Books: Report of a Miracle

STATE OF THE NATION—John Dos Passes—Houghton Mifflln ($3).

John Dos Passes started traveling in his bassinette. Born in Chicago (1896), he was taken to Mexico City by his parents the same year. Since then, he has covered every continent except Australia, on every conveyance from a Volga River steamer to a dromedary—and very often on Shank’s mare. Meanwhile he has published 18 books. (Best known: U.S.A., a three-panel novel of U.S. life and character circa World War I.)

Last year Dos Passos took his most important journey. His send-off was a soldier’s bitter letter. To answer its charges—that workers in industry were making too much money, that civilians should be regimented since soldiers were, that people charged with hampering the war effort should be shot without trial—he went to see for himself what was happening throughout the U.S. The widening rift between civilians and servicemen troubled him. He believed that although “all sorts of injustices have flourished under [the U.S. system] . . . I don’t think you’ll deny that during the 168 years of the existence of the U.S. the ordinary run of men here have had a better chance to develop and to live their lives as they wanted to than during any other period we know about anywhere else in the world.” He also believed that U.S. liberties had grown and survived by a sort of miracle—”and miracles only happen when enough people want them to happen.”

State of the Nation is a report of a miracle, and Dos Passos’ best book. Its 333 pages and 14 chapters cover the U.S. from Portland, Me. to Portland, Ore. It is the distillation of innumerable interviews in shipyards, union offices, hotel rooms, bars, restaurants, sharecroppers’ cabins, trailer camps, busses, trains, automobiles, machine shops.

Like a Tornado. The wartime U.S.A. that Dos Passes saw on his trip was unaware of its own achievements. In Port land, Me., the business district looked as if a tornado had struck it. “Everywhere litter and trash, small gimcrack stores, small unswept lunchrooms. . . . There were signs and cigaret ads instead of goods in the shop windows. The shipyard workers lived in half-slums, in trailer camps, in rows of prefabricated dwellings. When the shifts changed, the dense black crowd poured out through the gates, their faces gray and yellowish, their visored caps pulled over their foreheads, their thick clothes bunched at the waist under coveralls. Their bodies, baggy with sweaters and heavy woolen pants, moved sluggishly.”

Dos Passos was conscious of the strain and fatigue of the workmen, the ordeal of learning new skills, rediscovering forgot ten ones. He was more conscious than most of the contrasts of the new America, the litter and dirt, social as well as physical, and the beauty of the old towns, the electrifying wonder of the new industrial creations. Once he stood under the columned porch of a New England building watching the noontime traffic. Across the street a church steeple rose in the murky winter light. There was the smell of burning leaves in the air, the chatter of starlings, gulls circling over the city. “Only the people scurrying along the streets looked dead and gray and driven. They were warmly dressed, they looked well fed, but still as they passed by they looked helpless and fragile and faceless as dry leaves, blown along the gutter by a gust of wind. It’s tough on people to live in a time of too many changes, I was thinking. . . .”

100 Old Men. At a Portland shipyard “the air smelt of cold seawater, freshly sawed oak, steamed planking. The art of wooden shipbuilding had been forgotten at the start of the war. There was no one to teach the farmers, fishermen, service-station attendants, schoolteachers, office workers, how to shape oak for minelayers.

There were never more than a hundred grizzled oldsters eventually discovered. The youngest were in their 60s. The oldest was 84.” These 19th-Century survivors were building 20th-century destroyers. But the novice shipbuilders, said the executives, were better than the shipbuilders of World War I. They learned faster, behaved bet ter, dressed better.

Unloading the Detail. The 89 pages given over to wartime Washington are a brief masterpiece of social reporting. No U.S. writer can match Dos Passos’ use of the hackneyed, senseless, stupefying jargon of political insincerity. Nor is any other writer so quick to detect the process by which ideas harden into cliches, stock answers, pat remarks as offensive as the slamming of a door.

Dos Passos was in Washington when the antistrike bill was passed over the President’s veto (TIME, July 5, 1943). He talked with cynical New Dealers, got in an argument with a Communist taxi driver. He found out what “unloading the detail” means. He asked what happened when an industry was taken over by the Government. ” ‘That’s easy .. . first we call a meeting of department heads.’ ” ‘Aren’t they all busy? . . .’ ” ‘Nobody’s ever so busy he can’t take on something more, if he knows how to unload the detail. . . . We set up the blueprint of an organization. . . . We swear in the presidents of the companies as enforcement officers. They are instructed to haul the flag up over the plants and to exhibit the posters we send out explaining the situation. . . Last time we beat all records with the posters … we got them out over the weekend. . . .’

” ‘But what about production?’

“He was already looking at his watch. ‘You must excuse me. I have a dinner engagement.’ ”

Alligator Boats. Dos Passes was glad to get back to the production miracle. In the shipyards on the Gulf the building of invasion barges and torpedo boats had created a vision of a new postwar world. The boats could go anywhere, wriggle over sandbars like alligators, run up banks without wharves, truck their own freight over falls and far inland.

In Alabama, the bulldozers were leveling off pasture land. An old man who had kept a hundred Negroes on his thousand acres had sold his land to the Government for a powder plant. (The Government hadn’t paid him yet “but he reckons they will get around to it in time.”) What worried him was the Negroes. Right now most of them were making four dollars a day on construction jobs. ” ‘But what in the world are they going to do when they get turned off? . . . I’m not going to be in a position to look after them.'”

The miracle that John Dos Passos reports in State of the Nation is compounded of such concerns and such efforts, depending on no one of them and incomplete without them all. Its greatest mystery is that people who brought it about scarcely knew they were doing it. The greatest lack in this friendly book, refreshing as a visit home, is that nowhere does John Dos Passos, as a vigorously objective reporter, give voice to the emotions that his observations, and the people he observes, inspire. State of the Nation is the best report on the wartime U.S. that any writer has given, but good as it is, the raw material of the life that it condenses is still better.