The Original Red Scare Romance Novel
“I saw the Chief of Police today … .says the Russians have got a lot of paid agents here.”
What if, say, Liane Moriarty, back in 2020 at the height of the COVID pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, had given us a runaway, bestselling easy-read mystery/romance page-turner with a sympathetic heroine, a likeable hero, some thoughtful digressions on social issues and economic inequality, and a cheerfully happy ending right after the part where the novel’s Good Guys formed a volunteer Vigilance Society and beat the crap out of all the protestors and pandemic rulebreakers?
Future historians, at the least, would have found the novel’s success as indicative of something very strange in the national temperament in that year of grace, 2020.
But one clean century before that hypothetical novel, America’s leading lady novelistdid publish a runaway, bestselling easy-read mystery/romance page-turner (#7 on 1920’s bestseller lists) with a sympathetic heroine, a likeable hero, some thoughtful digressions on social issues and economic inequality, and a cheerfully happy ending right after the part where the novel’s Good Guys formed a volunteer Vigilance Society and machine gunned—literally machine gunned—all of those nasty immigrant striking millworkers who were about to launch a Bolshevist takeover anyway.
A Poor Wise Man is the Red Scare’s romance novel; not the Red Scare we usually think of (McCarthy-and-Hollywood screenwriters stuff), but the real, original version that followed what folks then called the Great War. This first Red Scare gets shorter shrift in high school history books (mine at least), just something-something Palmer Raids and Sancho and Vanzetti in the middle of explaining why the Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty while Edith Wilson kept inquiring minds from her husband’s sick room.
But people at the time couldn’t see the Scare as a footnote; they believed (or a lot of them believed) that they were living through the homegrown version of the then-recent Russo-Bolshevik coup. Overwrought, ludicrous and absurd perhaps, but the reality of that belief would be accurately portrayed in any thorough history which you needn’t read when you can see it in nearly every page of A Poor Wise Man. But first, our…
Authoress
He … was particularly fond of the cheerful murder stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)
You can’t overstate Mary Roberts Rinehart as a popular writer in 1920. She had books on thetop ten list in eleven different years, beginning in 1909 (she had two books on the top ten in 1910). She could be called the American Agatha Christie for her whodunit-in-the-mansion mysteries, and she’s been credited with first use of the phrase “the butler did it,” (although Wiki thinks this is stretched.) Her play The Bat was an indirect inspiration for Frank Kane’s creation of Batman. (And while it's true that the book was actually written by Stephen Vincent Benet under Rinehart’s name, it’s a measure of her status that Mr. “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and “John Brown’s Body” was her ghostwriter.)
Rinehart’s star faded in time, in part because the “hard-boiled” detective genre drove out her Victorian mansion-style mysteries. She never made the top ten list after 1936, although she gamely kept writing. (Her last book—The Swimming Pool, published in 1952—is an earnest but not-altogether-convincing effort to stay current in the noir era).
But the Rinehart of 1920—who brought outA Poor Wise Man—was at the top of her game. She’d thoroughly handled the First World War in fiction, providing (in Bab: a sub-deb) a hilarious account of a ditzily patriotic girl seeing the Kaiser’s spies under every bed (except that this being a 1917 novel, there is a real, honest-to-life German spy, just not the one the girl thinks). She’d been something of a war journalist as well, traveling to Europe and landing a personal interview (such was her name recognition) with the exiled Belgian King Albert.
So, Rinehart’s take on the Red Scare reflected (we can guess) the views of most or many of her contemporary Americans. A Poor Wise Man can’t be dismissed as a reactionary outlier, and Rinehart wasn’t the type of writer to pen such in any event. Born to a struggling family in what’s now Pittsburgh in 1876, her father (a luckless would-be inventor type) took his own life when she was nineteen, about the time she graduated from nursing school and married a doctor she had met there. She might have remained a contented wife and mother if her husband’s savings hadn’t been hammered by a stock market downturn in 1903. She took to writing to pick up the slack, her 1907 mystery The Circular Staircase sold more than a million copies, and Mary Roberts Rinehart was off to her phenomenal success in the first third of the century.
