Editor’s Note: In our current issue, we have a piece by Jay Nordlinger on John Dos Passos — specifically, on The Theme Is Freedom, a collection that Dos Passos published in 1956. Mr. Nordlinger is now expanding his piece in Impromptus. For Parts I and II, go here and here.
Sacco and Vanzetti were a cause célèbre in the 1920s. A few years later, the Harlan County miners were a cause célèbre. I am speaking of the coalminers in that part of Kentucky, who were locked in battle with the companies.
I should flesh that out a bit: The miners and union organizers were locked in battle with the companies and law enforcement. This battle was more than political, as it turned violent, involving deaths.
With fellow writers — most prominently Theodore Dreiser — Dos Passos went to Harlan County in 1932.
At the station is a group of miners and their wives come to welcome the writers’ committee: they stand around a little shyly, dressed in clean ragged clothes. A little coaldust left in men’s eyebrows and lashes adds to the pallor of scrubbed faces, makes you think at once what a miserable job it must be keeping clean if you work in coal.
In his Harlan County reporting and other such pieces, Dos Passos paints the most vivid pictures.
‐Dos Passos’s side — the pro-miners side — was dominated by Communists. They scorned the “liberalism” of people like him, as he puts it.
I remember the first time I heard the word “liberal” used as a putdown from the left. I was accustomed to it as a putdown from the right, or a simple designation. I was a college student, speaking to a Marxist-Leninist professor of mine. I brought up Christopher Hitchens. “He’s a liberal,” she said, scornfully. That was a lesson to me.
‐Looking back on these Communists, in the mid-1950s, Dos Passos calls them “human engineers,” who were manipulating the coalminers.
There is also this fantastically vivid remark: Dos Passos and the others of a more liberal bent were seeking to “even up the scales”; the Communists were out to “smash them.”
‐In 1937, Dos Passos went to Spain, to look at the civil war. There he saw the Fascists and the Communists, duking it out. “The liberals were dying under their crossfire,” he writes, 20 years later. Fascists and Communists alike “shot the best men first.”
Reading Dos Passos on Spain, I could not help thinking of David Horowitz. He was jolted by the Left when the Black Panthers killed his friend Betty Van Patter, who worked as a bookkeeper for them. Dos Passos had a Betty Van Patter, of a sort: José Robles, a scholar and political activist (left-wing). He was a translator of Dos Passos’s work into Spanish.
In that civil-war year, Dos Passos went looking for him — and could not get a straight answer. Instead, he got the runaround. Everyone was afraid. What had happened to this loyal Spanish republican, Robles? Ultimately, Dos Passos learned that the Communists had killed him — specifically, that the Soviets had. They had taken over the republican cause in Spain.
In the 1950s, Dos Passos writes,
Some of my associates … were disgusted with me for making all these inquiries. What’s one man’s life at a time like this? We mustn’t let our personal feelings run away with us. But how in the world, I asked them, are you to tell what’s going on except by personal experience? Sacco and Vanzetti were each just one man. Isn’t justice one of the things we are trying to establish? If one honest Spanish patriot has been executed, it’s likely that there are more. Our hope was to save the Spanish republic and all the heritage of civilization that went with it. If it has already been destroyed from within what are we fighting for?
‐You remember that Dos Passos had a problem in the Soviet Union, a decade before. He pretty much wanted to tell the truth. But he did not want to aid anti-Soviet propaganda. In Spain, he had a similar problem.
Again in the ’50s, he writes,
How to tell about it? You didn’t want to help the enemy, to add to the immense propaganda against the Spanish republic fomented by so many different interests. At the same time you wanted to tell the truth. As Pontius Pilate so aptly put it, what was truth? There were things you suspected you couldn’t yet be sure of.
Just describe what happens, I told myself.
In the Middle East today, there are many reporters — Western reporters (although there are fewer than there once were, understandably). I can tell you that many of them pull punches: They do not report some of what they see and understand. For one thing, they don’t want to be kicked out. They want to remain on the beat.
This has been a problem in Cuba too, for decades.
‐In a Barcelona hotel, Dos Passos met another writer. Twenty years later, he remembers:
Orwell had been wounded. His face had a sick drawn look. I suppose he was already suffering from the tuberculosis that later killed him. He seemed inexpressibly weary. We didn’t talk very long, but I can still remember the sense of assuagement, of relief from strain I felt at last to be talking to an honest man. The officials I’d talked to in the past weeks had been gulls most of them, or self-deceivers, or else had been trying to pull the wool over my eyes. The plain people had been heartbreaking. There’s a certain majesty in innocence in the face of death. This man Orwell referred without overemphasis to things we both knew to be true. He passed over them lightly. He knew everything. Perhaps he was still a little afraid of how much he knew.
Further on, Dos Passos writes,
Men who are about to die regain a certain quiet primal dignity. [He saw this in the First World War.] Orwell spoke with the simple honesty of a man about to die.
‐Another dose of Dos, looking back on the ’30s:
How to bring home to people in America that their own liberties depended to a certain extent on the liberties of Russians, Spaniards, Esthonians, Poles, Moroccans; that freedom in our world was indivisible?
Today, in the 2010s, words like those would get him tagged a neocon — which he was, in a way, as radicals-turned-anti-radicals tend to be.
‐In 1941, Dos Passos wrote an essay called “The Use of the Past.” “Every generation rewrites the past,” he says.
In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on.
Yes. How true.
Dos Passos goes on to write,
In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.
Yes, indeed.
‐More from the essay:
If, in the bedrock habits of Americans, the selfgoverning tradition is dead or has been too much diluted …, no amount of speechifying of politicians or of breastbeating by men of letters will bring it back to life.
Those words hit me with special relevance in our current election cycle.
Dos Passos continues,
We so easily take the word for the thing anyway, that even if what we consider our way of life were gone, we wouldn’t quite know it. It’s part of the way the human mind works that the verbal trappings of institutions linger on long after the institutions they referred to have faded away.
This is as sad as it is true, I think, and as true as it is sad.
‐Another line:
Without overconfidence we can say that our people and the people of England have used the art of politics with more skill and have upheld the dignity of the citizen as a man better than the peoples of continental Europe …
I think we can still say that, yes. But is the bar too low, given the trajectory of continental Europe?
Anyway, I should give you another line:
When we wake up in the night cold and sweating with nightmare fear for the future of our country we can settle back with the reassuring thought that the Englishspeaking peoples have these habits engrained in them.
Dos Passos is speaking of the habits of self-government, the habits of the Anglo-American political tradition. Can we still reassure ourselves in the night? Legitimately?
‐Two more doses from this essay, please, and then I’ll call it quits for the day.
In the last analysis … the continuance of selfgovernment will always depend on how much the people who exercise that liberty will be willing to sacrifice to retain it. A man in power will push his subjects around just as much as they’ll let him. But even in a riot the members of the mob and the members of the police force will behave as they have been brought up to behave.
Yes, yes (and I’ll have more to say about the importance of the home — so will Dos — later in the series). (School is important too, of course, especially in the early years.)
Your final dose:
Our occasionally selfgoverning republic has proved itself capable of bending without breaking under the terrific strains of the last ten years [the Great Depression, basically]. The question is whether there is enough will to freedom in the country to make it keep on working. Social machinery, no matter how traditional, left to itself runs down; men have to work it.
They do. We do. See you tomorrow for Part IV, and thanks.