Fortunately, I think the third volume really bounced back. Margo Dowling is a great character, and so is Mary French. Dos Passos' women really do tend to be better than his men, don't they?

The globe spins… Time flies…

At Versailles allies and enemies, magnates, generals, flunkey politicians were slamming the shutters against the storm, against the new, against hope. It was suddenly clear for a second in the thundering glare what war was about, what peace was about.

The war is over. And the rich grew richer and the poor went poorer…

In America, in Europe, the old men won. The bankers in their offices took a deep breath, the bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their coupons in the refined quiet of their safe deposit vaults, the last puffs of the ozone of revolt went stale in the whisper of speakeasy arguments.

And suffering from a postwar hangover soldiers sailed home to seek their place in the sun in peace. And those who’ve been scrupulous enough not to trample people under their feet were trampled under the feet of the unscrupulous ones…

…every man his pigeonhole… the personality must be kept carefully adjusted over the face… to facilitate recognition she pins on each of us a badge… today entails tomorrow…

Those who flew out of luck were going down losing their human qualities on the way down and those who flew into big money were going up losing their human qualities on the way up.
And at that everyone attempts to do everything possible to hasten one’s ruination.
The globe spins… Time flies…

USA..roughly 100 years ago. That was the subject of the 'USA' trilogy by John Dos Passos, but for him it was the recent past. 'The Big Money' is the 3rd and final installment. As I try to understand the USA of today it is instructive to look back on those days--by someone who was actually there. There is no question these were pivotal years in the formation of 'modern' America. As I noted in the my review of book 2, '1919' the outcome of the Great War (later known as 'World War I') was a calamity for international relations. Far from being the 'war to end all wars' it became the war that directly spawned WW2 and thence the Cold War and the American Empire that may one day be viewed as a calamity for the entire world given the trends that seem to emerge from this place. Interestingly, I just read in another book about who first came up with the term 'World War 1'. It was Ernst Haeckel (German biologist and ecologist) who said "there is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word," written on September 20, 1914. Anyway, the war was a disaster for America in many ways too as governmental overeach and suspension of civil liberties became rampant, setting an example that continues to this day in myriad new ways. But now we are in the 1920's (but Roaring? the term is never used in Dos Passos' USA) and the human drama of life in America is on display once again. It is fun to see Miami, FL in its infancy and LA with orchards. But the rich, the poor, and the striving are all trying to make some sense of their lives. The characters are fewer and there is a little more continuity of these generally sordid lives--Charly Anderson, Margo Dowling, Mary French and a bit of Dicks Ellsworth, along with numerous lesser hangers on. All are generally unhappy for a variety of reasons--love, alcohol, money, fate. The fact that it was Prohibition seems to have negligible effect on the consumption and availability of alcohol. Only the labor activist Mary French engenders much sympathy. The fundamental tension of 'USA' is the divide between the working class and what we might call the 'elite' class today. While his sympathies are clearly with the working man and their struggle, Dos Passos mostly focuses on the lives of the those struggling the 'make it' to the elite class which always seems to elude them. These are not tidy lives--with excessive drinking (and driving), frequent economic uncertainty and ruin, even rape and abortion. Is it much different today? We have new and even more sinister pathways and perversions. Once again I enjoyed the mini-bios, among them Frderick Winslow Taylor (founder of 'Scientific Management'), Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen ('The Theory of the Leisure Class'), Isadora Duncan, Rudolf Valentino, the Wright Brothers, Samuel Insull. I have actually read full biographies on three of them and obviously you see how Dos Passos has to simplify things, but they are still valuable toward an fuller picture of the period. I found Veblen's ideas on 'conspicuous consumption' to be particularly prophetic.

This is the third and final book of the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos with this book covering the post war years often referred to as the "roaring twenties." Much of what I mentioned in my reviews of n  42nd Paralleln and n  1919n regarding multiple narrative styles also applies to this book as well. Consequently, this book shares the scattered focus of the other books. However, this book when compared relative to the first two books impressed me as being a bit more interconnected.

The 1920s are represented in this book by four points of view: business, entertainment, advertising, and labor. A repeating characteristic among the book's characters is that appearance or perception of wealth is more important than its reality. Numerous times the appearance of wealth was illusory and quickly disappeared. I think all the book's characters were penniless at some time in their life.

There were many references to playing the stock market, drinking too much (prohibition didn't have much effect), sexual relations including abortions, and writing home for money. One interesting thing I noted was that the Spanish Flu is mentioned only once. There are several times when characters are sick with flu, but there's no acknowledgment as a worldwide pandemic. I think this matches the lack of public awareness at the time of what was going on.

