In preparation of presenting a paper on dos Passos (that is part of the second chapter of my dissertation), I decided to buckle down and try to develop a sort of large grasp on the three novels that make up the USA trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. Part of that grasp is developing a sense of the four different modes of writing that dos Passos employs. There are straightforward narratives (with chapters named after the main characters); “Newsreel” sections which stitch together popular songs, headlines, and news stories; “The Camera Eye” sections, which are apparently autobiographical and largely beyond description at this point; and, finally, mini-biographies of actual Americans, headed with a nickname mostly, and often written in a more opaque and actively textual style than the regular narratives, without being as blurry and disorienting as the other two sections.
Since the biographies are spread out over the 1200 pages of the trilogy, it’s tough to try and gauge a sense of what they demonstrate when considered as a whole. So here I’m producing a list of them, in order of their appearance in the novels. One will note that the large portion of persons were dead before dos Passos wrote about them, but not all of them. But the question to the reader of this post, then, is this: does this list of Americans stand in for a history of the USA from 1900–1930, which is one of the possible goals of the trilogy? What do you think? More importantly, who is missing?
- The 42nd Parallel (1930)
- “Lover of Mankind,” Eugene Debs (1855–1926), wobbly, socialist and politician
- “The Plant Wizard,” Luther Burbank (1849–1926), botanist and horticulturalist
- “Big Bill,” Bill Haywood (1869–1928), wobbly and socialist
- “The Boy Orator of the Platte,” William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), politician
- “Emperor of the Caribbean,” Minor C. Keith (1848–1929), businessman and colonialist
- “Prince of Peace,” Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), industrialist and philanthropist
- “The Electrical Wizard,” Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), genius and businessman
- “Proteus,” Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1965–1923), mathematician and engineer
- “Fighting Bob,” Robert M. La Follette, Sr. (1855–1925), politician
- 1919 (1932)
- “Playboy,” Jack Reed (1887–1920), journalist and communist
- “Randolph Bourne,” Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), writer and philosopher
- “The Happy Warrior,” Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), jack of manly trades
- “A Hoosier Quixote,” Paxton Hibben (1881–1928), historian and soviet chronicler
- “Meester Veelson,” Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), politician and academic
- “The House of Morgan,” J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), devil
- “Joe Hill,” Joe Hill (1879?–1915), songwriter and wobbly
- “Paul Bunyan,” Wesley Everest (1890–1919), wobbly
- “The Body of an American”
- The Big Money (1936)
- “The American Plan,” F. W. Taylor (1856–1915), management consultant
- “Tin Lizzie,” Henry Ford (1863–1947), industrialist and efficiency expert
- “The Bitter Drink,” Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), sociologist and economist
- “Art and Isadora,” Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), dancer and communist
- “Adagio Dancer,” Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926), actor and sex symbol
- “The Campers at Kitty Hawk,” The Wright Brothers (Orville: 1871–1948; Wilbur: 1867–1912), inventors
- “Architect,” Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), architect
- “Poor Little Rich Boy,” William Randolph Hearst (1869–1951), publisher
- “Power Superpower,” Samuel Insull (1859–1938), investor
- “Vag”
The last two biographies of the last two novels, “The Body of an American” and “Vag” don’t describe any single person. In fact, they’re notable in how they try to create an assemblage of a person from various singularities. I would not even lump them with the biographies, except that, in the table of contents, they are presented in the same type style as the biographies (each mode has its own heading style).
Tags: america, biography, history, John Dos Passos
April 26th, 2009 at 14:07
Clarence Darrow seems like he could fit in there. Emma Goldman, other extreme left types who trafficked in violence? Not a lot of women, obviously. Samuel Morse? A painter or architect? There is also a decided lack of regional/municipal/local politicians. Maybe someone like Altgeld, or a ‘martyr’ a la Sacco and Vanzetti, or those hung in retribution for the Haymarket blast. Black Jack Pershing? A criminal, besides Morgan? An investigator of the sort hired to research the 1920 Wall Street bombing?
More thoughts when I’m not on deadline with a copyediting thing. This post rules.
April 26th, 2009 at 17:26
Now I see what you meant by “crowdsourcing.” No, I’m not looking to fill in the gaps as part of my research.
Goldman I think is covered by the Wobblies–interesting at how many wobblies dP included versus straight up commies. S&V are, of course, key figures in The Big Money, so their absence makes sense. Furthermore, I think that dP chose people with long, extended careers/influence, though you could say Joe Hill (and Reed, maybe and/or Duncan) didn’t have that. I like that Paxton Hibben is totally off the map–no wiki entry, no nothing, save what appears to be a vanity press bio of the man. Dude wrote some seriously important books, apparently, but now he’s just the dude who wrote those books.
