I’m reading a book—Occasions and Protests—written by novelist John Dos Passos. It’s a collection of several articles and book excerpts that express his ideological views over the course of his life, views that shifted considerably. I have a special interest in him because he grew up on a farm on the same road as our place on the Potomac River. He is inspirational to me since, like him, I love to write. Yet his writing far exceeds mine. Nonetheless, I’m inspired by him as I write, looking out over the Potomac, much as he likely did.
Dos Passos was born in Chicago, graduated from Harvard College in 1916, and traveled widely as a young man, visiting Europe and Southwest Asia, where he studied literature, art, and architecture. During World War I, he served as an ambulance driver with the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in Europe before enlisting in the US Army Medical Corps.
Like many of his generation, the war profoundly impacted his life. And like Ernest Hemingway, he wrote about that experience and the slaughter of that war. In 1920, he published One Man’s Initiation: 1917. In 1925, his novel Manhattan Transfer was a commercial success. He would go on to publish a trilogy, The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), which in 1998 was ranked 23rd on the Modern Library’s list of the best 100 English-language novels of the 20th century. Written in an experimental, nonlinear form, the trilogy incorporated biographical elements and news reports to reveal the landscape of American culture in the early 20th century.
Over the course of his writing career, however, Dos Passos’s political worldview shifted. Impacted by his experiences in World War I, he became interested in socialism and pacifism, which influenced his early writing. That wasn’t usual for men in his cohort. However, in 1928, he traveled to the Soviet Union to examine its social and political experiment. He left with mixed feelings. Later, when he and other liberal writers found themselves fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939), he became disillusioned with left-wing politics. By the 1950s, his political views had changed dramatically, becoming more conservative. This would culminate in 1960, when he campaigned for presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. Quite a political evolution indeed.
While my political views have remained steady over time, when I think about Dos Passos’s conversion from leftism to conservatism, I can’t help but see the similarity with so many young Americans today. Many have drifted toward socialism, in no small part because of the challenging economic opportunities they face. Others, like Dos Passos, who experienced war in the Middle East over the decades, soured on war and drifted away from the views of conservatives who supported involvement in conflicts abroad. No longer.
Will the young people today find themselves more or less conservative later? In his 1941 book The Ground We Stand On, Dos Passos penned this about looking back as we consider going forward.
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times, history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life, they were not very different from ourselves; their thoughts were the grandfathers of our thoughts, they managed to meet situations as difficult as those we have to face, to meet them sometimes lightheartedly, and in some measure to make their hopes prevail. We need to know how they did it.”
It’s a call to all generations to take a deep breath, look back, consider what previous generations wrestled with, and how they handled it. Dos Passos continues:
“In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past the idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily with men’s hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards.”
Amid the change—indeed the danger—that we face today, we all would do well to set aside the “idiot delusion” that we have nothing to learn from the “grandfathers of our thoughts.” They had great wisdom, did not sink in the “quicksand of fear,” but relied on reason and the lessons of history. We can also, if we dust off our shelves and open a book to unblock good thinking.
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