The American political novel does not record changes as broad as
those seen in the English political novel. Some of the reasons for
this variance are clear. In mid-nineteenth century America, as now,
there was no titled aristocracy, no state church, no narrow and
restricted suffrage. Also, there was no nearby source of revolutionary
political thought and action such as that which troubled James and
Conrad. What is perhaps disturbing, however, is the theme most often
treated. If the subject most common in the English novel is political
change or evolution ameliorating injustice, the one most common in
the American political novel is corruption. Nearly half the American
novels considered are written around that theme. They present a history
of political misrule in which one group succeeds another. After the
carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Ku-Kluxers have disappeared, the bosses
who rule by mortgage holdings appear. They are succeeded by the
railroad interests. Utilities groups exercise power and are followed
by the oil interests. In the latest phase, corrupt political power is
exercised by gangsters. Domestic politics are almost always the subject
of books appearing before the 1930s. From this time on, however, the
novel becomes increasingly concerned with foreign ideologies and the
role of the United States in world affairs.
=Edgar Lee Masters: Expansion and Conflict=
Edgar Lee Masters’ _Children of the Market Place_ (1922) takes
English-born James Miles from his immigration to America in 1833 to
his dotage in 1900. Despite Miles’s successive activities as farmer,
broker, builder, and real estate operator, his chief function is to
chronicle the career of Stephen A. Douglas. The description of Douglas’
rise is paralleled by an account of the expansion of the United States.
Historical personages pass across the stage--Jackson, Clay, Polk,
Webster, Calhoun, and Lincoln. The great issues of the times, such
as the tariff and the bank, the Oregon dispute and the annexation
of Texas, contribute to the book’s atmosphere. Miles even describes
the February Revolution in France, and recounts its impact upon each
European country. After describing the founding of the Republican
Party, he gives his eyewitness account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
The Civil War is about to set fire to the land, but the main narrative
breaks off at this point. Masters attempted to liven the book by giving
Miles an octoroon half-sister who causes him to commit murder and is
herself the victim of rape and persecution. But the novel’s chief
value in a study of this genre is its attempt to delineate Douglas
and his political philosophy against the background of formative
periods in America’s history. The literary debits include a pell-mell,
unconvincing style loaded with rhetorical questions and overpowering
statistics.
=Albion Tourgée: Slavery and Emancipation=
In _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a vivid picture of
the Underground Railway through which slaves escaped to Canada. Among
her characters were abolitionists who aided them and agents hired to
recapture them. The historical aspects of slavery and emancipation were
treated more fully, however, by Albion W. Tourgée. _A Fool’s Errand_
(1879) tells the story of a man with the improbable name of Comfort
Servosse. A lawyer and ex-Union officer like Tourgée, he had moved to
the South after the war, as did the author. Referred to by Tourgée as
“The Fool,” Servosse attempts the difficult task of integrating himself
and his family into the life of a Southern community while supporting
the rights of the Negroes. His experience, extending from 1866 until
his death in the late seventies, is one of progressive disillusionment.
Thorough analyses of events support the conclusions he draws. Early
in the book one reads a detailed account of President Johnson’s plan
for Negro suffrage and also a statement of the supplementary Howard
Amendment. Having discussed the role of the secret, pro-North “Union
League” in the South during the war, Tourgée goes on to detail the
rise of the Ku-Klux Klan. Later he analyzes the acts of amnesty passed
by some Southern states to protect from prosecution members of secret
organizations such as the Klan. By 1877 the South is in political
control of its land again. Its policy of suppression has succeeded.
This was the fault, Tourgée tells the reader, of stupid and foolish
Federal policies:
Reconstruction was never asserted as a right, at least not formally
and authoritatively. Some did so affirm; but they were accounted
visionaries. The act of reconstruction was excused as a necessary
sequence of the failure of the attempted secession: it was never
defended or promulgated as a right of the nation, even to secure
its own safety.
