Re: I wonder how Eugene Debs might have reacted to this.
I read all three books of the trilogy many years ago.Dos Passos,s style,used newspaper clips,potted biogs of people in the news and plot lines that drew disparate fictional characters together within factual situations at a time of huge change in the USA.In many ways I found them better than any history lessons in describing American society and its values(as I found with Sholokov,s Don trilogy and Virgin Soil Upturned re Russia and Ukraine) .From being a socialist inclined supporter of the IWW,Debs,Bryan at al when he began the USA trilogy,by its end he was moving to the right and he continued further still as far as campaigning for Goldwater in the sixties.In many ways he followed one strand of American radicalism towards the libertarian right while another strand morphed into the Neo-Con right via Trotskyism. To this day I,m at a loss to understand why this came about though as in the case of Orwell his experience in the Spanish Civil War was clearly cathartic.
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