Howells's work lies not in its clear depiction of what is to be done to remedy social inequalities but rather in its guiding assumption that such inequities are indeed the central moral problem of the era. This is clear in the majority of Howells's vast body of work, and certainly in the seven or so works of economic fiction he produced from 1885 through 1894, of which Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) are the most striking examples.
While Howells's fictions might themselves demur at providing specific prescriptions for the social ills they depict, they nonetheless emerge from very specific social and political contexts that shape their general themes. Just before beginning Annie Kilburn, Howells had announced his intention of bringing attention to the injustice of the hanging of four anarchist laborers after the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886. While the novel has little to do with the actual historical occurrence or the specific issues related to it, in depicting Annie's haplessness at finding the proper means of exercising her conscience it does nonetheless underscore Howells's belief that what is at stake in the struggle of the workers is not charity, but justice. This conviction is laid out much more elaborately in the more complex A Hazard of New Fortunes, written right after Annie Kilburn.
Simply stated, Hazard expands on the ideological conflict represented in Annie Kilburn in the tension between Mr. Gerrish and the Reverend Mr. Peck. That conflict is centered, in the later novel, on the characters of Mr. Dryfoos, an Indiana farmer who has become a millionaire when natural gas is discovered on his land, and his son, Conrad, who wants to minister on behalf of industrial workers. Their conflict is played out through Mr. Dryfoos's founding of a new magazine, Every Other Week, for which he wants Conrad to become the publisher; at the same time, his two daughters desire to become situated within New York society after Dryfoos, his wife, and his children move there upon the founding of the journal. The actual dayto-day management of the magazine is undertaken by Basil March (who, with his wife Isabel, is actually the central character in the story) — who serves as its editor after having left an unsuccessful ca-233- reer in insurance in Boston — and the promoter, Fulkerson. The catalyst for the explicit eruption of the social tensions that underlie the relations among these characters is provided by the elderly Henry Lindau, a German socialist who is an old friend of Basil March's and who handles foreign correspondence for the magazine. At a dinner party Dryfoos holds to celebrate the success of the new journalistic venture, he and Lindau clash over politics with the result that Lindau is disassociated from the magazine. This scene prefigures the explicit break between the elder Dryfoos and his son, who forsakes the business of the magazine to work on behalf of the striking streetcar workers. During a riot between the strikers and the police, Conrad sees Mr. Lindau being beaten by an officer, and is killed by a stray bullet as he runs to the old man's aid. Lindau himself dies as a result of his injuries, unable to appreciate the elder Dryfoos's change of heart after his son's death. Broken by his loss, Dryfoos sells the magazine to March and Fulkerson, who foresee prosperous future, and moves his family to France, where they settle in fairly well among Parisian society. This removal of the upwardly mobile family from the American context — and the accession of apparently more moderate parties to the position that they vacate — indicates the degree to which, by this time in the history of the reform novel, the domestic locus has ceased to serve as the prime site in which the transformation of social consciousness can occur, and has become, rather, the source of new converts to bourgeois ideology in the capitalist context.
This transition in the novelistic function of the family may well be linked to the rather less obviously didactic strategy that characterizes the work of Howells as opposed to that of, say, Stowe or Phelps. Howells's treatment of social division amongst the urban classes in A Hazard of New Fortunes was admired by the younger writer Hamlin Garland, who noted that 'the author nowhere speaks in his own person, nowhere preaches, and yet the lesson is there for all who will read.' In a novel that followed on the heels of Howells's Hazard, Garland attempted to do for the Midwestern farmer and the cause of agrarian reform what Howells had done for the rights of industrial workers.
