Books: New Deal Epic

ONE CLEAR CALL (626 pp.)—Upton Sinclair—Viking ($3.50).

Despite an almost universal and merciless drubbing by critics, the first eight Lanny Budd novels of Upton Sinclair sold 1,340,139 copies in the U.S. The ninth should do as well, for it is exactly like the others.

Yet the Lanny Budd books have been published or are being published in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Holland, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Rumania, Sweden, Switzerland and (in a condensed form) the Soviet Union. With a picture of the U.S. which Europeans, especially Social Democrats, find entirely understandable, Sinclair is one of the two or three most popular American writers abroad.

Socialist Superman. It is impossible to outline the story of the whole series (or even of a single volume) without making it seem ridiculous. The books have to do with the adventures of a Socialist hero named Lanny Budd, the illegitimate son of a Connecticut arms manufacturer, born in Paris and educated in Europe, wealthy, handsome, courageous, sensitive, gifted and a true friend of the workingman.

Lanny Budd, like Vincent Sheean and John Gunther, meets all the great people of the world; he races about the continent of Europe on secret missions for President Roosevelt, like Harry Hopkins and Robert D. Murphy; he broods about the decay of contemporary civilization, like Henry Adams and Lincoln Steffens; he foresees what is going to happen with uncanny clairvoyance and advises people, especially President Roosevelt, with such telling effect that they come to depend on him for most of their information; he is always on the scene when great events are in the making—in Paris in 1919 for the Peace Conference, in Germany to hear Hitler tell him that Russia will be attacked.

It was he, it turns out, who wrote Roosevelt’s famous “quarantine” speech. He was the man who told Roosevelt that Mussolini and Hitler were actively intervening in Spain and that non-intervention was a farce. He is, in short, the embodiment of the modern American journalist-politician, the ideal New Dealer, the American equivalent of the glorified Bolshevik of Soviet literature.

In One Clear Call Lanny Budd is assigned by Roosevelt to bone up on rockets and jets. This is to prepare him for a visit to Germany to quiz a German scientist (anti-Nazi) on German progress in developing the rocket bomb. Thereafter the episodes are what might be expected: the high moment of almost every Lanny Budd novel is an escape from the Gestapo, or the rescue of someone from a Fascist torture chamber.

Lanny masters his scientific lessons without much trouble, hoodwinks Hitler about U.S. plans in Italy, and tells General Patton what to do about taking Paris. The book ends with Roosevelt’s election for the fourth term, and his discussion with Lanny as to what he should do next.

As in the other books, historical figures drift in & out of the story, blending indistinguishably with the figments of Author Sinclair’s imagination. Among them: Hitler, Marshal Kesselring, Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Mrs. Roosevelt, General Patton, General Donovan. They seem much less real than the imaginary characters.

Disquieting Tributes. Since the first one appeared eight years ago, a generation of book reviewers has ridiculed the Lanny Budd novels. Nothing is easier—sometimes it seems that they are filled with nothing but improbabilities and inconsistencies, with no subtler characterizations than those of a good comic strip. Yet reading the entire 6,237 pages gives the disquieting impression that the trouble with Sinclair’s fiction is not that it is improbable, but that too much of it is all too literally true. Nothing in the account of Lanny’s dealing with Roosevelt, for example, quite comes up to the adventures of Harry Hopkins in the White House and in Europe; and if Roosevelt’s decision to send Lanny to Germany seems casually made, so were some other F.D.R. appointments, apparently.

The portraits of Roosevelt are those of a hero-worshiper, and some of them are as devastating as anything his enemies ever composed. Roosevelt explaining his political strength and his policies to Lanny Budd compares himself to a man driving three horses: “One of these horses is young and wild; that is my New Deal group, backed by organized labor and its sympathizers, the intellectuals; they want to gallop all the time, and I have to put a curb-bit in that horse’s mouth. The second is much older, and inclined to be mulish; that is my block of Southern states . . . And then my third horse, a nervous and skittish steed which I seldom dare mention by name. You will consider my naming it confidential, please? . . . My Roman Catholic charger. There are twenty million Catholics in this country, and the great bulk of them think and vote as their Church advises.”

The Emancipated Spirits. But the greater accomplishment of the Lanny Budd novels is their evocation of the intellectual world in which the New Deal had its being. It is a world divided into good people—writers, painters, musicians, Socialists, New Dealers, honest workingmen, heroic underground warriors, and emancipated spirits generally—and bad people, such as moneygrubbers, gigolos, anti-Semites, businessmen (with exceptions), and of course Fascists and their sympathizers.

The good people are united in their hatred of oppression and their faith in social progress. Their eccentricities and personal misconduct (especially of a sexual nature) are viewed indulgently, so long as they retain this essential faith. On the other hand, the slightest expression of intolerance on the part of a captain of industry is regarded as incipient Fascism.

The good people cooperate with the Communists from their fear of reactionary conspiracies. They live in a world in which conspiracies are constantly forming against them, such as the Hooded Men in France and Colonel McCormick and William Randolph Hearst in the U.S. The world conspiracy of Communism leaves them largely unmoved.

Pictured in these nine volumes, this view of the world seems somewhat absurd. It also reflects, beneath its bogus overtones, a belief fairly prevalent in the U.S. from 1933 to 1944.