Reflections on John Dos Passos’s “USA”

[Having just read John Dos Passos’s USA, my father reflected on the author’s depiction of society in the early 1900s, including the stagnation of the “propertied class” and the qualified “revolution” of the workers. My father appreciated Dos Passos’s ability to see both sides of the social debate, and my father generally strove to match this kind of balanced objectivity in his own observations and critiques. His analysis that the New Deal prevented, rather than caused, a revolution has meaning today in the context of the various federal efforts to mitigate the current recession’s effects. Unfortunately, it’s no easier today than in the past to counter criticism of the government’s efforts with a “things would have been much worse” defense of those efforts.]

January 26, 1944 (Jefferson Barracks, Mo.)

…Yesterday I finished Dos Passos. In the last paragraph of the narrative, Mary French says, “Say, Rudy, if Ada Cohn calls up again, tell her I’m out of the office… I have too much to do to spend my time taking care of hysterical women on a day like this.” She put on her hat, collected her papers, and hurried over to the meeting of the committee.

When you know the situation and the characters, that paragraph sums up a lot of Dos Passos’ ideas and hopes. Ada Cohn is a rich Jewish girl, a dilettante musician. Mary French is a radical social worker. She and Ada become friends during college days at Vassar. The night before, they’d gone to a Greenwich village party given by Eveline Hutchins, a jaded member of the idle rich. Next morning the papers carry the story of Eveline’s suicide. That’s why Ada’s hysterical. Mary herself is terribly discouraged by the impending failure of the strike on which she’s working. But Mary, you see, has a cause to work for. No hysterics for her. She hurries off to a meeting of the strike committee. The year is about 1928.

That’s Dos Passos’ way of summing up what seemed to him the significant trends in the social history of the USA at that time. The rich propertied class had lost contact with creative living, was collapsing, stagnating; the “revolution” of the workers, on the other hand, was not strong enough to take over the state, as had happened in Russia, but the workers weren’t giving up.

If Dos Passos had been a professor, and written his book as a text, he might have called it The Radical Labor Movement In the United States 1900-1928. But he had more of a mind for people than for statistics, so he wrote as he did. He himself was on the radical side, but he saw more than the shortcomings of those on the other side of the tracks. He understood how faction and treachery within his own ranks had as much to do with the failure of the cause as did interference and persecution from the outside. Because of this objectivity, his work deserves a high rank as history, and powerfully drawn history. It burst far beyond the bounds of narrowly defensive propaganda put out by some “party-line” communists.

The conditions which Dos Passos describes, – the strikes, the beatings, the massacres, the official murder of civil liberties, – have never been part of my America. Yet I know that they happened, and still do happen. But to speak now of a revolution sounds ridiculous. The New Deal wasn’t a revolution. In fact, it probably prevented a revolution by restoring to the working people enough economic security to keep them from resorting to violence. But this security was largely restored through the channels of the existing industrial machine, and the owners of that machine remained in power.

Was this a triumph of the American democratic system? Have the men of property at last learned the responsibility of property? Can the unions settle peacefully their differences with the managers without the domination of both by government? And if government domination of both groups becomes necessary, can the real values of democratic society be maintained and strengthened?

Those are some very general questions for a liberal democrat today. I didn’t ask them to answer them here, because I don’t know the answers. To me now they’re like sign posts on the road.

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Education for All, Balanced Budget or Not

[This lengthy entry — pared down from a much longer original — followed an evening of caroling by my father and his two siblings while home for the Christmas holiday. After meeting a young farmer among the carolers, my father went on to discuss his belief that all people should have access to the highest educational opportunities of which they’re capable. In this sentiment I see a foreshadowing of his eventual work in university administration and development. My father argues that, if our country is able to pay whatever the cost necessary to wage war, it can also pay the cost of offering the best educational opportunities to all its citizens, regardless of their economic circumstances.

As in the previous posting, my father states his opinion based on lessons learned during the Great Depression — i.e. the need for government spending to address pressing societal and economic needs, regardless of “such bogies of finance as the ‘balanced budget.'” Our country today faces many of the same challenges and, unfortunately, it seems that the no-taxes/cut-spending crowd is prevailing over those (most economists included) who warn that cutting back on stimulus spending too soon could stall, and possibly reverse, the halting economic growth we’ve begun to achieve. My father’s youthful idealism that America’s values were shifting to emphasize “social success” rather than “money success” has since been shown, repeatedly, to be wishful thinking.]

