=Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Civil War=
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is a prime example of the novel as political
instrument both in intent and effect. Harriet Beecher Stowe declared in
her preface that
The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for
the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs
and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as
to defeat and do away with the good effects of all that can be
attempted for them....
The book did more than awaken sympathy; its millions of copies helped
rouse the growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, creating in part
the political climate out of which the Civil War grew and mustering
moral support for its prosecution. But the novel’s effects were not
confined to America. In _Literary History of the United States_ Dixon
Wecter called it “the most influential novel in all history,” and
Harold Blodgett noted that it was used in the campaign that secured
England’s Reform Act of 1867. Raymond Weaver, in his introduction to
the Modern Library edition, notes that half a million Englishwomen
signed an address of thanks to the author, and that Russians were said
to have emancipated their serfs after reading the book. The hero of
Edgar Lee Masters’ _Children of the Market Place_ says the book “was
not really true,” but he records the praise it won from Macaulay,
Longfellow, George Sand, and Heine, and adds, “The winds of destiny
previously let loose were blowing madly now.”
Translated into nineteen languages, the novel was also dramatized.
Eliza’s flight across the ice and Simon Legree’s cruelty have become
hackneyed, but the author did not rely exclusively on such melodrama
and tugging at the heartstrings. The plot is interlarded with case
histories of slavery--mothers whose children were taken from them,
women sold for “breeders,” men taken from their families and sent down
into the deep South. The reader may feel that Legree is a villain so
fiendish as to be unbelievable; he may find the angelic Little Eva’s
death scene, in which she cuts off golden curls and distributes them
to the sobbing family and retainers, cloying or emetic. There are
other characters, though, worth observing. Senator Bird of Ohio, who
had formerly supported the Fugitive Slave Act, shelters Eliza before
sending her to a Kentuckian who had freed his slaves and now runs a
stop on the Underground Railway. Artistically the novel is very bad.
Its structure sprawls, its melodrama creaks, and its sentiment oozes
over hundreds of pages peopled more often by cardboard figures than
believable human beings. This is another case, however, in which the
reading public paid no attention to critical standards. Mrs. Stowe
concluded her novel with the warning that
not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the
ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall
bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!
Her words were prophetic, and her book helped to bring about the dies
irae of which she spoke.
=Albion Tourgée: The Blunders of Reconstruction=
Just as the political novel helped to prepare the way for the Civil
War, so it commented upon the events which followed it. In _A Fool’s
Errand_ (1879) and _Bricks Without Straw_ (1880), two awkward but
intensely felt books, Albion Tourgée criticized the tremendous blunders
of the federal government in the Reconstruction era. Using the same
techniques of case history, pathos, and melodrama as did Mrs. Stowe,
Tourgée applauds the intent of the federal Reconstruction program but
is outraged and cynical at the way it was carried out. He praises
the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau but laments its dissolution and
the government’s virtual abandonment of the Negro. Like Mrs. Stowe,
Tourgée states the problem as dramatically and appealingly as he can;
then he offers his solution: education. Both of Tourgée’s novels close
with appeals for federal aid to education in the South. The Negro is
obviously in greatest need, but the aid is meant to be spread over
the entire educational system. Discarding all pretense at fiction and
writing directly to the reader, Tourgée concludes _A Fool’s Errand_ by
telling him that “Poor-Whites, Freedmen, Ku-Klux and Bulldozers are all
alike the harvest of ignorance. The Nation can not afford to grow such
a crop.”
=Perennial Theme: Corruption=
In the 1880s the American political novel began to shift from the Civil
War and Reconstruction to the theme of corruption. This subject was
explored extensively during the next five decades. Whether the scene
was the national capitol, as in Henry Adams’ _Democracy_ (1880), or a
ward in New York City, as in James L. Ford’s _Hot Corn Ike_ (1923),
the theme was the same--the betrayal of public trust for private ends.
Although many of these novels were written in the resurgent school
of Realism, all of them, in their depiction of pervasive corruption,
were capable of being political instruments through the nature of the
material which they treated if not through their author’s intent.
Whether the writer declaims through his hero against public robbery or
simply tries to present dispassionately what he sees, the revulsion of
the reader at the travesty of American political ideals is likely to be
the same.
