I do not believe it is too much to expect a President to be a poet. We have had a poet for President once in one supreme crisis of this nation and the crisis that is coming now is so much deeper, so much more human and world-wide than Lincoln's was that it would almost seem as if a place like the White House (where one's poetry could really work) would make a poet out of anybody.
A President who has not a kind of plain, still, homely poetry in him, a belief about people that sings, in the present appalling crisis of the world is impracticable or visionary.
So we do not say, "Have we a President that can get our Bells, Edisons, McAdoos, Achesons to be good by toeing a line?"
We say, "Have we a President who can swing into step, who can join in the singing, who can catch up?"
Tunnel McAdoo, when he lifted up his will against the sea and against the seers of Wall Street, was singing. When he conceived those steel cars, those roaring yellow streaks of light ringing through rocks beneath the river, streets of people flashing through under the slime and under the fish and under the ships and under the wide sunshine on the water, he was singing! He raised millions of dollars singing.
Of course he sang the way Americans usually sing, and had to do as well as he could in talking to bankers and investors not to look as if he were singing, but there it all was singing inside him, the seven years of digging, the seven years of dull thundering on rocks under the city, and at last the happy steel cars all green and gold, the streams of people all yellow light hissing and pouring through—those vast pipes for people beneath the sea!
If we have a President, let him sing like McAdoo, or like Luther Burbank, or like Theodore N. Vail, or like Colonel Goethals, picking up a little isthmus like Panama, a string between two continents, playing on it as if it were a harp; or like Edward Ripley playing with the Santa Fé Railroad for all the world like Homer with a lute, all his seven thousand men, all his workmen, all their wives and their children, all the cities along the line striking up and joining in the chorus or like Carborundum Acheson, backed up by his little Niagara Falls oiling the wheels of a world, weaving diamonds into steel, hardening the bones of the earth into skyscrapers, into railroads, into the mighty thighs of flying locomotives....
Any man who is seen acting in this world with a thing, as if he believed in the thing, as if he believed in himself and believed in other people, is singing.
Moses striking out with a rod, as we are told, a path along the sea for his people may have done a more showy thing from a religious point of view, hitting the water on top so, making a great splash with an empty place in it for people to march through, but he was not essentially more religious than McAdoo, with all those modest but mighty columns of figures piling up behind him, with all those splendid, dumb, still glowing engineers behind him, lifting up his will against cities, lifting up his will against herds of politicians, haughty newspapers, against the flocks of silly complacent old ferry-boats waddling in the bay, against the wind and the rain and the cold on the water, and all the banks of Wall Street....
When we want to tell News to our President about ourselves in America, we point to William G. McAdoo.