“Who are you, Woodrow Wilson, in God’s name?” the steeples and smoking chimneys, the bells and whistles, the Yales and Harvards, and the little country schools, the crowds in the streets, and the corn in the fields all say, “Who Are You?”

Then the people listen.  They listen to his “I wills” and “I won’ts” for news about him.  They look for news about him in the headlines he steers into the papers every morning, in the events he makes happen, in the editorials he makes men think of, in the men he calls up and puts on the National Wire—­in all these, slowly, daily, hourly they drink up their long, patient, hopeful answer to their question, “Who Are You, Woodrow Wilson?”

CHAPTER VII

THE PEOPLE SAY “WHO ARE WE?”

But if the President governs first by being news himself, he governs second by his appointments, by gathering about him other men who are news to people, too.

One need not divide people into good and bad, because the true line of division between good and bad instead of being between one man and another, is apt to be as a matter of fact and experience cut down through the middle of each of us.

But for the purposes of public action and decision and getting good things done, this line does seem to be cut farther over in the middle of some of us, than it is in others.  Taking a life-average in any moral or social engineering feat, in any correct calculation of structural strain, how far over this line cuts through in a man, has to be reckoned with.

The president by appointing certain men to office, saying “I will” and “I won’t” to certain types of men, in saying who shall be studied by the people, who shall be read as documents of our national life, puts, if not the most important, at least the most lively and telling news about his administration into print.

We watch our President acting for us, telling us news about what we are like, sorting men out around him the way ninety million people would sort them out if they were there to do it.

The President’s appointments may be said to be in a way the breath of the nation.

A nation has to breathe, and the plain fact seems to be that certain kinds of people have to be breathed out of a nation and other kinds of people have to be breathed in.  The way a President appoints men to office is his way of letting a nation breathe.

With all his attractive qualities, perhaps it is because Mr. Taft did not quite let the nation breathe, and suffocated it a little that there came such an outbreak at the end.  Perhaps it is because Mr. Taft looked at Mr. Ballinger and then looked at Mr. Pinchot, all the people of the country all the while looking on, and said, “Ballinger is the kind of man our people prefer, and Pinchot is not,” that the people broke out so amazingly, so incredibly, and decided by such an enormous majority that a man who could pick out men for them like this would not do—­as things are just now anyway—­for a President of the United States.