vernment that will govern us. The political
party in this country that will first be practical with the people, and
that will first get what it wants, will be the political party that
first takes Literature seriously. Our first great practical government
is going to see how a great book, searching the heart of a nation,
expressing and singing the men in it, governs a people. Being a
President in a day like this, if it does not consist in being a poet,
consists in being the kind of President who can be, at least, in
partnership with a poet.

It is not every President who can be his own David, who can rule with
one hand and write psalms and chants for his people with the other.

The call is out, the people have put in their order to the authors of
America, to the boys in the colleges, and to the young women in the
great schools--Our President wants a book.

Before much time has passed, he is going to have one.

Being a President in this country has never been expressed in a book.

The President is going to have a book that expresses him to the people
and that says what he is trying to do. He will live confidentially with
the book. It shall be in his times of trial and loneliness like a great
people coming to him softly. He shall feel with such a book, be it day
or night, the nation by him, by his desk, by his bedside, by his
silence, by his questioning, standing by, and lifting.

In the book the people shall sing to the President. He shall be kept
reminded that we are there. He shall feel daily what America is like.
America shall be focussed into melody. We shall have a literature once
more and the singers, as in Greece, as in all happy lands and in all
great ages, shall go singing through the streets.

There is no singing for a President now. All a President can do when he
is inaugurated, when he begins now, is to kiss helplessly some singing
four thousand years old in a Bible by another nation.

When David sang to his people, he sang the news, the latest news, the
news of what was happening to people about him from week to week.

Why is no one singing 1913, our own American 1913?

Why is no one stuttering out our Bible--one the President could have to
refer to, our own Bible in our own tongue from morning to morning in the
symbols that breathe to us out of the sounds in the street, out of the
air, out of the fresh, bright American sky, and out of the new ground
beneath our feet?

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