One of the wealthiest and most cultured residents of the famed Algonquin Avenue in Buffland (a city intended to be Cleveland[1]), Captain Arthur Farnham is a Civil War veteran and widower—his wife died of illness while accompanying him at a remote frontier post.

Seeing Sleeny's discontent, Andrew Jackson Offitt (true name Ananias), a locksmith and "professional reformer", tries to get him to join the Bread-winners, a labor organization.

Offitt's membership has tired of endless talk and plans a general strike, a fact of which Farnham is informed by Mr. Temple, a salty-talking vice president of a rolling mill.

Temple warns that the attacks on Algonquin Avenue are imminent, and aids Farnham's force in turning back assaults on the captain's house and on the Belding residence.

Sleeny wins Maud's hand in marriage, and Farnham and Alice Belding are to be wed. John Hay was born in Indiana in 1838,[3] and grew up in frontier Illinois.

[4] He was made Lincoln's assistant personal secretary, and spent the years of the American Civil War working for him; the two men forged a close relationship.

"[11] Although the American Civil War did not itself transform the United States from a largely agrarian to an urban society, it gave great impetus to a change already under way, especially in the North.

[15] He condemned the "unarmed rebellion of foreign workingmen, mostly Irish" and informed Stone by letter, "the very devil seems to have entered into the lower classes of working men and there are plenty of scoundrels to encourage them to all lengths.

The strike and its suppression featured in many books of the period, such as Thomas Stewart Denison's An Iron Crown: A Tale of the Great Republic (1885), with novelists often sympathizing with the demands of the strikers, though decrying their violence.

[21] Scott Dalrymple, in his journal article on The Bread-Winners, argues, "the brunt of Hay's ire seems aimed less toward these working men themselves than toward troublesome union organizers.

"[22] Hay biographers Howard L. Kushner and Anne H. Sherrill agree, writing that the author was attempting "to expose the way in which this class, due to its ignorance, fell prey to the villainies of false social reformers".

[20] To Hay, unions were dangerous as they manipulate the uneducated worker; it was better for laborers to work out their pay and conditions individually with their employer, as Sleeny does with Matchin.

"[24] Offitt, at birth, was given the forenames Andrew Jackson,[a] which according to Hay shows that the bearer "is the son of illiterate parents, with no family pride or affections, but filled with a bitter and savage partisanship which found its expression in a servile worship of the most injurious personality in American history".

[28] Robert Dunne points out that the working classes are not depicted favorably in Hay's novel, but as "stupid and ill-bred, at the best loyal servants to the gentry and at the worst overly ambitious and a threat to the welfare of Buffland".

Other, self-made members of the elite are depicted as more vulgar: Mrs. Belding's indulgence in gossip endangers the budding romance between her daughter and Farnham, while Mr. Temple, though brave and steadfast, can discuss only a few topics, such as horse racing, and his speech is described as peppered with profanities.

The rest of Buffland's society, as displayed at a party at Temple's house, is composed of "a group of gossipy matrons, vacuous town belles, and silly swains".

In 1880, Adams had published Democracy: An American Novel, anonymously, and when Hay arrived in Britain in July 1882, he found speculation as to its authorship to be a popular pursuit.

[33] In an anonymous letter to The Century Magazine after the book was published, Hay alleged that he chose not to reveal his name because he was engaged in business where his stature would be diminished if it were known he had written a novel.

According to Dalrymple, the likely real reason was that if it were published under Hay's name, it would harm his ambitions for office, for "to attack labor overtly, in print, would not have been politically prudent.

"[22] Tyler Dennett, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, speculated that Hay would not have been confirmed either as ambassador to Great Britain (1897) or as Secretary of State (1898) had senators associated him with The Bread-Winners.

[37] On July 20, the date of release of the August number, the company placed newspaper advertisements for The Bread-Winners, and said "the story ... abounds in local description and social studies, which heighten the interest and continually pique curiosity as to its authorship.

In early August, the New-York Tribune reported that the author was the late Leonard Case, a Cleveland industrialist and philanthropist—the manuscript had supposedly been found among his papers.

With Case dismissed, speculation turned to other Ohioans, including Cleveland Superintendent of Schools Burke Aaron Hinsdale, former congressman Albert Gallatin Riddle (author of twelve books), and John Hay.

The New Orleans Daily Picayune surveyed the lengthy list of candidates and announced that "the authors of The Bread Winners [sic] will all meet at Chautauqua next summer.

"[48] The Dial, the following month, praised the author's use of language but deemed the book "a preposterous tissue of incidents" populated by two sets of "exaggerated types", one vicious, the other absurd.

In a column in the Pall Mall Gazette, The Bread-Winners was seen as "eminently clever and readable, a worthy contribution to that American novel-literature which is at the present day, on the whole, ahead of our own", a statement which Harper's used in advertisements.

Ohio Congressman Martin Foran announced in March 1884 that he would write a book rebutting the author's view of labor, and published it in 1886 under the title The Other Side.

Harriet Boomer Barber (writing under the pen name Faith Templeton) kept a number of Hay's characters, while "turning the American industrial world into a sort of Christian utopia" in her Drafted In (1888).

[54] When the Academy Opera House collapses, taking hundreds of lives, Grimestone is deemed responsible for its faulty construction—as Stone was for the deaths in the Ashtabula railway disaster.

"[62] At Hay's death in 1905, obituarists were uncertain whether to assign the novel to him, an exception being The New York Times, which used handwriting analysis to link the book to him, and published it in its entirety over six Sundays later that year.