Radical Novel, 1870-1930

RADICAL NOVEL, 1870–1930. From its emergence as a Utopian evocation to its maturation as naturalist epic, the radical novel has explored central themes concerning the Left and the “life of the mind.” It has also, in its chaotic and shifting form, suggested the difficulty of American intellectuals’ search for artistic method.

The radical novel had its tangled roots in the women’s literature of the mid-nineteenth century. One side of a critique can be seen in the bizarre allegory The Salamander: A Legend (1848), by the prominent abolitionist lecturer Elizabeth Oakes Smith. The novel predicted a catastrophe for capitalism, which used science and technology in the feckless pursuit of profit. The other side is apparent in Caroline Chesebro’s Isa: A Pilgrimage (1852), about a utopian-minded couple who share a vision of sexual egalitarianism and crusading reformism. Until the end of the century, these two sides found vivid expression in scores of novels.

Anticipating moral degradation and disaster, Populist leader Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890) was by far the best-selling work, reaching perhaps a total of a half-million copies in the next quarter-century. Here, unchecked economic despotism leads to race suicide and to a vast debacle in which only a minority escape—to found a cooperative colony of settlers somewhere in Africa, with equal rights for women. Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1911), almost a rewritten version of Caesar’s Column with racial themes toned down and the urban class struggle seen more carefully, places endless conflict ahead. Socialist science-fiction writer George Allen England produced a trilogy Darkness and Dawn (1916), with a metaphorical treatment of World War I, portraying the total ruin of civilization through some mysterious events. The narrative leaves its two protagonists to discover a (definitely white) colony where civilization is being reassembled with equal rights and economic egalitarianism.

More realistically intended studies generally portrayed the emerging division of classes in the United States and sought some kind of resolution of class warfare through cooperative practices. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), the best known and probably most effective of these studies, offered a model in women’s cross-class cooperation. Helen Campbell’s Mrs. Herndon’s Income (1886) brought an outright socialist into the equation as a sympathetic soul. Most other critics, despite their radical critique, could not go so far. Christian socialist Katherine Pearson Woods, whose Metzerott, Shoemaker (1889), suggested how unjust economic conditions, if not remedied, could lead to fanaticism and disaster. Her Mark of the Beast, published in an issue of Lippincott’s in 1890, took a step further in endorsing Christian socialism (but not atheistic immigrant socialism) as the solution to the woes of the poor and as a moral correction to the excesses of the rich.

The numerous Utopian novels of the period drew a more brilliant picture of socialism in operation. Only a few might be described as written by authors familiar with modern socialist principles. Marie Howland, an activist in the American wing of the First International, contributed Papa’s Own Girl (1874), depicting life in a Fourierist “Social Palace.” Henry Allen, a leading participant in the St. Louis “Commune” briefly established by socialists during the 1877 railroad strike, wrote A Strange Voyage: A Revision of the Key of Industrial Cooperative Government; An Interesting and Instructive Description of Life on Planet Venus (1891). Mixing socialism and Swedenborgianism in an improbable plot—a man is invited by a beautiful alien to visit her socialistically organized home planet—it featured gold-lined toilet bowls among other technological innovations. Distributed by a short-lived socialist newspaper network, Strange Voyage had a minuscule success compared with that of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889), the most influential socialistic novel worldwide in the nineteenth century. Bellamy’s depiction of contemporary poverty versus technological Utopia not only inspired a political movement but actually made cooperative society seem possible to millions of Americans. His subsequent novel, Equality (1897), although analytically clearer in its critique of capitalism and depiction of women’s life in a socialist society, failed to retain readers’ interest in the continuing tale of Looking Backward’s two romantic characters.

Realism, inspired by the grinding poverty of the 1890s and by such foreign models as Emile Zola, made a sudden literary appearance around the turn of the century. A mainstream critic reportedly said that if Balzac had seen Pittsburgh, he would have exclaimed, “Give me a pen!” Actually, William Dean Howells’s novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1894) portrayed an urban setting seething with contradictions, while the short Yiddish fiction of the extended newspaper column (notably by Leon Kobrin) offered a close study of slum conditions. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—serialized in the socialist Appeal to Reason and reprinted as a novel in 1906—demonstrated the power and the potential popularity of the genre. Sinclair depicted packinghouse life and unsanitary conditions and made an impact on congressional committees and Socialist Party circles. Of Sinclair’s other numerous books, King Coal (1917) approached the drama of working-class life, this time amid the Colorado coal strike of 1913–1914.

