Essay Questions

What is the double irony in the narrative description of the aftermath of Mike having voted for Eugene Debs?

Eugene V. Debs was one of the most important figures in the battle for the rights of workers and a truly heroic titan within the story of the rise of organized labor. Mike casts his vote for the Socialist Party candidate Debs in a Presidential election while living in a hardcore Republican machine-controlled stronghold and immediately afterwards waits for the news to somehow get out and result in his being fired. He’s thrilled at first to have gotten away with bucking the machine as he is neither fired nor docked pay—“that the company had ways of learning how a man voted nobody in Braddock doubted”—but later comes to a saddening realization. Mike eventually is forced to recognize the “subtle irony” that merely casting a vote for a Debs is viewed by the machine as tantamount to symbolically throwing rocks against a fortress and that far from being punished for his supposed of act of rebellion, his vote is pathetically viewed as “the measure of his impotence.” And therein lies the irony which Mike has no way of recognizing, but which brilliantly foreshadows the fact that his son—a factual testament to the fact Mike most assuredly not impotent—will become a leading player in the organized labor movement that undoes the power of the Republican machine protecting the interests of the steel mill owners.

Which historical person could fairly be described as the antagonist of the conflict at the heart of this narrative?

Technically speaking, the antagonist of the novel would be most rightfully identified in the broad sense of the owners of the steel industry. A narrow defining of the villain might reduce the identity down to the United States Steel Corporation specifically. The trajectory of the novel follows the historical timeline of notoriously rich and greedy financier J.P. Morgan purchasing the Braddock steel mill for incorporation int his U.S. Steel Corp., but it is really the seller rather than the buyer involved in that transaction who is most fully representative of the role of antagonist in the story. That seller was Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in the American history. Carnegie is peculiarly fitting as a villain not just because he regularly engaged violence to end any attempts at organizing unions, improving working conditions and negotiating fair wages for mill workers. Such tactics were par for the course for all owners of industrial factories. What makes Carnegie a particularly vivid illustration of the abomination of this crowd was the obscene amounts of money he spent—which could have otherwise been spent paying his workers a decent wage instead of paying thugs to beat them up—creating an image for himself as a philanthropic supporter of the working man and democratic rights. The Carnegie Library, Carnegie Museum, the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the famous Carnegie Hall are just some of the expressions of his own greatness he built which are referenced in the novel.