Does this book have a conclusion? Well sort of and not really. Just for the heck of it I've included the poetic sign-off provided by the last chapter in this

Vag

The young man waits at the edge of the concrete, with one hand he grips a rubbed suitcase of phony leather, the other hand almost making a fist, thumb up

that moves in ever so slight an arc when a car slithers past, a truck roars clatters; the wind of cars passing ruffles his hair, slaps grit in his face.

Head swims, hunger has twisted the belly tight,

he has skinned a heel through the torn sock, feet ache in the broken shoes, under the threadbare suit carefully brushed off with the hand, the torn drawers have a crummy feel, the feel of having slept in your clothes; in the nostrils lingers the staleness of discouraged carcasses crowded into a transient camp, the carbolic stench of the jail, on the taut cheeks the shamed flush from the boring eyes of cops and deputies, railroad bulls (they eat three squares a day, they are buttoned into well made clothes, they have wives to sleep with, kids to play with after supper, they work for the big men who buy their way, they stick their chests out with the sureness of power behind their backs). Git the hell out, scram. Know what’s good for you, you'll make yourself scarce. Gittin’ tough, eh? Think you kin take it, eh?

The punch in the jaw, the slam on the head with the nightstick, the wrist grabbed and twisted behind the back, the big knee brought up sharp into the crotch,

the walk out of town with sore feet to stand and wait at the edge of the hissing speeding string of cars where the reek of ether and lead and gas melts into the silent grassy smell of the earth.

Eyes black with want seek out the eyes of the drivers, a hitch, a hundred miles down the road.

Overhead in the blue a plane drones. Eyes follow the silver Douglas that flashes once in the sun and bores its smooth way out of sight into the blue.

(The transcontinental passengers sit pretty, big men with bank accounts, highly paid jobs, who are saluted by doormen; telephone girls say good morning to them. Last night after a fine dinner, drinks with friends, they left Newark. Roar of climbing motors slanting up into the inky haze. Lights drop away. An hour staring along a silvery wing at a big lonesome moon hurrying west through curdling scum. Beacons flash in a line across Ohio.

At Cleveland the plane drops banking in a smooth spiral, the string of lights along the lake swings in a circle. Climbing roar of the motors again; slumped in the soft seat drowsing through the flat moonlight night.

Chi. A glimpse of the dipper. Another spiral swoop from cool into hot air thick with dust and the reek of burnt prairies.

Beyond the Mississippi dawn creeps up behind through the murk over the great plains. Puddles of mist go white in the Iowa hills, farms, fences, silos, steel glint from a river. The blinking eyes of the beacons reddening into day. Watercourses vein the eroded hills.

Omaha. Great cumulus clouds, from coppery churning to creamy to silvery white, trail brown skirts of rain over the hot plains. Red and yellow badlands, tiny horned shapes of cattle.

Cheyenne. The cool high air smells of sweetgrass.

The tight baled clouds to westward burst and scatter in tatters over the straw-colored hills. Indigo mountains jut rimrock. The plane breasts a huge crumbling cloud bank and toboggans over bumpy air across green and crimson slopes into the sunny dazzle of Salt Lake.

The transcontinental passenger thinks contracts, profits, vacation trips, mighty continent between Atlantic and Pacific, power, wires humming dollars, cities jammed, hills empty, the indian trail leading into the wagon road, the macadamed pike, the concrete skyway; trains, planes: history the billion dollar speedup,

and in the bumpy air over the desert ranges towards Las Vegas

sickens and vomits into the carton container the steak and mushrooms he ate in New York. No matter, silver in the pocket, greenbacks in the wallet, drafts, certified checks, plenty restaurants in L.A.)

The young man waits on the side of the road; the plane has gone; thumb moves in a small arc when a car tears hissing past. Eyes seek the driver’s eyes. A hundred miles down the road. Head swims, belly tightens, wants crawl over his skin like ants:

went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your home, shine bigger than your neighbor, the radio crooner whispered girls, ghosts of platinum girls coaxed from the screen, millions in winnings were chalked up on the boards in the offices, paychecks were for hands willing to work, the cleared desk of an executive with three telephones on it;

waits with swimming head, needs knot the belly; idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic.

A hundred miles down the road.
.

One of the most fascinating books I've read, being the last of Dos Passos's famous trilogy of U.S.A. The Camera Eye, The Newsreel and several characters some of which are real from our own history but most being somewhat superficial representations of all types of Americans and the view of our country from Dos Passos perspective at the time he saw it. I've read about how superficial the characters are but that was not his point. He was ambitiously striving to use these characters to tell, not their personal story but the story of the United States of America. I found all three books slow and difficult at times to maintain focus and interest but admire the work and recommend it strongly.