The African-American protest novel added something unique to this equation. Frances E.W. Harper’s notable Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted,(1892) confronted and sought to refute popular white writers’ descriptions of idyllic life under slavery and provided stories of black, middle class idealism. Sutton Griggs founded his own publishing company and wrote five, otherwise less-than-memorable novels with heroes who embraced their blackness and looked to social solidarity among their own people. Charles W. Chesnutt actually found a mass audience outside the African American community, no doubt because he won over major trade publishers with his romantic treatments of creole life and its skin-color complications in New Orleans and elsewhere. His vital protest novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), analyzing the racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, was largely ignored.

The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) deserves special consideration because its author is W.E.B. Du Bois, already a leading intellectual figure and destined for greatness. Semi-realistic, emphatically romantic, it was also seriously critical. A Black man and woman strive to overcome many racist obstacles and build a coherent community in Alabama during the immediate post-Reconstruction years. They have no choice but to advance through the use of the “silver fleece,” i.e., cotton, that had signified enslavement for centuries.

No other radical novelists, Black or white, approached Upton Sinclair’s popular achievement in the first decades of the twentieth century, but at least a few improved upon his often cardboard characterizations and predictable plots. Arthur Bullard, later a prominent American diplomat, offered in Comrade Yetta (1913) a touching treatment of a young radical woman who helps organize a garment union local, joins the staff of a socialist daily newspaper, and meets the activist love of her life. Ernest Poole’s The Harbor (1915), a best-seller, carefully portrays the lives of stokers and dockers who carry along the protagonist in their mighty strike. Leroy Scott’s The Walking Delegate (1907), virtually alone among labor novels, shows unionists at work in their daily affairs.

Novels of sexual exploitation retouched sentimentalism with socialist coloring and, in a climate of “white slave trade” revelations, briefly enjoyed a wide audience. Estelle Baker’s The Rose Door (1910), popular in socialist ranks, showed women of different classes seduced, deceived, and forced into prostitution. Reginald Kauffman’s House of Bondage (1910), a nationwide best-seller, fell back upon the plot of the rural refugee trapped by a big-city procurer, but added new insight into the futility of escape from the clutches of business profiteers and government corruption. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1903) projected the radical author forward, among his many socialist friends in particular (he allowed a section of his Idylls of the Poor to be published in the New York Call), as the true-life chronicler of the changing social conditions and mores that caused a “good” woman to act in ostensibly immoral ways.

Novels of personal emancipation, sexual and otherwise, turned this theme around to stress the awakening of women, especially, from artificial moral restraints. The Chasm (1911) by George Cram Cook, converted to socialism and bohemianism by his boyhood friend Floyd Dell, shows a wealthy woman who chooses Marxism (represented by her father’s socialist gardener) over Nietzscheanism (represented by her aristocratic husband). Her personal revolt permits the protagonist to choose the proper side. In Susan Glaspell’s The Awakening (1911), greatly influenced by George Cram Cook, and in Florence Converse’s The Children of Light (1912), these contradictions are solved less philosophically, as the female protagonists grow into a vision of socialism by extending their vision of sexual emancipation. Charlotte Teller’s The Cage (1907) likewise interweaves class and gender struggles, but with the twist that the protagonist must educate her ethnic socialist husband to reject the principle of legal marriage as the only legitimate expression of love. In Hutchins Hapgood’s Anarchist Woman (1909), the problem cannot be solved to the satisfaction of all when a slum woman freed from the limits of her background must finally abandon the anarchist-lover who sought in her development his own Pygmalion-like success.

