“War is a time of Caesars,” writes Dos Passos as he laments the death of idealistic, intelligent enterprises at the desks of elitist administrators. After witnessing the Spanish Civil War claim so many well-intentioned men, he advises caution for America’s New Dealers: “Some things we have learned, but not enough; there is more to learn. Today we must learn to found again in freedom our republic.”
“War is a time of Caesars,” writes Dos Passos as he laments the death of idealistic, intelligent enterprises at the desks of elitist administrators. After witnessing the Spanish Civil War claim so many well-intentioned men, he advises caution for America’s New Dealers: “Some things we have learned, but not enough; there is more to learn. Today we must learn to found again in freedom our republic.”
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Overview
“War is a time of Caesars,” writes Dos Passos as he laments the death of idealistic, intelligent enterprises at the desks of elitist administrators. After witnessing the Spanish Civil War claim so many well-intentioned men, he advises caution for America’s New Dealers: “Some things we have learned, but not enough; there is more to learn. Today we must learn to found again in freedom our republic.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504015462 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 06/23/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 572 KB |
About the Author
Dos Passos considered himself foremost a writer of contemporary chronicles. He preferred the moniker of “chronicler” because he was happiest working at the edge of fiction and nonfiction.
Both genres benefited from his mastery of observation—his “camera eye”—and his sense of historical context. Dos Passos sought to ground fiction in historic detail and working-class, realistic dialogue. He invented a multimedia format of songs, newsreels, biographies, third-person fictional narrative, and first-person semi-autobiographical narrative snapshots to convey the frenzy of America’s industrialism and urbanism in the twentieth century. His most memorable fiction—Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan Transfer (1925), and the U.S.A. trilogy (1938)—possesses the authority of history and the allure of myth. Likewise, he sought to vitalize nonfiction history and reportage with the colors, sounds, and smells documented on his journeys across the globe.
John Roderigo Dos Passos (b.1896, d.1970) was a writer, painter, and political activist. He wrote over forty books, including plays, poetry, novels, biographies, histories, and memoirs. He crafted over four hundred drawings, watercolors, and other artworks.
Dos Passos considered himself foremost a writer of contemporary chronicles. He chose the moniker of “chronicler” because he was happiest working at the edge of fiction and nonfiction.
Both genres benefited from his mastery of observation—his “camera eye”—and his sense of historical context. Dos Passos sought to ground fiction in historic detail and working-class, realistic dialogue. He invented a multimedia format of newsreels, songs, biographies, and autobiography to convey the frenzy of 20th century America’s industrialism and urbanism. His most memorable fiction—Three Soldiers (1920), Manhattan Transfer (1925), U.S.A. (1938)—possesses the authority of history and the allure of myth. Likewise, he sought to vitalize nonfiction history and reportage with the colors, sounds, and smells documented on his journeys across the globe.
Read an Excerpt
The Grand Design
A Novel
By John Dos Passos
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1949 John Dos PassosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1546-2
CHAPTER 1
Quiet Portico
1
March fourth dawned dark that year. The smudged sky hung low over streets of budding trees and lawns and colonnades that echoed Rome, Attic pediments, forensic domes, porticos
built proudly and long ago to frame the tall new men of the republic.
We stood in throngs along the Avenue waiting.
We stood all morning on old newspapers to keep the cold of the pavement out of our feet, waiting to see the discredited President whose term had expired ride by in a silk hat beside the President newly elected. We sat in jerrybuilt stands thumping our feet on the boards to keep warm. We stood on chairs and teetered on stepladders in empty lots.
We dreaded the rain to come, but there was only the raw gusty wind that tugged at the red white and blue bunting and heckled the flags
and snatched the newspapers out from under our feet and drove the torn grimy sheets out across asphalt lanes police and guardsmen cleared:
sheets that told
of panic at the locked doors of banks,
of stalled factories
and foreclosures and sheriff's sales and dispossess notices and outofwork gangs threatening state legislatures and bitter throngs round courthouses and wheat and corn burned in the stove.
Between the Capitol and the Library of Congress we sat closepacked and shivering in windswept stands watching with anxious eyes the halfmast flags flap and tug at their poles above the watchers on the roofs of the office buildings
and the frockcoated throng of official persons crowding out from under the dome
and the smooth broadshouldered figure confident and tall of the President newly elected who strode out on the arm of his son erect almost jaunty in his legbraces (in spite of paralysis) onto the rostrum above the goldspread eagle holding thunderbolts
to lay his hand on the Bible.
