In the work of SHERWOOD ANDERSON, IRVING HOWE finds a vein of authoritarianism and love of power which throws some illumination on the complexity of the Populist tradition in American literature, so often assumed to be the purest expression of democratic ideals. Mr. Howe is at present working on a book-length study of Sherwood Anderson for the American Men of Letters Series published by William Sloane; this short piece is adapted from a section of that work.
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Sherwood Anderson’s first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, is a direct reflection of his personal problems at the time he wrote it. He was then a paint manufacturer in Elyria, Ohio, and had not yet made his famous break from bourgeois respectability, which, as it happened, involved also a nervous breakdown. While still uncertain about the values by which he wished to live, he was already dubious about the accepted business creed. The only part of Windy McPherson’s Son that now seems authentic as fiction is its opening portrait of small-town life in late 19th-century America, but the novel as a whole is interesting as a direct and unvarnished expression of a discontented business man who wishes, somehow, to reconcile the life of accumulation with a morality of natural love.
In his second novel, Marching Men, Anderson took a step further on the path of discontent. Marching Men shows no confidence in the intentions of enlightened business men, but rather urges the more violent view that the nation can be righted only by a charismatic leader who will whip the masses into revolt. Like Windy, it begins as a crude Entwicklungsroman, a novel of “development”: Beaut McGregor, a powerful gawky boy, revolts against the de-energized passivity of Coal Creek, a Pennsylvania mining town. Though revering the memory of his father, a martyred miner, he despises the miners en masse, somewhat like a Lawrencian hero, for their drab acceptance of misery. When he leaves Coal Creek to make his fortune in Chicago, he looks back “full of hate . . . he might have wished that all of the people of the town had but one head so that he might cut it off. . . .” But, if we are to believe Anderson, McGregor’s misanthropic feeling toward the miners is dissolved when he returns to Coal Creek to watch them form a spontaneous parade of honor at his mother’s funeral. Like all of Anderson’s heroes, McGregor experiences a moment of intense perception that changes the entire course of his life: “. . . he had of a sudden one of those strange awakenings . . . he tried vainly to get back his old satisfying hate of the town and the miners but it would not come . . . they like himself were marching up out of the smoke and the little squalid houses, away from the shores of the blood-red river into something new.” The transformed McGregor is to be the people’s liberator.
In Chicago he becomes the leader of a movement known as the “marching men,” a group of workers united in dumb brotherhood to find “the secret of order in the midst of this disorder.” The world, cries McGregor, “should become a great camp. . . . Why should some men not begin the organization of a new army? If there are men who do not understand what is meant let them be knocked down.”
When McGregor is asked the destination of his marching men, he answers, apparently to Anderson’s satisfaction, in a free-verse leaflet:
They ask us what we mean.
Well, here is our answer.
We mean to go on marching . . .
We will not talk nor listen to talk. . ..
At a vast Labor Day parade McGregor tells his followers that if one of them “whines or complains or stands upon a box throwing words about, knock him down and keep marching.” True to his monomaniacal creed, McGregor beats up a tired follower and warns him, “This is no time for words.” At the novel’s end the movement collapses for reasons that are never clear, perhaps because Anderson hadn’t the faintest notion of what to do with it. But McGregor is in no way diminished or disparaged as a popular leader, and even the capitalist responsible for his defeat wonders whether he was not right after all.
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It is impossible to read this novel today without a slight shudder, for history has lent Anderson’s marching men a significance he could hardly have intended. Yet the novel has been charitably ignored or misconstrued by almost all of Anderson’s critics, whether because they have not read it or read it with increasing embarrassment, one does not know. When it first appeared in 1917, Francis Hackett reviewed it in the New Republic as “a graphic proletarian novel,” and the socialist Liberator, which should have known better, called it “a novel of ideas.” In an essay written in the 1920’s, the radical critic V. F. Calverton described Marching Men as “radiantly and romantically symbolic of the rise of the proletariat.” And in a recent highly sympathetic study of Anderson, which could have been based on historical perspective, Maxwell Geismar has conspicuously glossed over the novel’s totalitarian bias. Such misreadings can be traced less to the inadequate sensibilities of these critics than to their wish to preserve an image of Anderson, justified in other contexts, as a deeply plebeian and democratic writer.
Though the portrait of McGregor uncritically anticipates the power-worship, the manipulable irrationality, and the asexual fanaticism of modern totalitarian leaders, it would be absurd and melodramatic to conclude that Anderson was a fascist or forerunner of fascism at the time he wrote the novel. All of his political-moral inclinations were always to be quite in the other direction, and he himself was to look back with a curious blend of dread and awe to Marching Men. The theme of the novel was never again to appear in any of his writings, and Poor White, to cite one example, was to be characterized precisely by an opposite attitude to power and to human beings. What then is the source of the painful ideas in Marching Men? One may point to literary influences—Carlyle, mentioned favorably in an article Anderson wrote several years before Marching Men, and Jack London, whose Nietzschean notions were then floating through the American intellectual atmosphere—but surely these could hardly account for so thorough a defense of political mindlessness as Marching Men.
In part, the novel can be related to Anderson’s personal situation. If Windy McPherson’s Son represents his struggle to make a value-choice in the world of American business, Marching Men releases his resentment at the need to think through to that choice. Where Windy, because of its intellectual confusion, is limp and diffuse in feeling, Marching Men is full of spastic aggression and sadism which reflect undifferentiated anger at the burdens imposed by modern life. And where the earlier novel portrays sexual indecision, the later one conveys a scorn of women and celebrates the brotherhood of a potentially homosexual band. All of these signs of personal crisis were to come to a climax in Anderson’s breakdown in 1912.
Yet one feels a need to relate the novel to something more than Anderson’s immediate situation, to account for its politics in terms of political influences. Here one can only speculate, and the beginning of such speculation must be the assumption that the ideas of the novel are related to the intellectual currents of those years in the late 19th century when Anderson reached his manhood. Is it then too shocking a violation of the American democratic myth to suggest that some of the emotional qualities, if not the explicit program, of Anderson’s marching men may be traced back to Populism? That the great-man theory finds favor only among the upper classes is a misconception recent history has quite dispelled: the wealthy scorn a parvenu messiah, except perhaps during moments of extreme social crisis. Actually, the search for a leader who through the exertion of his will can lead the helpless and confused out of the wilderness is distinctly though not exclusively plebeian, very often related to a lower-middle-class desire, which is shared by declassed elements, for a violently dynamic alternative to radicalism. And in Marching Men Anderson contemptuously refers to socialists as people who merely wag their jaws, which is precisely the way a modern totalitarian speaks of those of his opponents who profess to base their views on reason.
It is commonly believed that the Populist movement was a righteous democratic uprising of the people against the trusts and railroads—which, in part, it certainly was. But in Populism there was also an insistently programmatic mindlessness, a mindlessness that was often its only program; a xenophobic scorn of city slickers and intellectual “longhairs” who “jawed” about ideas when immediate action was needed; an occasional stereotyped identification of the Jew with the odious Wall Street bankers; a sentimental glorification of mere solidarity at the expense of thought; and a prostrating infatuation with the eloquent leader whose voice cried out against crosses of gold and spoke for the inarticulate surge in the hearts of his followers. With the exception of the occasional anti-Semitism, all of these traits are present in Marching Men, though they are placed in an urban milieu and presented with a crude harshness no Populist could accept. To suggest that Anderson’s novel provides a historically faithful portrait of Populism would be merely malicious, but it does not seem at all malicious to say that it reveals a usually ignored aspect of that movement. The blend of leader-worship and impatience with ideas that is present in Marching Men is also to be found in the undersides of Populism; it comprises an authoritarian potential which is buried deep within, and censored by the “superego” of, a certain kind of plebeian revolt.
As a novel, even for a study of Anderson’s apprenticeship, Marching Men is of slight interest, but as an expression of ideas it remains highly relevant. It represents the price Anderson was to pay, and which he never quite reckoned, for his failure to assume the responsibilities of the mind; a price he would pay again and again.
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