In 1880 Tourgée published _Bricks Without Straw_, which spanned a
short period before the war as well as that after it. The book follows
the career of a Negro named Nimbus from chattel to landowner. But
the novel is no more a dispenser of sweetness and light than was its
predecessor. Nimbus is driven from his farm by the same forces which
had made a Southern home untenable for Comfort Servosse. The romance
between Northern Mollie Ainslie and Southern Hesden LeMoyne is redolent
of tears, misunderstandings, and pining hearts finally united. In
spite of its melodrama and other nineteenth-century trappings, the
book is valuable. The purpose and function of the Freedmen’s Bureau
are examined as well as the Black Codes which counterbalanced it.
Tourgée also discusses at length the township system installed in the
South during the Reconstruction era and its gradual destruction by
totalitarian appointee government on the county level. Near the novel’s
end the reader sees the pitiful plight of Nimbus’ friends victimized by
the Landlord and Tenant Act which strengthened the sharecropper system
and reduced many Negroes to serfdom.
=John W. De Forest: Post-War Corruption=
In _Honest John Vane_ (1875) and _Playing the Mischief_ (1876) John W.
De Forest built his stories around corruption in post-war Congress.
John Vane goes to Washington with a reputation for honesty. When he
succumbs to his wife’s pressure for money to finance social climbing,
he is more circumspect but just as greedy as his colleagues. His
tempter and mentor is Darius Dorman, called by the author “Satan’s
messenger” and apparently actually meant to be one, complete with
smoldering sparks and the smell of sulphur. He tells Vane not to
go into the war memories and the nigger worshipping; all those
sentimental dodges are played out. Go into finance. The great
national questions to be attended to now are the questions of
finance. Spread yourself on the tariff, the treasury, the ways and
means, internal improvements, subsidy bills, and relief bills. Dive
into those things, and stick there. It’s the only way to cut a
figure in politics and to make politics worth your while.
The main character in _Playing the Mischief_ is Josephine Murray, a
young widow who uses her attractiveness to secure passage of a bill
which awards her $60,000 compensation for a barn burned in the War of
1812. In the process of dealing with lobbyists and corrupting Senators
she loses the love of Edgar Bradford, a stalwart young Congressman
who has tried to dissuade her from her scheme. Rising in the House,
he denounces the lobbying and bribery he sees, declaring that
“Congressional legislation will soon become a synonym for corruption,
not only throughout this country, but throughout the world.”
=Hamlin Garland: Enter the Farmer=
Set in Iowa in the 1870s, Hamlin Garland’s _A Spoil of Office_ (1897)
deals with the role of farmers’ organizations in politics. Bradley
Talcott, silent and clumsy but obviously a dark horse who will pay off
handsomely, enters politics because it attracts him and because he
wants to better himself “for her,” as Garland insists on referring to
Ida Wilbur. Before they are married in a haze of romance and comradely
devotion to the farmers’ interests, they work with the Grange and the
Farmers’ Alliance. Free trade, national banks, and woman’s suffrage
are discussed frequently, as well as the depredations of corporations.
A sentimental and somewhat superficial book which substitutes clichés
and catch-phrases for exploration in depth of causes and effects, _A
Spoil of Office_ is valuable for its recital of the farmer’s early
role in politics--if one can bear the surfeit of bucolic virtues and
inarticulate devotion to a fair and exalted lady.
=Winston Churchill and David Phillips: Bosses and Lobbies=
In his “Afterword” to _Coniston_ (1906), Winston Churchill wrote that
“many people of a certain New England state will recognize Jethro
Bass.” But he denied that his book was a biography and added that
“Jethro Bass was typical of his Era, and it is of the era that this
book attempts to treat.” Beginning his story shortly after Andrew
Jackson had entered the White House, Churchill traces Bass’s subsequent
control of Coniston, Truro County, and then of the entire state
(probably New Hampshire). His original lever is a sheaf of mortgages.
