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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Betty Smith’s Bestselling Introduction to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2024

Nancy C. Unger Open the ORCID record for Nancy C. Unger [Opens in a new window]
Nancy C. Unger*
Affiliation:
Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA
*
Email: nunger@scu.edu
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Abstract

An analysis of Betty Smith’s bestselling coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reveals how popular literature can serve as an important introduction to signature issues of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration are highlighted in the novel—as well as attendant problems including poverty, machine politics, child labor, and prejudice and discrimination. Profound ignorance about sexuality and conception abound in a religious culture that made premarital sex and birth control sinful and shameful, with unhappy marriages and unwanted children the result. As poverty and deviant sexuality abound, eugenics is touted as a sensible solution. The novel helps to explain why there was no organized rebellion or revolution when the struggling poor found that the promise of upward mobility was elusive. Characters have differing definitions of the American Dream. Some seek respite in religion, leisure activities, or alcohol. Others find hope in a variety of reform measures, including public health and education, settlement houses, and unions. The novel ends as the technology that made the nation’s industrialization and urbanization possible continues to produce new marvels that will transform the lives of the urban poor, bringing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to a close.

Keywords

A Tree Grows in BrooklynBetty SmithAmerican Dreamurban povertyteaching
Type
Article
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 23 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Literary Studies and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , January 2024 , pp. 49 - 68
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 Diana Trilling, Library Journal, May 1, 1943.

2 See Robert Cornfield, “The Tree Still Grows in Brooklyn,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 1999, 27; Alan Kraut, “Books That Shaped America—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” Oct. 1, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rUxetvI9BU (accessed May 11, 2022).

3 Preface to Smith, Betty, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), vii.Google Scholar

4 Zonana, Joyce, “The Hungry Artist: Rereading Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ,” Hudson Review 7 (Autumn 2021): 45c–58 Google Scholar. See Flanagan, Hallie, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940)Google Scholar; Bentley, Joanne, Hallie Flanagan: A Life In the Theatre (New York: Knopf, 1988)Google Scholar.

5 Harriet King, “Betty Smith,” American National Biography, 1999, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1602241 (accessed Dec. 15, 2023); Zonana, “Hungry Artist,” 454.

6 Alvin Kleinmetuchen, “A Longed-For Musical from Times Gone by,” New York Times, May 3, 1998, NJ27; Postscript to Smith, Tree Grows, 13.

7 Zonana, Hungry Artist, 453; Amy Davidson Sorkin, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Should Read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” The New Yorker, Apr. 3, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-mark-zuckerberg-should-read-a-tree-grows-in-brooklyn (accessed June 12, 2023).

8 Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, Aug. 18, 1943, 17.

9 Smith, Tree Grows, 6.

10 Smith, Tree Grows, 20.

11 “Immigrants in the Progressive Era,” U.S. History Primary Source Timeline, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/progressive-era-to-new-era-1900-1929/immigrants-in-progressive-era/ (accessed June 5, 2022).

12 Smith, Tree Grows, 170.

13 “Immigrants in the Progressive Era,” Library of Congress.

14 Smith, Tree Grows, 191.

15 Therrien, Kathleen, “‘Why Do They Have to … to … Say Things … ?’ Poverty, Class, and Gender in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ,” Legacy 16 (1999): 94 Google Scholar.

16 Smith, Tree Grows, 122.

17 Smith, Tree Grows, 130.

18 Smith, Tree Grows, 44.

19 Smith, Tree Grows, 52.

20 Smith, Tree Grows, 13.

21 See Schuster, David G., “The Rise of a Modern Concept of ‘Health,’” A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , ed. Nichols, Christopher McKnight and Unger, Nancy C. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 255–67Google Scholar; Kraut, Alan, “Plagues and Prejudice: Nativism’s Construction of Disease in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century New York City,” in Hives of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City, ed. Rosner, David (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 65–90 Google Scholar.

22 Smith, Tree Grows, 145.

23 Smith, Tree Grows, 438.

24 See Fox, Daniel M., “Social Policy and City Politics: Tuberculosis Reporting in New York, 1889–1900,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 49 (Summer 1975): 169–95Google ScholarPubMed; Bates, Barbara, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Smith, Tree Grows, 438.

26 Smith, Tree Grows, 314.

27 See Sanger, Margaret, The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger (New York: W.W. Norton, 1938)Google Scholar.

28 For an overview on sexuality in the period, see Leigh Ann Wheeler, “Inventing Sexuality: Ideologies, Identities, and Practices in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 102–15.

29 Smith, Tree Grows, 249.

30 Smith, Tree Grows, 232.

31 Smith, Tree Grows, 62.

32 Smith, Tree Grows, 54.

33 Smith, Tree Grows, 340.

34 Smith, Tree Grows, 102.

35 Smith, Tree Grows, 341.

36 Smith, Tree Grows, 43, 232.

37 Smith, Tree Grows, 35.

38 Smith, Tree Grows, 304.

39 Chesler, Ellen, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 192 Google Scholar.

40 See Davenport, Charles, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911)Google Scholar; Leonard, Thomas, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is tremendous controversy over Sanger’s relationship with eugenics, as summarized in Joyce Berkman’s “The Question of Margaret Sanger,” History Compass 9 (June 2011): 474–84. Scholarship on the political right, including George Grant’s Killer Angel (2001), condemns her as complicit with eugenicists’ elitist and racist agenda. As Berkman notes, Chesler’s Woman of Valor (originally published in 1992), takes a more nuanced approach, asserting that “though Sanger upheld the eugenicist aim to discourage those deemed grossly unfit from procreating and even supported their coercive sterilization, she opposed the class and race bias of many eugenicists, warning against equating the poor or people of color with the unfit and insistent that ‘intelligence and other inherited traits vary by individual, not by group.’” Subsequent works have vilified Sanger (Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenics Legacy [Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005]) or defend her by placing her within the political and ideological straitjackets of her time (Carole McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.]).

