Chapter V: Part 5

When Sinclair published _Oil!_ in 1926 he saw the activities of the labor movement almost completely in terms of a class struggle. But it was an index of the relative progress of the American movement as compared with the English that strike violence remained the chief weapon on this side of the Atlantic. Two years later, in _Boston_, the situation was worse. He wrote that Massachusetts had “evolved a complete technique of labor smashing” in which a strike-breaking department developed in the Boston police force was rented out to manufacturers in neighboring towns. He concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti were not convicted and executed for a fatal armed robbery. They were killed because they represented the forces of social revolt to the banking and industrial interests which felt themselves critically threatened. Even eight years later, _In Dubious Battle_ represented large segments of the labor group as ill-treated men whose efforts to attain better wages and working conditions were opposed, not only by the employers, but by the forces of the state as well. It is in Dos Passos’ books that the American labor movement is seen making the transition from economic to political action. In _Adventures of a Young Man_ the pecan-shellers, the miners, the auto-workers are organized as forces which will obtain concessions through direct economic action rather than legislation. But _The Grand Design_ shows labor at work within the Democratic Party. There is no nationwide labor party, but the votes of the labor group are marshalled in support of candidates whose programs will provide them with legislative relief.

The continental labor movements, particularly the Italian, are portrayed in the novel as having a greater history of violence and misfortune than those in either England or the United States. Taddei’s Socialist workers take over their factories at gun point. Silone’s laborers are victimized by The Promoter. Koestler’s Rubashov recalls his mission of telling Little Loewy that the interests of his Belgian dock workers were to be subordinated to those of Russia. Similarly, the Fascists had destroyed the Italian labor movement for the purposes of the corporate state. And, of course, the classic irony was the full name for which “Nazi” stood: National Socialist German Workers Party.

The behavior patterns of the labor movement traced in the novel reveal gradual change. A more homogeneous and dynamic group than the peasants, labor has just as extensive a heritage of exploitation and strife. Although leadership has sometimes come from outside their class, it has been provided to a large extent by a dedicated and indigenous elite. Whole national labor movements have been submerged under totalitarianism; others have appeared to be sacrificed as pawns by leaders intent upon personal aggrandizement. But as the movement has matured, old weapons have been used with increasing moderation and new ones have been added to the arsenal. Organs such as the CIO Political Action Committee appear in none of the novels in this study, but such instruments typify the new tactics by which gains are obtained through political pressure. The archetype, of course, is England’s Labour Party, which, in assuming national power, has had to make the final transition by directing legislation which should benefit not only its own members but those of all classes of the nation. This represents an evolutionary development which is a reflection of some of the English national characteristics seen in the novel. Perhaps one ends not with a conclusion but with a question. The conservatives and liberals, the Republicans and Democrats, derive their strength from areas which are fairly well defined but which to some extent cut across economic and occupational lines. Can an instrument forged in hottest partisan conflict discharge the responsibility which comes with the attainment of the goal of political power? Can it legislate for a society, or will its antecedents compel it to serve a special interest group?

=Proletarians=

During the thirties members of the peasant and labor groups were the subject of a literary movement which produced the proletarian novel. This type of novel is generally unsatisfactory for the study of group behavior patterns considered here since its emphasis is much more sociological than political. There are some exceptions, however. _The Iron Heel_, _Man’s Fate_, and _In Dubious Battle_ have been called proletarian novels. Other proletarian novels not included in this study were written by Dos Passos, Farrell, Shaw, and Silone. The two novels by Malraux and Steinbeck straddle the line between the political and the proletarian. This is also true of _A Wind Is Rising_, which came after the movement as such had spent itself but which concentrated upon one of its favorite subjects, the southern sharecropper. Some of the proletarian novels have political overtones. Sherwood Anderson’s _Beyond Desire_ (1932), which was meant as his contribution to the proletarian cause, followed the career of Red Oliver as a Communist labor organizer in southern textile mills. Like Jim Nolan, he is shot to death. But this novel does not reveal as fully as Steinbeck’s book the part of the Communist Party’s labor strategy in its overall plan. The men of Liam O’Flaherty’s _The Informer_ are proletarians, members of the Irish Republican Army fighting the British. But in its most common form, the proletarian novel stopped just short of political action. It would present in dramatic fashion the conditions under which the members of this actually diverse group lived. If they took positive action, it was usually to join a union or the Communist Party. Steinbeck’s _The Grapes of Wrath_ shows the broad scale social delineation the proletarian novel permits; it also shows clearly that though its ultimate aim may be political, its primary textual emphasis is not.

