Dos Passos's america

...it is a story without a single protagonist...

...What redeemed him was finally waking up to the evils of Stalinism and the Left...

...But U.S...

...Fortunately, his dreams remained unrealized...

...Mac, an Irish-American printer who turns Communist and then drifts down into Mexico...

...These innovations include some 68 intercalated passages called "newsreels," each of which presents a string of newspaper headlines, overheard conversations, radio broadcasts, political speeches, advertising jingles, and popular songs...

...The American Dream, for Dos Passos, is a story of these failures, and the trilogy ends during the Depression with Vag, a hobo on the road, hitchhiking to who knows where...

...that it would be easy to dismiss the trilogy as mere propaganda...

...Ben Compton, the revolutionary who gave his life to the cause, only to be expelled from the Communist party for deviationism (or independent thinking...

...Meanwhile, the sentimental favorites of Dos Passos are exalted here—leftist icons like Eugene V. Debs and Big Bill Hay-wood, whose defeat or imprisonment presumably accounted for the decline of America into a moral wasteland...

...Still, Dos Passos was for a time vehement about his left-wing faith...

...The party-line Communists knew him for the bourgeois liberal that he was and ostracized him accordingly...

...What is finally most intriguing about Dos Passos is not his flirtation with the Left...

...For all his Marxist sympathies, Dos Passos was too keen an observer and too fine a novelist not to see the essential vacuity of Soviet communism...

...The fleeting glimpses of John Dos Passos we catch in these passages suggest that he was not willing to surrender to the canons of Socialist Realism, which demanded naturalistic portraits of "the grim horrors of life under capitalism...

...Dos Passos offers interwoven portraits of twelve major characters whose lives are presented as representative of American national experience as it altered under the impact of the industrialization, World War I, the Red Scare, the Jazz Age, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the Depression...

...At a New Masses organizational meeting, according to Malcolm Cowley, Dos Passos once derisively announced: "Intellectual workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your brains...

...The trio of novels he called U.S.A., much esteemed in their day but neglected in the years after Dos Passos's death in 1970, were an effort to rebuild the recent past in a condensed and dramatic form...

...Like other "socially conscious" writers, he toured the Soviet Union and liked what he saw...

...In grasping the threat they represented to democracy everywhere, he became increasingly passionate in the defense of republican American political traditions...

...Barry Goldwater was then the principal spokesman...

...And his melange of history, fiction, and biography in Midcentury (1961) is an attempt to define from a conservative perspective the more recent conditions of American life...

...Dos Passos's insistence on the writer's right to see with his own pair of eyes and judge with his own intelligence—evident everywhere in U.S...

...he covered strikes in America and didn't...

...Though he found big business still unfair to organized labor, he came to prefer the defects of American capitalism to the coercion of Earl Browder, Mike Gold, and the other American Communists who had tried to dictate what he should write about...

...It is these "establishment" figures who suggest an entrenched power structure preventing the evolution of a wholesome American culture...

...is decentralized...

...His most recent book is Vital Signs...

...Late works like Dos Passos's The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (1954), The Theme is Freedom (1956), and The Men Who Made the Nation (1957) all reflect an older, wiser, more mature and historically well-informed student of democratic political principles...

...Still, the father gave him a great many privileges, like international travel and private schooling at Choate and Harvard...

...Even so, the purpose of all these stylistic innovations was to aid Dos Passos in his portrait of America's failure to become the utopia of social and economic equality that supposedly only communism could realize...

...After all, many American writers were likewise seduced during the Depression by an apparat preying upon their utopian dreams...

...And, by the mid-fifties, he had embraced a conservative Republican vision of America for which Sen...

...Like Dos Passos's 1925 Manhattan Transfer, the narrative of U.S.A...

...So overdetermined is the left-wing ideology of U.S.A...

...Even so, Dos Passos was not a proletarian by birth...

...J. Ward Moore-house, the executive who invents public relations and becomes a spin-doctor for "the establishment...

...As the trilogy moves forward, decade by decade, these of course change with the times and create a sense of the chaotic fluidity of American popular culture as it rushes headlong into a meaningless future...