Perhaps, as Hapgood intimated, individualism more than collectivity held the American future. The best-crafted radical novels of the age came to this rather pessimistic conclusion. Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), almost a self-portrait of the successful American businessman who had lost his European soul, exemplifies the archetype. In Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), truly a proletarian novel and arguably a spiritual autobiography, neither literary success nor adoring women can ease the psychological pain of the talented proletarian, who can find no home in any existing social class and at last hurls himself into the sea. A young and socialistic Sherwood Anderson, in Marching Men (1919), renders the radical leader himself as a social-isolate Nietzschean giant who must decide for the masses. In another way, Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins (1917)—a pacifist novel that shows the agonizing decline of a young, enthusiastic activist to army recruit and gibbering madman—has the same moral. Socialist politics have failed and, at least in America, only individual credos (none too easy to live) remain. Even Mooncalf (1922), Floyd Dell’s generally cheery bildungsroman, ends on the same note.

This sense of alienation had its echo in literary life. Only so long as the older socialist movement remained intact did an intellectual climate exist for common discussion of radical literature and publication of short stories, which served many potential novelists as the site of earliest reception for their work. In the first years of the century, The Comrade (1900–1905) connected Howells and a range of nineteenth-century literary-reformer types with the young socialist reader. A fairly small-circulation weekly, Horace Traubel’s Conservator (1890–1919), offered close and sympathetic critiques of Jack London and a range of other writers devoted to Traubel’s judgments. For a few years after 1910, the Coming Nation, the Masses, and to a lesser degree the Liberator continued this process, but with diminishing enthusiasm for collective hopes.

By the 1920s, a sense of dread and frequently a repugnance at the state of American life pervade the radical novel. In the Yiddish world, where the novel had only begun to appear and where radicalism remained the prime mood of litterateurs, Joseph Opatoshu’s Hibru (1918) shows middle-class Jewish immigrants smug and arrogant about their material success. Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl (1922), although in English rather than Yiddish, is a similar portrayal of Jewish corruptions in America. David Pinski’s The Generations of Noah Eden (English translation, 1922) shows the Americanized children of a pious and kindly immigrant manufacturer turn to nihilism and self-destruction. Opatoshu’s stark novella “Lincherei” (Lynchers), published in a 1923 collection, Race, sought for the first time in Yiddish to expose the ugliest scenes in American life—hysterically happy southern whites roasting a black man alive for a sexual crime he did not commit. Among the established American writers, Upton Sinclair’s Boston (1928) sketched out the trial and judicial murder of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

In another sense, the defeat of the pre-1920 Left and the export of revolutionary hopes to Russia paralleled the exhaustion of Greenwich Village bohemia in favor of more exotic cultural scenes. Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1929) offered this bohemia “at home,” but only to Blacks who would remain forever outsiders in America. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) has a young man, frustrated in pursuit of a medical career in the US, thanks to his color, travel widely in the world, helpfully exposed to complexity and romance, with a dose of eros that critics disapproved. Waldo Frank’s semi-mystical novels similarly carried their protagonists outside the boundaries of existing American life. Even historical novels about the 1910s American Left, such as Elias Tobenkin’s The Road (1922) or Max Eastman’s Venture (1927), seemed to belong to some distant time and place. Certainly David Ignatov, writing in Yiddish, was the most modernist or expressionist of these writers, turning from the darkly realist In Keselgrub (“In the Crucible,” 1918) to the trilogy only published in completed form as Af vayte vegn (“On Distant Roads”) in 1932, moving from gloom and romantic radicalism toward a kind of mystic hopefulness within what remained a strange land beyond Jewish New York.

This artistic perception of “outsideness” posed considerable problems for the Left. The New Masses, fostered by Communist supporters, sought in its early years to maintain a balance between bohemian and Marxist sentiments, going over with both feet to a “proletarian literature” that had been demonstrated convincingly, in the form desired, perhaps only by New Masses editor Mike Gold himself, in Jews without Money (1930), the ultimate communist bildungsroman. The 1930s bought a temporary and partial fulfillment of this anticipation, but without removing the causes and deeper symptoms of the alienation and sense of unreality that marked the American radical author. Neither did the individual political commitments of literary giants—most prominently Theodore Dreiser, who would lead Left committees and add his name to Communist causes during the 1930s without ever firmly accepting the methods of Marxism or “proletarian literature”—alter the basic difficulty. The proper strategy of literary radicalism remained undetermined.

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 2011 edition.

Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Matthiessen, Francis O. Theodore Dreiser. New York: William Sloan Associates, 1951.

Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956.