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Crowds by Gerald Stanley Lee

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CROWDS

A MOVING-PICTURE
OF DEMOCRACY

BY

GERALD STANLEY LEE

_Editor of "Mount Tom"_

IN FIVE BOOKS
CROWDS AND MACHINES
LETTING THE CROWD BE GOOD
LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL
CROWDS AND HEROES
GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK


GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY


_Copyright, 1913, by_
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian_


COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, INCORPORATED

BOOKS

By GERALD STANLEY LEE

THE LOST ART OF READING
_A Sketch of Civilization_

THE CHILD AND THE BOOK
_A Constructive Criticism of Education_

THE SHADOW CHRIST
_A Study of the Hebrew Men of Genius_

THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES
_An Introduction to the Twentieth Century_

INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES
_A Study of the Man of Genius in Business_

CROWDS
_A Moving Picture of Democracy_


_Gratefully inscribed to a little Mountain,
a great Meadow, and a Woman.
To the Mountain for the sense of time, to
the Meadow for the sense of space, and
to the Woman for the sense of everything._


TABLE OF CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

CROWDS AND MACHINES


I. WHERE ARE WE GOING? 3

II. THE CROWD SCARE 19

III. THE MACHINE SCARE 34

IV. THE STRIKE--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS THINK 49

V. THE CROWD-MAN--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS SEE 58

VI. THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS 65

VII. IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN 66

VIII. THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE 69

IX. THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT PEOPLE 74

X. A DEMOCRATIC THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE 76

XI. DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS 80

XII. NEW KINDS AND NEW SIZES OF MEN 86


BOOK TWO

LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD


I. SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD 93

II. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE EFFICIENT? 96

III. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE INTERESTING? 103

IV. PROSPECTS OF THE LIAR 107

V. PROSPECTS OF THE BULLY 111

VI. GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS 114

VII. THOUGHTS ON BEING IMPROVED BY OTHER PEOPLE 116

VIII. MAKING GOODNESS HURRY 125

IX. TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS 128

X. THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTONOUS AND THE SUCCESSFUL 142

XI. THE SUCCESSFUL 146

XII. THE NECKS OF THE WICKED 154

XIII. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL? 163

XIV. IS IT SECOND RATE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL? 167

XV. THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT 173

XVI. THE MEN AHEAD PULL 178

XVII. THE CROWDS PUSH 184

XVIII. THE MAN WHO SAYS HOW, SAYS HOW 186

XIX. AND THE MACHINE STARTS! 194


BOOK THREE

LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL


PART I. WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES

I. MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP 205

II. MR. CARNEGIE TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE READ 208

III. MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE 211

IV. PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN BOYS 221

V. THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE 227

PART II. IRON MACHINES

I. STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS 236

II. BELLS AND WHEELS 240

III. DEW AND ENGINES 243

IV. DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL! 245

V. AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON 248

VI. THE MACHINES' MACHINES 250

VII. THE MEN'S MACHINES 252

VIII. THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD 256

IX. THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS 262

X. THE MACHINE-TRAINERS 266

XI. MACHINES, CROWDS, AND ARTISTS 269

PART III. PEOPLE-MACHINES

I. NOW! 280

II. COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES 288

III. THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN 286

IV. LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT 290


BOOK FOUR

CROWDS AND HEROES


I. THE SOCIALIST AND THE HERO 297

II. THE CROWD AND THE HERO 301

III. THE CROWD AND THE AVERAGE PERSON 303

IV. THE CROWD AND PIERPONT MORGAN 307

V. THE CROWD AND TOM MANN 313

VI. AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT PIERPONT MORGAN 323

VII. AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT TOM MANN 327

VIII. THE MEN WHO LOOK 331

IX. WHO IS AFRAID? 337

X. RULES FOR TELLING A HERO--WHEN ONE SEES ONE 343

XI. THE TECHNIQUE OF COURAGE 346

XII. THE MEN WHO WANT THINGS 349

XIII. MEN WHO GET THINGS 356

XIV. SOURCES OF COURAGE FOR OTHERS--TOLERATION 364

XV. CONVERSION 371

XVI. EXCEPTION 380

XVII. INVENTION 383

XVIII. THE MAN WHO PULLS THE WORLD TOGETHER 397

