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The Bread-Winners: A Social Study is an 1883 book by John Hay. Hay's second book is about the effects of industrialism on a post-Civil War America It was among the best selling books in the United States in 1884.

Plot

One of the wealthiest and most cultured residents of the city of Buffland's famed Algonquin Avenue, Captain Arthur Farnham is a Civil War veteran and a widower—his wife died of illness while accompanying him at a remote frontier post, and it was not possible to get her to proper medical attention. He has sought to involve himself in municipal affairs, but fails though political naiveté, though the victorious party has thrown him the sop of chairman of the library board. In that capacity, he is approached by Maud Matchlin, daughter of carpenter Saul Matchlin, a man content with his lot. His daughter is not, and seeks employment at the library as a means of bettering herself. Farnham agrees to put her case, but is defeated by a majority on the board who have their own candidate. She finds herself attracted to Farnham, who is more interested in Alice Belding, daughter of Farnham's wealthy widow neighbor.

Saul Matchlin hoped that his daughter would become a house servant, but having attended high school, she feels herself too good for that. She is admired by Saul's assistant Sam Sleeny, who lives with the Matchlins, a match favored by her father. Sleeny is busy repairing Farnham's outbuildings, and is made jealous by interactions between the captain and Maud. In Sleeny's discontent, Andrew Jackson Offitt (true name Ananias), a locksmith and "professional reformer", tries to get him to join the Bread-Winners, a labor organization. Sleeny is content with his employment, "Old Saul Matchin and me come to an agreement about time and pay, and both of us was suited. Ef he's got his heel into me, I don't feel it," but due to his unhappiness over Maud, is easy game for Offitt, who gets him to join, and to pay the dues that are Offitt's visible means of support.

Maud has become convinced she is in love with Farnham, and declares her love for him. It is not reciprocated, and the scene is witnessed both by Mrs. Belding and by Sleeny. The widow believes Farnham when he states he had given Maud no encouragement, but her daughter, when told, does not believe him. When Farnham declares his love for Alice, she turns him down and asks him never to renew the subject.

Offitt's membership has tired of endless talk, and plans a general strike, a fact of which Farnham is informed by Mr. Temple, a salty-talking vice president of a rolling mill. An element among the strikers also plans to loot houses along Algonquin Avenue, including Farnham's. The strike begins, paralyzing Buffland's commerce, though it is initially non-violent. Neither the mayor nor the chief of police, when approached by Farnham, are willing to guard Algonquin Avenue. Farnham proceeds to organize Union veterans, and purchases weapons to arm them. After Farnham's force rescues the mayor from being roughed up, he deputizes them as special police—on condition there is no expense to the city.

Meanwhile, Maud tells her father she will never marry Sleeny. She is wooed by Bott, who is a spiritualist and a Bread-Winner, and also by Offitt. Neither meet success, though Offitt dexterously prevents her from actually saying no, and through flattery and stories of his alleged past piques her interest.

By the end of the second day of the strike, which has spread to Buffland's rival city of Clearfield, the mood among the laborers has turned ugly. Temple warns that the attacks on Algonquin Avenue are imminent, and aids Farnham's force in turning back assaults on the captain's house and on the Belding residence. Bott and Sleeny are captured by the force; the former is sent to prison but Farnham has pity on Sleeny as a good workman, and he serves only a few days. The settlement of the strike in Clearfield takes the wind out of the Buffland action, and soon most are back at work, though some agitators are dismissed.

Offitt, despite being one of the leaders of the assault on the Belding house, has escaped blame and befriends the sullen Sleeny on his release. Upon learning that some workers pay their landlord, Farnham, in the evening of the rent day at his home, Offitt comes up with a scheme—rob and murder Farnham and let Sleeny take the blame as he elopes with Maud. Accordingly, Offitt sneaks into Farnham's house with Sleeny's hammer, but just as he is striking the fatal blow, Alice Belding, who can see what is going on from her house through an opera glass, screams, distracting Offitt enough so that Farnham is hurt by the blow, but not killed. Offitt hurries away with the money, and proceeds to frame Sleeny. Sleeny escapes jail after realizing Offitt's treason, and kills him. The stolen money is found on Offitt's body, clearing Sleeny in the assault on Farnham, but the carpenter must still stand trial for the killing of Offitt, at which he is aided by partisan testimony from Maud. A sympathetic jury ignores the law to find him innocent. Sleeny wins Maud's hand in marriage, and Farnham and Alice Belding are to be united.

