The haves and have-nots in 1920s AmericaFirst published in 1936, The Big Money is the third novel in the U.S.A. trilogy by author John Dos Passos. Like the two previous books in the series, The 42nd Parallel and 1919, The Big Money is written in an experimental format merging fictional narrative with biographical sketches of historical figures, interludes of stream-of-consciousness prose, and verbal collages of newspaper headlines and journalistic snippets. These elements combine to form a vivid panorama of American society in the 1920s.
Dos Passos saved the best for last. The Big Money is not only the final installment of the trilogy but also its best. This is largely due to the three very intriguing characters that serve as the novel’s protagonists: Charley Anderson, a war veteran hoping to strike it rich in the aircraft manufacturing industry; Margo Dowling, an attractive young woman who pursues a career in show business; and Mary French, a social worker who selflessly devotes her life to labor activism. The two former characters exemplify the commercialism and depravity of the capitalist rat race, while the latter presents a melancholy portrait of martyrdom to the cause of socialism. The supporting cast includes several characters who were featured in the two previous books. Though the narratives of all three novels are rather open-ended, here Dos Passos does to some extent draw the intertwined lives of his ensemble cast together into some degree of closure.
The chapters entitled “The Camera Eye”—vignettes written in a stream-of-consciousness style bordering on prose poetry—are the least successful element in the trilogy. Dos Passos backs off on these a bit in The Big Money, making those passages fewer and farther between, which is to the book’s benefit. Instead, he devotes more pages to the biographical sketches, which really do enlarge the narrative by providing valuable historical context that is interestingly told through the author’s leftist perspective. Among those whom Dos Passos profiles in this novel are the Wright Brothers, William Randolph Hearst, Rudolph Valentino, and Isadora Duncan. The “Newsreels” chapters also seem less random in this book and more pointedly directed at showcasing societal ills, most notably labor abuse and the class struggle but also murders and corruption.
The anticapitalist message of the book is more subtly presented here than in the more blatantly propagandistic works of socialist writers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London. Dos Passos spends most of the novel showing us characters struggling to survive and thrive within the capitalist system, chasing the brass ring and the almighty dollar. All the men seem to be alcoholics; all the women unfaithful gold-diggers, yet Dos Passos is not unsympathetic to these characters. These are regular people leading realistic lives in an oppressive system that drives them towards competition and exploitation. Only from the Mary French perspective does the reader ever get overt discussion of labor issues like miners in Pennsylvania and Colorado being gunned down for striking. The depiction of socialism is not entirely positive either, however, as Dos Passos often points out the greed and pettiness of those Mary French encounters within the movement.
The Big Money is a literary time capsule of an era in which America was rampant with income disparity, monopolistic trusts, and government corruption, yet somehow much of it feels uncomfortably familiar to the 21st century reader. What’s changed is that the labor movement and American socialism are neither as loud and visible nor as hopeful for change as they were a century ago. The societal problems that Dos Passos addresses appear to be unfortunately timeless, which will doubtless ensure the relevance of this exceptional novel for many years to come.
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The U.S.A. trilogy goes to war in EuropeThe novel entitled 1919, published in 1932, is the second book in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, following the The 42nd Parallel. Like its predecessor, 1919 is written in a modernist experimental format combining narratives of its characters’ lives with verbal collages (called “Newsreels”) of headlines and snippets from news stories, stream-of-consciousness vignettes (“The Camera Eye”), and biographical sketches of historical figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, John Reed, and J. P. Morgan. With these components Dos Passos constructs a sweeping yet intimate vision of American society, with this particular novel focusing on the World War I era.
The second book in the U.S.A. Trilogy is not quite as impressive as the first. The 42nd Parallel felt like it was building up to something big, but 1919 feels like the saga has taken a step backward, sometimes literally. In this novel, the major players of The 42nd Parallel are relegated to supporting roles while the background extras from the first book—Janey Williams’s brother Joe, Eleanor Stoddard’s roommate Eveline Hutchins—are elevated to starring roles. This involves going back in time not only to tell these new characters’ back stories but also to offer different perspectives of the events and relationships depicted in the first novel.