XIX. THE MAN WHO STANDS BY 400

XX. THE STRIKE OF THE SAVIOURS 402

XXI. THE LEAGUE OF THE MEN WHO ARE NOT AFRAID 404


BOOK FIVE

GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK


PART I. NEWS AND LABOUR 413

PART II. NEWS AND MONEY 422

PART III. NEWS AND GOVERNMENT

I. OXFORD STREET AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 431

II. OXFORD STREET HUMS, THE HOUSE HEMS 440

III. PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES 449

IV. THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO 455

V. THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!" 463

VI. THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE YOU?" 469

VII. THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE WE?" 472

VIII. NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT 474

IX. NEWS-MEN 476

X. AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT AND GOVERNMENT 483

XI-XII. NEWS-BOOKS 505-513

XIII. NEWS-PAPERS 517

XIV. NEWS-MACHINES 524

XV. NEWS-CROWDS 527

XVI. CROWD-MEN 550

EPILOGUE 539




BOOK ONE

CROWDS AND MACHINES


TO CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

_"A battered, wrecked old man
Thrown on this savage shore far, far from home,
Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows twelve dreary months
... The end I know not, it is all in Thee,
Or small or great I know not--haply what broad fields, what
lands!...

And these things I see suddenly, what mean they
As if some miracle, some hand divine unsealed my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me."_




CHAPTER I

WHERE ARE WE GOING?


The best picture I know of my religion is Ludgate Hill as one sees it
going down the foot of Fleet Street. It would seem to many perhaps like
a rather strange half-heathen altar, but it has in it the three things
with which I worship most my Maker in this present world--the three
things which it would be the breath of religion to me to offer to a God
together--Cathedrals, Crowds, and Machines.

With the railway bridge reaching over, all the little still locomotives
in the din whispering across the street; with the wide black crowd
streaming up and streaming down, and the big, faraway, other-worldly
church above, I am strangely glad. It is like having a picture of one's
whole world taken up deftly, and done in miniature and hung up for one
against the sky--the white steam which is the breath of modern life, the
vast hurrying of our feet, and that Great Finger pointing toward heaven
day and night for us all....

I never tire of walking out a moment from my nook in Clifford's Inn and
stealing a glimpse and coming back to my fireplace. I sit still a moment
before going to work and look in the flames and think. The great roar
outside the Court gathers it all up--that huge, boundless, tiny,
summed-up world out there; flings it faintly against my quiet windows
while I sit and think.

And when one thinks of it a minute, it sends one half-fearfully,
half-triumphantly back to one's work--the very thought of it. The Crowd
hurrying, the Crowd's flurrying Machines, and the Crowd's God, send one
back to one's work!

In the afternoon I go out again, slip my way through the crowds along
the Strand, toward Charing Cross.

I never tire of watching the drays, the horses, the streaming taxis, all
these little, fearful, gliding crowds of men and women, when a little
space of street is left, flowing swiftly, flowing like globules, like
mercury, between the cabs.

But most of all I like looking up at that vast second story of the
street, coming in over one like waves, like seas--all these happy,
curious tops of 'buses; these dear, funny, way-up people on benches;
these world-worshippers, sight-worshippers, and Americans--all these
little scurrying congregations, hundreds of them, rolling past.

I sit on the front seat of a horse 'bus elbow to elbow with the driver,
staring down over the brink of the abyss upon ears and necks--that low,
distant space where the horses look so tiny and so ineffectual and so
gone-by below.

The street is the true path of the spirit. To walk through it, or roll
or swing on top of a 'bus through it--the miles of faces, all these
tottering, toddling, swinging miles of legs and stomachs; and on all
sides of you, and in the windows and along the walks, the things they
wear, and the things they eat, and the things they pour down their
little throats, and the things they pray to and curse and worship and
swindle in! It is like being out in the middle of a great ocean of
living, or like climbing up some great mountain-height of people, their
abysses and their clouds about them, their precipices and jungles and
heavens, the great high roads of their souls reaching off.... I can
never say why, but so strange is it, so full of awe is it, and of
splendour and pity, that there are times when, rolling and swinging
along on top of a 'bus, with all this strange, fearful joy of life about
me, within me ... it is as if on top of my 'bus I had been far away in
some infinite place, and had felt Heaven and Hell sweep past.

