Its only chance to serve them is its youth, its gusto and freshness and its possible original- ity. But a hundred million people are not going to be original and do an original thing all together without advertising. The orig- 270 The Air-Line to Liberty inal men, the inventors of the futures of the nations — the men who could conceive and carry through an inspired programme, a vision a hundred years ahead, are not numerous. There may be ten thousand of them perhaps. If these ten thousand men were America, America could promptly and glibly proceed to act to-morrow like a nation-genius, but these ten thousand men are not America. There are ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand other men that go with them that will have to be got to see the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Then they will go ahead and back them up. One hundred million people in a democracy can- not be original without advertising, without spending time and money on their originality. In an autocracy a million people can be origi- nal in a few days. All an original man has to do is to get the attention of the Kaiser. Sixty- six million people are then to be seen at once doing original things, like the drive through Belgium, poisonous gases and Lusitanias, all in a few days. The life-blood of originality in a nation Conveniences for Being Original 271 turns on circulation or advertising. Progress and advertising (advertising might be called rapid-fire education) are synonyms. Adver- tising is radium. It will make people outdo themselves. It makes one man as a hundred thousand. First we advertise to see what the one man sees. The one man becomes a hun- dred thousand. Then we advertise to act and the one hundred million act as one man. We have never expected people to be orig- inal in vast crowds before. A hundred million people all being original together, all seeing and doing something inspiring and new to them, has not been possible because the heavy spiritual hydraulic machinery for pressing the originality out of great masses of human na- ture (the latent originality in all of us) has only been invented of late. The machinery of simultaneousness and everywhereness, for doing a thing everywhere, the wireless tele- graph, the movie, the telephone and the print- ing press and airship have only just begun to suggest what they can do. They make democ- racy possible. It was foolish expecting to have democracies in olden times, i. e., expect- 272 The Air-Line to Liberty ing vast crowds to see and act together and millions of people in hundreds of places to express themselves to the world, when they could not even express themselves to one an- other. A nation is as snug and trim as a vil- lage now. If it has a government that keeps it articulated and advertised together — a gov- ernment that has a news-spinal column, and a great light in its eyes — there is not a Kaiser on earth but that would wither before it. Conveniences for Being Allowed to be Efficient The other day I made out a list of fifty men in whom I have been particularly interested in the past twenty years. I came on a curious fact. If I find myself especially interested in a lawyer, a doctor, an architect, a painter, or man in any profession, I find he is almost always sure sooner or later to be attacked by the rank and file of success- ful men in his profession. He is engaged in making his profession a new profession. I find that a good way for me to pick out the men that seem to me the most valuable to the Conveniences for Being Efficient 273 country at large, is to look over a long row of a hundred men who are found fault with and pick out ten. I find I waste less time every year in looking over standardized persons and experts to find men of power. Nine unques- tioned experts out of ten are through learn- ing, and it is out of the questioned experts one must pick out the great men or the servants of the people. It seems to be the same with prac- tically every group. One saves time in look- ing for a man in a profession if one gathers together the outs or the half-outs. The best men are half-in and half-out of the professions to which they are supposed to belong. I have come on another fact. The men who have interested me have all been men who have had something, or who have been some- thing, that needed to be advertised. They have been inventions. They have attacked my imagination with what they could do, and with what could be done with them if people knew about them. They have made me want to have people know about them. The second or creative stage of a powerful 274 The Air-Line to Liberty man or of anything a powerful man does, al- ways seems to involve advertising. One of these men in whom I have been in- terested in this way — in his earlier under- ground tubular days was our present Secre- tary of the Treasury and dictator of railways, Mr. William G. McAdoo. Having had all these pleasant advertising emotions about him and having duly recorded some of them in Crowds, I was a little taken aback the other day to find (as probably Mr. McAdoo was when he saw it in the paper) that he had said in objecting to the recom- mendations of the Advisory Board of the Na- tional Advertising Association, "The trouble is that the Government if it advertises at all will have to advertise in everything." That is just it. But this is a recommendation instead of an objection. All anybody can say who has watched Mr. McAdoo is that apparently good government officials in proportion as they are efficient, think of ideas and want to carry out for the people that are more original and more ad- Conveniences for Being Efficient 275 vanced than the people would have themselves. In proportion as public men are efficient now- adays (Mr. AcAdoo's whole career tells us daily), they are trying to do things that can- not be done without educating the people who elect them to office, and without advertising to the people who are to help them carry them out. In proportion as a government is produc- tive in trying to do things too valuable to be thought of by people in general, in proportion as it is trying to enter into partnership with the people and get them to help, it must be an advertising government. A government that is not an advertising government cannot be said in any real sense to be a government at all. A government that objects to advertising be- cause, if it advertises in one thing it will have to advertise in all, better be kept from adver- tising. (It cannot be that Mr. McAdoo quite said what he is reported to have said.) Any advertising a government that says this, and means it, would do would be wrong and would waste the people's money. A govern- ment that can say a thing like this needs to have advertising advertised to it and needs to 276 The Air -Line to Liberty be told what the fundamental principle of advertising is. Every Cabinet officer ought to be the head of what is practically an Adver- tising Department. Mr. McAdoo is. Advertising is based upon the fundamental nature of a new idea. Advertising and a new idea are inseparable. Nearly every business man has seen the proof of this. First an idea has to be invented. Having been invented it has to be advertised to get the money, and the people to invest in it. Then advertised so that some samples of it can be produced. Then advertised so that people will look at the samples and use the samples. Then advertising stops and dramatizing sets in. The idea begins busily (like a sewing machine) advertising itself. One advertises at certain stages and not others, to certain peo- ple and not others. All advertising is for with an idea is to start it dramatizing or ad- vertising itself. Advertising is limited to new ideas or new application of old ones. All intelligent ad- Conveniences for Being Efficient 277 vertising, for a government or any one else in the long run, is self-supporting and creates value instead of spending it. All intelligent men spend ten hours a day in advertising, in getting somebody's attention. They are paid by the men whose attention they get, for getting it. People want to be adver- tised to. All new ideas and all ideals logically in- volve advertising or education. First, we advertise a new invention to get it produced and manufactured. Second, to get it used. In the third stage a new invention instead of advertising begins dramatizing. It demon- strates its value to people and speaks itself. A government does not need to advertise everything all the time. It moves on its ad- vertising to its new ideas. "The Government if it undertook to serve the people by advertising would have to treat all newspapers alike and could not use any discrimination" (or brains), says the New York Times. The Government in the person 278 The Air -Line to Liberty of Mr. McAdoo says that the government can- not serve the people by advertising, because if it advertised it could not use any discrimina- tion (or brains) in determining what subjects to advertise. If one, it would have to adver- tise all, Mr. McAdoo is reported to have said. But I must take issue with Mr. McAdoo (as I think he would probably with himself). If democracy is not allowed to use its brains and be discriminating, why make the world safe for democracy? The more this planet is made safe for a government that cannot dis- criminate, the more dangerous it is going to be to live on it. The specific thing a people's government is for is to discriminate between the people. It is the one power in the land that represents all the people and that is in a position to discriminate in behalf of all of them. It is selected by all the people for the express purpose of taking advantage of its cen- tral, national and impartial position to do their discriminating for them. The Times and Mr. McAdoo are more dis- couraged about democracy than I am. Democracy is an invention for making it Conveniences for Being Efficient 279 possible for crowds (for all practical pur- poses) to be discriminating. It is based on the idea that one hundred million people, by combining with, say ten thousand experts, can be as discriminating as they like. The National Chamber of Commerce met the other day and asked to have prices fixed by the Government. A hundred rival rail- roads have got together and practically asked the Government to run them for the people during the war. Twenty rival motor manu- facturers sat around a table in Washington the other day and threw all their trade secrets on the table for the Government and asked the Government to discriminate between them and between their trade secrets and take freely the ideas it could use best and quickest to make the Liberty motor. "Here is what I can do," every one comes saying to the Government to-day. "Take it or leave it," everybody is saying to the Govern- ment. "You alone are in the central position to serve all the people and be served by all the people." There is not one of us who in a national 280 The Air-Line to Liberty crisis will not give his secrets and privileges and his gifts up to some central power that he knows will use them, and that he knows is in a position to use them, for the people. The more a people's Government adver- tises the more the people count in it. Chapter V 281 MOBILIZING STATESMEN Letting a President be Reserved I WAS talking with a newspaper man a while ago about the custom newspaper men in Washington have had at times of see- ing the President twice a week. It is not so often now, I believe. I have often wondered what seeing the President in this way is like. I have never been quite willing to accept what has seemed to be the regular newspaper- ish point of view about the President's reserve. I have wondered what ordinary people like me or like The People would think of the President's reserve. If the people could be there concealed behind a curtain perhaps, watching the little ways the President has with the New York Sun or the New York Tribune or the Boston American — what would people think of the President? Is the President's re- lation to the papers really democratic or is it not? The idea touches one's imagination a little. 