John Dos Passos

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Excerpted: John Dos Passos’ “The Happy Warrior” (1932)

May 31, 2010 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

President Roosevelt: Laughing at funny jokes is bully.

John  Dos Passos’ writing is so brisk it’s sometimes hard to catch up to it. A while back, I offered up his biographical sketch about Isadora Duncan. Now I present some of the author’s writing about President Theodore Roosevelt, one of the more interesting characters in American history. The passage comes from 1919, the second volume of the U.S.A. Trilogy. In under one page, Dos Passos describes Roosevelt’s entire Presidency. An excerpt:

     “T.R. drove like a fiend in a buckboard over the muddy roads through the driving rain from Mt. Mercy in the Adirondacks to catch the train to Buffalo where McKinley was dying,
     As President
     he moved Sagamore Hill, the healthy, happy normal American home, to the White House, took foreign diplomats and fat armyofficers out walking in Rock Creek Park where he led them a terrible dance through brambles, hopping across the creek on cobblestones, wading the fords, scrambling up the shady banks.,
     and shook the Big Stick at malefactors of great wealth.
     Things were bully.
     He engineered the Panama revolution under the shadow of which took place the famous hocuspocus of juggling the old and new canal companies by which forty million dollars vanished into the pockets of the international bankers,
     but Old Glory floated over the Canal Zone.
     and the canal was cut through.
     He busted a few trusts,
     had Booker Washington to lunch at the White House,
     and urged the conservation of wild life.
     He got the Nobel Peace Prize for patching up the Peace of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War,
     and sent the Atlantic Fleet around the world for everybody to see that
America was a firstclass power. He left the presidency to Taft after his second term leaving to that elephantine lawyer the congenial task of pouring judicial oil on the hurt feeling of the moneymasters.
     and went to Africa to hunt big game.
     Big game hunting was bully.”

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Excerpted: John Dos Passos On Isadora Duncan

January 27, 2010 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Barefoot Isadora performs during her 1915-1918 American tour in this Arnold Genthe photograph.

In his U.S.A. Trilogy, modernist master John Dos Passos incorporated all manner of experimentation and ephemera, including idiosyncratic biography. One of the towering figures of early twentieth-century America he wrote about was the great dancer Isadora Duncan. An excerpt from his writing about Duncan’s hand-to-mouth upbringing with her mother and siblings (all punctuation and spellings are Dos Passos’):

“she bore a daughter whom she named after herself Isadora

The break with Mr. Duncan and the discovery of his duplicity turned Mrs. Duncan into a bigoted feminist and an atheist, a passionate follower of Bob Ingersol’s lectures and writing, for God read Nature; for duty beauty, and only man is vile.

Mrs. Duncan had a hard struggle to raise her children in the love of beauty and hatred of corsets and conventions and manmade laws. She gave pianolessons, she did embroidery and knitted scarves and mittens.
The Duncans were always in debt.

The rent was always due.

Isadora’s earliest memories were of wheedling grocers and butchers and landlords and selling little things her mother had made from door-to-door.

helping handvalises out of back windows when they had to jump their bills at one shabbygenteel boardinghouse after another in the outskirts of Oakland and San Francisco.

The little Duncans and their mother were a clan; it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world. The Duncans weren’t Catholics anymore or Presbyterians or Quakers or Baptists; they were Atheists.”

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