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

Dined at the ——'s last night. Judge —— was there. Two other lawyers. We sat after dinner and talked very late.

Three lawyers are too many for a dinner.

I do not know what it is, but I never spend the evening with a lawyer, without talking back to him in my mind all the next day.

Probably, if at this late date I were picking out what I would be in the world, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick out being a lawyer backwards.

The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in conducting people's fights for them.

My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once be started—a profession in which any man who went into it, would be occupied in being a lawyer backwards.

(I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of—because everybody would see—a whole nation would see all in one unanimous minute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like.)

Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by the things they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuous ad.—their huge national international display ad. just now of what a lawyer is like—of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is the United States Senate.

It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to most people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards—two or three hundred thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts everybody went to, to keep them out of fights.

You see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course he will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it over. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it is not impossible he will make your enemies love you.