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

I could pray the same model outline for a prayer. But for Christmasing, substitute propagandy-izing.

The word somehow itself in its own unconscious beauty dramatizes the way I feel about it. I have written many hundred pages of what I believe about reformers—about people who are trying to get other people's attention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what I believe now is that most people if they would stop trying to get other people's attention and try to get their own, would do more good.

The advertising in which I believe is the advertising that is asked for. I believe in getting a few million people to ask to be advertised to and to give particulars.

More good would be done this way than by turning the whole advertising idea around and working it wrong end to as we do now.

For instance at this present moment I want to know everything about myself and against myself, my enemies know. I do not see why I should put up with my enemies being the ones of all others to know things against me that if I knew would be the making of me. What I want to do is to find a way—make arrangements if I can, to get them to tell me—tell me politely—if they can, but tell me.

If every person, or party, or group in America to-day would do this, Capital, Labor, bankers, socialists, Republicans and Democrats, America would quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a great one. People who have organized to be advertised to will read advertising more poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as I would) more desperately. They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read where now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertising he has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or no the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true.

It is a platitude.

A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a great truth.

What the Air Line League is for, one of the things it is for, is to act on this truth.

Through the three branches, the Look-Up Club, the Try-Out Club and the Put-Through Clan, the Air Line League is an organization not for asserting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally sucking advertising. With its thirty million people joining it, asking to be advertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the National Vacuum Cleaner for Truth.