John Dos Passos

• “’Faith’ is a big word. Lincoln wouldn’t have needed to explain it, but today it has become one of those bugle words that leave an emotional blob in the mind instead of a sharp definition. By ‘faith’ I mean today whatever conviction produces a feeling of participation in a common enterprise. When faith is lost civilizations coast along on their inertia for a while but soon they start to rot and disintegrate. Much more than on material wellbeing or on technological successes their survival depends on an inner imperative that causes men to reach for what is good for them instead of what is bad for them….If Americans cease to be dedicated to ‘that something more than common’ which Lincoln spoke of, the republic he gave his life for has no more reason for being….There is nothing easy about such an assignment. The alternative is the partisan despotism that pervades two thirds of the globe. Even partial success will call for the rebirth of some sort of central faith as strong as Lincoln’s was.”[1]
• “We have slipped from one type of obsolete thinking – I mean the oldfashioned laissez-faire capitalist thinking…to a camouflaged socialism which is equally obsolete. Politicians and worthy persons orating in forums (even as you and I) toss around dogmatic statements from one book or the other more or less indiscriminately, on the theory that any stick will do to beat a dog with….If we could be left alone between the two oceans as we were a hundred years ago we could eventually muddle through to some sort of solution as we did in Civil War times. But we are not going to be left alone. We cannot afford a civil war between Management and Labor even if it never came to Gettysburg. We are going to have to find our solution under fire, under fire by particularly destructive weapons in the hands of particularly fanatical opponents who are determined to stamp out the spirit of liberty on this earth”[2]

John Dos Passos (1896 – 1970) was an American novelist, journalist, and man of letters with a prolific output throughout the majority of the 20^th century. While he experienced the world and its breadth of cultures, societies, and peoples, Dos Passos managed to cultivate a uniquely American style, and his appreciation of the country of his birth comes out strongly throughout his different works. Although he is certainly not the most optimistic of the writers profiled so far on the Weekly Sage, he is the most vivid and expressive, no doubt due in part to the many influences on his life.

Born in Chicago at the turn of the 20^th century, John Dos Passos from birth found himself caught up in the social ferment of his day. Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, exposing the Chicago slaughterhouses, was published when Dos Passos was only eight years old. Moreover, Dos Passos travelled extensively in Europe in his youth, providing exposure both to the Old World’s literary establishment and the youthful enthusiasm of the Americas.

Receiving the best in private education, and a personal tutor who took him around the globe, Dos Passos entered Harvard College in 1912. Despite his promising trajectory as a member of America’s intellectual elite, Dos Passos volunteered to serve in various ambulance services in World War I. This experience marked his writing, both filling a significant position in his subject matter, and molding the pessimism that characterized much of his work.

Along these lines, the U.S.A. trilogy is considered Dos Passos masterwork, following on the heels of his successful works One Man’s Initiation: 1917 and Three Soldiers, embodying an anti-war perspective. The three novels The 42^nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money, composing the U.S.A. trilogy, present similar themes and focuses, breaking down American society on both sides of World War I through various perspectives and vignettes. Dos Passos provided short snippets of his characters’ stories, interspersing brief biographies of important figures such as Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan, lists of headlines or quotes, and punctuation-free impressions of key moments such as the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

Presented in such revolutionary style, the lack of a similarly revolutionary aspiration is starkly evident. Dos Passos’ characters achieve success, at times, only to be humbled by their own limitations. Everyone has a flawed upbringing, imperfect emotions, and limited knowledge. While many seek to make the world a better place, either next year, tomorrow, or this afternoon, they manage only to make things more difficult for one another. Dos Passos brings out in detail the racism, elitism, and corruption of his day, and his characters simply cannot overcome the downward pull.

In this period, Dos Passos embraced radical politics, promoting worker’s causes, championing Sacco and Vanzetti, and going to Spain during the Spanish Civil War as part of his support for the Communist movement worldwide. However, this experience changed his viewpoint, if not his values, and Dos Passos began to see the dangers of the leadership and institutions that Stalin had brought to the international worker’s movement. He began associating with more conservative thinkers and groups, such as National Review, along with many other former radical friends.

As a result, Dos Passos’ writing also shifted, both in type and tone. He embraced biography, history, and social commentary, striving to educate and inspire in a new way. Following these changes, Dos Passos achieved less critical acclaim in his later years, perhaps helping to maintain the pessimistic mood from his earliest novels. His output nevertheless remained prolific, finishing with dozens of novels, numerous works of poetry, art, or screenplay by his death. While these works did not all achieve the same acclaim, Dos Passos maintained an ability to recognize and bring out the heart of the American people, in sickness and in health. Although his time is distant from the present, sharing these moments and enjoying this gift is a worthwhile enterprise today for anyone interested in being able to understand and appreciate their society and their neighbors.

• “Debs was a railroad man, born in a weather-boarded shack at Terre Haute. He was one of ten children. His father had come to America in a sailingship in ’49, an Alsatian from Colmar; not much of a moneymaker, fond of music and reading, he gave his children a chance to finish public school and that was about all he could do. At fifteen Gene Debs was already working as machinist on the Indianapolis and Terre Haute Railway. He worked as a locomotive fireman, clerked in a store, joined the local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, was elected secretary, travelled all over the country as an organizer. He was a tall shamblefooted man, had a sort of gusty rhetoric that set on fire the railroad workers in their pineboarded halls, made them want the world he wanted, a world brothers might own, where everybody would split even…But where were Gene Debs’ brothers in nineteen eighteen when Woodrow Wilson had him locked up in Atlanta for speaking against war, where were the big men fond of whisky and fond of each other, gentle rambling tellers of stories over bars in small towns in the Middle West, quiet men who wanted a house with a porch to putter around and a fat wife to cook for them, a few drinks and cigars, a garden to dig in, cronies to chew the rag with and wanted to work for it and others to work for it; where were the locomotive firemen and engineers when they hustled him off to Atlanta Penitentiary?”[3]
• “She’d never been in Boston before. The town these sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums back of Beacon Hill and decided that when the case was won, she’d write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty stationers’ shop and started right away taking notes for the novel….She’d never fall for a man again….Her job was keeping in touch with newspapermen and trying to get favourable items into the press….After she’d been out to Dedham jail to talk to Sacco and to Charlestown to talk to Vanzetti, she tried to tell the U.P. man what she felt about them one Saturday night when he was taking her out to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Hanover Street. He was the only one of the newspapermen she got really friendly with. He was an awful drunk but he’d seen a great deal and he had a gentle detached manner that she liked. He liked her for some reason, though he kidded her unmercifully about what he called her youthful fanaticism. When he’d ask her out to dinner and make her drink a lot of red wine, she’d tell herself that it wasn’t really a waste of time, that it was important for her to keep in touch with the press services. His name was Jerry Burnham.”[4]

[1] John Dos Passos, Occasions and Protests, (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1964), 323.

[2] John Dos Passos, The Prospect Before Us, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), 360-361.

[3] John Dos Passos, The 42^nd Parallel, (New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 26.

[4] John Dos Passos, The Big Money, (New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 450-451.