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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Modern World Threats to Creativity and Culture

[This journal excerpt revisits the theme of individual creativity, which my father saw as being threatened by many of the conveniences and distractions of the “modern” world in 1942. After all, how could the average person be creative when they were so easily drawn into passive activities such as listening to the radio, watching movies, or driving their automobiles through the countryside? Plus, people’s association with culture was fast becoming one of paying to experience its expression by others, rather than one of contributing to culture themselves.

My father, of course, would eventually see television eclipse all other forms of passive entertainment, and lived long enough to witness the emerging role of the Internet as a huge time sink. One can make a case that the Internet cuts two ways — both as a vehicle for endless browsing and superficial exchanges, and as a platform on which individuals can create and disseminate creative works with an ease unparalleled in history. On balance, though, I think the warnings my father raised in 1942 are much more apparent, and dire, today.]

January 28, 1943 (Middlebury College)

A central point in the arguments for socialism is the increased leisure time that will redound to the working classes, which they will be able to use in “a new burst of cultural feeling,” as E.C. Lindeman puts it. More efficient organization and utilization of the means of production will make comparatively short that part of the day which each individual must spend in physical labor. In other words, we put the machine in the proper place, as our slave, or, at least, as a subordinate partner, and then use our leisure time to participate in a great revival of the arts.

Maybe. We might remember, however, that our leisure life is as completely mechanized as our working life, – the automobile, radio, motion picture machine, and mass production printing presses. So we wonder if our machines really can give us new leisure, to be used creatively, or do they simply force us to live at such a whirlwind pace that we shall never really have the time for a “new burst of cultural energy.” We get our culture in such fitful and varied snatches that each one of these snatches becomes practically meaningless to us. We cram our lives up with incidentals in which we ourselves have no creative part – listening to the radio, watching sports contests, going to the movies and the theatre, driving through the countryside.

All these activities are supposedly part of the “broader, fuller life” which our machines have made possible for us. I don’t agree. If anything, the life of the common man today is narrower, even than that of the pioneer on our Western frontier a century and a half ago. Then a man was forced to produce the essentials of his own life. Though this was admittedly hard labor, it furnished a wide range in which he might exercise his creative powers. Today we don’t build; we buy. Our vaunted division of labor has been carried so far that we learn to spend our days as assembly lines, performing the simplest single operation in the manufacture of a product which we shall probably never use ourselves. For this degradation into an automaton we learn to be satisfied with a wage with which we can buy the essentials of life, and perhaps have enough left over to buy a little culture. Is it any wonder that men who find their lives crammed into such a narrow orbit sometimes go on strike. Wages aren’t their primary objective, no matter what they are told. Way down in deep they have a yearning to be men. Of course they are fighting against the feeling of insecurity, but behind this feeling is the caged fury of wild creative beings who have grown up in a society that has made the cramping of their native powers a prerequisite of existence.

No malevolent “ruling class” has consciously willed this situation. We grow up learning to listen to the radio, to watch movies, to ride in automobiles. Most of us never have a chance to be born, in any creative sense. We become culturally lazy by learning to admire the cultural activities of a few outstandingly creative, or skilled, persons in our society, and worse than this, we learn to look upon this admiration as a privilege, by often being forced to pay for it. We become hero-worshippers, and forget that we ourselves might have become heroes.

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Capitalism’s Failings and Socialism’s Promise

[This entry gives some insight into my father’s post-Great Depression hope for “collectivistic, or socialistic, capitalism.” Using as a starting point a lecture by Harry M. Fife, a Middlebury professor of economics from 1925-1950, my father writes about the exposed shortcomings of private business and the emerging potential of “public business.” It’s impossible to read this entry and its phrases — “general fabric of irresponsibility,” “rapacious self-interest,” “great spree of speculation” — without drawing parallels to the financial-market and mortgage manipulations that sparked our recent deep recession. It seems that the “corporate-finance-banker-imperialistic capitalism” of the 20s, 30’s and 40’s had some staying power. So did the ability of politicians and ideologues to demonize terms and concepts such as “socialism” and “welfare.” How quaint that my father could write: “No man can find moral justification for getting into business for the sake of profits.” And how sad that this sentiment is so at odds with the reality of our present-day world.]

December 11, 1942 (Middlebury College)

Fife gave a swell lecture this morning. He traced through the several phases of capitalism from the “putting-out” period down to the recent, and not yet extinct corporate-finance-banker-imperialistic capitalism. This last fits in as both cause and effect of the present woes of the world. But we are advancing into the period of collectivistic, or socialistic, capitalism. Please keep your thinking constructive, he said. Corporate organization is indispensable in our society. What we need to find out is how to keep the advantages of the corporation and get rid of its disadvantages.

Old Fife embodies the true spirit of our times better than any other prof that I have, not excepting Doc Cook. I’m going to ride high on that spirit not because I believe in following the crowd, but because I have no other choice, no other urge, but this. It seems to me that the moral issue is more clearly defined these days than it has been for a long time. Up until the depression of the 30’s there must have been room for a great deal of doubt in a young man’s mind if he asked himself just what his position in society should be. On the one hand there was the dominant business interest in private hands, apparently serving the community as well as anything available. On the other hand was the growing volume of public business, barely articulate, and yet containing dim possibilities of great future good in society. But a man would have had to be morally keen to have seen these possibilities, and courageous to invest his life work in bringing them to fruition.

This problem no long[er] exists. No man can find moral justification for getting into business for the sake of profits. This, indeed, must have always seemed narrow justification to some businessmen, even when it was thickly glossed over with the ideal theory of the self-regulatory, free competitive system, automatically assuring the greatest good to the greatest number. Many intelligent men who were hand and glove in the system must have sometimes wondered, nonetheless, if things were actually so fine as the theory suggested. A lot of people knew that things were actually very bad, but they were the people on the bottom, the working masses, and their voice didn’t count. In the land of “free enterprise” it was obviously their own fault that they stayed down; – they lacked the brains, or the ability, or something. It must have been possible for many men on the top to reason this way with perfect sincerity.

But this ground got shakier all the time, especially after the first World War. The moral compromise involved became more and more obvious to men in high positions, and [as] a result they began to lose faith in the system to which they were allied. They lost their integrity. Out of this general fabric of irresponsibility, the whole tendency of too rapacious self-interest which had been inherent in the system for a long time, though to a large degree rationalized out of sight, now came into its own. We embarked on the great spree of speculation, with all the bars down. It was an out-and-out case of dog eat dog, at least among the men of power and influence in our society who were to a large degree responsible for decent social order and justice. In that mad decade this class abdicated its position as the recognized leading class of the nation.

So the choice today is no problem. I am on the side that has stepped into the breach, – the New Deal side, the socialist side. And it’s a good side to be on, because it’s fresh and new, with an untainted, if short, history, and a tremendous future full of work. We’re not out for revenge, but as Fife says, our job is to build an economy for welfare, and not for money profits.

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