“I’ll join the Red Cross,” she said. “I can’t wait to get to France.”
Newsreel XIX
U. S. AT WAR
UPHOLD NATION CITY’S CRY
Over there
Over there
at the annual meeting of the stockholders of the Colt Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company a $2,500,000 melon was cut. The present capital stock was increased. The profits for the year were 259 per cent
JOYFUL SURPRISE OF BRITISH
The Yanks are coming
We’re coming o-o-o-ver
PLAN LEGISLATION TO KEEP COLORED PEOPLE
FROM WHITE AREAS
many millions paid for golf about Chicago Hindu agitators in nationwide scare Armour Urges U.S. Save Earth From Famine
ABUSING FLAG TO BE PUNISHED
Labor deputies peril to Russia acts have earmarks of dishonorable peace London hears
BILLIONS FOR ALLIES
And we won’t come home
Till it’s over over there.
The Camera Eye (27)
there were priests and nuns on the Espagne the Atlantic was glassgreen and stormy covers were clamped on the portholes and all the decklights were screened and you couldn’t light a match on deck
but the stewards were very brave and said the Boche wouldn’t sink a boat of the Compagnie Generale anyway, because of the priests and nuns and the Jesuits and the Comité des Forges promising not to bombard the Bassin de la Brieye where the big smelters were and stock in the company being owned by the Prince de Bourbon and the Jesuits and the priests and nuns
anyhow everybody was very brave except for Colonel and Mrs. Knowlton of the American Red Cross who had waterproof coldproof submarineproof suits like eskimosuits and they wore them and they sat up on deck with the suits all blown up and only their faces showing and there were firstaid kits in the pockets and in the belt there was a waterproof container with milkchocolate and crackers and maltedmilk tablets
and in the morning you’d walk round the deck and there would be Mr. Knowlton blowing up Mrs. Knowlton
or Mrs. Knowlton blowing up Mr. Knowlton
the Roosevelt boys were very brave in stiff visored new American army caps and sharpshooter medals on the khaki whipcord and they talked all day about We must come in We must come in
as if the war were a swimming pool
and the barman was brave and the stewards were brave they’d all been wounded and they were very glad that they were stewards and not in the trenches
and the pastry was magnificent
at last it was the zone and a zigzag course we sat quiet in the bar and then it was the mouth of the Gironde and a French torpedoboat circling round the ship in the early pearl soft morning and the steamers following the little patrolboat on account of the minefields the sun was rising red over the ruddy winegrowing land and the Gironde was full of freighters and airplanes in the sun and battleships
the Garonne was red it was autumn there were barrels of new wine and shellcases along the quays in front of the grayfaced houses and the masts of stocky sailboats packed in against the great red iron bridge
at the Hotel of the Seven Sisters everybody was in mourning but business was brisk on account of the war and every minute they expected the government to come down from Paris
up north they were dying in the mud and the trenches but business was good in Bordeaux and the winegrowers and the shipping agents and the munitionsmakers crowded into the Chapon Fin and ate ortolans and mushrooms and truffles and there was a big sign
MEFIEZ-VOUS
les oreilles enemies vous écoutent
red wine twilight and yellowgravelled squares edged with wine-barrels and a smell of chocolate in the park gray statues and the names of streets
Street of Lost Hopes, Street of the Spirit of the Laws, Street of Forgotten Footsteps
and the smell of burning leaves and the grayfaced Bourbon houses crumbling into red wine twilight
at the Hotel of the Seven Sisters after you were in bed late at night you suddenly woke up and there was a secretserviceagent going through your bag
and he frowned over your passport and peeped in your books and said Monsieur c’est la petite visite
Fighting Bob
La Follette was born in the town limits of Primrose; he worked on a farm in Dane County, Wisconsin, until he was nineteen.
At the university of Wisconsin he worked his way through. He wanted to be an actor, studied elocution and Robert Ingersoll and Shakespeare and Burke;
(who will ever explain the influence of Shakespeare in the last century, Marc Antony over Caesar’s bier, Othello to the Venetian Senate and Polonius, everywhere Polonius?)
riding home in a buggy after commencement he was Booth and Wilkes writing the Junius papers and Daniel Webster and Ingersoll defying God and the togaed great grave and incorruptible as statues magnificently spouting through the capitoline centuries;
he was the star debater in his class,
and won an interstate debate with an oration on the character of Iago.
He went to work in a law office and ran for district attorney. His schoolfriends canvassed the county riding round evenings. He bucked the machine and won the election.
It was the revolt of the young man against the state republican machine
and Boss Keyes the postmaster in Madison who ran the county was so surprised he about fell out of his chair.
That gave La Follette a salary to marry on. He was twentyfive years old.
Four years later he ran for congress; the university was with him again; he was the youngsters’ candidate. When he was elected he was the youngest representative in the house.
He was introduced round Washington by Philetus Sawyer the Wisconsin lumber king who was used to stacking and selling politicians the way he stacked and sold cordwood.
He was a Republican and he’d bucked the machine. Now they thought they had him. No man could stay honest in Washington.
Booth played Shakespeare in Baltimore that winter. Booth never would go to Washington on account of the bitter memory of his brother. Bob La Follette and his wife went to every performance.
In the parlor of the Plankinton Hotel in Milwaukee during the state fair, Boss Sawyer the lumber king tried to bribe him to influence his brother-in-law who was presiding judge over the prosecution of the Republican state treasurer;
Bob La Follette walked out of the hotel in a white rage. From that time it was war without quarter with the Republican machine in Wisconsin until he was elected governor and wrecked the Republican machine;
this was the tenyears war that left Wisconsin the model state where the voters, orderloving Germans and Finns, Scandinavians fond of their own opinion, learned to use the new leverage, direct primaries, referendum and recall.
La Follette taxed the railroads
John C. Payne said to a group of politicians in the lobby of the Ebbitt House in Washington “La Follette’s a damn fool if he thinks he can buck a railroad with five thousand miles of continuous track, he’ll find he’s mistaken… We’ll take care of him when the time comes.”