Analyzing John Dos Passos

        John Dos Passos seemed to take the average man and make him something more and then take the man of something more and bring him down to average simply by letting what the press does best, twist words, and then letting the “camera eye” reveal the rest. Take Big Bill Haywood, he was an average man, a man who was not big on feeling like a slave to his employer. That’s why when his first employer, “the farmer”, “lashed him with a whip” Big Bill responded by doing “his first strike” (Bradley, Beatty, Long, 1585). After that he would go on to numerous other jobs, more than 11 not counting his impromptu job of a delivery doctor to the birth of his own child. Then, this average man, full of steam and life, became an “organizer, a speaker, an exhorter, the wants of all the miners were his wants” (Bradley, Beatty, Long, 1586) now and that rose him to “the wants of all the workers…, he was the spokesman of the West, of the cowboys and the lumberjacks and the harvest hands and the miners.” (Bradley, Beatty, Long, 1587) Now this average man had power, with power comes responsibility as well as fringe benefits and expensive perks; perks that sway the responsibility and skew the fine line between right and wrong, leaving Big Bill Haywood to stand trial for the overextension of his power. This then led to jail time and being exiled to Russia where “[h]e died there and they burned his big broken hulk of a body and buried the ashes under the Kremlin wall.” (Bradley, Beatty, Long, 1588).

        Big Bill Haywood wasn’t the only person Dos Passos built up to strip down, or present striped to build up, he did this with many people in the public eye for his U.S.A. Trilogy. He also presented those not in the “newsreel” or “camera eye” he gave a voice to the working man that was never going to amount to anything more than another working man. Dos Passos allowed them to voice their thoughts knowing they had at least him as their audience. So when they said things such as, “it ain’t your fault and it ain’t my fault… it’s poverty, and poverty’s the fault of the system.”, (Passos, 14) they didn’t have to feel uneducated, instead, they could feel empowered by the listening ear. He gave a listening ear that allowed them to continue on with their wobbly thought out strung together thoughts that contained blame and fault instead of hope for change. Thoughts that sounded like this, “It’s the fault of the system that don’t give a man the fruit of his labor… The only man who gets anything out of capitalism is a crook, an’ he gets to be a millionaire in short order…But an honest workin’ man like John or myself we can work a hundred years and not leave enough to bury us decent with.”(Passos, 14-15) Seems like Dos Passos character Tim O’Hara was “tellin’ the truth” (Passos, 15) right? I mean Big Bill Haywood did get to have “champagne cocktails at the Ritz and sleep with Russian countesses in Montmarte” (Bradley, Beatty, Long, 1587) before he died in Russia and it did seem like he did have enough money left over to be burned and buried in a remote foreign land under a landmark too non-the-less. What more could the elite want? It’s a shame Tim only felt “like whipped cur.” (Passos, 15) but still felt the ability to fault poverty itself. It seems, that if he didn’t feel so whipped, he might have been able to take a walk in another man's shoes, however, I believe that was Dos Passos's main point behind his modern style.

        Dos Passos figured out a way to bring the headlines, “newsreels” together, full front, then describe further out through his “camera eye” what those headlines were eluding to, talking about, lending a voice to, damning, criticizing, personifying, glamorizing, and/or glossing over. Then in an "icing the cake" fashion he added in the narrative voices of common folk so that literary’s could pour over its ingenuity of art, school-age children could learn the history and those oblivious to the comings and goings of anything outside their 8x8 comfort zoned box could be introduced to the world should they have the attention span to finish this brilliant piece.



                                                                         Works Cited:

• Passos, John Dos. “The 42nd Parallel .”U.S.A, Random House, 1985, pp. 14– 15. The Modern Library.
• Bradley, Sculley, et al. “Fiction as Social History.”The American Tradition in Literature, 3rd ed., vol. 2, Grosset & Dunlap, 1956, pp. 1585–1588.