ABSTRACT
Number One, the second volume in Dos Passos’ new series of American portraits, takes up the story of the doomed Spotswood family at home where Adventures of a Young Man left it in a Spanish prison. It seems that Glenn Spotswood, who died a martyr to democratic socialism, had an elder brother, Tyler, who early in life had determined never to be a martyr to anything. Where the father, a disappointed Wilsonian, became a worker for the League of Nations and Glenn died, as he had lived, for communal and democratic ideals in an age of power politics and authoritarian revolutionists, Tyler became a press agent and contact man for an ambitious fascist hill-billy, Senator Homer T. (Chuck) Crawford. Glenn reacted against his father's Fabianism by becoming a Communist; but the point of Adventures of a Young Man was that he had to return in the end to something like his father's democratic integrity, or to the simple tradition of conscience—the familiar kann nichtanders!—followed by all the Dos Passos artist-heroes. The point of Number One is that even Tyler Spotswood, a genial political crook who had been impatient with his father's ‘preachiness,’ must find his way back to the people, back to a conscious democratic faith. ‘The people is everybody,and one man alone,’ we read in the last of Dos Passos’ prose-poems here; ‘weak as the weakest, strong as the strongest, /the people are the republic, /the people are you.’