=The Middle Class=

The middle class is not as well represented as other groups in the political novel. Of course, definition is a problem. In terms of economics, Glenn Spotswood and Robert Jordan are members of the middle class. In terms of politics, however, they are not bourgeois but intellectuals, Jordan a liberal and Spotswood a radical. Perhaps the true middle class does not provide enough drama for the novelist who deals with politics. Most of the people in _It Can’t Happen Here_ are middle class citizens, but they do not move and act in their normal environment. Their apathy has permitted the rise of a dictatorship, forcing them into the role of the persecuted or the underground fighter. Most often a novelist using a middle class hero will work a transformation upon him in which he changes his class identity. He will, like Glenn Spotswood, cast his lot with the class economically below his. Or, like Harvey Sayler in _The Plum Tree_, he will rise above it through political advancement which brings him power and wealth. In rare cases, the hero will manage to ride both horses at once. Peter Stirling, in Ford’s novel, will obviously be a successful candidate for the governorship of New York. But his stepping stone has been nearly twenty years of work in New York City’s tenement-ridden Sixth Ward. Ford’s style virtually guarantees that Stirling will be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl by the end of the book, but his career too makes it impossible to label him a member of the middle class from which he started. In _The Grand Design_ Dos Passos sometimes shows the middle class Washington office worker. Throughout _District of Columbia_, particularly in his prose poems, he refers to or quotes members of this class along with the executives and laborers. But there is such diversity that it is difficult to draw conclusions. Perhaps this difficulty in discerning pronounced patterns is in itself an indication of the nature of this class. Midway between the economic and political extremes, it has a leavening of the characteristics of both. But the political figure who comes from the middle class most often leaves it. If he does not, he apparently has less interest for the political novelist.

=The Rich and Well Born=

The economic and social upper classes appear in more different hues than any other class. They vary all the way from “red” millionaires like _Oil!_'s Bunny Ross to the same novel’s many “malefactors of great wealth.” Except for Disraeli’s heroes, his aristocrats are very often those usually described as “the product of exhausted loins.” Unless members of the English aristocracy take an active interest in the welfare of the classes below their own, they are usually portrayed as despising them. George Meredith’s aristocrat appears to hate these occupants of a world different from his. The Debarry family in _Felix Holt_ has humanitarian impulses, but its political action is directed toward maintaining its elevated position. Trollope’s aristocratic Liberals make efforts toward legislation which will reduce inequities, but far more typical is the old Earl, “Buck” Lostwithiel in _Fame Is the Spur_. A wringer of the poor and accident-maker for inconvenient opponents, he is deterred from horsewhipping Hamer Shawcross only by a raised sabre.

The evil aristocrat is not so common in the American novel as in the English. Mrs. Stowe and Tourgée portray him during the latter half of the nineteenth century in the South. Sinclair’s Back Bay Brahmins, years later, take violent action, sticking neither at hypocrisy nor dishonesty, to assert a form of slavery which is more economic than legislative. But aside from villains such as those in _The Plum Tree_, whose power actually comes more from money than lineage, the villainous role is usually assigned to the industrialist rather than the blueblood. This may be a substantiation of the charge that the primary aristocracy of America is one of wealth rather than breeding or cultivation. The Italian noble class is consistently portrayed as an oppressor no matter what the form of government under which it operates. Serfs are freed and reforms are instituted in _Fathers and Sons_, but offstage are the sounds of floggings and the murmurs of oppressed victims. The Marchesa Raversi’s Liberal Party in _The Charterhouse of Parma_ is anything but liberal. Individuals like the radical poet Ferrante Palla find as little favor with her as they do with the absolutist Ernesto IV. Separated from these nobles by time and space, Malraux’s Ferral and his backers have as little sympathy for the Chinese on whom they thrive as does Fabio Conti for Parma’s commoners.

There are some good aristocrats in the political novel. All of Disraeli’s Young England heroes approach politics with high seriousness and dedication. Coningsby is so suffused with virtue that he keeps his purity unsullied at the expense of losing his inheritance. Tancred’s politics are intermingled with a religious mysticism that leads him to the Holy Land. Meredith’s Beauchamp is such an emotional firebrand in his radical convictions that he makes Disraeli’s young men look like mild and high minded Rover Boys. But he belongs to their class. A little farther down on the social and economic scale is Cary’s Edward Wilcher. A politician of entirely different kidney from these zealous young men, he is a sophisticated and cynical careerist who writes embarrassing epigrams about members of his own party. But he is like the others in his concern for progressive legislation rather than perpetuation of the privileges of his own social group. Augustine St. Clare is one of Mrs. Stowe’s better slave-owners. He is obviously on his way to salvation, partly through the influence of saintly Uncle Tom, when he is untimely carved by a bowie-knife wielded in a fight he has attempted to stop. It is this accident which prevents him from freeing Tom. Churchill’s Humphrey Crewe is an eccentric and fatuous ass, but his intentions are pure gold. He seeks office because he believes he can benefit the state. In _The Grand Design_, Jed Farrington refers to “the Squire in the White House and his big business friends.” But it is clear in the book that though Big Business may conceivably have derived some benefits from the Roosevelt administrations, this descendant of New York state patroons was politically oriented toward less pedigreed groups. If one were to compile a balance sheet for this class, however, the villains would far outnumber the heroes.