282 The . Air-Line to Liberty The newspapers of America get together in a little crowd alone in the same room with the President of the United States and ask him questions. Chicago asks him a question. Then Boston speaks up, or perhaps New Or- leans. And so on. About seventy-five cities in this great nation in all are allowed to pop their heads in modestly in this way into the White House and are given a few respectful distant moments with the President of the United States in which to get him (if he can) to tell them things. At first sight this does not seem very demo- cratic. We are apt to like to think here in America, that our President is the servant of the people. We like to think of him as having his coat off and working hard for us, and as being very respectful when we come along to tell him how we want things done, or to ques- tion him about what he is doing. We do not like the idea — not at first sight, anyway, of being given a few little snippy minutes — by our National Hired Man, our First Work- man. We like to think we can have all the time we want and that the President will stand Letting a President be Reserved 283 there modestly, respectfully, while we are by, busy of course and in his shirtsleeves, but his foot resting on his shovel gracefully, while we tell him what we want and while we ask him to explain to us what he is doing and why he is doing it and why he is not doing it in some other way, or what he is going to do next. That is the way it is apt to seem at first sight It does not seem to some of us quite demo- cratic. There are three great classes of people in America with regard to the question, "Is President Wilson's reserve a democratic insti- tution or is it not?" Some of us will say that President Wilson's reserve is not democratic, that publicity and candor are the very breath of democracy. There are others of us who say that President Wilson's reserve as we have seen it working, so far, on the whole, is the hope of the people. The best way a man can do who has to do his work daily in the constant watchful presence of men who are crowding the people out of things that belong to the peo- ple, is to lie low, keep still, get the things for 284 The Air-Line to Liberty the people that belong to them, and talk after- wards. Suppose the President plants a fine, fat, promising, national acorn and a voter from Waco, Texas, comes along and says he does not trust the President on acorns, and says he wants the President to pull it up just for him to see how it is doing. Should he? Would this be democracy? President Wilson cannot run out of the White House and explain to everybody every day or so, just how it is that he is going to ferret out, discover, arrest, imprison, embar- rass, or throw out of business the men who are pocketing the people's money. The Presi- dent's special work is very largely one for the next few years, when American business men are passing through a period of moulting and are casting off their old skins and putting out their new moral feathers, of acting in behalf of the people as half nurse and half detective toward business. The President is largely oc- cupied in these present watchful years in catching burglars who are in his own house, and who are sitting as it were at his own tabic Letting a President be Reserved 285 and who are supposed to be ready to jump up any minute and help him catch themselves. If a hundred men are all gathered together in a room discussing how they are going to catch certain burglars and the burglars are all in the room, joining in the discussion, the less discus- sion there is, the sooner the burglars can be caught. The plain every-day fact would seem to be that if President Wilson cannot get people to trust him enough to let him keep still, he would really have to give up his position. If a democracy is not secretive at the mo- ment sometimes, it is not efficient. This does not seem — not at first sound of it — to be exactly a democratic remark. Prob- ably if Mr. Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, New Jersey, had heard anybody make it four years ago, he would have told him it was not so. The last man to understand the way Presi- dent Wilson is acting to-day would have been Mr. Wilson himself four years ago. His idea was then — before his election — that he was going to tell everybody everything. He was going to keep everything all told up all the 286 The Air-Line to Liberty time, every morning and every night. He thought that this was democracy. Mr. Wood- row Wilson would never have stood up, as I do now, for President Wilson. There are a great many of us who want to. We think we understand what happened to the President. We would like to see it happen to other pro- fessors. When Mr. Wilson stopped being a professor of democracy and became a Presi- dent, he grew very fast in a few days. He changed his mind. The moment he really buckled down to getting things for people, he found that the democracy he thought he be- lieved in could not get things for the people. He saw that the huge helter skelter candor we have in this country and that our public men think they have to have — what might be called a kind of crazy quilt, or spatterwork of pub- licity — could not be made to work. So he be- came suddenly the stillest person America has produced. So he became (if I may make bold) the National Mouse, and after eight years of having a Lion — and after four years with a beautiful, splendid, Newfoundland Dog — there are some of us who do not repre- Letting a President be Reserved 287 sent newspapers in Washington and who have a kind of desperately hopeful feeling about really getting things for the people — who are glad. There are but three qualifications I venture to believe that the American people are going to make when they find out how secretiveness in a President works. First, they will want to feel that now and then by word or action he will make a clean breast of things. Sec- ond, they will want to feel that he is a good listener. Third, they will want to feel that this secretiveness the Nation has trusted him with will never be used for the President's personal or party ends. For the most part it is the people who still believe in spatter-work publicity who com- plain of the President's secretiveness. For the most part our people believe that what is called the President's secretiveness is merely a postponed confidence. The President has rea- son to feel that he has been granted by the people — for a time — permission not to do his thinking out loud. 288 The Air-Line to Liberty When his idea is being conceived and before it is born — he keeps quiet about it. If a man really has something he is doing for the people, half of getting it done is the way it strikes the people first — and a very im- portant part of doing it is the way it is an- nounced. If a nation is looking forward anxiously to an heir to the throne — and it is announced that apparently there is going to be an heir, the nation keeps still and for quite a while, any- way, it is recognized as the Queen's affair. In the same way there is nothing unpatri- otic when an Idea is to be born in a democracy, to wait quietly and more or less trustfully until the person who is having it, has presented it. This is what one might call the biology of getting a thing done in a democracy. Silence in a President is one of the rights of the people. This is where a World Department could help. It would be able to get thousands of newspapers to help secure efficient and timely evidences for the people. VII FIGHTING TO A FINISH Chapter I FINDING THE RANGE BY fighting to a finish I mean gathering up in America seventy thousand locomo- tives, twenty-two thousand miles of solid freight cars, a thousand miles of passenger coaches and Pullmans, three hundred and ninety-one thousand miles of steel rails, and hurling them at the German people. This is what Mr. McAdoo is supposed to be doing all day every day. This is what America's World Department will do in the way of mobilizing the spiritual railroads of the country and presenting a solid- moving, massive, impenetrable, spiritual front a free inventive individual heaped-up moral 289 290 The Air-Line to Liberty energy, no nation like Germany can hope to withstand. Perhaps it will answer my purpose to quote for the moment from an entry in my journal : Mount Tom, , December, — . Three days ago (as I write these words) Halifax blew up, froze up and burned up all at once. What is it we see happening almost immediately all over the world in a breath, after it? We see Halifax getting so much attention in a fiercely busy, desperate fighting world, that it hardly knows which way to turn. Its advertising has got started and cannot stop. It is advertising to people now not to advertise it and more. The first thing we know it cries, "Four thou- sand people here are killed, dead or missing!" And it wants nurses, doctors and people to help. Then it sends out a cry to be relieved from too many nuises and doctors and people to help. It has nothing for them to eat. Now to-night it is telegraphing around the world, "Don't send us anything to eat or let any more people come to eat it! Send us cooks to entertain our tourists who have come to look at our misery, take photographs of us and make our sorrow into magazine articles." Halifax has the world's attention in fifty words. One night-letter sent in a minute makes people explode, all over a planet, into one Thought. Finding the Range 291 I caught myself the other day writing some- thing like this I wish I could touch the Listening Button in a man. I wish I could look over the index or table of contents of a man's mind, choose a subject I like and touch his talking button. I wish I could touch a button in a man — a button he didn't know he had, and which he wouldn't know I had touched — which would shut him like a book. I wish I could be deaf at will and look as if I couldn't help it — have these sudden un- accountable attacks of deafness that people would know I was liable to, like asthma, at certain times of day. After I had written these words (which had been subconsciously called up I suppose by having been to an afternoon tea the day be- fore), I was reading them over a minute be- fore writing this chapter and it suddenly came over me that while I probably cannot get a Listening Button or Talking Button arranged and set up in any of the people I know or meet at afternoon teas, National Listening Buttons 292 The Air-Line to Liberty and Talking Buttons could be arranged for and installed and operated by our World De- partment at Washington just as well as not. I do not mean by this an authoritative Cen- sor Department that would make people keep still — nor do I mean a kind of National School Teacher Pointer which would tell editors and great magazines when they could talk. The Department would operate rather in the hand of a man with a genius for it — as a kind of Hinting Works. It would be a National Mo- tive Power Station, which would depend for its success, not upon its authority but upon its suggestiveness and its power to precipitate team-work. If America organized attention, it could pool important national subjects on which it wants to find out what it thinks and what it wants to do; it might take one after the other, fifty-two subjects a year and settle them all — one a week. Something approximately like this could be done by forceful, free understanding given forth from a central source — by a World De- partment, which could make a kind of national Finding the Range 293 town meeting out of the newspapers and call them to order and make it possible for them to transact, and transact in order, the thinking and seeing business of the people. What a hundred million people in America for the week shall look at, can be determined. Attention