His voice after a moment's hoarseness was confident and full, carefully turned to the microphones, the patroon voice, the headmaster's admonishing voice, the bedside doctor's voice that spoke to each man and to all of us:
... a leadership of frankness and vigor and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory ... leadership in these critical days ...
(At the wheatfarmer's home on the plains the sheriff has driven up to go through with the sale. All around grayfaced men in overalls are scrambling out of splattered jalopies. We form a line silent with tight mouths in front of the farmhouse's rickety stoop. Five of us have guns. A cow lows from the barn. Fowls scatter cackling. The auctioneer has borrowed a table from the farmer's wife. Her face peers out a white blur in the kitchen window. We keep our mouths tight. The auctioneer's face is pale as milk. Nervously he raps on the table with his hammer. We listen silent to the lawyer's jargon. His voice is husky and he stumbles over words. There's a click as a shell slides into place in a rifle. 'Four cents,' a neighbor says. His voice is sharp and dry. No sound. The sheriff shuffles with his feet. 'Four cents.' No word. We let the auctioneer hurry through his rigmarole. His hammer drops weakly on the table. 'Sold for four cents.'
'All right neighbor, here's your farm back.')
The voice resounded in our ears, the pervasive confident voice:
... social values more noble than mere monetary profit ...
(All morning we sit fiddling at our desks in the broker's office. No business. The ticker idles. Card indexes are pulled open along the wall, ledgers piled over all the desks. In the senior partner's sanctum the accountants are at work. Every few minutes a curlyheaded man in his shirtsleeves with a pencil on his ear comes in to check over a column of figures on the adding machine. The senior partner walks out of his sanctum and breathes hard when he looks down at the paper strip full of figures. Stealthily he goes out the door into the washroom. He pulls a new revolver out of his trousers' pocket, bites down on the bright muzzle with closed eyes, and squeezes the trigger.)
... the falsity of material wealth ... the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit ... a conduct in banking and business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callow and selfish wrongdoing ...
The voice was confident, exultant. There was a smile on his lips. He talked with shoulders thrown back. We squinted to try clearly to see his face. We strained our ears to listen.
(Not Hiring reads the hastily scrawled card set in the window of the little green shack marked PERSONNEL at the gate of the great plant but the men still stand in line. We stand with limp empty hands staring with appraising eyes at the tall lit windows, black stacks and railroad tracks and slagpiles beyond, listening to the light throb and hiss of steam and the machinery's clank. Our hands slack at our knees we stand in line because we dread. We dread to go home. We dread to meet the women's eyes. We dread the kids' smeary faces when they cry: 'Daddy's home, we'll eat now.')
This was where we cheered:
... I shall ask the Congress for broad executive power ...
This was where we broke out and cheered:
... as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe ...
We clapped cold hands together. We clapped and hoarsely cheered and the new President sharply tossed his chin and looked down in our faces and smiled.
Daniel Boone Country
As Millard O. Carroll signed his name to the last of the letters on the desk in front of him, he caught himself starting an elaborate final flourish. He stopped halfway and screwed the top on his fountain pen. That ham actor inside his head was striking attitudes again. He laid the last batch with the others in the wire basket and yawning leaned back in the swivelchair with his hands in his pockets and his feet thrust out under the desk. The plainfaced clock on the opposite wall said thirteen minutes to five. He straightened up in his chair and pushed the oldfashioned pushbell.
Right away his secretary was there standing where she always stood. He looked up at her long upper lip and netted hair, caught the familiar pursed look about the mouth. 'All right, Louise,' he said.
'That makes our record perfect, Mr. Carroll.'
'How do you mean?'
'We've cleaned up our desk every day this year by ten minutes of five,' she said in her melancholy singsong.
'Business slack,' he answered in a tone he knew would check her. She gave him a reproachful look and retreated with the wire basket through the groundglass door.
He got slowly to his feet and stood looking through the broad window that wasn't any too clean out across the six tracks of the main line of the Kansas and Texas that gleamed in the afternoon light. On the other side were the scaling frame houses scattered among willows where his employees lived. From under him and all around came the hissing and clanking noises of the plant. His ears were beginning to pick out the individual familiar machines when he heard the 4.56, the whistle's hoot, the crossing bell, the rumbled bump of wheels over rails. The red slanting sunlight flashed in sharpedged dazzle on the windows of the coaches. He was still staring out at the train when Louise came back, her lips set for humming, with a sheaf of yellow slips for the filing cabinet in her hand. She let out a surprised squawk. 'Oh Mr. Carroll excuse me. I thought you'd gone.'