41 Smith, Tree Grows, 146.

42 Smith, Tree Grows, 231.

43 Smith, Tree Grows, 251.

44 Smith, Tree Grows, 8.

45 Smith, Tree Grows, 244.

46 Smith, Tree Grows, 10.

47 Smith, Tree Grows, 152–53.

48 Smith, Tree Grows, 379.

49 Smith, Tree Grows, 116.

50 Smith, Tree Grows, 82.

51 Smith, Tree Grows, 85.

52 Smith, Tree Grows, 82.

53 Smith, Tree Grows, 144. Gilded Age and Progressive Era debates about the proper balance between freedom and regulation raged over a variety of topics, including compulsory education and vaccinations for children, unionization, and wages and hours. See Furner, Mary O., “Defining the Public Good in The U.S. Gilded Age, 1883–1898,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 (Apr. 2018): 241–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sawyer, Laura, “Contested Meanings of Freedom: Workingmen’s Wages, the Company Store System, and the Godcharles v. Wigeman Decision,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13 (July 2013): 285–319 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, Betsy, Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020)Google Scholar.

54 Smith, Tree Grows, 151.

55 Yow, Valerie Raleigh, Betty Smith: Life of the Author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Chapel Hill, NC: Southern Sky Press, 2008), 154 Google Scholar.

56 Smith, Tree Grows, 152.

57 Smith, Tree Grows, 161.

58 Smith, Tree Grows, 164.

59 Smith, Tree Grows, 170, 174.

60 Smith, Tree Grows, 85.

61 Such beliefs were actively bolstered by sources ranging from Theodore Roosevelt’s American Ideals and Other Essays, Social and Political (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Company, 1903) to Russell Conwell’s phenomenally popular speech “Acres of Diamonds.” See Conwell, Russell H., Acres of Diamonds (New York: Harper and Row, 1915)Google Scholar and Bjork, Daniel W., Victorian Flight: Russell Conwell and the Crisis of American Individualism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1978)Google Scholar. For the impact of the American Dream, see Cullen, Jim, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Mike, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class ((London: Verso, 2018)Google Scholar; Churchwell, Sarah, Behold, America: “America First” and “the American Dream” (New York: Basic Books, 2018)Google Scholar.

62 Smith, Tree Grows, 33.

63 Smith, Tree Grows, 35.

64 Smith, Tree Grows, 280.

65 Smith, Tree Grows, 287.

66 La Follette quoted in Nancy C. Unger, Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer (London: Routledge, 2016), 92.

67 Roosevelt, Theodore, “Hyphenated Americanism, 1915,” in The Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ed. Link, William and Link, Susannah (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 166 Google Scholar.

68 Smith, Tree Grows, 439.

69 Smith, Tree Grows, 45.

70 Smith, Tree Grows, 113.

71 Smith, Tree Grows, 115.

72 Smith, Tree Grows, 103.

73 Smith, Tree Grows, 67.

74 Smith, Tree Grows, 138.

75 Smith, Tree Grows, 192.

76 Smith, Tree Grows, 178.

77 Smith, Tree Grows, 180.

78 Smith, Tree Grows, 181.

79 Smith, Tree Grows, 285.

80 See Fitzgerald, Maureen, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Rauschenbusch, Walter, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907)Google Scholar; Raphael, Mark, “The Jewish Community and Ellis Island, 1909,” Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora 3 (Jan. 1975): 172–87Google Scholar.

81 Smith, Tree Grows, 263.

82 Yow, Betty Smith, 37.

83 Smith, Tree Grows, 26.

84 Quoted in Yow, Betty Smith, 186.

85 Yow, Betty Smith, 186–88.

86 Smith, Tree Grows, 198–99.

87 Smith, Tree Grows, 206.

88 Smith, Tree Grows, 217.

89 Smith, Tree Grows, 52.

90 Smith, Tree Grows, 67.

91 See Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Kasson, John F., Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)Google Scholar.

92 On the growth of the film industry, see Musser, Charles, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Bowser, Eileen, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

93 See Heather Cox Richardson, “Reconstructing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 7–20.

94 Smith, Tree Grows, 345.

95 Smith, Tree Grows, 399.

96 Smith, Tree Grows, 347.

97 Smith, Tree Grows, 347.

98 Smith, Tree Grows, 426.

99 Smith, Tree Grows, 347. See Miller, Lawrence G., “Pain, Parturition, and the Profession: Twilight Sleep in America,” Health Care in America: Essays in Social History, ed. Reverby, Susan and Rosner, David (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 19–44 Google Scholar.

100 Smith, Tree Grows, 347.

101 Smith, Tree Grows, 287.

102 Smith, Tree Grows, 95.

103 Smith, Tree Grows, 176.

104 Smith, Tree Grows, 478.

105 Smith, Tree Grows, 487.

106 Novels that continue to see considerable classroom use include Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle as well as Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. Excerpts from The Jungle appear in countless textbooks and course readers, including William A. Link and Susannah J. Link’s edited collection A Documentary Reader: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). The Bedford Series in History and Culture released an edition of The Jungle in 2019, the same year it was published as a graphic novel, adapted and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann. Both The Age of Innocence (edited by Candice Waid, 2002) and The House of Mirth (edited by Elizabeth Ammons, 2018) are volumes in the Norton Critical Editions series.