1919

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Newsreel XX

  Joe Williams

  The Camera Eye (28)

  Playboy

  Joe Williams

  Newsreel XXI

  The Camera Eye (29)

  Richard Ellsworth Savage

  Newsreel XXII

  The Camera Eye (30)

  Randolph Bourne

  Newsreel XXIII

  Eveline Hutchins

  The Camera Eye (31)

  Eveline Hutchins

  Newsreel XXIV

  The Camera Eye (32)

  The Happy Warrior

  The Camera Eye (33)

  Joe Williams

  The Camera Eye (34)

  Newsreel XXV

  A Hoosier Quixote

  Newsreel XXVI

  Richard Ellsworth Savage

  Newsreel XXVII

  The Camera Eye (35)

  Eveline Hutchins

  Newsreel XXVIII

  Joe Williams

  Newsreel XXIX

  The Camera Eye (36)

  Meester Veelson

  Newsreel XXX

  The Camera Eye (37)

  Newsreel XXXI

  Daughter

  Newsreel XXXII

  The Camera Eye (38)

  Newsreel XXXIII

  Eveline Hutchins

  Newsreel XXXIV

  The House of Morgan

  Newsreel XXXV

  The Camera Eye (39)

  Newsreel XXXVI

  Richard Ellsworth Savage

  Newsreel XXXVII

  The Camera Eye (40)

  Newsreel XXXVIII

  Daughter

  Newsreel XXXIX

  The Camera Eye (41)

  Newsreel XL

  Joe Hill

  Ben Compton

  Newsreel XLI

  The Camera Eye (42)

  Newsreel XLII

  Paul Bunyan

  Richard Ellsworth Savage

  Newsreel XLIII

  The Body of an American

  About the Author

  First Mariner Books edition 2000

  Copyright 1932 and © renewed 1959 by John Dos Passos

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to E. L. Doctorow for permission to reprint the foreword, previously published in U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, copyright © 1991 by E. L. Doctorow.

  Title page illustration by Reginald Marsh copyright 1946 by John Dos Passos and Houghton Mifflin Company, copyright © renewed 1974 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Dos Passos, John, 1896–1970.

  1919 / John Dos Passos.

  p. cm.—(U.S.A. ; v. 2)

  “A Mariner book.”

  ISBN 0-618-05682-3

  1. United States—History—1913–1921—Fiction. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Influence—Fiction. I. Title:

  Nineteen nineteen. II. Title.

  PS3507.O743 N53 2000

  813'.52—dc21 00-027609

  eISBN 978-0-544-34145-6

  v1.1213

  Foreword

  Given neither to he-man esthetics, like Hemingway, nor to the romance of self-destruction, like Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, their friend and contemporary—he was born in 1896—was a modest self-effacing person, an inveterate wanderer who liked to hike through foreign places and sit down for a drink with strangers and listen to their stories. He saw literature as reportage. He admired the plain style of Defoe, and he read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel Without a Hero, all his life.

  Dos Passos was born wandering, living out his lonely childhood with his unmarried mother, Lucy Madison, as she toured the European capitals to avoid scandal while, in the United States, his father, John R. Dos Passos, an eminent corporate lawyer and lobbyist, waited for his invalided first wife to die. When that event came about, in 1910, the mother, the father, and the boy, a strongly loving triad, were able finally to constitute themselves as a family. But the isolation of his early life left Dos Passos psychologically detached, with the feelings of a perpetual outsider.

  The outside, of course, is a position of advantage for a writer. Reportage from the outside, and slightly above, is the working viewpoint of Dos Passos’s masterpiece, U.S.A. It is a nice irony that not the era’s big literary personalities, but this quiet inhibited young man, would produce the most vaultingly ambitious novel of all—a twelve-hundred-page chronicle of the historic and spiritual life of an entire country in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Not for him the portrait of a gangster, however metaphorically shimmering, or even the group portrait of a lost generation: Dos Passos goes wide—from the American incursion in the Philippines to the beginning of the talkies, from coast to coast and class to class. U.S.A. is the novel as mural, with society’s heroes standing out from the flames of history while the small-figured masses toil at their feet.

  In fact, the peripatetic Dos Passos landed one day in Mexico City and was much taken with the murals of Diego Rivera colorfully spreading, story after story, up the courtyard walls of the Secretariat of Education. In later years he indicated also his love of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century European tableaux—those with the saints painted big and the ordinary people painted small, filling up the background.

