In his “Afterword” to Coniston (1906), Winston Churchill wrote that “many people of a certain New England state will recognize Jethro Bass.” But he denied that his book was a biography and added that “Jethro Bass was typical of his Era, and it is of the era that this book attempts to treat.” Beginning his story shortly after Andrew Jackson had entered the White House, Churchill traces Bass’s subsequent control of Coniston, Truro County, and then of the entire state (probably New Hampshire). His original lever is a sheaf of mortgages. Through this power over his mortgagers, he places his men (also mortgage holders) in office and builds his machine. By 1866 Bass has gained control of the state, which he runs from his room in the Pelican Hotel in the capital. He has transferred his devotion from his dead sweetheart, Cynthia Ware, to her child, Cynthia Wetherell. His chief source of income is the railroad lobby, which pays handsomely for the legislation it purchases through the state legislature from him.
When Cynthia leaves him on learning his political methods, the saddened Bass begins to let his power slip away. The industrial and railroad interests start to combine while the Harwich bank stands by with mortgage money to help destroy his control. But Bass returns to fight one more battle when magnate Isaac Worthington has Cynthia dismissed from her school-teaching job and disinherits his son Bob for wanting to marry her. Mustering his power in the legislature and showering Worthington with adverse decisions from supreme court judges he has made, Bass blocks Worthington’s railroad consolidation bill. After compelling him to consent to the marriage and write conciliatory letters to the lovers, Bass lets the bill go through.
In Mr. Crewe’s Career (1908), set twenty years later, Churchill described the power shift Bass had foreseen. The legislature is now owned by Augustus Flint, Worthington’s former “seneschal” who controls the Northeastern Railroad. His “captain-general” who rules from Bass’s old room in the Pelican is railroad counsel Hilary Vane. The star-crossed lovers in this novel are Victoria Flint and Austen Vane. Austen fights the railroads despite his father and foresees the day when a new generation, willing to assume its political responsibilities, will turn out the railroad group. After a quarrel, Hilary leaves Flint but agrees to stay on for the gubernatorial nomination battle. As Flint watches Vane stalk from his study he sees “the end of an era of fraud, of self-deception, of conditions that violated every sacred principle of free government which men had shed blood to obtain.” Out of loyalty to his father, Austen refuses to let his name go before the convention, but he says that it does not matter, for railroad power is doomed. The book closes with a purple passage in which Austen and Victoria tell their love to each other and watch the sunset over the river.
Harvey Sayler relates his rise to boss of the Republican Party in David Graham Phillips’ The Plum Tree (1905). His springboard is a combine, financed by a dozen companies forming the Power Trust in his own mid-western state, which will establish its own control over the state legislature rather than dealing through middlemen such as Bill Dominick, brutal saloonkeeper and politician. By placing his own men in key positions and corporation-control statutes on the state books, Sayler makes the combine completely his own. After using this combination to ruin a rebellious “robber baron,” Sayler’s rule is unquestioned. He becomes a president-maker, later allowing his creature to return to political obscurity as the price for revolt against his authority. A penitent widower at the book’s end, he is accepted by his scrupulous childhood sweetheart.
Jack London: Marxism v. Fascism, Early Phase
Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) is unique for three reasons. It is one of the first relatively modern American novels which preaches Marxism, warns against Fascism, and is set in the future. Set in the twenty-seventh century, four hundred years after the Brotherhood of Man had overthrown the three-century-old Oligarchy, the novel is the annotated manuscript of Avis Everhard. The wife of Socialist leader Ernest Everhard, she is executed with him after the failure of the Second Revolt, which appears to have occurred sometime after 1918. A revolutionary Socialist, London attacked the capitalistic system, making its corporations the founders of the ruthless and repressive Oligarchy. London produces quotations from Calhoun, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt warning against the domination of corporations. He describes the police and strike-breaking functions of the Pinkertons in their service, specifically names eleven industrial groups said to dominate the United States in 1907, and chronicles the efforts of the labor movements for better working conditions. Sometimes maudlin and at other times vituperative, London nevertheless gives a frightening vision of a totalitarian state such as that which later became the actuality described in Silone’s novels of Italy under Mussolini. London anticipates other novels of this type even in particulars, as in the case of his “people of the abyss,” who are purposely degraded and brutalized quite as much as Orwell’s Proles.
James L. Ford, Samuel H. Adams, and Upton Sinclair: Oil Men and Anarchists
James L. Ford’s Hot Corn Ike (1923) deals with political corruption in New York City, at the same time harking back through one of its characters to the Know-Nothing Party and the assassination of Bill Poole. In 1926 Samuel Hopkins Adams’ Revelry moved on to corruption on the national scene. The novel is a roman à clef whose characters have a one-for-one correspondence to the real ones in Sinclair’s Oil! Willis Markham is Warren Harding; Dan Lurcock is Barney Brockway; Anderson Gandy is Senator Crisby. If the reader likes, he can read the latter as a key to the former. Sinclair inundates the reader with a detailed account of the corruption of the Harding era and highlights of the labor movement. He treats the impact of the Russian Revolution upon America and the political implications of American troops fighting the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Following the activities of the I.W.W., he describes the resistance to them which included such measures as California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act. This big book also treats, with the solidity Masters probably meant to achieve, an equally turbulent era in American national development. In Boston Sinclair used even more documentation to relate what he saw as the struggle between capital and labor. Through Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s active career and subsequent struggle for life, the reader meets many of the militant groups in the labor movement in America during the second and third decades of this century. The I.W.W. appears again with anarcho-syndicalists, and anarchists. Sinclair even distinguishes the communisti anarchici from the anarchico individualista. Although the book’s literary merits are submerged by the pamphleteering and passion, it is worth reading for the slice of faintly fictionalized American political history which it presents.
John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell: Communist Infiltration
Like Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Dos Passos’ Adventures of a Young Man deals with Communist infiltration of the American labor movement in the thirties. Giving the reader background material on the militant role of the I.W.W., both novels follow Communist labor organizers into the field among migrant agricultural workers, miners, and industrial workers. Through their characters the novelists reveal not only the immediate goals of the organizers in terms of wages and working conditions, but also the place of these struggles in the plan for a socialistic society. Dos Passos goes even farther in showing the international aspect of these efforts—the sensitivity to the Moscow-formed party line, the submergence of local issues in terms of the overall revolutionary policy.