Good men of wealth are even harder to find in this group of novels than good aristocrats. Disraeli’s magnates are the type who in modern America receive awards from chambers of commerce and engraved gold watches from deputations of employees. Elsewhere, the industrialist is a top-hatted advocate of _laissez-faire_ economics whose wealth is acquired more through the sweat of his underprivileged workers than by his own acumen. Millbank in _Coningsby_ and Trafford in _Sybil_ are rising merchant princes who are considerate of their workers and industrially progressive. But either they are ahead of their time or the industrialists who follow them in the novel are throwbacks to a more primitive industrial era. In _The New Machiavelli_ Dick Remington’s uncle is presented as a reactionary beast. His Newcastle pottery factory produces death as well as cups and saucers. He is as unwilling to install fans that will carry off the deadly fumes from the lead glaze as he is to concede any rights at all to his workers. The Rhondda Valley, where Pen Muff goes as the bride of union official Arnold Ryerson, has more than its share of Welsh women widowed by the coal mines. The management group remains in the background of this novel, but the miners’ efforts to obtain concessions which would now seem minimal are evidence of an attitude not dissimilar to that of Dick Remington’s uncle. In Conrad’s _Nostromo_ Charles Gould has justified his decisive intervention in Costaguanan politics by declaring that he was providing order which would benefit the natives as well as himself. Gould’s political commitment gives rise to one of the central problems of the novel--the extent to which his soul has been eroded to insure the undisturbed flow of the bright silver ingots from the San Tomas mine. Gould is not the only victim of his obsession. The other is his wife, who is all but shut out of vital areas of his life and thought. Early in the book he gives her his rationale:

I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material
interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the
conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how
your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and
disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands
must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come
afterwards. That’s your ray of hope.

All of the lobbying groups in the American novels are financed by industrial wealth. Whether the checks are signed by railroaders, utilities operators, or oil men, their purpose is the same: to apply pressure which will gain concessions. And, of course, in many cases these concessions cause a direct or indirect loss to citizens in lower income brackets. In _The Plum Tree_ Harvey Sayler uses his power to make an example of one of these men, “the greediest and cruelest ‘robber baron’ in the West.” The lords of Jack London’s Oligarchy specialize in the repression of workers with frequent resort to calculated mass murder. The climate had changed by the time Dos Passos wrote _The Grand Design_, but he included the lineal descendant of these predators. Jerry Evans retains a substantial interest in his economic welfare even as coordinator of Roosevelt’s War Procurement Board. Columnist Ed James’s off-the-record analysis is that

All Jerry can think of in the emergency is to use it to turn things
back into the business as usual channels an’ we all know that
in the southeast at least business as usual means Jerry Evans’
business. Of course he has cleared his skirts technically by
resignin’ from the directorates of most of his corporations.... But
they are still his corporations.

Individuals of wealth in the novel may derive their money from farming rather than industry, but unenlightened self-interest is still the chief motivating factor. This is the case with the powerful ones in _A Wind Is Rising_. Mulcting their sharecroppers, they derive added revenue from convenient prohibition laws. Other Dos Passos characters like Jerry Evans retain their natural roles even within the New Deal. Driving through impoverished Southern counties, Paul Graves is told that “relief is in the hands of the politicians and the politicians are mostly landlords who save it for their own tenants.” Steinbeck’s Fruit Growers Association serves its own interests in a more spectacular way. After an offer of twenty cents an hour fails to satisfy the apple pickers, the fruit growers use strikebreakers, vigilantes, sheriff’s deputies, and then troops to insure a harvest on their terms.

It is curious that one of the American industrialists who approaches goodness should be found in Sinclair’s _Oil!_ As in his other novels, the industrialists are the blackest of the black, but J. Arnold Ross is an exception. An independent oil tycoon who conscientiously tries to see his workers’ point of view, his rapacity is expressed in acquisition of oil lands by varied methods rather than iron-handed labor relations. After his death it is discovered that his business has deteriorated and his assets have melted, partly because of the naval oil lands scandal. But there is also a missing bundle of one million dollars, and at one point suspicion is cast upon his closest associate and friend. The implied moral is probably that Ross’s few unsuppressed humanitarian instincts rendered him less able to survive in this particular jungle. The other sympathetically portrayed man of wealth in this novel is Arnold’s son Bunny. Like Yevgeny Bazarov and his father Vassily, these representatives of two generations are never quite able to bridge the gap which separates them. Bunny loves his father, but his symbolic rejection of him appears on page after page in which he almost frantically disposes of his share of the oil money in subsidizing a leftist paper or attempting to found a labor college. Sinclair’s Cagoulards in _Presidential Agent_ are quite willing to weaken France in order to retain the Skoda munitions works. These Frenchmen are blood brothers of Malraux’s Ferral, who does not see the consequences of his economic interpretation of current history. The aristocrats and the wealthy are united in the Thornewell family in _Boston_. Fighting on two fronts, they eliminate anarchists and liquidate a parvenu entrepreneur in parallel actions. Sinclair’s judgments of these representatives of the upper class are violent and condemnatory. Sinclair’s condemnation is not quite typical of the political novelists who treat the rich, although more of them approach his position than Disraeli’s. When one compares the literary treatment of the lower classes with that of the upper, the difference is striking. One might explain this superficially on the grounds of distortion for dramatic emphasis, or the use of ready-made heroes and villains. But whatever the reasons, the majority of political novelists have been impelled to sympathize with the lower classes and condemn the upper.

POLITICAL GROUPS

The second criterion for classifying political groups mentioned at the beginning of this chapter was that of overt political behavior. The political novel describes the behavior of the group to which its characters belong, that group which, while seeking office or discharging it, conforms to a set of rules both written and unwritten. From one point of view, these seem almost like the rules for playing a game. From another point of view, they are the principles which must be followed if what passes for success is to be achieved. And these maxims are not merely empty phrases, for in the novel the politicians who flaunt them fail. An oversimplified summary of their content would be: follow party discipline regardless of any other considerations; use any means likely to be effective to gain an advantage over an opponent; follow political courses which are expedient rather than exemplary. One of the most succinct statements of this attitude is made by Senator Ratcliffe in Adams’s _Democracy_:

If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways
or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that
our society can be handled with gloves or long poles.... If virtue
won’t answer our purposes, we must use vice, or our opponents will
put us out of office....