There was one notable exception to this trend. It was Jack London’s
_The Iron Heel_ (1908). Projecting his story into the future, he wrote
of an America under the dictatorship of an Oligarchy serving the
interests of the large corporate and industrial groups. The reader
learns that the Oligarchy was eventually overthrown, but the book
concentrates upon a fictitious era of horrors unequalled until the
appearance of Orwell’s _1984_ forty years later. In his introduction to
the novel, Anatole France called London a Revolutionary Socialist. This
he was, and--in the novel, at least--a devoted Marxist as well. The
book was clearly meant to be a political instrument. Its fulfillment
of this aim may be judged by a comment of Stephen Spender in his
contribution to _The God That Failed_ (1950). He remarks that Harry
Pollitt, a high official of the English Communist Party, had told him
that in his opinion _The Iron Heel_ was “the best revolutionary novel.”
The Communist view of the propaganda value of literature makes the
comment significant.
=Upton Sinclair: Corruption Plus Radicalism.= Upton Sinclair’s books
were among those which marked the beginning of a transitional phase in
the American political novel. In them a new theme was added to that of
political corruption: the rise of leftist and radical forces. _Oil!_
(1926) focuses on Bunny Ross’s political journey to the far Left.
Bunny’s father, J. Arnold Ross, is one of the tycoons who selects,
pays for, and elects an American president. Naming names and placing
places, Sinclair sends his characters into the campaign of 1920. Verne
Roscoe says that he is negotiating with Barney Brockway of “the Ohio
gang.” Sinclair writes that “he made exactly the right offers, and paid
his certified checks to exactly the right men,” and Warren Harding
was nominated. The fifty million dollars poured into the campaign by
the oil interests (according to Sinclair) helped to finish the job.
The account of the naval reserve oil lease scandals which follows
makes Sinclair’s position on the activities of a powerful lobby very
clear. More an exposé than a work of art, the novel describes attempts
to hinder the organization of the oil workers and the strikes and
strike-breaking which follow. The book ends with an attack upon
an evil power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men
and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of
unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor.
Two years later Sinclair threw himself into a vindication of the
characters and lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The cast
of _Boston_ (1928) includes the fictitious Thornewell family, but they
are all dwarfed by the two Italians whose careers ended in the electric
chair. Sinclair presents the case as an effort by the city and state
governments to dispose of two representatives of the anarchist movement
which was thought to threaten society’s foundations. He maintains that
the government was supported in its attempt by representatives of
organized religion as well as the socially prominent and economically
powerful classes. Although the author said that he had tried to be a
historian, that he had not “written a brief for the Sacco-Vanzetti
defense,” the novel is precisely that. It is also an indictment of most
of the immediate society in which the events took place. He accuses the
prosecution of carefully building an illegal, trumped-up case heard by
the violently prejudiced Judge Thayer. He declares that the Commission
which investigated the case, made up of Cardinal O’Connell, Bishop
Lawrence, and President Lowell of Harvard, rendered an endorsement of
the state’s actions which amounted to a whitewash. Running parallel
to the story of the Italians is that of Jerry Walker, parvenu tycoon
of the New England felt industry who is legally plundered by the old
commercial and banking interests of Boston and New York. Mr. Sinclair’s
intentions to be impartial may have been sincere, but like the
exclamation points in his prose, they got away from him.
=Growing Political Consciousness: 1930 to 1954=
The great wave of political consciousness which struck America in
the 1930s surged over into the novel. It took several forms. There
was the novel which advocated liberal reforms in government, and the
novel which, presenting the Communist point of view, necessarily went
farther. The proletarian novel emerged. Sympathetically describing the
privations of the so-called proletariat to stimulate betterment of its
living conditions, these novels sometimes cleaved to the Communist
Party line but were often the work of non-Communist authors writing
from genuine concern for their subjects. The Communists regarded this
art form as another weapon in the class struggle. Paul Drummond, a
fanatical Communist writer in James T. Farrell’s _Yet Other Waters_
(1952), shouts that “now the time has come for Party literature.” Moses
Kallisch, leader of a front organization starting a Left Wing Book
Club, declares, “The day is not far off when we’ll overwhelm bourgeois
culture in America!” Increasing consciousness of the political
malignancy of Fascism and Nazism appeared in the novel. With the
descriptions of these dangers came appeals for the strengthening and
defense of the best in the American political system.
