SPECIAL GRAND JURY ASKED TO INDICT BOLSHEVISTS

the soldiers and sailors gave the only touch of color to
the celebration. They went in wholeheartedly for having a
good time, getting plenty to drink despite the fact that they
were in uniform. Some of these returned fighters nearly
caused a riot when they took an armful of stones and attempted
to break an electric sign at Broadway and Forty-second Street
reading:

WELCOME HOME TO OUR HEROES

Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming
When the rocket's red glare the bombs bursting in air
Was proof to our eyes that the flag was still there

THE CAMERA EYE (36)

when we emptied the rosies to leeward over the side
every night after the last inspection we'd stop for a
moment's gulp of the November gale the lash of spray
in back of your ears for a look at the spume splintered
off the leaping waves shipwreckers drowners of men (in
their great purple floating mines rose and fell gently sub-
marines travelled under them on an even keel) to glance
at the sky veiled with scud to take our hands off the greasy
handles of the cans full of slum they couldnt eat (nine
meals nine dumpings of the leftover grub nine cussing-
matches with the cockney steward who tried to hold out

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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 tell me they've signed an armístice tell
me the wars over they're takin us home latrine talk
the hell you say now I'll tell one we were already
leading the empty rosies down three flights of iron ladders
into the heaving retching hold starting up with the full
whenever the ship rolled 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 valley 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;

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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 till he
was nine, but when he learned to read his favorite read-
ing was Parson Weems'
Life of Washington.

In 1870 Dr. Wilson was called to the Theological
Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina; Tommy at-
tended Davidson college,
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 spell-
bound in the cause of Truth; but lawpractice irked him;
he was more at home in the booky air of libraries, lec-
turerooms, college chapel, it was a relief to leave his
lawpractice at Atlanta and take a Historical Fellowship
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

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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
all the steps of a brilliant 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
college 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 smalltown 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

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promised land of every man who desires liberty and
achievement.

The smalltown 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, "All 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 collar, 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 genially 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

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back office on Wall Street, smoking twenty black cigars
a day, cursing the follies 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 college 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 all 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
Bill 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 Versailles, manned the socialized

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government with dollar a year men out of the great
corporations and ran the big parade

of men munitions groceries mules and trucks to
France. Five million 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 shallow and the
grey look of the skin of starved children; they read in

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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 Rolls 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 full 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 called 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 illus-
trated papers?) (Did Meester Veelson know that the
people of Europe spelled a challenge to oppression out
of the Fourteen Points as centuries before they had
spelled a challenge to oppression out of the ninetyfive
articles Martin Luther nailed to the churchdoor in
Wittenberg?)

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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 allied 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
was too public a place to make peace in
so the High Contracting Parties
formed the Council of Ten, went into the Gobelin
Room and, surrounded by Rubens's History of Manie
de Medici,
began to dictate the peace.
But the Council of Ten was too public a place to
make peace in
so they formed the Council of Four.
Orlando went home in a huff
and then there were three:
Clemenceau,
Lloyd George,
Woodrow Wilson.
Three old men shuffling the pack,
dealing out the cards:
the Rhineland, Danzig, the Polish corridor, the
Ruhr, self determination of small nations, the Saar,
League of Nations, mandates, the Mespot, Freedom of
the Seas, Transjordania, Shantung, Fiume and the
Island of Yap:
machine gun fire and arson
starvation, lice, cholera, typhusi
oil was trumps.

Woodrow Wilson believed in his father's God
so he told the parishioners in the little Lowther
Street Congregational church where his grandfather
had preached in Carlisle in Scotland, a day so chilly that

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the newspaper men sitting in the old pews all had to
keep their overcoats on.

On April 7th he ordered the George Washington
to be held at Brest with steam up ready to take the
American delegation home;

but he didn't go.

On April 19 sharper Clemenceau. and sharper
Lloyd George got him into their little cosy threecard-
game they called the Council of Four.

On June 28th the Treaty of Versailles was ready
and Wilson had to go back home to explain to the
politicians who'd been ganging up on him meanwhile
in the Senate and House and to sober public opinion
and to his father's God how he'd let himself be trimmed
and how far he'd made the world safe
for democracy and the New Freedom.

From the day he landed in Hoboken he had his
back to the wall of the White House, talking to save
his faith in words, talking to save his faith in the
League of Nations, talking to save his faith in himself,
in his father's God.

He strained every nerve of his body and brain,
every agency of the government he had under his
control; (if anybody disagreed he was a crook or a red;
no pardon for Debs).

In Seattle the wobblies whose leaders were in
jail, in Seattle the wobblies whose leaders had been
lynched, who'd been shot down like dogs, in Seattle
the wobblies lined four blocks as Wilson passed, stood
silent with their arms folded staring at the great liberal
as he was hurried past in his car, huddled in his over-
coat, haggard with fatigue, one side of his face twitch-
ing. The men in overalls, the workingstiffs let him

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pass in silence after all the other blocks of handclapping
and patriotic cheers.

In Pueblo, Colorado, he was a grey man hardly
able to stand, one side of his face twitching:

Now that the mists of this great question have
cleared away, I believe that men will see the Truth,
eye for eye and face to face. There is one thing the
American People always rise to and extend their hand
to, that is, the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace.
We have accepted that truth and we are going to be
led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the
world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as
the world never dreamed of before.

That was his last speech;

on the train to Wichita he had a stroke. He gave
up the speaking tour that was to sweep the country for
the League of Nations. After that he was a ruined
paralysed man barely able to speak;
the day he gave up the presidency to Harding the
joint committee of the Senate and House appointed
Henry Cabot Lodge, his lifelong enemy, to make the
formal call at the executive office in the Capitol and
ask the formal question whether the president had any
message for the congress assembled in joint session;
Wilson managed to get to his feet, lifting himself
painfully by the two arms of the chair. "Senator
Lodge, I have no further communication to make,
thank you . . . Good morning," he said.

In 1924 on February 3rd he died.

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