Handout 3

READING LIST:
Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901);
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906);
Willa Cathers O Pioneers! (1913) & My ntonia (1918).
Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901)
1. "The great poem of the West. It's that which I want to write. Oh, to put it all into hexameters;
strike the great iron note; sing the vast, terrible song; the song of the People; the forerunners
of empire!" Vanamee understood him perfectly. He nodded gravely. "Yes, it is there. It is Life,
the primitive, simple, direct Life, passionate, tumultuous. Yes, there is an epic there." Presley
caught at the word. It had never before occurred to him. "Epic, yes, that's it. It is the epic I'm
searching for. And HOW I search for it. You don't know. It is sometimes almost an agony.
Often and often I can feel it right there, there, at my finger-tips, but I never quite catch it. It
always eludes me. I was born too late. Ah, to get back to that first clear-eyed view of things,
to see as Homer saw, as Beowulf saw, as the Nibelungen poets saw. The life is here, the
same as then; the Poem is here; my West is here; the primeval, epic life is here, here under
our hands, in the desert, in the mountain, on the ranch, all over here, from Winnipeg to
Guadalupe. It is the man who is lacking, the poet; we have been educated away from it all.
We are out of touch. We are out of tune."
2. Believe this, young man," exclaimed Shelgrim, laying a thick powerful forefinger on the table
to emphasise his words, "try to believe this--to begin with--THAT RAILROADS BUILD
THEMSELVES. Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. Mr. Derrick,
does he grow his wheat? The Wheat grows itself. What does he count for? Does he supply
the force? What do I count for? Do I build the Railroad? You are dealing with forces, young
man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men. There is the Wheat, the
supply. It must be carried to feed the People. There is the demand. The Wheat is one force,
the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them--supply and demand. Men have
only little to do in the whole business. Complications may arise, conditions that bear hard on
the individual--crush him maybe--BUT THE WHEAT WILL BE CARRIED TO FEED THE PEOPLE as
inevitably as it will grow. If you want to fasten the blame of the affair at Los Muertos on any
one person, you will make a mistake. Blame conditions, not men."
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)
3. The ruler of the district was therefore the Democratic boss, a little Irishman named Mike
Scully. Scully held an important party office in the state, and bossed even the mayor of the
city, it was said; it was his boast that he carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an
enormously rich man--he had a hand in all the big graft in the neighborhood. It was Scully, for
instance, who owned that dump which Jurgis and Ona had seen the first day of their arrival.
Not only did he own the dump, but he owned the brick factory as well, and first he took out
the clay and made it into bricks, and then he had the city bring garbage to fill up the hole, so
that he could build houses to sell to the people. Then, too, he sold the bricks to the city, at
his own price, and the city came and got them in its own wagons. And also he owned the
other hole nearby, where the stagnant water was; and it was he who cut the ice and sold it;
and what was more, if the men told truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the water, and
he had built the icehouse out of city lumber, and had not had to pay anything for that. The
newspapers had got hold of that story, and there had been a scandal; but Scully had hired
somebody to confess and take all the blame, and then skip the country. It was said, too, that
he had built his brick-kiln in the same way, and that the workmen were on the city payroll