One of the first things that strikes an American when he slips over from
New York, and finds himself, almost before he had thought of it--walking
down the Strand, suddenly, instead of Broadway, is the way
things--thousands of things at once; begin happening to him.

Of course, with all the things that are happening to him--the 'buses,
the taxis, the Wren steeples, the great streams of new sights in the
streets, the things that happen to his eyes and to his ears, to his feet
and his hands, and to his body lunging through the ground and swimming
up in space on top of a 'bus through this huge, glorious, yellow mist of
people ... there are all the things besides that begin happening to his
mind.

In New York, of course, he rushes along through the city, in a kind of
tunnel of his own thoughts, of his own affairs, and drives on to his
point, and New York does not--at least it does not very often--make
things happen to his mind. He is not in London five minutes before he
begins to notice how London does his thinking for him. The streets of
the city set him to thinking, mile after mile, miles of comparing, miles
of expecting.

And above the streets that he walks through and drives through he finds
in London another complete set of streets that interest him: the
greater, silenter streets of England--the streets of people's thoughts.
And he reads the great newspapers, those huge highways on which the
English people are really going somewhere.... "_Where are they going?_"
He goes through the editorials, he stumbles through the news, "_Where
are the English people going?_"

* * * * *

An American thinks of the English people in the third person--at first,
of course.

After three days or so, he begins, half-unconsciously, slipping over
every now and then into what seems to be a vague, loose first person
plural.

Then the first person plural grows.

He finds at last that his thinking has settled down into a kind of
happy, easy-going, international, editorial "We." New York and London,
Chicago and Sheffield, go drifting together through his thoughts, and
even Paris, glimmering faintly over there, and a dim round world, and he
asks, as the people of a world stream by, "_Where are WE going?_"

Thus it is that London, looming, teeming, world-suggesting, gets its
grip upon a man, a fresh American, and stretches him, stretches him
before his own eyes, makes him cosmopolitan, does his thinking for him.

* * * * *

There was a great sea to still his soul and lay down upon his spirit
that big, quiet roundness of the earth.

Nothing is quite the same after that wide strip of sea--sleeping out
there alone night by night--the gentle round earth sloping away down
from under one on both sides, in the midst of space.... Then, suddenly,
almost before one knows, that quiet Space still lingering round one,
perhaps one finds oneself thrust up out of the ground in the night into
that big yellow roar of Trafalgar Square.

And here are the swift sudden crowds of people, one's own fellow-men
hurrying past. One looks into the faces of the people hurrying past:
"_Where are we going?_" One looks at the stars: "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"

* * * * *

That night, when I was thrust up out of the ground and stood dazed in
the Square, I was told in a minute that this London where I was was a
besieged and conquered city. Some men had risen up in a day and said to
London: "No one shall go in. No one shall go out."

I was in the great proud city at last, the capital of the world, her
big, new, self-assured inventions all about her, all around her, and
soldiers camping out with her locomotives!

With her long trains for endless belts of people going in and coming
out, with her air-brakes, electric lights, and motor-cars and aerial
mails, it seemed passing strange to be told that her great stations were
all choked up with a queer, funny, old, gone-by, clanky piece of
machinery, an invention for making people good, like soldiers!

And I stood in the middle of the roar of Trafalgar Square and asked, as
all England was asking that night: "Where are we going?"

And I looked in the faces of the people hurrying past.

And nobody knew.

And the next day I went through the silenter streets of the city, the
great crowded dailies where all the world troops through, and then the
more quiet weeklies, then the monthlies, more dignified and like private
parks; and the quarterlies, too, thoughtful, high-minded, a little
absent, now and then a footfall passing through.

And I found them all full of the same strange questioning: "Where are we
going?"

And nobody knew.

It was the same questioning I had just left in New York, going up all
about me, out of the skyscrapers.

New York did not know.

Now London did not know.

* * * * *

And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I thought of
books.

I could not but look about--how could I do otherwise than look about?--a
lonely American walking at last past all these nobly haunted doorways
and windows--for your idealists or interpreters, your men who bring in
the sea upon your streets and the mountains on your roof-tops; who
still see the wide, still reaches of the souls of men beyond the faint
and tiny roar of London.

