John Passos - 1919

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.

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 light

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

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

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;