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Sadness, Exploitation, and Stories
Is American individualism good or bad--or is the story more complicated than that?
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million provides an interesting satirical counterbalance to the typical narrative of how to succeed in America as told by writers like Horatio Alger. And just as impossibly optimistic as those stories are, West’s story is pessimistic to the same degree.
The novella’s main character, Lemuel Pitkin, is a wide-eyed all-American youngster whose misadventures in the pursuit of happiness are reminiscent of the stories of Voltaire’s Candide. Similarly, Lem maintains a naïve faith that America is “the best of all possible worlds” despite repeated tortures, from his mother’s foreclosure to his wrongful imprisonment to his repeated encounters with shady figures from America’s underbelly. Through it all, “our hero” maintains a noble foolishness, even after his physical “dismantling” at the hands of Chief Satinpenny. Despite his purity and his relentless efforts to lift himself up by his bootstraps, Depression-era America picks Lem apart rather than rewarding him.
Perhaps most interesting is what transpires after Lem meets Shagpoke Whipple, a manipulative former president who rescues Lem from Satinpenny’s bear trap and shows him off as a traveling tent show. After Lem’s assassination, Whipple continues to exploit him, using him as a martyr to advance the cause of his National Revolutionary Party. This anti-immigrant, anti-“sophistication” party promotes a nationalist agenda with Pitkin as their poster boy. The reader is left to realize that this party’s platform, reminiscent of Know-Nothing and other conservative platforms in American history, is entirely contrary to the meaning of Lem’s life. Using Lem to promote the virtues of self-help is patently absurd to those familiar with him. West contends that in the Depression, no person can achieve success on their own, since the country was a desperate, often hostile place. However, as we see in the novel, questioning the validity of individualism and the American Dream, is not advantageous for politicians. In West’s perspective, these politicians further cloud our judgment and dismantle the falsely propagated hopes of America. While this understanding of America—a country filled with liars, thieves, hucksters, and the gullible innocents they defraud—is certainly a negative and perhaps overly pessimistic one, it is impossible to say that Alger’s optimism was any more valid. We can only learn from West that perhaps America in the Depression was a more complicated place than our common understanding of American stories could tell us.
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