I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had when I waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out of communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out of the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, into the long, white silent prayer of my people—and prayed with a hundred million people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets of a nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to God.
We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the war. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, to the great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-four full page ads in a thousand papers could do.
Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people—in advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement, eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows they look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, into prayers for a world—Mr. Garfield had few equals.
To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single stomach in the country.
To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a hundred million people—go in through the kitchen door of every house with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar when they ordered eight.
Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people look out of their windows on streets—thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the Germans!
We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in America, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany—was to interrupt people's personal daily habits.
The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to the people to whom we are trying to express it.
The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalists and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an hour in the day.
The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, in expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is plain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of the working ideas of the Air Line League.