In _Number One_ (1943), Dos Passos shifted from dictatorship abroad to dictatorship at home. Chuck Crawford is reminiscent of the late Huey Long of Louisiana. Magnetic, dynamic, and unscrupulous, Chuck wins the governorship and then goes on to the United States Senate. His personal aide is the alcoholic Tyler Spotswood, Glenn’s older brother. Served up as the goat in an oil lease scandal which breaks about Chuck’s head, Tyler allows himself to remain silent and be convicted. This is primarily because of Glenn’s last letter from Spain exhorting Tyler not to let them “sell out” the people at home. Tyler apparently feels that his conviction is an atonement for failure to accept the responsibility which Sinclair Lewis also said devolved upon each citizen. In the novel’s last three lines Dos Passos looks the reader squarely in the eye: “weak as the weakest, strong as the strongest, the people are the republic, the people are you.” _The Grand Design_ appeared in 1949 to complete the _District of Columbia_ trilogy. In this third novel, Dos Passos’ style remains the same--detached and impersonal, straightforward and clear. His politics (in the prose poems) seem unchanged. He appears to be liberal, to retain his sympathy for the smaller people having a difficult time economically. Since the book covers the war years, the danger represented by the Axis powers is evident, but the equally pernicious influence of militant international Communism is equally clear. Although the book is jammed with characters from many political strata, its primary focus is the career of Millard Carroll, who leaves his Texarcola business to join the New Deal Farm Economy Administration. As the war progresses, Carroll comes to feel that the Four Freedoms are being forgotten in its prosecution. He sees personal jealousies and conflicts within the administration. By implication, the program which produced relocation camps for Japanese-Americans helps to complete his disillusionment. Finally, crushed by personal tragedy, he resigns. The last line of the last prose poem tells the reader, “Today we must learn to found again in freedom our republic.”