When he was taking Nedda up to bed up an outside staircase in the courtyard he could see the flare of the tanker burning outside of the harbor on the blank walls and tiled roofs of the houses.
Nedda wouldn’t get undressed but wanted to see Joe’s money. Joe didn’t have any money so he brought out the silk stockings. She looked worried and shook her head but she was darn pretty and had big black eyes and Joe wanted it bad and yelled for Charley and Charley came up the stairs and talked wop to the girl and said sure she’d take the silk stockings and wasn’t America the greatest country in the world and tutti aleati and Presidente Veelson big man for Italia. But the girl wouldn’t go ahead until they’d gotten hold of an old woman who was in the kitchen, who came wheezing up the stairs and felt the stockings, and musta said they were real silk and worth money, because the girl put her arm around Joe’s neck and Charley said, “Sure, pard, she sleepa with you all night, maka love good.”
But about midnight when the girl had gone to sleep Joe got tired of lying there. He could smell the closets down in the court and a rooster kept crowing loud as the dickens like it was right under his ear. He got up and put on his clothes and tiptoed out. The silk stockings were hanging on a chair. He picked ’em up and shoved them in his pockets again. His shoes creaked like hell. The street door was all bolted and barred and he had a devil of a time getting it open. Just as he got out in the street a dog began to bark somewhere and he ran for it. He got lost in a million little narrow stone streets, but he figured that if he kept on going down hill he’d get to the harbor sometime. Then he began to see the pink glow from the burning tanker again on some of the housewalls and steered by that.
On some steep steps he ran into a couple of Americans in khaki uniforms and asked them the way and they gave him a drink out of a bottle of cognac and said they were on their way to the Eyetalian front and that there’d been a big retreat and that everything was cockeyed and they didn’t know where the cockeyed front was and they were going to wait right there till the cockeyed front came right to them. He told ’em about the silk stockings and they thought it was goddam funny, and showed him the way to the wharf where the Appalachian was and they shook hands a great many times when they said goodnight and they said the wops were swine and he said they were princes to have shown him the way and they said he was a prince and they finished up the cognac and he went on board and tumbled into his bunk.
When the Appalachian cleared for home the tanker was still burning outside the harbor. Joe came down with dose on the trip home and he couldn’t drink anything for several months and kinda steadied down when he got to Brooklyn. He went to the shoreschool run by the Shipping Board in Platt Institute and got his second mate’s license and made trips back and forth between New York and St. Nazaire all through that year on a new wooden boat built in Seattle called the Owanda, and a lot of trouble they had with her.
He and Janey wrote each other often. She was overseas with the Red Cross and very patriotic. Joe began to think that maybe she was right. Anyway if you believed the papers the heinies were getting licked, and it was a big opportunity for a young guy if you didn’t get in wrong by being taken for a proGerman or a Bolshevik or some goddam thing. After all as Janey kept writing civilization had to be saved and it was up to us to do it. Joe started a savings account and bought him a Liberty bond.
Armistice night Joe was in St. Nazaire. The town was wild. Everybody ashore, all the doughboys out of their camps, all the frog soldiers out of their barracks, everybody clapping everybody else on the back, pulling corks, giving each other drinks, popping champagne bottles, kissing every pretty girl, being kissed by old women, kissed on both cheeks by French veterans with whiskers. The mates and the skipper and the chief and a couple of naval officers they’d never seen before all started to have a big feed in a café but they never got further than soup because everybody was dancing in the kitchen and they poured the cook so many drinks he passed out cold and they all sat there singing and drinking champagne out of tumblers and cheering the allied flags that girls kept carrying through.
Joe went cruising looking for Jeanette who was a girl he’d kinder taken up with whenever he was in St. Nazaire. He wanted to find her before he got too zigzag. She’d promised to couchay with him that night before it turned out to be Armistice Day. She said she never couchayed with anybody else all the time the Owanda was in port and he treated her right and brought her beaucoup presents from L’Amerique, and du sucer and du cafay. Joe felt good, he had quite a wad in his pocket and, god damn it, American money was worth something these days; and a couple of pounds of sugar he’d brought in the pockets of his raincoat was better than money with the mademosels.
He went in back where there was a cabaret all red plush with mirrors and the music was playing The Star Spangled Banner and everybody cried Vive L’Amerique and pushed drinks in his face as he came in and then he was dancing with a fat girl and the music was playing some damn foxtrot or other. He pulled away from the fat girl because he’d seen Jeanette. She had an American flag draped over her dress. She was dancing with a big sixfoot black Senegalese. Joe saw red. He pulled her away from the nigger who was a frog officer all full of gold braid and she said, “Wazamatta cherie,” and Joe hauled off and hit the damn nigger as hard as he could right on the button but the nigger didn’t budge. The nigger’s face had a black puzzled smiling look like he was just going to ask a question. A waiter and a coupla frog soldiers came up and tried to pull Joe away. Everybody was yelling and jabbering. Jeanette was trying to get between Joe and the waiter and got a sock in the jaw that knocked her flat. Joe laid out a couple of frogs and was backing off towards the door, when he saw in the mirror that a big guy in a blouse was bringing down a bottle on his head held with both hands. He tried to swing around but he didn’t have time. The bottle crashed his skull and he was out.
