chapter five
The Novelist as Analyst of Group Political Behavior
The economic criterion is one of two means used by the political novel for classifying groups. The other index identifies groups by means of overt political behavior—party membership, acceptance of discipline, performance of specific acts. These two means of classification are not parallel but complementary. The first, in a sense, serves as a background for the second. Although the first is economic, its validity lies in the fact that party lines tend to follow economic ones, that modern political theory, particularly that of revolution, has been based increasingly upon economic facts as well as political ones. The approach of this chapter differs from that of the previous one in tracing behavior patterns which cut across national lines.
ECONOMIC GROUPS
The Lumpenproletariat
In trying to use these indices of group behavior it is no longer possible to deal in general terms such as “the poor.” Though “proletariat” may be precise enough for Marxism, even this term is too inclusive for close analysis of the material in these novels. Several gradations are possible within this least fortunate group on the economic scale. Professor Ambrogio Donini’s introduction to the Italian edition of The Pine Tree and the Mole identifies the lowest group in that novel as members of the lumpenproletariat. These people are not the workers whose taking of the factories Taddei fleetingly mentions. They are the lowest stratum of Livorno’s life, the drifters and criminals from whom the Fascists recruited members for their Black Shirt squads. It is their motivation as much as their behavior which differentiates them from the workers. While groups of militant workers are usually presented as trying to better the lot of their whole group, these members of the lumpenproletariat seem to be entrepreneurs. Rubachiuchi becomes an agent provocateur for the Fascists not to help the poverty-stricken, but simply to help himself. After he infiltrates an anarchist group, he aids in its destruction, not because he is personally opposed to anarchism, but because this is the job his employers are paying him to do. Very often in these novels one encounters Communists trying to destroy Socialists ostensibly because Socialism is thought to be a palliative rather than a solution to the worker’s problems. But these underworld figures do not have even this theoretical justification.
Although this group is not nearly so numerous in the novel as many others, its representatives occasionally appear. In Fontamara, Peppino Goriano returns to Fontamara after thirty-five years, some of them spent in a “political career” in Rome. A good man, he had been forced by starvation to become an agent provocateur for the police. He had earned five lire a day plus a twenty-five lire bonus each time a job resulted in his going to the hospital. For a brief time he had been a hero after a picture of him helping to wreck a Communist newspaper office had appeared in a newspaper. But the “Hero of Porta Pia” lost the honest job he had finally found when it was decided that “fascism could no longer shelter in its bosom such delinquents as had been convicted several times for theft.” Pablo in For Whom the Bell Tolls is a study in deterioration. A cruel but effective anti-Fascist at the beginning of the war, he is found by Robert Jordan to be a sotted semi-bandit who opposes Jordan’s blowing of the bridge. Having lost control of the band to his woman Pilar, Pablo tries unsuccessfully to forestall the demolition by stealing part of Jordan’s equipment. Although he leads the retreat after the bridge is blown, Pablo is no longer one of the “illusioned ones.” He is a guerrilla who retains only his violence and a dominating desire for survival. Old Zaccaria in A Handful of Blackberries is a bandit first and a partisan second. He had received a decoration for a crippling encounter with a German patrol, but the source of the battle was a truckload of cheese which he intended for the black market rather than a desire to free Italy. These characters are not nearly such low forms of life as some of the members of Taddei’s lumpenproletariat, but they are a part of that group to be found on the fringes of most political conflicts, individuals motivated by desire for personal gain rather than by principle.
Peasants
Almost as submerged in the economic structure is the peasant class. Here too there are extra-national similarities. The paisans of Silone and Taddei and the muzhiks of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky have characteristics in common. Ground down by oppression and exploitation, they engage in political action only as a result of outside stimulation rather than as a result of spontaneous desire among themselves. Often they may be too devitalized even to do that. When Bazarov in Fathers and Sons tells the peasants that they are the hope of Russia, he does not suspect “that in their eyes he was all the while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.” In a more subtle way Don Paolo tries to awaken the peasants of Pietrasecca in Bread and Wine. He has a little success with parables, but a direct attack upon issues produces nothing. When he goes to Fossa he asks the lawyer Zabaglione about peasant participation in the now disbanded Socialist Leagues. Zabaglione tells him:
What Socialism meant to most of them was a chance to work and eat till their stomachs were full, to work and sleep in peace, without having to be afraid of the morrow. In the league premises at Fossa, next to the bearded portrait of Karl Marx, there was a picture of Christ in a red shirt. On Saturday nights the peasants came to the league to sing “Up, brothers! Brothers, arise!” and on Sunday morning they went to Mass to say “Amen.” The permanent occupation of a Socialist leader was writing recommendations.
