The American Scene

An ongoing review of politics and culture


Articles filed under Fall of the U.S.A.


Fall of the U.S.A. Concluded: The Big Money

If one uses a generous definition of “fall,” I have squeaked in under the wire, finishing the U.S.A. trilogy just prior to the winter solstice. I hope a few of you are still keeping up, or have at least read enough to find something worthwhile in these bitter, beautiful books.

The tragedy at the heart of U.S.A., the death that gives it its heartbreaking force, is the death of yearning. Remember the introductory passage that Conor cited? The one about a wandering young man with “no job, no woman, no house, no city” but for whom “one bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough?” If you stopped reading, do me a favor and open The Big Money to its final pages and read the section titled “Vag.” See what’s become of that bold, searching hunger. The rest of you, keep reading.

In my first post on the books, I suggested a few topics that I’d keep in mind while I read. I’ll revisit them quickly to get myself caught up, then please carry on in the combox. Over the coming days, I’ll go back through the dogeared pages and see what, if anything, is worth bringing up.

The Law

When and where does the force of law manifest in the action of the novels and in the lives of the characters?

Easy enough: law and justice are distant, corrupt, and serve their paymasters.

Radicalization

We hear about it a lot today, mostly in embarrassingly glib terms. Muslim kids go into one end of a madrassa, and radicals pour out the other end. But what actually happens to make some people and not others receptive to radical solutions and life missions? I’ve always thought that notions of manhood had a lot to do with it, and Dos Passos appears to agree.

Interestingly, the most sympathetic and earnest radical is Mary French. While her male comrades are always shoring up one another’s commitment to the movement, Mary’s sincere humanitarianism keeps her going without any help from others.

What’s the Matter With Kansas?

To what extent do direct economic interests shape political orientation? Should they? The book presents solidarity as something ephemeral that takes constant energy input to avoid dissipation.

Like I mention above, the activists are always trying to instill solidarity among the oppressed, but getting their funds from wealthy liberals like Ada Cohn.

Scale

As we are discovering in the era of “food miles” and “too big to fail,” scale is an under-theorized element of political economy that carries a lot of intuitive weight. To what extent does Dos Passos present scale as a normative dimension?

Meh. Next question.

Media and the Information Economy

Reading this in hindsight, where, if anywhere, do we see hints of the emerging “knowledge economy?”

This is Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the so-called founder of modern public relations and prototype for J. Ward Moorehouse. Like Moorehouse, Lee worked for heavy industry as a publicist and for the Red Cross during World War I.

Ivy Lee

The Moorehouse character, like Lee, starts doing publicity for the steel industry, and becomes famous for his efforts at “harmonizing” public opinion with corporate and government policy. As he hits his stride, Moorehouse rhapsodizes over American industry, describing it as:

a highpower locomotive on a great express train charging through the night of old individualistic methods. … What does a steam engine require? Cooperation, coordination of the inventor’s brain, the promoter’s brain that made the development of these highpower products possible … Coordination of capital, the storedup energy of the race in the form of credit intelligently directed … labor, the prosperous contented American working man to whom the unprecedented possibilities of capital collected in great corporations had given the full dinnerpail, cheap motor transport, insurance, short working hours … a measure of comfort and prosperity unequaled before or since in the tragic procession of recorded history or in the known regions of the habitable globe.

By the end of The Big Money, Moorehouse is, quite literally, selling quack medicine and lobbying against its regulation.

The novels track this process of dissolution at both the individual scale and the national, starting with a hungry industrial fervor that seems almost pagan (the Pequod comes to mind a few times), and ending in a sanitized, bureaucratic, alienating, and superficial world of institutions beyond any individual control. “The storedup energy of the race” is squandered, leaving nothing to yearn for, but everything to want.

1919

I’ve finished up 1919, and started on The Big Money.

Anyone who abandoned the project before the end of 1919, go grab your copy, skip to the end of the book, and read “The Body of an American” chapter. It stands alone as a prose poem, a sort of “I Hear America Putrefying.” But it also pulls together Dos Passos’ ambitions and his omnivorous approach to portraying WWI-era Americans. Well, white WWI-era Americans, but that’s another conversation.

The idea of the Unknown Soldier always had an imaginative pull to me: as a kid, I was fascinated by the way indeterminacy could stand for universality. (Uh, spoiler alert: the Unknown Soldier dies near the end.) In this one chapter, Dos Passos does for the dismembered doughboy what he does for all his other characters, but more so. He follows the soldier not just from birth, but from conception, all the way to his confused, shell-splattered demise. Along the way, the soldier’s identity slips from one person to the next, and since Dos Passos’ characters often serve as little more than cameras through which we see places, the soldier stands for the land in all its variety as much as for the American people. Read it.

For those of you still keeping up, here are some topics for consideration.

Sex

What a miserable bunch of sad sacks these characters are, fumbling along in frustration until someone gets pregnant, at which point everything falls apart. The revolutionaries all talk big about freeing themselves from bourgeois notions of sexual propriety, but their revolution never quite arrives. Sexual liberation proves just as elusive — or illusory — as the workers’ uprising, and the two ideals are caustically juxtaposed. The bourgeois characters also dabble in liberated rhetoric when it suits their urges, but always fall back on convention somehow. Pregnancy, in almost every case, sets the rules.

