"The People Are You"

NUMBER ONE--John Dos Passes--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

John Dos Passes' first novel since Adventures of a Young Man (TIME, June 5, 1939) is a sad, harsh, funny companion piece to that disenchanted odyssey of a left-wing idealist. The hero of the former novel was young Glenn Spotswood, whose altruistic hopes wound up in death at the hands of Spanish Fascists. Hero of Number One is Glenn's tougher elder brother Tyler, private secretary, ghost writer and political handyman to Chuck Crawford, who calls himself Number One and is the most noisome, best-drawn demagogue in U.S. fiction.

Tyler Spotswood, in his early 405, can still sourly remember the Washington childhood he spent "in a yellowback walk-up apartmenthouse off a stagnant tree-choked street, with a preachy bookish father who was always broke and a sweet mother with trailing sleeves and a goody-goody kid brother who was a hopeless sap." For the hopeless sap, the mother's boy, idealism was all but inevitable. For the harder, more intelligent Tyler, cynicism was just as surely the outcome--cynicism, and that fatal softness towards unscrupulous proficiency to which cynics are liable.

Chuck Crawford, who combined the curly poll and hyperthyroid eyes of Huey Long with the minnesinging methods of "Pappy" O'Daniel, was crook and virtuoso enough to infatuate Tyler. Tyler gave him all his craft, all his nerve, all his strength, short of the little it took to totter through stale beds and suicidal bottles and to nurse occasional fantasies of the pleasure it would be to shoot his boss and make off with his hardheaded wife, Sue Ann.

"Chores for the People." Even when he was just a Congressman, and a couple of timid, rustic constituents paid him a Washington visit, Chuck Crawford could blather, "I ain't nothin' but ole Chuck Crawford that used to help you do your chores those cole mornin's while the missus was rustlin' up breakfast, an' now I'm here doin' chores for the American people."

Chuck is seen down home (apparently Texas) in the whirlwind campaign which takes him into the U.S. Senate. The day's timetable alone, as it revolves in Tyler Spotswood's drink-ravaged brain, is as sharp as a newsreel -- "8 o'clock, Pleasant Valley; 10 o'clock, Oddfellows' Hall in Arrowhead Springs; noon, Poplar Fork, barbecue at the ball park, baseball game; 3:30 at the livestock exchange in Harmony, auction off prize mule; Eberhart in time to talk to the workers coming out of the packing plant; then Horton, the Mexican Market, Sam Houston Square, Technical High School, torchlight parade starts Sabine and 12th, then the big meeting at the Grand Opera House."

The campaign goes better & better for 80 solid pages: Chuck's big white Lincoln and the sound-wagon (complete with hillbillies) which herald it; his miserable, bladder-bursting, exploited little boy; his ocarina solo in Every Man a Millionaire, the campaign song he wrote for himself;* Tyler's talks with gambling Campaign Funder Norman Stauch and other politicos; and such Crawford orations as the following:

"Folks, I ain't askin' you to elect me to the United States Senate. I ain't got the high-toned eddication for the job to tell the truth. You all know me I'm jess a small town salesman with a smatterin' of law. All I know's how to keep my hands outa the other feller's pockets. . . ."

Statesman at Play & Work. In a graphically described roadhouse ("Around a corner an arch of stout knotty pine opened into a big living room lit from skulls of longhorn cattle with electric bulbs in them set in a row round the varnished log walls"), Crawford is seen at play in blue-striped pajamas with a statuesque torch singer. In time he acquires a semi-Fascist radio station, is surrounded by more & more sinister henchmen. It becomes Tyler's business to take the rap for Crawford before a Federal grand jury and to be publicly repudiated by the demagogue : "Ah, there was the unkindest cut of all, the stab in the back from a friend. . . ."

A belated letter from Brother Glenn, already dead in Spain, almost makes Tyler turn state's evidence. Caught between treachery to himself, to his boss and to the people at large, Tyler jumps wildly off the water wagon. He faces the rap, crying: "We can't sell out on the people, but the trouble is that me, I'm just as much the people as you are or any other son of a bitch. If we want to straighten the people out we've got to start with number one, not that big wind. . . . You know what I mean. I got to straighten myself out first, see. . . . Thinking hurts. . . ."

"The people," the book ends, "are you."

If Author Dos Passes had given clearer reasons why men of Tyler's intelligence work for the world's Chuck Crawfords; if he had shown behind his sharply observed surfaces more of the intricate counterpoint of political machinery in action; if he had made the danger implicit in Chuck's kind--and Tyler's--more edged and more explicit; if he had not skidded into regrettable Sandburg-&-ketchup prose poetry this could have been a much better book. Even as it stands, it is a clear, vivid warning and bracer to that man-in-the-street who makes or breaks democracies, seldom reads books, and is this book's ideal reader.

-Sample stanza: And every farmer in the land Up on his hind legs will stand And the laborer at his job And the soldier and the gob.

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