I open the memoirs of General Grant, Volume II, at the place where he
is describing the surrender of General Lee, and find the following:
I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback on
_(sic)_ the field, and wore a soldier’s blouse for a coat,
with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army
who I was.
Anno 1865. I look out of my window and observe an officer of the
United States Army passing down the street. Anno 1922. Like General
Grant, he is without a sword. Like General Grant, he wears a sort of
soldier’s blouse for a coat. Like General Grant, he employs shoulder
straps to indicate to the army who he is. But there is something more.
On the left breast of this officer, apparently a major, there blazes
so brilliant a mass of color that, as the sun strikes it and the flash
bangs my eyes, I wink, catch my breath and sneeze. There are two
long strips, each starting at the sternum and disappearing into the
shadows of the axillia—every hue in the rainbow, the spectroscope, the
kaleidoscope—imperial purples, _sforzando_ reds, wild Irish greens,
romantic blues, loud yellows and oranges, rich maroons, sentimental
pinks, all the half-tones from ultra-violet to infra-red, all the
vibrations from the impalpable to the unendurable. A gallant _Soldat_,
indeed! How he would shame a circus ticket-wagon if he wore all the
medals and badges, the stars and crosses, the pendants and lavallières,
that go with those ribbons!... I glance at his sleeves. A simple golden
stripe on the one—six months beyond the raging main. None on the
other—the Kaiser’s cannon missed him.
Just what all these ribbons signify I am sure I don’t know; probably
they belong to campaign medals and tell the tale of butcheries in
foreign and domestic parts—mountains of dead Filipinos, Mexicans,
Haitians, Dominicans, West Virginia miners, perhaps even Prussians.
But in addition to campaign medals and the Distinguished Service Medal
there are now certainly enough foreign orders in the United States to
give a distinct brilliance to the national scene, viewed, say, from
Mars. The Frederician tradition, borrowed by the ragged Continentals
and embodied in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution, lasted
until 1918, and then suddenly blew up; to mention it to-day is a sort
of indecorum, and to-morrow, no doubt, will be a species of treason.
Down with Frederick; up with John Philip Sousa! Imagine what General
Pershing would look like at a state banquet of his favorite American
order, the Benevolent and Protective one of Elks, in all the Byzantine
splendor of his casket of ribbons, badges, stars, garters, sunbursts
and cockades—the lordly Bath of the grateful motherland, with its
somewhat disconcerting “Ich dien”; the gorgeous tricolor baldrics,
sashes and festoons of the Légion d’Honneur; the grand cross of SS.
Maurizio e Lazzaro of Italy; the sinister Danilo of Montenegro, with
its cabalistic monogram of Danilo I and its sinister hieroglyphics;
the breastplate of the Paulownia of Japan, with its rising sun of
thirty-two white rays, its blood-red heart, its background of green
leaves and its white ribbon edged with red; the mystical St. Saviour
of Greece, with its Greek motto and its brilliantly enameled figure
of Christ; above all, the Croix de Guerre of Czecho-Slovakia, a new
one and hence not listed in the books, but surely no shrinking violet!
Alas, Pershing was on the wrong side—that is, for one with a fancy
for gauds of that sort. The most blinding of all known orders is the
Medijie of Turkey, which not only entitles the holder to four wives,
but also absolutely requires him to wear a red fez and a frozen star
covering his whole façade. I was offered this order by Turkish spies
during the war, and it wabbled me a good deal. The Alexander of
Bulgaria is almost as seductive. The badge consists of an pointed
white cross, with crossed swords between the arms and a red Bulgarian
lion over the swords. The motto is “Za Chrabrost!” Then there are the
Prussian orders—the Red and Black Eagles, the Pour le Mérite, the
Prussian Crown, the Hohenzollern and the rest. And the Golden Fleece
of Austria—the noblest of them all. Think of the Golden Fleece on a
man born in Linn County, Missouri!... I begin to doubt that the General
would have got it, even supposing him to have taken the other side. The
Japs, I note, gave him only the grand cordon of the Paulownia, and the
Belgians and Montenegrins were similarly cautious. There are higher
classes. The highest of the Paulownia is only for princes, which is to
say, only for non-Missourians.
Pershing is the champion, with General March a bad second. March is
a K. C. M. G., and entitled to wear a large cross of white enamel
bearing a lithograph of the Archangel Michael and the motto, “Auspicium
Melioris Aevi,” but he is not a K. C. B. Admirals Benson and Sims
are also grand crosses of Michael and George, and like most other
respectable Americans, members of the Legion of Honor, but they seem to
have been forgotten by the Greeks, the Montenegrins, the Italians and
the Belgians. The British-born and extremely Anglomaniacal Sims refused
the Distinguished Service Medal of his adopted country, but is careful
to mention in “Who’s Who in America” that his grand cross of Michael
and George was conferred upon him, not by some servile gold-stick, but
by “King George of England”; Benson omits mention of His Majesty, as
do Pershing and March. It would be hard to think of any other American
officer, real or bogus, who would refuse the D. S. M., or, failing
it, the grand decoration of chivalry of the Independent Order of Odd
Fellows. I once saw the latter hung, with ceremonies of the utmost
magnificence, upon a bald-headed tinner who had served the fraternity
long and faithfully; as he marched down the hall toward the throne of
the Supreme Exalted Pishposh a score of little girls, the issue of
other tinners, strewed his pathway with roses, and around the stem of
each rose was a piece of glittering tinfoil. The band meanwhile played
“The Rosary,” and, at the conclusion of the spectacle, as fried oysters
were served, “Wien Bleibt Wien.”