Through this power over his mortgagers, he places his men (also
mortgage holders) in office and builds his machine. By 1866 Bass has
gained control of the state, which he runs from his room in the Pelican
Hotel in the capital. He has transferred his devotion from his dead
sweetheart, Cynthia Ware, to her child, Cynthia Wetherell. His chief
source of income is the railroad lobby, which pays handsomely for the
legislation it purchases through the state legislature from him.
When Cynthia leaves him on learning his political methods, the saddened
Bass begins to let his power slip away. The industrial and railroad
interests start to combine while the Harwich bank stands by with
mortgage money to help destroy his control. But Bass returns to fight
one more battle when magnate Isaac Worthington has Cynthia dismissed
from her school-teaching job and disinherits his son Bob for wanting
to marry her. Mustering his power in the legislature and showering
Worthington with adverse decisions from supreme court judges he has
made, Bass blocks Worthington’s railroad consolidation bill. After
compelling him to consent to the marriage and write conciliatory
letters to the lovers, Bass lets the bill go through.
In _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ (1908), set twenty years later, Churchill
described the power shift Bass had foreseen. The legislature is
now owned by Augustus Flint, Worthington’s former “seneschal” who
controls the Northeastern Railroad. His “captain-general” who rules
from Bass’s old room in the Pelican is railroad counsel Hilary Vane.
The star-crossed lovers in this novel are Victoria Flint and Austen
Vane. Austen fights the railroads despite his father and foresees
the day when a new generation, willing to assume its political
responsibilities, will turn out the railroad group. After a quarrel,
Hilary leaves Flint but agrees to stay on for the gubernatorial
nomination battle. As Flint watches Vane stalk from his study he sees
“the end of an era of fraud, of self-deception, of conditions that
violated every sacred principle of free government which men had shed
blood to obtain.” Out of loyalty to his father, Austen refuses to let
his name go before the convention, but he says that it does not matter,
for railroad power is doomed. The book closes with a purple passage in
which Austen and Victoria tell their love to each other and watch the
sunset over the river.
Harvey Sayler relates his rise to boss of the Republican Party in
David Graham Phillips’ _The Plum Tree_ (1905). His springboard is a
combine, financed by a dozen companies forming the Power Trust in
his own mid-western state, which will establish its own control over
the state legislature rather than dealing through middlemen such as
Bill Dominick, brutal saloonkeeper and politician. By placing his own
men in key positions and corporation-control statutes on the state
books, Sayler makes the combine completely his own. After using this
combination to ruin a rebellious “robber baron,” Sayler’s rule is
unquestioned. He becomes a president-maker, later allowing his creature
to return to political obscurity as the price for revolt against his
authority. A penitent widower at the book’s end, he is accepted by his
scrupulous childhood sweetheart.
=Jack London: Marxism v. Fascism, Early Phase=
Jack London’s _The Iron Heel_ (1908) is unique for three reasons. It
is one of the first relatively modern American novels which preaches
Marxism, warns against Fascism, and is set in the future. Set in the
twenty-seventh century, four hundred years after the Brotherhood of
Man had overthrown the three-century-old Oligarchy, the novel is the
annotated manuscript of Avis Everhard. The wife of Socialist leader
Ernest Everhard, she is executed with him after the failure of the
Second Revolt, which appears to have occurred sometime after 1918.
A revolutionary Socialist, London attacked the capitalistic system,
making its corporations the founders of the ruthless and repressive
Oligarchy. London produces quotations from Calhoun, Lincoln, and
Theodore Roosevelt warning against the domination of corporations. He
describes the police and strike-breaking functions of the Pinkertons
in their service, specifically names eleven industrial groups said to
dominate the United States in 1907, and chronicles the efforts of the
labor movements for better working conditions. Sometimes maudlin and
at other times vituperative, London nevertheless gives a frightening
vision of a totalitarian state such as that which later became the
actuality described in Silone’s novels of Italy under Mussolini. London
anticipates other novels of this type even in particulars, as in the
case of his “people of the abyss,” who are purposely degraded and
brutalized quite as much as Orwell’s Proles.
