What he wanted to know with his foot, was what this splendid Victory Arch he had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under, and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amounted to—how deep the glory had struck in.
I thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victory over the Germans ... forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing and eighty-seven million unconquered sullen Germans before our eyes in broad daylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying their bills! ... eighty-seven million Germans we have all got to devote ourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years.
I am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. Millions of Americans though in a politer way are doing it all this week. We want to poke through to the truth. We want something more than a theater property Victory Arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a real one!
We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest—to take down our lath and plaster Arch and put it up in marble instead.
We make this week a wager to the world,—a four and a half billion dollar dare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that the American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and hurrahs and tears and empty watery words—that we will chase Peace up, that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations—into the eternal underpinning of a world.
In the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning Victory Arch, all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake, with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim unconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through!
We will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory no small boy, no Bolshevik nation can stick its foot in!
When I corrected the proof of this advertisement—it was the last advertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York—it was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has melted away into roar.
But the truth I have spoken has not melted away.