Almost any nation or government can get some kind of Moses to-day but the men that America is producing would not particularly notice a Moses probably now.  A Moses might do for a Rockefeller, but he could not really do anything with a man like Theodore N. Vail who has the telephones and telegraphs of a country talking and ticking to us all, all night, all day, what kind of a man he is.

A big affirmative, inspirational man like David or even Napoleon who inspires people with one breath and fights hard with the next, a man who swings his hat for the world, a man who goes on ahead and says “Come!” is the only man who can be practical in America to-day in helping real live American men like McAdoo, like Edison and Acheson,—­men who can express a people in a business—­to express them.

The people have spoken.  A man in the White House who cannot say “Come” goes.

We want a poet in the White House.  If we can not have a poet for the White House soon, we want a poet who will make us a poet for the White House.

I do not believe it is too much to expect a President to be a poet.  We have had a poet for President once in one supreme crisis of this nation and the crisis that is coming now is so much deeper, so much more human and world-wide than Lincoln’s was that it would almost seem as if a place like the White House (where one’s poetry could really work) would make a poet out of anybody.

A President who has not a kind of plain, still, homely poetry in him, a belief about people that sings, in the present appalling crisis of the world is impracticable or visionary.

So we do not say, “Have we a President that can get our Bells, Edisons, McAdoos, Achesons to be good by toeing a line?”

We say, “Have we a President who can swing into step, who can join in the singing, who can catch up?”

Tunnel McAdoo, when he lifted up his will against the sea and against the seers of Wall Street, was singing.  When he conceived those steel cars, those roaring yellow streaks of light ringing through rocks beneath the river, streets of people flashing through under the slime and under the fish and under the ships and under the wide sunshine on the water, he was singing!  He raised millions of dollars singing.

Of course he sang the way Americans usually sing, and had to do as well as he could in talking to bankers and investors not to look as if he were singing, but there it all was singing inside him, the seven years of digging, the seven years of dull thundering on rocks under the city, and at last the happy steel cars all green and gold, the streams of people all yellow light hissing and pouring through—­those vast pipes for people beneath the sea!