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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All right, we are two nations, May 20, 2006
This review is from: The Big Money: Volume Three of the U.S.A. Trilogy (Paperback)
So says John Dos Passos in `The Big Money", Volume III of his USA Trilogy. Just as Benjamin Disraeli saw two nations in mid-19th century Britain ("who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws...the rich and the poor"), John Dos Passos saw two nations in the United States in the roaring 1920s.
Dos Passos is one of the (sadly lesser known literary giants of the 20th-century. At the height of his fame in the 1930s he found himself on the same pedestal as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The first two volumes of the USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel and 1919) were enormous successes. By the time "The Big Money" was released in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time". Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Dos Passos' literary reputation began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, along with Hemingway and many other literary figures including George Orwell made his way to Spain to assist in the Republican cause. Like Orwell, Dos Passos was deeply affected by the brutal infighting amongst Republican supporters. In the case of Dos Passos he was deeply distressed by murder of a friend (anarchist and Johns Hopkins Professor Jose Robles) apparently executed by Stalinist cadres for his nonconforming radicalism. Hemingway mocked Dos Passos for his unmanly concern for his friend. Hemingway's friends and most of the hard left literary community joined in. It is no surprise that Dos Passos' next book was criticized severely. The New Masses magazine referred to it as a "crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop". Dos Passos never reclaimed the popularity he had achieved with the USA Trilogy. Unlike Orwell, whose fame and reputation survived and grew after his Spanish Civil War experience, Dos Passos slowly fell out of the public eye. That fate is a shame when one considers the enormous energy and creativity that went into the USA Trilogy.
The idea of two paralel nations, one for the rich and their minions and one for the huddled masses, provides substance to Dos Passos' unique multi-media structure. In addition to the stories of these fictional characters, The Big Money is interspersed with mini-biographies of real people, newsreel clippings that place the story in a social a political context, and a series of autobiographical sketches (The Camera Eye) in which Dos Passos steps out from the story and provides his own personal context to the times.
The key fictional characters in "The Big Money" are Charley Anderson, Mary French, Margo Dowling, and Richard Ellsworth Savage. The "Great War" is over and the USA has, in the words of Warren G. Harding, returned to normalcy. The roaring 20s is in full swing". In one America the characters experience the world of prohibition and speakeasies; stock speculation by millions of Americans are buy and selling shares on profit and margins that are as ephemeral as they are risky. In the `other' America the characters see labor at war with management. Union busting and red baiting is the rule not the exception and urban workers; particularly immigrants are seen as Bolshevik threats. Charley Anderson crashes and burns after a meteoric rise. Mary French is absorbed in the workers' battles of the 1920s and Margo Dowling sleeps her way to fame and fortune in Hollywood.
The biographies cover the same two nation ground with min-biographies of Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Rudolf Valentino, and William Randolph Hearst amongst them. Dos Passos' personal Camera Eye observations reach their emotional climax as the story reaches the execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It is here where Dos Passos makes his two nations observation.
The Big Money is a worthy finale to The USA Trilogy. After re-reading the entire trilogy, thirty years or so after my first exposure to it in High School, I think it safe to say that it has still holds up under perhaps more mature observation.
The USA Trilogy remains one of the major literary works of the (U.S.) twentieth century and remains a work that should be read and read again. Highly recommended.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Show Me the Money, December 5, 2005
This review is from: The Big Money: Volume Three of the U.S.A. Trilogy (Paperback)
Stacked up against other Lost Generation contemporaries like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Dos Passos strikes a more minor key. His characters are unmemorable, his prose flat to the point of journalese, and his stabs at experiment, like the "Newsreels" interleafed between chapters, are so much chrome on some otherwise pretty conventional novelistic fenders.
But I think that limited scope is also a strength in his masterpiece, the USA Trilogy. With singleminded determination Dos Passos hammers together, scene by scene and newsreel by newsreel, a stark portrait of the Twenties as an era of greed, confusion, and above all a kind of free floating moral emptiness, a big, powerful, rudderless America cruising blithely on the froth of events. He shows you how the small guys get crushed without wallowing in a lot of sentiment about it, and how the fat cats alternately sleeken or decline into a sea of booze and betrayed ideals without resorting to cartoon stereotypes of `the Man'. You feel sorry for almost everyone on some level in this story, though Dos Passos keeps his lens distant enough to avoid pity, or the tragic glamour of a Jay Gatsby, in order to focus on the larger outlines of the postwar, post-Puritan world his specimens move in.
You don't need to read the preceding books in the Trilogy to enjoy The Big Money. It picks up the characters from the other two volumes, but the novel isn't really so much about these people as it is about the busts and bubbles that push them through history. It'll be hard to look at the Twenties as the colorful era of flappers, speakeasies, and the Charleston again after reading The Big Money; Dos Passos exposes the postwar malaise behind the excess in a way that brought to mind parallels with our own post 9/11 USA. I wonder who's our Dos Passos today? Maybe a filmmaker?
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a big book., August 17, 2002
This review is from: The Big Money: Volume Three of the U.S.A. Trilogy (Paperback)
I initially read the entire trilogy, U. S. A. by John Dos Passos, as a soldier in Vietnam, in June and July of 1969. Reading the two earlier volumes on America's lofty aims and actual experiences in World War One and the economic boom which followed it in the United States helped me try to imagine what my life would be like, as I faced growing old in a country which increasingly depended upon its global dominance for its style of life. Volume 3, THE BIG MONEY, ended this gigantic series with a political point of view that stuck with me more than any of the fictional parts of this novel. A look at the Contents in the sample pages gives some indication of the other tidbits in this trilogy, Newsreels, popular songs, and short bioographies, which make the composition of this trilogy unique. Of the biographies, I would consider "The Bitter Drink" on Veblen the most intellectual item in THE BIG MONEY, and my best introduction to how Socrates ended up drinking the hemlock. Most biographies were about people who were so famous that they might still be remembered. "Tin Lizzie" is a life of Henry Ford. "Poor Little Rich Boy" was William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper owner whose father died in Washington, a senator, but who was only elected to the House of Representatives, where he justified his politics with, "you know where I stand on personal fortunes, but isn't it better that I should represent in this country the dissatisfied than have somebody else do it who might not have the same real property relations that I have?" However familiar this might sound today, Dos Passos wrote that "his affairs were in such a scramble he had trouble borrowing a million dollars, and politically he was ratpoison." The biography of Hearst is at page 375 in the paperback which is currently available, a few pages after "The Camera Eye (50) they have clubbed us off the streets" (p. 371) which says: America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul their hired men sit on the judge's bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch The final nonfiction biography in THE BIG MONEY is called "Power Superpower" on page 420. Samuel Insull had been learning shorthand "and jotting down the speeches in PARLIAMENT for the papers" before he came to American in 1881 to be Edison's personal secretary. As president of Chicago Edison Company after 1892, "If anybody didn't like what Samuel Insull did he was a traitor." The part I liked best was after the stockmarket crash, when there were accounting problems involving a number of companies. "He held directorates in eightyfive companies, he was chairman of sixtyfive, president of eleven: it took him three hours to sign his resignations." When "Revolt against the moneymanipulators was in the air," he ran off and extradition proceedings involved at least four countries to bring him back to Chicago for a trial. So, "With voices choked with emotion headliners of Chicago business told from the witnessstand how much Insull had done for business in Chicago. There wasn't a dry eye in the jury." The result was different from the trial of Socrates in Athens a few thousand years earlier, and I think Insull had a better retirement than Socrates asked his friends to provide if they had to pay a fine for him. Maybe we are better off than some people. Read this book anyway.
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