U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [284]
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 soon the show was over, Prince Max
of Baden was pleading for the Fourteen Points, Foch was occupying the bridgeheads on the Rhine and the
Kaiser out of breath ran for the train down the platform at Potsdam wearing a silk hat and some say false
whiskers.
With the help of Almighty God, Right, Truth,
Justice, Freedom, Democracy, the Selfdetermination of Nations, No indemnities no annexations,
and Cuban sugar and Caucasian manganese and
Northwestern wheat and Dixie cotton, the British
blockade, General Pershing, the taxicabs of Paris and the seventyfive gun we won the war.
On December 4th, 1918, Woodrow Wilson, the
first president to leave the territory of the United States during his presidency, sailed for France on board the George Washington,
the most powerful man in the world.
In Europe they knew what gas smelt like and the
sweet sick stench of bodies buried too shal ow and the grey look of the skin of starved children; they read in
-246-the papers that Meester Veelson was for peace and free-dom and canned goods and butter and sugar; he landed at Brest with his staff of experts and publicists after a rough trip on the George Washington. La France héroïque was there with the speeches,
the singing schoolchildren, the mayors in their red sashes. (Did Meester Veelson see the gendarmes at
Brest beating back the demonstration of dockyard
workers who came to meet him with red flags?)
At the station in Paris he stepped from the train
onto a wide red carpet that lead him, between rows of potted palms, silk hats, legions of honor, decorated busts of uniforms, irockcoats, rosettes, boutonnières, to a Rol s Royce. (Did Meester Veelson see the women
in black, the cripples in their little carts, the pale anxious faces along the streets, did he hear the terrible anguish of the cheers as they hurried him and his new wife to the hôtel de Mrat, where in rooms ful of brocade,
gilt clocks, Buhl cabinets and ormolu cupids the presi-dential suite had been prepared?) While the experts were organizing the procedure
of the peace conference, spreading green baize on the tables, arranging the protocols, the Wilsons took a tour to see for themselves: the
day after Christmas they were entertained at Bucking-ham Palace; at Newyears they cal ed on the pope and on the microscopic Italian king at the Quirinal. (Did Meester Veelson know that in the peasants' wargrimed houses along the Brenta and the Piave they were burn-ing candles in front of his picture cut out of the il us-trated papers?) (Did Meester Veelson know that the people of Europe spel ed a chal enge to oppression out of the Fourteen Points as centuries before they had spel ed a chal enge to oppression out of the ninetyfive articles Martin Luther nailed to the churchdoor in Wittenberg?)
-247-January 18, 1919, in the midst of serried uniforms,248
cocked hats and gold braid, decorations, epaulettes, or-ders of merit and knighthood, the High Contracting Parties, the al ied and associated powers met in the Salon de I'Horloge at the quai d'Orsay to dictate the peace,
but the grand assembly of the peace conference