I have a hard time giving this book a good rating. dos Passos is so passionate about "the small guy" and the dysfunction of American life, but I am not entirely sure that he really got it that nine tenths of these people's problems were self inflicted. All of the men were basically alcoholics, all of the women were involved with men they either didn't love or were in adulterous affairs with men they thought they loved that didn't care about them, and none of them really seemed to give a rat's patootie about the other people in their lives. Would ushering in a worker's paradise change any of that? Very doubtful. The thing about the book that did NOT work, novelistically speaking, was the basic premise-- following this revolving cast of characters around from childhood through to their downfalls and demises. Too many sob stories, not enough uniqueness to any character to make you remember the details of their particular hard luck tale. He should have focused on one or two people and left it at that.

The style that I found so unique in The 42nd Parallel and 1919 was still present in The Big Money, the final installment in John Dos Passos's USA trilogy. But the narrative itself began to grow a bit stale, I think in part because the author had already begun losing his passion. Dos Passos, who in 1917 had declared "Every day I become more red," was at this stage hastening his gradual move to the right in social and political matters, having declared to Edmund Wilson in 1930 that he was becoming a "middle-class liberal" and by 1934 beginning to align with the "Ango Saxon chauvinist" attitudes of his father.

From the publication of The 42nd Parallel in 1930 to The Big Money in 1936, it is as if the USA trilogy had been finished by a completely different author from the one that started it. The optimism of the earlier work had changed to pessimism, the idealism of youth was replaced by a crusty curmudgeonly attitude, something noted by critics at the time.

Whereas I flipped through the first two books with ease and interest, The Big Money, though still a marvel in style, became somewhat of a slog. Aside from some fascinating historical bits, like the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, the book had lost much of the magic that made the first two installments so special. It seemed that Dos Passos was already in a state of giving up, if not yet on writing then at least in believing in those ideals that added passionate fuel to the earlier installments of his trailblazing USA trilogy.

Other Goodreaders have some stellar reviews of this book, so I won’t ramble. I am really glad I dusted this one off my shelf! It may be heresy, but I just jumped in and read this one rather than the whole trilogy. I don’t really think I missed much. Some of the characters are quite likable and others tugged at my empathy. Interesting depictions of soldiers returning from WWI and staling out their futures. The lives featured in this book range across the spectrum of those favored by fortune, hapless fortune seekers and those in struggle. The spectrum is partly summed up by the character George Barrow toward the end of the book, “the contradictions of capitalism.” It seems this assessment is timeless.

For me, the prose was smooth, but not memorable in most cases. I really liked this quote from the business titan, Wm. Randolph Hearst whose papers were exposing corruption.

“(His fellow millionaires felt he was a traitor to his class, but when he was taxed with his treason he answered): (the rest in italics) You know, I believe in property, and you know where I stand on personal fortunes, but isn’t it better that I should represent in this country the dissatisfied than have somebody else who might not have the same real property relations that I may have.”

i read this book without reading the first two in the series, but i have no regrets. i am pretty sure this was my first john dos passos book. i really liked it. i liked the hats, and all of the drinking, and the puffy eyes and family dinners. my favorite character was margo dowling, for a million reasons.

Interesting tidbits from this volume - Bungalow housing style is everywhere, cheap mission furniture, hehe now probably worth a fortune!

"Old Wives Tale" by Bennett, another Modern Library Top 100 book is read by some of the characters.

The airline stocks of the era were the like the early 2000s internet bubble.


JDP likes to show how politicians and even leaders of social movements are bought and sold, betraying the little people. The high life he shows was probably shocking back then, when money was really money. If only the little guy can catch a break ...

Comments on the style in my reviews of 1919 & 42nd parallel.

I would rank and compare this (and the whole series) with the much more widely read Grapes of Wrath. Both convey a mind-numbing sadness and make you really ache in your heart for the miserable lives and broken dreams of these characters.

I would never have made it in early 20th century America. The world was so much more harsh. Endless hours of back-breaking labor in unsafe working conditions and still no money to live on drove the men to drunkenness. They beat their women, abandoned their children. All the while the moneyed classes spent vast sums on trivialities, and yet they weren't happy either-- engaging in endless sad affairs, continual drinking, and obsession with the stock market.

I'm making the book sound like a downer, and it is. I guess that's what makes it so good-- it's unflinchingly honest about the sadness of the unfulfilled American Dream and the hypocrisies at the heart of the USA at this time.

Welp, this was quite a tapestry. I am not sure how much has changed in the 82 years since this final volume was published. The chapter on Hearst alone reminded me of how one could look at the current president. We are still two nations. And everything, still, is 100 miles down the road.