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

VI

GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT

My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and reformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extreme radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme conservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and self-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrong the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean—what they are like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like.

The quick way to deal with the industrial situation is to expose the extreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. The quick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come to terms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about one another, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructive job on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic human beings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are held up and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these human beings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, by engineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature.

These personalities to unlock a nation with—to make a hundred million men believe together and act together should be picked out, men like Charles Schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yet everybody ought to look at, and will like to look at when they know them.

Intensive publicity extensively applied.

Then with a printing press and a postage stamp multiply it by a hundred million. Make true beliefs about picked out men—typical men we have thousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives.

If the American people can come to know and interpret fifty men—if they can get fifty sample men right—they will then be able to use these fifty men every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlock team work with, with all the others. People will have something to work from and something to work toward, in judging what they can do with employers and with workmen around them.

Then we will have team work and civilization—we will have a democracy the Germans would like to be asked to belong to.

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