The first thing to do in making a start for new brain tracks for America is to pick out persons and brain tracks that set each other off.
Even an idea nobody would care about one way or the other becomes suddenly and nationally interesting to us when we find people we would not think would believe it, are believing it hard and trying to get us to believe it.
Suppose for instance that next Fourth of July (I pick out this day for what I want to have happen because I have so longed for years to have something strong and sincere said or done on it that would really celebrate it)—suppose for instance that next Fourth of July, beginning early in the morning all the Labor leaders of America from Maine to California, acting as one man broke away—just took one day off, from doing the old humdrum advertising everybody expects from them—suppose they proceeded to do something that would attract attention—something that would interest their friends and disappoint their enemies—just for twenty-four hours? Suppose just for one day all the Labor leaders instead of going about advertising to themselves and to everybody the bad employers and how bad employers are in this country would devote the Fourth of July to advertising a few good ones?
Then suppose they follow it up—that Labor do something with initiative in it—the initiative its enemies say it cannot have, something unexpected and original, true and sensationally fair, something that would make a nation look and that a hundred million people would never forget?
What does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in this country, if Labor; after the next Fourth of July, started a new national crusade for four weeks—if the fifty best laborers in the Endicott Johnson Mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should go in a body one after the other to a list of Bolshevist factories, factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitation of telling what happens to them in their Endicott Johnson mills, an agitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are like and how it works until the Bolshevist workmen they come to see are driven by sheer force of facts into being non-Bolshevist workmen, and their Bolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force of facts into being Endicott Johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front of themselves, who will be Endicott Johnsons for them.
All that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitation in America to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act of labor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing that either of them—either capital or labor—is thinking of somebody, believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besides themselves. Millions of individual employers and individual laborers about have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable and discriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow human beings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is to arrange some signal generous conclusive arresting massive move together to show it.
This is the kind of work the Air Line League proposes on a national scale like the Red Cross to arrange for and do.
The common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, the fellow human being—employer or employee.
The best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for America in shame and weakness to keep on deporting Bolshevists, is to arrange a national advertisement, a parade or national procession as it were in this country soon, of team work in industry and of how—to anybody who knows the facts—it carries everything before it.
The best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down through ten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers who stand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmen from all over the country who stand up for employers.