Source of book: I own this.
I have mentioned before that the Fundie literature curriculum I used in high school had some huge gaps. (Most notable was pretending the Civil Rights Movement - indeed anything after WWII - never happened. Except a favorable mention of Joe McCarthy, of course…) One thing I never really had the chance to learn was the wealth of literature written in the 20th Century. While this is hardly a unique problem - I have not been impressed by the overall knowledge of books displayed by most people, and older generations are not one iota better for that matter - I have had to seek out books from this era on my own.
I think too that it is easy in our culture to focus on the giants, those acknowledged to be the very best, and ignore the very, very good. So, while I agree that Hemingway and Steinbeck are worthwhile - indeed great - authors, they are not the only writers of the last century worth reading.
I am trying to remember if I ever even heard of John Dos Passos through my education. Maybe, I guess? But I do remember that I kept running across his name in other books, and very occasionally in a magazine article. For some reason or reasons, he seems to be, if not exactly forgotten (he is generally respected in literary circles), he isn’t read. Perhaps because he turned against his leftist beliefs after a friend was murdered by the communists during the Spanish Civil War, or perhaps because he criticized American mass culture before the 1950s took materialism to a new depth, or maybe because his avant-garde writing style was imitated by so many as to become cliche? I am not really sure what happened.
In any case, I found a “used” hardback copy of his U.S.A. trilogy at a library sale, and grabbed it. (It is a Library of America hardback, one of a bunch in my collection now - there have been a lot at library sales the last few years for a few bucks each, often in mint condition.)
The trilogy can be looked at as either three books which stand alone, or as a single giant novel. But that is also an incomplete description. The books do not really fit neatly into the category of “novel.” There is no main narrative, but instead, multiple narratives that stand alone, even though the characters meet in some cases.
Let me back up a bit. The book actually has four different things going on throughout. The first is what are called “Newsreels,” which are bits and pieces pulled from newspapers at the time of the book’s setting. In The 42nd Parallel, which is set in the run-up to World War I, the newspaper is the Chicago Tribune. The headlines and copy are run together so that they sometimes make amusing non-sequiturs. The second element is entitled “The Camera Eye,” and, like the newsreels, are a recurring feature. They are full “stream-of-consciousness” ramblings, and are memories of Dos Passos from his childhood and adolescence. They tie in with the historical events mentioned in the book, but have nothing to do with the actual narrative. The third element forms the bulk of the book. These are rather like normal chapters in a book, and tell the stories of his characters. However, they are not part of a unified narrative. In this book, there are five main characters, and all of their stories stands alone. The narratives do cross a bit, however, when characters meet each other. In some cases, the connections are brief, in others more intertwined. However, each of the stories could be its own story or even novella, without the need for the others. The final element are chapters on historical figures of the time, in this book mostly labor leaders. These brief biographies fit the theme of the book, but do not connect directly with the fictional characters.
So, who are these characters, and what happens? Well, all of them are born into working-class families, some more impoverished than others. They grow up, and find - or not - their places in American society. I guess that is a good enough way to put it.
The characters do vary a good bit. Mac (Fainy McCreary) grows up in brutal poverty, first in New England, then in Chicago. His uncle has socialist/unionist leanings, and trains him in the printer trade. When industrialist thugs destroy his uncle’s business, he sets out to seek his fortune, jumping trains, finding work where he can, eventually ending up in Mexico aiding the revolution.
Janey Williams grows up in Washington D.C. and grits it out to become a skilled stenographer, eventually working for J. Ward Moorehouse.
Speaking of Moorehouse, he is kind of a counterpart to Mac, in that he lives by words. However, he chooses advertising as his trade, and uses his chutzpah and utter lack of scruples to rise to the top of his profession. Oh, and also he manages to marry wealth, which gets him his start.
Eleanor Stoddard is another social climber, with ice in her veins, and little loyalty to anyone except herself. She is, more or less, the mirror to Janey, whose good heart means that she, like Mac, will never be rich.
Finally, there is Charley Anderson, a mechanic who is both gullible and over-generous, which gets him into trouble. His story is told at the very end of the book, which ends with him going off to fight in Europe. The narrative of his life continues in the next book, I believe.
One thing that really struck me about the book is that Dos Passos is able to maintain a dispassionate, “objective” view of his characters at the same time as he makes them all - even Moorehouse - sympathetic and mostly likeable characters. They are all marvelously human and complex, and you root for them to succeed, and to make good decisions, and groan when they do stupid things and fail, and so on.
Dos Passos also brought his settings to life. The gritty United States behind the glossy promotional flyers is where his characters live, where starvation is all too possible, but also where a man or woman can find a new life in a new city without a background check preventing employment. It is a place where you can jump a train, work for your dinner, and cut and run when things get too hot. You might find lumberjack work and put together some money, only to get fleeced the next day by a prostitute.
