“Tell us, are you for us or against us?” This was the parting question abruptly posed to Dos Passos by a Russian actress from the Sanitary Propaganda Theatre who was delegated to see him off on the train as he left Moscow after spending several weeks there in 1928 observing the state theaters and their productions to learn what he could to take back to New York to help the struggling New Playwrights. He knew what she meant; despite the ferment of creative innovation in the theater and cinema and the energetic commitment of all the workers and artists he met, he had caught occasional glimpses of what he retrospectively termed in his 1966 memoir the “iron fist”: the Englishman whom the Party refused to allow to leave the country because his wife was “a member of the old intelligentzia” targeted by the intensifying Party “terror”; the scholar who killed himself because he had the “wrong class origins”; the “anti- Jewish prejudice; the actress herself who, although appreciative that the near-starvation theater folk had suffered earlier, under “war communism,” was past, would shake her fist at posters of the ascendant Party leader Stalin “[i]f she was sure no one was looking.” He had seen in the post-Revolution Soviet Union how powerful art could be when allowed to flourish with government support, how successfully aesthetics could be harnessed into the service of radical politics, but also how vulnerable to exploitation and subversion or suppression art—and artists—could become under state control.

He would hear again a version of the same question the actress had challengingly posed, this time, in 1937, coming from his old friend Hemingway. “Are you with us or are you against us?”, Dos Passos depicts him as demanding when he confronted Dos Passos at the train station as he once again departed a complicated, politically fraught, but, this time, personally dangerous situation in a country where the two had gone to commit their talents as artists to projects in defense of the Spanish Republic against fascism.