So I keep wondering: if these characters could exercise the autonomy they claim they’d enjoy, what would they do with it? Would they be any happier?

Violence

Dos Passos makes no secret of his sympathies for the Wobblies and other heroes of American socialism, and his account of the Seattle General Strike, and the brutal response of the forces of reaction, makes Howard Zinn’s version seem cool and dispassionate. But there’s nothing about these earnest revolutionaries that suggests they’d be any less eager to employ rifle butts than Ole Hanson was. Just as with sex, none of the characters seem to have what it would take to wisely use the power they’re chasing. A pessimistic read of the series (is there any other kind?) suggests that by WWI, our institutions were already beyond democratic control, even by the well-intended, and that in the U.S., force and only force would dictate peoples’ economic and political lives.

American Immunity

Conspicuously absent in the book is a “war is hell” thread. Dos Passos hints at the horrors of trench combat, but the American characters who volunteer for service in WWI, whether in the military or driving ambulances, spend their time whoring and cafe-hopping. Pregnancy is a bigger threat to their well-being than Zeppelins or mustard gas. Americans are revered by the French not for their heroism, but for the material abundance they represent. I consider this one of the novels’ finest touches.

Along these lines, here’s a picture of an American ambulance driver. The driver’s name is Walt Disney.

Did you know someone made a rock opera about the Seattle General Strike? Now you do.

Dos Passos, a Poet Who Didn't Know It?

I’ve only just begun The 42nd Parallel, but my initial sense is that U.S.A. will be a fascinating, awe-inspiring, and somewhat tedious work. There’s a good chance I won’t finish it. Indeed, my main aim at this point is merely to complete the first book.

Part of it is that, having read the foreword, I know it’s not going anywhere in the traditional narrative sense. There’s no mystery that will be solved, no plot mechanisms that will drop satisfyingly into place. It’ll just go on, alternating, as it does, between scraps of news, episodic reports on varied lives, and impressionistic word-mess.

Because the book is so controlled in its formal methods, and because it deals more in imagistic fragments than in traditional narrative arcs, it almost seems to have more in common with poetry than with fiction. Indeed, I’m barely 50 pages in, but I already sense a fair bit of connection to poets who were Dos Passos’ contemporaries, broadly speaking. The Camera Eye bits are Joycean, of course, but I’m also reminded of Gertrude Stein, whose self-consciously broken word jumbles seemed designed to test — and break — the limits of language. The “story” bits, meanwhile, resemble reported pieces to some extent, but they also strike me as similar to the poetry of William Carlos Williams: Dos Passos uses simple language to describe simple scenes of life; there are few stylistic flourishes or references to anything beyond the present place and time.

Yet by interweaving the stories of the individuals with the news fragments and the impressionistic babble, Dos Passos hints at something larger: a national experiencing not just expanding, but breaking apart; a population in the throes of an event-driven, anxiety-inducing identity crisis; and a web of individuals who, caught up in it all, get by the only way they can — one small moment at a time.

The Quartet

Thanks to Sanjay, here’s a George Packer review from 2005 about Dos Passos’ onetime preeminence, and his falling-out with Hemingway:

For a brief moment, Dos Passos was as big as the big man of American letters. It’s hard now to remember that, several generations ago, the trio of great novelists born around the turn of the century—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—was a quartet, with the fourth chair occupied by Dos Passos.

Life in the USA, 1912

I’m deep in genealogical research for the non-fiction book project I’m working on. I stumbled across this tidbit in a family history:

Cicero Alexander (1836 – 1912) had a strong mind and a marvelous memory. Although he had little education in school, in his mature manhood he had all the polish and information on general subjects of a college graduate. When a young man he engaged in the dry goods business and later in the grocery business. He was sixty-three years behind the counter in Paris, Missouri. At his death all the stores in Paris closed and, as the funeral procession passed down Main Street, men lined up on both sides with head uncovered.

This stuff fascinates me.

UPDATE:

William Courtland Kinnon was born November 18, 1904. All his life he was interested in mines and mining equipment. I think he and his wife, Irene, were on their honeymoon in Long Beach, California, when they walked from their lodging to the beach. Billy wore a regular bathing suit for those times; it buttoned on one shoulder, the other side being a continuous seam. A policeman stopped and gave him a ticket for having the button unbuttoned!

I love that I can’t tell whether the writer is shocked at the unfastened button or the thought that one could get a ticket for that kind of thing.

Upward Mobility in the U.S.A.


As the characters in The 42nd Parallel start to converge, every one of them has demonstrated some type of pluck or ambition. The biographical sketches (Thomas Edison, natch) hit the same chord: initiative is everything.

Industry, as seen through the eyes of his characters in 1915-1916, isn’t a dehumanizing System, but a vital force that can be harnessed by men and women of ambition and the right kind of zeal. I suspect that as time goes on, it’s this temptation that lures the radicals away from their principles, but I’m not sure yet.

Photos from here and here.