=James L. Ford, Samuel H. Adams, and Upton Sinclair: Oil Men and
Anarchists=
James L. Ford’s _Hot Corn Ike_ (1923) deals with political corruption
in New York City, at the same time harking back through one of its
characters to the Know-Nothing Party and the assassination of Bill
Poole. In 1926 Samuel Hopkins Adams’ Revelry moved on to corruption on
the national scene. The novel is a roman à clef whose characters have a
one-for-one correspondence to the real ones in Sinclair’s _Oil!_ Willis
Markham is Warren Harding; Dan Lurcock is Barney Brockway; Anderson
Gandy is Senator Crisby. If the reader likes, he can read the latter
as a key to the former. Sinclair inundates the reader with a detailed
account of the corruption of the Harding era and highlights of the
labor movement. He treats the impact of the Russian Revolution upon
America and the political implications of American troops fighting
the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Following the activities of the I.W.W.,
he describes the resistance to them which included such measures as
California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act. This big book also treats, with
the solidity Masters probably meant to achieve, an equally turbulent
era in American national development. In Boston Sinclair used even more
documentation to relate what he saw as the struggle between capital
and labor. Through Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s active career and subsequent
struggle for life, the reader meets many of the militant groups in
the labor movement in America during the second and third decades of
this century. The I.W.W. appears again with anarcho-syndicalists, and
anarchists. Sinclair even distinguishes the communisti anarchici from
the anarchico individualista. Although the book’s literary merits are
submerged by the pamphleteering and passion, it is worth reading for
the slice of faintly fictionalized American political history which it
presents.
=John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell: Communist Infiltration=
Like Steinbeck’s _In Dubious Battle_, Dos Passos’ _Adventures of a
Young Man_ deals with Communist infiltration of the American labor
movement in the thirties. Giving the reader background material on
the militant role of the I.W.W., both novels follow Communist labor
organizers into the field among migrant agricultural workers, miners,
and industrial workers. Through their characters the novelists reveal
not only the immediate goals of the organizers in terms of wages and
working conditions, but also the place of these struggles in the plan
for a socialistic society. Dos Passos goes even farther in showing
the international aspect of these efforts--the sensitivity to the
Moscow-formed party line, the submergence of local issues in terms of
the overall revolutionary policy.
In 1952 James T. Farrell published a novel which also dealt with
Communism in the mid-thirties. It was _Yet Other Waters_, the story of
Bernard Carr’s attraction to Marxism and his subsequent break with it.
This sometimes turgid book centers around the relation of the writer
to the Communist movement. Many of the phenomena of the period are
there: the magazines purveying a Marxist interpretation of literature,
the writers’ councils and congresses, the attempts to generate a party
literature. Never a member of the Party, Carr is torn between an
attraction to its stated aims and repulsion at its rigid control of
thought and art. He joins picket lines, reads a paper at a Congress,
and then sees the Communists turn a Socialist meeting into a riot.
When he breaks with his party friends, he is given “the treatment.” He
is vilified in the left wing papers and reviews as party hacks make a
concerted attempt to destroy his literary reputation. (And, of course,
this attempted destruction of his means of livelihood is the same
method used by the extreme Right to punish political divergency in _The
Troubled Air_ and _Stranger Come Home_.) Unfortunately, the charge that
Farrell has a tin ear in writing dialogue is true. This long book has a
considerable cumulative effect, but one pays for it by wading through
many slow-moving passages. On the whole, though, it is a convincing
portrait in depth, valuable also for its retroactive anticipation of
the so-called “Literature of Disillusionment” which was to come from
such writers as Silone and Koestler.