It was, I suspect, by way of the Odd Fellows and other such gaudy
heirs to the Deutsche Ritter and Rosicrucians that the lust to gleam
and jingle got into the arteries of the American people. For years the
austere tradition of Washington’s day served to keep the military bosom
bare of spangles, but all the while a weakness for them was growing in
the civil population. Rank by rank, they became Knights of Pythias,
Odd Fellows, Red Men, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, Knights Templar,
Patriarchs Militant, Elks, Moose, Woodmen of the World, Foresters,
Hoo-Hoos, Ku Kluxers—and in every new order there were thirty-two
degrees, and for every degree there was a badge, and for every badge
there was a yard of ribbon. The Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, chiefly
paunchy wholesalers of the Rotary Club species, are not content with
swords, baldrics, stars, garters and jewels; they also wear red fezes.
The Elks run to rubies. The Red Men array themselves like Sitting
Bull. The patriotic ice-wagon drivers and Methodist deacons of the
Ku Klux Klan carry crosses set with incandescent lights. An American
who is forced by his profession to belong to many such orders—say a
life insurance solicitor, a bootlegger or a dealer in Oklahoma oil
stock—accumulates a trunk full of decorations, many of them weighing
a pound. There is an undertaker in Hagerstown, Md., who has been
initiated eighteen times. When he robes himself to plant a fellow
joiner he weighs three hundred pounds and sparkles and flashes like the
mouth of hell itself. He is entitled to bear seven swords, all jeweled,
and to hang his watch chain with the golden busts of nine wild animals,
all with precious stones for eyes. Put beside this lowly washer of the
dead, Pershing newly polished would seem almost like a Trappist.
But even so the civil arm is robbed of its just dues in the department
of gauds and radioactivity, no doubt by the direct operation of
military vanity and jealousy. Despite a million proofs (and perhaps a
billion eloquent arguments) to the contrary, it is still the theory at
the official ribbon counter that the only man who serves in a war is
the man who serves in uniform. This is soft for the Bevo officer, who
at least has his service stripes and the spurs that gnawed into his
desk, but it is hard upon his brother Irving, the dollar-a-year man,
who worked twenty hours a day for fourteen months buying soap-powder,
canned asparagus and raincoats for the army of God. Irving not only
labored with inconceivable diligence; he also faced hazards of no mean
order, for on the one hand was his natural prejudice in favor of a
very liberal rewarding of commercial enterprise, and on the other hand
were his patriotism and his fear of Atlanta Penitentiary. I daresay
that many and many a time, after working his twenty hours, he found it
difficult to sleep the remaining four hours. I know, in fact, survivors
of that obscure service who are far worse wrecks to-day than Pershing
is. Their reward is—what? Winks, sniffs, innuendos. If they would
indulge themselves in the now almost universal American yearning to
go adorned, they must join the Knights of Pythias. Even the American
Legion fails them, for though it certainly does not bar non-combatants,
it insists that they shall have done their non-combatting in uniform.
What I propose is a variety of the Distinguished Service Medal for
civilians,—perhaps, better still, a distinct order for civilians,
closed to the military and with badges of different colors and areas,
to mark off varying services to democracy. Let it run, like the
Japanese Paulownia, from high to low—the lowest class for the patriot
who sacrificed only time, money and a few nights’ sleep; the highest
for the great martyr who hung his country’s altar with his dignity, his
decency and his sacred honor. For Irving and his nervous insomnia, a
simple rosette, with an iron badge bearing the national motto, “Safety
First”; for the university president who prohibited the teaching of
the enemy language in his learned grove, heaved the works of Goethe
out of the university library, cashiered every professor unwilling
to support Woodrow for the first vacancy in the Trinity, took to the
stump for the National Security League, and made two hundred speeches
in moving-picture theaters—for this giant of loyal endeavor let no
100 per cent. American speak of anything less than the grand cross of
the order, with a gold badge in polychrome enamel and stained glass,
a baldric of the national colors, a violet plug hat with a sunburst
on the side, the privilege of the floor of Congress, and a pension
of $10,000 a year. After all, the cost would not be excessive; there
are not many of them. Such prodigies of patriotism are possible only
to rare and gifted men. For the grand cordons of the order, _e.
g._, college professors who spied upon and reported the seditions of
their associates, state presidents of the American Protective League,
alien property custodians, judges whose sentences of conscientious
objectors mounted to more than 50,000 years, members of Dr. Creel’s
herd of 2,000 American historians, the authors of the Sisson documents,
etc.—pensions of $10 a day would be enough, with silver badges and no
plug hats. For the lower ranks, bronze badges and the legal right to
the title of “the Hon.,” already every true American’s by courtesy.
