Spencerian Theory and Modern Rites of Passage in John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers

In 1901, not long before his death, Herbert Spencer visited the Naval and Military Exhibition in London at the famous Crystal Palace.¹ The irony must have been all too bitter for the octogenarian. The Crystal Palace had initially been constructed for the 1851 Great Exhibition, which featured the latest technological and artistic achievements of modernized civilizations; but in 1901, it was the showcase for the most deadly and sophisticated weaponry yet constructed. Spencer saw the display as evidence of “rebarbarisation.” With its “barbaric … ideas and sentiments,” he confided to his journal, civilization seemed poised to return to “an unceasing culture of blood-thirst” (Facts and Comments 133). If these were Spencer’s convictions in 1901, one can only imagine what he would have felt had he lived to see the guns of August 1914. By then the world he had known—or at least hoped for—was gone for good.

What a difference a half-century could make. Spencer’s arrival on the world stage in the middle of the nineteenth century brought to philosophical, sociological, and biological discourses a conceptual capstone to the Victorian Age of Progress. Grounded in an evolutionary theory that often overlaps with that of Charles Darwin, and in fact coining the term “survival of the fittest,”² Spencer operated on the premise, initially articulated in First Principles (1862), that evolution is a “change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and the integration of matter” (360). In other words, as societies progress over time, they become more segmented and particularized. Those individuals or races least able to adapt to their larger surroundings are likely to decline or become extinct, while those able to adapt will continue to break up into more specialized segments that will help perpetuate the larger social organism of which they are a part (341).³

First Principles depicts this evolution as a two-stage process. The first is the primitive society, which is marked by tribal militarism and a relative homogeneity among the members of that tribe, wherein “[e]very man is warrior, hunter, fisherman, tool-maker [and] builder” (343). But as these tribes break up into different factions and these factions solidify their borders and codify their regulatory principles among the different strata of citizens, they move into the second phase, which is marked by the development of nationalization and industrialization (344–45). This latter stage paves the way for what Spencer calls “equilibration,” wherein the society has diversified enough to establish a relative harmony among its members and with its external environment. Thus, Spencer claims, “[e]volution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness” (517). This evolutionary pattern and the acquisition of equilibration is key for understanding Spencer’s own time, the late nineteenth century, which witnessed, if not that “most complete happiness,” at least Great Britain’s ascendancy as the world’s great colonial and industrial superpower. It affirmed in Spencer a belief in the notion of Progress, that long heralded value born of Renaissance humanism.

It is through this context of Spencerian progress that I frame John Dos Passos’s 1921 Three Soldiers. I do so, however, not because the novel follows or even endorses a similar evolutionary trajectory. Rather, it seems to put the Spencer who recoiled in horror at the 1901 Naval and Military Exhibition into a conversation with his earlier self about where the humanist trajectory had arrived by the outbreak of World War I, the bloodiest and most technologically advanced war ever seen at that point in history. Noting Dos Passos’s acquaintance with Spencerian evolution, critics such as Donald Pizer and Townsend Ludington have linked the novelist, whom most consider to be one of the great innovators of literary modernism, to the naturalist writers of the late nineteenth century.⁴ Yet if Three Soldiers proves a reliable gauge of the matter, Dos Passos is not so much a latter-day naturalist as he is a dialectician, pitting Spencerian evolution against itself to make a larger point about young...