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

Labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital human nature another. They both believe on both sides what they want to, unless they go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitable habit started of making a deliberate, desperate effort not to.

The world is not being run from day to day by the truth. It is run by what people believe is the truth. It is what the I. W. W. extremists believe is the truth, which constitutes the important fact—the fact which has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. The truth about Judge Gary's attitude or Charles Schwab's, toward labor unions, makes no difference if nobody believes it, or if the labor unions don't believe it. As long as the labor unions are fooling themselves and believing what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact way to deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. The fundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off on their facts about themselves and believe what they want to about themselves. Naturally having begun with this they branch out and believe what they want to about anybody.

To this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we have obviously got to make provision for in modern American life, is practically a new profession—regular professional persons everywhere in all cities, and in all the different industries and in the highly specialized groups each with their special and different techniques, who are experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves and others of believing what they want to about themselves.

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XI

THE WHISPERERS

A very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in the habit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their office doors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves.

A very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in the habit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficient type are whispering around to one another against themselves.

One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people who are shouting would shut up.

But perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout.