1919
With the help of Almighty God, Right, Truth, Justice, Freedom, Democracy, the Selfdetermination of Nations, No indemnities no annexations,
and Cuban sugar and Caucasian manganese and Northwestern wheat and Dixie cotton, the British blockade, General Pershing, the taxicabs of Paris and the seventyfive gun
we won the war.
On December 4th, 1918, Woodrow Wilson, the first president to leave the territory of the United States during his presidency, sailed for France on board the George Washington,
the most powerful man in the world.
In Europe they knew what gas smelt like and the sweet sick stench of bodies buried too shallow and the grey look of the skin of starved children; they read in the papers that Meester Veelson was for peace and freedom and canned goods and butter and sugar;
he landed at Brest with his staff of experts and publicists after a rough trip on the George Washington.
La France héroïque was there with the speeches, the singing schoolchildren, the mayors in their red sashes. (Did Meester Veelson see the gendarmes at Brest beating back the demonstration of dockyard workers who came to meet him with red flags?)
At the station in Paris he stepped from the train onto a wide red carpet that lead him, between rows of potted palms, silk hats, legions of honor, decorated busts of uniforms, frockcoats, rosettes, boutonnières, to a Rolls Royce. (Did Meester Veelson see the women in black, the cripples in their little carts, the pale anxious faces along the streets, did he hear the terrible anguish of the cheers as they hurried him and his new wife to the hôtel de Mûrat, where in rooms full of brocade, gilt clocks, Buhl cabinets and ormolu cupids the presidential suite had been prepared?)
While the experts were organizing the procedure of the peace conference, spreading green baize on the tables, arranging the protocols,
the Wilsons took a tour to see for themselves: the day after Christmas they were entertained at Buckingham Palace; at Newyears they called on the pope and on the microscopic Italian king at the Quirinal. (Did Meester Veelson know that in the peasants’ wargrimed houses along the Brenta and the Piave they were burning candles in front of his picture cut out of the illustrated papers?) (Did Meester Veelson know that the people of Europe spelled a challenge to oppression out of the Fourteen Points as centuries before they had spelled a challenge to oppression out of the ninetyfive articles Martin Luther nailed to the churchdoor in Wittenberg?)
January 18, 1919, in the midst of serried uniforms, cocked hats and gold braid, decorations, epaulettes, orders of merit and knighthood, the High Contracting Parties, the allied and associated powers met in the Salon de l’Horloge at the quai d’Orsay to dictate the peace,
but the grand assembly of the peace conference was too public a place to make peace in
so the High Contracting Parties
formed the Council of Ten, went into the Gobelin Room and, surrounded by Rubens’s History of Marie de Medici,
began to dictate the peace.
But the Council of Ten was too public a place to make peace in
so they formed the Council of Four.
Orlando went home in a huff
and then there were three:
Clemenceau,
Lloyd George,
Woodrow Wilson.
Three old men shuffling the pack,
dealing out the cards:
the Rhineland, Danzig, the Polish corridor, the Ruhr, self determination of small nations, the Saar, League of Nations, mandates, the Mespot, Freedom of the Seas, Transjordania, Shantung, Fiume and the Island of Yap:
machine gun fire and arson
starvation, lice, cholera, typhus;
oil was trumps.
Woodrow Wilson believed in his father’s God
so he told the parishioners in the little Lowther Street Congregational church where his grandfather had preached in Carlisle in Scotland, a day so chilly that the newspaper men sitting in the old pews all had to keep their overcoats on.
On April 7th he ordered the George Washington to be held at Brest with steam up ready to take the American delegation home;
but he didn’t go.
On April 19 sharper Clemenceau and sharper Lloyd George got him into their little cosy threecardgame they called the Council of Four.
On June 28th the Treaty of Versailles was ready
and Wilson had to go back home to explain to the politicians who’d been ganging up on him meanwhile in the Senate and House and to sober public opinion and to his father’s God how he’d let himself be trimmed and how far he’d made the world safe
for democracy and the New Freedom.
From the day he landed in Hoboken he had his back to the wall of the White House, talking to save his faith in words, talking to save his faith in the League of Nations, talking to save his faith in himself, in his father’s God.
He strained every nerve of his body and brain, every agency of the government he had under his control; (if anybody disagreed he was a crook or a red; no pardon for Debs).
In Seattle the wobblies whose leaders were in jail, in Seattle the wobblies whose leaders had been lynched, who’d been shot down like dogs, in Seattle the wobblies lined four blocks as Wilson passed, stood silent with their arms folded staring at the great liberal as he was hurried past in his car, huddled in his overcoat, haggard with fatigue, one side of his face twitching. The men in overalls, the workingstiffs let him pass in silence after all the other blocks of handclapping and patriotic cheers.
In Pueblo, Colorado, he was a grey man hardly able to stand, one side of his face twitching:
Now that the mists of this great question have cleared away, I believe that men will see the Truth, eye for eye and face to face. There is one thing the American People always rise to and extend their hand to, that is, the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted that truth and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.
