Andrew Carnegie
The three individual novels that make up the trilogy collectively know as U.S.A. overflow with irony. The most biting is usually—though far from exclusively—found in the author’s biographical sketches of historical figures. These bios and their sharp ironic slices at the end are a dead giveaway of the author’s own political and person convictions. For instance, the ironic undermining of tycoon Andrew Carnegie’s reputation for philanthropy in the name of peace, love and understanding:
“Andrew Carnegie gave millions for peace
and libraries and scientific institutes and endowments and thrift
whenever he made a billion dollars he endowed
an institution to promote universal peace
always
except in time of war.”
The Scrooge of New York
The author’s bio of another rich tycoon—J.P. Morgan—paints a portrait of a man not afraid to squeeze every dime out of the sacrifice of others. Carnegie may have been hypocritical in his self-promotion of his inherent humanity, but his record of charitable enterprises is irrefutable. Morgan…not so much. And so even though it is true that a reading from the original printing of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has remained an annual tradition at the Morgan Library to this day, only the Grinch himself could possibly miss the irony of the following:
“Every Christmas his librarian read him Dickens' A. Christmas Carol from the original manuscript.”
Henry Ford
The bio of Henry Ford builds to a masterful demonstration of irony that works equally well on both an immediately literal level and a more expansive metaphorical one. The surface irony is obviously directed toward Ford being the legend credited as the inventor of the automobile living. The deeper sense of irony is suggestive of the vehemently anti-Semitic man who helped bring the world into the 20th century while desperately wanting to keep it in the 19th century or earlier:
“When he bought the Wayside Inn near Sudbury,
Massachusetts, he had the new highway where the
new model cars roared and slithered and hissed oilily
past (the new noise of the automobile), moved away
from the door,
put back the old bad road,
so that everything might be the way it used to be,
in the days of horses and buggies.”
Newsreels
Irony is not limited just to the cutting sort which usually closes the biographical sketches. An experimental technique found throughout the books is the “Newsreel” which offers headlines, new stories, advertisements, snatches of song lyrics and various other delineations of the time. Usually these elements are disconnected from each other entirely, but occasionally the author does slip in a little ironic association such the following in which a headline is following by the lyrics of popular song at the time:
“RUSSIAN BARONESS SUICIDE AT MIAMI
. . . the kind of a girl that men forget
Just a toy to enjoy for a while”
