When the Government takes hold quietly of the National Cash Register Company, turns it up, empties its contents out,—all its methods and its motives—and all the things It thought It wanted, and then proceeds to put its president and twenty-nine of its officers into jail, my readers will perhaps point out to me that this action of the government as a method of tempting people to be good, while it may have the virtue of being concrete and the virtue of being specific, certainly does not have the other virtue that I have laid down, the virtue of being affirmative. "Certainly" they will say "there is not anything affirmative about putting twenty-nine big business men in jail." Many people would call it the most magnificently negative thing a President could have done. Moses himself would have done it.
It does not seem to me that Moses would have done it, or that it was essentially negative. It could not unfairly be claimed that in spite of its negative look on the surface, it was the most massive, significant, crushing affirmation that a great people has made for years.
By putting the twenty-nine officers of the National Cash Register Company in jail, the American people affirmed around the world the nation's championship of the men that had been defeated in the competition with the National Cash Register Company. They affirmed that these men who were not afraid of the National Cash Register Company because they were bigger, and who stood up to them and fought them, were the kind of men Americans wanted to be like, and that the officers of the National Cash Register Company were the kind of men Americans did not want to be like, would not do business with, would not tolerate, would not envy, would not live on the same continent with, unless they were kept in jail.
The President of the United States, sitting in Washington, at the head of this vast affirmative and assertive continent, indicted the Cash Register Company, that is, by a slight pointed negative action, by pushing back a button he turned on the great chandelier of a nation and flooded a nation with light. We, the American people, suddenly, all in a flash, looked into each other's faces and knew what we were like.
We had hoped we believed in human nature, and in brave men and in men against machines but we could not prove it.
Suddenly, we stood in a blaze of truth about ourselves. Suddenly, we could again look with our old stir of joy at our national Flag. If we liked, we could swing our hats.
Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I had been trying to get this news for years. It is news I have wanted to live with and do business with. I have been trying to get my question answered. What are the American people really like?
The President points at the National Cash Register Company and I find out. All the people find out.
In the last analysis, the masterful, shrewd, practical, and constructive part of being a President of the United States—the thing in the business of being a President that keeps the position from being a position which only the second rate or No type of man would have time to take, is the fact that the President is the Head Advertising Manager of the United States, conducting a huge advertising campaign of what Americans really want.
He takes up the National Cash Register Company, picks out its twenty-nine officers, makes it a bill board sky-high across the country. "Here are the kind of business men that the people of the United States do not want, and here are the kind of men that we do!"