Though this may be the U.S.A. trilogy, 1919 takes place almost entirely in Europe as it chronicles its ensemble cast’s experiences during World War I. The roles they play in that conflict are hardly typical, however. None of the main characters is a soldier in the traditional sense. Almost everyone in the book finds jobs with the Red Cross or the ambulance service, and little if any combat factors into the plot of the novel. Everyone just seems to drift through France from town to town, dining and drinking. Of the latter activity, Dos Passos seems obsessed. Hardly a paragraph goes by that doesn’t include a reference to a specific beverage, alcoholic or not, as if citing the name of a liquid were enough to create instant atmosphere. Despite the fact that Dos Passos is quite skilled at sketching realistic lives and relationships, the endless imbibing gets annoying and monotonous after a while. The story also gets bogged down in its romances at the expense of history and politics. Towards the end of the book, the chapter on Ben Compton, a Jewish radical activist, is a step in the right direction. Too bad more ink wasn’t devoted to that character’s compelling story. Dos Passos closes the novel with a prose poem about an unknown soldier killed in the war. This brief piece is a bit pretentious in execution, but it does bring up aspects of the wartime experience that one wishes would have been covered more explicitly in the rest of the novel.
Dos Passos was a radical leftist when he wrote the trilogy, and he definitely takes a “people’s history” approach to the war, but he deliberately stops short of penning an overtly political screed like Upton Sinclair might have written. The book could have benefited, however, from more of Ben Compton’s experiences with socialism and the I.W.W. and less of the wine-sipping romance of PR man J. Ward Moorehouse and his employees. The most vivid historical impressions in the novel are those of the rampant jingoism and xenophobia of the World War I era. Anyone who expressed pacifist, socialist, or vaguely “un-American” views was in danger of being persecuted, imprisoned, or killed—a valuable cautionary tale for these divisive times in which we live.
1919 isn’t perfect but it certainly isn’t boring. If you’ve already read The 42nd Parallel then by all means proceed through the trilogy. It’s all just really one big novel anyway. As a whole, the three books comprise one great work of American literature. I look forward to following the story back to America in the third and final installment, The Big Money.
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Kaleidoscope of the American experience, 1900-1917The first book in the U.S.A. trilogy by American author John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, was published in 1930. The trilogy continues in the novel entitled 1919 and concludes with The Big Money. If this first volume is an accurate indication of the series as a whole, the U.S.A. trilogy is one of the best written and most important works in American literature of the early 20th century, on a par with great American novels like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
The 42nd Parallel is a modern Balzacian overview and critique of American society in the first two decades of the 20th century, with a special focus on the class struggle between capital and labor. Stylistically, it combines the muckraking naturalism of works by Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser with the cinematic modernism of Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. Although, like Steinbeck, Dos Passos clearly has leftist leanings, this is not a propaganda novel but rather a kaleidoscopic rendering of socioeconomic reality at a crucial time in the history of American labor. Dos Passos writes of Socialism not with the stridently hopeful enthusiasm of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but rather with the nostalgic melancholy of a lost cause.
Dos Passos constructs the book in a collage-like format. The bulk of the text consists of chapters that chart the individual lives of a handful of characters from childhood through education (or lack thereof) to their entry into the workforce and their subsequent struggle or rise. As the title indicates, the characters gravitate towards cities along the 42nd parallel of latitude—New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh—though the narrative occasionally wanders as far afield as Mexico. Each protagonist navigates the sociopolitical landscape to pursue the American Dream in his or her own way, whether that means striking it rich in big business, living independently as a single woman, or working to promote the cause of Socialism. The unflinching, nothing-is-sacred realism with which Dos Passos writes these lives is remarkable. The intricate narratives vividly illuminate the time period in question, yet readers of today will still find much to identify with in these characters’ experiences, making for a very compelling read.