Newsreel XXIX
the arrival of the news caused the swamping of the city’s telephone lines
Y fallait pas
Y fallait pas
Y fallait pas-a-a-a-a-yallez
BIG GUNS USED IN HAMBURG
at the Custom House the crowd sang The Star Spangled Banner under the direction of Byron R. Newton the Collector of the Port
MORGAN ON WINDOWLEDGE
KICKS HEELS AS HE SHOWERS
CROWD WITH TICKERTAPE
down at the battery the siren of the fireboat New York let out a shriek when the news reached there and in less time than it takes to say boo pandemonium broke loose all along the waterfront
Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light
WOMEN MOB CROWN PRINCE FOR
KISSING MODISTE
Allons enfants de la patrie
Lejour de gloire est arrive
It’s the wrong way to tickle Mary
It’s the wrong place to go
“We’ve been at war with the devil and it was worth all the suffering it entailed,” said William Howard Taft at a victory celebration here last night
Kahakatee, beautiful Katee
She’s the only gugugirl that I adore
And when the moon shines
Unipress, N. Y.
Paris urgent Brest Admiral Wilson who announced 16:00 (4 P.M.) Brest newspaper armistice been signed later notified unconfirmable meanwhile Brest riotously celebrating
TWO TROLLIES HELD UP BY GUNMEN
IN QUEENS
Over the cowshed
I’ll be waiting at the kakakitchen door
SPECIAL GRAND JURY ASKED TO
INDICT BOLSHEVISTS
the soldiers and sailors gave the only touch of color to the celebration. They went in wholeheartedly for having a good time, getting plenty to drink despite the fact that they were in uniform. Some of these returned fighters nearly caused a riot when they took an armful of stones and attempted to break an electric sign at Broadway and Forty-second Street reading:
WELCOME HOME TO OUR HEROES
Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early lig
ht
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming
When the rocket’s red glare the bombs bursting in air
Was proof to our eyes that the flag was still there
The Camera Eye (36)
when we emptied the rosies to leeward over the side every night after the last inspection we’d stop for a moment’s gulp of the November gale the lash of spray in back of your ears for a look at the spume splintered off the leaping waves shipwreckers drowners of men (in their great purple floating mines rose and fell gently submarines travelled under them on an even keel) to glance at the sky veiled with scud to take our hands off the greasy handles of the cans full of slum they couldnt eat (nine meals nine dumpings of the leftover grub nine cussingmatches with the cockney steward who tried to hold out on the stewed apricots inspections AttenSHUN click clack At Ease shoot the flashlight in everycorner of the tin pans nine lineups along the leaving airless corridor of seasick seascared doughboys with their messkits in their hands)
Hay sojer tell me they’ve signed an armistice tell me the wars over they’re takin us home latrine talk the hell you say now I’ll tell one we were already leading the empty rosies down three flights of iron ladders into the heaving retching hold starting up with the full whenever the ship rolled a little slum would trickle out the side
Meester Veelson
The year that Buchanan was elected president Thomas Woodrow Wilson
was born to a presbyterian minister’s daughter
in the manse at Staunton in the valley of Virginia; it was the old Scotch-Irish stock; the father was a presbyterian minister too and teacher of rhetoric in theological seminaries; the Wilsons lived in a universe of words linked into an incontrovertible firmament by two centuries of calvinist divines,
God was the Word
and the Word was God.
Dr. Wilson was a man of standing who loved his home and his children and good books and his wife and correct syntax and talked to God every day at family prayers;
he brought his sons up
between the bible and the dictionary.
The years of the Civil War
the years of fife and drum and platoonfire and proclamations
the Wilsons lived in Augusta, Georgia; Tommy was a backward child, didn’t learn his letters till he was nine, but when he learned to read his favorite reading was Parson Weems’
Life of Washington.
In 1870 Dr. Wilson was called to the Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina; Tommy attended Davidson college,
where he developed a good tenor voice;
then he went to Princeton and became a debater and editor of the Princetonian. His first published article in the Nassau Literary Magazine was an appreciation of Bismarck.
Afterwards he studied law at the University of Virginia; young Wilson wanted to be a Great Man, like Gladstone and the eighteenth century English parliamentarians; he wanted to hold the packed benches spellbound in the cause of Truth; but lawpractice irked him; he was more at home in the booky air of libraries, lecturerooms, college chapel, it was a relief to leave his lawpractice at Atlanta and take a Historical Fellowship at Johns Hopkins; there he wrote Congressional Government.