=John Steinbeck: The Party Organizer.= Appearing in 1936, Steinbeck’s
_In Dubious Battle_ sociologically described the violent course
and tragic end of a Communist-organized strike of apple pickers in
California’s Torgas Valley. Shortly after he applies for membership in
the Party, young Jim Nolan is taken down into the valley by McLeod,
a hard-shelled, veteran Communist organizer. The underpaid pickers,
living in squalor, follow Mac when he helps precipitate the strike. As
the apprentice, Jim follows each move carefully, learning both theory
and practice from Mac, who wants violence and a prolonged strike in
order to gain wide attention and pave the way for organizing subsequent
picking operations. Adept and devoted, Jim learns quickly despite
a gunshot wound and increasing hunger. He even assumes temporary
leadership over Mac when the latter’s vitality momentarily sags. At
the book’s end, with the strike failing, Jim falls into a trap and
his face is blown off by a shotgun blast. Mac carries his body to the
strikers’ camp platform. The book’s last line is Mac’s funeral oration
for Jim: “Comrades! He didn’t want nothing for himself.” The novel may
be considered a social and political study; the picture that emerges
is one of economic oppression, embattled workers, and hard but devoted
organizers.
=Sinclair Lewis: Native Fascism.= Sinclair Lewis’s fifteenth book also
appeared in 1936, and its title is an indication of the jolt it was
meant to give to American complacency. _It Can’t Happen Here_ is the
story of the American republic transformed into a Fascist corporate
state through a military coup d’état made possible by an electorate
which was attracted by share-the-wealth schemes, anti-minority
agitation, and primitive emotionalism. The methods of the Nazis and
Fascists are applied to eradicate the democratic system and even the
boundaries of states. The country is divided into eight provinces,
concentration camps devour the dissenters and the suspect, and all
of American life is harshly regimented. Lewis’s hero is “bourgeois
intellectual” Doremus Jessup. After he has lost his newspaper,
his daughter, and his son-in-law, he becomes a member of the New
Underground. When revolution wins back only half the country, he enters
the other half as a secret agent. This novel has most of the faults
and virtues of Lewis’s other books: character merging into caricature,
complete lack of subtlety, and embarrassingly awkward dialogue; but
with this there is accurate social criticism, a genuine if crude
vitality, and--particularly in this novel--a very earnest concern for
American traditions. Lewis’s point is made clear as Jessup reflects
that
the tyranny of the dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big
Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the
fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable,
lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogue wriggle in,
without fierce enough protest.
=John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway: Liberal Causes Abroad.= Glenn
Spotswood’s geographical and political odyssey, abruptly ended by a
rebel bullet in the Spanish Civil War, forms the central theme of Dos
Passos’ _Adventures of a Young Man_ (1938). Politically conscious even
as a boy, Glenn becomes successively a transient worker, a cum laude
college graduate, a Communist labor organizer, and a disillusioned
member of a splinter group. Clearly and dispassionately, Dos Passos
allows his story to unfold. There are unsavory, dislikable characters
such as fierce but noncombatant Comrade Irving Silverstone and sinister
Jed Farrington, an American Communist who, as a Spanish loyalist
colonel, divides his lethal attentions between the rebels and political
unreliables. But one has the feeling that the author is not leaning in
any direction. In the prose poems interspersed throughout the novel,
however, Dos Passos lectures his reader. The concluding paragraph
analyzes the growth of the American Communist Party and explains the
gullibility of the Americans deceived by it. The last lines tell the
reader that
only a people suspicious of self-serving exhortations willing to
risk decisions, each man making his own, dare call themselves
free, and that when we say the people, ... we mean every suffering
citizen, and more particularly you and me.
A little less obvious was the position of Ernest Hemingway in his fine
novel _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1943). Hemingway would very probably
disclaim any intent to write a political novel, but his book teaches a
lesson in one of the oldest and surest ways--by example. Robert Jordan
has left his instructorship in Spanish at the University of Montana to
go to Spain as a demolition expert for the loyalists. Although he has
placed himself under Communist discipline for military reasons, he is
not a Communist. He is a teacher who has taken a most un-sabbatical
leave to fight Fascism in a country he loves. Following the pattern
of most of these books, Hemingway sums up a few pages from the end.
Badly injured and unable to make his escape, Jordan lies waiting in the
forest to fight a fatal rearguard action which will buy time for his
escaping friends. He thinks:
I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here
we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the
fighting and I hate very much to leave it.
In _Number One_ (1943), Dos Passos shifted from dictatorship abroad to
dictatorship at home. Chuck Crawford is reminiscent of the late Huey
Long of Louisiana. Magnetic, dynamic, and unscrupulous, Chuck wins
the governorship and then goes on to the United States Senate. His
personal aide is the alcoholic Tyler Spotswood, Glenn’s older brother.
