This celebration was planned on a scale of lavish expenditure, in pageantry, oratory, illuminations, processions, and revelry unheard of in our history. The programmes were identical in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Washington, Baltimore, Norfolk, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and a score of smaller cities.
John Vassar refused to accept the invitation of the Mayor of New York to address the mass meeting of naturalized Americans in the Madison Square Garden.
Virginia Holland not only refused to lead the grand Pageant of Peace in its march up Fifth Avenue to the speakers’ stand, but she resigned as president of the Woman’s Federation of Clubs of America, shut herself in her room at their country place on Long Island and refused to be interviewed.
John Vassar read the announcement with joy. The leaven of his ideas had begun to stir the depths of her brilliant mind and pure heart! The defeats of the past were as nothing if they brought her again into his life.
He wrote her a long, tender, passionate appeal that he might see her again.
He posted it at midnight on the opening day of the Jubilee. He had read of her resignation only in the afternoon papers. The managers of the ceremonies had taken for granted her approval and announced that she would lead the pageant of symbolic floats on a snow-white horse as grand marshal.
Vassar waited with impatience for her answer the next day. If the mails were properly handled his letter should have reached her by noon. An immediate answer posted in Babylon at one o’clock might be delivered at Stuyvesant Square by six. He started at every call of the postman’s whistle in vain. He was sure an answer would come in the morning. Nothing came. He put his hand on the telephone once to call her and decided against the possibility of a second bungling of his cause.
Instead he called the post-office and learned that a congestion of mail, owing to the disorganization of the service by the Jubilee, had caused a delay of twenty-four hours in the delivery to points on Long Island.
He waited in vain another day. He walked alone through the crowded streets that night studying the curious contagion of hysteria which had swept the entire city from its moorings of an orderly sane life.
The din of horns and the shouts of boys and girls, crowding and jostling on the densely packed pavements, surpassed the orgies of any New Year’s riot he had ever witnessed. Every dance hall in Greater New York was thronged with merrymakers. The committee in charge of the Jubilee, supplied with unlimited money, had hired every foot of floor space that could be used for dancing and placed it at the disposal of the social organizations of the city. Wine was flowing like water. The police winked at folly. A world’s holiday was on for a week.