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Charley Anderson, for example, is a well-meaning, good-hearted aviator who won the Croix de guerre in the War. He has genuine mechanical ability, works as a mechanic for a time, gets along well with plain men when he sees them as individuals. But pursuit of the Big Money corrupts his native talents as well as his good nature, eventually kills him. Dos Passos frames the story of Anderson with thumbnail sketches of Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of scientific management; and Thorstein Veblen. Like Ford, Charley Anderson had native mechanical skill, loved to tinker with machines. Like Taylor, he suffered because he tried to speed up production, to make manufacture efficient, and shrank from the resulting hostility of workmen. Veblen, a lifelong student of the conflict between production and finance, who saw the constant "sabotage of production by business," adds an ironic footnote to Charley's tragedy.
Thus Dos Passos intimates that the stories of his characters are not exceptional or unique, that the waste, confusion, purposelessness in their lives, as well as their good human qualities and inborn talents also appear in the lives of famed figures in public history.
The Material. The Big Money begins with the return of Charley Anderson from France. After a brief glimpse of Manhattan, he gets a cramped job as mechanic in his brother's garage in St. Paul. But Charley wants to get in on aviation's ground floor, incidentally pick up some of the Big Money he sniffs in the post-War air. Almost as soon as he gets it, women and liquor finish him off.
Mary French takes a different road. A Colorado doctor's daughter who hates her hateful mother, she goes from Vassar into settlement work and from there into the labor movement, falls in love with one radical hero after another, only to be betrayed by all of them. Drowning her personal despair in work for the Cause, she finally emerges as an impersonal, efficient cog in Revolution's painfully assembling machine.
Margo Dowling, on the other side of the fence, starts as a child actress, survives a nearly disastrous marriage to a Cuban pervert to become successively show girl, mistress, Hollywood extra and at last a queen of the screen.
Richard Ellsworth Savage, first introduced in 1919 as a young Harvard poet turned opportunist among the glittering opportunities of the Peace Conference, is shown in The Big Money as a prematurely tired junior executive who works hard at being yes-man to J. Ward Moorehouse, the great stuffed shirt of the public relations world. When J. Ward finally falters, Dick Savage is right there to take over.