The Big Money

By John Dos Passos

(Houghton Mifflin Company: A Mariner Book, 2000)

Reviewed by William Barnhart

The Chicago Literary Club

November 13, 2006

 

c By William Barnhart, 2006

 

 

 

 

     All of us here, I dare say, have lived through several decades.  For each of them, culture pundits and historians attempt to invent a bumper sticker – a quip that distinguishes one ten-year period from another.  The Gay Nineties is probably the earliest segment of American history to receive an enduring label, although few people remember what was particularly gay about the years from 1890 through 1900.

 

    A clearer picture emerges when we think of the Roaring Twenties, which, as it happens, is when the phrase “Gay Nineties” first emerged in American discourse.  The two decades had much in common.  Both saw the rise of a super-rich class of Americans.  By the 1920s, wealthy families from the 1990s were referred to as the Old Money.  Newly rich families were the New Money.  Another common element of the 1890s and 1920s was an expansion of the number of Americans at the other end of the economic scale – the masses, as they came to be known.  In between were the strivers after what John Dos Passos, in the last of his trilogy of novels exploring America, called The Big Money.

 

      John Dos Passos was born in Chicago in 1896.  He is regarded as one of the lost-generation writers of the 1920s, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.  The truth is more complicated.  Dos Passos was not a member of anybody’s club.  He was a private person who valued his independence.  For most of his career, he ardently portrayed the conflict between individuals and institutions.  He was classified as a left-wing author.  But later, when he found fault with the institutions of socialism and communism, his former admirers on the left denounced him.

 

     Dos Passos was, first and last, a journalist.  As novelist E.L. Doctorow put it, “He saw literature as reportage.”1  He is typically described as withdrawn yet acutely observant.  He was, in the words of one literary critic, an “incorruptible witness.”2  He was a prolific writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  He even sketched and painted.

 

       His crowning achievement is U.S.A., three novels structured similarly, with overlapping characters.  The novels are The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. They present stories and images of the first three decades of the 1900s in America.  The structure is unique.  Dos Passos intermingled episodes in the lives of his characters with three additional literary devices.  He called the result his “four way conveyor system.”3

 

     At the end of World War I, where The Big Money begins, America swayed between optimism and unease.  The troops came home in ships.  A peace treaty was signed.  The country flexed its muscles on the global stage, strengthened by President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to aid the European allies.  Yet the horrors of the war lingered for the returning troops.  And the realization dawned that the benefits of America’s sacrifice to the war in Europe would not be distributed evenly among its citizens.

 

      The novel’s four-way structure conveys this ominous uncertainty from the outset.  The initial narrative concerns Charley Anderson, who was introduced in the first book of the trilogy.  He is an ace Yankee fighter pilot and a heavy drinker.  He arrives back in America, hung over, aboard a steamer stuck in a deep fog just off a New York City dock.  The novel begins, “Charley Anderson lay in his bunk in a glary red buzz.”  A popular French song he and fellow passengers were singing the night before rings in his head.  The song is “Je Cherche Après Titine.”  In 1936, the year The Big Money was published, this song had just achieved fresh popularity when it was spoofed by Charlie Chaplin as his first movie sound recording in a film, “Modern Times.”

 

     A second device in the U.S.A. trilogy, called newsreels, offers additional clues and context at the start of The Big Money.  The three novels contain sixty-eight of these interludes.  The brief newsreel segments contain bits and pieces of newspaper headlines and newspaper copy as well as advertising slogans and song lyrics from the periods being depicted in the novels.  They obliquely cement the fictional characters to actual circumstances.  And they point to where the novels are headed.  Many of the newsreel snippets have lapsed into obscurity.   But a little investigation reveals their power.

 

     The headlines that open the first newsreel in The Big Money are these: “Colonel House Arrives From Europe: Apparently a Very Sick Man.”  Colonel Edward M. House, a wealthy Texan, was never a colonel.  But he was a political supporter and close adviser to President Wilson.  He was Wilson’s confidential but widely publicized emissary to Europe before America’s entry into the war and during the peace process.  In October 1919, House returned from post-war peace talks in France, afflicted by gall stones. Beyond his illness, he had fallen out with Wilson, whose health was deteriorating at the same time.  House died in obscurity two years after The Big Money was published.

 

     A second figure briefly mentioned in the novel’s initial newsreel is Charles M. Schwab.  “Charles M. Schwab, who has returned from Europe, was a luncheon guest at the White House.  He stated that this country was prosperous, but not so prosperous as it should be, because there were so many disturbing investigations on foot…”    Schwab, who is unrelated to today’s investment brokerage executive, was one of America’s steel industry giants of the early Twentieth Century.  His Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania produced the beams that would form the skeletons of the modern skyscraper.  Schwab was ruthless and ostentatious.  He kept labor unions out of his company.  He built lavish homes in New York City and Pennsylvania.  And he lost it all and died deeply in debt in 1939.  He once said, “I’ve thought the whole thing over, and if we are going to go bust, we will go bust big.”4

 

       The trilogy’s pattern of shooting stars, typified by House and Schwab, holds in the third literary device Dos Passos employs, a series of personality sketches that Doctorow calls minute biographies.  Each book in the trilogy contains nine of these sketches.  Dos Passos wrote them from a skeptical, ironical point of view.