Minor Keith Didn't Die

Why that uneasy look under the eyes, in the picture of Minor C. Keith the pioneer of the fruit trade, the railroad builder, in all the pictures the newspapers carried of him when he died?

Minor C. Keith

"Longing On A Large Scale Is What Makes History"

The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy from warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench; blood tingles with wants; mind is a beehive of hopes buzzing and stinging; muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs, for the roadmaster’s pick and shovel work, the fisherman’s knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the lurching trawler, the swing of the bridgeman’s arm as he slings down the whitehot rivet, the engineer’s slow grip wise on the throttle, the dirt farmer’s use of his whole body when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the furrow. The young man walks by himself searching through the crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear, by himself, alone.
John Dos Passos, U.S.A.

Does every young man feel that way? The collegiate autumn I lived in Spain I remember many nights spent walking around for hours on end, stopping into a tapas bar in one neighborhood, striking off for a faraway plaza, getting a text from a friend that impelled me to a flamenco joint 3 miles away on the other side of the river, all to maximize the lived experience.

I’ve walked alone at night for so many hours in Paris, Munich and Seville — sober many times, half-drunk others, listening to Velvet Underground on earphones or merely the sounds of the city, going ten nights straight finding little of consequence, stumbling that odd Tuesday at 3 am into the after hours restaurant where a band is playing a last set that turns into a jam session that peaks three times before spilling out into the streets, so that you’re wandering home all hyped up on the night, watching the dark windows that stand between you and the sleeping populace, knowing you’ve stolen a few more moments of life than they’ll get.

It is impossible to live in New York City without lusting after careers you’ll never have, women you’ll never date — not unattainable fantasy jobs and girlfriends, but paths you might’ve taken were there only time to take them all. If only a man could live ten lives, you think to yourself, standing in autumn on an outdoor Brooklyn subway platform, the air just brisk enough to invigorate the lungs, the night a bundle of potential energy as yet unspent.

I haven’t any idea how many women are inclined to solitary all night wanderlust around sundry cities, but even if it is merely 5 percent, I still regard my ability to do that in relative safety and their inability to do the same among the most profound experiential advantages of being male in this world.

And that passage — what a way to start a book! The post title, by the way, is a sentence from Pafko at the Wall.

Fall of the U.S.A.

At some point in our recent talk of books and the literary canon, commenter Sanjay mentioned in passing the epic U.S.A. Trilogy of John Dos Passos. It reminded me that back when I was a teenager burning through the interwar classics, I kept running across references to Dos Passos as a sort of invisible patron to writers like Hemingway or Fitzgerald. “I’ll read that eventually,” I thought. Sanjay’s comment brought those old intentions to mind, and it seems that I’m not alone.

What We’re Doing

This fall, we will use The American Scene as a platform for the collective reading and discussion of U.S.A. Labor Day seems a politically and seasonally appropriate time to begin what we’re calling, in a tip of the hat to the Infinite Summer Project, the Fall of the U.S.A. There will be no explicit deadlines, but we will also brook no acrimony over “spoilers.” Comment as you progress through the books, and follow along at your own risk. You will see some contributions from friends of the Scene, some of whom you might already know from elsewhere.

This being The American Scene, we encourage a generous hermeneutic toward the books. They are obviously ambitious, and might fall short on certain counts. Let’s think first about what works, and then consider whatever flaws afflict them.

We live in the era of survival analysis, so we welcome any readers who want to participate without committing to the whole trilogy. Reality intrudes sometimes. Even if you might not make it the whole way, give it a try.

I hope to collect reference materials online somewhere (the Sanborn fire insurance maps, for instance, would be a great resource). Any readers who’d like to help are encouraged to do so once we decide on a framework. Maybe we’ll serve as a slow-burning flashmob on the wikipedia entry.

Themes for Consideration

I’ve only started the first book, so I’d make a lousy guide, but already a few themes are apparent. Here are some ideas to keep in mind as you read, and I’d love to see some other ideas in the comments thread (again, we might decide on a new technical approach to this in time).

The Law

When and where does the force of law manifest in the action of the novels and in the lives of the characters?

Media and the Information Economy

Reading this in hindsight, where, if anywhere, do we see hints of the emerging “knowledge economy?”

Radicalization

We hear about it a lot today, mostly in embarrassingly glib terms. Muslim kids go into one end of a madrassa, and radicals pour out the other end. But what actually happens to make some people and not others receptive to radical solutions and life missions? I’ve always thought that notions of manhood had a lot to do with it, and Dos Passos appears to agree.

What’s the Matter with Kansas?

To what extent do direct economic interests shape political orientation? Should they? The book presents solidarity as something ephemeral that takes constant energy input to avoid dissipation.

Scale

As we are discovering in the era of “food miles” and “too big to fail,” scale is an under-theorized element of political economy that carries a lot of intuitive weight. To what extent does Dos Passos present scale as a normative dimension?

I hope this proves worthwhile, and that everybody gets something out of the books, if not the discussion. Good luck and Godspeed.

UPDATE: Posts will be collected here: http://theamericanscene.com/category/FOTUSA/