The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. It had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national blank look.
Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out.
It was a Focus—a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking for it from us, every morning when they get up—asking for it as one man.
To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever known—this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred million people from having a blank look, let its chance go.
The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where it stopped, the Red Cross vision—the Red Cross spirit.
The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented as a future for the Red Cross.
The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body for the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division for the Red Cross.
But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for my purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people—the rank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves the soul of it and who would make the soul of anything—particularly the men and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to cool a little—had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set before the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated by the leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us—would have kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active labor in the Red Cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men and women for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the mere stress of merely beating Germans, there had been one before.
IV