Our people did not believe this idea.
How could our Government get through to each man in America that winning the war depended on him? Get through to each woman and each child that something must be given up by each of us to defeat the Germans? The Government not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately the country needed them—every man of them—but it wanted also to inspire the people and to let the people see their power themselves. They wanted to teach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to the people and to the world how reverently the men, women and children of America could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat the Germans.
I fell asleep in Maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the Grand Central Station. I came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlike Sunday we had during the war.
A single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which I could have had for a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me.
I mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent about human nature. I went over and stood and looked up Madison Avenue and looked down Madison Avenue.
I had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and I found myself upon what seemed to me the loneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place I had ever seen upon the earth—a corner of Madison Avenue. It seemed like a kind of vision to stand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. I looked up at the sign on the corner. It really was Madison Avenue.
It was as if the hand of a hundred million people had reached out three thousand miles. It was as if a hundred million people had met me at the corner and told me—one look, one silence: "Here is this street we offer up that the will of God should go by. We are going to defeat the Germans with the silence on this street."
I stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with the invisible—a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came over me that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, were reaching, while I looked, across the country. I saw my people hushing a thousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of Chicago, of San Francisco and New York like the aisles of churches.
There was no need of church bells the first gasolineless Sunday, reminding one noisily, cheerily, a little thoughtlessly—the way they do—that God was on the earth.
One could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. But the first gasolineless Sunday—five hundred thousand miles of still roads lifted themselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, saying for a hundred million people, "God still reigneth." And twenty million little birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at five hundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what had happened!