The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

In the wake of Haymarket, in September 1886, William Dean Howells published perhaps his most quoted “Editor’s Study” columns in Harper’s. He praised the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky but cautioned that the Russian’s work was to be appreciated “only in its place.” Its “profoundly tragic” note and the author’s socialism were unsuitable for the United States. Howells thought that American novelists should “concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests.” In a country where “journeymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is certainly very small, and the wrong from class to class is almost inappreciable.” It would be wrong to boast, but “the race here enjoys conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals may be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior.”