The Recording Angel by Edwin Arnold Brenholtz

Ridiculous labor novel

So-called radical novels of labor realism were plentiful in early 20th-century American literature, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle being the most famous example. Published a year earlier than The Jungle, in 1905, The Recording Angel was written by an actual proletariat, Edwin Arnold Brenholtz, who worked as a civil engineer for railroad and mining companies. The story involves a strike at an iron and steel mill in the fictional city of Steelton, Missouri. The title of the novel refers to when one character makes a vow to “the recording angel of God,” which apparently is a thing in Judeo-Christian mythology, but I had never heard the expression before. I enjoy reading the muckraking novels of this period because they provide an interesting look into a time in history when an American socialist movement challenged the trust-holding oligarchs of their day and fought for much-needed reforms (with mixed success). In The Recording Angel, however, the discussion of labor issues is so divorced from reality it’s absolutely bizarre.

For starters, the main reason for the workers’ strike in this book is not low wages or long hours but rather the fact that the management insists upon addressing the laborers by numbers rather than by names. Was that ever really a common problem? And would anyone have cared as long as they had food on the table? Nepotism is another complaint, since the children of the wealthy are granted management positions over more qualified workers. One rich, benevolent stockholder takes the side of the workers and supports them with his financial resources. His son, however, an executive at the mill, is an iron-fisted and abusive employer. Was this really labor’s problem in the early 20th century, that the boss’s son was a jerk? The reasons behind the strike, however, are barely relevant, since the strike hardly plays a role in the plot. Instead, Brenholtz opts for exaggerated melodrama and gives us an attempted murder, a contested will, a blackmailing scheme, and poisonings. The novel also includes a Jules Verne-type science fiction element in the employment of a technological device that would have been brand new and rather rare at the time of the novel’s publication but has now been commonplace for at least a century.

I don’t believe there is a single working-class character in the entire book, just a confusing assortment of lawyers, detectives, politicians, and oligarchs, many of them painted as broadly as a Batman villain. So much of the novel is taken up by interminable conversations between the blackmailer and the capitalist whom he is blackmailing. Chapter after chapter, the blackmailer reiterates the hold he has over his victim. Enough already, we get it. Could you please stop beating this dead horse so we can move on with some semblance of a story? After all that nonsense, the main thrust of the plot climaxes early, which leaves the reader having to plod through half a dozen epilogues.

The word “socialism” is used in this book as a miraculous cure for all societal ills, but The Recording Angel doesn’t actually teach the reader anything about socialism like the works of Upton Sinclair or Jack London do. From reading this novel, one would think that the socialist movement depends on wealthy industrialists who magnanimously decide to bequeath their riches to “the workers’ cause.” The cast of this novel includes at least three such unrealistic benefactors. If that’s what the success of the radical left in America rests upon, then they’ve got a long wait ahead of them before that pipe dream comes to fruition. The Recording Angel is not just a failure within the specific realm of the radical labor novel. It’s an example of bad writing in any genre.