David Pack,

Spring 2006

American Dreams

            The American dream has brought immigrants to this country for over one-hundred-fifty years. This dream promises that if you work hard, you will prosper. If you do this long enough, you may even someday become you own boss. This, however, can go awry, as is the case in Meridel Le Sueur’s novel the Girl. The novel focuses on the main character, an unnamed girl who moves to the big city, which her mother considers to be full of sin and iniquity, a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, from a rural area. She does so during the Great Depression, when times were excessively hard. Work was hard to come by, and even when work was found, it was hard to make a living at it as the economy was bottom-up. While the main focus of the novel is on the Girl and Clara, her friend with street smarts who helps her survive and adapt to the city, there are other characters of great importance. One such character who interacts with the Girl in a significant manner is Butch. Butch is a down-on-his-luck guy who is the object of the Girl’s obsession. He gets the Girl pregnant as they contemplate and plan their future together. They however, due a twist of fate and ill-made decisions, do not see this come to fruition. Butch is more than a character in this novel; he is an allegory for everyone who bought into the American Dream. Butch is a dreamer, a believer in this American dream, who sees his dream fall around him, all too late to save it or himself, making him a tragic figure.

            Butch has worked all his life, telling the Girl, “I been getting jobs since I got out of didies” (10). Butch, at the time of this conversation with the Girl, is about to go with his brother, Bill, to a start a job at the foundry (10). It is not that he didn’t want to work, that he was not making an effort to do so, like others in his time. He truly did make an effort to get ahead. He did so with legal means, too. This was unlike Hoink, Ack, and Belle who run an illegal bootlegging outfit and brothel. He also differs from Ganz, a mobster type who pays off the cops for protection. He is determined to make a living by working in a legit way. His goal is to save up and buy a service station. When he is dancing with the Girl at the German Village, Hoink and Belle’s bootleg joint/pub, he whispers to the Girl, “I’m gonna buy a service station of my own. Be my own man. You better go with me I’m a winner” (7). Later, once again while talking to the Girl about their future, he tells her, “I’m going to get a service station of my own. We can’t get married now can we? But I’ll buy a service station. I’m seeing a fellow who know a fellow’s going to loan me some to lease this here service station, then honey I’ll be a boss” (41). He truly believed he was capable of accomplishing this. When he is discussing his lack of luck in finding a job previous this with Belle, he displays his frustration and wants, saying, “I want a job… Jesus Christ, I want a lot of things. I’m full as a tick of what I want” (13).

            He begins his decline when try’s a “get-rich-quick scheme,” which goes against the American Dream and for what it stands. Butch sets off this chain of events that costs him dearly when he agrees to rob a band with Hoink and Ganz. Ganz tells the Girl, concerning Butch, “Your boy here… he’s alright. He’s a nice boy. If he does like I say you’ll both be sitting pretty, take my word for it” (53). Butch bought into what Ganz had to say. The robbery goes awry, Ganz being greedy, trying to take it all for himself and killing Hoink. Butch, too, is shot but is able to get away in the car driven by the Girl. It is on the drive that Butch’s status as a tragic figure becomes apparent. He tells the Girl, “I was thinking…standing by them pillars before we went in when that girl went by, there was a few seconds there, I could have walked out then, we could have lived our lives like you wanted. I could have walked out of there then” (88). He realizes this too late. He laments the loss this opportunity’s fortunes, telling the Girl, “Now we haven’t got a thing… after all that, and all that money in my hands, I can still feel it, what we could have done with even a little bit of that sweet money” (88). Butch’s dream dwindles even more when he and the Girl drive up to a service station. He tells the man running the station that he has a nice place, to which the man replies, “I put everything me and my wife had into this place… and now the Standard Oil company is going to take it away from me” (89). Butch questions whether or not the man had a lease on it and if the company can take it with a lease on it. The man answers that “that’s a racket, they make you feel like you got your place, like you’re going to be the boss, a big shot. They take all your dough and they got it fixed so that you can’t make good. You could work twenty-eight hours out of twenty-four, you could starve your wife and kids and throw them in with it. They got you milked from both ends. It’s a racket. They hold the cards, you can’t win. And when you give up, when they’ve sucked you dry, they get another sucker” (89). With this realization, Butch’s dream comes crashing the rest of the way down. As he lay dying, Butch recalls his past as a worker, when he “worked in a hat factory” when he was a “punk” (94-95). Just before dying, Butch questions, “All my life there- what in hell was I doing? Who said anything? What happened? Going around those streets year in and year out, boy and man, those narrow dark Godriddendevilhaunted whorish drunken grand streets upstairs and downstairs… with nothing Christ what was it who made it what got us we come to this bad end?” (95). Butch realizes that his American Dream, his hard work and determination for a better tomorrow, has come to naught. He has failed. He tried to shortcut the Dream and it cost him his life.

            The Girl was not the first novel I had read concerning the Great Depression. Having previously read Hard Times by Studs Terkel and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, I was familiar with literature that dealt with the Great Depression time-period, both in fiction and nonfiction forms. While the Joad family in Grapes is a fitting allegory for all those who lost their farms and headed west, the character of Butch that Le Sueur created in the Girl is, in my eyes, more prominent. He bought into the promise of the American Dream and watched it sell him out. He was failed by this promise and, in desperate times, took desperate measures. These desperate measures, this determination to prosper no matter what the cost, cost him his life, a price, I am sure, he had no intention on paying.

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