[An] attitude of determined omniscience informs all of U.S.A., even the biographical sections. Of the five historical personages who were still alive when Dos Passos wrote about them, none retains any control over his own destiny; that privilege is reserved for the abstract forces of history conceived under the aegis of Marxist-Veblenian determinism. The biography of Thomas Edison is oblique in emphasis; its subject, discussed in the past tense, is unable to free himself from his obsolete and socially dangerous work ethic because "he never worried about mathematics or the social system or generalized historical concepts." Henry Ford waits in seclusion for death, helpless and uncomprehending before the changes he has brought about. Orville Wright, left behind by a historical process gone wrong, lives an authentic life only in other people's memories…. Such are the lives of those who are swept up in the dialectic of history. Each suffers a spiritual death as his individuality becomes a part of the workings of historical law; and Dos Passos, the scientific historian, notes the phenomenon and passes on to other things.
In these historical sections of his novel, Dos Passos has consciously limited his powers of observation to those possessed by the Camera Eye: he observes, speculates, and even predicts, but before the abyss of motivation he draws silently back. The lives of the twelve representative Americans in the explicitly "fictitious" sections of U.S.A., however, are more open to analysis. They are subject only to the psychological constraints of verisimilitude, and Dos Passos seizes the opportunity to simplify his history by coming to conclusions. He never ceases to write as a historian, but when the subjects of his history are men and women of his own creation, the history he writes becomes simpler, clearer, and more theoretical. (p. 544)
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