At twentynine he married a girl with a taste for painting (while he was courting her he coached her in how to use the broad “a”) and got a job at Bryn Mawr teaching the girls History and Political Economy. When he got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins he moved to a professorship at Wesleyan, wrote article, started a History of the United States,
spoke out for Truth Reform Responsible Government Democracy from the lecture platform, climbed all the steps of a brilliant university career; in 1901 the trustees of Princeton offered him the presidency;
he plunged into reforming the university, made violent friends and enemies, set the campus by the ears,
and the American people began to find on the front pages
the name of Woodrow Wilson.
In 1909 he made addresses on Lincoln and Robert E. Lee
and in 1910
the democratic bosses of New Jersey, hardpressed by muckrakers and reformers, got the bright idea of offering the nomination for governor to the stainless college president who attracted such large audiences
by publicly championing Right.
When Mr. Wilson addressed the Trenton convention that nominated him for governor he confessed his belief in the common man, (the smalltown bosses and the wardheelers looked at each other and scratched their heads); he went on, his voice growing firmer:
that is the man by whose judgment I for one wish to be guided, so that as the tasks multiply, and as the days come when all will feel confusion and dismay, we may lift up our eyes to the hills out of these dark valleys where the crags of special privilege overshadow and darken our path, to where the sun gleams through the great passage in the broken cliffs, the sun of God,
the sun meant to regenerate men,
the sun meant to liberate them from their passion and despair and lift us to those uplands which are the promised land of every man who desires liberty and achievement.
The smalltown bosses and the wardheelers looked at each other and scratched their heads; then they cheered; Wilson fooled the wiseacres and doublecrossed the bosses, was elected by a huge plurality;
so he left Princeton only half reformed to be Governor of New Jersey,
and became reconciled with Bryan
at the Jackson Day dinner: when Bryan remarked, “I of course knew that you were not with me in my position on the currency,” Mr. Wilson replied, “All I can say, Mr. Bryan, is that you are a great big man.”
He was introduced to Colonel House,
that amateur Merlin of politics who was spinning his webs at the Hotel Gotham
and at the convention in Baltimore the next July the upshot of the puppetshow staged for sweating delegates by Hearst and House behind the scenes, and Bryan booming in the corridors with a handkerchief over his wilted collar, was that Woodrow Wilson was nominated for the presidency.
The bolt of the Progressives in Chicago from Taft to T.R. made his election sure;
so he left the State of New Jersey halfreformed
(pitiless publicity was the slogan of the Shadow Lawn Campaign)
and went to the White House
our twentyeighth president.
While Woodrow Wilson drove up Pennsylvania Avenue beside Taft the great buttertub, who as president had been genially undoing T.R.’s reactionary efforts to put business under the control of the government,
J. Pierpont Morgan sat playing solitaire in his back office on Wall Street, smoking twenty black cigars a day, cursing the follies of democracy.
Wilson flayed the interests and branded privilege refused to recognize Huerta and sent the militia to the Rio Grande
to assume a policy of watchful waiting. He published The New Freedom and delivered his messages to Congress in person, like a college president addressing the faculty and students. At Mobile he said:
I wish to take this occasion to say that the United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest;
and he landed the marines at Vera Cruz.
We are witnessing a renaissance ofpublic spirit, a reawakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the power of the people the beginning of an age of thoughtful reconstruction . . .
but the world had started spinning round Sarajevo.
First it was neutrality in thought and deed, then too proud to fight when the Lusitania sinking and the danger to the Morgan loans and the stories of the British and French propagandists set all the financial centers in the East bawling for war, but the suction of the drumbeat and the guns was too strong; the best people took their fashions form Paris and their broad “a’s” from London, and T.R. and the House of Morgan.
Five months after his reelection on the slogan He kept us out of war, Wilson pushed the Armed Ship Bill through congress and declared that a state of war existed between t
he United States and the Central Powers;
Force without stint or limit, force to the utmost.
Wilson became the state (war is the health of the state), Washington his Versailles, manned the socialized government with dollar a year men out of the great corporations and ran the big parade
of men munitions groceries mules and trucks to France. Five million men stood at attention outside of their tarpaper barracks every sundown while they played The Star Spangled Banner.
War brought the eight hour day, women’s votes, prohibition, compulsory arbitration, high wages, high rates of interest, cost plus contracts and the luxury of being a Gold Star Mother.
If you objected to making the world safe for cost plus democracy you went to jail with Debs.
Almost too soon the show was over, Prince Max of Baden was pleading for the Fourteen Points, Foch was occupying the bridgeheads on the Rhine and the Kaiser out of breath ran for the train down the platform at Potsdam wearing a silk hat and some say false whiskers.