Dos Passos and the ‘Middle-Class Liberal’

CanadianReview of American Studies Volume23, Number 2, Winter 1993, pp. 149-160 149 DosPassos and the 'Middle-Class Liberal' DavidHeinimann When John Dos Passos wrote The Big Money, the third novel of his trilogy U.S.A., he was undergoing a radical reorientation of his already radical politics. He had come to find communism and socialism unsatisfactory solutions to socioeconomic problems in America and was searchingfor and defining alternatives. His journalism of the time shows the definitionhe arrived at, personified in his concept of the middle-class liberal. Hepromoted the solution in The Big Money to engage middle-class liberals withhim in reforming America. 1 What liberalism meant to Dos Passos requires some consideration before hisfiction can be interpreted with reference to it. Liberalism, as it came downto him, had undergone a subtle but distinct change since its definition. John Gray sees modern liberalism beginning when Hobbes and Spinoza rejected "the inherited vocabulary of moral and political notions of the dominant Aristotelean and Christian traditions" (9). Though Spinoza's emphasison "freedom" is closer to the ideal of liberalism, it was Hobbes' valuingof "peace" that was established by the end of the nineteenth century (10); Bentham and ·the Mills had turned it from the individual to the collective,a turn that resulted in the "interventionist and statist tendencies" that concerned de Tocqueville in America (21). Hobbesian liberalism continued in Pierce, James, Dewey, and Veblen, whose pragmatism Charles W.Anderson saw in their "flexible, activist conception of law and state policy" (1), which "formed part of the intellectual background for 150 Canadian Review of American Studies Progressive reform and the New Deal" (ix). The late-nineteenth-century crisisin capitalism forced classicalliberalism, saysPeter J. Coleman, to make a 180-degree turn: traditional freedoms---"laissez-faire in business, individualism and self-reliance in personal behavior, and the liberty to pursue one's own self-interest"-gaveway to "management, order, controL community, public welfare, and statism" (64--65). The change made the managerialist New Deal palatable to liberals such as Dos Passos, especially with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935; they finally felt recognized in policy decisions (Landsberg 185).But, even with the New Deal's desirable supervision of banks and stock markets, its increasing bureaucratization and accumulation of power caused Dos Passos to lose faith (The Theme Is Freedom162).Admiration of Veblen, evident in the biography of him in The Big Money, "The Bitter Drink," yet an enduring classical liberalism, places Dos Passos between the pragmatic and idealistic traditions of liberalism. Richard Rorty's pragmatist analysis of liberalism helps clear up the apparent ethical contradiction of Dos Passos's position. Liberalism needs, not "truth, rationality, and moral obligation," but a "vocabulary of moral and political reflection" (44); the attempt at "consensus about what is universally human" must give way to "free discussion" (84) in a "general turn against theory and toward narrative" (xvi). The marginalized would change from "they" to "us" (192) in our attempt to, not "recognize," but "create" solidarity (196). Dos Passos valued narrative above all discourse, and his concern for the marginalized is evident throughout his writing, and especially in U.SA. That his liberalism wavered is the sign of how classical liberalism had permitted the creation of the plutocracy that governed America into the twentieth century. Dos Passos wanted to remain faithful to the ideal of liberalism which the middle class founded, but he saw that moral and political reflection were necessary to repair the corruption it had undergone. Disappointment in communism in the early 1930s led Dos Passos to rethink his politics. In an article for The New Republic, "Back to Red Hysteria," he defined the political activist he now favored, the middle-class liberal: By middle-class liberals I mean everybody who isn't forced by his position in the economic structure of society to be pro-worker or antiworker . They are the only class to which neutrality is possible in any David Heinimann I 151 phase of the struggle. I don't know if they can have any effect on the outcome, but their attitude certainly can affect the conditions under which the fight is carried on. If they are genuinely neutral, they can at least...