A southbound freight joined with the passenger train to drown out their voices. He waved his lightgray stetson at her and strode out of the office. The slambanging of the freight drowned out all the noises of the plant as he ducked through a lane of finished boxes wired up for shipment. He hurried. At a door he met old Slim, his stained felt hat on the back of his head, his jaw and adamsapple sharply thrust out under a twisted nose with a grease smudge on it. Slim opened his mouth to speak. Millard grinned and waved his hat and brushed past. Behind him the heaving and breathing of the plant rose above the clatter of the trains. Ed Gaskin stood on the steps of the shipping room. His face was all creased up with something he wanted to say but Millard sped past towards the parking lot yanking his hat down on his head as he went. He'd reached the Buick and fitted in his key and had his toes on the starter before the five o'clock whistle blew up behind him.
Immediately he was out the gate. Driving he forgot himself completely. His motor hummed with a little easy ticking of valves, the gearshift was a pleasure. Familiar streets were unrolling on either side: the broad avenue in from the plant, full of traffic, crowded between filling stations and automobile agencies; the dusty redbrick stores on Main, the courthouse and the yellowbrick hotel and the marble façade of the bank and then the dusty shingled porches of the lodginghouse belt and the new residences with lawns and trees and the parkway between willows out past the golf club.
He was so sunk in the habitualness of it he wasn't conscious of himself or of what he was doing until he stepped out of the car on the gravel walk beside the white stucco house where he lived and found himself face to face with his wife. Lucile had her garden hat tied on with a lavender scarf. She looked tired. She had a flowerpot in one hand and a trowel in the other. He drew her to him breathing her sweet usual fragrance, kissed her hard and lingeringly on the mouth.
'Lou,' he said still holding her shoulders, 'how am I ever going to tell 'em?'
'What on earth?'
'That I'm pulling out ... that we're going to ... you know.'
Her eyes looked at him teasing blue.
'Oz you've decided?'
He nodded.
She laughed. 'It's just as well because I've rented a house.'
'What on earth?'
'Eloise called up and said she'd found us the most wonderful little house in Georgetown so I said go ahead and make a deposit.' She turned in a quick birdlike way she had, set the pot and trowel down on the brick step and shot in through the side door. He stood staring after her with his mouth open. Then he burst out laughing too and followed her into the house.
'But how did you know we were going? I just made up my mind this morning.'
She stopped in the hall, looked in his face for a second still laughing and ran off upstairs. He stepped into the little washroom to wash his hands and face. While he was brushing his hair he stared into his face in the oval mirror: gray eyes under straight dark brows, broad white forehead; limp lightbrown hair thinning maybe, but it still covered his skull. He grinned at himself in a moment of furious boyish happiness. The ham actor inside him had gone. Now he felt all one. Lou has that effect on me he thought.
He ran upstairs after her. She had slipped out of her dress and stood in her slip at the basin in their bathroom washing herself with little dabs of a facecloth. He kissed her bare shoulder.
'Lou have we anybody coming to dinner?'
She shook her head.
'Suppose we go talk to the old man. Do you think he'll be cut up about it?'
'He probably knows all about it already.'
'How do you suppose Eloise knew?'
'She's a great friend of Josephine Watson. The eminent Mr. Walker Watson probably talks in his sleep.'
Back in the car everything seemed to fall into place in his mind. He drove towards town again past the golf club and sped along Prairie Avenue with its big new white houses that were half of them left unfinished when the development company went broke.
'I called Dad and said we'd stay to supper,' Lucile was explaining. 'He said Annie was getting restless about our never staying any more.'
'He'll be lonesome, first the boys now you,' said Millard thoughtfully.
'He won't let on.'
Lucile's father was sitting in the usual place on the porch behind the bigleaved vine, an old man with white hair in a white suit. His face had a caved look, the pale skin hung in a white fold over each side of his jaws. The eyes were sunken but there was still a trace of Lucile's blue in them as they fastened unsmiling on Millard's. Millard felt suddenly like a schoolboy brought up before the principal for flunking a course.
'So you're runnin' out on us,' the old man's voice creaked. 'You have your motives I suppose. You're doin' a foolish thing son an' you'll live to regret it. Well you're both young enough to come back and pick up your lives again. I shan't be here to see it ... Son, I don't want you to think I don't appreciate what you've done down here because I do, more than you children realize I think. It don't seem as long ago to me as it does to you since you came down here a skinny wreck of a boy just out of the army all wrists and ankles.'