=Office Holders: Rules and Skills=

Trollope’s novels constitute an excellent primer for the politician. Phineas Finn’s political eclipses are caused primarily by his persistent habit of voting in accordance with his conscience rather than the Liberal Party line. Edward Wilcher in _To Be a Pilgrim_ takes what he believes will be a vacation from politics after losing his seat in a close election. When he is ready to return, he finds that his party will not have him. His brother Tom reflects, “Perhaps they were always doubtful of him. They may have felt that he wasn’t single-minded enough. They didn’t like his writing, especially things like essays and criticism. Just as the Tories never liked Balfour’s writing philosophy.” When Phineas Finn’s friend the Duke of Omnium becomes Prime Minister, he permits himself the same luxury of being impolitic. The death of the Marquis of Mount Fidgett gives him a chance to award the Order of the Garter, normally given as a party spoil rather than a tribute to merit. When Omnium bestows it upon the good, fuddled, philanthropist Lord Earlybird, he nearly deals the deathstroke to his weakening coalition. Mr. Daubeny, on the other hand, is a consummate artist at the game of politics. Needing a vote of confidence to remain in office, he conjures up a seemingly foolproof and completely hypocritical measure for the test. As the head of the Tories, he introduces a bill for the disendowment of the Established Church. He assumes that the Liberals will be forced to vote for it as legislation they might themselves have proposed. But the Liberals play the expedient game, too, with the result that the Tories support what they are against to remain in office while the Liberals oppose what they are for in order to turn the Tories out. In other novels the conservatives also appear just as adept at rough and tumble politics as their opponents. Lord Lostwithiel hires Tom Hannaway to bribe Hamer Shawcross, who is standing for Parliament against Lord Lostwithiel’s son. When the attempt fails, Tom defames Hamer by asserting that he has done nothing for his mother even though he has had remarkable success. Hamer’s counterstroke is to take the night train to Manchester, pluck his mother from the happy home she shares with another widow, and exhibit her at a rally the next day to refute the charge. The whole atmosphere of English politics seems permeated by vigilance against quick marches. The wife of a cabinet minister, Nina Nimmo remembers the constant intrigues of groups within that small circle. Quite as wary are the rank and file of the House:

Everything they do is meant to have some effect beyond itself.
Indeed many ... had got so plotty that everything that happened
somewhere was “significant” of some “development.” If you only
asked them to take an ice, they looked at you knowingly as if to
ask themselves what you were “starting” and why.

The technique of buying off an opponent is more common in the American political novel than in the English. But the attempt to purchase Jack London’s Ernest Everhard is more subtle than that practiced on Hamer Shawcross. Everhard is offered a job as United States Commissioner of Labor. Even though this fee is more respectable than that offered Shawcross, Everhard rejects the offer in order to retain his freedom of action. The ways in which a political opponent can be embarrassed are legion. When Paul L. Ford’s Peter Stirling is called out with his militia regiment to protect six hundred strikebreakers, he is ordered to Grand Central Station, the spot where it is most likely that the militia commander will be forced to order his men to fire upon the strikers. Nick Galt in _The Voice of the People_ makes the Duke of Omnium’s error when he persists in making political appointments on merit. He earns the name of “The Man with the Conscience” but he loses important political support.

“Straws in the wind” may be a journalistic cliché, but the political novel is littered with them. Like Nina Nimmo’s hyper-suspicious acquaintances, they are another index of the complex behavior patterns of highly political groups. The ability to sense the meaning behind occurrences which often seem slight in themselves is another talent of the acute politician. When Jethro Bass, in _Coniston_, learns that the postmastership of the small town of Brampton is to go to another’s protégé, he realizes that this is the first skirmish in a coming battle for control of the state. His riposte is to take his candidate to Washington. An old soldier, he gains President Grant’s sympathies and the job. The invocation of a dusty city ordinance which pushes James L. Ford’s Hot Corn Ike and his iron kettle off the corner traditionally marks the invasion of Mike Grogan’s ward by reform elements. Willie Stark in _All the King’s Men_ rightly interprets the attempt to indict his state auditor as the first barrage in an attack against him by resurgent opponents. In _The Charterhouse of Parma_ the seemingly imminent execution of Fabrizio del Dongo makes Parma’s incumbent regime totter. The Archbishop is one of the very few acute enough to realize that “honour forbade the Conte to remain Prime Minister in a country where they were going to cut off the head, and without consulting him, of a young man who was under his protection.”