  He published the first installment of U.S.A., The 42nd Parallel, in 1929, having realized early on that what he was doing could not be contained in one volume. 1919 followed two years later, and the final volume, The Big Money, was published in 1936. He could have gone on—he had endless resources for the thing, having picked up its rhythm and much of the material from his own ambulating life. He’d gone up from Baltimore to Harvard, where he read and was impressed by the Imagist poets—Pound, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg. He also made his acquaintance with the work on James Joyce, the twentieth-century writer who, though hardly given to English plain speech, would have the most enduring influence on him. After Harvard he went back to his wandering, spending a year in Spain and studying architecture. But World War I was just over the border, and in 1916 he volunteered to drive for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, the same organization for which Hemingway and E. E. Cummings drove. He served in France and Italy, and then with the entry of America into the conflict he enlisted in AEF and, all told, got as much of a dose of modern war as he would need for the inspiration to portray its soldier-victims in his first novel, Three Soldiers (1921).

  The reticent writer was always disposed to the action. In the postwar twenties, he managed time and again to place himself in history’s hotspots—whether the literary scene in New York and Paris, revolutionary Mexico after the death of Emiliano Zapata, the newly Communist Soviet Union, or the nativist city of Boston, where he marched for the two imprisoned and condemned immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

  He was writing all the time, of course. He published Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), a book of essays about Spain, Manhattan Transfer (1925), a dark impressionist portrait of New York and technical precursor of the U.S.A. novels, and pieces in the New Masses, The Dial, The Nation, and The New Republic attesting to his leftist sensibility. He was a diarist and kept up an active correspondence with a variety of colleagues including Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald—all of them worried in the world, all of them news junkies arguing politics and entangling themselves in the crises of civilization.

  Not until the Spanish civil war would the profound diffe
rence between Dos Passos’s humanist ideals and the doctrinaire idealism of many of his contemporaries become clear: the visible moment of separation seems to have occurred with the execution in Valencia of his friend José Robles, a Republican, by a Communist firing squad.

  In his later life Dos Passos was as archly conservative as he had been radical. What remained constant, like a moral compass course that never veered, was his despair of the fate of the single human being bent into service of the institutions of modern industrial society, whatever those institutions might be.

  In fact, the pervading vision of U.S.A. is of people dominated by institutions, which is to say trapped in history. The novel is without a hero. We are given narratives of the lives of a dozen men and women—Joe Williams, a seaman; Mac, a typesetter; J. Ward Moorehouse, a public relations man; Eleanor Stoddard, a stage designer; Dick Savage, a Harvard graduate and World War I ambulance driver; Charley Anderson, a wartime air ace and inventor; Margo Dowling, an actress; Ben Compton, a union organizer; and so on—and watch three decades pass through them as they reach their prime and then age and flounder, either to die or to simply disappear or, with one or two exceptions, to end in moral defeat. Living below the headlines, they’re presented as ordinaries: their lives can intersect, they can sometimes be charming or sympathetic, but they are always seen from above, as in satire, and all their irresolution, self-deceit, and haplessness, and their failure to find empowerment in love or social rebellion, is unconsoled by the moral structure of a plot. U.S.A. has no plot, only the movement forward of its multiple narratives under the presiding circumstances of history.

  The circumstances themselves are occasionally flashed to us by means of the so-called “Newsreels” that interrupt the text with actual headlines from newspapers of the time, fragments of news stories, advertising slogans, and popular song lyrics, all popping up in rat-a-tat fashion, like momentary garish illuminations, as from fireworks, of the American landscape.

  Early readers were dazzled, as they should have been, by these collages. But Dos Passos does not stop there. A third mode is the minute biography, the periodic insertion into the text of highly editorialized brief lives of some of the paramount figures of each of the decades he covers, including Eugene Debs and William Jennings Bryan, Carnegie, Edison, John Reed and J. P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Isadora Duncan, and William Randolph Hearst—the secular saints of the Dos Passos tableau, often mocked, sometimes mourned, but in any event drawn big. Unlike the lives of his fictional characters, which flow incessantly, the breathless author saying and then this happened and then that happened, the biographies stand as firm in his annunciation as historical markers.

  Through the fourth major mode of address of the book, those Joycean passages under the heading “The Camera Eye,” Dos Passos records his own nameless life of sensations beginning with his early boyhood. These are perhaps the most enigmatic interludes. Like the Newsreels and brief biographies they give a topographical dimension to the text, as if points in the main narrative were being held under a higher lens magnification. They also implicate the narrator in the narrative, serving to underscore his moral commitment to the act of writing. But with his characteristic self-denigration, Dos Passos once justified these sections to an interviewer as planned lapses into “the subjective,” a way of keeping this terrible contaminant out of the rest of the manuscript.

  Here we should remember D. H. Lawrence’s warning not to trust the writer but the book. As with Dos Passos’s self-effacement, his objectivity, which is the literary form of self-effacement, masks an imperial intelligence, an acerbic wit, a great anger, and, above all, the audacity to write a novel that breathes in the excitements of all the revolutionary art of the early twentieth century—whether Joyce’s compound word streams or Rivera’s proletarian murals or D. W. Griffith’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s film montages.