for one week in America can all be got together for an idea to save a nation as easily as it can by a blown-up ship at Halifax. As attention has been got together for the Red Cross, or for the Red Triangle, or for the Liberty Loan in this way it can be for other things in due course. Publicity from a cen- tral source has already been tried out. We all know how much easier it is to do our own part in our own town of a national undertak- ing when we know that forty thousand other towns the same week are doing it. Attention in America can be got loosely into one national opera glass. We often seem blind on a subject. Nobody anywhere will seem to see for a second. Then the right man in our World Department down in Washington will turn the screw and a hun- 294 The Air-Line to Liberty dred million men in a flash will look at a crisis together, and all the nation and all the world in a minute will know where America stands, and what America thinks and what America proposes to do. Chapter II 295 ARMING A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE 1AM not trying in this chapter to give ad- vice to twenty thousand newspapers, or to bolster up the New York Times. I am not digging in under the massive structure of the Chicago Tribune, the Kansas City Star, the Boston Transcript and the Associated Press, and hoping fondly to put Mount Tom founda- tions in under them. Our nation and the world are facing a des- perate crisis in making democracy work — a crisis of the self-government of free peoples. If democracy cannot be made safe for the world, the last thing we can afford to do is to go on in a vague, hopeful way making the world safe for democracy. If the editors of the country do not mind, and will forgive a certain natural interest I have in having kept up a little longer on this planet a world I would like to live in, and would dare to have children in, I will do a little thinking out loud on a subject which will be left open to them to treat more adequately and fully themselves. 296 The Air-Line to Liberty The practicability or soundness of a pro- gramme turns very largely upon its having men whose imaginations it has touched, to carry it out, and all that the outline I am about to make is for, is to start somebody up more competent than I, to make a better one. I remember seeing often in my more de- pressed moments in the dining-room at Mul- doon's a sign near the door which I realized in a dim way must mean me if it meant any- body. If you want to know who is boss here, start something I am not forgetting this sign in the follow- ing loose sketch of possibilities in the way of mobilizing newspapers. Efficiency in a government turns on its power of presenting ideas to people so that they will want them and will help to carry them out. Efficiency in a people turns on the power of the people to present to a Government ideas which they want the government to consider and carry out. Arming a Hundred Million People 297 These are the two efficiencies a democracy must have if it is to compete with autocracy. Both of these efficiencies turn on efficiency in advertising — on presenting ideas to people, which they do not know they want. The Government wants to do team-work with the people. It cannot do it without pre- senting to them its ideas. And the people in their turn are full of more or less vague ideas — ideas very real and powerful but not yet put in order, instincts and desires and hopes which they want to present to the government. The deciding power in a democracy turns on presenting ideas, and upon touching men's imaginations with what one wants so that they will want it, too, and will let one have it. All power turns on winning the cooperation and enthusiasm of people who look unwilling. This is a way of saying that all power turns on advertising — that advertising is Government. The problem of making democracy efficient narrows down sooner or later to these two questions : How can a government advertise the ideas it is trying to carry out, to the people it serves? 298 The Air-Line to Liberty How can the people advertise the ideas they want carried out, to the Government? How is any advertising campaign run? The meeting place — the great national Common of ideas — the Public Market of ideas for America, the place where crowds of people who are advertising and being adver- tised get together and have it out and come to terms — is the daily press of the country. There is just so much territory of attention. There are just so many printed acres every day the people of this country meet on — where we hold our vast daily contestor tournament of what people think — where people determine and make known what they want for them- selves, for their government and for the world. If we are fighting Germany to a finish it might seem natural to the man in the Public Market to propose something like this: The Government should have a Director of Publicity who will meet the people daily in the Public Market or Common of Ideas and present the government's ideas and hopes to the people — so that the people will believe them and help carry them out. Arming a Hundred Million People 299 The people in their turn should have a Di- rector of Publicity who will meet the Govern- ment daily in the great Public Market or Common Ideas and present ideas to the Gov- ernment that they want carried out. The Government's Director of Publicity should be selected by the President, ratified by the Senate as the most important member of his Cabinet. The people's Director of Publicity should be selected by the organized newspapers of the country. As regards presenting certain ideas of the people to the government the newspapers of the country should be edited as one newspaper by a cabinet appointed by all the newspapers published in twenty thousand places every day. The people of this country have no right to take the President's time or the Govern- ment's time in presenting ideas people want carried out, in little dabs and nibs and hitches at the President's attention. A hundred mil- lion people in talking with a President should organize what they have to say — put it in order, say one thing at a time, and say things 300 The Air-Line to Liberty to a Government as trimly, as compactly, as the Bethlehem Steel Company would, or Mr. Vail's Telephone and Telegraph Companies, or the Pennsylvania Railroad. The sprawling hit-or-miss way the people have now of pre- senting little ideas to the Government's busy attention — the little local patters of ideas — sprays and atomizers of opinion — confronting the government — what might be called almost a perfumery of Thought — is one of the most colossal, incredible, incapable spectacles of modern times. It is democracy run wild and making itself ridiculous. The people of the country acting preferably or representatively through the combined newspaper editors should organize a Peoples' Attention Trust for the purpose of selecting and sorting out ideas for their President and their government to listen to. It has been in- timated that the main cross of being in the White House is the extraordinary number of men in America who will come to see a Pres- ident five minutes to tell him a five-minute thing — who cannot express a five-minute thing in five minutes and who need an hour to give Arming a Hundred Million People 301 him the five-minutes' worth. The hundred million people of this country if they will learn how to say five-minute things in five minutes can have as many five-minute-pieces of the President's attention as they want every day, each day, day after day. The Govern- ment and the people of this country in relation to one another should be like two men sitting down and talking the country's business over for the day every morning. The Kaiser has the world-news in his own private newspaper. He does not have to sit down the way our President does, and go through a great, inor- dinate, daily haystack of ideas in twenty thou- sand papers looking for needles of ideas the people are keeping tucked away in different parts of the country which they would like to get to the President's attention. The People should send in their secretary to the President and tell him each morning be- fore he begins his day's work, what they would be pleased to have him know, consider and do. The President would send in his secretary to the hundred million people every morn- ing as they go to their work and confide to 302 The Air-Line to Liberty them important things for the day that he wants them to know. If it were not for the attention-waste — the waste of the peoples' attention and the waste of the President's attention — this country could have time to be as free as it likes and as efficient as it likes — in the same breath. One way to do would be to have two big billboards in every paper every day — one the President's — in which he posts up on the peo- ple's attention what he wants them to know in the order it best serves the purpose of the people to know it. The other board right next to it would be the People's Bulletin Board on which the people's representative or specialist in presenting the people's ideas to a President, should post notices of what the people want the President — that morning to know and to think about. There should be what will amount to direct speech between the President and the people every day — say five minutes each — two col- umns. In addition to this — all the rest of the news- Arming a Hundred Million People 303 papers — the editorials and news-columns would be open to the President and the people both — through the editor and the reporters. I believe in the personal initiative of edi- tors and reporters and I believe that both the people and the President will get better, richer, more suggestive — more cooperative results out of having what they have to say ex- pressed through the minds of editors and re- porters — that is, through local editorial em- phasis and local news selection than in a rigid patent — inside way determined by a World Department or by Washington. Each paper should express itself and its subscribers in its own way — but all papers should express them- selves each with reference to all of the others — a great coordinated centre of suggestion in Washington and with reference to producing results together in the public mind and in the President's mind. The Kaiser's private newspaper is not wrong in principle though of course it has done more harm than any newspaper printed in the world. 