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 Howells Upon hearing of an event which has become known as "The Haymarket Incident," a violent 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 highly publicized incident sparked in Howells, who was successful novelist and influential critic of the literature and social issues of his time, the strike and subsequent executions of seven of the protesters involved had a trenchant effect on this respected man of letters. Howells illustrated his remorse for what he understood as a profound legal injustice in a letter he wrote to a friend shortly before the hanging of the Haymarket protesters: "It blackens my life. I feel the horror and the shame of the crime which the law is about to commit against justice."2 Howells' assertions in regard to the case were at the time radical and not widely supported; they contradicted the views of the majority of the American media, who chose to back big business and to disregard details that to Howells marked the trial as corrupt. Howells' views challenged a general sentiment in the press against working class 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." Three days later, commenting on the organizers of the same uprising, the Tribune contended that "Capitalism would offer any sum to see the leaders...strung up to a tel egraph pole."4 Howells was known for his radical political views, views which often questioned the effectiveness of a capitalist society, and it is not surprising that he subsequently supported the Haymarket laborers. Howells' socialistic views no doubt sprung in part from his readings of Tolstoy, especially from the Russian novelist's 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,.