In order to be efficient, in order to be free or even to have enough to eat, millions of American men and women of all groups and classes of the people have got to be capable and show that they are capable of changing their minds about themselves.
Everything we are hoping to do turns upon our recognizing as a people, standing out from the rest and pushing forward to lead us, men who know more than most of us know, men who are practiced in keeping their own minds open and can therefore open ours.
Instead of having for the next President of this country a man who braces people, who tightens people up in their convictions, or who drives the old beliefs they want to believe further down into them and makes them believe them harder, we are going to put in our demand for a President who is the engineer of the will of the people, who draws people out, who has the common sense, the reality, the sense of humor and the humanness to look facts and folks in the eyes, who keeps people on all sides who have dealings with him from being fooled about themselves, a man who makes people real when they are with him, who makes them when they even think of him, real with themselves and real with one another, and real in politics.
I mean by a man's being real in politics, being a politician backwards, keeping open to facts acting and preferring to act as children and strong men act, with the deepness and directness of the child.
The hundred million people in the book they would write if they had time, put in their demand for a big simple fellow human being in the White House, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with people and gets things out of people because he makes people feel they know him.
The political parties cannot help themselves the moment the people speak. They would rather slide in a man who does not see through them if they could, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and sees best, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the White House to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep this country as clean as a whistle.
IV
THE PRESIDENT'S RELIGION
I have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, to the old monks of the Middle Ages, who climbed up on mountain tops and lived in monasteries alone with God. If I felt just as they felt about being superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to live the most deeply, intricately religious life I could think of I would refuse to look like a saint and be President of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and would pick out the most difficult business with the most difficult class of men to compete with in the United States. Then I would go into it, put all my money and all my religion together into it.