The 42nd Parallel (22 page)

as o’er the foam his vessel reels

and He mixed up a toddy and Mr. Pierce pulled at his dundrearies and everybody was very jolly and they talked about the schooner
Mary Wentworth
and how Colonel Hodgeson and Father Murphy looked so hard on the cheery glass and He mixed up a toddy and Mr. Pierce pulled at his dundrearies and Mrs. Black smoked the little brown cigarettes one after another and everybody was very jolly with
Fra Diavolo
playing on the phonograph and the harbor smell and the ferryboats and the Delaware all silverripply used to be all marshes over there where we used to go duckshooting and He sang
Vittoria
with the phonograph

and Father Murphy got a terrible attack of gout and had to be carried off on a shutter and Mr. Pierce ninety six years old and sound as a dollar took a sip of toddy and tugged at his dundrearies silveryripply and the harborsmell came on the fresh wind and smoke from the shipyards in Camden and lemon rye sugary smell of toddy-glasses and everybody was very jolly

GREEKS IN BATTLE FLEE BEFORE COPS

Passengers In Sleeping Car Aroused At point of Gun

Flow, river, flow

Down to the sea

Bright stream bring my loved one

Home to me

FIGHTING AT TORREON

at the end of the last campaign, writes Champ Clark, Missouri’s brilliant Congressman, I had about collapsed from overwork, nervous tension, loss of sleep and appetite and constant speaking, but three bottles of Electric Bitters made me allright

Roosevelt Is Made Leader Of New Party

BRYAN’S THROAT CUT BY CLARK; AIDS PARKER

True, dear one, true

I’m trying hard to be

But hear me say

It’s a very very long long way

From the banks of the Seine

the crime for which Richardson was sentenced to die in the electric chair was the confessed murder of his former sweetheart 19 year old Avis Linnell of Hyannis a pupil in the New England Conservatory of Music at Boston.

The girl stood in the way of the minister’s marriage to a society girl and heiress of Brookline both through an engagement that still existed between the two and because of a condition in which Miss Linnell found herself.

The girl was deceived into taking a poison given her by Richardson which she believed would remedy that condition and died in her room at the Young Women’s Christian Association.

ROOSEVELT TELLS FIRST TIME HOW US
GOT PANAMA

100,000
PEOPLE UNABLE TO ENTER
BIG HALL ECHO CHEERING

at dinnertime the Governor said he hadn’t heard directly from Mr. Bryan during the day. “At the present rate of gain,” Mr. Wilson said, “After reading the results of the fifteenth ballot, I figure it’ll take about 175 more ballots to land me”

Redhaired Youth Says Stories of Easy Money Led Him to Crime

interest in the case was intensified on Dec. 20 when it became known that the ex-clergyman had mutilated himself in his cell at the Charles Street jail.

FIVE MEN DIE AFTER GETTING TO SOUTH POLE

DIAZ TRAINS HEAVY GUNS ON BUSINESS SECTION

It’s a very very long long way

From the banks of the Seine

For a girl to go and stay

On the banks of the Saskatchewan

It was in the Chicago Convention in ’96 that the prizewinning boy orator the minister’s son whose lips had never touched liquor let out his silver voice so that it filled the gigantic hall, filled the ears of the plain people:

   
Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the convention:

      
I would be presumptuous indeed

                        
to present myself against

      
the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened, if this

were a mere measuring of abilities;

            
but this is not a contest between persons.

         
The humblest citizen in all the land,

      when clad in the armor of a righteous cause,

         
is stronger than all the hosts of error.

I come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as the cause of

    
Liberty
. . .

a youngish bigmouthed man in a white tie

barnstormer, exhorter, evangelist,

his voice charmed the mortgageridden farmers of the great plains, rang through weatherboarded schoolhouses in the Missouri Valley, was sweet in the ears of small storekeepers hungry for easy credit, melted men’s innards like the song of a thrush or a mockin’ in the gray quiet before sunup, or a sudden soar in winter wheat or a bugler playing taps and the flag flying;

silver tongue of the plain people:

    . . . the man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer;

    the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis;

    the merchant in a crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York;

    the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in the spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain;

    the miners who go down a thousand feet in the earth

        
or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs

    and bring forth from their hidingplaces

            
the precious metals

                
to be poured in the channels of trade,

    are as much business men

        
as the few financial magnates

            
who

                
in a back room

                    
corner the money of the world.

The hired man and the country attorney sat up and listened,

this was big talk for the farmer who’d mortgaged his crop to buy fertilizer, big talk for the smalltown hardware man, groceryman, feed and corn merchant, undertaker, truck-gardener . . .

