IKE

I have always wanted to write a book an employer and a workman could read
looking over each other's shoulders. I would have two chapters on every
subject. In one chapter I would tell the employer things his workman
wants him to know, and in the next chapter I would tell the workman
things that for years the employer has been trying to get him to notice.
I would begin each chapter in such a way that no employer or workman
would ever know which was which, or which was his chapter, until he had
got in quite a little way; and I would do my best to have everybody read
each other's chapters all through the book. An employer would be reading
along in his chapter as innocent as you please, and slap his leg and say,
"THAT'S IT! THAT'S IT! It does me good to think my workmen are reading
this!" And then he would turn over the leaf and he would come plump full
head on into three paragraphs about himself and about how the public
feels about him, and about how his workmen feel about him, and about what
God is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my book
are going to help God to do to him, that will make him think. The first
thing he will think of perhaps will be to lay down the book. Then before
he knows it he will see another of those things he wants his workmen to
read softly poking itself out of the page at him. Then he will slap his
leg and think how I am making his workmen think. So he will go through
the book slapping his leg and shouting "Amen" in one chapter, and sitting
still and thinking in the next.

This is the gist of what I propose a new organization shall do on a
national scale.

It may seem a rather simple-minded way to describe what I propose a great
aggregation of American men and women on the scale of the Red Cross,
should do, but the soul, the spirit, the temperament, even the technique
of what I have in mind--in miniature, is in it.

It is true that it would be a certain satisfaction of course to an author
to prove to employers and employees that they could get on better
together than they could apart, even if they got on together better only
in a kind of secret and private way in the pages of his own book; and it
is true that a book in which I could make an employer and an employee
work their minds together through my own little fountain pen would count
some. I would at least be dramatizing my idea in ink.

But people do not believe ideas dramatized in ink.

The thing for an au