304 The Air-Line to Liberty The idea of his having one and the idea of our President's having one or an equivalent for one, has immeasurable possibilities for good. All that is the matter with the Kaiser's pri- vate newspaper is the Kaiser, and its being edited by a spiritual hired-man to please the Kaiser. If it were edited to tell the Kaiser the truth, this war we now are in, would be stopped in a week. This is the kind of private newspaper Pres- ident Wilson would have, if he had one. He would employ a genius at getting before him the truth. He ought to have what might be called perhaps The White House Gazette, written for him to read every morning, before he sits down to his work. It would pay the nation to have several hundred men in this private, more intimate form of news for the President cutting across newspapers for him, and saving the President's time and getting for him — the kinds of truths he could not get in any other way — and which could not always be confided in daily papers read by everybody. Chapter III 305 NEWS DYNAMOS THE publicity team-work I have in mind would be a failure unless it is rankly democratic in its spirit and unless it is con- ceived and operated by men who evoke rather than suppress the personality and power and independence in the editors of the country. It would be suggestive rather than author- itative in its spirit. The two Secretaries — the people's and the President's — each with an enormous nation- digesting or nation-assimilating organ to work with, would do by far the most impor- tant part of their work in supplying the news- papers with story-seed and news-seed and raw material for news-columns and editorial-col- umns to work up. These would be supplied from a confidential, national, central stand- point, steering the attention of the country or more strictly speaking the emphasis through the editors' minds rather than around them. The main part of the work of the secretaries would be work that no one ever saw or knew or guessed — not even the men they did the 306 The Air-Line to Liberty work on would guess it — except in a pleasant, general way — work on the minds of editors — an expert, prolonged, individual study of the personalities and temperaments and gifts of newspapers resulting in the ability of the President's Publicity Secretary to evoke and stimulate the minds of editors in directions which will be full of discovery to them and to the public. The listening the editors in this country do is what is governing the country. The editors I know, happen to knew best, spend much val- uable-looking editorial time listening every day. Nearly every editor has a little collec- tion of people he likes to listen to — not be- cause they are people who necessarily know as much as he does, but because a few minutes with them makes him begin unconsciously secreting editorials. The President's Secre- tary or Government director of Attention will best render his service through the perfect freedom and individuality and self-expression of all the editors with whom he deals, and will render his service best, not by suppressing or by pointing or steering — as by furnishing edi- News Dynamos 307 torial writers with editorial-spawn — or fur- nishing news-editors with news seed. All man- ner of very small looking but big-feeling facts, illustrations, symbols and principles will radi- ate from our World Department at Washing- ton. Attention steering from Washington will be dependent for its authority upon its being alive, — upon its being in the hands of men with gifts for it — a kind of science of spiritual or intellectual biology. 308 Chapter IV CENTRAL POWER HOUSE GOVERNMENT by the people turns on efficiency in presenting ideas in the right order and the right emphasis to a Government. Government for the people turns on efficiency in presenting ideas in the right order to a peo- ple: The efficiency in other words of a democ- racy turns upon two national, perennial, con- tinuous advertising campaigns, one conducted by the people toward the government and the other by the government toward the people, and both acting through highly organized agencies — trained experts and geniuses in at- tracting and holding attention and directing attention to a purpose. Nothing will take the place in America's present crisis of America's having a national presence of mind, and there is no way of America's having presence of mind — of secur- ing the presence of mind of a hundred million people, of finding out what a hundred million people want done, and no way of getting at- tention to it and of getting it done except by Central Power House 309 making arrangements for deliberate team- work of attention between the government and the people. We are competing with the most sublime and incredible Attention-Trust the world has ever known — the German empire. All of Ger- many's efficiency abroad, turns on its Atten- tion-Trust at home. If Germany had as good an Attention-Trust abroad as it has at home, Germany would not be conquerable. If a de- mocracy like ours, an intellectually loose- jointed, slow, good-natured democracy, is go- ing to compete with a trim, swift, secret-em- pire like Germany, it is only going to be able to do it by having more presence of mind than Germany has and — by having what might be called for the time being and at least during this present crisis and for our temporary pur- pose, an almost military presence of mind — an almost military attention-control. We must present ideas as armies and in companies and choose and choose voluntarily, for the time be- ing, to submit to a Commander-in-Chief of ideas if the specific thing we stand for and propose to prove to military nations is that 310 The Air-Line to Liberty ideas or spiritual forces are the real forces that rule nations and determine the fate of the world. Here for instance is this idea in this book — this idea of what I want for my people and the world. I have just been going over it in my mind. I want the American Government to com- mand the air over Europe, swamp Germany with news as to what America is fighting for, cut off the German army from behind. I want Mr. Howard Coffin to say that if we can hold the sky over Europe it can be done if we can get airplanes and air-men enough. I want Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford to say that if Congress will supply the money and the factories of America will stop making too many pleasure cars or whatever they think necessary America can make airplanes enough. This leaves three problems. How can we get Congress to vote the money for America to command the air over Europe? How can we get the people of America to furnish the money to command the air over Europe? How can we get the American people to furnish Central Power House 311 the men to command the air over Europe? These are all three problems of publicity — problems of touching the imagination of the American people with what they could do with the air over Europe if they get it. This brings me to the final thing I want. I want the attention of twenty thousand editors in America to the Hole of air over Europe. I want twenty thousand editors to agree with me on four points enough to lay them fully and culminatingly before the people. If there were a World Department, and it saw national possibilities in my idea, the idea could have a hundred million people saying that they wanted it (if they wanted it), in a week. I do not want to be understood as advocat- ing for a World Department in America — the remotest degree of outside restraint. I am advocating what might be called a kind of national news-magneto, or I might express what I am trying to by saying that the typical government attention-engineer will act as a news-carburetor. He and his department in 312 The Air-Line to Liberty their relation to editors' minds will deal in official news-spark plugs for the country from day to day. He will sweep without their necessarily knowing it or caring about it the national keyboard of what editors think. We want in a democracy above all things editors to be the editors of their own papers, but also because we are in a democracy there ought to be (agreed upon by themselves, and acting in a suggestive way) an editor to edit editors. Why should not editors arrange to have a national editor in chief, the one they like best, one who understands them, and who operates after the manner of the Associated Press. He would preside like the Speaker of the House, over a National Daily Congress, meeting on wood pulp. He would act as a balance and maintain evenly, not only the democratic or centrifu- gal, but the autocratic or centripetal power of the nation's thought. Chapter V 313 THE ENGINEERS OF SILENCE NOT the least part of the effectiveness of a Publicity Control Department would be its hints as to silence and emphasis at cer- tain times, and its saving of news — (as the President saved the Zimmermann note) until it can be made to accomplish a huge national event at one convincing stroke. A large part of massing public attention in a democracy would necessarily turn on pool- ing issues, on silence and emphasis which the Government could render by being confiden- tial with the press and winning its voluntary cooperation. As soon as our editors in acting through their own organized body, come to wield pub- lic attention as a great single national weapon against the enemy, there is going to be an ex- traordinary, new appreciation in America of silence. A good deal of white paper helps people to notice an idea. All one has to do, to see how silence demo- cratically wielded, could probably do for the 314 The Air-Line to Liberty country, is to glance over the advertisements in the back of the first magazine one picks up. If the editors of America are going to take the stock of attention in America per day, seriously — if they are going to take a nation's attention for a day seriously — as Germany takes her army, — if they are going to mass at- tention and hurl attention and make a huge, national drive of attention, silence in America and white paper — are going to get more and more priceless. One already sees what white paper is worth in commercial ideas and the value it already has in getting attention to com- mercial ideas will be still greater in national ones. The advertising men in the magazines do very well. The space is paid for — not only on the paper but the space in people's minds is paid for at very high rates and they have to use both kinds of space very economically. The main thing that an advertising man in presenting ideas depends on is silence and lis- tening to the reader. No advertising man tumbles out his ideas before the reader the The Engineers of Silence 315 way the government tumbles out ideas before the people. He is secretive and keeps things waiting. An advertising man calculates every word. If ideas are forces and are supposed to work, ideas must get into attention in the right order to work and they must get in one at a time. The main attribute of the way ideas are being presented by the government and the people to one another in America just now is that they are presented hit or miss, and on all subjects all of the time. If our government and our people are go- ing to be effective in presenting ideas to each other — there must be some one appointed — a governing board of attention appointed for both sides, to leave out words for a hundred million people and leave out ideas for them so that a hundred million people when they lift up their voice and talk shall make sense. Attention in this country is a motor-affair and it ought to be run like an automobile. It must go down certain streets at certain times and through certain places. Hence, the two Grand Traffic Managers of Publicity pro- posed. We will want freedom for all — but 3 16 The Air -Line to Liberty in order to have freedom for all we want a traffic manager to turn traffic where it counts and where it can get through. Three-fourths of the business of our two At- tention-Secretaries will be turning attention- automobiles down side streets or side avenues and making due arrangements for the pageant or procession of American public opinion and American public will, to go by. Even if in our new arrangements for governing the coun- try and making democracy efficient and snug — we determine that we do not need a secre- tary of speech, we will need a secretary of silence. A big, new, powerful idea that is being presented to a people depends largely for its value and its grip on their attention and their wills, upon the silences in it and upon the things that are not said. Silence in America can only be engineered by men we can trust. It cannot be engineered by five thousand newspapers offhand. It must be engineered by men the newspapers appoint and who represent them all, and who represent all the people. If the government of a coun- The Engineers of Silence 317 try is the attention of the country the attention must have emphasis, and must use selection. The newspapers of the country are the coun- tenance of the country. A national face must have features if it is to have an expression. This means the use of national emphasis and national silence for the purpose of national expression. A government cannot be efficient and democracy cannot be efficient without silence — and silence can only be efficient when it is trusted and when it is authoritative, and when it represents and is known to represent all of the people. 