John Passos - 1919

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.

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

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