Still Dos Passos's U.S.A.

 One of my reading projects for the summer has been to finish John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, and I just did last night. There are obviously many things one could say about an epic of that scale, but what came to mind for me in reading the last volume of the trilogy (The Big Money), was that our 2020s are coming to resemble very much the 1920s of a century ago that Dos Passos describes. We are still Dos Passos's America—and not in a good way. 

The trilogy as a whole is an elegy for the "lost republic" of Jeffersonian democracy, to use Dos Passos's phrase—the "storybook democracy" of Walt Whitman, as he elsewhere calls it. Beginning with a sympathetic depiction of I.W.W. labor radicalism at the turn of the century, Dos Passos charts the inexorable rise of big business and the dulling of conscience and moral values, as people find themselves duped into a needless war in Europe that is then cynically exploited by business interests. 

One of the final storylines in the book follows Richard Ellsworth Savage—also a central character in the second volume, 1919—who begins life as a would-be poet and radical pacifist quoting Swinburne, but who takes a job with a public relations firm in order, predictably, to give him time to write, and who ends up embracing the sham idealism of American corporate ideology once he comes to realize which side his bread is buttered. 

By the end of the book, he is using his literary talents to shill for a patent medicine conglomerate run by "Doc" Bingham (a character who also shows up as a small-time charlatan in the first volume). Bingham recruits Savage's PR firm to help him defeat proposed food and drug regulations pending in Congress that would dampen his sales of quack remedies. "[T]he [...] wild-eyed cranks from the medical schools [...] are trying to restrict the liberties of the American people to seek health and wellbeing[!]" cries Doc Bingham. 

The episode feels all too relevant in a week when the U.S. president has just rejected the long-standing medical consensus on childhood vaccines, bowing to pressure from the MAHA brigade; when Senate Republicans are harassing former public health officials; and when quack-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. currently runs the Health and Human Services Department. The snake oil salesmen and "patent medicine" charlatans are not only apparently as prevalent today as they were in the 1920s—now, they are actually running the very public health agencies that Doc Bingham railed against. 

One also feels that Dos Passos's tale is ripped-from-the-headlines when he describes wars and international politicking designed around the sole purpose of extracting oil. Here we are a century after Dos Passos wrote, and power politics still revolve around fossil fuels. The U.S. has invaded and set up a kept puppet regime in Venezuela, because, as Trump openly stated, he wants their oil. We started a needless and illegal forever war with Iran over oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump's own political allies are reportedly angling for oil profits in Greenland—a territory Trump has repeatedly threatened to invade. 

"Dick said hadn't we got plenty of oil at home," Dos Passos writes in 1919. To which his interlocutor replies: "You never can have plenty of anything... that's the first law of thermodynamics. I never have plenty of whiskey [...] Well, neither Standard Oil or the Royal Dutch-Shell can ever have plenty of crude oil." 

But most of all, the 1920s that Dos Passos portrays in the third volume of the series resemble our own, current '20s in their relentless xenophobia and red-baiting and nativism and persecution of out-groups. A pivotal episode in the final sections of the trilogy—as in Dos Passos's own political life—is the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Dos Passos's description of the tragedy brings to mind Trump's own recent effort to get a new Red Scare going, in time for the midterms, as well as the enforced disappearances this administration has carried out to black sites in El Salvador, Eswatini, Cameroon, Djibouti, the CAR, and many other impoverished, authoritarian, and war-torn lands.

"[T]his is where another immigrant worked hater of oppression who wanted a world unfenced   when they fired him from the cordage he peddled fish," Dos Passos writes of Bartolomeo Vanzetti in one of the "Camera Eye" sections; "how can I make them feel how our fathers our uncles haters of oppression came to this coast [...] the immigrants haters of oppression brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers America [...] or that this fish peddler you have in Charleston Jail is one of your founders Massachusetts?" 

Just as Kilmar Abrego Garcia or the Cuban refugees confined right now as we speak without charge or trial in a black hole in Eswatini are some of our founding fathers—immigrants who came to this country fleeing oppression and hoping for freedom. 

"[D]o they know," Dos Passos writes, "the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight [...] the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight [...] the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died." 

So it was, and so it will be again. A century after Dos Passos wrote, we are still fighting to make the "old words" of our "lost republic" live again. We are still trying to recover the "storybook democracy" that never was but always might be. The "immigrants haters of oppression" in our nation are showing us the way—the way back to those old words of freedom and liberty and democracy and justice "worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers districtattorneys collegepresidents judges," Dos Passos wrote—the words the immigrants and refugees and asylum-seekers who still put their trust in the American experiment are daring to renew; holding us to to the unrealized promise of our founders.