The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 6 May 2008
by John Dos Passos
American society isn't really given to much in the way of historical perspective or self-analysis. Just about everything that happened in the last hundred years is "so last century" that we forget the lessons of our grandfathers or great-grandmothers, those who lived through the deprivations of the Great Depression and the last time this country had a real chance at socialist change (as when Socialist Eugene Debs won third place in the 1920 presidential election). We have largely forgotten the conditions that brought about Roosevelt's courageous New Deal, the last real social revolution this country experienced. Things were pretty tough in the Depression, and the conditions that many workers lived and worked under have compelling and disturbing parallels to the conditions of lower-end workers today. And today, we don't have the powerful unions of the 1920s and 1930s to effect meaningful change in corporate and government policies. Things will have to get worse again before they get better again. Aspects of this novel remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. John Dos Passos, whose own political leanings swung between the far left and the far right (the farther you go in either direction, the closer the two extremes really are), writes of young Glenn Spotswood, an idealistic young man in the early decades of the 20th century. His father, also an idealist, was booted out of his job at Columbia because of his pacifist stance in World War 1. This leaves a deep impression on Glenn, who adopts a deep sympathy for justice and the working man. Through his college years, he yearns to drop out and go to work in the fields. He does just that for a summer and finds his purpose. Eventually and reluctantly graduating, his unlucky love life steers him toward a dedication to the Communist party and helping the downtrodden working man in the fields and mines of America. In the Appalachian mines, though, corporate and corrupt government interests are keeping the uppity miners in their place, defending near-slavery conditions on the basis that labor organizers are merely liberal elitist outsiders meddling in good old American capitalism (sound familiar?). Glenn works hard to help the miners organize, but is soon caught up in a trumped up murder trial (echoing the Sacco and Vanzetti fiasco of 1927). Glenn gets his walking papers while eight miners go to prison. His social conscience can't stand the injustice, though and he continues to work for their release. Unfortunately, the leaders of The Party have moved on. Their ideology won't stand still for the injustice perpetrated on any one individual. Glenn's sense of right and wrong gets him blacklisted by The Party. This is fine with him; the Communists are as blinded by their own lust for power as anyone else. We never get a truly intimate sense of Glenn's motivations, but his disillusionment with the Left mirrors the early years of the author's own shift away from party politics. Eventually, Glenn heads off to the Spanish Civil War (as did Dos Passos), where he meets with the same kind of closed-minded political power structure as he did at home. Dos Passos's message is clear. The excesses of power are just as bad on either side. The little man in the middle will always lose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.