I could not but look for your men of imagination, your poets; for the
men who build the dreams and shape the destinies of nations because they
mould their thoughts.

I do not like to say it. How shall an American, coming to you out of his
long, flat, literary desert, dare to say it?... Here, where Shakespeare
played mightily, and like a great boy with the world; where Milton,
Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley, and even Dickens flooded the lives
and refreshed the hearts of the people; here, in these selfsame streets,
going past these same old, gentle, smoky temples where Charles Lamb
walked and loved a world, and laughed at a world, and even made
one--lifted over his London forever into the hearts of men....

I can only say what I saw those first few fresh days: John Galsworthy
out with his camera--his beautiful, sad, foggy camera; Arnold Bennett
stitching and stitching faithfully twenty-four hours a day--big, curious
tapestries of little things; H.G. Wells, with his retorts, his
experiments about him, his pots and kettles of humanity in a great stew
of steam, half-hopeful, half-dismayed, mixing up his great, new, queer
messes of human nature; and (when I could look up again) G.K.
Chesterton, divinely swearing, chanting, gloriously contradicting,
rolled lustily through the wide, sunny spaces of His Own Mind; and
Bernard Shaw (all civilization trooping by), the eternal boy, on the
eternal curbstone of the world, threw stones; and the Bishop of
Birmingham preached a fine, helpless sermon....

* * * * *

When a new American, coming from his own big, hurried, formless,
speechless country, finds himself in what he had always supposed to be
this trim, arranged, grown-up, articulate England, and when, thrust up
out of the ground in Trafalgar Square, he finds himself looking at that
vast yellow mist of people, that vast bewilderment of faces, of the
poor, of the rich, coming and going they cannot say where--he naturally
thinks at first it must be because they cannot speak; and when he looks
to those who speak for them, to their writers or interpreters, and when
he finds that they are bewildered, that they are asking the same
question over and over that we in America are asking too, "Where are we
going?" he is brought abruptly up, front to front with the great
broadside of modern life. London, his last resort, is as bewildered as
New York; and so, at last, here it is. It has to be faced now and here,
as if it were some great scare-head or billboard on the world, "WHERE
ARE WE GOING?"

* * * * *

The most stupendous feat for the artist or man of imagination in modern
times is to conceive a picture or vision for our Society--our present
machine-civilization--a common expectation for people which will make
them want to live.

If Leonardo were living now, he would probably slight for the time being
his building bridges, and skimp his work on Mona Lisa, and write a
book--an exultant book about common people. He would focus and express
democracy as only the great and true aristocrat or genius or artist will
ever do it. A great society must be expressed as a vision or expectation
before men can see it together, and go to work on it together, and make
it a fact. What makes a society great is that it is full of people who
have something to live for and who know what it is. It is because nobody
knows, now, that our present society is not great. The different kinds
of people in it have not made up their minds what they are for, and some
kinds have particularly failed to make up their minds what the other
kinds are for.

We are all making our particular contribution to the common vision, and
some of us are able to say in one way and some in another what this
vision is; but it is going to take a supreme catholic, summing-up
individualist, a great man or artist--a man who is all of us in one--to
express for Crowds, and for all of us together, where we want to go,
what we think we are for, and what kind of a world we want.

This will have to be done first in a book. The modern world is
collecting its thoughts. It is trying to write its bible.

The Bible of the Hebrews (which had to be borrowed by the rest of the
world if they were to have one) is the one great outstanding fact and
result of the Hebrew genius. They did not produce a civilization, but
they produced a book for the rest of the world to make civilizations out
of, a book which has made all other nations the moral passengers of the
Hebrews for two thousand years.

And the whole spirit and aim of this book, the thing about it that made
it great, was that it was the sublimest, most persistent, most colossal,
masterful attempt ever made by men to look forth upon the earth, to see
all the men in it, like spirits hurrying past, and to answer the
question, "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"

I would not have any one suppose that in these present tracings and
outlines of thought I am making an attempt to look upon the world and
say where the people are going, and where they think they are going, and
where they want to go. I have attempted to find out, and put down what
might seem at first sight (at least it did to me) the answer to a very
small and unimportant question--"Where is it that I really want to go
myself?" "What kind of a world is it, all the facts about me being duly
considered, I really want to be in?"

