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3 Voices of Insurgency Strikes, Speech, and Social Realism There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today. —August Spies’s last words before being hanged for conspiracy in the Haymarket incident Words, words, words! how to make them deeds . . . with me they only breed more words. —William Dean Howells, Selected Letters The word in language is half someone else’s. . . . the word does not exist in neutral and impersonal language, . . . but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. —M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination THE “MAN WITH THE KNIFE” In the twenty-third chapter of his best-selling study How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis changes his rhetorical strategy. The preceding chapters have been largely documentary, using descriptions, illustrations, and photographs to represent the degradations wrought by poverty on the various inhabitants of the New York tenements. Working toward his concluding suggestions for urban reform, Riis attempts, however, to bring these images closer to the reader, to augment previous calls for humanitarianism with a bald appeal to self-preservation. He offers the following illustrative story: 66 A man stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth street the other day, looking gloomily at the carriages that rolled by, carrying the wealth and fashion of the avenues. . . . He was poor, and hungry, and ragged. This thought was in his mind: “They . . . have no thought for the morrow; they know hunger only by name, and ride down to spend in an hour’s shopping what would keep me and my little ones from want a whole year.” There rose up before him the picture of those little ones crying for bread around the cold and cheerless hearth—then he sprang into the throng and slashed about him with a knife, blindly seeking to kill, to revenge. Although “to-day he is probably in a mad-house,” according to Riis, “the man and his knife . . . spoke . . . the warning. . . . They represented one solution of the problem of ignorant poverty versus ignorant wealth that has come down to us unsolved . . . —the solution of violence. There is another solution, that of justice. . . . Which shall it be?”1 While such dramatic enactments of class insurgency are rare in Riis’s relatively restrained study, they are common in sociological and literary texts from the late 1870s and 1880s. In these texts, as in Riis’s sketch, when poor or working-class characters look across the economic gulf, they are unfailingly provoked into angry “thought[s]” and “blind,” vengeful actions. These characters may not premeditate their acts, but their authors clearly do, recounting them in order to make palpable what might otherwise remain distant. Just as Riis’s “man with the knife” breaks through the sacrosanct space that divides him from “wealth and fashion,” Riis’s prose becomes sensationalistic, threatening to release the blind vengeance of “ignorant poverty” on his comfortable readership. Seemingly, all that contains these men with knives are the writers themselves , who, having conjured forth the irrational ‹gures, proceed to label them as such, remove them to the “mad-house,” and translate their “blind” actions into vocal “warning[s].” We might, then, call this the “rhetoric of extortion.” Though reformists such as Riis seem to propose a choice between “the solution of violence” and the “solution . . . of justice ,” the decision is pretty much already made, and it is enforced by the very violence that “justice” is invoked to control. In this circular maneuver , acts of insurgency—often the solitary acts of working-class agency in these texts—are almost instantaneously converted into authorial power. In this chapter, I will be concerned with examining the discursive nature of working-class insurgency and the ways in which this insurgency is rendered in narrative discourse. As men with knives (or, more comVoices of Insurgency 67 monly, with pickets) acted according to a discursive rationale, by speaking loudly from the political and social margins, men with pens quickly responded, creating a dialogic relationship that is revealing in both its manifest content and its formal operation. To be sure, during this period, novelists and journalists also responded with hysterics and histrionics (the cry “insurgency” carried a particularly dramatic resonance in the decades after the Civil War and in the years immediately following the Paris Commune); but their reactions were often more subtle...

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