The pattern in which a nation allows its liberties to be subverted and destroyed is a familiar one. It is often thought that certain peoples, like the Germans and Russians, are more susceptible to authoritarianism than others. One stereotype of the American—descendant of Minute Men, the man who hates cops, the fan who cherishes his right to boo the umpire—has contributed to the impression that this submissiveness to authority has never been a part of the American character. Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Dos Passos’s District of Columbia, and the novels about dictators in southern states raise some doubts about the validity of this fundamental assumption. Each of these novelists seems to feel that the American citizen could well wake up one morning to find his rights gone as did the German citizen of the early thirties. Lewis dramatizes this catastrophe on a national scale, while Dos Passos, Warren, and Langley present it on the state level. Dos Passos, all through his trilogy, writes such frequent exhortations to vigilance that there is little doubt that he too has worries on this score. In Stranger Come Home Shirer centers his fire on McCarthyism, but he also goes back into history to recall the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the domestic anti-German violence of World War I. The popular press and magazines may represent the American as one who hearkens to the great voices on each Fourth of July and understands what he is doing when he raises his banner on Flag Day. The novelist often has serious doubts that he does.
Europeans have called the United States immature in world affairs. At least one of the novels in this group examines this accusation, and two others consider the same theme of irresponsibility on the national level. In both A Fool’s Errand and Bricks Without Straw Tourgée accused the federal government of irresponsibility. There is a close parallel between this case and the one Europeans have made. Pursuing an ideal, at least in part, the United States musters its enormous industrial and economic potential, puts its great strength into the field, and wins military victory. After talking a great deal about what should be done, it sets up committees which write many reports. Then the nation promptly forgets the problems of victory and happily returns to consideration of the tariff question or who is going to win the World Series. In the latter of his two books, Tourgée writes that the Northern statesmen and political writers seemed always to assume that the destruction of slavery would cure all the ills of the Negro. With a typical flourish, he adds:
The Nation gave the jewel of liberty into the hands of the [Negroes], armed them with the weapons of self-government, and said: “Ye are many; protect what ye have received.” Then it took away its hand, turned away its eyes, closed its ears to every cry of protest or of agony, and said: “We will not aid you nor protect you. Though you are ignorant, from you we will demand works of wisdom. Though you are weak, great things shall be required at your hands.” Like the ancient taskmaster, the Nation said: “There shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks.”
Nearly seventy years later, in The Crack in the Column, Weller said virtually the same thing. But this time both the problem and the stakes were global.
The picture of American politics which emerges from the political novel is an unflattering one. Although the “smoke-filled room” may be a cliché in the newspapers, it is a fact in the novel. The deck of candidates is shuffled, cut, and dealt—often from the bottom. The national conventions are a combination of circus spectacle and cynical chicanery. And after campaigns financed by funds from special interest groups, the people’s chosen representatives get down to the serious business of paying off their debts while lining their pockets. The crusaders for liberty and justice who appear can be set off against these political liabilities. But the electorate in whose behalf they struggle often seems unaware of the importance of the fight. Inheritors of a tradition of dissent and individual freedom, they are fair game for demagogues. They are also easy marks for the revolutionaries who, for perverted purposes, exploit their sincere but naïve desire for social and economic reform. Although the Republic somehow seems to weather periods of internecine violence and reversion to authoritarian rule, its citizens have a bad case of myopia in the field of foreign affairs. There are indications, though, that the corrective lenses bought in two world wars are beginning to bring distant events into focus. The American novelist’s view of his own political arena agrees surprisingly well with many foreign estimates of it. The American seems like an immature giant who tolerates much rough behavior but rushes into conflict when he feels that his basic security is threatened. Now the giant seems to be settling down. Still likely to make violent moves, he is acquiring some of the political sophistication that was, perhaps, too early expected of him.
ITALY: A SELF-PORTRAIT
After a quarrel with Jean Colbert, Tony Maggiore in Caesar’s Angel berates her friend Al Piazza: “You talk so big about it making no difference between American and Italian girls. You ever hear a good Italian girl open her mouth about politics? You hear her insulting the men?” This assertion is contradicted by Stella in Silone’s A Handful of Blackberries, but even were it completely true, it would be one of the minor differences between American and Italian political behavior patterns. Immensely different historical antecedents separate the two peoples. The Italian, with a background of autocratic rule except for comparatively short intervals, has played his political role on a far different stage from that of the American. But there is more to it than just politics. The economic bases which help to form political groups have produced in Italy a stratification in which the layers are more widely separated than any in America. The migrant fruit pickers, the dust-blown Okies, the exploited miners in America seem well off beside the systematically persecuted peasants and submerged city lumpenproletariat of Italy. The Italians at the other end of the scale are just as far from the norm. Gould, Fisk, and Vanderbilt may have owned railroads, but Prince Torlonia owns immense ranges of the Roman and Tuscan countryside, together with 35,000 acres of the Fucino basin worked by eleven thousand farmers. But this great gulf between classes is only one of the factors which appear responsible for Italy’s political ills.
Silone concentrates mainly upon the peasantry in his novels. His heart is close to them, and his description is sympathetic. But he does more than set forth their sufferings. His books also diagnose the cause of their problems and suggest solutions. Many of his peasants appear like credulous, superstitious children. The four-day thunder and lightning storm which nearly sweeps Pietrasecca off its mountain in Bread and Wine is blamed upon two lovers who have gone to live in a house considered damned. Don Paolo watches the gathering of a crowd which is swept into such a hysteria by its roar of “CHAY DOO! CHAY DOO! CHAY DOO!” that it forgets to listen to the oracular radio voice it has come to hear. Silone pities them: “a people whose wisdom was summed up in a few proverbs passed down from generation to generation, had been literally submerged and overwhelmed by propaganda.” Don Paolo also blames this ignorance upon the Church in Italy. Like his teacher Don Benedetto, who was said to have called the reigning pontiff “Pope Pontius XI,” Don Paolo feels that Italy needs
A Christianity denuded of all mythology, of all theology, of all Church control; a Christianity that neither abdicates in the face of Mammon, nor proposes concordats with Pontius Pilate, nor offers easy careers to the ambitious, but rather leads to prison....
Silone’s hero is equally dissatisfied with a religious vocation which withdraws from life. He talks with the beautiful and spiritual Christina, who devoutly waits to enter the convent: