If we have a President, let him sing like McAdoo, or like Luther Burbank, or like Theodore N. Vail, or like Colonel Goethals, picking up a little isthmus like Panama, a string between two continents, playing on it as if it were a harp; or like Edward Ripley playing with the Santa Fe Railroad for all the world like Homer with a lute, all his seven thousand men, all his workmen, all their wives and their children, all the cities along the line striking up and joining in the chorus or like Carborundum Acheson, backed up by his little Niagara Falls oiling the wheels of a world, weaving diamonds into steel, hardening the bones of the earth into skyscrapers, into railroads, into the mighty thighs of flying locomotives....

Any man who is seen acting in this world with a thing, as if he believed in the thing, as if he believed in himself and believed in other people, is singing.

Moses striking out with a rod, as we are told, a path along the sea for his people may have done a more showy thing from a religious point of view, hitting the water on top so, making a great splash with an empty place in it for people to march through, but he was not essentially more religious than McAdoo, with all those modest but mighty columns of figures piling up behind him, with all those splendid, dumb, still glowing engineers behind him, lifting up his will against cities, lifting up his will against herds of politicians, haughty newspapers, against the flocks of silly complacent old ferry-boats waddling in the bay, against the wind and the rain and the cold on the water, and all the banks of Wall Street....

When we want to tell News to our President about ourselves in America, we point to William G. McAdoo.

The first news that we, the American people, must contrive to get into the White House about ourselves is that we do not want to be improved, and that we do not like an improving tone in our government.  We want to be expressed the way McAdoos express us.  We want a government that expresses our faith in one another, in what we are doing, and in ourselves, and in the world.

We are singing over here on this continent.  We would not all of us put it in just this way.  But our singing is the main thing we can do, and a government that is trying to improve us feebly, that is looking askance at us and looking askance at our money, and at our labour, and that does not believe in us and join in with us in our singing does not know what we are like.

Our next national business in America is to get the real news over to the President of what we are like.

It is news that we want in the White House.  A missionary in the White House, be he ever so humble, will not do.