Served up as the goat in an oil lease scandal which breaks about
Chuck’s head, Tyler allows himself to remain silent and be convicted.
This is primarily because of Glenn’s last letter from Spain exhorting
Tyler not to let them “sell out” the people at home. Tyler apparently
feels that his conviction is an atonement for failure to accept the
responsibility which Sinclair Lewis also said devolved upon each
citizen. In the novel’s last three lines Dos Passos looks the reader
squarely in the eye: “weak as the weakest, strong as the strongest, the
people are the republic, the people are you.”
_The Grand Design_ appeared in 1949 to complete the _District of
Columbia_ trilogy. In this third novel, Dos Passos’ style remains
the same--detached and impersonal, straightforward and clear. His
politics (in the prose poems) seem unchanged. He appears to be liberal,
to retain his sympathy for the smaller people having a difficult
time economically. Since the book covers the war years, the danger
represented by the Axis powers is evident, but the equally pernicious
influence of militant international Communism is equally clear.
Although the book is jammed with characters from many political strata,
its primary focus is the career of Millard Carroll, who leaves his
Texarcola business to join the New Deal Farm Economy Administration. As
the war progresses, Carroll comes to feel that the Four Freedoms are
being forgotten in its prosecution. He sees personal jealousies and
conflicts within the administration. By implication, the program which
produced relocation camps for Japanese-Americans helps to complete his
disillusionment. Finally, crushed by personal tragedy, he resigns. The
last line of the last prose poem tells the reader, “Today we must learn
to found again in freedom our republic.”
=George Weller: International Communism.= In 1949 George Weller’s _The
Crack in the Column_ drew attention to one of the widespread areas
in which the Comintern was trying to extend Russian domination. The
scene is Greece. The novel reaches its climax when ELAS, the army of
the Communist-dominated EAM popular front group, fights the British in
the streets of Athens while the American army contains the Germans’
last great effort in the Ardennes. Shot down earlier on a mission,
American bomber pilot Tommy McPhail decides not to be evacuated by
the underground net of British Major Walker. He remains to engage in
similar behind-the-lines work. Walker becomes McPhail’s tutor in global
politics as well as espionage. His primary subject is the need for
the United States to accept responsibility for creating international
conditions favorable to the West, as he says Britain has done. Walker
tells McPhail that the United States must learn to recognize Soviet
strategy and combat it by such means as permanent American bases in
the Middle East. Once again, the most explicit statement of the book’s
message is saved for the end:
You Americans just pay your way out of the positions of the last
war, then [help] your way back into the same positions in the next.
You forget that war is continuous and this everlasting series of
visits to the strategic pawnshop a wasteful streak of postponement
of the eventual showdown.
Like many other novels which can be regarded accurately as political
instruments, this one, with its accomplished delineation of a complex
situation, tangled relationships, and deep cross-currents, contains
no direct appeals to the reader. Neither does it have any scowling
villains or radiant heroes. But the portrayal of the growing political
maturity of the naïve American under the tutelage of the able but weary
Englishman may perhaps achieve the same effect, and do it better.
=Norman Mailer: The Extreme Left.= The voice of the extreme Left,
rarely heard in recent American novels, sounded in Norman Mailer’s
_Barbary Shore_, a murky mixture of obscure symbolism, endless
conversation, and political theory disguised as dialogue. Published in
1951, the novel met with a generally unfavorable critical reception.
A reading bears out this verdict. McLeod, apparently speaking for the
author as his _raisonneur_, discusses what he calls revolutionary
socialism at great length. Rejecting Russian Communism as state
capitalism, McLoed’s two-thousand-word, non-stop lecture envisions a
mutually destructive war between “the Colossi.” The Lenin of tomorrow,
with the surviving theorists and proletariat, must be ready to spring
to the barricades of the rubble-strewn “hundred Lilliputs” which
survive. Before he is killed, McLoed passes his concept of Marxian
revolutionary socialism like a Grail or a sword to Mikey Lovett. He
is to keep it in readiness for the day when it can be used. This
novel is intensely political. Despite its ambiguousness and withheld
secrets, its essential point emerges: the first socialist revolution
was betrayed; the true revolutionary socialism must make the second one
successful.
