1919

A Hoosier Quixote

Hibben, Paxton, journalist, Indianapolis, Ind., Dec. 5, 1880, s. Thomas Entrekin and Jeannie Merrill (Ketcham) H.; A.B. Princeton 1903, A.M. Harvard 1904

Thinking men were worried in the middle west in the years Hibben was growing up there, something was wrong with the American Republic, was it the Gold Standard, Privilege, The Interests, Wall Street?

The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, small farmers were being squeezed out, workingmen were working twelve hours a day for a bare living; profits were for the rich, the law was for the rich, the cops were for the rich;

was it for that the pilgrims had bent their heads into the storm, filled the fleeing Indians with slugs out of their blunderbusses

and worked the stony farms of New England;

was it for that the pioneers had crossed the Appalachians,

long squirrelguns slung across lean backs,

a fistful of corn in the pocket of the buckskin vest,

was it for that the Indiana farmboys had turned out to shoot down Johnny Reb and make the black man free?

Paxton Hibben was a small cantankerous boy, son of one of the best families (the Hibbens had a wholesale dry goods business in Indianapolis); in school the rich kids didn’t like him because he went around with the poor kids and the poor kids didn’t like him because his folks were rich,

but he was the star pupil of Short Ridge High

ran the paper,

won all the debates.

At Princeton he was the young collegian, editor of the Tiger, drank a lot, didn’t deny that he ran around after girls, made a brilliant scholastic record and was a thorn in the flesh of the godly. The natural course for a bright young man of his class and position was to study law, but Hibben wanted

travel and romance à la Byron and de Musset, wellgroomed adventures in foreign lands,

so

as his family was one of the best in Indiana and friendly with Senator Beveridge he was gotten a post in the diplomatic service:

3rd sec and 2nd sec American Embassy St. Petersburg and Mexico City 1905–6, sec Legation and Chargé d’affaires, Bogotá, Colombia, 1908-9; The Hague and Luxemburg 1909–12, Santiago de Chile 1912 (retired).

Pushkin for de Musset; St. Petersburg was a young dude’s romance:

goldencrusted spires under a platinum sky,

the icegrey Neva flowing swift and deep under bridges that jingled with sleighbells;

riding home from the Islands with the Grand Duke’s mistress, the more beautiful most amorous singer of Neapolitan streetsongs;

staking a pile of rubles in a tall room glittering with chandeliers, monocles, diamonds dripped on white shoulders;

white snow, white tableclothes, white sheets,

Kakhetian wine, vodka fresh as newmown hay, Astrakhan caviar, sturgeon, Finnish salmon, Lapland ptarmigan, and the most beautiful women in the world;

but it was 1905, Hibben left the embassy one night and saw a flare of red against the trampled snow of the Nevsky

and red flags,

blood frozen in the ruts, blood trickling down the cartracks;

he saw the machineguns on the balconies of the Winter Palace, the cossacks charging the unarmed crowds that wanted peace and food and a little freedom,

heard the throaty roar of the Russian Marseillaise;

some stubborn streak in the old American blood flared in revolt, he walked the streets all night with the revolutionists, got in wrong at the embassy

and was transferred to Mexico City where there was no revolution yet, only peons and priests and the stillness of the great volcanos.

The Cientificos made him a member of the Jockey Club

where in the magnificent building of blue Puebla tile he lost all his money at roulette and helped them drink up the last few cases of champagne left over from the plunder of Cortez.

Chargé d’Affaires in Colombia (he never forgot he owed his career to Beveridge; he believed passionately in Roosevelt, and righteousness and reform, and the antitrust laws, the Big Stick that was going to scare away the grafters and malefactors of great wealth and get the common man his due) he helped wangle the revolution that stole the canal zone from the bishop of Bogotá; later he stuck up for Roosevelt in the Pulitzer libel suit; he was a progressive, believed in the Canal and T.R.

He was shunted to the Hague where he went to sleep during the vague deliberations of the International Tribunal.

In 1912 he resigned from the Diplomatic Service and went home to campaign for Roosevelt.

got to Chicago in time to hear them singing Onward Christian Soldiers at the convention in the Colosseum; in the closepacked voices and the cheers, he heard the trample of the Russian Marseillaise, the sullen silence of Mexican peons, Colombian Indians waiting for a deliverer, in the reverberance of the hymn he heard the measured cadences of the Declaration of Independence.

