The Ghost in the White House / Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

by Gerald Stanley Lee

This book is itself—so far as it goes, a dramatization of the idea of the Look-Up Club.

The thing the book—between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper—a kind of listening together of capital and labor, the Look-Up Club of The Air Line League is planned to do in the nation at large and locally in ten thousand cities—capital, labor and the consumer listening to each other—reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders, studying their personal interests together, working and acting out together the great daily common interest of all of us. The Look-Up Club, acting as it does for the three social groups that make up The Air Line League and having an umpire and not an empire function, operates primarily as a Publicity or Listening organization.

I might illustrate the need the Look-Up Club is planned to meet and how it would operate by suggesting what the Club might do with a particular idea—an idea on which people must really be got together in America before long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all.

Millions of American laborers go to bed every night and get up every morning saying:—

"The American employer is getting more money than he earns. We are going to have our turn now. Nobody can stop us."

Result: Under-production and the Fifty-Cent Dollar.

The cure for the American laboring man's under-production and working merely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that the American employer is working for something besides money—that he is earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job—the way he is saying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can be got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and the lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of the world all going out together.

I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports—men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like.

If all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what their laborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the face of Labor toward Capital—the face of this country toward the world and toward itself and toward every man in it would be changed in a week.

Suppose I propose to take one of these men and write about him until everybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeing that everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what would be the first thing I would come upon?