There were flags on every building. They walked past business block after business block looking for Times Square. Everywhere people were reading newspapers. At Fourteenth they heard a drumbeat and a band and waited at the corner to see what regiment it would be but it was only the Salvation Army. By the time they got to Madison Square it was the dinner hour and the streets were deserted. It began to drizzle a little and the flags up Broadway and Fifth Avenue hung limp from their poles.
They went into the Hofbrau to eat. Charley thought it looked too expensive but Doc said it was his party. A man was on a stepladder over the door screwing the bulbs into an electric sign of an American flag. The restaurant was draped with American flags inside and the band played The Star-Spangled Banner every other number, so that they kept having to get to their feet. “What do they think this is, settin’ up exercises?” grumbled Doc.
There was one group at a round table in the corner that didn’t get up when the band played The Star-Spangled Banner, but sat there quietly talking and eating as if nothing had happened. People round the restaurant began to stare at them and pass comments. “I bet they’re . . . Huns . . . German spies . . . Pacifists.” There was an army officer at a table with a girl who got red in the face whenever he looked at them. Finally a waiter, an elderly German, went up to them and whispered something.
“I’ll be damned if I will,” came the voice from the table in the corner. Then the army officer went over to them and said something about courtesy to our national anthem. He came away redder in the face than ever. He was a little man with bowlegs squeezed into brightly polished puttees. “Dastardly pro-Germans,” he sputtered as he sat down. Immediately he had to get up because the band played The Star-Spangled Banner. “Why don’t you call the police, Cyril?” the girl who was with him said. By this time people from all over the restaurant were advancing on the round table.
Doc pulled Charley’s chair around. “Watch this; it’s going to be good.”
A big man with a Texas drawl yanked one of the men out of his chair. “You git up or git out.”
“You people have no right to interfere with us,” began one of the men at the round table. “You express your approval of the war getting up, we express our disapproval by . . .”
There was a big woman with a red hat with a plume on it at the table who kept saying, “Shut up; don’t talk to ’em.” By this time the band had stopped. Everybody clapped as hard as he could and yelled, “Play it again; that’s right.” The waiters were running round nervously and the proprietor was in the center of the floor mopping his bald head.
The army officer went over to the orchestra leader and said, “Please play our national anthem again.” At the first bar he came stiffly to attention. The other men rushed the round table. Doc and the man with the English accent were jostling each other. Doc squared off to hit him.
“Come outside if you want to fight,” the man with the English accent was saying.
“Leave ’em be, boys,” Doc was shouting. “I’ll take ’em on outside, two at a time.”
The table was upset and the party began backing off towards the door. The woman with the red hat picked up a bowl of lobster mayonnaise and was holding back the crowd by chucking handfuls of it in their faces. At that moment three cops appeared and arrested the damn pacifists. Everybody stood around wiping mayonnaise off his clothes. The band played The Star-Spangled Banner again and everybody tried to sing but it didn’t make much of an effect because nobody knew the words.
After that Doc and Charley went to a bar to have a whisky sour. Doc wanted to go to see a legshow and asked the barkeep. A little fat man with an American flag in the lapel of his coat overheard him and said the best legshow in New York was Minsky’s on East Houston Street. He set them up to some drinks when Doc said they were going to see this here war, and said he’d take them down to Minsky’s himself. His name was Segal and he said he’d been a socialist up to the sinking of the Lusitania, but now he thought they ought to lick the Germans and destroy Berlin. He was in the cloak and suit business and was happy because he’d as good as landed a contract for army uniforms. “Ve need the var to make men of us,” he’d say and strike himself on the chest. They went down town in a taxi but when they got to the burlesque show it was so full they couldn’t get a seat.
“Standin’ room, hell . . . Ah want women,” Doc was saying. Mr. Segal thought a little while with his head cocked to one side. “Ve will go to ‘Little Hungary,’” he said.
Charley felt let down. He’d expected to have a good time in New York. He wished he was in bed. At “Little Hungary” there were many German and Jewish and Russian girls. The wine came in funny-looking bottles upside down in a stand in the middle of each table. Mr. Segal said it was his party from now on. The orchestra played foreign music. Doc was getting pretty drunk. They sat at a table crowded in among other tables. Charley roamed round and asked a girl to dance with him but she wouldn’t for some reason.
