John Dos Passos - Mr. Wilsons War

BOOKS BY JOHN DOS PASSOS

Historical Narratives

THE GROUND WE STAND ON
THE HEAD AND HEART OF THOMAS JEFFERSON
THE MEN WHO MADE THE NATION
MR . WILSON S WAR

Contemporary Chronicles

CHOSEN COUNTRY
THREE SOLDIERS
MANHATTAN TRANSFER
THE 42 ND PARALLEL
NINETEEN NINETEEN
THE BIG MONEY
THE MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED
ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN
NUMBER ONE
THE GRAND DESIGN
THE GREAT DAYS
MIDCENTURY

Mainstream of America Series

EDITED BY LEWIS GANNETT

MR. WILSONS WAR

Wide World Photos:
Culver pictures:
The Bettman Archives:

Mr. Wilsons War by John Dos Passos

Acknowledgement is made to the following copyright holders:
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., for excerpts from My Memoir by Edith Boling Wilson. Copyright 1939 by Edith Boling Wilson. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Dodd, Mead & Company, for excerpts from Leaves from a War Diary by James G. Harbord. Copyright 1925 by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., for excerpts from Peacemaking, 1919, by Harold Nicolson. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Ives Hendrick, for excerpts from Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page by Burton J. Hendrick.
Hillman Press, Inc., for excerpts from The Second Division: American Expeditionary Force in France, 191719. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Houghton Mifflin Company, for excerpts from Journal of the Great War by Charles G. Dawes. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring Rice by Stephen Gwynn. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company and Constable and Company, Limited.
J. B. Lippincott Company, for excerpts from My Experiences in the World War by J. J. Pershing. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
The Macmillan Company, for excerpts from Charles Evans Hughes by Merlo J. Pusey. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Rachel Baker Napier, for excerpts from Life and Letters of Woodrow Wilson by Ray Stannard Baker.
Mr. Archibald Roosevelt, Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Mrs. Richard Derby, for excerpt from Library of Congress collection of the Theodore Roosevelt papers.

eISBN: 978-0-307-81368-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 6112612
Copyright 1962 by John Dos Passos
All Rights Reserved.

v3.1

O NE hot dusty afternoon in the first week of September 1901 President William McKinley, accompanied by Mrs. McKinley and his two nieces, arrived for his official visit to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Amid the screeching of whistles and the jangling of chimes and the booming of a twentyone gun salute, the President and Mrs. McKinley were driven slowly around the grounds in a carriage drawn by four well-matched bays.

The next day had been designated Presidents Day. Mr. McKinley delivered an address from a platform decorated with the massed flags of all the American republics to a crowd which the newspapers described as packed to suffocation on the esplanade.

Mr. McKinley was a fine figure of a man, with a high broad brow and a roman nose flanked by searching gray eyes. Under the black neckcloth an ample piqu vest gleamed white between the folds of the long Prince Albert coat. As he stood looking down into the enthusiastic faces, with the cheers and handclapping resounding in his ears, he couldnt help a feeling of confidence in his countrys destiny and his own which amounted perhaps to complacency.

With the help of his friend Mark Hanna and the full dinner pail he had won re-election over William Jennings Bryan, nominee of Populists and Free Silver Democrats, by a plurality of over a million votes.

A new century was opening. The Spanish-American War was won. Expanding westward to include Hawaii and the Philippines, and southward to dominate Cuba and Puerto Rico, the United States had taken her place among the great powers in the world. After four years and a half of his administration, the nation rejoiced in unexampled prosperity.

This portion of the earth said Mr. McKinley, and struck a responsive chord in the listening crowd, has no cause for humiliation for the part it has played in the march of civilization. It has not accomplished everything, far from it. It has simply done its best, and without vanity or boastfulness, and recognizing the valid achievements of others, it invites the friendly rivalry of all the powers in the peaceful pursuits of trade and commerce and will co-operate with all in advancing the highest and best interests of humanity

He spoke of the effect of railroads and swift steamships and of the Atlantic cables in knitting the world together: Isolation is no longer possible or desirable. The same important news is read, though in different languages, in all Christendom.

He called for an increase in the merchant marine to spread the fruits of American prosperitywhich he found so great as to be almost appallingto less favored lands, and for increased intercourse with the Latin-American peoples to whom this exposition was dedicated. He demanded the immediate construction of an isthmian canal to join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the laying of a cable out into the far Pacific. He spoke with enthusiasm of the development of arbitration treaties between nation and nation which hopeful men were looking for to eliminate forever the causes of war: God and man have linked the nations together. No nation can longer be indifferent to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other, the less occasion there is for misunderstandings, and the stronger the disposition, when we have differences, to adjust them in the court of arbitration, which is the noblest forum for international disputes.

After the speech the cheering crowd broke through the ropes and mobbed the stand. Smiling and dignified Mr. McKinley stepped forward and shook more than a hundred hands.

McKinley was a popular President. His enthusiastic reception wherever he met plain Americans man to man gave the lie to Bryans oratorical denunciations of the Republican Party as the party of the trusts and of the oppressors of the working man and the farmer; and to the Labor Day rabblerousers who had been reviving the issues of the campaign.

Labor Day parades, animated perhaps by the news of the strike in Pittsburgh of seventy thousand steel workers who didnt seem to appreciate the fullness of their dinner pails, had drawn recordbreaking crowds.