Getting Together—and How It Is Done

The Nearer an Idea Comes to Not Being One, the Better Its Chances for Becoming a Nation-Wide Movement

F. M. COLBY

BUT of the new movements started last week, I happened to notice two, both destined to be "nation-wide" in about three months. One had completed the stage of local organization and was passing the city hall at Thompsontown, N. Y., and thence into history. The local organization of the other was fust beginning in a magazine, but you could see at a glance that it was certain to be rapid.

At Thompsontown there were five hundred men in line in green turbans, purple tunics, yellow silk Turkish trousers, stockings to match turbans, and white sneakers; seven of the men armed with broad swords, carrying banners, which together spelled the word Kiborah; and there was a catafalque in red and gold bearing a goddess. But though marked off outwardly in this manner, the Kiborah movement presented no such divergence from within. It was defined as civic, social, democratic, patriotic, and American, thus attributing to itself no quality that other movements cared to be without. Nor was it possible to learn from members any reason for joining it, that did not account equally for joining anything else, or for not joining anything. But they did say that the organizers believed in a broad programme as likely to bring the largest number together. They felt that by excluding only those citizens who had decided to be uncivil, unsocial, undemocratic, unpatriotic, and un-American, they would arrive sooner at "nation-wide" results. Broad and brotherly, that was the idea of it.

The Second Movement

BREADTH also was the main idea of that other movement which I saw beginning in a magazine. Everybody knows there is something wrong with society, said the organizer, but nobody has ever supplied a clear statement or a rallying-cry, and he was now ready to supply both. "Misdirection of Labor" was the clear statement and "Useful Work" was the rallying-cry. "Useful Work", he said, is an idea that will attract the thoughtful, and, at the same time, not repel the thoughtless, and a large proportion of the population could undoubtedly be got together on it. His method of realization consisted of an "ethical appeal with an emotional drive", comprising (1) An "eager and captivating pamphlet on coal"; (2) Twelve more pamphlets on Unemployment, the Police Force, and similar evils; (3) Twelve more pamphlets, "written in joy, beginning with the Middle Class—a folksy pamphlet in Kansas or Indiana style introducing us to ourselves". By these means, he said, something would be revealed; "the collective will would then grip it; and the idea would go through to its goal".

I suppose all the new social and religious bodies founded in this country in my lifetime have been founded in* this manner, and that nobody really knows why he is a member of anything. I suppose they all arise from the executive ability of founders, quite irrespective of what they found. Perhaps no American actually joins anything, but is merely blown into it by an "emotional drive". Somebody says Jerusalem! or Lord love you! or Let us be young and Christian, or Let us be good and true, and, before the bystander knows it, he is marching with the Jerusalemites up Fifth Avenue, or is a member of the Church of the Lord's Beloved with sixteen colleges in the Middle West, or a field worker for the splendidly organized Good and True Association with G. T. A. outposts all over the world. Thoughts that send any other people quietly to bed seem to speed ours to an interstate convention. Probably a rather important civic body could be founded on a yawn, if an organizing person happened to be present. In fact, the nearer a sentiment comes to a yawn, the more civic it seems to be, and the better suited for brotherhood purpose, being a broad thing in which everyone can join, and likely to be "nation-wide". Where the yawn occurs, at all events, civism seems almost certain to follow. That is why the most successful organizers always aim at something between the most popular of the Ten Commandments and a yawn, thus excluding only minds of a singularly wakeful malevolence.

But while the two movements I have mentioned do not differ from their predecessors, they do differ from each other, and as between the two I much prefer Kiborah, which seems to me at bottom perfectly honest and reasonable. The language of both is of course quite meaningless, but in the case of Kiborah this is at least excusable. Kiborah is simply an organized aspiration, and that is why its language is vague. No man knows why he is a member of Kiborah, but he feels why he is a member of Kiborah, and the light green turban and purple coat is a better expression of that feeling than any words could be. They are the outward signs of the untamed patches of a normal mind in the routine and uniformities of Thompsontown. Light green turbans are the free verse of plumbers, shooting upward out of the little wild-life left within them, after the civilization of Thompscintown has done its work; and if forty plumbers carried away by the green turban idea achieve only an identical appearance, that is only what happens to every latest school of poets. Deviation is the motive in each case; uniformity is the accident. Prometheus nowadays always marches with the Order of the Prometheans whether on the street or in the magazines. It is not the fault of the contemporary Prometheus that he happens to be born by the dozen.

Seen on the Grand Trunk line of American verse reaching back to Longfellow, free verse writers stand out like human beings walking on the sleepers, but so do the members of Kiborah seen against the regularities of Thompsontown. I do not mean that a shoedealer flinging himself into yellow silk Turkish trousers is as picturesque or interesting as a Futurist, Neo-Archaist or Post-Concussionist poet jumping the garden walls of contemporary literature. I simply mean that measured by standards of Thompsontown he is flinging himself as far. Though inferior in artistic merit, it is as sane and as honourable an activity.

But the Society of Useful Endeavour, as I presume the other movement will be called, is not directed toward any change whatever, not even toward a change of clothing. On the contrary, it aims at mere similitude of mind without even caring what the mind contains. Like eighty others on the list of recently formed civic and religious bodies including Americanization societies, its real aim is to increase the resemblance between the very sort of persons who resemble each other too much already. It is not a new movement, like something marching with a band and clad in peculiar clothing; it is an old muddle, like any one of the fifty-two newest American churches. It is based on the familiar principle that the nearer an idea comes to not being one, the better it serves for purposes of rapid organization—that if you can form an Onward Society of Christian Soldiers so broad in principle as to admit the heathen you can soon have two millions on the run. The benevolence of the social orgariizers is like the condition of the people that the Greek saw on the moon— all hollow on the inside, lined with fur, that one might get into the other and warm himself.

Clarifying Conversation

SUGGESTIBILITY is, I believe, the term applied to it by sociologists, and I gather from M. Gustave Le Bon, French mob psychologist, and others, that any short reiterated cry may in every country be followed by the rush of a million minds into a vacuum. But the superior suggestibility of my fellow-citizens does not in my opinion account for all the difference. I believe it is in part accounted for by the absence of conversation in this country, and by the exclusion of certain topics from it in the rare instances in which conversation occurs. I believe that in France, for instance, where people for several centuries have had the habit of speaking freely, at least sixty-five brand-new American religions have passed off in private conversation, the conversers having talked back to the founders and convinced them that the religions had been already founded or were not religions at all.

I raise no question at any point of the messianic menu from Adventists to the Sons of Zebadee, and I find no fault with any socially helpful civic body down to and including the Brothers of the Zodiac. After organization has taken place it is not polite either to ask the reason why or to mention duplications. However absent-minded the organized may have been at the time, they like to think they once knew why they were organized. But the presence of a freely conversing class in this country would, I believe, have so stimulated their curiosity in respect to what they were about to do, that about two hundred of the most powerful organizations on the list would have decided not to do it. They would have become members or communicants of the hundred and eighty organizations earlier in the alphabet who were doing it already.

But without disparaging the last dozen most rapidly organized Christian and civic departures, I must say that the contrast between them and the body of doctrine they departed from does not seem to me nearly so marked or so hopeful as the five hundred pairs of yellow silk Turkish trousers of Kiborah seen against the background of the Chamber of Commerce of Thompsontown.