Haymarket and Hazard: The Lonely Politics of William Dean Howells

Abstract

A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) came out of Howell's experience with the 1887 execution of the Chicago Haymarket Square anarchists, and it documented the constellation of issues that combined to make the Haymarket riots such a traumatic episode. The decline of agrarian values and the rise of industrialism, the pervasiveness of the free market, the strike wars between labor and management, and the rapidly growing urban areas which were changing under the tide of immigration all receive Howells's sustained treatment in the novel. Yet if most commentators can agree that the novel was Howells's most politically ambitions, hardly anyone has explored the of Howells's personal stake in the novel.(1) As much as Howells wanted to explore the unimaginable and certainly frightening changes that were confronting American society, Howells wrote the novel to explore consequences of his bitterness and alienation as a result of his Haymarket protest. Beginning with his travel narratives, Venetian Life (1886) and Italian Journeys (1867), on up through The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howells had enjoyed an unprecedented rise in both popularity and critical stature which seemed to justify his ascension to the apostolic succession Oliver Wendell Holmes had conferred upon him when he was a young man making a literary pilgrimage of sorts to visit his own literary idols, Lowell, Hawthorne, Emerson, et al.(2) Though Howells's commitment to realism, as biographers Lynn and Cady have shown, subjected Howells to some occasionally harsh criticism from his audience for his willingness to paint life too harshly, there was no question that by the late 1880s William Dean Howells was America's preeminent author. Haymarket, however, severed Howells from his conception of realism, of his audience, of America itself. Stripped from the comfort of all that had previously sustained him, Howells wrote A Hazard of New Fortunes as his bravest attempt to overturn what would become, unfortunately, our lasting image of him, best captured in the famous dismissive words of H.L Mencken: almost the national ideal: an urbane and highly respected gentleman, a sitter on committees...a placid conformist (Cady and Cady 259). To a remarkable degree, Howells's protest of the execution of the so-called Haymarket anarchists placed him on a committee of one, and his experience points up the many obstacles the writer in America faces who strives to make a political gesture through his fiction.Thus, critics have failed to see that Howells wrote his protest into the Novel through a kind of doubled perspective. On an obvious level, which. no one has failed to notice, Howells employed as his critical spokesman his favorite alter ego, Basil March, whom Howells had used in other novels, including his first novel, Their Wedding Journey (1871). March represents no on Howells's version of himself, but his audience as well. If Howells was going to convince his audience of the moral outrage that had been committed in the aftermath of the Haymarket riots, then he would. have to do so through a figure with whom his audience could identify. The eminently sane March fits this bill. On the other hand, Howells had become estranged from the very saneness March was supposed to represent. No longer did he share the values--in today's more politicized times, one might even use the word, ideology--that March could be said to represent: an essential middle-class faith that as unfair as American social conditions might be, things were, after al, worse elsewhere and, besides, things here ere no doubt getting better. As we shall see, Howells's divide opinion concerning America, as well as his doubled perspective in the novel, expressed itself in the figure of the would-be anarchist, and German immigrant, Lindau. A peculiar double motion occurs between March and Lindau. Ultimately, Lindau complicates March's response to the distinctly undemocratic social conditions that Hazard portrays, while at the same time March absorbs and drains the venom from Lindau's critique. …