On Writing in America: The Politics, Criticism, and Fiction of William Dean Howells :: Essays Papers

On Writing in America The Politics, Criticism, and Fiction of William dean HowellsUpon hearing of an event which has become known as The Haymarket Incident, a red outbreak that involved strikers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company on May 4, 1886, William Dean Howells felt provoked to respond.1 Whatever personal motives this exceedingly publicized concomitant sparked in Howells, who was successful novelist and influential critic of the literary productions and social issues of his quantify, the strike and subsequent executions of seven of the protesters involved had a hard-hitting effect on this respected man of letters. Howells illustrated his remorse for what he mum as a profound legal injustice in a letter he wrote to a friend shortly before the dangling of the Haymarket protesters It blackens my life. I feel the horror and the shame of the crime which the law is more or less to commit against justice.2 Howells assertions in regard to the case were at the time extr eme and not widely supported they contradicted the views of the majority of the American media, who chose to posterior big business and to disregard details that to Howells marked the trial as corrupt. Howells views challenged a general sentiment in the press against manoeuvreing classify protesters, who, like the workers involved in the Haymarket Incident, demanded certain rights in the workplace and proposed an eight-hour work day.3 It had become a trend in the media to back the employers rather than the employed, in the name of the free market, before the Haymarket riots. For example, several years before the incident at Haymarket, the Chicago Tribune had characterized a group of railroad workers involved in a similar incident as the scum and filth of the city. common chord days later, commenting on the organizers of the same uprising, the Tribune contended that Capitalism would offer any ticker to see the leaders...strung up to a telegraph pole.4 Howells was known for his r adical political views, views which often questioned the effectiveness of a capitalist society, and it is not strike that he subsequently supported the Haymarket laborers. Howells socialistic views no doubt sprung in part from his readings of Tolstoy, especially from the Russian novelists writings on the notion of Christian Socialism. Howells once wrote, Tolstoi sic gave me the heart to hope that the world may yet be made over in the image of Him who died for it,...(that) men shall come into their own,.