That was his last speech;
on the train to Wichita he had a stroke. He gave up the speaking tour that was to sweep the country for the League of Nations. After that he was a ruined paralysed man barely able to speak;
the day he gave up the presidency to Harding the joint committee of the Senate and House appointed Henry Cabot Lodge, his lifelong enemy, to make the formal call at the executive office in the Capitol and ask the formal question whether the president had any message for the congress assembled in joint session;
Wilson managed to get to his feet, lifting himself painfully by the two arms of the chair. “Senator Lodge, I have no further communication to make, thank you . . . Good morning,” he said.
In 1924 on February 3rd he died.
Newsreel XXX
MONSTER GUNS REMOVED?
Longhaired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked about something to eat
They will answer in accents so sweet
PRESIDENT HAS SLIGHT COLD AT SEA
Special Chef and Staff of Waiters and Kitchen Helpers Drafted from the Biltmore
Every Comfort Provided
Orchestra to Play During Meals and Navy Yard Band to Play for Deck Music
You will eat bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
the city presents a picture of the wildest destruction especially around the General Post Office which had been totally destroyed by fire, nothing but ruins remaining
Work and pray
Live on hay
Three truckloads of Records Gathered Here
eleven men were killed and twentythree injured, some of them seriously as the result of an explosion of fulminate of mercury in the priming unit of one of the cap works of the E. I. duPont de Nemours Powder Company; in the evening Mrs. Wilson released carrier pigeons . . . and through it all how fine the spirit of the nation was, what unity of purpose what
untiring zeal what elevation of purpose ran through all its splendid display of strength, its untiring accomplishment. I have said that those of us who stayed at home to do the work oforganization and supply would always wish we had been with the men we sustained by our labor, but we can never be ashamed . . . in the dining room music was furnished by a quartet of sailors
You’ll get pie
In the sky
When you die
GORGAS WOULD PUT SOLDIERS IN HUTS
800 FIGHTING MEN CHEER BOLSHEVIKI
All the arrangements were well ordered but the crowd was kept at a distance. The people gathered on the hills near the pier raised a great shout when the president’s launch steamed up. A detour was made from the Champs Elysees to cross the Seine over the Alexander III bridge which recalled another historic pageant when Paris outdid herself to honor an absolute ruler in the person of the czar.
ADDRESSED 1400 MAYORS FORM PALACE BALCONY
BRITISH NAVY TO BE SUPREME
DECLARES CHURCHILL
The Camera Eye (37)
alphabetically according to rank tapped out with two cold index fingers on the company Corona Allots Class A & B Ins prem C & D
Atten—SHUN snap to the hooks and eyes at my throat constricting the adamsapple bringing together the US and the Caduceus
At Ease
outside they’re drilling in the purple drizzle of a winter afternoon in Ferrières en Gatinais, Abbaye founded by Clovis over the skeletons of three disciples of nôtre seigneur Jésus-Christ 3rd Lib Loan Sec of Treas Altian Politian and Hermatian 4th Lib Loan Sec of Treas must be on CL E or other form Q.M.C. 38 now it’s raining hard and the gutters gurgle there’s tinkling from all the little glassgreen streams Alcuin was prior once and millwheels grind behind the mossed stone walls and Clodhilde and Clodomir were buried here
promotions only marked under gains drowsily clacked out on the rusteaten Corona in the cantonment of O’Reilly’s Travelling Circus alone except for the undertaker soldiering in his bunk and the dry hack of the guy that has TB that the MO was never sober enough to examine
Iodine will make you happy
Iodine will make you well
fourthirty the pass comes alive among the CC pills in my pocket
the acting QM Sarge and the Topkicker go out through the gate of USAAS base camp in their slickers in the lamplit rain and make their way without a cent in their OD to the Cheval Blanc where by chevrons and parleyvooing they bum drinks and omelettes avec pommes frites and kid applecheeked Madeleine may wee
in the dark hallway to the back room the boys are lined up waiting to get in to the girl in black from out of town to drop ten francs and hurry to the propho station sol viol sk not L D viol Go 41/14 rd sent S C M
outside it’s raining on the cobbled town inside we drink vin rouge parlezvous froglegs may wee couchez avec and the old territorial at the next table drinks illegal pernod and remarks Toute est bien fait dans la nature à la votre aux Americains
Après la guerre finee
Back to the States for me
Dans la mort il n’y a rien de terrible Quant on va mourir on pense à tout mais vite
the first day in the year dismissed after rollcall I went walking with a fellow from Philadelphia along the purple wintryrutted roads under the purple embroidery of the pleached trees full of rooks cackling overhead over the ruddier hills to a village we’re going to walk a long way get good wine full of Merovingian names millwheels glassgreen streams where the water gurgles out of old stone gargoyles Madeleine’s red apples the smell of beech leaves we’re going to drink wine the boy from Philadelphia’s got beaucoup jack wintry purpler wine the sun breaks out through the clouds on the first day in the year
in the first village
we stop in our tracks
to look at a waxwork
the old man has shot the pretty peasant girl who looks like Madeleine but younger she lies there shot in the left breast in the blood in the ruts of the road pretty and plump as a little quail
The old man then took off one shoe and put the shotgun under his chin pulled the trigger with his toe and blew the top of his head off we stand looking at the bare foot and the shoe and the foot in the shoe and the shot girl and the old man with a gunnysack over his head and the dirty bare toe he pulled the trigger with Faut pas toucher until the commissaire comes procès verbale
on this first day
of the year the sun
is shining
Newsreel XXXI
washing and dressing hastily they came to the ground floor at the brusque call of the commissaries, being assembled in one of the rear rooms in the basement of the house. Here they were lined up in a semicircle along the wall, the young grandduchesses trembling at the unusual nature of the orders given and at the gloomy hour. They more than suspected the errand upon which the commissaries had come. Addressing the czar, Yarodsky, without the least attempt to soften his announcement, stated that they must all die and at once. The revolution was in danger, he stated, and the fact that there were still the members of the reigning house living added to that danger. Therefore to remove them was the duty of all Russian patriots. “Thus your life is ended,” he said in conclusion.