Interspersed between these meaty chapters are shorter vignettes, including “Newsreels” that combine snippets of newspaper headlines, popular song lyrics, and radio journalism to offer glimpses into the historical events and general atmosphere of the time. The sections entitled “The Camera Eye” are free-form stream-of-consciousness prose poems that resemble personal reflections or dialogues between unnamed characters. Dos Passos also periodically inserts a brief biographical sketch of an important historical figure from the world of industry, labor, politics, or finance, such as Eugene V. Debs, Thomas Edison, Bob La Follette, and Andrew Carnegie. The “Camera Eye” sections often get overly self-indulgent in their surrealist beat-poetry aesthetic, but the “Newsreels” and biographies really do enlarge the reader’s understanding of the times.
Judging by this first book, it would seem the U.S.A. trilogy is not so much a trilogy at all but rather one big novel divided into three volumes. The 42nd Parallel can’t really stand on its own as a complete work of literature. There is no ending to the book nor endings to any of the narrative threads within. Instead, it’s a book comprised of beginnings. Nevertheless, I don’t fault Dos Passos for that because after having read The 42nd Parallel I certainly want to read the next two books to find out what happens to these characters and experience more of the author’s innovative re-creation of this pivotal period in American history.
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The bore of war
In his novel Three Soldiers, originally published in 1921, John Dos Passos attempts to present a realistic, unglamourized look at the lives of American soldiers during World War I. Upon its release it was praised by H. L. Mencken for its authentic portrayal of the wartime military experience. In the era of its publication, the book’s anti-war stance may have shocked the patriotic populace, but today’s reader, after having digested countless war stories through books and film, is likely to find this novel tame and dull.
It takes a while to even figure out to which Three Soldiers the title refers. The book starts out by focusing on a Private Fuselli as he moves through training camp and eventually ships out for France. About a third of the way through, however, Fuselli’s story is abandoned, and Dos Passos cuts to Private John Andrews, who takes center stage for the rest of the narrative. A third soldier, Private Chrisfield, shows up periodically as a sort of sidekick to Andrews. The result of this odd arrangement of the three men’s storylines is that the reader ends up feeling like Fuselli’s story was just a waste of time. There seems to be no apparent reason for structuring the book this way other than the modernist’s pretention to scorn convention and confound expectations.
This is the least of the book’s problems, however. Though this is an anti-war novel, don’t expect a story about the horrors of combat. There’s very little of that in this book. Only one scene of physical violence has the potential to truly shock, but the deadpan matter-of-fact manner in which the author relates the event renders it forgettable. Mostly, Dos Passos concentrates on the dehumanization of men forced to submit to military bureaucracy. He portrays the three soldiers as prisoners or slaves, and each handles the yoke of servitude in a different manner. Fuselli is the average joe, eager to make something of himself, who approaches the army as an opportunity. Andrews is the sensitive artist who doesn’t belong anywhere near military life. Chrisfield is the coarse redneck who actually seems to enjoy the brutality of war. Andrews’s plight, which occupies the bulk of the book, is hardly representative of the experience of a typical military man, and the more atypical his story becomes, the more Dos Passos’s arguments become moot.
I sympathize with Dos Passos’s leftist, pacifistic views; I just wish he would express them a little more stridently. The novel is just too darn sensitive. The reader wonders how much more interesting it might have been in the hands of a more blatantly didactic writer like Upton Sinclair. In the last few chapters, Dos Passos finally gets to his point, but prior to that the reader has to wade through chapter after chapter of doughboys wandering the streets of France; pursuing French women; sipping coffee, wine, or beer in French cafes; and engaging in long, pointless conversations. Every step they take, every move they make, Dos Passos writes it down. Dos Passos heavy-handedly sprinkles repetitive snippets of song lyrics throughout the prose and purposefully uses the phrase “putty-colored puddles” seven or eight times. Descriptions of trees and leaves are ubiquitous. Such gratuitous poesy merely inspires tedium and annoyance.
Dos Passos went on to a long, prolific career which included his magnum opus, the U.S.A. trilogy, hailed by many as a masterpiece of American literature. I’m sure there are some good novels among his body of work, but Three Soldiers is not one of them.
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