Up in the Air: Technology and the Suburban Nightmare in John Dos Passos's Airways Inc.

The home-making propaganda is the best training in national pride that the child or the adult can have. Homeless people make poor citizens. Nomads are seldom patriots. Give us a nation of homes, with each family loving and beautifying and developing its own, and there will be small need for teaching patriotism. (American Home, July 1929, 463)' Dos Passos spent much of his childhood in hotel rooms. His mother, the mistress of a prominent attorney, traveled extensively throughout Europe and America with her son, and he grew accustomed to long journeys by steamship and rail. The sights and sounds of a crowded city block, hotel lobby, bustling wharf, and busy thoroughfare signaled home for Dos Passos. This type of landscape not only characterizes much of his fiction, but it also helps explain some of his interest in the theater, which provides a literal space for recreating these dynamics. As a teenager at the Choate boarding school in Connecticut, he participated actively in drama, often playing the lead in school productions. These experiences inspired a life-long passion for the theater, and a few years later he decided to write plays "to attract, move, and mould an audience" for social change. Despite the comforting familiarity of city life, Dos Passos soon realized that he could not tolerate living in a place like New York for long. As a young man on holiday from school, he often found solace at his father's vast country estate in Westmoreland, Virginia. Nicknamed the White House, this place gave Dos Passos a sense for the pleasures of upper-class suburban living. He spent many afternoons horseback riding, swimming, boating, gardening, and entertaining his father's numerous guests. Yet as biographer Townsend Ludington observes, some of these experiences, like sailing on the family yacht, also made Dos Passos aware of "the distance between him and those less genteel than he or his family" (38). Such feelings became more acute when he returned to the United States after serving in the NortonHarjes Ambulance Corps. Small town America suddenly seemed unsettling in its uniformity, na?vet?, and opulence. The incongruity between his cousins' home in Bay Head, New Jersey, for example, "with its 'little square houses in rows, the drug stores, the board walk, the gawky angular smiling existence of an American summerresort,' and his life during the last year was appalling," Ludington notes (165). Although most critics focus on Dos Passos's portrait of urban America, the author was also fascinated by suburban culture. It is no accident, then, that most of his characters are caught between a desire to go to and run away from the big city, and Dos Passos captures the destructive allure of both in his play Airways Inc. Published in 1928 and staged by the New Playwrights Theatre in 1929, Airways Inc. depicts the gradual deterioration of the Turners, a family living in a white, working-class suburb not far from an industrial center. Originally titled Suburb, this play attacks numerous assumptions about home ownership and the technology facilitating suburbanization. The Turners's financial troubles primarily revolve around making the monthly mortgage payment, and this hardship has contributed to their disconnectedness from one another. Dad Turner, who laments his failed career as an inventor, continually feels neglected by his children. His youngest son, Eddy, begrudgingly works as a carpenter building suburban houses while he fantasizes about the excitement of city life. Claude Turner has become embittered and aloof from working in white-collar America for fifteen years, and their sister, Martha, resents the exhausting routine of cooking, cleaning, and shopping for the family. At the same time, she sacrifices her autonomy to keep them together: "Our home would break up if it wasn't for me" (105). The most promising of the Turner clan, Elmer, is a charming pilot in the mold of Charles Lindbergh. He has recently set world records in altitude and speed, and he has agreed to become a partner in a new company called Airways Inc. …