 

       The first quick biography in The Big Money concerns Frederick Winslow Taylor, who in the early 1900s popularized a system of industrial plant organization he called scientific management.  His work created the stereotype of the heartless efficiency expert. “At Exeter he was head of his class and captain of the ballteam, the first man to pitch overhand,” Dos Passo reports. “(When umpires complained that overhand pitching wasn’t in the rules of the game, he answered that it got results.)”  The industrialists who hired Taylor were intrigued by his methods but threatened by the radical changes he proposed.  In 1915, Dos Passos tells us, “on the morning of his fiftyninth birthday, when the nurse went into his room to look at him at fourthirty, he was dead with his watch in his hand.”

 

     With the benefit of hindsight, Dos Passos chose his real-life characters well.  Mostly, their stories fit with the fates of his fictional characters, who exist on a lesser scale in American society but who likewise fail to reach or maintain happy or commendable outcomes in life.  The fourth literary device, which Dos Passos calls “The Camera Eye,” comprises a series of autobiographical insertions that place the author into the fabric of the novel.  The Big Money contains nine Camera Eye segments, beginning with a reference to Dos Passos’s own return to America in 1919 after his service as a volunteer ambulance driver in France during the war.  “what good burying those hated years in the latrinestench at Brocourt under the starshells if the crookedface customsinspector with the soft tough talk the blurring speech the funnypaper antics of thick hands jerking thumb (So you brought home French books didjer?) is my uncle.”

 

     The intermittently troubling and amusing true-life interjections Dos Passos places in The Big Money represent the dividend on the novel’s principal achievement.  His characters, in their words and actions, are unattractive, even pathetic but hauntingly relevant to our current decade.  As Doctorow puts it, “…These are beings occupied almost entirely with their sensations and plagued by their longings, given mightily to drinking and fornication while their flimsy thought provides no anchor against the drift of their lives.”5

 

     The leading actors are war ace Charley Anderson, whose engineering skills and entrepreneurial ambitions are exploited by Wall Street; Mary French, whose determination to alleviate suffering leads her into the hypocrisy of communism; the beautiful Margo Dowling, whose survival instincts destroy her humanity; and Richard Ellsworth Savage, whose ability to play the game in the advertising business leaves him alone, robbed and naked after a night of debauchery.  To put it mildly, there are no heroes in The Big Money, but Dos Passos presents his characters without judgment.

 

    Near the end of the novel, two of the central characters, Mary French and Margo Dowling, who never meet, find themselves at the same party in a glamorous Manhattan apartment. Mary, who was invited to the party by her society friend Ada, takes in the scene:

 

     The nodding jabbering faces, the dresses, the gestures with hands floated in a smoky haze before her eyes.  The crowd was beginning to thin a little when George came back all flushed and smiling. “Well, I had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with Miss Dowling, she was most charming…But do you know what Red Haines tells me?  I wonder if it’s true… It seems she’s through; it seems she’s no good for talkingpictures…voice sounds like the croaking of an old crow over the loudspeaker,” he giggled a little drunkenly.  “There she is now, she’s just leaving.”

 

     A hush had fallen over the room.  Through the dizzy swirl of cigarettesmoke Mary saw a small woman with blue eyelids and features regular as those of a porcelain doll under a mass of paleblond hair turn for a second to smile at somebody before she went out through the sliding door.  She had on a yellow dress and a lot of big sapphires….  Mary was looking at it all through a humming haze like seeing a play from up in a smoky balcony.  Ada came and stood in front of her rolling her eyes and opening her mouth wide when she talked.  “Oh, isn’t it a wonderful party….  I met her.  She had the loveliest manners….  I don’t know why I expected her to be kinda tough.  They say she came from the gutter.”

 

     The headlines that open the final newsreel of The Big Money are “Wall Street Stunned,” “Market Sure to Recover From Slump;” the concluding biographical sketch is about the rise and fall of Chicago utilities magnate Samuel Insull; the final Camera Eye is drawn from the author’s trip with Theodore Dreiser and others to investigate conditions in the Harland County, Kentucky, mining region: “the law stares across the desk out of angry eyes his face reddens in splotches like a gobbler’s neck with the strut of the power of submachine guns sawedoffshotgunds teargas and vomitgas the power that can feed you or leave you to starve.”

 

    The novel’s final character is a vagabond, thumbing for a ride along a highway as an airplane filled with well heeled passengers drones above.

 

     “The transcontinental passenger thinks contracts, profits, vacationtrips, mighty continent between Atlantic and Pacific, power wires humming dollars, cities jammed, hills empty, the indiantrail leading into the wagonroad, the macademed pike, the concrete skyway; trains, planes: history the billionaire speedup.”

 

     Meanwhile, “The young man sits on the side of the road; the plane has gone; thumb moves in a small arc when a car tears hissing past.”

 

Footnotes:

 

1. E. L. Doctorow, Foreword to the 2000 Mariner Books edition of The Big Money by John Dos Passos, p. vii.

2. George J. Becker, John Dos Passos, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974, p. 101 (chapter title).

3. John Dos Passos, quoted in Becker, ibid., p. 58.

4. E. G. Grace, Charles M. Schwab, address to American Iron and Steel Institute, May                                                                                     21, 1947, p. 34.

5. Doctorow, op. cit., p. xi.