The American representatives of this class seem much the same. Garland’s A Spoil of Office follows the abortive political careers of the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance. Bradley Talcott sees this latter movement as “the most pathetic, tragic, and desperate revolt against oppression and wrong ever made by the American farmer.” His guiding star Ida puts it even more simply: “While our great politicians split hairs on the tariff, people starve. The time has come for rebellion.” Conditions in Iowa have changed eighty years later, but in the deep South they are almost as bad. William Russell’s A Wind Is Rising (1950) focuses on Negro tenant farmers charged 500 per cent interest by the landowners and cheated of part of the cotton crop they succeed in raising.
Whether he is Prince Torlonia or a Russian noble, the large landholder is most often seen in the novel as the embodiment of the forces which keep the peasant class in subjection. Men like Nikolai Kirsanov in Fathers and Sons may attempt to improve conditions, but the predominant pattern is one of exploitation which eventually produces violence. At the end of A Handful of Blackberries the peasants kill a bailiff when they invade the Tarocchi pasture lands they believe to be rightfully theirs. Debased and deprived, lacking political awareness, and incited by members of other classes, the peasant group turns to violence. In some areas of the world, particularly the United States and England, a steady economic evolution has tended to eliminate large segments of this group. The Russian peasant appears still to be a peasant, even though he may be a Stakhanovite worker in a large kolkhoz. But where the class still exists in a society in which violent protest is still possible, the pattern appears unchanged.
Labor
Commenting on one of the causes of the failure of the farmers’ movements of the seventies, Garland said: “They had made the mistake of supposing that the interests of merchant, artisan, and mechanic were also inimical.” In the novel these interests are not at all inimical. They are rather parallel, for the labor movement (which includes the last two groups mentioned by Garland) has as its natural antagonist the moneyed class to which the peasants’ adversaries belong. And in the novel the laborer is treated as sympathetically as the peasant, with the single exception of Disraeli’s Sybil, which gives an antagonistic picture of the trade unions. But there are two significant differences between the peasant class and the industrial labor class. The latter has adopted different methods and has met with a large degree of success.
The political behavior and history of the labor movement emerges very clearly in the novel. This group fought its first violent battles to achieve organization. When this was accomplished, concerted action in which the strike was the principal weapon was begun to attain better working standards. In societies in which unions are still free, the strike has retained its tactical importance, but it has been accompanied by progressively less violence. And as strife has decreased, a more effective technique has taken its place. The labor movement has gone into politics. The most overt form of this policy is the formation of a labor party like the one so successful in England. Less direct but still effective is the method used by American unions of supporting the party which seems most likely to serve labor’s interests. Peasants’ leagues and farmers’ groups had been formed to take direct political action, but none achieved such spectacular success as these labor groups. Unlike the peasants, the laborers had to a large extent provided their own leadership. Indicative of their more cohesive and militant nature is the frequently expressed distrust of people in the movement coming from non-labor classes. In Marcella the radical Nemiah Wilkins is suspicious of Socialist Harry Wharton. He feels that he is too well dressed and educated to lead a labor movement, and he looks forward to the day when they “would be able to show these young aristocrats the door.” Penelope Muff, a dedicated organizer in Fame Is the Spur, has the same feeling toward two women who work actively in the Socialist cause. They give both time and money, but to Pen they are outsiders taking a dilettante interest in the poor.
That labor’s energies would be channeled into politics rather than violence seemed at one time impossible. Looking back at his youth, Tom Wilcher recalls in To Be a Pilgrim that then “the rich men were still boundless in wealth and arrogance; the poor were in misery, and neither saw any possibility of change without the overthrow of society.” But the labor movement made the transition from a mob to a party. Pen Muff and Hamer Shawcross had seen it achieved when Keir Hardie, wearing a cloth cap rather than a top hat, drove down London’s streets in a wagonette instead of a brougham to take his seat in the House of Commons. And labor remained so conscious of its class origins that Shawcross seemed guilty almost of blasphemy years later when, as a Labourite minister, he wore his ceremonial uniform with its sword and cocked hat. Figures in the novel recall the lines from Browning’s The Lost Leader about the man who had betrayed his group “just for a riband to stick in his coat.” Such a one is Hamer Shawcross. Another is Chester Nimmo. Their supposed betrayal seems more heinous because of this class consciousness. Dick Remington may change from Liberal to Tory with a minimum of obloquy, but when Shawcross enters a wartime coalition government he is a Judas.