Sex is woven throughout the book in a realistic and non-judgmental way. Dos Passos doesn’t buy into the Victorian myth, to say the least. Men in particular get laid when they can - but women too. Consequences are real too. STIs and pregnancy form key plot points - as does abortion. This is real life as it was.
Overall, at this point in his career, Dos Passos was mostly optimistic that the future might actually be better. Unions were on the rise despite brutal retaliation from the police. Socialism was gaining in popularity around the world - and in the US - but had not yet become co-opted by brutal Communist dictatorships. The books were written during the Great Depression, so change was definitely in the air. Indeed, in retrospect, many of the great reforms of the 20th Century would be enacted during the 1930s and 40s. Dos Passos’ optimism was well founded, even as he himself became increasingly pessimistic and reactionary. (He literally campaigned for Barry Goldwater near the end of his life - that’s...a weird intellectual shift, to be sure.)
More than anything, The 42nd Parallel (and perhaps the others in the trilogy - I’ll have to read them!) tells in story form the reasons why reform was so necessary. I have mentioned this before, in connection with Carl Sandberg, but it bears repeating: the United States came very close to becoming a Communist country, and the reason it did not is that unions and government responded to the Great Depression - caused by amoral wealthy capitalists - by enacting social democratic reforms. We are in a similar moment today, and I strongly believe that if the American Right does not offer solutions to soaring inequality and third-world level poverty and homelessness, then there will be reform forced on them. If it happens peacefully, as in the 1930s, then our current governmental system will be preserved. If not, then there will be a lot of capitalists getting shortened by about 10 inches. That’s the lesson of history time and time again. But the ultra-rich never learn that lesson…
It would be a mistake to assume that the words of the characters are the beliefs of the author. After all, Mac is a socialist, Moorehouse is a propaganda man, so their views are very different. Neither is entirely the voice of Dos Passos, but instead represent depictions of real ideas being debated at the time. That said, this was Dos Passos’ socialist period, and those views pervade the book.
I should also mention, as a caution, that there are a lot of racial slurs thrown around in this book, and not just the well known ones. Every ethnic group, particularly immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, gets its own epithet, and Dos Passos uses them in a shockingly (at least today) casual manner.
This is not to say that the book is racist. At least any more than in the sense of the unexamined “of his time” sort of thing that every era seems to have. Dos Passos is deeply empathetic with everyone, particularly those at the bottom of society. While African Americans don’t really feature in the book, the one scene that is most painful is also one where Dos Passos is clearly portraying racism as a negative, as he does throughout the book. A minor character, Doc, who is a bit nutty in multiple ways, gets drunk, and starts ranting about how much he wants to go kill some n----rs. The decent and sane people around him, get him back to his hotel before he does something stupid. As I said, the book is about white people, and mostly populated with white people (partly a function of geography), but Dos Passos writes empathetically about everyone, regardless of race or national origin. He is particularly concerned with the plight of immigrant groups, even as he portrays ethnic hostility between them. Only the kleptocrats come in for true condemnation. And, given the catastrophe of 1929, they deserve all the ire he shows them and more.
So, let’s dive into some of the passages and quotes that stood out. Very early in the book, several characters are discussing the intractable poverty that they are in, despite brutally hard work. Mac’s mother has died, in part because of an inability to take sick leave or afford medical care, and his dad feels he has no choice but to “cut and run,” leaving his debts behind. Uncle Tim responds, addressing Mac and his sister:
“John, take it from me that I’d be the last one to want to bring disrespect on the dead that was my own sister by birth and blood...But it ain’t your fault and it ain’t my fault...it’s the fault of poverty, and poverty’s the fault of the system...It’s the fault of the system that don’t give a man the fruit of his labor...the only man that gets anything out of capitalism is a crook, an’ he gets to be a millionaire in short order...But an honest workin’ man like John or myself we can work a hundred years and not leave enough to bury us decent with.”
Later in the trip to Chicago, he tells Mac’s dad, “We’ll make a social-democrat out of you yet.” And this is the crux, isn’t it? Tim is a “socialist” in a sense, but not a communist. He is a “social-democrat,” one who believes that democracy isn’t democracy unless it allows the people to change their social conditions through government. That’s not really a controversial idea, except here in the United States, where inveterate racism combined with widespread belief in easily disprovable myths lead people to believe that social democracy - which the rest of the first world has - is synonymous with the Gulags.
How about another uncomfortable moment? In “Newsreel VI,” one of the headlines is “MOB LYNCHES AFTER PRAYER.” Not sure if that is an amalgam or not, but too often forgotten is that lynching was indeed a religious experience, with kids and prayers and picnics.
Also intriguing was a scene in Janey’s childhood. She is caught playing with the neighborhood kids, who happen to be black, and invited one into her house. Her mom goes ballistic.
“Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like and respect the colored people; some of them are fine self-respecting people in their place...But you mustn’t bring that little colored girl in the house again. Treating colored people kindly and with respect is one of the signs of good breeding...You mustn’t forget that your mother’s people were wellborn every inch of them...Georgetown was very different in those days. We lived in a big house with most lovely lawns...but you must never associate with colored people on an equal basis. Living in this neighborhood it’s all the more important to be careful about those things…”
One might say that Janey’s mom is a white liberal. And like a lot of white liberals today, there is this “let’s be kind, but we don’t want to associate as equals.” It is better than it was, I believe, but I still run across stuff like this, particularly in the form of wanting to keep low income people out of one’s schools and neighborhoods. The racism is there under the surface. Janey’s jerk brother then follows her around yelling “Niggerlover” until she cries. He is more like the openly racist white right wingers flying Trump flags. (He does improve a bit as the book goes on: hardship and growing up help.)
Janey’s mom is also retrograde in another way, also connected with her “high class” upbringing.
“But it’s so interesting, mommer,” Janey would say when her mother bewailed the fact that she had to work. “In my day it wasn’t considered ladylike, it was thought to be demeaning.” “But it isn’t now,” Janey would say getting into a temper.
Ah yes, the “stay-at-home mom” thing. Or, better, the woman who wasn’t so low class that she had to, you know, WORK. A reminder that “stay-at-home mom” has always been about race and class.
Later in the same episode, Janey is with a guy she is dating (but who leaves her after she refuses sex before marriage), and he has this kind of incoherent statement about politics, which I found amusing.
“I think Wilson’s a big man...Nothing like change anyway, the best thing in the world, don’t you think so? Bryan’s a big bellowing blatherskite but even he represents something and even Josephus Daniels filling the navy with grapejuice. I think there’s a chance we may get back to being a democracy….Maybe there won’t have to be a revolution; what do you think?”
That description of William Jennings Bryan is pretty funny, and accurate.
I should mention here as well, that the ellipses are in the original. It is one of the ways Dos Passos writes his dialogue. Likewise, there are a lot of compound words that are not hyphenated - he runs adjectives and nouns together and adjectives and adverbs, and adjectives with each other. It’s in interesting technique, and didn’t bother me much, other than in the sense that my proofreading self noticed it verymuch and I wanted to addspace to it. (See what I did there?)
I should also quote a bit of the “Camera Eye” stuff. This one is interesting in part because it shows the racial discrimination within the union movement, as well as the casual use of racial slurs.
when the streetcarmen went out on strike in Lawrence in sympathy with what the hell they were a lot of wops anyway bohunks hunkies that didn’t wash their necks ate garlic with squalling brats and fat oily wives the damn dagoes they put up a notice for volunteers good clean young
to man the streetcars and show the foreign agitators this was still a white man’s
That gives a bit of an idea of how the capitalization and punctuation free stream of consciousness look on paper.
Back to Janey, who by this time is setting out on her own, looking for work. Her experience at this agency is not particularly positive.
The woman at the disk was a stout woman with bad teeth and a mean smile, she made Janey pay two dollars as a registration fee and showed her the waiting list of expert stenographers she had and said that girls ought to marry and that trying to earn their own living was stuff and nonsense because it couldn’t be done.
Gee, thanks. Janey may never get rich, but she does make her own living. So I guess she is a success, after a fashion. Eventually she ends up working for Moorehouse, which is a fairly well paying job, and has other compensations. Janey loves the variety of advertising slogans and products. I particularly liked “Put an Alligator Pear on Every Breakfast Table.” Hey! Avocado Toast before there were Millennials!
One of the short biographies is of Thomas Edison. And it doesn’t exactly hit the usual highlights. It does, however, mention the time he accidentally dropped a stick of phosphorus in his makeshift lab, setting the train car on fire and getting himself kicked off. Kind if interesting to imagine if he hadn’t been a precocious white boy. A black teen would probably have been lynched as a terrorist. (This would, presumably, still happen today…)
One final mention is of the term “wobbly” to refer to a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, founded by Eugene Debs (who also gets a short biography). The word is used fairly often, and, while I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, I did look it up. It isn’t used much anymore, for some reason. I couldn’t help but picture a Weeble Wobble in a union cap…
Bottom line, I quite enjoyed this book. The characters and storylines were compelling. Dos Passos writes about injustice and hardship in a compassionate yet dispassionate way that is better experienced than described. He doesn’t preach (although characters do - in often contradictory ways), but shows. He shines a light on ordinary lives, ordinary people doing mostly ordinary things. The early 1900s are often overlooked, outshined by the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20s, but they have their own flavor, and are intriguing to read about. I look forward to reading the other books in the trilogy in the future.
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