John Passos - 1919

“Well, Eveline isn’t a little Jew or a tailor,” said Eleanor icily, “but I can tell you she did a great deal.”

Stevens walked across the room to Dick and asked him what sort of a man Moorehouse was. Dick found himself blushing. He wished Stevens wouldn’t talk so loud. “Why, he’s a man of extraordinary ability,” he stammered.

“I thought he was a stuffed shirt… I didn’t see what those damn fools of the bourgeois press thought they were getting for a story… I was there for the D.H. ”

“Yes, I saw you,” said Dick.

“I thought maybe, from what Steve Warner said, you were the sort of guy who’d be boring from within.”

“Boring in another sense, I guess, boring and bored.”

Stevens stood over him glaring at him as if he was going to hit him. “Well, we’ll know soon enough which side a man’s on. We’ll all have to show our faces, as they say in Russia, before long.”

Eleanor interrupted with a fresh smoking bottle of champagne. Stevens went back to talk to Eveline in the window. “Why, I’d as soon have a Baptist preacher in the house,” Eleanor tittered.

“Damn it, I hate people who get their pleasure by making other people feel uncomfortable,” grumbled Dick under his breath. Eleanor smiled a quick V-shaped smile and gave his arm a pat with her thin white hand, that was tipped by long nails pointed and pink and marked with halfmoons. “So do I, Dick, so do I.”

When Dick whispered that he had a headache and thought he’d go home and turn in, she gripped his arm and pulled him into the hall. “Don’t you dare go home and leave me alone with this frost.” Dick made a face and followed her back into the salon. She poured him a glass of champagne from the bottle she still held in her hand: “Cheer up Eveline,” she whispered squeakily. “She’s about ready to go down for the third time.”

Dick stood around for hours talking to Mrs. Johnson about books, plays, the opera. Neither of them seemed to be able to keep track of what the other was saying. Eveline couldn’t keep her eyes off her husband. He had a young cubbish look Dick couldn’t help liking; he was standing by the sideboard getting tight with Stevens, who kept making ugly audible remarks about parasites and the lahdedah boys of the bourgeoisie. It went on for a long time. Paul Johnson got sick and Dick had to help him find the bathroom. When he came back into the salon he almost had a fight with Stevens, who, after an argument about the Peace Conference, suddenly hauled off with his fists clenched and called him a goddam fairy. The Johnsons hustled Stevens out. Eleanor came up to Dick and put her arm around his neck and said he’d been magnificent.

Paul Johnson came back upstairs after they’d gone to get the parakeets. He looked pale as a sheet. One of the birds had died and was lying on its back stiff with his claws in the air at the bottom of the cage.

At about three o’clock Dick rode home to his hotel in a taxi.

the placards borne by the radicals were taken away from them, their clothing torn and eyes blackened before the service and ex-service men had finished with them

34 Die After Drinking Wood Alcohol Trains in France May Soon Stop

Gerard Throws His Hat into the Ring

SUPREME COURT DASHES LAST HOPE OF

MOIST MOUTH

LIFE BOAT CALLED BY ROCKET SIGNALS SEARCHES IN

VAIN FOR SIXTEEN HOURS

America I love you

You’re like a sweetheart of mine

LES GENS SAGES FUIENT LES REUNIONS POLITIQUES

WALLSTREET CLOSES WEAK: FEARS

TIGHT MONEY

From ocean to ocean

For you my devotion

Is touching each boundary line

LITTLE CARUSO EXPECTED

his mother, Mrs. W.D. McGillicudy said: “My first husband was killed while crossing tracks in front of a train, my second husband was killed in the same way and now it is my son

Just like a little baby

Climbing its mother’s knee

MACHINEGUNS MOW DOWN MOBS

IN KNOXVILLE

America I love you

Aviators Lived for Six Days on Shellfish

the police compelled the demonstrators to lower these flags and ordered the convention not to exhibit any red emblems save the red in the starry banner of the United States; it may not be indiscreet to state, however, in any case it cannot dim his glory, that General Pershing was confined to his stateroom through seasickness when the message arrived. Old Fellow of 89 Treasures Chewinggum as Precious Souvenir Couldn’t Maintain His Serenity In Closing League Debates

And there’s a hundred million others like me

Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates byaconcurrentresolutionadoptedon the4thdayofmarch lastauthorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be brought to theunitedstatesthe body of an American whowasamemberoftheamericanexpeditionaryforcesineuropewholosthis lifeduringtheworldwarandwhoseidentityhasnot beenestablished for burial inthememorialamphitheatreofthe nationalcemeteryatarlingtonvirginia

In the tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of

enie menie minie moe plenty other pine boxes stacked up there containing what they’d scraped up of Richard Roe

and other person or persons unknown. Only one can go. How did they pick John Doe?

Make sure he aint a dinge, boys,

make sure he aint a guinea or a kike,

how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?

… and the gagging chloride and the puky dirtstench of the yearold dead…

The day withal was too meaningful and tragic for applause. Silence, tears, songs and prayer, muffled drums and soft music were the instrumentalities today of national approbation.

John Doe was born (thudding din of blood in love into the shuddering soar of a man and a woman alone indeed together lurching into

and ninemonths sick drowse waking into scared agony and the pain and blood and mess of birth). John Doe was born

and raised in Brooklyn, in Memphis, near the lakefront in Cleveland, Ohio, in the stench of the stockyards in Chi, on Beacon Hill, in an old brick house in Alexandria Virginia, on Telegraph Hill, in a halftimbered Tudor cottage in Portland the city of roses,

in the Lying-In Hospital old Morgan endowed on Stuyvesant Square,

across the railroad tracks, out near the country club, in a shack cabin tenement apartmenthouse exclusive residential suburb;

scion of one of the best families in the social register, won first prize in the baby parade at Coronado Beach, was marbles champion of the Little Rock grammarschools, crack basketballplayer at the Booneville High, quarterback at the State Reformatory, having saved the sheriff’s kid from drowning in the Little Missouri River was invited to Washington to be photographed shaking hands with the President on the White House steps;—

though this was a time of mourning, such an assemblage necessarily has about it a touch of color. In the boxes are seen the court uniforms of foreign diplomats, the gold braid of our own and foreign fleets and armies, the black of the conventional morning dress of American statesmen, the varicolored furs and outdoor wrapping garments of mothers and sisters come to mourn, the drab and blue of soldiers and sailors, the glitter of musical instruments and the white and black of a vested choir

— busboy harveststiff hogcaller boyscout champeen corn-shucker of Western Kansas bellhop at the United States Hotel at Saratoga Springs office boy callboy fruiter telephone lineman longshoreman lumberjack plumber’s helper,