...During the Great War, he drove ambulances for the Red Cross, and afterward, when America entered the war, he enlisted in the army...

...After the Great War he was constantly on the road, writing novels, plays, political reportage, and travelogues...

...with rhetorical verve and a savage economy...

...His experiences in France confirmed his belief that the war had been provoked by a capitalist conspiracy...

...Dos Passos wanted the book to mirror what were then commonly called the "objective conditions" of American life...

...Anyone who has read around in the magazines and newspapers of the 1930s will immediately recognize the term "objective conditions" as a left-wing synonym for "capitalist exploitation...

...Politicians like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, efficiency experts like F. W. Taylor, and journalists like William Randolph Hearst are caricatured in U.S.A...

...To suggest the "objective conditions" of American life, Dos Passos engaged in a number of stylistic innovations that prove him to be one of the most creative fiction writers of his time...

...Less "objective" is a third major stylistic innovation—the 51 "camera eye" passages that are devoted, James Joyce-like, to the development of the artist (Dos Passos himself) who sees and records the "objective conditions" of American life...

...He was especially popular with the editors of left-wing magazines like the Liberator...

...The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists who in a robbery had murdered a factory paymaster and guard, Dos Passos called "judicial murder," and he twice got himself arrested in protest against it...

...Dick Savage, a would-be poet gone sour in a philistine America...

...And, to be frank, the dustbin of history is full of thirties proletarian fiction that needs no revival...

...Charley Anderson, a World War I pilot and mechanic turned executive whose very life is destroyed in the corporate rat race...

...For a time he was even a contributing editor to the Communist Daily Worker and the New Masses...

...His growing detestation of Stalinism and its leftist derivatives was quite vocal...

...In 1932 he voted for Foster and Ford, the Communist ticket...

...The political rebellion of Flaming Youth, as les jeunes were called in the 1920s, was in part a generational phenomenon, evident in the superficial socialism of many other young writers of the time, Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Edmund Wilson, and Theodore Dreiser among them...

...U. S. A. is therefore shot through with evidence that Dos Passos could not stomach the coercive and repressive diktats of the literary commissars...

...seaman whose life is an empty waste...

...A. also features biographical vignettes of public men and women whose lives were coterminous with and ominously revelatory of the changing times...

...And indeed, the young Dos Passos was so slavishly Marxist in his reading of social conditions that his fiction was usually considered an example of proletarian literature...

...A., despite the occasional ideological sludge—finally led him, toward the end of the Depression, to break with the Left...

...He had, in fact, grown up as the bastard child of a wealthy American businessman of Portuguese descent who did not acknowledge John until the boy was 16...

...He told one of his friends: "My only hope is in revo-lution—in wholesale assassination of all statesmen, capitalists, warmongers, jingoists, inventors, scientists....My only refuge from the deepest depression is in dreams of vengeful guillotines...

...We read instead about Mary French, who starts out a secretary and ends up working for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense team...

...Of course, in spurning the Left, Dos Passos incurred the wrath of the party hacks (and their liberal fellow travelers in the reviewing media), and his reputation has never completely recovered...

...The trilogy, composed of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), has just been reissued in a handsome and well-edited volume by the Library of America (1,288 pages, $40), and it affords the pleasure of rediscovering a major American fiction achievement...

...Joe Williams, a merchant James W. Tuttleton teaches English at New York University...

...He felt that Harvard did not prepare men for life in the modern world, and he remarked to Arthur K. McComb in 1917, "Until Widener [Library] is blown up and A. Lawrence Lowell [the Harvard president] assassinated and the Business School destroyed and its site sowed with salt—no good will come out of Cambridge...

...Besides the intrinsic merit of his fiction, Dos Passos is worth knowing for another reason: His literary and political odyssey expresses in a particularly pure way the fate of a great many early twentieth-century American artists and intellectuals who innocently and naively accepted but then recoiled in horror from the lethal embrace of communism...

...A.'s manifest self-contradictions, and the sheer art of the author's prose, make the trilogy still engaging more than a half-century after its publication...

...These advantages, however, only seemed to confirm the boy in his rebellion against capitalism and the class to which his father belonged...