Background

John Hay

John Hay was born in Indiana in 1838, and spent his childhood in frontier Illinois. During his apprenticeship to become a lawyer in his uncle's office in Springfield, he came to know Abraham Lincoln, and worked for his campaign in 1860. He was made Lincoln's assistant personal secretary, and spent the years of the American Civil War working for the President, with whom he forged a close relationship.

After the war, he worked for several years in diplomatic posts abroad, then in 1870 became a writer for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, continuing there working for Whitelaw Reid after Greeley's death in 1872. Hay was a gifted writer for the Tribune, but also achieved success with published works. He had been Class Poet at Brown University and in 1871 published Pike County Ballads, a group of poems written in the dialect of frontier Pike County, Illinois, where Hay had attended school. The same year, he published Castilian Days, a collection of essays on Spain, some of which had been written while Hay was posted as a diplomat in Madrid.

In 1873, Hay began to woo Clara Stone, daughter of wealthy Cleveland industrialist Amasa Stone, and married her in 1874. The marriage made Hay wealthy. The Hays moved to Cleveland, where John managed Amasa Stone's investments. In December 1876, a train of Stone's Lake Shore Railway was crossing a bridge, for the design of which Stone held the patent, when the structure collapsed. The Ashtabula River Railroad Disaster, including the subsequent fire, killed 92 people, the worst rail disaster in American history to that point. Stone was widely blamed, and left Hay in charge of his businesses in mid-1877 as he went to travel in Europe.

Postwar labor troubles and literary reaction

Although the American Civil War did not itself transform the United States from an agrarian society of small towns and agriculture, it gave great impetus to a transformation already underway, especially in the North. The challenges of feeding, clothing, and equipping the Union Army, and to provide the infrastructure for the war effort, made many wealthy, and led to an industrialized America.

This transformation did not stop at Appomatox; industrial production in the United States increased by 75% from 1865 to 1873, making the U.S. second only to Britain in that regard. Railroad construction made practical the exploitation of the trans-Mississippi West. Although the railroads helped fuel an economic boom, they proved a two-edged sword in the 1870s. The 1872 Crédit Mobilier scandal, over graft in the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad, shook the Grant administration to its highest levels. Railroad bankruptcies in the Panic of 1873 led to loss of jobs, wage cuts, and business failures, and to the Railroad Strikes of 1877, when strike over wage cuts on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad spread to other lines, the Lake Shore, much to Hay's outrage. Though the Lake Shore dispute, unlike those elsewhere, was settled without violence, Hay blamed foreign agitators for the dispute,. He condemned the "unarmed rebellion of foreign workingmen, mostly Irish" and informed Stone by letter, "the very devil seems to have entered into the lower classes of working men and there are plenty of scoundrels to encourage them to all lengths." The strike was ended by federal troops sent by President Rutherford B. Hayes, but at the cost of over 100 civilian deaths.

Public opinion was generally against the strikers in the 1877 dispute, calling for armed suppression to preserve property and stability. Those events featured in many books of the period, such as Thomas Stewart Denison's An Iron Crown: A Tale of the Great Republic (1885), with novelists sympathizing with the demands of the strikers, though decrying their violence. Another labor dispute that likely affected Hay's writing of The Bread-Winners was the Cleveland Rolling Mills strike of June 1882, which occurred right before Hay first submitted his manuscript. During the dispute, union members violently attempted to prevent strikebreakers from entering.

The Bread-Winners is sometimes characterized as the first anti-labor novel, but it was preceded by Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Stillwater Tragedy (1880). Aldrich had little knowledge of workers, and his work was not successful. Nevertheless, The Stillwater Tragedy was one of a very few novels to deal with labor unions at all, prior to Hay's book.

Writing and publication

Sometime during the winter or spring of 1881–82, Hay wrote The Bread-Winners. At the time, he was spending much time writing his part of the massive Lincoln biography he was compiling with John Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln: A History. His work on the Lincoln project had been delayed by diphtheria and attendant medical treatment, and was further delayed by The Bread-Winners, as once Hay began work on his only novel, he found himself unable to put it aside. The manuscript was completed by June 1882, when he sent it to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine, though whether he was submitting it for publication or advice is unclear. Gilder called it "a powerful book", but submitted no immediate offer for it.

Aside from his family and Gilder, the only person who likely knew that Hay was writing his novel was his friend Henry Adams. In 1880, Adams had published Democracy: An American Novel, anonymously, and when Hay arrived in Britain in July 1882, he found speculation as to its authorship to be a popular pursuit. He sent Adams a copy of a cheap British edition, writing "I think of writing a novel in a hurry and printing it as by the author of Democracy."

