CHAPTER VIII

NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT

A nation wakes up every morning and for one minute before it runs to its work it says to its President, “HERE WE ARE!”

The best a President can do in the way of a plain, everyday acknowledgment of the presence of the people is News.

The news that the people are demanding from the President to-day is intensely personal.  It is a kind of rough, butting, good-natured familiarity a great people has with its President, a little heedless, relentless, like some splendid Child, ready to forgive and expecting to be forgiven, it jostles in upon him daily, “Here we are!  What are you believing this morning?  Did you believe in us yesterday?  Did you act as if you believed in us?  Did you get anybody to believe in us?  Who are the men you say are like us?  What are they like this morning?

“We have asked a hundred times; we can only ask it once more.  How do you think you are turning out yourself, Mr. President?  Are you what you thought you would be?  Do you think it is a good time for us to decide this morning what you are really like?  And, after all, Mr. President—­if you please—­who are you?  And once more, Mr. President, in God’s name, who are we?”

This is always the gist of what it says, “Who are we?”

It is the people’s main point, after all, asking a President who they are, wondering if he can interpret them.

Then he shuts his door and thinks, or he calls his Cabinet and thinks.

Rows of little-great men file by all day.  They stand each a few minutes with his little Speck or Dot of the People in his hands, and they say, “This is the People.”

He listens.

It is very hard to be always President of the People when one is listening and the little-great go by.

One has to go back a little, in the night perhaps, or when one is quite alone.  He sees again the Child; it is what he is in the White House for, he remembers, to express this dumb giant, this mighty Child, half weary, half glad, standing there by day by night, saying, “Who are we?” One would think it would be hard to be glib with the Child.

Sometimes it is so deep and silent!

Once when It broke in on Lincoln in this way and said, “Who are we?” he prayed.

CHAPTER IX

NEWS-MEN

It seems very difficult to get news through as to who we really are to a President.  When I look about me and see what the President’s ways are of telling news about himself to us, I see that he is not without his advantages.  But when I look about to see what conveniences we have as a people for telling our President news about us, I note some curious things.  The fears of the American people, the fears and threats of labour and capital are organized and expressed, but their faiths, their wills, the things in them that make them go and that make them American, are not organized and are not expressed.