U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [102]
-240-on the stewed apricots inspections AttenSHUN click clack At Ease shoot the flashlight in everycorner of the tin pans nine lineups along the heaving airless cor-ridor of seasick seascared doughboys with their messkits in their hands)
Hay sojer tel me they've signed an armístice tel
me the wars over they're takin us home latrine talk the hel you say now I'l tel one we were already
leading the empty rosies down three flights of iron ladders into the heaving retching hold starting up with the ful whenever the ship rol ed a little slum would trickle out the side MEESTER VEELSON
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 val ey of Virginia; it was the old Scotch-Irish stock; the father was a pres-byterian minister too and a teacher of rhetoric in theo-logical 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;
-241-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 til he was nine, but when he learned to read his favorite read-ing was Parson Weems'
Life of Washington.
In 1870 Dr. Wilson was cal ed to the Theological
Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina; Tommy at-tended Davidson col ege, where he developed a good tenor voice;
then he went to Princeton and became a debater
and editor of the Princetonian. His first published ar-ticle in the Nassau Literary Magazine was an apprecia-tion of Bismarck. Afterwards he studied law at the University of Vir-ginia; young Wilson wanted to be a Great Man, like Gladstone and the eighteenth century English parlia-mentarians; he wanted to hold the packed benches spel -bound in the cause of Truth; but lawpractice irked him; he was more at home in the booky air of libraries, lec-turerooms, col ege chapel, it was a relief to leave his lawpractice at Atlanta and take a Historical Fel owship at Johns Hopkins; there he wrote Congressional Gov- ernment.
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
-242-to a professorship at Wesleyan, wrote articles, started a History of the United States,
spoke out for Truth Reform Responsible Govern-ment Democracy from the lecture platform, climbed al the steps of a bril iant university careeri in 1901
the trustees of Princeton offered him the presidency; he plunged into reforming the university, made
violent friends and enemies, set the campus by the ears, and the American people began to find on the
front pages
the name of Woodrow Wilson.
In 1909 he made addresses on Lincoln and Robert
E. Lee
and in 1910
the democratic bosses of New Jersey, hardpressed
by muckrakers and reformers, got the bright idea of offering the nomination for governor to the stainless col ege president who attracted such large audiences by publicly championing Right.
When Mr. Wilson addressed the Trenton conven-tion that nominated him for governor he confessed his belief in the common man, (the smal town bosses and the wardheelers looked at each other and scratched
their heads); he went on, his voice growing firmer: that is the man by whose judgment I for one wish to be guided, so that as the tasks multiply, and as the days come when all