Marxian Molt

Books*

1919--John Dos Passes -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

When Karl Marx postulated class struggle as the essence of social history he meant something subtler than street-riots and strikes. There is also the psychological struggle in which adversity gives the underdog strength, perversity steals the upper-dog's strength away. The War and its aftermath exemplified such a struggle: when the underdogs who did the fighting found out for whom they were fighting and why, there was a revolution in their way of thinking that shed no blood, but shed many of the orthodox ideals that had held society together until then.

In 1919 Author Dos Passes recounts, with circumstantial evidence, an American history of this mental molt. As in The 42nd Parallel by the same author, the story sandwiches pictorial life-histories between news-clipping, impressionistic sketches, and lives of historical figures written in a kind of prose-libre. The transitions from section to section are artfully casual, abrupt. The all-embracing social transition gives them focus and coherence.

First comes Joe Williams who, after a fight with a petty officer, deserts the Navy in South America. He gets forged papers, ships for England, is there imprisoned as a spy. Released, he gets back to the U. S., marries, enters the Merchant Marine. After that he ships from port to port drinking and wenching to forget the crazy War. A brawl in a brothel makes him forget it for good.

The other characters, with different emphasis on different details, tell much the same story. Artistic Eveline Hutchins, a Chicago minister's daughter; Harvardian Dick Savage; high-spirited, typically Western Anne Trent from Texas; Ben Compton, Brooklyn Communist--all shuttle across from the psychology of peace to that of war. Life in America, full of vaporous ideals and propaganda, had less real meaning than the meaningless War. In Europe, at least they could discover their essential loneliness, try to remedy it with love and drink. In desperate love and drink they began to see that their civilization fed their spirits only words, fed their bodies only to machines or guns.

Author Dos Passes closes his book with the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. "In the tar-paper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of--enie menie minie moe." In Washington they decorated the corpse with military medals of all the Allies, "a wreath sent by Hamilton Fish Jr., of New York, and a little wampum presented by a deputation of Arizona redskins in war-paint and feathers." Woodrow Wilson laid on poppies, the orators laid on praise. They did not realize, Author Dos Passes implies, that their civilization was being buried with the dead.

The Author. Son of a Portuguese New Yorker and a Southern mother. John Roderigo Dos Passes was born in Chicago in 1896. Graduated from Harvard cum laude in 1916, he saw service in France and Italy with various ambulance services. He developed a social consciousness and a wanderlust. Since the War he has traveled all over the map cheering for social change, not without result. After a walking trip with Dos Passes, Harry Carlton Hart, aristocratic scion of some of Philadelphia's best, took to wearing red socks with his evening clothes. Though scholarly and shy Author Dos Passes has seen service in Marxian class conflicts. He was arrested in 1927 at a Sacco-Vanzetti demonstration; was indicted with Theodore Dreiser in Kentucky for criminal syndicalism in 1931; serves as chairman on a relief fund for starving & striking miners. Nearsighted, extremely polite, he stammers. cannot pronounce the letter R, keeps bad language out of his talk, does not spare it in his books. Using the same draftsmanship, 1919 extends the canvas begun in The 42nd Parallel. Other books: One Man's Initiation, Three Soldiers, Rosinante to the Road Again, A Pushcart at the Curb, Manhattan Transfer, Orient Express, The Garbage Man, Airways, Inc.

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