“I am ready,” was the simple announcement of the czar, while the czarina, clinging to him, loosed her hold long enough to make the sign of the cross, an example followed by the grandduchess Olga and by Dr. Botkin.
The czarevitch, paralyzed with fear, stood in stupefaction beside his mother, uttering no sound either in supplication or protest, while his three sisters and the other grandduchesses sank to the floor trembling.
Yarodsky drew his revolver and fired the first shot. A volley followed and the prisoners reeled to the ground. Where the bullets failed to find their mark the bayonet put the finishing touches. The mingled blood of the victims not only covered the floor of the room where the execution took place but ran in streams along the hallway
Daughter
The Trents lived in a house on Pleasant avenue that was the finest street in Dallas that was the biggest and fastest growing town in Texas that was the biggest state in the Union and had the blackest soil and the whitest people and America was the greatest country in the world and Daughter was Dad’s onlyest sweetest little girl. Her real name was Anne Elizabeth Trent after poor dear mother who had died when she was a little tiny girl but Dad and the boys called her Daughter. Buddy’s real name was William Delaney Trent like Dad who was a prominent attorney, and Buster’s real name was Spencer Anderson Trent.
Winters they went to school and summers they ran wild on the ranch that grandfather had taken up as a pioneer. When they’d been very little there hadn’t been any fences yet and still a few maverick steers out along the creekbottoms, but by the time Daughter was in highschool everything was fenced and they were building a macadam road out from Dallas and Dad went everywhere in the Ford instead of on his fine Arab stallion Mullah he’d been given by a stockman at the Fat Stock Show in Waco when the stockman had gone broke and hadn’t been able to pay his lawyer’s fee. Daughter had a creamcolored pony named Coffee who’d nod his head and paw with his hoof when he wanted a lump of sugar, but some of the girls she knew had cars and Daughter and the boys kept after Dad to buy a car, a real car instead of that miserable old flivver he drove around the ranch.
When Dad bought a Pierce Arrow touring car the spring Daughter graduated from highschool, she was the happiest girl in the world. Sitting at the wheel in a fluffy white dress the morning of Commencement outside the house waiting for Dad, who had just come out from the office and was changing his clothes, she had thought how much she’d like to be able to see herself sitting there in the not too hot June morning in the lustrous black shiny car among the shiny brass and nickel fixtures under the shiny paleblue big Texas sky in the middle of the big flat rich Texas country that ran for two hundred miles in every direction. She could see half her face in the little oval mirror on the mudguard. It looked red and sunburned under her sa
ndybrown hair. If she only had red hair and a skin white like buttermilk like Susan Gillespie had, she was wishing when she saw Joe Washburn coming along the street dark and seriouslooking under his panama hat. She fixed her face in a shy kind of smile just in time to have him say, “How lovely you look, Daughter, you must excuse ma sayin’ so.” “I’m just waiting for Dad and the boys to go to the exercises. O Joe, we’re late and I’m so excited. . . . I feel like a sight.”
“Well, have a good time.” He walked on unhurriedly putting his hat back on his head as he went. Something hotter than the June sunshine had come out of Joe’s very dark eyes and run in a blush over her face and down the back of her neck under her thin dress and down the middle of her bosom, where the little breasts that she tried never to think of were just beginning to be noticeable. At last Dad and the boys came out all looking blonde and dressed up and sunburned. Dad made her sit in the back seat with Bud who sat up stiff as a poker.
The big wind that had come up drove grit in their faces. After she caught sight of the brick buildings of the highschool and the crowd and the light dresses and the stands and the big flag with the stripes all wiggling against the sky she got so excited she never remembered anything that happened.