=The Mechanics of Control=

The mechanics by which power is attained and kept require mastery for successful execution and close observation for understanding. Proficiency in applying these techniques is as much the hallmark of the professional political class as are the basic attitudes of the upper, middle, and lower economic and social classes. If possible, an opponent is thrown off stride before the race begins. Jerome Garwood in _The 13th District_ feels that his renomination to Congress is assured. But he is hurriedly called home to find that control has been wrested from his chief supporter by an opponent who has called an early district committee meeting after taking the precaution of securing enough proxy votes to establish his supremacy. In _Number One_ Dos Passos had noted the importance of seating convention delegations nine years before the celebrated controversies at the Republican national convention of 1952. In this novel Chuck Crawford defeats a rival in seating his delegation to the Democratic convention partly through the offices of friends who have influence in the White House. Often the law is scrutinized for advantages lying buried within it. Hank Martin in _A Lion Is in the Streets_ is swept into office on a tide of votes cast under his “God-blessed Grandpappy Law.” Passed at the state’s 1898 disenfranchising convention, the statute set up educational or property qualifications for voters but made them inapplicable to descendants of men who had voted before 1868. Obtaining photostats of the list of these men, he parcels them out as ancestors to his illiterate followers who would otherwise be unable to vote. Counter-measures against a dangerous opponent include the old dodge of conquering through division. When in _All the King’s Men_ the Harrison city forces want to split the rural “cocklebur vote” of MacMurfee, they see to it that Willie Stark enters the gubernatorial primary election. Of course, if one has sufficient magnetism, he can charm and beguile an opponent out of his path. In _The Grand Design_ hopeful candidate Walker Watson returns from dinner at the White House immensely pleased that the President wants him to “take care of his health.” This solicitude takes the form of advice for a rest on a ranch in Montana before the convention, “and particularly no speeches.”

The mechanics of political success must of course be applied beyond this highly technical behind-the-scenes area. President Roosevelt tells Lanny Budd that he is moving toward alignment with the Allies as fast as public opinion will allow him to go. In a less admirable concern for the same force, Governor Fuller of Massachusetts had denied a last appeal by Sacco and Vanzetti, according to Sinclair, because he wanted the job for which Coolidge did not choose to run. A refinement and elaboration of this technique is used by Senator O’Brien in _Stranger Come Home_ when he tries to time his committee’s most sensational charges to coincide with press time for late newspaper editions.

The organization of political machines is also refined into a science, particularly by people like Hank Martin in _A Lion Is in the Streets_, who splits his domain into territories and keeps elaborate files, one on promising opposition men who are to be destroyed politically. Methods designed to insure conformity include devices such as the safe deposit boxes of Ben Erik in _The City of Anger_ which contain documentary evidence of the purchase of key city officials. Nor is the psychology of interpersonal relationships forgotten. Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ always remains silent at the beginning of an interview in order to force the other to speak first at a possible tactical disadvantage. Even the protocol of visits is analyzed in _The Plum Tree_ by Harvey Sayler, who believes

there is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing
with men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man
has in the very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder
there--by going to see some one whom he should have compelled to
come to him, or by compelling some one to come to him when he
should have made the concession of going.

=International Communism=

Any discussion of group political behavior would be incomplete without mentioning international Communism. Since Stalin’s ascendancy over his domestic opponents in the late 1920s, the Communist movement has increasingly become an instrument of Russian national policy rather than a worldwide movement receiving help from the Soviets. Concomitantly, Communism and Communists in England, the United States, Germany, France, Greece, and China have much in common. An indication of the way in which this force cuts across national lines is the fact that nearly a quarter of all the novels in this study deal in varying degrees with Communism. Even though the behavior of this group is theoretically based upon reinterpreted Marxism, it contains definite patterns which relate to Party discipline, strategy, and tactics which seem organizational rather than ideological. One of the primary ones is the prohibition of original political thought outside the limits laid down in the Kremlin. Deviationism is a cardinal sin which destroys Nicolas Rubashov and endangers Rocco de Donatis. In a pious attempt to avoid such error, Dr. Jane Sparling in _The Grand Design_ immediately consults Elmer Weeks, head of the American Communist Party, to discover the proper attitude when Hitler invades Russia. Another pattern is the interpretation--and use--of every action not in terms of its immediate significance, but of its place in the overall plan. The strikes of miners, apple-pickers, or pecan-shellers are not local disputes between management and labor but battles in the class struggle to be used to educate the masses and provide useful martyrs. But all the while, the pretense that Communism is an international movement must be maintained. In _Adventures of a Young Man_ this view is purveyed to West Virginia miners:

Less Minot got up and said that the American Miners was affiliated
with organizations all over the country that was working to
overthrow the rotten capitalistic system that kept the working
class down to starvation wages with guns and grafting officers
of the law, and that if that was being a red, he was glad to
be called a red, and as for the Rooshians, he didn’t know much
about them, but so far as he could hear tell the working class
had overthrown its capitalistic oppressors over there under the
leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party and was running
the country in their own interests and was ready to help the
workers in other countries to do the same.

In _Darkness at Noon_ this diversion of Communism from the goal of international revolution to the service of the Russian state is clothed in a theory meant to make it both logical and necessary: when world revolution did not follow the Russian Revolution, it was resolved that the primary task was to preserve “the Bastion” in order to protect gains already made and to maintain a base for later advances. Therefore in each country where its activities are revealed, the Communist Party is found to act primarily in the interests of the Soviet Union.

The use of racial minority groups has not been neglected by the Communists. Several recent American novels have touched upon this subject. The most vivid and powerful is Ralph Ellison’s _The Invisible Man_ (1947). The book’s nameless protagonist flees the South dogged by discrimination and bad luck. He is drawn into The Brotherhood (a euphemism for the Communist Party) and rises rapidly to become “Spokesman” for the Harlem district. Despite appreciable gains he has made in membership, the young Negro leader is shifted downtown. A bloody riot makes it clear to him that the change in the Party line is deliberate. He finally understands the full meaning of his ideological tutor’s words, “your members will have to be sacrificed.” His break with the Party is basically the same as Glenn Spotswood’s. But here the emotional involvement and subsequent disillusionment are much greater. Farrell makes the same point in _Yet Other Waters_ through the speech of a Socialist Negro labor leader directed at Communists who have come to disrupt a meeting. In a long passage completely italicized for emphasis he says, “You are trying to manipulate and betray my people. You are no friend of the black man or the white man. You are the cancer of the working class. You are the architects of defeat.”

