, "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!

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 hi