When Sinclair published Oil! in 1926 he saw the activities of the labor movement almost completely in terms of a class struggle. But it was an index of the relative progress of the American movement as compared with the English that strike violence remained the chief weapon on this side of the Atlantic. Two years later, in Boston, the situation was worse. He wrote that Massachusetts had “evolved a complete technique of labor smashing” in which a strike-breaking department developed in the Boston police force was rented out to manufacturers in neighboring towns. He concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti were not convicted and executed for a fatal armed robbery. They were killed because they represented the forces of social revolt to the banking and industrial interests which felt themselves critically threatened. Even eight years later, In Dubious Battle represented large segments of the labor group as ill-treated men whose efforts to attain better wages and working conditions were opposed, not only by the employers, but by the forces of the state as well. It is in Dos Passos’ books that the American labor movement is seen making the transition from economic to political action. In Adventures of a Young Man the pecan-shellers, the miners, the auto-workers are organized as forces which will obtain concessions through direct economic action rather than legislation. But The Grand Design shows labor at work within the Democratic Party. There is no nationwide labor party, but the votes of the labor group are marshalled in support of candidates whose programs will provide them with legislative relief.
The continental labor movements, particularly the Italian, are portrayed in the novel as having a greater history of violence and misfortune than those in either England or the United States. Taddei’s Socialist workers take over their factories at gun point. Silone’s laborers are victimized by The Promoter. Koestler’s Rubashov recalls his mission of telling Little Loewy that the interests of his Belgian dock workers were to be subordinated to those of Russia. Similarly, the Fascists had destroyed the Italian labor movement for the purposes of the corporate state. And, of course, the classic irony was the full name for which “Nazi” stood: National Socialist German Workers Party.
The behavior patterns of the labor movement traced in the novel reveal gradual change. A more homogeneous and dynamic group than the peasants, labor has just as extensive a heritage of exploitation and strife. Although leadership has sometimes come from outside their class, it has been provided to a large extent by a dedicated and indigenous elite. Whole national labor movements have been submerged under totalitarianism; others have appeared to be sacrificed as pawns by leaders intent upon personal aggrandizement. But as the movement has matured, old weapons have been used with increasing moderation and new ones have been added to the arsenal. Organs such as the CIO Political Action Committee appear in none of the novels in this study, but such instruments typify the new tactics by which gains are obtained through political pressure. The archetype, of course, is England’s Labour Party, which, in assuming national power, has had to make the final transition by directing legislation which should benefit not only its own members but those of all classes of the nation. This represents an evolutionary development which is a reflection of some of the English national characteristics seen in the novel. Perhaps one ends not with a conclusion but with a question. The conservatives and liberals, the Republicans and Democrats, derive their strength from areas which are fairly well defined but which to some extent cut across economic and occupational lines. Can an instrument forged in hottest partisan conflict discharge the responsibility which comes with the attainment of the goal of political power? Can it legislate for a society, or will its antecedents compel it to serve a special interest group?
Proletarians
During the thirties members of the peasant and labor groups were the subject of a literary movement which produced the proletarian novel. This type of novel is generally unsatisfactory for the study of group behavior patterns considered here since its emphasis is much more sociological than political. There are some exceptions, however. The Iron Heel, Man’s Fate, and In Dubious Battle have been called proletarian novels. Other proletarian novels not included in this study were written by Dos Passos, Farrell, Shaw, and Silone. The two novels by Malraux and Steinbeck straddle the line between the political and the proletarian. This is also true of A Wind Is Rising, which came after the movement as such had spent itself but which concentrated upon one of its favorite subjects, the southern sharecropper. Some of the proletarian novels have political overtones. Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire (1932), which was meant as his contribution to the proletarian cause, followed the career of Red Oliver as a Communist labor organizer in southern textile mills. Like Jim Nolan, he is shot to death. But this novel does not reveal as fully as Steinbeck’s book the part of the Communist Party’s labor strategy in its overall plan. The men of Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer are proletarians, members of the Irish Republican Army fighting the British. But in its most common form, the proletarian novel stopped just short of political action. It would present in dramatic fashion the conditions under which the members of this actually diverse group lived. If they took positive action, it was usually to join a union or the Communist Party. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath shows the broad scale social delineation the proletarian novel permits; it also shows clearly that though its ultimate aim may be political, its primary textual emphasis is not.
The Middle Class
The middle class is not as well represented as other groups in the political novel. Of course, definition is a problem. In terms of economics, Glenn Spotswood and Robert Jordan are members of the middle class. In terms of politics, however, they are not bourgeois but intellectuals, Jordan a liberal and Spotswood a radical. Perhaps the true middle class does not provide enough drama for the novelist who deals with politics. Most of the people in It Can’t Happen Here are middle class citizens, but they do not move and act in their normal environment. Their apathy has permitted the rise of a dictatorship, forcing them into the role of the persecuted or the underground fighter. Most often a novelist using a middle class hero will work a transformation upon him in which he changes his class identity. He will, like Glenn Spotswood, cast his lot with the class economically below his. Or, like Harvey Sayler in The Plum Tree, he will rise above it through political advancement which brings him power and wealth. In rare cases, the hero will manage to ride both horses at once. Peter Stirling, in Ford’s novel, will obviously be a successful candidate for the governorship of New York. But his stepping stone has been nearly twenty years of work in New York City’s tenement-ridden Sixth Ward. Ford’s style virtually guarantees that Stirling will be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl by the end of the book, but his career too makes it impossible to label him a member of the middle class from which he started. In The Grand Design Dos Passos sometimes shows the middle class Washington office worker. Throughout District of Columbia, particularly in his prose poems, he refers to or quotes members of this class along with the executives and laborers. But there is such diversity that it is difficult to draw conclusions. Perhaps this difficulty in discerning pronounced patterns is in itself an indication of the nature of this class. Midway between the economic and political extremes, it has a leavening of the characteristics of both. But the political figure who comes from the middle class most often leaves it. If he does not, he apparently has less interest for the political novelist.
