to try between the two
until he found it.

The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. It
had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national
blank look.

Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank
look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out.

It was a Focus--a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only
of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not
unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the
focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national
daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking
for it from us, every morning when they get up--asking for it as one man.

To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in
getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and
amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever
known--this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its
mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on
the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred
million people from having a blank look, let its chance go.

The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where it
stopped, the Red Cross vision--the Red Cross spirit.

The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented as
a future for the Red Cross.

The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented
for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this
book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body
for the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division for
the Red Cross.

But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for my
purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people--the
rank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves the
soul of it and who would make the soul of anything--particularly the men
and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to
cool a little--had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set
before the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated by
the leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us--would have
kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active
labor in the Re