Books: The Traveler

THE PROSPECT BEFORE Us (375 pp.)—John Dos Passes—Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

“The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough … he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the want ads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough.”

The young man of whom Novelist John Dos Passes once wrote this passionate paragraph was John Dos Passes. Fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough to satisfy his rage to live, John Dos Passes has hurried about the world, a perennial seeker after the truth about his time.

He has surveyed that truth from top to bottom. Born 54 years ago on the genteel upper slopes of U.S. society, Dos Passes got a long look at the depths as a World War I ambulance driver. He came back to a U.S. racked by social and economic change, threw himself into the defense of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Before long, like many another idealist of his generation, Dos Passos had plunged deep into the murk of Marxism. The murk slightly distorted his otherwise vivid, sprawling trilogy of 20th Century America, U.S.A., which remains his most notable contribution to U.S. writing.

Strangling Liberty. Marx remained his Baedeker until the mid-’30s. Disillusioned earlier than many of his fellow idealists, he turned back to old beginnings: to democracy as the U.S. Founding Fathers saw it.

The Prospect Before Us is the latest stage on Dos Passes’ long road back. It is a calm, wide, sometimes rather hazy look at the democratic vista from where Dos Passos now stands, at a position close to that of the late Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis—champion of the individual, implacable foe of organized Bigness. The book presents—as an imaginary series of movie-illustrated lectures followed by questions from the audiences—a series of reports on countries Dos Passos has visited recently (Britain, Argentina, Chile) and on recent happenings in the U.S. The lecturer-audience exchanges, which seem at first to be a naive gimmick, are actually shrewd and persuasive glimpses into the thinking of average U.S. citizens. The reporting, as in all Dos Passes’ writing, is graphic, honest and peppered with insights.

Dos Passos went to postwar Britain to see how socialism had panned out after several years of hard sifting by history. He shook the official guides, went from end to end of the United Kingdom on his own legs and resources, catching impressions. One gloomy theme ran through the whole trip: socialism in Britain is strangling in dividual liberty in the historic citadel of liberty. Many a farmer and small business man told Dos Passos what an intellectual phrased most sharply: “England’s dead, quite dead, quite. We’re the lost island of the Atlantic, sunk in everlasting ennui, the Scandinavian ennui.”

In 1948 Dos Passos went to South America to see if there was any help for democracy in the younger societies of Brazil, Argentina and Chile. He found signs of pioneer strength in Brazil, but in Argentina as in Britain he found centralization leading toward tyranny. In Chile, he saw a democracy in danger of drowning with a heavy Communist minority tied to its neck.

Saving the Republic. With such dark augurs, Dos Passes came home to a fresh examination of U.S. democracy. After a tour of the great corn and wheat belts of the Midwest, a study of several industrial towns and a dissection of a huge food company, he was ready with some overall conclusions.

The great danger of the age is not Capitalism or Communism, says Dos Passes, but Bigness in all its forms. The great task of democracy is to control “these stratified corporations”—Big Labor as well as Big Business—so that they do not crush individual liberties by main weight.

How to control them? Dos Passes sees only one way: vigorous individual participation in all parts of the community. Among the developments that cheer him most: the use of profit-sharing devices, suggestion systems, management-labor committees, cooperative methods of enterprise. These, says Dos Passes, “are frail straws but they exist … I believe that our salvation depends on our making a stand and recklessly investing all our hopes and energies in [them]. The margin for error is narrowing with breathtaking rapidity. The time is coming when every citizen will have to ask himself at every hour of the day: Is what I am doing helping save the Republic or is it not?”