U.S.A. trilogy 355fiction, the trilogy was a significant contribution to
American literature. Unlike Ernest Hemingway and
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passos strove to provide
readers with the equivalent of a cinematic experi-
ence, and his words create a dazzling portrait of a
changing country, what Dos Passos himself called a
“slice of a continent.”
K. E. Birdsall
alienatiOn in the U.S.A. trilogy
Even before knowing himself that his 1930 novel
The 42nd Parallel would be followed by two fur-
ther novels that together form the U.S.A. tril-
ogy—his epic examination of U.S. society, culture,
and politics in the first three decades of the 20th
century—John Roderigo Dos Passos composed a
novel he hoped would illustrate to Americans the
potentially devastating effects of industrialization
and industrial capitalism on U.S. social relations
and politics. Especially in light of the radical shift
in how people began to view capitalism’s influence
on the individual and society as a result of the
stark contrast between the Great Depression of the
1930s and the affluence of the “roaring” 1920s, Dos
Passos felt compelled to describe these changes in all
their complexity. The two following novels—1919,
published in 1932, and The Big Money, published in
1936—therefore extend the scope of the often bleak
picture he paints of American social relations, a pic-
ture that is centrally motivated by what he found to
be one of the fundamental effects of capitalism on
society: alienation.
What exactly is alienation? In the context of
U.S.A., we need to take into account Dos Passos’s
leftist politics, within which alienation is one of
the central factors in the social effects of capital-
ism. Specifically, the form of alienation U.S.A. is
centrally concerned with is capitalism’s tendency
to transform the relationship between people into
one of commodities. In a capitalistic society, people
become “alienated” from others (whom they begin
to treat not as human beings but as competitors,
or objects) and eventually from themselves, as they
have to view themselves primarily not as human
beings but as objects of exchange on the labor mar-
ket. U.S.A. demonstrates this form of alienation in
part via its arrangement. The reader is presented
with a multitude of characters whose narratives
frequently intersect. However, Dos Passos presents
these intersections not as indicative of community
but instead as the absence of community, since the
encounters between characters are often coinciden-
tal, superficial, and generally meaningless. Not one
of the characters in the novels seems to be able to
sustain a permanent relationship with friends, part-
ners, or family members. In fact, characters (such
as Eleanor Stoddard or Margo Dowling) who do,
in fact, survive the struggle with capitalism and its
social consequences, are only able to do so at the
price of submitting to the alienating logic of capital-
ism by sacrificing human relationships. In this way,
Dos Passos represents a fragmented assortment of
individuals who, as a consequence of the influence of
capitalism, are never able to come together as a com-
munity of human beings and hence remain forever
in a state of alienation.
The consequences of capitalism’s alienating effect
on social relationships as represented by Dos Passos
are often tragic, which further underscores the
necessity to situate his perspective, on industrializa-
tion in general and on the 1920s in particular, firmly
within the historical context of the 1930s. A promi-
nent example of such tragic characters is Charley
Anderson. A firm supporter of worker’s rights in
his early life, Charley quickly becomes attracted to
the possibility of making money from his talent for
mechanical engineering. In his relentless pursuit for
money, Charley increasingly abandons his previous
interest in social issues and the treatment of others
for an interest in profit. Ultimately, his sole focus on
profit leads to the tragic death of Charley’s closest
friend and business partner, an event that forces
Charley to reflect upon his change. As a result of
this process of self-reflection, Charley becomes an
alcoholic and eventually dies of peritonitis.
The most despicable characters in U.S.A., how-
ever, are those who have come to accept alienation
as a social logic. It is those characters who represent
the nucleus of U.S.A.’s view of alienation. While
characters such as John Ward Moorehouse, who
marries exclusively for money and judges people
primarily based on their material “value,” are cer-
tainly represented negatively, his assistant Janey, for
whom Moorehouse is a hero and an idol, represents