The Rich and Well Born
The economic and social upper classes appear in more different hues than any other class. They vary all the way from “red” millionaires like Oil!'s Bunny Ross to the same novel’s many “malefactors of great wealth.” Except for Disraeli’s heroes, his aristocrats are very often those usually described as “the product of exhausted loins.” Unless members of the English aristocracy take an active interest in the welfare of the classes below their own, they are usually portrayed as despising them. George Meredith’s aristocrat appears to hate these occupants of a world different from his. The Debarry family in Felix Holt has humanitarian impulses, but its political action is directed toward maintaining its elevated position. Trollope’s aristocratic Liberals make efforts toward legislation which will reduce inequities, but far more typical is the old Earl, “Buck” Lostwithiel in Fame Is the Spur. A wringer of the poor and accident-maker for inconvenient opponents, he is deterred from horsewhipping Hamer Shawcross only by a raised sabre.
The evil aristocrat is not so common in the American novel as in the English. Mrs. Stowe and Tourgée portray him during the latter half of the nineteenth century in the South. Sinclair’s Back Bay Brahmins, years later, take violent action, sticking neither at hypocrisy nor dishonesty, to assert a form of slavery which is more economic than legislative. But aside from villains such as those in The Plum Tree, whose power actually comes more from money than lineage, the villainous role is usually assigned to the industrialist rather than the blueblood. This may be a substantiation of the charge that the primary aristocracy of America is one of wealth rather than breeding or cultivation. The Italian noble class is consistently portrayed as an oppressor no matter what the form of government under which it operates. Serfs are freed and reforms are instituted in Fathers and Sons, but offstage are the sounds of floggings and the murmurs of oppressed victims. The Marchesa Raversi’s Liberal Party in The Charterhouse of Parma is anything but liberal. Individuals like the radical poet Ferrante Palla find as little favor with her as they do with the absolutist Ernesto IV. Separated from these nobles by time and space, Malraux’s Ferral and his backers have as little sympathy for the Chinese on whom they thrive as does Fabio Conti for Parma’s commoners.
There are some good aristocrats in the political novel. All of Disraeli’s Young England heroes approach politics with high seriousness and dedication. Coningsby is so suffused with virtue that he keeps his purity unsullied at the expense of losing his inheritance. Tancred’s politics are intermingled with a religious mysticism that leads him to the Holy Land. Meredith’s Beauchamp is such an emotional firebrand in his radical convictions that he makes Disraeli’s young men look like mild and high minded Rover Boys. But he belongs to their class. A little farther down on the social and economic scale is Cary’s Edward Wilcher. A politician of entirely different kidney from these zealous young men, he is a sophisticated and cynical careerist who writes embarrassing epigrams about members of his own party. But he is like the others in his concern for progressive legislation rather than perpetuation of the privileges of his own social group. Augustine St. Clare is one of Mrs. Stowe’s better slave-owners. He is obviously on his way to salvation, partly through the influence of saintly Uncle Tom, when he is untimely carved by a bowie-knife wielded in a fight he has attempted to stop. It is this accident which prevents him from freeing Tom. Churchill’s Humphrey Crewe is an eccentric and fatuous ass, but his intentions are pure gold. He seeks office because he believes he can benefit the state. In The Grand Design, Jed Farrington refers to “the Squire in the White House and his big business friends.” But it is clear in the book that though Big Business may conceivably have derived some benefits from the Roosevelt administrations, this descendant of New York state patroons was politically oriented toward less pedigreed groups. If one were to compile a balance sheet for this class, however, the villains would far outnumber the heroes.
