The Bread-Winners: A Social Study is an 1883 novel by John Hay, former secretary to Abraham Lincoln who in 1898 became U.S. Secretary of State. The book takes an anti-organized labor stance, and when published anonymously sold well and provoked considerable public interest in determining who the author was.
The plot of the book revolves around former army captain Arthur Farnham, a wealthy resident of Buffland (an analog of Cleveland). He organizes Civil War veterans to keep the peace when the Bread-winners, a group of lazy and malcontented workers, call a violent general strike. He is sought in marriage by the ambitious Maud Matchin, daughter of a carpenter, but instead weds a woman of his own class.
Hay wrote his only novel as a reaction to several strikes that affected him and his business interests in the 1870s and early 1880s. Originally published in installments in The Century Magazine, the book attracted wide interest. Hay had left hints to his identity in the novel, and some guessed right, but he never acknowledged the book as his, and it did not appear with his name on it until after his death in 1905. Hay's hostile view of organized labor was soon seen as outdated, and the book is best remembered for its onetime popularity and controversial nature.
Plot
One of the wealthiest and most cultured residents of the famed Algonquin Avenue in Buffland (a city intended to be Cleveland), Captain Arthur Farnham is a Civil War veteran and widower—his wife died of illness while accompanying him at a remote frontier post. Since he left the army, he has sought to involve himself in municipal affairs but fails through political naiveté. The victorious party has allowed him the position of chairman of the library board. In that capacity, he is approached by Maud Matchin, daughter of carpenter Saul Matchin, 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 his wealthy widow neighbor.
Saul Matchin had hoped 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 Matchins, a match favored by her father. Sleeny is busy repairing Farnham's outbuildings, and is made jealous by interactions between the captain and Maud. Seeing 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 happy 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 it to 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 her mother incautiously tells her of the incident, does not. When Farnham seeks to marry 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 nonviolent. Neither the mayor nor the chief of police, when approached by Farnham, are willing to guard Algonquin Avenue. Farnham proceeds to organize Civil War veterans, and purchases weapons to arm them. After Farnham's force rescues the mayor from being attacked, 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 meets 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 [in the serialization, "Clevealo"], 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 the carpenter 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 Offitt 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. After realizing Offitt's treachery, Sleeny escapes jail 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, in which he is aided by partisan testimony from Maud. A sympathetic jury ignores the law to acquit him. Sleeny wins Maud's hand in marriage, and Farnham and Alice Belding are to be wed.
Background John Hay
John Hay was born in Indiana in 1838, and grew up 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 presidential campaign in 1860. He was made Lincoln's assistant personal secretary, and spent the years of the American Civil War working for him; the two men forged a close relationship.
After the war, Hay worked for several years in diplomatic posts abroad, then in 1870 became a writer for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, continuing there under Whitelaw Reid after Greeley's death in 1872. Hay was a gifted writer for the Tribune, but also achieved success with literary works. In 1871, he 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 wed her in 1874. The marriage made Hay wealthy. Hay and his wife moved to Cleveland, where Hay managed Amasa Stone's investments. In December 1876, a train of Stone's Lake Shore Railway was crossing a bridge 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 held the patent for the design of the bridge and was widely blamed; he left Hay in charge of his businesses in mid-1877 as he went to travel in Europe.
Hay biographer Robert Gale recorded that between the publication of the last of Hay's short fiction in 1871 and that of his only novel in 1883, "Hay married money, entered into a lucrative business arrangement in Cleveland with his conservative father-in-law [and] joined the right wing of the Ohio Republican Party ... The Bread-Winners was written by a person made essentially different as a result of these experiences."
Postwar labor troubles and literary reaction
Although the American Civil War did not itself transform the United States from a largely agrarian to an urban society, it gave great impetus to a change already under way, especially in the North. The challenges of feeding, clothing, and equipping the Union Army caused the building or expansion of many factories and other establishments. This made many wealthy, and led to an industrialized America.
This transformation did not stop when the war ended; industrial production in the United States increased by 75% from 1865 to 1873, making the U.S. second only to Britain in manufacturing output. 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. These disturbances culminated in the Railroad Strikes of 1877, when workers struck over cut wages and loss of jobs. The action originally started on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, but spread to other lines, including the Lake Shore, much to Hay's outrage. Federal troops were sent by President Rutherford B. Hayes to quash the strikes, at the cost of more than a hundred civilian lives. The Lake Shore dispute, unlike those elsewhere, was settled without violence. Hay remained angry, and 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."
Public opinion was generally against the strikes in the 1877 disputes and called for them to be ended by force to preserve property and stability. The strike and its suppression 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 often 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 Mill strike of June 1882, which occurred just before Hay first submitted his manuscript. During the dispute, union members violently attempted to prevent strikebreakers from entering the mills. A third strike that may have affected the final form of The Bread-Winners was that against Western Union in 1883—Hay was then a director of that corporation.
Gale noted that The Bread-Winners has sometimes been 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 book 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.
Themes