Sometime during the summer of 1882, Hay showed the manuscript to author William Dean Howells, a friend of his. Howells urged Aldrich, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, to publish it, who agreed, sight unseen, on condition that Hay allow his name to be used as author. Hay was not willing to allow this, and resubmitted the manuscript to Gilder, who agreed to Hay's condition that it be published anonymously. In an anonymous letter published in The Century Magazine after the book was published, Hay alleged that the reason he chose to remain anonymous was that he was engaged in business where his stature would be diminished if it were known he had written a novel. According to Scott Dalrymple in his journal article on the book, the likely real reason was that if it were published under Hay's name, it would harm him politically, "To attack labor overtly, in print, would not have been politically prudent." Tyler Dennett, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, speculated that Hay, in his later career, would not have been confirmed either as ambassador to Great Britain (1897) or as Secretary of State (1898) had senators associated him with The Bread-Winners.

In March 1883, the Century Company sent a postcard, with copies likely going to newspapers and potential subscribers. With the heading "Literary Note from The Century Co., it announced that an anonymous novel, "unusual in scene and subject, and powerful in treatment", and giving some information about the plot, would soon be serialized in the pages of The Century. The serial was originally supposed to begin in April or May, but was postponed because Francis Hodgson Burnett's novel Through One Administration ran long. On July 20, the date of release of the August number, the company placed newspaper ads for The Bread-Winners, and stated that "the story ... abounds in local description and social studies, which heiten the interest and continually pique curiosity as to its authorship".

Reaction

Literary mystery

Critical

Among the critics who reviewed The Bread-Winners harshly were one for Literary World which in January 1884 called it a "greasy, slangy, malodorous book ... repulsive from the very first step". The Dial, the following month, while praising the author's use of language, deemed the book "a preposterous tissue of incidents" populated by two sets of "exaggerated types", one vicious, the other absurd. Continent, also in February 1884, suggested that "he criticisms as a whole are severe, and justly so, the book being, with all its brilliancy, faithless and hopeless."

British critics were generally more favorable toward the book than were American ones. In a column in the Pall Mall Gazette, The Bread-Winners was seen as"eminently clever and readable, a worthy contribution to that American novel-literature which is at the present day, on the whole, ahead of our own," a statement which Harper's used in advertisements.

Imitations

Themes

Labor and class

Scott Dalrymple, in his journal article on The Bread-Winners, agreed, "the brunt of Hay's ire seems aimed less toward these working men themselves than toward troublesome union organizers. Left to their own devices, Hay believes, most labor- ers are reasonable creatures". Jaher noted that Offitt, a self-described reformer, "is arrogant, tyrannical and self-righteous. Hay's message is clear: the established system needs no basic change; eliminate the agitator and harmony returns."

Jaher noted that Hay's view of what a laborer should be is summed up in the character of Saul Matchin. Although a successful craftsman, he remains within the working class, not seeking to rise above his hereditary rank, and is content with his lot. His children are not willing to remain within that class, however: the sons run away and the daughters seek to marry into a higher class, symbolizing the change being wrought by industrialization.

Farnham and Alice Belding are the two characters in the novel who were never part of the working class, but who are scions of wealth. Other members of the elite are more vulgar: Mrs. Belding's indulgence in gossip endangers the budding romance between her daughter and Farnham, while Mr. Temple, though brave and steadfast, can only discuss a few topics, such as horse racing, and his speech is peppered with profanities. The rest of Buffland's society, as displayed at a party at Temple's house, is composed of "a group of gossipy matrons, vacuous town belles, and silly swains".

Historical view

According to Dalrymple, ",the anti-labor novels fail to hold up particularly well. None is a masterpiece of language, plotting, or characterization. Ideologically all seem quite heavy-handed, choosing to make their points with a nearly complete lack of subtlety.

References

1. ^ Hay, John (1883). "The Bread-winners". Harper & Brothers. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
2. Jaher, Frederic (1972). "Industrialism and the American Aristocrat: A Study of John Hay and His Novel, The Bread-Winners". University of Illinois Press. Retrieved 2012-03-27.
3. Hart, James David. The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste, p. 99, 309 (1950)
4. Zeitz, pp. 203–05.
5. Zeitz, p. 211.
6. Zeitz, pp. 222–23.
7. Zeitz, pp. 214–15.
8. Zeitz, p. 216.
9. Jaher, p. 71.
10. Taliaferro, pp. 173–74.
11. Zeitz, p. 223.
12. Dalrymple, p. 133.
13. Jaher, p. 72–73.
14. Taliaferro, p. 219.
15. Gale, p. 87.
16. Vandersee, p. 253.
17. Taliaferro, p. 213.
18. Taliaferro, p. 214.
19. Taliaferro, p. 215.
20. Dalyrmple, p. 136. sfn error: no target: CITEREFDalyrmple (help)
21. Vandersee, p. 245.
22. ^ Vandersee, p. 246.
23. Sloane 1971, p. 260 n.13. sfn error: no target: CITEREFSloane_1971 (help)
24. ^ Sloane 1970, p. 179.
25. Sloane 1970, p. 178.
26. Dalrymple, p. 136.
27. Jaher, p. 85.
28. Jaher, p. 86.
29. ] Jaher, pp. 90�–91.
30. Dalrymple, p. 141.