He got to talking to a young narrowfaced fellow at the bar who had just been to a peace meeting at Madison Square Garden. Charley pricked his ears up when the fellow said there’d be a revolution in New York if they tried to force conscription on the country. His name was Benny Compton and he’d been studying law at New York University. Charley went and sat with him at a table with another fellow who was from Minnesota and who was a reporter on The Call. Charley asked them about the chances of working his way through the engineering school. He’d about decided to back out of this ambulance proposition. But they didn’t seem to think there was much chance if you hadn’t any money saved up to start on. The Minnesota man said New York was no place for a poor man.
“Aw, hell; I guess I’ll go to the war,” said Charley.
“It’s the duty of every radical to go to jail first,” said Benny Compton. “Anyway, there’ll be a revolution. The working class won’t stand for this much longer.”
“If you want to make some jack the thing to do is to go over to Bayonne and get a job in a munitions factory,” said the man from Minnesota in a tired voice.
“A man who does that is a traitor to his class,” said Benny Compton.
“A working stiff’s in a hell of a situation,” said Charley. “Damn it, I don’t want to spend all my life patchin’ up tin lizzies at seventyfive a month.”
“Didn’t Eugene V. Debs say, ‘I want to rise with the ranks, not from them?’”
“After all, Benny, ain’t you studyin’ night an’ day to get to be a lawyer an’ get out of the workin’ class?” said the man from Minnesota.
“That is so I can be of some use in the struggle . . . I want to be a wellsharpened instrument. We must fight capitalists with their own weapons.”
“I wonder what I’ll do when they suppress The Call.”
“They won’t dare suppress it.”
“Sure, they will. We’re in this war to defend the Morgan loans . . . They’ll use it to clear up opposition at home, sure as my name’s Johnson.”
“Talking of that, I got some dope. My sister, see, she’s a stenographer . . . She works for J. Ward Moorehouse, the public relations counsel, you know . . . he does propaganda for the Morgans and the Rockefellers. Well, she said that all this year he’s been working with a French secret mission. The big interests are scared to death of a revolution in France. They paid him ten thousand dollars for his services. He runs pro-war stuff through a feature syndicate. And they call this a free country.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised at anything,” said the man from Minnesota, pouring himself out the last of the bottle of wine. “Why, any one of us may be a government agent or a spy right at this minute.” The three of them sat there looking at each other. It gave Charley chills down his spine.
“That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell ye . . . My sister, she knows all about it, see, on account of workin’ in this guy’s office . . . It’s a plot of the big interests, Morgan an’ them, to defeat the workers by sendin’ ’em off to the war. Once they get you in
the army you can’t howl about civic liberty or the Bill of Rights . . . They can shoot you without trial, see?”
“It’s an outrage . . . The people of the Northwest won’t stand for it,” said the man from Minnesota. “Look here, you’ve been out there more recently than I have. La Follette expresses the opinion of people out there, don’t he?”
“Sure,” said Charley.
“Well, what the hell?”
“It’s too deep for me,” said Charley and started working his way among the closepacked tables to find Doc. Doc was pretty drunk, and Charley was afraid the evening would start running into money, so they said goodby to Mr. Segal who said please to kill a lot of Germans just for him, and they went out and started walking west along Houston Street. There were pushcarts all along the curb with flares that made the packed faces along the sidewalk glow red in the rainy darkness.
They came out at the end of a wide avenue crowded with people pouring out from a theater. In front of the Cosmopolitan Café a man was speaking on a soapbox. As the people came out of the theater they surged around him. Doc and Charley edged their way through to see what the trouble was. They could only catch scraps of what the man was shouting in a hoarse barking voice:
“A few days ago I was sittin’ in the Cooper Institute listenin’ to Eugene Victor Debs, and what was he sayin’? . . . ‘What is this civilization, this democracy that the bosses are asking you workers to give your lives to save, what does it mean to you except wageslavery, what is. . . ?’”
“Hey, shut up, youse . . . If you don’t like it go back where you came from,” came voices from the crowd.
“Freedom to work so that the bosses can get rich . . . Opportunity to starve to death if you get fired from your job.”