318 Chapter VI THE LORDS OF ATTENTION THE best way for Americans to advertise democracy and to get Germans to want democracy, is to make democracy work in America. The Germans do not think we are making democracy work in America, and as long as they know and as long as they know that we know that they are at least half right, the only way to convince Germans how Democ- racy works is to beat them with it. The rub comes in making it work very quickly very well indeed, when we all know it has hardly ever worked before. The rub comes in summoning the nation's presence of mind. The lords of attention, the men to whom nearly all the attention of the country is rented by the day, by the people — the editors of the country, are the men to whom one naturally turns first to summon America's presence of mind. I hope that in these chapters in which I have exalted their profession, the editors of The Lords of Attention 319 the country will forgive the editor of a very little magazine on a very little mountain, for expecting so much, for sketching the necessity and that challenges the nation, and trying to indicate in a momentary way — a direction of action. That is all it is. It is all I can do to keep from cutting this section out of the book as the last pages go to press. I would, if I did not feel that the editors of the country would correct them and finish them. If the editors of America cannot organize — if the editors of the country cannot make democracy work, if even editors cannot do team-work together, give direction, motive- power to their own vision and to the vision of the people, how can the rest of us expect to do it? The' hotel men of America have organized for the conservation of food for the stomachs of the people and the editors will soon have to organize for the conservation of food for their minds. We are fighting the most massive concen- tration of attention, the most terrific Turbine 320 The Air-Line to Liberty Wheel of attention, the world has known, in the German Empire. It does seem as if attention might be organ- ized by the men who have the most of it in America and its motors set going, together. I have believed that editors — in the control of their product, will rise to the standard of laborers, organize for the country a Labor Union of Thinkers, a Brotherhood of Loco- motive Engineers of Attention, and Firemen of Thought! VIII THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN EUROPE Chapter I AMERICA GOES CALLING WHAT we propose to do with our air- planes in getting the attention of the people in Germany, we could do to equal ad- vantage with our Allies in getting their people and our people into what might be called a more or less personal and direct connection through the sky. We would wake up Germany out of its four-year news-trance in a week. And if we established a sky connection in Russia we would soon have Germany practi- cally whipped. Russia once waked up would be to Germany an America moved over right 321 322 The Air-Line to Liberty next door. Instead of moving America over in spoonfuls and in ships in a year America with a few airplanes could make Russia an America with her voice in the ear of Germany almost at once. We would not need to do the airplane ad- vertising on so large a scale in Russia or in the whole of Russia because Russia wants to believe us at heart. We could focus on stra- tegic points. Ten airplanes up over Petrograd confiding in the people in the streets and de- livering the papers from America, would re- duce Petrograd to common sense about Ger- many and about democracy in a few days. Then Moscow. Then after we had done Petrograd and Moscow, Petrograd and Mos- cow themselves would cheerfully do the other cities. And our ten airplanes could each go back to Germany. The same method would be the best way to get at our other Allies, and to express to them what we mean by advertising to our en- emies instead of shooting them, touching their imagination with what good publicity the news-bomb is, and how it works. Ten Ameri- America Goes Calling 323 can airplanes up over Paris, London, Man- chester (where the Manchester Guardian is published) and Edinburgh and Dublin, could keep America's ideas and America's prayer and hope and America's spiritual presence, even our physical presence in constant touch, — every morning and every night, with our Allies, with the noble and wearied people to whose rescue we have come so late. America with a few airplanes, will make up time with her Allies. And in a way too of course one's own private news-bomb from America which fell in one's own backyard or which one picked out of the eave's trough un- der the dormer in one's chamber window in the morning, seems more intimate and real and personal, and more direct from America than the self-same idea would, copied of! in a West- minster Gazette which one bought for the same old penny, from the same old news woman, on the same old step at the foot of St. Paul's. 324 Chapter II THE NEW WORLD-GAME I HAD hoped to put into this chapter a few sample news-bombs in which New York and Chicago and our other American cities could confide to London, Paris and Rome and our Allies what we are fighting for. But perhaps the best way to begin just at this stage will be to give first what might be called a kind of general background of what America believes. America's World Department will wish, I imagine, to conduct four groups of Exchange Advertising Campaigns, one a mutual adver- tising campaign between our own government and people so that we can act together, one be- tween ourselves and our Allies, so that we can act as a unit toward Germany, one with neu- trals to get them to use their influence with Germany, and one with Germany. While our World Department is being started and perhaps as a way of starting it, America will propose to her Allies, to neutrals and to Russia that all the nations of the world unite to propose to Germany the following The New World-Game 325 platform for the new world we are going to arrange to have. PLATFORM FOR A NEW WORLD FIRST. We are always going to disagree. The fate of all nations swings to-day on our discovering together and adopting together an understood inflexible method of disagreeing wisely, progressively, conclusively, and to the point and like civilized human beings. SECOND. We are always going to com- pete. The fate of nations swings on our dis- covering together and adopting together a method of competing in which we respect others, respect ourselves, and compete in a way we like. THIRD. The present method of compet- ing which Germany has been getting ready for forty years and has tried to establish, is not one that we like. And we do not believe, now that the Germans are seeing how it works, that Germany likes it. Germany has de- manded a method of competing which seems to us impossible and suicidal. To use milita- rism to stop militarism is suicide, and we do 326 The Air -Line to Liberty not propose in other nations to commit suicide to stop suicide for a minute longer than we can help. FOURTH. For Germany's competition in suicide we propose as a means of ending this war and of never having another, Mutual Or- ganized Permanent Advertising Campaigns Between Nations, spending as many million dollars a day on these campaigns as before the war we have spent in all nations on armies and navies. FIFTH. We believe that if disagreeing and competing for a world are conducted in the advertising spirit and by the advertising method, we will be able to determine in all nations and among ourselves to the satisfac- tion of all, the best men and the best methods in all activities and callings and in all nations, to rule mankind and represent the will of the people of the world. The gist of our reason that competition by advertising and by experimenting will result in the natural selection of the best and fairest men in each nation and all nations to be trus- tees for us all, is as follows. The New World-Game 327 Ninety-five per cent, of a good advertise- ment is the listening in it. It listens to the people it is addressed to. It knows all it can know about them before it speaks. It tries to know more about how they really feel, and what they really want, than they know themselves. Advertising puts a premium on courage, frankness and the pursuit of mutual interests and mutual dependence, just as militarism puts a premium on fear, secrecy, mutual hos- tility and self-sufficiency. An advertising competition between two na- tions will be a listening-competition between the nations. The nation that listens the best and that has the most people in it listening, will consider the people with whom it deals the most, and will be in a position to lead. The nations that have been considered, will all want it to lead. In earning its leadership by serving others it will have learned how to keep it by serving others. It will have learned that it will lose it, if it does not. 328 The Air-Line to Liberty America and the nations with her arrayed against Germany to-day do not claim to have exclusively a population of angels. The last thing we want to see abolished in civilized life is competition, or rather emulation. We do not even want selfishness abolished — a decent amount of it in the right place — (it would make us feel lonely) and the only practical way we can discover to stop war is to provide a substitute in which a decent thoughtful amount of selfishness will be allowed for and can be made to work. It will never work as fast or as sure as unselfishness, but we believe that selfishness mixed with imagination about other people, and stirred up with advertising, can be made to keep nations out of war. As a method of competition touching men's imaginations instead of hitting them in the stomach has two advantages. The first is that in the long run, men who can advertise, per- suade, convince and change men's minds are in the long run a fitter and fairer set of men to survive than men who can shoot, sneak, bully and blow up men's bodies. The chances The New World-Game 329 are that men who can master the imaginations and reverse the ideals and control the motives of other men's lives, will be the real superiors and will have the superior civilization to ad- vertise. The second advantage of advertising as a substitute for shooting lies in the organic na- ture of the advertising process. There will be not only a higher competition conducted on a higher plane by a higher order of men, but the competition is one in which men of cooperative and mutual genius will be the ones who have the greatest success. We will have competition in advertising to find out which are the best advertisers — which men with which things have the most power to read the minds of others. The psycho- logical basis of advertising is clairvoyant — is a genius for understanding instead of misun- derstanding. Even if its object is competitive its method is cooperative and the moment the nations enter into an understood and organized substitution of advertising for armament and begin a vast process of mutual finding out and mutual exchange and mutual modification and 330 The Air-Line to Liberty mutual experiment we will have peace by a converging of interests. By a huge daily in- terchange and every-day process men's lives will flow together the way brooks flow down hill. The substitution of a rational and human competition for an irrational and inhuman one is the only way out. The nations are fighting Germany because, with all their faults, they do not want to compete in the way she does. They are superior because they had assumed of everybody — of Germany included — that any deliberate attempts to compete again in the world by shooting and territorial con- quest was out of the question. Their very stupidity and unawareness was due to the fact that they were busy competing in another way. After all — it is what civilization is — the plane men compete on. In advertising and dramatizing