The talk of social justice petered out; T.R. was a windbag like the rest of ’em, the Bull Moose was stuffed with the same sawdust as the G.O.P.

Paxton Hibben ran for Congress as a progressive in Indiana but the European war had already taken people’s minds off social justice.

Warr Corr Collier’s Weekly 1914–15, staff corr Associated Press in Europe, 1915–17; war corr Leslie’s Weekly in Near East and see Russian commn for Near East Relief, June — Dec, 1921

In those years he forgot all about the diplomat’s mauve silk bathrobe and the ivory toilet sets and the little tête-à-têtes with grandduchesses,

he went to Germany as Beveridge’s secretary, saw the German troops goosestepping through Brussels,

saw Poincaré visiting the long doomed galleries of Verdun between ranks of bitter halfmutinous soldiers in blue,

saw the gangrened wounds, the cholea, the typhus, the little children with their bellies swollen with famine, the maggoty corpses of the Serbian retreat, drunk Allied officers chasing sick naked girls upstairs in the brothels in Saloniki, soldiers looting stores and churches, French and British sailors fighting with beerbottles in the bars;

walked up and down the terrace with King Constantine during the bombardment of Athens, fought a duel with a French commission agent who got up and left when a German sat down to eat in the diningroom at the Grande Bretagne; Hibben thought the duel was a joke until all his friends began putting on silk hats; he stood up and let the Frenchman take two shots at him and then fired into the ground; in Athens as everywhere he was always in hot water, a slightly built truculent man, always standing up for his friends, for people out of luck, for some idea, too reckless ever to lay down the careful steppingstones of a respectable career.

Commd 1st lieut F.A. Nov 27–1917; capt May 31–1919; served at war coll camp Grant; in France with 332nd E.A.; Finance Bureau S.O.S.; at G.H.Q. in office of Insp Gen of A.E.F.; discharged Aug. 21–1919; capt O.R.C. Feb. 7th 1920; recommend Feb 7–1925

The war in Europe was bloody and dirty and dull, but the war in New York revealed such slimy depths of vileness and hypocrisy that no man who saw it can ever feel the same again; in the army training camps it was different, the boys believed in a world safe for Democracy; Hibben believed in the Fourteen Points, he believed in The War To End War.

With mil Mission to Armenia Aug — Dec 1919; staff corr in Europe for the Chicago Tribune; with the Near East Relief 1920–22; sec Russian Red Cross commn in American 1922; v dir for U.S. Nansen Relief Mission 1923; sec AM Commn Relief Russian Children Apr 1922

In the famineyear the cholera year the typhusyear Paxton Hibben went to Moscow with a relief commission.

In Paris they were still haggling over the price of blood, squabbling over toy flags, the riverfrontiers on reliefmaps, the historical destiny of peoples, while behind the scenes the good contractplayers, the Deterdings, the Zahkaroffs, the Stinnesses sat quiet and possessed themselves of the raw materials.

In Moscow there was order,

in Moscow there was work,

in Moscow there was hope;

the Marseillaise of 1905, Onward Christian Soldiers of 1912, the sullen passiveness of American Indians, of infantrymen waiting for death at the front was part of the tremendous roar of the Marxian Internationale.

Hibben believed in the new world.

Back in America

somebody got hold of a photograph of Captain Paxton Hibben laying a wreath on Jack Reed’s grave; they tried to throw him out of the O.R.C.;

at Princeton at the twentieth reunion of his college class his classmates started to lynch him; they were drunk and perhaps it was just a collegeboy prank twenty years too late but they had a noose around his neck,

lynch the goddam red,

no more place in America for change, no more place for the old gags: social justice, progressivism, revolt against oppression, democracy; put the reds on the skids,

no money for them,

no jobs for them.

Mem Authors League of America, Soc of Colonial Wars, Vets Foreign Wars, Am Legion, fellow Royal and Am Geog Socs. Decorated chevalier Order of St. Stanislas (Russian), Officer Order of the Redeemer (Greek), Order of the Sacred Treasure (Japan). Clubs Princeton, Newspaper, Civic (New York)

Author: Constantine and the Greek People 1920, The Famine in Russia 1922, Henry Ward Beecher an American Portrait 1927.

d.1929.