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

THE TOWN PENDULUM

The Air Line League in its local, national and international branches will act as a Listening Machine.

A Listening Machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward. Worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. When the same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people listen until they understand.

There are people in every town and in every local branch of the League who have what I like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. People in motion are not as reliable and as calculable as brass. People have wills, visions, individual emotions and lurchings of their own. When a man with a pendulum temperament sees a colossal pendulum made of crowds of people—crowds of employers and crowds of workmen—swinging from one extreme to another, the first thing he wants to do as each issue comes up, local or national, is to see to it that his own mind and each other man's mind in these two crowds on each side of the question should go twice through the middle, to going once to the extremes at either end.

In other words, The National Air Line League will act to bring extremes together—twice through the middle to once at each end—and local clubs will act as attention-swinging machines—as attention-forcing machines between classes.

I might give an illustration:

The National League in its central office in New York gets a report from the local branch in the town where Smith safety razors are made that the Smith Works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustained ugliness and inefficiency. The Central Office, after quietly looking into it, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through its local branches reports to the ten million men shaving with Smith blades every morning that the workmen and managers of the Smith factories, who are working a nominal nine hours a day, are spending three hours a day in fighting with each other as to how Smith blades should be made for the public, and six hours a day in making the blades. The consumer is told by the League that he is paying for nine hours' work a day on his blades and only getting six, and that if the employers and employees in the Smith factories could be got to listen to each other and to work together the blades could be had for three cents less apiece.

The League will then proceed through its local branch in the Smith town to arrest the attention of the Smith workmen and the Smith employers. It will suggest that they get each other's point of view and sit down very earnest and hear everything that the other side has to say and everything the other side wants to do, until they find some way of getting together and being efficient and knowing how to make Smith blades.

If necessary in order to get the attention of the workmen and employers at the Smith Works to the desirability of their listening to each other, the users of Smith blades throughout the country will shave themselves with their fathers' razors for three weeks.

If the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America who shave will turn the Government out of office and have the law changed.