In the book the people shall sing to the President. He shall be kept reminded that we are there. He shall feel daily what America is like. America shall be focussed into melody. We shall have a literature once more and the singers, as in Greece, as in all happy lands and in all great ages, shall go singing through the streets.
There is no singing for a President now. All a President can do when he is inaugurated, when he begins now, is to kiss helplessly some singing four thousand years old in a Bible by another nation.
When David sang to his people, he sang the news, the latest news, the news of what was happening to people about him from week to week.
Why is no one singing 1913, our own American 1913?
Why is no one stuttering out our Bible—one the President could have to refer to, our own Bible in our own tongue from morning to morning in the symbols that breathe to us out of the sounds in the street, out of the air, out of the fresh, bright American sky, and out of the new ground beneath our feet?
It is easy for a President to pile up three columns a morning of news about himself to us, show each man his face in the morning, but what is there he can do with twenty thousand newspapers at his breakfast table, to pick out the real news about us? Who shall paint the portrait of a people?
One could go about in the White House and study the portraits of the presidents, but where is the portrait of the people? The portrait of the people comes in little bits to the president like a puzzle picture. Each man brings in his little crooked piece, jig-sawed out from Iowa, South Dakota, Oklahoma or Aroostook County, Maine. This picture or vision of a nation, this wilderness of pieces, can be seen every day when one goes in, lying in heaps on the floor of the White House.
A literature is the expression on the face of a nation. A literature is the eyes of a great people looking at one.
It seems to be as we look, looking out of the past and faraway into the future.