Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee

the spirit in which he will do it.

CHAPTER V

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THE CROWD-MAN—AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS SEE

       Table of Contents

      When Wilbur Wright flew around the Statue of Liberty in New York the other day, his doing it was a big event; but a still bigger event, as it seems to some of us, was the way he felt about New York when he did it. All New York could not make him show off. Hundreds of thousands of people on roofs could look up at the sky over New York, for him to go by, all that they liked. He slipped down to Washington without saying anything, on the 3:25 train, to attend to flying as part of the serious business of the world.

      Why fly around a little town like New York, or show your bright wings in the light, or circle the Statue of Liberty for fun, when you are reconstructing civilization, and binding a whole planet together, and wrapping the heavens close down around the earth, and making railroads everywhere out of the air? New York is always a little superficial and funny about itself. All it needs to do, it seems to think, is to snap its fingers at a man of genius anywhere on this broad world, whisper to him pleasantly, and he will trot promptly up, of course, and do his little turn for it.

      But not Wilbur Wright. Wilbur Wright would not give two million people an encore, or even come back to bow. As one looked over from Mount Tom one could see all New York black and solid on the tops of its roofs and houses looking up into a great hole of air for him, and Wilbur Wright slipping quietly off down to Washington and leaving them there, a whole great city under the sky, with its heads up!

      A little experience like this has been what New York has needed for a long time. It takes a scientist to do these things. I wish there were some poet who would do as well. Even a prophet up above New York—or seer of men and of years—glinting his wings in the light, the New York Sun and the World and the Times down below, all their opera-glasses trained on him, and all those little funny reporters running helplessly about, all the people pouring out from Doctor Parkhurst's church to look up. … It would be something.

      Probably there are very few capitals in the world—Paris, Berlin, or London—that would not be profoundly stirred and possibly much improved by having some man suddenly appear up over them, who would be so interested in what he was doing that he would forget to notice whether anybody was looking—who would be capable of slipping off quietly and leaving an entire city with its heads up, and going on and attending to business.

      There have been times when we would have been relieved, some of us, if the North Pole could have been discovered in this way and without large audiences tagging. There are some of us who will never cease to regret as long as we live that the North Pole could not have waited a little. We would rather have had Wilbur Wright discover it. One can imagine how he would do it: fly gracefully up to it all by himself, and discover it some pleasant evening, and have it over with, and slip back on his soft wings in the night, and not say anything about it. It is this Wilbur Wright spirit that I would like to dwell on in these pages. It seems to me it is a true modern spirit, the spirit which alone could make our civilization great, and the spirit which alone could make crowds great. It was the crowd that spoiled the way the Pole was discovered—all the millions of people, vast, thoughtless audiences piling in and making a show of it. Many people in America, all the vast crowds reading about it, seemed to feel that they were more important than the Pole; and when Captain Peary came back, vast crowds of these same people paid as much as five dollars apiece for the privilege of being in the same room with him. It was quite impossible not to contrast Captain Peary in his attitude toward the crowd and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to be a Wilbur Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair. All the while as he went about the country holding his little exhibits of the tip of the planet we could not help wishing, many of us who were in the Audience, that this man who sat there before us, the man who had the Thing in his hand, who had collected the North Pole, would not notice us, would snub us if need be a little, and would leave these people, these millions of people, with their heads up and go quietly on to the South Pole and collect that. It is because there are thousands of men who understand just how Wilbur Wright felt when he slipped away the other day in New York and left the entire city with its heads up that we have every reason to expect that the crowd is to produce great leaders, and is to become a great crowd, great and humble in spirit before God, before the stars, and the atoms, and the microbes, and before Itself. In the meantime, however, we see all about us in the world countless would-be leaders of the crowd, who would perhaps not quite understand the way Wilbur Wright felt that day when he slipped away from New York and left the entire city with its heads up. Most newspaper men—men who are in the habit of writing for a crowd and regarding a crowd quite respectfully—will have wondered a little why Wilbur Wright could have let such a crowd go by. Most actors and theatrical people would have stayed over a train or so and given one more little performance with all those wistful people on the roof-tops. There are only a very few clergymen in England or America to-day who, with a great audience like that and so many men in it, would ever have thought of slipping off on the 3:25 train in the way Wilbur Wright did. The ministers and the politicians of all countries are still wondering a little—if they ever thought of it—how Wright did it. Most of the other people in the world wonder a little, too, but I imagine that the great inventors of the world who read about it the next morning did not wonder. The true scientists, in this country and in Germany and in France, all understood just how Wilbur Wright felt when he left New York with its heads up. The great artists of the world, in literature, in painting, and architecture; the great railroad builders, the city builders, the nation builders, the great statesmen, the great biologists, and chemists, understood. James J. Hill, with his face toward the Pacific, understood. Alexander Graham Bell, out abroad doing the listening and talking and thinking the thoughts of eighty million people, understood. Marconi, making the ships whisper across the sea, and William G. McAdoo, shooting a hundred and seventy thousand people a day through a hole under the Hudson—understood.

      And God, when He made the world. And Columbus when he discovered America. And Jesus Christ when He was so happy and so preoccupied over His vision of a new world, over inventing Christianity, that it seemed a very small and incidental thing to die on the Cross—He understood.

      Wilbur Wright's secret was that he had a vision. His vision was that a human being could be greater and more powerful than the world had ever believed before.

      Just to be there was a great thought, to be allowed to be one of those admitted, to be present at the first faint beginning, the first still alighting of the human spirit from the earth upon the sky. Wilbur Wright made the most ordinary man a genius a minute. He made him wonder softly who he was—and the people all about him—who were they? and what would they think, and what would they do next? The first flash of light on the wings was a thousand years. It was as if almost for a moment he saw at last the whole earth about him. History, churches, factories on it, slipping out of its cocoon at last—its little, old, faded, tied-down cocoon, and sailing upon the air—sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible, through the Intangible—out to the Sun. …

      Perhaps the reason that New York was a great city a few minutes the other day when Wilbur Wright was there was that Wilbur Wright had a new vision in the presence of all those men of something that they could do. He touched the imagination of men about themselves. They were profoundly moved because they saw him in their presence inventing a new kind and new size of human being. He raised the standard of impossibility, and built an annex on to the planet while they looked; took a great strip off of space three miles wide and folded it softly on to the planet all the way round before their eyes. For three miles more—three miles farther up above the ground—there was a space where human beings would have