while they did it; however, one had to press closely to get these things out of the men, for it
was not their business, and Mike Scully was a good man to stand in with. A note signed by
him was equal to a job any time at the packing houses; and also he employed a good many
men himself, and worked them only eight hours a day, and paid them the highest wages.
This gave him many friends--all of whom he had gotten together into the "War Whoop
League," whose clubhouse you might see just outside of the yards. It was the biggest
clubhouse, and the biggest club, in all Chicago; and they had prizefights every now and then,
and cockfights and even dogfights. The policemen in the district all belonged to the league,
and instead of suppressing the fights, they sold tickets for them.
4. "I have pointed out some of the negative wastes of competition," answered the other. "I have
hardly mentioned the positive economies of co-operation. Allowing five to a family, there are
fifteen million families in this country; and at least ten million of these live separately, the
domestic drudge being either the wife or a wage slave. Now set aside the modern system of
pneumatic house-cleaning, and the economies of co-operative cooking; and consider one
single item, the washing of dishes. Surely it is moderate to say that the dishwashing for a
family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day's work, it takes, therefore, half
a million able-bodied personsmostly women to do the dishwashing of the country. And note
that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia,
nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken
husbands and degenerate children--for all of which things the community has naturally to pay.
And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would be a machine which
would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to the eye and the touch, but
scientifically--sterilizing them--and do it at a saving of all the drudgery and nine-tenths of the
time! All of these things you may find in the books of Mrs. Gilman; and then take Kropotkin's
Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and read about the new science of agriculture, which has
been built up in the last ten years; by which, with made soils and intensive culture, a
gardener can raise ten or twelve crops in a season, and two hundred tons of vegetables upon
a single acre; by which the population of the whole globe could be supported on the soil now
cultivated in the United States alone! It is impossible to apply such methods now, owing to
the ignorance and poverty of our scattered farming population; but imagine the problem of
providing the food supply of our nation once taken in hand systematically and rationally, by
scientists! All the poor and rocky land set apart for a national timber reserve, in which our
children play, and our young men hunt, and our poets dwell! The most favorable climate and
soil for each product selected; the exact requirements of the community known, and the
acreage figured accordingly; the most improved machinery employed, under the direction of
expert agricultural chemists! I was brought up on a farm, and I know the awful deadliness of
farm work; and I like to picture it all as it will be after the revolution. To picture the great
potato-planting machine, drawn by four horses, or an electric motor, ploughing the furrow,
cutting and dropping and covering the potatoes, and planting a score of acres a day! To
picture the great potato-digging machine, run by electricity, perhaps, and moving across a
thousand-acre field, scooping up earth and potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks! To
every other kind of vegetable and fruit handled in the same wayapples and oranges picked
by machinery, cows milked by electricity--things which are already done, as you may know.
To picture the harvest fields of the future, to which millions of happy men and women come
for a summer holiday, brought by special trains, the exactly needful number to each place!
And to contrast all this with our present agonizing system of independent small farming,--a
stunted, haggard, ignorant man, mated with a yellow, lean, and sad-eyed drudge, and toiling
from four o'clock in the morning until nine at night, working the children as soon as they are
able to walk, scratching the soil with its primitive tools, and shut out from all knowledge and
hope, from all their benefits of science and invention, and all the joys of the spirit--held to a
bare existence by competition in labor, and boasting of his freedom because he is too blind to
see his chains!"
Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)

5. One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska
tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and
eddying about thecluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky.
The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked
as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves,
headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and
the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted
road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain "elevator"
at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On
either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general
merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office.
The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock in the afternoon the
shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The
children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking
countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them
had brought their wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store
into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along
the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons, shivered under their blankets.
About the station everything was quiet, for there would not be another train in until night.
Willa Cather, My ntonia (1918)
6. LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it
was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden--Jim Burden, as
we still call him in the West. He and I are old friends--we grew up together in the same
Nebraska town--and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through neverending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves
wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch
and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of
many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like
these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers
when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in
vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with
little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that
no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a
kind of freemasonry, we said.
7. Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do not see much of him
there. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways, and is sometimes away from
his New York office for weeks together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another
is that I do not like his wife.
Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter afternoon, with a
bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with
him and tapped it with some pride as he stood warming his hands.
"I finished it last night--the thing about Antonia," he said. "Now, what about yours?"
I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.
"Notes? I didn't make any." He drank his tea all at once and put down the cup. "I didn't arrange or
rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Antonia's name
recalls to me. I suppose it hasn't any form. It hasn't any title, either." He went into the next room,
sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the word, "Antonia." He
frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word, making it "My Antonia." That seemed to
satisfy him.

"Read it as soon as you can," he said, rising, "but don't let it influence your own story."
My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim's manuscript, substantially as
he brought it to me.
8. I FIRST HEARD OF Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great
midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and
mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who
lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one
of the 'hands' on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for
my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never
been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new
world.
We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the
journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons,
a watch-charm, and for me a 'Life of Jesse James,' which I remember as one of the most
satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly
passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a
great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and
worldly man who had been
almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant states and
cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged.
Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an
Egyptian obelisk.
Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family
from 'across the water' whose destination was the same as ours.
'They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is "We go Black
Hawk, Nebraska." She's not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright
as a new dollar. Don't you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown
eyes, too!'
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to 'Jesse James.' Jake
nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.