The Workers’ Paradise?
The novel is primarily about the immigrant experience, but beneath that runs a history of organized labor in America. Business ownership comes in for a well-deserved roasting and though the following metaphor may be a little difficult to follow, it is the essence of the book’s perspective distilled:
“American industry, for all its boasting, was still crude and wasteful in its methods; and part of the cost of its education,—of that technique it was, in time, to consider, somewhat smugly, as a uniquely American heritage, a gift of God to the corporations of America,—was the lives and bodies of thousands of its workers.”
Well, He’s Living There in Allentown
Dobie is the “he” and thought not the town is not really that which Billy Joel sings about in his song, the metaphor applies universally. Dobie is still yet a teenager when the narrator makes the metaphorical observation about his parentage and just as Joel was saying through song that generations families members had their future lives shaped by the circumstances of their birth, so is the narrator suggesting that Dobie’s future is to a certain aspect predetermined for him.
“He was a child of the steel towns long before he realized it himself.”
Excellent Justification for Not Voting
George Kracha is a first-generation immigrant and the novel paints this element of the immigrant experience as one not conducive to assimilation. Part of assimilation into American society is political activity, but for George the purpose of voting between two men is negated by the very process which makes two men eligible capable of candidacy:
“To Kracha's way of thinking a little man could logically be for little men, but by his very success in getting nominated Bryan had ceased to be a little man. And the big man who was for the little man didn't exist, never had and never would."
Proud to be an American
A little-known regional skirmish of the Revolutionary War involving General Braddock—after whom the town he lives in was named—and George Washington provides Mike an epiphany which allows him to metaphorically confer upon himself the American part of Slovakian-American:
“General Braddock wouldn’t listen to [Washington]; and that to Mike was like a sudden flash of light, illuminating the basic, irreconcilable difference between things British and American. George Washington had been so obviously right that perceiving it made Mike feel himself already half an America”
The Not-So-Terrible Depression
The onset of the Great Depression was the worst crisis the country had experienced since the Civil War, enacting widespread and devastating damage to the entire population. Still, it was also a transformative period without which many positive advances which helped Americans progress toward greater economic freedom and stability would not have taken place for who knows how long. One of the circumstances of the collapse of the ownership class resulting from the Wall Street crash was that it paved for the way for successful workers revolution:
“As time passed, as the machinery of the country slowed down and the streets darkened with unemployed…it became plain that something was wrong, and even plainer that no one knew what to do about it”