War, no less than domestic conflict, is seen as an opportunity to extend Communism which transcends the immediate national issues. The Spanish Civil War was both a skirmish and a testing ground in which the full extent of Russian intervention was concealed to prevent direct reprisals. In _The Grand Design_ Jed Farrington tells Georgia Washburn: “In the short term war we’re allied to the Squire in the White House and his big business friends but in the long-term war they are our most dangerous enemies.” The subjugation of satellite party interests to Soviet interests is made clear in _The Crack in the Column_ by Moscow-trained Zachariades, who arrives to deliver his post-mortem on the unsuccessful EAM uprisings: “Our friends want no more premature, independent revolutions. They have Italy and Palestine to think of.” Even the details of authorized revolutions are foreseen and attended to. Leaders like Zachariades and Kyo Gisors in _Man’s Fate_ are made to order. Hemingway’s Robert Jordan reflects about the Moscow-trained, bogus peasant leader of the Loyalists, Valentin Gomez: “You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war.... You couldn’t wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manufacture one.” These novels illustrate Communism’s diversity of character and tactics and the rigid discipline it imposes upon its followers under pain of expulsion or death.

=Analysis of Mass Phenomena=

Interest in mass political phenomena is sometimes expressed by these authors not only through action, but in direct analysis and examination as well. Steinbeck’s _In Dubious Battle_ opposes two theorists: McLoed, who thinks this particular strike is a good one because it will give him a chance to “work out some ideas,” and Doc Burton, who serves as the strikers’ doctor to observe contagion in the social body. Sounding more like a social psychologist than a physician, he says

Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This seems to
be a bad one. I want to see, Mac. I want to watch these group-men,
for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single
men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all, he’s a cell in an
organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body
are like you.

Like Mac, Jim Nolan is a psychologist of mass violence. He even offers to reopen his wound so that his blood will provide a stimulus for the group to attack the strikebreakers. When the strikers are about to mob one strike leader who has bloodied another, he diverts them from this assault to the one he desires. There are other instances in which a specific theory of the effects of violence is used for political purposes. Just as Dostoyevsky’s Pyotr Verhovensky has his circle kill Shatov to cement them together, so Hemingway’s Pablo had made his townsmen communal executioners of the Fascists: “To save bullets,” explains Pilar, “and so that each man should have his share in the responsibility.” The basic attitudes behind mass political phenomena are analyzed by some of Koestler’s major characters. Both Jules Commanche and Julien Dellatre discuss the ills of France and Western man in general. Their conclusions are very similar to Rubashov’s critique of Communist policy. Finally Koestler himself sums up this consistent point of view when he explains the cause of Hydie’s constant and unsuccessful search in _The Age of Longing_: “the place of God had become vacant, and there was a draft blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.”

chapter six
The Novelist as Analyst of Individual Political Behavior

Repulsed by his party in his attempt to return to politics after the first World War, Edward Wilcher, in _To Be a Pilgrim_, turns to writing. He tells his brother:

No one has written a real political novel--giving the real feel of
politics. The French try to be funny or clever, and the English
are too moral and abstract. You don’t get the sense of real
politics, of people feeling the way: of moles digging frantically
about to dodge some unknown noise overhead; of worms all diving
down simultaneously because of some change in the weather; or
rising up gaily again because some scientific gardener has spread
the right poison mixture; you don’t get the sense of limitation
and confusion, of walking on a slack wire over an unseen gulf by
a succession of lightning flashes. Then the ambitious side is
always done so badly. Plenty of men in politics have no political
ambition; they want to defend something, to get some reform--it’s
as simple as that. But even then they are simple people, too, and
it is the simple men who complicate the situation. Yes, a real
political novel would be worth doing. I should like to do for
politics what Tolstoy has done for war--show what a muddle and
confusion it is, and that it must always be a muddle and confusion
where good men are wasted and destroyed simply by luck as by a
chance bullet.

Perhaps Edward’s insight into this aspect of politics has been sharpened by the fact that, despite his immediate denial, he has been hit by just such a bullet himself. But the impact must have been so great that it sent him into a state of shock which made him unable to see that the novel had done just what he said it hadn’t. The muddle and confusion are there, and so are the men who rise above it as well as those who are sucked under and lost.

=Motivation=

It is hard to draw the line between individual and group political behavior. A man may be a mirror or conductor of political forces as well as a discrete individual. His motivation is perhaps the most individual aspect of his political experience. Most of the leading characters in these political novels are strongly motivated. In only a few cases, such as that of Willis Markham in _Revelry_, does the individual drift into politics. The ones who, in Wilcher’s words, “want to defend something, to get some reform,” are very common. The “something” that Robert Jordan wants to defend is liberty in Spain, so that “there should be no more danger and so that the country should be a good place to live in.” Lanny Budd feels exaltation that in his role of Presidential Agent he is helping to defend democracy. The reform that brings Millard Carroll to Washington is expressed in the aims of the New Deal, and a similar response on a more emotional level is made by Glenn Spotswood. Passing the shacks of the Mexican workers they have tried to help, he exclaims, “By God, Jed, we’ve got to do something to stop this kind of thing.”

