‘Rejoining the United States’: District of Columbia and the Later Fiction

Abstract

‘It was somewhere during the years of the early New Deal that I rejoined the United States’.¹ Dos Passos’ private secession at the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti executions had not led him to join any organised movement of dissent: he retreated, as he wrote, into this ‘private conscience’. But he was still politically alert, and his activities led him naturally into contact with Communists. His experiences were disillusioning. Among the Harlan County miners and in Spain, Dos Passos was shocked by the ruthlessness and cynicism of those who professed to be fighting for the just society. Even in USA, one had sensed the repercussions of this in the harsh discipline of the party tacticians, the treatment of Mary French by Don Stevens, the air of conspiracy and deceit. Yet there it had formed, in the total context of the work, a mid-point of reflecting ironies between the terrible tragedy of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair and the entropic lives of the characters enmeshed in a sordid struggle for wealth and power. There was no direct assault upon the Communist faith.