Doc and Charley were shoved from behind. The man toppled off his box and disappeared. The whole end of the avenue filled with a milling crowd. Doc was sparring with a big man in overalls. A cop came between them hitting right and left with his billy. Doc hauled off to slam the cop but Charley caught his arm and pulled him out of the scrimmage.
“Hey, for crissake, Doc, this ain’t the war yet,” said Charley. Doc was red in the face. “Ah didn’t like that guy’s looks,” he said.
Behind the cops two policedepartment cars with big searchlights were charging the crowd. Arms, heads, hats, jostling shoulders, riot-sticks rising and falling stood out black against the tremendous white of the searchlights. Charley pulled Doc against the plateglass window of the café.
“Say, Doc, we don’t want to get in the can and lose the boat,” Charley whispered in his ear. “What’s the use?” said Doc. “It’ll all go bellyup before we get there.”
“Today the voikers run before the cops, but soon it will be the cops run before the voikers,” someone yelled. Someone else started singing The Marseillaise. Voices joined. Doc and Charley were jammed with their shoulders against the plate glass. Behind them the café was full of faces swimming in blue crinkly tobaccosmoke like fish in an aquarium. The plate glass suddenly smashed. People in the café were hopping to their feet. “Look out for the Cossacks,” a voice yelled.
A cordon of cops was working down the avenue. The empty pavement behind them widened. The other way mounted police were coming out of Houston Street. In the open space a patrolwagon parked. Cops were shoving men and women into it.
Doc and Charley ducked past a mounted policeman who was trotting his horse with a great clatter down the inside of the sidewalk, and shot round the corner. The Bowery was empty and dark. They walked west toward the hotel.
“My God,” said Charley, “you almost got us locked up that time . . . I’m all set to go to France now, and I wanter go.”
A week later they were on the Chicago of the French Line steaming out through the Narrows. They had hangovers from their farewell party and felt a little sick from the smell of the boat and still had the music of the jazzband on the wharf ringing through their heads. The day was overcast, with a low lid of leaden clouds, looked like it was going to snow. The sailors were French and the stewards were French. They had wine with their first meal. There was a whole tableful of other guys going over in the ambulance service.
After dinner Doc went down to the cabin to go to sleep. Charley roamed around the ship with his hands in his pockets without knowing what to do with himself. In the stern they were taking the canvas cover off the seventyfive gun. He walked round the lowerdeck full of barrels and packingcases and stumbled across coils of big fuzzy cable to the bow. In the bow there was a little pinkfaced French sailor with a red tassel on his cap stationed as a lookout.
The sea was glassy, with dirty undulating patches of weed and garbage. There were gulls sitting on the water or perched on bits of floating wood. Now and then a gull stretched its wings lazily and flew off crying.
The boat’s bluff bow cut two even waves through dense glassgreen water. Charley tried to talk to the lookout. He pointed ahead. “East,” he said, “France.”
The lookout paid no attention. Charley pointed back towards the smoky west. “West,” he said and tapped himself on the chest. “My home Fargo, North Dakota.” But the lookout just shook his head and put his finger to his lips.
“France very far east . . . submarines . . . war,” said Charley. The lookout put his hand over his mouth. At last he made Charley understand that he wasn’t supposed to talk to him.
About the Author
Born in Chicago on January 14, 1896, JOHN DOS PASSOS is one of the most well known writers of our time. He graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 1916 and went on to serve in the United States Medical Corps during the remainder of World War I. Upon his return Dos Passos began writing for several newspapers and magazines. His first novel, One Man’s Initiation, published in 1920, was inspired by his involvement in World War I. Dos Passos went on to publish more than forty books, fiction and nonfiction, focusing on social and political issues and customarily taking an extreme leftist approach. He was one of the most adept chroniclers in the twentieth century of the difficulties of the American working class and the decadence of the well-to-do. While his political views eventually grew more conservative, in his writing he still strove to create an accurate reflection of American culture throughout his career. Some consider Dos Passos’s most important work to be the U.S.A. trilogy. Among his other well-known titles are Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer, and District of Columbia. In his later years he made his home with his wife on a Westmoreland County, Virginia, property previously owned by his father. John Dos Passos died in 1970 at the age of seventy-four.
John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel
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