Millard burst out laughing. 'I must have been a sight.'
'But Dad he'd just had rheumatic fever.'
'I sized him up for a comer the first time I laid eyes on him Lucile. You wouldn't give him houseroom until I got him plumped up an' makin' himself a livin' ... Do you realize you're givin' up a million an' a half dollar concern?'
'Dad I'm not giving it up. I'm taking a leave of absence.'
'How much salary did you take out last year?'
'Fifteen thousand dollars.'
'An' you earned every cent of it an' that was in a depression year ... An' how much are those humbug politicians in Washington offerin' you?'
'It'll be around eight thousand ...' Millard felt himself blushing. 'But that's not the point. We owe something to the country ... I didn't get to go overseas in the war, went and got sick like a damn fool ...' The clock in the hall started chiming. The old man got shakily to his feet. 'Dad I've got a kind of bug in my head ... Lucile says it's all right ... That I might be able to help out,' Millard's voice trailed off uncertainly.
Joel Honeycutt with his white head thrust out before him in a butting attitude was heading for the screened front door. 'Supper's on the table,' he was muttering. He went in first and let the screen door slap sharply to behind him.
'Dad,' said Lucile running after him, 'I bet Annie's made popovers.'
Driving home after the old man had gone to bed they suddenly started talking like conspirators. 'What do you think?' Millard whispered.
'After we've been in Washington six months Dad'll be saying it was his idea all along,' Lucile said.
'Dolphy'll run the plant just as well as I do, if not better.'
'He won't think up anything new but he won't take any rubber nickels.'
'Anyway the old man's all set with Annie, the boys'll be at boarding school. If this isn't the time to make a break I don't know what is ...'
The car hissed over the pavement through the warm air of the fall night that smelled of ripe grass and sunscorched leaves.
'Oz when you were courting me,' Lucile said suddenly, 'you used to say you'd take me away and show me all the capitals of Europe.'
'It's taken me fifteen years to get around to it ... Well we're starting with the capital of America.' She didn't answer. 'We don't have anything to lose,' he said as he turned into their drive and let the car slide gently through the doorway of the garage. He turned off the ignition and they sat side by side looking straight ahead of them.
Lucile was humming thoughtfully. 'Oz I just thought. You'll have to get a job for Louise Aldershot.'
'At least I thought I'd be able to get away from that ugly mug.'
'Oz that's mean of you. She's so devoted.'
'But Lou I can't take my secretary everywhere I go. I thought I'd find me a darkhaired beauty familiar with the lobbies of Washington.'
'You'll take Louise Aldershot.'
'Why?'
'Because you'll need somebody you can trust. She's a wonderful secretary ... and if you don't she's going to cry and you're going to promise her anything.'
'I'm not such a softie as all that.'
'Yes you are.'
'How do you know? You don't ever cry.'
'I don't have to.'
He switched off the light and they both got out of the car. As they left the garage each of them closed one of the doors the way they always did. The house looked quiet and neat and dimlit. From the livingroom radio came the voice:
'My friends ...'
'Oh we forgot ... I left it on.' whispered Lucile. 'It's the President's speech ...' She grabbed his hand and they sat hand in hand on the low bench in front of the fireplace listening:
... 'In the execution of the powers conferred on it by Congress the Administration needs and will tirelessly seek the best ability that the country affords. Public service offers better rewards in the opportunity for service than ever before in our history — not great salaries but enough to live on ...'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Grand Design by John Dos Passos. Copyright © 1949 John Dos Passos. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Part I. Quiet Portico,Quiet Portico 1,
Daniel Boone Country,
Quiet Portico 2,
Blue Eagle,
Quiet Portico 3,
The Movement,
Quiet Portico 4,
The People's Mandate,
Quiet Portico 5,
Forecasts,
Quiet Portico 6,
Class War,
Part II. The Ship of State,
The Ship of State 1,
Our Own House in Order,
The Ship of State 2,
In the Field,
The Ship of State 3,
The Yanks Are Not Coming,
The Ship of State 4,
Presidential Timber,
The Ship of State 5,
American History,
The Ship of State 6,
The Working Farmer,
The Ship of State 7,
The Third Term,
The Ship of State 8,
Vacation,
The Ship of State 9,
A Great American,
Part III. The Power and the Glory,
The Power and the Glory 1,
Lend Lease,
The Power and the Glory 2,
Economic Warfare,
The Power and the Glory 3,
The Liberal Front,
The Power and the Glory 4,
Civic Courage,
The Power and the Glory 5,
The Level of the Leaders,