U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [103]
the sun meant to liberate them from their passion and despair and lift us to those uplands which are the
-243- promised land of every man who desires liberty and achievement. The smal town bosses and the wardheelers looked
at each other and scratched their heads; then they
cheered; Wilson fooled the wiseacres and double-crossed the bosses, was elected by a huge plurality; so he left Princeton only half reformed to be
Governor of New Jersey,
and became reconciled with Bryan
at the Jackson Day dinner: when Bryan remarked,
"I of course knew that you were not with me in my position on the currency," Mr. Wilson replied, "Al I can say, Mr. Bryan, is that you are a great big man." He was introduced to Colonel House,
that amateur Merlin of politics who was spinning
his webs at the Hotel Gotham
and at the convention in Baltimore the next July
the upshot of the puppetshow staged for sweating dele-gates by Hearst and House behind the scenes, and Bryan booming in the corridors with a handkerchief over his wilted col ar, was that Woodrow Wilson was nominated for the presidency. The bolt of the Progressives in Chicago from Taft
to T.R. made his election sure;
so he left the State of New Jersey halreformed
(pitiless publicity was the slogan of the Shadow
Lawn Campaign)
and went to the White House
our twentyeighth president.
While Woodrow Wilson drove up Pennsylvania
Avenue beside Taft the great buttertub, who as presi-dent had been genial y undoing T.R.'s reactionary ef-forts to put business under the control of the govern-ment, J. Pierpont Morgan sat playing solitaire in his
-244-back office on Wal Street, smoking twenty black cigars a day, cursing the fol ies of democracy.
Wilson flayed the interests and branded privilege
refused to recognize Huerta and sent the militia to the Rio Grande
to assume a policy of watchful waiting. He pub-lished The New Freedom and delivered his messages to Congress in person, like a col ege president address-ing the faculty and students. At Mobile he said: I wish to take this occasion to say that the United States will never again seek one additional foot of terri- tory by conquest; and he landed the marines at Vera Cruz.
We are witnessing a renaissance of public spirit, a reawakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the power of the people the beginning of an age of thought- ful reconstruction . . .
but the world had started spinning round Sarajevo.
First it was neutrality in thought and deed, then too proud to fight when the Lusitania sinking and the danger to the Morgan loans and the stories of the Brit-ish and French propagandists set al the financial centers in the East bawling for war, but the suction of the drumbeat and the guns was too strong; the best people took their fashions from Paris and their broad "a's" from London, and T.R. and the House of Morgan. Five months after his reelection on the slogan He kept us out of war, Wilson pushed the Armed Ship Bil through congress and declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Central
Powers:
Force without stint or limit, force to the utmost. Wilson became the state (war is the health of the
state), Washington his Versail es, manned the socialized
-245-government with dol ar a year men out of the great corporations and ran the big parade
of men munitions groceries mules and trucks to
France. Five mil ion men stood at attention outside of their tarpaper barracks every sundown while they
played The Star Spangled Banner.
War brought the, eight hour day, women's votes,
prohibition, compulsory arbitration, high wages, high rates of interest' cost plus contracts and the luxury of being a Gold Star Mother.
If you objected to making the world safe for cost
plus democracy you went to jail with Debs.
Almost too