ideas men who compete, compete in order to find out who is the best to lead, and when we find out who the best men are to lead, what they lead in is cooperation. We com- pete to cooperate. We cooperate to compete. It is a centripetal-centrifugal process and the The New World-Game 331 men who have mastered this process more than any other type of men in the present world are the men who have the gifts of the great salesman, and of the true and permanent advertiser. Advertising is the science of mutualism. The nation which can advertise best will de- serve to lead the others. With advertising as a substitute for war leadership in different things will be natu- rally divided among the nations. The things in which a nation has the most natural gift for considering the wants of other people will be the things in which each nation shall lead. When America's World Department gets the attention of the world, and competition in advertising is set up as a substitute for com- petition in shooting, we will be in a world in which, in a fine businesslike unreligious- looking way as a matter of course without praying about it and without singing psalms about it, Power in this world will be sorted out among people according to their power to think of others. The New Testament will be all in the day's 332 The Air-Line to Liberty work. Gradually we will reserve our pray- ing and psalm-singing for some more truly religious and less rudimentary thing than keeping from shooting each other. After all, with all our cathedrals and our music mounting to the skies, it does seem rather pathetic that all a whole world is pray- ing for — now for four years, is a mean humble thing like — keeping from shooting each other! Chapter III 333 THE END OF THE SELF-SUFFICIENT NATION \\ /'E, the nations of the world outside the * * Central Powers of Europe, believe and herewith declare our belief. We believe that if nations are going to return to self-sufficiency, after the war be- cause they are afraid another war is coming, another war will come. No nation really wants self-sufficiency. Clams are self-sufficient. The more highly developed animals and people and nations become, the more mutu- ally dependent they are and the more mutu- ally unprotected they can afford to be. Self- sufficiency in a nation is a by-gone, left-over, military idea. A self-sufficient nation, to-day, would commit suicide. Everybody in it would be bored to death. A self-sufficient city would soon be a village. Everybody would begin moving out of it as fast as he could. Nobody would ever want to know a self-sufficient fam- ily, and a self-sufficient man would not even 334 The Air-Line to Liberty take the trouble to have a self-sufficient fam- ily and would be too tired to get married. A self-sufficient baby would die in a few minutes. Voluntary and eager and truthful mutual de- pendence is the life of everything. The small- est size self-sufficiency can be done up in now, in 1917 years after Christ, is world-size. We believe that the way out for great nations after the war is to make conclusive, convinced, thorough-going and significant ar- rangements for being dependent on each other. To do this they must take aggressive measures and begin huge, mutual advertisements with each other, competing for one another's confi- dence and good-will, competing for the power, leadership with one another, the voluntary and acknowledged right of leadership in the things we can make the world want from us the most. We believe the nations that are the most dependent on the most other nations and can manage soonest to have the most other na- tions dependent upon them will soon be, both at the same time, in the same way, the material and the spiritual masters of the world. This The End of the Self -Sufficient Nation 335 is to be brought to pass by advertising, by ad- vertising now. We believe the future peace of the world turns on exchange, upon our having an in- ternational clearing house for the spiritual values and the material products each nation can best produce and best put forward in ex- change for the spiritual values and material products of other nations. Germany has material, and as she thinks, spiritual products that the rest of the world thinks it does not want. Either the world is not informed about how valuable these things are to it or Germany is not informed about how valuable they are not to it. In either case the quickest, cheapest way to find out the facts and get down to intelligent and useful action is for Germany to advertise in the world and for the world to advertise in Germany. If the increasing of advertising between na- tions is attended to, the reducing of armaments practically takes care of itself. Nobody will have any time to bother with huge, clumsy ar- rangements for shooting and being ready to 336 The Air-Line to Liberty shoot people we cannot get along without, and who cannot get along without us. If this is the end we are making towards Germany, when we get the Germans where they will listen to us what shall we find best to say? What shall we do? What is there that we can say and do now to prepare for the real test of civilization? The real test of civilization to-day is going to be its wisdom, its power in making terms with Germany. What is the wise and strong way to make terms with Germany? What is the way a sane man can deal with a crazy man's fear? Hold him, get away his gun. Then let him watch one making all the ar- rangements for killing him and then not do- ing it. We will get the mastery of the air, sweep the air clear of Germans and then we will treat Germans, not as Germans treat us, but as we hope to be treated by Germans and as we are The End of the Self -Sufficient Nation 337 going to be treated by Germans when we ad- vertise to them and when they have advertised to us, and when we know each other as we are. 338 Chapter IV A LITTLE COAL SHALL LEAD US ALL nations are making ready in the next few months to sign the death warrant of war. What is taking place daily before our eyes in the human spirit is the asphyxiation of war. War is over forever. The planet is to be provided with a nation-lock-up. Any nation that shall resist the offer of reasonable advertising and experimenting as a substitute for war, any nation that shall still believe in war, shall continue to get ready for it and try to make the rest of us get ready for it, shall be cut off from the family of na- tions, shall be moved bodily at the public ex- pense of the planet to a back corner of the world, walled in, and fed through a hole. The attempt of Germany and the attempt of all other nations she will try to sweep in her wake to be self-sufficient as regards Coal and Steel and Copper and Nitrates with the wireless mocking through the sky, seems to America and her Allies sentimental and ro- mantic beyond belief. A Little Coal Shall Lead Us 339 As a plain matter of fact which any nation but a megalomaniac nation would see, the bare bleak material forces of the world, the brute needs of all nations are going to compel all nations to act as the members of one body. To-morrow, day after to-morrow (we shall see it with our own eyes!) Coal, Copper, Ni- trates, Oil and Steel shall grasp all we know, and all we have in their swarthy hands, chuck the grave empty heads of twenty foolish na- tions together, and say, "DAMN YOU, LOVE EACH OTHER/" It is a pitiful sight — the majestic imperious human spirit being led at last by the Things it eats, and by the Things it wears, by heathen Metals, Acids, and Fertilizers to notice God. Civilization is saying plaintively to Metals, Acids and Fertilizers: "Almost thou per- suadest Me to be a Christian!" And all the while the wireless — our own wireless that we thought of ourselves — by night, by day, mocking at us through the sky! IX THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN GERMANY Chapter I UNDELIVERED LETTERS 1 OFTEN see people walking alone through crowds in the street with their lips moving. "Who is it you are talking to? There doesn't seem to be anybody!" I feel like step- ping up to them and saying: "You don't mean to say, do you, that with a great crowd of peo- ple all around you like this, you are merely talking to yourself?" Nine times out of ten when people go by one alone like this, all still and with their lips moving, they are thinking in the second per- son. They are talking to somebody they are going to do something to. 341 342 The Air-Line to Liberty If people's thoughts about what is going on in the world to-day had envelopes on them, nine out of ten billion of them — thoughts we are all having to-day any hour and any min- ute, anywhere, would be found to be addressed to Germans. Nations go elbowing by each other unseeing — mumbling in the street to Germans. For four years people's minds in every country of the world have been undelivered letters to Germans. Now that we are going to insist — some of us that some of the hundred billion letters to Germany get through, it is perhaps a good time to ask: "Which letters shall we get through first and what shall be in them?" Of course it is for our World Department, when we have one, to decide, but I have been thinking. I have been making out a little list of letters which I think it might be well to have deliv- ered first in the heaped-up four-year mail of the Kaiser, when we get it through. I had intended (if this book were not being jerked out of my hands into the printers) to Undelivered Letters 343 put in this chapter a few sample news-bombs such as I have in mind thousands of Amer- icans will write when we begin by air-plane corresponding once more with Germans. Ten Million American Germans in America to sixty-six German-Germans in Ger- many. American Labor Unions to German Labor Unions. The American National Chamber of Com- merce to German National Chamber of Commerce. Advertisement of Henry Ford's Workmen to Krupps'. Advertisement of Henry Ford to the Kaiser. Advertisement from John Spargo to Liebe- necht. Advertisement of Conversion of George Vie- reck by George Viereck — to anybody. Advertisement of Advertising as the World's Substitute for War. Advertisement to Germans to give us some more of their old fine "MADE IN GER- MANY" advertising and begin quick. 