Pay Envelopes: Tales of the Mill, the Mine and the City Street by James Oppenheim

Chicken soup for the proletariat’s soul

James Oppenheim

James Oppenheim was an American author, poet, and the founding editor of the literary magazine The Seven Arts. Though his work may not be quite journalistic enough to be classed among the muckraker movement in American literature, Oppenheim frequently wrote about social issues like labor struggles, women’s suffrage, and the pacifist opposition to World War I. His book Pay Envelopes, published in 1911, is a collection of eleven short stories, all of which depict workers and their struggles under brutal hours, unfair wages, and squalid living conditions. In a preface, Oppenheim explains that these stories are his attempt to elevate the plight of laborers to something approaching high art. The problem with this collection is that Oppenheim uses a bit too much artistic license. He often veers away from the frank realism of authors like Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser and ventures into sappy melodrama and rosy optimism.

For the most part, the workers depicted are laborers in steel mills. Pittsburgh is the setting of at least four of the stories. A couple others take place in New York City. One is set in a coal mining town, and the rest take place in unspecified urban centers. Outside of the blue-collar milieu, an office clerk and a medical student are featured, but both still live in poverty. In many cases, the protagonists of the stories are not the workers themselves but rather the women who love them.

At times, like Sinclair or Norris, Oppenheim brilliantly illustrates the harsh living and working environments of working-class and poverty-stricken citizens forced into pre-New Deal wage slavery. The problem, however, is that brutal reality isn’t good enough for Oppenheim. As one reads this collection, a repetitive pattern to the stories soon emerges. Relentless demoralizing toil turns the men into brutes who succumb to alcoholism, philandering, spousal abuse, and sloth. The women are typically martyrs who not only put up with this abuse but also sometimes support the family financially through their own hard work. Arguments ensue. Blows are struck. Suicide is contemplated. Destitution looms on the horizon. In the end, however, everyone makes up and realizes that love conquers all, even though none of their problems have been solved. Life sucks, but we’ll get through it together!

There are exceptions to the monotony. “Joan of the Mills” is the most overtly socialistic story, calling to mind Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. As in that novel, one of the things Oppenheim does well is to give sympathetic voice to the “Hunky,” a dated nickname for Hungarian or Slavic immigrants, who star in a handful of stories. The coal mining tale, “Stiny Bolinsky,” is another fine entry about a child laborer and a Lewis Hine-style photographer/reformer.

The main fault with Pay Envelopes is Oppenheim’s penchant for unrealistic happy endings. If Jack London had written this book, most of the protagonists would have committed suicide. If Frank Norris had written it, they would have died of tuberculosis or stab wounds. If Upton Sinclair had written it, they would have been imprisoned or shot as martyrs for waving the red flag in socialist party demonstrations. All of these options would have been more inspiring, exciting, and meaningful than the safe conclusions offered by Oppenheim, in which his characters aren’t any better off than when they started, just more contentedly resigned to their fates. Is that really the message Oppenheim wanted to send to workers? Just be happy with the hand you’ve been dealt, and everything will work out all right? Since I enjoy realist fiction of the muckraker era, I had high hopes for Pay Envelopes, but it ultimately proved disappointingly mediocre.

Stories in this collection

The Great Fear 

Meg 

Saturday Night

The Cog 

Slag 

A Woman 

Joan of the Mills 

The Empty Life

The Young Man 

The Broken Woman 

Stiny Bolinsky

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