American Quarterly

Bob Johnson
"A Whole Synthesis of His Time": Political Ideology and Cultural Politics in the Writings of William Carlos Williams, 1929-1939
American Quarterly - Volume 54, Number 2, June 2002, pp. 179-215

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Bob Johnson - "A Whole Synthesis of His Time": Political Ideology and Cultural Politics in the Writings of William Carlos Williams, 1929-1939 - American Quarterly 54:2 American Quarterly 54.2 (2002) 179-215 "A Whole Synthesis of His Time": Political Ideology and Cultural Politics in the Writings of William Carlos Williams, 1929-1939 Bob Johnson University of California, Irvine In William Carlos Williams's 1934 short story, "The Dawn of Another Day," a broken-down German-Irishman declares while drunk on scotch to a once-affluent friend that he is a communist. Further considering, he clarifies, "I'm a Democrat and I'm a Communist," and launches into a monologue on Marx's Das Kapital: I read that lousy book till I damned near knew it by heart. And the old bugger is right. To hell with the Capitalists that enslave the resources of the nation. You know yourself 5% of the people of the United States own 95% of the money. And 95% of the people own only 5% of the money. Now that's not right. We got to have a revolution and take it away from them. The setting is a moored yacht. The scene opens sometime between 1929 and 1933, during that short confluence of Prohibition and Depression when Americans could not even drink legally at the end of a bad day. The man's companion, broke and in possession of a yacht he is unable sell because of hard times, admonishes the old man for not pursuing a more American solution to the maldistribution of wealth: "Be yourself,...