From 1870 until the end of the century, United States farmers of the West and South were caught in a struggle with the industrial and -234- financial centers of the East as the country's economic base shifted from agriculture to manufacture: the mechanization of farming produced glutted markets and low crop prices; the development of railroad monopolies provided for high transportation costs that farmers were hard pressed to meet; high interest rates and an inflated money market added to the farmers' financial burden; a series of natural disasters made the welfare of rural families uncertain from one moment to the next; immigration and the opening of public lands in the West to homesteading increased the size and diversity of the rural population to such an extent that it was difficult for them to meet on common social territory to address their concerns. These problems that United States farmers faced were taken up through a number of burgeoning mechanisms for protest, including the National Grange, the Greenback movement, and the Populist Revolt. It was the complicated interrelation of these various developments that Garland attempted to treat in A Spoil of Office (1892), which illustrates the intense interest in social reform that characterized his early career.
The plot of the novel is bifurcated into an early section (developed from an unfinished novel on the Grange movement) that traces the development of Bradley Talcott's career first as an Iowa farmhand, then as a farmers' advocate and state legislator; and a later section that portrays his life as a politician in Des Moines and Washington. The central moral issue in the story involves Bradley's temptation, once elected to political office, to surrender the populist ideals on which his career had been based and succumb to the relative comfort of his position, a fate from which he is saved by the energetic Ida Wilbur, a Grange lecturer whose commitment to and understanding of the reform movement are much deeper than his own. Their union in the story results in the symbolic birth of a newly energized populist movement that will continue its vital work at the end of the novel.
What is notable about A Spoil of Office, beyond what most critics agree is a flawed structure and a nonetheless extremely accurate historical depiction of agrarian revolt, is its explicit treatment of women's subjection as a primarily economic problem. In a church lecture that Ida gives on 'The Real Woman- question,' she emphasizes that feminism -235- 'is not a question of suffrage merely — suffrage is the smaller part of the woman-question — it is a question of equal rights. It is a question of whether the law of liberty applies to humanity or to men only. . The woman question is not a political one merely, it is an economic one. The real problem is the wage problem, the industrial problem. The real question is woman's dependence upon man as the bread-winner. As long as that dependence exists there will be weakness.'
This position, which resembles orthodox Marxism's subsumption of all social inequality under the problem of class division within capitalism, characterized Garland's treatment of women's status in much of his early work, and the importance of his recognition of economics as a major factor in women's oppressed condition cannot be overlooked. At the same time, in works from 1894 and 1895, such as 'The Land of the Straddle-Bug' and Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, Garland focused specifically on women's rights as a social as well as economic issue, thus broadening his treatment of that social movement — feminism — which had largely laid the framework for the development of reform fiction as we have come to know it since the turn of the century.
Throughout the period under consideration, much of the work of social reform continued to be performed by women of the likes of I da Wilbur. During the 1860s and early 1870s, Anna Dickinson was extremely popular on the Lyceum lecture circuit, speaking on numerous topics, including feminism, the rights of immigrants, and union organizing. Carry Nation and Frances Willard led the temperance movement through the 1870s. During the 1890s, Ida B. Wells produced explicitly detailed articles and addresses outlining the atrocities of lynch law in the South. And Ida Tarbell raised before the reading public questions about the integrity of the leading capitalist institutions of the day; her 'History of the Standard Oil Company,' published in McClure's Magazine in 1902, exposed the corrupt practices of the Rockefeller empire, and launched 'muckraking' journalism. The great specificity of Tarbell's piece was duplicated in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, which detailed the degraded life of immigrant workers in the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking houses. Influenced largely by Jack London's 1903 attack on capitalism and the class system, People of the Abyss (London would go on to write a further indictment of this system in his 1906 novel, The-236- Iron Heel), and by the techniques of Tarbell and fellow muckraker Lincoln Steffens, The Jungle represents the culmination of the social protest novel before its impulses became dispersed in the global developments leading to World War I and in the various strains of American literary modernism.
The central figure in The Jungle is Jurgis Rudkus, a Chicago stockyard worker originally from Lithuania. Along with his wife, Ona, whom he marries after they both arrive in Chicago, his father,