344 The Air-Line to Liberty Advertisement to Germans to look up and put forward Germans we can trust. Advertisement for an International Ocean. Advertisement for a World Police. Advertisement for a World Court. Advertisement for World Trustees (selected from World Departments of each na- tion). Advertisement for a World Legislature. Advertisement for International Experiment Station in Mutual Interests. The Newspapers of America to the News- papers of Germany. Ninety-seven American Authors to Ninety- seven German Authors. American Catholics to German Catholics. Twenty Thousand American Protestant Churches to the sons of Martin Luther. American Orchestras — from Boston to Se- attle — to the Orchestra at Beyreuth. The Children of America to the Children of Germany (Letters arranged by the Youth's Companion) . Letter from Thomas A. Edison, the man who thought of Moving Pictures for Ger- Undelivered Letters 345 mans, to throw on the screen in all Ger- mans who see his Moving Pictures. Letter from Alexander Graham Bell on his own telephone to be telephoned to all Ger- mans at their telephones. The Little White Dog with His Master's Voice, to all children young and old lis- tening to-night to victrolas. The Ferry Boats of New York to the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American Lines — those vast lost ocean-ferries be- tween the souls of two great peoples. Advertisement for World Department in each nation. For Treaties guaranteed by advertising, which would be made to work and kept alive by agreements to advertise, treaties which would be living treaties instead of effigies and lawyers' scraps of paper. For American type of diplomats from all na- tions — all cards on the table. For Crowds of Consuls in cities instead of one or two. For Reversed Spies — an advertisement of the advantages of a Secret Service for de- 346 The Air -Line to Liberty tecting friends instead of enemies, and for ferreting out mutual interests between the nations. A Letter from Life to Fliegende Blatter. Notice served by Marconi and Wright and Curtis Brothers on the German Censor. Billy Sunday to the Reichstag. Billy Sunday to Twenty Thousand German Clergymen. Thirty Million American Women with their new votes, to the Women of Germany. An Advertisement of the Fate of the World. An Advertisement of the Graves of all Na- tions. The Women with Child in America to the Women with Child in Germany. A Letter from the women with child near the German armies, to the women of Ger- many. A Letter from the German General Staff and Hindenburg to all churches, to be read at Baptisms. But one could go on forever — thinking of possible letters. I cannot keep from imagin- Undelivered Letters 347 ing them and have been writing them — if there were room for them. Any one can. Every one will. Our minds have been addressed to Germans for four years. The dammed up mail to Germans to-day chokes the gates of the earth. If the Kaiser defies our overtures and will not let us advertise America to the German people we will advertise the Kaiser to the Ger- man people and the German people to the Kaiser. We will keep the German people and the German Government intimately in- formed, via the sky, about each other. The American people will send over letters every day with news in them from the Ameri- can people that the Kaiser and his people will read over each other's shoulders. We will not have to talk about freedom to the German people. It will be there before their eyes and almost before they think of it, knowing all about us that their Kaiser knows and know- ing it the same minute, and knowing that their Kaiser knows they know it they will be freed. They will be freed by the same words ad- 348 The Air-Line to Liberty dressed by the American people privately to them and their Kaiser together. If the Kaiser wants a letter from us, he will have to ask the people to let him see theirs. When he reads what the American people say to the German people the Kaiser will see in a flash before they know how they look, how the German people look. And when the people see the Kaiser reading the news from America they will see how the Kaiser looks before he knows how he looks. This will be awkward sometimes for the Kaiser. Americans will distribute from her air- planes little momentary democracies wherever they go. The heaped up letters from America at last, the miles of emotion from a thousand streets are going to be gathered together massed, wirelessed to Europe, translated into German, put in bags and dropped by airplanes on the people to whom they belong. The Kaiser can call like anybody else for his letters from the American people, at the People's Post Office. Undelivered Letters 349 The German people for many months of the more liberal sort — the Germans we think we have known in years gone by, and that we cannot give up, have seemed to us for a long and weary time to be saying to us underneath their breath, and as if they were being watched something like this. (They seem to us to have underneath an understanding with us about their Kaiser.) They seem to be saying, "This poor tragical figure you see here that you have watched and we have watched for years — this poor tragical figure here, pinioned soul and body under his own Machine, with the huge wheels of his own hell going round and round and round him sucking in a world — this man we put forward to you, because we cannot help it, to represent us in dealing with you." "Very well then," America will say, "you have a right to say you will use this man as your representative in talking to us. But we have a right to say that we will not use him as our representative to you. We will ex- change no word with him except when some 35° The Air -Line to Liberty other nation is in the room, or you — sixty-six million of you are in the room. "There will be no private letters from the American people for him from this day. "If your Kaiser wants news from America, the same ordinary Public Rural-Sky-Delivery you all have to have he will have to have. "You and your Kaiser can go out for your letters together, pick them up together and read them together." Chapter II 351 THE RIGHT TO CHANGE EACH OTHER'S MINDS IF one were to try to put up the American temperament and what it stands for, in a series of clear propositions, it might be this. It is not the truth that governs the world and governs people. It is what people think is the truth. In Amercia we are not nationally addicted to the sense of beauty or reason or to art and philosophy. We are — taking us by and large — workers in will and in facts. When we want to get our way, we cut across lots in our minds and deal with the facts in things as they are, and with the facts in people as they are. The most important and unchangeable fact about facts in people is, that they can be changed. The facts about a man for the most part are only temporarily allowed to be facts about him — by him and by us. The same seems true to us about nations. It is about to be true about nations, and about sixty-six million people in Germany. The facts that exist in the sixty-six million Ger- mans — the facts that we have in Germans, are 352 The Air-Line to Liberty merely our point of departure to the facts that we want. We do not let our minds fool them- selves about Germans, but the Germans we have are instinctively unconsciously to us, raw material for Germans we want. The moral is not far to seek. If we face the Germans as they are and the Germans that we have, deliberately roll up our sleeves before them and proceed to make them over before their own eyes into Germans that we want, we must make some regular decent and polite arrangement for giving them a chance to do the same to us. This is precisely what we want to do. We in America, — Americans the Germans have to have, offer ourselves as raw material to Germans, to be made over by Germans into Americans Germans would rather have. Hence this plan of mutual advertising be- tween our people which we now propose. We believe we could put in some very important touches on Germans and that they could put in touches on us, which neither of us could ever begin, in a thousand years, to put in on ourselves. Right to Change Each Others Minds 353 It seems to us that these touches can be made better, made more hopefully and more per- manently by using advertisements and experi- ments on each other than by the rudimentary and to say the least rather visionary way, we are using now of blowing each other to atoms, up into a kind of pulp or human protoplasm or planetary dust. This constructive philosophy or platform for action which I have outlined, is as it seems to me what America is for in the world. We may be said to be in a certain rough sense a nation of selected geniuses — selected out of all nations to make ourselves ridiculous if we like, or sublime if we like, in this way. With all our honest provincial blem- ishes of thinking and feeling, which any po- lite, grown-up nation in Europe can see at a glance, and with all our faults which can- not but correct themselves and correct us, I believe that in the present desperate hunger and need of the nations, it is going to be a kind of brute faith we have in ourselves, a kind of incurable, boundless hope we have for 354 The Air-Line to Liberty others that is going to hammer a civilization out of the present iron emptiness and stony sorrow of the world. It is for us to say whether this constructive fire within our souls, this spirit of advertising and melting down this love of beginning, and rebeginning, this passion for changing our own minds and changing others, in this hour of tragic eagerness among the older peoples looking to us, — shall make us ridiculous or make us sublime. If it is not to be ridiculous, it will have to be practical. The first thing we will have to do will be to avoid vagueness, all loving pa- triotic moonshine, and have ready for our- selves and for others a specific, vigorous and universal plan, which begins somewhere in particular and begins now. This means beginning with Germany. Chapter III 355 LOOKING AND TRYING WHEN two nations or two people quar- rel because they do not know what they think, the first practical, sensible thing to do, seems to be for them to go home and find out what they think and advertise them- selves to themselves until they agree with themselves as the first step to agreeing with others. When as it often happens two nations or two people disagree for the precise reason that they do know what they think and for the precise reason that they do know they do not agree, the thing for them to do is to exchange twenty million dollar advertising and listen- ing campaigns until they sort their difficulties out into the following classes and treat them accordingly. 1. Ex-disagreements. 2. Difficulties that dissolve at once when properly stated. 3. Difficulties that can be met for the time being, by agreeing to disagree. 356 The Air-Line to Liberty 4. Difficulties that can possibly or probably be settled by further discussion. 5. Difficulties that will have to be settled by experiments both sides make alone. 6. Difficulties that will have to be settled by experiments both sides make to- gether. 7. Finally, mutual advertising to all con- cerned of the conclusions and results of experiments. • • • • a There might be four groups of advertise- ments a World Department would arrange for in dealing with Germany or any other country. FIRST. ADVERTISING ILLUSIONS AWAY. There are the illusions the German peo- ple have about the American people. The German Government and the American Gov- ernment will cooperate to conduct a campaign in Germany to remove them; there are illu- sions the American people have about the German people, the German Government, and the American Government will cooperate to Looking and Trying 357 conduct a campaign in America which will remove them. SECOND. ADVERTISING FACTS AWAY. There are certain accusations Americans make against the German people which are true and which the Germans would be glad to take steps not to have true the mo- ment these particular facts are advertised to them and brought home to them, and there are certain accusations German people make against the American people which are true and which the Americans would be glad to take steps not to have true the moment the facts are advertised to them and brought home to them. THIRD. ADVERTISING MUTUAL INTERESTS. Advertising to have experiments and re- searches made to find out what the mutual in- terests are and then advertising to let every- body in both nations concerned, know them feel them and act on them. 358 The Air -Line to Liberty FOURTH. ADVERTISING INTER- NATIONAL DISCOVERIES AND EX- PERIMENTS. Many of the accusations the American peo- ple make against the German people are partly wrong and partly right and only by mutual experimenting and advertising can each side find out — sometimes by asserting and holding out and sometimes by giving way and some- times by experimenting on new common ground. With two huge advertising campaigns like this, a kind of colossal conversation between two nations, both peoples will finally be able to come to a conclusion which neither could have come to alone, a conclusion which the people of two nations all at work on it, per- sonally, individually, and nationally, create together. Peace brought to pass or main- tained in this way would be a matter-of-fact substantial process. The peace would not need a treaty except as a bit of bookkeeping. The treaty would be in the act itself, a great mutual, daily, international act of creative imagination. Chapter IV 359 LISTENING EVEN the people who do not want Amer- ica to use advertising, and who