Like Hemingway’s _For Whom the Bell Tolls_, Dos Passos’ _Adventures
of a Young Man_ had in its later sections described the fight against
Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Both novels recorded the infiltration
of the Loyalist forces by the Communists and the supremacy which they
achieved in many sectors. In his next book, _Number One_, Dos Passos
turned his attention to a source of growing concern to many Americans:
dictatorship on the state level as exemplified by the Long machine in
Louisiana. Two other novels, Adria Locke Langley’s _A Lion Is in the
Streets_ (1945) and Robert Penn Warren’s _All the King’s Men_ (1946),
are similar to it, although the quality of the writing varies greatly.
Dos Passos’s style is characteristically dispassionate and panoramic.
Warren’s book, despite devices smacking of melodrama, has sweep and
a highly evocative poetic prose. Langley’s novel is full of worn
devices: the faithful mammy with the corn-pone accent, the deathbed
message, hidden documents, and a shadowy avenger. But all three books
have their primary historical source in the career of Huey Long or the
forces in American political life which he typified.
=Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos: Global War and Politics=
In _Presidential Agent_ (1945), as in the rest of the voluminous Lanny
Budd series, Upton Sinclair mixed imaginary characters with real
ones, and fictitious events with those from last year’s newspapers.
In this novel (for which any other of the series might be substituted
for the present purpose), Lanny moves among the great ones of the
world as their intimate and confidant. As Presidential Agent 103 with
the code name Zaharoff, he sends his reports directly to President
Roosevelt. Using his entree as an art expert, he further ingratiates
himself into the confidence of the leading Nazis by becoming Hitler’s
_Kunstsachverständiger_. In this role he goes to Austria ostensibly to
purchase paintings for Hitler but actually to gauge Austria’s mood and
its ripeness for _anschluss_ with Germany. The incredible Lanny breaks
into an SS dungeon, Indian-wrestles with Rudolph Hess, and briefs
everyone about everyone else, from Lord Runciman to Kurt Schuschnigg.
He also finds time to outline Roosevelt’s Chicago “quarantine” speech.
All is revealed to him, from the Cagoulard conspiracy in France to the
temper of the Cliveden set in England. The pages of this long novel
are jammed with events and people who made news on three continents
immediately before and after Munich. A journalistic, omniscient
book, _Presidential Agent_ is loaded with slang, clichés, and gauche
conversation and narration. But it is an outstanding example of the
novel which records current political history.
Dos Passos’s _Grand Design_ pulls together the threads of several
current themes. In this one book, the reader finds a continuation of
earlier material about Communism in America, the rising labor movement,
and new liberalism in government. The transition is then made to World
War II, America’s world responsibilities, growing recognition of the
Communist threat, and American obligations in the post-war world.
The novel’s characters work out their individual destinies against a
background of New Deal reforms and international events leading to war.
But there is no arbitrary interlarding of the two. Dos Passos ably
manipulates these two types of material. He weaves them together into
one fabric so that they combine into a meaningful pattern which sets
off individual action against group action. The NRA, the WPB, the fall
of the Low Countries, the agitation for a second front--all of them
are there. But in this artistic fusion the lives of Millard Carroll,
Paul Graves, and Georgia Washburn remain individual, retaining their
identity and meaning.
=Post-War Directions=
In the post-war years, the American political novel seems to have gone
not in one direction but in three. The first is toward concern for
America’s world role as seen in _Grand Design_. The second returns to
the theme of corruption. The third leads to an exploration of domestic
dangers to traditional American freedoms. Weller’s _The Crack in the
Column_ pursues the international theme, indirectly indicating, upon
the basis of lessons learned in Greece, the program which has resulted
in the building of American air bases from Spain to Yugoslavia.
Weller’s book is also valuable as a political history of wartime and
post-war Greece. Besides the working of the wartime EAM front, the
novel describes the pattern of planned Communist expansion and Western
moves made to counteract it. Gallico’s _Trial by Terror_, besides
being an instrument for criticism of the foreign policy which gave no
protection to American citizens jailed and tortured behind the Iron
Curtain, also records one tactic of the cold war deliberately intended
to ruin American prestige in Europe.