A powerful motivating force which operates on a less conscious level derives from a man’s being a bastard. Hamer Shawcross in _Fame Is the Spur_, like Hyacinth Robinson in _The Princess Casamassima_, is illegitimate. Both men are raised by people who try to give them the emotional security of which their birth deprives them, but their attempts to change the society into which they were born seem in part due to the feeling that they are among its second-class citizens. Razumov in _Under Western Eyes_ has been raised, as far as the reader knows, without any family life at all. Yet he is motivated in exactly the opposite direction from Shawcross and Robinson. His assumption of a counter-revolutionary role is a direct result of his feeling that his nation and its existing social fabric are all he has. He tells the well-born revolutionary Haldin:

I have no domestic tradition. I have nothing to think against.
My tradition is historical. What have I to look back to but that
national past from which you gentlemen want to wrench away your
future?... You come from your province, but all this land is
mine--or I have nothing.

Generations later, another Russian reacts the same way under the new regime. Feyda Nikitin in _The Age of Longing_ has been orphaned by childbirth and a counter-revolutionary firing squad. The last message from his father’s eyes was one of “unshakable faith in the Great Change, and of a childlike belief in the marvels and happiness which it would bring.” This was enough to start Feyda on a career whose apex is the listing of Frenchmen to be liquidated after Russian conquest.

The character of Feyda serves to bridge the gap between men like Shawcross, Robinson, and Razumov and those who are motivated by a similar but much more powerful force--spiritual bastardy. One of these is the most demoniac of all Dostoyevsky’s possessed, Pyotr Verhovensky. He publicly ridicules his father: “the man’s only seen me twice in his life and then by accident.” It would be easy to make a case basing Pyotr’s anarchistic politics upon a partial transference of his resentment of parental rejection from old Stepan, his father, to Russia, his fatherland. Tony Maggiore, the hero-villain of _Caesar’s Angel_, is called “the terrible child--the child who had never known childhood.” Canon Borda’s analysis of Fabrizio del Dongo’s violent behavior is also based upon childhood experiences: “He is a younger son who feels himself wronged because he is not the eldest.” There are also characters like Joe Yerkes in _The Grand Design_ who set out to change a society in which they feel at a social and economic disadvantage. The houseboy and then protégé of a professor, Yerkes is eventually led, chiefly by his feelings of inferiority and insecurity, to join the Communist Party and to work at organizing auto workers. These activities are a means, though never acknowledged, through which he can try to change the existing society into one in which he will enjoy a higher status and more prestige. In _The Secret Agent_ the Professor’s failure in a series of jobs had turned him into a revolutionary determined to destroy the society which had rejected him. Jim Nolan had fought “the system” as a lone, dispirited antagonist. The example of cell-mates had finally channeled this antagonism into Communism, because “the hopelessness wasn’t in them.... There was conviction that sooner or later they would win their way out of the system they hated.” Some few individuals, like Disraeli’s exemplary young men, enter politics out of a sense of _noblesse oblige_. But more enter from a feeling of protest. Don Paolo’s reflections in _Bread and Wine_ emphasize the emotional nature of this motivation in revolutionaries:

He had once asked many militant members of his party what had led
them to Marxism, and nearly all of them had confessed that their
original impulse, as in his case, had been moral condemnation
of existing society. He had read the biographies of many
revolutionaries, and he had never yet discovered anyone who had
become a revolutionary out of scientific conviction or economic
calculation.

The pangs of unrequited love are partially responsible for Peter Stirling’s dedication to success in politics in _The Honorable Peter Stirling_, just as Frances Motherwell’s rejection by Vic Herres, in _The Troubled Air_, causes her to denounce the Communist movement to which he is devoted. Other motivating forces are just as conventional. Such dissimilar characters as Fabrizio del Dongo in _The Charterhouse of Parma_ and Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ are influenced by the career of Napoleon. The will to power as a basic drive is more clearly put by Old Gisors in _Man’s Fate_: “every man dreams of being god.” Mary McCarthy in _The Oasis_ (1949) labels Will Taub’s motivation as basically this when she says that “dreams of power and mastery, far more than its fraternal aspect, were what had attracted him to communism....” In some cases, like those of Silone’s heroes, the motivation is quite complex. Don Nicola, in _A Handful of Blackberries_, says that Rocco de Donatis “was the object of the clearest call from God that I have ever witnessed.” Yet he had become a Communist and left the Church like Pietro Spina in _Bread and Wine_ “because of the profound disgust with which he reacted to the abyss which he perceived between its practical actions and the words it preached.” Even Spina’s name--literally “rock-thorn”--is symbolic of the conflict between these forces within him. The carpenter, merchant, clergyman, or teacher may drift into his vocation through family pressure or pursuit of the line of least resistance. Almost always the politician enters his because of a powerful driving force which is just as likely to be subconscious as conscious.

