World War I
World War I is the book’s symbol for the loss of hope for democracy and capitalism to work for the good of the working class. America’s entry into the war ensured that should the forces for good be victorious, the way would be paved for capitalism to rule the world. Victory would be the shortcut over the forces of socialism which the barons of monopolistic, owner-weighted capitalism needed:
“whoever wins, Europe will be economically ruined. This war is America's great opportunity.”
Thorstein Veblen
A common misconception is that U.S.A. is a work of socialist revolutionary literature because it pits the working class against owners in the battle for democratic capitalism. While Karl Marx gets his requisite number of references, the actual symbolic overlord of the economic philosophy espoused by the author is the American economist who invented the idea of “conspicuous consumption” as the hallmark of America’s inevitable transition from a producer economy to a consumer economy. Veblen’s prescience is directly identified by the author in one of the biographical sketches in which he describes him a tragic figure: “dissecting out the century with a scalpel so keen…so exact that the professors and students nine-tenths of the time didn't know it was there.”
Sacco and Vanzetti
Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian-born anarchists charged with the 1920 double murder of a paymaster and guard of a shoe company. Their case became a rallying cry among the American left because the swift delivery of a guilty verdict despite evidence that was highly questionable to say the least seemed to make it clear they were scapegoats targeted for their political beliefs. Dos Passos was just one of many famous Americans who passionately took up their cause and in U.S.A. transforms their fate into the book’s central symbol the perversion of capitalist justice in America:
“If the State of Massachusetts can kill those two innocent men in the face of the protest of the whole world it'll mean that there never will be any justice in America ever again."
Samuel Insull
A number of capitalist industrial barons are forwarded as the symbol of everything that went wrong with American democracy after World War I: J.P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Henry and Thomas Edison among them. Ultimately, however, the central symbolic incarnation of everything that Veblen warned against almost certainly must be Samuel Insull, if only because of the breadth and depth of villainy. Insult practically invented single-handedly the most nefarious form of all monopolies of the them all: the kind that works in tandem with the government to assure that throughout most of the 20th century and into the 21st century the electricity, natural gas, phone service, cable television and internet service available to most Americans is limited to one or two single available suppliers. In addition, Insull’s symbolism as the worst of capitalist excess also extends to exploiting both workers and customers, embezzling and using wealth to buy “justice” for himself.
Vag
The trilogy comes to an end with a portrait of anonymous character known only as Vag. Vag is young man hitchhiking with a faux leather suitcase waiting for that eventual car to slow down while countless others speed by and kick dust back in his face. Meanwhile, overhead fly planes filled with "pretty, big men with bank accounts, highly paid jobs, who are saluted by doormen." And such the symbolic pageant of the real America playing out: an eternally fixed conflict between the haves and the have-nots.
