McAdoo found Crowder’s work brilliant. For it reflected his discovery that, when one was considering complex events, almost everything was equally true. It turned out that it was a matter of who phrased the argument first.

He wrote on his letterhead that to pay for the war was patriotic. America was the humble servant of its people, asking them to lend two hundred million dollars at 3.5 percent interest. The interest rate was abominable, but McAdoo explained to the country that this would keep down the cost of the war. He called it not a “War Bond” but a “Liberty Loan.” Then he folded his arms and sat back and waited without challenge for someone to have the gall to argue against buying a Liberty Loan.

When it turned out the war cost more than he’d thought, and the subscriptions to the loans were inadequate, there was a second round of Liberty Loans, which also didn’t pay for the war. A lesser man would have changed his ways, but McAdoo read the landmark studies Psychology and the American Business Model and Industrial Psychology: The American Crucible by Dr. T. H. Münsterberg to demolish what stood in his way: psychology.

Reading the books was like being bathed in light. He had never before felt he understood the worker. He wrote in the margins, “Aspires to greatness, and when that fails, goodness.” “Does not see self as cog but as essential.” Finally, “Optimistic—things will get better, even if he doesn’t understand how.” This was when he determined that patriotism couldn’t actually be sold, that people, to use his phrase, “only wouldn’t not buy it.” Then, like a wish granted before he’d known to make it, he received the call from Douglas Fairbanks. Actors. Hold them up side by side with the war effort, and the mind would draw a straight line between them.

That author T. H. Münsterberg had given him new ideas caused him to get out his letterhead to write him a letter of appreciation. But his secretary looked at him in disbelief.

“Münsterberg?” His secretary had graduated from Princeton, read The New Republic, and was still flush with the idea that wherever he stood was the fixed magnetic center of the nation. This annoyed McAdoo, but, on the other hand, his young charge did keep abreast of gossip. “The photoplay writer?”

McAdoo felt confused. He had been thinking of the picture houses, of course, but they had no relation to Münsterberg. Or so he thought. “No, the industrial psychologist.”

“He writes on motion pictures also. Sir.”

It was a “sir” that meant a certain young man would be at his club tonight, telling his friends about his employer’s ignorance. McAdoo let himself be a fool. “And?”

“You aren’t actually writing him a letter, sir?”