=Moral Problems and Changing Values=

Another characteristic of the politician in the novel is the often-met change in values. Basic to this process may be the frequency with which he encounters moral problems. Some may be like Senator Ratcliffe in _Democracy_, whose “weakness ... lay in his blind ignorance of morals.” But usually a choice must be made between that which is right and that which is profitable. Sometimes it is as clear-cut as whether or not DeForest’s John Vane should participate in the Great Subfluvial Tunnel Road (a satire on the Crédit Mobilier) which is to run under the Mississippi and unite Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico. Often the politician must decide if he will check his conscience in the cloakroom while he votes on a small issue in order to keep his party in power to attain larger ends. Trollope’s heroes usually make the difficult but morally right decision, but few applaud them. When Phineas Finn votes for the Irish Reform Bill, Lord Tulla declares, “Very dirty conduct I think it was.... After being put in for the borough twice, almost free of expense, it was very dirty.”

A symptom of changing values is the rejection of the constituency for the capitol. Even the Duke of Omnium begins to abandon the idea of retirement because “the poison of place and power and dignity had got into his blood.” The career of Bradley Talcott in _A Spoil of Office_ is a classic example. He thinks of throwing up his political life until his renomination is threatened. Then he finds that his office is the breath of life in his nostrils. Jerome Garwood’s comment on returning to Washington from campaigning in _The 13th District_ is that “it’s worth all a fellow has to go through out in that beastly mud hole to be back here where one can really live.” This pattern is bound up, of course, with the problem of conformity. In order to retain the prize, the politician must pay its price. Hamer Shawcross puts the best possible interpretation upon his own behavior when Pen Muff asks him why more can’t be done for the Welsh miners. He replies that they will do as much as they can without running the risk of being turned out of office:

I admit ... that it’s a matter of getting the most out of the
second best. If all things were working for the best--why, there’d
be no need of politics at all, Pen. I suppose the very word means
not what we want but what is expedient.

The ultimate change in values, of course, is the sellout such as that of which Shawcross and Nimmo are accused. There are cases too in which the change takes the form not of deterioration but regeneration. Most of these are found in vintage American novels, however, in which the love of a good woman does the trick. Harvey Sayler, Jethro Bass, and Willis Markham all reject the spoils of unsavory careers and don penitential garments under this influence. The European treatment is much more subtle. In his cell, Rubashov finds that his interior monologues are really dialogues, “that there was a thoroughly tangible component in this first person singular, which had remained silent through all these years and now had started to speak.”

=The Successful Politician=

The individual who emerges most clearly from these novels is the successful politician. One can even draw a complete profile of his characteristics. And this composite illuminates not only the primary subject, but also his counterpart. In the interplay between them one sees the essence of that critical phenomenon, the leader-follower relationship. In _The Prime Minister_ Trollope ponders these subjects:

If one were asked in these days what gift should a Prime Minister
ask first from the fairies, one would name the power of attracting
personal friends. Eloquence, if it be too easy, may become almost
a curse. Patriotism is suspected, and sometimes sinks almost to
pedantry. A Jove-born intellect is hardly wanted, and clashes with
the inferiorities. Industry is exacting. Honesty is unpractical.
Truth is easily offended. Dignity will not bend. But the man who
can be all things to all men, who has ever a kind word to speak,
a pleasant joke to crack, who can forgive all sins, who is ever
prepared for friend or foe but never very bitter to the latter, who
forgets not men’s names, and is always ready with little words,--he
is the man who will be supported at a crisis.... It is for him that
men will struggle, and talk, and if needs be, fight, as though the
very existence of the country depended on his political security.

The Duchess of Omnium’s discourse upon the tasks Omnium is unwilling to perform is much more an indictment of politics in its worst sense than this comparatively restrained analysis of Trollope’s. In much the same vein Meredith’s Stukely Culbrett declares that Nevil Beauchamp has “too strong a dose of fool’s honesty to succeed....” Hamer Shawcross’s own distillate of thirty years of political experience is a bitter brew. Dissimulation is the chief element in the formula for success. The politician must be an adept psychologist appealing not to reason and intellect but to “panic, passion, and prejudice.” Shawcross cynically adds that if these factors are not present at the critical moment, the politician must know how to create them. The lesson one learns from Chester Nimmo’s career is that the successful office holder must be as agile as a gymnast, as flexible as a contortionist, and as vigilant as a radar screen. In certain instances, the politician owes success to what he does not do rather than to what he does. The ultimate in the ossification of faculties whose exercise may be dangerous is reached by the Communists. General Golz reveals his formula for survival to Robert Jordan: “I never think at all. Why should I? I am General Sovietique. I never think. Do not try to trap me into thinking.”

Peter Stirling’s list of requirements for political success is quite different. Although he mentions physical superiority and dishonesty, his lecture sounds like a naïve version of the Boy Scout oath. He mentions bosses, but his account of the way he influences his constituents suggests Socratic dialogues in Athenian meadows rather than politics in a tenement district of downtown Manhattan. The physical characteristics which he mentions briefly are noted by other authors, however. Nick Burr is a Virginia Lincoln in appearance, while Senator Ratcliffe in _Democracy_, and Senator Planefield in _Through One Administration_, represent the portly and impressive type. Dan Lurcock’s acquisition of Willis Markham is based upon precisely these qualities: “Let him get that magnificent head into the legislature, where it would be on view, and there was nothing he might not do with it.” This case appears to exaggerate the value of physical impressiveness, but it illustrates the very real advantage which it confers upon its possessor.