On (Presidential) Power over the Lives of Men

Dos Passos could still, in the late 1940s when he wrote The Grand Design, offer up satire of the most bitter kind to express his anger at the abuses which rulers indulge in in times of war. Here he protests, amongst other things, the way FDR’s Executive Order 9066 was used for the purposes of internment of Japanese-American civilians in 1942. This is his most succinct statement of how America had still not learned “how to put power over the lives of men into the hands of one man and to make him use it wisely.”

“At home we organized bloodbanks and civilian defense and imitated the rest of the world by setting up concentration camps (only we called them relocation centers) and stuffing into them American citizens of Japanese ancestry (Pearl Harbor the date that will live in infamy) without benefit of habeas corpus. . . .

The President of the United States talked the sincere democrat and so did the members of Congress. In the Administration there were devout believers in civil liberty. “Now we’re busy fighting a war; we’ll deploy all four freedoms later on,” they said. . . .

War is a time of Caesars. The President of the United States was a man of great personal courage and supreme confidence in his powers of persuasion. He never spared himself a moment, flew to Brazil and Casablanca, Cairo to negotiate at the level of the leaders; at Teheran the triumvirate without asking anybody’s leave got to meddling with history; without consulting their constituents, revamped geography, divided up the bloody globe and left the freedoms out.

And the American People were supposed to say thank you for the century of the Common Man turned over for relocation behind barbed wire so help him God.

We learned. There were things we learned to do but we have not learned, in spite of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the great debates at Richmond and Philadelphia, how to put power over the lives of men into the hands of one man and to make him use it wisely.

~John Dos Passos, The Grand Design (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 416–18.

Dos Passos and Walt Whitman

By the time he came to write Century’s Ebb, John Dos Passos was ready to acknowledge to a far greater extent than ever before, and in a prominent way, his lifelong debt to and enthusiasm for Walt Whitman. But he was also wanting to enlist Whitman to his side in his grumpy old man’s complaint against what he saw as the spoilt youth of his day. Century’s Ebb contains not only direct quotes from Whitman (particularly from Democractic Vistas), but also features a miniature biography and indeed, right at the beginning of the book, an opening poem in the form of questions posed to Whitman:

You, Walt Whitman

who rose out of fish-shape Paumanok

to go crying, like the spotted hawk,

your barbaric yawp over the roofs,

to utter “the password primeval,”

and strike up for a new world;

what would you say, Walt, here, now, today,

of these States that you loved,

Walt Whitman, what would you say?

The biography concludes with these words:

Is your “fervid and tremendous Idea”

lost in “solid things”… “science, ships, politics, cities, factories,” in these years of “unprecedented material advancement”?

Are we indeed men worthy of the name, Walt Whitman, in these “years of the modern, years of the unperformed”?

Dos Passos is no doubt a little petulant here, wanting to have confirmed his own feelings of despair at the way modern, 1960s America has turned out (he had let friends know that he felt young people in the sixties did not know how easy they had things compared with his own lot in 1917).  This was still a Dos Passos looking for answers, however, rather than providing them. I believe that his petulance was not born of animosity, but rather of fear and impatience that people might not perceive the extent to which the power of modernity would overwhelm his old-time America – an America based, perhaps, on Whitmanesque principles, but certainly on Jeffersonian ones.

Lois Hughson (1973) and Robert P. Weeks (1980) both made significant points about Dos Passos’ debt to Whitman, identifying the personal and the political elements in it. Weeks pointed out that Dos Passos’ debt to Whitman was “one of the largest and most openly acknowledged in [American] literary history” (Weeks 1980: 431).  Dos Passos repeatedly drew on Walt Whitman, quoting him, borrowing his ideas, imitating him and saluting him most famously in Camera Eye 46 in The Big Money, in the parenthesis “I too Walt Whitman,” with which Dos Passos achieved a three-fold evocation of the poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, number 86 in Leaves of Grass:

– First Dos Passos suggests that he, like Whitman, is both a searcher and a questioner – “I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me.”

– Secondly, he acknowledges,  at the same time as he recalls the final chapter of Nineteen Nineteen, “The Body of An American,” that he too “had receiv’d identity by my Body;  That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.”

– Thirdly, he holds out the hope of a better future through the more fruitful use of the American past, evoking Whitman’s call across the generations (“I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;  I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.”) and embedding the parenthesis (I too Walt Whitman) in the slightly ironical, hopeful yet perhaps nostalgically unhopeful, rhetorical question, “what leverage might pry the owners loose from power and […] bring back our storybook democracy?”

As Hughson notes, “Dos  Passos’ ideas about political action and the exercise of power have an important source, not in an historian or political theorist or even in another novelist, but in a poet, Walt Whitman” (Hughson 1973: 179).

References:

Hughson, Lois. “In Search of the True America: Dos Passos’ Debt to Whitman in U.S.A.” Modern Fiction Studies 19.2 (Summer 1973): 179-192

Weeks, Robert P. “The Novel as Poem: Whitman’s Legacy to Dos Passos” Modern Fiction Studies 26.3 (Autumn 1980): 431-446

The Political Significance of Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers

Three Soldiers, published in 1921, was the first major anti-war novel of the twentieth century. It was bitterly attacked by partisans of the war party and as enthusiastically supported and greeted by opponents of war and veterans of the First World War, who knew what Dos Passos was writing about. As H L Mencken would later write,  “At one blast [Three Soldiers] disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality.”

The State of Mind Behind Freedom of Speech

A writer, a technician, must never, I feel, no matter how much he is carried away by the noblest political partisanship in the fight for social justice, allow himself to forget that his real political aim, for himself and his fellows, is liberty. […] To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind of freedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house. I don’t see how it is possible to organize effectively for liberty and the humane values of life without protecting and demanding during every minute of the fight the liberties of investigation, speech and discussion that are the greatest part of the ends of the struggle.

~excerpted from John Dos Passos, The Writer as Technician (1935)