Three recent novels treat corruption on the local level. They are
Charles Francis Coe’s _Ashes_ (1952), Mary Anne Amsbary’s _Caesar’s
Angel_ (1952), and William Manchester’s _The City of Anger_ (1953).
Although the theme is old, some of the actors are new. The lobbies and
trusts have been replaced by a more sinister operative--the gangster.
And the power behind the city government is not a single gang led
by a “Little Caesar.” In _Ashes_ it is the Mafia, a transplanted
Sicilian terrorist society. In _Caesar’s Angel_ the ruler is a national
syndicate. The hero of _Ashes_ is given a short lecture on the
economics of the ring:
It is no longer possible for our interests to keep all their money
profitably occupied. It piles up too fast. It threatens to become
visible to the Federal taxing authorities. We are constantly
seeking, and finding, new areas in which to invest. So-called
legitimate areas. It is foolhardy, perhaps, to pay such taxes as
legitimate commerce requires, but our sums are so vast that our
interests feel that they should be converted into capital assets.
The scale of corruption in Manchester’s book is more modest, for there
the rotten façade has been undermined by a local numbers racket rather
than a national group. The bought politicians are clearly drawn,
as are the agents who subvert them. Once again we are dealing with
fiction, but we need only turn to the findings of state and federal
commissions of inquiry to see the bases in fact. The best of these
rather ordinary novels is _The City of Anger_. The Freudian critic will
be interested in Manchester’s recurrent images of decay, corruption,
and physical filth which may, however, represent an attempt to buttress
stylistically his basic theme of political and moral corruption. In
_Caesar’s Angel_ Mrs. Amsbary’s criminals and police are terribly
hard-boiled but not completely convincing. Although her gangsters are
much better done than Mrs. Langley’s in _A Lion Is in the Streets_, she
still sounds somehow like a very nice lady trying to be very tough.
With his clipped, repetitive sentences and grim-jawed men, Coe seems
to be suffering from an overdose of Hemingway. Yet at times he manages
to go one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction with
dialogue like this from “Young Tim”: “You alone, Mums, combine such
true goodness of soul with such great understanding of things!”
Concern over threats to personal freedom forms the basis for Shaw’s
_The Troubled Air_ and Shirer’s _Stranger Come Home_. The events
and characters in these novels make it clear that they too have as
their starting points the contemporary history which they cloak
in fiction. The blacklists of Shaw’s book are as real as Shirer’s
Senator O’Brien and his Senate Committee on Security and Americanism.
Shirer’s people are taken from contemporary American life. Across
his stage parade General Cyrus Field Clark, a newspaper chain owner
of medieval prejudices and keeper of faded ex-movie star Madeleine
Marlowe; Bert Woodruff, a demented columnist; William McKinley Forbes,
dictatorial tobacco tycoon; and Senator Reynolds, the committee’s
representative from the Old South. The supporting roles are filled
with the same accuracy. They include the professional ex-Communists
and the sharp little committee counsel who puts loaded questions
with ominous mentions of perjury. The commentator’s radio career is
destroyed like that of his Foreign Service friend, although both are
innocent men. Shirer ranges far afield, from comments upon similar
periods of “hysteria” in American history to Hollywood’s refusal to
film _Hiawatha_ because his “peace efforts might be regarded as Red
propaganda.” The plight of Whitehead is well imagined, but the book’s
diary form is not a particularly happy choice and much of its prose
is awkward. As a record of the source of some of the most spectacular
domestic news of recent years, however, the novel is worth reading.
Mailer’s _Barbary Shore_, which is not a part of any of the three
post-war trends, displays the novelist’s function as a historian in its
retelling of the story of the Russian Revolution. A twenty-page account
and eulogy are followed by a description of the revolution’s failure
to spread and its consequent nationalization. Lovett also recounts his
discipleship under Trotsky before he goes on to list the forces which
created a police state instead of a promised land.