Having behind us

        
the producing masses

            
of this nation and the world,

supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests,

        
and the toilers everywhere,

we will answer

            
their demand

                        
for a gold standard

                                    
by saying to them:

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,

        
you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

They roared their lungs out
(crown of thorns and cross of gold)

carried him round the hall on their shoulders, hugged him, loved him, named their children after him, nominated him for president,

boy orator of the Platte,

                 silver tongue of the plain people.

But McArthur and Forrest, two Scotchmen in the Rand, had invented the cyanide process for extracting gold from ore, South Africa flooded the gold market; there was no need for a prophet of silver.

The silver tongue chanted on out of the big mouth, chanting Pacifism, Prohibition, Fundamentalism,

nibbling radishes on the lecture platform,

drinking grapejuice and water,

gorging big cornbelt meals;

         Bryan grew gray in the hot air of Chautauqua tents, in the applause, the handshakes, the backpattings, the cigarsmoky air of committeerooms at Democratic conventions, a silver tongue in a big mouth.

             In Dayton he dreamed of turning the trick again, of setting back the clocks for the plain people, branding, flaying, making a big joke

             of Darwinism and the unbelieving outlook of city folks, scientists, foreigners with beards and monkey morals.

             In Florida he’d spoken every day at noon on a float under an awning selling lots for Coral Gables . . . he had to speak, to feel the drawling voices hush, feel the tense approving ears, the gust of handclaps.

             Why not campaign again through the length and

breadth to set up again the tottering word for the plain

people who wanted the plain word of God?

                    
(crown of thorns and cross of gold)

the plain prosperous comfortable word of God

for plain prosperous comfortable midamerican folks?

He was a big eater. It was hot. A stroke killed him.

Three days later down in Florida the company delivered

the electric horse he’d ordered to exercise on

when he’d seen the electric horse the president

exercised on in the White House.

it was hot as a bakeoven going through the canal from Delaware City and turtles sunning themselves tumbled off into the thick ocher ripple we made in passing and He was very gay and She was feeling well for once and He made us punch of tea and mint and a little Saint Croix rum but it was hot as the hinges of Delaware and we saw scarlet tanagers and redwing blackbirds and kingfishers cackled wrathfully as the yellow wave from the white bow rustled the reeds and the cattails and the sweetflag and He talked about lawreform and what politicians were like and where were the Good Men in this country and said Why thinking the way I think I couldn’t get elected to be notary public in any county in the state not with all the money in the world no not even dogcatcher

He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on the Fourth of July. Poor Mrs. Moorehouse could hear the firecrackers popping and crackling outside the hospital all through her laborpains. And when she came to a little and they brought the baby to her she asked the nurse in a trembling husky whisper if she thought it could have a bad effect on the baby all that noise, prenatal influence you know. The nurse said the little boy ought to grow up to be very patriotic and probably president being born on the Glorious Fourth and went on to tell a long story about a woman who’d been frightened by having a beggar stick his hand out suddenly right under her nose just before the child was born and the child had been born with six fingers, but Mrs. Moorehouse was too weak to listen and went off to sleep. Later Mr. Moorehouse came by on his way home from the depot where he worked as stationagent and they decided to call the kid John Ward after Mrs. Moorehouse’s father who was a farmer in Iowa and pretty well off. Then Mr. Moorehouse went round to Healy’s to get tanked up because he was a father and because it was the Glorious Fourth and Mrs. Moorehouse went off to sleep again.

Johnny grew up in Wilmington. He had two brothers, Ben and Ed, and three sisters, Myrtle, Edith and Hazel, but everybody said he was the bright boy of the family as well as the eldest. Ben and Ed were stronger and bigger than he was, but he was the marbles champion of the public school, getting considerable fame one term by a corner in agates he maneuvered with the help of a little Jewish boy named Ike Goldberg; they managed to rent out agates to other boys for a cent a week for ten.

When the Spanish War came on everybody in Wilmington was filled with martial enthusiasm, all the boys bothered their parents to buy them Rough Rider suits and played filibusters and Pawnee Indian wars and Colonel Roosevelt and Remember the
Maine
and the White Fleet and the
Oregon
steaming through the Straits of Magellan. Johnny was down on the wharf one summer evening when Admiral Cervera’s squadron was sighted in battle formation passing through the Delaware Capes by a detachment of the state militia who immediately opened fire on an old colored man crabbing out in the river. Johnny ran home like Paul Revere and Mrs. Moorehouse gathered up her six children and pushing two of them in a babycarriage and dragging the other four after her, made for the railway station to find her husband. By the time they’d decided to hop on the next train to Philadelphia news went round that the Spanish squadron was just some boats fishing for menhaden and that the militiamen were being confined in barracks for drunkenness. When the old colored man had hauled in his last crabline he sculled back to shore and exhibited to his cronies several splintery bulletholes in the side of his skiff.