U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [283]
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 will feel confusion and dismay, we may lift up our eyes to the hills out of these dark valleys where the crags of special privilege overshadow and darken our path, to where the sun gleams through the great passage in the broken cliffs, the sun of God, the sun meant to regenerate men,
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