Not, of course, that I am insensitive to the services of the gentlemen
of those lower ranks, but in such matters one must go by rarity rather
than by intrinsic value. If the grand cordon or even the nickel-plated
eagle of the third class were given to every patriot who bored a hole
through the floor of his flat to get evidence against his neighbors,
the Krausmeyers, and to every one who visited the Hofbräuhaus nightly,
denounced the Kaiser in searing terms, and demanded assent from Emil
and Otto, the waiters, and to every one who notified the catchpolls
of the Department of Justice when the wireless plant was open in the
garret of the Arion Liedertafel, and to all who took a brave and
forward part in slacker raids, and to all who lent their stenographers
funds at 6 per cent., to buy Liberty bonds at 4¼ per cent., and to
all who sold out at 99 and then bought in again at 83.56 and to all who
served as jurors or perjurers in cases against members and ex-members
of the I. W. W., and to the German-American members of the League for
German Democracy, and to all the Irish who snitched upon the Irish—if
decorations were thrown about with any such lavishness, then there
would be no nickel left for our bathrooms. On the civilian side as
on the military side the great rewards of war go, not to mere dogged
industry and fidelity, but to originality—to the unprecedented, the
arresting, the bizarre. The New York _Tribune_ liar who invented the
story about the German plant for converting the corpses of the slain
into soap did more for democracy and the Wilsonian idealism, and hence
deserves a more brilliant recognition, than a thousand uninspired
hawkers of atrocity stories supplied by Viscount Bryce and his
associates. For that great servant of righteousness the grand cordon,
with two silver badges and the chair of history at Columbia, would be
scarcely enough; for the ordinary hawkers any precious metal would be
too much.
Whether or not the Y. M. C. A. has decorated its chocolate pedlars and
soul-snatchers I do not know; since the chief Y. M. C. A. lamasery in
my town of Baltimore became the scene of a homo-sexual scandal I have
ceased to frequent evangelical society. If not, then there should be
some governmental recognition of those highly characteristic heroes of
the war for democracy. The veterans of the line, true enough, dislike
them excessively, and have a habit of denouncing them obscenely when
the corn-juice flows. They charged too much for cigarettes; they tried
to discourage the amiability of the ladies of France; they had a habit
of being absent when the shells burst in air. Well, some say this and
some say that. A few, at least, of the pale and oleaginous brethren
must have gone into the Master’s work because they thirsted to save
souls, and not simply because they desired to escape the trenches.
And a few, I am told, were anything but unpleasantly righteous, as a
round of Wassermanns would show. If, as may be plausibly argued, these
Soldiers of the Double Cross deserve to live at all, then they surely
deserve to be hung with white enameled stars of the third class, with
gilt dollar marks superimposed. Motto: “Glory, glory, hallelujah!”
But what of the vaudeville actors, the cheer leaders, the doughnut
fryers, the camp librarians, the press agents? I am not forgetting
them. Let them be distributed among all the classes from the seventh
to the eighth, according to their sufferings for the holy cause. And
the agitators against Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Wagner, Richard Strauss,
all the rest of the cacophonous Huns? And the specialists in the crimes
of the German professors? And the collectors for the Belgians, with
their generous renunciation of all commissions above 80 per cent.? And
the pathologists who denounced Johannes Müller as a fraud, Karl Ludwig
as an imbecile, and Ehrlich as a thief? And the patriotic chemists
who discovered arsenic in dill pickles, ground glass in pumpernickel,
bichloride tablets in Bismarck herring, pathogenic organisms in aniline
dyes? And the inspired editorial writers of the New York _Times_
and _Tribune_, the Boston _Transcript_, the Philadelphia _Ledger_,
the Mobile _Register_, the Jones Corners _Eagle?_ And the headline
writers? And the Columbia, Yale and Princeton professors? And the
authors of books describing how the Kaiser told them the whole plot in
1913, while they were pulling his teeth or shining his shoes? And the
ex-ambassadors? And the _Nietzschefresser?_ And the chautauqua orators?
And the four-minute men? And the Methodist pulpit pornographers who
switched so facilely from vice crusading to German atrocities? And Dr.
Newell Dwight Hillis? And Dr. Henry van Dyke? And the master minds of
the _New Republic?_ And Tumulty? And the Vigilantes? Let no grateful
heart forget them!
Palmer and Burleson I leave for special legislation. If mere university
presidents, such as Nicholas Murray Butler, are to have the grand
cross, then Palmer deserves to be rolled in malleable gold from head
to foot, and polished until he blinds the cosmos—then Burleson
must be hung with diamonds like Mrs. Warren and bathed in spotlights
like Gaby Deslys.... Finally, I reserve a special decoration, to be
conferred in camera and worn only in secret chapter, for husbands who
took chances and refused to read anonymous letters from Paris: the
somber badge of the Ordre de la Cuculus Canorus, first and only class.