John Dos Passos
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Written for the New Hampshire Humanities Council 1998 Chautauqua Program, "Beginning the 'American Century'"
by Richard Johnson, Chautauqua Scholar, Dos Passos Interpreter, and Professor of American History, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
"Where do I belong? To whom do I owe allegiance? What is my country? Where is my home?" These fundamental questions are basic questions of identity which emerge among people when society undergoes rapid, fundamental change. The questions are social as well as personal, for they raise concerns about the nature of this society, its hopes and its reality. Such questions appeared at the beginning of this century in America. They continue to resonate even today among a large number of Americans who have lived in this century of rapid and startling change.
Such questions were essential to the twentieth century personal and political odyssey of American novelist John Dos Passos. At one point called the greatest writer of his time, Dos Passos deserves our attention for his artistic achievements. But perhaps more important for us today are his efforts to answer the nearly universal questions which erupted anew in this "American Century."
The first four decades of this century witnessed an enormous upheaval in social, economic and political events. In 1896, when Dos Passos was born in Chicago, America was still largely rural and just beginning to experience the first shock waves of a vast, industrial transformation. The horse was king, while Henry Ford's ubiquitous automobile remained a distant future dream. The most prominent African-American leader of his time, Booker T. Washington, had just given a public address in Atlanta, counseling members of his race to be humble, accept their inferior place in society, and concentrate on gaining technical skills rather than demanding equality.
One of the most wrenching political election campaigns of all time occurred in 1896, pitting the interests of the farms against the cities, memorialized forever in William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. The victory of the cities, with the inauguration of William McKinley as president, turned the nation slowly toward confronting the problems of urban and industrial life. In the cities a reformist impulse, the Progressive Movement, was born. Soon the indefatigable Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's successor, would place a national progressive movement squarely before the public's attention, with himself as its self-appointed leader.
All these events placed into question America's self-image. Challenged with an economic depression and the proclaimed "closing of the frontier," Americans faced the new century with great anxiety over domestic issues.
Three wars, the suppression of the Philippine rebellion, and a series of invasions of Central American nations also forced Americans to reconsider themselves. Were they, as they had believed, the peace-loving patriots who sought to extend democracy to other nations by their own example? Or were they instead a raw, powerful nation who obeyed no law but themselves? Who, after all, were these Americans? What place under the sun did they deserve? As a tidal wave of new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe arrived in America, spilling over into their cities and altering their society and its politics, the questions took on an almost frenetic urgency. Who are we?
A Hotel Childhood
For John Dos Passos, America's national quest merged with his personal odyssey. For him the question of identity held an intense personal meaning. John was an illegitimate child whose parents were already married to others. For the first sixteen years of his life John was not allowed to claim his father's surname. Fear of a social scandal for his father, a highly successful corporate lawyer, or his mother, member of an aristocratic Virginia family, meant that for much of his early life John and his mother traveled outside the United States, often in Europe, joined at times by his father. His mother Lucy, born in Virginia before the Civil War, almost forty-two years old when she gave birth to John, served as his closest friend and companion. He was, in his own words, a "hotel child."
During his youth John often felt isolated and bewildered by the society around him. His earliest memory recorded in the autobiographical sections of U.S.A. highlights a sense of danger and confused identity, as he and his mother fled a hostile crowd in the Low Countries which mistook them for English during the period of the Boer War.
A European sojourner during most of his early years, Dos Passos had to beg his parents to allow him to attend preparatory school in America. But America too regarded him as an outsider, a raw immigrant of sorts. At Choate School, in Wallingford, Connecticut, he was socially very uncomfortable. His glasses, slight build, and speech patterns from which tumbled both English and French accents tempted his classmates to tease him and call him names such as "Frenchy" and "four-eyes." There and later at Harvard, Dos Passos felt keenly the divisions which set him apart from the sons of the New England aristocracy.
While John was a student at Choate, his mother and John's father were finally able to marry and give John his father's name. The young man eagerly adopted not only a last name but a nickname as well, becoming "Dos" to his friends.
Still the deepest ties of social identity for John came from his mother, and they were cut when she died while John was a student at Harvard. Her death was a terrible ordeal for him, eased only in part by the efforts of his father and college friends.
A Committed Writer
As a college student Dos Passos told others he intended to become an architect. But before he graduated from Harvard he joined the editorial staff of the Harvard Monthly, wrote numerous articles and reviews, and began a novel. Already he had discovered an audience and a calling. His 1916 essay, "A Humble Protest," foretold his vision and ambition which would inspire his work over the next twenty years. He would challenge the mechanization of American society.
Has not the world today somehow got itself enslaved by this immense machine, the Industrial system? Millions of men perform labor narrowing and stultifying even under the best conditions, bound in the traces of mechanical industry, without ever a chance of self-expression, except in the hectic pleasures of suffocating life in cities. They grind their lives away on the wheels, producing, producing, producing....Is this what men have been striving for through the ages? Is this ponderous suicidal machine civilization?
