John Passos - Big Money

but cutting out business was not at all the Administration’s idea of making the world safe for democracy,

so Veblen had to resign from the Food Administration.

He signed the protests against the trial of the hundred and one wobblies in Chicago.

After the armistice he went to New York. In spite of all the oppression of the war years, the air was freshening. In Russia the great storm of revolt had broken, seemed to be sweeping west, in the strong gusts from the new world in the east the warsodden multitudes began to see again. At Versailles allies and enemies, magnates, generals, flunkey politicians were slamming the shutters against the storm, against the new, against hope. It was suddenly clear for a second in the thundering glare what war was about, what peace was about.

In America, in Europe, the old men won. The bankers in their offices took a deep breath, the bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their coupons in the refined quiet of their safedeposit vaults,

the last puffs of the ozone of revolt went stale

in the whisper of speakeasy arguments.

Veblen wrote for the Dial ,

lectured at the New School for Social Research.

He still had a hope that the engineers, the technicians, the non-profiteers whose hands were on the switchboard might take up the fight where the workingclass had failed. He helped form the Technical Alliance. His last hope was the British general strike.

Was there no group of men bold enough to take charge of the magnificent machine before the pigeyed speculators and the yesmen at office desks irrevocably ruined it

and with it the hopes of four hundred years?

No one went to Veblen’s lectures at the New School. With every article he wrote in the Dial the circulation dropped.

Harding’s normalcy, the new era was beginning;

even Veblen made a small killing on the stockmarket.

He was an old man and lonely.

His second wife had gone to a sanitarium suffering from delusions of persecution.

There seemed no place for a masterless man.

Veblen went back out to Palo Alto

to live in his shack in the tawny hills and observe from outside the last grabbing urges of the profit system taking on, as he put it, the systematized delusions of dementia praecox.

There he finished his translation of the Laxdaelasaga.

He was an old man. He was much alone. He let the woodrats take what they wanted from his larder. A skunk that hung round the shack was so tame he’d rub up against Veblen’s leg like a cat.

He told a friend he’d sometimes hear in the stillness about him the voices of his boyhood talking Norwegian as clear as on the farm in Minnesota where he was raised. His friends found him harder than ever to talk to, harder than ever to interest in anything. He was running down. The last sips of the bitter drink.

He died on August 3, 1929.

Among his papers a penciled note was found:

It is also my wish, in case of death, to be cremated if it can conveniently be done, as expeditiously and inexpensively as may be, without ritual or ceremony of any kind; that my ashes be thrown loose into the sea or into some sizable stream running into the sea; that no tombstone, slab, epitaph, effigy, tablet, inscription or monument of any name or nature, be set up to my memory or name in anyplace or at any time; that no obituary, memorial, portrait or biography of me, nor any letters written to or by me be printed or published, or in any way reproduced, copied or circulated;

but his memorial remains

riveted into the language:

the sharp clear prism of his mind.

The sunshine drifted from our alley

HELP WANTED: ADVANCEMENT

positions that offer quick, accurate, experienced, wellrecommended young girls and young women… good chance for advancement

Ever since the day

Sally went away

GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS

canvassers… caretakers… cashiers… chambermaids… waitresses… cleaners… file clerks… companions… comptometer operators… collection correspondents… cooks… dictaphone operators… gentlewomen… multigraph operators… Elliott Fisher operators… bill and entry clerks… gummers… glove buyers… governesses… hairdressers… models… good opportunity for stylish young ladies… intelligent young women

Went down to St. James Infirmary

Saw my baby there

All stretched out on a table

So pale, so cold, so fair

Went up to see the doctor

WE HAVE HUNDREDS OF POSITIONS OPEN

we are anxious to fill vacancies, we offer good salaries, commissions, bonuses, prizes, business opportunities, training, advancement, educational opportunities, hospital service… restroom and lunchroom where excellent lunch is served at less than cost

Let her go let her go God bless her

Wherever she may be

She may roam this wide world over

She’ll never find a sweet man like me

Poor Daddy never did get tucked away in bed right after supper the way he liked with his readinglight over his left shoulder and his glasses on and the paper in his hand and a fresh cigar in his mouth that the phone didn’t ring, or else it would be a knocking at the back door and Mother would send little Mary to open it and she’d find a miner standing there whitefaced with his eyelashes and eyebrows very black from the coaldust saying, “Doc French, pliz… heem coma queek,” and poor Daddy would get up out of bed yawning in his pyjamas and bathrobe and push his untidy grey hair off his forehead and tell Mary to go get his instrumentcase out of the office for him, and be off tying his necktie as he went, and half the time he’d be gone all night.

Mealtimes it was worse. They never seemed to get settled at the table for a meal, the three of them, without that awful phone ringing. Daddy would go and Mary and Mother would sit there finishing the meal alone, sitting there without saying anything, little Mary with her legs wrapped around the chairlegs staring at the picture of two dead wild ducks in the middle of the gingercolored wallpaper above Mother’s trim black head. Then Mother would put away the dishes and clatter around the house muttering to herself that if poor Daddy ever took half the trouble with his paying patients that he did with those miserable foreigners and miners he would be a rich man today and she wouldn’t be killing herself with housework. Mary hated to hear Mother talk against Daddy the way she did.

Poor Daddy and Mother didn’t get along. Mary barely remembered a time when she was very very small when it had been different and they’d lived in Denver in a sunny house with flowering bushes in the yard. That was before Brother was taken and Daddy lost that money in the investment. Whenever anybody said Denver it made her think of sunny. Now they lived in Trinidad where everything was black like coal, the scrawny hills tall, darkening the valley full of rows of sooty shanties, the minetipples, the miners most of them greasers and hunkies and the awful saloons and the choky smeltersmoke and the little black trains. In Denver it was sunny, and white people lived there, real clean American children like Brother who was taken and Mother said if poor Daddy cared for his own flesh and blood the way he cared for those miserable foreigners and miners Brother’s life might have been saved. Mother had made her go into the parlor, she was so scared, but Mother held her hand so tight it hurt terribly but nobody paid any attention, they all thought it was on account of Brother she was crying, and Mother made her look at him in the coffin under the glass.