Good men of wealth are even harder to find in this group of novels than good aristocrats. Disraeli’s magnates are the type who in modern America receive awards from chambers of commerce and engraved gold watches from deputations of employees. Elsewhere, the industrialist is a top-hatted advocate of laissez-faire economics whose wealth is acquired more through the sweat of his underprivileged workers than by his own acumen. Millbank in Coningsby and Trafford in Sybil are rising merchant princes who are considerate of their workers and industrially progressive. But either they are ahead of their time or the industrialists who follow them in the novel are throwbacks to a more primitive industrial era. In The New Machiavelli Dick Remington’s uncle is presented as a reactionary beast. His Newcastle pottery factory produces death as well as cups and saucers. He is as unwilling to install fans that will carry off the deadly fumes from the lead glaze as he is to concede any rights at all to his workers. The Rhondda Valley, where Pen Muff goes as the bride of union official Arnold Ryerson, has more than its share of Welsh women widowed by the coal mines. The management group remains in the background of this novel, but the miners’ efforts to obtain concessions which would now seem minimal are evidence of an attitude not dissimilar to that of Dick Remington’s uncle. In Conrad’s Nostromo Charles Gould has justified his decisive intervention in Costaguanan politics by declaring that he was providing order which would benefit the natives as well as himself. Gould’s political commitment gives rise to one of the central problems of the novel—the extent to which his soul has been eroded to insure the undisturbed flow of the bright silver ingots from the San Tomas mine. Gould is not the only victim of his obsession. The other is his wife, who is all but shut out of vital areas of his life and thought. Early in the book he gives her his rationale:
I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope.
All of the lobbying groups in the American novels are financed by industrial wealth. Whether the checks are signed by railroaders, utilities operators, or oil men, their purpose is the same: to apply pressure which will gain concessions. And, of course, in many cases these concessions cause a direct or indirect loss to citizens in lower income brackets. In The Plum Tree Harvey Sayler uses his power to make an example of one of these men, “the greediest and cruelest ‘robber baron’ in the West.” The lords of Jack London’s Oligarchy specialize in the repression of workers with frequent resort to calculated mass murder. The climate had changed by the time Dos Passos wrote The Grand Design, but he included the lineal descendant of these predators. Jerry Evans retains a substantial interest in his economic welfare even as coordinator of Roosevelt’s War Procurement Board. Columnist Ed James’s off-the-record analysis is that
All Jerry can think of in the emergency is to use it to turn things back into the business as usual channels an’ we all know that in the southeast at least business as usual means Jerry Evans’ business. Of course he has cleared his skirts technically by resignin’ from the directorates of most of his corporations.... But they are still his corporations.
Individuals of wealth in the novel may derive their money from farming rather than industry, but unenlightened self-interest is still the chief motivating factor. This is the case with the powerful ones in A Wind Is Rising. Mulcting their sharecroppers, they derive added revenue from convenient prohibition laws. Other Dos Passos characters like Jerry Evans retain their natural roles even within the New Deal. Driving through impoverished Southern counties, Paul Graves is told that “relief is in the hands of the politicians and the politicians are mostly landlords who save it for their own tenants.” Steinbeck’s Fruit Growers Association serves its own interests in a more spectacular way. After an offer of twenty cents an hour fails to satisfy the apple pickers, the fruit growers use strikebreakers, vigilantes, sheriff’s deputies, and then troops to insure a harvest on their terms.
It is curious that one of the American industrialists who approaches goodness should be found in Sinclair’s Oil! As in his other novels, the industrialists are the blackest of the black, but J. Arnold Ross is an exception. An independent oil tycoon who conscientiously tries to see his workers’ point of view, his rapacity is expressed in acquisition of oil lands by varied methods rather than iron-handed labor relations. After his death it is discovered that his business has deteriorated and his assets have melted, partly because of the naval oil lands scandal. But there is also a missing bundle of one million dollars, and at one point suspicion is cast upon his closest associate and friend. The implied moral is probably that Ross’s few unsuppressed humanitarian instincts rendered him less able to survive in this particular jungle. The other sympathetically portrayed man of wealth in this novel is Arnold’s son Bunny. Like Yevgeny Bazarov and his father Vassily, these representatives of two generations are never quite able to bridge the gap which separates them. Bunny loves his father, but his symbolic rejection of him appears on page after page in which he almost frantically disposes of his share of the oil money in subsidizing a leftist paper or attempting to found a labor college. Sinclair’s Cagoulards in Presidential Agent are quite willing to weaken France in order to retain the Skoda munitions works. These Frenchmen are blood brothers of Malraux’s Ferral, who does not see the consequences of his economic interpretation of current history. The aristocrats and the wealthy are united in the Thornewell family in Boston. Fighting on two fronts, they eliminate anarchists and liquidate a parvenu entrepreneur in parallel actions. Sinclair’s judgments of these representatives of the upper class are violent and condemnatory. Sinclair’s condemnation is not quite typical of the political novelists who treat the rich, although more of them approach his position than Disraeli’s. When one compares the literary treatment of the lower classes with that of the upper, the difference is striking. One might explain this superficially on the grounds of distortion for dramatic emphasis, or the use of ready-made heroes and villains. But whatever the reasons, the majority of political novelists have been impelled to sympathize with the lower classes and condemn the upper.