Graduating in 1916, Dos Passos set off for Europe, first studying in Spain but soon becoming an ambulance driver and seeing the war first hand. In his journals he recorded his shocked perceptions and gathered the material which he would use in his first two published novels, One Man's Initiation (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). The war struck him as the final act of a civilization gone brutally mad, the product of monopoly capitalism sacrificing the bodies of young men for the sake of an imagined market advantage. Surely, he felt, people would see for themselves the corruption all around them and cry out "enough!" Surely the putrid war would be followed by a reformist cleansing of civilization, a reclaiming of the best values of democracy. Surely the hopes of reform which had fed the Progressive movement before the war would return and spread throughout American society. Its task had only begun.
Move to Radicalism
However, Americans turned their back on reforms and instead embraced in the 1920's a decade of somnolence, too entranced with the material gains of new consumer products, most notably Henry Ford's popular Model T, to even recognize the failure of politics, of ideals, of the nation's democratic heritage. Dos Passos turned his pen and his body to social activism. He publishing two critiques of the war, followed by a realistic attack upon urban life in Manhattan Transfer (1925).
Like Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passos became known as a savage critic of an American culture reeking of vulgar consumerism and social indifference. America had sold its birthright, its sense of democracy, its concern for working people, while dazzled by an array of consumer products. The small farmers who made up the foundation of Jefferson's notion of democracy were crushed by a savage post-war depression. Congress refused all pleas for aid. Meanwhile the businessmen who ruled America, frightened by the specter of communism rising out of Russia, declared war on unions and attempts to make real the promise of a better life for workers. Looking at the post-war world, Dos Passos wrote, "It was suddenly clear for a second in the thundering glare what war was about, what peace was about. In America, in Europe, the old men won. The bankers in their offices took a deep breath, the bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their coupons in the refined quiet of their safedeposit vaults, the last puffs of the ozone of revolt went stale in the whisper of speakeasy arguments."
His writing burned with both anger and anguish at the tyranny of the captains of industry. It exploded over the trial and execution of two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charged with murder in a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The evidence against them was largely circumstantial. Dos Passos believed that any reasonable person would find them innocent. But the prosecution focused on their radical political views. Their conviction, the denial of several appeals, and their final execution in 1927 signified for Dos Passos only one thing: the utter moral corruption of industrial society. He later published his bitter anguish in an autobiographical section of U.S.A.
they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges...they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons
all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight
there is nothing left to do we are beaten...
they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch
all right we are two nations
But there was indeed much left to do. By the following year Dos Passos was rallying fellow writers with the cry that "we must have writing so fiery and accurate that it will sear through the pall of numb imbecility that we are again swaddled in." And with that charge he began collecting the material which would become three novels, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. In 1938 they would be published together in a monumental and highly-acclaimed trilogy, U.S.A. "I regard John Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time," declared an admiring Jean Paul Sartre.
U.S.A.
In the brilliantly-crafted and powerful U.S.A. one can see Dos Passos' vision and his talent at their finest level of creation. At first glance the trilogy appears to be a series of fragmented sections. There are four elements which intertwine: the narratives of twelve fictional characters, brief biographical sketches of contemporary Americans, "newsreel" headlines, and the "camera's eye" autobiography. In this last element, Dos Passos renders his own coming of age in America as he struggles to comprehend a nation which seems so at odds with the vision of its founders.
Soon the reader realizes that these four disparate elements are united by the author's central vision of a society in decline, with little prospect for its rescue. Yet there remains a sense of outrage, of betrayal, which suggests the author's own hope that a concerned citizenry, through some collective action, might yet find a way to redeem the country.
From Radical to Reactionary 
By the time U.S.A. was published, its author had moved away from the powerful clear indictment of a corrupting monopoly capitalism and his hope for redemption through collective action. In some ways the move was gradual as Dos Passos grew increasingly suspicious of the Communist Party. His visit to Soviet Russia in 1928 did not convince him that the Communist leaders were seriously improving the lives of common people. Nevertheless in America during the Twenties and into the Thirties, the causes Dos Passos supported had Communist support as well, and often, it seemed, when good-hearted liberals seemed to abandon justice if it threatened civility, the Communists remained true. Of all the forces on the political left which Dos Passos supported, the Communist Party, disciplined and organized, was the only one during the decades after World War I which appeared to have a chance of successfully organizing the working class. They were on the right side.
