"A Whole Synthesis of His Time": Political Ideology and Cultural Politics in the Writings of William Carlos Williams, 1929-1939

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. ¹

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, Fred. We're not back in the last century. Russia was. More power to her then. I'm for Russia. We'd be rotten sports if we didn't help their game. Let 'em work it out. But they're nothing but a lot of monkeys, a lot of thick heads. That sort of thing can never happen in America." With an air of common-sense, the younger man counters that the United States is not in need of revolution or even a new ideology so much as a plain, pragmatic, liberal policy: "You want to know how to [get rid of inequality]? . . . Just stop inheritances. Redistribute everything a man has accumulated at the end of his life." Not a bad idea, the older man acknowledges, were it not for the fact that inheritance law is backed by "[t]he army and the navy and every God damned cop" and that to overturn it would require "castrating every guy that passes his bar examination seven days after they admit him." The younger man adds a final parting shot, a final salute to American individualism: "But if you're an American and keep your nerve you don't need Capitalism—I don't care what you call it. Communism. Your damned Revolution." ² The older man merely continues asking the younger if he has read his Marx.

The exchange between these two encapsulates a basic political dilemma faced by many who lived through the Great Depression: what politics best suited a nation mired in economic quicksand and yet clinging to enlightenment values and the modern liberal state? For, on the one hand, the American Dream itself had been shown to be a colossal sham, as the older man, Fred, explains to both the reader and the owner of the yacht: "Don't need nobody, huh? Just a chance to use your brains. Big business, huh? Self-reliant, rugged Americanism. . . . The resources of the country are limitless! You're going to rise from your ashes like the Phoenix on the revenue stamps and make another fortune by skinning the life out of suckers like me." And yet, on the other hand, Communism seemed an unrealistic, if not insincere, alternative, the choice "of a lot of thickheads." ³ The impasse in which the two characters find themselves was not an unfamiliar one for Depression-era Americans.

If, as Williams's story suggests, one could be in the 1930s a Democrat and a Communist or a capitalist no longer certain that capitalism is what makes one American, then clearly political ideology in the...