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he
can help it. If Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Chesterton or Mr. Wells had been
so good as to write a book for me in which they had given the answer to
my question, in which they had said more or less authoritatively for me
what kind of a world it is that I want to be in, this book would never
have been written. The book is not put forward as an attempt to arrange
a world, or as a system or a chart, or as a nation-machine, or even as
an argument. The one thing that any one can fairly claim for this book
is that one man's life has been saved with it. It is the record of one
man fighting up through story after story of crowds and of crowds'
machines to the great steel and iron floor on the top of the world,
until he had found the manhole in it, and broken through and caught a
breath of air and looked at the light. The book is merely a
life-preserver--that is all; and one man's life-preserver. Perhaps the
man is representative, and perhaps he is not. At all events, here it is.
Anybody else who can use it is welcome to it.

* * * * *

The first and most practical step in getting what one wants in this
world is wanting it. One would think that the next step would be
expressing what one wants. But it almost never is. It generally consists
in wanting it still harder and still harder until one can express it.

This is particularly true when the thing one wants is a new world. Here
are all these other people who have to be asked. And until one wants it
hard enough to say it, to get it outside one's self, possibly make it
catching, nothing happens.

If one were to point out one trait rather than another that makes
Bernard Shaw, for so brilliant a man, so ineffective as a leader, or
literary statesman, or social reformer, it would be his modesty. He has
never wanted anything.

If I could have found a book by Bernard Shaw in which Mr. Shaw had
merely said what he wanted himself, it is quite possible this book would
not have been written. Even if Mr. Shaw, without saying what he wanted,
had ever shown in any corner of any book that one man's wanting
something in this world amounted to anything, or could make any one else
want it, or could make any difference in him, or in the world around
him, perhaps I would not have written this book.

Everywhere, as I have looked about me among the bookmen in America, in
England, I have found, not the things that they wanted in their books,
but always these same deadly lists or bleak inventories--these prairies
of things that they did not want.

Now, as a matter of fact, I knew already, with an almost despairing
distinctness, nearly all these things I did not want and it has not
helped me (with all due courtesy and admiration) having John Galsworthy
out photographing them day after day, so that I merely did not want them
harder. And Mr. Wells's measles and children's diseases, too. I knew
already that I did not want them. And Mr. Shaw's entire, heroic, almost
noble collection of things he does not want does not supply me--nor
could it supply any other man with furniture to make a world with--even
if it were not this real, big world, with rain and sunshine and wind and
people in it, and were only that little, wonderful world a man lives
within his own heart. There have been times, and there will be more of
them, when I could not otherwise than speak as the champion of Bernard
Shaw; but, after all, what single piece of furniture is there that
George Bernard Shaw, living with his great attic of not-things all
around him, is able to offer to furnish me for me single, little, warm,
lighted room to keep my thoughts in? Nor has he furnished me with one
thing with which I would care to sit down in my little room and
think--looking into the cold, perfect hygienic ashes he has left upon my
hearth. Even if I were a revolutionist, and not a mere, plain human
being, loving life and wanting to live more abundantly, I am bound to
say I do not see what there is in Mr. Galsworthy's photographs, or in
Mr. Wells's rich, bottomless murk of humanity to make a revolution for.
And Mr. Bernard Shaw, with all his bottles of disinfectants and shelves
of sterilized truths, his hard well-being and his glittering comforts,
has presented the vision of a world in which at the very best--even if
it all comes out as he says it will--a man would merely have things
without wanting them, and without wanting anything.

* * * * *

And so it has seemed to me that even if he is quite unimportant, any man
to-day who, in some public place, like a book, shall paint the picture
of his heart's desire, who shall throw up, as upon a screen, where all
men may see them, his most immediate and most pressing ideals, would
perform an important service. If a man's sole interest were to find out
what all men in the world want, the best way to do it would be for him
to say quite definitely, so that we could all compare notes, what he
wanted himself. Speaking for a planet has gone by, but possibly, if a
few of us but speak for ourselves, the planet will talk back, and we
shall find out at last what it really is that it wants.

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