However, there began to emerge in the American Communist Party a darker desire to control the movements of the political left, even when it meant undermining or destroying their allies. Dos Passos began to suspect more and more that the Communists' primary commitment lay with developing their own power, not that of the laboring man. He saw it in their desire to produce martyrs during the Harlan, Kentucky, Miner's Strike of 1931, and again in their disruption of a Socialist meeting at the Madison Square Garden in February, 1934. The critical moment occurred a few years later in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The Communists targeted a fellow sympathizer, a close friend of Dos Passos, Jose Robles, and in 1937 set up his execution.
The bullet which killed Jose Robles also killed any vestige of sympathy Dos Passos held for the Communists. He understood, with no turning back, that mass movements aimed at improving the common good were exceedingly susceptible to manipulation and control by despotic leaders. Hitler, Stalin, they were all the same. After 1937 the "enemy" which Dos Passos feared the most shifted from capitalists to the totalitarianism of fascism and communism. Both paid lip service to the "will of the people" while establishing despotic rule.
In 1941, the year our Chautauqua program concludes, much of Dos Passos' odyssey still lay before him. He enjoyed wide acclaim, yet his own decline as a writer, both in talents and influence, had already begun. Without directly repudiating his earlier work, Dos Passos moved philosophically and intellectually far from it. He declared that the critical times called out for a person to be a citizen first and a writer second. No longer did he trust the decent humanity of the common man to find the right answer to his political and economic troubles. No longer did revolutionary new ideas and actions hold the answer. Instead, Dos Passos came to believe the right answer was already known. Centuries before, the generation which framed the United States Constitution had realized the paramount value of liberty. Now it was up to a present day elite, one which understood that value, to preserve it. That elite, which now included Dos Passos, had the task of instructing society.
In a shift that baffled many of his friends, the writer who had previously supported revolutionary acts now switched to reactionary views. Dos Passos moved during the late 1940's to embrace the political right wing, particularly its libertarian element. The "enemy" internationally was Communism and Fascism. Within America the "enemy," when it wasn't some reflection of a totalitarian left, became bureaucracy. Protecting liberty from bureaucratic encroachments became the new mission.
Had he abandoned the masses? The author reasoned that the masses had gained some economic security, thanks to the New Deal. They had gained greater material comforts than people in any other nation. Even more important, they had managed to avoid the upheaval and destruction of society which had befallen Germany and Russia.
But one could not expect their support in this new crusade. The masses were always willing to abandon liberty for greater equality or greater material comforts, as Alexis de Tocqueville had pointedly noted a century before. One therefore had to turn instead to an elite, thinking Americans, to try to preserve liberty. That was the key.
Decline
Dos Passos plunged into a study of American history with the singular intent of discovering how the founders of the nation and Abraham Lincoln prized liberty and sought to preserve it for future generations. At the same time his writing seemed to lose its edge. The kaleidoscopic style, flush with irony, became flat. There was no longer anything ironic to communicate. Instead, the irony was that Dos Passos himself, seemingly isolated from the harsh realities of contemporary American life, increasingly sounded like an apologist for the power elite.
Many of his former friends were mystified by this change. Several literary critics lamented it. The new Dos Passos seemed more eager for security than understanding. He no longer sought out questions which tantalized him, made him a seeker, a visionary. The questions he asked were rhetorical, intended to instruct others. Politically he joined hands with those he had previously despised. Was he ever again truly at peace with himself?
William F. Buckley, prince of the political right, might have said that Dos Passos had finally found the truth, and Dos Passos himself might have agreed. If so, it was a truth that narrowed his writing, his sensitivity, his sense of dimension, of the broad sweep of history. His early works moved toward a rich, connected cacophony of humanity. His later works retreated, with occasional exceptions, in the direction of a single didactic note.
A Life Assessed
How then should we sum up John Dos Passos and his contributions to American life? Literary artists of the twentieth century owe him a great debt for his vivid craftsmanship of the novel. Political activists of both the left and right should honor him for putting into enduring words monuments to their perspectives.
For the man himself there remains both admiration and a sense of tragedy. He will always be remembered for U.S.A. and its powerfully deep, searing indictment of industrial society. Less convincing is his abandonment of that indictment, his shifting of gears. In a sense Dos Passos found himself betrayed by the forces of his own past. His biography shows us a man of deep commitments struggling to retain his core of integrity amidst the enormous political storms of the twentieth century.
John Dos Passos' odyssey offers us an opportunity to confront key issues of the twentieth century. Through his eyes we see the emerging power of the capitalist state. With him we are driven to question its justness for all, and forced to ask about such things as the relationship between war and profit-making. With him we experience disillusionment and the failed hopes of post-war intellectuals while morality seems on the decline and urban Americans blindly pursue material goods. Through his characters we face the harsh depression of the 1930's. In each setting we ask the questions so important to the humanities and to our society. How can we maintain a place for enduring moral values? What must this society do to sustain honesty and justice? In all our struggles and changes, is there yet a way for us to care deeply and sincerely about each other?