Staging Modern American Life pp 85-131 | Cite as
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Technology and the Suburban Nightmare in the Plays of John Dos Passos
Abstract
Dos Passos spent much of his childhood in hotel rooms. His mother, the mistress of a prominent attorney, traveled extensively throughout Europe and America with her son, and he grew accustomed to long journeys by steamship and rail. The sights and sounds of a crowded city block, hotel lobby, bustling wharf, and busy thoroughfare signaled home for Dos Passos. This type of landscape not only characterizes much of his fiction, but it also helps explain some of his interest in the theatre, which provides a literal space for recreating these dynamics. As a teenager at the Choate boarding school in Connecticut, he participated actively in drama, often playing the lead in school productions.2 These experiences inspired a lifelong passion for the theatre, and a few years later he decided to write plays “to attract, move and mould an audience” for social change.3
Keywords
Real Estate Home Ownership Consumer Debt Suburban Development Restrictive CovenantPreview
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Notes
- 16.See Gerald Leinwand’s 1927: High Tide of the 1920s (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001), 6.Google Scholar
- 27.Dos Passos, who admired Lawson’s uses of jazz and vaudeville in Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life (1925), wanted to achieve something similar in The Garbage Man(The Moon Is a Gong).As Ryan Jerving has argued, Processional “may be regarded as a kind of demolition work applied to the wall separating the popular from the serious, the market-driven mass product from the subscription- sustained aura-generating art object” (530). In The Garbage Man, Suárez likens Dos Passos’ use of jazz to the music played during films at the time. “Imitating movie musical accompaniment, it cued the turns of the plot with snatches of popular songs and sound effects” (Pop Modernism 82).Google Scholar
- 32.In this way, Mac becomes like the men in the first biography section who betray Eugene V. Debs, labor activist, politician, and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, for “a house with a porch to putter around and a fat wife to cook for them” (20). When discussing Mac’s decision to abandon his socialist principals to be with Maisie, Donald Pizer has argued that “[t]he polarities of American life in the early portion of The 42nd Parallel are either a dangerous commitment to independent thought or a safe acceptance of the status quo, with both possibilities paradoxically leading to decline or defeat” (120). For more on Eugene Debs and the IWW, see chapter 2 (“The Socialist Challenge”) from Howard Zinn’s The Twentieth Century: A People’s History (1998).Google Scholar
- 33.For more on the Florida real-estate boom and collapse in the 1920s, see chapter 6 of William B. Stronge’s The Sunshine Economy: An Economic History of Florida Since the Civil War. Stronge notes that “Florida’s real estate boom began to collapse in 1926—the crowd clamoring to purchase real estate suddenly switched direction and sought to sell rather than buy … Because of the large speculative element in the boom, it was inevitable that when sentiment changed, the reversal in activity would be dramatic” (100).Google Scholar