POLITICAL GROUPS
The second criterion for classifying political groups mentioned at the beginning of this chapter was that of overt political behavior. The political novel describes the behavior of the group to which its characters belong, that group which, while seeking office or discharging it, conforms to a set of rules both written and unwritten. From one point of view, these seem almost like the rules for playing a game. From another point of view, they are the principles which must be followed if what passes for success is to be achieved. And these maxims are not merely empty phrases, for in the novel the politicians who flaunt them fail. An oversimplified summary of their content would be: follow party discipline regardless of any other considerations; use any means likely to be effective to gain an advantage over an opponent; follow political courses which are expedient rather than exemplary. One of the most succinct statements of this attitude is made by Senator Ratcliffe in Adams’s Democracy:
If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles.... If virtue won’t answer our purposes, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office....
Office Holders: Rules and Skills
Trollope’s novels constitute an excellent primer for the politician. Phineas Finn’s political eclipses are caused primarily by his persistent habit of voting in accordance with his conscience rather than the Liberal Party line. Edward Wilcher in To Be a Pilgrim takes what he believes will be a vacation from politics after losing his seat in a close election. When he is ready to return, he finds that his party will not have him. His brother Tom reflects, “Perhaps they were always doubtful of him. They may have felt that he wasn’t single-minded enough. They didn’t like his writing, especially things like essays and criticism. Just as the Tories never liked Balfour’s writing philosophy.” When Phineas Finn’s friend the Duke of Omnium becomes Prime Minister, he permits himself the same luxury of being impolitic. The death of the Marquis of Mount Fidgett gives him a chance to award the Order of the Garter, normally given as a party spoil rather than a tribute to merit. When Omnium bestows it upon the good, fuddled, philanthropist Lord Earlybird, he nearly deals the deathstroke to his weakening coalition. Mr. Daubeny, on the other hand, is a consummate artist at the game of politics. Needing a vote of confidence to remain in office, he conjures up a seemingly foolproof and completely hypocritical measure for the test. As the head of the Tories, he introduces a bill for the disendowment of the Established Church. He assumes that the Liberals will be forced to vote for it as legislation they might themselves have proposed. But the Liberals play the expedient game, too, with the result that the Tories support what they are against to remain in office while the Liberals oppose what they are for in order to turn the Tories out. In other novels the conservatives also appear just as adept at rough and tumble politics as their opponents. Lord Lostwithiel hires Tom Hannaway to bribe Hamer Shawcross, who is standing for Parliament against Lord Lostwithiel’s son. When the attempt fails, Tom defames Hamer by asserting that he has done nothing for his mother even though he has had remarkable success. Hamer’s counterstroke is to take the night train to Manchester, pluck his mother from the happy home she shares with another widow, and exhibit her at a rally the next day to refute the charge. The whole atmosphere of English politics seems permeated by vigilance against quick marches. The wife of a cabinet minister, Nina Nimmo remembers the constant intrigues of groups within that small circle. Quite as wary are the rank and file of the House:
Everything they do is meant to have some effect beyond itself. Indeed many ... had got so plotty that everything that happened somewhere was “significant” of some “development.” If you only asked them to take an ice, they looked at you knowingly as if to ask themselves what you were “starting” and why.
The technique of buying off an opponent is more common in the American political novel than in the English. But the attempt to purchase Jack London’s Ernest Everhard is more subtle than that practiced on Hamer Shawcross. Everhard is offered a job as United States Commissioner of Labor. Even though this fee is more respectable than that offered Shawcross, Everhard rejects the offer in order to retain his freedom of action. The ways in which a political opponent can be embarrassed are legion. When Paul L. Ford’s Peter Stirling is called out with his militia regiment to protect six hundred strikebreakers, he is ordered to Grand Central Station, the spot where it is most likely that the militia commander will be forced to order his men to fire upon the strikers. Nick Galt in The Voice of the People makes the Duke of Omnium’s error when he persists in making political appointments on merit. He earns the name of “The Man with the Conscience” but he loses important political support.
“Straws in the wind” may be a journalistic cliché, but the political novel is littered with them. Like Nina Nimmo’s hyper-suspicious acquaintances, they are another index of the complex behavior patterns of highly political groups. The ability to sense the meaning behind occurrences which often seem slight in themselves is another talent of the acute politician. When Jethro Bass, in Coniston, learns that the postmastership of the small town of Brampton is to go to another’s protégé, he realizes that this is the first skirmish in a coming battle for control of the state. His riposte is to take his candidate to Washington. An old soldier, he gains President Grant’s sympathies and the job. The invocation of a dusty city ordinance which pushes James L. Ford’s Hot Corn Ike and his iron kettle off the corner traditionally marks the invasion of Mike Grogan’s ward by reform elements. Willie Stark in All the King’s Men rightly interprets the attempt to indict his state auditor as the first barrage in an attack against him by resurgent opponents. In The Charterhouse of Parma the seemingly imminent execution of Fabrizio del Dongo makes Parma’s incumbent regime totter. The Archbishop is one of the very few acute enough to realize that “honour forbade the Conte to remain Prime Minister in a country where they were going to cut off the head, and without consulting him, of a young man who was under his protection.”
The Mechanics of Control
The mechanics by which power is attained and kept require mastery for successful execution and close observation for understanding. Proficiency in applying these techniques is as much the hallmark of the professional political class as are the basic attitudes of the upper, middle, and lower economic and social classes. If possible, an opponent is thrown off stride before the race begins. Jerome Garwood in The 13th District feels that his renomination to Congress is assured. But he is hurriedly called home to find that control has been wrested from his chief supporter by an opponent who has called an early district committee meeting after taking the precaution of securing enough proxy votes to establish his supremacy. In Number One Dos Passos had noted the importance of seating convention delegations nine years before the celebrated controversies at the Republican national convention of 1952. In this novel Chuck Crawford defeats a rival in seating his delegation to the Democratic convention partly through the offices of friends who have influence in the White House. Often the law is scrutinized for advantages lying buried within it. Hank Martin in A Lion Is in the Streets is swept into office on a tide of votes cast under his “God-blessed Grandpappy Law.” Passed at the state’s 1898 disenfranchising convention, the statute set up educational or property qualifications for voters but made them inapplicable to descendants of men who had voted before 1868. Obtaining photostats of the list of these men, he parcels them out as ancestors to his illiterate followers who would otherwise be unable to vote. Counter-measures against a dangerous opponent include the old dodge of conquering through division. When in All the King’s Men the Harrison city forces want to split the rural “cocklebur vote” of MacMurfee, they see to it that Willie Stark enters the gubernatorial primary election. Of course, if one has sufficient magnetism, he can charm and beguile an opponent out of his path. In The Grand Design hopeful candidate Walker Watson returns from dinner at the White House immensely pleased that the President wants him to “take care of his health.” This solicitude takes the form of advice for a rest on a ranch in Montana before the convention, “and particularly no speeches.”
The mechanics of political success must of course be applied beyond this highly technical behind-the-scenes area. President Roosevelt tells Lanny Budd that he is moving toward alignment with the Allies as fast as public opinion will allow him to go. In a less admirable concern for the same force, Governor Fuller of Massachusetts had denied a last appeal by Sacco and Vanzetti, according to Sinclair, because he wanted the job for which Coolidge did not choose to run. A refinement and elaboration of this technique is used by Senator O’Brien in Stranger Come Home when he tries to time his committee’s most sensational charges to coincide with press time for late newspaper editions.
The organization of political machines is also refined into a science, particularly by people like Hank Martin in A Lion Is in the Streets, who splits his domain into territories and keeps elaborate files, one on promising opposition men who are to be destroyed politically. Methods designed to insure conformity include devices such as the safe deposit boxes of Ben Erik in The City of Anger which contain documentary evidence of the purchase of key city officials. Nor is the psychology of interpersonal relationships forgotten. Jethro Bass in Coniston always remains silent at the beginning of an interview in order to force the other to speak first at a possible tactical disadvantage. Even the protocol of visits is analyzed in The Plum Tree by Harvey Sayler, who believes
there is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing with men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man has in the very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder there—by going to see some one whom he should have compelled to come to him, or by compelling some one to come to him when he should have made the concession of going.
International Communism
Any discussion of group political behavior would be incomplete without mentioning international Communism. Since Stalin’s ascendancy over his domestic opponents in the late 1920s, the Communist movement has increasingly become an instrument of Russian national policy rather than a worldwide movement receiving help from the Soviets. Concomitantly, Communism and Communists in England, the United States, Germany, France, Greece, and China have much in common. An indication of the way in which this force cuts across national lines is the fact that nearly a quarter of all the novels in this study deal in varying degrees with Communism. Even though the behavior of this group is theoretically based upon reinterpreted Marxism, it contains definite patterns which relate to Party discipline, strategy, and tactics which seem organizational rather than ideological. One of the primary ones is the prohibition of original political thought outside the limits laid down in the Kremlin. Deviationism is a cardinal sin which destroys Nicolas Rubashov and endangers Rocco de Donatis. In a pious attempt to avoid such error, Dr. Jane Sparling in The Grand Design immediately consults Elmer Weeks, head of the American Communist Party, to discover the proper attitude when Hitler invades Russia. Another pattern is the interpretation—and use—of every action not in terms of its immediate significance, but of its place in the overall plan. The strikes of miners, apple-pickers, or pecan-shellers are not local disputes between management and labor but battles in the class struggle to be used to educate the masses and provide useful martyrs. But all the while, the pretense that Communism is an international movement must be maintained. In Adventures of a Young Man this view is purveyed to West Virginia miners:
Less Minot got up and said that the American Miners was affiliated with organizations all over the country that was working to overthrow the rotten capitalistic system that kept the working class down to starvation wages with guns and grafting officers of the law, and that if that was being a red, he was glad to be called a red, and as for the Rooshians, he didn’t know much about them, but so far as he could hear tell the working class had overthrown its capitalistic oppressors over there under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party and was running the country in their own interests and was ready to help the workers in other countries to do the same.
In Darkness at Noon this diversion of Communism from the goal of international revolution to the service of the Russian state is clothed in a theory meant to make it both logical and necessary: when world revolution did not follow the Russian Revolution, it was resolved that the primary task was to preserve “the Bastion” in order to protect gains already made and to maintain a base for later advances. Therefore in each country where its activities are revealed, the Communist Party is found to act primarily in the interests of the Soviet Union.
The use of racial minority groups has not been neglected by the Communists. Several recent American novels have touched upon this subject. The most vivid and powerful is Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1947). The book’s nameless protagonist flees the South dogged by discrimination and bad luck. He is drawn into The Brotherhood (a euphemism for the Communist Party) and rises rapidly to become “Spokesman” for the Harlem district. Despite appreciable gains he has made in membership, the young Negro leader is shifted downtown. A bloody riot makes it clear to him that the change in the Party line is deliberate. He finally understands the full meaning of his ideological tutor’s words, “your members will have to be sacrificed.” His break with the Party is basically the same as Glenn Spotswood’s. But here the emotional involvement and subsequent disillusionment are much greater. Farrell makes the same point in Yet Other Waters through the speech of a Socialist Negro labor leader directed at Communists who have come to disrupt a meeting. In a long passage completely italicized for emphasis he says, “You are trying to manipulate and betray my people. You are no friend of the black man or the white man. You are the cancer of the working class. You are the architects of defeat.”
War, no less than domestic conflict, is seen as an opportunity to extend Communism which transcends the immediate national issues. The Spanish Civil War was both a skirmish and a testing ground in which the full extent of Russian intervention was concealed to prevent direct reprisals. In The Grand Design Jed Farrington tells Georgia Washburn: “In the short term war we’re allied to the Squire in the White House and his big business friends but in the long-term war they are our most dangerous enemies.” The subjugation of satellite party interests to Soviet interests is made clear in The Crack in the Column by Moscow-trained Zachariades, who arrives to deliver his post-mortem on the unsuccessful EAM uprisings: “Our friends want no more premature, independent revolutions. They have Italy and Palestine to think of.” Even the details of authorized revolutions are foreseen and attended to. Leaders like Zachariades and Kyo Gisors in Man’s Fate are made to order. Hemingway’s Robert Jordan reflects about the Moscow-trained, bogus peasant leader of the Loyalists, Valentin Gomez: “You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war.... You couldn’t wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manufacture one.” These novels illustrate Communism’s diversity of character and tactics and the rigid discipline it imposes upon its followers under pain of expulsion or death.
Analysis of Mass Phenomena
Interest in mass political phenomena is sometimes expressed by these authors not only through action, but in direct analysis and examination as well. Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle opposes two theorists: McLoed, who thinks this particular strike is a good one because it will give him a chance to “work out some ideas,” and Doc Burton, who serves as the strikers’ doctor to observe contagion in the social body. Sounding more like a social psychologist than a physician, he says
Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This seems to be a bad one. I want to see, Mac. I want to watch these group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all, he’s a cell in an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you.
Like Mac, Jim Nolan is a psychologist of mass violence. He even offers to reopen his wound so that his blood will provide a stimulus for the group to attack the strikebreakers. When the strikers are about to mob one strike leader who has bloodied another, he diverts them from this assault to the one he desires. There are other instances in which a specific theory of the effects of violence is used for political purposes. Just as Dostoyevsky’s Pyotr Verhovensky has his circle kill Shatov to cement them together, so Hemingway’s Pablo had made his townsmen communal executioners of the Fascists: “To save bullets,” explains Pilar, “and so that each man should have his share in the responsibility.” The basic attitudes behind mass political phenomena are analyzed by some of Koestler’s major characters. Both Jules Commanche and Julien Dellatre discuss the ills of France and Western man in general. Their conclusions are very similar to Rubashov’s critique of Communist policy. Finally Koestler himself sums up this consistent point of view when he explains the cause of Hydie’s constant and unsuccessful search in The Age of Longing: “the place of God had become vacant, and there was a draft blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.”