Posted on 06/01/2004 5:27:52 PM PDT by doug from upland
Whatever he believed in the '30s, Dos Passos was a clear-eyed enemy of communism post WWII.
I was in Austria and John dos Passos is full of it.
No matter,he was still a damned lefty fifth columnist and a terrible play-write/author.
I had his works crammed down my throat,long ago and did some research on him back them and never saw anything about him doing such a turnaround.But it's been many decades and maybe I just never found that part out.
I hadn't heard that, but I would suspect that he was an enemy of Stalinism, but still thought communism would be a worker's paradise (much the same distinction Orwell liked to draw: socialism fails because of those who run it, not some inherent flaw).
If you know otherwise, I'd love a chance to read that Dos Passos genuinely rejected communism.
Isn't it just amazing that so few Americans have any comprehension of history? It's not just that they can't name who was President during the Civil War, or in what decade of what century the Spanish-American war was fought ... no, they don't have any memory or understanding of the history of the 20th century and the Second World War. Even many of the people who SHOULD know better because they lived through those years are utterly clueless.
God deliver us from the historical amnesia of the American population! Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.
ping
It's a repost, but a worthwhile one, to be sure.
This article is so AMAZING. It's like going into a time warp and reading the same pessimism in the MSM all over again.
"Agreed! This is all Bush's FAULT!"
Maybe they would blame Poppy (GHW) or his Dad, Senator Bush, since GW was just a toddler at the time.
No, Bush and Dick Cheney used Halliburton's TOP SECRET time machine and went back in time and created this mess.
Thanks for moving this to news. Doh. I thought that is where I had put it.
John Dos Passos is one of the most overtly political authors in this unit. Involved in many radical political movements, Dos Passos saw the expansion of consumer capitalism in the first decades of the twentieth century as a dangerous threat to the health of the nation. The son of unmarried Portuguese American parents, Dos Passos grew up in Chicago. He attended prestigious East Coast schools, first the Choate School and then Harvard University. He graduated from Harvard in 1916 and joined the war effort before the United States entered World War I, becoming a member of a volunteer ambulance corps and later serving in the American medical corps.
Following the war he became a freelance journalist, while also working on fiction, poetry, essays, and plays. He wrote a novel drawing on his war experiences, Three Soldiers (1921), but his 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer established him as a serious fiction writer and displayed many techniques that writers who followed him would emulate. Political reform underwrote much of his fiction, and in 1926 he joined the board of The New Masses, a Communist magazine. Though not a party member, Dos Passos participated in Communist activities until 1934, when the Communists' disruption of a Socialist rally convinced him that the Communists were more concerned with achieving power than with the social reform about which he cared passionately.
From 1930 to 1936, Dos Passos published three bitingly satirical novels about contemporary American life, The 42nd Parallel; 1919; and The Big Money, an excerpt of which is discussed in this unit. Together the novels form a trilogy called U.S.A., and they attack all levels of American society, from the wealthiest businessman to the leaders of the labor movement. Dos Passos believed that American society had been thoroughly corrupted by the greed its thriving capitalist system promoted, and he saw little hope for real reform of such an entrenched system. His novels experimented with new techniques, especially drawing on those of the cinema, a relatively new cultural form (see the Context "Mass Culture Invasion: The Rise of Motion Pictures," Unit 13). His "Newsreel" sections mimic the weekly newsreels shown before films at local cinemas, blending together a patchwork of clips from newspapers, popular music, and speeches.
Dos Passos's politics shifted radically following World War II, as he saw the political left, with which he had identified himself, becoming more restrictive of individual liberty than the political right. His trilogy District of Columbia (1952) reexamined American society from this new perspective, attacking political fanaticism and bureaucracy.
OK...thanks for the info...
Died in 1970. The above post discusses how he changed after WWII and recognized that the left was the real threat.
What was Roosevelt's exit strategy in 1942? Hell, its 62 years later and we are still in Germany and Japan.
Bump for later read.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.