John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

Mrs. O’Hara scolded and stormed, “Didn’t I tell you, Tim O’Hara, no good’ll ever come with your fiddlin’ round with these godless labor unions and social-democrats and knights of labor, all of ’em drunk and loafin’bums like yourself, Tim O’Hara. Of course the master printers ud have to get together and buy up your outstandin’ paper and squash you, and serve you right too, Tim O’Hara, you and your godless socialistic boosin’ ways only they might have thought of your poor wife and her helpless wee babes, and now we’ll starve all of us together, us and the dependents and hangers on you’ve brought into the house.”

“Well, I declare,” cried Fainy’s sister Milly. “If I haven’t slaved and worked my fingers to the bone for every piece of bread I’ve eaten in this house,” and she got up from the breakfast table and flounced out of the room. Fainy sat there while the storm raged above his head; then he got up, slipping a corn muffin into his pocket as he went. In the hall he found the “help wanted” section of the Chicago Tribune , took his cap and went out into a raw Sunday morning full of churchbells jangling in his ears. He boarded a streetcar and went out to Lincoln Park. There he sat on a bench for a long time munching the muffin and looking down the columns of advertisements: Boy Wanted. But they none of them looked very inviting. One thing he was bound, he wouldn’t get another job in a printing shop until the strike was over. Then his eye struck

Bright boy wanted with amb. and lit. taste, knowledge of print. and pub. business. Conf. sales and distrib. proposition $15 a week apply by letter P.O. Box 1256b

Fainy’s head suddenly got very light. Bright boy, that’s me, ambition and literary taste… Gee, I must finish Looking Backward … and jez, I like reading fine, an’ I could run a linotype or set up print if anybody’d let me. Fifteen bucks a week… pretty soft, ten dollars’ raise. And he began to write a letter in his head, applying for the job.

DEAR SIR (MY DEAR SIR)

or maybe GENTLEMEN,

In applying for the position you offer in today’s Sunday Tribune I want to apply, (allow me to state) that I’m seventeen years old, no, nineteen, with several years’ experience in the printing and publishing trades, ambitious and with excellent knowledge and taste in the printing and publishing trades,

no, I can’t say that twice… And I’m very anxious for the job… As he went along it got more and more muddled in his head.

He found he was standing beside a peanut wagon. It was cold as blazes, a razor wind was shrieking across the broken ice and the black patches of water of the lake. He tore out the ad and let the rest of the paper go with the wind. Then he bought himself a warm package of peanuts.

Come on and hear

Come on and hear

Come on and hear

In his address to the Michigan state Legislature the retiring governor, Hazen S. Pingree, said in part: I make the prediction that unless those in charge and in whose hands legislation is reposed do not change the present system of inequality, there will be a bloody revolution in less than a quarter of a century in this great country of ours.

CARNEGIE TALKS OF HIS EPITAPH

Alexander’s Ragtime Band

It is the best

It is the best

the luncheon which was served in the physical laboratory was replete with novel features. A miniature blastfurnace four feet high was on the banquet table and a narrow gauge railroad forty feet long ran round the edge of the table. Instead of molten metal the blastfurnace poured hot punch into small cars on the railroad. Icecream was served in the shape of railroad ties and bread took the shape of locomotives.

Mr. Carnegie, while extolling the advantages of higher education in every branch of learning, came at last to this conclusion: Manual labor has been found to be the best foundation for the greatest work of the brain.

VICE PRESIDENT EMPTIES A BANK

Come on and hear

Alexander’s Ragtime Band

It is the best

It is the best

brother of Jesse James declares play picturing him as bandit trainrobber and outlaw is demoralizing district battle ends with polygamy, according to an investigation by Salt Lake ministers, still practiced by Mormons clubwomen gasp

It is the best band in the land

say circus animals only eat Chicago horsemeat Taxsale of Indiana lots marks finale of World’s Fair boom uses flag as ragbag killed on cannibal isle keeper falls into water and sealions attack him.

The launch then came alongside the half deflated balloon of the aerostat which threatened at any moment to smother Santos Dumont. The latter was half pulled and half clambered over the gunwale into the boat.

The prince of Monaco urged him to allow himself to be taken on board the yacht to dry himself and change his clothes. Santos Dumont would not leave the launch until everything that could be saved had been taken ashore, then, wet but smiling and unconcerned, he landed amid the frenzied cheers of the crowd.

o qu’il a des beaux yeux said the lady in the seat opposite but She said that was no way to talk to children and the little boy felt all hot and sticky but it was dusk and the lamp shaped like half a melon was coming on dim red and the train rumbled and suddenly I’ve been asleep and it’s black dark and the blue tassel bobs on the edge of the dark shade shaped like a melon and everywhere there are pointed curved shadows (the first time He came He brought a melon and the sun was coming in through the tall lace windowcurtains and when we cut it the smell of melons filled the whole room) No don’t eat the seeds deary they give you appendicitis

but you’re peeking out of the window into the black rumbling dark suddenly ranked with squat chimneys and you’re scared of the black smoke and the puffs of flame that flare and fade out of the squat chimneys Potteries dearie they work there all night Who works there all night? Workingmen and people like that laborers travailleurs greasers

you were scared

but now the dark was all black again the lamp in the train and the sky and everything had a blueblack shade on it and She was telling a story about

Longago Beforetheworldsfair Beforeyouwereborn and they went to Mexico on a private car on the new international line and the men shot antelope off the back of the train and big rabbits jackasses they called them and once one night Longago Beforetheworldsfair Beforeyouwereborn one night Mother was so frightened on account of all the rifleshots but it was allright turned out to be nothing but a little shooting they’d been only shooting a greaser that was all

that was in the early days

Debs was a railroad man, born in a weatherboarded shack at Terre Haute.

He was one of ten children.

His father had come to America in a sailingship in ’49,

an Alsatian from Colmar; not much of a moneymaker, fond of music and reading,

he gave his children a chance to finish public school and that was about all he could do.

At fifteen Gene Debs was already working as a machinist on the Indianapolis and Terre Haute Railway.

He worked as locomotive fireman,

clerked in a store

joined the local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, was elected secretary, traveled all over the country as organizer.

He was a tall shamblefooted man, had a sort of gusty rhetoric that set on fire the railroad workers in their pineboarded halls

made them want the world he wanted,

a world brothers might own

where everybody would split even: