Sherwood Anderson wrote his strange and insightful novel, Marching Men, between the years 1906 and 1913. He saw the yearning of modern men for 'order' and the feeling of exultation the powerless individual feels when melded into the powerful mass. He foresaw the fatal years to come when the entire European and Anglo Saxon worlds, not to speak of much of the Far East, were peopled by men in uniform, when Man's greatest ambition appeared to be nothing more than to become part of a vast killing machine under the orders of a homoerotic leader who demanded his submission and worship.
Marching Men was published in 1917, the same year that the great Progressive, Woodrow Wilson, brought the United States into the Great War, turning the Great Democracy into a police state that silenced and imprisoned opponents of America's involvement in a European war.
In this passage Anderson explains his admiration for those who wield the lash, and sympathy for those who yearn for death, those who love order and hate harmony.
'In France after the great revolution and the babbling of many voices talking of the brotherhood of man it wanted but a short and very determined man with an instinctive knowledge of drums, of cannons and of stirring words to send the same babblers screaming across open spaces, stumbling through ditches and pitching headlong into the arms of death. In the interest of one who believed not at all in the brotherhood of man they who had wept at the mention of the word brotherhood died fighting brothers.
In the heart of all men lies the love of order. How to achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies and monarchies, dreams and endeavours is the riddle of the Universe and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form and for which he also will laugh in the face of death is in all men. By grasping that fact Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have made heroes of the dullest clods that walk and not a man of all the thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea but lived the rest of his life with a something sweeter, braver and finer sleeping in his soul than will ever be produced by the reformer scolding of brotherhood from a soap-box. The long march, the burning of the throat and the stinging of the dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder against shoulder, the quick bond of a common, unquestioned, instinctive passion that bursts in the orgasm of battle, the forgetting of words and the doing of the thing, be it winning battles or destroying ugliness, the passionate massing of men for accomplishment -- these are the signs, if they ever awake in our land, by which you may know you have come to the days of the making of men.'
This book is very puzzling. The central figure is fiercely driven by "the passionate massing of men for accomplishment," and he does indeed organize daily marches of laborers through Chicago's streets. But the marchers make no demands; thus there can be no accomplishment. From this and "Windy McPhersons' Son" I have concluded that Anderson locked in ambivalence: he is outraged over the exploitation of workers by the rich, but also dislikes and distrusts the socialist movements that takes Labor's side. Too bad he let this otherwise powerful narrative fade away in empty words.
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