Bibliography

Books

• Ackerman, Kenneth D. (2011). Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield (Kindle ed.). Falls Church, VA: Viral History Press, LLC. ISBN 978-1-61945-011-0.
• Gale, Robert L. (1978). John Hay. Twayne's American Authors. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-7199-9.
• Kushner, Howard I.; Sherrill, Anne Hummel (1977). John Milton Hay: The Union of Poetry and Politics. Twayne's World Leaders. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-7719-9.
• Leech, Margaret (1959). In the Days of McKinley. New York: Harper and Brothers. OCLC 456809.
• Thayer, William Roscoe (1915). The Life and Letters of John Hay. Vol. I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Taliaferro, John (2013). All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, From Lincoln to Roosevelt (Kindle ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4165-9741-4.
• Thayer, William Roscoe (1915). The Life and Letters of John Hay. Vol. II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Zeitz, Joshua (2014). Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image (Kindle ed.). New York: Viking Penguin. ISBN 978-1-101-63807-1.

Journals and other sources

• Dalrymple, Scott (Fall 1999). "John Hay's Revenge: Anti-labor novels, 1880–1905". Business and Economic History. 28 (1): 133–42.
• Davis, Harold E. (December 1941). "The Citizenship of John Perdicaris". The Journal of Modern History. 13 (4): 517–526. JSTOR 1874246.(subscription required)
• Dunne, Robert (Spring 1996). "Dueling Ideologies of America in The Bread-Winner and The Money-Makers". American Literary Realism, 1870-1910. 28 (3): 30–37. JSTOR 27746664.(subscription required)
• Friedlaender, Marc (1969). "Henry Hobson Richardson, Henry Adams, and John Hay". Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series. 81: 137–66. JSTOR 25080672.(subscription required)
• Howells, William Dean (September 1905). "John Hay in Literature". The North American Review. 181 (586): 343–51. JSTOR 25105451.(subscription required) .
• Isaac, Larry (December 2009). "Movements, Aesthetics, and Markets in Literary Change: Making the American Labor Problem Novel". American Sociological Review. 74 (6): 938–65. JSTOR 27801502.(subscription required)
• Jaher, Frederic Cople (Spring 1972). "Industrialism and the American Aristocrat: A Social Study of John Hay and His Novel, the Bread-Winners". Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. 65 (1): 69–93. JSTOR 40190942.(subscription required)
• Kushner, Howard I. (September 1974). "'The Strong God Circumstance': The Political Career of John Hay". Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. 67 (4): 352–84. JSTOR 40191317.(subscription required)
• Monteiro, George (February 1976). "John Hay and the Union Generals". Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. 69 (1): 46–66. JSTOR 40191692.(subscription required)
• Sloane, David E. E. (Fall 1969). "John Hay's The Bread-Winners as Literary Realism". American Literary Realism, 1870-1910. 2 (3): 276–79. JSTOR 27747664.(subscription required)
• Sloane, David E. E. (Spring 1970). "John Hay (1838-1905)". American Literary Realism, 1870-1910. 3 (2): 178–88. JSTOR 27747706.(subscription required)
• Vandersee, Charles (Summer, 1974). "The Great Literary Mystery of the Gilded Age". American Literary Realism, 1870-1910. 7 (3). JSTOR 27747927. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)(subscription required) .
• Woolman, David (October 1997). "Did Theodore Roosevelt Overreact When an American was Kidnapped in Morocco? Were Seven Warships Really Necessary?". Military History. 14 (4).
• Stevenson Jr., Randehl; Stevenson (Spring–Summer 2006). "John Milton Hay's Literary Influence". Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. 99 (1): 19–27. JSTOR 40193908.(subscription required)
• Zeitz, Joshua (February 2014). "Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay and the War For Lincoln's Image". Smithsonian. 44 (10).

See also

Full text at Project Gutenberg