By Bread Alone by I. K. Friedman

Prototype of the American muckraker novel

Isaac Khan Friedman was a socialist and settlement house worker in Chicago before becoming a journalist and novelist. He published a handful of novels about the working class and labor issues. Literature professor Walter B. Rideout, in his book The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954, called Friedman’s By Bread Alone, published in 1901, the first radical novel of the 20th century. As such, By Bread Alone is a sort of prototype of the muckraking literary movement that would soon follow, marked most notably by Upton Sinclair’s landmark labor novel The Jungle of 1906.

By Bread Alone is based on the real-life events of the Homestead Strike which occurred in Homestead, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, in 1892. Friedman sets his narrative, however, in the Chicago area, specifically in the nearby fictional town of Marvin, Illinois, which, much like Gary, Indiana, is named after the family that owns the local steel mills. Steel tycoon Henry Marvin has thousands in his employ, but he cares more about his own profits than the lives of his workers. When he refuses to pay his laborers fairly or improve their working and living conditions, they form a union and strike.

Friedman’s writing bears much resemblance to Upton Sinclair’s, but a bit more archaic in tone and clumsy in its delivery. Friedman frequently employs bizarre, outdated vocabulary, and his sentences are often structured in pointlessly convoluted syntax. Friedman is also guilty of one narrative mistake that Sinclair committed often in his career. The protagonist of the story is not a proletariat but rather an educated, wealthy “gentleman” who decides to slum it in the mills as a sort of sociological experiment. The events of class war and labor strife are not revealed through the lives of the workers but rather through the eyes of this labor tourist. Many of Sinclair’s labor novels, such as King Coal or Boston, are related through this same sort of upper-class intermediary. The only novel in which Sinclair tells his story directly through the workers themselves is The Jungle, which is why that book is his masterpiece. The greatest labor novels in American literature—The Jungle, The Octopus, The Grapes of Wrath—are the ones that dispense with the gentleman protagonist. In writing By Bread Alone, Friedman had yet to learn that lesson, and as a result the reader has to sit through an awful lot of clichéd Victorian romance to get to the scenes of class struggle. Much of the novel revolves around hero Blair Carrhart’s romance with a wealthy young “lady,” the mill-owner Marvin’s daughter. Much like Sinclair’s The Coal War, Friedman can’t even seriously entertain the idea of his gentleman hero hooking up with a working woman beneath his class. So much for sympathizing with the workers.

As a work of social realism, By Bread Alone may have been pioneering for its social aspects, but it fails in the realism department. The most effective scenes in the book are those of the strike and subsequent class violence, but such episodes never really seem to ring true. There’s too much heroism and not enough blood. Friedman’s work can’t compare with the gripping and visceral scenes of labor warfare in Emile Zola’s epic strike novel Germinal. When characters die in By Bread Alone, you recognize them as symbols but you don’t feel for them as human beings. His plot feels too facile; particularly the last couple chapters, which read like they’re from a different book entirely, and many problems are resolved in deus ex machina fashion. Historically, By Bread Alone may hold pride of precedence, but there are many other novels of muckraking naturalism more worthy of a reader’s time.
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