We’d expect, then, her 1920 Red Scare novel to make some interesting observations on society at the time, and in part it does. There’s the old reactionary capitalist robber barons fiercely opposing change of any kind, the newer, moderate managers willing to grant some concessions to labor but too little and too late, the conservative union leadership reluctantly calling a general strike under pressure from the membership, the inspiration drawn by radicals from the then-recent Communist takeover in Russia, and everyone else’s fear that that event was about to be replicated in the United States. And above all there is the hope that America’s “plain men”—normal, honest, independent, self-employed folks that neither own the factories nor work in them—can create an honest bipartisan government that transcends the capital-labor divide and does justice to all parties.
Right after those “plain men” come back from the whole Vigilance Society thing where they machine gun the hell out of the Bolshies and rescue their...
Heroine
“Mother, things have changed a lot in twenty years.”
Lily Cardew, young, beautiful, born to wealth but conscious of duty, spent World War I working in a Stateside troop canteen and returns home (at the novel’s outset) with a confidence that shocks her stuffy, Victorian-era family. Lily is a fairly obvious projection of Rinehart’s hopes and fears for the newly emancipated young women who can, like,vote now. There’s a little bit of pro-Lily fun when she tells her mother about her wartime experience taking care of pregnant girls the Army left behind, and a little bit more when she gets bored with the proper, polo-and-country-club boys she’s expected to date. But Rinehart (age forty-four when A Poor Wise Man came out) had only limited, apparent sympathy for the new girls. Lily gets a nasty comeuppance when her attempted independence gets her into radical circles and even in a brief marriage to an anarchist scoundrel. The romance is (for me at least) not nearly as interesting as the characters who surround Lily, starting with the old, hidebound tyrant against whom she rebels, her grandfather the tycoon, steel-mill owner, reactionary, and…
Gilded Age Robber Baron
“My whole contention is that the people don’t want to be served. They want to be bossed. They like it; it’s all they know.”
Anthony Cardew, Lily’s grandfather, son of a Jacksonian-era ironmaster, Union Army officer in the Civil War, launched the steel mills in the unnamed city whereA Poor Wise Man is set (it does seem to resemble Rinehart’s native Pittsburgh). Smart, mean, driven, and ruthless, Old Man Cardew ran the mills and the city as an autocrat, and intends to keep doing so. He spends his day at the club, complaining with other rich guys about labor unions, the income tax, and everything else, until even the other rich guys get sick of him. To Rinehart’s 1920 audience Anthony Cardew would have been a recognizable caricature of a leftover Gilded Age robber baron (steel magnate Andrew Carnegie had died only the year before) who has fallen far behind the times.
And yet…accorded a certain degree of respect. Anthony is never the book’s bad guy, and sometimes he comes off as nothing worse than the crusty but good-hearted old uncle at the dinner table. Rinehart even gives him what her readers would consider an honorable death (shooting out his mill window at the anarchist/strikers). Old capitalist reactionaries like Anthony Cardew aren’t the problem (in Rinehart’s view), but they aren’t the solution either, as what we want are men like…
The Moderate Republican
“It’s time somebody went into city politics for some purpose other than graft.”
Howard Cardew, Anthony’s son and Lily’s father, runs the mills as much as his father will let him. A nice guy compared to old Anthony (a low bar admittedly) he’s actually sort of bothered by how everyone in the city hates his family. He comes up with radical new socialist ideas like, um, installing a bathhouse and gym and even alaundry at the mill for the workers’ use (Anthony says they’re too dumb for that anyway), and letting the workers use the field next door for that newfangled baseball game (but Anthony blocks that because the rich guys need the field for polo). Howard evens runs for Mayor as the nominee of an unnamed party (obviously Republican), although Anthony says that’s a waste of time.
