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

In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to think three. The country pays for it for him.

America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington as Rock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers.

The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, the patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone system for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and magazines in which a whole nation thinks together—with one huge national thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in New York or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down into their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the people will never forget.

Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a bird's-eye view of the nation like the Literary Digest be fined for it? Why fine the readers of the Review of Reviews or Collier's or Scribner's for living in one place rather than another? I like to think of it Saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in the Youth's Companion.

Every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—that is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness of not being fined for it.

A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul—what he knows and feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a right not to be told he will have to read something published within a rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell—that his soul has got to live with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on.

As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation.

There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay for making men of all classes and of all regions in this country think and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the nation—some place where three million people act as one.

It is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it.

And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a great national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought, holds a meeting once a week together like the Saturday Evening Post, like Collier's—dismisses two or three million people from everywhere who get together there every Saturday night, and tells them to go home and read the Hampshire County Gazette.