The speech of the people

“The speech of the people” names both a stylistic principle and an ethical claim about U.S.A. E. L. Doctorow uses the phrase to describe a novel that records people in their particular voices, making everyday speech a way to hear the country and to contemplate the lives history might otherwise absorb.

The Phrase and Its Claim

In his afterword, Doctorow recalls that Dos Passos’s prologue calls U.S.A. “the speech of the people.” Doctorow treats that description as more than a label for the novel’s language: the author, he says, heard and recorded a collective voice, which later readers can hear again. The phrase joins a formal ambition—to make many kinds of speech present—to a moral demand implicit in the book.

Doctorow’s account also stresses that this voice is specifically American. The characters are not merely interchangeable examples of human sensation: they possess a national particularity that, in his view, remains recognizable to readers decades after the novel appeared. The phrase therefore points toward a people composed of distinct lives, not a single abstract national speaker.

Speech in Social Situations

The novel’s voices emerge through encounters shaped by place, work, and circumstance. In a bar, Joe Williams asks Maria about a man who can forge able-seaman papers and explains that he wants to leave the Navy for the Merchant Marine. Their exchange moves between Joe’s clipped sailor’s idiom and Maria’s mixed, nonstandard English and Spanish. The difference is not simply decorative: the conversation makes the characters’ immediate purposes and unequal command of language part of the scene.

A different encounter turns nationality into a question of recognition. In a rainstorm, an American tourist approaches Joe Williams, identifies him as a fellow American, and welcomes him to the city. The tourist’s stutter and conversational manner distinguish his voice, while Joe’s blunt replies register his discomfort with the handshake and his own precarious circumstances. Their short exchange gives national identity a specific, sometimes awkward sound rather than presenting it as an abstraction.

On the ship bound for Liverpool, speech becomes entangled with authority. After Joe Williams laughs with Tiny during a change of watches, Mr. McGregor challenges him and casts suspicion on his claim to be American. Joe insists that he signed on as an able seaman and objects to being assigned to the stokehole. The exchange ends with an order to put him in irons and treat him as a possible spy; he is told he will be handed over to alien control at Liverpool. In this scene, who is believed—and who has the power to define another person—matters as much as what is said.

Labor, Politics, and Unequal Power

During the Paris general strike, the novel sets several voices beside one another in a small restaurant. Don Stevens talks politics with Paul Johnson, while two older men judge the younger generation’s response to the strike. Their recollections of earlier street action contrast with their view that the day’s demonstrations have accomplished little. Paul, by contrast, admits that he knows little beyond what he has heard and says he wants to learn by taking work as a harvest hand. Eveline Hutchins listens as these positions meet over a shared meal; the scene gives political argument the limits and textures of an ordinary conversation rather than the shape of a settled doctrine.

The language of rights is tested more violently in the episode involving Ben Compton and other Industrial Workers of the World members. Before the men are forced to leave their trucks, one of them says they seek their constitutional right to free speech. The sheriff answers with a threat, and the deputies beat the workers as they are driven down a line toward the railroad track. Ben is questioned about whether he is a wobbly, refuses to deny it, and hears Bram Hicks urge the group not to forget the night. The contrast between a constitutional claim and the authorities’ response makes clear that being able to speak does not guarantee that speech will be protected.

Individual Voices and History

Doctorow places this conception of the novel against Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 account of its detached reporting. Sartre describes its presentation of feelings and utterances as resembling a “statement to the Press,” with individual lives accumulated from the outside and finally overtaken by collective consciousness. His question—what is an individual life against history?—sharpens the stakes of Doctorow’s phrase. The people’s speech is not proof that history has been overcome; it is a means of hearing particular lives before they disappear into it.

For Doctorow, that listening remains useful because the characters’ national and social particularity still feels present to later readers. His conclusion returns to the prologue’s formulation: the novel records a voice for readers to hear and consider. “The speech of the people” thus describes a plurality of spoken lives and the act of attending to them, while preserving the tension between individual experience and the collective forces that shape it.