do not believe in advertising, they will advertise that they do not believe in advertising. They will advertise that advertising does not work. If they do not want America to advertise war away they will advertise to America to keep it from advertising war away. If there is any substitute for advertising that any of us would like to propose and would like to get for all nations, we cannot get it for all nations without advertising it in all na- tions. And only advertising it in all nations can make it work. If up over the hurry of the presses now printing the first words of this book while I write the last, new events are coming to us that shall change the focus and jerk away all the whole foreground of the vision of the world, as has happened before, the faith in this book comes out to meet them. Whatever hap- pens or may happen from this day on in the 360 The Air-Line to Liberty war, the world is heaping up truth on what I have but begun to say. If what comes to-morrow proves to be war and more and harder war, nothing but adver- tising can pull us together to win the war, and nothing but advertising can make winning the war mean anything when we win it. Or if as it turns out when these words ap- pear, there is peace, nothing but advertising will make peace mean anything, nothing but advertising can determine in the hearts of the people what the peace shall be, or keep peace from being worse than war. Nothing but advertising can keep the na- tions when peace comes, from throwing the war away. The last stupendous chance of men to live with God, all the dying and the singing and the hope in it, the sacramental cup — the sacrifice of the blood of five million dead men lifted high before the altar, at the last moment dashed from our hands . . . shall slip away from us . . . slip away from our children and children's children forever — and dribble through the floor of the world. Chapter V 361 A BILLION DOLLARS' WORTH OF LISTENING RIGHTLY prepared and rightly placed we could win this war in a week, with one billion dollars' worth of listening. We could install arrangements that would insure the world against war forever with two billion dollars' worth of listening. After that, when the idea has been started and when two or three great or listening na- tions have been set going and any one can see what listening in a nation does for it, all na- tions small and great will listen eagerly for nothing. In asking my people to arrange with the nations to get and to get at once three billion dollars' worth of listening, I am asking them to foot quite a bill. But the three billion dol- lars, we would spend with the other nations spread over a year, would be cheap — for what we would get. We would be getting for our- selves and for the other nations something we want to get, for three billion dollars a year. We are paying out now — for what we are getting now — a billion dollars a week. 362 Chapter VI THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE AND THE WORLD Introduction THE important part of an idea is what people do with it. I have put the word Introduction at the top of this page because it is here that the introduction that is merely by the author ends and the introduction by the reader begins. I have written an opening paragraph on the general idea of stopping all wars and winning this one by advertising to the Germans as America's substitute for war. My first notion of what to do with this idea was to cut across with it at once to some who could act, who could make it over into what it should be, finish it and use it. I thought that the thing for me to do with it was to go down to Washington at once, knock on the door of the White House with it and place it in the hands of the President. Then it occurred to me how lonely and un- important the idea looked, and how much better it would be, and on the whole more po- lite to the President as well as more modest Introduction 363 to knock on the door of the White House with ten million people (readers of The Sat- urday Evening Post) and ask Mr. Tumulty to tell the President that ten million people were waiting at the door and wanted him to ask the President if the President could talk with them a minute. Of course I cannot say that the ten million people who read the Post (five to a number) will agree with me, but if the ten million peo- ple are found to want what I want, and will mention it to ten million more and will call the attention of twenty thousand editors to what we want, and will have it discussed be- fore the country, raising the money, the men and the airplanes we will have to have and finding and getting ready the stuffing for the bombs will be under way and the main lack in my programme, namely, provision for the backing of a President in carrying it out, will have been removed. The full under- standing, the full power of the people will be placed in the President's hands and the suc- cess of America in winning all war by adver- tising a substitute for it, will be assured. 364 The Air-Line to Liberty It has seemed to me that this kind of pro- gramme for America is one which in a very singular degree goes with the kind of Presi- dent we have. No statesman the world has known could be more close by temperament, by skill and by practice, to seeing, conceiving and carrying through such a programme. It is a pro- gramme that would not be possible without him. Only a man who is in the habit of see- ing and in the habit of taking with his own nation and with other nations a masterful — a spiritually highhanded course, could hope to bring this war and all wars to a full stop with religion with one sheer amazing world- wide feat of listening and advertising. At all events it is what would be religion to me — the touching the imagination of a great nation and the waking the solar plexus of a world. No living man could at this moment — like Woodrow Wilson, save a world by plumbing the sub-conscious depth of the human heart, by invoking God, by advertising throughout Introduction 365 the earth the prayers and the wills of a great people. No man sees as Woodrow Wilson sees the material possibilities of organizing the atten- tion of a nation, of massing the vision and the will of a people. But a great President cannot be a great President all alone. I invoke for him the faces I have seen in the streets. I invoke for him the spirit of great cities, of the skyscrap- ers, of the high mountains, of the mighty prairies and rivers, of the strong patient quiet fields stored in the hearts of my people. If the World Department I have in mind is to do its work and if the billion dollars' worth of listening with which we propose to end the war, is to be arranged for, the Presi- dent will need to feel a hundred million peo- ple behind him. The present Committee of Public Informa- tion which the President has established is the best emergency arrangement in the direction of the World Department which the Presi- dent could make without stopping to explain to the people, without asking them to help 366 The Air-Line to Liberty and with only such money as he could take out of his own private purse for special expenses. When Mr. Creel was asked the other day how much money he wanted a year to carry out what his conception of what his Publicity Committee should do, in this and other coun- tries, he said twenty-five millions would do. For such a World Department as I have in mind, if it were properly backed by the peo- ple, the President would have to plan for a very different scale of expenditure. I would want ten dollars apiece a year from every inhabitant of America from babies up, to mobilize the vision and the will of the peo- ple. Mr. Creel wants twenty-five cents apiece. Twenty-five cents apiece is all the President feels warranted in having taken from the pockets of the people, for vision, for mobilizing and massing and throwing upon the fate of the world, the prayers and the wills of the people. I do not believe that this will be true very long. I believe that the moment the people have had pointed out to them what America could Introduction 367 do just at this juncture toward winning the war and ending all war, with a billion dollars' worth of listening in Germany, the President will feel backed up in taking — for such lis- tening as he alone in the world could arrange for, all the money he wants. A thousand years ago when this last four years began I could pray under the roof of a church. A bell in a steeple called me and when I prayed I knew I prayed. Now I never know. Whatever I do, whatever I say or keep from saying I remember afterwards that it was praying — it must have been praying. And always with these crowds of people round me. I look at the stars and see trenches. I look at flowers — at beautiful women eat- ing and laughing in windows. And I see hungry cities. I see nations lifting their hands. And in a wide empty place. 368 The Air-Line to Liberty And people near by seem so far off. They go by like pictures. They are far away though I touch them. And all the funny little people in the great wide empty place go by with all their neat little religions — their cunning cathedrals. The sky is so near — the sky and the trenches. Why should I look at the roses in the win- dow? I have heard great cities crying like little children in the night. All their religions and other playthings seem taken from them. The nave of the world is stripped away and the nations are alone with God. When I think of the spiritual forces of the world fronted up in a great listening and ad- vertising machine against the Germans, I think of the way Isaiah put it once: Behold I will make thee a new sharp thresh- ing instrument having teeth. Thou shalt thresh the mountains and beat them small and shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan, and the wind shall carry them away. . . . Introduction 369 I come down to breakfast in my hotel. Glad things throng around me, laughing voices, sereneness. The sun shines in the great windows ... the hovering waiter . . . and the white cloths and the silver . . . and I take up my paper a second and sud- denly around the corner of a paragraph I want to pray! I want to pray in the middle of the front page of the New York Times! Out of the middle of that mighty street of the thoughts of men, where, silent invisible in- numerable, the faces and footsteps of all man- kind seem going past, my soul cries out, Oh God, Oh God! . . . and my waiter asks me if he shall open my eggs. . . . I had never thought until this war that praying could be quite like this before. Sometimes the prayers are not to God and I will see a faraway sky around me and hear the hum of airplanes through the clouds: "Oh Germans, listen to us! A hundred mil- lion Americans from over the sea, from out of the sky, we hover over you! We and our airplanes cry to you! Above the smoke of your chimneys, above your mighty cities, and 370 The Air-Line to Liberty above the still spaces of your fields we speak to you — from over the sea, from out of the sky! From out of the years that have been swept away in death, from out of the years that reach ahead, in the name of our fathers and your fathers and your children and our children we speak to you! to you! oh sons of Goethe and Schiller!" Note This book is written to meet a national emergency and it is written in an emergency style. It does not seem as if I can bear (the reader may see it between the lines) to leave my idea alone with him. And yet it does not seem as if I could bear any longer the un- speakable loneliness of believing it and not seeing it in action and not finding out if the world does not believe it too. Here it is. God helping me, what I have written I have written ! H 52-79 . 1 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: uiy 2001 PreservationTechnologie A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION j 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 j (724)779-2111 ^° /i^-. °° .. n* .v^t