Given his age, social status, and willingness to make moderate concessions to labor, Rinehart’s readers would have probably pegged Howard Cardew as a Theodore Roosevelt-style “Bull Moose” Progressive Republican (Anthony, on the other hand, would certainly have voted for Taft when the party split in 1912). Rinehart’s inserted aside that Howard fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War would have clinched that identification.
Nice guy as he is, Howard realizes belatedly that he lacks any chance of making Mayor, since his family (thanks to Anthony) is roundly despised by everyone in the city without a country club membership. But since his opponents, the equally unnamed (but just as obviously Democratic) party have been captured by the evil Bolshevik/anarchist/strikers, Howard bows out and throws his support to the independent, third-party candidate, who is—rather surprisingly for a supposed paragon of honesty—
The Old-Time Ward Heeler
A big, burly, man, with a fund of practical good sense and keen knowledge of men.
Mr. Hendricks, the “political boss of the ward,” a retired master plumber with “a curious, almost fanatic love for the city” decides to throw his own hat in the Mayoral ring. He’s disgusted with the nominee his own party (again, obviously the Democrats) will be forced to nominate by organized labor, and thinks an independent ticket might be the answer. A longshot bid at first, his candidacy takes on steam after Howard Cardew pulls out and puts his resources behind Hendricks.
Hence, Rinehart’s dream 1920 political coalition: an old-style Democratic ward boss leaves his party in disgust at labor’s influence and mobilizes his city connections, backed (eventually) by the money and influence of moderate, Bull Moose-style Republicans who have sidelined their own more reactionary elements. But even this coalition cannot succeed without the talents for leadership, oratory and violence shown by the novel’s hero, the “Poor Wise Man” of the title, the…
All-American Boy Scout and Vigilante
Things were rather desperate until the police found themselves suddenly and mysteriously reenforced by a cool-headed number of citizens, led by a tall thin man who limped slightly, and who disposed his heterogeneous support with a few words and considerable skill.
Our hero, protagonist, the All-American good guy named (gulp) William Wallace Cameron (you can guess the Scottish descent). Small-town boy, joined the Army during the War to fight for his country but kept at home for a slight limp, met Lily Cardew in camp and formed the silent admiration for her which all readers know will be rewarded at novel’s end with a happy marriage.
Cameron is virtually a Norman Rockwell ideal (and Rockwell was a teenage art student in 1920). Modest, helpful, good-hearted, and kind enough to live with a struggling family just to support and take care of them. Smart—real smart for his background—wants to go to college and in the meantime reads political and economic theory in his spare time, enough chemist’s knowledge to work in a pharmacy and planning to be a metallurgist. But at the same time he’s a genuine American orator, in an “aw shucks” home-spun kind of way. He starts by talking to the spare-time crowd in the pharmacy’s backroom and expands from there, being the kind of guy who can express just what the “plain people” are feeling and thinking. And the “plain people” are something of a fixation for Rinehart; she refers again and again to this 1920-style “silent majority,” neither capital nor labor, employers nor employed, just small proprietors and businessmen, professionals, shopworkers; a sort of middle and lower-middle class which, properly organized, can end the millowner/union dispute both politically and otherwise. The “plain peoples’” political arm is Hendricks’ (the old ward boss’s) third-party campaign, for which William Wallace Cameron serves as spokesman and de facto campaign manager. But Cameron—our good, clean, whole-hearted American young man—doesn’t trust just to politics. He also organizes…
The Vigilance Society
We want men who can keep their mouths shut, and who will sign some sort of a card agreeing to stand by the government and to preserve law and order.
The men each sign a card pledging their allegiance to the American system of laws (Cameron himself comes up with the oath), and start their little secret anti-anarchist group. The Vigilance Society begins with some street brawling at workers’ protests, and graduates to keeping their own private intelligence operation on labor/strikers/Bolsheviks. The feud gets nasty, with arson attacks on Vigilance Society HQ, and countryside ambushes where Cameron and his friends have been lured by false leads. And of course the expanded Vigilance Society plays a key role in backing up the state constabulary and city police in the final, climactic battle against the anarchists/Bolsheviks.