Wright I think counts for architect enough. As for painter, maybe dP figures US art only begins with Rothko.
Haymarket predates the historic scope, and we’ve got martyrs aplenty in Hill, Everest, Debs (for sedition), and Big Bill. It’s notable that the trilogy begins with the bombing of the Maine–er, no, the charge up San Juan Hill, so Haymarket is definitely too soon.
Local politicians would also undermine the scope a bit, too. Locally important, but not nationally. Note that, I think, every politician mentioned at least ran for president.
May 25th, 2009 at 7:52
In his critical study of the trilogy, Donald Pizer reproduced some notebooks that show that, in fact, nearly everyone you mention was at some point slated to have a “portrait” about him or her.
May 25th, 2009 at 7:53
Pizer also accounts for Hibben: he was a great friend of Dos Passos.
June 11th, 2009 at 11:59
I recommend Peter Glenn Christensen’s 1982 article “Dos Passos’ Use of Biography in USA” if you don’t already know it. (Rightly, in my view) it attributes far more intentionality to Dos Passos than the apparently random arrangement offers at first sight. It is available at this link http://fmls.oxfordjournals.org.....VIII/3/201 through the usual academic channels. If you do not have access, let me know and I can send you the PDF as an attachment.
It is worth recalling that Dos Passos was nearly always short of money, so to earn some extra $ he published many of these biographies separately in journals or as separate volumes, before the individual volumes of U.S.A., and perhaps in a hurry. His biography of Veblen, for example, which also appeared as a separate volume, has been criticized as being too derivative, too willing to rely uncriticaly on the “official” bio by Joseph Dorfman, who may well have been unsymapthetic to his subject. On this see Bartley and Bartley “Stigmatizing Thorstein Veblen: A Study in the Confection of Academic Reputations” in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 14#2 (December 2000):363-400
best wishes
Richard
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:54
Thanks for the heads up(s?). I’ll check that out. What’s your interest in Dos Passos?
July 27th, 2009 at 8:09
Well, that’s a long story…I am interested in Dos Passos because he was an artist-observer, an outsider looking in on the world and its ways, because he was an American of Portuguese descent and an illegitimate child, and therefore, for all these previous reasons, his literary career was one long autobiography, a search for his own identity, a kind of perpetual emotional rebellion. That, IMHO, is one reason why he is so interested in depicting the process and meaning of others’ lives in his mini-bios of significant people, combining them, in just about every one of his novels, with fictionalized portraits of himself and some of his closest friends.
Apart from that, I am doing a PhD dissertation on power and crisis in American political and economic life between 1890 and 1920. “U.S.A.” is both satire and portrait of the period: in other words, it is a good way to get into interpreting the political culture using an emotional (feelings-based) entry point, thus complementing the more conventional analytical approaches found in history or political science texts.
November 29th, 2009 at 18:09
Richard,
I’ve just come across your June posts. I would be VERY grateful for a PDF of “Peter Glenn Christensen’s 1982 article ‘Dos Passos’ Use of Biography in USA’”.
Unfortunately, I do not have access to the archive.
If you could send me a copy, it would be GREAT.
Many thanks,
Bob McAnulty
December 20th, 2009 at 0:50
(I’m not Tony Karon, aka Rootless Cosmopolitan, though we share a lot of opinions and beliefs.)
maybe dP figures US art only begins with Rothko.
I don’t think Rothko (born 1903) would have been known to dP when “USA” was being written.
There aren’t any music people. dP quotes at least one Irving Berlin song (“Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning”) but doesn’t examine Berlin himself or any of the other people who supplied to music track to his period: Scott Joplin, Victor Herbert, Rudy Vallee, Bessie Smith etc.
But without having read the scholarly material, but as a lifelong admirer of the trilogy, I’m not sure the biographies are supposed to “stand in” for American history; I think the subjects are meant to be representative figures, but that’s not quite the same thing.
December 20th, 2009 at 5:38
I think I meant the Rothko line as a joke. Since posting this piece, I have gone back and read a lot of reviews of the work from the time and so on, and I’ll put them together for a later post (I still want to do a geospatial analysis on the portraits, too).
June 17th, 2010 at 2:25
m, pls excuse my ignorance, but how do I fulfil Bob McAnulty’s request for me to send him a copy (PDF) of the article I offered you, Dos Passos’ Use of Biography by Peter Christensen.
I am willing to do it, but I have no e-mail address for him. It seems to me that commenters’ e-mail addresses are only visible to you as manager/owner of the website, not to other commenters.
You have ny e-mail address, so if you prefer to respond there please do so.
How are you getting on with your project for “a later post” ? It is now somewhat later….
all the best, R