=Novels of the Cold War.= As wartime cooperation with the Russians
was superseded by a growing awareness of the nature of militant
Communism and the Moscow-oriented loyalties of American Communists,
the novel chronicled this awakening. In _The Grand Design_ Paul
Graves had told Millard Carroll that a Russian purchasing commission
or a Russian-controlled political party meant “espionage and
counter-espionage and counter-counterespionage ad infinitum....” Novels
like Irwin Shaw’s _The Troubled Air_ (1951) and William Shirer’s
_Stranger Come Home_ (1954) recorded the violence of this reaction.
The function of these novels as political instruments was to rouse
indignation against the forces which, in seeking to destroy American
Communism, use methods as authoritarian and undemocratic as those of
the Soviets themselves. Both novels enlist the reader’s sympathies on
the side of loyal, non-Communist Americans who are unjustly attacked
by self-appointed judges using lies and questionable methods. These
courageous protagonists are virtually ruined professionally and
economically, for their integrity forbids them salvation through
conformity forced upon them by fanatical groups. _The Troubled Air_
embodies the problem in the efforts of director Clement Archer to
keep his radio actors employed until they can defend themselves
against charges of Communism made by _Blueprint_. This magazine,
like some which have appeared on the American scene, specializes in
allegations of Communist Party membership or sympathies on the part
of entertainers. Archer’s actions, exceedingly dangerous to his own
position through his lack of awareness of the nature of his opponents,
cost him his job. This novel is less a _roman à clef_, more complex,
and far more accomplished than Shirer’s book. Archer is victimized not
only by _Blueprint_ and the people who surrender to it, but by two
of the people he defends. Frances Motherwell renounces Communism and
denounces Archer. Vic Herres, an old friend and secretly a fanatical
Communist, has acted for his cell in selecting Archer as a “convenient
point of attack,” one who would fight the Communists’ battle for them.
The novel thus records the painful education of an honorable man whose
naïveté about American Communists is matched by his ignorance of their
opponents who borrow Communist methods. The book is very well done, and
in the reader-association with Archer which it produces, it provides a
vicarious ordeal of arbitrarily assumed guilt-by-association with no
recourse to conventional legal relief.
_Stranger Come Home_ is a fictionalized account of a group of similar
cases familiar to most newspaper readers. Here the spark is ignited by
a publication called _Red Airwaves_. Commentator Raymond Whitehead has
been blacklisted after his defense of Foreign Service officer Stephen
Burnett, accused of Communist sympathies before the investigating
committee of Senator O’Brien. Burnett is charged with conspiring to
give China to the Communists. He has actually done nothing more than
follow the foreign policy of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations
and criticize the corruption he saw in the regime of Chiang Kai-shek.
Whitehead successively loses his sponsor, his air time, and his job.
While he is in Europe he is accused by Senator O’Brien of being
a Soviet agent. This charge is based upon the testimony of two
ex-Communists who have become professional witnesses against people
like Burnett and Whitehead. To give immediacy and the personal impact
of the experience, the book is written in diary form. Although its
fidelity to actual events makes it seem a transcription and though its
quality as a work of art is not outstanding, the novel succeeds in
driving its point home. The villains are quite black and the heroes are
quite white despite the peccadillo here and there meant apparently to
humanize them. Nevertheless, the reader who grants belief and sympathy
to Burnett and Whitehead will be hard put to suppress indignation and
fear at the people, methods, and events which combine to bring near
ruin to two intelligent and patriotic United States citizens.
In 1952 Paul Gallico’s _Trial by Terror_ chronicled the ordeal of
Jimmy Race, reporter for the Paris edition of the _Chicago Sentinel_.
Slipping into Hungary to unearth the story behind the conviction and
twenty-year sentence meted out to an American named Frobisher, Race
is arrested. Brainwashed and tortured into a false confession at a
propaganda trial, Race is sentenced to prison. When his release is
eventually secured, he is a fear-ridden, completely disorganized
personality, an animal conditioned to confession as completely as
Pavlov’s dog was to salivation. But his destruction is not the only
cause for anger. His liberation was not achieved by his government, but
by his editor, who was able to blackmail the Hungarian Minister of
Affairs because of Titoist activities. The feeling throughout the book
is that the United States embassy played a diplomatic game in which
the deadliest weapons were strongly worded notes. The final irony is
that the release was accomplished by a private citizen forced to use
Communist methods of blackmail and intimidation. This novel graphically
indicts Soviet brutality. It also criticizes American policy in a
dramatic aspect of the cold war.