There was a loud thud at the foot of my door as 1184 pages of theory hit the floor.
Written as a trilogy between 1930 and 1936, the texts both biographically and through fictional short stories, use an experimental technique to explore the history of American society during the first three decades of the twentieth century.
For the sake of this blog I’ll be analysing four important pieces from the final book in the trilogy ‘The Big Money,’ which covers the pursuit of wealth and improvement, which ultimately always ends in emotional or social tragedy.
First, ‘Tin Lizzie,’ otherwise known as the story of Henry Ford and the manufacture of the Model T (the world’s first mass produced automobile). Ford’s dream and perseverance to make travel easy, affordable and simple was quite admirable. Always obsessed with technology and machinery he left his father’s farm to become an inspirational figure that revolutionised the way that products are produced in the modern industry. A shrewd businessman, who was very careful with his money, Ford looked down upon those who were less so, often driving various dealerships that fell into debt out of business. Despite this his intentions seemed to be good, and he paid the working man very well. The problem came when his model of mass manufacture became too succesful. The very idea of mass production that was founded with such good intent had become its own being, with men not making anything any longer, becoming like parts in a machine. The motor industry got bigger and bigger, faster and faster and Ford, trying to rein his Frankenstein like creation is unable to.
When the bubble burst in the stock market crash Ford refused work to those in debt. Eventually, a victim of his own struggle and strive to make the world a better place, he ends up an ‘old antiquarian’ who rebuilds his father’s farm with only a horse track.
I believe that Ford is the prime example of how somebody with the best of intentions can be destroyed by the mass market. It was the greed, and perceived need for more and more rather than just enough that turned an efficient practice of industry into an undervalued and low paid profession that we see in the world today. It is altogether tragic that a man that created so much opportunity and had so much, in fact, had so little. The downside to the American dream.
‘The Bitter Drink’ looked at Thorstein Veblen. A Norwegian Professor living in the USA, Veblen wrote a number of papers on American society from the ‘commoners’ point of view, in such a way that they didn’t even realise they were being written about. Veblen despised the capitalist society and the pursuit of fame and money and wandered from job to job throughout his life, never feeling as if he had really achieved anything even requesting that when he die there be no funeral or portrait for him. On the initial face of it I pitied Veblen, and it seemed sad that someone of such great intellect could feel as if he had achieved so little. However, on further reflection, and perhaps even more tragically, Veblen was in fact someone to be admired for being incorruptible unlike some, and his ideas were simply quashed my capitalisms might and power. Less we forget that the Berlin wall only fell around twenty five years ago, a relatively short time. Now, bar minor exceptions, we here virtually nothing of communism or its underlying principles.
In the tragic tale of ‘Adagio Dancer,’ Dos Passos writes of the life if the iconic actor Rudolph Valentino. A troubled Italian boy with little direction, he was sent abroad to earn money, but when he arrived didn’t want to take on a conventional job. He dreamed of being successful and soon became involved in dance. Thrust at a dramatic speed into the spotlight of Hollywood film, Valentino had become an enormous success and achieved his dream, but what came with it he was unable to handle. An attractive and slightly effeminate man, he was doted on by female fans and subsequently disliked by men. His following grew incredibly, and the stress of wondering what the people thought of him and pleasing them finally took its toll. Affecting his personal life he was constantly married and divorced, and suffered scandalous media concocted stories. He eventually contracted a gastric ulcer that worsened and he died at just 31, causing mass hysteria among female fans. 100,000 people lined the streets of New York at his funeral.
I think this biographical insight probably disturbed me the most due to the amazing number of parallels that can be seen with it and the society we live in today. Celebrity culture seems to be growing and an uncontrollable rate and the amount of pressure heaped on those who achieve this success is completely disproportionate to those they support.
‘Architect’ looks at the life of Frank Lloyd Wright covering his early career as well as his new and revolutionary style and experimentation in new materials. Wright shared an architectural vision with Adler & Sullivan but with what I perceive to be an essential difference. Whilst Sullivan believed that this vision in organic form was the key to a new architecture, Wright saw that he was the mechanism for this organic form. Sullivan ended up initially as an unrecognised great but Wright thrived and his arrogance and celebrity led to the ‘pure’ architecture envisioned by Sullivan becoming corrupted by events such as the Chicago World’s Fayre (another gathering of mass media). Wright’s projects soon ended up un-built, being commissioned for the wealthy elites who only wished to increase their social status.
Throughout his life he loses wives, dices with bankruptcy and has problems with the law but I can’t say that I would put Wright in the same category as Ford and especially not Veblen, as his arrogance and pursuit of his dream was on a level that was never set out to achieve a greater good, but fuel his own arrogance and personal achievement. Happy to exploit the masses when he thought necessary.
Despite my disagreement with Dos Passos’s view on Wright, the biographical pieces are written to show the tragedy of the American dream. In its pursuit, great things can be achieved. But often the success that comes from what they ultimately wanted costs them a great deal. Dos Passos sheds light onto a society that is viewed as the ideal free world, where anything can be achieved, but if you scrape the shine of this surface promise, what this achievement truly leads to is a society conspicuously without happiness.
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