John Passos - 1919

he had a plan all ready for stopping the gold hemorrhage.

After that what Morgan said went; when Carnegie sold out he built the Steel Trust.

J. Pierpont Morgan was a bullnecked irascible man with small black magpie’s eyes and a growth on his nose; he let his partners work themselves to death over the detailed routine of banking, and sat in his back office smoking black cigars; when there was something to be decided he said Yes or No or just turned his bank and went back to his solitaire.

Every Christmas his librarian read him Dickens’ A Christmas Carol from the original manuscript.

He was fond of canarybirds and pekinese dogs and liked to take pretty actresses yachting. Each Corsair was a finer vessel than the last.

When he dined with King Edward he sat at His Majesty’s right; he ate with the Kaiser tête-à-tête; he liked talking to cardinals or the pope, and never missed a conference of Episcopal bishops;

Rome was his favorite city.

He liked choice cookery and old wines and pretty women and yachting, and going over his collections, now and then picking up a jewelled snuffbox and staring at it with his magpie’s eyes.

He made a collection of the autographs of the rulers of France, owned glass cases full of Babylonian tablets, seals, signets, statuettes, busts,

Gallo-Roman bronzes,

Merovingian jewels, miniatures, watches, tapestries, porcelains, cuneiform inscriptions, paintings by all the old masters, Dutch, Italian, Flemish, Spanish,

manuscripts of the gospels and the Apocalypse,

a collection of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

and the letters of Pliny the Younger.

His collectors bought anything that was expensive or rare or had the glint of empire on it, and he had it brought to him and stared hard at it with his magpie’s eyes. Then it was put in a glass case.

The last year of his life he went up the Nile on a dahabiyeh and spent a long time staring at the great columns of the Temple of Karnak.

The panic of 1907 and the death of Harriman, his great opponent in railroad financing, in 1909, had left him the undisputed ruler of Wall Street, most powerful private citizen in the world;

an old man tired of the purple, suffering from gout, he had deigned to go to Washington to answer the questions of the Pujo Committee during the Money Trust Investigation: Yes, I did what seemed to me to be for the best interests of the country.

So admirably was his empire built that his death in 1913 hardly caused a ripple in the exchanges of the world: the purple descended to his son, J. P. Morgan,

who had been trained at Groton and Harvard and by associating with the British ruling class

to be a more constitutional monarch: J. P. Morgan suggests …

By 1917 the Allies had borrowed one billion, ninehundred million dollars through the House of Morgan: we went overseas for democracy and the flag;

and by the end of the Peace Conference the phrase J. P. Morgan suggests had compulsion over a power of seventyfour billion dollars.

J. P. Morgan is a silent man, not given to public utterances, but during the great steel strike, he wrote Gary: Heartfelt congratulations on your stand for the open shop, with which I am, as you know, absolutely in accord. I believe American principles of liberty are deeply involved, and must win if we stand firm.

(Wars and panics on the stock exchange,

machinegunfire and arson,

bankruptcies, warloans,

starvation, lice, cholera and typhus:

good growing weather for the House of Morgan.)

the Grand Prix de la Victoire, run yesterday for fiftysecond time was an event that will long remain in the memories of those present, for never in the history of the classic race has Longchamps presented such a glorious scene

Keep the home fires burning

Till the boys come home

LEVIATHAN UNABLE TO PUT TO SEA

BOLSHEVIKS ABOLISH POSTAGE STAMPS

ARTIST TAKES GAS IN NEW HAVEN

FIND BLOOD ON $1 BILL

While our hearts are yearning

POTASH CAUSE OF BREAK IN PARLEY

MAJOR DIES OF POISONING

TOOK ROACH SALTS BY MISTAKE

riot and robbery developed into the most awful pogrom ever heard of. Within two or three days the Lemberg ghetto was turned into heaps of smoking debris. Eyewitnesses estimate that the Polish soldiers killed more than a thousand jewish men and women and children

LENINE SHOT BY TROTSKY

IN DRUNKEN BRAWL

you know where I stand on beer, said Brisbane in seeking assistance

Though the boys are far away

They long for home

There’s a silver lining

Through the dark clouds shining

PRESIDENT EVOKES CRY OF THE DEAD

LETTER CLEW TO BOMB OUTRAGE

Emile Deen in the preceding three installments of his interview described the situation between the Royal Dutch and the Standard Oil Company, as being the beginning of a struggle for the control of the markets of the world which was only halted by the war. “The basic factors,” he said, “are envy, discontent, and suspicion.” The extraordinary industrial growth of our nation since the Civil War, the opening up of new territory, the development of resources, the rapid increase in population, all these things have resulted in the creation of many big and sudden fortunes. Is there a mother, father, sweetheart, relative or friend of any one of the two million boys fighting abroad who does not thank God that Wall Street contributed H. P. Davidson to the Red Cross?

BOND THIEF MURDERED

Turn the bright side inside out

Till the boys come home

daylight enlarges out of ruddy quiet very faintly throbbing wanes into my sweet darkness broadens red through the warm blood weighting the lids warmsweetly then snaps on

enormously blue yellow pink

today is Paris pink sunlight hazy on the clouds against patches of robinsegg a tiny siren hoots shrilly traffic drowsily rumbles clatters over the cobbles taxis squawk the yellow’s the comforter through the open window the Louvre emphasizes its sedate architecture of greypink stone between the Seine and the sky

and the certainty of Paris

the towboat shiny green and red chugs against the current towing three black and mahoganyvarnished barges their deckhouse windows have green shutters and lace curtains and pots of geraniums in flower to get under the bridge a fat man in blue had to let the little black stack drop flat to the deck

Paris comes into the room in the servantgirl’s eyes the warm bulge of her breasts under the grey smock the smell of chickory in coffee scalded milk and the shine that crunches on the crescent rolls stuck with little dabs of very sweet unsalted butter

in the yellow paperback of the book that halfhides the agreeable countenance of my friend

Paris of 1919

paris-mutuel

roulettewheel that spins round the Tour Eiffel red square white square a million dollars a billion marks a trillion roubles baisse du franc or a mandate for Montmartre

Cirque Médrano the steeplechase gravity of cellos tuning up on the stage at the Salle Gaveau oboes and a triangle la musique’s’en fout de moi says the old marchioness jingling with diamonds as she walks out on Stravinski but the red colt took the jumps backwards and we lost all our money

la peinture opposite the Madeleine Cezanne Picassso Modigliani

Nouvelle Athènes

la poesie of manifestos always freshtinted on the kiosks and slogans scrawled in chalk on the urinals L’UNION DES TRAVAILLEURS FERA LA PAIX DU MONDE

revolution round the spinning Eiffel Tower

that burns up our last year’s diagrams the dates fly off the calendar we’ll make everything new today is the Year I Today is the sunny morning of the first day of spring We gulp our coffee splash water on us jump into our clothes run downstairs set out wideawake into the first morning of the first day of the first year