  The stature of U.S.A. was immediately recognized by the critics of the day. By the time of its publication as a completed one-volume trilogy in 1938, the novel was generally regarded as a major achievement, although displaying the characteristics of a highly controlled vision. Malcolm Cowley thought of it as a “collectivist novel” perversely lacking the celebrations of common humanity that would be expected from a collectivist novel. Edmund Wilson wondered why every one of the ordinary characters of the book went down to fail ure, why nobody took root, raised a family, established a worthwhile career, or found any of the satisfactions that were undeniably visible in actual middle-class American life. Others objected to the characters’ lack of ideas, Dos Passos’s refusal to give them any consequential thought or reflection not connected with their appetites. And it is true these are beings occupied almost entirely with their sensations and plagued by their longings, given mightily to drinking and fornication while their flimsy thought provides no anchor against the drift of their lives.

  But for Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1938, it was exactly in the novel’s refusal to redeem its characters that he found its greatness. Their lives are reported, their feelings and utterances put forth, says Sartre, in the style of a “statement to the Press.” And we the readers accumulate endless catalogues of individual sensory adventures, from the outside, right up to the moment the character disappears or dies—and is dissolved in the collective consciousness. And to what purpose all those feelings, all that adventure? What is the individual life against history? “The pressure exerted by a gas on the walls of its container does not depend upon the individual histories of the molecules composing it,” says the French existentialist philosopher.

  But U.S.A. is an American novel after all, and we recognize the Americanness of the characters. They really do have a national specificity. In fact, the reader now, half a century further along, cannot help remark how current Dos Passos’s characters are—how we could run into Margo Dowling or Ward Moorehouse or Charley Anderson today and recognize any one of them, and how they would fit right in without any trouble. How they do. U.S.A. is a useful book to us because it is far-seeing. It seems angrier and at the same time more hopeful than it might have seemed in 1938. A moral demand is implicit in its pages. Dos Passos says in his prologue that above all, “U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” He heard our voice and recorded it, and we play it now for our solemn contemplation.

  —E. L. Doctorow

  Newsreel XX

  Oh the infantree the infantree

  With the dirt behind their ears

  ARMIES CLASH AT VERDUN IN GLOBE’S

  GREATEST BATTLE

  150,000 MEN AND WOMEN PARADE

  but another question and a very important one is raised. The New York Stock Exchange is today the only free securities market in the world. If it maintains that position it is sure to become perhaps the world’s greatest center for the marketing of

  BRITISH FLEET SENT TO SEIZE

  GOLDEN HORN

  The cavalree artilleree

  And the goddamned engineers

  Will never beat the infantree

  In eleven thousand years

  TURKS FLEE BEFORE TOMMIES

  AT GALLIPOLI

  when they return home what will our war veterans think of the American who babbles about some vague new order, while dabbling in the sand of shoal water? From his weak folly they who have lived through the spectacle will recall the vast new No Man’s Land of Europe reeking with murder and the lust of rapine, aflame with the fires of revolution

  STRIKING WAITERS ASK AID OF WOMEN

  Oh the oak and the ash and the weeping willow tree

  And green grows the grass in North Amerikee

  coincident with a position of that kind will be the bringing from abroad of vast quantities of money for the purposes of maintaining balances in this country

  When I think of the flag which our ships carry, the only touch of color about them, the only thing that moves as if it had a settled spirit in it,—in their solid structure; it seems to me I see alternate strips of parchm
ent upon which are written the rights of liberty and justice and strips of blood spilt to vindicate these rights, and then,—in the corner a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these things.

  Oh we’ll nail Old Glory to the top of the pole

  And we’ll all reenlist in the pig’s a—h—

  Joe Williams

  Joe Williams put on the secondhand suit and dropped his uniform, with a cobblestone wrapped up in it, off the edge of the dock into the muddy water of the basin. It was noon. There was nobody around. He felt bad when he found he didn’t have the cigarbox with him. Back in the shed he found it where he’d left it. It was a box that had once held Flor de Mayo cigars he’d bought when he was drunk in Guantanamo. In the box under the goldpaper lace were Janey’s high school graduation picture, a snapshot of Alec with his motorcycle, a picture with the signatures of the coach and all the players of the whole highschool junior team that he was captain of all in baseball clothes, an old pink almost faded snapshot of his Dad’s tug, the Mary B. Sullivan, taken off the Virginia Capes with a fullrigged ship in tow, an undressed postcard picture of a girl named Antoinette he’d been with in Villefranche, some safetyrazor blades, a postcard photo of himself and two other guys, all gobs in white suits, taken against the background of a moorish arch in Malaga, a bunch of foreign stamps, a package of Merry Widows, and ten little pink and red shells he’d picked up on the beach at Santiago. With the box tucked right under his arm, feeling crummy in the baggy civies, he walked slowly out to the beacon and watched the fleet in formation steaming down the River Plate. The day was overcast; the lean cruisers soon blurred into their trailing smokesmudges.