Text Message #1

Text Message #1

U.S.A.

By John Dos Passos

1240 pp. Library of America.

In the days when work did not entail reading for hours and calling it research, when I had what my father would term a real job, I used to wonder if the fiction I loved had a role to play in society. It seemed so irrelevant to my corporate job and to the business world in general. What could fiction have to say that would matter?

As Vice President Research at a consulting firm, one of my tasks was conducting focus groups. I traveled around the country, speaking with Americans of all sorts. After about twenty years, I had listened to thousands of Americans talking about whatever they wanted to talk about. As a natural consequence, I was in a good position to observe public opinion, trending topics, the cultural zeitgeist, or what I came to refer to as what Americans think about stuff. In all my years of focus groups, starting in the late 1990s and continuing until recently, I rarely heard Americans discuss fiction. One of the topics I did hear them discuss, increasingly in the last number of years, was polarization.

Polarization has been much-discussed for the past few year and is still a trending topic in the media today. The results of the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections are often touted as evidence that the United States population is bitterly divided. (Some blame President Trump for heightened polarization. Based on what I saw in my focus groups, I think he is more a symptom than a cause of it, although I would not dispute he, along with other politicians, is a polarizing figure.) I have written quite a bit on this topic in articles and blog posts regarding what I saw during my years of field research (I saw so much I am writing a book about it. Stay tuned.). All that writing led to thinking about one of the obvious questions – Is the current period of polarization and divide different from previous periods in history? I certainly saw in my focus groups that polarization existed long before the 2016 election. Based on what I saw, polarization is nothing new. This led me to wonder about the time before I conducted focus groups, pre-1990s. How not new is polarization?

This question was sparked, as so many things in my thinking are, by a novel. I recently read U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, published in 1938. The book, three full novels written a few years prior then collected plus some other texts, so quite a long read, is extraordinary in many ways, including the various writing techniques Dos Passos employs. There are four types of sections in the book. The sections entitled Newsreel include real newspaper headlines, article clippings, and song lyrics. The second type of section includes biographical sketches of historical figures such as Thomas Edison and Sacco and Vanzetti, some told fancifully, clearly through the lens of Dos Passos’ feelings about early 20th century American politics. The Camera Eye sections are, I have read although I do not know first-hand, autobiographical stream of consciousness on various topics. The fourth type of section is the novels themselves.

The three novels are composed of what I would term extended character sketches of twelve Americans in the first quarter of the 20th century, roughly before to after WWI. The characters include a war hero, a model/actress, a labor organizer, a public relations executive, a sailor, and (the sailor’s sister) a secretary (to the public relations executive). Some of them meet. Dos Passos focuses his storytelling on the social and economic forces that impact on and, in many ways, shape their lives as a vehicle to critique American capitalism in the early 20th century. In 1916, Dos Passos published an essay in The New Republic in which he foreshadows how his U.S.A. characters (maybe himself) and, by extension, many Americans, felt. “We find ourselves floundering without rudder or compass, in the sea of modern life, vaguely lit by the phosphorescent gleam of our traditional optimism.” Sound familiar?

One aspect Dos Passos returns to repeatedly, one of his text messages to the future, is the level of division – political, economic, cultural, social – in the America of the early 20th century. In The Camera Eye (50) Dos Passos explicitly states, “all right we are two nations” in a discussion of the Sacco and Vanzetti execution. The polarization in the country at the time permeates the character sketches. Labor agitation was roiling the country and it swims through the pages. Anti-immigrant sentiment, exemplified in the section on the Sacco and Vanzetti execution, reverberates through the labor strikes the characters attend, the speeches they hear, and the protests they join. Reading U.S.A., it becomes clear that Dos Passos felt polarization was part of American life, not a flash in the pan or a zag of the zeitgeist; rather almost part of the American character.

The Civil War period is an obvious time of divide and polarization in America. The post-war period could reasonably be considered a runner up for that distinction. The Vietnam Era comes to mind also.A perusal of American history books would show that while the level of divide in this country has waxed and waned with the historical tides, polarization, division, angry politics, etc. are not unique to the 21st century. Whether this is a comfort – we’ve been here before and made it through intact – or a harbinger– this is not going to get better – remains a matter of perspective.

Reading Dos Passos in 2021 forces one to consider how modern phenomena including the media saturation, some would say media hysteria, of our time could augment existing divisions. That snarky social media post takes on heightened significance when seen through the lens of Dos Passos. To my reading, the text message Dos Passos was sending out to the future is that rather than wring our hands about polarization by blaming a particular politician or political party, or waiting for the polarization to dissipate, we figure out how to work within the political divide. He even sends a text hint about how to do this which sounds an awful lot like compromise for the common good. Required reading?