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Book Review: Labor Economics: The Demand for State and Local Government Employees

although it was not until 1855 that Martha Tyler's A Book without a Title: or Thrilling Events in the Life of Mira Dana became the first novel to deal with a strike. After the Civil War more novelists wrote about strikes, but with little success. They were hampered by the fact that they were generally from the middle class with little or no first-hand knowledge of factory conditions, and, as a result, they failed to depict strikes realistically. By 1900, only a few novelists, such as William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser, had made use of the strike effectively. The new century saw steady, significant change. As more novelists who were familiar with working-class life began to write, the settings became more authentic. The socialist novel, in which the strike was used to dramatize the confrontation between worker and capitalist, also appeared on the scene. And the depression of the 1 930s provided the matrix for the development of a new genre, the strike novel, which did not simply make use of a strike but was "essentially about a strike...." The formula for the strike novel included a detailed description of the strike, which was depicted as "an explicit microcosm of political revolution." In addition, "at least one of the major characters must be shown to progress from political unawareness to class-conscious identification as a worker and a revolutionary, directly because of his experiences during the strike." The heyday of the strike novel was, however, of short duration. Because Marxist criticism demanded that it adhere to rigid criteria, the strike novel could not develop and died in the early 1940s. Perhaps the most interesting facet of this book is the author's exploration of the change in novelists' attitudes toward workers and poverty. This is where her reading of all those bad novels becomes important, for if they are worthless as literature, they do have significance for intellectual history. Steeped in the Puritan tradition, the earlier novelists tended to be unsympathetic toward those on the bottom of the economic scale, feeling that they had only themselves to blame for their situation. In the twentieth century, reflecting a gradual change in society at large, novelists began to question these earlier assumptions -to feel that the worker was often a victim of society who needed help. Unfortunately, however, there are too many factual errors in the book. Cleveland, not McKinley, was President during the Pullman Strike. Eugene Debs did not run for President in 1916; in fact, the author selected the only presidential campaign between 1900 and 1920 in which this five-time candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket did not run. She implies that Bellamy's Looking Backward was not a Marxist book because "Das Kapital had not yet been translated into English," although she must realize that Marxist ideas were known in the United States before Bellamy's novel was written. Although I cannot see that this book makes any significant contribution to knowledge, it is not without merit. We should commend the author for suffering through all of those bad, long-forgotten ovels, and reporting the interesting results of her study in a style which, while hardly sparkling, is clear and pleasant. Her findings concerning the changes in American thinking over the last century break no new ground but do represent a minor contribution to American intellectual history. I regret, however, that in her need to justify the significance of her study, Blake makes exaggerated claims for it in the conclusion. "The uses of the strike," she states, "have left some indelible effects on the American novelist. He can make unhesitating use of working-class life and working-class characters. He no longer accepts middle-class ideas as unquestioned truths." Somehow, I am not convinced that the "uses of the strike" were responsible for all this. Harold W. Currie Associate Professor Department of American Thought and Language Michigan State University