December 23, 1942 (Underhill, Vermont)

…At nine o’clock Kent and his wife arrived, and we proceeded to the main business of the evening. Most of the people who appeared to acknowledge our singing were old folks. They seemed genuinely pleased.

Kent is a young farmer, 23 years old. The local board had deferred him because he’s running one of the largest farms in the vicinity. There’s nothing deceptive in his nature. His face is pleasant, broad featured, Yankee; his body is big and strong, his hands massive. I suppose you’d call him raw-boned, a typical farm type. Bashfulness is a quality completely foreign to him. He was well-acquainted with me from the moment of shaking hands. Before I left him at midnight he had given me a frank appraisal of his fortunes and hopes…

I don’t envy Kent. He reminds me of Thoreau’s farmer who went through life carrying his farm on his back, a slave to his occupation. Kent isn’t degraded yet to this unhappy state, but the time may come. I just can’t see how he has much chance. His wife is a good kid, willing to work hard… he seems quite proud of her, partly because she’s an “out-of-state” girl, partly because she’s had an education…

…There is certainly a formidable barrier between the well-educated and the uneducated which can’t be melted down by simple appeals to humanitarianism. This doesn’t offer an excuse for snobbishness on the part of the well-educated. It does mean that the channels for communication between the two levels are considerably circumscribed. What a democratic state needs is an educational system which offers an opportunity for the maximum development of native talent (mental ability) in whatever economic level it appears. We should not be much concerned for the existence of these economic levels, so long as those at the bottom can earn enough to live without suffering. What we must avoid is the freezing of these levels. We know that exceptional minds appear at the bottom as well as at the top of the economic heap. The economic factors, however, have thus far been given far too much weight in determining what minds shall come to fruitful expression in the world. When genius is allowed to starve to death behind economic barriers, this is one of the most disastrous expenses that any society can shoulder. If the expenditure of money can build an educational system that will make such starvation or malformation of genius highly improbable, no sum will be too large to spend.

This was the point which was emphasized in that supplement to Fortune which I read in Burlington yesterday at the library. The National Economy, it was called. We have come traditionally to exalt money to a position where it becomes our master, instead of keeping it where it should be, in subjection as a slave to help us achieve social profits. We have too long been tyrannized into poverty and national weakness and unhappiness by such bogies of finance as the “balanced budget.” It’s taking a terrible war to break the delusion. We are finding out that we can spend just as much money as we need to preserve our national existence under the hammer blows of enemies who learned the same lesson several years before we did. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of billions our national debt runs into on the books, as long as we keep our national destiny in our own hands, – it doesn’t matter, if we apply the knowledge that we already have for the control of our financial system. This, of course, is the basic idea in the compensatory government spending theory of Keynes, Hansen, and their associates.

It is indeed, not only a new theory, but a new philosophy of economics, and marks the overall change from the last century’s focus on “money” success to this century’s focus on social success. It can’t be repeated too often that money is properly a tool, and not a tyrant, for men.

We do have the knowledge and the mechanical means now to assure every inhabitant of our country, and ultimately the world, freedom from economic insecurity. While this cannot be considered as the highest aim of man’s activity, it is essential to any permanent progress of man in his spiritual sphere. It is very important that economic security always be recognized as a means to a better life, and not as an end in itself, or as a guarantee of that better life. For life can be “better” only in a moral sense, and science, including economics, which we are using as a means to that better life, is in itself amoral. The Nazis are demonstrating that it can very well be used as a means to a worse life.

We don’t debase ourselves or jeopardize our ideals by studying our science as avidly as do the Germans. In fact, we criminally betray ourselves to destruction if we do not seize upon science for all it can show us about the waging of war and the building of the new world order. The significant difference comes if we use science as a weapon on the side of Christian morality. Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr. makes this point clear in an interesting exposition of the science of geopolitics in the Dec. 21^st issue of Life. We don’t damn ourselves by using what knowledge we can discover to make ourselves powerful, if we use our power to give our ideals of Christian morality expression in the lower but nonetheless necessary, level of economic life. The name of [Halford J.] MacKinder’s book on geopolitics was Democratic Ideals and Reality. He brought it out in England in 1918. Our trouble was that we wrote out a peace in which democratic ideals continued to be abstracted from reality.

What excites me now is that today there are a lot of men who know that we must not repeat this disastrous experience. Keats it was who maintained that the ideal can’t be separated from the real. Democratic ideals are just so much hot air until they are expressed as relationships of men to men, and men to goods in the marketplace.

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