Cameron’s generalship is (as always) superb; his charisma attracts not only his own social class but even the polo-playing types. Vigilance Society HQ, in fact, starts out in the company offices of a rich guy whose son (one of Lily Cardew’s old beaus) has joined up with Cameron. This sort of cross-strata inclusiveness hides from Rinehart’s readers the unpalatable fact that for all of the “plain people” talk, the Vigilance outfit is bankrolled from the country club. Perhaps Rinehart herself didn’t like thinking that way; hence, her creation of the small-town hero behind both an independent third-party campaign and the Vigilance Society. In both instances the phenomenon is portrayed as organic, with the sensible rich capitalists (like Howard Cardew) joining in only upon realizing that the evil forces of labor/anarchy/Bolshevism can’t be stopped by old-fashioned reactionary tactics (like those so long employed by Howard’s father Anthony). Thus the heroic coalition that defeats the bad guys, who can themselves be quickly sketched as…
The Descending Hierarchy of Immigrant Villains
From all over the world there came men who sought a chance to labor. They came in groups, anxious and dumb, carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded by men with cunning eyes.
While Rinehart will concede some bad native eggs, and some good immigrants, the Bolshevik problem (in her view) is mainly an import. Not that all immigrants belong in the same hell; like Dante, Rinehart created a multilayered schema for her villains, based (in her case) on national origin. Hell’s first layer is populated by,
- an Irishman, Jim Doyle, with an appropriately tragic, Irish backstory (his dad died of a broken heart losing land to Anthony Cardew). Doyle (that “Irish devil”) is an acerbic journalist with a regular salonful of intellectuals who gather in his house to explicate “the vision of Lenine.” Doyle himself (being Irish) puts all this in a “gospel-of-individualism” format, with autonomy for artists and intellectuals and suchlike. While a valuable propogandist, Doyle is too idealistic (as Irish are, of course) to be a thoroughgoing revolutionary, so actual movement leadership passes to..
- a Pole, Woslosky, without much backstory but simply assumed to be a ruthless Bolshevik. Woslosky runs the movement, using Doyle but with a certain contempt for the latter’s idealism. Woslosky supervises the cat-and-mouse games with Cameron’s Vigilance Society, and when he loses his life in one of those games leadership passes to…
- a Russian, code-named Ross, original name unknown, who leads the labor/anarchist/Bolshevik movement in the final, climactic machine-gunned confrontation with the Vigilance Society. No backstory at all, but of course when the labor movement is led by a Russian, there’s really nothing for it but to break out the machine guns.
And Summing Up
The year of our Lord 1919 … saw a socialism which, born at full term might have thrived, prematurely and forcibly delivered, and making a valiant but losing fight for life.
One can laugh at the dead-earnest seriousness with which Mary Roberts Rinehart sketches her full-on civil war with the Commies in an Appalachian steel town, but the American people who boughtA Poor Wise Man (#7, remember, on 1920’s bestseller lists) weren’t laughing. They had just seen (distantly) the incredible collapse of the Tsarist government in Russia and the Bolshevik success there. They thought similar things would happen in America or were indeed already happening; the 1919 Seattle General Strike is referenced in A Poor Wise Man as a serious Bolshevik uprising.
Rinehart can be partially acquitted of hostility to organized labor. She admiresSamuel Gompers, the anti-Socialist union leader (“a stocky little man grimly fought to oppose the Radical element, which was slowly gaining ground, and at the same time to retain his leadership.”) And she would have admired Gompers all the more for labor’s aid in the 1921 (emergency) and 1924 (permanent) immigration crackdown laws.
Again, one can laugh at Rinehart’s attitude towards immigrants—and especially her descending Irish/Polish/Russian scale of villainous foreigners—but the restrictive laws passed right after this novel would put her square in the 1920 American mainstream. After all, the immigrant percentage of the national population had peaked at 15% just before World War One, a ceiling that would not be reached again for a century,until in 2020
…things got real again.