The Sands of Power

MIDCENTURY (496 pp.)--John Dos Passos--Houghton Mifflin ($5.95).

Wars and panics on the stock exchange,

machine gun fire and arson,

bankruptcies, warloans,

starvation, lice, cholera and typhus:

good growing weather for the House of Morgan.

--John Dos Passos' U.S.A.

The villain of John Dos Passos' massive Depression trilogy, U.S.A., was big business. The villain of Dos Passos' latest novel, Midcentury, is big unions. This is certainly the most fascinating fact about the book and possibly the most significant. To Dos Passos, the last quarter-century is an upended hourglass in which the sands of power and the abrasive abuse of power have dramatically shifted.

After decades of diligent work and repeated failure, Novelist Dos Passos has turned back, almost in a gesture of despair, to the exact technique he employed in U.S.A. Slices of fictional personal histories are wedged between slabs of headlines and impressionistic biographic profiles of real-life movers and shapers. Instead of U.S.A.'s sardonic portraits of such tycoons as Carnegie, Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst, there are acid sketches of Dave Beck, Jimmy Hoffa and Harry Bridges. Dos Passos' own fictional characters are manikins, but they acquire a certain animation and excitement by being placed on the revolving stage of 20th century social and intellectual history.

Rebel with Cause. The basic premise of Midcentury is that labor won privileges and power but the individual laborer lost his freedom. He merely exchanged bosses and became the tool of the union leaders. Like a panorama of the labor movement, the individual case histories unfold. Blackie Bowman is one of labor's gabby old soldiers. From the veterans' hospital bed on which he is dying, he does a flashback recall of his life as a seaman, a miner and a wobbly of the I.W.W. Mostly it is a schooling of hard knocks on his own skull, including a stretch in prison.

Blackie is more a knight of the open road than the closed shop. He hops freights from job to job, starves in hobo jungles. He is a philosophical anarchist but a rebel with a lofty cause, the brotherhood of man. Bedeviled by whisky and women, his behavior is far from lofty. He spends half his time righting his course after wronging himself in one inane way or another. Yet labor's first freedom fighters, Dos Passos implies, came from the likes of Blackie Bowman, with his inarticulate urge to dignity and his roundhouse rage for justice.

No Right to Work. For young Terry Bryant, coming home from World War II, the battles of Blackie Bowman are won and done. Labor is not a cause but a kind of male club, possibly even a career. As the happy warrior of a rubber-factory local, Terry rises to shop steward only to discover that his union is run by and for a pair of labor racketeers called the Slansky brothers. Obscenely jeered and jabbed at by the younger Slansky, Terry slugs his tormentor. In seeming collusion with the Slanskys, management promptly fires Terry. Digging up his combat-fatigue history, the Slanskys start a whispering campaign about Terry's sanity. His appeal to the National Labor Relations Board for reinstatement is a bureaucratic farce. With two children and a wife to support, Terry is in the bitterly ironic situation of being a worker without the right to work. He leaves town, starts driving a taxi, and crashes head-on into tragedy.

Barracuda Waters. Not all of Dos Passos' sad sagas involve labor unions. Jasper Milliron is a driving venture capitalist who hopes to give an old-line baking-powder company a technological transfusion. Instead he sees his dream bleed to death in the barracuda waters of corporate executive suites. "Man is a creature that builds institutions," writes Dos Passos. The larger moral of Midcentury is that these institutions in turn grow so big and rigid, corrupt and powerful that they crush and entrap the builders. Whether it is bigness or power spawned by bigness that corrupts, big labor can scarcely deny Dos Passos' damning indictment of the "denial of the working man's most elementary rights, the underworld's encroachment on the world of daily bread, sluggings, shootings, embezzlement, thievery, gangups between employers and business agents, the shakedown, the syndicate, oppression, sabotage, terror."

Liberal critics may be tempted to dismiss Midcentury as a piece of biological conservatism brought on by the author's 66 years. Yet Dos Passos also still tilts at the U.S. commercial spirit. In pages dotted with ad slogans, he even achieves a kind of running parody of the affluent society, e.g., "KEEPS A MAN so ODOR-FREE A BLOODHOUND COULDN'T FIND HIM," "DON'T BE A DISHWASHER. BUY ONE," "IF YOU KNOW THE WOMAN WHO SHOULD HAVE THIS CAR . . ."

Dos Passos has lost much of the freshness, originality and compelling force he had in U.S.A. Still, Midcentury compresses the events of recent decades into a remarkable kind of living newspaper. Yesterday's paper is always dead, but the paper of ten years before yesterday is hypnotically alive. Dos Passos does not try to see beyond the headlines; he knows that history is headlines, plus elapsed time. He lets time itself etch the irony, write the parody, underscore the pathos. To relive history, as Dos Passos makes clear, is not all pleasurable nostalgia; it is also to feel the pain of an intolerable madness.

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